This has not been the best day I’ve ever had.
No heat in the church. I spent the morning an part of the afternoon dealing with that.
Now my laptop is making icky grinding noises, and I think it’s about to die.
Maybe tomorrow will be better….
Category Archives: Pop culture
Talk like a pirate
Fortunately, Ms. M sent email reminding me that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
In our church office, Linda, our secretary, and I are both big fans of talking like pirates, and we have been taking full advantage of this annual celebration. Claudette, our administrator, just looks at us and shakes her head.
A couple of minutes ago, Claudette said, without turning around from her computer, “OK, it’s time for me to go. Anything else you want before I take off?”
Linda said no, but I said, “Just one thing. We want to hear you talk like a pirate just once today….”
This strange, gruff voice came from Claudette’s desk. “Arrr, why would I want to do that foolishness?”
After a moment of shocked silence, Linda and I laughed. “Hey,” I said, “You’ve got the best pirate voice of any of us!”
“Of course I do,” said Claudette, grinning. “I’m older and wiser than both of you.”
“‘Pegleg Claudette,’ that’s what we’re going to call you,” said Linda.
Email [curse | blessing], part four
The fourth installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively. First installment.
Anarticle in today’s New York Times unequivocally answers the question that is the title of this post:– email is a curse. A front-page article by Brad Stone titled “Tell-All PCs and Phones Transforming Divorce: In the Digital Age, It’s Growing Hard to Hide Dirty Secrets” tells all about how email is changing divorce proceedings.
One man, suspecting his wife of cheating, installed a piece of software on her computer that took a screenshot of whatever was on her monitor every 15 seconds, and sent it back to him via email. She thought no one was watching; he discovered that she was having an affair, and that she and her lover were seeking sex from strangers via the Internet. Another woman checked her doctor husband’s email account — he had shared his password with her — and discovered that he was having an affair with a much younger medical resident, and that he bought a three million dollar condo so he could tryst in style. By the way, it turns out both these strategies for gaining access to email are perfectly legal.
The Times reporter quotes divorce lawyer David Levy as saying, “I do not like to put things on e-mail…. There’s no way it’s private. Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send button.” Actually, nothing is private once you type it into your computer. The Times reporter also quotes a private investigator, James Mulvaney, as saying, “Every keystroke on your computer is there, forever and ever.” Mulvaney claims that the only way you can erase data from your hard drive is to “throw your computer into the air and play skeet with it.” [Commercially available neodymium-boron-iron magnet can erase floppy disks and the magnetic stripes from credit cards; one would imagine that a strong neodymium magnet could erase the contents of a hard drive if placed directly against the disk; but I digress.]
This brings us back to the single most important rule for email: Do not write anything in an email message unless you would feel comfortable seeing it on the front page of the local newspaper. Or in court, for that matter.
PodCamp Boston 2
Coming up soon: PodCamp Boston 2, from 7 p.m. on Friday, October 28, through 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 28. According to their Web site, “PodCamp Boston 2 is the new media community UnConference that helps connect people interested in blogging, podcasting, social networks, video on the net, and new media together for three days to learn, share, and grow their new media skills.” Link to PodCamp Boston 2.
Although I’ll be tied up Saturday during the day, looks like I’ll be able to attend the rest of PodCamp. I’m going for three reasons:– (1) I love new media; (2) I’m fascinated by the UnConference phenomenon; and (3) I’m still trying to get organized to do a weekly video on this blog and maybe PodCamp will provide enough info and inspiration for me to make it happen.
If you’re planning on going, post something in the comments to this post, and maybe we can get together.
The mastiff and the curs
Guest blogger: Isaac Bickerstaff
According to family tradition, my great-great-grandfather told a story that went something like this:
A huge mastiff, a most magnificent dog, took one of his puppies with him one day on his daily walk. As they walked along Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol building, smaller dogs, curs and mangy mutts, dashed towards the mastiff, baring their teeth and barking furiously. But the mastiff paid no attention to them, and just walked on.
At last the puppy couldn’t stand it any longer, and said, “Father, why do you tolerate the yapping and the impertinences of those curs? Why don’t you bark at them, and silence them?”
“Ignore them, my child,” said the great mastiff, “without the curs, there could be no mastiff.”
Now, in 2007, my correspondent in Washington informs me that there are no longer any mastiffs living openly within the District of Columbia. The last of the great mastiffs was pulled down by a pack of flea-bitten curs more than a quarter of a century ago, his throat bitten in two, and his large heart eaten by the curs.
“There are still a few lesser mastiffs left in the District,” writes my correspondent, “but they dare not walk about openly. They disguise themselves as curs, engaging in all the petty and low behavior that curs engage in — yapping at nothing, eating disgusting bits of unrecognizable food dropped on the sidewalk, mindlessly chasing squirrels, and sticking their noses in each other’s rear ends. Yet those who are in the know say they have a sure-fire way of determining which dog is truly a mastiff, and which is a cur disguised as a mastiff. The curs disguised as mastiffs loudly proclaim that they are misunderstood today, but that future historians will judge them to be mastiffs. The mastiffs disguised as curs snivel and deny that they have great hearts.”
Food fight (literally)
Wanna see a video of a chase scene, where a giant apple chases after a huge snack cake? C’mon, you know you do! OK, the video is pretty goofy, the chase climaxes in a fight scene with a few disgusting moments, and of course it’s for a good political cause. In spite of all that, it’s worth it just to see the apple roll over the hood of a car, and to see the snack cake blind the apple with a UPC scanner.
