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The weekend before last I helped anchor a New Orleans Funeral w/ Music style march to open up a memorial concert for Eric Jackson, long-time stalwart of the Boston Jazz Radio scene...

(At around 1h20 the funeral march band makes a cameo for some bars of Wayne Shorter's Footsteps)

Some great classic jazz throughout, an honor to be a part of it. Surprising number of songs based on bands I'm in pondering playing them, but I don't think any that I actually played.

	If We Were Vampires Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit	Folksy, saddish song playing the "well if we're vampires we'd be immortal but we're not so let's make the most of what we got."
★ ★ ★ ★	Mahna, Mahna CAKE	The old "muppet" song - some folks on JPH want us to try an arrangement maybe sometime.
	Jesus Walks Kanye West	Big hiphop. via this tweet.
★ ★ ★ ★	Phone Wallet Keys (Single Version) Adam Sandler	Comedy rap.
★ ★ ★ ★	Dispatches 1 Blue Man Group	Cool percussion but I keep expecting it to turn into "Magic Carpet Ride" Inspired to for more Blue Man after this Vulture Oral History of the show.
★ ★ ★ ★	In Your Head Isabelle Brown	Nice modern fast R+B on the Hulu show "Woke"
	Giacometti Blue Man Group	Cool didgeridoo-ish noise in it... Blue Man Group really pursues cool noise making.
	I've Found a New Baby Ted Lewis and His Band	Old Time Jazz. Another thing folks in the band would consider trying to arrange.
	Lost at Sea Oshima Brothers	Sad modern pop, a bit like The National via This American Life
	Dynamite BTS	K-Pop! School of Honk is thinking about trying an arrangement.
	Liquid Dance A.R. Rahman, Swapna Madhuri, Palakkad Sriram	Really cool blend of modern electronic and that one classical India form, the vocal percussion they do. Mentioned on a "Strong Songs" podcast episode.
	Sting Ray The Jazz Crusaders	Some nice fast jazz. New Magnolia Jazz band messed with this a bit, I think because the leader thought it was near my own "Space Cadet" bassline.
	Fried Pork Anus Boxer Dicktown	Very brief comedy interlude I mp3'd up for Melissa from John Hodgman's Hulu cartoon series.
	Stand By Me (Live from the Late Show with David Letterman) Tracy Chapman	Really nice cover spotify introduced me to.
	Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 27: No. 2 "Moonlight Sonata": I. Adagio sostenuto Steve Anderson	More or less straightforward version of the classical piece, though I think with a subtle choir. Originally I was looking for Pianist SHOCKS Audience With Moonlight Sonata Dubstep Remix but you know I think the simpler form works allright. It is a moving piece.
★ ★ ★ ★	The Way I Am Ingrid Michaelson	Oh, such a sweet modern indie song. From a Melissa playlist.
	Excursions A Tribe Called Quest	Classic Hip-hop. Via Strong Songs episode on "So What"
	What Time Is Love? The Williams Fairey Brass Band	Odd Brass cover of KLF's techno hit.
	The Ballad of Kami Jean Mama Digdown's Brass Band	NOLA street band stuff. One of the songs I was asked to study up on when I swung in with Second Line Brass Band.

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About half way through Karen Armstrong's "A History of God". The reminder that the USA's weird interplay of religious naturalism vs fundamentalism - and a notable lack of mystery and mysticism with both - is pretty damn idiosyncratic, historically speaking.

Honestly I am legit surprised there aren't more religions based on worshipping the sun, that true giver of life. Or as an old Tumblr Post had it:

The sun is probably the closest thing we'll ever have to a true Eldritch Abomination. Hear me out here-

* Older than recorded history; was here longer than any of us and will be here long after we leave. Has a finite beginning and end but is still incomprehensibly ancient
* Burns itself into your vision instantly and can blind you if you look for too long
* Further prolonged exposure can cause cancerous growths
* Non-humanoid shape floating through space; colossal flaming tentacles angrily lash out on occasion
* Sort of just appeared one day and is now surrounded by the corpses of its stillborn children
* People used to sacrifice other people to appease it
* Pretty sure it screams at us sometimes

I was going to say that almost all energy on the planet comes from the sun. Though geothermal - the way the heart of our planet is the superhot ball of metal, around 8-10K F - seems like another Eldritch horror.

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"We could sell out and take a capital gain. Then again, the market's going up on Tabletop. We could hang on and make some real money. On the gripping hand, inflation's running wild on Tabletop. Lets get into something else."
[...]
"All of Pitchfork River, at least. Top to bottom, hill to spill, they've taken up that three-sided Aristotelian logic."

