John & Belle Have A Blog

Another tech bleg

While I'm on the subject of little tech bothers: we're moving house and I have an old beige G3 tower. Here's the thing. I no longer have a monitor for that, so I can't fire it up and wipe the harddrive before disposing of it - which I might as well do. What should I do to erase the drive? Open it up and just pull something? I'm afraid the innards of computers are a bit of a closed book to me.

UPDATE:  hmmm, I guess I could slave it to one of the other computers and see the drive that way . Nevermind, nevermind. I'll get back to packing boxes.

I'm Spamming Myself!

Something rather strange just happened. I got an ad for Viagra in my inbox. No, really. It was strange. Because it was from my own email address: jholbo at mac dot com. Is this something I should be worried about? Could my account have been hijacked to send spam? Or is this just some annoying thing I shouldn't worry about. How is it possible?

The House: The Housenating

Mm, so, fixing up the house is giving me a chance to live vicariously as a homeowner. It turns out that contractors make stupid mistakes and fail to turn up when they say they will! It's like I'm living in a NYTimes Style section dreamworld. Nonetheless, due to my mad skilz and the help of Thomas the Fixing Uncle, it is looking great over there (I learned how to use a power drill while standing on a 12-foot ladder! Carefully.) Still, I'm starting to get this "I have to move when now?! Whose idea was this?" feeling. Looking at that soothing fear-not Buddha hand on my wall will surely calm me right down.

I gilded those gilt bits myself. More pictures under the fold.

Roger Hodgson: History's Greatest Monster

John was singing Supertramp to me earlier. No, children, this doesn't mean we're getting divorced...yet. Now I'm going to have The Logical Song stuck in my head for a week. Of course, then I had to see if there was a video on YouTube. You really need to watch till after the saxophone solo, when Hodgson starts belting "who I am...whoIYAM" in sucessively higher registers. The sax player is wearing truly ridiculous glasses that, well, actually I have a pair just like that but it's different. Anyway, the look he gives the camera before blowing into this little pipe-zizzy-mabobber is so stupendously irritating that I want to go back in time and kill my parents so it will cease to be the case that I ever saw him do that. It will be replayed in lurid blood-tones on my inner eyelids for many miserable nights. But you know what Aristotle says, even to God this one power is denied: to change what is past.

I knew a strange person once who liked Supertramp. It came about like so: I met this cool girl from West Virginia at an archaeological dig in Cyprus. She went to a college in the Boston area but not Harvard or MIT, one of those other colleges. I think it's fair to say that she wasn't looking to rush right back to West Virgina. I went to stay with her and her boyfriend, a physics grad student at MIT, when I was visiting Harvard to decide about grad school. Viewed along one axis, he didn't rate such a hot girlfriend (and she was damn hot). Viewed from another perspecitve, he was a kind, reliable boyfriend who would get a good job somewhere other than West Virgina. He was playing Supertramp at their place, and he earnestly explained how he had gotten into them. You see, he was alphabetizing his CD's when he realized he didn't have any bands starting with the letter 'S', so he rushed out and picked up some Supertramp at random (this was before people knew about Asperger's, but in retrospect he really fits the bill). Imagine his surprise when they turned out to be so great!! At this point I felt that the price of exiting W.Va was getting a bit steep, but what do I know? I did help him out by suggesting bands starting with various underrepresented letters, since ideally there was meant to be rough parity with the proportion of English words starting with the various letters (so you can probably get by with just X and the Xray-Spex but are going to need a lot more 'S' bands.) And that's the story of how a high-functioning but modestly crazy person onced liked the band Supertramp, long ago.

Finally I should note that while reading YouTube comment threads is generally a swift way to lose all faith in humanity, I find myself agreeing with commenter chccazbnSS, who noted just one hour ago that "this song is gey!!! this shouldnt be put on youtube -.-!!"

Well, I Wasn't Going to Save You Before, But...

When new broke about Giuliani's SC campaign guy getting arrested on cocaine charges, my mom reminded me of a funny story my dad used to tell that I had forgotten about, also related to the prominent Charleston family. Charleston is pretty much right up there with Savannah as a place that's...I don't want to say 'closed to outsiders and besotted with the past,' but let's imagine something along those lines that is more positive. (And I would move to Charleston in a heartbeat! But then again I know people around there.) He was in Charleston with some distant cousins-types of ours and I guess everyone was drinking a bit, and one of these guys fell off the battery into the river, whence he was heard to cry "help me! I am a Ravenel!" Ah, The South. (Sounds too good to be true, admittedly, but the thing about the south is that truth is stranger than fiction, for reals.)

