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The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test.
They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.
[...]
I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love.
It does not seem important to me.
What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.

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Dear Kurt--I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.

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As I have already said, I was fully aware that I was not the sort of lumber out of which happy marriages were made.

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And how then did we face the odds,
Of man's rude slapstick, yes, and God's?
Quite at home and unafraid,
Thank you,
In a game our dreams remade.

in Wizard of Oz's twister scene, Dorothy sees a pair of men rowing a boat in the windtossed sky, and giving her a friendly tip of the hat. I want to know their story. Did they also land in Oz? What happened then?

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Happy Wake Up The Earth! Photos via Greg Cooland and Deborah J Karson, cmg, and Jennifer Taub:







Not sure those last ones are me at my band best but still. Good to be able to swap layers, either JP Honk Purple or School of Honk dots on top. My alabaster legs though... Happy International Tuba Day

(via Andrew Huang)

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Four Years After Arkansas Executed Ledell Lee, DNA Points to Someone Else Need a reason to hate the death penalty? (Or Trump SCOTUS appointees?) Here you go, innocent people, put to death in your name!

Harness the power of an enormous let-down.

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The important thing about stand up comedy is to call whatever you're doing -- standup comedy.

I miss the utility of the old Cyborg and Romantic namegenerators, but here's one for general backronyms - "KIRK: that Knocked-out Irretrievable Rectitude by a Kinsperson"

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I could listen to Peter Mayhew as an rough English accented Chewbacca yelling at Han Solo (placeholder dialog) all day:

Polar Sparkling Seltzer Mango Limeade has a terrific taste I can only describe as "spiky". Quote from Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat Pray Love":

"There is no old age like anxiety," said one of the monks I met in India. "And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety."

Maria thinks that in a civilized society one should be able to rely on such things as the post office delivering one's mail in a prompt manner, but Giulio begs to differ . He submits that the post office belongs not to man, but to the fates, and that delivery of mail is not something anybody can guarantee.

Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.

To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.

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Talking with Liz the other day, she asked if I had always worn glasses- yes, ever since 4th or 5th grade or so, with a brief unfortunate attempt at contacts in high school. So glasses are a part of my face, and I'm pretty comfortable with that. But I wasn't at first, which is funny- back around that time I tried to pretend that I liked classical and jazz because that's what smart people did and I was a smart person, but somehow I failed to make the same, perhaps even more obvious, leap for eyeglasses.

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I still do like PostSecret...

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Stood in with Prone to Mischief today on the Vietnam Memorial Bridge in Western MA - photo by John Bell
Arlington bike cops pulling over bicyclists for red light stuff, the corner of Lake Street and Mass Ave... Not sure I'm crazy about my tax dollars at work like that. Those lights seem ridiculously stupidly timed even for cars. Lots of gas and time wasted. People have dark thoughts that it's kept that way as a revenue source for the town.

I dunno, I suppose my opinions aren't very well formed, and it feels like wiser minds than mine have argued over if it really makes sense for bicycles to be treated so much closer to automobiles than pedestrians. Yeah, there's that sense of "bike privilege" that some motorists seem to resent bitterly, but to me it seems like if you're on a bike, most physical threats are to your person, but if you're in a car you're less of a threat to yourself and more of a threat to everyone around you, and using common sense over "it's got wheels, it must be a full on vehicle" black/white thinking makes sense.

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Thoughts on Deflategate, not that anyone asked:
1. My feeling is that the Patriots are in like the upper quartile of pushing rule boundaries, but are hardly unique with what went on with Spygate or Deflategate. I mean, Aaron Rodgers confessed to OVERINFLATING the balls for his games. Other teams got busted for taping as well.
2. Those texts are also kind of funny. But they also indicate that the refs were OVERinflating the balls, way above the NFL's own regulations. What's up with that? (Kudos that the released transcripts wern't edited to leave that part out.)
3. Neener neener neener. Patriots are great, your guys suck, our team YAY your team BOO.

She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat's words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change them either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive our lessons.

