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Had a conversation with Melissa yesterday, she was wondering how I'm not more observably disturbed by some of the suffering and injustices of the world - stuff in the Middle East say. Hadn't I seen some of the more heart wrenching scenes? No, I had seen them. Didn't I find them awful? Yes, absolutely god-awful and horrific.

But I guess - and it may sound callous, but I think it's morally ok to identify and recognize the awfulness but to keep it in your *head* rather than your *body*. Strong emotions are a way of trying to ensure useful action, but you *really gotta pick your battles*, because there are SO many battles to choose from. (I think of that line from Garrison Keillor's "Don Giovoanni": "Helpless rage is a major cause of falls in the home.")

I think some of the problem is that we *know too much of the world*. We're probably wired to deal with the slights and injustices of our family, our village, our village's feelings about our neighboring village, and not much beyond - all scenes where our input can make a crucial difference. But we take it on ourselves to understand local scenes and large trends from far away. But for most of those, we can't materially fix things! (Though we also get our ears full of anecdotes of great people, outliers, who DO make a difference, and we get frustrated we can't be more like those heroes of the new pantheon.) Frustration. And then: expressing the appropriate outrages is also a form of group cohesion, so you need to be careful not to sound like you're invalidating the outrage of your peers. (And fwiw signaling rowing in the same direction as your peeps in general is more important than being "correct" on any single issue - this fact cranks up polarization)

And complicating it further is having the individual appropriate outrage can be a LITTLE useful to helping the world right itself. It's like voting: if you are sick or break your leg and miss a vote, that's ok - either your candidate wins anyway, or they lose but it wasn't by a single vote. Your vote can only really matter as part of an emergent trend, and participating in conversations and writings about the issue before hand is as or more important than your physical vote, since that has more potential to nudge the trend.

So maybe those thoughts from that conversation were in my head as I dreamed last night; Dylan was driving Matthew G's car and RV (or maybe Matthew was driving Dylan's - I hate how hard it is to recall dreamtime!) with us in the back, and the road was unplowed from vast amounts of snow, and the car was underpowered for the trailer, and each time we plowed into a snowdrift it wasn't clear we'd make it through. And I'd close my eyes before each drift. And Melissa who was in the back with me asked me about it, and I said it was for emotional regulation, not getting too scared about something out of my control. (And I think that happens in real life for me - like when I was less confident at helping my band run itself, or maybe my own tuba playing, I would shut my eyes, especially if a performance was floundering a bit. Which, you know, is likely less helpful than being eyes open and communicating more! But I made myself grow past that and look at my band with eyes wide open.)

So I woke up asking if diverting one's attention is a "legitimate" form of emotional regulation, or if you always have to plow into the worst news, feel the full outrage boil in your gut, and still control it. (My dream tried to make a joke it couldn't quite land, about a parallel tendency to procrastinate on reading emails or what not... the joke was something like "see there's all these different communication forms - with texts, it's likely to be bad news. But then compare to email, which is likely to be bad news. Or to a call, which is likely to be be bad news. Or FB messenger, which like text is likely to be a short form of bad news [...]")

Interesting that my dream featured Matthew (whom I had had dinner with that evening before a mutual friend's birthday party) and Dylan - who showed us the "it makes sense that you feel that way" line, which can validate having the emotional response without fully endorsing or confirming its rational, objective basis. Did you have a mnemonic for remembering the directions North East South West?
I think Cora mentioned being taught "Never Eat Soggy Waffles", and there's a "Watermelon" variation too.
But... why? LIke for me "start at top, go clockwise" is as arbitrary as the 4. Like... North/South are easy in the same way Up/Down are easy. East/West are trickier (just like Left/Right is tough), but I think remember I was on East coast and what the map of the USA looks like made it easier.

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There's no question of things getting better.
Things are one way or they are another way; 'better' is how we see them, Archie says, and I don't personally, very much; though sometimes he makes them seem not so bad after all--no, that's wrong, too: he knows not 'seems'. Things do not *seem*, on the one hand, they *are*; and on the other hand, bad is not what they can *be*. They can be green, or square, or Japanese, loud, fatal, waterproof or vanilla-flavoured; and the same for actions, which can be *disapproved* of, or comical, unexpected, saddening or good television, variously, depending on who frowns, laughs, jumps, weeps or wouldn't have missed it for the world. Things and actions, you understand, can have any number of real and verifiable properties. But good and bad, better and worse, these are not real properties of things, they are just expressions of our feelings about them.

