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I heard no more questions. Only darkness, and my grandfather's voice, singing a polka: "In heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here ... " The voice modulated into something menacing, Luke Skywalker gone Joker, before I faded away. My sense of being alone in the dark stayed with me long after I realized I was in a room illuminated by artificial light.

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New disappearing dots illusion So trippy. The brain sees what it... wants? to see. Birthday Party Fun!
In NYC I bought a lined wirebound notebook that travelled with me to Portugal and then for some of Freshman year of college. I decided to scan anything in it worth keeping.

I was really into making logos, and funky typography in general...

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Happy 40th Birthday Pac-Man!

Though America had been a nation for nearly 80 years, it was incomplete. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution--those were political documents, pragmatic in their designs for democracy. What America lacked was what Emerson called for: an evocation of what being a democratic man or woman *felt* like at its best, day to day, moment to moment. We had a mind, the mind created by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders, but we did not know our own best spirit.
[...]
"I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman told a friend. "Emerson brought me to a boil." Whitman understood that he was a part of one of the greatest experiments since the beginning of time: the revival of democracy in the modern world. The wise believed that it probably could not be done. The people were too ignorant, too crude, too grasping and greedy to come together and from their many create one. Who were we, after all? A nation of castoffs, a collection of crooks and failures, flawed daughters and second sons of second sons, unquestionable losers and highly dubious winners. Up to now, our betters had kept us in line: The aristocracies of Massachusetts and Virginia had shown us the enlightened path and dragged us along behind them. Whitman knew (and Emerson did too) that this could not last forever. By sheer force of numbers, or force plain and simple, outcasts and ne'er-do-wells were eventually going to take over the nation.

On FB Elio wrote

Is it weird that I have a favorite guitar chord. Or more specifically is it weird that my favorite chord is the open fourth position version of D sharp diminished minor7th?

I wrote back

Tuba players don't have so much use for chord, but by far my favorite piano chord (which honestly I tend to use as a high percussion sound, with the tonic below as a bass drum) is the first three notes of the blues scale, which is "Cm add(4)" according to this scales-chords.com chord-namer page

The ScalesChords site has a set of interesting tools.

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Good description of issues in "Fixed Mindset" (the left)
I do wish I had less Fixed Mindset. My only problem with this chart is that it makes kind of yes/no; in reality it's a bit of a spectrum... any learner's potential isn't unlimited, at some point it's delusional to think you have infinite potential. (Also, one way improvement in real differs from this idea and, say, leveling up in video games is that backsliding is very, very possible.)

Also, practice needs to have a feedback loop, ideally with an independent and wise mentor, otherwise you might just be getting better at doing it wrong.

Still, it would be great if I had better intuition for the joy of getting better, rather than just the knack of finding interesting low-hanging fruit and sure wins.

Geek news, very glad that a recent Supreme Court judgement means East Texas should no longer be a Patent Troll Haven.

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Melania slapping Trump's hand away... I mean no wonder, she's wearing white, getting Cheetos dust all over your hands would be pretty dangerous...

OUCHhttps://t.co/XaPL1AbCm5 pic.twitter.com/zpZGkQxDFP

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) May 22, 2017

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Say you're driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

Porch-i-oke by Sari w/ Rev Dave and the Reprobates was a lot of fun!

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Teenage logic leaps swiftly and without fear.

Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

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The typical child entering kindergarten has a vocabulary of fourteen thousand words. To put that into perspective, a child is learning a new word every two hours of every waking moment. Without trying.

I'm not sure I fully agree with "without trying", though.

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"Middle age is that perplexing time in life where we hear two voices calling us, one saying, Why not? and the other, Why bother?"

Which reminds me, if I'm going to do that "every man should read Don Quixote three times" (as a young man, in middle age, when old - I should find the source of the admonition, it's stuck with me since high school) I should probably suck it up and do that one of these years.

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Upstairs neighbor confirms the smell is probably pollen, not cat pee. So... hooray? Gilbert Gottfried is booked for this year's Gathering of the Juggalos.

