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It's HONK! I decorated my tuba for the lantern parade.



It got a lot of positive feedback! I feel bad because some tuba players put so much work into decorations, electronic and otherwise, and I just tape on these rows of lights I got off a FB ad and convert my marker and valve oil pouch to a USB power pack carrier literally 20 minutes before showtime.

(Now I have to decide if I should keep the lights as is all the way through Halloween and Christmas... the one drawback is the tape looks like a just-out-of-surgery patient in the daylight...)

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(I know I posted "Momhead" before but I didn't put good keywords to find it like "ways my 4 year old daughter has insulted me" or "things my daughter said")

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Slate on Why Growing Parts of the Christian Right Are Convinced It's the Apocalypse.

Revelation talk scared me shitless as a kid.

Later I learned a lot of people who are into it are "pretrib", or "premillennial dispensationalist", who figure they get out-of-jail-free card, that suffering will happen, but all us good folk will be whisked away, only them bad sinners will get the worst of it, so BRING IT ON, THY WILL BE M-F'IN *DONE*!

What a garbage theology. What an un-Christian stance. What a way to ensure that you're not actually going to be all that concerned about being a good caretaker of the planet.

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Nobody wants to die. People don't mind being dead. Being dead is great! But getting dead...nobody wants to get dead.

A stopped clock is right twice a day.
A clock running in reverse is right four times a day.
A clock running at 720 times normal speed is right once a minute.
A faceless clock is never wrong.

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Biometrics were easy to disguise, so the authorities tracked people by their brain patterns. The only way to disappear was to change the way you think. Revolutionaries recruited artists, poets, and philoso-phers to give them mind-blowing insights whenever they had to lose a tail.

(Admittedly, as a detractor of special revelation, I have mixed feelings about that one.)

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'Don't let your random-number generators get loose,' the old programmer warned. 'Pi used to be an even three before a wild RNG got ahold of it.'

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'We had to switch from digital to analogue to get robots to feel emotions,' she explained. 'After all, they call them "numbers" for a reason.'

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'Nerves all over the body have thoughts, but the brain cannot receive them,' he said. 'Want to know what your organs think of their tyrant?'

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Relax while you can.

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It's all about the timing....

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A page for the hymnal for The Church of Gun, where every American student gets to be part of the worship whether they believe or not. From today's shooting in Arlington, TX.


Hasn't aged entirely well, a bit cavalier in a Loony Tunes way about mental health etc, but not too too bad:

LYRICS

dingdingdingdingding
here comes my wagon my wagon
to take me to the nutty factory
dingdingdingdingding
here comes my wagon my wagon
I can hear my keeper calling me

folks have made me what i am
i hope they're satisfied
i may not be what they want me to be
but the good lord knows i tried

just like a nut that falls
I'm a little cracked that's all
dingdingdingdingding here comes my wagon...
bbbbblllrrrptt!

(I love "i may not be what they want me to be / but the good lord knows i tried" - it's a tongue twister! also new to my Aunt who only knew the first and last parts)

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I forget who told me this, but someone once said, "There's very little you can learn that isn't bad news." The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in that.

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I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school, this isn't the let's-read-a-book school. And I get it and I understand it and it's a very interesting thing and I'm gonna be letting you know about it.

This statement says so much about his way of "knowing" the world. Screw the experts, at least 'til what the experts know - and are willing to share in books - screws you. The Care and Feeding of the Uffington White Horse Through More Than 100 Generations is an amazing tale. It has been pulling the community together for 3000 years - almost half again as long as Christianity. That is amazing. I made a custom case with James Harvey art from my comic on mortality...



It's got it all! Artsy-Fartsiness (it's a Picasso), Boobies (it's a Picasso), an encouraging aphorism, my own head, a hoodie, and I can take photos through the physical form of it. (and the material is maple so I can always knock on wood) And then I made an artsy lock screen from a different panel of the same comic:



Me and my the shadow of my own mortality!

