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RIP Nicole Brown Simpson.
And Ron Goldman.
And Norm McDonald.

Weirdest OJ Simpson cameo is a namedrop in the Buck Rogers episode "Planet of the Slave Girls" (yikes):

Capt. William "Buck" Rogers : Come on, Duke, it's me.

Major Duke Danton : If it's you Rogers, who's the juice?

Dr. Theopolis : The what?

Capt. William "Buck" Rogers : O.J. Simpson. I told you all about him out in the desert. Running back out of USC. He played for the Buffalo Bills.

I mean to be fair canonically Buck got frozen in 1987 which was even before the Naked Gun stuff but still.

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Thinking of the U shaped curve where middle age tends to be kind of a low point. 40 for women, 50 for men.

Sort of feeling it. But it feels, like, drive by circumstances rather than existential concerns? Like if I was rich - or even had a job I felt secure and productive in - I think I could get over the other stuff and be my usual chipper self. Which sort of sucks, I'd like to think that my cheerful existential outlook is independent of circumstances but its definitely gotten a boost from tech being a good career for most of the decades of my adult life, but stinking up the joint right now.

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via

I worship a god in the sense that a deep sea mollusc worships the whale corpse it's eating

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Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment was a Colossal, Society-Shattering Mistake...

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Sending off Van Damme was a mistake. He played with passion. "Passion" is a word we use when talk about love. It is also a word we use to describe a crime. ...Sometimes it is also a fruit.

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Raising the volume when listening to music can be equated to taking drugs. You can only go so high before you start to lose the ability to enjoy what you love.

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The story both starts and ends with the exact same sentence, the last in a sad way. "She smiled at me, like any stranger would."

RIP DMX. Slate has a decent writeup. I guess you could criticize him for being the biggest name way to the left of the Rappers, ranked by the number of unique words used in their lyrics chart, but I think about that Hemingway line "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

Crap, that is about the whitest way possible to write about DMX.

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Joined the Vaxholes with my pfirst pfizer. Thanks to my sweetie Melissa for taking point with the opening notification! And still on track for moving tomorrow...

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And props to CVS. I don't know all the details but they seem to be playing a really important role in getting vaccine into folks in MA!

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RIP John Conway. So many people's minds were opened a crack with the Cellular Automata of his "Game of Life"

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One thing I've absolutely noticed about myself, and which should be true as you get older: it's not that you want to die, but you are less attached to life. You're less panicked.

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"How should I think about this, Toni?" And I mean think. Not "How should I feel about this?" I know how I feel. But what is the right way to think about this? Because we would disagree about things, and lots of times she made me change my mind. And no one else has made me change my mind.

Diligence is the mother of good fortune

...cited in Leonard Nimoy's "I Am Spock", an exceedingly gracious book that I binge read last night. (Hm, is there a synonym for "binge"-watch or -read that isn't associated with eating disorders?) I wish it dealt a bit more with Spock's character and the general challenges of learning to control and utilize our emotions (which I'm increasingly thinking is our sole source of motive energy) and less about Nimoy's career, though it was a varied and thoughtful one. Kurt Vonnegut to his Ex-wife:

October 19, 1972
New York City

Dear Jane--

I wish you a happy birthday in confidence that, America politics aside, it really will be a happy birthday for you. At the cost of unbelievable amounts of pain, you have bought a new life and a new Jane for yourself. You have always paid your dues, and you have paid them again. We've both always paid our dues. That's honorable. I still believe in honor, although I would play hell defining it.

Now that we are through the worst of our present adventure in a world we never made, in bodies we never asked for, with heads we only dimly understand, it seems safe to say we hung on to more than most broken couples do. In a crazy way, it seems to me that we hung onto practically everything. We are not diminished.

I look forward to seeing you in November.
Much love--
K

http://www.sauerkrautrecipes.com/ - a long while ago a friend pointed me to this site as "things you didn't know needed their own domain", but 15 years later and it's still going strong.

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My ireland native father once told me that the first time he ever saw people use water for hot chocolate was when he came to america, and said that it was then that he 'knew this country was doomed'

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One to Sleep On: Release the past to rest as deeply as possible.

RIP Charlie Murphy - what a story teller!

What makes human beings unique? Some say it's language or tools. Others say it's logical reasoning. They obviously haven't met many humans.

