Blogito Ergo Sum

The Coming Robot Holocaust Part XIII: The Cutening

2011-12-12T15:14:00.003-05:00

It's been a while since I last fretted about the coming robot holocaust which will see all of humanity enslaved by our mechanical overlords (Daniel H. Wilson's novel Robopocalypse earlier this year wasn't bad but was far too optimistic), but then I came across this horrifying story over at New Scientist: "Fluffy baby robot helps keep you company":

Babyloid, Japan's latest therapeutic robot baby, is also designed to help ease depression among older people by keeping them company.

Uh huh. That's just what they'll be expecting us to think...Until it shoots icy death from its eyes!! But I could be wrong.

Also, too: slitherbots!

Between the Lines

2011-11-21T15:44:00.004-05:00

Over on the Facebook, Margie Dana and Katherine O’Brien simultaneously shared a link to a site that explains how to turn any* digital photo into a coloring book image, using a free online image editor that bears an uncanny resemblance to Photoshop called Pixlr. I was intrigued, so I thought I’d have a go.

Since the idea of a coloring book is to stay “inside the lines” I thought it apt to use a photo with a line inside me: a photo of me, taken by Steven H. in 2007, standing astride the Prime Meridian at the Greenwich Observatory in London.

The steps are pretty easy to follow, and it takes a few tries to get the Gaussian blur amount correct. (Pixlr itself is pretty easy to figure out; well, at least for me, since it is virtually identical to Photoshop which I have been using since 1992. In fact, I replicated the exact steps in Photoshop and got pretty much the same result.)

As you can see in the before-and-after, it came out OK, but not especially great, largely because of the source image.

It never occurred to me to do this before, but I there is likely a far more elegant way of doing this using Photoshop filters. But if you don’t have Photoshop, Pixlr is a pretty easy way to create printed “toys” for (and even of) the wee ones. Or perhaps even the not-so-wee ones (who am I to judge?).

* Well, as anyone who has played around with Photoshop’s myriad filters can tell you, what you get out depends on what you get in. For best results, photos should not be out of focus, and images with high contrast between foreground and background images work best.

The Turbo-Entabulator

2011-11-16T15:44:00.002-05:00

Via Chris Mooney's The Intersection blog, a very funny old video demonstrating the dangers of talking in "jargon," whether it be scientific, economic, technological, or entemesmomodic.

A New(ish) Book!

2011-11-09T16:41:00.004-05:00

Soon to be available via Lulu.com, what was known in a previous life as Getting Business: Opportunities for Commercial Printers and Their Clients in the New Communications Arena has been retooled, recrafted, and had all references to the printing industry removed.

It is now "Does a Plumber Need a Web Site?": Mad Dentists, Harried Haircutters, and Other Edgy Entrepreneurs Offer Promotion Strategies for Small and Mid-Size Businesses.

The official blurb:

"Does a Plumber Need a Web Site?" was the question someone asked Dr. Joe Webb, and thus launched an unconventional business book, written with "co-conspirator" Richard Romano, about a handful of interesting characters facing small business sales and marketing challenges. None of the case studies are real, but the business situations and challenges they illustrate are faced by entrepreneurs every day. This entertaining walk through business media is designed to stimulate ideas and provoke thoughts about how to engage customers and prospects. Whether you're a plumber, a haircutter, a B2B manufacturer, a restaurant owner, a B2B services provider, a doctor, a health club owner, or any other entrepreneur or provider of marketing services to small business, this book will get you chuckling—and seriously thinking about new ways of promoting a business.

I don't mind saying that it is perhaps one of the strangest books--certainly one of the strangest business books--ever written. And that's just the way we like it!UPDATE: It is now live on Lulu's e-store.

While I Was Out

2011-10-22T11:36:00.002-04:00

Yeah, I know, long time no blog. Okay, so what’s been going on?

Well, firstly, Syracuse played the best game it has played in at least a decade (that is not hyperbole, alas), blowing out #11 West Virginia 49-23 at the Dome. (We suspect they did so well because we did not go to the game.) I wonder how many couches were set alight in Morgantown.

Secondly, the Colonial Little Theater in Johnstown, NY, will be performing a staged reading of my play Takeoffs and Landings (link is a PDF) on November 11 and 12, s part of their New Play Festival. You may recall that this was the same company that performed my Christmas play Past & Present Tense in 2009.

Thirdly, Dr. Joe and I have a new book out, called Getting Business: Opportunities for Commercial Printers and Their Clients in the New Communications Arena. It’s a series of made-up case studies (the best kind!) of a cross-section of businesses and their ideal marketing and promotion strategies. It was a lot of fun to write—and we have received a lot of good feedback on it. We are working on a “generic” version that is designed for companies outside the printing industry. Dr. Joe wants to use the book to get more speaking gigs. I’d rather get more writing gigs, since I far prefer writing to speaking, and it has the added advantage of avoiding all the aggravation of traveling.

Speaking of travel, fourthly, I have continued racking up the frequent flyer miles, grudgingly, thanks to a trip to Nice, France, earlier this month for a Pira International event. Nice was rather pleasant, and I can see how one could easily adapt to that Mediterranean lifestyle. However, the fact that 99% of the population smokes like crazy meant that you really can’t go anywhere without being engulfed in billows of cigarette smoke. I think I came back with black lung. Next week, I head to New Orleans for CSICON, a science and reason conference, which should provide some good and highly welcome non-printing-industry networking opportunities (as well as a chance to meet in person of the my grad school classmates). I sincerely hope that is the end of the traveling for a while. Although, given Southwest’s intense love for kicking people off planes, there is a good chance I may not make it out of Albany. (Memo to Southwest: I’d much prefer the lesbians to the screaming children.)

Fifthly, my favorite contemporary author, Haruki Murakami, has a new novel coming out on Tuesday. Interestingly, the publisher produced a “trailer” for it. This week’s New York Times Magazine has a good story about Murakami.My weekend plans involve rereading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, easily his masterpiece up to this point.

Sixthly, Last week, I got a welcome surprise in my mailbox: Magnet magazine is back in print, after a three-year-hiatus. I never did like their Web site much.

Anyway, that’s all the news for now.

Btw, two excellent new albums on heavy iPod/CD rotation: They Might Be Giants’ Join Us, and Fountains of Wayne’s Sky Full of Holes.

Past, Present, & Future

2011-08-05T15:37:00.003-04:00

Ever since I pilfered my mother's vinyl copy of Time Passages (1978) circa 1983, I have been a fan of Al Stewart. Anyone who was vaguely conscious in the late 1970s knows a few of his top 40 hits—"Time Passages," "Song on the Radio," "Midnight Rocks," and (you'll know this one) "Year of the Cat." They were actually pretty unlikely top 40 hits, in retrospect, and as much as I liked the hits (pretty unusual for me) the album tracks reflected Stewart's tremendous in history, such that he today has been dubbed "the king of historical folk rock." Time Passages alone includes "The Palace of Versailles" (the French Revolution), "A Man for All Seasons" (Thomas More). Other Stewart subjects have included American presidents, Nostradamus, World Wars I and II, somewhat obscure figures from British History (Lord Grenville) and so on.

So when I saw that he was going to be playing Caffe Lena here in Saratoga, I couldn't resist. So last Tuesday, about 80 people packed Caffe Lena (it sold out)--and I have to admit it was one of the best shows I have seen. As of late, Stewart has been doing more the folk thing, touring with co-guitarist and singer Dave Nachmanoff (who also served as opening act--he has a few albums out and his latest Step Up is fantastic; I got to meet him between sets--and meet Al after the show). The set was an eclectic mix of stuff--some obscure, some not so much--from his 44-year career (his debut album came out in 1967--damn, that was 44 years ago...), up to his recent album Sparks of Ancient Light (2008), which is every bit as good as the records he put out in the 1970s and 80s, even if he doesn't have Alan Parsons as producer any longer.

He was big on between-song banter, talking about the historical subjects of the songs, albeit in a humorous, light-hearted way (he's a very funny guy), or just joking about the songs (like the lyrics "The literati in their cellars/Perform semantic tarantellas" in "Princess Olivia"). He and Nachmanoff play together extremely well, they have a great chemistry, and they seem to be having a blast. And Nachmanoff knows many of Al's songs better than Al does--they didn't stick to a preset setlist, but tended to wing it. ("Let's see if I remember this one..." was a recurring line, and at one point kept changing his mind about what song to play next.) Toward the end of the second set, he asked for requests--and everyone shouted out a a cacophony of titles (someone even yelled out "Freebird"--no, not me). "So, basically, every song I ever wrote," he commented before doing "Merlin's Time" from 1980's 24 Carrots. He followed that up, and closed the second set, with a rousing acoustic version of "Year of the Cat." Afterward, he commented, "Some crowds prefer obscurities and get upset if you play a hit. That seemed to go okay." Indeed it did.

Other highlights included the "Presidential trilogy," when they realized that they could actually play three songs in a row about U.S. presidents--well, not actually about them, per se; "it's just another way of using metaphor," he explained. Warren Harding and William McKinley? Strangely it works.

The crowd was a little hardcore; at my table was a longtime dedicated fan who drive up from Newark. Another felt compelled to correct one of Al's comments about William Jennings Bryan having lost the Scopes Monkey Trial (this was true, Bryan won, but Scopes' conviction was overturned due to a technicality). That's the kind of crowd it was.

It was a fantastic show, and I hope to catch them again.

Setlist (his Web site includes links to historical info about the subjects of some of his songs):

Fragile Thing (Dave Nachmanoff solo)
In Sickness and in Health (Dave Nachmanoff solo)
House of Clocks
Lord Grenville
Like William McKinley
A Child's View of the Eisenhower Years
Warren Harding
Mr. Lear
On the Border

Rain King (Dave Nachmanoff solo)
Palace of Versailles
Midas Shadow
Timeless Skies
Post World War II Blues
Princess Olivia
Merlin's Time
Year of the Cat

Sheila Won't Be Coming Home (Dave Nachmanoff solo song with Al playing along)
Katherine of Oregon

Here's an oldie, Al Stewart performing "Time Passages" (still my favorite) in 1978 (the shrill female voice is not on the record):

Ran Ran Ran

2011-07-04T12:59:00.003-04:00

Learned a few lessons, and hills are not always my friends, but managed the Firecracker 4-mile run in 43:32. Worst part was dealing with the crowd (2500 people signed up for this thing) at check-in. More water stations—especially early on—would have been a good idea (the first one didn't turn up until the 2-mile mark). The "misting stations" were an OK idea—except if you wear glasses, then you're blind and trying to wipe them off while running. The final mile included the steep hill up Excelsior/Maple Ave. past the Courtyard—that almost did me in (probably could have made it under 40 minutes without that hill). A few clouds would have helped, too, but at least it wasn't that hot. Other than that, it was a bit of fun, and I discovered some Saratoga streets I never knew existed!

Run Run Run

2011-07-01T16:36:00.002-04:00

On Monday the 4th, for reasons passing understanding, I shall be participating in the 5th Annual Firecracker 4 four-mile run around Saratoga. The winners tend to finish in the 20–21-minute range. (I can manage it in about 55 minutes). I wonder if I can get Dr. Scholl as my primary care physician...

The Rhythm of the Heat

2011-06-27T14:23:00.003-04:00

The great Peter Gabriel plays SPAC (Saratoga Performing Arts Center) tonight, and thanks to Audrey B.'s uncanny ability to win tickets, I get to see him live for the first time since 1986 (we had taken a road trip from Syracuse to the Rochester War Memorial, and I recall that at one point the stage show had him attacked by what appeared to be giant desk lamps; oh, and he didn't play "Solsbury Hill" which annoyed me, especially as I was not a fan of "Sledgehammer," his big hit single).

This time, he is backed by what he is calling the New Blood Orchestra and doing orchestral versions of his back catalog. If this version of "San Jacinto" (my favorite song from my favorite Gabriel record, 1982's Peter Gabriel [aka Security]) is any indication of the rest of the concert, I am even more eagerly looking forward to it.

Oh, what the heck, let's have a hit single (from the same album). Don't know if this would work with an orchestra. We'll find out:

Happy Bloomsday

2011-06-16T14:15:00.003-04:00

Today is June 16—the day on which James Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses is set (June 6, 1904). To my great delight, I discovered last week (via NPR) a weekly 5-minute podcast by Irish writer and BBC broadcaster Frank Delaney called Re: Joyce in which he is reading and annotating the novel sentence-by-sentence. He estimates the project will take him about 22 years. He’s been at it about almost a year already and I am halfway through the archive. It’s really quite good.

YYZ

2011-06-02T07:35:00.002-04:00

As I head to Toronto today, my inner (and outer) Rush geek takes especial notice of the Toronto Pearson Airport code: YYZ.

Saucy Autocorrect

2011-05-17T07:40:00.003-04:00

Every now and then, when I need a good laugh, I check out DamnYouAutocorrect. Although they do get rather repetitive, and some just seem a bit contrived, every once in a while I'll fall out of the chair laughing:

Plank Stares

2011-05-16T12:54:00.002-04:00

What?!?

a man died on Sunday taking part in the latest craze going viral on the Internet — "planking."

Acton Beale, 20, plunged to his death after positioning himself for a picture on a balcony railing seven floors up in Brisbane after a night out drinking.

He was a "planker," a fast-growing group of people who lie flat on their stomachs with their arms against their bodies — to resemble a plank — in unusual and sometimes dangerous situations.

Photographs of their exploits are then shared through social media sites.

Really? This isn't a story from The Onion? Nope; it's apparently a real phenomenon, for some reason. Viral is right; something is infecting these people.

(I know from my gym that the "plank" is actually an exercise designed to strengthen ab muscles--but you do it on the floor on a mat, rather safely.)

Then again, these types of silly stunts are nothing new to social media. I remember back in the early 1990s when a movie called The Program came out, there was a scene in which several characters, in a rather ridiculous demonstration of courage (as most such demonstrations are), lay down in the middle of the road and had trucks drive over them. Apparently, there were enough copycats in real life that the filmmakers had to excise the scene.

Get the Darwin Awards people on the phone...

Berlin Fact of the Day

2011-05-13T14:33:00.002-04:00

Not many people know this, but the real reason the Berlin Wall had been built was to keep in the thousands of completely and utterly psychotic bicyclists. Now they're loose!

By the way, Continental Airlines (I'm talkin to you), a 9-hour transatlantic flight in a densely packed 757 could be considered a form of torture. To paraphrase Roy Scheider in "Jaws"--we're gonna get a bigger plane, right?

I am now in Newark waiting to take what is a dead ringer for the original Wright Brothers plane for the last leg back to Albany.

If anyone knows what's good for them, they won't try to call or e-mail me for at least two days!

Bitter Bitte

2011-05-08T09:59:00.002-04:00

Okay, so my Learn German in a Hurry book doesn't say what the word for "exit" is, but it does inform me that Tischtennis spielen means "play ping-pong." Helpful!

Also, I do recall in Montréal a couple of years ago (where four years of high school French failed me) discovering that there are two absolutely essential words to learn in any foreign language to avoid looking like an utter dork in public: "push" and "pull." Which are not in my Learn German in a Hurry book. "Hang-gliding," though, is Drachenfliegen. It's like they know me!

Also useful: "walrus" is "Walross." I probably could figure that out by myself, should the need arise. Which it almost certainly will.

Achtung Baby

2011-05-08T08:55:00.002-04:00

Heading to Berlin today for three days to yammer to the masses at a Xerox Premiere Partners event. I have never been to Berlin, although I do have the Lou Reed album. Surely it's not that depressing...

In Berlin, by the wall
you were five foot ten inches tall
It was very nice
candlelight and Dubonnet on ice

We were in a small cafe
you could hear the guitars play
It was very nice
it was paradise

You're right and I'm wrong
hey babe, I'm gonna miss you now that you're gone
One sweet day

Oh, right, there is no wall anymore...

I bought a little German language tutorial book; curiously, it does not have the word "reservation" (as in "I have a reservation at this hotel") but it does helpfully include the word for "rhinoceros" (Nashorn), because you never know when an Ionesco play is going to break out.

I have a longish layover in Newark this afternoon, and they have a Sam Adams brewpub at EWR, so look for some increasingly incoherent Twitter posts later on...

Oh, and just a formality:

Sad Macs

2011-05-08T08:50:00.002-04:00

Over at PrintCEO Blog, I write about a new Mac-based malware attack—MAC Defender. By the way, yes, Macs can get viruses, it's just not that common.

[T]he other day a number of friends and colleagues—some of whom were Windows users, so I detected a certain “nyah” factor—forwarded me stories of a new Mac malware alert. It’s not a virus per se, but is rather something called “rogueware.” Says Computerworld:

“The program, dubbed MAC Defender, is similar to existing ‘rogueware,’ the term for bogus security software that claims a personal computer is heavily infected with malware. Once installed, such software nags users with pervasive pop-ups and fake alerts until they fork over a fee to purchase the worthless program.”

Sounds like Norton Antivirus—oh, but I kid Norton Antivirus…

The Eyes Have it

2011-05-08T08:45:00.003-04:00

Yeah, I know, it's been a while--but what better reason to return to the blogosphere than a giant squid eye in a jar, this one in the Smithsonian's collection. Hint hint: Christmas is coming...
Kind of reminds me, in a weird way, of the Stephen King quote: "I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk."

WhatTheyDon'tThink

2011-04-01T07:33:00.002-04:00

Over at WhatTheyThink is our annual tradition, the April Fool's edition of faux news stories from around the printing industry. I think we spend more time on these stories than on our real stories!

The Unfriendly Skies

2011-03-29T05:54:00.002-04:00

It seems appropriate that I am posting this while sitting in the Albany airport. As some of you may recall, back in November 2008 I won the District 53 Toastmasters Humorous Speech Contest with what has become known as "the airplane speech." The contest was apparently videotaped, but three years' worth of effort has not been able to procure a copy.

Last January, though, the District held a special "Jan Jam" event whereby past Humorous Speech Contest winners were invited to reprise their speeches and participate in a panel discussion. This time, I came armed with my own video camera and captured it, for reasons passing understanding.

There was no camera operator, so it's all in long shot, which means the prop "reveal" may not be all that effective. I also screwed up one line.

