If you're a regular visitor, you probably figured out I blowed up the server real good today (October 31, 2002).

Most things be broke, and this page is (was) being served old skool, via PWS on a 9500 running 9.1. So no comments, no dynamic pagebuilds (thus no sidebar), yadda yadda.

I'm struggling to go through the whole upgrade path from 10.0 to 10.2 on my 300mhz G3 powerbook, the oldest supported OSX box, and lemme tell ya... 'tain't pretty. I forecast another 24 hours of bitter pain and sadness. Dag nab it.

Jason Webley will present a Day of the Dead concert on November 2 at the Paradox in the University District. Online ticket sales are already sold out.

Jason recently performed in Moscow, where a theaterful of hostages was liberated - some from all toil, all trouble, and all tears - by an opiate-based gas earlier this month.

Jason's show flyers note "not all who attend will leave alive."

Click here to listen to an early work by Jason, Halloween. Here are the lyrics:

Last year, the concert concluded with a torchlit parade of about 600 through the streets of the U-District to the foot of the Ship Canal, where towers burned against the night to reveal human hands and la Belle Dame Sans Merci appeared in Charon's boat to take Jason across the water.

Something fantastic is crouching out there in the night behind Jason's shadow. Let's get a little closer, and see if we can make it out.

Dale Lawrence dropped a line to note that an editing error had dropped a graf from the website posting of his article on New Orleans. Its the third graf, and it's about the beat. Dale noted it was 'crucial', and I see what he means.

Tomorrow night, he'll be channelling Lou Reed in Bloomington. Wish I could be thre.

Washington state ferries eye Wi-Fi (at Computerworld). Eric Sinclair pointed this out from Glenn's 80211blog.

Sounds like they're anticipating a subscription-based service rather than a free access or hourly access service, which is too bad from my perspective - it'd be neat to be able to use the ferries as an 'office' at whim.

That pricing scheme revs me up about the outrageous fare increases on ferries over the past year, actually - it was about $40 to the San Juans this summer and $30 for the Kingston run when Eric was in town.

If you're gonna run the services on a full for-proft unsubsidized basis, you have to provide competition, something which has not even entered the discussion here in the state. State-sponsored utility-style provisioning can't work unless the underlying premise of universal access is aggressively defended and defined to mean, well, universal access. The ferries, like our power rates, are undergoing a betrayal of public interest which serves no-one.

On the other hand, if the state yanks the rug out on the ferries and electrical power, I'm surely willing to extend this basic destruction of the fabric of our economy by extending the practice to our freeways. After all, only by completely destroying modern industrial economics can we properly correct our accelerated environmental destruction, eh?

No more subsidies for roads! An end to freeloading by the demon auto!

Emergency is where MetaFilter user Stavros, whose real-world name is Chris, has chosen to archive his real-time experiences of dealing with, and offering community support for, the injury, hospital status, and eventual death of his friend Rick.

Rick was mortally injured in the terror bombing of that nightclub in Bali on October 12.

Rick's loss, and the experience of his family and friends is unique and specific to him as an individual. Indeed, all our losses vary. But there is commonality in our experience as the bereaved, and I'm linking to Stavro's site today for two reasons.

First, I suspect the organic, personal use of the web to document loss and grief is a natural, if previously unexpected outcome of blogs in specific. Second, my writing about the loss of my sister was specifically prompted by my emotional state around the anniversary of September 11, and therefore Stavros' loss is directly connected in another way as well.

Halloween is coming soon, and then on November 2, our dead will join us for one night.

Happy 34th, little sister. I know you'll love the show.

Twice in two days, the server upon which my sites reside has locked up; I will be keeping an eye on it and looking to know what's causing this.

Step one was tightening up the firewalls on the box, so please let me know if there's a problem you note with the day-to-day functioning here; it's possible I will have blocked a port that is in internal use.

Step two will involve setting up some logging apparatus this week.

All of which may mean extended, mysterious outages and the like, darn it.

The night after we brought Mavis home, Dave picked up a copy of The Stranger, Seattle's gen-x alternstive weekly, which has generally suffered at the hands of Seattle Weekly's backing by Village Voice media and by a lack of staff turnover.

The paper still shows sparks of former greatess, however, and one such spark has been the inclusion of poster reviews since Seattle returned to the blessed state of well and widely postered.

Lo and behold, this week, they'd picked our neighbors' lost pet flyer, featuring the protagonist of yesterday's entry, the lost and lonely Mavis!

Mavis is doing well, her family reports. "She's an indoor kitty now," says Christian.

About three weeks ago, our neighbor's cat, Mavis, disappeared. They were pretty unhappy, as you might imagine, and put up flyers.

Mavis is a house kitty who's very skittish around cars, and so no-one could figure where she'd gone.

Friday night as Dave, Viv and I walked back from a pho dinner at Thanh Bros on Broadway, we saw a black and white cat about half a block down the street. She was on 13th, off John in the direction of the reservoir. I called, "Mavis?"

Much to my surprise, the cat immediatley responded, and came trotting over, meowing, but still skittish, especially when a car would go by on John. She came to Dave and was purring loudly.

I told Dave to pick her up, which he did, but she would have none of it. Pushing out of his arms emphatically, I feared she was going to run away.

I told Viv to go get our neighbors so that if she did run off familiar voices could call her. Viv dashed up the street.

Dave picked her up again, and this time she allowed him to hold her. Eventually the jumped to the ground again and then I picked her up. I could see one of our neighbors across the intersectiion of 12th and John, by now; we had begun carrying the cat up the hill. She was purring and obviously very happy to be receiving affection.

The cat was still tryig to jump away each time a car passed, and by the time our neighbor had crossed the street, she'd gotten to the ground again. Mavis was still allowing me to gently restrain her and I was stroking her and talking to her.

Both our neighbors had caught up with us now, and Mavis's 'mom' was crying for joy. He husband held her closely as she cradled Mavis. She was clearly overwhelmed by the unexpected gift of being reunited with her cat again after such a relatively long time. She kept remarking how much weight the cat had lost, tears running down her face.