I admit the play didn't quite live up to my hopes. For obvious reasons it reminded me strongly of Monty Python's Professor of Logic skit, which came out a year or two after, but I'm not sure if the skit parodies the play or if they are both mirroring some British Academician tropes or a specific source.

Definitely some tie-ins with this kind of moral relativism and my concerns about how so much "reasoning" and signaling we do is about "I'm on team for this" or "I'm on team against this". Like that feeling is considered the most crucial thing. And I've been led to believe that having a feeling about something is the only thing that stirs us to action - we can't really think our way into action, only emotion provides the critical impetus. (Though we might have a subjective emotion that has us strongly support objective rationality.)

To try and reconcile the possible lack of good and bad as objective absolutes along with our overwhelming dependency on having strong for/against preferences to provide (possibly the entirety of) motif force for our actions, we are quickly forced to the question "what is the point of it all, anyway?" - like, existentially. For me the answer is to support the creation of creative, categorical novelty in the universe - to help humanity become something and create things - and types of things - that otherwise couldn't exist in this corner of the universe.

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You're looking like a million bucks, without the million. How close are you to the million? Forty thousand?

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Robots are mechanical men. They walk around, they set the table and don't say nothin'. They bring you your underwear and they put you to bed. They take out a cigar and smoke cigars. They stand there and watch you. Mechanical men. Christ, they wash windows, shovel snow, give you a cigar, put out the lights, and then they wave good night.

("No More Shaves" is a collection of illustrated stories from elders collected in the zine The Duplex Planet.)

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(SPOILER: wow, Legos, Nintendo, *and* Transformers - the biggest hits of the 80s and 90s!)

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added a Gelaskins to my new Macbook, and then an Apple sticker on the side for Alien Bill to ponder.
There is a lot I think Sam Harris is wrong about, sometimes dangerously wrong, but this is at least a thought provoking juxtaposition:

It's like one of those magic eye illustrations, where you're starting at a random dot stereogram, forever, and then finally the embedded 3D image just pops out. And this picture of Trump's appeal is really best understood in comparison with the messaging of his opponents on the Left; that's how you can see it in stereo. That's how the image finally pops up.

So taking the Trump half of this picture: one thing that Trump never communicates - and cannot possibly communicate - is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony. Even when his every utterance is purposed towards self-aggrandizement, even when he appears to be denigrating his supporters, even when he's calling himself a genius, he is never actually communicating that he is better than you, more enlightened, more decent... because he's not. And everyone knows it. The man is just a bundle of sin and gore, and he never pretends to be anything more. Perhaps more importantly, he never even aspires to be anything more. And because of this - because he is never really judging you, he can't *possibly* judge you - he offers a truly safe space for human frailty. And hypocrisy. And self-doubt. He offers what no priest can credibly offer: a total expiation of shame. His personal shamelessness is a kind of spiritual balm.

Trump is Fat Jesus. He's "Grab-Them-By-The-Pussy" Jesus. He's "I'll Eat Nothing But Cheeseburgers If I Want To" Jesus. He's "I Want to Punch Them in the Face" Jesus. He's "Go Back to your Shithole Countries" Jesus. He's "No Apologies" Jesus.

And now consider the other half of this image. What are we getting from the Left? We're getting exactly the opposite message. Pure sanctimony. Pure judgement. "You are not good enough." "You're guilty, not only for your own sins, but for the sins of your fathers: the crimes of slavery and colonialism are on your head" And if you're a cis-, White, heterosexual male, which we know is the absolute core of Trump's support? "You're a racist, homophobic transphobic Islamophobic sexist barbarian. Tear down those statues and bend the fucking knee."

It's the juxtaposition of those two messages that is so powerful.

I think the Left's message is subtler than that; it's not that the current day White Folk are responsible for their forefathers sins; but they might be responsible for not recognizing the benefits they continue to enjoy FROM those evils, generations after; the way society sets itself up and digs deep furrows for its constituent groups that are nearly impossible to escape from. Responsible for not seeing those furrows as something worth fighting against. Responsible for not recognizing that this nation is - in an ongoing way - not living up to its ideas of Liberty and Justice For All- that Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness has preconditions of equitable opportunity that are not being met.

