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While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

I thought of this when someone linked to an article Is making friends as an adult really hard, or is it just me? - even though the topic of the quote is romance, I think the idea is similar.

I know friends and bands - and the two overlap mightily for me over the past decade - are the main things keeping me in Boston (other than inertia) instead of retreating to NJ with my folks (with the benefit of being with and also supporting them.)

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So why is it "Boston Cream Donuts" are terrific, but a "New York Cream Donut" sounds horrific?

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Right, your voters: people who like being told what do, but don't like admitting it.

cracked on the history of the contact lens I sort of can't believe contact lenses exist. I mean I tried some for a while in high school, but yikes. What a daring thing to be around

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Spiders are the only web developers who enjoy finding bugs

I admit, stumbling on this panel was a weird way of finding out there's a "Kirk" in the Batverse.

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america is literally just such a deeply stupid cruel place like this is what smoking individualism for four hundred years gets you

I think for me the worst part of procrastination is that idea of "well what if you get lean into it, get some things done, but stuff sucks anyway?"

Or: there's still that list of longer term projects you have that will still be there when you die! (Though, conversely, you could say that that since life is a process, that would be a good sign of ambition even into old age, not a bad fossil of failure...)

Definitely a bit of the best being the enemy of the good. (Along with that general fixed mindset concept that if you feel laziness had you leaving some in the tank, some potential untapped, you have a less certain view of your own limitations.)

Though sometimes I think I lean too much into this image, which I literally have framed near my workspace:

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For grins I keep around my Gen 1 iPhone. Found this photo on its camera roll from probably not too long ago...

I kind of like it somehow, Dean's "what the hell are you doing" look.

Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn't just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it's because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don't really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they're as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn't actually happen to anyone else; it's literally *just* Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.

>So to everyone else in the galaxy,
>all humans are basically Doc Brown.

Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don't realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They're just like "yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience".

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It's so weird how you guys use Jesus like a college football mascot. You ignore the sermon on the mount, you step on the meek, you vilify the stranger, you ignore the poor, then stand up w your bruised egos and say, "Go Team Jesus!"

Nothing you do has anything to do with Christ.

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Why climate change isn't the end of the world. More mellow than the message I usually hear in my circles. Too blasé? I don't know if other languages handle it better, but "sorry" in English is a bit broken. Take phrases such as "I'm sorry to hear about your loss" -- Why is it so common to say "sorry to *hear* about"? (I guess you could also say "sad to hear about" and have the same problem.) Your hearing of it might be *when* you felt sad, but it seems odd or unsympathetic that the hearing of it is the subject of the sentence, and so what you're sad/sorry about. And then, of course, the "sorry that happened" and its retort "that's ok it wasn't your fault" or "why? you didn't cause it" - sophomoric responses but they point to that weird confusion of apology and sympathy built into the phrasing. I know I'm trying to dissect language in a way that doesn't make sense, and should generally be on the side of any common sentiment that expresses kindness, but it's a little troubling that we use such oddly ambiguous language for such an important thing. (And that's not even getting started with "I'm sorry if people felt what I did was wrong" non-apologies.)

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Mourning at the Magic Kingdom "Right after my father's funeral, I took my family to Disney World. It turned out to be the right place for me to grieve."

Weirdly my family took the same approach back in 1988.

Always kind of liked the line "Kirk! You're a graceless adolescent who just lost his father after a long illness! What are you going to do now?" "I'm going to Disney World!" Bummer Trump is too busy playing cranky racist old football-watching grandad to tweet about Puerto Rico.

And playing swaggering swingin' dick tough guy with North Korea. Great experiment, Mr. Dealmaker-in-Chief.

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Professional athletes take a knee when another player is hurt. I like that they're all taking a knee since the country is hurting.

Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.

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--W.J. Youden. Though I guess it's a shame it has been applied with too free a hand in stuff like "The Bell Curve" A few weeks ago, there was a lot of talk about the leading "So". I'm kind of annoyed I'm getting self-conscious about using it, since it's an excellent "softener" and frame. Coming out with unadorned statements of fact feels rough.

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current status: i want to eat coffee beans like cereal

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Scholastic's "Dynamite" magazine sometimes had a bonus magazine when you flipped it over, about videogames, called "Arcade". This is a comic I think I remember... corny, but written by R. L. Stine...

via

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Desert Golfing is my new Go-To mobile game. It's like an endless, zen-like calmer Angry Birds.

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"I have friends who smell their kids' hands to make sure they washed."
"That's a bad idea."
"Why? Because it shows distrust?"
"No, because if my mom had tried that, I would have made her regret it immediately."
"You'd have put something stinky on your hands just to bug your mother?"
"I wouldn't have had to. I'd have just acted a little too happy about her smelling them. 'Yes! By all means! Which finger would you like first?'"