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The first word spoken on the moon was "Okay."

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Hmm. Cleveland wins on a 13th inning, bases loaded balk, sweeping the Tigers, who just got done sweeping the Red Sox. Baseball!

Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something [the adults] never had--a physical link into the world of the fictional--through the tiny skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real.

--via io9 -- Amazing optical illusion... keep your eye on the center point, and the faces to either side are crazily distorted. Look at either face directly, and you see they're fine.

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Since I'm in a land of "funny lookin' money"... ideas for US Currency redesign by Michael Tyznik

--Can't wait for the new Tron movie! Here's UGO geekily analyzing the trailer and talking about details of the original that they hope make a return...

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http://snibbe.com/scott/dynamic/gravilux/gravilux.html - that's the web version of an 11-yr-old minimalist art program that, amazingly to me, is currently listed as the top free iPad app.

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Guess what movie I saw? Hint: not a very good movie.

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If Skynet won, and then, like, the Star Trek Borg arrived on Earth, could they make, like, Borg Terminators?

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They stuck a "Guns in National Parks" amendment on a Credit Card Reform Bill... eh? There should be a law against irrelevant amendments (but what amendments might THAT BILL have?) I'm kind of between worlds right now, mostly moved and staying in Boston, but with a lot of stuff, including my car, in Arlington. I went back there Tuesday night for my UU group, and to stop by the post office, and girly man that I am I had a quick crying spell. I'm gonna miss the place, the apartment really was so well placed, Arlington center with Gail's coffee shop, bookstore, CVS, crafts place, Starbucks, bike trail, access to Cambridge, a smattering of local retail and a ton of fun restaurants...

(Don't get me wrong, Roxbury Crossing is great as well, with a terrific local pub, supermarket, restaurants, the Green Line, MFA down the street, in shouting distance of JP, etc...)

I don't know if I was sad about what I did there in Arlington (and am putting aside), or what I didn't do there, the usual big questions about if I'm as happy with the state of my life as I usually think I am.

I gotta be amused at the way my life still seems to be following four year cycles; high school 88-92, college 92-96, the real world and the dot com boom 96-00 (and going out with Mo half of that, 98-00), 00-04 the rise and fall of a marriage, and now winding up 04-08, heading to Boston proper and starting as some kind of freshman yet again.

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Quote of the Moment

I don't know just what you heard,
But 'Come on, Baby' are my favorite words.

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Doodle of the Moment

--it ain't easy doodling with a laptop trackpad!

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used to have nightmare visions of boston nuked away; good thing i got over that now that i'm living and working here! I bought a bike yesterday!

Yesterday was a bit of a trial by fire, from the bike shop near Porter Square to Alewife, and then the bikepath home. I wouldn't be surprised if a bike on the Minute Man is about as fast as you can get from Arlington Center to Alewife, given the traffic and bus-waiting you avoid.

I didn't learn to ride a bike 'til I was in sixth grade or thereabouts, and always felt a little shaky. But yesterday felt pretty good; cars coming up on me weren't bothering me nearly as much as they used to. Hmm, maybe 15 years of driving makes me more confident in my situational awareness. Or, it might be this is just an easier riding bike than my old tenspeed.

Some of the people who have most dramatically reshaped their bodies did so by getting into biking. But, I think you have to get really into biking to have that kind of effect.

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Photo of the Moment

--Elio's hand, outside of Viga, Back Bay.

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Quote of the Moment

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

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Game of the Moment
Stick Remover... try to avoid as many load bearing sticks as possible while keeping the star above the line... kind of like a more engineer-y jenga.

Watched "The Pillow Book" last night.

