Babel On, Babel Off

2007-03-07T13:14:00.000-05:00

Happy ante diem quartum nonas Sextilis

2006-07-04T22:36:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2006-06-17T22:58:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-12T00:19:00.000-04:00

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!

2006-06-07T20:59:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-06T23:08:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2006-05-26T20:03:00.000-04:00

*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 ...

2006-05-11T21:26:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2006-05-07T22:17:00.000-04:00

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

2006-05-05T00:24:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

... in Somerville?

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

What do YOU doodle? - Legals Placemat Edition

2006-04-26T23:42:00.000-04:00

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!!

2006-04-26T21:24:00.000-04:00

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)

2006-04-23T22:42:00.000-04:00

... 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

2006-04-23T00:59:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2006-04-20T22:29:00.000-04:00

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?

2006-04-20T22:23:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-19T23:50:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-18T22:47:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-18T22:03:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-17T23:11:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-17T12:24:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-16T23:24:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-16T21:07:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-14T23:36:00.000-04:00

... 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 ...

2006-04-14T22:58:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2006-04-13T14:10:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-13T09:48:00.000-04:00

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!

2006-04-12T21:47:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-12T17:40:00.000-04:00

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)

2006-04-11T23:54:00.000-04:00

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

Who knew Web2.0 would be put to the service

2006-04-10T20:19:00.000-04:00

… 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"

2006-04-10T20:05:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-10T18:15:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-09T23:06:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-05T21:11:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2006-04-05T20:56:00.000-04:00

… 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 ...

2006-04-05T19:23:00.000-04:00

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?

2006-04-03T22:40:00.000-04:00

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. ...

2006-04-03T21:44:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-03T13:28:00.000-04:00

… 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

2006-04-02T19:35:00.000-04:00

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 ...

2006-04-02T17:55:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-02T17:37:00.000-04:00

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

2006-04-02T00:07:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

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:

(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

2006-04-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-01T19:46:00.000-05:00

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

Finally, a solution to dog pee?

2006-03-31T22:35:00.000-05:00

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 ...

2006-03-31T20:10:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-31T14:35:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-30T20:10:00.000-05:00

"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

2006-03-30T00:00:00.000-05:00

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

It's all about the Media

2006-03-27T00:11:00.000-05:00

Well, isn’t that just TYPICAL. JUST as I finally start to get the hang of this whole blogging thing (STARTING to, I said! I know I still have the Lamest! Blog! Ever!), I find out that the COOL bloggers have already moved on to something much more interesting.

I mean, who wants WORDS when they can watch pretty pictures? Nowadays, it’s all about the movie clips. A blog with nothing but acres of verbiage smattered with links and peppered with a few images just doesn’t cut it any more, OH no. That’s old hat. You’ve got to either include a fragment of some show you enjoyed (“fair use”???) or you actually have to produce something original of your own to share. And people are doing so. In spades.

I think I first started catching on to this when I came across a link to the hilarious and clever Brokeback to the Future trailer at YouTube.com that made the rounds a few weeks ago (there are actually literally dozens of Brokeback -spoof-trailers, though most of the others I looked at range a little more towards the mean-spirited or even simply plain spiteful).

You can find a little bit of ANYTHING at YouTube. You can spend hours in a slack-jawed fog, eyes-glazed-over stupour, as you discover that people are willing to record themselves doing anything. And it isn’t even necessarily all porn! Some of it is mind-bogglingly stupid, some of it extremely clever, and a lot of it is very funny. Youtube is of course where I found that fantastic live-action intro for the Simpsons that I posted about earlier (and which Fox actually used this last Sunday as the intro to a real Simpson’s episode!!).

This is a pretty natural outgrowth of the online audio streaming that’s been going on and getting increasingly popular over the past couple of years, with “podcasts” and shows available on iTunes, etc., but it’s just taking it to the next level (if you have the bandwidth and hardware for it).

In FACT, I've been meaning to write about this topic for several weeks now: but now I know I'm really lame if it's being going on so long that even the newspapers have already caught wind of it. The Globe actually scooped me on this one (“Clip and Play”, March 26) this last Sunday before I had a chance to blog about this new trend. In addition to YouTube, they mention AtomFilms.com, Ebaumsworld.com, thelonelyisland.com and Channel101.com, none of which I had heard of, in my lame, brain-dead way.

The Globe article isn’t as interested in the dissemination of videos on the web as in what to them is this development: the appearance of these videos on “real media” like TV. Something which was news to me, actually:

''South Park," aspiring animators know, had its origins as an online Christmas cartoon. The 21-year-old creator of the short film ''MySpace: The Movie," a massive YouTube hit, recently got a development deal from mtvU. Last year, ''Saturday Night Live" hired a trio of roommate-filmmakers -- Channel 101 veterans -- who posted their work on their website, thelonelyisland.com. Now, they're largely responsible for SNL's infectious ''digital shorts," such as ''Lazy Sunday," a rap starring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg on a trip to see ''The Chronicles of Narnia," or this month's ''Natalie Rap," with Natalie Portman in gangsta mode.

Yeah, I guess that’s kinda interesting.

