Having a not-so-secret on-again off-again thing for Salt-n-Pepa over the years, I had to watch the first few episodes of their new eponymous reality show on VH1. I watched episodes 2 and 3 late last night, and this morning I was thinking that it’s all so staged and bogus that I probably wouldn’t watch any more.

But then, how exciting is it that Spinderella’s coming back in episode 4? There’s no way I’m not watching that.

You are so crafty, VH1, and I am so hooked.

—subtitled, as we used to say in college—
“Make a Run for the Bathroom”

Exhibitionist has several good links to negative commentary about the Taco Bell world series promotion.

Palimpsest — SELL — This word no longer speaks to the zeitgeist. Ditch it now and cut your losses.
Autochthonous — STRONG BUY — So much cooler and evocative than “indigenous”; anything “chtonic” is hot, hot, hot.
“Not so much” — HOLD — Naysayers have denigrated it for almost a year now, but it’s still going strong. Keep a close eye on it, though, and prepare for its demise; perhaps use it…. not so much.

A favorite blog closes shop. Grazie for all the great stuff I found through you over the years.

Moderately interesting reading here, and here.

More academic reading here.

It was always bogus, though, right? I mean, how do you quantify the value of a network? It was only ever something that made intuitive, poetic sense.

Aside: I like Facebook better than a lot of other of the big social networking sites, but LinkedIn got me a new job, I like simple old Flickr better, and I like my blog the best.

Ideas I never got around to doing and that are now past their time:

• What kind of invading Barbarian horde are you? (visigoth, saracen, hun, etc., etc.)
• Noam Chomsky Ate My Balls
• Kerouac-o-matic (inspired by the Chomskybot, I had this idea sometime in 1995)
• Dancing Lindbergh Baby

Standing outside the ZDNet building at 1 Athenaeum St in Cambridge, with a coworker taking a smoke break.

Him: Did you see the X-Files last night?
Me: I sort of hate the X-Files
Him: Mulder actually used the phrase “Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex”. Somebody at Fox fuckin’ knows, man!

Which until now has been a secret crackpot theory.

I was checking my feedreader this afternoon, after being about a week out of date, and in my RSS feed for all flickr photos tagged “letterpress”, I saw something for the Oblation Press of Portland, Oregon, and it made me think about the Oblation Board in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and that great situation where Lyra is dressed up at an elegant dinner party with Mrs. Coulter and she starts to get a glimmer of the horrible truth about the Oblation Board, and decides to run away. That whole scene, and that feeling of fear, just came alive in my brain, like the fear and imagery of a super vivid dream.

Which leads me to share my crackpot theory. Good fantasy (and I just don’t have the energy now to define my terms, so there) somehow actually is a map of the subconscious, and (even farther out on the limb…) that it actually somehow triggers biochemical reactions in the brain.

I’ve mentioned a favorite Borges quote before, and I think it gets at the same idea: “We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.”

Crackpot theory #425 appeared first a few years ago when I was re-re-re-reading the Lord of the Rings just after the first of the movies came out. The part where Frodo and Sam are in Mordor feels like it goes on forever, there’s such a grey, weighty, washed-out feeling that weighs that whole section down; the landscape seems paradoxically both precisely described but also strangely without landmarks or differentiation. I started wondering why such a place would take shape in Tolkien’s mind, and why it could also appear with such vividness in my own. But simultaneously, it occurred to me that I couldn’t imagine a better depiction of what depression feels like. I don’t know. Maybe your experience of depression is not illuminated by the presence of hobbits, but mine is.

Anyway. Discuss.

*I’m not really counting. There are too many to actually bother counting.

Except, imagine “Country Roads” by John Denver instead of Camera Obscura.

To appreciate the following quip from Editrix, you need one piece of information: her younger brother was Fox baseball commentator Joe Buck’s college roommate. She has many fine stories about his schmarminess even as a youth (apparently his closet was predominantly full of oxford dress shirts), but they are hers to tell.

Now, tonight, just after Manny hit the last in the string of back-to-back-to-back home runs, I swear, Joe Buck called Manny Ramirez “Man Ram”. I had to share this, so I jumped on ichat and had the following conversation with Trixie:

ME: i think joe buck just called manny ramirez ‘manram’
TRIX: you HAVE to be kidding
TRIX: we gave up and turned off the tv
ME: no
ME: not kidding
TRIX:manram. that is wrong on so many levels.
ME:alas
ME:”a long shot by manram”
TRIX: it’s like those “what if so-and-so had killed hitler when he had the chance” premises — my brother could have saved us from this horror.

From this morning:

Wren outside Davis station
drinks October rain
from an upturned bottle cap

My itch for visceral musical experiences that don’t involve amplification or electricity or recording technology or guitars got a great big ol’ scratch this weekend at the Honk! festival. I can’t even try to explain what the whole Honk! thing is about, so if you want words, you should check out their website.



Terri astutely pointed out that this is the only thing we’ve ever seen in the United States that approaches what the street festivals we’ve been to in Barcelona are like. There are probably more differences than similarities, and La Merce is on a much bigger scale and there are more different kinds of things going on. But they both are sort of these autumn things that happen in the street, where there’s drumming and dancing, where there’s no performer/audience split— everybody is a participant. They’re both sort of modern expressions of something much more primal.



As far as I know, while there are over a dozen bands like this in the country, it’s the only festival of its kind. It’s definitely one of those things that make me happy to be living in Somerville.



I shot some video. It’s crappy, but it’s slightly better than the photos for giving you the flavor. It’s still nothing like being live in the middle of a dozen people all playing REALLY LOUD instruments.

Walking home from the Honk! festivities in Davis Square today, Terri and I were chatting, and then we both suddenly fell quiet because we both started overhearing the conversation behind us. There were three guys, presumably on their way back to Tufts for a wacky Saturday night, and strategizing on the best combination of alcohol, interpersonal dynamics, and opening lines that they could use to start an orgy. I wish I had exact quotes here for you, but I don’t. The prevailing strategy, though, was that you needed a room with a large enough number of people, everybody had to be sufficiently drunk, it had to be sufficiently late at night, and then one couple might be able to start making out, and trigger a massive and simultaneous increase in hormones and decrease in social inhibitions among everyone else in the room.

Tufts freshmen are so cute.

Guys, I hate to disappoint you, but this is not a recipe for an orgy, it’s a recipe for vomit and people trying to figure out how to spend the next three years avoiding each other. Start small, like having sex with one person, and work up, OK?

…

Second, to see what rate of progress one can expect in software technology, let us examine the difficulties of that technology. Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence, the difficulties inherent in the nature of software, and accidents, those difficulties that today attend its production but are not inherent.

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

— Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., in “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering”

In other words, good software depends on being able to faithfully and usefully represent reality.

If you like hookworms, William James, and endocrinology, you might also like a subscription to Vanity Fair, reruns of “Maude”, and the bubonic plague.