The Abandoning of Stereotypes

Ha. Just now when I tabbed down to the type-the-actual-text box, I saw the menu for selecting a font, but the tiny Helveticarrific text tricked my eye into seeing "Fart" and I thought that would be a strange new feature for Blogger to add. I envisioned a control that I would drag to a place in this text, and when you read that part, a cartoon ass would appear and expel a cartoon fart, complete with speed lines and exclamation-marked phonetic sound effects ("Phlabbt!!!")

Anyway, that's not what moved me to post today. I have some links to share, because I know none of y'all can find web pages without guidance, so everyone hold hands, and stay in the crosswalk (that would be a believable name for a "Christian Rock" band that sounded "edgy" or "indy", and those two adjectives would be in bold type anytime Crosswalk was written about, even by less-than-charitable reviewers)

The first of said links is CKAN. It's really a good resource for knowledge of all sorts. I only looked around briefly, but there's at least a good dictionary there, and I recall seeing the word "Dentistry" in the category list.

This is a transcript of a speech by the late Douglas Adams. I won't give away the logic to it, but I will say that it's clever (as if you wouldn't guess that).

Not much of an entry, really. Mostly, just letting people who care know that I'm still alive and not smoking cigarettes. Nope. No smoking. Not one fucking drag. Haven't even been close enough to a cigarette to get a sniff of second-hand smoke. Now if there was a mechanism to convert nervous tics to electricity, they could light this entire goddamned city for free off me.

Li'l Brudder: Homeless & Unemployed

OK, so I was writing an email to my brother (hereafter referred to as Li'l Brudder) with a couple of video links, then I remembered that he is, for a few days, unemployed and homeless. That is, he is changing jobs (with two or three weeks off in between) and moving to a new house (having to vacate the old one two weeks before he can move in to the new). So most likely, he can't see the internet, as he's cowering under a newspaper while a silhouette of a hobo menaces the entire park until near dawn when the old stereotypical Irish-American cop tells him to move along before decent folk get a fright during their morning constitutional.

The first of the aforementioned links is "Lucifer" by Rockbitch. Imagine the original "Star Trek" guest actresses making a lesbian activist cable access show. It's actually a bit stranger than that, but I can't adequately explain how much, so go look. I'll watch your purse until you get back.


The other link is Stacy: Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies. Two things really struck me as odd with this (OK, many more, but two bear mention). First is how nonchalant, even cheerful, the girl seems when she says, "My name is Eiko. I'll probably die in about a week, then I'll become a Stacy!" They could have put in subtitles that read, "My Mom says that she'll take me to Disneyworld if I pass Algebra!" and I would not have doubted it for a moment. The second thing I want to mention is the last few frames, when the subtitles read: Coming August 18...... Near Death Happiness Late Show. I want so badly to steal that name. I would even renounce my former promise not to start another band, if I could call said band "The Near-Death Happiness Late Show." Hmm. Someone did phone and tell me that she found a microphone for me. That's the truth. After installing linux, I discovered that the built-in microphone and camera on the monitor screen/lid didn't work, so I started looking at what was available, and the best price over at Hy-Mall was also the one with the best frequency response numbers (30-17,000Hz). But ever the economically skittish one, SugarCheeks told me to wait. I was convinced that she was just putting me off and hoping I would give up the idea, and about to go pay 70 kwai, when she phoned to tell me she found a good mic for 20 that had the same specs. I'll find out in a couple of hours how the sound is, and if it works with Skype (the listed justification for buying such a thing was to use Skype under linux).

"Oh, Tenderfoot, I feel like I'm at a crossroads of my life, and there's like, an IHOP on one corner, and a Denny's on the other... Can you give me some sound financial advice?"

Then came the last days

The semester is very nearly finished. Grades only need to be printed, signed, and given to the people in that little room where the classroom keys used to be kept. I feel like I slept through the whole thing. There's all those hand-written notes I made while in class, detailing who was naughty and who was nice, that seem to indicate I was present and conscious, but I honestly can't recall much of anything. Every third page includes a deprecating note about the text book*.

Over the weekend, I installed Xubuntu on my laptop. It's more efficient than Ubuntu's standard release. I didn't like not being able to turn off gnome. I'm not sure I love XFCE, but when I started looking for the latest Slackware release and googling Linux from Scratch, She Who Must Be Obeyed mentioned that we share this machine, and I had to finish whatever I was doing in time for her to do some "real work".

All told, the installation took an hour from booting the CD to configuring our PPPoE, Chinese language support, and "windows-only" printer. I promised Dearest that, after I fetched something cold to drink, I would explain how to reboot the machine into XP. In the time it took for me to retrieve a cold one, she figured out how to use all the software she cared about (Firefox, OpenOffice, and an MP3 player I didn't know was installed) and would probably have gone on to hand-tune the kernel if other tasks not been more pressing.

Recently, I came to the realization that I could search for images now. In the old days, I used to look at newsgroups for new wallpaper or images that might connect to things I was writing. So, the idea that Flickr might conveniently give me all the images of "abandoned" that I could handle was a pleasant surprise. Damn, what will they think of next, a way to download music?

I've meant to mention Philosophy of History for a while now, but never seem to remember it while I am at the computer. It's an excellent resource for information about history. Look down the page a bit for "Reference Resources" and there's about every royal family ever documented.

