Meeting My Minimum Daily Requirement of Data

Why didn't I know this sooner? Put "unemployment rate: X city or county or state" into Google and it will pull up the current Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. I came to this today after running across a pet peeve of mine: undated data.

The web site I was consulting had all kinds of economic data about a certain place, nicely arrayed in a table, with comparisons to other polities (state and national numbers). Just what I was looking for. Except that it didn't have a date — not even a year. Making it, for my purposes, completely useless.

So, I fed Google a bit. Unemployment rate: Schaumburg, IL: 6.4 percent. Middling. Unemployment rate: Fargo, ND: 3.6 percent. We should all be so lucky, though it took a less-than-clean energy boom in the Dakotas to do it. Unemployment rate: Yuma, AZ: 16.1 percent. Just the first place I thought of that I was sure had a lousy rate, and sure enough it does.

YouTube Revolver

I had the urge to listen to "Tomorrow Never Knows" today, which I probably hadn't heard in 20-plus years, except for the excerpt on Mad Men on Sunday (which I've read cost the show a quarter million). Not owning a copy of Revolver, I naturally went to YouTube to look for it. But I also was astonished to find the entire album (UK version) posted as one chunk.

Not only that, but there are more records: mostly canonical rock albums of the period in the suggestions bar, but a few more recent ones as well. I vaguely thought that there was a 10-minute limit on videos, but I don't really don't pay attention to YouTube that closely. The bigger surprise is that the copyright holders haven't swatted these down. Surely they could. Maybe the postings are considered a free way to market mp3 downloads.

So I listened to "Tomorrow Never Knows." When I heard it in younger days, it was just one of many Beatles songs. Sure, they did songs like that. But I was listening some years after all their work had been released. Now that I know more about popular songs recorded in the decades before it, I have some inkling of how strange the song must have sounded when new; it and most of the album.

Social Media and Its Discontents

Hard freeze dead ahead. The first taste of the coming months, which always feature all the winter details: the icy crunch underfoot, the wind blast in the face, the snowflakes and icy rain and slush. But also the indoor sensations -- the whoosh of the furnace, the dim gray morning light in the bedroom, the trappings of Christmas.

I just checked my Facebook page for the first time in about two weeks, and it seems that no rogue programs are trying to link to dirty pictures there. "Over the past couple of days, many users have complained about finding links on their Facebook pages taking them to images depicting jarring violence and graphic pornography," the WSJ noted. "Although the way the latest spam messages spread isn't new, their content is more shocking than the typical scam enticing a free iPod shuffle."

Dang. I never get interesting spam. I'm mostly done with Facebook for now, anyway. It's refusing to repost BTST in my Notes section, which was its main job as far as I was concerned.

But it's possible for the site to waste your time even if you don't visit it. I put "Facebook" into the Google search box and the autocomplete suggested mostly innocuous words like banners, mobile, timeline, status, full site, emoticons, login home page, symbols, quotes. But when I put "Facebook is," autofill suggested is down, issues, is evil, is like jail, is stupid, isnt working, is not working, is like prison, is for losers, is bad. Even better, I then tried "Facebook wants" and got my phone number, you to pay, to be a tastemaker, to change, a phone number, money, photo id, your unborn child, to buy instagram, your kids.

Some Useless Information to Fire My Imagination

Got a message from the friendly folks at Facebook recently. And one from some spammers in a non-English speaking nation. First, the Facebook message.

Hi Dees,
We're trying out a new feature to reduce the amount of email you receive from Facebook. Starting today, we are turning off most individual email notifications and instead, we'll send you a summary only if there are popular stories you may have missed.
You can turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings at any time.
Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Suits me. I get too much in my in box anyway. This was, of course, a day when the social media site annoyed many millions of -- I suspect -- its middle-aged users by changing something suddenly. Seems like this has happened before, but I can't remember now. The main thing Facebook does to annoy me is forget to republish BTST to my Notes section, which has been happening this week. Guess the Facebook servers have been too busy gearing up for the Next Big Thing to attend to routine business.

