Temp

Yes, “Occupy Wall Street” is on my mind.  Yes, that’s why I selected these lyrics today.

½ Full

Climbing over mountains
Floating out on the sea
Far from lights of a city
The elements they speak to me

Whispering that life
Existed long before greed
Balancing the world
On its knee

Don’t see some men as half empty
See them half full of shit
Thinking that we’re all but slaves

There ain’t gonna be
No middle anymore
It’s been said before

The haves be having more
Yet still bored

Won’t someone save?
Won’t someone save the world?

I have a blog feature that’s had thirty instances?  Wow.  I’m choosing Severed Hand this week — an ode to psychotropics.  “What is human, what is more?  I’ll answer this when I get home.”

Severed Hand

Big man stands behind an open door
Said, “Leave your lady on the cement floor.”
“Got some kicks, want to take a ride?”
I said, “Yeah!”
“Take your pick, leave yourself behind.”
I said, “Yeah!”

I’ve no fear but for falling down
So look out below!  I am falling now!
Oh please understand I just need, my friend,
A way — a way — a way home

Tried to walk, found a severed hand
Recognized it from the wedding band
Said “It’s ok, do you want some more?”
I said, “Yeah!”
“You’ll see dragons after 3 or 4.”
I said, “Yeah!”

“Understand I’m not falling down,”
I said.  “Look around, the room’s taller now”
I can’t close my eyes, ’cause I see the sound in waves –
In waves — lets me stay calm

If I don’t lose control
Explore and not explode
A preternatural other plane
With the power to maintain

Like a tear in all we know
Once dissolved we are free to grow
What is human, what is more?
I’ll answer this when I get home

“And the meanings that get left behind.  All the innocents lost at one time.  We’re all different behind the eyes.
There’s no need to hide.”  Marvelous song.

I Am Mine

The selfish, they are all standing in line
Faithing and hoping to buy themselves time
Me, I figure as each breath goes by
I only own my mind

The North is to South what the clock is to time
There’s east and there’s west and there’s everywhere life
I know I was born and I know that I’ll die
The in between is mine
I am mine

And the feeling, it gets left behind
All the innocence lost at one time
Significant, behind the eyes
There’s no need to hide
We’re safe tonight

The ocean is full ’cause everyone’s crying
The full moon is looking for friends at high tide
The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied
I only know my mind
I am mine

And the meaning, it gets left behind
All the innocents lost at one time
Significant, behind the eyes
There’s no need to hide
We’re safe tonight

And the feelings that get left behind
All the innocents broken with lies
Significance, between the lines
(We may need to hide)

And the meanings that get left behind
All the innocents lost at one time
We’re all different behind the eyes
There’s no need to hide

Readers know I obsess about songs from time to time.  And, oh man am I obsessing over “Miles Away” by The Corin Tucker Band, from 1,000 Years.  The whole album is stunning, but this song is transcendent.

Miles Away

New moon peeking through
Now the sky is brand new
Feel it on my skin, is it night or noon?
It’s been the blackest night for quite some time
Since my love left with that heart of mine
It kept on ticking, I don’t know why

(Chorus:)
Now this rock bottom hurt has a whole new feel
It feels like the moon since I saw you here
And the light that comes from your face
Brightens this place
Tell me who needs a sun when it goes away?
It sets on me every single day

Darlin’, I’ll get my light from a star who is miles away

If I look too long will I lose my place?
I get caught staring into space
You see, my dear, there’s much I’d like to erase
It’s later now, my eyes adjust
Ooh, what a pretty boy he was
Pretty is as pretty does

(chorus x 3)

You thought I had stopped this feature, huh?  Well, I have.  I’ve just had these lyrics cycling in my mind for hours — about how myth can control us — and how we can reclaim the notion of faithfulness, as faith in our loved ones.

Faithful

Plaque on the wall says that no one’s slept here
It’s rare to come upon a bridge that has not been around
Or been stepped on
Whatever the notions we laced in our prayers,
The man upstairs is used to all of this noise
I’m through with screaming

And echoes nobody hears, it goes, it goes, it goes
Like echoes nobody hears, it goes, it goes, it goes
We’re faithful, we all believe, we all believe it (4x)

And echoes nobody hears, it goes, it goes, it goes (2x)
We’re faithful, we all believe, we all believe it (3x)
So faithful, we all believe, we all believe it

Myth is belief in the game,
Controls that keep us in a box of fear
We never listen
Voice inside so drowned out, drowned
You are, you are, you are everything
And everything is you
Me, you, you, me, it’s all related
What’s a boy to do?
Just be darling and I will be too  –
Faithful to you

All Vedder Tuesday

I love this song’s lyrics: Socially conscious; empowering; bitterly satirical at points.  The music is fantastic, too.  Enjoy.

