Over at Miranda's, some Smog discussion has broken out, courtesty of that old standard, the "what's the saddest song you know" discussion. Smog has a place at the table in that discussion, as Bill Callahan does songs about inadequacy and the grinding metal sounds of relationships going off the rails better than just about anyone. But, as Miranda says, when he's not writing about how every girl he ever loved has wanted to be hit, his songs are little hymns. (I confess that I don't find "White Ribbon" as uplifting as she does, although it's a beautiful song; I'm a simple soul.) Anyway, here's my vote for the most uplifting Smog song other than "Prince Alone in the Studio": "River Guard". We are constantly on trial / It's a way to be free.
One-time WWF wrestler Nikolai Volkov is running for the Maryland House of Delegates. I'd say people should vote for him, but I suspect that once in office he would turn heel.
The latest version of Jumpcut, my open source clipboard enhancer for OS X, has just been released. It provides clipboard buffering – that is, it remembers the last umpteen text-based things that you've cut-and-pasted. There are several other applications that do the same thing for Macs, but I think Jumpcut does it pretty well. If you're running OS X 10.3.9 or later, and you're not wedded to CopyPaste X, Quicksilver's clipboard feature, PTHPasteboard, or one of the other guys out there, try it out. The price can't be beat.
I saw a fun double feature last night (projected from DVD, alas, which always looks awful, but I suppose it helps people make these things on the cheap). The Call of Cthulhu is an homage to period Lovecraft; they did a great job with the props and costumes. There was at least one very recognizable shot of Providence, RI. I even enjoyed the fonts on the title cards. It's hard to make a movie shot on digital look like a silent; the makeup, the lighting, and the grain of the "film" all wrong. Even if you duplicated somehow duplicated the undercranked herky-jerky motion, actors today don't have the same balletic physical expression (and broad-gestured overacting) that most of the silents, particularly the serials that are third-cousins to Lovecraft's florid pulp, had. But a lovely effort nonetheless, and the film did a great job of capturing the fever-dream mentality of Lovecraft, along with hints at his snobbishness, racism, and sheer narrative incoherence. Two IA IAs up, even if they didn't nail the weird geometries of sunken Ryleh. Perhaps those can't be captured on film.
The other was Trapped by the Mormons, an entirely different affair. It's a remake of a 1922 exploitation film ("a silent British film which is to Mormonism as 'Reefer Madness' is to marijuana usage", says the IMDB review), with the campiness cranked up to 11. The lead actress, Emily Riehl-Bedford, is lovely in a period and rabbity sort of way (she reminded me faintly of Illeana Douglas), and while the movie drags in the middle, the ludicrous Mormonozombic fight scene at the end is worth the price of admission and then some. I can only assume that some of the more laughable title cards came from ("He's a... He's a... A MORMON!") came from the 1922 version. The cast and crew, a bunch of members of a DC theatrical troupe, Cherry Red, which puts on cheese and sleaze shows such as Poona the Fuckdog -- the existance of which I thank Skot for introducing me to -- has no real interest in mimicking a genuine silent, which helps account for some of the amateur porn feel of the staging. (A great deal of it feels like it was shot in someone's bedroom, although I'm sure it was on a stage somewhere in DC.) The editing is also, charitably, better than I can do. Good fun regardless, and the best movie I've ever seen in which two Mormons kill someone by gnawing through their jugular vein.
Along with such twenty-first century niceties as "always remember to try Control-F5 to flush the cache" and "if all else fails, try rebooting your router", I need to add "make sure the file handling code supports spaces in file names". It would have been nice if I had figured that out yesterday.
On the heels of my mention of Albert Pujols, universally beloved baseball white-hat, Deadspin reports
that Jason Grimsley, the Diamondbacks pitcher heretofore largely known for once crawling through a drop ceiling to steal Albert Belle's illegally corked bat from the umpires' room after it had been confiscated, has coughed up some names in an investigation of human growth hormone use. One of them is Pujols' long-term strength trainer, dating back to his junior college days. Innocent until proven guilty, of course, but I owe David
an apology for insisting that everyone said that Pujols was squeaky clean (except on the age question).
At work, I've helped a few people set up new MacBooks in the last few weeks, and seeing a virgin install of Tiger is a reminder of just how many tiny apps I need to make a Mac feel heimisch . This isn't even counting "real" applications, like Camino or TextMate. This is just the little guys, the interface hacks.
OS X has replicated the great vi/emacs schism with its powerhouse duo of shortcut applications, Quicksilver and LaunchBar (and Butler , the forgotten RC Cola of the app-launching wars). I was a relatively late convert from LaunchBar to Quicksilver, which I suppose is the emacs of the pair in that there's a dazzling amount of crap you can make it do, most of which I am too scatterbrained to remember and almost all of which I am too lazy to set up. (Also, if you follow the tutorials lovingly posted at 43folders , I believe Quicksilver will check your email, massage your iCal, and give you a happy ending.) I use Texpander almost entirely for having a few signatures I can alternate between for email (the main one is triggered by the MediaWiki-inspired "~~~~", which I can remember); I use Gmail Notifier , MenuCalendarClock , and the messaging system Growl . I religiously install CalcService . Until the developer seemingly abandoned it, I use a little note-taking app called Sidenote . I myself wrote an application , Jumpcut , which provides clipboard buffering (kill-ring, to you emacs guys), and I can think of a half-dozen applications which provide similar functionality, some of them quite good.
