I'm just saying....

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Minus one feline...

RIP Pittising
1997-2011


She was the smallest kitten I'd ever seen, not much bigger than my fist, and she had a coat the texture of a Brillo pad. She was ill when we adopted her; she had giardia, which meant, in quick succession and despite the ridiculous amounts of handwashing, we got giardia. (I have never felt so awful, and hopefully never will again. I can remember that it was the summer of 1997 because I ate the first solid food I'd had in a week on the day it was reported that Princess Diana had died.)

She didn't stay small, though. She was a big gray cat of indeterminate lineage, a 20lb monster. (She did, however, eventually get a nice soft coat.) When this cat jumped on your lap or on your stomach in bed, you damn well knew it. She would be petted on her own terms, when she wanted it, and was one of those cats who would lie across your hands on the keyboard. All twenty pounds, on your fingers, on the keyboard. The shoving-of-the-butt-in-your-face-while-watching-TV was another favorite game.

But she was a sweetheart. She adopted the new kittens as her own, even carrying them in her mouth and grooming them. She accepted the advent of the hairless kittens with reasonable grace, though I would get these looks like, "I don't mean to tell you your business, but those things ought to be hunting for themselves by now." She was the first cat to accept the kids and seek out their affection. The two boys were so thrilled the first time she deigned to sit in their laps.

She hated the vet like no other animal I've ever known. She never attacked, but would sulk to beat the band, and go hide and hiss at anyone who came near. Extracting her from under the waterbed was always an interesting challenge.

But 14 is pretty old, even for an indoor cat. I hope she wasn't uncomfortable, towards the end. I don't think she was. Even tonight, before it became clear that a trip to the veterinary ER was in our immediate future, she singled out and snuggled up to each of us. My grandmother always said that animals would say good-bye to those they loved before they died, and I hope she was right.

That's all I have to say about that.

Sunday Miscellany: National Creamsicle Day Edition

The word "zany" dates from the 16th century, and comes from the name of some of the peasant class characters in the Commedia dell'Arte.

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Southern Utah is beautiful. Remote, but beautiful.

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I bought a CD of dirty jokes, songs and stories recorded on Edison cylinders at the turn of the 20th century, and WOW are some of them blue. There's nothing new under the sun...

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There was a legit reason for the no brown M&Ms clause.

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I'm currently reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It's easy to forget that most of the really interesting hippie stuff happened before 1969.

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There is a Circle of Hell in which you eternally shop for school supplies.

For my once and future Iowa peeps: Green River recipe

I got to thinking about these after reading an article about soda jerks and old-style soda fountains (read it: it's got recipes) and after hearing about a friend's RAGBRAI experiences.

These are SO good. You may want to scale the recipe down a bit, though.

Green River

Lemon Syrup:

1 gallon boiling water
15 pounds granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz lemon extract
1/2 oz citric fruit acid

Lime Syrup:

1 gallon boiling water
15 pounds granulated sugar
1 1/2 oz lime extract
1/2 oz citric fruit acid

Crushed ice
Carbonated water

To make the lemon syrup, pour boiling water over sugar. Cool and strain. Ad extract and citric fruit acid. Pour into gallon jug and store. Follow the same method for preparing lime syrup. When ready to serve, pour 1 1/2 oz. of each syrup into an 8 ounce glass. Fill with crushed ice and carbonated water. Stir and serve.

Makes 88 servings.

(From A Cook's Tour of Iowa by Susan Puckett)

Sunday Miscellany - I can haz new toy!

So I formatted the laptop and slapped Ubuntu 11.04 on it - the "Natty Narwhal" release.  So far so good, though the touchpad just sucks in this OS.   I mean, the touchpad just about sucks in every OS, but this is remarkably bad.  Oh well, USB mice are cheap.  (On the A+ exam, one of the questions asked about troubleshooting touchpads, and one of the multiple choice answers was "Plug in a real mouse."  I knew this wasn't the correct answer, but I wanted to choose it anyway.)

The only tricky things so far have been the install of the DVD playback support and the wireless drivers.  And man, for a Linux install, finding the terminal window is a lot trickier than it should be.  After some false starts I was able to dredge the remnants of what UNIX commands I learned back in the Wild Wild West days of the internet and successfully navigate the CLI.  That, and remembering about case sensitivity, should be my big challenges.  :)

I've gone purely Linux on this, and removed Windows completely.  If I may channel Marko Ramius for a minute, "When he got to the New World, Cortez burned his ships.  As a result, his men were well-motivated."  If I have to use it, I'll get better faster than if I have the option to slip back into the familiar.  So we'll see what I can learn here.

(Wow, is it just me or does this OS handle graphics a lot better?  I mean, I knew it always did, back in the day, but VGA wasn't that hard to beat.  There's a noticeable difference from even the Win 7 ATI driver.)

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I actually have another new toy!  My tabletop warp-weighted loom came in from Lacemaker USA.  I haven't had a chance to warp it up yet - I'm reading through Marta Hoffman's The Warp-Weighted Loom first.  The nice thing about this model is it has holes in the beam, so I can warp it without having to weave the threads into an inkle band first.  I'll give that a try at some point, naturally, but I'm keen to get started.

