You birds, always cracking foxy...

Jump in the air!

The Jump Project looks like fun.

Tribes

I'm getting obsessed with tribe.net. It's like Friendster, but the servers aren't overloaded (yet?). Cooler still: you get to make (or join) "tribes" based on your interests. It's fun to make a new tribe — two hours later you have a whole little online peer group.

Or maybe it's just this working-from-a-hotel that's doing it. Not so much with the human contact since Monday. And it's not my usual quiet San Francisco work-at-home isolation. I can hear the Siggraph parties out the window at night, but I don't really feel like swiping Jason's badge and going. I'm sitting alone on the edge of lots of human activity. By choice, mind you, but still. It's an odd feeling.

The race is on

A whole bunch of bloggers have started linking to kamgod.com recently. Will we get through, or will the professor read about himself online somewhere first?

Sandy Eggo

We're in San Diego this week. Mona's guarding the hot tub (we suspect she may have been waiting around the corner, cell phone and towel in hand, for us to finally leave yesterday). The drive down was fun — Jason let me play DJ all the way (really need a bigger iPod, though, if I'm going to be able to take requests).

The plan: Jason goes to Siggraph, I stay in the schwanky hotel room with my airport hub and my laptop and do regular work, only with room service and a killer view. I could get used to this.

Paging Randy Newman

Got no reason to live?

Everybody's Talkin' At Me

Moment of silence for John Schlesigner.

It now falls to the younger generation of filmmakers to carry on the tradition of impaling bad guys:
Impaled.
Impaled.
Impaled.
Should have been impaled.

Anyway, if there was an afterlife, I'd like to think that Mr. Schlesigner would be driving through it right now in John Voight's car.

Crazy Flakes?

No, my dear, you are just insufficiently kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Nip/Tuck

Did you ever wonder what would happen if James Ellroy and David Cronenberg collaborated on a TV show? Well, wonder no more.

I like shows that leave us with little life lessons. Like, for example, when you find yourself using hams to weigh down the corpse of a child-molesting drug lord who died on, scratch that, was killed on your operating table by his own brother, you may find yourself reflecting:

1) That you should really spend more time with your son, seeing as how he's the one who told you that alligators in the Everglades won't consume a human corpse unless it's seasoned with ham.

2) At least you weren't tortured with massive botox injections to the face and penis by said drug lord's ex-boss, which is something your business partner can't exactly say, in no small part because his face is paralyzed.

3) Maybe it's time to start screening patients a little more carefully.

Okay, so imagine that you pretty much only watch the PAX channel. You get your news from the 700 Club and, as far as fiction goes, if it ain't about angels bringing families together, you're not interested. Basically, imagine yourself as Ned Flanders.

Okay, now imagine what kind of programming you'd *think* is on all the other channels, if you were Neddy. This is that show. Not Buffy, for all its hot Wicca on Wicca action. Not ER, for all the sex, drugs and invasive medical procedures designed to twart Gawd's will. Not NYPD Blue for all its cussin' and Dennis Franz's nekkid hairy ass.

The problem with all these shows is that each of them proceeds from the faulty premise that humanity has some redeeming qualities. So, no matter how much juicy depravity they cram between commercials, there's always this little cloud of hope hanging overhead.

Not so Nip/Tuck, with its child-molesting, drug-dealing, corpse-disposing, face-torturing, fat-spewing, hottie-mutilating goodness.

Not to mention all the little moral quandries like, would you circumcise your teenage son so he can have more confidence when he has sex with his girlfriend? Or would you perform a boob job on your best friend's wife to help save their marriage even if you think her breasts are perfect?

For good measure, we even have a little anti-bilingualism ("Don't speak a foreign language in front of daddy that daddy doesn't understand.")

That's quality programming.

The score: 4 TV breasts (artfully hidden), 2 butt cheeks (not hidden), botox-fu, liposuction-fu, 1 mutilated supermodel, The Circumcision Tango, alligator-fu, Thank You Masked Man, 1 crisis of conscience, Fear of a Brown Planet, and one look from a check out clerk that perfectly captures the "Christ, how much ham can you people eat?" sentiment I'm sure we've all felt on one Easter or another.

Four stars, Jason Bob says check it out. Also, check out The Audition, you sick bastards.

Why do I want this?

The Ambient Orb sits in your house, connected to the internet through a wireless network. It changes colors based on data it receives. It comes pre-set to reflect changes in the DOW, but you can also set it to read custom data that you've put online. Like I could theoretically make it turn green if I have more than five unread email messages, red if Rob's been logged into the dev server for more than 18 hours (always a bad sign) and yellow if Jason's posted something new here.

