Bumped into Havoc randomly at Cafe of India in Harvard Square; we had a nice talk while I waited for Krissa.
Got tickets to see Marcel Marceau. I figure once I see The Best Mime On Earth I’ll be able to finally say if mime sucks. Shockinly, Dave turned down my offer to come along.
Wow. Wow.
The notion of a ‘datafountain’ is pretty damn cool. I think I want one of these in my office, splashing every time a bug is closed or something like that.
This makes this depressingly real. Also in the ‘depressingly real’ category is this meta-historical piece from the Onion. Note the publication date on the Onion’s piece, then note all the links.
On a more positive note, I had a great Labor Day weekend in New York. I saw my old roommate Justin and my cousin Alicia, and ate a lot of spectacular food- Jamaican, spectacularly good and spectacularly expensive sushi, and of course Cuban food at Victor’s. We also did (as is our wont) a lot of museum browsing. The Met (again), wherein we discovered that after five visits there, there were still entire galleries I didn’t know existed. The Whitney, for the first time, where I saw a lot of cool expropriation, including the brilliantly titled Trademark with Eight Spotlights by Ed Ruscha, who has to be my favorite artist of the past 50 years (at least among artists I know of.) There is also a lot of great Warhol, again with several pieces having a theme involving taking trademarked or otherwise protected imagery and twisting it. I have to think Warhol would have fully embraced the Creative Commons.
Besides having a blast at the Whitney, we went to the Museum of Immigration on Ellis island. All of Krissa and I’s family came either too eary or too late to pass through Ellis Island itself, but it was still a powerful museum. These were people for whom America was a choice and a sacrifice, not something that happened to them, and that, I think, explains some of the differences between their worldview and the worldview of their children and grandchildren. Anyway, a powerful museum, and one I recommend.
Am currently re-reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, which was sort of amusing and insightful by turns when I first read it. Given the subject matter (a candidate from the party of incompetents running against a loathed republican incumbent) it seems to resonate more this time around. Anyway, an enjoyable read.
I’m glad to see 2.8 getting out the door; I’m sorry I have not had the time or energy to be more involved with it. Hopefully that will change for 2.10- I’ll probably know that soon. Anyway, congrats and a hearty thanks to everyone who contributed to it. Old slackers like myself appreciate it :)
clarkbw: have you seen any reports of monkeyjournal eating links? In about 50% of my posts, the links vanish or are garbled, which… sort of sucks. Any idea?
Rich: I believe iRobot is a play on Asimov’s I, Robot, and not so much an iMac or iplanet thing. For what it is worth, I love my older roomba, and will probably be ordering a new one as soon as it is clear when they’ll ship.
Todd: you might want to take a look at xmlterm, which was a terminal in XUL that shipped in mozilla for a while; it had some fun toys like an ls that would show file icons.
My father is evacuating his house tonight because of Frances. My mom is on higher ground. My little brother and sister don’t remember Andrew- they were babies at the time. They are mostly bummed this weekend that I’m not coming, and celebrating a couple days off of school. It looks like they are going to get spared, mostly, but it is still a nervewracking time- they are old pros at this, and scoff at ‘mere’ category 1 or category 2 hurricanes, but Frances looks like a real whopper of a storm, the kind that makes long term Floridians nervous. We had it pretty good in Andrew, all things considered, but I did a lot of time afterwards in relief work, and the area around ground zero was… surreal. No trees over a few feet tall survived- they all got snapped off at about chest height. And entire neighborhoods just vanished. The first night, somehow we lost power but kept phone services, so we called my aunt,and she gave us the play-by-play over the phone. When she told us that the air force base had just been scoured from the face of the earth, we just couldn’t believe it- I mean, it was supposed to take nuclear strikes from Fidel, and the hurricane had just made it cease to exist. The government didn’t even bother to rebuild it. Anyway… I’m rambling, I guess, but if it turns slightly south again, I’ll probably have a lot more rambling to do over the next few days.