The only way these two things could be more Kirk-y is if they had Alien Bill and/or Tubas.

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FOLLOWUP: I think it's too much! I like the lock screen but might look to change the case.

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FEMA Deletes Information About Lack of Water and Electricity in Puerto Rico. When you start hiding relevant objective facts, you're doing evil, from the NRA blocking statistics being gathered to the DOE being told they can't use the term climate change. In denial and fucking evil. It's one thing to disagree on interpretation and meaning and making value judgements and priorities, but when your ideology goes downward to change the scene on the level of facts rather than the flow of influence going the other way, that's evil.

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Lego Giraffe near the Assembly Square AMC - work field trip to see the new Blade Runner... we are so coddled.
Finished Nicholson Baker "The Fermata" - I've always liked this author with his extreme sensitivity to the details of the inanimate objects of our life... and some of the animate one. Penn Jillette gave him a shout out in his book on his diet, so I picked this one up. It's the perviest thing I've read in a while, using the same scifi trope later presented in the film Cashback, both being about a young man who can gains the power to freeze time, and uses that poewr to undress women. Both justify it to themselves and their audience that they do it to see the women's hidden beauty, and take care not to not have the women alarmed once time restarts.

(Baker dabbles a bit more into the technical details of what such a power might actually be like, and why and how the whole rest of the universe isn't absolutely static, plunged into darkness with photons stopped in their tracks, etc... it reminds me of H.F. Saint's "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" that did the same for invisibility... the title character has to take care eating transparent food (broths, clear gelatin, etc) since the food doesn't share his invisibility until he digests it...)

Anyway, some nice quotes:

Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back.

I had not been aware before that moment of the straightforward erogenousness of a ring: it suddenly occurred to me that the sides of the fingers are sensitive in an upper-thigh sort of way, and that the singling out of that fourth vulnerable shy finger, the planet Neptune of fingers, which otherwise gets no unique treatment in life and does very little on its own except control the C on the high school clarinet or type the number two and the letter X, to be held and gently stimulated forever by an expensive circle of gold is really quite surprisingly sexual.

I wanted to tell Joyce these dreams. But she wasn't my lover, and lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams.

(Fingertips are so durable. They don't even explode when you use them as temp shoehorns; they just tingle for a second as your impassive heel forces itself past.)

I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss.

I really like this TV by Samsung

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I fell asleep to the Seahawks/Lions game last night, and for some reason hearing about a completely wrong call REALLY hits my "THIS INJUSTICE SHOULD NOT BE" buttons...

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A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back. The relationship between our mind and our physical brain and our sense of self and our relationship with the universe is amazing and at times unnerving.

You think it's cool to hate things. And it's not. It's boring. Talk about what you love and keep quiet about what you don't.

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One of those mornings where you think "huh, lot of glare from the windows, makes the monitor look so dark, relatively" and then 10 minutes later you remember you still have your sunglasses on.

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SNL Skit "Whites" -- man I wish we were all this cool with demographic change. ("WHITES: Still calling the shots til 2050. 2060 Tops.")

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Is there any generalized way to get old medical records? Specifically I wish I had more data about what I weighed before 1998 or so, high school, college, and just after. More for curiosity's sake, but still... I'd love to know what my start and end points were for my weightloss in high school (first time I gave it a serious effort... I was gently teased for constantly having to pull my pants up) and what it was during college.

