Brass Knuckles
I hate jazz. I mean, jazz of the squeak-blatt-toot variety. I know that makes me Mayor McCheese of Squaresville, but I always felt like jazz was an inside joke and I was definitely not inside. It’s all smack and sunglasses and a smug sense of its own coolness.
But somehow I love ragtime, jazz’s crazy grampa in the attic. Ragtime is a joke, too, but I’m in on it. It’s wild, exhuberant bullshit; it’s showy and silly and just this side of stupid. It’s whorehouse piano — poor old Scott Joplin hisself died of syphilis.
My very favorite ragtime piano tune is by two moderns, William Albright and William Bolcom. Yes, this is self-conscious smarty-pants clever-boots well-nigh-atonal modern crap and I ought to hate it, but I don’t. It’s one of those rare pieces of music I’d give a non-vital body-part to be able to play, and then I’d waste my life playing it all day.
Okay, I know what you’re going to think: “You’ve got to be shitting me, Weasel! This is complete crap. He’s just mashing keys there at the beginning, and then it goes downhill.” Well, yes, but give it a chance. Clinical psychosis is the charm of this piece.
The tune is all over the place, the timing is all over the place, but it holds itself together just well enough to keep you listening. Anxious, but listening. It goes haywire and, right before you click it off in disgust, it turns sweet. Drift along on the sweetness of it, and suddenly it’s in your shower waving a knife around.
It’s like bringing home that new person you’ve been dating for dinner with the folks. You know, that new person with Tourette’s Syndrome. Or listening to a very important speech delivered by George Bush. Or being called upon unexpectedly in a meeting, when you were all hungover and daydreaming. You close your eyes, whisper the please-keep-it-together prayer and hope for the best.
Behold! Brass Knuckles:
[audio:brassknuckles.mp3]
February 27, 2007 — 9:06 am
Comments: 7
Damien sez: more global warming, please
February 26, 2007 — 5:06 pm
Comments: 2
What did YOU do at the office today?
I built this thing. It’s not the only thing I did today, but it’s the only thing I did today that made me go “eee!” It’s a ripple displacement. I’ve never done one with this software before. “eee!” (If it’s making you nuts, right click and uncheck “play”).
This would be an intermediate step in most 3D animation, this slightly off-white, textureless place. I call it Milkworld. A lot of the things I build never make it out of Milkworld; I’m usually called upon to explain stuff rather than re-create a photorealistic scene.
I’d like to live in Milkworld — it’s very soothing here — but I’m such a slob, I’d probably get some color on it.
Have a good weekend. I’m going someplace with my new camera. “eee!”
Update: Huh. Doesn’t work in Opera or Firefox. Just IE. That’s odd because Damien’s Jaunty Balls works fine.
Update II: There. Don’t know what was wrong, but I fixed it by paring the embed code down to the minimum. Of course, now you can’t right click and uncheck “play” — you have to watch it loop. Bwahahaha! Wait! What? Close this window…? Nooooo!
February 23, 2007 — 2:21 pm
Comments: 8
It’s here!
I’ve been agonizing about a new digital camera ever since mine started to go screwy a year ago. So far, I’ve bought good quality point-and-shoot cameras, and I’ve been happy. But I use a camera enough to merit something better. I’ve been teetering between high-end point-and-shoot and low-end digital SLR (even if I could scrape up the money for a high-end DSLR, I’d be scared to use it). Here’s what it came down to:
Sony Cybershot DSC-H5. Somebody at work just bought one of these. It’s slick. It’s a high-end point-and-shoot, so you can compose with the LCD (only one digital SLR will do that — I love to shoot using the LCD, not the viewfinder). Plus, it’s got a 12X optical zoom Zeiss lens with image stabilizing. Plus, it takes regular old AA batteries, which is sweet. Downside? Sony. They make beautiful stuff, but they abandon product lines, leaving you stranded. My poor Clié was traumatized when they bailed on the PDA market.
Olympus Evolt. Low end DSLR. The newer versions support composing on the CRT. Also, they sell it bundled with a wide lens and a long lens, so you’d be all done buying gear. All my early digital cameras were Olympi, and they make splendid optics. Downside? All my Olympi eventually broke on me, so I think their stuff is delicate. And a complete kit it may be, but at getting on for $700, it’s a little more scratch than I want to fork out.
Some flavor of Canon. In the days of film, it was Canon for me. My A1 was a dinged-up, ruggedized thing of Road Warriorific beauty. They’re certainly a major (maybe THE major) player in the digital market. It’s what they’re using at work right now. But…I dunno. My last point-and-shoot (the screwy one) was a Canon, and defective from the get-go. To be fair, I know someone else who got brilliant pictures out of the same model, but I didn’t and I’m inclined to be grouchy about it.
