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I am pretty sure that most people's minds are not monolithic; that there are different subparts. And that often these parts can have different personalities- even their own agenda about what they want, whether or not the higher aggregate self would agree that it's a good thing to have.

I think these parts tend to be more emotional and less rational than the whole. My current favorite metaphor is them as young students in a noisy classroom. My students are pretty well behaved though, and so I usually have an even keel, my precious equanimity intact.

What I'm not sure of if these parts are consistent; or as my friend Arun posed it, are they more like a (persistent) particle or a (transient, recurring) wave? And it's always felt like it might be important for me to be generous and accurate when thinking about my parts, lest I stir up resentment ... or horror of horrors, be confidently wrong at someone else's expense (in this case, the someone else actually being a part of me)

But now... I'm ready to name some of the more important player parts. Well, not name literally- that still feels a little too corny. But describe their role. (Except while writing this I stumbled onto the term "fella" for them which seems about as good as any.) I'd also be interested in hearing about other people's parts...

One easy to spot one is the eater fella, the one with the sweet tooth (but who digs savory too. And specific textures...) Any tasty food in proximity is cause for this fella to bring the issue to the attention of the whole (Luckily if the food is labeled as someone else's the fella is more behaved, so Melissa's food can be safe. And it's relatively easy for me to make wiser, calmer decisions when I'm at the store.)

Probably the penultimate most import fella is based on ego, and fixed mindset. I have a kind of devils bargain with him; he reassures me I'm worthy and reliable and even sometimes exceptional, but in return I don't push the boundaries of that... so in life, I'm an optimizer, I look to the good of the current situation and I don't take many big swings.

The ego and the eater have a weird alliance sometimes when I'm programming- any time I run into even the most trivial of stumbling blocks- uncertainty of even something like "this step might not show me off as an effortless genius"- and I'm up and looking for a little walk, quite possibly for a snack or even a cold drink.

But the ultimate most import fella- the one that might even be the teacher that has helped build such a generally tranquil classroom- is the need to be in harmony with the greater good, the objective truth, the consensus reality. This need, well internalized by the larger motley assortment of fella parts in the classroom, effectively stops my own preferences from snowballing into disruptive anger or fear or sadness that the world isn't what I want it to be.

I suspect this fella might have gotten a start or at least a huge boost when as a child I took in tales of eternal punishment for the wicked, for anyone too out of step with God's purpose. Though ironically this huge need to be an agent of whatever Truth was universal ended up being rough for my Evangelical Christian faith: Since other people are signposts for the truth (maybe not even signposts, but R+D and manufacturing infrastructure for the Truth - but that's a different story) and about the only reliable way of preventing self-deception, the number of other religions in the world just made it seem remarkably unlikely that one small set of special revelations were right and all the other special revelations were wrong. So now I don't put stock in anything that relies on special revelation.

Anyway. I invite you to think about if this model seems true to your experience, and if so who are the parts who end up making noise in your classroom...

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These arguments were the lifeblood of the hacker community. Sometimes people would literally scream at each other, insisting on a certain kind of coding scheme for an assembler, or a specific type of interface, or a particular feature in a computer language. These differences would have hackers banging on the blackboard or throwing chalk across the room. It wasn't so much a battle of egos as it was an attempt to figure out what "The Right Thing" was. The term had special meaning to the hackers. The Right Thing implied that to any problem, whether a programming dilemma, a hardware interface mismatch, or a question of software architecture, a solution existed that was just . . . it. The perfect algorithm. You'd have hacked right into the sweet spot, and anyone with half a brain would see that the straight line between two points had been drawn, and there was no sense trying to top it. "The Right Thing," Gosper would later explain, "very specifically meant the unique, correct, elegant solution . . . the thing that satisfied all the constraints at the same time, which everyone seemed to believe existed for most problems."

I stole a paperback of this from my Uncle's library back in the day. It covers the MIT / Tech Model Railroad Club of the 60s, the Apple II etc homebrew hackers of the 70s, and then the early home computer programmers of the 80s.

