versimilitude, tangent, and sophistry

When I posted this to FaceBook and Flickr, I mentioned that this either sounded like lyrics from a hard-core punk song or from early Metallica, specifically "Master of Puppets". A cow-orker suggested the lyric "master of crumpets, I'm bringing you treats" and, well, that set off a whole chain reaction of neurons in my head.

Following is the result, with apologies to Cliff Burton's dead corpse. Go ahead, set it to the song's music in your head. I think it works pretty well.

-----

So you've come to eat. Won't you have a seat?
Here's our list of dinner specials
Can I start you with a drink, a cola or a beer?
Do you want some appetizers?

[chorus:]
Salad, soup, or fries
Now it's time to dine
Watch out, the plate is hot
Enjoy your tater tots.

The check comes after
Please pay your server
Don't pay up front, sir
Please pay your server
Server

Server of crumpets I'm bringing you treats
Fresh apple pies and delectable sweets
Would you like coffee or some hot tea?
Just tip me well or I'll make you bleed
Server
Server
Just tip me well or I'll make you bleed
Server
Server
[end chorus]

Steaks and fish fillets, here are your entrees.
Feasting like lords of the manor.
I'll get you a refill; it won't be on your bill.
Would you like some fresh ground pepper?

[chorus]

Server, Server, written on the check, big letters
Server, Server. Can't you fucking read?
Laughter, laughter, to pay up front is most unwise
Laughter, laughter, next time I'll pee in your french fries

Tips are well called for, twenty percent or more.
For duly servicing your cravings.
Don't give me any lip, I'll spit in your French dip
And slip rat poison in your gravy.

[chorus]

This started as a response to meestagoat's recent post about watching The Terminator. It doesn't really have an snappy ending but it seemed to be too long to just leave as a comment elsewhere...

The first Terminator is, IMO, the best of them all. It's beautifully dark, both thematically and cinematically. It's the only movie of the franchise that's mostly driven by the narrative rather than big explosions or cyborg shenanigans. Not that it lacks in cyborg shenanigans, of course, but it's the only one which isn't ADD-addled enough to feature an extended sequence of Arnold slowly, carefully, and methodically carving his eyeball out with an X-Acto knife. No sequels could get away with that. T2 was nice in advancing some narrative--who isn't a sucker for dire predictions of SkyNet?--but began totally sliding into SPECIAL EFFECTS BIG EXPLOSIONS wankery, Agent Doggett and Linda Hamilton kicking ass notwithstanding. Plus T2 was just too "sunny" and bright, visually speaking. Why The Terminator isn't listed in discussions of sci-fi- or tech- neo-noir is beyond me.

Finally, that last sequence in which Sarah Connor is getting fuel and the kid snaps her picture, hustles her, and says that the storm is coming, only to have her retort "I know" before driving off into it, in her Jeep? Fucking gorgeous.

K. and I booked a four day weekend at the McMenamin's Grand Lodge, a little west of pr0tland. It is close enough to be serviced by Tri-Met yet far enough to be in the rural hinterlands of the Yamhill valley.


misc.notes:

* a former Masonic lodge? there are lots of Masonic flourishes and details all over the place. Maybe a Masonic retirement home of some sort???
* aging hippies met in pool on Friday, 4 acre private farm, taught at Pac U, informed us of pool's natural, chemical-free properties; aging hippie guy was born in Chicago... I just absolutely cannot get away from Chicago out here.
* real fucking RC on tap! (note: find "cola of freedom" post and graphics) Hail RC Cola!!!
* buffalo country = south of Tenino, Wash.
* Yamhill valley's subtle topography reminiscent of Illinois, mountains in the background notwithstanding... nostalgic!
* staying in Harvey Clark room... local minister who helped found what eventually became Pacific University. (note: copy quote from room wall)
* the second floor men's bathroom has a really amazing urinal


20090424 -- a catalog of a rough day:

1. stayed in bed until 2

2. lunch: buffalo burger... deliciously juicy, thick, and appropriately medium-rare. also, nicely fatty for buffalo.

3. stroll around Forest Grove: properly bifurcated highway (OR 8), a handful of quaint old buildings in the town's main intersection

4. stroll through Pacific University campus: lush and green with lots of trees (quaking aspen)... possibly another Olmstead work? several historic buildings (romanesque maybe) with a nicely Modern student union building and a contemporary library.

5. soaked in outdoor heated pool: nestled among trees and landscaping behind Lodge building; natural stone used; irregular shaped; built-in sitting bench all around; water jets are built into the sitting bench and provide a more diffused and fulfilling massage than the small number of powerful jets in standard hot tubs.

