Prompt Attention

Every issue, Writer's Digest magazine has a little short short story contest in which they provide a prompt and you are supposed to write a 750-word (no more) story based on it. I usually try to participate, just for fun (haven't won one yet, but hope springs eternal), and you may recall that I do usually post them here, although sometimes I forget.

Right before I left for the long weekend last Friday, the latest issue arrived, and the contest prompt was "A police detective is assigned to a case involving a burglary at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop."

So I mulled that over on the drive to Boston (long road trips are great for plotting out stories and other projects; most of the first half of It Might Have Been was "written" between Saratoga and Boston) and it kind of gelled Saturday night. First thing Sunday morning, I was able to write it down. A bit silly, but fun.

Unfortunately, when I got back home yesterday, I reread the prompt and discovered that it actually said: "A police detective is assigned to a case involving arson at several Krispy Kreme doughnut shops." Oops. Actually, that might work out better; I just need to alter a few things.

The Leavening

Detective Brad Gilroy got out of the car in front of the Krispy Kreme and strode over to where the suspect was being held.

“Lieutenant,” he said with a tone of slight confusion, “did I hear you correctly?”

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Jordan. “Employees say this individual”—he gestured to a handcuffed suspect being held by two uniformed officers—“charged in, brandished a weapon, and demanded every doughnut they had.”

“A weapon?”

“Yes, sir, this.” He handed Gilroy a plastic bag inside which was a metallic blade-like object. “It’s a frosting knife.”

Gilroy expressionlessly looked at the suspect. As if on cue, he began to struggle.

“I must get back! You have to believe me! All of humanity hangs in the balance!”

Gilroy sighed knowingly. “Great, one of these. What did you want with the doughnuts?”

“I must get them back! Quickly”

“Back where?”

“To—” He stopped abruptly.

Gilroy knew the drill. “Let me guess, you’re from the future.”

The suspect cautiously nodded.

“Cyborg?”

“Human.”

Gilroy sighed again. “All right. Let’s have it from the top.”

The suspect looked around warily, then began. “I am from the year 2207.” He glanced across the parking lot to what looked like a large metal mixing bowl, easily four feet across and three feet deep. “You see, we are in the middle of a civil war.”

The suspect explained. In the late 21st century, after decades of food scares, and the contamination and recall of many “healthy” foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, and even meat, consumption of junk food skyrocketed. Peoples’ entire diets revolved around M&Ms, cookies, cakes, and other snack items. The Twinkie rose to the top of the food pyramid. By the beginning of the 22nd century, obesity had become epidemic and public health was in crisis. The government was unable to cope effectively (not surprisingly), and society was left with a power vacuum that was exploited by several ambitious and ruthless dieticians and nutritionists. They seized control—which was easy enough given their superior physical condition—and declared martial law (some called it “marshmallow law”), banning all foodstuffs that were not deemed “healthy.” At first, violators were punished via a stern lecture, but, inevitably, power corrupted, and before long the possession of any dessert item was punishable by death. Even possession of a dessert cookbook was grounds for imprisonment.

“My own grandmother,” said the suspect, “was caught with a bootlegged copy of ‘Completely Cookies’ and was sentenced to 10 years in the ‘food pyramid,’” a massive stone structure that served as a maximum security prison.

Any revolution will eventually spawn a backlash, and soon one began in the last surviving Dunkin Donuts franchise. “So many of them were built in the 20th and 21st centuries that it was statistically certain that at least one would survive the Healthy Age.” One did, and a “doughnut underground” was formed. Within a decade, it had built itself into a force powerful enough to overthrow the Nutritionists. “The doughnut was our symbol, our rallying cry, our weapon.” The world indeed ran on Dunkin.

Among some revolutionaries, legends had been passed down the generations about another type of doughnut, the fabled Krispy Kreme, and the countryside was scoured for evidence. This was about the time that time travel was discovered. “We sent scouts back in time and they brought forward examples of Krispy Kreme doughnuts.” Soon, there was a rift, and two factions emerged—the Dunkinians and the Krispyites—each vying for control. The result was violent civil war. “It became impossible to tell the blood from the jelly.” Those with access to the time portals went back in time to acquire more doughnuts to fortify their arsenals. “As Krispyites, we don’t have the luxury of having a manufacturing infrastructure the way the Dunkinians do.”

“So you see,” concluded the suspect, “these doughnuts are desperately needed in the future.”

Gilroy stared at him for several moments. There was no sound but dry leaves blowing softly across the parking lot, and the occasional crackle of a police radio. “Get him outta here!” Gilroy finally exclaimed.

As the suspect was being led away, he broke free and dashed across the parking lot. “Get him!” yelled Gilroy.

The suspect jumped inside the metal bowl before the police could catch him. He flipped a switch and there was a bright flash. The bowl and the suspect vanished. Everyone stopped and stared, mouths agape.

The lieutenant looked at Gilroy. “Sir?”

Gilroy looked at his watch. “I’m going out for a salad.”

Home Furnishings from the Quincy Collection

Via Boing Boing. I was wondering how to redo the bathroom. This bloodstained bathmat and matching shower curtain would be perfect when the CSI folks come over. They could go with the line of chalk outline beach towels I saw a few years ago.

Seg-what?

Now, I confess, the first thing I ask myself when I see a Hummer on the road is, "What deep-seated psychological torment must be required to want to drive one of those things?" But then at the other end of the spectrum, after seeing the prototype of a joint venture between Segway and GM, I can't help but wonder, "Who with any sense of shame would want to be seen in something like this":

Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), a compact, battery-operated two-wheeler for two that it's developing with Segway, Inc., maker of the upright electric lawn mower–like vehicle that debuted in 2002.

PUMA, which exists only in prototype, resembles a golf cart cut in half: it's a two-seater that stands upright thanks to dynamic stabilization, which uses an array of angular rate sensors and accelerometers to determine the orientation and motion of the vehicle's platform.

But then, probably the same people who don't mind being seen on a Segway. Granted, I'm all in favor of vehicles that run on alternatives to petroleum, but...come on. By the way, it also looks like a death trap, especially given that it

can travel at speeds up to 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), with a range up to 35 miles (56 kilometers) between recharges

This is just asking for trouble, knowing how everyone around this thing would be driving. I mean, one ditzoid yakking or texting while driving an SUV and game over.

On another matter, I guess I'm still bitter that the Segway has forever altered the way a lot of people think the actual word segue is spelled.

What Can Brown Do for You?

Brown fat, that is:

For more than 30 years, scientists have been intrigued by brown fat, a cell that acts like a furnace, consuming calories and generating heat.
...
papers, appearing Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicate that nearly every adult has little blobs of brown fat that can burn huge numbers of calories when activated by the cold, as when sitting in a chilly room that is between 61 and 66 degrees.
...
The fat really is brown, researchers say, because it is filled with mitochondria, the tiny energy factories of cells. Mitochondria contain iron, giving the tissue a reddish brown color.

The hope is that scientists may find safe ways to turn on peoples’ brown fat, allowing them to lose weight by burning more calories. But researchers caution that while mice lose weight if they activate brown fat, it is not clear that people would shed pounds — they might unwittingly eat more, for example. The data on global patterns of obesity are not good enough to say whether living in a cold climate makes people thinner.

My non-scientific observation, living in the frozen Northeast, is that it does not.

What's Your Sign--Really

There is no factual basis to astrology, of course, but now a story over at LiveScience shows that there is even less reason to believe our astrological forecast: our "sign" may not be what we think it is.

Zodiac signs were originally determined by which constellation the Sun was "in" on the day you were born.

Early astronomers observed the Sun traveling through the signs of the Zodiac in the course of one year, spending about a month in each. Thus, they calculated that each constellation extends 30 degrees across the ecliptic.

But this was more than 2,200 years ago.

