Felicity at Goliard Dream posted a long memoir of her youth as the child of anti-war activists in Berkeley in the sixties.
I found it very interesting. I guess I might, in fact, enjoy that memoir of my mythical hippy house on Polk, circa 1968.
note to self
In the future, have at least one meal prior to drinking several pitchers of beer with Spencer.
10.2.4
Phew!
Didn’t even break sendmail.
Apache had some directive syntax changes, and experimentally enabling mod_dav generated repeatable crashes. But on the whole, painless.
Tomorrow I believe I’ll tackle the miscellaneous other upgrades.
hmph
I’m not feelin’ it today, I gots to admit.
Need to move a bunch of crap around in my office, but I also have a raft of server upgrades due – I started to work on it at noon, but the software kept getting checksum errors when I’d download it. So finally, by the time I had what I needed, there was not gonna be enough time to wrap the upgrades before dinner.
The major piece is a system upgrade to bellerophon, which, according to MacinTouch is likely to break PHP and sendmail at least, and possibly more – some of the problems seen outside these kinds of apps are a bit unsettling as well, involving inabilities to go online – although via modem primarily.
Therefore, I REALLY want a clean 8-hour block ready to fix things.
I wonder, should I dry-run on my desktop box first? Mebbe.
…
I am kinda putting off a review of Coloring Outside the Lines, by Aimee Cooper. It’s a memoir of time spent in the nascent streetpunk scene in L. A. around 1980, and I really enjoyed the book.
A full review is forthcoming, but I’m also looking to try to place a piece so I’m sort of dawdling in this venue.
Lowdown: if you’re an ex-punk or currently are, or if you have an abiding interest in subcultural histories, go pick it up. It’s pretty good. Kinda raw, but enjoyable. I have no actual idea how it might play to someone who wasn’t on the inside.
Good points: namedropping is strictly limited, and focuses on the stupidity of namedropping, or at least the futility of celebrity. In fact, music is not at all what the book is about. It’s about one of the ways that young people come together to define themselves when the traditional structures made available by society don’t operate as intended.
At least one other reader of the book complains that the narrative is about no-one famous, and that these people apparently interact with the music scene in a peripheral way. Well, yeah, but that’s why I thought it was interesting. I mean, somone else already wrote those books, and I’m not interested.
Would I enjoy memoir of a hippy house on Polk Street in 1968? Maybe. On the other hand, it might really irritate me.
Libeskind plan selected
Libeskind Plan Chosen for World Trade Center Site (NYT) – which pleases me, I must say. The design struck me as head-and-shouldrs above he other designs. I thought I’d blogged the designs back in December, but apparently not.
In a reading experience simply PACKED with synchronicities, last night, after watching a terrifying NOVA devoted to the charmingly low-tech “Dirty Bomb,” which featured unsettlingly high-quality visualizations of a bomb-blast in London’s Trafalgar Square, I opened my March issue of Smithsonian to find a story (full text PDF) about the same thing.
A few pages in, and here’s a comprehensive profile of Daniel Libeskind.
And here we are, a day later. What’s next, a stunning revelation about Macchu Picchu?
Posters, part II
Modern Drunkard‘s propaganda posters pick up on the WWII poster remix idea.
Sadly, the level of wit in the copy on these leaves something to be desired, even if the imagery does not: see “Fight for Your Right to Party” in the lower left corner.
I AM FOOD!: idle clickery
Caterina.net: From the Taittiriya Upanishad
O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful!
I am food! I am food! I am food!
I eat food! I eat food! I eat food!
My name never dies, never dies, never dies!
I was born first in the first of the worlds, earlier than the gods, in the belly of what has no death!
Whoever gives me away has helped me the most!
I, who am food, eat the eater of food!
I have overcome this world!
He who knows this shines like the sun.
Such are the laws of the mystery!
This was found via a random click into Caterina’s site from dear pal Anne Zender‘s blogroll.
I LIKE it! Screw the context, I have no idea about it – I am FOOD!
(Today I was a delicious coq au vin.)
Same Difference
Same Difference is a 16-part online comic focusing on a Bay Area friendship between two twentysomethings. Jerry pointed it out, and it’s been getting citations for a few days, as the story arc just completed.
It’s really quite excellent – not standard webcomics fare, which can tend to reflect the demands of the web by presenting condensed, efficient bursts.
This well written and thoughtful, and the script takes its’ time in moving from point A to point B. Additionally, considering the work technically, the author, Derek Kirk Kim, has a strong grasp of comics craft.
In several passages he uses the story to display this command. While these presentations felt tentative, as though it was the artists’ first use of the method or that a given technique was being invented as the page was designed, they are uniformly successful.
In this thread, he’s invited reactions to and discussion of the 2-year project.
Blimp Week Bonus Beats
“Using the artificial convection of my central heating, the blimp stealthily departed my office. It moved silently through the living and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully.”
I laughed, and laughed, and then I laughed some more. Then Viv came in to look worriedly at me, and my stomach hurt. Then I laughed still more.
Via email from Paul Frankenstein.
Duct Tape secrets revelated
Boing Boing links to a Washington Post article that reveals links between the GOP and America’s largest manufacturer of duct tape.
Which made me think of a few things I joked about, why, just the other day!