So characters in this science fiction novel have noticed an idiosyncratic speech construction: "on the one hand X, on the other hand Y, gripping hand Z" where the final point is the overriding decision maker, and the characters realize that it means the extraterrestrials (with humanoid but asymmetrical bodies, with two small arms and one larger one) are having a big culture influence on the human colonists.

For some reason the phrase has always stuck with me - I always assumed "Aristotelian logic" was that idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis though I guess that's more Hegel's dialectic, and Aristotelian is more that "If P then Q, If Q then R, P, so R" stuff.

"War and violence are not very funny," said Sharon, "unless they happen to you--then they are funny because they haff to be."

So interesting to know it as a parody of BU in the 1980s - but very violent and chaotic "Illuminatus! Trilogy" energy. Some "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" references as well.

God's covenant with his people begins with a promise to the old and childless Abraham that his descendants will be as many as the stars in the sky. This promise is advanced with the birth of a son, Isaac, but God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac atop Mount Moriah. From the historical point of view, we know that this is a test of faith: Abraham will bring Isaac up the mountain and bind him for the sacrifice, but God will intervene before it is completed. Yet it is in the nature of such a test that one can't *know* it to be a test at the time. Abraham must show himself willing to do something inexcusable, and the fact that he never actually does it is beside the point. What's more, he does not tell anyone--not even Isaac--what he is doing. He suffers the anxiety of that trip up Mount Moriah alone, suffers even the possibility that he has misunderstood God's command, that he is about to do something unforgivable. Finally, having passed the test, he descends the mountain again and returns to his old life, proceeding as though nothing had happened--as indeed, objectively, nothing did.

For Kierkegaard, this was the nature of the truly religious life. It entailed an inward turning toward God, one that could not be reduced to a moral law. In the preceding decades, great effort had been made to rationalize Christianity and situate it as the foundation of a universally binding ethical code. The problem, from Kierkegaard's perspective, was that Jesus did not call us to obey a set of rules; he called us to love. It cannot be that adherence to an ethical code is the highest life, because it is possible to obey every rule placed in front of you without ever feeling love in your heart. To the aesthetic and the ethical was added a third category, the religious, which was beyond both.

As a person not blessed with faith, I think a lot about the story of the Binding of Isaac. Actually, I do have a strong unwavering faith- but is wrapped in an impenetrable shell of anti-faith: at the core, there exists an Objective Truth, but it is obscured in the certainty of uncertainty. You can make decent guesses at the shape and form of it, but asserting you know it is a kind of blasphemy.

In this context, being asked to do an apparently monstrous deed in the name of faith is really tough to distinguish from being asked to a monstrous deed in the name of tremendous self-delusion.

Which is why I lean Humanist - in the face of certain uncertainty we have to lean into principles such as the golden rule, and other truths that seem pretty close to universal, and have some hope that common ground across faiths tells us something of what the obscured Truth actually is.

(Also I feel like I should know more about Kierkegaard than I do, given how cool his name is.)

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Not really my cuppa tea, but sometimes I think about the sexy yeti from the Church of the Subgenius...

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Lisa Hanawalt of Tuca+Birdie and Bojack Horseman (and Baby Geniuses podcast) wrote a comic on Pride and Prejudice and Horniness during a time of quarantine...

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Michael Sorkin's 250 Things an Architect Should Know from Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants":

"First, words. We want words that are about Venus, words that'll tickle people. Make them sit up. Make them muse about change, and space, and other worlds. Words to make them a little discontented with what they are and a little hopeful about what they might be. Words to make them feel noble about feeling the way they do and make them happy about the existence of Indiastries and Starrzelius Verily and Fowler Schocken Associates. Words that will do all these things and also make them feel unhappy about the existence of Universal Products and Taunton Associates."

He was staring at me with his mouth open. "You aren't serious," he finally exclaimed.

"You're on the inside now," I said simply. "That's the way we work. That's the way we worked on you."

"What are you talking about?"

"You're wearing Starrzelius Verily clothes and shoes, Jack. It means we got you. Taunton and Universal worked on you, Starrzelius and Schocken worked on you--and you chose Starrzelius. We reached you. Smoothly, without your ever being aware that it was happening, you became persuaded that there was something rather nice about Starrzelius clothes and shoes and that there was something rather not-nice about Universal clothes and shoes."

"I never read the ads," he said defiantly.

I grinned. "Our ultimate triumph is wrapped up in that statement," I said.

"I solemnly promise," O'Shea said, "that as soon as I get back to my hotel room I'll send my clothes right down the incinerator chute--"

"Luggage too?" I asked. "Starrzelius luggage?"

