Category: Words

Someone sent me a copy of Mono Kickstart, which I had admired at LinuxWorld Expo. I’m not sure who sent it, but I’m quite grateful. I had been hoping someone would write a book like that, and fearing the prospect of having to write it myself. Very exciting news for Mono: means that it’s catching on…

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have a song called Rye Whiskey, which is the first few results when you search for the song on Google. But it’s also known as a Woodie Guthrie song, and NPR fave John McCutcheon does a version, and the song itself goes well back into the mists of time known only to Alan Lomax and the rest of the music historians.

I haven’t heard the Nick Cave version but the iTunes store has the Guthrie version, as well as several instrumentals that don’t seem related. You don’t hear that kind of folk song much, it’s either earnest politics or silly children’s music and the occasional hippie-church-outdoors hymn. This is the sort of bitter alcoholic wail you expect today to hear from… well, Nick Cave or Johnny Cash.

Anyway, I sure wish I had some rye whiskey right now.

I’m writing an article for a Novell magazine, and keeping a constantly friendly but not over-casual tone. And I’ve got several conflicting tones in the random stanzas knocking around in my head:

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
“LEND ME SOME SUGAR! I AM YOUR NEIGHBOR!”

I’ve also been thinking of slogans. “We Make IT Boring” sounds awesome, because it’s not immediately intuitive, but if you think about it for five seconds it makes sense: IT is exciting only when things go wrong, or if things only occasionally go right. If it just works, you don’t notice it any more than you notice the incredibly complex workings of household appliances. When IT just works, it becomes boring, and you can actually something done instead of futzing around with your IT infrastructure.

The conflict of a slogan proclaiming the boringness of a product is what makes the slogan catchy, and rare– it’s a risk to have a conflict there, especially to have a disparaging comment in your motto. There’s a reason that the app that declared “It Sucks Less” never caught on (Was it Oleo?). But “boring” isn’t the same as “not sucking” — it means predictability, which is not at all bad for things that are, in essence, tools approaching the status of utilities or appliances.

That’s my deep thought of the week, by the way, so savor it deeply.

W. T. F.
(courtesy of Mixmaster and Dan Mills).

OK, here’s the first few bits of my translation. Let me know what you think. The book is called Hijo de Ladrón, which translates to Son of a Burglar, or Son of a Thief. There was an English translation published as “Born Guilty” in the early sixties, but it sold poorly, and Rojas didn’t see a dime of it, and it’s now out of print and nearly impossible to find. The novel is the first of four about a young man who grows into an increasing awareness of himself and his place in society as the son of a thief, as a writer, and as a political being in the linotypists union. It’s semi-autobiographical, based partly on Rojas’ life and partly on the lives of people he knew. It includes a number of historical events, most notably the Valparaiso trolley riots which immediately precede the arrest which sets the scene for the novel. I’ll post more as I get further along.

If you have comments on the style (stilted? too many commas?) or on the content itself, please do let me know.
Continue reading “Tbe first part”

Funny: dooce.com

Political: Why is Bush Popular?

Dear MBTA:
I feel that I am not alone in saying I’d gladly pay double the fare on the T if I thought it would be well-used. That’s why your capital investment program proposal and the comments period are so important: they really makes clear what the MBTA is doing with the money, and that gives me peace of mind and makes me feel that my tax dollars and fares really are at work on something good. To expand on your customer outreach, it might help to put up posters explaining where your money comes from (so much from fares, so much from state grants, so much from the feds, etc.) and what percentage gets spent on things– information that is in the capital investment overview but which is not going to be seen by many riders.

My comments on the capital investment program are as follows:

First, I love that you are planning on the ticketing and fare changes. I especially like the idea that they may some day permit fare adjustments based on traffic (charge more for peak hours, less for off-peak, for example), and if they help us gain better data on passenger usage patterns. Another way to get better system data would be to install GPS systems in busses, like those installed in snowplows, so that we know when and where a bus line is late. For example, the 47 bus is too often late, perhaps because it is such a long route and delays anywhere in the system add up. Maybe it would help to divide it into two bus routes or to adjust its path somehow– you could tell what to do if you had better data from GPS systems.

