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But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they've rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.

But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it's treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at.

My dad's name was given phonetically as Ha-gu-yah-cla-ga-hus. (My mom was A-wan-ghan)

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But that way of getting songs and dances, I guess that's way past our stage. I guess we're too civilized nowadays, cause at that time, see, they practically lived right with the animals and out in the woods all the time. They didn't have no automobiles or airplanes flying around or anything of that sort, and they were so close to nature, I guess that's how they probably got to get some of these songs together. A lot of stories, different stories, has been told of how these songs originated, and all of it starts with them coming from the different animals that were roaming the big forest at that time. And in the mountains and places like that, along the rivers, you can hear all these different kind of songs that was made up. Then as it came along, these persons that had heard these songs had started handing them down to the younger generation, up till today. Like me learning these songs: I learnt that from me going to all these different dances when I was a young lad, just a young kid at that time, just a little boy. Well, I started dancing the Eagle Dance when I was just about eight or nine years old. So now you can see how we carry our religion and traditions and all that. Most of us that had lived right along where the longhouse is, still believe in this religion, and we try to keep up the traditions as our older folks had done years before, and I think that's just the way it's been handed down all down through the years, from generation to generation, as far as I know of.

via an interview with Jerome Rothenberg: Parts 1 + 2, Part 3. The interview also speaks of using song for environmental protest (against a dam) so I'm sort of pleased to identify a rough parallel with some of my musical work, even as I realize musical protest is always an uphill climb with clear successes thin on the ground.

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How to give an MLK jr Day speech...

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Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.

I feel like I've quoted this a lot, surprised I couldn't find it in my blog history.

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I hope people in the Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge area appreciate how I helped ward of major snowfall this last storm by having purchased a new snowblower after the last snow we had.

Murphy can be your friend and ally once you appreciate his mysterious ways.

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Good overview of symptoms of the new COVID variant, especially the scratchy throat. (Like I'm always tired and always have some allergy phlegm, so it's good to be knowing what else to look for.)

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I wanted to give you something --
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

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We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It's pointless telling them that it's for the sake of knowledge, if they don't care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don't just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.

Went for woodsy walks with Jon and Sophie today. Admittedly "Hartwell Town Forest" was less cool than Sandy Pond Trail, but this photo from the former came out well:

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TFW you worry you haven't properly appreciated a 3 day weekend because it's Monday evening but it feels like a Sundayless Saturday

SEE. SEE?

See where the frog
under the grass bank sits--
Where I would sit
if I were afraid.

I came down to the lake
this morning, to get away
from the dish/spoon clash
of familiar, familial

loving. Frog sits
rocking on the round
chest of his breathing.
I've seen his black-and-green

eye, I've seen the light
make a wet spot in it.
And there's the tight gold
line of his underjaw,

there's his small large body.
The question: *Why don't you
want to catch him?* A new
answer: *Because he's scared.*

Out in the wet cool air, this
frog's cheeks shudder
like gills out of water.
And I am not yet perfect,

either. I am not yet
adult and whole.
I didn't keep myself from moving.
Too green. He had to leap.

I have been trying to find this poem for ages - all my googling was for naught even though my memory of a number of the ending line turns out to be accurate. I just found it in a web-based snapshot I had constructed of everything I had on my PalmPilot...

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I like "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" a lot because "if they don't win it's a shame!" is the maximum healthy amount to care about any sport.

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A while back Kottke wrote on Jason Fried's "I've never had a goal". That's a stance that comes naturally to people with fixed mindset; even back in middle school I was pushing back mightily against my mom's proposal for me setting goals for grades, preferring to promise to put in a good effort and see where I ended up.

I mean, I know that's as much "failure avoidance" as anything positive, but still, interesting work gets done. I still have a lot to learn about leaning into those challenges that are intimidating me and challenging my ego about being wikkid smaht and triggering my fear in feeling incompetent, but I'm not sure "goals" is the answer.

What about you? Where does goal-setting fit in? For the longes time I had a Sticky note on my Mac desktop "enterprise volltron - dream of".... I guess it would look something like this:

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Don't "Help" by stacking plates at restaurants

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I sort of hate when people rip on Beats headphones assuming it's just a branding thing, and also that you can truly tell the quality of headphones by pure audio fidelity.

