John & Belle Have A Blog

Just because our computers died, doesn't mean our blog has to ...

So I got the iBook back. Nothing on it. Sigh. Sad, sad. The emptiness.

Anyhoo. You don't just want me to boohoo on your shoulder.

Actually, it's been quite good discipline not having a computer in the house in the evenings, with the wife and kids gone. I haven't really been focused on my beer drinking lately. (Ba-DUM. Thanks for coming out tonight.) No, seriously. I've been reading books and taking notes for projects on paper. And, basically, there's a lot of intellectual work I do best not on a computer. And I've been neglecting it. And now it's getting done. So that's good. I really feel very productive. (Plus I've been drinking some beer, yes. In moderation.)

Partly it's good to go without a computer because of blog addiction. It's good to not check the blogs every five minutes when I'm home alone.

I've been goofing around contently with Adobe InDesign (30-day free trial!) on my school machine. Basically I've been seeing whether it's worth the money. Lemme tell you: there's lots of palettes. And it's really not that expensive, if you can get the educational rate for the whole CS2 suite. Dunno what it costs in the states, but I can get it for $750 Sing, which is less than $500 US. That's good for Photoshop plus GoLive, Illustator, Acrobat. The works.

So anyway, I have this idea for a superhero comic. There's a mad scientist. Very much kicking it old school "they literally threw me out of medical school" school of Silver Age monologuery. But this one has been kicked out of Adobe labs for his dangerous and heretic 'electro-organic' approach to graphic design and professional publishing software. He's trying to combine Photoshop and InDesign into a single organism - more power! I need more power! But suddenly there's some sort of overload and, to make a long origin story short, the experimental hybrid organism breaks down into two piles representing its original components, now reduced to organic sludge, out of which emerge - a pair of twin heroes and a pair of twin villians. Dodge and Burn are the heroes. They have the powers of, um, making things light and dark. Firing light bolts and making the place dark. The blond, sunny one is Burn, and the paradox is that although he is apparently lighter, he makes things darker - fires dark bolts. Whatever. Dodge is the dark one. Brooding. Yet he shoots light. Anyhoo. Bleed and Slug are the villains left over from the desktop publishing half of the failed experiment. Bleed is some sort of a sinister, inky monstrosity who envelops you. Slug has the ability to ... to ... sort of extra-dimensional shift. (Yeah.) There is a 'slug' area outside of our three-dimensional space. (Like the Negative Zone.) And he darts in and out of it. I think. Furthermore, this extra-dimensional space holds information about the space we inhabit. So slug can sort of manipulate our world from this other dimension.

iDied Update; Publishing Thoughts

Well, we lost everything since the end of January, except for about 600 kidpics burned to CD at one point. (See previous post.) Both computers suffered catastrophic hard-drive failure. One of them - the new G5 iMac, less than 3 weeks past warranty expiry. Nothing. recoverable.

That's rather sad.

And figuring out which CD's we've added in the last year, and now lost, is going to be exciting and interesting work.

All my computer-using life I've been a haphazard backer-upper. You never think it's going to happen to you; certainly not the double lightning strike. Man, now I've got that old-time religion. I'm never going to let this happen again. Awful.

Costing us an arm and a leg to get the two machines back, wiped clean of all the personal stuff we really value.

Belle lost quite a bit of work on her novel, but she thinks she can do it again, and better. I don't think I had any writings that weren't also somewhere else. But I'm sure in 3 months I'll be smacking my forehead remembering that big old draft that is now gone.

You could cheer me up by buying something through Amazon on the sidebar. If you are feeling like buying something through Amazon.

Hey, I've got a question - maybe for Glenn F. (thanks for the helpful speculation about power conditioning, old friend.) Suppose, just suppose, I wanted to set up a small e-press - a publishing house. And suppose I wanted it to be the case that authors could do as much as possible to prepare their own documents. That is, I want to lighten the typesetting and page layout load that falls to editors as much as possible. Presumably this would involve giving authors some choice of templates or layouts or especially stringent requirements for tweaking, say, an MS-Word doc. But the real question is: what desktop publishing applications might facilitate this venture. There are the big commercial ones. I've downloaded a 30-day freebie of InDesign, because I'm used to GoLive and Photoshop, so I figure probably I'll pick it up OK. But it isn't really realistic to expect all potential contributors to this venture to learn, let alone own, such heavy-duty, expensive stuff. Open source? Scribus? I've never really messed about with such things, but I have a sense that it's still probably a bit daunting.

