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The PRONK festival is reinventing itself, away from the classic HONK! model and into being more neighborhood-centric, and emphasizing indigenous folks and BIPOC... School of Honk played, and then JP Honk was invited to help start up the brass section of the after party...

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Interesting defense of the old english system of measurement - fractions based on 2s 3s and 4s are much easier to deal with on your head than decimals

A serious pity, if we had 4 fingers on each hand or 6, our math would be much better, because 8 is great for getting to binary and 12 has that 3 and 4s dividing mojo.

i'm a little acorn brown
lying on the cold cold ground
everybody steps on me
so i'm a little cracked you see
i'm a nut (*tck* *tck*)
i'm a nut (*tck* *tck*)
i'm a nut

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Reshma Saujani's TEDtalk Teach girls bravery, not perfection (or if you prefer text, here's a
transcription)

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Great mini-honk-fest with School of Honk.

I rate it 10/10.

Or even 2020.

Oh my God, what if we're just people?

A quote from Sam Harris' podcast about that need for believers to ask what are you left with if you can't be assured of the divine source of your holy texts.

It's interesting hearing where those believers grapple with some of the same problems skeptics have: the contradictions between the availability of repentance and salvation despite everything being predestined by God mirrors me trying to figure out how free will exists in a universe that seems governed by physical laws of cause-and-effect (or quantum randomness - but that doesn't help the problem.)

Sometimes fundamentalist interpretations (across religions) feel more consistent and true to me than more relaxed ones, even as I despise their conclusions and actions - but sometimes their extrapolations from their faulty initial premises have an admirable clarity. I reject their conclusions, of course, as will most humane people, believer and non-believers alike... but I then don't know how that's not a call to a universal humanism. Today is the 30th Anniversary of my dad's death.

Last year around this time I went to the Boston MFA with Melissa and Liz, and I told them the story about my dad's art collection, how even though he had no budget he knew how to juggle finances and became a small-time collector, especially lithographic prints. (I have a few vague memories of going with him to meet with dealers in upstate NY, rifling through those bins like they used to have in record stores.)

In the year of his death, well after he was incapacitated from illness, he invited representatives of the Cleveland Museum of Art to peruse his collection and see if there was anything they wanted to add to their permanent collection. They chose two pieces.

Of course as a 14 year old I didn't really get the level of honor that represented, how that kind of affirmation from such an institution meant to so much that it was worth making a gift, even a gift that was rarely going to be "on view"...

Last year was the first time I remembered that public institutions now post their collections online, so I could see what the prints in question were:

The first was "The Kerosene Lamp" by Wanda Gág (1929)

Such an intriguing kind of meltiness to it all... In 2014 The New Yorker wrote on some of the artist's children's books)

The other was Thomas Hart Benton Sorghum Mill (1969)


My dad was classic "champagne on a beer budget" where I tend to the reverse, a bit. I suppose you could speculate that the kid from small town Ohio felt he had something to prove in a way that I don't, though also he had an artistic sensitivity I lack - and a gourmet-ish attention to detail evident in, say, his baking with precise measures and his incredibly persnickety needlepoint work.

FWIW I'm kind of the polar opposite of that, preferring things that are superficially intriguing, to be generated and consumed in the most expedient method available - I've cultivated my way of skimming a book and quickly getting the jist into kind of a lifestyle. On the other hand, I suppose the programming I do has a similar need to attend to tiny details...sometimes I wish he was around so we could have done needlepoint / pixel art collaborations.

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I should post this link : clevelandart.org/art/collections - Cleveland has a fine art museum (no pun intended) and the website made it trivial to find these.

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I just now had a 2-and-2-together moment. I was thinking "Well, yeah, Cleveland Museum - I mean that's where we were living" - but also, that is probably the very museum in a story he'd tell of his own young boyhood - going on a school field trip, up from downstate Coshocton Ohio, and once there being kind of stunned by the art of undressed women... "teacher... teacher... you can see her, her THINGS". To go from the boy in that story to having works from his collection accepted there - that's a heckuva narrative arc.
(The irony of crossposting that to FB when I could be doing something more productive is not lost on me) Donald Trump's own daughter doesn't want a kiss from that loathsome man.

via Jezebel's Donald Trump Got Curved by Both His Daughters Tonight

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tomorrow, we are all going to wake up and try and go about our lives with some measure of normalcy... but please, take a moment to remember that tonight, in front of the entire country, the republican nominee for president said that he would use his office to persecute and jail a citizen... allegedly for a crime of which she has already been investigated and found free of wrongdoing, but probably, more likely for daring to be his political opposition.

