John & Belle Have A Blog

Basic Architecture

Zoë did this one freehand, using only a ruler. And a book about Greek architecture.

Speaking of basic architecture: I'm finally getting around to installing Leopard on our desktop iMac. Here's the thing. I actually tried it once and it encountered some problem, causing it to eject the disc summarily at a certain point. Somewhat nervouse-making, when one might be betwixt and between systems. But maybe our machine isn't meant to take it. Our specs are as follows:

Machine Name:    iMac G5
Machine Model:    PowerMac8,1
CPU Type:    PowerPC G5  (3.0)
Number Of CPUs:    1
CPU Speed:    1.8 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU):    512 KB
Memory:    1 GB
Bus Speed:    600 MHz

I would have thought a G5 with 1.8 GHz processing speed was good enough. Supposedly you only need G4 and 800+Mhz. But maybe the Bus speed is too slow. I dunno. Should I just try again?

Will a machine like this run slow on Leopard. It runs just fine with what we've got. Maybe I don't even need the upgrade. What do you think?

With All The Flowers Upon It

You know, I should post on my blog more, or I'll kill it. Ummm...Happy Easter! The girls and I made these marbelized eggs from Martha Stewart. They turned out very nicely, but the girls wanted to know why our weren't as perfect as the ones on Stewart's page. I had to explain that she has lots of people to help and could make 100 eggs before getting the ones they photographed, and Zoë and Violet seemed OK with that.

You may not know this, but you don't need to buy those Paas things at all; you can just mix water, white vinegar and ordinary food coloring to make egg dye. I've been too queasy to want to blow out a bunch of eggs, so we used hard-boiled, which are easier to deal with but sadly perishable (particularly on the equator!). We also didn't make an egg tree or lamb cake or even leg of lamb this year, I am really falling down on the holiday craft angle here. I remember how my family mocked our friend Lane when he told us about egg trees, which we'd never heard of before, but actually I think they're great. Did any of you make them when you were kids?

On the health front, we're just hoping we won't have to take Violet to the ER again today but I kind of think we will. O HAI I CAN HAZ HELTH PLZ?

UPDATE: NOOOO, I BE SPENDIN 5 HRS AT THE EMERGENSH ROOM!!!

Verbatim Conversation

[Scene: Belle is lying in bed with the laptop; John is reading Alison Bechdel's Funhome.]
Belle: [scrolling moodily] Everyone who posts at The Corner is a dick.
John: What are you thinking about in particular?
Belle: Nothing.

Maybe He Should Move to Florida?

I don't read Lileks like I used to back in the hazy free love incessant warmongering early days of the blogosphere, for a number of reasons. One is that he's starting to just bum me out. There's an undercurrent of profound despair beneath the matchbooks and the jeremiads on out-of-stock fall-harvest-themed paper towels. Consider:

I also have to get a meat and cheese platter from Costco. I like to pretend that they’re my caterer. I call them up an hour before I go, say that I’d like a big meat and cheese platter. The meat must be pre-rolled and secured with small wooden pins – tapered on both ends -  and I require that the cheese be cut into triangles and stacked in a fanned-out semicircle. I also expect some of the cheese to have at least one edge cut in the serrated style.

Uh – whatever, we have a lot of pre-made plat-

I shall be there in an hour. Good day to you sir.

See, that's funny in a way, but sad-funny.

             

Dream Home

Getting people to loathe you can be the ticket to big time blogging success. The bloggers at the NYT's Dream Home Diaries are putting this theory to the test, and are halfway there. You really have to go back to some of the earlier posts, and you must read the comments to get the flavor of this whole bizarre enterprise.

They started with a proposed budget of $300,000 to build their dream/retirement home on a lot they had bought on a barrier island in Florida. Then they came up with a series of massive, strangely proportioned architectural drawings, about which all the commenters said the same thing: your house is too big. Also, it will cost at least 600 to 700 thousand dollars. Your (still college aged) children are not all going to be visiting you at once with your putative grandchildren, so you don't need that many bedrooms (and the extra laundry room). Finally, you don't need a roof deck on top of the third story.

The husband is sticking to his guns on the roof deck despite the facts that: he is afraid of heights; the deck can't be covered with anything (such as an awning) because it will all blow off in a hurricane (likewise any furniture will have to be taken up and down again fairly frequently); it will be incredibly hot and buggy up there; you will have to carry your glass of wine up all those stairs; the deck can only be accessed via a narrow spiral staircase, and this seems at odds with the forward-thinking-to-retirement aspects of the house (such the construction of an expensive elevator); and finally, most compelling, the builder says there will be serious drainage problems. What's up with this? It is the only way to see a teeny bit of ocean from their actual lot.

Now, I am perhaps prejudiced in that I am very attached to the vernacular architecture of the Low Country, where there are many islands like this, but honestly, people have been building houses in these places for ages. High ceilings, fans, screened porches? Is any of this, I say, is any of this getting through that head of yours? </Foghorn Leghorn> Most recent developments: the house will cost $700,000! OMG who could ever have known! They are curiously unfazed. They get a huge mortgage and do a little superficial penny-pinching, including the worst way to save $3500 ever; they themselves will get all the permits and arrange with the town government for water and sewer hook up, rather than letting the builder do it. (Keep in mind that they live far away).

The commenters melt down. The comment section has actually developed into a fairly good community bound together by searing hatred for the posters and lots of genuinely good advice on the minutiae of building, provided by well informed Floridians.

In their defense, the latest front elevation looks OK-ish.

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?

