(paraphrased from memory)

"You worked for an oil company, didn't you?"

"Yes. Shell."

"Middle management?"

"I was in marketing. For oil. Which is technically the easiest job on the planet. Does your car have a fuel gauge?"

"Yeah... "

"You know when that goes into the red bit?"

"Yeah... "

"Buy some petrol. Job done!"

- Jimmy Carr on the stresses of the workplace, Top Gear "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car" interview with Jeremy Clarkson

but iTunes has just randomly reminded me of one of the weird things in the world:

The first four notes of the piano line in the Journey song "Faithfully" are the same as the first four notes of the theme song from M.A.S.K.: Mobile Armored Strike Kommand.

This catches me out every time. The Journey song comes around on what used to be called Party Shuffle and my brain instantly picks it up and goes, "Masked cru-sa-ders working overtime / fighting crime / fighting crime!"

My ISP inadvertently gave away my static IP in the course of a database shuffle this afternoon. Sadly, by the time the tech working the case figured that part out, the database people had all buggered off for the day, so the tech had to sort it by hand, and is now putting in a ticket so the SQL people can fix whatever it is when they get in tomorrow and hopefully prevent it from happening again.

Amusingly, though I have largely forgotten how any of this stuff works, I suspected something like that had happened when I looked at the log and noticed that my IRC connection had dropped at exactly 4 PM. "I'll bet somebody kicked off a database run or something and it ate my static IP assignment," I thought, and lo, that's exactly what happened.

I'm not on Neurontin any more. I can get to work on those bottles of cider that I bought about a week before I started taking said do-not-consume-alcohol-with-this medication. Hopefully, they haven't gone off yet.

... Nope, they haven't. But the Newcastle Brown has, alas.

Somebody has mailed at the very least everybody on my street - conceivably everybody in town - a copy of the noted 1858 work of Seventh-Day Adventist proselyte propaganda The Great Controversy. You know the sort of thing, I'm sure - a strangely-reasoned and curiously-worded document which purports to illustration, through quotations from some edition or another of the Bible, that the U.S. Department of the Interior are minions of Satan and that Jesus is watching you think about how much you'd like to punch your neighbor in the middle of his face. I may have the specific details wrong there, but you get the idea.

( Here's a bit more flavor if you need it. )

It has to be condeded that this is not a very well-produced little volume - the cover illustration seems to have been done by an unattended copy of Photoshop and the interior pages are printed on what appears to be newsprint, giving the whole production a singular air of flimsiness - but even so, it can't have been cheap to mail a copy to each street address in however large an area they chose. (And it was street addresses, not persons - they're addressed to Resident and Mom got two, because her house technically takes up two numbers on our street, 43 and 45.) This is especially odd when you consider that, as far as I am aware, there isn't a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Millinocket. I think the nearest one is over in Lincoln. So if they're on some kind of recruiting drive they're a bit barking up the wrong tree anyway.

Now, if you happen to be reading this and you are a Seventh-Day Adventist, you may have gotten the impression that I'm mocking one of the core volumes of your faith's theology. And... uh, well, I am rather. Sorry. If it makes you feel any less downtrodden, I'm hardly singling your denomination out - if the Mormons, say, or Temple Beth Abraham in Bangor, or the Catholic Diocese of Portland had mailed me something as preposterous as this I'd be riffing on them today instead. I find myself gripped with a mixture of incredulity and dismay whenever I'm presented with evidence that people still believe with apparent sincerity in such almost willfully quaint notions as a wholly non-metaphorical invisible war between the supernatural archetypes of good and evil taking place in the Material World's Corridors of Power. That's a live roleplaying game plot, not something to take seriously at the very heart of one's being in the year 2009.

Current Mood: checking... no, not converted

Maine, as an aggregate entity, does not care that you're Very Disappointed In It.

Current Mood: enough already, jeez

"If you were a child in Victorian Britain, and you weren't actually in the workhouse, you may have been lucky enough to play with this." (THUMP) "That is good old-fashioned modelling clay. It was available in the following range of colours: grey."
- James May, James May's Toy Stories episode 2: "Plasticine"

Dammit! All he needs now is one of the utilities and he'll have a virtual stranglehold on that side of the board.

"Basically, everything I've found out [is] that my family are food-hoarding suicidal murderers."
- Jodie Kidd, Who Do You Think You Are?

