fling93 loves fishies

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Busted!

New favorite show: Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel (and not just cuz of Kari Byron).

Myths are debunked by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, two silly geeks who are special-effects experts and love building stuff. I mean, really love building stuff. They will not just debunk the myth, but will go to great lengths to build whatever it takes to show what it would actually take for the myth to happen.

For example, take the myth about the guy who overfilled his washing machine and then fell into the machine and got violently spun around. Well of course, washing machines won’t spin if you open the lid, so they could’ve just stopped there. But no, they decide to override that safety mechanism, only to find that washing machine engines don’t have nearly enough torque to spin a person. They could’ve stopped there, but no, they decide to hook up a car engine to the washing machine to see if that would be enough…

You get the picture. Best part, the narrator makes fun of them for all this! It’s great fun for the viewers and the Mythbuster team as well, and they also do a great job clearly explaining the science behind everything with amusing animations (and yes, they do get the science right). Both Erika and I enjoy it thoroughly, and there are not too many shows we both love (although I finally got her hooked on Battlestar Galactica — but goddamn, they took their sweet time before finally doing another decent episode).

So check it out! It’s just icing on the cake that Kari Byron is cute and cool beyond words (and quite a talented artist as well).

Oh, is she a redhead? I hadn’t noticed.

Adventures in Podcasting

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking part in “an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain.” Namely, LibriVox. Essentially, a bunch of us volunteered to record ourselves reading chapters from books available freely from Project Gutenberg, and Hugh is assembling them into a podcast.

The book we’re doing right now is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I was originally assigned chapter four, but the guy doing chapter three needed some more time to sort through issues with his recording setup, so I got bumped up in the batting order (despite the fact that I have a lousy on-base percentage).

Anyway, that’s how I spent the last weekend. So without further ado, here’s my reading of Chapter 3. It clocks in at 33:48. For those who missed out on the earlier chapters, you can get chapter one here, and chapter two here (these are read by other people). You can also subscribe to the LibriVox RSS feed or their podcast feed.

And if you don’t care about the minute and uninteresting details of the story behind the making of this recording, you can stop reading right now. Those of you who are too bored to bother to look for something else more interesting, continue on (there’s a cute kitty cat picture!).

LibriVox (aka Podcast Gutenberg)

Hugh has a new project that I’d like to draw attention to:

LibriVox is a hope, an experiment, and a question: can the net harness a bunch of volunteers to help bring books in the public domain to life through podcasting?

LibriVox is an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain. It works like this: a book is chosen, then you, the volunteers, read and record one or more chapters. We liberate the audio files through this weblog/podcast every week (?).

More information here. The first book chosen is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (a work chosen, no doubt, for its renewed relevance today). Although all the chapters are already claimed, anybody interested in volunteering for other works can do so at the forum. Be sure to read this guide before recording.

I’m signed up to read chapter 4 (even though I was disappointed to learn that it did not include a hot sex scene with Natalie Portman), and I’ll be sure to post a copy here when I’m done.

Update 10/24/05

Librivox has now moved to a new domain. Oh, and I recorded chapter 3 of The Secret Agent instead of chapter 4. Here’s the audio file. You can get the other chapters at LibriVox, of course. And LibriVox’s profile is definitely on the rise after Boing Boing mentioned them.

Maxim Gets It All Wrong

Okay, I’m watching the Maxim Hot 100 on VH1, just for… uh… research purposes! Yeah, just in case some important… um… researchy situation where I might need to know who was on it for some science-like reason. Yeah! Oh, and not to mention that I had to make sure that they got it right! Yeah, for that reason.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting but not surprising that Battlestar Galactica’s Grace Park (Boomer) was ranked higher than Tricia Helfer (Number Six), and I have nothing against that random chick who happened to be at #1 — but they were just wrong! I mean, hello? Duh!! It’s supposed to be Natalie Portman!! Is there anybody who doesn’t realize that she’s the hottest thing since sliced bread… oh wait, sliced bread isn’t hot, I mean… uh… toasted bread! Yeah, bread that you left in the toaster oven a little too long and it’s so hot that it… uh… catches on fire and then you try to pull it out of the oven but then the toast is so hot that it burns your fingers and you say to yourself, “Don’t Panic!” and so you think for a bit and then run to the fridge to put butter on them and then you remember that butter actually isn’t good for burns and then you lick it off and it stings like hell but then you go, “mmmmmm, butter!” but then you realize from the taste that it isn’t really butter but margarine instead and then you don’t remember whether that’s okay to put on burns or not and then the smoke alarm goes off and you remember from school that you have to go outside cuz it means it’s a fire drill but you’re too embarrassed because you didn’t listen to Todd Parr and are wearing your clean underwear on your head… um… I mean this is all hypothetical, for illustrative purposes of the hot toast and everything.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Natalie Portman being screwed… uh, I mean shafted… uh… I mean Maxim just got it all completely and totally incorrect by not having her #1. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, there were guys lining up to see her new movie weeks in advance, at the wrong freakin’ theatre! I mean, the damn film was so disappointing because she was only in fourteen scenes and really only had that one semi-interesting outfit where she was brushing her hair, but people still keep going to see the thing. You just can’t get any hotter than that!

