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Super low-key month for new-to-music. "Important" is a charmingly geeky philosophical novelty song. "Pledging My Love" was realizing that Johnny Ace was a real performer, not someone Paul Simon made up for his ballad to John Lennon's death "The Late Great Johnny Ace".

4 star:
* WILDFLOWER (Billie Eilish)
* EP. 4: Important (Ian McConnell)

3 star:
* Seven Nation Army (Epic Instrumental Version) (Phoenix Music)
* Want You Gone (Aperture Science Psychoacoustic Laboratories)
* Scenario (feat. Busta Rhymes, Dinco D & Charlie Brown) [LP Mix] (A Tribe Called Quest)
* Pledging My Love (Johnny Ace)
* Do It (Jesse Winchester)
* Antidote (Orion Sun)
* Money (Cardi B)

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Yesterday I had the single most delightful body of water related activity I've ever had in New England - this tidal creek at Good Harbor Beach near Gloucester
As the tide comes in or out you are gently swept along, carried along in a way that combines the floatiness of the ocean, the movement of a river, and the choice of depths of a pond. Then you clambor onto shore, walk back and do it again. You can just float along, or feel like you're Michael Phelps achieving mighty speed with your swimming form, or bound along the creek bed. water-aerobics style - I was able to recreate a feeling I get in my dreams, where I step step and then glide forward upright, my feet an inch or two above the ground.
There are some caveats: I think you have to time things around high tide for that day (I'm guess if high tide was noon, 9am-11am and then 1pm to 3pm might be optimal?). Non-residents have to reserve parking way ahead of time. It looks like they've had some bacteria problems over the years, so you have to make sure its open. And there are rocks under parts of it so as the water lowers you need to take some care and put up with some possible bumps and scratches.
But despite all that, it has the potential to be one the best in-the-water times ever!

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★ ★ ★ ★	Since I Found You Gone The Exploding Voids	Kind of lovely break up song from a pretty obscure but great European group. Final song I didn't already have from their new album... been their biggest American fan since I heard their transcendent As It Comes at the end of their indie horror film "Welk"
	Alone Again Or Love	Old rock, nice mix of latin sounds. From the movie "Bottle Rock"
	Goosebumps (Remix) Travis Scott & HVME	Club pop. Played by a DJ at a highschool graduation party afternoon.
★ ★ ★ ★	Let the Tiger Out Andy Cooper	Hiphop with a ton of funk. Via this Dance Flash Mob video.
	Elvira The Oak Ridge Boys	Cornball countrified 80s song. I so remember this from, like, summer camp in like 1983 or something. But Dave S mentioned it for some reason at a Vermont reunion weekend.
	Xiquexique Tom Zé & José Miguel Wisnik	Art song with interesting sounds that goes on a bit but... I think it has a strong "sound of toothbrushing" influence? Matthew Greene played this at a Vermont getaway weekend.
	War Hypnotic Brass Ensemble	Nice NOLA style brass. During Vermont reunion weekend, Sean mentioned this one.
	Solitude of Sirens The Exploding Voids	Great indie sound. "Are you the siren, or the lighthouse, to my thoughts?" Penultimate song I didn't already on their latest album
	My First Girlfriend (Slowed) MattyB	Inane kid hiphop that becomes transcendent slowed down... Found on tumblr... check out the link, I also love the animated GIF she used to post it.
★ ★ ★ ★	Be OK (Acoustic Version) Ingrid Michaelson	Upbeat song, a gal and her guitar and just a little production seasoning. Playing in an open roofed outlet center in NJ.
	This Feeling Alabama Shakes	Gentle and lovely song about arrival after hard times. Used on the show "Fleabag"
★ ★ ★ ★	Rumors Lizzo & Cardi B	Excellent empowerment hiphop, dig the bass. Jim W wrote: 'So…I slept on Lizzo and Cardi’s “Rumors” and gotta be honest, it’s even better than Fleetwood Mac, and I love Fleetwood Mac 🤣'
	Kryptonite Joey Nato & Atlus	Obscure hiphop, nice beats. My friend Jonathan has the single best track record at recommending new music that I actually like. I feel like there's probably a pretty simple formula about percussion sound he's figured out...
★ ★ ★ ★	Strange Celeste	Slow, sad, beautiful. From a poignant scene in "Ted Lasso"

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So, Republican Senators breaks the government of confirmation for most of a year to steal a SCOTUS seat, Texas makes a law to unleash a legion of Deputy Dawgs to sue women and doctors, SCOTUS issues late night picayune rulings where the conservative bare majority pretend their hands are tied to stop things because of the bizarro legal cleverness. Huh.

