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When I think about decluttering... I think about Marie Kondo's admonition NOT to do it place by place in the house. But perversely her insistence that that's not the way makes me think it might have aspects that are worth trying. I don't want to go for an extreme minimalism, but I would like the space I regularly inhabit to have everything in it showing a purpose.

Also thinking about detecting "sparking joy" reminds me of this #stupid-idea-buddies chat idea I had:

#1465 Trying to declutter but Marie Kondo is too pile-centric or mumbo-jumbo-y? Arrange all your possessions in a long straight line ordered by how much you want each item, make a perpendicular line at the cut off point, and discard everything to left. DONE AND DUSTED.(Note, you may still have to dust, especially around those shelves where the cluttering items used to sit.)

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JP Honk gets a shoutout from WBUR for our upcoming performance at Somerville Porchfest - 1-2PM @ 32 Chandler St... Ten years ago today I marched for the first time with the band that would become JP Honk. I just missed marching in their Wake Up The Earth Parade but here is an item that was making the rounds... The Venerable Book of Honk - Chords and Lyrics - 2013 April 17.. you can compare that to the current chart library I manage for the band



At that point the band was very much of an offshoot of the vibrant Dunster Rd community, and was strongly anchored on Jonathan on keyboard (rolling around on the back of a big tricycle) and Bryan on Guitar. I think you can hear (and see on the left just a small part) of the percussion rack of pots and pans we used to roll around for audience participation..... there was also a "big shared skirt" thing, a big thing stretchy cloth that like 3-4 people could wear as a skirt together

Over the years the band has remolded itself as more of a classic New Orleans style street band, keeping up the community and activist vibe, and last year we were a full on "back of the t-shirt band" for HONK!fest, which I think reflects the work we've put into shaping it as a place for joy and (usually) harmony.

On the one hand, wow, ten years! On the other hand it's like wait, I've only been doing this mostly in my 40s?? Ah well here's to many more years honkin'!

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Technically, the success of an evolution line is measured by how many bugs became features

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Pretty cool video on how Nintendow's Breath of the Wild got players to explore more freely - mostly by hiding interesting stuff around a lot of corners Oh, thanks construction across the street, giving me a chance to appreciate my new-ish noise reduction headphones with that generator or pump or whatever it is endless whine.

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I remember seeing this version of the Beatles Come Together as a Flash Video way back when - not sure what the story is behind it but I dig it...

How Delicious to Say It,

to allow it like hibiscus to wend over the tongue
where it opens at the gate, lending its red, unknowable
taste. What wonder the palate may embrace – in a flick
behind the teeth: loquacious, Liebchen, Schätzchen.
Let us praise the labium that shapes such syllables, and
parlay of their attendant assumptions like a shuttlecock
struck back and forth over its simple backyard net.
Let us not neglect, but laud the mature mouth ready
for more than a dollop, the spoonful of lip, loon,
April, billow, or some simple pronoun. No. It wants jouissance,
Dostoevsky, provocations heating the exchange, say
chipotles in the chocolate. Consider the uvular awakenings
of the day, the throat stretched to signify its pleasure and release.
Your name spun through the reel, wound up from the bass
of me. How I want to say it, and hear my own, again.

for Matthew

via the poetry unbound podcast. What a sensual poem!

"my mother told me once that when l was three years old, my potty lid was closed, and instead of me lifting it, I shit my pants."
"lovely story."
"the point is, i'm not the type of person...who'll disrupt things just so I can shit comfortably."

How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

These are 3 bits of pop-culture that rattle around my head more often than most things, probably because they reflect parts of me.

My life's central theme of "the important thing in life is to try to align yourself with the objective best, but that you must never feel certain that you know what the best is" leads all 3 of these things to resonate with me.

In Dante's case: I figure things are the way they are for a reason. It's not that I don't have preferences, but I'm careful in asserting them. And if there's something I don't have much of a preference for, I REALLY don't have a preference for. It's not passive-aggressive "I want it to be one thing but I want to see if you can figure it out and will blame if you get it wrong" - if you make a decision affecting both of us after I demure, and in retrospect it turns out to be wrong, I don't blame you! It's true I desperately want to avoid being at fault, but I'm happy to look for a consensus best guess, and if it's wrong, it's wrong,no biggie.