Godspeed You Spack Emperor

Spencer Ackerman has finally gotten approval from the DoD to go to Iraq as an embedded reporter. I can't think of anyone whose reporting from Iraq I'd rather read. Having gotten the chance to see his body armor subjected to flailing fists of fury in December, I know I am one among many who hopes that will be most strenuous workout it ever gets. We here at John and Belle Have a Blog pledge to keep the home fires burning bright by utilizing 50% more Wu-Tang lyrics as post titles, and listening to the Clash while blogging up to 200% more than usual.

Also, that Moqtada al-Sadr has a posse graphic is hilarious.

ZOMG Curse Words

Scott Lemieux is right about this:

One can argue about whether the Edwards campaign should have been more risk-averse in terms of hiring Amanda (although some people are ignoring the many positive things she brings to the table), but for Edwards to have caved in to transparently phony reactionary-identity-politics outrage would have been catastrophic. It also seems worth pointing out--especially given the smearing of Shakes, who said nothing that could be seen as "anti-Catholic" even by ridiculous wingnut standards--that any prominent feminist blogger would have been victim of the fake outrage machine. If Edwards had hired Jessica Valenti, Danny Glover would have been on the horn to Ann Althouse and Dr. Helen so they could discuss Jesscia's profoundly troubling décolletage and its implications for John Edwards' campaign before the ink was dry on the press release.

It's also important to note that, pace Ogged, it wasn't a crazy idea for the Edwards campaign to hire Marcotte. I took the message away from the hire that Edwards was really serious about his commitment to women's issues. He got to signal to everyone who cares about feminist blogging that he was willing to take risks because the issue is important to him. And since no one gives a crap about feminist blogging, the risk of alienating some Peoria voter who'd be like "I prefer the measured tone of LizardBreath" is basically zero. Now he's refused to back down from some right-wing spin machine BS. Maybe not a win on all fronts but not a transparently stupid move either.

Memory Lane

I was taking a trip down blog memory lane not long ago looking up my cheescake recipe. The comments thread is very instructive. That was back before the Fafblog sublimed on us*; damn, I miss those guys. Funniest part:

Fontana, agreed. I left the OED out of my first comment, expecting universal acclamation and thanks, but then everyone ignored me, and damn, you can't ignore a blogger.

Posted by: ogged

How good that we agree.  What's really sad about this whole thing is that we don't get 20-something comments on anything at that other blog and Belle does it with dessert.

Posted by: FL

Yeah, it's sad that nobody comments on unfogged.

*I think Emerson said this first but I'm willing to be corrected.

The Future's So Bright

I was searching for sky colors on flickr so I searched for photos tagged with sunset. There were about one and a quarter million. That's enough for 3,000-odd years of sunsets, and of course almost all the photos on flickr were taken in the last few years. Among those years there are thousands of pictures of each day's sunset, from all over the world. That's just beautiful. If you had told me that when I was a teenager, and that I would also be able to upload pictures from my phone, I think my desires for futuristic stuff would have been satisfied. On the other hand, actual present me is shopping for a new phone and I'm a bit disappointed. The most megapixels on a camera I could find was 2.0 on a Motorola. (Well, on a phone that I also generally wanted, because I kind of just want that phone. But only blue?) The phone I have now has one point three, and it's a year and a half old. I was thinking I could get four at least. Grumble.

If It Wasn't For Bad Luck

UPDATE: just skip to the bottom where I encourage you to go help Gary Farber out. This is a boring story, except for the minor car accident.

Today just hasn't really been my day in some ways. I walked down to the bank machine to get cash for a taxi to Orchard road. I wanted to go to the Apple store to get a new cable for my iPod (we lost ours in the US somehow, despite (because?) not taking it out of the bag ever). So, the cash machine sucked my card in and then...nothing. More happy ads for DBS products, more 'please insert your card.' It was trying to pretend nothing even happened between us! OK, so I went inside and convinced them to cancel my card even though I didn't have my passport with me (which was nice of them). They would have given me a new one had I known my passport number, and I could have called home for it, but then I realized that my passport number has changed since I opened the account. I have to go back with my old as well as my new passport. Sure hope I can lay my hands on that expired passport! I know I wanted to save it because it has lots of cool stamps, so it's...around (fateful words of doom in my house).

OK, I got money out of another account and got in the cab, and I asked to be taken to Liat Towers taxi stand, which was a clever, insidery thing to do since if the driver leaves you there he isn't forced to enter the central business district and pay the toll (deducted automatically as you pass under the gantry). Thoughtful, right? But then the driver went the wrong way, going around by River Valley Road, which defeated the whole point. So I asked him to leave me at the Grange Road side of Wheelock Place, which is actually illegal, but whatever. There was another taxi pulled up there with someone getting in, and moments after I unhooked the seatbelt we got into a pretty severe fender-bender with the other cab which attempted to pull out as we were trying to pull in ahead of him. Lots of scraping and crunching, but not much bonking my head on the seat back, so that was good. The driver took my number, but I hope he doesn't call to have me confirm his side of the story, because he was frankly 50% at fault.

Blah blah blah (god I sound like James Lileks; "then the girl at the McDonalds said something irritating and I thought about how in the fifties she never would have said anything like that, and there woudld have been glass bottles of coke, and then I went home and microwaved a hot pocket, and...") got my cord at the Apple store, after drooling over a $4000 monitor. "iPod dock connector to firewire" it's called. Sounds promising, no? The cashier pointed out it was a firewire cable. "Yes, yes it is," I proffered calmly. I think we can all see where this is going. When I plugged the iPod in it said "firewire is not supported. To move files please use the USB cable included." What? There's no other thing this damn cable is for but to connect my 3 month old iPod to the iMac via a (lovely, unoccupied) firewire port. Is this some DRM bullshit? I mean, yes, a USB cable was provided originally. But so? Arrgh.

