Both because I am a gearhead, and because I always get lost no matter where I am or how many times I’ve been there, I bid tonight on a Garmin ETrex Legend GPS (and here’s my cache). I won. This excites me. Now when I travel around Europe, I can wander aimlessly like my brother and Abs did, a bit more secure in my ability to find my way home.
I’m trying to work out some kind of theme for my trip to Europe, just to narrow down the enormous range of possibilities that I won’t get to see this time around. I think a large theme of the trip will be Europe For Various Sorts Of Geek, but I’m thinking also that I might like to find a lot of good wine and cheese around France, then drink the wine and eat the cheese (my cache). Also people have suggested I check out Nice, and two people — independently, and it seems to me quite remarkably — suggested that I visit Cesky Krumlov, a small town near Prague. Maybe this isn’t super-remarkable, actually; the town does have its own website, so it can’t be that obscure. One of the Cesky Krumlov-recommenders also suggested I visit the Terezin concentration camp near Prague; I probably will, because I need to see one of the camps at first hand.
I don’t want to spread myself too thin while I’m in Europe, so maybe I’ll limit myself to France, the Czech Republic, and Ireland. I’ll be visiting friends in the first and the third country from that list. Maybe I should spend the remaining 18 days or so just ambling around France, fortifying my French with good Burgundy.
As always, I welcome travel suggestions.
I found a totally fascinating FAQ about linguistics within Mark Rosenfelder’s Metaverse, which I in turn found linked from my former coworker Joe’s site. I have no idea whether Rosenfelder is qualified to discuss linguistics, but at least he gives pointers to other, seemingly reasonable sources. And the FAQ itself is absolutely fascinating; I spent hours reading through it and clicking over to other links. Highly recommended reading.
Thanks to Jeff, and a pointer to some helpful info on the XML CDATA tag, I have produced what looks like a perfectly valid RSS feed for this site. I’ll tweak it some more (it just looks messy to me), then link it from my sidebar and give it one of those cute 
icons that all the cool kids are using nowadays.
Probably no one cares, but I’ve been adding a few categories to the sidebar at your left. George Will, for instance, isn’t someone whose site I visit often, and even if he were I’d only be visiting it because I loathe what the guy writes. Hence he sits in a separate category. As for the “temporary” category: I found that I was using my own homepage as my bookmarks file, even when I’m at my home computer; I just think it’s easier that way.
My friend Adam taught me a neat trick that helps you get around stupid search tools. For instance, if you search RyanAir for flights from Dublin to Paris, the URL for the search results doesn’t reflect the cities you searched for. Result: you can’t bookmark a search. Adam suggested that I just save the search page to disk, edit the HTML to change the form’s method="post" to a method="get", then perform the search off my copy of the file. The trick works almost perfectly, and the result is that the sidebar features a link to a saved RyanAir search.
Wouldn’t it just be smarter, and better for the user, if websites encoded search terms in the URLs? That’s what MapQuest does, for instance, even with the very long URLs that MapQuest searches can produce.
This is a pretty frequent annoyance. I had to use this same trick a couple weeks ago to link Roger Ebert’s reviews of films by Aki Kaurismäki. IMDb’s forms are set up in such a way that I, at least, can’t figure out how to perform the same trick on them. It’s odd that we even have to.
I’m fumbling my way through making an RSS feed out of my weblog. I’ve made some progress, but it’s still a mess: the Perl module that generated the RSS added a bunch of RDF tags with no contents, which strike me either as a bug or as a consequence of something stupid that I did.
Also, the HTML é entity — which renders as the “é” character — isn’t valid XML, so I need to load in the HTML DTD if I want to make some of my earlier posts load correctly; I’m not sure how to do this with that Perl module. Still, it’s progress.
I was just reminded of something my friend Chris wrote a while ago that made me laugh a lot:
For me though, the emotional impact of these lyrics is almost shattering:
I wear my sunglasses at night
He wears sunglasses. But at night.
How fucked up is that? Can you imagine? I mean, it’s dark already, but with sunglasses, you’d be blind.
And he does it so he can “watch you weave.” But it’s so dark out! How can he?! Man, what a terrible existence. All he wants to do is watch someone weave. But he can’t.
This is on top of Chris’s essay about where to find the vice president, written when Cheney was reported to be in an “unspecified location”:
Dick Cheney is in my living room.
That’s right, he’s in my living room. He’s been on our couch for 2 days now. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s in my living room, either. At first I thought: “This must be a joke. He’s got the remote in his hand, and he’s watching UPN. This is one of the last men I expect to like UPN.” However, as I watched his squat, seated form, I realized that this was in fact Vice President Richard Cheney. He has a stately elegance about him . . . not unlike a gorilla. He sits motionless and watches the antics of middle-class African-American sitcoms, the exciting adventures of the crew of the first Enterprise, and the touchingly funny life of Raymond and his family with a peaceful contemplation.
