There are a constellation of “Perfect Movies”, here goes: Airplane!, Clue, Young Frankenstein, History of the World Part One, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Mannequin, Jeffery, Noises Off, Deathtrap, The Man With Two Brains… there are more for sure… but those are the ones that come off the top of my head.
Post-Answer Update: And of course, how could I forget, The Kentucky Fried Movie!
Saint Patrick’s Day is always a little bit of a problem. The trouble is deciding what you are actually celebrating. Are you celebrating Irish culture? Are you celebrating Alcoholism and Thuggery? Are you celebrating the actual Saints Day? The whole day is riddled with problems. If you are going after Irish culture, and you think you can explore it with food, and you wander into a “Corned Beef and Cabbage” recipe – save your effort. That dish isn’t Irish at all. It’s Jewish. So for proud Irish Catholics, they may be a touch upset at that. As with Alcohol and Thuggery, well, they go hand in hand. People put food coloring in beer and feature alcoholic beverages, because the Irish are stupid brutish obnoxious drunks. Obviously. And you have to placate the gaelic horde with alcohol before they push your wife down a narrow staircase. Then we get to the Saint himself. This one is jammed-packed with issues. Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. Supposedly to save the Irish Potato, which I believe is either called the Muck or the Punter. But this is a cute little charmer to answer curious children. What was Saint Patrick doing? Snakes? How about aboriginal druidic and pagan peoples? Yeah, there are a lot of people still quite upset, even thousands of years later that Saint Patrick ejected the original people and original belief systems out of Ireland so the Catholics could set up shop. I never really got into it very deeply, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’s just an allegory and didn’t really exist. Much like the rest of the “Holiday” it’s primarily what you think it is that it becomes for you.
For me? I wear my family crest which I have on a shirt and I spend time looking at pictures of County Antrim where I suspect my family was originally from. I look at the tartan for Antrim and I spend a little time daydreaming about the boat and the red-hand on my family crest. Then I enjoy some Corned Beef and Cabbage and think fondly of a nice Jewish family helping out a down-and-out Irishman. Then I start thinking about Latkes and Knishes. I then fall asleep in my recliner after several beers and finally do some honor to my proud ancestors. 🙂
My parents chose my name. My middle name is my fathers first name, and his I believe is related to one of his grandparents. I admire the icelandic people because name construction is a rather straightforward affair and delightfully chained together with either -son or -dottir. I imagine my family was quite fond of biblical names, since we have so many, Joseph, John, James, Theresa, Martha, Timothy, Andrew… and that seems to be more influenced by my father’s side where all the biblical names are hanging out. On my mother’s side, the names aren’t biblical at all. Susan, Mildred, Allen, Reuben. I’m quite happy with my given name, and I think it fits me well. There is something to note however, people who call me by my complete given name irritate me. Being called Andrew sets me on edge. It’s not that I don’t like it, but it makes me very agitated and skitterish. I much prefer Andy. The people who call me Andrew, if they are really paying attention will notice a look that I’ll give them, and it’s not altogether pleasant. All of that reaction is really quite reflexive. It’s almost as reflexive as when someone whines at me. I cannot brook whining. I have to clench my fingers into tightly controlled fists and lock up my arms to prevent myself from grabbing the whining person and shake and slap them senseless.
Funny that these prompts evolve into other discussions very easily. Naughty! 😉
I seriously can’t even think of a single one. There are a gallery of options but doing anything with any of them would be just too awkward. The only thing that I would love would be to have a brunch with Stephen King and give him little bits of lettuce for hours and hours and at the end a huge feast and see if he understands analogy.
I used to be able to play the Trumpet, but a protracted amount of orthodontia pretty much obliterated that pursuit. I found that I much prefer to consume art than try to produce it myself. I think I lost the faith, when it came to music when I stopped feeling the need to compete for “chair position” back in grade school. Much like other parts of my life where competition rears its ugly head I find myself questioning the inherent value of the activity and then considering the people that surround me. Usually the evaluation leads me to consider the people around me to be worthless sacks of protoplasm, then to question why I’m even doing something and if it’s really for me, and then I usually walk away from it. As time goes on I find myself more interested with insular matters. Recently at work several coworkers have asked me if I felt bad that someone else took sole credit for what a group that I was involved with accomplished. Frankly I’m not after approval or rewards. I’m just here to do what I do, if people want to make a big production of it, that’s up to them. If other people want to claim the spotlight, all the more power to them. This is the core reason why I have zero interest in sports. I’ve never seen the point of it.
I’ve found a new blogging tool called Blogsy. I bought it from a recommendation from The GiveMeMind Blog.
The way the app is set up is a novel approach and it is taking a little getting used to. There are two sides to a blog post, a rich side and a write side. Establishing a link is a little cumbersome, but it’s better than having to schlep to an HTML reference to remember the vagaries of assembling an “a href” construct.
I’ve defined all my blogs that I use. Thats another small issue, as I write there isn’t any clear way to say which blog I’m writing to at this point. I suppose that when I get to publishing we’ll see how is all works out.
I figured out where the settings are, but they aren’t ordered logically. the blog you post to is at the bottom of the list, but it’s settings determine all the other fields above that one, urrrr? Also, while WordPress has a correct hierarchy of categories, Blogsy just squashes them all out into a linear list. Perhaps they’ll fix that in a later update. Let’s hope so.
The cost was $2.99 and so far I’ve seen about $0.99 value with this app.