But nooooooo, they don’t put the hotness that is Natalie Portman anywhere in the top ten, or the top twenty!!! Or, get this. Not. Even. In. The. Top. Frickin’. FORTY!!!!

Give me a fucking break!

So where did they put her? I kid you not, way down at forty-two! They listed forty-one not-so-hot women… well okay, that Lindsay Lohan isn’t half-bad… but still, when there isn’t a single hottie that is hotter than Natalie, how can you come up with forty-one so-called hotties to be ranked ahead of the one and only precioussss Natalie Portman!!

Un-frickin-believable!

Well, unless…

Unless, of course, this is Maxim’s way of letting everybody know that Natalie Portman is truly the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Yeah, that must be it.

Okay, so never mind! Go back to surfing the net for porn or whatever it was you were doing.

Punchbowl Poetry

Well, look at that. It’s May 5th, 2005, and you know what that means!

Yes, that’s right! There’s only TWO MORE WEEKS until Natalie Portman’s new film opens. Incidentally, that’s also when my term paper is due, so here’s yet another meme to tide you over. Yeah, I’m such a hypocrite (Update 6/9/05: Yeah, not only did I watch Episode III on opening day, I also watched it again on opening weekend. And I also watched Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy twice on opening weekend. Maybe that list of things wasn’t so much about things I didn’t get but about things that I was in denial about getting?).

While you’re waiting for Natalie’s new film me to get back to political commentary, check out Will Wilkerson taking on the recent liberal meme of Social Security as insurance, making many points that I had planned to make myself (via Julian Sanchez). And for something a bit shorter and simpler, check out my comments on Social Security at sQurl’s newly remade blog, Mythos of a Sorority Geek.

I should take this opportunity to mention that sQurl has been on a roll ever since she renamed her blog and began focusing on her perspective of gender issues. Of particular note is her critique of the notion of equality, and her observations on how different genders present information.

But to get back to the meme, Donna B. tags me with Ellison’s Punchbowl Meme:

Simply compose a four-line poem and post it on your blog. The first and third verses of the poem should read “Turd in a punchbowl.” Verses two and four may be about any subject (including turds!) but they must rhyme with each other.

Okay, that’s simple enough. No rules about meter, so I can sprawl a bit. Here goes nothing…

I just don't get it

Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling… but nice.”

I saw this meme in several places. I was directly called out by Elke, but I also saw this from Amanda Rohn, Julian Sanchez, Gene Healy, and Matt Yglesias. Since work and my Poli Sci class are conspiring to keep me from blogging very often (and that probably won’t change until I’m done with my term paper in late May), I guess I might as well participate.

As Elke said, “I know he loves fishies…” (as well as the hotness that is Natalie Portman) “…but what does he not care for?” Well, it took me a while, but here’s the answer:

Casino Night 2005

Erika and I had a real blast at this last year, and it’s for a good cause, so I thought I’d help put out the word for Casino Night 2005 for those of you in the South Bay:

Friday, January 28, 2005 — 7:00 - 11:30 PM

At: Villa Ragusa, Campbell, California (here are directions)

Buy tickets online!

Casino Night benefits the EHC LifeBuilders’s programs for homeless adults throughout Santa Clara County.

$50 per person includes a night filled with fun casino games (Roulette, Blackjack, Slots), live entertainment from Woodeye, hors d’oeuvres, a complimentary beverage, one ticket for a prize drawing, and a complimentary keepsake photo.

