Expendable

So, imagine my surprise yesterday when the lil man from the Post Awful drives up with a big package, which I just assume is something that Peggy ordered until I look at the label. "Think Geek?" I think to myself. "Where do I know that name from?"

And then I see that it's addressed c/o me to "Jack Bals" at "the fhb blog" and I start laughing.

"Yeah, crewman. Just go back behind that rock there while Bones, Spock and I go in the other direction, okay?"

"Y---eeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

"He's dead, Jim."

THANK YOU, MIMI!

.

For the Inner Geek

In the Star Trek universe, the Red Shirt is the phase-cannon fodder obliterated on screen to alert the audience to the danger of the situation. It's Roddenberry proclaiming, "We could have just killed one of the characters you cared about!" The Red Shirt is a sci-fi idiom for the anonymous, the expendable, the smoking boots behind a boulder. We've printed that word, "Expendable," in a Trekish font on a red 50% polyester/50% cotton jersey ringer with black rib-knit collar and cuffs.

Just don't stand next to us when you wear that thing.

via ThinkGeek: from $12.99. I think this one will be on the "Buy" list once I start think about wearing "Ts" again.

Staying Cool

A great idea from Kevin Kelley over at Cool Tools:

When it came to music, I was an old fogie. I had a shelf full of Bob Dylan, Allman Brothers, Brian Eno, and more Bob Dylan. You know, old guy's music. I actually liked a lot of the new popular music I overheard, I was just not up on it. Didn't know what was what. Recently I've found two tools to keep me current with great contemporary music that wasn't just top 40. My iPod is now full of some pretty hip music, which I thoroughly enjoy.

Here's what works for me. At my birthday or Christmas, I request as my only present that my kids, nieces and nephews burn me a disc of their favorite music in the last year, or so. It is an easy gift for them to make, and a great learning experience for me. The few tracks I can't stand, I just delete. The stuff I love I seek out on iTunes to purchase more of. From this I get the fashionable tunes.

This trick actually works even better with kids not your own. When I am traveling overseas I ask students who befriend me to burn me a CD of their favorite local tunes, and boy does this beckon forth some great unknown stuff. I landed some lovely Polish rock this way. I've learned to not be bashful asking because everyone loves to share their favorites. The main thing is to not ask your friends; they think too much like you. Instead you want the "other-ness" from fans in other lands and other generations. In my experience this method works better than following random play lists on iTunes, or random recommendations on Amazon. The winnowing process to burn to a CD is more selective, and perhaps because it is being made for a specific person -- me -- it is, well, more personalized.

Matt, Dan, Mimi, et al; you now know what I want the next time you want to give your ol' fogey relative something for his birthday or Christmas.

WATCHMEN Movie in Jeopardy?

The curse apparently continues:

20th Century Fox is seeking an injunction to stop production of "Watchmen" until its rights dispute with Warner Bros. is cleared up, the movie's March 2009 release date may be in jeopardy...

via Brainiac

Star Trek Meets Jefferson Airplane

For all the cat walking on the piano; let's blow up a mail box; chocolate rain crap on YouTube, you get the occasional moment of brilliance, like this. "Feed your head" indeed.

Are You Connected to Mountaintop Removal?

Mountaintop removal is a radical form of coal mining where entire mountains are literally blown up. This new web tool at iLoveMountains.org allows you to see how your power company is connected to coal mined through mountaintop removal.

Zip code 03054: Merrimack, NH

You are connected to mountaintop removal. Your electricity provider, Public Service Co of NH, buys coal from companies engaged in mountaintop removal

The story of Kirk, West Virginia, is one of many that are connected to the power plants on your grid, which are marked on the map below.

The mountaintop removal mines shown in red are connected to the nearest coal power plant on your grid: Merrimack, operated by Public Service Co of NH.

Click on the mine symbols to get a closer look, or click here for a detailed explanation.

Poetry Hour with Your Host, The Hulk

Even here -- even in peaceful forest -- they will not leave Hulk alone!
Wherever Hulk goes, enemies follow him -- try to hurt him!
Why? Hulk does not know! All Hulk does know is --
When enemies attack, Hulk fights back -- and smashes -- HUH?
Is not enemy -- is tree! Hulk is attacked by -- tree??
Wha --? Now other trees attack Hulk -- and rocks -- flying rocks!
Hulk is confused -- doesn't understand!
Hulk LIKED trees. Hulk LIKED rocks.
Hulk thought they were his friends -- Hulk's ONLY friends --
But if peaceful forest attacks Hulk, too -- then Hulk has no friends --
and Hulk will crush anything that gets in Hulk's way!
Do you hear Hulk, rocks?
Do you hear Hulk, trees?
Leave Hulk ALONE -- or Hulk will make you REGRET it! - Len Wein DEFENDERS issue, #12, February 1973.

WGA Strike News

I still have the lil' " AMPTP walk out" banner at the top of the blog, but I'm hopeful I'll be taking it down soon. It some ways it's a false flag because, as you know if you've been following the news, the AMPTP and WGA negotiators have been in "informal" discussions since the past weekend, and rumors are rife that they're close to agreement on a new contract.