I’ve started to think that there is definitely something to the cookie-jar hypothesis. That notion that we want what we can’t have. Specifically to a point this morning a take off this classic idea which might be called the inverse cookie-jar hypothesis. I see this a lot in people who behave in a very outspoken fashion, beyond all rationality about a certain topic. For example, the people who are so preoccupied with homosexuality that they go to extreme lengths to stamp it out, are intolerant to the differences of other people and in general can’t stop talking about it. In my hypothesis these people are themselves struggling with their own internal battle of their gender roles and sexuality. The gender and sexuality issues could be abstracted away and a more general theory could be that any topic that people are irrationally obsessive about indicates that they are wrestling with that very same topic in their own lives. So in a way, bigotry is a masquerade of self-loathing. If you see a bigot, whatever it is they are a bigot about, is the definition of the thing that they are struggling with.
If this theory is correct, not only does it explain a lot about the behaviors of people who are really out of control, but it helps those who are victims of the bigotry understand that it really isn’t hate-directed-outward, but hate-directed-inward. That’s important, and people shouldn’t lose sight of that, if the theory, you know, is true. 🙂
I have identified the next innovation frontier! Multiple device presence synchronization.
Every innovation is born out of a tangle of issues that represent a problem. For this particular point, my problem is a maddening one. I have several streams of information that I regularly check on:
I use different access devices during my day depending on the setting and activity level present in that environment. I use my iMac while I’m active at work, I use my iPhone and iPad mixed when I’m traveling as a passenger. I use my iPhone while waiting for long durations in queues and I’ll eat private meals with either my iPhone or iPad running. My problem is one of annoyance and the possibility that I’ve missed information. When I move forward in any of these information streams on one device it can be a challenge to update all the other devices with “my bookmark” in each stream. If I’m catching up on tweets on my iPhone and I get to work, I want to switch my attention away from my iPhone and towards my iMac. What I want is for my last seen tweet to be updated on each device when I start it’s attendant application. The same goes for my Google Reader RSS Aggregator. I read news items while riding the bus from home to work and when I arrive at work I want to pick up on my iMac where I left off on my iPhone.
There are several applications that I use that have ways to address my needs, but they aren’t wholly reliable. Twitter has a “favorite” system that could be used for this, but that’s expecting one bit of the system (a square peg) to be pounded into shape to work as a solution for something else (a round hole). And Google Reader has a built-in capacity to do some of what I wish, but nobody has written the code to facilitate that requirement yet.
How could something like this best work? As with many other things the answer I believe lies in abstraction. The most convenient form of abstraction would be to have every client I use understand how to interface with Dropbox. Each app can connect to Dropbox and in the root folder of my Dropbox it can use file time and date stamps to determine when the latest updates were sent to my Dropbox, and the files themselves contain the positional information that I need to share between many systems. When I read tweets, the latest tweet that I’ve seen has its date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. When I’m browsing Google Reader articles, the last-seen-article has it’s date stamp put in a file and sent to Dropbox. So on and so forth. Everything is transparent, the files are easily accessible from Dropbox and because the network is ubiquitous, I have no problems accessing Dropbox from wherever I am. Even if I didn’t have the network all the time, the syncing and updating functions of Dropbox would eventually guarantee that my position updates are always up in the cloud.
With this solution I could start reading tweets on one device, put it to sleep and continue reading on another device. I think this will become more and more relevant as time goes on and people start using multiple devices, computers, tablets, and handhelds. The only real challenge is encouraging every app vendor and system writer to hop on board with this idea.
I’ve had a long-standing problem that just suddenly got resolved. I have lost my WMU Procurement Card and my WMU ID months and months ago. I’ve never lost anything like this and I’ve harbored a suspicion that the two cards ended up in some pocket of some article of clothing that I haven’t worn since I saw them last. It’s been close to a year that these two cards have been missing. I’ve been dreading my monthly balance of my WMU Procard fearing that it fell out of my pocket in Chicago or Denver and I never knew. The other dread I had was reserved for October of this year when my WMU Procard expires. “Give us your old card…” would have been an EPIC problem.
But thanks to Scott, who was searching for his lost iPhone he pulled the cushions off the blue couch in our living room and apparently as bright as day and twice as maddening were both my WMU Procurement Card and my old WMU ID. So, these two very important bits of my professional life were in the safest place in the entire universe. Stuck in my couch. Now they are right in front of me and will be stuffed in my wallet.
I’ve searched all around for these two G-D cards and the whole time I’ve had George Carlin in my head: “Well I’ve looked everywhere!” “Well, obviously not, the god damn thing is still missing!” “Have you ever checked a suit you haven’t worn in 20 years for something you had 5 minutes ago?!” and finally the cloud parts and here are the missing cards.
At least now I don’t have to worry about this any longer. Just to polish off the entire affair, I found Scott’s phone as well. It had fallen behind the toilet, between the wall and the water supply line.
It sort of feels like life took a chunk out of me and noticed, and put a chunk back.
One of my friends on Twitter expressed their physical disgust whenever they encountered “News”. I advised them to just stop looking at it.
Really.
What good can come of consuming “News”? Horrible stupid incompetent idiots who are bumbling around with the world in their hands and they have butterfingers! Nearly everything in the 24 hour news cycle is negative or upsetting in one fashion or another. Most of it doesn’t really directly affect any of us in any meaningful way other than to make us sad, depressed, upset, or disgusted. I have stopped watching the 24-hour news cycle shows and now get most of my news-a-tainment from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and even that I pick and choose what I watch and what I just toss out.
If something in your life just makes you angry and upset, what’s the value in it? The world will continue, or not, whether you are aware of it, or not. Is knowing about what is going on really that important to you? Ignorance is bliss, so why not choose ignorance? In the end it’s far better for your mental and physical health. If you absolutely MUST touch this toxic stew of suffering, at least filter it through your preferred satirist. Laughing about the horrible is far better than enduring the horrible all by yourself, without the laughter.
