Blogosity

Another Match

and this one is reading Digital Fortress, not The DaVinci Code. Is Dan Brown richer than Steven King yet? Maybe I should be writing a thriller...

Am I The Only One

in America who's not read/in the process of reading The DaVinci Code? I'm in the drug-store picking up more distilled water for the CPAP machine, and two women are talking about it behing me in line; I come home and get an email from yet-another-online-dating-service about a potential match, and what does her profile say but that she's reading the DVC? What is is about this book? Yeesh.

I know badger hated it, but as IIRC couldn't put it down. (On the other hand, badger's been in a hatey mood recently--I mean hating The Curse of Chalion is just plain freaky, if you ask me.)

Yeah, I Wish

Which Jhonen Vaquez character are you? By EmReznor.

Outsmarting myself

Lately I've been trying to improve my life by reducing the small annoyances (I've been impressed by recent work of psychologists on what actually makes us happy, as opposed to what we mostly incorrectly predict will make us happy). One of the things that I've found works well for me is not to try to make too many mental notes of little things that I have to remember to do at some future point; instead I do them as soon as they occur to me, and then I can forget about them.

For instance, if when I'm home I get the idea that I want to bring X to work with me tomorrow--instead of telling myself to remember later, and then either forgetting or running around in the morning trying to find X, I just get up from whatever I'm doing and find X and put it in my briefcase. I find my discipline for doing things, whether it's doing the dishes, paying the bills, writing a blog entry, is much better when I act as soon as I get the impulse rather than try to list (particularly mental lists) and time manage. I'm much better at resuming interrupted tasks (particularly ones like most household chores that don't require a state of Flow) than I am at juggling bunches of to-dos.

Obviously, this isn't going to work for a lot of people, but I think the underlying principle--that of trying to objectively assess the way you behave and arrange your habits to go with your strengths and minimize your weaknesses, instead of holding out for some efficient ideal way of doing things that you aspire to but never actually follow--is a good one.

Another example: I pay particular care to always putting stuff down in the same place when I come home. It's not at all that I'm a neat-freak with a place for everything and everything in its place--some of the places that I put things are just plain messy. But I try to make sure that they're the same messy place every time. I get home, and I empty my pockets onto the night stand. My night stand becomes a pile of junk (every once in a while I clean it up when things start falling off it because they're piled too high), but my watch, keys, good pen, and wallet are always on the nightstand. It's been ages since I've spent any time searching for any of them. It's just not a thing that I have to spend any time thinking about any more, nor does it ever cause me any anxiety (searching for misplaced stuff always makes me anxious, even when it's something that it doesn't really matter if I find). Again the point isn't that everybody ought to live the way I do, but that a little bit of thinking about my actual habits let me come up with a way to use just a little extra discipline to smooth out a semi-constant annoyance in my life.

It's not the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but it helps me to get by.

Should I?

Wrestle with the CPAP machine again tonight? I'm still somewhat congested, but now I'm starting to wonder if it's allergies and I'll never really be breathing easily until the spring is over. Maybe if I just stuck with it all night...and if I felt too bad in the morning, call in sick....

Badger's M0M or BAW's M0M

Take your pick

Tightly Wound: Conversations With Grandma

Is there a secret M0M factory where they turn them out? My M0M is probably from the same factory, but since I don't have kids (and exert some effort to minimize the time I spend with her and my nephews together) it's not as evident right away.

Rook has got a blog

major_rook

Yay.

Bwahaha!

Tightly Wound: Ultimate Fighting Championship, Toddler Style

Ahenh. phew. I don't think it sounds like moomin's sport, but both of my nephews could have been contenders.

New Blog

BlogLatin

Odd Dream

I dreamt that badger, rook, and I were participating in a Star Trek LARP at some convention. It was snowing outside the hotel. rook was playing a Klingon (somewhat against type). badger was a Star Fleet captain, and somewhat chip-on-shouldery about being a female captain, even though they are common enough in Star Fleet. Granted we seldom saw one until Janeway. (Plenty of female Admirals, even I think in TOS, but they were all REMF types, not active captains. This was a discussion we had in the dream, btw.) I was some kind of alien, non-Federation, race, I think--I'm a bit hazy on that; also, since I had never LARPed before (true IRL), I was pretty hazy on how things worked and was basically following badger and rook's lead. Our task was to keep safe some secret plans on a data disk (I think this leaked in from the space opera campaign that TwitchMonkey is running in my Sunday night game), which badger and rook put in the hotel-room safe for safekeeping--except they couldn't actually lock the safe, because that would be against the rules since the LARPers couldn't really pick the lock although their characters could in game. Or something.
I remember being snarky about Star Fleet regs, in the fashion I am snarky about most of the shows, taking advantage of my alien/outsider status in the game as well as my noobiness in the LARP. One incident I remember is that somehow rook and badger ended up in a tangle on the floor (both dived over the bed to grab something or other), and my character saying, "If you're going into pon far you two should get a room." Upon which rook indignantly exclaimed "Klingons do not do pon far!"