I would like to point out that the stairways at Park Street station are too small and that it’s slow to get from the Red Line to the Green Line during peak hours when transferring. I guess you already know that, and from looking at it, it wouldn’t be easy or cheap to fix.

In an ideal world, I’d like to see the Green Line replaced with real trains. When you examine the Somerville extension, please consider running it underground rather than aboveground, because you can see on the B, C, and D lines that aboveground lines, especially with so many at-grade crossings, are a disaster.

Also, can I just whine about how Arlington was stupid to reject the Red Line extension, and suggest that the issue should be revisited? I mean, really. I look at Washington DC and what it has accomplished with its Metro system, and it just makes me so jealous– they have interstate cooperation on this thing, and we can’t even get Arlington to agree to something that benefits them and everyone around them? Come ON! We need greater coverage, because Boston is a huge metro area, and if they don’t want a stop, well, put in a Lexington stop and pass Arlington by! And how about Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Chelsea?

Yours,
Aaron Weber
Slummahville

Seth Stevenson, writer for Slate, writes about sucking: a review of various kinds of vacuum cleaners — replete with commentaries about vacuum-cleaner fanatics and discussion boards — and also a review of ads for the Dyson cleaner. I wonder if he’s in league with Dyson. Nonetheless, I want want want one.

I have been writing a letter in the tradition of open letters to people who are unlikely to respond, except not funny. I know that the McSweeney’s letters are the deadpan sort of humor that is often not funny, and that the letter I have written may be construed as funny, and may in fact be unintentionally hilarious, but my sincerity is almost real here, which is about as close as I get these days. The letter goes:

I know you blame yourself for Ettore’s death, but I do not blame you. I know you blame yourself because I blame myself. I was surprised by my feelings of guilt, even though I could have expected as much: after all, it’s in the insurance company’s pamphlet about dealing with the death of a loved one.

I haven’t heard from you, and I hope that’s not because you’re afraid I’ll blame you. I also hope it’s not because you never liked me all that much. I like to imagine that you are busy doing late-December tasks, that have thrown yourself into work and art as a way to cope, that you are finding your own ways to mourn.

I want to get beyond this writing of saccharine letters about forgiveness and growth. I want to stop waking up in the night thinking “goddamnit, he can’t be dead, I just spoke with him,” or “Monday I have to ask him about the product schedule,” or “I should lend him this album, he’ll totally love this. I want to stop wondering if I could have done something. If I had known, I would have acted, but I did not know. If you had known, you would have acted, but you did not know.

Fear, suspicion, and guilt cling to us, but they cannot help him and they cannot help us.

Also, I feel a need to confess that at the wake, when people asked me how I was, I kept wanting to point at the body and say “I’m doin’ better than he is!” The statement, while true, was nonetheless very, very inappropriate, and I feel bad for even thinking it.

In the US, a the bucket where you throw refuse is called a trash can. In Britain, it’s typically called a dustbin or a bin. The US versions of Mac OS have a “Trash” folder where you put files you want to delete, and US versions of Windows use a “Recycle Bin.” However, British versions use “Wastebasket.” Nautilus follows that lead: “Trash” in the US English version, and “Wastebasket” in the British English version. Of course, this leads to anger on the part of those who feel that “Dustbin” or “Rubbish Bin” or “Bin.”

Within five minutes of this discussion beginning, it invariably goes beyond insulting Americans (everyone in the discussion agrees they can’t speak properly) to the various portions of the Commonwealth arguing over their respective dialects. I love watching people hash out colonial disputes that have been settled for generations.

Curiously, it’s mostly Australians and English people who do this– the Indian developers rarely get involved. For the most part, I think, Indian programmers are satisfied with the quality of the British translation and want to improve the quality of display for Hindi, Devangari, and so forth.