Internets
So a few months ago I noticed that when one went to Threadless.com, the main menu would wish one of the many community members a happy birthday. And, since I wasn’t doing anything better with the evening of my 30th birthday, I hit reload an enormous number of times until it finally said mine. I had no idea so many other t-shirt purchasers and I shared the same birthdate. Of particular surprise was a Ben from St. Louis also uses the site and is born on the same day. Also, belated birthday wishes to ExcellentRaptor, VampireCatBoy, MunkeyFlingsPoo, MrSaturn, EverydayAnonymous, DurinSavesTheday, and Organs.
If you didn’t get me anything for my birthday, feel free to order a t-shirt while the $10 sale is still on, and give me the referral credits that will allow me to order still more t-shirts in the future.
On a different note, few things make me happier these days than the magnificent Channel Frederator, which downloads itself to my iTunes podcast menu every Tuesday morning. This Tuesday was particularly pleasant, though, because of Tim Farrel‘s cartoon “E-mail!!” The exclamation marks are his, not mine, but simply because they are part of the title and not the sort of over-exuberance I usually employ in my writing should not indicate that I don’t think this is the cleverest, funniest cartoon I’ve seen since 2003. Download the cartoon directly (10.9 MB .mpg file), and if that won’t convince you to subscribe to Frederator, then I’m not sure what can.
Good Night.
Many changes have been afoot, and much activity has been imminent, so there hasn’t been much typing of late. Just in the last five days I’ve driven to New Hampshire, eaten two Thanksgiving dinners, spent ten hours in transit to a church in Pittsburgh — flying, waiting, flying again, busing, and then walking about fifteen to eighteen blocks — then three changes of company in quick succession, more walking, then busing, flying, weather delays, more flying, and landing and being presented with the unsightly spectacle of a $2,000 vehicle repair and inspection bill for a $1,600 car. Then cake, then more driving.
And all this happened after a week of frantic internet activity. The V announced that it was going to be leaving the chilly embrace of Prospero’s Delphi Forums system in favour of the more flexible and totally free Beehive Forums system. With them went went many of the other assorted WEFugee forums, including those hosted by Dan, Keith, JOSH, and Ted. Which, with the exception of my own little humble Delphi Forum, comprised a pretty comprehensive list of all the reasons why I subscribed to Delphi’s services in the first place. So, I had to figure out how to host a Beehive forum of my own. (Click and join!)
And to do that, I had to download Beehive and phpMyAdmin, install them both, get the rights to create a database on my webhosting, discover that I didn’t have the right permissions through phpMyAdmin, do lots and lots of searching and tweaking of the prefs to try to correct this, try to lean MySQL, contact my hosting service, discover they provided a much better and cleaner version of phpMyAdmin, delete a database, create a new database, install Beehive, delete phpMyAdmin, and then configure the new version of The Brothel. So that was the previous five days before the previous five days. There’s still a missed week of posting in there someplace, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
So, here’s my minor story from Thanksgiving, to help allieviate the long silence: The week before, despite the fact that I have been trying to reduce my spending, I had gone to see George Clooney’s Good night, and good luck. at my local cinema. In part this was because of the immensely favourable review it received from the keen eye of Andrew Wheeler, but also out of the sheer surpise of finding it at my local commercial movie house instead of at the nearby art theatres. A few days later, at the traditional family outing of Going To See A Cheesey Movie In Order To Get Out Of The House After Thanksgiving, the even more commercial movieplex had a pile of miniature posters for Good night, and good luck, with a photocopied flier available for the public to take. However, the flier wasn’t supposed to be there. The flier was actually a photocopy of a letter from Warner Independent’s promotional department, detailing instructions that would allow the theatre manager to download the actual flier, and any additional P.R. materials he wished. Included in the letter was the password that would allow one to download hi-rez images, and other virtual press-kit materials. The flier that the letter asked the theatre manager to photocopy instead of the letter was nowhere to be seen.