Bass is emotionally resonate, so a pair of headphones that emphasizes that may well be better for many people: see Pump up the music -- especially the bass -- to make you feel powerful and Here's Why People Love Deep Bass Sounds In Music

Of course, I think modern Beats headphones aren't as over the top in bass as the first few years of 'em.

Then again, I am a tuba player, so take it with a grain of salt. A few days ago I posted my Ed Emberley Tribute animal puppets on his official Facebook page and last night I got this email from his personal account!

Needless to say I am stoked!

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Aww Mr. Rogers! Still a work in progress, but I'm optimistic about this arrangement of "Peter Gunn" I made for JP Honk...

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Yesterday I noticed I can play tuba almost as well with my left as my right - an old observation for me, actually, but I realized there might be a tie-in with another bit of physical modeling i do: I tend to remember which key on my keyring is which via it's physical placement, and more specifically, I subconsciously expect them to be in left-to-right order corresponding to the outermost/innermost arrangement of the doors. Take my car and house keys (one for the front, one for the back)... holding them all "teeth up", my hand expects the car key on the left (corresponding to how I first arrive), and then the front door key to the right of that (since it's the key I need next) and ending with the key to the back (either since I don't need that then, or because the back of the house is "more inner" than the door facing outward to the street. It takes much more mental effort to remember which key is which when they don't align to a inner/outer concept.

So: tuba valves, three in a row. I would have assumed I associate them with either specific 1,2,3 placement. And maybe it's just that I use the same finger for each valve, just on the other hand, when I play leftie. But it seemed like a "deep" revelation that maybe I think of them more in terms of which valve is closest to me - and that maybe years of playing brass as a youngster imprinted that way of thinking on me. But maybe that's mixing up cause and effect, or so there's another, simpler explanation.

In general, I'd say I have a hard time than average remembering left from right.

Hmm. This could explain piano being challenging for me as well? Like it's just harder to integrate things when on my left hand, the thumb plays a higher note, but on my right hand the thumb is the lowest note. Yeah; when I try to play basslines with my left, everything feels wackily backwards.

Scariest phrase in the English language: 'In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Scalia...'

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Damon Linker:

Liberalism offers the following deal to individuals and groups: give up the hope of controlling the whole of social life, of using government power (and violence) to enforce your vision of the highest good, and allow the natural pluralism of society to grow and flourish; in return you'll be granted the freedom to find a home within that highly differentiated socio-cultural ecosystem, a place where you and those with whom you freely choose to associate can also grow and flourish in peace.

Tolerate -- and you will be tolerated in turn.

That's the liberal bargain. It is one of the finest achievements of Western civilization, and one of its greatest gifts to humanity in all times and places -- nothing less than an all-purpose strategy for getting along despite our often rancorous disagreements about the highest good and ultimate ends of life.

Muslims who admire (let alone who go to fight for) the Islamic State, or who favor a form of sharia law that would make apostasy a crime punishable by death, have effectively rejected the liberal bargain and opted to exile themselves from liberal civilization.

And therein lies the challenge confronting the liberal West.

It's interesting to think about the differences between the US and Europe in their relations to their Moslem populations.

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I refuse to read the Superbowl XLIX as anything but "X-Licks".

I always think postseason Win/Loss records are kind of wonky, because the postseason is 1 and done, so you actually get fewer opportunities to lose, so to speak.
Interesting. I am now "Dropbox Guru" status with 48 Gb "for the next 24 months". Sounds like a sneaky way to get me to pay in 2016.

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http://mentalfloss.com/article/29713/11-insane-features-normal-human-anatomy holy crap we are all bioluminescent? Day 2 of my Galloway 5K program. As an ex-Marching Band Kid, I gotta say having music set a pace is enormously helpful (and I can still adjust my stride to work it less or more). On the other hand, I am compelled to do a little stutter step so that "left foot on one" holds true when the music skips a beat in its transition.
--To promote her photo restoration services, Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway colorizes icon images. via 22 words, with 9 more examples including Lincoln-- see her deviant art page as well, which has that icon VE day kiss in Times Square.