OK, the project is something I've sort of sketched at the Valve (here and a bit more here). You don't need to click over to get the punchline, which is: a co-op publishing house where academic authors essentially 'pay' to their works peer-reviewed and edited - pay by doing doing the same for others. (You might 'pay' for having your book published by contributing peer reviews of six other projects, or whatever turns out to be a good number.) The idea would be that the publication is primarily electronic: clean, attractive HTML; spiffy PDF; and a POD option - maybe from Lulu. Everything free (except you pay for the POD if you want it. And if authors wanted to stick on a little commision, fine. Sell as many of those as you can, but don't expect to sell too many because you are also giving it away.) I figure I can get people who write at least this well.

There's an academic respectability issue for this project, but leave that to me for now. And the technical question raised above: how to optimize the submission so that it is as easy as possible to convert into HTML, and as close as possible to the final product that is to be turned into nice PDF? Without it being that it is too hard to authors to figure out all this without taking a mini-course in desktop publishing? (There isn't any question that SOME demands would fall to authors, probably above and beyond those they might get elsewhere. They'd just plain have to figure out what was needed from them.)

Thoughts? (Obviously a lot of this is vague.)

iDied

Man, this is bad. Just before I left on my road trip through Boston, Brooklyn and LA (I've gotta write that one up) our iBook died. And also our two iPods. And before that our video camera died. And just last night our iMac up and died. Before the iBook came back from the shop. Which is very bad because we use the two macs to back each other up, so I really hope we haven't lost, like, the last 10 months of kidpics (minus a couple hundred that got burned to CD), plus all iTunes inputs for the last 10 months. (Since the last time both macs died at the same time and I made sure that everything was backed up to one or both of the little external hard drives that aren't our iPods. At least one of which is still alive, I just checked. I've misplaced the cable for the other one. Gotta hunt around.)

This is starting to cost money. And make my hair fall out from frustration.

I'll Keep My Women Like Flo-Jo

You should always have a packet of frozen phyllo dough in your freezer (ditto all butter frozen puff pastry in a block) and then you can make magical "stuff we've got in the house" pies.

Sausage and Spinach Pie:

6 pc Cumberland or mild Italian sausage, removed from casings and crumbled
2 onions, chopped fine
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1/3 c choppped fresh herbs (italian parsley, basil, oregano, etc.)
salt and fresh ground pepper
2 packets frozen chopped spinach, thawed and pressed dry in a clean kitchen towel (you can microwave, covered, with a little water to thaw)
1 c shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 c unsalted butter, melted
1 packet frozen phyllo pastry, completely thawed

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Fry sausage in olive oil till brown. Remove from pan to paper-towel or brown-paper-lined plate to drain. Pour off any excess oil.

2. Fry onion over medium heat, stirring well, for 5-8 minutes. Add garlic and fry a minute or so more.

3. Add chopped bell pepper and fry 3-4 minutes more. Turn off heat. Return sausage to the pan, along with herbs, salt, pepper, and cheese.

4. Brush the bottom of a 9x13 pan with melted butter. Brush one sheet of phyllo with butter and place, unbuttered side down, in pan. Continue with 3 more sheets, alternating the long edge of the pan with which the original sheet is aligned. Fold excess dough inwards. A less covered-with-dough place will form in the centre. Brush 2 more dough sheets, then cut each in thirds. Cover the thinly-covered area with the cut pieces of dough.

5. Smooth filling over dough. Repeat above procedure as regard dough. If desired, crinkle a few unbuttered sheets over the top. Bake for 40 minutes at 350.

It's tasty! I was thinking that chorizo, wilted fresh greens, and cilantro and cotija/feta would be nice. But basically, once some butter and pastry gets involved, it's all good.

There;s really no Mixalot relevance; that song just happened to be playing as I blogged.

I'm Not Holding My Breath

Wow, a Second Avenue subway line? Let the gentrification of Avenue D begin! Actually, that'll no doubt happen long before the new subway line does. Still, great idea.

Breaking News: David Brooks Making Lazy, Slap-Dash Assumptions; Penning Trite, Innacurate Columns

You really have to go read this Slate article eviscerating Bobo Brooks. Seriously, I think he woke up this morning, went to the bathroom, and was like, "I didn't used to have an asshole there. Is that new"?