Hey Kids! Kids!

Kid pics. Under the fold

Zoë Art: Cosmic Hunger Edition

So we got these Human Torch figurines at KFC and, naturally, Zoë wanted a few things explained. So she ended up coming up with her own story about how Superzoë and Super Mei Mei met the Fantastic Four and fought Galactus together. What they did - this was Zoë's idea - was find a boulder as big as Earth, paint it to look like Earth, then build a machine to magnify the Invisible Girl's power, so she could make the whole Earth invisible, while Galactus ate the fake 'Other Earth'.

Advantage: Awesomeness! (Click for larger awesomeness.)

Jump! Jump!

Until now, I had never read this Chuck Klosterman article listing THE TEN MOST ACCURATELY RATED ARTISTS IN ROCK HISTORY! (via Julian Sanchez, via Jim Henley. And thanks for posting it on your LiveJournal, random person!) It is awesome. Read it.

7. Tone Loc: Nobody really takes Tone Loc seriously, except for frivolous pop historians who like to credit him for making suburban white kids listen to rap music that was made by black people (as opposed to the Beastie Boys, who made white suburban kids listen to rap music that was made by other white people). This lukewarm historical significance strikes me as sensible. Neither of Mr. Loc’s hits are timeless, although “Wild Thing” samples Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin’” (which I like to imagine is about M*A*S*H star Jamie Farr, had Corporal Klinger pursued sexual--reassignment surgery in an attempt to get a Section 8) and “Funky Cold Medina” samples “Christine Sixteen” (at a time when Kiss were making records like Hot in the Shade and nobody in America thought they were cool except for me and Rivers Cuomo). Those two songs were actually cowritten with Young MC, whose single “Bust a Move” is con-fusing for the following reason: Its last verse states, “Your best friend Harry / Has a brother Larry / In five days from now he’s gonna marry / He’s hopin’ you can make it there if you can / Cuz in the ceremony you’ll be the best man.” Now, why would anybody possibly be the best man in a wedding where the groom is their best friend’s brother? Why isn’t your best friend the best man in this ceremony? And who asks someone to be their best man a scant five days before they get married? This song is flawed. And while I realize the incongruities of “Bust a Move” have absolutely nothing to do with Tone Loc, the song somehow seems more central to Tone Loc’s iconography than his role in the movie Posse, which was the best movie about black cowboys I saw during the grunge era.

Hey, I thought KISS were cool then too! Slightly off-topic, I listened to Kriss Kross' "I missed the bus" today, and people stared at me on Jalan Merah Saga because I was laughing out loud like a big goofball as I waited for Galerie Cho Lon to open.

House Stuff

So, the renovations at our new place are coming along (we're not moving for a week or two). The place was in kind of poor shape, not terrible but dingy etc. Zoë suggested the other day that it was dirty "because people from the Philippines used to live there. Remember Rina's house?" I was horrified. My daughter is prejudiced against Filipinos! Ack! I asked what ever suggested that awful idea and she said "Yaya told me." Ah. It turned out that, as a factual matter, the house was in bad shape because people from the Philippines were living there, not just one family but a bunch of foreign workers with several to a room. Total parenting failure averted.

This explains why the interior windows have bars (part of the house used to be open and was enclosed, the bedroom windows looking on this space are pointlessly barred)--so that each room could be locked. I feel that we're on the hook for a little more in renovation cost than is ideal, since we're basically replacing the kitchen cabinets (the owner is paying some but not half). On the other hand, we got a good deal on the rent even if the costs are averaged out. Plus it will look great.

It's a really funky old house and I'm very excited about it. It's not the black-and-white house of my dreams...but only insofar as I haven't painted the outside black and white yet, and put up bamboo chick blinds! The house looks onto a lovely park that is lined with black-and-whites, and I don't have to look at my own house as much. The owner tried to freshen things up by painting every surface in the house insitutional green, except for the brown kitchen cabinets. (There's also a big green stripe on the tan outside. If we end up staying longer in Singapore I really will paint the outside, but it's too much $ at the moment.) It's nice that there's a yard for the girls; you can see that MeiMei is taking gardening seriously. More before-and-afterage below the fold.