Man, this was great. It's such a human response to technology:

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'You've got an interesting accent. Subtle. I can't place it.'
'It's text-to-speech... I was raised by smartphones.'

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I dig how my new iOS7 text tone "Synth" sounds a lot like the first little blurbles of this Soundwave the Decepticon breakdancing video

Point of the game is to take over the world by financial means only. You learn Marxist theory, and that is inseparable from fun!

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I like love

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/47607517@N04/7977944264/sizes/k/in/photostream/ - writing advice from Vonnegut, from an ad from a 1980 International Paper Ad. I spent a big part of Saturday looking at Google Book's complete collection of Spy Magazine. (Weirdly I ended up finding the "Party Poop" photo I was looking for after I had skimmed through every magazine in the index by doing a text search on the half-remembered caption-- Amber confirms Google Book's indexing is often half-assed) It's astonishing how fresh late-80s Spy looks today.

It got me thinking about other magazines I wish I had access to an archive of, and one was Dynamite, a scholastic kids magazine of the 70s and 80s. I remember being stragely fascinated by this cover with Gary Coleman:

Mostly, I was kind of amazed by the prominence of the layer at the edge of his cheek and the area under his nose...


So, you know. Mostly I want old issues of "Dynamite" because I distinctly remember certain issues were specials about video games... or rather, you'd flip the magazine over and upside down and there would another video game themed magazine there... unfortunately I can't find mention of this second magazine anywhere, even on the complete-looking and nerdishly footnoted Wikipedia Entry.

Man, also I really liked the show "Diff'rent Strokes"

Followup in 2014: looks the flipped bonus magazine was called Arcade...
--more from Myron Krueger. This stuff is commonplace now (funny how both PS3 and Xbox 360 have just recently introduced stuff that seems to have deep roots in this stuff) but when I realize he was doing some of this with hardware that's as old as I am, it's pretty humbling. (I wrote a bit more on him 4 years ago

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So the google search results page updates live now. Type 'awesomeee' and then watch it get progressively more retarded with each 'e' you add

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Life is a re-gift

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"We don't have to go Trader Joes"
"YES WE DO!"
"Oh right you need your soda!"
"YEAH YEAH!"
"You have a problem..."
"I know- OUTTA SODA!"

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We felt a little bad about cutting in front of a dozen odd people by using the Chiopotle app to order salads on the drive there, but got over it.

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Botswanan roads are famous for having big potholes and big wildlife to avoid. There's a joke among South African overland drivers: if you see two eyes in the middle of the road while driving through Botswana at night, chances are it's a giraffe standing in a pothole.

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--Thanks to the (maybe meanspirited?) People of Walmart site, many many more people now know the inexplicable video genius of RickyTic3

Pontification of the Moment

I think redundancies get a lot of flack that they don't deserve...

People who pick on "ATM machine" or "SAT test" or even "Chai Tea" or "Sombrero Hat" (ok, those are bad examples, because the foreign word actually acts as a modifier specifying a type of tea preparation, or hat) don't understand how useful redundancy can be all over language, in terms of "gratuitous" parts of speech or syllables...

Redundancies make spoken and written language more robust, able to be understood even when the transmission lines aren't clear, whether that's a literal electronic signal fading, background noise at a party, someone just reading too fast, or, in this case, a possible cultural or contextual gap that needs to be bridged.

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Video of the Moment
Wow, this Wii Wario game is really shaking things up!

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Exchange of the Moment

"I want to ask you a hypothetical question."
"My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind."

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Reading "The Postman Always Rings Twice"- "Banned in Boston", I'm such an outlaw! At least in 1934 terms.

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"don't sit cryin' over good times you've had / there's a girl right next to you / and she' just waitin' fr something to do"

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I think the amount of music I've acquired, and how I don't recall where I got most of it, points to how long and rich and varied life is.

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Boston Public Garden is such the wrong place to cut across quickly... darn you winding and verdant scenic paths! Make way for ducklings, ya The other day I saw a bumper sticker:

MOUNTAIN PEOPLE ARE WISE OCEAN PEOPLE ARE HAPPY

Are there layers to that I'm not getting? Are they talking about, I don't know, Nordic folk vs. Mediterranean, or maybe campers vs. beachgoers, or are "mountain" and "ocean" symbolic of an outlook on life? I guess I associate a level of planning and general toughness with the Mountain People, and a bit of an easier life thanks to the bounty of the Ocean for those folks, but I don't think I'm getting it.

Not many Google hits for it either.

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Defense of the Moment
The Sports Law Profesor defends Belichick's line about "interpretation of the rules" as more than a mere rhetorical smokescreen. Yeah, the article has quite a bit of unseemly legalese analysis, but it does point out some ambiguity in the "Game Operations Manual" and it makes it easier to enjoy what's likely to be heckuva season with this year's Patriots with a clear conscious.