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Such a busy weekend at Honk!

Photo by Candace Esslinger - this was the clear Saturday before the Drenched Sunday

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Man, iTunes store search is so pathetic. Supposedly a while back they had a power search mode, but now it's just keywords. You can't search for just a song title, for instance, you're going to get any artist or album who has the same name. Even better - their version of "All Results" cuts off at 100. So if there are over 100 non-title matches for a song you're trying to find a good cover of, and the song's title is later in the alphabet, there's no way the song you're looking for will show up on the list.

Even more insulting is the message after those 100 items:
"Less relevant items are not displayed. To narrow your results, use more specific search terms."

I would if you'd let me, jerky. Getting all kinds of psyched for HONK! Fest 2015​ - me and my tuba will be at the School of Honk open rehearsal/performance at 3 today (Kenney Park near Davis), the "real" concert at VFW Dilboy Hall at 6, marching with JP Honk on the big parade between Davis and Harvard Square tomorrow at noon, then back with School of Honk on the Harvard Square main stage at 5:30 to support the trombone choir, and then the All Band Jam! Check out http://honkfest.org/2015-festival/schedule-2015/ for details if you're in the area and stop by- there should be a TON of awesome music all over the place. http://www.xkcd.com/1432/ XCKD kind of weighs in on the "devil's advocate" thing.

On the one hand, I get that (especially white dudes) injecting a "let me play devil's advocate here" can be destructive and hurtful of non-dominant voice and views. On the other hand, for me "devils advocate" thinking is also an exercise in empathy, a way to try to take on alternate viewpoints and understand the feelings people who disagree with me have, to see what's influencing people, whether or not we agree.

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--via http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3506#comic

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http://www.beagleton.com/flash/whatmessage_postswiff.html Posted this over ten years ago. I like people who also think most URLs should be permanent.

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Sometimes I really long for a technically-minded career coach, or mentor of some kind. Even though I'm reaching the midpoint of my career, I think I need some guidance, feedback, and cheering up in general. on my devblog, the history and charm of MacPaint

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Sounds like someone strangling a clarinet player... and I talk from experience.

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http://kirk.is/2008/10/10/ -- huh. Just realized today is the 25th anniversary of my dad's death. But I think I said everything I need to say about it 5 years ago.

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http://english.bouletcorp.com/2013/10/08/our-toyota-was-fantastic/ this is nice Regretsy posted some clips of Obama reading his own book, and taking the voices of various characters from his life... cussing hilarity ensues.

"Way too complicated."	"Buy your own damn fries."	"There are white folks..."
"Sure you can have my number baby!"	"Got nothing on me..."

In posting these clips, I also made up the alienbill soundboard with these clips and a bunch of other .wavs I grabbed in the mid-90s. Some of the Simpsons ones are pretty funny, and a lot are at least "potentially useful" in office situations, if you're in that kind of office.

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RUIN every Knock Knock joke by saying 'It's open!'

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found online

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http://www.cartoonstudies.org/index.php/lifeinhell/ - Matt Groenig "Life in Hell" tribute, worth downloading PDF, in a hurry go to Slate for a sampling

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buscemi eyes at work

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Some men are born to greatness, with others the devil simply says 'you'll do.'

This should probably have just been one long video...

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I kind of dig people talking about it being 101010 = 42 in binary = Meaning of Life Day...

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loveblender october 2010 via

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Decluttering Rule #538: if in the course of decluttering, you find a hat or helmet, you must wear that hat or helmet for at least a while. Twentieth anniversary of my dad's death.

I wonder what the rest of adolescence and then adulthood would have been like with him around. I wrote about his myriad interests and pursuits when I noted I had been alive for as long without him as I had been with him, and I wonder what would have caught his eye over the last two decades. His world was before the Internet, before the Cellphone, before clever-GPSes, before all these things that I think have really reshaped life... not (primarily) in the most important ways of love and friendship, but in a ton of other aspects, large and small.

