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Keep to the middle course. Steal bits of wax and feathers discarded by other, better fliers. Let the sun rise and fall. Let the waves pound themselves to mist, again and again. Your task is not to be flawless. Your task is to fly.

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Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

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We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together.... That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.

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There's an optical illusion that's easy to fall for, even if you know the trick: the more distant you are from other people, the more invulnerable they appear.

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...the awareness that although you'd like to think you perceive things cleanly and objectively, you've never felt the vibe of a room that doesn't happen to have you in it.

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Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. But if you look closer, the ink never really dries on any of your experiences. They can change their meaning the longer you look at them.

It's often said that there's nothing to be gained in looking backward. But there are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret; a kind of questioning that can allow fresh context to trickle in over the years, slowly filling out the picture like an inkblot painting, right there in front of you.

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Maybe it's not so bad to dwell on the past, as long as it brings you closer to the truth. If nothing else, it's a way to push back against the oversimplification of time. Trying to keep a memory alive, as something more than just a caricature of itself.

Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas.

And a work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

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We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

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moriturism: (n.) a tiny jolt of awareness that someday you will die, which leaves you lying awake in bed whispering silently to yourself, *Oh, right, this is it*; an unsettling reminder that your life is not just a game you're playing or a story you'll be telling later, but your one and only glimpse of what the universe has to offer, like a kid waking up in the back seat of the family car at night, having just pulled into a bright neon gas station, looking around for a moment or two, before settling back in for the long road trip, sleeping for miles and miles off into the dark.

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Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

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The 1984 Atari Arcade game Peter Pack-Rat feels like a fever dream, maybe because it never got ported to consoles? My arcade at the Aviation Mall near Glens Falls NY had it though.
via

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Train your heart like a dog.

Once again I'm daydreaming about how the perfect Todo program, even if I have to make it myself, would turn my life into a joyous whirlwind of productivity....

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Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

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When you're a kid and your parent(s) decide to move to another town you have no idea that it will be way harder for them to make new friends than it will for you

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

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WHERE DID ALL THE SAXOPHONES GO? "How one instrument went from being the backbone of American popular music to being a punchline in a joke about the '80s." Reminds me of my 2004 rant about saxophones as the most overrated instrument. I disavow most of that now - I was just a bitter tuba player who hadn't played tuba in like 8 years.

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Don't deep fry gnocchi. Skip to :30 and enjoy....

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ATTN: FOG IS JUST REALLY BIG GHOSTS

Case in point:
Kids and Crafts. As an uncle with show-off tendencies and decades of doodling it can be a challenge to find the right balance co-creating with kids. I want to foster their creativity, show them the joy of amateur creation by example... but it's hard to conceptualize the challenges they face, and I don't want them to be frustrated with their skillset. In the same way it's weird when a toddler is at an age where you can have a mini-conversation with them about the state of their diaper, the way "coloring in the lines" is a developmental milestone and the stages of drawing they go through defies simplified cognitive models - it's hard to get your mind into that lack of hand-eye coordination.

I think of Sedaris' hilarious "Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol" - - where a professional theater critic brings his full guns to bear on a local elementary school Christmas Pageant. Or, worse, that real life story of a kid whose musical ambitions were quashed by a father who would almost throw her off the piano stool to show how he could do it better.

It takes mindfulness to find a decent balance: having fun making stuff with the kid, not blatantly condescending in terms of artistic level but not overwhelming them with tricks I've picked up over 4 decades, and also praising their effort and not intrinsic ability-- trying to keep them away from fixed mindset! (Maybe it helps to keep in mind how mediocre my attempts to draw real-life things are... I'm not half the cartoonist I'd like to be.

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My new favorite black ink pen. I really have developed a preference for thick lines ala "Bold"/10mm.

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Why So Many Smart People Aren't Happy Superman, the solution to all of our problems...

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A few days ago I posted about someone painting 292 on the side of the "Jumbo 2" elephant. On FB Adam K mentioned it was Tufts' place in an ordered ranking of top 300 "party schools" from a short-lived magazine called Inside Edge (that he actually wrote briefly for, before it folded) that was maybe a trailblazer for patterns Maxim and FHM would use.

I found this Baltimore Sun article on it from way back when --"We're the male version of Sassy," says Jonathan Hsu, editor in chief of Inside Edge, during a phone interview from his dorm room at Harvard University.