Problem: Brooks' first example of "French rap lyrics today" is, well, 13 years old. The song in question, "Brigitte (Femme du Flic)" appeared on the 1992 album Pourqoui Tant de Haine, by the long defunct duo Ministère A.M.E.R. (The group's rappers, Passi and Stormy Bugsy, have gone on to successful solo careers.) Moreover, Brooks' research seems to consist of reading two articles in conservative-identified American periodicals. I suspect that Brooks' source is Theodore Dalrymple's article, "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris," which appeared in the Autumn 2002 edition of the City Journal. Dalrymple provides the exact translation that Brooks cites as "Bitter Minstry's … best-known lyric"—though the lyric is not so well-known that (based on a Google search) anyone else appears to have ever translated it into English.

Now there's nothing wrong with Brooks using Dalrymple's translation, or even relying on his ideas. But isn't Brooks implying some broader knowledge of the topic at hand? Look again at his citation: "Most of the lyrics can't be reprinted in this newspaper, but you can get a sense of them from, say, a snippet from a song from Bitter Ministry." That "say" suggests that Brooks has any number of examples at his fingertips. The truth is, it's probably one of only two French rap lyrics he's ever heard—or, rather, read. The other he cites is the invective of "Mr. R," who, needless to say, the French know as Monsieur R. And lo and behold, a quick Google search turns up "France's Homegrown Gangstas," from the Sept. 28, 2005, issue of the Weekly Standard (where Brooks is an editor), which features the exact same English translation of lyrics from Monsieur R's "Fransse."

Ooooooooowwww. That had to hurt. Him, Tierney...and the only women columnist on the Times editorial page is Maureen Dowd? They could have Belle Waring for much less money, too. Much less. Of course, with the new TimeSelect thing no one would read my stuff anymore, so it's a trade-off...

Frrrrriday Random 10!

Boy, I sure have been slack on the blogging lately Friday Random Ten:

1. Tripping Out/Curtis Mayfield (?!)
2. Pulsewidth/Aphex Twin
3. Cairo/Santo and Johnny
4. O Girlfriend/Weezer
5. I Almost Forgot/Matthew Sweet
6. Get Ready (12'' mix)/Delroy Wilson (From Darker Than Blue: Soul From Jamtown 1973-1980, which you whould definitely buy. It's got a reggae cover of Randy Newman's Baltimore!)
7. The Night Hank Williams Came To Town/Johnny Cash
8. Delphium/Aphex Twin (iTunes gets into these moods, you know)
9. Underwater/Sugarplastic
10. Wind Up (Quad Version)/Jethro Tull

Well, that was weird. Not a lot of flow.

You Got Me Tripping Out

Do you guys think that during the taping of the Curtis Mayfield song "Tripping Out" there was a dude in the sound booth putting his finger into the side of his cheek and then popping it out? On the back-beat, for the whole song? It sure fucking sounds like it.

I Will Look Repulsive While I Mangle My Guitar

Hey, y'all should go see my sister be in a video! (Click on the Renee Heartfelt one. It takes like 1,000,000 years to load, but it's worth it if you want to see some blurry pix of my sister. She's, um, the hot chick in the video, but you knew that.)

There's a cheesy atom bomb explosion
All the big groups use
Atomic light will shine
Through an old venetian blind
Making patterns on your face,
Then it cuts to outer space
With its billions & billions &
Billions & billions and
Be in my video
Darling, every night
Everyone in cable-land
Will say you're 'outa-site'
You can show your legs
While you're getting in the car, then
I will look repulsive
While I mangle my guitar

Frank Zappa--Be In My Video

It's Still Friday on The West Coast of America Friday Random 10

Well, for me it's more of the 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday Friday Random 10, but we'll just let that slide.

1. Teen Age Riot/Sonic Youth
2. Aretha, Sing One For Me/George Jackson (from Hi Times: Hi Records the R&B Years, which I recommend highly)
3. Ain't No Room/The Vines
4. In The Yacht/The High Llamas
5. You Could Be Born Again/The Free Design
6. The Groove EP (Vocal Mix)/Astrojazz
7. Where It's At/Beck
8. Before They Make Me Run/The Rolling Stones; strangely enough this might just be my favorite Stones song. Certainly one of the all-time greats, with that sweet, sweet can't really-sing Keith vocals thing happening (just like in Torn and Frayed). "I wasn't looking real good but I was feeling real well." Truer words.
9. Count Five or Six/Cornelius
10. In Amber/Love as Laughter. A good band, my friend Daniel sent me the CD recently, because he's so great. Plus, they're as featured on the OC. You might think that's a deal-killer, but just think, the Guided By Voices song Teenage FBI was on Buffy, right? Right?