Wednesday, 31 December 2003
A spiritually-enlightened person I know asked me, "Are you the same person now that you were at the beginning of 2003?" I didn't even have to think: This past year was transformative in a way that no other year of my life has ever been. My answer was an immediate "No!"
My friend smiled warmly and said, "Well, then. It must have been a good year."
Indeed.
Happy New Year to all mahnamahna.net readers. May you find stillness and peace within, and see it echoed in the world around you.
Thursday, 18 December 2003
Wednesday, 17 December 2003
Some folks dig year-end best-of lists. Here's more
Best of 2003 lists than you can shake a stick at.
[spotted on Metafilter]
I got some spam this evening. It contained one ad image, hyperlinked to a web site that's apparently paying a spammer to push some traffic its way. I never saw the image, because I use an e-mail client whose
interface looks like it may be older than me, and it doesn't do images. The body text of the message read as follows:
princess janus region wiseacre annulled buck carboxy methylene ahoy lackluster sanatorium psyche farthest linkage qatar desert poverty ringside monarchic anything frailty
more...
Tuesday, 16 December 2003
(As if you needed another?) "A
Texas housewife is in big trouble with the law for selling a vibrator to a pair of undercover cops." She could go to jail for a year.
Friday, 12 December 2003
I'm writing a new column for
PC World, all about Free Software (including, but not limited to, Linux). The
first edition went live today.
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Anil Dash (one of the minds behind
Moveable Type)
reminds me why I love New York so much, and makes me want to move there.
Wednesday, 10 December 2003
This is ironic. (Doncha think?)
Tuesday, 09 December 2003
I got two pieces of snail mail from the Democratic party today. This fascinates me. I have not been a registered Democrat for more than five years, and I have never been registered as one at my new address. Yet they keep writing to me.
more...
Monday, 08 December 2003
1
iRiver iHP-120 +
1 cable = mp3 music in my living room, for the first time. A low-tech way to make it happen, but oh is it sweet.
Tuesday, 02 December 2003
I am awash in a sea of phlegm. I've been sick since last Friday. My fever has been as high as 103.1, a number that should be associated with the FM dial, not a human being's internal temperature. I'm on the mend now, and wishing like hell I'd gotten a flu shot this year, because the flu is almost certainly what this was. Have you had a flu shot this year?
There are no excuses.
Tuesday, 25 November 2003
We got ourselves an old Indian dude here. Lives in a cave most of the time. Has a following. No biggie; this sort of thing happens in India. But: Dude sez he ain't eaten for decades. Doesn't need to drink water, either. Shows up at a hospital to be observed by science.
Ten days of constant observation, and our man eats nothing, drinks nothing, and, you'll be keen to know, "neither did he pass urine or stool." Someone at the BBC deserves a sound beatdown for the headline on this article, but I enjoyed meeting
Prahlad Jani.
Ten minutes ago I knew very little about SF's Treasure Island.
But now. . .
Saturday, 22 November 2003
Here's what the
Big Game bonfire looked like last night at Cal's Greek Theater. Walking back down southside, we passed under the Campanille, which was lit up in blue with gold graphics on each side, like
this representation of the coveted Axe.
It took Cal two quarters to heat up today, but the result was sweet, sweet, sweet.
Cal 28, Stanfurd 16.
Things are always strange when we visit
the Farm but there was something especially strange (and, though it pains me to admit, cool) going on down there today, as you can see in the shot I took of the Stanfurd Band doing their moronic bit before the game. Look back there on the sideline, and you'll see a large
Trojan Rabbit, straight out of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We never did find out what the deal with it was. It left before the end of the game.
Friday, 21 November 2003
Is there any doubt left that Big Media is
perhaps the most harmful of the various cancers afflicting this country?
"This is Laci Peterson and shark attacks and Kobe Bryant put together," said Martin Kaplan, professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications. "It's a miraculous combination of sex and taboos and pop music and plastic surgery."
Get. Me. Off. This. Train.
Tuesday, 18 November 2003
Back in 1999, I wrote an article about the very first work of interactive fiction, Adventure, which you can still experience on modern PCs. The piece was written for a proto-webmag that vanished years ago; I resurrect the article today in honor of the
9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, which Slashdot
took note of this morning.
more...
I was already in high school when Wal-Mart invaded my part of the country. I stayed away, having read about how the megachain decimated small-town general stores all across America's heartland. So I've been in a Wal-Mart store only three times in my life, and only made a purchase there once. After reading
this article, I'll probably keep out for good.
[spotted at Ten Reasons Why, which also points to further commentary on this issue]
Wednesday, 12 November 2003
This
nine minute video captures a breathtakingly beautiful bit of art that was performed at the Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival this past August. The artist is one
Ferenc Cako. I just love discovering artists whose work is unlike anything I've ever seen!
[thanks to the_lucky_duck for the link]
Tuesday, 11 November 2003
If you follow
this link, you will hear Joe Lieberman sing "Oaklahoma."
Sunday, 09 November 2003
I cannot explain the existence, here in my house, of the tiny little wrench you see here. I discovered it on the floor shortly after the big move-in, felt a question mark balloon appear above my head, and placed it — the wrench — on my desk.
It has been there ever since. I still don't know whether it lived here before I did, or whether it traveled here with me. I do not know what it belongs to. It is made of plastic. It bears no markings at all. If it belongs to a toy or something like that, it belongs on that list they put out every Christmastime regarding playthings that can be swallowed. Perhaps it came with some bit of gadgetry?