Conservatives are cheaters.

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Funny seeing this on McGST. Reminds me of "Banned in Boston" and the city's reputation for puritanical overreach.

Also surprising is the estimate of $35K/year for an arcade machine! I knew the arcade industry of the early 80s - while faddish - was huge, $8 billion in 1982 when this article came out, one quarter at a time - Domestic Gross for Hollywood was only $3 billion that year! Still, $35K in a year? (Nearly $100K today). 35K = 140,000 quarters... 383 plays a day? Assume a 16 hour day, from like 8am to midnight, that's around 24 plays an hour. So not too far from constant play... so maybe that's a little exaggerated? Still.

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Rationality when combined with uncertainty is a great tool for empathy. You're not convinced of your own correctness, but when you put things in rational terms, that's the willingness to put things in a universal language and connect with others who might have a clearer idea of the truth.

I don't understand how some people who don't have certain, with their little fiefdoms of faith, that "I know I'm definitely right, so everyone who believes otherwise is wrong" generate much empathy... maybe just sympathy for all those wrong blighted fools.

	Evil Boy (F**k You In the Face Mix) Die Antwoord	This month's songs are bookend by two of the dirtiest and/or raunchiest hiphop videos I've posted, I think... I guess I got this from a Quora What is the most R rated music video put out by a band?
	No Diggity (feat. Dr. Dre & Queen Pen) Blackstreet	Love the infectious slow groove of this. Via defining the 90s musical cannon - kind of weird I didn't know this song very well.
	Watermelon Man (Single Version) Mongo Santamaria	Version of this Herbie Hancock song built the genre "Latin boogaloo" This is one song my bands play a lot. Easy and cool and delicious, just like watermelon.
	Home O'Death	Haunting. A friend was posting on some kind of genre, like dark ambient country or something?
	Jock Box The Skinny Boys	Oldest school hiphop here. The show "Workaholics" use bits of this as bumper music.
★ ★ ★ ★	Moderation Florence + the Machine	Do I Look Moderate to You? Recommendation from Arun
	Rock Hard Beastie Boys	This is... kind of bad? But it's interesting to hear something I hadn't heard so close to tape that meant so much to me as a teen. via the Beast Boys documentary on Apple Plus or whatever it is.
	Barcoders Jamming ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS!	Two guys using barcode scanners wired for sound! Amazing. via this tumblr post that said "My brain was transported about 10,000 years into the future while listening to this."
	Big Daddy vs. Dolemite (feat. Rudy Ray Moore) Big Daddy Kane	Classing playing the Dozens... Watch the Eddie Murphy "Dolemite" movie tribute....man what ever happened to Big Daddy Kane...
★ ★ ★ ★	Slippery When Wet The Commodores	Sexy 70s. from the Dolemite movie soundtrack.
★ ★ ★ ★	Alison Holly Cole	Tender cover of the Elvis Costello song. Some of my favorite covers ever come from Holly Cole... I've Just Seen a Face, Waters of March, her Tom Waits stuff...
★ ★ ★ ★	A Hero's Death Fontaines D.C.	Sink as far down as you can be pulled up / Happiness really ain't all about luck / Let your demeanor be your deep down self / And don't sacrifice your life for your health I think my cousin Bill posted about this song...
	Hey Heartbreaker Dream Wife	Girls rock. Recommended by Arun.
★ ★ ★ ★	WAP (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) Cardi B	Heh. Kind of weird that there is a "radio" edit. (Wet and Gushy? huh) Am so enamored of the opening verse of the explicit version... Making the rounds...

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The flashbacks in Breath of the Wild play out like Zelda is a dating sim protagonist who flubbed all the sidequests and didn't understand the resource economy and did the relationship events all out of order and ended up getting such an incredibly Bad Ending that it literally destroyed the world, and the entirety of BotW proper is about the obligatory Childhood Friend NPC who was supposed to be the default endgame relationship if the protagonist didn't reach ten hearts with anybody else dealing with the fallout from that.

