donsense

Astrotweets

2010-03-25T06:38:00.000-07:00

Lately I've wondered if I would ever get back to blogging. Today I saw this cool story of astronaut Soichi Noguchi sending mobile pictures from the international space station back to earth through his twitter account.

As far as I'm concerned, that about does it. We've accomplished everything.

Most of us use such technology to show the world the sushi plate sitting in front of us. Which, up to now, left us one step short of accomplishing "everything."

In the meantime, here I was about to post the link to my facebook when I remembered that once upon a time I used to blog.

When I arrived here to finally show my face again, I was horrified and amused to learn that it was exactly one year ago today that I posted. So, instead of composing a draft and then letting it stew for a month and then maybe adding photos, and thus merely bulking up my 'drafts' folder, I'm just going to publish this and run.

Beware: DilbertFiles.com Is Not A Joke. I Repeat, Not A Joke.

2009-03-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Reading Dilbert panels is really really important.

I once formulated an extremely convincing argument for including a visit to Dilbert.com once a day in order to, well, something something, business acumen, cultural something finger on the pulse, savvy insight, something something staying on my game. Be the ball.

I wish I could remember it.

So when I went to read me some Dilbert this afternoon - after work, uh, during research time, preparing for tomorrow something something be the ball - I saw a link to something called DilbertFiles.com.

Instantly I broke out into psychotic laughter because Dogbert was pointing to the ad and clearly a joke was intended. Eventually, through my tears of internet mirth, as I came out of my coma, I could see Dogbert was quite serious.

Hmmm. Confusion. This was a real link to a real service, and I was not actually supposed to split open with laughter and spill my convulsively cramping innards onto my desk.

So, I cleaned up the blood and clicked on the link.

Apparently, for a nominal fee, you can create an online server space which can be used to transfer monster-sized files to people, with upwards of a hundred huge attachments on a single standard email. You can created shared folders, password accounts, and the like, and use the space as an online backup for everything which you can actually access from any computer anywhere with no special software.

Question is, how safe is Dogbert going to keep my files??

I don't personally see a compelling need to subscribe to any level of the service they offer, but I can see how some small businesses or a professional, like a graphic artist for instance, might find this pretty handy.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'm heading back to the funny pages.

Bobby Jindal Is A Perfectly Normal Young Obfuscating Republican Who Supports Creationism In Schools And Was Once Involved In A 3-Hour Exorcism....

2009-02-27T06:39:00.000-08:00

You think the Louisiana Governor is squirming now?

Wait until he seeks higher office and THIS gets more play.

Arizona Phoenix* Random Eleven

2009-01-30T20:17:00.000-08:00

Jesusland - BEN FOLDS
N.M.A. - EEF BARZELAY
Carolina - BENJAMIN GIBBARD
Welcome Home - RADICAL FACE
Naked As We Came - IRON & WINE
The Last High - THE DANDY WARHOLS
Simple Love - ALISON KRAUSS
Right Side, Wrong Bed - SMASH MOUTH
Feeling Oblivion - TURIN BRAKES
Lies Behind The Sun - PIERCE & E.J. MAGGI
For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless in Ypsilanti - SUFJAN STEVENS

* A long long time ago a man who had only recently worked as a grocery checkout clerk - a bagger - got himself a job as a quarterback on an arena football league team, where he started making the relatively big bucks. In an unlikely twist, the man some time later was the starting quarterback on an actual NFL football team. There, he did his job in a satisfactory manner, a description that would have been just as apt at the little grocery store for which he had not too long before filled bags of sundries. One day this NFL quarterback found himself playing in the Super Bowl with his team. My, what a rise to stardom.

The man then did what all good quarterbacks do: he faded. He bounced around the league, started behind rookies and other quarterbacks who will never be known as greats. He was, in a way, back to bagging groceries.

But never count out a nice guy. After being a washed up back-up QB for most of four seasons, suddenly the man starts every game, for an entire season. Suddenly the man wins games, suddenly the man is on top, again. His team, his new team, is going to the Super Bowl. Only one other quarterback in history has brought two different teams to Super Bowls.

He is reborn. He is risen from the ashes. It's fitting that this man, this year, plays in Phoenix.

MORE

10 Lessons* Random Eleven

2009-01-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

Do not fear the link. The links provided go to an info page for each song provided by pandora dot com. Hear a sample and then act according to your whim. But always come back here. Simple.

Let Me Know (Demo) - YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Each Coming Night - IRON & WINE
Jenny Under House Arrest - THE TROPHY FIRE
On/Off - SNOW PATROL
Seaside - THE KOOKS
1995 - THE RADIO DEPT.
Tame Thoughts - WARM IN THE WAKE
So Says I - THE SHINS
Your Scars - CHARLEMAGNE
President Of What? - DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
The Great American Napkin - THE SUMMER SKINNY

*I guess January 18 is as good a time as any to do a quick and mercifully final look back at what went wrong with the Bush administration. Not just to keep flogging the beast but to see if there are any general lessons to learn.

Oh, and there are. Bob Woodward writes in the Washington Post on ten insights to draw from the Bush, uh, calamity.

Just A Second - or - So That's The Purpose Of The Earth's Rotation And International Time Keeping Whatsa-Whoosit Commission

2008-12-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

Secret functionaries of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service are going to insert an additional second into the space-time continuum, in between 11:59:59 p.m. and 12 midnight on New Year's Eve. Oddly, this is about when every person on the planet will be paying attention to the clock.

Very very crafty.

Intercepted communications indicate that this additional second has been smuggled into this dimension for the purpose of adding to the already massive block of time currently amassed over the eons. The intent, as deduced by counter-intel analysts, is to keep the earth on track with reality, a goal which the most recent United States Presidential Election had already purportedly achieved.

Science marches on. And so does time, even with the additional weight.

See for yourself.

A-11* Random Eleven

2008-09-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

I used to be able to link each song to a full free play at Napster (the legal Napster). Now, I can't do that. I am linking each of these to a sample play at either Amazon or Itunes or some other place as I see fit. If I were driven to be cleverly rich and have all those multiple streams of income I'm always hearing about, I am sure I would go through the time to set up a referral link commission thing, with one of them. But, No.

Coyote - JENNY OWEN YOUNGS
The Way I Am - INGRID MICHAELSON
Foundations - KATE NASH
Engine Heart - MIRAH
Finally Woken - JEM
Gray Or Blue - JAYMAY
The Polite - KATIE TODD
Happy Alone - EARLIMART
Hands - MS. JOHN SODA
The Park - FEIST
Dark Side - POLLY PAULUSMA

* If you tune in to an NFL game one day and you see the offense line up with three lineman at the ball, three receivers out right and three out left, with two quarterbacks something like 8 or 10 yards back from center, go ahead and blink so you can watch closely, and then remember this article.

What may one day be the offense of the future of football was dreamed up at Piedmont High School by coach Kurt Bryan and Director of Football Operations Steve Humphries a few seasons ago.

They call it the A-11, and if they threw it out onto the field every now and again you might forgive the trickery. The high school has but 1000 students and sometimes you have to drag a little desperation onto the field and see what he scares up.

But this is no gimmick. This is how the offense lines up most of the game. This is a full offensive scheme which runs, passes - and yes, inserts a trick play or two - and which in its first season produced a 7-4 record and has resulted in three straight post-season appearances.

What makes this offense so innovative is that depending on exactly where everyone lines up, any five of the eleven players on the field could be eligible to catch a forward pass on any given play.

The "Offense of the Future" looks kind of fun, even here in the present.

PS -- If you worked your way through this post because you arrived with an undying interest in Mirah and Feist, but you found yourself in an article about football and became hopelessly lost at "three linemen", well... thanks for trying.

Beach Day

2008-08-08T23:47:00.000-07:00

I can never be entirely certain, but I think the kids had a good time at Torrey Pines.

Earthquake

2008-07-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

About 2 minutes ago. 11:43 PST. It felt like it was rocking west/east. I'll guess a 4.something near or off the coast of San Diego's North County. Or of course, bigger than 4.something but farther offshore.

UPDATE
It was about a 5.8 centered about 80 miles ~~northeast~~ northwest of my location, near Chino Hills directly east of L.A.

Almost a whopper.

This site is great.

UPDATE #2
Now a 3.8 aftershock around the same area. Could not feel that one here.

When The Professor Asks What Kind Of Crap You're Working On, Say It's Pre-Clovis. He Digs That Shit. Well, you do. For Him.

2008-07-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

Would you prefer I use the term "scat"? Maybe "Fecal Fossils"? Hey, I like that one!

Caspar Milquetoast

2008-05-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

I'm a busy guy. But, not too busy for you, the top-tier blog peruser. No, despite my overburdened underpaid semi-professional nearly-hypothetical "career", I am still able to upload a blog post, or two, roughly every quarter (or two), all year! Because I care.

I was researching ("lunch-killing") the origin of the word Milquetoast three or four months ago and came across the newspaper comic strip character "Caspar Milquetoast".

Sayeth the article found at the above link, in part:

H.T. Webster's most famous protagonist was such a wuss, he'd buy a new hat when the one he was wearing got blown onto a patch of ground protected by a "Keep Off the Grass" sign. A sign reading "Watch This Space" could render him motionless for hours.

Funny, funny stuff.

Sated, and excited to have acquired a link to "content" for my media empire, I captured and saved it into my blogger drafts where I have since left it at a constant temperature in oak barrels at my secret blog fermenting location deep in the mountains of... my... secret... state. This slow process has allowed it to acquire a mesmerizing redolence not unlike a tincture of brambleberry, cracked pepper, sweet alyssum, and soap.

Served now for your pleasure, here.

Above, actually. In the second paragraph.

Daily? Who Said Anything About 'Daily' ? Oh, I Did? Well, Yes, But I Also Added '-ish', So This Is Daily-ish: Let's Talk Saturn

2008-03-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

If you look at Saturn every night you'll slowly lose the ability to see the rings. This, like all natural phenomenon has a perfectly logical explanation, although I would really like to tell you that ring-miners from quadrant eleven-peck-do have been taking all the colors away and Saturn's almost out now.

So, the truth: You're going blind.

Alright, alright, the real truth.

As Saturn passed us every now and then we must of course pass over the ring horizon or the - I don't know - but we're soon going to be looking at Saturn edge on with the ring.

Read all about it here:

NASA - The Vanishing Rings of Saturn

NOTE - the body in the photo above is Saturn's moon Dione, revolving around Saturn in a sea of objects making up the ring. This view is edge-on. If you look at Saturn through a telescope right around now, this is what you'll pretty much be seeing.

Well, not Dione. You won't see Dione.

Sorry. I know how much you wanted to.

Must ... Type ... Words ... MUST ... Hit ... "Publish" ... - or - Since When Does Publishing Twice A Year Count As "Blogging" Anyway?

2008-02-23T21:42:00.000-08:00

BREAKING NEWS:

BLOGGERS GET WRITER'S BLOCK,
EVEN THOUGH NOBODY READS WHAT THEY WRITE!

VIDEO AT 11:00 ... IF WE'RE UP TO IT!

Seriously now. This is ridiculous.

I maxed out my allotted space for DRAFTS in my blogger site about 2 years ago. Every time I get an idea for a new post and save it as a rough draft, the oldest unpublish post drops off the DRAFTS list. What a perfectly senseless waste of time well-wasted in the first place.

You didn't even know there was a limit, did you. Clearly, I'm an old pro.

So, a new vow. I am not ashamed of making this new vow in public because, well, nobody reads this site anyway.

The vow:

Even if I don't have the time to craft an elegant and insightful expository piece worthy of Slate or Wired or Smithsonian Magazine Online, I will whack out a 400 word blob of blogness anyway, if I have to hire an untrained team of juvenile monkeys to do it for me. Every day. -ISH.

I promise.

Again.

Oh, and make sure to go bother LUKE and MIKE and LUKE&MIKE&ME&OTHERS for their ridiculous lack of hitting the "PUBLISH" button too. (Mike's better than the rest of us, but...)

Thanks.

[UPDATE - I've noticed that Mike's server is down. My guess is that he'll notice in about a week or two. We'll see.]

Pacifist Propaganda * Random Eleven

2008-01-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

Through December - LAURA VEIRS
One Man Guy - RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Gillian (Live) - THE WAIFS
Between The Lines - SAMBASSADEUR
Eyes - ROGUE WAVE
All U Can Eat - BEN FOLDS
Bronson - CALLA
Kissing The Lipless - THE SHINS
Radiation Vibe - HEM
Tomorrow Is A Long Time - NICKEL CREEK

* I always hear that until Vietnam no one ever protested wars in the United States. Of course I always chuckle hearing that. There probably hasn't been a war in the history of Earth that wasn't protested in some manner.

I thought of this when one day as I was - don't ask me when or why - checking in on the FBI:

# Publication Number: M1085
# Publication Title: Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation 1908-1922
# Publisher: NARA
# Series: Old German Files, 1909-21
# Case Number: 8000-174151
# Case Title: Pacifist Propaganda
# Suspect Name: Mrs. S. E. Sheffler
# Page: 1
# Collection Title: Investigative Reports of the Bureau of Investigation 1908-1922"

10,000 Defeats* Random Eleven

2007-07-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Cold Cold Ground - JOHNSMITH
Falling - CAREN ARMSTRONG
Liar - ESKIMO JOE
Tickets To The Fight - SODASTREAM
Calling God - JANN ARDEN
Buried in Teeth - MARIEE SIOUX
Planxtry Ellie Murphy - COLCANNON
Clove Cigarette - STEPHEN ASHBROOK
Doubt - STEREOLAB
1/2 a Million Miles From Home - DIANE CLUCK
Bridges And Balloons - JOANNA NEWSOME

* Nearly meaningless milestones are fascinating because in such markers we can find volumes of hidden significance. The rest of the story, so to speak.

The Philadelphia Phillies baseball team are about to garner their 10,000th loss as a major league team. This is significant in that there is not a single team in any sport in the entire world at this volume of losses.

As losers go, they're the best.

Better yet, they're not even lovable losers, which is why we don't know about this spectacular streak of theirs. Every year we see stories of the undyingly faithful fans of the Cubs and the Red Sox, willing to wait generations for their teams to one day win the big one. Faithful to the end for their lovable losers. But Philadelphia is brutal. Brutal to visiting teams, brutal to their own.

So now we know why. I read that Philadelphia as a city has gone the longest of any city with teams in all four major sports, without any championship. If it wasn't for that whole "birthplace of America" thing I'm not sure there would be a reason for keeping the town around.

But let's look at this 10,000th loss in another way.

In 1990 I read a book by Luke Salisbury called "The Answer Is Baseball", and I consider it a primer on how to illuminate the fine but ubiquitous network of strands connecting our cultural artifacts and the forces moving our society hither and yon. Baseball is not just baseball. Our relationship with entertainment and leisure is as significant a force in our lives as our jobs and our families. Why? There is a cultural meaning embedded in that connection. It's a relationship. It's a dance or an art form which allows us to reconcile, or at least, tinker with, the complexities of what we see as right and wrong with our lives and the world. You think I'm being dramatic? Just ask a baseball fan about their biggest disappointment and you will see somebody brought nearly to tears over a single curveball thrown decades ago.

Salisbury's book uses baseball trivia to open essays that journey into deeper valleys of significance hidden in the nooks and crannies of statistical tables. Well, it's fun, too.

For instance, what could it matter that there were two different major league pitchers who each threw home run balls to both Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron at some points in their careers? Well, understand, Ruth ended his career in 1935 and Aaron began his in 1954. Who pitches in the major leagues for twenty years!? Great pitchers, that's who.

[23 JULY 2007 UPDATE] I might have this stat all flubbled with another. A serendipitous post by Tom McMahon over at his blog says that pitchers Lefty Grove and Ted Lyons did something similar to what I was describing. They each gave up home runs to Babe Ruth during his 60 Home Run season in 1927, and gave up hits to Joe DiMaggio during his 56 Game Hitting Streak in 1941. This might just be the story I recall. My point is the same, of course. Great pitchers, long careers. And don't ask me why I capitalize Significant Baseball Moments; I just do.]

In such simple stats can be found a deeper story. Sometimes that story speaks volumes about the society in which we live. The first Native American to play major league baseball preceded the first black major leaguer by nearly 50 years. And the story of this one man's rise and fall illustrates the tragedy that is the story of the American Indian in 19th century America.

But not only do statistics and stories from baseball's past reveal details of our society at large, they connect our own personal stories to our present. Everyone has an "I was there" story, a "What I was doing when JFK was shot" story. And everyone can recount an anecdote about the TV star or ballplayer who grew up in their neighborhood.

Hank Aaron once hit a home run in St. Louis which, because he stepped out of the batter's box to hit the ball, was disqualified as a home run and he was ruled out instead. His record 755 home runs, of course, don't reflect this small detail from the afternoon of August 18, 1965. But it happened. And it's a story for at least one fan that connects back to his childhood playing pickup ball with the kids in his neighborhood. One of those kids was the son of the man who gave up that ghost home run to Hank Aaron that August day and got an out instead. This man, in fact, was himself ending a long career that began with the disappointment of not pitching in the 1950 World Series because his unit was called up for Korean War Service.

Such is the endless social and cultural tapestry woven with the trivial details of a child's game.

So to the Phillies and their 10,000 defeats. Who loses 10,000 games? Well, a team that has remained in the same city in the same league for over 100 years. They are the only team in any sport in America who has accomplished that. A team that has played in front of nearly six generations of baseball fans. Six generations of Philadelphia children and adults who, abuse their teams as they may, won't ever give up on them, and whose life stories are intricately tied to the many defeats AND victories fought one day at a time, one inning at a time. One pitch.

Tug McGraw threw the final pitch that sealed the Phillies only world championship, near the end of his career, and as a boy I used to read the comic strip Scroogie which he ghosted through a writer and illustrator and published in newspapers throughout the U.S.