Song of Choice

Early every year the seeds are growing
Unseen, unheard, they lie beneath the ground
Would you know before the leaves are showing
That with weeds all your garden will abound?

If you close your eyes, stop your ears
Hold your mouth, how can you know?
The seeds you cannot see may not be there
The seeds you cannot hear may never grow

In January you’ve still got the choice
You can cut the weeds before they start to bud
If you leave them to grow higher, they’ll silence your voice
And in December you may pay with your blood

Close your eyes, stop your ears
Close your mouth and take it slow
Let others take the lead and you bring up the rear
And later you can say you didn’t know

Every day another vulture takes flight
There’s another danger born every morning
In the darkness of your blindness the beast will learn to bite
How can you fight if you can’t recognize a warning?

Close your eyes, stop your ears
Close your mouth and then you know
Let others take the lead and you bring up the rear
And later you can say you didn’t know

Today you may earn a living wage
Tomorrow you may be on the dole
Though there’s millions going hungry, you needn’t disengage
For it’s them not you that’s fallen in the hole

It’s all right for you if you run with the pack
It’s all right if you agree with all they do
If the Fascist Party’s slowly climbing back
It’s not here yet, so what’s it got to do with you?

The weeds are all around us and they’re growing
It will soon be too late for the knife
If you leave them on the wind that around the world is blowing
You may pay for your silence with your life

Close your eyes, stop your ears
Close your mouth, they’re never there
And if it happens here, they’ll never come for you
Because they’ll know you really didn’t care

You know what’s great?  Activist music.  Especially when it’s screaming heavy metal.

Like this track from Los Angeles band System of a Down.  Here are the lyrics:

Prison Song

They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison

Following the rights movements
You clamped down with your iron fists.
Drugs became conveniently
Available for all the kids.
Following the rights movements
You clamped down with your iron fists.
Drugs became conveniently
Available for all the kids.

I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch,
Right here in Hollywood

Nearly 2 million Americans are incarcerated
In the prison system of the U.S.

They’re trying to build a prison

They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
For you and me to live in.
Another prison system
Another prison system
Another prison system

Minor drug offenders fill your prisons
You don’t even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars
Against the new non-rich,
Minor drug offenders fill your prisons
You don’t even flinch
All our taxes paying for your wars
Against the new non-rich

I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch,
Right here in Hollywood

The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system), has doubled since 1985

They’re trying to build a prison

They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
Another prison system
Another prison system
Another prison system
For you and me, you and me

They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
For you and me
Oh baby, you and me

All research and successful drug policy shows
That treatment should be increased,
And law enforcement decreased
While abolishing mandatory minimum sentences.
All research and successful drug policy shows
That treatment should be increased
And law enforcement decreased
While abolishing mandatory minimum sentences.

Utilizing drugs to pay for secret wars around the world,
Drugs are now your global policy,
Now you police the globe.

I buy my crack, my smack, my bitch,
Right here in Hollywood

Drug money is used to rig elections
And train brutal corporate-sponsored
Dictators around the world.

They’re trying to build a prison

They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
They’re trying to build a prison
For you and me to live in.
Another prison system
Another prison system
Another prison system
For you and me
They’re trying to build a prison,
They’re trying to build a prison,
They’re trying to build a prison,
For you and me.
Oh baby, you and me!

Do you know comedian/musician/philosopher Tim Minchin?  If you do, you will be chiding me for taking so long to discover him.  If not, drop everything.  Watch at least a couple of these.

Maybe start here?

Then maybe move on to an eco-awareness song (that takes the piss out of activist rock stars)?

And a song about “Prejudice, the language of prejudice, and the power of the language of prejudice”, with regard to that one taboo word:

A ten minute jazz-backed beat poem about critical thinking?  (No, trust me, watch this):

And round it out with an immensely touching piece that has immediately become my favorite Christmas song.  Of all time.

While in the car with my mom, Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter” comes on my iPod:

Mom:  Boy, does this take me back!  Driving you or your [younger] brother around in high school!

Joshua:  It’s old enough to have been me.  It was released as a B-side in 1992.

M:  {amazed:} A B-side?!  What the hell was the A-side?!

J:  “Jeremy”.

M:  {ponders:} Oh, yeah, OK.  I can see that.