The book probably was pretty inspirational for me, and I see how well this "Right Thing" attitude parallels how I see the world, the central relic of the religiosity of my youth... I have this sense that there is an ultimate objective Truth- the "view from God's Throne" of the world for matters of What We Should Do (whether or not there is a divine butt in that chair!) and any view holdable by humans is only an approximation of that divine perspective - and any earthly authority is only valid to the extent to the extent that it is an accurate reflection of that view. (This is in contrast to an everything is subjective view... it leans into uncertainty in a way that both hard core fundamentalism and post-modern-ish existenitalism lack.) Random devblog entry on apple + computing in general's idea of safety vs privacy, the decline of # of domains on the web, the appeal of FB, and my many years on the independent blogosphere

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Happy Frickin' Birthday COVID.

Sometime this fall -- using a combination of Stoicism, stubbornness, and a sort of magical thinking that Jason-in-his-30s would have dismissed as woo-woo bullshit -- I decided that because I live in Vermont, there is nothing I can do about it being winter, so it was unhelpful for me to be upset about it. I stopped complaining about it getting cold and dark, I stopped dreading the arrival of snow.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the potential and limitations of just willing changes in one's own mind to make them happen.

I feel over the past few weeks I've been doing a solid job of pruning some of my weird little angst-y habits, and generally living a positive sense of Andy Warhol's "So What" - a deep acceptance of things as they are, and not as I'd prefer them to be.

(It is helped immensely by a looming backdrop of "LOL Nothing Matters". Like, it's all the heat death of the end of the Universe at the end of the universe anyway, so why get worked up about much along the way - why run, you'll just die tired. But it also works on smaller lifespans... I get anxious about something going poorly for a band I'm in and love. It's probably not the end of the band! But even if it is, that's ok too.)

Sometimes I wonder if the kind of mindset-driven change Kottke references (linking to several other great pieces) can go anywhere... for instance, I feel like I (perhaps) live out a Buddhist-ish principle of my "self" not really mattering that much, to the point of seeing it as being illusory - but if I'm there, or anywhere near there, it's not thanks to the kind of intense meditation that marks the path for so many people. Have I found a shortcut (albeit one that mostly works for people who have a lifetime of stressing the importance of groups and rational interpretation over personal preference) or am I just fooling myself?

I hear about people who have either radical outlook changes or major behavior improvements (like, completely giving up smoking) thanks to LSD. And what I've heard is, it's not like the one time use of the drug banged out a new permanent pathway at the neurochemical level - instead, there was a moment of insight at the memetic level; a thought, an idea... maybe one devilishly hard to express to others through words, but still, something that lives and makes changes at level of thought and interpretation.

Really brings you to the woo-woo of "words have great power", eh?

(There is one dark side to this: people who ARE able to reshape their outlooks through some kind of force of will still need to have sympathy and empathy for folks who for whatever reason can't use that same approach. Yelling "snap out of it!" at someone is not great or loving therapy.)

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It takes a snowflake two hours to fall from cloud to earth. Can't you just see its slow, peaceful descent?

By synchronicity I also saw my first flakes of snow today, so I'm busting out this quote I've been saving... Playing tuba with Veterans for Peace on Armistice Day:
Sam Harris:

The truth is none of us know how much time we have in this life.

And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present. Or at least it can.

And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things.

I mean take something like "road rage". This is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car, and somebody does something erratic, or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want. And you find yourself getting angry. Now I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being mindful of the shortness of life. If you're aware that you are going to die, and that the other person is going to die, and that you're both going to lose everyone you love and you don't know when... you've got THIS moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, it's not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living. And the sun is out, or it's raining- both are beautiful. And your spouse is alive, and your children are alive, and you're driving. And you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You're just running an errand. And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about but which if you COULD know them you would recognize are impressively similar to your own - is just driving slow.

This is your life. The only one you've got. And you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them in a way that they FEEL it, and in a way that YOU feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place, you've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence, so why not relax and enjoy your life? REALLY relax. Even in the midst of struggle. Even while doing hard work. Even under uncertainty.

You are in a game right now, and you can't see the clock, so you don't know how much time you have left. And yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible; you can even change the rules, you can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible and get others to play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to Mars so that you can start a colony there. I actually know people who will spend some part of today doing that. But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life. And an awareness of death is the door into that way of being in the world.