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http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project Oh, man. 5 years ago I found this project page. The begging the question of the fundamental correctness of everything Conservative is just mind boggling. "We know we're correct, and we share God's view of everything. So if anything in the Bible doesn't support exactly what we believe and how we believe it, it must be a mistranslation, and we can fix that." It runs so counter to other fundamentalist ways of thinking - swapping "the inerrancy of the Bible" for, like, "the inerrancy of us" (or maybe "the inerrancy of Rush Limbaugh") Check out the "talk" tab for extra awesomeness.
Also, that "best of the public" scheme it leads off with, that pretty much anybody who deeply studies a subject starts drowning in the kool-aid of that fields collective wisdom... man, physicians, heal thyselves!!! If you are bummed (as I sometimes can be) about not having the chance to go into orbit, go see Gravity in IMAX. It gives you as much of the sweeping vistas and feel of microgravity as possible, and also scares you from wanting to go 'til we get a lot of the details better worked out... "Well, that was average," said Tom, meanly.
"Ow, my balls," said Tom, testily.
"Meanest. Waitstaff. Ever!" Tom yelped. 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 4 of 4.

on the porch of my first apartment with jt, eating pasta and listening to the soundtrack to "the birdcage". this hit me as 'a moment' when i was in that moment	dylan's odd gag of pulling out his work-id-on-a-retracting-spool like he was a pullstring doll that could only say "i love bank boston. i love bank boston"
driving to new york on rainy night, my civic spins out, luckily the truck was a good distance away	buying m. expensive sunglasses, an early token in our relationship
an asian gentleman disarming my clogged traffic road rage on memorial drive by waggling moose antlers	stockpiling jugs of water ahead of y2k, just in case
making a german 7 year old giggle with a terrible "auto-baum" draw and cartoon	design group hanging out upstairs after layoffs
looking down the dark, snow covered road before finishing the walk home; it also registered as one of these moments i wanted to fix in my mind	endless games of "pokemon puzzle league" with eb
working with m. to saw the legs off a table too big to move and restore them; her insecurity, the skepticism of eb	during knowledge transfer when leaving a job, in joking anger i tossed a remote at noor, but hit and hurt him for real.
getting so sunburned this one time with k that my chest was pretty much the same shade as my nipples...	a weird moment of hubris when jz pulled up a game site at work as we were waiting for a compile
the moment of dawning horror realizing the oreo handed to me had actually been pre-licked - my mouthfull response 'wheahs da cweamy fillin'? is a moment providing many laughs for eb in the years since...	the craziness of my first 24 hour comics day; forgoing sleep to tell a story i had wanted to tell for a long while
the first kiss with amber, the electricity and sudden spark of this being the one...	later, a trip to niagara falls, and her nervousness on the oversized ferris wheel there...
that same trip, weeping on my dad's grave	and on the way backcoming to the where the church where i lived in an apartment with my folks was with amber, and seeing the grassy lot
so, those are my moments. some of my moments.	moments, and memories. some researchers think memories aren't so much made but remade; the act of remembering cements and reshapes the neuronic pathways
i guess that's one thing photographs do; become the canonical record, the mold for future remembering. and these comic panels will guide my future memory, I'm sure	is it telling what showed up here? more from my younger days than recently, and my dad shows up more than my mom; i'm not sure what to make of that
i think somehow i want my moments to outlast me; that's why i'm writing this now	it's tough to let go.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2270046/ - the pitchforks of the right vs. the snickering of the left, which hurts the other more?

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http://gizmodo.com/5656971/url-shorteners-in-peril-as-libyan-government-seizes-ly-domain - bit.ly in trouble? Dislike shorteners overuse.

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Triangle man hates particle man - They have a fight, Triangle wins. Is this Plato's "World of Forms" triumphing over the mundane world?
Dating Montage, via FoundFootageFestival and smithy00101

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http://www.slate.com/id/2231320/ compassion + ownership are likely hardwired in, not bestowed by "civilization"- but baboons are real jerks!

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http://conservapedia.com/Conservative_Bible_Project -WOW- Besides being brazen, it so doesn't jive w/ a "biblical inerrancy" core that has been a bedrock assumption - Conservatives finding their presumptions more important than the history of the Word of God... YIKES.

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http://blog.okcupid.com/ - holy cats, the analysis from okcupid is amazing in a gazing at other people's navels kind of way

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1JpJ53FbXg HS Football- the joy of playing to the whistle, 1:30-2:00 Chilly!

