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Friday, November 25th, 2005
This morning I started reading Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever. Ms. Savan is in Ellen's writers' group, and she was signing books at Marshall School's (where Sylvia attends) Library Day. I was interested in the book because of a strongly negative review in the NY Times, by P.J. O'Rourke, who is not the first person I would have thought of to review a book on pop culture. (O'Rourke offers a quintessential lack of self-consciousness with such lines as: "I didn't learn any fresh ripostes, topical quashers or new verbal conveniences from 'Slam Dunks and No-Brainers' except 'What is the dilio?' I take this to mean 'What is transpiring here?' I tried it on my children. They looked at me blankly.")
posted morning of November 25th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, November 24th, 2005
Hm. Well the bread could have come out better -- I should not try and do it on a schedule, like the plan this morning was to get it done before lunch. I did not let it proof long enough, and it is too dense. Toothsome though -- it is very good dipped in soup, which is what I had for lunch. Update: The loaf of bread which we gave to Michele was actually a lot better -- must have been something to do with variable heat in the oven. Still, they would have been better with a longer proof time.
posted afternoon of November 24th, 2005: Respond
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Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Sylvia and I are baking bread -- I'll let you know how it comes out. (I don't bake bread often enough but when I do, it tends to come out surprisingly well for someone who does not keep in practice. When I was 22 or so, I worked for 1 or 2 years at Amy's Bread -- she whose cookbook I am now using -- as a shaper and occasional mixer of dough, and I seem to have kept some skills from that time.)
posted morning of November 24th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
I started jury duty last Tuesday. Before I went in to serve, a bunch of people made comments to me along the lines of, "Of course you just tell them you think the guy is guilty, then they won't pick you" or conversely, "Well just tell them you're opposed to capital punishment, then they won't pick you." And I sort of nodded along. Well when I was called up for voir dire, I didn't say either of those two things, just answered the questions I was asked in what I think was a fairly thoughtful manner; and I was selected. (Court is in recess this week, I will be going back in next week to hear the case.) And I'd just like to go on record saying, I don't think jury duty is for suckers.
posted evening of November 23rd, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Last night I was reading a post by Sebastian Holsclaw at Obsidian Wings -- it was a long post about a visit he had made to meet the new baby of his friend Caithie in Iowa. The first part of the post was how he had felt out of place in the Midwest, like his clothing identified him as an outsider. He spoke of reading a newspaper editorial opposed to gay marriage and gay adoption. (Here I picked up that Caithie was gay.) The next part of the post was about a restaurant where he had dined, one nationally famous for its mouse. (I think that's what it was; this part of the post seemed to have been composed and edited in a hurry with a lot of typos.) He said he thought the dish was actually some different small rodent; it was very good, "but the end kept running out from under my fork." This seemed like an excellent image -- there was still the main body of the post to read, but I skipped down to the end wanting to leave a comment about how I was picturing a little mouse tail and legs scampering away from his fork; but at this point (in the dream, still) Sylvia came in and started climbing on me, which took my attention away from the post and woke me up. (Odd that I could be woken up by something happening in the dream.)
posted morning of November 15th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 12th, 2005
Last night for bed-time story, Sylvia requested a Just-So story. (An "old favorite" -- about 9 months ago we were reading from that book just about every night; but it's been on the shelf untouched for a little while now.) After a consideration of the contents she settled on "How the Leopard Got his Spots", saying even though "The Elephant's Child" is her favorite story, she wanted to see about this one. (When we were reading it regularly, she would ask for "The Elephant's Child" about one night out of three; I got so used to it that I was able to recite it from memory one night when we were driving a long distance and she really wanted to hear a story.) Well "How the Leopard Got his Spots" is one of the more objectionable stories in the book but with a bit of editing you can get most of the racism out and just have it be about colors. So that's what we read. Now our edition of "Just-So Stories" has two sets of illustrations, line drawings that I think are from the original edition -- they have captions that read as if Kipling wrote them -- and more recent color prints.* When we were reading about Baviaan, the "dog-headed, barking baboon" who is the wisest animal in South Africa, there was a line drawing of him, a drawing which looks nothing like a baboon. Sylvia objected -- "that's not a baboon with a dog's head, that's a person with a lion's head -- like a backwards sphinx!" (She learned about the Sphinx recently and is pretty into the idea.)
*I wish, I wish that I could find the edition of "Just-So Stories" that my dad read to us from when we were young. It was oversize and the illustrations were just beautiful. It's possible I am misremembering and they were the same as the color illustrations in this book, just bigger; but I'm pretty sure they were more abstract and symbolic.
posted evening of November 12th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, November 7th, 2005
As long as I'm recommending stuff to listen to: Sylvia and I were eating breakfast yesterday morning and listening to Airborn Event with Dan Bodah on FMU, when "Joy Pt. 1" by Shakti came on. Well we both started sort of unconsciously bopping in our seats -- I made eye contact and asked her if she felt like dancing. She grinned and looked away. Then a minute later she said, "Dad... do you feel like dancing?" So we got up and rocked out in the kitchen. Happily it is quite a long song. Here is the playlist for the show with links to audio if you care to check it out -- some of the nicest dancing music I've heard in a while.
posted afternoon of November 7th, 2005: Respond
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This morning I started reading Data Crunching, by Greg Wilson, which Bill Delavega recommended on his site, Dispatches From the Prairie. The subject of the book is an activity that occupies a fair (and growing) piece of my attention, namely converting data between different file formats. Wilson writes in an engaging and accessible style, and his examples are useful. So far (I'm reading Chapter 2) there is an unresolved ambiguity about writing reusable code vs. being "reasonably sure" your code will never be reused. (I think this ambiguity will not be resolved because it's pretty universal; I've encountered it a lot in my own work and never been able to resolve it beyond making what seem like reasonable compromises.) A bonus: A lot of the examples are in Python, which is a language I've been wanting to start using for a while now.
posted afternoon of November 7th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 5th, 2005
I've been recommending this over at Unfogged -- you ought to go to the Ed Schepp Radio Experiment and listen to his 11/4/05 show, "Future Perfect". Trippy. There are highlights all through the thing but the last 10 minutes or so are really mind-blowing; if you listen in RealPlayer format you will be able to fast-forward to there if you want.
posted evening of November 5th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, November second, 2005
Ellen has been teaching reading classes for emergent readers for the past year, at libraries around the area. I have started to develop a web site for her program: Pageturners, Ink.
posted evening of November second, 2005: Respond
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