Entry into the Texas Hold ’Em Poker Tournament is an additional $50. There are a limited number of seats available for the tournament — be sure to register early!

Additional prize drawing tickets are available for $10 — winner need not be present to win.

Join in the fun and help end homelessness!

Tickets are on sale online now!

For more information or for tickets contact:

Ken Goldstein — 408.294.2100 ×227

or

Alan Aerts — 408.871.7000

And these are the raffle prizes:

1st prize: JVC 32" flat screen TV
2nd prize: Sony Stereo System
3rd prize: GoVideo DVD/VCR

For those of you who’ve always wanted to try their hand at craps but were too chicken to do so in Vegas (ahem, I’m talking about you, Courtney), this is the perfect opportunity. Of course, I probably shouldn’t talk, as I’m too chicken to enter the Texas Hold ’Em Tournament.

And for those unfamiliar with these games, I’ve written primers on How to Play Craps (which also talks briefly about EHC’s “Casino Bowl” last year) as well as for Texas Hold ’Em Poker. I assume blackjack, roulette, and slot machines are simple enough for everyone to pick up pretty quickly on their own.

We already bought our tickets weeks ago. Hope to see you there!

Update 1/13/05

I should clarify that this is not gambling with real money. Your admission includes some “play” chips. They aren’t redeemable for money, but at the end of the night, they have some prizes for the people who end up with the most chips (at least, that’s how it worked last year). This is why I say it’s a perfect opportunity for you to try out some games that might ordinarily intimidate you.

JANE: Abortion and the Underground

My wife, Erika, produced several wildly successful shows of The Vagina Monologues for V-Day at San Jose State last year and the year before. While highly entertaining, these did not feature professional actors, but were community theatre shows where San Jose State students and other members of the community were invited to participate.

Well, now she’s getting to do the real deal. At Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (PPGG) she is co-producing the Bay Area’s premiere of JANE: Abortion and the Underground by Paula Kamen, and this will be a full-blown production with actors and a director with stage experience, plus costumes and sets and everything. The show is a week from Saturday, January 22nd, at the Brava Theater in San Francisco. To buy tickets, call 415-202-7233 or buy them online (scroll to the bottom of the page).

A Christmas of Being Still

I heard about Buy Nothing Day from Courtney. It’s too late now, but the idea was for everybody to agree to not buy anything on one of the heaviest shopping days of the year, November 26th. Kind of a mini-boycott to protest the consumerism that now dominates the holiday season.

I understand the sentiment behind it, but I have to say that this sort of thing just won’t work from an economic perspective. It’s a pretty similar situation to those calls for boycotts of gasoline on certain days or weeks or from certain gas stations. You just end up shifting some demand from one day to another (or from one station or oil company to another1). The overall level of demand doesn’t change, which means the overall amount of sales and revenues do not change. And so the companies really don’t care.

Indeed, it’s my suspicion that retailers really don’t like the holiday rush that much since it’s harder to project sales for such a high peak and then stock inventories accordingly. Of course, they do like the overall effect of increased demand and buying of stuff. Because seriously, what percentage of the gifts you get are things you really want or use? Yeah, a lot of them end up sitting in an attic or closet unused, or you end up donating them or regifting them to someone else. This essentially means someone got manipulated into paying money for something that nobody wanted (an economist would call this high deadweight losses — via Tyler Cowen). And furthermore, it happens every year. Retailers absolutely love that. And it’s this sort of craziness that inspires anti-consumerism (and I can understand the sentiment, being a big fan of Fight Club and Radiohead’s OK Computer).

But buying stuff is not evil. Indeed, it’s the lifeblood of economic activity. An economy can’t provide jobs unless people are buying stuff to pay for those jobs. But, of course, buying stuff that nobody wants just causes the economy to create more useless things. So I thought I’d provide a few more constructive suggestions.

Robert's Snow Auctions Starting

I’ve blogged on Robert’s Snow before. Robert’s Snow (the book) is now available in stores (and makes a great holiday gift!), and I also thought I’d pass on a followup e-mail on the snowflake auction from my sister, Alvina. Apologies for not getting this up sooner, as there were a few other events that have now passed, but I was a little bit preoccupied. Anyway, here’s Alvina:

Hello All!

