Autoblography

Things You Cannot Blog About:

Not blogging
Anything other people might find boring
Things you may have mentioned before
Opinions that may be misconstrued
Opinions that start out being as a Great Analogy but get overcomplicated to avoid being misconstrued
Flippant stuff if you haven't blogged in ages
Serious stuff if you haven't blogged in ages
Work
Internal Marriage Functionings and Machinations (apart from the last post - IMs don't count)

So! This results in, rather unsurprisingly, a lack of blogging that's gone on for aaaaages. So screw it, frankly.

I went to Philadeplhia with Krissa and Beth and Josh last weekend. Josh's band, Heads Up Display, were playing a gig at the Grape Rooms in Manayunk.
Manayunk! There's a place in the world called Manayunk.
We had a great time. We saw the queue for the Liberty Bell (it was HUGE you guys, you should go see it for yourselves, it was really impressive), and the Philadelphia Art Museum, which does a much better impression of what Greece Must Have Looked Like In Its Prime than the tiny models at the Parthenon, with the sad exception that the Philly architect built in sandstone in an area with a healthy coal-burning power industry, so his creation will probably go down the road of impressive architectural decay more rapidly than its distant marble counterparts. All the people doing Rocky Balboa impressions at the top of the long run of steps were funny to start, tiresome after the tenth or twelfth, and then sort of sad, but not as bad as people who drove past the Rocky statue at the bottom of the steps yelling ADRIAAAAAN! and disappointingly maintaining excellent control of their cars.
The GPS with the Mary Poppins accent died as we arrived in Philadelphia:
Turn left.
Recalculating.
Turn left, then turn left, then keep left.
Recalculating.
Drive point three miles
Battery Low
Thank god for that
so we navigated our way home via assumption that New York would be easy to hit and when that failed, Google Maps on our new iPhones. This of course meant that those batteries died but by that time we could see the Empire State Building so aiming at the city was back on the cards.

My schizophrenic work iTunes library is on shuffle and just played three songs in a row beginning with 'Sugar':

Sugar Mountain: Neil Young
Sugarless: Caviar
Sugar Magnolia: Grateful Dead

I have no idea what the odds are of that happening.
I have 5456 songs, so 1/5456x1/5456x1/5456, I suppose, or 6.15x10E-12 or 1 in 163 billion. Maybe. But then that's the odds of any three song combination coming up. It's only because I spotted a theme afterwards that makes it unusual. Maybe we should downgrade probability for only being impressive in retrospect.

It's goddamned hot and humid at the moment. Our apartment's main air conditioner is struggling to keep up. The compressor just takes whole evenings off. Everyone assumes that as a building design engineer I know everything about air conditioners, but I don't get paid to pick window units out of the Home Depot catalogue. I could sketch out a scheme for the whole apartment block in a day or so that'd cost a couple of hundred thousand bucks but when it comes to the smaller bits of kit, after learning that it Makes Things Colder I'm judging it on how nice the front bit looks just like everyone else.

I have just eaten my lunch - it was a ham sandwich.

There. Bases covered.

6 minutes

Formula VS. Perfume by Heads Up Display from Carlos Molina on Vimeo.

Digg this video

Heads Up Display are great - check out their site here!

So! If you watch this:



Then when you watch me doing something similar in the middle of this:

 

...it won't look so odd.

Yesterday in Central Park, Adam (an old university friend ) and I took part in a dynamic human sculpture, organized by Oxfam, Avaaz, and a host of other organizations, as part of tck tck tck. Tck tck tck is a campaign for an international climate change plan that is ambitious, realistic and -vitally- binding.

Many news organizations were sitting on top of the cranes, shooting away - so far I can only find stills, like this one, (AP/LA Times) of the starting hourglass, and then this from Reuters of the tck tck tck in the lower bulb...but I'm sure the video of the full transformation is coming.



I was part of Siberia.

This week is Climate Week in NYC. Events abound.

The COP15 talks in Copenhagen in December are our best hope for another Kyoto style agreement in the next few years. If an agreement is not made there and action taken, climate change will keep accelerating.

If you are not in New York but would like to get stuck into the effort, avaaz.org provides details of how to get involved in the Global Climate Wake Up Call, a campaign to help people communicate their concerns to governments worldwide before this week's UN Summit, and Copenhagen later this year.

And yes, I too think I look ridiculous.
Your point?

