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I use mardi gras throws (the more hip term for "beads") on my tuba for decoration and as back up percussion. As the loops break I retire them and put them in jars...

Just the other day I realized that two of the main problems with them might cancel each other out: they break and they are tough to untangle. But that might just mean: they can be repaired! Re-tangling a broken loop at the end by twisting the beads around each other seems like it might be weirdly stronger than a lot of the basic connections? I'll have to make some experiments to see how they survive under real-world conditions, but still...

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Borrowing Blockbusters: The Best, Worst and Weirdest Star Wars Knock Offs This was fun to watch.

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Sure, I WAS Team Pfizer - but now that Moderna has a vaccine with a name as macho as I am - SPIKEVAX (all caps) how could I resist?

Also I like that the Walgreens worker jdgaf about band-aid placement for proper logo display- same for the flu shot bandaid on the other arm...

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Once upon a time I read a beautiful set of short stories "We Find Ourselves in Moontown" by Jay Gummerman. In one of them the main character is watching a rerun of "The Fugitive":

I turn the set back on and close my eyes. "I want to understand you," a woman is saying to The Fugitive. "You will in time," The Fugitive tells her. "May I use your car?"

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in class on middle egyptian language & literature i did a couple years ago, we translated a letter which began 'What does it mean that I have not heard from you? My heart wonders what you are doing 1000 times a day.' At end of lecture, professor reveals the letter was never sent

(On a tangentially related note, I reformatted the old K+R Carousel, this huge stock of love letters from back in the day.)

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Happy 40th Birthday of the Smiley!

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Related: I'm ok that emoji have become more popular than punctuation smilies, but bummed that the "laughing so hard I'm crying" ones are 2 of the top 5 spots in the USA- I use plenty 😃 to round off the edges of my casual writing, but the laugh-crying ones are trying to hard, like they seem dishonest, the LOL of the emoji world...

More on the history of the smiley at Lunduke CONTENT WARNING: Violence (esp. for folks who love Star Trek)
Highlite to see:

/Highlite I feel like this writer is using a rather idiosyncratic definition for empathy vs sympathy vs pity like saying empathy is where you actively worked to feel compassion but sympathy is where you feel it naturally because of similar circumstances for yourself? (Which is usually closer to the hallmark of empathy...)

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"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now... The more you dwell on the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.

Listening to the Judge John Hodgman podcast (recommended) and the topic is saying God Bless You after someone sneezes. As a precocious kid I was all too happy to explain that I said "Gesundheit" instead, that it was the German word for health, and "Bless You" was based on old superstition about demons getting in or out during the sneeze or something, and was therefore a little spiritually suspect. (These days I prefer "Gesundheit" just because it's more fun to say loudly.)

I guess that's an early instance of me favoring objective Truth (i.e. the nature of God and demons) over cultural practice.

Actually, I'm still a little fuzzy on the verb "to bless". Like, asking God to bless us or someone else makes some sense (even if it's asking God that whatever his preordained divine plan was, couldn't it pleased be tweaked a bit in our favor?) but then in the Bible you see people called upon to Bless the Lord, etc. Is that a reference to some kind of inner divinity humans carry? Or, is it from God to human a blessing is like good fortune or happy attribute (in the "she was blessed with a keen wit" sense) but from human to God it's like general praise and thanks?

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a great response to Shane Gillis and the art of the non-apology.

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Saw David Byrne's "American Utopia" the other night.... balcony seats at the Colonial - not good if you have vertigo!

Fun show - I didn't really grow up with Byrne's music, but some of his later collaboration songs like "Toe Jam" and "Lazy" were included. The set was a giant bead curtain, that framed the stage like the back and 2 sides of a giant cube with the main performance in the middle. Some of the songs had a lot of fun with light and shadows - making figures giant or distored or in one case like a b+w TV screen ala poltergeist. QWOP cosplay:

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Yarr. I have heard precious little about Talk Like a Pirate Day this year. Ye scurvy dogs.

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I want to see Dexter from Space Ace and Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair in the next Smash Brothers. About the Juggalos March on Washington. I didn't realize how serious that "they're a gang" label the FBI socked them with was, and how it screws with a lot of lives.

Might as well called The Salvation Army a gang. Or Jehovah's Witnesses - and they're recruiting.

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The juxtaposition of some deep and profoundly sad emotion against the semi-technical details of the composition and goals, of making the photographs deliberate... it's a little jarring. It can almost seem a little tawdry, but sometimes making good worthy art – art that measures up to the magnitude of the occasion – can't be left to happenstance.