Many of you already know about “Robert’s Snow for Cancer’s Cure,” but the time has finally come to ACT! For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the quick summary:

Do you love The Polar Express or Olivia or Harry Potter? You could own an original art piece (not a print!) by the illustrators of those books and help the fight against cancer at the same time! How? By participating in Robert’s Snow: for Cancer’s Cure, a unique fundraiser for cancer research. Over 170 illustrators of children’s books have made original works of art — on wooden snowflakes — to be auctioned online from October 31 to December 12.

Children’s book author/illustrator Grace Lin created Robert’s Snow: for Cancer’s Cure after her husband was diagnosed with cancer; she rallied her colleagues to contribute to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the way she knew best — with art. On wooden snowflakes, illustrators such as Chris Van Allsburg (The Polar Express), Marc Brown (Arthur), and Mary Grand Pre (Harry Potter) have created exclusive works that are now on auction at www.robertssnow.com. Don’t miss the snow!

Many of the auctions are going on right now, so please pass this along to everyone you know!

Also, for those of you in Massachusetts or California, we have some events coming up and opportunities to see the snowflakes in person — believe me, the websites do not do these pieces of art justice. They are absolutely breathtaking in real life, so if you’re able, go see them in person. I’m flying out to Los Angeles for the Storyopolis event, so please join me!

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 125 West Bay Road, Amherst, MA.
Oct 31-Dec 12 Snowflake Exhibit 29: snowflakes selected from the collection will be on display here!

Storyopolis Art Gallery, 116 North Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA.
Dec 2-12, Snowflake Exhibit Snow on the west coast! Over 70 snowflakes from the collection will be display here.
Dec 2, 7pm Exhibit Opening: meet participating local artists and see the snowflakes.

You’ve voted for president (I hope), so now “vote” for your favorite snowflake by bidding on them. I have the winning bid on one of the snowflakes right now, but believe me, I’ll be thrilled if I end up not being able to afford any of them.

Thanks, everyone. Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Alvina

What are you waiting for? Go ahead and bid!

Everyone Thinks They're a Writer

Well, I’m still writing away at the novel, although I’ve only now hit the halfway point, 25,000 words, with only one week left to go. So I’ll probably not make the wordcount goal. Which means I might as well blog. :)

And while I’m on the topic of writing novels, via Brayden King, I ran across an interesting article in the New York Times about the progress being made on computer programs who can write.

South Park Nails the News Media

Wow, that was one of the best South Park episodes ever, “Quest for Ratings,” where the kids run a news show and are getting clobbered by Craig’s “Close Ups of Animals with a Wide-Angle Lens.” Parker and Stone have totally nailed exactly what’s happened to our media. It’s why I don’t bother getting my news from television anymore, since, as I’ve previously mentioned:

I think television is a truly horrible way to get your news. For one, it is incredibly time-inefficient. Not only can you read much faster than you can listen, you can also pick and choose what topics to read about, whereas a news broadcast walks you through a bunch of topics chosen by somebody else. Also, the amount of time spent wading past advertisements seems higher for television than for newspapers or web browsing…

Not to mention that it is a lot harder to speak about a subject objectively than it is to write about it objectively for the simple reason that it’s much easier to remove emotion and bias from a piece of writing than it is from a human voice or face…. Plus, images tend to be much more emotionally loaded than words and can probably distort your memory of what actually happened.

And that South Park episode shows another obvious reason that I overlooked. Television news is way too sensitive to the number of eyeballs watching any given episode. If there’s a slow news day, they get clobbered. There’s tremendous pressure to just make stuff up or stretch the truth ridiculously, just like the kids ended up doing to try and compete.

Indeed, just as CBS did.

NaNoWriMo

Been taking a bit of a breather, in case that wasn’t obvious. That last monster of a post had been taking up a lot of my time the past few weeks. And I’m not going to have much of a break until NaNoWriMo starts.

Wot’s dat, you say? National Novel Writing Month, where the challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. It doesn’t have to be great. It can be utter crap. It just has to be 50,000 words. The idea is more about motivation and the artistic process than the actual result. I guess it sounds kinda like an extended stream-of-consciousness exercise, but my impression is that it’s much more than that.