It's rough. I know as I clash on Social Media that I carry some of that holier than thou, but I try not to. More so than many of my fellow lefties, I try to give every outlook the benefit of the doubt, and see what are the difference in starting assumptions that are leading moral, rational people to very different moral conclusions.

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I think--and this is the commonly accepted view in political science and economics--that [the majority of people voting for reasons that have to do with identity, not ideology] is a result of perverse incentives - it's just not worth voter's time to know things unless they're interested in politics--unless it's their hobby or job.

This ties in to the idea that a voter needs to be reconciled with their individual vote only mattering as part of a larger trend/demographic, without losing that emotional energy to keep at it.

Color is a fiction of light.

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At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — let go because you can.

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Nice Quora: If I shine a flashlight at Mars, does a small amount of the light actually reach it?. Someone is chanelling my childhood!

I once dreamed that a giant meteor was headed for earth, and the government had set up loudspeakers throughout the cities so Obama could give a final address - I'll never forget how strangely comforting it was when he said "there are places we've never been before. Some of us have never been to the Alps, some of us have never been to Marrakesh. The next life is simply another place we've never been before, and we're all going to go explore it together."

Played through the main story mode of Super Mario Odyssey yesterday- I muscled through that in pretty much a day, but there's a lot more to explore in it. Yeah the plot is the same lame old Damsel in Distress (made a bit worse by the "and Bowser is plundering all these themed lands for wedding gifts", and a big wedding scene at the end, though tempered by Peach saying forget both of you, I'm not your damn trophy and am going off on my own adventure) but its capture mechanic ("Remember kids! Keep on a hat lest you get possessed by Mario!") really delivered in one of the main things I play video games for: engaging physics and alternate controls. Taking over a Tropical Wiggler to stretch around a bend (with subtle squeezebox sound effects) or using a Poki's beak to sproing up a wall are visceral delights.

I'm impressed too by the Switch, I was thinking that the ability to play away from the TV like a tablet or Gameboy wouldn't be that useful since I don't have a commute, but it really adds some nice options , playing in bed, or in the living room when something else is on television, etc.

The best break anybody ever gets is in bein' alive in the first place. An' you don't unnerstan' what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain't gone be stuck with it forever, either.

Arranged in descending order of "hey this is interesting!"...

• Scrubs- Sanford and Son (Scrubs) - I just love this comedy bit, so I dumped this whole video as an MP3.
• Umbrella (Mechanical Bride) Latest I got in the "creep slow cover" genre.
• "YMCA" reworked to Minor key (Village People / Oleg Berg) When the Village People become villains in a video game, this is their theme music.
• Believe (Pomplamoose) I really like this cover of Cher's song... I love how much denial the lyrics carry.
• It's the Music (A.Skillz & Stickybuds Remix) (The Mighty Mocambos) A rare addition to my energy playlist. For a while I thought the refrain was "Stinky Butts" not "stickybuds".
• Fancy (Reba McEntire) A lovely song about a terrible situation
• Feeling Good (Bassnectar Remix) (Nina Simone) Strong Remix of great song.
• Radioactive (Pentatonix & Lindsey Stirling) Another cover, with a lot of strings.
• Keep Your Heart Young (Brandi Carlile) Good advice on a kind of country/western tip.
• Pay Attention (Pomplamoose) Cool original song (though I had to tell itunes to cut out the last bit, when it turns into a skit like thing)
• You're Not the One (Blood Diamonds Remix) (Sky Ferreira) Just some decent pop.
• Sat (Time) (Atlantic Brass Quintet) Instrumental
• Introdiction (Scroobius Pip) Kind of sophomoric (e.g. "In the end they are just words, you give them power when you cower man, it's so absurd" on the c-word) but some good stuff
• Fireball (feat. John Ryan) (Pitbull) - like "Girl on Fire", I'm left wondering "why is it ok to rhyme a whole phrase with itself as long as it ends with 'fire'" (as in "roof on fire")

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You have the rights to my face. You do not have the rights to my lagoon of mystery!"