That's kind of hilarious too.

[Henry Ford's] ignorance was a frequent source of wonder. He believed that the earth could not support the weight placed on it by skyscrapers and that eventually cities would collapse in on themselves, as in some kind of biblical apocalypse. Engineers explained to him that a large skyscraper typically weighed about sixty thousand tons while the rock and earth excavated for the foundations would weight more like a hundred thousand tons, so that skyscrapers actually reduced the burden on the earth beneath them, but Ford was unpersuaded. He seldom let facts or logic challenge the certainty of his instincts.

Kindness covers all of my political beliefs, no need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

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Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he's never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don't wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don't lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.

--via 22 words

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http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/tech-tip-really-simple-http-server-python I kinda love this one liner that gives you a static http server on any machine running Python (like Macs...)

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My company is doing "Take Your Child to Work Day". For me then it has to be "Take Your Inner Child to Work Day". Which kinda is every day. Three random snarks my dad would play with me from time to time:

• A typical response to me asking "Have you seen my shoes?" was "Well, the last time I wore them..." At one point I thought I would out clever him and ask "Yes? Yes? What did you do with them?" but he was disarmingly quick to respond with a "Well I put them right back where I found them."
• Another favorite to almost any semi-rhetorial query like "Where's my book?" was (in a certain sing-songy voice) "Ok, I'll play your silly little game, where is your book?"
• Finally, this exchange:
  Him: "Lets do a knock-knock joke!"
  Me: "Ok!"
  Him: "Great, you start!"
  Me: "Knock knock!"
  Him: "Who's there?"
  Me: "..."

I'll be playing some of these games with the kids of my friends, having already instructed my (now college aged) cousins in the fine art of video game trash talking.

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The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.

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'We're stuck in time like fish in water,' Eagleman said, oblivious of its currents until a bubble floats by.

The Unreachable Pyramid from Brady Hall on Vimeo.

(Very mildly NSFW). See this if you have no idea what it's on about.)

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Some Sony employee designed these folding studio-ish headphones so the hinge in the back grabs your neck hair when they're around your neck- boo.

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Latest anti-pedant gripe: nowadays Decimate means, roughly, leave 10% standing, not destroy 1-in-10. Language evolves, and we're not the Roman military. (OED backs this, a bit)

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I need a better word for my anti-pedantic gripes. (e.g. "ATM machine" and "PIN number" actually make sense-redundancy can strengthen language)

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I tend to identify people by their hair. Also, when I doodle, I start with the hair (covers and frames head) Related?
My bud cmg and I walked the Revere shore yesterday, the first summerish day of the year. We saw this guy doing some kind of surfing with a giant kite... though a minute of googling implies the sport is, err kitesurfing. He seemed really excellent at it, keeping his kite out of the water, and getting a nice long cruise with and against the wind, without having to stop and paddle back out very much. It seemed like the most technical surfing fun you could have with such limited waves.

Afterwards we met up with JZ at Picante at Central Square, and ate at some tables outside. It felt kind of cool and european to sit and eat and banter a bit... the food is a few notches above the more typical Qdoba or Anna's Taqueria - bummer their license for beer etc doesn't extend to those tables...

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JZ really digs on Micro Center, stops by like weekly or so. I think this area REALLY needs a Fry's Electronics, just for diversity. Listening to him chat with the employees in the PC building section is interesting... it's such a hobbyist approach to PCs, like it wouldn't be very different if they were talking model rockets or railroads or those high end RC cars or something. The fact that its computers is almost secondary to it being guys focused on a technically detailed building hobby.

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A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

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You know, I might have a bit of hoarding syndrome for information. I'm loathe to give up URLs that might be worth returning to.

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3 game sweep of the Yankees, 2 meals of outdoor patio dining, 2 trips to the beach, 1 cookout... not such a bad weekend. Had some stitches on my leg that are coming out Monday.

One lesson learned from that: do NOT bother with CVS store-brand band-aids, they just don't stick for crap.

For a while I bought into the idea that store brands were around as good, that whole "maybe it's actually manufactured by the same folks and just rebadged" but no... at least sometimes it's truly inferior.

In these times when people are thinking a bit more frugally, any other thoughts on store-brands?