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Jack Anderson's Gastrointestinal Map:

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Taking a shit without looking at your phone counts as meditating now

So we turn to the second conservative talking point - that it stops urban areas from overrunning the rural ones, by having more people. (And we'll leave aside that that was a concern largely for less-populated states that wanted to keep their slave-owning ways) I think Jamelle Bouie put it pretty well: "[Abolishing the Electoral College means that politicians will only campaign in (and listen to) urban areas.] is wrong on the impact of ending the Electoral College. A presidential candidate who focused only on America's cities and urban centers would lose -- there just aren't enough votes. Republicans live in cities just as Democrats live in rural areas. Under a popular vote, candidates would still have to build national coalitions across demographic and geographic lines. The difference is that those coalitions would involve every region of the country instead of a handful of competitive states in the Rust Belt and parts of the South."

Google's Chrome browser turned 10 the other day.

This Gizmodo piece mentions that, and about how it's kind of weirdly hard to switch, even when other browsers have caught up on most fronts, and it so clearly puts you in a part of Google's fiefdom.

Some of it's just UI laziness. I've been using Safari more often, trying to push just a bit beyond the monoculture, and because it's said to be easier on the laptop battery, but even the way it does UI tabs feels off. And Chrome's developer tools are even tougher to give up; I don't know if they are better or I'm just extremely used to them.

I remember when IE3 + 4 came out, how much better they felt than Netscape of the time, but it's hard to say exactly why. And Chrome still feels a bit like that now, there's a tough to poinpoint "roundness" in its UI.

Still, the popularity of the browser combined with how "chromebooks" and not tablets have supplanted netbooks or whatever came before for low-cost computing, especially in schools, is a troubling monoculture even without Google's sense of tracking you for the sake of its advertisers.

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Could we, without relentlessly criticizing, let people have their pumpkin spice, and avacado toast, and their fandoms, and their D&D, and their too-early-Halloween-decorations, and whatever little harmless things in which they've manage to find a tiny shriveled flower of joy?

Descending order of "you gotta here this", 4-star stuff in red.

• You Don't Want to Go to War (Rebirth Brass Band & Soulja Slim) Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society brought this Rebirth Brass Band to BABAM!s set at the "Free Speech" Counter-Rally.
• How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer (Auralnauts) Love this, and the "creepy female vocal cover of pop hit" in it...
• Glorious (feat. Skylar Grey) (Macklemore) Seeing him dance around with his 100 year old grandmother is great, and the choral use is terrific too.
• Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video: 2nd Attempt (Mike Polk, Jr) Liked this a few years ago, finally decided to rip it. "Don't slow down in East Cleveland, or you'll die"
• Circle Be Unbroken (Zylawy Brothers) I do have a soft spot for old churchy songs
• Chelsea Hotel No 2 (Lana Del Rey) I'm not sure if this cover really reveals anything new about the original, but Lana Del Rey's syrupy voice is lovely..
• Chant: 13th Hour (Redbone) Interesting Native American group that (suspiciously?) had more success in Europe than here. I do dig songs that bring in historically native acoustic elements...
• I Like It (Foxy Shazam) It's kind of Queen revisited.
• That's Love (Oddisee) Nice bit of hiphop.
• Marmalade (feat. Lil Yachty) (Macklemore) I have mixed feelings about 4-starring 2 Macklemore songs in a month.
• Bling Bling (Junglepussy) Raunchy, feminist in its way.
• (For God's Sake) Give More Power to the People (The Chi-Lites) Such a weird opening sound. Also, I love clips from Soul Train.
• Theme from "Enter the Dragon" (Main Title) (Lalo Schifrin) Finally watched this movie...
• Guaglíone (Pérez Prado and His Orchestra) School of Honk just added this mambo...
• Runs In the Family (The Roches) This was mentioned by Tom when I listed Amanda Palmer's song of the same name last month.
• Got to Get You Into My Life (Earth, Wind & Fire) I always like Tufts' Amalgamates cover... but didn't realize it was a straight forward cover of this version, not a very smart cover of the Beatles...
• Something's Got a Hold on Me (1961 Single) (Etta James) Great old R+B

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trump promising $5 million for president obama's birth certificate but only $1 million to hurricane victims is as on-brand as you can get

Aug 11 we had a repeat of playing with the Landmarks Orchestra at the Hatch Shell...



here I am front and center, both as we calmly played along with "Hall of the Mountain King" and then when we went into full on honkin' mode The month started with a lot of band: helping shutter the JP Library for renovations and then the Hatch... a big swing underdog on the 9th, trombone shorty on the 13th, and ends on a holiday note.