How cool is it that my mom can have this conversation?

Movie buffs want to help me brainstorm? What songs have directors ruined for you by playing over a horrific event?

Usually it only hits me when talented directors do this; they create images seared into my mind that are evoked every subsequent time I hear the song.

Off the top of my head: “Love Hurts”, as a sheriff grieves over his step-daughter, shot by police; Johnny Mathis’s “Wonderful, Wonderful”, which accompanies deformed brothers as they beat a policeman and his wife to death in their home; “The Hokey Pokey”, played while a possessed doll tries to kill a girl’s mother; and (obviously) Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle”, which accompanies one of the most-disturbing torture scenes of the ’90s (again of a cop — what’s with the recurrent police theme in these scenes?)

Contributions?

My brother (a regular contributor here) has written a surreal humorous poem that may-or-may-not be entitled “A Poem”.  It begins:

I

did

not

write

this

poem

I

compiled

it

It really is great.  Check it out.

I just listened to Candlebox’s song “Sometimes” — for some reason a common title for songs by grunge and alternative bands — and forgot how much I loved the lyrics.  Here’s an excerpt:

Somehow we’ll find a way
We’ll paste it back together
These ripped out pages of old coloring books
Where your gold is silver, my blue is gray
Its all held together by cellophane tape

But we change directions, we watch the tides
And we borrow too much
We form restrictions, we form lines
And we separate you from me

But sometimes — sometimes we carry more weight than we own
Oh, but sometimes — sometimes goes on and on and on and on

Marvelous.

OK, you (a collective proper subset) have asked for it: here is a sneak peek at a scene from my in-progress SF novel.

The assassin didn’t hear anything until Zero spoke.

“Squire?” said Zero.  The assassin spun, as he had a few minutes before, but without pulling the trigger this time.  He wore a fashionable and semiformal orange denim kilt and a black rugby shirt, fringed in hyperwhite.  A pea-soup duster, which until recently had hidden a belt with matching hip-holsters, was swept back.  He was shod in the trendy faux-bare-feet style, and the weapon from his right-side holster was in his hand, pointed at the middle of Zero’s chest.  Zero’s weapon was pointed at the assassin’s face.

“Easy,” said Zero.  “You don’t want to fire that thing.  What’s your name?”

The assassin barked a laugh.

“You’re Terran,” said Zero.  “Male, maybe twenty-five.  You’ve been captured on camera.  They will have looked up your name by now.  I just don’t happen to know it.  Tell me, and I will have something to call you other than Squire or Assassin.”

The assassin equivocated momentarily.  “Seamus,” he said.  “You can call me Seamus.”

“Good, that’s a start.  Seamus.  Thank you.  Now, if you would, please put that on the floor and slide it over to me with your foot.”

Seamus laughed again, a harsh sound like flint striking steel.  “You would like that, no?”

“Yes, I would,” said Zero.  “But not for the reason you think.  Because I abhor killing.”  Zero took a step forward.

“Stop!  I have a gun!” snapped Seamus.

Zero’s head shook minutely, back and forth.  “No, Squire,” he said.  “What you have is a sidearm, if you are military.  A pistol if you are an enthusiast, a weapon if you are an engineer.  You would call it a gun only if you just purchased it last week.  You slipped it through some of the most sophisticated detection screens on this planet.  How did you do that?”

Seamus chuckled.

“That’s OK,” said Zero.  “I’ll guess.  What you have is a Pulsar-7 corundum pistol.  Recent manufacture — maybe this Rat.  Last Pig at the earliest.  Right so far?”

Seamus’s face remained impassive.

“OK.  It’s all ceramic — that’s how you got it into the IPA Parliamentary room.  Room-temperature superconducting ceramic, which is expensive.  From the charred parliamentarians around us –” Zero gestured with his head without shifting his gaze “– you just pulled the trigger and pirouetted.  That means a highly illegal full-automatic modification.  Full-automatic means you wouldn’t have a gnat’s chance of bringing that through a CQA post, even here on Calymon.  Your pirouette probably took at least five seconds.  Maybe six.  That means liquid oxygen-cooled.  I’m still right.”  The last was a statement more than a question.  “As for padparadscha….”

Seamus blinked twice, then tried to hide it retroactively.

