Loser's Guide

Literary Investigations

2011-03-11T06:50:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the smash hit film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is actually based on an anonymous Jacobean comedy called “The Goodman Hath By Some Alchymie Diminish'd His Childer”??

Defensible Value Proposition

2011-02-23T12:27:00.000-08:00

I'm going ahead with the secret bombing of Chaos
A masterstroke if I do say so
I hope no one finds out.

WikiLeaks Threatens Legal Action

2011-02-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

In the Guardian today ... :

Wikileaks is threatening to take legal action against a former employee whose book chronicling his time with the organisation characterises its founder, Julian Assange, as obsessed by power and money and with a fondness for young women.

“[O]bsessed by power and money and with a fondness for young women”??? Holy shit man, this will not stand.

Looking Around

2011-01-25T12:41:00.001-08:00

We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found.
But we would like to have a chat with you about why you requested that page.
What did you think you would find there?
Are you not satisfied with the normal, mainstream news that you can access?
Do you think you are special? Is that it?
Who told you about that page?
Where did you hear about it?
Who else knows about it?
Have you told anyone else?
If yes, who?
Type their name(s) here:_______________

Dream/TV

2011-01-20T08:42:00.000-08:00

In my dream I am watching TV, which is showing a poorly-produced knock-off of one of my earlier, better dreams.

Moment of Self-Examination

2011-01-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

Imagine finding yourself burning in Hell for all eternity.

Would you not be baffled?

“What's the meaning of this?” you will probably ask. “It seems less than fair.”

More Wikileaks

2011-01-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

Somebody you don't want to mess with, if you value your safety and sanity—Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (via Eschaton).

Bastards just never let go.

Terrorists, Again

2011-01-17T07:53:00.000-08:00

This is quite interesting: A Canadian writer on terrorism has been named by a news service as a terrorist-in-training. If you read the story, it's not an innocent mistake: it seems to be part of a deliberate piece of nonsense. See Terroristes parmi nous..., via Dr Dawg's Blawg.

And the reason it's important is that a whole list of newspapers went and stupidly copied the story. You can practically see this rubbish going through the arteries, to the veins, and on into the multitudinous capillaries...and then you wonder why people have stubborn, stupid beliefs.

Synopsis

2011-01-16T20:09:00.000-08:00

Frédéric returns to his village after a long absence.

The arrival of a new saucier changes everything.

After joining forces to defeat Gevicius, Pepi and Bosanquet learn that they're not so different after all!

Back to My Book

2010-12-29T16:12:00.000-08:00

Sitting there in the restaurant, watching my wife give a blowjob to a total stranger—a total stranger to me, at any rate; I suppose to her he would have ceased to be a total stranger somewhere around minute three of this blowjob—and catching myself drifting, I make an effort to concentrate on my book. Or rather, between the second and third lines of the fourth chapter, I think, Should I be paying quite so much attention to this book and neglecting the meal I am eating? Do I even know what I'm eating? Fries, of course. I have eaten the battered fish blobs. These fries are salty and crisp, and almost cause me to lose my place in my book, but not quite: the book is nearly enough to occupy me, because here, at the beginning of chapter four, the main character has decided to snap into action and make some changes in her life. Her husband is in Belgium, so she has contacted a real estate agency to sell their apartment, and now she is starting to pack her things. But first, she needs to get something to eat. Some fries, maybe?

Brains of Baader-Meinhof

2010-12-28T13:31:00.000-08:00

... the German government had the brains of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe removed for study ...
The brains of all but Meinhof have apparently been lost and cannot be accounted for by German authorities.[13]
— Wikipedia, “Andreas Baader”

U-2

2010-12-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the U-2 (the aircraft and its implementation, not that bunch of rich garden gnomes) was developed in part to allay people's anxiety about intercontinental weaponry?

And it ought to have worked, except people were determined to get anxious about it no matter what happened.
— Fundamentals of the Basics, 33rd ed., 33.

ALL HANDS JOINED IN A LUSTY CHEER

2010-12-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

Here are the captions to a bunch of illustrations in some adventure book:

DESMOND FIRED RIGHT INTO THEIR MIDST
THE NEXT INSTANT WE CAUGHT SIGHT OF THE SAVAGE-LOOKING HEAD OF ONE OF THE MONSTERS
“IF YOU SHOUT, I WILL PUT A BULLET THROUGH YOUR HEAD”
WHEN I RECOVERED, I FOUND MYSELF LYING ON THE DECK
“BOB ELLIOT LIGHT 'UM PIPE HERE,” SAID DOOLIBUT
ALL HANDS JOINED IN A LUSTY CHEER
SOME, ON THEIR KNEES, WERE PRAYING
THE CONVICT ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE
A SAVAGE HELD HER BY HER LONG HAIR, WITH HIS SWORD LIFTED ABOVE HER HEAD

People certainly knew how to entertain themselves back then.

A Bit of Optimism

2010-12-20T20:41:00.000-08:00

Some people worry about Christmas getting less religious than it ought to be. It's really controversial. They worry that there's not enough Jesus. That Jesus died for our sins, and we might be at Peak Suffering right now.

But I wouldn't worry about that.

There will always be plenty of suffering to go around.

And I doubt that Jesus will ever get tired of dying for our sins.

Alibis

2010-12-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

Just to make assurances doubly sure, he gave us a brief tour of his house at 4 Hawmatawk Crescent. A fine house. Typical for a career officer of his age, aside from the, what is it, sort of dungeon thing in the basement.

He also showed us a movie of him asleep at the time of the murder. There was a time stamp and everything. There you are. 4:30 am, the time of the murder, and there he is, coughing and going back to sleep.

“I remember thinking, as I lay there asleep, what if there was a murder going on somewhere? And here I am, safely far away, sleeping the sleep of an innocent man with a solid, solid alibi.”

Elsewhere...

2010-12-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

He appears to be opening his mouth, and just a reminder, we can't hear what's going on in the cockpit, but I assume he's screaming or perhaps shouting something. It would be interesting to know what that is—what, if anything, he's screaming, or if it's just an emotional reaction of some kind. It could be fear, or pain, or—anger, I suppose. Or all three.

Just a reminder to viewers, those flames are getting closer. The lower part of the module is in fact engulfed in flames, on fire. So I would say it's pretty hot inside there. That's why he's getting some discomfort.

Photography

2010-12-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

“How come — what are all these photographs of dog shit? Kenny? Can anyone — ”

Kenny said:

“I don't know. You sent me out there with a camera, an expensive one, and you said, you know — ”

Everyone thought about what had been said. Everyone was, quite apparently, tryng to remember what, if anything, had happened at the indicated time. Everyone wanted to exchange glances. But no one did.

“What did I say?”

What did he say? Who knows? Long time ago. A week, at least.

“I've forgotten.”

“I don't think I said, ‘Take pictures of dog shit’. Did I? That's not something I would say.”

Embarrassed by Own Naiveté

2010-12-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

ACS:Law, the controversial London-based solicitors' firm involved in making copyright claims, keeps about 40% of the payments made by alleged filesharers, while rights holders receive between 20% and 30%, research by the Guardian has revealed.

For a typical letter demanding £300 as settlement for the allegation of filesharing, the record company would get between £60 and £90, while ACS:Law would retain £120. The rest would go to pay the companies which find the alleged filesharers, and to pay internet service providers to hand over data.

[More...]

So there you have it. That's actually the real deal, the reason why this is an issue: someone stands to make money from it; more money than the original thing is actually worth. It's “magic money”, the best kind.

Or did you believe all that guff about protecting artists and thinkers and so on? I did, for a while. I seriously thought that senior law partners in big firms and various business heads were lying awake at night and fretting about hard-working bands and musicians who were having trouble paying their bills. And they thought to themselves, “It's just not fair. We're honest in all our dealings with people. Why shouldn't people in basements downloading stuff also be honest? We need to step in and help.” Something like that. But I was wrong.

Improvements

2010-12-13T08:05:00.000-08:00

Anyway, we did this operation on his brain, just like we did with the mouse—interestingly, a man's brain resembles a mouse's in every particular. It's just quite a bit bigger. So—

—And then what?

—And then we ran him through these mazes, just like the mouse. And boy, was he good at it!

—A success!

—You could say that. You should see him go through that maze! Still dumb as a post, mind you, but put him in front of a maze and ... stand back.