And I wonder what he would have thought of me. My agnostic stance. My academic achievements. My marriage and divorce. Things I've written. Bands I played in. Websites I manage. My hobbies, my humor. I was so graceless at the time he was getting sick and dying. I guess there were glimmers of some of my potentials then, but also some outlines of my limits... and how would those limits have been different if he had been there? I know I'm very feedback driven, and so some of that has been cultivated in how I relate with my mom. Other relatives too, and teachers, and respected colleagues... but there's one type of approval I know I'll never really hear, and I wonder how that's changed my course, for better or worse.

I'll never look at him from an adult viewpoint, just over my shoulder in retrospect, and projection. I want to know what he would have made of this world, what he would have continue to make of himself in this world. Hell, in 4 or 5 years I'll be as old as he was when he died. Won't that be something!

H'oy.

October is such a bad month. Do other people get that too? Even apart from the current financial terrors, it just consistently seems to be an ugly season for me. A lot of the deaths in my family this time of year. Almost ten years ago today I wrote a note in my Palm Pilot's datebook to see if the young romance of Mo and I was still around, and it was around 5 years ago that she was deciding it wasn't what she wanted. just in general this time has a sense that things get worse, fortunes falling along with the temperature.

Can't wait for Halloween.

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<<should i stand now where i've never been? / should i leave this place behind? / this old railroad car is loosening from the tracks>>

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It's clear AT&T is compelled to charge 20 cents per txt msg even on unlimited data plans, because HEY SCREW YOU

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pentomino Twitter's "Hot Topics" seem to be subject to whole lot of "hey guys, everyone Twitter on this!" manipulation.

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McCain's really used "Fight With Me" as a slogan? I mean, I would, gladly, but it wouldn't seem super fair for him with his war injury etc. Announcement: I will never be able to spell "seperately" correctly on the first try. The problem may be phonetic.

That is all.

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Inexplicable Objects of the Moment


Hmm. When did fire alarms start spouting sideburns? Oh, and: ewww. (Taken in the Arlington Street Station hallway.)


USE THIS PRODUCT MAY MAKE ENGLISH NOT TO SO GOOD! (Taken at the South End 7-11 magazine rack.)

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Music of the Moment
All of the Beatles' LPs condensed into an hour of extremely weird and fast music.

Hearing about the Detroit Lions right after the Tigers beat the Yankees, it got me thinking, how many cities have coordinated teams? I made up a list of all the NFL, MLB, NHL,and NBA teams and sorted it alphabetically to gather the cities, and came up with:

• Atlanta features the Falcons, Hawks, and Thrashers (a type of bird)
• Baltimore features the Orioles and Ravens- this is one of my favorite connections, actually, one of the few bright spots of Baltimore stealing the Browns.
• Chicago has the Bears and the Cubs, another one I was already aware of
• Detroit has Lions and Tigers

Then there were more with more obvious thematic links to the city:

• Colorado Avalanche and Rockies
• Dallas Cowboys and Mavericks
• Houston Astros and Rockets

There were a few other cases as well, but none seemed quite as interesting.

Of course there might be more cool instances if teams didn't move around, leading to such dumb things as the New Orleans team moving and becoming the "Utah Jazz".

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Quote of the Moment

Confine your kissing to the irresistible.

...advice from when he was managing the Metropolitan Opera and there was a flu pandemic.

Maynard Ferguson... I love this photo

I used this as the top of the page quote for the lastest issue of the Love Blender. I also did a review of "The Way We Were" and in researching that I found out something sad... Maynard Ferguson is dead!

He was kind of an idol of mine, in a campy kind of way, but man did he have chops!

He's the only jazz musician I've made an effort to see live, twice, once at Daddy-O's and once at Ryles. His cover of Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon" is just the bomb-diggity.

I've been thinking about what my perfect "TODO" program would look like. Recently I reorganized the Todo category on my Palm, taking a cue from David "Getting Things Done" Allen's "What's on my Palm" article. (It used to be a simple webpage, now they made it a crappy PDF "free download" that you have to "Add To Cart" and go through a full checkout process to get. Way to be customer-friendly there, guys.)

The general idea is organizing tasks largely by where they need to get done, and then segregating out the "maybe/somedays". So I have categories

• @anywhere
• @call (calls to make, I might end up rolling that into @anywhere)
• @home
• @internet
• @store
• @waiting for... (useful to track dependencies seperately, or a reminder that you're expecting a shipment from Amazon, etc)
• @work

There's also "Someday/Maybe" and a few legacy categories that are usually just a different flavor of "Someday". He also suggests a category for big projects that have multiple subtasks, but I haven't started to follow that approach yet.