Texas Hold 'Em Poker

Update 11/17/04: Added the bit on side pots and alternative ways to handle the case when the dealer forgets to burn a card. Plus other minor edits.

Well, I’m back from the wedding and family reunion. It was most notable for the godawful service we got from the Radisson Hotel Santa Barbara. Still, it’s always cool to hang with all of the cousins, so it was a lot of fun.

Especially since we played plenty of Texas Hold ’Em Poker (and since I knew the rules this time, I did a little better than last time). I’m not really much of a poker player and don’t have a regular game, so I’m sure people like Courtney would crush me like an insignificant bug. Plus, those who know me very well know that I am very expressive and emotional, which aren’t exactly strengths when it comes to poker (I have a tendency to jump up and down with a goofy grin on my face when I get pocket aces — or when I get cookies, for that matter). But I just can’t deny the appeal. The wife is hooked, too, and was planning on setting up a weekly game among her feminist friends, so we had grabbed some inexpensive poker chips from Toys “R” Us.

It’s pretty amazing how poker has just taken off. My wife often remarks how we’re seeing it pass the Tipping Point. It seems like most everybody’s at least heard of the game, if they haven’t yet watched Bravo’s highly entertaining Celebrity Poker Showdown or ESPN’s World Series of Poker (which I haven’t yet seen). So not surprisingly, we had plenty of takers when I sent out an e-mail to the cousins, inquiring if we should bring our chips to the reunion.

One cousin asked to be reminded of the rules to refresh his memory, and as I am often wont to do, I wrote up a long-ass e-mail. In hindsight, I think he was joking about needing his memory refreshed, and the e-mail was so long that nobody even bothered reading it. So I figure I’d slap it up here, so I’d at least get a blog post out of the damn thing. And maybe there’s a small chance that there’s somebody out there not yet familiar with the game and wants to learn more. Plus, it can kinda be a companion piece to my How to Play Craps post.

Anyway, I’ve often heard it’s simple to learn, difficult to master. So far, I have to agree. Here are the rules:

Suburban Nation

It was actually sometime last year that I read Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. I was just browsing through City Lights, and it caught my eye, so I leafed through it. I don’t really know why (aside from the fact that it was prominently displayed). Sprawl has never really been an issue I cared about, since I had always assumed it was an issue for extreme environmentalists who want us all to live in sustainable communes, or rabid liberals who hate Wal-Mart and Starbucks.

But this book, which I very highly recommend, was very non-political and pragmatic in explaining why suburbia is simply not laid out in a way that’s very convenient or healthy for people. And it depicted sprawl, not as an issue of fighting growth (which is inevitable), or moving everybody back into the cities (which is unrealistic — people fled them for a reason), but more of a problem of how to design neighborhoods (in both urban and suburban settings) in an efficient and scaleable manner.

Great Courses: Power Over People

Well, I finally completed the Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory on audio CD, part of the Great Courses from the Teaching Company that I blogged about earlier. I thought it was very enlightening and worthwhile, and I found Professor Dalton to be an excellent lecturer (although sometimes when his voice dipped, it was kinda hard to hear him when I was on the freeway, but note that ‘93 Saturns weren’t exactly known for their quiet ride).

I have to say the subject matter it covered wasn’t quite what I expected. I guess I didn’t really know anything about political science. I thought it would talk more about politics and forms of government, but I guess that’d be more civics than political theory. Instead, this course covered various theories exploring human nature to determine what kind of society would be ideal for humans. So there was quite a bit of overlap with philosophy, which surprised me. While I fully expected to see the lectures about Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hitler, and Gandhi, there were also ones on Thoreau, Freud, and “The Hindu Vision of Life.”

Robert's Snow

I received an e-mail from my sister, Alvina, and thought I would pass it on. As I mentioned earlier, she works in children’s book publishing and is close friends with Grace Lin, the writer and illustrator of Okie-Dokie, Artichokie!, Olvina Flies, Dim Sum for Everyone, and my personal favorite, The Ugly Vegetables. Her new book coming out is Robert’s Snow. Here’s Alvina with the rest:

Hi all,

Many of you already know about this online auction for cancer research that children’s book author and illustrator, Grace Lin, started in honor of her husband, Robert, who was diagnosed with Ewings Sarcoma a few years ago. For those of you who don’t know the whole story, please go to the Robert’s Snow for Cancer’s Cure website or see the below press release for more information.

