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You know, reading about the lifetime ban of an NBA player and noting the rise of legalized sports betting... and my inability to "get" the appeal of betting, at all... my philosophy is all about knowing there has to be absolute truth (in this case, the outcome of a sports event, regarded after the fact) but also accepting your uncertainty of that truth - if I'm not 100% sure of something I feel morally compelled to lay out where the uncertainty is. (So I won't say "your keys are on the kitchen table" even if I recently noticed them there since stuff might have changed or my memory have tricked me - I'll say "I think your keys are on the kitchen table")

But recreational sports betting plays in a very different emotional and maybe epistemological space. Either flexing that you're sure you're smarter or luckier than other folks, or wanting to tie in your fate more closely with a favorite team's, or just thrill seeking spiced by real financial consequences. I just don't get it.

(I remember my mom's views on gambling, when some gambler wanted to share his winnings with the church. I don't remember the outcome, but I do remember my mom pointing out either its losing money, or it's gaining money on the backs of others (I think "on the backs of others" more so than a protestant work ethic stance of wanting to link diligence to financial outcomes.)

I suppose I shouldn't be on too much of a moral high horse about it. There's a chance I'd be better off by taking more chances over all, in different aspects of life, rather than always hunting for sure wins and low hanging fruit.

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I do love fictional brands, thinking about logos and what not is always a kick.

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Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma--all of which sought admission to the union--did not become states.

Potential alternate States of the USA are so rich for alternate world thinking... (Also mentioned Sequoyah, a state based on the communities of Native Americans...)

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Guano was noxious, "a beastly smelling-bottle sort of mess, looking like bad snuff mixed with rotten kittens," as a Vermont paper put it.

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[Philippines Governor] Governor-General Forbes found time for other pursuits. "I get up leisurely when I feel like it, write in my journal sparingly so as not to run into the error of being too voluminous, and play a few hands of cards to iron the crinkles out of my mind." In the afternoons, Forbes would spend "an hour or so" reading newspaper clippings, but he would stop at four to "take a ride, or play polo, according to the day." "I have let the great world sweep by," he purred.

The crinkles thing reminds me of how I like a first thing game of Wordle

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The United States military is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another and last and least a fighting organization.

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O God! that whole damned war business is about nine hundred and ninety parts diarrhoea to one part glory: the people who like the wars should be compelled to fight the wars . . . I say, God damn the wars--all wars

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Suddenly these pesky foreigners rose up before us in their own lands, doggedly refusing to understand our tongue, no matter how slowly and loudly we spoke it. It was little short of outrageous.

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Ewww - companies that scrape funeral home obituary listings and make their own obituaries, so they can sell some of the flowers and other auxiliary. But adding injury to insult, they have bad, dumb bots that rewrite the things so they don't violate copyright laws.

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(Note to self, this liberty bell with legs poster was "Sweet Liberty" not "1776")

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People walking along the street observed sparks jumping between their feet and the ground. Sparks sprang from water line taps when touched. Light bulbs within 100 feet of the lab glowed even when turned off. Horses in a livery stable bolted from their stalls after receiving shocks through their metal shoes. Butterflies were electrified, swirling in circles with blue halos of St. Elmo's fire around their wings.

That thing with the butterflies sounds really amazing.

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I just got a (even) larger monitor - 30.5" - like a billboard!
Thinking I'll simplify my physical desktop by getting rid of the old cheap "portrait mode" monitor I had on the side. 2 screens can probably be enough... and while sometimes useful the extra monitor was more like geek "virtual signaling" than anything truly necessary.

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I've been steadily using Woebot, a chatbot app that does a light form of CBT. It pointed me to this "whiteboard video" from a Carol Dweck lecture on helping kids to not grow up with fixed mindset:

I know there's some critique - but not really disagreement that some of the basic themes have something to them and are likely useful.

