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The progression of a month is so weird. One day you're like "oh the month has barely started, plenty of time for it to live up to its potential" then a week later "oh jeez this month is like almost half over".

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The one year I manage to get to Tubachristmas and I get in the Globe :-D

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Here's Boston TubaChristmas 2022:

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this take on Padme/Anakin with him going down an alt-right rabbit hole suddenly made so many things make more sense. A little bit of LEGO-heavy early Christmas w/ Cora, and a few other shots from the week.

"infant so tender and mild" suggests the existence of a spicy baby

My favorite bit of new-to-me language use around NOLA: "it's been a minute"- a kind of rueful recognition of it actually having been a long while. I mentioned that that to our tour guide Butch yesterday, and he came back with "go to make groceries" where most other parts of the country would say "go to buy groceries"

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Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. [...] It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. [...] What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Cultivate an awareness of the moments you might be having even now, people! Even if our once tender hearts are a bit scarred over, and so that we fear Cunningham was right and there 'will be no other', that we won't feel as deeply as we did in our youth- or that in our middle age, after we might not have so many decades to create focal length and see how meaningful a moment that was -- I think there's still time for moments.

(I'd also take the chance in stumbling over this old Cunningham quote to plug my old 24 Hour Comics Day work Of The Moments.)

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Took Me Eleven Minutes to do That Thing I've Been Avoiding for Three Months: A Memoir

One of the best Vine compilations ever. Man what a brilliant medium that was. Consumer Vigilante

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and if you see me first
 you say hello

and if i see you first
 i'll say hello

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How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult Yarr. Sometimes I think my favorite post-college housing was "the big yellow house", 6 or 7 people, some in couples, sprinkled across 3 floors.

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advent day 11
advent day 11

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Beginning of the End for Giant Glass? I would be kind of bummed if Giant Glass fell - including that jingle (why do I not mind it when 1-877-Kars-4-Kids unfailingly causes me to angrily stab for the radio dial? Maybe horns vs guitar?)

Fun fact: Giant Glass was named after the football team. Don't hold that against them though - that was before the Patriots. Hell, even my Waltham-based granddad liked the Giants then.

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Yesterday I learned that Scheiny (nee "Beauty"), my lovely Holton Collegiate Sousaphone, has a serial number that dates it to 1954...

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New Airplane Seating with a View More for the "I Wish I Was Insanely Rich" file.

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glad I looked up from my book

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Lots of cool and accessible analysis of 30 years of David Letterman Top-10 Lists. My only argument is I've heard that the final #1 entry for each list, while often indeed the zingiest, is often not meant to be the out and out funniest, they often go for the biggest laugh around #4 or #3. Or so I've heard; it's probably too subjective to really analyze.

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An interesting way to bring up kids with video games...

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Interesting argument in favor of the Harvard Jerk Lawyer and the $4 chinese resturant overcharge.
Edelman's blog does seem to have a legitimate consumer protection angle but still... unless you argue that this kind of nuttiness is the only way of getting the attention of a small business, it was too much zero compromise.
advent day 11

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Admiral Grace Hopper, computer pioneer, on Letterman. Awesome to see her hand out her nanoseconds, and kudos to Letterman's Late Night (albeit in the 80s) for having her as a guest!

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A flowchart to find the game right for you.

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The Grolier Poetry Book Shop is a landmark of the Harvard area.

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Happy 20th Birthday DOOM!

advent day 11

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People want to believe so badly, and that's exactly what they do.

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Crazy huge gorgeous orange moon as we head back east to Boston...

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"There's an Occupy Berkshires. We missed that when we were driving around there."
"Occupy Berkshires-isn't that just called 'camping'?"

click to run

sier - source - built with processing
So the topmost video on yesterday's page on Doodling Mathematically touched on Sierpinski Triangles but didn't get into one of my favorite ways of making them. It's called the Chaos Game and you can do it with pen and paper, though you get quicker results with a computer program...

The core idea is pick 3 corners of a triangle, and then any point (or one of the corners). Then randomly pick one of the 3 corners, and draw a dot halfway between that point and the corner. Then randomly pick one of the 3 corners again, and draw a dot halfway between that corner and the last dot, and repeat. After you do it enough times, Sierpinski's triangle rises from the mist.

I've tried to animate the manual process with this program, slowing it down and sketching out the line, with the outlined circle being which corner had been picked and the white circle being where a new dot is drawn ... move the mouse up and down over the canvas to speed it up or slow it down, and click to start with a new dot.

