Interrobang‽

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If I ever decide to move away from ‘eclecticism’ as a site name (which I’m not likely to do anytime soon), I think ‘interrobang‽‘ would be a great replacement.

The English language is constantly evolving. During the twentieth century alone we observed this evolution in many ways: spelling changes, new words, technology terms, scientific terms, and colloquialisms. Punctuation is also evolving. In 1962, the interrobang (‽), was introduced by the New York publishing establishment as “a twentieth century punctuation mark”. The interrobang combined the functions of a question mark and an exclamation point. It received some attention at first, but never caught on, although for a brief period during the 1960s it was added to some typewriter keyboards.

(via Boing Boing)

Rules for the Kerry/Bush debates

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Courtesy of Bob Harris:

The candidates are forbidden from asking each other any direct questions of any kind, nor can they challenge each other with proposed pledges. Thus, much of the skill used in actual debating is explicitly forbidden. Point for Monkey.

No pre-written notes of any kind will be allowed, nor can candidates use any props or have anyone in the audience to point to (like, say, Allawi) to examplify their rhetoric. Point for Kerry.

In the “Town Hall” debate, audience members will ask their moderator-screened questions, but they won’t be allowed any follow-up, and if they deviate from approved levels of free speech, they will be silenced. Candidates will therefore be able to a) change the subject entirely, b) misleadingly paraphrase the question (one of Monkey’s best tactics), or c) stall by following-up an earlier point, especially since their opponent is forbidden from asking any direct questions in response. Huge point for Monkey.

Remaining-time lights will be mounted directly onto the cameras, so the candidates don’t have to break fake eye contact with TV viewers.

In the “Town Hall” debate, the candidates will have small, predesignated areas in which they can “move about” in their attempts to simulate the body language of actual human connection. The candidates’ “move about” areas will not overlap in any way.

The shaking of hands is contractually mandatory.

Not far removed from a total farce, unfortunately — still, I’d like to be able to see them. Unfortunately, as I don’t bother with television, I’m not sure what options I have. Does anyone happen to know if there are any plans to webcast any or all of the debates? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Zero!

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More than a week after returning from my vacation, I’ve finally reduced the number of unread items in NetNewsWire to zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I’m caught up!

Until the next refresh, of course.

Hey, I think these things are exciting.

iTunes “Prince Mega Medley (Hot Tracks)” by Prince from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 12:50).

Muldoon Road, Anchorage, Alaska

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Another 360° panoramic photograph from my recent vacation. This time, I’m standing on one end of a pedestrian overpass on Muldoon road, just beyond the curve where Muldoon becomes Tudor (the curve can be seen on the extreme left and right of the image).

Muldoon Road, Anchorage, Alaska

My parents’ house, where I lived from mid-3^rd^ grade until I moved out when I was 18, is hidden beyond the trees just to the left of the tree in the foreground towards the right side of the image. The Chugach mountains rise just beyond our housing area, giving it its name of Chugach Foothills. The houses in the mid-ground in front of the mountains went up during one of the housing development booms while I was in high school. Mostly obscured by the tree on the right of the image is a large park, often used for summertime soccer games.

Were you to follow Muldoon Road to the far northern end (a few miles beyond where it disappears in this photo), you’d end up at my alma matter, Bartlett High School. While I moved to Seattle just a few months before my 10-year reunion and didn’t go, my friend Royce was there (while he graduated in ’90, his girlfriend Stephanie was in my graduating class) and snagged me a Class of 1991 10-year reunion T-shirt which he gave me while I was visiting.

As with the Lake Spenard photo, there is a QTVR photo in the extended entry for this post (I do it this way so that modem users like my parents don’t have to download the 2 MB QTVR movie when they load the main page).

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

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In the midst of watching all of the recently-released Star Wars films (okay, sure, they’re not quite what they were when I first saw them, but they’re still a lot of fun), Prairie and I took a break on Saturday to wander down the hill to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

In short, it was exactly what I was hoping it would be: check your cynicism at the door and have fun.

Visually, it’s astounding — the stylized noir-ish world is beautiful to watch, and I had quite a few moments of simple geek glee at what I was seeing on screen. From the sepia tone of the entire film to the art-deco stylings of late 30’s New York to the giant marauding robots straight out of old pulp science fiction covers, I’m sure I had a goofy grin on my face from beginning to end.