--Sam Harris, from the introduction to his podcast discussion with Frank Ostaseski, a Zen Hospice pioneer - to complete the plug "And there are very people more aware of death and the lessons it has to teach us than my guest today. Today I'm speaking to Frank Ostaseski..." - the podcast is a good listen.

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U.S. Navy Is Very Sorry That Their Pilot Drew A Dong In The Sky. This is powerful shamanic magic.

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I plan to take solace in how when our acrobatic robotic overlords come to take over, their boxes will say "Boston Dynamics" WOOOO BOSTON!!!!

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite.

That's his start to my favorite poem ever. Lately I've been thinking about the power of words. It's this feeling I'm growing increasingly aware of of fundamental weirdness: how someone can choose to say something, and it (most likely) reflects the universe as it seems to them, though they might be being deceptive). But there is that choice of what and how something is said, and what is left unsaid, and from that choice some limited ability to shape the perceptions of others...

(Ironically, or appropriately, it's not easy for me to put this vague feeling into words...)

I find subtitles in movies distracting, especially if the written version precedes the equivalent from the actor's voice, which is usually the case. It throws the whole farce of cinematic and theatrical productions in sharp relief: these characters have no agency, they, and the people typing in the subtitles, are mere outlets for authorial intent, their words (and by extension: their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences, their whole being) preordained in some script.

But we have no such script. We are actors and authors all at once, at once the product and creators of our environment. (Even with faith in the Almighty, the ultimate Author, there's a lot of free will to be exercised locally.)

How astonishing!

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Fun Montreal Fact: on the Montreal Metro, doors open and passengers disembark as the train is still gliding to a gentle stop.
--from 30 Hilariously Terrifying Animal Hybrids That You Can Be Glad Don't Exist

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CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music - Nigel Stanford from Nigel Stanford on Vimeo.

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It's cool how our pinky finger evolved into a cell phone stand.

How clever of IKEA to hide the instructions between the giant wooden shelves of the EXPEDIT unit, where it can better hide unsullied by the various bits of hardware and tools in the end container.

When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work in that way--so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness.

Kind of sounds like the foreign policy we had in the 2000s.

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It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

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God made man because He loves stories.

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In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

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For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems that are beyond our comprehension. Well, the truth is there are simple answers. They are just not easy ones.

I would argue "and maybe not good ones".

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Miracles aren't always blessings.

New navel-gazing, the latest in a search for a KUT (Kirk Unified Theory):

I have a very good memory for certain details I find "interesting", but also a disdain for, or at least disinterest in, other types of nuance.

I think the details that interest me, that have hooks my memory can grab onto, are the things that describe how an object interacts with other objects. Previously, I've seen this as appreciating the verbs of something over nouns. (Recently on my tech blog I put the implication for this in my work as "People and computers should be judged by what they do, not by what (you think) they are.")

In this world view, a nuance that's only a quantitative and not qualitative difference doesn't matter all that much. But of course there are shades of gray: The difference between two admittedly similar fonts, say, Arial vs Helvetica, will never matter to me, but I can appreciate how two radically differently weighted fonts will look different when piled up into a body of text. Eventually the quantitative changes add up, it changes how the object interacts with other systems, and that's how a qualitative change is born.

(A bit of weirdness is how a measurement is some usually a form of interaction. I think this might be why I better thinking about things that have a quantitative hook, it's clear how the thing interacted with the measuring system. When I gain or lose weight, I might notice pants or shirts are tighter or looser, but I never look that different to myself. So I depend on a scale to keep me on track, because otherwise I have no idea; degrees of chubbiness are a non-interactive nuance.)

I saw this in school a lot: classes where you had to learn a few basic ideas and then apply them in real time, I did well in. Physics, I was fine in; 4 or 5 equations explain so much. Chemistry I struggled with, there was just so much to know. Foreign languages were disasters. Math up until Calculus was easy but then suddenly there were SO MANY equations you just had to know... History classes were a seeming exception. I would have guessed they were full of dates and names to remember, but I think now since there were hooks and anecdotes about what the people did, or how they interacted, I was pretty good at it.