So easy to start thinking of the old world as black and white, though Calvin's Dad explained that that's the correct viewpoint anyway.

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Our health is a voyage and every illness is an adventure story.

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The measure of success is not whether you have a problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem you had last year.

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The problem with sweeping a girl off her feet, Sammy, is that you have to keep on sweeping. Love doesn't work that way.

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If God can do anything, he can make a mistake.

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Holy cow. With SOPA would we have no http://drunkronswanson.com/ ?

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McArdle on how NYC's reversal to better fortunes probably depended on the financial sector boom.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/2012/01/simple-slot-machine-effect.html - a simple (well nigh trivial!) jQuery slot machine effect demo'd on my UI Devblog.
--via

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Just noticed XP's taskbar has an odd nod to Fitts' Law; if the mouse is on border at edge or corner, a click nudges the mouse to hit the button. (Though I still think "Fitts' Law" type analysis tends to neglect cognitive load issues.)

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My desk at work! Rockin' the Vertical Second Monitor, Bonus Baby Third, and Sea Monkeys.

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"The moon is lovely tonight."
"So are you."
"So perfect. So bright."
"So are you."
"Yet so distant and cold."
...
"Well?"
"I don't suppose the moon will come back to my place tonight, either."

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So yesterday I got a new laptop (Toshiba P505) with a 18.4" screen. "Laptop" might be the wrong word, I've had standalone monitors smaller than this.

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The Toshiba P505 is good, but the "zero pressure media buttons" just to left of keyboard are WAY too easy to accidentally hit, plus they're hardwired to make a super-obnoxious BEEP?? What a dumb design decision - luckily you can just turn them off in BIOS.

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Unsure if I dig "Aero's" translucent window borders, but long for a CSS virtual color "translucent" that showed the windows beneath.
huh?

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Hunt feeling not so bad. Scavenger activity went well and was fun. "Courier Bag" is an anagram for "Aerobic Rug" (Yoga Mat), so we did that.

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Sarah explained my willingness to have the MIT Seal imprinted on my collarbone and keep score on sharpie on arm is why she likes me.

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Just saw someone drinking from a water fountain. Been a *while*! I remember Germans thought that odd, in high school; maybe they were right

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The Letter W and The Number Seven: the Polysyllabic Dorks of their respective little worlds.

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via Bill the Splut, 5 second movies: http://tinyurl.com/77q2ge - man do I dig brevity!

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Happier with my role at the Hunt, seeing myself as the Sanch Panza to these puzzley Don Quixotes.

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No corporation will ever pay a creator enough to sue them successfully.

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Geek note: how deeply ingrained is "i" as my generic counter variable?

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Solving 3D Minesweeper Arrangement problems by brute force. Did I mentioned I slept in a sleeping bag on a table last night?

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Geekery: need to learn to think in regular expressions... I use substr and iteration when I should just do regex groups. Bauer showed me up!

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Done with the hunt. Unwinding. Terribly ugly non-pass interference call at the end of Philly vs Arizona.

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Mystery Hunt made me feel like Gollum in the Hobbit... "What have I got in my pocket?" isn't that hard a question, but it feels unfair. If you were to plot the year as a circle, would you put Winter at top? Would the months and seasons run clockwise or counterclockwise?

For me, counterclockwise (aka widdershins, which is a great word) I'm not sure why, though. I saw some kind of ad lately that had Winter at top, Spring at left, Summer bottom, Fall right, and it seemed totally natural to me, even though thinking logically, you might want it to shadow (heh I was going to say "mirror", which is misleading in this case, and then "reflect" which wouldn't be any better) the way a (half) day is portrayed on a clock.

In short, years go widdershins for me and I have no idea why.

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Site of the Moment
One of my favorite gripes is the griping of others. (Kind of a "how tolerant can we be of intolerance" derivative, which had its apotheosis in the Onion's ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters)

So the #1 Google hit for "Carberry's Central Square" is a page on a site called Yelp.

Visits here always spawn the question of how mediocrity can survive for so long.

or for the nearby 1369...