It was about a lovable loser baseball team.

In one strip, Scroogie explains the game-of-inches adage to his skipper during a mound conference. The skipper says, "Inches? That ball went 793 feet!"

Scroogie's reply: "Yeah, 9,516 inches."

A game of inches, a game of defeats, a game of life.

Hard Wired, Soft Wared, Free Willed - or - Free Will, But I Won't

2007-05-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

I watched the film Stranger Than Fiction with Will Farrell playing Harold Crick, an IRS auditor who realizes he's simply a character in somebody's unfinished novel.... He consults with a psychologist and then with a literature professor. He desperately tries to determine whether his story is a tragedy or a comedy.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I get to Harold's problem let me throw you a number:

"57".

Fifty-Seven is the answer most of the time, if you ask the right question.

Ahh. The right question. But for a society with all the right answers, it is disturbing how often we are unacquainted with the right questions.

As is taught in sales and marketing courses from universities to corporate training rooms throughout the land, to get the answer you desire, you need to simply come up with the right question.

Is this due to the nature of our brains, or the universe?

If I stand before one thousand people, get them to clear their minds by asking a series of simple calculations, and then ask them all to "think of an odd number between 40 and 60", the vast majority of them - let's say, about nine hundred and seventy of them - will automatically think of the number "57".

Why would far more than 90% of people think of this one number, among ten choices?

If I ask them to think of a colored vegetable, most will envision a carrot.

A colored tool... a red hammer.

How is it we can all see ourselves as autonomous individuals, yet we all come up with exactly the same answers to questions which seem to offer us a myriad of choices? If our brains all react the same, like preprogrammed automatons, what does this say of Free Will? Creativity? Cooperation? Tax reform?

Well, I don't know. It says red hammer, it says carrot, it says 57.

But also, it points to some sort of universal strategy or pathway for problem-solving or memory-retrieval, perhaps part instinct, part learned behavior.

Our similar wiring makes us think in a manner that is most predictable when we control for a few points of input.

It's how magicians get away with everything.

Does this mean we are forever doomed to act as all others before us, and all others after?

Well, did you ever notice we've never stopped warring? Procreating? Organizing? Dreaming?

We are to a degree controlled by our wiring. When somebody acts just a little out of the norm, he's nuts. His behavior is not what is expected, even if we don't know what explicitly we should expect, or why.

I watched the film Stranger Than Fiction with Will Farrell playing Harold Crick, an IRS auditor who realizes he's simply a character in somebody's unfinished novel.

The film very cleverly plays with our sense of fate, predetermination, and particularly the forces that compell us to act the way we do. The film was far more sophisticated than I expected going in. At it's core it asks who writes the rules? Can the rules be broken? If we discover what fate awaits us, do we have the will to change it? Should we? What are the consequences?

Harold Crick follows self-imposed rules of behavior to the point of obsessive compulsion but the question for us is, is it because he is written this way? Are we all written similarly?

The author is following rules of literature in creating and running Harold's story. But she herself is compelled to follow certain self-imposed rules regarding how she deals with the protagonists in all her novels (she kills them).

When Harold suddenly begins to hear her narrative voice as he goes about his day, he is given an insight into where his actions are leading. Suddenly, he is thrown off of his original path. And so is his author.

In trying to discover his future, is he changing it? He consults with a psychologist and then with a literature professor. He desperately tries to determine whether his story is a tragedy or a comedy.

In the process, he transforms. He lives. He does things he never thought of doing. Is he suddenly freed from only his own constraints, or also from the unseen but more tangible forces moving him about? This still is as the author is writing it, no? He is still moving inexorably toward the carefully crafted climax of the story. Right?

The author, for her part, is completely unaware of Harold's recognition of her existence. As far as she is concerned she is writing another story of fate - "Death and Taxes" - and she struggles mightily to develop the plot device for the story's climax, while Harold seeks her out in an effort to avoid what he understands is his untimely end.

The whole story is about breaking rules - rules of conduct, rules of writing, of traffic, of love, of the universe. It shows us there are rules we know about, and rules we don't.

We may be purposely defying the constraints we see laid upon us, as does the subject of Crick's audit when she refuses to pay a portion of her taxes; as does Crick himself when he falls in love with her and gets involved. Or we may be breaking rules we don't even know exist, laws written in our DNA or pathways paved in our brains over time, or passages written by the fates in a larger narrative intertwined with the threads of others' stories.

We all die. This is the explanation given to Harold by the lit professor when he so vainly tries to avoid his pivotal role in a story almost finished. What we do and how we conduct ourselves up to that point, however, allow us the ability to co-author this story. Harold does things, effects people, and truly lives, knowing that he needs to do it now, before the story ends.

Kurt Vonnegut's novels almost all used the story-within-a-story device to explore fate, playing with time travel and predetermination and authorship. Billy Pilgrim became "unstuck in time" and a couple of the times he keeps dropping into are where he is telling his own story after the fact. And, before the fact. Many of Woody Allen's short stories deal with stories within stories with the characters discovering their authors' existence, and the authors themselves finding they too are characters, and everything becomes a circus of discovery of fate's trifles. Mighty Aphrodite plays with the gods playing with the fates of mortals, and themselves being characters, in a play of course, on an ancient Greek stage.

Douglas Adams's entire five books of the trilogy "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is nothing if not a whimsical pummeling of our ideas of who authors whose existence, and how little control we have over any of it.

My favorite literature all struggles with these relationships, existentialism, time, fate, ethos, recognition, and the struggle between choice and acceptance, and the dignity of our own place in the bigger picture.

John Irving, William Shakespear... I suppose it would be easier to list the authors who do NOT work with these constructs.

... So, if we think we know our fate, and we walk willingly into it because we understand the purpose it serves, is this now free will? Are we, in this act, writing our own story if we already perceive it to be written?

Perhaps for the moment all I can say to that is "Green Screwdriver".

Although it has little to do with what I've just actually written, I include for you here a link to the article which spun me off into this direction. You may have to register though because it's been a while since I read it at NY Times online:
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t - New York Times

Fallon Ku

2007-04-28T00:27:00.000-07:00

mike and aleah
friends family hearts and masks
daffodils and pie

Tridecennary - or - I'm Sure If I Try Really Hard I Can Think of Something I've Been Doing For Thirteen Years

2007-03-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

According to Anu Garg at A Word A Day, the word Tridecennary is not to be found in any dictionary in the world save one, the Oxford English Dictionary. Something to do with the relatively unappetizing nature of a 13th anything, particularly an anniversary.

Also, as of yesterday when he penned the entry for his daily word blast, a Google search on "Tridecennary" only brings up one hit.

Since AWAD has 600,000 subscribers the world over, including me, I'm sure the Googledearth will end about... an hour ago.

"A Word A Day" began 13 years ago this week, and I believe I've been on the mailing list for over half that time. That means I have forgotten the meanings of more words than you'll ever know. Punk.

And while I was typing in that sentence in my angry old man persona it occured to me that in 1994 I started a business which I am still running, more or less. It's not exactly the same company, and I have no employees, and, well, I'm still counting this year as my Tridecennary.

ps - The image of the wooden blocks, I stole from a blogger in England because I like how the number 1 is reversed. The image links to his blog if you want to rat me out. Punk.

pps - I officially claim to have coined the word "Googledearth" - meaning, "a lack of internet references to a word or phrase, as evidenced by a paltry list of results when searching for the word or phrase in Google." Donald J. Sheffler. Pass the word. Literally.

ppps - Yes, I know there are uses of the phrase Googled Earth, and thus a Google search of googledearth will indeed bring results, but not the way I phrizzled it, my friend. I also see a company trying to sell the site googledearth.com, but again that's merely an opportunistic money grab based on "Googled Earth" along with any number of other mispellings or typos of or about Google Earth. Go ahead, I dare you to keep arguing with me. Punk.

The Golden Tomato Awards for 2006 - or - How Do You Choose A Film To Rent?

2007-01-27T22:38:00.000-08:00

I used to be a Netflixian. Then I dabbled in Blockbusteria. Now I only have time, money, and inclination enough to sweep through the local library once every couple months for a flick or two.

Which is a dreadful tragedy, seeing that I currently have about 458 films to see, listed in order of preference based on reviews, awards, the stars, the directors, the image on the front of the jewel case... you know, all the stuff that should tell you if you'll enjoy the experience.

Let's see, if I get to see about 10 films a year, and my list grows at the rate of 50 films a month, at what point will I drop a piano on my head to stop the throbbing? And how is this related to the trains that start in Cincinnati and Dallas at different speeds and exactly how long before they'll collide in Knoxville?

I've created a monster because I truly feel compelled to see them all, someday, somehow, every last one of them including Mumford.

If I could only just make it all the way through the third season of The Shield I think I'll be well on my way.

Don't you ever wonder if, on your deathbed, you'll regret that you never actually watched Being John Malkovich because you kept dropping it down on your movie list in favor of Wag The Dog and The Shipping News, for like, your final 45 years on Earth?

I don't, because I've seen Being John Malkovich already. Glad I saw it. But do YOU ever wonder such things?

Every January, like an eternally reincarnated lemming, I throw myself off the cliffs of sanity and I peruse the lists of the previous year's greatest films at sites like ROTTEN TOMATOES. It's a site dripping in so many comprehensive lists according to genre and year that I can get my gluttonous fill all in one stop, and then cry myself to sleep for the next 340 nights knowing I'll never see 99.9% of what I've just listed as "must sees".

Seriously, I'll climb Everest before I get to number 100 on my list.

At times like this I hate films. I hate the internet. I hate the professor who replaced the two trains in the math problem with two motorcycles and a spiral parking garage ramp. Terrorist.

Georgia Destroys 488 Towns -or- I Coulda Sworn Chatoogaville Was Right Here!

2006-12-28T23:34:00.000-08:00

Seems the official cartographers at the transportation department in Georgia are quite the decluttering types. So if you live in or near what used to be Hemp GA, or proudly call yourself a citizen of what turns out to be not Po Diddy Crossroads GA, you and the other unworthy denizens of the "Late 488" have been swept under the rug... the impossible to re-fold as it originally was folded rug.

Some of my favorites: Phinizy, Flippen, Gammage, and Smarr.

If my gramma was from Poetry Tulip GA and then all of the sudden even her ten gallon magnifying pan can't find her dot on the map, she'd be ready to fly into the nearest airfield and flag down a passing roadster and stand on the runner if need be, until she could hop off at the nearest deer crossing and then wade through the thicket into town, er, the filling pump, and start kicking some cartographic butt.

These places are drenched with meaning and value. I hear that the Town Formerly Known As Chatoogaville holds the distinction of being the last little country store on the highway to Alabama if you're tooling around northwestern Georgia. That, honestly, deserves a dot.

"Hey," comes the defense from the handwaving, protractor-clutching state employees with nothing better to do than to reduce good folks' hometowns to erasemarks, "whoever heard of Hickory Level anyways? Who, that is, other than Hickory Levelorians... or Levelatians... er uh... Anyway!"

So to all the New Invisibillies: Happy New Year to You, whoever you are and wherever you were.

Georgia erases 488 places off the map

By the way, it turns out that if any of these bumps on the road have zip codes they'll actually be spared. And finally, I have to leave you with the official list:

COUNTY / TOWN:
Appling Pine Grove
Atkinson Kirkland
Bacon Guysie
Baker Bethany
Baker Crestview
Baker Elmodel
Baker Hoggard Mill
Baker Milford
Baldwin Browns Crossing
Baldwin Coopers
Baldwin Hardwick
Baldwin Scottsboro
Baldwin Stevens Pottery
Banks Hollingsworth
Bartow Cassville
Bartow Folsom
Bartow Funkhouser
Bartow Pine Log
Bartow Rydal
Ben Hill Bowens Mill
Ben Hill Queensland
Berrien Glory
Bibb Lizella
Bleckley Cary
Brantley Atkinson
Brantley Lulaton
Brantley Waynesville
Brooks New Rock Hill
Bryan Blitchton
Bryan Ellabelle
Bryan Groveland
Bryan Keller
Bryan Lanier
Bulloch Denmark
Bulloch Hopeulikit
Bulloch Leefield
Bulloch Nevils
Bulloch Stilson
Burke Alexander
Burke Munnerlyn
Burke Rosier
Burke Saint Clair
Burke Shell Bluff
Burke Vidette
Butts Fincherville
Butts Stark
Butts Worthville
Calhoun Turman
Camden Colesburg
Camden Harrietts Bluff
Camden Saint Marys
Camden Spring Bluff
Camden Tarboro
Camden Waverly
Camden White Oak
Candler Aline
Carroll Bowden Junction
Carroll Clem
Carroll Hickory Level
Carroll Hulett
Carroll Jake
Carroll Kansas
Carroll Lowell
Carroll Sand Hill
Carroll Tyus
Catoosa Keith
Charlton Moniac
Charlton Race Pond
Charlton Winokur
Chatham Monteith
Chattooga Chattoogaville
Chattooga Cloudland
Chattooga East Trion
Chattooga Holland
Chattooga Poetry (Tulip)
Chattooga Tidings
Cherokee Buffington
Cherokee Cherokee
Cherokee Free Home
Cherokee Hickory Flat
Cherokee Keithsburg
Cherokee Lathemtown
Cherokee Lebanon
Cherokee North Canton
Cherokee Sharp Top
Cherokee Union HIll
Clay Days Crossroads
Clay Suttons Corner
Clinch Council
Clinch Edith
Cobb Blackwells
Cobb Clarkdale
Cobb Due West
Cobb Lost Mountain
Cobb Macland
Coffee Pridgen
Coffee West Green
Colquitt Autryville
Colquitt Cool Springs
Colquitt Hartsfield
Colquitt Murphy
Colquitt New Elm
Colquitt Sigsbee
Columbia Evans
Columbia Leah
Columbia Lewiston
Columbia Martinez
Columbia Phinizy
Columbia Pollards Corner
Coweta Madras
Coweta Powers Crossroads
Coweta Raymond
Coweta Roscoe
Coweta Sargent
Crawford Horns
Crawford Musella
Crawford Salem
Crisp Hatley
Crisp Raines
Crisp Wenona
Dade Wildwood
Decatur Ausmac
Decatur Fowlstown
Decatur Lynn
Decatur Vada
DeKalb Brookhaven
DeKalb Klondike
DeKalb Tucker
Dodge Gresston
Dodge Roddy
Dodge Yonkers
Dooly Drayton
Dooly Snow Spring
Douglas Bill Arp
Douglas Chapel Hill
Douglas Fairplay
Douglas McWhorter
Early Colomokee
Early Damascus
Early Hentown
Early Killarney
Early Lucile
Early Nicholasville
Early Rowena
Early Saffold
Echols Haylow
Echols Mayday
Echols Needmore
Effingham Ebenezer
Effingham Egypt
Effingham Meldrlm
Effingham Shawnee
Effingham Stillwell
Elbert Dewy Rose
Elbert Fortsonia
Emanuel Lexsy
Fannin Epworth
Fannin Hemp
Fannin Higdon
Fayette Starrs Mill
Floyd Coosa
Floyd Crystal Springs
Floyd Everett Springs
Floyd Floyd Springs
Floyd Mount Berry
Floyd Pinson
Floyd Rosedale
Floyd Shannon
Floyd Six Mile
Floyd Wax
Forsyth Big Creek
Forsyth Chestatee
Forsyth Coal Mountain
Forsyth Heardville
Forsyth Matt
Forsyth Silver City
Franklin Sandy Cross
Franklin Unity
Fulton Birmingham
Fulton Crabapple
Fulton Red Oak
Fulton Rico
Fulton Sandy Springs
Gilmer Cartecay
Gilmer Cherry Log
Gilmer Whitestone
Glynn Everett
Glynn Sea Island
Glynn Sterling
Glynn Thalmann
Gordon Cash
Gordon Nicklesville
Gordon Redbud
Gordon Sonoraville
Grady Beachton
Grady Harrells Still
Grady Nickleville
Grady Rocky Hill
Grady Spence
Greene Bairdstown
Greene Greshamville
Greene Veazey
Gwinnett Five Forks
Gwinnett Harbin
Habersham Batesville
Habersham Hollywood
Habersham View
Hall Belmont
Hall Blackshear Place
Hall Chestnut Mountain
Hall Murrayville
Hancock Culverton
Hancock Devereux
Hancock Linton
Hancock Mayfield
Hancock Powelton
Haralson Draketown
Haralson Felton
Harris Cataula
Harris Ellerslie
Harris Jones Crossroads
Harris Mountain Hill
Harris Mulberry Grove
Hart Airline
Hart Nuberg
Hart Reed Creek
Heard Glenloch
Heard Glenn
Heard Roosterville
Heard Texas
Heard Waresville
Henry Flippen
Henry Kelleytown
Henry Ola
Houston Clinchfield
Houston Haynesville
Houston Henderson
Houston Kathleen
Irwin Holt
Irwin Lax
Irwin Waterloo
Irwin Wray
Jackson Apple Valley
Jasper Adgateville
Jasper Eudora
Jasper Hillsboro
Jeff Davis Snipesville
Jefferson Grange
Jenkins Perkins
Johnson Donovan
Jones Bradley
Jones James
Jones Wayside
Lamar Goggins
Lamar Johnstonville
Lamar Liberty Hill
Lamar Patillo
Lamar Unionville
Laurens Cedar Grove
Laurens Minter
Laurens Rockledge
Lee Byne Crossroads
Lee Palmyra
Liberty Retreat
Liberty Sunbury
Lincoln Amity
Lincoln Chennault
Lincoln Kenna
Lincoln New Hope
Lincoln Woodlawn
Lowndes Bemiss
Lowndes Twin Lakes
Lumpkin Garland
Macon Fountainville
Macon Garden Valley
Madison Diamond Hill
Madison Neese
Madison Paoli
Marion Brantley
Marion Doyle
Marion Draneville
Marion Five Points
Marion Juniper
Marion Putnam
McIntosh Carnigan
McIntosh Cox
McIntosh Cresent
McIntosh Eulonia
McIntosh Jones
McIntosh Meridian
McIntosh Pine Harbor
McIntosh Ridgeville
McIntosh Shellman Bluff
McIntosh South Newport
Meriwether Harris City
Meriwether Oakland
Meriwether Wooster
Mitchell Brachville
Mitchell Greenough
Mitchell Hinsonton
Mitchell Hopeful
Mitchell Lester
Mitchell Pebble City
Monroe Berner
Monroe Blount
Monroe Brent
Monroe Dames Ferry
Monroe High Falls
Monroe Juliette
Monroe Russellville
Monroe Smarr
Monroe Strouds
Montgomery Kibbee
Montgomery McGregor
Morgan Centennial
Morgan Fairplay
Morgan Pennington
Murray Holley
Murray Ramhurst
Muscogee Midland
Muscogee Upatoi
Newton Almon
Newton Oak Hill
Newton Stewart
Oglethorpe Sandy Cross
Oglethorpe Stephens
Oglethorpe Vesta
Paulding New Georgia
Paulding New Hope
Paulding Union
Paulding Yorkville
Pickens Blaine
Pickens Hinton
Pickens Ludville
Pickens Marble Hill
Pierce Mershon
Pike Hollonville
Pike Lifsey Springs
Polk Esom Hill
Putnam Flat Rock
Putnam Nona
Putnam Stanfordville
Putnam Warfield
Putnam Willard
Quitman Hatcher
Rabun Wiley
Randolph Coles
Randolph Fountain Bridge
Randolph White House
Richmond Gracewood
Rockdale Magnet
Rockdale Milstead
Schley LaCrosse
Schley Murrays Crossroads
Schley Sellars Store
Screven Captola
Screven Dover
Screven Millhaven
Screven Woodcliff
Seminole Desser
Seminole Reynoldsville
Spalding Digby
Spalding Experiment
Spalding Pomona
Spalding Rover
Spalding Vaughn
Spalding Zetella
Stephens Boydville
Stewart Barges
Stewart Brooklyn
Stewart County Line
Stewart Florence
Stewart Louvale
Stewart Randall
Stewart Renfroe
Stewart Sanford
Stewart Troutman
Stewart Westville
Sumter Arles
Sumter Flintside
Sumter Friendship
Sumter Methvins
Sumter New Era
Sumter Sumter
Talbot Box Springs
Talbot Pleasant Hill
Talbot Po Biddy Crossroads
Talbot Prattsburg
Taliaferro Lyneville
Taliaferro Raytown
Taliaferro Robinson
Tattnall Mendes
Taylor Charing
Taylor Fickling Mill
Taylor Howard
Taylor Jarrell
Taylor Mauk
Taylor Potterville
Taylor Rupert
Telfair China Hill
Terrell Doverel
Terrell Graves
Terrell Pleasant Hill
Thomas Five Points
Thomas Patten
Tift Brookfield
Tift Chula
Tift Eldorado
Tift Sunsweet
Toombs Cedar Crossing
Toombs New Branch
Toombs Parkers
Toombs Stanleys Store
Towns Alexanders Mill
Treutlen Lothair
Treutlen Orianna
Troup Abbottsford
Troup Andersons Corner
Troup Big Spring
Troup Evansville
Troup Harrisonville
Troup Long Cane
Troup Smiths Crossroads
Troup Wares Crossroads
Turner Amboy
Turner Coverdale
Turner Dakota
Turner Inaha
Turner Worth
Twiggs Bullard
Twiggs Dry Branch
Twiggs Fitzpatrick
Twiggs Huber
Twiggs Myricks Mill
Union Ivy Long
Upson Crest
Walker Catlett
Walker Cedar Grove
Walker Centerpost
Walker Cooper Heights
Walker Davis Crossroads
Walker High Point
Walker Hinkles
Walker Naomi
Walker Noble
Walker Villanow
Walton Mount Vernon
Walton Nicholasville
Walton Pannell
Walton Youth
Ware Bickley
Ware Dixie Union
Ware Glenmore
Ware Millwood
Ware Needham
Ware Okefenokee
Ware Taimo
Warren Cadley
Warren Cedar Rock
Warren Mesena
Warren Norris
Wayne Broadhurst
Wayne Doctortown
Wayne Gardi
Wayne Madray Springs
Wayne Manningtown
Wayne McKinnon
Wheeler Jordan
White Leaf
White Nacoochee
White Sautee
Whitfield Dawnville
Whitfield Mount Vernon
Whitfield Rocky Face
Whitfield Tilton
Wilcox Owensboro
Wilkes Aonia
Wilkes Prather
Wilkes Sandtown
Wilkinson Nicklesville
Worth Anderson City
Worth Doles
Worth Gammage
Worth Gordy
Worth Isabella
Worth Shingler