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

Islam vs Christianity throwdown... comic, but kind of cosmic.

It reminds me of this quote from Off to Be the Wizard (great book, by the way, what Ready Player One should have been) by Scott Meyer:

The advantage that religion has over magic or science is that man's inability to understand is built into the system, so if an explanation is confusing or unsatisfying, it strengthens the point.

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The flow of discourse is just as real to human beings as the pathway of a fleeing zebra is real to a pursuing lion. They are both varieties of motion in certain kinds of space; it's just that the space of hunting is physical and the space of discourse is mental.

Guys just aren't wearing enough hats these days.

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On my devblog: "lose dozens of Mbs just by following this one weird old tip!"

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For under $300 I got a 5 yr old refurb Thinkpad X41 from Microcenter... weird to see 4:3 screen again! No "windows" key, but kinda awesome pen on screen tablet. Man, I'm such a sucker for touchscreens.

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Without that black fold-around slipcover case, the iPad really feels like a big digital photo frame.

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[on the possible b-/m-illion typo Dow drop] "Imagine what would have happened if the guy yesterday typed 'zillion'!"

--Haha, I still like the damn song

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"Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both."

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http://www.slate.com/id/2217604/ - nice gallery on American West photography, though it seemed to lose its thesis.

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We forget how magical the humble telephone is; the telepresence of someone's voice in our ear, even if they're miles away. Wondrous!

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http://www.slate.com/id/2217815/ - the linguists view of the Klingon language Continued from yesterday...

So in October of 1999 I got to travel to St. Paul, Minnesota to explain the weird inbred computer language we had recoded the Midwest Surplus Retailers website in.

I'm surprised that my journal indicates it was October, because my strongest memory is how cold it was...bitingly ice cold, but I was grateful for that, because these offices are right across the street from this:
These are stockyards. These are where the cows we eat go to die, and I imagine the smell must be awful in summer. But you know, fine, it's alright, it's not like I'm a vegetarian. But still, this truck...


This truck seemed to be permanently stationed there... in fact I think I see it in this Google maps view. The truck is at the end of a raised conveyor belt. All day long former bits of cows go drip, drop, plop into the truck.

So I got the tour of the facility. They had just put in a new automated conveyor/scanning system and my main host (I forget his name, some manager) had come up with the design and implementation and was rightfully proud of it. (Their warehouse with the system still features prominently in their advertising, more on that tomorrow.) I was duly impressed, especially knowing the challenges people on the hardware side of things must face.

But that wasn't my last bit of culture shock. To be fair, I was kind of sheltered, the kid of clergy who had gone to a fancy-ish school in the Northeast and then was on his second white-collar job. Still, the amount of lockdown for the restrooms, along with posted warnings that anyone found writing graffiti there would be fired, was jarring, a reminder of a blue collar way of life I didn't know much about. (This was for the warehouse workers; the big banks of cubbies for the folks handling the calls was its own special kind of sould-draining-ness.) I was also surprised, just based on geography and I guess climate, at how many Latino workers were there, I thought that was something you'd mostly see on the coasts.

The folks whom I was there to train were pretty good guys. It was a bit depressing, just because you could see in their eyes how you didn't have a lot of options when you wanted to do high-tech stuff in that part of the country, but they seemed to be getting by. (This was somewhere in the middle of the dot-com thing, and even though I wasn't (yet) at one of those Aeron chairs kind of places, I could tell I had been relatively spoiled.)

The biggest shock was yet to come: a trip to Executive Country!

Shock #1: the paneling. Again, maybe it was the contrast with Boston corporate land, but seeing all the high muckity-mucks hanging out in what looked like the finished half of your parents' basement was odd.

Shock #2: the President of the company (Gary Olen) was out that day but his office... I think I saw more bear pelts and deer heads in that room than I have since. (At least it hid the paneling.)

Shock #3: the VP who was in, a woman who I guess was head of technology, had a pyramid of cigarette butts on her desk that would have made a crowd of tiny, tiny Egyptian slaves proud.

