Happy ante diem quartum nonas Sextilis

They've just started the fireworks down on the Charles River ... even though I'm six miles away in Somerville I can hear it.

Boston's fireworks are, I think, second to none in the world. They are "composed" by an artist of no mean talent: and I say composed because they feel like works of music. Symphonies in light and fire and percussion.

People begin to camp out on the Esplanade, on the southern (right) bank of the Charles river in Boston, the night before, at least. By sunrise on the morning of the fourth, the island is already crowded with people and all of the good spots on the riverfront are already taken. Spots further back on the island are really no good since there are large trees that get in the way, especially of the lower fireworks. I've never had a riverfront spot, myself, at least not right there, in front of the barge. That would be fantastic, with the reflection in the water. It would also be interesting to be on one of the hundreds of boats that crowd into the basin throughout the day -- a huge traffic jam through the locks at Charles river dam that no doubt begins the day before, and ends up with a river so crowded that you could practically walk from one bank to another without getting wet ...

Many people, of course, also fill out the Cambridge side of the river. That's not nearly as good, as the closest you can get to the river is on a sidewalk, behind a metal railing. The sidewalk is far too narrow to accommodate many people, and the railings will get in the way. The grassy areas in Cambridge are behind Memorial Drive, which makes it even worse. Some people set up chairs on either the Mass Ave ("Harvard", though it's nowhere near Harvard) or Salt-and-pepper (Longfellow) bridges. But they have the same disadvantages as the Cambridge side.

Many years ago I did find a great spot however that is a good alternative to the Esplanade island: and that is the strip of land between the lagoon (which separates the island from the mainland) and Storrow drive. That area does not fill up until after 6pm on the fourth itself. You can usually find a spot right on the bank overlooking the lagoon itself. You get the advantage of reflections in the lagoon (admittedly not as good as the Charles), and the trees and people on the island are far enough away that they are too small to block the view. It's quite ideal, at least unless you want to spend more than 24 hours in the same spot.

Watching the fireworks on the Esplanade is quite a commitment: by 8pm, every single square inch is filled with human bodies. You can no longer tell where there's pavement and where there's grass. And you had better have done whatever you needed to do before then, because whatever spot you happen to be in by then, you will be there, come what may, until 11:30pm at least. It's like some sort of nightmare Science Fiction scenario of the world after a massive population explosion. And it takes hours to get home by then, too, though they do run the T for extra hours, and it's free. God help you if you drove.

When Lotus still owned the Lotus Development Building right on the Charles, people used to watch from one of the balconies; and when Lisa used to work on the 14th floor of the Green building at MIT, she had a picture window overlooking the Charles and the Boston skyline just above where the barge is usually moored. I never watched from either spot. I just don't see the point of not being there, on the Esplanade, if you're going to do it at all.

Tonight, though, I have to admit I'm glad to be home in the air conditioned cool, and not out in the muggy, crowded, sweaty heat with a quarter of a million other crazies on the Esplanade. I've done my Esplanade time. I'm all about the comfort nowadays!

Bad-TV-we-love Hangover ...

Spent the whole day doing nothing but watching the entire first season and the first episode of the second season of Footballer's Wives. We discovered this show recently on BBCAmerica - apparently in the UK they're already on the 5th season, but on BBCAmerica they just finished Season 3 and started on Season 4.

This show is just deliciously awful. It's total Soap-Opera, Dynasty-for-white-trash-nouveau-riche British football (soccer) players and their wives, mistresses, wives' lovers, long-lost babies, yadda yadda yadda. Our favourite characters are, of course, Tanya and Hazel: man-eating, chain-smoking, ball-busting vagine dentate who are just about the only characters to have survived to season 4, apparently.

Interjection: I find it interesting somehow that in England, it's the Northerners who are depicted as stupid, brutish, ignorant, "white trash", and have the "thick" accents, while in the US it's the exact opposite.

We've been enjoying quite a lot of TV about these types of characters, actually, since our other great "discovery" late in the TV season this year was My Name is Earl. Joy steals absolutely every scene. "Boys, get your mama's white plastic stripper shoes out of the lego box!" Unlike Footballer's Wives, though, Earl is a really, really sweet show. It manages to have its cake and eat it to: ridiculing an entire socioeconomic segment of American culture while still treating them with a lot of affection and warmth. It's one of the freshest, most clever shows we've seen in a long time.

Catch-up Post

I was doing pretty well in April, then May was a total loss, blog-wise.

Lots of things happened in May: we saw Madama Butterfly in Portsmouth, fostered a copper-coloured husky for a while; I found a huge mess of flickr groups to which I have started contributing photos and which I will be doing more of; I finally did something about my stalled Greek-reading and proposed starting an online reading group for Euripides' Medea, which is now in full swing; I started getting more and more interested in videoblogging and started uploading some full-sized videos and am also now shopping for a digital camcorder; we had the annual SomDog presence in the Somerville Memorial Day Parade (for which I appear to be cursed, when it comes to getting video footage), and to ring out the month, on Tuesday, May 30, our dog Prospero fell off the 2nd-floor balcony to our abiding terror and suffered a severe dislocation of his right hip (and thankfully, nothing more). I've uploaded some photos to flickr and am in the process of making videos to document his recovery.

Sorry for the boring, no-links, no-photos posting, but I've got to get the blogging RE-jumpstarted somehow and this is the quickest way.

Zap!

Now I know why the CIA trained Latin American Secret Police to use electrodes as torture devices. I had nerve conduction tests done today just to make sure that the persistent chronic sensory peripheral nerve problems I've had since my "floxing" with Levaquin and Cipro 3 years ago are not signs of a more serious, or degenerative, problem.

Take it from me; if you don't HAVE to have a nerve conduction test done, DON'T. It's ... very ... VERY ... painful. 90 minutes of it.

666

SOOO much going on I've fallen wayyy behind on blogging (but since so much has been going on I have even more of a backlog to blog ABOUT).

But I just couldn't let this day go by without a quick nod to the apocalyptic cadences of the date (and it works whether you do European or American order): 06/06/06.

X-Men, the Least Stand ...

*sigh*

I was afraid that the movie wouldn't live up to the Preview ...

I knew that the Phoenix Saga would be hard to do justice to in just one movie.

But boy do I wish Bryan Singer had done this one, too ...

*sigh*

Very blue ...

We've been fostering a dog since Saturday for Somerville Animal Control, and we got very attached to him. Tonight we adopted him out to a young man who is taking him to his father's house in Foxborough. We know it was the right thing to do, but we're missing him already. More details later ... :-(

Death by Pollen ...

I never used to have spring allergies. I've had fall allergies since I was a little'un growing up in Urbana, Illinois and Columbia, Missouri. (No allergies in Bladon, Oxfordshire, from what I am told.)

Since moving into the Willow Avenue house in 1997, however, I have slowly been acquiring spring allergies as well. And they seem to be getting worse every year. This year's a doozie so far.

My eyes have been itching so much I've wanted to just rip them out and rinse them off; I've rubbed them so hard that they're not only permanently pink and bloodshot and constantly watering now but the skin around my eyes is practically turning purple. I get scared looks from people: I probably look either like I've been crying non-stop for hours or I'm some sort of drug-addict.

My symptoms tend to oscillate between itchy eyes and fits of sneezing that leave me drenched in sweat. Needless to say I've had precious little energy for anything else the past couple of days: blogging included.

Technorati Tags: personal seasons seasonal allergies byjjmg

Portsmouth Blogging

Staying overnight in Portsmouth after seeing the Granite State Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly. More details later.

Where Wild Turkeys Come Home to Roost

... in Somerville?








Technorati Tags: somerville local boston bostonarea trees phones cellphones nokia birds turkeys wildturkeys byjjmg

What do YOU doodle? - Legals Placemat Edition

Legal Sea Foods Placemat
Originally uploaded by IVSTINIANVS.

This is the kind of thing I doodle when I’m bored: some poetry in Greek (Sappho and Homer), some English written in Tengwar (Tolkien’s invented script for Elvish -- I’m such a frakkin’ nerd!!), and the two scripts I most recently taught myself (which I will have to blog aobut later): both Japanese syllabaries, hiragana, and katakana.

At least this time I didn’t conjugate any verbs ...

Thanks to Legal Sea Foods of Kendall Square, Cambridge:

for the useful paper placemat!

I'm too tired to figure out how to get the Google Maps API to work in blospot even with the help of Ron Larson. I'll have to come back and fix it later...

UPDATE 04/28/2006

I have had to temporarily comment out my FeedMap-powered BlogMap in my sidebar: turns out that its javascript code was somehow preventing my Google Map from displaying... FeedMap is based on Microsoft's MapPoint; one would like to hope that the incompatibility is purely ... accidental. ;-)

Technorati Tags: Fun silly personal scripts writingsystems calligraphy greek tengwar kana hiragana katakana syllabaries japanese sappho homer odyssey doodles doodling restaurants placemats handwriting cambridge massachusetts local boston bostonarea legals legalseafoods food sea ocean flickr byjjmg

April 24-30 is TV Turnoff Week!!

Oops!  I completely forgot about this:  a campaign by AdBusters.org.  You may have seen the AdBusters magazine on the stands (at least if you shop at places like Whole Foods or similar places in "loony" liberal enclaves such as the Boston area).

The week is already nearly three days over but luckily, I haven’t watched anything on TV this week except for what was picked up on the TiVo prior to April 24, and I haven’t even watched much of that (only about an hour total). *whew* Anyway, it’s not too late to stop turning off those TVs tonight!

Make sure you see these rejected ads where you can also listen to and read the egregious rejections by the networks.  Fox, MTV, ABC, and most others refused all of their ads.  CNN appears to be the only broadcaster that accepted any of them.

The rejected ads are all public-service type ads addressing (at various levels of indirection) such issues as consumerism, obesity, bulimia and anorexia, Global Warming, etc.

You can also read and in some cases actually listen to the rejections themselves.

Most rejections were pretty forthright and honest: "our business model is selling advertising time; why would we run an ad telling people not to buy things or telling people our other sponsors’ products are bad for them?" You can’t blame them for taking that kind of position.

But some were a little less clear: I especially love the bits about how ABC rejected them not because of any "written policy" but simply because they said so.

Most egregious was the person at ABC said that they don’t accept anything that is "controversial about issues of public importance". I seeee. So, ads about drunk driving don’t count? Or drugs? But it’s too controversial to talk about obesity, or bulimia and anorexia? Or Global Warming? And the Swift Boat ads weren’t "controversial"?

These people are also behind an annual Buy-Nothing Day -- this year’s will be November 26.

Currently, AdBusters are suing a broadcaster in Canada, and are hoping to use this precedent as a stepping stone to "reclaiming our most basic freedom - the Human Right to Communicate."

You may also want to "Sign the Media Carta"

Oh, and by the way.  I don’t think that playing Sudoku on your TiVo counts.  (I found apps.tv via Zatsnotfunny;  I’ve forgotten what led me there in the first place.  But it took about 2 seconds to get these apps running on my TiVo.)Technorati Tags: Politics media consumerism tv television economy economics environment health globalwarming globalisation adbusters advertising corporations corporateculture tivo games gadgets toys tech technology entertainment web tools downloads byjjmg

Technorati Tags: Politics media consumerism tv television economy economics environment health globalwarming globalisation adbusters advertising corporations corporateculture byjjmg

Blip.tv Videoblogging! (The Vegas Twins play like idiots)

... and I test out Blip.tv!

Blip.tv is another video-hosting service, only this one is more videoblogging-centric than YouTube or Google Videos. It's basically a videoblog host. You sign up and you basically get your own vlog there, though it comes with a feature to cross-post your vlog entries to:

• your own blog (or whatever "other" blog you may already have)
• Flickr (it sends a thumbnail to flickr)
• del.icio.us (Blip.tv gives you the option to tag your posts, and it will bookmark them with those tags [though they are not also Technorati Tags])

The cross-posting seems a bit buggy (Blip.tv is still in Beta):

• cross-posting is kind of slow (they sort of hint at this by giving you a page to check the status of your cross-posts), so it's clearly an asynchronous task
• the status page doesn't work, since it said "completed" immediately, but the cross-posting to This Blog and to del.icio.us took about 10-15 minutes
• as of 25 minutes, the thumbnail still hasn't shown up on Flickr

The cross-posting to another blog is also implemented as kind of an after-thought. Which may be deliberate. At least, they don't provide you with a way to embed your video in your "real" blog the way Youtube et al. do. They just generate a boring href link. But again, this may be a feature, not a bug. Maybe they are trying to encourage you to let go of your old blog and embrace the Blip.tv vlogging way.

