cyclotram

Monday, March 06, 2006

Columbia River Crystal

I've gone off on the occasional rant about awful public art from time to time, so I thought it was high time I featured something that I actually like. This is Columbia River Crystal, by David Curt Morris, a New York sculptor who just happens to have grown up in Portland. Even graduated from Reed. I'm not saying that out of small-town boosterism, but it is kind of a neat bit of trivia.

Updated 11/12/08: I've always reserved the right to go back and update old posts if I've got something more to add on the subject, and this post was overdue for a little tweaking. In particular, when I wrote this I didn't have the whole Flickr thing sorted out yet, so I used a photo I found on the net somewhere. I'm not real big on doing that anymore, so I'm replacing it with a bunch of artsy-esque photos I took recently. If these don't float your boat, here are two photos I ran across out on the interwebs. Hmm. Was "interwebs" even a word when I wrote this originally? Is it a word now?

Forgive me if the post rambles off topic a bit toward the end. I used to do that a lot. At least the new photos are all "on topic". Well, whatever. On with our story...

Why do I like it? Reasonable people can disagree about this, of course, but I think it's beautiful, and it fits its location perfectly. The only downside is that its location is fairly obscure, at the entrance to the Crown Plaza office complex on the south end of downtown, near the corner of 1st and Clay. You either have to know it's there and go in search of it, or you have to walk around in the area a lot and eventually stumble across it, which is what I did.

The really encouraging thing is that it's a recent piece, installed in 1997. I'm not really hip to current trends in the art world, but I'd like to believe that abstract sculpture is improving over time, with this being a recent(-ish) example, and the infamous "Rusting Chunks No. 5" a.k.a "Leland One" representing a primitive, bygone era.

On my TODO list, there are two more downtown artworks I mean to track down when I get a chance. I've heard there's a neat little fountain in the underground parking garage of the ultra-mod 60's Union Bank of California Tower. And a few weeks ago I was driving past one of the new engineering buildings at Portland State University, and noticed what appeared to be the "parking garage pillar" thingy I mentioned in the Rusting Chunks post. I thought it had been demolished to make way for the new CS building, but maybe they just moved it instead. If true, that would be a serious crying shame.

While searching for info on the UBC Tower's fountain, I came across an fascinating blog entry mentioning the building itself, from the local blog anti:freeze. The building also features on this list of the best buildings in town.

Also came across pics of two smallish fountains in town that I've never personally seen or heard of. I gather the second one is somewhere near the lower reservoir in Washington Park, but I couldn't begin to guess where it might be located.

Yet another interesting post that wasn't quite what I was looking for. The "Cool flower planter" item toward the bottom looks like it's at Lovejoy Fountain Plaza. The author complains the area seems deserted, especially during off-hours. Which is true, but in this case I think it's great. I've always thought of this park as a sort of modernist secret oasis in the middle of the city, known only to those who live or work or go to school in the area. And really I'm just fine with it staying that way, especially now that tourist-filled streetcars are running just a block or two away. If only they knew, they could stop, and gawk, and loudly tell each other how there isn't anything quite like this back home in Idaho Falls, and drop their gum and cigarette butts everywhere, and pester the locals with stupid questions, and demand to know where they can buy tourist knicknacks, maybe snowglobes with the fountain inside or something, or cheap his-n-hers size XXXXXL t-shirts with pictures of the fountain on 'em, and maybe a tasmanian devil too, just to spice things up. But luckily it's not in the guidebook, so they don't have a clue it's there. For now, it's our little secret.

Friday, March 03, 2006

Conquest!!!

I've just seen an exceedingly crappy movie, and I'd like to share it with you. In a recent post about sword & sorcery movies, I made a brief mention of Conquest, by the infamous Italian director Lucio Fulci. It arrived today, by the grace of Netflix and the US Postal Service, and... wow, it's really poor, a terrible, terrible movie.

Before I get to my own comments, here are some other reviews, so you can get a diverse set of opinions about the film and all. From the website names alone (other than Amazon, perhaps), it's obvious that the Merchant-Ivory mafia holds no sway here. Several of the reviewers are horror fans who think the director's normally a genius, except perhaps for this movie. Even the most harcore fanboys can't make this one look good:

And now for a few comments of my own:

I've never seen so much fog in my entire life. Is it supposed to be artistic? Or did somebody's no-good brother need a job, and the only thing he could do was run a fog machine? Enough with the fog, already. It's true that a proper S&S movie needs a bit of fog machine work here and there, but not every freakin' scene. Certain Fulci apologists have tried to blame the movie's appearance on a bad video or DVD transfer, but it's obvious that there was fog in the original scene.
The score is suitably cheesy. It's one scene after another of some dork noodling away on a synthesizer. One mentally associates 80's fantasy movies with heavy metal music, but I don't recall actually seeing the two combined on film. It's always synthesizers. And at least in this department, The Conquest delivers.
If there's a moral to the story, which I doubt, it's that being able to see the future is more trouble than it's worth. The evil sorceress forsees her own demise at the hands of one of the two heroes, and everything from there is all self-fulfilling prophecy. Basically she decides that some guy in a distant land is a threat to her, because he has a WMD (a magic bow, in this case), and sends her minions out on a preemptive attack to deal with him. Sound familiar? Does this ever turn out well?
If we're going to be genre sticklers, there are no actual swords in this movie. One guy has a magic bow, the other has a sling, plus some special rocks that explode when you toss them in people's campfires. The bad guys don't seem to have mastered tool use (probably couldn't, in those costumes), and rely on a bit of listless wrestling and occasional tossing of nets.
You couldn't pay me enough to do the scene where the older guy's tied to a pole underwater, and he's rescued by a pair of dolphins that bite the ropes away from his wrists. The next time you see a dolphin, look at all those teeth. You couldn't pay me enough. Yikes!
Not to spoil things, but the film does pull a switcheroo on viewers as to which guy will be the sole conquering hero in the end. You think it's one, but it's the other. I'm not telling which.
There's a bit of gore here, but it's not exactly high-quality gore. Unless the natives of these weird and foggy lands have Campbell's tomato soup for blood.
The evil high priestess spends the whole movie wearing just a spiky g-string and a gold mask, plus the occasional boa constrictor. If I'd seen this movie when I was 15 or so and impressionable, I might've ended up with some really odd notions.
However, everybody keeps saying the movie's full of sex and violence, and it isn't, at least not by S&S standards. She alone accounts for about 90% of the movie's t&A. And not to be crude or anything, but that 't' is lowercase for a reason, if you get my drift.
Like any S&S "buddy" movie, there's an obvious gay subtext to the movie, but as usual the movie doesn't pull it off very well. There's no real chemistry between the older and younger guy. It's almost as if the director wasn't aware of this theme, despite all the loincloths and furry boots.
Also, the young guy is really scrawny, and the older guy is, well, older, and kind of stubbly. Neither takes his shirt off in the whole movie, which may not be a bad thing. So the movie really falls down in the beefcake department. I like to think I'm an egalitarian sort of person, so if the women in S&S movies are going to be objectified, the men ought to be as well. It's only fair.
I don't think Fulci liked dogs very much. The sorceress's lackeys are weird dog-faced creatures, and she and the faceless male(?) being that arrives to help her out halfway through both are able to transform into dogs. None of this is ever explained, of course.
People spend a lot of time sleeping in this movie. I don't know why. Tsetse flies, maybe? It's never explained, but you soon realize that you don't get a lot of action or character development out of sleeping characters, do you? Actually in this movie you don't get a lot of action or character development, period.
Whenever people aren't sleeping, they're having "dramatic" scenes at what is either sundown or sunup. If you feel like creating a Conquest drinking game, you might want to start out with "If someone tries to emote in front of a sunset or sunrise, drink!", and go from there.
There's an edgy moment where the older guy kills some random peasant with an arrow and swipes the pig carcass he was carrying. Our heroes then enjoy a hearty pig dinner. The young guy is puzzled because the older guy's supposed to be such a great friend of animals and all. The older guy makes a flippant remark about that, and we never revisit the issue. Hey, he's a barbarian, not a righter of wrongs and defender of the defenseless.
The blue glowing magic arrow thing isn't a bad effect for 1983. It's the movie's one effect, so it's used over and over again. It's not bad, but you'll be sick of it before long. The bad-guy arrows inexplicably shooting out of a large bush are not such a good effect, and you'll see this one a few times too many as well. I did like the way our heroes endure a few minutes of these cheesy arrow effects, and then turn tail and run away.
When the young guy ends up getting hit in the leg, we discover that the bad guys use really puny arrows. Not so much arrows as pipe cleaners, in fact. Or maybe pine needles. But these, ahem, arrows are poisoned, so when the young guy gets nicked by one, he ends up with a number of highly unconvincing boils. More tomato soup.
You can always tell if someone's a peasant, because if so, they're always covered in caked-on mud. Yes, even on their hair. Peasants always have muddy hair, it seems.
The movie doesn't lack for poorly animated birds and bats. The older guy finds an injured bird of some kind at one point, and once he's nursed it back to health in a day or two, it rejoins the film's other two marionette birds. I guess to heal one of these birds, all you really need to do is reattach the strings, and it's off flying again.