The trip to San Francisco back in May was marvellous. So marvellous in fact that Krissa and I were completely seduced by the place and created half-baked plans to move there...how, where, when...who knew? But it was a pleasant enough mindset with which to enjoy the second half of our time there.

The motto of the American South during the Civil War was Deo Vindice - God will vindicate, will justify - God is on our side.

Krissa and I are going to San Francisco on Thursday. We shall be staying with some rather fabulous people and paying visits to many more.

This is a first and a couple of furthests for me - furthest from home, furthest west...first time seeing the Pacific, and of course first time to California. Another pin in the virtual map, some more turf explored...I am really excited!
To see the city, to see people, see giant redwoods...

Even if it takes me three hundred and sixty five times as long as Phileas Fogg, I'll get round the world eventually.

The UK has released a list of people who are barred from the country for "propagating views" that "fundamentally go against our values" according to the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith.

I am seriously mixed up about this.

First, I read Fred Phelps is not allowed into the UK.
Undeniable satisfaction.

Second, a voice of moderate rational argument from Inayat Bunglawala:

“If they step over the line and break the law, it's at that moment the law should be enacted, not beforehand...If people are keeping their odious views to themselves, that's their business. We should not be in the business of policing people's minds."

I feel unease. That's absolutely true. And as far as I know, Fred Phelps, to run with an example, has not broken any laws in the United Kingdom. He is a notorious, vocal bigot with views many people find abhorrent. The fact remains that he has not broken any law in the United Kingdom.

By the time I read (at the bottom of this BBC article) that Martha Stewart had been denied entry to the UK because of her insider trading deal I was positively upset. This is dangerous, ridiculous, populist nonsense.

I've already quoted an excerpt, but this bears repeating:

“Coming to this country is a privilege. We won't allow people into this country who are going to propagate the sort of views... that fundamentally go against our values.”

Jacqui Smith - Home Secretary

I understand there have been attempts under UK law to prevent the instigation of hatred on racial or religious grounds, with varying levels of success or moral objectivity, but this particular quote rings with a dangerous tone of protectionism. If entering the UK is a privilege, there is a standard. This isn't a hint, this is precisely what the government is saying.

Even worse, the standard is vaguely defined as a contrariness to values. 'Fundamentally' is overused and is just as woolly as 'reasonable' and 'actual'. It's a dangerous word - you understand if someone is described as wrong. If they're described as fundamentally wrong, your understanding hasn't changed - but the describer has added nuance to how wrong the person is.

I do not think that the United Kingdom should have a monarchy.

It's a personal view. It crops up in conversation occasionally. I'm not an activist, but if the subject comes up I can get quite passionate about it. I don't know if I've ever changed anyone else's mind, but I may have done. I may have propagated my views.

(I don't want to go off on the explanation, but here is a part of it in a nutshell -  I think that the monarchy is a remnant of a time when we were not self-governed. The institution serves no useful purpose. Any minor purpose it does serve, it would be better as the duty of an elected representative. Even if we are now completely democratic, the monarchy and the royal family form such a grand part of our national identity that their cultural primacy skews it, deforms it, so that we are not modern or rational in our thinking about our place in the global community, or about our role as individuals in a global society...like I said. Part of the explanation.)

Anyway.

If, because the United Kingdom has a monarchy, we can safely assume that is a value or belief the United Kingdom holds...and I am against it.

I am against one of the values of the United Kingdom.

Am I fundamentally against it?
Well yes. You'll have to work hard to change my mind on the matter.

So...what now?

The satisfaction I felt when reading that Fred Phelps was barred from the UK is exactly the sort of feeling this announcement is designed to give. What it's not designed to achieve is the feeling that if I disagree with what the government feels is a cultural value (fundamental or otherwise) I can have my right (sorry) privilege to enter the UK removed.


So, Jacqui Smith - I am against the monarchy, and I've told people about it.
Can I come in?

I am feeling enormously cheerful and optimistic.

Contrary to all indications.

How are you? You okay?

Okay so work work work, right?
And now I'm in a really good mood. 

If you can vote and you have yet to - don't make it a spectator sport for yourself too.
Get out and vote.

PALIN: Yes, Sen. McCain does support this. The chant is "drill, baby, drill." And that's what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into.

(then, later...)

PALIN: So even in dealing with climate change, it's all the more reason that we have an "all of the above" approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.