The native Palm Todo definately isn't my ideal. For instance, I'd like to view all tasks in all categories on a single page, but when I do that on Palm it gives no indication what the category for each task is. There are some other shortfalls as well, including poor integration with a datebook. Here's what would make up an ideal TODO app for me:

• TODOs are each assigned to one category (or more? There might be strength in allowing multiple, like Gmail's "tags") from an editable list of categories and an editable list of priorities. (And the "default" priority should be settable, I'd set it to "medium priority" rather than Palm's default of 1.) "View All" can be configured, then, to sort by category or by priority, but making both factors visible for each task.
• Ones marked done are segregated to a seperate listspace but still viewable on the Palm (not Palm's own weird "archive completed on computer at synch") Then you can get that smug little "look at what I've done!" feeling.
• Quietly (as in not displayed on the default display) the creation date and "done" date is stored, and there should be an option to resort displays by these dates.
• Simple ability to make subtasks. I've seen this most easily done by little arrow buttons...the right arrow indents the task and makes it a subtask of the previous task, and the left arrow would restore a subtask to being a "sibling" of the previous tasks. None of that sophomoric "a task with 4 subtasks is 25% complete when one of those subtasks is done" graphical indicators. (There's a slight internal complication with this, as a list of completed TODOs might display a few unfinished parent TODOs for context, but I think it can be done in an intuitive way.)
• This might be feature-creep but maybe my ideal program would embed a full datebook. I'm fond of Outlook's "Today" view, which shows a collapsed view of a days events (when you're scheduling time, you might want to have a typical one hour = one line view, but otherwise I prefer a simpler "list of day's events" formats) along with TODOs.
• Tasks could be assign a due date and there would be a visual indicator of just how overdue something is. And you could also make non-task "Events" that still show up in the datebook but with no nagging.
• Palm is pretty clever about figuring recurring datebook entries, giving you the option of saying, e.g. for a monthly event "the 9th of every month" or "the second Sunday of every month". It doesn't let you say "the last Tuesday of every month" however...my idealized TODO would take care of that as well.
• There would also be "Recurring Floating TODOs". Say I'd like to be reminded to pay bills every 15 days, though I know I let it slide sometimes, but always want it to be 15 days ever I last did it. These TODOs would show you at a glance how long its been since you've done them as well as be able to remind and then nag you when certain thresholds are reached.

I guess that's about it. Dang, this got to be a long and rather eccentric entry, I hope some percentage of the regulars find it at least skim-worthy. Feel free to chime in with your counterpoints or new ideas. I'm not sure if I'll ever get to doing this, or what language I should write it in...maybe one of those specialty simple Form-based languages for Palm?

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UPDATE:13 years later and I'm still thinking about this Quote of the Moment

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.

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Technology of the Moment
I am learn is a blog made by a computer script. It does a surprisingly good job of sounding like some kind of demented teenager who has English as a distant second (or maybe third) language. What I like about it is the guy set it up so it spontaneously posts every once in a while...there's something beautiful about a demented 'bot that starts itself up, even if it's just a random timer, relative to a script that the developer fires off every once in a while.

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Goal and Reward of the Moment
So lately I've been drooling over some LCD projectors friends of mine have...instead of a TV, they plug into the projector and get a HUGE, crisp picture on a movie screen. At the low-end these run ~$800, so it is a bit of an indulgence, so I've been thinking of ways to possibly justify it. Until yesterday, "Well, Christmas is coming" is all I could come up with. (It's not like my current TV has stopped working or anything.) Though today I had a brainstorm: I should use it to bribe myself to get these 2 rooms of mine cleared out...my closet of immense modular storage, and then the back room, which was kind of a dumping ground for my move this summer. If I could do those rooms, really pare down the clutter, clean my house, and (maybe) clean up my files as well, that really would be an accomplishment. Plus, there's something nice in not having a 200lb tv in my life.

Of course, there are some pros and cons. But maybe I can kick my butt into doing the needed decluttering, and just know I have the indulgence as an option rather than something I'm neccesarily going to do.

Actually, the whole thing reminds me of how weird money is. Like, I was thinking about a getaway weekend, and it really wouldn't be a big deal to spend $100-$200 on a hotel. But $50 video games seem really expensive. A nice dinner, maybe my part of the bill comes to $30. But I hesitate when a DVD is like $25. $800-$1000 seems like a HUGE deal, but I pay more than that for rent every month. Food and lodging are neccesities, sure, but people who are otherwise pretty financially strict with luxuries don't always sweat on economizing on those things...