But I’m still more interested in the proliferation of online videos on the web itself, something which seems to be accelerating. In addition to YouTube, two sites I have stumbled across recently are:

OneGoodMove: a progressive political blog that provides a regular digest of clips from shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Bill Maher. Now, if I miss these shows, I can just go to this blog to see what I missed. Very useful!! (The Daily Show, by the way, is available on iTunes, according to this blog.) This is a great blog!
The Malcontent: Video: producers of little clips they call “Malcovision”. This is a gay-themed site that I discovered when I was googling Brokeback in the days after I had seen it. I was particularly interested in finding out what was behind all the buzz about Heath Ledger being accused of “homophobia” for the way he introduced Brokeback at the SAG awards. You can find the “malcovision” version of Heath’s performance here. (Sorry, I just don’t buy it that he was “playing gay” there. He just looks a little drunk and — as he has said in interviews — completely unprepared to do the introduction. No homophobia here, as far as I can tell.) There’s also clips from a hilarious Oprah show with Heath, Jake, and Anne Hathaway here: well worth watching just for the way Anne gets embarrassed out of her skin. It’s adorable. Don’t remember if it’s in one of the shorter clips or in the whole video that they have a link to there. (You have to be old enough to recognize the theme music for the beginning credits of these “malcovision” shorts. Funny.)

Well, as long as I continue to use Blogger I don’t think I’ll be posting too many videos. Besides, I still have a lot of catching up to do before this blog becomes worth reading anyhow!

Update March 30, 2006: I didn't quite put two-and-two together yesterday when I finished up this post (which has been in draft mode for over a week), but what I touched on here is merely the tip of the iceberg in a creative revolution that's been going on for a while now: just google terms like "social media" and "open source filmmaking". In fact, this dovetails with another post I've had in draft mode for a couple of weeks now, inspired by my encounter with the King Kong Production Diaries (plus the post-production diaries on the movie DVD: ) and by this post (and this follow-up) at gapingvoid, and the new blog from the filmmakers of Hallam Foe. More on this later! Categories: video, clips, videosharing, onlinevideo, tv, entertainment, homevideos, youtube, malcovision, malcontent, jonstewart, dailyshow, media, multimedia, byjjmg, socialmedia, Social Media, kong, kingkong, king kong, peterjackson, peter jackson, web2.0, byjjmg

And while I'm on the topic of Flickr ...

2006-03-26T20:24:00.000-05:00

... and films. Through Withnail_eye, I discovered this addictive photo pool:

Name That Film!

Categories: photos, photography, images, pictures, flickr, web, social, sharing, photosharing, film, movies, entertainment, trivia, byjjmg

Northern European Passtimes ...

2006-03-26T19:54:00.000-05:00

It's good to know that the country of Pushkin and Lermontov, Chekhov and Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chaikovsky, is still churning out individuals of truly amazing skills:. This is a video you don't want to watch if you're suffering from a hangover.

This is from a blog that I just stumbled across: Days that End in Y, which apparently provides readers with a continuous hosepipe of "Today's Reasons to Drink". An earlier post introduced me to the Danish word Olfrygt, defined as "fear arising from a lack of beer". Tells you a lot about the linguistic priorities in Scandinavia

Categories: alcohol, drinking, vodka, akvavit, denmark, russia, scandinavia, video, words, wordblogging, blogos, funny, languages, language, linguistics, danish, russian, hungarian, byjjmg

Cooler flickr pool hath no one ...

2006-03-26T15:23:00.000-05:00

... than Withnail and I over at flickr. I was recently added to the contact list of withnail_eye — I don't know why; I don't know what I did to deserve it, but it was a treat, because he (he? she? probably he) has taken some great photos of Penrith, Cumbria, the real-life setting of the on-location shots of one of my absolute favourite films of all time, one of the best films ever made, and often referred to as a "cult" film, Withnail & I , the film that introduced me to my favourite member of the McGann clan, Paul, (there are three others, including Mark McGann, of The Grand, Series 2 ), to Richard E. Grant (How to Get Ahead In Advertising , L.A. Story , Gosford Park , Bright Young Things ),and to Richard Griffiths, whose current claim to fame is as Harry Potter's evil Uncle Vernon ().

Paul McGann is one of those talented British character actors who pop up all over the place (he's got 54 roles listed at his IMDB page) and are sure to have a place in The League of Obscure British Actors (which is really hard to find now: a Google Search including McGann turns up this site, so when it was indexed it had him on it, but that site will now quickly redirect you to this livejournal page, where it is hard, if possible at all, to find the actors that were once listed; and nobody has written about the League on wiki ...). He was also the very short-lived 8th Doctor (how could they waste his regenerations like that?!) — his IMDB trivia page gives the quote "I don't want to be remembered as the George Lazenby of Doctor Who." Oddly, enough, though I know of only one appearance: this made-for-tv movie, which I can't find for sale anywhere, this page suggests that he was also in four episodes, which is news to me.

McGann most recently (for me) played an enjoyable villain in Kidnapped, which recently played on Masterpiece Theatre — Kidnapped, by the way, provided one of the latest of Lisa's and my favourite quotes: as soon as I saw the Highland Witch woman say "Not everybody's as friendly as I am" I looked at Lisa knowingly and laughed and she looked at me annoyed and crabby, since she knew I was implying that this would be the end-result of her ever-increasing curmudgeonly, misanthropic ways. Nonetheless she has embraced this quote as her own and we say it often. He was also (barely) in Queen of the Damned , though his part as David Talbot was cut to the bone, as was the case with all the other minor characters, since they were combining two novels. And it looks like he's going to be in another Geraldine McEwan Marple: I can't wait! (Yes, I said it before, and I'm saying it again: I don't care what the Marple afficionados say about it; I don't care if Joan Hickson is more accurate or faithful to the original — this is one place where my pedantry and addiction to purism is taking a back seat to actually enjoying what I watch. Hickon is unbearably, narcolepsy-inducingly dull and extremely unplesasant to watch. If this is accurate, then Christie's Marple in the books much also be a remarkably unpleasant character. McEwan is simply a delight. It's the difference between drinking a cold cup of tea and a bottle of champagne.)