Looking at the design, I'm pretty sure I could tweak it to do a 2/1 twill, though I'm going to start with a tabby and see how that looks.  Without the top selvedge, naturally, it's impossible to prove whether something was done on a warp-weighted or a horizontal loom, but they're pretty sure people were doing 2/2 twills in the Bronze age, if not the Neolithic.
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I'm woefully behind on all Things Fannish, lately.  I haven't even seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean,  much less the new Harry Potter.  DH said that there were people dressed up for the premiere on Friday.  I have GOT to get a Minerva McGonagall outfit together.

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Cool stuff I found recently:


A fascinating article on city-wide pneumatic tube systems.  Seriously, a literal system of Intertubes.

The Prague Pneumatic Post. I have GOT to go see that someday.

Questioning the Inca Paradox.  In which is discussed the possibility of the Inca using knotted strings as a type of written message.  I learned a new word:  any system of notation that conveys information without being related to the speech sounds of a particular language is a semasiographic system.  (The article uses the examples of musical notation and Arabic numerals.)

A remarkably even-handed article on fanfiction.  Look, I know a lot of people on my various f-lists are NOT fanfiction, em, fans, but I am.  I will freely admit, the vast majority of it is complete dreck.  I mean, you end up staring at things going, "Really? An actual person wrote this, or has someone gone crazy with a Markov generator?"  But the stuff that's good is really, really good; it feels like you've found another episode of your favorite show, or that your favorite author wrote another chapter.  And that gets addicting.

Plus, it's people trying to write who might not otherwise.  And is a more constructive hobby than watching TV.  So there.

Sunday Miscellany

2D Goggles: pure unadulterated awesome. Seriously. Make sure you read the footnotes, too.

(I <3 Steampunk. The only reason I don't have a full costume/persona is the distressing lack of free time lately, and well, Victorian-era corsetry is beyond my current skill point level in sewing.)

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This is a funny commercial.

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A 19th Century LOLcat.

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The more I read about late 19th century counterculture, the less I'm impressed by the Hippies. Seriously, your grandparents did it first, Boomers!

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SNARK

Right, so the kids are going to the Very Good Summer School (the one for which their Mother got up at the ass-crack of dawn and sat in the freezing cold line, not that I'm counting) and so far so good. They're enjoying it. Mostly, they're enjoying the swimming, but they're having fun (and coming home completely exhausted, which is a good chunk of the point).

But they are taking a few classes. And, for one of the Heir Apparent's classes, the teacher sent home a slip to be signed giving the teacher permission to give the kid pieces of chocolate as a reward. Entirely unobjectionable: I would not take the word of a nine-year-old when it comes to food allergies. However the choices were 1) the kid is allowed to have chocolate; 2) no the kid is allergic but may have something else, and, number 3:

I would prefer that my child not receive extrinsic rewards.

LOLWUT!?

Who *thinks* like that? Seriously? These are nine-year-olds, for crying out loud. Are you expecting them to find the innate beauty in parts of speech? Are they supposed to rejoice in the times tables? Get a real kick out of memorizing the important dates in American history?

Look, if you can get a kid genuinely interested in the process of learning, that's great. But at this stage of the game, you're not actually teaching them anything interesting. You're teaching the building blocks that will eventually lead to them being able to learn interesting things. Times tables will become calculus. Parts of speech will teach them what they need to learn to write, and to appreciate a well-turned sentence. You need to learn when the Civil War happened before you can read the fascinating accounts of the war itself. The cool shit comes later, and kids are notoriously bad at delaying gratification.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that some people just forget what it was like being young...

Monday Miscellany

A day late, a bit short and very random. It's been that kind of week:

A Boustrophedon is a type of text in which the lines are read first from left to right; then, on the next line right to left; then, on the next line, left to right - like an ox ploughing a field, hence the name. That's just amazingly confusing.

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A very timely (and funny) filk from Tom Smith Don't Tweet Your Weiner. Slightly ribald.

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In the interest of fiber nerdery, I bring you the table-top warp-weighted loom. OH how I covet it.

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Paul Krugman lands a zinger.

Cave paintings

So one of the things I got to do last weekend was go see "Cave of Forgotten Dreams," directed by Werner Herzog. Basically, there are areas in the south of France that are on limestone and just riven with cave systems; occasionally, these are found to have evidence of ancient humanity. The most famous is, of course, the cave of paintings at Lascaux, but the Chauvet finds are even older, dating from 33,000 years ago. They let Werner Herzog in with a camera to document it, and he turned it into a 90-minute digital 3-D film.

It was AWESOME. Just amazing. The paintings were mostly of animals, and entirely untouched. Even more fascinating is that the cave system was in use for some time; for example, one of the paintings depicts a herd of oxen. It wasn't originally a herd, though. Someone drew an ox, then someone else came along FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER and drew another ox. So the caves were in use, known of, and the images were of things that would have remotely similar meanings.