So in sum, if you're going to see exactly one S&S movie, see a different one. If you're going to see all S&S movies, you'll have to get around to this one sooner or later, but try some of the classics first, so you have a good handle on the conventions of the genre. Then watch this one just for the sake of completeness. For anyone who doesn't fall into either category, um, I don't know whether to recommend this or not. I'll be happy to recommend it to anyone who agrees not to blame me when they decide they hate the thing.

Writing without a thesis

I'm not happy with this post. I was playing around with Blogspot's "Next Blog" button a few days ago and started collecting various items I ran across, hoping I could massage them all into another sort of "Found Objects" post. The main problem is that I don't really see a common thread among the stuff I collected, and what's more, I don't really have a lot to say about any of it. Even if I did, posting another "random tidbits" post so soon after the last one -- with cute animals in it, no less -- seems like cheating. It's too easy.

I figured that instead of just deleting this post-that-didn't-jell and discarding all of my, uh, hard work, I'd add a lame explanation/apology about how it came to be, and post the damn thing and be done with it. This thing isn't up to my usual high standards, and I'd like to think that other people would notice the difference as well. I'll try to do better next time, probably.

So first off, here are two pictures of cute cats, both of which link to their blogs of origin. I came across these in quick succession, and if I believed in fate I'd blather some nonsense about how I was somehow meant to cover these. Really all this tells us is that cats show up on personal blogs a lot, so the odds of running across two in close succession are pretty reasonable.

Another pseudo-fated item is an interesting blog titled "It's a numeric life", which I actually ran across twice during my little "Next Blog" excursion.

One curious observation: I was surprised by the sheer number of blogs in Portuguese, both from Portugal and Brazil. One I came across discussed (I think) the blogger's recent experiences at Carnaval in Rio. Unfortunately I lost the URL for that one. Probably wouldn't be safe for work anyway.

A small unordered list of other blogs I thought were interesting:

No More Mister Nice Blog, a good political blog.
studiosavant, a blog maintained by a group of sculptors up in Edmonton. One recent post marvels at the odd sculpture-related news you stumble across when you sign up for Google news alerts on the topic.
TopEnd Tales, a photo blog from Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
Food GPS, a food blog apparently from the SF area.
Xooglers, a blog by+for ex-Google employees.

Here's the part where I insert a lame joke along the lines of "What rhymes with Xoogle? Koogle, of course". It's supposed to be funny because you'd be thinking "Google", the actual obvious choice, and then I go and spring "Koogle" on you, leaving you wondering what the heck a koogle is. Not a very good joke, is it?

Anyway, I'd go on to note that the Koogle I have in mind is not the "kosher search engine" by that name, but rather a peanut-butter-like concoction from the early 70's, which combined artificial "peanut butter" with various other artificial flavors, like vanilla, chocolate (both pictured below) or my personal favorite, cinnamon. Yes, I actually liked the stuff, I think I was the only person on earth who did, because it soon disappeared from grocery shelves without a trace. I remember meeting the Koogle mascot at a local grocery store, goo-goo-googly eyes and all, and I was heartbroken when my mom explained to me that Koogle was gone and there wasn't going to be any more. That was quite a difficult concept for a small child to grasp. Out of spite, I refused to eat anything containing cinnamon for a good while afterwards, because it wasn't the thing I really wanted.

Finally we get to an editorial cartoon I found, again linking to its blog of origin, which in this case is in Norwegian. I originally had this baby at the top of the page, but today I changed my mind. I think the Jesus-with-a-shotgun thing would give the whole post a sort of sour and shrill tone. I've done a lot of complaining about political and religious nuts lately, and I don't want it to seem as though I'm just droning on and on about it. But still, I think it's an ok cartoon, and here it is.

Evwybody wuvs bunnies

Ok, I threatened to do this a while back. It seems that not everyone loved that picture of a French bulldog puppy I posted. So here a few pics of cute bunnies, because everyone loves bunnies.

Everyone, that is, except Dubya and his evil cronies. See, the first two pics are of the Northwest's very own Pygmy Rabbit, which is dwindling across its range due to habitat destruction. The Washington State population has been listed as an endangered species since 2003, which wasn't a tough call since there's only a few dozen of them left in the wild. However, just over a year ago the US Fish & Wildlife Service refused to seriously consider listing the species as a whole. Seems that certain pygmy rabbits made the poor choice to live in western Wyoming (Cheney's supposed home state, by which I mean "where his Tie Fighter crash-landed"), right on top of possible oil and gas deposits. And if there's one thing constant about the current administration, it's that anything or anyone who gets between them and their oil will be enthusiastically slaughtered.

Since George hates bunnies, we can be absolutely sure that Jesus hates bunnies too. Although maybe not for exactly the same reasons. Maybe he's still bitter about the whole Easter thing, which I guess is understandable, but condemning all rabbits over one single puny crucifixion (and a temporary one, too, if contemporary accounts are to be believed) is just overdoing it. I certainly would've thought he of all people would be above petty guilt-by-association. But then, I never was cut out to be a theologian, I guess. It's all so complicated.

Lest you think this whole post is going to be yet another political rant, let's move on to the third picture, which links to a post by a Swedish blogger. I'm not entirely what it's about; the only Swedish-to-English online translator I've come across is SYSTRAN, and the results aren't all that intelligible:

” how sheep one a rabbit to jump over an obstacle, and so many obstacles consecutive, that moreover is high?” The each the most common question I might until when I tävla in Kaninhoppning. I believe that the reply is an ensemble average rabbit and drivers, but also a lot of tactic, technology and to last friend with the animal. How man goes to weigh stages for stages goes to read in the last beech about Kanin-hoppning. The is typed of the before this federation's chairman Lisbeth Jansson, and the each also she that typed the very the first beech about this sport.

So from what I can gather, there's a competitive sport that involves having rabbits run obstacle courses. The link within the quote points at what is (I think) a local club or federation devoted to the sport. Who knew?

And what post about rabbits would be complete without at least one bad movie reference? The image above links to one review of the timeless classic "Night of the Lepus", starring Janet Leigh and DeForest Kelley, among others. Another review is here, and there's quite a few more out there, if you're interested, which I'm positive you are.

tags: rabbit bunny endangered bush cheney lepus jesus kaninhoppning

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Today's Found Objects

Four political pics: two of our Glorious Leader, and two of our Actual Leader.

Four items found by using that neato "Next Blog" button up in the corner, two of which are about food.

