Great minds think alike (and so do ours)

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If you ever want to know a bit more about me, talk to my dad for a while. Not necessarily about me — just talk to him. He’s a cool guy.

Dad and I are a lot alike, and I realize that more all the time. That certainly had its fair share of disadvantages growing up (saying that we butted heads on a regular basis might be something of an understatement), but once I got old enough that we could handle approaching things as two adults rather than as a father and son perpetually at loggerheads, things evened out. I’m glad they did, too. Dad is, quite honestly, one of the most intelligent and well-rounded people I’ve met. You should see the library at my folks’ house — heavy on philosophy, psychology, religion, and penguins (all good subjects to be heavy in, I’d say), but by no means limited to those subjects. Dad and I both have a tendency to investigate any little thing that peaks our interest, and it shows.

In the midst of all our various conversations (well, okay, arguments when I was younger, discussions as I matured), I picked up two very important lessons. Firstly, that having been gifted with a working intellect, it’d be a shame to let it go to waste. Secondly, that a good sense of humor is a priceless treasure (though, admittedly, whether or not dad and I share a “good” sense of humor may be a matter of opinion, given as we are to absurdities, wordplay, and bad puns).

Given the political slant many of my posts here and at The Long Letter, it would be understandable (though somewhat regrettable) if I gave the impression that I was uniformly anti-military. However, nothing could be further from the truth. While I never decided that the military was a direction I wanted to take my life in, I am a “military brat”. Dad served in the United States Air Force for ten years, and spent another eleven and a half years in the Air National Guard. Something I’ll be eternally grateful for, though, is that even growing up in a military family, I was never force-fed the steady diet of über-patriotism and “my country, right or wrong” (which many people, unfortunately, do not realize is only half of the full quote) attitude that so many other military children are.

Rather, I grew up realizing that the military, and our country, like any other large organization (all the way from corporate entities to religious movements) does some things that are very good — and some things that are very bad. The good things should be recognized and celebrated, but the bad things should also be recognized; not to be celebrated, but to be studied, learned from, and prevented in the future. Dad was very instrumental in keeping me grounded in my political views — grounded in a very liberal/democratic mindset, but grounded none the less — neither falling into an ultra-right wing “the military is always right” stance, nor an ultra-left wing “the military is always wrong” stance.

Which brings me around to what prompted this (hopefully not over-saccharine) missive. Dad just posted a wonderfully written post in response to someone being so uncouth as to drag out the old “baby killer” epithet when they found out about his military service on a mailing list he participates in. Rather than rising to the bait and indulging in a flame war, his response is beautifully stated, and well worth reading.

It does matter, Dad. I’m glad it matters to you; I’m glad that, thanks to you, it matters to me — and I’m glad that, even with all our disagreements, you’re my dad.

Homework

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Bring Marilyn Monroe’s “I Belong to Daddy” in to work tomorrow so I can let Bethany hear it and compare with some of Björk’s work (there’s a specific Björk song I’m thinking of, but for the life of me, I can’t remember which one off the top of my head).

What's going on?

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All of a sudden, the right-hand sidebar, rather than displaying on the right side of the page, is being shoved underneath the left-hand sidebar, after all the main content — at least, that’s what’s going on in IE6 on the PC.

Grrrr.

I have no idea why.

Found the offending post, and removed it for the time being. Haven’t figured out what the issue was, though. Hrm.

Greek Mythological family tree

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Wow. Just wow. A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology, by Harold Newman, looks to be fascinating.

It was about 20 years ago when Jon O. Newman, a federal appeals court judge in Manhattan, walked up to a staff member in the New York Public Library and asked, “Do you have a book anywhere in this library that has a complete genealogical chart of Greek mythology?” They didn’t.

“O.K., second question,” Judge Newman said. “If there were such a book, would you buy it?”

“We’d have to,” the librarian replied.

It was what the judge had wanted to hear. For years, his father, Harold Newman, had pursued a hobby — an elaborate genealogy project — trying to link all characters from Greek mythology in a single family tree. Judge Newman wanted to finish it.

Now, the Newmans’ work has been published by the University of North Carolina Press as “A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology: Comprising 3,673 Named Figures of Greek Mythology, All Related to Each Other Within a Single Family of 20 Generations.”

More details can be found at the New York Times. It’s a bit on the pricey side at \$75, but man would that be a fascinating book to spend time browsing through.

Stubble fun

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Silly advantage to having a shaved head: after going clubbing on a weekend night and getting the stamp on your hand or wrist, next time you’re in the shower, get a good headfull of shampoo lather, then, before rinsing off, rapidly scrub your hand or wrist across your head. That sixteenth of an inch stubble makes a great impromptu scrub brush! Viola — no more stamp!

Yes, I know that a washcloth, or loofah, or bath poof, or any number of other things work just as well. But they’re infinitely less entertaining to blog about.

Batteries

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Note to myself: Pick up a 9-volt battery for the smoke alarm on the way home tonight. That painfully loud chirp every five minutes or so is getting really annoying.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

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Wandered up to one of the downtown theaters today to catch the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Enjoyable, and worthwhile as either a matinee or a rent, but enough problems that it’s not a definite must-see.

Plotwise — well it was basically a Bond film (perhaps that was why they got Connery’s involvement?). Insane mastermind criminal bent on conquering the world, and our intrepid heroes have to stop him at all costs. The true draw was the heroes themselves, all of whom were drawn from literary works: Alan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll (and, of course, Mr. Hyde), Tom Sawyer, and the sole female member of the group, Mina Harker (wife of John [?] Harker, assistant to Professor Van Helsing during that nasty incident with Count Dracula — yes, she’s a vampire). That alone made some of the scenes quite entertaining to watch, as various references would occasionally be dropped in (though not as many as I felt could have been).

