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Just watched Love Story. It's sweet (if very sad) even if some of the early romance feels unearned. Interesting glimpses of late 60s Cambridge. You know, stuff like "snow". (Also I always appreciate the chance to inject a Tom Lehrer "Fight Fiercely, Harvard!")

They had a line that that to rent four rooms for 8250 a month 9in Cambridge) is absolutely impossible. took me a second to realize they meant $82.50. (~$670 these days, which at least 2-4x what I'd say now, if not more.)

(IMDB'ing around I see Ali MacGraw also played a Radcliffe romantic interst in "Goodbye, Columbus". Though that's the city and not the lost spice mongering slaver dude.)

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It's funny how much I resent "rate this movie" features on streaming services and IMDB. And for my own records, I have no trouble ranking stuff 1-5 stars (heavy on the 3s and 4s; 2s are some what disapointing, rare 1s I despise, 5s are like all time greats for me - and it's curved by my expectations for it) but being called to being part of a big consensus judgement goes against my sense of the world.

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Today I watched Love Story and Goodbye, Columbus. Neither were super fantastic but I feel empowered.

I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics that I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.


Sent from my iPad

How to hack, Missouri-style (a multi-step process):
go to a public, but HORRIBLY written site
right click and hit "View Page Source"(or hit F12)
read

Sounds like they are wanting to persecute some reporter for bringing their ineptness to their attention.

(So much for being the "Show Me State", clearly they are bigger believers in "don't show me")

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The other week I posted lyrics to Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs (Continued)". For some reason I wanted to take a deeper dive at deconstructing it. (Sort of a throw back to my English major University days, though maybe more subjectively than I was allowed to then! I once did a ten page paper on a 3 line poem.)

Acoustically the song starts by painting a broad soft landscape, gently sorrowful in tone, and taking up a full third of this song which is kind of a reprise of a longer piece.

The first lyrics start continuing the wistful tone set by the orchestration:

If I could have it back
All the time that we wasted

...An impossible wish for having time again. The album this track is from (and that shares a name with it) has a strong apocalyptic theme. So the loss could be somewhere between the personal and the larger community scale - and maybe with a fear that people should have done more preparation when there was the chance.

I'd only waste it again

One thinks of the Tallulah Bankhead line "If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner" and similar expressions that can almost challenge the idea of free will - if we were the same person we were then, and in the same situation, of course we'd take the same actions and make the same mistakes.

But then:

If I could have it back
You know I would love to waste it again

A female voice joins in on the second line of this phrase - suddenly the "we" of the second line of the song (in a piece otherwise in the singular) gains a new depth. Not only do these lines mark a switch from the regretful to the wistful, but there is a shared sense of connection, a shared past.

Waste it again and again and again

A lovely mechanic of repetition here that mirrors the way time is 'wasted', especially with someone: over a series of repeated days, weeks, months.

What is the context of the song? There's a strong sense of loss here, whether it's in the apocalyptic story of the larger album or merely a failed relationship. (And for me it hits home - I'm at peace with my life, and not having made a traditional family, but I think for many there can be a sense of lost opportunity and wasted young adulthood.)

Well, I've got to ask

This is the only spoken line in the song. Who is the narrator asking? A divine figure who might be able to grant his wish to have the time back? Or maybe it's a hopeless plea to the other half of the "we" of the song, to rekindle a broken relationship. Wistful and resigned either way.

2022 Update: after watching Weide's Vonnegut documentary, I looked up this song and realized the lyric might be "I forgot to ask". Which still carries weight in the same way. Maybe even more poignant for me; Amber told me that it was me failing to ask her "Please don't do this" is what sealed our fate.