I discovered Blip.tv through Zip Zap Zop, a videoblog that kind of has to be seen to be believed. It's produced by a very extroverted and exhibitionistic guy in the latter half of his 30s living in New York City who calls himself Clark Saturn. (It's kind of too good to be true to imagine that this is his real name, especially since he often pronounces it "Clark of Saturn" - though he sometimes seems to spell that "clarkovsaturn".) I definitely learned some interesting things from Zip Zap Zop:

• You don't need to rehearse your "performances" - you can hem and haw and go "ummmm" a lot and basically think out loud.
• In a sense, in fact, from the above, you might say that it's easier to vlog than to write regular blog postings. At least, the way I write them. No correcting yourself, no editing out mistakes, no efforts to achieve good grammar. It seems thoroughly liberating!
• If you buy the right equipment, you can mix all sorts of things into your blog like bulleted lists or presentations or really anything that you can display on your computer.
• You can be completely, utterly, and totally devoid of any spec of sanity, but someone will marry you anyway.

In the unlikely event that Clark reads this, I mean all of the above in the nicest way. Honestly. [Insert Smiley-emoticon here]

Actually it was one of Clark's postings that pointed me to another Vlogger's site, the one belonging to a professor in Missouri, called The Richard Show (in all my life I never thought I would hear the place-name "Rolla" again since moving away from Columbia). ZipZapZop pointed me to a post here where Richard's wife is wished happy birthday by vloggers from here to Kathmandu, including the people who do Blip.tv. They make copious use of the word "awesome". The name Blip.tv caught my attention, so I checked them out. The happy birthday post is very cute and sweet, by the way. And Clark appears in it. Inexplicably, with a Japanese fan. And, also inexplicably, naked. Well, at least what you see (basically just the shoulders).

Anyway. This is another video taken with my

Nokia 6256i (and uploaded to my laptop via Bluetooth) - note however that unlike my earlier videos which I uploaded to YouTube here, this video was not in any way "processed": it is still a 3g2 file. It plays for me in QuickTime and in Real Player. I'm not sure how it will play for you, but if it doesn't play automatically, QuickTime will definitely do it, though you may need to make sure that it is associated with the 3g2 file type.

OR: Go to Blip.tv to watch the video

The description I gave it at Blip.tv is:

Circe and Prospero rough-house at the new(ish) Off-Leash Recreational Area in
Somerville's Nunziato Park

I failed to mention that Prospero is trying to climb on top of Circe. Not to hump her at one end or the other, but actually to climb up, on top of, or over her. It's ... just weird.

So which video-hosting site will I go with? I'm not sure. (And I bet there are others besides the ones I've identified so far). If they get the bugs out, Blip.tv looks very cool, which its cross-posting and tagging and automatic bookmarking on del.icio.us. On the other hand, YouTube and Google Videos have huge communities, à la Flickr. I doubt I will go for Google Videos, given the rather irritating waiting period you have to undergo as they decide whether to approve your video or not (presumably they want to avoid porn and stolen copyrighted material). I'm an instant-gratification kind of a guy, so that's just probably not going to do it for me.

Some more videoblogging/vlogging stuff I picked up since my last post on the topic:

• A Yahoo Group on Videoblogging
• An article on How to Videoblog with Blogger

Obviously I need to start either digitizing my analog camcorder tapes, or I need to get a DV camera.

Technorati Tags: dogs pets friends dogparks playing videos clips videoblogging videoblogs vlogs web2.0 personal regional local bostonarea nunziato local bostonarea somerville lisa prospero vegastwins circe boston bliptv zipzapzop therichardshow byjjmg

Book Acquisitions, late April 2006 edition

Sooooo, I was pretty self-controlled today. Didn’t spend too much. Not like the time when even the bookstore’s actual owner shook her head as she ran up my pile while saying “You went overboard again”. (And that was a bookstore in a town that’s 2.5 hours drive away which I only visit once or twice a year: Cunningham Books of Portland, Maine; but the bookstore owners there all know me.)

Today I just picked up a couple of remainders at the Harvard Book Store (unaffiliated with the University with which it shares an intimate propinquity), an independent book store in Harvard Square which I like to patronize (along with Porter Square Books , the best new indie bookstore around and totally the best thing to happen to my neck of the woods in years) in between shipments from Amazon. The store is also called Harvard New and Used.

• Columbia Chronologies of Asian History and Culture
• The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

Why these two books in particular? They actually weren’t the only books I thought about buying. Several others looked interesting, including The Helmet of Horror by a Russian author named Victor Pelevin (Виктор Пелевин). This book is a retelling of the Myth of Theseus, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur , and is part of the delightful Canongate Myths Series, which includes:

• The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood of Handmaid’s Tale fame (which latter book was made into a movie starring Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Aidan Quinn, and Robert Duvall)
• A Short History of Myths, by Karen Armstrong of History of Godfame (and whose most recent book I also recently bought)

When I saw the Helmet of Horror at Harvard New and Used, I almost walked right over to Schoenhofs to see if they had the Russian original, Шлем ужаса, but I figured I’d look it up online. To my surprise and disappointment, they don’t seem to have it — at least not yet — though if it’s already had a chance to be translated into English you’d think they would have it by now (they have several other things by Pelevin). Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried about it, though: the text itself appears to be available online here. As you can see (even if you don’t read Russian), it’s quite an interesting-looking stylistic approach to both novel-writing and Greek mythology. I love the use of emoticons.

The Chronology book I got because I have been interested in Things Asian of late — I’ll have to post about that separately — and the Burns I got because, well, (a) I had no idea Burns was that prolific (I have several editions of Burns, but apparently not the complete works), and (b) he is supposed to be my great-great-great-to-the-Nth-degree grandfather, if my grandmother Sarah Burns of Dunoon was to be believed, so I figure I just should have it. Plus I love his poetry.

It is a pure coincidence — and in light of my discussing myth, an instance of fascinatingly Jungian synchronicity — that both the Robert Burns book and the Myths series are from the same publisher…

Going for the Little Guy Again

So according to today’s NYT, the Bush Administration is cracking down on the companies that employ illegal immigrants, arresting seven managers of a “Houston-based pallet supply company”.  According to the article:

Company supervisors knowingly hired illegal immigrants, provided them with housing and transportation to and from work, and even reimbursed one undercover agent for the cost of obtaining fraudulent identity documents, Homeland Security Department officials said.

So far so good — I’m not in favour of a “guest worker” program that will just create a permanent underclass of non-voting workers:  workers that can’t vote Democrat.  So who do they arrest?

No senior corporate executives at the company were detained, but officials filed criminal charges against seven lower-level managers and a foreman from New York, Texas, Ohio and Massachusetts for conspiring to transport, harbor, and induce illegal immigrants to come to the United States, charges that carry maximum sentences of up to 10 years in jail.

“No senior corporate executives” … Oh, why am I not surprised?  No, throw the book at the little guy but don’t piss off your Republican Campaign Contributors!

Is it Getting Drafty?

I don't know how I could possibly be finding myself say this — though I was too young, myself, I still vividly remember when many of my friends’ older brothers were faced with the terrifying decision of deciding whether to run away to Canada or stay to get drafted for Vietnam — yet I find myself in agreement with today’s NYT op-ed contributor, Paul Kane, who proposes bringing back the selective service — i.e. the draft — only this time for both men and women, and without deferments.  His primary argument is that this will send a message to Iran and our allies that we’re serious and will actually make war less likely.  Personally, I’m not sure I buy that argument, though I am more sympathetic to this one:

But most important, America's elites and ordinary citizens alike will know that they may be called upon for wartime service and sacrifice.

And frankly, this is what appeals to me.  It is often said that Democracies are less likely to go to war than Dictatorships.  In fact, Bush himself — apparently unaware of the irony — made the same argument in the run-up to the Iraq war.  If the past six years has taught us anything, a Democracy without the reality of shared sacrifice is far too apathetic to care about whether our predominantly Black, Poor, and Southern volunteer army gets sent off to war.

Frankly, it seems to me that this may be the only thing that could wake up the White Suburban Middle-Class voter, too prone to vote their own selfish pocketbook.  Will it make wars less likely?  After all, the Vietnam War happened on a basis of lies and misinformation as well, and the middle class sent their kids to war and elected Nixon twice.  So maybe not.  But I do know that the Middle Class is so totally untouched by this war that it is no surprise that they have abdicated any responsibility for it.

The liberal blogosphere is certainly reacting negatively to this proposal:  Atrios asks “Who Let the Crazies Out” and links to a Matthew Yglesias essay entitled “War is Peace”:

Sending a giant conscript army to occupy Iran is a terrible idea. If you think our current troops lack the appropriate training for the occupation of Iraq, just wait until I'm the one doing it.

I don’t doubt it.  But the point isn’t to send drafted kids to war.  The point is to make voting parents think twice before pulling the trigger on arrogant chickenhawk incompetents who never served a day in their lives in the military.

Maybe these voters won’t be quite so gung-ho about “kicking some Ay-rab ass” if their own kids were the ones doing the kicking.

MIT is Full Of Them

Temple Grandin today at Porter Square Books! Fantastic reading!! Biggest crowd I've seen yet. Of course I got there an hour early so I could snag a seat, but easily two thirds of the people there were standing.  Can't believe there's an independent bookstore this great within walking distance.

From her Wiki page:

Temple Grandin, PhD, (born August 29, 1947) is an associate professor at Colorado State University and arguably the most accomplished and well-known adult with 'high functioning' autism in the world. Grandin is also a world renowned professional designer of humane livestock facilities.

She’s doing readings of course to promote her book Animals in Translation , which just came out in paperback.  We picked up a copy at Porter Square Books a couple of months ago and were amazed to discover that the author herself was actually going to be speaking there.   She wrote the book because her autism gives her insights into how animals think:  i.e., non-verbally.  In her talk she mentioned many similarities between autistic people such as herself and animals:

• An Attention to detail that “normal” people just “tune out” (this was vividly demonstrated during her talk when she lost her train of thought due to the espresso machine in the café at the far end of the bookstore;  the rest of us of course were tuning it out but she had to stop and ask us “what is that sound?”)  Her research with animals shows that they notice all sorts of details that to us seem important:  this is something that books on dog behavior also talk about (for instance, a dog may sit when you make a certain gesture that you’re not even aware of, and may not have learned the meaning of the word)
• Savant behavior:  just as some autistic people are like Rain Man, some animals have extremely specialized talents:  an example she gave was birds that are able to memorize the thousands of miles of a migratory route in a single voyage.
• Fear as the prime emotion

And of course, the lack of language in animals:  Dr. Grandin herself says she thinks in pictures, and without pictures she cannot grasp abstract concepts.  She says, and it is easy to believe this, that language covers up and hides a lot of details that animals are very aware of.

Her work has mostly been focused on making slaughterhouses and livestock facilities more humane.  She has worked with McDonalds and Wendys and Burger King and the USDA and put together a simple, objective rating system to grade slaughterhouses that the USDA now uses in its audits.

Some of the most important things she talked about were the difference between abstract and concrete approaches to the world:  for instance, she said she has often noticed that she sees the most extreme political views, on both the right, and the left, in “people who work in offices” and just “don’t know what it’s like out there in the real world, on the ground.”  Which is something I definitely agree with:  it would be a huge improvement if we had more leaders and politicians who dealt with the concrete realities instead of ideologies and abstractions.  A lot of damage has been done through idealism.

McDonalds was apparently one of the pioneers in demanding humane treatment of the animals in its “product”.  One of Temple’s most affecting topics was when she talked about how she brought executives from McDonalds who had never been in a slaughterhouse to actually see what happens there.  She took them to the better ones, and they were saying things like “well, this isn’t so bad;  it’s not as bad as I was afraid it would be”, but then when she took them to the more poorly-managed ones, she saw the eyes of one executive bug out when he saw an emaciated dairy cow, barely able to walk, being led to become hamburger:  and McDonalds has been on board ever since.

Another thing I was very gratified to hear was her when she discussed current animal breeding practices.  She didn’t mention the AKC by name — and indeed was also talking about horse-breeding and pig-breeding (apparently in the rush to breed more “lean” pigs for lower-fat pork, the breeders also inadvertently selected for much more aggressive pigs that fight one another a lot more nastily).  But she did also talk about dogs and how they are being bred for trivial matters of appearance and not for whether they are healthy or have good behavioral traits.  She mentioned a huge rise in knee-surgeries in dogs, for instance.  (The wrong that dog breeders (even the “good” ones, not the infamous and monstrous “puppy mills”) and the AKC are doing is covered very admirably by Stephen Budiansky in his book The Truth About Dogs , which I highly recommend:  one of the best things you learn from him is that one of the founders of the whole Kennel Club movement was also a eugenics nut whose notions about “purity of bloodlines” was part of the pseudo-scientific claptrap that the Nazi’s drew upon for implementing their racial programs, and that the kind of ideas about genetics and inheritance that the AKC breeders live by was discredited for human beings but still lives on in animal breeding.