However, actually my life is awesome, and I live in a great apartment with my beautiful family and have enough money to be worried about my computer peripherals, so in the grand scheme of things this wasn't, in fact, a bad day at all. Gary Farber, on the other hand, is going through a real rough patch, so any John and Belle Have a Blog readers who have made it to the end of my drivelling complaint please think about kicking him some dough.

'Russian' Estoti Commingles Granoblastically With 'Russian' Canady, aka 'French' Estoty. Let's Start There

I know MY commented on this re: Congresspedia before, in a note I'm too lazy to look up now, but there is something silly in the NYT Magazine article about how s33krit blogs will revolutionize intelligence gathering. It's actually a good idea, although the prospect of CIA/DIA flamewars looms large. The thing is, they're calling their 'open-source' spy wiki 'Intellipedia'. Obviously they're echoing Wikipedia, but they've chosen the wrong part. What they're making is, in fact, a wiki, so it ought to be Wikintellia or something.

Tangentially related, the internet let me down today. I wanted someone to have drawn a map of Antiterra from Nabokov's Ada. But Wikipedia met me with the sad words: "This article about a fantasy book is a stub." Peter Lubin sniffs in an otherwise good article that "it would be unfortunate if, as with Tolkien's boring hobbits, a cute little cult of Antiterra developed (with maps, and vocabulary, and sinchilla mantillas). That is not likely to happen." On the contrary, it would be awesome, although maybe no one should be allowed to bring their 10-year-old daughter to AntiterraCon. (Finally, why when they make movies of Lolita do they insist on having her played by a 16-year-old? She's twelve. It seems to me to betray an unseemly sympathy with Mr. Humbert.)

House of The Blogging Sun

We were all in the computer room yesterday and John was typing away in a Valve comment box. I said, "John, are you feeding the troll?" "Yes." Me: "Don't feed the trolls!" Zoe asked if daddy were really feeding trolls. I explained, sort of. Then MeiMei pipes up: "Daddy's fixin a trolls!" Now she's convinced that's what daddy's doing as he ka-tippety-taps away. "Daddy's fixin a trolls!"
My mother was a baker, lord,
She baked these whole-wheat rolls,
My father was a blogger, lord
Always fixing trolls.

Real Men Read Books

This is a really heartwarming story from Cory Doctorow; a Navy sailor deplyed in the Mediterranean and short of books has been printing out novels and stories from Cory's site Craphound and sharing them with his shipmates.

A couple hours later, the only noise in the place was when one of the half-dozen guys sitting around would look up and ask, "Hey, who's got page 41 of Down and Out?" It was... well, I'm not sure I can express how weird it was. These are men who aren't normally readers, much less consumers of slightly wacky science fiction, and they're now getting impatient with each other to finish chapters so they can find out what happens next.

It's starting to change the very *tone* of where I work on the ship, six hours on and six hours off: instead of the ever-present three B's of talk to pass in the time in the plant -- beer, babes, and bodily functions -- it's discussions of which novel (or short, since we've now got printouts of every piece of fiction on craphound.com stuffed into a file cabinet) we liked best, and why, and what makes this stuff cool, and where can we get more like it, and even starting to talk about the copyfight, and why that's important.

I spent about two hours last night as I was reading glancing up every so often, and grinning like an idiot every time 'cause there were five guys whose talk usually revolves around how drunk they were this one time head-down in some pretty intense reading.

Thank you.  This is really something else.

That's really cool. Congratulations to Cory for making a difference in some people's lives. Man, having the internet on your ship sure does improve things about a million percent, doesn't it? Being able to IM your girlfriend from an undisclosed location beats staring at the bottom of the upper bunk, for sure.

This Post Produced By Saban

The Times casts light on that tragicomic modern phenomenon: couples who lie in bed blogging with laptops. I am in bed right now! John complains that he's reading comic books and not doing something weird like blogging, but whatevs:

Larry Smith knows he is treading a fine marital line. Mr. Smith, 37, is the editor of Smith, an online magazine he founded, and he loves to work in bed at all hours — midafternoon, 2 a.m. if insomnia strikes, then again in the morning.
Sitting there in bed half awake with a cup of coffee is extremely pleasant,” he said.Yet Mr. Smith is all too aware of his wife’s mounting disapproval of his routine and suspects that a laptop-in-bed ban could be imminent.

Luckily John and I don't have this problem, because we're both blogging! Like these people:

Dr. Enoch Choi, 36, and his wife, Tania, 33, who have been married 10 years, both take laptops to bed to write their blogs. “I suppose I started the trend,’’ said Dr. Choi, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif. “But now my wife is just as much the nighty-night PowerBook key-banger, blogging away for her friends.”

Freaks. And I can't believe that having said "nighty-night PowerBook key-banger" he wasn't able to get a Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers joke in there somehow. Step it up, Enoch.

Macron in Microsoft?

I have a dumb question. I've never figured out how to make the more obscure diacritical marks in MS-Word. Never figured out how to put haceks on Zizek. Never figured out how to put the right little lines over arete or dikaiosune. Can you help me? Do I need a plug-in?

Consider This A JBB Open Thread

An internet milestone has been reached. As of this moment, the entire front page of Atrios consists of nothing but posts entitled "Open Thread" and saying "Yeah, yeah another stupid open thread." Really. 40-something of them. Scroll all the way down to the bottom. I assume it won't last long. Or is a blogger malfunction? I mean, with the blogspot people?

To The Guy Who'd Throw A Party If He Knew Someone To Call

Theme song of the blogosphere. I can't believe I never heard this before.

