People looking for a new excuse to play with their Photoshop software might want to have a look at this. Only on the Web can you find so much coolness and so much weirdness, encapsulated in the same place. (Via Collaboratory. Yeah, I’m supposed to post things to Collaboratory, not filch links from there. Yeesh.)
A Follow-up
David Sucher comments on something I said in my post the other day about development in my town. Basically, he wants to clarify that his book City Comforts isn’t actually a series of proposals of new ideas of his own creation, but rather a series of observations he’s made of urban environments with inviting atmospheres. I didn’t mean to suggest, in my original post, that someone in Orchard Park read his book and said “A-ha! Let’s do all this! Make Mr. Sucher’s positions so!” But I probably wasn’t clear enough on that point. I was simply struck by seeing a lot of the ideas I saw in Mr. Sucher’s book “in play” in a town that has been trying to redesign its environment in the last two or three years. It was more of a “Wow, he was on to something in that book!” moment than a “Cool, someone’s read that book!” moment.
I’m pretty new, and not very well-read, to the area of urban renewal and development, so City Comforts is really the only place I’ve seen these kinds of ideas and observations laid out, with any analysis of just why they work, so when I indicated “Mr. Sucher’s ideas”, that’s because to me, they in a sense are Mr. Sucher’s ideas. This is meant in pretty much the same way that we might describe a set of political opinions as “My Uncle Joe’s ideas”, even though it’s pretty obvious that they didn’t actually begin in the mind of Uncle Joe, but rather because that’s where we first encountered them. Thus, when I say “Mr. Sucher’s ideas”, I’m really employing a bit of linguistic shorthand, because it would be too cumbersome to employ a disclaimer each time out.
Additionally, there is something to be said for “synthesis” of already-existing ideas as being at least sometimes as important as actual conception of new ideas. If Mr. Sucher has gathered a bunch of disparate elements of city design into a single package, then in my mind that constitutes something of a “new idea”, even if it’s not made out of whole cloth.
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It’s fun, to charter an accountant….
Mickey has a warning (actually, it’s kind-of a “warning in progress” that’s been going on for a while, and I kept forgetting to link it) about the new DVD release of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Apparently Disc One doesn’t play correctly in “progressive scan” players. (What does that mean, anyway?)
Anyway, those who are interested in this particular title should beware. (I currently own no Python on DVD, mainly because Python’s not really the sort of thing one can view in the presence of a four-year-old. Holy Grail is probably OK, and I suppose episodes of Flying Circus are fine. But Life of Brian? Nope. And Meaning of Life is right out.)
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It’s a Feline World
All the genetic research these days is fascinating. The implications are huge for things like when they identify the gene that makes people more prone to cancer and whatnot. But what I really want them to isolate is the gene that makes cats beg to go outside, so they can merely walk out, sniff the air, and come right back in. Or the gene that makes cats observe any object being placed on a floor, chair or bed, and deciding, “I’m going to lay down on that.” Or the gene that allows cats to sleep through all manner of incredibly loud noises, with the sole exception of the vacuum cleaner, which terrifies them utterly. Or the gene that makes cats carefully analyze the situation each time they want to make the roughly two-foot jump (total distance, that) from the floor onto my lap, when they can jump up heights of four feet or more without stopping to think about it at all in other circumstances. Or the gene that makes a cat walk across my lap, left-to-right, then back again right-to-left, and then left-to-right again, and so on until, having made at least four complete circumnavigations of my lap, deciding to lay down.
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That’s MY Senator, Dammit!
Kevin Drum wants to know what’s up with all the constant speculation on Hillary Rodham Clinton: will she run for President, will she stay out of the race, and why is it that every utterance by her or by her husband is interpreted by many on the right as a calculated maneuver in her and her husband’s long-standing conspiracy to return to power.
I doubt she’ll run in 2004. If she ever runs at all, I expect it to be either in 2008 (if next year’s Democratic nominee loses) or 2012 (if next year’s nominee wins). My thinking here is that Clinton wants to build up a record of her own in the Senate (where I generally think she’s doing a good job, although I’d like to see some more pork in Buffalo, to be quite honest) and put some distance of time between her and her years as First Lady. Even then, I suspect that the stars are simply aligned that Hillary Clinton is more likely to become a person of enormous influence in the Democratic Party, but probably never actually President.
