Happy 20th Birthday to my Scion xA, "Puck".
In some ways this car has been my most consistent and steadfast constant companion for these two decades. The AC is shot, a dozen other small things are going wrong, but still it drives well, parks like a dream, and holds a tuba.
And like with the tuba - I love when something works well but it well past the time when you're worried about (more) nicks and scratches
I have the goofiest little invocation I sometimes make as I walk to Puck - "funky little car funky little car gonna go real far in my funky little car".
I think it's hard to give up a car like this in part because WE don't want to be discarded when we're a bit old, and our AC doesn't work...
Anyway. There may come a day when I have to give you up, old friend, but today is not that day.
Bad photo but I feel like Keytar Bear at 8am is a good omen for the day. Maybe the month.
Didn't realize there was is a massive ransomware attack going on making and many car dealers are back to working with pen and paper... Cory Dotorow has a good essay on it
She liked Montgomery in the same way she liked the ring-tailed coati, the bez-muuch whose croak resembled the baying of the calf rather than the croaking of other frogs, or the cry of the owl, which Ramona thought unlucky. She liked Montgomery because he was part of her world and she loved everything in it. He was like that well-trodden path.
She wished to be unafraid and for the world to be good. Neither thing seemed possible.
new tuba bead set just in time for the big Pride weekend! a bit more percussive, durable, and fabulous than the previous mardi gras style throws. waiting for Boston Pride At the Leftist Marching Band's 20th Birthday Party gigOGNJ path lightCambridge CommonProvidence St
4 star:
* Pigeonometry (Aesop Rock)
Song about Pigeons. I love the "A thousand is a lot" line.
* Salud y Vida (Daddy Yankee)
La Victoria Taqueria is some of the most authentic Mexican near Boston, and they this was playing...
A few weeks ago Melissa and I listened to Conan O'Brien interviewing Howard Stern, and he talked about his book of interviews ("Howard Stern Comes Again") which I bought and recently read.
People who mostly know Stern from the 80s and the 90s might not realize how much he's grown and matured, especially since he switched to SiriusXM. He'll still do some of the shock jock sex stuff, but he's done a lot of therapy and is a fantastically well researched and emotionally resonant interviewer.
A lot of good (and touching) quotes here, but my favorite was Billy Joel talking about how he could still play piano after getting his hands banged up in a motorcycle accident: "No, piano is a percussion instrument. People think it's a string instrument, but piano you play like a drum."
I have this theory. I don't know if this holds water, but it's just that if death is the end of the story, how the story ends, then marriage is a giant step in that direction. Actually, the fear of marriage is the fear of death.
[My slamming my own hand until it broke was] similar to cutting, when the pain on the inside is so intense, you just want a way for it to stop. Your brain literally can't handle the physical pain and the emotional pain. One of the receptors turns off. So when you feel like you're drowning by all of the emotional stuff . . . And there was horrible stuff going on at my house at night. That's something that scars you in a way, that unless you've lived through it it's hard to articulate.
Dave: See, there was a pounding nervousness when I was nineteen. There was a debilitating fear. And then I'd just start [playing "All Along the Watchtower"] and no one would pay any attention. Maybe one person might stop. But the convenience with [it] was when it was a little bit chilly I could just play the song and never stop playing it.
Howard: Yeah, it's a little monotonous, isn't it?
Dave: I would play it this way and that way. I could do it for an hour, swear to God. Until someone told me to stop and shut up. I did have one really humiliating experience. This guy came up and just put his hands on the strings and said, "Shhhhh." And then walked away with his pretty Dutch girlfriends. And they all went, "Ha ha ha." And I was just *crushed*.
When you're happy, drink and do drugs; when you're unhappy, don't.
Howard: When you break up, do you rip up pictures, or--
Gwyneth: No.
Howard: You still have them somewhere?
Gwyneth: I have a couple pictures, yeah.