So again, why do I want this?

Oh, the Magnanimity

Clinton on Bush: 'Everybody makes mistakes.'

And, with that, the entire AM radio band just exploded.

It's a good day when you stare into the Abyss and it smiles back at you.

As usual

Clearly, I overslept and missed the city-wide Crazy Flakes™ giveaway.

To Act Like A Man

Okay, so how do we describe the axis of masculinity? It occured to me last night while watching The Godfather that Diane Keaton, when taken as a function of her leading men, describes a linear interpolation between two opposite, but equally important, components of the male psyche.

In The Godfather, she is married to Michael Corleone, who is pretty much the poster child for the patriarchy. And while Michael (and, indeed, Vito) have a number of minor character flaws, their essential strength and consistency make them very appealing figures.

In Annie Hall, por otro lado, Ms. Keaton is paired against Wood Allen's quintessential self-parody, Alvy Singer. Every character he's ever played is pretty much a variation on Alvy. As characters go, you couldn't be less like Michael Corleone than Alvy is, unless you made him, like, Romulan or something.

So, where along the Singer/Corleone axis, as defined by the Keaton attractor, is the ideal (minimum energy) point? The answer is obvious, of course: Steve McQueen. We knew that going in. Alternative first-order (Euler or Rung-Kutta) approximations may also produce James Garner, Lee Marvin or Alan Arkin, but the McQueen result is accurate to several decimal places beyond these values.

And yet, there is an unaccountable discrepancy in this otherwise unassailable logic: Diane Keaton never dated Steve McQueen. Troubling.

Criswell Predicts

One day, tiny robots will live in our pants.

Elvis

Costello, of course. In Berkeley last night. We gambled on "limited view" seats near the stage and got lucky.

My comments are:

1.) The show was completely different from his last show in Berkeley (less than a year ago, I'm pretty sure). But still perfectly marvy. Wish he woulda played more from the new album, but hey.

2.) How much pot can you motherfluffers smoke, anyhow? Good gawd.

In other news: I'm reading Rob's programming book, for money, to give opinions and try to catch last-minute errors and stuff. It's a strange experience. The third author the publisher brought in at the last minute (when co-author #1 faded away) is both a major windbag and a total faker. He doesn't know obvious things about the language, and he thinks he's qualified to write a book about it. His chapters are alllll about the damage control. The other chapters are pretty neat, though.

Words Words Words

I can see the Bush Administration's point about the insignificance of 16 little words.

Take this example:

"None of us that wear this uniform are free to say anything disparaging about the secretary of defense or the president of the United States."

I mean, they're just words, right?

"None of us that wear this uniform are free to say anything."

What could they possible signify?

"None of us are free."

Just words.

Paging Oliver Stone

Okay, this is for real scary.

Is it possible that this guy's, what? murder? suicide? heart attack?, was unrelated to information he might have about British Intelligence falsifying the "dodgy dossier"? Uh, sure, I guess it's possible. Hell, it's probably even likely. Yeah. People die all the time.

Yeah. Nothing to see here.

Eight Is Enough

Friendster update:
You are connected to 125733 people in your Personal Network, through 8 friends.

One Damn Thing After Another

So now history will forgive us.

I guess history's just a sucker that way. Sure, we may step out a bit with falsified intelligence and unilateral war, but we always come home to history. And why? Cuz we luuuv you, baby. Yellowcakegate? Aluminum tubes? Missing WMDs? They don't mean anything. You're all we got, history. You gotsta forgive us baby.

Bush is to history as Clinton is to blue dress.

Everyone else has got to be linking to this too...

... but DAMN. Crow, problem, tool. Solution! I know people who aren't that clever.

That depends on what the definition of 'has' is...

http://slate.msn.com/id/2085612/

Cuz everything old is new again...
da da...da da...da da...da da...da...da..da...da!

This Wasted Land

Okay, so I was having a Charlie Kaufman moment, debating what sort of muffin to reward myself with after I stop procrastinating, when the Spirit of Robert McKee visited me and told me to get my fucking ass to the gym and stop wasting his goddamn time.

So I did. And there did I see my first ever complete episode of "Boy Meets World." Understandable. Not my demographic. I won't even go into the usual "too hip for Disney" putdown thing cuz, know what? I used to watch "Charles In Charge". On purpose.

What disturbed was the casting.

The "boy" in the title is played by Ben Savage, who we all remember as the lovably Oedipal junior Napoleon psychopath from "Wild Palms", which was pretty good up until the third act de-newy-ment.

Who ever heard of making a movie better by putting LESS Dana Delany in it? Does that make any sense? Does that make any fucking sense? Hush, Robert.