But I digress. (I always do.)

For me, Griffiths will always be Uncle Monty, Grant will always be Withnail, and McGann will always be & I (my pedantry does not go so far as for me to want to call him "Marwood" though my pretentiousness will always go so far as for me to be sure everybody knows he's called Marwood ). This movie was probably one of the first "indies" I saw or at least that I noticed was an "indie" when I first saw it (I saw it on the big screen when it first came out in Boston in 1987), and I have always loved the name of the production company, Handmade Films, George Harrison's baby.

I have watched it several times since, and I still gasp every time & I first wakes up in the morning after they arrive at Penrith and sees the view over the lake. This film is one of the things that cemented my relationship with Lisa, since it was one of her favourite films already before she moved to Boston in 1990 and when I brought home a rented VHS copy she was thrilled that I loved it too. As mentioned in a link below, it is also an inexhaustible source of memorable quotes. I have generally gravitated to Withnails' - since even when I first saw the movie I felt that the things he said were rather a lot like things that used to come out of my mouth at the time. Things like "I feel ... unusual" and "I demand to have some ~~food~~ booze !" [I'm so mortified that I got that quote wrong; I guess it shows how my priorities have changed over the years... you can see lots more quotes here and the whole script here] I've always identified more with Withnail than & I, in fact, though I'm much more boring and have far, far fewer vices, sadly.

You can find out more about the film, including some wonderful real-life autobiographical background, on the web. A couple of years ago I scoured up these links:

From here: ""Withnail was based on Bruce Robinson's best friend from drama school Vivien MacMillan (I think that's his surname). This larger-than-life hedonistic thespian died of throat cancer in his early 40s. Robinson was quoted as saying "I could never believe that the biggest coward I'd ever met could become the bravest man I have ever seen in so short a space of time. They ripped his voice out." and "Apparently, when Vivian Mackerrall had had his throat removed because of the cancer, he had to be fed through a tube which ran directly into his stomach. Towards the end, he was pouring brandy into it by way of a funnel."
A site on Bruce Robinson
From here, "The Withnail and I script contains a virtually non-stop array of one-liners from all the characters... making it one of the most quotable films ever made." [emphasis mine]
The Criterion Collection's blurb on the DVD is here.
This: Withnail & I is a book about the film
A Withnail forum
An interview with Richard E. Grant
Bruce Robinson on IMDB

Plus you can find more links at the Withnail pool. Speaking of which: I had never really got off my fat butt to find out whether the Penrith of the film really existed, but it does, and these great photos prove it. I wonder if you can go on a "Withnail tour" (if there is, a google search doesn't turn one up) like the Pride and Prejudice tour (from the good version ) I know you used to be able to do, or if these photos are just spontaneous.

(By the way: somebody should buy me this Doctor Who Mega Collection for $589.95, at least until they come out with a more complete set. I've been a fan of the Doctor since I was 5 years old, when I was brought back to the UK for the first time after our emigration for my grandmother's funeral, when the show was on its 2nd or 3rd season, still in Black and White, and I was given a great Dalek toy that would roll around on the kitchen floor and change directions whenever it bumped into a wall: who knew 1966 technology was so cutting-edge?!)

Categories: entertainment, film, movies, cult, cultmovies, Cult Movies, withnail, withnailandi, Withnail and I, paulmcgann, paul+mcgann, richardegrant, richard+e+grant, actors, fiction, brucerobinson, bruce+robinson, indies, independent, independentmovies, independentfilm, directors, doctorwho, doctor+who, byjjmg

Sleaze Appeal

2006-03-26T15:07:00.000-05:00

No I'm not talking about Republicans today. I'm still on my film kick.

And speaking of Aaron Eckhart, I was reminded by Lisa today of this amusing little article on him in this last Friday's Boston Globe, which I risk the wrath of the copyright gods by reproducing in full:

THE SLEAZE QUOTIENT
Author(s): WESLEY MORRIS Date: March 24, 2006 Page: D1 Section: Arts
Born with an entitled demeanor and a jaw line that should be studied in geometry classes, Aaron Eckhart risks seeming like a lout even when he's on his best behavior. But the man has sleaze appeal.
As a tobacco lobbyist in "Thank You for Smoking," he rates a Jack Abramoff-y 9 out of 10 on the Sleaze-o-Meter. Here's how his other roles score: "In the Company of Men" (1997) : Neil LaBute's debut started it all. Eckhart played a white-collar creep who made misogyny a sport. After playing a thoroughly convincing creep, he spent subsequent LaBute films ("Your Friends and Neighbors," say) playing gradually less despicable men.
"Paycheck" (2004):
After taking a few years off from unapologetic villainy, Eckhart came roaring back as a corporate meanie who deceives and bullies Ben Affleck. With his Brylcreemed hair and white-collar hauteur, Eckhart was such a picture of nutty executive privilege, he could have been starring in a documentary.
"Erin Brockovich" (2000): Seeing Eckhart as Julia Roberts's lovable, Harley-riding boyfriend was suspenseful. We spent the whole movie waiting for him to turn into a bastard. He never did. Still, when she asked him, "Are you gonna be something else I have to survive?" you got the sense that she'd seen "Company of Men."
"Possession" (2002): This unconvincing LaBute collaboration cast Eckhart as a sleuthing grad student who's up to his chin in turtlenecks and Gwyneth Paltrow. He beds her and still helps her finish her research when they're done. Wow.
"The Core" (2003): Eckhart plays a geophysicist who saves the world, which has stopped spinning. That's right. He's the hero, and, in another movie, his prize would have been a jaw lock with Hilary Swank. Instead, he just sets off a nuclear bomb.
© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company