6. lying around / napping / internetting -- the McMenamin's rooms do not have TV but have wi-fi, which is an altogether better combination

7. dinner... Dungeness crab cakes delicious; polenta cakes delicious; delicious and innovative salads that use real greens instead of abominable iceburg lettuce; steak delicious and tender to the point that it effortlessly yields to the knife, chefs not afraid to make "medium" closer to medium rare;

8. lied around watching medias

behind the cut, just in case anyone is still frantically catching up

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a) slept late both days
f) took advantage of the hotel's hot tub; sauna was closed though
b) conducted perambulatory investigations of much more of town than on previous visits: downtown, Gonzaga campus and nearby off-campus areas.
e) found Gonzaga charming. I like those plucky Jesuits even more
i) drove up a little north on Hamilton and back down Division. found Yoke's grocery store and the awesome General Store.
c) tested the re-configured GPS "tricorder" to great success; now to really build it
d) found a delicious pizza joint with RC on tap
g) shopped 75% off at Macy's clearance floor
h) slid down the giant little red wagon at riverfront park

observations:

0) Spokane's downtown has the most amazing streetlight posts that I have ever seen
1) features not one properly bifurcated highway "business loop", but at least two. both intersect downtown
2) Seattle Dick's vs Spokane Dick's (the two are not related): neither better nor worse, just different. I do like Seattle Dick's special sauce, though, giving Seattle a slight edge.

The full summary (direct link) is well worth reading. It's six, short, sweet pages of the full decision. It is pretty much a direct legal refutation of the most common arguments against same-sex marriage, or unions. Seriously, some of the county's arguments (against same-sex unions) seem appallingly specious. All things considered, it's a pretty straightforward and common sense document that nicely counters the mouth-frothing in the popular media.

Recognizing the sincere religious belief held by some that the “sanctity of marriage” would be undermined by the inclusion of gay and lesbian couples, the court nevertheless noted that such views are not the only religious views of marriage. Other, equally sincere groups have espoused strong religious views yielding the opposite conclusion. These contrasting opinions, the court finds, explain the absence of any religious-based rationale to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s same-sex marriage statute. “Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring government avoids them . . . . The statute at issue in this case does not prescribe a definition of marriage for religious institutions. Instead, the statute, declares, ‘Marriage is a civil contract’ and then regulates that civil contract . . . . Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with marriage.

As I've said before, for all of the horrible things the Soviets did to people, one thing they did right was the complete separation of civil and church marriage. You'd go before some komissar at the city hall to have the civil marriage and thus get all the civil, contractual rights that come with it. Then, if you wanted, you could go have a church wedding. Not that they had a good track record on LGBT rights, but a more formal separation of civil and religious might be a way to start here.

The following was a reading response for my class (The Place of Monuments -- Memory, Mourning, and Making) last quarter. Specifically, it was in response to excerpts from Roland Barthes' _Mythologies_. As it was already past length, I left out entirely my next section, which was going to discuss the delicious homoeroticism inherent in pro wrestling. It's too bad, really, because that was going to be even juicier than the Cold War jibber jabber.

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I love how this turned out... with the fog... and the amber street lamps... and the YELLOW of the Golden Nugget. Many a time back when I lived in Chicago did I go to a Golden Nugget--there are five or so scattered somewhat compactly in the area--after a late night of drinking or after catching a show. It was usually either of the two on Irving Park that I would frequent after my ears were still ringing from live music. This one on Lawrence was more suited for a quieter late-night dining diner experience.

I once came here with somebody I was dating. She ordered coffee, decaf because she did not want to be kept up by the caffeine, and proceeded to fade in and out of conversation. An observation was made that our schedules were wholly incompatible. It didn't last.

Ever since the frightening and supremely amazing Dr. Who episode Blink, I've harbored a greater fascination with statues. It is probably exacerbated by the monuments class that I took last quarter.

The eyes on statues are always either frighteningly life-like or eerily life-less. I think the black-and-white really does it justice here. And speaking of eerieness, I love the faint shadow in the background. Whatever you do, don't blink.

"new" lens... all manual settings... so old skool that it can only see in greyscale!

Google Ocean! Sweet!

Here's Washington's continental shelf.

And of course, the Google map / NOAA chart thing that's been around for a while... which is truly *gush*worthy.

Given the planet's gonna look like Waterworld before too long, this couldn't be timelier!

Results

We think http://mad-eponine.livejournal.com is written by a woman (73%). --taken from http://genderanalyzer.com

The site also thinks that the Urban Archives is written by a man (68%). And finally it believes Seattlest to believe 90% manly (down from 94% earlier today!) which is fairly amusing. Because sex and gender (and conflating the two) and quantitative measurements... ah, I'm not really railing against such the experiment:

We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web! We hope you like it!

There's nothing over at uClassify.com that explains the logic. It would be entertaining and interesting to see how the classifier makes decisions. I'm curious as to whether it does so based on stupid things like mere word frequencies and/or subject terms or whether it relies more on things like grammatical structure. The latter could open a lively discussion on the nature/nurture aspects of linguistic tendencies, for example. On the other hand, it could also posit an overly-statistical and/or over-structural connection of language, sex, and gender.


