Twitter goes to the movies

One thing about the Twitters is it’s a great place to get silly. Every once in a while someone starts a hashtag dare, and it’s off to the races.

After the Texas Lege banned feminine hygiene products in its hallowed chambers, #ReplaceAWordInAMovieWithTampon trended for a day or two.

You know: Lethal Tampon. A Fistful of Tampons and so on.

Then there was #TitlesWithNachos.

So you had Die Hard with Nachos, Where the Wild Nachos Are, Harry Potter and the Deathly Nachos, No Nachos for Old Men and… Well, you get the idea.

One of my favorites, and therefore my excuse for the Funky Friday post today, is #1letterwrongmovie. Change one letter in a movie title; get a whole new film.

What happened with this one was that the Photoshoppers came out in droves. It wasn’t enough to play with the words; they had to augment the images.

You do not want to be drinking anything while looking at these. Or, if you are, at least aim your nose away from your keyboard.

Nightmare on Elmo Street:

 

Pilates of the Caribbean:

Fat & Furious:

Iron Nan:

And—I can’t decide which wins the prize—Lord of the Wings:

Or Paws:

What do you think?

A flight into history

A friend of mine alerted me to this video of B-17s in action during the Second World War. It’s set to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”.

B-17s were the workhorse of the US air war in Europe, and they were perhaps the earliest of my technology interests.

They didn’t have the payload capacity or the range of other bombers, but once their armor was beefed up, the Eighth Air Force followed a strategy of formation flying and they developed long-range escort fighters, the B-17 just kept pounding targets all over Europe.

It was called the “Flying Fortress” because you could shoot half of the fuselage, most of the tail and other sundry parts away, and it would still make it back to base. (You can see this in the video.)

I’ve actually been in one—a guy I was going out with was designing Mattel’s “B-17 Bomber” Intellivision game, and we went to an air show specifically to see it. (The game kind of tanked; wonder how it would do with today’s graphic action capabilities?) 

(And if you want to see the interior, here are some pix from the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine.)

The interesting thing to me was the old guy they had showing us around. He’d flown in the craft and had lots of stories to tell.

The one thing I remember, 30 years on, is that he said that, even with its stolid homing capabilities, about half of the Forts were lost during the war. (And since each plane held a crew of ten, that means a loss of more than 50,000 men.) According to this guy, a high proportion of those losses occurred on a crew’s 25^th (and final) mission. The pilot would try some damn-fool stunt, like buzzing the control tower, and that was all she wrote.

Well, maybe, maybe not. I can’t find that documented anywhere, but it makes a good story.

Both Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite were working journalists during WWII, and they’ve written about “ride-alongs” they took on B-17s. I recommend their accounts to you. Before their sortie, they’d absorbed the ground-pounders’ usual complaint about how war for the flyers was all glamour and no risk. They had a different perspective afterward.

Cuisine-in-a-can

Okay, I suppose someone was going to do this at some point. For any number of reasons.

Wired reports that a grad student at a London university has created a 12-course dinner-in-a-can. Twelve foods embalmed in gelatin & entombed in a can. Chris Godfrey says it’s part of his investigation into today’s “bombastic consumerism”, but I’m betting he really did it to see if he could.

From the top down they include:

Selection of local cheeses

Pickled Kobe beef

Ricotta ravioli

Shiitake mushrooms

Halibut poached in truffle butter

It goes on and on, through the main course, rib-eye steak with grilled mustard greens; and it ends with a canelé and hazelnut latte.

Leaving aside the issue that a latte is not an appropriate after-dinner coffee, I guess Chris Godfrey has covered all the major food groups, although covering them in gelatin just makes them icky.

(Hey—you ever eaten an aspic by mistake? You’d be scarred for life, too.)

I’m really seeing this as a guy thing—can’t think of any woman who’d spend hours and hours preparing expensive ingredients and layering them in a can, knowing no one’s ever going to eat the result.

Me—I can’t even get my head around the turducken. Plus, if you’ve ever tried to get the jellied cranberry sauce out of the can whole at Thanksgiving, you know this would be a bitch-and-a-half to extrude onto your plate without smooshing it.

But I bet Godfrey gets his degree off this. His committee’s probably all-male.

The flow of human history

I came across this timeline of sorts—“Histomap of Four Thousand Years of World History”—yesterday. It covers 2000 BCE to 1931. (Click here to go to a somewhat larger version at the Slate site.)