They didn't mention Nurse Betty !! Where you get Eckhart literally oozing oiliness in his sleazy finest — this time though as an exceptionally pathetic, white-trashy kind of sleaze — but where the punishment-for-sleaze action is particularly cutting. Can't imagine why they would have left that one out.

Categories: entertainment, film, movies, funny, humour, globe, bostonglobe, nursebetty, nurse%20betty, aaroneckhart, aaron%20eckhart, sleaze, actors, celebrities, byjjmg

Dayom! TV I didn't know about edition ...

2006-03-25T20:34:00.000-05:00

There's an Ab Fab with Nathan Lane in it? When did that happen? Apparently, according to epguides, in Dec. 2004: Titles & Air Dates Guide, near the bottom, episode White Box.

Looks like it's not from season 5, which explains why I haven't seen it. It's one of three specials that I guess aren't on DVD yet.

Oh, well. You can still buy the rest of the series here and generate a microscopic commission for me:

	Absolutely Fabulous - Complete Series 1-3 $47.99 (%20)
	Absolutely Fabulous - Complete Series 4 $26.99 (%10)
	Absolutely Fabulous: Complete Series 5 $21.99 (%27)
	Absolutely Fabulous - Absolutely Special (The Last Shout/In New York) $21.99 (%12)

Categories: entertainment, tv, sitcoms, abfab, absolutely%20fabulous, fun, funny, humour, british, dvd, byjjmg

Totally-useless Trivia #1

2006-03-25T11:42:00.000-05:00

Jason Reitman:

director of the new movie, Thank You for Smoking, which I do want to see -- I love Aaron Eckhart and this movie looks wickedly funny -- is the son of Stripes and Ghostbusters I & II
director
Ivan Reitman.

Brought to you courtesy of IMDB and last Sunday's Boston Globe.

Categories: entertainment, movies, film, directors, thank you for not smoking, stripes, ghostbusters, jason reitman, ivan reitman, trivia, totally useless trivia, totallyuselesstrivia, tut, byjjmg, jjmg

Just when you thought the boys from Akron ...

2006-03-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

... had run out of ways to be weird, in an original way (and to make money doing it):

Devo 2.0!

(And it's hard to imagine anything more devolved than Disney ...)

From the Boston Globe article today:

''Devo 2.0," which just came out as both a CD and DVD on Disney Sound, takes the notion of making music for a new generation of fans to a whole new level. ''Devo 2.0" boasts the original band members plus five kids, ages 10 to 14, who contribute vocals to 10 newly recorded Devo hits and two new songs. Devo is sending its proteges, who go by the name Devo 2.0, on a 10-date tour of middle, junior high, and high schools that plays Hartford on Tuesday. Devo 2.0 features lead singer Nicole (likes dancing, swimming, Gwen Stefani, Kelly Clarkson); guitarist Nathan (likes the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and online Scrabble); drummer Kane (likes Josh Freese, the Mars Volta, and ''drums, drums, drums"); keyboardist Jackie (likes Chopin, singing, and chocolate); and bassist Michael (likes martial arts and the Devo song ''Cyclops").
No word on whether the kids will be brandishing whips.

Haw haw.

Brings back wonderful memories. I, of course, was through being cool before I ever got started.

(Devo's wiki page.)

Categories: music, devo, rock, pop, alternative, newwave, punk, culture, popular, popularculture, devo2.0, funny, bands, akron, ohio, byjjmg,

V for ... very undecided (new and improved version)

2006-03-23T23:24:00.000-05:00

Saw V for Vendetta tonight.

First of all I just have to say. And this won't make any sense to you until and unless you see the movie. But. HOW the hell did they get the cameras into my bedroom without me noticing? I mean, literally. Those stacks of books. I honestly expected to see me lying there.

Anyway.

I am very fond of Natalie Portman. I loved her in Closer . I thought she was great in this. But my God, woman. Get yourself another accent coach. SOOOOOooo distracting. (This pretty entirely negative review is good for a chuckle: "Natalie Portman brings sensitivity and emotion to her beleaguered heroine but she loses a valiant battle with her character's wavering English accent. " )

I was really, really enjoying this movie up until the part which I won't spoil for you but it's where you and Evey discover something really shocking and though I'm sure it's being faithful to the graphic novel (which I haven't read), I just kind of found it contrived and annoying. I mean, the movie IS a comic-book movie (and from then on only becomes even more so), so you have to suspend a lot of disbelief, and I'm all up with that, but up until then I was taking it pretty seriously even for a comic-book movie. That part just didn't work for me at all. I wouldn't have reacted the way Evey did, and frankly it spoiled a lot of the drama of what had led up to it (though it explained why things weren't going a lot worse for the character in question).