* Seriously, why do the textbooks have to uniformly suck? The piece of crap we were given this semester was, at best, good for a laugh when the matching exercises went in ways I'm certain the authors never envisioned. In 12 chapters, they included 8 discussions of Elvis Presley, including activities requiring students to stand up and tell everything they knew about him (the students took turns standing, saying "Nothing" and then sitting back down).

A post in which I will not use the Q word.

Last time, I linked a few videos from Yellow Machinegun, and mentioned the day-long wandering that led me to them. From there, I chanced upon eX-Girl. To say this band is "different" is like saying that China is "inhabited". Here they are introducing themselves to an audience.

This video (sorry, no song title given) defies concise description, incorporating noise, prog-rock, and some performance art that makes me think of the B-52's back in the day.

Hettakorii No Ottokotou is a shifting five and a half minute operatic number that sometimes reminded me of the late 1970's, and sometimes just messed with my brain.

Tofu Song is an acapella number that begins as a sort of fugue, then sounds like people doing science fiction sound effects with their mouth, then goes back to sounding classical.

Here's one last clip wherein they wear inflatable chicken heads and play in a rainstorm. Having typed that, I have the sense that somewhere, someone has just won, and someone has just lost, a wager made late one night after heavier-then-usual drinking.

Is there an exorcist in the house?

A few days back, or maybe a couple of weeks (damn fugue states!), I was following a trail of Eurobeat videos, and somehow discovered Yellow Machinegun. The first video is "Heartache". Something just seems wrong here. They look happy (too happy) and smiling in a way that I've seen my students do. In fact, there's a shy girl in one of my classes that looks remarkably like that bass player/singer. I was thinking it would be more pop sunshine happiness music, and then the smile was gone and that demoniacally-possessed voice comes out of her mouth.

Next up is "Spicy Spiky" which I haven't heard the likes of since 1986. Back then, girls wouldn't even attend shows where this kind of music was playing. The audience was exclusively composed of 20-something men with A.D.D.

"Vanish Your Being" and "Climb" continue the same under-two-minute vein, and make me think seriously about buying a skateboard (disembodied voices in the dark corner of the room are saying "you'll put your eye out" as I type that).

I don't have too much to say this afternoon, but I've now spent so much time staring at Polar Clock that I felt compelled to link to it here, so that anyone who chances on this page in the unforeseen future will click on the broken link and curse under their breath.

I just finished reading the second issue of Steampunk Magazine. I'm still undecided what I think of the phenomenon of steampunk. Is it a reaction to the reality of near-pervasive computing and networking? Is it just that devotees of such an idea could only find each other on the web? Or did the net plant the notion in most of those people's heads?

So, for about a week now, I've had occasional, severely painful muscle spasms at the back of my skull and neck. Sweetheart brought some traditional medicine home. It looks like about a tablespoon of gravel in an envelope, but I swallow it with tea, and not only do the spasms go away, but I'm left in an incredibly good mood (whether that's because the agony is relieved or my chemistry is re-balanced remains undetermined as of this writing). So I was telling one of my colleagues about this stuff, in the context of him explaining that the medicine someone gave him for his headcold has an amphetamine-licious effect. He pointed out that one of the early symptoms of SARS is stiffness in the neck and muscle spasms. I needed another envelope of gravel as soon as I returned home.

The Lost

This afternoon, I had a terrible headache, so instead of going to watch the tug-of-war as planned, I came home to rest. But, I can't just rest. That would waste valuable at-home-undisturbed time. So I started sorting through the bookmarks, particularly the folders labeled with dates, because those are from moments when I had to leave suddenly, and just opted to "bookmark all tabs" and sort out what I was doing at a later time.

So, I have no idea how some of those things came to be open at the same time, or what stream of consciousness I was fly fishing in, but there were a few worthwhile links. The only one I feel like sharing today is this article by William Gibson. He discusses "regooding" of places he has previously known and loved. I'm wondering now what it is that gives that feeling of being part of a place. Not that usual "hometown pride" schmaltzy bullshit, but a deeper feeling that a place is special. A small city where I used to live has fought to try and preserve that vibe, but as quickly as a Wal-Mart will taint it, so will attempts to institutionalize or codify it. You can't zone cool. You can't even really ask people where it is in their town. They always steer you away from the skuzzy, hole-in-the-wall looking place to yet another god-damned T.G.I. McAppleGarden (only because they honestly believe that you would be offended if they suggested Hooters). Thus, you are barred from the real place. You are isolated on the other side of the "here" glass. You are part of the stream of motorists, consumers, travelers, and passers-by, separate from the reality of the place and the people who live in it.

I'll go one step further, and say that this same thing happened to Second Life. At this time last year, it felt much more like a community. Lately, it feels more like an abandoned advertising laboratory. Empty buildings full of virtual merchandise for sale (sometimes on broken display devices) and occasionally, you find someone atop a ladder with a message saying how much virtual money they're getting for acting like they're washing the windows. Aimless wandering is hampered by exclusionary landowners.

Probably, the best thing to do is make a note of such places and times in your diary, and then you can reminisce about them after the small town where you went to college gets Disneyfied, the secluded lane where you took your first date is bulldozed to make way for a strip mall, and the park where you used to take your children is invisible behind a row of billboards and an expressway clover-leaf. Joys are fleeting and soon lost forever, but you can count on some asshole trying to sell it back to you after he ruins it.