Random Thoughts That's the blog's name. Has an interesting post about ex-CNN anchor Aaron Brown's recent appearance at Southern Oregon University
A blogger from Chile reminisces about his old Atari. Ahh. A compatriot. I'll have to share some ancient Atari memories of my own some time.
The Blog that ate Manhattan, about cooking and such. The current recipe is for a Thai Beef Salad, and sounds very tasty.
The Shredded Monkey, another cooking blog, not actually featuring monkey in any form that I can tell. Current article is about grilling salmon. Mmmmm.... Fishhhh.....

Three articles about GWB's (hopefully dwindling) personality cult, plus one fun example of said cult:

"Is Bush Worship a Cult?"
"The Cult of Bush"
"George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism"
And whaddya know, here's one company that would love to sell you an extra-special Jesus fish emblazoned with the words "BUSH" and "One nation under god".

Not Very Confidential Video

So right on the heels of Mardi Gras we now learn that our Glorious Leader in fact was warned about Katrina after all. It's all caught on what media accounts refer to as a "confidential" government video. Which to me is the only shocking part about this latest news. Keeping a video record of how decisions are made doesn't really seem like the Bush way. I suspect that the one and only lesson George will come away with from all this is to never keep any records of this kind, or if it's unavoidable, classify them as Top Secret and stash them away in the equivalent of the vast government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And track down whoever leaked the current videos and have 'em tortured, of course. That goes without saying.

Right now they're spinning it that the public shouldn't read anything whatsoever into the few videos that have come out, since they aren't representative of the Katrina decisionmaking process as a whole. And of course they're also refusing to release any more videos so that the public can see the "real" picture they're telling us exists. No, your job as a patriotic American is to ignore the evidence, and have faith that the Glorious Leader can do no wrong. Otherwise the terrorists win.

Really, I'm not kidding. For example, in this blog hosted by the Chicago Tribune, the poster argues the videos have just made Bush's political troubles over Katrina that much worse. Which is not exactly going out on a limb these days. The interesting part is the user comments, where a poster calling himself Bruce froths at the mouth about all the "leftists" out there bashing our president. See, what it all really boils down to is the subtle distinction between "breaching" and "overtopping" a levee. Displaced New Orleans residents may see this as splitting hairs, but we're told that in reality it's absolutely crucial. If you use one of the two words when talking to the president, and then the other thing happens, well, clearly he wasn't warned, had absolutely no reason to believe anything bad would happen, and is therefore blameless as always. See, it all depends on what the definition of "is" is, or something. It never ceases to amaze me how the first post always goes to a wingnut, and the wingnuts always have the party-line talking points memorized. (Another example: USA Today survey of the blogosphere reaction. First post: wingnut.) Sometimes I wonder if there's a big bunker full of these people somewhere deep beneath the beltway, where a legion of party hacks is paid to surf the net all day, hunting for even the mildest criticism of the government, and responding with cookie-cutter screeching tirades. It would explain a lot, although "Bruce" claims to be a teacher of some kind, and says he'd give an 'F' to any student who made an argument similar to the one the blogger presents. Which doesn't surprise me a lot either. It seems to have become a core conservative tenet these days that if you have any power at all, no matter how small and petty it is, you have a solemn obligation to shamelessly abuse that power in the name of politics (or religion, which is basically the same thing anymore).

Anyway, now I can't help but wonder whether there's a videotape lying around somewhere that shows GWB and friends deciding to lie to the world about WMDs, or to assume everything will go smoothly in postwar Iraq. That would be fascinating to watch. Alas, someone's probably erasing those tapes even as I write this.

Which sort of brings us to the other political tempest of the day, the Dubai ports deal. The administration, and its media cheering section, would like us to know that only bigoted, isolationist xenophobes could possibly be against the deal. Fancy that, Bush trying to shame us into supporting his latest bungle with what is essentially a political correctness argument. Wonders just never cease. Here's a good rebuttal to that argument, good because it doesn't couch its opposition to the deal in terms of pure political opportunism. To a lot of liberally-minded people, it seems safer or more PC somehow to flat out say they're opposing the deal strictly out of a cynical quest for partisan advantage, rather than admit the whole thing gives them the willies. Which is a sad comment on what politics are like in this country anymore, but there you go. I'd like to suggest that being "xenophobic", as the pundits put it, is nothing to apologize for, so long as there's a real rational basis for it. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily award George points for being idealistic, and suggesting that the UAE ought to be treated the same way as the UK. The world would be a fantastic place if that was possible. But sadly, it isn't, at least not right now.

One of the pro-deal arguments that really irks me is that if the deal doesn't go through, we risk alienating friendly governments. And the last thing we'd ever want to do is anger a supposed ally. Which is not an argument we heard Bush making in the runup to the Iraq war, certainly. And yes, we do count the UAE as an "ally", at least on paper, but our problem in the Gulf has never been a shortage of friendly, corrupt, medieval despots. People at my end of the political spectrum have been arguing for decades that we shouldn't be supporting these people. In recent years Bush has been arguing in favor of "democracy" in the region, which would be great if I though he really meant it. But then, the indications are that the general public in the UAE (and surrounding Gulf states) doesn't like us very much.

We can argue til we're out of breath about whether tolerance should extend to societies that oppress women and routinely behead people for being gay, or criticizing the government, or even practicing "sorcery", whatever that is. I tend to think tolerance is a two-way street. When a country teaches its schoolchildren they have a duty to go slaughter the infidels, a group that presumably includes me, it tends to reduce the level of goodwill I'm willing to show them in return. That's just human nature, PC or not. I don't cut a lot of slack for creepy religious fundies here at home, and I really can't bring myself to be all that much more forgiving of them abroad, regardless of the particular religion they're going all fundamental about.

Dubai, in recent years, has struck me as an especially horrifying place, an utterly artificial, futuristic dystopia straight out of a bad SF novel. The emirate's leaders have positioned the place as a sort of Disneyland for billionaires, with world-class golf courses, ultra-luxurious hotels, fabulous shopping, and a complete absence of basic freedoms of any kind, basically Singapore with burqas, with the added attraction of a meek, nearly invisible and poorly-paid noncitizen underclass to perform all the actual labor. Metropolis, anyone? The WTO's met here on occasion, since they've gotten sick of all those protesters they tend to attract. No problem, just hold the meetings somewhere where protesting isn't allowed. Problem solved.

There's another argument you see sometimes, saying that if we don't approve the deal, we're meddling in the free market, which is Bad. Whether that's actually Bad is an argument for another time, but let me just point out that the company in question is a state-owned enterprise in Dubai. They're about as free-market as, say, Amtrak. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, necessarily, just that the free market argument is deeply bogus.

But in the end, the argument Bush & Co. always come back to is that we should support the deal just because he says so. He says it's been reviewed thoroughly, although he won't say exactly how, and that should be good enough for us all. Even though the entire process happened without his direct involvement. I guess the argument is that the Glorious Leader is infallible even when he's out of the loop, in which case the junior staffers who made the call were just being infallible on his behalf. In general, all government employees are infallible, and have been so since January 2001, insofar as they're carrying out the Leader's whims and desires.

On the bright side, this is an election year. Yay!

Tags: mardi gras new orleans katrina bush video iraq wmd dubai uae wto

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Sword & Sorcery (stopgap edition)

I don't recall if I've actually promised to do a really thorough post about the many joys of 80's sword & sorcery movies, but I meant to promise to do that. And if I had promised, and you'd been waiting all this time, today would almost, but not quite, be your lucky day.

I say almost, because this post is not the end-all-be-all post I may or may not have promised. I'll get around to that sooner or later. Instead, for the time being, here's a fun and amusing grab-bag of other people's S&S movie reviews I've run across, some of which include stills and/or movie poster art (such as it is). I should note in passing that S&S movie art traditionally bears no resemblance to anything in the actual movie. For instance, the Deathstalker poster shown here (which links to a movie review in Hungarian, if you're up for that) pictures a large troll-like creature, although nothing like it appears anywhere in the film.

