Zen and a Teal Tunnel

I'm probably going to become pretty artistic over the next two weeks. I have a motivation, and I have a learning source.

The motivation: My main board activity for SOGO is, at the moment, split between a forum for the students (a seminar, not a web forum), and redesigning the website.

The source: Zen. I just got Zen in print in the mail Saturday, and it is a gorgeous book. It's introducing me to styling, design, color selection…this will be a good project.

Most important, though, is making my brain meet on a middle ground. My left hemisphere's run amok for...eh, I'll say a decade. Combining the CSS, HTML, and VB.net coding seemed to be a fine sustenance for the logic side, while leaving room for whatever art that poor, dimished right half can muster.

(I've even started playing around with Context-Free Design Grammars, since the latest version has, finally, a lesson.)

A Nickname for Jade

Up until the last three lines, these are a loosely quoted passage from tonight at Fools Play. (Correct me if you can / want.) It was Taisha's first two-person show night (yay absent fools(?)!). The format was "Fools Play Shopping List," where two audience members become shoppers. (A little more on the format is at the Format Forest for tonight.)

Mike: "And now, we're about to get our next shopper for Fools Play Shopping List onstage. You sir, what is your name?"

Knutaf ascends to the stage, but talks while stepping up: "kNutf!" Didn't come out as clearly as it should've.

Mike: "I'm sorry?"

Taisha sings: "Gnutef, the Duh-Uuck!"

The image of Knutaf jerking about on stage, saying "Gilkers!" flooded minds (well, at least mine); the audience gave a laugh.

Mike: "Noo, he's not a duck! I'll bet you've gotten plenty with your name, Taisha."

Taisha: "Ooooh yeah. I've heard tons."

Mike, not letting her leave it at that: "Name just one."

Taisha: "Grundelbitch."

What an Obscure for-Oly Reference

Fools Play unveiled FoolsPlay.net, "Fools Play Island," two weeks ago. I've only just started playing in it, so I've seen some of Fools Play's history, and gotten a few keys. (It's a half-&-half informative / game site; you learn about Fools Play recurring characters, on the one hand, but on the other, you have an Inventory.) The last thing I did was read some of the Fools' bios.

Thursday of Lakefair, 2005: A band performed at noon on the main stage: "Locust Street Taxi." They were slightly hip-hop, but mostly played...I don't know how to describe the music. They had a guitar (electric), bass (electric), trumpet and trombone (which conduct electricity), bongos (which resist electricity), and drums (electrical death via the brush). They had a cool sound, so I bought one of their CDs through one of the band members.

That band member, I somewhat know through dancing. She has an awesome-looking swivel-hop that I have a burning desire to learn and put into my Lindy basic at intermittent points.

Here's the odd tie-in. Nathan Geyer is one of the singers of Locust Street Taxi, also plays trombone. He also happens to have a bio on Fools Play Island, having been the Orange Fool. It requires a trip to the Graveyard to read.

Well, look at that. Outside of my friends, and maybe some of the Yellow Fool's stage-dance antics, swing dancing and Fools Play are two-apart. (One-apart means directly related, right? Or is that "Directly Related?") There's a little more "Small World" symptom for you.

Katrina Slideshow

I realized that the kind of gallery I wanted Excess Celery to be is what Kodak's galleries are. But that's not why I'm writing this.

BoingBoing has been posting dozens of Katrina items, which I believe wholly appropriate, and much, much more informative than most TV news can deliver. Today, in one of the Katrina posts was a photo gallery, filled with about two hundred shots, of a hotel worker's account of New Orleans before, during, and after the storm.

The BoingBoing post is here, and the gallery is here.

Two Films

— Sideways; A Very Long Engagement

Sideways, I saw more recently - just finished at ten tonight. The frequent wine tasting that started the story off reminded me I had intended to sample some white, and my dad just happened to have some out. In terms of the candy-cane categorization of wines, I'm much more a white than a red. That's as sophisticated as my tastes are now.

Sideways otherwise had fine moments. Miles's progression from depression was warming, when he'd smile with Maya in the car. And, those two describing the beauty of wine to each other was entrapping. The film was a fine one, probably made more so by my complete lack of watching dramas otherwise.