“Yeah.  Padparadscha.  You don’t know that word.”  Statement.  “I wasn’t sure until I saw your reaction.  The best padparadscha is from your corner, on Terra.  The Subcontinent.  Padparadscha is corundum.  A beautiful pink-orange.  Great for jewelry, better for lasers, like the weapon in your hand.  You could have bought some of the stone at home.  But you didn’t.  Do you know what that means?”  He didn’t wait for a response.  “It means,” he said, slowly moving his left hand to the collar of his tunic and pulling it down.  “I wore the right color shirt.”  Under his loose tunic lay a form-fitted mailshirt, ashen spidersilk over blood-red ruby.

Seamus’s hand began to tremble the slightest bit.

“Steady,” said Zero.  “Keep your hand steady.  I’m not here to scare you.  I’m here to educate you.  For instance: if you were to calculate the absolute worst place in the Association to commit a mass assassination this week, you couldn’t have chosen better.  You are in the city of Noki.  So, Noki sheriffs.  Province of Ellssiss.  So, Ellssiss marshals.  On Calymon, but at an interplanetary event, so you have both Interior and Exterior Calymonian intelligence services with jurisdiction.  This is an ad hoc Parliamentary session.  Every single attending delegation has native-soil claims to this meeting hall, and they all brought security.  Plus Parliamentary police.  And why are they here?  To discuss the Flaro ‘problem’.  That means that, begrudgingly, both sher and resh Flaronians have the right to carry arms in this hall.  If all the first part of the list wasn’t enough to scare you, the Flaronian bit should.”

Seamus’s hand hadn’t stopped trembling.  After a pause: “Which are you?”

“Which am I?  No.  I’m just a weapons enthusiast.  I like that pistol in your hand.  I like mine more.”

Seamus looked incredulous.  “That?”

“Yes,” said Zero.  “This.”  He slowly rolled it first clockwise, then anticlockwise, letting Seamus see it without moving his aim from between Seamus’s eyes.  “Yes, I know it’s old.  An antique.  A needler-railgun.  Magnetic coils accelerate iron spikes at Mach-several.  This one has a mixed magazine: it can fire four-nought needles — that’s finer than a sable’s hair — up to 6-go bolts, which are thick enough to hammer into teak wood.  It’s an antique, as I said, and it had an antique stabilizing computer in it.  But I removed it.”

Seamus’s hand began to steady as his mouth began to develop a sneer.

“I’m not done,” said Zero.  “I removed it because it would get in the way.  I can control my aim by one two-thousandth of a degree.  That is more than accurate enough to perforate the three dots of an ellipsis on a printed page at a hundred meters.  Your pistol’s computer couldn’t get within two orders of magnitude of that, let alone this one’s old computer.”  He saw the look of naked disbelief on Seamus’s face.  “Oh, you bet your life,” he said with a fleeting grin.  “Squire Seamus, my liege.  Put your weapon on the…”

Seamus’s forefinger depressed the trigger pad.  The biometer measured the patterns of the nerve running through his finger, more individual than any retina print, in microseconds.  With a scream, Seamus jerked his hand, moving the focus of the beam up toward Zero’s face.

Zero had a moment to smell the dusty scorched flax of his tunic and the slightly metallic char of the spidersilk, but he had been right about the color of the ruby: the corundum reflected most of the energy of the beam, scattering it harmlessly, the little that was absorbed feeling like a matchstick dragged upwards along his sternum.

With a fluid snap of his arm, his eyes still locked on Seamus’s face, his needler moved down and to the left, the air snapped with a whip-crack, and the aim of the needler returned to between Seamus’s eyes.

Just at the top of Zero’s mailshirt, the laser beam stopped moving, stopped burning, and a fraction of a second later Seamus’s shriek of rage turned into a howl of disbelief as his nerves informed his brain of what had happened.  Seamus gazed wildly at his wrist, thrashing his arm from the elbow, trying to move his curled digits, no more responsive than the trigger pad had become when the nerves through his finger had stopped transmitting.

“That,” said Zero quietly, firmly, “was a three-nought needle.  I clipped the back seam of the O2 tank in your pistol.  What you fail to feel in your wrist and hand is what it doesn’t feel like when your carpal nerve is suddenly frozen.  If I call for help now, Squire –” Zero’s expression bore a sadness Seamus could not understand “– the doctors can save the rest of your arm.  Reach for your other pistol with your left hand, and the next bolt severs your corpus callosum.  My Squire, my liege, my master,” said Zero, “I do not want that any more than you do.  On the ground, if it pleases you.  Now.”

(Unlike the rest of this site, this content is copyrighted All Rights Reserved.  See here for details of the mcgees.org content license.)

