tag/photo

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The belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter is called Capgras delusion. It was first identified in 1923, when a psychiatric patient claimed her husband and children were "the object of substitutions."
[...]
One of the most interesting aspects of Capgras delusion is the element of love. Usually it is not a stranger who has been replaced, but a beloved. In the 1990s, psychologist Haydn Ellis and others theorized that Capgras delusion is the result of your mind recognizing a face without feeling the love that you normally associate with that face.

Love is how we know we are in the right time.

Today some BABAMers supported Cosecha Massachusetts at the end of their 4-day march to the State House demanding a public hearing in the transportation committee to push the bill for drivers licenses for all - here's the state house and Cosecha folks as reflected in the bell of a french horn

#DriversLicensesForAll #ManejandoSinMiedo

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It's a gift to get to be anything at all.

Liz introduced me to this episode of "99% Invisible" helping to launch a new podcast, Everything is Alive. The podcast feels like a shadow of Shintoism, it gives inanimate objects voices and then interviews them. The premiere episode interviews a can of generic cola named Louis, and the unscripted dialogue ends up feeling like a very funny style parody of the "This American Life" genre - but it actually made me a bit verklempt.

(I remember I did a similar bit as a 9 year old or so, running around with a tape recorder and interviewing objects for some sort of faux radio program - but I didn't think to give them human voices, so I had to interview loud things like a handbell and an electric pencil sharpener.)

(Related: once you've heard the podcast see Margaret Davis' "Peas")

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Law 1: Every program can be optimised to be smaller.
Law 2: There's always one more bug.
Corollary: Every program can be reduced to a one-line bug.

- oh wait Ken Arnold had

Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction — from which, by induction, it is evident that every program can be reduced to one instruction that does not work.

that's what I was thinking of.
Melissa and Me in a view from inside Alicja Kwade's TunnelTeller at The Crane Estate in Ipswich- took the tour of the great house and rambled around the grounds yesterday, with Kristin and Dave and her mom Nancy who took the photo. You could easily recreate the James Bond gun barrel opening!
when the hat matches the tuba

One of the few tuba shots here that's not of me, btw

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Great take down of that anti-diversity memo at google, from a guy who just recently left the company, and so can talk a bit more freely. (Update 8/17: Another take from the Economist)

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A few days ago I asked on FB

Is there a single word for "able to readily be put into words"? Like "quantifiable", but about words...

My friend Anne suggested "articulable", and that seemed to be the best bet. ("Describable", as in the opposite of "indescribable" missed the mark somehow, and I wrote a follow up:

See, The opposite of "articulable" (or its maybe more flexible usage, "can't be articulated") has some interesting differences with "indescribable" and "ineffable". Those two so often get into supernatural woo-woo and the like; to some extent they deal with what can be "truly known".

I suppose there's something too with the practical opposite of "articulable" being along the lines of "can only be intuited". I guess "indescribable" is often implying "can only be known via direct revelation". So it suggests a epistemological triangle: knowledge that is articulable, knowledge that can only be intuited, knowledge that relies on direct revelation.... and each corner has its own words to describe it (and its opposite). Also, one of these corners is not like the others - only articulable knowledge is amenable to meaningful debate.

Come to think of it this was some of the sticking point for me and my erstwhile discussion buddy EB. I place probably too much emphasis on the articulable corner, and sometimes doubt the validity of the other corners. There's another aspect too, of how stuff is learned; EB emphasized the "body memory" aspect of things, like how taking the time to think and reason can get in the way of muscle memory and true mastery. You can get from "articulated knowledge" to deeper forms of knowing, but it's a slow tough process.

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This looks cool Mop

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No offense to (the?) Charm City, but my weekend would be somewhat better if it was not ending with a flight to Baltimore.

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Waiting at an airport bar, reading, looking up at a March Madness game- oh, highlights, just the baskets. It's funny how you can tell which team is leading, by seeing which teams scores they're replaying- the other team has almost always made as many baskets, but not being a part of the easy narrative they're shuffled aside. Boot at Bread and Puppet

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The One Thing The NFL Will Never Do To Make Football Safer. Spoiler: remove the padding and helmets. Like the "protection" added by boxing gloves, the body armor they wear lets the hits be a lot more forceful without as much visible damage at the time, and so leads to much worse long term problems.

