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Note for future argumentative self, this article on how the nra rewrote the second amendment.

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I gave blood yesterday! I went to the red cross at the local Knights of Columbus, because it's like a 10-15 minute walk.

The little monument to "God's Unborn Children" outside gave me a little pause. (And also how Columbus was kind of a raging asshole whose slavemongering ways were offensive even by the standards of his day) But you know... it was a nice, air conditioned space. Like without compromising my staunch pro-choice views, I think the nation might be better when we can still co-operate on points of agreement and for good causes, even as both sides keep advocating for the issues they find important. I always thought the old Doors line should be recast "did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a wikipedia page on?" By some counts there's like 610K people off of Wikipedia's "Category: Living People", so on a world of almost 8 billion, that's like .008% of folks. So now I don't feel so bad.

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20s: OMG deep down we all feel the same

30s: you have your own experience I won't presume to know how you feel

40s: to communicate anything accurately is a miracle

50s: chaos rules our bodies are dying hold me

60s: every good thing is precious

70s: what is that light

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Regular eye exam today - Gratitude to the Universe and the Powers That Be that my eyes are in pretty good health!

My model of the universe is so visual.... that I was tempted to use the word "view of the universe" for it. I guess if something bad happened to my eyes I'd adapt, but for now I'll just be thankful I only have to pop my glasses up to read close up stuff. Abandoned ship near Dakhla city in Morocco

Via via

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Just using one backpack strap: dumbest hallmark of Generation X.

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So the NY Times article says How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.

(Do note, that is "per day"- which seems a bit weasle-y.)

I admit, it's hard to reconcile that sanguine number with the anecdotes of folks I know who got breakthrough cases: Two cousins, upstairs neighbors, an online friend, a bandmate. Like I'm not quite sure how many people I have in my extended orbit, but that seems like a lot of 1 in 5000 per days!

BUT - those people barely felt it. The vaccine finally does make COVID into what anti-maskers were saying about it last year - it is like the flu, IF you get the damn jabs.

And I'll tell you why non-vaxxers aren't more pants-shittingly scared, moved enough to do the simple and sensible thing - it's this "Monoclonal antibody" treatment. Sure, it's pricey, time-consuming, and doesn't provide the lasting protection of a simple COVID jab, but at least those darn liberals aren't singing its praises! It's a high price "Get Out of COVID 'Free'!" card for moochers who are just misinformed about vaccinations. Like it's so weird... like someone might be "hesitant" because the vaccine is "new" and slightly different than regular old Flu shot vaccines... but they'll subject themselves to this equally "undertested" treatment, once they get concrete evidence that their own ass is, in fact, on the line. Crazily frustrating. We could be moving on and getting back to normal socializing if it wasn't for these fools. This article on why the word for the Empire Strikes Back tauntaun should not be capitalized reminds me of those "I probably would have thought ewoks were stupid if I was older when 'Return of the Jedi' came out" things - I thought the chaotic horseback (err, "fathier-back") dash through the casino in "The Last Jedi" had a goofiness only surpassed by the gallop (on "orbak-back") on the surface of a Star Destroyer in "The Rise of Sky Walker". But in the 80s I totally took the "yeah we need to cavort around astride these big kangaroo-ish things because it's too cold to use spaceships" excuse at face value. Maybe because tauntans were clearly awesome.

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The other day I mentioned to Melissa I was going to write my doctor about a niggling medical issue and she asked if I had one of those Partners/Aetna/whatever systems where I could communicate with him, and I said yes, and she asked which one, and I said I had no idea, and she mentioned this struck her as a rather "male"-ish tendency... not that either of us our strong gender determinists but that there was a correlation such that a woman might be more likely to have that kind of detail remembered. (Similarly I notice both her and my aunt memorize credit card numbers, whereas I'm lucky if I succeed in efforts in remembering my "3 digit code".)