He looked startled for a moment and then regained his calm. "Starrzelius luggage too," he said. "And then I'll pick up the phone and order a complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. And you can't stop me."

"I wouldn't dream of stopping you, Jack! It means more business for Starrzelius. Tell you what you're going to do: you'll get your complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. You'll use the luggage and wear the apparel for a while with a vague, submerged discontent. It's going to work on your libido, because our ads for Starrzelius--even though you say you don't read them--have convinced you that it isn't quite virile to trade with any other firm. Your self-esteem will suffer; deep down you'll knew that you're not wearing the best. Your subconscious won't stand up under much of that. You'll find yourself 'losing' bits of Universal apparel. You'll find yourself 'accidentally' putting your foot through the cuff of your Universal pants. You'll find yourself overpacking the Universal luggage and damning it for not being roomier. You'll walk into stores and in a fit of momentary amnesia regarding this conversation you'll buy Starrzelius, bless you."

O'Shea laughed uncertainly. "And you did it with words?"

"Words and pictures. Sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. And the greatest of these is words. "

"The Space Merchants" is a sci-fi novel from 1952 projecting culture's course if Madison Avenue continued to run the place - they missed a few things, assuming only that ads would just get louder and more obnoxiously attention grabbing and ignoring the current concerns we face about privacy and tracking, but overall it's quite prescient.

Overall that passage wasn't as memorable for me as much as this one about trial/interim marriages and especially the urge of landing a romantic partner with achievements that you can kind of show off - borrowed valor so to speak - but overall a remarkable book.

(Also a few months ago I quoted "...should each human being's vote register alike, as the law books pretend and as some say the founders desired? Or should a vote be weighed according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence--that is, the money of--the voter?")

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On my dev blog "man, what I really wish I could do is have to jam my finger HARDER into this flat piece of glass"?

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All Trump ever wanted to do was make engaging television, and by that standard it's been a wildly successful presidency.

I was looking for evidence that maybe my tendency to answer the phone "Kirk here" came from Star Trek... this came bubbling to the top...

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Clouds are not something to moan about. They are, in fact, the most dynamic, evocative and poetic aspect of nature.

to tune into the clouds is to slow down. It’s a moment of meteorological meditation.

We are part of the air. We don’t live beneath the sky. We live within the sky.

--Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society - here's a NY Times long article about it.

I've always appreciated clouds - I remember coworkers at the patio bar after work asking what the hell I was looking at - and a google image search for cloud site:kirk.is shows plenty of photos I've taken.

The article was posted at Lost in Mobile, webkeeper Shaun McGill liked my comment

If there was only one place on earth where clouds gathered, could you imagine how much people would pay to travel there? And how in awe they would be, and how many photos they’d take?

Great stuff, and I'm the newest member of the Cloud Appreciation Society! How did the U.S. become so much more conservative than other Western democracies? I thought there was some thoughtful discussion here. I've been thinking about what the USA does better and does worse than some of its peers, and why...

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Alanis does Ironic 2016

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"Old Jon Snow knew nothing. Existentialist Jon Snow knows nothingness."

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There's a big difference btw knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is something you can glean by Googling. Wisdom comes from Googling for years.

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Played tuba with my super niece yesterday...

Everyone tells teenagers that they don't know what love is. But everyone wants to feel like a teenager when they fall in love.

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http://loveblender.com/ ...

"I've prepared a PowerPoint presentation that will cover the basics of what I wish to discuss with you," Lucifer begins, opening up the ThinkPad.
"Stop," Billy says, "PowerPoint?"
"It's my preferred medium," says Lucifer.

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Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work.

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The illusion of life from cento lodigiani on Vimeo.

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http://twentytwowords.com/what-clients-really-mean-when-they-talk-to-a-web-designer/ I always dig this kind of rule-of-thumb simplification.

You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.

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I went my whole life not knowing that there is a part of my body named the Canal of Schlemm and this is my new greatest regret.

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Nobody has all the answers, because all the best answers generate more questions.

After I posted my thought

Verbs are stronger than nouns. Nouns may try to be constraints for verbs, but verbs transcend those boundaries all the time.

on facebook James Brooks posted this awesome blast from the past:

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"Social Conservatives", please all hurry up and die so that the next, more loving and empathetic generations can undo your damage.

