Clash of the 21st Century Fabrics

A little while ago, I was minding my own business, futzing on the computer when Laszlo pops in from the other room.

"That guy you like from 'Law & Order' is playing the bad guy in the Buck Rogers' episode that's on right now," Laszlo says.

"Which guy?"

"The one who died."

"Jerry Orbach? On Buck Rogers?"

"Yeah, him. You've got to see this red shiny costume he's in."

I laugh and follow Laszlo back into the other room just to get a quick peek at that. The scene, though, has changed to a scene that has just the robot and Buck in it, talking.

"Oh, god, I vaguely remember that robot," I said. "Is that a floodlight embedded in his stomach?"

"His name is Tweekie."

"The robot?"

"Yes."

I chuckle. "This was so written in the '80s, wasn't it?"

Laszlo nods. As the Tweekie/Buck scene seems to be going on endlessly here, Laszlo starts to get a little irked. "Come on! Go back to Jerry Orbach in the red shiny outfit!" he yells at the TV.

"Is his red shiny thing worse than that red velour thing Buck Rogers has got on right now?"

Laszlo affirms that it is. Then, he says, "He's playing the evil music producer of a band that is sending music waves out that are making all the teenagers in the universe violent."

"Oh, my god. A juvenile delinquent theme yet!" I say, cracking up. "Do the kids on this one all start go-go dancing and riding flying motorcycles like in that old 'Lost in Space' episode?"

Just then, a new character enters in the scene -- a blonde tart in what looks like a futuristic twist on a green felt Robin Hood outfit -- if you can picture that.

"That's the music producer's lackey," Laszlo explains.

The robot makes a pass at her as he exits the scene.

"I can't take this anymore. Just get me a couple of screen captures of Jerry Orbach when he's finally back on," I say. But just as I am about to flee, the scene shifts into one with the evil music producer.

Oh. Yeah. Red and very shiny. Worth the wait.

___________________

See for yourself. Click on the thumbnails below to see some screen captures.

A Luckily Charming Last Day of March

My front window is open a crack this evening, and there's a drunk (or something) guy out there who's been walking up and down the alley for the last hour or two, talking mostly gibberish to himself.

But as he passed by my open window just now, I heard him ask this (of no one) loudly and clearly: "Have you ever seen a leprechaun?"

Okaaaaay.

Why, no, good sir. But how many do you happen to be seeing at the moment?

Math, Science, & Girls, III

Amazing how this topic is still going pretty strong in the usually short-attention-spanned mainstream media. Personally, I'm thoroughly bored myself with the Harvard soap opera, but then that was never the bit about this that really caught my attention anyway.

I've been reading a lot of the other articles that have cropped up, though, and appreciate getting to see some more thorough explanations of the various research studies from which some people's remarks have allegedly been extrapolated. Also, some of the peripheral articles and opinion pieces spurred by this topic have been pretty entertaining at times.

I've seen, in some of these arguments, mention made of the renowned geniuses of history where the fact is pointed out how these were almost always male. Retorts to that usually point out something along the the line that until relatively recently in history most females received little or no real education and usually were not allowed by cultural standards to actively pursue or involve themselves with any sort of advanced scholarship, so all of this obviously made it unlikely that if there had been any potential female geniuses that they would have been in a position where they might have ever been noticed, let alone cultivated.

However, I haven't seen anyone point out (lately) that there are quite a few famous male geniuses in history who did abysmally in school and on tests. Einstein, for example.

Funny thing about geniuses. Some of them have been known to not do well with orthodoxy, and the upper echelons of academia are certainly an orthodoxy unto themselves.

So .... Maybe standardized testing in elementary and high schools isn't always the best way to ferret out those precious geniuses, eh? Just a thought.

Academia is a hierarchy, and it doesn't seem too likely a genius (of either gender) who can't or won't get the hang of the protocols, such as excelling at standard tests, would have any chance of breaking into, let alone rising in the academic hierarchy these days. Would someone like Einstein, who had a poor formative academic record and wasn't part of the university establishment when he came up with his breakthrough early theories, have much of a chance to be heard and recognized in the current day? I don't think there are such things as self-educated or "freelance" physicists these days, are there? Don't physicists today have to be anointed in some way by the established orthodoxy to even get a paper read?

I think it'd be interesting to see someone informed in such areas address something like that in some depth ....

