I kept track of some of the articles I poured over on Wikipedia. It’s an amazing thing. WikiGnomes (People who make minor edits) Konqueror, the GPL web browser. Puerto Rico (game). Raw food diet, because I was unclear.
17
Feb 06
What’s the haps on the craps?
I had a pretty eventful week, for me anyway. Wednesday night my mom came up to Dallas for business and I went up to Garland after work and had a spaghetti dinner with her and my cousin at my cousin’s apartment. Since I hadn’t seen my mom since Thanksgiving she brought up a few Christmas gifts. That was a nice surprise. Maybe we should take all the Christmas presents we get and spread them out over the year?
Thursday morning I woke up after thirty minutes of playing tag with the snooze button. When I got up I found that some of the changes John had made to the listserv had prevented mail traffic to the list. This was a stressful thing early in the morning, and I had to put that fire out before heading into work.
With Jody out of town in Austin, I had to find something to do thursday night. Luckily, I had made plans with James and Melissa to go out, and we went to this pub called The Drunken Monk over by SMU, which James refers to as Southern Millionaires University. It must be noted that James is technically an SMU student since he is in the video game design program there in Plano. The pub was packed and we had a hard time getting a table, although as I said at the time, thursday is the new friday, tuesday is the new monday. It’s amazing how much of the work I do during the week is squeezed into tuesday and wednesday, which seem to be my most productive days. I can’t be the only one.
James and Melissa are a nice couple as well as great people on their own. I’m glad they’re marrying each other and asked a lot about the whole deal since I don’t know a lot of other people who are getting married. It’s a good feeling to see two people with love for one another. We talked and hung out and drank a few beers. I’m excited about being a groomsman, although I’m glad it’s still a few months away since such ceremony makes me immediately nervous due to the obvious gravity. I’m probably overthinking it.
14
Feb 06
Brokeback Mountain as slash fiction
From Steve Sailer’s heretical blog, Brokeback Mountain as slash fiction:
“Slash” is about 100% written and read by women — some lesbian but most straight. In fact it follows romance novel formulas very closely. One member of the buddy pair is more sensitive and feminine — physically a man, emotionally a woman — while the other is a conventional romance hero. With Kirk/Spock, it’s Kirk who’s the sensitive one and Spock who’s the cold, emotionally distant hero who discovers his true feelings at the end. Part of the appeal is that the guys end up having sex not because they’re gay, but because True Love conquers all.
Gay men aren’t any more interested in “slash” than straight men are in Georgette Heyer. [Who?] The real parallel to “slash” among straight men is girl-on-girl pornography, where women combine ultra-feminine bodies with implausibly guy-like appetites for casual sex. Presumably these women inhabit the same male fantasy land where hot babes are interested in cool guy stuff, like martial arts and field-stripping automatic weapons, instead of boring girl stuff, like relationships and feelings (whatever those are).
Both slash and girl-girl porn tell us a lot (maybe more than we’d like to know) about the chasm between male and female sexuality. but, apart from the physical activities, they have nothing to do with real homosexuality. It’s funny how many reviewers are so clueless about human sexuality they can’t figure stuff like this out.
14
Feb 06
Liberace was an alien from outer space
…with hotpants. As far as I know, this is a real photo. Liberace had a huge following among middle aged women, which is completely inexplicable. Why do older women love flamboyant, closeted gay men? Clay Aiken probably has a similar following.
14
Feb 06
The memory leak is the main problem with Firefox
Ben Goodger on the irritating Firefox memory leak: “What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.” Bugs as design features. Sounds familiar.
14
Feb 06
Brokeback chant
Shelus sent me this funny item:
Fans of No. 5 Gonzaga have been asked to stop yelling “Brokeback Mountain” at opposing players.
The reference to the recent movie about homosexual cowboys was chanted by some fans during Monday’s game against Saint Mary’s, and is apparently intended to suggest an opposing player is gay.
The chants were the subject of several classroom discussions over the past week, and the faculty advisers for the Kennel Club booster group urged students this week to avoid “inappropriate chants” during the Bulldogs’ Saturday game against Stanford, which was nationally televised on ESPN.
10
Feb 06
Caché
Jody and I went out for dinner and a movie last night after work. We stopped off at Campisi’s Egyptian, a good Italian restaurant here in Dallas with good food and great atmosphere. I just read on their website that Jack Ruby ate dinner at Campisi’s the night before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Campisi’s is the kind of place where you see nicely dressed old couples who look like they have been coming back for a while. My favorite feature: coatrack attached to every booth. I had spaghetti and meatballs, although in this case it was meatball. The plate came piled with a ball of spaghetti and the marinara sauce was sweet and fresh. I almost had to use the garlic toast to cancel out the sweetness.
After dinner, we crossed Mockingbird Lane to stop over at the Angelika to see Caché, a French film about a couple who are being secretly filmed and provoked with these mysterious recordings. It’s a movie where you have to pay close attention. Unlike what we’re accustomed to from Hollywood, it doesn’t pre-digest the ideas or plot for you. You really have to observe and think about it. After the movie, in fact, this older gentleman kept asking people as they were leaving if they “got it” in the hopes that they would give him “the answer”. I’m glad he didn’t ask me because it seems almost a violation to ruin that sense of mystery with an inarticulation of your own sense of meaning, even though I’m sure he could have come up with his own interpretation had he just thought about what he had seen. That’s not to say that the film tries to be incomprehensible because it doesn’t, however it’s very much an examplar of the “show don’t tell” school of film-making. It is worth seeing.
10
Feb 06
Blogs I love
Sometimes I really need a break from reading about all the technology-related prognostication and navel-gazing. Here are a few antidotes to the usual fare:
WWTDD: What would Tyler Durden do:
I don’t know how much unicorn blood they pump into her [Terri Hatcher] on the set of ‘Desperate Housewives’ to make her look human for a few hours, but think about it, when was the last time you saw a unicorn? Exactly.
“I heard,” I say, “that you went cliff diving, but when you dove, your lat spread flared out so wide that you took flight, and glided out to sea, and they had to send a Mexican Coast Guard boat five miles offshore to pick you up.”