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I really like Scottish tweets

Yesterday JP Honk played for our bandmate Matt and his beloved Nelson's wedding! (all but the first two photos by Melissa)

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Also after there was pumpkin carving at Miller's! Ours is the large pumpkin on the left. We sort of cheated - Melissa found sound prosthetic teeth - but they looked great and menacing. (I'm all for laziness when it gets the job done...)

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3 bonus wedding shots (stills from video)

All things have a bit of soul.

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We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

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In a way we are already living the dualistic existence that Kurzweil promised. In addition to our physical bodies, there exists--somewhere in the ether--a second self that is purely informational and immaterial, a data set of our clicks, purchases, and likes that lingers not in some transcendent nirvana but rather in the shadowy dossiers of third-party aggregators. These second selves are entirely without agency or consciousness; they have no preferences, no desires, no hopes or spiritual impulses, and yet in the purely informational sphere of big data, it is they, not we, that are most valuable and real.

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From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

(Describing the weariness of life and the relief that comes from the assurance that it cannot last forever.)

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There are two types of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky.

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The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once made a joke to this effect. Perhaps, he mused, God got a little lazy when he was creating the universe, like the video game programmer who doesn't bother to meticulously work out the interior of a house that the player is not meant to enter. "He stopped at a subatomic level," he said, "because he thought humans would be too stupid to progress so far."

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The op-eds making the case for shutdown all seemed to follow the same formula, beginning with some vague appeal to the intrinsic value of human life and then quickly devolving into profitability algorithms and affordability assessments in an attempt to demonstrate that the choice made sense on both moral and economic fronts--a tactic that only confirmed, in the end, the opposing view that human life was reducible to economic logic. This trend reached its logical end in an op-ed by Paul Krugman, who flatly debunked the truism that human life was "priceless." The statistical cost of life was calculated all the time in transportation and environmental policy, he said: it was roughly $10 million.

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Damn, my devblog is 10 years old today! Thoughtful piece on practicing mindfulness of death. I know with my "So You're Going to Die" comic, there are some people who are more comfortable with not thinking about the topic, but I do think keeping your eyes open and exploring the emotional space is a very useful thing. Like the Nikki Mirghafori says we are too often out of alignment with what we actually know our lives to be; something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. As Dr. Jenn Mann says "The unconscious mind doesn't know the difference between past, present, and future", so often the conscious awareness of the conclusion of things is jarring, but we can think and feel ourselves to a more honest and healthy and accepting place.
Simon Pitt writing on "Computer Files Are Going Extinct" (or "The Death of the Computer File.doc") had this nice line:

Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.

I would nitpick and say "files plus browsers and maybe a scripting language", but I think Pitt points to a major sea change. For me, coding is still about files - nouns - and then very well tested trustworthy verbs of the browser itself, and not too many intermediaries. Now coding is so much verb, so much process, and younger programmers put raw DOM into the same "low level stuff I don't need to think about much" level as an older CGI hacker might put assembly language.

The rest of the article was kind of delightful for us old-timers, reviewing how services and streams and what not have replaced quasi-physical files.

And I think that's a bummer. I'm currently reading Barbara Tversky's "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought". It really emphasizes how there's a physicality to our thoughts, that we turn to metaphors of space and motion all the time to make sense of our experiential data - and with files and folders, there was a physical nature to our filesystems as well. I kind of hate the iPhone's "all your photos as a big stream" approach to life, or using "smart folders" to take a giant heap of information. Folders can be clutzy and coarse grained, but there was a flexibility and sense of stability to them that the modern replacements lack. Before I started college I got to visit Marcos, our exchange student from Portugal... his friends put on a poetry and fashion show "Fractions of Seconds" and I saw a village bullfight.

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Random notes on reading and vanity:
1. I recently shelled out the $20 to get my old and scratched but great touchscreen Kindle off of ads, so the lock screen is an attractive grayscale image instead. Worth it I think.
2. It's funny that besides column width, my other reason for not using my phone as a reader is so that it's more obvious to onlookers that I'm engaged in reading and not browsing or gaming. This may be one of the most shallow things about me. (On the other hand, I always think it's good when the cover matches the book. So to speak.)
3. Come to think of it, I've switched from iPad Mini to this old Kindle full time. Maybe partially in existential protest to Apple leaving the Mini behind- I'd buy a new model that supported the Pencil in a second. But also, despite the lack of backlighting and color-coded highlighting, e-ink readers are such a chill technology.
4. Since 2000 I've been recording books read, movies watched, games played through, tv-series consumed. It's nearly impossible for me not to gamify this for myself- like I know I'm driven to complete mediocre books just for the little mark. At the end of the year I post a list with comments and recommendations. I'm not really trying to impress anyone with the numbers, just compete with my past self. Maybe I should consider posting the list without counting...