Current Mood: amused

November 1
(Length of day: 10:06)

Sunset: 4:12 PM
Civil twilight: 4:52 PM
Astronomical twilight: 6:01 PM

woo hooooooo.

A friend of mine has directed a number of episodes of a very successful BBC drama called... mmm, well, I won't tell you its real name. I'll say it's called Spies, and it's immensely popular and it's gone into its, I don't know, sixth, seventh, eighth series or season as we like to say in the American fashion now. And it's a jolly romp of a show. I have to confess I have something of a weakness for it. (...) Most of the episodes involve bombs going off somewhere in London and someone having to save it, so there's a lot of driving around therefore. A great deal of high-speed pursuit, as I believe it's called. And naturally there's a lot of communication between the base, where Harry Pearce, who runs it all (...) he has to communicate with them, they have to communicate with him and with each other. It's the modern world. Information, data exchange, 3G, Bluetooth, WiFi, they’ve just got to be in touch at all times to save civilization.

Um, except when they're driving of course. When they're driving, they can't use the phone. When they're driving, they have to have their seat belts done up and they must never use the telephone. They mustn't even use a hands-free telephone. They're entirely welcome to kill each other in cold blood. They're entitled to betray their country on screen. They're entitled to behave badly to their wives and their children, they're entitled to eat unhealthy foods, but they are not entitled to use a telephone, in the car. Which real people, in an emergency, would do. Yes, I know it happens to be illegal, but it's also illegal to shoot people in the face. But they shoot people in the face, and nobody stops them doing that. But there is a man, there are a series of men and women whose whole job is to stop you from having people filmed, in cars, not wearing seat belts, or making phone calls. It's called "compliance". Compliance with what? Compliance with being an arsehole? Compliance with stupidity! Compliance with making this country a shithole!

I cannot believe that anybody would allow this to happen. I cannot believe that they wouldn't just say, "No! I'm going to film it they way it should be!" What is the point of having cars and backgrounds and extras? What's the point of trying to make it realistic? Why not just do it against cardboard? If you're not allowed to do it as it really would be done because what? Because you're setting a bad example? Well, what kind of example are you setting by betraying your country or shooting people in the face?

I don't know where to begin, and I don't know where to end. I want to take the people who are responsible for this, and I want to squeeze the life out of them. I never want them to get up again. I want them to understand how insane they are. And I have a horrible feeling that they're shaking their head and saying something about how it's wrong to set a bad example to children or something. Whereas SHOOTING PEOPLE IN THE FACE - how many times to I have to say this? - apparently ISN'T setting a bad example to children oh my God I want to EXPLODE with fury.

And the awful thing is they win! The directors and the producers of the program comply! Ah! Why don't they just tell them to FUCK, OFF!

- Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry's PODGRAMS, Episode 5: "Compliance Defiance"
Sept. 2, 2008

Current Mood: amused

"SAFE AND NON-TOXIC"
INSTANT RECHARGE
PROCEDURE
EXPOSE TO ANY LIGHT
SOURCE FOR FIVE SECONDS.

RECOMMENDED FOR EVERYONE
OVER SIX YEARS AND
FUTURE SPACE TRAVELERS.

EXCLUSIVE LICENSEE:
PRO ARTS, INC.
P.O. BOX 428
MEDINA, OHIO 44256

Made in U.S.A.
©1977 DC COMICS, INC.

( It comes with a little informational insert, too. )

Okay, I've mentioned him twice in the last two posts, which is kind of an indication, I guess, but I have suddenly and inexplicably decided to become a huge Stephen Fry fan. I don't really know why this is happening right now; I've enjoyed his part of the relatively few things I've seen him in (that'd be... two guest appearances on Top Gear*, playing the only likeable character in V for Vendetta, one appearance on Parkinson, and... oh yes, I have the UK audiobook edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone around here somewhere), but never to the point where I felt, "Yes. Must seek out more of this man's work."

Well, the other day I happened to run across and watch the Jeremy Clarkson episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, the BBC's genealogy program, and having enjoyed it, I looked through an episode list thinking, Okay, who else here have I ever even heard of? Oh hey, Stephen Fry, picked it up, and... well, that was it, really. Now I'm working my way through Stephen Fry In America and trying not to be too keenly disappointed that he skipped almost my entire state. (I don't take that personally. Everyone does it. :)

* My favorite bit of his Top Gear appearances: The first time he appeared, it was in an episode which had as its A-feature a film they'd made testing cars on the Isle of Man, and Jeremy asked if he'd ever been there, prompting an exchange not unlike the following (paraphrased from memory):

Fry: I have, actually, and ironically that's the one thing you can't do there. If you get to the customs desk and say "I love man," they say "Not around 'ere you don't."

