Of interest to locals, Anita pointed out that the amusing John Moe has a blog, Monkey Disaster. She was on his new show, which is called The Works. I like the show and think it's very interesting, but unfortunately it runs in a bad time slot for me, 8pm Tuesdays. It reflects Moe's amusing on-air persona, and while my off the cuff description 'This American Life does a business show' is incomplete and a bit too extreme (or even inaccurate - it's an interview-based format, not elaborately produced), you get the idea. Maybe somewhere triangulated by The Onion, The Stranger, TAL. I sure like it better than Day to Day.

Oh, and speaking of public radio, see ya, Bob. Bummer about the pink slip. My God, how long has it been? November, 1979?

I was thirteen. It was the winter after the worst midwestern blizzard of all time. I have no recollection of the morning mix before Morning Edition - probably light classical mixed with weather and five-minute hourly news blips. I recall during the winter 1978 a sense that there should be more news in the morning - there simply wasn't time to read any national events after all the school closings. I guess we must have listened to the commercial stations as well - a quick peek at the charts for '78 reassures me there's a reason for my lack of recall.

The snow eventually drifted up over our garage door, making it impossible to get the cars out. Dad sent me up on the roof to argue with Cold Miser [large .wav file from here.], his reasoning being that I was lighter and could get some of the snow off to start attacking the drift. I recall being unhappy at the prospect instead of sensibly sledding down the drift. I don't recall if I ever actually made it to the roof.

Anyway, Morning Edition came as a giant anxiety reliever, specifically addressing the information flow problem I had experienced during the awful winter before. Life won't be the same without ya, Bob.

The Rasterbator: make it bigger - much, much bigger.

SFW, I sweauh ta gawd.

Back again for round 2 of FTF job interviews. I think I did OK, not kickass, but decent. I erred in not bringing a water bottle as I found myself susceptible to drymouth.

Read Chomsky.

No, really, read Chomsky. On his blog.

I have no idea if his title is a reference to the film, as my title here is, or perhaps to King Canute, or to a more obvious source.

[via MoFi. Good monkey! Have a banana.]

Jason D. dodges a bullet.

Whoo, is it bothersome to have blogrolling down. Good thing I was halfway through setting up a backup bookmarking system a while ago.

I gotta say the 9/11 hearings on the radio are making for gripping listening.

'Walking zombies' threaten subways - New York Newsday. It's a deal of trouble keeping them off the tracks.

Walking dead have a lot to tell the living - Cleveland Plain Dealer. Gems of wisdom such as 'ooouargh' come to mind.

Recording industry web site downed, possibly by zombies - USA TODAY [via BoingBoing]. If the RIAA is downed by the walking dead, is it self-inflicted?

Zombies push Jesus from top of North American box office - The New Zealand Herald (See also Zombies drive Jesus from Box Office at MTV). No word on how badly the fall may have hurt Our Lord.

Plight of the living dead - The Scotsman. Won't someone think of the zombies?

Zombie debt collectors dig up your old mistakes - MSN Money. Glad to see we're finding a way to put the poor buggers to good use.

Zombie behaviors integral to human consciousness - ScienceBlog.com. Yes, dear. Of course, dear. Mmm-hmm.

UPDATE: Now that's fresh: Company says some frozen lobsters live again - Maine Today [AP]. Missed this the first time through. I did see it on Monday, but forgot when assembling the headlines. [PF via Off the Kuff]

And finally, the always forward thinking LA Times proffers Lifestyles of the Undead at the subscription-only Calendar Live.

There are more headlines like this showing up every minute. I believe a mutant brain-eating virus may be spreading among the nation's headline writers.

I don't know about you, but I'm boarding up the house.

TRAPPED BY UNDEAD, NEED HELP - "This is not a joke. We are alone and constantly battling for our lives." At blogspot. A few days ago, they were wondering why there is an apparent news blackout. I'd say the blackout must be over. [seen on MeFi a few days ago]

"It's obvious that there was some kind of chemical explosion that might have led to the catastrophe that Roy and I are now a part of. Mr. Quincy tells me that these documents were drafted in response to the reports of, what at the time, seemed like mass canabilistic attacks in these areas."

I wonder, are these zombies somehow adipocerean?

Luckily, here's a helpful documentary from the sixties both on how to respond, and how not to. Practice gun safety, kids! [via BoingBoing again]

The (Not So Short) History of Paper Boats, by Ken Cupery.

"Over a hundred years ago a prosperous industry emerged in Troy, New York in the manufacture of rowing boats and canoes from paper. These ranged from simple single-person rowing shells to a 45 foot "pleasure barge" that could seat seventeen in addition to its six oarsmen. This business began in 1867 when Elisha Waters, a Troy NY paper box manufacturer, and his son George Waters, invented and then patented a method for constructing boat hulls from paper..."

I'll see our cardmodels and raise you a full-size boat.

Stumbled across while looking for a better steamboat model than the one to be found here, which came about from looking for a version of Stagger Lee via chordie (There are at least two). In the course of looking I learned that St. Lous stemaboat magnate Jim Lee had the habit of naming his boats after his sons, and one was the Stacker Lee - which is apparently unrelated except by name to the original gunsel, Lee Sheldon, who 'shot that boor boy so bad' in St. Louis in 1898.

chordie provides a meta-base of multiple web sites that contain various iterations of lyrics and chop-chord style marked-up versions of songs, which is the particular format I prefer to learn from. the site makes clever and appropriate use of CSS to send printer data. Alas for Safari's fixed 1/4" margins.

The site offers membership, which appears to provide users the ability to build song collections and to save these collections to PDF for downloading.

Finally, the site also offers a beautiful feature, instant song transposition. Here's the traditional song House of the Rising Sun - click the "Transpose" link under the chord lookup diagram, and look at the chords, both in place over the song lyrics, and in the lookup box.

The only feature I could think of that I'd like to see added is an instrument selection feature, so that I could set the chord lookup to display mando or banjo chords instead, or in addition.

As far as content, personally, I'd love to see the digitrad database added. The main website for digitrad is the Mudcat Cafe, but Rick Heit has long offered a 'personal' copy of the songs on his website. His offering is interesting because it provides the melodic information for the song in one of several formats.

I will be helping a friend move from Mac OS 9, where she relied upon a flavor of Netscape as her email client of choice. So some info on getting that data out will be helpful, I imagine.

to Mozilla 1.0 from N4.x.

Exporting the addressbook from N4.x.

Export from N.x to Outlook/OE.

Export from Yahoo to Mozilla, re-export to Address Book.

OE to AdBk.

Or I might consider trying an Apple-provided import script that supports multiple formats, including Palm, OE, Eudora, and Claris Emailer. Hm... maybe I should finally try to merge my Palm contacts with my woolly, overgrown thornbush of a Eudora address book.

Hmph. It only picked up 24 contacts, out of several hundred. Must not have known where to look.

So here's an ancillary question - can you get email archives out of Netscape?

Email Servers and Mac OS X - by Graham Orndorff, original publication date 2001.

Mac OS X Hints thread - scroll down for an updated rewrite of the preceding article.

Troubleshooting with Postfix Logs: by Kyle D. Dent, author of Postfix: The Definitive Guide - 01/22/2004 (at OnLamp, an O'Reilly site).