Anyway, I give you this throwback to the days when I was afraid of flying--a much happier, more convenient time...

Let the Madness Begin

2011-03-13T17:13:00.003-04:00

Get yer brackets out. Watching ESPN's Selection Sunday while listening to Separation Sunday. I'm guessing Syracuse will be a 3 seed, but I am always wrong. At least SU isn't going into the NCAA finals with a multitude of casualties.

The Unfriendly Skies

2011-03-08T20:54:00.002-05:00

Yes, I am utterly appalled by this horrific story:

Virgin Blue Flight Attendant Puts 17-Month Old In the Overhead Storage Bin

I mean, come on, that's outrageous. Everyone who flies knows that children should go with the checked luggage.

Alas Vegas

2011-03-08T16:37:00.004-05:00

Greetings from Las Vegas, my least favorite place on Earth (it's basically DisneyWorld for people having mid-life crises or pining for the days of adolescence, for reasons passing understanding). I am staying at the Wynn Resort, not, I later found out, named for Ed Wynn, or even Keenan Wynn. One doesn't realize how much one appreciates anti-smoking legislation until coming here. What happens in Vegas stays in my lungs.

The other morning, there was one of those quintessential "Only in Vegas" stories.... I was walking down the hotel corridor and one of the rooms had a Charlie Sheen People magazine cover taped to the door, accompanied by a handwritten note, presumably to the chambermaid, saying "Stop taking down our Charlie Sheen pictures." The chambermaid was behind me and she knocked, then entered the room. I heard her then gasp "Oh, my God!" I did not want to know and kept going. Te CSI people didn't show up, so I assumed it was nothing horrible....

The one good thing about Vegas, though, is that the hotel exercise room is generally empty at 6 am...

Postcard

2011-02-24T12:59:00.002-05:00

Greetings from Graphics of the Americas in Orlando, Florida. Not many people know this, but this city was actuallt named for 1970s singing sensation Tony Orlando. Every dawn, the entire town gets up and sings "Tie a Yellow Ribbon."

And, needless to say, here is the reason you always want to get a hotel room on the 1st floor:

Death Stalks the Highway

2011-02-14T12:17:00.001-05:00

Noooooooo!!!!

After the television, the computer and the smartphone, the car is set to become the consumer electronics industry's "fourth screen" - a venue where there will not be enough hours in the day for us to spend our hard earned cash on in-car apps and pricey in-app online services.

Bringing new meaning to the term carnage.

UPS Store--U Positively Suck

2011-01-31T14:46:00.003-05:00

Ten-and-a-half years ago, when I first moved to Saratoga Springs, I rented a mailbox at the local UPS Store (then Mailboxes Etc.) for my business mail and especially for packages, because I quickly learned that the USPS, UPS, and FedEx liked to leave packages out in the rain and snow. (FedEx in particular has a remarkable knack, I have discovered, for placing boxes exactly where water drips from the eaves of the house.) A PO box was out of the question, because it was predominantly to receive packages from couriers that could not deliver to a PO box.

For 10 years, this system worked fairly well, although once I moved out to the suburban hellhole I couldn't walk up to get my mail anymore, which had been convenient in winter when I can't get my car out of the driveway. The transition from Mailboxes Etc. to The UPS Store went fairly well, and, well, the original owner's idea of "good customer service" was to not actually hit anyone. It also meant that I didn't have to change my business address the three or four times I have moved. And may (hopefully) continue to move.

A week or so ago, the UPS Store location began having strange hours, being closed during my usual dedicated errand times, and cryptic signs on the door would say "Due to a change in ownership at the Wilton branch, we are closed." Which meant I couldn't get my mail.

Today, they appeared to have shut down for good--no notes, no nothing. No one answers the phone. The Wilton branch number doesn't even ring. I e0maled the Wilton branch and (shock!) got no response. I called the Post Office hoping to retrieve any mail that had not been delivered, but they "didn't have it" and they pointed out (I could detect the nyah nyah in her voice) that the contract I probably signed with them (I don't recall; it was a decade ago) gave them the right to take possession of the customer's mail and do with it what they will. So I guess my mail, including checks (assuming anyone has deigned to pay me in the past couple of weeks), bills (like for my first semester of grad school), etc., is all in limbo. It doesn't help that I have to go out of town tomorrow for the rest of the week and will be unable to resolve any of this. Grrrrr....

This is just really lousy business practice. If they are in the midst of a change in ownership, I hope they realize that they have lost a lot of customers (given the swearing I have witnessed as people tried to get in), including me. A simple letter or a phone call or an e-mail explaining the situation and arranging some sort of contingency plan would have gone a long way toward not making me feel like a complete schmuck for having been a loyal customer for 10 years. Never again.

I don't like to use this blog to bitch about things, but it has been an incredibly frustrating experience, and I feel I should warn folks out there to absolutely avoid using these services and "businesses" for anything important.

Slitherbots!

2011-01-27T15:09:00.001-05:00

Via LiveScience:

Using a computer program, researchers at the University of Vermont simulated a population of naive "baby" robots. The robots had to complete various tasks in their virtual environment, such as finding objects and walking toward them. Those robots that performed poorly got deleted, while the best-performing ones remained "alive."

The robots that changed their body forms (like tadpoles growing into frogs) learned to walk more rapidly and developed the most stable gait, the researchers found.

“We learned that it is easier to breed robots that change shape,” said lead study researcher Joshua Bongard, a professor of computer science.

Yep, we're boned.

Not So Precious Fluids

2011-01-26T14:28:00.004-05:00

I refuse to ever buy bottled water, but it's a safe assumption that I will steer clear of anything called MeatWater: beef-salad flavored water. Beef salad? Okay. They also have cheeseburger-, barbecued chicken wing-, and Italian sausage-flavored water.
For the health-conscious (if that's the right term to use) they also have grilled salmon- and chicken salad-flavored water.

Speaking of vile beverage ideas, Audrey B. passed along a link to a new whiskey-in-a-can:
Wrong. So very wrong. What's next: vodka in a juice box?

Here's an idea, though: want a whiskey and water? Try mixing your canned whiskey with some Meatwater. It would make for some strange tasting notes. Well, stranger tasting notes.

Born Under a Bad Sign?

2011-01-14T15:22:00.002-05:00

Good grief:

An assertion in a Minneapolis Star Tribune article that our understanding of the zodiac is off by about a month - and that therefore people have been identifying themselves with the wrong sign - caught fire on the internet Thursday, and many folks are in an absolute panic on social media.
...
Some vowed to get their tats removed. Others groaned about losing the sign with which they’ve identified themselves for years. The zodiac and related terms - including Ophiuchus, said to be a 13th and neglected sign - were trending Twitter topics much of Thursday.

But before astrology fans scrape the ink from their arms because they think they're now a Virgo instead of a Libra, they should consider this: If they adhered to the tropical zodiac - which, if they're a Westerner, they probably did – absolutely nothing has changed for them.

That's worth rephrasing: If you considered yourself a Cancer under the tropical zodiac last week, you're still a Cancer under the same zodiac this week.

Yikes, people still take this stuff seriously?

I've often been called officious--but not Ophiuchus. Of course, there is absolutely nothing to astrology--well, except for The Onion's horoscopes:

You're getting better at figuring out what your dreams really mean. However, all that stuff that happens when you're awake is still pretty baffling.

My favorite debunking of astrology is via the great James Randi:

Fonts of Knowledge?

2011-01-14T14:58:00.003-05:00

Says LiveScience:

Want to remember what this article says? Maybe you should read it in Comic Sans.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, I'm better. What are they talking about?

Fonts, or styles of typeface, that are relatively difficult to read (including the much-maligned Comic Sans) help people learn new information, according to a new study. The font effect works both in lab experiments and in real classrooms, perhaps by forcing students to work harder to process the information.
...
Dieman-Yauman, his faculty mentor Daniel Oppenheimer and their colleagues published the results in the January issue of the journal Cognition. Keeping with the theme of the research, they titled their paper, "Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes." Diemand-Yauman was the lead author.

People generally assume that the easier it is to learn something, the easier it will be to remember the information later. But education research has shown that in many cases, it’s the struggle that makes information stick.
...
Dieman-Yauman and his fellow researchers were interested in whether switching from easy-to-read fonts to more-difficult ones would create a desirable difficulty and improve learning. They began by presenting information about three made-up alien species to 28 volunteers. Each alien species had a strange name, such as "pangerish" or "norgletti," along with seven physical characteristics. Volunteers got a list of alien names and characteristics and had 90 seconds to memorize which characteristic matched which species.

Some of the lists were typed in an easy-to-read font, Arial. Others, the disfluent lists, were typed in either Comic Sans MS or Bodini MT.

After the 90 seconds was up, the researchers distracted the volunteers for 15 minutes, then tested them on their new alien knowledge. Turns out you want your alien hunters to study up in Comic Sans: The scores for those who read the disfluent lists averaged 14 percentage points higher than those who read the list in Arial (86.5 versus 72.8 percent, the researchers found).

Trouble is, Comic Sans is not an especially difficult typeface to read--at least not visually. Sure, it makes me vomit, which is distracting when trying to comprehend something, but it's legible.

Anyway, the researchers then took their experiment to the real world...well, if high school can be considered the real world:

The researchers recruited teachers in six subjects — advanced placement English, honors English, honors physics, regular physics, honors U.S. history, and honors chemistry — from a public school in Ohio. Each teacher sent copies of his or her classroom presentations and worksheets to Dieman-Yauman to be transferred to difficult-to-read fonts.

He and his colleagues chose three difficult fonts based on preliminary studies: the crowded and boxy Haettenschweiler, the cursive-like Monotype Corsiva, and the bubbly Comic Sans Italicized. When there was no electronic version available to alter, the researchers made blurry copies of the worksheets instead.
...
The students who learned with difficult fonts got better grades and didn't seem to notice the font switch – in surveys after the study, the researchers found no differences in how students liked the material based on font. Novelty could play a role in the results, the researchers wrote, but the novelty of the fonts — which weren't too outlandish compared to regular textbook fonts — should have worn off over the course of the experiment.

As for Comic Sans, this famous photo pretty much sums it up:

Work for Free?

2011-01-14T14:45:00.003-05:00

A very funny ('cause it's true!) flowchart for determining whether or not you should ever do work (I am guessing graphic design work) for free.

Click image for large, legible version.
h/t The Big Picture

In Pod We Cast

2011-01-14T13:49:00.002-05:00

Dr. Joe interviewed me this morning for a podcast for my WhatTheyThink special report, The iPad: What it Is, What It Isn't, and What It Means for Graphic Communications Professionals. Check it out here.

Coming to a Phone Near You

2011-01-14T10:51:00.002-05:00

I guess it's now official: the iPhone is better for making movies than making phone calls. From Reuters:

An award-winning South Korean film director shoots a 30-minute movie using only Apple's iPhone 4.

Damn You, Autocorrect!

2011-01-13T11:40:00.003-05:00

Anyone who has an Apple mobile device--iPhone or iPad--has likely at one time fallen prey to the dreaded "Autocorrect," a predictive text correction feature that half the time is helpful, and the other half of the time creates confusion--or hysterics, usually while texting. A wonderful Web site I discovered called Damn You, Autocorrect! collects screen shots from mobile devices and the linguistic anguish it causes. (Warning: Bad language and many autocorrects tend to be obscene. Also, some may find really bad typing and spelling offensive...)

Fake Criterions

2011-01-13T11:27:00.005-05:00

Any self-respecting cinephile is familiar with the Criterion Collection, which, according to the company, "has been dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements." Criterion Collection DVD artwork has a distinctive look. I just received my latest CC newsletter, and was reminded of a very funny site Derek L. had told me about a few months ago: Fake Criterions, essentially a Tumblr feed of faux Criterion-style DVD art for movies that would, I dare say, never actually make the real Criterion Collection. For example:
Now I'm tempted to try my own hand at one...

Behind the Time

2010-12-19T11:19:00.003-05:00

Hmm...Time's person of the year is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. A bit unTimely, but then as Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture points out, by the time (as it were) the big media companies catch on to something, it's already old news, like making Amazon's Jeff Bezos Person of the Year in 1999, five years after Amazon was founded. I guess it helps when the Person of the Year has a hit movie based on them. I suppose 2012's Person of the Year will be Steve Jobs or the Wikileaks guy. Then again, achieving Person of the Yearhood usually marks the zenith of that person or company's influence (or stock value), so perhaps it's all downhill for Facebook now. (Hope springs eternal.)

Fast'n'Bulbous

2010-12-18T16:08:00.002-05:00

RIP Captain Beefheart.

Even Yet Still More "Antisocial"

2010-11-02T05:33:00.000-04:00

The latest chapter.

Lon Triton took a final walk up toward the bridge from the cargo deck. He was walking with a bit of a limp in his center foot; he must have twisted it on something, or it was his old plantar fasciitis acting up again. Fortunately, Dr. Scholl’s was one of Ophiuchus V’s largest companies, second only to the Trimon Brothers Glove Emporium. In fact, as he passed by Cargo Bay 7, he had an urge to grab one of the 500,000 Ophiuchian orthopedic shoe inserts, but he knew that was verboten.

He passed by Cargo Bay 2—where 500 special pianos were being held (they were the ones with black, white, and gray keys)—and heard what he assumed was Dun Tridwell, his young deckhand, playing a beautiful and wistful piano solo. He was quite the talented young Ophiuchian, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he left the crew and went to piano school. He smiled sadly; in his own youth, Lon had entertained fantasies of being a pianist but he was literally all thumbs. It was a very rare genetic defect, but still occurred on occasion on Ophiuchus.

“Captain,” came a voice over the intercom, “please come to the bridge. We will be exiting the wormhole in two minutes.”

And none too soon. Lon was looking forward to some shore leave. He had been on the road—or, he should say, in the wormhole—for the better part of the past two years and he needed a little bit of downtime. And the time was right, too. His son Lop was about to undergo The Nosing, and there was the celebration to prepare. Ophiuchian children are born with very small noses; it isn’t until their sixteenth year that the nose literally bursts forth from the face to its full extent. It happens in the space of about two hours, and it is the responsibility of the parents to ensure that the proper ritual is prepared so that when The Nosing takes place, the youth in question is surrounded by his or her closest family and friends who all take turns wiping the emerging protuberance with sacramental facial tissue. To miss one’s own child’s Nosing ceremony was one of the most shameful things a parent can do on Ophiuchus.

Lon strode into the bridge and stood behind the pilot. Out the front window, he could see the twisting undulations of the wormhole.

“About to hit exit point,” said the pilot.

There was a bright flash out the front window, and the ship exited the wormhole and re-entered normal space. Off in the distance, Ophiuchus V gleamed. To the right, the blinking dodecahedron that held the wormhole depot. Lon stared, and furrowed his brow as he saw several dozen pinpoints of light swarming around the planet like what humans would call fireflies. As the ship headed toward the planet, the fireflies began to get closer, and Lon and the pilot both noticed simultaneously that they were heading right for them.

“What are those?” Lon asked.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

They neared quickly, and Lon could soon make out that they were fighters of some kind, looking like two steam irons welded together. Thin beams of light shot out of the hole from which, had they been irons, steam would have sprayed. The beams hit the top of the cargo ship, and it lurched. Fortunately, Lon had the stability of a tripod, so he kept his feet as the ship shuddered.

“Are we being attacked?” said Lon, obviously rhetorically.

“It appears so,” said the pilot.

The enemy ships began to swarm and take more shots at the cargo ship, which rocked back and forth. Pieces of the hull began to rain down on Lon and the pilot.

“Bon, send a distress signal to Ophiuchian Space Central. Then open a channel to...whoever those ships are. And take evasive action.”

“Distress signal sent. We don’t have the maneuverability to evade fighters like that.” The pilot pressed some buttons. “Channel open.”

Lon grabbed a handset from the console. “To the attacking ships, this is Lon Triton, captain of the Tribay III. We are a cargo vessel transporting pianos and foot care products. We pose no threat to you or anyone else. Please break off this attack.”

There was a crackle of static, and a deep, gruff voice said, “No.”

Lon and the pilot looked at each other. Lon said into the handset, “Can you at least tell us...why you’re doing this? Do you have something against piano music?”

“Like you don’t know,” came the response. It was a voice that sounded like what an Earthman would liken to a bullfrog with a mouthful of live crickets talking over a bad cellphone connection. “Look at my face.”

Now Lon was even more confused. “But I can’t see your face.” And, if it was anything like the voice, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see it.

The connection went dead. The ships continued to swarm and fire upon the cargo vessel. Soon, Lon could see several pinpricks of light rising from the plane surface. The Ophiuchian space defense. They arrived quickly and began firing upon the attackers, which began to scatter. Within a few moments, the Ophiuchian fleet had scared off the intruders. Lon and the pilot looked at each other and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Bon, open a channel to the Ophiuchian fleet captain.” The pilot twiddled some more knobs. “Thanks, guys. Who the hell were they?”

“No problem, Captain,” came a voice over the loudspeaker. “Ships looked to be Ziij in configuration.”

“Why on Ophiuchus V were they attacking a cargo ship, of all things?”

“Unknown, sir. We will be launching an investigation. In the meantime, you are cleared for docking at the Ophiuchian Port Authority Terminal 5, Bay 6.”

“Thanks. Over.” He turned to the pilot. “Damage report?”

Chattering came over the speaker. “Some minor structural damage....One minor casualty...” As he listened, his face turned grave, and his nose drooped. “Sir, it’s Dun Tridwell.”

“Is he okay?” asked Lon.

“In a way. He was in Cargo Bay 2 during the attack. As the ship pitched, the pianos began slamming against each other. His hands were crushed. He’ll never be able to play again.”

Lon looked downcast. “I don’t care what the space command says, this means war. Even if I have to fight it myself."

I, Pad

2010-10-22T16:21:00.001-04:00

I just signed up for Netflix after a lapse of a few years and discovered that I can stream movies to my iPad using their app. And it works pretty well!

