‘Tis (Almost) the Season

I was feeling grumpy yesterday about all the Christmas decorations in the mall as I walked around with Lisa and our friend Kelley, who was visiting from Maine. But this morning I saw something that changed that feeling in a second.

Every morning I walk through Government Center Plaza on my way to catch the train. For the past month or two there has been a crew building a big tent shelter — one of the kind that have steel frames and their own climate control. Something that looks like it’s intended to stand up all winter.

This morning I went by to see that the tent had changed. Formerly plain white, it was surrounded by wooden boxes painted like they were wrapped presents, and the spire of a pine tree stood on the far side. Curious, I walked past the door and saw the interior decorated with pine rope and lights.

And I started crying. Because I thought about all the kids who would be having Christmas without one of their parents this year. And all the parents who wouldn’t be hearing from their grown children.

I hope the city intends that tent for the children.

Wah wah wah

So I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself this morning…we have no classes but I’ll still be working my butt off. So I’ll probably update the page in dribs and drabs over the day as I start to feel better.

Love in the Time of … Ada?

Having finished Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera on Friday, I was desperately grasping around for something new to read. The difficulty is that almost all my books are in storage in New Jersey, owing to the difficulty of fitting six bookcases into an 825 square foot apartment in Boston and still having room for many cases of wine.

Then I realized I still had some Nabokov on my shelves. I hadn’t read Ada, or Ardor in many years. It was time to pick it up again.

I had forgotten how genuinely strange the book is. I’m one chapter in and I’m in love with the book again. I hope that Dmitri Nabokov (the author’s son and translator) at some point approves a hypertext edition of the works, because his works cry out for linking, annotation, and just general explication. The book is set in a slightly different world in which Russia and the US coexist (as they did in Nabokov’s memory. Reading the place names alone is an adventure: the states New Cheshire and Mayne, the cities “Aardvark, Massa.” and “Lolita, Texas” (!), the transposition of Russia into somewhere in “‘Russian’ Canady, otherwise ‘French’ Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and Stripes.”

But it’s a love story. More about that as I get further into the book.

Experimenting with Site Layout

This is an experiment with using the news items feature of Manila. This feature will do a few things for the site

  • It will enable me to post things more directly to the website
  • It will eliminate some of the date and time confusion that the site has occasionally had when posting an item late on a certain day
  • It will improve the syndication of the site, making it easier for users of tools like Radio to point to things on my site

We’ll see how it goes.

Scripting iTunes

A new script today. No Manila, but it’s a productivity enhancement for my blogging. It grabs the currently playing song from iTunes and drops it into TextEdit. The script is called iTunes2TextEdit, and it’s available from my mac.com homepage.

You need iTunes 2 and MacOS X to run this script. It also works pretty well with TextEdit2Blog, my other script for blogging from TextEdit.

I want to enhance the script to dump in links with the song information automatically, but other than linking to a Google search, I’m not sure where to point the lookups. The Ultimate Band List and IUMA are both hard to navigate from a search standpoint. Why is there no IMDB for information about music?

Currently playing song: “Becuz” by Sonic Youth on Washing Machine.

Hello Swindon, Goodbye Kitty

A couple of links this morning, some good, some bad, some just scary.

My friend John Vick, with whom I sang in the Virginia Glee Club and who was a housemate for a while back in Virginia, continues to do good things with his band Hello Swindon. They have a webcast today via Knot Radio from 10 to midnight Eastern time. Check it out.

There’s a pretty good Vladimir Nabokov web site that I just discovered yesterday called zembla. Lots of stuff about Nabokov and his works. Check it out. Now. 🙂

Finally, the scary-funny one. Seems that in the 1960s, the CIA was bugging
kitties so that they could eavesdrop on the Soviets. My favorite part: “They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that.” Of course this wouldn’t be a funny Cold War story without a really bad first test of the technology…

Post Election News–and Blues

From time to time, even though I call the Commonwealth of Massachusetts my home (for a while longer), I still have to check back in on my one-time home state, Virginia. What I found this morning surprised me.

The Democrats won the governorship in Virginia, but their slim grasp on minority was further eroded in the House of Delegates. Gilmore’s showdown with the GOP-controlled legislature over the budget probably helped Mark Warner win more than anything he did. The irony is, I’m betting Warner can do a better job of working with the Republican legislature than the GOP candidate would.

Actually, Warner’s victory was pretty remarkable. For a guy who’s never been elected to public office, he showed remarkable sensitivity to the views of the electorate. Correctly sensing that Northern Virginia voters would accept a tax increase to fix congested roads is only counterintuitive to someone who’s never lived there. At the same time, he apparently made a pretty successful appeal to the southwest of the state by calling it an “untapped resource” and playing up hunting, bluegrass, and NASCAR.

In other election news, Greg’s candidate is now in a runoff, ensuring his continuing lack of sleep for a little while longer. And I did not vote for the first time since 1990. Not for lack of good intentions, mind you. It’s just that we moved in the spring, I was gone all summer, and I’ve been running since I got back. I never got my voter registration updated to my new address. It’s no excuse: I feel worse about not exercising my right to vote than about anything I’ve done in about ten years. It’s a good lesson to learn, though–you have to make time for what’s important.

Things You Can’t Get Out of Your Head

Busy morning, but then which mornings aren’t?

Scary music flashback: “Here Comes the Rain Again,” by the Eurhythmics. I think I’ve only heard their performance about three times, but when I was at Virginia I heard one of the a cappella groups, the Virginia Belles, perform it about 500 times. I’m no longer worried about wearing out repertore with the E-52s.

Alarming visual of the day: Furniture rooftop quickies. Link courtesy Greg Greene, horrific brain scarring images courtesy Adam Pesapane’s production company PES. Both Virginia alums, of course.