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything

Oh man, at first I thought this quote was "a love poem about everything", which is a concept I like even more.

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Looking to make up some band music (but not looking to spend hundreds of dollars) I've been wrestling with the interface of both "MuseScore 2" and "NoteFlight", both very similar programs with startlingly frustrating UI. Why do they make it so hard to enter new notes and/or select existing notes to edit? Didn't Music Construction Set have this figured out in like 1984? For reals.

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--My Super-Niece at the New England Aquarium (still from footage for my 'One Second Everyday'
advent day 11

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Beginning of the End for Giant Glass? I would be kind of bummed if Giant Glass fell - including that jingle (why do I not mind it when 1-877-Kars-4-Kids unfailingly causes me to angrily stab for the radio dial? Maybe horns vs guitar?)

Fun fact: Giant Glass was named after the football team. Don't hold that against them though - that was before the Patriots. Hell, even my Waltham-based granddad liked the Giants then.

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Yesterday I learned that Scheiny (nee "Beauty"), my lovely Holton Collegiate Sousaphone, has a serial number that dates it to 1954...

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New Airplane Seating with a View More for the "I Wish I Was Insanely Rich" file.

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glad I looked up from my book
Friday at WTC station on the Silver Line I saw this new public art project - kind of awesome, it uses lenticular trickery so the goldfish change as you look at them from different angles.



Yeah. Been there since 2009. I started working and walking by it nearly daily since 2015.

How much of life do I miss by not paying attention?

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Or maybe I can pretend it's my own private Berenst#in Bears Problem and I'm secretly from another slightly more mundane parallel universe. Lego!
http://nextdraft.com/ - this daily email newsletter is worth signing up for, about the only thing besides Quora and "Javascript News" that I appreciate having sent to my inbox. It would do a decent of keeping you up with the biggest news stories, a few more relevant bits, and then an almost always funny "Bottom of the News" couple of items. The curation is first rate. They also have an app if you prefer that to email.

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seaport has the best clouds sometimes Lately I've been daydreaming about what it would be like to "quantum leap" back into my past self and cope with the technology I was using then. (Of course, I guess it would be more true to the show to try and fix all of the problems I've made for myself, but that's a different episode.)

Just tons of little things: "Oh right, my first iPhone didn't have copy and paste and the network was super slow" "Oh yeah, you used to have to type URLs into the address bar, Google keywords had their own box," "Oops no cellphone!" "Oh dang, Windows 95 didn't really support USB"... " "Windows 3.1 things minimized to icons, no task bar", "Oh tape walkman!" etc etc.

And more recently I've been sorting through old digital photos, separating the wheat from the chaff. And besides appreciating a few well composed shots and savoring photos of people I miss, it's often the background incidentals I find interesting: what was on my bookshelves, how an old shared apartment was arranged, what decoration it had, and of course those glimpses of technology (like an old browser open to some random page, or a PalmPilot lying on a table, etc)

I guess close inspection of these images is as close to "quantum leap" time travel as I'll be able to get. Some I'm disturbed how we're all borderline amnesiacs (this happens to everyone, right?) -- these photos from a decade ago show events I have no real recollection of, sometimes even people I don't know anymore. (Though of course, memories are so often made by later remembrance rather than at the moment of the event, so this kind of photographic review is an exercise in remembering more deeply.)

Right now I'm back to the very early 2000s, which is also when I started a daily diary, so sometimes I'm able to cross-correlate events when the photos don't tell the full story. (You know, there was an uptick in photos around this time as well, and it was after I philosophized my way out of being uptight about death. That might not be a coincidence...)

Of course, the sheer volume is a bit overwhelming. I've been an avid digital photographer for over 15 years (and was taking selfies before it was cool) -- sometimes I'm distraught at how little time I've had on the planet, but these photos remind me by their shear volume that it was actually quite a lot.

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Related: on the benefits of living more deeply in the past... or the future... or the present. yesterday, I saw a video on the physics of skateboard tricks and this morning I am suddenly weirdly struck by the everpresence of gravity; how it's always down down down and it seems like a miracle that anything can stand at all.