Other than Deathstalker II and Barbarian, I haven't actually seen these movies (yet, anyway). Some aren't out on DVD. Others are, but Netflix doesn't have 'em. So it's not for lack of trying. That's basically what I'm trying to say here.

Deathstalker II. As I've noted before, D2 is the absolute cream of the crop so far as S&S movies go. The DVD audio commentary by the director and a couple of the stars is priceless.
Deathstalker III, which I haven't seen. Of the four films in the Deathstalker saga (five, if you count the much later Barbarian), this is the only one that isn't out on DVD. And I don't own a VHS player anymore. It's a crime against humanity, I tell ya.
Dungeons and Dragons
Warrior Queen
Several movies including The Conquest. I see that Netflix has just gotten itself a copy of The Conquest, so if it's up to snuff I may say a few words about it in the near future. Updated: I've seen it, and my review is here.
Quest for the Mighty Sword (ator)
Quest of the Delta Knights
Sorceress, the 1982 film by that name, not the 1995 Julie Strain vehicle by the same name, which I haven't seen either. Incidentally, the latter is not an S&S movie, but it was directed by the same guy who did Deathstalker II many years earlier.
Princess Warrior.

And let's do some silly Technorati Tags just for the hell of it. I'm curious to see if anybody shows up here because of these.
sword sorcery sorceress barbarian movie deathstalker princess queen warrior dvd vhs netflix troll

Referreriffic

One of the more fascinating things about this whole blog racket is the way you often get chance visitors wandering in from other blogs, solely because they happened to be nosing around the wonderful world of Blogspot at roughly the same time you posted. This is quite fascinating, in that you end up with a fairly random (there's that word again) slice of the web, or at least that part of the blogosphere hosted within the borders of the Google Empire.

I like the idea of a list that forms on its own, without anyone making a conscious decision to categorize all these blogs together. You could call the list an HTML found object, I guess. Or an instance of order (of a sort) emerging from chaos, perhaps. The repressed conceptual artist inside me -- and admit it, we've all got one -- really lives for this kind of stuff.

[Technical note: Maybe you didn't know this, but when you click on a link from one page to another, your browser cheerfully gives the new website the url of the page you came from. That's what I mean when I say "referrer". Some random visitor was at each of these pages, clicked "Next Blog" or did something else that sent them from there to here, and left visible footprints in the process. Some browsers let you disable or monkey around with your referrer field. If you use Safari, you might want to take a look at PithHelmet, which gives you control over this and other stuff.]

So here's a list of recent Blogspot referrers, with spam "blogs" weeded out, listed in no particular order. At the risk of imposing arbitrary structure on this delightfully unordered list, a few blogs I thought were standouts of the bunch are in bold. Not that I'm trying to influence you or otherwise reduce the local entropy level, mind you.

The image, incidentally, is a random walk, a topic of ongoing interest in math, physics, and CS. The researchers at the University of Texas note they're using a physical source of true randomness, not something generated by a computer, which would be pseudorandom at best. So it's not really the same sort of thing as what we're talking about right now, but it's an interesting subject on its own, and the resulting images seem apropos to our topic, at least in an aesthetic sense.

So here's our list:

Liftakna
fender_girlz_world
More Ohio Backroad Pics
RP Guest Services
Sobre Futbol
"Space" [twentysixtytwo] (Astronomy pics)
The Gathering (Baptist)
VCC HS Boys Small Group
Don't waste the pretty
Mind Spa
"life is a zoo in a jungle..."
Best Blonde Jokes
Straight Flushing
mitt liv som schweizare
econhour3 - top article right now is about the Olympics.
Rainbows and Storms
Viñas y sierras del oeste argentino Not a lot here, but it's about Argentinian wine, which I (and my wallet) are fans of.
Through the Eyes of the Beholder
Aziza's Island Oasis
Foreclosure of a Dream
Marcela Infante
The Parker Land
KGV Library Zone
Adam
Say NO to Jim and Dawn Gibbons. A liberal/progressive blog from Nevada.
marcelleqb
for yu hui
زیر گنبد کبود (The blog name's in Farsi, as is most of the blog) I don't know very much about Iranian music, but the song linked to in the post "Throwing something out of my circle" is quite nice, I think. Also a recent post about the Oscars. I have to agree, I too am pleased that Brokeback Mountain didn't win.
Diario de un sufí de Alcorcón An art & poetry blog from Spain, which also has an Oscars post. Well, a photo of Jack Nicholson. (gag! blech!)

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Mardi Gras by proxy

So it's cold, dark, and miserable outside in this joyless northern city of ours. Meanwhile, people half a continent away are having a grand old time, and some of them may even remember it tomorrow. But thanks to the magic of the Internet, we can get a small inkling of all the brainless and irresponsible fun we're missing out on. That may be good or bad, I'm not sure. So here's what showed up after wandering the net for a while, while waiiiiiting for my uber-overweight C++ app to recompile on a slowwwwww HP-UX box:

A rant about the city of New Orleans's comically failed attempt to find commercial sponsors for this year's Mardi Gras.
An artist/blogger from New Orleans discussing the
glory of beads. This is where that cool frog photo comes from. As she puts it, Reason number five million and eight why New Orleans is the greatest city on Earth: in New Orleans, even the trees wear jewelry!.
A brief history of the culinary phenomenon that is king cake.
A lesson for the uninitiated about what Mardi Gras is all about, really, including a bunch of king cake photos (including the one you see here).
One blogger's memories of going to Mardi Gras with his buddies way back in Y2K.
Another Mardi Gras reminiscence, including a paean to Popeye's biscuits.
A post about the singular joys of bringing a fundie to Fat Tuesday.
The source of that "We're from Texas, you OWE us" image. The poster is sort of disgusted, and rightly so.
How could I not pass along this post about the local beer down New Orleans way? I mean, it's beer...
Yet another blogger who found a previous Mardi Gras a bit mind-boggling.
Seems everyone except me has a Mardi Gras story. Here's another one.
An interesting and unusual perspective on the holiday, coming from a Catholic seminarian in New Orleans.
A comedian from New Orleans has a piece about why Mardi Gras is important.
Of course, you can never really get away from the earnest, well-meaning people who feel nobody should have a single moment of fun until we've gotten rid of all the bad stuff going on in the world. Here's one example.
And the inevitable earnest documentary about how Mardi Gras beads are made in China.
A student whose Sociology prof gave a talk about "Ritual disrobement during Mardi Gras", which is apparently an outgrowth of the capitalist system. It's really astonishing the things you can get a grant to study these days.
That professor may not even be right, to top it all off. Here's at least one visitor who practices a socialist bead-throwing philosophy.
Someone else writing about the ongoing "gone wild" phenomeonon. You know you want to read it.
Holiday greetings from another blog I stumbled across. Probably not safe for work, of course depending on where you work.
A post aptly titled Mardi Gras Hangover, with links to numerous photos. [Added 3/1/06]

Tags: mardi gras new orleans.

large & small stuff, plus current events

I've sworn a solemn oath to never use the words "random" or "musings" in a weblog post title ever again (and let's add "thoughts" and "meme" while we're at it), so today's title is about as generic as I'm likely to get. You might have noticed that I've just figured out how to do those fancy-schmancy Technorati tags, and I suppose it's possible I'm overusing the feature just a little.

Pop quiz: Of the two images here, which one is a new Cassini image of the surface of Titan, and which one is an electron microscope image of a viroid? Kind of hard to tell, isn't it?

I was reading a bit about viruses recently, due to that annoying cold I had that I'm nowhere close to finished whining about just yet. I hadn't realized that there's now an ongoing effort to classify viruses and give them latin names. So that most common cold viruses fall under the family Picornaviridae, genus Rhinovirus. The little bastards.

[Note: If you really aren't that interested in my latest science-geek diversion, just scroll down the page a few paragraphs until you see the words Mardi Gras.]