Math, Science, & Girls, II

I've been amusing myself today by reading more stuff on the brouhaha and the reactions to the articles about the brouhaha. Although in the post I did earlier today, I mentioned liking Saletan's Slate article on the subject, I also quite liked the dissenting opinion provided by this Crooked Timer post: Pharyngula on Larry Summers, which provides a lot more background by people in academia about the matter as well as some links to some meat refuting the basis of Summers' generalizations that caused the uproar. Interesting stuff, all of it.

_______

As to my own self-absorbed musings (I'm allowed self-absorbed musings -- I'm not arguing anything academically) on the matter about whether any of this might apply or explain my traumatic algebra thang, I actually have decided after a conversation with Laszlo earlier this afternoon that the biological questions I postulated in my case are probably not relevant nor sound. I think I'm onto something much more likely with that "New Math" angle.

But I've been enjoying wondering about some of the possible angles in this matter. Although I think I've had enough for today, so I'm going to go do something much less contemplative. I might even kill a few brain cells (left & right brain cells) with a beer or two. It helps to remind one's brain cells who's boss every now and then, ya know, in my very un-empirical opinion.

Math, Science, & Girls

I've found the recent spate of articles about the brouhaha over the remarks of Harvard's president on math, science, and gender quite curious. I personally found some of the questions he raised intriguing, but I'm not an academic, and I'm sure much of the harsh reaction was part of academic inner sanctum politics, of which I'm blissfully ignorant. Of course, his remarks as they've been reported were phrased in a way that made them so easy to misconstrue, as it seemed like he'd been throwing out some broad generalizations -- and the hazard of generalizations is that people forget they are just generalizations. Making the generalization about the fact that girls do not tend to perform as well at math and science in school and then asking the question if that could be attributed to biological differences could easily be inaccurately construed as saying all females are innately not as capable at math and science -- which is, of course, pure bull and a faulty correlation. And I don't think was actually what he seemed to be saying at all. Of course, there are plenty of brilliant female mathematicians and scientists now and in history (pssst, here's one: Marquise du Chatelet). Just as there are also plenty of males who don't take to math or science, too.

I think of the many articles I've seen recently about this, this article in Slate does one of the better jobs of sorting out and summing up the particulars of the flap: Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head - The pseudo-feminist show trial of Larry Summers. By William Saletan

I found these parts from the article especially noteworthy and well-put:

"The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering."

later:

"By some accounts, Summers referred to 'innate ability' or 'natural ability' as a possible explanation for the sex difference in high-school test scores. This is what set off the furor."

and later:

"Let's be clear about what this isn't. It isn't a claim about overall intelligence. Nor is it a justification for tolerating discrimination between two people of equal ability or accomplishment. Nor is it a concession that genetic handicaps can't be overcome. Nor is it a statement that girls are inferior at math and science: It doesn't dictate the limits of any individual, and it doesn't entail that men are on average better than women at math or science. It's a claim that the distribution of male scores is more spread out than the distribution of female scores—a greater percentage at both the bottom and the top. Nobody bats an eye at the overrepresentation of men in prison. But suggest that the excess might go both ways, and you're a pig."

____

But still, flap or not, some of Summers' provoking questions fascinated me. As I'm not an academic, I was less interested in wondering about how these questions could explain the male/female ratios in the upper echelons of the academic world than in the implications for the general population that such questions do raise. And I am sad to see that the questions themselves raised such a flap that it's likely no one in the academic world will willingly take them on right now. As I'd be curious to see the answers.

The questions raised about contemplating the differences, including possible innate differences, regarding females in relation to their involvement and interest in mathematics and science fascinated me enough to entertain the notion in a bout of pure omphaloskepsis. As I've long wondered about my own apparent failings at high school math, which weren't actual failures, but have haunted me in varying ways ever since.

Let me explain.

I've always been interested in science, but I have never been at all versed in advanced mathematics, which of course has put limits on my understanding of certain aspects of some of the sciences. And when I was in school (20+ years ago), my lack of advanced mathematical knowledge also prevented me from exploring some science courses that would have required an ability to understand or do advanced calculations.

I know for certain that not all females are innately bad at or disinterested in math. I can remember many females I shared math classes with in school who seemed to be intrinsically brilliant at math. I have a female cousin who was in the same math class I was in in 7th grade. She was one of the best, if not the best, students in that class. Her intrinsic grasp of math was obvious and amazing. And she's since gone on to be brilliant in the field of engineering.