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Arun and his pup Bolt
Latest decluttering thought: WaPo on the upcoming book "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning."

A few of her tips: Don't start with your photos, as you'll get bogged down in your memories and never accomplish anything. Make sure you keep a book of passwords for your heirs. Give away nice things you don't want as gifts, such as china or table linens or books, as opposed to buying new items. Keep a separate box of things that matter only to you, and label it to be tossed upon your death. It's okay to keep a beloved stuffed animal or two.

It reminds me of the thought that Kondo's "Life Changing Magic of TIdying up had a bit of a death wish.

It also reminds me of this Donald Hall poem and then a quote from Laura Miller:

Aging well is largely a process of recognizing what you don't need to worry about, one thing at a time, until, presumably, you winnow it down to life itself and find you can easily let that go too.

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Kiko Alonso took an afternoon stroll with a Falcons receiver over his shoulder this is beautiful Three photos (from School of Honk's trip to Georges Island) by drummer Lilia Volodina





I love the sky in the first one.

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into. The other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.

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via pleated-jeans So happy to see Amazon's Kindle app for iOS has finally added in "Collections"! It was so frustrating to just have "giant pile of books, some read, some unread".

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living.

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Looks like the placeholder at alleyoop.com ain't there no more.

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Much to my delight, "Rhubarb and Custard" appears to be a bit of a thing for candy in the UK.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk - My top 50 moves on-- arranged this obscure-ish Lisa Lisa item "Skip to my Lu" for acappella but never sang it... 2019 UPDATE: I lost the video at but this page talks about how scientists are having to research how a bicycle balances itself.... --This is what's beautiful about science: sometimes the conventional wisdom, even about everyday phenomenon, is wrong and the community embraces the new findings.

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It's sad how Wile E. Coyote is remembered for his violence, and not for his brilliantly realistic paintings of tunnels.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com - I am starting a UI/UX dev blog, jQuery/DHTML5, etc. Mostly for my own future reference, but others might dig it.

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NY Times was to polite to print slogan "Suck for Luck", where some NFL fans team want to throw the season for #1 draft choice QB Andrew Luck

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RIP Benoit Mandelbrot. Thank God he wasn't murdered. It would have taken the cops forever to draw the chalk outline.

Daphaknee points out that Vice magazine has a totally excellent PDF with lots of artists reinterpreting "Where the Wild Things Are" including this one by her Japanese Comic favorite Kago Shintaro (warning, strange and pervy- but evocative and brilliant - stuff if you dig into that link there.)

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The Dawkins vs Armstrong dueling essays from WSJ that my UU Science and Spirituality discussed last night. Dawkins is a fundamentalist literalist who just happens to have truth on his side. Doesn't mean he's 100% right though - I really think fundamentalism of all stripes is the core problem, when faith becomes more important than life. (But at least Dawkins is a fundie about the process - the scientific process - and not just the current result of that, the scientific consensus, such as it is.)

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http://alienbill.com/2600/playerpalnext.html - way too often I find myself cribbing CSS/Javascript from that page I made back in the day. New Love Blender has been published.

In other things Kirk is up to, I think this weekend, from 5PM Saturday to 5PM Sunday, I'll join in 24 Hour Comics Day @ Millers. That should be interesting. If sleep deprived.

Ugh, Dow keeps sliding, I have no idea why IE and skype work on my laptop but Firefox doesn't, mild lower back soreness. But, like all things, it could be worse. (Also, I drew this pumpkin on that laptop. I wonder if I need to adjust for my tendency to draw on a slant on it.)

Blew off the debates last night for the chance to see the finale of Project Runway. I am a bad person.

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Exchange of the Moment

Female customer: Does my ShopRite card work here?
Bored cashier: No, this is a Gristedes.
Customer: Well, I was just curious about their relationship.
Bored cashier: Like any good relationship, it's all about boundaries.

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I GODDAMNN HATE VISTA. HATE HATE HATE. Firefox autoupdated, now doesn't load pages. IE works. Firewall claims to be off. W. T. GD. F!?!?!

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<<there's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met / part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?>>

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Feels like I'm getting that cold going around maybe. A hint of tenderness in the throat, a dab of drip. Just in time for 24hour comics day.