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The Internet and Money and Hearts......

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Standards_Day Today is World Standards Day. Except in the US, which celebrates it on the 23rd.

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Also, the infamous Smoot became chairman of standards board ANSI!

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Group shot of the band!
bouncy house! bouncy house! bouncy house!

(iPhone 5 macro mode isn't half bad. Although the lens isn't up to my Canon's quality, the touchscreen helps...)

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The performance that Inspired the new James Brown movie. I checked out the soundtrack for the new James Brown movie on iTunes, and was kind of bummed that it was the original versions, and not remixes with a modern feel - as great as the classics are, they've been available for a while. Anyway, watch this. James Brown was the showman of the century.

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At my husband's grandmother's wake my MIL took my 4 or 5 year old up to see his grandmother in the casket. Everyone was hushed, listening. He paused, looking curious. "Why is there a pillow under her head?" he demanded.
My mother in law faltered. "Ummm, so she could be comfortable," she said, trying to placate him.
He looked at her incredulously and spoke to her as if she understood nothing at all. "Grandma, she's dead. How could she be comfortable? What do you mean? You could take a chain saw and cut her up and it wouldn't matter at all." Everyone was literally speechless.

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http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/31/news/companies/radioshack-future/index.html Say goodbye to Radio Shack, for reals. I'll miss it; sometimes for the odd bit of obsure electronics it was pretty great. (Not to mention for my first laptop in 1991, an hard drive free 1100 FD (haha someone put that 20 year old machine on the Internet via the serial port... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4vvUoueOE )

Now I've now started grabbing little things like that from Amazon - that's the dark allure of Amazon Prime, stopping me from having to arrange trips out for things I can wait a day or two for.

It will be really hard to convince the next generations that the name "Radio Shack" was kind of a retro thing in the 80s and after, that it wasn't quite as out of date as the juxtaposition of "radios" and "shacks" would suggest.

Also, http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/ for all your old RS catalog nostaligia needs... I can almost smell the weird newsprint they used. Singing the song of my self, I updated http://kirk.is/java/ with recent projects and http://alienbill.com/ with gamejam results.

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The typewriter repair store that is LITERALLY next door is having a typewriterfest at noon. Hit me up if you're curious!

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october blender of love

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Hanging with the typewriter fans at the Cambridge Typewriter Co's Type-Out... my beauty circa 1936 holds up really well, it has a nice feel. (Not as crazy about its typeface, but still.)

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Off to Alaska!

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So it'll be Sales Tax Free weekend in MA? Does it count for that bullshit tax on software services? GET YOUR CODING IN THEN!!!
hard day basementing
about 300 cubic inches of Lego

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I decided I had too giant a surplus of underused Lego, so I divided it three ways, and am giving 2/3 of it to two different friend families. It looked to be about 300 cubic inches (at least seemed to more or less fill 3 10.5 cubes.)

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"I wish you could see what I can see. Sometimes you have to be up really high to see how small you are.

I'm going home now."

...from Gizmodo's watch the video of the space jump here

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My childhood would have been that much less confusing if George Lucas hadn't named one planet 'Tattooine' and another 'Dantooine.'

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Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

study in black cat and white ikea daybed
from a collection of artifact toys my mom brought me,
some i recognize from my childhood, but some i don't, like this...
Spy Pond, Arlington
Instagram's "Lo-Fi" filter is becoming my favorite. I kind of like the idea of having a signature look for this stuff, and Lo-Fi simplifies and makes thing pop a bit, allowing more focus on form and shape, which I think is more important to me, style-wise.

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http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ digging this site reviewing branding/logo makeovers.

Hauled out the Lego when EBB and his brood came over.... my collection is pretty immense but sadly underutilized... I might need to break it up and share the wealth, though it's maybe even tougher than giving up books!

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My idea for a new Olympic sport: swimming tug-of-war. Brilliant, right?
I have to admit, I had mixed feelings telling people we were "going to my folk's place at the Jersey Shore" which gives the wrong impression it at least two directions. But, it is also kinda nice.