The auction is picking up steam: over 150 illustrators have signed up to illustrate/decorate wooden snowflake ornaments, including Jules Fieffer, Chris Van Allsburg, Mary Grand Pre, Peter Sis, Robert Macauley, Ruth Sanderson, Marc Brown, Todd Parr, Chris Raschka, Robert Sabuda, and more! Below are some of the snowflakes that have come in so far (there are more on the website). The actual auction will run via eBay from November 1-December 12. For those of you who are children’s book illustrators (or have illustrator friends who may be interested), please go to the website to sign up—the deadline for snowflakes is August 1.

But my main objective is to create more awareness of the auction itself. If you have any media contacts who you think might be interested in picking up this story, please let me know or pass along this email. Also attached is the press release. If you have a website and are willing to link to www.robertssnow.com, that would be great, too! If you know of any galleries or bookstores that may want to host the actual snowflakes, carry postcards, and/or put up a poster, please let me know. We are also looking for more sponsors—a celebrity would be nice! Any and all help is welcome.

Thanks for your support!

Best,

Alvina

Here’s some sample images of the flakes so far (click on them to zoom in — be sure your browser allows pop-up windows):

You can see a few more at the website.

And here is the press release she mentioned:

Cirque du Soleil & Matthew Cusick update

Many months ago, I mentioned that Cirque du Soleil fired Matthew Cusick for being HIV positive, which struck me as discriminatory:

This additional article on Cusick from the Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network notes that “there are no documented cases of HIV transmission between two athletes during a sports event,” which isn’t too much of a surprise. Even in contact sports, open wounds coming into contact are extremely rare, except perhaps in boxing (and really, if they cut down on the ear-biting, that’d go a long way). And as the CDC points out, even if “an open wound came in contact with an HIV-positive athlete who is bleeding, the odds of transmission would be less than 0.3 percent,” and of course, that’s a big if anyway.

I’d figured most people understood all this by now after the whole Magic Johnson deal, but I guess I was wrong.

If you consider that the odds are already astronomical for two open wounds to come into contact, it should be clear that Cirque du Soleil’s fear of HIV transmission is unfounded and not a good reason to fire somebody.

I’ve been meaning to post an update on his case for some time. Via Scott, PlanetOut reported in January that the EEOC indeed ruled that this was illegal discrimination:

Me R a Litturit (allmoast)!

Via Sebastian Holsclaw (who got it from Mrs. Tilton), some bloggers are spreading around a list of books that you are supposed to have read if you’re really a literate person (although many say the list has some glaring flaws), and they’re highlighting the ones on the list they’ve actually read. I guess I’ll participate in this meme cuz someday, someone might be able to use a crawler to gather statistics on it or something. Plus it makes me look hoity-toity.

Well, come to think of it, I seem to have the most unforgiveable lacunae of anyone who’s participated, including Abiola. Heck, who am I kidding? I didn’t even know what “lacunae” means (it’s a hoity-toity way to say “gaps”).

Anyway, on to the list:

Partners and Marriage, by Nerburn

I generally prefer not to repost other people’s material, but I’ll make an exception. I ran across this old e-mail I received a long while back, and I recalled that it served as some of the inspiration behind my own marriage post. I figured, like most forwarded e-mails, that everybody would have seen it by now. But I didn’t find many copies on the web, so I think it’d be worth reposting.

Update 5/3/04

I guess I should have looked harder. I have discovered that I have misattributed the author. It was not written by Eduardo Calasanz, but by Kent Nerburn as Chapter 26 for Letters to My Son: A Father’s Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love, a book of essays he wrote with Richard Carlson. I contacted Nerburn (and incidentally, he has a blog), and he has graciously allowed me to leave it up on my site.

Anyway, I think he got it right on. And I know I’m very blessed to have lucked into my marriage, becoming best friends with my wife before I realized a sexual relationship with her was even possible (some background here).

Enjoy.

Partners and Marriage

by Kent Nerburn

I have never met a man who didn’t want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn’t fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives.

Great Courses from the Teaching Company

The idea for my The Message, Not the Messenger post (which urged people not to exclude sources of information) had been kicking around in my head for quite a while for various reasons. But I have to admit that one of the motivations behind that post was somewhat self-serving.

