Hey look! Look, everybody, you teeming ones and twos (hm, this is like being on the air, er, wire at WQAX): Eric Sinclair‘s back on the air!
Eric is my very oldest friend, an acquaintance sparked by, you guessed it, a Star Trek book being read covertly in Mr. Noel’s 6th grade Health class. By me, If I recall.
(current Trek reference count in this blog: on a logarithmic scale, it’s a lot. Did I tell you I’ve written three – or is it four – pieces on ENTERPRISE for
In a wonderful serendipity, since I just got off the phone with Classmates.com, I caught the last half-hour to forty-five minutes of the classic teen rocker flick, “Rock and Roll High School”, which features the Ramones, Warhol scenester Mary Woronov, and the inevitable Clint “Balok” Howard (hmm… The Howard family and Star Trek… haven’t I been here before?), Ron Howard’s I-think younger bro.
Ah, I love this movie. What luck! Shot at the height of the Ramones’ superpowers, the filmmakers made the nearly incredible decision to include nearly an entire albums’ worth of Ramones tunes in their entirety. The centerpiece of the film is a five-or-six song concert in which the songs are presented pretty much as is, live on stage.
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I had a phone interview this morning with a very professional recruiter for Classmates.com. I fear I started things off badly by asserting that they were IIS-based and located in Kirkland, which is incorrect in both cases.
I can’t say it was the most successful phone interview I’ve ever had. Still, I certainly hope to hear from them again. I think the Classmates.com idea – a site that permits and encourages people to locate others that they had contact with at specific times in their lives, such as high school – is one of the most natural uses of the internet, and has the potential to be as successful and central to internet users’ lives as eBay has become.
In fact, Classmates >could< become the central clearinghouse for internet contact information, if done right. Boy it'd be tough; but that would be a damn fun job. I have a bazillion great ideas how to get there; let's hope I hear back from them so I can share.
I assumed the whole world was losing sleep over this, but when I mentioned it at a recent gathering, not ONE person had even heard of it. So here goes:
In early March of 2002, an Antarctic ice shelf the size of RHODE ISLAND collapsed into the sea, an apparent result of, um, melting ice.
Amazing pix:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?group=events/sc/032202iceshelf&i=index&e=1&tmpl=sl
So, uh, how much is mountain real estate going for in coastal regions? How high’s the water, momma?
Oh, and by the way: screw the Kyoto Treaty, this is a fantastic market opportunity! Surfboards for everyone!
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! We’re Number One! We’re Number One (in greenhouse gas emissions, that is)!
Geez, I can really go on and on, huh?
OK, I pledge:
a) shorter entries
b) more focused entries
c) multipart entries when I get my steam up
d) shorter sentences
e) fewer nested clauses
I don’t know why it comes out that way. It is how I actually think, in my head. Long, complex, gramatically correct sentences.
I think my linguistic facility is responsible for both my strengths and weaknesses in coding. I don’t think in arrays; I think in trees.
I really enjoyed the illustration for Malcolm Gladwell’s review of “The Myth of the Paperless Office” on page 92. I enjoyed the article itself, of course, which is a reflection on messiness in the workspace as an organizing principle. Both the review and the illustration appear to reflect the ideas of David Gelernter, CS guy at Yale, victim of the Unabomber and the author of the pretty great “1939: The Lost World of the Fair”.
Piles, it seems, are actually a really efficient way of organizing information.
Although a piler, I’m not so sure I agree. But then, as with much of Gelernter’s work, I see lots of things I agree with but don’t necessarily reach the same conclusion.
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My eagle-eyed wife spotted a link from the previously cited as somewhat scary The Andy Griffith Show Watcher’s Club. The link further demonstrates the debauched interconnectedness of TV land. Mayberry was used as a set in the original Star Trek series episdoes “Miri” and “The City on the Edge of Forever”. A devoted member of TAGSWC has assembled a website which has to be the oddest Trek-related site I’ve ever seen:
The thing I particularly love about this site is the abandoned, devastated cityscape seen in “Miri”, considered as a plot point in the Andy Griffith story line. What happened here? Did everyone move to Central City? Was it a riot or plague? Maybe it was a huge race riot, such as Rosewood or Tulsa in 1921.
None can tell – but it seems clear, Mayberry didn’t make it to the future.
Hmm… mentioning Rosewood and Tulsa in the context of a Trek-related posting reminds me – gotta do a bit on race in Star Trek sometime. Aaron McGruder’s always hilarious daily strip “The Boondocks” recently cited Levar Burton’s Geordi LaForge as a “most embarrassing black person”. Aaron’s observations echo those of my pal Dave Dushe.
Dave pointed out to me that Worf and Geordi, the only series regulars of African ancestry in TNG, are symbolically emasculated as a defining characteristic of their beings. As I said, it bears some musing.
Well, following the lead of Ken Goldstein and Eric Sinclair, I’m setting up a wee blog site. Ken and Eric’s sites are accessible via the links section.
I hope shortly, once I have a grasp of the capacity of this blog app, (the perl-based Movable Type) to provide blog-hosting for at the least my family.
To kick things off, here are three recent short essays.
There are other recent project links to be observed in the “Links” section of this page as well. I assume most of my initial visitors will have already heard about them. When updates to these projects occur, I’ll note it here.
I woke up one morning thinking I’d had dinner with my pals Greg and Stacy. They just got back from three weeks in France and we were to see them shortly. Greg was kind of showing off, ordering in (very fluent) French, in the dream. Then somehow we all started discussing the recently broadcast 2-hour “NewsRadio” reunion special. Such a show has not ever existed, to my knowledge.
It turns out that Maura Tierney, so excellent as Lisa on the actual show, was unavailable for the reunion production, and so instead, a role which in this conversation was characterized as “Dave’s girlfriend” was played by an actress who had previously portrayed Austin Powers’ girlfriend, and yet was neither Heather Graham or Elizabeth Hurley. I assume that this actress must be the actress portraying the International Man of Mystery’s paramour in the upcoming Austin Powers movie.
When I explained this to my wife after awakening, she exclaimed, “She’s a dwarf!”
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Consider this: the Dick Van Dyke show and the Andy Griffith show were shot at about the same time and shared, I believe, a producer in the person of Danny Thomas. The Griffith show featured child actor Ron Howard, of course. The van Dyke show, in addition to the well-known castmembers, featured a child character, the son of the Petries, named Richie.
Additionally, the writers for the show based much of the mise-en-scene of the show on their experiences working as writers on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”. Among the writers and performers was Carl Reiner (Alan Brady). Carl’s son Rob would later go on to fame as “Meatball” on “All in the Family” and as a skillful director of films about late childhood, adolescence, and of course, Spinal Tap.
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