Zoë Art!

Zoë has made a leap up to a new artistic level. The best first (click for larger). The Queen, from Snow White. At first I thought she'd traced it. Then she showed me the picture she used. She copied it, free-hand. She did an incredible job of capturing the expression. (I'm not sure where the bird came from, however.)

Next, Snow White:

Next, Winnie the Witch (a character in a book). This doesn't look much like Winnie, actually. But it's distinctive. I like the shoes.

Finally, the artist herself, looking tired but proud:

Israelites

Just the other day I was thinking about how I don't really know any proverbial sayings or stories from the Qur'an. So when I saw some childrens books at Mustafa Centre in the series "Quran Stories For Little Hearts" I decided to spring for the 6-book box, at $24. A couple of them are beautifully illustrated, while the rest are standard crummy kids' book stuff. It's interesting to see the devices used to avoid illustrating people; in "Uzayr's Donkey" the donkey appears in all the scenes while Uzayr himself is only implied. Likewise in "The Treasure House" we see lots of camels and buildings, but no wicked Qarun (although we do see two servants from behind as they carry the keys to his treasure house--Qarun is so rich that several men are needed just to carry the keys.) What I found interesting is that of the 6 books, 2 are set in Pharaoh's (Firawn's) Egypt, where the children of Israel are in bondage. Qarun is a rich child of Israel who has forgotten his people and become an advisor to Firawn (at first I thought this was going to be about Joseph, but it's not). One of the other books is about the escape from Egypt and the prophet Musa's (Moses) parting of the red sea. I knew that the patriarchs of the old testamant, as well as Jesus (aka Issa) himself, are part of the Muslim tradition, and one hears about the whole "People of the Book" thing, but I was suprised to see so much focus on Allah's special relationship with the people of Israel.

Who Knows What She'd Think Of Homsar

MeiMei noticed my Homestarrunner T-shirt yesterday, which I hadn't worn in a while (since we're moving I've been sorting and pitching out clothes etc, resulting in some old favorites being found.) She looked at it thoughtfully for a minute and then said "Mommy, that chicken doesn't have any arms." So true.

Sunday Random Metropolisdickery Panel

Sometimes it is suggested that Superman is the only guilty party. The truth is: he only moved to Metropolis because there's something subtly twisted about the whole town.

Also, Soju Is Vile

This NYT article explains how Korea's drinking-oriented corporate culture is changing in the face of increasing numbers of female employees. Traditional Korean nights out with your office mates typically involve getting totally hammered. Reducing drinking, though it's presented as something the companies are doing for women, also helps men who dislike having to drink so heavily. Maternity/paternity leave or days off to care for sick family members are the same: plenty of men want to take time off when their babies are young, and a policy pitched as helping women can be a boon to them too (provided the mores of their workplace actually allow them to take the time, which in the US can be a doubtful thing.) The article tells of a woman who won a lawsuit against her former boss because he pressured her so heavily to drink that she couldn't take it and left the job.

In the case of the 29-year-old graphic designer, when she was interviewed at the 240-employee online game company in 2004, she was also forced to submit to an “alcohol interview,” according to the court ruling. She could drink only two glasses of beer and no soju at all, she said.

Her boss, though, liked to go out with his 10-person marketing team — six men and four women — at least twice a week until the predawn hours and brooked no excuses.

One time, he told her that if she called upon a “knight in shining armor,” [a male co-worker who agrees to take her turns at a drinking game] she would have to kiss him. So she drank two glasses of soju. Another time, after she slipped away early, he called her at home and ordered her to come back. She refused.

That's not even about drinking culture so much as it is about having an abusive bully as a boss. Luckily, despite the lost lawsuit, he's sure to be offered a place here in the States working for the Republican party: "At the trial, the boss said he was so intent on having his subordinates bond that he sometimes used his own money to take them out drinking. He called the woman a weirdo and said of the lawsuit, 'I’m the victim.'"

TV Eye On You

This is an interesting use of Google-Earth type technologies: Amnesty International has teamed up with some generous donors of satellite info and servers to create a monitoring system for Darfur:

The use of satellite cameras to capture developments on the ground allows computer users around the world to keep a virtual eye on vulnerable populations in faraway, otherwise inaccessible places. For example, Malam El Hosh, a settlement nestled in the arid terrain of Darfur in western Sudan, will be monitored to detect evidence of violent changes. A nearby water well, a large resource that may attract militias bent on uprooting settled communities, is one reason that site was chosen to be monitored.
Lars Bromley, project director for the AAAS, explained that the commercially available photos can show objects or spaces as small as two feet across -- sufficient to reveal the destruction of small huts or other makeshift structures.