Anyway.  Some other great highlights:

• When talking about non-verbal traits that autistic people share with animals, she discussed dogs and how their minds are mostly focused on “smell images” instead of picture images.  She talked about a neighbor’s beagle who always wanted to stop at a transformer box in the neighborhood, but his owner would never let him stop and sniff his “pee-mail”.
• She talked about the white matter in the brain and how this constitutes the broadband connections between parts of the brain.  In autistic people, these connections become limited, so she has connections to the Graphics Design Department, while Rain Man has connections to the Accounting Department.
• She said that what to normal people is the “Freudian subconscious” is right there on the surface with autistic people:  “talk about rude pop-up ads”.  (Keep in mind that she always thinks in images.)
• And, of course, the biggest laugh came when she talked about the spectrum from autism to aspergers (which is considered a milder form of autism), when she said “MIT’s FULL of THEM!”

The attack of the cyborg cocroaches

And they said Dr. Frankenstein was a fictional character ...



(Or see the video with its comments at YouTube here.)

And just in case that didn't creep you out (it's kind of cute, actually), this guy's other work will give you nightmares:



Thanks to Kevin over at Tyler and Jack's Padded Cell for bringing this to my attention. I found Kevin's blog via a Technorati search for the Hallam Foe blog; turns out Kevin works at the hotel where the film is currently shooting, but is too professional to ask to have his Deathwatch DVD signed by star Jamie Bell (i.e. he doesn't want to get sacked). So near, and yet so far.

Technorati Tags: fun videos videoblogging youtube newmedia cyborgs cocroaches frogs galvanism technology frankenstein science scientists mad madscientists academics byjjmg

Patently Ridiculous

I was pleased to read this article in the NYT about a certain Geoff Goodfellow who, it appears, invented the concept of wireless email back in 1982, but who never patented the idea and has never seen a penny of what the article says is a $612.5 million business.

Though it is heresy to voice such an opinion in my industry these days, as a software developer I’ve seen the kind of stuff that gets patented, and I know that the entire system of intellectual property law is broken. Not just with patents, but with Congress’s penchant perpetually renewing copyrights. This is not what the Constitution set out to accomplish with patents and copyrights. As the article says:

For legal and technology experts, the tale of Mr. Goodfellow's pioneering work is evidence of the shortcomings of the nation's patent system, which was created to reward individual creativity but has increasingly become a club for giant corporations and aggressive law firms.

It’s all about litigation taking the place of innovation. A company I used to work for was destroyed quite literally overnight by a patent law-suit based on a concept so obvious that it’s taught in every Computer Science 101 course; but the point is, your patent doesn’t really have to be able to stand up to scrutiny. The point is that most companies aren’t going to have the money to pay for the lawyers to prove it. They’ll either pay you off or they’ll go out of business (and if they do have the money, they’d probably rather just buy the patent off you so they can screw the next guy).

As Goodfellow says:

You don't patent the obvious. The way you compete is to build something that is faster, better, cheaper. You don't lock your ideas up in a patent and rest on your laurels.

What a concept.

Technorati Tags: business economy corporate corporations litigation lawyers patents patent law copyright technology innovation wireless email byjjmg

Cruel, but funny - Boston Columnists Edition

You’ll only get this if you live in the Boston area or are for any reason a reader of the Boston Globe. But if you are, you will certainly enjoy the post Fixing the Internet by “Gavin M” over at Sadly, No, skewering our resident tame conservative columnist nincompoop, Jeff Jacoby. In case you don’t know (and in the unlikely case that you want to), Jacoby is the Globe’s answer to David Brooks, only far more predictable (Brooks may be a moron, but at least he is creative about it and doesn’t always tow the party-line-du-jour).

I just had to add Sadly, No to my blogroll, and not just because it has a fun and clever name.

Don't miss the faux movie poster in their post on "David Horowitz in High Anxiety". Or the article How Can I Ever Have Sex Again When John Bolton Roams the Land? They seem to particularly enjoy trolling around the wingnut hemi-blogosphere and dredging up juicy examples of right-wing idiocy to put on display for public ridicule. For example, Gavin wrote a post entitled Or Maybe a Hydrox, in which he delicately investigates the charges of the latest example of Liberal Academia's War On Decency reported by a certain Wayne Perryman:

Yeah, that Rev. Perryman -- the favorite black clergyman of the conservative race-baiting set. And what titanic outrage has liberalism supposedly committed this time? It goes a little something like...

which he duly reproduces. I particularly enjoyed his subtle and understated reaction to this example of liberal perfidity:

Right. Aiee. Oh-em-eff-gee, three exclamation points. At long last, etc. Now, how many of these liberal-professor/details-unclear 'final exam' stories have turned out to be factual? In any case, this shows why no one with a brain is fooled when Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, and the rest of the WingNet bigots flap their arms and yell about liberal secret double-standard racist liberal in bla bla yonk ah-oogah.

"Bla bla yonk ah-oogah" indeed.

Technorati Tags: politics humour humor funny blogs wingnuts sarcasm parody cruel cruelbutfunny jacoby perryman sadlyno byjjmg

Patriots Day

For those of you who stumble across my blog from outside of Massachusetts, you may enjoy this little bit of trivia.

Today Massachusetts celebrates the Battle of Lexington and Concord — the famous “shot heard 'round the world” — generally considered to be the beginning of the American War of Independence.

It’s a holiday that doesn’t really exist in the rest of the country (except, apparently, Maine, according to Wikipedia), and brings blank stares from out-of-staters, and even from not a few in-staters. Seems kind of odd to me that people in this country wouldn’t want to celebrate the start of the Revolution, though I suppose the Fourth of July is considered to be enough in most states.

Every year on this day (celebrated on the third Monday of every April), a bunch of colossal history nerds re-enact the whole

schebang, from Paul Revere’s famous ride, on a real horse, in real Georgian costume, up Mass Ave into Lexington, to battles complete with muskets on the Lexington Town Green and down by Concord’s Old North Bridge (Google Map). If you’re willing to get up at the crack of dawn, it’s quite a lot of fun to watch.

Patriots Day is also the day of the Boston Marathon. Everybody’s heard of the Marathon. The attention given to the Marathon probably explains the lack of attention to the goofy re-enactments of Patriots Day itself.

Just about everybody has also heard of the origin of the word “Marathon” in the legend of Pheidippides, the Athenian herald to ran the 26 miles to announce the victory of the Athenian army over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon, considered to be one of the great “hinge points” of history, especially as Persia was at the time the largest empire the world had ever seen. Oddly, the Wikipedia articles on this topic keep referring to the “Town of Marathon”. That’s news to me. Although there is certainly a town there now, and was probably a town there in ancient times (though whether it was there at the time of the battle is something I don’t know), but I always understood it to refer to the name of the field where the battle took place. Wikipedia also incorrectly defines Marathon (Μαραθών as the Ancient Greek word for “fennel” (which is presumably what the field was full of): the word for fennel was μάραθον, with the accent on the first syllable and a short ‘o’. Μαραθών is apparently an adjective meaning “overgrown with fennel” (“befennelled”?). Whether Marathon was already a real place-name, either of a field of of a town at the time of the battle is something I don’t know.

An apparently “official” site for re-enactors on Patriots Day: BattleRoad.org

WBGH did a very fun documentary on the Patriots Day re-enactors, which gets re-broadcast around this time of year on PBS stations.

Technorati Tags: local bostonarea boston massachusetts lexington concord revolution revolutionary revolutionarywar war independence history historic minuteman minutemen british paul revere paulrevere greece greek ancient persia persians marathon wgbh byjjmg

We GODda talk

So I was driving home from work on Thursday night and I tuned in to Christopher Lydon’s newest show on PRI, Radio Open Source (in the Boston Area it’s carried by WGBH).

The show that night was a thouroughly engaging interview with Northwestern University’s History Professor Garry Wills, author of the new book What Jesus Meant.  The book’s title was inspired by the catchphrase “What Would Jesus Do?” [WWJD] – the answer, of course being not what the Republicans are doing, but in fact what Wills has to say is more interesting than that.

Religion and secularism has been on the radar screen even more than usual in the U.S. even since the 2004 elections, in which “moral values” were reported to be one of the top reasons people gave for going to the polls.  Democrats have been openly debating whether they should attempt to soften their secularist image and embrace God more in order to win over more swing voters.  (As if there’s ever been a Democratic Presidential Candidate who didn’t mention God in practically every single speech;  as if it was news that there has never been any chance of an avowedly atheist politician in this country winning an election for any major office.)

But Wills’s own opinion on the matter is a fresh and fascinating take on the issue, and is backed up with ample scriptural evidence.  His Op-Ed essay of April 9, entitled “Christ Among the Partisans” (behind the NYT’s “Times Select” firewall — unortunately so, as it should be required reading for all voters in this country:  and not just for “all thinking people” — as Adlai Stevenson put it, we need a majority!) begins tersely but thunderously, and without compromise:

THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.

Make no mistake:  these are the opinions of a deeply committed believer.

He goes on (I’m tempted to paste the whole thing in here):

This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.

Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.

…

The Romans did not believe Jesus when he said he had no political ambitions. That is why the soldiers mocked him as a failed king, giving him a robe and scepter and bowing in fake obedience (John 19:1-3). Those who today say that they are creating or following a "Christian politics" continue the work of those soldiers, disregarding the words of Jesus that his reign is not of this order. [emphasis mine]

(Matthew 6:5-6 was of course also the inspiration behind Magnificent Obsession, though in that book it’s almost reduced to a kind of Science Fiction or Fantasy concept.  (I think they sucked all the bizarre quasi-SciFi-quasi-Christianity out of the story for the 1954 movie  with Jane Wyman.)

It is difficult for a nonbeliever to judge much of what Wills says, particularly about the mysterious uniqueness of Jesus:

Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we would all be better off if we took up the slogan "What would Jesus do?"

That is not a question his disciples ask in the Gospels. They never knew what Jesus was going to do next. He could round on Peter and call him "Satan." He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father's judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first.

He is more a higher Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, than a higher Socrates. No politician is going to tell the lustful that they must pluck out their right eye. We cannot do what Jesus would do because we are not divine.[again, emphasis mine]

My first reaction is to point out that history is full of prophets and sages who spoke and taught in paradox and whose morality seemed impossible to capture in easy-to-understand rules.  And it’s also fugll of organized religions packagine and tidying up the teachings of those prophets.  Nonetheless, I am confident that Wills’s interpretation is far, far closer to what is actually written about Jesus in the Gospels than anything the so-called “Christian Right” is saying.

Not that this should be news.  The hypocrisy and wrong-headedness of the conservatives’ appropriation of Christianity as their own should be clear, and not merely for such obvious examples as Jesus’s injunction about camels (or ropes) and needles regarding the Republicans’ wealthy donors.  The entire Gospel Story is one of Jesus’s enmity with the “fundamentalists” of his day:  the “Scribes and Pharisees” who put strict adherence to the letter of the law in its minutest details above all other considerations.  How the so-called “moral majority” can’t see themselves as the Pharisess is beyond me:  the Matthew / Grand Obsession quote above should be enough to tip them off, but they’re too busy worrying about following all the right rules so they can get into heaven to really pay attention.

Yet, as George Lakoff (linguist, author of Don’t Think of an Elephant  and founding member of the Rockridge Institute) would say, the Right has “framed the debate” very effectively.  Everyone assumes that the choice is between grown-up, hard-nosed respect for the tough lessons of the scriptures, or some sort of wishy-washy, I’m-ok-you’re-ok, feel-good secularism.  Rubbish.  The hypocrisy, ignorance, and sheer intellectual dishonesty of the Right when it comes to their mis-use and mis-appropriation of the scriptures is trivial to expose.

