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The other day, I added a new piece of room decor that makes my inner child so, so happy: an Arcade1Up 2/3 scale edition of the old Star Wars arcade game. That game just grabbed me so hard as a kid - the idiosyncratic "yoke" controller just feels so good, and the 3 stages of Death Star destroying action are so well crafted.

I wanted to get this game when we got the condo but it was out of stock in 2021, but they rereleased in time for to be an early Birthday gift to myself. Arguably I don't really have room for the arcade game, but between a renewed effort to keep my office orderly (which is surprisingly soothing) and some rearranging and other newish-decor, I am really digging my space.

I also did a panorama shot when I first settled in circa 2021. I've given up the CRT/Atari setup. If we had a bigger space I still have the gear to have a lot of old game systems going, but to be honest I don't think I miss it all that much, and this new arcade replica really lands for me. The art on the side is so gorgeous as well... here is a history of its development, including how its controller (which is not like what X-wings have in the movies, but plays so well) came from Bradley Tank simulations Atari was making for the military.

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Life tastes better when you're chugging!

I feel this way especially about popcorn. The best tasting amount of amount of popcorn is as much as you can stuff at your mouth at one time.

The great works of the Lord are carefully crafted in respect of all that he wills, so that in a wonderful and ineffable way nothing happens contrary to his will, even that which is contrary to his will!

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I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we'll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends, lovers, and so on. But we'll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time, and in fact we'll die first. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don't they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn't death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call 'breaking up or staying together' (!), because at the end of our lives, when there's nothing left in front of us, it's still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive--because we are so stupid about each other.

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"Right. You must think I'm a complete fucking idiot."
"No, I think you're highly intelligent. It's not lucky for you, in a lot of ways. If you were a little stupider you might have an easier life."

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(Been a while since I've read a novel and even longer for a physical book i think! Some of the same settings as her previous works, young intelligent people balancing concern for the state of the world against their own lives and relationships. This work has Rooney using different modes, almost like a camera lens' focus, where sometimes the scenes (between the characters' exchanged emails) are described detached and externally, and other times with much more interiority presented.)

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Henry was my pet rat, and he died
last night in my hands. He was three
years old, which is way longer than

an albino rat is supposed to live. To be
honest, he wasn't a very smart animal,
but he was so sweet that now I wonder

if intelligence has anything to do
with leading a good life. He had been sick
for a few months, and every twelve hours

I had to apply antiseptic and lotion
to both his back feet. By the end
they didn't really work anymore,

so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way
so cute and sad that I started calling him my little
sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,

a surprise: you would think that when your rat
is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months
you'd be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel

and mixed the solution, I picked him
up and noticed his breathing
was s slow. I lay down with him

on the towel, the towel where we'd spent
the last few months, where I think we
finally, really, completely loved each other,

not like humans do: humans always want
something from you and he and I
would rather just be together than apart,

and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way
that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain,
his head fell forward, and there was so much less

light in the room. The lamp was so far away,
like the light of a house to which there is no
road. I know, he was just a rat. So many

just like him, all white, red eyes,
die every day and only one or two people
in white coats are even there to see it.

He was all in white, he was always there
to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare,
so many nightmares, I would turn on the light

and there he was, holding on, a constant companion
to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment,
the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying

in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside
my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat
once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big

Mouse. Named proof that something could need me
and still love me. Named please
can I have some of your apple? Or I know

you're sad but I'm hungry. Don't go; if you go
I won't survive: a child reaches for her father;
a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;

a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly,
sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together.
Some day I'm going to have a child. She's going to have

eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like
she'll need me alive then, she needs me alive
now; I can't say goodbye before I've had a chance

to say hello. I don't stare off bridges anymore.
I don't count out little blue exit signs and even today,
with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away

it feels like someone else buried him using my body,
today I came home and only wanted to sleep
for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed

me once, and I know something will need me
again. One day I'm going to have a daughter.
She's going to sleep through the night

sometimes. She is a light on a rock
at the edge of a lonely see. You see that light
out there? That's where I'm headed. That's home."