I know that the mere mention of Mrs. Clinton’s name sends many on the right into fury, which I don’t understand, but there it is. I can certainly understand the antipathy to the most visible national figure on the opposite side of the political aisle, but the hatred of Hillary seems to go deeper than that, at least in my perception. A typical comparison is that she’s rather like Ted Kennedy, a figure to be revered on the left but who will never ascend to higher office because of dirty laundry. But that baffles me: no charge of “dirty laundry” has ever actually stuck or been proven true, and she was a victim of the one bit of dirty laundry that stuck to her husband. And the Ted Kennedy comparison doesn’t work, to me, because – – well, Mrs. Clinton never did anything that left anyone dead. (I take it as given that Vince Foster really did kill himself.)
Anyway, my reaction to all the Hillary Clinton speculation is a mixture of “Why?” and “Who cares?”
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People Better Than Me
Neil Gaiman, a guy I really hate because he does everything I want to do and way better than I could do it, was featured on NPR’s Talk of the Nation the other day, in a good, long interview that mainly deals with comics. Gaiman sounds entirely too happy for some of the dark stuff he writes. For instance, when host Neil Conan asks Gaiman why the Sandman is so dour, Gaiman chuckles and says something like, “Yeah, he is a gloomy bugger, isn’t he?” Anyway, it’s a great interview. Gaiman’s take on the Joseph Campbell “Hero’s Journey” is a hoot.
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Tomorrow is another day!
Speaking of Gone With the Wind, I’m watching Sunday Morning on CBS right now, and there’s a story about Bob Mackie, a costume designer who did (among many other things) the outrageous costumes for the Carol Burnett Show. To this day, the mere sight of Carol Burnett, doing a GWTW parody, wearing that dress with the curtain rod through it sends me into spasms of laughter. In the interview, Mackie said something like, “I’m best known for the curtain-rod dress…”
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They Promised Me a Hurricane!
This will probably sound insane to anyone who happened to be in Hurricane Isabel’s line of fire, especially those who live close to where the storm actually came ashore, but I must report that I feel a bit “gypped” because the storm took a more westerly route than predicted: it basically approached Buffalo, and then went around it. So all we’ve got is a lot of wind and a bit of light rain.
Oh well, we’ll still have blizzards.
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Painting the Weather
Via Ionarts, I spent a little time perusing an online art gallery entitled Painting the Weather. It’s a fascinating exhibit, notable in the range of art represented: there are Japanese screens beside Impressionist works beside English pastorals, like this particular painting by John Constable (whose work I’ve always loved):
“Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows”
For some reason, looking at a Constable painting always makes me want to read some Tennyson. Or watch Monty Python, I’m not sure which.
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Chickens in the Mist, part the fourth.
:: JANE GALT.
In a recent column, Paul Krugman takes a break from being shrill about President Bush to be shrill about chickens. Krugman considers the increasing numbers of chickens crossing roads to be a scandal of major proportions, one which illustrates the perfidy of this Administration, which just proves my adage that the party out of power is always insane. (How the out-of-power party, being insane, ever manages to convince people to put them back in power is a mystery. But I digress, my little chickadees.)
The problem is one of opportunity cost, and how such things scale across a large-scale economy. The problem is that resources have to be allocated, and in any such system, one has to keep in mind who is doing the allocating. So we end up in a situation where chicken-crossing surpluses are not only inevitable, but desirable. It is indicative of a general trend toward more wealth being created in the chicken-crossing set, and that, contrary to what Krugman would have you believe, is a good thing. Ergo, those who question the wisdom of the chickens crossing the road are ignoring a fundamental economic reality, and they’d really all be a lot happier if they’d become libertarians and realize that I’m right about everything.
(NOTE: It should be clear that I basically made up a lot of economic-sounding folderol here. If this post makes any sense, that is by sheer accident rather than by design. As if I needed to say that, in a post about chickens.)