<seinfeld>What is the deal with this tiny little wrench?</seinfeld>
Wednesday, 05 November 2003
I scored 124.5 on the
80's Lyrics Quiz. You see this sort of thing on the Web from time to time, but you never see one this well implemented, or this much fun. Who can beat me? No
cheating!
Oh, the memories that can come flooding back just because of one line from one song!
Turns out there is a new version of
Donnie Darko, one of my favorite films,
in the works. The "Director's Cut" will feature scenes cut from the original version — some that were on the DVD, some that were not. There will also be more eighties music, because now Writer-Director Richard Kelly has more money to buy song rights with. There is something a little weird about a director doing a "Director's Cut" of his first film just a couple years after it came out, and I will approach the new version with some apprehension because I think the original is so nearly perfect (and some of the cut scenes on the DVD were really bad). But I cannot wait to return to Donnie's world and see it from new angles. One thing I am certain will not change is the ending, for it's built into the movie's DNA that it can only end one way. After all, "Every living creature dies alone."
We thought the
almiqui was gone forever, but no, a farmer in Cuba came across one. I wish he hadn't. That thing is going to give me nightmares. It looks like it can't wait to bite my toes off. Or worse.
Tuesday, 04 November 2003
Get your holiday shopping done early. The web brings you
just the item for all your friends and loved ones.
[found on MetaFilter]
Monday, 27 October 2003
Yesterday, my grandmother was evacuated from her house in San Diego and told to flee the oncoming brush fire. So far, her house remains standing. The rest of my family is just trying to cope with the unbreathable air and the miserable heat. My mother took the preceding picture from her backyard yesterday morning, before the last bits of blue sky disappeared. She says that ash has been falling like snow for nearly 24 hours now. It is not unusual for me to feel glad that I am not in San Diego, but today,
whoa Nellie am I ever glad I'm not in San Diego.
Thursday, 23 October 2003
Over on Slashdot, they're talkin' about how the makers of Gator — a truly nasty bit of behind-your-back software that sits on your system and launches pop-up ads — have forced a Web site to stop referring to their product as "spyware."
Actually, I've got no problem with that. Gator is not spyware: It does not spy on you. But it
is a fucking parasite that, when teamed up with other parasites, can
bring a system to its knees. The last time I was visiting my folks, I did a simple run of
Ad-aware on their system, and it was hit city. Unacceptable. Unacceptable that their computing environment was letting this go on without their even knowing.
more...
Tuesday, 21 October 2003
Roger Ebert has
a few thoughts about leaf blowers, rakes, the President, and the way things used to be.
Monday, 20 October 2003
Proper old-school "underground" net.radio is not dead.
SomaFM proves it. We're talking commercial-free, fantastic listening here. I frequently mainline their Groove Salad stream during work hours, and have just discovered Beat Blender for nighttime. If you're feeling silly — or better yet, if you aren't feeling silly, but you wouldn't mind it — listen to the Secret Agent stream and pretend you're stuck in an old B-movie. Oodles of fun.
The tunes are amazing, and the tech is righteous: No bitchy-hoggy Real or Windows Media players needed here. Just
WinAmp or
Foobar2000 or
Audion or
iTunes or
XMMS to decode a simple mp3 stream. Click and listen. (And don't overlook the handy Amazon-linked song histories available at the SomaFM site.)
[Through Groove Salad, the Supreme Beings of Leisure just sang "Nothin' Like Tomorrow" to me. Word.]
Monday, 13 October 2003
Most of the country celebrates Columbus Day today. Berkeley wishes you a happy
Indigenous Peoples Day.
If you translate Sir Mix-a-Lot's
Baby Got Back into Latin, and then do a literal translation
back into English, you get something like this:
Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.
For who, colleagues, would not admit,
Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body
Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits
So that you want to be conspicuous for manly virtue, noticing her breeches
Have been deeply stuffed with buttock?
[found on jwz]
Friday, 10 October 2003
This is a geek-rights issue that could impact anyone who watches TV, so listen up. The
Electronic Frontier Foundation provides some background:
The future of television is digital. In fact, the FCC has already said that television manufacturers will be required to include digital television (DTV) tuners in their sets after 2007. You may not have heard much about DTV yet, but Hollywood is already there, lobbying the FCC for regulations that will force "content protection" technology into every DTV device, including televisions, PVRs (including digital TiVos), and any computer that touches a DTV signal. more...
Tuesday, 07 October 2003
I voted this morning, but after reading
this article by an ex-coworker of mine, I am not at all convinced that my vote will be counted. There could be all sorts of shenanigans afoot, and we'd never, ever know.
Monday, 06 October 2003
For the Beatles fans in the audience: An
interview with Sir John Lennon, regarding, among other things, the 1980 assassination of Paul McCartney.
[found on The Morning News]
Wednesday, 01 October 2003
I'd like to humbly beg my readership's indulgence, for I need to ask a favor. I've got some traffic-reporting software running here on mahnamahna.net, and I'm not sure I can believe what it is telling me. Therefore:
If you are a regular (or semi-regular) reader of this blog, I implore you to take twenty seconds out of your day and add a comment (content not important) to this entry. If you wish to remain an anonymous lurker-type, please consider posting a comment under a pseudonym. This is honor system stuff, obviously: Please post just one comment. But please, play this dumb little game just this once, so I can get a real handle on how many people are reading.
I thank you all in advance. Now let's see that "comments" number climb.