For instance, it always makes me see red when I hear someone bleat on about how “the Bible forbids homosexuality” when even a beginner’s level of Biblical Scholarship should show what shaky ground they’re standing on — especially if you hear a Christian say it.  There are only three places in the entire Bible that make even the slightest mention of homosexuality:  the story of the Cities of the Plain, the one clear, unambiguous injunction in Leviticus (which is what most people are referring to), and some rather ambiguous comments in Paul.  Of these, the first must be dismissed immediately:  the story of Soddom and Gomorrha is about betrayal of trust and violation of the code of hospitality, not homosexuality, and as I will get to in a moment, the third is also pretty flimsy.  But in fact, the second, the Levitical “abomination” reference must be dismissed by any believing Christian, since it is universally accepted by all Christian creeds and confessions that the new covenant of Christianity nullifies the entire Jewish Law Code!  It is the hight of screaming hypocrisy to single out a single passage from a Law Code that also forbids eating pork or shellfish, or touching a woman who is menstruating, or mixing the wrong kinds of plants together in the same field.  In fact, unless you are an Orthodox Jew — where you really do believe that every single jot and tittle of Leviticus and Deuteronomy must be obeyed — Leviticus is shaky ground even for a Jew to rely on.  You can’t cherry-pick the parts of a Jewish Ritual Purity Code and decide that “God really meant this part, even for gentiles!” without the slightest evidence.  As for Paul, the only part of the Bible having to do with homosexuality that is applicable to Christians, his reference appears to be about male prostitutes, but even if it weren’t, unless you’re also willing to follow his advice regarding the subordination of women (that they should not be allowed to speak in Church, for instance), then again you’re cherry-picking.

Wills makes essentially the same argument regarding abortion, at least in the interview that you can listen to on the Radio Open Source site:  since there is not a single reference to abortion in the Bible, he says, all arguments must rely on “natural law” and “natural reason”.  And there, “reasonable people can differ”.  “The Bible Says So” is not something you can really argue (if it’s true), but “I gay sex revolts me” or “I believe a foetus is a human being” is.

As I said, this topic has been on the radar screen for some time, and before I sign off I’d like to leave you with two more references.

First, Slavoj Žižek’s NYT op-ed piece from March 12 which he wrote the wake of the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis and in which he declares that “Atheism is a European legacy worth fighting for”:

More than a century ago, in ''The Brothers Karamazov'' and other works, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism, arguing in essence that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. The French philosopher André Glucksmann even applied Dostoyevsky's critique of godless nihilism to 9/11, as the title of his book, ''Dostoyevsky in Manhattan,'' suggests.

This argument couldn't have been more wrong: the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted -- at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the ''godless'' Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism.

Sadly, it’s another Times Select item, because I agreed with pretty much everything he said (of course I have a copy and can furnish it upon request).  It puts me in mind of the story of a Conservative Catholic guest at a dinner party who insisted that she could never vote for a Democrat since they are “against religion”.  Her argument?  “When has religion ever hurt anybody?”  Most jaw-dropping aspect of this?  The question was posed at the dinner-table of a Polish Jew. 

Actually, I was surprised at the time that his essay didn’t get whole hell of a lot more play in the blogosphere.  Oddly enough, most of the people who wrote the tiny trickle of letters and blog-comments in response to Žižek's essay back in March (at least the ones I found) seemed to have interpreted it as advocating some sort of weak-kneed, liberal “appeasement” for the Muslim rioters (it makes you wonder if some people even bothered to read the essay), something it most emphatically did not do:

While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth.

What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

Dare I say it?  Amen! 

But maybe I’m being a bit too hasty.  Two days after Žižek's essay, a certain Paul Myers, professor at the University of Minnesotta, and a self-described “godless liberal”, posted an essay to his “Science Blog” Pharyngula.  Though he made no reference to Žižek (and in fact I think his posting came out purely by coincidence), he seems to be following the advice of subjecting “all … religions … to a … ruthless, critical analysis”.  It was entitled:  No respect for Christianity…so stop demanding it.  It starts with another defence of atheism, which is fine:

I like Avedon Carol, but she just doesn't get it. Explaining that the Right has successfully portrayed the Left as "godless" and then talking about how wrong they are because the Left is full of good religious people and that there are atheists on the Right too is simply perpetuating the idea the Right wants spread—that atheists are bad, a taint on the culture, and that a good way to demean a movement is to mention that its got atheists in it. Thanks, but no thanks. Can we instead just try to get across the message that freethinkers are good people we aren't ashamed of for a change?

… but goes beyond that to insults:  “I will not hesitate to express my scorn every time one of my "allies" in this "coalition" thinks the way to better the country is to promote more belief in false fantasies.”

Although I do have some sympathy for this sort of argument (you may have noticed my slight tone of exasperation above where I start with "As if there’s ever been..."), I don’t think this kind of approach is likely to win any friends, and, frankly, I’m not quite so convinced of the rightness of my own beliefs as to belittle those of others.  I have to say that this guy hasn’t learned any more humility on the subject in the meantime:  witness today’s commentary, entitled Easter brings out the insipid:

Why, no, no sighs of pity here. The resurrection is a made-up story; it gives me no hope at all. It does give hope to con-artists everywhere, though, I'm sure.

I don't find the story particularly sublime, either. "Absurd" is a better word for it, and for that reason I don't find it moving at all. How does it tell us anything about the nature of this god? He's simultaneously omnipotent and human, killable and not killable, capable of creating whole universes yet unable to pull out a few nails. If Christians weren't so thoroughly indoctrinated into the whole mess from an early age, instead of being moved they'd be baffled.

Ouch.  No, I don’t see much value to the progressive movement in alienating every believing Christian, even the progressive ones.  Žižek did call for the “ruthless, critical analysis” to be respectful.  Doesn’t seem like much to ask.

Technorati Tags: religion atheism christianity jesus garrywills garry wills wwjd scribes pharisees leviticus homosexuality bible scriptures biblical soddom gomorrha easter resurrection gospels slavojzizek slavoj zizek science islam muhammad muslims byjjmg

Two Roeper Zinger Reports for the Price of One

Roeper wasn't really on his game this week. In fact, Ebert produced the only really decent zinger of the day, about the new movie The Sisters:

It is possible to make a great modern version of Chekhov as Louis Malle did in
Vanya on 42nd Street. It is also possible to make unconvincing, pointless, and
unfocused version of Chekhov, and that would describe Sisters.

Sadly, Roeper's characterization of Joel Edgerton - saying that he "gives a Vanilla Wafer of a performance [in Kinky Boots] - can be applied to his own performance in this week's episode.

Last week's episode had a lot more: about On a Clear Day, which I want to see, and which is most decidedly not to be mixed up with On a Clear Day you Can See Forever, a guilty pleasure of mine, he had this to say:

'On a Clear Day, Billy Elliot and the Calendar Girls Can See the Full Monty. '
About once a year we get one of these heart-warming tales from across the pond
about a determined dreamer who sets out to accomplish an impossible and/or
controversial task.

Heh. Interestingly enough, he gave On a Clear Day thumbs up, despite the zinger. (He picked up on the same thread in this week's review of Kinky Boots: "Time for another quirky Brit-Com about working-class folks with a crazy dream!" - which he did not recommend.)

His best zinger from last week was for Antonio Banderas's newest venture, Take the Lead, based on a true story about a ballroom dancing instructor who volunteers to teach dance to a bunch of New York City schoolkids on detention: "I thought this movie was a Leslie Nielson away from being a pure parody of all these high-school movies." Nice one! Though I could tell that much from the previews. And actually, I thought the Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe did a much better job in his April 7 review, Missteps and questionable moves:

Teacher wants to teach. Students won't let him. Then he reels them in by speaking their language, or rather, he lets them speak their language all over the pastime he loves. Indeed, when he tries to play an oldie for the class, someone tells him, ''Yo, man, I need the remix!" So Sarah Vaughan is out in favor of mash-ups combining standards and new stuff.

Pierre Dulaine is a real-life ballroom dancer and instructor who has inspired scores of New York elementary schoolers to merengue and waltz. If I were Dulaine or any of his pupils, I'd find ''Take the Lead" distressing. Not because Dianne Houston's script leans on enough ancient movie formulas to qualify as a question in the math portion of the SAT; nor because director Liz Friedlander, a veteran of so-so music videos, doesn't meet a sequence she can't turn into a montage more appropriate for a Sprite commercial. The movie would bug me because its makers don't seem to think much of ballroom dancing, or learning.

I would probably have chosen "depressing" instead of "distressing", but that certainly summed up my reaction to the clips I've seen of this film.


Technorati Tags: entertainment tv reviews humour ebert roeper ebertandroeper ebert roeper movies film critics byjjmg

This is like Chocolate

... for a Language Nerd.

Pick a verb! Any verb! And get it conjugated for free!

Categories: language, languages, linguistics, reference, web, online, verbs, conjugation, conjugate, byjjmg

The Mystery Finally Solved ...

How the Daleks could be the most dangerous race in the universe without being able to climb stairs!

In the new series with Christopher Eccleston, now playing on the Sci Fi Channel, all is revealed. Search for "as it followed Rose and the waster up the stairs" here.

And if you don't, it's <a href="http://www.dwwa.net/dr2/Power/chant.wav">appropriate audio</a> for you!

I can't quite decide what to make of the new series. I mean, I'm glad it's back on the air, though now that they're already up to a 10th doctor (and they never even used poor Paul for more than one episode!), I don't know what they're going to do: this Gallifreyan is out of regenerations! But seriously. The original show (which is one of my absolute earliest memories of television: the earliest was something called "Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men" which I watched in my attic bedroom of our thatched 300-year-old cottage in Bladon) had its wonderful charm, its special effects and production values that felt like the sort of thing a couple of teenagers could whip up out of stuff in their dads' garages. It didn't take itself too seriously, and it certainly hadn't the slightest hint of sex on screen (yes of course the sidekicks provided some sexual interest for the adolescent heterosexual male viewer but it was all kept to their imaginations); nor did it have much in the way of serious violence. I wasn't surprised to hear that there is going to be some sex (at least a kiss?) in the new series, and of course it's obvious that the new series would have better CGI effects (though they're still pretty lame; Babylon 5 had better CGI ten years ago), but what I can't figure out is whether the new series is just totally going for "kiddy series" or what. The End of the World episode had some delicious adult humour with Zoë Wanamaker but the pilot episode was up their with the cheesiest of the original series, and what was with all the farting jokes in World War Three?

Oh, well. They know they have me anyway, farts or not.

(Observant readers will remember when I mentioned my predilection for wanting to be waited upon hand and foot. It wasn't until Lisa saw her first Doctor Who episode and heard something a little bit like this:
<a href="http://www.dwwa.net/dr4/Destiny/obey1.wav">more audio</a> that she realized that I didn't make up that particular delivery. "So that's where you get it from!" Then she hit me.)


[ Update, April 15:

I forgot to mention two more cool things I liked (both of which are spoilers):

• This was to my knowledge the closest look we have ever had of the Dalek life-form itself. I thought it was pretty cool. All tentacled and slimey, pulsating, and dripping with goo. I also enjoyed seeing that it was a cyclops, which I suppose makes sense, considering that it has only one mechanical eye.
• I also enjoyed the self-destruct mechanism. Finally an explanation for those giant ball-bearings all over the Dalek's "battle armour"!

- end Update]

Categories: entertainment, tv, series, scifi, sciencefiction, fiction, doctorwho, doctor, who, dr, eccleston, bbc, uk, english, british, humour, funny, daleks, byjjmg

Metaphors ...

So Lisa landed safely in Akron and called my cell phone while I was sitting down to lunch with my colleagues from work. Of course the inevitable question came "what are you going to do about Easter?"

As I said in my preceding post, I am just not into Easter. I just don't have all those warm, comforting, childhood memories of the holiday like I do about Christmas. My parents were atheists, so going to Church on Easter was never something we did. They did, however, celebrate Christmas with all the trimmings and it's always been important to me to carry on that tradition:
(Plus, green is my favourite colour, and red a close contendor for second place; Christmas's colours rock; pastels ... just don't.)

Now, I do have a few scattered childhood memories of an egg-hunt here, or an egg-colouring party there. But they clealry didn't make that strong an impression on me for me to want to carry on the practice. Plus, I did have friends whose parents were serious at least about going to Church on Easter, even if they never went the rest of the year, so I did end up being invited a couple of times to what to me were interminably long, insufferably boring Services where I was expected to sit quietly and not laugh and wear uncomfortable clothes.

Easter is very important to Lisa, however. She loves getting Easter Baskets full of all sorts of diabetic-coma-inducing treats. One of her funniest childhood memories is of the family dog, a gigantic German Shepherd, call in flagrante delicto standing all four paws on the dining room table with a startled expression on its face and easter grass hanging out of its jaws. Plus, Lisa is a huuuuge fan of roast lamb. I've made Lisa a few Easter Baskets in my time, of course, and we made one for her sister Gina when she got her new dog Salem:


Of course this basket was full of dog-treats.

Lastly, I simply cannot abide Peeps, though I admit I won't turn down a Chocolate Bunny. But as our colleague Ron pointed out, "
you think the bunny is solid, then you bite into it and it's hollow".

"A metaphor," said our colleague Helen "for life."