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Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg! Batmobile lost a wheel, and Joker got away!

--Sticking my head over Amber's shoulder in the mirror reminded me what an oversized cranium my neck sports... hadn't thought about that in a while

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The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

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I think grown adult in a "SAW" movie should have to use algebra practically or EXPLODE, just to weaken some punk middle schooler's argument.

4/6 of my team "The Yooper Doopers" at the Boston waterfront, during the Cashunt photo scavenger hunt part of Alleyoop's Summer Fun Day. (in 2023 I made a better version to view the image below: toys.alienbill.com/alleyoop-loop/)

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$8.5 billion for Skype? Man, and I thought Ebay got ME to overpay for stuff...

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http://is.gd/7IaG3I - Secret Service Twitter!
--Rex is a right jerk sometimes, but he can also be super cute... photo by our friend Kjersten...

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"I look so cute in my new hoodie!"
"You kind of look like Harry Potter"
"I look like 'Somewhat Harrier Potter'"

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retroremakes says "The design doc for Marble Madness is well worth a read btw, if you haven't already:" http://www.atarigames.com/page5/files/page5_5.pdf (warning kind of a big PDF file)

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Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.

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You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

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Hey LazyWeb, is there any way to use a laptop as an external monitor for a second laptop? Like "extend my desktop" onto whole 'nother PC...

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Living each day as if it were my last makes me ask: WTF? I have to go to work on my LAST DAY EVER?!

--Interesting refutation of some widely held beliefs that anime characters aren't "white" -- I'm a crappy artist and tend to think in icons, so I'm impressed by any kind of ability to generalize facial structure in a meaningful way. (Though it makes me wonder... do northeast Asians look more like *western* animated characters, too, by nature of a flatter facial structure?)

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My hard nose, glass jaw, and soft heart.

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If that One World Gov't the rightwingers are uptight about would mean no region-locked DVDs and games, I say- BRING IT ON! UN Uber Alles!

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Apple synching kind of sucks. iTunes: some things live on iPhone, some things live on iPad. Leave the apps the hell alone.

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2019 UPDATE:



--Peggy the One-Footed Sea Gull, who was screeching and generally hassling us last evening on the beach.

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click for fullsize This is the view off the patio of my company's cafeteria, overlooking Newbury Street. It is made with a super-nifty iPhone 4 program called You Gotta See This -- it utilizes the new gyroscope in the thing and is well worth the $2 price.

The photo is quite a lot like the collage FoSO shot with my borrowed Kodak DC20 back in like, '96 or '97 -- but now it's a heck of a lot easier.

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Your life's Episode IV starts at 30. Everything before that is just prequels.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2261955/ - I guess what technology has given nerd romance in 'Net dating it is taking away with the rise of e-readers...

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http://technologizer.com/2010/08/01/the-great-operating-system-games/ - heh, just thinking about GORILLAS.BAS and Space Cadet Pinball. Seriously, someone out there is the best 3D Space Cadet player... I wonder who...

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Strangely hungry this AM. Might end up being a 3-Atomic-Fireball morning.
--Max Headroom was really ahead of his time -- kinda predicted Fox News by a few decades!

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Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

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http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/2/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality So Manny is out of here...
in retrospect, his lackadaisical outlook could get annoying, but in some ways, it's nice how relaxed he could be. "It's only baseball, have a sense of perspective" was an attitude that served him and, as much as we hate to admit it, the Red Sox as well.

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Photo of the Moment

--Fast Moving Bird outside the Au Bon Pain near Copley Square - wasn't expecting two catch an image like that.

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I lived Slylock Fox this morning! "Man on T thinks Kirk has his stolen bag. How did Kirk prove it was his own?" [Kirk showed him the holes]

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"bromance"?

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Charming. Boston has a god damned first of the month expired inspection sticker patrol.

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Ah the highway food court service plaza. Such a throbbing mass of humanity... As Evil B pointed out to me, yesterday's entry was pushing the already high self-indulgence bar for this site. Mostly it was just a goof.

