My friend Angela and I went to the Stand By Me Celebration in Brownsville, Oregon today. It was about a 30 minute drive from Albany. In the mid 80’s, the movie Stand By Me was filmed in Brownsville. I have no idea why since all of Stephen King’s stories usually take place in Maine. But it was. I’m not a huge fan of the movie and I don’t think I’ve ever read the Stephen King story that it was based off of. I saw the movie once or twice in the 80’s and that was it. But it seemed like it might be fun, so we went.

Brownsville was a nice little town. I think we enjoyed visiting all the shops and museums there more than the actual Stand By Me stuff. The town was packed with people and there was Stand By Me stuff everywhere. Everywhere you looked they were selling Stand By Me memorabilia. There was even Stand By Me water.

We wandered around for a few hours, reading all the things about the movie. Brownsville is really small and I’m sure that movie is the biggest thing that will ever happen there. It seems like even when they’re not having a Stand By Me festival, there’s a lot of Stand By Me stuff everywhere. It was fun to learn about the movie, even if neither of us could remember a whole lot about it. We had lunch inside a bar and grill that was in the movie. There were old cars all over the streets and 50’s music blaring. A few of the cars were the ones used in the movie.

At some point, I got the idea of telling people that we’d seen River Phoenix there, who was one of the 4 stars of the movie. He died in 1993. Then the plan evolved into me wearing a CAST badge and claiming to anyone that asked that I was River Phoenix. So we started looking around for paper to make a fake cast badge. There were other cast members at the event and quite a few that had badges that said EXTRA on them. In the pie eating scene, they used people from the town to be extras. We purchased a Brownsville, Oregon button that would hold my badge on and found some paper that I could draw a badge on. Then Angela suggested that I just go ask for a real badge.

The badges were in clear plastic and looked pretty nice and there was a booth for cast members and extras to get them for free. I could easily claim I was an extra and they wouldn’t know. I chickened out at first, but then went back and asked for a CAST badge. I was going to tell the old man there that I was River Phoenix if he asked, just to see what he’d say. And if he noticed that I wasn’t, I planned to tell him that I was an extra in the pie eating contest. If you’ve never seen the pie eating contest scene, you really should watch it:

Oddly enough, though, the old man didn’t ask who I was in the movie. He just believed that I was a cast member. He was friendly and chatty enough, but he didn’t ask me. I wasn’t expecting an actual Cast badge. This ruled! I said thank you, put it on and quickly walked away.

We didn’t stay for much longer after I received my badge, but I did manage to have a little fun with it. While inside an antique shop, the elderly lady working there noticed my Cast badge and asked who I was. I told her I was River Phoenix, one of the four boys in the movie. Her face lit up and she says, “Ohhh!” She actually seemed a little star struck. We said a few words to each other and I shook her hand, then we left. It’s hilarious to think that she might tell everyone that River Phoenix was in her shop. And that if she finds out that he’s dead, she might think I was a ghost or something.

We were on our way back to the car after that, but stopped to get sno cones. A group of teenage girls were working at the sno cone stand and the one making my sno cone asked who I was. I told her River Phoenix. She pauses, smiles, and says that I’m her hero! I’m being looked at by all these girls and one of them tells an older lady in the back that River Phoenix is buying a sno cone from them. I think I heard one of them mention that he was dead. I knew that my ruse was up then, so I blurt out something along the lines of, “JUST KIDDING!”

They all had a good laugh about it though. I told them that I was actually just an extra in the crowd and I don’t know why they gave me a Cast badge. The girl giving me my sno cone made a big deal about it, saying she wasn’t going to let me buy anything from her. Then she told me that she’d spit in my sno cone and a few other random things. All just kidding around, of course. Geez, I hope she was. I tipped a dollar and we left. Being a star for 20 minutes was fun. It’s probably good that we left before I ended up getting punched in the face.

Reading all the Stand By Me stuff on their website earlier this morning made me decide to download the movie and watch it, since I hadn’t seen it in 20 years. So we got back home and watched it. If we’d stayed there any longer, we could have watched it outdoors AND we could have watched them have a real pie eating contest. But that would mean hanging around there for another 5 or 6 hours, which was just a bit too much Brownsville, Oregon than I wanted.

It was cool to see the movie after visiting all the sites. We recognized every other thing in the movie. We didn’t realize that the interior of the bar was in the movie, so we were able to see about where we our table was. Actually I think the movie camera was in our table’s spot. The bar looked exactly the same in the movie as it did today. More or less. And we recognized cars and other parts of town. It was cool. I have a new appreciation for that movie. But I doubt I’ll ever watch it again.

