Jim Davis + Franz Kafka = ...

See more. Courtesy of Daring Fireball.

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Best Optical Illusion, ever!

See here courtesy of Daring Fireball

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When I am old, I hope I'm long forgotten

I feel very uncomfortable around the elderly - I don't think this is a particularly rare sensation. And it's not, mind you that I dislike older people, by any means, I've always had the idea that if one could really sit down and be friends with someone who is 85 years old, it might be a very interesting relationship, but the whole idea of actually DOING it seems VERY intimidating somehow. This wasn't as bad when I was a child, although I mostly base that off my Grandpa who I think was in age denial right up until he died. And in all honesty, I must admit I was never fully comfortable around my other three grandparents, despite them being very friendly, nice people, I imagine. But even so, the idea of meeting a new older person, now, is very unsettling. We were at Amanda's Grandmother's house today, for dinner, and I felt utterly out of place, the entire time. I like Amanda's grandmother, she seems like she's probably a saucy, queer-smiled British woman with a lot of great stories to tell. But, I sat next to her, and I felt enormously, shamefully uncomfortable.

But, again, I don't think this is rare, because waatching other people interact with someone older isn't entirely comfortable either, there comes a certain age where everyone seems to recognize you as somewhat outside of their sphere, and they mak painful attemptys to be polite with you, attempts that seem uncomfortable and unnatural. I don't know when that age begins, but it does seem to come. I wonder what it is like when ther ar e a lot of older people around, if they are silly and playful, and enjoy each other, without feelings of obligation or discomfort. I also wonder how hard it must be to be a saucy, queer-smiled British woman, who everyone thinks of, treats as, and expects to be, a tired, sickly old matriarch... 

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Madame Butterfly

So, I've never really listened to Opera, I never went as a kid, being as they don't probably have a lot of opera houses on Army bases, you know, or small towns. And most of my personal taste I developed by buying CDs I knew nothing about - well, I knew I wasn't interested in buying the 'Best Arias Ever!' CD, and to actually BUY an opera is a pretty big investment in something that a lot of people proclaim to be dull as sticks. I'm still not very good at listening to it, but after going to an opera recently with my dearie, and after getting a small-ish Nova Scotia over the Ring of the Niebelungen, after naming a programming project Siegreud (long story...), I've checked some out from the library.

This week, I listened to Madam Butterfly, and OH what a sad story! The music is a very different sort of genius, from someone who knows nothing about what he's listening to, because not knowing a lick of Italian, and with only the Wikipedia synopsis of the plot, I could not only tell exactly what was happening when (and this was while answering phones and working tickets at the office!), my little brain could perfectly see the staging of the entire production. The most heart-wrenching part for me wasn't when she sings "To die with honor, when one can no longer live with honor", it was when she blindfolds her child, and gives her a doll and an American flag, and you hear this little trinkling background notes from the Star-Spangled Banner - it was terrible! It's a lucky thing I was on the 'working tickets' part, then, not the 'answering the phone' part... ;).

Anyway, the greatest irony of the whole thing, I guess, is that I almost felt ashamed in admitting how enjoyable the whole thing was. It's not the whole 'Guys don't like opera' or anything like that. It was more that normally when I've heard someone talk about this or that opera, my knee jerk reaction is to think they sound snobbish. Like they're showing off that they can enjoy the old boring version of television, while the rest of us are only capable of laughing at Seinfeld. Of course that's ridiculous, but in some sense, Opera, like Jazz, seems to be spiralling towards the slow death of artsiness. It's so funny to read about the student-bohemians going to the opera for an evening lark 100 years ago, and then think how dignified and precise Opera is in the modern mindset. Opera singers are all trained in being precise and perfect, and in keeping the technique used 150 years ago, it seems. It makes me wonder what it would be like if Opera actually grew and changed, instead of becoming a museum piece, like Jazz has become, where wild-minded tortured geniuses are pushed out by legions of hackneyed technically talented copycats. Of course, this is all nothing at all, as I haven't exactly listened to enough opera to know if new composers are putting out genius works, but the point still seems to stand that people GOING to the opera want to see the standbys, there is no longer a market, it seems for beautiful new things. Like Jazz.

Not that the standbys aren't gorgeous - Madama Butterfly, for instance. But they're dying, slowly, because there is no relevance anymore, no growth.

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Plain ol' text files...

Do you sometimes wonder if we all overthink things sometimes with computers? Like, since we CAN have X amount of power, we SHOULD... I've recently just been thinking how really nice plain ol' text is - windows users, think notepad. It's just so clean and pure! When I was writing, I found out that if I wrote in just plain ol' TextWrangler, the same vanilla text editor that I write code in, I got a lot more done. I didn't have to care how it looked, there was only one job to be done - writer - instead of typesetter, proofreader, and all the other jobs that, say, MS Word lets you do. I didn't even have red squiggly 'hey stupid, learn to type' lines, it was so liberating! Besides, for those of us who are geeks, plain text has been around forever, will be around forever, and is eminently scriptable, mungable, fiddle-ready, and flexible...

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There will now be some very freaked-out birds in the world...

Luke... join me, and we can rule the Muscatoogee Annual Hot Air Balloon Jamboree as father and son!

(Linked from GeekDad)

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There but for the grace of God go I...

Have you ever considered who you'd be if you grew up somewhere where the prevailing culture did not encourage you to be a good person? The other day I found myself wondering - if I grew up with a father in the Ton-Ton Macoute, or something, who would I be? I can't much claim any of my better features as my own invention - most of what I've ever done that's any good was either natural talent that I didn't do any work to make any better, or the influence of good parents, etc. If I had crummy parents? I'd be a horrible criminal. It's humbling to know that really I'm no better a person than, say, one of the rebels in Sierra Leone, raping villagers and cutting their husband's hands off.  Just luckier.

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At the grocery store...

...someone told me how young I look, when I said I was 28. I guess 28 is the cutoff for when I am expected to look young? Not that I'm bitter, it was just odd, like I'm well-preserved. You know. At 28.

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Now, HERE is a word to add to your everyday vocabulary...

Wiktionary's Word of the day:   erinaceous: Of, pertaining to, or resembling a hedgehog.   (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/erinaceous)

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