I would have put my lack of recollection into a more personal bucket of "I'm into gist, not nuance" - the same kind of explanation I have for being a little face blind, or for being able to effectively skim at great speed - and so I put info like "how to contact my doctor" in a little database-y thing I have.

What do y'all think? Is there a gender-identifying correlation here, in terms of remembering details? Melissa and I went for a hike, the "Great Blue Hill via Skyline Trail" according to AllTrails, the counter-clockwise loop with just a small shortcut back to where we parked and avoiding the final hill.
Medium level hike, some clambering up and down.


Not the finest picture, but
A. tough to get light exposure on clouds properly
B. oh and we are panting like lizards



Panoramic View from Eliot Tower. It doesn't do justice to hell well you can see Boston from there. Also, I would say I really prefer hikes with interesting goals. (And kayaking with fireworks)

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Churchill said "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." I sleep soundly in my bed because I've had a wank mate.

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getting a crop top that says "you are not immune to propaganda" with matching booty shorts that say "propaganda" on the ass

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Really bummed about the MIT Media Lab thought that article pointed out things were grossly mercantile there - "The Media Lab has long been academia's fanciest glue trap for morally elastic rich people." It's that "can you separate appreciating the art from condemning actions of the artist" question that is so much at play these days, but on an institutional level, and for tools I really appreciate like Processing and P5.

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the idea that anti-depressants are supposed to fix you is like rehydrating a raisin and calling it a grape

ready for a day of 4 different sets (not even counting the one I'm skipping for other social obligations!)

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i enjoy shots of me and melissa where our cranium sizes seem to place us as different species.

"He who says, "Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world [...] It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher."

I have such a difficult time really absorbing this. My best model of my person epistemology and morality says there are two levels: the first of simple objective facts, the second of interpretation, goals, and "shoulds"... and that the second layer is vaporously thin, and I feel ill-suited to judge anything - except to that which seems to interfere with a clear view of the underlying objective layer. There I judge like a mo-fo. At least that's why I think I am like I am; sometimes I wonder if it's just me needing to be a perfect little beacon of truth for my ego's sake. But no... I think it's more accurate to say that accuracy about the basics is a hugely important thing for me. I am a proud member of the "reality-based community" Karl Rove mocks, and when Scott Adams says no, all that's important is persuasion, I'll try to persuade anyone I can that that attitude sucks.

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Man, Florida's looking to get Chinese Hoaxed to pieces.

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Happy 50th Birthday Star Trek!!! Today represents my 5000th entry on this site as a blog! I started in the final days of the year 2000.

(As usual, I used my Date Toy tool to count the days for me. Man-- 5000... I remember celebrating my personal 10,000th day in 2001, I had a little party, "K10K". Crazy to think I've been doing this site for half as long as that.

Yesterday I did a search, and found I had only missed 5 days (each of the 5 now have placeholders) -- 2011.07.07, 2013.03.16, 2013.05.04, 2013.05.08, and 2013.05.13. (Not sure why last May was so rough!) Of course, I had missed previous entries, but had already backfilled them, generally within a day or two.

I wish I had something bigger in mind to celebrate the occasion. Like it would be a perfect time to bring it to a close, or maybe move it to tumblr. (The homebrew nature of the digital underbelly of the site is amusing to me... it's pretty good, actually, I drag and drop images to upload things to my edit tool and everything.)

The site (then http://kisrael.com/ ) had existed for a while before, but I decided to jump on this whole new "blog" bandwagon I'd been enjoying with other people. Some of it was moving the quote journal I kept on my old Palm Pilot (remember them?) to a place it was more readily shared.

For a while, in the mid-2000s, this place was a little online hub for some of my friends and family. I think FB sucked the air out of the room for that - it's difficult for one site by one person to be as compelling as a site that will stitch together a single page from LOTS of friends and family. And then spammers came and overran my humble little homebrew comments system, and I've since shut it down.