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My wife and I play this fun game during quarantine, it's called "Why Are You Doing It That Way?" and there are no winners

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You can't believe it's not butter? Buddy, almost everything is not butter

"AAAAAAAH! I could bring you to small claims court for this!"
"Small claims court costs thirty dollars. Do you have thirty dollars?"
"Of course! What do I look like?"
"Normcore Ted Kaczynski."

The characters are written super-broadly, but man does this show deal with some real issues of sexism and fat-shaming

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Baghdad Barr
--An old shot, but not sure it ever got on the site. A relatively rare tuba shot from the last few years in that I'm not playing Scheiny - trying out one of the School of Honk's polka dot horns.

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The Calmness of Airline Pilots and, most recently, Tammi Jo Shultz, one of the first female Navy pilots. And also the demeanor of the flight controllers - makes me wanna watch "Pushing Tin" again. Bass Section of the School of Honk in Austin, TX, via The Book of Honk (prints available)

(The Ride 'Em Cowboy is my favorite from this batch - usually the tuba is riding me, nice to turn that around, though the "hero shot" might be even better than Franklin Marvel's Take at Figment.

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You might see punching bags are even better hugging bags if you'd just calm down for a second.

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Write up about Ze Frank and The Show. Man that was great. Also, I really miss his page of little digital toys, he was a really inspiring toymaker...

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What do you care what other people think?

Dream-inspired product idea: tiny stickon LCD screens for your fingernails. Powered by the wearer's bio-electricity, or by a thin layer of battery. Showing off changing patterns, or possibly an image of the object you are touching. (In which case they'd need bluetooth or something, so something touched by a few fingers could be displayed by all.

You know, an e-ink version of the simplest form of that might just be possible.

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The best volleyball video you'll watch today, I promise you.

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The 3-point shot and other basketball history... with Curry having basically broken regular basketball (check out this chart) I was wondering where the 3 point shot came from.

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PROTIP: not only does Youtube let you playback videos at increased speeds, but you can just hit "greater than" to make it go faster, you don't have to go to the settings menu.

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Speaking of Youtube videos... and Star Wars... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSuDjjlIPak

I wonder if anyone tried to fit the room the droids are running around in into the canon.

'Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release. Clearly this is the control panel for an army of the undead.'

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/18/austerity-economics-only-works.html Lies, Damn Lies, and austerity-agenda blowhards cherry picking data and screwing up their own Excel

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Past? Imperfect. Present? Tense. Future? Conditional.

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Stories are just data with soul

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Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

When I think about stuff I find sexy and/or appealing these days, certain accents, certain poses, etc, and then I think back to the high school era or earlier examples of me appreciating them... I really wonder if those examples are the cause, or the effect of a pre-existing appreciation...
Besides the crazy athleticism, I dig the crew nature of these things, and how the other crew has that nice mix of boisterous dismissiveness and enthusiasm for what the other crew is doing.
--Marilyn Monroe - Amber's friend Sam let us have a print of this she didn't want when we were with her in Cleveland... thinking about using it as kind of an inspirational thing in the basement exercise-y area. Funny how much it looks like one of Madonna's main looks... maybe that's where Madonna got that bicep fetish of hers.

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blender of love april 2010

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[Cleaning out apartment stuff]
"Yeah, I think this heavy duty candle was part of a pack of 'Y2K surviving' stuff Mo's dad gave us..."
"Well, it worked.."

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When the girl with the hummus met the boy with the pita... that's romance!
--Man might be the Hairless Ape, but this is the Hairless Chimp... so very strange looking.

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http://forgetomori.com/2009/paranormal/ghosts/michael-jackson-ghost-haunts-muhammad-ali/ - Jacko haunting Ali/Foreman? WEIRD.

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http://www.a10.com/game/Slammings.html - nice little physics-y anti-Lemmings

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I cannot believe that "smashenfreude", the joy of smashing, has existed nowhere prior on Google! Gonna be the name of my new Java toy. Last night I was walking around Porter Square and had a kind of good news / bad news situation. The good news was that that one space that used to have a used bookstore in the basement (about halfway down between Porter Square and that one Church) again has a used bookstore in the basement! The bad news was that the bookstore was Mcintyre and Moore that used to have a much larger and more visible place at Davis Square.