Naturally, I snagged one. That’s two major studios I can now get press materials from. Only fourteen to go.
Horn-Rimmed Spectacles
There were a spate of articles in the recent past about Singles Supermarket shopping evenings, that would allow unattached foodees to scope each other out while simultaenously being able to check out what they were planning on carting to the check-out.
New ways of organizing the event of meeting people is apparently good business and therefore good news, and so we have also read articles about speed-dating, internet dating, singles nights at dog-walking parks, and the like. I’ve always felt that if there were enough single people to provide fodder for all these techniques and still keep both personals columns and bars populated, then there must be enough single people out there that it shouldn’t require vast machinations to meet them.
Says the single thirty year-old man. Anyway…
The British Library has recently publicized their second library-based singles evening, an event that is taking place in conjunction with their “Beautiful Minds” exhibit. I very much enjoyed the sales pitch for the event — called a “mingle” — which mentioned that the exhibit is about “the history of the Nobel Prize, focusing specifically on 30 individual Prize-winners, over the whole range of six prizes — Peace, Physics, Chemistry, Economic Sciences, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature — from the past 100 years. What better backdrop for people who are bold, bright, bored and single to meet their match?”
Unfortunately, the event may pall next to the rather ordinary backdrop that the British Library provides for the passionate. Guardian writer Will Hodgkinson claims that one doesn’t need to get dolled up and go to a special exhibit at the library, when it is already teeming with sparks.
[S]exual tension… crackles like electricity throughout the building. In the old British Library, this tension exploded on to the toilet walls, where quivering dons would scrawl profanities too shocking to repeat here, but in the new building it is mostly confined to furtive eye contact and the occasional conquest. “I met my three last boyfriends in the British Library,” says Glaser. “You’re working in the abstract, sharing space with these people who you cannot imagine existing in the world outside, and the sexual and personal life is repressed for most of the day. But believe me, when it comes out, it comes out with a vengeance.”
None of the above should come as a surprise to the students and librarians closer to home. There was a minor flap in 2001, covered by the New York Times as well as Rolling Stone, I believe, when the Yale “Porn and Chicken Club” decided to make a student-produced and -performed blue movie about the not-uncommon phenomenon of students having sex in the aisles and shelves of the library. Apparently, the film was never completed, at least not for public release. And with the vast array of quote-unquote “amateur” pr0n out there, I’m sure that it’s not a great loss to the world. It certainly won’t have much affect on frantic fumblings between mutually beautiful minds in the stacks. One of the many reasons why high school librarians tend to prefer designing their demesnes with half-height, well-lit shelving.
And just because I fully expect this entry to be egregiously blogrolled by automated blogspot traffic aggregators because of my use of certain vocabulary, let’s go for broke: make sure you give a spin to The New Pornographers’ “Mass Romantic“.
Lawrence
Lawrence of Arabia is, in my opinion, the best film I’ve ever seen. It’s magnificent to watch, and compellingly unusual in its characterization. I have vague memories of my great-aunt Edie having a bit of a thing about T.E. Lawrence, and one of these days I will have to make sure I buckle down and overcome my habitual resistance to reading non-fiction so that I can further investigate the man and the politics in which he was embroiled.
Given the chance, I’d love to start this journey at the exhibit that just opened at the London Imperial War Museum, all about Lawrence and his life, his career, and his bizarre death — in fact, the exhibit includes the very motorcycle on which he died, a particularly macabre piece of inclusion that only a war museum could probably get away with. It will be open for a respectably lenghty period of time, and if I started saving money today… I still wouldn’t have enough for plane fare by the time the exhibit folds in mid-April. Anyone interested in getting me an early graduation present is hereby duly winked at.
Nominally, the exhibit has opened because of the seventieth anniversary of Lawrence’s death… except that the seventieth anniversary doesn’t seem all that numerically significant. Apparently it qualifies for “Platinum Jubilee” status, according to the Big Book of Anniversary Proceedings, so apparently when something has lasted seventy years, we’re less picky about the manner in which we carve up the number one hundred. I merely mention that being dead for a long time isn’t actually much of an acheivement, as everyone will be able to do that with certainty.