They Call the Doctor...Weevil

Blogger Dr. Weevil has a new blog,The Oracle, in which he is translating Baltasar Gracián y Morales's Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia into English, day by day, a paragraph at a time.

I admire this kind of project.

Oh That Affluent Rooster!

Probably my favorite song on the Vargas album so far:

El Mariachi: Songs: La Carcel De Cananea

La Carcel De Cananea

Voy a dar un pormenor
De lo que a mi me ha pasado:
Que me han agarrado preso,
Siendo un gallo tan jugado.

Me fui para el Agua Prieta
A ver quien me conocia,
Y a las once de la noche
Me aprehndio la policia.

Me aprehendieron los gendarmes (sharifes)
Al estilo americano:
Como era hombre de delito
Todos con pistola en mano.

Me enviaron a Cananea
Atrevesando la sierra,
No me les pude pintar
Por no conocer la tierra.

Al llegar a Cananea
Alli perdi la esperanza;
Porque alli fui consignado
Al juez de primera instancia.

A otro dia por la manana
Nos raparon la cabeza,
Porque me iba a visitar
El administrador de mesa.

Me sacaron un recibo
De la casa del congreso,
Donde preguntaba el juez:
-Sabe usted por que esta preso?

Yo le conteste muy serio,
Poniendome muy formal:
-No me han de formar un templo
Ni un palacio de cristal

La carcel de Cananea
Se edifico en una mesa,
Y en ella fui procesado
Por causa de mi pobreza.

De tres amigo que tengo
Ninguno me quiere hablar,
Comenzando por el Chango,
El Leoncito y el Caiman.

Despedida no les doy
Porque no la traigo aqui,
Se la deje al Santo Nino
Y al Senor de Mapimi.

Ya con esta me despido
Por las hojas de un granado.
Aqui se acabo el corrido
De este gallo bien jugado...

The Carcel De Cananea

I am going to give a detail
Of which to my it has happened to me:
That they have taken hold to me imprisoned,
Being a rooster so played.

I was myself for the Dark Water
To see who me conocia,
And to eleven at night
Me aprehndio the policia.

They apprehended gendarmes to me (sharifes)
To the American style:
Like he was crime man
All with pistol in hand.

They sent to me to Cananea
Atrevesando the mountain range,
Me I could not paint to them
Not to know the Earth.

When arriving at Cananea
Alli perdi the hope;
Because alli I was briefed
To the judge of first instance.

To another day by the manana
They shaved the head to us,
Because it was going to me to visit
The table administrator.

They removed a receipt to me
Of the house of the congress,
Where the judge asked:
- Know you so that this prisoner?

I answer to him very serious,
Very formal Poniendome:
- they do not have to me to form a temple
Nor a crystal palace

Carcel of Cananea
I build myself in a table,
And in her I was processed
Because of my poverty.

Of three friend that I have
No he wants to speak to me,
Beginning by the Chango,
The Leoncito and the Cayman.

Goodbye I do not give them
Because I do not bring aqui,
Is left it Santo Nino
And to the Senor de Mapimi.

With this I already take leave
By the leaves of a distinguished one.
Aqui I finish the in excess one
Of this played affluent rooster...

As I was saying to badger last night, this level of literal translation isn't so different from the subtitled J-Pop songs in the anime I watch.

Groovin'

I've been groovin' to the Chavela Vargas Coleccion de Oro that I got on badger's recommendation. I understand about two words in ten (although that doesn't stop me from trying make up silly translations), but I'm struck by how utterly unironic the whole thing is. When she sings a sad song, by gum she sobs. There is no cool here, no hip distancing tricks, nothing that smacks of the post-modern (or even of the modern) poseur. How refreshing.

Samson Redux

One thought leads to another, and being reminded of shaggy Samson snoring leads to the verse from one of my favorite albums (Have Moicy, by Moicy band) being stuck in my head:

Them pillars that held me
Busted in half
Now I'm here bleeding
but I still get to laugh Why-hy-hee-hee
Wo-oh, snicker
Why-hy-hee-hee
Wo-oh, snicker

Ork(sl)ut

I just realized that the reason that badger has (literally) ten times as many friends on orkut as I do is that she invites people she meets on orkut to be friends! Seriously, it never occurred to me to try adding someone as a friend unless it was someone who was already a friend IRL. Sometimes I'm so dense it's a wonder that light escapes.

Translating Poetry

Faithful to manga - Tartsville

This thread on translating manga reminded me of one of my favorite examples of translated poetry, even though (as I understand it) it is really an act of substitution. Michael Kandel translated Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad from Polish to English, and in one of the stories a cybernetic bard is built and presented (by a jealous rival of the inventor) with a ridiculously difficult task in constructing a poem. Kandel, rather than trying to translate the wordplay literally, constructed and solved a parallel task:

"A poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter 's'!"


Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

Sick

Home sick today, with a sore throat. Could've gotten some work done, if the extranet client worked, which it doesn't because the automatic update that was supposed to push it down to the laptop when it was in the office failed. Oh well. It's not like I really wanted to work.