11.17.04

Chicagoland

I attended a conference last weekend in the aptly named Downers Grove, out in the suburban doughnut of strip malls and car dealerships that surrounds the city of Chicago and buffers it against the redneck sea. I used to live in the northern part of this doughnut, in a town called Glenview, next to a big naval air station. But the naval base has since been eaten by little starter mansions, and I'm hoping other reminders of my adolescence will follow its lead.

I had only been back to Illinois once before, for my high school reunion, and it felt both creepy and dissociative to return to the place as someone who can now drive and buy alcohol and do other adult things that were off-limits back in the day. The radio in my rental car (red! Wisconsin plates!) was tuned to the same oldies station that I had been addicted to as a thirteen-year-old boy, with the ageless Dick Biondi still announcing each two-minute song in a voice of indestructible enthusiasm. I found this unusualy distressing; a man should only have to hear so many Paul Anka tunes in his lifetime.

The conference hotel was one of those places, like the Gulag, designed to be easily reachable from a major transportation hub, but far enough away from any population centers to keep people from trying to leave. This caused some grumbling during the early stages of the conference (an academic technology snoozer), when people had enough energy to contemplate leaving the building, but after the fourth or fifth discussion on 'whither courseware', all traces of initiative and spark had given way to a pleasing somnolence.

There is some funny cultural mixing near the hickipause, that border area where urban civilization starts to give way to big hair country. The conference hotel breakfast bar offered freshly brewed cappucino, but also sausage pucks spread in a lattice on a layer of Wonder bread. For lunch, there was foccacia, tuna carpaccio -and hot meatloaf with red sauce. I knew that if I were to head just a few miles further west, I would start to see feed stores, and then enter the four hundred million square miles of corn that separate Chicago from the nearest topographical feature. But instead I pointed my red cheesemobile east, into the city - I was going to meet Mimi Smartypants!

I don't know what I can tell you about Mimi Smartypants. She is my writing hero, a longtime intellectual crush, and the antidote for every time I get sick of blogs, politics, trackbacks, formats, syndication feeds, the Future Of Computers, emergent folksonomies, or any of the thousand other ways people have invented to be tiresome online. Mimi can (and probably does) write two thousand words about a piece of lint she found on her sleeve, and it will be engaging, full of obscure interesting links, and funny enough to make her site impossible to read during staff meetings. Not many sites pass that bar with old Stone-Face Ceglowski.

So you can imagine my excitement at getting to meet Mimi, her husband LT, and their Internet-famous daughter Nora, especially since my visit was so cloaked in mystery. I still did not know so much as Mimi's real initials even as I stood outside the front door to the Smartypants compound, trying to figure out which apartment button to push.

I was greeted at the door by an elegant, petite Asian woman in a Viking helmet who directed me to my seat and then climbed into a kind of hamper for much of the rest of the evening. I tried speaking a little Polish to her to break the ice, but it just gave her the giggles. I wonder if it was some kind of happy nostalgia for retroflex sibilants (the single strange point in common between Polish and Chinese), or just the novelty of Gibberish Speaking Man.

In any case, Gibberish Speaking Man had a wonderful time with both the small woman and with her extremely likable parents, and wishes to extend a big, awkward public "thank you" to you all. I look forward to the day when we can talk for an evening without the spectre of next-morning seven o'clock meetings, and without me having to keep my blood alcohol in the safe driving range.

The rest of my readers are encouraged to go buy Mimi's book. Help fund the beer that fuels the writing that makes us all so happy.

11.04.04

Calm The Fuck Down

Dave Winer this morning:

Driving through Bush Country, looking Jewish with Massachusetts plates on my Lexus, I felt really self-conscious. 51 percent of the electorate looked the other way and re-elected a President who started a war with a far-away country that was no threat to the US. Why do people like me feel so scared of what this country has become?

Because they're histrionic, attention-seeking narcissists?

Simple. How do we know they won't go to war with us?

Ah.

And Glenn Fleishmann on BoingBoing:

I've been Jewish, not very observant, my whole life. I'm one of the first generations of Jews to not fear assault as they went to school or lived their lives in secular or religious ways. To not worry about slaughter. I have only met a handful of concentration camp survivors, including a teacher in college. I don't know what it is to be oppressed or insulted for my ethnic and religious heritage.

Today is the first day I am afraid in America because I am Jewish.

Today is the first day I fear for my new son, who is not, but has a Jewish father.

I vote that Godwin's Law applies here.

Also, Glenn Fleishmann: if you have lost more than 20% of your hair, you MUST post an updated photo on your website.

Don't make me come over there and take your kid.

11.03.04

Source Code for Language Guesser

I have made the source code for the Languid language guesser available in a module called, astonishingly, Language::Guess. Enjoy.

Documentation is forthcoming.

Thanks to everyone who tried out the language guesser, and thereby helped me debug it. I have added multiple language training sets, taught it to recognize some forms of gibberish as gibberish (rather than Cebuano), and fixed a bunch of Unicode handling errors, all thanks to your noodling.

11.03.04

Perspective

I live these days as a permanent houseguest of my friend S., a stern-looking, white haired Russian Pushkinist. S. grew up as an expatriate in Czechoslovakia before making his way to Germany and then the United States.

In 1994, when the Republican Revolution took place, and there was much gnashing of teeth at Jesse Helms becoming chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, I remembering asking my friend S. whether he was upset at the outcome.

My friend smiled and shook his head no. "You know," he said, "The last time I was upset was in 1968."

11.02.04

Election Day

Everyone is excited about the election, and websites are progressively going down under the traffic. From a technical point of view, this is amazing - it's 2004, and serving local cached copies of the same text file to millions of people should not be a challenge, particularly if you have some inkling that Nov. 2 could be a high-traffic date for your site.

Idle Words vows to stay up!

I've been something of a skeptic about the power of blogs to do X, for most values of X, but the accounts of so many people voting, spontaneously contributed, are something unique and wonderful. If you want a feel for what an election is like in this enormous country, there is no better way to find out than by reading the many threads.

I went to cast my vote around lunchtime; in Vermont it's always a pleasure, since our lines are short, the election monitors are all grandmotherly, lovely people, and the polling stations are in a high school gymnasium straight out of Norman Rockwell.

As as semi-immigrant, I'm struck as always by the way everyone accepts the ground rules of democracy. This is how it works, and whoever gets picked, runs the country. If Bush loses today, he will hand over the keys to the army, the treasury, and the entire executive branch to a guy he loathes, and who he thinks will help America "drift toward tragedy", just because an 18th century document says so. That's a pretty impressive habit to build into your culture.

For all the talk of fraud, voter harrassment, and legal challenges, democracy here has deep roots, and the civic-minded people (again, mostly in their eighties) doing their share to make it work today are enough to turn even a jaded fish like me maudlin.