However, the War Museum seems to be getting significant mileage out of the fact that Lawrence, in his unique position as cultural ambassador, had a particular understanding of the conflicts and peoples of the region, and was bitterly opposed to the way in which Araby was divided by the European governents. A map with Lawrence’s alternative proposal is on display at the museum, and the implication seems to be that the Mid-East conflict would be significanly different today if the map had been drawn by someone, like Lawrence, who knew “the facts on the ground [and] the people of those areas.”
In totally unrelated news, I have no idea how, precisely, to interpret the juxtaposition of this image and the accompanying title, but it’s my favourite new web-thingy. EDIT:The Beat has switched publishers, and the archive of that post no longer exists, but I believe it was the headline “This is going to be one of those days” and then this picture.
Perhaps, but the Plasma Rifle is Mightier than the Pen
The following totally sums up my feelings about myself: no matter how stylish the haircut, how well-cut the suit, how menacing the glower, my inner nerd places a pen behind my ear and crumples any prospective menace or cool like a foil cupcake liner.
By the way… there’s no way that a man with a pen in his ear can look cool, even with a big gun.
Literally, I just sit looking like this…
Even if I press [the trigger] all it would do is your taxes.
I think I may need to be Jon Stewart with a Big Fucking Gun and a pen for Hallowe’en.
Smorgasbord
This is my 100th post on this blog. I’m within spitting distance of having been a member of Blogger for five whole years, and yet I’ve only just accumulated my hundredth post. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong.
Or perhaps not. Steven M Cohen, over at Library Stuff (also in its fifth year, coincidentally) quotes Michael McGorty on the longevity of weblogs: “Weblogs that last, (whether their content has significance or no) will doubtless be those whose authors are possessed by that need which makes otherwise normal people sit down and write with the regularity that other folks eat dinner. In other words, writers will continue to be writers…” I have never bought into the LiveJournal concept. I have an actual journal, various non-internet journal software packages, and a DelphiForum for my petty personal recollections of Stuff What I Done Today. I think of a weblog as a column, as a venue for presenting organized thoughts or pointed observations in order to further reflection and discourse. Granted, my audience is slim and there is not much in the way of external contirbution to the dialogue. However, as Stephen Fry points out on Quite Interesting, “dialogue” should not be thought of as mutally exclusive to monologue. It is a common mistake to think that “dia” is synonymous with “duo”, which is most certainly is not.
For today, however, I present to you no organized point, but a series of random-ass thoughts:
- I purchased a new printer, with scanning and photocopying capability. It cost me only $99 before taxes, a service plan, and a special extra ink catridge for printing photos. It was purchased, despite the fact that I am striving to restrict myself to only essential purchases, because I assumed I might need to print out papers for class and my previous printer was not living up to its name. Went ’round to the local Used Computer store and offered it and my scanner to them, and they turned me down, saying peripherals were too expensive to repair. Still, I dug around for the manuals and install discs in case I can offer them to someone, and stumbled upon the receipts. In 2001, when I bought them, the printer and scanner cost me a total of $597.95. Even after working well for four years, it’s tough to sit here, feeling incredibly broke, and think that it’s effectively $500 wasted.
- Speaking of money woes, I had a crazy dream where a former co-worker of mine was doing some part-time extra work out of her office where she processed the personnel forms for the recently dead. I don’t know if I died in her district, or if I as assigned to her jurisdiction because of our professional connection, but allow e to say: Kato, you were very good at your job, and I don’t begrudge you trying to pick up some extra cash for your family, but I expected a little bit mor of a personal touch or some remorse, and not just more paperwork.
- I’m pretty sure I’m the last person on Earth without a cell phone. Is this why I’m the only person I know who wanted the ViPod to have a little camera built into it? Since it got a color screen and started synching with iPhoto, you’d think the next step would be that they’d build in a version of the iSight for integrated use with iPhoto as well as portable video podcasting or something. Apprently not.
