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Honestly I think this is an interesting metaphor for emotional regulation in general.

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If someone asked me "What are the signs of love?" I would have said without hesitation, It's the familiarity and the removal of cost, And to find yourself not having to lie, and the embarrassment removed between you two, and see yourself acting in your nature without trying to be something else so she likes you, And that you two keep silent and the silence gets delicious, And that one of you two talk and listening gets delicious.

	Walking On Sunshine Träumeler-Musig Ebikon	Brass band cover of the 80s classic. This Basic Instructions comic says this "is still the best musical shorthand for happiness.", but I wanted to find a cover of it.
	Fast Car (feat. Dakota) [Radio Edit] Jonas Blue	Club-ish cover. Background music at IKEA, of all places. The song has been on my mind after I participated in a Tufts A Cappella groups distanced cove of it. (Tracy Chapman went to Tufts but I don't think she liked it.)
	Pachuco Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del Quinto Patio	Don't know the genre of this Latinx music but I dig it. Playing on a radio station in GTA5
★ ★ ★ ★	Yesterday (feat. India Carney) Scary Pockets	Funk cover. Now I'm hearing about Scary Pockets everywhere, didn't realize it was the Pomplamoose/Patreon guy.
	Chasing Cars Snow Patrol	Pop. This tumblr entry What was it about Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol that sent TV producers in the mid-2000s absolutely buck wild?
★ ★ ★ ★	Hot Girl Megan Thee Stallion	Not to be confused with "Hot Girl Summer", pretty good sex rap, big WAP energy. Theme song, with puppets, from "A Black Lady Sketch Show" on HBO
	Marble Machine Wintergatan	Machine made music with marbles. Like that old 3D card graphics demo but... unbelievably real?
★ ★ ★ ★	Get By Talib Kweli	Uplifting Hip Hop, nice instrumentals. Mentioned in Patrisse Khan-Cullors' book "When They Call You A Terrorist" as an empowering performance.
	The Girl from Ipanema Elise Trouw	Sweet cover. Gives the impression of being a one-person show? I always want the lyric to be "But each day when she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead not at he" despite the grammer.
	My Medicine Snoop Dogg	This version has Willie Nelson backing the chorus, which my version doesn't. Mentioned in Cracked's Facts about Snoop Dogg
★ ★ ★ ★	drivers license Olivia Rodrigo	I am a sucker for high school nostalgia stuff. Even before she performed it live there SNL had a almost promotional skit about it.
	Memphis Tennessee Elvis Presley	Rockabilly, liked it a little better than Chuck Berry's original. The reveal is a bit jarring til your realize he's singing about an estranged daughter. The Johnny Rivers version of this song was allegedly played in Vietnam.
	Killing Me Softly (feat. India Carney) Scary Pockets	I think the last of the Scary Pockets covers for me for a while
	Wannabe ala NiN OpenAI Jukebox	An AI trained on Nine Inch Nails is then told to try to finish up "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls.

