Do you know that absurd “Cami Secret” product advertised on that even-more-absurd commercial?  No?  Well, neither did I, until I found out my In-Real-Life friend Allison Mosier stars in it:

Three days ago a hilarious spoof of the commercial was posted to YouTube:

In just that little time, it has almost surpassed the actual ad (there’s a term for this phenomenon that I’ve forgotten) and is on its way viral.

Allison?  Is not only an awesome sport about this, but would like to be the actual person to appear on SNL for the (inevitable) spoof.  There’s a Facebook petition to get this to happen.  Just go and “Like” it.  That’s really not a lot to ask of you, right, if you were tickled either by the original or the spoof?

Again, here’s the link!

Referring to my beard, that is.  The quote I gave to the original inquirer was “a full beard in two weeks and a very full beard in three.”  Use of the words is up in the air, but this is 22 days:

Take midnight on the day I was born, in the time zone I was born, as my personal “epoch”

As of this timestamp — 2010-08-19 23:51:40 UTC — I am one billion seconds old.  I believe that takes everything into account, including leap seconds and Daylight Savings Time; but if not, one might need to subtract 00:00:15 off the number.

Even measured in microliters, a DYA attempt would be very poorly-advised.  But if anyone has reasonable suggestions, I’m up for it.

New adventure time!  I’ve gotta be out of my apartment by the 1st, and I have NO PLANS yet!

“They said timing was everything. Made him want to be everywhere.”

and

“And my ties are severed clean.  The less I have the more I gain.  Off the beaten path I’ll reign.”

Eventually Galen will figure out where the bug in his Ruby on Rails code is that explains why each of my stories seems to get hugely more hits — and insanely quickly — compared to almost any other author’s, but until then, I will revel in the delight that this one — “A Tensile Moment” — seems likewise to be soaring in site views.

Enjoy!

When Niall was three years old, and he would be inconsolable, I would try picking him up, turning him upside down, laughing, and tickling him.  Low-tech, and sometimes it failed.  But sometimes it worked.

When an adult is inconsolable, the techniques that occur to me are not much more sophisticated.  Whether I do or not, I am tempted to try a joke.  Being inconsolable is scary for me.

But is that remedy or manipulation?  Am I trying to find purchase to generate enough leverage to change the other person?  Give me a place to stand and a joke funny enough and I will move his or her world?

Maybe.  Perhaps it is an attempted remedy for me, and my fears.  It could make things worse; I always fear that, too.  And would distraction be a remedy, after all?  Maybe it would just hide the sadness for a bit.

Well, maybe that’s the point.  If time heals all wounds, perhaps that time would best be spent laughing.

(Three Word Wednesday is an effort to create a distributed online writers’ collective by, once per week, giving a uniform prompt to writers.  This week, the words were joke, remedy, and leverage.)

My third effort at Six Minute Story is up, and is entitled “A Lonely, Lonely Wasteland”.  This strikes me as a bit of a weak title, and it’s moitié-moitié among the readers who have contacted me so far whether I made any sense in using the word “forked” as a metaphor.

One clicks a box, sees a prompt (in this case an image), and, simultaneously, a 6 minute countdown timer starts.  In the case of this image, what I thought was a forked stick was … um … a pair of legs.  So the story will make more sense if one “fixes” the image.  To match.

This message is primarily useful for young men who are reading this (although young women should have an idea of how to help select the appropriate size for their male partners.)  Young men, please pay attention.  This could be some of the most important advice you ever receive.

The most-cited figure for latex condom breakage under proper use is 0.4% – 2.3%.  If you have just begun to have sex, and you are seeing rates on the high end of that, or especially a dramatically higher breakage rate — say, upwards of 10% — the most likely solution is that you need to wear a “Magnum” or “Large” size.  In my experience, no one thinks to tell young men this.

