Author: Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.

I have been flown…

Yeah, so I missed a day, but that’s because by the time I got home last night, after a day pretty full of AcroYoga, it was late and I was exhausted.

But I also got to fly, for real, yesterday and today. Video is forthcoming.

Mind you, I am now contractually unable to make fun of any of my flyers if, say, they can’t tell their right from their left when we’re working together–when you do some of this stuff, it is impossible to tell which way is up, down, sideways, whatever.
It was *amazing*.

Addressing the New York Times article about John Friend

The New York Times Magazine has a profile of John Friend “up on the web”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25Yoga-t.html (and presumably soon in print). As an Anusara-Inspired yoga teacher, who has met and studied with John many times, I was interested to read it.

Overall, I thought the piece was pretty good.

Most of the things that Ms. Swartz writes about John–and yes, everyone in the Anusara community calls him John; it seems like name-dropping until you meet him, and then it seems pretty natural–ring true to me. But not all.

I’ve attended 8 events with John, and while I certainly agree that he has his groupies, I’ve never seen anyone attempt to give him their hotel room key, which the article succeeds in making sound like a commonplace occurance.

I also diagree with the characterization of John as “an easygoing guy with an easygoing yoga — except when it comes to business.”

If you go to an Anusara Teacher Training with John, you will understand that he’s not really all that easygoing. His expectations of his teachers–especially of the Certified Teachers, but of anyone who is attending one of his teacher trainings–are very high.

He wants the people he trains to be teachers to be the best of the best.

I would be interested to have gotten more of the context surrounding Judith Lassater’s comments; they seem very negative, but I wonder if there was more to them that made a different point. I also wonder if they were specifically directed at John or were just about the commercialization of yoga in general.

Incidentally, that John draws a salary of $100K a year doesn’t bother me one bit. John’s been teaching professionally for a quarter of a century, and is internationally prominent. Prominent enough, in fact, to get profiled in the New York Times Magazine. I put to you the question: in what other profession in this culture would that salary be considered excessive for someone in his position?

More Beatles, I suppose

So, Jack White performed “Mother Nature’s Son” at the White House. Not my favorite rendition of it ever–Jack’s voice is great in other contexts, but doesn’t quite work here for me–but still a particularly gutsy move, when you consider who’s in the audience (look to the President’s right at about 1:45):

Why hasn’t anyone done the obvious?

So Kanye West samples King Crimson’s _21st Century Schizoid Man_ for his new single power. But while I was watching a documentary about The Beatles today, it occured to me that what someone really needs to sample or borrow is the drum track to “Tomorrow Never Knows.” That would beat the famous samples from “When the Levee Breaks” easy.

For when you need fun in your comic books.

I give you Atomic Robo’s “Free Comic Book Day 2009”:http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/04/27/fcbd-09-page-1/ comic.

Having read the three collections so far, I can say that it’s all great fun, though Dr. Dinosaur is definitely the villain that makes me laugh most.

“Shut up, I’m a Time Travelling Genius!”

90 to 40

I am now 90 days from being 40 years old.

I think these decade birthdays always loom especially large because I’m a decade baby.

Over the last week I’ve been considering what I’m going dedicate myself to for the next 90 days, so that perhaps by the time I actually hit 40, they will feel more like habits and rituals and be easy to maintain.

One that I’ve actually already started on is blogging every day. It doesn’t have to be significant or insightful or, I suppose, even coherent. Perhaps it will just be a picture of the latte I have in the afternoon, or whatever coding problem I solved (or didn’t 😉 that day.

It’s more about the consistency of writing every day, because I also want to start keeping a (private) journal. For the last 40 years, I’ve mostly been able to operate off memory alone. But I know that’s not going to last forever, and I’ve probably _already_ forgotten a lot of stuff I would like to have written down (though, of course, I can’t be sure). So writing daily, both for public and private edification.

A related desire is that I want to be more diligent in keeping track of what I get done. I have a lot of days where at the end, I feel like I haven’t gotten a lot done. Objectively, this isn’t true, but I don’t record it anywhere. In short, there’s no evidence, it’s totally ephemeral. So I want to be more diligent about knowing how I filled my days.

