I’ve never been that interested in Thurston Moore, but I am interested in his new book.

We spent the better part of Memorial Day weekend in the bathroom together. It’s just the kind of incurable romantics we are.

Well, we were actually just doing the first serious home improvement project we’ve done since before we moved in. We painted the bathroom and replaced one of the two lighting fixtures. I spent most of today in a small room huffing paint fumes, and I have this incredible urge to listen to Ween for the rest of the night. Changing the light fixture was easier than I thought. I have a healthy aversion to any project in which the worst case scenario is electrocution, but, honestly, the hardest part was figuring out which circuit breaker the lights were on. The rest is just hooking up the wires.

Probably the nicest thing that we did was to take out the cruddy shutters that were up in the window. They were actually unopenable because of their proximity to the shower curtain rail, so the window, by extension, was also unopenable.

We took a break for dinner last night while one round of paint dried to meet up with Amy & Doug at the Elephant Walk. It’s kind of crazy that I’d never been there before, it being so close, and the French Cambodian cuisine being as appealing as it sounds. We actually went to that address many times in the early days of the Terri & Ezra Show, when Finnegan’s Wake, the erstwhile pub, was in that location. I had this amazing Cambodian beef tips thing that I can’t stop thinking about. I woke up this morning craving it for breakfast. Terri also enjoyed the vegetarian dish she had.

Saw the new Star Wars one more time on Friday. The second time around, the stuff that made me cringe stood out a little more. But overall, if you can get past the first hour, it’s actually pretty good. The point where Anakin turns bad is pretty much where it starts getting interesting. If I were the age I was when Empire Strikes Back came out, I think I could be much more forgiving.

My apologies for any interruptions or weirdness my RSS feed has caused your reader of late, but I’ve switched the blog from Movable Type to Wordpress. I *think* all the things I needed to fix to keep people from getting broken links have been fixed (redirected the old RSS URL to its new home, made sure the links to individual items that Google knows about are still working and don’t look too bad, etc.)

The new site is still somewhat under construction and is definitely a little more stripped down than I intend, but it’s at least functional. I intended the cutover to be a little smoother, but a series of unrelated events led me to accidentally delete the old Movable Type blog.

I’m going with WordPress because

   
1. I’m sick sick sick of comment spam!
2. My ISP has an easy installer for WordPress & I was able to import all the content from MT— including comments— in about 15 minutes.
3. WordPress is free
4. WordPress is easier to customize & hack (e.g. it actually has an idea of a theme, and the design (design in the software sense) is sane: not Perl CGIs that write HTML files: blech!.
5. WordPress has more plugins & a better user/developer community.

Mrs. RealFake and I are busily working on a printing project, which will need to be hand inked if the roller company doesn’t come through for me and mail me back my re-covered rollers in the next two days. Even the typesetting tonight was derailed for want of an at symbol. A sign of the times, I suppose, that at symbols are more essential to everyday life than they were when my beautiful vintage typefaces were cast. However, if it is a cents sign you want? I’m your man.

Anyway, the want of rollers and frustration of the at symbol led me to an experiment I’ve been wanting to try for some time involving type and sculpey. It’s cooling in the kitchen while I kill time writing this.

And now Mrs. RealFake is poking me and telling me it’s time for bed. I agree.

A Boing Boing post pointed me to this, which finally explains what that Space Invaders grafitti we kept seeing in Paris is all about.

For the Rushmore fans out there, it looks like Max’s dream in the opening scene (which is also like the plot of Good Will Hunting) is based on a true story. [via Slashdot’s obituary of George Dantzig.]

I must confess, I stole that headline.

I know I should probably not waste space on this blog, or seconds of my finite time on this planet, on anything Revenge of the Sith-related. But somewhere inside me is the kid who listened to the casette-with-book set of the original Star Wars incessantly, being too young to see Star Wars in the theater the first time around, and those being the dark days before VCRs. I can still probably play back the whole thing in my head, from the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare to the snippets of actual film dialog to the closing music.