Nice interior, and I'm sure the drinks are nice too. I'm here to comment about the rotten tasteless tuna salad that I had a few days ago that cost $4.50 too much, albeit costing $4.50. A sorry substitute for a light lunch, I had to go down the street to Shalimar for something decent to eat.

and

Latte was boring and tasted off. Like the coffee beans were rebelling against providing taste, or something. Also, ordered a quiche, and what I should have called it was a "Salt Cheese Pie".

So the negativity is irritating, but then again, I'm even skeptical when people go to the other extreme. Basically, any review of a place longer than a quote inside a Zagat's snippet is going to say more about the reviewer than the place itself.

A few weeks ago when I was helping my mom move in I had the responsibility of setting up a few pieces of "flatpack" furniture, a bookshelf and then a rather more ambitious computer desk. The desk was actually kind of a pain to get right ("no tool assembly" my left buttcheek! Maybe if I had the gripstrength of Chewbaccca...) though it ended up coming out ok.

It made me wonder, though, what the main cost savings is with these things. Passing some of the factory labor cost onto the consumer, in terms of time? The cost to ship it? The cost to store it? A kind of artificial price differentiator, so that they can charge more for the pre-assembled stuff? Or is it just the lowcost materials all around?

It's probably some of all of that, but according to some of my friends in retail management, shipping is likely one of the bigger issues. I guess shipping is by volume, not just weight, because they were talking about having to pay to "ship air" for things that are less dense, like an assembled piece.

Well, long live flatpack. The desk manufacturer had some kind of slogan like "making good furniture possible" and there is a bit of an egalitarian aspect to it all.

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Slashdot Article of the Moment
Huh, some guy wondering if he can age himself out of a programming job, kind of tangentially related to the whole age discrimination issue. That's certainly a concern of mine... I don't really seem to have a management temperament, even though I feel I do pretty well as a technical lead, but at some point, people are going to start wondering why I'm content just being a developer... Poem of a Past Moment
Don't you know
how kisses can lie?
That taste of milk
and salt
That can be a matter of artifice
Carefully constructed
put together like a fine..
like a good story

But sometimes...
it can be nuthin' but truth

--Oct 11 2004. Not my finest poetic moement, but hey.

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Boom and Bust of an Upcoming Moment
So a guy who they says totally called the 90s boom and the 2000s bust sees the same cycle happening again, but with a higher high and then in 2010 or so, a lower low, something between the US economic funk in the 70s and Japan's 90s and the actual Great Depression. "Maybe we'll see unemployment at 15 percent, give or take" -- ack, plus he thinks the worst part is deflation, as a result of the shrinking workforce. This kind of mirrors that one Atlantic article "a view from 2012" or whatever it was, that says some of the same thing though without the boom, especially with our insane amount of debt....

Wonder what I should do to brace myself, assuming this is roughly accurate... go crazy trying to get money now, but don't speculate too much investment-wise I guess....

So...wow, it's cold.

I finally got up some drapes for my bedroom and the tv/video room...tan suede, a little "western" feeling but I like it. It's not utterly "lights out" in the bedroom but it is significantly darker and I think it helps my sleep quite a bit...it's noticeably harder to get up in the morning if I went to bed too late (in the "I think I've been sleeping deeply recently" way, not the "I slept fitfully" way.)

But man is it cold. My thermostat was set to like 68 but the temperature was reading in the lowish 60s. I need to get some more drapes for the other rooms...I think. But I worry, unless I pin up the bottom of the curtains they're going to be covering the radiators, which looks ugly...would that undo the good I'm doing in blocking the chill from the window by also trapping the heat from the heating system? Maybe I should just buck and pin 'em up and see what happens. My place is going to be relatively dark though.

Actually, I got to googling the difference between "curtains" and "drapes" and got admonished by this for Dummies article: it's draperies never drapes. Err, whatever.

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Flowers of the Moment

--Flower arrangement (for a family friend's grandfather's memorial, alas) by Ksenia. I helped winding the ribbons around the base. I like how this photo came out.

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News Quote of the Moment

Watch to see what I can still do!