I need to reassert the habits of self-care. Eating well is an important part of that–I could stand to lose a little girth right at the moment–but even more importantly, I want to return to a daily meditation practice, a daily yoga practice, and other daily maintenance. I’ve gotten away from all of those in the last six months, and I’m very aware of it. 90 days is long enough to help me get over the hump in making these back into habits.

I want to get out of my music listening rut. It seems like I have a lot of music that has gotten short shrift–played a couple of times, and then dropped for more familiar things. Each day I want to find the time to listen to a whole album I don’t know well from beginning to end.

Perhaps other things will present themselves. Anyway, it’s going to be a fun time.

At the mercy of excessive choice

I want a new cell phone. In fact, my Treo 700p, at a solid 3 years old, may be old enough that I could say I *need* a new cell phone.

Apple isn’t even an option–with their hostile attitude toward non-Apple software interfacing with the iPhone, I will never be able to work with it effectively in Linux. So no go.

That leaves Android.

Normally I wouldn’t worry excessively about whether my phone was upgradeable, but the just-released Android 2.2 sees such a significant performance boost for so many applications, it becomes _even more_ important on an older, slower phone.

In order to be sure, I’m only considering phones of a very recent vintage, since those are the only ones that seem sure to get a FroYo upgrade–phones from some manufacturers that are a mere six months old aren’t getting updates, so I am wary. I want to hear a commitment from the manufacturer *first*.

I happen to have Sprint right now, but I’m not wedded to them. They do have the cheapest data plans around, and I live in one of the first WiMAX areas in the country, so their 4G phones are attractive.

I’ll have to see–so far every phone I’ve looked at has had *some* wart that has kept me from committing to anything yet–but right now it looks like the Samsung Epic 4G (complete with real keyboard!) might be the phone I’m looking for. Only time will tell.

What really matters on the Internet

I’ve actually thought it for a while, but it took “a post”:http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/07/17/kodi-1997-2010/ by “John Scalzi”:http://whatever.scalzi.com to get me to write.

What really matters on the Internet–blogs, twitter, Facebook, what-have-you–is that it acts as a place we can remember what really matters to us.

I’ve read memorials for people’s pets–dogs, cats, what-have-you–parents, grandparents, unborn babies, friends I’ve never met and will never have a chance to meet, and they’ve all been worth all the spam and blink tags and chain letters combined.

To have a place to share our memories of those who were important to us–share them far and wide, digging deep into what they really meant to us without having to be so concerned about what people are going to think when they hear it–is a great gift, even if we don’t always recognize it.

Reconsidering…

As so often happens, we resist things we don’t understand, in favor of those we do, but if we only take the time to learn…

Geek-dom ahead, you have been warned.

I do almost all of my programming in Perl these days–in fact, for the last decade and a half or so. I’m not interested in getting into a langage war here–I know Perl’s weaknesses as well as its strengths.

Anyway, for the last three years or so, we at “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/ have used a Perl script to manage refusing connections from malign hosts and rejecting requests to send mail to non-existent addresses–generally at a sustained rate of several per second, occasionally peaking into dozens per second or more, per server (we have 16 production servers).

Perl has no useful multi-threading, and if we tried to service these requests using one script per connection, we would be screwed–in fact, when we first tried to manage this stuff ourselves, three years ago, our first implementation did just that, and the servers melted; they couldn’t take the load of all of those memory-piggy scripts running at once.

Back in 2007, looking for a solution to this, I found “POE”:http://poe.perl.org/, a mature Perl framework that allows you to do event-driven cooperative-multitasking with asynchronous I/O and various other bells and whistles.

It is very good at what it does, and over the last few years I’ve become very conversant with it. We have several very important pieces of our infrastructure written with it, and they work very, very well.

Still, it has some issues, the biggest of which is that you have to write your code in a very particular style–short routines that queue events that are handled by other routines and things like that–things that mean that if you write code to integrate smoothly with POE, it’s going to look very weird if you try to use it outside the POE framework, and if you write your code outside the POE framework, it’s not going to play well with POE.

As a consequence, there are lots of libraries that don’t play well with POE–you can use them, but you loose the smooth cooperative-multitasking and asynchrony; basically, you lose the ability to handle many things at once, at least with low-latency. And people who aren’t used to POE end up looking at your code in bafflement.