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Three pennies keep a large electric light bulb burning all night, and they buy about thirty thousand additions or subtractions or other elementary computations at current large-computer rates (omitting overhead, communication, and programming expense). This is enough computation to balance a large number of monthly bank statements, and at face value seems to compare very favorably with the equivalent amount of electricity. Furthermore, the cost of computation has been decreasing steadily, whereas electric rates have been stable for over twenty years now.

The modeling of computation as a commodity or utility is intriguing; it didn't focus enough on the personal computer (or specialized devices we now enjoy) but comparing it to "The Cloud" and the rent-a-server style services of today is a fun exercise.

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The harsh truth about speed reading... I'm no "speed-reader", but I've always read quickly, and attribute a big chunk of my academic success to that - especially for standardized tests. But I've come to admit, there's a big aspect of it that's just a gift for skimming, and bouncing back to the tough bits. (When I loose that go back "what was that part in the middle again?" capability, like when someone is spelling a name or password for me out loud, I am comically hopeless and inept.)

And I don't know what's the cart and what's the horse, but that kind of "get the gist" living permeates so many parts of my life, from how I learn technical things to how I appreciate music. I'm kind of anti-nuance; the world is so full of things that are "interesting" in and of their own right, things that are novel and creative and show or make some unique aspect of the universe (or rather, show that aspect in a usefully unique way) that I'm impatient with forms that require long-form close attention, and/or keeping lots of things sorted in my head. My buddy Tom Kermode coined the neologism "cruxian", a term I love- I want to optimize for the crux of the issue and the subtleties have to watch out for themselves.

Often time that "crux" is "how things interact". I don't care so much about the interior lives of things; people and computer objects alike should be judged on what they do, not what you think they "are". (Conversely, from a Bayesian analysis point of view, what they "are" will influence what they are likely to "do", so getting a handle on what they "are" is better than relying on individual observations of their action.)

Unfortunately too often faces and names fall into that bucket of "less important" nuance, and I think it's the main factor in my face- blindess (or at least face-myopia).

Get the gist?

If someone says 'pinch me, I must be dreaming'. You shouldn't pinch them, because if they wake up you stop existing.

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A redneck's call for racial responsibility... plenty of cussing but I like this guy.
Interesting article from Cracked, 4 Benefits of Your Job That Are More Important Than Money. I know some of the appeal is "I Want To Believe", but I think there might be more to it than that. Awesome New Old New York photos:

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I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

--Vania Heymann's "The Crazy Watering Can", via Bill the Splut What a well-executed and provoctive concept! I love how not even Apple fandom is exempt... (reminds me a little bit of Cleveland's Church of the Holy Oil Can.)

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'You won't like me when I'm angry. Because I always back up my rage with facts and documented sources.'
--The Credible Hulk

via boingboung where they say

Clement Valla collects Google satellite photos where the image-processing software went a little wonky and created the illusion of wiggly-wobbly landscapes. It's inceptiontastic!

Cool stuff... reminds me a bit of the work of Guy Billout

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Want To Live To 100? Try To Bounce Back From Stress : NPR http://ow.ly/1stmBN

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When it comes to the care of the body, our scientists search for longevity amd not for euphoria. If experimenting on chocolate cake, our scientists will study how quickly it kills you, not whether the pleasure is worth it.

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Interesting. Based on trailers, it looks like Tag: The Power of Paint is to Portal 2 what Narbacular Drop was to the original Portal. So, being one of those dorky "first day adopters" (though not like, waiting in line or anything) I decided I would try to put my thoughts about the iPad here.

It's... cool, but overrated.

As a laptop replacement, it's not quite there, except for very casual users. The trouble isn't the general browsing; that's a fairly superb experience. Once you get the feel of scrolling and zooming, it's awesome, suddenly you have a screen where the content on the screen can exactly reflect the focus of your mind and eyes.

But then I try to do some semi-advanced things, and run into problems. The iPhone has always annoyed me with its lack of a "ctrl-F" "find matches in page" feature. I can live with that on a handheld browser, but with something with the aspirations that the iPad has, it hurts.

There are more problems for people who are used to multi-tab browsing. I kind of like the thumbnail-based way of dealing with multiple "screens" (even though the iPad is pretty bad with frequently flushing other pages out of memory, so the pages have to have their content reloaded when you come back to them) but while there's a "Open in New Page" feature, there's no "Open in New Background Page" option. That means if you prefer to open interesting links in the background, and then come back to them when you're done with the current page, you have to have your finger ready to jump to the page manager and then hit your current page- hopefully quick enough to not have it lose your page. (Actually, even if you prefer to follow new content and then come back to what you started with, you're at risk for losing your place.)

