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The Happy City Index has released its list of happiest cities in the world, with mainly European cities making their gold tier. They tend to have four elements in common: prioritizing people over cars, access to nature, plenty of museums and a diverse food scene.

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A friend who has returned to India sent me this article The Language Trap, showing how (just as a for instance) most USA political conceptions will not map neatly onto an understanding of what goes on in India, and vice versa.

narratives about doomed love that aren't romantic in nature. the love between siblings who understand each other the most but are growing apart no matter how much they try to come back to one another. the love between friends whose life paths pull them apart and they never see each other again, only remembering the face of a once kind childhood. the love for a hometown that year by year becomes less and less the one that raised you until you are a foreigner in your own backyard. there was no stopping it. the love was there and it mattered and you can never come back again.

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oh noes, I need to start and stop another email soon!

Striking photo! also interesting to see how Ukraine forces cover up the Z on captured equipment...


...as despicable as what the Z stands for it was an amazing bit of branding. Though at this moment, in retrospect, it seems like less a sentiment of populist support and more a signal of the decay and unprofessionalism of so much of the Russian armed forces.

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I did my first kickflip today since breaking my femur 7 months ago.
It was difficult.
It was painful.
It was sloppy.
It was [possibly] payback for me harassing strangers to do the same.
But it was gratifying beyond words.
Find your metaphorical kickflip and don't quit on it.

In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software "makes" the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted--*of course* we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.

I've thought about this passage, or at least this book as the source of similar sentiment, often over the years, and was surprised to see I hadn't placed it in my common place blog before.

Currently I'm using it to bolster a defence of bands I'm in; I'm getting some heat from one of its members that it's not taking the music seriously enough.

But I think the idea that music is shaped by the space is mirrored by how it's also shaped by who shows up. My HONK! music tends towards the motley. Not just activist bands, but open community bands who will try to work with people at all levels and from all backgrounds - and, which might be the sticking point, doesn't necessarily demand a lot of time "woodshedding". (Maybe this reflects my own laziness about practicing. I've always coasted on tuba parts being less technical and my own constantly being in about 4 bands at once, and so I'm maybe too reluctant to tell people they need to hunker down.)

So we have a mix of people who maybe just had music-as-an-elective in high school and college and are getting back to it, or even some people who just started with ear training School of Honk, against, like, lapsed escapees from Berklee. We draw music influence and sometimes charts from lots of places (probably especially other HONK bands...) in the NOLA street tradition and trad jazz and maybe a little klezmer and African and Central/South American and Caribbean - like in a way it reflects a beautiful patchwork society. I mean not as much as we'd like at times- achieving diversity and looking like the less-gentrified parts of neighborhoods we're in is a challenge. Like if you're trying to frame most music as being of a culture, our is more loosely knit than many other traditions that come from a specific community - like, progressive liberals, often white, who live in small atomic families, often are living far from where they grew up, and who dig on bringing in lots of musical influences to their playing.

I've always thought that musical performance is usually leaning either towards connecting with crowds or impressing other musicians. The best can of course do both, but in a world of part-time musicians, I think it's ok to focus on the former more than the latter. "3 chord wonder" punk bands could rock the hell out of their venues! And while that's not who we are or what we do, I think it's a good reminder that even simpler music can be emotionally resonate.

I'm always going to worry that I'm not being harsh enough with the band, that maybe it could benefit from more tough love on demanding practice, more careful tuning, work on intonation, emphasis on dynamic, and thoughtful design of percussion. And my fundamental inability to judge critically (something that's really fundamental to my temperament, but that's a different story) is some of why I usually shy from an official role of "leader" - along my usual preference for consensus over top-down authority. (Also, I used to hold the idea that HONK bands - like my high school marching band - must always shun music stands, but have come to learn to split our repertoire into stuff we can march around with and pieces we will be stationary for, I think a decent compromise)

