Dammit! I just hosed a full gig of pics from the Elph, AGAIN! That included basically all of the pictures and movies from the move. Dammit! Now I'll never see the old place again.
A comment appeared in my queue this morning from one Nouri, The Moor Next Door, an Algerian blogger living in the US. Nouri was commenting on my cryptically-titled 3108, an entry here on locating blog-world resources which included a longish stab at outlining some points of interest concerning my relationship with the country of Algeria.
(The title is a puzzlin' reference to attempting cross-linguistic blogtrawling; 3 = B, 1 = l, 0=O, 8=g.)
Nouri's blog is a current-events and commentary blog about Algeria, something I've longed for. Understanding and keeping track of events and politics in Algeria via the usual suspects in the US media is quite challenging, partly a result of the terrible civil war fought there in the early nineties.
I suppose American readers will in generally have been most exposed to Algeria via the works of the French author Albert Camus, who was born in Algeria and who set both of his best known works in the Algieria of the late colonial era. Camus also wrote short stories set in French North Africa, some of which when I last checked had never been translated into English. This seems to me an oversight.
As I read Camus, although the works are generalized to reflect the writer's contemporary intellectual milieu of existentialist thought, the impetus behind the work appears to be colonial relations itself. The Guest, linked above, for example, turns on an interaction between a schoolteacher and an Arab who has been dropped off by a cop at a frontier school, instructing the teacher to take the Arab to a prison.
The story is recognizably a Western, and is easily imagined as a John Ford movie - John Wayne making a brief appearance
at the school to drop Jay Silverheels off into the custody of Jimmy Stewart. Throughout the story, Camus presents the encounter of the icons of civilization with the vastness of the landscape and the precolonial inhabitants as inherently absurd and without positive outcome.
This theme - the unexpected consequences of the encounter between Europe's colonizing cultures, the precolonial people, and the resulting hybrid culture that emerged in the wake of the end of the colonial era - remains, unsurprisingly, a major area of personal and political investigation for those countries affected by it, as Nouri's long post, On Historical Maturity, illustrates.
A few entries prior, there's longish critical attack on Robert Fisk which examines uses, mis-uses, and perceptions of postcolonial theory, winkingly and appropriately entitled L'etranger, a direct reference to Camus. In this entry, Nouri makes an offhand reference to Frantz Fanon, a French Martiniquean who worked as a psychiatrist during the Algerian war of independence and published a seminal anticolonial work, The Wretched of the Earth, which was highly influential throughout the sixties in many countries dealing with the struggle to define a postcolonial future. The work may also have influenced the speeches and thought of Malcolm X, who near the end of his life began using the language of anti-colonial analysis to describe conditions he saw in the United States.
It seems likely that someon somewhere has recognized that I'd enjoy Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, but I always avoided them, understanding the deistic reference of the title to cast them as marketing artifacts along the lines of Left Behind.
This week's amusing New Yorker profile of the author makes it clear I've misminded the meme. Should I ever read another book, I'll keep these in mind.
I noted this low on the media radar sometime around Thanksgiving but hadn't gotten around to blogging it yet: Dial-a-Human!
Yesterday I gave my parents a real-time video tour of the house and grounds via the magic of 'high-speed' internet and wifi. I must be a seriously negative creep because instead of marveling that we could do such a thing, I most have thunk on how aggravating and infuriating it is to deal with thousand-dollar technology that works as well as the two-dollar technology of 1968, at least as I recall it. Except the whole realtime video thing. And the two-dollar thing.
This of course fills me with well-warranted self-loathing, especially when I reflect on the fact that the easiest thing to cobble up on moving in to the new place was a Silvertone Victrola cabinet containing one (1) five-year-old iBook with an Airport card and one (1) set of high-quality powered spruce-cone computer speakers. I have been using this nightmare hybrid to stream in roughly equal proportion music from my 20-odd gb stash, near-real-time radio from local NPR gabfest KUOW, the same from old-home-place dusty classics champeen WFIU, and assorted other public radio streams including local cooler-than-thou woo-woo yipniks KEXP and also-old-home-place and shaggy enough to get me to relax faves WFHB.
Still, it's the classical radio in front of the fire to which I've turned the most. Technology sucks.