Microsoft: More Evil Than You Had Ever Imagined

Just now I had a fake trackback on my T. Rex post that led to...http://www.msn.com/!!! The official site! Microsoft is employing trackback spambots?! This seems like a big deal. To whom should I complain? I really want to let people know about this because I am frankly astonished that a huge corporation would put its reputation on the line by using this awful, awful tactic, one which has basically ruined trackbacks for many blogs, leading to their just being turned off, at a loss for all internet users. Seriously, this is fracked up. I'll see if I can get boingboinged or something so we can see if this is a widespread thing. Y'all should submit this link to the automated boingboing suggestion form (don't email Cory Doctorow or whomever, because it pisses them off). I have to think that blogosphere-wide outrage would shame Microsoft into cutting this shit out with a quickness. This is a Microsoft double-whammy to our family this week, because John just discovered that his favorite drawing software, Expression, has been bought by Microsoft. They have produced a working Mac beta (seems great, not super-buggy and loads of fun new features), but having gone to the trouble to do so, they won't be supporting Mac in the final version! Ha ha ha, it's almost as though a corporate directive from above ordered the development team to do this in an attempt to chip away at Mac's dominance of the high-end graphic design market!! Rassa frassin rootin-tootin cotton-picking/Yosemite Sam voice.

Fonts bleg, copperplate edition

I'm in the process of learning bookmaking with InDesign because I'm gonna move into publishing, man. (I'm knocking the CT Chris Mooney book event into shape, then I'll do more ambitious things with some Valve events.) My question for you is: how do I tell whether I own a given font? Like most people I've gotten most of my fonts without noticing where or how. So probably they were acquired honestly. Once upon a time I bought this 100 font pack, but I couldn't tell you now what was in it. And bunches of free fonts downloaded. But in my wild youth I may have installed a thing or two, or - er, 100 - that don't belong to me. Example: I'm using a couple flavors of Copperplate in the CT book. How can I tell whether I own it? Does Copperplate come with Office or any Adobe product? How does one check?

Except, oddly, I never invite comment spam to dinner

"A blog is a place where you can create a community that centers on exactly the issues you want to discuss, with the people you want to have a discussion with. It's like throwing a big dinner party where all the people are interested in exactly the same conversation as you!"

It's interesting to watch the evolutionary process, as comment spam learns to mimic humans. First, it was just bizarre. Now it can reliably do: blurbling sycophancy. What it needs to learn is: spunky and irreverent.

Retrospect tech bleg

Another techbleg. I just bought a new external hard drive - an iomega - because the old one was behaving a bit strangely. I paid extra for a drive that came bundled with Dantz Retrospect 6.0 for Mac because, back in the day, I always used Retrospect religiously. Then I lapsed from these regular dataprayers and I had a crash and lost data. So now I'm being good. So I install Retrospect ... and it won't even launch. Just crashes instantly. (On an iMac running 10.4.) I google around and find pages like this. Now I'm disinclined to use if even if I can get it to launch. Who the hell knows? Twitchy unreliable backup software? Has the whole world gone mad? Any thoughts or advice? I can get the thing installed on my school iMac (running 10.3.9). But the email registration didn't work. It 'couldn't connect with the internet'. Well, fine, I can fax. But I'm not feeling confident about the quality of a program that can't call home on the internet.

One cool thing. The school was selling off some old b&w G3 towers for super-cheap. So I snagged one to be Zoë first computer (came with a giant heavy old blue plastic monitor.) She's excited! She's got the biggest computer in the house!

UPDATE: Damnit. G3 has something wrong it. Can't install anything. Ah, well. I'll take it back and trade it.

The camera is badly damaged so we have to spend big!

So the litany of our techtastrophes limps on. Our 3-year old Canon vidcam up and died; everything is shorted out, plus it grew a lobster claw, and it will cost S$430. That's about US $264. Seems like time to buy a new one, wouldn't you say? It has to be a mini DV one, because we've got lots of old tapes still to input. What about this one [Amazon]? Seems pretty good but I haven't really started looking yet, and I haven't even looked at the market for, like, three years.

Fonts bleg!

I'm trying to figure out how to organize fonts on mac. I'm futzing with Font Book. Here's a puzzle. I have fonts showing in various applications which aren't showing in Font Book. Searching the hard disk, I'm coming up with no file named, for example, 'Bitstream Vera'; although, oddly, it seems to think a font called Symbol.dfont is it. How is that possible? It also seems like there should be a better way than I'm finding to make it be the case that the ten fonts I really use are more easily available. You can make collections in Font Book, which is nice. Get all the silly ones in the same place. But then when you are scrolling through that mess in MS-Word it's all just a mess again? There isn't any way to export that collections structure to applications. Scrolling through even a hundred font names is somewhat tedious. If I want to have lots of fonts, do I need to get Suitcase or whatever? I've never really bothered with this stuff before.

UPDATE: And another thing. After our last mactastrophe I reinstalled MS-Office and I just installed Adobe CS. So all my fonts come from these two mighty acts. And, weirdly, no Palatino. That's like having 100 flavors of ice cream and no ... chocolate. I guess I'll just copy it over from some other machine. (What, is Palatino not cool anymore and I didn't get the memo?)

This is boring. I'll amuse you. Zoë and I were going out to a restaurant together. She looked behind.

The moon is following us. He must be going to a restaurant, but a different one. Where they eat stars. So the moon is a vegetarian.

Because stars aren't made of meat?

Right.

Actually, that would be a good one to use on vegetarians. You are chewing into a hunk of bacon. They look disapproving. You get all earnest. "No, it's alright. Everything we are ... is starstuff."

Technorati doesn't love us?

Here's an odd thing I've noticed before and only just gotten around to semi-verifying. Technorati doesn't pick up outgoing links from J&B. Example: in the last week I've made a couple links to the Valve [technorati link cosmos]. Nothing showing. And a link to the ISB [technorati link cosmos]. Again, nothing showing. I had sort of noted this out of the corner of my eye in the past, and assumed I must just be mistaken. I've blogrolled the Valve, but that initial link never showed when the Valve was starting up (and had precious few incoming links.) The effect actually seems to be quite consistent. Is there some explanation for this? It's peculiar because TypePad is, to say the least, rather a standard service provider. Why would Technorati be blind to a TypePad blog, whose incoming links it sees just fine? I should probably actually sign up for Technorati and investigate further. (At the moment it's giving me the 'sorry, we're overloaded' message.) Thoughts?