And we've lost a few of the "escapees from serious musical pursuit" players who get frustrated with the group, see its level as more of a ceiling than a floor. It's a bummer when that happens, because it's usually a loss acoustically and pedagogically , and of course I get filled with second-guessing. But still, I'm pretty happy with what my bands are able to do and the community they bring to my life and the chance to have musical fun for myself and others. I spend a nice low key week w/ my Mom and Aunt at the family's vacation/retirement homestead at the Jersey Shore (Melissa alas had to stay in Boston).
So there is this set of songs that my grandfather Papa Sam would sing along with his daughters Betty and Susan that are part of my family lore (along with a few stragglers from summer camp) and so I enrolled my folks in a project to get them on video.
Entry 1: The song "Titanic", a light hearted but kinda macabre ditty:

Lyrics:
O they built the ship titanic
to sail the ocean blue
and they thought they'd built a ship
that the water'd never get through
but the Good Lord raised His hand
said the ship would never land
it was sad when the great ship went down

CHORUS:
O it was sad it was sad it was sad (too bad)
It was sad when the great ship went down
to the bottom of the
*SEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEA
*husbands and wives little children lost their lives...
it was sad when the great ship went down

It was off the coast of England
and not too far from shore
when the rich refused
to associate with the poor
so they sent them down below
and they were the first to go
it was sad when the great ship went down

[CHORUS]

so they threw out all the lifeboats
to the dark and stormy sea
and the band struck up
O Nearer My God to Thee
Little children wept and cried
as the waves came over the side
It was sad when the great ship went down

[CHORUS]
(to the bottom of the sea!)

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The [1980's Spring/Summer Football league] USFL was a modest sensation until Donald Trump purchased the league's New Jersey franchise and forced the league to abandon its spring schedule for the the fall in order to compete directly with the NFL. Not long after, the USFL collapsed.

From sports franches to casinos to nations, the man really has a reverse midas touch, every his hand rests turns to crap.

The Wikipedia page mentions the play may have been to force the NFL to merge - and they even won an anti-monopoly lawsuit against the NFL. And won $1. But under antitrust law, that $1 was tripled!

(Another fun detail from Wikipedia's page on the USFL: "Trump's failure to purchase the [Buffalo] Bills [in 2014] was cited as a major factor in his ultimately successful decision to run for President of the United States the next year")

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Tim-buddy, until I see the a near equivalent of this from the democrats, I'm going to cling to my view that your opinion (admittedly stated 12 years ago or more, but I don't think you're likely to recant) that Republicans and Democrats are just about as bad when it comes to gerrymandering is R,O,N,G wrong.

Do you really think so many Democrats are just that much better about following instructions about "burn your notes and tapes on this"?

A leaked audio recording reveals how state lawmakers are taught to trash evidence, avoid the word gerrymander, and create an appearance of bipartisanship.

And new computer programs have made it worse.

I have some minor sympathy for the concept of the "Goldilocks principle", that they can neither pay too much attention to race or too little, but still. They are pretty damn blatant about their agenda, vs say California Iowa and New Jersey that according to the piece are getting fairer and more competitive maps with independent commission or bipartisan efforts.

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via

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This one kind of makes me think about gravitas. My view of the importance of seeking the confirmable objective truth makes me a bit susceptible to things stated in a confident, intellectually-sound sounding manor - I assume the speaker has done their due diligence and isn't putting their own personal agenda ahead of the facts...

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Apple designers get a serious case of show-offness when it comes to make their phones as thin as possible, even at the cost of battery life and durability. One of the silver linings is that phones-in-cases become much less bulky than they were in the iPhone 5 era or before - the case just brings it up to being a typical size oldschool phone, as if the case were part of it - and so now everyone gets to pick how their phone looks and we don't look quite as much like the Apple drones so many of us Boston techies are.

I like getting custom-made ones with art by Jame Harvey - the indie artist who has done work fo DC, as well as my own comic on mortality. Here they are:





And here's the latest (first one where I didn't technically commission the art, though I helped fund the Kickstarter...



Of course, lock screens can be pretty hip too... the new one on the right is a zoom in of a poster I ordered from him when he was doing freelance commissions:


I also made a wallet or two.