Decent, not great month for music. A lot from Spotify.

	Hooked On Polkas "Weird Al" Yankovic	One of the few polka medleys I grew up with but didn't have in my collection! My mom bought me a book going over all of his songs...
	Effortless Elegance Keith Mansfield, Alessandro Rizzo & Elliot Ireland	Funky little background piece I think they use in one of the Saints Row games.
★ ★ ★ ★	This Year The Mountain Goats	"I am going to make it through this year if it kills me..." via this tumblr post
★ ★ ★ ★	Twister "Weird Al" Yankovic	Weird Al Beastie Boy pastiche. Brings me right back to summer camp when I played this tape again and again in my walkman.
★ ★ ★ ★	That's the Way It Is Daniel Lanois	Melancholy Cowboy song from "Red Dead Redemption 2"
★ ★ ★ ★	Champage Liz & Lisa	Wistful late 80s indie. Like almost a decade or so ago Amber mentioned not being able to find this one song "Chamapagne" on an old Lisa Loeb tape from 1989, but now it's here on Youtube, and I ripped it as an mp3.
	I Don't Want to Miss a Thing (Acoustic Version) Karizma Duo	Nice cover of a cheesy song. Hunted around on iTunes for a more palatable cover that caught the grace of it, after seeing it in Saints Row or something.
★ ★ ★ ★	The devil wap down to Georgia Dj Cummerbund	Crazy mashup Some of these mashups are doing interesting tricks to make the vocalist sound like they're changing the words (like it opens with the guy saying "devil wap down to Georgia"?)
	Walk on the Wild Side Suzanne Vega	Cover. I was wondering "huh, what is Suzanne Vega doing these days.
★ ★ ★ ★	Wellerman The Longest Johns	Sea Shanty (unless your pedantic on wikipedia, then it's a "whaling song") making the rounds... Guess I saw the same aux cord video other folks did.
	Da Doo Ron Ron The Crystals	Wall of sound at its best. RIP Phil Spector.
	You, Dear Eloise	Modern torch song. Random spotify recommendation, I think looking for makeout music.
	Burn Ray LaMontagne	Folk tinged smokey song. Melissa likes this one.
	Too Repressed Sometymes Why	Very blunt folk. ("I want to f*** you, but I'm too repressed...") That Spotify playlist.
	New York's My Home Shirley Horn	Love song to NYC. The Fran Lebowitz thing on Netflix had a different version of this song.
★ ★ ★ ★	Revelry The Careful Ones	Indie sounding pop. I just dig that sharp, high contrast percussion. That Spotify playlist.

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Everyone talks about how 2×2 and 2+2=4 but nobody talks about how 3×2×1 and 3+2+1=6

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Huh. Either it was a really good month for music or I'm getting soft in my old age - only a few songs were less than 4-stars, and one was even 5...