Saturday, 27 September 2003
Being a California Golden Bears fan is a bit like being a Cubs fan or a Red Sox fan: Your team never goes all the way and seems to have a problem with bad luck, but every now and then they pull off something that makes all the heartache worth it. I can't say it any better than the team did in an e-mail I just received:
The California Golden Bears upset the #3-ranked USC Trojans on Saturday evening before 51,208 fans at Memorial Stadium and a national television audience. The win marks the first time the Bears have defeated a Top 5 nationally-ranked team in more than 28 years.
Let me add that the game
was won in triple overtime. It was amazing, and I'm psyched to have been there. I also think I know what gave the Bears an edge: One of the first things the super-obnoxious Trojan band did was play Stanfurd's fight song, "All Right Now." I'm sorry, but if you're going to pull shit like that, you deserve a trip to the shed and a long bus-ride home.
Friday, 26 September 2003
Close up yer wounds when a bear attacks you!
[found on Fark]
I have got to
try this the next time I'm in New York with someone.
Wednesday, 24 September 2003
I'd like to think that the average American can spot the problem with what our president
says here, but I think that would be naive.
"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."
Right. Cuz when you think
objective you immediately think
Rumsfeld and
Rice and
Ashcroft.
[found at Billmon's Whiskey Bar]
Tuesday, 23 September 2003
We got rid of DDT, and we've banned PCBs, but the "better living through chemistry" folks have another acronym up their sleeve.
And it's everywhere.
When Oakland resident Katrina Friedman, 31, agreed to join the study, she assumed that her healthy diet, yoga and a clean job at Hot Studio, a small San Francisco design firm, was producing chemical-free milk for her baby daughter, Ruby.
But Friedman had PBDE levels in her milk at 79 parts per billion, higher than the number that triggered a ban of the flame retardants in Europe.
"I love my child more than anything. I want to protect her from broken glass, bullies at school and invisible poisons like this one. But I'm powerless. These chemicals aren't banned in the United States, and we're just continuing to add them in the environment," Friedman said.
Monday, 22 September 2003
A lonely woman in Florida
drinks herself to death and leaves behind only bits and scraps of woe:
There were three yellow Post-its on the fridge. One said: "By myself, with myself." Another said: "Broke and alone." And the third said: "Higher purpose?"
On the dining room table was the start of a personal ad she had written in a lined notepad: "Single and ready to experience..."
She stopped before she figured out what she was ready to experience. On the next page, she had written: "Can't. I'm not willing at this time."
Sunday, 21 September 2003
I took
this picture back in August but forgot to post it.
Thursday, 18 September 2003
There's a
new Beatles album coming out in November. I knew this was in the works, but I didn't know the release date or the stupid name they've given it.
I already have un-Spectorized versions of the stuff on
Let It Be, and it's all definitely superior to what was originally released back in 1970, but there's still no getting around the fact that the band was not making great music during these sessions. They filled their work environment with anger and acrimony until coming together one last time to craft
Abbey Road, where the magic is palpable one last time.
[thanks to AK for the link]
Wednesday, 17 September 2003
Wandering ever-so-slightly off the beaten path in southwest Berkeley last Saturday, I found a building that was really a
ghost.
Tuesday, 16 September 2003
I took Political Science 101 as a senior in high school. My professor was a dude by the name of Carl Luna, and he was a better lecturer than any professor I encountered in my four years in the Poli Sci department at U.C. Berkeley.
Now Dr. Luna is authoring a
blog on California's recall for the
San Diego Union-Tribune. Good, informed rants, and well worth the read if you're a political junkie.
Monday, 15 September 2003
. . . is
Yellowstone National Park:
"The impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend," says Professor McGuire. "Magma would be flung 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. Within a thousand kilometers virtually all life would be killed by falling ash, lava flows, and the sheer explosive force of the eruption. One thousand cubic kilometers of lava would pour out of the volcano, enough to coat the whole of the USA with a layer 5 inches thick. The explosion would be the loudest noise heard by man for 75,000 years."
In my new hood, last Friday night . . .
Friday, 12 September 2003
Find out how rich you are (money-wise) compared to the rest of the world at the
Global Rich List. Humbling stuff: If you're making more than $33,700, you're better off than 99 percent of your brothers and sisters on the planet.
Thursday, 11 September 2003
Tonight I went through three shoebox-sized boxes of "miscellaneous important stuff" that followed me here to the new digs. These seem to be functioning as a time capsule of sorts. Among the items I have stashed away in these boxes over the years:
- The San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, May 30, 1996, the front page of which uncharacteristically sported Herb Caen's column. This was the day Caen told his readers he was dying.
- A printout of a job posting on IDG.com, dated 11/10/98, for "Associate Editor, Here's How Online / PC World, Online Services Group." In pencil is my shit-I'm-excited scrawl reading 11:00 A.M. FRIDAY. That must've been the interview.
- A $98 credit at Fry's Electronics, dated June 11, 2001. I was issued this as a result of the Fry's Low Price Guarantee, but after receiving it, I went through a long period of buying no goodies at Fry's, and I forgot I had it. Then I remembered I had it, but by then, I didn't know where it was anymore. Now here it is. It has no expiration date on it. They should accept it, right?
- The New Yorker, September 24, 2001 issue. Front cover: Black towers on a black background. Two years ago now. Heavens. There is a mailing label on the cover. It lists a place where I no longer reside.
Tuesday, 09 September 2003
Opus is
returning to the Sunday comics, and I ain't talking reruns, here.
[found on Slashdot]
Monday, 08 September 2003
I have never had to wash my dishes by hand. Every non-dorm place I have ever lived in has had a dishwasher, until now. This makes for an interesting adjustment.
