Month Two--
See Archives for October's entries.

First let me note that we are back to standard time, which is the only time we ought to be using, in my opinion. Goddamned time changes! We all need to synchronize our watches to Greenwich Mean Time, and be done with all this time zone nonsense.

I hope that motherfucking cowboy doesn't win another term in the White House. He makes Southerners look bad. At the same time, electing a Massachusetts Democrat makes me a bit queasy. Reminds me of Dukakis, who was a total pinko. And that's coming from someone with socialist tendencies (at least re. health care). That's all I have to say about the election.

So it's the day after elections, and no winner yet. Everyone says too close to call. Is that a surprise? Did anyone think there would be a clear winner. And so the contest continues: Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich.Who will win?

Politics can be interesting and all, but few people make it interesting. I think I would make a really nasty politician. I would probably be unrelenting in a personal attack on my opponent, digging up dirty laundry and using somewhat underhanded propagandatechniques. Among those techniques are:

Name-calling
Glittering generalities
Euphemisms
Transfer
Testimonial
Plain Folks
Bandwagon
Fear

But if you really care, you'll visit the propagandacritic site.
Something else along those lines is this site I found that deals with different types of fallaciesthat are used in logical arguments. It would have been nice to have this list before the debates in order to go over it with a red pen, checking off each fallacy as it occurs

I do have another obituary to mention. Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and writer, was assassinated in Amsterdam on Tuesday. I'm not exactly sure which Tuesday. (Article is in the NY Times, registration required, but I've head the login/password slashdot/slashdot works.) The headline read Dutch Filmmaker, an Islam Critic, Is Killedand I immediately assumed the person killed was a Somali woman, "Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born refugee who fled an arranged marriage and ended up in the Netherlands, where she is now a member of the Dutch Parliament." I know that woman has had plenty of death threats. She is very outspoken, and claims Islam subjugates women and promotes domestic violence. If you can read Dutch or aren't scared of a foreign website, hereis the personal website of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which redirects to the website for the VVDVolkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Freedom and Democracy) and they dohave an English-language version of the site. If you're lazy, or just curious enough to read three paragraphs, the following is a quote i got from yet another Dutch website.

What with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Pim Fortuyn, Holland has had more than its share of radicals (Pim Fortuyn was a gay politician who had an anti-immigration platform, and was accused of being racist but in my opinion had solid arguments. He agreed with Ayaan Hirsi Ali that Islam is a "backward religion."

Well, what do you know? I wanted to stop talking about politics, but I ended up talking about politics in the Netherlands instead. Anything to avoid talking about the mess here in the US of A.

I believe one of my coworkers has infected me with something. I feel the onset of disease . . . not at all fun. Scratchy throat has begun, but I'm trying to ward off congestion and a sore throat, the whole full-blown cold thing. I had somany cups of tea yesterday, I was pissing constantly. And since I also took a B-vitamin, it was fluorescent yellow every time.

There was a Brazilian cronica that I read a few years back about illness. A cronica is a form of writing we don't have in English, but I would compare it with a free-form editorial, but not necessarily political. They're often found in newspapers, usually under five pages long.

Anyway, the cronica was called "Turmas" or something, and any Brazilians reading this, forgive the lack of accents. I'm not exactly sure how to do that in html . . . though a quick search on google could probably enlighten me. A turma is a group of friends. A gang, but in the Little Rascals "Our Gang" sense rather than a Crips vs. Bloods sense. The word pe means "standing," so "turma de pe" would be a gang on foot, vs. "turma sentado," sitting down. In the story, an old man walks into a restaurant and sees one of his friends hanging out with a bunch of young people. They're talking about something insignificant, and eating French fries with lots of salt. A bit later, the old man pulls his friend away from the youngsters and asks what the hell he's doing with people his grandchildren's age. The man replies that this is his "turma sentado," which he much prefers to the "turma de pe." When he gets together with fellow old people, it's always at a wake, and everyone is standing around consoling the poor crying widow. "Poor thing," someone will say, "he must have eaten too much salt." Then one geezer will start talking about his aches and pains, and so it goes for the turma de pe. In contrast, when getting together with young people, they sit around ( turma sentado) and talk about trivialities, putting salt on French fries that have already been salted, and never talking about aches and pains.