But rumors are just rumors, as Mark Evanier notes, and we'll have to wait and see. According to Mark, "The Writers Guild is convening an 'informational meeting' for Saturday evening at the Shrine Auditorium," which he opins is a message to the Evil Empite to the effect, "Hey, we're bringing the whole membership in...and on a Saturday evening, no less. It would be in your best interest for us to have a deal by then which we can enthusiastically recommend to the membership."

One can hope. I haven't felt the withdrawal pain as keenly as I had imagined, thanks to the intermittent but always welcome Medium, the start of new seasons of Torchwood and Dr. Who on BBC America, and the surprisingly good Sarah Connor Chronicles which is currently running on 24's Fox slot. I kind of miss 24, but last season was sooooo bad that giving it a year's rest might be the best thing for our long-term relationship. And I kind of miss Heroes, but not as much as I thought I would. Heroes seems to be like the nut dish of TV. You'll sample it until the bowl is empty when it's around, but you don't think about it when it's not there.

It's a good thing I'm not on the WGA negotiating team. I wouldn't come off strike until the AMPTP promised to put the full season of Day Break on DVD. I'm still pissed about that.

Patti Smith @ the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

"I felt I should be able to do something at the Smithsonian, being a Smith." - Patti Smith

Smith was at the Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium at the Smithsonian's Archive's of American Art this past weekend, in promotion of a new book the Archives are publishing, With Love, a collection of letters between artists and their loved ones.

The letters, which ranged from funny to quirky to heartbreaking, discussed love by way of art, or art by way of love. The letters she read were all notable, but it was her asides and introductions that really made the evening. Like the way she described the artist Joan Mitchell, before reading her letter to lover Michael Goldberg. "Certain broads just know how to smoke a cigarette. I know we're not supposed to admire it." That particular letter was read with such personal, casual colloquialism that it sounded as if Smith herself had written it. "I'm drinkin' the beer you left me on the winah' sill. And I'm kissin you. I do this all the time." As you might expect, she discussed letters as a lost art — their beauty being in their "paper, the handwriting, the little drawings." The handwriting that conveys the sorrow or energy of the authors. She said, "I know they can be burned... but they can't be deleted."

Sounds like the perfect Valentine Day's gift for your literary sweetie.

Amanda Mattos' full article is well worth the read. As I said in my comments over at the DCist site, reading it made me wish I had been there.

The World of the Class of 2011

From Beloit College's annual "Mindset List":

Each August for the past decade, as faculty prepare for the academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has released the Beloit College Mindset List. Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989.

Some random samplings for the Class of 2011...

They've grown up with bottled water.

They've never "rolled down" a car window.

They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

The World Wide Web has been here since they were born.

Flickr Users to M-soft: Eff Off!

You can't say that Microsoft doesn't inspire passion. Unfortunately, it's usually the wrong sort of passion.

via the "Microsoft: Keep your evil, grubby hands off of our Flickr" photo pool.

Dreamtime catchup

The blog/podcast that just keeps on going is at Episode 49 with a show on Blossom (Dearie) and Jack (Sheldon), two jazz artists with a mutual Schoolhouse Rock! connection.

I made several changes in late 2007, finally creating a dreamtimepodcast.com domain, cloaking the blog - which is still hosted by blogspot - under the aegis of that domain, and moving the then-45 podcasts away from my original host, Solidcasts, over to their new Dreamtime home. The transition went relatively smoothly, except for iTunes. Note to any burgeoning podcasters out there - do not let your RSS Feed out of your control.

WARNING - Heavy geek weather ahead: Unfortunately, when I originally signed Dreamtime up in the iTunes directory, I used the direct Solidcasts RSS Feed. While Solidcasts had the benefit of creating/updating the feed through a simple form entry system, they provide no way for you to manually update the feed. Thus, no way to redirect to a new feed location. Plus, when you kill the Solidcasts account, they simply delete the feed. As far as I could determine, I had about 150 listeners who were subscribed through the iTunes directory, so I had to create a special show giving them instructions on how to find episodes when I moved. Most seem to have made the transition. But the old Dreamtime listing - now pod-dead - still sits in the iTunes directory, the iTunes' team ears deaf to my pleas to redirect the listing to the new feed.

The solution to the problem - if you care at this point - is to 1) make sure that your original feed is under your control so you can create a feed redirect if necessary, and 2) Use Feedburner as the feed address for all podcast listings, including iTunes.

End Geek Storm.

Now Master of my own Domain, I'm getting better tracking of audience stats: Dreamtime the blog gets about 4-5,000 a month visitors a month, about 60 percent of those coming from a referring site, such as Expecting Rain, which is my #1 supplier of visitors. #2 is "Night Time in the Big City," more-or-less a TTRH mp3 download site, and #3 is usually the TTRH Wikipedia article.