And in the Kelso/Jackie thing- just like I don't have respect for my own intuitive preferences, I can sometimes resent people complaining things out of my control. Yes, I know the joke of the scene is that there WAS something Kelso could have done... and I often am good with sacrificing my own small preferences if it serves the good of the group or beyond. But it's so frustrating to me that most people, including folks I love, don't have the same equanimity about things that comes naturally to me, an equanimity that I try and foster a bit.

Finally, the Vonnegut. It way overstates how I feel - I do feel plenty of things, but I also curate my emotions, stop things from snowballing. When situations are out of my control, when situations aren't my fault, and/or when situations aren't affecting me or my close group... I have trouble throwing my heart into it. I still act in accordance of working for justice for everyone, even people outside my local group, but it's kind of intellectualized. I disapprove of the current administration greatly, I think it's stupid and damaging to things I hold important in a thousand ways, but I try and disengage from the culture of outrage. I guiltily second guess that sometimes, like maybe you have to foment that sense of disgust in order to provoke more and better action (not to mention to show your bona fides to your local group), and maybe it too much flaunts my privilege of not being in a group most affected by it. But it's also a kind of self-care.

I do know of one strong emotional preference: that of subjugating my intuitive emotions to rationality. That's how I *feel* I'm being a good, thinky person. I have a second emotional preference too - having my ego protected. Seeking assurance that I'm pretty smart and useful... that my existence is justified by those two things. The Darth Vader / Obi Wan fight redone in the style of the Prequels / Sequels light saber duels:

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http://somervilleartscouncil.org/somervilleporchfest/ My standalone version of the Somerville Porchfest map is live! Probably a few seasons overdue for a visual makeover, but still gets the job done - lets people plot their afternoon without crashing the SAC site. Proud to chip in with that a little, especially now that Somerville is my city :-D

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Now that have missile-mounted knives I want to see a missile with a big boxing glove.

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We turned out to be superficial to the core.

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Nothing's been quite right since John Lennon got shot.

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the more i think about it the more deeply ironic it seems that the act of declaiming "virtue signaling" (ie implying insincere lip service to what one's tribe feels is correct) is itself one of the most blatant kind of "virtue signals"

"Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can't be paralyzed by the fact it might not work out."

via The Atlantic's longish article The Presidency Is Too Big to Succeed, how expectations for the office, along with the supporting infrastructure and how Congress has ceded so much power, make true success impossible.

Still I think Obama's point is true for many of us in the trenches as well. Challenges are- duh- challenging, and most truly easy things will have already been dealt with.

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Good lord Facebook, what kind of short attention span theater is Kirk's April Moments? "Hey kids, remember April? Man! Seems like just yesterday! Or at least, 10 days before yesterday"

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The Boston Public Library has digitized all their M.C. Escher prints:
Man, did books of his stuff leave a big impression on me as a teen. My friend Rebekah loves her 10-key but this is ridiculous

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"now that there is no fbi director we can finally make copies of vhs tapes"

I have to admit it's kind of a masterstroke; dems hated him spoiling a close election, reps hated him for not persecuting more, Trump gets to put off the Russian investigation... the only loser is the sense of this country not being a Nixonian Banana Republic. Who's Older and Younger Than You Sigh. Potentially mildly depressing interactive chart ahoy! My consoling thought is I don't really I was me 'til like early/mid in my high school years...

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I had a dream the other day that had a dump truck, but with rocking chair runners instead of wheels.

Lyndon Baines Johnson never elaborates. It's a personal rule I have found advantageous. I never elaborate. Folks distrust folks who elaborate. Write that down, boy: 'Never elaborate.'

A lyrically sympathetic view of a more complex than he might seem man. An Italian by the name of Francesco is working on a "fan translation" of http://soyouregoingtodie.com/ into Italian. Recently he asked for clarification on one of my typically meandering sentences, and I really like the analogy he buttered me up with:

"Your whole writing style has this watery consistency which I find aesthetically exquisite and perfect for this comic but a p.i.t.a. to translate nevertheless."

"This feels like the Soviet Republics in '89, one more down: Minnesota House passes Marriage Equality in 75-59 Vote. Equality is coming."