So many of us have cameras in our pocket now, and many of us our becoming more fluent in a new visual language (usually pretty casual - but with the right filter capable of moments of quick beauty). Maybe we should all take a bit more time to set up some shots of people we love, photos that will tell the story about this time and this place and this person. Thelonious Monk made a list for his fellow musicians 1. Monk’s Advice (1960)., transcribed by soprano sax player Steve Lacy in a spiral-bound notebook.

• Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean that you don’t have to keep time.
• Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head when you play.
• Stop playing all that bullshit, those weird notes, play the melody!
• Make the drummer sound good.
• Discrimination is important.
• You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
• All reet!
• Always know
• It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.
• Let’s lift the band stand!!
• I want to avoid the hecklers.
• Don’t play the piano part, I am playing that. Don’t listen to me, I am supposed to be accompanying you!
• The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.
• Don’t play everything (or everytime); let some things go by. Some music just imagined.
• What you don’t play can be more important than what you do
• A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.
• Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig & when it comes, he’s out of shape & can’t make it.
• When you are swinging, swing some more!
• (What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as possible!
• Always leave them wanting more.
• Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.
• Those pieces were written so as to have something to play & to get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal!
• You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drummer who didn’t want to solo).
• Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like himself.
• They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.

Had my first quick lesson with manual transmission thanks to Llara.

I learned: A. I am not a magical prodigy at this, despite understanding most of the theory. B. Clutches have more "give" than I was expecting, I was thinking of them as an "on/off" kind of thing, but the is it/isn't it question makes the seessaw trick a bit tougher.

So I'm at that stage where I understand how tough it can be but caught a glimpse on how nice it must be once you're used to it- but for now I SO appreciate my humble car's automatic

Stick is so European, by which I mean: you can't do this and drive and eat a cheeseburger, that's damn near Un-American!

Marget's nurse in earlier years, said God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good Christian. She meant to help in the providing, to make sure, if she could find a way.

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"Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it."
"But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?"

This book (a recommendation embedded in Vonnegut's "A Man Without a Country") is terrific: humanist, humane, and subversive.

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Why I Hope to Die at 75. Thought-provoking piece. Via Next Draft, which is the best email newsletter I've ever subscribed to.

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A while back someone posted about a website that made it really easy for people to indicate which of several date/time options was convenient for them... I remember thinking the name didn't have a lot to do with the site function itself. Any idea?

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http://doodle.com/ was the one I was thinking of... very easy to make little "when can you make it" polls.

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Oh, man. Too true.

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From Augusten Burrough's "Magical Thinking":

I smiled and nestled against him. He kissed my shoulder. I'd never felt closer to him because I did know that he was mad and yet it didn't matter: He loved me enough to be mad at me and not then have to reconsider the entire relationship.

You know, I think I have trouble feeling that in general, though I don't think it's the fault of the people who love(d) me. I think sometimes we forget about how devastating Hurricane Katrina was... found a reference to this song w/ Chuck D and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and this powerful slideshow...

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"Yarrr... I'll scalawag the lot o' ya, yarrrr, with the walk-the-plank. Keel-haul." I'm not a very good pirate #talklikeapirateday

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Lately I've stumbling with the UIs of GarageBand and Xcode, fumbling without grokking the core interaction metaphors... the silver lining is that it's a chance for empathy with my non-techy friends and family I try to help, where the OS and browser can also seem opaque and inscrutable.

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http://www.xkcd.com/1110/ - today's xkcd is amazing. Play with it, then check out the "cheat mode" at http://xkcd-map.rent-a-geek.de/

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"So are you saying we're related to monkeys?"
"I'm saying you're related to yeast."

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I'm not sure if Netflix's streaming selection is strong enough to stand alone. Not having "ok, physical delivery" as a fallback will hurt. I think Netflix will now mostly be good for watching seasons of TV shows- otherwise might as well buy things a la carte with Vudu or whatevs.

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I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.

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Do people know the expression "net-net"? As in the bottom line, getting to the point AFTER weighing pros/cons? Realizing it might be obscure

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At my UU Science and Spirituality group, the idea that Evil isn't "choosing bad" per se, it's choosing bad BECAUSE it's bad. Which goes along with my idea that deliberate, subjectively recognized evil is rareish; but people might be prioritizing an "ungood" good...

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1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.

--There's been a lot of news about Super Mario's 25th Birthday -- this is one of my favorite bits. Reminds me a lot of Myron Krueger's early Artifical Reality studies.
--impressed by the deftness of this Python/Trek mashup. (via)

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Photoblog of the Moment
So I'm not sure if I'll be able to match the photoblog I made in Japan last year, in terms of # of photos, in terms of internet access, in terms of Europe not being as exotic as Japan. (Heck, in terms of me lying about the apartment too much, though I'll try not to overdo that)

Still, here's a day of it. Because I didn't think things through, I ended up having an overnight stay in London. But it worked out ok, I got to see a little bit more than I would have otherwise, and maybe a layover in an English-speaking but foreign country helped ease the transition...