I think the main culprit is that for most young hetero men, the only erect penises they have seen, other than their own, are in pornographic films.  Almost without exception, professional pornographic actors have sizes far in excess of the mean and median of the human population — and I assure you that they are wearing larger sizes (when they do wear them — an upsetting topic for another thread).  A male porn star’s erect penis size is no more representative of typical men than female porn stars’ breast size (many young men don’t realize this either, but that is an upsetting topic for yet another thread).

In general, research shows that atypically long penises have a higher rate of slippage failures, and atypically wide penises have a higher rate of breakage failures.  The penis circumferance for which standard condoms in the United States are intended is 5″ (~13cm).  The formal measurement is the average of the circumferance at the base, in the middle of the shaft, and directly below the glans, but don’t let formal measurements keep you from taking this measurement.  Take this measurement as soon as possible.  It is important — it could change, or even, save your life, to know the proper condom size you need.

Don’t use an excuse that you need to buy a fabric tape.  The cord on your earbuds will suffice.  Don’t use an excuse of not having a ruler.  If you have a piece of printer paper, that will do.  Fold it in half lengthwise.  5″ is a half inch shorter than the folded paper along that axis.

I don’t have any idea the range of sizes, outside the median, for which the condoms are considered appropriate.  But if it’s not even close, you need to investigate larger options.

Thanks for paying attention.

I’ve jested — and gotten some good laughs, for myself and for others — out of my jokes about “groupies” online.  That’s not a sufficient, nor a wholly appropriate, summation of the issues of sexual safety online.  This has been a cause of mine for a long time, but I have been shamefully silent on the topic of late.  I want — as a lay volunteer who has dealt with a distressing number of traumatized and fearful women — to put down the (perhaps few) lessons I have learned.

The “groupies” joke disguises two scary facts.  One is, that among the many flirts, I’ve actually picked up two actual stalkers of late online.  But that’s not the primary worry for me, although it has, of late, made me cautious about interactions online.  I am a man, and a large man; my situation is vastly different from the situation of women online, and massive gender disparities exist.  I said to someone recently that having two stalkers perhaps gets me part of the way to understanding the position of the average female online user.

What got this rolling for me was a bunch of very playful and wonderful flirts on Twitter via Direct Message.  But the events that have led me to take up the cause again, as a primary concern, have been conversations with two different women whose flirting tones have been significantly different from the rest.

I just had a very upsetting exchange on Twitter which — as usual, in my hyper-introspective way — leads me to second-guess my actions.  I’m not going to identify anyone, nor directly quote either of the women’s messages to me, but I want to post the following that I sent to the most recent woman, after an exchange in which I tried to make it clear that I am not interested in romantic attentions from her, to which she responded that I had misunderstood her intentions.

I wrote:

Thank you.  I’m in a weird place.  I’ve gotten two VERY CREEPY stalkers of late, and it’s coloring my worldview.  It is VERY uncomfortable for me.  Upon reflection, I’m not sure if a public timeline post [something I had done recently] would dissuade them.  But: I’m a man and not used to this, as would many women who spend time online be.  I’ve gotten PLENTY of flirts, but it’s sometimes hard to sort out, especially when some haven’t been JUST flirts.  So, please forgive me.  It’s not my place, but you MAY want to decrease your tone, if just for your own safety.  I’ve worked with too many women [...] to know that misconstrued flirts can cause people to track YOU down.  I did a lot with womens’ safety groups in college[, for instance].

OF COURSE it SHOULDN’T be the case.  In a perfect world, women could flirt with impunity.  But, in my experience: It is not that world.  It’s the same reasoning as OF COURSE the college women I worked with SHOULD be able to go dancing [wearing] WHATEVER they want to.  And in NO WAY are inappropriate advances THEIR FAULT.  But there is a difference between “blame” and “self-preservation”.  I’m lecturing and it’s not my place, as I noted.  Just: PLEASE be careful, OK?  I have HONESTLY worked with women who have behaved in “just flirty” ways and had guys who THOUGHT [...] were being welcomed track them down.  And it’s NOT HARD to track someone down.  Sorry again. :-/

Her response to this was telling me that I was claiming she was “asking for it”.  She explained that she was safe because her tweets are private.  I was told her only mistake was believing I was “cooler” than I am.  And then I was blocked.