(Incidentally, the narration on the film is entirely worth ignoring. It ranges from the banal to the irritating to the whifty. But they're never going to allow the public into these caves, so this is as close as you can get.)

It was also a painful reminder of how little we know, and how little we will ever know. Those people - recognizably us, definitely homo sapiens sapiens - had a culture, apparently had religious beliefs, and we will never know what they were.

The amount of stuff that gets lost to time is staggering. (Actually, the amount we've been able to infer from limited data is equally staggering. For example, they know that humans started wearing clothes about 100,000 years ago, courtesy of the lice we carried along with us. Most other mammals get infested with one type of louse, whereas we have two: head lice and clothing lice, and ne'er the twain shall meet. Biologists were able to extrapolate backwards to see that the two species diverged about 100,000 years ago. Well done, clever people!)

So much of what we do is ephemera. If you're extraordinarily lucky and manage to get a piece of paper stored in *exactly* the right conditions, it might last a few thousand years. Leather, maybe a little longer. (This is why the Declaration of Independence is barely legible and the Magna Carta is still pretty clear.) Modern media is the worst, to the point that people worry that we might be entering a digital dark age, where future historians will have NO idea how we lived on a day-to-day basis. The videotapes from the Viking Mars missions in the 1970s are already degrading to the point of illegibility. Basically, if you want it to last, get it off your computer.

But I've always held that people don't really change. Not fundamentally. How they express their fundamental humanity might change, but deep down, at the end of the day, they want to have enough to eat; to not be alone; to love their children and to continue on into the future.

I love it when they find an old trove of letters, the only medium truly written for a contemporary reader as opposed to the public or posterity. Roman letters found in Britain, near Hadrian's wall, talk of birthday parties and sending pairs of socks to a soldier deployed far from home. There's a wonderful Sumerian letter in which the author instructs the recipient to remind so-and-so that that bastard still owes her money. And one of my favorite diary entries by Daniel Defoe talks about how, before a the Great Storm of 1703, his barometer fell so low that he thought that "the tube had been handled... by the children."

As the mother of two boys, I felt the most astonishing sense of kinship across three centuries.

One remnant of humanity they found, before the landslide which caused the cave to be abandoned, was the footprints of a child, possibly the oldest known human footprints that can be positively dated. Why was the kid there? Did he do some of the drawings? Was he just there to fetch somebody, to admire the handiwork, or did he have a role to play?

We'll never know.

Sunday Miscellany: Post-Rapture Edition

Well, I didn't get taken up, so I guess I'm going to Hell. This surprises no one.

Things I have learned this week:

"To Anacreon in Heaven" is actually pretty hard to sing, much harder than "The Star Spangled Banner." Seriously, Francis Scott Key, what the hell?

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World War One is still claiming victims on the former battlefields of France, to the point where some farmers have to have armor on the undersides of their equipment. Seriously, there are full-time bomb disposal workers who do nothing but remove WWI ordnance. Mustard gas: it still sucks after a hundred years.

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Monogenetic volcanoes are short-lived, and don't reactivate after they've gone dormant.

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Maryland has battlefields from two civil wars.

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I'm no gardener; just ask the bowl of thyme dessicating on my front porch. Plants tend to die in my custody. However, I really like formal gardens, and, as a fan, I really like boxwood. I love hedge mazes. But the thing of it is, the smell of boxwood is particularly evocative to me. I once tried to express it to someone like this: there's a garden somewhere at the end of the universe where time stands still, stopped at a hot, drowsy summer afternoon for all eternity, and it smells of boxwood.

When even your mother looks at you like you're nuts, you tend to keep these observations to yourself afterwards.

But today I found out that Oliver Wendell Holmes had similar feelings about the smell of boxwood, that it is "the fragrance of eternity" and “it is one of the odors that carries us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past: if ever we lived on another ball of stone than this, it must be that there was box growing on it.”

Ha! So at least if I am crazy, I am crazy in good company. Maybe it's like that gene that makes cilantro taste like soap? One gene makes cilantro inedible, another makes the smell of boxwood trigger temporal hallucinations? I dunno.

I didn't mean it!

So my Facebook status for 1 April was all about how I was quitting the Internet. Seriously, it was MEANT to be a ha-ha, like that would ever happen sort of thing.

Yeah.

It's been a fun six weeks: upheaval at work, a (groundless) health scare, a couple of deadlines, general exhaustion, personal difficulties and a visit from my old friend The Black Dog.

But I had a great trip to Oogie's (more on that later, with the long-promised pictures), Oliver had a great (if belated) birthday party, spring has more or less sprung (though it's been a really schizoid May), the kids' summer is more or less set. The one hobbyish thing I've been doing is a little bit of spinning: you've got a time limit with grease-spinning. It has to be done within a couple of months of coming off the sheep, or the lanolin gets too old to draft properly. So I've done a bit of that on my Turkish Drop Spindle, with lovely results.

In sad news, if anyone knows of anyone who wants to buy a membership to this year's North American Discworld Convention, let me know. Because of the changes at work and some juggling of vacation time, I won't be able to go.

