Since my blog has been falling short on its promised logomachy lately, I thought I'd rectify that on the cheap by reposting some comments I just offered on an interesting post by lizzard over on Badgerbag, in re a Buddhist nun's comments on the hard to translate Tibetan word shenpa, and lizzard's recent thinking about the poetry translation she's doing--in particular a line of thought that she's following that would lead her more often to leave certain words like "tarotaro" (I think it's a sharp-tailed Ibis, Cecibis oxycerca, although that's not the first definition googling comes up with) instead of domesticizing it as a local bird such as mockingbird. It may well be that lizzard is the only person in the world regularly reading this blog, which would make this redundant--on the other hand, what better reason for not spending a lot of effort rewriting these into stand-alone pieces?
Google knows. Or at least, I presume that's how blogger is selecting the ads that show up in the BlogSpot banner. It's interesting to see what ads it thinks are relevant based on the current content. Today it's flipping between web and RSS related stuff (and I probably just made it more likely by typing that) and Do Not Call related stuff (ditto). What's surprising, though, is when you get a "My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay" moment: an ad shows up for something that makes you wonder how the hell you triggered it. For instance, a few days ago it was an ad for what turned out to be an Objectivist site--but I know I've never written the word "Objectivism" in this blog until now...and I don't see the relationship to what I was saying about X2. Maybe my mention of the webcomic "Something Positive"?
BTW, my Tivo does not think I'm gay...it thinks I'm a nine-year old boy.
So, what brought on this rant? Well, besides the fact that it's been worrying me lately in several contexts, the proximate cause is this blogger who seems like quite a smart person in other respects, but argues that the National Do Not Call list is useless because a) it might be hackable, in the sense that it doesn't seem to have safeguards yet against people unregistering a phone number that doesn't belong to them and b) "Bottom line, you won't get calls from small businesses, but them who have the tall dollars will still bother you." There are so many things wrong with these it's hard to know where to begin, which makes it a perfect example of cynicism inducing functional stupidity. Rather than wasting a lot of time dissecting it, I'll just leave it at two obvious questions: Is any telemarketer really going to find it economically viable to deliberately and fraudelently target people who've troubled put themselves on a Do Not Call list? and Aside from telephone companies (which are covered by this, thanks to the FCC vote) do you get a lot of marketing calls from "tall dollars" companies? I know I don't. Sometimes it seems the whole point of cynicism is a pig-headed refusal to accept the wisdom of Admiral Gorshkov's maxim: Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
The national do not call list is now open for registration; sign up before August 31st and most telemarketers will have to stop calling you after Oct. 1st. (Charities, political organizations, and businesses with which you have a "pre-existing relationship" are exempted, but that's pretty much to be expected: the first two are certainly freedom of speech issues, and the last prevents you from, say, filing a complaint against the utilities company when they call you to warn you that they're shutting off your service for non-payment....) The state where I live has had one for a year or so now, and it's worked wonders for me; I've gone from two or three telemarketer calls per day to one every couple of weeks, and that one usually something like a charity that I already contribute to. Originally FCC regulated companies (airlines, banks, etc.) were also going to be exempt, but the FCC just voted 5-0 to include them, so woo-hoo!
I've been playing a lot of Ratchet and Clank (for the PS2) lately; it's by the studio that did all but the last Spyro the Dragon game, and like Spyro the Dragon it hits the sweet spot for me between difficult enough to be interesting, but easy enough not to be frustrating. Since I'm not a twitch-monkey like my friend Doug, that's a fairly narrow range. Most action games, for instance, and all first-person shooters that I've tried, are simply too hard for me to get anywhere. Most of the time I favor turn-based RPGs, where my lack of reflexes doesn't detract from the experience, and my patience and puzzle-solving abilities are rewarded. Still, when an action game manages to hit that sweet spot, it can suck me right in; I must have played about four hours of Ratchet and Clank on Sunday.