Spy Ku* Random Eleven

2006-12-12T23:54:00.000-08:00

Loss - MULL HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Bridge - PAGE FRANCE
Listen - DEAD HEART BLOOM
Years and Years - LYLAS
Breeze Black Night - THE DITTY BOPS
Perch Modifier - WOODEN WAND
Hills - THAO NGUYEN
La Lune - MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY
Cover Yr. Eyes - LOIS
Follow Me - THE SOFTIES
Brainiac's Daughter - THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR

*
polonium punch
afterglow of sweet revenge
a drink best served cold

.....
Polonium is Nasty. You can easy kill an international spy with just a small sample of it in a drop of water that perhaps finds it's way into his martini, maybe. Not that I have any knowledge of such a plot, or even of the seven dour conspirators who met in a Belarussian cafe last April to finalize details in a hushed urgent manner. No, I am a humble cobbler, concerned only with feet.

Polonium (Polonium-210)is the first element discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie when they were trying to find out why pitchblend was radioactive. It is a byproduct of the decay of naturally occurring Uranium-238 so it can be found in nature but in extremely small quantities. Uranium decay only produces a relatively small amount, and what little it creates has a half-life of only 138 days.

This versatile little radioactive killer is one of the elements under investigation as a heating source for space missions because it gives off so much radiation that half a gram in a capsule heats up to 500 degrees C.

Everything you wanted to know about Polonium, but were afraid to ask: X

Zonal Pelargonium* Random Eleven

2006-12-04T23:32:00.000-08:00

Across The Universe - RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Running/Returning - AKRON / FAMILY
The Party - MATT POND PA
Wildflowers - TOM PETTY
Iceblink Luck - COCTEAU TWINS
Do Not As I Do - HANNE HUKKELBERG
Icebound Stream - LAURA VIERS
What A Shame - THE KINGSBURY MANX
Stewed Bark Of An Old Tree - DEVENDRA BANHART
Jackie, Dressed In Cobras - THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
Skeleton Key - MARGOT AND THE NUCLEAR SO AND SO'S

* We have these geraniums (gerania?) in the front and back which grow like weeds and flower multiple times throughout the year, bringing all manner of hummingbirds and butterflies and imbuing all our views with a circus of color and it's all just so Oz-ish (Where are the poppie fields?).

Anyway, as I understand it, in most parts of the country you have to pull the geraniums and shake out the dirt and store them in a cool dark place for the winter and then replant in Spring, and so on. But this is Southern California, where the motto is "Let It Grow" (or "Smoke em if you got em", I can't remember which). I just cut them back when they grow over the path or get taller than me.

Last weekend I needed to see if it would be OK to cut these back right before Winter this year. Probably nothing short of driving a tractor over them would do them any harm, but it never hurts to check. I just don't want to wait until the Spring because this year we hacked them all back right before they would have flowered so they didn't do their colorful thing.

Knowing that Al Gore invented the internets for such a thing, I hopped online to learn about my flora.

It turns out that our "geraniums" aren't actually geraniums. They are often referred to as Garden Geraniums or Zonal Geraniums because of the pattern on the leaf, but they are actually Pelargonium. Linnaeus originally included them with Geraniums when he classified them, causing almost as much confusion as when he put humans into the same category as the striped bark beetle.

So there are real Geraniums, and there are the common Garden Geraniums which are not Geraniums at all.

Zonal Pelargonium. That's what grows all around my house. Ya learn something new every day.

Lumpy Moon* Random Eleven

2006-11-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

Her is You - MULL HISTORICAL SOCIETY
My Friend The Addict - COLIN MACINTYRE
Hourglass - A BAND OF BEES
Engine Room - TUNNG
Concrete Seconds - PINBACK
Fingertips - EMILIANA TORRINI
Deus - THE SUGARCUBES
The Party's Crashing Us - OF MONTREAL
Roses And Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein - MATMOS
Prelude From Partita No. 3 For Solo Violin - BELA FLECK
Donkey Town - MARK KNOPFLER & EMMYLOU HARRIS

* NASA says gravity on the moon is really lumpy, meaning if you're in orbit around the moon you will pass through strong fields of gravity and weak fields. If you were standing next to an area with a strong gravity field and you hung a plumb bob, a weight at the end of a string, it wouldn't hang straight down toward the center of the moon but would actually lean a little toward the area with the stronger field.

So, golfing on the moon has yet another variable to deal with.

Almost as important, this is causing havoc with the orbits of satellites and it is nosediving them into the ground. Previous manned missions to the moon had orbits at angles which eluded the lumpy parts but future missions will have to use small rocket blasts to continually adjust their orbits.

In addition, new training protocols for all future astronauts have already incorporated instructions to drop down at least one club and close their grip a little on anything over 500 yards.

The earth's mass is for the most part uniformly distributed so gravity on the surface hardly varies at all. The moon, though, apparently has extremely dense areas distributed haphazardly throughout it. So instead of being all swiss cheese, it's a badly mixed lump of swiss, mozzarella, brie, and very sharp cheddar.

Yes, these are the things I ponder while gathering your random eleven.

Fall Back* Random Eleven

2006-10-29T20:54:00.000-08:00

The whole weekend now, I have been unable to upload a photo to blogger, so forget it. The universe is balancing against the hour I gained on Sunday morning. And in case you are unaware of my position on karmicism, here's a clue: I just coined the word "karmicism".

UPDATE - got a photo up...

Maybe now is a good time to remind you to go ahead click the links and listen to the songs, if you are so moved. Any links go to Napster, where you can listen to the song for free, and no, I will not make any money on the link nor on any action you might then take once you are there. And it's the squeeky clean legal Napster which pays royalties and stuff.

Just go and enjoy.

Here's the list:

Total Peace - SEBADOH
Thinking Out Loud - EMILIANA TORRINI
Strange - BUILT TO SPILL
I Die - MAGNETIC FIELDS
Look Away - THE APPLES IN STEREO
Sheriff Ochs - KIND OF LIKE SPITTING
Old Flame - THE ARCADE FIRE
Afford - AKRON/FAMILY
I Thought - BRYAN FERRY
Telephone And Rubber Band - THE PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA
What's In Store? - ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI

*We never forget to set the clocks on fall-back weekend, ever.

Not until this time. After I realized - about midmorningish - I filled the extra hour with coffee and a newspaper. From now on I will make a habit of forgetting to fall back until about mid-Sunday. Quiet mornings need to last longer anyway.

Scarecrow Tethered* Random Eleven

2006-10-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

Magnetized - LAURA VEIRS
Adlai Stevenson - SUFJAN STEVENS
Bookends - ALFIE
Animations - THE KINGSBURY MANX
Spine - PAGE FRANCE
Virgin Annie - LYLAS
Paperback Bible - LAMBCHOP
The Funeral - BAND OF HORSES
Homemade Bombs In The Afternoon - A.C. NEWMAN
Ever Rotating Sky - DAVID THOMAS BROUGHTON
That Girl From Brownsville Texas - JIM WHITE

*Outside my window is a scarecrow we put up next to the front walkway for the Fall. Hanging nearby is a large set of wind chimes. I think it's tuned to Debussy's Clare de Lune but I only remember this from the packaging, not from my hearing.

One of my genius kids tied a blue ribbon from the scarecrow's wrist to the chimes' string just above the sail at the bottom, so now the set appears to be floating like a balloon tethered to our straw sentry.

With each little breeze, my mute yardmate tugs the clapper just to get my attention.

Brilliant.

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-10-10T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Trees And The Wild - MATT POND PA
River Of Orchids - XTC
Trainer - PINBACK
La Familia - MIRAH
Tilliboyo - THE KRONOS QUARTET
Unfortunate Few - THE DITTY BOPS
People Folk - TUNNG
Trouble - CAT STEVENS
Goods - MATES OF STATE
The Luckiest - BEN FOLDS
Molly - HATESTICK

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-10-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

Making Plans For Nigel - XTC
Deus - THE SUGARCUBES
Mother Mary - EELS
Come Undone - THE DELGADOS
Oh What A World - RUFUS WAINRIGHT
Winged Can - NEDELLE
Billy Budd - MORRISSEY
Expresso Love - DIRE STRAITS
A Little Longing Goes Away - THE BOOKS
Love You - SONDRE LERCHE
You Are The Light (by which I travel into this and that) - JENS LEKMAN

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-09-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

Sundrops - KRISTIN HERSH
One Plus One Is One - BADLY DRAWN BOY
Time Of No Reply - NICK DRAKE
Speak Like A Child - THE STYLE COUNCIL
These Days - NICO
Fishing For A Dream - TURIN BRAKES
For Sure - AMERICAN FOOTBALL
Just Be Simple - SONGS:OHIA
Jerusalem - MIRAH
Walk Ten Miles - MUM
I Lost My Wind - THE MICROPHONES

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-09-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

The Absence Of God - RILO KILEY
The Trees And The Wild - MATT POND PA
Trainer - PINBACK
Easter Hymn - ROSE POLENZANI
Curuncula - PSAPP
Little Kids - KINGS OF CONVENIENCE
Tiny Cities Made Of Ashes - SUN KIL MOON
Other Voices - IMAAD WASIF
Chat In Amsterdam, Winter - ARAB STRAP
You'Re My Drug - THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR
Rising And Falling In A Little World - ELF POWER

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Jesus The Mexican Boy - IRON & WINE
The Natural Night - NEDELLE
Take Me Out - THE RED HOUSE PAINTERS
None But Shining Hours - THE BOOKS
Með Blóðnasir - SIGUR ROS
Mountains Of Mourne - TARKIO
El Otro Lado - JOSH ROUSE
The Legionnaire's Lament - THE DECEMBERISTS
Yard Of Blonde Girls - MICAH P. HINSON
Love Love Love - THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
Mud Hands - FINGERS CUT MEGAMACHINE

AFA Objects To Profanity On 9/11 Documentary - or -Longing For The Days When Death And Terror Came With Clean Language. And Short Hair.

2006-08-30T23:14:00.000-07:00

Open letter to the American Family Association:

Dear AFA,

You people are stunningly senseless.

Love,
Normal People

PS - In a way, I guess I can understand the kind of pain you might go through if you were to settle in with your wife and kids in front of the tube for a comfy showing of the heartfelt and uplifting documentary "9/11".

"Now kids, while you're watching 3000 people die, ignore the nasty language. Pass the popcorn."

Really though, after watching firefighters in New York wake up to a beautiful day in New York city, and after seeing planes hit the twin towers, and after watching people jump to their deaths, and hearing their concussive blasts as they hit the ground all around the rescuers assembling to charge into the towers to their doom, I say imagine, if someone saying "Holy Shit!" were to intrude on your enjoyment of the otherwise wholesome fare.

It's absolutely insulting that CBS would allow cuss words to ruin an otherwise perfectly suitable production about our collective ~~innocence-shattering~~ national experience.

The big galoots. Why, I oughta....

Imbeciles' Call To Action

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-08-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

Two Of A Kind - SYD BARRETT
Lay Me Down - FOREST SUN
Deborarobed - T. REX
The India Song- BIG STAR
X-Ray Style - JOE STRUMMER
Loving You Too Long - BILLY BRAGG
Lay Me Down - THE FRAMES
St. Augustine - THE HORSES
West Of Her Spine - BELL X1
Words For Two - SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Original Air-Blue-Gown - THE MOUNTAIN GOATS

Geography Teacher Displays Foreign Flags: Stampede Kills Eleven - or - What Are All These Other Shapes Doing On My Globe Of The U.S. ?!

2006-08-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

There was no stampede and nobody died, but I got a kick out of my own headline(s). Isn't that what blogging is all about? Giggling like a mentally diminished 20-year-old who has just discovered toes? Exactly.

But seriously... and I mean seriously in a not-funny way: A Geography teacher got it into his head that displaying actual flags of actual foreign countries was still legal here in the United States of All That Matters.

Boy, did he get schooled.

In other news, math teachers in Colorado can no longer use Greek symbols in their equations.

Pluto Demoted. Immediately Files Grievance. - or - Horoscopes The World Over Are Wrong! ... Still!

2006-08-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

For a couple days last week I was pretty excited about the prospect of suddenly having 12 planets in our solar system. I was ready to welcome our newly adopted planetary brothers and sisters, Ceres, Charon, and the unnamed baby.

Preceeding this week's International Astronomical Union meeting in Europe, a subcommittee had made some recommendations that would have elevated to full planethood Pluto's moon Charon, producing a binary planet system, along with the asteroid Ceres and the still to be properly named 2003UB313, which originally was hailed as the tenth planet.

Well, now the IAU has done its work. Its evil, dirty work. It has finally, after thousands of years of skygazing, settled for us, on a proper definition of a planet.

And Pluto is out. Dwarf-something, Transneptunian has-been ball of ice just like the rest of 'em. And 2003UB313 is out too. Way out. It will get a name but likely not a planet's name.

This is really all Michael Brown's fault, anyway. He and his group discovered the iceball formerly known as the tenth planet a few years ago, and since the distant body was larger than Pluto, this whole question of what a planet actually is has simmered like a Jovian eye up until week's meeting.