Got a chuckle out of this in the New York Times today: "Facebook, the Web’s biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy."

Don't we already have an entity like that? You know, television.

Here's the spam. Of the two messages, I preferred the spam. I get so little quality spam these days. "Septimus Obama"? I have to like that.

Howdy Septimus Obama is without a doubt giving Gov Grants that can help family members locally to help stimulate the particular financial state. Investigate for yourself N7Gov . com tend not to pass up. It's not going to last lengthy!!

The Yabba-Dabba-Doo Virus

We spent the last few days of April recovering from a virus on the loose in the house. Last week, Lilly had it, then Ann, then me. Ann had to stay home from school on Friday, then I felt crummy on Saturday. While I was on the couch for much of that afternoon, Ann, mostly recovered, decided it was time to watch a lot of the fourth season of The Flintstones, a DVD set that was given to us some time ago.

I appreciate its spot in the annals of TV animation, and like it for the most part, but the show was never a top favorite of mine. A half-dozen or so episodes is more than enough at one sitting. Still, the season premiere that year, which guest stars Ann-Margret more or less as herself, is an exceedingly charming cartoon. Maybe that's because the show's husband vs. wife antics are toned down for the episode, with the addition of a musical score that's aged a lot better than the premise of the show. I don't ever remember seeing this particular episode in repeats, and I don't know whether my family would have been watching on the original airdate, September 19, 1963, but I wouldn't remember it from then anyway.

I'm mostly recovered from the virus now, and back at the word mill. So I saw the May Day Google Doodle featuring the anniversary of the opening of the Great Exposition of 1851, including the Crystal Palace, a steam locomotive, and the Koh-I-Noor Diamond, among other marvels of the fair and the age.

Does "doodle" seem the right term, considering how much planning probably goes into them? My own choice for today's doodle would have been dandelions, which have sprouted in great number on my lawn, other lawns, vacant lots, roadsides and other green patches that I can see. But that's just me being narrow-minded. The Great Exhibition is well worth remembering.

Among other things, The Guardian notes that, "the building and the original show helped create the English euphemism 'spend a penny,' meaning go to the toilet, after sanitary engineer and plumber George Jennings created the first public loos. The so-called Monkey Closets were located in the Retiring Rooms, and visitors, who were also offered a shoe shine, were charged a penny to use them.

"The first show was a big success and the profit made was used to found London's Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum." Full article here.

Those are all fine legacies of the expo. Never heard of "spend a penny," but it seems to count as old slang. Any museum that has full-sized copies of Trajan's Column, as Victoria and Albert does, is all right by me. Though overshadowed by other London attractions, I can attest that the Natural History Museum and Science Museum are also excellent.

Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi

This is an interesting graphic. But what's the point? Africa's big all right. Number two after Asia in the all-continent square mile/square kilometer challenge. Everyone ought to know that, though I'm sure many people don't.

But if suddenly everyone in the world knew how big Africa is in the scheme of continents, it would follow that -- what? Africa would be held in higher regard because it's so big?

What would the graphic mean if, instead of the U.S., China, India and various European countries, you put in Canada and Russia? Africa's roughly 11,730,000 sq. mi.; Russia measures about 6,601,000 sq. mi.; and Canada comes in at 3,855,000 sq. mi. or so. That is, Russia and Canada would be short of filling up Africa by a Chad or Mali or the like.

This too is an interesting map, courtesy that endlessly interesting blog, Strange Maps. The numbers are a little old now, but the comparisons are probably still apt. Illinois' budget problems have been compared to Greece or Ireland, which might be appropriate in terms of relative debt load, but simply in terms of GDP, the state's failure would be more like an implosion of Mexico. Also remarkable is that, after decades of decline, Michigan still has an Argentine-sized economy.

But No Postcards From Nietzsche

The verb used to be "surfing" the Internet -- how quaintly '90s -- but it's more like clearing your way through undergrowth with a machete. If you're not paying much attention, the path you've cleared will disappear again, and you won't be able to remember how you got there; and if you don't bookmark, you might never come that way again.