Unbeknownst to the ancient astrologers, the Earth continually wobbles around its axis in a 25,800-year cycle. This wobble—called precession—is caused by the gravitational attraction of the Moon on Earth's equatorial bulge.

Over the past two-and-a-half millennia, this wobble has caused the intersection point between the celestial equator and the ecliptic to move west along the ecliptic by 36 degrees, or almost exactly one-tenth of the way around. This means that the signs have slipped one-tenth—or almost one whole month—of the way around the sky to the west, relative to the stars beyond.

For instance, those born between March 21 and April 19 consider themselves to be Aries. Today, the Sun is no longer within the constellation of Aries during much of that period. From March 11 to April 18, the Sun is actually in the constellation of Pisces!

So if the predetermined characteristics of your sign never seemed to apply to you, now you know why. Or, more likely, it could be because there is no reason to think that the positions of stars millions or billions of light-years away should have any bearing on your psychological make up.

Wise Madonna of the Flies

All right, the last one (or, if you're reading this blog upside-down, first up) is a cool find: Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians on David Letterman in 1989--I remember this, and thought I was in an alternate universe when I heard (somehow, there was no Internet then) that he was going to be on.

I Feel Like a Three-Legged Chinchilla

Guzzling Marshmallows

Let's see if we can spot the over-35s out there. How many of you remember this one?

The Devil's Fishbowl

Robyn Hitchcock live acoustic in 2007 with Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger on backing vocals.

It Might Be Up to Chapter 6

And, of course, last Friday, the latest installment of It Might Have Been was posted over at http://massmedea.wordpress.com/.

One Nation Underground

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, the 1951 snoozefest Unknown World takes us 2,500 miles below the Earth surface, for some reason.

The word “bore” can mean either “to pierce with a turning or twisting movement of a tool” or “to cause to feel boredom.” In the case of Unknown World, both senses are appropriate, as a team of deluded scientists spends 74 agonizing minutes in a large, motorized drill burrowing into the Earth and getting on each other’s nerves. In fact, it often seems like an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. “I’m a sick man...a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there’s something wrong with my liver.

Non-Craptacular

Lest it seem like blogs are solely a place to complain about things (see below) I should in all fairness use this space to at the same time praise one particular company (well, technically two).

Back in December 2003, I bought a new treadmill to replace one that, purchased in 1998, gave up the ghost. An exercise equipment store in the Clifton Park Mall was having a sale, so I picked up a Keys Fitness Milestone treadmill. And it's great (note present tense); my only beef was that the instruction manual was obviously automatically translated from its native language by Google and then proofread by a vision-impaired raccoon. (In fact, when I sent in the warranty card, they had a space for comments and I literally wrote "proofread your manual!") Still, that's fairly picayune stuff, and it turned out to be a good machine.

Flash forward 5+ years, and that's 5+ years of fairly rigorous use (about 45-60 minutes every day, once in a while skipping a day, admittedly). A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of a routine and an error message flashed on the control panel just as the unit shut down. Now, let me tell you, when a treadmill abruptly stops while you are running full speed, you develop a healthy respect for the laws of physics.

The instruction manual was of no help (big shock) so I went to the Keys Fitness Web site, where they have a "Contact Support" page, and described my problem--and, hey, they let me use more than 240 characters, so I could actually describe the problem fully. (Take note, Sony.) Less than a day later, I got a note back from a Robin Scott (not the Robin Scott who, under the moniker M, recorded the 1979 hit "Pop Muzik"--or at least I don't think) at a company called Maverick Service and Assembly. Turns out that Keys Fitness has filed for bankruptcy--I hope they proofread their court papers--and Maverick took over their customer support. So I was told that I needed to call them. Which I did.

I called Mr. Scott (no, not Montgomery Scott and, no, he did not talk about, pop muzik, talk about, pop muzik...) and we cracked open the motor cover and went through some things. I learned an awful lot about the inner workings of a treadmill. Although the error code I got could refer to any of a variety of related things, he seemed to think that it had something to do with a defective speed controller. This is a small, plastic tuning-fork-shaped structure that attaches to the motor. Connected to the motor is a fan, and around the base of the fan is a set of teeth that pass through the two prongs of the controller. Sensors in the controller count how many teeth pass per unit of time and that's how it calculates the speed. I never knew that. If the controller stops working, the unit gets confused and shuts down in a panic. Kind of like having any kind of contact with Sony. Anyway, he ordered me a new speed controller. (I also needed to replace the walking belt, which was getting a little frayed by this time.) He also told me to ensure that I use a spray lubricant on the walking belt at least every 30 days. I mentioned that the instruction manuel said not to, under any circumstances, use a lubricant on it, as it will dissolve the belt and the underlying board. Robin said, "I don't know why they print that. You shouldn't use WD-40 but instead a lubricant like NAPA 8300 that is safe for wood." Harrumph. I guess it was more like a destruction manual. No wonder they're bankrupt.

A few days later, everything arrived. Robin had sent detailed instructions (PDFs) of how to replace everything, which were actually not badly written, although there were a couple of steps that seem to have been written by someone in a Nyquil-induced haze or that kid from The Sixth Sense, as they apparently saw parts that weren't there. It did require a fair amount of contortion, and it would have helped to have fingers like those aliens in Close Encounters.

It was not easy to get the new controller on, and it took a few tries to get it seated properly. Once that was done, I started up the treadmill, and then it shut down with a different error message. Doh! So I called Robin back and he was flummoxed, since that error message referenced the same basic problem (who designs these things?). So we tried a few things, and I eventually ended up on a conference call with it seemed everyone else in the support department and I stumped all the experts. He said it may very well have been another defective speed controller, so he sent out a second one.

Overnight, I started mulling that over, and it didn't seem statistically likely. So the next day, I went back into the motor and took out the new controller and examined it in the light. I noticed that a small, sliver of plastic had somehow been shaved off the tip of one of the prongs, and was partially obscuring the thin groove where I suspected the sensor was located. So I pulled off this sliver, made sure the groove was clear, then reinstalled it. I started up the treadmill and success! It worked. Feeling lucky, I started my usual routine and had no problem--and, in the two weeks since, it has worked flawlessly. Knock wood.

So, a shout out to Maverick Service and Assembly and Robin Scott for exemplary customer service and to Keys Fitness for, despite all their woes--both financial and editorial--actually made a damn good treadmill that will hopefully keep--and keep me--running for 5+ more years.

Craptacular

In January 2008, for reasons passing understanding, I thought it would be a good idea to buy a new TV. I didn't really need one, the old one that I bought in 1997 worked fine, but, I figured, what the heck. A friend of mine had recently bought a widescreen LCD TV and it was faintly cool. So after poring through Consumer Reports, I took the plunge and picked up a Sony Bravia 46-inch LCD TV and it was not bad. Watching the NCAA finals last year in HDTV was pretty cool, although, since I refuse to pay more for cable than I absolutely have to (since I find 99% of all programming these days to be unwatchable), that was one of two channels I get in HD. Mostly I just used it to watch DVDs.

All a moot point, since a couple weeks ago the TV started acting up; everything on the left-hand side of the screen ghosted (including menus, so it was not some user setting that had to be adjusted), and would eventually collapse into a thin horizontal line, like the beginning of The Outer Limits. I did discover that it cleared up if I whacked the side of the TV, like Fred Flintstone or Ralph Kramden used to do. That probably wasn't a viable long-term solution, so I went to Sony's Moebius strip of a support site and, naturally, the FAQs were of no help beyond determining if the TV was plugged in or not or whather I had working retinas.