I suppose, technically, Technorati doesn't love our love. Is link-love from J&B the love that dare not speak its name?

UPDATE: I see now (thanks, ogged) that I can do it manually, post by post. Seems like there ought to be some way to automate, although maybe that's TypePad's deal, not Technorati's. I also just used Technorati's own 'ping your site' feature, so by the time you read this, the outgoing links may have been registered.

Why does google think I'm a robot?

For the past few days, when I do a google search using my school computer - a mac - I get a 'prove you aren't a spider or a robot or a virus-infected computer' error/test page. I have to read the wubbly letters in the little box, then I get my search results. This rejection is only intermittent, and it's not really all that inconvenient, but it's never happened before. Anyone know what's going on?

iBleg

I've got a weird problem with our iPod. At the moment it ONLY works on our iBook or my old iMac at school. If I plug it into our spanking brand new iMac it shows but, if I try to put tunes on, it freezes the whole system so I have to turn the machine off. I've reinstalled the iPod software - reset to factory settings. I can do that fine, but get the same result. It's sort of inconvenient because the MUSIC is on the big machine. So now I've got to attach the iBook to the big machine. Move 10 gigs of songs onto the iBook. Then plug the iPod into the book. It so happens that the three machines have three different systems running: the iBook is 10.2.8; old iMac is running 10.3; new iMac is running 10.4. It's an old iPod. Three years old, I think. One of the click-wheel ones. Any clues why an old pod might not like 10.4? Or why it might like iTunes 3 but not iTunes 6?

Long story, short pier

Long story, short pier lives again! although Kip needs to make the place look fancier again. (Get those deltiographs pumping, man.)

Long Time No Blog

You know, I'm sorry. Where's the blogging? Where? Sad to say, when I am at home I keep thinking of other things to do, like hang out with my family and friends. As my brother Ben says, "sometimes I just don't care about what someone said on the internet." But that's wrong, very wrong. I care. A lot.

I went to a party at Matt Yglesias' house the other day, which was fun, even though they wanted it to be a real grown-up party and I lowered the tone. I got to meet his roomate Kriston, and Ezra Klein, and Kevin Drum and stuff. It was cool, but the coolest part was that I met hilzoy!!! Yes, THE hilzoy. It was totally airwolf. No, it was Swayze. That's how cool it was. I realized that because hilzoy is so smart and funny and reasonable, I had a subconscious assumption that she looked like Linda Evangelista with glasses on and a bun, like they put on hot actresses who are pretending to be marine biologists or nuclear physicists. That's not what she looks like at all! But that doesn't affect her basic hotness, because inside she's sparkling with hilzoy goodness! Of all the bloggers I read, she and Katharine are the two about whom I think "she's really making a difference." So, three cheers for hilzoy!

Now, on to the holiday goodness.

Stuffed Dates:

pitted Medjool dates
whole almonds
confectioner's sugar

1. Stick the almonds in the dates (you can fit two in a fat Medjool date and it is worth it to pay extra). Roll them in confectioner's sugar. All done!

Minestrone:

1 1/2 c white beans
2 bay leaves
hard rind of parmesan cheese (you should always save these since they last forever)
two medium onions, chopped
3 leeks, washed well and chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
3 bulbs fennel, sliced thin
1 carrot, minced
1 c white wine
6 Italian sausages
1 t fennel seeds
olive oil
1 large can plum tomatoes in sauce (Muir Glen is best)
water or broth
1 c macaroni
salt and freshly-ground pepper

1. Soak beans either in cold water overnight or in just-turned-off boiling water for 1 hour. Drain, add new water and bay leaf and parmesan rind, and start cooking.

2. Brown sausages in a little olive oil in a dutch oven or other heavy pot. Remove and slice into thin rounds. Pour off most of fat from pan. Fry onions, leeks, fennel and and carrot for 5 mins or so. Add garlic and fennel seeds and cook 1 minute more. Add wine and boil, scraping up bits, for a minute.

3. How are those beans doing? Cook them till they're getting soft, then add to pot along with bay leaf, can of tomatoes (chopped, or rather, I just poke around with a knife in the pan after pouring the can in) water or broth to make a soupy mixture, and sausage. Cook till everything is done. Add macaroni and cook till done. You could make it look fancy by making little parmesan toasts to put on top and sprinkling them with some choppped fennel top (just the dill-looking part).

OK, I promise to be back tomorrow with more bloggy goodness. Really baby. I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just that you make me so mad sometimes...Aw, come on over here and get some sugar.

Failure, failure, failure, success, failure, failure, failure, success

Man, I don't have luck with computers. First, the two macs fail (fixed). iPod sort of working again (natural healing processes). iPod shuffle (dead, but they say they'll pick it up in a couple weeks.) Oh yea, and vid cam (memo to self: take to Canon repair center.) So I'm super safely backing up my school iMac (which has been behaving a leetle funny) to the iomega 250 GB drive (which has been making a whining noise), and the drive just won't read a good number of the files (keeps giving me dozens of -36 error messages.) So I can either copy all that stuff to a number of CD's or risk copying it to the 10GB iPod and hope it doesn't fail again (whew, worked. I actually managed to transfer an entire 3.6 GB of files from one computer to another.) And thankfully Belle made a CD of 500+ iPhoto library files for X-Mas pics and I can just input them into iPhoto (oh wait, something corrupt about the files. OK, so iPhoto never, ever will be able to read them again. I'll  copy them over to a different folder, use Photoshop to view them til the end of time.) Speaking of which, I lost my Photoshop and GoLIve update discs in the office move 16 months ago, so I didn't know what I was going to do about restoring them. And then I just opened this drawer and ... there they are. Right next to the Expression2 disc I lost 16 months ago. (OK, install those.) Then I looked behind a shelf and found this library book I lost last year, and had to pay the library to replace. And now I've lost this other library book. It's not like the place is a mess. Don't know how I do it. Found my Essential Dr. Strange. Okey. I'm just going to watch some quality cinema and drink a tall Tiger. Wokah-chika-woka-chika-wokah-chika-Waaaa!