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Mooning someone, mooning FOR someone-- different things! Who knew-- I just heard a dumb radio spot, or maybe it was just pretending, for AT&T. A bunch of cheerleaders were shouting "W! T! G! T!" (Way To Go Team) and "G! T! G!" (Go Team Go) as well as saying "I D W" for "I Don't Wanna"-- it's some promotion for text messaging. Ironically, only the mother's character's Not Getting It "ASAP" example is actually shorter when spoken than the original phrase. (It's the old "www" thing all over again.)

On a similar note I noticed I've stopped using the usual abbreviations like "C U" and "4", just because the iPhone kind of pushes you away from the short cuts.

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Video of the Moment
--Best part: "When God Gives You Lemons YOU FIND A NEW GOD". Via trunkbutt.

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Quote of the Moment

You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...

So not too long ago (even though it was a month or so of on-again, off-again playing) I got through a wonderfully cathartic video game, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. You get the chance to play the Hulk as he smashes and slams his way through cityscapes and bleak desert landscapes, crushing buses and cars (or ripping up the latter for use as armor-plated gauntlets), doing battle with tanks, 'copters, and even more specialized mech foes, leaping over (and even running up the side of) buildings and landmarks. The sense of speed and power was almost palpable, and was a great after-work stress reliever. It's rare that a game aims to so viscerally capture what it would be like to wield such immense power in a kind of "sandbox" setting.

So I got into the Hulk for a bit. (The movie of a few years back is sitting in its red netflix envelope right now.) One guy on a message board asked who would win, Hulk or Superman, a question which the Internet has of course thoroughly addressed. But on a different forum I found a slightly larger version of this post 9-11 image:



Man, after playing that game, and its exploration of the uncontrolled fury and occasional boasting ("Hulk is strongest there is!") of the Hulk, this image feels more and more like a metaphor for this nation and its response to WTC, particularly in Iraq: righteous fury and exercise of strength even if more restraint and finesse was called for and would have put us in a better situation.

Oh well. On a lighter note, from Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin comics blog:


Heheheheh. Well, Hulk is supposed to be strongest one there is...

Line of the Moment

Greg Goss wrote:
> Old Spanish money prior to the English take-over
> of most of North America could be broken into eight
> smaller bits. Think of the pirate stereotype,
> obsessed with "pieces of eight".

"Pieces of nine."

Awwwk! Parroty error.

(Geeks only need apply.)

I'm thinking about a revamp to my website (along with moving to a new webhost, thanks FoSO and FoSOSO!) and I realize maybe it's time to think about some kind of content management system. More specifically, I'd like to make presentations of stuff I've done over the years, and tag it with some kind of metadata, so along with the usual arrangement by type (these are my photos, these are my Java toys) you could also arrange it by...well, arranging by year comes to mind. And search on keywords (I use one or two sentence writeups for a lot of my content, it turns out.)

I have a lot of different stuff. Ideally I could use the system with my current data presentations, like the way photobook is arranged, or how I display my gamebuttons is. Sometimes it's not clear what a "chunk" is...maybe gamebuttons is a single "thing". Or maybe each gamebutton is...aargh, I dunno.

And then I have to decide if I should stick with flatfiles or upgrade to a database...flatfiles are so reliable and portable though, I hate to give them up lightly..

I'd also like to add in a lot of stuff, and just make a more canonical Kirk site. Not that 98% of it will be of any interest to anyone else, but it would be neat if all the old school stuff I've scanned in was there, and links to all my Loveblender.com rambles...I guess there would have to be a private section for the stuff I'd like to have in the same format but don't want everyone else to see...I don't have a strong sense of privacy, but I know other people I've interacted with do.

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Link of the Moment
The Math Behind Murphy's Law...LAN3 points out that the recent Genesis solarwind spaceprobe crash landing was due to a sensor installed backwards which is amazingly similar to the story that actually gave rise to Murphy's Law -- originally stated as:

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Quote of the Moment

If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those can result in catastrophe, then someone will do it.

Dang it to heck, September 25 was my 1000th kisrael.com and I didn't even notice. Grrr! (And it was a lame entry too, and I knew it then, or else I wouldn't have called it "Thursday Thud"...the "Quote of the Moment" was too appropriate, in retrospect.) As always, here's how I figure these anniversary dates out. (I hope I do better at catching the 100K rollover of my car--I got a good photo at 50K.)