- In the introduction to A Briefcase Full of Blues, Elwood Blues goes on the following rant: “By the year 2006, the music know today as the blues will exist only in the classical records department of your local public library.” I may end up giving some version of that speech in concert this weekend — it’s supposed to be the “We would especially like to welcome all the representatives of Illinois’ law enforcement community who have chosen to join us here in the Palace Hotel Ballroom at this time…” from The Blues Brothers feature film, but I frequently get them mixed up in the moment. And once I get started on the wrong one, I can’t stop; the sheer velocity of each speech demands no deviation — but the sheer proximity of the date makes the point meaningless. We can’t preserve the blues now if 2006 is the dealine and only eighty days away. I hate changing classic scripts for a contemporary audience, but I just might. If the momentum will let me.
- Right, so I really will start getting Pan~Theisms drawn and up. I have not yet been able to successfully establish the disciplined weekly schedule that I’ve been aiming for in order to complete all my various projects. Stay tuned.
And on that note… here’s to another five years.
Ambrosia Parsley
“My parents weren’t really hippies. They were a cross between hippies… and bikers, and… and my father was a lineman for the county. And we lived in Reseda, me and my twin brother and my older brother, and my mother and father. And one day we heard that a CostCo was coming to the area. And this was a huge thing, this was like the Emerald City. And my father was able to get a get a card, and so he and my mom went to the store, and left my older brother to babysit me and my twin bother until they got back. And they were gone for, like, three hours. And we sat at home and, and we had all these visions of, you know, these huge packages that they might bring back, like a container with two hundred and eight Twinkies. And when they finally got back, all that they’d bought was an enormous bottle of NyQuil — and really, it was huge, it was like… this big — this huge bottle of NyQuil and a giant container of Flinstones Chewable Vitamins.
“So, the next time my parents went to CostCo, leaving my twin brother and I to be watched by my older brother, we really liked cowboy movies. We would always watch John Wayne movies and so we went out into the back yard and we stacked up six cinder blocks, three on one side, one on top of the other, and three on the other side. And then we put a piece of plywood across it, and this was our bar. Because in cowboy movies, all the important stuff happened at the bar. And we got out the bottle of NyQuil because it came with that little shot glass as part of the cap, and people were always doing shots in cowboy movies. Another thing we used to watch a lot was Three’s Company, and there was a bar in that too, the, uh, the Regal Beagle. Right, the Regal Beagle. And they were always eating little bar snacks out of a bowl at the bar of the Regal Beagle. And, well, we had a bowl… it was wooden, you know, parquet… and so, we poured a bunch of Flinstones vitamins into that for bar snacks and placed it down at the end of the piece of plywood.
“And so we took turns. One would be the bartender, and the other would have to go all the way to the other end of the yard. And you’d hook your thumbs in your belt loops and walk towards the bar. And we made the sound of spurs with out mouths as we walked. ‘Ching. Ching. Ching.’ And when you’d get to the bar, you’d pour out a NyQuil slammer and slide it across the bar and knock it back. And then you’d eat bar snacks. And then we’d switch, and then we’d switch again.
“I don’t know how long we did this, but I remember seeing my brother lying on the floor of the hallway… and then I remember blacking out.
“When I woke up my dad was there and there was a doctor in the house. I’d never seen a doctor make an actual house call, but there he was, and he had a black bag and everything. And out of the black bag he took some Ipecac and he gave it to us. And so we were sitting on the couch, and they brought in these saucepans, and we were throwing up and crying because no one likes throwing up. And my dad was trying to cheer us up, and he was pointing into the saucepans full of this green… and he was saying, Oh look, that’s a good one. Look you can still see Betty’s head. Oh, there’s Dino…
“So, this next song has nothing to do with that. This was written about my first crush. He was 15 and I was 12. And then he was killed. And I went to his funeral. He was my first dead boy. Yeah.”