News

2010-10-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

French rogue trader Kerviel jailed, fined billions...

Link.

Societe Generale's lawyer Jean Veil called the sentence a "moral compensation" for its employees and shareholders.

Metzner had called for Kerviel to be acquitted of all charges except the false computer logs, blaming the bank for the 2008 scandal that almost destroyed it and claiming that the trader's bosses knew what he was up to.

But presiding judge Dominique Pauthe told the court that defence evidence heard in the trial in June "does not allow us to deduce that Societe Generale was aware of Jerome Kerviel's fraudulent activities".

He "exceeded his mandate by taking speculative positions without the knowledge of the bank, on a gigantic scale," Pauthe added, saying Kerviel had acted calmly and cynically.

Veil told reporters: "It has been very clearly shown that Jerome Kerviel's behaviour, his lies, were so sophisticated that the bank could not suspect what he was doing."

I guess that's the part that is most troubling. The last part. Everyone knows banks—particularly the huge ones—are terribly naive and susceptible to fast-talking jaspers. Banks often have a—I don't know if you've noticed it, but I have, many times—a certain trusting, unspoiled quality about them. They're simple, good folk. That's why people like to do business with them.

How could you lie to a bank, anyway???! It's like lying to a small child who trusts you implicitly and believes all your stories about lion-hunting in Africa.

It's disgraceful.

A Drunken Man Wirtes Huikaiu

2010-07-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

I am old

I drink a single bottle of tequiola

and call it a night

A Bit about That

2010-06-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

Eschaton's “Wanker of the Day” is sort of startling, I would think, in that the piece by Joel Stein appeared in Time Magazine, rather than in some college paper or something.

On Wikipedia:

Stein taught a class on humor writing at Princeton before moving to Los Angeles in early 2005 to write for the Los Angeles Times.

.H'm.

Let's Get This Straight

2010-06-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

“I promise by all that's holy that I will never, ever steal your lunch money, unless I really need to.”

How Do You Fix a Clusterfuck?

2010-06-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

Well, I think you can just manage your way out.

Here's what Thomas E. Ricks, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of “The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq” has to say:

Mr. Obama should then replace them [i.e., Ambassador Eikenberry and the special envoy, Richard Holbrooke] with a team that has a single person clearly in control, with the power to hire and fire the others. And he should send that new group to Kabul with clear orders that they should get along, or expect to be relieved.

See? Just get it done, dammit!

Hm?

2010-06-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

It's funny, police in this country regularly light up somebody with 50,000 volts for no good reason, but they're easily frightened. Look at them cross-eyed and you can get charged with “intimidation of justice system participant by watch and beset”. Just watching them gets them all antsy, of course, but besetting them—that's pretty serious.

“Are you besetting me, sir?”

“Uh, no, I was just—”

“Sir? I'm gonna have to ask you to stop besetting me.”

Jesus of Québec

2010-03-08T17:15:00.000-08:00

Interesting, from Le Devoir:

Publiés dans Présence magazine de mars-avril, les résultats d'un sondage fait en janvier les amènent à penser que «Jésus semble toujours bien ancré dans le psychisme des Québécois». Des 950 répondants, en effet, 76 % affirment «bien» ou «assez bien» connaître Jésus et 52 % sont désireux d'en apprendre davantage sur lui. Plus de la moitié se disent «impressionnés» par Jésus et près du tiers le qualifient de «modèle de vie». Seulement 23 % y voient un «personnage inventé». Même pour les athées, les agnostiques ou les gens sans religion, sa figure serait «incontournable».

Inland Empire

2010-03-07T07:08:00.000-08:00

I watched Inland Empire (2006) the other day. Luckily, I had some help from IMDb FAQ, which contains “major spoilers”. I don't really think anything can spoil this movie. You're probably best off knowing as much as possible going in. You'd probably want to acquaint yourself with the Cliff's Notes too. In fact, it's one of those movies that will be “spoiled” if you haven't spent a few weeks preparing for it ahead of time.

I think it's Lynch's 8 1/2, except it's “4 7” (the name of the original, uncompleted movie that the movie within the movie is meant to be a remake of), because Lynch has made four or seven movies so far. Or four movies that people can understand, or seven if you include things like “Rabbits”.

It's interesting and extremely fast-paced if you assume that it could be an attempt to treat memories, fantasies, information and experience as one thing. For example, you could say that a person's identity is composed exclusively of what they remember. As an individual, you are the person who remembers a certain set of events. But how you remember them is also significant: why do you remember things? How do you reconcile unavoidable fantasies (imagined theories of what might happen, without which a human would be no different from a rabbit) with very imperfect memories and largely incomprehensible, chaotic information about reality?

I thought it was interesting that the movie opens with a scratchy 78 droning on about something called “Axxon n”, apparently a long-running Baltic radio drama. That's how we learn about reality. Noisy old recordings of unknown people talking about the long-running Baltic radio drama which is out there.

Lyrics

2010-03-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

Bob Dylan's lyrics are really great.

Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killing done?” God says, “Out on Highway 61”.

But you can't go around muttering them aloud (tunelessly, unaccompanied) without people thinking you're nuts, in the supermarket or wherever.

Look out kid it's something you did, / God knows when but you're doing it again

They all sound kind of angry, and angry muttering just alarms people.

For that matter, happy muttering is no better. Try it. See what happens.

But it's okay to talk out loud if you're on your cellphone, because presumably there's someone else at the other end. People are standing at the check-out line, shepherding their purchases through, and suddenly they get an important call. It's always the same: “Where are you now?” “I'm in the grocery store,” they answer, “I'm just leaving.” Almost as if they're justifying themselves to an unseen accuser. But that's normal.

Tempo Giusto

2010-03-05T13:27:00.000-08:00

You could say that music was written to be heard. Obviously! Only a fool would maintain otherwise.

But was it written to be played, necessarily?

How to Sleep

2010-03-02T18:54:00.000-08:00

I used to hope that sleeping would get me somewhere. For a while, I ended the day thinking: All right. That didn't go so well. Sleep, then try again. And I would lie there angrily expecting new ideas, and a fresh roll of the dice the next day. And then I stopped doing that. Instead, I looked at sleep as a barrier, though not a huge one, to the thing I was trying to do. I took to waiting it out. While sleeping, I imagined myself awake, unusually alert, ready to jump at the enemy as soon as he was in view. I saw myself laughing quietly, suspended in the dark, not really in the bed, but hovering in the shadows above it. Failing to notice people coming into the room was part of my cover.

But now I have to be even more cautious. More alert. More awake. More profoundly asleep.

Garbage

2010-02-28T11:28:00.000-08:00

When I got home today, I noticed that the neighbours had put out incorrect gabage. It had been rightfully ignored by the garbage collectors, since today was recyclables day, and they had put out plain garbage. Their hideous, hideous garbage remained uncollected in a number of bags at the curb, a civic rebuke of the most obvious kind.

I felt kind of bad for them, and wondered if I should maybe offer my support.

A card, maybe?

Or perhaps best to say nothing, as I don't know them that well. But that always seems a little cowardly.

A Rather Tense Conversation

2010-02-27T19:51:00.000-08:00

In the café I happened to be standing in the queue near a table occupied by a bearded man in a suit and a rather small, rustic individual who appeared to be a leipreachán or something.

—That's quite a story, said the man in the suit, I can only imagine your discomfort.

—It certainly was very embarrassing, and it's not the first time it's happened! Or the last! Hee hee hee! (We was drinkin, you know.)

—Yes indeed. Well. And so, we're here to talk about these wishes, in fact.

—Ah yes. Now that would be—

—Which, my client instructs me, you have undertaken to grant. I am further advised that there are three of them, and they are, as yet, unspecified. Is that your understanding? Good. So, my client will be seeking three payments of ten billion dollars each, which, we are prepared to argue, comes well within the terms that define a “wish”, and—I think you'll find in this letter, if I can just find it for you here—ah, here it is. A draft. You'll want to go over this carefully—a reasonable schedule for these payments. Now, of course, the only real issue is the disbursement of these moneys, over a period of time that would be agreeable to everyone, I think. We would be looking for...

That was one disgruntled-looking elf. Leipreachán. Fairy. Whatever.

A New Joke

2010-02-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

In the café today, I saw that someone was telling a new joke.

