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that memory foam mattress
with too many memories

(poem I just wrote for the Blender of Love, from a conversation over the weekend)

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Why I need to polish my standup act #529:
"So y'know in 'Fast and Furious' they have that button mounted between the front seats? and they press the button when they need to go faster? my 2004 scion totally has that!!! it's called finally remembering to turn off the parking brake." Friday we had Cora hangout with Melissa's nieces at their place... I think they had a pretty good time. Unrelated shot over Hickory Hills Lake:

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There should be a universal friendly return wave meaning "happy to see you too but I don't recognize you quite yet"
(Like when someone is driving by in a car and waves but you can't quite see who it is) Some quotes on concern and care - The Wells is via Gardner's "aha! Paradox", the latter 3 from a document my friend Len collected for a join project way back when.

As long as there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man must behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness was not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

Patience is the ability to care slowly.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that are forever blowing through our minds.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles-by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage. It's the healthiest thing a body can do.

Thinking about the final Twain quote. Not quite sure I agree that "distraction" is always healthier than a kind of acceptance. I know that for folks with a certain kind of anxiety, it IS best to steer clear, but personally I am better served by leaning into a Warholian "So what?" (When I catch myself avoiding thinking of a problem, part of me starts assuming that the avoidance behavior was justified and that the problem must be REALLY bad. The bad situation's reputation increases its menace tenfold than if it does when I say "ok, that might happen, it might not, if it does, I will still muddle through. Ok, maybe not tenfold, but two- or threefold.)

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Some car names really make you wonder - why is the Hyundai Excel named after a spreadsheet? Why is the Honda Citation named after what you hope you don't get when driving?

But, I think Ford has topped itself with its new truck, the "Ford Tremor". If I remember rightly the billboard was like "Where the road ends, the Tremor begins"

Huh.

(Also, please no tired old jokes about the "Chevy Nova" in Spanish markets...)
snicker

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

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LOL John McCain getting back from brain surgery to help people not have medical coverage. What a fuckin' hero!

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UPDATE:
Let me amend that list line to take into account what Susan Tutu mentioned on FB; that my statement was a bit churlish, and we should look to what he actually said - I actually googled before I wrote, didn't find it, but tried again - here it is-
What that speech lacks is much talk of the topic at hand - medical coverage. It's all very meta about procedures and bipartisanship. So while the call to be reasonable and seek compromise can be a noble one, there's also an air of "Teach The Controversy"! about this. Obama et al spent a lot of political capital - and in the end squeezed the ACA through an a procedurally unsavory way - against the party of no, whose demonization of who was a clearly qualified and professional and thoughtful man carried a lot of ugly undercurrents. Republicans have 3/4 of a decade to come up with a better plan, and they have jack and squat. Trump said "You're going to have such great healthcare at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it is going to be so easy," and while his supporters are probably even better than his detractors at accepting his flim-flam, on the campaign trail and after, as mere signaling of mood and intent than actual substance, it's still embarrassing how badly the Republicans with all their gerrymandered power right now, are handling this. McCain's line "All we've managed to do is make more popular a policy that wasn't very popular when we started trying to get rid of it." is telling- Republicans don't have a story to tell about something that will actually help non-wealthy people, from the poor to the middle class, because that's not their story, at all. Best Photos of 2004... Mo and I part ways, I sell the house, publish my Atari game, and spend a lot of time with EB and Jane.

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Slate on The Hillary Haters. Saturday at a party I was showing around some old Spy-magazine covers about Hillary from the 90s (I remember 'Hillary as dominatrix in particular.) The endless dislike of her has a lot of roots in sexism, without a doubt. I had to bring those cool sunglasses back to get the lenses replaced; the person helping me at the eyeglass place didn't bother to ask if I wanted polarized or no.

Like this site says:

Polarized lenses can be troubling for people who need to see LCD (liquid crystal displays) screens clearly. In fact, wearing polarized lenses can make an LCD screen difficult to read and can even make it seem to disappear completely at certain angles. Therefore, operators of heavy equipment or pilots should not wear polarized lenses

Umm, given the number of screen based gadgets we have in our lives, that kind of means NO ONE should wear polarized lenses. Duhhr.

And it wasn't just my local gadgets (it was kind of funny, actually: my iPad 2 was fine in portrait mode and a totally black screen in landscape) but I'd see weird patterns on electronic billboards and gas pump LCD screens etc.

Also, without asking they included a brown tint; for a while I thought the kind of weirdly omnious, pre-storm-looking shade was a side effect of the funky blue mirroring I requested, but no: they just slapped it on. The remade lenses will have a more neutral gray tint.