So, part of this is courting advice from women and from trained professionals, to help me, to help other men interested in supporting such issues, and, ideally, to help women.  Was I out of line?  What is the proper response?  Should the right response be silence or advice in such cases?

I said the following to someone I respect: “Seeing the faces of women who have later blamed themselves changed my opinions.  Surely some of them would have liked information beforehand?  But of course this is Twitter, I don’t know her, and maybe it was inappropriate.  It’s my old stuff resurfacing, maybe.”

So, please help me, and help my readers, by commenting.

Second point:  If you have links to groups and resources regarding women’s safety issues, please share, explain, and link here.  I have volunteered with the following organizations:

1.  Take Back The Night

2.  A local chapter of Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles county (who, to their great credit, spent much time with women’s safety issues in addition to reproductive rights.)

3.  Most universities have either formal or informal escort programs.  I worked with one when I was in college.

I have not worked with RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network begun by artist Tori Amos, but I have heard nothing but great things about them.

Thoughts, feedback, and contributions of resources courted.  And — to state the obvious — support such causes.  We live in a horrible world in which on can be both innocent and assaulted, and there are helpful safety tips: everything from parking locations, escorts, and personal defense devices such as pepper spray — in addition to prudent ways to behave and not to behave to decrease the risk of sexual assault.  The latter is a horrific commentary on culture and/or human nature.  While I have heard contentions claiming its falsehood (“Rape is not about sex”, “Sexual assault has nothing to do with a woman’s behavior or dress”, “A rapist is as likely to rape an eight-year-old or a seventy-year-old as a flirtatious woman”), this is not my lay training, and this is not my lay experience.

But that being said: every time I talk about this I fear I may be expressing false and sexist thoughts.

Discussion open, below:

This has been a præternaturally wonderful day, with an even awesomerer end.  I’ve written about it scattered about various sites, and I’ll consolidate it all tomorrow, probably — for my own later reference, if nothing else — but I wanted so kinda *sigh* in satisfaction here at mcgees.org, and to thank those blog readers — including today’s new ones — that helped make today so great.  You all rock.

When I shaved my beard a week ago, I got a number of responses.  I was told it took a “little” age off my face.  I was told it took “10 years off my face”, and, by a freshman-year-of-college roommate, that I looked like that 16-year-old boy from that year.

I was told by someone that, as much as she hates facial hair, and even given that most of the time we were close I had been clean-shaven, that I looked bizarre without it.

I was told I looked scary without it.

I was told that it was “just like a man” to grow a beard and then shave it arbitrarily.

I was told by n people, where n was surprisingly large, that I looked much cuter with the beard.  n-1 of those comments were by women.

I got exactly one comment that I looked better without it.

But all of those, as interesting data points, were entirely outweighed by the fact that I looked strange to myself, and that I really missed what it did to the shape of my face, and I missed being able to stroke it thoughtfully.  (Bearded men do that not as an affectation.  It’s more like having a worrystone in our pockets, and turns into a tic.)

I announced that I was growing it back.  And I got two inquiries — from women, of course — wondering how long it took to grow a beard.  One would be an answer by email.  Two — blame my education if you wish — suggested a study.

So, skip this post, of course, if you don’t care.  But I decided to document it.

I have the first six days’ pictures prepared, which I will put in the comments, so that it doesn’t overwhelm people who read this on a feed.

So, here we go:

ScratchDate.com: A Place for People Who Enjoy Dating Cats is a hilarious site ironically exploring the tropes of online dating.  It is (probably?) SFW.  I am much less sure if it is “Safe for Sanity” or “Safe for Brains”.

You can contribute your own, if you have the sort of mind good at combining Rule 34, lolcats, and The Simpsons.

To x-post this to Facebook or not to post this to Facebook?

This is so worth a whole post.