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	Afternoon Fireworks Duke Herrington	Nice and jazzy with a little funk. (background to this animated infographic)
★ ★ ★ ★	Alive Beastie Boys	Nice hip hop, not sure how I missed it. "Isn't it nice, to be Alive..." (random youtube suggestion)
★ ★ ★ ★	Chicken Noodle Soup Webstar & Young B featuring AG aka The Voice of Harlem	I totally missed this in 2009 - love the woman rapper in this, and I kind of always like that air raid siren. "Today kids will never know the adrenaline rush us 10 year olds got when we heard DJ Webstar’s Chicken Noodle Soup at the school dance" (via)
★ ★ ★ ★	Use Your Brain The Dirty Dozen Brass Band	Awesome NOLA street music. (via Street Brass Podcast)
	Rollin' Stone Muddy Waters	Blues classic. (Melissa was asking - why both the band and the magazine named after the same thing...)
★ ★ ★ ★	It Ain't My Fault 2 Mystikal & Silkk the Shocker	I really like Mystikal's flow. (this brilliant tweet that has King of the Hill's Boomhauer lip-syncing it.)
★ ★ ★ ★	People Who Died The Jim Carroll Band	Adore the cheerful macabre vibe of this, it's like "88 lines about 44 women" for dead people (Melissa randomly thought of this song after the premier of “Solar Opposites” ended with an “in memoriam”)
	Send Me Some Lovin' Little Richard	The man invented Rock and Roll. (RIP Little Richard - via Little Richard’s Music Was Dangerous, but So Is Freedom)
	When Doves Cry Prince	The lyrics of this are such a reflection of the way he was balancing masculine and feminine energies... (realizing I only had covers of this song, after Prince's recent "live" concert stream)
	Caravan The Dirty Dozen Brass Band	Cover of a classic. (via Street Brass Podcast)
	You Were a Good Hand Long Haul Paul	Kind of long, but touching tribute to a real driver. (Over the Road podcast, where Long Haul Paul is the narrator.)
★ ★ ★ ★	We Will Rock You Max Raabe	Charming 1930s-radio cover. (via)
	Junko Partner Dr. John	Aw, I miss Dr. John. Glad I got to see him live. (Melissa got her dad a Dr John cd for his birthday, and he recommended this song to me.)
★ ★ ★ ★	Here Comes the Hotstepper (Heartical Mix) Ini Kamoze	Surprised this hadn't made it into my collection before. Also, didn't realize the echo chorus was "Murderer". Tempted to try and back a HONK cover of it. Always Sunny in Philadelphia waterpark episode.

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One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think that it's going to be just like it is now, only worse.

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It's sort of my philosophy--looking for the nothingness. The nothingness is taking over the planet.

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If it's dumb to think all cops are bad, then let's not think all protestors are looters.

(Also, tear gas a church to go stand in front of it waving a bible, good look.)

spring 2019 one second everyday

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Unrequited love is way underrated. It's kind of like smoking. Ultimately it's bad for you, especially in the long term. Both are bad for your health, make you "smell" worse to others, and cause you to pick up annoying repetitive habits, whether it's constantly wanting something in your mouth (smoking) or anxiously checking e-mail (unrequited love). But on the other hand, both have a certain glamour, give us something to do with ourselves, and have a huge deserved mystique and romantic history behind them. Smoking gets you outside where as otherwise you might stick yourself in the office all day, unrequited love gets you to write amusing bon mots where as otherwise you might write nothing but pedestrian e-mail.

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I don't remember who gave me the idea, but I'm SO much happier now that I'm framing my task manager in terms of what benefit I'll get from doing things rather than having an endless list of tasks I "need" to do.

My seasonal 1 Second Everyday! Still assuming that 1:30 or so of a season tells a better story than 30 seconds of a month. Lots of Fenway Porchfest and the obvious revival of band season...

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AIweirdness blog's neural nets continue to delight, this time with Roller Derby Names. Would love to see the source material as well. First off, you have to see this Betty Boop cartoon starring a rotoscoped Cab Calloway as Koko the Clown: Anyway, music I added to my playist last month, in rough descending order of "you should hear this", 4 star stuff in red.