Presumably deep in the prospective budgets of the Republican party there is an item like:

Tank, storage: crude oil.
Quantity: 1
Capacity: 4 billion barrels
Cost: Difficult to calculate
Purpose: Preserving petroleum products...above ground

There was also a contradiction in Governor Palin's successive assertions that human activity isn't responsible for climate change, that she encourages reduction of emissions in the US, and that we must encourage other nations to curb emissions "that America would not stand for".

China only recently overtook the US as the world's worst polluter...would I be wrong to suggest that it's a little soon to be mounting that high horse?

When the first episode of Pushing Daisies aired on TV, I was thrilled to pieces. Not only were the cinematography and art style playful and quirky, but the script was refreshing and unpredictable, and Anna Friel was finally back in my life. I loved it.

That's all I've seen to date. Even before the credits finished rolling on that first epsiode I was waiting for it to come out on DVD. Like a lot of people, I don't have a regular schedule; when it comes to being in front of a TV at the same time week after week, I don't even try. I'm not the kind of person who needs to see something NOW and there's plenty of other entertainment in the world to keep me occupied in the meantime. Krissa and I went back to watching our Netflix DVDs, and the current TV season carried on without us.

Occasionally, seeing a billboard for the Pushing Daisies on a bus, I worried.
Maybe it was too quirky, too unusual.
Maybe people weren't watching it.
Maybe it would be axed.
What could I do?
I didn't want to sit there watching the seventh and final episode on DVD, enraged at the brutal termination of yet another interesting show. Not again.
How can viewers communicate our desires to the networks?

The way in which my enthusiasm for a show manifests is that I bother to rent every disc in the series on Netflix rather than quitting and taking them all off my queue...which doesn't give any feedback at all to the stations...and by that time, why would they care? They sold the rights for DVD distribution for a fee based on TV ratings, and you're not giving their advertisers face time by watching a series on DVD.

This is the crux of the odd three-way relationship between advertisers, the television stations and the audience. They want completely different things and only care a little, in an indirect way, whether or not the other parties get what they want.

We the audience want entertainment with as little financial or time-sacrifice as possible. The TV stations want to sell advertising to make money. Advertisers only care about selling their products to make money.

...Kelloggs was a British company. I never for a moment thought the box I spent twenty minutes reading each morning with the 'By Appointment To Her Majesty' crest was anything but British. I never saw 'Road to Wellville'. Admittedly after reading Bill Bryson's description of the invention of the cornflake I had less of an excuse. Krissa loves to tell this story.
...'Oldsmobile' was slang for an old car. Who came up with that as a brand?
...fruit juice in a can was a stupid idea. I still think this.
...it would be weird if someone handed me a cup of coffee in a bag. I still think this.
...all American beer was regulated to 4% alcohol by volume or under. This is mercifully and incredibly wrong. Hurrah!

...I understood weights and measurements. Metric! Metric metric metric. I miss you so. Instead of beautifully interchangeable metres, kilometres, litres and so on, I have to wrestle with feet, slugs, fahrenheit, horsepower and British Thermal Units (hahahahahaha).
I have been reduced from (occasionally) working things out in my head to ALWAYS needing paper or a calculator, and more often than not, the internet as a reference.
Example:
1 British Thermal Unit is the energy needed to heat a pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Fair enough.

12,000 btus of cooling is called a ton of cooling. This is based off how much cooling can be done by a ton of ice. Historically - not so long ago that people were happy to sweat all day, but long enough ago that they weren't very good at preventing it, air conditioning was performed by dumping a large brick of ice in front of a fan and then pushing that cold air around a building.
So, perfectly naturally, 1 ton of ice = 1 ton of cooling.
All big AC equipment is still rated in tons.
And don't even talk to me about slugs.

...England was an English speaking country (I have since been corrected - NYU require prospective students of British citizenship to take an 'English as a Foreign Language' test if they wish to study there.)

...aliens came from outer space, when in fact I am one.






...

Type 1

Early in the morning yesterday in Washington DC, on a narrow grass median where a highway off-ramp meets a crossroads, a man leant a large white stuffed bear against the traffic light pole. Let's call the man Tom, and we'll call the bear Dick.
Dick was dressed in torn and dirty clothing and was holding a sign that read 'S.O.S.'

Tom withdrew to the trees on the other side of the road to take pictures of Dick and the cars. For hours, on one knee or standing, he took photographs from many different places at the roadside, usually when the traffic lights were red and the space between him and Dick was packed with cars.