Mathematical genuises seem to crop up on my father's side of the family from time to time. My father was a mathematical genius. He used his mathematical gifts in his profession as a chemist. I remember watching him scribble down formulas and equations with an ease of someone making out a grocery list. He could do complex equations in his head and give out the answer accurately and quickly. He was tickled when hand-held calculators came on the market and spent a lot of money to get one of the early models, although he was as good as those calculators himself. He died in 1982, and I've always wondered how excited he probably would have have been had he lived just a few years beyond that and could have been able to buy and play around with his own PC.

I, on the other hand, am not a mathematical genius. In school, I was always entirely competent and adept with basic computational math -- adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing. I was good with fractions and remember bizarrely enjoying doing math problems where reducing fractions was involved. But decimals (and percentages) threw me sometimes, as I would often mix up the rules about where to place the decimal point in more complex multiplication and division equations with decimals.

Fortunately, these days, I can just use a little calculator and not worry at all about that little failing of mine.

Anyway, although I wasn't brilliant with math, I always got pretty good grades in it until ... until ... I hit a Great Divide in my freshman year in high school. As it was then I was introduced to and conquered by {shudder} algebra.

Algebra traumatized me and scared me off. In retrospect, I know that letting myself be traumatized by algebra and basing subsequent academic choices on honoring that fear was probably both unnecessary and silly. But it was what I did.

Although I actually understood enough of algebra to fake my way through it at the time and end up with a 'B' as a final grade, I knew that I had not understood it really. And that frightened me, as it was the first subject in school I'd ever come across that I felt completely lost in, that I never felt that I'd gotten even a small handle on. It didn't help me out a bit that my father was a mathematical genius either. My attempt to get him to try to explain it to me was one of the traumatic events of my adolescent life. He didn't understand why I didn't get it and was angry with me for not understanding it. When my father thought something was obvious, he was generally pretty impatient with anyone who didn't see the obvious. So, he acted as if my lack of understanding of it was just some deliberate affront on my part.

So. At 14, the end result of my experience with algebra just made me secretly conclude I was just hopelessly stupid at math. Since my high school allowed students to opt out of taking a requisite second or optional third year math class (geometry and trig, respectively) by taking four years of a foreign language, violà, that's what I did, merci beaucoup.

I was told by my friends back then who went on to take geometry that geometry was much easier and actually made sense (where we all had agreed algebra often hadn't).

___

Anyway, even if the academic world is in a tizzy over such questions being brought up at all, the questions relating to possible biological differences playing some part captured my fancy. And so I've been contemplating them in regards to my own trauma with algebra.

Like these:

I was smack in the middle of puberty when I took algebra. Does puberty have any effect on left-brained/right-brained function? Could there be some suppression of left-brained function in females during their puberty or something like that?

I've seen it reported that studies have pointed out that women's brains generally are shown to be better at multi-tasking. Could it be that a brain better at focusing on one task at a time has an edge when it comes to advanced mathematics?

Although I've been posing such questions to myself, I also just stumbled across another possible culprit that could explain my particular problem with algebra. As I'd forgotten whether or not I was taught in the era of "New Math" or not, I did a search before finishing this post to look up when New Math had been an influence.

I found this q&a from The Straight Dope Mailbag: What exactly was the "new math"?

This excerpt from it especially intrigued me:

The following examples may help to clarify the difference between the new and old math.

1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?

1970 (Traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. What is his profit?

1975 (New Math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1. (a) make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M (b) The set C representing costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of the set M. (c) What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

I know this example is partly meant to be facetious, especially as the example goes on to make fun of the more recent ways of teaching math have attempted:

1990 (Dumbed-down math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.

1997 (Whole Math): By cutting down a forest full of beautiful trees, a logger makes $20.

(a) What do you think of this way of making money?
(b) How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?
(c) Draw a picture of the forest as you'd like it to look.

But facetious or not, that example of New Math brought back some bad memories, and I now wonder if some of my horrible experience with algebra, which I did happen to take in the year 1975, could possibly be because maybe the textbooks and lesson plans used in my algebra classes at the time were ones using some New Math concepts.