The premise of R&C is pretty simple: you're Ratchet, a furry mechanically inclined humanoid who's been coopted by a little robot named Clank into trying to save a whole bunch of planets from the depredations of an evil megacorp (as if there's ever any other kind) that's stealing chunks of them to build a new homeworld. Along the way you pick up bunches of gadgets that let you shoot, bomb, flame, hoverboard, glide, suck up and release bodies of water (!), taunt your enemies, and so forth. Most of the tactics in the game consist of figuring out how best to use your available gadgetry to accomplish your missions. (I'm told that if you're good enough at dodging and button mashing, you can actually do most of the game just hitting things with your basic wrench, but that's not an option for me.) One of the things I really appreciate is that, unlike similar games, there's no one way to solve the various problems, so it's not just a matter of trying the various gadgets until you find the right one for the task: you can actually approach things differently based on your style of play. For instance, I get a lot of mileage out of the sniper mode of my blaster, and the Taunter which can lure enemies into obstacles. It's a lot of fun.
I'm either coming down with a summer cold, or my allergies have kicked into high gear, but I'm all stuffed-up, sneezing, and headachy. At this rate, I'm not sure I'm going to make it to the end of the workday; I may have to bag it and go home to lie down.
I've added an RSS feed to this blog; look for the XML link to the right. Unfortunately, I've had to abandon my little dropcap at the beginning, because the php page that creates the RSS gets confused by the SPAN. I may fix that at some point, if I can be bothered to learn enough php...By the way, if you're looking for a good, minimalistic, free RSS-feed reader and you happen to be running Windows you could do a lot worse than Effbot News, a Python-based RSS reader. (Don't worry, you don't need to have Python installed: the download comes with enough of the core Python executable to run...and if you do have Python, installing it won't interfere with your regular Python installation.)
The date has taken place, and overall things went well. We went to a brewpub and had dinner and chatted. I'm not really sure that she's intellectual enough for me, but she wants to see me again so I'll probably give it another go. An example of what I mean by not intellectual enough is this: We were talking about philosophy (because she was asking about my interests), and she brought up that she had read a book, the name of the author of which she couldn't remember; after she described a little about it, I guessed that it was probably Epictetus the Stoic. I was pretty interested by this, but when I tried to follow up by asking what she thought of it, she more or less changed the subject. This happened a couple of times during the evening; just when I thought the conversation was going to get deeper, she veered towards more conventional small talk. Maybe she harbors passion for the lively intellectual conversation, but reins it in because a lot of people are turned off by it....but I'm not counting on it. She seemed to like me, though.
If the characters of Something Positive blogged, would the result be Plain Layne? Something like it, anyway.
I have a date tomorrow night. Travellers might want to be on the lookout for airborne swine. More news as it develops.
And while we're on the topic of X2, has anyone besides me even noticed that John/Pyro's line to Bobby/Iceman's father about it being the father's fault because mutant genes always come from the father can't possibly be true unless DNA and chromosomes work a whole different way in the X-Men universe (more than just certain genes grant superpowers)? It's a funny moment, and it doesn't really detract from my suspension of disbelief, but I thought it was interesting that as far as I can tell nobody picked up on this, even among my science-geeky friends (of course most of them are physicists and mathematicians, not biologists).
BTW, in case the reason isn't clear it's as follows: Females have two X chromosomes, and get one each from their fathers and mothers; males have an X and a Y, and so the Y must come from the father. So while it would be possible for the "X-factor" that causes one to be a mutant to be found only on the Y, and so only in males, if it's found in females it must be present on the X at least some of the time, and therefor inheritable from a female carrier of the X-factor. We know there are plenty of female mutants, so we do know it occurs on the X (it may also occur on the Y, but we don't actually know that). But if it's present on the X, it could have come from either the father or the mother for a female mutant, and must have come from the mother for a male mutant.
In Bobby Drake's case, we don't know the X-factor is on the X or the Y, but if it came from his father we'd need some explanation of why it didn't manifest in his father or his brother. On the other hand, if it came from his mother it could have been recessive and on that part of the chromosome that isn't paired against anything on the Y (which is shorter) just as real-world traits like color-blindness and hemophilia are--so his mother wouldn't express it (recessive) and his brother wouldn't have it (50-50 whether an egg has the X-factor or its Non-X-factor pair). Of course, if the X-factor is such a sex-linked recessive, you'd expect more male mutants than female mutants, which doesn't seem to be the case, but you might get around that by supposing there is more than one X-factor gene and not all are recessive. Another possible explanation is that the X-factor is carried by mitochondrial DNA--but everyone gets all their mitochondria from their mother alone. So Pyro was just messin' with Dad.