I found I moving and difficult not to share her strong emotion.

What Do I Know points out this direct-linked video at Fandango.net. It's about 4 mb.

It made me laugh, and I still feel like this guy fairly frequently. Command-N means "new folder", dammit, not "new window."

Not to mention the ridiculous "slap the user silly" open and save dialogs which feature the patented "where the hell did my files go" user interface refinement.

But. Anyway.

Did I mention in part three of my unexpected geek celebrity interactions I will be interviewing William Shatner ths afternoon on the phone?

Lordy.

In the morning, when an IU graduate sees the headlines IU cops check on porn report and IU student saw actors, including one in a bear suit at Romenesko's oddities and morons news page, it sorta makes a man homesick for the crunchy leaves and shrieking hormone addled midwestern youth of his hometown.

Oh you crazy kids. We all remember our first porn bust with fondness. So many more yet to come.

Good times. Good times.

I quickmarched to the bookstore today, against my wallet's better judgment, in order to pick up a couple books for review at Cinescape.

It is a crisp, clear, sunny day; the afternoon sun shining brightly on autumn-scented air. The bright leaves of fall crumble beneath the feet of my neighborhood, and the trees – all of the trees, with the exception of our evergreens, naturally – are clad in full and brightly colored robes.

This is almost disturbingly anomalous. Fall in Puget Sound is overcast and drizzly, with rainstorms at predictable times of day.

Just before sunset, the sun breaks out from underneath the cloud deck to dazzingly illuminate the city with golden light so strong and yellow it defies belief. Increasing the contrast, this is uniformly preceded by a half-hour of rain.

Likewise, just before dawn, rains sweep through the city. It's been this way every year here since I arrived for about three months, from October through December, and there are certain consequences.

The rain knocks the leaves from the trees. The overcast dampens people's mood, somewhat. The light show in the half-hour before sunset is like a great shout of laughter. The air is perfectly clean, without a hint of pollution, also due to the twice-daily rain.

This year, the air smells of a city and of burning leaves. The trees and the sidewalks carry the leaves, and the leaves on the ground retain their brittleness long enough to crunch and crumble underfoot.

It's pleasant, because the ambience is that of the falls of my youth in Southern Indiana. It's disturbing because it certainly means that the drought will adversely affect everything from municipal water stores, to, yet again, my freakin' electricity bill (I turn my head, mutter "fuckin' Enron pigs," and spit).

I lived here for six years before I realized that spring here smells like flowers, not chlorophyll. I know what the damp smell of autumn is here, and what I smell this year ain't it.

So.

My job has taken a turn for the much more interesting, as you may have noted. I spent Monday afternoon on the set of X-Men 2 in Vancouver, watching a scene being shot, which I described for Cinescape here:

X-MEN 2 exclusive shooting notes.

The other story posted today from the visit can be found here:

X-MEN 2 spoof takes.

The second story recounts a few clips that we were shown by the director, Bryan Singer. Singer's also directed "The Usual Suspects", the first X-Men movie and more. He looks very, very young. He's actually a mature, seasoned 35.

What's interesting for me in the context of the writing I've been doing here is this: I write about what I observe, internally or externally, during the day. Suddenly, I'm also being paid to do this.

I mean, I theory, I'm being paid. Check's in the mail. You know. You've all heard how that works, I'm sure.

So, back to the main topic. How can I write about what I see without using material which my editors feel they have an exclusive interest in? It's a pickle, lemme tell ya.

Additionally, the process of writing professionally is much more time-consuming than writing here. Here, I can just make up what you have to say, although I certainly hope to accurately convey the meaning and flavor of a quote in this context. There, I have to roll the tape and check the notes, and even then I still get it wrong sometimes.

On the way back from Vancouver this time, we found the border crossing where the customs officials DON'T scowl and snap from under all-black paramilitary gear. But I can't tell you where it is unless you'll take a loyalty oath.

What else? It's not news to CINESCAPE readers, I guess, that there are hundreds of people, well, a good hundred, anyway, who hang around for hours and hours while a film is being made. It wasn't really news to me, either, but there sure were a lot of people on the set.

I shook hands with Ian McKellen, the film's Magneto, which, really, was very cool. Also with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who plays Mystique, and, yes, it was much like shaking hands with a blue-paint-covered naked supermodel. One does not know what the appropriate social behavior is. Smile, look into her eyes, nice to meet you.

Really, too much, too hard to separate the news from the personal right now. Tomorrow, I must write everything in a rough draft form so I have it as raw material for here, and there, and elsewhere. As an exercise, it will be a good thing, I think, to be thinking about personal versus news while I work on this tomorrow.

I do have a concrete assignment or two for the material from Cinescape as well, and that will undoubtedly shape it.

So, what just happened here? Did I just wake up and find out that I'm a writer? I am so confused. No. Bemused.

Time for a nice glass of scotch.

Off to Vancouver for more X-Men stuff.

See you tomorrow. Here's the first two stories from the press conference I went to on Friday.

McKellen on X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN, SUPERMAN

(he makes a kind of snarky remark about them other guys)

Stewart: Picard or Xavier could kick Kirk's butt

One captain to another. Entertainingly, I was told I might get to do a quick interview with William Shatner soon. The initial statement Stewart made (concerning Achilles) was in response to a question from me.

I apologize for not offering more thoughtful material on these experiences and hope to be able to shortly. A major part of my hesitation is an uncertainty concerning how to draw a line between what's appropriate for here and what's best reserved for Cinescape.

The explosion blinded me, and I started back in shock as I waited for feeling to return to my face, just ahead of the rumbling wall of debris carried on the shockwave. I began to realize that I had heard a loud sound just as I looked up, out of the window. I should not have long to wait.

I may have dropped the x-acto blade and ruler I was using in paste-up, or I may have carefully placed them on the surface of the layout table, groping in my blindness. Which direction was I facing? Northwest. That's where I saw the flash. There was a three-story building in that direction. Had I seen the flash through the upper stories of the building?