Howard: But when you get married, in the future, you gotta rip up those pictures then.
Gwyneth: Why? Every piece of your life is an important piece of your life.
I love what Rodney Dangerfield says in the following pages about how he doesn't believe in God, he believes in logic. A big part of me agrees with him. I have often said, "There's no God. There's no way." Then I'll quickly think better of it. "I better not say that." I'm so paranoid. What if there is a God, and I get punished for not believing? "Well, there might be one," I blurt out. "Yes, there definitely is a God!" Like I said, I'm in a weird in-between zone--my personal purgatory. This indecisiveness is even more agonizing and confounding because it violates the single most important rule of being successful in radio, which I mentioned earlier in this book's introduction: you must have a definite opinion. I've defined my entire career by this principle. Yet when it comes to religion, I'm unable to follow it. Telling people, "There is no God," is good radio. Telling people, "There is a God"--also good radio. Telling people, "There is no God . . . but wait, maybe there is one," that's bad radio. I know it, but I still can't help myself. I'm afraid to offend the Almighty.
I so desperately want to believe. I don't want the party to end when I die. I can't grasp that the world is going to go on without me and not miss a beat. Really, at the end of the day, I'm hoping for the movie Ghost: I drop dead, wrap my arms around Demi Moore, and we make pottery for eternity.
Howard: The backstory has to be believable. It's like porn.
Amy: Yeah. Sure. Well, I know what kind of porn you like, which is your babysitter stuff.
Howard: Babysitter, massage room--
Amy: Yeah, massage room. Yup, that's nice. 'Cause it also involves a massage, which I always think is nice.
Howard: Always nice. I watched two girls give each other a shower last night. One was a reluctant lesbian, and the other one was full-blown lesbian.
Amy: I feel like the reluctant one maybe was on board from the beginning.
Howard: But do you feel like you wasted time when you were young? Are there any regrets?
Billy: Sure, I've got regrets. Anyone who's really lived has regrets. If you have no regrets, what kind of life did you have?
Howard: You don't panic when you see your hands swelling up like that, living as a piano player?
Billy: Nah. They weren't that good to begin with. This is rock and roll. You play with your elbows if you have to.
Howard: Oh, come on.
Billy: No, piano is a percussion instrument. People think it's a string instrument, but piano you play like a drum.
Howard: For sure. I think it's refreshing you're not one of these guys that appears to be marketing constantly. We were just talking this morning about how Jimmy Buffett is building a retirement home called Margaritaville.
Ed: If I was to do anything, there's a local brewery near me, and I'd love them to make me a beer. That's the one thing I would endorse. [Or] ketchup--if there was a bottle of ketchup.
Howard: How many guys do you know who do the whole living on couches and everything and then don't make it? It's crazy sad.
Ed: The only ones that I know that don't are the ones that had a plan B. So the moment you go, "Ah, I don't want to sleep on this couch anymore. I have this really good job I can go to"--that's the moment that it doesn't happen. I actually haven't met anyone who has set their mind on something and not achieved it, eventually. There are actors that make it when they're fifty, and they become the biggest actor in the world when they're fifty, and that's because they haven't had a plan B and they've just been like, "Nah, fuck it, I'm gonna do it."
You got to piss off *somebody*. It's not good weed if you don't choke a little bit.
Sadly, [our beloved cat Leon] died on the operating table. The tumor was even bigger than they thought, and he lost too much blood during the procedure. I was devastated. So was Beth. We sat in my office and cried. My life felt so empty without Leon sitting there on the couch next to me. I wrote a five-page love letter listing everything I cherished about him. I didn't want to forget a single detail of our time together. Little things, like how Leon only ate dry food and hated when I scratched his side. It was my way of paying tribute to him. I'm not sure when I'll be able to go back and read it. The pain is still too raw.