I don't know how much the selection has suffered. I found 2 cool remaindered books and 2 interesting used titles, and they're not even fully unpacked yet. They have a lot of small rooms down there, but still, it is after all a basement.

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Photos of a Past Moment
OK, I lied about not posting more Japan stuff. On flickr I posted a gallery with A Baker's Dozen of the visually strongest photos that I took, the ones that I also decided to printout. They arent' quite fullsize but 1024x768 is a lot better than what I posted here earlier. (I might add a few from another set of 10 I considered printing but decided against.)

The 400x300 size I post here doesn't do justice to some of the images, IMO. If anyone wants a semi-decent 8.5x11 printout of any of these, let me know and I'll get one made for you.

Side note: I did this month's Blender of Love and used this kind of cheesy photo from my Japan trip. The thing is, the folks there like this shot a lot more than I do even, and are encouraging me to use it as a bit of a signature every month. Not sure what to do about that, it's cute and all but with more than a touch of schmaltz...

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Quote of the Moment

By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all our leaders was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.

So I was on the subway on the evening of Marathon Day, and a French woman (I think French, though I suppose could be French-Canadian or something) asked me about my book A Year in the Merde, which she pointed out might be a play on "A Year In Provence".

It was cool because I was able to confirm that "My Tea Is Rich" (the book's hypothetical name for a chain of English Tea Rooms) does strike French folks as funny... it's a play on "My Tailor is Rich" which was a common sentence for French-speakers learning English.

The woman mentioned she likes cross-cultural books so I recommended Hellenga's "The Sixteen Pleasures". The whole incident made me wish I had a personal business card to hand her... not in a "trying to give women by number" kind of way, but just on the off chance there could be some followup communication, making it a smaller world. Or, it could just be a bookmark!

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Hobo of the Moment

--"Kirk the Jerk", my own hobo, ordered through Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's Hobotopia project, where for $10 he would draw your Hobo name on a postcard. (He's now doing fairy tale scenes for $20.) (thanks Bill the Splut who got his own hobo)

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Business of the Moment
I am so bummed that my first knowledge of a 1,428-Year-Old Business in Japan was that it was being closed down! It was Kongo Gumi, builder of Buddhist Temples. (via boingboing)

I know I'm being small-minded in several ways by thinking like this, but hearing about the Duke University lacrosse players makes me think.... Lacrosse? Why are schools getting so serious about a sport with such a niche place in the popular consciousness?

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Quote of the Moment

One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.

It's a great point... less of an exaggeration than it might first sound... and I'm trying to apply to my life at work, especially when there's a task I feel intimidated by. I tend to want to run and hide in those cases, and that's really not a useful strategy.

As FoSO can attest, I found the quote while looking for that famous Churchill exchange, "Sir, you're drunk!" "Yes, Madam, I am. But *BLLAAAAAARGH* blu ble prtooey....."

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Link of the Moment
Niiiice, a a kind of "alt.humor.best-of-slashdot", SeenOnSlash.

Dang it, some retarded script has been through here adding two empty comments to a lot of the recent entries. Probably some message board spam bot or something, maybe the homebrew nature of my site saved me from a ton of harder to delete messages... Update: fixed. Looks like they didn't go further than "past two weeks".

Other note, people who might not have checked kisrael.com over the weekend, there's some good comments in yesterday's entry on changing cities...given the geographical diversity I might have a bit of here, I'd love to hear some more thoughts on what it means to change location in a major way...

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Story of the Moment
Cory Doctrow has a cool new story, i, robot...kind of a literary mashup of Asimov's 3-laws Robot stories, "1984", traditional cyberpunk, post-singularity, and cop noir. Good stuff.