I’ll start out with a complaint—why couldn’t Slate have made it zoomable? At least zommable so that it doesn’t go into a blur?

But beyond that, this thing is fascinating.

For one thing, it’s beautiful to look at—the multicolored rivers of human groupings, flowing through history. They appear, they expand; they disappear…

If you view the whole thing as one long strip, it looks like something that came from one of those WPA murals that used to adorn all manner of public buildings. Which would put it in the right time-frame for something that ends history at 1931.

Look at where the US appears—that little blue rivulet way, way down towards the bottom at the left. Just a little blip in the course of human history. & Great Britain—it achieved its greatest point of expansion just as we broke away, presaging the collapse of empire.

China is the one constant in this whole thing—ain’t that a kick in the pants?

I really wish I could print this out on some gigantic printer, so it’s at a legible scale. Then I’d hang it on a tall wall next to a multi-floor staircase so people could walk up and down to follow the streams of history.

Second complaint—why couldn’t Slate have commissioned a graphic artist and historian(s) to pick up at 1931 and take it through to at least 2010? This just cries out to be updated.

Gratitude Monday: My excellent birthday adventure

Saturday was my birthday. I stopped making a big deal about that around the time I moved to Seattle and pretty much gave up the will to live. My family and friends always remember it, and I get the most wonderful cards and presents; I just don’t bother with it much myself, since the closest one of the family-and-friend crowd is more than 500 miles away.

But a couple of weeks ago, a friend who lives right here asked how I intended to celebrate my birthday. She takes this kind of stuff seriously, to the point of taking the day off from work to mark her own birthday. So I thought, well, why not?

Except for our foray in to Union Square for the SF Design Week events a couple of months ago, I’ve not been into San Francisco in a couple of years. And those trips were for job interviews. So that became our destination.

It was an incredible day.

We had to adjust out plans a bit when we realized that Outside Lands was going on in Golden Gate Park, but it still turned out great.

We started out with breakfast at Mel’s Diner, where the food was good and the service what you’d expect at a place that makes its money from tourists who won’t be returning.

The real star of the day was the park, where we spent about six hours, and barely cracked its possibilities. Dahlia Dell, the conservatory, the de Young Museum, the rose garden, the Japanese tea garden and the carousel were all we could manage.

Highlights:

The conservatory reminded me of its counterpart at Kew Gardens, though smaller and more intense. (Meaning it was basically a sweat lodge with a lot of greenery.) They have a temporary exhibit of a butterfly garden, which was fascinating (down to and including the signage):

They invited you to add the word for “butterfly” in other languages onto a chalkboard. Ann and I gave them the German (der Schmetterling); right after that, a Vietnamese woman wrote in bướm bướm, which is apparently pronounced somewhere between “bom-bom” and “boom-boom”. But I like the repeated “B” sound for the fluttery creature; seems appropriate.

I was stunned by the variety of dahlias, all concentrated into a small space, so they just cry out for your attention. Also, for the ministrations of bees, who were stocking up on all the good pollen:

The carousel was wonderful—totally mechanical (as opposed to electronic), with spectacularly beautiful animals. It dates from 1914. I rode the tiger (no limericks, please). Take a look at the stork:

To tell you the truth, by this time (nearly 1700) we were just the teensiest bit tired. So back to Japantown for some of the best sushi I’ve ever had, with boats floating past us to distribute the delicacies. Listen—I’ve eaten a lot of raw fish in my time; this was amazing. Also: first time I've ever seen éclairs at a sushi bar; much less floating past me on bamboo boats next to raw shrimp and salmon.

The sushi cutter’s name (according to his name tag) was Alberto.

America, gonif.

It was a great way to celebrate my birthday, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it and for a friend to share it with. Gratitude Monday hardly seems big enough to cover it. But it’s a start.

Warehouse of the damned

One of the people I follow on Twitter is a Brit, Ben Gunn; an articulate, outspoken advocate for criminal justice reform and non-violence.

(My readers know that when Bas Bleu calls someone “articulate”, that means he’s reached the higher echelons of those who have an actual idea, arrange their thoughts before writing, and express themselves well. I don’t toss that word around like beads from a Mardi Gras float. You can see what I mean at Gunn's blog.)

He’s also an ex-con who was released from prison not long ago after serving 32 years for the murder of a friend when he was 14. (I don’t understand the niceties—if that be the right word—of the British justice system, but it seems as though he’s on some form of never-ending parole, and can be busted back to prison for any one of a number of infractions. That is, he’s always got a sword of Damocles hanging over him.) He’s not burdened with bitterness by his experience, which I find remarkable.

