I'd forgotten what it was like to work with dial up. Point. Click. Go get coffee or finish the next level of Arkanoid. Check. Repeat. Packets are sent with same laconic speed as most tectonic forces, but with far less certainty. It makes one picky about where one points one's mouse. A wrong click could make you the unwitting guest of a four-hour barber-pole wait-a-thon. And the AOL user agent just makes my internet life that much more fun.

These cyber woes are offset, however, by real life here in Minneapolis. A town, I am glad to report, that has food that is not steak, and stores that sell things other than tack. Cedar City has many applicable adjectives one might use to describe its charms, but goolgling for "metro" among them will render nothing.

Now I'm waiting for Questionable Content to load. Two minutes and counting. This page is just not going to load, is it? AOL will not display it. It just wants to be left alone. It can wait all day for me to leave. God. These speeds are so hard for one used lately to living at least halfway inside the titanium frame of my powerbook, and the banal-infinite Indra's web of the internet which it contains.

I got my first Bingo yesterday, albeit with my opponent's help. Le sigh. Still, though, I feel like a real Scrabble player now, like I've completed my first solo flight. My final score was 408 or so, a PR! Let's sing "Eye of the Tiger" together, shall we?

"Rising up, out on the street, duhn nuh nuh nah nah nuh nuh..."

...and so forth. Bridge. Chorus. Real big hit.

Also this trip: Art Museum, starring Balthus and an illustrated Dante! Special appearance by: Japanese Tiger prints! Some crouching. Also Dragons! Some hidden.

I really love sumi ink paintings, and these tigers were fine examples. The best, imho, were those done before the artists had seen an actual tiger, and had to draw using pelts, their housecats, and imagination. These paintings have a naturalness and familiarity to them, that when applied to a semi-imaginary idealized form, retain a startling amount of life. The animal's architecture, musculature, is not quite right, but the pose and the energy of the coiled form as it prepares to spring, shows a complete comprehension of the subject. You can see the future action on another, imagined layer of the painting clearly. It breathes.

Several Hokusai plates and a re-creation of a Japanese teahouse were also on display. The smell of tatami making me a bit nostalgic.

Tonight is dinner with some of Erin's friends, and now is back to Pattern Recognition.