There was an appalled silence. One woman seemed torn between wanting to get up and leave or burst into tears. The man sitting next to the speaker didn't know where to look, and very much wanted to keep the company in one piece, but had no idea what palliative thing to say. He permitted himself a frozen grin, clearly not to be taken as a result of the joke, but a sociable reflex. I could see that he knew how to deal with tragedy, always providing just the right phrase, the confident manner, but here he was at a loss. And no wonder. It fell to some less central figure to break the spell by comparing lattes: are the ones at Dino's better?

And I thought: Don't worry—years from now, after we're all dead, people will laugh at your joke, uproariously.

Meetings 2.0

2010-02-24T20:52:00.000-08:00

It seems only yesterday people were saying “granular” and “drill down” and “accessing resource tools”—shopworn buzzwords, that now have all the buzz of a drowsy winter fly horribly marooned in an attic window. What's happening to us?

All Night Drug Store

2010-02-23T20:36:00.000-08:00

Ages ago there used to be a whole campaign for some toothpaste which included a line like “Four out of five dentists recommend Crest as part of a regular course of dental hygiene”. What happened to the fifth dentist? Was he being held incommunicado? Or had he gone underground? Pariah or hero?

I thought I saw him once, on the highway, screaming at motorists. “You fools! Don't use Crest! I don't recommend it!” And people just zoomed by, laughing with their unnaturally brilliant teeth.

Anyway, he's out there. I even heard there was a secret network of them, men and women who couldn't be bought, and just refused to recommend some product. Some brusquely, without a moment's doubt; others agonising over the decision for weeks, thinking of the unfair burden their private Calvary would bring to their family and friends.

But they knew there was a price to pay. And they knew there was no going back.

After a Meeting

2010-02-23T18:07:00.000-08:00

Well, the ball is in our court. Very much so. We just need to find the court. Oh, here it is...ah, “Members Only”.

Our Friend Tiger

2010-02-22T19:13:00.000-08:00

It's odd how many novels are about adultery. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, everything by John Updike, etc. Even novels that aren't about adultery often include some adultery as a device. But I don't think I know any adulterers. People get divorced or break up so easily now.

—What time it it?

—Divorce time!!

—Uh, I'm just gonna get a coffee first.

—Okay, eleven-thirty, then. Please leave your key at the desk.

It's also odd that people care about Tiger Woods' domestic arrangements, even people who never play golf. I think it has something to do with his fame, maybe. Supposing somebody said, “That guy who plays the concertina outside the Superstore is having some kinda marital problem, I fear”, nobody would care, not even people who know who he is. But if millions of other people knew who he was—if he had been on TV or in magazines—then it would be interesting, because he becomes a kind of currency. Famous people belong to us in a way that our closest friends don't, so it's kind of heart-warming, I guess.

Or

2010-02-19T20:05:00.000-08:00

—Who said, “I'm saying nothing and I'm saying it”?

—John Cage?

—No. Yes. No.

Man on Wire

2010-02-19T04:20:00.000-08:00

Just like Philipe Petit, when the twin towers were being built, I thought it would be marvelous to walk between them on a wire. It would be a perfect baroud. Yes, you heard right—a baroud.

Not me, though. Far too busy. But someone else, I thought, oughta get up there. Make it happen!

Abnormal Psychology

2010-02-18T09:17:00.000-08:00

A tall young woman unloads parts of her knapsack at a table nearby as she prepares to settle. A binder, some pens, and Abnormal Psychology, 6th ed., which probably retails for around USD 399.99. Abnormal psychology = babe magnet.

I straighten my tie, shoot my cuffs, clear my throat, temporarily overcome several facial tics...Why, excuse me, Miss. I couldn't help noticing...

Accidents

2010-02-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

Somebody shot somebody else by accident. However, the police got all nosy...

—We heard you two were having an argument, some time just prior to the accident.

—Oh yeah. Boy, we have these ding-dongs sometimes, you know? And after, you're all, ‘I don't even know what we're arguing about’, kind of thing. But that was before the accident.

—So, just to clear this up once and for all, to sort of get it out of the way and out of our inbox, so we can continue with our enquiries—and who knows where they may take us? Perhaps nowhere—you had the argument. And then you shot him.

—By accident.

—By accident, yes.

—Yes, we had the argument. And then, there was this accident.

—So, you could say, the argument was pretty much concluded when you shot him?

—Yes, that's a good way of putting it. It had come to an end. Then the shooting. Which was totally irrelevant. Just out of the blue.

—You had run out of argumentative sallies by that time? The matter was exhausted?

—Yeah, I think we both left it there. We'd both said pretty much everything. You know, there's a point where you're kind of, you know, whatever.

—Yeah.

“The matter was exhausted?” “Yes...”

—You know, and it's—we've been through all this before, nobody's going to come up with some new thing. You're not going to suddenly convince the other person that you're right and they're wrong. Especially about something you've been arguing about for years. You just see things differently. Neither person is listening, really. They're just sort of revisiting things in their own head. I think it's usually some other, hidden thing that's the problem. You know, they seem pissed off about you or what's been going on, but actually it's like a thing. An ongoing thing they have with something or someone else. It's the situation that's—

—that's the real problem, yes.

—And that's why you can't really resolve it.

—Exactly. Exactly. Well, sorry to take up so much of your time. I guess we'll just file this under ‘U’ for The Unexplained.

Work

2010-02-15T05:29:00.000-08:00

—We'll just push a button, and the work will be done for us!

—And you'll be drawing a salary for what, exactly?

—Oh, for keeping a watch over the process. Supervisory capacity.

—I hardly think they're going to want to pay you to watch the work getting done.

—Don't say—

—Well, okay, I won't say it. It'll be our little secret, then.

—Beat.

Why do you keep saying “beat”?

—It's in the script. Haven't you read it? Beat.

—No, that must be an earlier version you have. We've syncopated it. All that “beat”, “beat”. You should download the new version.

—H'm.

—It's a PDF file.

—What format is it in? Word?

—Bacon sandwich.

—You know what I'd like right now? Oh, right. I guess you're right.

Records Management

2010-02-14T20:39:00.000-08:00

The dreamer writes down his dreams in the morning, if he remembers them. It horrifies him to think that there have been dreams he cannot remember, almost as much as it unnerves anyone to conclude that recent parts of their waking life have gone unrecorded, as though unobserved and unreal.

He has already completed one book about his dreams, a loose-leaf binder holding a year's worth of them, carefully noted down on lined paper. Now he has dreamt about that binder and begins to formulate today's entry. He can describe the binder even to its troubling bottom ring and faded endpapers—and suddenly recalls that he has already done so in still another binder, containing his observations and descriptions of things like tattered binders.

But where is that binder?

An Ad

2010-02-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

“Ask your doctor about cognac.”

I saw this ad in some paper:

Comment utiliser la puissance de la prière à des fins médicinales 4,99 $

That's just a bit confusing. You so often see ads for medicines that this almost sneaks into that category. It's odd because although products like abilify and so on have verifiable, chemical effects, they appear to be marketed rather like charms and philtres. Actual, useful drugs don't get that treatment. There aren't ads saying, “Ask your dentist about novocaine”. Doctors generally know what they're doing, in their rough, unschooled way, and it probably doesn't pay to get all up in their grill about what they think they're up to. That would be where the prayer comes in.

The illustration at right is from Louis Malle's Le feu follet (1963). A portion on Youtube can be seen here.

Overheard

2010-02-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

Something that's been bothering me for years, because it's in bad taste. But everyone used to wear a hat. Then JFK made public appearances with no hat on. It was cool, neat, casual. Men quit wearing hats en masse, guys in ads wore no hats, sporting short yet boyishly rumpled hair. Hats were for old guys like Ike and Dick and Nikita and Ward Cleaver.

And then the thing happened. He was riding along in Dallas with no hat on. And he got shot in the head.

What if he had been wearing a hat?

A gust of wind, he dips his head and reaches up to secure his hat.

What if there had been a pothole in the road?

Bonk. The passengers lurch forward as bullets pass over them.

—Christ, you need to get these streets fixed!

What if some nut had screamed out, JFK, JFK, you bastard!

JFK twists his head around to get a look at the guy. Who's that?

—Ah, some nut. Don't worry.

But the streets were smooth and the crowds adoring.