The song then continues with further repetition:

Sometimes I can't believe it
I'm moving past the feeling again
Sometimes I can't believe it
I'm moving past the feeling again
Sometimes I can't believe it
I'm moving past the feeling again
Sometimes I can't

The repetitions alternate between the main singer and the second voice until fade out. Are both parties surprised at their success in moving on? But the "again" in the line, along with the repetition of the lines themselves, points to it not being a steady sense of increasing equanimity - so is the surprise at just having the ability to move on, or at realizing the backsliding into feeling has happened again?

The song ends with a fade out - so it's ambiguous what the truly final line is, but "Sometimes I can't" works well, and ties into the confusion about if the singers have moved on or not.

This is an amazing 1:30 of music.

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Life Lessons Learned in My 40's That I Wish I Could Tell My 20-Year Old Self. Well-trod territory but good. JP Honk played PRONK! Bookended with band trips to Atlanta and Florida, and the musical Hello Dolly in between. Removing ads from loveblender.com, which (not surprisingly) weren't making much of anything. But what I find funny is remembering once upon a time I thought they made the site look more serious and professional.

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Blender of Love

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Silence is so accurate.

<3 Carrie Fisher - this GIF set of an interview with her is gold. Loved her writing ever since this diary entry as she wrestled with a crush on Harrison Ford (and who wouldn't crush out on Harrison Ford)

"I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional and intellectual feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture."

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Wow, Spy Pond is less than a mile from me. SPOILER: it ends up ok-ish.

UNEDITED: Bystanders rush to help woman after she accidentally drove vehicle into Spy Pond in Arlington Description from John Guilfoil Public Relations on Vimeo.

Ugh, 1AM and the building is thrumming with the bass sounds of the paving equipment on Mass Ave outside. (For a while they were incorporated into my dreams as the background engine noise in a "Bioshock Infinite"-esque floating city fantasia, but no longer.)

My tax dollars at work!

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But if you're like me and find yourself making really slow progress, with your Toss and Donate piles growing slowly, if at all, you might have a bigger problem. Obviously you don't want to self-diagnose a psychological condition like hoarding just because you read a column on a comedy website. You'd need some kind of quiz for that.

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Keeping up with PVC frame craftiness, I designed a stand for a foam-board pinned poster to place on my table as I launch the physical version of my comic at Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo 2015. All the joints and enough pipe for me to make a mistake or three was less than $10.


yesterday, I saw a video on the physics of skateboard tricks and this morning I am suddenly weirdly struck by the everpresence of gravity; how it's always down down down and it seems like a miracle that anything can stand at all.

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The Internet and Money and Hearts......

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Standards_Day Today is World Standards Day. Except in the US, which celebrates it on the 23rd.

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Also, the infamous Smoot became chairman of standards board ANSI!

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Group shot of the band!

about 300 cubic inches of Lego

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I decided I had too giant a surplus of underused Lego, so I divided it three ways, and am giving 2/3 of it to two different friend families. It looked to be about 300 cubic inches (at least seemed to more or less fill 3 10.5 cubes.)

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"I wish you could see what I can see. Sometimes you have to be up really high to see how small you are.

I'm going home now."

...from Gizmodo's watch the video of the space jump here

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My childhood would have been that much less confusing if George Lucas hadn't named one planet 'Tattooine' and another 'Dantooine.'

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Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

--via 22words

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Facile observation: you see more MacBooks in Boston, but more PC laptops on the commuter rail.

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ENDI Tank Battle for iOS is excellent -- like a BattleTanx lite, great quick hit, perfect controls. Best student game I've seen in a while.

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You don't realize how weirdly effective a bicycle kickstand is 'til it breaks- odd how one little rod can then form 1/3 a stable tripod.

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Sigh-With a scratched iPhone 4 lens, I wonder why the iPad camera connector doesn't work with it: darkly suspect Apple's avoiding camera competition.

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Does anyone know chess notation? "1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nc6 3.Qxf7 mate" forced a rule change to specify "legal moves only" but I can't visualize...

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http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 - the full Sculley interview is worth it.