★ ★ ★ ★ ★	Problem 99 (Jay-Z vs. Ariana Grande) Rockit	Best of Bootie mashup - a lot heavier on the Jay-Z side... really started growing on me. End of a pile of Best of Bootie I set aside.
★ ★ ★ ★	F-cking Boyfriend The Bird and the Bee	Frustrated pop... Found while looking for Again + Again by the same folks.
★ ★ ★ ★	Rosie the Riveter The Four Vagabonds	Sweet little bit of patriotic a cappella... I was kind of happy such an early culturally important song was known for its performance by African-American artists... also love the "Rrrrrrrrrrr" sound effect. Referenced at the WW2 Museum in NOLA.
★ ★ ★ ★	The End The Beatles	My Beatles lore has some odd holes, especially their later stuff. Referenced in Every Sample from Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique"
★ ★ ★ ★	Margaritaville Jimmy Buffett	I'm not in much danger of becoming a Parrot-head but I appreciate the middle aged fantasy narrative of this one... They had a singalong of this on a live podcast of "My Brother My Brother and Me"
★ ★ ★ ★	September Franny London	I'm always a sucker for female-vocalist covers, of a disco classic in this case... Heard on the animated series "Big Mouth"
★ ★ ★ ★	Underwater Temple, Underwater Monk Ollie's Sonic Emporium	Goofy little joke hiphop piece, but catchy. Via this tumblr entry
	Hump Day Miss Eaves	Super-direct and raunchy hiphop homage to women flickin' the bean... Ending credits of "Big Mouth"
★ ★ ★ ★	Compared to What Roberta Flack	Beautiful lowkey jazz protest song. Great light percussion and bass. My fellow activist bandmember posted Les McCann & Eddie Harris' version... more uptempo, and I love how you can see the musicians communicate in the video - but I love Roberta Flack's version, which is also a bit more concise.
	No One Kisses Like a Tuba Player Can Brett Harrington	"You ain't been 'til you kissed a tuba player, no one kisses like a tuba player can..." Corny hayseed music... makes me ponder on the cultural artifact of "kissing booths"... Some youtube recommendation...
★ ★ ★ ★	Talkin' out da Side of Ya Neck University of Washington Husky Marching Band	Marching Band cover of hiphop. I dig the chanting. The national champion LSU Tigers have a Marching Band that plays this, and there were articles about trying to get students to stop singing a dirty version of the lyrics... different Marching Band here tho.
★ ★ ★ ★	What a Man Linda Lyndell	The original that Salt N Pepa borrowed from... I might have been looking for a version of Lena's cover? But like with "Shake Yo Thang"/"It's Yo Thang", I'm grateful for Salt N Pepa covers introducing me to such great songs...
	In the Pines Lead Belly	Old Blues. Known covered by Kurt Cobain, later. Don't know where I heard about this, but it's interesting some versions are "My Girl" but the original might be "Black Girl", which has a different feel.
★ ★ ★ ★	Darkness Eminem	Low-key protest song about mass-shootings; the video is kind of an amazing pun that doesn't come out as much in the song.
★ ★ ★ ★	Unchained Melody Lykke Li	Lovely soft cover of the song we shmaltzily dance to in high school. (The one thing is the weird repetition of syllables (rivers flow, rivers flow, rivers, to the sea, to the sea, to the sea) - is that even in the original? )) from the movie "Booksmart"
★ ★ ★ ★	The Monkey Dave Bartholomew	More blues. Interesting which verses the Dirty Dozen Brass Band version leaves out. The "Fabulous Thunderbirds" cover was on the credits of Silicon Valley.
★ ★ ★ ★	Bad Blood (feat. Clara C) Kina Grannis	Really sad breakup song. "Big Mouth" again.

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Middle Age is the era of life where you've been doing everything for like at least 5 years, even the stuff that feels new...

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Few situations are so bad that they couldn't be worse, which is cause for both thanks and alarm. 17 years ago - to the day - I titled my blog entry "the silence of the rams", but between being held to 3 points and the Pats having virtual homefield advantage crowd-noise wise, it fits even more this year.

Like I said, there was a weird-amount of robot themed ads. Wonder if it taps into our anxieties about automation?

Anyway, for me the most memorable ad was the Bud Light / Game of Thrones crossover - for people annoyed by the "beer for normal folks not the effete elite" of the original series, seeing it get wiped out by cleansing dragon fire was terrific - and the thing was so unapologetically violent and Thrones-y -- kind a surreal and nightmarish, but not in a bad way:


(FOLLOWUP: HBO said the Bud Knight had to die)

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Slate in 2005 on The Lamest Dynasty in Sports.

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Oh, also Burger King just straight up showing "Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger" was artsy and nuts.

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When a bird is buried, the worms have their revenge.

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Also, final(?) sportsball note... Boston "Beat LA" twice in half a year? Ha.

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I'm not telegraphing anything. No, no, no. There's a difference. When President Obama pulled out of Iraq in theory we had Iraq. In other words, we had Iraq. We never had Syria because President Obama never wanted to violate the red line in the sand. So we never had Syria. I was the one that actually violated the red line when I hit Syria with 59 Tomahawk missiles, if you remember. But President Obama chose not to do that. When he chose not to do that, he showed tremendous weakness. But we didn't have Syria whereas we had Iraq. So when he did what he did in Iraq, which was a mistake.