The above is a approximate and reconstructed retelling of the introduction Ambrosia Parsley of Shivaree gave to a song tonight during a performance at MassMoCA. It was not only hilarious, and a fascinating combination of rambling and expertly-told, but it great fun to watch the other five members of the band settle and wait for the conclusion of the tale. Their reactions ranged from the totally impassive, to the entertained, to the deeply impatient.
Anyway, just to say that I always pay particular attention to a musician’s ability to create patter between herself and the audience, to establish rapport and to speak what is usually fairly canned material in a naturalistic way. In a concert that involved a minor amount of technical heckling from the audience (I rather feel that some people were not expecting the cacaphonic and occasionally dissonant phantasmagoric sound mix that is the predominant sound of the group), and some excellent return heckling from the frontwoman, perhaps ten to fiteen minutes were taken up with similar storytelling. Not seques, particularly, but clearly performances in their own right, even if they weren’t actually on the set list.
Shivaree’s excellent singles are available for MP3 download: “Goodnight Moon” is the potentially-familiar radio single from the 1999 album, I Oughta Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump. The newest album, Who’s Got Trouble has a completely different line-up of collaborators and backing musicians, but the single “Close My Eyes” is catchy and fantastic.
Beijing Bicycle
The first musical artist I ever seriously listened to, eagerly awaiting the release of each new album, was Weird Al Yankovic. While other kids were discovering the Beastie Boys and Tiffany, my musical diet consisted of Weird Al and Tom Lehrer. So parody is practically my native tongue.
Which may be why this article particularly tickled me, much in the same way that Erica-Lynn Gambino‘s take on William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say” did. A new UK single by “identikit singer/songwriter” Katie Melua entitled “Nine Million Bicycles” has come under fire by cosmologist Simon Singh. Singh takes issue with Ms. Melua’s cavalier lyrical treatment of the scope of the measureable universe in a column in the Guardian United:
We are 12 billion light-years from the edge,
That’s a guess,
No one can ever say it’s true,
But I know that I will always be with you.When Katie sings “We are 12 billion light-years from the edge”, she is suggesting that this is the distance to the edge of the observable universe, which in turn implies that the universe is only 12 billion years old. This is incredibly frustrating, because there are thousands of astronomers working day and (of course) night to measure the age of the universe, and the latest observations imply a universe that is almost 14 billion years old, not 12 billion.
…In short, Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe “a guess” or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it to be 13.7 billion years old. You might think that I am being rather uptight, but the role of the scientist is slowly being undermined with a growing belief that scientific results are merely subjective guesses that go in and out of fashion. In fact, scientific results are a careful attempt to objectively measure reality, and although they may be refined over time, they are always our best hope of getting at the truth. In light of this, I propose that Miss Melua rewrite her opening verse so that it reads:
We are 13.7 billion light-years from
the edge of the observable universe,
That’s a good estimate with
well-defined error bars,
Scientists say it’s true, but
acknowledge that it may be refined,
And with the available information,
I predict that I will always be with you
Most hilarious, even if it doesn’t scan. I actually have to agree with Mr. Singh, particularly in light of the recent article in the New York Times about the decline in elementary scientific knowledge, including the jaw-dropping statistic that one in five Americans actually believes that the sun revolves around the earth. However, the song is criminal is other important ways: it’s dull, it contains a cheekily-Asian chord pattern in the intro, and comes complete with a bizarre music video that starts as if it’s going to be structured in an homage to the classic “Powers of Ten” video, and then just goes… silly.
Another bright spot in all this was the discovery of the Fixed-Gear Gallery, a series of photographs of bicycles as an art form.
Thanks to Andrew Hogg for the article and John Mazzeo for the epithet.
Toast Julienne
Sometime in August I did a massive design update on the site, as I finally figured out how to use Blogger’s archive function, something that had been eluding me for, yea, these five years of membership. In doing so I also instituted the comment function so that the site can be a little more interactive.