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I am almost halfway serious about starting to consider the possibility of maybe someday changing my name to "Kirk Is".
--Messing around with Instagram

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I lost all respect for myself when I bite my own tongue. I've been chewing for decades, how did I manage to fuck that up?

--via (found by Amber)

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I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

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http://harveyjames.livejournal.com/157143.html - Harvey James' take on drawing people, and how many heads tall people are...

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You'd think Buddhist practice would be good for weight loss: (acknowledge hunger, but as a transient feeling-) but the Buddha was kinda fat.

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Fun Fact: my first nickname, given to me by my parents when I was a long but very chubby infant, was "The Buddha"

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Funner Fact: my parents were odd enough that their friends thought maybe that was the name they picked, despite being protestant ministers.

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Weird. My work computer has lots its ability to type capital "h". Lowercase is fine. Maybe the thing I do to swap out caps-lock for ctrl?

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http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20050905/stupid-utopias-a.shtml - nice survey of bad ideas for "Utopias"

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http://www.sudaneseeducationfund.org/ - friends of mine help refugees. I'm sponsoring a triathalon-er buddy for $50. Wanna help too?

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When Sumana calls my cell I like to answer the phone with a fake business name. Today I said:
L: Leonard's Apple-Eating Service.
S: What are you doing?
L: I'm eating an apple. I figured I'd try to turn my hobby into a business.

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Every Bostonite who freaked out about "the aquapocalypse" should text "Flood" to 90999 and donate $10 to Salvation Army flood relief in Nashville - that's the real deal.

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Netflix on Wii is awesomer than I expected. Season 1 of The Office, yay! Weird how "on demand" life is becoming.

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http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/ - like overheardinnewyork but txt messages.

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Wow. "ctrl-F" search in Vista opening a new specialized app window, not that sidebar crap? Maybe there is hope for Microsoft.

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Celtics win despite forgetting how to shoot in the final quarter. Man, NBA refs stink.

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Wow, twice in a row now Pap has let the Red Sox down in the 9th. (Though the Sox are keeping up their proud tradition of leaving legends of men on base.) Maybe I'm jinxing him by tuning on the radio in the eighth as I get ready to turn in!

Apologies for the crudeness of today's title. You know, it's funny how every once in a while I still think "Wow, I can't believe the Pats won every game and then lost the Super Bowl." (Makes me think of that "BeliCHOKE!" headline idea I had, along with a thousand other football fans.)

So ummm... Go Celtics!

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Photos of the Moment
Quote of the Moment

We are so afraid of the sight of death.

I read a book the other day. It said that as soon as someone dies in a hospital, they pull the sheets up over their head, and they wheel the body to some chute and push it down. They can't wait to get it out of their sight. People act as if death is contagious.

It's not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It's part of the deal we made.

[...]

It's natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it all is because we don't see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we're human we're something above nature.

We're not. Everything that gets born, dies. Do you accept that?

All right. Now here's the payoff. Here is how we are different from those wonderful plants and animals. As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on--in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.

Death ends a life, not a relationship.

I'd previously been exposed to the idea of living on in the community of people you've touched.

My internal scientist would argue about that point with my internal poet, saying that, well what about when all the people you know die? That the best you can hope for is an ever-dispersing circle of influence, the old "ripples in a pond" metaphor. But the poet, no intellectual lightweight, has come up with a new tact; the trick is to look beyond tracking the scope of one individual, but to start considering them as part of a community... even if it's just the ad hoc community of people that individual touched. Then, you can start looking at how that community influences the slightly larger society, the community of communities, so to speak. And so on up the line, like a big fractal.

It's vain, and usually in vain, to just focus on "my influence". You need to take solace in being part of something larger, and thinking in terms of "our influence".

Alright, it might not be the most profound observation you'll read this week, but I was happy to think of it.

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Article of the Moment
On Slate, Daniel Gross on Why Bubbles are great for the economy. In short: the money goes out, but the infrastructure remains, plus our system seems to be able to weather these times pretty well. Might be a small consolation if you're burnt by one of these, but still.

