Jef Raskin, someone without whom your life would be very different, passed away yesterday. He came out of that wacky hippie Apple/Silicon Valley culture of the 70’s, some fun photos of which are here.

Cool. Looks like SixApart finally published my Movable Type plugin to display Flickr Tags.

We heard one of the college stations playing Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus” as we were driving around today. It occurred to me that nobody would probably even think of Faubus now if it weren’t for the Mingus song. I used to be inclined to think that because even lambasting someone gives them some measure of validity, that it could actually be more effective in the long run to just ignore them. But I’m coming around to thinking that sometimes you have to think of the short run. What might have happened if Mingus and thousands of others hadn’t spoken up against segregation? I’m guessing that the people actually fighting it would have had a much tougher time. Actual legal segregation might still be around. Probably better that we remember the occasional goon.

So, everyone’s eulogizing Hunter S. Thompson, but I’ve never been able to understand what the fascination is. I’ve tried, but I think that somehow my demons don’t recognize much in his demons. I guess it’s not generally nice to say “what’s the big deal” when someone dies, but somehow from what I know about the guy, it seems like he’d appreciate a little piss and vinegar more than the universal fawning I’ve been reading.

I haven’t read any Strindberg plays, but I have the idea enough to think August & Helium is pretty funny, especcially Absinthe and Women.

Ed points this out: The Somerville Gates. The cat in the background kills me.

Some notes on my post about Andrew Bird.

1. The link to the mp3 of “Tables and Chairs” is working, now that I’ve fixed the five f’d up things about my home network & web server. So you can actually listen to it, and have a clue what that post’s title is about.
2. I actually love the Magnetic Fields, and listened to 69 Love Songs pretty constantly for most of 2000, as Terri will verify, probably through gritted teeth. The new album just makes me tired, though. I don’t care if all the songs begin with the letter ‘I’ and the tracks appear in alphabetical order— Stephen, give me something I can use!

Just noting.

I’m inclined to say these people are idiots. But then I saw how they’ve made it soooo easy for 13-year-olds to skip straight to the good bits of “objectionable” books— and published it on the Internet, which I’m sure none of the kids have access to in school— I actually applaud their efforts!

Nice to see these guys get the Turing award. I didn’t realize they came up with TCP/IP in just two days: I guess I’m quite not down with my Internet lore. I wish the NYT article went a little more into why TCP/IP is so cool, because it’s not really hard to understand. People just get scared because there are lots of letters and slashes. I don’t feel up to writing it myself now, or I would.

I think it’s inspirational. It’s nice to be reminded that two people can lock themselves in a hotel with a yellow legal pad and come out two days later with a paper that utterly transforms the world. They didn’t need to be put in a special pre-school for precocious eggheads so that they could get into Harvard when they were 14. They didn’t need VC funding. They didn’t need a note from their mom. They just did it.

Tonight’s fortune.

Folks, I implore you to treat yourself and buy the new Andrew Bird album. I’ve never posted an mp3 here before, but I can’t not share this song because it makes me very happy.

If it’s not your bag, no harm done. But I can’t get over how much it’s exactly what I want to hear right now. I’m not sure how he’s reading my mind.

I picked it up in Portland last weekend, along with John Coltrane & Duke Ellington and Pharoah Sanders’ Thembi (yes, Bull Moose music was having a sale on jazz on the Impulse! label). Thembi is my new favorite Pharoah Sanders album. Formerly, it was Karma, but 1) let’s face it, he should have just called it “The Creator Is a Master Plan” and not bothered to fill up the rest of the vinyl– it already clocks in at 35 minutes with that track alone. 2) it’s not something you can just casually listen to. You really have to block out a weekend and get yourself geared up for it. Thembi is in a similar vein, but it’s more digestible. “Morning Prayer” is about nine minutes long, and so it’s a perfect song to listen to on my walk to the T: it starts when I leave the house, it’s appropriately consciousness-altering/wake-up stuff, and it wraps up just as I get to the door of the Someday.

The Ellington/Coltrane, well, it’s just not hitting the spot right now. It’s too urbane & sophistocated. Someday I’ll want to listen to it, just not right now.

But check out Andrew Bird. He picks up actual motifs from Weather Systems in clever ways (like building a longer vocal track around one of the untitled instrumentals that originally appeared on it, or using the actual phrase “weather systems” in a lyric, or picking up a glockenspiel part from the track “Weather Systems” after a line about changing atmospheric pressure). The violin playing is fantastic. The songs are clever but it’s not a junk food, witty, Magnetic Fields-y embalmed-in-its-own-irony clever. Despite the fact that he seems to tour a lot, it sounds very much like he’s been spending a lot of time alone on his farm, thinking.

I still haven’t quite gotten over the fact that we ended up seeing Interpol in Providence instead of Andrew Bird at Johnny D’s.

(alternate title: how to know when it’s time to step away from the keyboard and leave work)

I just caught myself trying to figure out what Googlebot’s Myers-Briggs personality type would be if Googlebot had a personality. I decided it’s ESTP: extroverted (it always looks outward), sensing (not intuitive), thinking (not feeling), perceiving (not judging– that happens later, when PageRank is calculated…).

What it really means is that it’s time to head home.

As a concerned citizen points out in The Guardian, “With some simple insulation and double glazing, the Queen could easily halve her heating bill.”

What I think is bullshit is that the NYT won’t print the word “bullshit” even when the story’s about an essay called “On Bullshit“.

The essay’s worth a read, too. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” He’s off to a good start…

But… “For one thing, the expression bullshit is often employed quite loosely — simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific literal meaning.” So you’re saying people say “bullshit” and they don’t mean cow manure? Another scatological idiom involving “Sherlock” comes to mind…