Personally I would just kind of hate to be the guy who dispatched the 9th planet by discovering the 10th. This would be a great joke if Mike Brown's real first name was Charlie. And the IAU was Lucy. And the ball - well, you get the idea.

However, lo and behold Mike Brown is pretty OK with all of this. In fact he explains in quite a clear and convincing manner exactly why the final definition approved by the IAU is correct and proper, here.

In brighter news, it just became 11.11% easier to memorize all the planets.

Story at Bad Astronomy Blog

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-08-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

Off With Yr Hat - THANKSGIVING
Fast As I Can - ERIN MCKEOWN
The Scarlett Tide - ALISON KRAUS
Hold The Fort - BILLY BRAGG
She Will Have Her Way - NEIL FINN
Sing A Song For You - THE MAGIC NUMBERS
Walk Real Slow - LADY & BIRD
I'd Like That - XTC
A Plain Morning - DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL
Decades - JOY DIVISION
Uncorrected Personality Traits - ROBYN HITCHCOCK & THE EGYPTIANS

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-08-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to promise, but I will say, as a way of forcing myself to do so, that I will be supplementing these "randoms" with regular posts soon. "Regular", as in "consistent". Really. I don't promise, but...

Lazy Little Ada - COLIN MELOY
Hammers Sitting Still - DANIELSON FAMILE
Hopi Profiteers - TIM KINSELLAS
Bodybuilder - ANDY WHITE
Tahuti, Splendid Scribe - IMPOSSIBLE SHAPES
Wish You Well - PHIL MANZANERA
Disembodied Voices - FINN BROTHERS
First Kiss - BORN HELLER
Rolling Suitcase - ROSE POLENZANI
Is This Home On Ice - CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH

... if I stop demanding clever and insightful pieces from myself, I'll actually post something. So I'll leave the heavy lifting to the committed bloggers. I'll give up my quest for a Pulitzer and just start offering the detritus currently cluttering my Drafts file. Good luck to you all.

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-08-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

Throw Me A Rope - KT TUNSTALL
The Biggest Lie - ELLIOT SMITH
One Step Ahead - SPLIT ENZ
The New Sane Scramble - JANA HUNTER
A Phoenix & Doves - DIANE CLUCK
Grass - ROBERT WYATT
Drink To Me, Babe, Then - A.C. NEWMAN
Sold! To The Nice Rich Man - WELCOME WAGON
Swim - ANI DIFRANCO
Now That I Know - DEVENDRA BANHART
Belle Of The Woodsman's Autumn Ball - THE SKYGREEN LEOPARDS

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-08-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

Song For A Sleeping Girl - DEVICS
Clear Spot - PERNICE BROTHERS
The Sweetness Lies Withing - HEFNER
Stockholm Syndrome - YO LA TENGO
Blundering Blood - NEDELLE
Gold As The Color - LOS HALOS
North Atlantic Sand - DON PERIS
Long Time Ago - GOLDEN SMOG
The Good Times Are Killing Me - MODEST MOUSE
I Wish That I Was Beautiful For You - DARREN HANLON
If There's Such A Thing As Love - THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-07-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

Shallow Brown - THE LOVE HALL TRYST
When Tomorrow Comes - ANNA TERNHEIM
Easy To Be Around - DIANE CLUCK
Jumping Fences - THE OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL
Seas Like Stars - FEMME GENERATION
Nice Day For A Sulk - BELLE & SEBASTIAN
Twilight Creeps - CROOKED FINGERS
Untouchable - GLENN TILBROOK
Night Minds - MISSY HIGGINS
Ends Of The City - DARREN HANLON
You Can Decide - FIELD MUSIC

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-07-24T22:14:00.001-07:00

She's Just Like Me/Taking Time - THE APPLES IN STEREO
Catch You - PIEBALD
The Auditorium Birds - THE MOORE BROTHERS
Sweet F.A. - LOVE AND ROCKETS
Word For Two - SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Alley - PEASANT
The Air - MODEST MOUSE
Twin Cinema - THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS
You Think You're A Hypochondriac - GOLDEN BIRDS
Invention - PEDRO THE LION
Things Are What You Make Of Them - BISHOP ALLEN

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-07-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

New thing - Now you can hear part of my little world. Per Omni's comment on one of these posts - hey, this one! - I've begun including links so you can listen to some of the tracks.

It's FREE - You may have to register the first time there but from then on it should just open a separate window and play when you click on a track here.

Disclosure - I am not getting a commission. Just enjoy, knowing that you are not contributing to me or to the economy with your musical reverie.

I'll go back bit by bit and link up tracks in previous posts.

Now That I Know - DEVENDRA BANHART
Brian Wilson - BARENAKED LADIES
Chasing Forever - SEXSMITH & KERR
Tiny Echoes - LYLAS
Mayor of Simpleton - XTC
Saint Simon - THE SHINS
I Didn't Understand - ELLIOTT SMITH
Growing Upside Down - THE DITTY BOPS
Crooked Teeth - DEATHCAB FOR CUTIE
Unsolved Child Murder - LUKE HAINES
Never Far Away - JACK WHITE

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-07-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Fleet Renee - LONE OFFICIAL
Greeting Card Aisle - SARAH HARMER
Far Away - MARTHA WAINWRIGHT
Doggy - ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
Cold Kilburn Rain - MARY LOU LORD
Weathered - JANE WEAVER
Sunday Morning Wednesday Night - SPOON
Hips - KIND OF LIKE SPITTING
Then I Will Miss You - DAVID FRIDLUND
I Could Be Nothing - GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS
Emma Blowgun's Last Stand - BEULAH

More Fun With Sports Agentspeak - or - Whenever It's Not About The Money... It's About The Money

2006-06-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is beautiful. It's about money. It's about fame and image. It's about who your real friends are. I mean, it's about fame and image - did I mention that yet?

I was just wondering earlier this week how Ben Roethlisberger the big affable Super Bowl Quarterback was doing.

Remember a few weeks ago his motorcycle, a car, and his body, all collided on a Pittsburgh street. The injuries weren't critical - just some unconsciousness and broken bones and surgery and such, standard football fare - but the incident launched a round of discussions about what a bozillionaire pro quarterback thinks he's doing riding a motorcycle around town and putting his ~~body~~ lucrative contract on the line.

Apparently he's OK.

Says Ben Roethlisberger's agent Ryan Tollner:

"I don't think that this (motorcycle accident) will have any negative effect on Ben's marketability. Ben is still the same person, the same guy that has been so widely coveted by corporations. He still has the same good, wholesome American values. He's articulate, he's got the looks, plays for the right team and he wins games."

We're so relieved.
The sentence that followed all this?

"Throughout this process, Ben and his family realized who genuinely cares about him and not just see dollar signs."

Let me paraphrase (and do I have to?):

"Luckily thank God in Heaven our prayers are answered Ben's cash flow won't be disrupted. And even better, Ben and his family think we care about his health. It's what we call a win-win."

One more thing, a little off-topic, but I can't just let this slide:

I admit that on this blog I overtly sacrifice proper syntax, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary all in the interest of feigning a conversational tone. I'd like you to think I speak this badly in person too, is all I mean.

But what the hell was Tollner's last sentence thinking?

Ben and his family realized who genuinely cares about him and not just see dollar signs.

It's ironic how clearly the message came through.

As badly as that line was mangled, I would like to suggest something. Perhaps this Ryan Tollner guy is really clever. Maybe even Mensa clever.

Doesn't it look vaguely like he was structuring that last sentence to metaphorically recreate the actual motorcycle wreck? The guy might just be a genius.

The sentence is rolling along just fine, albeit without a helmet - "Ben and his family realized who genuinely cares about him" - and it could have safely come to a stop with a simple period. It had said all it should have said.

But the unsuspecting sentence rolled right into the intersection with that "and", and with no warning was blindsided by the blue-grey Camry of subject-verb dissonance. "...and not just see dollar signs". Ooooh, what a collision! Verb tense torn assunder, singular and plural rolling into a heap against the lightpost, OH THE HUMANITY! It never had a chance. End quote.

Update: The driver of the Camry, a Mr. Freudian-Slip-Revealing-All-The-Speaker-Really-Cares-About, was unharmed.

Mojo, Martha's Face, And Me At The Spirit Club - or - A Midnight Moment From 1986

2006-06-27T23:54:00.000-07:00

A band I was "managing" in 1986 played fairly often at a dark little place called the Spirit Club in San Diego, sometimes headlining and sometimes slotting in midweek, mid-lineup. One night Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper were playing there too.

This was around Summer 1986, and I'm guessing we opened for them, as usually two or three acts did 40 to 60 minutes each leading up to the headline at 11 pm.

A few college buddies of mine came to the show and while we were at the bar in the back, watching Mojo jump (successfully) from table to table and rant and ramble, one of our party pulled out an MTV studio ID Badge and handed it to me.

It was not his ID Badge, exactly, not legally, but he was really proud of it and thought Mojo ought to see it.

This guy with the purloined badge was the younger brother of my college buddy's girlfriend and was visiting from New York. He worked at the ever-growing MTV studios checking the right people in and throwing the wrong people out.

And this guy currently, inexplicably, owned Martha Quinn's official-but-obviously-lost MTV studios ID Badge. In all its purty young smiley Quinnish glory.

Mojo had performed "Stuffin' Martha's Muffin" minutes before, and was probably in the middle of his Elvis is Everywhere tirade, but in any case this was a coincidence too cool to pass up. (Despite the fact that I didn't also have a matching Fake-Beard-and-Sunglasses Elvis Presley Stuckey's Cafe Busboy ID, which are slightly less difficult to come by than Martha Quinn's MTV studios Badge.)

As an aside, Mojo claims that the Elvis is Everywhere schtick came to him in 1987, and he may be right. Meaning, maybe I've incorporated my later memories of it from its annoyingly constant MTV presence after that. Elvis is everywhere in the time space continuum too.

So after Mojo's calisthenic set I walked up to him and flashed Martha's ID.

Mojo says in his online bio that he was rendered speechless for the first and only time in his life in 1992 when Don Henley unexpectedly jumped onstage with him in a small club in Texas to sing along with Mojo performing "Don Henley Must Die".

But I beg to differ. At least in that case in Texas he had a song to finish. Words already prepared.

In the Spirit Club that night in 1986, he looked exactly like he might if he was trying to determine if his own picture was on the driver's license he was about to hand to a police officer: Can't. Quite. Make. Out. The. Face.

When he finally realized what he was holding he blasted out with "No f*-- way, f*--- dude *--! *---- where the *--- did you mother*-- *--- get *--- *--, mother*---! *--!"

Something along those lines. And so another round of 1 a.m. rock dive-bar guzzlry broke out and a good time was had by all, as always.

This was early in Mojo's career and I'm sure the momentary sheen wore clean off since not long after even he became an MTV-badge-holding personality. I'll have to send him a note or an email and see if he remembers jumping around the Spirit Club in San Diego with Martha Quinn's ID about 20 years ago.

This little incident is not in his bio and that's a little dissappointing, is all. Understandable, to be fair, because looking back over the blur of a rock-tour career probably only allows so many details to resolve.

Details like:

"11-8-95 Country Dick Montana joins Elvis in the great beyond on stage in the middle of a song at a sold-out show in Whistler, British Columbia. It could have only been better if he had been getting a hand job from the club owner's wife at the same time."

Postscript:
The 1980s were ridiculous.

Random Day Random Eleven

2006-06-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

There Will Come Soft Rains - DEAD HEART BLOOM
Simple - VIOLET ARCHERS
The Time Has Come - SING SING
Anthony - NICKEL CREEK
Right In The Head - M. WARD
Sing A Song For You - THE MAGIC NUMBERS
Go Ask An Old Man - COLIN HAY
Better Than I Know - ASHTON ALLEN
Sweets - YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Puke A Pitch Black Rainbow To The Sun - MAT SWEET
Don't Ask - GRIZZLY BEAR

Random Day Random Eleven - or - I Don't Know Where I've Been Either

2006-06-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

Hey. A guy gets busy.

Own Two Feet - SHOULD
Luv Song - JANE JENSEN
Bird Stealing Bread - IRON AND WINE
Syracuse - PINBACK
Filthy Bird - ROBYN HITCHCOCK
Farewell To Arms - THE RED KRAYOLA
Wonderful (Live) - ADAM & THE ANTS
Stay In The Shade - JOSE GONZALEZ
Last Sunset - GLEN PHILLIPS
Jenny Wren - PAUL MCCARTNEY
Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby - GILLIAN WELCH, ALISON KRAUSE, EMMYLOU HARRIS

Friday Random Eleven

2006-06-08T00:45:00.000-07:00

Loud Cloud Crowd - STEPHEN MALKMUS
Laughlines - COCTEAU TWINS
Doubt - STEREOLAB
For Love - LUSH
Five Moments - THE FIELD MICE
Hate The Sun - SEEKONK
With Candy - LILYS
Heaven - BUFFALO TOM
Razorblade - THE STROKES
I Am Always The One Who Calls - PEDRO THE LION
Things Are What You Make Of Them - BISHOP ALLEN

Dilbert - or - How Come When We Have A Perfectly Well-Established Cultural Icon Someone Has To Come Along And Point Out A Predecessor?

2006-06-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

Ahh, Dilbert, yes, I love that character.
The goofball, the horrible screwup, the perfect example of the guy you don't want to be.

And his sidekick Spoiler. Funny. I'm telling you, I'd laugh till my eyes bled if I was on their ship. I mean, until someone overshot the deck or something.

What? You don't know what I'm talking about? Dilbert and Spoiler?

C'mon, you've heard it, right? "What a Dilbert". Classic phrase. You never heard your grampa say it? My mom's cousins who were in the Navy used to hear it all the time.

Maybe we're talking about two different Dilbert comic characters.

You're obviously not familiar with the Navy Flyer named Dilbert. Dilbert Groundloop. And his cousin Spoiler, the mechanic.

The cartoon character originally named "Dilbert Groundloop" was conceived by Capt. Austin Doyle, USN and Lt. Cdr. Robert Osborn, USNR in the weeks after Pearl Harbour, with Osborn being the artist. The name was quickly shortened to just "Dilbert" and in a series of one panel sketches on flyers and in training pamphlets, Dilbert quickly became a sort of anti-hero as the classic head-up-and-locked pilot just looking for an accident.

See?

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Scott Adams's comic with the pointy-haired boss and the coffee-swiggin oaf and the evil cat confidant, and so on. Even if Adams himself is a paranoid anti-science instigator blog turd. But I digress.

If you want to know more about the original Dilbert, just start here.

Or Google Robert Osborn Navy and you'll find a wealth of info.

I ran across the original Dilbert when I was looking through this book:War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War by Paul Dickson.

For now, I need to go grab another cup of coffee. The control tower will be fine without me for a few minutes, right?

Friday Random Eleven - Friday, Saturday, What's The Difference?

2006-06-03T21:45:00.000-07:00

Uppers Aren't Necessary - ROCKY VOTOLATO
The One You Love - RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Pale Yellow - THE DITTY BOPS
Peace Love And Blood - MAGOO
Darlene - MAPLEWOOD
1000 Pounds (Duck Kee Style) - SUPERCHUNK
Trailer Trash - MODEST MOUSE
How The Story Goes - THE RED WALLS
Falling At Your Feet - DANIEL LANOIS
Wheels On Fire - THE MAGIC NUMBERS
See You Later - HEATMISER

Einstein, Noguchi, and Buckminster Fuller - or - What's A Little Art, History, War, Politics and Science Between Friends?

2006-05-29T23:35:00.000-07:00

In 1986 I drove up to Costa Mesa California with some classmates and a professor to view a courtyard.

You read that right.

To be fair, it was a large courtyard. But yes, we went there specifically to see it, only.

Isamu Noguchi produced plazas and playgrounds, sculptures of stone, metal, water, paper and wood. And ceilings. And furniture, and light fixtures. And theatre sets. He was prolific, and his career spanned something like 70 years plus.
This post is not about Noguchi necessarily. Another post, another time.

This post is about that serendipitous confluence of people and events that in this instance just kind of tickled me.

That's what the internet is for, right? Trivial happenstance, regifted.

A Western Union Telegram in 1936 was effectively the internet email of the time, where you could fabulously pass a message cross country in the blink of an eye. This was modern science at its dutiful best, in the heady days before the second world war when modern science would be bent into ghastly shapes and unthinkable temperatures.

But the sheen of modern science and the World's Fairs that flaunted it, was blinding. Political and economic issues of poverty and the nature of work, of enslavement and ideology, exploitation and national advancement, all were conspiring to plunge the world into a war of epic proportions. In 1936, in America the Depression had flattened much of the decade for the average person, but the end of bad times was somewhat in sight. Things were progressing, science was enlightening, business was continuing, and people were working, at least.

Europe, however was slipping into mad nationalistic terror. Japan was running rampant over the Far East in wars over natural resources and human labor.

Russia and Mexico and a number of other nations were just coming out of a decade where the nature of work and community were being explored in whole new ways. I say "coming out" of that decade when really I mean spiraling down off the tower, dropping directly into a decade of dictatorship and terror that would crash headlong into opposing ideologies and powerful war machines of another constitution altogether.

In 1936, Isamu Noguchi was a young artist and designer doing his first large public mural, in Mexico. Fifty years later I went to walk around a bank building plaza called "California Scenario" where Noguchi's favored thematic mixture of nature and technology was expressed so elegantly you'd hardly get the impression that his career was born in the turbulence of a world at war with itself.

bookofjoe.com pulled up, from somewhere, a copy of a 1936 Western Union telegram from Buckminster Fuller to Isamu Noguchi, responding to a question Noguchi had while working on his first large public sculpture. Noguchi wanted to get clarification on Albert Einstein's equation for energy so he could include it in his panoramic political piece.