So, first, two reviews. First, Anthony Lane slashes the whole thing with his lightsaber prose. He’s always so much fun when he out and out loathes a film. I’ll have to wait until I see it to decide if he’s being too harsh (I suspect so), but as if you’ve been reading this a while, you probably have noticed that I pretty much value contrarianism for its own sake. Second, Roger Ebert. He’s not afraid to enjoy the kind of thing Anthony Lane calls (sincerely) “vulgarian”, so he’s quite positive. And he points out something I’ve been thinking, too:

Note: I said this is not necessarily the last of the “Star Wars” movies. Although Lucas has absolutely said he is finished with the series, it is inconceivable to me that 20th Century-Fox will willingly abandon the franchise, especially as Lucas has hinted that parts VII, VIII and IX exist at least in his mind. There will be enormous pressure for them to be made, if not by him, then by his deputies.

I have to agree. There’s a very farewell-tour disingenousness about how much Lucas is making about how this is the last one ever, ever, really, so you better go see it while you can! That, and the fact that Lucas has built a production empire which can make movies faster and faster, with less and less filming of actual physical objects. They’ll be able to whip those last three off in a few months and string out their release over another ten years. Lucas will be a shrivelled cackling man in a dark hood by that point.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking is that the whole renumbering of the first trilogy that the second trilogy introduced ex post facto is bogus. The whole thing only makes sense if you start with Star Wars (which I have decided I will always only call Star Wars, never A New Hope or Episode IV) first. Who cares which happened first in the chronology of the fictional universe? Audiences since, oh, The Odyssey have accepted the fact that when you’re telling the story, you don’t have to tell it in chronological order. That temptation seems to be there particularly with fictional works that spawned whole imaginary universes. I feel similarly about editions of The Chronicles of Narnia that re-order the books chronologically, which ends up putting most of the worst books first and actually throws off how the narrative’s supposed to work.

Reminder to self: this guy looks interesting. Note to others: anybody know anything about him?

Currently watching Compulsion on Fox Movie Classics. Not a terrific movie, but it inspires tonight’s readings, wikipedia articles on Leopold and Loeb, the Scopes Monkey Trial, and Sacco and Venzetti. This was all 70-80 years ago. Nice to see we’ve come so far.

I know I said I’d shut up about this, but it just got more interesting.

The bride who was in the limo which caught fire in front of Johnson Gate at Harvard commented in my blog and in least one other about what happened:

I was the bride in the limo, and just saw your blog when I was doing a search about the incident. We were never interviewed by the police, so I’m not sure if there is any investigation going on. The limo company has done NOTHING to address the situation. The didn’t even send back up transportation to get us to the reception! Everyone was fine, but all my bridesmaids’ things (in the trunk) were ruined, and our lives were all at risk. I feel worst for my bridesmaid who was 8 months pregnant, and for my 3 year old flower girl, and for my poor parents.

It’s pretty lame of the limo company. According to what she wrote in Randy’s blog, the limo company’s name was Discover Boston. Randy is rustling up a posse to pressure the limo company to make it up to the newlyweds.

If anyone from Discover Boston finds this, would you care to present your side of the story?

I’ve been remiss in posting an update of our trek to the day game against Oakland on Wednesday.

It was a perfect spring day at Fenway; the game was a little more interesting than it should have been. In the 9th inning, one strike away from a save despite giving up two runs, and the entire crowd cheering him on, Keith Foulke gave up a 2 run home run to Eric Byrnes, putting the Sox behind. He was rightly booed after finally finishing up the inning. With Varitek’s walk-off 2-run home run the next half-inning, you pretty much couldn’t ask for more from a game drama-wise. Which on one hand is not good, because what is up with Foulke?!, but on the other hand is good, since we’ve only managed to get tickets to two games this season, so they’d better be memorable! The next one comes in June, when my cousins are coming up from the ‘Burgh to see the Pirates in inter-league play. So it will no doubt be fun, regardless of how good the game is.

A couple of baseball-related links before signing off.