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On the difficulty - but continuing importance also - of peer reviewed science... includes a great p-value fiddler interactive widget.

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Cora Vs The Rooster...

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Editors are frustrated writers, and writers are... frustrated writers.

In Alaska, I had some good and thoughtful discussions with Riana and reached some new conclusions. It's a tangle of old and new thoughts, and unclear setups of cause and effect, but: for me, somehow implanted at a deep and defining level, Verbs trump Nouns. What you do, how you interact, is the critical defining factor, and pushes what one might "really be" to near irrelevance.

There's a downside to this concept: nobody -- myself included-- has intrinsic value. (Note, I'm not really defending this value, but talking about my recent discovery as it as a foundation to a lot of my moral and psychological landscape.) In this view, if you do nothing, you're worth nothing.

There are consequences to this view: I think it means I don't have a solid core of real self-worth, and so a rection formation grew up around it: as a kid, I was precocious, and I think that got parlayed into a need to be the bestest, smartest kid in the world, because that was the only game in town. Early on this led to ugly consequences: my young rage at losing a board game, say. Looking back, maybe that's because that was upsetting the natural order of the world with me at its pinnacle... but even more scarily, if I wasn't the bestest, what was I? Maybe nothing! So of course I fought against it.

(There's a seeming contradiction here -- 6 years ago I was looking at a Scientific American article about kids who get the idea that intelligence is innate and fixed, and so the important thing is to always look smart. ( http://kirk.is/2007/11/30/ ) You might think that would lead them to self-confidence, an unassailable bit of ego core, but instead it brings on fear and strategies to avoid looking like anything less, like a mere mortal. And I think that's because if they (and me) aren't the greatest then they are worth nothing.)

The other side effect of not having a sense of self-worth is I tend to be a goodie-goodie rule follower, but I think that's less of a moral sense than a fear that if I don't follow the rules, I'll be rejected and maybe thrown out, because there's nothing fundamentally worth saving.

Often getting over-intellectual about something is helpful for me, because I can purposefully use my intellect to overcome my gut feelings. This one is tougher though because, intellectually, I don't what the answer that tells me "everyone has intrinsic worth" is. Existentially speaking, the idea that people's value comes from interactions with Everything Else has a lot of appeal.

One possible intellectual out came to me in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a great bit of fanfic speculating what would have happened if young Harry Potter had been raised not by the Dursleys but by an Oxford Professor and his supportive and loving and intelligent wife... at one point, in explaining that there was no simple way of conclusively demonstrating that he (Harry Potter) wasn't the next Dark Lord, Professor Quirrell explains

"The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable."

Harry blinked. He'd just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.

So there might where the answer is: yes, what's important is what we do, not what we are, but what we are goes a long, long way to determining what we do-- and from there, intrinsic value can be potentially found.

Still, it's a long way from a weak intellectual defense to really "getting it" and living it, and nearing some kind of midway point in my life, I have to acknowledge that a lot of my grooves are kind of set, and it may always take a big dose of mindfulness to see that I'm worthwhile and can and should take on even challenges that may leave me frustrated and looking less than stellar.

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http://www.romanization.com/books/formosan_odyssey/footbinding.html Man -- if this article is onbase, footbinding might not have just been torturous for women, but something that (in an oddly meta kind of way) reshaped Chinese infrastructure and zeal to explore as well.

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oh, and RIP Seamus Heaney.

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This is beautiful. Make this jellybean count, people.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ on my UI dev blog: EMPOWER EVERYONE - What Google Hangouts, AppleTV, and ITS PDP-6 have in common
--I was looking at some of the random art and sketch programs I have on my iPad (before I realized Art Studio was hands down the best) and I found this-- err-- retouching of a photo I had taken of Amber, near Niagara Falls. I assume I made it, but have no recollection of what I might be on about, but it makes me kind of laugh...
--"Dancing at the Movies" (against Footloose) via felisdemens - thought MELM+MELAS might dig it...

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"#lessonlearned Never volunteer for an experimental drug without learning what the experiment is."
--http://twitter.com/FakeScience

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I wonder if any phone lets you record various "conference codes" to pick from and playback, for conference calls and automated menus etc...

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http://flavorwire.com/95206/john-waters-10-best-pieces-of-advice-for-functional-freaks - I still find John Waters weirdly a little hot.