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@Cracked ( http://is.gd/g2elW ) vs Douglas Coupland @NYtimes ( http://is.gd/g2en7 ) on neologisms - I think Cracked wins.

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http://adangerousbusiness.com/2010/01/05/the-museum-of-soviet-video-games/ - soviet era arcade museum
from b3ta - I find it totally hypnotic

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http://www.thebigmoney.com/slideshow/new-buck-starts-here - ideas for a US currency dacelift. Probably bad ideas, but fun to think about.

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<<the best thing you've ever done for me / is to help me take my life less seriously / it's only life after all>>

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I got your four finger gesture right here, Steve Jobs!

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SO ANGRY because of loops other coders go to do automagic form to model mapping. Screw that! "model.foo = formelem.val" ain't that hard!

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"Eternal Sunshine" collectors edition box is oddly selfpromoting, embossed msgs like "Dazzling", "Profound", "Timeless"-for academy voters?

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"let's hear it for the boy", modernized, would replace "watches every dime" with "is up to hid eyeballs in credit card debt" Yesterday I was at Salem Plumbing Supply with Evil B. Despite the prosaic name quite a little show room. They even had a usable restroom with one of those Japanese toilets that... err.... let's just say it gets to know you better than many casual dates will.

What made me fear for our civilization, however, was the way they now have bathroom mirrors with (evidently) one-way-glass and embedded television screens. I kid you not. The design was pretty clever, and it looks like when it's off it appears to be a normal mirror, but there's a TV screen taking up the bottom third or so.

Oy.

The other day we had some Grey Poupon mustard at work. Oddly, my strongest association with that mustard is working with mentally handicapped kids at Camp Happiness, a daycamp run by the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland. The kids generally all got boxed lunches, but there was nothing for the counsellors except for this surplus of hotdogs we kept on hand, and then, oddly, Grey Poupon to dip 'em in.

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Quote of the Moment

Thighs--of course. But knees--never!

I think I know what she means, Knees are weird. Or rather, I blame the kneecaps, the rest can be quite lovely.

Joke of the Moment
Q. What was Beethoven's favorite fruit?

A.

--The only way I could think of showing a sound based joke...

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Geek Fashion of the Moment
WOW. an LED-tanktop that plays "Conway's Game of Life".

I wonder if the idea could be modified to scroll text as well...

Dang it...with Curt Schilling hurt, the Red Sox offense picked a damn poor time to get themselves into a one hit funk. I remember one time after a Patriots' game when Brady said "sometimes the defense carries the offense, sometimes the offense carries the defense". (After he threw his way out of a jam that the the D had gotten them into in a high scoring game.) But it always takes some of both...last night the pitching held its own, but the bats just weren't there.

Stupid sport.

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Personal Triumph of the Moment
Last night in yoga class I did an honest-to-goodness handstand...I'd only tried it once before during a previous 10-week session and it didn't go so well, but last night I got it done with relative ease. (I think part of the trick is when you're bent in half, ready to push off (hands on the ground,one leg bent for springiness, the other straight to haul up) is to keep your feet close to your hands, so there's less rotational inertia....that was my instructor's advice, and he said I managed to do it nice and lightly, rather than slamming full force into the wall I was against.) By chance I was directly across from the yoga room's small mirror, so I could totally see my moment of triumph. Fun!

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Photo of the Moment

--This deer survived a 25 mile trip caught in the bumper of a Britsh driver's Rover with only a few cuts and bruises. (via autoblog)

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Link of the Moment
Drug Smugglers Do The Craziest Things...some really clever bits of engineering to pack these things away.

Parody of the Moment
A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, "What does love mean?" The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined and more than made up for the jail time they had to do. See what you think:

When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. Then she gives him a hand-job. That's love.

Love is what makes you smile when you're tired. Wait, no, that's coffee.

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. They don't call you 'jerkface' like all the kids at school do. Oh, how I long for the sweet kiss of death.

