ObservationsThe Caldecott and Newbery winners for literature have been announced… for 2012. The year’s barely under way and they already know who’s going to be the best! Science Fiction in action!
Archive for ‘Observations’
I may be losing this battle, but come on.
Many of you out there have heard me rail against the verb ‘login’. You would never say ‘I loginned to the Interwebs.’
‘Log’ is the verb. In the case of technology the verb is followed by a prepositional phrase starting with ‘in’ or ‘into’ to describe where the logging happened.
Thank you, Adobe Systems, for taking my pet peeve to the new absurdity. In an official communication I have been instructed as follows (copy-paste here, so the capitalization is also theirs): Login into Your Account with the ID listed above
Yeah. Login into. Is anybody reading this before it goes out?
I’m in a bar, and on one silent TV I’ve watched the same helmet-to-helmet tackle over and over. This is a big deal in American Football these days, as folks realize that slamming your hardened plastic shell into someone else’s hardened plastic shell causes both brains to rattle around in their fluid suspension dangerously.
Helmet-to-helmet is not good for brains.
So I’m watching this incident in super slo-mo, and it looks petty bad at that speed. The guy that got hit lay flat on his back for a while, took a breath, and got up. One of his larger teammates came over to encourage him and no doubt express admiration for his toughness. He did this by — wait for it! — slapping his quarterback on the helmet.
You should know me better by now.
Got a message from YouTube today, saying they missed me terribly and wished I would *ahem* login *cough* now and then. So I did. I’m an agreeable sort of fellow.
Google, who now holds almost my entire music collection, whose business mandate is to use data about people to make money off them, suggested that I might enjoy watching the latest Beyoncé video. Or Lady Gaga, perhaps? Or maybe Justin Bieber.
Google, seriously. What the Fuck? You know all the songs I’ve listened to for the last month. Justin Bieber was notably absent. Ravonettes, 50 foot wave, Sex Pistols. Nothing remotely like the Beib came down the wire.
If you’re going to collect data about me and then try to sell me stuff, as least do it right.
One man stands out from the crowd.
I was watching (without sound) some show that features a guy who may (or may not) be the the showbiz illusionist Chris Angel. The show was called something like “I’ll wear anything and fight anyone to get on TV.” Nothing to do with showbiz magic. Probably-Chris Angel’s job was to chat with the other host and interview stupid people. (I assume they were stupid; I suppose they may have been discussing quantum mechanics.)
What struck me as I watched this silent farce was the remarkable brightness in Angel’s eyes compared to everyone else’s. His eyes caught the light from the camera in a way no one else’s did. Was this intentional? I don’t know. But he focussed intently into the camera, and his dark eyes did the rest. The result was that he just looked… special compared to everyone else.
Tonight I set up a twitter account. My twitter ID is JerrySeeger.
Why did I finally do it? Here’s my first (and to date, only) tweet, addressed to Antonio Gonzalez of the Associated Press:
The other day I opened the cabinet to grab some cold cereal. I wasn’t sure which specific cereal I was going to have, I just knew that a bowl full of yummy not-too-sweet flakes with some almond milk splashed over them would be tasty. Probably I’d slice a banana over the cereal.
So, surveying the candidates with an open mind, I was confronted with… anonymous boxes. Black-and-white panels of nutrition information. I selected a cereal and resolved to put it away with the other edge showing, so my poor tired eyes could identify that box better the next time.
It turns out the other side was no better, and I realized that all the cereal boxes in the cabinet used the side panels as junk space.
Big mistake, I say. In the case of cereal, all the marketing is on the front of the box, with stuff on the back of the box to keep the kids without TV in the kitchen occupied. The packaging designers are missing an important opportunity.
There are two phases to marketing a box of cereal; first you get it off the store shelf and into the shopping cart. That’s what the front panel does. But the marketing isn’t over then; cereals are still competing to get from the box to the bowl. The winner of that contest empties the box faster. It’s about selling the next box.