Still sticking with the sandals.

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Quote of the Moment

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

I think Jeff Hawkins has a pretty decent neurological explanation for this. I find it happening when trying to recollect old coworkers, people I might have seen on a daily basis, but... well, they tend to get lumped into categories, sometimes in broadly physical or accent-y ways.

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Links of the Moment
I felt kind of bad about enjoying engrishfunny, especially since I'm so gridingly monolingual, and I know how many Asian languages even spell themselves phonetically... but then I found Wordsplosion, delighting (or mocking, whatever) signs written by, presumably, native English speakers, so now I feel a little less guilty. (I think making it worse is how professional-looking print technologies has outstripped amateur proofreading.)

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I hate national baseball broadcasters. They're smart but they have no soul.

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<<if you smiling, that should set the tone / just be limber>>

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Yimminy Crickets. 10,600 was once thought of as kind of a floor for the Dow, <10K is kind of freaking me out.

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Explaining "Triangle Trade" to my Finnish coworker. Now he's excited, trying to figure where to get slaves, the tobacco from the local 7-11

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Software User Interface Lesson: I guess sometimes half-assed is worse than no-ass-at-all because you ass-ume it's doing the right thing.

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It's almost easy to think yeesh, maybe the Y2K guns-n-gold style crowds were right, but there's much ground twixt here and mad max. Last night on the T they said they weren't going to be making a stop at Park Street (one of the hubs) and would be going straight through to Government Center because of a "Fire Emergency".

For a moment it seemed kind of odd that they would let subway cars pass through. I have to confess to a tinge of hope that the train would be picking its way through some kind of smoky ruin, embers still glowing. (If nothing else, to make some compelling shots for my photography class--it's not like I have anything against Park Street station.)

I have a nagging feeling I saw a similar scene (semi-automated transportation system taking the horrified passengers through some kind of ravaged, post-apocalyptic landscape) in a movie or game, but can't think of what. Maybe the recent "War of the Worlds" remake? That at least had a flaming train barreling through a train station.

Of course, the reality in the station was far more humdrum, a mostly empty station with some MBTA workers checking things out, some bewildered older guy wondering why none of the trains would stop to let him on.

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Idea of the Moment
Hockey Needs a Soccer Premiership-like league system. The core idea, where the worst 3 teams get kicked out of the "major league" and 3 teams from the next one down get promoted seems fantastic, a way of keeping up the drama at the lower levels and stopping brazen "playing for the draft-pick".

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Video of the Moment
A gal I met at the xkcd dream girl event (a gal currently at my alma mater, who let me try out the Diablo/Chinese Yo-yo she was playing with) sends along this Rube Goldberg video... similar to stuff I'd posted before, and a little "cheaty" with the cuts, but the bit with the chess board is brilliant.

Ugh. I'm getting bajillions of bounces to "alienbill@alienbill.com", I've had to make a Google filter. Apparently, someone is using that as the "From" line in some retarded weightloss SPAM. Such asscactusry.

I guess one of these days I have to pick a smaller number of "valid" email addresses and stop receiving any fool thing that heads to one of my web domains.

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Lyrics of the Moment
So the other weekend when Ksenia and I were in Vermont we went to the Banana Republic factory outlet and I heard the coolest song... it was a nice electronica remix of "theme to Peter Gunn"...but it had lyrics, something I had never heard for that song:

Every night your line is busy,
All that buzzin' makes me dizzy.
Couldn't count on all my fingers
All the dates you had with swingers.
Bye-bye.
Bye, baby.
I'm gonna kiss you goodbye
And walk right through that doorway.