I used their e-mail support service to describe the problem (and they limit you to 240 characters--is Twitter really the best model for describing what can be complex technical support problems?) and five days later I got a response, which was only a link back to their general support site that I had already checked out and which, as it happens, is where you get the link to send them e-mail. A Moebius strip, indeed. (Funny; they had e-mailed me a customer support satisfaction survey even before they had responded to my actual issue. Needless to say, they got all 0s). However, their response also suggested calling a local service center, and they provdied some options. I looked them up and 2 out of 3 got very low user ratings, but one got good marks, so I called them--Electronics Specialist (just the one?) in Albany.

They came fairly promptly, gave a few preliminary suggestions (something about the "z-control board" or the "Heisenberg compensator" or the "warp drive" or whatever), and hauled it away to crack it open. After two weeks of tests, and swapping out boards, and consulting the I Ching, it was determined that the entire display panel is "bad" and needs to be replaced. The cost? No man can say! But, they did say, likely about as much as I paid for the TV. Bullshit. Entire books could be written about why that is not going to happen.

I guess I could put a poster on it and use it as static decoration. But in all likelhood I will probably try to sell it to someone who can fix it themselves. Maybe I'll call another ssrvice center, but actually Electronics Specialist seemed pretty on the ball. I don't have the time or the inclination to pursue this any further. Also, my new rule is: never buy anything ever unless it is absolutely necessary. And never buy anything from Sony again.

It's funny--Sony used to make decent products. The Trinitron I bought in 1997--and which has more mileage on it than my car--is still working like new (knock on wood). And it will continue to do so until the day it dies...in which case, well, books always work.

Must-See Non-TV

Around the World in 80 Telescopes

Live 24-hour webcast from astronomical observatories

Organised by ESO, the European Southern Observatory, from its HQ in Garching, Germany
Date: 3 April 2009, 09:00 UT (Universal Time/GMT) to 4 April 2009, 09:00 UT (Universal Time/GMT).

Duration: 24 hours

"Around the World in 80 Telescopes" is a unique live 24-hour webcast, following night and day around the globe to some of the most advanced observatories both on and off the planet. You can watch it right here on the 100HA website, and on the 100HA channel on Ustream.tv.

Rocket from the Crib

Hmm...and they say that sugar makes kids hyperactive*. From the Times Union:

Traces of a chemical used in rocket fuel were found in samples of powdered baby formula, and could exceed what's considered a safe dose for adults if mixed with water also contaminated with the ingredient, a government study has found.

*Actually, the sugar-causing-hyperactivity thing is a myth, not borne out by experimentation, and debunked here.

iCapture

Here's another accidentally discovered iPhone feature that I never knew existed. For some reason, I was looking through my camera roll on the iPhone (I almost never use my camera phone) and I discovered a bunch of screen captures, and I had no idea how they got there.

So I did some digging, and learned that if you hold down the Home button, then press the Power/Sleep button, the iPhone takes a screen capture and adds it to the camera roll, where it can then be transferred to a proper computer.

Note that this only works in the iPhone 2.0 software.
Pretty cool. I don't know that I will ever need this, but it's good to know that it exists.

Baby Got Bacteria

I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again: you never hear of tainted M&M's or Oreo cookies being recalled:

It could take weeks before health officials know exactly which pistachio products may be tainted with salmonella, but they've already issued a sweeping warning to avoid eating the nuts or foods containing them.
...
The FDA learned about the problem March 24, when Kraft notified the agency that routine product testing had detected salmonella in roasted pistachios.

I love this:

Kraft and the Georgia Nut Co. recalled their Back to Nature Nantucket Blend trail mix the next day and expanded the recall to include any Planters and Back to Nature products that contain pistachios Tuesday. [emphasis added]

"Back to Nature." I guess we should remember that just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it's healthy. After all, salmonella bacteria are 100% natural. Think about it won't you? Thank you.

LiveScience today has the lowdown on salmonella (not an April Fool's joke):

Salmonella are a group of different strains of bacteria that can contaminate almost any food, causing diarrhea, abdominal pain and fever. Scientists are still learning why the microbes are so problematic. One reason is that they have evolved tricks to get around the human immune system.

Infamous for clinging to cutting boards even after they've been washed, salmonella is now known also to lurk inside you, multiplying quietly, then striking only when it has built up a formidable and sickening force.

Scientists also just learned that salmonella find protection inside amoebas — which are ubiquitous on land and in water — perhaps one reason they spread so effectively.

And dig this:

Last week we learned that salmonella sent into space became more virulent in the zero-g environment.

Dang; and I thought I could save money by keeping the gravity in the house turned down. Oh, and it just gets worse:

Reptiles, including turtles, are prone to pack salmonella on their skin.

Guess I'll have to do something about all the turtles in the kitchen. And as for hanging out with Gamera, guess not anymore. So much for being the friend to children.

All kidding aside, though, and even though one doesn't want to go freaking out unnecessarily, the Centers for Disease Control has everything you need to know to prevent salmonellosis, which is actually pretty easy, and pretty common sense. Still, I guess it means no more chicken sushi.

Fool's Errands

Ever wonder how the tradition of April Fool's Day began? LiveScience did:

Though pranksters and joke-lovers in many countries now gleefully prepare to dupe friends and loved ones on April Fool's Day, no one knows exactly when or why, or even where, this tradition began.

A giddy spurt of practical joking seems to have coincided with the coming of spring since the time of the Ancient Romans and Celts, who celebrated a festival of mischief-making. The first mentions of an All Fool's Day (as it was formerly called) came in Europe in the Middle Ages.
...
The most widespread theory of the origin of April Fool's Day is the switch from the old Julian to the Gregorian calendar (now in use) in the late 16th century. Under the Julian calendar, the New Year was celebrated during the week between March 25 and April 1, but under the Gregorian calendar, it was moved to Jan. 1. Those who were not notified of the change, or stubbornly kept to the old tradition, were often mocked and had jokes played on them on or around the old New Year.

Some of us have our own April Fool's traditions. Over at WhatTheyThink, Dr. Joe and I whipped up a bunch of Onion-like stories related to the graphic communications industry. My contributions involved Facebook declaring itself a sovereign nation and Twitter being replaced by a nanoblogging site that limits posts to a single character. Dr. Joe announces a new dating service for printers as well as the fact that press manufacturers were acquired by Russian and Middle East soverign funds. Over at PrintCEO blog, I talk about how the Graphic Arts Society of Printers (GASP) adopts a new logo imbued with magic powers.

We're not the only ones. Each year, Google send out a faux announcement. This year, they "announce" some smart new tools in Gmail. I personally like the "manage relationships" feature. (A comprehensive archive of Google's past April Fool's announcements can be found--where else?--at Wikipedia.)

The Wanting Comes in Waves

Magnet magazine has an extensive Q&A with Colin Meloy of The Decemberists whose new album by the way, is quite excellent--and, as they mention in the intro to the interview, completely unlike anything you're likely to hear these days. Kind of like all their albums.

Graphic design tip for The Decemberists, though: there is a phenomenon in printing called dot gain, which means that if you set, say, the lyrics in your CD booklet in 9-pt. white type on black, the letters will plug up and will be largely unreadable. As indeed they are, especially to older listeners whose eyesight has always been pretty bad. And after all, who else but older listeners will be buying the actual CD?

It's Snow More!

Huzzah! The last patch of snow in my yard has finally melted. Unfortunately, that now means I have no excuse not to start yard clean up... It's always something, isn't it? Boy, do I miss apartment living!

It's a Cookbook!

As someone who has cookbooks, recipe cards, and FoodTV.com printouts all stained—some to the point of illegibility—with various ingredients, I have to say I like this idea:

The Demy™ is the first and only kitchen-safe digital recipe reader that will revolutionize the way you cook. The Demy™ holds your personal recipe collection in one compact, sleek device. Featuring a high-resolution color touchscreen, an uncluttered interface and many special tools to make any cook’s job easier.

$300 though? Dunno. I could probably just use my iPhone, a device I already have, and which I would probably have on hand while traveling with the Kanamits back to their planet.