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Cute Girlfriendism of the Moment
Arlington had a Patriot's Day Parade today. I thought it was kind of endearing that Ksenia thought it was just some dumb thing for the football team at first. And it was interesting that she said she likes "this" kind of parade...as it turns out, as opposed to something with a lot military fluff and nonsense like they had sometimes in Russia (especially in a big town like Moscow, I'd wager.) I guess drummers and fifers in goofy colonial outfits and little league teams are a lot better than tanks and soldiers!

Music Video of the Moment
LAN3 said that New York Girl in Baghdad was probably "too weird to be political" and he might be right. Still, an interesting video with a nice little tune behind it.

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Nostalgia of the Moment
Before I threw it away, I thought I'd reclaim the interesting bits of this high school Spanish quiz: Three things learned/remembered from this:
1. I was really mediocre at Spanish.
2. My high school teacher had us use "Spanishized" versions of our names (Juan for John, etc) but "Kirk" doesn't really translate so the teacher had me use the name Nacho. (The "ir" of "Kirk" tends to be very strange to native Spanish speakers, which is why a señorita or two has been known to make my toes curl by bending my name around two syllables.)
3. I went through a phrase of printing my name in a really stylized manner. Luckily, by the time of this quiz I had dropped giving the "R" a double line for its vertical bar.
4. I would sometimes draw a guy in a sombrero. I think I liked the way the tassles would hang straight down despite the angle of the rest of the hat.

And now I can throw the quiz away...adios!

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Car of the Moment
My cousin Ivan has started ragging on me about the age of my beloved Honda Civic. He sent me this car show link and the one that really caught my attention was this MINI Cooper Convertible. I've heard that the MINIs are now a kind of neo-"macho" car, which is a bit too bad. And I don't know why I have this 'thing' for convertibles; with the top down its windy and noisy and a sunny day will blind you...still, this kind of compactness really appeals to me. Quote of the Moment

"I don't want to be young again, I just don't want to get any older."

Though I dunno, having a bit less freedom but a lot less responsibility was kind of nice...

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Link of the Moment
Slate on the mathematics of marriage, a guy who seems 85% able to figure out if a couple is going to make it or not...hmmm, I wonder how early in a relatinship his technique seems to be effective? (Heh, also on Slate: the news you might've missed a month ago today, what with the war starting and all.)

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Fetish of the Moment
My name is Ulrich Haarbürste and I like to write stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped up in cling-film. Oddly innocent and straightforward short stories. Strange world, if it's not just an odd joke. Job interview today...actually, it's for the very same position Mo applied for yesterday! So we've set up something that can at best be Win/Lose and has a chance of being Lose/Lose... but the chance of being some kind of Win is important to us right now. Still, it's a little strange.

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Quote of the Moment

"I've found that the best way to break up with a girl is to sit down with her, look deep into her eyes and say, 'Raise your hand if you're Nick Ehart's girlfriend.' When she does, I say, 'Slow down there, Champ.' The rest seems to take care of itself."

A good retelling of an old line.

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Link of the Moment
One of the best "Behind the Video Games" sites I've ever see, The Arcade Classics has a fair deal of history I'd never heard before...and I've seen a lot of the stuff that's out there.

I was talking with Lee yesterday. I mentioned that Mo and I have differing ideas about the ideal living arrangement. She would love to get a house sometime reasonably soon, just a typical house that we would make a home. I on the other hand have less achievable ambitions. Although the sharing of bathtubs and kitchens wasn't so great, looking back, living in a big semi-communal arrangement in the Big Yellow House with 4 or 5 other people was a really fun time. It was great to have different people to talk to along with your SO, and it was trivial to get various multiplayer games going full tilt. Now it's a lot of work. So my ideal would have us with our own apartment of sorts, but within trivial walking distance (like, right down the hall) from a lot of friends. And if there wasn't communal space per se (ala common areas in dorms), there would still be a lot of unnanounced visits. But then, as I said to Lee: "F***-- I just realized I'm describing the set of Seinfeld, or Friends."

Sigh.

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Quote of the Moment

"Well," the Goddess said, "your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time."