Mickey Conquers the Commons

Seldom have I been so disappointed in a Supreme Court ruling as this. I'm trying really hard not to resort to scatological terms to describe the thinking of the seven justices who voted to uphold what amounts to perpetual copyright. Would that the minority opinion, which seems more common sense, had held sway:

Justice Breyer also wrote a dissenting opinion. He argued that the CTEA 20-year extension does not make the copyright term limited, as is required by the Copyright Clause, but instead �virtually perpetual.� Further, Breyer argued that the CTEA's primary effect is not to promote science, but to inhibit it. Conceding that the Copyright Clause grants broad legislative power, Breyer nonetheless concluded that the CTEA falls outside that grant, thereby making it unconstitutional.

QOTD

Even the video game stories hailed as brilliant come across as bad science fiction from the 1950s or dreadful teenage love poetry (which covers anything from Square).

Poster on stevenberlinjohnson.com

Toys, Toys, Toys, In the Attic!

I think I might be buying one of these when they come out, and giving my GBA to Kelly.

Note to Myself

As I'm currently snowed under about five great big books (okay three are huge, one's medium and one is thin but dense), I decided to leave a note here for later reference. I was reading William Gibson's weblog and he went on an absolute tear about the genius of Iain Sinclair, mentioning Landor's Tower (fiction) and Lud Heat (prose and verse). The library has Landor's Tower, a non-fiction book called Rodinsky's Room, and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, another novel. I'm probably gonna sample Landor's Tower, and then maybe if I like it I'll buy a copy of London Orbital, supposedly a travelogue of London, but filtered through this strange poet's eye.

After all, when one of the authors you've most enjoyed raves about another author, what else are you supposed to do?

QOTD

As to drugs facilitating creativity, I think I�ve seen a lot of paintings, most often stacked along the walls of thrift shops, that argue against this. (Amphetamines, however, can definitely facilitate macram�.)

William Gibson

Geek Lust

I'm in geek lust again. The Pentel Twist-Erase III 0.7mm Automatic Pencil is the best mechanical pencil I've ever used. Jean's been buying those disposable plastic mechanical pencils at the grocery store, and we've got dozens laying around the house. I started buying leads and feeding them into the front (breech-loading) to prolong their life, but there was no replacement eraser for them. So I went to Staples and bought a couple of brands of mechanical pencils which do have eraser refills as well as lead refills. They are concidentally both Pentel brand, but the Twist-Erase is the hands down winner! Geek love!

Mafia

I'm not enough of a people person to want to rustle up a crowd and play this myself, but it seems that Mafia is one heck of a fun parlor game. Jean disagrees with me. "So what. You sit around with your eyes closed."

Of course the game is a little more complex than that, and the real boost comes from all the human interaction, some insightful people, some not so bright, all trying to figure out who's who.

What came out of sharing this with Jean was immensely valuable, though. I'd just spent the better part of the day trying to tutor Jean on logarithms for her math course, and the going was slow. But now I find that she does not learn by hearing. "Everything you just read me about that game, it boils down to people sitting in chairs with their eyes closed."

So now I have to do some hard thinking on ways to be a better tutor, since I'm a very verbal person. What to do, what to do?

All Consuming

If you are an avid reader (as am I), you should check out All Consuming. It's an aggregator site for bookreaders. Erik checks Weblogs.com (a website which notifies clients whenever a weblog on it's list is updated) every hour, then scrapes the indicated weblogs for mentions of books. As I understand it, he looks for URLs pointing to Amazon as an easy way to recognize a book reference (which makes sense, since I understand he's an Amazon employee). Once he's gotten all that data, he posts a list of the most frequently mentioned books. It's an automated community book circle!

You can also maintain lists of the books you read on his website. Where this really comes into play is that he generates javascript you can link to which places each book on your website with a link back to his site, covering other people's comments on the same books. It's very cool! His Javascript has a slight bug, so for now I'm inlining his code so I can fix the bug, but you can find the books I'm currently reading in the left sidebar.

Sunday Outing

Kelly and I saw The Wild Thornberrys Movie on Sunday. She liked it a lot, and I didn't fall asleep, so two thumbs up!

Afters

Saturday was a NOVA weekend, and there were no new movies to see, so we fell back on the "let's go out for a bit of nosh" alternative. Usually we've been going to the Macmenamins restaurant, John Barleycorn. Food a little bit pricey but tasty and varied, location good for me since it's ten minutes away from home. You may recall that I took Jean and Kelly there for the great Armagnac experiment, and it got good marks from them.