Meanwhile and Far Away

Elsewhere in cyberspace, while awaiting the next Movie Mis-Treatment, if you dare to purchase any previously mistreated movie, I have set up an Amazon Associate account and if you buy any DVD via the links on the Movie Mis-Treatment site, I get a few pennies. Most titles are available for under $10 (for good reason), and they make great gifts, especially for people you don't like. And since Easter is coming--why not let Night of the Lepus hippity-hop into your Easter basket!

It Might Still Continue to Be

Chapter 5 of It Might Have Been is now up at http://massmedea.wordpress.com/.

Ole Tarantula!

Do you regularly buy fresh fruit like bananas and grapes? If so, you may have some cool new pets. From Scientific American:

Each year, there are several news reports of wandering and huntsman spiders, the main "banana spiders," showing up in grocery store bananas as well as poisonous black widows, which find their way into bunches of grapes on store shelves. Both fruits are generally sprayed with pesticides to prevent insect infestation and usually washed before shipment. Still, even with these precautions and visual inspections, some insects manage to survive.

Spiders are not insects of course, but I suspect they were speaking generically. The article includes an interview with a Cornell entomologist who explains the risks (such as they are) of produce-borne spiders. Oh, and what to do in the rare case that you are bitten by one.

I've never been especially frightened of spiders; I think they're pretty cool (although many years ago one got into my computer, built a web on the motherboard, and shorted out the power supply--it was my first web site, I guess). Most spiders are actually quite harmless. Even the fearsome tarantula is not especially dangerous--in all of medical history there has not been even a single incident of a tarantula causing a human fatality. But then no one is particularly frightened of mosquitoes, and they have been responsible for millions of deaths worldwide thanks to their ability to transmit disease (which spiders do not do), so perhaps we need to rethink our entomological risk assessment.

Wise Madonna of the Flies

This was an interesting find...Robyn Hitchcock joining The Decemberists onstage for a version of Robyn 's "Madonna of the Wasps." The video and audio are a little out of sync, but Colin Meloy sounds eerily Hitchcockian on the verse he sings. By the way, Meloy sings backup on the new Robyn Hitchcock album, and Robyn plays guitar on one track on the new Decemberists album.

In My Pocket, Nightmares Dress...

In eager anticipation of The Great One: Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 at the Paradise Club in Boston on April 13... Intimate performance of "DeChirico Street" with violinist Deni Bonet circa 1996 or 1997. You'll also want to check out Giorgio de Chirico's 1914 painting "Mystery and Melancholy of a Street."

It Might Have Continued

Chapter 4 of It Might Have Been is now up and awaiting comment.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime (Adjusted for Inflation)

Heh.

The Voice of the Turtle

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, thrill (or is it kvell) as Gamera the giant flying turtle returns to save two irritating children from brain-eating alien women, wars, and traffic accidents (huh?) in Attack of the Monsters.

The generically named Attack of the Monsters was the fifth Gamera movie and is easily the worst and silliest, which is saying something. The “villain” is Guiron, a vaguely dog-like lizard thing whose head is a giant knife. It could have been the official mascot for those old Ginsu knife commercials. (“In Japan, the face can be used as a knife.”) The dialogue is very very badly written (or at least the American dialogue is, which often sounds like the original Japanese script had been automatically translated by Google), the dubbing is pretty atrocious, and the creature effects are worse than you usually find in these “guy in rubber suit” movies. The “physics” of how the monsters move makes the Star Wars movies seem downright classically Newtonian.

Happy Pi Day

That is, 3/14, of course.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It Might Have Been--Chapter 3

It's Friday, so Chapter 3 of my novel-in-progress is up at http://massmedea.wordpress.com. As always, comments are welcome.

A new chapter every Friday.

Basketball Diaries

Well, SU actually beat UConn in the Big East Tournament last night/this morning--after 6 overtimes! I can't remember a time before that game. I think half the players had graduated during the course of the game, and the players they brought in toward the end were in high school when the game started.

I do not envy them for having to play WVU tonight. I will again try to live-tweet.

That's Entertainment

Sez Bloomberg:

Bernard Madoff, scheduled to plead guilty today to masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history, may have to fight off prison inmates who want to squeeze him for money or blame him for the Wall Street crash.

“Madoff isn’t going to be real popular,” said Larry Levine, who served 10 years in federal prisons for securities fraud and narcotics trafficking and now advises convicts on surviving time behind bars. “All the guys there will have wives or parents who are losing their homes or their jobs or who can’t send money to them anymore. Everybody’s going to be blaming Bernie.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ah, schadenfreude.

One down, how many more to go?

Time Warp

I finally found a way to solve a weird iCal calendar application syncing problem between my Mac and my iPhone. Specifically, appointments or meeting times would inevitably turn up several hours later on the iPhone than on my computer. For example, my iPhone would tell me that my 6:30 p.m. Toastmasters meeting was at 10:30 p.m. I was wondering if this was a subtle jab from my iPhone that I tend to be chronically early for appointments. I didn't know I had it running in passive-aggressive mode. Anyway, this was starting to drive me crazy, so I was poking around online and I found a fix:

Go to the iPhone's Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars, scroll all the way down to the end, and make sure that in the field marked Time Zone Support, the specified time zone "example city" matches what is set on your computer (the iPhone default is "Cupertino, CA," and for some reason mine was set to "London" even though I don't recall ever setting this when I go to London). Anyway, I made sure both my computer and iPhone were both set to "New York, NY," re-synced (re-sunc?), and now all my appointments are set for the correct time. The disappointments are a whole other problem...

Hot Lead and Cold Feet

I swear to god this is not an Onion story. From CNN:

Three years ago, Phillip Loughlin made a choice he knew would brand him as an outsider with many of his fellow hunters:

He decided to shoot "green" bullets.

"It made sense," Loughlin said of his switch to more environmentally friendly ammo, which doesn't contain lead. "I believe that we need to do a little bit to take care of the rest of the habitat and the environment -- not just what we want to shoot out of it."

Lead, a toxic metal that can lower the IQs of children, is the essential element in most ammunition on the market today.

But greener alternatives are gaining visibility -- and stirring controversy -- as some hunters, scientists, environmentalists and public health officials worry about lead ammunition's threat to the environment and public health.

Ah, so it's the lead that's the danger. I see.

Day for Night

Maybe it's me, but I get jet-lagged when we change the clocks in the spring and fall. And this year we changed them earlier than I was expecting. But was it a good idea? The most recent issue of Scientific American (and other studies and articles I have seen) suggest that DST may not have quite the benefit we think it does:

People may think that with the time shift, they are conserving electricity otherwise spent on lighting. But recent studies have cast doubt on the energy argument—some research has even found that it ultimately leads to greater power use.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with conceiving the idea of daylight saving in 1784 to conserve candles, but the U.S. did not institute it until World War I as a way to preserve resources for the war effort. The first comprehensive study of its effectiveness occurred during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when the U.S. Department of Transportation found that daylight saving trimmed national electricity usage by roughly 1 percent compared with standard time.

Scant research had been done since, during which time U.S. electricity usage patterns have changed as air conditioning and household electronics have become more pervasive, observes economist Matthew Kotchen of the University of California, Santa Barbara. But lately, changes to daylight saving policies on state and federal levels have presented investigators new chances to explore the before-and-after impacts of the clock shift.

In 2006 Indiana instituted daylight saving statewide for the first time. (Before then, daylight time confusingly was in effect in just a handful of Indiana’s counties.) Examining electricity usage and billing since the statewide change, Kotchen and his colleague Laura Grant unexpectedly found that daylight time led to a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million. Although daylight time reduces demand for household lighting, the researchers suggest that it increased demand for cooling on summer evenings and heating in early spring and late fall mornings....