Luckily, I have a sink that is very conducive to quick and efficient washing, if you feel like being serious about things. It's a small double sink, so you can very quickly flood one of 'em with soapy water, dump the dishes in, go at it all with a brush or whatever your own favorite implement of destruction is, then rinse in the other sink, and then dump everything into the drying tray on the counter next to the sink.
I did some semi-serious cooking this evening, so it called for some semi-serious dishwashing. I was in the middle of the aforementioned procedure when I flashed back to when I was sixteen. I used to work eight hour dishwashing shifts at San Diego's
Sea World. In the summertime, during tourist season. Back then, I had three very large sinks in my arsenal, along with a dedicated garbage disposal that had its own mini-sink. Plus industrial soap, and bleach that I could use for sanitizing things in the third sink, if protocol required it and I felt relatively un-mistreated by my employer that day.
So tonight I was scrubbing a small sauté pan when some long-forgotten muscle memory kicked in, and my hands awakened and reminded me that years ago, I would scrub ten-gallon copper caramel pots and such for days and days. I tripped on that for a bit, standing there in my tiny kitchen here at the new digs, washing dishes by hand for the first time in a dozen years.
Friday, 05 September 2003
Fifteen years after his death, Robert A. Heinlein's
long-lost first novel is being published. Posthumous productions are generally
disappointing, but Heinlein, in death, has amazed me before: The uncut edition of
Stranger in a Strange Land is one of my all-time favorite reads. (I have what I think is a killer film adaptation rumbling around in my head. Perhaps someday I'll let it pour out.)
Thursday, 04 September 2003
So one dear friend gives me a copy of the movie poster for
Gigantic (a documentary about
They Might Be Giants, New
York band extraordinaire) as a housewarming gift. And I realize that it needs to go on the side of the fridge, a very visible spot in my new digs. Now, how to affix it there? Oh, how 'bout with the handcrafted New York subway magnets that another dear friend gave me for Christmas last year? Perfect!
It's interesting how various possessions are playing entirely new roles here at the new digs. Magnets that never before had an important function now have one; a bedroom bookshelf moves out of the bedroom; a phone that has not been used for years suddenly comes in handy because it fits where others will not, and I realize for the first time how pleasing its real-bell ring is compared to modern electronic chirps. Anything is possible when even an object as mundane as a lamp suddenly takes on a whole new and exciting and fantastic function.
There is rebirth all around me, everywhere I look. I am living in easterland, and I feel it warming me from within.
"I don't think either one of us knows why we split up. It was like, say you're going to a nightclub one night with your friends and you're in line and the next thing you know there are guys with helicopters and there's machine-gun fire and you don't know what happened. And that's kind of like what our breakup was like."
Wednesday, 03 September 2003
You cook dinner and melted cheese drips onto the oven floor for the first time. You put a scratch in the wood floor. You replace a lightbulb with another of lower intensity. You learn where the floor squeaks, and how the breeze comes in most strongly through a particular window. You cart people over and ask them what they would do with a problemmatic room. You make your house a home.
That's the only word a friend had when I asked how Burning Man was this year. Pictures like
these and
these make me want to experience it next year.
Saturday, 30 August 2003
Today is the first Cal football home game of the season. GO BEARS! Tomorrow, I move for the first time in six years. GO ME! Updates may cease for a bit if there are connectivity issues at the new digs. Happy long weekend to everybody.
Thursday, 28 August 2003
Pure Web fun:
elevatormoods
I recommend starting with a selection other than #1, which is a bit of a downer (no pun intended).
You'd think that the events of the past couple of years would have taught Americans a lot about the danger of mixing religion and government, of the value of separating church and state. But no: Four out of five Americans
do not understand the Constitution. Of that group, I'd have to guess that the vast majority are Christians; I doubt there are many American Hindus (or Buddhists or what-have-you) out there who think it's a good idea to erect Judeo-Christian monuments in government buildings. It matters not to the Bible-thumpers. They're gonna show up and shove God — their God — down your throat whether you like it or not. (And by the way, you're going to hell.)
[found on The Morning News]
Tuesday, 26 August 2003
Check this out, word-nerds.
[Thanks to LB for the link.]
Monday, 25 August 2003
And what it is ain't exactly clear. Some sort of ruling has come down on the
California DVD Case, but the
Associated Press and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation seem to disagree on what was actually decided.
Skimming over the
actual decision I think what I am seeing is that the original preliminary injunction — requiring the defendant to remove DeCSS code from the Web — has been upheld. That's what the A.P. article zeroes in on. But there is a bunch of other language in here that seems helpful to the EFF and all the other Good Guys in this saga. So that's where the EFF's optimism must be coming from. Hmm.
The Washington Post
reports the story but misses the most important part, which Lessig
brings out to some degree on his blog. Listen: Open Source and Free Software crusaders are
not against such things as intellectual-property rights. What the
General Public License (for example) basically says is this:
more...
Friday, 22 August 2003
New Line has
decided to release the extended versions of
The Fellowship of the Ring and
The Two Towers — previously available only on DVD — to theaters in the weeks leading up to the premiere of the saga's last installment,
The Return of the King. Kick ass!
Someone keyed my car last night. Not horribly — I think it will mostly come out with a good strong buffing — but still, this just stinks. I didn't do nothing to nobody: didn't steal no one's parking space, didn't mouth off to nobody, nothing. Nothing, I tell you. But out of the blue, this. Some people just suck beyond belief.
And yet, this cannot ruin my Friday. I move in just a week and a coupla days. Last night I bought rugs for the new digs. Tomorrow there is some serious freaking A/V shopping on tap. Life is wonderful, and nothing's going to convince me otherwise today.