About 30 percent of visitors come through some sort of search, and the remaining 10 percent hit Dreamtime directly. And that pretty much reflects my subscriber base. I seem to have about 500 subscribers to the podcast, a smaller - but I think, more accurate - figure than the numbers reflected by Solidcast's stats. And I have a slightly higher number of regular readers at the blog itself.

Evolution Explains Why Lolcats Control Your Mind

My rule about LOLcats is only to post the ones that make me, in fact, LOL. And this one did.

My new favorite place - i09 - has an article on why we find LOLcats fascinating, as well as a couple of other great images. I'm not sure I buy the argument, though. I think a commenter's theory, that we all just likez cheeseburgerz, is as likely.

2b? Nt2b?*

"... Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels [in Japan], five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere." - via the New York Times.

There are moments - happily still few and far-between - when I can feel myself ossifying. Reading Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular, an excellent article in this past Sunday's NY Times that I commend to your attention, was one of the moments. I still feel fairly hip, but there's an entire generation behind me whose thinking and ways of communicating are as different from mine - and probably yours - as a Spider from Mars. It took me a long time to learn that part of my difficulty in understanding my father was that I was dealing with a man whose basic adult attitudes and prejudices were mostly formed in the `20s and `30s, as mine were by the `60s and `70s. It's the rare person who can overcome the world picture you grew up with.

*the title, btw, was meant as a joke, as I remembered reading several parodies of classic novels redone as text messages. But, of course, speaking of ossifying...

Small Stakes Poker Game Busted in CA

This may already be all over the poker blogosphere, but since I only read two blogs of said sphere and have seen it in neither, here it is.

From Reason Magazine...

"...If California is like most states (and I believe it is), a poker game is only illegal if the house is taking a rake off the top. In this case, it looks like that "rake" was the $5 the extra the hosts asked from each buy-in to pay for pizza and beer.

Police also took a 13-year-old girl out of the home, away from her parents, and turned her over to child protective services. In addition to the charge of running an illegal gambling operation, the hosts are also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Good thing the poor girl was saved before slouching toward an inevitable life of crime..."

... and a first-hand account here.

The New Black is the... New Black

via Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers said on Tuesday they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

Why We Strike

Robert Elisberg has a tongue-in-cheek but very accurate FAQ about the Writers Guild of America strike...

I hear that the directors are more mature than writers, which is why the AMPTP corporations are negotiating with them?

Some people believe that third-graders are more mature than writers, but it only appears that way because writers rarely see daylight or other humans very often. The AMPTP corporations are negotiating with directors because it's what they've wanted to do since Day One. You see, directors hate striking for anything. In their entire history, they have struck once, for five minutes. Literally. Actually, it was more a clerical error. How far will directors go to avoid striking, even for something worthwhile? In 1984, Gil Cates negotiated the royalties for home video down by 80 percent, to the whopping 4 cents that artists get today. If you were the AMPTP, who would you rather negotiate with? The WGA was a nuisance that had to be tolerated until the directors were finally available. But now, writers have created so much attention about New Media that even the DGA knows it can get something good, if it tries.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Symbolic Analyst

While many commuters dream of working at home, telecommuting, I happen to know what it's like to work that way.

I never could stand to commute or even get out of my pajamas if I didn't want to, so I've always worked at home. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. Others like myself also have been drawn into the online world because they shared with me the occupational hazard of the self-employed, home-based symbolic analyst of the 1990s -- isolation.

The kind of people that Robert Reich, call ``symbolic analysts'' are natural matches for online communities: programmers, writers, freelance artists and designers, independent radio and television producers, editors, researchers, librarians. People who know what to do with symbols, abstractions, and representations, but who sometimes find themselves spending more time with keyboards and screens than human companions. ~ Howard Rheingold

via 43 Folders, as Matt Wood, also notes, "I’m curious to see [Rheingold's] updated thoughts on isolation of the self-employed, “symbolic analyst,” because as someone whose daily companions are usually a toddler and a dog, I can tell you that it still exists 16 years later.

As it does. 90 percent of the time, I can't imagine ever going back to "go-to-work" work. But the isolation - especially in the Winter when I tend to cocoon more, finding any excuse not to go out - does get to me occasionally. And, as much as I love them, two cats provide little intellectual stimulation. Emotional and even physical, as I chase the whooping Bear around the house, yes. Intellectual, no.

David Lynch on Watching Films on Effing Telephones

I love my new iTouch above all things, and have even occasionally watched some short videos on it, but Lynch is right. Just as the experience from theatre to living room TV, watching a movie on the small screen of a phone or video player diminishes the experience.

Bob Dylan makes a similar argument about how bad music sounds today compared against older recordings, another diminished experience for the audience. You wonder how far it will go. Will their be a lash back sometime in the future where a jaded audience demands quality over technology? Or will anybody care?

via Iggy, whose blog I yes still read through its RSS Feed - which come to think of it could be argued as a diminished experience itself. Is reading blog snippets through a Reader a lesser experience than actually going to the blog and reading the full post?

It's Another One of your Spooky Do's

The most intelligent science fiction series of 2007 - plus lotsa shagging and snoggin' - is back for Season 2.