So, I've already mentioned the "best beer buddy" prose all the catalogs are written in, but the fact is there's something to it, I guess they do a fair amount of product testing there, and I got the impression that hunting trips were kind of a bonding thing for the upper echelons, and to be "one of the boys" this VP had to make a trip. Hence, the deer head on her office wall:

"Yeah, that was the one time I went hunting. But it was a good kill, no kill regret all..."

Yikes! Ok, fine, I eat meat, hunting is a different culture that I can respect, etc etc but... shouldn't, like, the concern about HAVING kill regret act as your little Jimminy Cricket telling you that this is something you shouldn't be doing?

The trip was OK despite the cold. (And I still have a photo of the local bar advertising the weekly "Meat Raffle" - again, there's my over-privileged snarky self being inappropriately amused.) I stayed at a hotel that was a refurbished mini-castle, and got to visit the famous Mall of America and ride a roller coaster inside. I went to Planet Hollywood there (not having enough guts to bring back a business receipt for "Hooters") and passed up the opportunity to buy a Robert Smith jersey (who had been the football star of my high school, but always in Randy Moss' shadow when he played with the Vikings.)

Tomorrow: "no snark regret at all"?

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LIKE LINUX, 7ZIP THE FORMAT IS ONLY FREE IF BEING A PAIN IN THE ASS TO YOUR FRIENDS HAS NO COST. (ps i.e. just use ".zip")

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our conscius minds may not have free will, but rather "free won't!"

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i had "luck be in lady" in my head for a few days. luckily, my interior monologue has a lovely singing voice.

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musta been a good day of coding; I'm having to unclench my jaw. Yesterday my car was followed by the "General Lee":



Seriously... this is where route 16 forks onto 2 and 3 near Alewife.



Man, I loved that show when I was in like fourth grade. Much to my parents dismay.

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Poem of the Moment

I live in a Chiropractic World
A world free from drugs and disease
A world free from pain and suffering
A world free from poverty and war
A world free from anger and hostilitym
A world free from chemical imbalance and ill mental health
A world free from vertebral subluxation

This is the first half of a poem also posted at the Marino Wellness Center I take my yoga class at.

I have to say, that seems a lot to expect from keeping folks' backs in order... plus I like all those rather lofty and noble and somewhat abstract goals, culminating in a rather more prosaic medical issue.

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Quote of the Moment

"I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward."

Gah, can't believe they're calling it "iGoogle"... how late-90s of them! Quote of the Moment

"You can ask him anything, but he's going to say what he wants, at the pace that he wants. It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is."

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Spellcheck Thought of the Moment
I've been thinking more about why I like Google's spellcheck feature so much. It's not like I don't have other ways of checking spelling, and it's less customizable than almost any of them...I can't tell it to ignore HTML, the names of certain people, or just little vocabulary quirks I'm content with using. But before Google, there were 2 main spellcheck UI formats I encountered. Microsoft Word has both of them...the oldest is having the computer read through your document and throwing up a popup for each word it thinks is incorrect. Later, Word's default switch to the "immediately underline the suspect word" format. I thought it was a big improvement. But Google, in effect, gets the best of both worlds... press the button, and each suspect word (in the input forms) is colored and underlined, and you can click to get a droplist of suggestions for each one. This is great! It allows quick scanning in a way "popup on each word" doesn't, and by not showing up until you're ready to spellcheck, the underlines don't interrupt your writing flow the way the Word default does. (I just can't bring myself to ignore the notification as soon as it appears.)

Heh. I love it when I can analyze exactly what it is in a UI that makes it work for me.

Also, Google's check leaves corrected words a different color until the spellcheck is over. This is likely partially a programming expediency, but it also has some very positive UI implications.

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Link of the Moment
Slashdot linked to this this comparison of old gadgets and their current counterparts, and someone pointed out the even niftier gadget blog retrothing.

Dream Quote of the Moment

You could put nature on the back of those planes that never needs to land for refueling, and raise a child there. That child would learn to live with a stricter set of rules than one raised on earth.