Escape Claws

2010-10-22T16:12:00.003-04:00

I can't tell you how often I have been in a shopping mall, an airport, or a train station, and said, "You know, I could really go for a live crab." Well, if I were in Nanjing, China, I could just stroll up to a live crab vending machine. The machine keeps the crustaceans at a 5 degrees Celsius, at which point, apparently, they go into a kind of hibernation or suspended animation. And, the vending machine's owner says, if you are accidentally dispensed a dead crab, they will give you three live crabs. Sweet deal, if by "sweet" you mean "horrifying."

I have no idea what they are saying in this video, but some of the user reactions don't seem encouraging.

On the plus side, it would thwart people reaching their hands up in the machine to steal a free one!

A Sucker for Tentacles

2010-10-22T16:09:00.002-04:00

I can't remember the last time I had a pot pie of any kind, but this idea (via Boing Boing) for a tentacle pot pie may make me reconsider.
Up next a shepherd's pie made from actual shepherds.

You Have to Hand It To Them

2010-10-22T12:53:00.004-04:00

Who says great designers don't think alike?

The other day, I bought the book Proofiness, by Charles Seife, published by Viking, which is an excellent (and funny) exposé of math abuse and deception in today's media (a worthy modern take on the old 1950s classic How to Lie With Statistics). Highly recommended.

This morning, I received in the post a review copy of a book called Sleights of Mind by Steven Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, two neuroscience researchers whom I had met at the Santa Fe Science Writers Workshop last year, and who study how the mind lies to us, published by Henry Holt. I am looking forward to reading it.

What immediately struck me about these two books were their covers:
Those hands certainly get around! (Thank you, Thing.) In fact, close examination shows that it is the same stock image (from Getty Images, according to both book jackets). They're wearing gloves, otherwise I would check their prints.

It kind of reminds me of that back page in Consumer Reports where they occasionally show all the different ads that use the same stock photo models; one poor guy, apparently, had every disease on Earth until he finally turned up in an ad for a funeral home. Then there was the fickle family who were in one ad for a cable company and then the same bunch turned up in another ad for satellite TV.

My former TrendWatch colleague Heidi Tolliver-Nigro and I used to write a lot about stock photos back in the day and we would always point out that one of the downsides to using royalty-free imagery was the chance that someone else would end up using the same image.

Even Yet More "Antisocial!"

2010-10-16T10:21:00.001-04:00

The story continues.

“I have two questions.”

“Acknowledged.”

“’Where are we’ and ‘is that a dragon?’”

“Unknown and affirmative.”

“I have a third question.”

“Acknowledged.”

“’Do you have anything to drink on you?’”

“Negative.”

“Damn.”

“Acknowledged.”

Thirty seconds earlier, Dr. Pock and Jet had abruptly appeared in what appeared to be a dimly lit room. Upon further investigation, Pock was able to discern that it was some kind of bar. He grinned. However, his elation was quelled when he caught sight of the dragon not ten feet away from where he and Jet were standing. Its presence was bad enough; that it stood between Pock and the bar was the bigger issue.

It wasn’t particularly large as far as dragons went; it measured maybe five or six feet from nose to tail when on all fours. It had thick, rust-colored scales that covered its entire body, and a set of fearsome claws. Curiously, on its back was a large tattoo of what looked like a raven-haired teenage girl. Pock found that curious. The dragon had a set of ominous teeth that were only visible when it smiled.

Wait... thought Pock. Smiled?

“A fourth question,” he said.

“Acknowledged.”

“’Is that dragon smiling?’”

“Affirmative.”

“Okay.”

Indeed, although a dragon is, physiologically, a fearsome creature, the fact that this one seemed to be smiling—and not smiling in an evil or mischievous way—was decidedly at odds with what was otherwise a daunting appearance.

“A sixth question.”

“I believe you’re only up to five,” said the dragon in a remarkably clear, articulate voice.

Now Pock was completely freaked out.

“Unless I miss my guess,” the dragon continued, “you are the unwitting victim of a wanderhole.”

“A what?”

“A wanderhole. A small fragment of a wormhole that, as its name suggests, wanders through space. They were created decades ago during the great intragalactic wormhole building projects. When the wormholes were created and manipulated to travel in certain directions, small bits were dislodged and have been traveling randomly through the galaxy. Only very rarely are sentient beings or spacecraft unlucky enough to fall into them. I mean, the odds of it are pretty astronomical. But this is astronomy, after all, and sometimes these things happen. It looks like you two have just joined a very select club.”

“Ah.”

“At any rate, welcome to here.”

“What is the name of here?” asked Pock.

“Come again?”

“This planet. This place. What’s the name of it?”

The dragon thought. “That’s a good question. We don’t really have a name for it.”

“You don’t?”

The dragon shrugged. “It’s never come up before. We just refer to this place as ‘here’ or ‘this place’.

“What’s your name then?”

“We don’t have names. We’re more of a pronoun-based culture.”

“But not very pro-noun,” offered Pock.

“Yes, that’s very good. At any rate, let me buy you two a drink.”

Pock moved to a barstool with a speed that the dragon could swear caused a red-shift. Jet and the dragon sat on either side of him. A taller, upright, much stouter dragon appeared behind the bar and poured three drinks. Pock gave it a cursory examination before taking a sip. It tasted remarkably like gin, but with more beef. And like that would stop him. He downed it in one gulp and the bartending dragon poured another one.

“I’m Benjamin, Benjamin Pock. And this is Jet. Jet’s a robot. We’re from the planet Earth which is, um, somewhere far from here.”

“I can imagine. The wanderholes can send folks on some wild journeys.”

Pock downed another drink and a third one appeared in front of him. Whatever this place was or wasn’t called, he liked it already.

“It’s remarkable, though, that you speak perfect English,” said Pock.

“Come again?”

“Your English. It’s perfect for a race that has never heard of Earth.”

The dragon looked at him confusedly. “That’s curious. I was about to say the same thing about your speaking our language perfectly.”

“Which is called...”

“Our language,” said Pock and the dragon simultaneously, as Pock was starting to catch on. Well, to a point.

“My little red friend, you are blowing my mind,” said Pock, quickly draining his third drink.

“It really is a question of tradition,” said the dragon. “You see, many thousands of years ago, the two beings who developed our language met for what has come down to us through our lore as The Naming of Things, when they gave all the objects, and creatures, and plants, and feelings, and snack crackers in our culture certain names. But then they stopped abruptly, and said, ‘Whoa, dude, these names we have for everything are so totally sick, but if we, like, give all the gnarly beings a single name, then, like, they’ll be stuck with that and that’s all they’ll ever be, which would totally suck.’”

“They spoke strangely,” said Pock.

“Yes, well, it was an early form of our language, which has evolved and grown in complexity. And become less ridiculous. Anyway, they decided that nouns—especially proper nouns—were far too existentially limiting, so they named as few things as possible, just the bare minimum of what was needed to actually have a functioning language and culture, and that was it.”

“That’s cool.”

A few more dragons had started entering the place and took places at the bar, at booths, or at highboy tables set around the edge of the room. Pock looked around curiously.

“What up?”

“It is the Red Hour,” said the dragon.

“Red Hour?”

“A daily ritual of the most solemn type, marking the close of another day, another day’s worth of good work done, and a celebration of life. It involves high spirits, revelry, and heavy drinking.”

“Basically Happy Hour,” said Pock.

“Yes, But ‘Red Hour’ sounds a bit more ominous.”

“Hey, I’m just happy to see that you actually have a name for something, my nounless friend.”

“It’s that important to our culture. The trouble is,” the dragon added with a touch of sadness, “that our insta-choir—well, jukebox, really—is broken.”

Pock perked up. “Well, my friend, you are lucky that we happened in here today. Jet—“

Jet had been sitting quietly, staring at the drink he was unable to actually consume, performing a chemical analysis of it with his eye sensors.

“You might be interested to know what this contains,” he said to Pock.

“Never. Anyway, we are in a position to help these people—well, beings. Jet, Command-Boogie Shoes.”

And with that command, Jet stood up and walked out to what it now occurred to Pock was a dance floor. Jet held up his hands, and opened a plastic panel on each of his palms, revealing speaker holes. Loud music started blaring out of his hands, and the dragons all perked up. Some moved into the center of the room and began gyrating.

“He has a whole library of MP3s loaded into him. And we sometimes supplement out incomes by DJing at parties. Our act is called Bennie and the Jet.”

“Interesting.”

Pock walked over to Jet. He unfastened a clasp behind Jet’s left ear and the top of his bald head swung open on a hinge, revealing a mirror ball. It caught the reflection of the ceiling lights and Jet started rotating his head.

“That’s quite an act you’ve got,” said the dragon.

“You should see karaoke night.”

Yet Still More Antisocial

2010-10-09T09:21:00.000-04:00

Chapter 4 of Antisocial!:

Zev walked in the front door of Armstrong & Associates and approached the reception desk. The General had retained, as receptionist, Major Janice Barbara, career military, formerly of the Elite Computer Virus Task Force, and, Zev thought, intensely psychotic. As he entered and before he could attract her attention, the phone rang.

“What do you want?” she growled into the phone. “What?...Who the hell are you?...Is that name supposed to mean something to me?...He is, is he? I bet...Are you for real or am I going to have to shove a grenade up your ass?...All right, douchebag...Please hold.” She pressed some buttons and hung up the phone. She noticed Zyzzyx, grunted, then pointed with her thumb over her shoulder to the corridor behind her.

“Good to see you again, too,” he said as he passed.

Zev grimaced, then walked down a short carpeted corridor past a half dozen closed wooden doors until he came to a conference room. Inside, General Armstrong 7 was leaning against the table. He looked much the same as he did when last Zev saw him five years earlier. He had lost a little weight, but was still meaty and compact, with a jowly face that made him look more than a little like the bulldog in old Warner Bros. cartoons. He was pushing seventy, but still looked like he could beat the crap out of anyone. And he could, though he tried to do less of that sort of thing these days. The General, who had been born Armstrong Q. Piddle, got married four years earlier to an extraterrestrial, and his new wife insisted he take her name (“7”). He hadn’t put up much of a fight.

He was joined by a blonde, early twentysomething woman whom Zev did not know. Sitting in a chair, looking forlorn, was Tharbax Cannuuttuu. The General saw Zev in the doorway and beckoned him inside.

“You know, General,” said Zev, “if you’re having trouble attracting clients, I think I may have discovered your weak link. Might I suggest an automated phone system?”

“Zev Zyzzyx,” he said in a businesslike fashion, without the slightest indication that they had not seen each other in almost five years, “this is UTa, one of my associates.” He indicated the blonde woman.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, shaking UTa’s hand.

She stared at him blankly.

“UTa,” said the General, “English, ‘nice to meet you.’”

“Nice to meet you,” said UTa.

“Okay, then,” said Zev, a little confused. Then, to Tharbax, who was looking at them impatiently, “You’re sure it was the Ziij?”

“Most assuredly.”

“Do you have visual evidence? It’s recommended that all ships have a visual recording system.”

There was no such thing as galactic law yet—although that was one of the things that Armstrong & Associates was working on—so “recommendations” were the best they could manage.

“Of course.” He turned to the doorway. “Muutuu!”

Two Aldeberans who had been waiting in an adjacent office entered. They were jointly carrying a large wooden crate of the kind used to transport fine art. They set the crate down at the far end of the conference room and began to slowly and carefully lift out a canvas.

“Oil on canvas, five feet by three feet. This is one of Muutuu’s best pieces,” said Tharbax. “He painted it during the attack. I think he truly captures the hostile energy of the attackers.”

Muutuu and the other Aldeberan held up the canvas between them. Zev, Armstrong, and UTa stared blankly at it.

“This is your visual recording system?” said Zev.

“What is it?” asked the General.

“I admit it’s abstract,” said Tharbax.

“Abstract? It’s a completely black canvas,” said the General.

Muutuu looked hurt.

“No, it’s not completely black. Muutuu, bring it a little closer. First of all, the lighting in here is appalling, but if it were not, you could tell that the shade of black changes subtly over the width of the canvas, representing the disruption of space itself. If you look ve-e-e-ry closely at the right side of the painting, about halfway down, there is a tiny gray speck.”

Zev and Armstrong leaned in close an stared at the canvas.

“Okay, so there is,” said the General.

“Well, that’s the Gadabout I, a tiny speck in the utter vastness of space, rendered even tinier by this vile attack.”

“Ah,” said Zev, rubbing his forehead. “It’s not...compelling evidence...”

“It’s merely recommended that we have a visual recording system. No one has specified the exact nature of it. Admittedly, Muutuu is a bit more abstract than the artist we normally employ...”

“Okay, thanks,” said Armstrong to Muutuu, and the Aldeberans packed the painting back up. “Fortunately, we have a statement from the Ziij grand exalted leader—sorry, Grand Exalted Leader—taking responsibility for the attack, claiming they were provoked.”

“Provoked!” said Tharbax. “A monstrous slur! We have had no contact with any member of the Ziij for at least two Aldeberan years. It’s entirely possible they might interpret that as a slight, but the Ziij have always made it very clear that they are the ones to initiate any contact, and we have simply been acceding to their request. In the meantime, will you, General, kindly lend us your assistance in launching a counterattack?”

“Now just calm down,” said General Armstrong. In truth, he would love nothing but to launch a wave of intense destruction against the Ziij, but he had set up his consultancy to avoid such things and resolve interplanetary disputes in a more civilized manner. In time, Tharbax would see the wisdom in that philosophy. More importantly, though, the Ziij were one of only a tiny handful of planets in the galaxy that was actually able launch an interplanetary attack. Earth certainly couldn’t. It had cost a fortune and a three-year U.N. and U.S. Congressional boondoggle just getting the funding to build a shuttle to get to and from the nearest wormhole depot.

“I think the matter deserves a bit more investigation before we start a war,” said Zev.

“Investigation? What is there to investigate? They attacked my beautiful ship and decimated my wine cellar. And you two are well aware of the role that the Gadabout I plays in interplanetary relations. In fact, it was I who provided the means for you both establishing galactic amity. So when I-“

The General held up his hand. “Yes, yes, yes, we’re all well aware of this. But what if the whole thing were the result of a simple misunderstanding? It could escalate and claim many thousands or millions of lives needlessly.”

“Oh, I think you’d say quite needfully if you saw what they did to my oak floors.”

“Tharbax,” said Zev, “just give us a couple of days to make contact with the Ziij Grand Exalted Leader and find out what’s going on. Remember, if they launch a counter-counterattack, they could very well end up destroying more than your wine cellar.”

Tharbax thought about that a moment. “Very well. I give you two of your days while we effect repair on our ship. But after that, if this situation is still unresolved, I shall go elsewhere to seek redress of my grievances.” Zev had a vague hunch what he meant by “elsewhere,” and the result would not be good.

“Agreed,” said the General.

Tharbax marched out of the room, followed by the other two Aldberans carrying the re-crated artwork. Zev and Armstrong both sat down heavily at the table.

“What do you think?” asked Zev.

“Aside from a prepared statement, we’ve been unable to make any contact at all with the Ziij. We don’t know what the problem is, or what this so-called ‘provocation’ was. And they’re a pretty ornery race even on a good day. I need to get Pock and Jet to hack into their planetary communication system and make some back-channel inquiries, but I have no idea where they’ve gone.”

“Pock and Jet? That’s strange. You tried calling them?”

“As you know, Pock doesn’t have a cellphone.”

“What about the bar?”

“That’s the first place I thought of. I sent Jet out to get him and now Jet doesn’t respond to phone calls, texts, or e-mails. It’s like they just vanished off the face of the Earth.”

“If he’s not in his office, it’s possible Pock is lying in a gutter somewhere, blind stinking sober,” said Zev.

“I know. That’s what worries me. Or one of the things. I have a whole list of worries somewhere.”

“Do you want me to see what I can dig up?”

“Leave Pock and Jet to me. The Ziij situation is more urgent. I want you to take UTa to the House Despot on Sprawlnia.”

“The home improvement superstore?” He grimaced. He hated that place. “What on Earth for?”

“The general manager is Ziij, and he’s the only off-homeworld Ziij that anyone knows of in the entire galaxy. Maybe he can give you some clues until I can find Pock and Jet.”

“You don’t want me to go to the planet Ziij itself?”

“Not without knowing what kind of a reception you’d get,” said the General.

“That’s a fair point. I’ll head out at once.” Zev turned to UTa. “Do you speak Ziij?”

“UTa speaks every language in the galaxy.”

“You mean...”

“Yes, she’s a Universal Translator.”

Zev stared intently at UTa, who stared blankly back at him. “I’ve heard of Universal Translators but never actually met one.”

“You’ll find that one of the drawbacks of the Universal Translators is that their minds are so crammed full of vocabulary and grammar rules that there is no residual brainpower to initiate or even participate conversation. She just translates. Watch. UTa, Swahili, ‘My name is UTa.’”

She snapped to attention. “Jina langu ni UTa.”

“Interesting,” said Zev. “UTa, French, ‘Let’s go.’”

UTa stared blankly at him and remained silent. Zev looked at Armstrong.

“Well, almost every language in the galaxy,” said the General.

“Ah.” Zev turned back to UTa. “Shall we go?”

Said the General, “UTa, Ziij, ‘Let’s go.’”

Said UTa, “Ghiik nom.”

“I can see we’re going to be having some rather one-sided conversations.”

Zev and UTa headed out toward the next shuttle to the nearest wormhole depot.

Reel Around the Fountains

2010-10-09T09:01:00.003-04:00

Day two of the week of concerts brought us to the Paradise in Boston and New York City’s Fountains of Wayne, named for a lawn ornament store in Wayne, NJ. Known for their slickly produced, expertly crafted power pop, they translated that to a live setting fairly effortlessly. The sound was a bit murky (at least where we were perched) so it was difficult to make out the between-song banter, but it didn’t really matter. When a band has only one hit (the rent-a-Cars-esque “Stacey’s Mom”) the rest of their discography is wide open (not the most prolific of bands, in 15 years they have only released four proper albums and one collection of outtakes), but they did seem to focus on those tracks that had been singles, even if some of the song selections were a bit (in my opinion anyway) a bit out in left field (opening with “I’ve Got a Flair”? Okay.), although most did turn up as singles. And there were some of my favorite tracks I wish they had played (“Red Dragon Tattoo,” “Leave the Biker,” “New Routine”) but they neglected to consult me when putting their set list together. (They are reported to be working on a new album, which explains the tracks I was unable to identify.)