Categories: personal, funny, humour, friends, metaphors, life, easter, holidays, religion, religious, christmas, childhood, memories, eggs, baskets, dogs, pets, peeps, bunnies, chocolate, helen, ron, lisa, byjjmg

All by myself

Sorry if that title gets an unbearably sick-making song stuck in your head.

(I guess that apology is insincere since if the title didn't get the song in your head, this reminder will...)

So Lisa's off to beautiful Akron for a week, to visit with friends and family over Easter. Myself, I've never been partial to Easter. I just don't like pastels ...

I find that most people look at me funny when I call Akron "beautiful". Lord knows that I used to be the same way: most people, if they see Akron at all, it's from the interstate, and the view ain't pretty.

Akron, or "Rubber City," is of course is famous for once having been the major centre of the tire industry (yes, I chose to spell "center" the British way and "tyre" the American way) in North America. It went through major economic decline as did the rest of "rust belt" America. I used to tease Lisa with calling her home town "Akrid" and saying things like "ah, yes: the best of both worlds: in the middle of nowhere and urban blight!"

It wasn't until I visited in 2001 (Lisa's mother was diagnosed with lung cancer on 9/11/2001 and we went there for her [successful] surgery) that I realized how unfairly maligned the city was. Akron first of all lives up to its Greek name: it is definitely built on a "high" place, with sweeping vistas in all directions, affording views of heavily-wooded hilly countryside in all directions. The streets are lined with big, gnarled, old-growth oaks and maples and other trees, and the city is filled with huge rambling old Victorian houses with turrets and wraparound porches looking out on cobbled streets. The rubber industry was very kind to the city for many years and made a lot of people very wealthy in their time. So although most of the work has by now been outsourced to Mexico and elsewhere, and although Downtown Akron is still half boarded-up and could easily stand in as the location of a post-apocalyptic film where the neutron bomb has hit and left all the buildings standing but killed all living things, yet nonetheless there is still enough of a thriving economy to support some great restaurants and coffee houses and even some really great organic food markets.

Plus, the city is surrounded by greenery: there is ample state parkland around the area, where we could take our dogs (we drove to Akron with Argus, and Lisa's sister Gina of course has her own menagerie) for hikes up and down hills and trails and past waterfalls and streams. And Akron is stunning in the autumn.

Akron is of course also the home-town of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and of Devo.

I was tempted to come along this time, not only because Akron is pretty, but because I really do want to try to make it to the Cleveland Museum of Art because they have my personal favourite pictorial representation of Medea (or, more pedantically, Medeia) in their collection on a Lucanian Calyx-Krater (Krater: the Greek word for a bowl used for mixing wine with water: the ancients never drank their wine neat). This is one of the two most famous ancient images of Medea; the other is in Munich (Munich 3296). (A third was a fresco on the walls of Pompeii.)


It shows the witch Medea (wiki) escaping from the Corinthians (she has just killed their king and his daughter, who was about to marry her husband, Jason of Argonauts fame, and according to Euripides, she has also just killed her two children by Jason in order to punish him for divorcing her and leaving her and the kids in the lurch). She is in a chariot drawn by dragons; the chariot has rays coming out of it because it was provided by her grandfather: the sun-god Helios (wiki). (Her father, Aeetes, was also the brother of the witch Circe (or, more pedantically, Kirke) of Odyssey (Odusseia) fame, whom my female Siberian Husky is named after, not without cause, the bitch!) Another page on Medeia here.

Alas, the museum happens to be closed for renovations at the moment, so I'll wait until the next time Lisa has a nostalgic moment.


Well, that's that. Until Lisa comes back, it's just the dogs and the cats and me; and I promised Lisa I won't just duct-tape and cork the cats 'til she gets back. I'll even actually feed them, the bastards! *HEAVY sigh*.

νῦν δ' ἐχθρὰ πάντα, καὶ νοσεῖ τὰ φίλτατα...

Now I just have to get that song out of my head ...


Categories: personal, funny, lisa, akron, music, ohio, devo, pretenders, dogs, argus, byjjmg

Happy Birthday Zeppo!

We have been helping to take care of the dog of a neighbor of ours who is ill. This dog is an 70-pound Airedale and quite a handful. His name is Zeppo. (Personally, Lisa and I think he looks more like a Harpo, but we didn't get to name him.)

Poor Zeppo has a lot of energy and hasn’t been getting out too much. When we walk him around the neighborhood we’ve been having to keep him on the leash, since he’s not our dog and we don’t want to risk having him run off (not to mention it’s not strictly legal, of course, outside of designated off-leash areas; and until last Sunday there was no such thing in Somerville).

So on Friday, March 17, which happened to be St. Patrick’s Day, we took Zeppo to the nearest real dog-park, near the corner of Chestnut and Park St. in North Reading. I took a couple of video clips on my Nokia 6256i cell phone and now I’ve uploaded them to YouTube, which kindly supples the <embed> code needed.

These mark the very first videos I've uploaded anywhere. I chose YouTube because unlike Google Video, it doesn't make you wait while someone "approves" your uploads.

So here they are!

Zeppo running around:

Zeppo playing fetch:

Sadly, the YouTube 3g2-to-Shockwave processing seems to leave quite a bit to be desired ... They're coming out a lot choppier than they should. When I play the originals in QuickTime they aren't choppy at all. I'll have to find a way to convert them from 3g2 to something else and then upload them again.

Also, they are extremely tiny. You're better off watching them here and clicking this little button: to play them original size. They're still choppy but slightly more watchable.

Yes, they are the world's lamest videos, but the upside is, they're short!

Categories: dogs, pets, friends, dogparks, playing, fetch, zeppo, videos, clips, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, web2.0, personal, regional, local, bostonarea, byjjmg

It Pinches Bottoms

It Pinches Bottoms
Originally uploaded by IVSTINIANVS.

Lisa demands that we throw this chair away. JUST because the wood is coming apart. JUST because it's like one of those puzzles you had as a child made out of wood pieces that look fine as long as you don't touch it when the whole thing falls apart.

"It pinches Bottoms", she says.

As if pinching bottoms was a BAD thing.*


*As I said earlier, I am a man of many bruises ... Ah, these women who demand respect. When will it ever end?

Categories: personal, funny, silly, somerville, local, bostonarea, regional, backyard, furniture, bottoms, byjjmg

Iustinianus does Video! (with someone else's content)

My friend Margaret has alerted me in a comment here that has published her first video to Google Video (she went Google instead of Youtube).

Google Video kindly provides a useful little "Embed" button that generates the HTML code you need to stick the vide on your own webpage, so here we go. Without Margaret's permission, she is collaborating in the inauguration of Babel On, Babel Off's first embedded Video. This is now a Videoblog!



Update: And, it doesn't work! No surprise. The code google generated is clearly not right. For one thing, the embed "src" parameter is "http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?videoUrl=". They clearly left off the value to the right of "videoUrl", so it's no surprise it won't play. There's nothing to play. The thumbnail image url came out all wrong, too, which presumably is why the image is black. Tsk. I'll have to check Google Video's fora to see if people have complained about this, but at least for now, I can blame google for this failure.

Update again: Fixed. Don't know quite what happened. Went back again to Margaret's page and clicked the Embed button and this time there was a hell of a lot more code.

Update 3: ARGH! I'm beginning to think it's Blogger's fault! I paste the code in to the "Edit Html" page and when I switch back to "Compose" the code seems to get "simplified" into uselessness. I'm going to try publishing this posting without switching back to "Compose" and see if it works.


Categories: videos, media, videoblogging, videoblogs, web2.0, google, friends, byjjmg

More Videoblogging

This:

will put a smile on your face if anything will. It’s from a new VideoBlog (and you know what those are now because I told you) called “All This and Brains Too” by a couple, unmarried, who appear to have some difficulty agreeing on spelling.

Stop reading, and click on the face. Don’t wait. You’ll enjoy it.

I have to say Lloyd is much nicer than I am. He didn’t even threaten NOT to edit out the “if I show too much” bits. Talk about missed opportunities for spousal (or friend) abuse.

I found this via this Gapingvoid posting, which you should visit if you want to see what Hugh McLeod looks like (and sounds like: God what happened to his Edinburgh accent? At least I have an excuse: I was forced to immigrate before I was even going to school!).

Categories: fun, funny, humor, humour, video, citizen media, social media, citizenmedia, socialmedia, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, web2.0, gapingvoid, uk, britain, england, english, british, eccentrics, byjjmg

Who knew Web2.0 would be put to the service

… of Nerds?

Star Trek 2.0:  providing a much-needed excuse for pasty-faced fans to spend more time bathing in the glow of the computer and the TV.

“Social” Media in action!

Categories: technology, entertainment, tv, science fiction, star trek, scifi, sciencefiction, startrek, trek, spock, humour, funny, web, web2.0, socialmedia, socialsoftware, social media, social software, geek, byjjmg

To "Tuttle"

Oh, this is priceless.

This comment (“When is a Republican Not a Bully? Never”) in an open thread at DailyKos pointed me to what is apparently now a notorious story amongst Linux folks. I highly recommend it for chuckle value. Make sure you follow all the links listed there, particularly the ones to the articles at The Register. Their author, a certain "Ashlee Vance in Mountain View", has the kind of pen that really leaves a mark. The text of the actual emails is also available.

The short version of the story is that Jerry Taylor, the city manager of a microscopic Oklahoma town known as "Tuttle" threatened the developers of an the open-source OS that his web servers ran on, called "CentOS" with reporting them to the FBI for hacking, when in fact the problem was due to a boo-boo by the city's ISP. The CentOS authors tried to explain to him that there was no way their OS could have been installed on their machines by hackery, to no avail. (Unsurprisingly, the ISP's no doubt outsourced and below-minimum-wage support staff disavowed all knowledge of the mistake and of the OS they used.)

Then, after the problem was fixed, he compounded the insult by deriding Linux developers as "a bunch of freaks out there that don't have anything better to do," and dismissed the Open Source movement with: "(CentOS is) a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he's got on his hands."

Unsurprisingly, this town voted for Bush by a margin of 70% to less than 30%.

Categories: politics, republicans, wingnuts, idiocy, humour, humor, funny, geek, geeky, linux, os, opensource, software, byjjmg

Blogmaintenance comma boring

I've added an "Amazon.com Wishlist Badge" to my sidebar. Nice. Provided by Xanadb. I'm going to have to tweak or replace it at some point, though, to add my Amazon.com associates referral id. These people will also turn your wishlist into an RSS feed for you, and a Google search will turn up many other examples of people doing something similar. I found Xanadb through a guy in Cincinatti who also appears to have lost about 50 pounds over the past year or two through some very sensible changes in lifestyle. Damn him! ;-)

I've also added a bunch of blogs to my bloglines-driven blogroll recently, including:

• Gapingvoid (Hugh McLeod of "How to be Creative")
• Get Your People... (the Hallam Foe blog)
• New Media Musings
• Literally, a Web Log - a wry look at the overuse of a certain English word
• All This, and Brains, Too - a new VideoBlog
• onegoodmove, which I mentioned earlier
• Songlian - a blog by my friend and former colleague, Désirée, currently working hard on a new business venture that looks to be fascinating

Update April 12: now the Amazon.com Wishlist Badge isn't showing up and I seem to be getting javascript errors ... *sigh* blogmaintenance is never done ...

Categories: blogs, blogging, metablogging, bloggingaboutblogging, blogroll, bloglines, amazon, rss, wishlist, books, bookbuying, bookshopping, bibliophilia, bibliomania, biblioholism, byjjmg

Smashing Success Story, Canine Edition

Today was a banner day for dog-owners in Somerville with the opening of the first legal place in Somerville to run your dogs off-leash: the Nunziato Park off-leash recreation area (OLRA), which consists of a corner of the park itself, fenced off specially for dogs and their human companions. (See also the dog map here.)

This was achieved through immense hard work by the people at Somerville Dog (especially Michèle and Marshall), by Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone, Carlene Campbell, our great Aldermen, and all the people who helped raise the money through fundraisers, yard sales, donations, and the like.

Somerville Dog volunteers handed out treat packets, and there were tables with dog treats (including cake by Polka Dog Bakery), human treats, and a special table set up by the city for people to get their dog-licenses (required for entry to the park) in case they hadn’t already done so.

Our own dog-walker, Scott Parisi of Best in Show and a Somerville resident himself, was also there (hopefully he drummed up a little more business for himself).

Lisa, of course, was all a-fuss and a-worry, following Prospero and Circe around to make sure they didn’t do anything embarrassing (which, being dogs, they are always guaranteed to do), but she also was the only one smart enough to print out directions to Angell and the Woburn Veterinary Emergency Hospital just in case. Luckily they weren’t needed. Fun was had by all.