So, leaving Friday... Yarr, almost missed talk-like-a-pirate day but can't actually muster up the energy to do anything about it.

A "repository for banks' bad debt" sounds a little sketchy, though the markets seem to love it. Over other 30 days this past year have had swings of over 250 points, so while these 400-500 point things are bigger, and you wonder about the medium term trend, it's funny that it's getting all this attention. (Heh, in researching that last statement I realized finance.yahoo.com has lots of free historical pricing data. Maybe I should research some of my wacky correlation ideas -- though going from simulated "paper trading" to the real thing is a step I'd be very cautious about.)

Finally, the other day I twittered about supporting both the Houston Food Bank (boingboing linked to an appeal for them specifically) and Salvation Army Emergency Relief. My mom (who currently works at the National Headquarters of The Salvation Army mentioned:

Major George Hood, who is the National Community Relations Section here told us that there simply has not been the public response to Ike that we saw, say, to Katrina, but the costs are enormous.

So even if you're worried about your 401K, but with the wolf is still far from your door, you might consider a donation.

Oh, actually, in other Texas news, Bob Barr thinks Republicans and Democrats should not be on the Texas ballot for president because they missed the filing deadline -- they hadn't had their conventions at that point. I think he has a strong point about rule of law and the de facto enshrinement of Two Parties Now and Forever Amen.

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Video of the Moment


--Ninja Kitty is like the world's best player of Red Light / Green Light. (2019 update: aka Kitty Gets Sneakily Close to Owner)

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Quote of the Moment

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

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You can't have human without the hum.

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He knows he's written many of the chapters of his life. Had some good romances, not in a bad place. But: no rewriting. This scares him.

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He doesn't mind "spoilers". His passion is not for what they did but how they did it. In this life, he'd rather know; he'd rather know. Sigh. Friends are going through some rough times but I will attempt to carry the day with a series of trivial little amusements and diversions.

One of life's little lesson: you know, there's only a certain range of area on pants where you can put a pocket and make it easily accessible while the wearer is walking. This is the kind of lesson you learn when you have a pair of otherwise fine cargo pants with ripped top pockets, and so you put your wallet in a pocket lower down, and thus have to do a graceless little crouch walk when you remember you need your wallet to get through the gate of the MBTA.

(And by "you" I mean "me".)

Plus, putting objects in a low pocket leads to odd swinging. Put a heavy object (such as a camera) in there and get walking and you can bang a knee something fierce.

(And again, feel free to substitute "me" for "you" in that scenario.)

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News Item of the Moment

SNELLVILLE, Ga. -- Police questioned an armless man Monday about the death of his neighbor.

Relatives of Charles Keith Teer, 47, claim he died after the armless man head-butted and kicked Teer during a fight. [...] Teer's relatives told police the men were arguing over a woman.

Teer's sister said the armless man attacked her brother.

"They got into a big confrontation, a verbal confrontation and a fist fight and he came after my brother, he came will full force, and head butted him as hard as he could," said Lynn Elliot.

She said Teer collapsed and died a short time after the fight.

It's clear that even severely handicapped people are not as helpless as the popular imagination may assume. Of course, there's a humorous element to this tragedy... I mean, there's a town called "Snellville"?

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Link of the Moment
It's been a long while since I've kept up with the Onion (though lately I've been keeping up with What Do You Think? thanks to the Slate sidebar appearance) but 14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid seemed really funny. I guess because those "American Apparel" ads, keeping that whole Calvin Klein grunge sex vibe (but losing most of the underage factor) kind of sneak up on you, and "American Apparel" is a brilliantly bland name.

The Onion might have jumped the shark with their massively uplifting (in the sense of "screw them, we're keeping on") response to 9/11. That was a cultural milestone, but for whatever reason they seem to have lost their place at the center of 'net culture since then.

I feel kind of bad for losing track of the AV Club.

So this is Seattle! I got in town around 4 last night, so I figured it might be the best chance to explore a bit. And I splurged a tad and decided to give Canon one more chance, with its weirdly PSP-looking SD630. Avast! It is Talk Like A Pirate Day! Aargh, but it ain't Blog Like A Pirate Day, so I can't be arsed to rewrite the link down below!