The “Farm Bill Food Battle” video.
Thanks to Carol.
The Case of the Pointless Paperwork
This afternoon, I worked on organizing my office. I hate organizing my office. It’s boring. I want to be making something happen, not straightening up my desk and filing paperwork. Of course, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do those mundane office chores. Somewhere, the poet Gary Snyder talks about how important maintenance is — you can’t always be creating things, he says, you also have to maintain what you’ve got. So I tried to tell myself that I was doing Snyderian maintenance this afternoon, even though I think what Gary Snyder had in mind when he was talking about maintenance was more along the lines of sharpening his axe or cleaning out the barn, chores which would have been much more attractive than dealing with paperwork.
In my opinion, the greatest theorist on the subject of paperwork was the great philosopher, Perry Mason….
….Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.
Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”
“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”
“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”
Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”
“Yes.”
“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”
“Yes.”
“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”
“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.
“And did you answer those yourself?”
She shook her head, smiling.
“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.
“Transferred them to another file.”
“What file?”
“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”
Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….
[from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1939.]
In the book, Mason works on paperwork for about ten minutes before a new client walks into the office with another high-speed murder case. I should be so lucky. In my office, I plugged away all afternoon. I kept hoping that a client would walk in the door and want me to investigate a murder case. That didn’t happen, although the chair of the House and Grounds Committee did stop in for ten minutes to let me know how the various building maintenance projects were coming along.
By the end of the day, I had found lots of paperwork that had once been relevant, but was now so irrelevant that I skipped the “LAPSED” file and threw it right into the recycling bin. Such was the sad end of the case of the pointless paperwork.
Sweatshop-free dress shirts
All of a sudden, my dress shirts are wearing out. I bought these shirts six or seven years ago from Land’s End, so I automatically went back to Land’s End and looked at their Web site. The same shirt costs the same as it did six or seven eyars ago, about US$25. In fact, I remember that same shirt costing about $25 twenty years ago. According to The Inflation Calculator, “What cost $25 in 1987 would cost $44.31 in 2006.” That suggests to me that these days, these shirts are now made overseas by workers who earn just a pittance for their work.
My conscience held me back from ordering shirts from Land’s End. I did a Web search for “union made shirts.”
And I happened to find Justice Clothing, which supplies union-made clothing as “the sweatshop-free alternative.” They carry two lines of dress shirts. They carry Kenneth Gordon shirts, based in New Orleans, with a nice button-down shirt selling for US$56.25 each if you buy two or more — unfortunately there was nothing in my sleeve length. Fortunately, Justice Clothing also carry shirts by Forsyth of Canada, who make a line of tall sizes — blended fabric button-down shirts for US$40 each, and 100% cotton straight collar shirts for US$53 each (for two or more).
Just thought someone else out there might like to know.
Max Roach
By now, you’ve probably heard that Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, died on August 16. The thing that stands out for me about Roach is that he, along with drummer Kenny Clarke, moved the beat up to the cymbals. As the BBC puts it in their obituary of Roach:
Before bebop, jazz was primarily swing music played in dance halls, and drummers served to keep time for the band, Blue Note spokesman Cem Kurosman said.
Roach, along with fellow-drummer Kenny Clarke, changed that by shifting the time-keeping function to the cymbal, allowing the drums to play a more expressive and melodic role. [Link]
All of which opened up all kinds of rhythmic possibilities, moving jazz away from the strict 4/4 beat of the popular dances. Many people accused Roach and the other originators of bebop of making jazz undanceable — as if you can’t dance to 3/4 and 5/4 and polyrhythmic beats — as if moving jazz from the dance hall to the concert hall made it somehow less worthy. I like to think that Roach saw larger possibilities for jazz, just as Mozart saw there was more to a minuet than music for one kind of dancing.
What I didn’t know about Roach was how active he was in fighting for the rights of African Americans. Trymaine Lee, in a appreciation printed today in the New York Times, reports:
“It was his technique,†said Jimmy Heath, 81, a saxophonist. “And his concepts were so innovative. But he wasn’t only a drummer. The thing about Max was he was always fighting for the rights of African-American people, that we were creative, worthy people. 
The group [jazz musicians Heath, James Moody, Jon Faddis, and Phoebe Jacobs] remembered an incident at a Miles Davis show, when Mr. Roach took to the stage with a protest sign — “something to do with Africa or black people,†Mr. Heath recalled — and sat there with the sign held high above his head. “Miles was like, ‘Man, why did you have to do that during my set?’ †Mr. Heath recalled, laughing with Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Moody. [Link to NY Times article]
I’m also amazed at the range of musicians with whom Roach played or made recordings. Of course I knew he had played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. I did not know that he had played with Duke Ellington, nor did I know that he played with avant-garde composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, nor did I know that he had played rap music with a hip-hop group called Fab Five Freddy, nor did I know that he had performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Roach could play the full range of African American music — indeed, he played the full range of human music.
Selected videos of Max Roach:
Roach with Dinah Washington in “All of Me”
Roach playing Ellington’s “What Am I Here For”, with Billy Taylor and big band
Roach with Fab Five Freddy and break dancers
Roach soloing on just hi-hat