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For somebody fluent in over six million forms of communication, it's weird that C-3PO went with 'gay-tinged passive aggression.'

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<geekrant>
What was so bad about the "applet" tag? It still works in 6 lines while #processing 's 40 lines of "object" is busted on chrome.
I hate "standards compliant" tags that are
A. harder to read
B. grandly more verbose
C. more fragile than the old school ones.
Like, setting margin-left:auto and margin-right:auto for a div instead of the old center tag. (I know it's not as simple as that but still)
</geekrant>

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Man, my GPS that was stolen was rather easy to replace with a newer model, but the cheap MP3-to-FM-adapter I got, not so much. Can't find it at Walgreens, and most other models don't have the nifty bass boost feature... FWIW the adapters that use the headphone jack A. work with every MP3 player and B. let you crank the volume and get a stronger signal to the radio. It's frustrating to have a car that can play MP3s if they're burnt to disc, but then the cheaped out on the fifty sense to have a stupid plug in the thing. Hell, sometimes it would seem better to have a cassette deck, the adapter would be easy then.

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I wish when I was born my first word would've been 'quote' so that right before I died I could say 'end quote'

Hmm, maybe I should try to get EBB2's first word to be "quote" - "antidisestablishmentarianism" might be a little too ambitious anyway.

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The point isn't to 'understand' music. It's to empathize with it.

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Sigh, yet another work account set up for "kisreal" not "kisrael". An easy enough mistake, but still... semi-seriously (well, very semi-) changing my name to "Kirk Is". You know, it's funny how with Twitter taking most of my casual thoughts, more often than not I'm stuck with talking about the weather here. It's almost as bad as the filler I write for the Love Blender. Or a conversation with a stranger on an elevator.

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Quote of the Moment

There is something, that comes suddenly like a wind on a warm summer's evening. It takes you off guard, and leaves you without peace. It follows you like a shadow, and it's impossible to shake. I don't know what it is, so I can only call it love.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

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Link of the Moment
Speaking of Royal nicknames Wikipedia has a page of Honorific Titles in Popular Music: 3 Kings of Rock-and-Roll, two Kings of the South, the Godfather of Soul, 4 Queens of Pop... it's all in there.

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Board games.. I guess ultimately I like, say, Pictionary + Taboo over Settlers + Fluxx. Ultimately it's more fun to be creative than smart.

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http://www.slate.com/id/2206445/ - Obama smokes?? I'm finishing up Shuttle Astronaut Mike Mullane's "Riding Rockets", a pull-few-punches look at his time with NASA (including his own admittedly sophomoric humor, as well as a fierce criticism of the political culture there.)

One thing I had forgotten is besides the two tragedies, the Space Shuttle program has had many near misses. On his second flight, on Atlantis, heat tiles got knocked off the bottom-- they couldn't even tell quite how many until after they had landed-- and their chances about making it home safely were in doubt. His commander on that flight, "Hoot" Gibson, encouraged a casual stoicism:

"No reason to die all tensed up."

That's a pretty decent outlook to have.

Reading the book reminded me of my vague desire to go into space, though I'm not sure if I'd be able to afford it any time soon. But Mullane writes mostly about the spectacular view... I realize I'm more in awe of the idea of weightlessness. I figure the view I can get some idea of through wide-angle pictures, etc, but the physical sensation of floating, without the viscosity of water interfering with your movements... that's something you can't readily duplicate on Earth.

Maybe I should just try to go in one of those freefall "Vomit Comet" planes for 30 seconds at a time. Zero gravity is actually a bit annoying in the long term! (Especially in the bathroom department, another topic Mullane isn't shy about discussing.)

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Link of the Moment
So, come to think of it, yesterday's "atariparty" GIF might have been inspired by this terrific website of C=64 Sprite Art. (I was googling after some kisrael comments about C=64 sprites... for some reason I had gotten to thinking that they were monochrome, and you had to double them up to get multiple colors. I stand corrected!

The skateboarder, from "Skate or Die", was one of my favorites. Overall I thought that game looked like it came straight from an Amiga. (And the NES version was much less impressive.)

PS it's more difficult than I expected to get a clear MP3 of the title screen music for Skate or Die... I don't think the emulation gets it quite right, and its sampled electric guitar and terrific simple drumwork just doesn't carry through.

It seems so dark these days, but I console myself with the reminder that these are very near darkest days of the year, that the sine wave of daytime has pretty much peaked, axial tilt is doing its worse and we're surviving, and for the most part it will only get better from here.