This time, however, a larger group of people than my little clique was involved, and they voted for Applebee's. I was hesitant, and Dan started to give me a hard time about it. This isn't uncommon, as it seems Dan and I have gotten into the habit of good-natured ribbing bordering on the argumentative. I've been pondering this, and I think it's because I've got a whitish beard and thinning hair on top, so I remind Dan of his video partner, Terry. He and Terry have a tempestuous relationship, which has more than once broken out into publicly raised voices. So I hope I'm not headed in that direction!

Anyways... Dan was giving me a hard time, and I was hedging, but went with the herd. The food was okay, but uninspired. The talk was fun as usual. Sunday I told Jean where we went, and the whole story of my hesitation and the ribbing I took. Jean, it turns out, has eaten at Applebee's with work colleagues, so she knows it as well as Barleycorn.

"Why would they want to go to Applebee's? It's a chain. Okay, John Barleycorn is part of the Macmenamin chain, but that's local, so it has some flavor. At John Barleycorn, the food was expensive, but there were a lot of good choices, and the atmosphere was neat. At Applebee's, you get fried chicken strips. It's like an expensive Denny's."

I rest my case.

Longterm Reading

One of the books I've perused from the library in the recent past was The Great Terror, by Robert Conquest. It's a great book, chock full of detail, and in the 'Reassessment' edition, corrected with lots of new knowledge coming out of the former Soviet vaults. Unfortunately it's also a hefty book, not the sort that you can really read from the library. I told my wife that I was fascinated yet disappointed in it. It's one flaw (from the perspective of one uneducated in the details of Soviet history) is that it dives right into the infighting and casually refers to all the players as if you already know who they all are. As I told Jean, I need a book that leads up to this book, filling in all the details of what came before.

So what does Jean get me for Christmas? Yep. I'm really happy, and looking forward to reading it over a period of several weeks, but first I gotta find that other book, the one that sets the stage. Any recommendations? Maybe Ten Days That Shook the World? Since Conquest is clearly anti-Communist, Reed's pro-Bolshevik book should provide an interesting counterbalance...

<A HREF="http://www.dogme95.dk/the_vow/index.htm">Dogme 95</A>

Jean rented Italian for Beginners over our holiday break. This is, to the best of my knowledge, my first exposure to a film made under the strictures of the Dogme 95 'vow of chastity'. Filmed with a digital video camera, the story is that of normal human relations, without bombs or fisticuffs (in contrast to another movie I saw in the theatre over my holiday break, The Gangs of New York). The only music in the film is music occurring in the given environment. There is no musical score. This is reminiscent of Touch of Evil, Orson Welles' film of corruption in a Mexican-American border town.

To be clear, I enjoy the better Hollywood blockbusters, and the occasional blockbuster which is not truly of Hollywood, such as Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which I saw last Thursday with several of my friends. And I had some initial misgivings when the film started and it became clear that it was shot in video. But as the story unfolded, I became involved in the characters' travails, and by the end, both Jean and I were contributing excited comments about what was happening. The final scene is notable as much for what it doesn't spell out regarding the characters' fates as for what it does.

If you can handle slow movies with lots of dialogue, and are not put off by handheld video imagery, try this movie. Jean and I intend to seek out some of the other Dogme 95 films, at least the ones which have won awards and are therefore easily available.

<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/7601/pope.htm">They Took My Thumbs, Charlie!</A>

Never let your daughter talk you into playing 'twitch' fighting games for hours to level up your character. The left joystick controls character movement during battle, which is real-time, in Kingdom Hearts. I've got the sorest thumb today. Jean was complaining about the same thing...

Kingdom Hearts, First Report

One of the presents from Santa was to Kelly and me. Kingdom Hearts is a joint venture between Squaresoft, one of my fave game companies, and Disney. It mixes characters from the various Final Fantasy role-playing games with characters from the Disney stable, in an adventure game with a mix of story and action. Kelly was asking for it frequently before Christmas, though by the time Christmas rolled around, the ad campaign for it was over, and Kelly had forgotten all about it.

Monday we finally got through the backlog of toys and Kelly decided that she wanted to play the game. We got through the first part, arrived at Destiny Island, and collected all the items we needed for our raft. Then we were 'promoted' to the next sequence. The first time through I was pigpiled by a bunch of evil little shadow creatures, and I couldn't hit them for the life of me. My character got killed. Kelly told me to try again. This time I decided not to try fighting the shadow things, and instead ran across the island looking for help. I found Riku and got to the next level, a boss monster that looked like a big shadow demon. I fought hard, but got snuffed again.

At this point, Kelly took over, starting on Destiny Island again. She went into her 'hop, jump and twist' mode, where she just endlessly runs around, jumps up on stuff, whacks things with her sword, and generally pushes every button in sight. I went back and checked the play clock, and she did this for seven hours. Needless to say, I took a nap during that time.