My favorite personal tech site Lost in Mobile is running a Ultimate Mix Tape competition. Here's what I sent in to Shaun, webmaster, and music judge:

My ultimate mix has two sides,
attack side and regroup side
the final song on each kind of leads to the other group

Plus a bonus song, the titular kirk's best song in the world,
the one he's obligated to dance to each time he hears it,
if only for a little head snake.

attack side

1. Chameleon - Maynard Ferguson
2. All The Rowboats - Regina Spektor
3. Might Like You Better - Amanda Blank
4. Super Holla Tricka - Beastie Boys vs Gwen Stefani vs aSkillz Krafty Kuts
5. Cool As I Am - Dar Williams

regroup side

1. Buildings & Bridges - Ani Difranco
2. As It Comes - The Exploding Voids
3. Concrete Wall - Zee Avi
4. Tenderness - Paul Simon
5. It's Your Thing - Isley Brothers

bonus track

1. Groove is in the Heart - Deee-Lite

It's pretty eclectic, but maybe you'll hear something you dig.

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25 of the best photos of Mohammed Ali. I like that the commentary talks about what works and doesn't for each photo.

While some [human predeccesor] bands interacted peacefully with each other, on average about one in eight men died in conflicts between bands, compared to one in a hundred men who died due to warfare in the twentieth century.

That's quite a remarkable idea when you think about it.

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One reason that mediated boredom is so hard to notice is that it cloaks itself in the rhetoric of nowness and newness. To recognize oneself as bored, one must know how to differentiate between moments--if only to see that they are essentially the same.

bird

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I understand why people hate the DST thing, but the minute you say our summer evenings should end an hour earlier, you are dead to me.

Under a bridge near the Museum of Science


Wind turbines are popping up all over...

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BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of 'Scientific Creationism'.

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"I'm learning to code" is the new "I'm working on a novel"

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"I was surprised Hannah at work didn't know how to make a paper airplane."
"She's young?"
"Well like 22ish? I mean I knew how to make one when I was 8..."
"She didn't grow with no other stuff to do."

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"Boketto" - I like that the Japanese have an explicit word for gazing into the distance without thinking. (2019 UPDATE: I guess English has "zoning out")
via

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Headphones in the store always sound better, because you're actively listening to the music.

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Sweet, JoustPong is going to feature http://www.montrealindies.com/?p=93 (kind of an after-party for http://sijm.ca/2010/?language=en )

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I've been listening to Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God" on audiobook. It takes a lot discipline to listen to stay focused on a non-fiction audiobook, something akin to what you need during meditation.

She asserts repeatedly that ancient peoples had a clear split between Mythos and Logos (an idea first introduced to me in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"). Some cultures had multiple creation myths geared at explaining different aspects of the human experience, and none of them were expected to hold up to a literal interpretation as historic events. The book doesn't really cite evidence, though (at least not the audio version, I don't know if the real thing has endnotes or something) so I'm left wondering if maybe folks were just, you know, gullible back then. I mean, I'm sure some of the hoi polloi took the stories at face value -- I can't believe the question "mommy, did that really happen?" is new, created by our modern culture.

On a friend's private message board, he quoted slain politician Pim Fortuyn's line about "I don't hate Islam. I consider it a backward culture." My response was

I'm starting to think that the the backwardness of any given culture is in direct proportion to the degree the Fundamentalists (be they religious or atheistic, like the commies) hold sway.

And of course one of the traits of Religious Fundamentalism is that it demands to be thought of as scientifically, historically accurate and true. I'm not sure if Literalism is always a requirement, or if some branches of Fundamentalism admit to a poetic reading of parts of their scriptures.

My friend asked me to put my concluding statement on the site's quote board:

Fundies have this brittle need for the Mythos to be backed by Logos, but trying to back Faith with Science is bad for both faith and science.

This is what we see in America today. Evolution really shouldn't be a question... but it's also not an answer, a fact we saw demonstrated by the Social Darwinism and Eugenicist movements.

Of course, non-religious Fundamentalists have the inverse problem of Logos minus Mythos (Man, it's annoying that "Logos" looks like the plural of "logo"). At my UU Science and Spirituality group I said of Dawkins and his crew that I believe them to also be Fudamentalists, the difference is they probably have the facts on their side. But what they need to accept is those facts probably aren't what really matter to the human experience, and science is notoriously bad at showing us how to live, or why.

Hmmm.

You know, some of the issue with a Mythos/Logos split is why should anyone believe one thing rather than another? Atheist Fundies seem to be worried that people would start to believe any old thing, which partially explains mockery like The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster... I don't think that's how people actually work, however.

So why do people believe what they believe? Probably because it "feels right" - but what feels right is probably what they're used to, and what they're used to is probably what they grow up with.

