I dunno.
I just had the phrase stuck in my head. The '92 Simpsons episode (origin thread about how it came from one of the show's writer's childhood) clearly predates the 2000 release on a Alice Cooper Japanese bonus disc of the song "Clowns Will Eat Me".Can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...can't sleep...clown'll eat me...
It's shlock, but it's not awful shlock.
I was fully prepared to hate The Hebrew Hammer, but it's not that bad. It's not that good, but it's not that bad, either. I was afraid they'd blow the import of Hanukkah out of proportion or throw in meaningless Yiddish words only because they sound funny. The movie does no such thing.
It does, however, four things that bother me. In increasing irksomeness:
Wow. I regretted that last one before I even started typing it.
Looks nicer, is all.
Blogger has had an automagic Atom feed for a while now. The hyperlinked content and paragraph breaks show up all nice in SharpReader, so I changed the links on this page to point to my Atom feed. The RSS feed isn't going anywhere, it just doesn't look as good. I don't feel like spending the time to invent an alternative when one already exists.
The customized Romeo and Juliet sucks. First: once you start substituting in, most names are going to completely ruin the iambic pentameter. Also, if you're paying six times what the Folger Shakespeare Library edition sells for, you deserve a better happy ending on your Shakespearean tragedy than four dinky, tacked-on lines. The last two lines of the "classic" happy ending don't even rhyme, unlike every Shakespearian tragedy that comes to mind.
Some constructive criticism, then, to all would-be Romeos: buy a nice, unadulterated hardcover edition. If you can't think of a couplet you can sign the frontispiece with, take the five bucks you've saved and pay someone to think of one for you.
For lack of nothing better to post about, here's the first of some short reviews.
Azar Nafisi was an English Lit university professor in Tehran before the Shah was deposed and for quite some time after. She was eventually kicked out of Iranian universities, and still kept teaching novels to a small group of female students.
The book founders the most when talking about her private coterie of students, especially in the beginning where I could only have kept names and personalites by making a crib sheet — until Nafisi hits her stride in the second of four sections, 'Gatsby', most her students feel quite flat. Once "Reading Lolita" starts with actual storytelling, it frames a very effective comparison of the Western world's concept of "the West", the Iranian concept of "the West", and Iranians' concepts of their own society during unrest, revolution, and aftermath.
I started reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and thought I might be better equipped to understand if I read "Lolita" itself. Nafisi clearly sees something wonderful in Nabokov's prose — his description of American middle-class houses, his subtleties of the unreliable narrator, Humbert Humbert. I got frustrated from not seeing what she does from the novel, and didn't finish. My suggestion: read "The Great Gatsby" instead. "Reading Lolita" spends more time, and much better time, on "Gatsby" or on Henry James novels than Nabakov. If you're not planning to read "Reading Lolita", read "Gatsby" anyway. I'll even give you a copy.
As Nafisi brings F. Scott Fitzgerald's take on American dreams and Henry James' versions of feminine courage side by side with her students hopes and actions, she gives a very real and very immediate sense to the importance of fiction and the Middle-East context it was read in.
I'm getting a haircut today
I saw an ad for "Japanese hair straightening". Why would there be a Japanese straightening technique? Don't the Japanese already have straight hair? A quick check with google shows that some of these products really are from Japan. So what do they call them there?
I've heard said that you don't see signs for "Authentic Philly Cheesesteaks" in Philly or "New York-style Pizza" in New York. But Dominos (or Pizza Hut or somesuch) has a national campaign that they surely aren't exempting one of their largest markets from. And was in Philly a few years back and saw signs touting that one store was more authentic Philly than the rest (and therefore tasted better, etc.).
Regardless, I'm getting a haircut. I'm using ancient United States buzz-cut methods passed down from one generation of immigrants to the next (my usual barber was born in Vietnam).
I have been amazingly inert for almost a month now.
I've been a homebody, and home sucks. I just finished sending off a bunch of emails to strangers from Craigslist asking to live with them. I've never done the roommate thing before, so I'm not sure what people are looking for. The usual trick is, If you were on the other side, what would you want to hear? but not ever having dealt with this sort of thing, I can't imagine anything other than the basics: someone modest and relaxed with a steady source of income so they pay their share of the rent.
