| ^ 2002 | July 2002 >> |
Sam Spade
I have been listening to old Sam Spade radio shows, complete with plugs for Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic:
Again and again, The choice for men Who put grooming first.
Obviously not directed at me. Although in other respects, the forties (radio version) seem like a good fit. For example, complete crassness in all dealings with women, and a prevalence of villains who let you deliver two minutes of rapid-fire patter before you punch them out.
Most of the villains I encounter are of the snarky type, who won't listen to patter, and don't let you punch them at all.
[link]Strange Noises
A beastly hot night, and the cat is doing pirouettes, trying to catch a moth somewhere. I have been listening to the pleasant 'ping' of the Semant-O-Matic, as people run searches and poke around. Listening and reading the Sunday papers.
And what interesting things there are. For one, the gigantic Arizona wildfire, all fifteen hundred square miles of it, which makes today's McSweeney's post all the more poignant - I love the firefighter letters, I hope he doesn't get hurt in what is turning out to be a terrible summer out West.
I had never really thought about what an enormous thing a forest fire was until I went to Montana last summer, and stayed across the mountains from the Moose fire, which was then on its way to covering 60,000 acres. When the wind blew right, cinders would fall like fat snowflakes, and thick haze would cover half the sky. The sunsets were fearsome — I would have thought of Mordor, had I read the relevant books by then — and the afternoons got progressively more orange, before fading to a dark grim sooty grey. Terrifying and strange sight, and with the fire still many, many miles away.
--
There are strange noises in the air tonight - for one, people in Kokomo, Indiana are hearing a mysterious hum, and no one knows what it is. Many people can't hear it at all, some have moved out of their homes to get away from it.
For another, investigators scrutinizing the cockpit voice recorders for the China Airlines 747 that broke up with no warning at 30,000 feet are hearing a series of strange thumps in the minutes before the explosion. Explosion? Or what? It scares me that 747s apparently have a failure mode that involves complete structural failure with no warning at high altitude.
And if you fall from such a plane into the sea, you may well be eaten by whatever huge leviathan is making the unexplained noises from the deep. Who knows what is living down there, or when it will get hungry and come up for a snack?
[link]Liberace
I am sitting here trying to solve the mystery of the erratic dialup. Four or five minutes of blissful 56 Kbps browsing, and then *poof*! There is no more incoming traffic. I blame the iBook, because the cube in the other room stays online for long languorous hours.
iBook? Cube? No, this is not some ultra-hip chromed Architectural Digest fantasyland I inhabit. It is an ultra-hip rural paradise, with an employer who has a fondness for Macs and a surplus of cubes, and lets busy programmers take them home. But all the cubes in the world won't get you broadband in Brandon.
On the subject of cubes, have you noticed how the Apple design mafia has taken over? I was thinking about this when I went to see About a Boy — a truly excellent movie — where the main character has a cube tucked away in his swank apartment. It seems like every onscreen computer these days is a Mac, if the character is hip enough. Sex and the City, natch. There is a website out there somewhere with a wonderful theory about how you can tell who will be a secret villain on the X-Files based on whether they use a PC or Macintosh, but I have lost it and can't seem to get it back.
I look at these onscreen computers, and flat titaniums and Vaios in the soft-focus backgrounds of so many print ads, and can't help but wonder if a few years from now they won't look as silly as the picture I saw in the front of a 1988 issue of National Geographic, which had a stylish young yuppie stepping out of a doorway, talking nonchalantly into a cell phone the size of a toaster.
The process whereby technology becomes part of the culture - the way cars or railroads did - is a clever mystery. We have a whole set of cultural images and myths wrapped around those two inventions: Casey Jones, railroad hoboes, the ballad of the long-distance trucker, drag racing, motel culture. When will computers ever get their own folk heroes?
And for the computer folk ballads, what will they find to rhyme with 'Maciej'?
[link]Nostalgie
France!
The French are voting today, and already we know that turnout is at a record low just one month after the LePen fiasco.
Who can blame them? We are no longer allowed to belittle the French electorate, because in our last election we wound up with George W. Anyhow, it is slightly creepy that all the major political figures over there seem to have gone to school together. At least here we have Harvard and Yale, not just one froufrou 'Superior Normal School' to cultivate our future leaders in.
But elections are not important. What is important is to live in a country where the grocery store has a bazillion kinds of cheese, and there is no de-luxe conveyor belt at the checkout counter, just a miniscule little shelf to balance your cheeses on. And where beer and yogurts come in tiny little containers, so you can go through them like cherry tomatoes. I miss the talk shows that feature a huge table artfully covered with books, and six grizzled intellectuals drooling at the busty young moderator, where the audience sits in wrap-around bleachers that look more appropriate to a season finale of American Gladiator. I miss the evening news, where the newscaster is bright orange and has hot pink lips. Why doesn't Peter Jennings get pink lips?
Even the cats, I am sure, would be classier in France. They would eat côtelettes de volaille, and we could call them minou.
[link]A New Kind Of Science
I just got my copy of Stephen Wolfram's magnum opus, and it is a book to fill you with questions. For example, how can a guy be smart enough to single-handedly discover and explore a new branch of science, and yet not have the sense to hire an editor? The text reads like B-movie mad scientist (at least in the introductory bits), but the pictures tell the story, like they always will. It seems we have a case of a megalomaniacal lone genius who is actually the real deal. I am blown away by this book - my mind has been doing somersaults all evening, and that is only after reading the captions. And at 10 lbs, it's perfect for pressing cheese or hurling at that not-so-significant other, especially when that other is a cat who has just devoured another one of your marigolds. [link]
Matched Sets
Do you ever wonder why certain tastes and proclivities come as a packaged set? For example, why can people who like organic food and sandals reliably be counted on to be into African dance, practice reiki, sit in drum circles, wear hemp clothing, and smell kind of funny? Or for that matter, why do people who support school prayer also tend to oppose gun control and favor expanded oil drilling? Doesn't that seem like apples and oranges and pears to you? Even more baffling - why do so many firefighters and cops have mustaches, and why do so many professors tend to have beards? All this based on a girlfriend-placating visit to the Vermont Renaissance Fair yesterday to see people play dress-up and eat an enormous smoked turkey leg. It got me thinking about how many other people there were computer programmers, and that got me wondering again about the strange ways of our tribe. I have noticed a predisposition towards Renaissance Fairs, science fiction, martial arts (especially anything Japanese), knives and swords, CPR training (all the sysadmins where I work are EMTs), beards and utility belts. Where does it all come from? When can it please stop? [link]
| ^ 2002 | July 2002 >> |