When we got back home, we took some pictures of the dogs in comatose, post-dog-park bliss:

The City’s Press Release: City Opens Off-Leash Dog Recreation Area at Nunziato Park.

Categories: local, boston, bostonarea, somerville, dogs, pets, dogparks, dog parks, offleash, leash, celebration, byjjmg

Get your Kos on the Radio

Markos Moulitsas was interviewed on On Point this morning:  who knew he was even in Boston?  You can listen to it here.  Well worth a listen.  It’s especially illuminating when the former democrat turned republican caller explains how it seems to him the Democrats never try to say what they believe in.  Which is true:  they’ve been told by consultants for decades now that what they believe in “doesn’t play well” so they just hem and haw.

Categories: politics, partypolitics, partypolitics, democrats, kos, marcos, marcosmoulitsas, marcos moulitsas, dailykos, bloggers, byjjmg

So what's the use of being a pedant ...

… if you can’t be read?

Adrian Miles, whom I mentioned earlier, was kind enough to draw my attention to the fact that I missed the “r” in front of and the “.au” at the end of the URL http://www.rmit.edu.au/. So, no, he’s not at MIT, but at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. My bad. My apparently mid-life-acquired dislexia. :-(

He still hasn’t added the hyphen to “problem making” or justified his use of “quotidian” as a noun, however ;-). As for the hyphen, the subtitle to his blog is very hard to parse:

Documentating and discussing the problem making that is video blogging (vogging) with the tiresome quotidian of the desktop digital.

The first six words exhibit an exemplary “garden path” parsing problem. Take this sentence:

I have real a problem making my dog sit.

Some people would rather say “I have a real problem WITH making my dog sit,” but in my idiolect at least, the sentences are synonymous.

So parse this next:

I’m going to spend some time documenting and discussing my problem making my dog sit.

That’s why I think it helps the reader to write “problem-making”. Then you know that “problem-making” is a simple noun phrase that is the direct object of the verbs. But even:

Documentating and discussing the problem-making that is video blogging (vogging) with the tiresome quotidian of the desktop digital.

doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since quotidian is an adjective, and who knows what “desktop digital” means. :-) It does have a quirky kind of tongue-in-cheek charm to it though.

One last observation: there is no such word as “documentating”!!!! Yes, there is the word “documentation”, but there is no verb “documentate” and therefore no present participle or gerund derived from it. This is what linguists call a “back-formation”: for instance, “burgle” was back-formed from “burglar”, which really did not start its existence as an agentive formation from “burgle” (like “robber” formed from “rob”). Back-formations frequently do end up making their way into the language, and as a linguist I should just sit back and let the formations form. But honestly. Documentate? You have to draw the line in the sand somewhere! :-)

Categories: video, clips, videosharing, onlinevideo, online, video, media, multimedia, socialmedia, SocialMedia, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, vogs, blogs, blogging, citizenmedia, citizen media, richmedia, rich media, videosharing, video sharing, web2.0, byjjmg

So much for spring ...

There’s something pathetic about posting these and saying “you can’t see it, but the air was thick with huge fat snowflakes”, but that’s precisely what I’m doing. It reminds me of the time a dear friend of mine returned from a trip to Iceland, and showed me picture after picture of nondescript grey, moonscape-like rock, with commentary like “this was supposed to be a Puffin, but it flew out of the way before I snapped the picture…”

(There was one picture with the bright orange toes of a couple of feet right on the edge; I presume those must have been the feet of a somewhat fatter-than-usual puffin — puffins, you see, fly with their neon-orange feet sticking straight out behind them, like this: as if they have faulty landing gear.)

Anyway here are the pictures that are supposed to be pictures of it snowing:

It’s weird that they came out looking like it was raining. It was (somewhat) above freezing, so the huge puffy snowflakes were melting on contact. So you’ll have to take my word for the puffy flakes. Maybe it’s why everything looks blurry. It was just my cell phone ..

Now, it’s scarcely unheard-of for it to snow in April in New England, though after teasing us this weekends shorts-weather it does seem awfully unsportsmanlike. After all these years you’d think I’d be used to that …

Notwithstanding, this has been the weirdest weather-year I can remember:

• First we had monsoon season in October;
• then we had one of the heaviest snowfalls of the year on Hallowe’en — the car took hours to dig out;
• then in February it couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to be in the upper 60s or below freezing on the same day!

Throw in Katrina and the Hurricane season making it well into the Greek Alphabet and … Global Climate Change? You decide.

Categories: personal, local, boston, bostonarea, somerville, weather, seasons, spring, snow, snowing, puffins, photographs, photos, photoblogs, photoblogging, funny, humor, humour, silly, byjjmg

The real Ithaca?

From this month’s Smithsonian Magazine:

Odyssey's End?: The Search for Ancient Ithaca

This is pretty cool. For the background, in case you weren’t paying attention: Ithaca (or, for the pedantically inclined, Ithaka), of course, was the homeland of the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, and is described in the epic as being located off the west coast of Greece. There is an island off the west coast of Greece called Ithaca today, but even in ancient times it was questioned whether the island then known by that name was really the island Homer referred to, since his description of the island and its location doesn’t really fit Ithaca. (In case you were wondering how that could be, there was a long period of “dark ages” between the age depicted in the Homeric epics and the era we know as the Classical era. The Homeric epics were the product of centuries of oral epic poetry and by the time scholars in the Classical Era were starting to study and analyze them, it was a good 500 years later.)

So the debate about whether the island now called Ithaca (i.e., called Ithaca non-stop for the past 2500 years) is Homer’s Ithaca. Lots of different solutions have been tried, but as far as I know, the solution proposed by Robert Bittlestone, a British Management Consultant, is unique:

he argues that a peninsula on the island of Cephalonia was once a separate island—Ithaca, the kingdom of Homer’s Odysseus some 3,000 years ago. He believes that the sea channel dividing the two islands was filled in by successive earthquakes and landslides, creating the peninsula of Paliki, as it is known today.

Cephalonia is the large island in the centre of the photograph below:

and the peninsula Brittlestone thinks was Ithaca is on the far (upper) left with what looks like a big puffy cloud hovering over it.

As the Smithsonian article goes on to say:

Like Heinrich Schliemann, the businessman who discovered the site of ancient Troy in the 1870s, and Michael Ventris, the architect who deciphered the written language of Minoan Crete in the 1950s, the 54-year-old Bittlestone is part of an honorable tradition of inspired amateurs who have made extraordinary discoveries outside the confines of conventional scholarship.

And at least some scholars are taking him interesting:

“Bittlestone’s insight is brilliant,” says Gregory Nagy, director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington, D.C. “He has done something very important. This is a real breakthrough convergence of oral poetry and geology, and the most plausible explanation I’ve seen of what Ithaca was in the second millennium B.C. We’ll never read the Odyssey in the same way again.”

Can’t get much more distinguished then Nagy, especially where Homer is concerned.

Bittlestone’s book: Odysseus Unbound

And a couple of cool books on Michael Ventris: who is one of the coolest characters in the entire history of Classics scholarship (and much less irritating than Schliemann); a man who died far too young.

Categories: classics, classical, history, ancient, greece, greek, homer, epic, myth, mythology, odyssey, odysseus, ulysses, ithaca, ithaka, amateur, ventris, linear, crete, troy, trojan, iliad, books, bookshopping, bookbuying, bibliophilia, bibliomania, biblioholism, byjjmg

Yup, that's pretty much MY M.O. ...

Ywanna complain about that?

Source: Gapingvoid, and in particular Hugh McLeod's point #24 ("Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.") in How To Be Creative.

Categories: blogging, bloggingaboutblogging, metablogging, gapingvoid, creativity, creative, hugh mcleod, byjjmg

Ah, the pitter patter and chitter chatter

… of elementary-school kids across the street.

I often work at home, especially if the weather is gorgeous like it’s been the past few days, and I happen to live directly across the street from a 100–year-old elementary school. In fact, directly across the street from the school playground.

That means noise. A lot of noise.

Now, personally, I actually find the noise of the little kids perpetually milling about in the playground and squealing away quite pleasant. Comforting, almost. A sort of “all’s right with the world” background noise.

There are two things I have never acquired the taste for, however:

• The school always seems to have at least one little girl who is a real “screamer”. And I don’t just mean the usual happy squeals and shrieks. I mean this is a girl who sounds as though she’s just been pitched head-first off the top of a tall building. She always utters a long, drawn-out, top-of-her-lungs, high-pitched shreak that starts out high and then slowly and steadily lowers pitch. Honestly I am certain that if you were standing at the top of the grand canyon and had just pushed a little girl over the edge this is what you would hear. We’ve lived here 9 years now and it’s literally been every year: almost as if the school just has one on staff at all times. I can only assume that each little shrieking girl in turn has grown up and moved on, so that’s what makes it so amazing that there’s always one to
• There also always seems to be a “barking boy”. And he doesn’t try to bark like a big dog. No woofs from him. Oh, no. It’s always squeaky, high-pitched yaps like from a small espresso-addicted dog. I can’t stand that kind of dog or the kind of barks it makes, and I can’t for the life of me imagine why there is always a little boy who thinks that his greatest god-given talent is to bark like one. Again, the school always seems to acquire a new one every year when the previous one moves on. I guess I should draw some lesson about the immutability of life from all of this …

This morning I could have sworn I heard one child screaming “Let me DIE! I just want to DIE!” I don’t know what an 8–year-old could possibly have experienced in the playground to elicit such strong emotions …

Categories: personal, boston, somerville, kids, children, funny, byjjmg

Roeper Zinger #2

Not that I would ever have had the slightest impulse to see Basic Instinct 2, but Roeper’s recent review trashing the movie was worth seeing if only to marvel at his amazing breath control in delivering this slam in a single gulp:

Is-it-really-an-act-of-genius-to-kill-a-guy-by-having-sex-with-him-in-a-car-that's-going-110-miles-an-hour-and-then-crashes-into-a-river,-and-then-you-swim-away-and-he-dies-because-you-injected-him-with-killer-drugs?

When Ebert goes on to point out that “This character cannot be played well. But no-one could play her badly better than Sharon Stone,” Roeper’s reply is again delightfully catty:

You don't -- you don't see Dame Judi Dench? As Catherine Trammel?

Not that’s a movie I might actually go to see. 

Categories: entertainment, tv, reviews, humour, ebert, roeper, ebertandroeper, ebert and roeper, movies, film, critics, byjjmg

Spring, when a young man's thoughts turn to Blogging ...

It’s a few weeks late, and it was still pretty chilly (only mid-60s), but today we have the prooof that the season is here with a few firsts:

• First day of me wearing shorts.  It’s one of those days where it’s a bit too chilly in the shade, especially when the wind kicked up, but it was way warm enough in the sun.  I refuse to post pictures;  still carrying my winter hibernation weight.
• First day with the Tufts Athletic Fields being full of people playing:  (Lisa had to take the pix from my speeding car as I careened around Powderhouse Square)
  
• First day of shirtless guys playing ball (in Dilboy Field;  softball), always a sure-fire sign that winter is over. Still thought it was a bit chilly for no shirt, but the guys in question had obviously spent all winter working out and were probably impatient to show it off, despite the pasty white sun-starved skin.

Amazing what a mood-enhancer spring is every year!

Of course, there’s already been proof for a while now.  The crocuses started poking out weeks ago.  But this feels more real.  It just still looks weird without any buds on the trees yet.

Categories: personal, local, seasonal, seasons, boston, somerville, spring, tufts, byjjmg

It's All About the Decorum

I know this is still old news, but I just had to post a follow-up to my earlier post on how Paul Hackett was pressured by the Democratic Party not to run for the Senate in Ohio.

After writing that post, I came across this article from February 14 in the New York Times. A little Valentines Day love-letter from the tools who run the Democratic Party. This was my favourite quote from the article:

Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the Cook Political Report, said that part of what made Democratic leaders nervous about Mr. Hackett was what had also made him so popular with voters.

"Hackett is seen by many as a straight talker, and he became an icon to the liberal bloggers because he says exactly what they have wished they would hear from a politician," Ms. Duffy said. "On the other hand, the Senate is still an exclusive club, and the party expects a certain level of decorum that Hackett has not always shown." [emphasis mine]

Excuse me? Decorum? “Exclusive Club”? This is the same club where Vice President Cheney told Senator Lahey to “go fuck himself” and where Senator Rick Santorum compares gay marriage to “man-on-dog sex”? (Too lazy and pissed off to look up the links myself; you can google them.)

And the kind of “straight talk” that upsets the Democrats? From the same article:

Mr. Hackett was widely criticized last year for using indecent language to describe President Bush. Last month, state Republicans attacked Mr. Hackett for saying their party had been hijacked by religious extremists who he said "aren't a whole lot different than Osama bin Laden."