Quote of the Moment

I've always had sort of an ironic view of life. My belief system is that when this is over, it's over. That you don't look down from heaven and wait for your loved ones to join you. There may be some soul activity, but I'm not sure about that. But what I am sure about is that your molecules continue and in due time become something else. That's science.

And that works for me. So that if this is it, you better take it at its right proportion. That there are serious things, but most things are temporal and ephemeral, and you should cultivate that attitude. That joy and love and all the verities are what counts. So I try not to take too many things seriously, and if I find myself caught up in the seriousness of the moment, within a period of time, I'm able to cajole myself out of it.

Wow. One for the mortality guide quotes page. The guy is amazing. Go buy his spoken word album Has Been. (kisrael'd previously)

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Palm Cleanout of the Moment
I have a category on my Palm TODO, "@google", things I want to look up online and possibly link. "Palm Cleanout" will be the "of the Moment" where I stuff that stuff.
Wired had a bit on Josh Davis, "the Jackson Pollock of the Internet age". I really got a wonder...a guy like that, how much is innovation and skill and how much is raw chutzpah?

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Technical Reference of the moment
Tim pointed me to quirksmode.org that has a lot of crossbrowser coding comparisons and suggestions.

My mom asked for full printout of me on Mt. Monadnock so I decided a nicely framed version would be a good Mother's Day Gift. It turned out to be slightly more difficult than I expected to get good print made.

For starters, there's the dimensions/ratio issue. Most of my digital cameras use the same ratio as a computer monitor, 4:3 (640x480 is the most famous value for that ratio, my current camera shoots 1600x1200.) However, most frames and digital printing options go for other ratios like 4x6 or 5x7. I'd rather do the needed cropping myself, rather than leave it to the tender mercies of the person behind the counter or some computer program. The math for that was pretty simple, but annoying to do for different ratios, so I decided to make a little toy to do it for me in the future, an online photo-cropping calculator, rather than repeat the process in the future:

Crop-Sharer

Enter Original Photo Size: by or pick....     800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200 2048x1536 Enter Desired Ratio: by or pick....     3x5 4x6 5x7 8x10 8.5x11 11x14 11x17

(Let me know if you have any suggestions for the default digital photo dimensions or the desired ratios...)

So the sizing issue out of the way, getting good printouts was more of a problem than I expected. At first I got the help of my Uncle...they have a photo printer they didn't mind sharing. He mostly had 4x6 stock, which was fine, except his printer couldn't do edge to edge at that size, it left a centimeter or two of border on one side. (Also it would give 3/4 of the way through printing that GIF of Ksenia until my Uncle converted it to a JPG.)

So that border was really bugging me, and also I found a frame that needed a 5x7 printout. I decided to go to Staples...I made a properly cropped version for 5x7 as well as resizing it with a border adding up to 8.5x11. I asked the lady which she wanted to try to print...she guessed the 8.5x11 version, but that didn't work because the print auto-scaled the whole thing down, probably it had to add its own border. They didn't charge me for the mistake though and then she used their software to scale the 5x7 version to just the right size. The result was not too bad but the color transitions weren't as good as on my Uncle's. (One note about Staples, though...later I wanted to help Ksenia print out a CorelDraw file, and the guy couldn't tell me over the phone if they could read it...and that they'd charge us money just for trying. So some of my good feelings about the place were swept away.)

Eventually I changed my mind about the frame and needed a 4x6 print again...this was Sunday morning, and Ksenia needed her file printed (CorelDraw but we dumped it to JPG) so we went to the 24-hours Kinko's at Harvard Square. That worked out pretty well, it's a bit more DIY, but it was a cheap place to get an 11x17 printout. (You have to ask for help selecing the right printer tray, however) I made some 4x6 copies, laying out the page in Word. Then I also decided to try a self-serve color photo machine they had there, which was really cheap, like 60 cents. That probably would have been the #1 way to get a 4x6 printout, except on this particular machine the colors were a bit washed out. (I know I'm old fashioned, but for some reason I kind of distrust these machines and their ability to read straight from a CD I've burnt, or a memory card...I keep wondering what happens if the photos are in subfolders, or if there's some other weird data problem.)

