Category: Words

Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition: the indispensable Linux reference book. Go buy a copy. Or write a positive review. Or both. Ideally, both.

This isn’t real content, but here’s some neat stuff:
Via Freakonomics, a page that charts the current mood entries of Livejournal users.

Bostonist. A weblog about Boston.

Deep-End Dining, a weblog about weird food. I’m pretty excited to try the live octopus. Because any food that bites back is sure to excite.

C: damn i wish i could get myself to blog regularly
Verbal: the secret is a high-fiber cereal.
C: Hahaha.
Verbal: Several of my friends have signed themselves up for a “content challenge,” where they post at least once every day for a month, and it has to be real content– no quizzes, no random links to the NYT without at least some good commentary.
C: I bet your friends are “writers.”
Verbal: I don’t know what most of them do, actually. I’ve only met two of them. They’re just blogs I read. Does that count as friends?

I finished the Half-Blood Prince on Friday night– Bookdwarf had company over, but I was hidden in the bedroom with the air conditioning and Harry Potter. For the last hundred pages or so she came in every few minutes to see where I was, and if I was crying.

I didn’t cry.

OK, so, I resisted it as long as I could, but I have started reading the latest Harry Potter installment. I managed to avoid reading any of them until last year, well after Phoenix came out. And now I’ve managed to wait all of six days before, last night, giving in and reading the first couple chapters.

My current guesses as to who dies in the end: I don’t know about the “central character death” but I’m thinking, there have to be some additional collateral fatalaties. For one, Voldemort. He dies at the end of all the other books, too, so he’s got to die in that one. Also that French girl. This is a novel by a Brit, after all– the French can’t go so well in this one either.

I kind of hope Hermione gets it, though. Not sure why.

Someone suggested today that New Hampshire’s license plate motto would be so much better if you could add “Baby” to it. As in, “Live Free or Die, Baby.” Sort of like in Terminator II. The alternate motto of course is “Home of Tax Free Shopping, Baby.” Yes, that’s a real NH slogan. Maine might also benefit: “The way life should be, baby.”

Of course, Florida already has that kind of motto. Their license plates say “Election Fraud and Hurricanes, Baby!” Or is it only in my imagination that those are the only attractions in the state?

The other day Nat suggested that it would be funny to make a t-shirt with the slogan “e^2pi*i is the loneliest number” and when I figured out what he meant, a few minutes ago (the answer is “1”) it occurred to me that, while it might be funny to have a shirt with an alternate expression of “one” on it as the loneliest number, aren’t there other, lonelier numbers? I mean, could e^pi*i be lonelier? That’s got one less pi*i, and it’s negative. Or maybe i is really the loneliest number. It’s imaginary, you know. That’s gotta be pretty lonely.

Someone pointed out to me that just linking to some random Times article is the highbrow equivalent of posting random quizzes nobody else cares about: it’s what you do when you have nothing interesting to say.

So, here’s two links to random crap that is not from the Times
The Poor Man parodies Powerline:

But, more importantly, the MSM seems to have conveniently forgotten about a little thing called 9/11, the day that everything changed forever. Sure, prior to 9/11, it was wrong for Michael Jackson to rape the shit out of little kids, and I am on the record saying so. But that innocent world is gone forever.

Stewie, from the Family Guy, hates on his babysitter’s boyfriend:

HA! I got your hat! Take that, hatless! Now go back to the quad and resume your hackey-sack tourney! I’m not going to lie down for some frat boy bastard with his damn Teva sandals and his Skoal Bandits and his Abercrombie and Fitch long-sleeve, open stitched, crew-neck henley smoking his sticky buds out of a soda can while watching his favorite downloaded Simpson episodes every night! Yes, we all love Mr. Plow – oh, you’ve got the song memorized, do you? SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE! That is exactly the kind of idiot you see at Taco Bell at one in the morning – the guy who just whiffed his way down the bar-skank ladder.

After Bookdwarf finished with Japanland it was my turn. I’m most of the way through it now. Outline: hardy American, documentary filmmaker, world-citizen, and individualist Karin wants to truly understand wa, the Japanese concept of harmony. So she arranges a host family through her judo teacher, and stays for a year and tries to understand Japanese subtelty. She is not a subtle woman: she is outdoorsy, outspoken, unable to follow directions, can’t cook or clean, and is single past the age of 30. Big no-nos.

She obviously loves the country, but also strains against its insistence on order and obedience, and she definitely highlights several unflattering examples of the human cost of wa. In particular, she travels to a shrine in northern Japan to film a weeklong retreat of a spiritual group known as Yamabushi. Most of the attendees are older men, newly retired, some sent there by their wives because they have nothing else to do and just get in the way around the house. Retired guys out in the woods getting in touch with themselves, each other, and nature are not unfamiliar to American society, but she describes the men as desperately in search of meaning in their lives now that their salaryman days are over:

One man retired less than a week ago. He began working for his company at twenty-one. His commute was two hours and thirty-four minutes each day. I do the numbers. Five days a week. Fifty weeks a year. Thirty-nine years.
“You’ve spent twenty-five thousand horus on the train,” I say. “That’s nearly… three years, night and day.”
He gets very quiet. I leave him alone.

As the passage illustrates, Muller is not always the most sensitive to the feelings of others, and her portrayal of Japan is, while appreciative and honest, not 100% positive. I am sure that this comes as a great disappointment and dishonor to her host family. I was glad to see that while she is critical of some aspects of Japanese society, her self-assessment is also unsparing: she certainly doesn’t shy away from discussing her cultural miscues, which range from comical to genuinely painful, especially when she offends someone she respects and scrambles ineffectually to apologize.

In all, Japanland is balanced and well-written. Recommended.

Quick summaries of the novel Bangkok 8 make it sound like a trashy mystery but it’s so much more. I mean, yeah, there’s prostitution, drugs, gem smuggling, and of course murder. But there’s also buddhism, the conflict between east and west, and pretty balanced explorations of the society in which the prostitution, drugs, gem smuggling, murder, and international intrigue take place. Highly recommended.