This immediately paid off. Back when I first made a website in college, I can recall searching for various pop culture homepages and tribute sites and finding nothing. It was an incredible thrill to dedicate a section of my website to the television show Nowhere Man, and have it be one of two relevant things that came up in a Google search. And because the web was still thin and rarefied at that time, I actually got an e-mail from the show’s creator, Larry Hertzog, who had found my page in a similar search.
Now that the web runneth over with content, I never assumed that similar things would happen, but immediately after establishing the content function I have received comments from the screenwriter of Charade-knock off Duplicity and from author Julian Gough.
Mr. Gough was incredibly nice, answering my little questions about his previous works and his former band, Toasted Heretic. He mentioned that the band’s first two albums were being released for the first time on CD and would be available through the indy music retailer CD Baby. The disc was released on September 23, against all conventional New Music Tuesday rules, and CD Baby didn’t have a link to it until the following day, and I’d only just posted. So in order to maintain my one-post-a-week consistency I said that I’d write all this up for New Music Tuesday on the 27th, and promptly forgot.
So here we are now.
And since I’m well aware that none of you have the faintest clue who Toasted Heretic are (unless, of course, you found this entry by searching Google’s new blog search for “Toasted Heretic”), I recommend that you download “Lightning” which is charmingly energetic, and “You can Always Go Home“, which I think gives an indication of how much fun of a live jam band they must be. Remember that you can download these with impunity; on the liner notes of the album, the band is quoted as saying, “Our principle on PIRACY and COPYING STUFF remains the same as it always was: copy this album for your poorer friends, and make the rich ones buy it.”
In other update news, I have also redesigned the Pan~Theism page, and will be adding new weekly strips to it on Wednesdays. We kick this off with a computer-generated comic made with the online Strip Generator, as pointed out to me by Nick Locking.
Handwriting
Continuing my recent literary fixation, another post about books. Sorry. But when one finds that one’s studies to be a librarian aren’t as bibliophiliac as one anticipated, this stuff is bound to boil up in other aspects of one’s life.
The Library of Congress is a vaguely disappointing tourist attraction. When I visited there in 1998 I think I expected to be able to wander through the concentric research desks and check out where Robert Redford sat in Three Days of the Condor. I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that it was not actually an open stack library, nor a national library. However, there was a curious exhibit of assorted works on display in an area open to the public. There was a rather awe-inspiring letter from Edith Wharton, who had the most divine, refined handwriting I had ever seen. I made me despair of my own haphazard scrawl… but it also reminded me that the only D I ever got in school was in fourth grade handwriting, and that such elegant curves were probably a dream I shouldn’t bother to germinate.
However, as compelling as that letter was, I must say that the most amazing thing in the exhibit was a page of original art from Walt Kelly’s “Who Stole The Tarts”, an “Alice in Wonderland meets Joe McCarthy” pastiche from The Pogo Stepmother Goose. It was amazing to see Kelly’s careful penwork, and a surprise to learn that he did his pencils completely in non-photo blue.
Speaking of Alice’s Adventures, The BBC issued a technology press release today about the addition of the manuscript copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground to the British Library’s “Turning the Pages” collection, digital representations of browsable original works that are too valuable and/or fragile to be visited in person. Alice joins thirteen other works, including “the Diamond Sutra, Jane Austen’s History of England, the Leonardo Notebook, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Mercator Atlas of Europe…” The fact that these are manuscripts and not first editions means that one can attempt to peer into the heart of the writer through his or her handwriting. The samples to the right demonstrate Lewis Carroll’s neat, legible text — almost certainly restrained and refined so that it could be read by Alice Liddell — Jane Austen’s loose student script, and Da Vinci’s famous backwards rebus.
By the way, the above selection of Da Vinci is translated as follows: “.yadretsey aet revo tuoba em gnillet saw sumadartsoN gnuoy taht nworB naD tawt sselkcef siht ekil hcum …seil syawla droc eno no dednepsus ydob a fo ytivarg fo ertnec ehT”
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