Still, this has been a fine solution for us for years, and I’ve resisted changing it, because every time I’ve tried to work with something else–and here I’m thinking specifically of “AnyEvent”:http://search.cpan.org/dist/AnyEvent/, I just couldn’t see the big benefit. The one time I tried reimplementing something with it, the code got a few lines shorter, but otherwise, it was 6 of one, half-dozen of the other.

And then I had my epiphany.

What I realized is that I could rewrite some code that was duplicated between the “regular” programs, and the high-performance daemons to use AnyEvent in such a way that I could use
the same code for both–when I needed high-peformance cooperative multitasking, I would have it, and when I didn’t need it, the code would look exactly the same.

In effect, I was going to be able to get rid of a huge chunk of duplicative code and use the same code everywhere, transparently. And once I got the basic libraries re-done, there was even more code I was going to be able to merge.

In the space of 24 hours, I rebuilt our low-level LDAP and Memcache access layers to transparently use AnyEvent. I didn’t change any code outside of those libraries, and all tests passed once I was done. That performance-critical daemon I talked about at the beginning–I’ve almost finished rewriting it in the space of a couple of hours.

By making this change, everything is looking cleaner and more straightforward than ever before.

When you have that moment of realization, everything can change.

When everything you know is wrong…

Despite growing up in the ’70s, I had no clear memory of the 10cc song “I’m Not in Love”; my first encounter (as far as I knew) with the song was on Tori Amos’ _Strange Little Girls_ (and I’m going to try and ignore that this album is now 9 years old–where did the time go), where, frankly, it sounds like a musical rendition of a suicide note.

When “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/ linked to a documentary about the making of the song, I was intrigued enough to watch it.

Suddenly, I realized that, in fact, I did know the original version of the song, in all its treacly, soppy glory. I had just never connected *that* with Tori’s version.

What else have I missed?

Incidentally, there’s an interesting article at Sound On Sound “about the making of the track”:http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun05/articles/classictracks.htm.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

Yeah, I know I’m probably late to the party on this one. I haven’t finished the book yet, and if I knew just a little less, I might find it very convincing. As it is, I am left with significant doubts.

Simply put, there are basic factual errors and what I think are meant to be simplifications or glosses on complex topics that are so gross as to misrepresent things, in subjects about which I know a fair amount, which lead me to be suspicious of everything else in the book–because why would he just play fast-and-loose-and-ignorant with the stuff I happen to be familiar with.

In the realm of basic factual errors, when discussing Eric Schmidt (P. 67), he says, “He ran Novell, one of Silicon Valley’s most important software firms”.

That must come as a great surprise to Novell, that had its roots in Provo, Utah, and, looking on novell.com, appears to this day to not have offices in Silicon Valley (though, interestingly, corporate HQ is now in Waltham, MA).

This tells me that 1) he didn’t do basic fact checking himself, and 2) he never showed that piece of text to anyone who knew even the most basic things about Novell.

In the realm of simplifications or glosses that are so gross as to distort reality, well, let’s talk about Bill Joy.

First, I acknowledge that Bill Joy has huge expertise in software development, contributed many important things to UNIX, and was working deep in its internals during a time when it was rapidly gaining features.

But “by the time he happened to be presented with the opportunity to rewrite UNIX, he was up to the task” (P. 46)? I have to question this. Bill Joy was part of a group of grad students at Berkeley who modified and extended the base Unix distribution from AT&T. He was a DARPA employee tasked with running the group that added TCP/IP to the Berkeley kernel. He was a founder of Sun Microsystems. But he didn’t, as the text implies, single-handedly rewrite UNIX.

Or,

bq. It was so good, in fact, that it became–and remains–the operation system on which literally millions of computers around the world run. “If you put your Mac in that funny mode where you can see the code,” Joy says, “I see things that I remember typing in twenty-five years ago.” And do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the Internet? Bill Joy.

To quote from Wikipedia, on “Mac OS X”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X, “Mac OS X is based upon the Mach kernel. Certain parts from FreeBSD’s and NetBSD’s implementation of Unix were incorporated in Nextstep, the core of Mac OS X.”

Now it’s true that FreeBSD and NetBSD are both descendents of the BSD releases that Bill Joy helped create, package and distribute. But that path is tangled and tortured, and much of the original code has been rewritten over time by others, so, to imply that millions of computers around the world are running this operating system Bill Joy ostensibly wrote is ridiculous.