So I went on the web and did some research, and discovered that the boss monster is called Darkside (no, not Darkseid), and most hints suggest that you need to spar with Tidus, Wakka and Selphie on Destiny Island to build levels (one guy said Level 7). So we spent today sparring, bringing in Jean as our ringer for several matches (she's the Bust-a-Groove champ around here, so her reflexes top all others in the household). It's now around 3:30, and we are at Level 7 at last. We saved, and quit, 'cause I insisted to Kelly that my hands were too sore to do any more fighting (and Kelly never does the fighting parts of these games).

So at this rate, assuming we don't lose interest first, or get ticked off by some unfair (*cough* Final Fantasy X *cough*) segment of the game, we'll finish the game around the time Kelly becomes a teenager .

New Gallery

Okay, after a long hiatus, there's a new banner atop this log, linking to a new gallery, holiday themed, of course. I took off all the days between Christmas and New Year (four work days), and I've been rationing my Internet time. Okay, I'm still fiddling with Mac OS X programming, and playing Diablo II (and Fallout 2), but I'm not cruising the usual sites, and I haven't felt interested in posting.

Maybe over the next few days I'll try to catch up. If not, sue me.

Flaming Lips

I've been listening to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots lately. Since I don't listen to pop radio, and I don't watch MTV, it's easy to fool myself into thinking I've discovered something counterculture, but that don't make it so. I'd read about the Flaming Lips on various weblogs, and gotten the impression that they were a group known to a bunch of young in-crowd web design types, and decided to give them a try.

Now I don't really watch commercials either, since I've got ReplayTV, but the other night I was 'watching' a show while working a griddler puzzle. When I work puzzles or munge about with my laptop, I sometimes miss that the commercials have started and one or two get past me before I skip the rest. And so it was that night. I'm hearing in the background various babble including the umistakable voice of Penn Gillette, saying "it's 37! 37, okay?"

So I looked up, and there was a scene out of Beetlejuice (the afterlife waiting room, to be specific). A bunch of guys in bunny suits are surrounded by all sort sof oddballs, including Penn. Then a door opens, and a guy calls out, "Flaming Lips, you're up!" The bunnies get up and leave the room, and the next thing I see is them performing a song from the album I recently bought. Okay, I was fooled. They're mass-market, commercials and everything. Ya got me.

But how's the album? Pretty good, overall. The opening song, "Flight Test", is a very good example of putting your best foot forward, and gets the album off to an enchanting start. I'm kinda disappointed in the title song, or anyway, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, pt. 1. Pt. 2 is no-longer-experimental mix-up electronic noodling and sampling, and I like it quite a lot, thanks.

No blow-by-blow on this album. It's pretty homogeneous, so if you like one song, you'll most likely enjoy the others. I'm keeping it in my rotation for the time being. But I'm already itching for something new.

Household Hints

Don't put corn husks (or cornsilk) down the garbage disposal.

Yeah, I know, but I'm a guy! I expect a food grinder to grind food, by gum! Jean's been after me for putting cantaloupe rinds, grape stems and everything else down there, and now, the corn husks were the 'straw' that broke the disposal's back. It was jammed up good. But if eggshells are okay, bits of bread, oatmeal, and so on, where do I draw the line? When I do the laundry, everything goes into the same load, and the same temperature, dammit! If the clothes can't handle it, then buy better clothes!

So before suggesting we buy a 40hp garbage disposal with carbide blades, I called the 800 number labelled on the side. This was a voice menu which offered helpfully:

"If you'd like tips on how to fix your disposal, press 1. If you'd like the number of a local authorized repair service, press 2. If -- "

2

So I got through to a guy and described the problem. "Can you send a guy over?"

"Did you try the wrench?" he asked.

"There's a wrench?"

"Yep, it should have come with your disposal. It's a 3/8 " alan wrench. Insert it into the base and twist it around. Should clear things up. If not, call me back."

So I hunted around in the kitchen drawers, looking for a hefty alan wrench. Sure enough, I found one, labelled 'disposal wrench' in the metal, no less. A couple of twists, and it's working again! W00t! Now I can put corn husks in again! Just kidding, Jean.

But seriously, can I have a list?

Sunday Report

Sunday was much less crowded than Saturday. I got up and did my chores, decided to save strength training for Monday, so did just the Bikeler. After a shower and a brief lunch, I got into dishes and laundry. One of the nice things about modern convenience appliances is that for a large part of the time, you aren't really doing anything. So once the loads were running, I fired up Diablo II and applied some of the knowledge I'd gleaned by reading the first ten pages of the manual, finally.