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Propaganda of the Moment

--from this GREAT Worth1000 contest, remix propaganda art. You only need to read down about half the page, then they get lame. The "Keep 'Em Phallic" one is also brilliant.

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Link of the Moment
Hmm, I was wondering what was the least dangerous part of the country to live in, disaster-wise...slate.com did an analysis and New England does pretty well in general...though in the end they announce:

Slate's "America's Best Place to Avoid Death Due to Natural Disaster": the area in and around Storrs, Conn., home to the University of Connecticut.

Now you know!

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Damnation of the Moment
DAMN IT, my comment spam filters are leaking...I think they're useless "feelers" to learn about how to post a comment, automated bits of meaningless praise like "Your blog is realy very interesting." and "Thank you for the info!". MOTHER F'ERS! I wish I owned 100 automobiles, so I could take the fingers of the people who wrote these scripts and slam them in the doors of those hundred cars, again and again and again and again and again.

Quote of the Moment

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

I'm not entirely sure of the context, but I think it predates the "my milkshake brings all the boys in the yard."

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Journal Entry of the Moment
Subway Series: SHOW TUNES 2, FUNDAMENTALISTS 0.

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Video of the Moment
Goofy yet information rich video: Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black. The typeface "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers". It amazes me how many typefaces and fonts there are out there sometimes.

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Sage Advice of the Moment
kirk: man, i'm getting some stuff done and i still have plenty of time for more, but i really feel like i'm pissing the day away...
LAN3: hehe. I like to do that on Sunday, though I was given an open invite to call a cute woman if I'm going to see a movie today, so I'm tempted to get up and go far far earlier than I normally would.
kirk: w00t!
kirk: but i do have a cold, and i could theoertically say i'm 'recovering' from the party-hardying last night.
LAN3: hehe. You don't need an excuse to piss away a Sunday. It's what people do.
--March 28 2004. I find great solace in that line "You don't need an excuse to piss away a Sunday. It's what people do." Yarr! It be National Talk Like A Pirate Day! You best be talkin like me, or we'll have you taking a long walk down a short plank to Davey Jone's locker! Yarrr! (Dangit, my pirate voice sounds like the Sea Captain on the Simpsons trying to speak ebonics. Ah well.)

Optical Illusion of the Moment

--Yarrr, you'll be thinking' these little seeds are spinning when they aren't spinning at'all. It's like you were too deep into your cup of ale, yarrr, y'scurvy dog. This and a regular pirate's treasure of other tricks on the eye can be seen at this here webpage. Yar.

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Java Applet of the Moment
Ahoy! This be some more booty for yer eyes, Arrrrr....the coolest special effect I've seen across th' seven seas. Natalie Portman as Matrix Code, and a higher-rez and byootiful version, a Portman Reloaded -- Object404.com seems to have a pirate's treasure o' neat stuff, go look or I'll keelhaul the lot o' ya. (and he says he be lookin' for a job, if you need a guy for yer ship's crew.)

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

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Line of the Moment

This program runs at a blistering speed. And by 'blistering speed', I'm refering to the blisters formed on your fingers while drumming them on your desk, waiting for the damn thing to get finished.

Link of the Moment
Some people think funerals should carry a certain dignity. Peachtree Caskets begs to differ! Where else are you going to go for a casket with a lighthouse, or a golf course? ("Fairway to Heaven") Scroll all the way to the bottom for the best one of the batch.

Exercise for the Class: pretend you have little taste. What would you want on your custom casket? What graphic would represent your biggest interests in life? I'm afraid mine would have a picture of Mario or an Atari logo or something like that.

Figure out how to put large reproductions of photos of the deceased family and/or pets on caskets, and you'd make a mint.

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Geek Link of the Moment
You know, I know it's not really a fair opinion for a User Interface Geek to have, but sometimes it seems that users are kind of dumb. It's pretty amazing what people don't realize about their environment...are techies that different?

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Bushism of the Moment

There's an old saying in Tenessee, we have it in Texas...you probably have it in Tenessee too......Fool me once, shame on......shame on you... ...but fool me-you can't get fooled again.

Jeez I think our car companies are sitting on a goldmine, if only they'd realize it. Afghanistan is very rugged terrain, there's a ton of money being poured in there, and I believe that Muslims deserve an SUV that reflects their lifestyle:


Of course, not to be out done, we Americans need a car that shows our determination to "rid the world of the evil-doers", and whose name echos the (admittedly ill-chosen) words of President Junior:


I mean, who needs a tough, durable vehicle more than the Islamic fighters? And what vehicle is more American than an SUV? These facts, combined with a transportation-vacuum created by people's reluctance to fly, might help revitalize America's struggling manufacturing sector...