That competition is all about the side panels. If I were king of a cereal company, the boring stuff would be on the back, and the side panels would be devoted exclusively to “Hey! Look at me! I’m yummy!”
This episode will grow.
The Title of this episode commonly appears as fine print in television commercials, where the advertiser wants to make sure no one holds them responsible for someone else being stupid.
I may add to this post, but here’s the one that forced me (yes, forced) to write this little episode:
- Do not attempt an automobile collision while someone is hanging from the side of one of the vehicles, on the side of the collision.
- Do not jump out of an airplane while holding a sphere of electricity and then hurl said sphere into a cloud that you are falling toward, filling it with lightning.
I know you were going to.
Being fake is hard.
I was recently farting around with my Facebook profile. I uploaded a new profile image (which doesn’t really look very good as a thumbnail but apparently it doesn’t save my old profile photos, so now I’ll have to find the original to go back), and while I was at it, I glanced through my other profile information.
My profile is scant, not so much because I’m trying to protect my privacy as because I can’t imagine why anyone would care about most of that stuff.
In fact, the only ones who might be interested in any of that stuff are the ones who with the overt goal of invading my privacy. So, why not help them out? There’s a field I can fill in for my political leanings. It occurred to me that ‘anarchist’ would be fun, but ‘communist’ would be more provocative. Even though communism is an economic system. People get mixed up about that.
Hobbies? How about ‘recreational explosives’ and ‘euthanasia’? Maybe ‘book burning’ to keep people guessing.
Senate Committee Chairman: So, on your Facebook profile you declared yourself to be a communist! And a bomb-throwing murderer!
Yours Truly (trying to remember): Did I?
SCC: Yes! You also burn books, so you’re obviously not completely evil, but we demand an explanation!
YT: Simple. That’s not me.
And that would be the truth. I am not a Facebook profile. I’m not even a blog, though blog-Jerry and public-Jerry do have a lot in common.
East-Coast people often say they hate how ‘fake’ Californians are. In fact, Californians say the same thing about other Californians. But what does that actually mean? My theory: Californians don’t express anger as openly as others, and they don’t lean forward when they listen to you (the way southerners do), so they must be fake.
Whatever. Everyone’s fake. I’m fake. And seriously, that’s the way it should be. You know the me I’ve learned to project since my earliest days. The one who plays nice, gets along, and tries to make the world a better place (usually). You don’t want to know me the way I know me. I don’t want to know you that way either.
Then there’s the person you imagine when you read this blog. Not the same as the person you find when you run into meat-me at the frozen yogurt shop. Blog-me might be a little more articulate, since he reads most things he says before he says them. Blog-me talks about different things, sometimes more introspective, and doesn’t really worry so much about boring people.
Blog-me is a different person. A different fiction.
So why not Facebook-me? Why not create some whacked-out extremist commie bomb-thrower and be that guy?
There’s a good reason not to, actually. It’s hard enough work maintaining the personas I already have. All the -me’s are pretty lazy.
Be the first to invest!
Recently ‘they’ found a brown dwarf nearby. A brown dwarf is a star that never quite made the grade; when all the other stars in the dust cloud were snatching up fuel these hapless wanna-bes were left just shy of the mass (and therefore gravitational pressure) to squish hydrogen atoms together into helium, and as a side effect shooting off heat. They’re barely stars at all.
You can see a thoroughly uninteresting photo of one over at Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s pretty close to us — on a cosmic scale at least — a mere 40 light-years away. What made this one interesting (to me at least) is the surface temperature. It’s about the same temperature as the room I’m sitting in right now.
So let’s say, for the sake of Science Fiction, that one can travel faster than light. Only slightly more impossible would be dealing with the high gravity. Once those two minor things are taken care of, you could build your house on this star. Well, there probably isn’t a real surface per se, and there’s likely to be some pretty wicked radiation and magnetic what-not. And epic storms, like on Jupiter.
BUT – if you solved those things, you could build your house on a star. That would be cool.
Suddenly I’m an Eagles fan, just for letting me type the above.