The band is based around the core nucleus of songwriters/guitarists Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger (the former is the lead singer, the latter does most of the stage banter), with co-guitarist Jody Porter and drummer Brian Young, and in fact Collingwood and Schlesinger often tour as a solo acoustic duo. Their songs are usually story songs and character studies, usually done in a humorous, sarcastic, or satirical way, with great couplets and zingy one-liners, grafted onto songs with big hooks and catchy choruses. They can veer from style to style, and it can be said that if you don’t like their style, just wait a song. Even if “Stacey’s Mom” is the song they are most known for, it’s still a pretty funny track. And “Somebody to Love” is one of the few songs that mention Schenectady.

Fountains of Wayne have always been a distillation of the last 50 years of pop/rock and their songs have often included sly (or sometimes not to sly) references to those who have gone before them—and get inserted into the playlist. (A live version of ELO’s “Can’t Get it Out of my Head” appears on their outtakes album Out-of-State Plates.) Last night, they segued from “Radiation Vibe” (their first single) into Blue Öyster Cult’s “Burnin’ for You,” a snippet of a Foreigner song, and what I was told was a fragment of a Kiss song.

I had been kind of looking forward to opening act Marshall Crenshaw, another great songwriter who had been a one-hit-wonder back in 1982 (“Someday, Someway”) but we could barely hear him. True, he was sitting down, played solo electric guitar (that never stopped Billy Bragg from putting on a dynamic performance) with what looked like his own Fender Champ amp, and wore a hat, but still.

Set list:

“I’ve Got a Flair”
“No Better Place”
“Denise”
“Dip in the Ocean” [?]
“Somebody to Love”
[??]
“Valley Winter Song”
“Hey Julie”
[??]
“Barbara H.”
“It Must Be Summer”
“I-95”
“Mexican Wine”
“Radiation Vibe”

“Fire Island”
[??]
“Stacey’s Mom”
“Sink to the Bottom”

"Our Psalms Are Singalong Songs"

2010-10-07T07:40:00.002-04:00

Based on looks alone, Craig Finn of The Hold Steady may seem like an unlikely frontman—you’d be forgiven for thinking he was the band’s accountant—but he is perhaps the most energetic rock band leader I think I’ve seen in a long time. He radiates an enthusiasm and an excitement that carries over into the crowd, and, last night at the Royale Theatre in Boston, I don’t think he stopped smiling once. So when he sings, “You gotta stay positive,” you feel like you’ll seriously disappoint him if you don’t. He’s also pretty tough on mikes and mike stands; his extensive hand gestures (I can sympathize, as everyone in my Toastmasters club would attest; he must be of Italian descent) tended to knock them over and roadies were having a time of it keeping up with him. In fact, the vocal mike wasn’t working for the first few lines of “Chips Ahoy!,” which was okay because everyone in the crowd sang it instead—as they did most songs.

The rest of the band were equally into it, and they tore through almost two dozen songs in a 90-minute set, which leaned heavily on Stay Positive (2008) material, the first and last tracks on the album bookending the concert, starting with the opening call to arms “Constructive Summer,” and closing with the John Cassavetes-inspired “Slapped Actress.” Only one song, “Barfruit Blues” (“She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips”) came from their first album. The Separation Sunday songs, especially “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” seemed to whip the crowd into an even bigger frenzy, and for good reason. “Hornets! Hornets!” (about my basement) with its massive riff (and references to both Vladimir Nabokov and Kate Bush) was a great way to open the encore. Their latest album, Heaven is Whenever, was represented by a scant five songs, although the crowd didn’t seem to warm to them as much as they did the older ones, which is usually the case, except maybe “The Weekenders,” a sequel of sorts to “Chips Ahoy!”—“She said the theme of this party’s the Industrial Age and you came in dressed like a train wreck” (Dickens would approve of that line).

This is a band that knows how to put on a show, not relying on theatrics—or even much verbal banter (Finn, a transplanted Minnesotan, opened with a comment about his beloved Twins)—but terrific musicianship, great songs, and, most importantly, an infectious energy that never takes the fans for granted and conveys the feeling that they wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than on that stage. It was definitely one of the best shows I’ve been to, and was worth the four years it took to finally get tickets.

Boston.com review here.

Set list:

“Constructive Summer”
“Massive Nights”
“Hurricane J”
“Sequestered in Memphis”
“Barfruit Blues”
“Rock Problems”
“You Can Make Him Like You”
“The Sweet Part of the City”
“Magazines”
“Stevie Nix”
“Ask Her for Adderall”
“You Gotta Dance with Who You Came to the Dance With”
“Chips Ahoy!”
“Stuck Between Stations”
“Lord, I’m Discouraged”
“The Weekenders”
“Southtown Girls”
“Your Little Hoodrat Friend”
“Stay Positive”
“A Slight Discomfort”

“Hornets! Hornets!”
“Banging Camp”
“Slapped Actress”

Yet More "Antisocial!"

2010-10-02T05:59:00.001-04:00

Chapter 3 of Antisocial!, the sequel to Virus!.

Dr. Ben Pock took the last swallow of vodka and tossed the bottle into his recycling bin. Ever since the state had revamped the bottle bill to add a $1 deposit on wine and hard liquor bottles, Pock had been donating his empties to the office cleaning lady. Given Pock’s tendencies, that meant that, after four years, his cleaning lady could afford to put her son through at least two years of college.

Pock worked for Armstrong & Associates, located in suburban New Jersey, not far from the original secret underground bunker that had housed the Elite Computer Virus Task Force. In fact, immediately after the ECVTF was shut down four years earlier (someone had, in his spare time, developed some freeware that did everything that the fruits of the ECVTF’s years of research and development did) the site was razed and replaced by a strip mall. General Armstrong 7 (né Piddle), with the help of his new wife, had subsequently started an interplanetary consultancy dedicated to, as the mission statement put it, “enabling the amicable relations between and among alien worlds and fostering intragalactic trade.” They were located in the strip mall between a Family Dollar and Mr. Wong’s China Buffet.

When the General was assembling his associates, Dr. Pock had been on the short list of candidates, given either his expertise with computers and other matters of technology, or the fact that he had just turned up at the office and everyone just assumed he worked there already. It was a confused time, and the details are rather murky.

Pock shut down his computer, turned off the lights, walked out of the office into a beautiful September evening, and began the one-mile walk to his apartment. Pock didn’t have a car and in fact had given up on the idea of driving a few years earlier. While he was fastidious about never drinking and driving, he was still unable to avoid a steady stream of traffic accidents and incidents. Once, someone talking on a cellphone had rear-ended him at a stoplight. A week later, someone texting while driving had veered into his lane and drove him off the highway and down into a ravine. The guy never stopped—or even noticed. A week after Pock had got his car repaired, he was T-boned at an intersection by someone who had run the red light. Further investigation showed that the other driver had been operating a printing press installed in the passenger seat while driving. Said one of the police officers at the scene, a grisly tableau of twisted and smoking metal, blood, and ink, “You’d think you wouldn’t need laws for this kind of thing.” And the less said about the incident with the surgeon who had been performing open-heart surgery while driving, the better.

At the halfway mark between the office and his house, Pock stopped in at his usual post-work destination, The Flounder’s Arms, a British-style pub founded by a former smelt fisherman. He was still good friends with the barmaid, Zienia, even though they had once been romantically involved. It hadn’t worked out. As she told him at the time, “Ben, you’re just too laid-back, easy-going, and, well, fun. I was brought up to expect that couples would always bicker, that you’d be trying to bend me to your will, and be dominating and controlling. I guess I’m just looking for someone more macho, ill-tempered, and joyless.” That she had found this hard to come by in New Jersey perplexed Pock.

Pock took a seat at the mostly empty bar and took out a newspaper. Zienia smiled and said hello. “The usual?”

“Of course,” he said.

She poured out a club soda with lime and placed it in front of him.

“Thanks,” he said.

Dr. Pock rarely drank outside the office. It was his policy.

While Zienia attended to other patrons, Pock glanced at the front page of the newspaper. “New Petitions Against Tax” and “Building Code Under Fire” were two of the front page stories. He glanced down below the fold. “U.N. Debates Mideast Crisis.” It seems like the news is the same every day, he thought. He looked around casually; there were three other patrons at the bar. Two were sixtysomething-year-old men with red bulbous noses, while the third was a youngish woman absorbed in reading a paperback book. He could tell from the color of the book cover that it was the bestselling The Girl Who Baked a Lasagna, the fifteenth installment of a crime thriller franchise that had outlasted its original author by twelve books. Pock had given up on the series after The Girl Who Dressed Like an Otter, even though he felt the series had started to lose its appeal with The Girl Who Stretched the Premise. He smiled as he thought that perhaps he should pursue the idea he had many years ago of writing a new Charles Dickens novel.

Dr. Pock, after all, did have a doctorate, although it was in Literature. He had been educated at Oxford, and when he returned to his native America, he was not interested in teaching, so attempted to find out what kind of job he could get. He quickly discovered that in the high-tech boom of the 1990s there was not a great deal of demand for a Dickens scholar, and his mention of his doctoral thesis—which had explored the relationship between Dickens and his protégé Wilkie Collins—usually drew stares so blank he was tempted to write on them. So he went to a career guidance counselor and explained how he had devoted his studies to Victorian fiction. The counselor stared at him expressionlessly for a moment, then spent the next forty-five minutes slapping him. When the counselor’s hand had finally tired, he took a deep breath and began reviewing Pock’s various test scores.

“Well,” he had said, “your U&Is are really really low.”

“What are—?”

“Unethicals and Immorals. Yours are way below average. So forget about working on Wall Street.” He flipped to another sheet. “And your Standardized Asshole Aptitude score is also in single digits, so law school is out of the question.” The counselor knitted his brow as he contemplated leafed through the test results. “I’m afraid your Douchebag Quotient is too low for any of the high-paying professions.” Yes, standardized testing had adapted over the years to the 21st-century marketplace. “Maybe you should try to go back to school for something useful. Maybe computer science would be up your alley. There’s also animal husbandry. How do you feel about bull semen?”

Having little alternative, Pock did go back to school to try to get up to speed on Information Technologies and did discover that he had an aptitude for it.

One challenge was that Pock had had a checkered relationship with anything electronic. It’s not that he believed that he exerted some mysterious effect on them, like people who claim that they have some sort of electromagnetic force that repeatedly kills watch batteries. Rather, the more he understood computers and technology, the more he realized that just about everything has some kind of innate bug or flaw—some more than others—and that for a reason he has never been able to find, these bugs always choose to manifest themselves whenever Pock is around. So anything that functioned flawlessly would suddenly—as he put it—“start to create” the moment he walked into its presence. Computer memory would suddenly run out, applications would suddenly quit, operating systems would crash, Internet access would go out—in fact, he has been banned from his local coffee shop and Internet hotspot because the moment he walks in, the WiFi goes down. His one attempt at starting a Twitter feed caused a service outage that lasted six hours. It had an upside; companies that seek to keep their employees off the Internet hire him to come and sit in an empty cubicle for a while. Productivity increases by orders of magnitude.

Despite all of this, he still occasionally managed to accomplish things and the way he became such an expert on computers and software was by having to fix or work around the havoc he had stumbled into.

He had learned to coexist relatively peacefully—and soberly—with these devices for years...until one night. He had to prepare a presentation and was working in PowerPoint. It seemed that every command did something completely random. After spending a gut-wrenching three hours trying to change a font, he finally snapped. He collapsed to the floor of the computer lab and lay there in a semi-conscious state, whimpering. When he was finally able to stand, he staggered out of the building, lurched across the quad, and made it to the nearest off-campus bar he could find. He began downing vodka tonic after vodka tonic until he was able to see straight again. Then, picking up a bottle for the road, he strode back into the computer lab and was able to finish his presentation. And thus, ever since, he has only been able to accomplish anything using computers or technology while heavily under the influence. But as soon as the computer went off, he sobered up and did something purely analog.

Thus it was that, sitting at the bar, drinking club soda, and reading a printed newspaper, that he was beginning to feel the euphoria of sobriety.

And then Jet walked in.

Jet was Pock’s assistant but, more to the point, Jet was a robot. Jet had been a prototype developed by Sy Borg Industries, and had been in the custody of company CEO Frank Meineke until three years earlier, when Meineke was killed in a freak accident. (While beta-testing an application that enabled Jet to function as a gourmet chef, a bug in the program caused the robot to confuse “balsamic vinegar” with “strychnine.”) Jet had been created in Meineke’s image; he had the physical appearance of a balding, paunchy, middle-aged man. He wore a pink Izod shirt, white khaki pants, and brown topsiders with no socks. He had built-in telephony, 6G and WiFi connectivity, and GPS capabilities. His shirt could be removed and his stomach folded down into a keyboard. Pock added functionality to Jet as he needed it.

Jet had proved, if not invaluable, then at least not very annoying during the deadly computer-to-human virus outbreak five years earlier, and was thus added to General Armstrong’s consultancy in the capacity of “Special Assistant and Bartender to Dr. Benjamin A. Pock.” Given Pock’s problems with technology, their relationship has been a little, shall we say, fraught.

“Hi, Jet!” called Zienia. She had also once had a relationship with Jet. What the heck? she had thought at the time. Entire books could be written about why that hadn’t worked out, but a large part of it had to do with the emotionlessness of Jet’s artificial personality and that his designers hadn’t felt the need to make Jet, shall we say, anatomically correct. Then, again, Zienia had to admit, she had once dated an economist and Jet had been a substantial improvement.

“What the hell do you want?” said Pock, suddenly feeling his euphoria drain away.

“You must return to the office. It’s an emer—“ Jet suddenly paused for a moment, then added “Tarrel says, ‘Been up less than 3 hours and planning for nap time already.’”

“What? Oh, for the love of Benji...”

“AlbertQ says, ‘I’ve never had a bagel this good.’”

“Who the hell installed TweetDeck in you?”

“It installed itself.”

“Jet, Command-Quit-TweetDeck.”

“Not possible. Zandra says, ‘Had an awesome time at Paul’s surprise Bday party!’”

He tried again more slowly and distinctly. “Jet. Command. Quit. TweetDeck.”

“Not possible. Would you like to update TweetDeck?”

“I don’t want the damn thing installed on you at all, let alone updated!”

“Craggie says, ‘Tonight's specialty of the house: Chinese take out...yummy.’”

“Go away.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a valuable upgrade?”

Pock started hyperventilating. “Zienia! Vodka tonic!”

She knew the drill and got his drink quickly. He downed it in one gulp. He calmly said, “Jet, Command-Force Quit-TweetDeck-Override FU519.”

“TweetDeck ended.”

Pock sat back and sighed.

“You’re still welcome to update it,” added Jet.

Pock looked around for the nearest sharp object, then Zienia refreshed his drink. He calmed down further.

“All right, then, what’s the problem, my plastic and metal friend?”

“Tharbax Cannuutuu has arrived at Armstrong & Associates and needs assistance.”

“Tharbax Cannuutuu? Of the Aldeberan Cannuutuus?”

“Affirmative.”

“That’s weird. What’s the trouble?”

“His ship was attacked.”

Pock’s eyes widened. “Attacked? Like Star Wars attacked? Yikes. We’d better go.”

He put some money for the drinks and a tip on the bar.

“Sorry, Zeenie, gotta run,” he called.

“Good night, Ben.”

Jet and Pock walked out of the bar into the still light autumn evening. And then they abruptly disappeared without a trace.

The Blues are Still Blue

2010-09-27T17:20:00.002-04:00

However, I had to sell my Belle & Sebastian tickets for October 15. Sigh.

Here's one for Debbie P., who's never heard of Belle & Sebastian.

Chips Ahoy!

2010-09-27T17:12:00.002-04:00

After four years of trying, mi hermano and I finally got tickets to see one of the greatest extant bands in the world: The Hold Steady, playing Boston next Wednesday.

Rock on.

And last night, I discovered Fountains of Wayne are playing Boston two days later. Cool.

Rock on.

More Antisocial!

2010-09-25T08:06:00.001-04:00

Chapter 2 of Antisocial!, the sequel to Virus!

One of the most dreaded places in the entire galaxy is the main terminal of the wormhole depot near Ophiuchus V. First of all, it was designed with complete disregard to things like movement and traffic flow. The placement of gates stairwells, escalators, and shop doorways facilitated beings bumping into each other every five feet. A rare hour went by when there wasn’t a fight of some kind, usually by beings who had never been to the depot before. Veterans, on the other hand(s), were used to it and just sighed a lot.

Then there was the fact that it was constructed without even the slightest consideration of aesthetics. Words simply cannot describe how depressingly awful the architecture and design is. Galactic Traveler magazine once described the Ophiuchus V wormhole depot as looking like the result of Frank Lloyd Wright eating, partially digesting, and throwing back up the main lobby of the Chrysler Building.

Shops of all sorts were strewn randomly around the perimeter of the main concourse, and the Food Court, many said, was aptly named, because in it you felt like you were on trial for your life, combining the most inedible food from twenty-five different worlds and cultures. All the various cooking smells coalesced into a thick miasma that hung over the food court like a pall and challenged anyone to actually remain hungry, or at the very least not be violently ill.

Needless to say, the wormhole depot was an ordeal even under the best traveling conditions. And “best traveling conditions” was not a phrase that even remotely applied to Zev Zyzzyx and his wife Eep. They shambled into the main concourse from Gate 9 and Zev collapsed onto a plastic chair—one with the least number of stains—in the waiting area and panted heavily.

“I tell you,” he said, “they need to do some sort of maintenance on that thing. I’ve never traveled in a wormhole that was so unstable. I can’t actually find a part of my body that doesn’t ache right now.”

“I’m surprised you can find any part of your body at all,” said Eep. “You haven’t used your real form in at least six or seven years.”

“Longer than that, I think.”

Zyzzyx was a shapeshifter whose normal form is somewhat squidlike and tentacled, but, after emigrating to Earth more than a decade ago, morphed into the physical form of American actor Ernest Borgnine and remained that way—largely because his wife Eep had fallen in love with him while he was in Borgnine form. Why mess with a good thing?