At my pharmacy today, the pharmacist (himself, and not a tech, as is more typical) was helping a customer and was quite embarrassed that he didn’t remember her name.  The sentiment he meant to express was that he spent so much of his day on the pharmaceuticals side of his job that personal relationships fell by the wayside, and that he was sad about that.

But what he said was “I’m sorry, my head is so full of drugs that I can’t always remember people’s names.”  He was a very good sport, if rather embarrassed, when he realized how it came out sounding.

The best review of my new comedy show was “My face still laughs from hurting.”  Granted, the reviewer was a jovial masochist with ADD who had wandered off-topic, but I’m hoping if we flash the review fast enough people might switch the words around.

It will go well alongside the reviews “Very amusing that McGee was able to find someone to produce it”, which we’re editing down to the first two words, and “Four stars — obviously — turned down the leading role, before McGee was forced to attempt carrying the show with his pathetic performance.”  We are likewise truncating that one.

(Any readers good at drawing laurel leaves?  I can pay you in 2-for-1 ticket coupons.)

I don’t have a comedy show.  I just thought this was clever.

I’ve blogged about this before, but ~10 years ago, news started flying around the (newborn) blogosphere that Wil Wheaton (best known, at that point, for Star Trek: The Next Generation) had begun a blog!  HA! So we all rushed over to laugh.

And … well, shit.  He was awesome.  Struggling actor; great stepdad; fucking awesome writer; even lived nearby.

His writing turned into book deals, which were even better.  His acting became more and more successful.  And he slowly moved from alt.ensign-crusher.die.die.die among geeks to Super Geek Overlord.

He’s been picking up great gigs — Eureka, Big Bang Theory, The Guild — and further cementing himself as geek idol.  He’s a fixture at Comi-Con.  He is super-humble — his normal response to his fame, he explains, is shock, because “I’m just this guy, you know!”  He’s also known for (further-)popularizing the phrase “Don’t Be A Dick”, which is a fine motto for life.

So it’s his birthday today.  On Twitter, where he has, by the way, >1.6M followers, stuff just — well, kept getting awesomer.  Awesomer and awesomerer.

ThinkGeek marked today as “Don’t Be A Dick Day”. Twitter users from John Hodgman, Peewee Herman, and the joke “Death Star PR” account, to NASA (yes, that NASA) tweeted him happies.  Apparently his birthday showed up on Entertainment Tonight.  Nathan freakin’ Fillion tweeted him wishes, adding “Stay shiny” (!).  People started making him shit, both physical and digital.  And this graphic was created — which, OK, to be fair, you’re gonna have to be a geek to really appreciate — and sent to him:

Another user started a #toastwheaton hashtag, urging people to raise a glass and take a picture (I joined.)

Wil Wheaton, for his part, chatted with people, was publicly thankful, and tweeted about the gifts from his family, including a vintage Casio calculator watch from his stepson (he exclaimed how awesome it was that the default year in the date setting was “1980″.)  He took a picture of the results of the first calculation on the watch.  Yes, 42.

Just wow.  Geek overload (the colloquial term is “nerdgasm”, for the record).  This might be my favorite birthday ever, and it’s not even my birthday.

Here is Wil Wheaton on Twitter.  And this search will let you follow more good @wilw birthday stuff.

If you don’t get why this is cool or funny: I’m sorry.  Sucks for you!

I ordered takeout at the local (Americo-)Chinese restaurant last week.  Opening one of the fortune cookies, I remembered that the one I had opened the previous week had two fortune slips in it, although I couldn’t remember what the fortune was.

And then I realized that there were two fortunes in this one, too!  No, wait: three!  And I read the first one, and thought “Oh, yeah, that was it!”  And the other two were … the same.  Comme ça:

So, while “every-thing” might be overstating it, I am way-fortunate in receiving extra fortunes!

The Gibson Les Paul guitar is by a near-infinite margin my favorite electric guitar.  As what I play and write is mostly bluesy and funky grunge, there is nothing remotely like a heavy slab of mahogany and their particular pickups to get an incomparable thunk sound out of an instrument.  Using only the neck pickup and doing stuff like strumming hard enough to bounce the strings off the fretboard only enhance this.