The reply from Fuller is a piece of word artistry in itself. Try to imagine reducing the Theory of Relativity to a telegram. From bookofjoe's site:

...a finite value for basic factor in motion universe stop speed of radiant energy being directional outward all directions expanding wave surface diametric polar speed away from self is twice speed in one direction and speed of volume increase is square of speed in one direction approximately thirty five billion volumetric miles per second stop

Ultimately all Noguchi wanted was to include e=mcsquared in his piece, to symbolize the new and fabulous world that the new generations in Mexico and Italy and everywhere were to discover going forward in 1936. Of course, Noguchi's interest has always been the precarious balance between the better parts of nature and human technology and this elegant opposition could be seen even in his first political piece in the calm before the storm.

I find it fascinating that just a few years after Noguchi and Fuller discussed Einstein's equation, the fury of atomic fission would abruptly end the war between the U.S. and Japan. Actually, that's not the fascinating part. The fascinating part is that this is such a fine example of the overlapping and intertwining elements of art and science and politics and history.

Yes. That's the fascinating part.

strolling plaza of sandstone water metal stone STOP mountains rivers deserts represented includes pine trees fountains STOP Isamu Noguchi designed STOP glad to see it - time to go home and study STOP

bookofjoe: Buckminster Fuller explains Einstein's theory of relativity in a telegram to Isamu Noguchi

Monday Night Random Eleven

2006-05-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

Virtue And Wine - SONDRE LERCHE
Double - VETIVER
You Can't Be Told It You Must Behold It - SWIRLIES
Look On And Cry - CROOKED STILL
By Heart - SILVIE LEWIS
Crumble - JULIE DOIRON
Shewane - SOWETO GOSPEL CHOIR
In Your Bright Way - GRANT W. McLENNAN
The Oasis - APPLES IN STEREO
The Way That He Sings - MY MORNING JACKET
Home By Saturday - HAYDEN

Friday Random Eleven

2006-05-26T18:01:00.000-07:00

Amelia No. 2 - MAHOGANY
Rilkean Heart (Acoustic) - COCTEAU TWINS
Logtown - PEASALL SISTERS
Rock Of Ages - GILLIAN WELCH
On Your Marks - GRAHAM MACRAE
The Professor And La Fille Danse - DAMIEN RICE
The Swedish Libra And You - THE LADYBUG TRANSISTOR
The Mountain Tomb - THE SPEAKERS
World On Fire - JED AND LUCIA
I'll Be Your Lampshade - BEULAH
Cafe Des Amis - BLUE EYED SON

San Diego California - or - Who Needs A Quiz To Tell You This Is Where You Want To Live?

2006-05-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

Mike The Cousin found an online quiz-survey-thing that slices and dices your lifestyle preferences and then spits out a list of the top 24 places you would love to live in the United States.

And by the way, Mike, see the fabulous blanket of snow nestled in the mountains framing downtown San Diego in the pic. The old aircraft carrier Midway is visible in the bay in front of the skyline, for reference. I mention it because the depth in the photo is compressed a little to give the illusion tht the mountains are a mere stone's throw from downtown when in fact they are closer to Wyoming.

I went to this site and played their little game, and then after getting the list of towns and cities most perfectly suited for me, I chucked the results contemptuously and rigged up a second try.

Why? Well... I don't want to live in central Louisianna, no matter how convinced that computer is that I'll be happy in Natchitoches. And why would I not want to live in Louisianna, or Arkansas, or even Hawaii? Well, because I live in San Diego California, that's why. Nothing - not even obscene real estate prices and the preposterous cost of living here - could eject me from the place.

Oh, I'm sure one day I might succumb to my attraction to historic little towns with picturesque vistas, volunteer fire departments, fresh air, and babbling brooks with shady footbridges, sporting a vibrant cultural center not far off, and such, but hell, I only have to move about 12 miles from here to get all that.

Truth be told, I was just curious to see what other U.S. locations I might secretly harbor as faintly possible second choices to my own personal paradise here. You know, in case I had a posse on my tail this town couldn't hold me anymore, whatever. On the first go-round, since some of my quiz answers were really enthusiastic about all the amenities I am happy to have here, a disproportionate number of the suggestions were either right here in my backyard, or in places where the overriding characteristic is year round non-freezing, like Louisianna, and Hawaii. Nine of my first Ten choices were in those two states. (I just can't explain the Louisianna thing.)

So on my second quiz run-through I softened my excitement for sun and water, and admitted to enjoying rain, and cold, and the occasional buffalo trampling through my backyard. My results were a little more interesting, but still curious. I really am enamoured of the places on the list that I've actually visited, places like Salem and Eugene in Oregon, Santa Cruz and Corvalis in California, even Albuquerque New Mexico.

In any case I now have meaningless-quiz-envy, because Mike still came up with a much more interesting list of places than I did. I want to desire those places! Why can't I unwittingly wish to relocate to the same places he unwittingly wishes to relocate.. to !?

So, here's my list, loving put together by a cold set of silicon chips and wires in a temperature-controlled electrohovel somewhere in Colorado. Since Natchitoches stubbornly showed up on the second try, along with places like Frederick Maryland, and Fayetteville Arkansas, I'm going to just have to concede that maybe these places have something going for them. Even Louisianna.

But they're not San Diego. All I'm saying.

__________________________
San Bernardino, California
Santa Cruz, California
Alexandria, Louisiana
Natchitoches, Louisiana
Honolulu, Hawaii
Portland, Oregon
El Cajon, California
Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana
Ventura, California
Charleston, West Virginia
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Little Rock, Arkansas
Santa Barbara, California
Frederick, Maryland
Hot Springs-Hot Springs Village, Arkansas
Eugene, Oregon
Valencia, California
Corvallis, Oregon
Sacramento, California
Palo Alto, California
Salem, Oregon
Milwaukie, Oregon
Las Vegas, Nevada
Albuquerque, New Mexico

Monday Night Random Eleven

2006-05-22T22:30:00.000-07:00

Without A Song - VETIVER
Howl At The Moon - PRISCILLA HERDMAN
Standing Still - TARKIO
Rose Parade - TRAPPERS CABIN
Not Going Anywhere - KEREN ANN
Save Me - DIANE CLUCK
Surf Song - JAMES YORKSTON AND THE ATHLETES
Halfway To A Threeway - JIM O'ROURKE
Non-Threatening - THE LADIES
In My Room - BLOW
Love Just Don't Quite - PAPAS FRITAS

Me And The Clock - or - Blood Feud Cage Match

2006-05-22T22:24:00.000-07:00

This is a short post. But it's a post.

My clever double reverse strategem was to log on at least twice a week to post my random eleven musical selections. My goal was to cajole myself to turn posting into a habit. Didn't work, beyond logging on twice a week to post my random eleven musical selections. Now I look like a spam blog.

So, new strategy is to set an appointment with myself each night to render one post, long or short, and publish. A real appointment. 9 p.m. sharp, Me. Be there.

We'll see how this goes.

UPDATE June 11: Not even close.

Friday Random Eleven

2006-05-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

My method? I calls em as I hears em.

Poppyland - STEPHIN MERRIT
Wake - THE TEETH
Farm, CA. - JANA HUNTER
Mountains Of Mourn - TARKIO
The Argument - JAI AGNISH
My Heart As An Arrow - LOS HALOS
Following A Red Balloon - BART DAVENPORT
La Noyee - CARLA BRUNI
You Should Be Hated Here - CARISSA'S WIERD
I Do - PEDRO THE LION
Pale Moon - UNCLE EARL

Tuesday Random Eleven

2006-05-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Human Abstract - APOTHECARY HYMNS
Blizzard Of 77 - NADA SURF
Stardust Motel - ANDREW NORSWORTHY
Emma J - BRENDAN BENSON
Simple - VIOLET ARCHERS
Music For A Found Harmonium - PATRICK STREET
Southern Paws - DANIELSON FAMILE
Love Hungry Man - MARK KOZELEK
Melt Away - MAGGI, PIERCE AND E.J.
Twice On Sunday - LYLAS
Golden Hair - SYD BARRETT

Friday Random Eleven - Sunday Night Version

2006-05-14T21:51:00.000-07:00

Woops, Sunday night. It's been a long and withering weekend, what with all the relaxing and having coffee and reading the paper and playing with the kids, gardening, pulling weeds, cutting in some stepstones and transplanting, pumping up bike tires and applying sunscreen liberally, having lunch in the shade, seeing mom's craft fair and then doing Mother's Day stuff with the whole extended clan... Rough! Don't know how we do it!!

So, I'm kind of like Nightline and 48 Hours. You never know when my regularly scheduled programming will rear it's head. Tonight:

Heaven or Las Vegas - COCTEAU TWINS
It Takes All Kinds - 8889
Truckstop Cassettes - PORTATASTIC
St. Augustine - BAND OF HEROES
I Will - THE BEATLES
Spooky - 3Ds
Your Light Has Never Shone - MORNING RECORDINGS
Bush - PAGE FRANCE
Wake - THE TEETH
Barcelona - RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
Which One - DAVID KILGOUR

Monday Random Eleven

2006-05-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

Where Don deigns to keep up with his readership of zero by lobbing off another list of accomplishments by actual artists. He just figures, "art in, art out". Why comment?

Thusly:

Brothers On Wheels - STEWART COPELAND
Golden Lion - YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Your Call - THE CONCRETES
From Grace - THOMAS DYBDAHL
When U Love Somebody - FRUIT BATS
The Fridge - JOHN STAMMERS
If Jesus Drove A Motor Home - JIM WHITE
One Life Away - M. WARD
Born Secular - JENNY LEWIS
Goodbye Little World - REMY ZERO
Dirt - PENGUIN CAFE ORCHESTRA

(and don't follow the link to the rest of the article which doesn't exist, this time, but which still tries to entice you by pretending, the way links will)

Friday Random Eleven - Saturday Version

2006-05-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

Again.

Pale And Precious - DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR
Little Monkey - DEVENDRA BANHART
Bridget - SAM ASHWORTH
Young Pilgrims - THE SHINS
Scars & Options - ROMAN BOLKS
Julie-Anne, Patron of Thieves - THE SKYGREEN LEOPARDS
Look Inside America - BLUR
Moonlight Mile - TURIN BREAKS
Yellow Taxi - MATT COSTA
Doggy - ANIMAL COLLECTIVE
Jen Is Bringin The Drugs - MARGOT & THE NUCLEAR SO AND SO's

Monday Night Random Eleven

2006-05-01T23:22:00.000-07:00

Crooked Lines - THE GO BETWEENS
This Is The Day - THE THE
No Woman, No Cry - XAVIER RUDD
Early Mornin' Rain - PETER, PAUL & MARY
Aching To Pupate - REGINA SPEKTOR
Crispy Christian Tea Time - THE ROBOT ATE ME
Going To California - LED ZEPPELIN
Love Power - THE SOFT EYES
The Last Climb Up Indian John Hill - ROY
Losing True - THE ROCHES
Whether Or Not It Matters - THE KINSBURY MANX

Friday Random Eleven

2006-04-28T22:19:00.000-07:00

Alyda - YO LA TENGO
Nevermind - DROP THE FEAR
The Lovers' Rights - THE ROSEBUDS
Listen - DEAD HEART BLOOM
The Everthere - ELBOW
This Hand - SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
The Dogs of B.A. - MIRAH
Ever Rotating Sky - DAVID THOMAS BROUGHTON
Borrowed Wings - JIM WHITE
The Ghost of Who We Were - THE GREENCARDS
What You Gave Away - THE ONE AM RADIO

The Great San Diego BOOM Mystery - an Update

2006-04-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

To update this blog post, yesterday's paper has a more scientific story about the BOOM. Scripps scientists call it a sound wave created about 120 miles off the coast of San Diego, in a military warning area where no civilian flights are allowed:

"According to data analyzed by the scientists, the wave was felt on San Nicolas Island, northwest of San Clemente Island, at 8:40 a.m. It hit Solana Beach at 8:46 a.m., the western edge of the Cleveland National Forest at 8:47.30 and the eastern side of the Salton Sea at 8:53 a.m. From there, it appears to have dissipated.

Elizabeth Cochran, the lead researcher on the project, said the wave moved at 320 meters per second, roughly the speed that sound travels through the air. Its velocity was too slow to be that of an earthquake, she said."

Makes sense.

Union Trib story

Monday Night Random Eleven

2006-04-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

November - AZURE RAY
Rubber & Soul - ANE BRUN
United. The Way You Were. - DIANE CLUCK
Off With Yr Hat - THANKSGIVING
Los Pajaros Del Rio - VETIVER
Tents Along The Water - THE SKYGREEN LEOPARDS
Silent Movies - T.W. WALSH
Streets Of Your Town - THE GO-BETWEEENS
Rosebush Inside (Morees Bickham) - SEAN HAYES
I Love That Man - DEVENDRA BANHART
Hail - HAMELL ON TRIAL

Friday Random Eleven, on Saturday

2006-04-21T23:04:00.000-07:00

Hey, I got busy. But busy or not, I always have music in the background. So here's what I picked out of the crowd this week.

In Between Love - TOM WAITS
Leslie Anne Levine (Live) - COLIN MELOY
Ballad Of Bitter Honey - EEF BARZELAY
Let Me Bleed - PAJO
Going For The Gold - BRIGHT EYES
The Seed of Truth - THE VISION OF A DYING WORLD
Think Small - TALL DWARFS
Pan-Ther - THE IMPOSSIBLE SHAPES
Cross Your Eyes - THE KINGSBURY MANX
The Morning Paper - SMOG
Feather - PAGE FRANCE

(and no, the post will not continue if you click here where it says to continue)

Monday Night Random Eleven

2006-04-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

The question you may be asking is
"Will Don ever post anything but lists of music?",
to which I might reply
"Why are you and I discussing me in the third person?"
in an effort to redirect the conversation.

Yes, you see, Operation Random Eleven as a strategem is supposed to drive me to consistency in posting, first, then to easy regularity and ultimately to voluminosity. At which point I will probably stun and sadden my vast blog audience by announcing a hasty departure, since posting blogs on a daily basis will destroy my career and leave my marriage a smoldering hulk of excuses and denial.

But I digress.

"These go to eleven":

Cronulla Breakdown - PERNICE BROTHERS
No More Ghosts - METAL HEARTS
Details of Attraction - CONSONANT
Half A Person - THE SMITHS
Haze of Love - CAKE
Pittsburgh Brain - MIXEL PIXEL
Pretty Little Cemetery - RON SEXSMITH
Red Right Ankle - THE DECEMBERISTS
The Way - BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY
Truck Stop Cassettes - PORTATASTIC
The Delicate Conversation - SPEAKERS

Friday Random Eleven

2006-04-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know, in a couple of my previous posts I said "mine goes to eleven".

Not too original really, since there exist any number and style of top-ten lists pushed to eleven. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a "Trilogy" of five books. If you think about it, triplets are not only 3 individuals, but also 3 sets of twins. But enough dancing around the topic.

Yes of course my comment was an homage to Spinal Tap, what with this being a list of artists and songs. But yes I do also know that the proper quote is "These go to eleven". Syntax required that I change it a bit. Now, after rolling it through my brain for a while -(see how I spend my days?)- I've decided to screw syntax, and go with the phrase that is probably destined to become the most popular culturally referential bit of moviedom, at least from the 1980's.

None of the songs individually go beyond maximum volume. But they do go over the edge in respect to their "favoriteness". And the quote is right. See, I'm obviously here to play ball.

So.

"These go to eleven."

Sunday Drive - THE EARLY NOVEMBER
It Froze Me - THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
(Tumble) In The Wind (Version 1) - LUKE TEMPLE
No Lullabies - KILL CHEERLEADER
False Alarm track 2 - KT TUNSTALL
Birds & Sun & Clay - AUGUST BORN
Sno Cat - KRISTIN HERSH
Walk Of Shame - WINECHUGGERS
I Could Be Nothing - GREAT LAKES SWIMMERS
Seventeen - MEREDITH BRAGG AND THE TERMINALS
Blundering Blood - NEDELLE

Monday Night Random Eleven

2006-04-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

"But mine goes to Eleven"

Western Isles - THE BATS
Swept Away - PHISH
Sleeping Diagonally - THE SIX PARTS SEVEN (w/SAM BEAM)
When I'm Gone - KIND OF LIKE SPITTING
Overkill (Acoustic) - COLIN HAY
Hey Miss Cane - DEVENDRA BANHART
How Many Lights Do You See - BRIGHT EYES
I Felt Your Shape - THE MICROPHONES
Now We Know - JEFF HANSON
Bird Song - MARISSA NADLER
A Picnic Few Want To Attend - HALF-HANDED CLOUD

earthquaku

2006-04-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

windows applauding
walls drumming stomp and shimmy
coffee shivers hot

Last week I thought a short earthquake had run through my house. I was wrong, although someone called me from about 15 miles south of my place to see if I felt it.

Somebody said something about the Marines doing something. That explains everything.

Friday Random Eleven

2006-04-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

Somnambulist - XTC
Lay Ye Doon Love - OLD BLIND DOGS
On The Porch - THE FORMAT
If I Were A Carpenter - ROBERT PLANT
Et Tu, Kitte? - THE KINGSBURY MANX
Scissor Paper Rock - FINGERS CROSSED
Ballad Of Paul And Sheila - MASON JENNINGS
Maybe You Can Owe Me - ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI
Far Too Deeply - ANDY GUTHRIE
Girl And The Ghost - K.T. TUNSTALL
I Will Follow You Into The Dark - DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

Earthquake Number 952, or the Marines?

2006-04-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't know how many earthquakes I've ever felt, because I grew up here and the phenomenon is constant. It just is. So, "952" is symbolic, if not precise.

Earthquake here just 3 minutes ago shook all the walls of the office, and the windows were making themselves heard too.

Back to work.

UPDATE - No Earthquake. Apparently the Marines were "doing something". What the?