So I went for the Nikon D40. Not because I had any blinding insight, but because I missed a shot last weekend on account of my duff camera, and I thought, “Shit! Get off the pot! Choose now!”
This one has gotten great reviews. It’s Nikon’s newest, and its most entry-level. The image quality (everyone says) is equal to better models, but with some of the (so complicated I would undoubtedly never use them) bells and whistles stripped away. Around $550.
It’s beautiful to hold. Much smaller and lighter than any of the other SLRs I tried (which relieves me of one worry — that I’d so hate lugging around all that camera, I wouldn’t). All the controls are in easy reach of the index and thumb of the right hand — I started to feel at home within minutes. Big, clear LCD (even if I can’t compose with it), and a great menu system (I’m allergic to product manuals, so this is a must).
I haven’t had much chance to shoot with it yet, but I think I did the right thing. Expect more searingly observant photo essays of the alienation of young people in urban society adorable cat pictures.
February 22, 2007 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 18
Here’s something cute. Now fuck off.
Damien at about ten weeks. Click the photo to see the big color hardcore Cat Lady version. He still has magic testicles at this point, albeit rudimentary.
Started out with the best intentions today, but I got all jammed up. Stupid work. Stupid deadlines. Stupid not-being-born-rich.
Oh, and Thursday’s Weasel sucked. So I killed it.
February 21, 2007 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 6
Gong hay fat choi, y’all
Happy Year of the Pig. Actually, Chinese New Year started yesterday, but they celebrate for two weeks, so we haven’t missed much.
The first day is the welcoming of the gods of heaven and earth. I hope you did that. The second day (today), you pray to your ancestors AND the gods (hi, Grammy!). Also, you have to be very nice to dogs, because it’s their birthday. All of them. No, I don’t get it, either.
After that, it gets muddled. I got different advice from different web sites. Mostly, you gamble, wear red and give away envelopes of money to children. So it’s like your blowsy Aunt Irma times a billion. (Yes, I really had a blowsy Aunt Irma. She once answered the door wearing three eyebrows, two on the left and one on the right. A little makeup table accident. Could happen to anyone).
The idea is to maximize luck and prosperity in the new year by doing lucky things and avoiding unlucky ones. The Chinese love money without shame. How they went communist is anyone’s guess.
Like, you mustn’t buy pants or books or shoes, because those words are homophones for “bitter,” “lose” and “rough.” A “homophone” is a word that sounds like another word. Please stop thinking about other, alternate definitions of “homophone.” People in the Far East often make an explicit association between words that sound alike.
New Year’s is also called guo nian — literally means the Passover of the Nian. The Nian was an ugly monster that came out of the hills and ate people in Spring, until they figured out the drums and firecrackers would scare it away.
A holiday with a monster. How cool is that?
We once wandered into London’s Chinatown quite by accident on New Year’s. They were doing the Lion Dance in the street, with the slinky monster and the drums and the firecrackers and the bok choy and everything. It was very exciting.
I like celebrating other people’s holidays. If I keep learning about other cultures, it hastens they day I won’t have to work at all.
“Oooh. Sorry. Can’t come in. It’s the Shoton Festival today. Yeah. You know. The traditional Tibetan yoghurt banquet. Right.”
February 19, 2007 — 10:28 am
Comments: 3
Damien Weasel, Cat Scientist
Poor little bastard was set up. She went out first and planted herself at the foot of the stairs. They are arch enemies, so his only escepe was to take a flying leap over her head. The walk was covered in an inch of smooth, melty ice with a skim of water over the top. This is his first Winter and we haven’t had a good freeze yet, so he doesn’t know from ice. He took his leap, hit, made it all the way to the end of the walkway on his ass in one smooth, wet, flailing pinwheel of knees and paws and elbows and turned around with this amazing “whoa! d00d!!1!!” look on his little mug.
Imagine if he still had balls.
— 6:15 am
Comments: 8
Blogging and the OCD Mailman
Have you ever seen this video of the OCD Mailman that made the rounds a few years ago? For nearly three minutes, this guy pulls the basket out of a public postbox, checks it, feels around for mail, closes it up, walks away, walks back and does it all again. You’ll never know how long three minutes is until you watch this performance. If he did it at every stop along the way, this poor bastard missed his dinner.
I find this one more ‘funny ouch’ than ‘funny haha’, having been gifted with an improbable number of O’s and C’s myself.
This guy is a ‘checker’. I’m more of a ‘polisher’ myself. I hone. And I burnish. And I buff. And I do this weird thing where I must maximize the efficiency of simple tasks.