Investigators got another opportunity in 2007, when daylight time nationwide began three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and ended one week later in the fall. California Energy Commission resource economist Adrienne Kandel and her colleagues discovered that extending daylight time had little to no effect on energy use in the state. The observed drop in energy use of 0.2 percent fell within the statistical margin of error of 1.5 percent.

Interestingly, I am apparently not alone in experiencing adverse effects of DST (even if mine are purely imaginary):

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and their colleagues looked at myocardial infarction rates in Sweden since 1987 and found that the number of heart attacks rose about 5 percent during the first week of daylight saving time (called summer time in Europe). In the October 30, 2008, New England Journal of Medicine, they suggest that this rise may result from the disruption of sleep patterns and biological rhythms.

But then:

the clock shift could help prevent traffic accidents by enabling more people to drive home in sunlight.

Yeah, but those people are usually driving while on cellphones, making them more susceptible to crashes, while at the same time causing heart attacks in those of us who are not on cellphones and have to deal with them. So it's pretty much Carnage-A-Go-Go either way.

Even Less Splendid

A comment on the Scientific American blog post I cited below raised an interesting point about how artificial sweeteners may actually contribute to weight gain. I at first threw the BS flag, but the more I thought about it there more it seemed that there might be something to it...so I did a little digging and found that there are studies that suggest that the use of sugar substitutes can backfire:

Why would a sugar substitute backfire? Swithers and Davidson wrote that sweet foods provide a “salient orosensory stimulus” that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isn't followed by lots of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would.

The good news, Swithers says, is that people can still count calories to regulate intake and body weight. However, she sympathizes with the dieter's lament that counting calories requires more conscious effort than consuming low-calorie foods.

Swithers adds that based on the lab's hypothesis, other artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame K, which also taste sweet but do not predict the delivery of calories, could have similar effects. Finally, although the results are consistent with the idea that humans would show similar effects, human study is required for further demonstration.

I know there is a great deal of political opposition to people actually studying things, but this may be worthy of a deeper look.

Not So Splendid

Hmm..Had not thought about this...

People like sucralose – the artificial sweetener marketed as Splenda – because the human body can’t break it down and use it. That means the substance has almost no calories and makes it a popular ingredient in everything from cookies to diet sodas. Unfortunately, it turns out that modern wastewater treatment methods don’t break down Splenda either.

Obviously, a trifle bit more study might be warranted. I do rather prefer Splenda to all the other artifical sweeteners out there...

It Might Have Been

One of the extracurricular projects that has occupied much of my free time for the past year or so has been the writing of a "real" novel (i.e., not an exercise in unfettered silliness like Virus!, which I still like and find very funny, but, well, it is pretty silly and, hey, is now available for the Kindle or the iPhone Kindle app). It has gone by various titles (including Mass Medea and Irrational Exuberance), but for the nonce has become It Might Have Been. It is nearly "done" (only a few more chapters to go), and I am generally happy with most of it--to the extent that I can ever be completely happy with anything that I write, and the tweaking of older chapters is pretty constant (who was it who said that writing is never finished, just abandoned?).

The novel is basically the story of the staff of a popular computer magazine during the height of the dot-com boom years (1999-2000). It's largely a social satire of those years (my year of reading the collected works of Charles Dickens helped immensely in developing a narrative voice), but at the same time is a David vs. Goliath story of the publishing industry (easily translatable to any other industry you care to name). No, it's not a memoir of my Digital Imaging/Micro Publishing News years--1997-2001--by any stretch of the imagination; in fact, it's pretty much just a stretch of the imagination).

Anyway, one of the things I have taken away from various writing workshops I have attended in the past few years is that one strategy that successful authors have started using is "workshopping" books-in-progress online, and that by driving substantial site traffic and gleaning comments, authors can demonstrate to potential agents/publishers that there is actually a market for what they are writing. So, when in Rome...

Ergo, I have set up another blog over at http://massmedea.wordpress.com* (yes, I had not come up with the new title until after I had set up my user account). So, please, go visit, leave a comment, pass the link along, etc. Let's get those numbers up! Let's make this Web 2.0 thing work.

I will be posting a new chapter every Friday. Chapters 1 and 2 (a special "two-hour world premiere") are up already.


* There are three reasons I like WordPress vs. Blogger or Typepad. The first is that it makes it pretty easy to track traffic and other site stats. The second is that WordPress lets me paste text from MS Word and preserve formatting like italics and bold--something Blogger does not do (that I am aware of)--which keeps me from having to go through a post again and re-add formatting, which is a pain in the tuchis. The third reason--there are three reasons I like WordPress (nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!)--is that WordPress also allows me to add my own header illustration.

Incommunicado--Sort Of

It's funny how dependent we become on these things.

On Saturday afternoon, the hamsters that power my Web host's servers finally collapsed with exhaustion, and I discovered Saturday afternoon that I was unable to retrieve e-mail from my richtextandgraphics.com account. Nor was my Web site up, and I could not access my site's control panel application. It was Saturday afternoon, so no big deal, and I figured it was something temporary and that it would be back before long.

24 hours later, it was still out, so I dropped them a note from my Roadrunner account, and they told me everything was down and they were working "around the clock" to get everything restored. I pestered them again Monday morning, so now it was starting to get kind of urgent. Although my Web site is back up, e-mail and control panel are still down. The specific time when things will be restored has now become a moving target, and as I write this on Tuesday morning, it's still down, which has really become rather intolerable. It's like having one's phone service out--worse, actually.

I will pester them one more time and give them "24 hours" (like a Star Trek villain--"You have 24 hours to beam down the Enterprise crew or your ship will be destroyed! Bwa-ha-ha!") but after that I will be forced to move my domain to a new host (the folks who host my Movie Mis-Treatments site seem more on the ball than my RTG site hosts).

The point is that if anyone reading this has been trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with me via e-mail, I am not being antisocial (well, at least not via e-mail; Instant Messaging is another story...). If it's urgent, try my alternate address.

iKindle

I read a review this morning of the Amazon Kindle app for the Apple iPhone. Basically, the application lets you buy, download, and read Kindle books on the iPhone. So if you don't want to shell out $359 for the Kindle itself, you can still read Kindle-formatted e-books.

What that means is that, since the iPhone does not use the E Ink e-paper display, you don't get the e-paper experience. But that's okay, because a) the iPhone Kindle app is free and b) the iPhone display is actually pretty readable as it is. So I downloaded the app and bought an e-book (Charles Dickens' Sketches by Boz, which I don't have in print) and it's actually not a bad experience. I have mixed feelings about e-books (see below), but if one were to start reading e-books, the Kindle app might very well be the way to go. It's not perfect, but of all the e-book applications I have seen over the years, it's perhaps one of the best.

The Kindle app uses the same font as the proper Kindle. You can adjust the size of the type to one of five presets, and the text is dynamically reflowed, although the justification sometimes causes weird gaps between words. If the Kindle format ever incorporates a sophisticated H&J feature, this will look a lot better, but I don't know that that is even possible. They could also make the text ragged right, which might end up looking better, but I guess they really want to ape the typographic conventions of a printed book. (I can't speak to how the Kindle app handles images, but the review I linked to earlier says it handles most images fairly well.)

A page fills the iPhone screen, and tapping the screen once brings up the limited menu with which you can add a bookmark, access the ToC and all your bookmarks, change the type size, and scroll through the book. The page is turned by dragging your finger across the touch screen, and you can go forward or backward. Pages turn pretty quickly; once in a while it takes a couple seconds, but usually only when quickly flipping pages.

There are some iPhone-centric features I wish the Kindle app supported, such as squeezing the screen to resize the page, turning the display 90 degrees, etc., but those are fairly small points. The display is very crisp and while I have not read anything at great length on an E Ink display, this app seems remarkably comparable. (I have read many many things on the iPhone screen and have no problem with the display.) Interestingly, the iPhone display is color, while the Kindle itself is black-and-white only. While that is likely to change probably a few years hence, it does make a compelling case for bypassing the Kindle hardware reader and going straight to the iPhone.