Actually, it had been about five years since Zev Zyzzyx traveled off his home planet of Gargleplax. He was shocked at how far into disrepair some of his most heavily traveled wormholes in his youth had fallen. Blame it on galaxy-wide budget cuts.

Beings traveled with relative speed and ease throughout the Milky Way Galaxy by means of a series of wormholes that the Galactic Transportation Bureau (GTB) had constructed several decades earlier. Wormholes clustered at various nodes or depots scattered throughout the galaxy. Travelers sit inside small egg-shaped pods and, when a wormhole opens—which they do at set times, like train schedules, only more reliable—the pod is inserted into the hole and shunted along to the next wormhole depot, where travelers can transfer to other wormholes or catch a shuttle to the planet nearest to the wormhole depot. To get from Gargleplax to Earth takes four transfers, and each one appears to Zyzzyx to have involved a less and less stable wormhole. The GTB has been strapped for cash for decades.

“Well,” said Eep, who had been doing a lot more off-planet traveling than Zyzzyx lately, “they’re experimenting with a private toll-based wormhole over in Orion and the fares and surcharges are outrageous. You have to pay $50 for any luggage you are carrying. They even have telepaths on the staff who scan travelers’ brains and charge them an additional $100 for emotional baggage. They claim its for the benefit of service personnel.”

“I bet.”

“You should never take it. They can tell if someone is a shapeshifter and they’ll charge a separate fee for any additional physical forms you could take.”

“I’d be broke by the time I got to Scorpius.”

“Speaking of being broke, there’s a pretty big gift shop here. We have forty-five minutes until the next wormhole opens...”

Eep was a sucker for a good wormhole depot gift shop, and the one on Ophiuchus was one of the most elaborate—and deeply upsetting. T shirts that read “Ophiuchus V is for Lovers” were offset by similar T shirts that read “Ophiuchus V is for Bitter Enemies.” There was an entire wall of shelves devoted to coffee mugs designed for every conceivable mouthpart. One souvenir Ophiuchus V mug for the spider beings of Arachnis XII cost more than the entire U.S. space program, due largely to the complexity of its manufacture.

The biggest point of contention, however, involved gift store items of questionable taste—well, taste being a relative term when it comes to wormhole depot gift shops. The beings native to the planet Ophiuchus V, which was the name given to the Class M planet orbiting Alpha Ophiuchi, are tripedal, have three arms, and have faces dominated by an eight-inch-long maroon-colored nose. They are a very kind, mild-mannered species (with three hands, they are known for their exceptionally complex yet beautiful piano music), and in some ways their docile nature has made them ripe for parody throughout the galaxy. When the wormhole depot gift shop opened, the first items to be offered for sale—created by the GTB’s Gifts & Novelties Division—were big plastic noses, Ophiuchian versions of the old Earth Groucho nose and glasses, exaggerated plush toys, decorative tripods, a spare arm that can be attached to another being’s chest with Velcro, and many more such gifts. There was also a relatively respectful action figure of Queen Cleolanta, one of Ophiuchius V’s most important historical figures.

The crème de la crème of the gift shop, if that’s what you want to call it, is a large ceramic teapot, the body of which is a sphere painted to look like the planet Ophiuchus V, while the spout is a long red nose. The tea is dispensed from the nostrils. Galactic Traveler magazine has voted the Ophiuchian teapot the “tackiest gift shop item in the galaxy,” a close second being the Mount Rushmore bookends sold on Earth.

It should be said that the Ophiuchians were themselves none too pleased about these items, but once they saw how much money they were making as a result of the sale of them, them swallowed their pride, took an extraordinarily deep breath, and let it be.

Zyzzyx looked at Eep. “I don’t need a rubber nose.” He suddenly looked around. “Hey, what happened to Astra?”

“He had to go in the pet pod. Because of the bad wormhole conditions, the GTB disallows luggage and pet carriers in the same pod as travelers. He should be along shortly.”

Zev and Eep, being two distinct species from different planets, were incapable of interbreeding, and had no interest in children of any kind anyway, but did adopt a pet Squog which, as its name suggests, is somewhat reminiscent of a squid crossed with a dog. It is covered with shaggy gold-colored fur, has four legs, as well as a dozen flailing tentacles. It lacks a head in the conventional sense, has two large eyes on either side of its torso, and in the center of the tentacles, a razor-sharp parrot-like beak. It lives predominantly on dry land, but is partially aquatic and likes to frolic in water. Zev has found that the resulting smell is a combination of wet dog and day-old seafood. (Basically, Astra was Eep’s idea.) The Squog is a highly intelligent species, and Zev found that the only obedience-related challenge was teaching Astra the difference between “brother in law” and “chew toy.” They had the Gargleplaxian equivalent of 911 on speed dial for a while.

Zev sat back on the seat and closed his eyes for a moment. Eep stared into space, started, then rolled her eyes. Zev looked at her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Another beet from my brother.”

Social media had made its way across the galaxy, of course, and given that the Festerians—Eep’s race—were telepaths, their version of social media took place mentally via what were called “brain tweets” or “beets.” Many folks on Festeria lived for the beets, but they tended to give Eep a headache.

“What’s he doing now?” Zev asked.

“He just had a sandwich and found some mystery eggs in it. I told him to avoid that deli.”

Zev grunted, and rubbed his temples. “All I can say is that I am very happy your brother found a hack to disable the marketing chip. I really couldn’t take that right now.”

“He said he got it from an O’Reilly book,” said Eep.

Laws had been passed that prohibited anyone from traveling throughout the galaxy without a marketing chip installed in their brains. Each chip included a being’s name, home address, planet of origin, phone number, e-mail address, blood type, average yearly income, type of car/spacecraft driven, favorite color, favorite food, religion, sexual orientation, physical attributes one found most sexually alluring, and so on—basically, every aspect of one’s personality. The marketing chip enabled all of the marketers and advertisers in a given public location, like a wormhole depot, to target someone with true one-to-one marketing that took the form of vivid hallucinations and holgrammatic pop-up ads, often featuring relatives, loved ones, ancestors, and even religious figures, all hawking various products and services. These “ad-visions” often drove people into complete and utter insanity (there was a psychiatrist call button located next to the defibrillator), but their return on investment was dynamite.

An Ophiuchian redcap wheeled out a metallic box the size of a filing cabinet. It was dotted with inch-wide airholes and something could be seen moving about inside.

“Mr. Zyzzyx and Ms. Eep? I have your pet.”

The box shuddered and the creature inside—Astra—made a noise that sounded like an opera tenor gargling with a nylon stocking filled with Jell-O.

“Aww,” said Eep, “isn’t he cute?”

“Please sign this acceptance form,” said the redcap to Eep, unlocking the metal container from the handtruck with his left hand, holding out the form in his right hand, and offering a pen in his center hand. He sniffed reflexively, an Ophiuchian idiosyncrasy.

Eep signed the form, tipped the redcap, and the Ophiuchian tri-toddled off. She leaned over the pet carrier. Astra was still lurching violently back and forth. “There there, mummy’s here now. Did you have a nice trip?” To Zev she added, “He really doesn’t like traveling all that much. He gets very grouchy.”

“I know how he feels.”

Eep looked over at him. “Zev, is everything all right?”

“What do you mean? You know how I hate traveling.”

“It’s not that. It just— in the past five years, you seem to have gotten...I don’t know...more morose and less playful than you used to be.”

“Have I?”

“Remember the first time we traveled, we were stuck in this depot because of some serious wormhole instability or something.”

“That narrows it down...”

“There was this hideously disgusting couple from Proxima Centauri—newlyweds, we guessed, they were just all over each other. And the guy had to pee or something, so you decided to play a trick on them and shapeshifted into his form. I could read your mind so I knew it was all a joke, but you and she started going at it—and when the guy came back, he was shocked to find his wife making out with...himself. I thought it was hysterical.”

“How puckish of me.”

“Then...” she was really starting to crack herself up at this point, “you decided to shapeshift into an Ophiuchian, but you had forgotten that you can’t shapeshift your clothes, and, well, that third leg had nowhere to go.”

The memory brought a smile to Zev’s face. “Yes, and all the females were staring at the...um, result with lust and admiration.”

“Actually, I think they were agape with horror.”

“It’s a fine line.”

“We used to have a lot more fun, is all I’m saying,” said Eep. “And I was just wondering if everything was all right. I could read your mind, of course, but you know I hate doing that.”

You do? he thought.

“Yes, I do!” she said.

“I rest my case,” said Zev, smiling. “Anyway, yes, I feel fine. It’s just...I don’t know. A kind of ennui, perhaps. It’ll pass.”

“I hope so.”

Eep got up, took a deep breath, and walked over to the Food Court across the concourse. She ordered a pastrami sandwich for herself, an Arcturan grot with cheese for Zev, and a large slab of raw Ophiuchian malm steak for Astra.

When she got back to the seats, she was aghast. “Astra! How did you get out of your carrier! Get off those seats! And why are you wearing Zev’s pants...Oh, I see. Cute.”

Zev popped back into his normal form. ”Gotcha!” he said with a laugh.

“Now that’s more like it.”

She handed Zev his grot, lifted the lid of the pet carrier, and tossed in the malm. She quickly closed the lid. Inside, Astra convulsed wildly and ate his malm steak with a noise that sounded like an inner tube filled with geese going through an industrial meat grinder. Which wasn’t far from the case, actually.

After lunch, they still had another twenty minutes before the wormhole opened, so they sat back and napped. Suddenly, Eep was jolted awake. Her eyes popped open and she stared straight ahead. “Oh, my god!”

That woke Zev. He looked at her. “What is it?”

“A rebeet from my brother. Tharbax Cannuutuu’s ship was attacked.”

“What? Why? By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

Zev reached into his pocket and took out his mobile communicator. He made a quick call. When he was done, he snapped it off.

“It was the Ziij,” he said.

“The Ziij? But why? Sure, they’re not the most agreeable race in the galaxy, but they’ve never attacked anyone before.”

“I don’t know. Tharbax is at General Pid-I mean, General Armstrong’s now. When we get to Earth, I’ll drop you off in New York and head out to New Jersey. This is serious.”

“Who’d want to attack Tharbax Cannuutuu? That’s just crazy.”

“I don’t know.”

They got up and nervously paced until the wormhole was due to open.

London Calling...Again

2010-09-18T06:50:00.002-04:00

In November (November 30, to be exact), I will be keynoting the Dot Gain "Disrupting the Future" Conference in London. I whipped up a little promo video for it:

Close to Home

2010-09-18T06:46:00.002-04:00

In case you missed my FoodCEO Blog posts vis-à-vis the Locavore Challenge, the full week is here:

Day 1: Barn in the U.S.A.
Day 2: That's Avoré
Day 3: Morning Becomes Eclectic
Day 4: Where the Beefalo Roam
Day 5: Bringing it All Back Home

Antisocial!

2010-09-18T06:21:00.003-04:00

The long-awaited (by me, anyway, if no one else) sequel to my 2005 sci-fi-comedy Virus! is now underway!

In Antisocial!, it is five years later, and the Elite Computer Virus Task Force has been shut down. General Armstrong 7 and his new wife Mellory--young, attractive, with an IQ of 900 and a prehensile tail--has launched an initiative to unite the inhabited planets of the galaxy. Complicating matters, someone is launching surprise attacks on trading vessels. Who would be so rude...and why? Could it have something to do with the new galaxy-wide social-media network? Really? That's the premise? Okay...

Recalled to Earth from his home planet, extraterrestrial shapeshifter Zev Zyzzyx, his wife Eep (and pet Astra) seek to get to the heart of the matter. Or at the very least, the liver of the matter.

Meanwhile, speaking of livers, Dr. Pock and the robot Jet accidentally fall into a "wanderhole" and randomly travel the galaxy, meeting a planet of fun-loving, proper-noun-hating beings whose culture parallels Earth development only in the case of the English language and Journey songs; the Monk Mimes of Mellitus and their infamous "walking vegetables" and heady eggplant wine; and the denizens of 0100100100 IV, a planet of Luddite robots. Will they make it home...and, come to think of it, why would they want to?

Chapter 1 is below.

Virus!, meanwhile, is now available as an e-book via the Apple iBookstore for the iPad; as an e-book for the Amazon Kindle; and, of course, in good old-fashioned print.

Antisocial!

A Novel by Richard Romano

The marble spacecraft glided silently through space, like a lead hockey puck sailing across a starlit beach in slow motion. It passed close by a few outposts and deep-space convenience stores, and watchers seeing it elegantly drift by gaped in awe. It lacked the gaudiness that so many spaceships possessed; indeed, this craft had a certain baroque elegance. Unlike the typical outer space cruiser, with headache-inducing arrays of blinking, flashing colored lights—most of which clashed harshly—this craft had a bare minimum of illumination; nothing colored or flashing, just simple white lights at various intervals around the center of the craft, only what was necessary to comply with outer space navigation regulations, as well as highlight the inlaid goldwork and gargoyles that decorated the circular hull.

To those on board, it was the equivalent of late night, and Tharbax Cannuutuu was strolling down the carpeted corridor toward what on any conventional ship would be considered the bridge, but on Canuutuu’s ship was called the social director’s office. Canuutuu was between five and six feet tall, bipedal, and vaguely humanoid; kind of like any castmember of Jersey Shore. His hairless skin was the color of a good fifteen-year-old Scotch, and his wrinkled three-fingered/one-thumbed hand gripped a snifter of Arcturan brandy. He walked into the office and settled into a Queen Anne chair mounted atop a marble podium. In front of him, two secretaries sat at Victorian desks entering diary logs, checking supplies, and piloting the ship. The leaded-glass viewscreen on the wall displayed the view ahead—deep space.

Tharbax was the Host of the Gadabout I, the flagship of the Aldeberan VI social scene. Often voted as “the most hospitable planet in the galaxy,” Aldeberan VI’s space program was launched to travel the galaxy and make contact with other races and species by means of parties and soirées. In fact, Aldeberan VI’s engineers spent decades perfecting a staggeringly tiny yet immensely powerful engine simply so the ship could have more space for ballroom dancing.

“Mr. Spuumantii,” said Tharbax, swirling the turquoise liquid in his snifter, “what is our canapé count?”

The secretary to Tharbax’s left consulted a parchment ledger. “We are down to fifty sklorm rolls, seventy-seven fried mostancho flowers, and we are completely out of shrimp rings. We cannot handle another party without replenishing our reserves.” There was a barely perceptible tone of panic in his report.

“He’s right,” said the other secretary. “And the Master of Crudités reports that we are fresh out of...well, fresh vegetables.”

“I see,” said Tharbax. “How close is the nearest catering planet?”

“Within five light years,” said Spuumantii. “At maximum amble, we should make it in less than two Aldeberan days.”

“Excellent. Please set course for it.”

“By all means.”

The ship veered slightly and continued its travels through the inky blackness.

“Gentlemen,” said Tharbax, rising from his seat, “I think I shall call it a night—“

He was interrupted by a violent lurching of the craft.

“What the devil was that?” asked Tharbax.

“I don’t know,” said Spuumantii. He picked up the receiver of an antique telephone and dialed 0. He listened for a moment. “Apparently, we are under attack.”

“Attack?” said Tharbax with no small amount of incredulity.

The craft lurched again, knocking Tharbax back to his seat. He nearly dropped his snifter. Plaster dust rained down from the ceiling. The main viewscreen went blank.

“Where’s the lieutenant sous chef? Get him on the speaker, please.”

“Right away.” Spuumantii’s partner, Caastuulii, flipped some crystal knobs on the desk in front of him. From a large, scalloped gramophone horn, the tinny voice of the lieutenant sous chef could be heard.

“Tharbax! We have sustained serious hits to the dorsal and ventral portions of the hull.”

There was another, more violent lurch. The chandelier above Tharbax’s chair swayed violently back and forth. Tharbax regarded it warily, and stood up to move from beneath it.

“How very rude,” said Tharbax. “Who’s attacking us? And why?”

“We do not know,” said Spuumatii. “The sensors are out and the screen is nonfunctional.”

“Well, then, could someone please look out a window?”

There was silence for a moment, then the lieutenant sous chef came back over the gramophone horn. “It’s the Ziij. I recognize their warships. A most inelegant design and their food synthesizers are appalling.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Tharbax. “Why on Aldeberan VI are they attacking us? We’ve had no contact with them in years.”

“And they know we have no weapons,” said Caastuulii.

“Well, except for that Antarean wine someone gave us. That could be considered a weapon, but we would never even think of serving it to the Ziij.” Tharbax thought for a moment. “Spuumantii, send a message to the Ziij flagship.“

“Right away.” He flipped a knob and a sheet of fine notepaper slid out from a slot on the desk. He took a fountain pen from its holder and glanced back at Tharbax in readiness.

“Dear Sir,” dictated Tharbax, as Spauumantii write in a flowing, elegant hand. (Inhabitants of Aldeberan VI were also known for their excellent penmanship.) “I am Tharbax Canuutuu, of the Aldeberan Canuutuus. It has come to my attention that a fleet of Ziij warships is firing upon the Gadabout I, and I’m afraid I find this most unacceptable. Please discontinue at once, or I shall be forced to seek retribution. As you well know, we are not a violent race, but I must warn you that unless this attack ceases, I will send a sternly-worded letter to the Grand Exalted Leader of the Ziij.” He paused for a moment. “Spuumantii, please be sure to capitalize the title ‘Grand Exalted Leader.’ He’s rather picky about that.”

“Certainly.”

“Thank you. Now, please deliver that immediately.”

Spuumantii folded the sheet of paper into an envelope, addressed it, and affixed the proper postage. He inserted the letter into a mail slot in the underside of his desk. There was a soft thoonk as it was pneumatically sucked into the bowels of the craft. “Ready Postal Bay 5,” said Spuumantii into his phone. He nodded as he heard the confirmation in his earpiece. “Ready...and...mail.” He nodded again. “Thank you,” he said and hung up. “Message sent,” he said to Tharbax.

“Excellent, thank you.”

There was one more violent lurch which dislodged several of the wall sconces. They clattered to the oak floor. Tharbax winced as he saw several gouges appear in the wood where the sconces fell. All was quiet for a few moments. Tharbax looked at his secretaries expectantly. Spuumantii’s phone purred. He picked up the receiver and listened. “Tharbax, the attack has been broken off.”