Plus, I'm with Ebert on this one bit. And I'm not giving anything away since it's all over the trailers. But somehow blowing up big buildings just doesn't have quite the feel it used to. Plus, come on. The 1812 overture? How jejune is that? (I told you: I'm a lot like Frasier Crane! I loved it when he used that word. So irritating. Heh.)

Anyway.

There are some movies that get better the more you think about them. There are others that you enjoy while you're watching it but which kind of don't bear thinking about afterwards. This movie isn't quite in the second camp but I'm afraid it's not really in the first camp either. (Sith , for instance, was definitely in the second camp; the more I thought about it the more pissed off I got.) I'll have to sleep on it.

Next Day:
Ok, I've slept on it. I'm liking it better. Yes, it has the flaws I already mentioned, and some I haven't: there are of course many awfully convenient events towards the end (ways in which V manages to manipulate affairs just a little too well) that seem contrived even for the comic-book genre; and since Evey was given a decision at the end to make one might have hoped she would have made a more original one ... But I don't agree with the review I linked to above. They clearly didn't get into the spirit of the thing.) And of course, I particularly enjoyed the updated political references (the original graphic novel was in part an indictment of Thatcher, but the movie is an explicit indictment of Blair and Bush). I don't know what Ebert and Roeper were thinking when they sounded all confused about whether this refers to current political events or to Hitler. The film could hardly have been more UNsubtle in its reference to current events. And, given my politics, that is certainly one of the biggest reasons I enjoyed the film (love that "Coalition of the Willing" flag!).

Filmrot has a placeholder here for discussion with a link to that bad review and to this one which really captures what I like and don't like about the movie. I agree with it almost entirely. I don't know why the Filmrot guy describes this latter review as a "positive" one.

One last thing. It has been reported all over the place that the author of the original graphic novel, Alan Moore, demanded to have his name taken off the credits for the film. The New York Times has a great article on this in which, frankly, Alan Moore by his own words comes across as a pompous blow-hard. Talk about temperamental artists: this guy is a caricature straight out of a bad Murder She Wrote (he'd be the one that would buy it). An excerpt:

Last year, when Mr. Moore received a phone call from Larry Wachowski — who, with his brother, Andy, had written and directed the "Matrix" movies — to discuss the "V for Vendetta" film that the Wachowskis were writing and producing for Warner Brothers, Mr. Moore felt he had made it clear that he did not want to be involved in the project.
"I explained to him that I'd had some bad experiences in Hollywood," Mr. Moore said. "I didn't want any input in it, didn't want to see it and didn't want to meet him to have coffee and talk about ideas for the film." [italics applied to petulant quote my own; you will have to imagine the foot-stomping on your own]
But at a press conference on March 4, 2005, to announce the start of production on the "V for Vendetta" film, the producer Joel Silver said Mr. Moore was "very excited about what Larry had to say and Larry sent the script, so we hope to see him sometime before we're in the U.K."
This, Mr. Moore said, "was a flat lie."
"Given that I'd already published statements saying I wasn't interested in the film, it actually made me look duplicitous," he said.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Silver said he had misconstrued a meeting he had with Mr. Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 20 years ago, when Mr. Silver first acquired the film rights to "Watchmen" and "V for Vendetta." (Mr. Silver no longer owns the rights to "Watchmen," though Warner Brothers is still planning an adaptation.) "I had a nice little lunch with them," he said, "and Alan was odd, [heh] but he was enthusiastic and encouraging us to do this. I had foolishly thought that he would continue feeling that way today, not realizing that he wouldn't."
Mr. Silver said he called Mr. Moore to apologize for his statement at the press conference, but that Mr. Moore was unmoved. "He said to me, 'I'm going to hang up on you if you don't stop talking to me,' [God, what a butthead!]" Mr. Silver recalled. "It was like a conversation with a tape recording."

In the article, Moore clearly can't be bothered to give a single reason why he didn't like the movie. "I've read the screenplay," Mr. Moore said. "It's rubbish." Okayyy, then. I'm all for integrity and all, but when his fiancé says "He's frightening to people because he doesn't seem to take the carrot, and he's fighting to maintain an integrity that they don't understand." it just makes me think of the kind of naïve, Holden Caulfield integrity that you grow out of after adolescence ... I particularly enjoy this quote from the illustrator (whose name does appear, very prominently, in the credits):

Mr. Lloyd, the illustrator of "V for Vendetta," also found it difficult to sympathize with Mr. Moore's protests. When he and Mr. Moore sold their film rights to the graphic novel, Mr. Lloyd said: "We didn't do it innocently. Neither myself nor Alan thought we were signing it over to a board of trustees who would look after it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls."

Heh.

Still. That bedroom. Glad to know I'm as crazy as some nutcase who lives in a basement.

Categories: entertainment, film, movies, comicbooks, vforvendetta, natalieportman, comics, reviews, alan moore, byjjmg

King Kong "Blooper" Video

2006-03-22T18:06:00.000-05:00

Check out this video: King Kong Movie Bloopers! Jack Black! HILARIOUS!. It's actually very funny!! Unlike most blooper videos, this one isn't just an endless series of nothing but bloopers. It's actually quite clever and funny. Mostly at Jack Black's expense. :-)

Categories: entertainment, film, movies, video, peterjackson, kingkong, jackblack, actors, celebrities, directories, humour, funny, byjjmg

David Brooks goes Greek

2006-03-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

It's really, really sad that the old David Brooks is a Moron blog stopped publishing as of last September (that isn't when the whole Times Select thing started, is it? I thought that was later ...). I'm sure I would have enjoyed reading their response to Brooks's latest, "All Politics is Thymotic" (or here for printable version, but you'll have to be a Times Select or NYT print edition subscriber to follow that link, though you can read the entire text here or here). Perhaps their blog has moved to a new site, but I haven't found it ...

