It all started innocently a few hours ago. I had returned from the Internet store, where Otakar and I had accomplished almost (but not quite) nothing. I was telling Soup Boy that the bowling alley (our Internet lifeline) was closed today. It turns out it’s the owner’s names day. Sure, what the heck, close the place when I haven’t read email in three days.
So Soup Boy had hoisted his trusty mobile phone to find out just whose names day it was, thinking if it was a common one it might explain why Český Telecom was also closed for business, more or less. Can’t fight the names days. Shouldn’t try.
Before his fingers did their nimble dance over his phone, however, he got a message. He read it, chuckled, and asked me, “You want to be an extra in the James Bond movie?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Then right now send a message to this number,” he said.
Having no time to think, I could not stop myself from acting. I sent the message. In a couple of minutes I got a response. “Can you come in for photos soon? Now?”
My best is none too good, and I was not looking my best. I bought two hours to do what I could for my appearance. Soup Boy gave me directions, and off I went. I found the place thanks to Soup Boy’s unerring directions (remind me to tell you some day about how directions are given in this town), and I was early. The agent… Hmm… let’s call her Athena… was in a state. My being early didn’t help, but I sat quietly and opened my book. There was another guy there for the same reason, and when she realized she had two birds to kill she gave us some paperwork and took us in to be photographed.
The other guy went first. He was taller, more fit, and had screen experience, but we weren’t competing. No, Athena just needed every breathing soul she could round up, photograph, and send to the producer. She took a few shots of the other guy, giving him direction like “OK, now turn to the side, look this way, and give me an impish smile.” As I filled out my paperwork I practiced a few impish smiles.
Then it was my turn. I stood up straight and looked into the camera, wishing I had the same latitude as on my previous modeling gig. “Take off your glasses,” Athena said. “Smile a bit. Lean forward a little. Now look mean.” Mean? Mean? I started to adjust myself into a mean attitude but I was far from finished when she said, “Great. Lemme see what I’ve got.” I could tell she didn’t think she had much, but wasn’t hoping to get any more. (Or at least, didn’t think it was worth the time to try.)
I left, confident that Dr. No would never have to face me down, but what the hell. “We’ll tell you in the next forty-eight hours,” Athena said.
A few minutes ago, I got a message. I’m needed to meet with wardrobe tomorrow. I should bring clothes that look like I’m from Florida if I have them. The list started with silk suits (uh, yeah, right) but got down into my range, but my Rusty’s Surf Shop shirt won’t play. (No logos).
Two day’s work, rent covered for the month. Not bad. And if I see Dr. No, I’m gonna wax his ass.
Got myself a sweet little MP3 player, noise-canceling headphones, and a hat.
Today I may eclipse that with style, however. Apple just announced that it is shipping Intel-based machines starting today. That means users of Jer’s Novel Writer will be buying them. That means JNW needs to work on them. That means I need to be able to test JNW on them. And that, in turn, means I need to buy one, and they’ll be a heck of a lot cheaper here than in Europe.
We’ll see.
This was the first holiday to be added to the Muddled Calendar, and it marked the beginning of the 2th initiative, just one of the innovative contributions of the legendary Mr7k. In his words:
January the Twoth will, henceforth, be known as New Year’s Day (Observed)tm. For those amoung us who are too (choose one or more) drunk (still), hungover, tired, way into watching football, or otherwise occupied to start the new year on January the 1st, New Year’s Day (Observed)tm is just the ticket. Think of it as a much needed mulligan on the first tee of each year.
A while back I gave you the lyrics for the opening theme to a Japanese animation called Cutey Honey Flash, a sublimely ridiculous retelling of a ’70’s televison series. This one may just top that.
I’ve only watched one episode of the show, but Club-to-Death Angel Dokuro-chan may be my new favorite. The show involves Dokuro-chan, cute as a button with her halo, who has inexplicably moved into the bedroom of a high school student named Sakuro. The guy’s not as lucky as you might think, however; this little angel has a bit of a temper and a giant baseball bat with wicked spikes, which she does not hesitate to use. In the first episode, she decapitates Sakuro with Excalibolg at least three times in great fountains of blood.
It’s hilarious.
As quick as she is to anger, she immediately feels remorse and with a “Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi!” she twirls Ecalibolg cheerleader-style and restores the fragments of his skull. “That hurt,” he said one time after being killed.
She declares that she will be going to school with him, and he makes her promise not to crush anyone’s skull. She reluctantly agrees. Then she agrees not to reveal that she is an angel.
“And of course, you can’t use any of your mysterious angelic powers, either.”
“No angelic powers.”
“No tear gas, either.”
“No firing of tear gas, either.”
“Don’t forget our promise, Okay?”
I don’t want to give it all away, but she’s not a terribly trustworthy angel.
