Accept no substitutes

Author: Paul (Page 139 of 147)

Dogs, kids, flix

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Sometimes you buy a present for someone that you really end up enjoying yourself. This Christmas, the surprise shared gift was a copy of Mark Haddon‘s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. I picked it up for Sally without having kept up with why it was supposed to be good, but every fiction writer on my Warren Wilson College writers alum list had picked the book as one of their favs so I added it to the gift bag on a whim. Haddon has had a career as a children’s writer, but this book in the voice of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who discovers a murdered poodle and sets out Holmes-like to solve the crime. Like Roddy Doyle’s wonderful “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha,” the voice is convincing and unique and compelling. In fact, I found myself making comparisons to Doyle’s writing as I read “Dog.” Not that the boys who narrated the novels had that much in common. Doyle’s Paddy is a common tough 10 year old from Barrytown; Haddon’s Christopher is a unique traveller in an unsual (to him) world. Doyle is clearly the better writer — less artifice, more direct to the heart action –, but Haddon has the line on the world in which Christopher lives right down to the difficult math that gives him strength to go on. I don’t mean to go into a full book review, but I can say that Sally picked up the book and didn’t stop reading til she finished several hours later. I took the book and read past midnight before I finished it.
I was inspired to google for “Sherlock Holmes autism” which showed me that more people than I had a feeling that Holmes himself may have been modeled on someone with Asperger’s and not just some one hooked on the famous 7% solution of cocaine.

Blender with peas
Tucker and I took a break from extracting the DNA out of dried peas to go see “Limony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events”. It was not completely an unfortunate event, but if you have read and loved the books as we have you will not be impressed. The movie is a Jim Carrey fest and for that it is a fine film including an uncredited cameo by Dustin Hoffman. But it in no way measures up to the intricate slyly revealing multi-layered plots of the books. The books are puzzle pieces of their own; the film both shows too little and too much. What is funny, campy yet gloomy in the books becomes merely depressing in the movie despite the beautiful design throughout. Take your movie money and buy some dried peas, dish soap, 91% alcohol, and meat tenderizer and extract some DNA instead. Take what money you have left and buy the books.
Extra: Roger Ebert uses Wikipedia as a trusted source in his review of this movie.

G’boro bloggers get more attention

Jay Rosen’s PressThink site has a nice longer article on the Greensboro News and Record‘s blogsphere vision and a bit about the Piedmont Bloggers Conference, Ed Cone, Lex Alexander, David Hoggard and others. Rosen praises G’boro’s paper for being on the leading edge of citizen and journalistic blogging. It’s no surprise to me that the News and Record is on the forefront; the paper is owned by Landmark Communications whose Virginia Pilot had the first live blogging reporter at the John Malvo trial.
He also makes mention of Anton Zuiker’s organizing the Triangle Bloggers Conference for February 12 — in case you weren’t paying attention ;->

Cracker to the Cooler

Those who cracked an unprotected wireless connection in a Lowe’s store in Michigan will soon be doing time. Brian Salcedo, 21, of Whitmore Lake, Mich is looking at 9 years — greater than the 5 1/2 years given to Kevin Mitnick. Salcedo was facing 12 – 15 years, but the sentence was reduced by Judge Lacy Thornburg (AP misspells Thornburg as Thornburgh) because Salcedo cooperated with Lowe’s.
This is not Salcedo’s first brush with the law over cracking; he has the honor of being the first person arrested in Michigan for cracking when at 17, he broke into Arbornet and cracked the University of Maryland system.

The Evil that is out there (computer version)

No Comment: First, we get comment-spammed to death on every variety of blog on ibiblio. I set up authimage and all is happy (except you guys quit commenting) for me. The Moveable Type comment-spam drove the load on our servers through the roof. Fred and John were on top of that and we are undercontrol there.

Santy: Yesterday and last night, we, like every place that has anyone running phpBB, were attacked by the NeverEverNoSanity worm (aka Santy). Only a few sites were hit, but it was not pretty. John spent the evening before his travels patching all 30 or so of the not updated phpBB sites that we could find on ibiblio. Like many ISPs and universities, we’re still finding defaced sites and instances of the worm.
UPDATE We had more hits and defacings than we first realized, but Fred, Josh and John are far along on the clean-up. The final toll may be as much as 30 sites at least partially defaced. Luckily, the restoration of those sites has mostly gone quickly.

Background Reading: I’m at the same time reviewing a chapter for an upcoming computer security book on spam. One line sticks in my mind: research shows that there are only about 200 active spammers in the world at one time, but they generate more spam than three times the population of the earth every 24 hours.

Pucked! Coffee that heats itself

Puck's self-heating coffee

Exotic pizza chef, Wolfgang Puck, has added his name and brand to single-serving self-heating canned coffee. Puck already has a branded milk-jar shaped coffee drink. The new drink will use calcium oxide (aka quicklime) to heat the coffee/latte as hot as 145 F. No, the CaO will not be in the drink directly although that might be a boon to those with osteoporosis. It will be in a patented recyclable container surrounding the Puck formulated drink. The quicklime will be pressed into a tablet or a “puck.”
The technology, which was known to the Romans, is a patented product from On Tech who will be deploying the technology for hot teas and soups as well as other products.

