Author Archives: Tin Man

Capturing Memories Through Flight Tracking

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If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that I was in Santa Fe last week. I was there for a work conference and I annoyingly Foursquared and tweeted my way through everything.

I get romantic and wistful when I fly on airplanes. I get daydreamy and introspective as I fly above the earth and look down at the vast landscape beneath me. I love sitting at the window and staring down at everything. On this trip I flew through Dallas, so part of my trip was Dallas< -->Santa Fe. The plane flew over numerous crop irrigation circles and isolated north Texas towns, and I imagined all the people living in those little places. People I will never meet, towns I will never visit. It makes me sad that I’ll never meet them. I spot what is probably a high school football field, and I imagine everyone from the town and the nearby farms getting together there on Friday nights for high school football games. They live in these self-contained places where everyone knows who everyone else is. I wouldn’t really want to live there. But it still makes me wistful.

I see a small town, and then a long, straight road that must go on for a couple of miles, and then at the end of the road I see another small town. I’ll never know what towns they were.

But no. The thing is, with the internet, I really can see those places again. I can see the flight path I took, and I can click on the Google Earth link and see my flight path in Google Earth and zoom in on the towns I probably flew over. Maybe I was looking at Tulia, Texas, and Happy, Texas?

It’s so cool that with the internet, we can capture these moments and memories and places that used to just flow through our fingers like sand before disappearing forever. Now we can revisit them. I love it.

Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis: “Days of Our Lives” Goes Gay

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There have been gay characters on soap operas for a few years now. But this time it’s different, because now my soap, Days of our Lives, finally has its first gay characters. I’m so psyched.

Even though I rarely watch Days anymore, it’s still my soap. My mom has watched it almost since the beginning, and I picked up the habit from her when I was 11 or 12. I’ve been following the Hortons and the Bradys on and off for 25 years. (Holy crap, it’s been that long?) I know, most soaps have mediocre acting and writing; whenever I watch Days and Matt happens to be in the room, he rolls his eyes. But I can’t help it. These people are like family to me.

So, here’s the deal: the show recently introduced a new character, Sonny Kiriakis (played by Freddie Smith), who’s the son of Justin and Adrienne Kiriakis. (Justin and Adrienne were on the show in the late ’80s and early ’90s and then disappeared for a long time until returning a year or so ago. We’d never seen their son until now – he was “traveling the world.”) Sonny’s first appearance was June 23, and the audience learned that he was gay just two days ago, when he came out to his great-uncle Victor. His parents already knew and were already supportive, which is so refreshing to see. (This scene, where they talk about how they first reacted, is touching and seems pretty realistic to me. And I like the line about the cowboys.)

The writers are setting Sonny up for some sort of somethin’ with Will Horton (played by Chandler Massey). Will is both a Brady and a Horton: he’s the son of Sami Brady and Lucas Horton, and he’s the grandson of Roman and Marlena, one of the most legendary couples in the show’s history, so his character has deep roots. (Will has been on the show since the mid-90s, but Chandler Massey just started playing him last year.) Will just graduated from high school, and lately he’s been acting kind of awkward around his girlfriend, as if something’s going on with him that he doesn’t want to talk about…

Sonny and Will met each other on Sonny’s first episode on June 23. Take a look: chemistry?

A few YouTubers are archiving the whole story. Because it just began and because most characters only show up a couple of times a week, it doesn’t take long to catch up. Start here.

I will be following excitedly.

Trial on TV

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You know what’s weird? The Casey Anthony trial is a case that has apparently transfixed America for three years. You know when I first heard about it? Two or three weeks ago. And that’s only because I decided to record The Today Show a few weeks ago so I could watch Meredith Vieira’s last episode and Ann Curry’s first episode as host. (I’ve long been interested in The Today Show as an institution even though I don’t watch it regularly anymore.) They did a report on “the Casey Anthony trial” and I had no idea what they were talking about. I figured it was another one of those sensationalistic “missing white girl” stories that I have no interest in. I barely gave it a further moment’s thought until the verdict was announced yesterday. I was working from home, and I saw online that she’d just been found not guilty. I went to the TV, where the previous half hour of MSNBC was in the TiVo buffer, and I rewound it and watched the announcement of the verdict.

I’m baffled as to how I’d heard so little about this case. I guess it’s because most of the news I follow is from politics websites and the New York Times, and if there was any coverage of it in the Times until yesterday, I missed it. We also watch NBC Nightly News almost every night, but Brian Williams has barely covered it there.

After watching the verdict, I went to Wikipedia to read up on the history and details of the case, so I’ve caught up a bit.

Again, it’s weird, because when all the O.J. stuff was going on in the ’90s, I generally knew what was going on, even if I still didn’t really obsess over it or anything. But this case? I hadn’t even realized it existed.

I’m not disappointed that I missed most of this. On the contrary. But I’m still just… baffled that I did.