Send E-Mail Everywhere: Postfix on Mac OS X 10.3 Panther / 10.2 Jaguar. Step-by-step for CLI activation

The Postfix Home page.

PostFix Enabler bolts a GUI front end onto the vanilla Mac OS X postfix distro. Unfortunately it's documented rather sketchily, and the SSL cert tool it sports has yet to perform reliably for me, prompting this research binge. I think I figured out how to set up certs at the command line when I set up sendmail but that was a couple of years ago, as I recall.

Even when I have been able to get the cert to take, Eudora chokes at login; the message I get looks to me as though Eudora is misreading EOL characters from the server.

So here's a page on Eudora authentication errors.

I have a vague recollection of wrestling with UW-IMAP and the associated UW doohickeys to get Eudora to play nice; I thought that was all associated with the 'secure-only' reqs that is the current standard for email transfer.

Correspondent number 2 weighed in last night. Here's what Blake Carter has to say:

Ni hao Mike--

I suspect you've heard more about the craziness than I have. My boss likes the KMT because he says its' policies are economically more stable. Foreigners and musicians all like the DPP (President Chen's party) because he's big on Taiwan as Taiwan. My teacher friends with scooters are all annoyed with the traffic jams caused by the protests. With only a 0.2% victory for Chen, of course the KMT wants a re-count which according to yesterday's newspapers they're going to get. My Chinese teacher says don't go out at night because it may be dangerous, but she's thirty, still lives with her parents, and hangs out at net cafes playing video games.

As far as a fake shooting no one can say yet though there are some pretty strange circumstances, eg despite the fact you can't scratch your ass without someone taking a photograph, supposedly the only relevant pictures of the parade the police have come up with are 28 lanes from each other so they can only narrow down the shooting to a kilometer-long area (Chen didn't notice he'd been shot till blood came through his jacket and Lu, the vice-president, only said she felt a sharp pain in her knee and thought she'd been hit with a firecracker).

There's the bell for class; if I hear anything good outside of what the papers and TV say I'll let you know.

Got to go,
Blake

Blake's lived in Korea, China, and now Taiwan for (I think) more of the last ten years than he's lived in the U. S. He played concertina in the earliest version of the BKB. He has a bright red suit, dark black dyed hair, and an interesting sense of humor.

Certain mummies may be chemically transformed into adipocere, or 'grave wax'. (This links to a pretty comprehensive site on the subject which includes some very, very grisly photos, so buckle your seatbelt. Probably NSFW.)

When a body is subject to wet conditions for a period of time, it can transform into a kind of soap.

When I was a child, the Smithsonian Institution displayed, among countless other human bodies in the various display halls, the body of The Soap Man, the butter-colored corpse of a victim of a Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic from the late 1700s, William von Ellenbogen.

Sadly, in my opinion, the display of human corpses has become generally frowned upon in the context of institutions of higher learning, and with some exceptions, one by one the skulls and femurs have moved into storage.

The imeptus for this change was the passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. Unsurprisingly, the great majority of the human remains on display in museums across this great nation of ours were once inhabited by members of Native American culture.

The wide range of Indian remains on display at the Smithsonian and elsewhere reflected the interest in physical anthropology that dominated the developing discipline between 1875 and the beginning of the First World War. In a recent New Yorker piece on the great German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, this set of interests and the agenda - that of seeking to prove or disprove racial superiority and purity, frequently via braincase measurements - was detailed at length. The article in question is The Measure of America by Claudia Roth Pierpont, and appeared in the March 8, 2004 issue The New Yorker. For some reason, I found the article here, in what appears to be a stray Lexis-Nexis feed.

The approriate decision to remove the Amerindian remains appears to have prompted a reconsideration of the educational purpose of displaying soap mummies.

The accidental educational message of some of the displayed material is quite clear. Chicago's human body slices (linked above) are visibly drawn from persons of African-American heritage, and the implication can't have been lost on the generations of African-American teens that have poured through that city's Museum of Science and Industry since the slices were first installed.

Yet the most important educational message that the soap man taught me as a child was that science could be spooky and entertaining and a source of mystery and thrills. The subtext to this message was a salutary hostility to superstition. The Soap Man was not an imperialist trophy or statement of racial inequity; he was a scientific curiosity, whose supposed educational message (fat becomes soap when leached with certain chemicals) was greatly overshadowed by his entertainment value and consequent demystification of death and corpses. I worry a bit, I guess, about the abandonment of the field to vernacular exhibitors and well-financed ghouls.

A footnote for Seattle readers:

One of Boas' most important collecting partners in his trips to the Northwest to build his collections for the NYC-based American Museum of Natural History was the store that today displays Sylvester and Sylvia, our own beloved Curiosity Shop. Boas also worked for Chicago's Field Museum, to a lesser extent. The store helped with all of the US-based anthropological collecting expeditions to the Northwest at the turn of the century, and in effect, when you stand in that crowded little corner of the pier and look up into the welter of century-old curios hanging from the rafters, you're looking through time into part of the world that Sylvester and Sylvia inhabited.

In a science experiment I conducted last night, it was determined that the introduction of one (1) complete dirty martini into the chassis of one (1) Macintosh Wallstreet G3 Powerbook via the apertures provided for speakers and keyboard will produce the following results:

1) a pleasant, gin-and-olive aroma will be noticeable in the environment of the computer.

2) upon initial introduction of the liquid to the chassis, the computer will no longer respond to keyboard commands, such as tapping the space bar to awaken the computer in preparation for an orderly shutdown.

3) No amount of verbal instruction to the computer (or to other entities traditionally associated with faith-based enterprises) will alter result number 2.

4) when partially disassembled after about twelve hours, a residue of liquid may be noted resting on the motherboard of the computer.

5) if power is experimentally reconnected to the computer and the power button is pressed, after a few minutes, a disturbing staticky noise will travel from speaker to speaker for about thirty seconds.

Observations are continuing.

On March 3, 2003, Mr. Lope explored some of the parameters of comment spam. I refrain from crosslinking to his linked sites for obvious reasons.

And with that, Danelope Week draws to a close. Thanks a lot for coming and stay tuned for occasional updates.

The excercise proved fruitful in ways I was not wholly expecting. The idea of picking one person's weblog and randomly mining it for synchronistic links echoing your own editorial topic for the day over a period of time is, as far as I can tell, original to Danelope Week. I think it would be fascinating to see others do this.

I beleive the full and appropriate name for this practice is obvious: I hereby dub it Seven Link Boots, after the famous boots of myth and legend.

TypeKey: Six Apart's answer to comment spam. A centralized ID system for weblog commenting.

This should help to resolve comment spam. Will it be widely adopted? There are reasons to wonder.

Google/Blogger, for example, may already have some sort of commenting system under development that is resistant to comment spam. Furthermore, if TypeKey is wholly proprietary (and given the sound, business-oriented development decisions that have come out of Six Apart lately, I can't think of why it would be open) Bloogle may actually have a reason to design against TypeKey.

You see, TypeKey has the potential to dramatically increase the market value of the company Six Apart. That value increase would rest upon two facts, inherent in any system such as TypeKey.

