With the release of Perl 6, the ascendancy of Python as programming language will move into full swing. “Perl” they say, “is the best wrench to hammer in all your screws.”
The increasing popularity of swanky (and expensive) new Vespa scooters in the US will drive hipsters and indie-rockers to ride classic mopeds. I’ve seen several around Allston and Somerville just this past week.
Two neato articles: What Sex and the City owes to the Golden Girls, placing the hott HBO series in historical perspective, and a quick critique of Boy Meets Boy.
First, the girly show: I’m hooked. I don’t even have a TV. I watch it every week at Megan’s place (followed by The Wire for a dose of testosterone.) But the article is correct in stating that the real pull of SaTC is the friendship among the women, and that it’s the friendship which makes the show so enduring. Each of the women sems to represent different facets of contemporary femininity; their interrelationships form a more complex whole that makes the show infinitely more watchable.
Secondly, the dating show: six episodes, fifteen suitors, some undisclosed number of which are not really interested. If a straight guy fools the bachelor, the faker gets a million bucks and the bachelor gets dissed. Nice. Says MediaLife: “the fact remains that the premise is undeniably cruel and seedy.” Now that you put it that way, I’m almost tempted to watch. It’s the pull for shows like Change of Heart, Joe Millionaire, and, for that matter, Candid Camera: we know something they don’t. It’s dramatic irony reduced to tragic sarcasm.
Crooked Timber has some interesting articles on identity and humanity and nature.
Questions: To what extent is the nonhuman world an obstacle to human endeavor? What about the endeavor to change human nature? Does the human portion of the natural world become an obstacle to human endeavor?
Genetically modified food, for the most part, does not bother me. I am not troubled by ‘golden rice’ or by pest-resistant bT soy any more than I am by a hybrid rose, a plumcot, or a purebred dog. Which is to say, there’s potential for trouble there, but not, for the most part, awful trouble. It’s perfectly possible to have all of these things without ethical problems– but they can arise.
So what if we synthesize all of our food some day? So much of what I eat is contaminated with industrial waste: the mercury in my fish, the pesticide in my vegetables. Why wouldn’t hothouse everything be safer? An individual hothouse tomato, grown without pesticides, might be better. An individual farm-raised fish could be safer than one roaming free in the heavy-metal ocean. But human beings cannot maintain the biodiversity or healthy balance of nature. At least, not yet. Remeber what happened to the various biodome experiments? Systemic failure.
I saw a blind woman in the T this morning, holding the cane just a fraction of an inch below her foot level as she descended the stairs, so it tapped only when she reached a landing. She went all the way into the station, mostly not touching the walls or the floors, tapping only once or twice when she needed to make a turn. But she was close by the wall. She’d need sight, (or a much longer cane, or a lot of practice) to walk down the exact middle.
Moderation is often the hardest route to take. It’s much easiser to hew closely to one wall or another.
Reasons to be a Republican. And a complimentary list of candidates for the White House in ’04, scoring them based on ‘scandal points.’ I like the scandal-points system.
Some people seem to be betting against John F. Kerry because they have been unsure of his ethnicity. Apparently he had Eastern-European Jewish relatives, and everyone has been assuming he’s Irish because he has an Irish-sounding name and wants to be John F. Kennedy.
I’m surprised that this is an issue. But then again, I’m also surprised when people do things like confuse religious law for secular law. Not to say I’m immovable or perfect. I’ve been swinging more and more towards gun-ownership, on the premise that guns, like drugs, are best regulated rather than criminalized. The statement “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns’ is, in essence, true. And nothing is made safer by placing its manufacture, distribution, and usage into the hands of organized crime.
I haven’t posted many pictures for awhile, because I keep forgetting to move them off the camera. Two I’ve just moved off the camera from earlier this summer: Megan at Fenway and doing a crossword.
The heart is not only a lonely hunter, though it is certainly that. It is a drowning salesman, a bloodied clown, an incurable disease. We pay dearly for its every decision…
Steve Almond, “The Body In Extremis” My Life in Heavy Metal
I just bought a Snickers bar that has 510 calories and 24 grams of fat, or 36% of my daily recommended intake of fat.
Kinky folk everywhere rejoiced to learn that a molecule found in saliva can help treat colonic ulcers.
Home economics archives. Different kind of economics from the ones I’ve been looking at.
The cost of classes at Harvard Extension seems to obey interesting rules. The more you want to get from it, the more you have to pay, certainly: to take it for no credit, it’s three or four hundred. For credit, perhaps five. Writing intensive courses are seven hundred, enrollment limited (more labor-intensive as well, thus more expensive). And the business school classes are always part of a degree or certificate program, and cost a minimum of $1200, pointing out their extra economic value, or something.
I’d like to know more about economics, but that would require more math than I’m willing to suffer. I suppose there’s always business school, which would have the additional advantage of shocking and horrifying my parents.
The O’Reilly “So You Want to Write a Book guide is quite a good one and takes you from the proposal through the publication. The GNOME Documentation Project Style Guide is enough to convince anyone that technical writing is the opposite of style. Same for this article from the Chronicle in which a textbook author chronicles his discontents.
Steve Almond knows how to write really well. In the first story the narrator recalls his rock-out youth as a rock concert reviewer for a newspaper, cheating on his girlfriend, and says: “It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.”
I, too, am still broken. I will always be broken, because I am human, and we are all inherently flawed. But it’s through the flaws that beauty comes in, I think. Or maybe just the rain.
Secretly Ironic 