Man, I hate bad "default settings" for stuff like this... ah well, their (company's) lost, it just cost me some time. Another great song and video by my favorite German group...
http://whistling-fish.org/thecolors.html -- cool color changing bookmarklet. Right up there with http://kathack.com/ !

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https://github.com/jehna/VerbalExpressions - seems like a great idea of regexs!

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A while back a friend tried to convince me that both political parties are equally as Machiavellian. Nope. NY Times on the Great Gerrymander of 2012 - found this after reading about how North Carolina is rolling back the clock with voter surpression, thanks to a shitergy with gerrymandering and the Supreme Court's trashing of the Voter Right's Act

another great clip, with George Jefferson teaching his neighbor Tom how to be black...

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Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?

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I like taking things and people at face value, because I'm most interested in how things relate and interact, which is utterly dependent on their surface levels and presentation.

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We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

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http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/3832 -- Some 'Wreckers have made a bit of art out of my Asteroids/RTS mashup game....

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There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: 'Not today.'

From my friend Sumana's Blog:

When Leonard and I first moved in together, I asked him to get rid of those big pint glasses he had. They were chipped and scratched, but that's not what I minded. I just didn't like dealing with glass, because glass breaks. Anything glass is on loan from a jealous God. I feared the inevitable smashes, so goodbye glasses.

Years passed.

Somewhen I found myself thinking, so what if the glass breaks? There's a saying that you must drink from the cup as though it is already broken. Maybe I'd just had enough hard knocks to appreciate ephemeral joy and function for what they are, instead of clutching them so hard they fall apart. Maybe I'd had enough hard knocks to know that I won't fall apart even if a glass does.

There's a Jorge Luis Borges quote:

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

So now I've bought a few commemorative pint glasses, on trips. One from Pacific Standard. One from Borderlands. One, from an art shop in Providence, featuring two astronauts in love.

We drink water from them, mostly. The clear round glass admits light, lenses it, lets me see a dream of what's on the other side.

They are for him. They are for us. They are for me. They are whole, and someday they will be broken. Not "but," but "and." But I chose them, so I can distantly imagine even cherishing the memory of their deaths.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I.
From half a mile away
In Central Square
Where police still hang
After headquarters moved
Because they are called here eventually
And they like that Italian place I go to.

II.
The unused tricycle.
And the occupied holding cell.

III.
If he really said
"I'll speak to you your momma outside,"
That would be the best part.

IV.
On top of a hill called "Class"
Looking at another hill called "Race."
Or the other way around.
It is hard to tell which hill is higher.

V.
Chapter 272, Section 53
Once applied
To "rogues and vagabonds."
It now merely threatens
"Common railers and brawlers."

VI.
Everyone should be afraid of the police.
Even though no one should have to be.

VII.
Amy lived on Ware St.
She sat in my living room
Describing how well Skip dresses
How he smiles at strangers.
That southern thing.

VIII.
Andy had never heard of Gates.
But knows one of the cops
Who showed up in a news photo.

IX.
A Cambridge cop once yelled
Because I came too close
To an exploded manhole.
Then, deferentially,
"I'm sorry. I don't want you to get hurt."

X.
Melissa Harris Lacewell
thought you should know
#SkipGates...likes white folks.

XI.
If you yell at a cop in my part of Cambridge
It is usually okay.
As long as you are homeless
And intoxicated.
Or crazy.

XII.
Malcolm X. asked
What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?
In Cambridge, you call him a rock star.
Some people do, anyway.

XIII.
I too have had
Just-got-back-from-Asia jet lag.
It makes you crazy.

With all due apologies.

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"The Butterfly Effect" was a pretty good flick! Kind of like an extended Twilight Zone episode.

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First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.

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The IKEA catalog, strangely soothing and hypnotic- all those idyllic scenes painted in words. Are those real apartments done up, or sets? Man this site has had a lot of talking as of late. Lets get some pictures!

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Dig neuroscience books-fun to think about thinking, and if my brainwork is on the unusual side, or if my mental life is par for the course

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katwinx "bring out the gimp! ... so we can show him this property's lovely, lovely floor coverings."

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consciousness is like eyesight. peripheral vision is supper-blurry but we don't notice 'cause everywhere we look is in focus. So, Boston NOW seems to be edging out Boston Metro... at least I see more people handing it out, and more piles of it around.

I always feel a little bad for the people handing it out. As well as for the folks selling the more traditional papers.

Overall that seems like a lot of trees on a daily basis, and I wish there was a corresponding upgrade recycling program.