Anyway.

Lately I've begun to think that my difficulty remembering faces is part of this. A curve of cheek or a shape of nose is hard for me to remember because there's no interaction there, it doesn't change how people or things interact with it (until you get into the extremes of beauty or ugliness.)

This feeling of separating the sheep of details from the goats of nuance shapes how I read as well. I read at a breakneck, almost skimming, pace, but then I have time to go back and jump to the difficult or important parts. (This was a hugely valuable skill for many Standardized Tests.) Conversely, it is INSANELY difficult for me to take in spoken words in real time, like with simple directions, or even somebody spelling a word out loud. (Seriously, I hate when somebody thinks they're helping me by spelling something out loud, I get lost after the second or third letter.)

I NEED things written down... not because I think in pictures, but because I think in interactions. Come to think of it, words ARE better at describing interactions than pictures! It makes me think that labels like "thinks in words" need to be more specific... I don't remember seeing categories of learning or thinking style that quite get the noun/verb, interaction-centric system that I now see is so crucial to understanding where I'm good and where I'm bad at coping with the world.

(Another wacky anecdote, where I can see my thinking is verbal, but not audio or visual: spelling. I'm OK at remembering the spelling of words in terms of the consonants, but once it's a blend of vowels, forget it. If it doesn't come out in how I say it, I'm not going to remember what it looks like on the page. Amber had to learn that it wasn't just my usual laziness or a lack of attentiveness that was causing so many typos... she knows at a glance that a word is spelled wrong -- I think the hook is visual for her -- while it is physically much harder for me to get the vowels right because of no mouth-interactive consonants to grab onto.)

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I think of the iPhone (and before that the PalmPilot) as an almost literal extension of my brain. Kinda funny how I can go ahead and look at a bit-o-brain.

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It's a fast paced, complicated world, baby.
Understand something or have an opinion on it.
There's no time for both.

Leonard pointed out this amazing Astronomy Picture of the Day taken on the ISS... two quick thoughts:

• I think any geek worth his or her salt is now entitled to have an enormous crush on astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson.
• The Cupola she's looking through looks suspiciously like the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon (also a bit like the front of a TIE-fighter)

Sigh. I dunno what's cooler about space, the microgravity or the view.

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http://www.onefoottsunami.com/2010/11/16/mistakes-ive-made-drinking-four-loko/ - the tail of about the worst drink imaginable
--via The Comics Curmudgeon on the most throwaway of throwaway panels. Beetle Bailey and Sarge are the Vladimir and Estragon of our time, or the 60s, or whenever the hell they're supposed to be from.

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A big all-greens salad. No fork. Solution: two plastic knives as chopsticks! Only minor abrasions. Welcome to the working week.

It was like old times last night, crashing at JZ's after a late night of video games (plowing through Gears of War 2 in this case.) It made sense because I had to be in Burlington the next morning.

I think an afternoon of boardgames and a night of videogames was a good bit of self-medication for the bad mood I was in yesterday.

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Video of the Moment

--Church Choir covers of hiphop songs. Oy. They need more speed and precision, which makes me think it might be just some experiments. Via archmage, who also linked to a neat fully baked Skoda Fabia car commercial.

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Quote of the Moment

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

In these days and these markets, I think bewilderment is a pretty hot commodity.

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Geek Link of the Moment
Computer Naming Schemes. A great occasional pleasure in the life of a sys-admin type geek is when you get to establish a computer naming theme. Done well it's more playful and memorable than boring numbers and codes. I remember at Eaton lab at Tufts, muppets ruled the day. I always liked the idea of Jazz musicians, Satchmo, Bird, Miles, Roach, Ella... my own "what I name my desktop" name Monk comes from this series.

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I prefer "bodywash" to soap, and, hey, who doesn't like shampoo, but the products that claim to be both weird me out a bit.

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You know what's a relatively unheralded wonder-product? Ordinary window glass. I mean, a solid you can SEE THROUGH like it was air? Wow!

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So my lack of sense of economic scale (billions, trillions, whatevs) scales down as well as up... a 3% retail sales drop is a "collapse"??