As looking at that example made me remember a common reaction I often had in my algebra class towards some of the problems presented to us to solve. Namely, I'd often think to myself: "What the hell are they talking about here? What is it I'm supposed to try to solve in this gibberish?" So, I'd spend an inordinate amount of time just trying to unravel what the question to solve actually was before I could get around to even attempting to solve it. Drove me insane.

Perhaps I ought to find a more straightforward kind of algebra tutorial (or even maybe one day attempt to take an intro class) and see what I'd make of it now. Especially to see if my problems with it back then might have been caused more by some of the horrendous "new math" influences than by possible biological influences or just my own innate failure to grasp the logic of algebra.

Which brings up another question -- were studies ever done on the "New Math" to determine any differences in how males or females responded to it? Because if females happened to have done more poorly with the "New Math" than males, that surely might account for the current gap in the upper echelons of academia, given the time frame it would take for an academic to rise to that level. Mightn't it?

Questions, questions, questions.

____

I have had a few other musings related to this topic in recent days, but I'll save them to post another day.

What's Your Poison?

A Boston Globe article titled Against Types (link via Arts & Letters Daily.) points out the criticisms levelled against various personality type tests.

I am intrigued by personality tests, but I am utterly against them being used to qualify or disqualify anyone for tangible things -- like jobs or involuntary institutionalization.

I think an ultimate personality typer, though, is to interpret the interpreter's description of a type and figure out from how they describe someone else's type what type they'd likely be. That, as they say, would be telling.

Or maybe this is the real ultimate. From an old Columbo episode where the suspect happened to be a psychiatrist. On one of Columbo's visits to his prey, the psychiatrist says to Columbo:

"I haven't given you a Rorschach test yet, but my guess is you're a bourbon man."

Mottled Mottoes

I love this sort of junk: Heraldry Mottoes. A site with the translations to scores of traditional old mottoes (mostly Latin or French ones).

Sometimes, I kinda think of 'em as a sort of yesteryear equivalent to a bumpersticker or some proudly hung calendar sprinkled with daily motivational quotes and other "be the best" kinds of affirmations. Virtus in arduis, which the site says means "Courage in difficulties" in Latin, would be just at home on some manager trainee's cubicle wall today as it was on some poor sword-fodder's shield back then, don't you think?

But, truly, my delight in these, my favorites, are the kinda off-the-wall ones. The ones that make ya wonder if a quantity of grog or something might have been involved.

"Motto! We gotta have a motto? They're SOOO stuffy and booring."

"Hey! How 'bout 'Free Grog!' That'll really bunch up the tights on those pious motto types!"

"Nah. That's already taken. Last year. The pious types didn't even blink -- they just quietly tacked on the word 'temperance" to their old virtue, virtue, blah, blah, blah motto."

"Oh, hell, screw this. Just scribble down the first stupid thing that comes to mind on that cocktail napkin. Yes, I said cocktail napkin."

"....?"

"Yes, we did have them in Medieval days. I swear it -- on my family's crest!"

______

You know it could be the way it happened.

I'm sure we all know the kinds of things that end up on cocktail napkins.

Perhaps these, for example?

Delectat et ornat
Translated from Latin on the Heraldry site to mean:
It is both pleasing and ornamental (Latin)

or this:

Erectus non elatus
Latin for: Exalted but not elated

YEAH, I like that one. I'm exalted, but not elated most any day! I'd stand under that banner (especially if it rains)!

And I know I know a few people who'd kill for "It is pleasing and ornamental."

_____

Hey, a little game suggestion/ time-waster idea for the idle and listless. Pick what your motto would be for the day from that site and leave it in comments here.

(I know Melusine will play this one, if no one else! -- It's like the old Latin sayings thing we played with years ago, don't you think, Melusine?)

And now I must bid you adieu with this thought/motto:
Luceo non uro
I shine but do not burn (Latin)

pity ...

I Never Would Have Guessed

You learn something new every day:

"It was an image, along with [Aleister Crowley's] famously hypnotic stare, that led Bond author Ian Fleming to model Blofeld on Crowley. "

So, was Octopussy modelled on Madame Blavatsky?

April is the Weirdest Month

Any month that begins with April Fools' Day and ends with Walpurgisnacht is far more weird than cruel. Oh, and the fact that Tax Day is smack in the middle of it seems both weird and cruel.

April was pleasantly weird for me this year.