The cases were mostly ordered from zazzle. For what it's worth, two of those cases were wooden, which I wouldn't recommend if you need it to last more than a year. Got a iPhone 8 yesterday, but for some reason didn't achieve instant spiritual enlightenment? Maybe I should have held out for the iPhone X? *chin scratch emoji*

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Huh! using FB to lay tracks, acoustically as well as visually:

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One Last Thing Before I Go - fantastic radio episode / podcast by This America Life. Hearing about the "Phone of the Wind" was moving. Pretty decent month. 4-star stuff in red.

• You Really Got Me (The Kinks) These guys were really ahead of their time. (Looking to whip up a version for JP Honk)
• Ghost Town (Hot 8 Brass Band) Another song we're thinking about for JP HONK, especially for halloween.
• I Wish (Stevie Wonder) Been on a Stevie Wonder kick lately - to me he kind of felt like a harbinger of a new generation of motown.
• I'm My Own Grandpa (Willie Nelson) This is such a fun song. So glad I found a non-Ray Stevens version.
• Cookie Thumper! (Die Antwoord) I'm kind of amazed by the whole Afrikaans / Xhosa elements to this. Also I like the lyric "I rhyme tight! Tight! Tight! Tight! / Spark mosh-pit shit cause I rhyme so hype / Put me in front of someone I don't like I go punch! Kick! Bite! Fight!" Actually the sense of menace in this thing is amazing.
• Drunken Sailor (The Irish Rovers) Another fun novelty song.
• Major Tom (Shiny Toy Guns) I took me a while to realize this is only a sequel to "Space Oddity" - I think a Tufts a cappella group might have smushed them together. Anyway, nice cover.
• One Hundred Years From Today (Frank Sinatra) I liked this song. Also, I like that Sinatra is more a humanist than you might have guessed, and this song reflects that.
• Soy Yo (Bomba Estéreo) I guess its made the rounds but this a fun song.
• toxic but it keeps getting faster (britney Spears Ft. Fast) What a genre! Someone said "this is what anxiety sounds like"
• Tearin' It Up (Gramatik) Funky.
• Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (Lee Dorsey) Also funky.
• Fast As You Can (Fiona Apple) Fast as you can is not as fast as Toxic but it keeps getting faster.
• Chelsea Hotel #2 (Leonard Cohen) Love the lyrics.
• Epic (Faith No More) Is there a more 90s video than this? Fun fact: VVN Music found [Faith No More lead singer] Patton to possess the highest vocal range of any known singer in popular music, with a range of six octaves.
• F**k You Mistletoe (Kyle Dunnigan) This tale of cowboys who stumble into gayness is one of the funniest songs I have. I think it really nails the genre.
• Gyruss (Game Theme) (8-Bit Arcade) This is, hands down, the best music on the Atari 2600.
• Do You Feel It? (Chaos Chaos) From a sad scene in "Rick and Morty"
• Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee (Sticks McGhee & His Buddies) A favorite of Tom Parmenter, the man who came back from being dead. Wine, wine, wine - Elderberry - or Cherry - Black Berry - Half + Half ------- Half what and Half what else??

Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?

Thinking of doing 24HCD but second guesing.... why is it so hard for me to think of a plot?

Any suggestions? I was coding some Processing (for my Advent Calendar) on the T and a gentleman by the name of Jonathan Feinberg happened to sit next to me and comment that he doesn't see much Processing hacking on the T. http://mrfeinberg.com - he's been involved in Processing.py and some other cool stuff like http://www.wordle.net/ and had a link to http://whiteglovetracking.com/ , crowdsourcing tracing Michael Jackson's Billy Jean glove and making art from that data.

I have to rethink my morning strategy of "huddle in a corner of the car" when hacking on T... when I CAN find a seat and thus code on the evening commute, I've had a higher percentage of chances to talk about Processing and programming in general.

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My "two favorites" from last night drawing class...

I liked this < 1 minute gesture drawing, though the instructor Doug thinks my multiple line betrays a lack of confidence.