Everything is as it is, and it should be. If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age.

Really hope those "he'll be shown as a hologram at the super bowl!" rumors are false.

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"Screw the country's attempts at meaningful infrastructure work, or ever getting debt down - but enjoy your free membership to Costco!"

If you understand, things are such as they are; If you do not understand, things are such as they are--

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Then, one day, the oldest seer he had ever sought out (and the one most to be feared) had asked why the camel driver was so interested in the future.
"Well... so I can do things," he had responded. "And so I can change those things that I don't want to happen."
"But then they wouldn't be a part of your future," the seer had said.
"Well, maybe I just want to know the future so I can prepare myself for what's coming."
"If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise," said the seer. "If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur."
"I want to know about the future because I'm a man," the camel driver had said to the seer. "And men always live their lives based on the future."
The seer was a specialist in the casting of twigs ; he threw them on the ground, and made interpretations based on how they fell. That day, he didn't make a cast. He wrapped the twigs in a piece of cloth and put them back in his bag.

http://trumpdonald.org This is fun

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Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.

I lost my hat so yesterday I took the chance to get some cheap XLIX gear- the best swag until 2025 when it'll be Super Bowl LIX proper. I like that this is probably a pre-victory hat and doesn't announce the winner...

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I don't believe anyone believes in a one-eyed man who is riding about on a horse with eight feet. We see the stories as poetic metaphors and a manifestation of the forces of nature and human psychology.

2019 UPDATE: these days I'm worried about "old Norse Gods" as the center of white power ideology... The 32 NFL Teams reimagined as Star Wars entities. The NFL teams are really a rich mix of graphic design launchpads.

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The possibilities are endless, but the probabilities aren't.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveler's_dilemma This seems a bit bogus, like that on where the judge says "you'll be executed one of these weekdays, but the day will be a surprise to you" leading to the prisoner figuring he can never be executed, or the sum of all positive integers equalling "-(1/12)"... proofs that seem to say more about the misapplication of the logic system than the "real world" situation represented.

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A few weeks ago I wondered if I should adopt an attitude of assumed belligerence about the world, assuming every minor or major inconvenience was an assault on my person that I have overcome or at least muddled through, and heaping scorn upon the universe's inability to really stop me. (People on Facebook argued that no, this was probably not a particularly pragmatic stance, unpleasant for wielder and witnesses alike.)

Now, I'm wondering about the opposite: the assumption that most things in the world, from software programs to traffic light patterns, are here to help me out, reaching into my fluffy cloud of privilege for my benefit, and that the correct attitude to take on after any given frustration is one of pity for the object, that it's doing the best it can just like everybody does, but was thwarted. (Aww, poor little crashing iPhone app... oh, silly traffic light, programmed for the benefit of me and all people but keeping me waiting here under its blind red eye for the benefit of non-existent pedestrians)

I think the pity springing from assumed Pollyannic Imperfect Pan-Benevolence might be a lot healthier than the triumphal resentment springing from thwarted prevalent Mischievous Belligerence. (I'm also aware both attitudes suffer from a big dose of solipsis, or at least a represent an uncharmingly Kirkocentric view of the universe.) In either case, I am sincere in trying to find an emotion to channel the irrational and unhealthy fury I feel at these events. (To quote Homer Simpson: "Lousy minor setbacks, this world SUCKS!") From the HEY I REMEMBER THAT! Department:

-- via Cracked's 6 Most Counterproductive PSAs of All Time

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UGH, just poking around with PhoneGap for HTML5 fun on Kindle Fire gets me back to the Eclipse hell that helped draw me to UI to start with!

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Gawd it sucks. Follow all the steps at http://phonegap.com/start/#android -- There IS no damn "New > Android Project" option. What he hell. Hate hate hate
via. I like how you can see the cold front drawing moisture from the gulf like a spigot to make clouds.