And the software that allows you to access the Internet being Bill Joy’s creation? Um, no. This is not to say that the implementation of TCP/IP in BSD UNIX was not important, or that the BSD Sockets interface is not worthy of mention. But the fact is, over time, all of that actual code has been replaced, just as Bill Joy scooped out chunks of what came before him and replaced them.

Again, none of these things are outright falsehoods, but they are such enormous missrepresentations of the true state of things, that I am left wondering how much stuff he distorted in his discussions of hockey, about which I know nothing.

Obama may be better than Bush or McCain, but that ain’t much of a bar, and he’s doing the absolute minimum to clear it

What better evidence than “[“Patriot Act renewed”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmao3Tg9nvBQeAOMAVzmeZkrmAoAD9E4QD501]”.

Parenthetically, you want to know what’s destroying our way of life? It’s not Healthcare Reform, (which would save lives and money and infringe your freedoms not at all), and it’s not the fiscal stimulus (which even Republican economists agree helped keep unemployment from growing and the economy from slowing even more than it has), it’s the continuous encroachment of the “law-enforcement elements of our government on our civil liberties under the guise of making us safer”:http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html. It is the “intelligence agencies conspiring with communication companies to relieve us of our right to privacy using warrantless surveillance”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR2007082302056.html who are “then let off the hook for breaking the law”:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9872969-38.html. It is our “willingness to approve of immoral acts done in our name”:http://www.gallup.com/poll/118006/Slim-Majority-Wants-Bush-Era-Interrogations-Investigated.aspx.

Unfortunately, we haven’t left most of those things behind by electing Obama, and we’re not even getting appropriate levels of bread and circuses in compensation.

I’ve been on the internet an awfully long time…

More than two decades, in fact, though most of the earliest stuff was on borrowed accounts–I don’t think I had my own email address until twenty years ago _next_ year.

The funny thing is that there are people I know from my very earliest ventures on the ‘net with whom I still cross paths.

In no particular order:

“Steven Grimm”:http://www.facebook.com/sgrimm, who is now a member of Facebook’s infrastructure team working on memcached (which we use very extensively at Ironic Design) was “very active in the Atari ST community”:http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=UASgvBQAAACx55dwHhwEwRiGqT1dtGCz6ByVaTvQhk5i4n6ZEwWJug back when I was first getting on the net.

“Howard Chu”:http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ was, if I remember correctly, responsible for both the largest FTP repository of Atari ST freeware up at terminator.cc.umich.edu (for which I used to know the IP address, because DNS was not reliable in those days), as well as handling the porting of the Gnu C compiler to STOS. This is what I learned to write C in. These days, he is the primary coder on the OpenLDAP server (which we use very extensively at Ironic Design).

“David Parsons (orc)”:http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/ was part of the community when I started reading newsgroups, and worked on the STadel port of the Citadel BBS software to the Atari ST. I ran across a reference to his C reimplementation of the Markdown text-processing language.

Now my current connection to orc is more tenuous than the others, but the idea that these people I have known of for twenty years are still involved in software that I used and depend on on a daily basis…it’s kinda weird.

Why many anti-flu vaccine people annoy me

So, a friend on facebook posted this, and it pisses me off enough that I really need to vent:

I’ve held my tongue about a lot of the anti-flu-vaccine talk that’s been flying around because while I think it is pretty baseless, ehh, it’s the flu, who cares–as long as you’re pretty healthy going into it, you’re going to endure a week of feeling like crap, and maybe if you’re unlucky, a nice bout of pneumonia.

(Hopefully not a multi-drug resistant strain, in which case you might be screwed, since it’s always been true that it’s usually follow-on infections that kill you, rather than the flu itself)

Anyway, I, myself, am very inconsistent about getting vaccinated–sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t–so I’m not going to whine at people to go do it.

However, I draw the line at anyone who believes all vaccinations are bad–as the person who captioned this video does, and as many, many people going on about not getting the H1N1 vaccination give the impression of believing–is at best, spectacularly ignorant.

At worst, they’re a *Dangerous Fucking Idiot*.

Don’t believe me? Two words: “smallpox”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox, “polio”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio.