“I see. I guess my letter had the intended effect.”

“No, actually, I’m sorry, but it appears that the Ziij ship refused delivery. They broke off the attack of their own accord.”

“I see. Well, as long as it’s broken off. What is our damage report?”

“Coming through now,” said Caastuulii, listening over his own telephone handset. “Minor structural damage...gargoyles C4 and D7 missing their heads...fuel line severed...we have only three hours of power left.”

“Is that all?”

“I’m afraid not....Severe damage to the wine cellar. We lost all the Orion reds.”

Tharbax collapsed back into his chair. “Oh, my God. Including...?”

Caastuulii looked back and nodded sadly.

“The ’56 Mintaka? It’s always the innocent who must suffer. This is a tragedy beyond all imagining. Spuumantii, what is the nearest planet?”

“Let me see...Earth is within a six-hour scampering.”

“Excellent,” said Tharbax. “I know someone there who will be able to help us plan our revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“I know, it’s rather gauche and all, but that ‘56 Mintaka must be avenged! Set course for Earth.”

“Anywhere on Earth in particular?”

Tharbax thought. “Yes. We need help with revenge and retribution of the most unspeakable kind. Set course for New Jersey.”

Locavore Challenge

2010-09-14T07:28:00.003-04:00

That is, "eating only locally produced foods," not locovorism, which is eating only Amtrak food.

My inaugural projects for the new FoodCEO.com include a brace of articles on the NY Locavore Challenge (Part 1 and Part 2), as well as my first blog post detailing the challenge.

24 Hour iPad People

2010-09-09T14:15:00.004-04:00

In preparation for writing a report on the impact of the Apple iPad on the graphic communications industry and the demand for print, I felt it incumbent upon myself to actually get one.

It arrived yesterday, and within an hour I was completely enamored of it. It does almost everything I use my iPhone for, except calling (but then AT&T's reception seems to have gotten so much worse lately, that it's just as well) and anything that requires a camera (like QR codes or WhatTheFont) or a microphone (Shazam). It immediately hooked into my WiFi network (I have the 3G version, but so far have no real need to buy the service; perhaps when next I travel) and it quickly sync'ed (sunc?) all my various e-mail accounts, calendars, contacts, etc. It tried to fit my entire iTunes library on it but, well, my iTunes library is 85 GB and requires a separate external disk, so it was unsurprisingly unsuccessful.

It sync'd all the apps that I had downloaded or purchased for my iPhone, and most of them work OK on the iPad, although some (like Yelp and TweetDeck) do not resize to the iPad's dimensions well.

The onscreen keyboard is very comfortable to type on, much much much better than the teeny tiny iPhone keyboard. In fact, I downloaded Apple's Pages app ($9.99) and it is easy and comfortable to write on the iPad. And I can export a Pages document to Word format and, when next I sync the iPad, can download whatever document I was writing to my Mac and open it in Word. So I have begun writing my iPad report on the iPad itself, which seems apt. Other programs in the iWork suite are also available as apps, including the spreadsheet program Numbers and the presentation program Keynote (which I always liked better than PowerPoint, but then I like leprosy better than PowerPoint). There is an adapter available to connect a projector to the iPad so it could conceivably be used for presentations. Hmm...

I have begun checking out more and more apps. The New York Times app is well done, as is the NPR one. I found a National Geographic one produced by Zinio and it is lame, being just the pages of the print edition, which means two-page spreads are separate pages. Very inelegant.

The iBook app for buying and reading e-books is actually pretty good, although the selection on the Apple iBookstore is still a bit skimpy. I bought Paul Murray's Skippy Dies as an iBook e-book and am about 70 e-pages into it--and iBook is probably the best e-book reading experience I have yet had. Reading on the iPhone isn't bad, but it is pretty small, and oddly, the small size of the device makes it a little difficult to read comfortably, if you're used to printed books. The iPad is about the size of large paperback, and is quite comfortable, ergonomically and visually. (Oh, and Skippy Dies is also a very funny book.)

I tried downloading the Barnes & Noble Nook app and it looks OK, but for some reason the e-bookstore doesn't like my credit card, despite the fact that I had used the same account to buy printed books two weeks ago. I kept getting a "could not authenticate credit card" error message in the app, and it told me to call a phone number, which led to a voicemail system from hell that ultimately couldn't identify the order number. So much for the Nook app. More like Nyuk.

NASA, by the way, has a terrific app that lets you track satellites, see where the International Space Station is, watch video, learn about the solar system, and a million other cool things in a beautifully designed "HD" app.

Already, after only a day, my behavior has been changed by the iPad. While eating meals, I would typically read whatever printed magazines have come in the mail (and I never eat at the computer, for a variety of reasons mostly involving the potential for liquids to blow it up) but now I have started reading iPad news apps like the NYT while eating, although I suspect I should not use the touchpad the next time I have pizza or chicken wings. I spend more time on YouTube now. The Web is now more portable than ever--and the form factor is just about ideal. It's not as bulky as a laptop (odd that I should consider laptops bulky!) but it's easier to scroll around on type on than the iPhone.

Perhaps even most crucially, I downloaded the New York Times Crossword Puzzle iPad app, and it actually lets me sign in using my pre-existing subscription log-in, something the older iPhone app never let me do. I only very rarely used to do the puzzle on the computer, preferring to print it out and do it in pen, but the experience of doing it on the iPad was pretty good. (I did today's in a pretty slow 18 minutes because half of that was figuring out how the app worked.)

In a nutshell, I adore the iPad, but I guess we'll see what happens once the novelty wears off.

Pole Position

2010-08-13T15:29:00.002-04:00

I've never been a big fan of cellphone cameras--but I think I have found the killer app for them:
And, thanks to it, I can now find my car at Albany Airport.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane...

2010-08-10T17:38:00.002-04:00

Scientific American:

Marine biologist Silvia Maciá was boating on the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 2001 when she noticed something soar out of the sea. At first she thought it was a member of the flying fish family—a group of marine fish that escape predators by breaking the water's surface at great speed and gliding through the air on unusually large pectoral fins. But after tracing the creature's graceful arc for a few seconds, Maciá realized this was no fish. It was a squid—and it was flying.

Cool.

And, words one rarely comes across: "On a LISTSERV dedicated to mollusks..."

I'd Call it "Ail"

2010-07-28T15:29:00.004-04:00

The world's strongest ale, it would seem, requires the world's strongest stomach. Not only is The End of History stronger than whiskey or vodka at 55 percent volume, and not only does it fetch £500 a glass, but it is also sold inside the bodies of dead stuffed animals (how I wish I were making that up). I ask, what could possibly be more appetizing than pouring a hearty libation from the mouth of a dead squirrel?
This sounds like a horrifying preview of what a Ted Nugent Pale Ale would be like.

Time Doesn't Stand Still

2010-07-25T11:29:00.002-04:00

Rush came to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC)--a scant mile from my house--Friday night; fortunately, the monsoon-like rains stopped about an hour prior to show time. They are doing construction on the Geyser Road bridge so I was unable to walk to SPAC and was stuck driving. Grr.

Anyway, the tour is dubbed the "Time Machine" tour, and is designed to be a stroll through the Rush ages (kind of like any Rush concert, really), with particular emphasis on the 1980s.

The stage set was designed with a "steampunk" theme. Steampunk, if you are not a regular visitor of Boing Boing, is a sub-genre of science-fiction that imagines the future as it was envisioned in the past, typically in the Victorian era (i.e., when steam power was prevalent); think of H.G. Wells, or the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine (but not the wretched 2002 remake which, coincidentally, was partially filmed in the Saratoga Spa State Park), Jules Verne, or even the great 1960s TV series The Wild Wild West. Basically, this meant lots of large vats, tubes and pipes, and occasional billows of steam. Neil Peart's drum kit, built especially for this tour, was absolutely beautiful, even if it wasn't as sprawling as it usually is. (His epic drum solo also had a kind of brooding sci-fi feel to it.) Occasionally, a stage hand would push a grocery cart on stage and toss a bunch of rubber chickens into a large cistern to the Geddy side of the drum riser. Okay. (It bears mentioning that amongst the Rush faithful, when describing where seats are, they are not stage left or stage right, but rather on the "Alex side [left] or Geddy side [right].)

As for the performance, it was the usual tour de force. They resurrected a few obscure tracks from the 80s that work better live than on record (I'm thinking anything from Power Windows or Hold Your Fire, which are my least favorite of their 18 studio albums. Oh, and after the intermission, they performed Moving Pictures, one of the greatest albums ever recorded, in its entirety. Paradise, really.

They also previewed two new tracks from their forthcoming Clockwork Angels album, "BU2B" (aka "Brought Up to Believe") and "Caravan." The record is apparently a science-fiction concept album; as Neil Peart wrote in the tour program, "these days an 'album' is an abstraction dearer to artists than audiences," which is why they are breaking with the timeworn pattern of recording an album and then touring behind it. I liked the new songs (they are available on iTunes), even if they still seem a little embryonic; they got mixed reviews from the folks I was hanging out with before the show (a friend of a friend is a moderator on www.therushforum.com and had organized a meet-up of regulars from the forum who, it bears mentioning, had not even been born when I went to my first Rush concert!*)

The band changed the arrangements of a few songs; "Closer to the Heart," tends to be the more protean of their songs, and "Working Man," dating from the pre-Neil Peart era, opened with a kind of reggae arrangement; it was more like "Working Mon." The opening bit of "La Villa Strangiato" sounded almost polka-like!

Unfortunately, I had waited too long to buy tickets, so I had really crappy seats and could not see any of the rear-screen projections, which were apparently very funny. I guess I'll have to wait for the DVD. I did manage to catch the one thart ended the show which went on wa-a-a-a-y too long.

All I can say is that I am glad these guys are still around. The Saratogian review is here. I also heartily recommend the recent Rush documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage.

The complete set list was:

Spirit of Radio (Permanent Waves, 1980)
Time Stand Still (Hold Your Fire, 1987)
Presto (Presto, 1989)
Stick It Out (Counterparts, 1993)
Working Them Angels (Snakes and Arrows, 2007)
Leave That Thing Alone (Counterparts, 1993)
Faithless (Snakes and Arrows, 2007)
BU2B (new--Clockwork Angels, 2011[?])
Free Will (Permanent Waves, 1980)
Marathon (Power Windows, 1985)
Subdivisions (Signals, 1982)

Intermission

Moving Pictures (1981)
Tom Sawyer
Red Barchetta
YYZ
Limelight
The Camera Eye
Witch Hunt
Vital Signs
Caravan (new--Clockwork Angels, 2011[?])
Drum solo
Hope (Alex Lifeson acoustic guitar solo; Snakes and Arrows, 2007)
Closer to the Heart (A Farewell to Kings, 1977)
Overture/Temples of Syrinx (2112, 1976)
Far Cry (Snakes and Arrows, 2007)

Encore:

La Villa Strangiato (Hemispheres, 1978)
Working Man (Rush, 1974)

I wonder if they'll tour in 2012 for the "100-year preanniversary" and play 2112 in its entirety...

*1982, for those playing along at home

Tidal Pools

2010-07-23T15:04:00.002-04:00

Looks like another maritime evening; I have tickets to see Rush at SPAC tonight, as a monsoon has swept in from the west (the same one I took off from in Grand Rapids yesterday). Fortunately, I have indoor seats.

The 1980s! "The suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth..." or anyone with a pulse, really.

I Write Like

2010-07-17T06:50:00.003-04:00

I just read about a Web site called I Write Like that claims it can analyze your prose and tell you what famous author you...well, write like. I suppose I'll be skeptical about it if it likens me to authors I don't like, but claim it's eerily accurate if it likens me to authors I do like. As I write this post, I have not tried it yet.

So let's go live to I Write Like.

First, a little mantra: Not Dan Brown, not Dan Brown, not Dan Brown...

I'll start with some text from Disrupting the Future, the book about revitalizing the printing industry that I co-wrote with Dr. Joe Webb. Who do we, in combination, write like?

I write like
Isaac Asimov

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Okay, that's acceptable. I guess I'll have to grow mutton chops. Idea for a mystery novel: Murder at GraphExpo...

So, next I'll paste some random paragraphs from Virus!, a silly science-fiction comedy novel I self-published a few years ago. Who do I write like? (I shudder to think...)

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

ZOMG!!!! That site is utterly brilliant!! The people who developed I Write Like are geniuses!!!

Okay, how about a random passage from It Might Have Been, an unpublished "serious" novel?

I write like
Charles Dickens

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Wow! I love you, Dr. Johnson, and I want to have your babies. (I am not fudging any of this, by the way.)

Okay, how about a boring old printing industry business conditions report I wrote for WhatTheyThink?

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmm...I think he might take umbrage at that. If he were still alive he'd roll over in his grave...

Okay, one last one. How about one of my silly movie recaps:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Interesting. I've never read David Foster Wallace--maybe I'll pick up Infinite Jest and see if it's a combination of comic recaps of bad science-fiction movies and a printing industry business conditions report. Maybe I've got an idea for my next WhatTheyThink report...

So, basically, I think I Write Like is spot on, and the people who created it are complete and utter geniuses.

Comments?

2010-07-08T17:52:00.002-04:00

I rarely look at the comments on this blog, because I never get any, but it seems I'm world-famous (or something) in Asia. I hope no one is saying anything obscene...

Creative Writing Update

2010-07-08T17:45:00.002-04:00

A hot-as-hell holiday weekend gave me the opportunity to stay inside the air-conditioned house and do another long-awaited (by me anyway) Movie Mis-Treatment--this time, the 1954 "eyesore" Killers from Space.

Also, I added the script for Take Offs and Landings to the Fiction page on my proper Web site. This is a stage play currently under consideration by the Theatre Workshop in Johnstown, NY (fingers crossed!), which did a staged reading of my Past and Present Tense last year. I hope I learned from my mistakes!

Heatwave

2010-07-06T15:19:00.003-04:00

Ugh. Says weather.com:

I think they're understating it. Remember that Twilight Zone episode where it got so hot that paintings were melting off the wall? It's getting like that...

Fit to Be Dyed

2010-06-25T14:37:00.003-04:00

On my trip to Philadelphia last week (or whenever it was), I read the Stieg Larsson "phenomenon" The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It's funny; I would say that literally two-thirds of the people on the train were reading either it or the sequel (The Girl Who Played With Fire). It really is one of those collective unconscious things; I found myself trying to hide the cover, as I felt embarrassingly conformist!

(By the way, the author is not to be confused with Gary Larson, who would probably write a book called The Dragon With the Girl Tattoo.)

Actually, I rather liked the book, although I'm not entirely certain why it's become the phenomenon it has. Possibly the real-life saga of the author has something to do with it (Larsson died abruptly at age 50 after delivering three completed manuscripts--the story goes that an elevator was out of order, he took the stairs and, being a heavy smoker, he had a massive heart attack as a result...make of that what you will). He's not a bad writer (although his books are translated from Swedish, which may explain some of the odd phrasing here and there), and spent most of his career writing for the financial press, so he has a very unadorned but functional style. His translator is British, so characters ride in lifts and hide things in the boot of their cars, etc., which I have no problem with.

I have to admit, compelling as it was (and, yes, it did keep me up late one or two nights), it's not a particularly complex story. I was expecting all sorts of twists and turns, and plots within plots, but it's all rather straightforward. (Actually, the things I was expecting may make for a more compelling thriller!) I was also expecting the two parallel plot threads--the corporate malfeasance and the family murder--to turn out to be linked in some way, and--spoiler alert-- they are not. And Mr. Evil--Wennerström--doesn't even make an actual appearance in the book. One would have liked some kind of confrontation between Mikael Blomkvist (the co-protagonist of the book) and his nemesis, but nothing doing, although Wennerström gets a great comeuppance; would that all the financial scumbags and Bernie Madoffs of the world got the same.

And the opening scene--elderly Henrik Vanger gets a mysterious flower on his birthday, as he has for 40-odd years--is a bit of a grabber, but at the end, I couldn't can't help but wonder, "He couldn't have figured that out ages ago?"

The other protagonist--she with the titular tattoo--Lisbeth Salander, is a well-drawn character, although the speed with which she bonds with Blomkvist seems a bit too facile, given her fundamental antisociability (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers). They don't meet until halfway through the book, so maybe a bit more set up would have made the relationship a little more realistic. Still, she's a great character, and you root for her even when she's doing something unspeakably horrible, because the people she's doing it to are the scum of the Earth. (The original Swedish title is Män som hatar kvinnor which means "Men Who Hate Women," which is apt, but probably a bit less commercial and cryptic.)

And with all the Swedish names and places, it's very easy to get umlaut fatigue. I am still seeing dots before my eyes. Or above them, actually.

I wonder, if the author had survived, and the book had been properly edited and perhaps bits of it rewritten, if it would have been a lot better. But even if it doesn't quite live up to its hype (but then what does?), it's at least a million times better than anything Dan Brown ever wrote, so it has that going for it.

So, it's ta ta to the tattoo; I just started the second book, so we shall see.

The Saratoga Film Forum showed the Swedish film adaptation last month, so maybe when it comes out on DVD I shall rent it. I can only imagine what Hollywood will do to it.

But then, maybe I like the Fountains of Wayne song better.

Books Without Conversations

2010-06-24T12:21:00.004-04:00

I am deeply deeply ashamed that, when co-authoring Disrupting the Future or doing the various debates and presentations on the subject of print vs. new media...I am ashamed that I had completely forgotten about the opening paragraph of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

A fine English major I was! I hang my head in shame...

Unfriendly's Restaurant

2010-06-24T07:37:00.003-04:00

Good grief. From the "that which doesn't kill you just makes you huge" file, via Ken A., the "successor" to the appalling KFC Double Down is the Friendly's (and one uses that brand name advisedly) Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt. What is it? Well, gird your ventricles:

First, there's a Friendly's Big Beef burger, but instead of a bun, there are two (count 'em, two!) grilled cheese sandwiches.

Ill yet? You will be:

1500 calories (870 of those from fat); 79g of saturated fat; and a whopping 2090mg of sodium (trouncing the Double Down, which weighs in at a paltry 1380mg of salt)

Here's my question: does it come with a defibrillator?