Oh, and hey. I just noticed that you can download a free version of Creature House Microsoft Expression. It says it's for 'loyal users' but doesn't ask you to prove it with a serial number. It also says it's a beta even though version 3 has been out a couple years. But who argues with free? (But you do have to sign up to Microsoft's password thingy.) You can read reviews here and here. Here are some instructions. The 'help' function doesn't seem to work on the beta. I've used Expression 2 a lot. I draw my illustrations for teaching purposes with it. I find it works better than other tools just for making eye-catchy scribbles, which are more or less my 'never took drawing' signature style. (I'd send you to the website but it's down. Don't ask. But I've got a copy of the 'writings' site up on my .Mac site. You can see my Plato stuff, for example.) The department had me make a big banner, 1 meter by 2, for this open house thing. It was sort of fun and I made it in Expression, mostly. I've put an image under the fold. The guy who looks like he's wearing a pineapple is supposed to be Confucius.

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.

How-To

As you probably know I've been pioneering cutting edge anti-troll technology - see this CT post. Letters, we get letters. Mostly 'how can I tell it's a troll? - Nervous in Winnipeg'. 'My cousin knows someone who knows someone who lost a finger trying to disemvowel a troll. - Faints At the Sight of Blood in Brainerd.' I had Belle snap a few pics, showing me using the software. I hope this is reassuring.

Bloggerama

Thanks to Jim Henley for organizing the blogger whatnot! And big ups to Reason's Nick "Bar Tab" Gillespie! I had a great time and got to meet lots of fun people. I don't care if my brother and sister laugh at me for being a big geek, I'm just going to keep on making friends on the interweb. It's odd how there are people whom you know only online, and if you were asked whether you had any clear picture of what they looked like, you would say no, but nonetheless you feel very surprised when you see them. It's as if you had some latent, Orwell-picture-of-Dickens type conception in mind, never elicited till it crashes into reality... Also, people said very nice things about my writing which made me feel very guilty for not providing free entertainment around here lately, so I promise to improve on that score.

Partying With Your Internet Friends

Wow, I sure haven't been blogging up a storm, huh? I'm ashamed to say I've been...having fun with my family. I know, I'm a loser. But, if you're in the DC area and want to meet your favorite non-blogging blogger, why not mosey on down to the Rendevous in Adams-Morgan this coming Thursday? I'll probably be there around 8 or 9. This was all Jim Henley's idea. John is meeting Tyler Cowen in Singapore next week, so, Tyler, if you want to pull off a John and Belle exacta...

Sooo, America. There sure are a lot of fat people, huh? Damn. And big cars. And sketchy dudes who yell lewd stuff at you on the street. I'd kind of forgotten about that.

Vehement apathy and its discontents?

Thoughts related to our Theory's Empire event at the Valve.

Sean McCann writes:

In my fantasies, I yearn for TE to convince its readers of what I think are two major conclusions toward which it leads: (1) Though they’ve been frequently, if not characteristically exaggerated to the point of absurdity, some of the widely shared beliefs made commonplace by Theory are, at least in some versions, perfectly reasonable—and at a certain point in the history of the literary academy may plausibly have seemed badly needed. (2) Criticism of Theory is not inevitably motivated by anti-intellectualism or political or cultural conservatism or characterized by intemperate bluster.

Yes. Intellectual debates over Theory ought not to be conducted at the level of that scene in The Jerk - the sniper at the gas station. (Here's a wav file; transcript here.) Critics of Theory indulge in "die, textface!" over-aggression and miss their target. Defenders of Theory cultivate a "he hates these cans!" incapacity to gauge their critics' motives. (What is the Latin for 'can hatred'? There ought to be a word for the fallacy of saying critics of Theory 'fear difficulty'. Call it: argument from can hatred.) It is easy to conclude the debate is just a mordant, inconsequential clash of mild personality disorders. Why not just accept 1 and 2 and have yourselves a nice conversation? This is obviously why I like Theory's Empire. Yet trying to get as far as 1 + 2, you may only get as far as Groundhog Day; each morning the same old tune. Here's part of a comment to my post:

As someone mentioned earlier, this whole after-the-book defense has a bizarre wiff of preemption to it. I don’t mean to be rude, but one could reasonably suggest that such a squirrely defense of a grossly irresponsible book amounts to no more than an elaborate straw man beat-up, beginning and ending (though chock full of promises and deferrals) with a glib, and hardly original, diagnosis.  In short, it strikes one as the work of a gifted politician. And God help us to save literature from them!

Oh, for the sweet love of the arrow-like nature of time, when are you supposed to discuss a book except after-the-book? What could an open, round-table discussion of a scholarly book from a major university press possibly be construed as 'preempting'? Studied silence? It's not as though we are not willing to hear criticism of the volume. (At least he didn't want to be rude. At least he thinks I'm a gifted political operator working to destroy literature.)

I'm not complaining about how the event is coming off. Complaining about one cranky comment would not be complaining that my glass is half empty, it would be complaining that the meniscus level of the fluid is not actually above the level of the glass. That would be unreasonable. I think the event is going extremely well and I'm proud and really glad I put in the work to make it happen. (I used to be a bit like the sniper, truth be told. So if some folks think I hate cans, it's karmic payback.)