Like, I’m reading a book and drinking coffee and eating a piece of toast. When I finish, I want to go upstairs with my book. This (naturally) has to be done in one trip. If I put the cup on the plate and tuck the book under my arm, I can go in the kitchen and put the dishes in the sink, but I have to put the book down to rinse them and the book might get wet. If I put the book down on my way into the kitchen, it’s not on the shortest path to the stairs on the way back. If I swing by the stairs first and put the book down, I’ll go past the mail, which I will want to examine. But I will have a plate and a cup in my hand.
In the end, I manage to calculate the route of maximum economy. Or, you know, say ‘screw it’ and go for a drive.
I read a biography of Turing that claimed his bicycle lost its chain periodically on his way to work, causing him to fall off. Rather than fix the gear, he observed that the chain worked its way off every twelfth revolution, built an apparatus that calculated the number of elapsed revolutions and rang a bell in time for him to jump off the bike right before the chain slipped.
I’ll bet the story isn’t true. It’s got that apocryphal stink all over it. But the general approach is weasel-approved (not that I’m comparing myself to the Father of Modern Computing, you understand — Turing was way gayer than me).
So blogging has been a sort of therapy — having to throw shit into the arena fast, often, half-polished and one-eighth baked. It might be less painful to pony up for an actual therapist, but you never know if you’ll get the good kind who dispense drugs, or the bad kind who want to talk about your mom and your genitals. In the same conversation.
So, now that I have the new site nailed down, the general plan is to post something every weekday, be it ever so small or craptacular. That’s not a promise, it’s a general plan. Weekends off. And if I find one of those congenial, pharmaceutical-dispensing pshrinks, I am so out of here.
See you Monday.
February 16, 2007 — 7:33 pm
Comments: 9
Misspelling my way to fame and fortune
Judging by the Google hits from the WordPress site, two of my biggest sellers were “Janet Jackon” and “Stonehedge.”
“Heh heh,” I thought, “stupid illiterate Googlers.” Until it dawned on me I had to be getting those hits because I had spelled those words that way. Which — duh — a search proved to be correct. I started to fix my mistakes, and then it occurred to me that the pool of websites serving the “Janet Jackon” community is a LOT smaller than the pool of websites serving the “Janet Jackson” community and I was closer to the top of it. Why throw away hits? And hits of such obvious high quality, as well.
This isn’t a new idea, capitalizing on sloppy typing. If you type drudge.com, you won’t get the Drudge Report but the Drudge Retort. I have a friend who was surfing once and tried typing the URL for the blog Biased BBC by hand. He got as far as “bi”, prematurely hit ENTER and Firefox sent him to bi.org — serving the world bisexual community since 1996. And now that it’s cached, he keeps accidentally renewing it.
At least, that’s what he says. Me, I get Behavioral Interventions when I do that. But, hey. I love you, man. You don’t ever have to explain yourself to me.
My one correctly spelled big seller was “boobies,” both of the “perky” and “droopy” varieties. So, I’m thinking…what if I misspell “boobies”? That’s got to be a pure, pharmaceutical grade Googlepalooza, right there.
Let’s start with Boobah — TV’s colorful, squeaky creeptastic pustules. Invented by Anne Wood, who also brought the world the Teletubbies, they too are aimed at under-fives and hallucinogenic drug users. Boobah are a continuation of the freaky fat-assed aliens theme, but without the Tubbies’ charm and obvious artistic merit.
Click the link. But stay away from the brown acid.
As opposed to buboes, which are swollen lymph nodes. They’re a common feature of many diseases, but they gave their name to the bubonic plague. In fact, Wikipedia says, in current epidemiological usage, if it ain’t got buboes, it’s not a plague. Bubonic plague was (almost certainly) the cause of my favorite pandemic, the Black Death.
My second favorite pandemic was the 1918 ‘Flu Pandemic, but that’s gotten so much press, what with the whole bird ‘flu thing. You know how you like something, and then it gets popular, and that ruins it?
In conclusion: boobys booobies boøbies boòbyes bubies bôôbeze bubize beubice boobease bübice b°°beez and boo!beas!
February 15, 2007 — 10:26 am
Comments: 4
You know what I love about being a drunk?
Every day has the potential to be April Fool’s and Christmas morning rolled into one.
Like the morning I woke up and my bedroom furniture had been completely rearranged. Not knocked over, mind. Carefully rearranged. (Okay, actually…that morning scared the shit out of me and I toned it way down for a while).
Today I got a package in the mail: a book I have no memory of ordering. It’s like a present from Drunken Me to Sober Me. Drunken Me has pretty good taste and knows better than to order anything over ten bucks or so, so I’m not bothered.
Looks interesting. Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements. Under three dollars, hardback, in Amazon buy it used. I love buy it used.
Though why they insisted on misspelling ‘$*!)@’, I have no idea.
February 14, 2007 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 6