A Very Long Engagement, I saw as the end of our last Butt-Numb-a-Thon, two Saturdays ago. I am completely infatuated with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, as he has directed my three favorite French movies ever (one I just named; Amelie; and The City of Lost Children). I'm looking at his IMDB entry, though, and I see that he directed Alien: Resurrection, too. I haven't seen that, but I'm getting a really funny crossover of his directing style in my head — he typically doles out personal nuances of some of the characters, like a mother in Engagement who would always respond to her dog's pew, "Doggy Fart, warms my heart." Imagine an alien head popping out, and the camera freezing, focused and zoomed in on the head and its stem neck, a narration taking over:

"This little one, known by his genetic code hash of TAGGA, shared a love-hate relation with his host's daily duties. While loving the air and getting out in it whenever the host's hostility contracted just the right muscles," the scene cuts to an Alien hiss-roaring and the little head TAGGA popping out, "There is nothing he detests more than when he's driven out not by hostility, but by being squeezed out as part of the muscles at the other end when Mr. Host has to excrete yesterday's well-earned and bountifully enjoyed human flesh," the scene cuts to an overhead shot looking straight down at the host Alien, only the head visible via angle, who's looking up and screams the head out as a skeletal hand plops down onto the ground and clatters backward into the camera view. TAGGA's jaw structure is a frown, and not upside-down. The scene then cuts back to the action; Alien eats someone, or something.

I never actually saw any of the Alien movies. But, I'd love it if that scene were in there somewhere. It'd be a beautiful Jeunet moment.

Vingt-et-un, avec vin

I almost thought I wasn't going to be at work this last week. I was on call for my first jury summons – makes me feel all the more adult. I ended up not getting called; that was sort of disappointing. I would've loved to show up to the interviews with my degree from Evergreen, and being shown the door soon after. "My interests?" I'd respond in the interview. "My current legal interest is in how the Recording Industry Association of America is completely lampooning the consumer's ownership of music, because of their insatiable desire to make filthy, filthy money." The door would probably slam into me on the way out.

I do think it would be interesting and worthwhileto serve on a jury; I'd be happy to do my citizen's duty. But thinking of a way to get out of it in the interview holds an appeal not unlike knowing your next phone call's going to be from a telemarketer – and you'll be ready.

An aside, slightly on that topic I tried to make me sound as biased decided as possible: I got a birthday present last week from Cass & Aaron, a certificate for FYE. I put it to good use and got the "Spamalot" soundtrack, a copy of which I then made for Aaron. I was wondering if CD protection had indeed been put in place, as I had read. "Spamalot's" distributed by Universal Music, not mentioned in that article, but I still worried that the CD protection would be in place.

I burned a copy with that copy of Roxio 6 that I shall never ever update, because it works well and can only get less with upgrades as more compliance with copyright crippling enforcement crippling is added. I burned the copy in "Raw" mode, which I've taken on faith meant a 1-to-1 copy of the bits from the source disc to the blank disc. That apparently isn't the case, by observation. That disc I copied won't play in my Mac. It'll play in either Windows machine in the house; I haven't tested on the headless box, for lack of VNC in the OS that does play audio. It'll play on the CD player in my car and in the house stereo. But, on the Mac, it just siphons all the resources into a pile of computational piss on the table; clicks of any kind don't register for nearly a minute. Good thing there's a special Eject key on the keyboard that works in, so far, all cases. That's still an oddity.

Well, life goes on, with or without the birthday present that faces Apple resistance on copying. At the Little Tokyo Steakhouse dinner last week, which was a freakin' delicious part of Federal Way, Aaron and Cassie got me that gift card for FYE. Katie got me a card and a book, "Here Speeching American." The book really screws with my head; it's mashed-up English spoken with dialectical grammatical structures, from around the world. Strains the left brain. Her card, though, was too freakin' cool: It was a birthday calculator, giving my age in such animals as dog, cat, crocodile...I thought it was so cool, I had to make it into a real calculator.

So, I ventured into the realm of PHP and wrote an XML representation of the card's scalars, an XSL transformation to reformat the data into HTML fit for the blog, and a PHP script to give my accurate age, pick a random animal (or planet), and plug into the sidebar.

This will lead to me -finally- getting an automated update system for that "Shameless Concert Plugs" section. I always wanted to get that done in a data-driven fashion instead of typing the things into the index template manually; that section saw no love this last year, though plenty was there to give. Now, though, I just need to find, maybe write, an XML format for classical concert listings.

I spent sporadic parts of the weekend writing that age-translation script. What a way to spend the actual birthday weekend, eh? Friday night, my actual birthday, I had a teeny tiny amount of wine – red wine, was supposed to be good according to my dad. Well, I had the same balky reaction I had trying some wine in Canada over spring break. I thought then that the wine I was having was just bad because it came from poor storage in the rock club I was in, but after the same conclusion at my birthday dinner, I'm now pretty sure I'm not (yet) a red wine fan. White's next on the list.

Age 21. There very well may be more to this year than wine and XML. Prospects for getting into "FREE for 21 and over" swing events are good. Beyond that, though, I'll just see what time allows me.