Sigh, Yankees evened it up last night. On the other hand, that just means it's now a 5 game series, except now Red Sox have homefield advantage.

"Cowboy Up" is such a funny little motto/rallying gimmick for the Red Sox. I kind of like it, despite my usual caution with most things of a western theme...I mean our guys are kind of working on a paradox, a team of mavericks, but hey, humans (especially Sox fans) are complex, we can handle contradictions.

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Links of the Moment
Sitting on my backlog is Multi Theft Auto, a project that makes the violent but brilliantly flexible game "Grand Theft Auto 3" into an online world with many, many homocidal maniacs about, not just the one of the usual single player mode.

Tied in with that is a great essay, Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs. (MUDs, "Multi-User Dungeons", are an older form of shared online world, exclusively text based. It's a very clever metaphor...players who are Hearts are in it for the social interaction, Clubs are out to cause other players grief, Diamonds seek to advance in status in the game's terms, and Spades try to dig up information on the mechanics of the game itself. It goes on to talk about how MUDs are generally balanced to encourage one group or another, and how the groups interact with each other in general. Cool reading.

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Salvation Army Reference of the Moment
Heh. James Lileks took a picture of the Salvation Army building on 14th Street in NYC, and described it as "Very cool, but highly ominous; it's like a soul-eating machine, not a soul-saving one." My mom worked right around there for the better part of the 90s. (Whoops: Craig points out that I posted the wrong link, though this review of my current old but terrifically small and functional cellphone is a good read as well for the budding Kirkologist.)

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Mascot of the Moment
This is Floyd D. Duck, the mascot of BubbleYum. According to the BubbleYum site, Floyd says "Hope you're in the mood to POP...come join the bubble party!" That's quite a rallying cry. Clearly, Floyd is a role model for anyone who enjoys the sweet pleasure that is the result of modern bubble gum technology. The site even has desktop wallpaper and screensavers with the attitude-laden mallard's visage.
Got home earlyish last night. Still it felt like I had no time, 'cause it was dark so early. My body must have thought it was later than it was. Dang it all to heck. I have to switch into my "life goes on at night mode". It's not always easy.

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Editorial of the Moment
A clear view of how distorted our view of Iraq is. The USA bombs, the public doesn't even notice. Those "no fly zones" are basically just made up. Gah, we suck.

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Good Carma
When I drive into Salem each morning, about 1/3 to 1/2 of my time is spent in Salem on this long main street. I actually appreciate the ability to do little favors for drivers who are trying to cross the street or merge into traffic, because it's a non-zero-sum game. By waving them in, I'm adding at most a tiny tiny bit to my drivetime (and usually not even that) but most of the other drivers in my lane don't seem to be as generous, so the person trying to move could have been stuck there for a long while. So I get to collect the good karma of all the little waves and what-not.

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Quick Link of the Moment
Worth a quick glance, the homepage of a Lego guru.

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Theology of the Moment

"Is there a God?"
"There is, but we don't know where. Or who. And, indeed, why."

From a page of asking a lot of famous and semi-famous people "Is There A God?"

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Article of the Moment
There was a big Slashdot discussion on the Fortune Magazine article Generation Wrecked. Fun to try to figure out where you fit on this bellcurve. For Mo and I (who are at the tail end of the age range) I think it's firmly on the righthand side, far from the people who are struggling and/or broke, but we never did wander into the "retire in my 30s" territory that some people were able to find in the dot com boom.

Religion of the Moment
Wow. I had close to a religious experience watching the Earth recede from Monday's Space Shuttle Cam footage when "Endless Column" on the Blue Man Group CD came on. Terrific, melancholy but hopeful intstrumental. It's almost enough to make me forget that the shuttle is such crappy 1970s technology.
Wow, it was a busy time on this site's guestbook yesterday. Not sure who Y.Nne is at the moment, maybe I'm being dense.

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Multimedia of the Moment
Interesting flash film: What message? You left a message? (self-described as a "Science Fiction Flash Movie without Interest") Would be one of the coolest flash videos ever, except that it doesn't heed the precept "harmonicas spoil most things". (via Ranjit I think.)

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Quote of the Moment

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'.

I might be going on a bit of a Pratchett quote kick.