Buying books is pretty easy; you buy them from Amazon either by computer or via Safari on the iPhone, although Amazon's idea of "1-click checkout" is a bit of a misnomer, since it takes about as many clicks as buying anything from any e-commerce site. Happily, you can register the Kindle app with a preexisting Amazon account, so you don't need to set up anything new. Kindle titles range in price from $0.99 up to $9.99 (or more), with $9.99 the going rate for new releases--not bad when you consider that most new hardcovers go for $25.99 and up. (Sketches by Boz was $1.99, even though it is in the public domain, but I guess someone had to take the trouble to convert it. But then while many classics are in the public domain, things like specific translations, annotations, introductions, and other supplementary materials are not.) You can also download free sample chapters of e-books before you commit to anything.

Once a Kindle book is purchased, it is automatically downloaded to the iPhone the next time the Kindle app is launched. Sketches by Boz downloaded in less than 15 seconds over my WiFi network. I wonder, though, if I ever do get a proper Kindle, will I be able to transfer books I have bought for the iPhone app to it? It would not surprise me if they made me buy it again. Not that I will, of course.

I will still always prefer printed books; they will always work, they don't need batteries, and they don't have annoying DRM technologies. I can drop a printed book (because I am a klutz) and it will still be readable. But the Kindle iPhone app is a good way to experience e-books. I can see using it when I travel and want to read books on planes, trains, buses, etc., but don't necessarily want to lug a printed book around. (I bought the new novel Drood in Florida to read on the flight home, and it's an 800-page hardcover. Lugging it around airports is good for building upper body strength, though.)

Here's what I would love, but you know it will never happen: buying a "book" will not only give me the print edition--so I can read it at leisure at home--but also the electronic version (at no extra cost), so I can take it with me elsewhere. That is staggeringly unlikely, just as a print/audio book "bundle" will never happen.

I do have certain reservations about buying e-books in general, and they're the same ones I have about buying iTunes vs. actual CDs: digital data can be far too ephemeral. Some years ago, I had a Handspring Visor PDA (it ran the Palm OS) and, since I have always been interested in e-book technologies, I had purchased several e-books designed to be read on it. When the Visor died a couple years later, my e-books were gone. Are Kindle books likely to suffer from the same problem? After all, hardware changes, I will likely get a new iPhone (or something) in a few years, and file formats change, god knows. Will the Sketches by Boz e-book I bought today still be readable on anything I am likely to own (or anything at all anywhere) in five years? 10 years?

Say what you will about print, it endures. That's why Sketches by Boz can still be read 173 years after it was written.

Laying Cable

Via The Big Picture. I have always been glad that I don't get CNBC. However, I do wish I got Comedy Central, to' only for one show (maybe two). Jon Stewart's bit on the incompetence of CNBC's financial reporting is quite funny.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

TOR-CHA!

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, the latest movie to be abused is the 1959 giant lobster flick Teenagers from Outer Space. A character who vaguely looks like alt-rock icon Morrissey
is my lame excuse for interjecting a bunch of Smiths' lyrics. (Morrissey actually has a new album that just came out, and it's not bad...)

“David Love” is the star of Teenagers from Outer Space. Well, he’s on screen most of the time. Whether that means he’s the “star” is open to debate. It also stars Harvey B. Dunn, which is what they used to announce at the end of stage productions of Harvey. It also co-stars Tom Lockyear. A “lockyear” is an official form of measurement defined as “the length of time it takes to break into a really high-quality lock.” Actually Tom Lockyear is a pseudonym for the director, Tom Graeff. The production associate was C.R. Kaltenthaler (not H.R. Pufnstuff) which, according to the Internet Movie Database, was the real name of star David Love. And, of course, written, produced, and directed by Tom Graeff (aka Tom Lockyear). So basically there were at most five people involved in making this movie. Good graeff...

Hearst so Good

Six months after publishing their Esquire magazine E Ink cover (which is still blinking away in the basement), Hearst is apparently developing their own e-paper-based reader. Says Gizmodo:

While Hearst has been silent regarding exact product specifications, we do know that the device will feature a 8.5x11ish screen to appease publishers used to large page layouts, and Hearst will allow the device's "underlying technology" to be adopted by other publishers (we're assuming that means without licensing fees).

According to Fortune, we're likely to see the device this year. And with Sony giving up their early lead in the e-reader world, it's none too soon that the Kindle will get some friendly marketplace competition—even if Hearst isn't openly chasing after the book market.

In some ways, a magazine-based e-reader makes sense; with your subscription, you get the reader and issues are electronically beamed to it. Mind you, I don't know that that is what Hearst is planning, but if I were creating an e-reader for magazines, it's what I would do.
I would also strive for color, although E Ink's e-paper technology isn't there yet (if Hearst is going with an E Ink display).

Still, I remain dubious of dedicated e-readers. I think they will only take off when they are incorporated into devices that do other things. Why are the iPhone and the BlackBerry so popular? Because they are single devices that can do a variety of different things. Merge a Kindle with an iPhone with an E Ink display and you're more than half the way there.

MacGyver was a Mollusk

From the L.A. Times:

The guest of honor in the aquarium's Kids' Corner octopus tank had swum to the top of the enclosure and disassembled the recycling system's valve, flooding the place with some 200 gallons of seawater.

"It had grabbed the tube that pulls out the water and caused it to spray outside the tank," said aquarium education specialist Nick Fash. Judging by the size of the flood, Fash estimated that the water flowed for about 10 hours before the first staff member, Aaron Kind, showed up for work.
...
The tiny octopus, which is about the size of a human forearm when its appendages are extended, floated lazily in the water that remained in its tank.

It watched intently through glass walls and portholes as workers struggled to dry the place out in time for the day's first busload of schoolchildren to arrive on a 9:30 a.m. field trip.
...
The incident was reminiscent of a 1994 incident at San Pedro's Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in which an octopus named Octavia pulled a plastic pipe loose.

That giant Pacific octopus died when all of the water in her tank drained out.

Since octopuses are considered by many to be the most intelligent invertebrate -- and to have good memories -- Fash said he jury-rigged his octopus tank piping with clamps and tape in hopes of thwarting any further mischief by its occupant. "She would need tools," he said of his octopus, which until now had no name.

"Some people are suggesting we call her 'Flo,' " he said.

Fare Weather

I had never heard of RyanAir before last Friday, when I came across the news story that they had planned to charge passengers to use the rest room. The clever folks on the Internet were quick at coming up with the card below, suggesting some other ideas for penny-pinching airlines the world over (via Boing Boing).
All I can say is: don't give them any ideas!

Monster Mashup

Maybe it's because I never really cared for Jane Austen, but I find this rather funny. From the New York Times:

Quirk Books announced the publication of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)

But wait, there's more:

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures was developing a project called “Pride and Predator,” in which the giant alien from the 1987 cult classic pays a call on the Bennet family.
...
To some scholars, however, it’s a short leap from verbal sparring to real swordplay. “It makes sense to give Lizzie a grander scope for her action,” said Deidre Lynch, an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto and editor of “Janeites,” a collection of scholarly essays about Austen devotees. “It goes with the muddy petticoats and the rambling across the countryside in this unladylike way. The next step is ninja training.”

And there is no sign that it will stop there:

Next year, Ballantine Books will publish Michael Thomas Ford’s novel “Jane Bites Back,” in which Austen turns into a vampire, fakes her own death and lives quietly as a bookstore owner before finally driving a stake through the heart of everyone who has been making money off her for the last two centuries.

Then again, I did just start reading Drood, a fictional account of the "events" that led up to the writing of his last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. From the flap copy:

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.

Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?