So how did I find the Nietzsche Family Circus? Only a few hours after I found it, I don't remember. "The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote," says the site. "Refresh the page to see a new comic..."

I had to spend a few minutes with that. The best pairing I randomly created featured the eldest child, whatever his name is, standing in his pajamas next to a pile of presents under a Christmas tree on Christmas morning, saying, "God is dead." Was that really randomized?

The Free-Floating Dysfunctional Family Circus Archive v1.1.2, on the other hand, isn't randomized. It's astonishing how many dysfunctional captions there are.

I visited the resale-shop postcard bin today. Not my first visit there, but I try to hit the periodic half-off storewide sales, when the cards are 12.5 cents each. Can't beat that. Except today, when everything in the store was 75 percent off. Cards were 6.25 cents each. I bought 50.

Some depict places I've been, others do not, and a few are novelty cards. Out of 50, I bought two previously mailed cards without looking at them too closely. But I did see that they feature archetypical postcard messages, that is, along the lines of "we are here, it's beautiful here, we like it, see you later."

That shorthand is so well known that Jimmy Buffett was able to use for his own comic ends as recently as 1981 in a song called "The Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful." But I suspect that future generations -- as soon as my daughters' cohorts -- won't be familiar with it.

One card was of Niagara Falls, sent by a Mrs. Wallace to a Mr. & Mrs. Joe Van of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The other was of the Blue Ridge Parkway, sent by Viola to Mr. & Mrs. H. Dede of Floral Park, New York.

On closer examination, the really astonishing thing is that these two cards were mailed within days of each other in July 1970 -- one definitely the 21st of that month, according to the postmark, the other maybe the 16th or the 18th, since the postmark is incomplete.

That by itself isn't astonishing. But what were they both doing in the same box in the same shop at the same time, considering that they went to different people in different states 40 years ago? Moreover, I picked them more-or-less at random out of several hundred cards. How did this happen? I'll never know.

Thursday Salmagundi

We've had a run of dry, sunny days here, but not quite with full August heat (except for last weekend). This week has seen low- to mid-80s F. for highs and remarkably cool temps at night. I have lunch out on the deck if I can, and walk around the neighborhood in the late afternoon if I can do that. Declining summer, it is. School starts in less than two weeks, and I've already seen peewee footballers out practicing in parks, a little earlier than I remember in other years.

It's been six years this week since we moved into this house with a deck. I did some poking around not long ago, and it seems like the theoretical value of the house since 2003 has described a path that pretty much looks like the Matterhorn. Or at least the Matterhorn as it appeared in an old Donald Duck comic -- smoothly up to a point, then back down again. The real question now is whether it's any lower than in 2003.

I don't intend to find out. Child incubation, the main point of having a suburban house, isn't finished yet.

Got some borderline spam today from someone encouraging me to play a geography quiz associated with Facebook. No thanks. Can't muster the desire to do quizzes on Facebook, though other people are welcome to them. I usually find that geoquizzes are either too easy (what's the capital of France?) or too hard (name the eight countries on the migration route of the coconut-laden African swallow).

I persuaded Lilly to take an online U.S. states geoquiz recently, one that gives you three chances to match the correct name with the correct state. Guess it on the first try and you get three points. A correct second try gives you two points and the third gives you one. A perfect score would be 150. She got 113, or about 75 percent. Not bad, but I told she needs to know all the states by the time she gets to junior high.

Two other oddities I forgot to mention about Star Trek in a recent posting. One was McCoy's motivation for joining Star Fleet -- a divorce had left him destitute. Really? That kind of thing happens in a world of no poverty and full gender equality? Besides, he's a doctor, dammit. You'd think he'd be able to find a job of some kind, unless the movie's trying to make some point about the long-term (really long-term) impact of socialized medicine.

Also, in passing, I heard Capt. Pike tell the young Kirk that the Enterprise was being built at the Riverside Dock, or Shipyard, or something. I know I heard Riverside. A tip of the hat to Riverside, Iowa, which calls itself the future birthplace of Capt. Kirk, just because no place else had thought of it first? Some years ago, I drove through Riverside and managed to see this, but not this.

Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys?

On Memorial Day, clouds and rain and cool air moved in following sweet hot pre-mosquito days of mid-May. With the coming of post-Memorial Day rains, mosquitoes have emerged from wrigglerdom to bother us mammals.

I was looking at the guest list for the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour on Wiki the other day (don't ask) and it looks like someone seeded the list with a handful of bogus performers, but none with a better name than "Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys." ("Jericho Squeezebox" isn't bad, either.) Further research reveals that the name is mentioned on other pages that borrow material from Wiki, but Irwin and his Jockeys don't have their own page on the sprawling encyclopaedia, probably for good reason.

If such a thing as Wiki had existed at the time, I might have posted references to my own entirely fictional '80s band, Sarratt Main Desk. But I did have a SMD concert t-shirt made by a graphic artist friend of mine, and I still have it somewhere in my drawer of retired t-shirts. The shirt celebrates the band's Tooling Around the World Tour to promote their album Haecceity Control, with stops in Bangor, Maine; Horseheads, NY; East Carbon, Utah; Schaumburg, Ill. (!); Dar Es Salaam; Pflugerville, Texas; Meeteetse, Wyo.; Smyrna, Tenn.; and Pyongyang.

Speaking of tattered tees, I also have a souvenir shirt from the grand opening of the first Krispy Kreme in downtown Chicago in 2002. Got a free box of doughnuts that day, too. The shirt has a pic of a plain glazed KK doughnut with the words, "The Real Chicago Loop" or something like that. It's a memento of the early 2000s glory days of KK expansion, which is now a B-school case study about the perils of expanding a brand too much, too fast.

That comes to mind because I noticed the other day that the Hanover Park, Ill., Krispy Kreme has gone belly up. I think the economy killed that one. I'm fond enough of their product -- I remember discovering KK gleefully in Nashville nearly 30 years ago, when the chain was Southern exclusively -- but the truth was, the only time we ever bought doughnuts at the Hanover Park location was when we got a hold of coupons offering two boxes for the price of one, since a dozen normally comes at a premium to more ordinary doughnuts. Otherwise our sometime doughnut business goes to Country Donuts, a suburban chain made up of three locations.

Quiz Day

Rain pretty much all day today, the sort of day when taking Facebook quizzes seems to be a good way to pass the time. Rather than posting them separately on that social media site, however, I'm putting them here.

What Kind of Shoe Polish Are You?

You are Kiwi brand. Your waxy colloidal emulsion would be welcome on just about any dress shoe, and you have one cute little bird as your mascot.

What Kind of Scary New Disease Are You?

You are SARS. You come from the bird swamps of the mysterious Orient and leave 'em gasping for air. You consider swine flu just a déclassé social climber.

Which Vice President Are You?

You are Thomas Marshall, chosen to balance your ticket because you have a sense of humor while the top guy does not.


I also picked my five favorites from these important categories. If I didn't have other things to do, I'd collect a thumbnail pic of each one.

Five Favorite Second-Tier Nazis

Martin Bormann, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Alfred Rosenberg, Walther Funk

Five Favorite Food Additives of All Time

E260, polyethylene glycol, gum arabic, glycerin triacetate, FD&C Red No. 2 (a classic!)

Five Favorite Renaissance Instruments

Dulcian, sackbutt, crumhorn, kortholt, shawm

Just Another Late Adopter

After a week on Facebook, I can see why middle-aged people have taken to it. Namely, it's too good for kids to monopolize. I've corresponded, briefly of course, with a handful of people I haven't heard from in years -- in one case, 30 years, since we both left high school.

Not that it's going to replace other forms of correspondence. Postcards, especially.

Still a little fuzzy on how parts of it work, but no hurry on figuring it out. I'm also a little fuzzy on people fretting about the privacy of the things they themselves post there. Or anywhere on line. The Internet is publishing. Meaning it's open to the public. Who wants to share embarrassing pics of themselves, anyway?

