Resolution review
It’s been six months since I laid out my resolutions for 2005. Let’s review. (It ain’t pretty.)
- Learn how to conjugate Italian verbs in a tense other than the present.
Non completo. - Get a goddamn backhand.
Many lessons later, complete. Whether it’ll hold up in match play is a wholly different matter. - Fall in love with NASA again.
Not yet, but I feel that I could be seduced more easily these days. - Be nice to political bloggers.
Publicly, yes. Lots of private cursing, though. - Learn to match beats when remixing.
Nope. Still a stutter-step crossfader. - When home, watch only high-definition television programming.
I achieved this for a few months. The Cubs season ended my streak though, as only a handfull of games are in HD. - Convert all old mix tapes to MP3.
Not going to happen. Quality too low; quantity too high. - Become able to change my son’s diaper with one hand.
Ashamedly, no. - Avoid LAX like the Black Death.
Done. - Avoid the Black Death.
And done. (But that mole is a little worrisome.) - Get to know my nephews better.
Eh, sorta. - Figure out how to make my own oak switches for the Russian Baths.
Hell, I don’t think I’ve even been to the baths since January.
Well, that’s rather depressing. I wonder what the median success rate is for New Year’s resolutions for the public at large. In fact, I wonder if anyone even remembers them by mid-year.
Like a caterpillar
“Daddy, I’m not going to take a bath until you let me smell the maggots one more time.”
What’s most wrong with this statement?
(1) child giving parent an ultimatum
(2) presence of maggots somewhere in our home
(3) implication that he doesn’t need to bathe unless exposed to maggots
(4) suggestion that I let him smell the maggot-pile in the first place
(5) that he needs another hit of rot-waft
Architectural spine
BusinessWeek just published their annual design awards. The Kansas City Public Library won one for their facade-as-library-shelf.
I knew I was on to something in this post, but maybe not quite so literally.
See also: Virtual flâneur
Algebraic soundboard
Terminus of one of the tubes that form the lattice “dome” above the great lawn at Millennium Park with the ribbon-like Gehry bandshell behind it.
“Heresy” after a decade
Ten years ago I wrote a paper for a small graduate school conference that in retrospect marked a real turning point in my life. The Heresy of Hypertext: Fear and Anxiety in the Late Age of Print was a bit of a personal manifesto, an attempt to bring my literary critical skills (my day job) to bear on the new media of hypertext (what I obsessed about most of the rest of the time). But, in truth, it was actually an extended rant to my English grad school professors about the importance of hypertext and digital text. Great scholarship “Heresy” wasn’t — and oh my how saturated it is in gradschool-speak neologisms! — but it is still the most linked-to part of any site I have ever had. It has even been anthologized and translated.
But ten years is a long time when you’re writing about new media. Let’s see how it holds up.
Just as bibliographers regard 1501 as the year that printed books emerged from the “cradle” of their post-Gutenberg nativity, the first year of the coming millennium will likely serve as a convenient demarcation point for the end of the beginning of electronic textuality.
True enough. By 2001 blogging was in full swing, putting to rest any notion that the written word and electronic media were somehow incompatible. Though literary hyperext was not a mainstream phenomenon in 2001 (and is not now) I think it is fair to say that by 2001 most would agree that electronic textuality had matured to the point where the distinction between it and the printed word was largely academic — a sure sign of cultural assimilation.
Though this new textuality promises to level hierarchical distribution of and access to even the most esoteric data, we should not make the mistake of equating the leveling with a reduction in the standards of professional scholarship. In fact, in such an intraloquial and interactive scenario, shoddy work quickly draws attention to itself, succumbing to the necessarily higher standard of excellence in a web of virtual collaborators and competitors.
Mostly true. Wikipedia is a great example of this kind of collaborative weeding-out of shoddiness. A web of casual editors does expose deficiencies in rigor and quality faster than in other media. But the very anonymity, publishing reach, and fungibility of electronic text also makes fraud a hell of a lot easier.