He prefers the sunlight, I think. He seems somehow more at ease and exudes a feeling of contentment. However, this could just be the sun casting a glint in his eyes. He, of course, doesn’t tell me any of this. He is a busy man, who knows important things that are not for me to question. Many of the thoughts he has would surely be too great for my mind.
Alisa is bothered by his presence, but I assure her that when the time is right, he’ll leave just as mysteriously as he came. She has, I admit, occasionally yelled at Dick. He doesn’t seem to notice, but it bothers me. I’m also convinced that she’s tried to move him off the couch, because his jacket was wrinkled yesterday. I thought of ironing it while on him, but thought better of it and just patted it down and gave it a good once-over with the lint brush.
Our couch is made for 2 people, so my relationship with Alisa has a new dynamic . . . or rather, the TV watching does. We sit on the floor in front of the couch and Cheney has the chip bowl in his lap. I was nervous about this: What if Dick doesn’t like chips? But Alisa insisted that we compromise, and I decided to step down. I mean, the Vice President is in my living room. He chose US (or me; I don’t think he’d get along with Alisa) out of all of the people in this country, he chose my apartment (ours, I mean). Isn’t that enough?
I don’t really know what it is that Dick Cheney does, but that shouldn’t stop me from liking him, or at least trying I suppose. I sit up at night sometimes and just watch him, staring at the TV (which Alisa insists should be off at night) with the moonlight on his face. He seems happy here, running the country from inside his mind, or whatever great things Dick Cheney does that I don’t know about.
Without knowing what I was doing, and with only the RSS spec (helpful as it is) to go on, I hacked together a little Perl script to serialize my weblog into RSS. Yet it doesn’t seem to be working, in the sense that my browser isn’t displaying it the way it displays Larry’s. I suspect I’ve done something wrong. Can anyone spot my error?
Postscript: Looks like there’s a Perl module that does a lot of this RSS stuff for me. It is now 1:12 a.m., however, and I am too tired to do anything valuable with this new information.
As if the lack of evidence weren’t enough, the U.S. appears to be denying the Red Cross access to Iraqi POWs (my cached copy). There is evidence that we’re subjecting them to the same borderline-illegal treatment that we’re giving POWs elsewhere, including gagging and hooding.
Once again, welcome to American democracy. (Link courtesy of Metafilter.)
My favorite comedian — Eddie Izzard — will be on tour starting in August. The whole world should go see him. I know I have readers in Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, and as luck would have it Izzard is traveling to all those places. Tickets go on sale May 28 for most of the tour dates. (News courtesy of Metafilter.)
I’ve never read Gawker Stalker, but I laughed like a hyena* at one chunk of Jason Kottke’s blog.
* — Editor’s note: I have never actually heard a hyena laugh. To quote the above link, neither have you.
(Spoilers ahead.) Discussions with friends, a second viewing, and my own reflection convince me still more that The Matrix Reloaded is a bad movie. Its script is slack, whereas the first Matrix’s script was tight and gripping; this is not surprising, given that the second would have made lots of money no matter how bad it was. The second Matrix features an entire plotline — the debate over whether to dispatch a ship to chase after the Nebuchadnezzar — that exists only to set up the deus ex machina rescue at the end. It features numerous interminable fight scenes that are pointless to advancing the story. Indeed, I’m convinced that the Wachowski Brothers forgot that they had a story to lay out during most of the scriptwriting; they were probably busy sipping gold-flecked martinis from the mouths of black-eyed virgins in Maui, using the proceeds from the first Matrix. When it came time for the story, the Wachowskis used three boring monologues (the Oracle’s, the Architect’s, and the Merovingian’s) to lay it out, because they didn’t have the energy — apparently — to use the language of film for that purpose. And the monologues contain banal philosophy, whose banality only becomes more obvious upon a second viewing. When we think we might encounter some interesting thoughts — when Neo is talking to Councillor Harmann, for instance — we expect interesting observations. Inevitably, the Wachowskis let us down. So what we get are banal action scenes, interspersed with banal philosophy and very little story. Add in all the holes that others have laid out better than I could do, and you have a mediocre movie at best. Which is really unfortunate, because the first Matrix was an unqualified masterpiece.
I’ve gone off so frequently and at such length about this movie because the first was so remarkable. It is certainly one of my favorite movies ever; I’ve watched it probably 15 times by now, and even after all those viewings there are only a couple things I would change (remove the line “It’s our way or the highway” toward the beginning, and lose the pointless romantic subplot).
Of course I’ll see the third one; I have to see how the story ends. But I won’t buy Reloaded on DVD, whereas I gladly sprang for the two-disc DVD set for the first movie. The Wachowskis have let their best fans down.