(Tangent: in some ways, this is parallel to the kind of accountability that is what attracted me to a rationalistic outlook. I seem to live in subconscious fear of being called to account for why I make certain decisions, like if they went wrong, and just saying "well I went with my gut feeling" might not cut it, even in this hypothetical scenario. Being able to present the logical steps that led to my conclusion, though, seems like a much stronger defense -- even if I was wrong, I put in a good effort, and wasn't "just guessing".)

So is "culturally established" truth inherently suspect? Sometimes I wonder if it isn't like Warhol's "Art is what you can get away with" line, that the demonstrated longevity and strength of a form of Mythos in YOUR culture is a greatly determining factor. (Isn't there some quote from the Dali Lama about how you probably shouldn't try to switch to Buddhism if that's not what you grew up with?) Still, noting that I believed what I believed because I grew up immersed in one religious culture, and that if I had been born the child of an Imam rather than a Sweet Talkin' Son of a Preacher Man I'd most likely be struggling to be as good a Moslem as I had been trying to keep true to Christianity, was a huge blow to my faith, one that I'll probably never fully shake off.

Hmm. Still, it's weird how the Scientific Revolution probably helped inspire so many Christians to insist that their outlook was just as backed by Logos as it was by Mythos, and that leads us to the culture wars this country has today.

The "just" in the phrase "that's just a myth" is a terrible, terrible word. Myths can be True even if they're not true. Can people accept that? Like Bokonon said, as channeled in Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle"

Live by the foma [Harmless Untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Maybe they're doesn't need to be much more to it than that.

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You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? "Baffling."

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Congratulations to the Yankees. They finally got the team they've been paying for all along...

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Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road? A: Because it was on the other side.

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Now John Henry said to the inventor,
"All your tubes don't mean a damn.
All your wires and your circuits
They are just a modern quirk. It's
Never ever gonna beat a Thinkin' Man.
"They are never gonna beat a Thinkin' Man."

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http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-200-calories-look-like.htm

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Developer Rant: God damn, I'm so sick of editors that auto-close tags, quotes, curly-braces, and parens. They screw up more than they help. So, I had a pretty great time last night at FoSO's... eight of us watching CNN in HD on their massive projector screen (which made the weird CNN Star Wars hologram stuff even weirder), and a bit of Comedy Central, chips and this AMAZING guacamole, and some Indian takeout, a touch o' the creamy fat boozy goodness of Bailey's on ice, a few of us on laptops, with Jen closely watching the meta-results, giving us the low-down on what news agencies were calling what state for whom and when. And then, a bit o' champagne. Not a bad way to welcome an important milestone in race relationships, and hopefully a turned corner in the political situation.

Some of my friends are less sanguine about Obama, and posted a link to this article painting Obama as a Marxist. This was my response...

That article is almost histrionic.

By global standards, both Dems and Reps are strongly right leaning. We don't know from "Marxists". Seriously, it's hard to see that claim made with a straight face-- he might be more socialist leaning, but by my reckoning that's a far cry from "Marxist".

The Democrats put forward a figure who managed to be simultaneously able of inspiring huge masses of people and of demonstrating a calm, technocratic approach to solving the huge problems we find ourselves saddled with. That is amazing.

"Although I did not vote for Obama and do not understand why anyone would--even if one did not care much for McCain"

Well, you could argue that Bush defeated McCain twice... one by being a ruthless campaigner, and then by being a terrible president.

I think the tremendous success the Democrats saw last night is a repudiation of the NeoCon big stick agenda and the Republican support for "We can trust these guys to regulate *themselves*" Greenspanism.

I now dislike the LDS more than ever. You know, for a people who had to flee to the wilderness in part because of how they wanted to arrange their non-traditional marriages, they're terrible, terrible blowhards in this California gay marriage thing, and I have less respect for their church organization than ever.

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Quip of the Moment

It's not just Bush. Palin taxed the crap out of oil companies in Alaska and redistributed the wealth in the form of checks to all Alaskans including herself. Clearly she's a Neiman-Marxist.

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Optimism of a Recent Moment
Before the election Marc Armbinder reposted Rick Davis' memo explaining the optimism the McCain campaign had then, though adding thoughts why even then he thought the hope was unfounded. Still, I find it an interesting study in how situations can spun and how to generate cotton candy hope from ephemeral tubs of airblown sugar.