So I was really interested when I saw a link to the article ”15 Iconic Les Paul Players” at gibson.com, and while I agree with most of their inclusions (Jimmy Page, Slash, Ace Frehley, and Pete Townshend, for instance), there were a couple of frustrating omissions.  Some should-be-obvious guitarists such as Neil Young, some recent converts that might easily be missed such as Alex Lifeson, and those in my personal pantheon (that might not be in everyone’s) such as Stone Gossard and Adam Jones.  But the most bizarre omission?  Les Freakin’ Paul.

I miss my axe.  I hate thieves.

I’ve been asked for my Vegan Curried Lentils & Rice recipe by several people so far.  So here it is.

This might be an obnoxious recipe to those who do not cook as I do.  It’s basically a framework to hang a recipe upon.  The good news is that as long as you follow a few basic ratios (rice/lentils/water) and a couple warnings (don’t burn stuff, don’t salt it while cooking), it’s pretty hard to mess up this dish.

In the broad strokes, it’s:

2 parts white rice
2 parts lentils
8 to 10 parts water
oil
plant matter
spices
salt

In the way I made it last night, I used about 1 ½ half cups each of rice and lentils, so these guidelines will use those figures.  Scale up or down, arithmetically, as needed.

Sort the lentils on a tray, removing stones and broken, freakishly deformed, and very hard or discolored lentils.

Finely chop the vegetable matter you want.  How much?  More than you might think.  Last night I used  about four inches of ginger rhizome, peeled; two (small) bulbs of organic heirloom garlic; and a medium-sized jalapeño pepper, seeded but leaving the placenta.  A shallot or two are awesome, but I couldn’t find any here.  Some people add half an onion, but I’m allergic.

Combine the spices you want in a cup or bowl so that you don’t have to fiddle with measuring them while stuff is cooking.  Here is where it gets super-fun.  Use your creativity here.  I might use

1 tsp each of:

white pepper
paprika
cumin
fenugreek

Somewhat less of:

nutmeg
cardamom

Much less of:

asafœtida

A few leaves of:

bay

And a hellishly large amount of:

turmeric

Seriously, like two rounded tablespoons of turmeric.  In my opinion it’s the key, and will help nutrient absorption, digestion, and prevent gas.  Really.

You can play around with other spices you might like.  If you do enough cooking, you will know what will go well.  You might use some anise (a small amount), if you want to take the dish in that direction.  I haven’t tried ground mustard, but I bet it would work.  Black pepper would also go.

There are, of course, commercial curry powders.  I think that’s no fun at all, but if you’re new to this, you can use solely such a powder, or (better) half commercial prep and half what you design.

Do not add salt.  You will ruin the lentils if you salt while cooking.  It’s a chemistry thing.

Heat oil – about 4 TB – in a heavy pot over high heat until it starts to sputter.  I find grapeseed oil works best.  It’s a bit yummier, I think, made with ghee (clarified butter), but that of course makes it not vegan.  If you use ghee, use medium-high heat and don’t wait for it to sputter.

Add the spices and fry them to dissolve the fat-soluble chemicals.  Don’t let the oil smoke.  Before the oil reaches that point, add the chopped vegetable matter and cook that in the oil to soften the chopped vegetables.  You might find you need to decrease the stove temp, depending on your stove and pot.

When you’re about to faint from how freaking awesome your kitchen smells, add the white rice, dry.  Toss it in the oil, vegetables, and spices, and keep stirring and cooking.  You are trying to toast the rice at this point.

When it’s toasted, add the water.  I used six cups, but you can use as much as 7 ½ or so.  Stir to make sure the other ingredients aren’t sticking to the bottom.  Add the dry lentils; stir again.  Increase heat the the highest setting and, uncovered, bring to a rolling boil.

