Electric Josh

Hmm
One of the Boing Boing guys is moving to paradise for a year with his family. How totally unfair. I need a job that allows me to work while travelling with K and the kid to far flung Pacific isles.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Agh!!
Everyone's okay, but my building just got hit by lightning. Son of a bitch! Now my hands are all tingly from the voltage.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Law
Go see how long it takes you to figure out that this is a parody. (Noticing that it's at The Onion is cheating.)
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Rock
Not this space's most wholesome link ever, but Girls Are Pretty is well worth reading. A small sampling:

You could either let today slump its shoulders and slink anonymously into the faceless mass of 9 to 5 same-old same-old, or you can conduct yourself as a soldier of rock n' roll, behaving with the grace and fellow-feeling of one who has let rock n' roll into his heart, and bestowing upon your fellow brethren in rock the spirit and truth only to be found in rock n' roll.

Paywall
So I was about to post a link to a story in the Times about how American evangelicals have decided that Islam is evil, and are trying to win hearts and minds by converting the residents of recently vanquished countries, when I suddenly noticed that all my old links to that particular newspaper have scrolled behind a paywall. Apparently they want us to pay money to read stuff on the web. Well, I'm certainly not about to contribute to that, so we'll have to wait until the article appears elsewhere.

Stupid declining paper.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Beach
It's cool and rainy, and the sun isn't expected to appear until we all go back to work on Tuesday, but we're off to hunker down for the weekend anyway down the Cape. Expect radio silence here.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

D-WV
At least one Senate Democrat has rediscovered his spine. Nice.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

More beef
The Atlantic comes through again with a retrospective called The American Way of Beef. It's about beef.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

NY
So there's a thing in The Nation (okay, fine, it's in the sidebar now) about how the New Yorker is suddenly a wimpy outfit, afraid to say anything that might upset the President and his cabal. As if in on cue, the New Yorker has a piece (talked about here; the actual article isn't online, which means that you don't get to read the article from here, nor do you get to see convenient blockquotes from it in this space) about the right-wingedness of Roger Ailes of Fox News and Willie Horton fame. It is not a hard-hitting piece. Alas.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Moo
Speak of the devil: mad cow disease begins its big North American tour.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Photo
Trolling photo.net during lunch in search of background pictures, as I sometimes do, I came across this one. Neat.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

H
From the Pyrrhic Freedom Department comes news that it looks like all the hydrogen for our Freedom Cars is going to come from fossil fuels anyway. A-and what's more:

Even if industry manages to safely contain the carbon left behind, the Bush administration's plan to extract hydrogen from fossil fuels will wind up wasting energy. John Heywood, director of MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab, says a system that extracts hydrogen from oil and natural gas and stores it in fuel cells would actually be no more energy efficient than America's present gasoline- based system.

Tweezers
From the Take-This-Plane-to-Havana-Or-I'll-Tweeze-Your-Eyebrows Department of The Atlantic comes news of an official TSA report (you might have to dig to March's press releases manually, since tsa.gov seems to shuffle URL's periodically) summarizing their agents' checkpoint haul:

Through February, intercepted items included 1,101 firearms, nearly 1.4 million knives, nearly 2.4 million other sharp objects including scissors, 39,842 box cutters, 125,273 incendiary or flammable objects, and 15,666 clubs.

When an item is intercepted, a passenger has the option of returning it to his or her vehicle, giving it to someone who is not getting on the flight, putting it in the mail before again going through the checkpoint, storing it in a checked bag if a permitted item is involved, or voluntarily abandoning the item at the security checkpoint. TSA is authorized to dispose of abandoned property if it has no commercial value or if storing and handling costs exceed sale value.