Because, in the end, nothing explains scientific truth like a singular, simple number!

I took a mental health day from work. I should just build these into my work schedule somehow as the need for them looks like it will be coming up monthly. $MY_WORK is slowly moving off of a legacy reporting system to a new system which will trade old headaches for new ones will be much more automated. The current system involves a lot of menial manual steps that aren't mentally challenging; however they are involved enough that you actually have to pay attention... because if people don't get their MARC records in exactly the right, idiosyncratic way... SWEET MOTHER OF FUCK PEOPLE START DYING!

This sort of computer work offends me immensely; it also fills me with rage, quite literally. Oddly, I have no problems with periodically doing menial physical labor because somehow I believe it cleanses one. On the other hand, menial computer work makes me think, "it's 2009, people, are you fucking kidding me"?

Anyway, after doing my distributed portion of the menial work the day before, I had to stay away today because I was cranky and irritable.

So I wandered onto campus and picked up my course pack for my Theories of Knowledge class. Allow me to re-iterate with the proper punctuation: THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE!!!. Your internal speaker should reproduce that with lots of reverb. After a heaping plate of lunch at China First--the specials include a large entree, soup, fried rice... and a a Free pot of tea for $5.45 American, tax included!--I sat about at Solstice and did some light reading.

A few hours later my mood entirely improved. Additionally, my vocabulary has been enriched with fine German words like erklären, verstehen, and Geisteswissenschaften. Charles Mudede would be proud. My new favorite word, though, is emplotment, both as a word and as a academic modus operandi.

I'm a little shocked that reading about philosophy of science, philosophy of history, positivism v. anti-positivism, etc. cheered me up so much. It's crazy. I was reading one thing and would then open up one of my other books to cross-reference. I convinced that somebody observing would have gotten the mistaken impression that I knew what I was doing.

For a while during a busy period, I shared my table with another grizzled grad student--I could see the dried tears of agony and crushed hopes in his eyes. While I read a nicely cranky, though cool-headed, essay entitled "A Non-Positivist Conception of History" from my cheaply-made and plastic-ring-bound course pack, the guy across the table unfolded his sweet, antique-looking, metal reading stand and read from a hard-cover texbook merely entitled Thermodynamics as if it were a bible or something. The coincidental metanarrative was most satisfactorily dramatic.

Still though, I'm thinking of arming myself with steel-bound literature, perhaps with an attached chain, to protect myself against those roving gangs of empiricists who shake down humanities people for their lunch money and kick random quantitative figures in their faces while they're down.

Like every other lj-user, I looked into some backup solutions this evening. Not that I think The Russians will pull the plug--though as a nation Russians are notorious plug-pullers--but, in general, backups of one's vast digital empire are not a bad thing.

Naturally, I fooled around with this Perl script precisely because it is a Perl script. One of these days, one of my arch-nemeses will set up a box with a stick and string. Inside it, they will put a Perl script on a shiny plate. I simply won't be able to resist; I will be caught. That is the power Perl has over me.

I wouldn't recommend using this script for the casual user. There must be far friendlier and nicer solutions for the non-command-line unwashed. Also, for some reason, it would not work out of the box for me so I had to perform a minor hack. I did away with some needless error-checking of the login process. Now instead of lying to me that there was an "Error logging in" it just logs in and slurps down my every well-thought and insightful post.

It worked on both my MacBook and on vindiesel, a Linux box. I am now v. pleased that I have a command-line Perl solution. Russians, I am prepared for you! Just like those plucky Wolverines in Red Dawn.

It has come to this. Apparently, I'm losing the patience to drag out the USB cord, or the CF card reader, to offload pictures from my camera. So I'm casually thinking about the Eye Fi. Of course, I'd have to get a SD-CF adapter since my DSLR uses CF.

USB is just a simple cord, for fuck's sake; I should be content with it. But I think I know where this anti-wiring sentiment comes from. Having tinkered with electronics and dealt with wiring for so many years, I've just come to hate wires in the practical sense. I wish that either the EEE or the MacBook had a built-in CF card reader. Oddly, the idea of getting the SD-CF adapter and using a regular SD card by then plugging it into the EEE's built in SD reader sounds somewhat appealing, even though--or perhaps because--it is Rube Goldberg-esque. But as long as I'm buying and adapter, I might as well get the EyeFi.

Still, though, I fear the Cylons. That, aside from financial prudence, has been keeping me from making my camera get with the wireless fidelity. I mean, I can unplug a USB cable quickly enough if when I see that a Cylon virus is hacking my connection. Similarly, I can also pop out the SD card. But with wireless? Those toasters can just get in lickety-split and pilfer my data any old time.