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Video of the Moment

--File this under "vaguely artsy ideas that didn't work". This is the Alewife T station one night, where there was a tremendous amount of machinery noise echoing in the central enclosed area. The effect was very THX-1138 or Logan's Run (given the kind of modernist look of the place to begin with) but I'm not sure if that comes across here. And I broke my own rule about "don't turn the camera vertically when recording video".

Ksenia's friend Alla is in town, and we decided to go on a Whale Watch cruise and hit the aquarium...

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Link of the Moment
Via Bill the Splut, it's Bad Congressional Hair.

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Quote of the Moment

The Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous.

He's discussing the Republicans rush fearmongering about Nancy Pelosi "a woman from SAN FRANCISCO" as Speaker of the House, which he feels is an irritating viewpoint, especially from a party that seems to have lost its ideas of fiscal responsibility and general simple conservatism.

The idea of the association between high intellectual and economic activity in a region and a thriving gay population harkens back to that one study I kisrael'd a while back.

Finally got around to download the photos from my camera. Kisrael has been looking a bit text-y these days so I thought I'd share. Lucky you!

Passage of the Moment

It's hard to stop looking for something without simultaneously giving up hope. I don't know how. Buddhists learn the art of non-attachment, or they say they do. But have you ever seen a Buddhist lose his car keys? I have, and they're just like the rest of us.

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Random Gripe of the Moment
Feh. Typing "amazon.com" only works like half the time, but "www.amazon.com" works all the time. I hate typing the "www" and I always secretly look down (just a little bit) on people who instinctively type it in first when you're telling them about a new URL. Even if sometimes they're right and you need the "www".

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Image of the Moment

--82-Year-Old Pole Vaulter, via cellar.org's Image of the Day. Man, I hope I'm still physically active when I'm that age, even if not quite THAT active...

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Bad News of the Moment
EB pointed out that what passes for my "hometown", Cleveland is ranked poorest big city in the USA, despite some promising rebound activities in the 90s.

I was in the suburbs of Cleveland for most of middle school and all of high school...actually, I was van monitor during my summer job with the Catholic Diocese's Daycamp for Mentally Handicapped kids, and got to ride through those neighborhoods on a daily basis.

It's tough to hear about this, especially since those poor neighborhoods on the East Side of Cleveland were kind of pushing their way east into the towns I went to school in. Our community in Cleveland Heights (7th and 8th grade) was especially interesting, half-Black (who wanted a nice neighborhood to live) and half-Orthodox Jew (who wanted to be within walking distance of the temple.)

Article of the Moment
Another Bill piece, from last week, a Vietnam vet argues yeah, maybe Iraq is another Vietnam after all. Not that our president would know, shirking even from his Air National Guard work.

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Quote of the Moment

What you don't know won't help you much either.

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Product of the Moment
Now it's not just George Bush you can get in convenient action figure form: Herobuilders.com's villain page has Saddam Insane, Osama the Dirty Terrorist, and Massive Headwound Uday...some of 'em even talk. Flash Link of the Moment
Cute odd flash cartoon the everyday happenings of weebl. There's a whole archive with tons of other episodes, but they're all minor variations on a theme...good music though, especially that first one.

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Ad Link of the Moment
Loveblender was down this morning, which always make me nervous that files will turn up missing. Makes me think I should've read and acted on The Tao of Backup. It turns out to be a big advertisement, but it's somewhat amusing reading up 'til then.

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Quote of the Moment

From a marketing perspective, you don't introduce new products in August.

The other day, this appeared in my guestbook:

Kirk, Regarding "Mortality for Skeptics" and this whole 9/11 tragedy...would you ever like to go back in time (even to your high school days or so)and pick and choose people who were in your life more so at one time and let them know what they mean/meant to you. Would you let them know what they taught you? Was there anyone in your past that this would apply to?

--a certain someone, 2001.09.23

I don't know what to make of this. I feel like if I don't guess right about who it is (and really I'm very unsure) they'll feel bad.

I'm a nostalgic guy by nature. I value a lot of people who made me what I am today. From my high school days I probably miss my dad the most, or at least I wish he hadn't died when I was still going through my awkward early teen years, before I accomplished things that I value today. Other than that, I tend to turn to romances first, and then my circle of friends.

I'd love for whoever wrote this to contact me via e-mail, it sounds like we have something to talk about.

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Thoughts of the Produce Section 2


(Notes: The strawberry's suggestion seems all too relevant these days, considering the possibility of us over-reacting in Afghanistan. Originally the banana's thought was about the destruction of culture, but now I'm more thinking of it from the sustenance it would provide. The carrot's line is from a jazz piece I think, and the lettuce's thought is now a bit defunct. I'm not sure if basketball would interest me anyway, actually. (More on the history of Thoughts of the Produce Section))