I spent a week and a half in mid-April in New Orleans. Visiting the co-editors -- Melusine and the Marquis.

Stayed with Melusine. She wrote a handful of entries in her LiveJournal mentioning what all we got up to, beginning with this entry.

Found out (by a quick googling) after I returned home a little more about that Spanish ship she mentions in her "Avast me hearties!" entry. Turns out it is the Spanish navy's training ship, so all those young sailors were apparently cadets. Google turned up this site that has photos of this magnificent ship, the Juan Sebastian de Elcano. There's a good photo of the beautiful carving on the bow.

____

April being called the cruellest month, of course, comes from the opening of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Eliot was originally going to title this poem He Do the Police in Different Voices.

But I guess since his opening line was about April's cruelty and not its weirdness, maybe "The Wasteland" sounded a bit more tough or something.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
   
Memory and desire ....

The fragment "mixing memory with desire" has long been one of those lines that stays in my mind, cropping up at random moments. Apparently, that line does that to other people too. There's a certain episode of the Tick (I don't recall offhand exactly which one it was) where the Tick uses that very line in one of his rambling pontifications: "So once again, we find that evil of the past seeps into the present like salad dressing through cheap wax paper, mixing memory and desire."

So now I say -- once again April Fools' Day segues into Walpurgisnacht. With salad days and a salad dressing of memory & desire in an easy-to-squeeze bottle.

Yup. April is the weirdest month.

Happy &†#$%*!!! Day

You remember that Star Trek episode, don't ya? The one where the alien-chick-of-the-week popped THE question: "Kirk, what is love?"

Who the hell can answer that? (Kirk certainly blew it --in my opinion.)

About the only generalization about love that seems to be universally true is that you can't generalize about love. Oh, yeah, people do. All the time. And they're not necessarily totally wrong, but no generalization is going to be applicable to everyone in every situation every time. Not ever.

Hell, even generalizations that I came up with just for myself that seemed true enough at the time will then turn out to not be so in subsequent situations. It's enough to drive one to drink or at least to slap around some troubadours for coming up with the notion of courtly love.

And because today is Valentine's Day, the hills are alive with the sounds of people hawking or mocking the issue of love and related topics. If the people who thrive on celebrating (or selling) this holiday weren't enough, there's now also a huge backlash of dissident anti-valentiners who seem bent on providing something grumpy, thoughtful, or ironic as a so-called antidote to the traditional hearts & flowers overdose.

Can't turn on the TV or do one's usual rounds of reading without all of it smacking ya in the face.

Notable examples from my day so far:

Around 3 am-ish earlier this morning, I happened to go into the kitchen. To do so, I have to pass through the room where Laszlo's computer desk is. He was working on his computer and had the TV on in the background (he has a TV tuner on his computer). As I passed through, Laszlo noted sarcastically "CNN is doing a story on adultery in America right now."

I snorted and replied dourly, "Happy Valentine's Day."

We both laughed. As screwed up as we are, we still often take solace in the fact that we still aren't as screwed up as a lot of people seem to be. Hey. It's something.

____________

Afterwards, I meandered over to my own computer to answer my email and do a little reading. Arts & Letters Daily, which is definitely one of my favorite portal sites, has had practically nothing but links to articles on topics related to love in the last couple days. But as they're a portal site, that could well be not out of their own deference to St. Valentine's Day, but because of the glut of articles about love that appear this time of year. As I think Arts & Letters happens to usually find some fascinating stuff, mercifully the articles they chose to link to were of the more interesting variety (comparatively-speaking, at any rate). And a few of them got me thinking, such as these two: this book review from The Washington Post and this article on the science of love from The Economist. Part of what both these articles are explaining is the basis of limerance, a term and concept that still seems to be not that widely known although I've noticed it seems to be popping up a little more frequently in recent days in random articles and books.

Because I've been fascinated by this concept of limerance for sometime and have had to try to explain it occasionally to people when I bring it up, I've been meaning to write up something I could post here about it with the best of links I've been collecting on the subject.

So, after doing my little reading rounds, I had the not-so-bright idea that I should quickly dash that off in honor of today. But it's not a quickly dashed-off kind of subject, and I've now wasted 3 hours trying to do it. So, instead, especially because I need to get back to some other stuff I'm in the middle of, I am giving it up for right now and just wish you a Happy Valentine's Day (or Anti-Valentine's Day, if that's your wont). Turns out I have nothing to say on the subject today. As is evident by this vent.