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International News of the Moment
Slashdot reporting on Iranians capturing squirrels they claimed were spying, that is, wired with high tech gear and what not. "Wait Wait Don't Tell me" had the best line about it, roughly paraphrased:

I can just see the situation at the White House, Cheney turning to Bush at the conference table and saying "OK, we tried your idea, now could we please get back to business?

The show then devolved into Rocky the Flying Squirrel "Moose Undt Sqvierrel" jokes, but still.

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Failed Products of the Moment
Format Wars, The Tech That Should Have Won. (Warning, gratuitously cheesy illustrations.) The (largely USAian) Slashdot readers thought it was junk as were the technologies it championed, but this gentleman points out that most of these did pretty well in the UK, where the article came from.

This morning I had very vivid, yet now irritatingly vague dreamlets involving the snooze alarm... something drawing parallels between Peanuts cartoons with their dealing with imaginary friends and the difficulty in sorting out the real world from the dreamworld when you're first waking up. Pressing snooze was represented by some sort of bureaucratic form you had to fill out that helped explain what you were dreaming about. And then after all that I realized it might all be because I'm expecting a sucktastic next few days at work.

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Joke of the Moment

Married 25 years, I took a look at my wife one day and said, "Honey, 25 years ago, we had a cheap apartment, a cheap car, slept on a sofa bed and watched a 10-inch black-and-white TV, but I got to sleep every night with a hot 25-year-old blonde. Now, we have a nice house, a nice car, a big bed and a big-screen plasma TV, but I'm sleeping with a 50-year-old woman. It seems to me that you're not holding up your side of things."

But my wife is a very reasonable woman.

She told me to go out and find a hot 25-year-old blonde, and she'd make sure that I would once again be living in a cheap apartment, driving a cheap car and sleeping on a sofa bed.

The same guy sent in a joke earlier about a man who asks his wife to bring him a beer quickly, "before it starts", as he plunks down in front of the TV. His wife brings him a beer. He repeats the request then, and the wife is angry but complies...the third time though, she explodes, angry that he just came in, didn't say hello, demanded beer, after she'd been cooking and cleaning and ironing all day... "aw crap," he says, "it's started."

Again, both of these jokes aren't very woman-friendly, but they have interesting conceptual constructions, one with parallels, the other with self-referential systems.

Rant of the Moment

I'll come right out and say it : LOGO blows. So does Lisp, but at least you can actually write programs in Lisp, if you are masochistic enough. Forth is for engineer nerds who think FORTRAN 77 is too high level, Smalltalk is for liberal flannel wearing publishing geeks, Java is for abstraction wonks who like to make up phrases using odd words like 'facade' to describe perfectly ordinary comp sci stuff from 30 years ago that they have just now 'reinvented', C++ is for overly caffeinated control freaks who will argue for hours about inheritance and then go write it in crappy C syntax anyways when nobody is looking, assembler is for wierd ninja-geeks who sit around in dark rooms mumbling about cycles, straight C is for power tripping egomaniacal maniacs who would rather spend twenty hours rewriting ALL of your code BECAUSE YOU DID IT WRONG rather than spend an hour learning to use something somebody else wrote, Pascal is for teachers who flunked out of English class but still wanted to pretend to be superior.

And Basic? Basic? BASIC?

Basic is for the rest of you.

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Game of the Moment
I while back I kisrael'd Zombie3...now there is Zombie4, and it feels a lot more like a game than a demo, relative to the previous version. Pretty tough though!

Ramble of the Moment
Not the most original thought, but new to me...dialing up voice mail on my cellphone starts to sound like the opening notes of "Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear?" (Samsing phones remap the keys from regular touchtones to the musical C-scale). So I got to thinking about that song (mostly I know it from that Simpsons' Episode where they buy a doorbell that plays just the first line, but gets stuck and plays it over and over) and how that lyric could be read so differently, in like a Hitchcock-ripoff horror movie: "It's eerie...you show up, and then all these different kind of birds show up and start attacking and pecking at everyone's eyes! I never knew a humming bird could be so vicious....what the hell is up with you? Are you cursed?? Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear Every Time You Are Near???"

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Banner of the Moment

--from typoGenerator, a tool for making coolish but meaningless banners with text.

