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...