In that same era I alwso enjoyed a guest-run sidebar -- first Dylan's Sidebar, then Dylan and Sarah's, then The Sidebar of the People.

Over the years the content changed as well... the current site is (usually) less chatty than the old days. Early on I started using the "of the Moment" framing for individual things, which I guess got dropped a while back when I started putting twitter/tumblr like "short form links and quotes and images" in a special "of the Moment" box. The "real entry" / "of the Moment" dichotomy still exists, but it doesn't mean very much anymore.

I sometimes wish I had a tag system or somesuch to separate the wheat from the chaff here- make it easy for me to pick out my personal projects and "good photo days" (or special theme days like monthly musical roundups or One Second Everydays) and rambling essays from all the days of random quotes and links. I guess that's what I was doing with my Best-Of page, but it hasn't been updated for years.

One reason I've been slow to switch to tumblr, with its laudable community sharing culture, is giving up feeding this site's retrospect feature, where I can see what I posted on this date going back over the years. It was awesome 4 or 5 years ago, but now I admit the view is long... 14 plus years of material (it covers the 4 years or so of my Palm Pilot journal as well) is a bit too much.

So I dunno. I guess I'll just keep on keeping on, regardless of a nagging suspicion how my Foolish Consistency with it reflects a psychological disfunction, that changing course would reflect a rebuttal and rejection of my former self... I wish I had an easier time embracing the concept of personal change and growth. On the other hand, I still enjoy having this blog, and I refer to it quite often, and am grateful how useful it is for digging up half-remembered anecdotes and quotes and links.

5000... yeesh!

Nelson, stung by the winter cold, reminds himself of the Koyukon elders' advice 'about accepting the weather as it comes and avoiding remarks that might offend it. This is especially true of cold, which has great power and is easily provoked to numbing fits of temper.

Damn, can't find the quote this reminds of (in 2019) with a manly character (written perhaps by Tom Robbins or Robert Anton Wilson) about how "weather should either be admired or ignored"...

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Vikings Punter Chris Kluwe tears into Maryland politician about gay marriage... makes me a bit more of a Vikings fan! (Warning, NSFW language to put it mildly)

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apple trees and sky

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On my resume, under skills, I put 'has a landline.'

--by Micaël Reynaud who wrote "Guest in this motion : Van Gogh, Renoir, Cézanne, Segal, Henriquez, Desrosier, Macke, Sorolla, Von Motesiczky, Merritt Chase, Van Doesburg, Matisse, Van Dongen, Camoin."

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Rick Perry's Free Market Paradise vs. My Socialist Hellhole of Massachusetts via http://twitter.com/carsonblume --Star Wars poster -- see ones for all 3 of the Original Trilogy... (via)

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http://www.slate.com/id/2266404/ - Hey Republicans, how about some support for Petraeus? No? Moral and intellectual cowards.

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Kirk's Rule of Thumb for Online Music Shopping: in choosing between different versions of the same song, go for the shortest. It's more concentrated, the core ideas of the piece presented in a smaller package.

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The light of dawn in her room was as pale as skimmed milk.

Mighty God King (a mighty fine blog, from coverage of various comics to talk about how actually the Canadian health system is really quite decent) has pre-emptively declared this best comic moment of the year. I'm inclined to agree...

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Book idea: Kirk's Guide to Ineffective Childcare. Chapter 1: Consoling a hungry infant w/ full diaper.

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We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist.

"C'est la Vie!"
accepting that
"this should not be!"
but coping
more stoically; philosophically--
"C'est la Vie..."
--a poem I twittered the other day; I'm trying to use "C'est la Vie" as a bit of a mantra to preempt or quench these little bursts of frustrated outrage I experience on a regular basis.

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Such a pleasure of autumn, to kick back on a Sunday afternoon or night, put on a football game you don't care about, websurf, maybe sleep...

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New favorite dumb car name: the Nissan "Murano". Because "Idiota" just didn't scan.