News—Well, Not Really

2010-02-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

In an extremely interesting (and cheerless) post, Dred Tory makes a reference to this bit of news:

“There seems to be an emerging consensus that when all is said and done, the Afghan jihadist movement—in one form or another—will be part of the government in Kabul,” U.S. think tank Stratfor said.

Overheard (Almost)

2010-02-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

That's ten minutes of my life, my life-span, that you've consumed. Thoughtlessly. You are like a corporation laying waste to dreaming hills to get one lousy mineral.

—Did you know there's bauxite somewhere underneath all this?

—Trash the fucker!

Yes, a corporation. Except your shares are worthless. Your IPO went nowhere. The Dow laughs at you.

Invitation

2010-02-08T04:12:00.000-08:00

Bertrand had been working for several months as his country's trade representative on the island. One morning he received, in the mail, a hastily-printed notification from the General.

General Sweet Daddy invites you to a pancake breakfast at the Palace...Driftwood Lounge, rue 19 Novembre ... Monday 12.V.10 07:00 hrs

It's usually “cordially invites”. That's the formula. But General Sweet Daddy doesn't do that. General Sweet Daddy speaks and writes plainly. The General tells you a thing, or asks you; his verbs need no modification.

Thumbs Down on Momentum

2010-02-07T06:22:00.000-08:00

It's a Latin word that has been trying to sneak into the French language. The Banque de Dépannage Linguistique offers several possible alternatives: élan, impulsion, lancée, force, essor, allure, vitesse (de croisière), rythme, dynamisme, vigueur, énergie, conjoncture (favorable) ou conditions (favorables), and some examples here.

I can see a counter-argument: someone might say that the whole point of the word is that it can be used to mean so many slightly different things. I can see “momentum” acquiring a great many new meanings (maybe even “a whole host” of meanings).

Or it might lose its elan soon.

But in general, well done, BDL.

What I'm Doing

2010-02-06T15:27:00.001-08:00

I've no idea what she does, or how much money she must make. I've asked, she explained.

— Ah, so they pay you once a twelvemonth in charcoal briquets. How — unusual!

Something to do with some business or other, helping something realize itself. It's sort of like a magic trick.

It's a lot like my job, I think. I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm doing something. And I'm the person that does that. People come to me and wait for something to get done, and it seems to get done. Things get done all day, and I'm doing them. Every so often I make a mistake, which then has to be fixed. An extra thing for me to do, or to get done.

I've met the people at her job. This one, that one, the woman who causes trouble.

Ah! The woman who...

That's right. Has a problem with...

...people doing things wrongly. Going to the bathroom, going to cofee-break, using the photocopier, declining to sign a petition proscribing incorrect photocopier use. Why didn't I think of that?

Vocations

2010-02-06T07:21:00.001-08:00

It must be a lot of work being a pitbull. I don't think you could pay me enough. Growling all day.

Copying Stuff

2010-02-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

Yeah yeah yeah. I know this isn't the right way to look at it, and is, in fact, very irresponsible and just not helpful. But whenever people talk about unauthorized copying of texts or music (known as piracy), invariably the expression “intellectual property” is used, and it makes me think about the unconscionable plunder going on. Somebody's I-pod, for example. Imagine archeologists of the future digging up an I-pod, dusting it off, and looking at each other with wild surmise. “Look at all the songs in here. This will tell us everything we need to know about the culture of the Ancient Americas. Listen to this, listen!”

...dzkkk...Forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room, you can bring your girlfriends and meet me at the hotel room....

“Incredible. But I wonder how it got here, in this treasure chest.”

“Oh, probably some pirate. The waters around here used to be lousy with them. They would get letters of marque, and then cruise the seas looking for rich intellectual booty such as this.”

You can read about ACTA onWikipedia. And then you'll probably want to check one of the sources there, for example, Wikileaks. But what do you find? The link doesn't work, because Wikileaks is suspending operations for a bit. That's normal, though.

Here's link to Free Software Foundation that hasn't been scrubbed yet.

Dialogue

2010-02-04T20:54:00.001-08:00

A. : Well...that was kind of difficult...
B. : Whatever you do, just don't invite the Antichrist over again, okay?
A. : I didn't know!
B. : Well, now you do.
A. : I guess--I guess I should've, maybe--
B. : Just don't have the Antichrist over. It's that simple. Don't invite him next time.
A. : Maybe--
B. : No! (Aside) I realise I have done the wrong thing, and it'll be nothing but Antichrist from now on.

The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site

2010-01-20T14:18:00.000-08:00

So I guess it'll be goodbye to the New York Times soon.

The thinking is that money's tight right now, so coporations and large businesses are no longer spending as much on ads, but you know who's loaded? That's right—readers! Let them take up the slack for a bit. It's not like there's any other stuff for them to look at on the internet.

(And where did I learn about this story? Not the New York Times.)

Future Historians

2010-01-05T21:00:00.000-08:00

I am afraid that future historians will be overwhelmed at the amount of garbage we managed to produce, and at what terrible cost, and that will be our lasting achievement as a civlization, far beyond anything else that we can do in the way of thought or feeling—garbage. Incomprehensible, improbable, preposterous mountains of garbage.

Maybe I'm just having a bad day.

Something To Contend With

2010-01-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

Imagine that you were tasked with writing poems for people who hate reading poetry. After the first three seconds, they're all, “Can we get this over with please!? Why's it taking so long? And also, can I get a blow job with this?”

Does that sound far-fetched?

Unfortunately that's how it is.

New Year's

2009-12-31T15:05:00.000-08:00

Did I already talk about this? One thing I need to do is enable comments in some way.

I notice some people are using the Echo product from JS-Kit. It looks like a big piece of meringue.

If you were a well-trained military sniper, and then left the service, probably the RCMP would visit you from time to time after you got out, just to see how you were getting on.

—Le Premier Ministre is going to be visiting here next week, so ...

—Oh, yes, I saw that in the paper. Good for him!

—So ... do you have, like, any plans then? You're gonna be in town, or...?

—Oh, definitely, yes. Where'm I gonna go, with this so-called stress thing?

—That must be hard. Very difficult. But you're, like, okay, right?

—Oh yes. Gosh. This is me being happy.

—That's good. So, we just wanted to see how you were, and everything...

Eventually they would get up to leave and ask, as they head out:

—Sooo, you're basically happy with things? You know—everything's going okay for you? Job, homelife? Relations with the neighbours?

—Oh, yeah.

—Doing good?

—Sure, sure.

—You have everything you want?

—Oh yeah. Wish we'd get some decent weather though!

—Isn't that the truth, ha, ha, ha! Good. Well. You're good for money and everything? ...Don't need, like, a few extra bucks?

Sort of a prophylactic conversation.

New Year

2009-12-31T14:48:00.000-08:00

I thought as it's New Year's Eve I should buy some alcohol so I can wake up with a huge hangover in the new year, just to get things off to a good start in 2010!

But it seems to be sort of cold in my apartment, and I thought: Drunk and frozen is no way to start the new year. And contrary to popular belief, alcohol really lowers bodily temperature somewhat.

But then I thought, oh, it's New Year's! Live a little! So I got a bunch of wine and made a small fire in the trash, which I can probably easily control—right? Just, you know, have to keep an eye on it.

Spoilers for a Film I Haven't Seen

2009-11-10T06:32:00.000-08:00

- Dear, I wanted to talk to you about the strange child we have adopted; perhaps we've made a mistake, and she's actually a demon or, or, or some sort of demented being from another period; a murderous bloodsucker, if you will.

- Oh stop stop, dear. We've been through all this. Take your medication, or it'll get much worse.

- But dear. Strange things keep happening--

- All easily explained by some logic, or by a general feeling of what is “reasonable”. We've been through this before, dear, remember? I don't want to remind you of the last time when you were inexplicably crazy and drugged out, because we've agreed never to talk about that, except in a strangely allusive manner as need arises.

- Yes, I wish you would kind of stop that. It wasn't a big deal, and it's kind of boring when people--

- Dear--let's not talk about your, ah, ah, ah, ah, “crisis” again.

- Fine by me. You make it sound like it was like Nasser closing the Suez Canal or something.

- I'd better set up an appointment with Dr Simulacrum, I see...

- Yes, whatever. The thing is, this adopted kid (albeit an outwardly normal, dwarf-life creature) appears to have been sacrificing small animals and so on and apparently the other kids in the neighbourhood all shit their pants when she looks at them cross-eyed, so, I don't know. Don't you think it might be worth keeping a weather eye open?