Love is when you go out to eat and give someone most of your French fries without making them give you any of yours, and they don't report you to the FBI for not calling them 'freedom fries'.

Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, and he wears it every day. Then you tell him you like another guy's shirt, and he beats up the other guy and takes his shirt and gets sent to juvie. Love is fun!

(--by Jacob W. Haller on alt.religion.kibology--probably a parody of these quotes.)

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Movie of the Moment
How on earth did I miss this movie? Best title for a movie I've ever heard of.

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Programmer Link of the Moment
Joel on Software on Character Encoding. S'funny how much you can get away with without this ever coming up, but when it does, man can it be painful.

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Gamer Link of the Moment
We're just a-poppin' with special interest links today. Check out 1Up.com's 50 to Watch, small, highly readable profiles of the likely major players of the next few years of gaming. Overall, the site looks like an interesting up-and-comer in online coverage of video gaming.

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News Thought of the Moment
Supreme Court to decide on use of Pledge in U.S. schools. You know, it seems kind of weird that people pledge allegiance to a flag. To the republic for which it stands makes sense, but I don't think enough people really grok what a flag means, at least in the sense that the pledge means it. The story I link to mentions the "under God" phrase is a johnny-come-lately Communist witch-hunt-relic anyway, but that fact isn't mentioned enough, in my opinion.

Reminds me a bit of this one time when we were playing darts against the Elks Lodge in Arlington. I was glancing at some proposed changes to their constitution, and mostly it was someone wanting to add "...and who will salute the flag" to a bunch of qualifications for membership or other roles. I wondered if there was some wanna-be Elk who was declining to salute the flag, or if they were just being paranoid, or what. Small Gif Cinema of the Moment

big jule

This is from Euclid High School's 1991 production of "Guys & Dolls". I was the menacing ganster "Big Jule", who gets slugged by the hero Sky Masterson...but this time the actor playing Sky tripped on my foot and landed square on my nuts. My knees flying up here was pure reflex. Luckily my character did nothing but lie there for a while. "Sky" was barely able to finish the scene without cracking up. Amazingly, it happened during the final dress rehersal, the only time the show was allowed to be taped.

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Quote of the Moment

"You wouldn't kill yourself, it's just not your nature."
"I resent that. I'm as broody and romantically self-destructive as the next girl."

That's a new WB cartoon set in the Batman universe. (Where Batman has skipped town, according to this Salon review.)

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UI Link of the Moment
Alan Cooper, "Father of Visual Basic", on 14 Principles of Polite Apps. Good stuff for any software application authors out there.

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Kirk's Fantasy of the Moment
Oh my goodness. An upcoming sex comedy starring Madonna, directed by the Guy who made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch?? (Admittedly the Guy (Ritchie) in question is her husband.) Somebody up there likes me. (Message to Katie P... if you get this give mookie an e-mail at mookie@en.com)

Last night Mo and I went with Mike and Dave to Rudy's and then to Boston Billiard Club...it was fun, but pretty expensive... I guess the waitresses in the short black dresses and knee high boots shoulda been a give away. Our waitress was pretty amazing, with a body right out of the more realistically drawn R. Crumb cartoons...actually not too far from Devil Girl.

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Political Quote of the Moment

But I think the deepest reason for this divergence is a simple lack of power. The awful thing about becoming a second-rank power is that you discover that foreign affairs involves dealing with foreigners, and taking seriously their absurd ideas about the world. This is something which America has yet to learn.

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Link of the Moment
A fun little read, A Letter To My Younger Self, where 42 year old Brian Elroy McKinley writes to his 14 year old incarnation. If only we all could do something like this! (Of course, if everyone told their younger selves to "buy microsoft stock" and so on, the markets would get pretty darn weird.)

Image of the Moment

Click for Original

On stileproject.com (a rather raunchy R-rated site), an unusually innocent image of a guy who made himself a transformer costume...that actually (more or less) transforms. Akihide Fukui from California made it...amazing in more ways than one.