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a massage can have a message, but a message can't have a massage

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J.Brown:"You don't have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got- Don't turn it loose, 'cause it's a mother."-best drumsolo advice

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Nice, got a ticket for tonights soldout-record-breaking Red Sox game! (Why do I never have my Sox hat or sweatshirt when this happens...)

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Kevin S points out that soldout-record-breaking game SOUNDS cool, but people at the next night, or the next, etc etc, will have it too Man, digital photography really changes things, doesn't it? What a bummer: the times of my life I find it easiest to be nostalgic about are also the least well-documented (heh, maybe there's a hint of cause and effect there) simply because photos cost money to develop then. And while there was something special about the "ooh, open the envelope and see how they came out!" moment, it wasn't a substitute for the instant feedback and ability to re-pose shots that didn't quite come out.

There are some odd side effects of this sea change... times when I happened to have a camera around (generally this one decent 35mm point and shoot I inherited from Nana) loom larger as I think of my past. And, frankly, my standards for photos of people I cherish have gone up, whereas before the photos I liked were usually "just snapshots".

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Video of the Moment

--Ronald Jenkees is...amazing. Unabashedly in love with his music, he reminds me of some of my comp sci professors, if they could do what they did on a musical keyboard instead of a computer one. He's more focused on jamming than beats, but does both pretty well.

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Game and Links of the Moment
Crayon Physics (Windows only?) is a lovely little creation game... use a virtual crayon to draw boxes (and other shapes, though things tend to get boxified) to push a red ball into a star. As you create each box, it begins to fall, topple, and otherwise follow the laws of game physics.

Kloonigames is on a game-a-month kick, I need to check out all the entries in the Season 1 Overview sometime soon. (Did that. Some real delight in there. Reminds me I need to catch up on Orisinal some day.)

In other game design coverage, Bad Designer, No Twinkie! are articles from a game design blog that discuss what NOT to do when designing a video game. Mr. Ibis and Co. is in town, and so Saturday evening where having a party, like around 6, aftern an afternoon of multiplayer videogaming. Any regular readers in the Boston area are welcome to come join in for either or both parts (hi Candi!)... I'm having a sneaking suspicion that evite is not a reliable way of getting invites any more, so tonight I have to make a plethora of last minute phonecalls.

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Quote of the Moment

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend their lives.

But hell, that's how I spend my life as well. Passage of the Moment

It took me twenty-nine minutes to get to the Van Nuys Hotel.

Once long ago it must have had a certain elegance. But no more.

The memories of old cigars hung to its ceiling and of its leather lounge chairs.

Room 332 was at the the back of the corridor, near the door to the fire escape. The hall that led to it had a smell of old furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives.

The hotel dick, a real dope by the name of Flack, told me that the party in Room 332 had checked in at 2:47 P.M. under the name of Dr. G. W. Hambleton, El Centro, California.

Of course I had to pry it out of him. There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the mirror and wonder.

Great stuff, the comic really captures the noir sensibility. I love the world-weary self deprecation of that final bit.

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Milestone of the Moment
100 billion bics. Yow. One of those under-appreciated technologies, I'd say.

Quote of the Moment

When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.

He seems very fond of the "rambling" type of essay, but it has to be interesting, and ideally should come up with a few surprises.
I wonder though...it seems like when you're a kid you know it all, but when you're old you're too stodgy and crusty to change your opinion...there's only some time in-between when you're flexible and adaptable and trying to work stuff out.

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Statue of the Moment

--At the risk of sounding totally parochial and Beavis-and-Buttheady, what the heck is this statue / fountin center in the Boston Public Gardens all about? Two naked kids, the girl riding the boys back. And I'm not sure what the boy is doing but I guess that's where the water comes out.