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My first crush on an Irish girl...I was ten years old, and her name was Elaine. Little red-haired girl; Well, she looked like you, But if you were ten, Which you're clearly not. Not that you look old, but you get my-- I'll just stop now.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2226697/ - analysis of "Black Bart Simpson" T-shirts and related merch. If in a hurry just check out http://community.livejournal.com/pacific_novelty/31181.html

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Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

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Sometimes I really miss enforced naptime. Work is never like kindergarten in the good ways.

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http://relaxationresponse.org/steps/ - I remember reading "The Relaxation Response" a long while ago at the recommendation of a college infirmary doctor. I was impressed that it seemed more concerned with helping people in a secular way than selling either a belief system or books. It somehow seems contradictory to say "I really should add a daily Todo app entry of 'medidate'" but I think I really should.

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Finishing up a biography of Washington. His last act was to feel his own final pulse. As a society I think we've forgotten what a hero he was.

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He then led his guests to the piazza facing the Potomac, where he paced back and forth and liked to talk about farming (plow designs, the dreaded Hessian fly, crop rotation schemes). He often enjoyed an after-dinner glass of Madeira, which he held casually with his arm draped over a chair while listening impassively to any political talk that he preferred to avoid. Awkward silences did not disturb him.

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Are you ever tempted to look at the human form as something alien? Regard a face upsidedown, mouth moving in the forehead... or the odd columns of arms and legs. Yeesh, last night was the first night I got myself into bed by like, ten in almost a week... a company party, minigolf and videos with out of town friends, 3 nights of physics jam, and then throwing off my actual bedtime by falling asleep to Star Trek: Next Generation reruns on the couch...

Random thoughts on ST:TNG, from a comment I made to Nick B writing about the closing of Star Trek: the Experience

I guess now I watch with a more critical eye than I used to... the treknobabble was stupefying, along with ... I dunno, there's a certain laziness to the writing maybe? People never deal with a mysterious situation by acting like people trying to suss out a problem do, instead they just hold up signposts to the final explanation. (And sometimes the explanations are so coincidental... oh, see, it was Geordi's VISOR that was doing some dumbass handwaving subspace thing triggering your quantum universe watchamacallit, and Data was able to scan that your RNA was resonating different than EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE but you're not exploding or anything)

Two of the episodes were of the "alternate timeline" varieties, which I tend to find the most compelling to watch as well as the most infuriating. One was "Parallels" -- the scene of a desperate, long bearded Riker on a wrecked bridge trying to sabotage attempts to return him to the universe where the Borg have nearly conquered is striking. The other was "Yesterday's Enterprise" with its cool design of the 1701-C, splitting the difference between the later movies and the new show. Both fudge timeline splits in different dumb ways... neither try to explain why what alternatives we're seeing are so close to the "real" reality. (Besides the dumbness of the "War torn" Enterprise-D having started with the same crew (sans children), it would've been cool if they had thrown in some more militaristic in its design...)

Anyway. I still enjoyed the shows, but it's funny not having thought about it that much for like a decade.

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Science of the Moment
Slate's Jim Holt on The End of the Universe... he quotes Annie Hall where a psychiatrist consoles Alvy who's being neurotic about the expanding end of the universe "It won't be expanding for billions of years, Alvy, and we've got to enjoy ourselves while we're here, eh? Ha ha ha." The "Ha ha ha" makes it sound insipid, 'cause other than that it's pretty good advice.

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seeing what's on the back of a scanned in paper, much easier to read the negative; evolution-wise, guess it's 'cause night vision is useful

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I have zero urge to crossdress, but am suddenly curious about what the mechanics of walking on spikey highheels feel like.

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Feels like fall. Not just the weather; the mood? The light?

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katwinx yeah; the everywhere aspect of Twitter returns a spontaneity I had lost when I went from a palm pilot journal to a web-based blog Another fine day for manual labor in Rockport.

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Rant of the Moment

Has anyone told the Human Torch that it might not be safe to sit on top of a gas tank when one is on FIRE? Nice message to send the kids, assholes!

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Video of the Moment

--I just dig the energy of this remix, if not so much the guitars.
Apollo 440 also did the most interesting ambient remix of "Mysterious Ways" I've ever heard.

Hmm. I guess there's a danger that when I'm busier at work but doing "interesting" things that this site becomes a bit "bloggier". (Or as I put it when describing the site to someone who's not web-saavy, more "here's what I had for lunch today") I don't have the freetime that finding interesting tangental links and quotes requires. And even my recent reading on the plane hasn't been too fruitful from a quote point of view.