One: as in TypePad, the user-base for the application necessarily provides valuable personally identifiable information to Six Apart. That information, plus the direct relationship to the user it represents, is marketing gold, and translates directly into a higher valuation for the company.

Two: I believe that the long-term solution to the knot of regulatory and business problems surrounding 'legitimate' spam - commercial and marketing emails that you actually have given permission to receive - is to centralize the consumer information, and for the advertising entities to provide incentives to the user to create ever-more elaborate profiles. The user could then, in theory, set, edit, and change levels of permission to receive the spam in exchange for incentives - free magazine subscriptions, downloadable sotware (sic!), DVDs, that sort of thing. The system should also provide auditability of marketing campaigns directed at the user - a record of the user's legitimate spam.

Managed correctly, the system would be deeply attractive to users. By this, I mean managed for the benefit of the user base rather than for the advertisers, something which will be no mean feat. A primary requirement will be keeping the UI free of advertising clutter; communicating that idea to the geniuses who came up with the flashing, blinking ad banner and the audio-enabled java display ad will cost some sad sack their sanity. Interestingly, both Glogger and Six Apart have clearly demonstrated that user focus is a core component of their business practice and software development discipline.

Because weblog commenters are likely to be a highly desirable slice of the online audience - 'influencers' in marketing parlance - TypeKey represents a nearly-ideal deployment environment for such a system.

I have no idea, of course, if that's what's being considered. But the pieces are in place. I think this development and the simple possibility that it could lead to places beyond the proximate driver of weblog commenting and comments spam is very intriguing.

So why do I say that Bloggle might wish to design against TypeKey? Well, since user-base numbers are a crucial metric in determining the relative success of an application, and because this extends Six Apart's potential registered-user base beyond both TypePad and MT's user base into a population that both includes and exceeds the total set of blog-using people in the world, Googer will be under pressure to respond. The typical American software company business response would be to circle the wagons and make life hard for the competitor. By now, though, I think we all know that Google is not a typical American software company.

The real question is, will they become one after the IPO?

Don't forget - it's National Corndog Day!

Taiwan's Leader Wins Election; Tally Is Disputed [NYT]

TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 20 — President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan was declared to have won a second term by a razor-thin margin on Saturday, but the opposition Nationalist Party called for the election to be annulled and suggested that the president might have staged an 11th-hour assassination attempt to get votes.

I've dispatched emails to my Taipei correspondents and received the first response last night. Joe Zagorski, who has lived in Taiwan since the last U. S. presidential election and speaks Chinese fluently, reports the following:

Ai ya!

What a crazy deal!

I have one friend, a KMT supporter (educated and intelligent, I can't figure out what she sees in the KMT,) she was very bummed out about it, didn't really say much except she thought the election should definetely be postponed. So, she evidently felt it would be a big boost for the incumbent to get shot in the gut.

I have another close friend, a radio announcer who is an enthusiastic supporter of Chen Shui Bian and the greens (not to be mistaken with the Green Party a la Nader) and she was nothing short of outraged, immediately suspected Beijing was behind it, and she is convinced the shit is gonna hit the fan now.

Me... I guess I'm not expecting the worst. I would say that it is very very serious to have the president of the country shot the day before elections... on the other hand, opinions of the people I meet vary from 'convinced it's China,' all the way to 'it's a play to get a sympathy vote and he had himself shot.'

I am reserving judgement until they find out who done it. Actually, I have a sixth sense about this, I'm pretty sure it was Lee Harvey Oswald...

The KMT are the Nationalists, and the Greens Joe refers to are the Democratic Progressives, the party of the victorious incumbent.

The reasons that the idea the assassination attempt might be faked are straightforward: the wounded candidates were so slightly hurt that they were back in public less than eight hours after the shooting and the hospital where the candidates were taken is said to be under the control of close political allies of the wounded candidates.

The NYT story goes on to note that Mr. Chen, the victorious incumbent, has made election-eve claims of assassination attempts in the past. The second page of the online story includes a detailed accounting of the numerous odd circumstances surrounding the shooting.

On October 22, 2001, Mr. Lope, in his longer-entries section, posted an entry concerning his purchase of a digital camera. It was a day which started with no hint of the ghastly events to come.

"As I wandered through the path shooting photos at various light levels and distances, I noticed that three squirrels had apparently become fixated with the camera, so I stopped to see how tight of a shot I could get. As I leaned over, talking to one squirrel to coax it nearer, it leapt onto my face (complete with requisite teeth-gnashing and claw-swiping) and latched onto my glasses, pulling them from my face and attempting to run away with them. After spouting several choice expletives and retrieving my specs, I decided that I'd had my fill of nature."

Many moons later, Mr. Lope posted a photo of the 'accursed rodent' moments before the wild attack began.

QT trailer for CASSHERN at Apple Japan (via the Cartoonist, again!). Beautiful CGI visualized alternative-world thingy. Giant Robots! Grungy cities! Guys in body armor jumping around waving swords.

It looks like live-action anime. I'd love to know more.

Space 1999 Command Center. [via the Cartoonist].

Ah, that's the stuff.

I forgot to mention - when we were in Snoqualmie last weekend, we stepped into a funky little antique joint by the trains - over the counter hung a wide selection of variously battered SF toys, including an awesome, nearly three-foot long Eagle toy that I recall as so impressive when I was little kid. I never owned one, by a playmate did, and the hugeness of the piece amazed me.

loaf is an email filtering verification system from Maciej and a partner, in early days yet. For the record, I love the 'cantbedone.org' URL.

I nearly did not blog this until I realized the underlying concept bothered me, and that I could explain why, in non-technical terms. It also fits broadly into my theme for the day: identity is the face we choose to show others, and privacy is the area of concerns that arise when that identity is challenged for one reason or another. Frustratingly, I'm in a hurry, and so I'm going to have to cover this very broadly and I hope I don't misrepresent anything or mis-state a fact. If I do, I'll clean it up as soon as I am aware of it.

The way that Loaf is described as working: an encrypted (or disguised, or hashed, at any rate it's not human readable) copy of your whole email address book is appended to each one of your outbound email messages. When it's recieved and parsed by another Loaf-using email system, the sender (you) is rated based, essentially, on your degree of familiarity to the recipient (or really, of course, to Loaf). The more familiar you are, the likelier it is that your message will get through.

It's a pretty neat idea, and I can't think of any reason, functionally, why this would be problematic.

However, I think there is a very good reason to mistrust the concept. It's based on both legal approaches to privacy and ethical concerns underlying them. Forgive me a moment of digression.

Generally speaking, in the US, legal guidelines for organizations that gather and manage personally identifiable information (PII) are required to follow a specific set of practices with regard to how that information is gathered, stored, and made accessible for correction or deletion to the initial source of that data, generally the consumer. An example of that is COPPA, which is a law that effectively requires online data gatherers to either collect no PII from children under 13 or to ensure that parental permission has been granted for that data to be gathered.

It's my opinion that the PII is the property of the consumer and that there is an ethical obligation to the consumer to permit some level of error-correction feedback mechanism. Additionally, there is an obligation on the part of the data maintainer to follow a 'best-practices' level of security with regards to the data, and practices which allow the data to move to a different organization with different privacy practices, while legal, are frowned upon. Of course, such data transfers happen all the time, notably in corporate acquisitions.