The show opens with Dokuro-chan flying among the clouds, cute little angel wings flapping, a frightfully happy smile on her little face, the vicious-looking bat flying along next to her, while a perky girl-voice sings:
Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi
Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi
The bat that can do anything, Excalibolg!
Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi
Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi
When you hear my magical spell, you’ll be reborn again.
No, no, don’t be like that, dummy!
Don’t glare at me like that! Please!
Club-to-Death Angel, spraying blood everywhere, Dokuro-chan!
Club-to-Death Angel, she makes you bleed from the heart, Dokuro-chan!
I’ll step on you, tie you up, beat you up,
Kick you, be a cocktease, hang you,
But that’s just how I express my love!
Club-to-Death Angel, who pounds you with her bat, Dokuro-chan!
Club-to-Death Angel, blood-stained all over, Dokuro-chan!
I’ll cut you, punch you, toy with you,
Stab you, leave you out in the cold, drip stuff on you,
But that’s just how I express my love!
Pipiru piru piru pipiru pi!
“Bleed from the heart” is more literal in this translation than usual. During the opening credits there is a sequence where she is dancing around like a cheerleader, swinging her bat, and with each stroke more blood splatters about. She ends by dong the splits, hands raised, bat twirling, smiling from ear to ear, a twinkle in her eye, while blood drips down the screen. Priceless.
As most of you already know, I like to watch and see just what it is that brings the accidental tourist to this site. Google and its buddies form and extremely important role in the Websphere, finding for people the information they need in this big, disorganized pile of fact and opinion.
The search engines are imperfect, however, and sometimes people end up here.
Usually the search phrase is innocuous, “plate of shrimp” or something like that, but occasionally the search will be interesting, either for the odd phrase or where it linked to. Old-timers can have a little fun chuckling at the resonances between the search and remembered episodes, while newcomers can use this page as a guided tour of some of what has gone before. Search terms I do not want to attract to this page are, as always, haphazardly obfuscated with spaces.
The usuals were there, although egg frying is not bringing in the unsuspecting guests the way it once did. I’ll have to do something about that. And, after all this time denying I have a picture of elk poop, I find that I do have one after all (it’s right there in the middle). Unfortunately no one is coming here looking for elk poop anymore. “M e a t” is becoming an increasingly popular word in searches that bring people here, and I hadn’t considered before just how cool a word that is. I think I’ll say it again. M e a t.
I have the cover over at Piker Press this week. I don’t always mention when I’m published over there, but this one I rather like more than half the time.
Although there was one edit I wanted to make before it went live, and then I just plan forgot. D’oh!
It’s an interesting story, surely. It has all the elements a good story needs – technology, a baseball bat, beer, and lingerie. But… it belongs elsewhere. So hopefully by providing the previous lurid tease I can leave it behind and get back to the business at hand. And in November, uninformed political raving is replaced by NaNoWriMo as the Single Most Tedious Blog Subject.
So let’s talk about NaNoWriMo, shall we? How many others out there have trained their spelling checkers to recognize this word? Today I haven’t been as prolific (yet), but I still managed to cross 10K here on day three. The story is just plain writing itself. I’m not one of those writers who just rambles on and lets characters surprise them with their behavior (well, if you don’t count the eels); I’ve got plans for these folks. But things are coming together nicely. My biggest concern is that the wisdom of some of the people is showing too early, while they’re just supposed to be caricatures. But that’s a rich man’s problem. There is wisdom.
It is not laugh-a-minute funny, but (if you ask me) it is coming out nicely. It’s that half-smile nudge-nudge funny. I only have to sustain it for 27 more days.
Enough of that. On a less happy note, there are a bazillion NaNoWriMo folks using Jer’s Novel Writer, and there’s a bug. People have lost work. The bug has been lying dormant for a while, but wouldn’t you know it? It’s in the word count feature. Suddenly, in November, people are very, very interested in their word count.
I got a rather irate message from some guy about losing a whole night’s work. It’s bad, and I’m not trying to duck out on folks who have a lot going on, but who the hell uses beta software all night without hitting save once? Maybe because I am often using very dodgy versions of the software I’m more save-conscious, but I’ve been a saver from way back. I just don’t trust these damn machines. You have backed up your work recently, haven’t you?
Happily, earlier today I finally found the problem. I had seen the evidence before, but tonight I turned my thinking ninety degrees and saw the answer. Tomorrow I will release a better version of the software. Meanwhile I’m sure there are posts all over the place warning people away from JNW. I can’t blame them. Once I discovered the problem, I posted warnings myself. Still, there’s a black eye there to overcome.