As I said, he’s outspoken, which puts him on the firing line for a lot of Twittercrap. And if you don’t know what I mean by that, well, let me just say that you don’t want to know. He invites it by asking questions and then debating whoever slews over to lambaste him. No death threats so far (that I know of), but I've seen at least one person publicly call on the prison service to haul his ass back to the slammer. 

He followed me a couple of months ago, after I replied to a retweet of his tweet, “I’m trying to think why stupidity shouldn’t be made a crime. All I can come up with is that there will never be enough cells…”

I was honest: “Uh, they’d certainly have to make room for me. Several times a day. #guilty” On account of, I can be as big a dimwit on occasion as the next guy.

Since then I’ve watched the firestorms Gunn provokes, although I’ve mostly stayed out of them. But the Twitter-dot-com is kind of like a British public school: it fosters shoot-from-the-hip opinions backed by a minimum of fact or ration and propelled by a turbo-charged and vehement viciousness. Well—start-ups are like that, too.

But I’m not here to talk about that. No, of course I’m not; it's Friday.

Yesterday he tweeted, “There are times when I wonder whether people have lost their intellect, moral conscious, or just their balls. #twitter”

And all of a sudden I got this image of a great cosmic “lost-&-found” social media warehouse, chockablock with all the decent human qualities people heave away in vast numbers when they get a Twitter handle or a Facebook page.

(Or, indeed, when they join any online forum. I was on a World War I discussion list back in the 90s and you would not believe the mud-slinging, character assassination and multi-syllabic versions of "get stuffed" that flew back and forth amongst the academic set.)

So, I envision stacks and stacks of tattered civility, discarded moral compasses, dysfunctional synapses, disused intellectual rigor, lost gonads and the like. All waiting hopefully to be claimed by their owners, or auctioned off to someone who’ll appreciate and use them; but all the while knowing there’s small likelihood of that.

Sadly, there’s obviously another building full of massive egos, blaring voices and atrocious spelling, writhing with activity, metaphorical elbows flying; everyone trying to shout above the din of all the other inmates. It’s like a 24x7 rugby game—muddy, bloody and painful—without a goal.

See, the term “social” media is really a misnomer, and now whenever I sit back gobsmacked by some new piece of stultifyingly grotesque inanity or mean-spiritedness on one of the platforms, I’ll just see another addition being made to that warehouse.

And another. And another…

We're gonna need a bigger warehouse.

More spam in the queue

So here are the contents of the spam folder of one of my email accounts recently:

I don’t know why I’ve got multiple spam for laser services; I don’t want to speculate as to what they know about me. Also—I kind of wonder how much hair removal you can get for $6K? But not enough to open the email.

No, I didn’t open the PRIVATE MESSAGE! I’m guessing it was Svetlana or one of her mates.

The Pimsleur people have been round a few times. They were actually reviewed fairly well in some magazine story I was reading about the best ways to learn a language. But I’m in the midst of learning Python, and that’s all the language I can handle at the moment.

As for the expanding hose… No.

Ideas for free (continued)

I mentioned last Friday that I have library cards for six systems in the Silicon Valley, and that I got them simply by presenting myself to the various entities and showing photo ID.

I thought I’d just give you empiric proof of that claim:

America, gonif!

Changing guard at WaPo

Well—big news in the, uh, news business: The Washington Post Company announced yesterday that it’s sold its flagship property, The Washington Post, to Amazon founder/CEO Jeff Bezos, for $250M.

Some interesting things about this sale:

WaPo senior management kept the fact that the paper was on the block secret from everyone, including its own employees. Reaction all over the place was stunned disbelief. I don’t know what that says about their newsroom’s investigative abilities.

Bezos, 49, has bought the paper as a private individual. It’s not Amazon making the purchase. But there have been some wags on Twitter capitalizing on the connection between the man and his company:

Apparently $250M is chump change to Bezos, who has a personal worth of $25.2B, according to Forbes.

I don’t know what to say about this—I loved WaPo. It was one of the best things about living in the D.C. area, having a first-class newspaper to read every morning.

When I moved to the UK, I was appalled by what passed for journalism there, the conflating of news and editorial commentary, the massive delta between the quality of national/international and local coverage, the lack of comics and coupons. I was accustomed to having a local paper what was also national, staffed by professionals (with one or two exceptions, like Janet Cooke) who were great news people and fabulous writers. I used to check WaPo regularly online to get my reportage.