So, yesterday. Ksenia and I thought about going to my family's place in Ocean Grove, but it seemed like too much of a drive, and the rag-end of Ernesto promised to cut into what little beach-y time there was to be had. We also toyed with like Toronto or Montreal, but then realized the drive was even longer.

(Truth is, I'm really bad at organizing vacations. I guess I really don't "get it". Putting it into my whole "interesting/non-interesting" world view... there's lots of interesting stuff at home I haven't even seen, and I don't think tourists see the really interesting bits of a place unless they have a native guide. (Plus hotels are so frickin' expensive! A typical daily rate is pretty high, beyond my typical "mad money" threshold.)

So we decided to maybe do more of an overnight trip Monday or Tuesday. So yesterday we took care of a few errands around Harvard Square, then we went up to that new Jordans in Reading. I've been thinking about something couch-like. We start at the Fuddruckers there. Man, I still think that's about the best Burger place in the world... fantastic burgers, home fries, these banana shakes...amazing.

Then we wandered the labyrinth that is Jordans. It's kind of scarey what a maze that place is.

Then we caught Superman Returns 2D/3D at the IMAX... only having 4 scenes in 3D was kind of a bummer, but still it was decent. The "Superman = Jesus" thing was a bit heavyhanded (and I know the weirdness of that coming from two jewish guys from Cleveland has been remarked upon before.) and Lois was way too young, but still not bad.

Kirktrivia of the Moment

1. i had to go pee before writing this
2. i'm dating a nice gal from Russia right now
3. I checked the starting time with the little LCD display on my desk phone, even though I guess the clock on my laptop would've worked just as well
4. I spoke with a calypso accent at first, learning to speak on the island of St. Thomas in the virgin islands.
5. therefore my first words to my (probably racist, and not happy about his grandkid talking like an islander) were "Heyyyyyy Poppa Samm" -- you have to imagine the accent for that I'm afraid
6. I don't like it when my wrists get warm from my laptop
7. i think prose is better than poetry
8. i'm not very romantic despite running the romance poetry community website "blender of love"
9. I have the domain "mortals.be" so that http://lord.what.fools.these.mortals.be should be a valid domain
10. i like to drink a lot of water but haven't landed on a vessel I'm truly happy with. Right now I'm using a big plastic tumbler, which carrries a risk of tumbling. before this i tried gallon jugs and reusing clear plastic soda bottles, but the jugs are tough to clean out and the bottles are kind of skanky and don't hold much water
11. i think i'm about as heavy as i've ever been
12. i can seal my nostrils just by inhaling hard, and also flare them at will. the former always gets more laughs, even though as a kid I thought the latter was more impressive and unique
13. I don't think I have the writing cajones to be a famous writer.
14. I'm a touch neurotic. I'm prone to very intermitent anxiety attacks.
15. The attacks seemed to get there start around Y2k anxieties in 1998 or so, but they find various subjects to latch on to from time to time.
16. I'm paralyzingly afraid of proof coming out that I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I'd rather not try and fail then try and fail and prove my lack of inborn greatness.
17. Diet Coke with Lime is my favorite soft drink, the one I'll probably grab when presented with a full array at a store
18. I've been to Canada, Mexico, Portugal, England, and Germany. Curiously I've never been west of the Mississippi in the USA, except maybe for a half-forgotten airport stop on route to Mexico.
19. I sometimes feel like I'm in a low level digital photography contest with my ex-wife. I've been doing it a lot longer but she recently went the fancier camera route. I don't think she knows about this.
20. I changed fact #2 to make it less incriminating. (the subject changed completely, it wasn't about my romantic life at all previously)

--Response to a "Write 20 Random Facts (true or not)" in morecake's livejournal. Supposedly then you're allowed or supposed to ask many people to do likewise as minutes it took....12 in my case. Mmmmm....EB, FoSO, LAN3, Lex, 'ELM, 'ELAS, Mr. Ibis, Beau, Sarah, Nick B, ErinMaru, Aparajita...feel free to try it, it's kind of amusing. (Dylan too but I don't even know if he's around and about.)

16 is one of my biggest character flaws, previously references (top quote there.) 19 is of course patently silly, and also previously noted

Political Quote of the Moment

"Who would you more likely vote for for president--the Tin Man, who is all brains and no heart, or the Scarecrow, who is all heart and no brain?" It was a landslide: Tin Man 49 percent to Scarecrow 13 percent.