This is about as embarrassing as pictures get on this site.

I went to the Spam Museum, and I'm not ashamed to publish that fact.

Today, I Learned About Castle Grayskull

Mimi Smartypants is still worth reading: Speaking of bad-assery, Wikipedia recently taught me that Castle Grayskull was surrounded by a 'bottomless abyss,' she writes. I did not know that! What a great feature! LT and I would really like to remodel our condo building to look just like Castle Grayskull, just need to get the other owners' approval (we will wait for one of those drunken board meetings). Now that I know about the bottomless abyss I will definitely include it in the plans. Cancel the garbage pickup and the recycling service! We will just throw everything in the abyss! And it will never fill up, no matter how many old newspapers or takeout menus or door-to-door Mormons we toss in there.

I had to look up Castle Grayskull, since I was only vaguely aware of it as a feature in a cartoon I've never watched, and I couldn't remember which cartoon, though I suspected it had something to do with fantasy heroes, the eternal spat between good and evil, and such like.

I was right. The castle features prominently in He-Man and Masters of the Universe, a cartoon franchise after my time, beginning as it did in the early '80s. Internal evidence in her blog puts Mimi at about 10 years younger than I am, and thus in a better position to appreciate the merits of He-Man and Skeletor. Somewhere in this house, however, I do have one or two action figures from the series, or maybe some other iteration of the series, though I don't know where or when I got them (cereal box? McDonald's?), or where they are at this moment (maybe the garage, but it's too cold to check). Such is my cluttered life.

That's not the only thing that's cluttered. If you look at the Wiki entry for Skeletor -- which is roughly the same length as that of Isaac Newton, except with fewer footnotes -- there's an entire section of four paragraphs devoted to "The question of Skeletor's head." Plus some amusing links.

What About the Sirens of Titan?

Someone named Clarissa Burt sends regular messages to my business e-mail address with the subject line "Clarissa Burt Talks." That address is mostly spam free, since I so seldom give it to people who have no business e-mailing me. But the address is on a couple of media directories -- such as Cision, formerly Bacon's -- so perhaps Clarissa got it that way.

Technically, her messages aren't spam, since they only ask that I listen to Clarissa's Internet radio show at a particular time every week. After weeks of messages, I was finally curious enough to check to see what manner of shows she offers.

A talk show, it turns out, as would be logical with a name like "Clarissa Burt Talks." Talks about what? This week's guest:

John Gray, Ph.D., is the best relationships author of all time. With sales of close to 7 million, Dr. John Gray's 1992 book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, has outsold all other hard-cover books published in America in the 1990's. In his highly acclaimed books, audiotapes and videotapes, as well as in his enlightening lectures and weekend seminars, Dr. Gray entertains and inspires audiences with his practical, easy-to-use communication techniques that can be immediately applied to enrich lives and relationships. Listen in as Dr. Gray joins us to discuss his new book, Why Venus and Mars Collide.

Shucks, I missed the "interview" with "Dr." Gray. Somehow I'd assumed that he had faded away with other fads of the 1990s. Still seven million is an impressive number, showing clearly that a reader of his books is born every minute.

Yes, We Have Bananas. Sort of.

In spite of a lawn that looks something like this -- from a raccoon's eye perspective, I think --

-- it's been unusually cold in recent days. Last Friday evening, cold air from Canada and warm air from the Gulf quarreled somewhere over my property. The cold temporarily won, occupying northern Illinois over the weekend and into this week. On Monday morning, in fact, enormous but short-lived snowflakes fell.

But at least the situation has given me the excuse I need to procrastinate further on certain outdoor projects, such as cutting the aforepictured grass.

I don't know who Nick Andrews is, but an informal poll among Lilly and her friends suggests he's got a future in pleasing the 10-year-old set. There's a fortune in that; just ask Disney. Naturally, we're behind the curve on this one, since his video has been kicking around on YouTube since the bronze age of that institution, 2006 (4.8 million views or so since then, apparently with a large boost from Dave Barry's blog).