I wish my grandmother would act more like the turma sentado, because there is only so much I can hear about my grandfather's medications and his latest medical problems, aches and pains, unexpected complications.

I'm working on a way to let people email a day's entry to someone. Of course there is always copy/paste, but I want to format everything nicely, make it painless for all my loyal readers (if ye exist). Since I'm doing everything from scratch (no pre-made web tools for me, thank you) it may be awhile before this ever happens. I'm still trying to get the pages to display right in different browsers. Just a brief administrative update. Move along.

Right now I'm listening to Ween's "Chocolate and Cheese" album which I came very close to re-purchasing, because i misplaced it. I knew what had happened--I took the CD to work, then put it in the wrong jewel-box with some other CD, so in my normally well-organized CD collection there was one jewel box with two discs, and I couldn't find it. Earlier this week I finally found it. Hurray for Ween! I remember first hearing "Pure Guava" in high school, and that was Ween's first album to have wide distribution. And I must say, Gene and Dean Ween put on a fine show. Saw them at Stubb's BBQ in Austin, Texas a couple years ago.

Another brief, music-related comment-- if you actually buy CDs instead of just downloading music, I highly recommend Django'sfor both new and used CDs, including some obscure ones. Apparently they have retails stores across the country, and all their used CDs are in the national database. Yesterday I got Yo La Tengo's "Electr-O-Pura," which also came out while I was in high school.

What an odd thought, that the music of my heyday is grunge, Yo La Tengo, Ween, etc. So will those bands eventually be on classic rock radio stations, or will they fade into obscurity, remembered only by aging music fans like myself?

For reference, here's how to do accents in html:
[omitted for now, in xml]
So now I can go back and correct accent marks. Oh boy.

That's plenty of rambling for today. Hasta luego. Ate logo.

I was wrong. That's not enough rambling for today. There's at least one more issue I want to address, and it's about politics. I have two relevant quotes, the first from NY Times editorialist Paul Krugman:

The next quote is from an email a friend sent me yesterday:

Paul Krugman, being a syndicated columnist, can't say things like my friend said, because it's tabboo to wish someone failure. But if they're a horrible person, why should that be wrong? Let me go on the record to say that I hope Bush fails miserably, is caught cheating on Laura with an HIV-infected crack whore (male or female, though male would be better), and goes down in history as the USA's Mussolini. Except the trains don't run on time.

Lately I've been spending more time working on the backbone of this site rather than producing new content for it. But the rationale is that I'll save myself time in the future by putting in the effort now. What do I mean by the "backbone" of the site? I'm talking about the way I organize entries, the way I deal with archiving old stuff, the layout of the site when it hits your desktop. I am trying to move all journal entries to an XML format, which is pretty cool but not 100% compatible with all browsers. If you want to see my work-in-progress, check out what I've done with October's archives. I can tell you right now that it looks fine in Mozilla and Firefox, crappy in Safari, and half-crappy in Internet Exploder 6.0. I don't have Firefox 1.0 yet, but since the site looks fine in version 0.10, I doubt the move to 1.0 will break anything.

I will say that all the different types of browsers must make cross-browser compatibility a nightmare, at least for any site that uses XML and CSS.

Okay--enough administrative crap for now. At the moment I'm filtering and degassing a buffer solution to use in a fancy, $325,000 instrument that's in my office / windowless den.

I'm heading home now. Maybe then I'll have time to ramble some more, as if there were anything interesting to write about.