Also, the lack of Flash hurts more than I expected. I don't really miss it on the iPhone, but on something trying to provide a total browsing experience I miss it.

(The Flash thing is even more interesting with the recent decision of Apple to not allow apps that are made in, say Flash or some other environment, and then have iPhone versions generated. I was full of outrage for a while, and it still seems kind of disgusting. I've read this explanation of it that makes the decision seem slightly less evil, that don't want half-assed multiplatform ports, they want to be the focus of developer's efforts, or nothing. (On the other hand, given how flooded the app store already is...)

The keyboard is so-so. You have to type with the fleshy part of your fingers for starters, and overall I find the layout of the iPhone keyboard more consistent - in particular, having the apostrophe be in a different "mode" is a bit frustrating.

Copy-and-Pasting isn't always consistently supported across apps, and like on the iPhone, sometimes the would-be-helpful "jump to paragraph boundaries" selection feature gets it wrong and it's tough to correct.

A few apps are buggy (Twitterific often loses its scrolling when messing with links embedded in a tweet, and I think I once saw something similar in Safari.)

I guess some of my biggest iPad disappointments kind of fit the model described in The iPad: Where Creativity Goes to Die -- the idea that this is a machine geared for passively consuming content, not creating it. (Actually, maybe that idea came up not as an accusation, but as a defense of the machine's limitations.) My main justification for this expensive toy was an old one: I'm still looking for the perfect doodling device, the one that lets me sketch a cartoon and then upload it to my website. But this machine is only halfway there. I've tried 4 or 5 different sketch apps, but none of them are really pixel centric.

(Maybe I'm just a weirdo in thinking that it's nice to draw in pixels and THEN shrink the image as the last anti-aliasing step; all I know is that when I try to flood fill or otherwise color in these apps, I tend to get kinda blurry messes. There is a chance that I'm thinking about this wrong, in a weird, Mid-90s "Microsoft Paint" kind of way and I should try to get fluent in some kind of vector drawing app instead.)

But even when I have an image I want to post, my options feel limited. Ideally I'd like to just use an Upload form - but with iPad Safari that's disabled -- I'm not really making files. Each app has its own database of my images, and then most will let me transfer it to the photogallery or email it, and one will let me tweet it and another will let me post to Flikr. Bummer! I have to jump through more hoops to get to what I want, but at least half the issue is trying to have more fun with a machine geared at consuming rather than making content. (I have some similar issues when I try to manually copy tweets into my personal blog thing.)

So that's it. In my final analysis, I'd say a netbook plus iPod touch is a better way of spending what an iPad costs. On the other hand, the iPad really does feel like the way of the future, and as more tablet options emerge, my issues with this kind of system might fade away.

(It's also kind of funny how it's not independent of having a real laptop or PC - when you fire it up out of the box refuses to have anything to do with you until you synch it up with iTunes, and woe be upon you if you hadn't previously upgraded iTunes...)

There are some other issues I didn't get into - it's nice that it can use the same conector cable, and its speakers are decent for music, but it would be nice if somehow you could use the same iPhone cradle some times of external speakers depend on.

Here's another review of being hands-on with the thing.

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Do not fear mistakes, there are none.

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First day, new job- Pearson Education. After a year of consulting-style gigs, so ready to really latch in.

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Another thought to disturb slumber: For an octopus to imprison a human, all it would need is a gate with 3 doorknobs.

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Punk rock was a conspiracy engineered by Gibson and Fender to convince people they didn't have to learn or practice music to buy gear.

Happy Easter!

For Easter/Passover/Whatever frickin' Pagan spring thing it is, Rebekah and Kate organized a makening of tasty homemade sweets.

Currently reading: "Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head? The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies"

This book is a lot less prurient than advertisement in The Atlantic might lead one to believe... half-prude/half-Freud if you'll pardon the slant rhyme and none of it all that interesting. I'm not sure if I'll bother to finish.

I'm thinking about adding a "currently reading / just watched" sidebar for any regular to write about stuff they're reading or a movie or video they've seen. Any thoughts?