Unfortunately, the plot has holes — well, holes big enough to sail the Nautilus through, some of the most astounding of which involve Venice, which is apparently some alternate-reality Venice. I’m still trying to decide which surprised me more: sailing the Nautilus (roughly the size of an aircraft carrier) through the canals of Venice, or driving a car pell-mell through the streets of Venice. Streets? Yeah, streets. And there’s more to come….

Sean Connery was, well, Sean Connery. As enjoyable as he is to watch, I can’t say that I’ve seen him in a role that really required much of him in a good long time. It’s unfortunate, too, but lately he seems to be just riding on the “Sean Connery is a crowdpleaser no matter what” wave, instead of getting anything actually challenging.

The rest of the cast — adequate, and they all filled their parts well, but none of them particularly stood out, for good or for ill.

Effect wise, it was a mixed bag. Some of the shots I liked a lot — the Nautilus, for example, I thought was gorgeous (if a little ridiculously large). Gleaming alabaster, with silver filigree and decorations, even to statues on the fore and aft of the submarine. Impractical, but gorgeous to look at. The shots of the Invisible Man were also quite impressive, especially when he had facepaint on (to make himself visible) and you’d get a shot of him from behind. Hard to describe, but fun to see. Other shots were less impressive, including an exploding building towards the beginning of the film, which was something of a surprise. I know there’s a push to do as much as possible with CGI, but would it have been so difficult to actually create a practical explosion effect? Oh, and Mr. Hyde just didn’t impress me in the least. Ah, well.

End result: not great, but not horrible, as long as you don’t think too much. Worth matinee prices or a rental, but not anything to stand in line for an evening show over.

Oh, two last things. First — I want fight scenes that can be watched, not fight scenes that have so many half-second cuts that it’s impossible to follow any of the action. Second — can we please have a movie that doesn’t have the obligatory five-minute “Look! If you give us enough money, we’re gauranteeing yet another vapid sequel!” sequence before the end credits?

Roger Ebert’s review is priceless, by the way.

Tweaking TypePad Templates

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Up until now, all the various design tweaks I’ve made on this site have been conducted from within the TypePad interface, without my mucking about with any of the code. That’s starting to change, however, as I start to incorporate some of the conventions I’ve gotten used to with my templates at The Long Letter into the site here. I’m taking things a little slowly to make sure I don’t break anything (permanently), but work has begun.

Some details and thoughts on my changes follow.

(The following notes will be updated as I work my way through the various templates and make my changes.)

All templates

Two minor changes have been made to all the templates.

The first is purely cosmetic, in that I’ve adjusted the indenting of all the HTML code so that it’s easier for me to track through. As a side benefit, it should be a bit easier for other people if they go poking around in my source code.

Secondly, and important for usability, I’ve noticed that in the default templates, none of the hyperlinks have the title attribute set (the text that shows as a tooltip in most browsers, or before the URL in the status bar in Safari). I was somewhat surprised by that, but it’s a fairly simple fix for most of the tags.

Archive Templates (category and monthly)

The default templates for archives display every post in its entirety in reverse chronological order (exactly which posts are displayed depends on the archive type — all posts in a single category for category archives, all posts in a month for monthly archives, etc.). That may work well if you create short posts, or don’t post terribly often, but for me, it’s a nightmare. I tend to babble and create (ridiculously) long posts, and while this site is new, if I do end up adopting TypePad for my permanent home once it’s open for business, then I’m going to want to import all two years plus of my archives. Obviously, with the default templates, this could make for extremely long archive pages.

So, to combat that, I set up my archive templates to create essentially a ‘table of contents’ for each archive page. Each archive page now displays the title of each individual post, linked to the post’s individual entry page. After that comes the post excerpt, then a brief listing of the post’s metadata (post time and whether any comments have been added — were I creating a multi-author weblog, post author would be included also).

With this setup, while each archive page will still grow over time, it will be substantially smaller than it would be if it were displaying the entirety of each post. By including the post’s excerpt, it allows for a little more contextual indication of what each post is about, so it should still be relatively easy to find individual posts.

Currently (as of 8:20pm, July 13th) I’ve only altered the category templates to reflect this scheme, but monthly archives should be updated shortly.

7/13 8:54pm: Monthly archive pages have also been updated.

Archive templates (individual)

Not too terribly many changes here, aside from the aforementioned HTML re-formatting and adding title attributes to the hyperlinks. I did tweak the post metadata line so that the permalink is attached to the timestamp on the post rather than a single word that just says ‘Permalink’, and then added permalinks to individual comments with the same style. Other than that, it’s primarily the same.

I would eventually like to see if the live comment preview I have working on my individual pages on The Long Letter will work in this layout, but I’ll probably save that for another night, just in case it turns into more of a battle than I think it will.

Main index template

Again, like the individual archives, not too many changes — primarily just the formatting of the metadata line, with permalinks moved to the post time. Not that exciting, overall.

Main archives template

The default main archive template is functional, but nothing more than that. A simple list of links to the monthly archives, with links to category archives (if you’re using categories) below that. Not bad, of course, but I wanted to do better.

The monthly archive links I’ve kept more or less the same, with the exception that rather than listing out one on top of the other (and using up a large amount of vertical space for very little information), they list out horizontally. Of course, you can’t really tell that now, but when we roll around to August it’ll be more obvious.

For the category archives, I’ve included the post titles to the last ten posts in each category beneath the category title. The title itself links to the full category archive page, while the post titles link to their respective individual pages. It’s not much more information that what was available before, but it does give a little bit more, and can make searching for a recent post a little quicker than digging through each archive page if you don’t quite remember what category it got tossed into.