Anyway, the father is played by William Russ, who has had a long and distinguished career playing variations on the evil "Lifetime Movie of the Week" husband/father/boyfriend/priest/school teacher/crossing guard/dentist/cop/newspaper reporter/auto mechanic/drug dealer/what have you.

But, those of us who are me will remember him best in the role of Evan Freed, gleefully blowing away artfully lit headless mannequins with a pair of Mac 10s in Episode 201 of Miami Vice.

If you have not seen this episode of Miami Vice, then you have not seen any episode of Miami Vice.

I guess where some see a wasteland, I see a zen garden. I hate zen gardens.

The CIA Told Me Turkeys Could Fly

Reading this report, it suddenly came to me. Our president is Arthur Carlson.

The only problem is that instead of Andy Travis we have Dick Cheney and instead of Bailey Quarters we have Condi Rice.

Scratch that, though. At least Carlson had the mivonks to admit when he'd made a mistake.

Now with more music and Les Nessman,
J.

One of Those Days

Nothing gets your head doing the "Dissociation Tango" faster than finding yourself sympathizing with the head of the CIA.

All Dogs

A man sits at a table, drinking water and chain-smoking. An audio cassette recorder is running.
See? I knew you were going to ask me that. First question I get, every time. It's like fifteen minutes. Hello? Andy Warhol? The "fifteen minutes of fame" guy?

Anyway, what old Andy never told us was that during your fifteen minutes, you have to answer the same goddamned questions over and over.

So I'll say it now, finally and for the record: to this day, I have no idea why I took that chihuahua.

So I guess I should start at the beginning. I was in New York for the first time in my life and I wanted to visit Ground Zero. I think that's pretty understandable. I mean, I don't think you're sitting there saying to yourself "shit, that's weird" or anything.

But let me tell you, it's eerie. It's like a graveyard and a carnival and a city all in the same place.

Anyway, who gives a shit, right? So, anyway, there I was and there's this big hole in the ground and I've never been there before so it seems perfectly normal. There are big holes in the ground all over the place, why not here?

Except, of course, you know that there isn't SUPPOSED to be a big hole in the ground here. There are supposed to be...well, you know what's supposed to be there.

So anyway, anyway, I started to feel dizzy, like when you stand up too fast? and so I go into this rest area and right away there's this really helpful girl and she hands me this chihuahua. And I'm holding this thing and its heart is racing a mile a minute and it's looking up at me with those buggy eyes and I lose it.

I don't really know how to describe the feeling, but it just seemed clear to me that either the towers needed to be there or I needed to not be there or the chihuahua needed to not be there.

So, by now the girl is catching on that something's weird and she's whispering into this microphone thing hidden in her sleeve and backing away from me slowly and I knew that no matter what happened next the chihuahua and I were in this thing together.

So I bolted. I just ran right out the door with this little six pound dog-rat thing under my arm and it's panicking and hyperventilating and pissing all over me and I didn't have a plan and I didn't know the area or where I was going.

So I just ran until I couldn't run anymore and I found myself sitting on this bench by the harbor and I could see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance and I had this animal and I don't know any better way to explain it except it made sense to me that a chihuahua could make the swim.

In retrospect, it probably wasn't reasonable to assume that he'd be able to survive very long in the near freezing water, or that he'd have any instinct to head for an island miles away from where he was thrown in, but those details didn't seem important then and they don't seem important now.

What is important is that I gave that animal the only chance at freedom he had in this life, and that's a pretty good feeling.

Neal Stephenson said it best

Remember, in Snow Crash, when Hiro first encounters Raven?

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

"Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken."

I think Karen Marcelo just might have a parallel effect on a few of us geek chicks.

1,835,729:1 Against, And Falling

Uh, Zaphod? Looks like we need to adjust the improbability drive again.

Essie Mae Washington Williams

According to Slate, Ms. Williams is Strom Thurmond's daughter (born 1925, to a woman who was not Thurmond's wife). Ms. Williams is also, as it happens, black.

What would it be like to be Essie Williams? I can't even begin to imagine.

Oh yeah, Monterey

Here. Pictures!

First, a panorama off our balcony:


Jellyfish at the aquarium:


Lowwwwwwwfish — sharks and rays:


Path to beach from hotel:


View from our room (and a bonus shot of my ass — sorry):


No pictures of the condom-jellyfish on the beach. Maybe next time.

... The Musical

This site (link from Boing Boing) got me searching for "the musical" on Google. I had no idea.

Menopause, The Talmud, Rod Stewart, and, of course, ADHD: The Musical.

Out With A Bang: A Soulful, Velvety-Throated Bang

One less Barry White in the world. That's one too few now.