Wednesday, 20 August 2003
If not, I highly recommend
The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Just finished it. Don't think I've ever read anything quite like it. Very funny, and in its own strange way, very, very deep.
The closest thing to it I can think of is Flann O'Brien's
The Third Policeman. (What? Never read that? Imagine the product of an early 20th-century Irish Douglas Adams. Drool.)
1) So I'm watching Letterman tonight, and suddenly the video is replaced by a screen of text, white on a red background, looking like something produced by an oldschool TV-studio character generator, the sort of crap they had for the video productions class at my high school, and it says:
Emergency Alert System
Tune to Channel 20 for Emergency Instructions
Child Abduction Emergency
more...
Monday, 18 August 2003
Google just got
more powerful.
[found on Follow Me Here]
Sunday, 17 August 2003
You know the crap the Republicans pulled in
1998. You know the crap they pulled in
2000. Most of my readers are probably pretty well up-to-date with the crap they're pulling now in
California. But have you caught wind of the crap they're pulling in
Texas? And can you spot the pattern here?
Wednesday, 13 August 2003
Tonight I saw
Gigantic, a well-crafted documentary about one of my favorite bands,
They Might Be Giants. The film kicked much ass and had some great footage of TMBG's John and John and the Band of Dans, but I think my favorite shot was a brief glimpse of the New York subway. The screen was suddenly filled with the unmistakable tile, a station sign in the unmistakable font, and then, the unmistakable shining silver behemoth, barreling into the station like something terribly out of control.
I arrived home to find that
Gothamist (one helluva four-star blog that you must start reading if you love New York) had a
posting about the subway, and a nice little picture. Sigh! Perhaps the universe is telling me I need to visit New York. After all, it's been nearly a year since I've been down below with my beloved silver trains. Or had decent deli. Who wants to go to New York with me?
(Alternatively, perhaps the universe is telling me it is time to return to and finally finish Major Art Project #2, which is intensely subway-related and has been on the back burner for so long that Major Art Project #3 has since been conceived and completed.)
Tuesday, 12 August 2003
Sometimes life gets busy, and in a good way. Something clicks in your brain. Things seem different. More
possible. Inertia decreases. Momentum increases. Fog: Now gone. And if you're me, you suddenly find that you've found yourself a new place to live. My days in this place where I've lived for six years —
six years! — are now finally, officially, numbered.
[Thanks to the_lucky_duck for this entry's title.]
Thursday, 07 August 2003
John Ashcroft just called to say "
I told you so." (I mentioned Mr. Hawash
a while back).
Tuesday, 05 August 2003
You see
the damnedest things on the streets of San Francisco.
Monday, 04 August 2003
If you're into politics (or you like to keep on top of Boosh's myriad lies as best you can) you really must start reading Billmon's
Whiskey Bar. Today's post, "
The Check is Not in the Mail," is a shining example of why.
Sez the New York Times:
Geoff Garin, a pollster who is working for Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, said the Democratic anger toward Mr. Bush was "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling," and perhaps comes closest to the way many Democrats felt about President Richard M. Nixon.
[feel free to use gatsby/daisy as user/pass pair]
Sunday, 03 August 2003
I've had a two-concert weekend, and lord, how it has soothed my soul. Friday night I saw blues legend B.B. King play out at Chronicle Pavillion. What a fantastic treat. I was never much into the blues until this past year, and now I just can't get enough. I've discovered there's nothing better to listen to when you're down: The blues doesn't hold you down in your depths; they make you realize that we all hit rough spots, that overall things aren't so bad, and that even in the midst of adversity, you can still let your light shine, and you can still create something breathtakingly beautiful. I feel blessed to have seen B.B. play. He's getting on up there in years, and we may not have him around for too much longer, although he looked and sounded awfully good to me. I'd bet my last dollar he keeps performing till the day he leaves us.
more...
The Boy Scouts are in trouble in my hometown. Their 18-acre camp and council headquarters facility in Balboa Park is leased to them by the city for a buck a year, and that preferential treatment is now under fire in the courts due to the BSA's official policies that exclude gays and atheists from the organization.
more...
Monday, 28 July 2003
The Grand Lake Theater is not only the Bay Area's most beautiful old-time moviehouse. It also displays
fantastic political messages on its marquee from time to time, just as the old U.C. Theater did (and how we miss it so!).
Saturday, 26 July 2003
We killed the Hussein brothers. We took pictures of the bodies and showed them to the world. Okay, you
might convince me that this was a necessary evil, given the parameters of the ongoing disaster over there. But then we cut the bodies open, shaved them, plastered and painted their faces, and again took pictures and showed them to the world. Well, I'm sorry. I think that Rumsfeld has lost it.
Isn't it interesting that
IslamOnline.net is the only site I can find that is showing the before-and-after shots
side by side? Every bit as interesting as the fact that its article was so prominently linked to on
Google News...
Thursday, 24 July 2003
One of the highlights of my recent week away was getting to make friends with a dog named
Dutch. He is a golden retriever / german shepherd mix. Last night I hung out with a friend and
Cinnamon, her energetic mutt. And for the next couple of days, I am caring for
Henry, a camera-shy feline who very nearly got me thinking I need a cat. (I don't. Do I?) What I really need is a dog, but that's not going to happen until I have a house and a yard someday. Dogs need yards.
The
International Herald Tribune (which has one of the craftiest site designs on the web) brings us the
best article I've read about this recall foolishness here in California. Duly noted are the impact of Propositions 13 and 98, and Darrell Issa, San Diego slimeball extraordinaire. If you're not up to date on this saga, this will catch you up.