In practice, the response of most commercial organizations has been based on a desire to minimize the ancillary data-management costs of PII while making every effort to allow that data to be utilized within the business. It's effectively a business asset, and as such is percieved as adding value to the organization. Thus your level of access to the data may be limited to writing a letter to the company to request that your record be deleted.

This is unsatisfactory for any number of reasons; adding to the problems with the current approach are the rumblings we hear about the possibility that data collections and methodologies may become available for proprietary protection under U.S. intellectual property law. This may mean, for example, that if in the context of a discussion of privacy management methodology I cited a sample record - or the structure of a specific PII database - I might be in violation of a proprietary concept or data object. But I'll leave that bone for the EFF to worry at the moment, as vexing as it is.

Returning to Loaf: the concept relies on individual email users exposing their email address books to anyone they send email to. That information may or may not be unpackable to reconstitute the specific PII it contains in a way which is maliciously or unethically useful. From the lack of absolute language on the descriptive page I link to above, I'd be very surprised if it was impossible to do so.

Moreover, by deliberately placing the PII into a sharing-oriented environment, the strategy violates the legal and ethical guidelines I just sketched (however fuzzy my sketch might be), primarily by sharing a specifc element of that PII (your correspondent's email address).

Therefore, it will be very difficult to deploy any solution based on this approach into commercial organizations that have been working to ensure compliance with the guidelines and regulations.

I am by no means an expert either in the sort of programming that Maciej (a good guy, by all accounts, and a hell of an online writer to boot) does, or, honestly, in online privacy. I do think that I have raised some valid points for discussion. I hope that Maciej or his partner can take the time to address them.

Signal + Noise: Save Those Chicken Bones points us to a book which includes instructions on how to build an Apatosaurus from your KFC ossuary. [via Monkeyfilter.]

On October 3, 2000, Mr. Lope penned a few breif lines that directly contradict the central thesis of Being John Malkovich.

Of course, he's also 2903.

This has nothing to do with Mr. Lope or anything, but my favorite part of Lawrence of Arabia is after Lawrence and the surviving boy under his, um, care pass through a blasted, abandoned Army base at the side of the Suez Canal, and emerge on the banks of the waterway. A lone motorcyclist on the opposite bank appears, and stops when hailed.

Cupping his hands, the British biker shouts over the unbridged gap of water and sand.

"Who are you?"

After a pause, he repeats the question with greater urgency. Lean cuts to a reverse-angle closeup of Lawrence's face.

The Statesman claims that Don Foster has fingered exposed unmasked uncovered revealed the author of Belle de Jour. Foster used computer-based linguistic analysis to deduce that Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors. [via Boing Boing]

USA Today Says Reporter Faked Stories [NYT]: Five-time Pulitzer nominee fired. Jack Kelley spent 21 years at USA Today, and judging by the fabrications cited in the article, had a knack for the dramatic moment:

For one of the stories that helped make him a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2001, Kelley wrote that he was an eyewitness to a suicide bombing in Jerusalem and described the carnage in graphic detail. But the investigation showed that the man Kelley described as the bomber could not have been the culprit, and his description of three decapitated victims was contradicted by police.

The newspaper also said ``the evidence strongly contradicted'' other published accounts by Kelley: that he spent the night with Egyptian terrorists in 1997; met a vigilante Jewish settler named Avi Shapiro in 2001; watched a Pakistani student unfold a picture of the Sears Tower and say, ``This one is mine,'' in 2001; interviewed the daughter of an Iraqi general in 2003; or went on a high-speed hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2003.

And topping off our little collection, who wouldn't be interested in reading what happens when a writer for The Stranger connives and cajoles Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass into meeting him for a beer at Brooklyn watering hole for a joint interview?

I think I have found my theme for the day; Charlie Kaufman sets the tone.

Girl Trouble's 20th anniversary show [P-I] will be at the Crocodile on Saturday ($7). But we've been invited to see the new Kaufman flick, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Viv actually read the script months ago (in an early draft, mind you). She found it via Kate Winslet's web site. I found it on the amusingly named Being Charlie Kaufman fan site.

The site also contains more writing by Kaufman.

Online Poker: Hold 'Em and Hide 'Em [NYT]

Excerpts from the opening (Quoted bold italics mine):

"Ben" sleeps five hours a night; the rest of the time he sits at his desk in his "Brooklyn" apartment playing online poker. He won $5...

"Ben" quit his "teaching" job five months ago and now makes around $100 an hour. Five days a week, he clocks 10-hour shifts of Texas Hold 'Em on his Dell laptop computer. With reggae in the background and coffee mug in hand, he studies his competitors who sit in London, Copenhagen, Los Angeles and elsewhere, while the dealer in Costa Rica tosses cards.

Sure, thing, "Ben". We know where "Brooklyn" is too, and it's in the garden state, with a majestic view of the Pulaski Skyway. Such a transparent pseudonym.

the electric sheep screen-saver [via BoingBoing].

Neat-o.

I told my barber "Three and a half - four inches on top, shorter on the sides."

He misheard that, somehow, as "Three-fourths of an inch on top, shorter on the sides." I did not realize what had happened until he clapped clipper to pate, and by then, we were committed. Oh well. I hear the military is fashionable this season.

The preceding post was also inspired by Mr. Lope's generous entry commemmorating this year's St. Patrick's. I had no idea choral music was a favored listening habit.

Strangely, hoever, searching his site only yeilded fruitful results on the words sing and karaoke, a discipline for which Mr. Lope has previously expressed his fondness.

Thanks. This is hard.

The Bare Knuckle Boxers are my old Irish music rock band, in whch I played this electric mandolin. I also ran the old version of the website, which is worth rummaging through. Last night Greg (the other ex-mando slinger of BKB) and Karel (ex-guitarist) dropped in on the current version of the band at Mulleady's in Magnolia. Mulleady's was always a fun place to play and they sounded just fine.

The occasion was a CD release; the recording features the new lineup and while I have just finished ripping it to listen to it, I have not yet played it. As I was ripping the disc I dug into my archives to find material that the original lineup of the band recorded.

I hadn't listened to the older stuff for a while; it sounds good! I'm looking forward to hearing the new stuff.

These three songs were recorded at Gravelvoice in May, 1999. The songs 'All for Me Grog' and 'The Gallowglass' were released on a split single (genuine vinyl!) by Seattle character Wally Hargrave of Estate Records. Haven't run into him lately - wonder what's doin' at the Estate?

Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes - How to Share Libraries is a hoary how-to covering a way to provide full-user-rights access to a single song collection.

I'm reviewing this to see if there's a way to rip simultaneously to a networked storage area from two or more machines and have the new song data be simultaneously available to all the copies of iTunes running. Currently, System A and System B write file data to the Library files separately and locally.

The obvious solution is to go under the hood and set up symbolic links such that all the iTunes instances write to the same file. The question is, "Can iTunes manage record-locking, or does it rely on a file-locking approach? What if there is no locking protocol at all? Does that corrupt the database?"

Generally, I suppose the right way to work this out is to test it empirically, since it's easy to rebuild the database if there's a problem by smply dragging the files into the iTunes window.

One supposes that disabling iTunes' "keep my music folder organized" option might be a bright idea before moving ahead wth the test.