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More Politics of the Moment
Slate was having some Conservatives wondering what should the Republicans do now. (To which my answer is crawl in hole and think for a few decades about what they've done, and preferably stop mixing up their social conservatism and fiscal conservatism in one unholy mess.) But Jim Manzi said, in part, this:

We need, at least initially, competition for students among public schools in which funding moves with students and in which schools are far freer to change how they operate.

and then later

The role of the federal government could be limited but crucial. Suppose it established a comprehensive national exam by grade level to be administered by all schools and universities that receive any federal money and required each school to publish all results, along with other detailed data about school budgets, performance, and so forth each year.

I guess he hasn't heard about the dangers of "teaching to the test", and doesn't recognize the contradiction, or at least extreme tension, between these two parts of his suggestions.

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Kind of weird how CNN's giant screen has other channels showing above it. "Reminder: you could be watching Family Guy"

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#current why did Colbert have a cockatoo on his shoulder?

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Election HQ for me now; 8 friends, 3 laptops, 1 projector alternating between CNN and Comedy Central, Indian Food, champagne at the ready

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Man, I hate facebook comments showing some of my buddies ain't in my political camp.

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"I like that the camera is panning back to get some imaginary shit in the frame"

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Palin's earrings are clip-ons?

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Least favorite phrases from this campaign: "in the tank" and "our treasure"

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Gah, certain fringe folk going "Obama is not my president", blah blah. But fringe liberals did the same thing previously. MODERATION PEOPLE!

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California's "simple majority to mangle constitution" rule is frickin' nuts. A pox on them and the LDS "pray away the gay" efforts. A "how Asperger-y are you?" quiz is making the rounds. A friend of mine LJ'd her results and there was some interesting followup conversation. This was my (somewhat jumbled) response:

I emerged as rather more neurotypical than I expected taking this. I kind of like the idea of shadow syndromes; I *think* - but am absolutely not sure - that neurotypical folks can feel some hint of empathy w/ people w/ many conditions, that relatively few mental states and disorders are 100% foreign and distinct from the basic human condition: for myself, I've had incidents that have reminded me of the forgetfulness and lapses of alzheimers, the alienation and sensory overload of aspergers, the raging id and weird interaction of tourette's, the hardcore ebbs and flow of focus of ADD, the odd mixups and phonetic swaps of dyslexia. (especially the last one, but it's not nearly as trendy as it used to be.) Not to say that the difference is just one of quantity not quality, there is a giant world of difference with people for whom these "shadow" symptoms are controllable and workable and just an intermittent, lightweight "huh thats funny" and people for whom its a major, almost identity-defining and socially crippling characteristic -- and maybe this whole concept of similarity is more misleading than I realize, unrelated conditions similar only in surface aspect. But still, I'm not so down on potentially self-coddling self-diagnosis of shadow syndromes, if only how it can promote human empathy with those who absolutely have the condition.

So this weekend... Rockport work was rained out so my weekend was full of "creative leisure": some miscellaneous online tasks, starting work on this one intensely geekish game-project "CAoleslaw", writing yesterdays "sunrise/sunset" tool-- and then some great leisure-leisure, finishing the Xbox 360 game Bioshock (after a month or so of intermittent play), watching the Patriots come from behind to win this year's "Game of the Century of the Decade" despite some lousy officiating - I defer to the commentators, and when THEY say it was "tough call", my self-righteous ire gets up in arms. But generally I've decided I need to work on cultivating equanimity in my team's success or failure, especially seeing how little it has to do with me, or anything of major importance...

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Quote of the Moment

If you can't laugh at yourself, you're a fool.

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Link of the Moment
A cute little WW2 book for kids about how they can help win the war. It ends with a pitch for buying bonds... what stunned me is that, according to an online inflation calculator, the $18.75 a bond costs is about $250 in today's money. Man!

I'm composing this on my latest piece of gizmo heaven, a Pocket PC. I'm sure I will have more about to say about it later, but for now I just want to make two three observations:

1. handheld wifi is hecka fun
2. whoever thought blue LED keypads (where just the letter or symbol lights up on an unlit surface) are cool should be beat over the head with a blunt PDA... it's impossible to focus on and difficult to read the letters
3. not putting the angle brackets on the little keyboard makes it kind of a pain to do HTML. I guess the designers of this device wouldn't see that as a huge issue...

