Go, right now, to this posting in The Tinfoil Project (the latest from Shelly Powers) and enjoy. God, Shelly. Just beautiful. I'm, I'm, fraught with dumbstruck admiration.

Happy Birthday, Jill!

The Most Surreal Strip

"Zippy the Pinhead" might have a claim as the world's most surreal comic, but my vote would be for the "so normal, it's bizarre", strip, "For Better or for Worse" by Lynn Johnston, which I read religiously every morning.

FboFW eerily violates every precept of a daily comic strip. It's set in Canada (Canada?). It has month-long, meandering story arcs whose original plots I've forgotten by the time they end. The characters - all somewhat pudgy unisex types - are drawn and act so similarly that I have trouble differentiating them from each other. The only name I can ever remember is "April."

A month in a typical FBoFW story might have April's boyfriend, April, a helicopter pilot, flying in to her graduation ceremony, before she goes to teach the Aprilapril Indian tribe in the far North. Meanwhile, April receives a motorcycle on loan from her mechanic, April, to the delight of her little sister, April, who is secretly in love with her brother's photographer friend, April. Meanwhile, old April falls down the stairs in her candy shop, while her dog April howls for help. April's grandfather, April, grouchily reminisces about when he used to be a hot item on the guitar.

I think what I like most is Johnston's earnest attempts at humor. You can tell she's almost completely without a sense of humor, but still tries her best. Sometimes she delivers punch lines that fall as flat as a Thanksgiving dinner joke told by your drunk Uncle Harry. Sometimes after three panels of set-up, there isn't any punch line at all.

It's kind of like life itself. Surrealism masqueradiing as normalcy. Punch lines you never get. Maybe that's why I like FBoFW so much.

Prancing in the rain

Massive thunderstorms yesterday evening in southern New Hampshire. Fall is nearing, and it was dark by eight, the only illumination outside coming from the constant lightning.

"Come out to the porch and see," Peg said. "It's like a solid wall of water."

"Want to..." I began to ask, as we watched the rain pour down.

"I'll go if you go," she interrupted.

And we quickly stripped off our clothes, and charged buck-naked out into the grass on the front lawn, prancing in the rain and the dark, Peg giggling like a teenager all the time. We circled the house hand-in-hand as the rain poured down and the lightning flashed...

... and then went back inside, toweled off, and became adults again.

Gmail for the troops: Have a gmail (Google email. Still invitation only at this point) invite? Here's a great idea. Donate it to a service member abroad (via Wil Wheaton dot net).

I started reading comic books again in the mid-80's, largely due to Dave Steven's "The Rocketeer", published by Pacific Comics. It's not hyperbole to say that Pacific changed the face of comic books... and made the industry a better place to work for both writers and artists. Here's an in-depth history of Pacific, by Jay Allen Sanford (via "news from me").

A nice deal here, via Mark Evanier's "News from ME" (link to left). 25 free digital prints from participating Target's. Catch: Offer expires this Sunday the 22nd.

It's all about me

With apologies to Shelly at Burningbird for semi-appropriating her title. Shelly's addition of an "About Me" link to her weblog (which, mysteriously, has disappeared today) prompted me to update my profile on my business site... as well as fixing a typo I found elsewhere that survived dozens of prior reviews. Typos are like cockroaches, there's never just one.

Anyway, I've been meaning to rewrite the profile to better reflect what I'm doing now -- more writing and creative direction, less hands-on multimedia. I'm leaning towards Pdf'ing my profile and using it as my primary resume for future work. I've received good feedback on it and (I think) it paints a better portrait of who I am and what I do than the traditional resume. Please God that I never, ever, have to again go back to a "go-to-work" sort of job and need a traditional resume.

One more try, done during lunch 

Strawberry Fields, NYC, April 2004 

I dunno.. think there's any resemblance? Created with "The Portrait Illustration Maker"site, which also contains the wonderful copyright notice, "to which the copyright of the picture compounded here is exposed"

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” - Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

One of Sterling's characters misquotes (I think) Heinlein on pages 64-65 in the hardcopy “The Zenith Angle”, perhaps forgivable as the character is also suffering from Alzheimer’s. I put “I think” in parentheses as one of the great mousetraps of the Web is incorrect reproduction of quotations, and almost never proper citation of the source. I suspect the above quote is the correct one, because it’s the most often reproduced, but in the interests of full disclosure, will note that I haven’t gone to the source to verify. But try running the first few keywords of the Heinlein quote through Google and you’ll get three different variations on the first page of results, with some writers correctly attributing it to Heinlein, some to his fictional character Lazarus Long with no mention of RAH, some mentioning that it was extracted from “Time Enough for Love” (or the “”Notebooks of Lazarus Long” chapbook, where it was reproduced), some not bothering to provide any reference at all.