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Seriously though, if your politics can be safely described as "ultra" ANYTHING, you're doing it wrong. And I hate you. You are the problem.

"Without a belief that you will be rewarded or punished after the end of your life--what drives morality among your people? . . . I know that you're a good person. Where does that goodness come from?"

"I behave as I do because it is right for me to do so . . . by the standards of my people."

"But where do those standards come from?"

"From . . . from our conviction that there is no life after death! . . . A person's life is completely finished at death; there is no possibility of reconciling with them, or making amends after they are gone. . . . If I wrong someone . . . under your worldview I can console myself with the knowledge that, after they are dead, they can still be contacted; amends can be made. But in my worldview, once a person is gone . . . then you who did the wrong must live knowing that person's entire existence ended without you ever having made peace with him or her."

This passage is quoted in Gabriel McKee's "The Gospel According to Science Fiction", a survey of various SF books with religious implications my mom got me for Christmas

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Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

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Damn it, Google searches for "Romper Stomper" are dominated by some dumbass skinhead Russell Crowe movie. I miss the toy + show.

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S'funny, kind of, how the old school bathroom white earbuds and synch cables clash with the new Apple look of glossy black with silver trim.

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I love (read:hate) when an MS browser considers XML "active content" to be blocked -"DONT THEY KNOW HOW DANGEROUS INFORMATION CAN BE?"

--Making the rounds, the trip home from the dentist...MAN, why can't I find a dentist who uses that stuff rather than then jabbing my gums with novocaine?

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Does 13 years of experience plus 1 or 2 in college justify a 3 page resume? Or should I start ignoring or squashing the early stuff?

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Man, my pixel art idea for a kisrael redesign looks like sheer crap. Sheer, pixelated crap.

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"I thought the girl was charming"

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Heh. My former manager set out a cancel notice for our weekly 1-on-1s with the following message body: :-(

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Closeups of football players in HD during the SB national anthem were very stubbley. Disturbingly so.

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The-well,a- trouble with angstily putting off email is you finally get to it all, feel great w/ empty inbox, then BAM- the replies come in.

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It's funny that more people don't giggle at the term "windbreaker"

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"Come at me like a panther 'cause you know yes is my answer" had to be the hottest Deee-lite lyric ever. Lady Miss Kier FTW Wow, that really stunk.

4th down, 13 yards to go, in long FG range... they decide to try for first down... what? WHAT? Seriously. You have a young kicker with a solid leg; give him a chance. Or punt. Going for just showed a disrespectful overconfidence that completely killed the game for the Patriots.

What a disaster! Congratulations Giants, you did things no else did against the Patriots this year.

Weird.

I'm almost wondering if playing in what is otherwise the worst division in football is hurting the Patriots; they do have at least 6 winnable games every season.

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Science of the Moment

We sometimes find when we get up in the morning, by a rise of an inch in the barometer, that nearly half a ton has been quietly piled upon us during the night, but we experience no inconvenience, rather a feeling of exhilaration and buoyancy, since it requires a little less exertion to move our bodies in the denser medium.

(Tomorrow will mark my last day of quoting from it, along with some commentary.)

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Video of the Moment
--Bill the Splut posted some Raymond Scott stuff, but I gotta admit I enjoy the full-Orchestra version of "Powerhouse" more than Raymond Scott's smaller quintent. So yesterday I attended the funeral of Joe Scheinfeldt, last of the Scheinfeldt brothers, 4 great and funny guys, including my grandfather Papa Sam.

Anecdotes about the brothers include them swimming across the Charles naked, clothes in a bundle above the water (they were all good swimmers... actually all of them except Papa Sam served in the navy for decades), getting dresse, then sneaking into a Sox game. The legend doesn't explain if the swimming helped them sneak in somehow, or if it was just for the hell of it.

The graveside service was Navy, and included some moving touches, the flag-draped coffin, a rifle salute, taps, and the presentation of the flag to Joe's widow.

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Comment of the Moment

"Good God. Wait until somebody leaves a Speak and Spell lying around. They'll probably send in a hostage team to negotiate with it."