Though Republicans called for an apology, Mr. Hackett repeated the mantra of his early campaign: "I said it. I meant it. I stand behind it."

Glad you stand by it. It’s true! As I’ve said for yeras, the only thing that stops the Religious Right from blowing up or shooting people in greater numbers than they already are (or did you forget about Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, and John Salvi?) is that they don’t feel completely humiliated and powerless and ignored the way Muslims do: hell, outside of Hollywood they hold all the reins of power these days.

Categories: politics, democrats, party politics, ohio, nytimes, nyt, new york times, peter+hacket, democrats, senate, double standards, dick cheney, cheney, the cheney word, patrick lahey, byjjmg

"Method" Blogging

I haven’t had time yet to finish my last post on changing media and video sharing, which is going to be about “Open-Source filmmaking”, and amongst other things, Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries, and the new film by director David Mackenzie, Hallam Foe, which is currently shooting in Scotland, and which, as I mentioned in my update at the bottom of my first “changing media” post, has its own production-diary weblog, Get Your People (… to call my people).

All I have time for now is to draw attention to the first posting Hallam Foe’s star, Jamie Bell, has made on the blog: which is remarkable for being done entirely in character.

I already humiliated myself to whoever is administering that blog by posting a brain-damaged comment asking painfully idiotic questions like “gee, is he a method actor or something? is he in character all the time now?” It only occurred to me after writing that comment that it was probably simply a clever, fun, and original way for Bell to contribute to the blog — which heretofore has been providing thoroughly entertaining views into the mundane details of making films in a rainy, wet, and muddy Scotland. and it certainly puts you in the mood to want to see the film. And it makes you wonder: have they decided that he should do all his postings in character? Probably not, or that’d risk giving away the whole film; but maybe this will be the only posting he’ll make. And are the other players going to post? Not that I’m

I’m definitely looking forward to following this blog, especially since I missed out on following Peter Jackson’s Kong Production Diaries while they were being published online, as the film was being made. It’s already very amusing, though at times I worry I may be the only one thinking “Poor Roger…”

Categories: entertainment, film, open source filmmaking, blogs, blogging, hallam foe, david mackenzie, jamie bell, method acting, method blogging, fun, funny, kong, kingkong, king kong, peterjackson, peter jackson, byjjmg

Social Media, Citizen Media, and uncle Tom Cobbley and All

This is the third in my occasional series of postings inspired by the phenomenon of media-rich blogs and video sharing.

As I self-importantly suggested in the update I appended on March 30th to my first posting on this topic, I had realized that I had actually stumbled onto something bigger. I even rather overambitiously used the word “revolution”.

Now, let me just pause here: I’m going to try to avoid overreaching here — to try to come across as if I have something of great profundity and originality to say. I have found it difficult to find a “voice” that I am comfortable with in this blog, and I think one of the reasons is that I frequently seem to fall into this trap: of struggling to turn what are just a bunch of observations and unformed thoughts into something “real”. It’s also why I frequently fail to post on current events until long after they are no longer interesting, so that I end up not posting about them at all.

This time I am going to try to make a concerted effort to avoid falling into that pretentious trap, and I will try to restrict myself to some few simple facts that I have become aware of, sites I’ve found from googling, and the necessarily rather shallow, facile, and incomplete impressions I have formed from those facts. I will also try to avoid any more uses of words like “revolution”!

Although, if I can say one grandiose thing it’s that these are exciting times! (At least, as long as you can forget about Dubbya’s concerted efforts to start world war III…) What’s going on today feels, to me, like the early signs of the long-hoped-for fruition of what the internet has long promised to be: what the personal computer revolution (sorry, that word again), going back to the earliest days of the Altair and the Apple II, was supposed to be, when a bunch of already-aging hippies were talking about the democratizing power of technology. There’s nothing quite that touchy-feely going on here, but it is still pretty cool.

First, some clarification in terminology. I used the term “Social Media” in that earlier update, but I think I was using it too broadly. For instance, one of the sites I have stumbled upon in the past few days is Strange Attractor (“Picking out patterns from the chaos that is the blogosphere”), which is written by a pair of bloggers named Suw Charman and Kevin Anderson at Corante (which describes itself as “a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields.” — I know nothing about them), and they happen to have very obligingly listed their notes from what appears to have been a very recent conference on “Changing Media” held by the Guardian newspaper. Conveniently for me, the conference was organized into these separate topics, for each of which Sue has made a nice separate posting:

• Citizen Media
• Social Media
• Digital Rights Management
• Blogging, and
• Podcasting

(You can also look at their postings on the introduction and closing remarks of the conference as well.)

The moment I saw the term “Citizen Media” I realized that this is what I had been talking about in the past couple of posts about videoblogging and YouTube and the like: that is to say, “user-generated content” (the tagline of the “Citizen Media” session was “What is the impact of user-generated content on the traditional business model? “).

“Social Media” by contrast, refers to media around which some sort of (real, human) social network can be built, based on shared interests and tastes. One of the speakers was a Martin Siskel of a site I recently discovered, last.fm. Here is how Suw reports what Martin says about it:

What's so social about our social music network? We put the users in charge. Plug-ins to track what music you listen to. Connects you to similar people, compares your music profile with that of others. Recommends music based on what the people with similar music profiles to you are listening to that you are not listening to. Aggregates information about bands on wiki pages.

1.5 million people on Last.fm.

Although they don’t mention it, this sort of thing must presumably also include sites like flickr, a great site, a site which has created an amazing, dizzying assortment of interlocking communities all its own.

Social Media, I would venture to say, seems to me to simply be a subset of “Social Software” in general. Social Software is software that, as Martin says, “connects you to similar people”. Others have written more than I intend to on social tagging aggregators like furl and technorati and del.icio.us, 43things, and AllConsuming (see for instance my friend Koranteng’s bookmarks on “social” and “tags” — and he’s always a good source of links for further study; and by apparent coincidence, Koranteng appears to have just written a posting on social tagging, entitled, with his characteristic flair, Frisson de Folksonomie).

There’s a big overlap between Citizen and Social Media, as well: YouTube for instance, at least where the clips are “citizen-generated” is precisely both.

I’m not going to try to make too much sense of this but it also seems to me in a way all of this is the flip-side of what people have been talking about with the term “the Long Tail” (and see Koranteng’s bookmarks here and here): i.e. “that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.” I’m not trying to say anything especially profound here: merely that there are a lot of people looking at non-traditional ways of doing business, of connecting with people, of being creative, of sharing their creations. In this vein, I particularly liked the subtitle to the Social Customer Manifesto: "There are no spectators anymore. Participate." (And this time at least, people seem to be looking at these ideas with a little more clear-headedness than in the “it’s the new economy, stupid” days of the dot-com bubble.)

Oh, and you can get another slant on most of the above by reading the Wiki article on Web 2.0.

ANYWAY. What I really want to get to here is the interesting connection (in my mind at least) between all these swirling developments and what is going on with more traditional media. And this is where I come to the topic of Open-Source Filmmaking, which is what I will discuss in my next post in this little mini "series".

I’m not going describe “open source”. If you’re a person who reads blogs you probably already know all about it, and if you don’t, just google it!

Categories: video, clips, videosharing, onlinevideo, online, video, tv, entertainment, homevideos, youtube, media, multimedia, socialmedia, Social Media, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, vogs, blogs, blogging, realitytv, reality tv, citizenmedia, citizen media, rich media, video sharing, digital rights management, drm, last.fm, music, del.icio.us, allconsuming, 43things, tags, tagging, social tagging, folksonomies, long tail, web2.0, byjjmg

New Zealand Phonetics and Ancient Greek

I never noticed before I started watching Peter Jackson’s King Kong Production Diaries (plus the post-production diaries on the special edition 2-disk movie DVD:) just how interesting their pronunciation of the open mid front vowel as in “bed” and “hair” (in British and American English, represented with the IPA symbol [ɛ]. The New Zealand pronunciation has raised the vowels to such an extent that to my ears at least they almost make those words sound like “bead” and “here” (in IPA, [i:]).

Now, in linguists’ reconstruction of the pronunciation of Classical Greek (what is sometimes referred to dismissively, in a straw-man fashion, as “Erasmian” pronunciation by some polemicists who prefer to believe that modern Greek — uniquely amongst all the world’s languages, I might add — has failed to change in pronunciation over the past 2500 years, even though Erasmus has nothing whatsoever to do with modern linguistics), the letter Eta (Η, η) was pronounced like an open mid front vowel of long duration: i.e. just like the sound in the word “hair” or “there” (without the “r” sound that Americans put on the end of it, of course — the British pronunciation would work better), or like vowel in the French word “même”: in IPA, [ɛ:]. In Modern Greek, this letter (like an awful lot of vowels and dipthlongs) is now pronounced like the “i” in Machine (and in fact this is why Russians write that sound with the cyrillic letter и, which is simply a stylization of eta).

The Erasmian pronunciation, by the way, held that eta was, as in the reconstructed Latin pronunciation, a close mid front vowel, like in (roughly) English “day”, and that is how many Classicists who are not trained in linguistics still pronounce it. This reconstruction was due to the simple fact that longer vowels are usually more close than shorter vowels: Latin short “e” is assumed to be like the “e” in bed [ɛ], and the long one like “day” [e:]. Further research convinced linguists, however, that even though eta is a longer vowel than epsilon, it is still more open, counterintuive though that may be, so eta is [ɛ:] and epsilon is [e] — i.e. a short, close sound as in French été.

Although I am convinced by the arguments regarding the reconstructed pronunciation of eta, I always did find it somewhat more difficult to imagine how such an open vowel could be raised all the way to [i]. The Erasmian sound of [e:] seemed more likely to be raised that far, especially since epsilon was more close than eta, and yet it was not raised (if anything, it was lowered).

But the New Zealanders have provided me with proof that it is quite possible for speakers of a language to selectively raise a mid front vowel all the way to a high front vowel. How about that!

Categories: language, linguistics, dialects, accents, greek, ancient, phonetics, phonology, classics, classical, historical linguistics, new zealand, film, entertainment, movies, peter jackson, king kong, byjjmg

Political Insults, Classical Style

William Annis pegs the Cyclops (the Cyclops of the Homeric tradition, the one Odysseus blinded, not one of the smiths of the Hesiodic tradition). He’s an Ayn Rand Libertarian!

Heh.

Categories: classics, classical, greek, latin, ancient, alvb, homer, euripides, epic, myth, mythology, cyclops, polyphemus, ayn rand, atlas+shrugged, annis, politics, fun, funny, byjjmg

More about Videoblogging...

I knew already when I wrote in my earlier post on this subject that I had at best just begun to scratch the surface of this new trend in media-rich blogging. It has since come as no surprise upon further research to discover that in fact I had barely begun to disturb the dust ON the surface — if that — so I’d now like to proceed to at least make the shallowest of scratches if I can.

Even a casual google search will immediately turn up at least three names associated with this practice:

• Videoblogging seems to be the most common term for the practice itself;
• and the resulting blogs seem to be referred to primarily as Vlogs
• though at least one guy calls them Vogs

There appear to be several on-line tutorials to adding videos to your blog: Freevlog provides a nice friendly guide that contains instructions even for a blogspot-hosted blog (though you need a third-party site to store the media, about which more below), and there is another Blogspot-oriented tutorial here. Freevlog’s apologia for vlogs is persuasive:

A vlog is a videoblog and you want one because, let's face it, they're not going to put you on TV. Besides, not playing that game is what makes this so much fun. You can do whatever you want.

Videoblogging.info has its own introduction, with a nice neat definition:

What is Videoblogging?

Videoblogging is a new form of expression centering around posting videos to a website and encouraging an audience response. It is the next step from text blogging and podcasting.

Wikipedia’s article on vlogs makes particularly interesting reading (I shamelessly cull much of its introductory content):

With development of RSS enclosures, which provide the ability to attach media files to a feed item/blog post, or the use of the Atom format (which supports rich media content by design) it is possible to bypass the mainstream intermediaries and openly distribute media to the masses via the Internet. Vlogs typically take advantage of this technological development, just as audioblogs have in recent years via the podcast boom.

As of 2006, videoblogging is rising in popularity, especially since the release of the new Apple Video iPod and the availability of iTunes Store's video content. iTunes uses the term video podcast to describe a video blog.

One of the potential problems with Vlogs is the current inability of search engines to create rich metadata or "search engine" data from the stream. For Vlogs to be fully embraced as part of web culture, some indexing solution will need to emerge.