Ice Palace

Last night the temperature dropped to 13 F and the wind blew down from Canada before the power went off in our house. I was sitting in bed wondering when I’d have to load up my family, our lizard and Sally’s mother and head off to a Day’s Inn. As the first hour passed, I thought of the wonderful F. Scott Fitzgerald story, “The Ice Palace.”
The story, as I remembered it, contrasts the life and reactions to weather, practice and environment between south Georgia and some where that might be Minnesota. Fitzgerald is most interested in the young woman of the South, called “Sally Carrol,” who is obviously a stand-in for Zelda.
I mentioned the story at lunch today as the temperature crawled up to 23 F. No one among my collegues at the table seemed to have heard of it — or to have read much Fitzgerald. The entire story — it is short — is on-line thanks to the folks at the University of South Carolina, a state not mentioned in the story. NC is mentioned in an important way.

“Ever been North before?”

“Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina.”

The irony over time is that Zelda eventually died in a fire in Asheville, NC while a patient at Highland Hospital many years (1948) after the story was published.

There is also an image of how the story looked in the Saturday Evening Post of May 22, 1920.


Ice Palace

See also Linda Wagner-Martin’s Top Ten Jazz Age books in the Guardian UK.

Night of Hawks

Channeling Sonny Boy Williamson via J. Geils Band with a bit of rock and rolling the Temptations on occassion to a biker bar audience at the Blue Bayou Club in Hillsborough, the Nighthawks were the perfect band for the crowd. The average Harley Davidson owner is between 35 and 54 (white male as you might expect) with an income of $78K/yr. I can find no source for the average age of a blues harmonica player and less about their average incomes. I can tell you that the show started at 9:30 as opposed to shows at the Cat’s Cradle which start close to 11 or midnight. The band, the Nighthawks, are very tight and very aware of each other, having played together for 30 years you might expect that. They were very casual as if they walked out of the same 50+(age) biker crowd to play with their tattoos, black t’s, old school lace up sneakers or heavy boots. Songs were mostly about women. Women, who dispite the bands superpowers, could not be gotten next to (“Can’t get next to you”) or couldn’t be called “Sugar” (“cause sugar ain’t that sweet”) or who shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (that is to say the band is past their glammor boy days) or were the sweetest thing in town, but had let them down. The band and the audience has put on a few pounds, but that stopped neither for dancing and getting down. It’s been a while since I was in a smokey club — the Blue Bayou which as a private club allows smoking as well as drinking and dancing is certainly smokey. I had forgotten how it gets in your hair and clothes even if you stand by the slightly open door with the draft blowing the cold night air in toward the bar.
It wasn’t the breeze that caused the band and the audience to get on their best guitar faces in reactions to some basic blues beats and some old school audio circuitry; it was the whining harp and smokey air burning our ears and eyes as should be true in such a successful venue.

Happy anniversary to the Blue Bayou.

Anton Zuiker and Vanuatu

Anton Zuiker returned to school after some time in the Peace Corps spent on a tropical Pacific island in Vanuatu. Luckily for me, he came to UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication to study Medical Journalismand to get evangelize for blogging.
Anton was in my first Virtual Communities class where he presented the work he had done on his family blog/website the Zuiker Chronicles.

All of that is a lead-in to saying that Anton has a nice article on paper in this week’s Independent in the Front Porch feature about Survivor and Surviving in Vanuatu.

Elvis SOLD by Lisa Marie

I am holding back on the Scientologist jokes and the Michael Jackson jokes as I write this.

Here’s the scoop: Scientologist, Michael Jackon ex-wife, Elvis heir, recovering drug addict and rock star impersonator Lisa Marie Presley is selling her father. Not his body, which if he is really dead, is buried on the one bit of the EPE holdings that Lisa Marie will keep. That is the 13 acre Graceland. But almost everything else. Even though the estate brought in over $45 million last year and even though Elvis is the top earner among dead celebrities according to Forbes, Lisa Marie is selling 85% of EPE for only $100 million! There’s more in the AP report on Salon. and in Forbes.

Those of us who have seen Bubba Hotep know the true fate of Elvis (and of JFK)>

Fried Mars Bars and more in the cooker

I may have seen fried Mars bars, sold as Milky Way in the US, in Edinburgh, but one thing is for sure there was a lot of frying going on in those pubs and takeouts. For some reason, it took a mention on Jay Leno’s show to send health officials out looking for candy friers. The health scientists verified that 1 in 5 fish and chips shops fry Mars bars. Batter ’em up. Drop ’em in. Sell ’em for 70 p. Reported somewhat sensationally by the nearly unbelieving Times. Also covered by the BBC.
Miles, we missed this treat whilst in Scotland. But you can try this at home.

Battling Comment Spam

It’s sad to have to spend time on this. Spambots are not only email pains but they are blog bothers too. Every day I get a number of comments sprayed at this blog. Luckily I have spam words alerted to them, but I still have to go through and clean them out. I will never play texas hold’em ever ever ever.
Besides turning on Spam words and tuning the list to catch the latest, there are a few tricks that I do not yet use but plan to.
This discussion is very helpful http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/spam/ as is http://wordpress.org/support/3/13443 as is AuthImage (thanks to Daryl L. L. Houston for pointing that one out).

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