Someone recommended it to Lilly recently, and it's her favorite for the moment. Some of her other friends seem to like it as well, and it reminds me of some of the better movies made by members of my college film class in '83. Back then, the class saw it, and that was that. You were lucky to get a copy of your work on video. Now the world can see it, provided Dave Barry mentions it.

Anyway, this is "My Hands Are Bananas."

A New Style of Automatic Writing

First thing, as always, on March 6. Remember the Alamo!

Geof Huth is going in for open-heart surgery tomorrow. I wish him a successful operation and a speedy recovery, so that the world may continue to enjoy the word-fountain that he is, among many other good reasons.

With Geof in mind, this will be a wordy post. Yesterday I figured out a way to use Google's automatic translation feature to call up various versions of BTST. I suspect that the translations wouldn't be too elegant, and sometimes would be plainly bizarre, to native speakers of these languages, but I don't care. Just the thought of robo-translation for no special reason is enough for me. And that fact that in three of four cases, "cheapo" is still "cheapo" in the text.

The following are the first paragraphs of the March 4th posting, in automatic Spanish, German, Japanese and Arabic.

Sra Byrne's & I
No sólo es mi cheapo 1984 Edición rústica de la señora Byrne's Dictionary coloración amarillenta y agrietada con la edad en la columna vertebral, es bastante obsoleta, teniendo en cuenta las referencias en línea. ¿O es? Voy a seguir de todos modos, ya que no todo lo que habitan en el mundo de papel-masa ha emigrado a la esfera digital.

Frau Byrne's & I
Nicht nur ist mein cheapo 1984 Taschenbuchausgabe von Frau Byrne's Dictionary Gelbfärbung mit dem Alter und in der Wirbelsäule geknackt, es ist ziemlich gut überholt, da on-line Referenzen. Oder ist es? Ich werde es trotzdem zu halten, da die Wohnung nicht alles in der Welt Papier-Masse hat wanderten in die digitale Welt.

私のバーン＆ミセス
N安っぽいだけでなく、 1984年は私のペーパーバック版のミセス 黄変してバーンの辞書には、年齢やひびの入った棘は、時代遅れのことはかなりよく、ラインリファレンスを検討しています。 それとも？ それを維持するつもりだとにかく、以後は、世界のすべての住居に移住して紙のように大量には、デジタル領域です。

السيدة بايرن 's& أنا
ليس فقط هو بلدي cheapo غلاف عادي طبعة 1984 من السيدة بايرن قاموس الاصفرار مع التقدم في السن ومتصدع في العمود الفقري ، وهو جيد الى حد ما فات أوانها ، والنظر في الاشارات على الانترنت. ام هو؟ انا ذاهب الى ابقائه على أي حال ، لأن ليس كل مسكن في العالم - ورقة الكتلة قد هاجروا الى المملكه الرقميه.

Mrs. Byrne's & I

Not only is my cheapo 1984 paperback edition of Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary yellowing with age and cracked in the spine, it's fairly well obsolete, considering on-line references. Or is it? I'm going to keep it anyway, since not everything dwelling in the world paper-mass has migrated to the digital realm.

I have more books than bookshelf space, and so some items have been tucked away for a while, Mrs. Byrne's among them. I was doing a little rearrangement work over the weekend on one of these hidden piles recently -- reorganizing, no, since that assumes a prior organization -- and unearthed the book for the first time in a few years. So naturally I had to stop moving books around and browse through it for a while. Its full title: "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words" (1974) by Josefa Heifetz Byrne, daughter of the violinist Jascha Heifetz. (See the Groucho Marx quote in that entry, under "Career.")

I would share some of Mrs. Byrne's selections here, but no need. Someone has already done it, and better than I could, unless I wanted to take more time than I do to get it done.

Oddly enough, I also discovered a couple of fine word sites over the weekend: World Wide Words and the straightforwardly named A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. What better on a still-winter weekend?