• Immigrants (We Get the Job Done) (K'naan, Snow Tha Product, Riz MC & Residente) Super powerful hiphop from The Hamilton Mixtape - they were playing this before the May Day rally.
• Get Down In Formation (Beyoncé vs. Me & My Toothbrush vs. Kool & The Gang) (Happy Cat Disco) Just realized I'd missed some years of "Best of Booty" mashups.
• It's Not the Crime (Tower Of Power) "It's not the crime / It's not the thought / It's if you get caught" - Wait Wait Don't Tell Me used this as themed intermezzo music.
• My Turn (Czech Republic) (Martina Bárta) This slow sweet song is my favorite from Eurovision this year.
• Sing to Me (feat. Karen O) (Walter Martin) Amazingly sweet duet
• The Parting Glass (The Wailin' Jennys) An Irish song of departure, mentioned in this NY Times piece on euthanasia a man deciding on his exit so he could attend his own wake.
• One Monkey Don't Stop No Show (Big Maybelle) Tom Parmenter mentioned this in response to me talking about "Not my circus, not my monkeys"
• St. James Infirmary (Cab Calloway) Fantastic Betty Boop cartoon version...
• After You're Gone (Remastered) (Django Reinhardt) A group I didn't quite get to perform with for Somerville Porchfest did this - you can see the francophone woman who sang it in my 1 Second Every Day (May 9)
• Talk Dirty (feat. 2 Chainz) (Jason Derulo) There was that article Where Did All The Saxes Go that mentioned this as a recent example of quick riff sax, along with Macklemore.
• Hit 'Em High (The Monstars' Anthem) (B Real/Busta Rhymes/Coolio/LL Cool J/Method Man) Heard the Cavs played this before the one game the Celtics took from them.
• Subway Gawdz (Too Many Zooz) I was sick and missed seeing these guys live, alas.
• Work It Out (New Radio Edit) (Beyoncé) There's a 2006 Best of Booty mashup that I like a bit better, but this is good too.
• Lovely Day (Bill Withers) Melissa mentioned how much she loves this song.
• Dead Wrong (Star Wars Remix) (Richie Branson & Solar Slim) There's a mashup CD of Notorious BIG and Star Wars songs.
• GTA Liberty City Stories - Dark March (Danger Mouse & Ben Morfitt (SquidPhysics)) Bumper music from a video game I just realized they ported to iOS, nice italian themes
• The New Knife Game Song (Rusty Cage) I kind of wish the lyric was "And if I miss my fingers / I will start to bleed / But all the same I play this game / 'Cause it's what I need"
• Yodel It! (Romania) (Ilinca) Also from Eurovision: Yodel Rap
• Weed Star (Hash Mouth). "All Star" with all lyrics replaced with Snoop Dogg's "Smoke Weed Everyday".
• Uma Thurman (Fall Out Boy) Uh, it's a song, with the theme to the Munsters.

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I sort of love the the new version of Javascript uses "let"... reminds me of old school BASIC. As usual, in rough descending order of "you should hear this!", 4-stars in red.

• Go Your Own Way (Lissie) The big drum and general big sound of this cover is terrific.
• Berzerk (Eminem) Sweet oldschool tribute; I like the cleverness of the old school Beastie Boys shout shout-out: Just like I did with addiction I'm 'bout to *kick it* / Like a magician, critics I turn to *crickets*
• Get Ya Hands Up (Fatman Scoop Vs. Amerie) (TheFunkyFr34k) Mashup with awesome drums. 4 stars. Not sure why the Statham.
• H.S.K.T. (Sylvan Esso) It's no "Coffee" but it's not bad.
• You and I (Ingrid Michaelson) One of those sweet-lyric'd ukulele duets.
• J. R. R. Tolkien vs George R. R. Martin (Epic Rap Battles of History) I love the opening - "Brace Yourselves! Gather up your trolls and your soldier elves!"
• Creep (Hungover At Soundcheck In Berlin) (Amanda Palmer) Porch-I-Oke's performance of "Creep" got me interested in covers... she hits some notes a bit too hard, but still, good.
• One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer (John Lee Hooker) Melissa introduced me to the George Thorogood version which tells a great story but is kind of long.
• California Dreaming (Lee Moses) Soulful cover.
• Batman Theme (Neal Hefti and His Orchestra) Full version of this is pretty sweet.
• Neato (Three Loco) The video is even dumber than the rapping!
• Blackbird Special (Dirty Dozen Brass Band) School of Honk started doing this one, and I wanted to get a better feel for the tricky syncopated bassline.
• Too Soon to Tell (The Subdudes) You can really hear that this is Bonnie Raitt song, even when it's just the guy singing.
• Walk on Water (Ira Losco) Every year I watch the Eurovision recap and see if there's a song I like - I've never found the equal of Satellite but I like the drums in this one.
• In The End You're An All Star (Jeremy Turnbull) Odd but functional little mashup.
• Beer Barrel Polka (Frank Yankovic & His Yanks) No explanation needed. I hope.
• Yes Bitch (K Rizz) Club music from "Broad City", and probably the most perfect Broad City song ever.
• Slow Down (Brand Nubian) Got this because it sampled Edie Brickell, but the misogynist lyrics almost made me put it back.