Click here to view the pictures from today. They’re not the greatest pictures ever, but the Brownsville museum had the coolest collection of old lineman’s tools I’ve ever seen and I got a lot of pictures of those. Plus my cool CAST badge is in there.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention – it was a little creepy how nice everyone in the town was. I mean, it’s nice that people are friendly. I’m just not used to it. Like we’re walking down the sidewalk and some guy with a couple of kids says, “Hi! Welcome to Brownsville!” And a few other people in museums have random conversations with us. I’m just way too anti-social for that kind of interaction. I just checked the population of Brownsville and it looks like it’s under 2,000. So they probably notice who all the out of towners are. For such a tiny population, though, they sure have a nice downtown area.

Woke up around 8am today at the hotel. Walked across the street for breakfast at McDonalds and then called a cab to take us to the train station. Rode the train bus back to Albany and I’ve done pretty much nothing but listen to podcasts and unpack all day. Speaking of podcasts, Nate and Di are back! They did a short show and it was great. I’m really happy that they’re going to start doing shows again. Listened to more than 4 hours of the Mediocre Show and then an episode of Twisted Pickle. I didn’t listen to any podcasts while I was away so I’m really behind on them all.

Also picked up the mail and stopped by the store for bread and milk. The plants are all alive. I thought 3 weeks without water would kill them, but they look fine aside from a little brown on them. My deadbolt was unlatched and my alarm was turned off. I was thinking the landlord may have stopped by, but the gate was padlocked so they couldn’t have come in the back door. Maybe I just forgot to lock the deadbolt. I can’t explain the alarm, though. There’s no way I forgot to set the alarm. Maybe my shitty Radio Shack alarm system just turns itself off after a few weeks. I really need to spend some money on a real alarm system. Maybe the power went out and reset it. But it’s got a battery backup. Argh, I dunno.

Reorganized office stuff to accommodate some new stuff I brought back with me. Had to adjust shelves to make things fit. I can’t wait for my boxes to arrive in the mail, since I mailed all kinds of good stuff back to myself. My factory car stereo is one thing that’s on its way that’ll be nice to have back. Plus a lot of the kids’ toys that probably cost more to mail than they’re actually worth.

I need to buy a cheap cassette deck. I brought back all these cassette tapes that I want to transfer to mp3 and throw away.

A few months ago I discovered a comic strip called xkcd. Their web page describes it as a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. It’s immediately become my favorite comic strip ever. Better than The Far Side, better than Dilbert, and better than Calvin and Hobbes. I’ve viewed every single comic strip on their page at least twice. I’ve never liked a comic as much as this one. Here are a few random comics from their site. Hopefully they’ll let me hotlink:

And this image makes a great desktop wallpaper. Everyone go visit xkcd.com right now and view every one of their comics. Then buy their shirts and posters and anything else they’re selling. New comics come out occasionally but don’t seem to be on any kind of a schedule.

I’m on some kind of conference right now with altalp, iball, trevelyn, ethermine and I think phish phreak and maybe a few other people. I can barely understand anyone.

Took my dad’s truck to storage today. My intent for this trip is to donate tons of stuff to the Salvation Army instead of dealing with Craigslist. I already sold all the really valuable stuff and the Salvation Army gives me a receipt for everything I donate, which is good for a giant tax writeoff. I took about 1.5 truck loads. The first load used just about every cubic foot of the truck bed and camper shell. It was packed. The Salvation Army people seemed annoyed that I was giving them extra work to do. Last time they were so thrilled at the stuff I was bringing them. This time I felt like a nuisance.

I gave them a microwave, printer/scanner, rocking chair, toy box, overhead projector, 2 VCRs, a dual cassette deck, boom box, trash cans, probably 4 full boxes of clothes, stuffed animals, a 2-drawer dresser, about 10 – 15 board games (good stuff like Perfection, Clue, checkers, Monopoly, etc), kid bed sheets and quilts, pillows, sleeping bags, my roller blades, the kids roller skates (they wouldn’t fit anymore anyway), 2 radio control 4×4 trucks, 2 sleds, 2 large boxes of hot wheel tracks, a 6 foot ladder, doll house, tons and tons of books.

