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.

The Year of Suffixical Thinking.

I was reading Mimi Smartypants' recent remark that "Kafkaesque" needed replacing. Her invention is "Kafkalicious". Looking back over my notebooks and other writings, I notice a disturbing frequency of "-esque"-derived terms. So, I marched myself up to the board, and made a list of replacement suffixes.

• ish -- This strikes me as stodgy, and possibly grammatically correct. The last time I saw Stephen Colbert's show, the term "Lincolnish" made an appearance during the opening montage. I want my own suffix, so this is out.
• rrific should be able to denote either good (terrific) or bad (horrific), but in testing, it always tended to add a positive flavor. I'm not certain, but I think I've heard the term "monsterrific" before.
  
• tastic actually seems more positive than "rrific" if that's possible.
  
• rotic seems to add an element of sexuality. The term "Kafkarotic" would most likely be applied to literature that was alternately arousing and frustrating. "Nihilistic Foreplay" would be an interesting band name.
  
• tronic would serve the purpose similar to any of these other suffixes, but only in the context of robots or computers.
  
• gical/stical bring to mind magic and fantasy, but not in the usual sense. They are RPG magic and fantasy. "Kafkastical" would refer to an event similar to rolling a 20-sided die on a card table in Mom & Dad's basement to select an absurd, frustrating fate.

I'm certain that a number of other choices could be invented with a little time and effort, but such are beyond the scope of this page. Somehow, I got the notion in my head that posts to weblogs shouldn't be edited after posting (I think I read about someone who refuses to edit previous posts) and I extended that to the notion that posts should be written as quickly as possible. Five songs have gone by in the MP3 player, so this must go off to the old post graveyard now, and I should start some serious work on the shitty first draft I've been lugging around for six years.

Mail. Ink. Sugar.

The package containing my birthday gifts arrived yesterday. Along with a few Moleskines, Mom packed a box of pop-tarts, some little Debbies, and a couple of bags of coffee (word of my earlier inability to find it must have reached her, despite the fact that she refuses to use a computer or the Internet).





I have no idea where I originally found this picture. If you recognize it, please tell me where it lived before. The reason I'm showing it now is because one of the relics sent along for my birthday was a pen, nearly identical to the one in this picture, except with a clear finish on the wood instead of black paint. The brass parts are all the same. Said pen is capable of taking Fisher refills, and the weight and size are about perfect for me, so it might lead one to ask why I left it in New York when I moved here, but that kind of thinking won't get you anything good around here, Pal. I would recreate this picture now, except with one of the coffee cups in our house here, none of which resemble this this one. Alas, no matter when I try to take photographs, the rechargeable batteries aren't recharged, so the lens deploys with a pitiful sound, and then a beep alerts me that I will not be taking any pictures until I find fresh cells to power the camera.

Somewhere in the search for the origin of that photo, I ran across Hoarded Ordinaries. It had nothing to do with the quest I was on, but the photos struck a chord momentarily. The photos of the monument to Hannah Dustin and the sign leading to a monument (no mention if the path is to the same monument or not) made me think of a vague notion that arises in my notebooks. In the region where I lived until recently, there are a plethora of these signs. Some mention battles or encampments from the Revolution or the Civil War. Some mark significant places in the Native American culture. One marked the first tavern on a particular stretch of highway. The contrast, in my brain, is between the signs, which indicate some kind of interest for non-residents, and the everyday nature of the location, which is never the destination of anyone's vacation. Perhaps that location was the site of something particularly significant, but now it's the parking lot for the drug store.

Another link on Dr. DiSabato's page led to a discussion of NaNoWriMo. That reminded me that I've left my own manuscripts hanging for a while. I was going to do Novel Writing Month this year, but a bunch of stuff came up and I spaced on it completely until today. While I was showering, I briefly thought about the fact that there's no International Novel Writing Month. I think I'm going to say it is in July, because I will have free time then (November is the middle of the semester here, so I hardly have time to eat and do laundry, let alone try to crank out 3500 words per day). Then, necessarily, I tried to similarly abbreviate the name, which led me to say "IntNoWriMo" until the phrase "IntNoWriMo-da-vida" came out. I will go wash my mouth out now, and then start preparing.

beam me up snotty

During the mucous-flooded hours of the past few days, I've been obsessed by previous computers I owned. The word processing programs they had were one short step up from a typewriter, but that was exactly what I wanted. We downloaded and installed OpenOffice here, because a former colleague clued me in to the way other proprietary programs collected information and sent it back to the death star to be reviewed by unknown persons for unknown purposes. But that seems to be a bug-for-bug mimic of a badly designed interface. Every time we start a new document, someone has to go find the buried menu with the proper checkboxes (and it isn't with the rest of the preferences) and turn off all that "change my random keyboard-mashing into whatever you think is proper" stuff. I want something to begin instantly when I ask it to, and let me begin typing immediately, before I forget what I wanted to write. Someone is out there now, saying, "If you forget what you wanted to type that quickly, maybe it wasn't worth writing to begin with," and you know what? FUCK YOU. When I decide to use a machine I paid money for, the quality of what I do with it is nobody's business. I want what I want, not what some hand-picked, error-corrected end-user survey said everyone should want.

I read, with some sadness, that Fred Fish passed away a few days ago. Back in the day, I used to mail order 3.5 inch floppies from a catalog. Many of them were from Fred's collection. Those were days before the industry became a giant pissing contest for billionaires. I kind of miss that. I miss being able to understand exactly how the hardware worked, and how to make code directly access it all.

That's a trend--an unfortunate one. Back when I understood the API documents for my computer, I could also look at the engine of my car and piece together how it was supposed to work. It was still simple enough that a non-expert could figure out how the pieces interacted. The last car I had, on the other hand, had a cover over most of the engine to protect it from non-expert's eyes. When I took it in for service, the mechanic attached a cable from the engine to a PC and told me that I didn't really need new spark plug wires (of course, it wasn't wet that day). As a point of interest, the later "technologically improved" vehicle actually got worse mileage than my old '76 Corolla.

So when I hear talk of microprocessor-controlled toasters, I envision a nightmare scene. On a tiny LCD screen, an animated slice of toast would appear when the button to make toast was pressed.

"Hi! It looks like you're trying to make some toast. How can I help you?

1. Begin toasting bread (current setting: black and completely charred)
2. View additional settings options
3. Learn about toast with MSN® food research guides®!"

So you choose 2, the same as every day, to set it back to normal toast, with no burnt parts. After asking, "Are you sure? You can't change this setting after the bread is inserted." the whole thing goes blank, then the user is prompted to unplug the toaster, wait 30 seconds, and plug it back in. This cycle would repeat until the user was faced with a decision between eating toast or being on time for work.

Enough, I suppose. I'll go off and hunt something with a crude stone tool now, and cook it over a newly-discovered fire. And this machine will ask me if I'm sure I want to turn it off, and I will suppress the urge to scream obscenities at it.