Sir Mix-a-Lot had a lesser known sequel to "Baby Got Back", "Put 'em on the Glass", moving from a celebration of butts to one of boobs. (And notable for having a video with topless dancers that I think got play on late night MTV)
One of the odder pairs of rhymes from the song:
Some say I only rap about wealth
But baby can I talk about your health?
Lungs, lungs, m***f**in' lungs
Get a brother oh so strung
I can't quite figure out if that's a euphemism or a terrible misunderstanding of anatomy, but as a tuba player I would like to think of it literally, as a tribute to one of the most important parts of a tuba players physique.
I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem
My mom sent me an article from Christianity Today: Isaac Asimov Believed the World Could Go on for Thousands More Years. Why Can't Christians?, comparing Christianity's current assumption that the end of the world was just around the corner (an assumption having been made for the past 19 centuries or so) vs Asimov's "Foundation" series where statistical study (like.. prophecy, but science-y) shows that the Galactic Empire will soon fall into a 30,000 years Dark Age - or one of only 1,000 years if the titular Foundation can make and preserve an "Encyclopedia Galactica" to help humankind reboot itself.
30,000 years dwarfs the thinking of most eschatology-minded Christians (I guess they do think of a 1,000 year reign of Satan) even when they claim to be thinking of "forever and ever"
There is a more resilient and thoughtful flavor of Christianity that understands there is value and strength in the religion even if straightforward readings of Revelation are misguided (or if the scriptures really mean it when they say "no man knows the day or hour") Heck - "preterism" says Revelation already happened, and did a good job calling the destruction of Jerusalem and he persecution of Christians under Nero.
That's a serious problem with going all or nothing in the rightness and correctness of your religion - the idolatry of saying this Book is inerrant, absolutely preserved by God in its long history of translation and compilation and curation - and must be taken more or less literally (i.e. maybe just poetic in some of the bits, like saying "4 corners of the earth", but overall never metaphorically)
The "inerrant" view avoids some heresies of ordinary joes picking and choosing what they want to believe (and so permits the church to wield doctrine in authoritarian ways) but boy does it create a rigid and ultimately brittle structure. And seemingly contradictory - the mental gyrations you have to go perform for what "generation" means when Jesus said "Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" 2,000 years ago is a wonder to behold.
And this sense of All or Nothing reflects the brittleness that cracked open my own faith a teen. It seems like most believers are not very think-ful about why so many other folks believe so many other things - refuse to consider the nature of why they believe what they believe as anything but God-given, and aren't we lucky that were given just the right belief in this sea of wrongness, and can't we feel that in our heart, don't know about those other heathens. What a stunning lack of sympathy, a myopia that ignores what other people are seeing and lacks almost any introspection, just a feeling of "God must have graced me with the singular belief that happens to be correct."
I guess the thinking is if "Left-Behind" style readings of Revelation isn't correct, then who knows what other readings might be misguided? And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the fear that people might pick and choose the parts of the faith that seem convenient. (Almost like, you know, how many Christians seem to ignore that bit about rich people being radically unlikely to get into Heaven... camels through eye of the needle must mean something different.)
And that's what we have today. Mainstream folk Christianity forgets that Jesus was a radical leftist teaching generosity and compassion and sacrifice, and so degenerates into a tool to enforcing the status quo and nostalgic views of how things used to be - ignoring the work it took to morally GROW into supporting obvious markers of equality, like that woman are fully people who can vote, or that black people are fully people and can't be owned. (And yes, flavors of Christianity helped this country make that growth, but not the mainstream reactionary bent in ascendancy today.)
But a flavor of "All or Nothing" that has most molded me is the universalism of The Salvation Army and evangelical Christianity - that the most important Truths apply to (and are potentially available to) everyone, or else they are not worthy Truths I should rally for. The unlikelihood that Salvationist Protestants got it right while everyone got it various levels of wrong led me to conclude that this flavor of belief wasn't as universal as I needed it to be.