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Convo of the Moment
So I enlisted Sarah in my self-defeating introspection about how self-absorbed I can be:

sarah: Well... I don't know if I can offer you any helpful advice... my own interpersonal relationships are all in the crapper these days. I am inclined to think we are ALL self-centered.
kirk: I have noted that w/ almost every story I hear, I formulate a counter story, and I've started to make a better internal-censor for that, that is a little harsher in judging relevance/general interest
sarah: I think that's a very reasonable approach
kirk: SELF CENTERED RIGHTS BABY
sarah: Hell yeah!
kirk: EGOCENTRIC POWER TO THE PEOPLE
sarah: You can't spell I without I!
kirk: heheh

And like I said right after this, digging your own story does not mean you don't dig other people's stories! It's a communication style mismatch as much as anything I think...

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Link of the Moment
Tales from the Court - what happens when the stenographer puts aside the role of passive recorder and gets in on the Two-Fisted Action!

So there's a great used bookstore at Davis Square, McIntyre and Moore. I stopped in the other night and found this odd book, "Investigating Sex: Surrealist Research 1928-1932", a series of 12 roundtable discussions about sex by fairly major surrealist figures.

It's an interesting read (though they generally aren't sounding stereotypically "surreal") but a lot of it comes across like this:

RAYMOND QUENEAU   Péret?
BENJAMIN PÉRET   I always follow the woman's preference. I always ask what she prefers.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Queaneau?
RAYMOND QUENEAU   I agree with Péret.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Prévert?
JACQUES PRÉVERT   I share Breton's view.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Morise?
MAX MORISE   It is a matter of whatever is mutually agreeable.
BENJAMIN PÉRET   Unik?
PIERRE UNIK   Like Péret, I always ask the woman what she prefers.

I kept think of the Loony Tunes "Goofy Gophers"... "After you!" "No, after you!" "After you, I insist!" "Nononono, after you!"

Still, I ended up liking Man Ray even more than I did before, though he was only in one of the discussions:

ANDREÉ BRETON   Does the man have any comparable way of recognizing the woman's orgasm?
GEORGES SADOUL   No.
ANDREÉ BRETON   Man Ray?
MAN RAY   The woman is strongly aware of the precise moment of orgasm in the man. But the man has nothing to go on except for the woman's lassitude.
ANDREÉ BRETON   And if this lassitude is simulated?
MAN RAY   Too bad for the woman! I go along with her act.

But my favorite bit was the following exchange...

ANDREÉ BRETON   A fanciful question: Péret finds all the women with whom he has had sexual relations assembled together, in a café for example, with the one he loved or believed he loved standing apart. What would he do?
BENJAMIN PÉRET   Run for my life.

They seem kind of preoccupied about simultaneous orgasm. (Maybe because of the times they give for how long it takes once the preliminaries are done... "five minutes", "five minutes", "twenty seconds maximum" "Less than a minute", "Two minutes", and "between fifteen and forty seconds")

The other question that caught my attention was if they had had sex with a woman who had since died, and if that brought on pangs of remorse. As far as I know all my former lovers are still around, but it's an oddly disquieting thought.

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Article of the Moment
Could we have accidentally nuked Jupiter by letting the plutonium-packing Galileo satellite crash into its crushing depths? (Or as loquacious put it on metafilter, "All these worlds are yours, save Europa. Attempt no landings he...llo! What the hell is wrong with you!? Did you just nuke Jupiter?")

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Passing of the Moment
RIP Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt is up in Heaven now.

Damn, but did he write some good stuff. "Cat's Cradle" with its pseudocult of Bokononism is something I could really get behind.

I think I need to reread his recent "Timequake".

Breasts of the Moment
Boingbong reported that one of the French protestors re-enacted Eugène Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People", bare-breasts and all. (I remember my mom answering questions I had about that painting with explanations of how it was kind of like a metaphor for freedom.) This is kind of a cool collision of sex, politics, and art, though I keep thinking how much her hat (seen better in some of the other links from the BoingBoing article) looks like what Papa Smurf was wearing.

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Game Link of the Moment
Of intense interest to a small subset of people who keep up with kisrael... a page on StarFox 2, the unreleased SNES sequel to the classic, with a 45 minute gameplay movie. It looks like an outstanding game, a real pity that it got pushed-aside for the much prettier but entirely more pedestrian Starfox 64. This game has an interesting framework where you have to travel on a map screen, zooming into battle as enemies keep advancing in real-time on the map. Kind of like a supercharged version of the old 2600 game Space Attack.