Go research *those*, and understand that vaccines are too important a tool for their application to be governed by knee-jerk reactions either for or against, and if you’re helping to create an environment where people are fearful of vaccines, one day it is going to backfire when something much worse than mere flu comes along.

I feel like I am living in the 18th century when it comes to this shit. I have no love of Big Pharma, but fucking-A, people, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt like this is neither helpful nor productive.

Of course they knew each other

I think it’s clear that their work is of a piece–wildly innovative, to the point of being totally incomprehensible–so it should come as no surprise that “Frank Zappa and Jack Kirby not only knew each other, but apparently hung out a bit”:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/10/jack-kirby-and-frank-zappa-a-cosmic-friendship-.html

“Via”:http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2009_10_14.html#017871

Why Health Insurance is simply different

“Jim Henley”:http://highclearing.com/ has “a post”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2009/09/07/9869 that points to and condenses a couple of other posts that I think do a great job articulating the fundamental difference between health insurance and other types of insurance.

I think that understanding that health insurance is a fundamentally different beast from, say, your car insurance is an important part of being able to have a rational conversation about what an appropriate place for the government might (or might not) be.

I *also* think he makes a clear statement of why the individual insurance model doesn’t seem to work; while you may not agree with his conclusion as to the appropriate response, I think he lays out the choices one has clearly and pretty inarguably.

Today’s bizarre youtube path

I was listening to Jeff Buckley’s _Grace_, and was looking for lyrics to “Mojo Pin”, and my quick google search included a link to a youtube video of a live performance video:

From there, I followed a link to footage from the same performance of “Last Goodbye” because, you know, it’s a lovely song:

And then things started to get weird.

See, that had a link to a video of Scarlett Johanssen doing a cover of Tom Waits’ “Yesterday is Here”:

There was no way I couldn’t check that out. Somewhat to my surprise, I was not repulsed.

From there, I follwed a link to a cover of the same song by Cat Power:

Didn’t care for that one as much, but oh what it led me to: The Flaming Lips & Cat Power performing a pretty good cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”:

Which in turn led to video of TFL doing it with Peaches:

Which was interesting mostly for its oddity (the audio quality bites, too).

But the TFL & Cat Power video *also* had a link to Sabbath performing it in Paris in 1970:

That’s pretty powerful.

It is also amusing to know that Ozzy’s stage act hasn’t changed a bit in 40 years.

Our new coffee grinder

An Ascaso i-1 in the cow print paint job.

The old grinder broke. It probably wasn’t more than a year old, but what do you expect when the most abused part of the machine (the doser lever) is plastic? Just another reason I will never buy anything with the name Gaggia on it again (the espresso machine being the other).

I did a quick check on the web, and no one would admit to having the parts I’d need to repair it, so I did a little modification with a Dremel to make it usable for a while, until I could figure out what to replace it with. Of course, a friend who has the same model and had the same breakage later told me that he was able to get replacement parts. Oh, well.

I spent several hours researching on home-barista.com. I can no longer find the gigantic head-to-head comparison series one of the founders of the site did from a couple of years ago, but I read it last Friday, and was all set to buy a $900 Macap grinder…when I stumbled across a message from the same guy suggesting that if you were doing low-volume work but wanted a good grinder–noisy, messy and slow, but with very consistent, very good results–you should consider one of a trio of low-cost grinders all using the same conical burr system.

Not many places seem to carry them, but I found a place that had the Ascaso/Innova I-2 grinder. When I showed Anne the one with the cow pattern paint job, well, we figured that if it was only _decent_, for $255, we had done OK.

I am pleased to say it is far more than decent. It is certainly better than the Gaggia MDF it is replacing. It took a while to dial in the grind, and the burrs will certainly become more seasoned over time, but even so, it is already pulling better shots, and the doserless form factor makes for less waste and less mess for a household that has *maybe* five shots pulled in a day.

I don’t pretend to be a super-taster or even particularly sophisticated about my espresso making, but even if this is only taking us to an “above-average” place, well, it’s definitely taken us up the scale. I now do believe it when the serious espresso guys talk about the grinder being the single biggest variable you can control in the quality of the coffee that you get from a particular bean.

100 Bullets

Last week the last collected edition (#13) of _100 Bullets_ arrived. So I started back at the beginning and read all the way through.