____________

Here's a link, though, to a curious page on the etymology/mythology for Saint Valentine from the site Pandora Word Box.

It's an amazing and strange site. It subtitles itself by these subjects: Classic Mythology Etymology Medicine Arts Humanities. First time I stumbled into it sometime ago, I spent hours there and was rendered practically incoherent for a couple days.

Here's another page link from it that I particularly like.:

I am still overly amused by the brilliant captions they used under a couple of the paintings on this page: "Male evasiveness" for Picot's painting L'Amour et Psyche and "Feminine curiosity" for Louis-Jean-Francois Lagrenee's Psyche surprend l'amour endormi.

Like I said, Happy &†#$%*!!! Day

The News, The News, The News

I was under the weather earlier this week with a stomach thing and huddled in bed for a couple of days, feeling like crap. I distracted myself with TV and was one day just flipping through channels during the couple hours when the news pervades all the networks.

I happen to rarely watch TV news, as it often infuriates me. Not the content of it necessarily. But the lack of content.

So, as I find it silly to yell at the TV all the time (after all, that is Laszlo's favorite hobby, and I leave that pasttime to his capable vocal chords), I just simply have given up watching TV news as a general rule. I especially avoid the cable news networks, which I find really awful. I prefer to read the news, and I usually do so via the Internet.

But sick in bed earlier this week, not inclined to get anywhere near my computer, bored and addled, I decided to check in on the news -- just to see what they might be going on about currently. As peeking in on it every now and then usually just confirms my resolve to avoid it....

So. What was the big story every channel was doing? Um ....

Michael Jackson. {click} Michael Jackson. {click} Johnnie Cochran holding a press conference about Michael Jackson. {click} Michael Jackson. {click}

I screamed at the TV. I could not help it.

"That is NOT news!!!!! Fucking hell!"

Okay, granted. I suppose the Michael Jackson arrest (etc.) might deserve a small paragraph tucked away somewhere. But it does not deserve hours, days, weeks of scrutiny and attention and dissection. It just does not. There are a few other things going on in the world that are just possibly a wee bit more significant.

Frazzled, I tried to find a Lifetime for Women horrible movie instead. I can take schlock movies. I can't take schlock news. Didn't like the movie they were running then. So, I kept clicking. As I clicked, noticed one of the local news stations had mercifully finished with their long Jackson Report segment, so I stopped clicking the remote to listen to the the story they were relating right then -- about a new poll that just came out saying that people are shifting away from nightly network news and newspapers for information about the presidential campaign. (Yahoo! News - Poll: Alternative News Gaining Influence).

The anchor had a lilt of disapproval in her voice as she read the report.

This poll also said a significant number of people actually were getting their news from TV satires like "The Daily Show" and "SNL."

Then all the anchors did that thing they do these days and broke into a little repartee between themselves. As they expressed utter disbelief to each other about the poll results, they rolled their eyes at the stupidity of the public viewing audience and just generally gnashed their teeth at how we've all slipped into the abyss of doom and ruin, especially about the part where people were using comedy shows as their main source of real news.

And I, I seethed at the TV: "Yeah, y'all are SO much better. Do you watch yourselves ever?"

Poor news anchors. I'm sure some of them wish they still did news. I'm sure some of them know all too well why people are shifting away from them.

____________________

Now, mind you, I have nothing against frivolous or weird news. In fact, I enjoy some of it very much. I enjoy it much more than the real news. Naturally. But I still want the real news -- as I've got some wacko notion that it's a good thing to stay at least moderately informed on this and that. One of my peasant delusions, no doubt, but I like to think it's important somehow, somewhere anyway.

Not that I'll regurgitate the real serious news here, though, don't worry. I do my bit and keep myself moderately informed, but dissecting or arguing current events as sport is not something I'm inclined to do much myself -- just ain't my forté. Especially online. I'm often happy to see others do it -- if it's good discourse or debate and not just mud wrestling with epithets. Which, ya know, is where it too often goes.

____________________

Anyway, I'm no longer sick and cranky and yelling futilely at the TV. I've even caught up on some of the news the TV didn't tell me about.

AND. I even found a tremendous gem of frivolous news when I popped onto Yahoo to find the link to the poll news story I mentioned.