Aw man, I gave away so many books that I didn’t want to. I’d forgotten what a kickass collection of hacker books I had. I had all these books on the history of the phone companies, 2 or 3 on Kevin Mitnick, another on the Masters of Deception, tons of Unix security books and general programming, probably 50 issues of 2600, and lots of others that I just can’t remember. Lots of other hacker books, though. Oddly enough, I kept all my bank robbery books and donated my hacker books. What does that say about my future? HRRMMMMMMM. Plus tons of kids books. I mean lots and lots of kids books. Stuff I read to the kids from when they were 1 until just a couple of years ago. And it sucks to get rid of those since we have so few in the house in Oregon. At least we get to the library a lot, though. Two or three of the Harry Potter books, lots of comedy books. So many books. Oh yeah, dozens of home improvement books. I had books on all kinds of cool woodworking and remodeling projects. And just general stuff like plumbing and electrical. I’d say a total of 5 large boxes of books. Spessa would be disappointed in me.

Throwing out all my old shirts was slightly less disappointing, but still sucked. I had a lot of weird shirts and a lot of hacker shirts. Defcon, Rubicon, Phreaknic, and even a couple PLA shirts got donated. The original YOU WILL PLA shirt got donated. As in, the very first one from 1996, from the first batch of 6 that were ever printed. I would have kept it and sold it on phonelosers.org, but it was looking pretty terrible. It was white and had pit stains. I was glad to get rid of a lot of those clothes, though. I had way too many shirts. My old closet in my Alton house was too big. Plus I got rid of a lot of clothing that a cousin gave me for Payton that didn’t fit him yet. Clothes that had no wear on them at all.

Later in the evening, the kids and I all went to storage again. I had them sort through a few boxes of stuffed animals and toys. I told them they needed to get rid of most of them and they did a great job with that. We ended up filling 3 large totes full of toys and bringing one back home to take back to Oregon. So I’ve already got a bunch of new stuff to donate on my next trip to Salvation Army. Plus I filled up a suitcase of stuff that I wanted to bring back. Mostly office supplies, picture frames, and some CDs. I’m bringing back my original factory car stereo for my Focus since the one I got for 50 cents at a garage sale is starting to malfunction. I’m probably going to mail a box or two, then bring back the rest in suitcases that I’ll buy from Salvation Army, just like we did during Christmas. I just hope the cab in Portland can fit all our suitcases.

I know I probably said this back in a December entry, but it feels great to get rid of all this stuff. Just to eliminate all this clutter from my life. 20+ years of collecting useless shit and finally being able to rid myself of it. It’s like that old man I met at the Eugene flea market who was selling all the baseball cards and baseball memorabilia that he’d been collecting since he was a boy. He said he wasn’t doing it for the money, but he just had no use for it all and wanted all the crap out of his house. It sucks to lose those cool hacker books, my giant phone collection, and all my electronics and wires. But if I didn’t get rid of it now, I’d just be selling it all at a flea market 30 years from now. I just wish I could have given it to somebody who would want it. Plenty of people on the forums would have loved all that stuff. It’s too bad I didn’t give it all away when I could. My goal from now on is to not accumulate tons of useless shit.

We’re having a good time in Illinois so far. Yesterday we went to the City Museum. I hated myself for forgetting my book. I did a lot of wandering around by myself and a lot of playing games on my cell phone. After the 20th or so visit, I’m really bored with that place. But the kids still have a great time there.

Man, I love my new Dell laptop. It’s so nice to have everything on a laptop that actually works. My old laptop was slow (it was a 1999 or 2000 model that I’d been using since 1999 or 2000) and the battery never worked right. It’s so great having a laptop with everything I own on it. And being able to use it for hours at a time without plugging it in is so new to me. I’ve even got a spare battery for it, so it can go for about 6 hours. It just rules. I hope this one lasts for years.

Worked, drove to Corvallis and wandered around downtown for three hours, got Payton a birthday present, got a couple books from The Book Bin (Mark Twain’s Roughing It and his autobiography), ate at some potato chip deli, got a prepaid cell phone at Fred Meyer for the kids to use (only $14.99, plus a minimum of $40/year to keep it running), went to the Amtrak station and picked up some tickets, hung out at home the rest of the night.

Played that STUPID Desktop Tower Defense game for several hours while I watched movies. I’d say that game has wasted at least a full 24 hours of my life by now. I want to kill murd0c for introducing me to it. Worked on the book a lot, though. And walked to the store for milk. That was my day.