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Snark of the Moment

Crayons can teach us a good lesson... ...they're different colors, have strange names, but all learn to live together in the same box.

"Also, powerful forces beyond your control will use you for their own ends, constantly rubbing you down until you're a worn-out nub, and then will throw you in the trash. So, what I'm trying to say is, somebody go get grandma some more gin."

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Design of the Moment

--Weird, I thought I posted this yesterday... making the rounds it's a big old logo design FAIL from the UK's Office of Government Commerce...

--I decided to paraphrase a dreamish thought I had this morning in the form of an xkcd ripoff homage. It came out well enough, but I'm not sure if it's going to be all that funny to anyone else... and for the record I do clean my apartment more often than that.

It hits me that I'm generally overdue for deciding about how I feel about having kids. Historically, my thinking has been that having kids is this weirdly cosmic thing that you can't really grok 'til it happens to you, and that's what possibly made it worth the price of admission of your old life, your old life with its relative abundance of free time and free cash. This was countered by my general sense of anxiety, worried about being so completely responsible for another being, and also uncertainty about the World As We Know It continuing on its merry way.

Lately, though, as the generation just ahead of me begins to have major issues with aging parents, I'm begining to wonder if kids are becoming de facto retirement policies (especially given uncertainties with Social Security and what not.) I've heard so many stories about families dealing with older members who are experiencing alzheimers and other conditions that I wonder what's happening to the old folks who don't have that kind of support system, and what the odds are that I'll end up one of them if I stay on my current course...

Hmmm.

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Quote of the Moment

The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.

Pauling is the discoverer of how atoms bond with other atoms, later known for his peace activism, and they say second only to Einstein in terms of scientist public recognition... (I would say his fame has not been as long lasting though)

I'm reading Alan "Einstein's Dreams" Lightman's "The Discoveries". The author was supposed to be at my last United Universalist Science and Spirituality discussion group meeting, but couldn't make it at the last minute.

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Video of the Moment
I kisrael'd some of Paul Robertsons art, which turns out was all prep work for this most amazing Video Game that never was, Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. 112 megs, but so worth it for anyone who has ever played that old "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" Arcade game.

A month or so ago someone from this one band asked if they could use my old Young Astronauts in Love cartoon on a shirt. The musician's comment that he was having trouble making a good cartoony astronaut me realize that I'd been drawing the basic form since high school, and reminded me of one particular time I used it: the victory screen for my Windows game InterGalactic SpaceMan BlastFest:

Space Man Red is the InterGalactic Champion! All Hail SpaceMan Red!

You can download it from my Alien Bill Productions page. It still runs on modern versions of Windows, though you probably need to download the "vbrun300.dll" file linked at the bottom of that page. But I thought I'd share that victory screen as well as the custom sound effects I recorded for the death screams of the little jetpack wearing astronauts:

scream: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 / victory!

One of the voices is actually Dylan of Sidebar "Fame" (who was subletting from me in Waltham at the time)...bonus kudos for the first person on the comments section to say which one. Also, the "victory" sfx is clearly not me.

Anyway, I've toyed with the idea of a port of InterGalactic SpaceMan BlastFest to the Atari 2600, but it's still a long way off, if ever.

Link of the Moment
Check Your Head.

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Screensaver of the Moment
Coolest idea for a screensaver that I've seen in a while: Holding Pattern is the view out of a passenger jet window...

Screensavers...what a sad little lost artform. The fact is usually screens don't need that much saving, burn-in is relatively rare, and then there's the way it's much more power effecient to suspend both the CPU and the monitor...sigh. But it was such a nice idea: when you're not using the computer, it should show you something cool 'til you want to use it again. Ah well.

At one point I kind of wished the phrase "about as useful as a screensaver on a PalmPilot" would come into vogue, but I was younger and maybe even geekier then.

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Summary of the Moment
A John Shirley blog entry on a recent Scientific American article about how we're being drowned in options. It also touches upon how there are two basic chooser types: Maximizers, who tend to become obsessed about looking for the "best" option, and Satisficers, who have less stress in general by following a "good enough is best" philosophy, but even that path is becoming more problematic.