So I embrace the uncertainty. My Faith is- there IS a singular, universal Truth, and one with moral implications. But the other tenant of my Faith is that we can't be certain what the overarching Truth is. It might even have many forms, many paths to God - a view the New England flavor of the UU church leans into. But I think - almost by definition, a shared-reality based Objective, transcendent overarching Truth is the bedrock of everything that is. (heh - I realize I still tend to think of Truth as something on high... maybe I should switch my thinking to think of it as what's supporting the ground we walk and build on. Underarching, not overarching.)
So what's weird is this doesn't just put me into opposition with normal "we're right, they're wrong" faiths, it also puts me in opposition to "there is no single truth, so everyone has their own truth" existentialism. The idea that there is a yardstick we should be thinking of to frame our morality - no matter how dimly we can see it - is different than saying everyone has their own totally legitimate wooden ruler, and so we have no way of evaluating other people's Truth.
Aficionados of Kirk-ish cringe will appreciate 32:30, where, accompanied by Martin Witczak, I perform Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". While it's not quite as deeply awful as I had feared... late 50s drawing room novelty songs might not have been reading the room that well.
(Also now I love pigeons!)
I also am in the jazz/stage band at 1:16:16 - I think we called ourselves "Shh - it happens" and we played Theme from Shaft and... MacArthur Park? Really?
I do like my tuba behind the opening "Muppet Show Theme" act at 00:30 (along with seeing a gal I was probably dating then, Marnie S) and there's "Lion Sleeps Tonight" at 20:00 - I wasn't involved but the act comes to mind from time to time.
Some pretty decent if very 90s, Boys 2 Men-influenced crews, synchronized dancers, and rockers.
Overall the energy is a bit "Napolean Dynamite Dances at the Rally" but I'm glad to see it.
A long while ago I did the Global Game Jam with street-art artist Bart Cusick ( the result - Heartchers - is still a pretty good 2 player, one screen iPad game!) and then more recently he gifted me with some Alien Bill designs he was playing with - some of my favorites Bills anyone has made tbh.
I realized it would be a good set of images for my multiscreen work laptop setup - they won't get seen by folks all that often but I will catch a glimpse every time I lock the computer. And the simpleness of the white/black somehow seems more professional while still obviously being very playful.
Check out more of Bart's work at bartcusick.carbonmade.com
There are two things that don't have to mean anything - one is music, and the other is laughter. [Chuckles] Don't have to mean anything, that is, in order to give us very deep pleasure.
I bought myself a new-job celebration gift of a new Freitag bag - upcycled from the kind of Truck tarps they use in Europe. Large enough to handle a laptop and hoodie, but still one strap - I still have that old '80s bias against wearing backpacks properly (plus they can heat up your back.)
I'd feel more sheepish about spending so much, but I really like the material more than regular nylon or canvas. Also, when I look around about "why is it so important to have a one-strap bag", I see that now... it's apparently stylistically ok for a guy to have a fanny pack so long as its worn like a bandolier? I think I'm not the only one with issues on this.
Dr. J, via Oliver Fox saying why every NBA championship should have an asterisk
Steam Boat Races. Wowza.. what a bad idea! I feel like I can hear some 19th Century version of Scotty from Star Trek saying "I canne give her any more cap'n, she's gonna blow!" but it being... for real, with a lot of death.
wow. seriously moved by this:
I didn't realize it at the time but this was low-key me from 1996-2013
I liked this list of old timey baseball nicknames
"but one doctor called it dsd" yea some doctors also used to call bipolar women hysterical. and many doctors still think black people cant feel as much pain as white people. and being gay was a mental illness for a long time. bigotry makes its way into medicine
I never understood why the current version of DSM was considered holy writ when earlier versions had such horseshit in it.
Dr Ruth, Richard Simmons, and Trump getting winged. Like the 80s are throwing up.