Doug showed us Picasso, and in general was encouraging us to draw less. One result:

Doug praised the courage of the minimalist hair (especially in comparison to big blobs of dark for hair in some of the other pieces) but now that I think about it I might have stolen it from Homer Simpson.

I got permission to show this work. I like it because it's so similar to but so different than mine:

Among other differences, the artist has much better control over her charcoal than I do.

I ended up being a little discouraged by the evening. Doug is encouraging us to get off just aiming for realism as the final goal, but I'm not sure I have enough chops to pull off so much lessness, or that I like the results as much. http://boingboing.net/2012/10/03/movie-43-trailer.html - super not-safe-for-work trailer for a movie loaded with hollywood stars looks raunchy and hilarious

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Watched the movie "Perfect Sense" last night. Darkly romantic in truly disturbing epidemic horror setting...

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Didn't watch debates; heard Romney looked better. Also heard he had greased up Reagan hair, and on radio his voice had that rasp. #trickery

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Of course, the biggest problem with current Republicans is they put into practice the stuff Reagan was smart enough to only use as rhetoric.

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lost in fog

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Romney 2012. Soft on Wall Street. . . . . Tough on Sesame Street.

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U can't say we have religious freedom AND that we're all children of the same God, Bro!!

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http://www.ij.org/about/4058 -- wow, fuck civil forfeiture abuse. that is a travesty. Averaging about 3 incidents a year? Damn.

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Heh, love that the new iOS app is physical greeting cards. Reminds me of "Tim Cook: I'm Thinking Printers"

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My favorite iOS 5 feature gets no mention: splittable screens for iPad, so you can thumb type while holding it...

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The urge to be top dog is a bad urge. Inevitable tragedy. A sensible person seeks to be at peace, to read books, know the neighbors, take walks, enjoy his portion, live to be eighty, and wind up fat and happy although a little wistful when the first coronary walks up and slugs him in the chest.

My 24 Hour Comics Day project this year -- my attempts to come up with an actual story sort of fizzled, so I made this nostalgic and kind of self-indulgent work about moments and memory.... this is part 2 of 4.

jeff at an after-church get-together, chugging a 2-liter of soda, saying he just 'had to burp', and throwing up all over	my dad, stricken with spinal meningitis, his muscular control system shot, explaining how he just wanted to enact how a son asks for money, and the father takes it out of his wallet, and gives it to him
making dad fried bologna sandwiches in the mornings after he was debilitated, but then stopping, uncomfortable with it all	being teased by my boss mr.j about how i'd furtively slink off to eat my allotted daily candy bar during my pharmacy shift
mr.j convincing me he had a voice controlled radio by sneakily changing stations with the steering wheel control buttons	and mr.j giving his tie to a UPS store clerk who admired it, then grumbling to me on the drive back about how he had to do that
my dad fighting to regain coordination, shakily taking walks around the block	mall fieldtrips with pregnant teens from my the program my mom oversaw, looking a bit like i had my own harem
staying up all night for the first time with beau, playing 'ninja' on the atari 800xl, throwing a joystick at him in frustration	the first kiss - the atomic fireball passed from her mouth to mine
mike d.b. snapping a girls bra - admiring the chutzpah, if not the manners	the chunky black and smelling of machine oil stands in the high school bandroom
marching band, screaming myself hoarse leading boom chikka boom	not stopping to say good morning on what was my dad's last morning
the changing of the honor guard at my dad's salvation army funeral	the state trooper saluting my dad's funeral procession
on a band trip to mexico, one member miming milking a cow in order to request milk, and cornell then just saying "milk please"	music camp, standing on the dew covered field for flag raising, the smell of mess hall
getting pantsed at music camp	sneaking away with d at the end of camp, the grass, her breasts - a first for me... making up for enthusiasm what i lacked in skill.
later during a more traditional courtship of j, calling her up at her house to have her look at the moon with me	ellen showing us a raunchy passage from "tropic of cancer" in the bandroom, and mike and i teasing her with "squish squish" ever after
after a day or two of being sick from school, looking at my horrible acne in the bathroom mirror, and later realizing it was actually chicken pox	flirting with v on the bus to boston, lying on the bus floor and studying her face upsidedown
outside the gubitosi's with v, kissing and kissing and kissing	opening my eyes once then, and seeing her eyes weren't shut either

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Somehow the way "Super Pac-Man" transcends the maze a bit with the title character bigger than the tunnels still blows my mind.