Here's a good article I came across that talks about subcellular life forms. I'd been planning to talk about some of the topics in that article myself, but it's clear and well-written, and I'm lazy, so I'll just say "yeah, what he said". In particular, the discussion about plasmids is interesting. At present they aren't usually considered to be "alive", but this strikes me as an arbitrary choice. I suspect they'll eventually come to be seen as viruses that just happen to have a symbiotic, rather than a pathogenic, relationship to their host cells.

Virology is an interesting subject to me because even though a vast amount is known about viruses, the basic taxonomy is still being sorted out, and fundamental questions like "how did viruses originate" are still very open questions. It's not even known whether all viruses share a common origin or not. It's possible that at one point all life looked sort of viruslike, for example see the RNA world hypothesis, and the less-popular hypothesis that the very first life forms were based on something called peptide nucleic acid, or PNA, a robust but not very versatile cousin of RNA and DNA.

Jumping abruptly from small to large, here's a new hypothesis about what's inside gas giant planets. In the end, it's still the case that nobody really knows, and nobody's come up with a good way of finding out. The Galileo probe seems to have been less helpful than everyone expected, for example. Cassini's sent back some interesting pictures of clouds at Saturn, but still no definite word on what's under the clouds.

I personally feel that all questions about cosmology, origins, the universe, and everything, would be much easier to address if we were all to adopt the Misanthropic Principle. (Contrast that with the more widely known "anthropic principle", which I tend to think of as "creationism for Mensa members".)

On an unrelated, yet timely and silly note, I'd like to work the tag "Mardi Gras" into this post somehow. And now I have. Yay. Which is about the closest I'm likely to get to a Mardi Gras celebration, as Portland is about as non-NOLA as it's possible to get. We're all prim and proper and we can only have a good time if we hide under a dozen layers of irony and pretend we hate the whole thing. We pretend we're all having a bitter laugh at the expense of people who don't have "creative class" jobs and expensive liberal arts degrees, but secretly we all wish we were them. Portlanders think it's hee-larious to wear John Deere hats in public and guzzle PBR from an actual beer can, as if it's all a silly lark, but ask them to give 'em up, and they can't. They just can't. People here are way too insecure and pseudo-sophisticated to ever simply have a good time and leave it at that.

In addition, Portlanders have been conditioned in recent years to think that if it's a real holiday, there ought to be a government-sponsored party in Pioneer Courthouse Square, or maybe Waterfront Park, even though most of the time there isn't one. The local TV news often sets up a camera crew near the square on Fat Tuesday, St. Patrick's, and a few other big days, and there are inevitably big groups of clueless people wandering around, wondering where the government's party is at. They always look utterly lost and confused, as if a few short years of mollycoddling by the city has rendered them unable to party on their own initiative. It's just as well that the city often neglects to hold a party, since these events are inevitably dreadful "family friendly" (meaning "alcohol-free") affairs, full of smug Subaru-driving yuppies all packing strollers the size of small SUVs and the inevitable pair of black labs. If I was the mayor, and I saw how one of these events turned out, I'd immediately cancel all future ones.

Meanwhile, if you run a bar or restaurant, you can't hold a proper party for fear of incurring the wrath of the jackbooted thugs of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission [PDF].

It's all a crying shame, really. Except for the evil booze police and the sheeplike, proudly anhedonic general public, we've got everything we need for a good time. You need streets for parades, and we have those. We have a container ship terminal somewhere in town, so you can import entire shiploads of beads right here, directly from China. Lots of multistory buildings, some with balconies, so the whole bead-throwing thing can be done properly. We even have very lenient laws about public nudity here, so we could even pull that off as well (so to speak), in the unlikely event that the weather cooperates. Alas...

[Oh, BTW, the first picture is the viroid, the other is Titan, in case you were curious, yet not curious enough to bother clicking on either link. So now you know. And as GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle.]

Monday, February 27, 2006

olympics (pt. 3)

Just a quick addendum to pass along a few Olympics links from elsewhere in the blogosphere that didn't fit anywhere in the last post:

A personal favorites list at Corsairs Affairs.
A Dutch blogger is puzzled by the tepid way the US media and public reacted to the Olympics. Granted, he's coming from a land of rabid speed-skating fanatics, so he may be setting the bar kind of high, but he makes some interesting points.
A counter-perspective to my (and others') rants about NBC, from someone who argues much of the criticism is undeserved.
A comment discussing the weirdly hostile reaction the Olympics evoke in some people. I'd add to this the tendency I've noticed among cultural-conservative types to reject any sport that's enjoyed beyond our borders, with the possible exception of baseball. They seem to require a fantasy sports world where foreigners simply don't exist at all. NASCAR even takes it a step further, to a world where foreign cars don't exist either. If there's any chance that an American will ever lose to a foreigner, they just can't stand to watch, I guess.
Not to beat a dead horse, but here are three more discussions about TV coverage. Something else just occurred to me about TV coverage of the games. I seem to recall that back in the old days, when they weren't covering the sports they'd sometimes go off on an extended travelogue about the city and surrounding area hosting the games. That would've been nice, especially now in the age of HDTV. You don't need an expensive commentator or anything, just put an HD camera in a helicopter and fly around town and show us the region's points of interest, just as pure eye candy. Is that too much to ask for? Italy's a beautiful country, and we hardly got to see any of it. If all you're going to give us are closeups of pouting skiers, or speedskaters bitching about each other at news conferences, your investment in fancy HD gear was a total waste.
I don't usually pay attention to Bryant Gumbel, but apparently he recently made some sour comments about why he hates the Winter Olympics. So naturally people are calling him an idiot, and rightly so.
Another blogger coins a perfect description: Bodefreude. I wish I'd thought of that. Wasn't quite as fun as rooting against the Bad Dream Team during the Athens games, but hey. On the other hand, Mr. Miller's poor showing will no doubt impact Nike's bottom line, resulting in pay cuts for all those poor little six year olds in China who make all their shoes. I hope Bode's happy.
Two more bloggers who enjoy curling. I'd never watched it until these Olympics, since it's always been shunted off to some random cable channel, usually at 3 AM. I can safely say that if you want to watch something other than figure skating and hourlong tearjerking athlete bios, you're going to need cable and a DVR. Anyway, it's surprisingly fun to watch. It's all strategy and tension, and there's nothing else in the Winter games remotely like it. And then, here's someone who inexplicably doesn't like curling. Takes all kinds, I guess. :)

Incidentally, after doing a bit of blog searching lately, I've decided to take a solemn oath to never use the words "random" or "musings" in a blog entry title ever again. Ok, if I'm talking about random numbers or something I might make an exception.

olympics (pt. 2)

There are all sorts of things I love about the Olympics. Even the always-goofy opening and closing ceremonies, something I think I ought to try to explain. Olympic opening and closing ceremonies have always been a guilty pleasure: Gloriously middlebrow events full of bombastic, empty spectacle, pompous ritual, and supreme cheesiness all around. They're great that way. This year's ceremonies were great even by the usual Olympic standards. They had everything: Incomprehensible plotlines, goofy costumes, people dancing with plastic cows, a Ferrari doing donuts in the middle of the stadium, a Ricky Martin concert, poorly synchronized and unimpressive faux Cirque du Soleil routines, a survey of the greatest disco hits of the 70's while the athletes entered the stadium, giving the athletes red clown noses to wear at the closing ceremony (which almost none of them did), and so on. I think there probably was supposed to be an ultra-noble and abstract organizing theme, or concept, or at least slogan behind each ceremony, but unofficially for both of them it was the usual one: "One Damn Thing After Another". Still, after ten years nobody's yet managed to top those chrome pickup trucks back at the Atlanta games. That was just.... priceless. And am I the only person who thought having Muhammad Ali light the torch in Atlanta was actually kind of sad and painful to watch? He got that way by doing something he first became famous for in the Olympics, to top it all off.