So. This gem I will share with y'all forthwith -- in case you didn't happen to stumble upon it yourself whilst keeping informed yourself:

Yahoo! News - Starbucks Opens First Shop in Paris.

Oh, dear, oh, dear! A merde grande, that story!!! (Better than EuroDisney! Certainly better than Michael Jackson.)

Ooh la la! Frappez-moi!

{click}

Orion's Waist Cincher

Ya know, when you're out cavorting in the company of a couple o' lovely drag queens who are laced up into their Wednesday Best for Bondage A-Go-Go and you happen to look up into the crisp chilled Thanksgiving Eve sky -- well, you just sometimes can be taken aback when you see a new twist or two in those same old stars.

Epiphany? Or Kamikazes?

Whichever it may be, I tell you, I give my thanks for it all as the night morphs into this holiday morning and announce to no one in particular:

Thank you and good night. We haven't left the building.

Celery Tights

Among the goodies on Lileks' site is this: LILEKS (James) : Institute: The Peculiar Art of Mr. Frahm

This peculiar series of illustrations features startled women whose pink panties have just accidentally fallen to their ankles. The women usually also always happen to be holding a bag of groceries in which a bunch of celery is always present (an anomaly Lileks points out and analyzes at length).

As Lileks points out in the introduction to his presentation:

For starters, their entire premise is untenable: underwear simply does not fall down like this, unless the wearer has no hips and the panties no elastic.

Well, yeah. Ordinarily, I'd agree. In fact, I did agree the first time I looked at Lileks' presentation of Mr. Frahm's art, which was some months ago.

Then, as if invoking a curse upon myself by laughing at those silly women with their wayward panties, not very long after, I started having trouble with my undergarments of a disturbingly similar nature.

And I hadn't even been in possession of any celery at any time.

It all started when I had just gotten back from New Orleans in April. If you read the highlights of my trip there, you'll have seen the mention of a tattoo I got while there. I know I didn't happen to mention where said tattoo had been placed on my anatomy (and the little pic of it doesn't really show the part of my body in context either). Well, the tattoo happens to be on my outer upper right thigh.

For a few weeks after getting that tattoo, I tried to accommodate the healing of said tattoo by trying as much as possible to avoid wearing things that would unduly chafe the skin where said tattoo was located. Thus, for a couple weeks or so, I wore a lot of loose skirts with stockings underneath.

And one day, outfitted thusly, I left my house to go somewhere and halfway down the block, I felt the panties I had on slipping downwards. Unlike the women in Mr. Frahm's art, though, my facial expression didn't betray any startled look. More one of irritation. But then my panties weren't pink nor did I have any celery. And I caught the damn things before they got around to even getting a half-inch below my skirt. So, with a highly irritated expression on my face, I trod back home to correct the problem while firmly holding up one side of them through the fabric of my skirt to prevent .... the celery thing from fully happening.

Because of course that's what flashed through my mind -- "Damn it, so it does happen. But I don't even have any celery."

Being of a pragmatic nature, especially in regards to underwear, I blamed the incident on the undergarment -- they were old; the elastic, upon closer inspection, seemed like it probably had become too worn out to be serviceable anymore. So, I promptly threw the garment out.

But, alas, that was not the end of the Celery Curse for me. A few weeks passed. My tattoo had healed, and I was able to wear other things. I tend to wear black tights at times -- under shorts or skirts or whatnot. Apparently, a pair of black tights I had in my possession decided to go the way of the Celery. These tights had the irritating habit of rolling downwards if I walked any distance in them. An insidious habit because they would not start doing this until I had gotten several blocks away from home, but once they began to do this, there was no stopping them. I just had to spend what should have been a pleasant walk stopping every couple of minutes to yank them back up into place again. And again. And again. Those damn tights fooled me twice like this (as I had stupidly forgotten to toss them out the first opportunity I had to remove them the first time). And as one pair of black tights looks much like any other .... I unfortunately ended up accidentally putting them on again another occasion only to have my ordeal with them repeated.

I did, the second time I went through that with that pair of tights, remove them when I finally returned home and immediately cut them into little bits (cursing celery, Lileks, Frahm, art, and garments in general as I did) and put the bits in the garbage at once, so I'd never accidentally put them on ever again.

So far, rending those "celery tights" to bits like that seems to have ended my curse of the Celery Tights and, happily, my clothing has returned to being cooperative with me lately.