Cover and immediately reduce heat to the barest simmer.  Set a timer for 45 minutes.  If you’re using green lentils, they need a bit longer; 55 minutes, say.  Resist the urge to take the lid off and check during while cooking.  They’ll be fine.  They’re grown-ups.

After the timer goes off, move the pot off the heat and let it sit for, say, 10 to 15 minutes.  Open and stir (the rice and lentils are likely to have ended up in layers).  Is the consistency what you wanted?  If not – too gruely or too thin – make a mental note to adjust the water as you see fit next time.  If it’s way thicker than you wanted, you might have some luck adding water and simmering a bit longer, but that’s a gamble.

You can salt the whole pot now, but I prefer to salt each portion.  Serve hot.  It makes it not vegan again, but you can stir in sour cream for transcendent awesomeness.  Various Indian-style relishes – the ones Patak makes are great – can also be stirred in.  Their “Mixed”, “Hot Lime”, and “Hot Mango” relishes are among my favorites.

Let cool to lukewarm and put in a sealed container in the refrigerator.  You will have a ton of it – probably more than you expected.

Enjoy!

So, if you were to imagine the most amusing thing that could have fallen out of your backpack at the library, leading the librarian to rush after you to return it, what would it be?  ‘Cos my story today pwns everything else I can think of.  Mostly because, had it been intentional, it would have been legendarily corny.  Contemplating doing that on purpose would have made Tobias Fünke blush.

My last tweet was “That’s it! Fuck Windows! I’m rebooting in[to] Ubuntu!”  That was, in the words of the old saying, “Nine hours ago.”

I rebooted into Ubuntu to try to fiddle with WiFi again.  Couldn’t get it to work.  “So,” I thought, “I’ll go back to Windows 7, research, get any files/drivers I may need, then reboot into Ubuntu, copy the stuff from the NTFS partition, and I’m good to go!”

Um, no.  A Facebook-distributed virus bricked my Windows installation.  Hardcore.  I’m almost certain, upon research, that this was the cause.  “So, OK,” I thought.  “I’ll go to the library, do the research there, burn any files I might need onto a CD-R, and go home and do the Ubuntu thing that way.”  That wouldn’t fix the Windows problem, but, as I wrote (poetically) before, “Fuck Windows!”

Um, no.  I found what I needed, yes.  I burned it onto a CD-R, yes.  I brought it home, yes.  But my notebook doesn’t ship with an optical drive and my external drive — well, doesn’t work.  At all.  Ubuntu can’t see it, the BIOS can’t see it.  I feel lucky that I can see it.  It’s black and opaque, so that helps.

So I used F8 to boot into the Windows restore partition to try to repair, and:

Um, no.  The “repair” failed.  I think this is because I resized the partition.  So the only option was to rewrite the Windows partition (fortunately I can do that rather than wipe the whole disk).  So I started it going, glancing at it occasionally, and then decided to — um, go build Rome.  WTF?  The reinstallation took approximately 14 of the nine hours.  In the last stages, the Toshiba and Best Buy software was installed, which, frankly, is a metric ton of malware.  OMFG.  It interrupts one’s work, spies on the user, reports stuff to who-knows-whom.  But I got it going again, after the so-many hours.

But, of course (“of course”?) my MBR had been rewritten by the reinstallation.  So I can’t load Ubuntu any longer.

But, OK, that’s cool!  Now all I have to do is download a Karmic USB live image and boot off that!

Um, no.  Can’t find my frakking USB key, the reason for which is likely related to what I plan to be the next post.  The one avec much hilarity.

So I went looking for a way to reinstall GRUB or lilo from Windows.  This is: well, somewhere between “I haven’t figured out how to do it” and “Fucking impossible”.  I’m leaning towards the latter, as all of the utilities I’ve found are x86, and I’m in 64-bit Windows. 

So (another “so”) I’m going to try to do it through Wubi, which I have essentially-zero confidence will work.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: I may disappear.  For a long time.  Especially if Windows gets hosed again.  And the cheapest fix may be to go buy another USB key tomorrow.  And a big part of this problem — not all, but much — is a virus.  Infecting Windows 7.  Distributed via Facebook.  #FAIL

Please email me any luck you may have lying about.  Not that I’m guaranteed to be able to check my email in finite time.