I'm beginning to get the feeling that Dagwood Bumstead was the paragon of healthy eating.

Censory Overload

2010-06-16T16:27:00.003-04:00

Channeling both George Orwell and James Joyce...

Remember back in 1984, when Apple's famous Superbowl commercial introducing the Macintosh played on how Apple was going to destroy Big Brother (which was supposed to be IBM)? Well, to coin a phrase, "meet the new Big Brother, same as the old Big Brother." But, then again, at least they reversed their tyrannical decisions:

Once again, following bad publicity, Apple has reversed a decision involving content for the iPad. Just in time for Bloomsday--today!--the annual celebration of James Joyce and his modernist masterpiece "Ulysses," Apple announced that it was a mistake to demand changes in "Ulysses 'Seen,'" an adaptation of the book for the iPad that began life as a web comic. To win approval from Apple, the creators had altered several panels that included nudity.

And:

Apple this week also overturned a decision involving a graphic-novel adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest that introduced gay themes (or extrapolated from gay subtexts). To get the okay from Cupertino, the creators of that app placed opaque black boxes over images of two partly disrobed male characters kissing and fondling. After bloggers complained, Apple called that move, too, a mistake.

Speaking of Ulysses, last night, during my annual re-reading of it, the "Cyclops" episode kind of reminded me of the Teabaggers.

Tales of Brave Ulysses

2010-06-16T07:40:00.003-04:00

It's June 16--a happy Bloomsday to everyone!

Among the Madding Crowds

2010-06-15T15:25:00.001-04:00

New Pornographers Friday night at the House of Blues in Boston!

Spanning the Globe

2010-06-10T15:14:00.000-04:00

Once again, The Onion tells it like it is.

Boston Globe Tailors Print Edition For Three Remaining Subscribers

Flower Power

2010-06-10T14:51:00.014-04:00

While in London a couple of weeks ago, Amy M. and I went to the Chelsea Flower Show, which was a lot more fun that I was expecting it to be. It really is quite the event; the BBC devoted an hour of prime time coverage to it each night all week.

It was also quite mobbed:
I was promised giant mutant vegetables, and I was not disappointed:
Some of the display gardens were quite elaborate:
I like the idea of this; would that all roads could be devoid of cars and covered with flowers:

And, of course, carnivorous plants are not without their appeal:
And here's a motto I think we could all live by:
After downing rather voluminous Pimms and lemonades, we went in search of food, and followed the signs that read "Seafood and Champagne." We were not disappointed.

I got bit by (among other things) the gardening bug, and picked up a bunch of seeds (mostly herbs) which, after only less than two weeks, are growing insanely.

It Was 30 Years Ago Today...

2010-06-01T18:06:00.003-04:00

Well, last Sunday, actually. On May 30, 1980, Peter Gabriel’s third album was released, the one widely believed to be his masterpiece, if not in terms of sales, than certainly of artistic vision.

1980’s Peter Gabriel was third album to be titled Peter Gabriel, even using the same typeface, his idea at the time being to have each album seem like subsequent issues of a magazine. As a result, the third album is unofficially called “Melt,” as the cover features what appears to be Gabriel’s face melting (courtesy of Hipgnosis). (He would have kept this going but his record company decided, with album four, that he should start naming them properly; so 1982’s Peter Gabriel ended up with the more or less official title of Security, likely because the cover picture appears to be a still from a bank security camera. Minimalist titles like So, Us, and Up followed. In fact, those are the only proper studio albums he has released since 1982; not the most prolific of artists, is he?) Five years into his solo career (Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, following The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour), his first two albums, Peter Gabriel (aka “Car”) and Peter Gabriel (aka “Scratch”) careened from style to style, sometimes successfully (“Solsbury Hill,” “Here Comes the Flood,” “D.I.Y.”), sometimes less so (most of “Scratch”). However, by album three, he had found a sound, a vision, and the songs that made them work. It could be called “world music,” although at this stage I’m not sure what world it would be; certainly not Earth. I first heard “Games Without Frontiers” on the radio circa 1980 or 1981 or so and thought it was one of the strangest—and coolest—songs I had ever heard. The rest of the album is only modestly less strange, but still very cool, and more than a little haunting.

“Melt” was produced by Steve Lillywhite, early in his production career, and the record boasts the sound—of which Lillywhite was a chief architect—of the “gated” drum sound; that is, a noise gate is applied to a conventional drum to change—or eliminate—the decay of the impact. Coupled with a lack of cymbals, it tended to add a unique, punchy, and at times almost electronic sound to acoustic drums. This became a popular sound in the early 1980s, and it is argued that this was the first album to use this effect. It is highlighted on the opening song “Intruder” (drums played by Genesis mate Phil Collins—the effect is also featured on Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”), a creepy creepy song about, well, an intruder. “I know something about opening windows and doors/I know how to move quietly—to creep across creaky wooden floors.” The obsession with obsessive personalities continues on “No Self Control” (“I don’t know how to stop!”). “Start” is a brief sax/synth instrumental that leads into the radio favorite (well, played on the radio once or twice) “I Don’t Remember,” featuring Tony Levin’s “Stick” (a type of mutant bass).

More deranged characters appear in “Family Snapshot,” an attempt to get into the mind of a Lee Harvey Oswald-like political assassin (“‘I don’t really hate you/I don’t care what you do/We were made for each other—me and you/I want to be somebody/You were like that, too’” After the heavy drama of “Family Snapshot,” side one (in the old vinyl days) ends with the light-ish “And Through the Wire” featuring guitarists Paul Weller (The Jam, whose classic Sound Affects came out in 1980) and Dave Gregory (XTC, whose extremely classic Black Sea also came out in 1980). Side two opens with the big hit (well, it occasionally got played—it rose to #48 in the U.S.) “Games Without Frontiers”—and, yes, that’s Kate Bush chanting “Jeux sans frontières” in the background), leading into “Not One of Us” (“You may look like we do/Talk like we do—But you know how it is...”). “Lead a Normal Life” is set in a mental institution. The album ends on a political note; “Biko,” about South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko, who was killed in police custody in 1977. The song begins and ends with a chant of the South African song “Senzeni Na?” (“What have we done?”) which was sung at Biko’s funeral. “Biko” was often played at the end of Gabriel concerts, and the audience were encouraged to chant along.

Speaking of which, several SU-ians and I journeyed to Rochester in 1986 to see Gabriel live on the So tour. Although he didn’t play “Solsbury Hill” (my favorite Peter Gabriel track), and I was not a big fan of So (it was his big mega-platinum albums with “Sledgehammer,” “In Your Eyes,” and “Big Time”), it was still a phenomenal show.

So, let’s put on the great Peter Gabriel, melt a bit, and get so strange across the border...

The official pre-MTV video for “Games Without Frontiers”—ah, the state of video technology in 1980!

It Was 25 Years Ago...

2010-05-14T20:26:00.004-04:00

25 years ago yesterday, on May 13, 1985, Dire Straits’ fifth studio album Brothers in Arms was released. It has the distinction of being the first compact disc I ever bought; I had got my first CD player as a high school graduation present (which I suppose suggests that that was 25 years ago, as well...oh, joy) and Brothers in Arms had just come out, so...

I was pretty much a Dire Straits fan from day one—I had their debut 45 “Sultans of Swing” back in 1978, and I pretty much kept up with them throughout much of the early 1980s. Mark Knopfler is a guitar god.

Having formed in Britain as part of the pub rock movement in the mid-1970s that preceded punk, Dire Straits were certainly out of step in their homeland, although they were a hit in the States (“Sultans of Swing” was a top 40 single). They began as a four-piece—Mark Knopfler on lead guitar and vocals, brother David on rhythm guitar, John Illsley on bass, and Pick Withers on drums. Only Illsley would still be in the band by Brothers in Arms.

Their first, eponymously titled record (1978) remains one of the great debuts, with scarcely a bad song on it (“Sultans of Swing” was in it), although their quickly recorded follow-up Communique (1979) had that “difficult second album” feel to it, and the scrabbling guitar solo in “Lady Writer’ was obviously supposed to be the next “Sultans of Swing.” It wasn’t.

David Knopfler had left by the third album Making Movies (1980), which was a great leap forward in style and complexity, and 1982’s Love Over Gold—boasting the compelling 14:25 “Telegraph Road” and one of the greatest, most intense guitar solos ever—went even further. (It remains my favorite of their six studio albums.) A retreat to simpler material resulted in the 1983 EP Twisting by the Pool, by which time Pick Withers had been replaced by ex-Rockpile drummer Terry Williams, albeit temporarily. (It was also in 1983 that Mark Knopfler recorded his first movie soundtrack, to the great Bill Forsyth film Local Hero, and started his career as a producer, producing Bob Dylan’s comeback Infidels.)

By 1985, Dire Straits was little more than Knopfler, Illsley, and a collection of other musicians and less of a proper band. (Session man and ex-King Crimsonsite Tony Levin plays his “stick”—a weird sort of bass—on “One World,” actually my favorite track on the record.) Odd, then, that Brothers in Arms became such a mammoth hit record. The first three tracks are still mainstays of FM radio—“So Far Away,” “Walk of Life,” and of course “Money for Nothing,” the anti-MTV song that ironically became an MTV hit (the computer animation—a novelty in 1985—helped). Actually, it wasn’t really an anti-MTV song; Knopfler often wrote from the perspective of characters, and in this case it’s blue-collar appliance schleppers who think that there’s nothing to being a musician.

I confess to not having been all that impressed with Brothers in Arms at the time; sure I liked it, but it was actually my least favorite of their records at the time. It’s hard to explain why; listening again to it 25 years later, it’s not especially dated like a lot of albums from the 1980s—perhaps the atmospheric pop jazziness of many of the tracks didn’t suit me at the time, but I appreciate it a lot more now. I remember using the new features of my first CD player to skip slower tracks like “Your Latest Trick” and “Why Worry” but with hindsight they’re actually quite nice. Perhaps I’ve mellowed in my old age. “Ride Across the River” always seemed a tad Peter Gabriel-esque, and the title track remains a haunting, beautiful classic.

I think part of the difficulty was that it was the first record I remember hearing that was released at CD length (actually, it’s only 54 minutes and change, although I remember it being longer, for some reason); as someone brought up in the vinyl era, you get used to the rhythm of two ~21:30 sides; song sequencing used to be a bit of an art, and even today albums that go on much longer than 45 minutes can’t always keep my attention. It’s hard to explain.

Following the tremendous success of Brothers in Arms, Knopfler was never particularly comfortable as the rock star, so he retreated into soundtracks and production and didn’t reconvene Dire Straits until 1991 and the so-so On Every Street. And then he called it a day and began a solo career. He remains a guitar god.

So let’s put on Brothers in Arms, celebrate the leaving forever of high school, and recall a time when this kind of computer animation was impressive.

Then we can check out the Weird Al version.

Talk Talk

2010-05-13T08:22:00.002-04:00

Via The Onion, of course:
Semi-Literate Former Gold Prospector Given Own Cable News Show

I confess I don't have cable, and avoid cable news channels at all costs, so I don't really know, but from what I've read...you mean, this isn't Glenn Beck?

Heaven is Whenever We're Together

2010-05-08T13:15:00.005-04:00

Two new albums have been receiving non-stop rotation on my CD player/iPod.

Together, the new one by The New Pornographers, is an improvement over 2007's Challengers, and the extensive use of cellos makes it sound a bit like mutant ELO at times. The refrain in the opening song "Moves" I assume is "These things get louder" but I swear it sounds like "Bee stings get louder," the kind of elliptical lyrics that wouldn't be beyond A.C. Newman. There are the usual complement of looney Dan Bejar songs, although they're less looney than, say, "Jackie, Dressed in Cobras" from Twin Cinema, or anything on the last Destroyer album (Bejar's own band, whose last album featured songs titled "Foam Hands," "Leopard of Honor," "Shooting Rockets (From The Desk Of Night's Ape)", for example). But then with tracks called "Valkyrie in the Roller Disco" and "A Bite Out of My Bed" ("Someone took a bite out of my bed"), Newman can be pretty odd, as well. This is one of those records where, after a play or two, you feel like you have known these songs for years. (And with lines like "Honey child, you're not safe here..." someone's been listening to The Smiths.) And only Neko Case's harmonies can make lines like "I wear my Sunday suit to walk the streets/That would feel Byzantine" sound sensible. "Up in the Dark" ("What's love but what turns up in the dark?") is classic NP. Great record; I highly recommend it.

On Tuesday, Heaven is Whenever, the new one by The Hold Steady, came out. They may never make a record as good as 2006's Boys and Girls in America again, but this one is far superior to 2008's Stay Positive. You have to like a song ("The Weekenders") that begins with the line "There was that whole weird thing with the horses." (Actually, it's the return of the characters from the song "Chips Ahoy!" about a girl who can psychically pick winning horses. Hmm...anyone got her number?) "She said the theme of this party is the industrial age/You came in dressed as a train wreck." THS's keyboard player quit, so there is more guitar on this one, which is fine by me. It's not hard to imagine "Rock Problems" being sung by Ray Davies on a Misfits/Low Budget-era Kinks record. The opening song, "The Sweet Part of the City" ("the parts with the bars and restaurants"--indeed) begins with a little riff that is unfortunately vaguely reminiscent of Jefferson Starship's "Find Your Way Back," which I hope was unintentional. In the title track, "She said Hüsker Dü got huge/But they started in St. Paul/Do you remember 'Makes No Sense at All.'" (I do, actually--it was on Flip Your Wig, as well as a 1985 EP which also included Hüsker Dü performing a cover of not only The Byrds' "8 Miles High" but also "Love is All Around"--yes, the theme to The Mary Tyler Moore Show--which has to be heard to be believed.) The song continues, "Heaven is the whole of the heart/Paradise by the dashboard light/Utopia is a band/They sang 'Love is the Answer.'" And that pretty much sums up the bulk of THS's influences. Great record; I highly recommend it.

There's no video up for any of the songs yet, but who needs video when you have audio anyway?

iShow

2010-04-30T14:14:00.003-04:00

Jon Stewart, as usual, is right on the money vis-a-vis the brouhaha over Gizmodo, the purloined iPhone prototype, and Apple's complete freakout.

If you're unfamiliar with the story, background is here. Shorter version: if you're an Apple engineer and you're field-testing a new iPhone protoitype, don't get drunk in a Redwood City bar.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Appholes

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Apple—you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn't supposed to be this way - Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the f--k is going on?!

…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn't order the police to bust down the doors, right? I'd be pissed too, but you didn't have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone's door, why don't you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There're no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T's signal?!

More Fun with Reptiles

2010-04-16T13:03:00.001-04:00

Rock on.

Union of the Snake

2010-04-16T12:49:00.002-04:00

Via Boing Boing, snake used as a weapon by noisy hotel guests. I bet they were playing Whitesnake. Hmmm...Snakes in a Hotel. I think we've found the sequel to Snakes on a Plane. If the series catches on, they can do Snakes in a Cab, Snakes at Baggage Retrieval, and Snakes on the 1:20 to Birmingham.

Disrupting "Disrupting the Future"

2010-04-10T15:10:00.001-04:00

I only steal from the best.

Agog at Evil Oxen

2010-04-07T15:46:00.003-04:00

In the tradition of “Diary of a Crossword Fiend” and other crossword puzzle blogs I heard about at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament back in February (as well as the official NYT Crossword blog), I am finally getting around to starting to blog sporadically about my own crossword puzzling. This may or may not be a daily thing; as with most things, we’ll see.

By the way, if you routinely do any of these puzzles and have not done them yet, be forewarned—there be spoilers here! I should do a “below the fold/read more” kind of thing, but I’m lazy.

There are generally three puzzles I do each day. Today, my times were:

New York Times: 8:40
L.A. Times: 7:14
CrosSynergy (Washington Post): 5:59

I don’t really try for speed.

Today is a Wednesday (I think...yes, it is), which means a mildly difficult New York Times puzzle. It is by veteran Richard Silvestri, who usually injects a fair amount of humor into his puzzles. It took me a while to glom onto the theme; the first theme entry was clued “One who plunders boatloads of jack o’lanterns?” and the answer was PUMPKIN PIRATE. Okay... The second theme entry was clued “First-rate chastisement?” and the answer was SUPREME BERATING. Still didn’t get it; I’m fairly dim today. The third and final theme entry was clued “Nickname for an unpredictable Communist?” ERRATIC THE RED. Aha! ERIC THE RED with RAT inserted. Ah, then theme entry #1 was PUMPKIN PIE with RAT in it (I’ll have the pumpkin pie without so much rat in it...wasn’t that a Monty Python sketch?) and #2 was SUPREME BEING with a RAT in it. An odd theology, that. Anyway, 58 Down explains what’s going on: “Chinese calendar animal...or the key to this puzzle’s theme.” Ah...and 59 Down is RAT. Curiously, this isn’t actually the Year of the Rat (except in Ft. Lauderdale, I am led to understand...); it’s the Year of the Tiger, which is better than “The Eye of the Tiger.” The last Year of the Rat was 2008. Al Stewart’s “The Year of the Cat” was released in 1976.

Elsewhere in the Times puzzle, the ALOU baseball family appears again, but there aren’t too many of the “old regular” entries one comes across all the time today. Some witty clues: “Fall preceder” (PRIDE), “It’s game” (TAG), “Ship of fuels” (TANKER), and something I did not know: “What ‘........’ means to a typesetter” (STET). Or, as we used to say in magazine publishing, “never let them see you stet.” And what did Cervantes call “The tongue of the mind”? PEN.

The theme answers of Donna S. Levin’s Los Angeles Times puzzle were 16 Across “Extremely defensive state of mind” (BUNKER MENTALITY); 30 Across “Physical play” (ROUGH HOUSE); 39 Across “Abstinent one” (TEETOTALLER); 54 Across “Sam-I-Am’s story” (GREEN EGGS AND HAM). The theme? As 60 Across explains, “This puzzle’s theme—according to Twain, it’s ‘a good walk spoiled’” (GOLF). Yes, that line is just too too Twain.