Things I have learned since late March:

Spinning in the grease ROCKS, and gives a VERY nice finished product.

I need to sleep more.

Astronomers (and, by extension, the people in the Space Program) use the Julian Calendar.

Abbottabad is not a good place for a SUPER-SECRET HIDEOUT.

Lendrum makes a very nice spinning wheel. Am hoping for the Dollar to gain against the Loonie.

Phosphorus can be distilled from human urine. This involves a complicated process that would probably not endear me to my husband or neighbors.

Cleaning out an IT office of over a decade of occupancy will result in days of work largely resembling an archaeological dig. Was unable to interest Indiana Jones in any of the contents.

Perimenopause can begin as early as your late thirties.

Money can't buy taste. On the other hand, wearing a beige rococco toilet seat on her head was probably the only way Princess Beatrice was going to get in any of the paparazzi shots of William and Kate's wedding.

That's all for now. Definitely more later.

Wow...

The white lines, man, I can still see the white lines when I close my eyes.

My mind is seething with ambition: gotta get that table loom that Meg gave me warped up; want to finish that biography of Cleopatra I started; want to start processing the fleeces I got this weekend (step one - read up on spinning in the grease); want to write my "What I Did This Weekend" report; want to clean the house (Dear God it's a mess)...

All the while my body is saying, "Bitch, we just spent 18 hours out of the last 72 in the car. Go pass out."

I think I'll take the majority vote.

Sunday Miscellany: The End of the World. With Peacocks.

Universe save us from the eschatologists! Look, ok, this week has been Special. Really, really Special. But a bigass earthquake in Japan (now with added radiation) and a new war in the Middle East does not an apocalypse make. Is this stressful and anxiety-producing? Absolutely. But I don't care what the Mayans said, this stuff isn't more frequent; it's just that the advent of cheap recording devices and unlimited bandwith has just made it more immediate. Even twenty years ago, a terrible tsunami was just Something Awful that Happened in Foreign Parts. Now you're watching the shaky camera video of water lapping at someone's feet and desperately hoping they got out okay.

But! You say, Nostradamus predicted that in the End Times a Second Sun would rise over Japan!

Seriously, you're taking life-changing advice from a guy who doesn't know the difference between fission and a fusion reaction? Puh-leeze!

I've never gotten the obsession with predicting the end of the World, nor the apparent glee that some of the predictors take from the prospect. Really, you want all your non-believing and differently-believing friends and neighbors to die horrible deaths in war and torture while you get swept up to Heaven? Do you dream of their last agonizing thoughts being about how they should've listened to you and accepted Jesus into their hearts?

And they call *me* passive aggressive.


To quote Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite books):

"I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff--well, if you could see them all in Heaven--serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add."

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I learned a new word this week:

Pavonicide: The killing of a peacock.

Those of you who went to Grand Outlandish in the years after they moved it from Sir Kragon's land will know exactly why I'm glad there's a word for it, but for those who don't, we spent several entire Memorial Day Weekends on a piece of land owned by someone who raised peacocks.

OMG those birds are annoying. I can still do a damned accurate imitation of a peacock call courtesy of that weekend. AT ALL HOURS, they went off. Let me tell you, the LAST thing you want to hear at the crack of dawn after you've been out at bardic circles all night long is one of those things going off in your ear.

The peacocks escaped the weekends unscathed, to my certain knowledge, despite the presence of a thousand people with the weaponry and know how to dispose of them properly. We even had recipes...

Beware The Ides of March...

It's hard to know what to say about the ongoing crisis in Japan without sounding trite. I can't even imagine the horror of the whole thing, and frankly, I don't want to. I continue to be humbled before the brave stoicism of those affected directly by this; I don't know if things would be the same if this happened in an American city. If an agnostic's prayers count for anything, they've got them.

What do we even call it? The Sendai Earthquake-Tsunami-Volcano-Radiological Disaster of 2011? The Great Embuggerance? And seriously, what the hell? For crying out loud, Universe, didn't Japan have enough bad karmic crap happen to it in the 20th century?

I've been watching the coverage pretty much non-stop since it happened; BBC and NHK mostly. (The American networks have been mostly useless. CNN is close, but they're trying too hard to tart up the story, as if it needed it.) Every time there's some sort of crisis, I take to the news like a crazed junkie. I feel really ghoulish doing it, but it verges on compulsion.

The thing of it is that I'm this way about a lot of things. A quick scan of my personal library shows more than a few books on plagues, catastrophes, sociopathy, psychopathy and other horrors. My husband makes fun of me: I can't watch horror movies, as obviously fake as they are, but I will watch all sorts of documentaries about disasters and serial killers. He actually asked once, "So you can only watch when it's actually happening to real people?"

But it's more complicated than that.

I can't NOT look, when something terrifies me. I'm getting better about flying, but at the depths of the phobia, I was infinitely more comfortable in a window seat staring at the ground, the better to see that it was still 30,000 feet below me. Once, when I went to visit my friends who live at the top of the HILL of DEATH in Colorado, my friends drove me back down the HILL of DEATH so we could go to the pub. They noticed that my conversation was becoming increasingly disjointed, and looked to see my eyes transfixed on the edge of the cliff we were driving along, and they said, "Just don't look!"