In decreasing order of "you should hear this!":

• Do You Swear To Tell The Truth The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth So Help Your Black Ass (Amanda Palmer) NSFW, quite, and with an unfortunate title/refrain - but I love the tale of the artist figuring out her life and sex life on her own terms, it's very sweet in its own way.
• Feel Right (feat. Mystikal) (Mark Ronson) I thought this was a 5-star but I think I ended up liking the video version more than the bare song. But the song is pretty good.
• Hold Heart (Emilíana Torrini) Almost syrupy in its sorrow, there's an amazing amount of nuance in its delivery.
• Bulldozer (Goldishack Guerrillas) Political piece, uses a kind of Bro outlook in an amazingly catchy protest work.
• How Naked Are We Going to Get? (The Blow) This vido is a train-station a cappella version of a thoughtful little song.
• Common People (Full Length Version) (Pulp) I think it's good for me to get back to the original from the William Shatner / Joe Jackson cover
• J.Rabbit - Tequila Remix v5 (J.Rabbit) Tweak of a classic. I love the movie clip (?) it samples, "Just drive over to my place, kick back, get some tequila..." - the way she pronounces te-Qui-la...
• The Full Retard (EL-P) An aggresively stupid and NSFW song... the perfect club music for "Hot Tub Time Machine 2"'s future scene.
• Spiders and Snakes (Jim Stafford) Dig the shadow of youthful sexiness in this one.
• Alfie (Lily Allen) What's hilarious about this is that it's about the actor who plays Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones.
• That's Life (Frank Sinatra) For a while I mirrored my dads anti-mafia-based dislike for Sinatra, but given his strikingly progressive views, I've been digging him more.
• The Thrill Is Gone (1969) [Single] (B.B. King) RIP, B.B. King... I like the haunting orchestral strings in this.
• Where Your Eyes Don't Go (They Might Be Giants) Hmm, I like this version a lot better than the one I got, but I love the line "Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders / What the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"
• Star Wars Imperial March (Dubstep Remix) (Lduk) I like remixes that don't pad their idea into 8 minute jams.
• I Learned the Hard Way (Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings) I'd like this song more except for this weirdly off-pitch flute that toots in on the chorus - is it supposed to be like a train whistle?
• Partition (Beyoncé) Is this just half the song? Anyway, some good sexy pop.
• Breaking Bad Remix (Seasons 3-5) (Chris Lohr) A goofy exercise in sampling (in a show I never watched) but I like the percussive elements of it.

What a month it was! Especially at the beginning...

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My new formula for coping with life's setbacks: multiply the annoyance/impact level by the amount I can do to improve the situation by the malicious intent I can presume. So if any of those are near zero, I should be more able to take it in stride. (Historically I think I've been thoughtlessly assuming too much malicious intent, like with traffic holdups.) May was a pretty lackluster month for me for new music. So few songs that rather than collate into genres I'm putting them in rough chronological order (based on the original versions, even when it's a cover.)

I would have hade 3 or 4 more, but I didn't get the gumption for hunting down some international songs.

No 4-stars, and as always exclamation marks point out better than average videos.

• Ode To Joy (Beethoven) After playing a lot of the video game "Peggle" I wanted a version of Ode to Joy w/ Chorus (what they use as an end of level reward.)
• !I Want Candy (Razed In Black Remix) (Bow Wow Wow) Felisdemens, one of the people I keep doing these "musics I found" updates for, played me this when we met up for dinner last month.
• Edge of Seventeen (Lindsay Lohan) Yeah, it's probably sacrilege to go for this instead of the Stevie Nicks version, but I like modern-polish covers with glossy female vocals.
• Rockit (Single Version) (Herbie Hancock) Shortest version I could find of this breakdance-era song you didn't realize you knew. (Mentioned in "Off to Be the Wizard", a great book that deserves the love "Ready Player One" has slavered all over it.)
• !!None of Your Business (Salt-n-Pepa) Solid sex-positive 90s hiphop.
• !Mambo No. 5 (Lou Bega) A song I kind of liked from a time when I wasn't buying singles... fun. The rest of his album gets really repetitive, though.
• The Rooster (OutKast) Nice retro riff ... it's similar to the one I used in my Atari game, which was also used by Britney Spear's "Circus"
• !Open Your Eyes (Snow Patrol) One of the final "The Office" episodes had this romantic song. I admit when I hear the opening I'm always a little bummed when it turns out not to be Blacked Eye Peas' I Got A Feeling
• !I Feed You My Love (Margaret Berger) Ever since Satellite I keep one ear open for catchy songs from the Eurovision contest. (This recap video was handy.)
• !!Hell Broke Luce (Tom Waits) Rough Antiwar song. The word "Luce" in the title is so weirdly evocative, though I couldn't find anything that it meant.
• !!Radioactive (Imagine Dragons) Fun, BIG song, cool video.

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Yankees had a 111-year old fan in the stadium! Red Sox help pay tribute by winning 1-11.

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Blender of LoveNow with FB likes...

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Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

--Kinda like how you get to see the "sell" the other wrestlers do to show this kid's amazing luchadore-ish power... via

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In retrospect, one thing I really dig about London: that many of the billboards on Tube stations are for books. I'm reading "The Pregnant Widow" by Martin Amis now, wot I saw on the tube.

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30 Days of Super Heroes Day 2: Technology Hero Robot

"Jake 2"
--via xoxoxobruce... (who found it here) you know you don't see many sousaphones with the bell pointing up, though I'm not sure why not.

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New AT+T Pricing Plans - mixed feelings about this. Looks like I use ~300Mb/mo now. Want tethering, dread having to think about usage -- unlimited data was a HUGE enabling factor when I first started using the iPhone.

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A civilian goes to Mars. When he returns to Earth, he's being interviewed on his impressions of Mars. The interviewer asks if the people on Mars are more advanced than people on Earth. The civilian says they are, and the interviewer asks by how much.

"I would say six, seven weeks," the civilian replies. "When I was up there, they had the disposable razor blades and it was like six or seven weeks after I returned to Earth before we had them."

He says "that was [a routine] that died, but I still love it."

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4 day weeks feel so disjointed- Tuesday feels like Monday so then you overcompensate and Wednesday feels like Thursday.

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There once was a man
from Nantucket who could not
fit well in haikus

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I concluded the worst thing that could happen is if we change our core values and let it slide. I can't do that. I'd rather quit.

OH NO STEVE! DON'T QUIT! PLEASE KEEP MAKING COOL iStuff AND DON'T LET THESE GIZMODO TURKEYS GET YOU DOWN!!!!

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Code Monkey say god damned login page not "functional" or "elegant"

My latest apartment project! Still potentially a work-in-progress, but also at a point where I could leave off for a while and be happy with how it looks and whom it reminds me of.

I meant it to be chaotic but it turned into a big letter Q, with my dad on thin ice at the center, FoSO as the tail of the Q, then clockwise from top it's Ksenia on the stairs, me with EB+EBSO in our worker outfits, my Aunt, Mom, and Uncle perched on Irish rocks, my buddy Mike and a pal of his, having beers in the afternoon on their roadtrip to Boston, Jane making a muscle, Professor Couch from Tufts, and Mo, Veronika, and V's friend B in line at the Statue of Liberty. On the facing wall, clockwise from top-left it's Sarah in Groucho glasses, Josh raising Erin, JZ imitating Blue Man, and Mr. Ibis contemplating a coconut.

Unshown here are a few more photos, a family photo from when I was may 10 or so (with my folks in Salvation Army uniform), a Prom photo that I cherish in large part because the background was made of extra of the material used to make my date's dress, and then a semi-diptych of diploma-accepting photos, my mom with her masters and me at the end of high school (my Aunt assembled that and had it down here in what was her workspace.)

The photos are meant to be chosen for visual appeal as well as emotional value to me. There were a few people I just don't have interesting photos of, and now I need to buy more frames. (Mostly these are $2 wonders from Family Dollar.)

Inspired a bit by Henry Miller's bathroom, though I kept it more friends-and-family-ish.

If nothing else, the bathroom is a lot less bare now!

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When you think about it, the whole process is rather strange: Northern Europeans and some sub-Saharan Africans have become "mampires," mutants that live off the milk of another species.

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Anyone who says Dustin Pedroia wouldn't be even cooler with a jetpack and sixteen-foot metal claws is just lying.

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Rules for Programmers: Every class need a comment. Any time you do something in a complex way when there's an obvious simple or hardcoded way: EXPLAIN WHY.

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notepad++ seems like a good editor. Using Firefox has made me appreciate a IDE-ish "restore open docs", tho I guess textpad coulda done it. Last night I was hanging at Francesca's in Back Bay with JZ and his neighbor Marianne who is currently fighting breast cancer. She's currently working on wringing the most enjoyment from her days before radiation treatments knock her out for a while.

It was interesting hearing about her life philosophy. She's 50, twice as old as JZ and about 15 years on me. Up until a few years ago she was a self-proclaimed workaholic. In general, she and JZ seem to have some things in common, a certain competitive drive that I lack. They're both athletic go-getters and I'm more careful about picking my battles, redefining what games are worth playing to optimize for low-hanging fruit.

Quite a way to end a weekend. I'm almost at risk for taking for granted that she's going to beat this thing no problem.

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Tower of the Moment

--Excerpt from Goon Tower, a collaborative effort from the somethingawful.com users.

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Quote of the Moment

Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.

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"what time is it?"
"half past"
"half past what?"
"I dunno, the little hand on my watch broke"

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summertime in boston and that difficult to shake feeling like you can't appreciate it ENOUGH. (not that I'm trying all that hard) I was watching the History Channel Star Wars special the other night, the one going on about how Star Wars has these mythic tropes, and when they showed Luke removing Vader's helmet at the end of Return of the Jedi, I started thinking about how Hayden Christensen must be thinking "that's supposed to be me?"... and I finally put my finger on something that has been bothering me fore a while:
  
Darth Vader unmasked and Uncle Fester; separated at birth?

In doing my extensive research for this, I found this Wii "Mii" Avatar of Vader Unmasked... I guess there are whole sites dedicated to celebrity Miis. Also I found this rather disturbing bit of fan art, Lava Damaged Vader, buy this one guy who does a lot of them.

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There's a level of facility that everyone needs to accomplish, and from there it's a matter of deciding for yourself how important ultra-facility is to your expression. ... I found, like Joseph Campbell said, if you just follow whatever gives you a little joy or excitement or awe, then you're on the right track.

(heh, speaking of Joseph Campbell...as the Star Wars special did at great length...)

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You know, I think I need to rethink having positive feelings about Giuliani. I had some doubts back when he Disneyfied Times Square, and especially his recent playing-to-the-cheap-seats indignation that our Iraq policy may have set some of the conditions that let WTC happen, but he had that social liberal / fiscal conservative vibe going, pro-choice and all... but after reading that link, yikes. So, at Max's suggestion, I've started following The Hacker's Diet ("How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition").

Its core metaphor is the "Eat Watch", a hypothetical wrist-based gadget that tells you when to start and when to stop eating, an artifact to help people with a poor internal "Eat Watch", much in the same way eyeglasses are an artifact to help people with poor vision.

It's a back to basics program with the following ideas:

• Ultimately, it's calories in minus calories out, so count what's going in very carefully, but you have almost total freedom within that range.
• Weigh yourself daily... and here is some nifty software (Excel or TADA, Palmpilot!) for getting a weighted average, so you can see beyond the way daily water weight fluctuation will swamp daily weight loss and spot the trend.
• Here's a simple optional light exercise routine that scales up week by week. (But don't fool yourself, even fanatical exercise will only burn off like a cheeseburger.)

In some ways, this program resembles my previous homemade routine that was reasonably successful, especially the "daily-weigh-in" bit. And I think I was ok at maintaining for a while, which raises the question, why did that stop? I've drunk the kool-aid that says it needs to be a WOE/WOL (Way of Eating/Life) change, not a diet, but I think the WOL I constructed was kind of dependent on the particulars of my married life.

So I'm thinking that daily recording of weight should be a permanent part of my life. Which isn't so hard, both with the "Eat Clock" Palm application that makes cool little weighted charts, and my proven ability to keep a private diary and log of my media consumed.

Actually, I've been weighing myself semiregularly so I wasn't startled by the numbers I was at, but I kept blowing past my "if I reach weight X, then I'll start getting serious about doing something" triggerpoints 'til now I'm 15 lbs above my previous all-time high. (Hmm, actually in the comments on this kisrael entry, I give a pretty good summary of my weight history...and I guess I'm like 15-20 lbs more than I was at that point, ugh!)

The program recommended calorie counting and exercise before diving into the hardcore diet, but it turns out a strict calorie counting regimen is a huge diet aid by itself (the whole, "damn, if I eat that I have to record it, and maybe even look up or calculate the calories) so I guess I'm on the program. Its gone well for the few days I've been on it, but I haven't had to deal with any social eating, either in restaurants or with Ksenia's family. I'm not sure how to deal with the guesstimation that will entail. I do feel better already, though I guess that must be largely psychosomatic.

A doodle from 5 years ago... I think the joke was no matter how skinny I got, I'd still have the cherub cheeks.

Calorie counting can be very freeing if that's your primary concern, because if you've really got a handle on your intake, it's ok if a certain portion of that intake is absolute crap. At least that's the attitude the program implies. The author even suggests pre-packaged meals as an easier route to calorie counting, if your culinary standards aren't too high, and mine aren't. The Hacker's Diet doesn't totally reject the need for good nutrition, but it does say "we're omnivores, and we're eating too much"

I look at it like this. I'm fighting a war that has three fronts: my weight, my nutrition, my exercise. If I tried to pursue my ideals in all three at once, lose weight, eat terrific and fresh stuff, get into a more strenuous and time-consuming weight training and aerobic exercise program, I'm likely to lose. I'm going to focus on the weight loss and fight a holding action on the other fronts: picking what seem like decently balanced frozen and prepacked meals for my nutrition, following the currently - laughable - but - scalable exercise program of the Hacker's Diet. If and when I make my weight loss goals, or at least have clearly modified my WOL, then I might look into doing better on the other fronts, but in terms of bang for the effort buck, I think weight loss should be my main focus.

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Funny of the Moment
The first entry in Lore's new project Bad Gods made me laugh. Funny stuff and its good a return to some of the Slumbering Lungfish multimedia form.

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Article of the Moment
Heh, vaguely related to today's ramble: a surprising link among the villains of several large-scale terrorist attacks: they're all a big part of gym/workout culture. Kind of disturbing on a few levels.

--It took me a long time to realize the cleverness of the Goodwill Industries logo...for the longest time I just saw it as the happy half of a greek drama mask, but look...it's a lowercase G! Clever!

Quote of the Moment

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

I somehow found this quote in 1999 but now I'm actually reading the book. He's not quite as good in small column format I think.

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Trivial Online Tool of the Moment
I'm almost embarassed to post this because it's pretty trivial, and only has a so-so chance of ever being useful to anyone but me, but I just "released" the sorting tool sort of v0.1. I had a bunch of files name, one per line, that I wantd in alphabetical order. I could have written a perl script in a minute or so, or (gak) fired up Excel (or look--TextPad does it too! Sheesh) but it only took a few minutes to turn it into a simple webapp.

If any one can suggest away of making this tool useful to them with a few more options or features, please let me know.



Poem Snippet of the Moment

The last thing you said to me
tore my heart into pieces;
For you held my heart in your hands
only to drop it into feces.

This was the start of the very the first poem I had to read for this months' loveblender...despite that, I decided to keep reading through this month's works and resist the urge to shut down the site forever. (I kid, I kid. But it is a remarkably bad stanza, the worst that comes to mind on the Blender...just the awful bumpy rhythm to get to the forced-sounding rhyme with a word that's so clinical yet still way too evocative, all for an incredibly sappy sounding tale of heartbreak...)

