Posted on by mwhybark

Vidpod

I have spent a portion of my weekend messing with RSS and The Democracy Player, per the instructions linked, and so far, so good, although my DSL speed is slow enough to consign this to permanent experiment until I finalize the LAN setup and shanghai one of the G4s as a dedicated media server.

The Times has a look at the burgeoning world of IPTV content production: As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born.

One of my longtime colleagues has been oriented to providing IPTV instructional programming for over a decade now – it really seems like this should be his moment. I wonder if he has rights to all the content he’s produced over the past ten years? On a related note, I wonder what would happen if I started considering my weekly pitchlist as the basis for video content as well? In particular, a subset of my story ideas are always how-tos, reviews, and explanatory material. A typical magazine story yields 500 to 700 words and takes less than a minute to read, in my experience. If that 700 words could be recast as a three-minute-script and shot at the time the article is prepared, I think there might be a decent microcontent media property, as long as the subject matter is sufficiently consistent.

Some of these ideas could also very productively apply to SIFFblog, I think. Hmmm.

Posted on by mwhybark

Seattle and ashes

Charles D’Ambrosio sketches scenes from a pre-boom Puget Sound – my good old days, chilluns – in The New Yorker.

UPDATE: I found the story, as I often do with D’Ambrsio, beautiful and evocative. Interstingly, I distinctly felt that this story was written in conscious dialogue with Alexie and Vollmann. Perhaps someday Vollmann will write of the Northwest directly.

UPDATE II: on Father’s Day 2016 I noticed that the new Yorker appears to have bitrotted this, and presumably other, old links. Fixed. This post gave me such a thrill when the author himself dropped by to express appreciation for my expression of appreciation.

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Reading

Of late, I have been breasting my way through the purple prose of Rafael Sabatini‘s The Sea Hawk (almost nothing, it seems, to do with the Errol Flynn flick of 1940 despite the distinct probability that the film is an adaptation) on my superannuated, but happily green-glowing, Palm Vx. Sadly, as I have come to enjoy reading material in a darkened room, the Palm will not sync with my current main machine, as both it and my Palm-powered phone share a username and there is no easy way to change a username on a Palm machine.

Happily, I experimentally tried beaming a Palm Reader doc from the phone to the decrepit museum piece. It went swimmingly, and now my alarm clock is also my bedside reader, loaded with this and that. If only I could figure out how to cobble a working AvantGo conduit over the beam.

Posted on by mwhybark

Al Ghoul

An idle witticism by a friend led me to look, briefly, into the etymology of “alcohol.”

As he jokingly suggested, the word comes to English via Arabic:

In general usage, alcohol (from Arabic al-kukhūl الكحول = “the spirit”, “the chemical”.)



The wikipedia entry takes a pleasant jaunt into free association, worth examining:

However, this derivation is suspicious since the current Arabic name for alcohol, الكحول = ALKHWL = al???, does not derive from al-kuhul. The Qur’an in verse 37:47 uses the word الغول = ALGhWL = al-ghawl — properly meaning “spirit” (“spiritual being”) or “demon” — with the sense “the thing that gives the wine its headiness”. The word al-ghawl also originated the English word “ghoul”, and the name of the star Algol. This derivation would, of course, be consistent with the use of “spirit” or “spirit of wine” as synonymous of “alcohol” in most Western languages. (Incidentally, the etymology “alcohol” = “the devil” was used in the 1930s by the U.S. Temperance Movement for propaganda purposes.)

I’ll drink to that!