Continuing the Joss 4th theme, a bit from Season 3:

Willow: Are you scared...because I thought you had...
Oz: No... I have. But this is different. I mean...you look great. And you've got the Barry working for you. And its all...good, but when it happens, I want it to be because we both need it too...for the same reason. You don't have to prove anything to me.

They Can't Take The Sky From Me

Firefly was a great show, canceled before its time. If, and I emphasize if, there is a patriotic bone in my body, it is summed up by the sentiment of the title song.

Burn the land.
Boil the sea.
You can't take the sky from me.

What appeals? Hope without denial. Not just redefining bad as good so you can be smug or glib about human suffering as though it's part of some plan you've decided you're privy to, a cosmic joke whose punchline somehow justifies the rather clumsy setup.

The world can be frelled sometimes. Some dickweed can come along and burn the land and boil the sea and that's bad, but then there's still the sky. Even then, who knows? Maybe they can even suck the sky away. Or worse, replace the sky with "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Who Wants To Marry A Drunken Frat-Boy Date-Rapist?"

And what is it on those shows with the hot-tub/red-rose/champagne toast scene? It's like it comes out of some horrible prom night second-base playbook. The water is obviously always cold because rising steam frells the optics. The champagne is clearly flat and probably cheap and the rose was probably bought by some PA being paid $75/wk for the privilege of working on a "real TV show." Is this the breeding game? Is this where the next generation of double helices are coming from? Sure. No different than anything that's gone before. Courtship has always been arranged by the the institutions of power. In the past it was church and family. Now it's FOX. BFD.

Just remember, crackers don't matter and nobody has margaritas and pizza and you'll be fine.

And Liz helps me, too. That's the idea, I guess. And while she will always be Willow, Season 5, she does have a bit of Peacekeeper training as well.

Oops

So I managed to have a wee small meltdown last week. We (the three of us in my little company) were supposed to go to dinner with a client from a corporation that brings us a respectable amount of business. But I'm a geek. It's obvious to anyone reading here that I'm a geek. I don't shmooze so well with the corporate types.

And just in case dinner wasn't enough, said dinner ended up happening in the LAST remaining dot-com outpost in the city. I didn't even know there WERE any dot-commies left around here. I'm talking 'bout the $900-jacket, extra hair gell, Mercedes-SUV types that took over my city during the late nineties. (Yes, the ones I wrote code for, so don't get the impression I'm blameless here.)

Anyhow, I'm there, and I'm horrifically underdressed in my significantly-under-$900 gabardine shirt, black pants, and sandals, having heard we'd be having seafood by the Embarcadero. I also didn't think to bring a bunch of cash for parking. There's always parking by the Embarcadero at night. Or there are lots where you pay afterwards, and there are ATMs nearby. Except on the bizarre time-warp block where there's only valet parking, and at first I can't even get a valet to look twice at me in my Toyota (which on normal days I'm damn proud of, since I bought it new for cash outright and it gets better mileage than anything but a hybrid, and it is NOT a frelling SUV).

So of course it gets worse. I finally get a valet to deign to look at me in my car, and find out that it's ten bucks (due up front) to park the car. And I have exactly nine dollars. There's no public parking for blocks, and I was supposed to have been at dinner ten minutes ago. And the asshole won't let me leave the car in the street for 30 seconds so I can go grab a buck from James. I lost it. I just lost it. I drove to a payphone (cell batteries were, conveniently, dead) and called James and asked him and Rob to please please say I had a personal emergency. Then I went home and took about fifteen xanax and wondered what the hell I was doing with my life.

Damn, man. These are such petty, first-world-y problems to have, too. I should probably just suck it up and be glad I'm healthy, in love, and working. That's a lot of good stuff to have at once. Is it so wrong to want that, plus the ability to write code I'm happy with, plus the ability to maneuver through client dinner obligations?

I dunno.

On the shiny side of things, Cinder and yoga have taken care of my back/hip pain. I actually feel 35 again, instead of like sixty. And Monterey was fantabulous. We had a hotel cottage-thing right on the water, Jason went body-surfing (I stuck to the pool - the beach had thousands of dead jellyfish that looked exactly like used condoms), and we went to the aquarium and gawked at fish, then ate their relatives in a touristy restaurant over the water. And I got to read Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress.

So, you know. The usual. Liz tries to act like a normal human and fails, but takes comfort in nature and science and fiction and stuff. Also, Jason. Jason helps a lot.

Vacation

We've been in Monterey, hanging out with the otters and jellyfish. Tomorrow we've got plans to see the never-aired-in-the-US episodes of Firefly. Thanks Rob!

We'll have stories and pix up later.