I had perhaps the perfect Monday, which was shocking because the weather — raining, windy, and cold all day — was so atrocious. Around 10:30 or so this morning, my friends Allison and Mike called to ask whether I’d like to go to Northampton with them to soak in a hot tub for a while. One doesn’t turn down such an invitation, so off we went. We had a great car ride there, ate some great pizza in downtown Northampton, soaked for a bit with a friend of our friend Liz, took a tour around the town hosted by said FoaF (her name is Cathy; she’s quite charming), came home, ate sushi at Suishaya, and retired. And here I am. For a crappy day, this actually turned out marvelously well. When combined with this weekend’s craziness, I’ve had a pretty amazing three days.
It’s now 3:15 p.m. on Sunday, meaning I’ve not slept in something like 30 hours. I spent a crazy Saturday night and Sunday morning at the home of my friends Seth and Steph, celebrating the latter’s 36th birthday. It was craziness. Take your standard party elements and make them crazier. Then make them last a very long time. Then add in some really sweet, emotional people. It added up to a rockin’ night. I am exhausted now, though, and I think I should nap for three or four hours.
After about nine hours during which I couldn’t receive inbound connections (i.e., no email and no web traffic), I figured out that it wasn’t my DNS provider, but rather that somehow my Linksys router had renamed my main machine from 192.168.1.100 to 192.168.1.101. I know, I know, the user always blames the machine, but I think it’s actually plausible here: I rebooted my machine, so maybe it changed IPs then. It’s not supposed to happen, but maybe it did. In any case, I am frustrated right now. And tired. I am going to bed. But if any of you wrote messages to me that bounced back, that would be why; please resend them. Thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience.
In what is I think a bit of inspired silliness, my friend Josh and I started to hypothesize over IM about how much different the world would be if the Homeland Security Advisory System rated threats on a scale of Dons (Don Juan, Don Rickles, Don Johnson, etc.) rather than colors. We have begun the arduous process of developing the National Don Threat Level indicator, but we need your help.
I’ve had bad luck recently with nonfiction. I tried reading de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and gave it up about halfway through; I just couldn’t handle the Age of Reason’s pretension that it had discovered unavoidable Laws Of Man. De Tocqueville tosses off generalization after generalization with hardly any evidence, and after 250 pages I had to abandon it. Then there was Holmes’s The Common Law, of which I understood about 10% because I know nothing about the common law; as my friend Adam points out, Holmes’s book is not recommended as a first text on the subject.
Now it’s on to Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Let’s hope I have better luck with some good fiction.
Larry has an interesting article claiming that Starbucks will not allow people to take photographs inside the premises. This is another example of intellectual-property protection gone haywire — trademarks are enforceable even against innocuous things like taking a photograph of your friend in a Starbucks. Apparently this is a big problem when making movies; filmmakers have to check the copyright or trademark status of everything that falls within the frame. It’s absurd.
Larry has a cool idea for this weekend: let’s have people around the country check whether their Starbucks has the same hard-on against taking photos. This could be instructive.
I’d like to propose a convention: you’re only allowed to say you “live in Boston” if you live within walking distance of the T. I might even accept the definition that you “live in Boston” if and only if you live within the city limits. But in no sense is Worcester — home of the “Boston Gun Range” – in Boston. People in Boston would be embarrassed to call Worcester a part of the city.
I used to be a very big fan of the Indigo Girls, back around the time of their first two albums. Then, between their live albums, Swamp Ophelia, and Shaming Of The Sun, they got progressively worse. With the exception of “Get Out The Map,” Shaming Of The Sun is an atrocious album.
Now I’m looking back on their earlier stuff, and I wonder whether I was just wrong about them throughout their career. Some of their songs are certainly quite good, notably “Prince of Darkness,” “Love’s Recovery,” “Love Will Come To You,” “Virginia Woolf,” “Airplane,” “Nashville” and “Let It Be Me.” But too often, they descend into the cheapest tricks of the music industry: yelling as a replacement for emotional subtlety (e.g., their version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which I’ve come to agree over the years is a mockery of the original Dire Straits tune); duo crescendos that are supposed to stir us; and laughable lyrics like “I think about my fear of motion / Which I never could explain / Some other fool across the ocean years ago / Must have crashed his little airplane.” Thank you for your valuable contribution to the discussion of reincarnation. Thank you also for injecting “little” as a way to fill out the meter.
In general, I’m getting tired of gimmickry as a way of achieving emotional connection with the audience. Movies do this all the time, using John Williams-style scores, lovemaking early in the film between two ill-fated lovers (the man is spending too much time at the station, and his wife misses him so, but unfortunately she has to die), etc. Musicians all too often scream and play through distortion, thinking subtlety passé. When a movie like Talk To Her or Man Without A Past comes along that treats the human condition with some respect, it is more apt to bore us than to resonate with us.
But I don’t understand why we need gimmicks in the first place; humanity is interesting enough on its own. The job of the greatest literature and film is to distill all the complexity of reality into a tiny slice of a higher reality, where we recognize something fundamentally true about ourselves. The greatest books and films have done so without needing to trick us or manipulate us. I’m looking forward to a return to this subtlety. Or maybe I’ll just have to seek out the more obscure films, music and literature.