And finally, as we’re cleaning up the odds and ends, I must tell you that the Non-Stop Snack Bar is really the Herna Snack Bar. It doesn’t say Non-Stop anywhere on it. I’m just so accustomed to associating Herna (casino) with Non-Stop that I never looked twice. I have visited that place again three times, and on none of those occasions was Hanka working. I had hopes for tonight, since the last time I saw her was on a Thursday, but no. Last Thursday, however, was a holiday weekend eve, and Pavel did mention something about coming in on Fridays. Maybe tomorrow…
I’m sitting at the Little Café Near Home, planing my November, which is looking bright, and somewhere along the way I started thinking of triangles — not sure what set it off — and a missed opportunity by my math teachers in seventh grade.
My memory being notoriously bad, I’m amazed I remember any of this stuff, but we spent a lot of time in geometry class messing with triangles. One thing that was pounded into our heads was that once you define the lengths of the sides of a triangle, you’re done. That triangle is fixed. I think we called it the side-side-side theorem, or SSS for short. It was just another fact. Just another checkbox in the curriculum.
It might have caught my interest more, and perhaps the interest of others who didn’t take to math so well, it someone had mentioned that it could be the single most important fact in mechanical engineering and architecture. Triangles are rigid.
Now I remember how I started thinking this way — most of the chairs in this place, sturdily made of steel, are distorted. Over the months and years of use people have leaned back in them until now they are all somewhat out of shape. They are sturdy, but they are all about rectangles, not triangles. It would not take much to redesign these chairs to be much sturdier.
So you put a chair like this in front of a high school math class and say, “Behold, the power of the triangle in your everyday life.”
But then I did some more thinking. Thoughts often lead to thinking, and thinking to thoughts, in a vicious cycle interrupted only by head trauma or the presence of a member of the opposite sex. I thought of Notre Dame Cathedral. No triangles. Apparently stone is not a material for triangles. It’s good with compression, but tensile strength is laughable. It can only be flexed one direction.
But wood is certainly a good triangle material. I remember as a kid staring up at the rafters in church, seeing the triangles there, admiring the way they were made with parallel planks bolted together like a giant tinkertoy. I remember those rafters better than any sermon.
But older examples of triangles in architecture, I’m having a hard time with. There’s the old footage of the great New York skyscrapers racing each other into the sky, giant rectangular steel frames with steeplejacks racing about with hot rivets. There must have been triangles in there or the whole mess would have twisted and fallen, but they’re not apparent in those old movies.
So, architecture guys: Sacre Coeur, no triangles; then there was that skyscraper where exotriangles were added when they realized after they built the thing that the wind tunnel tests on the models were flawed. If you were given half an hour in front of a semi-comatose group of young math students who don’t give a rat’s ass about SSS, what would you tell them? How do you pass on that this seemingly esoteric fact is a cornerstone of our civilization? In your absence, how do you advise teachers to do the same?
The scope of this ramble is rapidly expanding, to where I now want to create a framework that allows professionals to pass on their passion to students who don’t have any way to recognize when they are confronted by a potentially life-changing fact. I want a footnote in the book that links to a video of an architect getting really gung-ho about triangles, or a chemist going batshit over – uh – whatever chemists go batshit over. I want to challenge leaders in every field to think back to the most basic fact their profession is based upon, the thing they take most for granted, and explain it to people who have never heard it before. They would be giving meaning to the really important bits, things that would otherwise be lost in the noise, but simple facts that could decide a career. There’s some kid in that geometry class, not so good at proofs and theorems, but when given an important tool for buildin’ stuff, might just perk up a bit, might see the connection between all these numbers and building a hotel on the moon.
For me.
Thought I’d drop by the Little Café Near Home yestereve for a bit of writing. It’s a good place for that. Of course, it’s only polite that I enjoy a beverage while I’m there. Beverages cost money. Specifically, cash. My reserves were a little low, but as I hopped off the tram I was surrounded by ATM’s. The closest belonged to a shiny German (perhaps Austrian? Maybe Swiss) bank with a friendly yellow sign. It’s been a good friend on many other occasions, so I ambled into the foyer of the otherwise dark and silent building and inserted my card.
After contemplating just how much money to withdraw and punching a few buttons, I waited. Then the screen flashed:
“Unauthorized use. Card retained.”
I stood there for a moment while it sunk in I would be getting neither money nor my card back.
No LIttle Café then, but a trip back to the homestead and an international long distance call to my bank. The first thing Linda told me, before I even explained the situation completely, was that one of the major networks that carries transaction information was down. Once I explained my problem she started digging into my account info, then put me on hold for fifteen minutes or so.
Finally she came back on. “We tried everything, and we can’t figure out why they kept your card. We’ll work on it again when the network is back up.”
Probably the problem was caused by the network failure – the authorization was lost somewhere in the ether and the fraud detectors went off at the bank. Today I will go down there and ask for my card back. That should be interesting. In the meantime I have another card, but I’m afraid to use it.