Viv and I are breakfasting at the W this morning, and the chatter at the next table appears to be about some sort of blogging start up.
I'd take a picture, but I won't.
This thread is where I spent last Christmas, in a room with Viv, my parents, and Spencer. Can't help thinking about it again today.
[via Boing Boing] 10 + 100 Creative Commons Christmas Songs. I'll be paying specific attention to A Medieval Christmas. Greg and I actually worked up a set book of obscure Christmas-related folksongs a few years ago but never really nailed the set. Looking at some really old European source material would be a great place to continue the project. i suppose looking at popular sheet music favorites of the 1840s to 1860s would be another good place to dig.
A better browser-based whois. I found this after noting that my commandline version of whois no longer gives me dummy prompts to specify which whois server I'm querying. Ridiculous.
After getting off the phone with Qwest, it seems that my ISP was under no technical obligation to run a separate ADSL line to the house, although Qwest notes that the locale is speed-restriced for DSL to 256k, which is a pain and has made clear to me that I was running well over that speed back at the apartment.
Here's the interesting bit; I think I could cancel my Qwest DSL entirely and just go with the new ISP and save $15 a month, especially if Qwest notes the speed restrictions are hard-wired. The outstanding question in my mind is, "Are there technical advantages to a non-separate DSL line as opposed to the new POTS line they dropped with ADSL on it? Can I get more bandwidth by lighting fewer wires?"
It seems unlikely, actually.
The next question, of course, is "Can I multiplex the lines, especially without paying for the circuit that may or may not be attached to the Qwest line?"
Of course, I should really be doing stuff like unpacking boxes instead of wrestling with ephemera such as bitstreams.
One cord of 2-year seasoned cherry, inbound for afternoon delivery. Now I must prepare a crib!
Getting closer to figuring out the firewood thing, and I hope to have a cord slated for delivery on Friday.
I noticed that after burning the fire very hot for a short period of time, the masonry in the back of the hearth turned white for a while. I'm curious about this, but Googling yields singularly crappy results. Surely the fire is not heating the bricks to the point of glowing.
Overall, I remain in the gloomiest frame of mind, despite reconnecting with my firebug preadolescence. All I can do is wait it out, really; I hate life changes and I also hate the holidays, and I'm reliably unhappy at this time of year. Finding myself entering into a rerun of my adolescent living circumstances, with fewer financial options, would naturally tend to accentuate this frame of mind, I think.
But what the hell! I only stayed that angry for ten or eleven years, right?
a) conventional wisdom hereabouts notes that firewood should be stored away from the mists of our winters. Alas, my home currently mostly lacks such a place.
b) what's the going rate for a cord of dense wood hereabouts, anyway?
c) no, really. where does you alls keep the good burnin' wood? Izzit near? 'Cuz I'm needin'.
Adam Engst announces the end of Info-Mac in today's Tidbits. Over ten yeas ago, Info-Mac was the best place to get the most interesting shareware, freeware, and demos online for the mac, and provided a crystal-clear glimpse into a future where much software was free and disposable bits and shiny things ruled the eye of the online magpie. One hopes the archives were preserved in time such that future cybarcheologists can sift the bits for clues and treasure.
FINAL SCORE.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: I concur, the best of the films to date. I fear it may be a high water mark. Better than any of the books I've thus far read, richer and more convincing.
New clutch: installed, snappy, and quite different in feel from the other one.
Holiday, work, and move exhaustion: quite powerful.
The previews at the movie theater were missing any picture at all for well over ten minutes. As far as I can tell, not one person arose to register a complaint.
later, Viv and I are eating dinner at that Thai place in the big downtown mall, Pacific Place, waiting for the car to be ready, when the PA annoinces the indoor snowfall feature.
Apparently (and I can confirm this) the mall hosts these artificial snow displays during the holiday shopping season.
It's like a scene from a 1980s dystopian comic book or from, specifically, Harlan Ellison's A boy and his Dog. At the same time, I assure you, it's pretty neat to look at. Unfortunately, it does not reproduce well on cell phone camera.
this morning as I topped Capitol Hill on my way to pick up Karel and Tod, my clutch finally gave up the ghost at the corner of Mercer and Federal.
After some cell phone scrambling, I brought the car to berth in a quick turnaround transmission shop downtown. The car should be ready tonight.