But I cannot help but remain a little wary now of re-encountering the curse of the Dratted Celery Tights another day. I know now they can attack without warning.

So, yeah, look at Lileks' section on Mr. Frahm's art, but I warn you of possible consequences of reacting to the illustrations with too much hubris. Celery or not, things can happen to your underwear if you do.

My Own Personal Mistletoe?

A friend of mine just sent me this link in email.

Yahoo! News - Bat Spit May Yield Stroke Treatment - Report

Oh, my. The mischief I could get into quoting THAT headline .....

(no doubt why my friend sent it along ....uh, thanks.)

Quantum Comparisons

Be afraid, very afraid. Bat was presented with a bit of Quantum Physics Theory today. And think she understood it. Something about some apparently famous photon paradox theory ....

.... that proved: when you choose to measure one thing, you have to forgo knowledge of something else.

"I know that one." Bat said. "e.e. cummings: 'if feeling is first, those who pay attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you."

Bat's afraid. That's why she depersonalized herself pronounly.

No. That's not a word.

My Brain is Leaking

".... we still face negative unemployment among people who understand the Internet. "

This is a quote from an article by Jakob Nielsen, famed usability dude.

I read this article some months ago, and I still from time to time suddenly have to stop and ponder what exactly "negative unemployment" means. The double negative here fascinates me perversely.

Mainly because, if I am interpreting it correctly, "negative unemployment" seems to mean "employed." This idea bemuses me no end. ("I've been 'negatively unemployed' gainfully for many years." Oh, yeah, use that in a cover letter.)

Had reason to re-remember the dubious term again today.

It'd be nice if Mr. Nielsen applied a few of his commandments on usability to sentence construction and comprehensible terms.

"Negative unemployment impacted the micro-climate."

"The guru's legacy triumphs mainly on the plain in spain."

"Right-sized. What a load of .... Omphalaskepstic euphemisms."

Ooh, I'm just making up hype-speak now. Making up THOSE sentences sent a shiver through me -- like the kind when you poke at a bruise on your arm intentionally just because it sort of feels good to irritate the tender spot.

Make them stop.

____________

On the other hand, an email thread with my old friend Lenore led to making up some other sick things today. Under the subject: "The POEBOAT, with your Cruise Director, Ligeia", I degenerated into this spew:

Nautical bells, bells, bells. The Loooooooosssssst Looooove Boat ..... sinking evermore ....

Just imagine Ligeia, the Cruise Director, with that short feathered hairdo, and your laughter will render all her shuffleboard sign-up sheets powerless .....

Join us for the Masque of the Red Lido Deck as we sail to our luxurious destination: a weekend jaunt around the the Plutonian Shore on the

Loooooooosssssst Looooove Boat ..... sinking evermore ....

with:

Hop-Frog, as Your Bartender
Montresor, as the Captain
Roderick Usher as "Doc"
and the Ourang-Outang, as Your Yeoman Purser

____________

I think I have to stop the graphics binge soon. My brain is obviously leaking. On the bright side, though, I just finished the page where I made my older novels available as PDF files now .... if anyone wants to see them, they must email me as they're tucked only in a semi-public directory. I decided not to make them fully public, but I'll pretty much let anyone who wants to read them have access to the directory .....

Need to redo the writing index to include this now .... but I think I'll nap a bit now.

Frog Codes of California

Random anecdote from last July:
______________________________________

Laszlo, the other day, listening to Kallisti and I plotting last minute Bastille Day preparations asked us exactly what Bastille Day was about.

"It's the equivalent of their Independence Day," we said.

"From whom?"

"From themselves. They basically massacred themselves."

To which he replied, "It's illegal to kill frogs with a gun in California, you know."

Whether THAT was a non-sequitur or an oblique attempt at a pun, I'll leave up to debate. But we laughed.. He said he had the statutes handy. We said, "email us them." So, he did.

We laughed uneasily at some of these, wondering what frog-horrors once happened to cause lawmakers to make some of the more specific points in legislating these particular human-frog interactions.

Anyway, for perverse, quite perverse, amusement, the frog codes of California:

.............................................................................................................................
There are other laws that mention frogs, but these are the biggies - Laszlo
.............................................................................................................................

6885. The commission has no power to modify the provisions of this
article by any order, rule, or regulation.