Our local NBC affiliate had a crew in Torino, and they were interviewing people after the closing ceremony. One guy said he liked it better than the opening ceremony, which he thought was really confusing and "full of culture". You can't make up stuff like this. It's pure gold.

I'm not actually sure how much we can blame the Torino organizers for the disjointed nature of the ceremonies, since all I've seen of them is NBC's coverage. Last night's closing ceremony was especially bad that way, and it was obvious it'd been hacked up and reordered to fit NBC's own tastes. Every now and then they'd break in to the ceremony for an extended reminiscence about one of the US gold medalists, and I got the impression they were cutting large parts of the ceremony so they could fit in all the sappy instant nostalgia crap. But the worst, the absolute worst part was the near hour-long Tom Brokaw piece about how glorious World War II was. NBC seems to think that the important lesson everyone should come away with from the last two weeks is that we all need to stay perpetually misty-eyed about the exciting and wonderful world of war. Let me go out on a limb and propose that in the future, the phrase "enemy machine gun nest" should never, ever appear in any Olympic coverage, period. If you'd had company over to watch the closing ceremony, and someone had gone off on an hour-long nostalgic bender about WWII, and just wouldn't shut the hell up about it and let you watch the damn ceremony, all because he thought his own personal obsession was more important and he wanted to inflict it on everyone, I mean, you'd think that was supremely rude, wouldn't you? That Brokaw scumbag just did that to the whole country. But then, the opening ceremony commentary by his equally smarmy anchor desk replacement, Brian Williams, wasn't that much better. I guess the network decided we should have someone there to spew grim factoids and remind us all about what an ugly and violent place the world is these days. You know, to make it all "relevant", or whatever. So current events in the world are pretty terrible, yes, we all know that. Can't you people just STFU for a bit, just let us have our two weeks of fun escapism, and an imagined world where countries really do meet only on the playing field, not the battlefield? Is that just too freakin' much to ask? Bastards.

Anyway, I don't remember a lot about opening and closing ceremonies prior to '96. I'm actually not sure I watched them before that. That, or the just weren't as memorable. Or I'm getting old and starting to forget things. I do remember the bit from Barcelona (1992) where they lit the torch with a flaming arrow, although I might have just seen that clip on the news, I don't remember exactly. That was fun to watch, although it may have touched off a subsequent arms race in lighting the torch with bigger and weirder stunts. Nobody's topped the flaming arrow yet.

Some selected memories of past Olympics, summer & winter:

Montreal, 1976 The earliest Olympics I remember, and then not very clearly. I remember watching a lot of weightlifting, for some reason. I recall that one of the American competitors was black, and I made some sort of prejudiced remark about him for that reason. My parents were appalled, and wanted to know where I'd gotten those ideas. The correct answer in those days was probably "everywhere", so I'm glad now that I got a serious scolding about it at the time. An important life lesson, learned from the Olympics. Just for that, I probably merit my own human interest story on national TV next time the games roll 'round. Although since it was 1976 I think the actual important life lesson was that it's OK to hate people, just so long as their uniform says "CCCP" on it somewhere.

Lake Placid, 1980 I think I did watch the "Miracle on Ice" game, but I wasn't a hockey fan at the time, so it didn't make that big of an impression on me. No, what I cared about was Eric Heiden in his shiny gold speedskating suit. I had a new idol. I really wanted to be him, wear the gold suit, and skate super-fast. For probably the next year or so, I was convinced you could run faster if you attempted to do that side-to-side speedskating stride, and nobody could convince me otherwise. Sometimes I wonder how things would've turned out if I'd had access to ice skates at the time. But then again, this was around the time I was attempting little league and youth soccer. I was mostly OK at soccer and flat-out awful at baseball, so I wasn't exactly giving people a lot of reasons to think I had a bright athletic future ahead of me.

Los Angeles, 1984 I remember having a nasty cold during part of the Olympics, just like this year. Instead of curling and biathlon, I was curled up in bed watching a bit of cycling and a lot of equestrian stuff. I seem to recall they were playing theme music from the movie St. Elmo's Fire during one of the show jumping events. Ahh, the 80's were a dark and primitive time.

Albertville, 1992 I really miss Olympic demonstration sports. The Albertville Olympics featured a couple of fascinating events: "Ski ballet" (since renamed to the somewhat less goofy "acro"), which was the silliest thing I've ever seen on snow, period. I'm sure it's really hard and all. I've heard synchronized swimming is really hard, too. Just because something's hard doesn't make it a sport, though. And then there was speed skiing, which was about as far away as you can imagine from all the touchy-feely kiss-up-to-the-judges stuff they've been adding in recent years. It's all about top speed in a straight line, period. I don't remember it being that interesting to watch, but it had a certain geekish appeal and a "how do they do that?" quality, sort of like ski jumping. Any winter sport where you need special non-flammable pads so you don't catch on fire when you crash has got to count as reasonably "XTREME" in my book.

Torino, 2006 One thing I've always liked about the Olympics is the way that most of the athletes (various basketball and hockey "Dream Teams" excepted) seem positively giddy to be there. By now it's a familiar sight to see athletes filing into the stadium holding camcorders, taping the whole thing for posterity to show the folks back home. That never stops being endearing. During one of the US women's curling matches, there was a great moment where two US team members (both of whom looked about 17 years old) were puzzling over what shot to try next. There was a brief pause, and then one turned to the other and said in a quiet but excited voice, "We're on TV!". And they both smiled.

Perfect.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

olympics (pt. 1)

The Olympic closing ceremony's wrapping up over in the other room as I'm writing this. No, that's not quite right, they actually wrapped hours ago, but you'd never know that from the people on TV.

This isn't going to be a critique of NBC's abysmal coverage of the games. That's already been done pretty thoroughly, so instead I'll just point out a couple of good examples. I wouldn't have expected The Nation to cover the Olympics at all, but here they are, with a well-argued rant about the idiotic and chauvinistic coverage provided by NBC, a.k.a. the Neocon Bellowing Corporation. That rant references someone's blog offering a similar argument. And another example I came across. I realize I may not resemble the statistical "average" American, but I have to think that the same ideas have occurred to a lot of Olympics fans. Viewership is way down this year, and there's got to be some kind of reason behind it. Maybe viewers aren't the knuckle-draggers the TV people have them figured for, and they'd really like to see something that isn't a.) ignorant Cold War-style chest-beating nationalism, and b.) manipulative, tearjerking human interest stories about how somebody's great-grandmother passed away 15 years ago, or their dog got run over, or whatever. Enough of the moronic prepackaged storylines. Just shut up and let us watch the actual games, already, ok?

For a rather opposing perspective, the Big Old Media types at AOL present a list of ideas on how to "fix" the Olympics, gleaned by interviewing a variety of sports marketing experts. Since these are basically the people whose ideas count with the Powers That Be, I'm afraid things are going to get worse before they get better. Most of the ideas seem to focus on making the games more like the world's biggest reality show. Let the viewers vote on figure skating winners, stuff like that. Plus the authorities need to manufacture international rivalries, like USA vs. Austria in skiing, for example, because the whole point of the Olympics is to hate people from countries you can't even find on a map, I guess.

On a cheerier note, here are a trio of blog entries I came across by people who love the Olympics, each for his or her own reasons, which is great.

The Canadian blogosphere is active as well. Here are four rather interesting examples. You have to feel for the Canadians, four long years of handwringing about their men's hockey team failing to medal. That's got to sting a bit. The blame game has barely begun, so (even though I'm not Canadian) let me get my 2 cents in. The Gods of Hockey will never allow any team with Todd Bertuzzi on the roster to win an Olympic medal of any color, much less skate the Cup. If you don't believe in that sort of thing, you could also lay the blame at the feet of Joe Thornton, who apparently didn't want to be playing for Canada any more than he wanted to play for the Bruins.