I’ll add this to my short story from when I was 15 and my poem from when I was 18.  We were given the (brilliant) assignment in class to update a nursery rhyme.  This was such a good idea for whoever put it together — the teacher, or if it was on state curriculum or something.  I was assigned “Jack and Jill”.

Jack and Jill (updated)

Jack and Jill drove up the hill and hit another commuter
Jack jumped out and hopped about and fell on his Apple computer
A cop was hailed and Jack was jailed and this was the final decision
For when he struck that Nissan truck he caused a four-car collision

(This is probably either a good argument for why you would have wanted to know me at age 11 or a good argument why you would not have.  Not sure.)

There’s an odd phenomenon in which one collecting field will have some things much more cheaply than in other fields, and some things much more expensively.  Here are some ideas for using other types of stores, or other collecting fields’ supplies, to help with stamp collecting, sorting, and shipping.  There are of course converse cases, but  those belong in other posts. 

Trading cards

• Padded 3-ring binders are much cheaper in trading card collecting than in stamp collecting, and sometimes even cheaper than non-padded ones from the office center.  They’re great if you don’t mind a logo on the front (most have one) — or those can be easily covered with a label.
• “Toploaders” — hard cases — are cheap and great for inserting a stamp or small pane or cutout into to mail cheaply, and are thin enough that they never get tampered with in customs.  These are under 15¢ apiece.  Look for these at Amazon.
• “Penny sleeves” — thin archival plastic sleeves to securely hold a trading card —  are crystal clear (you can easily scan through them, for instance) and are great for stamps.  They don’t seal like most stamp bags do, but they are super-cheap (about $1 for 100 — it’s not just a clever nickname!)  One can fold them over and hold them securely with sticky tape.  Make sure to fold them — you don’t want stamps sliding up and touching tape adhesive!  Here are some at Amazon.

Comics

• Comic “Bags & Boards” have lots of uses.  Put a backing board into the mylar sleeve, slide a stamp sheet in front of it, fold the flap over and seal it.  A “Current Comic” size cut into thirds fits perfectly into a #6¾ envelope; therefore they can be used to stiffen covers sent for first-day servicing or can stiffen FDC-size polybags and glassines.  The bags themselves can hold panes.  These are around 9¢ apiece for a pair of bag and board.  Here are some at Amazon.

Office Supply Stores

• Letter filing and storage boxes are frequently much less expensive at office supply houses than through stamp supply mail-order houses.  If you buy your envelopes in bulk, keep the boxes and store (a smaller number of) full envelopes inside.  The cardboard will almost certainly be non-archival even if the envelopes are — line them or make sure your envelopes are in archival plastic.

Craft Stores

• “Archival mist” — an aerosol can or pump bottle/can full of alkaline fluid to deter yellowing of acid paper — can be a tenth of the cost at a craft store compared to stamp supplies.  This is easier to get in a walk-in store than by mail order, too, because some have shipping restrictions.

Any other ideas for cost savings in philately?  Add them as you like!

Really bad insomnia past few days.  So I’m taking the time to do a bunch of work on the site.

Tonight I revamped my stamp offers page.  It’s now basically a “What I collect, or used to collect before it was all stolen” page, due to lack of funds.

Enjoy!

I collect Machin stamps — the long-running series of renderings of a plaster bust of the head of Queen Elizabeth II.  If you’ve received any mail from the UK since 1967, you are likely to have seen them.  This picture of the Queen — printed in various fashions after a bust sculpted by the late Arnold Machin — is history’s most-reproduced image (in print), with billions that have run off the presses.

This is the picture on Wikipedia:

I collect examples with 22m circular date stamps — the “cancels” — situated squarely on the stamp and clearly readable.  But I set aside other ones that catch my eye.

And this one did catch my eye:

Isn’t that cool?!  I’m working on a Machin album right now — designing specialized album pages to print from my computer.  This image will be reproduced on the album cover, and the actual stamp will appear on the first page.

I plan on a set of pages on this site on the topic of collecting postmarks on Machins, that will have a literature review — if you are a stamp collector or just an interested person, please reply with any suggestions of what else to include.  But until then, I’ll give links to what I consider the best current printed references:

The site last.fm allows one to “scrobble” (make a record of) a play of a song on one’s music player.  I had to reset my plays a year ago due to scrobbling errors — many tracks were being wildly duplicated.  Now I have another year’s worth of data.  Top 15 artists over the past year, in descending order:

This leads me to two conclusions: (1) I love data mining and (2) my musical tastes are absurdly predictable and haven’t changed all that much over the last ~20 years.