At about 11 o'clock another man crossed to the median.
Let's call him Harry.
So we have Tom among the trees with his camera, Dick the bear, and now Harry.

Harry stood for a moment, looking at Dick.
Dick and Harry were both dressed in tattered, weathered clothes, and Harry had a sign as well, a big one he held under his arm. To Tom's distress, Harry dropped his things in the grass and picked Dick up bodily. Carrying him under his arm, Harry crossed the second half of the street and propped Dick against a trash can on the pedestrian sidewalk and, leaving him there, made his way back to the median.
Harry's sign said, 'Vietnam Vet hungry and homeless please help'

Tom hung around for another couple of hours taking pictures of Dick in his new spot, without moving him. Now Tom took pictures when passersby could be seen reacting to Dick and his sign. At about 3 o'clock Tom picked up Dick and walked off. Harry stuck around.

So; two things.

Firstly, Tom and Dick. Or at least what I think Tom and Dick were all about - I didn't ask.
Congress is considering energy legislation this week.
The folks at wecansolveit.org think that if:

-you care about the recent elimination of the hugely successful and economically beneficial renewable energy industrial subsidies that have boosted the progress of renewable energy in the US
-you're concerned about the push for domestic US drilling being used as an excuse for continued reckless use of fossil fuels (the USA is using 25% of the world's oil and sitting on 3% of its reserves)
-you're a little vexed about the fact that we are on the brink of seriously fucking the earth up

...well then!
You should call your Member of Congress and tell them just that.
Here's how.
Don't use the word fuck like I did.
If you don't have a Member of Congress, call your local governmental representative.

Secondly, Harry.
I don't know what to say about Harry other than...peace and compassion - let them move you.

Downtown Manhattan is again today swamped with visitors attending the memorial service for the victims of the September the 11th attacks. The reading of the names is echoing in the streets near the former site of the towers. The mood is subdued and sad, but today I witnessed none of the aggression and appetite for vengeance I had seen, admittedly only at the crowd's fringes, at previous events. I hope that says something about how people feel, and not the police's policies on demonstrations at the ceremonies. I noticed a huge water cannon under covers in a nearby sidestreet in a row of waiting police vehicles.

A block from the WTC site, a wild-eyed man stared at me in my bank's lobby as I walked in. He was in the process of taping some home-made posters to the glass. I can't really remember who he blamed for 9/11, but the words 'INSIDE JOB' featured. I had just been walking through the crowds listening to the names, and I was feeling very emotional. Upstairs, I let the teller know, and she asked a security guard to go down and talk to the man.

I frowned at Google the other day. Not because of Chrome, although I'll get to that in a minute, but because Google - the search engine bit - wasn't being helpful.

A few shots from a walk Krissa and I took along the coastal cliff path west of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. It was very windy, and we got excessively rained on.

I didn't take pictures of those bits.

Krissa: actually, you know, i want to spend some time with you too - dinner out is better than dinner at home for that.
plus dinner out makes NO dishes.
i think i just want to try some place new maybe?

Sent at 2:49 PM on Friday

me:Okay!

Sent at 2:50 PM on Friday

Krissa:what are you in the mood for?
me:Well of course, anything
but I think something vegetably and herby.
Like, experimental vegan or something
Nepalese
Bengali
Sumatran
any of the above

Sent at 2:52 PM on Friday

or steak
there
that gives you some wiggle room.

I finish a glass of water and stand up from the table to get a refill from the cooler.

Other Person: You know what they say about drinking water?
Me: What's that?
Other Person: That by the time you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated.
Me: I thought that was the point of feeling thirsty.
Other Person: No, no, you don't get it. By the time your body is telling you you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated. It's too late, see?

pause

Me: Riiiight.

Krissa is asleep; napping in the afternoon heat.

Review up at videogamesblogger.com.

Italy knocked out of Euro 2008

Opponents of gay marriage stay quiet

I love the idea that these two 'news items' are connected.

Taken by Krissa

I read this for the first time about ten years ago and, I'll be honest, lost track of what was going on. With a lot more Vonnegut under my belt I can say this is both one of the saddest and most penetratingly insightful of his books. Some of his other works are strongly flavoured by the horror of humanity's actions in World War 2, but this book largely eschews the normal satirical Vonnegutian flippancy when dealing with such grave and outrageous issues, and instead pores over the devastating personal effects of war, politics, art, love, patriotism and the mutability of human values.


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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