- I am concerned about your slow descent into alcoholism and madness. Yes.

- Er, meantime, one of our non-possessed kids has gone missing, and there was a bit of muffled screaming and whimpering a little earlier. I've no idea if those two things are related, obviously. But...

- Oh, he's sure to be in his room, where our children always are, ensconced with teddy bears.

- I looked for him, but he's not there.

- H'mm, this is difficult...I've got an idea: let's for look for him somewhere else!

- Okay! That might work!

- Although I've a feeling the police will eventually pull up in several squad cars to arrest whoever.

- Here's hoping we all survive the final tussle!

- We always do!

spEak You're bRanes Speaks

2009-09-18T08:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've always thought that too: that whole collective noun thing is inexplicably dull. Go to spEak You're bRanes (Need to scroll down a bit):

...collective nouns are a long, pointless list of words you’ll never actually use in a sentence and the most smug, tedious and unfunny substitute for wit and eloquence the English language has to offer. By the way, did you know that the collective noun for people who comment on news sites is a “shitting bumwank” as in “Have you seen the massive shitting bumwank of racists on the Telegraph site today?”.

I have to say I've never heard of “shitting bumwank” though. It sounds serviceable, but perhaps there's also a U.S. English equivalent?

PR

2009-09-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

“These Famous Music Books enjoy an enormous sale in all parts of the British Empire--they are Marvelous Value.”

Honestly, how could you not buy something advertised in this way?

News for Yahoos

2009-09-08T12:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not really interested in politics, just in word use. This thing I found on Yahoo News contains a curious example of poor wordsmanship. In describing responses to the possibility that US president Obama make a short speech to schoolchildren as the year begins, they write:

Some conservative critics feared that the aim of the speech was to recruit US kids to the liberal cause and brainwash them with socialism.

I don't think “critics” is really correct here. They mean something like “loonies” or “bugfuck insane rightwing freaks”.

War on uh, Someplace

2009-07-27T16:35:00.000-07:00

This is one of the things that's kind of funny and kind of sad, from Media Matters, via Eschaton: Fox News graphics department has shaky grasp of Mideast geography. They show a capture of a map used by Fox News to make some wankery point about the Middle East, with Iraq labelled “Egypt”.

That might seem like a small matter ... well, no, not really. I was thinking that I could easily imagine Fox News labelling Australia as “Africa”, or something, because who cares? But basic geography is important.

The truly striking thing here, though, is that Iraq is the country that Fox and many of its consumers have enjoyed seeing bombed and tormented for many years. They sold the war, they got a lot of entertainment out of it. And now they can't find the place on a map.

I don't know. It just seems truly insane, but on an organizational level. The whole network must be as nuts as it nuttiest blowhard.

I suppose soon they'll have “Mordor” on their maps. It won't make any difference.

Authoritarians

2009-07-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

From a free book that you can read online in .pdf, The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer.

But I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do.

It's quite interesting and I do think well worth the twenty or thirty bones that you might pay for it in paperback, but with this curious wrinkle: you can read it for free.

A bit more about Dr Altemeyer at Wikipedia.

Now Playing

2009-07-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

I saw a thing the other day that said that Harry Potter had outgrossed Spiderman. Don't you think it's a bit odd, that adults are lining up to watch movies about magical creatures?

Of course, there can't be anything wrong with it, personal taste and all that. But the culture has changed.

I can remember reading a comic of some kind as a kid—“Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos” or something—and being startled to discover that some of the people writing in to the editor were apparently adults, stationed at Parris Island or wherever. I found it impossible to imagine my parents, for example, being able to read a comic book, let alone comment on one. The whole world of comics was completely closed to them. In a way, I took it to be one of the odd and sad things about being an adult. One of the less-appealing things about growing up. I guess lots of other people agreed.

College Days

2009-07-20T03:53:00.000-07:00

“Money and sex I think we've already dealt with in chapter one as being unattainable by any known means. Now...”

And so began one of my favourite prof's most well-attended lectures on “The History of Trial and Error”.

Reinventing Biography

2009-07-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

Il n'existe pas de relation directe entre “l'homme” et “l'oeuvre”, mais une série de liens complexes et enchevêtrés, un vrai noeud qui les unit d'une étrange façon. Car l'oeuvre invente son auteur au moins autant que l'auteur crée son oeuvre, ce pourquoi j'ai pu parler d'Hergé commme du “fils de Tintin”.

—Benoît Peeters, Ecrire l'image, p. 137.

A Positive Note

2009-07-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

James enters the room to find Jamilah already seated at a table.

Jamilah: I'll bet your ears were burning, I've been saying such good things about you! All the work. Really just a super job.

James: (Sitting down at the table) Oh!

Jamilah: Peter was very impressed. Everyone is.

James: Peter was?

Jamilah: Yes, and everybody.

James: Talking about me?

Jamilah: Just glowing reviews I've been giving you.

James: Oh—good. When I got your note, that you wanted to see me, I thought it was going to be, you know, stuff.

Jamilah: Oh, nothing like that. Not this time.

James: Okay, good, I was worried. A bit like at school, where you'd get this “PLEASE SEE ME” written on your essay when you got it back. If you had written something disagreeable, I guess.

Jamilah: Oh. Did you make a habit of writing disagreeable things at school?

James: No. I meant: if you did.

Jamilah: Why would you write something disagreeable in an essay? To provoke some sort of reaction?

James: The thing is, you probably didn't think it was disagreeable when you wrote it. It was just common sense. And it's hard to imagine anyone getting all nettled and irate, anyone normal. Nothing to be irate about.

Jamilah: Is it fun to see people getting honked off by something you wrote?

James: I don't think anyone was honked off, just a little irate. And no. Why would I, in a million years, want that? It's no fun at all.

Jamilah: So you don't enjoy the reaction that this squib or whatever provoked.

James: There was no “squib”.

Jamilah: Well, broadside, or salvo or whatever.

James: No, I wasn't trying to have a naval engagement. I don't even—you now how it is, you say something or write something that seems normal, just making some kind of point, or not, and there's some thing in there that bothers some one person. That one thing annoys them, and only them, I think.

Jamilah: You're sure it only bothers that one person.

James: Well, no one else is going mental.

Jamilah: —of the few people that read it.

James: But it's hard to imagine, somebody reading it and then going, “Okay, this is really pissing me off. I must get to the bottom of this. I must seek him out and get satisfaction”. I mean, of all the people that might read it.

Jamilah: Well, why is it bothering him, then?

James: Because he's mental? I don't know. I would steer clear of it if I could.

Jamilah: Avoid the issue altogether.

James: I mean, nobody writes or says something and thinks: “I know what I'll do, I'll conceal these hidden terrible insults only really crazy people will detect, and it'll set them off, ha-ha, should be fun”. Why would you do that?

Jamilah: Most people are polite.

James: Yes.

Jamilah: And would probably not say anything. They're forgiving. They may hear something they don't like and let it go. They profoundly disagree, but, you know—“oh well”. They let it go.

James: Oh, you're saying everyone's pissed off, but they're just being nice about it?

Jamilah: Well, they may not even be aware of it. This one person is saying what they're all thinking but too nice to say, or even think, at first.

James: So this very angry, deranged individual would be their spokesman, in other words.

Jamilah: Well, in that spirit.

James: Too nice to think, in other words, they might not have had these thoughts, might have found nothing objectionable, if it weren't for this nut.

Jamilah: But it's still there.

James: No. Because, first of all, there's nothing objectionable. I didn't intend to inflame anyone. Second, the one person, this nut, finds something to whinge about. Next, he inspires others to join him. They were okay with it at first, of course. But he—

Jamilah: I don't think—

James: —he, like an angler at a stream, nets the one truly innocuous thing capable of distortion, skillfully misreads it, and promulgates his own crazy interpretation among the others. And in their naïveté, like seal pups waddling up to the hunter—

Jamilah: I think you're going a bit far.

James: Maybe. But it's the only halfway reasonable explanation.

Jamilah: Anyway. So I was telling Peter about all this. How great it's been going.

James: Peter?

Jamilah: Kind of, building it up, you know.

James: Well, thanks, but you don't really need to do that.

Jamilah: I have to make everything look well, put everything in the right light. For him, I mean. Sort of focus on your success.

James: It's going pretty well. As you said.