Here’s a wee sampler I put together for you:

I’m watching the pilot of the program ReGenesis.  Crack team of scientists.  Pretty formulaic so far, but interesting characters.

So, there’s reasonably good setup for exposition, and the main character (a molecular biologist) says “OK, Virology 101:  Viruses are very small.  They’re about a millionth of an inch across.  If this room were a cell, a virus would be a pinprick.”

Wait, what?  BOTEC time.  How big is a ‘pinprick’?  I’d say about a tenth of a millimeter.  That means there are 10,000 in a meter, and maybe 80,000 across the room they’re in.  So if a virus is a millionth of an inch across, then by this scale a cell is between an eighth and a 16th of an inch across.  Which it’s not.  A cell’s about 10 microns (1 × 10^-5m) across: off by a factor of 200.

OK, so say we keep the scale.  Divide the cell width by 80,000.  That would make a virus 1 × 10^-10m across.  Which it’s not.  They’re talking about Poxviridae, which is about 2 × 10^-7m across: off by a factor of 500.

So, what’s the actual scale?  A human cell is roughly 50 times the width of a pox virion.  So if they’re in a room 8m across, rather than a pinprick, it’s about six inches across.  The difference between the ratio of six inches to the room and a pinprick is about 2000.

Am I making too big a deal out of this?  Maybe.  But it’s a mystery show.  Presumably, we’re supposed to potentially figure it out while they’re working on it.  Or else, at least have it plausible at the end.

If you’re unconvinced, imagine a traditional detective show.  Someone is talking about how fast a car could have fled the scene of a crime.  But instead of saying “The max speed of a Toyota is about 100mph”, they say “The max speed of a Toyota is about Mach 200″ (that’s about ten times the highest velocity the space shuttle reaches as it goes into orbit).  Or instead of “Just a drop of this poison is enough to kill a man — he wouldn’t have noticed it in his coffee”, they say “Just half a cup of this poison is enough to kill a man”.  Would that be fun in a show?  No, right?

Or let’s say there were a book that some people wanted to put into a science classroom, that instead of saying the Earth was 4½ billion years old, was off by a factor of 2000, and said the Earth was only 2¼ million years old.  That’d suck, right?  But that one’s silly.  Certainly no American would trust a book that said the Earth was as preposterously young as two million years old, right?!  Good thing!

I have converted everything in the Single Malts Pages from static HTML files to the content management system.  Many of them are quaint snapshots in time of my reviews from when I was much less experienced.  Some generated awesome flames, examples of which can be found in the entries for Loch Dhu and Johnnie Walker Green Label.

If you take a look and find any errors, please let me know.

I found a short story I wrote, longhand, when I was fifteen years old.

Rex woke me this morning.  One moment I was asleep, dreaming that a crate of oranges had just been delivered to my door, and the next moment I was awakened by friendly snorts and whines coming from the speaker on my bedside table.

Rex is my dog.  Actually, Rex is a kind of hybrid of a computer dog and a Rolodex.  I programmed Rex in 72 hours straight.  About thirty hours of it was the actual skeleton of the program, and the rest getting Rex’s snorts and whines right.  I did it, finally.  It took me 42 hours, but I console myself with the fact that it was the 42 hours at the end of the programming rather than the beginning, and that about three hours into the snorting lessons my coffee machine broke down.

I got out of bed, cautiously, and tiptoed across the collection of coffee mugs that had accumulated on the carpet of my bedroom, to the bathroom first, then to the hall closet (this was a mistake; I am not a morning person), then to the kitchen.

I walked up to the counter and opened my high-use drawer.  It contains my keyboard, my pizza roller, my coffee filters, a box of pens, and my laser pistol.

I buy my pens from my baker.  He sells donuts by the “baker’s dozen” (13) and pens by the “baker’s gross”.  I get 156 pens in a box.  This is my baker’s logic.

He maintains that because a gross is a dozen dozen, a baker’s gross should be a dozen baker’s dozen.  I say that a baker’s gross should be 169 pens: a baker’s dozen baker’s dozen.  I still buy my pens from him, though.  My baker’s pens are cheaper than their office-supply counterpart, and I am in the habit of finding myself needing a loaf of cornmeal hearth bread more frequently than finding myself in need of a telephone answering machine.  After all, people stopped using telephones a hundred years ago.

My laser pistol qualifies as a high-use item due to the large number of people I have over for a cup of coffee and the corresponding number of people who have never seen a Smith & Wesson Mark VII Aility [sic] sidearm.  I traded my car for it at last month’s community swap meet.  It doesn’t work.  Neither did my car.