Wednesday, 16 July 2003
One rule of vacations is that sometimes the weather does not cooperate. But, even with the clouds, does this look so bad?
(Besides, the Bay Area has gotten me used to skies like these.)
Monday, 14 July 2003
I am completely down with this and other "English"
rules posted at the entrance to a botanical garden in Hanoi.
(This image made its way to me in friend-of-a-friend fashion to make its Web debut here at mahnamahna.net. I'll let the photographer decide whether to claim his fame in the comments or labor on in obscurity.)
Wednesday, 09 July 2003
You thought this new decade was just about terrorists and war and lying Republicans. But noooo: This is also the decade in which we begin to phase out swimming pools with deep ends. No kidding.
Mark Morford, wackjob columnist for
SFGate, usually the sort who is
off the deep end,
has something to say about this.
I have such fond memories of swimming lessons from my childhood. I don't know how many summers had swimming lessons as a major component. At least five. And I know exactly what Morford is talking about. I remember triumphing over the deep end. It changed from a Dangerous Place where I was not allowed to an area I could splash on out to, turn around, and look across the pool to the kids who couldn't yet tread water. There I was, and there they were. Kids. Growing up.
Tuesday, 08 July 2003
The Internet is shit. I do a lot of net.cheerleading, but this dude has a really good point, I must admit.
Monday, 07 July 2003
The Web can teach you wonderful things. Like
how to take good pictures of fireworks. I really wish I'd read that last week.
more...
A school board member in Illinois
is in trouble for his advice to others regarding comments at a committee meeting. Sure, his statement is risqué, and therefore probably inappropriate given the setting, but humiliating and degrading? Really? The uncanny thing is, my ninth-grade English teacher — a woman — used the exact same metaphor in explaining how long our essays should be.
[found at the Obscure Store and Reading Room]
Sunday, 06 July 2003
Experience the works of
Larry Carlson.
Friday, 04 July 2003
On the Fourth of July, Americans celebrate not only liberty, independence, and freedom; we also celebrate the power of the written word. Other countries celebrate their independence on the day a jail was stormed, the day a monarch granted autonomy, the day a war was won. Americans celebrate the day the country's founders put quill to ink and crafted an elegant screed. Word up.
We don't have a monarch here in America, but we do have sacred texts that we hold every bit as dear. The
Declaration of Independence, like its brother the Constitution, is a brilliant document but an imperfect one. We cringe now at the Constitution's
three-fifths compromise, and similarly, this bit from the Declaration, recalling one of the crimes of King George, certainly clashes with the premise than all men are created equal:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
We take for granted how extraordinary the American experiment was at the time that it began. And we also take for granted how much closer we are now to a society that holds as "self-evident truth" the equality of all. But look: In 1776, we were still talking about savages. And slaves.
This country was not perfect when it was created. It is not perfect now. But it remains a bold experiment, one that thus far has brought a higher standard of living to more people than any experiment that came before. As the experiment continues, there will be further
missteps, and there will be unexpected
triumphs. But even when things are looking
really bleak, keep your chin up, and have some faith in this country. And today, take a moment to admit it: We are, in fact, very lucky to live here.
Happy Fourth of July, folks.
Thursday, 03 July 2003
Senate majority leader Bill Frist used to adopt stray cats, take them home, kill them, and cut them into pieces.
I ain't kidding.
[feel free to use gatsby/daisy as user/pass pair; found on The Morning News]
Sunday, 29 June 2003
. . . between all the goings up and the whole of the comings down and the fog of the cloud in which we toil and the cloud of the fog under which we labour, bomb the thing's to be domb about it so that, beyond indicating the locality, it is felt that one cannot with advantage add a very great deal to the aforegoing by what, such as it is to be, follows . . . (Finnegans Wake, 599: 29-34)
Yesterday I went wandering, and found myself at a place I have not visited since I was a different person.
Come. I wish to show you this place.
Friday, 27 June 2003
John Lennon sang to me this evening:
Can you hear me,
That when it rains and shines
It's just a state of mind?
Can you hear me?
Wednesday, 25 June 2003
Kinda hard to hold your head high when you travel abroad these days, isn't it? What you need is the
American Traveler International Apology Shirt!
[found on hebig.org/blog]
Monday, 23 June 2003
John Edwards has balls. William Saletan proves it with a
fantastic, short dissection of the candidate's current message.
Points two through six form what I think is a strong common-sense argument that, if eloquently and passionately and intelligently voiced by a charismatic candidate, could put Boosh right out on his keyster. What are the odds?
[We now pause for a self-absorbed moment to note that this is mahna mahblog's hundredth post. Huzzah!]
Today's Supreme Court
decision upholding the Children's Internet Protection Act is a travesty for many reasons, but above all it demonstrates the bind that we netizens will remain in until all our leaders understand and use the Internet.
more...
Sunday, 22 June 2003
Today, Beck played the Greek Theater on the campus of my alma mater. It was an absolutely glorious, crystalline summer day. Blue skies. Slight breeze coming in off the bay, making the eucalyptus trees that ring the theater dance.
more...
Friday, 20 June 2003
Listen up, Americans. Iraq is
not a quagmire, and we are
not engaged in an occupation of that country, and anyone who says we are is a goddam freedom-hater. Right? I'm caught up, right? Oh, no, missed one thing: Combat ended May 1. Thus spake Boosh, right? So: War over, no quagmire, no occupation.
And yet . . .