Same
We went to our first baby-having class tonight at the hospital, and a couple of things were painfully obvious:

1. I am not a unique flower. Of the ten couples there, at least five of us boys were about 30, had either sideburns or a goatee, were wearing green short-sleeved shirts, had essentially the same haircut, and made the same quiet wisecracks during the movie. Our wives were roughly identical, although mine was, of course, the cutest. They probably all have jobs like mine and little websites exactly like this one.
2. Uhh... we're about to have a baby. Holy crap!
3. Our baby is going to be huge. (K isn't thrilled.)

Food
Since the Times Magazine is full of architecture, which is a lot less fun to look at online than in print, I guess I will instead read The Guardian: Food: Why We Eat This Way.

I swear this is a coincidence, but in the last few weeks I've decided to become terrified of mad cow disease again, which is too bad, because beef is tasty and prions are just so damn cool!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Email
It took me ten years of playing and working on computers connected to the internet to figure this out, but I've finally discovered this: if I want to get anything done at all, I must close all email programs. Simple as that.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Ford
Since the exhaust system on my puny Saturn is failing anyway, this might be a good time to go buy myself a new Ford Phallus. Heh heh.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

George
Dave points us to the Christian Science Monitor's article about the hoo hah surrounding George Orwell's 100th birthday (he's already dead). Best quote, on people's tendency to overcite the man:

It's part of what Daphne Patai, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, says is a lack of independent thought. Orwell is too often used to bolster arguments without deeper analysis... "Independent thinking is the only thing that will get us out of the ideological messes that we're in."

Traffic
So my 25-minute commute took 90 minutes this morning because of this asshole here insisting on travelling too quickly through a twisty, deep underground tunnel (whose very name is now, absurdly, a matter of some pointless political debate). Argh. But what can you do about traffic?

Well, you can simulate it. (Thank you, twenty years of school!) One of the many clever skunkworks projects that I've toyed with in my mind for a bit and then dropped on the floor due to intrusions from real life has been to get a useful (or at least interesting) traffic simulation running. Driving eleven miles through aggressive, stop-and-go traffic for 90 minutes in a car with a manual transmission and a failing (that means loud) exhaust system counts as real life.

A cursory web search turns up some super expensive software for traffic simulation, and several scientific papers. Cellular automata (the last one) being easy, we'll start there. Stay tuned.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Kurt
This space's favorite composer of novels composed nearly entirely of one-liners, Kurt Vonnegut, speaking at the Mark Twain house in Hartford:

What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government.

Shuttle
Trolling around the Edward E. Tufte site I stumbled across a link to this 20-page diagramatic timeline of the space shuttle's failed reentry.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Filing
I contemplate this most boring of all subjects because I'm an Information Worker, and it's basically all I do. First read this filing essay. Then read these cartoons about filing. Empathize, people.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Voter apathy
Here, from The Guardian, is how to keep the kids interested in politics:

A radical new proposal from the Green party in the southern city of Granada would see the introduction of a controversial new youth sex voucher, the so-called "bonosex", to give amorous young couples aged 25 or under a 50% discount in the city's hotels.

The vouchers would allow young people to initiate their sex lives in "dignified" surroundings, rather than in the cramped, uncomfortable and clandestine places they were normally forced to use, according to a party spokesman.

Speaking of plagiarism
This response, to this, stolen verbatim from Tom Tomorrow:

The media landscape isn't exactly pretty right now, but it's about to get a lot worse.

On June 2, the Federal Communications Commission intends to lift restrictions on media ownership that could allow your local newspaper, cable provider, radio stations, and TV channels all to be owned by one company. The result could be the disappearance of the checks and balances provided by a competitive media marketplace -- and huge cutbacks in local news and reporting. Good, balanced information is the basis for our democracy. That's why we're asking that: "Congress and the FCC should stop media deregulation and work to make the media diverse, competitive, balanced, and fair."

Reporters
Well, here's Tom Tomorrow's slant on the whole bizarre, extended screwup at The New York Times.

I know that nobody ever said life was going to be fair, but you know...in a just society, fuckups like Stephen Glass and Bill Bennett and Jayson Blair would retreat behind a wall of shame, never to be heard from again.