Neighbor Search: interactive search interface with embedded links that allows you to search, by neighborhood, name, or proximity, to see the publicly-recorded presidential campaign donations in the area you're looking at.

In the search results, clicking a name or a donor's street address will result in a new set of results. Neat!

I doubt, however, that some of the donors would be happy to know that their primary residential address is available in this manner. I found, for example, the home addresses of some recognizable local business execs in my first set of search results.

The lesson? When you give money to a campaign, you should report a P. O. Box as your address.

[via Monkeyfilter]

I had a phone interview today, which went well enough, I suppose. I was only really unhappy with my responses to one specific question, concerning freelance clients. My non-writing freelance client relationships have tended to be so very informal that I had a hard time recalling the names of the specific companies involved - I could remember the individual people involved and identify them by name but the corporate identities they employ were only muzzily summoned.

So I sat down and made a little list. Next time I have that question I should be well-prepared.

On March 17, 2003, Mr. Lope informed us that he is of Polish extraction via a tasteful web banner, and thoughtfully provided a link to the Gaelic Insult Generator. Despite his proclamation of Polski pride, it does not appear that his ethnicity features prominently in his site conception.

Despite this, one hopes that Mr. Lope might find the illuminating thoughts of one Maciej Ceglowski on his ethnicity and native land of interest. Mr. Ceglowski, a native-born Pole largely reared in the United States, recently posted a long and affectionate essay about Warsaw.

GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface gallery [via MeFi, agin]. Neato. GUIs through the ages. The march to and fro along the road to usability in all its' stark majesty and failure.

Actually I just made up that last bit cuz it sounded cool.

Mild-Mannered Literary Guys Transform Into Comics Writers [NYT]. The article highlights the appearance of literary writers as comics writers, framing it as a trend. Mmmm. I'd say it more reflects a broader openness to brand-based experimentation in the Houses of the Supes, which is not to say that the work produced isn't valid artistic experimentation. The brands that open the door in this instance are the writers' names. Think of Chabon as Kiss for the oughts. You know, for the kids. It's aimed at the same audience that bought the Kiss comics in the seventies now that you all have English degrees and mortgages.

My take sells this whole thing a bit short, though. Marvel has shown a willingness to open their characters to respected creators that are far from as well known as Chabon such as James Sturm and Pete Bagge. Unfortunately, I haven't ever seen any of these guys' material for the bigs because I rarely hit a comics shop and when I do I'm usually flat broke or there chasing a specific indie title.

Mini 50 robot conversion project. [via MeFi] Amazing. Look closely, though, for not all is as it seems. Perusing the MeFi thread may illuminate.

On November 28, 2003, Mr. Lope featured some Nintendo card models.

This link was derived from a search for the word "model" conducted via Mr. Lope's search facility. Not included in the search results was the April 29, 2002 link to the Paper Engineer's Workshop, the online presence of Keisuke Saka, whose work highlights the sculptural qualities of automata.

UPDATE: D'oh! Mr. Lope beat me to the workshop link here. On his site he notes he likes the Dreaming Penguin - I'm partial to the Doomed Fish, but I like the chairs and also 'the most famous quartet in the world,' neither apparenty kitted, more's the pity.

UPDATE II: And look! Dan's got the Yamaha papercraft stashed down in there too!

I can't stop!

Yamaha

Yamaha offers a range of models both predictable and not. A samurai helmet! Frogs! Snails!.

Also available are many models of animals, including a polar bear and a penguin. One assumes the bear might easily become a yeti. I did not notice the presence or absence of a club. Furthering the video-game wildlife concept is of course the
hedgehog. Alas, however, no badger nor snake.

Wizards of the Coast

Dungeons and Dragons village and keep construction kit, including gatehouse, houses, walls, and, of course, a mausoleum and graveyard. Alas, no cathedral.

3D Papercraft

Japanese (commercial?) site, framed. In the column to the left, click 'new' or other topic heading. 'New' will open an 86 page list of offsit elinks from which I pluck another obscure Trek model at Homespun Magixx, an utterly kawaii hamster, and a selection of guitars.

(This was originally an update but grew as I explored the Czech model site. Chezchloslovakia was a center of paper modeling back in the seventies and there are continual and lovely new kits coming from the Czech Republic today.)

Three more from BB. I've seen the NASA stuff, may have seen the Star Wars stuff, and the Aliens rifle is new to me. The Aliens site also has a wide range of other models available. Unfortunately it's framed which makes it hard to link to properly. The modeler (a Czech) also includes a link labeled 'My Building Process' which explains how he develops his models from extant 3D models. His English is not 100% but like his models he gets the important stuff correct.

Models available from him include the APC, the entire colony (understandably 'under construction'), and projected models of more or less everything in the entire film. This guy is pretty ambitious. Finally, under his link marked bonus, he provides some intriguing models from a variety of sources including Star Trek movie-era Starbase and in some ways the most intriguing, a spacecraft model credited as being from the 'great Czech comic Galaxia' but which is in fact unquestionably at least based on the original Battlestar Galactica.

Again I say, what, no Space 1999?

UPDATE: whoops, almost forgot. A Tron lightcycle.

Woah! Boing Boing runs not one but two cardmodeing links, to the intriguing and new-to-me work of John McEwan, highlighting a steampunk sub. Steampunk appears to be a theme in the man's work.

I should write about card modeling as an art form sometime. Hm.

Link number two is to papertoys.com. I recall seeing this site from looking for steamboat links.

One of my favorite blogneighbors is the oft-a-bit-exasperated-seeming Danelope, whose wit, intellect, and deadpan sense of humor frequently bring a chuckle or snort of interest from me.

Mr. Lope, as I shall refer to him here in magisterial fiction, lives in the University District and I beleive is originally of Floridian extraction. I have never encountered him in real life. He claims to be twenty-five years of age. Sometime after I began perusing his works, I came to realize that this person is also the man who contributed the catalyzing clue to the Kaycee Nicole saga.

Recently, Mr. Lope wondered if he'd overstayed his welcome in blogland. I for one, welome our ... no, wait, that's not the right catchphrase. Let me try again.

The response was the predictable outcry from Mr. Lope's teeming audience, including yours truly. In fact, I somehow channeled the true appearance of Mr. Lope's website, considered in avatar as a 'low-rent comic book superhero.'

Lucky for my viewing audience, I recently uncovered a visualization tool for this avatar, featured here.

In the context of my automatic telescript delivery, the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky saw fit to put the words "I promise to gank, with credit, one a day, for an entire week, once you return to duty." into my mouth.

Forthwith, this entry shall be the first of my dischargements of this debt.

On May 9, 2002 this entry noted an informative survey of cabbits, the cat-rabbit hybrid that promises to be all the rage in about fifteen years. This link was found by poking through the results for the search term kitten at Mr. Lope's web site.

It should be noted that whatever Mr. Lope's assertions regarding my sanity, he remains wholly unqualified to practice psychiatry in the state of Washington and shall remain so for the foreseeable future.

Origami Pony: for shiny pony variety, please use a tinfoil square. I reccommend a sheet about 7 inches square. The one I constructed, however, resembles some sort of dinosaur or perhaps a poodle.