Wednesday, 18 June 2003
Last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
abolished the office of Lord Chancellor (which has been around since 605 C.E.) and paved the way for a Supreme Court to replace it. I love the British political system: It is like a cranky, pissy, gummy old engine that seems built to last forever. It's flexible enough (unwritten constitutions help in that respect) and magical enough to rear up every now and again, sputter and cough, backfire, and then neatly retune itself. Hell, even the elections come along at irregular intervals. "Surprise! Time for new leaders!" That can
happen in Britain. And Tony Blair can establish a Supreme Court. Cuz they don't have one.
Of course, the Tories are saying
not so fast. (Love those wigs, too.)
[A Reuters article running in "Bangladesh's Independent News Source" — isn't the web the damnedest thing?]
Monday, 16 June 2003
Alphablogger Cameron Barrett (the brains behind
CamWorld) has launched
WatchBlog, a three-columned blog focusing on issues relating to the 2004 election. Editors of the Democratic persuasion control the left column; Republican editors control the right column; and Third Party types control the content in the middle. This is a really fantastic idea. Let us hope the site does not disappoint!
...a man who never lived had a relatively ordinary day.
Happy Bloomsday, readers!
Friday, 13 June 2003
There is an online parlor game of sorts that seems to be quite popular amongst the
Live Journal types. Someone sends you five questions, and you answer 'em on yer blog. Well, why the hell not? The following questions come to me from my good friend Dave,
The Dangerous Episcopalian, a.k.a. Bigpancakes.
more...
Thursday, 12 June 2003
California State Senator John Vasconcellos has introduced a bill that would provide ID cards to users of medicinal marijuana. The legislation, through sheer coincidence, currently carries the designation — are you ready for this? —
Senate Bill 420. Not laughing?
Catch up.
[found on petebeck.com]
Monday, 09 June 2003
Surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears? Take a one-minute vacation from the life you are living.
One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else.
One-minute vacations are brought to you by
Quiet American and are highly addictive.
Sunday, 08 June 2003
Does anybody out there have a use for the Insert key? I accidentally hit it a few minutes ago — kicking the machine into that godawful bizarro mode in which anything you type overwrites whatever is in its path — and because I type pretty fast, it took me a few keystrokes before I realized what was happening, at which point I had to stop, look, find the freaking Insert key, and punch it again to stop the insanity. I have to stop and look to find the key, mind you, because outside of situations like this where I've inadvertently hit it, I have no need to hit it. Ever. I do not know of a single application in which it performs a useful function instead of "enable bizarro mode." It exists only to cause me a minor annoyance now and again when it requires me to press it again. As if to keep it appeased.
(Can some Mac user out there tell me if Macs do the same thing with Insert?)
Thursday, 05 June 2003
Naomi Watts would like you know that her dog may be sick, but
he is no stoner. Please be understanding.
"The postwar period in Iraq is messy. We haven't found what we said we'd find there and there are unpleasant questions about assumptions we made and intelligence we had," said one senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "If many more months go by and our troops are still there, the Iraqis are still fighting each other and us, and we still haven't found any WMD, there will be hell to pay."
Oh yeah? Ya mean things
aren't looking so good overseas? Well they're no better here, where a new government audit spells it out quite clearly: Detentions of foreigners following 9/11 were "
unduly harsh". (A Justice Department spokeswoman's response was the bureaucratic equivalent of "tough shit.") Meanwhile, the Rs decided to trim the cost of the President's tax cut by
hosing cuts for the folks who need it most.
But not to worry. Perhaps it will
all be over soon. (If you feel down about this stuff a lot, perhaps you should bookmark that last link.)
Monday, 02 June 2003
Every now and again I find an old eighties album in the used bin that I've never gotten around to buying a copy of. And I snag it. The most recent is INXS's
Kick. Man, what an album. How many of y'all remember "Mediate," the trippy coda for "Need You Tonight"? It consists mostly of nonsense along with a few great bits of advice, all in phrases ending in -ate — not unlike when Joyce fills a page with -ation words in
Finnegans Wake. The "Need You Tonight" video included "Mediate," which got a treatment that ripped off Bob Dylan's promo for "Subterranean Homesick Blues": As each line was sung, a card with the lyric was held up and then tossed to the ground.
I thought it was pretty common knowledge that INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence died of autoerotic asphyxiation, but Google's results seem to indicate that that fact has never been confirmed. No matter the cause, when INXS died along with Hutchence, we lost a fantastic band.
Sunday, 01 June 2003
Last night as I was preparing dinner, there was a strange and alarming noise outside. It sounded sort of like someone setting off some firecrackers in the nearby parking lot, but I took a look out there and saw nothing. Today I discovered the source: The large tree outside our apartment lost one of its main branches.
Last week there were some birds beginning to nest in that tree. They chirped nearly constantly in the morning and at twilight. Today there was no sign of them.
Happy June, readers!
Thursday, 29 May 2003
What do you do when you've just burned a CD and you realize you don't have a spare jewelcase to store it in? Point your browser to
papercdcase.com.
[And it's powered by Free Software! Buy recycled paper!]
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
The Netherlands is gearing up to outlaw indoor smoking, California and New York City style. But wait! What about Amsterdam's coffee shops?
Unclear.
It's taken four years, but the
California DVD case will finally reach the state Supreme Court on Thursday. (From there, it will probably head to the U.S. Supreme Court.) And yet, the media is still
getting the story completely wrong: DeCSS was not created to copy DVDs (though its code can be used in that fashion), but rather to make DVDs viewable with
Free Software.
