Eclecticism

Sometime between July 5th and July 8th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Monsignor’s Confessional: Darkness That Exists Just for You: "Once a month, The Vogue would fill with people who joyfully attended the famous party. It provided them sanctuary and freedom, it was a place they could feel safe and comfortable while expressing themselves in any way they saw fit. The outfits ranged from fetish wear to costumes, pony falls to dread falls, bright colored hair to black hair, large amounts of make-up on both women and men. It was not uncommon to see guests dressed in corsets, dog collars, chains, or any variation thereof." I have a few sets of photos I've taken at various confessionals in my Seagoth collection on Flickr, including the final Christmas Confessional at The Vogue mentioned in the article.
• Introducing the Google Chrome OS: "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."
• Sarah Palin’s 10 Most Awkward Media Moments: "If the soon-to-be-former Alaska governor's rambling resignation speech made some viewers wince, it was probably not the first time. Here's a look back at the soon-to-be-former governor's most cringe-inducing moments. And yes–we included the turkey." Listening to her speak makes my head go all asplodey.
• Fiction World Rocked as Woman Claims No Sexual Attraction to Neil Gaiman: "At a recent book signing, Joan Green, 24, stunned her friends when she admitted that upon meeting Neil Gaiman, she did not find him attractive. 'He was nice and all,' she confessed a few minutes after getting a copy of American Gods autographed. 'But, he's not, you know, my type.' One of Green's friends, speaking anonymously, said, 'She's lying. Everyone thinks he's dreamy. Everyone. Even Hillary Clinton.'"
• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the 'Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Sometime between July 1st and July 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Giant Squid Caught in West Seattle: "A Puget Sound resident reeled in what is believed to be a Humboldt Squid Friday in West Seattle. Rodney Sarkees estimates the squid was roughly 8 feet long, and roughly 80 pounds. It took two people to lift. Sarkees released the squid back into the water after catching it. Fish & Wildlife later captured and relocated the squid. Officials told Sarkees it was a Humboldt Squid – the largest they'd seen in the area." Okay, yeah, I don't think I'll be swimming in the Puget Sound at any point in the foreseeable future.
• Keep Khan Out of Star Trek 12: "I had been meaning to write this 'keep Khan out of Star Trek 2 (or 12, rather)' blog post for a while now — but honestly I thought Orci and Kurtzman were just kidding about including him. The script for the next Trek, at this point, consists of a few Gorn cartoons on a cocktail napkin, and they're barely batting ideas around. So it's easy for them to hint at all sorts of fan-favorite stuff…. Why not? Anything's possible at this point, and it doesn't do any harm to answer 'maybe' to every question. And of course, if the fans get particularly thrilled about one of these trial balloons, then that tells them something. But now, it sounds as though the Fringe co-creators may actually be considering resurrecting Khan, who's still sleeping in his little suspended-animation capsule in their revamped timeline. So just in case they're really serious about this, here's a list of reasons why a new Khan would be a terrible, epically bad idea."
• Water Seeping Through Howard Hanson Dam Is Picking Up Speed: Oh, my — I'm glad we live on the third floor of our apartment building! "The speed at which water is seeping through a flank of the Howard Hanson Dam has, by one key measure, increased since January, and the people who operate the dam don't know why. Nobody's saying there will be large-scale floods for the first time since the dam was built, but the weakness in the dam abutment — the side of the valley against which the dam was built — means the Corps of Engineers may have to severely restrict how much stormwater the dam can hold back for the next several winters. And that could mean more water flowing through the valley below, raising the risk of flooding for the cities of Kent, Renton, Tukwila and Auburn."
• The Blue and the Green: "You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. So I loaded the image in Photoshop and examined the two spirals. Like I said, incredible! For pedantry sake, the RGB colors in both spirals are 0, 255, 150. So they are mostly green with a solid splash of blue."
• The Puppet Show: Creepy-cool: photos of children to make them look like puppets, dolls, or ventriloquists dummies, depending on your interpretation.

Sometime between June 30th and July 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Slow Reversal of Periods and Quotation marks: "In the past, total integrity of the greater ideas within a missive was required, hence, something set off in quotation marks framed the complete thought, including a period or comma. But as technology advanced, the need of technical speech developed. Here, total integrity of the letters themselves is required. A trailing character within a quotation, required by grammatical tradition, could introduce unnecessary error to the data." I've been using this style (formally called logical punctuation off-and-on for years when the situation called for it (especially, for instance, when writing URLs or code).
• The Boys Club: I wish that I'd one, discovered this post when it was posted, and two, had the time to actually read through the many, many comments, but this is MetaFilter's discussion about Pixar's lack of female lead characters (a recurring thread on my blog).
• 16 Bitchin’ Commands and Shortcuts for Twitter: "I love a shortcut, and regularly make use of a range of keyboard shortcuts on Twitter. There are more of them than you might imagine. As such I have aggregated a bunch of commands to provide you with one handy cut-out-and-keep / 'bookmark on Delicious' guide. "
• Fallen Princesses: "I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues."
• Supervolcano May Be Brewing Beneath Mount St Helens: "IS A supervolcano brewing beneath Mount St Helens? Peering under the volcano has revealed what may be an extraordinarily large zone of semi-molten rock, which would be capable of feeding a giant eruption. If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park."

Sometime between June 26th and June 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• LANL Scientist Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light: "Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow. Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. "
• Picasa Web Albums – Pride 09: Steve Barta's shots of the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" — the seagoth contingent in this year's Pride parade. Looks like a good turnout! I missed it this year, but should be back out with everyone next year!
• Fake Photojournalism Wins: "I think what they've done is not to make brilliant photojournalism, but to make brilliant art. There was certainly a significant price to be paid for that art, or perhaps many prices: the reputation of the award, the reputation of the judges, even their own reputations perhaps–and only time will tell–but they've surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is."
• Giving Up My iPod for a Walkman: "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
• "A Barkeeper Entering the Kingdom of Heaven": Did Mark Twain Really Hate Jane Austen?: "Twain marveled that Austen had been allowed to die a natural death rather than face execution for her literary crimes. 'Her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy,' Twain observed, apparently viewing an Austen novel as a book which 'once you put it down you simply can't pick it up.' In a letter to Joseph Twichell in 1898, Twain fumed, 'I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.'"

Sometime between June 12th and June 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Michael Bay Finally Made an Art Movie: "Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one."
• Roger Ebert on the new Transformers film: "'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination."
• Dear Pixar, From All the Girls With Band-Aids on Their Knees: "I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn't you have chosen something — something — for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys? Or more to the point, why couldn't your first female central character be as specifically drawn as the women and girls (and girl robots, etc.) you're already writing as secondary characters?"
• 16volt Release Entire (7 Album) Back Catalog for Free: "16volt is releasing their entire back catalog for free. You simply go to their site at www.16volt.com/downloads and grab all you want. People who think a donation is the correct way to go can donate money which the band will use for touring expenses. The reasoning behind this release is explained by the band's founder and front man, Eric Powell: 'We have decided to give our whole back catalog away for free. We wanted to open up the opportunity for anyone and everyone to hear the band. We have heard so many times for whatever reason, oh yeah we have heard of you, but we never heard you. Well now there is no reason. There is no barrier to entry.'"
• Mixxx | Free Digital DJ Software: "Free, open source DJ software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux / MIDI controller support / Superior mixing engine with recording, vinyl control, and more / Written for DJs, by DJs" And, unfortunately, as many things are these days, Intel-only, so doesn't do me any good.