A blogger in Norway is doing a bit of handwringing as well.

And finally, here's someone who argues that the Olympics turned out the way the did because Torino is a highly paranormal city. Oooh, spooooky. And it's not just because of that creepy shroud thingamajig, either.

I was going to say a few words here about why I like about the Olympics, but it's getting late, so I think I'll save that for tomorrow. So arrivederci for now...

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Greetings, Cyclotram visitor #250 (or so)!!!

I've just noticed a curious relationship: I've hit about 250 visitors here, right about the same time iTunes has hit a billion songs downloaded. So assuming that each user downloads a mere 4x10^6 songs, we're about neck and neck so far as web traffic goes. I really think that's something to take a lot of pride in, and it's certainly not a coincidence. And furthermore, Steve Jobs & Co. have been at this a bit longer than I have, so I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that I'll get my second 250 before Steve gets his second billion. And my marketshare continues to expand. Mwhahahaha!

In the interest of fiscal responsibility, I'm not actually giving out any enormous cash prizes for being the 250th visitor. What, you think the dot-com era's still going, or something? In lieu of schwag, here are a couple pictures of gibbons, because gibbons are really cool. The first image links to the Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, CA, while the second links to the homepage of a French physicist who apparently likes gibbons.

And while we're on the topic of "lesser" apes, here's a fun column out of Alabama that pokes a bit of fun at Pat Robertson. If he didn't exist, Democrats would have to invent him. And even then, nobody would believe it. Pat Robertson is an unflattering caricature of Pat Robertson, and the inevitable riot, too, all by himself.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Short Attention Span Edition

Misc. links and comments without much of a unifying theme:

Our local basketball team would love a chance to wallow at the public trough, please. The Trail Blazers can't survive without taxpayer handouts, we're now being told, even though they're owned by Paul Allen, the world's 7th richest man. Right now the team isn't saying whether there's any chance they'll pull up stakes and leave town. I guess they wouldn't want to get our hopes up too much.

Someone's put together a list of Blazers-fan blogs, if you're curious. What a dreary and depressing hobby that must be.
Here's another report about the sleazy petitioners behind the campaign to get rid of our fair city's shiny new public campaign financing program. I ran into several of these people myself, and my impression was about the same as hers. I'm sorry, but even if I did agree with the petition (which I didn't), there's no way I'm giving a copy of my signature to someone who looks like they're being paid in meth and stolen car stereos.
A funny review of a terrible new movie I have no intention of seeing.
Somewhat less close to home, there's another Cassini Titan flyby coming up over the weekend, if you're interested.
In case you've ever wondered where the hell celery comes from, today's your lucky day. Here are some images from the celery harvest in Salinas, California. Oregon State University offers some tips on successful commercial celery cultivation here in the Willamette Valley. Who knew? Not me, apparently.
And while we're doing a grab bag of mostly local topics, it seems the local citizenry in Portland is solidly opposed to trying to land the 2008 Republican Convention. The culture clash would be awfully fun to watch, though, you have to admit.
Some candidate statements from the upcoming student government elections at Portland State University. Back before there was an Internet, you couldn't enjoy all this useless blathering unless you were right on campus. But now, citizens of fledgling third-world democracies can find this stuff and learn a thing or two about how to make utterly empty and vapid campaign promises.
And finally, let's all raise a glass to the nice folks at the Technical University of Darmstadt, who've just unveiled their newly invented robotic bartender. The Register article is the only one that correctly places the university in Germany, not the Netherlands. Note to journalists: "Deutschland" != "Dutch". Sheesh.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Egg and Olive Penguins

From the very beginning, it was inevitable that I'd eventually write about the egg-and-olive penguin phenomenon. It's a unique combination of two recurring themes here at Cyclotram: cute animals and horrific 60's cookbooks. As the original article notes, you can indeed assemble a semi-realistic, semi-cute, semi-edible, semi-penguin-like object out of nothing but black olives, hard-boiled eggs, and toothpicks. Does this count as "cooking", or do we file it under "hobbies and crafts"?

And to top it off, the, ah, recipe first appeared in an immortal tome titled "Meals with FOREIGN FLAIR". It's not known what country the authors had in mind, in this case. Perhaps Italy, because of the olives, you know.

I had a surprising amount of trouble locating pictures of egg-and-olive penguins. Once upon a time, they were everywhere, in every cookbook. But that was in the pre-Internet era, and they seem doomed to be one of the many things destined to disappear down our collective cultural memory hole, merely because they failed to make the leap to the latest and greatest medium. Just like all the great songs that never made the leap from 8-track to mp3. Yes, both of them.

If you'd like to compare and contrast, here's another penguin recipe. This recipe suggests they'd be perfect for a Linux get-together. Not because anyone will eat them, but a good ironic laugh will be had by all.

The page also provides a recipe for Tang Pie, but sadly there's no image to go with it. Sure, we can all laugh about it now, but when they start holding county fairs on the moon, this recipe's guaranteed to bring home a nice blue ribbon for some happy homemaker of the future.

If you tire of the whole egg-and-olive business, and you wonder what real penguins taste like, you may be out of luck, if this FAQ from NASA is to be believed. Seems the UN frowns on that sort of thing. Another FAQ page, this time from the US Antarctic Program. There seems to be a fairly widespread public interest in chowing down on penguins, which our government is valiantly struggling to discourage. Here's one rather colorful passage.

Frederick A. Cook, a doctor aboard the Belgian vessel Belgica when it was stuck in pack ice in 1898, basically regarded penguins as inedible: "If it's possible to imagine a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce, the illustration would be complete." But because they needed fresh meat to help combat scurvy, he told the captain of ship to regard penguins as medicinal, and swallow the meat as a duty and example to others.

You have to admit that sounds awfully discouraging. Although it's also true that most food from the 60's and 70's could be described in roughly the same way. Sometimes there was even Jello(TM) involved. Even today we aren't entirely free of icky retro-food. As one example, the one and only Emeril recently proffered a recipe for lima bean casserole, although at least he had the decency to relegate it to being a side dish and not the main course. So in theory you could feed it to the dog and nobody would notice, assuming the dog was hungry enough.

And speaking of Linux, which we were doing a minute ago becaue of the whole penguin thing, while also speaking of things that ought to disgust all civilized minds, everything's looking very very bad for SCO these days, as usual. And yet the charade continues. I just don't get it. I really don't. I mean, even back in the lawless days of the Spanish Main, you couldn't go on indefinitely in the piracy business unless you managed to turn a profit on occasion. Granted, these days SCO's more of a ghost ship than a pirate ship, but it's still amazing (and highly suspicious) how the bastards keep the damn thing afloat.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Generic Followup

The title of this post is a very, very poor title, according to an article I came across on how to crack the blogging "A-list". And, I mean, who wouldn't aspire to that?) Also, I need to use lots of graphics, and generally try to make people believe (rightly or wrongly) that they know and like me. Hmm. I'll take that under advisement, I guess.

But I do like graphics. Here's a French bulldog puppy for ya. Everybody and their sister loves puppies, right? See, I can pander shamelessly with the best of 'em, if I need to. If the puppies don't reel 'em in, I can always try bunnies. Evwybody wuvs bunnies!

Although (and this is the followup I mentioned) I have discovered a surefire way of my own of generating at least one or two guaranteed hits. And now I'm going to let you in on it, absolutely free. Just be sure to use the phrase pretrib rapture somewhere in your post, and bingo! The previous post's already gotten two search engine hits, and I'm guessing the first was probably the same person who left the earlier note about that "Diehards" article. Oh, goodness me, I've gone and used the phrase "pretrib rapture" again, so I'm guessing this post will pull in a hit or two as well. Hello, again!