That's one truth I'm coming to terms with: there's too much cool and interesting stuff out there. You can't read all the worthwhile books in the world, or even a tiny fraction of them. It's not easy to know the ratio of cool stuff I'll see over the cool stuff out there is closing in on zero.

In another related note...it's only been a few days, but I feel like the discipline needed to keep my house ready for unexpected drop-ins is good for me and my dreams of decluttering. I know it's a fantasy to think that I'll be able to keep up this level of neatness once the real need to do so passes, but still, it's a nice fantasy.

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Update of the Moment

"How do you know I'd be afraid?" Lloyd said, "How do you know that would be the last thing I'd feel?"
"I don't know that." Shwartz tick-tickeded the pen. "You can never know. That's what's terrible about death."
"Lots of things you don't know when you're alive. So what's the difference?"
Schwartz's fingers stopped, and he stared at Lloyd as though he had seen him purely and for the first time.

...it kind of ties in with the previous entry. See today's comments for an explanation of how the "too much cool stuff" ties in to the anti-packrat decluttering simplification bug. In short, it's about learning to let go. I'd like to say it's about not defining ourselves by our posessions, but I think we ARE somewhat defined by our posessions, and that's ok.
Man, did I watch a stinker of a movie last night at Jim and Sam's Bad Movie Night..."The Black Ninja". A black...err, ninja who drives...you guessed it, a Black Ninja motorcycle. He's a top notch defense attorney who gets suspects free and then kills them. It's either so new or so bad it doesn't show up on IMDB.com! Which is especially odd because it was written/ directed/ starred in by Clayton Prince, who has been in some mainstream stuff incuding the Cosby Show and Third Watch. (And according to a more offical website, the other actors have pretty big credentials as well.) I'm no Bill the Splut when it comes to talking about this kind of stuff, so I'll let kungfucinema.com do the work for those who want to know how bad indy chop-socky can be. Had a good theme song though, kind of a retro-blaxploitation number.

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Quote of the Moment

"Gee honey, I don't regret going to college. Why then I might not have married you. What would have become of me then? I would have probably just lived an empty, meaningless existence, ordering hookers and pizza till I dropped dead... ...with a slice in my mouth and a greasy hooter in my hand."

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Cultural Lesson of the Moment
How To Bow is a great and informative flash presentation, going into great detail about Japanese manners at work, home, and while going out. Really informative and thought out, though even the "fast" silent version is rather slowly paced. (Which might be part of the point, I don't know.) I love this kind of cultural stuff. The metafilter conversation where I found the link has some discussion about Western quirks, which I also find interesting. Seems like it would be tough to keep track of everyone's seniority ranking to the extent that they do in Japan, but it might be kind of nice to have a formal system of respect. On my way to Philly, not much time to write!

(PS: Snow?? On the ground?)

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Image of a Previous Moment
This is me with my Mom and Dad singing "On The Good Ship Lollipop" for a talent show, way back when. I think we were a big hit.

My mom is doing a 20 minute presentation about her life, but she doesn't have most of her photos there with her in England, so she asked if I had any photos that would help tell our family story. (Also, if I had a better scan of this War Cry / Seneca picture, which I don't, alas.)

So I thought this would be as good a time as any to post the scans I made of my photo album, 427 images in 9 sections. They possibly aren't of terribly large interest to anyone outside my immediate family and friends, and maybe not even them... if you're in a hurry, you can see the 26 photos I picked out for my mom, in case she didn't have time to go through the huge batch. (Those 26 include 2 not in the album, one of her being dedicated (The Salvation Army's version of a baptism) and one of my mom as a young Salvation Army officer or cadet.) Conspiracy Theory of the Moment

The Fifth Protocol of the Elders of Zion: Pika, Pika!

There is a theory in some Arab communities that Pokeémon is Japanese for "There is no God in the universe" or "I am a Jew" (not a shortening of "Pocket Monsters") and that the whole thing is a way of corrupting Arab youth with jewish mysticism and gambling. Or something.

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Office Toy of the Moment
I always wanted one of these things when I was a kid, so I bought one at a Kay-Bee post-Holiday sale. I'm resisting springing for the larger version from a Natural Wonders close out.

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Quote of the Moment

In short, assume that any time it appears that evolution is working in reverse, it is probably an illusion.

He's arguing that the conventional wisdom that today's pitchers just don't have what the old guys had is dead wrong.