It looks like Mike Whybark also enjoyed the film, and his comments are well worth reading — as he has a fascination with many of the elements that make up the film already (“…the thirties, aviation technology and pulp fiction, lighter-than-air aviation, the cinema of the thirties…”), he’s a bit more critical of some aspects of the film than I am. He does bring up one thing that I noticed right off, though: the similarity of Gwyneth Paltrow‘s Polly Perkins to Rosalind Russell‘s Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday, one of my favorite movies of all time — and the fact that Paltrow doesn’t hold a candle to Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s homage to Hildy Johnson in the Cohen Brothers’ Hudsucker Proxy as Amy Archer.

But Gwyneth Paltrow’s Polly Perkins, a reporter, is clearly an homage to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson from the 1940 His Girl Friday. That’s all to the good. Yet, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Amy Archer, another Russell homage (from The Hudsucker Proxy) captures the stacatto vocal rythms that are crucial to the thirties mise-en-scene. Alas, Paltrow’s dialog and interplay with Jude Law’s mercenary aviator, while lazily amusing, has nowhere near the verbal power of her character’s forebears.

Not that Paltrow does a bad job at all, I just kept thinking that it could be just that much better, if only…. Nice to know that I wasn’t alone in picking up on that.

Anyway, for me, a wonderful film. Definite keeper once it’s out on DVD, and I’m looking forward to getting to see it again.

iTunes “Happy Rave ’95 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Happy Rave ’95 (full mix) (1995, 1:10:03).

Spenard Lake, Anchorage, Alaska

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One of the panoramic shots I took while on vacation in Anchorage &dmash; Spenard Lake, which together with Lake Hood makes up the single busiest seaplane airport in the world (over 90,000 operations in 1994).

Spenard Lake, Anchorage, AK

Since this is a full 360° panorama, you can see the same seaplane at the far left and right of the image. The mountain range in the background is the Chugach Mountains, which had just been hit with termination dust earlier in the week (for you lower-48’ers, ‘termination dust’ is the snowfall on the peaks of the mountains — its appearance marks the end of summertime in Anchorage). Towards the right of the picture are three cars: my mom’s van, which I was driving that day; James’ Geo something-or-other (which will soon have the custom license plate “NUPRIN” — “Little, yellow, different”), and Mercedes’ car. Just behind the workshack is a yellow apartment building, you can just see the balcony of Marc and Laura’s apartment.

For a more “like you’re really there” experience, click on through to the extended entry, where I’ve posted a Quicktime VR version of this image (assuming this works, I’ve not yet tried uploading Quicktime files via ecto).

My parents were kiddos too!

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One of the PROJECTS I took care of when I was visiting home was installing a new scanner for dad that had a slide attachment on it. Apparently at some point in the past, someone decided that slides were “the thing”, so dad now has a huge number of slide carousels down in the garage.

Mom and dad at age 20

Now that he has a scanner that can see them, he’s been going through and adding a lot of old photos to the family photo album. I love seeing these — it’s so fun to go through shots of my folks when they were around my age (or younger — as in this photo, taken at age 20 at their wedding rehearsal dinner).

I’m sure there are more coming, but right now, dad’s added pictures of mom and dad in college, dad in R.O.T.C., their wedding rehearsal dinner, and their wedding.

iTunes “Sheep” by Pink Floyd from the album Animals Trance Remixes (1995, 16:03).

What if…?

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This is really worth reading and thinking about: What if America were like Iraq?

What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

It goes on from there, and it’s not a pretty picture. Might give some a better mental concept of just what the situation in Iraq is like right now.

(via Backup Brain)

iTunes “Thank You” by Duran Duran from the album Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin (1995, 4:33).

Politicizing Warfare

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The Washington Monthly is asking about the fantasyland that George Bush seems to be living in, when waging a war in which the strategy seems to be based not on any real situations, but on election-year political situations.

[Our upcoming] election, and the political considerations that go along with it, have been driving our military strategy for the past two years. Before the war, we passed up a chance to take out terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi — for political reasons. We invaded with too few troops — for political reasons. We lowballed the cost of the war — for political reasons. We ignored the UN and then turned around and pleaded for their help — for political reasons. Then we installed Iyad Allawi as president behind the UN’s back — for political reasons.

And just recently we’ve learned that the Marines were yo-yoed in and out of Fallujah — for political reasons. The president has bizarrely dismissed his own intelligence agencies’ analysis of Iraq as “guessing” — for political reasons. He’s ignored the advice of his own generals about troop requirements for the upcoming [Iraqi] elections — for political reasons. And assaults on Baathist enclaves have been postponed until December — for fairly obvious political reasons.

And things just keep going downhill.

(via Atrios)