Jamilah: Right, I need to focus on that. Kind of bring out the outstanding things, and maybe, put a spotlight on that. Not the other things so much.

James: Oh.

Jamilah: Right. I want to emphasize the good things. Stick to that. So. Can you think of anything?

Lashings of Steak-and-Kidney Pie?

2009-07-03T06:26:00.000-07:00

“We’ve got to become born-again Canadians, I think, and explain to our kids, our families and our neighbours why the Conservatives are the party they can count on to work for them and for their values.”
—From MacLeans's, via Red Tory v.3.0

What's Mike Duffy been born again as? A gnat? A toad? And what's all this “values” stuff? Isn't that some kind of tired retread from rightwing religious fundamenalism?

I think people ought to be allowed to smoke in bars, but never mind about my values, what are Mike Duffy's? Nothing to do with honest journalism or public service, obviously, so what?

At the Gotham City Hotel

2009-07-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

Robin decided to visit Batman in his rooms at the Gotham City Hotel. He found him watching TV and drinking beer.

“Cars for the Summer”, said Batman, mimicking the TV, “exploding with values.” He looked at Robin briefly. “Get you a beer. Oh, that is—d'you want a beer?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Batman went into the kitchenette, opened the fridge, removed two beers and, as an afterthought, grabbed the J&B from the counter and returned.

“Thanks,” said Robin. They swigged away at their beers for a few seconds. Batman noted that he had one open already and quickly drained that. Then he said:

“So, I dunno. You're probably gonna need a little bit of cash. For going out with the girls and so on—”

“Well, not really.”

“Well, there is some money. I can have some put into your account. Soon. Never fear.”

“That's all right,” said Robin. “Everything's fine.”

“I've gotta—oh, my, what I've gotta do! Gotta go there, gotta go here. Talk to people. Get things moving on the old Wayne Industries front. Are you meeting any nice girls?”

“No, sir.”

“What about that—”

“I am thinking about Gotham City U. Maybe going next autumn.”

“Well, kind of—I guess you know—” and here Batman became side-tracked in contemplation, or in consideration of some half-eclipsed memory that demanded his reluctant attention for several seconds. Robin waited. At length Batman said: “Selling the house.”

“What—you mean—”

“Yeah. The house.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Robin went to the bathroom and came back with a tumbler, which he unwrapped and filled with a small quantity of J&B.

“I imagine,” said Robin, “it would be kind of hard to sell with a Batcave underneath it.”

“Batcave! Just pave it over, if I had my way. Of course, you'd know more about that than I. What's he doing in there?”

“I don't know. Just living there, I guess. He has it sealed off, you can't get in.”

“What, heat-vision, melted, fused door thing?”

“Some junk like that. Also he did some super-tidying.”

“Oh, aren't we sensitive to our surroundings! ‘Oh, pooh, what is this? Batman's empties! Feh!’”

Robin smiled. “Something like that.”

“That guy. Y'know, it's funny—just thinking back, here, if you'll indulge me—I thought, when I met the guy—you know, Superman! Compared to me, he had undeniable, ah—”

“Yeah, well, he's got powers and stuff, but—”

“No, no, to be fair, now, Dick: it's not just that, there's a certain, ah, ethical, if you will, envelope that goes with that. He does—or did—live up to it.”

“Bruce—”

“No, no, in no way can I reproach him, for all the grief he's caused—and not just to me—he remains a, ah—remains—certainly, y'know—”

“He's a mealy-mouthed hypocrite, Bruce. Come on.”

“That's a fairly large thing to say, Dick.”

Batman remarked, with some alarm, that Robin had turned his face away, probably to conceal his tears, and said:

“Well, for Goodness' sake, there's no reason to get upset, Robin. Really.”

“I'm sorry, it's just—just—”

“Well, buck up, is all I can say, old fellow. Good Heavens, you'd think someone had died!” After a moment, he added, “You remind me so much of your mother, sometimes. No, we'll be okay. A little setback, that's all. Nothing to worry about.”

When the crisis was averted, Batman said:

“Here, I've an idea: let's listen to Hank Williams.”

“You have your LPs?”

“I do indeed.” Batman knocked back the J&B, poured himself another, and then got up, making his way to the stereo and singing, very much in his own manner: “Cow's gone dry, and them hens won't lay...” He turned to Robin and continued, brightly, pedagogically, “...but we're still a-livin', so ever'thin's oookay!” He then attended to his stack of LPs, humming as he sorted through the Frank Sinatras and Tony Bennetts. Robin stood up and wandered over to the window.

Down below he could see Central Avenue, still very busy with taxicabs and limos, dropping off people or picking them up. He heard Batman fumbling with the stereo behind him and smiled, and said to himself:

“Superman, you cocksucking son of whore. You'll learn to curse the cunt that shat you out before I'm done with you, you miserable fuck.”

Limbaugh: Grace of a Jungle Cat

2009-07-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

I used to read James Bowman's movie reviews with some interest, until I realised that he seemed to suffer from a sort of indefinable neurosis. Almost every review, no matter what the subject, excruciatingly turned on some rusty blowhard's axis about patriotism or good manners or some damn thing. American Beauty, American Psycho (“Of course the media and the critics in general just love this stuff because it plugs into their two favorite pastimes: feeling superior to Republicans and feeling miserable and alienated about the state of the nation. It is all a pose, of course, but then Ellis's book and Ms Harron's movie are poses too.”), Angela's Ashes (“As a result, there is too much of the besetting sin of Hollywood, which is an appeal to self-congratulation.”), all found to be unmanly and therefore inimical and possibly harmful.

I wondered, how does a normal person get this way? Did something happen to him? A disappointment? A bitterness? Some rancune?

I don't know. But here he is, back in 1993, writing a puff piece about Rush Limbaugh in National Review:

Yes, but . . . Is Limbaugh really an homme serieux, a man with the gravitas to be a - let alone the - republican leader? [“]A lot of very wealthy Republicans consider themselves sophisticated beyond the Limbaugh types,” Bennett goes on. “They miss the point. Rush is extremely sophisticated, extremely smart. The great thing is that, never having been through a university, he is not complicated with pedanticism. He's very serious intellectually. He knows how to frame an issue, how to debate an issue, how to argue ad finem and ad absurdum. He does both. But he is larger than a leader of the political opposition. He represents a shift in the culture. Another ten years of the political change he stands for will take us beyond Republicans and Democrats.” ...

Famous for being fat, he comes across in person rather as an imposing presence: big, but with the grace of a jungle cat - a quality that goes with his yellow-green, cat-like eyes.

He goes on in this vein, practically swooning as he bathes in Limbaugh's cigar smoke, excited, truly enthusiastic.

I become sad thinking of the many assholes in this world.

Police

2009-06-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

The Insane Detective pursuing nonexistant clues.

But he's almost right.

He passes by the scene of another crime, dimly aware of it, curious, even—other detective are already gathering there, greeting each other, slapping each other on the back. He is tempted to join them. How easy that would be! But his crime scene is elsewhere. No, everywhere. There are no borders to the crime scene. The crime is undetermined, and a man is being sought.

Unfunny Joke Week!

2009-06-29T15:24:00.000-07:00

After I heard that Michael Jackson had died, I started to have the odd feeling that we, the general public—the witless, idle, starved-for-entertainment, imperious gabies that we are—had somehow killed him. He was like some sort of demented creature that everyone laughed at and encouraged, from his youth on, and look what he turned into: a monster whose survival depended on mass attention, and, therefore, on ever more outrageous behaviour. How did that happen?

You see all these cute kids on TV, in movies, whereever. In many cases, their greatest performance were beaten out of them.

Hysterical Realism

2009-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Something I was looking for...

Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

—James Wood in The Guardian a while back.

Quotations

2009-06-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Well, you know, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. It's almost impossible to say that without seeming like a tedious prat.

And Then—

2009-06-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

I was in the music shop the other day—not the one that just closed, but the one that is still open and sells only DVDs and CDs and other audio digitalia.

And I asked, “Can anyone recommend some good aleatory music? Or should I just feel my way around?”

A Handy Trick

2009-06-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

I was wondering how you could slide div boxes or expand them. If you look for information about that, you can find all sorts of javascript libraries to download and then lots of stuff that doesn't work so well. Obviously you should be able to do the following with just a few lines of code: Open (or move) a box; close it (or move it back); have one button that does both things; and be able to have as many instances on the page as you like, in other words: re-use the same code. That proved to be the tricky bit. Also you want to do it gradually, because it looks better.