Back in Virginia at the end of 2001, and without a job, I still had the consolation of a first-class newspaper to curl up with everyday.

But, of course, you don’t step into the same river twice, and the news industry has been struggling with the changes wrought by the Internet for at least a decade. A lot of great newspapers have come as near as dammit to folding; WaPo itself has had several rounds of lay-offs/early retirement offers that have changed the nature of its coverage.

After Ken Ringle left, to tell the truth, it just wasn’t the same for me.

Even now, as I went to their site to get the Bezos sale story from the horse’s mouth, I was greeted by a popup telling me I’ve used one of my 20 free story views for the month. Sigh.

Bezos issued a six-paragraph letter to WaPo employees. In it he assures them to the extent possible that the transition will be smooth, he’s not going to be involved in day-to-day management, etc. But there will be change. (Or death, but of course he didn’t say that.)

Here’s one graf that gives me some hope that the paper won’t turn into a three-times-a-week publication, or a scandal-rag:

“Journalism plays a critical role in a free society, and The Washington Post – as the hometown paper of the capital city of the United States – is especially important. I would highlight two kinds of courage the Grahams have shown as owners that I hope to channel. The first is the courage to say wait, be sure, slow down, get another source. Real people and their reputations, livelihoods and families are at stake. The second is the courage to say follow the story, no matter the cost. While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham’s example, I’ll be ready.”

Well—he certainly understands the purpose and the past of this paper. I hope to God he equips it for the future. I’d like to move back there and have it to read everyday again.

Gratitude Monday: Paris by way of Seoul

There’s a bakery/café in Santa Clara, a couple of miles from my place. It’s called Paris Baguette, but it’s actually a Korean-owned chain with outlets on both coasts. Since Santa Clara is the Northern California equivalent of Koreatown in LA, it makes sense that you’d find this where it is.

  

There are other PB stores in Palo Alto and Cupertino; both of them are more upscale and attitudinal than the one in Santa Clara, which is in a somewhat downmarket shopping center that also has a cheesy furniture store, a Korean market, a shoe repair shop, a hair salon and the like. The shoe guy is how I happened on the center in the first place.

The café part is a little run-down looking, but they’ve got good wi-fi, and power outlets to plug your laptop into. And their croissant-based pastries are lovely—flakey and tasty; you can’t eat them without making a complete mess with all the little crumbs.

Plus—they make the best latte of any place in the Silicon Valley. It’s my treat for the days I hit the gym; it’s silky, luscious and it sometimes comes with latte art:

The pastry offerings fascinate me. I tried the “Strewed Pea” twist a couple of times. For the life of me I cannot discern what “Strewed Pea” might be, but it’s kind of good. I’ve not tried the Tuna Pastry, but it seems pretty popular with the other customers.

(It’s interesting that they put it out next to the cream cheese pastry. You’d think the latter would pick up some of the taste of the former. But maybe not.)

Recently they’ve added a Tiramisu pastry, just at the weekend—a kind of croissant rolled around mascarpone filling & dowsed in cocoa powder. It’s completely decadent. I have to tap off a couple of tablespoonsful of cocoa and powdered sugar before I can eat it. Even so, I’m sure I walk around with cocoa smears on my face for half the day.

I enjoy spending a couple of hours at PB of a morning, writing, checking target companies and so on. I could do that at a couple hundred cafés in the valley; but the added attraction of PB is that I’m often the only Meeguk saram there. I love watching the Korean housewives who get together there for a nibble and some gossip. It reminds me of my time living in Seoul, although I never experienced anything like this when I was there.

(I can’t pick up much of the discussions any more, which is what comes of learning a language in a “conversation” class, not a proper language class. But there you are.)

It may be partly because I’m decidedly not Korean, and therefore stand out, but I’ve achieved “regular” status by virtue of me being there once a week. If counter people are free, the moment they clock me walking through the door someone starts making a latte. I was there a couple of weeks ago—the last time I had to take my car in to get the antenna replaced—and mentioned it to the blonde at the counter. This past Saturday she inquired after the car. I’ve definitely arrived.

So for Gratitude Monday today, I’m grateful that I have Paris Baguette, where I can savor a latte, get croissant flakes all over me and my keyboard, sit with a friend for a couple of hours talking, and people-watch to my heart’s content. I hope you’re lucky enough to have a similar place to get away from it all.