Although I'm only 50 pages into it, it's not bad, being narrated by the character of Dickens' friend and author in his own right, Wilkie Collins, so it has that Victorian tone to it. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully no zombies will show up.

Tunes for Our Times

Times change, but not very much.

Beach Reading

The NY Times Book Review arrived in my inbox moments ago and the lead review, by Carl Hiaasen, couldn't be more timely. As I head down to Miami Beach for Graphics of the Americas on Sunday, I think I've found my airplane reading:

FOOL’S PARADISE
Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach
By Steven Gaines

Most people don’t go there for intellectual enrichment; they go for the sex, dope and parties. [Not printing presses? How odd. --RR]

That wasn’t exactly the original idea. Back when the mangroves were razed and the sand was dredged from the ocean bottom — yes, even the beach is fake — the developer Carl Fisher envisioned the place as a respectable winter getaway for well-to-do Northerners, an American Riviera.

As it turned out, gangsters also prefer sunny climates over snow. By 1928, Al Capone and other thugs had discovered Miami Beach, and organized crime was taking over the town.

The GoA Gala is being held at the Fontainbleu Hotel, which apparently has a bit of a checkered history (I confess I know very little about Miami Beach other than what I remember from The Godfather Part II):

Gaines sees symptoms of social dysfunction in architecture, like the garishly emblematic Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue. It was the product of a tumultuous collaboration between an obstinant developer named Ben Novack and the architect Morris Lapidus. The two couldn’t stand each other, and went to their respective deathbeds claiming sole credit for the design of the massive, weirdly curved structure, which was built in less than a year.

Maligned by critics, the Fontainebleau instantly became a lively hangout for card sharks, mobsters and movie idols.

And what do you know: I also got a 40% off coupon from Borders today, too. What are the odds they'll actually have it?

Kindling

Just spent a good four hours formatting my old (mis)adventure in self-publishing—Virus!—for publication on the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. (It was really just an experiment in learning how to format books for the Kindle. And if I somehow sell a few, great.)

I was finally successful, and it will be available for sale--for all (or both, if even that many) of you Kindle owners out there—in 12 hours or so for the extortionate price of $8.99. I figure at that price point--which is one I actually have control over--no one is likely to question my sincerity.

Anyway, a couple of observations about the process:

• Amazon strongly encourages that e-book titles be in HTML format, as it claims that is the only format that will convert reliably, even though it says it supports .pdf, .doc, .mobi, and a smattering of others.

• I had produced the book in Adobe InDesign and the Kindle conversion utility doesn't handle native InDesign files (big surprise).

• Getting decent HTML out of InDesign is not easy, especially if (like me) you had a bunch of different document threads and a few illustrations here and there. The Exoport to Dreamweaver command is pretty hit or miss. Perhaps I just need to spend some time playing with it, but I've rarely had luck with it.
  

• What some of the Amazon user forums recommended was copy the text in InDesign and paste into Word, and then you can save Word files out to HTML. You can pretty much imagine how that works out.
  

• I tried that approach, and required a great deal of tweaking styles to get everything looking decent, even by Word's low standards.

• I saved the Word file out to HTML, but Amazon's conversion utility kept choking on it. I toyed around with a few things but to no avail.

• Finally, I just uploaded the Word file itself to the conversion utility and it went through without a hitch. I was able to preview it to get an approximation of how it will look on a Kindle and it didn't look bad. One of the feratufres of the Kindle is the ability to adjust the size of the type, which means that text will inevitably reflow, which I guess is why they don't like PDFs, which are by their very nature a static page format.
  

• The process is not appreciably different from way back in 2000 when I used to experiment with converting files to be read on Palm-based e-book readers.

After doing all this, I just got in the mail the latest Design Tools Monthly newsletter which mentioned some third-party applications for getting HTML out of PDF files. I shall have to experiment further. Of course, I don't actually have a Kindle, but then my birthday is only six months away....

A-Twitter

Because I apparently don't have enough time toilets in my life, I am now on Twitter, for no adequately explored reason. I will experiment with livetweeting from today's SU-Georgetown game. I will either end up hooked on Twitter or I will never want to have anything more to do with it again ever. The world hangs in the balance. Follow along if you dare at http://twitter.com/rromano.

Bride of the Gorilla

Over at Movie Mis-Treatments, the latest is the 1951 Raymond Burr/Lon Chaney "thriller" Bride of the Gorilla.

I guess the first question would be: where is the bride of the gorilla registered? Banana Republic, of course.

Lunacy

The last couple of nights have featured a pretty dramatic full moon, and perhaps not entirely coincientally, Scientific American has a story up about an old chestnut, the so-called "lunar lunacy effect," the belief that the full moon has some kind of effect--usually a bad one--on human behavior.

One survey revealed that 45 percent of college students believe moonstruck humans are prone to unusual behaviors, and other surveys suggest that mental health professionals may be still more likely than laypeople to hold this conviction. In 2007 several police departments in the U.K. even added officers on full-moon nights in an effort to cope with presumed higher crime rates.

There have been serious attempts to study whether such a phenomenon exists, and actual evidence in support of the effect has not been forthcoming:

Florida International University psychologist James Rotton, Colorado State University astronomer Roger Culver and University of Saskatchewan psychologist Ivan W. Kelly have searched far and wide for any consistent behavioral effects of the full moon. In all cases, they have come up empty-handed. By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study—a statistical procedure called meta-analysis—they have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls. In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled “Much Ado about the Full Moon,” which appeared in one of psychology’s premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary.

I guess the first question that always struck me when the lunar lunacy theory came up is, what would be the mechanism for it? That is, how can the moon affect behavior? Apparently, there have been attempts to ascribe the phenomenon to tidal forces, since the human body is mostly composed of water, but

First, the gravitational effects of the moon are far too minuscule to generate any meaningful effects on brain activity, let alone behavior. As the late astronomer George Abell of the University of California, Los Angeles, noted, a mosquito sitting on our arm exerts a more powerful gravitational pull on us than the moon does. Yet to the best of our knowledge, there have been no reports of a “mosquito lunacy effect.” Second, the moon’s gravitational force affects only open bodies of water, such as oceans and lakes, but not contained sources of water, such as the human brain. Third, the gravitational effect of the moon is just as potent during new moons—when the moon is invisible to us—as it is during full moons.

I read some time ago (can't remember where) that this theory may have originated in the very real phenemenon that, back before there were streetlights, on nights when the moon was full you had more people out at night, and more opportunities for mischief. The SciAm article also suggests one other source of the myth:

before the advent of outdoor lighting in modern times, the bright light of the full moon deprived people who were living outside—including many who had severe mental disorders—of sleep. Because sleep deprivation often triggers erratic behavior in people with certain psychological conditions, such as bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), the full moon may have been linked to a heightened rate of bizarre behaviors in long-bygone eras.

I don't know; that does seem like a bit of a reach. Anyway, I have to go turn into a werewolf now...

The One and Only

Once again, The Onion tells it like it is. This is the funniest, yet probaby truest, technology story I have seen in a while.

Warning! Many many bad words; probably not work safe, particularly if you work for Sony.

No Fly Zones

Speaking of arcane, useless knowledge, Friday night I was out with some friends and somehow the topic came up: "to keep flies away, hang clear plastic bags filled with water." Trying to think of some logical reason why this would work, I made a mental note to look into it. It's apparently a popular belief in Florida (so you know logic will have nothing to do with it), as well as in the Caribbean.

What's the verdict? According to some anecdotal reports, it works. According to others, well, not so much. According to this article in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star:

No one is sure where the idea came from, and researchers contend there's no scientific evidence to show that the bags do any good.
...
Some speculate that the sunlight reflecting through the water somehow scares or disorients flies. But Phil Kaufman, a University of Florida professor of veterinary entomology, said there is no scientific research to back up those claims.