(If you want to sing along, the first four lines go along with the classic "dum dum Dum dum DUM Dum DUM DUM" bassline, and the next 4 are the same melody that kicks in in the "Spy Hunter" video game... or you could just listen to the sample they have on the Amazon page)

It turns out it's Sarah Vaughan singing, with a remix by Max Sedgley. (the original has very light percussion and lacks the drive the remix has.) Sarah Vaughan did another great "lyrics addded" cover of "'Round Midnight", which is actually how I was able to learn its somewhat amorphous melodic line.

The Verve Remixed³ also has a remixed Sarah Vaughan cover of Peggy Lee's "Fever". Oddly, the remix has exactly the same drive and beat as "Peter Gunn", so it doesn't work quite as well, given "Fever"s natural laid-back groove. Still, a good CD, as are the other ones in the series. (Or rather, each CD has at least 1 or 2 songs making it worthwhile, with the rest good filler... "Is You Is Or Is You Aint" is the start of the first one, "Whatever Lola Wants" for the second.)

Interesting piece Slate linked to with the caption How Amnesia Cured My Depression...the author's temporary utter loss of short term memory left him a more relaxed person.

As a guy with a chronic underachievement of certain kinds of memory, it's an interesting concept. One wonders if the brain is largely a zero-sum game, if an increase in, say, creativity need be balanced by a deficit in, say, short term memory. I guess that's a bit of wishful thinking, but there might be some trade-offs there.

As far as I can tell, I have a very tangental mind, and I think that it's one of my strengths (though it needs to be tempered when I'm trying to communicate with other people!) I've heard it argued that lateral thinking and the ability to see the parallels in dissimilar scenarios is one of the purest (and most difficult to replicate in AI) forms of intelligence we have. I often use trips to the restroom or to fetch water as a chance to roll a problem around in my brain, manipulating factors and statements as if they were worrybeads. And running through permutations is one of the things I do, just switching factors around and seeing if anything sticks, or triggers some further thought.

This habit, assuming some fellow geeks share it, might explain the unfortunate fondness for puns: our brains are frequently buzzing with alternate interpretations and takes on what's in front of us, and sometimes the alternate meaning a pun provides strikes us as amusing or insightful. I derive a lot of jokes from things I mishear, or misinterpret, from people I'm talking with. I can usually autocorrect and figure out the correct meaning ,but if the wrong one strikes me as amusing I'll deadpan that I misheard and don't understand, repeating the wrong version in the form of a question.

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Bumper Sticker Retort of the Moment
The other day I saw that "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" bumpersticker. It's a nice thought, but...I don't know, it's kind of negative about "being lost"...you would think someone who enjoyed a good wander would appreciate the odd being lost now and then. I think a better slogan would be "Not All Who Wander Are Aimless", which expresses the idea that wandering is kind of the point of what they're trying to do.

Well, that's the bumper sticker I'd make, anyway.

Dang, sorry to see my American/European dream thing didn't get any response...

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Cover of the Moment

--A pulp-sci-fi cover by Frank R. Paul. That's an awesome gallery to browse through, and if that's just the first "room" of the gallery (links to other rooms below the thumbnails and the business card.) So many cool images!

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Video of the Moment
In confirming the wording of my title quote, I found this little gem, a video of Sony's humanoid robots doing Geisha dances. (The quote is from an old C=64 Impossible Mission, with its even more famous speech opening "Another visitor...Stay a while...Stay FOREVER!" Of course, the Atari 7800 version of that game actually was impossible, so it just goes to show.)

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Politics of the Moment

Now are you sorry you didn't nominate this guy for president?

I caught a bit on the radio, more on TV. And since I know I'm biased and who I'm going to vote for, I judge the candidates the way I suspect the general populace: how do they look? What kind of aura do they project? Cheney looked old and tired and slouched through most of it, but Edwards blinked too much. I liked the gaffes that Saletan points out, though I do admit Edward's dodge on his attendance record was a bit much for a rationalist guy like me. But overall, I do think he would have made a stronger candidate than Kerry...again, mostly because he's better looking. That's what wins elections.