On Sunday, Bishop Donal McKeown addressed a 112-year-old Irish temperance association in a homily during which he spent a large portion of the time discussing clerical abuse:

Many criticised the Holy Father when, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he spoke of the need to do penance and proposed that Friday should be kept as a weekly day of penance.  Some commentators dismissed that as asking the ordinary people of Ireland to do penance for the sins of clergy and bishops — and they couldn’t understand that idea.  But all Christians come from the strange belief that Jesus is the innocent One, the Lamb of God that took away the sin of the world.  Our secular society — that so often likes to locate sin and repentance only in individuals rather than accepting the possibility of corporate responsibility — cannot easily comprehend the idea of doing penance and making reparation for others. But Pioneers and all Christians can. … Continue to do penance for the sins of those Church personnel who abused children.

He also, by the way, wished that the “secular hierarchy” would “accept that they too share responsibility” for child abuse because they are entrusted with “righteously punishing offenders”.  These would be the same offenders that the Church has … actually, never mind.  There’s just simply nothing snarky that I can say here that would begin to do this wickedness justice.  I guess I can sum it up this way: the bishop is right in his argument that this is strong evidence for the existence of evil and the need for reparation.  But the evil is in his speech, and the responsibility for reparation is not on the secular.

Idea:  We all have nonstandard characters that we want to use in our posts, tweets, status updates, emails, comments, and what have you.  In the dark ages, one had to enter the character entity in HTML markup to have it show up in a post (entering “ö” for “ö”, for instance.)  Entering the actual character (the “ö”, for instance) could make your character disappear when you hit “Submit” or (!) crash the software that ran the blog or message board (I told you it was the dark ages.)

But now, not only is there better handling for more extensive character sets (such as ISO 8859-1) in web apps (and, crucially, browsers), but using HTML markup in, say, Facebook or Twitter will actually not work.

So: why not keep a list of characters you need most frequently in a place where you can cut-and-paste?

The absolute best place to do this is Google Notebook, but for some unfathomable reason, this product, which is one of Google’s best, is no longer accepting new signups.  So you may have to put it somewhere like an email draft, or a blog draft, or … somewhere else.  It’s best if it’s on the Web, so you can access it wherever you need it.

Each of us has different character needs, but mine looks like this:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♯
№ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘
← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ – —
« » † ‡ …
♥ ♡ ☺ ☹ ★ ☆ ☠ ☮
® ™ ± ° ℃ ℉
² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ ƒ ℵ ∂ ∞ ∫ ∴
≅ ≠ ¿ ¡ £ € ¢
ñ ç ö æ œ

I also keep a list of frequently-needed words:

Renée
naïveté
über
résumé
Gödel

This page at Big Baer is really useful.  So are lixlpixel live preview and fileformat.info, without which writing on the web would be much more difficult for me.

So, idea:  Play with those and make your own list!

Here’s a self-indulgent post (another, I guess).  I’ve been thinking about my favorite music videos of all time.  This is sure to be a fascinating list, given that I don’t watch music videos, and haven’t since the mid-’90s, so the chance that these are representative in any fashion is vanishingly small.

Still, though, these five struck me as seminal when I first saw them.  All (huh) were directed by feature film directors, significant animators, or those who went on to direct feature films.  I believe this suggests something about the legitimacy of the art form.

In chronological order:

1984, Thriller by Michael Jackson
Director John Landis directed the films The Blues Brothers, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and the (excellent) Masters of Horror episode “Family”

1990, Vogue by Madonna
Director David Fincher directed the films Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

1994, Sabotage by Beastie Boys
Director Spike Jonze directed the films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are

1998, Do the Evolution by Pearl Jam
Directors were Todd McFarlane (the artist behind Spawn) and Kevin Altieri of Batman: The Animated Series

2009, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
Director Francis Lawrence directed the film I Am Legend and has another in development

I’ve never tried to share a YouTube playlist before.  Nor, as it happens, create one.  Put this squarely in the “I would have thought it would be easier” square.  I can’t seem to embed it meaningfully or to give a nice graphical preview, so, to make it big at least:

Here is the playlist link!

