News You Can Bruise for 2007 May 23

Wed May 23 2007 11:20: Wikiclock: sort of a social Rube Goldberg device.

Wed May 23 2007 15:34: Sam and I just talked to Jon Udell for his Friday Podcast series. I sounded like an idiot the whole time, but hopefully the miracle of editing will save me.

(3) Wed May 23 2007 16:17: Wow, that made me feel better:

Every IT generation has its seminal tome that transcends time and connects the dots in a way that no book had before it. For the object oriented generation in the 1980s, it was the Gang of Four (GoF) book. For the application architecture generation in the 1990s, it was Fowler's book on patterns (PoEAA). "RESTful Web Services" will be, in my opinion, that book for the 2000s Web services generation.

Wed May 23 2007 18:00: Excellent interview with Trace Beaulieu, though it ends with a lot of Hollywood pheromone exchange that I find dull. Includes anecdote about the monkey he made so angry that he was thereafter wary of working with any show business monkey whatsoever (my default position). Also:

But I realized that without that character [Crow], I really didn’t have a reason to mock anything. I actually kinda like stuff.

A stuff-liker? Blasphemy!

One of my very-long-term projects is to collect random observations about MST3K episodes and the underlying movies. (Sample observation: the 1950s were a very good time to do a low-budget military-themed movie because there were lots of surplus trucks and equipment you could get cheap.) Not reviews per se, but an attempt to find the more subtle themes and interconnections in the massive MST3K oeuvre. I bring this up because of this line from the interview:

You know, maybe the robots were sort of a practice for [Joel]. I think he’s a pretty good dad.

Thanks to this project and time's perspective, I see now that the fundamental fact about MST3K, the one that makes it more than a comedy show, is the relationship between Joel Robinson and his robots. In my adolescence without a father I took as a model for masculinity Joel's mix of father, older brother, and demiurge. This is kind of weird but I could have done a lot worse. I suspect I'm not the only one.

Usually children leave their parents, but Joel left the 'bots. They helped him leave. What does this mean?