I really need to start driving to work, but I can't neglect to mention the TV-B-Gone, which was invented by a guy named Mitch Altman who started a company called "Cornfield Electronics" just to make these gadgets. The article in the NY Times didn't give a link to any place to buy one, but fortunately it's just www.cornfieldelectronics.com, which makes it easier. Anyway, it's a keychain fob (I don't know what exactly a fob is) that is preprogrammed with 200 IR codes to turn off TVs. The idea is that sometimes we are forced to watch TV (or at least listen to it) in captive situations. My biggest problem was in the Austin, TX airport, where TVs are on all the time, in every corner, and they cannot be turned off or silenced. Makes it fucking impossible to read a book, at the volumes these TVs were emitting. But I'm not the only one who feels that way. There was a quote in the article that sums-up my feelings very well:

The article also mentioned that the inventor, Mitch Altman, does not himself have a television. They included a parenthetical "(of course)" but I don't think it's so obvious. I like TV, in general, but don't want it crammed down my throat. At a pub near my work, there are multiple TVs, on all the time. I guess it's kind of a sports bar, so could be expected, but it's fucking annoying to have NASCAR blaring at you from a wall-sized television right by your table when there is no one else in the establishment, and definitely no one watching. That's coming from someone who grew up in NASCAR country, so it wouldn't be any different if it were football, hockey, etc.

All right. Now I really have to go.

So, I was finally able to figure out how to login to my home computer from work. Very convenient. I figured out a few other things, too. (Geek stuff ahead; beware) Rather than deal with using tables to format my web pages, which is a rather nasty and hacky solution, I decided to use xml to store the meat of the site, and use an xsl stylesheet to transform the xml into usable html. This is done automatically by many browsers, but if you try to "view source" you'll just see the raw xml file, not a formatted html file.

So what's the solution? I searched around google and found that many people are using Java to transform xml and xsl documents into html that stupid browsers (i.e., old and not updated) can read. That's no good for me. I took an intro to Java programming class, but that was 4-ish years ago, and I Can't Remember Shit. I am suffering from CRS syndrome. Besides, a computer guru that I trust told me that Python is the bomb. Some people say it's the "silver bullet" of programming languages, because it is relatively easy to learn (I'm still learning) and it takes care of things like garbage collection. Those are the kind of details that make programming in C a nightmare. I've never gotten past "pointer arithmetic" in C. But that's okay, because I don't make my living as a code monkey. In today's employment scene, I'm sure that's a good thing. Otherwise I'd be unemployed or living in Bangalore.

So Python is what I ended up using. I paid for a subscription to the O'Reilly Safari service, which lets you "check out" a certain number of programming books to be viewed electronically, with any browser. I am simultaneously reading an intro to Python book and a book explaining how to use Python with XML. There are two major Python XML packages:

4Suite and
PyXML

I had thought installing Python modules would be cake, since Python itself is an interpreted (rather than compiled) language. In fact, lots of Python modules actually use C code to do the processor-intensive stuff, so you do have to compile stuff, and it is not cake.

Whatever. There's a Python utility that does exactly what I want. This is how I use it:

And it works like a charm. At least on my home machine. But I haven't been able to get it to work on my shared host (shared meaning I don't have root privileges, making installations painful).

That's enough geeky stuff for now. It won't apply to most people, but if there happens to be someone else in my situation, maybe it could be of use to them.

In completely unrelated news, the theatrical community is all a-twitter because of a new play written by Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues." The new play (not a monologue) is called "The Good Body" and attempts to rehash more cliched "insights" into Woman, with a capital W. Such as the fact that women are not happy with their bodies, and do ridiculous things to make themselves look good.

I wonder if substance matters at all anymore, or if I could make a bundle by telling people things that they already know, but wax eloquent while doing so. Imagine a one-man show called "Shitting in the Woods" about the life of a bear, and the troubles with catching salmon by mouth. I could talk about how sad it was that my habitat was being destroyed. I could talk about how much I like nuts and berries. It would be genius, and I would make millions.

