December 2007

John Scalzi writes a rather moving and rational answer to the eternal questions of “is that all there is?” and “why bother?”

I have to say, it tracks with many of my own philosophies:

Whatever: Reader Request Week 2007 #4: The Inevitable Blackness That Will Engulf Us All
With the exception of the very last of these, theres not that much to be done about it; the universe is not notably sympathetic to our cries that we should be special and eternal. Its nice you feel that way, the universe is telling us, but one day Im going to end and Im going to take you with me. Once you wrap your brain around this simple and unalterable fact—the fact that not even the universe is getting out of here alive—the rest of it comes pretty easy. And you realize that to some extent worrying about enduring when your genome will dissolve, your planet will dry up, your sun will engulf your home and every single thing that ever was in the universe will randomly pop out of existence, a particle at a time, is a little silly. This frees you to stop freaking out about what will happen in the future and focus on what the hells going on now.

And I say, life’s a gift. Never mind who from, necessarily. Rock out and have a great day!

Had a great time, and we’re wiped out. Here are some vaguely representative photos via a fuzzy phone camera.

This is Leah and Me at a very unflattering angle listening to my Uncle Lee sing at a local church service (Lutheran) he sounded great!

And here’s the same uncle and my aunt singing on Christmas Day:

And here’s a cousin (Mike) and my Grandma (Jean) and the new in-training puppy (Toby):

That’s all I have for photos. I also have a drawing I did as the basis of an ornament for some friends of ours who happen to love Linux and the Ocean. I did it in pen, then a brush pen, then embellished in PhotoShop. Leah and colored the final product with crayons. That’s right, we were kicking it like 2nd Grade, baby!

Right now, 9:56pm on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 2007, I want to sleep now.

I bid you peace.

As of today, three years married for me and Mrs. Leahpeah. It’s been, and continues to be, a pleasure. I have a real partner and someone I learn from and who learns from me every day. What a gift from the Universe.

All my love,

Joe

Leah and I took a trip to a local Thousand Oaks Ralphs Supermarket—freeway-close and near the intersection of Moorpark Road and Janss Road—to get some Christmas essentials—namely: colored cellophane paper, candy canes, and IBUPROFEN. And what to my wandering eyes did appear, TWO AISLES OF SEASONAL TRAPPINGS. Only, what Season? Perhaps Christmas? Perhaps New Year’s? Here we are, December 19th in the year of Our Lord, two-thousand and seven. Guess again, says the Universe. No, not Christmas. No, not two aisles of New Year’s hats and noisemakers. The reason for the Season, and a two aisle display of candy and suchlike—VALENTINE’S DAY.

My eyes goggled, I went stiff from shock. I pointed this out to Leah. She was stunned. I snapped a photo so I could chronicle this sign of the times in a blog post.

Greetings America! You’re crazy!

Several weeks ago, Leah got me a jar of Jelly Bellies for work from CostCo (our houseguests had a membership and we took advantage of it for a wee little while):

Here they are yesterday, at the tail end of their existence:

I like having candy at my desk. Folks come by, they say hello, they hang out. It’s cool. Jelly Bellies are a pretty spiffy candy anyway. Yesterday while playing some Munchkin, the jar got finished. I still have some candy at my desk, leftover from the gingerbread-house making back on Thanksgiving, but it’s almost all gone. If Christmas brings more candy, I expect I’ll have even more to share at my desk.

There’s an entire blog devoted to the song St. James Infirmary. It’s called NO NOTES and is pretty great. It’s a testament to the power of the web to provide whole environments where fandom and obsessive scholarship can flourish. I’m a big fan of fansites. If someone has a peculiar obsession, I think that’s great.

I first heard this song song done on Saturday Night Live a jillion years ago performed by Lily Tomlin with Howard Shore and his all Nurse Band. It was such a strange song it burned into my memory. I was probably 10 or 12 years old when I first heard it (so, 1980/1982 or so) -either a rerun or in syndication. It’s from Season 1, Episode 6 of SNL, 1975.

The song is disturbing, sad, about death, but still has a braggadocio that’s really odd. I’m not crazy about the wikipedia entry for the song, but it’s interesting nonetheless. The Lily Tomlin version I can’t find an online video of, but there are some others on the ubiquitous YouTube. Here’s an animated version featuring Coco the Clown over the top of a Cab Calloway version:

And here’s the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo stage show (yes, that Oingo Boingo) covering the song, very much in homage to the Cab Calloway version:

And for yet another take, Cab again, with a more swinging version from 1964. Cab Calloway might be one of the top 10 most watchable musicians ever.

As I said, the song is disturbing. The song’s singer is talking about going down to the infirmary where her girl is on a long white table and is “so cold, so fair”—if not dead, then certainly dying. Then he says she’ll never find a sweet man like him. Then he goes into a whole section on his vanity, and how he wants to be buried. The song is sung with a very real emotion. If anything, the fact that the narrator is a cad actually confirms the reality in a way. I find it very moving.

One of the best versions is by Louis Armstrong. That’s worth seeking out. The Amazon MP3 store has it. In fact, it has 156 versions of the song.

Excellent photo by Mack Reed over on Metroblogging.la: “Frigid dawn over Los Angeles”:

Absolutely beautiful. About ten years ago I worked downtown on the night shift at California Hospital, just a few years after that I worked as a temp at ARCO working on web pages, where I first encountered any server-side programming in a little language called Perl. Photos like these remind me of the great beauty possible in a city some consider ugly and cruel. Not me. Me, I love Los Angeles.

I really like this set of photos, originally from Girl Vogue Korea in January 2006. They are sweet and charming and very 21st Century. If you had asked me in 1986 what I thought magazine fashion spreads for teen girls would look like in 2006, this would have been my answer. Of course, I’d have also told you that the robot would be real and functional. Well, at least we have the illusion of my supposed futurity.

So Flickr Pro users now have access to stats, also announced on the flickr blog on the amounts of traffic they get, and where that traffic comes from. One of the first things I saw was a post on Valleywag that uses an old image from my Amiga Pictures set, here’s another old link to my
amiga set, and another:

Most of my images are licensed under a Creative Commons license, and it’s fun to see where these are used. For example, the Wikipedia article “Book” includes a photo of mine of Kali Kirk at the San Diego City College Learning Resource Center, which was taken for the technical writing class Leah and I took at City College in San Diego several years ago. I mentioned it in a blog post back in 2004. And actually, that image was one that I recieved a note from someone from The Pirate Party about using in a poster back in 2006. I never heard anything more about that though. This is the image:

Two silly ones pulled in from starwars.yahoo.com, recent: 1 and 2:

Here’s a usage of this image from a post in Hebrew. Interesting, but I wonder what the article is saying? I tried Google Translate and Babelfish and don’t see any machine Hebrew to English translators. What’s up with Hebrew? Is it harder to machine translate than, say Arabic or Chinese or Korean or Japanese? Or is it simply a less popular language?

More great work from flickr. I’m impressed. We use it to print family photos and get prints at Target, excellent service. Unrelated, but I thought I’d mention it since I’m all warm and fuzzy and enthusiastic about the service today.

So at work some of the guys, notably Jukebox JT, have started referring to me as “Youth Pastor Joe”—presumably it’s about my being generally non-confrontational, even-tempered, and diplomatic. They mentioned I should have a public-access TV show and issue helpful messages to the kids today. It’s pretty funny stuff, actually.

Youth Pastor Joe has a nice ring, no? I don’t mind being poked fun of, really. Not if it’s for being a congenial guy.