But I have to. It's like somehow if I keep my eyes on the Peril, that I'll be able keep it at bay.

Irrational, I know, but there it is. So you're on notice, O Great Embuggerance, that I'm watching you.

Watching the ongoing coverage does make doing a customer-service-related job somewhat awkward. It is VERY tempting, when someone calls in crying, "OMG I'LL DIE IF I CAN'T GET TO FACEBOOK THIS HAS RUINED MY WHOLE DAY I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!" to respond with something along the lines of:

"Just shut the fuck up and move to Sendai."

It was the week that was...

I'm on a news diet. I just spent the last three days staring at various video feeds running the horrible, horrible news from Japan. I'm not allowed to go to BBC, NHK or the NYT for the rest of the night.

I can go to CNN, though. It's not like they actually show news, anyway.

I am at a loss for words. The people of Honshu are living through every nightmare scenario I could ever imagine, their entire world wiped out in the blink of an eye. My heart goes out to them.

A freaking 9.0. I mean the goddamned earth *moved.* The axis tilted 4 inches, the day slowed down a little for a second, and a freaking TECTONIC PLATE dragged itself over two feet. Watching all the footage, it looked for all the world like I'd dumped out a box of legos and ran a garden hose through it. If I'd seen this in a movie, I'd have slagged the SFX guys for overplaying it.

It's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget that the space in which we live is so very fragile, that we live on this tiny little strip between ice and fire...

Excuse me, I gotta go hug my kids.

Sunday Miscellany...

For the record, I don't hate all contemporary art.  For example, Brian Dettmer is 15 kinds of cool with a side of awesome-sauce.  I didn't think I'd ever admire book desecration this much, but it's absolutely fascinating.
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I alternate between being amused and appalled at this NYT story on the  Native Society, "a new club that is limited to native New Yorkers, many of them city dwellers who might reside in 10021 — the ZIP code of upper Park and Fifth Avenues — or be graduates of certain prep schools."

It's a wonderful example of a reporter very gently snarking on the subject of his article.  The undeserved arrogance is a schadenfreude-tastic joy to behold.  Take, for example, this quotation:

“It’s not about who you were born, or what you were given, but what you’ve made of yourself,” explained one member, Alexa Winner, a 22-year-old stylist and fashion designer. “Anyone can come from a wealthy family, but it takes actual brains and ambition to do something with that.”

SweetieHoney, if you’re 22 and you’d actually accomplished something Earth-shattering, then the New York Times would be writing about You the Wunderkind and Your Fabulous Accomplishments, not the Sooper-Seekrit Ultra-Cool Members’-Only clubhouse that you and your little friends came up with.

Seriously, kids, if someone is comparing you to an Edith Wharton novel in this context, it's not a compliment.  :)

On the plus side, I now totally get that "Sex and the City" episode, "Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women."
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I'm reading the comment threads on the Austen threads at Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog (Disqus is blocked at work) and I have to say that I've never quite gotten the mindset that hates to see a favorite book turned into a movie.  I'm not saying that good books don't get totally screwed over into bad movies, because that happens more often than not, but that the book and the movie are two different media, with two different requirements.  What makes a good book does not necessarily make a good movie, and vice versa.  There is room in this world for two different interpretations of the same story.  Embrace the "And."  Maybe the movie will suck, maybe it won't, but it doesn't (or at least, shouldn't) change your relationship with the story itself.

Incidentally, this will be my 21st year on the Internet, and I will tell you that every group of fans has the Flamewar Topic: the question that, if introduced, will cause the group to instantly balkanize and lob insults at each other.  On the Star Trek groups, it's Kirk vs. Picard; on the MST3k, it was Mike v. Joel.  Rec.arts.polymer.clay could not be relied upon to discuss the relative merits of Fimo and Sculpey in a rational manner, and for the love of God, avoid the Rabid Ianto Fangirls at all costs.

You'd expect better of the Jane Austen fans, but, seriously, don't bring up the subject of Fanny Price without donning asbestos undies first.

It's early.

I'm sitting in the line to sign the kids up for a very good summer school.  Apparently, turning up at 4:00 makes you a piker.... the really hard-core folks camp out overnight.

This seemed like such a good idea in the light of day.

There's a strange, vaguely tent-city vibe to the whole affair; people cocooned in sleeping bags on lawn chairs.  People who, probably, a decade or so ago, sat out all night for rock concert tickets.  (Or, in my case, for tickets to see Star Wars: Episode One.  I had a great time in that line - a much better time than I did at the movie.)  There's probably some profound observation to be made about that dichotomy, but I'm too cold and tired to think of it.

All I can say is that this better count towards a better nursing home.

Lunchtime Blogging: Austen v. Coates

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a married blogger in possession of a good blog, must be in want of some Jane Austen.

The inestimable Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading his way through the Jane Austen novels, and it's been interesting to watch; there's a sort of ZOMG THIS IS ACTUALLY GOOD reaction that is entertaining, and it's combined with the fun of watching someone read something you love for the first time.