Quote of the Moment

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

So I added a "favicon.ico" icon, that should show up on the addressbar, and when someone adds this site to their bookmarks. My head. In 256 pixels, of 16 different colors. I like it.

So I caught a repeat of some of the pre-home-opener ceremonies last night. Tremendous day for the Red Sox, one of those "dang I wish grandpa was still around" deals. And to cap it off with a 8-1 drubbing of the hated Yankees...loverly.

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Link of the Moment
This was making the rounds a few days ago, one guy's 25 Favorite Seasame Street Moments with tons of illustrations. I had totally forgotten "Billy Joe Jive: Super Crimefighting Ace". And I still love imitating those muppet aliens...."yip yip yip yip yip yip uh-huh uh-huh"...and then when they start to imitate the telephone they find...great stuff, they even have an mp3 of 'em!

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Sidenote of the Moment
Oh, by the way...GAH! SNOW! IN APRIL!

As you were.

Feh, turns out my proposed title of "mundane monday" was already taken.

Spent a lot of yesterday starting the 2600 Cookbook, a kind of reference for people trying to learn to program the Atari. I think the format has a lot of potential, but obviously, it's not of tremendous general interest to the assembled kisrael masses. I like the logo I came up with for it though, that's "Short Order Sam" from the Activision game "Pressure Cooker". Hopefully Activision won't move in...

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Quote of the Moment

The sum of the Universe is zero.

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Article of the Moment
Slate.com on those armed military contractors. They're our very own unlawful combatants! No Geneva Convention for these tough hombres!

Armed contractors for the Army...seems like we're hitting more of that "Robocop" distopia all the time.

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Invention of the Moment

Idea for a fountain from the Gallery of Ingenious, but Impractical Devices (part of the larger The Museum of Unworkable Devices, mostly focused on perpetual motion machines.) Aesthetically pretty cool, but I wonder: were people expected to touch lips with it or not? If so, it would detract from the health benefits of it not being the shared drinking cup (which was a problem back in the day.)

Some mostly server-related changes in the works for this site. I've secured the domain kirkjerk.com and eventually it will point to this site...and hopefully gradually become the canonical name. Though I'm doing some server migrations, so for now it's just a test site, since I need to see if my scripts will work for this site and the loveblender.

Also you might notice a small change at the header of this page. I've decided that having a headshot at the top of one's website, even a very stylized b+w one, is kind of lame. I've always called Alien Bill my signature sketch, and now he's returning to his rightful place. (Also, I plan to roll alienbill.com into this site, so since he's losing his frontpage I thought he deserved this.)

Let me know what you think! My comments pages have been lonely lately.

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Found Poem of the Moment

thiswayshehadalreadyhadenoughscotchyetshekept
drinkingpreferringintoxicationtothesightofhim
holdingsomeoneelsehewasbacktohisoldwaysagain
tobeingthatnotsosmoothtalkingcharmerwhoalways
knewwhattosay

When she submitted this poem, she likely mistook a special "title" field for a "comments" field, which the 'blender munged into a filename like you see here, though I've added linebreaks. The filename broke winzip, but as a poem I think it has a certain breathless beauty.

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Toys of the Moment
Dang, why didn't they have these tiny R/C fightin' tanks when I was growing up? Or in time for my latest birthday? (via slashdot)

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Recipe Typo of the Moment

"Place first 5 ingredients in a large owl"

So, this is my last day at Gale...

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Image of the Moment

Wild turkeys in the parking lot of my soon to be previous company. I'll pause a moment to let the metaphor sink in... ...err, or something.

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AIM Exchange of the Moment
kirk: I was going to say something like "man, cleaning out your desk must be one of the most depressing activities in the world" but then I thought no, that would be "burying the members of your own family"
kirk: or some such
ranjit: worst is when it's both at the same time. Ramble of the Moment
I post to Usenet quite a bit, though a lot less than I used to. I went through a period where I was sick of the "Israel"-ness of my name, just the possibility of annoying assumptions and having to explain it. For a while I used "Captain Kirk Is Real", but now it seems to show up as "Kirk Is". And I think I've forgotten where to change it. That's rather zen of me, actually.

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Link of the Moment
X-entertainment is a must see site for anyone who grew up in the 80s. I have never seen so much kid's pop-cultural goodness in one place, taken apart in highly amusing fashion.