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Shills of the Moment
Two guys mentioned in the movie "The Corporation", ChrisAndLuke.com had an interesting strategy of being nothing but pure "spokesguys" to help raise cash for college. And it looks like it worked...it was wacky enough that they got a lot of press on talk shows and what not, so their sponsor actually got exposure, and they got money. Their original slideshow was amusing, especially the one that goes Sponsor Us: We Will Eat Your Cereal Even If We're Not Hungry!

Oy, yesterday was terrible for hometown fans in Boston...after way out slugging the Yankees in the previous two games, the Red Sox fail to sweep, losing 3-1, and the Patriots 4-0 preseason doesn't do much to mitigate their 31-0 defeat at the hands of Buffalo...I guess maybe giving them our old quarterback and losing a core defensive guy to them because of a contract dispute might not have been such a hot idea. Not to be too much of a fairweather fan, but I have a few feelings for Buffalo, they were the first team I ever started to root for, back when I lived in upstate New York.

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Comic Panel of the Moment

--Also pointed out by Bill, this panel of powerful nostril superpowerness, from the short-lived comic Fly Man.

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Computer Science Quote of the Moment

A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions that make it fail.

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Video of the Moment
Via Bill the Splut, an 8bit look at D+D. This reminds me of some old promotional video for a video game...Diablo 2? Something...that took a similar look at the old gaming table.

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Links of the Moment
Two links that complement each other in odd ways. The first is a Globe and Main rant by Sci-Fi author Spider Robinson about the long-term decline of Science Fiction, how it has been supplanted by Fantasy and a few Franchises with "Star" in their name. The second is a link I was previously planning to use, an interesting crossover people are making as a roleplaying game: SteamTrek. "Steam Punk" is a genre that extrapolates an alternate past where certain things are different, some technology problems were easier to solve in the 1800s or so than they were in our world, and a technology emerged that, to a modern person, seems like an odd blend of the unbelievably high-tech with the quaint and charming (like steam engines.) (Incidentally, The Difference Engine is a terrific book in that genre for any computer history literate geek , what if Babbage's computation devices were in fact engineer-able by the tool quality of the day, and inspired a Victorian London cultural revolution.) Anyway, Steam Trek has a British Aetherfleet exploring solar system full of aliens that is suspicously like the Star Trek galaxy. Some very clever stuff. Video Game Quote of the Moment

Man will always use his most advanced technology to amuse himself.

Crane in this case is David Crane, creator of Pitfall! and many other important games. From this inteview that was on slashdot a while back, though I found that Meet David Crane from a 1984 issue of "High-Res Magazine" had more information, so you might want to check that out instead. (Note to future self- this is NOT the article where he talks about how you could probably couldn't do Atari 2600 version of Ghostbusters)

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IMDb Quote of the Moment

"But popcorn - ah, popcorn was made for watching the world go by. Look. I stick my hand in the bag without taking my eyes off the street. I throw some popcorn in my craw. I chew...and I'm still looking. That's what I call class."
"Sure. Peanut eaters don't know how to live."

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GWB Political of the Moment

He characterized his consultations as less an exchange of ideas than an effort to "see the leaders of the world and remind them of the facts."

This quote reminds me of everything I hate about the administration. 'Moral Clarity' my ass, it's just a deliberate myopia that makes the world look like Us=Good Them=Bad. Wow, keeping up this theme of powers of 10 milestones, (kirk10k (days), kermitcar50k (miles) or figure out your own milestones here) Unix turns 1,000,000,000 seconds old today. According to
     perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1e9';
it's at 9:46 tonight, Eastern time.

This matters to geeks, because the standard Unix time stamp is the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, GMT, and it shows up often. Actually there may be some minor Y2K-like effects on various systems that store that timestamp as a 9-digit number, or assume you can sort the timestamp alphabetically. (Which was an assumption that worked from March 3, 1973 'til today.)

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Joke of the Moment

Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers.

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News of the Moment
Finally, wrapping up today's theme of Time: Man, I've been through some long concerts before but this one takes the cake.