I can't wait until he gets to Persuasion.

in which I raise my eyebrow at an essay on art appreciation...

I ran across an article called "How to Behave In An Art Museum" linked to on Andrew Sullivan's blog this week.

Particular quotation:


Your friend comes to visit. You go to whatever exhibit you found on the New York Times website that morning while he was sleeping. At the museum, he talks about the pictures in a voice loud enough to make you uncomfortable. He asks, “What do you think makes this painting so powerful?” Or, “What do you think this artist is trying to say?” The questions are not stupid. It’s just that you can’t think of how to answer them without sounding stupid yourself. Should you say, “I think the vibrant use of orange really enhances the composition”? Or, “She’s critiquing commodity culture, while also reveling in it”? No! Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed. But refusing to answer your friend’s questions is no solution either. You’re paralyzed. And you’re not even sure what you’re afraid of. You’re not sure whether your replies will make you look like a philistine or a snob. Which would be worse? Which are you more qualified to be?


Good Lord.

I'm having difficulty articulating the extent to which this person annoys me.

I'm not sure what's worse; the sort of modern artist who feels that something is more profound when it's projected on the ceiling, or all the people who feel like they're being graded if they don't say the right things about it.

Perhaps the author would be more capable of having something profound to say if he wasn't so worried about sounding profound for the other museum-goers who, if they are even remotely aware of his existence, are probably just wondering why this guy looks like a high school student who has forgotten his cheat sheet?

Dear author: just go to the damn museum, look at the pretty pictures, and for the love of God and little Fishes, get the hell over yourself. 

It's funny... the author talks about the decline of High Culture, as if High Culture is anything but a modern phenomenon.  This division of high and low culture seems to have crept in sometime in the 19th century.  Before then, art appreciation was linked inextricably to your social standing or to religion.  People were exposed to great art because 1) they were rich and could afford it, or 1) they were in church, where either the institution itself or its noble (read: rich) patrons had put it there.  People wanted to be conversant with great art because it was such a potent indicator of not just social status, but of financial status.

Now, of course, as the author points out, it still is, but it's an entirely different measure: whether or not the viewer has imbibed enough of the current level of study, enough of the vocabulary, to measure up as one of the Educated Elite.  The actual opinion of the artwork is not nearly as important as the words one uses to talk about it; this sort of Emperor's New Clothes orthodoxy is the death of original thinking when it comes to art.  One almost envies the 17th century patron who could say, "I don't care, I just don't like it.  Do it over or I don't pay."

If all you're doing is coming up with something that's so abstruse that only other properly educated experts can get anything out of it, how is that not simply intellectual masturbation?  How is that so very different than the Klingon Language Institute?  I'll tell you: the Klingon Language Institute doesn't take itself seriously, and the Art World is the Universe's major supplier of Taking Itself Too Seriously.

If art is supposed to hold the mirror up to human existence, what good is it if most of the existing humans can't understand it?

And, for the record, no, I don't think that art should be a race to the bottom.  I do think art should be challenging, but the hallmark of a truly great artist is that his or her work can be appreciated by intellectuals and plebians alike.  Everyone laughs at Shakespeare, everyone admires the Mona Lisa, and Beethoven's 5th is the most overplayed piece of music EVER for a reason.  All these can be, and are, appreciated by complete neophytes and experts at the same time.

As long as, of course, they're not taking themselves too seriously...

Lunchtime Blogging...

Brought to you by my laptop and my tethered Android.  Oh, the heady freedom!

It's a nice sunny day out here on the park bench outside my building.  A little bit chilly, in the breeze, but give it a couple of weeks...

So anyway, today I ran across a friend's post that stated that a friend of his was looking for work in the professional field of radical geography.

Radical geography?

Previously, I would've defined "radical geography" as something akin to what happened in Christchurch, NZ, this week, but according to the wikipedia entry on Critical Geography, Radical Geography:

...emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as the inadequacies of behavioralist methods became clear. It sought to counter the postivist quantitative methods with normative techniques drawn from Marxist theory: quantitative methods, it argued, were not useful unless alternatives or solutions were given to problems.

The final and, arguably, most successful of the three schools was humanistic geography, initially formed part of behavioural geography but fundamentally disagreed with the use of quantitative methods in assessing human behaviour and thoughts in favour of qualitative analysis. Humanistic geography used many of the techniques that the humanities use such as source analysis and the use of text and literature to try to ‘get into the mind’ of the subject(s). Furthermore, Cultural geography revived due to humanistic geography new areas of study such as Feminist geography, postmodernist and poststructuralist geography began to emerge.

My first reaction:  "Wait, what?"
My second reaction:  "No, seriously, what?"
My third reaction:  "We are still talking about borders and land formations here, right?"
My fourth reaction:  "Ok, the next academic who gripes at me about the incomprehensibility of computer jargon will get snarked at with extreme sarcasm."