I'm only playing this sour-seeming note here at J&B because I am frankly a bit gobsmacked by a comment Scott Kaufmann left to John McGowan's post. Scott responds to McGowan's wondering hope that perhaps "academics interested in such questions have won their way through to a place where they can be discussed and examined calmly?" Scott says nope.

I think it’s largely a product of a self-selecting audience. I assure you that I could reignite the culture wars in my home department (UCI) with a reference to Clarence Thomas. But the people who participated--and many, many more people read than commented, at least if the feedback I’ve received via email is any indication--are aware that the stakes of participating in this debate are both much, much higher (the permanent record of one’s participation is and for the foreseeable future but a google away) and much, much lower (the lack of acceptance, nay, the hostility of the academic community at large to the idea of serious scholarship or scholarly interaction taking place on a blog).  (Could I nest any more clauses in that sentence?) After I sent out the CFP on the event--which for reasons unknown to me went out with this week’s batch instead of last’s--I received a number of, shall we say, “impolitic” emails from people who wondered why they should bother with the event.  That they felt compelled to email me vehement statements of their apathy surprised me, but then I realized: the people who would participate aren’t the ones who would see this as a forum in which to shout everyone else down.  (Mostly because, unfamiliar with the medium, they probably don’t realize that you can indeed, through trollish repetition, shout everyone else down. But in the meantime, their ignorance contributes to our bliss. Or what-not.)

Can it really be that participating in our event might be professionally dangerous? People bothered to send him email? Can it really be that so many people think it is so clearly terrible? I honestly don't know what to think.

Mad Love 4 Snoop Derby Derb

What does it say about the Corner that John Derbyshire is far and away the least crazy person writing for the blog?

"Mr. Derbyshire a) blames the administration for not being serious about nuclear proliferation, b) expects a pullout from Iraq and a civil war, c) is happy Michael Jackson has been acquitted and d) supports euthenasia."

Er, yup.  As opposed to:

(a) Is fine with North Korea having a bagful of nukes and Iran just about to get same, after four and a half years of this administration sternly declaring that neither thing will happen.

(b) Expects a major US presence in Iraq indefinitely **or** a pullout soon, followed by Shias, Sunnis and Kurds all dancing arm in arm round maypoles.

(c) Would like to see California prosecutors give more attention to thieves, rapists, and murderers, and less to harmless freaks.

(d) Believes in the Golden Rule, and most certainly would NOT wish, either for myself or a loved one, either to be kept in a vegetative state for 15 years, or, when it was finally determined that I could be allowed to die, be slowly dehydrated to death.

The preference for action over empty words; a skepticism about the possibilities for multicultural harmony in Third World nations; a desire to spend limited law-enforcement resources on crimes that actually harm people and their property; and a fondness for the Golden Rule; these seem to me to be pretty solidly conservative principles.

Meanwhile, J-Lo is speculating about the hotness of Condi Rice hooking up with Angelina Jolie. OMG!!!! Jonah, naturally, veers between warbling about William Shatner and sharing the fruits of his deep thinking about Adorno: "Part of the problem -- at least for me -- is that Marx and Freud when combined by folks like Marcuse and Adorno were even dumber than they were when considered separately." I could go on about J-Pod, but...

iPod Shuffle Hack

Man, I totally want to get into the now-famous Make magazine for this hack.
1. Cut the neck-cord of your iPod shuffle.
2. Insert a gold chain.
3. Thread both the iPod and a human vertebra onto the chain.
This is the shizznit. I hope I don't get stopped by homeland security at my next stop in the States.

Catfight!

Woohoo! Sign me up for the blogger women jello-wrestling tourney! That'll get CNN's attention, for sure. I think I'll start with... Majikthise. Eventually, after I whup Wonkette and go to the finals, I'll have to face off against Michelle Malkin. This is going to be totally hott! Of course, I'm just assuming Kaye Grogan gets eliminated early in the other conference. (John's comment, re: the Waring/Malkin bout: "ew." Me: "What? I can totally take her!?" John: "I bet she bites.")

Just Like Jesse James

I feel bad, leaving Belle to uphold the honor of our blog while I'm off Valvateering. Then I try to make myself feel better by telling her she ought to do a thing where every post is a recipe plus sassy 'and a pony'-style opinionation served up hot. She could so completely dominate the gourmet chef political pundette arena. Warren Zevon even wrote the song for her:

She really worked me over good
She was a credit to her gender
She put me through some changes, Lord
Sort of like a Waring blender

I figure if she doesn't get sued by the blender people she can make a lot of money selling blogads to gourmet outlets. Stuff like that.

(I will try to post sometimes.)

It's a Man's, Man's, Man's, Man's Interweb

An interesting post from Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon about blogrolls, and other things. I was struck by this:

One point of criticism is that all the aforementioned bloggers are valued--in their own circles. (I read gardening sites, so I would know.) That political bloggers get more attention than others isn't a bad thing, but instead an example of America's continuing enthusiasm for democracy. This is a painful topic for me, because the real, honest me apparently melds well with the much-vaunted straight white male blogger. (And my class consciousness makes me immediately stand up and point out that I am also melding well with the upper middle class that treats college educations as a given, even though I was the first in my family to get one.)

The ugly, naked truth is simple--men like me. This fact is very apparent in my non-internet life where I have many effortless friendships with men and my fewer friendships with women that take much more effort. What should be an idiosyncratic part of my personality looks like it might be a personality trait that helped me grow quickly from an unknown blogger to one who writes on a blog big enough to get national attention. The odd thing is that Jesse isn't really part of the contigent of men who like me because I'm a man's woman. But it's fair to say that a lot of the positive attention that I received at Mouse Words has a lot to do with me being a man's woman.