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Comic of the Moment
Fleep is a very odd comic...a guy is trapped in a phonebooth surrounded by concrete, with what (he estimates) about 48 hours of Oxygen left..."Using only the contents of his pockets (two pens, a paperback novel, three coins and 20 ft of unwaxed dental floss) our hero must fashion and execute an escape plan before he runs out of oxygen". Very strange, some of the Macguyver-like details seem a little suspect, but very cool. Mixes of the Moment
So, previously I discussed my newfound philosophy of dance mixes and here's the latest and bestest incarnation of it--up to three CDs now. I like randomly theming mix sets, starting them with an appropriate .wav, and stumbled on a Star Trek theme...although I still like to push the best songs to the first mix, I used a very geeky method to assure all three were ok (divided the music into hiphop, covers, and misc, and then each of those into two tiers, and then as even a distribution as possible of the 6 categories...Captain Kirk got the first pick from each category though.)

When I posted my last attempt at the perfect dance mix, Deevaa wrote "I want a copy of your CD!!" in the comments section, so I sent her a set, all the way to Australia this morning.

Captain Kirk: The Mix "But a woman..." (soundclip) Groove Is In The Heart (Deee-Lite) Burning Down The House (Tom Jones w/ The Cardigans) Bust A Move (Young MC) Baby Got Back (Sir Mix-A-Lot) The Bad Touch (Bloodhound Gang) Hip Hop Hooray (Naughty By Nature) Little Miss Cant Be Wrong (Spin Doctors) Like A Prayer (Bigod 20) Jump Around (House of Pain) A Little Less Conversation Radio Edit (Elvis vs JXL) Things That Make You Go Hmmmm... (C + C Music Factory) Summertime (DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince) Slam (Onyx) 99 Red Balloons (Goldfinger) Smack My Bitch Up (Prodigy) I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor)

Mister Spock: The Mix "Logic is a little tweeting bird" (soundclip) All The Things She Said (t.A.T.u.) Sexbomb (Tom Jones w/ Mousse T) Stress (Jims Big Ego) Shake Your Thang (Salt N Pepa) Walk Like An Egyptian (Bangles) Take On Me (Reel Big Fish) Humpty Dance (Digital Underground) Unbelievable (EMF) Wild Thing (Tone Loc) One Way Or Another (Blondie) Push It (Salt N Pepa) Walk This Way (Run D.M.C.) I'm Too Sexy (Right Said Fred) Me Myself And I (De La Soul) It Takes Two (Rob Base & D.J. E-Z Rock) Ice Ice Baby (Vanilla Ice)

Doctor McCoy: The Mix "not just a biological unit..." (soundclip) All Star (Smash Mouth) Gonna Make You Sweat (C+C Music Factory) One Week (Barenaked Ladies) OPP (Naughty By Nature) Tainted Love (Marilyn Manson) Funky Cold Medina (Tone Loc) Private Idaho (The B-52s) U Cant Touch This (M.C. Hammer) Hungry Like The Wolf (Reel Big Fish or Less Than Jake) You Be Illin (Run DMC) Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana) Parents Just Dont Understand (D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince) What I Like About You (The Romantics) Joy And Pain (Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock) My Sharona (The Knack) Now That We Found Love (Heavy D. & the Boyz)

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Link of the Moment
You can click on the links above to hear the sound clips I found at Star Trek in Sound and Vision, a site with tons and tons and tons of audio and video clips from all things Star Trek. A really amazing amount of material.

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News Line of the Moment
Slate.com had a great front page caption for their story on Blair: "Finally, a Politician for Grown-Ups (Too bad he's English)". I respect Blair a lot, though Bill the Splut was greatly amused when I mistyped his name "Bliar", given his involvement in the whole WMD spindoctoring.

Also the other day Slate.com had a good piece on typical summer jobs for teens, giving "They say you learn how to", "You really learn how to", "Upside", "Downside", "Wages", "Minimum age", "How do I get this job?", and "Hook-up factor" for each. Poem of the Moment

I cannot separate her
from the beautiful body.
She has charm and a very
gay spirit; in every way
she's attractive. Intelligent
and she reads good books.
But it's the faultless body
that forces me to make a fool
of myself, pursuing a virtuous
girl I could never possess.

Image of the Moment
This image is making the rounds. I guess it would be funnier if the pope were in better health, but still you can see him thinking "mama mia, won't this guy shut UP???" as Bush reads on and on and on.

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Geek News and Links
How to really secure your PC against theft-- it's the Google cache, without images, for some reason the original is gone. NASA tries to build that little floating sphere droid Luke learns lightsabering with in the original Star Wars. Finally, the new geek rallying cry is "Free Dmitry", the guy who got arrested 'cause he pointed out Adobe's system wasn't as solid as advertised. (The former geek cry was "Free Kevin", I think Mo has the bumpersticker somewhere.) (Most of this stuff via slashdot)