In all seriousness, I hope the friend of my friend finds a job soon.  And that I might get to meet them someday, so that they can explain what it is they do using the small words.  :)

To quote Larry Colen:

Twas Unix and the C++
Did compile and load upon the VAX:
All Ritchie was the Kernighan,
And LISP ran in GNU EMACS.


"Beware the Jargontalk, my son.
The Mac that talks, the dull PC.
Beware the Amiga, and shun
The voluminous PDP."


He took his listed code in hand:
Long time the pointer bug he sought--
So rested he by the Coke machine,
And stood awhile in thought.


And as in nerdish thought he stood,
The Jargontalk, with awk and grep,
Came geeking through the COBOL wood,
And edlin'd as it schlepped.


One two! One two! And through and through!
The line printer went click'ty clack!
And with a meg of memory dump,
He pulled an allnight hack.


"And hast thou slain the Jargontalk?
Telnet to me, my nerdish boy!
Copyleft GNU! Callooh! Callay!"
He deroffed in his joy.


Twas Unix and the C++
Did compile and load upon the VAX:
All Ritchie was the Kernighan,
And LISP ran in GNU EMACS.

Totally punting.

Things I Have Learned This Week:

L. Ron Hubbard's wife was named Mary Sue.  This amuses me.

Some older Adobe programs will be irreparably damaged when you patch up newer yet mostly unrelated Adobe programs.  This can take a long time to figure out.

The word "Hello" is a relative newcomer to the linguistic scene.

"Pushing Daisies" is a good show.

Meh.  I'm tired.  The Heir Apparent's birthday was today.  I'm too tired for thinky thoughts.

Netbooks and Linux: a bit of tech blogging...

So am seriously tempted to buy one of the little netbooks and load Linux on it, just to play.  The original plan was to do his with my Macbook, (note to my PC snob friends: I don't want to hear it, it was a hand-me-down.  Do you turn down free laptops?  Cos I don't.) but the Macbook has so completely insinuated itself in my life (complete with hipster cover) that I dread messing with it.

Some websites recommend trying it with the very clever expedient of loading Linux on a big thumb drive, tweaking it there to get the hardware drivers working correctly, and then running the load on the actual hard drive.  (I can't believe you can do that with a thumb drive, that's so cool!)

The HP minis are reasonable price-wise, and seemed to work well at the high school I used to work at.

Something to think about..

How quickly we become accustomed...

So I just finished Eric Flint's 1632.  It tripped my "What Happens Next" button, and now I want to read the sequel.

See, I've read at least a little before falling asleep nearly every night for almost 35 years; that's why the Kindle and I are perfect, because it has the potential to greatly reduce the teetering pile that threatens to topple over on me and my husband while we're sleeping.  The Kindle further reduces domestic tensions by having it's own cunning little book-light, so the room stays dark and my husband can sleep.

So I go to Amazon to place my order, and THE SEQUEL ISN'T IN KINDLE FORMAT.  OH THE HUMANITY.

I have to ORDER it and WAIT until WEDNESDAY.  WEDNESDAY!  But I want it NOW!  NOW NOW NOW!

It's not fair.  :)

I rather liked the book, though.  It got a bit anvilicious, from time to time, and some of the characters seemed a bit caricaturish (looking at you, John Simpson) but it was quite good, and the author clearly knew his stuff.  There was a definite hint of O HAI I WROTE A FIX-IT FIC FOR TEH SEVENTEENTH CENTURY LET ME SHOW YOU IT!

Incidentally, I think history classes should put a lot more emphasis on the 17th century.   As centuries go, in European history, it is an Epoch of Suck surpassed only by the 14th.  I've actually heard people argue that Christianity is better than Islam because different factions of Christianity have co-existed without ever having gone to war.

*blink*

Em.  No.

It was a meat-grinder.  It was awful.  Even in the Colonies, the Pilgrims and Puritans persecuted away merrily, sure in their belief in the Righteousness of their Faith, and the Absolute Justice of their Cause.  Remember, kids, Rhode Island exists because that's where you went when Massachusetts was going to burn you at the stake.  The Founding Fathers' insistence on the Separation of Church and State was so profound because those decades of slaughter were still pretty fresh in the collective memory.

Incidentally, can anyone recommend a good biography of Gustavus Adolphus?  Clearly I need to read more about him...

To Fly

I love long car trips.  I love the feeling of staring down miles of open road, going fast with some good music on the stereo.  It used to take people days to complete trips that I can do in hours; I've come to think of it as putting on my seven-league boots.

Until I saw this.

Now I want a pilot's license.

You didn't need the next three hours, did you?

TV Tropes

I have to tell you, I'm committing a slight breach of netiquette in even linking directly to That Site.  It is a time-suck extraordinaire, not so much a wiki walk as it is the pop-culture equivalent of Ulysses' trip home.

But I found this wonderful bit of of trivia: apparently, when reviewing the new BBC Sherlock Holmes' adaptation, a writer for Auntie Beeb assumed that Watson being a veteran of the war in Afghanistan was part of the modern updating of the story.

NOPE!

It's Afghanistan.  Mind you, throw a dart at a timeline, there's probably a war in Afghanistan that year.