"It's a pretty safe bet it doesn't work," he said.

On the other hand, the bags could very well worsen the fly problem, as was found in one experiment whose researcher I do not envy:

[A] North Carolina State University researcher spent 13 weeks looking at the effects of water bags on flies at an egg-packing plant. Mike Stringham, also a veterinary entomologist, meticulously counted droppings left by flies on white "spot cards."

The results were conclusive: The water bags attracted more flies.

"In the control room versus bags, the bags were consistently higher every time," he said.

The great site HowStuffWorks has a take on this, suggesting how the water bag idea might work:

The insect's head mostly consists of a pair of large complex eyes, each of which is composed of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. These eyes can't move or focus on objects like human eyes, but they provide the fly with a mosaic view of the world around them. Each simple eye provides one small piece of the puzzle, much like the way a screen's pixel delivers one detail of the larger picture.

A housefly bases its sense of direction on the direction sunlight comes from. Some entomologists believe that when these complex, sensitive eyes experience refracted light, the insect becomes confused and flies away.

While some supporters claim water bags keep all kinds of flying insects away, most report success with complex-eyed insects, like houseflies.

Nice theory, but they are quick to stress that so-called evidence in favor of the water bags is more than likely a case of the "placebo effect":

In medical terms, this is when people who think they're being treated for a condition feel better, even if that treatment treats nothing at all. The same effect could occur for people who think they are treating a pest problem.

That is, some other factor might be keeping the flies away, and they correlate the lack of flies with the presence of the water bags, which may have nothing to do with it.

So for now, all we have to go on in support of this idea is anecdotal "evidence," which is rarely conclusive. (This is after all the most pressing issue in the world today, so we need this resolved ASAP.) This phenomenon was also cited on Boing Boing earlier this year, and the range of reader comments is indicative of the problem with anecdotal evidence: a few say it works, most say it doesn't. I'll stick with the scientists on this one until compelling evidence that it works is found--but then only if I move into the Amityville Horror house, since flies are the least of my problems.

"Exit, Pursued by a Bear"

That was one of Shakespeare's most famous stage directions, from The Winter's Tale (III.iii). It is unknown whether on stage they used a real bear or someone dressed as a bear; bear-baiting was a popular entertainment at the time, so they had them on hand.

I mention this because--although I am a week late--I recently came across something I did not know about Groundhog Day--in, of all places, a biography of Shakespeare: something very much like Groundhog Day dates back to the Middle Ages.

February 2 is not only the point halfway betwen the winter solstice and the spring equinox, but is also the traditional date for the Christian celebration of Candlemas, or the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. In the Middle Ages, there arose the belief that on this day hibernating animals such as badgers and bears (it varied by country and indigenous hibernating mammal) woke up tentatively to appear on this day. If the day was sunny and the critter saw its shadow, six more weeks of winter remained. If instead the day was cloudy, the weather would turn mild, leading to an early spring. In England there are various references to the "Candlemas bear" and the rhyme "When the wind’s in the east on Candlemas Day/There it will stick till the second of May."

In Germany, the main meterological mammal was the badger and German immigrants to the United States carried the legend with them. In Pennsylvania, where many German settlers ended up, they used an indigenous groundhog (Marmota monax, or woodchuck) instead. Six of one, half dozen of another, really.

Punxsutawney, PA, has been ground zero for Groundhog Day since 1887. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, an examination of the weather and mammal-prediction records have put so-called Punxsutawney Phil's accuracy rate at less than 40%, which I would estimate as being still better than any Capital Region meteorologist. Imagine if the groundhog had Doppler radar. By the way, whether a groundhog does or does not emerge from its burrow is believed to be related to the amount of fat it was able to store before going into hibernation, although my guess is that Phil gets a wake-up call.

I should also point out that there is no Medieval tradition that the feast of Candlemas involved waking up to the same day over and over.

Set Me Free

You've heard of Wikinomics and Freakonomics. Now, I guess the latest is Kinkonomics.

Are you asking youself, "where have all the good times gone?" Are you on a low budget? Well, when work is over, give the people what they want--a little bit of abuse, all day and all of the night. According to those dedicated followers of fashion over at CNBC:

One of the kinkier trends to emerge from this recession is that many professional women are turning to dominatrix work to supplement their incomes...

Quan interviews some of the women who've turned to fetish work, including "Linda," who works as a editor by day and a dominatrix at night.

And "Jessica," who works as a web-site designer three days a week, and sees a few fetish clients a week.

Before you go passing judgment, check it out: You can make anywhere from $80 to $1,000 an hour in the dungeon.

Just as long as you're not like everybody else.

Stomach Abuse

Speaking of mistreatments, Men's Health magazine has its 20 Worst (i.e., unhealthiest) Foods
in America 2009. I don't claim to have the healthiest diet in the world, but just reading these descriptions is enough to make me never want eat anything again ever. Some examples:

2. Worst Pasta of 2009

Romano’s Macaroni Grill Spaghetti and Meatballs with Meat Sauce
2,430 calories
128 g fat
207 g carbs
5,290 mg sodium

With three times your recommended daily intake of saturated fat and two days’ worth of salt

Granted, I love a good pasta with meat sauce, but that's just ridiculous! Shame about the name.

8. Worst Burger of 2009

Chili’s Smokehouse Bacon Triple-The-Cheese Big Mouth Burger with Jalapeno Ranch Dressing
2,040 calories
150 g fat (53 g saturated)
110 g protein
4,900 mg sodium

You know this burger's in trouble when it takes more than 20 syllables just to identify it. If you think the name’s a mouthful, just wait until the burger hits the table. You’ll be face to face with two-and-a-half day’s worth of fat—a full third of which is saturated. To do that much damage with roasted sirloin, you’d have to eat about eight 6-ounce steaks. It’s nearly three days’ worth of saturated fat.

By the way, you can order a defibrillator on the side.

3. Worst Starter of 2009

Uno Chicago Grill Pizza Skins (full order)
2,400 calories
155 g fat (50 g saturated)
3,600 mg sodium

This appetizer is like eating a Large Domino’s Hand-Tossed Sausage Pizza! Would you ever think of saying to a waiter: “Why don’t you start us off with a large meat pizza?” If you’re ordering for a party of more than 5 it might be OK, but for smaller groups, it's tilting toward gluttony gone wild.

And let's not forget...

1. The Worst Food in America of 2009

Baskin Robbins Large Chocolate Oreo Shake
2,600 calories
135 g fat (59 g saturated fat, 2.5 g trans fats)
263 g sugars
1,700 mg sodium

We didn't think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins' 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you'll find in most chemist labs.

Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It's soiled with more than a day's worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.

Remember, as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development once said, "You want your belt to buckle, not your chair."

Off to See the Zard

Wow, has it been two weeks since I last posted? Tempus fugit.

Anyway, over at Movie Mis-Treatments, there is a new post--the 1974 Sean Connery shamefest Zardoz.

After director John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance became a smash hit, he was given carte blanche (if not carte budget—$1 million, pretty paltry even by 1974 standards) to make whatever project he wanted. A recipe for over-the-top self-indulgence? You betcha. Written, directed, and produced by Boorman, Zardoz is an imagining of what human society has become by the year 2293. And it ain’t pretty. Or even coherent.

It’s a triumph of visual style often at the expense of narrative coherence. Heck, Zardoz makes the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey seem as clear-cut and understandable as a Scooby-Doo episode. My guess is the narcotics budget for Zardoz far exceeded the visual effects budget.

It stars Sean Connery, who had just quit the James Bond series and was apparently so hard-up for work that he agreed to don an upsettingly skimpy red sarong and cavort around the Irish countryside groping women who bear more than a passing resemblance to Eric Idle.

And probably the last thing any human should ever have to see is Sean Connery in a wedding dress. From Russia with Love, indeed.