So I guess I would suggest going to Kinko's over Staples, just bring a CD with your stuff. Though I'm getting an idea to just do 8.5x11 photo printouts on my cheap color HP, and thumbtacking them up...I kind of like the idea of how now that I'm digital, I don't have to treat the prints with nearly as much respect, they're easy to replace if something happens without hunting for a negative. Aargh, where do I want to live?

And how much do I went to spend? Like it seems cool to be able to spend half of what I was spending on a mortgage (most of which was being sunk into interest anyway) but $300 more than that, which seems to be the going rate for the good sized apartments in Arlington I've been looking at and then I'm back in vaguely "seller's remorse" territory.

Sorry if lately this journal has been even more self-absorbed than usual. It has been that kind of weekend.

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Image of the Moment

--I had Mo take this photo with her new camera when I was over dropping off an air filter. I'm trying to figure out if I like it, and if it would be good as one of several for an online personal.

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Game of the Moment
Metroid Cubed is a new slant on the original NES game, literally, using some nifty little tricks to give it some visual depth while still preserving its 2D gameplay. At the bottom of the page, along with the really big white-on-green shaded "PLAY" button there are some other cool link, including Isometric Zelda and "100 Marios". (The one with rotation is pretty funny.)

It reminds me of an idea I had for a Java "MegaMan Bestiary" with user controllable versions of all the bad guys, the neat robo-creatures, of the original 8-bit NES MegaMan. I think the closest I ever got to doing that was making animated GIFs of Mo and me in Mega- form.

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Journal of the Moment
Making the rounds (but Bill got me to take a second look) it's Heavy Little Objects, exceedingly readable descriptions of the random clutterables this guy has in his house. Idle Boast of the Moment
Hrm...some guy was out to make a point about recent inflation of SAT scores by getting as low a score as possible. One tidbit he mentions that thanks to the recentering in 1995, exactly the score I got in 1992 would now be considered a "perfect 1600". Damn! Take that, you punk Rosser!

Mo gently reminds me that "uh, Kirk, isn't it time to move on?" Ok, so I'm being a petty Al Bundy reliving his high school football glory years...still, for some reason "bubble tests" were one of those things I was really good at, and it's annoying to think I missed having an aura of "perfection".

Of course I heard they're adding a third 800-pt section in, so that soon all of our <1600 scores will make it sound like we were rampaging idiots.

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Gamebutton of the Moment

It's the Magic 8 Bar! Concentrate on your Yes or No question, then click and all will be revealed... (You may also wish to visit A Magic 8-Ball Unofficial Home Page, or my own gamebutton arcade (2019 UPDATE: or this Halloween Wearable Version))

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Academic Observation of the Moment

One of the Elizabethans' favorite Classical verse form was the pastoral allegory, which had reached its peak in Virgil's Eclogues. In such poems simple shepherds discourse on country life, which would all be pretty boring except that the whole thing is a disguise for comment on contemporary affairs. Actually, most of it is still boring.

Hey, I got a job! TaxWare. Not the best commute, and not the most splashy subject matter, but a very solid company, using interesting technology. (And 4 weeks vacation/personal days...plus they even met my previous salary.)

Wow, Mo and I did really well, considering the conventional wisdom about the state of the job market.

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News of the Moment
Did you hear that the pipe bomber was trying to bomb in the pattern of a big smiley face? Weird. Methinks someone has been watching Fight Club a few too many times.

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Quote of the Moment

The more I keep dealing with computers, the more it resembles a bad redneck romance: constantly flipping between 'I love you so much!' and 'Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?'

Web Toy of the Moment
This is so cool: dizzycity. They took 360 shots at every intersection in Manhattan. If you know the city at all, maybe even if you don't, it's way fun. 360 degrees, look up, down, zoom in. Here's a shot of my mom's old apartment building at 95th and West End Ave: (The toy uses even bigger images than this.) Doggone, I miss her apartment there. When she moved, I lost having my own micro-studio apartment that overlooked broadway. (via memepool)

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Quote of the Moment

We ought put the Department of Defense together with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Interstate Trucking Commission, and the Fish and Wildlife Service and just call it the Department of Guys.

Only the first one applies to me though, I'm not much of a guy. Though someone else on the group pointed out it was missing a department of boobies.

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News of the Moment
Salon on the Phantom Energy Crisis. Or, as The Onion headline put it, "After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling".