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OK month for music.

4 star:
* Romeo And Juliet (2022 Remaster) (Dire Straits)
(I went on an Indigo Girls kick, and tracked back to the original thinking of their cover that I've always liked. (Also Douglas Adams praises the romantic qualities of some Dire Straits albums, I wonder if this song is part of it.))

* Express Yourself (Remix) (N.W.A)
(Good hip hop with great sample (Years ago a friend of a friend put this beat under a riff I made on a Casio SK-8 .. https://kirk.is/2003/04/27/))

* Born This Way (Lady Gaga)
(Leftist Marching Band plays this song, and I've been toying with an arrangement for my bands. Great message. Interesting how Madonna "Express Yourself" it's like.)

* What's Up Danger (Blackway & Black Caviar)
(Heather Anne Campbell mentioned this song getting her through the time of her double mastectomy. I don't absolutely love the song, but the attitude of helping turn anxiety about threats into excitement seems so useful. )

* The Battle of New Orleans (Digitally Remastered) (Johnny Horton)
(I remember my mom singing this song for me way back when... "We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin' /
There wasn't as many as there was a while ago")


3 star:
* Trash Day (Parody of "Hot In Herre" By Nelly) ("Weird Al" Yankovic)
* Predator (Yvng Patra)
* I've No More Fucks To Give (feat. Damian Clark) (Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq)
* All That You Are (Bear's Den)
* A Box of Porn in the Woods (Heels)
* Nomad Shuffle (Southside Aces)
* The Drunkard Song (There Is a Tavern In the Town) (Rudy Vallée)
* Mowin' Down the Roses (Jamey Johnson)
* Into the Great Wide Open (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers)

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This "Pac-Man meets Sinistar" cracked me up.
(by Tom Northrop, via Atari Force - - Hmm - I guess the glider harkens from Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures)

Explain my no vote. (Another voice says, "Yes m'am.") [Heavy sigh] You know, I'm a diagnostic radiologist. And diagnostic radiologists, historically and in many places in this state, *still* do all of the first trimester OB ultrasound. So I am extraordinarily, personally familiar with the development of a fetus in the womb. And for you to sit here and say that at 15 weeks, a fetus has a functional heart; a four-chamber heart that can survive on its own, is fallacious. That is not true. There is no viability. You know, I look around at my colleagues on this committee. I am the *only* woman on this podium right now. I am the only physician sitting on this podium. This bill is a medical sham. It does not follow medicine. It does not even purport to listen to medicine. And for each and every one of my colleagues to be so willing to cast an aye vote, when what you are doing is putting your finger; putting your knee; putting your- a gun to women's heads. You are *killing women* because abortion will continue. Women will continue to have efficacy over their own body, whether or not you make it legal. I vote no and I really, really apologize to the people in Kentucky that we are spending this much time and this much energy when we have families in poverty. We have single women heading households in poverty at a higher rate than any other group in the state. And you all are not addressing that. You all are making it worse. Thank you.

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I feel that is true about, like, things in general. We can generally muddle though. I don't want to discount traumas that can result, but I don't want to underestimate our ability to fortify ourselves against them, and then recover from them when they do occur.

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I was a little bummed to notice I could notice the dark falling a bit earlier. I got to thinking about seasons - I thought I had been told it was was a gyroscopic wobble of some kind, I was googling if it was coincidence seasons lined up with the year... turns out I was thinking of it wrong...

Like this page explains and this diagram shows, the axis of the earth is pointing in an arbitrary kind of way, towards Polaris, and it stays that direction as it goes around the sun, and that's what changes the light/dark balance, not a wobble in the earth itself.

	Shelter from the Storm Bob Dylan	Classic folk. via the movie "St. Vincent", though I also read a Harper's article about a guy who might be Bob Dylan's secret son, his mom is clearly referenced in a verse.
★ ★ ★ ★	Call Me By Your Name (Montero Cover) SuperKnova	A beautiful layer of guitar added to the song. maybe via this reddit but mostly from tumblr maybe?
	Worried Blues Gladys Bentley	Blues. I adore the trumpet singing she does, it's so rich and detailed. Via this cracked article.
	Mind Your Own Business Delta 5	New Wave Girlz. via the recent Apple Ad about privacy
★ ★ ★ ★	Chug Jug With You Rok Nardin	This sweet fan song about the game Fortnight redone with a huge how to make a blockbuster movie trailer vibe. via tumblr.
	Traffic Cone Traffic Jam Moon Hooch	Funk band stuck in traffic. Johnny the drummer mentioned this crew to me.
	good 4 u Olivia Rodrigo	sk8r boi / early 2000s energy here. Introduced via her exposure as artist and reference on SNL.
★ ★ ★ ★	Fine Azz Kamillion	Dig the percussion in this strong woman hiphop. Title to HBO's "A Black Lady Sketch Show"
	Riches and Wonders (Remastered) The Mountain Goats	The lowfi aesthetic is amazing, like I just love how you hear the recording machine itself. I forget how I stumbled into this song but I always think about how much author John Green adores this group.
	Highlights Courtney Love (Lois Maffeo + Pat Maley band)	I think this band's name is kind of hilarious. Like the song's Goofus and Gallant reference. Idiosyncratic backing music for this Simon Biles slow motion video.
	I'd rather have a bottle in front of me (than a frontal lobotomy) Randy Hanzlick	A Dr. Demento Classic...probably kind of insensitive now.
	Got It Boomin Oren Major & The Grand Mess	I like the big blatt horns of this hiphop. from a "Love Death and Robots" episode.
	Prove It On Me Ma Rainey	Interesting early gay anthem. Trumpeteer Annie of "Annie and the Fur Trappers" mentioned this song after I mentioned Gladys Bentley's "Worried Blues"
	Yard Sale, No. 1 The Exploding Voids	Indie pop. I ran into The Exploding Voids when they used what became one of my Top 5 ever songs As It Comes. And they just released a new album which I am adding to my collection a song at a time.
	Watermelon Man Maynard Ferguson	Jazz and Mayo on the high trumpet. A staple of some of my honk bands, ken from "New Magnolia" mentioned this version when I suggested he had it to his band's set.
	Lean (Quickie Mart Remix) Boyfriend	A bit too repetitive but some nice sounds. from "Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens"
	How Come My Dog Don't Bark (When You Come Around) Dr. John	Great storytelling in song form. My friend Sophie asked if "I ain't got nobody" was well known, and my other friend Dave mentioned the line referencing it in this song.
★ ★ ★ ★	Home Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros	Cheesy fun faux folksy romance. From songs you hate more than anything.
	Accusations The Exploding Voids	I do like the soft voice of the Voids.
★ ★ ★ ★	Black Betty Ram Jam	Dig the drums and general rollicking nature. From songs you hate more than anything. Guess I'm a contrarian. Though even after looking on the wikipeida page I'm not sure if there's a weird racial portion of this.

I was reading a short story that revolved around Capgras Delusion, the psychological disorder where someone becomes convinced that people whom they know well have been replaced with exact duplicates - victims of it will fabricate all kind of outlandish theories about the "swap" because the "imposter" simply isn't triggering the part of their brain that signals recognition, and so the victim literally can't believe that the person is who they are claiming to be.

This story explored what it would be like for an otherwise cognitively normal person to go through a double trauma: of having their loved ones taken from them and then realizing that the problem is with them. It was almost the trope of "unreliable narrator", but set up so the reader realized what was going on well before the main character worked it out.

I got to thinking of my deeply ingrained belief that meaning and value is an emergent property from groups, not something an individual carries inside-- could it be that that sense that truth is objective and shared, not ingrained and intuited, meant I would have less inclined to have this problem?

And then I started wondering, is my sense of relying less on intuitive judgement tying into my mild face-blindness? ("face-myopia") Like do other people get more ability to recognize and remember folks because they have a better developed and more trusted intuition?

It's a "Just-So" story without much backing, but seems almost as strong as my idea that my face-blindness is because I skim the world, getting the gist quickly and glossing over detail, and the contours that separate one face from another are that kind of detail...

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TIL it's a "tough row to hoe" not a "tough road to hoe".

And to think I have pride calling myself the descendent of Ohio farm people! Yeesh!

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Having a lovely time at the Jersey Shore, days at the beach, then back with my mom and Aunt Susan ... Aunt Susan's traditional "Kirk's arriving, going to oven fry up some chicken for him to consume cold like an animal at any odd hour" is great, I think only my Grandma's Meatloaf on a white bread sandwich with too much ketchup holds a higher place in my personal family food lore. (huh- both of my favorite dishes are best best day from the fridge...)


Also I love seeing fireflies here. Hope they find an ecological niche in whatever our world turns into.

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her lips were netflix red

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This medium story resonates for me in two directions; one is it being about the semi-defunct (but revived) GameLab game SiSSYFiGHT 2000 (I knew the coder for it) and the other is because it's about mourning a dad who died in one's youth, and seeking any path to getting to know who they were a bit more.

The Unveiling

Instead of a pebble to mark our grief
or a coin to ease his passage
you placed a speaker
at the top of his head
and suddenly a drumbeat
came blasting out of the grass,
startling the mourners on the far side
of the cemetery, clanging the trees,
scattering the swifts
that had gathered around the stone
like souls of the dead,
souls that were now parting
to make way for a noisy spirit
rising out of the dirt.

My body is [my] temple. That's why I like to feed it burgers.

"I simply mean to emphasize that politics and political differences are much less important in reality for most Americans than they appear on the Internet, cable news, or in other forms of media."

I think it's an important thing to remember. (I don't want to down play that ultimately policies do have consequences, but right now as I sit on a porch with my Aunt surrounded by neighbors we certainly disagree with on most things political, it's nice to remember basic politeness and general neighborliness can see us through.)

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

I was trying to remember the URL http://doodle.com/ - it's a convenient website for finding mutually agreeable dates for special events. (I had the same idea I was going to make for a friend, something called whenworks4u)

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I wanna go see Transformers now...

This video does a pretty good job of explaining his work. He's kind of the Thomas Kinkade of what he does -- but there's more craft to it than it might seem.

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All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain't got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don't interfere with nobody else.

(Bleh the quote might actually be by John Fugelsang; why the hell do people change attributions?) Today I heard of two interesting East/West cultural differences;

1. Asked an open ended question about journaling and photo-albums, many of the European say they'd journal to remember happy times but the central theme from the Asian students was avoiding repeating mistakes.

2. In visual identification test, there seems to be a cultural difference with the American subjects picking out the most central foreground object (and able to recognize it more quickly in different contexts) and Japanese subjects absorbing scenes more holistically, and having an easier time with questions about the aggregate whole. (And 9 months of living in the other country seemed to reverse the difference, which says really interesting things about neuroplasticity.)

You don't want to take too much out of such uncited tidbits, but still.

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Man, I forgot about Vigilante 8. That was a fun series... on N64, got into that instead of Twisted Metal.
--via 22words and Bill the Splut

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Intelligent Design. A loving God. Allergies. You can pick two.

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"Why don't you go talk to her?"
"Talk to her? Would you talk to a rainbow? Or a sunset?"
"If I wanted to get it on with refracted light, I would."

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What is it with everyone and their questions this morning? 'Where'd you learn how to drive?' 'Will you marry me?' 'Why would you say that to my baby?'

A few years ago I update you all to EB's method of preperation for the Great Chair Famine of 2012 but man, I think someone's got him beat... --via picture is unrelated

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Self-portrait reflected off a Toyota Yaris

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and off a Scion xA.

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My (new? or just unrealized...) superpower: smothering my legitimate urge to be helpful with a general obliviousness, so that I offer to carry, say, the third of 3 big boxes Amber is wrestling, or bring up the sixth of 6 loads of laundry.

OK, this is kind of silly but for the longest time I sort of assumed Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck were, like, the same person. So I built this quiz to see if it was just me, or what, but now without trying to cheat I can get it kind of easily.

If you take it please post your score in the comments. I was delighted to get my team at work to slightly subvert the "name miniproject after fearsome animal" paradigm by calling itself "Team Angry Manatee". I had to swivel around the projector to the whiteboard, and dry erase marker in a cannon, machine guns, a bomb and a helmet over the projected Google images photo of one, but it was worth it.

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Joke of the Moment

What's green and smells like yellow paint?
Green Paint.

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Slate Articles of the Moment
For some reason lately I've been stockpiling some interesting Slate articles, never quite getting around to posting them.

Ron Rosenbaum on catchphrases. Some phrases that he finds annoying I find cool and useful and vice versa. I wonder how old he thinks "my bad" is? I remember my girlfriend making jokes about it in 1990 (mishearing it as "my bag" and then translating into french as "mon sac")

William Saletan on hypocricy on human values... interesting meditation on the division between public / semi-private / private, how the first category often has more to do with how we'd like the world to be than we are ourselves. (Which is a positive spin of good old hypocrisy.)

Finally... Paul Collins on whence the semicolon? I must confess my understanding of when to use colons and semicolons is pretty shallow and academic, if that. (But like Paul Robinson says... "The period and the comma are the only lovely marks of punctuation.")

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Man, the Run DMC "King of Rock" cameo in Guitar Hero Aerosmith with ONLY Run (or is it DMC?) is kind of depressing

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Hmm. 34 years old and I'll still veer off my path to steer towards a pigeon for a bit...








Wow. Youtube and Google Video both have so much frickin' content! It reminds me a bit of the pre-Google Internet, that there's so much there, you just have to figure out how to find it.

Oh, by the way, what are some good Boston burb ideas for fireworks? I know there's always the Charles but I'd prefer something that wasn't an all-day event to get a good view...

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Quote and Video of the Moment

Truth, medical resaearch, and fun: the holy trinity of the thinking person.

I watched the few other episodes that are there online. It's a cool show, but you can see them using some BS-y tactics themselves, with a lot of ad homenim attacks and some other tricks. (via Nick B)

Some evening and night photos from a recent trip to Chicago:

View from the Sears Tower at Twilight:
(great time to go, the lights come on
but it's not too dark to see the detail.)


Not sure what building this is, near the Sears Tower:


Navy Pier on a Foggy Night:

• At some point I wanted to rant about how lousy a tool Excel is for "issues lists" and "data dictionaries" that my project had by the truckload. The UI is so ugly, data gets hidden where you can't see it, you have to make up these retarded little macros for everything, etc etc...
• Ridiculously over-modified cars. From England, I think. I wonder if "Northern Monkey" in the URL is a bit of cultural chauvinism, what with London being an urban center to the south and all.
• Video game fun: Gamespot's Top 10 'Boss Fights'. Boss Fights, usually a one on one conflict with a particularly nasty enemy, are really a big draw of many games for me. I appreciate how Rare and some other companies always make it easy to come back to the game and just do the cool boss fights...

• Men who cherish for women the highest respect are seldom popular with them.

• Pretty good site for developers:Builder.com.

• --I keep meaning to get around to making my own 3D Wigglegrams, but I haven't yet, so I'll go ahead and link to the page.

It's kind of strange being on this eating plan. I think my body wants carbs, but it's not smart enough to realize that's what it wants, so it ends up with this non-de script feeling of need.

The deal is Mo will cook (breakfast, usually that we can eat the rest of the next day, and dinner every night, with the leftovers for lunch the next day) but I have to clean the dishes, which is a bit less but still a pretty significant of an amount of work. Having to spend that much attention on food, rather than just microwaving or getting something out...I dunno, it feels like a bit of a throwback to hunter-gatherer times. Also, our morning moderate exercise routine (100-150 mini-trampoline jumping jacks, 20-30 minutes fast walk w/ seriously swinging arms, then a lot of stretching) takes a lot of time, so that adds to that feeling, having to devote so many more resources to attend to my basic bodily needs. And 'having' to go to bed at 10, so that there's 8 hours when we get up at 6...yeesh, I'm feeling a bit cramped for time these days.

Also, it feels kind of weird to bring lunch to work, though I'm not sure why. I think it might go back to elementary school, where it seemed like the less well-off kids would be the ones who would always bring their lunch. (Unless you were poor and on assistance.) And it always seemed like a lot more fun to have the hot lunch at school. It's not that big a switch for me, I've been a desk-eater (eater at desk, not of) for a while. But still, walking in with my plastic bag of bottle of cran-water, lunch portion, morning and afternoon stick...I feel like a bit of a tool.

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Engrish of the Moment

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SAUNA PANTS !!!
[...]
DOCTORS ARE WARNING THAT TESTICLES OF THOSE DRIVERS FOR TAXI, BUS, TRUCK.... ARE GETTING WEAKER AND THEIR SPERMATOZOA IS FACED WITH SERIOUS DAMAGE OR DEATH AS THEY STAY OR WORK IN HIGH TEMPERATURE.

SPERMATOZOA IS PRECIOUS SEED FOR YOUR OFFSPRING IN FURTHER FUTURE.

THEREFORE, I STRONGLY SUGGEST THAT ALL MEN, EXCEPT A HOLY FATHER AND A REVEREND, SHOULD WEAR SAUNA PANTS WHEN THEIR TESTICLES ARE FACED WITH HEATING.

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Quote and Article of the Moment

Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say.

Hey, there are some fireflies about! I thought we were too far north to see many here...maybe it's just being in an ever so slightly more suburban environment. (The movies I tried to take with my digital camera didn't come out so well, just a field of black with a nature-y soundtrack.)

There's something divine about fireflies.

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Links of the Moment
Ranjit pointed out VillainSupply.com, the place for all your all your superweapon needs. A few days later, Bill the Splut pointed out that President Junior has his eyes on taking out that supervillain Saddam, his daddy's nemesis. Pretty convincing argument that there's going to be a war sometime in the next 18 months. Ugh! Now, I have to admit that I thought that the last few conflicts we've been involved with were going to turn out worse than they did. (Give or take a bombing of a wedding party or two.) But man, our good fortune (and I acknowledge that it's not just fortune, but the result of a lot of hard work by brave people and money invested) is not going to last forever. And it's weird, but right now I "economic impact" weighs so heavily on my mind. Which is kind of stupid and shallow, but my neuroses have to fixate somewhere I guess.

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Quote of the Moment

We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it.

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Four in the morning

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
the hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
If we're to go on living.