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For all the talk about "protecting marriage", it's worth mentioning that Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the United States

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UPDATE: "Social Conservatives", please all hurry up and die peacefully, in your sleep, surrounded by your loved ones, so that the next, more loving and empathetic generations can undo your damage.
--via

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THE FUTURE IS AN UNPREDICTABLE CHAOS OF INEVITABILITY

click to play

tvland - source - built with processing
--an animation based on a drawing I made on Marnie's PC in the very early 90s...use the mouse to speed up, slow down, or reverse the animation!
--A nice counter to all the damn "rape-the-80s-childhoods" movies coming out. The GI Joe trailer really makes me wonder-- the joy of GI Joe in in the 80s was that it was like the Village People came to town to chew bubblegum and kick ass... making them all a bunch of Robocop-looking Master Chief wannabes seems short-sighted.

And of course, the Trek movie that followed was pretty grand, though with enough Fridge Logic issues that it's really better to enjoy the Space Opera aspect and not think about stuff too much

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At the corner pub with my Uncle, he just bought a beer for this workman guy from Bavaria who does the big glass pieces at the various Apple flagship stores... he's proud of the big cube on 5th Avenue in NYC, but even more so the giant 42-foot single panes at the one in Sydney... So, wrapped up in my own little world at work, and going down memory lane with Sportsman's Guide, I feel remiss for not thinking about the tragedy of Burma more than I have been. The toll there is orders of magnitude worse than say, Katrina, and make my personal problems seem like quantum noise in comparison.

In other news. It's tough not to be charmed by tales of Dale Davis, the 115lb, 78 year old blind bowler who just rolled a perfect game of bowling (more details and photos here, at a local paper that clearly has no idea about permalinks.) I guess bowling can be all about muscle memory! The details in that second link are lovely.

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Quote of the Moment

You're leaving college now, and going out into real life. And you have to realize that real life is not like college. Real life is like high school.

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I got a YOGA BILL like a MOTHERFUCKER!

Evil B and I caught Spiderman 3 at the Boston Common Cinema last night. he parked at the Boston Common Parking Garage... that thing is crazy! There's an entrance in the middle of the park, and it looks just like some kind of tourist pavilion, but it has stairs and an elevator down. Very James-Bond-Super-Villain-esque, this innocuous looking structure in the park, with the massive steel and concrete infrastructure beneath...

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Movie Quote of the Moment

"You want forgiveness? Get religion."

It's even more blatantly obvious in the film, that has a bit of fun with the new hairstyle = a darker broodier you bit. The film wasn't too bad but man... when did summer blockbusters start getting so long?

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Politics of the Moment
The War Nerd answers Sen. Lindsay Graham's rhetorical, would-be-points-scoring question "If the war in Iraq is lost, then who won?" Answer: Iran. It's like we wrote the finishing chapter of the Iran-Iraq war 15 years later.

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Video Gaming of the Moment
I've mentioned dessgeega, hardcore gamer gal, before, and just want to say that I like her new blog. Very content rich, with each entry talking about some interesting game, most of which I haven't heard of before.

I was talking with Tim yesterday, the head engineer of my development group, about the appreciation for Google's form of spellcheck that I posted about the other day. He said that his ideal UI would actually collect mistakes over in a sometimes hidden, sometimes visible pane on the right side. Personally I thought this was a little nuts, because you lose so much of the context and scan-a-bility, even if you have some clever "click to show it in context" feature. He thought having the mistake in one place would make it quicker to work through mistakes sparsely distributed in a long document (not so much scrolling to see stuff)... he views spelling mistakes as being similar to programming bugs, which are best handled in a kind of batch format...

I still think what Google has is going to be superior to Tim's idea for the majority of people, but it's fascinating to hear dissenting opinion like that.

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News of the Moment
Scientology nearly ready to unveil Super Power Training Center. Wow. This sounds so much like Xavier's mansion in X-Men I can hardly believe it. (Someone should photoshop Tom Cruise, John Travolta et al. as the X-Men toughing it out in the Danger Room.)

Also, the main thing I have to say about Blaine failing to break the underwater record is that I like the name of his trainer, Kirk Krack.

Oh, and Slate points out how self-destructive Nancy Pelosi might be for the democrats. How dumb are they? If there's one thing this nation doesn't want, it's lots of partisan investigations. The heartland doesn't seem nearly so pro-Bush as it used to be, but it's not intensely anti-Bush either, and if the Democrats had a chance to make strides these mid-term elections, it would be by being a party of balance and moderation.

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Quote of the Moment

If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

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Games of the Moment
My innergamergeek is getting all revved up about Nintendo's new console with this Nintendo Wii launch show coverage. Lots of photos.

Construction of the Moment

--At the developer's room lunchtable, I have a chunk of the bricks from a Lego advent calendar, plus some from a mini-Star Destroyer kit. Lately I've been enjoying making small dinosaur lizard things...