Clarkson: Oh! That's right, you can be birched for that on the Isle of Man, can't you?

Fry: Yes, quite so. Of course, that's something many people pay good money for in London, isn't it?

(Oh, and I just remembered he's in a couple episodes of Bones, before they replaced his character with one who annoyed me.)

When I'm incredibly tired, I get very chatty and outgoing. I've had lovely conversations with my short-range neurologist, her secretary, the files-and-billing lady at my primary care physician's office, and a furniture salesman today, in which I was scintillatingly witty and drily bantersome in a manner reminiscent of a slightly more loutish, American Stephen Fry (by an odd coincidence). Maybe I should arrange these two-to-three-day broken-field no-sleep-a-thons more often.

And, on top of that, I've remembered something about my early days at school that I must write down before I stagger off and finally go to sleep. I was talking with my mother on the way home about educational technology. She works in that field, being one of the training consultants to the State of Maine Department of Education for such things as portable computers (with which the state is now graciously providing every student in grades... what... 8-12, I think), SMART boards, and whatnot. And it got me thinking about what "interactive" classroom technology was when I was in grade school, nigh-on thirty years ago.

Some of you may be too young to remember this technology, but, when I was in grade school the usual method of providing information to a whole classroom's worth of kids at a time, assuming you didn't just run off 30 copies of whatever it was on the mimeograph¹ in the principal's office, was with a device called a filmstrip.

This is just about what it sounds like: a strip of 35mm film, developed positive, which was displayed one frame at a time through a primitive projector. Think of it as a sort of deeply analog PowerPoint. The presentation technique was a lot like a slide show, but without all the fuss and clatter of a slide projector - actually a pretty elegant solution. In my schools, the filmstrips came in little plastic cans with pop tops, and the poshest series of them came in big cardboard boxes with little sockets for each can.

The audio for these things was included on a separate cassette tape, which the teacher would play through one of those brick-shaped Radio Shack decks lying on the AV cart next to the projector. The narrator would describe a frame, then there'd be a beep and a short pause while the person operating the projector would obey the Pavlovian imperative to advance one frame, and so on. Normally, this person would be one of the students, cranking the filmstrip projector being beneath the teacher's dignity.

There was a kind of tribal politics to being picked for this job. It helped if you were good at it, but if you were an unknown quality you might get a shot if you polished enough apple. Even if you managed that, though, if you were just hopeless at the job - missed the beeps, advanced so that the frame didn't line up, skipped a frame entirely, or God forbid did what Eric Cogswell did and stripped the sprocket holes, ruining what we were assured was a very expensive and hard-to-replace piece of our school district's educational equipment, you'd have a very hard time getting picked at all. Some of the kids were too cool to show that they wanted to do it; some were so eager it was clear they didn't want to and were hoping to just get it over with. This was the state of the educational art in rural Maine in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I was a kinghell filmstrip advancer. The best in the business. I had a touch like a surgeon with that knob; I could even get the beat-up, ancient machine in Mrs. Mackin's room to work right, and that thing was so balky it once jammed on Chip Gould to the extent that the filmstrip caught fire². I was so finely attuned to that one-kilohertz tone that I could hear it getting ready to sound, but I never jumped the gun. Way too cool for that. Teachers would deliberately pick other kids sometimes just to give them a chance, but they always came back to me, because they knew that if you wanted a filmstrip presented smoother than glass, no matter what the subject matter, you called on the Hutchins. Ka-chow.

(I never had the faintest idea what any of those filmstrips were trying to teach us, because I was so focused on getting the presentation technology to work perfectly that I had no mental bandwidth left at all for the content, but I now consider that advance training for my later work in the Internet service industry.)

And then, as so often happens to truly skilled artisans who practice an obscure and delicate craft, automation put me out of business. When I was in the fifth grade, Mr. Warren's classroom received a brand new filmstrip projector. It had the tape deck integrated right into the machine... and it had automatic advance. It could hear the beep on the tape and click forward by itself. The newest filmstrips in that classroom actually had silent beeps, some kind of ultrasonic signal embedded in the audio stream on the cassette that would signal the thing to advance without being audible to the students.