Thanks for all the feedback and support yesterday.

I've been thinking more about when in my life I lost this baseline optimism of "chances are things will work out alright." Googling my own site for a reference I realized I a long but fairly cohesive ramble about this last April, and much of what I would have said now I said then.

Going solo as a consultant (but as a co-worker pointed out, I'm not totally alone; part of my hourly rate is access to my company as a resource through me) still makes me very edgey. It probably points to several character flaws in me: I'm very recognition/reward driven when you get right down to it, and petrified of being the guy "screwing things up". The unknowns, then, of consulting gigs, especially when I'm having to play catch up with some of the technologies, is nervewracking.

And then there's those rings under my eyes...I've noticed that I seem more likely to have problems putting complex thoughts into speech lately, though I'm not sure if I'm just more aware of it now, or if it could be related to not getting enough sleep, or if it's, you know, rapidly degenerating mental facilities, probably from whatever carpet shampoo they use in my new office or something. But the sleep thing is a real possibility: my anxieties have produced some very elaborate...not quite nightmares, but strange, technology-themed haunting patterns. I realize that my subconscious brain has invented a whole new computer scripting language syntax, and so I get the fun of half of my half-awake brain fretting how it has to accept that it doesn't get what the other half is generating, because it's labeled the new stuff as the technology for work. And another time I think my brain mapped the layout of comforters on my bed into an intractable programming issue.

It's that kind of stuff that makes me wonder if I should look for some kind of medication... I dislike the idea, and am nervous about addiction, but being somewhat sleepless over stuff like this can't be useful to me.

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Technology of the Moment
Speaking of being alone, my company's development crew tend to use AOL Instant Messenger. The trouble is many companies we travel to block it on their network. So I have high hopes for meebo flying under the radar for some time -- it's a web-based UI to AIM, MSN, Gtalk/Jabber, and Yahoo. Being able to reach out to my co-workers back at the ranch is mightily reassuring, even though I don't want to be too dependent on it.

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Link of the Moment

--back to the part of kisrael that isn't all-Kirk, all-the-time... the story of this wasp that turns Roaches into mind-controlled zombies so that it can lay its eggs in them is captivatingly horrifying.

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Quote of the Moment

The real problem with having mind-controlled zombies as my servants is that it's tough to get up a really sincere-sounding round of cheers when I've come up with a plan I think is worth cheering.

Question of the Moment
So I had a thought yesterday...just what was Atlas standing on when he was holding up the world? Google to the answer! Maybe it's the classic on the back of a turtle...and it's turtles all the way down! But I didn't remember much about turtles in my hazy memories of greek mythology. According to Godchecker's Atlas entry, I guess he's atually holding up the heavens, which makes a little more sense given a geocentric world view...but it would be harder to make into a nifty statue, so the world it is.

So the answer was a little prosaic, but at least I found Godchecker, a very readable if somewhat flippant reference on all sort s of deities.

Tools of the Moment
Michal Kowalski has put some useful freeware programs on the web. Probably few of you will find his 6502 Macroassembler & Simulator as useful as I did (a way of practicing the math programing I had to get the Atari 2600 to do) but his Exif Image Viewer is a simple tool that can autorotate the JPEGs that my camera notated as being taken with camera held sideways. (Other software can do this of course, but my other options seemed to be either the bloatware that came with the camera, or a downloader that used to be free but now wanted $20-$30 for functionality that is now 75% included with Windows and 25% in Kowalski's program...) He also has a font viewer for Windows, and some other programs for BeOS and the Atari ST.

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Quote of the Moment

'Faith' in the language of heaven is 'Love' in the language of men.

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Link of the Moment
Tips on searching with Google. Starts with the very basics but works it way up to some complex-ish strategies.

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Gamer Link of the Moment
I continue to be a sucker for videogame "Top 10" lists and Top Ten Real-Time Strategy Games of All Time is no exception. I think I've only played Starcraft, but I find the genre (commanding large armies in real time) conceptually interesting, especially games that have you leading hoardes and hoardes of warriors.