Interesting thing about the word “teetotaler.” For many many years, I thought (despite the spelling) that it derived etymologically from preferring tea over booze—that is, non-alcoholic beverages. However, I learned in a Toastmasters meeting that it has an etymology not unlike D-Day. Says the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1834, possibly formed from total with a reduplication of the initial T- for emphasis (T-totally "totally," not in an abstinence sense, is recorded in Kentucky dialect from 1832 and is possibly older in Irish-Eng.). The use in temperance jargon was first noted Sept. 1833 in a speech advocating total abstinence (from beer as well as wine and liquor) by Richard "Dicky" Turner, a working-man from Preston, England.

Elsewhere in the L.A. Times puzzle, Giant Mel OTT makes one of his ubiquitous appearances (he would be, with the ALOUs, part of any crossword puzzler’s baseball all-star team, methinks). We can lower our cholesterol with 57 Across (OLEO), another “regular.” Once, BUTTER was an answer in a puzzle and I exclaimed “I can’t believe it’s not oleo!” “Drug in Shatner novels” is of course TEK.

Finally, Lynn Lempel’s WaPo puzzle is titled “Coat of Many Colors” and is rather a clever theme that works nice and symmetrically: “Like plumbing or carpentry jobs” (BLUE COLLAR), “Sign of hope amid the gloom” (SILVER LINING), “Still popular Elizabethan ballad” (GREENSLEEVES), and “Best Actor winner for ‘Sayonara’” (RED BUTTONS). It sounds like something they would have worn in the 1970s.

It has been long believed (even repeated by Rebecca Fraser in her excellent recent book The Story of Britain) that “Greensleeves” was originally written by Henry VIII as an attempt to woo Ann Boelyn. Others dispute the story (Alison Weir points out in her 2002 book Henry VIII: The King and His Court, that “Greensleeves” was written in an Italian style of composition that didn’t reach England until after Henry’s time, and of course it seems highly unlikely that Henry VIII would have written anything Elizabethan). Wikipedia tells us that

One possible interpretation of the lyrics is that Lady Green Sleeves was a promiscuous young woman and perhaps a prostitute. At the time, the word "green" had sexual connotations, most notably in the phrase "a green gown", a reference to the way that grass stains might be seen on a lady's dress if she had made love outside.

On her sleeves? Curious.

Anyway, elsewhere in the puzzle, we have two entries clued “The whole kit and caboodle,” 32 Across (ALL) and 40 Down (EVERY BIT). “Kit and caboodle”...there’s a phrase that sends me to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

kit
"round wooden tub," 1275, probably from M.Du. kitte "jug, tankard, wooden container," of unknown origin. Meaning "collection of personal effects," especially for traveling (originally in ref. to a soldier), is from 1785; that of "outfit of tools for a workman" is from 1851. Kit and caboodle is 1861, from boodle "lot, collection," perhaps from Du. boedel "property."

That answers that. The crossword puzzle mecca of ENID is clued today as “Present-day Oklahoma city on the old Chisholm Trail.” RHEA is clued as “Actress Perlman with an ostrich-like namesake.” I guess it depends on whether you are a Cheers fan or an ostrich fancier. Or perhaps both, of you’re that much of a Renaissance man/woman.

It’s always interesting (and I use a hitherto unknown definition of “interesting,” it would seem) when the same word appears in more than one puzzle on the same day. Today, we had OXEN in both the NY Times and the LA Times, and AGOG and EVIL in both the LA Times and WaPo. I'm often agog at evil oxen.

Here's the Mutiny I Promised You

2010-04-02T15:27:00.002-04:00

All right, one more for the road. NP from their last record. This may be how I'm getting to Vancouver next week which, coincidentally, is where the NP's hail from.

The Song That's Shaking Me

2010-04-02T15:22:00.003-04:00

One for the road.

New New Pornographers album due May 4! And they are touring; mi hermano and I have tix to see them in Boston June 18.

From their first record. That Neko Case--she could go places...

Propeller Time

2010-04-02T15:18:00.000-04:00

Rock on.

For Openers

2010-03-23T15:43:00.003-04:00

Ah, convergence. Now this is a universal remote: a TV clicker with built-in bottle opener Perfect for those who have become--or want to become--completely immobile.

Of Thee Icing

2010-03-19T07:57:00.004-04:00

First we had photocakes and photocookies, and now we have cupcakes with actual working, scannable QR codes printed on the icing.

Reportedly, the QR code will take you to the Montreal Science Center Web site.

If you swallowed a camera and the QR code still worked, then I'd be really impressed.

"I Never Travel Far...

2010-03-18T07:53:00.001-04:00

...without a little Big Star."

RIP Alex Chilton.

Gone Phishing

2010-03-17T08:29:00.002-04:00

I came across an interesting variation on the infamous "Nigerian" scams--you know, that someone in Nigeria needs help holding onto millions of dollars and just needs your bank account information...yeah.

Anyway, I got the following note this morning purportedly from someone who is in my Toastmasters club:

Hello ,

How are you doing? Hope all is well with you and family, i am sorry i didn't inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.

I need a favor from you as I've misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money and other valuable things were kept and I will like you to assist me with an urgent loan of $2,800 to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home.

I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with and I'll Refund the money back to you as soon as i return.Please kindly help me to send the money through Western union with my details below.

Name: XXXXX
Address : 12 Cromwell Road
Zip code: SW5 OSW
State: London
Country : England

kindly help me to make the transfer as soon as you receive this email and once you have it sent, send me the money transfer control number with details used in sending it.

Thanks so much

Your reply will be greatly appreciated.

D----a

A couple of things struck me. First, having known this person for years, it was more than a little out of character (and she types better than that)--and, second, even if I didn't know her well, why would she be asking me for help? If someone were really stuck, wouldn't they be more likely to call someone they know rather than send a generic e-mail?

Oh, and they don't call them ZIP codes in England.

The scary part was that the reply-to address was almost the same as her proper e-mail address--but two letters had been transposed.

As with most scams, a little common sense and a little logic go a long way toward not falling for these things. Something as simple as doing a Google search for the subject line (in this case, "Kindly Assist Me") also turns up a few links to similar scams.

Other clues that something is a scam: if a bank that you have never heard of tells you to update your account info, it's probably a scam. (Funny: I used to get all sorts of notices presumably from "Fifth Third Bank" telling me that my account info needed updating. I had never heard of "Fifth Third Bank" and the name even sounded phony. And then I was watching a basketball game a few months ago and it was being played in the "Fifth Third Bank Arena" in Cincinnati and I thought, "Hey! That's the bank that's in all those e-mail scams! It does exist!" Probably not the kind of marketing the bank wanted.)

Anyway, the point is, if it sounds phishy, it probably is!

Somthing Fishy

2010-03-03T09:53:00.003-05:00

Happy 89th birthday, Abe Vigoda!

My belief is that he is a succubus, sucking the life from younger celebrities.

Takeoffs and Landings

2010-02-27T14:58:00.002-05:00

Despite everyone at Graphics of the Americas cynically doubting that I would never get home from Miami Beach yesterday, what with Phase 2 of the Snowpocalypse ravaging the Northeast, in point of fact my flight from Miami to Philly took off on time and landed 10 minutes early. My connection to Albany also took off on time and landed 5 minutes early.

I was actually dreading flying US Airways after my last bad experience, but this time I think they may have redeemed themselves in my eyes.

Tarnished Silverlight

2010-02-26T07:59:00.002-05:00

Well, I tried to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. While writing my story on the keynote address by MS's August de los Toros for today's WhatTheyThink, I had wanted to include a link to a very cool video that Microsoft Surface had put together showcasing all the futuristicky things they were working on in the area of ubiquitous interactive touchscreen and flexible displays. No dice. It wasn't that I couldn't find the video--I couldn't even get onto the Surface site.

I am on a Mac, naturally, and use Safari as my default browser. When I went to the main Surface site, I was told I needed to install Silverlight (Microsoft's Flash-like animation and video environment)--to basically see anything. Since installing software is always tons of fun, and when I'm on deadline is one thing I adore getting sidetracked with, I thought, "Sure, why not?" Since I was on the GoA pressroom WiFi, it was a tad slow, so it took about 15 minutes to download. Fortunately, I needed to take a restroom break and socialize a bit, so I let it do its thing.

I came back, it was done, and I again tried to launch the Surface site. This time I got the Silverlight logo that spun a bit and eventually stalled without doing anything. Great.

So then I tried Firefox, my other default browser when a site doesn't like Safari. This time, I got the spinning Silverlight logo again, as well as a countdown, which stopped at 30 and went no further. Great.

Okay, Plan C. I actually have Internet Explorer on my Mac. It has been years since Microsoft had a version of IE for the Mac, but I have carefully preserved this one in a hermetically-sealed folder on my hard drive on those rare occasions when a site I need to access won't work with anything else. (For example, I once did a lot of writing for a publishing company that configured their independent contractors' online billing site to only work with IE--which they only did after MS discontinued IE for the Mac and probably knowing full well that 90% of their contributors are on a Mac and won't be able to use IE. It wouldn't surprise me if that was their not-so-subtle way of preventing their freelancers from billing them.)

Anyway, IE crashed within seconds of accessing Surface. Great.

Strike 3.

So, I really wanted to link to that video, but never got that far. It does make me wonder what the future depicted in that video would look like if Microsoft actually were the ones to develop all these products. I had to be nice in my WTT article, but all I could think was, if it all ends up anything like Office or Windows, I'm going to want to take one of those glass displays, smash it, and slit my wrists with the shards. A fatal error has occurred, indeed.

There was one brief debate in one of the sessions I attended yesterday where the topic of whether Flash or some other online video/animation environment would prevail, and I don't really care either way--as long as it's something that works fairly transparently and consistently. I have never had a problem getting Flash to function, and I'm sure if I looked, I would find that there are even better solutions out there. But to be the one that prevails, it's going to have to be the one that is most easly available, is most stable and functional, and causes the least amount of grief to use. That's a tall order for any software company, but the reward is the conquering of the universe.

Feed the Bird

2010-02-25T17:56:00.002-05:00

I have attempted to consolidate all my myriad social media activities into one place, so using Twitterfeed I am attempting to set up a feed so that things I post here at Blogito Ergo Sum automatically feed to Twitter and Facebook. This post is an attempt to see if it works.

Rippit

2010-02-25T17:36:00.003-05:00

Here's an idea that combines one of the most disturbing memories of high school biology class with hand-knitted craftsmanship. Via Boing Boing, we give you: a hand-knitted dissected frog. Perfect for grandma.

Hold That Ghost

2010-02-25T11:25:00.004-05:00

So I checked into The Marseilles Hotel yesterday, and although it's not the nicest hotel in the room (your typical South Beach flea trap), I was more than a little bemused to see this Post-It Note attached to a little purportedly inspirational poem on the wall:
I don't know what picture they are talking about, but I detected no ghost activity--not even actress Alice Ghostley. (The next door room's closet is behind the [thin] wall behind the bed, and it's easy to hear hangers clinking about in the morning. Perhaps the ghosts offer a valet service.) Fortunately, there has never been any definitive evidence that there are such things as ghosts. But even if there were, there certainly, as far as I know, has never been a reliably documented incident of someone being killed or injured by a ghost. So there's not much to be scared of.

I do have a question about ghosts, though. Even if we grant the premise that there is some kind of energy that comprises the soul and that it can linger on Earth after we shuffle off this mortal coil, and even if we assume that it can take the physical form of the person who died, why, oh why, is it wearing clothes? Ghosts always seem to be "seen" wearing Victorian garb, or fancy dresses (never flip-flops and tank tops, thankfully), or whatever. What would the mechanism for that be?

And another thing. Those silly ghost-hunting shows...they always seem to be using infrared cameras to capture "heat traces" or whatever, which is supposed to be evidence for ghostness. As Ken A. explained to me (as he has used infrared cameras), in order to pick up anything, you need to calibrate an infrared camera using a coefficient that has been determined for the surface generating the heat (which is what infrared radiation is). How do you calibrate an infrared camera to take into account the surface of a ghost? Because unless you do this properly, whatever you pick up on the camera could be anything and not especially reliable.

Boxing Day

2010-02-23T13:14:00.006-05:00

So, anyway, last weekend, if you have read below or followed my Facebook/ Twitter/ TweetDeck/ Etc. updates, you know was the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott in beautiful downtown Brooklyn, NY. It's located right across the street from the Supreme Court Building, and rumor has it that the hotel was constructed for the primary purpose of sequestering juries, although I'm told that may be apocryphal.

Anyway, the event drew about 650 contestants (and many other non-competing guests) and worked like this. For most contenders, there were seven puzzles, which ranged in difficulty from pretty easy to "queen bitch" difficulty (Will Shortz's term). Everyone gathers in the main banquet hall, and yellow folders help ensure that one's eyes stay on one's own puzzle:
A puzzle is passed out, Will Shortz says, "Ready, set, go," and a clock ticks down the time allotted for a given puzzle--15 minutes, 20 minutes, etc. When you are done, you raise your hand, a proctor picks up your paper, marks the time, and you are released to go out to the lobby and commiserate with others--"what the heck was 19 down?" "did you get the theme of that?" "I have shamed the family," "I paid money to do this," and so forth.

It's interesting how the puzzle scoring and tracking has evolved, and it's a somewhat sophisticated process now. Every contestant is given a Contestant Number, and a sheet of bar-code labels that you stick on the back of each puzzle. (How fortuitous that a crossword puzzle grid can be easily used as a bar code!) These all varied by contestant:
The puzzle is graded by hand; judges verify manually that each square is filled correctly, and deduct points for wrong letters and blank squares (I am happy to say that in seven puzzles, I got no wrong answers or left any blanks). Points are then awarded by how quickly the puzzle was completed. The marked puzzles are then scanned and uploaded to the contest Web site, and you can log in with your contestant nunber to see the scanned puzzles, and track the standings (which are also posted in hard copy on the wall near the banquet hall). I would say that at least half of the contestants had iPhones and BlackBerrys or at least laptops. There were computers in the lobby of the hotel, as well.

There are a bunch of different contestant categories, based on skill, age, and geography. The A category is the best of the bunch--these are the power solvers who are more like human laser printers and can fill in an entire grid faster than I can write a single letter. (There are all sorts of tricks they use, only some which I have any aptitude for.)

At the end, there is an eighth puzzle that is used for the playoffs. If you've seen the movie Wordplay, you know how this works. There is a stage on which is a set of three large puzzle grids mounted on easels. The three contestants stand at their easels (they are angled such that they can't see each others' grids), they are given sound-proof headphones, and then solve the final, really hard puzzle while 700+ people watch--and Neil Conant of NPR and puzzle constructor Merl Reagle do play-by-play commentary. It's pretty intense, but a lot of fun.
You do meet interesting people from all walks of life--some of them are rather silly walks:
This is Jim Jenista, who apparently always comes to this event in some bizarre costume or other. He's kind of a celebrity.

It was a fun time, and I look forward to next year's tournament. I must work on my speed.

Case Closed

2010-02-23T12:33:00.002-05:00

Why do I get the sense that if I ever used this impressive toothbrush holder, I would never make it through airport security? (Via Boing Boing)

Power Point of Know Return

2010-02-23T12:27:00.002-05:00

An oldie but a goodie, via Boing Boing today--comedian Don McMillan's "How Not to Use PowerPoint" routine. So true, so true...

How You Doing, Bernie?

2010-02-21T14:39:00.002-05:00

Sitting in a TGIFriday's in Penn Station, I finally, for the first time, am hearing the original of a 1999 Weird Al parody. "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" that Shazam tells me is by The Offspring. What a wretched song. I much prefer Weird Al's "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi."

What are Words For

2010-02-21T14:29:00.002-05:00

For those who have not been following my Twitter and/or Facebook updates, I finished the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament at 75th out of 644. I shall blog more about it (and post pictures) when I get home to my proper computer--God and Amtrak willing...

There Goes Paradise

2010-02-19T05:32:00.002-05:00

I have really been enjoying the new SyFy (jeez, I hate that spelling) Channel show Caprica, a prequel to the new Battlestar Galactica, which I also liked a great deal. And I can watch it even though I don't have cable, or know what night it is on. SyFy, like a number of other networks, makes their shows available online, which means they can be watched any time one wants. I can connect my laptop directly to my TV, and some networks (like ABC) have online video quality that even exceeds that of what comes over my cable provider! This is how I watch Lost each week--and I recently discovered a show called FlashForward, which I also like a lot. And what I really like about watching programs online is that there are far far far fewer commercials. There are the usual commercial breaks (shows are actually written with "act breaks" and develop dramatically between commercials), but only last about 30 seconds (not enough time for a bathroom break, though) and typically include only one sponsor. In the case of FlashForward, some episodes offered the option of playing a 90-second introductory "infomercial" and then being able to watch the show without any commercials. Yes! Hulu.com is also a good site to watch old and new shows with a minimum of interruption.

This is how TV began, after all--a single sponsor footing the bill for a show, and commercial breaks were kept to a minimum and you didn't get the constant clutter of a zillion ads per 2- or 3-minute break (which even individual sponsors hate). If you think commercials are taking up more programming time these days, you're right. If you watch old and new series on DVD, you can see this quite dramatically; in the 1960s and 70s, a one-hour drama like Star Trek or The Wild Wild West clocked in about 52 minutes per episode. A half-hour sitcom like M*A*S*H or The Bob Newhart Show was about 26 minutes. Today, a "one-hour" drama like Lost is 42 minutes; a half-hour sitcom about 21 minutes. And, to be honest, I remember the single sponsor's ads better than a zillion (generally loathsome and tasteless) ads clustered in one block.

Being able to watch shows online with a minimum of commercials is far preferable (yes, someone has to pay for them, but there has to be a better way)--but it may be changing. Unfortunately. Says Ad Age:

Starting this fall, Nielsen intends to start making available data that take into account viewing of commercials that run in a particular show, no matter whether they are seen online or on TV. The data will be made available for evaluation starting this September and are intended to become the basis for ad negotiations in February 2011.

But here's the catch: For Nielsen to be able to provide the commercial rating, shows seen online will have to have the same group of commercials that run on TV. If this system were adopted en masse -- and it's not clear that it would be -- online viewing might be crammed just as full of commercials as the more traditional TV-watching experience.

Oh, well, It was nice while it lasted. Guess I'll go back to reading books and watching DVDs.