Too bad in real-life the Tin Man/Scarecrow split is more like 50/50. Ok, that's not quite fair, though Bush has made some MAJOR miscalculations, which he NEVER ADMITS TO which is what ticks me off. MSNBC had an almost-fawning biography of the man, that made me a little more sympathetic to his outlook, but from day one, he never acted with the "humbleness" that he claimed or with what a guy who GOT FEWER VOTES should.

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Thought of the Moment
Howard Stern was a repeat this morning, they had on some guy who is against California's Three Strikes and Your Out laws. It made me think: do you suppose the anti-Gay Marriage legislators who are whining about "activist judges" and "legislating from the bench" are some of the same ones who helped pass mandatory sentencing guidelines and "three strikes" laws that take away judges' discretion in sentencing?

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Web Challenge of the Moment
Here's a simple question, but I could not Google up an answer to it: "What is the closest MBTA Subway stop to the Boston Opera House?" The Opera House itself seems to be lacking a canonical website, so all you get are ticket sites. The MBTA's search site is sadly lacking...or rather the opposite, showing me tons and tons of bus routes and what not that I'll never use. The phone number I found for the place doesn't get answered. Most tourist info sites don't mention anything about T-access.

What is this, 1995?

Quote of the Moment

God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

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Image of the Moment

I don't know where exactly this logo is from, other than this BBC article on the RIAA laying down a $50K smackdown on music copiers, but I like it. UPDATE: Check the "comments" section for Bill the Splut's explanation of its origins.

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Article of the Moment
Great little bit of (most likely) foolishness at kuro5hin.org, Traffic Zoology, considering packs of highway cars as conglomerated creatures...it's hard to know exactly how serious to take the idea. Oy, time to drag ourselves back to work after the long weekend. Dang. I think the ideal workweek would be like...I dunno, 10-16 hours?

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Stupid Pop Culture Observation of the Moment
If you made a diet pill, would you call it Norexin? Yeah, that sounds like it's a healthy way to lose weight, "Gee doc, I'm having trouble with my self image because of these unwanted pounds..." "Take a Norexin^tm!" How about a pill called "Vulemic"?

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Emotional Exhibitionism of the Moment
I've put the Selections from the K & R Carousel up as this month's Blender Feature. It's an extract from the e-mail archive from a college relationship I had, some of my best and worst writing.

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Link of the Moment
From deep within the backlog (last October, actually) it's n3xt.com, a series of odd little artsy flash animations, some with some minor interactivity. A new one every month by the look of it. (If you find you can't close a given animation, look for the "X" by the link to it on the main list.) News of the Moment
Salon.com reports on Colonel Gadhafi (have they finally standardized the English spelling of his name? Here's a page that lists over 16 alternative spellings) as he mocks U.S. on coup anniversary. My favorite part was

With respect to savings, he held up a glass of water and said it was too big, and people could not possibly drink all the liquid they poured into it. Smaller glasses would stop them from throwing away excess liquid, he said.

So, smaller drinking glasses. That's what will point the way to solving whatever ails their economy.

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Lyrics of the Moment
The other day, I got this note on my guestbook:
I got Bobby Sichran's cd "From A Sympathetical Hurricane" from Disc Diggers (at Davis Square) for about a buck. It was kind of an odd cd, but I listened to it a lot that summer. So the posting he referenced was the rather obscure list of old .sigs from my Palm journal--he musta been googling his name. So, to make a more proper posting of it:

I got gravel in my paw
Dirty motor oil soaked
Down to my skin
Got gravel in my paw
Dirty motor oil soaked
Down to my skin
Broken glass in my mouth
Sparkles
Every time I grin
--Bobby Sichran, "Stray Dog"

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Joke of the Moment

A Scotsman and a Jew went to a restaurant. After a hearty meal, the waitress came by with the inevitable check. To the amazement of all, the Scotsman was heard to say, "I'll pay it!" and he actually did.

The next morning's newspaper carried the news item:

"JEWISH VENTRILOQUIST FOUND MURDERED IN BLIND ALLEY."

Kind of a so-so joke, but they said that it got the newsgroup on the front pages of major newspapers and banned at the University of Waterloo and Stanford so I thought it deserved attention here, a drop in an anti-censorship lake.