OK, coming closer to my bar for "too geeky to post" (which is, like, a VERY high bar for me) - I just expanded my personal system for managing all the wires and plugs that any device-owning adult will probably have to deal with.
So, the idea is, yes a single box for all these damn wires, but then each type of wire in its own labeled baggy.
Previously I had these baggies:
USB/USB-C
USB Micro(?)-Smallest
USB Mini(?)-Bigger
Lightning/Dock/Samsung
AV
Camera
Power
Random
Now I have those plus:
Mouse/Watch/Stylus
Earbuds
HDMI
Laptop-ish Power vs Power Small Device (replaces early "Power" baggie)
"That was special. I'll never forget this night... until I walk through the door and dissolve into the universe."
"Can I ask you something, buddy? How did you... know?"
"Look, it wasn't like a heard a bell ring or anything. I just suddenly had this calm feeling, like the air inside my lungs was the same as the air outside my body."
"For spiritual stuff, you gotta turn to the East. [...] Picture a wave... in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it pass through and it's there, and you can see it, and you know what it is, it's a wave. And then it crashes on the shore... and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. That's one conception of death, for a Buddhist. The wave returns to the ocean... where it came from. And where it's supposed to be."
"Not bad Buddhists."
"Not bad. None of this is bad."
I really didn't realize until looking up my favorite mechanic's ("Zone Kar") that West Somerville really juts up between Arlington and Meford.
(Reminds me of how New Hampshire reaches out between Mass and Maine to grab a piece of the shore, except instead of the ocean it's that piece of the Mystic River.)
"The other thing David--that's my brother--says about [author Howard Bell] is that he has the absolute perfect bestseller's name."
"Really?" said Dirk. "In what way?"
"David says it's the first thing any publisher looks for in a new author. Not, 'Is his stuff any good?' or, 'Is his stuff any good once you get rid of all the adjectives?' but, 'Is his last name nice and short and his first name just a bit longer?' You see? The 'Bell' is done in huge silver letters, and the 'Howard' fits neatly across the top in slightly narrower ones. Instant trademark. It's publishing magic. Once you've got a name like that, then whether you can actually write or not is a minor matter."
Donald Trump is that kind of name ala Howard Bell / Steven King (and "Trump" is phonetically and metaphorically strong; I don't think we ever would have had a President Drumpf.)
And Trump's new running mate's name, "JD Vance", has that same energy. "JD", while it doesn't fill a book cover that well, is better than "James" would have been.
Trump knows from branding, as you can tell by his first reaction after seeing he survived being shot at is "let's make a WWE photo-op"
If Trump can say he likes people who weren't captured when talking about POWs, can I say I like presidential candidates who weren't shot at?
(And great, now the hollow Republican chant has shifted from USA! USA! to FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! like folks are throwing hands in a high school cafeteria. And frankly that's the one of the gentler metaphors for what a giant hall full of white dudes screaming in unison for their leader looks like.)
Chris Fleming on the Power and the Glory of the song Chameleon - too much power in the hands of a middle school jazz band near you.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community's experiences. I will dispense this advice now:
Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP; or never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of PHP until your stack is completely jammed. But trust me, in 20 years you'll look back at your old sites and recall in a way you can't grasp now, how much possibility lay before you and how simple and fast they were. JS is not as blazingly fast as you imagine.
Don't worry about the scaling; or worry, but know that premature scalability is as useful as chewing bubble gum if your project starts cosy and small. The real troubles on the web are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; if your project grows, scale it up on some idle Tuesday.
Code one thing every day that amuses you.
Style.
Don't be reckless with other people's data; don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
POSSE.
Don't waste time on shiny new frameworks; sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they're a trap. The web platform doesn't need gigs of node_modules.
Remember the guestbook entries you receive; forget the spam. If you succeed in doing this well, tell me how.
Keep your old site designs. Throw away your old nested
s.
Flex.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your site. The most interesting websites don't even have an introduction, never mind any blog posts. Some of the most interesting web sites I enjoy just are.