After all, I myself am not an expert in anything except my field, which’d bore you to death. I’m not an academic and don’t have a Ph.D. in anything. Not even a Masters. I don’t really regret the choice, given that my field of work is software engineering, which has been quite lucrative so far, but I’ve often wondered whether I am meant for this line of work, and whether I’d be better suited for a life in academia or some other field.

Or maybe even blogging.

Clone Wars Gets Deep

I’ve been watching the animated Clone Wars “micro-series” on the Cartoon Network. Each episode is only three minutes, and up to this point, almost every episode has just focussed on one battle scene each. Pretty good fun, but there’d been very little plot or substance, so I didn’t feel compelled to recommend it.

However, I thought tonight’s episode, Chapter Fourteen, was particularly interesting. If you haven’t figured out where Lucas will probably be going in Episode III, you might not want to read this.

My Original Snarkier Marriage Comment

While on the topic of short and long blog posts, I should mention that I do actually regularly write much shorter takes when I am commenting on other blogs. This is because I view blog posts and blog comments as two different kinds of media which warrant different approaches, and I think my long post and short comment on gay marriage illustrate this quite nicely, if I do say so myself. Plus, it occurred to me that some of you who read my very lengthy On Marriage post might be interested to see the original four-paragraph comment that it started as.

Television's Replacement

While pondering on how TiVo allows me to time-shift (especially valuable when it comes to watching Formula One), hearing on NPR about the rise in popularity of Internet animations, and reading on Slashdot on how television is losing out to video games, it occurred to me how television is probably going to evolve — or be supplanted, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps my vision has been thought of by others, because it seems so darn obvious, but I haven’t seen it discussed much before.

(Update 3/20/04
Indeed, combining RSS and BitTorrent technologies achieves what I’m thinking of, as already discussed on Slashdot and in much depth by Ernest Miller in a concept he calls “broadcatching,” but note that much of the discussion is pretty technical, so my take is still worth reading.)

Hmmmm… maybe I should back up a bit. Back in my post about the shifting of creative power, I reported the unfortunate cancellation of Angel, the excellent spin-off to Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had received a burst of energy this season when Joss Whedon was able to devote his full attention to it after the end of Buffy and the cancellation of Firefly (by the way, Julian Sanchez reports that the Firefly movie has been given the go-ahead — and in other good news, Family Guy will be returning!).

In searching for a silver lining, I did note that developments in film and music seemed to indicate that the barrier to entry in the creative arts continues to drop drastically:

Jennifer Government and NationStates

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Books Inc in Mountain View for a reading by Max Barry from his new novel, Jennifer Government. I haven’t actually read the book, but the premise sounded interesting. Anyway, you can sample Chapter 1 of the book here. And at the reading, Max read the first couple of chapters in the book (um, yes, he did read it aloud for those of you who were wondering if we were telepathic).

Basically, it’s a world where multinational corporations run so much of people’s lives that your last name is the name of the company you work for. For example, one of the main characters is, of course, Jennifer Government, and she does indeed work for the government. Another character is Hack Nike, who — you guessed it — works for next to nothing.

And in Chapter 1 — well if you’re going to read Chapter 1 for yourself, read it now, cuz I’m gonna give away some of the punch line — Hack is assigned to an interesting marketing campaign…

On Marriage

Update 2/16/07: Before you read this, I should mention that Erika and I filed for divorce at the beginning of the year. While I think a lot of what I say here is still valid, we obviously made our share of mistakes, so you may want to take this post with a grain of salt. I don’t regret marrying her, and we are still good friends, but it will take a while before I decide exactly how to incorporate what I’ve learned into this piece.

Well, due to all the recent hubbub over gay marriage and discussions of a federal amendment to “defend marriage,” I’ve been giving the whole marriage and divorce issue some thought and thought I’d weigh in on it and what I think really ought to be done (which is not what you might expect). Of course, what started out as a reposting of a short four paragraph comment turned into much more than that (covering more about marriage in general than gay marriage). So I’ll cut the small talk and just get into it.

TV News Good and Bad, but Creative Power Is Slowly Shifting

Got some good news, and some bad news. Well, let me start with the good news (since the bad news flows better into my main point). Remember, the re-imaging of Battlestar Galactica “mini-series” by Ronald Moore? Well if not, you can read my review to jog your memory.