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Company may crack down to ensure folk wear IDs on clip or lanyards. Don't hate idea as much as before. Funny idea: IDs mounted on Headbands. I really don't think Apple is that great at UI, or at least they don't put out much effort in iTunes. (I've probably griped on similar themes before.) Just little touches, like how if you're sorting by star-ranking, and then rerank a song, it jumps away from the mouse to its new homes, instantly, and if you're worried you misranked it, you have to hunt it down with the search engine and check. Or if you rip a CD it knows nothing about the album, artist, etc are blank. To then enter the information by hand, you have to click in this special "magic area" on the left of the blank space. (If they had a placeholder, as they do for the songs ("Track 01" etc) then you could click anywhere on the placeholder.

Seriously. Even as I try to give groups the benefit of the doubt in turns of technical or alternate-use considerations I'm not aware of, sometimes it feels like I'm the only person who cares about good UI.

Speaking of that, would you trust your web design to this man?



Just wondering. Not sure what I was googling for when I found that guy, but I dig the late 90s vibe of it all, the effort to reach out to non-techie businessmen (note the golf course in the background) and collaborate on them to make sites that ignore the new traditions of what websites look like and make it feel "familiar" like TV. (No hard feelings, Mr. Price, maybe this link will help with the Google placement in some small way...)

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Quote of the Moment

My soul, do not seek eternal life, but exhaust the realm of the possible.

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Sports of the Moment
Robert Weintraub on how NFL teams need to get back to basics. I was only a bit aware of how simple the Patriots' offensive scheme had become (though a little nervous about them becoming dependent on Randy Moss -- but then again in other situations it still seems like Brady is mixing it up, receiver-wise.) Makes me think of Vince Lombardi's "We will give the opposition our game plan and we will still beat them, because we will out execute them." I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but still. It's nice that part of being really smart is knowing when to be simple, elegant, and a bit dumb.

That's some amazingly mild weather we've been having as of late. Boston folks enjoy it while it lasts!

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Quotes of the Moment

And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people trend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity, with a motive'

A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler's List

...all about his time on a luxury cruise. Man, that WOULD be pretty spooky.

As you can gather, I'd highly recommend David Foster Wallace. So frickin' smart! Not the lightest reads, but worth it.

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Link of the Moment
Fantasy League Congress is a bit amusing how it quantifies the "political achievements" of our congresscritters. Right now, Republicans lead the heavy hitters, I wonder if that will change with the next session, given all the committee switcheroo that will be happening.

Damn. It turns out my ebay'd Samsung i500 phone didn't work out. The refurbished model I bought had some hardware problems, caveat ebayer, but really it was the software integration that just wasn't ready for primetime. There might be solutions for all those things, like a seperate app for text messaging, but when the usually rock-solid Palm "ToDo" app starts crashing, the karma just plunges through the floor. Pity that.

So I'm going back to my old Samsung video phone, the VM-A680. I was compiling a big snarky list of faults with it, I was going to start a feature called "the En-suck-lopedia", but then I found workarounds for what I thought were the more egregious UI crimes, so what was left sounded kind of petty, and the star-based "suckage" rating system was total overkill.

But no sense letting all the ranting go totally to waste, so here are the faults as I sees them:

• Because of the probably battery-draining color outer screen, you have to press a button to see the time. So it's less good of a pocketwatch than the ancient Samsung I used before. Minor point.
• I don't know how many damn pictures I took of the inside of my pocket before unearthing the "Camera Key Guard" feature. (Because it's clamshell, key guard isn't an issue otherwise.)
• Exact same icon for "VIBRATE" (ringer off) and "VIBE/HIGH" (ringer as loud as possible). These are the two settings I tend to bounce between, so the icon is useless.
• As I've previously grumbled about, 8 levels of volume is just too much fine grain control. (Must be a Samsung tradition, the i500 had the same deal.)
• Battery charging icon is the animation of 3 levels of charged-ness, you have to watch for a while to tell if it's charging or just at one one of those levels.
• You can't change the "Flip Sound" like you can the ringers, just on/off. I'm just so jonesing to get the same beeps Captain Kirk got when he flipped open his communicator, instead I'm stuck with the same "magical pixiedust" SFX that every other Samsung user has. Bleh.
• For the longest time I thought you couldn't edit the "name" associated with a phonebook entry. It turns out you can, it just looks like you can't.
• Voice Memo seems capped at 10 memos. Why? This is a phone that can store lots and lots of video (with sound) and picture.
• The photo and video management is odd. There's this distinction between "saved to camera" and "saved to phone" that makes no sense to me, and there's no "select all" or "invert selection" option, just an "erase all" when you go to delete. Also you can only select 10 items at once, I have no idea why. (Update...it seems things are "saved to phone" if you ever tag them for any use on the phone, either as background or to flash on screen when you get a call.)
• The ToDo list display is just dumb. Every ToDo has an associated priority and date, and on the main display these are displayed first, hogging up the whole line, and only when you move the cursor to that ToDo does the actual task name scroll into view.

That said, it is a decent phone. The hardware is excellent, I like some of its features like "video wallpaper" (I recorded some fireworks in Euclid, OH that I get to see whenever I open the phone), clamshell with flip-to-talk is great (you can see who it is on the outside screen), you can configure the arrowkeys to quicklaunch different features (though not every feature of the phone, pity) and it's a much more reliable alarm clock than my Palm.

I've been thinking that the only PDA functions I need these days are a decent datebook, a ToDo with categories (not priorities) and something I can put a few light memos in. My beloved Palm is overkill these days, but the phones aren't good enough yet. I guess you can download apps for this thing, but they all seem to be in Java. As much as I like Java, I'm not sure if it's really the greatest thing for small devices...no handheld gizmo should subject you to notice-able "Loading Please Wait" screens.

Feh.

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Quote of the Moment

There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.

I think that's one thing that most "Intelligent Design" people gloss over...they not trying to say "this could have a purpose" but also "and I'm confident I know what this purpose is"

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Link of the Moment
Physician, heal thyself: an extremely cluttered site about decluttering...and advice like

Since you can access the Web and send and receive your own email without owning a computer (and for free when using access at a public library), think carefully if you need to get your own computer and Internet account.

should tell me it's a "same planet, different worlds" kind of thing for me anyway.

Literary Passages of the Moment
Tom Robbins, excerpts from "Still Life With Woodpecker":

Who knows how to make love stay?

Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half. It will stay.

Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.

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News of the Moment
Howard Stern is right, we are becoming such a nation of prudes. We've totally lost the idea of a little bit of light, sexy fun...the Monday Night Football intro was hardly pornographic. "Won't somebody think of the children??" We've got more hangups than...dang, what's a good end to that sentence? A strike at AT&T? A blowout clearance at The Christmas Tree Shop?

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Correction of the Moment

"in clause 82, paragraph 17, subsection (b) of the original treaty, delete the word "pertanually" and replace with the word "insubdurience".

Still, it seems to be taken seriously by the guy griping about the abuse of language by politicians in this article. As far as I can tell these are perfectly cromulent words. Quote of the Moment

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh, it is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

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Game of the Moment
Zefrank.com's Spaceship Racing Game is some challenging fun...don't forget, unlike other games of this type, you can thrust forwards and backwards. Also, although it looks like the game lacks any convenient way of trying that again when you mess up (it seemse like 3 klutzy mouseclicks, all over the place) you can just tap return 3 times to give it another go.

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Funny Link of the Moment
Nice to see some new content at The Book of Ratings...State Quarters part 5! Dang it. I'm having backlog issues. In switching to a intraday update style, I have this huge backlog that's never going to get used, and prevents me from using the backlog tool properly. Most of it's not stellar, or else I would've used it already...but much of it is still worth looking at. So:

• Red Robot is an interesting concept, showing up in many media, bent on destroying all hu-mans. (unfortunately, all the local files on that page have been removed.) He has his own decent video game and is a regular character on Diesel Sweeties
• Hey, I had this cool Star Wars case/big gun when I was in middle school! Great for playacting. I let the actors at the Cleveland Heights Dobama Theater Marilyn Bianchi Kids' Playwriting Festival use it when they did the play I wrote ("Starpox") and then forgot to retrieve it after, sigh.
• The Foresight Exchange lets you invest in certain predictions, like "US attacks Iraq in a year" to "1000 Tons per Year from Space Mining by 2040". Sort of a Prophecy Stock Market.
• Sadie Benning made some indy-famous films using Barbie and the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera that used regular audio tapes to store pictures. The Pixelvision is highly sought after, and appeals to my spirit of obsolete imaging technology.
• About a year ago (when all this backlog comes from) someone signing themselves "abradagis" wrote "hallo 1996" in my guestbook. I have no idea what this means.
• A Story About 'Magic'. I think every computer should have a switch labeled 'Magic' and 'More Magic'. From an Appendix to the Hacker's Jargon File, which also has the entertaining Story of Mel.
• A great song from Usenet about English accents, Supercockneyrhymingnasalwhiningandstopsglottal!
• Huh...looks like Japanese bondage porn with all the ropework kinda might kinda sorta have evolved from the Samurai art of Hojo Jitsu...a fun word to say.
• Well before the "second" Star Wars movie was released this summer, there was a petition to have Boba Fett be revealed to be a woman. I guess they were thinking of another famous scifi female bounty hunter, Samus Aran of Metroid fame.
• "At the risk of stating the obvious, I'll point out that there is no such thing as the last word on usenet." -- Deborah from this alt.fan.cecil-adams Usenet post.

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Link of the Moment
I saw a photo of one Michael Jackson removed his surgical mask in court recently, how the rumors of "his nose falling off" are true. Couldn't find a good link, then memepool.com linked to a Photographic History of Michael Jackson's Face. Man. I feel sorry for the guy...he really has issues.

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Political Jab of the Moment

"We've got to act fast! - Saddam's got weapons of mass destruction!"
"Does he intend to use them?"
"There's one way to find out!"

Flicks of the Moment
So tomorrow is the relase of the Nintendo GameCube... I'll be there right as the store opens. But here are some European Commercials for the PS2, the GameCube's well-established rival. They were directed by David Lynch of Twin Peaks fame. Most of them are so-so, but the Wolfman one is this incredible rant, and the Bambi one is just very funny and cool looking.

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Funny of the Moment

The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo
by Richard Aronson (aronson@sierratel.com)

...In the early seventies, Ed Whitchurch ran "his game", and one of the participants was Eric Sorenson. Eric plays something like a computer. When he games he methodically considers each possibility before choosing his preferred option. If given time, he will invariably pick the optimal solution. It has been known to take weeks. He is otherwise, in all respects, a superior gamer.

Eric was playing a Neutral Paladin in Ed's game. He was on some lord's lands when the following exchange occurred:
ED: You see a well groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo.
ERIC: A gazebo? What color is it?
ED: (Pause) It's white, Eric.
ERIC: How far away is it?
ED: About 50 yards.
ERIC: How big is it?
ED: (Pause) It's about 30 ft across, 15 ft high, with a pointed top.
ERIC: I use my sword to detect good on it.
ED: It's not good, Eric. It's a gazebo.
ERIC: (Pause) I call out to it.
ED: It won't answer. It's a gazebo.
ERIC: (Pause) I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way?
ED: No, Eric, it's a gazebo!
ERIC: I shoot it with my bow (roll to hit). What happened?
ED: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it.
ERIC: (Pause) Wasn't it wounded?
ED: OF COURSE NOT, ERIC! IT'S A GAZEBO!
ERIC: (Whimper) But that was a +3 arrow!
ED: It's a gazebo, Eric, a GAZEBO! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don't know why anybody would even try. It's a @#$%!! gazebo!
ERIC: (Long pause. He has no axe or fire spells.) I run away.
ED: (Thoroughly frustrated) It's too late. You've awakened the gazebo. It catches you and eats you.
ERIC: (Reaching for his dice) Maybe I'll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my Paladin.

At this point, the increasingly amused fellow party members restored a modicum of order by explaining to Eric what a gazebo is. Thus ends the tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. It could have been worse; at least the gazebo wasn't on a grassy gnoll.