I removed my last pen from the drawer.  This was OK: I could use some more cornbread.  Four loaves.  I’ve gotten this down to a fine science: I go through 156 pens for every four loaves of cornbread for every 3 coffee mugs.

I was also out of coffee filters.  This was not OK.

So, car-less, coffee-less, wearing clothes I had slept in, and carrying my last pen, I made a plan:

• Buy coffee filters
• Buy pens
• Buy bread
• Buy car
• Wash clothes

Armed with this list, I set out to face the day, stepping over the crate of oranges outside my door.

So wordy!  But I don’t think too horrible for a 15-year-old.

Whoops!  Missed the anniversary by five days, but the ten year anniversary of the mcgees.org blog was on 15 December (mcgees.org itself predates this by almost a year, and my first personal website by five years.)

In that inaugural post I had to define for people what a “blog” was, how it worked, and indeed referred to it by the full name “web log”.

To put this in dramatic context: when my inaugural blog post was published, Clinton was in office.

Does Google crawl <IFRAME>-related tags?  Yes.

I created a page with this code:

<IFRAME src="URL1">
    <a href="URL2">URL2</a>
</IFRAME>
<NOFRAMES>
    <a href="URL2">URL2</a>
</NOFRAMES>

Each was only mentioned on this one page, and my web logs verified Googlebot was the only visitor besides me.

All three URLs were identified and crawled by Googlebot.  So, Google does crawl <IFRAME> “src” URLs, links in the interior of an <IFRAME>  (the “alternate text”), and links within the deprecated <NOFRAMES> tag.

Before you believe something, and definitely before you pass it on, perform these steps:

1.  Type it into Snopes.  Has Barbara already done the research for you and shown it to be inaccurate?  She’s pretty good at that stuff, and it’s her full-time job.

2.  If there are quantifiable elements, punch the figures into a calculator.  Do the numbers check out?

3.  Does the claim violate what are generally accepted as fundamental ways the physical universe works?  If so, ask how much of human knowledge, research, and understanding would have to be overturned.  If it’s “a great deal”, consider whether it’s more likely that the claim is untrue.

4.  Would the claim’s truth or falsehood have any easily-observable effects?  If so, are they happening?  For instance, if people could psychically predict cards, would casinos still be in business?  If any newspaper psychics could foresee the future, how did all of them miss the 9/11 attacks?

5.  Consider if the claim immediately benefits the claimant.  If so, be on your guard.

These are all before you even have to start wondering whether someone’s personal testimony is reliable, whether data was collected rigorously, whether testing procedures were adequate, etc. — even before you worry about whether the people in the story actually exist or not.

I’ve changed the canonical domain of this site from “www.mcgees.org” to “mcgees.org”.  I’ve gone back and forth with this a few times, but now that I’m also using the domain as a link shortener — and in that capacity I do strip the “www.” to save four characters — I decided to unify it.

I think I have made sure that everything still works (or, rather, works now), but if you see something broken, please let me know.

One of the most fascinating rap feuds I’ve seen.  Eminem (who also performs under his birth name Marshall Mathers and a stage persona Slim Shady) and Everlast (who also performs as Whitey Ford and in/as House of Pain) —  both white rappers who have faced scorn by some for co-opting the hip-hop art form — were trading swipes in diss records back and forth. 

Pay attention to the consistent topics of the insults:  inauthenticity; speculations about the other’s sexuality; relationships with family and women; size of fanbase; strength, toughness, and level of bravery; medical problems (Eminem battles drug dependency and depression and Everlast a congenital heart condition that has caused heart attacks); and condemning each other for being poser Caucasians.  Also, each refers to the other by his unflattering given name rather than his stage personae.

The more context and history one knows about each respective MC’s problems, the more interesting this is, but here’s a lyrical sampling:

Everlast:

What?  Did I hurt your feelings?  I’m supposed to be scared, now, right?  I’d like to dedicate this record right here to Mr. Marshall Mathers’s mother.  Here’s one from your moms: …

With your candy-ass name, you’re a candy-ass rapper… You just a fake tough guy, trying to act hard, but won’t walk a lobby without your bodyguards…  With your platinum-blond Caesar, you look like a ho, like Eminem stands for “Marilyn Monroe”…  You punk ecstasy-junkie, you waste of skills: stop riding my deals, stay high on pills…

You won’t be slapping me with no empty gun…  You can’t keep your woman from going astray.  Better run and check that kid for your DNA…  I take care of my moms, but you get sued by yours…

You wanna talk shit, money?  Come and talk it with the hands.  I ain’t wasting no more time with you, man, fuck this shit, that’s it.