Shortly after my whole place shook, I got a call from somebody 20 miles south of me asking if I felt the earthquake. So, what the heck are the Marines doing, shaking all the buildings in a 20 mile radius? Bowling?

UPDATE 2 - The Union Tribune online say's it's a mystery.

UPDATE 3 - The Union Tribune yesterday (April 23) had an article about the mysterious boom day here a couple of weeks ago and explains that similar booms followed in other cities around the U.S. I attribute the "series" to that classic human phenomena where we notice events in clusters. For a whole summer, for instance, we'll hear about some staggering rash of shark attacks but later find that the statistics are the same as any other year.

Either that or I go with the UFO theory. :-)

Friday Random Eleven

2006-03-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Live It Up - WILLY MASON
Cayman Islands - KINGS OF CONVENIENCE
Blackbird - SARAH MCLACHLAN
The Ash Gray Proclamation - ROBERT POLLARD
International Small Arms Traffic Blues - THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
Horses In The Sky - TRA-LA-LA BAND
The King's Shillings - KARAN CASEY
No Name #6 - ELLIOT SMITH
Say Yes - CORD STONE
Lost Outside The Tunnel - AZTEC CAMERA
As We Go Up, We Go Down - GUIDED BY VOICES

Tuesday Night Random Eleven

2006-03-28T22:55:00.000-08:00

Dropped My Shadow - MIGUEL MENDEZ
We're Going To Be Friends - THE WHITE STRIPES
Farther On - VETIVER
Swing Life Away - RISE AGAINST
World Spins Madly On - THE WEEPIES
2 Birds - MUGISON
The Dress Looks Nice On You - SUFJAN STEVENS
Kuula - LAU NAU
The Fridge - JOHN STAMMERS
Wop-A-Din-Din - RED HOUSE PAINTERS
I Saw You In The Wild - GREAT LAKES SWIMMERS

"And the Secret Handshake?"

2006-03-28T22:25:00.000-08:00

"Off the record, I want it on the record that I categorically deny the existence of off-the-record meetings, such as this one. The end of that sentence is also off the record. That's not a double negative. So, off the record, we are never not off the record if the meeting itself is not actually on the record. Got it?"

I wonder if he passed out secret decoder rings too.

The story of the super secret invisible meeting between the President of the United States of America and select members of the Press.

Friday Random Eleven

2006-03-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

I like seeing this on other blogs. So I've stolen it.

However, "Mine Goes to Eleven"...

_____

Neverending Math Equation - SUN KIL MOON
The Fisherman's King - LOS HALOS
Persephone - COCTEAU TWINS
26 Is Too Soon - KIND OF LIKE SPITTING
Sold! To The Nice Rich Man - WELCOME WAGON
Election Day - HEIKKI
One Chance - MODEST MOUSE
Mahgeetah - MY MORNING JACKET
Teeth In The Grass - IRON & WINE
Neptune - GLENN TILBROOK
Favorite Day - WONDERFUL SMITH
_____

NASA - Our Place in the Universe

2006-02-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

Cosmic evolution is depicted in this image from the exobiology program at NASA Ames Research Center, 1986. Cosmic evolution begins (upper left) with the formation of stars and planetary systems, proceeds (bottom) to primitive and complex life, and culminates with intelligence, technology and astronomers (upper right) contemplating the universe.

Since it seems to be the intention of the 24-year-old-journalism-major-political-appointee-creationist Public Affairs Officer at NASA to alter, delete, or skew the statements of real scientists,admistrators, and writers working there, I'm going to include here, in full, the article NASA - Our Place in the Universe which I found still posted at the official NASA website.

It may be gone soon, if young gun George Deutsch is allowed to run roughshod over reality for too much longer. The following article is exactly what operatives for the whacky anti-science fundamentalistas in America are doing their best to snuff out.

It's an absolutely lovely article, by the way:

Editor's Note: This is the 13th in a series of essays on exploration by NASA's Chief Historian, Steven J. Dick.

In one of his Four Quartets titled "Little Gidding," T. S. Eliot wrote

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Eliot did not have space exploration in mind (the lines were written in 1942), but the sentiment poetically captures one of the most important reasons we explore space. NASA's exploration of the universe, and that of other nations, reveals humanity's place in nature in the broadest possible sense. That view of ourselves has changed dramatically over the last century. One hundred years ago most astronomers considered the universe to be about 3600 light years in extent, less than a billion years old, and with our solar system near its center. Astronomers today have seen objects 13 billion light years away in a universe 13.7 billion years old containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. We are peripherally located in one of those galaxies, known as the Milky Way.

((photo and caption moved to top of blog post))

Nothing, however, has been more revolutionary than the idea that this entire universe is in a state of constant change, as planets, stars and galaxies are born and die. This story of the life of the universe, and our place in it, is known as cosmic evolution. Although the idea has roots in the 19th century, and was occasionally invoked in the first half of the 20th century by astronomers such as George Ellery Hale, it really came into its own only in the Space Age.

Already in 1958, in his classic book Of Stars and Men, Harvard College Observatory Director Harlow Shapley wrote that the Earth is "on the outer fringe of one galaxy in a universe of millions of galaxies. Man becomes peripheral among the billions of stars in his own Milky Way; and according to the revelations of paleontology and geochemistry he is also exposed as a recent, and perhaps an ephemeral manifestation in the unrolling of cosmic time."

In his 1967 essays Beyond the Observatory, Shapley wrote that "Nothing seems to be more important philosophically than the revelation that the evolutionary drive, which has in recent years swept over the whole field of biology, also includes in its sweep the evolution of galaxies and stars, and comets and atoms, and indeed all things material."

Cosmic evolution has become the guiding principle for modern astronomy. The science programs of the world's space agencies may be seen as filling in the details in this story of the life of the universe. Indeed, the very idea was spread during the 1970s and 1980s by NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, and NASA's broader astrobiology efforts, discussed in the last essay, constitute its biological component.

Especially for the last decade, NASA's Origins program has had cosmic evolution as its overarching epic story. When the program began in 1996, it was viewed as "Following the 15 billion year long chain of events from the birth of the universe at the Big Bang, through the formation of chemical elements, galaxies, stars, and planets, through the mixing of chemicals and energy that cradles life on Earth, to the earliest self-replicating organisms – and the profusion of life."

The array of Great Observatories (Hubble, Compton, Chandra and Spitzer), along with many other spacecraft, have provided an ever more robust view of cosmic evolution and the place of our pale blue dot and its inhabitants. There are also theoretical underpinnings to the idea. In his book Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, Eric Chaisson describes the concept from the all-encompassing point of view of thermodynamics and the flow of energy.

Cosmic evolution has several possible outcomes. Its endpoint may be planets, stars and galaxies. We observe these and know they exist, and the result is what we might call the "physical universe," magnificent in and of itself. Alternately, cosmic evolution may result in a profusion of life, either microbial or intelligent, throughout the universe. This outcome, the Holy Grail of SETI and astrobiology programs around the world, would constitute a "biological universe." A third possible outcome, rarely discussed, is a universe in which cultural evolution is taken into account.

If, as is often assumed, intelligent life is millions or billions of years old, cultural evolution may have resulted in a "postbiological universe," in which flesh and blood intelligence has been superseded by artificial intelligence. Carnegie Mellon AI pioneer Hans Moravec has famously postulated a postbiological Earth in the next few generations. Given the time scales of the universe, its seems much more likely to have already happened in outer space.

All of these outcomes have implications for human destiny. It may be our destiny to populate the universe, or to interact with its flesh-and-blood intelligence in many forms. Or, in the postbiological universe, we may have to interact with machine intelligence. But there are more immediate implications. Sir Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist and Anglican priest, has called cosmic evolution "Genesis for the Third Millennium," and suggested that it must be incorporated into religious doctrines. Reverend Michael Dowd has taken that sentiment to heart in a DVD called "Evolutionary Christianity," in which he incorporates "the entire history of the universe and the emergent complexity of matter, life, consciousness, culture and technology," in short, the epic of cosmic evolution.

In both space and time the study of cosmic evolution allows us to see the universe as it really is, to reflect on our place in it, and to "know the place for the first time." Space programs may often seem bogged down in technical details, politics and funding controversies. But we should not lose sight of the longer term implications. Although its practical benefits are many, space exploration has no higher calling than this search for our place in the universe.

Further Reading:

Eric Chaisson. Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

Steven J. Dick, "Extraterrestrial Life and our Worldview at the Turn of the Millennium," Dibner Library Lecture, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, May 2, 2000.

Steven J. Dick, "Cultural Evolution, the Postbiological Universe and SETI," International Journal of Astrobiology, 2 (2003), 65-74.

Dowd, Michael, "Evolutionary Christianity," DVD, described at www.evolutionarychristianity.org.

Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

Arthur Peacocke, "The Challenge and Stimulus of the Epic of Evolution to Theology," in Steven J. Dick, Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life and the Theological Implications (Templeton Foundation Press: Philadelphia and London, 2000), pp. 89-117.

Harlow Shapley, Beyond the Observatory (Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1967)

Harlow Shapley, Of Stars and Men: The Human Response to an Expanding Universe (Beacon Press: Boston, 1958).

Steven J. Dick
NASA Chief Historian

Who Are These Idiots?

2005-10-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

From an article about Intelligent Design getting blasted in a Natural History Museum. (Sure, I know it appears that I blast Intelligent Design every chance I get - this is pretty accurate - but I was more interested in the following points):

"1 adult American in five believes that the Sun revolves around Earth, according to one study carried out last summer.

80 per cent of Americans surveyed by the CNN TV news network believe that their government is hiding evidence of the existence of space aliens.

70 per cent believe it likely that Saddam Hussein was involved personally in the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

I'm particularly stunned by the first statement. Isn't it pointed out to every single child in America, at least 90 to 900 times, by teachers, peers, and parents, Sesame Street, somebody, that the freaking sun only LOOKS like it's rising and falling??

How many times in the 18 long years between birth and adulthood does an American person hear the simple fact that the earth goes around the sun? How many mobiles do you see, cartoons, drawings, TV shows, etc etc, to not even mention, maybe, school!?

1 in 5 adults still thinks the sun circles the earth?

Holy crap.

Intelligent Design in a Nutshell

2005-09-29T15:23:00.000-07:00

As elucidated by Winnie the Pooh:

"That buzzing-noise means something. If there's a buzzing noise, somebody's making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you're a bee. ....

"And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.....

"And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.

So he began to climb the tree."

Meet You On The Bell Curve

2005-07-19T00:11:00.000-07:00

But then, I already knew that.

How About a BIG Piece of Pi for Breakfast.

2005-07-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

The number Pi never ends. In math terms, it's irrational. Like me whilst playing racquetball.

Pi starts out 3.14159265358- and continues on infinitely. The fact that there is no end to Pi has spawned an increasingly ludicrous - but fascinating - race to harness computer power and cleverness in order to calculate more and more digits of this infinite number.

And even more fascinating and just as senseless, a Japanese mathematician, or professor, or sensei, earlier this year successfully recited from memory 83,431 decimal places of Pi. See, and you thought gamers were obsessed. Actually, believe it or not, the man is a mental health counsellor. Go figure (in a manner of speaking).

Not too many hundreds of years ago merely the first five or six digits past the decimal had been calculated. And really, isn't that close enough?

I read recently that as of last year approximately 1.2 trillion digits past the decimal had been calculated. 1,200,000,000,000 decimal places. I'm thinking, if you use Pi the way it's designed to be used, you could fill a small round pool with water, measure the diameter, let's say exactly, and the depth, and then figure out the exact volume of water in that pool. Now, if you use Pi to the precision of 1.2 trillion digits, I'm guessing you're just as accurate as individually counting every single water molecule in that little pool. Just a thought.

While commenting on a mathematician's blog recently - well, a relative who is/was a mathematician, and who has a blog - I related how I was just trying to put that into context. Trying to wrap my brain around how god-awful LONG 1.2 Trillion digits is.

I figured that, if I were to write out Pi, in my normal handwriting - and assuming I could live the 15,000 years it would take me day and night to write that many digits - the result would start in my office, pass through my living room and kitchen, continue outside and across my back yard and my neighbor's yard too, and then down his street, across the freeway and the golf course and town center, all of San Diego County and over the mountains and through the deserts of California, Arizona and New Mexico, the entire South, continue across the Atlantic, bisect Africa, the Indian Ocean, through Australia and the Pacific, onto our beaches and across our canyons and industrial parks and finally into my neighborhood and across my street and my front yard and then back here into my office from the west. Ten times.

It's a long number. And since it's an infinite number, 1.2 trillion digits is just the first hint of a breath of the thought of the beginning of the actual number. It's not even begun as far as infinity is concerned.

Not that I ever think about this or anything.

The Mayor-Go-Round Continues...

2005-07-18T22:50:00.000-07:00

This past Friday, July 15, San Diego Mayor Dick Murphy's resignation became official and he was replaced by Deputy Mayor Michael Zucchet. Zucchet will stand in as acting Mayor until a new Mayor is sworn in.

Check that, hold the presses. Today, Monday, July 17, Michael Zucchet was convicted on federal corruption charges in the San Diego Strippergate scandal, and is immediately suspended from the San Diego City Council, along with councilman Ralph Inzunza. Councilman Charles Lewis, who was indicted together with Zucchet and Inzunza, avoided this year's legal circus by dropping dead before the trial ever started.

So, the mayor was gone Friday and then the deputy mayor is gone just after lunchtime Monday, before the city council could even appoint another deputy mayor to take his place - you know, should something like a federal corruption conviction knock him out of office.

This afternoon whatever was left of the council appointed - now follow me closely on this one - a "temporary mayor pro tem". In other words, councilwoman Toni Atkins is mayor for a week. Next week the council will appoint a "permanent mayor pro tem" to cover the job. A permanent temporary mayor. But there's more:

The next day, July 26, will be the previously scheduled special election for mayor, and if none of the 11 candidates gets 50% of the vote then the run-off election on Nov. 8 will put the top 2 candidates head to head. (This time, there will be no write-in third candidate allowed to join the two-candidate run-off, like last year.)
So whomever is appointed permanent temporary mayor next Monday will possibly see his or her replacement elected the next day. I say we should have a new mayor appointed every single week of the year; this is fun.

If you're wondering how we get along here in San Diego: Planning is key.

For more information, I have no idea who you can call. Nobody's in.

At Least 1 Full Apostle Lost to Erosion in Australia

2005-07-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

Year after year on the coast of Victoria, Australia a cluster of 9 limestone towers known as The Twelve Apostles has withstood constant tidal assaults by the Indian Ocean. In news today it was reported that one of the 150-foot towers has collapsed into the sea in front of a stunned family of sightseers.

On a sidenote, according to at least one loony, this event is somehow proof of a young earth. (Link=Rockstar's Ramblings)

A couple questions: If the badly named formation of 9 towers represented The 12 Apostles then does that leave 11 Apostles standing now, or 8? Or, if the 12 original apostles were represented proportionally amongst the 9 towers, at 1.33 apostles per, wouldn't that leave 10.66 apostles now?

And then, of course, which apostles have weathered away? Presumably Judas would be the one full apostle removed from the club, but then what about the 1/3 apostle? Perhaps Peter? (at a rate of .11 compensation for each instance of denying Jesus in one night. Did anyone happen to hear a cock crowing twice on the beach before the collapse?)

I'm assuming that the powers that be - the Park Service - intend on keeping the name The 12 Apostles. I mean, perhaps then the simplest solution would be to apply apostolic inflation and increase the current Apostle-Tower exchange rate from 1.33 Apostle per Tower, to 1.5 per. Would there be implications?
I'm not an economist, nor a prophet, so I can't predict the effects in Victoria State or even globally, in tweaking an exchange nearly 15% in one fell swoop.

Or might we assume from the name that maybe 12 apostles once stood there and that by implication 3 had already been lost to the sands of time before this week? I'm assuming just based on my limited knowledge of the actions of erosion in that part of Australia, perhaps thousands of apostles have stood guard there, since long before their namesakes even existed. Imagine that.

How about this: Could it be that this formation is really an indication of some grand coverup? Were there really only 9 Apostles to begin with? It wouldn't be a stretch to deduce that the same folks who once recorded their more ancient ancestors' ages as 600 years and 900 years plus, might also have padded the books when it came to counting Apostles... Hey, maybe there aren't any "lost tribes" of Israel either. And maybe "nine" is the true bakers' dozen?

Just asking.

Thursday Night is Whackjob-o-rama!

2005-06-23T20:05:00.000-07:00

Quack-Palooza!

Just check out the lineup at the National Geographic Channel:

8:00pm Spontaneous Human Combustion TVG
9:00pm Ghosts TVG
10:00pm Bigfoot TVG
11:00pm Crop Circles TVG

I keep hitting the top of the TV but it ain't going away!

(The National Geographic Channel? Travelling the Globe to bring you loons from your very backyards...)

That was the whole post. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programs. But please comment now.
thanks

Earthquake

2005-06-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Hey, an earthquake just rolled through, seconds ago.

Heard a rumble and a small jolt, like a truck next door or something, then a few seconds later the roller actually came through. I'm guessing a 3.something close by or a 4.something farther away.

Update - It was about a 5.0, about 50 miles northwest of me.

UPDATE 6/16/05 1:55 PM PACIFIC:
Another one, quick jiggle, just as if I got a little dizzy. Wouldn't think it was an earthquake except that my door rattled, the wall creaked, and my keyboard moved back and forth beneath my fingers. Couple seconds.

Dumb Laws That Are, Yes, Dumb, No - Not Laws

2005-06-09T20:20:00.000-07:00

Saint Nate's Blog: Laws Too Strange To Be True

Just Don't Chop Down Any Conifers While Yer Here....

2005-06-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

Border Agent: Sir, do you have anything of value to declare?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: Do you have any luggage with you today?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: Is that blood there, on your hands? And shirt?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: And this isn't blood, on this chain saw?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: Sir, is there any blood on this sword...