Try to understand the shockwave that this sent through Katahdin Avenue School in the fall of 1983. You would have thought that Mr. Warren's room had just been fitted with its own Hubble Space Telescope. Principal Sanders gathered us all around and sternly informed us that this new and sophisticated machine was very expensive, which was why it was the only one in the school district, and we were not to touch it under any circumstances. This was nothing short of a slap in the face to those of us who were accustomed to our unofficial laurels as filmstrip technicians. Had I known about the Industrial Revolution at the time, I think I would have jammed a wooden shoe into the projector in protest³. Alas, I did not, so I could merely sulk and hate it. We didn't even use the old one in my fifth-grade classroom, Mrs. Page's, any more; instead, we'd swap into Mr. Warren's room while they were out at Phys. Ed. and watch our filmstrips there, like kids bagging their parents' bigscreen TV for the Xstation while they're away at Vail.

And I look at all this stuff my mother's been hired to teach teachers how to use today, so that their students' academic careers can go by in a Wikipedia-fueled blur of scenes from that hokey holographic computer room on CSI: Miami...

... and I think, Those kids will never have the satisfaction of knowing that they have made themselves absolute masters of the filmstrip projector.

On the other hand, I imagine you can get better porn on a MacBook.


¹ My first and only deliberate experimentation with recreational chemistry involved Dave Evans and me daring each other to take huge huffs of the fumes coming off our wet-from-the-mimeo test papers one day. We got a five-second high, a mild headache, and banishment to Mr. Sanders's office.

² This was an additional wrinkle to the job of filmstrip operator: The projector bulb was incredibly hot, which actually made the job a bit dangerous. If you were extremely uncareful you could get yourself a nasty burn. And touching the bulb would make it blow out, of course, which would be costly. Never happened to me, but I saw it a couple of times. I can only imagine how sued a school department would get if that happened to a student today.

³ Hence the term sabotage.

"I find that getting around London is a bit of a bore by almost any other means than a good old-fashioned London cab, and I've been driving one of these now for about, ooh, I dunno, 15 years, I should say. On one occasion I was stopped at traffic lights and a man said, 'Pimlico, and drive like hell!' And I was going more or less in that direction, so I said, 'All right.'"
- Stephen Fry on Who Do You Think You Are?

Last night normal nasal service was more or less resumed; I rejoiced and promptly got some sleep.

Tonight, when I have somewhere to be in the morning (and a longish drive to get there), we're back to "you can have one or the other, but not both," which is just maddening enough to keep me awake.

I really can't capture in words how furious this makes me when it happens. Especially now, when I thought I was in the clear. But no; even fluticasone has failed me tonight. And tomorrow... well, today, now, I'll need to be out of the house in about five hours... is going to suck.

Episode 1, "Airfix", aired today, and I've just finished watching it. As the title suggests, it's centered on James's childhood love of Airfix, an injection-molded plastic model kit maker (the American equivalent would be something like Monogram or Revell). Building on the segment about Airfix from James May's Top Toys, he examines the history of the medium, corrals a group of modern schoolchildren (they seem to be about 13, which would make them... what, eighth-graders in the US, not sure how UK schools work), puts them through a sort of Airfix boot camp with some preliminary models, and then they all set about building an Airfix model of a Supermarine Spitfire.



On a scale of one to one.

It's brilliant. As with the Meccano segment in Top Toys, the kids Don't Get It and rather make a hash of things at first, but as it goes on, some of them start to tune in, and there's a whole subplot about the construction of the giant model kit, before the kids even get a chance to build it. And both of James's parents make appearances, which is nice. His mum was on an episode of Top Gear some years ago, but I hadn't seen his dad before.

Next week's episode: Plasticine!

Apart from the public utilities commissioners of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, I mean.

I did my shot at around 4 PM and my deltoids are already aching (for some reason, that's where my Flu-Like Body Aches tend to concentrate). This shit sucks. (The condition necessitating the treatment, not the treatment itself. Well, maybe the treatment itself too, but there aren't any better ones yet, and one doesn't want to dis the efforts of the researchers to date.)

The Macintosh startup sound was made with a Korg Wavestation.

Hey, solipsistnation, didn't you used to have a Wavestation? Wasn't that the one with the little round sorta jewel-like buttons?

Man, now I'm all nostalgic for Those Days.

Current Mood: nostalgic