Alternatively, you may visit this site.

Let's see now, there was something about soft, soft fur, right? Howsabout The Patch?

If that's not to your taste, how about a visit to petloss.com to read the touching tributes to beloved pets now departed. Turn those speakers down - midi music ahead!

LLANTO POR IGNACIO SANCHEZ MEJIAS, a setting in French, Spanish, and English, with images.

By Frederico Garcia Lorca - Images by August Puig

(from different sources, an extract in English. From "3., Cuerpo Presente." Full original Spanish text here. this English translation appears to have been made by a native Spanish speaker and is very literal gramatically while containing an occasional English misspelling, such as 'looses' for 'loses' in stanza 3 for 'pierda,' which I noted and changed.

A more graceful translation might seek to take the Spanish 'stones,' 'piedras' and 'loses,' 'pierdas,' and make the English words chime accordingly.

In English the best-known example of this metonymy that occurs off the top of my head is Bob Dylan's well-known chorus, which is left as an excercise for the reader. )

Yo quiero ver aquí los hombres de voz dura.
Los que doman caballos y dominan los ríos;
los hombres que les suena el esqueleto y cantan
con una boca llena de sol y pedernales.

Aquí quiero yo verlos. Delante de la piedra.
Delante de este cuerpo con las riendas quebradas.
Yo quiero que me enseñen dónde está la salida
para este capitán atado por la muerte.

Yo quiero que me enseñen un llanto como un río
que tenga dulces nieblas y profundas orillas,
para llevar el cuerpo de Ignacio y que se pierda
sin escuchar el doble resuello de los toros.

Que se pierda en la plaza redonda de la luna
que finge cuando niña doliente res inmóvil;
que se pierda en la noche sin canto de los peces
y en la maleza blanca del humo congelado.

---

(Here I want to see those men of hard voice.
Those that break horses and dominate rivers;
those men of sonorous skeleton who sing
with a mouth full of sun and flint.

Here I want to see them. Before the stone.
Before this body with broken reins.
I want to know from them the way out
for this captain stripped down by death.

I want them to show me a lament like a river
which will have sweet mists and deep shores,
to take the body of Ignacio where it loses itself
without hearing the double planting of the bulls.

Loses itself in the round bull ring of the moon
which feigns in its youth a sad quiet bull,
loses itself in the night without song of fishes
and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.)

Alternative translation, from here:

Here I want to see those men of hard voice.
Those that break horses and dominate rivers;
those men whose skeletons vibrate and who sing
with mouths full of sun and flint.

Here I want to see them. Before this stone.
Before this body with broken reins.
I want them to show me a way out
for this captain constrained by death.

I want them to show me a lament like a river
with sweet mists and steep banks,
to bear the body of Ignacio and let him disappear
without hearing the double snorting of the bulls.

Let him disappear in the round bullring of the moon
which feigns in its youth a mournful quiet bull;
let him disappear in the night without the song of fishes
and in the white thicket of frozen smoke.

---

Following Attacks, Spain's Governing Party Is Beaten [NYT]

---

I first learned of the fragility of democracy to military assault from internal or external sources as a result of my kindergarten year, 1969, spent in Santiago, Chile. Later in my life I lived briefly, while still a child, in Guadalajara, Mexico. Both of my parents are bilingual in Spanish and English, and my godfather was born in Saltillo, near Mexico City. My wife was born in California of Cuban parents. It is my opinion that the Spanish-speaking peoples of the world are today the most acquainted of all linguistic groups with both the promise (whether broken or upheld) and the price of democracy. They bear the scars of these struggles. Their suffering and their opinions command my sympathy, respect, and love. The people and democracy of Spain have been much on my mind the past few days. I toast their electoral practice.

Viv and I drove up to Snoqualmie Falls this afternoon and walked around the old trains near the depot. It was obviously the off-season, and while the plants down around our apartment are beginning to think it's Spring, the trees at the higher elevation of the Pass are under no such misapprehension.

Wait, can trees experience apprehension?

Nevermind.

The trains and the depot were interesting both for what they are and the activity around them - there were numerous volunteers, mostly sportin' ye olde-tyme striped overalls, beavering away madly on the stock, rolling and otherwise.

Despite the volunteers' obvious devotion to repairing and restoring the engines, cars, and miscellaneous multi-wheeled objects somewhere between the two, I found the most compelling aspect of them to be their obvious age and weathering. The most aged-appearing engine was the most interesting thing to look at.

Although the ten-foot black-painted blades of the rotary snowplow's snout were pretty cool, too.

A few blocks away from the open and walkable area by the depot are some more old engines, mostly in even rougher shape than the easily accessible material on display.

...and I must note that the crab thread cited first thing this morning drove me to the store to obtain some tasty Dungeness crab which I shall prepare as a love offering for the female of my species.

No word on my inclination toward performing a mating dance, however. (Warning: link may offer TMI to those about to eat crab.)

Maybe I should just embargo posting around dinnertime?

NOTE: linked recipe in no way constitutes a promise implied or otherwise to employ linked recipe.

National Corndog Day: [via MeFi]

(Dammit! Two MeFi food links in 24 hours! And I call myself unemployed!)

This March 20, I know I'll be celebrating a special holiday with my loved one. Mmmm.

poupou: thom's housewarming: poupou has wildly exceeded the minimum RFC-mandated blog standard for cat pictures.

In a former life, I designed promotional items that were quite similiar to the promo materials a political campaign might employ.

Therefore, please take and reproduce these KG '04 items.

Site badge:

(You should link to Ken's website when you run this, I think.)

Site Banner (I may revise this):

(links to a 468 x 60 banner.)

Bumper strip (this image links to a huge PNG which is suitable for reproduction via CafePress, hint hint):

Ask MetaFilter: Can one safely eat canned, pasteurized, crab which has been allowed to reach room temperature over part of a day?

This AxMe thread definitively, entertainingly, dramatically answers this question, and many more.

So, the radio mentions a four-alarm fire in my neighborhood, and says it's at '8th and Seneca,' which is actually not quite in my neighborhood. I mapquest it and realize it's near Michael.

A click later, and I'm reading eclecticism : More trouble at the Jensonia, Michael's on-the-spot account, with pictures.

While I'm talking about Michael, I should note his excellent summary of the mostly-forgotten mid-1800s war between the US and Britain that took place in Washington's lovely San Juan Islands, off shore and to the north of Seattle, due west from Bellingham.

Three-headed frog ... not, says the Apothecary's Drawer. It's a 'mating ball.'

Spotted via the indispensable thingsmagazine.

Spalding Gray hunches around his beer. His body looks thin inside his padded gray winter jacket, a wintering seabird. He's been perched on the bar stool since early evening, drinking slowly. It's a raucous Thursday night at Seattle's venerable Comet Tavern. To Gray's left, there is an open space at the bar, drawing patrons to and fro in search of drink. The bar is full of young people, wearing leather and flannel, unshaven and long-haired. "Back in Black" plays loudly in the high-ceilinged, smoky rooms, making conversation difficult.

Yes, I'm set loose
from the noose
that's kept me hanging around.

Well, I'm back, back.
Well, I'm back in black, yes I'm back in black!