Tunes
So earlier this evening I took part in a phone survey sponsored by one of two local (ha!) radio stations, WBCN and WAAF. They both claim to play alternative music (which was all the rage 10 years ago). Both are mediocre. Both have the amazingly annoying feature that less than 50% of their airtime during music shows consists of music; that is, even when they aren't playing talk shows, more time is spent on advertisements and DJ yammering than on songs. The songs that they do manage to play are variations on a theme or two, mostly attempts to emulate the latest hits, which were, in turn, attempts to emulate the latest hits. Hence my answer to, What radio station do you list to more than any other?: NPR.

It was one of those surveys where they ask you to listen to a snippet of a song and then rate it on a scale of 1 to 5. The kicker: I was to avoid commenting at all on songs I'd never heard! This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but makes perfect sense when considered from the perspective of whomever They've found to be programming director at either of the two stations. Don't worry about what we don't play; just listen to it, and identify yourself with whichever of the preprogrammed options you prefer. Consumer punk. Among the few dozen five-second pieces of telephone quality music were two or three songs I didn't recognize and that sounded pretty good, but, of course, the snippet is all you get. No idea where to hear these songs again, or buy them. Ah, well. The car has a CD player, and my friends and little brothers have better taste in music than anyone I've heard on the radio...

How can the entire music industry miss the clue train quite so badly?
[permalink | reply | tb ]

philg
From some strange land where everyone is an excellent, terrifyingly egocentric writer comes Philip Greenspun, who, after pioneering the website worth reading, has a weblog. Among the latest completely bizarre entries:

Here we are in 2003 and the city apparently is spending $17,000 per year for each remaining student (still the most expensive in Massachusetts) to achieve some of the lowest test scores of any district in the state. The $17,000 number combined with the poor results invites some brainstorming.  The world's best-performing secondary schools tend to be in Asia.  Korean students do especially well on international tests.  This U.S. military guide says that Korean private schools range in price from $2,000 to $13,700 per year.  So the taxpayers of Cambridge could afford to charter Boeing 747s to fly kids to and from Korea every month, enroll them at the most expensive boarding schools in that nation, and still end up spending less than we're spending now.

GYWO
Once again, a new Get Your War On. Have fun.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Tunes
Here's what happens when real authors decide to talk intelligently about music.

Country music has become so squeaky-clean that a recent song in which Tracy Lawrence claimed that his grandfather taught him ''how to cuss and how to pray'' was banned from several radio stations, cussing being too strong a concept for airplay. Long gone are the days when Merle Haggard took care of his searing morning hangover with an ''afternooner'' and sang about it. This is thanks in large part to the vice grip of Clear Channel Radio, which buys up radio stations and makes carefully researched decisions about what Americans are free to listen to. Clear Channel has decided that patriotism sells, and that cussing and afternooners are definitely out.

O: How do you feel about being closely identified with the politics of "Okie From Muskogee" and "The Fightin' Side Of Me" now?

MH: Oh, I must have been an idiot. It's documentation of the uneducated that lived in America at the time, and I mirror that. I always have. Staying in touch with the working class... but it's pretty easy to lie to me. You could lie to me. They had me in a film called Wag The Dog because of "Okie From Muskogee" and my close scrutiny of the people that are being shitted. I've become self-educated since I wrote that song. But it still has a very timely description.

Times
Holy crapola! The Times has discovered that one of their reporters has been serially making stuff up.

In an inquiry focused on correcting the record and explaining how such fraud could have been sustained within the ranks of The Times, the Times journalists have so far uncovered new problems in at least 36 of the 73 articles Mr. Blair wrote since he started getting national reporting assignments late last October. In the final months the audacity of the deceptions grew by the week, suggesting the work of a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction.