Keep Greg in your thoughts. It’s election day and he’s working on an Atlanta campaign. Maybe after today he can get some sleep.

Light Blogging Day

Probably another light blogging day. I’ve gotten into the part of the semester where, despite my best efforts, every day is a fire drill.

Unfortunately I can’t post my current assignment to my blog–it’s too long and the subject matter (forgiveness vs. utilitarianist philosophy) is a little too far out to try to make work as blog matter. Maybe later I’ll figure out how to tie it all together.

Quick pointer: Esta talks about hooking my grandfather up on e-mail this morning. Esta’s always been better than I have about keeping family ties close, and this story shows why.

Update: I finally received my replacement power adapter (see the discussion of my fire hazard problem here). Fortunately my problem was in the AC cord and not the “yo-yo” itself. Apple made an incremental change to the adapter recently that rendered the plug incompatible with the receptacle on my PowerBook G3. However, the AC cord is compatible with my old yo-yo, and it’s charging merrily even as we speak. So to sum up: if your yo-yo is broken and it’s a model M7332, make sure you replace it with an adapter that’s designed for your G3. However, if it’s your AC cord, you can order either one and it will work.

Interestingly, both models are “Model M7332.” But the one that works with mine is manufactured by Delta Electronics in Thailand and the new one comes from Dongguan Samsung Electro-Mechanics.

Salmon Days

Light blogging day today. My workload at the end of the week is always unpredictable. Today I have more competitor research to do for my E-Lab company, to straighten out some things about getting paid for the curriculum development work I’m doing, and to start a paper that’s due on Monday.

One quick link: the Register is running a live TV show about the perils of tech support. It’s called Salmon Days, about the perils of days when you spend the whole day fighting for your life upstream against the current. The trailer is hysterical (though it contains lots of bad language and even some partial nudity). The best part? “It looks like you’re writing a letter!” “I’M NOT WRITING A ****ING LETTER!!!!”

More Beautiful as it Unfurled

Happy November!

I spoke too soon yesterday. This morning I noted that fully half of the trees in Government Center had started turning yellow.

I have to find another replacement power adapter for my PowerBook today. This is the second one that’s crapped out on me. The first, at the beginning of this year, had a cable break at the end that plugged in to the computer. This one has developed a short in the part of the power cord that plugs into the wall, near the “yo-yo.” (See this picture of the power adapter if the term yo-yo confuses.) It was actually kind of entertaining: a small flicker of white-blue light coming from under the yo-yo. When I saw what it was I unplugged it, but it had already burned through some of the outer strands of the gold wire inside the plastic.

Today’s music: “Sleep” by Mark Eitzel. I’m still mining all the artists whose stuff I heard on KEXP over the summer. An artist to listen to but not necessarily to sing along with. Lyrics to “Sleep” are less profound in print than sung, but from the equally brilliant “Christian Science Reading Room”:

I was so high
I stood for an hour outside the Christian Science Reading Room
And suddenly I could not resist
I became a Christian Scientist
…
Though in my days of gravity
The absolute measure of being free
I was so high
That I even scared the cat
And using the language of his tail
He said he had a vision: thousand-watt flags flying over my head
And then he hid under the bed
And his eyes were as big as bells
And suddenly he could not resist
And he became a Christian Scientist
And together we explored our world
And found it became more beautiful as it unfurled

Surrender to November

My website has a Seattle section; why doesn’t it have a Boston section? I’ll pull one together pretty soon, but the plain truth is that Boston isn’t so new to me the way Seattle was.

Still, every now and then I find things that make me think about the city. Every morning on my way to school I walk through the plaza at Government Center. It’s a big brick and concrete bowl that has an amphitheatre area, a stage, an assembly plaza, and a bunch of other stuff in it. The plaza drops something like two stories from Congress Street down to Faneuil Hall. It’s surrounded by large civic and commercial buildings–City Hall in particular, winning my award for ugliest concrete monstrosity this side of the FBI Building. From the base near City Hall it can look a little like the amphtitheatre at Siena through which the palio runs, but without the cafes, shops, and good architecture that distinguish that space. Most days it’s just a place to rush through, though sometimes during the summer you see people eating lunch there.

The irony is that until the 1960s the place was pretty happening, though in an unsavory kind of way. Scollay Square (warning: cheesy music at that link) was notorious for being an area of ill repute–prostitution and other kinds of crime were apparently pretty common, as well as less illegal but still fairly disreputable entertainment like the tassel twirling Sally Keith…

But there’s still some life in the place. You just have to know where to look for it. In the days after the crash, people gathered for vigils and prayer services. Every third day or so the news trucks roll to the back of the plaza to support the crews who cover City Hall. There are always vendors hawking papers right outside the doors of the T station, sometimes in song as the Boston Globe guy was this morning.

The thing that struck me most this morning, though, was the trees. At this point in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, most of the trees are either in the last spasms of their fall colors or have lost their leaves entirely. This morning, though, I looked up into a crown of green around the rim of the bowl of the former Scollay Square. It seemed to be saying to me, Don’t rush. Enjoy the end of the green while it lasts.

Today’s music: “See Jane” by Shannon Worrell, a Charlottesville musician who I first saw play in the Corner Grill in 1993 and who I always thought had the potential to go the distance. (Unfortunately her deal with the record label The Enclave folded when EMI was in its mid-90s throes and she fell off the map.)

Trees half turning
One branch in summer, another one burning
Can’t decide to stay
Can’t decide to stay
Or surrender to November

Good reading: The Fear of the Radical Alien: Boston Italians Between the World Wars. A really fascinating study of the culture of the North End that ties in Sacco and Vanzetti as well as the impact of multiple waves of immigration.