Do PCs have any of this? I know someone wrote a LaunchBar clone, AppRocket
, for Windows, and there's the excellent Shortkeys
, but Windows users don't seem to geek out on this the same way Macheads do. (For that matter, despite the existance of Sawmill
, Linux users don't seem to, either; 98% of my Linux use is just at a command prompt, though, so my impression could be mistaken.) Is this really just a cultural thing? Are people swayed by the Cult of Jobs simply more willing to spend twenty minutes configuring something that will save them 18 seconds every time they launch Photoshop? And what great PC (or Mac!) UI hacks am I simply not aware of?
("Trouble in River City" was the name of some kind of punk-rock zine I flipped through idly when I was in East St. Louis visiting a high school friend, Mariette. Do people actually call St. Louis that in real life, without feeling like a high school drama teacher is going to appear behind their shoulder and demand they hit their mark in the big "Seventy-Six Trombones" scene?)
Because I cannot escape being a self-parody, I'm in a fantasy baseball league. I did one in college, and then again two years ago. The latter league was run by some online friends of mine, who proceeded to mercilessly pound me into the dirt. I sort of stopped paying attention at the end and ended up feeling a bit bad about it, so I sat the next year out. This year, an actual real-life friend of mine, a man who was at my wedding, pleaded with me to help round out a league of his. I suspect I will be gifted with a dirt-pounding again, but I'm having fun so far despite the sucking vacuum that is my pitching. One of the reasons is that I my first-round pick, pick #2 of the draft, was Albert Pujols, the consensus best player in the game and a man whose name has launched a thousand PG-13 jokes. Pujols was hitting like a madman, leading the league in slugging and on a pace to break the single-season home run record.
This week, of course, he got hurt, straining a muscle while chasing down a fly ball. He's expected to be out up to six weeks. Pujols is, by all accounts, a stand-up guy: he and his wife do charitable work in both St. Louis and the Dominican Republic; they're heavily involved in Down's Syndrome fundraising (Pujols daughter has Down's); the biggest controversy surrounding him is the persistant rumor that he's older than his listed age of 26. He's a beautiful hitter, a decent fielder, fun to watch. He's a good a person as any to set the single-season home run mark, and record races are fun to watch, so it's a shame that he's hurt, but I'm moderately distressed. My fantasy season just went down in flames, I think.
I grew up an Orioles fan. When I discovered sabremetrics, I also started following Billy Beane's Oakland A's, the more so since the Orioles apparently collectively ran over a gypsy's kid sometime around 1997. I'm sure Pujols is a great guy -- nice to dogs, a fabulous karaoke artist, sweet smelling like flowers after a rainstorm -- but I have no rooting interest in either the Cardinals or the NL as a whole. There are a host of reasons why baseball is no longer the national pastime. Football is manifestly better on television than baseball, which is best experienced at a daytime game or on the radio with Vin Scully (or maybe Jon Miller) announcing. Basketball attracts the best athletes these days; just ask Charlie Ward. But how much of it is the unwinding of tribal loyalties? One of the reasons that the opening scene of Underworld works so well is that it's understood that, for men of a certain age, particularly from the big East Coast cities that hand out literary awards, your rooting interest in baseball defined a sense of your place in the world. I can't imagine my grandfather, a die-hard Sox fan, ever turning off the television after a walk-off home run and thinking, "Well, at least Giambi was on my rotisserie squad."
Most of my friends from college (and immediately post-college, when I was being a webmaster in California for a small company and not making any money to speak of despite living in California and doing web work at the height of the bubble) are LiveJournal people. Having discovered weblogs somewhere around 1998 -- and then MetaFilter, through a Jason Kottke post -- there always seemed something a little bit off about LJ, even above and beyond the fact that all the pages looked like something the cat dragged in. I had just enough graphic design abiity to know I should do something better (I stole unrepentently from Heather in her jezebel.com days), even if I couldn't actually pull it off. Not running your own code on your own server also seemed like a cop-out for reasons I can't really articulate beyond a sense that driving a stick-shift is a better way to understand the road.
My blog, Snarkout, is more of a writing exercise than anything else; I write about weird historical anecdotes, mostly, and ephemeral literature and con games and people who believe in flat earths and aliens. (Also, there are many stories about elephants.) It's the kind of book I like to read, only irregularly produced and with a level of scholarship so low that an eighth-grader would laugh at it. On the other hand, even after the 2001 explosion of mainstream interest in blogs, a sort of September That Never Ended for personal content on the web, it's not the sort of thing that most people are doing, so I'm largely content.
But it's not the same as writing about what I'm up to, which apparently is interesting to some people. (Thanks for the invite, Andre.) I'm bad about taking photos, worse about uploading them to Flickr; I generally assume that the last album I listened to (Quasi's Featuring "Birds") is of little interest, and I know the world doesn't give a damn about my opinions of Al Swearingen. But I can write a little bit about code, and a little bit about music; people can check in and see what I'm up to. It's what my colllege friends get out of LJ, mostly; I'm not invested in interpersonal drama so much, but it's worth a try. Maybe I'll finally figure out what people who aren't obsessed with Edison murdering Topsy have known all along.