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CSS-gurus; any explanation for why absolute positioning is in document coordinates UNLESS there's a position:relative'd wrapper?

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/10/hand-the-taxpayer-a-receipt/63909/ - a receipt for taxpayers...

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I was a little surprised to find Tammy Faye died a while back. I thought her eye shadow granted her immortality. Here's what I've posted at kisrael.com/features/sloths/... it was great fun working with Miller and Kate again. The 100 panel guideline for webcomics is seeming a bit excessive; frankly I didn't have quite that much story, so I added a bestiary thing at the end. Miller got a full stoy drawn and captioned, a first for him, and Kate got a lot of great panels I'll be linking to here. Mille blogged it a bit on his livejournal but it seems to fade out in the early hours.

My previous experience, plus my quick sketch doodle style, let me get done in about 18 hours even after following a false start for the first half hour and then losing another 30-40 minutes of captioning due to laptop failure, so I got a bit of sleep in.

Six Toed One Eyed Battery Operated Laser Sloths is my work for 24 Hour Comics Day 2009.

It is a story I originally came up with in the seventh grade, redone and deconstructed.

You can see the original here - I'd recommend reading it first, it's short, and kind of gives a context to this.

by Kirk Israel	Call me JinJin.
I am a Six Toed One Eyed Battery Operated Laser Sloth.	You could not easily pronounce the name of my home, but it translates as "The Place Where It All Is"
I have six toes, 3 per foot.	And of course, my one eye.
The eye is the source of our laser. We take pride in the strength and accuracy of our lasers.	When I was young, I could drop a Dokdok Tree nut from its Dokdok from a distance of 80 meters!
Batteries are the source of our energy and much of our culture.	We harvest them from our Alkaline Forests.
The battery replacement ritual is very important to us! You can't let just anyone replace your batteries! (We have a name for sloths like that!)	I wish to tell you a story from my past. I was very young, I had just received my first tie from the Tie Store.
(and what a day THAT had been - the ties of that age, so colorful, so much life!)	It was the time our Electronic Parchisi Tournament -
Sloths from across the land gather and through this system our leader is determined.	But as we parchised, a menace was creeping across the land.
They were the Zappers - creatures of electricity wrapped in a skin of malice - moving onto our precious Alkaline Forest like a hoard of locusts.	Long after, we could see that they had stripped the Alkaline trees of their homeland - all that was left was scrubbrush and waste branches.
Old ParNok had just proven his worth to be our leader when word of the Zapper invasion came	We tried to mount a defense. We used our lasers - at first warning shots, and then we used our beams directly.
But it was no use. Laser against Electricity - nothing. Electricity against sloth flesh, however...	...we lost many fine sloths that day.
The Zappers occupied our precious Alkaline Forest, leaving huge swaths of wasteland behind. I weep a single tear when I recall the beauty of that old growth.	Those were dark days. Many sloths went dark for want of batteries.
ParNok called a general meeting. Although I was all but a youngling, still sporting my first tie, I was allowed to speak. I had an idea.	"Lets get Puddo!"
I had met Puddo months before through a strange set of circumstances I will not relate here. But we had traveled together to the land of the Uniccordions, and I saw the respectful distance the Zappers kept from him.	The relationship between Puddo and the Sloths was even then the stuff of legend; something about the lending of a cup of milk during a hard time.
The messenger Mamabird was sent to Puddo's hi-rise condo...	(And that condo was something, hundreds of meters above the ground. He took me up there after our journey, I could see from What's-His-Name Island to Big Lake in the West!)
Puddo was almost arrogant in his confidence. The other sloths took heart in his stance, but even then I saw something else.	Anger? Hunger? Hubris? to this day I'm not certain.
We formed a small party and journeyed to the Alkaline Forrest.	Those first Zappers didn't stand a chance.
