News You Can Bruise for 2009 May

The recording was from my mother's perspective. She was at a fair with Susanna. They were sitting in a Ferris wheel, dangling their feet in the air. The fair was noisy. My mother held some fair food in her left hand. I'm going to guess it was deep-fried cheesecake, because she liked cheesecake, and because of what she said to Susanna a few seconds after the recording started: "Nothing but rides, nothing but cheesecake, nothing but fun."

A couple seconds later she repeated it, and turned to look at Susanna. That's when the recording stopped.

Part of it is the fake realness that rubs off from a dream, but that seems like a right thing for my mother to say. If I were one who interprets dreams I'd say that that line constituted some kind of advice from my mother. But it was just the part of her that I remember coming out when the rest of me was asleep. And I can already feel that part start to fade.

Sumana says of the white, "Astoundingly flavorful." and "Tastes more like a grape than any grape juice I've ever had." The red is less sweet and goes better with food. They're both amazing. I really dislike wine, and it's a shame that there's no Two-Buck Chuck of grape juice, a cheap grape juice that tastes like real grapes. (You can get decent grape juice at the Greenmarket but it's adulterated with apple juice, that universal donor of juices.)

I also ordered a bottle of the acidic green "Verjus", which is supposed to be good for cooking. I'll post about it once I use it.

I am gonna mention two problems that I think are summer movie problems not Star Trek problems, so if you don't like spoilers or complaining, turn back.

Problem #1 has to do with the relationship between Scotty and his alien co-worker on Hoth. Scotty's always yelling at him, shoving him around, generally treating him like Igor. I don't terribly mind that Scotty was made the comic relief (it's Simon Pegg, after all), but this seemed cruel and even kind of racist of Scotty. There's only room for one racist on the Enterprise, and that's McCoy!

After the film I had writing group, and I told Andrew about this. He mentioned an interview he'd read in which Simon Pegg said Scotty and his co-worker had gone stir crazy being assigned to Hoth for so long. Sure, but stir crazy is a double-edged phaser. The alien should have shoved back.

Problem #2 is reliance on ungodly coincidences. I'm sure I'm overlooking something but I can't think of another Trek movie where major plot points just happened by coincidence. This shows up at its worst on Hoth. Kirk gets marooned there, he wanders around for a while and finds Future-Spock. Then the two of them wander a bit more and run into Scotty! If Kirk had found a guy (Scotty) who went on to play an major role in his life, that would be contigency, not coincidence. But Kirk meeting Future-Spock and then Future-Spock meeting Scotty was too much to bear, somehow.

PS: John Cho is terribly miscast as Sulu, but if someone says "We want you to play Sulu in a Star Trek movie" how can you turn them down?

Number forty-seven said to number three
"Hey, we're both prime!"

I took some photos, but Susanna imposed a press embargo so that I wouldn't spoil the present surprise. Well, now the surprise has happened and I've got nothing to post tonight, so check it out. Susanna's entry on the topic has sewing instructions for all the food.

Here's what I mean. By normal standards, Khan is a really bad Star Trek villain. Star Trek villains generally have some self-justifying line of BS that makes them the hero. The Borg want to unify all life forms and cultures, the Cardassians are imperialists spreading civilization, the Xindi think they're acting in self-defense. Admiral Leyton is trying to stop the Federation from becoming soft. Harry Mudd is a Willy Loman type who's just trying to shift product. Etc. Their actions make sense given their worldview. Even TOS-era Khan assumes what he does is right by virtue of his innate superiority.

But Khan in Khan is Captain Ahab, a character defined by his obsession and his need for revenge. He no longer cares whether he's doing the right thing. With Khan it made sense, because he's the superman who's been humiliated by Kirk, a normal person. But the people who make Star Trek movies keep making the villain into Captain Ahab as if that'll make the movie good.

Check out the lousy Trek movie villians. Soran: obsessed with the Nexus. Ru'afo: wants revenge on the Son'a. (Yeah, I had to look those names up.) Shinzon: wants revenge on Picard, which doesn't even make sense. Nero: wants revenge on Spock (also makes no sense). Obsession. Revenge. They're all trying to be Khan.