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Provocative Science of the Moment
A semi-scholary study on Why Women Evolved Breasts. One crackpot theory I've heard (but the article doesn't mention) is that bosoms evolved to resemble women's bottoms to facilitate face to face mating, as opposed to rear entry...but the supposed evolutionary advantage of the former escapes me at the moment.

Passage of the Moment

I object when people, especially therapists, talk about "resolving grief," as if grief could ever be so compliant. We humans don't "resolve" grief; we live with it. The pain of our losses recedes, over time, and we get on with our lives. But periodically one may well find the chill hand on the heart--what we miss, our mortality--its sudden grip like a sharp intake of breath. It is important for us to recall in such moments that we still remain. Grief washes over us and we are left standing. It's okay. Nothing's wrong. It's just a natural part of things. Dead leaves underfoot. A clear autumn evening, the black sky like a vault, the vapor of our own breath in the air, a surprise. "Oh," we say. "It will be winter again soon. It's grown dark so early." And we burrow deep into our clothes for a moment, glad to be heading home.

It's mostly a book on couples' communication. I plan to read it as kind of an autopsy for what Mo and I had, and to try to do better next time...

I think for a long time I've confused having almost no sense of privacy with having a well-developed sense of intimacy, and maybe that's not the case. I think I tended to clam up about some things, how I felt about Mo (I tend to see saying I Love You as kind of a manipulative thing; you show love by your actions, the words can be faked) and when things were bad at work (I didn't want to rub her face in the way how, other than being vaguely supportive, she was helpless to make that situation better.)

So I'm a little worried that, because I really do believe in the power of people to make deliberate changes in their lives (even though it often doesn't take 100%, complete turnarounds are rare) I'm going to read this book, see so much of what Mo and I went through analyzed and given roadmaps to workthrough, that it's going to be really frustrating...a big "if only" game, "if only she had expressed how she saw the problem in English."

UPDATE: Interesting to note the similarities between this passage and this bit from Garrison Keillor's "Mr. Blue" column. Quote of the Moment

When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

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Link of the Moment
Situation Puzzles are kind of fun, strange sounding situations summed in a sentence, and the other players have to ask yes or no questions to suss out the story. I should figure out a way to get these into my Palm Pilot without seeing all the answers so we could have fun on trips.

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Snippet of the Moment

Before I relate to you the next part, I have to tell you a little bit about the Pantheon. It has the world's largest domed ceiling. A domed ceiling might be a big deal in the world of architecture, but in the world of whispering it is definitely lousy.

From his book "Pure Drivel", a slim volume of small, often absurdist essays. It also had a great line of his I saw first published in The New Yorker:

Embarking I saw a woman standing aft, her back to me, looking very much like a doric column would if it were leaning against a rail.

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News Item of the Moment

[At first] the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it. Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard.

I don't know about you all, but I am deeply disappointed by these monkeys on typewriters. Shakespeare, hah! Just a page full of S's and then some A J L and M. It is to scoff! If flung poop is beautiful, only than do they have a chance of making a masterpiece. Going through the backlog, found a few links with a common theme, of sense and mind related handicaps:

Deafblind.com was the oldest link, people who have the same double handicap that Helen Keller. You know, I think I can imagine what it would like to be deaf, and I think I can imagine what it would like to be blind (I think I could more readily cope with the former) but I'm not sure I can really wrap my mind around constructing a map of the world without sights and without sounds; it's an almost completely alien experience to me.

Then there's a more specific problem: prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. Some of us have trouble remember names and faces, but these people really mean it. It's written by a woman, Cecilia Burman, who is coping with the condition and writes about it fairly well. Her stones visual metaphor is interesting.

Finally, NPR recently had some coverage on Temple Grandin. This is a woman with autism who has done some amazing things. The NPR piece focused on the work she's done to make slaughterhouses less cruel (not quit the contradiction in terms that might seem.) On her autism.org page, she writes in great detail about her condition, fascinating stuff. An interesting tie-in is that she sees some of her nervous system's reaction to that of a wild animal, missing some of the layers that a "normal" child has. Years ago (when she was 18) realized that the "squeeze chute" used at ranches to calm cattle provide a physical stimulation that she craved, so she built her own for human use, and it's had a great calming effect for many autistic people. (Shown here is a chair version she made in collaboration with an artist.) Her work at working to remove the fear and panic from livestock's last hours is her way of paying back what she has learned from them.

(2020 Update: perhaps the spiritual successor and commercialization of the general idea are weighted blankets. weightedblanketguides.com/benefits-autism-adhd pinged me to link to them)