At least she obeyed the Ancient Advice of when attempting a silly stunt, "Never say anything more predictive than 'Watch this!'" More backlog flush! Lots of computer science quotes this time. Don't hate me.

• People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious.

• I've never liked the term 'computer science.' The main reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.

• It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

• Yet more computer science quotes are around.

• The invention of the biohazard symbol.

• A Christian tries to use "The Matrix" as a witnessing tool...or something. Soundclips, handdrawn comics, and more!
• The online comic Achewood has many admirers.
• This is a link. "This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context."
• Like that last link, I guess I was on an everything2 kick: Common video game design flaws and Videogame cliches made some pretty good reading.
• Either it took too much room, or I was just too chicken to post this 1974 Charles Simic poem about breasts.

Saw "Spider-Man" for the first time last night, a freebie Pay-Per-View. Not to sound like a barbarian, but they should have just called it "The Rack of Kirsten Dunst"...yowza. (And I thought of that before the scene in the rain. Ahem. I digress.)

So, once more we delve into my good old backlog. This brings us all the way up to halfway through last August!

• Kartoo is a cool-looking but ultimately not terribly useful search engine that graphically displays the relationships between sites matching your search.
• I must have made a note to check out FreeRIP to help with making some mix CDs...haven't tried it yet though.
• Ranjit preserved his old Word.com staff page, including such Flash Shockwave-based hits as "Zen Meat Garden", "Anti-Tapioca", and "The Crossing Guard's Coffee Break". For reasons that are unclear to me, I added "Metal Fingers In My Body" to this backlog entry, the name of an animated pornographic techno music video =about a robot gigolo. Unfortunately I couldn't refind a link to the video itself.
• Who doesn't love Paul Harvey? A bit much on the conservative side, but you have to respect his principles and work ethic. I think he's a Salvationist, actually. (I.e. attends The Salvation Army as his church.)
• An article on Ben Franklin and his "Junto" group, a supper club that achieved many cool things.
• The offical free software Hello World program. Another blow for the Open Source movement!
• Slate's "ad report card" on Viagra vs Enzyte. Those Enzyte ads are really odd. I didn't realize that the phrase "suffragium asotus", displayed after Enzyte's name, isn't a chemical, just dog-Latin for "sensual assistance".
• Wage-slave.org has made a Scorecard of Evil to keep track of our beloved president.
• Saltine has a lot of good ideas, including an idea for yet another flavor of Diet Coke.
• Looks like someone in Australia has managed to patent the wheel. I guess this is mostly to point out how absurd the world's patent systems have gotten.

Image of the Moment

Woman or Sax Player? (actually looks a bit like Bill Clinton...) I first saw this image years ago, and really liked the stylized woman. But then I starte asking, what part of the sax player is forming the woman's mouth? (via ZZZ online)

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Link of the Moment
Public Service Announcement: How to identify if your cow has mad cow disease. A little corny, but still makes me laugh. Link of the Moment
In this vast existential wasteland we all pass through, I was forced to explore what could fill the void in my soul. My friend Ranjit has revealed what could fill that void: Web Toys based on Bland Vegetables. For your viewing pleasure and mine, he has created: THE OKRALEIDOSCOPE. As he puts it, after I tell him he is not a well man:

"Hey, Louis suggested it! Of course once he did, I had to do it. [...] I haven't succeeded in getting any paid work done in weeks, but the moment I hear 'okraleidoscope' I jump in."

He requested that I link to his site moonmilk, where you can see a lot of his other creations as well.

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Quote of the Moment

I wouldn't presume to know, but in this I have a hunch -- Dr. King would agree with me

"So Mrs. Lincoln, Mr. Ford would like to know how you'd feel about doing an ad for his theater..." Sheesh.

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Geekness of the Moment
I finally caved and got a Palm IIIc. The iPaq is nice, but has synching problems, and was a bit more expensive. I decided I needed a PDA capable of storing and viewing a decent version of this Journal, and with AvantGo, the IIIc does quite a respectable job. Changing from a private text based journal to a public HTML journal actually is a turning point in my life.

Between this new color gadget and Ranjit hooking me up with a ROM site for MAME the Arcade Emulator, I don't feel a strong need to leave the house tomorrow.