UPDATE: All toold, this will be something along the lines of an $800 commute. Yesterday I was joking with Viv about buying a 1980's Volvo we saw on Aurora for $575. Maybe I'm not joking so much now.
Viv and I are driving the last load from our apartment to the house as I thumb this into the Treo.
I loaded the car with fragile things, paper sculptures and the like before our final meal as Capitol Hill residents, at the reliably delicious, and reliably overpriced, Coastal Kitchen.
We picked up a few replacements for things gone AWOL in the move (scissors and scotch tape and the like) on 15th before we got in the car to head north.
Once we started driving, without thinking, Viv adjusted her seat, audibly crushing part of a paper four foot scale model of the Space Needle I'd carefully stowed behind the driver's seat. I didn't flip out, I'm happy to report. But that accident is a perfect metaphor for my dissatisfaction with the move and the house.
The Seattle I built for myself in dreams has been crushed. I don't feel connected to this new phase of my life by desire or joy, only obligation and economic realities that I can never control. Life out past the end of the sidewalks was exactly what I had as a child, and I hated it, and I hate it still.
UPDATE: Upon unloading the car, the Needle and the damage done turned out to be, unsurprisingly, mostly in my imagination. I retain the right to excercise that gloomy entity.
UPDATE THE SECOND: Burn ban cancelled, there's a fire in the hearth. Finally.
As a new homeowner with a fireplace, I have need to know the URL of a Burn Ban status page. I wonder if someone's scraped an RSS feed of this together, as I'm itching to gaze into the embers.
I surprised Viv with a Christmas tree this evening, telling her I was running back to the apartment to shift another load.
Chez Siffblog, ESF encackled me this evening. I found this piece hilarious and interesting.
Alas, I am so busy, Dear Internet, that I must confess that while I think of you all the time, it is only now that I can spare a moment to write. Of course, I have nothing much to say, my time filled with the empty clock-calories of modernity.
Ever wonder how that value-priced gasoline brand can price a dime under everyone else? They only allow ATM cards and tack on 45 cents, which doesn't sound too bad until you find that the pump you're using has poor flow and no pump-lock, so you're forced to squeeze it with all your carpal-tunnel might until it turns off and won't restart at 5 gallons, for a nice 9 cent tack-on to the stated price of X minus 10 cents per gallon.
Speaking of which, my relatively well-maintained (pay no mind to the fender there, kiddo, move along now why doncha) 1993 Toyota Camry gives fine, 30-some-miles to the gallon driving. That's been just about a fill up every other week since I started driving to work. Now that a) we're in the new location, well to the north of my old apartment and b) still moving and therefore driving back and forth betwixt job, apartment, and house several times a day, today was the first time i ever had to try to fill the car up due to an empty tank the day after I had filled the car up due to an empty tank.
For some reason, my interim internet solution at the new location disallows https: connections, a distinct inconvenience during the holiday season.
No tree yet, but tomorrow, I think, we'll get one.
The aprons of the new property appear to consist of pure Mississippi gumbo, cleverly disguised as oil-stained gravel admixed with cedar needles.
Simon is still in deep hiding, having crawled inside an unsealed wall and then commenced to howling. He was coaxed out.
No first fire in the fireplace yet. But this night I did succeed in crafting a Martini. Some sort of lounging device must assuredly await.
ITEM:
Last night was the first we spent in the new home. Of the cats, Chloe's adjusting well, Simon not so much. I'm with Simon, to date. I keep myself sane by reading Bart's blog. What ever storms I'm dealing with in my heart and in my mind, there's no possible grounds for me to express even the slightest grumpiness, which of course doesn't stop me at all.
ITEM:
In today's Seattle Times, Eric Scigliano rips the not-quite-new main building for the Seattle Public Library a new one, bemoaning the fact that no-one bitchslapped the place on opening. Begging to differ on this point, I'd like to note that my status as a critic of the SPL includes the building as well as predates it. Alas, I could not find the piece online using the paper's search tools. It appears in the paper's "'Focus" section, which does not appear in the navigation that I could see.
ITEM:
NYT runs love letter to Rocketboom, features still frame from episode featuring PF's poppa. Coincidence, or conspiracy? You decide. Also, what's up with the pf.org redirect to the Progressive Policy Institute website?