I feel honored to have been there to see the great warrior Puddo in his prime!	The Zapper's bolts ricocheted off his soft flesh, leaving just the tiniest scorch marks and the smell of burnt sugar
We hid behind a Flob Rock and hoped it didn't choose that moment to Flob.
The enemy had been beaten. Full of cheer, we went back to the gathering area to report of the glorious victory.	We started preparing small groups of foresters to inspect the forests, and to resume the harvest.
We were ready to resume life, but Puddo warned ParNok against complacency.	He encouraged us to form a war party and follow him. Because of the special relationship I had with Puddo, I was selected to carry the quart bottles of milk that was part of our tribute to the mighty Puddo, as well as some of his sustenance.
"Puddo", I asked, "How will we find them?"	Puddo confided in me that he had had a special device, a relic that could catch voices from the air, that was also excellent at locating Zappers.
For days we followed Puddo as he bounced along. I think I had my batteries changed twice, and could barely keep up.	Finally we spotted the Zappers in the distance.
There were hundreds of them! They had set up some kind of camp in the shadow of a big rock.	I hadn't realized Zappers could breed, but there were small Zappers running around, looking like snogworms after a heavy rain.
Puddo bounced forward. And just stood there.
You could hear a DokDok Tree nut fall.	Dozens and dozens of the Zappers gathered around him.
My fellow sloths and I retreated to the branches of a nearby tree. (We don't look like it, but Six Toed One Eyed Battery Operated Laser Sloths are terrific climbers.)	Some kind of signal was given. Energy started jumping between the Zapper Warriors
Sparks arced every which way, connecting them in a crazy lacework of electricity.	Puddo just stood, and grinned.
Then - the biggest ZAP I've seen and a second later, the loudest CRACK I have ever heard!	I turned my head, my eye blinded by the afterimage.
The air was bitter with ozone.	Puddo was gone.
I nearly cried out, but was sushed by one of my companions.	The Zappers were celebrating.
I couldn't understand their foul tongue, but their tone was clear. I shivered, thinking of what they might try now that they had vanquished our champion.	And then... and then...they looked up.
I could hardly believe it - it was Puddo.	Flocks of disturbed Mamabirds circled him.
But he was.... bigger than before? It was hard to tell, he was so far away	...But somehow his bulk continued to grow, and spread
He landed across the entire encampment	And that was that. The mighty Puddo took a few hours to shrink and regain his shape, made good use of the milk I had carried for all the miles.
For a month after, we roamed across "The Place Where It All Is"	Puddo used his Zappo-Detectomaticmeter and found the last groups of Zappers.
They weren't happy to see him, I'll tell you that at no cost!	At long last it was time to go back.
On our arrival, the Six Toed One Eyed Battery Operated Laser Sloths threw another Electronic Parcheesi Tournament.	(It was mostly our way of celebration, but I think too sloths were happy to see ParNok give up the tie of leadership.)
Puddo bounced back to his condo.	I accompanied him one last time.
He hummed his war song all the way home.
	Graffitos
Paint Pond	Tuba Ceral Killer
Cereals	Hop Rock
Flob Rock	Bop Fish
The Tie Store	Popper Piranha
Zapper Youngling	Thingos
Water Thingo	The Big Tree
DokDok Tree	Alkaline Tree
Mama Mamabird and baby mamabirds	Uniccordian

Since I have to struggle so mightily to make this website not just me, I thought I'd post some art by other folks. In retrospect it is just possible that posting an image of me, a thing by my officemates out of my bricks, and a cartoon about my street is probably not making such big head way in losing the Kirk-centric nature of my website...

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Jokes that were probably old 10 years ago: Tori Amos sings that she Crucifies Herself. Quite a trick, tough once you get the first arm up.

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EB fixing door a worker broke:"can't blame a stupid person when they're stupid; and they do dangerous stuff for small pay" "They get paid?" For my photo composition class, I got 8.5x11 prints made, $2.50 a shot at the print shop in my office building.

