Wednesday, July 11, 2007

I can’t keep it a secret any longer

Seriously, it's just too stressful to keep the secret. Stewart Butterfield my baby daddy.

Pownce

I have in my possession a small quantity of Pownce invitations. If I know you and you would like one, leave a comment below, describing in appropriate detail why and how I should Pownce you.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

In memoriam

I just received the following from my alma mater:

It is with great sadness that we report the death of Sister Mary Mangan on July 3, 2007. She had been living in the Loretto Motherhouse in Kentucky. A memorial service will be held in Kentucky.

Sr. Mary led a remarkable life dedicated to the Catholic faith, progressive political activism, and academic pursuits. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (wearing full habit) at a time when there were virtually no women in the discipline. She was continually involved with numerous political activities, from the civil rights movement to the League of Women Voters. As a longtime faculty member in the Department of History/Political Science, Sr. Mary served as department chair as well as chair of the university faculty. She was awarded the status of Professor Emeritus in the 1980s, but continued to be an active teacher and departmental member for another decade.

Those of you who knew Sr. Mary will certainly never forget her wry sense of humor, thirst for knowledge, and commitment to high ideals. She represented the best of the Webster tradition.

To which I can only add "amen". Sr. Mary was the professor and adviser who most challenged me during my undergraduate years. She set very, very high expectations for all of her students and inspired them to meet them. She took me on as an already voracious reader and encouraged me to read even more, particularly about public policy and international politics. And she did have a wicked sense of humor, delivered with a wink; if you could make her smile or laugh, you really felt you had accomplished something for the day. And she had a particular vocal tic that sometimes made even the direst subject amusing; after posing a question to you, she would seemingly involuntarily add "mmm-hmm" with a slight lilt. I confess now that we often gently mimicked her during post-class discussions in the halls of the Administration Building.

Until she moved to Kentucky, I would frequently see her around campus or when I was passing the convent. She always had time for a chat. I found myself thinking of her often in recent years, usually when reading the New York Times or Christian Science Monitor, wondering what she'd have to say about this story or that. I more than occasionally wondered if she ever thought of me since one of the things that most amazed me about Sr. Mary was her uncanny recall of nearly every student she'd ever taught, where they were, what job (or, often, elected position) they held and other, minute details of their lives.

I hope those many connections around the globe and her faith were of comfort to her. Knowing she was in the world, still learning, teaching and speaking truth to power, was something of a comfort to me, particularly in recent years. She'll be missed, mmm-hmm.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

“… we’ve relinquished … imagination to the marketplace.”

Well worth a read to remind us of the importance of the arts—all of them—to our lives and society, these remarks by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, at Stanford University's commencement. A snip:

The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young.

There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

A Pulitzer conspiracy?

According to comments on its MySpace site, it appears that the Newsies flashmob I mentioned a while ago didn't happen as planned. Anyone know what happened? Is Christian Bale OK?

Pimp my Firefox

Three new (to me) Firefox extensions I'm enjoying:

• Add to Search Bar: Makes it easy to add new site search engines to the Firefox search box. I just added the search on the theatre's website and it works a treat.
• Fission: Puts a progress bar in the address bar, ala Safari.
• Smart Link: Makes it easy to open plain-text URLs with a contextual click.

Sneaking feeds from the PD

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch website is a bit of usability nightmare, but most vexing is its spotty use of RSS feeds. You can generally get news headlines and section headlines, but they're not full-text feeds and they have a firehose approach (for example, you can get a feed of all columnists but not just pick and choose your favorites).

Last year, the paper launched a bunch of blogs and they continue to roll out others. Powered by WordPress, the PD Blog Zone is as frustrating to navigate as the rest of the site and its feed selection is no exception. If you rely on auto-discovery, you wind up with a feed of comments from all blogs, not the original content. The individual blogs have no obvious links to their feeds either.

But last week, I accidentally discovered how to trick the PD into giving up its blog feeds: Just take the address of the blog and append /feed/ to the end. So, for example, if you're a transit geek like me and want to follow the new Driver's Seat blog, the feed address would be http://www.stltoday.com/blogs/news-the-drivers-seat/feed/. Alas, they're still not full-text but at least they provide a few lines whenever the site updates.

Are the blogs themselves any good? It's a mixed bag. The Driver's Seat is new and largely focused on the roads (necessarily, given the current mania around the I-64 reconstruction), but there are occasional public transit and Metro tidbits and it may improve with both breadth and depth in time. I've only sampled a few of the others and haven't found anything else particularly feedworthy to stick into my NetNewsWire yet.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Farewell to a lady

Former Texas governor Ann Richards has died. She was 73.