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Videos of the Moment
More of the best (in my opinion) of big boy...Air Force Academy student films his wacky dancin' roommate (who seems pretty good spirited about the whole thing.) His dancing kind of reminds me of that old guy in the Six Flags commercial. Also interesting, the Elephant in the Restaurant reminds me of the old "Bull in a China Shop" metaphor, and View from inside an F18 has some good music, but it goes on for a bit. And why are those things always shot facing the pilot? I'd like to see something closer to the pilot's POV for a change.

Parasite of the Moment
The Worm Within is a surprisingly tastefully done but funny story about a guy in Europe and his tapeworm. Still, not for the squeamish.

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Quote of the Moment

I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause.

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Video of the Moment
All I can say is thank goodness my workplace doesn't have forklifts. Drags in parts, but is honestly Laugh-Out-Loudable once it gets going. (via Bill the Splut) Quote of the Moment

"It's better to have loved and lost than to have loved and caught something."

..I found it in the comic where my favorite TMCM quote I had only seen reprinted originated,

Unrequited Love is like hitting your head against a wall that isn't there.

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Link of the Moment
I kind of had the feeling Moore was kinda propgandizing during "Bowling for Columbine", and I found a page that really lambasts it as a deliberate fraud. I think it puts the case a bit too strong, but it does back up many of its arguments.

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Thought of the Moment
Reading slate.com's explainer on Bennett and the odds of slot machines, it seems like there should be some strategy to preserve your winnings and cut your losses...like a Maxwell's Demon for slot machines, but that lets winnings through rather than fast moving molecules. I know that it's probably as unworkable a concept as the original Maxwell's Demon, and misplaced confidence in this kind of half-intelligent scheme is what makes casinos rich, but still. I find it an interesting metaphor. Quote of the Moment

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but regardless of whether you're blowing off someone's limbs or collecting Super Happy Tree Fruit, if you're playing videogames, the 'mature boat' has sailed a long, long time ago.

Fans of Nintendo often get mocked as "kiddy" gamers, since the games by that company tend to follow the Japanese "cute" tradition, as opposed to other system that have a focus on grittier, "mature" games.

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Link of the Moment
For EGM's anniversary issue Seanbaby wrote an article EGM's Crapstravaganza: The 20 Worst Video Games of All Time which is now available online, in a slightly more raw form. Funny, though there was something about seeing this stuff in print that doesn't translate to the web.

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Link of Two Weekends Ago
Just in case anyone out there was still wondering what PhillyClassic looked like, this AtariAge Photo Album is probably close to being the canonical online view. Sure, on one level it was just a big honkin' room (well, a ballroom I guess) but man...what a room! Ramble of the Moment
A friend of mine says he was at a really wild MIT party this weekend. Strippers both professional and amateur, participatory mudwrestling, the works. It hit me that I haven't been to very many parties like that; maybe none. And that made me a little sad. Both because of the sheer enthusiastic debauchery of it, and also there's something about public nudity that I am in favor of, for reasons both stimulatory and intellectual.

"The nipples of strangers sometimes means more than those of the ones we love."

And the other thing is, if I'm going to do it I almost have to do it soon, or else I'm going to seem like a lecherous dirty old man... I know this sounds just a few short steps away from those Girls Gone Wild videos they're hawking on TV. And maybe it is. But I remember Garrison Keillor's final entry in his meditation "Postcards", where he suggests the 50 word limit I try to live by, and then follows with examples of the form:

Sunbathing yesterday. A fine woman took off her shirt, jeans, pants, nearby, and lay on her belly, then turned over. Often she sat up to apply oil. Today my back is burned bright red (as St. Paul warns) from my lying and looking at her for so long but who could ignore such beauty and so generous.

It sounds like a line, but that generosity is part of it.

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Link of the Moment
The original (well, possibly the 90s rereleased version) Star Wars was on network TV yesterday. It made me think of Star Wars Technical Commentaries. It's an interesting site. The idea is that they take all the technology presented in the Star Wars movies and books at face value, and then try to figure out how the universe works, and more about the socities that would have produced it. It's very cool in a geeky way.