I have to say that I have always thought of myself this way, if not in these terms: a man's woman. I like lots of things that other women don't. Political wonkiness? NFL football? Target practice with a Colt .45? Bullshit, cock-swinging arguments about philosophy? (You are REFUTED! Boo-yah! U R teh suXX0Rz!) Yah, sign me up for the good stuff. I think John's moher and sister used to advise him that there weren't any girls like me and he should try to mellow out and be less of a logic nerd in order to get chicks. My sister is much the same way, with different guy's interests: online RPG's and war reenactments. It is my vague sense that this "man's woman" aspect of my personality also lends itself very much to blogging. Is this consistent with my blogging persona viewed from the reader side? Is this a problem with blogging? One reads a lot of vague gesturing towards usenet origins, etc., but is this really explanatory? God, I hope this doesn't mark the tri-monthly return of "where are the blogging girls". It's like the annoying swallows of super-irritating Capistrano or something.

Font Trouble

Tomorrow is my first class; I am teaching Greek to some NUS students here at home. It should be fun. But I am having a leeetle problem with the Greek font I downloaded (it's called Aisa). It has adopted a "one-stroke" strategy for accents/iota subscripts and what not, that is, you press option+2 to get aspirated alpha with a circumflex, and on and on (rather than typing,say, option+i and then the desired letter, the way you would get umlauts in a roman font). Here's the thing: I can't find some of the letters and there really doesn't seem to be KeyCaps in Mac OS X. There's a font palette thingy, which shows me what they would look like, but it doesn't describe how to produce the various letters. So, I have tried: plain old typing, shift, option, option+shift. The command key is always doing real stuff, not typing letters, so that's out. Control? Not getting any love. I've got plenty of crazy rare things I will never need--epsilon with a circumflex? Can that even happen? I'm all ready to type words containing iota with a dieresis and a grave accent. But what about a little something called epsilon with, you know, like a grave or acute accent? Or iota with grave or acute? And, less pressingly, how do I put breathing marks and accents before capital letters?  We are talking about some of the characters I am likely to type the most of all, so they must be hidden somewhere really obvious...help me out here Mac people/classicts types. I think this is a unicode font, if that helps.

Fuddy-Duddy Email

A curious note from the (print edition of) the Economist:

...many young South Koreans would be bemused by mobile devices with keyboards, such as the BlackBerry, which is popular with businesspeople in America for keeping up with their e-mail. The South Koreans already have handsets which can do this, but they do not think e-mail is particularly cool, and they do not like the spam that comes with it. They prefer to send text messages, which are more immediate and are certain to be delivered instantly. South Koreans in their teens and 20s increasingly look on e-mail as an old and formal means of communication, according to one study. "You would exchange e-mails with your bosses, but not your friends," says a young South Korean marketing assistant.

The reliability of the article is presumptively undercut by its later reference to The Matrix Reloaded as "a cult movie", but it's interesting nonetheless.

I saw another one just the other day, a special new blog

I know this doesn't sound healthy, but I've, I've ... started a blog: a literary studies group blog. It's called the Valve and it just got turned on. I've written a whopping great Holbonic inaugural post, a rewrite of themes I've hashed out before: blogging, academe, literary studies. (Some folks might say I'm repeating myself. I do hope I'm improving myself.)

I'm probably going to lighten up at J&B and Crooked Timber for a time and focus on this new project. Just so you know where to reach me. Please drop by and link to us and all that desirable stuff.

New Look

We needed a new look. Try reloading if you aren't seeing it. I snagged the scan from this fine site. I used to change the images once a week. I shall try not to let this pair languish for months without giving them a break.

UPDATE: I've changed the filename for our logo. It's no longer called 'banner', on the hypothesis that this might have been the source of some apparent false positives in the ad blocking department. Is anyone out there STILL not seeing any logo at all?

Henry may be dropping by

CT refugee Henry Farrell may show up and guest-post. (That's a customer service rep from our ISP in the background.)

Does He Have a Christian Cousin Named Isaac Synagogas?

Is Matthew Yglesias Jewish or something? On a more serious note, I agree with everything in this post.

Soylent Bleg

Kevin Drum likes my CT Soylent Security snark. One of his commenters remarks that Jon Stewart made Soylent Green jokes last night. (We don't get Stewart here in Singapore, sadly.) I'm curious. Soylent is evergreen comedy stuff, like everything Heston-based. Did Stewart actually make a social security Soylent Green joke? That would be cool, because it would either be an incredibly odd coincidence or a sign that someone who writes for the show trawled CT for last minute material.

CT is down

Kieran Healy just emailed to explain that Dreamhost - which hosts Crooked Timber - is down but not quite out. Filesystem problem. Flux capacitor not fluxing. So you can see but not do. Read but not comment or trackback. But it sort of looks like it's gonna work. But it's a cruel deception, like Tantalus trying to eat those darned grapes. So no doubt tomorrow we will be faced with a bazillion quintuple posts from folks who just kept trying. Here's my advice: don't try until you see an all-clear from Kieran or some such authority figure whom you have come to trust.

(May this humble public service announcement divert into pastures that may better profit from it some small trickle-off from this dammed hydrodynamic force of baffled, redundant verbiage. This is my pious wish. And now, to bed.)

Mactastrophe

On Thursday night our new iMac began behaving a bit strangely, by Friday it was very sick indeed and I spent over an hour on the phone with AppleCare. By Saturday - when I shlepped it way out to the apple service centre - it was clearly in need of major hardware repair. Screen doing this sort of jaggy thing, like a DVD freezing up. Bizarre pixilations. Screen turns strange colors. Plaid (I don't know how else to describe it.) Salmon, blue, different shade of blue, black. (Lik