I was so honored to have met Governor Richards once. She was brash and brassy, loud and incredibly smart. Scary smart. I often said that if she had chosen to run for president, I would have left my job and worked for her for free for as long as it took to put her in the White House.

We may not see her like again for some time, but she certainly tried to make sure we would. She encouraged young women not to settle, ever, for anything less than the best they could do.

Richards often told young girls not to try her path diverting from obedient know-no-alternative housewifery to a late discovery of personal potential.

"The only standard that truly matters is the one you set for yourself," she said at Girls State in 1993. "And you cannot count on Prince Charming to make you feel better about yourself and take care of you, like some funhouse mirror that reflects you at twice your real size.

"Because Prince Charming may be driving a Honda and telling you that you have no equal . . . but that won't do you much good when you've got kids and a mortgage . . . and he has a beer gut and a wandering eye."

On embarking on her 12-year stint as a statewide official, Richards said: "Naturally, I want it to be easier for women to get involved in politics. I want them to think of politics and public service as a good place for them, as something honorable and something worthwhile for them to pursue. And the way they are going to do that is to say, 'If she can do it, I can do it.' "

The world has lost a true lady in every sense of the word. I hope there are Harleys in heaven.

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Just relax

Ahem. My pal Mr. Happy Crack knows better than to neglect his annual physical. Remember kids, even corporate mascots know the importance of good health and regular checkups!

Sunday, May 21, 2006

That it will, little Sally. That it will.

Quik-Stop Window, Troy, Missouri
May 21, 2006

Katherine Dunham has died

Dance legend Katherine Dunham has died. She will be very much missed, particularly in her home of East St. Louis, where she was an activist and agent for peace, change and—always—the dance.

"She was not just a dancer," [Donna] Pollion said. "She was a philosopher. She was a multi-faceted person. Anything you can think of, Miss Dunham has probably done it. She has written books. She was an artist. A good friend. She never shunned anyone. She was always available."

She was 96.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Google made me call my therapist

Google launched Google Calendar today, which looks pretty sweet, if its error messages don't give you a complex:

Sunday, April 2, 2006

All the news that’s fit to sing…

If you imagine writing the news on a deadline is challenging, imagine writing lyrics and music for the news. That's what they do at The Aural Times, providing headlines with a bassline three times a week. I particularly liked this ditty about Isaac Hayes in a cappella style.

Friday, March 31, 2006

Idioddity

And just who is this "usual gang of idiots" responsible for foisting MAD on the world every month? Meet them here.

If you prefer something more paper-based, the Internet's own Mark Evanier has written a heavy actual book titled Mad Art : A Visual Celebration of the Art of Mad Magazine and the Idiots Who Create It, which it pains us to recommend.

MAD Coverage

Naturally, anything as demented as MAD will be carefully and copiously documented on the Internet.

MAD (and possibly mad) fan Doug Gilford has an entire website dedicated to the covers of MAD Magazine, from issue number one to the present day. Unsurprisingly, this clinically obsessive obviously thorough individual has also recorded each issue's table of contents.

Meanwhile, Dick Hanchette (and I think we're all assuming that's a made-up name) has constructed a similar tribute to MAD's special editions.

Auntie Establishment

Over the years, MAD Magazine had its share of run-ins with authority. For example,

• They stuck it to J. Edgar Hoover


• A Supreme Court case, Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc., established a legal precedent protecting parody.

[interjection]? [pronoun] [verb]?

Ultimately more entertaining and certainly funnier than Women's Lib: Why not try some Mad Libs?

It’s a mad, mad, mad, MAD World

Founded in 1952, the delightfully warped MAD Magazine is still entertaining childish (and we mean that in the best way) minds with its infantile (and we mean that in the best way too) humor about pop culture, politics and pretty much anything else that needs a satirical skewering.

The original cover price was 10 cents (cheap), but in the intervening 54 years, inflation and shameless greed have elevated the current newsstand price to $3.99 (still, they claim, cheap!). Through the years, MAD brought the work of artists such as Antonio Prohías, Don Martin, Al Jaffee and Sergio Aragones—and the usual gang of idiots—to the attention of world hungry for crudely-drawn parody comics.

The magazine has inspired a television show, a demented internet forum (but we repeat ourselves) for fans, and even a Christian-themed parody of the parody magazine itself.