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Literary Passage of the Moment

Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. [...] It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. [...] What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Comparing the excerpt to the full passage from the book, it seems like it does a pretty good job, removing the bits that are more subjective, and that the reader would need to take in more of the book to catch the setting. But then another side of me wonders if those subjective details are what it's all about, what sets the scene first, with the more universal analysis built on top of that.

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Article of the Moment
Slate on Sudhir Venkatesh's new book on the ghetto economy and sociology. It's a fascinating article, but it almost sounds too good to be true, like one of those personal stories where the main character turns out to be completely made up by the author.

Quote of the Moment

Even young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

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Article of the Moment
Slate had a good, not-afraid-to-be-opinionated tour of the monuments of our nation's capital

Kind of weird to think how tombstones are also kind of like one-person-honoring monuments themselves.

Quote of the Moment

A spine is a long bone that goes down your back. Your head sits on one end, and you sit on the other.

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Newsline of the Moment

Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, " 'What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?' All this Oprah [stuff]," he said. "They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, 'I'm with you.' We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.

"[stuff]", huh? It's an intriguing idea, though I wonder if "American" would ever be considered a tribe there, or if there's too much animosity for that... Link of the Moment
You have to be into some obscure bits of literary geek culture to get this, but what if Jack Chick wrote on the Cthulhu mythos?

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AIM Chat of the Moment

sarah: I can understand wanting to be younger again, or rather wanting to live out the freedom of singledom in the college years... we all probably feel that from time to time, but I think that I only feel that way because I forget all the crap that went along with it... the grass is always greener scenario
kirk: well, she doth protest that she's never really lived alone, except maybe a very brief time in college, and barely that, just doing the whole serial monogomy shtick
sarah: So she wants to go be a lonely slut?
kirk: well, that's certainly how I'd put it, yes.
kirk: well, no.
sarah: well... what's so great about living alone anyway... the longer you live alone the harder it becomes to accomodate living with another person... it's just the highway to crotchetyness if you ask me

Don't know if this is nice to post, but it feels good at this difficult time in my life. Plus I thought it was a little funny (Sarah did immediately say she was being facetious about the "lonely slut" remark, or rather "fecissuoaos... fecisous ...phecishus? Facicious?" ) and I do like the phrase "highway to crochetyness". Sarah and Dylan are great for snarky IMing with, except Dylan's never online. Links of the Moment
"Obey Your Kisrael.com." "Kisrael.com Tested, Mother Approved." "Strong Enough for a Man, Made for a Kisrael.com." The Advertising Slogan Generator is providing all my Kisrael.com slogan needs! And if that wasn't cool enough, the Brunching Shuttlecocks' C.Y.B.O.R.G. (what would your acronym be, if you were a robot designed to cause mayhem?) has been upgraded to generate cool graphics like the one here to the right.

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Quote and Review of the Moment

The Turkish Enterprise's dress code has got to cause problems. The female personnel are forced to wear miniskirts that end four inches above the bottom of their asses, and when they turn around to work on the spray-painted cardboard computers, they have no secrets. I'm sure this leads to situations where the navigator loses his concentration and says, 'Miss Uhura, we are crotching a course for the panties sector, coordinates your whole ass hanging out. Repeat: panties, panties, panties.'

The review was funny though it went on for a bit...but this damn "coordinates your whole ass hanging out" quote has been sticking in my brain.

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Headline of the Moment
"The Bush administration is reminding potential attackers that nuclear retaliation is among the U.S. options." Pandora, your box is ready.

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Quote of the Moment

The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

Dylan said about the same thing to me when I was having my "existential crisis", that I was fretting about the fate of the world while he was worrying over the current price of ground beef. Image of the Moment

--A common, drive-you-nuts typo for the Nintendo game "Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader" is "Rouge Leader"... Robert Montjoy of bobville.com created this memory aid, but he says it hasn't helped much...

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Web Tool of the Moment
Interesting...MakeAShorterLink.com. You enter one of those big honking links, and they will store it in their database, and give you a short, easily cut-and-pasteable link that when clicked will bring you to your original target...a neat idea and public service.

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Dialog of the Moment

"She's about a quarter turn from being a diesel dyke."
"You haven't seen my new belt!"

It was quite the macho belt to go along with MZ's new short haircut. In a similar story, Mo got hit on by a woman Newbury Comics. She was very happy to still have her old "dyke street cred"...