But so I've been inert. I haven't been minding my own blog; I haven't been reading yours (for any given value of 'you'). I haven't sent a note to the conductor girl, and now I can't find where I put her email address (dammit!). I haven't exercised. I haven't gone anywhere different or interesting (I'm not including the Morrissey concert here, obviously).
At least I've been sleeping a little better than my average, which is still crap for most people, with the exception of last night when I was just too cold and the heat was not working. Yet another reason to move.
and also encourage you to try something else instead. Seriously, scrounge around for a cheap, used PIII 300-based box and install OpenBSD on it instead; get Services For Unix now that it's free, and can mount NFS shares where Cygwin can only serve them; download VMware. Don't get me wrong, Cygwin is an amazingly detailed and clever set of sophisticated hacks. The development crew is a cool bunch. But a hack is a hack.
Anyway, in interest of giving something back to the community: if you find people can't see mounted directories when connecting to a Cygwin server, check the registry keys.
In Cygwin, the mount command will only take a folder, like "/usr/bin", and point it to a Windows drive, like "D:\cygwin\bin". Cygwin can't open a device directly, it depends on Windows for the filesystem and device drivers. What's more, the mappings are stored in the registry, not in /etc, like all us UNIX weenies would expect. I was running ProFTPD and was setting default directories to folder that, via a mount, redirected to the D: drive. After I upgraded my version of Cygwin, users FTPing would find themselves in the directory and could list the files, but the permissions showed up wrong and they couldn't send or recieve any files. Turns out the upgrade reset registry key permissions so that the user that the ProFTPD server was running under (BUILTIN\SYSTEM) could read them but normal users couldn't. Since this was a Windows 2000 box, I ran regedt32.exe, went to "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Cygnus Solutions\Cygwin\", clicked on "mounts v2" branch, went to the menus under Security -> Permissions... and added the group Users and gave them read permissions. Permission inheritance propagated the change down to the sub-branches and the problem was fixed. Yay.
So now that I think of it, while I might like listening to Death Cab for Cutie, do I really want to pay to see them in concert?
There's a fairly representative collection of DCFC mp3s here. But I'm more up about ...and you will know us by the trail of dead, Flogging Molly, and PJ Harvey. Now I'm fairly sure Double-D has a Flogging Molly CD if not two, and you can't tell me you haven't at least one of PJ Harvey's songs.
I'm trying to be good w/budget. But if I'm going to see Morrissey, too, Polly Jean might just have priced herself out of my price range. But she's so cool. It's not fair.
aye, there's the rub
Erica and I have been going back and forth about the Olympics and what counts as a sport. Her suggestion is for a more objective scoring method for figure skating. My argument is that it doesn't matter: I like figure skating as it is, but it's not a sport.
> [...] Is windsurfing a
> sport just because you can measure who crosses the finish line first?
> I will acknowledge that there is a degree of finesse involved because
> you need to read the wind, but are they the same kind of athlete? I
> couldn't do what any beginning gymnast or figure skater does, and I am
> in awe of the top athletes, Paul Hamm, et al.Exactly. Because you can measure who crosses the line first. I'm not sure if I like racing as a sport, either. To me, that straddles the line but is easily closer to sport than figure skating.
I'm thinking by writing here, so forgive me if this isn't fully clear. My definition of sport: Sport is a direct physical competition between people that gives the competitors an opportunity to demonstrate good sportsmanship. And by good sportsmanship, I mean primarily fair play.
- Direct physical: take soccer as an example. As a team sport, there is an important mental aspect needed to win a soccer match, but if you can't stay active on the field for an hour, you aren't going to make it to the Olympics. While there is the intermediary of the ball, the physical actions you take directly and clearly affect the actions your opponents then choose (this has to happen if you want to play
competitively, anyway).- Between people: the measurable part of the struggle is between you (or you as part of a team) and another person or other people.
- Sportsmanship and fair play: Try hard to win, and always follow the rules; compete on equal terms. So there needs to be clear rules for you to follow, and clear, objective terms for the winning conditions. The measurement of whether the winner won a match should only be important because it is compared, on the same terms, to the measurement for other competitors in that match.