New rule of thumb: big prints make any photo look a bit artsier.

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Snapshots of the Moment
For a while now... maybe since Dylan moved to San Diego... I haven't had any trouble keeping Timezones straight for the USA. But yesterday one of the guys at work gathered people for a teleconference 4 hours too early because he did the math wrong for the Mountain time zone. (subtracted 2 when he should have added)

My trick involves a certain physicality: in effect, it's as if I'm overlaying the United States on the top half of a clock: Then, it's easy to grasp how a mental timezone journey's west sets the clock back one hour. Each hop to the west has a matching hop backwards on the clock. (Hopefully my super-crude diagram makes things more clear, not less.)

Prior to this, I also mixed up how many hours back to go for, say, California time... I have little problem recalling that the country has 4 timezones, but before this "3 hops back system" it was easy to make what computerists call a fencepost error and subtract 4 instead of 3.

PS Am I crazy in remembering that Windows used to have a much niftier "timezone" interface that would highlight the area of the timezone as you selected it, and maybe even let you select a timezone by clicking on your area? My install of XP has a select list and then a static map of the world beneath, with no obvious interaction between the two. It almost feels as if some retarded patent stopped Microsoft from having the niftier UI.

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Quote of the Moment

I read the book of Job last night. I don't think God comes well out of it.

Synchronicity: David Plotz' Blogging the Bible makes it sounds like the book of Joshua can have a similar effect. Pickup Line of the Moment

Are you a magic feather? Because my heart just grew a tail, and flew away.

...this was my favorite, bringing together two bits of geekly lore, obscure-ish Nintendoisms and those lists of pickup lines that have made the rounds over the years. (Thanks Mr. Ibis)

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Image of the Moment

--Salon.com points out that newspapers used to be much prettier...I really like this one, and its sense of optimism tinged with concern.

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Article of the Moment
On happiness, from evolutionary to practical perspectives. Weird how our brains aren't good at finding contentment. I liked the bit about how the happiest nuns were the longest-lived.

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Idea of the Moment
Boingboing posted about amphibious houses. This might really be the way we slowly slide into a "Water World" type future, assuming sea levels keep rising. I'm sure many places are always going to be on dryground, but for the coastal areas...it's kind of interesting to think about how life would be, when every place is like Venice, but bobbing.

Commandment of the Moment

VI- Thou Shalt Eat EasyMac
Student asked unto God if there was any alternatives to the cafeteria, and God said to him, you shall eat a lot of EasyMac. It is easy to make and you don't need milk or a stove. And student said microwaves were forbidden by the RA. And God said to him, you shall hide the microwave under your bed with a towel on top. And Student asked, what if it is discovered. And God told him to stop being such a pussy, and it was good.

I also really liked the one about the Hoodie. It's funny, I have two of this one GAP green zipped hoodie, and they really are like my security blanket this time of year. I've kept one around at work for like at least 5 years now, even though the sleeves are fraying now. Plus last week, after a minor fenderbender (hit from behind) and a bit of an anxiety attack I realized I was wearing one almost 24-7, which is a little pathetic but hey...like the link says "And God said unto student, you must wear a hoodie, for it is a useful garment." (link and choice of quote via Candi's LJ)

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Science of the Moment
There's actually a pretty solid explanation for why that painting's eyes seem to follow you around the room...and no, it's not because you're living a Scooby Doo episode where there really is a guy behind there.

Woo, slept for like 11 hours last night. I feel a little better!

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Geek Conceptual Art of the Moment
So Slashdot had a story about this program called Baudio (originally "Ka-Blamo") that trivially turns any file into a sound file. The point is, I guess there's some forms of legal protection that apply only to music...so with pieces like John Cage's 4'33" (four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, or that long of ambient concert hall noise when performed live) out there in the canon, can now any random computer file get the same protection supposedly reserved for music, just by running it through this program? Anyway, Baudio's homepage has three examples of what it sounds like. (They aren't too bad but you may want to turn your speakers down just a tad.) The GIF is too short and staticy, the Photoshop PSD starts the same but gets cool in the end, but the BMP version sounds awesome. (It all has to do with how repetitive the images are internally, how they store the same data. GIF ties it up into as neat a bundle as possible, but with BMP you can practically feel each line as it comes up.)