After some experiments I figured out how to do it and, as they say, it's really quite simple:

Toggle

Of course, this is just a simple example. You could change it around so it grows vertically, or use the same principle to have boxes containing some feature slide onto the page from offscreen, and so on.

This box is 80px wide and expands to 250px. You can, of course, change all that, bearing in mind that the sizes have to be the same in the three parts of the code. You could leave the ids as is, since each box will have its own, and the toggle function is called using that particular id. For example, the div might be <div id="blob" style="...">, and the call will be <a="#" onclick="toggleExpand('blob');return false">. You can also change several things each time. For example, in function expandIt after slidingDiv.style.width...; you can add, on a new line, slidingDiv.style.height...;, or (if you have positioned the box) ...top..., etc., then reverse it in function unexpandIt.

In the Journals

2009-06-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

An extremely interesting thing in this week's TLS: “Money makes the (Greek) world go round”...

An entirely new feature of money is that its possession renders unnecessary in principle all pre-monetary forms of social relationship: reciprocity, redistribution, kinship, ritual, and so on. Money allows you to fulfil all your needs. It provides the power to increase itself. And it tends to promote predatory isolation. Hence the focus of much Athenian tragedy on the extreme isolation of the individual – from the gods and even (through killing) from his closest kin.

Summer, Grass

2009-06-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

Some people, when the weather gets warm and they walk through parks and verdant areas, will find that their feet are searching for dogshit, although they are unaware of this.

Bringing Duke Ellington Back

2009-06-17T17:31:00.000-07:00

The other day I was in the coffee shop and couldn't help wondering about the music that was being played: apparently it was “Bringing Sexy Back” by somebody called Justin Timberlake. It's not bad. It's catchy. You can listen here. It's actually kind of interesting.

Almost as good as:

From Some Book

2009-06-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

On the filming of Dr Strangelove, Ken Adam, in an interview in Christopher Frayling's Ken Adam and the Art of Production Design, remarks that Peter Sellers had a great deal of difficulty coming up with a characterisation for U.S. President “Merkin Muffley”. Adam claims Sellers felt lost unless he had something to parody, and nothing offered itself.

It's curious, because I have always found it to be one of his subtlest characters: the physical stiffness, the demeanour, and the accent of course. His accent was both catalyst and constraint.

I sometimes think people would be better off looking for someting to parody instead of trying to develop an original identity on their own.

Maybe they do!

Lo Smemorato di Collegno

2009-06-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes called “Il Caso Bruneri-Canella”, it's the actual historical incident of an amnesiac (supposedly) finding an identity, the stuff of a billion stories and films. Well, this one, anyway. [Note to self: Google, Google, Google!!]

A professor Giulio Canella, a captain in the Italian army during WWI, saw action in Macedonia, possibly wounded, and later listed as missing. His wife awaits his return. Eleven years later an amnesiac turns up. “Do You Know This Man?” the newspapers ask, publishing his photograph. Canella's wife sees him, meets hims a couple of times, becomes convinced he's her lost husband and welcomes him home.

However, he's actually not the guy, but some typographer called Bruneri who already had a history as a fraudster. He and Mrs Canella insist, nevertheless, that he is the guy. He grows a beard and studies philosophy to become more professorial. The country is in an uproar rivalling that of France's Dreyfus affair. One speaks of nothing else, friendships are shattered, people nervously look around whenever the subject comes up at dinner parties.

Despite long trials and ample proof to the contrary, the couple continue to affirm, to the end of their days, that Bruneri is the lost Canella.

Most likely the actual Canella is wandering around confused, poor and unrecognized to this day.

Looking Around the Blogosphere

2009-06-15T08:28:00.001-07:00

I've read Eschaton for years and have found it variously interesting, but what keeps me coming back is the terseness!

Every so often the editor makes a perfect, crystalline, commonsense post, too:

My uneducated opinion is that everyone seems to be disproportionately obsessed with this country [i.e., Iran] largely due to the fact that for the past several years we've been worried Cheney's gang would decide to bomb the shit out of it for no particular reason.

Dumbness...

2009-06-09T05:39:00.000-07:00

Read this whole stupid thing. Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt talking to an aide...

“Speaking of career-limiting moves, I'm in shock that that MP Joy Smith brought forward private member's legislation on human trafficking.”
“I didn't see that,” says Ms. MacDonnell.
“She's on Canada AM. And the reason being is that there's no way any of us should be introducing anything around justice issues or finance issues right now. You just can't touch those two things.”

OMG, etc., now can we get serious, responsible, adult, educated people to do these important jobs please?

From Japanese Poetry

2009-02-25T16:35:00.000-08:00

Kimi hi o take
Yoki mono misen
Yukimaroge
— Basho

When your friends come over for tea or something, it's nice to be able to offer them a large snowball. You might want to have a few on hand, just in case. I always do.

New Words

2009-02-25T14:46:00.000-08:00

I learned this new word the other day: douchebaggery.

Well, not really. I have heard it before, but I've only now decided on a temporary, conditionally accurate definition for it.

If you tell someone about a problem you're having, and their intial reaction is: It must be your fault, somehow, then that is douchebaggery of the purest sort.

“H'm, well, without knowing much about it—or anything, really, just having listened to you, sort of, in these few minutes—I feel I must conclude that it's something you've done. Most likely. Because everyone knows God allows only nice things to happen to people who keep their noses clean.”

I think it's fair to say that douchebaggery is central to many traditional ways of thought.

New Year, Same Junk

2009-01-21T12:48:00.000-08:00

Just checking out David Frum's latest project:

Listening to Obama, I often think of the nervous comment of Michael Banks when he meets Disney’s Mary Poppins for the first time. “We better keep an eye on this one. She’s tricky.”

Oh, indeed, touché. One of the things I retained from seeing the movie as a child was the potential usefulness of the rich Disney dialogue for future quips about politicians and such. Cartoons and children's movies are generally a goldmine when it comes to formulating some insightful commentary. Lines from “The Gnomemobile” and “That Darn Cat” pretty much inform my world.

His main point is that Mr Obama's speech was tricky and ambiguous, because when he says “the market”, he might very well mean “the whole private economy”.

Can you see how someone might make that mistake? Because I can.

Sometimes people say, “Would you care for a coffee while you're waiting?”, and I understand them to say, “Would you care for all the caffeine products in the universe while you're waiting?” There's a fine difference.

Educated Insularity Might Cause Revulsion

2008-12-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

Is this supposed to be funny? The Washington Post on Barack Obama's elitism in choosing people from a narrow little circle of the educated:

In a country where politicians often wrap their learning in folksy charm to avoid seeming elitist, his candidacy represented a forthright assertion of intellectual prowess, as he turned his oratory and cerebral demeanor into campaign assets.

Unfortunately, Andy Borowitz already got there in the Huffington Post: Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy:

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

The Washington Post article is not bad. Bit obvious in places, maybe.

More on That Non-Crisis

2008-12-03T17:20:00.000-08:00

The CBC reports this as if it were some he said/she said thing:

Radio and TV ads have already rolled out and countrywide rallies are planned for the weekend. The Tories have characterized the agreement as an undemocratic coalition beholden to a separatist party.

But opposition members have denied the charges. They fired back with charges of hypocrisy, citing a letter to former governor general Adrienne Clarkson in 2004, signed by then opposition leaders Harper, Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton that discussed the prospects of dissolving Parliament if the government of Paul Martin, the prime minister, was to be defeated.

Can't they get it right? There's no crisis. The situation is normal. Minority governments are subject to just such a move. It usually doesn't happen because minority governments in the past have usually been careful to act like minority governments, and that was because they were usually led by someone with at least a modicum of sense.

Of course Harper knows this. But like all his weird cronies on the right, he has evidently convinced himself that ordinary Canadians don't know anything about their own country. They truly wish that were so, and eventually they've come to act as if it were, and news sources aren't exactly knocking themselves out to deny it because the horseshit is so darn entertaining.

Film Critics

2008-12-03T04:34:00.000-08:00

Robert Ebert on the strange thing that is happening to newspapers and other media. “Death to film critics! Hail to the CelebCult!”:

Earlier this year the Voice fired Dennis Lim and Nathan Lee, and recently fired all the local movie critics in its national chain, to be replaced, Variety's Anne Thompson reported, by syndicating their critics on the two coasts, the Voice's J. Hoberman and the L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas. Serious writers, yes, but...