Is the version above the correct one? I think so, but it’s just as possible that one person posted it incorrectly and others – including me – are compounding the error. State something wrong in enough places on the Web and eventually it becomes a “fact”, especially if you’re googling for it. Sterling, for whatever reason, leaves out “balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone… cooperate, act alone… analyze a new problem…”

I wonder if he Googled it?

Finding the exact citation for a quotation, or for that matter, the exact quotation, on the Web was also one of my banes as a Google Answers researcher, almost always taking more time/effort than expected when I tried my hand at it, and seldom turning out well. I finally gave up hunting down quotations, although I had one unusual success.

One (or more)-liner reviews: Bruce Sterling's "The Zenith Angle" is a mind-candy read of interesting ideas loosely linked together by a forgettable plot. Sterling zips like a hummingbird on speed from subjects ranging from laser cannons, to why corporate jets are dangerous to homeland security and what can be done about it, to how to set up a SkunkWorks, to why the war on terrorism is similar to the dot.com boom. I think Sterling was reading Neal Stephenson when writing “”Zenith”, as the characters’ voices are all distractingly reminiscent of those in “Cryptonomicon.” Still recommended with all those disclaimers.

“Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” Today is the birthday of one of my boyhood heroes, whose wine the adult Fred enjoys today. Happy Birthday, Fess! In a nice piece of synchronicity, Davy Crockett’s birthday is tomorrow, August 17th.

If you're depressed, I suggest you hustle over and read/view Shelly Powers' "To my Terraphile Friends" posting at Burningbird. Shelly is not only a very good writer, she has one of the prettiest weblogs I've ever seen. The photos brought a smile on a dreary, rainy New England morning.

"This is not my blood": In June, an 11-year-old Japanese schoolgirl murders an 12-year-old classmate, apparently because the victim had been making fun of her on the Web. The Washinton Post article, reprinted in the Globe, on the escalating violent crimes of Japanese youth. also mentions "hikkomori syndrome", a total withdrawal from society that may affect up to a million Japanese adolescents.

Sometimes I think Japan is 15 minutes into our future... sometimes I think I'm in no hurry to get there.

Writing in today's Boston Globe on bidding for shares in Google's IPO, Steve Syre characterizes it as an "unnecessarily complicated, confusing process and an emphasis on secrecy when transparency should have been the standard."

"Unnecessarily complicated, confusing, and an emphasis on secrecy" pretty well sums up my experience as a researcher with Google Answers, which I think I'll be writing about in the coming days.

If you're one of those people who only buys Playboy for the articles, save yourself some money. You can read the interview that caused the latest Google gaffe (a term I'm thinking of copyrighting) as an amendment to their SEC filing right here.

I was just thinking today that one of the things that makes you feel old is seeing familar names in the obits nearly every week. Bon Voyage, Julia. Peg's cooked up a lot of great meals from your books. I'm sorry you're gone, but 91 and passing away in your sleep is about as easy way to go as I can think of.

An interesting story by Daniel Rentzer on an encounter with Jim McManus during the World Poker Tour championship event at Bellagio. I'm going to excerpt it, as frankly, Rentzer isn't much of a stylist, and the story is buried in the middle of a less-than-interesting article. The full piece is here, if you want to wade through it. As to the McManus episode...

"... Prior to this hand I lost roughly 25,000 chips which was about half my stack, to the well respected author of "positively fifth street" James McManus. The confrontation we got in was really strange and made me very angry to say the least. If I recall correctly I was dealt K-Q and brought it in for a raise from middle position. Jim took his time and called the raise. The flop came with three spades and a Queen, giving me a pair of queens with a strong kicker.

I bet again and Jim took his cards and pushed them towards the dealer and it looked to me like he was folding. Jim never called for time and never protected his hand. The dealer also thought he was folding and took his cards and put them in the muck. Right when I was about to throw my cards away Jim started yelling at the dealer and claimed he never meant to fold his hand. He had flopped the nut flush and was apparently trying to determine how much he was going to raise me. But the entire situation confused the hell out of me and I did not understand if he was serious at first, because he had actually pushed his cards towards the dealer.

Anyways, the floor man came over and took Jim away from the table to ask him what he had thrown away. The floor man then checked the muck where his cards had been thrown away and gave him his hand backafter confirming that the cards were his. It was clear which two cards were his because they were only about half way into the muck. Most casinos would never even have considered giving him his hand back, but the rules differ from casino to casino. He finally got his cards back and raised me whereby I called.

I also called his bets on the turn and the river when the river card came with a king. I now had top two pair and liked my hand enough to call his all-in bet on the river. He showed the nut-flush and I lost about 25,000 chips on this hand. I probably would have folded my hand if I could have got a read on him during the flop betting, but after all the commotion I was confused and made a bad call. I still don't think it was correct to give a player his cards back after they hit the muck, especially if the player had pushed his cards towards the dealer. This hand hurt big time and most likely was the main reason I did not have a chance to win this event."

...right, Daniel. It's all that nasty ol' writer's fault.