Anyway, back to the linkflush:

• Why Bad Habits Are Hard to Break... someone once put it "Bad habits are hard to break...especially when you like them."
• Analysis of the 'Left Behind' Series... the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of our time?
• What's Your Dangerous Idea?
• I always thought stretching before exercise was a little over-emphasized.
• Videogames: Don't Try This at Home, but mostly because people will look at you funny.
• Uncovered: celebrating women in NYC (and also, the way they struck down the laws against toplessness.) I have to admit, I find the normalcy of it all very appealing. In a similar vein, Personal Breast, "12 essays on 12 pairs"
• Penn & Teller had an unreleased video game, Smoke and Mirrors, including Desert Bus, a real-time 8-hour drive across the desert.
• Did I link to 'Borrow a Bias'? The idea is a library that lets you "borrow" someone from a different walk of life so you can learn more about them.
• The Angry Nintendo Nerd
• In need to get some Super Mario War mojo working.
• Probably one of the biggest questions in my life I'm ignoring: Should I struggle to get my survivalist mojo working? Yeesh, what a paradise this life will seem like if something truly does go wrong.

--Beau's a sidebar regular, I attended the Cleveland Temple Corps (the Salvation Army church in Cleveland Heights) with him and his younger brother Lin. Just a little teasing of Lin's "new" look (though I think he's been doing that for a while now.

(I tweaked the photos to make them look as similar as I could, but I didn't do that great of a job of it...)

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Article of the Moment
A Good Essay Against Clutter. My issue is...but what about all these books? Getting rid of so many en masse always seems like a sacrilege.

Quote of the Moment

Writers Should Keep Their Fame In Perspective
Literary immortality is a moment in geological time

Useless Kirk trivia: today's title "One Moment In Time" was the Forbidden Song for my high school marching band after a subset had to play it over and over and over and over for the parading of the homecoming court candidates one year. Even mention it, never mind hum it, and you had to do a lap.

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Political Griping of the Moment
"At least Dems won't have to clean up Bush's fiscal mess". My favorite observation: it's amazing how all the Red states are the ones who are net drain on Federal income, and the Blue states are the ones that actually work for a living. Republicans used to be known for some measure of fiscal responsibility, but now they and their states are the "ghetto welfare moms" of the USA.

Lyrics of the Moment

I'm glad no one's here just me by the sea
I'm glad no one's here to mess it up for me
I'm glad no one's here just me by the sea
But man, I wish I had a hand to hold

I saw an orange starfish on the side of a rock
I poked on his back & tried to pull him off
A crab scared me away he ran close to my toes
And man, I wish I had a hand to hold

The moon is nowhere almost time for the sun
The voice of the waves sound anciently young
I'm a prisoner of freedom ten toes in the sand
And man, I wish I had a hand to hold

I'm in the habit of being alone
I try hard to break it I can't on my own

I'm glad no one's here just me by the sea
I'm glad no one's here to mess it up for me
I'm glad no one's here just me by the sea
But man, I wish I had a hand to hold

I've always dug these lines. I think Edie Brickell is a little underrated.

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News Article of the Moment
Science proves that Classic Video Games are good for you and your memory. Well, for 25-45 year old guys.

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Link of the Moment
15 Trends Taking Shape in Logo Design. I've always liked logos. Glad they're finally getting away from all those stpid double spiral things. Quote of the Moment

I don't regret a single kiss I ever participated in. Cocaine-fueled, alcohol-tinged, whatever. A kiss is love and love is God so it's all good, baby.

I wish our beloved president was the kind of man who would say something like that. But it reminds me of my new theory about listening to the guy...3/4 of the time, it makes a lot more sense if you pretend he's really really drunk.

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Web Toy of the Moment
The eys have it. Might've been better if I had seen it in time for halloween.

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News of the Moment
Yet another thing for me to be neurotic about, NPR mentioned this new find that the northeast USA is likely entering a cycle of increased likelihood of superstorms. So the Diamondbacks won the World Series. With all the magic New York had, and the recent bad times, it's tough not to have mixed feelings about that. Plus, I hate when really young new franchise teams win, since it was the punkass Florida Marlins that bought big talent, beat in the Cleveland Indians in 7, and then completely dismantled the team the next year, having got what they paid for.

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Quote of the Moment

My dad once told me, laugh and the world laughs with you, Cry, and I'll give you something to cry about you little bastard!

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Video of the Moment
Ok, this is kind of odd. It's an old commercial for Joust on the Atari 5200. It's a full two minutes. The middle part is a bit long and pointless, but the final 20 seconds is very bizarre and wonderfully spooky and surreal.