As I started work this morning I was alerted via email that some of the live recordings from the recent all-Indiana convocation of independent musicians of the past three generations known as Musical Family Tree Fest had been posted to the Musical Family Tree site.
Browsing the site I happily discovered that my old pal John Terrill's mid-nineties four-track wonder "Frowny Frown" has been made available in full, a treat for me as I had never had a chance to sample this incarnation of John's sonic madness.
Of special interest and appreciation for me were a reworked, county-tinged version of my favorite of John's songs, Angeline, the new to me and quite amusing Chuch Bus Blues, the agreeably downbeat Blind, and the deliciously psychedelic Stoney Mansions.
UPDATE:
Terrill appears to have also contributed the Rosebloods records, Dragon in the Field and Under the Apple Tree, which saves me the trouble of digitizing them myself, by God! Huzzah!
You would not believe it if I told you, and I can't tell you about it here. Suffice to say that today is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day, and torpedoing is involved. No one is actually dying and no specific future is threatened, but my abiding faith in a universe of cruel hopelessness has been affirmed today.
Also the Seattle Smoking Ban goes into effect tomorrow. Hit the Comet, people.
After discussions with Qwest, my ISP, and some research, I have an RMA for the router that Qwest billed me for, the only problem being that within the past 30 days I WAS NEVER SENT A ROUTER BY QWEST. The router I was billed for is nonexistent. I was sent a router several months ago, which I paid for, and I'm inclined to return it. But alas, less than a week ago, I trashed the shipping material.
My ISP assures me that a) the router they installed is generating rental income for them and b) no router they would install would be billed to me by Qwest, as they are separate operations.
My vanishing phone number has been explained, as well. It seems that my ISP, unbidden and unapproved, dropped a whole new line to the house in order to establish ADSL, instead of regular DSL. In so doing they thoughtfully moved the existing handsets onto the new circuit, presumably allowing them to bill me for the "service," in addition to whatever other charges are to be levied. A swift call to them identified that balance as a mere $123 and some petty coppers.
Ah, the sweet, clean air of the free market, where service is sublime and price competition flattens cash outflow. The hell with that! Nationalize 'em! Slow and ineffective service that costs little and is subject to my will as a voter beats slow and ineffective service that costs a shitload and is beyond recourse every single day of this century or any other! Citizens, why do you tolerate this sort of crap?
Laguagehat notes some errantry upon a root, in russian, and is amused by the response.
It brought Jason to mind.
Qwest is billing me 200 dollars this month for a phone number that does not work and a DSL router I actively fought delivery on. Wish me luck, persistence, and restraint in my interactions with customer "service" personnel.
Halfway through the New Yorker thing on type designer Matthew Carter, I check to see if it's online. Alas, no dice. Note to self, readers, and bitwise archaeologists: I will have to save my mag to give to Stacey B.
Holy moley! That soulless rapscallion Reynolds over at Fantagraphics hijacks me yet again! He kindly points out that stone comics genius Kim Deitch will be appearing in Olywa upon the morrow, at Danger Room Comics, more or less.
Just over thirty days after the remodel started, Petr is packing up. The top floor is ready for us and the debris is hauled.
I called him on October 25 or so, and he called me on the 27 saying he could start the next day. He estimated two to three weeks and it came out to just over four. Additionally, the weeks he worked were far from 40 hours long, which was fine with me. The remodel cost about twice what we hoped it would but our initial budget was developed based on an expectation of double overruns, so as much as I would have liked to hang onto the money, I'm happy with what we received for the cost.
We did not cash out our savings in entirety by any means, and I'm confident we've enhanced the value of the house. Now I have to figure out how to keep on the beam for the next few years addressing the deferred maintenance issues and the additional improvements and alterations that could benefit the place, such as doublepane windows, an upgraded power system, and so forth.
BBC NEWS | Europe | Russian squirrel pack 'kills dog' due to pine cone shortage?
About damn time.
I've personally been calling for an outbreak of Bigfoot sightings since I moved here in 1990, first tying the phenom to a poor national economy and then to an overheated local economy. Currently I hold that such outbreaks are largely tied to inflationary housing markets. Bring on the mystery anthromorphs!