Since the beginning—well, actually since issue #21—the proceedings have been presided over by the magazine's gap-toothed mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, whose signature slogan, "What? Me worry?" and assorted other utterances have inspired readers to slap knees, hold stomaches and scratch heads—sometimes even their own—for decades.

Thanks to the marvel that is Amazon.com, you can join the madness yourself and receive MAD Magazine in the mail! Every month! On actual dead trees! For just $12. (Cheap!)

Sunday, March 12, 2006

What I’ve learned at SXSW so far:

Obscurity is the new fame.

Rock on.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Online tag sale…

Shameless commerce: I am helping my funny friend Jill (aka The Lipschtick Lesbian) liquidate some of her videotapes and DVDs, along with a couple of my own, on eBay. If you bid, bid as though you were helping to pay for my godsons' college education, because you will be.*

* Not entirely true. I will probably spend my portion of the proceeds on beer and Jill has been coveting a Prada belt. But we might buy the twins a cute jumper set or something.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Three things

The good, the very good and the "le sigh"...

• I have become a recent convert to and big fan of Amazon Prime, the "all-you-can-eat" free two-day shipping service. Of course, it's not free after the three-month trial they're offering; it renews at $79 annually. But for the amount of holiday shopping and incidental me-me-me buying I do, it will handily pay for itself and save me money besides.


• My Christmas treat to myself was a new digital camera. I flirted with the idea of making the jump to digital SLR but, based on some website reviews and personal recommendations, instead bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5. My golly, it's nice: A 12X optical zoom Leica lens, superior stabilization feature to reduce blur from handshake and enough manual settings to satisfy what little photo geek I have in me. I'm still getting the hang of its many features but for the price (about $350) and size, I'm mightily impressed.


• Last night, I returned home to discover that the hard drive on which my iTunes music library resides est morte. Oh well, at least I have a backup. Unfortunately, that backup is in the form of several hundred CDs stored in boxes in the basement. But hey, reripping my entire music collection is a great opportunity to sample at a consistent bitrate and get that metadata right the first time, right? Right? *cries*
  
  Also lost in the crash: Six years of server logs for this site right here (no big), a ton of digital photos (all on Flickr anyway) and some porn (some commercial, some more...um, personal in nature). Ah well. No more tears! Enough is enough.

A new camera, a new hard drive and a new year speeding toward me. Excelsior!

Sunday, December 4, 2005

What a bunch of characters!

This description of the mayhem that erupts on Hollywood Blvd. when costumed characters (some hobbyists, some full-timers) compete for space and tips is just priceless. My favorite paragraph:

Mr. Harper, the 40-year-old Elmo, says he was set up by the cops. But upon returning to his spot a day after his arrest, he conceded that things are tense these days among the characters, who form cliques and alliances to defend their turf and make money. Mr. Harper, for example, says his Elmo is a foe of Batman and Superman, but in cahoots with Mr. Incredible, SpongeBob SquarePants and at least one of the half-dozen Spider-Men who prowl the street.

Fair warning, visitors to Los Angeles: Do not incur the wrath of the dreaded Mr. Incredible-SpongeBob-Elmo alliance! [via The Slumbering Lungfish]

Bonus comic: Public School.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Kick-ass Christmas decoration

I'll probably just manage to get the tree up and decorated this weekend. But I'm awfully tempted to do something like this. Man, that's just...it's beautiful.

Monday, August 8, 2005

Nomenschclature

Confidential to He-Whose-He-Must-Be-Renamed: Why does he need a new nickname? What's wrong with that one? If he's such a good Catch—and so far we all think so—you'll still be calling him that while you hold hands in your rockers and that'll be just darling.

Besides, when I read "Lovebear", I think I threw up a little in my mouth.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

I fold

It's funny the odd little skills and bits of information you pick up on your journey through life. I haven't held that many different jobs, but my career path has had a couple of sharp bends in it and so my brain is littered with not entirely useless but certainly trivial additions to my skill set.

The latest reminder of this fact is this site about how to fold napkins into fancy presentation shapes that Tom pointed out. I picked up a few of these (notably the cardinal's hat (which I always called Sister Bertrille) during my stints as a dinner theatre dancer and sometimes cater-waiter.

(If only I had known about these 20-some years ago, I might have garnered even more county fair 4-H blue ribbons in the table setting competitions. Oh yes, even then, I was a champion designer of theme tables. Surprised? I thought not.)