As you might have guessed, this being the good news, Slashdot reports that the new series has been greenlighted (greenlit?) by the Sci-Fi Channel. Ronald Moore talks a little more on his plans for the show here and here (although spoilers from the “mini-series” are revealed in that second link). Sounds promising, especially if the series is as good as the “mini-series” (come on, it was really a two-hour pilot of a show they weren’t sure they were going to make). We’ll see.

And as for the bad news, it’s really bad. Via Whedonesque, Variety reports that the WB will not renew Angel for a sixth season. WB’s official press release is here. How’s that for a Valentine’s Day present? Well, I was wondering why the 100th episode (with Cordelia) was so crappy. This was clearly a storyline that was intended to take a while to develop, and then the writers were suddenly scrambling to tie up loose ends (much like X-Files and Babylon 5 had to do).

So, what to do now? As always, there’s petitions you can sign, but they tend to have mixed results. The reality is that there’s not a whole lot of options, but I think that developments are slowly percolating to change the nature of all media, which I’ll get to again later.

How to Play Craps

Last night the wife and I had a great time “gambling” at Casino Bowl 2004, a fundraiser to benefit the Emergency Housing Consortium. It was $50 a head, and you get $200 in play money chips as well as a free drink and raffle ticket. Yeah, you don’t actually win money, but the highest winners of the night got to win some neat prizes. We both had a blast! It was called “Casino Bowl” because of the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, and all the people working there wore various football jerseys. Plus among the prizes was a Jeff Garcia autographed football — a SJSU alum as my wife always points out — and a nice suede 49ers jacket (yeah, there was also a Raider jacket, but who’d want that?).

Of course, I headed straight for the craps table. My wife started out at the slots, but didn’t have much luck so she joined me. She’s never played craps before, but since it wasn’t real money, she found it less intimidating to try it out. As for me, back in one of my earlier jobs, our Director of Software had a fondness for gambling, so for a few of our Software Group offsite outings, we did a day trip to Vegas, and before we went, one of the managers gave us a crash course on craps (and being engineers, it involved flow charts). And I was quickly hooked.

Super Bowl Violence and V-Day

Super Bowl Sunday’s coming up, and my wife mentioned that it’s the worst day of the year for domestic violence against women. It occurred to me I could use that as a tie-in announcing V-Day and my wife’s upcoming appearance in her school’s production of The Vagina Monologues. Well, it sounded like a good idea, but after poking around a little bit, I ran into one little problem…

Buffy: Chaos Bleeds for PS2

Well, I actually did plan to post yesterday (so you get double the pleasure today), but the wife needed me to drop by Fry’s Electronics to pick up some printer paper, and of course I can never resist browsing around Fry’s for a couple of hours, and I finally picked up that Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds PS2 game (grammatically speaking, shouldn’t it actually be, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer?). So of course, there’s no way I could avoid playing it.

Yeah, the game’s been out for months, and I’m a huge fan of the show (started watching it soon after they moved it away from Monday nights, so my first episode was the second season episode, “School Hard”, where Spike first shows up). So I’ve been planning to get it for a while. But I absolutely refuse to pay $50 for a PS2 game, and this was the first time I saw it available for $20.

Battlestar Galactica Redux

The Sci-Fi channel is airing a new Battlestar Galactica miniseries. The first episode aired last night, but airs again this afternoon at 3:52pm PST right before episode #2. There’s an encore presentation of both episodes this Sunday at 4pm PST.

The series is pitched as a “re-imagining” of the original series, with changes that have met with strong reactions from fans. The most striking changes: some Cylons now appear as humans (and thus can infiltrate the colonies more easily), Starbuck and Boomer are women, and Commander Adama has to work with a Colonial President.

These didn’t sound like good ideas. Indeed, the new Adama, Edward James Olmos (best known as Lt. Castillo in Miami Vice, Harrison Ford’s enigmatic partner in Blade Runner, and the teacher in Stand and Deliver), actually advised hard-core fans of the old series to not watch the new one. So that, combined with the fact that the Sci-Fi Channel is a bunch of poopieheads for cancelling Farscape, and I had a tons of reasons to hate this going in. But I was actually pleasantly surprised.

Okie-Dokie, Artichokie!

My sister works in the children’s book publishing business, and one of her best