I was in Rockport helping EB clear way for an insulation work crew last night, and I crashed there and took the commuter rail down this morning. He mentioned that if you stay on the left side of the Rockport-to-Boston early train you can some nice sunrise views. I was too slow for some shots, but I thought this one was OK, if a bit pedestrian:

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Article of the Moment

Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues built upon previous study of seven competing rules for verb conjugation in Old English, six of which have gradually faded from use over time. They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an "-ed" suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.

In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.

Other tidbits: New verbs entering the language are always regular, and the word "wed" might be next to go, with "wed" being dropped for "wedded"

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Site of the Moment
Unclutter.com... yet another one of "those" sites, but pretty good.



--Methuen MA, 2007.09.03 Back now. Will try and catch up on comments etc. later...

Heh, actually there's less to catch up than I thought... maybe at some point I'll post screenshots of my editing system but I'm not who besides TSM would find that interesting.

Anyway: the Pats-Colts game. Bleh. Some crazy-weird calls, like taunting on Troy Brown (Referee: "he taunted me by gently tossing me the ball when I wasn't ready and making me look bad!") My co-worker is convinced (and predicted it a few weeks ago) that Belichick would basically throw the game to keep his team angry. Given how it looked they could have just kept it on the ground for the whole game, I almost think he's on to something, but that's a heap of wishful thinking.

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Quote of the Moment

I am the emperor, and I want dumplings.

According to Bartlett's Anecdotes this is his "one recorded notable saying." It reminds me of Sarah and I riffing on a similar theme many years ago: Her was "I would that the minions bring me my biscuits" and mine was "Summon the waitstaff--I would have a scone." Hers has aged a bit better.

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Image of the Moment

--A scenic pond my mom and I drove past in New Hampshire. It was chilly up there, I almost had to rethink my current idea of "wear sandals until I have to wear boots."

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Politics of the Moment
Iraq as the Ultimate Welfare State, and pointing out how Bush is kind of an anti-Reagan in that regard.

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Link of the Moment
The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, "Knowldge's Last Chance", picks up the best of what Wikipedia discards. (via BoingBoing)

Rant of the Moment

Evolution is supported by the entire scientific community; Intelligent Design is supported by guys in line to see The Dukes of Hazzard. No. Stupidity isn't a form of knowing things ... 'Babies come from storks' is not a competing school of thought in medical school. We shouldn't teach both and if Thomas Jefferson knew we were blurring the line this much between church and state, he would turn over in his slave.

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Gadget of the Moment
The Japanese Segway has no handlebars, just a little handheld controller. (Glad it's not a remote control, I'd hate to see that thing hacked.) Just lean and go... as the article points out, it makes it a lot more stowable at the office.

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Photo of the Moment

--My Dad as Superman, or at least in a Superman T-shirt. I believe this is at the Salvation Army's "School for Officer Training" (SFOT, their seminary) and this is a bit of a prank, the T-shirt there to get people to think he's gone off the deep end and might just jump.

Quote and Ramble of the Moment

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods -- such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job -- then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer -- and happier -- lives.

Man, what a thought-provoking statement!

I wish I knew how to act on it. Wish I had a better understanding of how my budget worked. It seems like I should be able to live on a lot less and I'm essentially debt-free (and with a comfortable buffer from the house) but my Savings grows very. Very. Slowly. Is it the toys? Media? Rent?

I can't complain about my job: it's not very strenuous, it's not physical labor, it pays well, my team has added some interesting and fun people. I must complain about my job: it's really tough to get motivated about its random projects, it has an awful commute, and I'm not happy with my work there. I guess most of my complaints are about the cosmic injustice that we all have to work except for this exceedingly tiny minority. Is it a life out of balance? Am I missing some fundamental daoist thing in not being able to find a deep satisfaction with my daily efforts?

There was an interesting Ask Slashdot about how to make programming fun again. It sounds like this guy really has it together.

One question: how restorative is travel? It always seems kind of stressful but fun, along with being something people "should" do. Or maybe the problem is that vacations always get lumped into these 1 or 2 week chunks, enough time that you feel compelled to "do something cool", but not enough time to really fit into the new lifestyle?

Sometimes it feels like my life and relationships and nation's politics all need a reboot. Not to wipe everything out, just get rid of the cruft, start with mostly the same installed programs, but free and clean to make a better go of it all.