As a followup to an earlier post of mine, but kind of still on the topic of luring unwitting visitors to this dark and remote corner of the web, I took a peek at Technorati to see if I show up there at all. Just out of idle curiosity, mind you. The answer is of course "no", and the only hit for the word "Cyclotram" is a movie review of Unknown World. Like most reviewers, he got bored and rated it a 2 out of 5. Am I the only person on the whole freakin' planet who likes this movie?

Then I decided to google for "cyclotram". Again, purely out of idle curiosity, you understand, not because I'm wallowing in vanity and neediness or anything. Lo and behold, at the moment this very blog sits squarely atop the heap. Followed closely by the FeedBurner RSS feed I set up a while back, which is odd since I'm not aware that anyone's actually using the thing, other than the occasional hit from Yahoo's blogsearch bot. But hey, at least I can say I'm down with the whole groovy RSS thing, which is about as close as I've ever gotten to being trendy. Next, after lil' ol' me, comes the movie's page in Amazon's DVD section.

Hey, whaddya know, I also show up on something called BlogShares, which claims to be some sort of fantasy blog stock market. Whatever the hell that is.

I guess I'd better get busy spending all that fantasy IPO cash I didn't realize I had, and start making brainless bizdev deals with other little-known blogs, and then post about it here, thereby driving my stock up even further. It's a new economy!!! To the moon!!!

How to suck up to me...

In a highly encouraging development, Guy Kawasaki has written a piece about how to suck up to bloggers. His thesis: Suppose you're a soulless corporate marketroid with a product to sell, and you'd really like the blogosphere to do one of those nifty viral marketing campaigns for you, gratis. Or as close to gratis as you can manage. What you want to do, in essence, is adopt a highly condescending attitude towards bloggers, and regard them as insecure little kids who respond well to, among other things:

Extravagant and obviously insincere praise
Random bits of token schwag straight from the bargain bin, and
Smarmy marketers who pretend to be their new best friend in all the world.

As an aside, I do have a Guy Kawasaki anecdote. He was an investor in a company I worked for at one time, and he dropped by and gave a little insipirational talk, followed by a bit of Q&A. Someone mentioned they'd read a book recently that had a glowing quote of his on the cover, heaping praise on the book, going on to say they agreed with his assessment. Kawasaki then admitted he'd never actually read the book, and said that he often gives canned quotes like that out of professional courtesy. Didn't see a blessed thing wrong with that. I mean, what could possibly be wrong with deceiving the general public? After all, if you can't deceive them, who can you deceive? That was the day I decided Kawasaki was a total sleazebag.

Here are a couple of other blogger takes on the article: Marshall Sponder at WebmetricsGuru and Jeremy Zawodny.

For my part, my first reaction is to feel terribly, terribly left out. I've been doing this for a couple of months now, and I still haven't been contacted by anyone's corporate marketing department. Kawasaki at one point says "Today's egocentric, self-indulgent blogger with five page views per day may well be tomorrow's Technorati 100 stud." Couldn't agree more, although I'd like to think that I'm neither egocentric nor self-indulgent, and it's also true that five page views per day is a red-letter day here at Cyclotram, and furthermore I don't think I'm the most easily persuaded person on the planet. Still, when there's a big party going on and nobody thought to invite you, you can't help but grumble a little. It reminds me of high school, and I'd rather not be reminded of high school.

So far there's only been one instance of anyone trying to get their personal topic onto my radar. In a recent post where I ranted about the so-called "rapture", I recently got a rare user comment suggesting that I cover the topic further, particularly an article titled "Pretrib Rapture Diehards". So there, I've actually gone and linked to the original, and users can go look at it for themselves. The article takes a different perspective than I do, and seems to be arguing that it's incorrect theology. Whereas I argue that "incorrect theology" is redundant, as there's no other kind of theology. All religious beliefs are untrue, but some are harmless and others aren't. If religious people are just going to sit around navel-gazing all day, it doesn't impact me other than giving me an excuse to roll my eyes a little. But it's another matter entirely when they demand eternal war against the evil unbelievers on the other side of the planet, coupled with a gimlet-eyed book-burning theocracy here at home. Even if their theological credentials were impeccable, and they could point to passages where Jesus commanded his followers to go forth and slay the infidels in his name, or laid out God's precise wishes regarding stem cells and people in persistent vegetative states, they'd still be precisely as wrong as they are now. (As an aside, here's a good blog entry I came across discussing Thomas Jefferson's edited-down bible, where he excised all the silly and irrelevant crap about miracles and so forth.)

In any case, it turns out that the user who made this comment has made a bit of a hobby of posting similar comments around the net, encouraging people to check out the "Diehards" article. So I guess in a large sense we could consider this a marketing campaign. And I did take the bait, sort of, which ought to be really encouraging for anyone who'd like to try enlisting me in a campaign to really sell something.

I mean, personal integrity and the solemn Blogger's Oath we all take (c'mon, don't tell me you forgot about that part) both prohibit me from guaranteeing or otherwise leading people to believe that I can be bought for any price, much less that I'd stay bought thereafter. But it'd be highly entertaining and possibly lucrative if the world's top marketers and lobbyists decided to have a go at it. Why should "important" bloggers and politicians and doctors get all the goodies?

In that spirit, here are a few basic do's and dont's if you want me to blog on your behalf.

Golf doesn't interest me, either as a player or as a spectator. All-expenses-paid trips to St. Andrews may be enough to buy Tom DeLay's undying loyalty, but I like to think I'm a tougher nut to crack than ol' bug-boy there.
I don't want a freakin' polo shirt. If I wanted polo shirts, I'd go to more trade shows. Pens with your logo on 'em, maybe, but if they run out of ink or dry out quickly, you risk the infinite wrath of the blogoverse. So logo pens are probably out too. In general, anything that says "I've got a whole crate of these, and I'm handing them out to bloggers like candy" isn't going to do you a lot of good. I mean, how am I supposed to feel all warm and fuzzy and special and excited about your product unless you prove you care deeply about the real me, by getting me something a.) unique, and b.) expensive. A shiny new Lotus Elise or Exige might be a step in the right direction, so long as we're playing Dear Santa here. British Racing Green, natch.
If you're trying to sell crack cocaine, or Windows XP, or lite beer, or a war you'd like to start, I'm afraid you're out of luck. I have to draw the line somewhere.
I've mentioned that I like wine on occasion, right? Great. Although I should caution that it's not a lifestyle affectation for me, so don't make the mistake of thinking I also care about the other stuff that's supposed to be inseparable parts of the "lifestyle" (cigars, expensive Harleys, Hummers, Dockers, big shiny metal watches, er, "sports chronographs", fighter pilot fantasy camps, etc.).
If you have cool hardware, it might be worthwhile to ship me some and see if that helps. Be warned that if you send the bottom-of-the-barrel entry level model, I will find out. Infinite wrath of the blogoverse, remember?
Kawasaki's only real insight, in my mind, is the bit where he suggests Stanley Cup tickets might be helpful. Really it depends on who's playing, though. If Detroit's playing, I'll want seats close to the ice, and a generous supply of fresh octopus. You know, for throwing.
If one were to skip the shopping trip and just donate cash, it would make the whole transaction so much more honest, don't you agree? If you've actually read this blog at all, you'll have noticed that I often rant about people who aren't honest about their motives. No sneakiness, no wink-winks, no quid pro quo. You want a deal, put it in writing, with greenbacks behind it.
If you want me to use phrases or words I normally despise, like "paradigm" or "synergize", it'll cost you extra, big time. And I'll still probably put them in quotes. Readers will think it's more "authentic" that way. Trust me. We'll fool 'em all, and make millions! Mwhahahaha!
And I should mention that no matter what, I'll feel obligated to do the full disclosure thing and inform readers I'm shilling for someone on a paid, or semi-paid basis. It's only fair. If readers are going to get spoon-fed, they at least ought to know who's holding the spoon.

There. The cards are on the table. So if I sound like the ideal willing patsy for your unholy corporate interests, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Thx. Mgmt.

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