Incidentally, there's been a similar technique used for a while by Atari programmers...there was this add-on for the Atari called a "Supercharger" that could load games from cassette tape, and there's a way of converting an Atari program into sound in a way that the Supercharger can understand it. Here's the file in the mp3 form, but it's really screechy and annoying. (And for the Atari Supercharger to 'hear' it through it's little wire, you have to turn up the volume...I hate it when forget to switch the wiring and it comes blasting out of my speakers...)

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Subculture of the Moment
Wiggaz; white kids gone gangsta. With commentary along side.

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Kiss of a Previous Moment
I was kind of wanting to see that infamous "open mouthed kiss" between Madonna (butch) and Britney Spears (fem) at the MTV Music Awards, forgot about it, but then found this page with the clip. Maybe I've seen too much stuff on the Internet and become a bit jaded, but I thought it was actually really boring. Family anecdote from, oh, 1995 or thereabouts: the kitchen of my Aunt and Uncle's brownstone has a great view of their cobblestone backyard. One summer day my Uncle was doing some maintenence back there, using a broom to push some water towards the drain. My Aunt came over to see what I was looking at, and I said "Poor old guy, look at 'im down there, sweepin' the water." The joking premature senility reference is funny, at least to us (maybe because my Uncle is a decade older than my Aunt...though still a far far way from the old folk's home!) but of course, it was not an unreasonable way of moving water, preventing stagnant puddles from forming. (Letting the sun take care of the rest, like my buddy Dylan said "Evaporation is God's Paper Towel.")

And now, I wonder if that might be a half-decent metaphor for how I need to live my life. One of the reasons we laugh at sweepin' the water is that you're not going to get it all, but you might get enough to matter. Even if the water keeps coming back, you're better off sweeping than not. I think I need to start sweeping: sweeping the laziness, sweeping the clutter in the house and car (I guess that can be taken literally as well), sweeping the so-so spending habits during uncertain economic times. Maybe it's even what you have to do with relationships, keeping things moving and heading off the stagnation of just going through the motions.

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Advice of the Moment
If you're on an airplane, don't drop dry ice in the toilet. Trust me on this one.

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News of the Moment
Heh. An official from Iraq suggested a duel between the leaders of the two nations. You know, I bet Bush could win in a footrace, pretty easily, they say he's one heckuva runner.

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Quote of the Moment

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Heh. When I was in high school (Dear old Euclid) we had a phenomenal football team. We'd kick everyone's butt, up to the point we had to play the Catholic schools, who could basically draft all the talent they needed. Anyway, a big part of that was a player named Robert Smith. He was a year ahead of me but I usually ended up sitting a few tables from him in the cafeteria, thanks to band. Anyway, this is the same Robert Smith who became one of the star players of the Minnesota Vikings... in fact he has fan sites dedicated just to him. It sounds like he's considered a real class act. He recently announced his retirement...some little thing about wanting to be able to walk when he was in his 40s. Anyway, I'm always amused when I end up controlling his character in "NFL Blitz 2000". I had to get out a yearbook to prove his EHS-ness to my cousin. (Euclid had some other great players, like Pepe Pearson, though as far as I know no one quite as stellar as Smith.)

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Logo of the Moment
I saw this red cow logo, for the Robert Stigwood Organization, at the end of the movie "Tommy". The company was associated with some really big projects in the 1970s, Grease, Saturday Night Fever, Jesus Christ Superstar etc. Their "real site" seems dead, but information on what it did can be found on this Saturday Night Fever (the musical) site.

I dunno, I just really like the logo.

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Link of the Moment
Ever heard of a trauma treatment called EMDR? Salon.com has an interesting piece on it...supposedly it's highly effective, though to an observer it looks like hokum, like low-rate hypnotism. Interesting.