Jhk and Lizzard both have interesting posts about X2 on Badgerbag, although I don't really agree with either. X-Men has always been a parable about alienation and minority status, not gender and "masculine identity" and to me analysis along the latter lines is more than a bit strained. For one thing, although jhk makes much of Stryker's patriarchy (as father of Jason), and something of Magneto's (as a father-figure for Pyro), he completely ignores the third patriarch of the movie: Professor X. Frankly it's hard for me to see a movie about the conflict between three patriarchs and their "children" and ideologies as a movie which "...finds fault with the traditional patriarchal identity, and demands the search for a new one" just because two of them are villains.
Read or Die! R.O.D has just rocketed to the top, or nearly, of my favorite anime. Yomiko Readman is a biblioholic substitute teacher, who also happens to be a part-time super agent known as "The Paper" working for an organization called The Library. Her super-power: she can control paper, and make it do almost anything.
I'm finally having some success on the match.com front. Yesterday I tried picking five likely seeming candidates and emailed them, trying hard not to overthink anything...and I've already got positive replies from my two favorite picks: one is a librarian, the other an anime fan. (I suspect this shows that even in online dating, it's still the man who has to make the first move.) I'm trying not to get my hopes too high, but it looks like I'll at least get a couple of dates out of this.
I'm an Extreme Geek ( 57.39645%), according to The Geek Test, just edging out Lizzard of Badgerbag. Of course, being an Extreme Geek means that you recognize the difference between accuracy and precision, so I can't really crow....
Check out The Flowers of Evil: Ask Charles Baudelaire.
Hey, sign these petitions: Reclaim the Public Domain and Reclaim Copyright Law. They may not help, but they can't hurt. Unless you're the kind of person who thinks that megacorporations owning all ideas in perpetuity--except the ones that they don't care about which nobody will be able to republish because it's impossible to find who has the rights--is a good thing. (You can read the reasoned arguments about the current state of copyright and its forseeable future at Eff.org if you think I'm exaggerating.)
I got back from sunny SD last night, and over all the trip went well; I would have had a blast if it hadn't been for RI's insufferable significant other. I ended up spending the last night in a hotel, because I just couldn't stand to be under the same roof with her another night--although what I told RI was that the air-mattress wasn't hard enough for my back and since whatserface had demanded that we both be out of the house before eight AM (she had to wait for the carpet-guy to show up between 8 and noon, and waiting around obviously required that she not be distracted by other people in the house.) it would be easier for me to take a hotel near the airport. I think he suspected my real issue, but while I don't object to a polite lie, I'm not happy enough to help her treat him shabbily to lie convincingly.
The capper was this little incident, although it's pretty much of a piece with her general behavior:
We were getting ready to go somewhere about ten minutes away that we were supposed to be at six. At 5:50, as RI is dressing, whatserface says she'll go on ahead, and we can follow in a cab. RI nixes that plan, and we leave at 5:55. All the way there she sniped at him:
You knew we have to be there at six, if you just had a little bit of kindness, a little courtesy you could have started getting ready earlier and then you wouldn't have been late. Now we're not going to be there on time, and nobody knows where to put anything. I'm the only one that knows. Just a little kindness is all I'm asking for, but you have to make me be the bitch.
Over and over, variations on this theme, while RI tried to tell her relax, we're not going to be late, it's going to be all right, this isn't the time to talk about it, etc. Eventually he started raising his voice--she wouldn't even pause to let him speak--but it was still just I wasn't late, we'll be fine, and so on, 'til I wanted to smack him.
Me, I'm cringing in the back seat, wishing I were rude enough to ask them to let me off so they could continue their psychodrama in private; of course, my personal belief is that would have ruined part of the point for her. We arrive at about eight past six; we're the second ones in the parking lot. Whatserface's daughter and grand-daughters are just getting out of the other car.
The occasion of this pleasant little family scene? RI's fortieth birthday party.