This is not a shiny, happy story. To give you an idea, if you look at the Wikipedia page “listing the main characters”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_in_100_Bullets, there are only three who are not at least presumed deceased, and of the ones who are marked indeterminate, I, personally, would only consider one of those to be truly likely.

Even though stories like that usually aren’t to my taste, I found it a compulsive page-turner. It starts off as if it’s going to be a too-clever sort of a morality play repeated ad-infinitum, and just when you think it’s not worth proceeding, you’re shown that there’s a lot more going on than you realize.

Azarello’s scripting is tight–nothing is wasted, with what seems to be throwaway background action in one arc becoming part of the foreground in another–and his feel for how real people speak never rang false for me. The characters are posessed of their own idiosyncracies, feeling true and in some cases worthy of compassion. And Azarello’s not afraid to surprise you–something that I’m sure was made easier by having a well-defined end-point in mind when he started.

Risso’s art is the bomb. Having the same artist for the entire run is helpful because it gives the characters a sense of more concrete identity–even during flashbacks or after dramatic personal changes, they remain easily recognized. And his economy of line is brilliant–it is as if Frank Miller had taken his best approach to fine line-art (from _Elektra Lives Again_ or thereabouts) and then continued down that path, creating a vocabulary that is expressive, compelling, and versatile.

Definitely worth a read.

Highlights of Free Software Documentation #1

When someone undertakes something for fun, or out of passion or deep commitment, the end result is often, I think, more reflective of them personally.

This is generally true of Free Software, and in the Free Software universe, I think this is sometimes even more true of documentation–you’re not obligated to write it, no one’s paying you, few people enjoy writing docs, so if you’re doing it at all, it’s because you _believe_.

So the writers’ personalities and convictions show through just a little bit more, Like this bit from “Dave Rolsky”:http://autarch.org/ with whom I am slightly acquainted. Contained within “Moose::Cookbook::Basics::Recipe10”:http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/Moose/lib/Moose/Cookbook/Basics/Recipe9.pod I ran across this gem:

bq. Our Human class uses operator overloading to allow us to “add” two humans together and produce a child. Our implementation does require that the two objects be of opposite genders. Remember, we’re talking about biological reproduction, not marriage.

Brilliant.

It’s hardly coincidence…

that as my grandfather was dying, I was probably talking about him–my dad had mentioned that he stopped eating at the beginning of the week, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know it would be soon.

Still, for class yesterday, I had had a notion to talk about something else, and gotten it all planned out in my head, and when I sat down that all pretty much went out the window, and I really ended up talking about my relationship with my grandfather.

Well, not directly, because that would have been boring as shit for everyone in the room–but as I talked about the way that we each have the opportunity to form the narrative of our own lives, I was thinking about all the choices I’ve made, and I’ve seen how a lot of the ones I’ve made recently–the more conscious, considered ones–have been made out of a desire to be warmer and more open and more fluid, none of which are what are attributes immediately called to mind when I think of my grandfather.

Which is not to suggest that I don’t love him, but I was always intimidated by his presence when I was younger, and by the time I was old enough that I could have gotten past that, well, it was too late.

I do envy my sister’s kids a little, though–they are all having a great opportunity to have close, long-standing relationships with their grandparents, and I think they will value that immensely as they grow older.

Upon re-reading “Fables”

So, over Memorial Day Weekend, instead of getting together with people (well, there was some of that) or cooking a bunch of food (though there was some of that, too), I organized my comics.

I am embarassed how many I have–I have, somewhat unfortunately, gotten back into the habit of reading them, and damn if they don’t pile up. But for the last couple of years, I have not been in the habit of keeping them organized. Things got shoved in boxes or stacked up on boxes or generally just hidden and neglected. Finding things was a non-starter unless I was feeling absurdly energetic.

So I got them all organized this weekend (which is *also* the first step in trying to divest myself of a lot of them).

Having, for the first time in a long time, the ability to go back and re-read things in a continuous stream that I had previously only read in short temporally discontinuous bursts, I’ve been re-reading some stuff. Since I go to the trouble to pay $20/month for the virtual server to host this blog, it seems like I should use it, so I may review some things here.

_Fables_, by Bill Willingham[1], was the first thing I read through. It’s taken me a couple of days to get through the 80+ issues.

The good news is that I liked it–sometimes it’s easy to lose that basic perspective when you’re taking something in a couple dozen pages at a time separated by weeks.