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: ... this hatchet ...

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: ... the brass knuckles ...

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: ... this bent kitchen knife?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: I'd like to welcome you to the great state of Maine. Do you know
what our state motto is?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: It's "Dirigo"! Know what that means?

Crazy Guy: No.

Border Agent: Neither do we! We really don't know much of anything!
Border Agent: Hey now, Have a good day. Be safe.

Typical day at the U.S. / Canada border.

Narcissus Said There Would Be Days Like This

2005-06-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Note to self: Trick is to angle mirror toward computer monitor.

There.

Debating the Controversy of Teaching the Controversy

2005-06-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

Luke over at "Correct My Spelling!" got himself into a debate with a journalist colleague about the Intelligent Design, uh, issue.

I only read Luke's side of it but I trust that at some point he will break down and actually type in his colleague's work so we can all read it on his blog too. (Actually, Luke, why don't you have him email his piece????)

Anyway, I responded to Luke's post, and he responded to my response, and well, now everyone is tired. I'll recap the posts/responses here, and then - would you expect anything less of me? - I still have more to say:

Luke:

Evolutionists have refused to take part in the intelligent design hearings in Kansas. It's beneath them, they say. ID is just creationism in a more inclusive blanket. Current Intelligent Design proponents, though, say it's unfair to lump them in with the quaint ideas of creation science.... They've come to shake things up. Except Intelligent Design isn't new, and their underlying goals probably aren't even science.

Read Luke's entire post HERE. It's very good.

My first response was, reasonably enough, to Luke's first assertion, that evolution scientists boycotted the Kansas Kangaroo Court last month because they felt it "beneath them."

But that's not my take.

Here's my response:

I would suggest actually that rather than being based on intellectual arrogance, the science boycott is just a practical refusal to play "show trial" with the IDers. Scientists' testimony would have meant nothing to the end result, since the actions to be taken by the school board this summer are a done deal. The hearings are nothing but an ID PR Carnival, and scientists rightly stayed home, rather than suggest that a real scientific "controversy" exists where it clearly does not.

So I have this great vision:

ID is a boxer, in the ring bobbing and weaving, jabbing, running, float like a butterfly sting like a bee (all according to "kind" of course).

Big left hook (bacterial flagella!), jab (carbon 14), jab(Cambrian exoskeleton).

His supporters are screaming for him to connect ["show 'em the design!!"].

Another left hook (molecular clock!), a right hook (irreducible complexity!).

The crowd is on its feet ["Do the math! Not enough time for diversity! Noah's flood!"]

The fighter is spinning. Checking his corner. [are we accepting Microevolution? or sticking with Genesis!? 3 Billion years acceptable? Or 8000? Three trainers, one nodding, one shaking his head, one shrugging] No matter. Another left hook (transitional fossils!), and a right (Directed Descent!) a flurry of body shots (Eyeball!, Mousetrap!, Clotting Cascade!, ATHEISM!!)

But notice... the opponent is not in the ring.

ID is shadowboxing. ID refuses to admit he's shadowboxing, of course, he claims there is a legitimate fight going on, right before your eyes, and that the opponent is just too afraid to show. And the opponent is going down. And the opponent is at once hiding and conspiring with the boxing commission to revoke ID's license, and also laying there on the mat taking an eight count, right there on the floor, look! Wait, don't look! Check out my uppercut!

And then Luke:

I like that Don, but I have to draw the opposite conclusion.

There will be no proper trial of ID, they've framed the theory in such a way that it will never reach real court on constitutional grounds [also in such a way that utterly neuters whatever shred of explanatory power other design arguments have], so all there is are these kangaroo courts set up.

As showy as it all seems, let's not forget how science gets done: with money. Much of the money is donated R&D in the private sector, drug companies, defense and what not. But most of the bleeding edge science--the stuff that seems anecdotal and mystical now but which will one day shape our understanding of the universe, and lead the practical technologies of the next century--is funded by the government.

Government funding, as it were, is all about show trials, because show trials offer the illusion of public opinion. Show trials, in this sense, are analogous to lobbying groups. It's not only about throwing around money, it's about demonstrating the perception of influence.

Public opinion directs tax dollars because public opinion creates the law makers who direct the tax dollars. Their careers depend on public opinion.

If the gentleman from Pennsylvania or the lady from Ohio perceives the thrust of lay science shifting [which is what this equal time nonsense will do I believe], then I guarantee they will begin to fight to preserve their delegates perceived interest.

I wouldn't have such a big problem with ID if it were given the time it deserves, a paragraph in chapter one of our science books alongside other quaint creation theories [Pan-Gu and his egg for example], but equal time suggests equal weight, and equal weight is something ID definitely doesn't carry. If nothing else they should have gone to bat with the full weight of the scientific community behind them. It wouldn't have mattered in Pennsylvania, but the cameras on those procedings beamed out a fair ways past Scranton.
---
Incidentally I read my colleague's piece and it was well written and researched, but I pretty much called everything he was going to say. I appeared first on the page, so by the time he brought up William Dembsky and the Discovery Institute, I'd already handled the former and exposed the motives of the latter.

Reading it almost felt like I'd done some witchcraft, but, like the spurious design argument, it was a statistics game. There are only a handfull of ways ID can be argued. 2500 years of working through logical permutations and we have 5 essential arguments for the belief in God [6 if you count Kant's half-joking contribution]. Of those five, only two are valid to this conversation in the current scientific paradigm. Two ways to demonstrate the possibility of God versus X(n) [where n is the number of species of organic life that live and have lived on the planet] ways to demonstrate evolution.

And now back to me:

Well, Luke, I wouldn't say yours is an "opposite conclusion" from mine, per se.

Unless, I guess, we're talking about a constitutional test. Actually, I think Kansas is a good example, I believe it will come to a constitutional test. The ID argument is strangely self contradictory there. ID says it is a legitimate science, nothing more, no religion, etc., but its argument for inclusion in the school curriculum is that evolutionary science is, via it's naturalistic "dogma", religious! So, in a roundabout way, despite claiming to NOT be religious, ID is requesting equal time in order to counter the "religion" of science. This ridiculously stilted dichotomy is going to get them in trouble.

You and I both see the ID game as a public/political battle for hearts and minds (and funding), as opposed to valid science. We agree there.

But I have to say, how "science is done" is not really the issue; how "science is taught" is the issue. The important point here is that ID is not science. Period.

ID is a social, cultural, and political construct. It can not speak to the natural sciences. I don't see any reason to keep it from History, Comparative Religion, Social Studies and Civics, all the subjects which explore those issues. Putting it in Science classes, though, would be tantamount to inserting it into the Weather segment on the 11 o'clock news.

"I wouldn't have such a big problem with ID if it were given the time it deserves, a paragraph in chapter one of our science books alongside other quaint creation theories [Pan-Gu and his egg for example]..."

This is probably where we disagree. First, unless I missed something recently, I don't think that any quaint supernatural beliefs are currently included in the first chapters of any science books as it is, right? Not Pan-Gu, not Greek mythology, not the Yanomamo tree ancestors. Why start now?

Maybe things have changed, and these Phun Phacts are included in sidebars and highlight boxes in science texts to sex them up a little. But I think this would look more like a mockery of the misinformed. Which leads me to my next point.

ID wants to be taken seriously, like you said, with "equal time". It doesn't want to be pigeon-holed as an unverifiable mystical explanation that modern science has now explained. In fact, it wants to challenge science, break the perceived conspiracy of silence, and blow down the house of cards that they intuitively find naturalistic sciences to truly be.

And yes, I see where you said you "wouldn't have a problem with ID if...", but that "if" is unacceptable to both sides. Rightly so, I think.

I personally see no conflict whatsoever with a person believing that there is or could be a deity, a force, and entity, prime mover, God, gods, what have you, while seeking and understanding the sciences for what they are, a process of discovery and experimentation and model-building that explains our natural physical existence, including evolution. This person is at once living in faith and still understanding that it is a realm untouchable by physical sciences. And vice versa.

It appears to me that MOST people of science, and MOST people of faith, fall into this category of people!

I think the ID crowd on one side, and the militant atheist crowd on the other, are minority cells existing under the very low ceilings of the bell-curve's extreme ends.

However, the ID strategies, which are it's ultimate undoing, are schizophrenically attempting to appeal not only to their "base" - the small fringe of young-earth creationist fundamentalists - but to the middlings too.

The middlings range from those who accept an older earth while still maintaining that man was created in somewhat of a "poof" manner, to those who believe in the impossibly unabservable idea that everything happened exactly as science sees it, BUT that it was divinely directed and the proof of this lives in the "gaps" of our working models.

This bobbing and weaving ID is self-contradictory. It's a jumble of strategems and gambits, many working against each other. It really is shadowboxing. ID actually can't be defined, can't develop a model or a "science", can't really even agree on a direction of exploration. It can only design political "strategies", The Wedge Strategy, Dembski's new Vice Strategy, etc. None of these are science. They are just PR.

So, maybe next is the School Voucher Private Education Strategy? (again)?

We'll see.

The Doomsday Rule

2005-05-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

Slow news night? Or am I just this lazy?

I haven't posted in a while so I'm just lobbing this softball so you know I'm still around.

A couple days ago my oldest daughter asked me which day of the week she was born, errrrr, 13 years ago. Well, I know I know things. "That was a Wednesday afternoon." And I know I get these things wrong all the time. I've only fooled myself into thinking I know them.

So I headed straight to the computer to Google the date. Seriously. And the stuff I found about dates...

First, I confirmed quite quickly that it was a Wednesday since putting Tuesday or Thursday ahead of the date got no results while Wednesday lit up the board, so to speak.

Then I found stuff about the Gregorian Calendar and the Julian Calendar and moving New Year's Day forward etc etc.

Then I found this: The Doomsday Rule.

It looked at first like a quick and/or easy math trick to calculate exactly the weekday of any given date. Well, yes, it was "math". Quick and/or easy was not in the stars, so to speak.

It was a lot of this:

Computing Rosh Hashana

Rosh Hashana is the Jewish New Year's Day. In a Gregorian year Y A.D. (i.e., the first day of the Jewish year Y+3761), it happens on September N, where

{[ Y/100 ] - [Y/400] - 2}+ 765433
492480
(12G) mod 19 + 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4
(Y) mod 4 - 313 Y + 89091
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
98486
= N + fraction

and G is the Golden number, except that it must be postponed by one or two days in the following circumstances....

Now, yes, there was in fact a trick to memorize, and yes, now I can actually figure any weekday based on a given date, in about 5 minutes, as long as we're not talking BC dates.

Or, Rosh Hashana.

Or for instance, when the Vernal Equinox ought to occur in 2027. I will be Googling this one.

Hope you had a good Memorial Day Weekend.

Ginormous vs. Egantic

2005-05-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

As soon as I heard that "ginormous" was first in the Merriam-Webster Top Ten Favorite Words NOT in the Dictionary, I thought of it's Siamenym: "Egantic".

(And yes, I, Don Sheffler, made up Siamenym. If you use the word anywhere you have to mention how awesome I was to come up with it, and of course you need to let M-W and OED know its source. The opening sentence in this post would be the word's first known usage - blog or otherwise. As far as I know. OK?)

Anyway Ginormous seems vaguely feminine. Big, to be sure, and feminine.

Egantic just seems powerfully manlike and huge. Ahh, nah, it doesn't. Who am I kidding? I was just trying to find a way to get Siamenym into the game.

I'm all flusterpated now.

Your 15 Minutes of Fame Aren't Actually Yours

2005-05-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone,
There's not enough time to actually give each of you 15 exclusive minutes of fame.

Sorry.

You'll all have to form parallel lines and BLOG your heads off simultaneously and hope someone notices. Take all the time you want, because you're sharing it.

With everyone.

Sincerely,
Your friends, the Powers That Be.

The instantaneous self-publishing that blogging allows has brought a welcome egalitarian element to human discourse. It provides a hyper-soap-box that has not been available to humans at any time in history.

Or does it?

I don't know how many people read my blog, for instance - and I bet I'm a pretty good example of the average Mr. Everyone - but I'll bet I could distribute my views more efficiently if I simply stood in front of a supermarket and shouted them out from, well, an actual soapbox.

Certainly blogging will continue to evolve, and the growth of blog hubs - like blogcritics.org and others - promise to increase exposure of "everyperson" to the rest of the wired world going forward.

But if everyone is talking, who's listening?

I myself read online a lot, to the detriment of writing. I don't have 24 hours a day to myself so I find myself gathering like a squirrel. I add links to my favorites or subscribe via RSS and Atom and scroll through my aggregator at lightning speed looking for content I'll eventually wish to comment on.

And I'm constantly sucked into the commercial blogventures like the weblogsinc network of professional bloggers and business people vying for my time and the infinitely expanding Gawker Media Empire, a sort of oxymoronic "diversion central".

I wonder if I should hire people to read stuff for me. Then I can actually work, and interact with my real-life family, whose names currently escape me.

_______

In 1992 I was taking some courses back at UCSD part-time, after a long hiatus, to finish my degrees. In one of the courses a young and spunky couple of geeks introduced us all to "the internet". As if we were in a bunker having a secret meeting of the Che Guevara society of new-world communicators, they excitedly distributed a list of complex looking urls printed out with a dot-matrix printer in the computer lab on a long perforated computer paper spool.

These were "addresses". To things you could "find". On "the internet".

I hardly understood a word they were saying. I got the gist of it, though. Not only could we "find" information, we could "offer" information. We were supposed to be able to personally interact with other people somewhere on this internet by using our student network accounts to send "email" and/or "upload" stuff for viewing.

Crazy.

The leaders of our little Internet Junta were insisting that this growing virtual network of computers across the world was going to change the way we all interact and communicate. Political discourse and social & artistic expression were to soon flower in ways none of us could imagine.

Some forward-thinking geeks we had there.
And they were right, if you call a decade "soon".

By this time, 1992, I had read a couple of books in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series, which in themselves were wildly forward-thinking in terms of the future networking of citizens of the universe. Card's tales described the social and cultural communications that would be possible for even the most unknown of unknowns, as soon as IDEA overcame LISTENER's predisposition to ignore the otherwise unimportant SPEAKER. This by the shifting of AUTHORITY via this new network.

______

Just a year after this UCSD class, I was on Compuserve at home, and then over to AOL (I was one of the first 100,000 subscribers as of 1993). Even then, though, figuring out how to format an email address to a user on another service gave me and the other 99,999 AOL subscribers fits. Well, for a week or two anyway.

Two years after this I actually had a company web page up on the internet - at considerable cost. But that's still just business, advertising, etc. Sure I could get my own personal site - Hey, actually, that's what I did. At considerable cost. This was no way for everyone to get their own 15 minutes of fame.

And then I started noticed in the late 1990's that companies were also giving server space to their employees. Getting there.

And finally has come blogging. Instantaneous, self-published blather.

Ah, the freedom.

______

However, it seems that as soon as blogging hit our proverbial "fame" funny bones this past couple years, the co-opting began.

Google, who will eventually figure out how to link to our brains directly, bought Blogger.com, which by the way was a good thing. Now it should remain forever free. If that's a good thing. (Tip: I'm never as sure of my own statements as I pretend).

And how is it free?

Advertising. They've got my eyeballs in return for giving me free space to try and attract eyeballs too. So how do we free bloggers get eyeballs to actually read what we're writing? Well, we can just write and hope. We can make the rounds, make connections with the like-minded, trade links, become a community, so to speak.

You can game the system like the Hot Abercromie "Chick", or you can keep pumping out page after page of topical, engaging content like unemployed people on speed, or you can combine with other bloggers to expand your repertoire of interesting content lines. Form alliances. Blogging Communes.

Meta-Opine.

And poof, we're ALL famous ALL the time.

We've gone from passive digestion of broadcast news of the 1970's, to Talk Radio through the 80's and internetting through the 90's, and finally to blogging, still in its cacaphonous infancy.

Where any of you can say anything you want.
Someone might even hear you.

"First, Don't Write Poetry..."

2005-05-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

A student at the College of New Jersey has unearthed an 1888 school newspaper interview with Walt Whitman, who gave three bits of advice:

"First, don't write poetry; second ditto; third ditto."

He didn't say to avoid writing altogether; he encouraged learning the craft of writing in every way, including "condensation". I'm guess that's a directive to edit, and when you think you've edited enough, edit some more. Good advice for word-hemorrhagers like me.

He did say to learn the printing business if you were going to write, presumably so you could self-publish if your content was inspired enough to challenge some views.

Wonder what he would have thought of blogging.

Article at CBC.ca

Louis Leithold, Malibu High, and Infinity

2005-05-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

I don't claim to be a Calculus expert but I did take about 94 years' worth of it in college. Give or take.

My youngest brother - who never took an interest in the sciences in school, but who now can't get enough of Nova programs and the Discovery channel - this brother and I, often discuss the history and significance of physics and math, biology, black holes and string theory, and beer and of course the famous mathematician John Forbes Nash's game-theory hypothesis on bagging the hottest girl at the bar. Actually, bagging one of her friends. All the stuff brothers chat about, right?

One day we were just glossing over the basics of The Calculus (actually I'm sure we were just scheming some trick bar bets), and we got around to the paradox of getting halfway to a goal each successive step in a series of steps, and ultimately never getting there. Repeating the process infinitely gets you infinitely close so you have finally in essence "arrived". As they say in The Calculus, "close enough". No, really, that's what they say. I've heard them.

Louis Leithold, or perhaps we should just call him Dr. Calculus, last week finally took that last half-step toward the end of his full life.

n = infinity, the equation is solved.

I haven't looked up a list of all the pseudo-mathematical quasi-journalistic smarmy phrases for announcing the passing of a Calculus legend, but that ought to suffice for now. "Close enough."

