Month: August 2002

Since the remarkable Calvin and Hobbes ended, the only daily comic strip that has been able to make me laugh on a consistent basis is the wicked Dilbert. (Interestingly, my parents don’t like Dilbert at all, which I attribute to the fact that they are teachers — neither has been anywhere near corporate America for more than twenty years. Not that education isn’t riddled with its own share of weirdos, idiots and incompetents; but the two are really different animals.)

Well, Dilbert is still going strong, but now — at long last — there is another strip that makes me laugh almost every time I read it. It is Aaron MacGruder’s Boondocks. The strip from last Sunday may be the funniest thing I have ever seen in a comic strip. This particular installment is subtle, witty, and also a wonderful tribute to a past master of this oft-ignored art form. Check it out.

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A very quick micro-rant about a new pet peeve: I’ve noticed, only in the last month or two, that e-journalists (I don’t like the word “blog” or any of its suffix-derivatives) have a new modus operandi when they have a series of links they wish to share on a given topic. They will write a sentence where each word is a different hyperlink. (An example of this can be found here.) I’m not entirely sure why this bugs me, but I really have trouble seeing the word “to” as a viable word to be linked, by itself, to someplace else. I suppose this is cleaner than employing something like this: (see related links here, here, here and here), where each “here” is a link. I don’t know, but it still strikes me as cumbersome. (Or maybe it’s simply the amount of linking in a single post that bothers me, combined with the effect of it all being jammed together like that in one sentence.)

Ah, well….

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I always wondered if the Ancient Egyptians left any cookbooks in Hieroglyphic form. Now I know. It’s too bad they aren’t planning to sell this stuff commercially; food-as-history is always fascinating. (As a lover of fantasy, I consider it something of a personal failing that I have yet to taste mead.)

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Congratulations, No. 12.

I attended college from 1989 to 1993, when Jim Kelly was leading the Buffalo Bills into their greatest era ever. In my freshman year they lost a thrilling playoff game in the last seconds to the Cleveland Browns; each season thereafter for the next four years ended in heartbreak at the Super Bowl. Those Super Bowl years, although they ended sadly each year, were special to me precisely because I went to college nearly 900 miles away from home. The Buffalo Bills were a tangible piece of home a long way away; they were something to which I could point with pride. Whenever a Bills home game was televised (which, in Iowa, was not very often), I could point to the stadium and the aerial shots of the surrounding countryside and say, “That’s home”. Sports fandom can be ugly; but there are other times when sport can give us something more than just a Sunday afternoon thrill.

Someday, some quarterback will lead the Buffalo Bills to a Super Bowl championship. It may even be the new man, Drew Bledsoe. As a fan, I hope that he does. But no matter who eventually brings the Vince Lombardi Trophy to Buffalo, there will never be a greater champion than Jim Kelly.

(Except, maybe, Thurman Thomas. OK, and Bruce Smith. Yeah, and Andre Reed….can’t forget Steve Tasker, Cornelius Bennett, or Darryl Talley or Kent Hull either….man, that was a hell of a football team.)

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IMAGES OF THE WEEK

Side view of Buffalo City Hall, taken from the waters of Lake Erie.

Front view of Buffalo City Hall and Niagara Square.

:: The city of Buffalo is blessed with an abundance of fine architecture, much of it dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most prominent architectural gem in Buffalo is City Hall, a 26-story structure that blends Art Deco and Classical styles to create an imposing but beautiful structure. The building can be seen most dramatically from the Canadian side of Lake Erie, where it is the foremost structure in the city skyline. It is the second tallest building in Buffalo, superseded only by the 40-story HSBC Center. That building, though, is on the southern tip of downtown and therefore does not detract from City Hall’s ability to draw the eye. The building was built between 1929 and 1931.

The tall obelisk seen in the second photograph stands at the center of Niagara Square, which is one of the hubs of Buffalo’s original radial street layout. (This, in turn, was based on the radial layout of Washington, DC.) That street layout has since been compromised by development — most notably, the cutting off of arterial Genesee Street by the city’s Convention Center — and has been cited as a necessary component in any revitalization of downtown. Over the last few decades, the city has aimed business development almost exclusively at its Main Street corridor, which has concentrated most economic activity along a single street as opposed to fostering a cluster of vital streets within downtown. Alternatives to that way of thinking are now being discussed.

The images link to informative sites on Buffalo in general and the City Hall in particular, via Skyscrapers.com. This fascinating site contains architectural information on dozens of cities. (BTW, I had no idea that Tulsa, OK was that big!!)

