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Monday, November 7th, 2005
As long as I'm recommending stuff to listen to: Sylvia and I were eating breakfast yesterday morning and listening to Airborn Event with Dan Bodah on FMU, when "Joy Pt. 1" by Shakti came on. Well we both started sort of unconsciously bopping in our seats -- I made eye contact and asked her if she felt like dancing. She grinned and looked away. Then a minute later she said, "Dad... do you feel like dancing?" So we got up and rocked out in the kitchen. Happily it is quite a long song. Here is the playlist for the show with links to audio if you care to check it out -- some of the nicest dancing music I've heard in a while.
posted afternoon of November 7th, 2005: Respond
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This morning I started reading Data Crunching, by Greg Wilson, which Bill Delavega recommended on his site, Dispatches From the Prairie. The subject of the book is an activity that occupies a fair (and growing) piece of my attention, namely converting data between different file formats. Wilson writes in an engaging and accessible style, and his examples are useful. So far (I'm reading Chapter 2) there is an unresolved ambiguity about writing reusable code vs. being "reasonably sure" your code will never be reused. (I think this ambiguity will not be resolved because it's pretty universal; I've encountered it a lot in my own work and never been able to resolve it beyond making what seem like reasonable compromises.) A bonus: A lot of the examples are in Python, which is a language I've been wanting to start using for a while now.
posted afternoon of November 7th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 5th, 2005
I've been recommending this over at Unfogged -- you ought to go to the Ed Schepp Radio Experiment and listen to his 11/4/05 show, "Future Perfect". Trippy. There are highlights all through the thing but the last 10 minutes or so are really mind-blowing; if you listen in RealPlayer format you will be able to fast-forward to there if you want.
posted evening of November 5th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, November second, 2005
Ellen has been teaching reading classes for emergent readers for the past year, at libraries around the area. I have started to develop a web site for her program: Pageturners, Ink.
posted evening of November second, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, October 30th, 2005
Our bedtime story tonight was "The Fir Tree", the final story in Tales From Moominvalley, which Ellen and Sylvia picked up the other day at Scandinavia House. Sylvia requested this story because the picture on the first page of the story is of a young Woody, who looks kind of like the Dweller Under the Sink from Moominland Midwinter. The DUS is a mysterious creature who does not speak the same language as the Moomins, and when Moomintroll tried to talk to him, he got angry and said "Radamsah!" which Sylvia found just hilarious. So, we read this story with Sylvia specifying that I call the Woody "Radamsah", which substitution I did make most of the times his name came up. (When I failed to make it, Sylvia was quick to correct me.) (This occasionally happens when we are reading a story, that Sylvia asks me to make some substitution -- for instance when we read Moominland Midwinter, the instruction was always to refer to Too-Ticky with masculine rather than feminine pronouns. -- Note that this is kind of interesting in a weird way as Too-Ticky was modeled on Jannson's female partner, maybe Sylvia is picking up on an intentional gender confusion?) "The Fir Tree" is a wonderful Christmas story, one of the best ever I think. To summarize: The Moomin family normally hibernates through winter and so do not know about Christmas; but this year the Hemulen wakes them up because he is resentful at their sleeping peacefully away while everyone else works so hard at celebrating Christmas. He doesn't bother to explain what's happening though, and the best the Moomins can make out from their fractured interactions with various Hemulens and Gaffsies, is that some kind of dangerous creature named Christmas is coming when it gets dark, and they need to find a fir tree and decorate it, and cook a dinner and set out presents to placate the monster. They end up setting up a very nice Christmas jubilee for the Woody and his small friends and relations, who are impoverished. And then go back to sleep, still not really understanding what is going on. While we were reading the part where the Moomins were arriving at their conclusion that "Christmas" is the name of some monster, Sylvia observed, "like the Dr. Seuss Christmas monster, who takes all the presents away." Yes, nice parallel to find.
posted evening of October 30th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, October 29th, 2005
I bought a used copy of The Evolution Man by Roy Lewis, through Amazon. I remember it from my childhood as being a laugh riot -- it came yesterday and I read some of it tonight, and it does not disappoint. The idea of the book is to show some of the milestones of human evolution and social development, as seen through the eyes of a young early hominid named Ernie, his Luddite uncle and his forward-looking father. It's a little bit the same effect as Kipling's "Just-So Stories", but more clever and insightful.
posted evening of October 29th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, October 27th, 2005
Sylvia and Ellen were at Scandinavia House (on Park Ave. and 37th) yesterday, and found to their great surprise that the gift shop there is just full of Moomin merchandise. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Seems pretty obvious now -- they have stuffed animals, pottery and a bunch of other stuff. They did not get any of that, but did pick up the CD of "Muumilauluja" -- lovely but hard to understand, being in Finnish er, Swedish and all. We listened to it last night and played "try to guess the character who's speaking" based on the voice characteristics, which was pretty fun. This morning I did a search and found that the CD is translated into English as Moomin Voices, available from CDBaby. Update: Er, I'm confused here. Looks like "Muumilauluja" is, as I at first thought, in Finnish; and "Moomin Voices" is in Swedish. No English translation, I think.
posted morning of October 27th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
At the beginning of last night's dream, I was reading an article in a history journal, regarding the discovery of a bag or box lunch which Martha Washington had prepared for her husband. It was believed to have been from early in their married years. The central idea of the article concerned the discovery that George or Martha (I forget which) had not deigned to smell the lunch; or maybe that George had requested that Martha not smell it, or prevented her from smelling it. This was presented as evidence of a lousy marriage, specifically of George denying Martha's full humanity. I remember thinking both, Wow, how would you discover something like that in the historical record, and That seems like a pretty wild extrapolation from the data point. Maybe they just didn't have good smellers. Or something. I was reading the article on the train going in to work and as it arrived in Hoboken, I climbed out the porthole onto the platform -- this train was equipped with portholes next to each seat. I was sitting in the front of the second car, as is my wont. Apparently I did not wait until the train came to a complete stop, because a conductor (a black woman) yelled at me from the first car to please return to my seat until it did. As I made my way back to the second car so did she, more quickly than I, and when she got to my seat she found the bag lunch which I had forgotten to take with me, and handed it to me through the porthole. Not sure what the relationship is between the two parts of this dream.
posted morning of October 26th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, October 21st, 2005
A comments thread well worth your perusal, is under Kieran Healy's Ye Ladies of Easy Leisure post at Crooked Timber. I am of course modestly proud of my own contributions but the whole thing is pretty well at the acme of the form. People are talking past each other, personalizing, crying in their beer, and the whole thing just magically hangs together. Plus Belle called me a pervert. Also, this Michael Berube post on classic rock FM radio has lots of good stuff.
posted afternoon of October 21st, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Sylvia's birthday present from her grandparents was a bicycle accessory we've been thinking about getting for a while now. It is a tandem trailer, which converts my bike (or Ellen's) into a bicycle built for two, with the rear seat being low enough for Sylvia to ride on it. She loves it! Here are some shots of us riding around.
posted evening of October 20th, 2005: Respond
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