See, you may think you "own" those shiny silver discs you've bought. You may think you can play your DVDs on whatever damn hardware you like. But the movie industry says you're wrong. Moving overseas? Your American DVDs won't play on European or Asian players. Run Linux instead of Windows or the Mac OS? Too bad: There is no sanctioned player software for that platform. Free Software projects don't pay ransoms to gain the "secret recipes" needed to access closed data formats — instead, such projects reverse engineer the formats in question. The movie mavens (along with their inbred cousins in the music industry and the commercial software cabal) want to outlaw this sort of reverse engineering for good.
This might not sound scary if you're the type of person who sticks to commercial software and never has a need to reverse engineer a damned thing. Windows will always play DVDs, and Windows is all you'll ever use, so why should you care about this issue? I've got one word for you: e-books. If industry can in fact control
how you access the content you have paid for, then the evil possibilities are endless when we arrive at a time and space where e-books are more prevalent than their dead-tree counterparts.
Say you someday purchase a book in Microsoft Reader 11.0 format. Two years later, you decide to upgrade to a new e-book reader. You get home and you realize that your new reader only reads Microsoft Reader 12.0 files. Microsoft is willing to "upgrade" your 11.0 format books to the new format, but for a fee.
Right there, you've been denied access to content you
paid for. Will it
be legal for you, at that point in time, to reverse engineer the 11.0 books you
own and convert them to 12.0 format yourself? Or would it be legal for you to hire some good-natured hacker to do this work for you?
Some geek in the back just stood up and said my example is bogus, because we can safely assume that new hardware would be backwards-compatible and would be able to read older files. All right, then: Say you purchase a bunch of books in a competing format — Adobe's e-book format, version 8.0 let's say — and that competing format doesn't do so well in the marketplace, and eventually, Adobe gives up, packs up, goes home. You've got a few dozen books in their format, which is now abandoned. And then your Adobe e-book reader fails, and you can't find replacement parts or anyone who can fix it. Will it be legal for you to reverse engineer the Adobe format and convert your books to another format you can access? Will it be legal for you to pay a hacker to do the work for you?
We don't know the answers to these questions yet. The next chapter in this particular legal saga begins tomorrow.
Thursday, 22 May 2003
This smells like a hoax to me (where'd the picture come from?) but I don't care. I love bears. And here we've got one that
came across a U.S. Navy submarine and decided to try to make a snack of it.
[found on jwz's Journal]
Tuesday, 20 May 2003
If you're visiting Manchester, England anytime soon, you can
have lunch at Fawlty's, be mistreated, and love it. (I'll have a side of rat, please.)
Are you like me? Are you a wannabe, self-taught coder who understands the concept of
regular expressions, but hasn't mastered them yet? Or are you a Real Coder who needs a tool to help churn out particularly nasty regexes? The
Regex Coach is your salvation. Look at that screenshot! Wow! And the sucker runs in Windows or Linux! If only it were
Free...
[found on hebig.org/blog]
We all worry about the folks who create The Simpsons running out of ideas. (Well, those of us who do not believe that's already happened worry about it.) If truth be told, the series is just not as consistently funny as it used to be. How much longer can it possibly go on?
Last night as I was watching the show, a solution struck me. What if all the characters changed? I mean, what if they shook up the show with some season-ender that just changed everything, and then picked up from there the following season, and stuck with the changes? It would be sort of like that trick they pulled on you in the original
Legend of Zelda, where, at game's end, you were
suddenly told there was a second quest to fulfill. And in that second quest, all the locations were the same, and yet different; all the characters were the same, and yet different.
Imagine: Springfield outlaws nuclear power, doing away with Homer's job and reducing Mr. Burns to a beggar. Mayor Quimby is impeached and removed from office. Moe finally comes out of the closet and declares his love for Smithers; they open a bed and breakfast while Barney takes over Moe's tavern. The Simpsons win the lottery and move into Mr. Burns's mansion. Maggie (but no one else) suddenly ages a few years and is no longer completely dependent on Marge, who celebrates her freedom by running for mayor. You get the idea. Now it's your turn: What happens to Flanders? Grandpa? The Old Sea Captain? Perhaps some characters become more important than before, while others fade into obscurity (I nominate Reverend Lovejoy). Mightn't all this get us ten years of fresh scripts?
Alas, history shows this approach isn't a guaranteed creative jackpot: Recall the directionless second season of Twin Peaks, in which they changed most of the show's characters drastically but couldn't very well figure out what to do with them. Still, wouldn't bizarro Simpsons someday be better than no Simpsons?
I got some spam this evening. It contained one ad image, hyperlinked to a web site that's apparently paying a spammer to push some traffic its way. I never saw the image, because I use an e-mail client whose interface looks like it may be older than me, and it doesn't do images. The body text of the message read as follows:
Here's what the Big Game bonfire looked like last night at Cal's Greek Theater. Walking back down southside, we passed under the Campanille, which was lit up in blue with gold graphics on each side, like this representation of the coveted Axe.
Things are always strange when we visit the Farm but there was something especially strange (and, though it pains me to admit, cool) going on down there today, as you can see in the shot I took of the Stanfurd Band doing their moronic bit before the game. Look back there on the sideline, and you'll see a large Trojan Rabbit, straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We never did find out what the deal with it was. It left before the end of the game.
Wandering ever-so-slightly off the beaten path in southwest Berkeley last Saturday, I found a building that was really a ghost.
You see the damnedest things on the streets of San Francisco.
The Grand Lake Theater is not only the Bay Area's most beautiful old-time moviehouse. It also displays fantastic political messages on its marquee from time to time, just as the old U.C. Theater did (and how we miss it so!).
One rule of vacations is that sometimes the weather does not cooperate. But, even with the clouds, does this look so bad?