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Image of the Moment

--Ksenia (this very nice gal I've been dating as of late) at the top of the stairs. I like the way the lighting came out.

Photo of the Moment

--Mo went to an acupuncturist the other day, and also had some "cupping" done. Mo now has spots! Actually, they're kind of like giant hickeys... I'm almost suprised that my inner-skeptic isn't dismissive of acupuncture. I'm not sure I buy into all the explanations about why it works, but (even though I haven't researched it much) there does seem to be some empirical, or at the very least strong anecodatal, evidence for what it claims to be able to do.

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Dialog of the Moment

"I learned a lot from that encounter group you sent me to."
"Yes?"
"Everyone was totally honest. We told each other what we really thought of each other. No one was allowed to get away with any falsehood or insincerity"
"You must've learned a lot about yourself."
"Yes, I learned how valuable self-deception can be."

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Link of the Moment
Hey Kids! WIN BIG! With REAL! SUPER MARKETING: Ads From The Comic Books! Great for a Quick Browse! Or a Good Long Read!!

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News of the Moment
Europe is about to launch their first moon probe.

"Despite decades of research, we have never fully discovered what the Moon is made of," says Manuel Grande at UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who built the spacecraft's X-ray spectrometer.

Haha! So my cheese theory has not yet been disproven!

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Update of the Moment
Dang, I was wondering if someone would have something (hopefully nice!) to say about a slightly risque picture of Mo...then again I've always found jeans sexy. And Mo sexy. Despite the acu-hickeys. Image of the Moment

--Peterman hurtling towards true love with Lelsee on a Cape Cod beach at the post-reception gathering for their wedding, 2003-9-20.

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Link of the Moment
Sorry for the kind of bare weekend, update-wise. It doesn't get much better unless you're interested in video games, in which case you might find Game Spy's 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time list a good read. Image of the Moment

--Detail of Salem Parking Lot, 2002.11.22

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Gross Article of the Moment
Sigh. Cruel Site of the Day pointed out this article from the Tufts Daily [R-rated link, not for the squeamish], paper of my alma mater. It starts "I don't believe that there is a woman, homosexual male, or flexible boy out there who would claim that semen tastes great" and goes downhill from there. Looks like someone is trying to capture that "Sex in the City/on Campus" vibe and failing miserably.

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Book of the Moment
Today I'm raking. I haven't really raked for years, maybe not ever, really. It's not bad work, really, but I in trying to think of a good way of bagging the results, I decided to consult Google. Amazon offers me a chance to buy a book, How to Rake Leaves, for the low low price of $40.24! Now, yeah, technically I was the one looking for some pointers, but $40 for How to Rake?

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Tip of the Moment
Whoa...I'm a bit of an inadvertant expert in getting around Windows without using the mouse (it goes back to the day when I used to sit way back in my Papasan chair with the keyboard in my lap.) Anyway, I knew about tabbing through links in IE, and using return to open one, but I only now just realized I can hit shift-Return to open a link in a new window. (BTW, the other thing I always setup is the Accessibility option "MouseKeys" that lets you move the pointer via the numberpad.

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Funny of the Moment
Samuel Stoddard's Ultra-Condensed version of "Titanic":

Leonardo DiCaprio Your social class is stuffy. Let's dance with the ship's rats and have fun. Kate Winslet You have captured my heart. Let's run around the ship and giggle.
(The ship SINKS.) Leonardo DiCaprio Never let go. Kate Winslet I promise. (lets go)

THE END

From Movie-A-Minute, where they cut out all the filler bringing movies to their essential core. They do the same thing for books as well. It's funny how getting engrossed in a project can take your mind of the problems of you and the world. I get up to my neck in the Blender, and suddenly it's like we're not marching to war with Iraq, the potential for ever-increasingly-devastating terrorist attack isn't there, and my job is completely secure for as long as I want it with an even better there for the asking. And I gotta wonder, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a healthy break-taking from all the neurotic fretting that can be of no help to the situations anyway? Or a dangerous flight from reality that threatens to keep me from taking positive steps of preparation to deal with whatever comes next?