I was going to say something about how I thought we used Leithold's Calculus book in my college courses, but then I remembered that I was "studying", as they call it at UCSD, under Al "Mr. Exciting" Shenk, and coincidentally we had to constantly purchase the newest version of "Calculus and Analytical Geometry" written by Al "Mr. Sizzle" Shenk himself. A grand coincidence, to be sure.

So, back to Louis Leithold. He wrote "The Calculus", which is considered, in all of its editions, to the be the quintessential writing on the subject, and far superior to that of Al "Do The Hustle" Shenk. Not to disparage Al "One-More-Beer-Bong-And-I'll-Let-"n"-Equal-Anything-You-Want, Dog" Shenk, but I'm on a roll here and I can't seem to stop.

Back again, to Louis Leithold. The man loved teaching, loved the subject, loved the art of it, to the point of working nearly for free, past the age of 80, at Malibu High School long after a distinguished college professorship spanning over half a century. He taught AP Calculus and cajoled his students to mind-bogglingly high AP Test Scores (mind boggling even for Math Majors, go figure). Come to think of it, we're talking high AP Calculus scores at Malibu High. Mind boggling.

Dang, ok, really, back to Louis Leithold. Apparently, if you've met him, you're a better person for it. That's a great reputation to leave behind.

His Math Text Was the Standard, His Touch in Class Exceptional

Intellectualismo

2005-05-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

The following is a list of posts and responses in a forum exchange at FrontPage Magazine.

I was so amused by the post titles alone, that I haven’t even read the content of the exchange.

You can read them in full if you wish at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/index.asp?ID=14579.

("No you can’t"
"Yes, you can"
"RE: Yes, you can: you CAN’T!"
"What did you call me?!"
"RE: What did you call me?!"
"RE: RE: What did you call me?!"
"You’re paranoid."
"No, you are."
"You are"
"RE: You are."
"RE: RE: You are.")

OK, here’s the real list:

Darwinism and Creationism - prairieson 6:01:10 PM

Intelligent design isn't a scientific theory.... - BevD 6:54:59 PM

RE: Intelligent design is scientific theory.... - Cato 7:33:35 PM

No it's not a scientific theory...... - BevD 8:55:45 PM

RE: No it's not a scientific theory...... - Cato 9:10:36 PM

I didn't want to embarrass you by - BevD 9:20:06 PM

RE:You only embarass yourself - Cato 9:23:20 PM

RE: Intelligent Design THEORY - Cato 9:33:18 PM

That's so sad....... - BevD 9:50:21 PM

RE: What is an inference? - Cato 10:04:54 PM

There's no such thing as "empirical observation" - BevD 10:17:14 PM

RE: There's no such thing as - Task 11:29:37 PM

RE: I never said it was - prairieson 8:05:20 PM

RE: Actually - SST 6:38:58 PM

Adaptability IS evolution...... - BevD 7:01:37 PM

RE: Adaptability IS evolution...... - SST 7:06:17 PM

Adaptability is not the same as "fit" - BevD 9:01:47 PM

RE: Of course it isn't - SST 9:45:01 PM

No, I'm pointing out that biologically - BevD 10:09:27 PM

RE: No, I'm pointing out that biologically - SST 10:46:49 PM

RE: Doubtful - prairieson 6:55:31 PM

Read "Origin of the Species"...... - BevD 7:04:17 PM

RE: Read - prairieson 7:15:56 PM

RE: Marxism and National Socialism - Cato 7:40:53 PM

They certainly are not. - BevD 9:07:18 PM

RE: Marx & Darwin -A love story - Cato 9:24:30 PM

And it is apparent that you didn't read it........ - BevD 10:11:12 PM

RE: And it is apparent that you didn't read it........ - Cato 11:41:37 PM

p.s. Species don't transform - BevD 6:29:09 PM

RE: p.s. Species don't transform - RightTeacher 6:45:36 PM

So? Species don't transform into - BevD 6:56:45 PM

RE: p.s. Species don't transform - RightTeacher 6:46:46 PM

RE: Darwinism and Creationism - tony 6:51:57 PM

RE: Darwinism and Creationism - Connie 7:49:45 PM

This is wrong. - BevD 9:16:31 PM

RE: This is wrong. - Connie 10:02:21 PM

No, Connie, no evolutionist - BevD 10:14:17 PM

RE: No, Connie, no evolutionist - Connie 10:22:15 PM

RE: RE: Darwinism and Creationism - prairieson 9:27:52 PM

RE: RE: RE: Darwinism and Creationism - Connie 10:16:37 PM

In the interest of brevity (and when is that ever an issue with me??) I took out some innocuous comments through the middle. (What? Innocuous comments?)

I stumbled across this just because in the last week or two I've been following the farcical Kansas Kangaroo Kourt hearings on Intelligent Design.

Maybe I should just get back to watching my Netflix Queue.

Time-Travel Party Didn't Work Out, Tomorrow

2005-05-06T17:39:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure Amal Dorai's bash at M.I.T. tomorrow is gonna be a good time. Top-notch physicists will speak, top-notch students will listen, somebody will spike the punch, to be sure. You can't stop those M.I.T. kids.

But nobody from the year 2770 will come. or 5990. Or really any time past 10pm on Saturday May 7, 2005.

Today, May 6, 2005, is apparently the time for me to come out and explain something I've theorized for years. And years.

Here's my statement, and I'll make it now lest everybody think I came up with it after tomorrow's bomb of an experiment.

Time travel to past points will never be invented / discovered / developed. Ever.

There. I feel much better.

Now, in case you think I'm being smug, and you think there may be some time far far in the future where I'll be proven wrong, just understand, I've already been proven right.

I've been proven right, in fact, every single day that has transpired in the millions of years since the earth first formed. This is really quite simple. If at any time, ever, ever, in the future, be it 90 years from now, or 90 gozillion years from now, if time travel to past points were to come about, then we would already have been visited by someone from the future. Last year perhaps, last millenium maybe, any number of times and places in the past "billions and billions" of possible moments that a future traveller would have landed in his or her past.

I mean, even if for thousands upon thousands of years the powers that be will thwart all attempts by unscrupulous individuals to tinker with the past, even to simply come and see it, don't you suppose that given enough time, eons maybe, that somebody would successfully commandeer a machine and zing back into the past? And that then in the ensuing gazillion years after that, then another one or ten or 50,000 trips would eventually be logged? You think that if time-travel becomes a reality, that in the vast limitless future, absolutely NONE of those theoretical time-trips would have been made to any point in time before Saturday May 7, 2005? Ever?

Fine.

Wait till tomorrow night at 10 p.m., which is the time that Amal Dorai has selected as the moment when visitors from the future should come to East Campus Courtyard at M.I.T.

Oh, yes, forgot: latitude and longitude have been provided on the invitations(42:21:36.025 degrees north, 71:05:16.332 degrees west), in case the school doesn't exist in the far-flung future from whence these partiers will arrive.

-----
Remember Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure? The scene where they're being hotly pursued, and they come up with a great idea, goes something like this: "This is important - Tomorrow, we have to remember to come back in time, to here, at 10:00 this morning, and hide a smoke bomb right behind this couch! Hey, look, here's the smoke bomb! Awesome! Dude!"

Well, this party is kinda like that. We can all spend the next 50 years creating lavish invitations and putting them in movies and books and on space-ships and so on, and simply supply the information for the May 7, 2005 MIT bash.

Many of Amal's friends have already been putting invitations on acid free paper and slipping them into obscure library books that may not be opened for decades or centuries. Awesome! Dude!

Funny, I'll have to dredge it up somewhere, but in 1993 or so I read a really cool novel set right here in San Diego (La Jolla actually), about some UCSD physicists in the 1980's who come up with a way to shoot some sort of particle at a time-space location where the earth had been in the 1960's. And they send messages back in morse code and hope that some grad student somewhere picks something up on a machine and recognizes the obviously intelligently arranged pattern in the static as a message. To test their experiment they suggest the recipient of their message put package at the post office in La Jolla to be held for Dr. Suchandsuch to pick up in 1988 or something. Then Dr. Suchandsuch simply drove down to the post office and, DUDE!, there's a package that some 1963 UCSD Intern delivered as instructed.

But back to my thesis. Tomorrow will forever disappoint anyone hoping for such a temporal miracle - err, not that I'm mixing religion and science here. Figure of speech.

And if I can't find that book any time soon, I'll just have to send a coded message back to myself in 1993 so that I will have put it into a lock-box at the bank down the street.

Funny, I don't remember ever getting a message like that.

The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005

"Do You, Jennifer, Take John as Your Husband, and Promise Never To Pull This Shit Again?"

2005-05-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

"The only good news is the authorities didn't start yanking Latinos out of blue vans all over the Southwest."
- Runaway Bride - New York Daily News

So, should she be busted? You tell me. On the one hand what's the use of locking up a harmless though narcissistic jerk?

Or is there maybe a problem with sapping the combined resources of the FBI, Georgia state and county officers and the entire 50-officer Duluth police department for nearly a week?

Just so she could "think", if that's what they call it in Vegas these days?

Now, although on the issue of crime I could usually be accused of leaning in the "Law and Order" direction, I reserve my real angst for murderers, rapists, child molesters, and other violent offenders. Not pot-smokers, jay-walkers, and runaway brides. I really want the prisons available to house the clods who deserve it.

In this case, though, there is still a question of culpability to be answered. Just as the Wendy's Chili Bowl Finger Faker has in effect destroyed a franchise owner and harmed a chain of restaurants in just the latest in a suspicious list of lawsuit incidents, the runaway bride crossed the proverbial line when she called in a blatantly false felony kidnapping.

As her unbelievably understanding fiance points out, it's not against the law to get cold feet. Running off isn't illegal. If she had simply taken a bus back to town and apologized for scaring everyone I wouldn't be writing this post. It happens.

But how many people went without real police attention that week? How much injury or mayhem did people suffer, if any? Could we possibly know?

And I don't know if it was 30 minutes or 2 hours or half a day between her 911 call and her subsequent confession. I don't know if whatever amount of time it was really caused any damage to anyone anywhere. She didn't hang on to that lie for days on end.

But in that time what if there had been a "hot-stop" on a blue van with a hispanic driver because of her hysterical story? What if someone got hurt or killed?

The FBI is just walking away from it. The fiance has forgiven her. The Duluth authorities are still mulling it over.

No harm, no foul?

Good luck with that marriage, though.

Zen and the Art of Art

2005-04-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

Luke spit out one of his typically brilliant music reviews tonight. You know, the kind where I just may be enjoying the review more than I'll even enjoy the art in question.

But the comments section there touched on something near and dear to my heart: What makes art ART.

This is not intended to be a long drawn out thesis so I'll get right to the decidedly plain point. The act of creating art of any kind, be it music, sculpture, cartoons, performance, is an act only completed by the engagement. The viewer, listener, the victim, whomever, actually "engages" with the piece, even if just for an instant, and has a conversation.

That might sound too new-age-like. I'm not talking mind-meld here. I'm saying that the information offered by the piece is never the same for any two viewers, because the information is processed differently in each viewer. The conversation is completed by and within the viewer, and is unique.

I personally dig site-specific monumental sculpture or environmental pieces. It's just my thing, because there is such an immense variety of possible interactions with viewers. Whole corporate plazas are created by artists and architects to create interplay with thousands of individuals, families, groups; most have no idea of the artists' intentions any more acutely than, maybe, that rock over there looks like I want to sit on it, and that purple chain link fence over there changes color when shadows walk by on the other side.

But the issue of "who defines art as art" has always intrigued me. Is such a plaza art? What if photos of it hang in a museum? What if the stones were hand-picked and polished by an established sculptor, yet sit un-named outside the entrance of a bank? What if a porn afficionado grows a huge flowering shrubbery in the shape of a puppy at the front door of the Louvre?

What if a neighborhood guerrila group puts up a red watchtower outside a gated community to highlight their impression that such communities are divisive Gestapo trappings?

What if some guy named Banksy sneaks his own little drawings and paintings into world reknowned art museums and his pieces hang undetected on the walls for days?

Oddly, the actual sinister act itself is performance art at its best. Author, author.

We the real viewers see documentation, photos of people looking at the rogue pieces on the wall of the museum, so now the viewer becomes the viewed and is only interesting in that what they are viewing is unintentionally hosted and framed by an institution that by the fact that you entered its hallowed halls indicates to you that what you are viewing therein is art. Not only does each of the unknowing art subjects affect each of us differently when we see the story, but they too were all each engaged by the piece individually. While one perhaps could tell something was amiss, another may have wondered what would merit the piece hanging there, and a third found it to be the piece sublime.

Excellent.

You know why blogging is so huge? We all want to be artists.

And so, we are.

Mayor Spins Out, Explodes

2005-04-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

Last November - and December - I told you about Our Crazy Mayor's Race.

The "winner" was incumbent Mayor Dick Murphy, who, after half a million votes were counted and re-counted, came out on top of a goofy 3-way race by about 2,000 votes.

The race was goofy because a write-in candidate was allowed to join a Two Candidate Run-Off Election. The result was that the expected clear winner of the campaign, Ron Roberts, somehow ended up 3rd after splitting the vote with the write-in. Amusingly, the write-in all but won except that 5,000 of the voters who wrote her name on the ballot didn't fill in the bubble.

To be fair, Dick Murphy didn't even want the job. Really. He announced a couple of years ago he wouldn't run for re-election. Later he changed his mind. He came in second in the primary, and was bound to lose the run-off to a popular, enthusiastic critic. Then came the sneaky hippie write-in trick and Murphy's hopes for a quiet retirement were dashed.

After protracted and somewhat ridiculous legal maneuvering on all sides, Mayor Murphy fell across the finish line in December and was sworn in to his office, with a smile on his face.

That was stupid of him.

An SEC probe into city finance fraud, a U.S. Attorney and FBI joint investigation into public corruption, repeated city bond-rating downgrades by Wall Street, and a burgeoning recall effort have combined to tear the wheels of Murphy's vehicle. All in just 4 months.

This morning he resigned.

His interim replacement will be Deputy Mayor Michael Zucchet.

In case this fact isn't too exciting to anyone, Zucchet's own trial on Federal Corruption Charges begins next Tuesday.

I am not making this up. See?

Life Without Parole

2005-04-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

A couple months back I replied to a Luke post about the death penalty. I support the death penalty, with it's myriad avenues of appeal and delay, giving every last ridiculous opportunity to question the validity of the original verdict, and the original sentence.

The 20+ years that the doomed man appeals his case and sits in solitary confinement is 20+ years without the perks that he definitely doesn't deserve and which ordinary lifers do get. Books. TV. Sunlight. I guess you could include gang affiliation and rough sex.

Oh, and a decent night's sleep. The great thing about a condemned man's twenty years of appeals is that every sleepless night gets him one day closer to that nagging final beyond that sits smiling right down the hall. What a monkey to have in your cot with you.

But secondly, more importantly, I threw in a practical concern that I don't think enough people appreciate: Bargaining power.

Seriously, say what you will about the death penalty not being a deterrent to capital crime. Honestly, I can understand that taking upwards of 25 years to actually execute a death row inmate, isn't scaring anyone straight on the outside. Fair enough. "BUT," I said:

If we never in fact execute another death row inmate I still think the death penalty has done its job. How so, you ask?

I'll answer with a question: Under what other circumstances could you ever see a convicted criminal BEGGING AND PLEADING for Life in Prison with No Parole?

Well, time's up. None. I'm perfectly thrilled to live in a state where the heinous special-circumstances worst of the worst scum, have to actually HOPE for Life without Parole (LWOP) instead of the alternative.

And, if we didn't have this system in California where LWOP is a BEST ALTERNATIVE for a Special Circumstances defendant we wouldn't have nearly the number of guilty pleas for capital crime as we do, either.

[Hey - I blockquoted myself! Very very cool.]

Anyway, the Olympic Bomber Jackass is my told-ya-so CASE IN POINT.

If there were no death penalty then he would have no reason to plead guilty - we would be spending the next five freaking years having a trial for this noodlehead that would have allowed him and his ilk to filibuster the process and make statements of their righteousness, all for possibly ending up with a hung jury or lesser charges or, worse, an acquittal.

I always just wonder, if a decade ago, L.A. had announced their intent to rigorously pursue the death penalty in the O.J. trial, you know, for the murders he sloppily committed, would O.J. have simply pled guilty and accepted life without parole?

Actually, I don't wonder at all.

He would have.

I have a gun to my head, and if you don't buy a box of pens from me right now, I'm going to blow my brains all over the ceiling.

2005-04-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

When I worked at a sales office for a promotional products company in the 1980's, I actually heard those words spoken by a fellow colleague in his miserable little cubicle, directly behind my own miserable little cubicle. It was kind of a hoot for the sales room, we chuckling and wondering if someone was really on the other end of the line, Mike stringing the prospect along, presumably to a triumphantly impossible sale, everyone ending their own phone calls to watch this train wreck of a pitch. Thing is, it was funny, at that moment. A little break in the tedium. Comic relief.

But when that call was over - "you just killed me!" - he picked up the phone and slid his ruler down the page to the next line and dialed. He got the owner on the phone, introduced himself, and told him he had a gun to his head blah blah blah.

All day he did this. Eight hours of the same line to gas station owners, chiropractors, real estate agents, and the like. It was his plan. His angle. His new system. Just devised it over lunch. He wasn't trying to be funny. He had just gone insane.

Mike who had a system for winning at craps but never had a buck to play. Mike who had allegedly walked away from a sports talk radio show in Phoenix to be a professional gambler at Del Mar. The surf meets the turf meets Mike.

Mike, 40-something and never not drunk, who later went to jail for forging his own mom's signature on a whole book of checks he stole from her on one of his visits home. Mike holding a loaded gun to his head, and if you don't buy a box of pens from him right now he's going to blow his brains all over the ceiling.

I thought of ol' Mike when I saw THIS GUY'S SITE.

See, now, Mike didn't think about making people care about him first. Mike was not a cute little bunny. That's where he goofed.