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Misunderstood Joke of the Moment
It's dawning on me that for years I got the "wrong" mental image from that old one liner "he's so fat, when he sits around the house, he sits around the house". I always pictured some enormously fat person, so enormous that they could sit over the house, engulfing it completely. (Yeah, what can I say, I had a graphic imagination.) Only now do I see that the joke probably means just around, only big enough to cover varying locations inside the house. Link of the Moment
This 1980 look at the Space Shuttle points to it as an expensive and dangerous boondoggle. It's foresightful in some ways and shortsighted in others.

If you haven't heard about it, there is some interesting work going on in the private sector on reusable space launch components...one of the coolest is the Roton Rotary Rocket, which actually has a helicopter like rotor at the top. It's an ingenous approach which helps the craft gain speed at liftoff while consuming much less fuel (and being more efficient has a nice virtuous circle effect: the less fuel you need for liftoff, the less fuel mass you have to carry. The less fuel mass you have to carry, the less fuel you need...) as well as helping to slow the craft as it re-enters the atmosphere.

You know, for someone who was complaining about all the Shuttle coverage, I sure am talking about it an awful lot.

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Phrase of the Moment

"Come, shall I stroke your 'whatever', darling? I am so randy..."
"So am I, darling. Whatever your stroke, I shall come."

It's a palindrome sentence (you can read it backwards, word by word, and get the same result) that's been stuck in my head for a bit. At first it didn't seem that impressive, but now the form seems cooler than regular palindromes...this one depends on how "stroke" and "whatever" can be completely different grammatical types depending on the context.
Alright! My 14-point-underdog hometown team kicked some superbutt. GO PATS! It's really cool; even as they were coming on to the field, the starters weren't individually announced; it was just The Team. That's style. They dominated the first half, held a "line in the sand" against a powerful Rams offence that tied it up, and got a terrific final drive in to end with a winning field goal in the final 7 seconds. It was one of the best games ever to watch with some friends and chips and beer. And salty pork...mmmm. Actually, we set up two TVs, one for some video gamin', the other for the game, but it was more football than otherwise. (Incidentally, today's title shamelessly ripped off of Fox News.)

I like the "new" Pats logo, up there to the left, though I understand why some have called it the Flying Elvis. The classic logo below was a pretty mean lookin' fellah. I had a sweater (gift from my longtime Pats fan grandfather Papa Sam) with that guy on it: in fact, I think that's what I'm wearing in that picture with my folks getting adopted into the Seneca Nation.

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Quote of the Moment

"If I knew the meaning of life, would I be sitting in a cave in my underpants?"

Keyboard Fun
Just got one of those Microsoft split keyboards for home, like I have at work. Except all they have are the 'pro' model, with USB connectors, and a row of special shortcut buttons at the top. I'm not sure what I think of those. Except for volume +/-, they're pretty much all things I don't really need or have my fingers trained for already, in terms of using the existing keyboard shortcuts. (Of course, I used to think 'damn windows key. I can just use ctrl-escape!') Actually, it is kind of annoying how small the spacebar is becoming these days. That shortcut key on the right side for the context menu is well night useless, generally I have to click on the thing anyway.

It's also funny that they've started labeling common keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-N, etc., with captions. It feels like I'm back on my Commodore 64 with all the graphical shortcuts. Even odder is that the symbol they decided to use for Ctrl, a circle with 3 lines cutting through it, looks a lot like the Netscape ship steering wheel as it appears on the taskbar.

Actually, I really wish I could have an ergonomic keyboard without the stupid numberpad. It's just a space hogging unused piece of electrocrap.

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Link of the Moment
This is pretty scary: Ouchy the Clown. He even does meetings! (via CamWorld).

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Ramble
Having an odd little e-mail discussion with this one guy, who wrote me about my mortality pages. I guess he disagrees with the idea of matter being the 'ultimate reality', he thinks that some consciousness is what everything is based on, that The Matrix is a good metaphor for What's Really Going On. I dunno, we'll see what turns up.