Summertime, and the Living is Busy

Time for summer break around here. Back to posting in about two weeks -- August 7 or 8. Much to do until then, both work and play. Summer recommendations until then:

Hairspray. A major delight. That coming from someone who isn't completely taken with movie musicals. I took the girls, at Lilly's request, to see it on its opening day last Friday. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie on opening day. I didn't even do that as a teenager, though of course opening days were localized in those days. For example, Star Wars opened in San Antonio on July 1, 1977, some weeks after it had in larger cities (I went with friends to see it on July 2, and waited in a fairly long line).

Cicadas. They've finally come in some numbers to my part of the world. When I hear them, I like summer even more. They make the sound of high, hot summer. Summers of yore. That's a strong association to get from a noisy insect.

This video, Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, made for YouTube some months ago. Especially entertaining to those of us with significant exposure to Japanese TV. It must be fun for other people, too, what with about 1.6 million views.

All these suggestions are noisy. For something quiet, read "The Quietest Place in the World," an article by my friend Ed. The complete text is here. As a travel writer, Ed's at the top of his game. I'd like to recommend longer reading material, but among the handful of books I've pursued recently in the few moments I have time to read them, nothing stands out. For now, high-quality short articles, such as anything on Ed's web site, will do.

MeTube

YouTube ought to be YouToo, as in you too can waste your time with it. I'm not interesting in posting on it -- I do enough of that here -- but still, it suits my eclectic, sometimes eccentric tastes. Below are more links than usual, ways to waste time this weekend. But I can't promise they'll be around for long. Such is the nature of the site.

I had a science teacher in junior high who once, when a class troublemaker asked to go to get a drink of water, mocked him by singing a few lines of "Cool Water." I had no idea where that came from, but it did stick with me. Now I know: see the Sons of the Pioneers, "Cool Water."

Back in the mid- to late '80s, I acquired perhaps a dozen LPs by Pete Seeger. But I never heard this song or saw this cartoon before. Charming.

Years ago one of my college pals, Dan Monroe, introduced me to the music -- and just as much, the persona -- of Tom Waits. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else on stage with a megaphone and a microphone, as in "Chocolate Jesus."

I probably could have seen Johnny Cash live at some point, if I'd wanted to, back when I lived in Nashville. I'm sorry I didn't. This is him with the Carter sisters on "Wabash Cannonball. Listen to the rumble, listen to the roar.

Who knows how long this will be up. Or this. Couldn't find the intro to Tom Slick, however.

Recently I've been acquainting myself with the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica on DVD. If you've seen it, and are familiar with the original as well, this will be amusing.

And, while I'm in the SF mode, this is The Invaders intro, as well as the Astro Boy intro in Japanese. Yuriko got a nostalgic kick out that.

For Ann, It Will Be No More Astounding Than Plumbing

Something always seems to eat up Thursday nights lately, and last night was no exception. Spent some time installing new information technologies around here, the details of which I will pass over. Enough to say that new technologies are pains in the butt until they start working. Then you forget about the pain, until they break.

But the new gizmos allowed me to waste some time today tooling around the likes of YouTube and Google Video. Actually I've had access to them for a while, but the improvements make them easy enough to make it worth the trouble. One of the things I found by simply requesting "Apollo 11" was a tape of about 10 minutes before and after the launch, as it was televised in 1969 (or if not, it certainly was artful editing). Astounding, these libraries that sit on our desks. When they're not annoying.

Sam and Mimi

Not long ago Netflix delivered I Am Sam to my mailbox, and I saw it yesterday.

For those of you who missed it in 2001 as I did, I Am Sam stars Sean Penn as a somewhat retarded man named Sam who, through peculiar and barely explained circumstances, fathers a child that he raises by himself in a not-too-shabby LA apartment he mysteriously affords on his $8-per-hour busing job – with the assistance of a seemingly agoraphobic friend from time to time – until the age of seven. Then the state of California takes away the child. (The really remarkable thing was why it took the state that long; but then again, the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly.) Many weepy scenes ensue. Plus dramatic family court scenes, as Sam and a stereotypically selfish lawyer (who learns life lessons from simple Sam in not being so selfish) fight to get his daughter back.