Image of the Moment

--Mo doing her best James Dean impression. (Ok, not counting the shoulders. Pbbbt.)

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Giraffe in Bathtub with Lightbulbs of the Moment
Bill, who thinks that I get to his site by searching Google for man who fired shots in front of UN Bldg. yesterday, linked to this site, Rumsfeldism: The New Surrealism. Rambles a bit, but the first few paragraphs are great.

Political Jab of the Moment
Statistics point to Democrats being better for the Stock Market, which goes against current conventional wisdom about the pro-business Republicans. Maybe unfettered "do whatever the hell you want" economics isn't ultimately what gets the job done. I think the most apt analogy was by a middle or high school teacher, who saw today's companies reflected in the behaviour of his students. There's a lot of terrific raw energy and creativity in there; but left alone without some level of regulation, and you end up with chaos. The Lord of the Flies syndrome.

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Kirk's Law of Group Meetings During Uncertain Times
"Once any layoffs have occurred, you cannot schedule any business meetings for more than than 6 or fewer than 3 without causing large amounts of anxiety and trepidation."

Dang, I think both the title and phrasing of this law need to be punched up if it's going to catch on as any kind of meme.

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Signature of the Moment

Normally I'm not one to believe in little green men from Mars. But one night, as I was driving home from a party, I caught something in my headlights I still can't explain. It had weird, catlike eyes and only stood about a foot tall. It was covered with grayish fur, and walked on all fours, like a cat. It had a tail, which if I had to describe in terms of something here on Earth was, in a way, like a cat's. Also, it was carrying a ray gun in its mouth. It was either a ray gun or a mouse.

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Air Travel of the Moment
Apparently Continental changes their rates at 7 Eastern....in an instant our flight to Cleveland (for my high school reunion) went from $235 to $930! D'ohh.

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Link of the Moment
Getting some attention recently is a 'blog created by a Kevin, a homeless man--I think he's using publically available computers at the Nashville library. Seeing thoughtful descriptions of homeless life really bridges a gap that many people see between "us" and "them".

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Joke of the Moment
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?"

The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."

There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"
--The world's funniest joke according to LaughLab. A lot funnier than many of the other jokes they had on that site.

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Moment of the Moment

--Thanks Ranjit. This may signal the start of more intraday updates. You know what I like? I like putting on loud music in my car and then watching the image in the sideview and rearview mirrors shimmy with the thump of the bass, that's what I like.

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Image of the Moment

My camera's 3000th photo: a loader that was parked outside my building yesterday with wheels about as tall as me. I have a 6-yr-old's fascination with machines like that.

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Link of the Moment
Somehow, I'm a little weirded out but not terribly surprised that we process brand names using emotional logic, not the same kind of thought we use to identify regular objects. I guess the book The Space Merchants got it right...

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Funny of the Moment

The Bad Erotic Fiction Award, for bad writing about sex, went to AA Gill. He told the organisers what they could do with it - but not very well.

Quote of the Moment
"The guy's nuttier than squirrel turds"
--Officer in Me, Myself, & Irene

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Link of the Moment
Nutty liberal conspiracy theory or did Gore win an outright victory in Florida? (Even more likely to be unmentioned in these times of crisis. I'm glad that President Jr. and Co. haven't just rushed in there, but I think Gore would have avoid loose talk of a "Crusade" and all the cowboy chatter.)

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Image of the Moment

I just wanted to say that this tree that I pass weekdays on my way to work, although partially obscured by a telephone pole, looks a lot like a rooster. That is all. Image of the Moment

I've been scanning in my old photo album. This is one of my favorites, my dad and I on a public beach on St. Thomas (Virgin Islands) where my family lived for a year.

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Quote of the Moment

How many times must I tell you? Queens consume nectars and ambrosia, not hot dogs.

Quote of the Moment

Talking and listening to the people in this marketplace is the best way to learn. The trees in the countryside can teach me nothing.

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Image of the Moment

I'm usually not a big "aww, isn't that cute" kind of photographer, but... "aww, isn't that cute?" Taken at a barbecue held by some friends. I love the concerned expression, the "stop with the cameraing and make with the drink-getting!"