Perhaps people would not take seriously a play about a bear. Let's forget for a second the existence of "Seussical the Musical" or "The Lion King" or "Cats." People like stuff written from the heart. I could continue the gender theme, and write about the pressures and pitfalls of being a man. How it is impossible to interpret women. How it is impossible to fathom caring about interior decoration. Gay men might be better attending "The Vagina Monologues."

When I was a pubescent boy, I recall reading "Our Bodies, Ourselves" almost cover to cover. There were some parts about masturbation and sex, but there was a whole lot more about feelings. I remember the section on lesbians, entitled (and I shit you not) "In Amerika, They Call Us Dykes." There was another section about dreams and fantasies. I'll paraphrase, but I'll pretend like it was a quote:

That's probably a bit hyperbolic, but you get the idea. Since reading that book, I have yet to encounter any original ideas on the subject of women's health, self-perception, sexuality, etc. It all seems to have been done before I was born. Why, then, is it that I can pay so much attention but the female human still seems so alien?

ODB DOA -- PCP OD? RIP

The Old Dirty Bastard a. k. a. Osiris a. k. a. Big Baby Jesus a. k. a. Dirt Dog a. k. a. Dirt McGirt a. k. a. Russell Jones is dead. He apparently complained of chest pains, then keeled over and died, right there in the recording studio. He was two days shy of 36.

This picture is probably the way I will remember him best. If you care to read what the NY Times had to say, that article is here. An Associated Press article had a touching quote from his mom, Cherry Jones:

My guess is he had a heart attack as a result of habitual crack use. Not PCP. Whereas many people say Jesus died for our sins, Big Baby Jesus sinned 'til he died, for our vicarious pleasure. If he had not lived a life of such excess, he would not be so interesting. But for me, it was really his rhymes and style that made him stand out. He was a poet. A profane--no, make that motherfuckin' profane--poet. As he explained in in the intro of "Brooklyn Zoo II,"

Anyway, I think an appropriate tribute to a poet is a collection of some of his more meaningful verses.
Chronologically, the first Old Dirty Bastard track that got my attention was "Shame on a Nigga" on the first Wu-Tang Clan album:

Also from that album, the track "Protect Ya Neck":

From his debut solo album, the track "Brooklyn Zoo II":

"Shimmy Shimmy Ya," one of ODB's few radio singles, is really one of my favorite rap recordings:

On his second solo album, a standout track is "I Can't Wait," with a sample from the TJ Hooker theme song (before my time, but still cool). At the end of the song, Big Baby Jesus gives some crazy shoutouts:

Another one of his radio singles,"Got Your Money," this one featuring Kelis (before anyone knew who she was) and the Neptunes (before anyone knew who they were, either) has one of his cleverest lines, I think--

You can call me dirty, and then lift up your skirt [clap clap]
And you want some of this dirty, God made dirt and dirt bust yo' ass!

Here's the whole verse:

I guess that's enough of a tribute to that dirty ol' nigga. Do you think they have pimps in heaven?

Been too long since I've written anything. I've been concentrating more on input than on output. The balance is hard to find. Thanksgiving is over, so the pre-Christmas blitz is about to begin. Batten down the hatches. Guard your credit cards. The advertisers are about to strike, because there are only x shopping days left until X-mas.

I think Buy Nothing Day is a cool idea. Here's a link to some info from Adbusters. And here's a link to the virtual central station for Buy Nothing Day. Too bad it was yesterday (technically, although feels like today to me since I haven't gone to bed yet). Unfortunately, I had to drive a few hundred miles today and needed to get gas and two $1 Dairy Queen burgers. On the way over Willamette Pass here in Oregon, I saw an SUV turned over in a ditch. The roads were coated in ice an inch or two thick. Not a very fun experience. I'm not a fan of ice and snow, except in homeopathic doses.

The site is embryonic at this point, but check out the new subsite located here.