Eminem:

I dedicate this to all my fans… Let’s tell this Whitey Ford to go fuck himself…

I knew you was jealous from the day that I met you…  I’m even liked more by your niece and nephew.  And now you hate [rock musician] Fred [Durst] because [DJ] Lethal left you?!  …

Got in touch with his roots, found a redneck in his blood, and said “Heck, country/western rap records are good!”  So he picks a guitar up, strums a couple of notes.  He can’t rap or sing, but he wants to do both…  I punch your fuckin’ chest till your heart kicks in gear.

You talk about my little girl in a song again, I’ma kill you…  And Im’a tell these motherfuckin’ fans the truth, the reason why you dissed me first and I answered you: … Back in ’94, ripped opened a show for you; rocked the crowd better, and stole your whole show from you.  Took your motherfuckin’ DJ, and stole him, too…  So fuck you, white boy, drop the mic, let’s fight.

Here’s what interests me most about the phenomenon of rap diss tracks:  This whole pattern is as old as the hills.

Nothing in the topics or motivations is historically novel; the demands that the other man stop talking and fight, even having the threats delivered cleverly and in verse, is part of culture.

Yes, there’s yucky and offensive stuff here.  But anyone who thinks it’s rap music that’s introduced this is mad.  Capulets and Montagues is the same thing.  Cyrano is the same thing.  Throwing down gauntlets is the same thing.  Pistol duels over insults or affaires de cœur are the same thing.  16th century Roman pamphleteering?  Same.  Thing.

And all those things are studied in history and lit classes.  These feuds will be, too, once they’re over suitable generational horizons.

Perhaps even more intriguingly:  If I put you in a classroom and asked you to brainstorm the obvious topics of insults between young, male, savannah-dwelling nomadic hominids in small groups, what would you come up with?  I imagine the list would include the other man’s physical strength, his courage, his ability to accumulate wealth, his level of respect in the community, his sexual prowess, his trustworthiness, his outward signs of masculinity and virility, his ability to gather and keep-loyal sexual partners capable of reproduction, and his health and likely longevity.  Because these are all so relevant to survival of a tribe and the appropriateness of that male breeding, and disparaging him on these topics increases the likelihood of the accuser mating.

So, yes, when they call each other homosexual cowards who are loathed by everyone, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s not admirable — but it’s not unique and it’s not novel.  Context is essential much of the time — but in social behaviors, it’s everything.

Twitter: Concisely

Six Minute Story: Eloquently

YouTube: Animatedly

MetaFilter: Cautiously

io9: Helpfully

mcgees.org: Openly

email: Sparingly

Facebook: Begrudgingly

I’ve created a new account at etree.org — a site for traders of legally-redistributable live music — given the loss in April of almost all my bootlegs.  I had one years ago, but long enough ago that I don’t remember my username, and no longer have access to the email account I used at the site.

I wrote an intro basically saying “Hey, I’ve been trading for a long time, but I’m starting over, so I’m going to be humble about all this.”  Except for touching upon a pet peeve of mine:

I’m an audiophile, but I’m also a scientist — so I will happily accept 256 or 320Mbps MP3s of audience DATs.  To argue that the psychoacoustic modeling in the compression of an ultra-high-bandwidth MP3 is the limiting factor for audio quality when the audio is from a guy standing in the audience with microphones in his hat (that he hopes will pick up speaker output more than audience noise around him), and the microphones are in turn connected to a pocket device that is itself doing digital sampling, is rather silly (exactly what information do self-styled audiophiles think they will lose with an MP3 in this situation?)  But if you want audience DATs “lossless”, sure, I can swing with that. 

I’ve encountered some tab notation I’ve never seen before:

e:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|
B:-o-///-|-----------------------------------------------|-o-/-|
G:--///--|r(7)--r(9)--r(7)--------r(7)--r(9)--r(7)-------|--/--|
D:-///-o-|------------------r(7)--------------------r(7)-|-/-o-|
A:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|
E:-------|-----------------------------------------------|-----|

1.  Do r(7) and r(9) mean to pluck a string already bent a quarter tone above frets 7 and 9, respectively, and release the bend while the string is still sounding?

2.  Can someone explain how to interpret the notation of what I assume are slides at the beginning and end?

Please comment here.  And if this should be obvious, my apologies.