Mr. Blair, who has resigned from the paper, was a reporter at The Times for nearly four years, and he was prolific. Spot checks of the more than 600 articles he wrote before October have found other apparent fabrications, and that inquiry continues. The Times is asking readers to report any additional falsehoods in Mr. Blair's work; the e-mail address is retrace@nytimes.com.

Every newspaper, like every bank and every police department, trusts its employees to uphold central principles, and the inquiry found that Mr. Blair repeatedly violated the cardinal tenet of journalism, which is simply truth. His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer - which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts - as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole.

On the other hand, consider the difference in tone between this sort of annoyed, sheepish apology (Just by reading, you can actually tell that the authors are living beings, super pissed about this guy and sheepishly apologetic!), and the usual monotonous pap that most papers (including this same one) usually emit, the unending stream of jargon-laden, single-sentence paragraphs thrown together in essentially random order. Maybe an interesting writing voice, or at least a non-mechanical one, might be too confusing for most readers...?

At least the usual, terrible dryness leads to great humor, even if unintentionally.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

SAT
Given that among this space's dozen loyal readers there are relatively few that are sufficiently nerdy to read Slashdot regularly, we take time out from Mother's Day festivities to point out (especially to Libby) this new frontier in taking the SAT's: minimizing your score. (This space would smugly admit to having failed badly at minimizing our SAT scores back in the day (heh heh), but it's kind of pathetic when guys pushing 30 still remember their SAT scores.)
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Mothers
Mother's day this weekend. Mom's flying in from SF as we speak. Barb's coming down tomorrow. Nice!
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Space
So had I ever stated anything along the lines of, "Boy, would I really like to be an astronaut," this report of the latest near-death reentry via Soyuz capsule would force me to say, "Never mind." I wish there had been pictures taken of this:

The capsule bumped to earth on the Kazakh steppes and tipped on its side, the astronauts said, leaving the crew hanging almost as if from the ceiling, too weak to extricate themselves for close to an hour.

Able at last to "ooze" from the ship, as Dr. Pettit put it, the crew simply lay on the spring grass, drinking in the smells and view. Then Captain Bowersox re-entered the ship, working to establish communications while Mr. Budarin tried to set up a new antenna outside.

Oops
I missed James Brown's 70th birthday.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Heh heh
Another excellent Baath party 404.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Bob
One of the primary advantages of having parents that listen to a lot of good music is that they'll sometimes listen to a good song with the kid around until everyone's completely sick of it (the song, not the kid), and then not listen to the song again for decades at a time. For you, the kid, this means that when you hear Mozambique by Bob Dylan at your friends' wedding twenty-five years later you get all excited and think, "Damn, where have I heard this excellent song before...?"

In this case, I assume the song was overplayed by my dad. Good job, dad. [Update: it was Barb. Good job, Barb.]

I'd like to spend some time in Mozambique.
The sunny sky is aqua blue.
And all the couples dancing cheek to cheek.
It's very nice to stay a week or two
And maybe fall in love just me and you.

Ouch
Playing softball and painting shouldn't make someone feel sore. All together now... "I gotta get in shape."
[permalink | reply | tb ]

But no one told me, Senator McCarthy!
It seems I've missed Loyalty Day. Ponder.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

Beer at the VFW
The title kind of says it all. The New England Real Ale Exhibition started last night, and I swung by after work with a few colleagues. It's being held (as always, apparently) at the VFW hall in Porter Square, in Somerville, which is a strange venue for anything, but one I've now found myself having fun at twice in six months; the other was a Halloween party that some people threw. Both times the place has been packed and I've known five or fewer people, but everyone seems to have a good time and there's no noticeable smoking. Both crowds have been strange, like a college house party with everyone's parents and older siblings there having a good time, too; must be Somerville.

At any rate, NERAX had more good beers to sample than people should rightly be exposed to on a school night, including two Magic Hat brews that I'd never heard of before. And it was at the VFW, so how can you go wrong?
[permalink | reply | tb ]