In the back of the bar, two pool tables see a lively trade. Throughout the rest of the tavern’s brick-walled, graffiti-insulated rooms, smoke roils above the chattering din. Glowing cigarettes jab, arms wave. Laughter and shouts wrestle Australian guitars. A young man rises from the ancient maritime cable spool reincarnated as the far corner table. Lunging unsteadily for the empty pitcher, he draws back with it in hand and turns in the direction of the bar. He weaves his way over the threshold of the corner room and dodges traffic by the entrance before berthing near the taps.

The bartender, a young woman whose dark waist-length hair is braided down her back, is busy. Seeing this, the young man hunches forward, standing. He clasps his hands together in a way that conveys anxiety and patience. Idly he looks to his left and right up and down the bar. As he looks to his right, the motion catches the corner of Spalding Gray's eye, who turns to face the young man. He looks at the young man for a long moment.

The idea of young people's music and Seattle is in the media's air this season, and Gray, who has come to town to workshop one of his monologues, is curious. He's looking for a way to talk about music in his life. He thinks perhaps this location, this person, may provide an insight or hook. It will tie his specific musical interests to the interests of the larger American audience.

The young man is skinny, nondescript. He wears a torn and paint spattered T-shirt, once black, now faded to grey. The shirt’s stitched-on pocket is coming loose, flapping. The faded shirtback advertises Marlboro cigarettes. His hair is unkempt but short, and his eyes are wide, set in a perpetual expression of slight confusion. Gray leans toward him.

"Excuse me," Gray says. "But do you like classical music?"

The young man is puzzled, and his brows knit. He's clearly uncertain that he heard the question correctly above "Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution." Before he can say "What?" Gray repeats the question.

"Do you like classical music?"

The young man does not recognize the gray-haired actor. He finds the query offputting. He shrugs, non-committal, wondering if the slender figure is a chicken hawk. "Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don't think I ever really thought of it before. I mean, I dunno. Like, I don't hate it or anything."

As he says this, he can see Gray losing interest. This eases his concern about the stranger’s motivations. The two nod, a fresh pitcher of beer arrives, and the young man makes his way back to the spool. As he sits down, he mutters quietly to his nearest tablemate about the strange interaction at the bar. The rest of the table is busy making short work of the beer and the incident is forgot.

A few minutes later, another denizen of the spool stands to fetch another round. His bright red hair falls to his shoulders, and he wears a loose-fitting black leather jacket. Upon reaching the bar, he recalls his tablemate's anecdote, and looks, curiously, at the slight gray-clad figure. As if on cue, the actor turns.

He says, of course, "Do you like classical music?"

The red headed boy enthusiastically says that he does. Gray presses him, asking for more information. What kind of classical music? Opera? Chamber music? The baroque? Perhaps he prefers Philip Glass, or Stravinsky?

This barrage undermines the self-confidence of the redhead, who admits his uncertainty. As before, Gray turns away. The redhead looks closely for a long moment before his fresh pitcher arrives. He returns to his party.

As he takes his seat, he asks the wide-eyed youth for more information about his encounter at the bar. As they compare stories, and the similarity becomes clear there is interest at the table. Their consensus: harmless but eccentric, an ancillary benefit to this time well spent. The redhead has held something back, however. He asks around the table if those in attendance have ever seen Spalding Gray's film, Swimming to Cambodia.

At least one person has. The redhead explains the film, over the music, and then gesturing, asserts that the evening's eccentric is none other than Spalding Gray. Opinion around the table is split. One of the participants in the debate who has seen the film disputes the possibility.

He ventures to the taps, and touches the grey-coated figure's shoulder to draw him out of conversation.

The actor turns.

"Are you Spalding Gray?" asks the disputant.

For a moment, they look into one another's eyes.

"No," he says, shaking his head. "That's not who I am."

The Lone Hand Four Aces, - or - Equal to a Royal Flush, To be acted by
A TROUPE OF EDUCATED DOGS, IN FOUR ACTS.

Miley Pleasanton Crawford, Inventor.

This scanned vaudeville act's script is one of a number available from the American Variety Stage archive at the blessed sweetness that is American Memory.

Here's "At the Front Door," a comedy act in "one", by Sam Erlich for Gorman and West, 1910.

"I'm an actor; cross my heart and hope to die; really I am; you can't do me anything for that; I asked the janitor to wake me so that I could catch a train; he woke me an hour too early; I can swear to that; Ask my watch; you can't do me anything for that; I got a job to sing; can I sing? O yeah, a little bit; Only a bit. (with intro) Tra la tra la la la..." (song)

Spalding Gray, 62, Actor and Monologuist, Is Confirmed Dead [NYT] - Gray called from the ferry, saying he was going to visit some friends.

ESPN.com - MLB - John Henry Williams dies; lies frozen beside Ted [ESPN via BoingBoing] - A message left for Williams' lawyers was not returned.

Zapata Murder Trial Begins [P-I]- No telephones appear in this story, although it begins at the Comet.

Aristide Under Lock and Key, Delegation Says [Magic City News]- "Mildred Aristide answered the phone. I said, 'Hello Mildred, this is Kim Ives, we are here.' At that point, the phone line went dead. We have tried to call many times since then but there has been no answer." This article is interesting; I hope a non-activist source investigates.

Witness says phone went dead when she asked suspect if he killed girl [San Diego Union Tribune] - A woman testified today that she asked if her acquaintance was the murderer - then the line went dead. (Bonus points for proper use, in the lede.)

Gene Gable is Waxing Nostalgic Over Paste-Up [via The Cartoonist].

Back in the pre-DTP era, the only way to get decent-looking type and page layout (besides metal and woodtype, specialty processes since the sixties if not before) was to enlist the services and technology of a typesetter and their large, heavy, amazing computational devices known as phototypesetters (scroll down in link).

Back in those dark days I apprenticed on the AM Varityper and would occasionally help Steve out on his Compugraphic device. The Varityper ran on CP/M and stored data on 8" square floppies; the Compugraphic model that Steve used had, to my knowledge, no long-term storage, although I beleive you could edit what was in the buffer.

These systems used lights, phtoosensitive paper, a daunting system of photochemicals and developing machines. Upon either a disk or flexible plastic strip, transparent images of each character in a font had been printed. In the typesetting process these characters were exposed, one at a time, appropriately mechanically enlarged or reduced, onto the 'slicks,' the rolls of phototype paper. The operator would then take the roll of exposed paper, encased within a light-tight receptacle, and feed it though the developer.

Once the type had been developed, one cut it up, waxed the paper, and laid it out on boards, using rulers, T-squares and triangles to maintain a semblance of order.

The codes used to tell the machines to make type a certain size or to tab around in a table were not at all dissimilar from HTML; the main differences being in the actual grammar and vocabulary of the codes and the trifling fact that except for the very last generation of machines there was no way to visually preview your work until you looked at the developed typesheets.

Ah, by cracky. I must be among the youngest people to be trained on these systems, having graduated high school the year the Mac was introduced. By 1987 the era was over. My friend Wes once told me how as a sailor during the Gulf War he helpd as his ship had dumped their Varityper overboard at sea when they got the new system for the ships' newspaper.