I’m in a bar and apparently the preseason starts today. I’d say that this mattered not at all, but I do have this observation: On what I think was the Raiders’ first play of the first game of the preseason, there was a fight.
For all the noise they make, Apple can be pretty subtle.
As an employee of your favorite fruit-flavored gadget company, I find myself noticing some interesting things about the way my employer promotes itself. For instance, there are the buildings of Infinite Loop. There are signs at the entrances to the campus, but on the buildings there are no logos.
No logos on any of the other buildings Apple occupies. No logos on the big gray busses that glide up and down the freeways, taking workers to and from Cupertino. (The busses have WiFi, of course.) No logos on the shuttles to the railway stations or on the bikes you can check out to travel between buildings.
You’d never know, driving on I-280, that you were passing through a company that has more cash on hand than the Unites States.
So why wouldn’t a company as intent on spreading its brand take advantage of putting their logo on stuff they already own? I think because it would almost become a joke in iCupertino. There would be an apple on every damn thing in the city. HP used to have a big presence here, but now Apple’s new mother ship will be built on their old campus. (Business note: few places in the world will have greater demand for sandwiches and beer than the one-block radius around the new Apple campus.) Seagate’s here, and plenty of other companies, and they put up the signs. Apple just is.
But none of that is why I sat down to write this little episode. I’m watching baseball right now, and an ad for the iPad 2 came on. It’s a nice, friendly ad, and one of the little vignettes it plays is of a very small child writing his first words with his finger.
The camera moves over the iPad (2!) as the child completes the ‘n’ in ‘lion’. His penmanship is pretty good. (I know it’s a ‘he’ because he’s wearing blue.)
Of course, Lion is also the name of the operating system Apple released last week. Coincidence, I’m sure.
And not a real sport in sight.
I am surrounded by TV screens, all showing things that resemble sport. In soccer, a Mexican team is playing a Spanish Italian one. I have to say I was pulling for Guadalajara over Seville or wherever Juventus comes from. [Um... Turin, actually.]
I didn’t see the goal, but I did see a few supposedly macho men lying on the grass crying. Not as many as I expected, which just goes to show you how far this league is from earning my respect. Only four episodes of babyism in the second half? That’s progress! I’d like to think the boys from North America spent less time on the soil than the Europeans.
Meanwhile, my left eye and right hemisphere have been absorbing X-Games. I watched an event where kids rolled their bikes down a ridiculous slope, up a ramp, through the air (tricks ensue) and then, if they land, they have a chance to do one more trick. I’d say maybe 30% landed the first flight. Probably less. These kids fell a long, long way, sometimes with a bicycle in the crotch, and when things came to a rest they took a deep breath and walked off, trying as hard as possible to NOT look hurt. A nice departure from the soccer.
And yet. Does the double-front-flip or the backflip-with-the-bike-spin score higher? That’s for the judges to decide. Ultimately most of the events in the X-Games are slightly-more-dangerous figure skating. Contestants do stuff and someone else decides who wins. Interesting, occasionally entertaining, but not satisfying from a sporting point of view.
When does hockey season begin again?
Defying death is safer these days.
I’m in a bar right now, trying to get the blog mojo working. On the TV I just saw a commercial that featured some sort of record-breaking car jump. I just couldn’t get excited.
Back in the ’70s the guys doing jumps just put a big motor in their cars, set up a ramp, and took a shot at the other side. Sure there were some estimates of how far they would fly if they were going a certain speed at the top of the ramp, but there was still a seat-of-the-pants feel to it. You started small, you jumped farther and farther, and learned to land on your wheels.
Now, I see a specially-modified car sail through the air and all I see is math. The driver has only to hit the ramp at the right speed and keep level and Bob’s your uncle. [This has always been the case, but 'the right speed' was not as exactly-known as it is now, nor was it so easy to hit that speed back in the day. I contend. And now that I think of it, some ramps back then might have doomed the driver no matter the speed.]
Daredeviling, like tennis, has suffered from the advance of technology.
WWEKD?