Minor spoilers, also not for the very squeamish, hit Ctrl-A or highlight to read:
<SPOILER> The movie made me think that I'd love to get my skin recycled to bind a book after I die. I was thinking it would be a form of immortality, to always be on some bookshelf somewhere... and I was thinking what book I'd like to bind. Some book I've found deep or meaningful? The story of my life? Something popular, so I'd see use, rather than languishing on a shelf? But then it hit me, if I want people to read a book, wrapping it in human skin probably isn't the best way of going about it, it's pretty darn creepy. </SPOILER>

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Challenge of the Moment
Zefrank inspires you to make an Earth sandwich by putting slices of bread on the ground on opposite sides of the planet. He even gives you tools to help you locate the opposite, though sadly for the continental USA that's the Indian Ocean (dang, I always thought we were more exactly opposite from Australia.) May some Spaniards and New Zealanders can get it together...

The video is amusing in its own right. Zefrank rocks.

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Article of the Moment
Before it expires... FoSO sent me this article about happiness and how lousy we are at guessing how delighted or despondent specific events will make us... Not much of an update today, kind of hectic schedule.

One random thought: I can't wait 'til the current cocacola promotion ends, the one that makes all the caps green. For one thing, it used to be much easier to tell the "with Lime" versions that I like so well apart from the normal types. Secondly of course, I never frickin' win free coke, despite the 1-in-12 odds...well, I did once...and of course the prize is "one liter", despite the fact that few places actually stock much between the 20oz and the 2 liters...I think it's all part of nefarious plot.

I guess that's just cosmic justice...at work we'll a bit too quick to exploit the way the machine will give two cans for the price of one. (But not bottles so the former always runs out before the latter.)

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Quote of the Moment

I learned, never date a Jedi. It makes them crazy.

So many people are so down on this flick, even though most of the people I talk with think it was pretty good. Played a little hooky Friday and went with Peterman and Leslee to Six Flags New England (we went despite the commercial with the wacky dancing old guy and the gratingly catchy jingle.)

While the coasters ended up being their usual fun selves, Peterman noticed that my two favorite parts, the ones that I ended up talking about the most, both involved drumsticks.

The first was lunch...I had been jonesing for a giant turkey drumsticks ever since I saw a tv show that showed 'em for sale at this giant Texas fleamarket months ago, and Six Flags had 'em...amazingly, they lived up to my hopes and expectations, just a massive chunk of tasty tasty meat you can rip off with your teeth.

The second was an arcade game they had there...I think it was an MTV Drum Jammer...it's basically drum karaoke, you pick a song and then drum along. (Not like one of those DDR games, it doesn't judge you or anything.) I've been thinking of using a little mad money on a drum pad setup, one of those tabletop models, and this convinced me I really need one.

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Images of the Moment

• An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), ''Beginning Again,'' by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.
  --Retraction by The NY Times Magazine.

• What does God need with a starship?

• Soundsupport makes "video" games for blind people, like Drive...completely audio based. ("Video Games" is kind of a funny phrase, actually.)
• Last time I went to Cleveland, I was amazed to see that Big Chuck and Little John were still on the air. They're old school Saturday Move filler hosts...corny as heck, but kinda fun.
• My Dart Team plays out of "Legends Hall of Fame Grill" in Waltham. But they say on credit card receipts, it shows billed to "The Rough and Smooth Room". What's that all about? The imagination runs a bit wild...

swerve	1D pong	newton's cradle
fishtank

Link of the Moment
This is so cool... a dream I sent in got selected for illustration on Jesse Reklaw's Slow Wave site. (Here's a local copy.) People say it's a good likeness. Sigh. I always forget how big my lips must look... also it's funny, I think at I sent in this image (in negative) to show him what I looked like. His drawing of me has a shirt barely open over a darker t-shirt, a style I mostly wore in college, and also it's pretty rare that the T was darker than the overshirt. Ah well, it's still really cool (and a little surreal) to be able to relive a dream like that. It's a really fascinating site, illustrating dreams that people send in. You can recognize the strange logic dreams have as you click through the archive.

Dreams are so hard to remember. I know they have a device that can wake you up just as a dream starts, and that's bad for your mental health. I wonder if they could make a machine to gently wake you just after you've had a dream, so that it would be more possible to record it.

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Quote of the Moment

If making it in the real world doesn't involve sleeping until noon and playing frisbee all day, I'm totally screwed