To the mind weaned on the indelibility of the printed word, electronic text seems unstable, less epistemologically graspable. I submit that this mostly unconscious perception of instability generates anxiety in the reader, anxiety of the type usually written off to the “it just feels different” category.
I think I missed on this one. Perhaps it was true in 1995, but I’m now of the opinion (largely because of Matt’s work) that the immateriality/instability was an illusion. The “just feels different” aspect, I suspect, was mostly a function of screen resolution.
Not a bad little paper, after all. Overwrought to be sure, but a personal milestone and one that I will always look to as the springboard that launched me into the arc that I am still on.
Always check the hitch
At the MCA.
Tips for bulk-shucking crawfish
Do it outside. Juice will splatter when you crack the carapace.
Keep separate containers for shucked and to-be-shucked mudbugs. They look remarkably similar and after removing the meat from a few dozen you’ll start to confuse the two piles if you use one container.
To remove tail meat, do the following. Press down with the thumb of one hand where the tail meets the body. Push towards the head with thumb. Rip head off with other hand, discard head. You should have two legs (or more) still attached to the tail and a small white Y-shaped piece of meet sticking out from the tail (pulled from the body itself). Crack off the carapace where the legs are connected. Push index finger, nail first, between the meat and the shell from front to the end of the tail, severing the connection between the two. Pull out meat. Remove small, usually dark vein that runs the length of the tail. The key is to pull it out rather than rip it out since there is a small piece of meat that covers the vein and might as well be retained if you can do it.
Darker-red crawfish have harder shells. On these dark crawfish, you might want to crack the tail like you would do with a lobster before attempting the above.
Your thumbs and forefingers will develop lots of micro-cuts. This is nothing to worry about.
Assuming you seasoned your crawfish with liberal amounts of cayenne (and related hot stuff) your hands will begin to burn after about twenty or so shuckings. It seems the spice-infused crawjuice just seeps in. This is something to worry about. It hurts.
About 17 lbs. of crawfish generates as much meat as pictured above. Lots of work. Best to make certain you’re really into crawfish before undertaking. Good luck.
Tonsiloliths
My brother and a co-worker of mine both have tonsiloliths. Literally, “tonsil stones” and sometimes referred to, so pleasantly, as “throat scabs” these nasties are actually just whitish balls of accumulated goo that form around food particles and bacteria rather like a pearl does around a grain of sand. They live tucked away in the tonsil cavity, occasionally peeking out to say hello and cause a little halitosis. Oh, they also are without question the stinkiest things I have ever smelled produced from a living human body.
If they are ready you can pop them out and dispose of them. I’ve had the unfortunate privilege of witnessing both my co-worker and my brother do this. The funny thing is that they both thought they were uniquely afflicted with these mouth-born stinkbombs and were either too embarrassed or too unconcerned ever to wonder if it were a documented condition. Of course, it is. Googling around a bit with descriptive keywords it is easy to find forums devoted solely to people happy to be in the company of other tonsilolith-producers.
Having witnessed all this, I consider myself a second-hand tonsilolith sufferer. At present, there are no online communities devoted to this topic.
[At one point I actually ran Google keyword ads here and made a little scratch given just how many people search on “tonsilolith”.]
Semiotics of freedom
A question for you. What is the difference between these two things?
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Give up? The first establishes the freedoms that Americans enjoy and must protect at all costs. The second is a symbol of that freedom. OK, so another question. Which is more important to you? Which would you be more likely to put your life on the line for? Seems to me an easy choice.
Whenever the issue of flag desecration comes up I can’t help but think of early religions that came to value physical depictions of a god more than belief in the deity itself. Aren’t we past this, people?
Nailed
My son crawled out of bed tonight and announced to us that he needed his toenails clipped. I thought this was the funniest thing I had ever heard — at least a very creative excuse not to go to sleep (what if a long nail caught on the comforter?!) — but I immediately knew that laughing would not be received well by thelovelywife. I stifled my laughter in my elbow pit.
Without looking up from her magazine my wife dryly replied, “Son, we do not trim toenails every night. Go back to bed.” Which he promptly did.
See, I would have blown that exchange in any myriad of ways.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