I posted six episodes that day, an opening salvo to establish some of the themes of the blog. I mentioned my candidacy for President of the United States. I mentioned software and blimps. I told a story about an adventure on a previous visit to the Czech Republic, and I wondered whether using iBlog was really the way to go. (I’m still not sure, but 535 episodes and 4500 comments later, the thought of moving makes my head spin.) I posted a few more episodes in October, but November was a write-off, and things only went in fits and spurts until I decided to use the blog to chronicle my homeless tour. That’s when things started to gain traction.
Two years later, the title of this blog seems more appropriate than I ever could have imagined. It is a description not just of this blog, but of my life. I am a half-baked idea.
I’ll spare you further retrospectivosity until April 2th. Once a year is enough for that kind of thing.
Funkmaster G-Force pointed it out recently, and you can check for yourself. From Lindsay Wagner to Renee Zellwiger, chicks dig me.
Well, not me, per se, but some idea of me expressed in these pages. It is a carefully crafted and sloppily maintained me, an idea that’s got out of hand and is running amok through the blogosphere. It is, perhaps, slightly less artificial than the me you would meet if you were to stumble into the Cheap Beer Place right now, but only just.
This particular me, the one you know, is defined by words. Strings of symbols strung together to form ideas. And all of those smaller ideas coalesce into the grand idea of whoever it is I am. Though, maybe it’s not as grand as all that.
There have always been pen pals and others who come to know each other through words, but now we’re looking at something on a whole new scale. One of my NaNoWriMo ideas involves creating a completely artificial person online. But if that person is consistent and compelling, is there really any difference between that and who you’ve come to know here at Muddled Ramblings?
On a smaller scale, in the comments there are also new people – personalities that did not exist before but are just as real in this context. People with no birth certificates, no social security numbers, but in this place they exist and are known.
Of course, some of you have met me in the flesh, so you have two versions of me to compare. Perhaps there is some overlap, the intersection of the two Jerrys that can give some footing on who I really am. Whatever that means.
The gnomes at Google understood better than anyone else that the Internet was more than just a big pile of information. It is a big, loosely structured pile of information where connections are based on association, rather than categorization. In that way, I believe, it models human memory more than other repositories. But while surfing the net, hopping from link to link, is much like daydreaming, what was missing was a way move to a specific piece of information. There was no way to concentrate. In that giant ad-hoc pile of info is the answer to your question, but where? Google and the other search engines provided that critical capability, and without them the Web would be damn near worthless.
So, hooray for the search engines!
As a side effect, the search engines also give us a snapshot of the cosmic unconscious. We can see what it is that people are looking for out there. From here, it looks like a hell of a lot of people want to know how to fry eggs, and to read about Japanese g i r l s who wear short s k i r t s in the winter. They want pitchers of the oddest things, and they want to know the ins and outs of X-ray g o g s. Then there are the strange ones.
I occasionally chronicle some of the searches that brought people here to MR&HBI. Because this episode will also be cataloged by Google and the others, phrases I do not want to distract the engines from the original quarry I obfuscate with spaces.
Perhaps it is a sign of the changing times, but while eggs queries are still the most common, queries about my little writing app are on the rise. Queries about particular bars are on the decline. Perhaps that means I need to write about more of them.
Apple made a big fuss over Tiger, saying it was their biggest upgrade in years. From a developer’s standpoint, there is really is some big stuff – if all your users have Tiger as well. I can’t use any of those cool things, but I’m looking forward to them in the future.
As a user, there are new features that are supposed to be very exciting, but for the most part I just end up unimpressed. Maybe if dashboard came with widgets that didn’t suck, I’d be more impressed.
There is one feature, however, that well and truly rocks. The dictionary. It is a true dictionary, not just a list of words for the spelling checker (in fact, sometimes the two do not agree). It is a full-on dictionary with alternatives, common phrases using the word (under “wolf” you can read about crying wolf and throwing someone to the wolves, among other things), and usage notes. Who’s or whose? Affect or effect? It is filled with concise and well-written guidance for an excitingly complex language. Connected is a thesaurus. Double-click any word in any definition and you jump to its definition. I spent a couple hours the other day, starting with moor, passing through Scotch, and ending somewhere around horse. High was a good read.
I do occasionally use it for spelling help, but much more I use it to learn more about particular words. Knowing the dictionary is there has increased my curiosity about the ins and outs of some words and has allowed me to use others with confidence.
There are probably other online dictionaries that are as good – I’ve never done a survey of the field – but man am I glad I have this one. I realize now I should have been using a dictionary more my whole life, but now any word in any document is just a right-click away, and I’ve learned tons. I’ve gotten much closer to words I thought I knew intimately.
As a bonus, no one is bugging me to put a thesaurus in Jer’s Novel Writer any more.