The movie would have the audience believe, in almost literal terms, that “all you need is love,” and that if you believe that a grown man with “the mental capacity of a seven-year-old” might not be an adequate sole parent for a child of any age, then you’re just a big meanie (as Sam might say). If you love your kids a lot, then all those other little details will work out.

This is Hollywood baloney of the worst sort. The movie went to great lengths to assert that you don't need to be Einstein to raise children, as if anyone really believed you do. You do, however, have to have the capacity to do the grunt work involved in child-raising, not to mention the forbearance necessary to put up with the whelps at their worst moments, and enough experience with the world to anticipate ordinary dangers. My experience with people “with a mental capacity of seven years old” – that is, with my older daughter, until she turned eight – tells me that someone like Sam, alas, doesn’t quite have what it takes, even though he wuws his little girl.

Of course, my daughter isn’t a 40-year-old retarded man, but somehow the comparison is apt. “Mental age” might be a nebulous construct foisted by an uncaring mental-health-industrial complex on the differently-abled, but somehow I can’t shake the notion that it has real meaning. There are half a dozen good reasons I don’t tell Lilly (8), “Your mom and I are going somewhere warm for a few weeks. Here’s a few hundred dollars. Take care of Ann.” (3)

But Sam I Am... no, I Do Not Like Them, Sam I Am... no, the movie, also goes to considerable length to say that people of more ordinary intelligence, or even (gasp) high intelligence, can make lousy parents. In fact, that message is hammered home repeatedly, as if it were startling news. And as if it means that people of more limited mental skills must therefore be OK parents, provided they love their kids (a lot!).

There’s formal a name for that kind of fallacy, but I forget my college logic training just now. The informal name for that kind of thinking is “wrong.” To draw a comparison: Sometimes people with functioning eyesight have problems seeing – Sun’s in their eyes, they misplace their glasses, it’s a dark and foggy night, and so on. Therefore it follows that a legally blind person ought to be able to get a driver’s license, because hey, so-called “normal” people can have trouble seeing.

Enough of that. But I haven’t disliked a movie so much since Patch Adams.

On the other hand, I do like Mimi Smartypants. She keeps an on-line diary that’s a lot of fun to read. My friend Ed recommended her to me recently, and he did not steer me wrong. Naturally, she’s been writing for years, has written a book, and has been featured in more conventional media, and yet I’ve never heard of her. Things dribble down to me pretty slowly. Anyway, here are a few samples:

“My soup was good, but someone at the grill might possibly be from Neptune and never heard of a grilled cheese sandwich, maybe because Neptune cows give a sort of crystalline milk and thus cheese is only meltable under certain atmospheric conditions. Or maybe the grill guy was just really stoned.”
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“I noticed that a Red Lobster, of all things, has opened downtown at Dearborn and Ontario. [She lives and works in Chicago.] I did a literal double-take on the street since I could not believe my eyes.* Who in their right minds is going to eat at a Red Lobster in downtown Chicago? There is exponentially better food mere steps away, everywhere you turn. Food that was not freeze-dried and reconstituted in boiling water, even.

*Okay, I have had one beer and my associations are all loose and muffled, but you don't even really want to know how long I kicked around some weirdo Macbeth allusion ("Is this a Red Lobster I see before me, the door handle toward my hand?")”
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The next day's celebration [for her birthday] was much better, although since I had spent part of the day reading the latest issue of Brain, Child I was a little off-kilter when it came to the candle-blowing birthday wish. They should have renamed the magazine Death, Child just for that one issue---at least two articles dealt with the topic… and the child-deaths were not even statistically-improbable, make-you-feel-better deaths like "I Took My 6-Month-Old Scuba Diving And He Touched A Poison Rockfish Even Though I Repeatedly Made The Sign For 'No' Underwater" or "Live Crocodile Playland: McDonald's Issues Formal Apology." They were things like slight cold = meningitis = death!