[smacks gums, leans on cane, squints out from rocker through bifocals]

Gable's piece includes images and discussions of a number of the artifacts of the era, including technical pens and X-Acto knives. I have some very nice technical penas that haven't seen use in at least ten years, if anyone's interested. A full set of Mars Stadtler and an off-brand set. The Mars nibs are a physical pleasure to use.

On this Ask MetaFilter thread, user mert requests the identity of a 'gravelly voiced Russian folk singer who sounds a lot like Tom Waits.' He notes that he then gets a bunch of the identified singer's music off Kazaa.

I, of course, think I know of a American singer he might like, and I am now interested in tracking down Mr. Vysotsky's music myself.

J. Beverley Oke, Analyzer of Starlight, Is Dead at 75 [NYT]

Now that is an obit headline.

What's On My Pen Drive:: The Road Warriors Guide [via MeFi]: Peter Garner has assembled a list of apps that can run directly from a USB pen drive in a Wintel environment and which require no install on the host computer. He accomplishes this by going old-skool and employing many DOS apps.

Highlights include a link to a DOS version of MS-Word and (incredibly) to a zero-setup web browser that supports SSL called OffByOne.

I'm tempted to grab all of this and stash it somewhere, it seems so very useful and potentially transient.

iLife '04 won't allow one to install from CD to a machine that has a max rez of 800 x 600, such as an older iBook.

Install iPhoto 4 on an Unsupported Mac may provide information on how to get around this. I'm not familiar with Blogintosh, so I can't make a contextual judgement about the site's usual quality of information. I will follow up, though; the site sure looks inviting.

UPDATE: Everything went smoothly, and iPhoto had no difficulty launching and loading a large library of shared photos via Rendezvous.

Tonight, my ears are all about Miles.

It's a sweet pleasure.

John Kenn is the maintainer of the web site I was casting about for the other day.

Apple Discussions on iSight and iChat AV are my next big pile of research to wade through.

Rising Up and Rising Down: Vollmann's Anatomy of Violence. [NYT]

See? Din't I tell yez ta pick this up?

I do not know if the NYT guy got a different edition than I - but I wouldn't call the thin-cotton cased boards that form the covers of these books 'luxurious.'

It's more 'respectful,' a minimum effort to provide a physical presence for something the author and publisher both want to sell at a not-too-extravagant price.

Although $100 for seven voumes will certainly seem like an absurdist and luxuriant toll, it is not. Just check what new retail for the single volume of the most recent Harry Potter book was, and come on back to chat.

I'll be around all day, playing this here banjo.

The author of the review dismisses the work, in the end, as 'a work of grand obsession that, for too often, lies dead upon the page,' citing overwritten prose and the (in this book) unplumbed reasons for Vollmann's compulsion to 'to put the body in harm's way.'

I'm not to be dissuaded from the work on this basis, as I have a thesis about Vollmann's fascination, and have learned to read him at his most empurpled. I certainly promise more here upon this work after (or given the length, as) I complete it.

bubblegum machine, via The Cartoonist.

Alas, I don't have time (I've been, er, hip deep in Plumbing Problem Volume Two) to suck down all the good stuff until Monday. In addition to the week 68 material featured (The Germs' "Lexicon Devil" being my highlight) I noticed stuff by the Sonics, The Kingsmen, Tommy James and the Shondells, as well as loads of the kind of radio crap that tormented me and twisted my soul in to the loathesome and festering pit of black hatred it is today.

Highly recommended.

I have a pal who recently saw the Happy Flowers in a show somewhere on the East Coast.

I'm not sure if he knows about their web site. Hopefully he'll see this and be amused. In a horrible oversight, there are no audio assets available. The music is inexplicable, so I won't even try.

dung.swf is some sort of flash-based animated video starring what appear to be fly or tapeworm larva singing a song, apparently in praise of poop.

There are plentiful kanji Korean (?) titles. At times the chorines don poop-hats.

It's not grotesque in a not-safe-for-work way. In fact, it's practically kawaii. You may wish to be at a midpoint between meals, however.

Poupou would like a translation.

It's really no fun when your kitchen sink barfs up your neighbor's dispos-alled schmutz and floods your kitchen and dining room at 10 am.

And then when your indoor cat runs away outside in fear it's also no fun.

Sigh.

UPDATE: Sink still clogged. Cat came back.

thingsmagazine.net's jpl mentioned that his fambly posesses a fragment of the zeppelin L32, shot down over England the 23rd of September 1916. A police account may be found here, and entertainingly, an illustration of Lt. Sowrey's victory over the L32 may be found within the deep reservoir of Rosebud's WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive, the link that prompted my discussion with jpl in the first place.

(Rosebud is a former comrade-in-pixels of mine from my days as a kite-wrassler in the underpopulated massively-multiplayer online sim Dawn of Aces.)

I'm pretty sure it's a different 23rd of September than the one the song is about. It's also worth noting that this is not the Great Zeppelin Raid, which took place in February 1916.

jpl notes that it's uncertain how the object came to his family. If our cousins over there behaved as we did when one of these huge things came down in our countryside, I'd guess a relative came as a part of a crowd and took the cross away as a souvenir. I would particularly direct new readers to the comments on the linked entry which feature personal anecdotes relating to souvenirs and at least one eyewitness acount of the death of the airship in question, the USS Shenandoah.

In this instance, there is a song.

I had a couple of beers with a new friend and promised to dig up some links on the Dick Tracy watches recently developed by Microsoft. I'm particularly looking for a specific blog that I thought had trackbacked me on something. Thus far, I think my recollection was flawed.

Spotlight on SPOT is a dedicated blog that I bet he's familiar with.

I think the site I was looking for is here. Paul Robichaux wrote about his SPOT watch here, here, and here.

I also mentioned the band Midnight Thunder Express, but today Karel let me know that they broke up, I guess. It was still a great show.

I myself have also been rooting around in search of certain other sites I know I've seen before on several topics. I have a good handle on iSight and iChat stuff, but I know I saw an excellent overview site when I was first researching it. I have no idea what it was called and naturally, I neglected to bookmark it.

The other topic I'm chasing (again) is iDVD theme construction, which is woefully underdocumented. Michael Braly linked to some tutorials back in April, 2003, but the links presented there, as I recall, provided instruction more on how to hack existing themes than on crafting them from scratch. Ah well, time's up for today.

Salam gives us the skinny on the Iraqi Shia festivals.

Later, after the explosions and mortars, the ever-elusive Raed weighs in, worried.

sheep at b3ta proffers an amazing thing.

Sheep Films is the creator's site.

The image may appear to be broken at first.

Hm... look at the other anims on his member site! Fantastic!

NASA to announce 'significant' finding - tomorrow.

Hm, could it have to do with the recent rock-drilling thing they were doing?

Everything Burns points out that you might prefer to avoid microwaving your New Twenties.

Or perhaps you'd prefer to nuke them. At any rate, tin foil should probably have a place in your wallet next time you need to fly.

Albert Ayler: His Life and Music, by Jeff Schwartz.

This book is my attempt, as of 1992, to assemble the information available on the life of Albert Ayler. Since then, I have added a few things and attempted to correct errors. There have not been major updates. For example, relevant material from recent books on Paul Bley, Sun Ra, Perry Robinson, and Bill Dixon, has not been worked in.

Also, here is a discography.