Maybe if I had an attractive and stylish carrying case for my USB cable, I would feel better about the whole affair.

The view out my mom's kitchen window. There's a foot of snow on the ground with some intermittent flurries falling. Occasionally, a gust of wind blows some snow off the roofs. It's not snot-freezingly cold today but not warm enough to make being outdoors pleasant. This past weekend was horrible: minus 30F with windchill. So much for my ideas of wandering around and taking pictures.

Driving outside is kinda fun. Outside the city limits, the streets aren't salted as well, but still passable. People are still sliding around a bit but not dangerously so. Perhaps I'm off-kilter, but I like a little bit of sliding; it reminds me that physics still works. I miss rear-wheel drive, which at the very least is extremely predictable wrt traction loss. Everywhere, city or suburb, side streets are not plowed thoroughly. But at least the snow is packed down. Good thing this place is flat. Traffic is pretty horrible, though.

Inside, I'm writing on the laptop while drinking coffee and eating a Nutella sandwich. The radio is playing the local NPR station and I'm cooking beans for the sauerkraut and re-animating dried mushrooms for the christmas eve supper.

I feel like an NPR/PBS commercial.

Ellensburg, Washington

Ice Cube and Cut Rate Liquors... all in one place!

I've been enjoying my monuments class, partially because we've read a lot of backstory with respects to monuments and ideas about monumentality. So it's not a boring slideshow about actual monuments but, rather, a fairly dense reading about many ideas connected to monumentality, history, and architecture. We've covered ancient hunting/gathering societies, notions of sacrifice/violence, gift economy, Renaissance ideas of antiquity, critiques of history, and 19th/20th century strains of thought on ornament and monument. I must say it has been a pleasant academic rogering, all in all.

But I've also felt a little disoriented; there is a lot of material to grasp and I always wonder whether I'm "getting it" or whether I'm just a punk-kid-don't-know-nothin'. I've been working on a draft of my final paper. There was a bit of procrastination because I had a bunch of ideas amorphously floating around my head without any unifying narrative or flow... or way to tie together some of the theory to my examples.

If you have seen my workspaces or processes, you should not be surprised that I hardly ever write from an initial outline. There does seems to be some organization--though I will vehemently deny this if publicly accused--to the ostensibly disheveled scatter of notes, both digital and written scribbled in many places. Even my unforgivably long thesis had only a loose collection of the vaguest of official outlines, of which the only unified one was the final table of contents, which I probably would not have made if the graduate school didn't force me to do it. More important to me were the ones I constructed after I had written significant portions just so that I could see what I had done and what fabrication I had remaining.

Usually, though, an "outline" emerges as I'm writing and plundering from my conceptual pile(s) of scattered notes. It takes the form of concept and process notes in my draft to the effect: "write about A here", "this intellectual rogering could use more lube to shore up the shoddy analysis", "theory B in slot Q goes here", "delete this pretentious clap-trap". With respect to this last note, I've started keeping a "dead letter office" section in my drafts. Instead of deleting large swathes of unneeded narrative or half-baked ideas that never went anywhere, I am now moving them into a dustbin at the end where, perhaps at a later date, they can be picked up and used at another time. Intellectual recycling! This paper written with 30% wasted analysis.

I really need to get a portable, waterproof whiteboard for the shower because I swear I come up with some really good ideas and fully-articulated and philosophically consistent arguments that seemed to drop out of my head entirely when I'm drying myself off.

Anyway, after a few days of letting things bounce around in my head, I started turning my scribbled notes into disjointed paragraphs. Paragraphs have grown and multiplied and I've even been able re-arrange things to have some sort of flow. As an added bonus, I've been able to start gently rogering my examples with the theory. (I've been developing a mild theoretical crush on Roland Barthes... specifically his take on mythology... in addition to his signifier-signified-sign junk... and his meditation on the Eiffel Tower).

My overall topic (at the moment) is, vaguely, "monument and mythology of community". I'm looking at "monument" of the unintentional variety, specifically the low-brow and commonplace: things like architectural elements like the porch and places like the corner store and "main street". I'm making the case these unlikely structures turn out to be monuments because of the grander ideals they invoke, or are deliberately intended to invoke. Fun stuff. I'm finally able to start making inroads toward a coherent argument. It helped that I watched some curling--the most theoretically rigorous sport--on CBC before I left today to get the theoretical juices flowing.

Specifically, I'm looking at Celebration, Florida ("the town that Disney built!") and DuPont, WA to draw examples, although I'm very likely going to bring in Leavenworth and University Village from previous academic and informal writings. What with my continuing, it seems, interest in artifice and kitsch, perhaps I am turning into some sort of kitsch scholar. In any case, I'm totally digging on this business of metaphor, allegory, and mythology as it relates to the built environment, especially when it's low-brow, duplicitous, and/or subversive.