I had a brief moment of gratification in reading “As of 2006” — since that way I could feel I’m not that far behind the curve, but this article was written in January of 2005, and this MSN article is from last March, so I guess this wiki article author is behind the curve right along with me.

Of course as one would expect, someone at MITSomeone at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has a blog devoted to the subject of (what they call) Vogs. (Catty bitchy moment: this particular scholar seems unduly attached to the word “quotidian” — it not only showed up in a casual persual of the blog in the title of a recent post, but appears in his blog’s nearly unintelligible (though, I’m sure, studiedly so) subheading: “Documentating and discussing the problem making that is video blogging (vogging) with the tiresome quotidian of the desktop digital.” If I were to be a completely tiresome pedant — well, since I am one — I would feel obligated to correct “problem making” to “problem-making” and to ask him what he is trying to accomplish by using “quotidian” as a noun. I mean, I’m all for affectations and for completely unnecessary uses of Latin, but this is just a little too twee even for me.)

In addition, the wiki article cited above has a link to an interesting (though thickly-written) paper by a certain Adrian Miles entitled “Media Rich versus Rich Media (or why video in a blog is not the same as a video blog)” If you ask him, he’ll tell you it’s because of the granularity. Hum.

Anyway, both Miles and the author of the MIT blog I mentioned claim to have been tracking this trend since 2000. Which I find particularly remarkable since I don’t think blogging entered the public consciousness at all until after 2000, and online videos were much more painful to download back then than they are now when many more people have broadband. Nonetheless, the Wiki article on blogs says that they date back to 1994. News to me. The internet itself barely existed on the radar screen of even my colleagues in the software industry back then.

Another site I stumbled across is Social Software, which amazes me by telling me that my TiVo has started offering videoblog content. That’s going to be cool, especially if and when the new standalone (non-satellite-based) HD Tivo that they just showed at CES ever comes out this year. (I still haven’t hooked up my PC to my new HDTV and the Comcast PVR is just unbearable…)

More: VideoBlogging Universe has a directory of vlogs, and there appear to be several online content-storage repositories for uploading your videos, beyond YouTube, which I mentioned earlier: for instance, OurMedia, Blip.tv, and Google Video (kindly brought to my attention by my friend and colleague Margaret in her comments to my earlier posting). I have been very impressed with the rich social interactivity on YouTube (though an awful lot of the comments are pretty brain-dead); OurMedia certainly seems to be going for the same kind of social network. I haven’t really looked into Blip.tv or Google Video enough to judge yet.

All of the content-storage sites have the same disclaimer, warning you not to upload copyrighted content. So far that seems to be getting more or less completely ignored — as best as I can tell, with impunity — although at least the clips in question are pretty short. Plus, much of the time, the clips are uploaded with some sort of commentary (even if the title is the only source of commentary), so the clips can almost be considered “quotations” of a sort.

But there is some genuinely original content, ranging from the abysmally amateur to some stuff that approaches the professional. Much of the content seems almost seems to be a kind of amateur, wannabe “Reality TV” (I suspect that this is what the Vodka-drinking video I linked to below is all about). We live in an age, of course, of self-expression and exhibitionism where personal secrets are broadcast to millions all the time: that’s been going on for the better part of two decades or more, going back at least to daytime talk TV such as Jerry Springer where the “white trash” of the week aired their dirty laundry for a chance at their 15 minutes of fame (“you kaint marry him, Char-Leene; he’s your half brother!”). People have been sending their Stupid Pet Trick and Stupid Human Trick videos to play on mainstream TV for years, and ever since the so-called “Reality” TV craze began (no matter how contrived the “reality” is), it has provided us with a steady stream of voyeuristic opportunities.

It’s not all “The Me Show”, though. There is genuinely original content. Ranging from the exclusively original, such The Jib Jab Bush and Kerry video (“This Land”) that made the rounds just before the election (they have a new one, recaping Dubbya’s 2005), to the satirically altered video such as Tom Cruise killing Oprah with Dark Force Lightning (a favourite).

Well, that’s all I have for this posting. I do have more coming on some of the broader issues, as I hinted at in my update to my earlier posting, so stay tuned!

Categories: video, clips, videosharing, onlinevideo, online video, tv, entertainment, homevideos, youtube, media, multimedia, socialmedia, Social Media, videoblogging, videoblogs, vlogs, vogs, blogs, blogging, realitytv, reality tv, tomcruise, oprah, jibjab, citizenmedia, citizen media, rich media, video sharing, ourmedia, bliptv, tivo, web2.0, wiki, byjjmg

Finally, a solution to dog pee?

Clover lawns? Now, that's a thought. From their website:

Clover is a better lawn than grass is. It requires less water, requires less mowing, and it requires no fertilization; ever. It fixes nitrogen in the soil and is beautiful. It also aerates and enriches heavy soils. It will not urine scald when dogs urinate on it.

Yes! This could be a solution to the problem I posted about below.

Got this from Signal vs. Noise (they also link to Less Lawn, which could really work for the front yard, too).

Categories: dogs, pets, grass, lawns, somerville, backyard, clover, cloverlawns, lesslawn, blogs, 37signals, signalvsnoise, byjjmg

Why the Democrats Never Win ...

This is, pathetically, embarrasingly, two weeks late, but I can’t go without posting this. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t .

Besides, it may just still be news for those few stragglers who actually read my blog (Technorati rank: 864,492. Woo-HOO!) and who also missed this particular Daily Show segment (from March 14 or thereabouts, I gather), as I did:

Paul Hackett Doesn't Fit the Matrix

Remember Paul Hackett? He is a former marine and veteran of the War in Iraq who ran last year in a special election in heavily Republican district in the Cincinatti area. Although he lost to the Republican candidate, 48% to 52%, this by itself was gigantic: according to his Wikipedia article, his showing was the best for a Democrat for more than thirty years: since 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandals, and which Bush carried in the 2004 election by 64%.

According to this clip, Democratic Party Leaders actually asked Paul Hackett not to run in the midterm elections this year against "vulnerable Republican Senator Mike DeWine" in Ohio, where the Democrats hope to pick up a seat.

The Daily Show interviews a Democratic operative: "There's a matrix for electability ... follow some instructions from your consultants ..." Oh, yeah. The Democrats' consultants' have done such a great job over the past 30 years. He even goes on to mention focus groups. "Take the language that people use in Focus groups and 'patter it back.' That's what it's all about" <rant tendentiousness="nauseating">Ah, yes. Focus Groups. Isn't it Focus Groups that tell the networks which Pilots will make winning shows every season? And they're always on the money, right? The TV fall lineup is never a steaming bowl of loose stools, right? It's just all part of the desperate human need to believe that they can control things. The way corporate executives and MBAs convince themselves that if their business succeeds, it's because of things they did and the way they did them (it's never due to luck, say, and god forbid it's ever their fault if it fails). It's the engine that churns endless stands of trees into the latest Business-related books on "Management" and "Leadership" and how to pat your back that as a corporate executive you're not just a parasite on society but are actually driving the economy and "making" weath. The same inane hope that convinces people that their mutual fund managers actually earn their money or that industry analysts actually have the slightest idea what goes on inside the companies they cover (other than the soulless time-sink of pointless meetings which is the prime activity of the Corporate Employee).</rant>

This … explains … a lot. Sort of makes you want to make all your contributions directly to the candidates and not to the party. As one should expect from Jon Stewart, this segment roll-on-the-floor funny ("Al Gore's 837 easy steps to Campaign Victory"), but it’s also cry-your-eyes-out-for-the-future-of-this-country(-not-to-mention-the-rest-of-the-world) sad, and it’ll make you really, really, angry.

Courtesy of Onegoodmove. Your one-stop shopping blog for Daily Show segments you didn’t watch on TV.

Categories: politics, democrats, partypolitics, ohio, comedy, Jon Stewart, Daily Show, Social Media, Video Clips, blogs, onegoodmove, byjjmg

Back Yard Blogging

My heartfelt thanks to whoever it was that invented Wi-Fi.

Most transcendently beautiful day of the year so far.  Sunny, blue skies, few whisps of cloud, 70ish, breezy.  Ahhhhhh.

And now I can use Bluetooth with my lovely new(ish) Nokia 6256i (phonescoop) with its mediocre but serviceable camera to upload some pix of my ugly, ugly back yard that looks as though the Roman Legions have been through here and sown the ground with salt: 

Of course, all of this while I should be working.  I’m a ba-a-a-ad widdoo boy.  It’s ok, it’s ok, I can work from the back porch too!

 

 

Why Homer Simpson is My Hero, Reason #12

"Bring me beer and your deepest chamber-pot. Chop-chop!"

<claps twice>

Also deeply satisfying: the way Marge is slowly shaking her head. And the look of utter shock on Lenny’s face.

As for me, I love to say “chop chop” and clap when demanding something. But it usually gets me whacked. I wish I could order Lisa about that way without ending up rubbing a bruise afterwards … The same thing happens if I jiggle my glass so the ice clatters when I need a refill! I’m a battered man. Ah, for the days when you could sell your help to the silver mines when they got too uppity. *sigh*

Actually, this Simpsons episode (Sunday, March 26, 2006) was the first in a very long time that had laughs all the way through. The show’s been running on fumes for a few years now, sadly, but this one was pretty good.

They also used the wonderful live-action Simpsons intro that came out of the UK and has been on Youtube for a while, to replace their usual couch gag. Sadly, Fox has a tendency to run their first-run Simpsons episodes long, so if I don’t remember to adjust my TiVo, it cuts off the end. So I didn’t get to see the credits: I was curious how they were going to credit the makers of that short.

Ah, well. I guess I’m going to have to get my own glass refilled tonight.

(No, I don't have 11 other reasons; I don't even know how many there are. I was even tempted to make up a number in the hundreds, but 12 seems more realistic.)

Categories: entertainment, tv, sitcoms, animation, simpsons, funny, stills, screenshot, screencaps, homer, Homer Simpson, marge, Marge Simpson, boorishness, byjjmg

Stephen McCauley at Porter Square Books

Porter Square Books just keeps getting cooler and cooler. I attending a reading tonight by the author Stephen McCauley, who lives here in Cambridge, for his new book,

Alternatives to Sex

We arrived about an hour early since we knew it was going to be crowded. And it was. At least half the people who showed up had to stand through his reading, which was well worth it. I bought my copy of the book before it got crowded (so I would have it ready for him to sign without having to stand in an ungodly line), and had started reading it before he arrived. It’s hilarious. He has a great style. Very witty, very funny, very rude. I kept bursting out laughing as I read, as more and more people showed up, as we waited for the author.

And his reading was phenomenal. One of the audience-members after the reading pleaded with him to do his own books on tape, since he has such a great delivery. (He prevaricated, saying he’s never been offered the opportunity, but I get the feeling it’s not his cup of tea.)

He actually read selections stitched together from the first several chapters, including several passages I had just read. I found it interesting that he had made subtle changes - changing an adjective here, adding a detail there - most of which seemed to improve the text, at least in the context of a live reading. During question-time I asked him why his text differed from the published copy - was this from an earlier draft, perhaps, or does he just improvise a little as he's reading and substitute things that he thinks will sound better "in the moment"? I'm not sure he got the question since his response focused on how this wasn't a straight reading from any single section of the book but was stitched together from several of the early chapters; my question was actually for those parts of the prose that I recognized (having only just read them a handful of minutes earlier), though. I actually got quite a few shocked looks from other audience-members at my use of the word "improvise". I didn't think it was an insult; I thought it was a fascinating glimpse into an author's creative process at work. He did provide the little tidbit that this particular reading was put together for PEN's "Eros Night", so he deliberately gathered up parts that focused on the sex for this reading. Very, very, funny parts about sex.

McCauley is of course the author of :

Object of My Affection

which was, as you must know, made into a movie: with Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd, and Nigel Hawthorne, and one of my favourite actors, who we just don't get to see often enough, Tim Daly (aka Joe Hackett of Wings - they're finally releasing the DVD!).

McCauley said he’s going to be giving another reading this Saturday, April 1, at the Cambridge Borders store in the Galleria Mall. He’s well worth listening to.

And I got my copy signed!

I also picked up a copy of The Great Transformation, by Karen Armstrong, author of apparently hot off the presses. It appears to be her narrative of the Axial Age. But I'll definitely be reading Alternatives to Sex first.

Categories: books, bookbuying, bookstores, bookshopping, shopping, bibliophilia, biblioholism, bibliomania, fiction, nonfiction, stephenmccauley, movies, entertainment, film, dvd, jenniferanison, paulrudd, nigelhawthorne, objectofmyaffection, alternativestosex, religion, history, axialage, karljaspers, karenarmstrong, readings, fun, cambridge, massachusetts, portersquare, portersquarebooks, byjjmg