Like Brooks's output generally, this column rests on gross over-generalizations and over-simplifications and shows that Brooks still has his genius for missing the point. Nonetheless it does articulate an important insight that is valuable at least to people without a smattering of anthropological or sociological education. The force of Brooks's argument is that politics - and in fact human motivation in general - is driven primarily, sometimes almost exclusively, by the need for respect:

Some people believe men are motivated by greed for money or lust for power. But money and power are means to get recognition. They are markers of success, and success makes men feel important and causes others to pay attention when they walk in the room.
Plato famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, eros (desire) and thymos (the hunger for recognition). Thymos is what motivates the best and worst things men do. It drives them to seek glory and assert themselves aggressively for noble causes. It drives them to rage if others don't recognize their worth. Sometimes it even causes them to kill over a trifle if they feel disrespected.
Plato went on to point out that people are not only sensitive about their own self-worth, they are also sensitive about the dignity of their group, and the dignity of others. If a group is denied the dignity it deserves, we call that injustice. Thymotic people mobilize to assert their group's significance if they feel they are being rendered invisible by society.
Thymotic people mobilize on behalf of those made voiceless by the powerful. As Plato indicated, thymos is the psychological origin of political action.

In other words, politics is all about "the Dis".

Now, this isn't quite as stupid or reductionist as it may sound, though as I will get to in a moment it does go too far. It is important to understand and recognize this motivation when and where it occurs. Brooks is even correct in pointing out that this motivation can have positive as well as negative expressions ("mobilize on behalf of those made voiceless by the powerful").

However, Brooks's trademark penchant for overgeneralization takes over as usual, and he carries things way too far:

In this country, when workers strike, they're not enraged over a few cents an hour. They're enraged because they feel their company is not acknowledging their worth. When social liberals squabble with social conservatives, each group is trying to assert the dignity of its own lifestyle.

This begins to gravitate more to the more wishy-washy concept of "self-esteem" and conjures up images of condoscending HR departments and business gurus giving seminars to corporate middle managers on how to pamper your employees' self-esteem so they don't demand to be treated ethically or paid fairly.

And of course Brooks completely missed the anthropology lectures where they taught us about the difference between shame-culture and guilt-culture. People, particularly males, brought up in a shame-culture are particularly prone to become enraged when they feel somehow "dissed" (or "dishonored"). The Ancient Greeks of Homer's time were a classic shame culture, as were the Japanese, the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, etc. In our day and age, the Muslim world is still very much a shame-culture -- this is why women and girls in such societies are frequently murdered by their own family-members, usually by fathers, brothers, or uncles, if they are perceived have brought "shame" on the family through illicit contact with males outside of their families (even if this contact is not sexual -- in a society that demands Purdah, even allowing a non-related male to see your face or to talk to an unrelated male can be enough to bring a death-sentence from your own family). Even a girl that is raped can be killed by her family to remove the stain of dishonor. In a guilt culture, it isn't about shame -- about being caught or about being seen as shamed or dishonored -- it is about whether you actually did something wrong. The European western world has not had a shame culture for many centuries, except in a few pockets. In the United States, the South still has a large smattering of shame culture, and in fact I remember reading many years ago about a study showing that Southerners are more likely to commit acts of violence if they feel they have been dishonored or disrespected in some way than are people from other parts of the U.S. (I remember that there were even some threatened Southern acts of violence in response to that report).

So although Brooks is certainly imparting an important lesson to people that may not have caught on that male sense of honour is a strong motivation behind a lot of politics, but it certainly has very little to do with strikes or political parties in the West, at least.

I'm curious about what the classicist bloggers will have to say, if anything, about the -- to my mind at least -- rather idiosyncratic definition for "thymos" that Brooks uses.

[Personally, being the inveterate pedant that I am, I prefer the spelling "thumos" for the Greek θῡμός (θυμος if you don't have a unicode font installed, which you should [look here]) . The Greek letter "υ" (capital: "Y"), called since the Middle Ages "Upsilon", is rendered into the Latin alphabet in two different ways depending on context: as "u" when it occurs in dipthongs such as "au" or "eu" (from αυ, ευ) but as the manufactured letter "y" (actually the Greek upsilon, not a Roman letter at all) in other contexts - in fact this was one of Cicero's particular pedantries. The reason for this is that the (reconstructed) Ancient Greek pronunciations of that same letter is believed to be different between those two contexts (as they still are in Modern Greek though in completely different ways): Romans had their own diphthong "au" pronounced identically to the greek αυ, so it made sense for them to spell it that way; but they had no sound corresponding to the contemporary Greek upsilon, which sounded like modern French "u" or German ü.) Nonetheless, it is the same letter in Greek, and it galls me to see it rendered inconsistently as "u" in one place and "y" in another - often in the same word! - especially since there are words, such as "hubris", which we for some reason render inconstently with "u" instead of "y" (if we were to be consistent with the inconsistency that is the conventional Latinate transliteration, it would be "hybris", just as the Greek prepositions ὑπό and ὑπέρ show up in English as the prefixes "hypo-" and "hyper-", beginning with the exact same letters as ὕβρις).