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Sports Update of the Moment
Red Sox "evened up the series in a must-win situation" (sounds a lot better than "staved off elimination", which makes it sound like they were down 2 or 3 games, not just 1) but the Cubs lost to those "punk-ass Marlin" (not that it matters but I'm never going to forgive them for having a hearltess rich owner who bought good players, won it all, then dispersed them to the wind after a heartbreaking (for me) 7-game series over my beloved Cleveland Indians.) Still, I guess it's good, that Red Sox/Cub series, with it impossible for either team to win, would have brought about the implosion of the universe, so I guess we caught a good break there.

I'm kidding. Sox are going to win it all.

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Grumble of the Moment
Hidden Tracks on CDs. What the hell is the point? Either it's a normal track that they leave out of the listing, or they stick a song at the end of another song, or they do something stupid like put 90-odd blank tracks between the normal songs and tht hidden treasue, or a ton of silence. Do they think they're being funny? Or cute? Or interesting? Wrong on all 3 counts.

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Article of the Moment
I've gained a lot of respect for Slate.com over the past few years...frankly, it's a more consistently interesting site than Salon. Today they had a run down on the top candidates to be the next pope...a lot of politics and other considerations. (Interestingly, the top 4 candidates consist of a Black, a Hispanic, an American, and (in a technical sense) a Jew.)

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Tourist Attraction of the Moment
Whoa! The Colossal Colon Tour is in Boston, right now! Copley Square, to be exact. Clearly, you don't want to pass up the chance to crawl through a 40 foot long, 4 foot tall model of a human colon, right? And see things like things like cancer and Crohn's disease and polyps? Link of the Moment
It's the Rocklopedia Fakebandica, "The Ultimate Fake Band List". Cool because it's so geeky, and cool because it gives a bit of background information for each one. Includes one of my all time favorites, MC Skat Kat. (The title for today's kisrael.com comes from a kind of rallying cry-and-response Juj the drummer and I had during pep band. "Why's That??" "'CAUSE WE'RE THE BAND!" Seemed like it could justify a lot at the time.)

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Map of the Moment
A Worldmap of Freedom with freedom being defined in terms of consent of the governed...interesting.

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Quote of the Moment

The most underrated dog is the hardy hybrid. Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all dogs are created different.

(via Bill )

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Game of the Moment
Elegant little Java game, Space Dudes. Combination controls: the mouse for movement (but your guy moves at a set pace, sometimes having to catch up to where you put the mouse) and the arrowkeys for firing. A bit like Robotron meets Centipede in feel.

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Quote of the Other Moment

The only problem with leaving a relationship is that you take you with you.

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News of the Moment
Why are we so blind to the death of over 180 by a terrorist blast? I mean, heck, a lot of those people were Australians...and they're white! I guess heaven forfend we look at anything that distracts from our war against Iraq...that whole "War Against Terrorism" is so 2001 anyway. Hell, that's only like 15% as many who died in WTC. Hardly bares our attention. They should just send in Paul Hogan.

Guh.

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Bachelor Recipe of the Moment
Kirk's Ginger Tuna
Open can of chunk tuna. Drain water. Dump into bowl. Add generous abount of Ginger Soy sauce. Stir and Enjoy! Serves 1. Or 1/2, if you're hungry.

Regular readers may notice a certain similarity to the previously published reciped Tuna ala Kirk. Ah...got my Palm IIIc back the other week. That PalmV is falling apart. It's so nice to have a color screen...not for any particular color display need, but it's pure black-on-white (not dark grey on light grey) is so much easier to read. (The cat knocked the IIIc off the table onto the floor giving the screen a nasty crack or three.)

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Web Comic of the Moment
This panel's from Get Your War On by mnftiu.cc. (The site name comes from "My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable", from a series of Karate cartoons also on the site. Also Filing cartoons.) The artist uses old clipart (I always thought that stuff was pretty creepy) to make some funny/true cartoons. Pretty decent political satire, actually. (via cruel.com)

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Idea of the Moment

An Israeli friend recently informed me that the UK fought the Islamic terrorist attacks by burying the criminals with a pig. Apparently the Islamic belief is that if ones' body is buried with a pig (because they are considered unclean) their soul will go to hell.
I did a little research into this subject matter and found it to be basically true. (at least for certain fundamentalists) This got me thinking. If we put a baby pig on every airline flight then all suicide terrorists would abort their missions as they would not want their souls to go to hell.

. Hahaha, afraid of pork. That's almost as funny as that Osama Bert-Laden thing.