It's funny when Cheney brought up his being selected as VP candidate back before 2000 without mentioning that he was heading up the search committee...

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Passing of the Moment

I tell ya I get no respect from anyone. I bought a cemetery plot. The guy said, 'There goes the neighborhood!'

Dialog of the Moment

"Yankees suck!"
     "Why do Yankees suck?"
"...because they hate their mothers."

I always wondered why, exactly, Yankees Suck and now I know.

For anyone mildly interested in baseball but without easy news access (Hi Mom, in London) Sox evened their 5 game series 2-2 vs the A's with the deciding game tonight, Yankees took the series from the Twins, Cubs took their series from th Braves, something like the first time in 95 years that they've won a series in the post-season. Oh, and the Patriots won too. And the Browns beat the Steelers in Pittsburgh. So all in all I'm pretty happy with my fandom of Boston and Cleveland teams.

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Nineties Nostalgia of the Moment
Remember Tamagotchi, those little LCD keychain "virtual chickens" in the mid-90s? Here's an Academic Paper on 'em. (If you're in a hurry just skim through what's probably the most interesting page) I guess people got sick of babysitting the little things, or maybe look after one little critter paled in comparision to Pokémon's "gotta get 'em all" dozens and dozens of different creatures.

It might be kind of difficult to explain Tamagotchi to our grandchildren, or at least how we were so taken with creatures made by such primitive little displays, even when better technology was theoretically available. I had forgotten how the little things almost required 24/7 attention.

Here's a different page with a lot of images, including "screenshots" and a picture of the original inventor.

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Link of the Moment
Map of the London Tube with walklines, the walklines show you which stations are easily walkable, a bit of data missing from the original.

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Political Quote of the Moment

I'm the master of low expectations.

Sunday morning, waking up
Can't even focus on a coffe cup
Don't even know who's bed I'm in
Where do I start, where do I begin

In googling up the lyrics (though most of transcriptions stick an ugly "I'm" before "waking") I realized it must have been in Vanilla Sky, which I watched last night--good movie. An old lover loved the first part of that chorus, it did a good job of describing her inability to cope with the morning, though she was a little more hesitant about the "Don't even know who's bed I'm in" part...

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Video Game of the Moment
Curling: The Video Game. (Well, actually "Take-Out Weight Curling") Though I really shouldn't snicker; any nation that so supports baseball (ever try to explain that to a foreign exchage student?) or football (like Rugby, but with body armor) has some 'splainin to do of its own. And curling now has a movie of its own, Men with Brooms.

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Link of the Moment
Do Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems? [insert 'plug and play' joke here]

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Magic of the Moment
A Wicca Ceremony for Anorexics. Kind of a scary synergy, that. Pro-anorexia groups are kind of odd. At the risk of offending nearly everybody, I'd say they remind me a bit of the Deaf Culture crowd. Both issues are less black and white than the casual (and non-deaf/normal-eating) observer may realize.

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Quote of the Moment

A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that still doesn't mean she can't have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones.

From this month's Blender of Love digest I just finished. It featured the results of an interesting little competition by Gala, who had people write love poems to famous monsters. This graphic is made from the little award badge icons I made up for it....Wolfman didn't come out so well but I like the others.

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TV Listing of the Moment
The History Channel is currently showing "Desert Storm: The Ultimate War". That title is incorrect in a literal as well as a figurative sense; still, I think it will be interesting to watch given our current war plans.

(Huh, looks like my new "intraday update" style makes some big daily entries. I guess in some ways it brings it closer to my original PalmPilot based KHftCEA journal, where I'm more willing to write minor little points.)

Notes: "The World's Angriest Eggplant" was one of the earliest participants in Thoughts of the Produce Section. The corn is thinking of a slogan that I couldn't get out of my head during my a cappella days with sQ (alternating with "Shake What Yo Mama Gave Ya".) The other two speak for themselves, for what it's worth. (More on the history of Thoughts of the Produce Section)