Man, is that game a timesink! I'd get up occasionally to check the laundry, unload the dishwasher, etc., but in toto, I think I wasted three hours this time. I gotta get a new computer in the den, so I can move this game over there and spare Jean, who patiently waited while I played.

In the evening, before preparing for dinner, I took Kelly for a walk to a neighborhood where I knew a lot of the homeowners had gone nuts with the Christmas lights. It was misting lightly, and wasn't cold at all, so it was a very nice walk, about a half hour in all. Then it was time for a Snapper fish dinner, with sweet potatoes (no, not fries).

Saturday Report

Kelly is a real schemer. We went grocery shopping and her school is having a raffle in front of the store. For the second week in a row, she got Jean to give her a dollar so that she could buy a ticket. Great, support the school, all that, I thinks. We went about our shopping business, and as we left, Kelly got involved talking to somebody, so I grabbed a dollar and bought a raffle ticket too. Jean said that the raffle person told her that they weren't selling many, so I was thinking I'd do my part, and maybe have better odds as well. On the way to the car, Kelly seemed a little miffed, and Jean explained. It seems Kelly planned on winning a specific prize, the Xbox. Then since she owned it, she'd make Daddy ask permission to use it!

Geez, what gratitude! I let her use the PS2 pretty much any time it's practical (Jean's not using the downstairs tv, it's before Kelly's bedtime, etc.). Now I'm a competitor for 'her' prize. Sorry kiddo, maybe next week I'll bring a twenty! Or maybe I'll just give her a dollar or two myself. We'll see...

So now I know what Armagnac tastes like. Trouble is, it's been so long since I've tasted any kind of brandy, that I couldn't tell you if this is rougher than cognac or what. Jean, Kelly and I made the trip to John Barleycorn, which is a McMenamins restaurant ten minutes from where we live. This is incidentally one of the post-NOVA hangouts when no movie is handy.

We went for lunch on Saturday, Jean playing designated driver since I knew I wanted to try the Armagnac. I'd heard one of those 'color' stories on NPR about the history of Armagnac, and how it is fading away in the face of more populist liquors, so when I saw it on the menu at Barleycorn's one post-NOVA night, I decided I had to try it (despite the possibility that the brand served by Barleycorn's might be one of the 'tweaked' versions with more sugar that desperate producers have been experimenting with to try to bring back business, and incidentally hastening the demise of genuine Armagnac).

Result: it was smooth and quite pleasant tasting. I'll have to try the cognac some other time to see if there is a noticable difference. Food-wise, Jean had a salad, Kelly had a honkin' cheeseburger, and ate it all, and I had the fish tacos. Yum! We shared a hummus plate as well.

Saturday evening was the NOVA Christmas party, and food was brought by all. I pigged out, and got a shake and sweet potato fries at Burgerville on the way to Tom's after the meeting, so my weight spiked a good five pounds. Going down now, thanks.

There was a bit of Christmas themed anime, but otherwise it was a standard meeting. I'd already handed out my presents to select friends at the previous meeting since I was unsure Alan was going to be in town this weekend. So I got to receive without giving this time. Alan got me a book on taking better family portraits. I'm gonna have to cram between now and Christmas morning to see if there are any good ideas for good spontaneous photos. Tom got me a Code Monkey T-Shirt from Think Geek, and I'm wearing it now! Yahoo! Finally, John Jackson got me an Indian epic, since he knew I was curious about Indian cinema. My memory is so shoddy I can't remember if I got him a present or not. I'll just have to double up and get him a treat post-holidays. King Hu's A Touch of Zen is out on DVD, maybe he'd like that? I'm getting it for myself, so maybe I'll just buy two copies.

We all piled into Tom's apartment to view the Canadian DVD of Brotherhood of the Wolf, which we'd seen in the theatre, but had fun watching again. While there, I got to sample Tom's gift to Alan, a bottle of Oregon made Sake. It was served in tiny glasses, so since I had a single one, you know I'm not a souse! Finally it was time to go home, and I drove safely, rest assured.

Saint Lucia in a Coal Mine

The words I was fumbling for regarding the lighting at the Church last Sunday are reciprocity failure. In this case, it would be moot, as I was hand holding the camera and had live moving subjects, so the fact that I was frequently shooting at 1/8 second means there'll be much blur, but there could be reciprocity failure too. Just wanted to note that down since I'm trying to get all this SLR tech lingo straight in my head.

By the by, the film is still sitting on the shelf at home. Development could take another week, then I have to get my butt in gear and scan any decent results. So don't hold your breath.