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Link of the Moment
With all the talk about the digital bugle (an insert to a real bugle that plays Taps, supposedly sounds pretty good because it uses the horn's bell to resonate, to make up for the way American WW2 Veterans are passing away in great numbers, and there aren't that many qualified buglers) I found this site, taps bugler. It's really a moving song, so melancholy. It's a real challenge to get right...between the high emotion and the way the player doesn't usually get a chance to warm up at all, it's very easy to crack notes, like happened at JFK's internment at Arlington cemetary.


It seems like there's a lot of room for expression in the length of the individual notes. I wonder if there's any disagreement between buglers about how long things can and should take...I imagine a "end of day" version might be pretty close to as it's written there, but at the service for a soldier it's probably good to give it more time.

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Stunner of the Moment
NEWSFLASH: the Administration can't seperate politics and reproductive rights. Awesome!
Err, and by "Awesome!" I meant "Assholes!" I'm not sure if "pregnancy from occurring" means it prevents conception, but still; to have societal freedoms dictated by one view of "conception = there's a soul there!" is just wacked. By that token, they should want to arrest God or at least Mother Nature, the biggest abortionist of all...I've been told that in fact the majority of "pregnancies" spontaneously end, often evading detection. Travel Photos of the Moment

Mo with Papa Smurf in Cochem, Me and Samus (from the game 'Metroid') at Frankfurt Airport.

• Software sucks because users demand it to.

  More specifically, they'll spend for new whiz-bang features, and on the first company to bring those features to market no matter how badly implemented. (e.g. "Microsoft: where quality is job 1.1")
  
  
• I find it endlessy almost amusing that the trucking company called "Yellow" has trucks and branding that are all distinctly orange. I finally found out why in a FAQ response.
• American coins generally aren't "fair" with a 50/50 chance of landing either way. When given the choice, always pick "tails". Seriously. I did this all through darts season, it was heads like once or twice, and tails about 8 or 9 times.
• My family used to have a password, like if they didn't to send someone I didn't know to pick me up from school. It was "Mississippi". Now you know. Please don't abuse this knowledge to kidnap me!

• Unrequited love is way underrated. It's kind of like smoking. Ultimately it's bad for you, especially in the long term. Both are bad for your health, make you "smell" worse to others, and cause you to pick up annoying repetitive habits, whether it's constantly wanting something in your mouth (smoking) or anxiously checking e-mail (unrequited love). But on the other hand, both have a certain glamour, give us something to do with ourselves, and have a huge deserved mystique and romantic history behind them. Smoking gets you outside where as otherwise you might stick yourself in the office all day, unrequited love gets you to write amusing bon mots where as otherwise you might write nothing but pedestrian e-mail.

For as long as I can remember, when you do a Google search on "kirk israel", this page comes up. It's the most random thing, I have no idea why Google thinks so highly of it. Even weirder, it just has a link to my entry in that thread, it's not the entry itself. So odd.

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Funny of the Moment

Neither of my parents understand how an answering machine works. When my mother leaves me a message she's actually trapped inside the machine. It is just like a desperate cry. "Carol? Carol? Carol? Are you there? Carol? I'm in the machine." And my father's even worse. He leaves me these messages, "Uh, tell her that her father called."

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Link of the Moment
Back in the day, before the Internet ran smack dab into American popculture, there was the BBS. I missed out on that whole scene. I remember seeing some graffiti for "The Eleventh Hour BBS" (later the Durex Blender Corp) in my dorm's public restroom freshman year, complete with phone number and modem settings...that guy (Brian Moynihan, e-mail me if you read this) ended up being my roommate the next year. Quote of the Moment

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

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News of the Moment
Canada moving closer to legalizing marijuana. Man, they are so much cooler than us in so many ways. They just have a better attitude about stuff than we do. I don't smoke, I don't really want to, but it really ticks me off that I could get into so much trouble if I did.

On the other hand, from the poetic justice department, Jenna Bush may see some jailtime thanks to her daddy's draconian zero-tolerance law. Man, wasn't Bush a party-heartier 'til at least his late 20s? What is it, only Nixon could go to China and only W could crack down on heavy drinking and probable cocaine use?