Meanwhile, the Detroit Free-Press has decided it needs no film critic at all. Michael Wilmington is gone from the Chicago Tribune, Jack Mathews and Jami Bernard from the New York Daily News, Kevin Thomas from the Los Angeles Times--and the internationally-respected film critic of the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, has retired, accepted a buy-out, will write for his blog, or something.

I was wondering about that. If you use Yahoo! mail, you can't help noticing the junk news items they have in the latest news box. There's an interesting parliamentary development here in Canada but the news on Yahoo.ca! was about some people that murdered each other and some new healthy way of eating roughage.

Oh Well

2008-11-20T16:53:00.000-08:00

Enlightened Hogo of European Baustil.Enlightened Hogo of European Baustil.

I'm surprised that this effect sort of works, for the most part.I'm surprised that this effect sort of works, for the most part.

AAGH™AAGH™

Open / Close

Your Link

This may be wonky also. But I am happy. I have striven against incorrect !DOCTYPES.

HTML

2008-11-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

I was looking for some stuff about HTML forms and such and came across this interesting take on “reset” buttons; specifically, why they should not be used:

The extra choice requires extra thinking, and the time saved by using an optimal interaction technique is often smaller than the time wasted on having to think instead of just moving ahead with a single interaction technique that is always used. It takes at least one second and often two seconds to decide between two possible interaction techniques which is why it is usually better not to offer users a choice. (A second may not seem like much, but it translates into about $100 million in lost productivity per year world-wide.)

And it's true: people are everywhere wasting time thinking about things, and therefore things are not done and money fails to be made. A serious problem, because each year hundreds of trillions of dollars are just not being made. I didn't make a hefty sum myself, to be honest. But at least I wasn't thinking.

Some of these people, you know, they're not only thinking—they're sometimes even indulging in “extra thinking”.

H'm

2008-11-18T20:52:00.000-08:00

A Thing to Keep Things Neat

2008-11-17T19:45:00.001-08:00

This is an easy way to keep links free of dust and pet hair with a piece of plexiglass.

Open/Close

A href

Depending on your browser or the day of the week, the above may look a little out of shape. That's mainly (I sincerely believe) caused by style elements already at work on this page.

But in general, you can see the main idea: how to keep elements of your web page or blog clean and dust-free. Your keyboard may be a mess, but at least the Internet can be tidy.

Biographical Notes

2008-11-11T16:20:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to see that “Breakast at Tiffany's” is considered an all-time great movie. I can remember seeing it on TV way back and thinking it was stupid, but there were lots of things that I thought were stupid when I was ten years old. Everyone's making a fuss, I thought, maybe I'm just too young to appreciate it. So I rented it recently.

It's still sort of silly. Back then I couldn't understand why the two characters are all bored and dull. If anything, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I just accepted that they were pissy and weird the way adults are, with their unidentifiable problems. Now I see that they're just time-wasting nuisances. They're bored with themselves. Also, she throws her cat away. There's a whole bunch of junk about how she hasn't named the cat because bla bla bla, but evidently it's too much effort to look after a cat.

So obviously, what ever happened to Holly Golightly?

Supposedly some guy ran into her in Brooklyn in the 1970s. She was working in a basement tavern. At first she was kind of reluctant to admit that she was Holly Golightly, but after some prodding and a few drinks, she opened up.

Apparently she didn't go to Brazil or marry George Peppard, but went out to LA to try her luck. She was married to producer Wiktor Bychzslap for a while. You remember him, he made all these movies about motorcycle gangs, and was very close to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth of Ratfink fame. What a time that was! Wild hot-rod rides among the beatniks and hodads.

“Yes, interesting, but what was she like?” I asked my friend, impatient to discover the truth.

“She was nuts, a deadbeat, cadging drinks in a pathetic fashion, vomiting into one of several shopping bags that she carried. And that was on a good day.”

“Oh.”

“...eh, the worst thing is they were plastic shopping bags, like ones you get from the supermarket, with a lot of other junk in them. Creates a bad impression.”

“Like you just don't care any more, right.”

“Exactly.”

Nothing Has Happened, So...

2008-11-11T10:02:00.000-08:00

I thought it best to update the school picture.

A really sunny day. Armistice Day is usually overcast and drizzly, but we've been having a spell of balmy weather.

I read somewhere that IT expenditures, believed at one time to promise improved productivity, have not led to any increase in productivity. They didn't realize how much worker time would need to be devoted to by solitaire and MS Paint.

Some Pactical Use

2008-11-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

Having browbeaten this javascript into producing clickable links, I set about causing it to allow links in a hidden div (or tab-type menu div) to remain visible, even after people click the link and go to another page and come back. That might be useful if you had lots of links and wanted them in various categories on the one page, but in different divs that you can open and close.

You can test the example here.

It may sputter when you return, but I think I can fix that. It does work and doesn't cause any errors.

Picture Update

2008-11-09T14:55:00.000-08:00

This morning it was extremely foggy, and I could barely see the school on the next block. I decided to make a picture of the upper windows and the odd foggy sky behind then in MS paint →

A bit later, the fog had cleared so I updated my picture →

I went out for a bit and then came back. It was no longer foggy but it had become considerably darker, so I had to update the picture again →

Building Corporation Alliance Enabling Strategies

2008-11-09T13:52:00.000-08:00

I was reading an important news headline on Yahoo News about something that nGenera said about this generation, which is to say, everybody in the world except children and old people. nGenera has an opinion about that—about the nature of the population of the entire planet—and it deserves immediate promulgation by news sources like Yahoo.

It was fairly interesting. Une question, though: What is “nGenera” and what the fuck do they fucking DO? You would think “nGenera” means “a given number of types of things”, but it turns out to be none other than “BSG Aliance”! Of course!

What does BSG stand for? And what do they do? In the sense of, what do they do?

Here are some Google headlines:

BSG Alliance Announces Acquisition Of New Paradigm. [They don't mean “a new paradigm”, but something that calls itself “New Paradigm”, the way I might decide to call myself “Mr Excitement”. Or “BSG Alliance”, which is what I had wanted to call myself until now.]
Renowned Business/Technology Innovation Strategist Don Tapscott's New Paradigm acquired by BSG Alliance to Enable Next Generation Enterprises.
nGenera Corporation was formerly known as BSG Alliance Corporation[!]
Who is nGenera? [Well, funny you should ask.] nGenera helps its customers become Next Generation Enterprises, On Demand. Today’s business conditions demand fundamentally new forms of ...

...BS, probably.

Clickable Links in a From

2008-10-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

For aeons man has wanted to know how to make a clickable link appear in a form. If you search Google for it with all the related terms, you'll get all kinds of interesting stuff not exactly about that, but the result seems to be that it can't be done: data appearing in a form box were never meant to be clicked, and besides, why would you want to do that?

But you might. Some of the data might be in the form of links. You might want to click on them. What's so weird about that?

Anyway, you can do this, I've finally discovered, by using one of two methods, “createTextNode” and “innerHTML”. Nobody in the javascript community seems to want to talk about it, though.

This is just a test form, but you could put a whole list of links in if you wanted.

What you do is, first rewrite the links as javascript-friendly pieces: for example,
<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>
becomes
"<a href=" + "http://www.google.com" +">" + "Google" + "</a>" ;
that is, the tags and their content have to be separately in quotation marks and each piece except for the first has to be preceded by a plus sign.

Then you direct this data to a hidden input box.
<input type="hidden" name="links" value="" />.

Then you add a <div> where you want the links to appear, presumably right underneath the form or near it:
<div id="linkdiv"> </div>

Then you add a button to perform a little code:
<input type="button" value="Show Links" onclick="showLinks()" />

Then, in the <head> area, you add the code for this function:

 <script type="text/javascript"> 
 function showLinks() {
 var f = document.getElementById('linkdiv').innerHTML = document.myform.links.value;
 }
 //NB “myform” will be the name you give to the form. 
 
 function closeLinks() {
 var clear = document.getElementById('linkdiv').innerHTML=" "; 
 }
 </script> 

The closeLinks() function can be called from the initial part of the form so that it will clear out the previous data each time. For example:
<select name="myselect" onchange="showInfo();closeLinks()">
Etc.