In terms of storytelling, it doesn’t really hit its stride until the second story arc, where it becomes obvious that it’s not going to just be a lighthearted romp. And it doesn’t find its emotional core until __Storybook Love__. But Willingham, with consistent artist Mark Buckingham, have come to work as a great team.

And I have to give props to Willingham–there are elements that he planted within the first dozen issues that are just now coming to fruition; characters I was utterly unaware of have suddenly become monumentally important–though, I have to admit, I feel like the current storyline (“The Great Fables Crossover”–and yes I think they are being ironic with that title) is a bit of a diversion from what seemed to be developing. I’m confident that in the end, it will all at least *appear* intentional.

Anyway, I would recommend this to pretty much anyone. There are people in tights, but they’re medieval, not superhero, tights.

fn1. I should mention that I remember Bill Willingham from back when he used to do illustrations for TSR–in fact, I think I have a couple of comics from the early 80s that have ads he illustrated on the back covers.

Someone should start the First Church of Fabulousness

The only tenet of which should be, “Two people who love each other should be allowed to marry.” Maybe two tenets, the other being, “Be excellent to one another,” which has its plusses, too.

At which point, the opportunity to have same-sex marriages becomes one of religious freedom. To restrict such marriages becomes a first-amendment issue, which carries more weight than equal protection, apparently.

Of course, I would hope that many heterosexual couples would also want to get married in the First Church of Fabulousness–it being fabulous, see–but, you know, they, too, could exercise their right to choice.

Kindle 2, redux

“Just a little shy of two months ago”:http://tendentious.org/2009/02/if-it-werent-for-the-drm.html, I noted that I really, really liked the looks of the Kindle 2, etc., but that I simply could not in good faith allow someone else to hold my content hostage via DRM.

No doubt people scoffed at the possibility. Two months later, “it happened to someone”:http://consumerist.com/5213774/amazon-can-ban-you-from-your-kindle-account-whenever-it-likes.

And I’m sure as hell never buying one.

“Via”:http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/PAx7DLPBeGA/ive_been_saying_on_the.php

I might have read a copy of Starlog a quarter of a century ago…

but certainly not in recent memory.

The news that it’s ceasing print publication and trying to make it as a web-only publication really doesn’t impact me at all. But “Mark Evanier”:http://newsfromme.com/ linked to “a post from Lee Goldberg”:http://leegoldberg.typepad.com/a_writers_life/2009/04/starlog-goes-under.html about the magazine that includes an amusing anecdote about covering the premeire of “The Living Daylights” while writing for the magazine:

bq.. All the journalists were invited by the studio to the premiere, which Prince Charles and Lady Diana were attending as well. We had to wear tuxedos and were driven to the event in limos. There were huge crowds being held back behind barracades in front of the Odeon Theatre as we pulled up. I got out of the limo just as a short young lady was emerging from the limo in front of me, so we walked in together. People were going nuts, taking pictures of us and waving. I leaned over and whispered to her: “Makes you wish you were famous, doesn’t it?”

She laughed, patted my arm, and we parted in the lobby. Almost immediately I was swarmed by my fellow reporters. One of them asked “Do you know who you were walking with?”

I had no idea. I figured she was another reporter. He told me it was Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. I still had no idea who she was. So either she thought my remark was clever or that I was a complete dolt for not knowing who she was. But I like to think that somewhere out there is a photo from that event with a caption like “Chrissie Hynde with unidentified lover.”

p. Can’t beat that.

Cocktailians

“Something new for the feed reader”:http://www.cocktailians.com/.

Complete with video of Rachel Maddow (yes, that one) “making a cocktail”:http://www.cocktailians.com/2008/12/jack-rose.html.

I think I just had a moment of personal revelation

Listening to [_Blue Oyster Cult_]’s “Cities on Flame”, I realized that the reason all of these older albums I love have comparatively wimpy-sounding drum tracks is because the drummers are too good–to make a big goddamned noise, you have to hit so hard that you lose any notion of subtlety.

John Bonham is arguably the prominent exception. Even when he’s beating the crap out of his kit–on “We’re Gonna Groove”, for instance (though listening back to it, its drum track is less in-your-face than I imagine it to be)–he’s still got a very subtle way with timing.