But back to Brooks's definition. I ... have to say that I had never heard it defined as "the hunger for recognition". The word does have quite a large, fluid range of meanings, and it changed meanings over the five centuries from Homer to Plato, but it basically is a Greek word for "spirit", and is often simply used as a synonym for ψυχή ("psyche" or, more pedantically, "psuche": usually translated as "soul" and the source of our words psyche, psychology, psychic, etc.). The LSJ offers these definitions:

A. soul, spirit, as the principle of life, feeling and thought, esp. of strong feeling and passion
I. in physical sense, breath, life
2. spirit, strength

II. soul, as shown by the feelings and passions; and so,
1. desire or inclination, esp. desire for meat and drink, appetite
2. mind, temper, will
3. spirit, courage
4. the seat of anger
5. the heart, as the seat of the emotions, esp. joy or grief
6. mind, soul, as the seat of thought

(There were several other words for "mind" as well.)

And it is well-known that it derives from the Proto-Indo-European root "dhu-" (see, e.g., here), meaning "smoke", giving the Latin "fumus", the Russian дым, etc. It makes sense that this particular Greek word for "spirit" would have connotations connected with passions, especially anger: smoke as from a fire. Plato's three divisions would then be reason, desire (the kind of desire that perpetuates life), and spirit/courage/anger.

But to get back to Brooks, there is a little bit more fun we can have with him before we go. How embarrassing for him that his column was published the very same day in the very same newspaper as as this delightful book review, where the reviewer, Walter Kirn, bitch-slaps silly the author of the very book, "Harvey Mansfield's new book, Manliness," which Brooks praises in his column as "a subtle exploration about the virtues and vices of the thymotic urge."

Kirns shreds Mansfield mercilessly and hilariously (we can only hope that for Kirns that there aren't any vestiges of shame-culture left in the Harvard Faculty club) for a 40-years-out-of-date cluelessness and "a pipe-smokey academic baritone that I for one thought had vanished from this planet)":

[Mansfield] shows little awareness of much that's happened recently . . . in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers, Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men." A time warp where it's further possible — in a passage on the sexes' characteristic senses of humor — to cite an event from over 40 years ago as his one and only illustration of feminine wit. . . In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings? Or, if he dwells among us, when was the last time he left the faculty club?

I'm amazed I never noticed this Kirns guy before. Now this guy is not a moron.

Some more links about "thymos/thumos":

Wanted: Participants in The Brooksian Thymotic Experiment
Technorati search for blogs linking to this column (and another for blogs linking to the printable URL of the column)
Article about Thymos and self-esteem, drawing heavily on Francis Fukuyama (not surprising that Brooks would get some of his inspiration from that other guru of over-generalization)
Ask.com article about Thymos

Categories: politics, political, shame, guilt, ancient, classics, classical, philosophy, plato, thymos, thumos, greek, roman, latin, psychology, , guiltculture, shameculture, anthropology, sociology, culture, brooks, davidbrooks, davidbrooksisamoron, fukuyama, manliness, books, nyt, byjjmg

Real Estate Nausea in Boston ...

2006-03-19T19:13:00.000-05:00

I live in the Boston area, which has one of the most expensive places in the country to live, real-estate-wise. I bought my house, a 2-family 3-story 1905 Edwardian cookie-cutter house near Davis Square, Somerville, in 1996 for half the price that a single floor of similar houses is now fetching as a condo in the same neighborhood. I've seen condos in my neighborhood range from $300k to $600k. It's unbelievable. (This doesn't make me rich: even if I wanted to borrow every cent I could out of the house I couldn't afford the mortgage on it, and unless I want to move to a completely different part of the country I'd need every cent of equity I have in this house just to move to another house.)

One thing we do have to do if we ever want to sell this house is some major renovation. These exorbitantly overpriced condos have of course all been recently upgraded, though with cheapo Home Depot crap that will just fall apart in 5 years. Clearly buyers will expect a new kitchen and new bathrooms, and the house needs some wiring and a major exterior paint job.

It's *very* hard in this area to find contractors, though. Believe me, I've tried. One part is of course that almost nobody you ever speak to who has had work done will actually recommend their contractor. Usually quite the opposite. But the problem is that the ones who *do* come recommended are unavailable. They usually don't return phone calls and even if they do, they usually cut you off with "what's your budget?" The problem is, the home renovation market only needs a few dozen very wealthy individuals (corporate executives or financeers or the like) in a region to keep them completely busy year-round, year after year, doing little additions to their suburban McMansions or redoing their kitchen for the third time. So people are not only often booked two plus years ahead, but the jobs they *are* getting have insanely huge budgets.

I got some skepticism from coworkers recently when I told them that when I get the "what's your budget" question, it is quickly followed with "I don't do any jobs less than $250,000." Two hundred and fifty thousand for RENOVATION?! That's on TOP of whatever mortgage you have, which is already twice that or more if you bought within the last five years!

Well, here's some corroboration: today's Boston Globe reports on four houses in the area that are vying to appear in a future episode of This Old House. Get this: the *cheapest* budget for renovation is $250,000. The other three houses have $300,000, $500,000, and $650,000 budgets respectively. This ... is ... insane. It can't possibly last.