AI had previously used publicly available satellite images to confirm that the government of Zimbabwe was destroying large settlements and dispersingtheir inhabitants. Cool. Doesn't seem like it'll be too long before someone is charged with war crimes on the basis of actual photographic evidence of him committing atrocities.

Birthday

It's my birthday! Happy Birthday to me! Both the girls are really sick and fevered, with that pale, floppy look only a sick child can have. It makes you grateful for modern medicine, especially antibiotics. I can only imagine the agony of being a mother when (and even now, where) every childhood illness might be the deadly one that carries them off. As it is, they're OK, they've just got a bad cold. So, we didn't make a cake and I stuck a candle in a piece of baklava that John got with our take-out dinner. I bought myself the birthday present of a black crystal chandelier from one of the myriad of lighting shops on Jalan Besar. (I was sort of hoping someone else would give me this cool old elmwood kitchen cabinet, which is pink?) Yay, I've wanted one for ages! I still can't find any sconces I like, though. Humpf. I stopped by Mustafa Centre to get some saris I'm going to sew into curtains, as well as a few boxes of rose turkish delight. I should just learn how to make it. They were out of my favorite Sri Lankan gingersnaps, though. I had to go with an inferior brand that's not, as the good ones are, actually too hot for children to eat. Also, went by the molding store to buy chair rail and decorative doo-dads for the ceiling lights to depend from. The painters were kind of shocked by my paint choices yesterday, and I'm pretty sure I now know how to say "crazy" in Hokkien. Perhaps the pent-up painting demand caused by my last having painted my room in '85 when we lived by my grandmother's is playing a role. Bah, they're only professional painters; what do they know? It's going to look great.

UPDATE: You know what the problem with racist chalkware is? It's really heavy so the shipping is a killer. And of course, it's racist.

Tuesday Random Legion Panel!

And history's three greatest villians are? Answer under the fold. (By the power of Random Legion Panels, I will drive away this blog's readers!)

I Was Steeped In The Movies Of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Which Is Why I Advocate That The US Paint Itself With Mud And Start Shouting "Come on! Kill me! I'm here!"

Newsbusters is outraged that the Traitorious M.S.M isn't hyperventilating about the recently publicized al-Qaeda torture manual. I consider myself a connoisseur of crazy right-wing comments, and this thread is officially awesome. There is general agreement that the liberals are just as much enemies as the terrorists, including bonus conspiracy theorizing about how Muslims have inflitrated the ranks of top newcasters. Everyone regretfully comes to the conclusions that we're going to have stop being so darn nice to everyone and really take the gloves off. This comment by "misterbill", though, is a delicious frappé of psuedo-reluctant bloodthirstiness and self-parody:

KC -- well said--I admit that it bothers me--to follow the lead of the enemy in our behavior, but if we lay out the Marquis of Queensbury rules we leave ourselves at a serious disadvantage. The enemy will feel free to do as he wants. As an older American, I was steeped in the movies of WW2 and how we held to our high moral ground in our dealings with the enemy. It does not work if the enemy's purpose is to destroy us. We have too many people in America who naively believe that if we withdraw our troops the world will be a paradise. All that will happen is our enemy will be emboldened to strike us in our own land again. I hope our troops will continue to do what is necessary in dealing with prisoners to protect me and my family. [emphasis mine]

Ah, Republicans. They're going to go for Thompson for sure.

Keroro vs. Polar Bear

Well, that chalkware is weird. Fortunately, I did something normal. I bought a cheap VCD set of season 1 of Keroro Gunso - AKA Sgt. Frog. It's really quite entertaining. As wikipedia explains: "Both the manga and the anime focus on the steadily deteriorating ordeal of the Keroro Platoon, a group of two-foot-tall frog-like invaders, who try, but fail miserably to conquer the world and sell useless merchandise to the citizens of Japan." Here is Sgt. Frog, getting punched by a polar bear, due to the fact that he has been tricked into thinking the hosts of "A Touching Interview" have come to film an episode on earth.