Miscellany

Recently I deep-cleaned my keyboard. I popped off all the keys one by one and polished the gunk off of them, and vacuumed out all the crevices. A couple of minutes into the job, I decided to open a blank file in textedit, and see what came out. The results are below. Continue reading “Keyboard Poetry”

Site version #004 launched today. Movable Type on the backend, along with much input from tcc and stg54 on the new skin. My neighbors must think I’m the most unpleasant sonofabitch on the face of the planet. I’ve been working from home now for almost three years, and often the silence of my apartment is bookended by occasional profane explosions directed at a perfectly fine piece of code that just refuses to work. Such is my life as a web developer. Code is among the most elegant and evil of humankind’s inventions, a series of devices designed to enlighten and to obfuscate. Any rookie programmer, no matter the language, has the same experience when they first begin, the horrifying realization that code operates on its own logic, just different enough from what a lifetime of experience with ethnic and national languages has taught us, that the very way a person thinks has to accommodate itself to the demands of the code. In the end, even after becoming comfortable with a new way of thinking, problems usually turn out to be simple syntax error. For those of you unfamiliar with programming, imagine you were stone drunk and had to write a ten page paper due in the morning, and every time you made a typo, your word processing program would call you an idiot and refuse to work. But you’ve got tunnel vision, you can’t see what the error is. Then, in order to get something, anything, done, you search on the web for someone who has written a paper on the same subject as you, and blatantly plagiarize them. And that’s okay! Don’t worry, though. You’ll get better, or you won’t be able to find any work. Welcome to the world of website development. Continue reading ““Well, Looks Like Yer Gonna Need a Complete Overhaul.””

Last week, ESPN.com held a mock college football draft, where writers selected the 40 teams from the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) that they would like to see constitute a pared down top division, and subsequently divided them into four regional conferences. It was an interesting idea, one brought forth by the NCAA’s inability to put together an effective method of crowning a national champion. A lot of people have spent a lot of valuable time fretting over the jumbled state of the FBS, as if it were some form of national emergency, a tragedy of the first order that oftentimes there is no clear king of college football at the end of January. It is an interesting problem, though. Continue reading “How To Fix College Football”

Roughly 102 hours, 45 minutes, and 40 seconds after Apollo 11 lifted off from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral on July 16th, 1969, the lunar module touched down on the surface of the moon. Of course, today marks the fortieth anniversary of the landing. Over the next three years, six more missions were launched to the moon, and five were successful. The Apollo program is arguably the greatest achievement in engineering and courage in human history. Never before, and never since, have human footprints marked the surface of another heavenly body. The significance of these events cannot be overstated. Continue reading “One Giant Leap and Then...Nothing”

The house that once stood in a lot on the corner of West Market and North Highland had been a wine seller’s business in its last legitimate habitation. The house had been empty for years by the time it was torn down. Funny enough, even the corner where the house once stood is gone, the stretch of Highland that reached Market having been paved over to make way for an expanded branch of the Akron Public Library. Now that’s progress. Continue reading “La Mise En Scène Est La Chose”

There was a startling sight off the foot of Manhattan this morning. A Boeing 747 trailing a fighter escort was seen making multiple low passes near the Statue of Liberty and many tall buildings in Jersey City. In response, some buildings in Jersey City and in Manhattan were evacuated, for fear another terrorist attack was under way. However, this wasn’t the case. The 747 was the backup plane for Air Force One, flying by New York City for an Air Force photo shoot. Apparently, the city had been made aware of the flight path by the Federal Aviation Administration. The NYPD acknowledged this, but also said that it had been barred from alerting the public. What were they thinking? Continue reading “It’s Coming Right for Us!”

The New York Mets are playing a home game against the Florida Marlins on Tuesday, April the 28th. There are plenty of good seats available, but I’m not interested in those. Good seats at a ballgame are a luxury that my friends and I cannot afford. Nosebleeds have been the order of the day for all but rare occasions in my sportsgoing life. Good seats are reserved for rare gifts from corporate contacts or semi-retired acquaintances ready to rip through their retirement funds. The most expensive ticket I’ve ever bought was for a Yankees/Indians matchup at the Stadium last year for sixty-five bucks...in the upper deck. A similar seat in the new stadium goes for twice that amount, now. But this article isn’t a rant about the high price of seats at sporting events. It’s about fees. Continue reading “Ticket Fees Are Bullshit”

Never touch anything in a subway station. Never lean on a column, sit on a bench, or, God forbid, do a pull-up from a rafter. Subway stations have been coated with a hundred years of filth. Brake dust, rust, flakes of lead paint, rotten food, rain water drained from the street, dog piss, rat piss, human piss, vomit, all kinds of fecal matter from all kinds of sources. There’s no reason to believe the rare occasions when things are sprayed and scrubbed down that everything is cleansed. Even the smell of the air, a truly unique odor, tells one all they need to know about the tunnels. In the cars, it’s different. There are three options. Sit on a dirty seat, a thin layer of clothes between you and the plastic; hold onto a metal bar; or surf, holding nothing and risking falling on the floor, which is just as bad as lying on the track bed in some cars. In fact, the ideal situation would be to ride the subway in a deep sea diving suit which, upon exiting, is dipped in gasoline and set on fire.

Everyone who loves rock and roll has an opinion about the best album ever recorded. Is it Electric Ladyland, Who’s Next, Led Zeppelin’s fourth, Abbey Road, something else? The arguments one way or another are endless, and fill a damn large percentage of late night bar talk. Every music magazine one could think of has lists all over their web pages. Top 100 albums ever, best 500 songs, best punk albums, folk albums, classic rock albums, alternative albums, ’60s albums, ’90s albums, all coming out the wazoo. For me, all the history of modern music, rock, blues, jazz, coalesced and circulated in a massive storm over a recording studio in Los Angeles in May 1970. For two weeks The Stooges channeled all the hectic and destructive energy of loud music and put it on tape. The result was Fun House. Continue reading “Ron Asheton”

When living in the city, never buy rice from the corner store if it comes packaged in a cardboard box. There is no liner in the box, and you can’t see inside. The rice just sits in there, snug against the smooth, brown sidewalls, in an imperfect seal. After you pour out a cup into some boiling water and all sorts of brown stuff floats to the top, that’s when you realize that at some point between harvesting, processing, packaging, and sitting on a shelf, your box of rice became infested with bugs. Rice in a plastic bag mitigates this problem. Look in the bag, check for bugs. No bugs? Buy the bag, and store in the freezer.