It must have been an airburst. That should scramble radio; all I would hear would be static. Did an EMP weapon also knock out power? I could still hear my Lou Reed tape crooning "ooooo, new sensations." It must not have been an EMP burst, then. What was to the northwest?

Crane Naval Weapons Storage Depot was north of the city, I thought. Wasn't it a county north? That'd be what, fifteen miles?

I had been taught to count seconds from the lightning stroke ripping the spring skies of the Midwest until I heard the thunder roll. One second of silence meant one mile of distance. Count and compare two strikes to determine if the storm is headed toward you or away.

Had it been fifteen seconds since the flash? I had been jolted with terror as my field of vision whited out, and been deep in concentration on the task at hand. Now I became more aware of my body as I began to guess how long had passed. I had received a full dose of adrenaline, and my heart roared and thumped in my ears, my neck.

I was seated, bolt upright, on my draftsman's stool. My body was rigid, alert, tensed for immediate flight or more information regarding the imminent threat.

I was working in an office on the second floor of one of the oldest buildings on Bloomington's downtown square, a two-story brick building that dated, as I recall, to the 1850s and which may have had a name that reflected its' original builders. A cannon ball was lodged in the side of the building, just under the window out of which I was at that moment looking. I had been told that the ball was the result of a Civil War skirmish. It's not clear how factual that information is.

It is known that during the Civil War, a garrison of union troops was stationed in Bloomington specifically to minimize the impact of any secessionist counties in the southern half of the state, Indiana. The unit was used to quell a rebellion in Brown County, but from Bill Weaver's accounts of the rebellion for a Brown County newspaper, the rebellion consisted of some meetings that were broken up. No heavy artillery appeared in the retellings.

Since the building dated back so far, I had no great faith in the seismic integrity of the building. In fact, I recalled the spectacular collapse of another elderly brick building down the street when I was a child. The Towne Cinema's grand slump had been accompanied by a fire which destroyed a print of Ralph Bakshi's ambitious "American Pop". I recall this because I was hoping to see the film the next day.

I had just reached the conclusion that it was a good idea to get the hell out of the building before the scientific tsunami reduced it to rubble and trapped me within, blind, burned, and bleeding. I began to grope for my jacket.

I had remained facing the window, and as my hand brushed my jacket, draped on the backrest of my chair, I noticed a slight pinkishness to the undifferentiated field of black that had replaced the unbearable white.

Then, quickly, the pink flushed through the spectrum, resolving, as the darkness cleared, into the view out the window I had expected to see moments before, as I looked up.

Out the window, cars rolled, people walked, and small birds flitted; the streetlights changed, and fall leaves fluttered to the sidewalk. A telephone pole just outside the window rocked violently back and forth, the only object in such motion. Just below a large cylindrical capacitor, an eight-inch bar of metal whipped in the trail of the pole's oscillations.

Occasionally, the bar would graze a set of clamps, obviously designed to hold one end of the bar in place, and a rosy-white shower of sparks would burst forth for a moment.

I gaped.

After a moment, I realized what had happened. I had glanced directly at the capacitor on the pole just at the moment a power surge, or something, had overloaded the gear. The simple, exposed metal breaker had been thrown as a result, accompanied by a blinding arc.

The crisis passed, I immediately began laughing and shaking uncontrollably. I turned to my half finished layout and was not able to hold the x-acto as my body burned the adrenaline off. I scrawled a half-legible note, and took the afternoon off.

As I recall it, the note read, "Survived nuclear explosion – gone to drink heavily. Will make up time tomorrow."

It's a long drive up and back in a day - 3 hours each way, with a slow border cross both ways. We got waved into Canadian emigration for a short bit of closer scrutiny on the way up it was shorter on the way back.

I had left my birth certificate in the trunk when we hit the border on the way back, and the black clad border inspector, who looks just like a swat cop without armor, instructed up to pop the trunk.

He negelcted to tell me to get out of the car to get the certificate, though. Rule number one with cops and cars is do nothing unless specifically instructed, so when he expressed irritation that I had not exited the car to et the certificate I was puzzled.

Anyway, we got through with no difficulty.

I do not know how much of the material from my visit needs to be reserved for Cinescape, so I can't write about what I saw in great detail here yet. But it was cool, and very interesting.

We were attending a press conference and set walkthrough for the X-MEN 2 movie currently in production in Vancouver. Nearly the entire cast was at the press conference, and I asked a question during the conference of Patrick Stewart. Then I got shy and clammed up, much to my disappointment.

The set walkthough was also remarkable. For now, all I'll note concerning the sets is that what we were shown was very large.

For work. With Spence. At an ungodly hour approximating the time of this posting.

And I get to do it again on Monday. Any drivers?

Well, it'll still be fun. 3 hours up, three back. Six to eight on the job.

Boing Boing links to a discussion of the TiBook's realtive wimpitude in airport (WiFi, 80211b) range compared to the iBook, which has a nice antenna that extends range.

But the reason I'm linking is because of the acronym and explanation for laptop cards!

I'm just going to repeat it here, so, like, don't bother.

PCMCIA: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms!

Ha ha ha ha.

Ha.

That's hilarious!

What the hell do I know, I'm no Ken Goldstein!

Say it with me now: KEN GOLDSTEIN KNOWS FUNNY!

Rarely does my editorial troll uncover material that I want to refer to here, but last night I found this:

NEW WALLACE AND GROMIT!

Free! Online! Did I mention it's FREEEEE!

It's only a minute, but still.

One of my correspondents turned in this very interesting news: James Sturm, author of The Cereal Killings, a founder of the Onion's sibling the Stranger out here in Seattle, and most recently the author of the fascinating baseball comic The Golem's Mighty Swing, will be authoring a Marvel miniseries starring the Fantastic Four, to be titled Unstable Molecules.

Sturm's work fascinates me for the same reasons that Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay does: both artists take elements of pop culture generally recognized as fantastic or in Chabon's term, "Escapist", and rework the themes from fantasy and wish fulfilment to expressions of personal and social growth and accomplishment.

Anyway, I think it's innerestin', cuz comic books is neat-o.

All Roads Lead to Olympic is Anne Zender's picture post on our recent weekend together in Seattle. She got her pix processed first, darn it, and there's a lovely shot of Eric and me at Hurricane Ridge which makes me happy.

pix.whybark.com :: Rainier with Spence (8-26) :: 9 is an image of the other mountain, which Eric and Anne did not see except when they flew out.

There's some neat shots of the high trails around Paradise in the fog starting here. I believe I like this one the best.

These are pix from late August, on a jaunt taken in company with dear pal Spence. Unfortunately, that picture I link to at the top of the post was the best view of the moon-tang we had all weekend.

Earthy: 12240 points. I'd like to thank strategy and luck, and years of reading!

C'mon, show me whatcha got.

I subscribe to the Vulgar Boatman email list, and bandleader Dale Lawrence posted this today:

The Boatmen are playing two special Halloween shows next week, masquerading as the Velvet Underground.

Friday October 25 at Vertigo in Bloomington (IN): It's a fund-raiser for the Pin-Up, a local arts publication. The club itself will be masquerading as Andy Warhol's Factory and the Boatmen will play two full hours of your (or at least our) favorite Velvets songs.

Saturday October 26 at Radio Radio in Indianapolis. A Halloween theme night featuring seven Hoosier combos, all in disguise (Pink Floyd, the Beatles, etc). The Boatmen go on at midnight and play an abridged (30-minute) version of their Velvets set.

I'll give you a nickle if you attend both nights.

Believe me, this has every possibility of really being something. I am hosting ten songs from a show the band played in February, 2001 which sound uncannily like Exploding Plastic Inevitable era VU. This is possibly by design, since they cover Foggy Notion (unfortunately, the file I'm hosting cuts off... but the recordist promises more from the tape this Thanksgiving).

If you're still kicking around Indiana, go to this show.

On Sunday, the four of us (Eric and Anne, visiting from Chicago; and my wife Vivian and myself, for those keeping score at home) engaged in one of the umpteen mandated activities for out-of-town visitors and took our city’s lovely, 60’s vintage monorail from downtown a whole mile to Seattle center, where the Space Needle and the Experience Music project are located.

The Seattle Monorail Project and the local politics around it came up, of course. I held back from a full-on rant about the incredible resistance to the monorail initiatives – soon to be voter approved in three separate ballot measures - on display from local elected officials and media, the absolute flip-side of the cheerleading for our thrice-defeated-at-the-polls sports stadiums. Our local political class and media leadership have set a tone, which is inimical to democracy, and it chaps my hide.

But as I said, I held back. Good for me.

We were considering visiting the Pacific Science Center, but decided against it; Eric and Anne were not really interested in visiting the Experience Music Project either. I’m not certain why, exactly, but after making sure they had a reasonable idea of what was available to see there, I didn’t push it.

We knew that there was an antiquarian book fair being held that weekend on the Center grounds and I was sure that Eric would be interested. We wandered in the direction of one of the exhibit halls, where I thought the fair was (incorrectly, as it turned out), and paused to observe the not-so-new any longer fountain, doing its’ synchronized fountaining to various music pieces, including a particularly ridiculous New Age inspirational number, all thrumming synth pan-pipes and smattered harpistry against the reverb of the kettle drum and chimes.

I was inspired to spontaneously narrate an inspirational powerpoint montage on the theme of teamwork, corporate efficiency, innovation, and the idiot pablum of the cube farm. I amused myself hugely. I have no idea about anyone else.

Moving around the fountain we passed the unctuous pre-recorded security warnings emanating from Key Arena, which sounded exactly like something from a Judge Dredd comic. I mocked them in this manner: “Greetings! You have entered a zone of suspended constitutional rights! For your safety, please do NOT make cynical or sarcastic remarks regarding these security measures! This undermines the ability of our enforcement personnel to maintain control of the situation! Violators WILL be beaten prior to being ejected from the premises!”

Ah, simple pleasures for a simple man.

Finally, after some misguided peregrinations we arrived at the book fair, two large rooms full of old and interesting books. I almost immediately ran into Rick, the guitarist from the Sun City Girls, a long-time acquaintance, and we chatted about their upcoming tour, his book stock (he was there as a dealer) and caught up in general.

There were two R. Crumb originals from the eighties on display and for sale in one booth; I did not ask the price for fear I’d decide I could afford them.

We wandered on, and in the second room, were immediately confronted with an intimidating, enticing, huge pile of individual leaves from medieval miniatures, all of great beauty. The booth these leaves were at offered a very extensive and high-quality stock, but was the only dealer offering large quantities of leaves. Individual book leaves such as these are controversial because in order to offer the leaves, a book must be broken up, which obviously makes scholastic work on the book impossible.

Nonetheless, stuff like this happens to all old and valued art in every culture throughout history and I can’t find it in me to get worked up over it.

Other items of note (some of which I’m still amazed to have gazed upon) included a first edition of a book printed by Ben Franklin; a book carrying a dedication and autograph from Ché to Juan Peron (“saludos revolucionarios, Ché”) that was of obscure fascination for me; a little note from J.R.R. Tolkien, which thrilled me in a way that’s hard to describe because I knew his handwriting.

The same case displayed two letters from George Washington, one of which was laid serendipitously next to a note from Thoreau. Geo’s handwriting was astonishingly meticulous, zero line variation or letter-shape variation, and open and clean and large and legible. It emanated discipline and rectitude.

Mr. Thoreau’s hasty note featured such wild variation of line width and apparent velocity that one could hardly fail to note that the philosophical approaches to life (and what we know of them as they have been depicted to us as media creations) of these two distinguished gentleman, inventors of my nation, were embodied in such a quotidian thing as their handwriting.

There was an unbroken medieval book of days available for a mere one-hundred-thousand dollars, and many small, ancient copies of printed manuals of magic and alchemy, collectively known as incunabulae and somewhat disparaged because of their status as supposed unreliable information sources and wellsprings of superstition. To me, they may be that. But so are more conventionally accepted works of spiritual reflection, and these books are also interesting sources of art and the printers’ craft well worthy of a leafing through.

I had an interesting conversation with a dealer who specialized in Latin America concerning some interesting books I have that passed to me from my family’s time in Chile in 1969; one of the books was published following the Chilean coup (of a few years later) in English and I understood it to be a publication of the junta aimed at increasing American support for the coup; the gentleman I spoke with knew the book bad had some differing opinions about the book, and encouraged me to get in touch with him.

I was surprised to see only one example of American woodtype publicity posters from the nineteenth century, which are my favorite for their shouting, bumptious ornamentation and flowery throbbist purple prose. Again, I did not ask the cost lest I should decide it was affordable.

There were four small first editions of the initial publications of Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest who spoke out against the treatment of the Native Americans at the hands of Columbus himself and continued to do so until his death, many years later. These works were heeded in their day but the polices growing from them proved unenforceable, and the consequence, through the end of the great plagues among the Natives, was virtual genocide. However, las Casas’ forceful advocacy for the native populace unquestionably helped provide the framework from which the rich and beautiful hybrid cultures of Latin America sprang.

Seeing these books was a moving experience for me. I was grateful for it.

Finally, there were numerous large (15 x 22 inch or larger) examples of medieval music, which immediately appealed to me as a possible wall decoration. Upon investigation, I was both surprised and not surprised to find that these large sheets were, as with the bound music I mentioned earlier this week, relatively inexpensive. Prices ranged from about $300 to as low as $50, which astounds me.

I was pleased to be able to (more-or-less) read the Latin on many of the sheets.

I did not buy any, though. If we’d gone on Saturday I believe I would have returned on Sunday to pick one up.

Apologies for my weakened discipline - Eric and Anne are in town and I haven't had time to plant butt in chair long enough to discourse upon aught. There will be makeups and fictional dates attributed.

But I have been practicing my conjugations of "tump", in honor of Eric's degree from Texas A&M and his paternal status as horse-wranglin' Texan.

He's awful quiet though. I just can't seem to get him into the lie-telling and shoutin' mode one expects. Since we both actually grew up in Indiana maybe there's a reason for this.

Eric and I began our friendship because of a book. It was one of those '70s Star Trek paperbacks. Since then both he and I have perpetually crammed our living spaces full of other books. Vivian occasionally tries to cull the herd, as it were, but I'm agin it.

Thus it was appropriate that today we worked our way from Pioneer Square back up to Pike Place Market and thence to Capitol Hill, my 'hood, by way of bookstores and one book bindery.

Vivian and I are having an 1868 American edition of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words rebound as a gift for Viv's best friend, a piano teacher. I was surprised to learn that genuinely old lithographed scores, such as those in this book, are quite inexpensive. The book, in fact, cost significantly less than the new binding; and you'll generally find that antique bound music collections are very inexpensive. Much less, in fact, than prose books of similar vintages.

I suspect that this is a reflection of the relative incidence of literacy; many more persons can read transcriptions of spoken language than can read musical notation.

I find the valuations remarkable, particularly in light of the extremely elaborate frontispieces which have been common to music publication since at least the 1820's. It's a really interesting way to increase your personal exposure to antique book design, type, and illustration, especially if (as I do) you admire the frequently disparaged work of American commercial typographers and typesetters of the nineteenth century.

When we walked into the bindery, I immediately noticed not one but two 13 by 10 inch 4-inch tall printer's lithography stones, the foundation of industrial printing from just after the turn of the 19th century until around World War One. No longer produced, these stones were all quarried at one place, from the Solenhofen Limestone, in Germany.

Science geeks will recognize this as the place which yielded archeoptryx, the dino-bird which is regarded as the best evidence of the link between dinosaurs and birds. Archeoptryx is also the reason that the stones are no longer milled. The deposit which the stones were taken from was desirable for lithography because of its' perfectly even grain and the ease with which it could be worked. The process was partly invented in Solenhofen because the stone was available.

The same conditions that produced that perfect grain - consistent settling of silt without disturbance for centuries - also, necessarily, created conditions perfect for incredible preservation of fossils. Archeoptryx is important not only for the morphological features it shares with dinosaurs and birds, but also for the fact that the fossil's original soft organic matter was cast, as well as its' bones: you can see the animal's feathers.

When alternative plate material, such as plastics and steel, became available for use in lithography printing (still the primary method for commercial printed material production today), mining of the deposits for the production of further litho stones was forbidden. The litho stones of Solenhofen became heirlooms of a vanished technology, so that the trove of fossils secreted and remaining might tell us new stories of the deep past.

Thus, the stone which helped to build mass publishing and therefore literate culture and all its attendant benefits (and comp/aints) is now more deeply precious by dint of simple physical rarity and the even more rare fossils the stones hold within their hearts. Perhaps Daumier's celebrated "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was drawn upon a stone that holds with in it an even more perfect specimen of Archeoptryx.

To find these stones, holding dual significance of the heritage of nature and culture, employed in the shop of an antiquarian book bindery made my visit there distinctly pleasant. In the bindery, the stones are used as a cutting surface for the leather being prepared in the bindings.

The craft of the shop, of course, carries information forward from the past in two discrete ways itself. By repairing old and worn bindings for antique books, the information in the old books becomes more accessible itself; and the craft of the shop per se is an information vector from pre-industrial times.

The heritage of deep archeological time; the heritage of the book itself, predating printing; the heritage of the antique book from the inscribed manuscript to the introduction of flexible-plate lithography; and the heritage of printing, of widely reproduced knowledge and art, all were represented before me in that tiny craftsman's shop. I stood and smiled in this knowledge.

Eric, Anne, Vivian, Eric's cousin Ilse, and I went to Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics for a picnic today.

Eric has one of them new fangled micro-wireless doohickeys, a Danger hiptop, I think, that allows you to check email, reply, websurf, and so forth from a thing about the size of an overweight palm pilot.

I tried to post to the site from the line for the ferry with it, and was able to log in and compose an entry, but lost the signal about the time I hit "submit". So, no George Jetson entry for today, alas.

I do have pix, but - alas - the MT upgrade has sprung an undoing of thumbnailing at upload upon me. So none for now. (OK, now is later, now. so now, being later, there's a pic)

Eric did, pretty much, keep saying "wow", as he looked out across the view from the Ridge. "We don't get so much of this in Chicago or Indiana."

Eric, who'll be here later today for the weekend with his lovely wife Anne, had an unpleasant urban event happen in his back alley yesterday.

He shares some impressions at the link above.

I had every intention of using the Trackback doohickey, but ya know what? It doesn't work the way it should. So I won't.

By "should", I mean I can't just use the Trackback URL as the link, which is certainly what's required for widespread, casual user adoption.

Shuttle external view liftoff video.

On um, Monday (?) they added a new feature to the Shuttle liftoff - real time video on the shuttle itself, looking down.

The link is to an archive of space and rocketry vis, inlcuding the listoff vid.

Via BoingBoing sideblog.

Metafilter is, as many of you know, a community website which consists of audience submitted websites. Boingboing.net is similar, but more moderated in structure (a team sifts suggestions for posting). There are lots of others, each with their own approach and ethos, such as the blog-centric blogcritics, the activist Indymedia (invaluable for “radioactive” news stories such as protests, not as diverse as one might hope for analysis: anonymity and paranoia discourages reflective writing, generally) and the grandpappy of all of 'em, the computerly-oriented slashdot, which in turn derives some of its genetic code from usenet, a pre-web news and discussion environment well-archived at groups.google.com.

D’you remember on “Millionaire” how accurate the audience was? I read somewhere that on the show, in 80% of the cases where the audience was polled on the correct answer to the posed question, the audience was correct. Metafilter is like that. To a varying extent, the rest of these sites are was well. The information presented is fragmentary and holographic, and you, the observer of the audience interaction, must assemble the data into your own picture.

The sites express the theory and practice of democracy, the thesis that we all collectively are able to make decisions together that are the least hurtful for the most of us.

Sometimes the reactive power of the collaborative sites is astonishing. Do you recall that big winner for the evening news a short while ago, the angry mom smacking her kid around near an SUV that was taped on a security camera? The day the story broke, there was a thread on MeFi that shortly included a detailed, knowledgeable discussion of the possibility that the woman and her daughter were Irish Travellers, a gypsy-like culture that was able to transplant lifestyle, controversy, and tradition to the United States.

I’d never heard of the Travellers before the MeFi thread. The family’s heritage as Travellers or not is not germane, particularly, to the news story – woman strikes child – and this was only tangentially mentioned in the professional news coverage a few days later.

This is not a unique experience – and it happens on Slashdot frequently as well. Mind you, these sites can be wrong as hell; they don’t offer the same kind of apparatus that professional news sources do. But when they are right, they are right more informatively and faster, it seems to me, than conventional news sources.

Personally, I adore MetaFilter and boingboing the mostest. Metafilter in particular, with its huge userbase (over 15000) is something I ping at least daily, often both morning and night.

I have yet to reflect on this to the point that I can effectively write about it as a discrete topic, but MeFi and boingboing between them, in conjunction with blog sites (that’s many of you, dear reader) and the NYT website, to a lesser extent – it gets used for specific coverage of a topic I want old-style validated reportage on – has replaced my daily paper as the main way I follow unfolding events in the world.

Well, that, and the Daily Show.

I still read the paper, but I kind of buzz through it for orientation, then I read MeFi, then boingboing, then you guys, then the Times, and then I start my news troll for Cinescape, keeping in mind interesting material I saw in the other four places as I look at the entertainment press.

Oh yeah, Google News is right on the verge of being my daily international page. One aspect of it that I perceive is it appears to skew coverage based on where morning is: if you read it when it’s 3am in the UK, you’ll get all the UK’s morning site updates, for example.

Hm, interestingly, that means that without a doubt I am consuming far more news on a daily basis than at any other time in my life.

Even more interestingly, my job is to add to that stream of info while at the same time filtering it for Cinescape’s audience, which I understand to be (online at least) very entertainment-industry in composition.

tap tap tap

squEEELpangggg!

H-hello?

'zis thing on?

tap tap tap

now with MT two-point-fivey goodness!

(I 'spect my perl search is broken, at the moment. I'll make time to fix it tonight.)

UPDATE: Search repaired, and even improved a bit. Now the sidebar in the search results is updated when the page builds. Also, I think that the good people at Movable Type may have tightened up the performance of the search code per se - it didn't feel as, uh, "draggy" (testing a plugin with those quotes, too. Shucks, no dice.).

Uhm, far out. Like.

Heather's been invaded by a confused bird.

Hilarious! Perhaps next time, the male of the species, loong feathers and all!

No Nostalgia has updated their site this week.

They are the label-side of both the Mysteries of Life, whom I've written about at length here, and the Vulgar Boatmen, whom I'm overdue to write about.

As with most things, it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it.

But.

Not tonight.

Instead, I'll call your attention to the No Nostalgia hosted Dale Lawrence article, "On Mashups", which Eric Sinclair noted to me when it appeared in the Chicago Reader a few weeks back; Dale is writing about his appreciation for the form which is currently best known for propelling Elvis back to his proper #1 place on the charts with "A Little Less Conversation". Dale does not write about this record however, but rather about more obscure remixes which combine two disparate tracks to create a new work, frequently completely unauthorized. He digs the crazy kids, baby.

I'll also point out Dale's recounting of An Extra Week in New Orleans this spring, when he made time, among other things, to attend the Mystic Kights of the Mau-Mau's First Annual Ponderosa Stomp.

The Stomp was a nearly-unbelievable lineup of greats and obscurities from the heydey of American regional rock, which I encourage you to learn about both from Dale's article and from the Mau Mau site.

Dale is the reason I love rock music, no bones about it: his music taught me everything I know and believe on the topic, so reading his account of watching Scotty Moore play "Heartbreak Hotel" in a small-club setting had special meaning for me (Moore was Elvis' guitarist on most of his early records, including that one).

Too bad Buddy Holly lies in his grave lo these many years, as I nurse the thesis that Holly stands to Dale as Dale stands to me (with the caveat that I'm not in the same musical league, mind you; matters of taste and theory only, uh, theoropositated).

Anyway, at least one good pal of mine was involved in getting the Stomp together, and it pleases me greatly that some sort of dialog should result. In a way that's not too far fetched, Dale's music helped make the Stomp a reality, and helped conjure Scotty Moore there in front of him.

It's a conjure town, they say.

Ihnatko on some bands from the sixties.

See, I told you that you didn't have to be a Mac techie to find him amusing!

(Dear God, I can spell the man's last name without checking now.)

My review of THE CARTOON HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE VOLUME III is up at Cinescape now.

If you haven't read Vols 1 & 2, by all means do! Allan Bloom is crying becasue of YOU!

(What? you don't think he was referring to these books in his hearty cries for more history in the curriculum? Could be. In that case, let him cry, cuz you should still read 'em. They might even lead you to gen-u-wine classics: I wouldn't ever have paused for Herodotus if not for these books.)

Volume 3 is more good stuff, with less of the funny bits, I thought. The central narrative of the book is, in fact, the rise of Arab civilization and the period in which it held sway over the Mediterranean.

Lots of ground covered here that I don't recall from History 101. Well hell, just read that review.

Aargh, sorry this entry isn't up til now. Guess I got too involved on Friday and Saturday. So: howzabout some mixed notes?

First off a big YEESH to Mr. Baruz for hooking me up to mainline a dang wordgame: Bookworm will keep me from my household chores for days. Weeks, even. I got NOZZLES with some bonus or something.

Next, I went overboard on the research for what's gonna be an 800-word piece on the IMAX re-releases of "Attack of the Clones" and "Apollo 13," and went and saw "Space Station 3D" and "Apollo 13" back to back last week. Or maybe the week before. I forget. Go see 'em both.

"Space Station 3D" was in un-headachy, polarized-lens-headset 3D and boy was it neat. It was very interesting to compare and contrast the static, information filled framing of the 3D movie to the artful, you-only-get-to-see-what-we-show-you approach of what is an excellent Hollywood flick, A13.

I'm working on another oversized project to spring on y'all soon. It's neat, If I do say so myself. It's not as convoluted as the KGP.

Hey-HEY RAM is cheap again. $50 for half a gig. Get it now before the port closings start messing things up good.

We have two successive waves of guests arriving shortly; Hotel Perez-Whybark will be booked until November.

I have let my blogrolls get out of hand.

Somehow, I must impose order.

Time for musing.

I'd been thinking I needed to point out some of the new links over in my sprawled out collection of blogrolls over there, and the latest of Paul's occasional summarization entries reminded me of this.

So, to wit:

Griff's ultramicroscopic generally publishes the harebrained reflections of this funny Texian designer. Since I've read him, he's, among other things, proposed that toilet seats are the cleanest surface in the house, noted that his proper nickname may be "Tater-Head", and of course, offered a reflection on the particular value of olfactory stimuli with regard to bacon cheesburgers. I'd hazard a guess that he's a big Farrelly Bros. fan. (How'd'ya spell that?)

Do not drink Coke while reading lest you suffer the dreaded snort-attack.

Scott Chaffin's The Fat Guy (another Texian) has been noted previously here, I think. I enjoy reading it because Scott is prone to neanderthal outbursts of conservatism which he immediately doubts, in smaller type, beneath them. He's also very funny. The tension between his dead-set certainties and immediate uncertainty absolutely humanizes his presentation, makes him a better read than, say, The Economist or P. J. O'Rourke.

I'm interested in what Scott has to say precisely because he shares his process of perception, whereas when I make the effort (it's rare, because I get so worked up) to read one of the professional conservatives, I just want march over to their house and punch them repeatedly in the face. I don't learn anything from that experience, while I do from Scott's writing. How can I put this? Scott's writing is lower-case-d democratic, and in my book, that's a good thing.

He also subscribes to the "leave it be" blogging school, so you can, for example, follow his experience of and reactions to the supposed discovery of weapons-grade nuclear materials by the Turks last week. He's cooled off a bit here, and then gets the news there were no radioactive materials involved.

I understand he's in the market for a good tin-foil hat.

Back when I was unfolding that tragedy for y'all, I was happy to find that well-known Macintosh funnyman Andy Ihnatko had revivified his website with a creaking, clanking homebrewed blog apparatus. He's been posting semi-reg'lar since then, and boy is he funny. I think he's even funny of you're not a Mac techie. But how the hell would I know?

Also added that week was Brian Sobolak's Planetary Delight, in which Mr. Sobolak reflects. Brian was the first person I did not know to write in response to my work that week. His writings reflect what I take to be some wrestling with intermittent depression, something I'm familiar with. It's interesting, to me, to read his entries because of the familiar ring they have on the subject. The experience of looking at the world and seeing nothing in it that renders pleasure, only reminders of suffering, while at the same time simply shrugging about the perception, is, well, familiar.

Finally, Brian recommended the Amazing K's Driving through Nebraska, which I heartily second. While K's compositional style is a bit unpolished for the web (no short paragraphs separated by white space here), his writings are densely allusive and frickin' laugh-out-loud HILARIOUS.

The density of the postings is such that the effect is overhearing that kind of nutty bohemian-of-all-trades who mumbles in the corner at your favorite coffeeshop. It turns out he's not so nutty, he's just had a LOT of espresso, and his stream-of-consciousness runs to, among other things, comparing his dog's waste-voiding practices to the compositional techniques of Gustav Mahler and Wagner. In fact, his essays tend to be too dense to easily cite, and he's absurdly prolific (on the day I post this, for example, he's posted eight entries between 11:26 am and 2:17 pm).

Although there are others in the "new" section, they are clearly better-known and longer-established, so I'm not gonna fret about describing them.

So, ta-ta to you, and see you tomorrow.

Googlefight: hours down the drain. Endless fun. A new gambling opportunity.

via MeFi.

Ken kicked my ass six ways from sunday, btw, the bastid: Mike Whybark v. Ken Goldstein.

On the other hand, this is obviously a conventional wisdom meter: Rolling Stones v. Beatles.

So what on earth should I make of quality v. quantity?

I suppose I'll take consolation in the knowledge that discernment v. popularity at least provides a sensible result.

I can rest my case with the inevitable Macintosh v. Windows.

Drummond & Son, in the October 7 ish of the New Yorker, spins a sodden tale of my town, and I thought it was nailed. The geography is right, for example; and while Mr. D'Ambrosio locates his typewriter shop in Belltown, there was just such a shop about four blocks from where I live, that's now become a fine drinking establishment specializing in European beers.

I read the story in my living room, on the couch, as a fine fall rainstorm lowered our famous clouds above, a down comforter. I should have shouldered into a tweed and stepped outside, just to get the smell right as I read.

While I did not note any specific pop-culture clues to the time-setting of the story, I'd guess it was just about the time I moved here or a couple of years after. The city felt like the story feels - isolate, wet, distant, a reserved neighborliness - even chilliness - in the place of the yammering aggression that fuels most American cities.

If our recession stays the course, that's something that might return, I hope. I liked it here then. I liked the fact that buses were expected to be a part of the middle-class landscape and that poets and musicians could bump into one another in used book stores. Maybe that city's still out there.

Our air is noticeably fouler now than it was five years ago. As I've written here before, our governmental apparatus is in a state of paralysis, preferring to close libraries and launch smear campagns at various wings of themeselves than to support good ideas and execute them well in the public interest. Perhaps that listless stupidity is, as the story implies, Seattle's child. I hope not.

Mr. D'Ambrosio is interviewed here. Oh, look. A quote:

"Writing about the Pacific Northwest is a funny phenomenon, particularly being from Seattle. The Seattle that I have an allegiance to was a desperately unhappy place. It's not the Seattle that over the last ten years has evolved to become a place that, at least in the States, has a kind of national prominence. Particularly grunge music has focused attention on the place. It's really the Seattle of the 70's that I grew up in which had the highest unemployment rate in the country; it was a dump. There was a big sign above the freeway saying, "Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights." People were leaving in droves. Boeing [airplane manufacturer] had laid off a huge amount of people and the real estate market was totally depressed. Nothing was going on. And that's the city that I actually still look for in a way, even though it has become hidden by the coffee shops. "

nameneko, or something.

Yes, more cats.

Damn, I should tell my wife that this is turning into a, uh, cat-egory on the blog.

I remember seeing this genre of animal pics all over Nippon when visiting circa 1978. I found it perplexing.

570 bars. Drink your way through Seattle.

Once an ambition of mine, now laid aside. Via Absolute Piffle.

Blöödhag. It's an interview with a band I used to practice down the hall from. I saw the link at Boing Boing, and posted the following at the comments thereof. Then I thought, oh, you people would be interested in this.

Blöödhag is an "edu-core" band. They play ultra heavy speed-metally thrash. They also like reading.

To learn more, hit the interview. The website, Bloodhag.com looks to be down.

---

I practiced down the hall from them here in Seattle for years - about the time they were first getting local press, I was getting ready for a gig and they were having a band meeting.

I was puttering around, packing gear, and I kept hearing shouts, the sounds of young men expressing opinions.

(They all wear post-punk black and converse all-stars and glasses - kind of an ultra heavy nerd-core look. It made me fond of them.)

So I paused to hear more clearly. The shouts went like this:

"No, NO NO! We MUST put JRR Tolkien before Ray Bradbury! We gotta!"

"Are you CRAZY? Why the heck would ANYONE put Issac Asimov there? I think you're more after, like, Philip K Dick, or maybe Murray Leinster. Actually."

And so on.

It sounded like the craziest science fiction convention argument of all time. Like people ranking SF and fantasy authors by some secret system that they all understood but which was opaque to even a knowledgeable SF reader, such as yours truly.

Suddenly it hit me. All their songs - every last one - are named after authors. They were arguing about a set list or release order. Read the quotes above, but insert "Louie, Louie", and other song titles. You'll get it.

I did, and laughed out loud, and went down the hall to share my amusement with them.

So... Billy Childish played a song once that had that refrain, above, and it's a great song.

When Steve Jobs sings it, it's not so good, to me.

Ever since the very earliest installs of OS X I have had recurrent, highy irritating timeouts in the console which essentially amount to "I can't see any name servers, so you can't have the internet."

The messages are spurious and do not reflect actual status of the name servers addressed. Rather than trying again, and so on, the default behavior of the OS has been to stop attempting DNS enquiries until the process which performs the queries is stopped and restarted in one of several ways.

In lay terms, the computer decides that the pipe to the net is plugged and stops trying to get data from it. But the pipe's fine.

There's no meaningful documentation of this bug at Apple's website.

I'd learned workarounds.

Guess what? in OS X 10.2 (Jagwyre), my workarounds have been DISABLED! The lookupd messages in console are even gone.... but the problem is still there, and infact, it appears that all Apple's done is make it harder to diagnose the problem when it occurs.

Terminal, a new and different app apparently LACKING font smoothing, now has user-tied scrollback disabled as well.

Oh, I'm steamed. From my perspective and a couple of hours of scowling at the screen, this is a downgrade.

Keep working on the record!

Vee-Jay covers the interesting story of this label.

Here are A and B of a record they put out.

I'll provide you with these tidbits:

The record shown lacks a sleeve.

I found it in a record bin in the boonies someplace in North Carolina, and paid $2. it was a, like, Mom and Pop antique shop. I still wisht I'da bought the armadillo charranga they had.

(a charranga is the lil bitty guitar-like thing you see in use by your local Andean buskers, and sometimes in the context of mariachi combos. It's similar to a uke, but has more strings, if I recall aright.)

It's not clean. Someone stepped on it and pivoted, possibly while wearing Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars.

Alright record geeks, (there are at least two of you out there....) GO! What's so special here? I'll help, never fear!