First, since Terri’s veg, and has pretty dismal options for snacking at Fenway, a recent post in the Food Museum Blog reminds us that it doesn’t need to be that way, especially for an otherwise vegetarian-friendly town like Boston. The veg options at SBC park seem tasty enough that even I, a devotee of the Lord’s hot dog, would be tempted.

Second, I’ve often had difficulty in identifying the song clips played before the batters step up to the plate. I need wonder no more, thanks to this thing which Terri pointed out to me today. [For the record, I did correctly identify that Bill Mueller’s at-bat song was Rush the other day…

Terri continues to en-Flickr scans of the lovely photos she took on old-school film. More coming, no doubt.

Of the many words I love, “quiddity” as been very close to the top of the list since I discovered it. I forget the context, but I feel like it was a summer or two ago, it came up (I have no idea how or why) when I was visiting the parents. My mom was looking it up, but I tried to guess what it meant from my smidgie of Latin: I guessed “what-ness” or “thingitude”. I was close:

quid di ty (kwi(d’i(-te-) pronunciation
n., pl. -ties.

1. The real nature of a thing; the essence.
2. A hairsplitting distinction; a quibble.

Or even better, from WordNet,

The noun quiddity has 2 meanings:

1. Meaning #1: an evasion of the point of an argument by raising irrelevant distinctions or objections
   Synonym: quibble
2. Meaning #2: the essence that makes something the kind of thing it is and makes it different from any other

On the Latin theme, I may start writing error messages in Latin after reading this.

It’s been a rainy planet weekend. The weather has been rainy, and it recalls the weather of the original rainy May days when Terri and I became friends, many a year ago, which we called the Rainy Planet. (Yes, hence the name we’re using for the press). In fact, one of those rainy days we hung out was the day of the Kentucky Derby, as was this past Saturday. We were supposed to go to my friends Kelly & Brecky’s derby party (they’re from Louisville), and I got confused about which Beacon Street it was on. I assumed Somerville, since they lived in Somerville; in fact, it was Beacon Street in Boston. So we ended up walking around in the rain back and forth down Beacon Street in Somerville, and we eventually just gave up and went (I think) to the Thirsty Scholar. Anyway, that was 1997. Fast forward to the rainy planet of 2005.

Friday night we scrambled to get a bit of gardening in. We had some flowers that really needed to get in the ground, and the forecast for the whole weekend was rain. So Terri did some clearing & weeding in the afternoon, and when I got home from work, we just beat the sunset and the impending raindrops.

The main innovation is that we are sort of reclaiming the sort of no-man’s land which we haven’t messed with because it’s hard to tell where the property line is. But our neighbors rent and don’t really keep it up, and it visually looks like it should go with our place. So, we’re just going to start taking care of it. What’s the worst that can happen? We basically just pulled up some weeds, planted some cleome, and put down some mulch, leaving the lilies, irises, and tulips that were already there.

Saturday, we took another trip through inclement weather to Chicopee Mass. to Letterpress Things. John had an impressive amount of new equipment (well, none of it’s new) that was there on consignnment from someone’s Kelsey shop. There were hundreds of cases of type, three presses, and lots of interesting ephemera and oddities, all practically brand new. Seemed like someone bought a bunch of stuff with good intentions, and never really used it. We ended up with four new cases of type, some decorations and borders, and some new plates. Still no great source for rollers. John mentioned a New England company which he is trying to talk into taking orders from small shops and hobbyists. But in the meantime, I’m getting a little impatient with an idle press. I was hoping for rubber, but honestly, I’m just thinking of getting them recovered with the old-school “composition” stuff from Tar Heel Rollers.

This afternoon, I’m going to run a few things the tedious hand-inking way.

Blogged to death, but if you haven’t head about it yet, those wacky MIT kids are throwing a time traveller’s convention. It’s cute and strangely heartfelt, and this is possibly the most earnest plea for viral marketing I’ve ever seen:

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Ok, so just for posterity, it’s at

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
(events start at 8:00pm)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
3 Ames St. Cambridge, MA 02142
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

Be there early and often.