I would start at the one on the top, the Caliendo.

Let me know what you think.  I think they’re all worth watching and were the best among those I watched.  And let me know if I can do the YouTube linkage better.

I was told yesterday that I look like rock star Claudio Sanchez, a name I didn’t know.  So I went looking for a pic, and thought I’d strike the same pose to show that is nonsense:

Digging the new USA show Covert Affairs, what appears to be a stylish bubblegum espionage action/romance series.  Good production values and effects, even though the makeup is, of course, a bit over-done.

Wide-mouthed Piper Parabo is looking very toned, very hot, and is growing into her features quite nicely in her mid-30s.  She’s acting better than I remember her having done, and although I don’t speak the (many) languages her character speaks, I’m convinced by her accents.  Seeing her character have to play a role within the show, she’s showing good range.  It’s also nice to see charming and boyishly-handsome Christopher Gorham, a fave of mine I haven’t seen around in a bit, be back on a show.

So far — and my predictions in the past have been notoriously bad on the nature of programs based on their pilots — it is coming across much like Alias without the fantasy element, and with some nice intrigue.  Provisional recommendation.

A new meme floating about is I Write Like, a statistical analyzer wherein one pastes a writing sample — longer is better — and the software determines, according to metrics the programmer has chosen, which author’s writing most resembles.

Reading on forums, it’s apparently actually doing something, and the author has promised to provide more info on the algorithms.

I posted a chapter from my unfinished sci-fi novel — a bit reluctantly — and this is what I got:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

OK.  I guess I can live with that.

The recent Sharron Angle post gets this:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Pardon me while I go celebrate.  There’s nothing like affirmation by a piece of software using secret criteria.

Here is a true story you might not know:

Classically, the definition of luminous intensity involved whaling and Imperial measurements.  The CIE, an international group, realized the problems in this definition, both because the definition no longer jibed with modern opinions on conservation and a post-war rejection of systems unique to one empire, and because guaranteeing that this definition could be properly employed worldwide was, in practice, hampered by its dependence on the technological sophistication of those in the respective areas, which is unfair.

With the growing understanding of the revolutionary impact black bodies could play in the collective scientific community, the CIE, an international body, attempted in 1948 to change the old standards.  Making use of this growing respect, a universal that could be employed all over the world was agreed to be necessary, and the definition was thus changed to eliminate false measurements.  At long last, the promise of truth overthrew candlepower.

But this was 1948, well before other revolutionary restructurings on the international stage.  And, problematically, luminous intensity was still held at arm’s length in the scientific community: it existed independently of the standard measurements used worldwide.

Jumping forward 31 years, it was realized that this was no longer tenable, and that science as a whole would benefit from a closer embrace.  Understanding the dramatic impact of Watts, luminous intensity underwent a fundamental redefinition.  After much work, this new unit — given the beautiful name candela, from the most-classical language in science — was made the peer of other standards.

Final note: if you look at the definition of of candela, you will see a cryptic “683″ in the denominator.  This number is significant for several reasons.  It is indivisible; it was made most famous by Sophie Germain, a pioneering female mathematician who fought against oppression and bigotry all her life to fulfill her calling; and, under the Eisenstein definition, it has no imaginary part.  This is not the reason given for its use.  But I think you will agree that it is pleasant to keep in mind.

Holy crap.  Dear Bob Mike: Official Historian of mcgees.org, please mark this as the day when mcgees.org realized the power of YouTube for something other than funny skits and music videos.  Fucking fantastic.

Video:

Government responses to various ad campaigns:

“Join our health club and you will live forever” → Fines
“Join our diet program and you will live forever” → Fines, FDA investigation
“Join our church and you will live forever” → Tax exemption