Some of the Trek films don't have villains at all, which I always enjoy, but look at the good villains. General Chang: afraid of change. Borg Queen: is a freaking Borg. Even Sybok (religious fanatic) is a decent villain. I don't think you can get a big-budget SF movie made these days with no villain, but maybe if Khan hadn't been such a good movie the other Trek movies would have been better.

PS: Anyone complaining about red matter, rewatch Khan and try to explain how Genesis works.

Is mine the first infernokrusher story to be sold? That can't be right. Prove me wrong. Examples predating the invention of infernokrusher grudgingly accepted. By browsing LibraryThing tags I've determined that John Varley's "Steel Beach" may be genuine infernokrusher, but most other things given that tag look like regular slipstream. Hey, if I don't have the expertise to slice music into sub-subgenres, I'll settle for fiction.

PS: I know infernokrusher is just a joke. Jokes are meant to be told.

I met a guy, I'm pretty sure it was Mirco Müller, who grew up in East Germany. He'd never heard of the PolyPlay (which I'd forgotten the name of at the time), but he was conversant with the home computers of the time, and he mentioned that radio stations would broadcast programs for kids to record. They'd count down and then send a game or some other program over the air. You'd record it on a cassette tape and then use it in your computer's tape reader.

This is such an awesome idea and I'd never thought of it because it's so damn socialist. At the point on the technology curve where computer cassette drives make sense, you need to have private ownership of computers, but government ownership of radio stations and a government policy encouraging kids to mess around with computers (see previous entry for contrasting policies).

Otherwise the people who run the radio station won't want to make a timeslot to broadcast data, and the people who wrote the software will want to sell it instead of broadcasting it. You could have this scenario in a world with very primitive but very cheap computers, where such a show could be popular, but that brings us into the realm of science fiction--where I intend to milk this idea for all it's worth.

I thought this project would take me days to realize, but thanks to Will McGugan's great Python chess library it only took a few hours. I did find a few bugs w/r/t what the chess library considers to be "check" and "checkmate", but I fixed them and sent in a patch.

While I was at it I fixed Dada Maps and Spurious, whose bits had rotted.

I also heard back from the original ChessPy author, who for complex reasons invited me to make my bug fixes public by forking the project. So here you go. It's also got unit tests for the stuff I changed. It's really easy to use, and recommended if you have some Dada Chess-like project that needs to run simulated chess games that don't require an AI.

Brendan had a similar restaurant called "We'll Fry It!"

It was not, however, until the 19th century that any great advance [in modern calculating machines] was made. In 1820 Charles Babbage began the construction of a machine for calculating mathematical tables, and in 1823 the Royal Society secured aid from the British government to enable him to continue his work. Babbage's progress not being satisfactory, this aid was soon withdrawn, but the work continued until 1856, when it was abandoned. From the time when Babbage began to the present, however, the modern calculating machine has been constantly improved, first by Thomas de Colmar (1820), and various types are now in extensive use.

[0] But that book is only 75 pages long, which makes me think that the history was greatly expanded, possibly in the post-public domain era. That would explain why no one ever scanned Volume II.

• $39,000 and $45,000 compared to about $600 for a standard drill." So just take the Novocaine (pasted into the search box by accident)
• "1000 rat corpses"
• "An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting"
• "bringing down the house" fabricated
• "carolyn maloney" fisa
• "do not read beauty magazines"
• effect of ice sheets on ocean currents
• "Fiscal Pear"
• "groucho marx" "finnegans wake"
• "here comes the universe" (rejected title for Thoughtcrime Experiments)
• "iron man" lebowski invoice (I was right!)
• "james g blaine" "the state of maine"
• kermit cookie cutter
• learn to blow glass in brooklyn
• multi-nippled rotating
• "neccessary evil but still cool"
• "one leg is both the same"
• piraruchu
• q*bert joke book
• rice cooker as crock pot
• "santa claus is parents" (I think I was going to make a Soylent Green joke)
• two-player simultaneous play
• "under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License"
• "villian the villain"
• "where fun goes to die"
• xliterate
• "you are * and i claim"
• zombic hunch

Update: in case you were wondering, there were 4834 distinct search strings in my history.