Categories: realestate, houses, economics, bostonarea, prices, "real, "boston, boston, "house, prices", curmudgeon, "housing, bubble", bubble, bubble, byjjmg

Weekly Roeper Zinger Report #1

2006-03-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

I wish I had been keeping a record of these one-liners since I first noticed that Roeper's reviews were actually becoming my favourite part of the show. Not so much the reviews when he likes the movie (though Ebert in the latest show complemented Roeper for being "poetic" in his mini-review of Duck Season (Temporada de patos)), but for his thumbs-down reviews: especially the ones where he is panning a movie that Ebert just said he liked.

On the whole I am finding myself agreeing with Roeper's taste far, far more than Ebert's: Ebert seems far too willing to give chances to some really bad movies, as with She's the Man, which really does look dreadful. It was his rebuttle to Ebert's inexplicable thumbs-up that gives us this week's zinger:

You could watch any sitcom half-asleep on the couch and you could see
better set-ups and payoffs than this.

Chuckle. I also enjoyed Roeper's suggestion that Shakespeare probably would rather keep his name off the credits for this film (though Ebert seemed think that this movie didn't have any problems that weren't in Twelfth Night; sometimes you have to wonder about that guy).

I wish I could remember some of his earlier jabs; at the moment the only one that springs to mind is in his thumbs-down review of Eight Below (which I'm probably going to see anyway: *sigh*), where he was wondering through the whole film how they were going to find a way to make Paul Walker take his shirt off in the antarctic, and good for them that they found a way. (It was funnier when he said it.)

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

Fun with linguistics, travelogue-style

2006-03-17T20:14:00.000-05:00

Linguistics doesn't make its way into the news media very often, so it's always nice to see the field get a little scrap of attention now and then, even if it means turning to the Travel Section.

This delightful article ("It's Not the Sights, It's the Sounds"), filed by the NYT under Activities and Interests > Road Trips, is a fun read that even someone who doesn't know anything, or even care to know anything, about linguistics (i.e., pretty much everybody) could enjoy, since it deals with regional variation in pronunciation in the United States (what we usually call "accents"). In other words, this is linguistics of a non-threatening variety.

Here you can learn: some frightening details about Pittsburghese and Rochesterese, that there is really only one regional dialect all the way from Chicago to upstate New York (which was news to me — and I'm still not sure I'm convinced about that one), and most astonishing of all, that linguists are willing to pay $620 (no, that is not six dollars and twenty cents) for a meticulously-researched compendium of Norht American regionalects called Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change.

What is alarming about this is not so much the price, but the images of horror, tragedy, human loss and deprivation that must accompany paying for it out of a linguist's salary. Makes one wonder if linguists stay married very long ("Honey? I'm sorry we can't afford food for the kids this month; but I just had to have the latest research on the Ohio River valley syllabification patterns!"). (Me? I don't have kids. And I overspend even an engineer's salary on books I don't need. But that's a story for another blogposting.)

You really, really have to love a book that has a chapter titled "The general fronting of the back upgliding vowels".

(And yes, I do know what that means.)

Even more fun, this article has links to some mp3s with sample pronunciations (some of which are not to be tried by the faint-hearted), and another link to a great list of regional vocabulary (under the heading "local color").

And if these links should go stale, you can thank Charlene here for braving the wrath of the copyright gods for copying the entire text here.

But I have a more personal connection. I was branded as learning-disabled by my first grade teacher, a Mrs. Wenty (who was herself at the time probably only about 22 I bet and straight out of some "College of Education"), because, as it happens, when I was learning to write for the first time, I wrote her speech phonetically. For instance, she showed my parents that I was an incorrigibly bad speller because I spelled the word "ant" (or maybe it was "aunt") as "eant". Which is how she pronounced it. As a child straight out of the UK at the time, I was not yet inured to that sort of pronunciation. (Come to think of it, I'm still not ...) My parents tried to explain this to her ("but that is the way you say it"), but I gather she was not amused. Lisa and I came across a brutal assessment of my near-retardedness ("language skills: very weak!") when going through my mother's things after she died. Lisa wanted to look up Mrs. Wenty in the Urbana phone book to yell at her and tell her I had been to Yale and to Harvard and in linguistics! I just told Lisa I should have the thing framed. (Still haven't done either.)

BY the way. When I talk about "linguistics in the news" I am not talking about such things as William Safire's old On Language column in the NYT Magazine nor Eats, Shoots & Leaves (a delightful book, by the way). That's not linguistics. Linguistics, of course, has nothing to do with proscribing what is or is not "correct". It only has to do with DEscribing what IS.

But then, linguistics, is one of the least understood (and least respected) branches of knowledge, and yet, paradoxically, one that everyone seems to think themselves expert in. I guess because everybody has mastered at least one language (their native one), they feel qualified to argue the finer points of folk etymology or child language acquisition issues with a linguist, when they would never dream of arguing quantum mechanics with a phycisist or even the correct maintenance of drains with a plumber. Harrumph. Hell, what am I doing defending a field I abandoned 19 years ago for the greener pastures of cubicles and staff meetings and reorgs just because I wanted to be able to afford $620 non-fiction books that'll collect dust on my shelf and make me look intellectual ...

Categories: linguistics,, languages,, dialects,, phonology,, phonetics,, laboff,, regionalects,, pronunciation,, accents,, languagemavens,, books,, bookbuying,, byjjmg,, jjmg

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Weekly Roeper Zinger Report #1

Fun with linguistics, travelogue-style