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When exploring the world of classical music, it is all too easy to stick with the safe, big names like Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Stravinsky, Bach, and all the other familiar composers. After all, there is a reason that these composers are “the Greats”. However, there are many, many other composers whose music deserves hearing every bit as much, with their own unique pleasures. I’m thinking of composers like Tveitt, Finzi, Kalinnikov, Ligeti, Martinu, and Nielsen — just to name a few. Reasons for the obscurity of these composers often has less to do with the inherent quality of their music than one might expect; it might be that they composed at a time when their particular style was out of fashion; or perhaps they composed a handful of works whose reputations are so good that they have overshadowed the rest of their output; and there is, of course, the constant reality that many composers — being relatively poor and not in good health — simply died before their gifts could blossom in maturity. And there is the problem of the sheer volume of music produced; not everything can be heard and preserved. It is a harsh reality that undoubtedly has cost the world some music that otherwise might be seen as masterpiece quality in its own right.

I’ve been looking a bit lately at the Unknown Composers Page, which contains information on a number of these nearly forgotten artists. Perhaps, if there is still life in classical music, part of it lies in breaking beyond the standard repertoire and discovering the true depth and diversity of our musical heritage.

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Anyone who ever looks around at their environment and thinks, “Oh my God, what kind of life is this?” can take solace in what this guy has apparently decided to do for a living.

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And speaking of online personality tests (see the post immediately below this one), here’s one of my own devising. You are a classic nerd if the following terms and/or phrases are meaningful to you:

1. Plugh.

2. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

3. XYZZY

4. You are in the bedquilt. Passages go off in all directions.

These phrases are from one of the oldest and greatest of computer games, the classic text-based adventure Colossal Cave. I started playing this game when I was in fifth grade; the program was installed on the mainframe at my father’s job. A text-based adventure is precisely what it sounds like: you are basically told what you see, hear, smell, and sense in any particular setting, and then you decide what actions to take based on the descriptions. You type the actions on the screen, and the game responds accordingly. If you are told “You are in a dark room with passages to the east and west”, you might type “Go east” or “Go west”. Along the way you gather treasures and take them someplace for safekeeping (I won’t give it away if you haven’t played the game), and in order to acquire some of the treasures you have to solve puzzles. It is rather like a teletype version of Myst or Riven; the object of the game is exploration and puzzle-solving as opposed to killing beasties and gathering experience points.

Colossal Cave is the earliest of the text-based adventures; others would come later, the most famous being Infocom’s classic Zork! trilogy, which was similar to Cave but had a much more sophisticated parser. (Where Cave only understands two-word commands like “Go North”, “Get Coins” and “Wave Rod”, Zork!‘s natural-language parser allows one to type things like “Get the coins, go north, and wave the rod.”) Many other text-based adventures have been written and can be found on the Web (afficionadoes use the term “interactive fiction”, actually). Some of them are a lot of fun to play. Playing games like Colossal Cave is not only fun, but is also a vivid reminder that the written word, skillfully harnessed, can have more power than pictures.

(Follow the link for tons of information on Colossal Cave, including downloads and hints. You can e-mail me for hints, but I probably won’t give them to you; I will instead laugh evilly as you try to vanquish the dragon or try to figure out how to circumvent the troll. Heh heh heh.)

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I don’t typically take those “personality tests” that are proliferating around the Web and particularly the blogosphere; I’ve found that in most of the hypothetical situations that are the basis of the questions, what I would really do is never one of the options. I do recall a rather devious IQ test that consisted of page upon page of math and language questions; after a while you start to realize that the questions are repeating, and soon thereafter you realize that the test is unending. Sure enough, when you quit, the test sends you an e-mail which calculates your IQ based solely on how long it took you to catch on to the joke. I don’t recall my personal result, but it wasn’t very good. It caught me on a day of high gullibility, I suppose.

My favorite all-time personality quiz, though, is the One Question Geek Test. (I have no recollection at all of where I encountered it first, except that I’m pretty sure it was on a Usenet group.) The test is elegant, clever, and witty when you realize the joke. The single question is this:

1. Pronounce the word “coax.”

I love that one.

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Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has had a couple of interesting posts (here first, and here second) on his journal about music, digital distribution, and the recording industry’s increasingly Draconian efforts to strongarm Congress into scuttling long established practices of Fair Use. Interesting stuff. His position seems to be very similar to mine: the “Information [music, books, movies, any content whatsoever] Wants To Be Free” is as ludicrous a credo as has ever been coined, but the recording industry has gleefully squandered what little high ground it had in its right to maintain its deathgrip on the Keys to the Realm. On the one hand is the industry that wants the right to hack into any computer they suspect to be harboring illegal copies of music, without any of the usual protections against this sort of thing that law enforcement agencies have to deal with; and on the other, the people who, in Tom’s words, “are like children who’ve snuck into the candy store warehouse, and now think that free gummi bears are your god-given right.”

(Update: Other interesting articles on this issue, concerning specifically the bill before Congress that the RIAA is trying to get passed, include this one by Stephen Den Beste and this one from Instapundit.)

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