(Can I say that I adore the update?  Also?  Benedict Cumberbatch.  Not only is his name fun to say, he's got a really nice voice.  Apparently, he's done some books on tape that I will clearly need to find to soothe my commute...)

Ayn Rand, Welfare Queen

Ayn Rand: I am not a fan. At all.  And I've tried!  Lord knows I've tried.  I've read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, We The Living and two (2) different biographies of her.  See, people base their entire philosophies, lives and (in the case of Alan Greenspan) Federal Reserve policies on her.  I was trying to see what the appeal is.

I failed.


As far as I can tell, she has been providing excuses for sociopathic behavior amongst the socially inept since 1957.  (And no, I'm not saying that all Ayn Rand fans are socially inept sociopaths, but hang with the Objectivists for any length of time and you know EXACTLY who I'm talking about.  They're the crazy right-wing answer to the obnoxiously proselytizing vegan.)


So reading this today?  I LOLed.

Money quote:

However, it was revealed in the recent "Oral History of Ayn Rand" by Scott McConnell (founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute) that in the end Ayn was a vip-dipper as well. An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

 I mean, I'd LOVE to pay for the best medical care out of my own pocket like a proper, upstanding citizen, but it's SO EXPENSIVE.

Oh, Ayn.  What would John Galt say?

And the defenders are out in force, I see, in the comments on the article.

Their argument seems to be, "Well the JACKBOOTED THUGS in the MARXIST GOVERNMENT STOLE that money FROM HER WITHOUT HER CONSENT TO USE FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE LOOTERS AND THE MOOCHERS!  She had a RIGHT to take some of it BACK!  And she only GOT $11,000, she MUST have paid more in THE LEGALIZED THEFT THAT IS CALLED INCOME TAXATION over all the years she was in the United States!"

One, she might've only gotten $11k in Social Security payments, but I can damn well guarantee she got more in Medicare.  Lung cancer treatments are and were expensive.  Clearly, she was worried that it would entirely wipe out the fortune she had amassed; is it likely that she had paid out more in taxes than her entire net worth at the time?  Not even in your most fervid John-Bircher nightmares.

Two, if she felt so sure that she was acting in sound principle when she signed up for this, why did she feel the need to use a pseudonym?

GENDER EQUITY EPIC FAIL!

Now, when it comes to Condoleezza Rice, I do not ideologically agree with her, and I think that a lot of the decisions she made in the Bush Administration were wrong.  However, I respect her accomplishments and her intelligence; it cannot be argued that she is a very smart and extremely well-educated lady.  

So when I read this, it was hard not to puke.

She was the NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR AND  THE SECRETARY OF STATE.   COUNTRIES GOT INVADED ON HER SAY-SO.  SHE GUIDED THE HAND THAT HAD THE FINGER ON THE FUCKING BUTTON AND YOU’RE ASKING HER IF SHE WANTS A PRETTY PRINCESS DRESS WHEN SHE GETS MARRIED?

Jesus wept.

Anyone who says that sexism is dead will be hearing from my Second in the morning.

Me vs The Kindle

(First Off:  Dear Girls-Sitting-Next-To-Me-At-The-Coffee-Shop - Just go up and tell the lady behind the counter that she gave you the wrong flavor cheesecake.  You paid good money for it, get what you paid for.  Do NOT sit down at your table (next to me) and bitch loudly for 15 minutes (between bites) about how you cannot abide coffee cheesecake - sorry, let me translate that to teen-speak, "Like OMG, this just SUCKS, yo!"  Also, reflect that if this is the worst thing that has happened to you as of 8:00pm, it's a pretty good day.)

On topic now, the Kindle.

I like to read.  A lot.  It's kind of a compulsion at this point.   I purged like a madwoman before we moved, so now I'm down to nine freestanding seven-foot bookcases, completely full with spillage everywhere.  (And that's not counting the children's books.)  So, when stumped for an anniversary gift (I think I've turned into that relative for whom no one knows what to buy), my husband got me a Kindle.

So up until now,  when discussing the Kindle, I've talked smugly about how I planned on sticking with 19th century technology for my fix, and generally limned in excruciating detail the sensory joys of the printed page; the crisp paper, the heft, the comforting smell, the obviously-loved look of a well-worn tome...

Bugger all that for a lark.

It's great.  It's freaking MAGIC.  I get online, hook up the wires, sort them out and they're ALL THERE.  So I'm sitting out someplace, somebody makes a recommendation, I pull out my phone, find it, order it, and Amazon SENDS IT TO MY KINDLE.  INSTANT GRATIFICATION, BABY!  And if it's out of copyright, you can usually find it for free.  And I can jump between them, which is important because, to quote the Hero of Canton, "Well, I just get excitable as to choice."

I've figured out how to sort them now, so the hard drive space is my only limitation. 

That and actually finding time to read.  :)

Hello, World!

This is an experiment... I am gradually accepting the idea that I might not entirely suck when it comes to writing, so I'm resolving to do more of it.  This may or may not go anywhere; my track record of starting and not finishing projects is legendary. 

So we'll see.