Add plenty of semantic HTML.
Be kind to your eyes, your visitors will appreciate a nice theme.
Maybe you'll blog, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll have users, maybe you won't.
Maybe you'll give up that cool domain.
Maybe you'll sell that little project and hate what the buyers do with it.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your code is half spaghetti; so is everybody else's.
Enjoy your . Style it every way you can. Don't be afraid of CSS, or what other people think of it. It's the greatest design tool you'll ever learn.
Animate, even if you only try it out in your local IDE or CodePen.
Read the documentation, even if you don't follow it.
Do not read React dev rel articles; they will only make you feel confused.
Get to know the web platform; HTML, CSS and JS are there for good.
Be nice to your community; they are your hyperlinks that keep the web interconnected and the people who will give the web a future.
Understand that frameworks come and go, but for a precious few you should donate to the maintainers.
Work hard to bridge the gaps in accessibility and responsiveness, because the older you get, the more you need the accommodations you didn't need when you were young.
Host on Netlify once, but leave before it makes you static.
Host on Überspace once, but leave before it makes you dynamic.
Contribute.
Accept certain inalienable truths: connection speeds will rise, techbros will grift, you too will get old-- and when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young websites were light-weight, tech founders were noble and fonts used to be bigger.
Respect the W3C.
Ask for help and people will support you.
Maybe you have a patreon, maybe you have venture capital funding; but you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your tabbing order, or by the time you've got arthritis, using a keyboard will be useless.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.
The old web is a form of nostalgia. Rebuilding it needs to be more than fishing the past from the disposal, painting over the inaccessible parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
He who has worn spectacles,
Knows the pleasure of sharp edges.
The distance is now close,
The blurred now clear,
Old friends meet again,
As if a veil was lifted.
I had a half memory of this poem about when eyeglasses came to China, but I couldn't find verification of it outside of ChatGPT.
Another year, another week up at Lake George with my bestie Dylan... we're trying to find a good name for a truly pleasant aquatic passtime - straddle a pool noodle like it's a rocking horse, and then kinda swim/tread over to a nearby dock, then go back. Compared to just swimming, it's so lovely, because you can keep up a conversation. We're thinking of branding it "water-walking". Maybe "water-walk-and-talk".
(Ok probably not the first people in the world to come up with this but still.)
Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.
Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. [...] I love you Christians. I'm a Christian. I love you, get out, you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don't have to vote again, we'll have it fixed so good you're not going to have to vote.
Kottke just (re)posted WWW: The Way We Were (just noticed the acronym pun there) talking about how the show "Halt and Catch Fire" had a Don Draper-esque speech about the nascent potential of the earliest Web, and how it could be just anything.
There was a beautiful and egalitarian time shortly after that - even if you didn't want to pay to host your own website on the "Information Superhighway", "Geocities" was a free or cheap option to hang your shingle and put your stuff at a fixed URL.
But then - as the 2016 article mourns - FB came in and offered trivial sharing your stuff with friends and family, and then Twitter and Instagram rolled in to give you a shot at that ephemeral immortality of "going viral" with bon mots and images, respectively. And suddenly becoming a part of the endless stream made more sense than building your own little island
I know I'm biased. My twenty years of blogging (at my site kirk.is ) has given me an incredibly rich archive, even if its value is mostly just for me. (I can generally retrieve any half-remembered quote, anecdote, personal photo or meme) And the technology of my "side hustle" of Porchfest websites carries more in common with those early-web days - before UI work exploded into an impossibly wide and dense forest of libraries and frameworks.
So much was lost. Geeks used to think a good URL could be forever - and while the Wayback Machine is still fighting that war against entropy, I think the stream is this endless deluge encouraging all but the most stalwart to let stuff just get swept away. And maybe I'm foolish to be hoping for earthly immortality and not embracing the transience of all things. Still, I think we could do better.
