• .@BrentSpiner Did you see the public retraction of The Lancet's #vaccine / #autism link? Three cheers for real science! http://bit.ly/b265Ix #

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I rate The Graves seventh out of eight in this year’s Horrorfest, and the lowest-rated for simply being a bad film.

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Super, super late this week.  Sorry.

Love Boat Captain

Is this just another day, this God-forgotten place?
First comes love and then comes pain.  Let the games begin.
Questions rise and answers fall, insurmountable.

Love Boat Captain
Take the reigns and steer us towards the clear, here.
It’s already been sung, but it can’t be said enough:
All you need is love

Is this just another phase of earthquakes making waves?
Trying to shake the cancer off?  Stupid human beings!
Once you hold the hand of love it’s all surmountable.

Hold me, and make it the truth
That when all is lost there will be you
‘Cause to the universe I don’t mean a thing
And there’s just one word I stil believe
And it’s …

It’s an art to live with pain.  Mix the light into gray
Lost nine friends we’ll never know two years ago today
And if our lives became too long, would it add to our regret?

And the young, they can lose hope ’cause they can’t see beyond today
The wisdom that the old can’t give away
Constant recoil, sometimes life don’t leave you alone

Hold me, and make it the truth
That when all is lost there will be you
‘Cause to the universe I don’t mean a thing
And there’s just one word that I still believe and it’s
“Love”
Love. love. love. love

Love boat captain
Take the reigns and steer us towards the clear
I know it’s already been sung but it can’t be said enough
Love is all you need
All you need is love
Love, love
Love

• Since #Ubuntu has decided to be all "legal, ethical & shit" in #Karmic, here is how to enable #AAC encoding in #ffmpeg: http://bit.ly/cWCSoV #

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• I get (tiresome) queries as to why I am so negative regarding #religion. Exploration of one of MANY reasons: http://bit.ly/bL4zRB #atheism #

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In my tabulation, The Final comes in at 8th place — the worst out of eight.  It gets this honor not because it is a bad film — which it is — but because it is completely unacceptable.

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I think it will be the case that people with email notifications will see the synopses in the clear, so I hope that doesn’t cause problems for those who want to see the films.  If it does on this first one, don’t read the snippets in the subsequent emails, instead visiting the site directly.

• I may be unable to watch #JonahHex simply due to #MeganFox's torturous corset. :-/ 20" at the outside. http://bit.ly/bWRK34 @realmfox #
• Gah. Researching that last tweet, http://shiantology.com/. Poor kid. Could we just throw everyone who runs celeb fan sites in prison? #
• So gross I can't even joke. "Edgy appeal" does not belong ANYWHERE NEAR a description of children's underwear. http://bit.ly/aO70Xd #

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As previously mentioned, I was eagerly awaiting the fourth year of the After Dark Horrorfest, an annual festival showcasing eight independent horror films.  I enjoyed it — a lot — as I expected.  But I thought I would write this post, which elaborates on:

Horror movies are one of the most trope-drenched genres of art that exist.  There is nothing inherently wrong about this — impressionist symphonic music is too, for instance — but one will sometimes watch an entire film for one key moment in which conventions are upended.  And, of course, recognition requires that one is familiar with the conventions in the first place.

Horror films were an Immersion Project for me, and one that I stuck with after the year.  I’m a huge fanboy now.  But I think it would be funny to tabulate the occurrence of tropes in these films.  There are probably both false positives and false negatives in the list, but I expect their occurrence is less than 10% — which we’ll find out if another fanboy critiques my list.

The films are:

D: Dread
H: Hidden
LM: Lake Mungo
KT: Kill Theory
TF: The Final
TG: The Graves
TR: The Reeds
Z: Zombies of Mass Destruction

So, eight films, all these tropes, and $100 later, will I go to next year’s festival?  Hellz yeah.

I want to write longer reviews of these, but I’d like input on the reviews’ format.  More inside.

… and no antibiotics yet.  Do please excuse any delay in responding to emails.

• 2010-01-28 17:08:00 GMT-8: #Inbox 7371 #inboxzero #inbox0 #

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Wow!  Twenty-one!

I’m in a place today where I can post lyrics to this song without (probably) crying — shout-out to those intimate enough to grok that, and a louder one to those who know why — so I should take the chance.

The End

What were all those dreams we shared
Those many years ago?
What were all those plans we made
Now left beside the road?
Behind us in the road?

More than friends, I always pledged
‘Cause friends they come and go
People change, as does everything
I wanted to grow old
Just want to grow old

Slide on next to me!
I’m just a human being
I will take the blame,
But just the same
This is not me
You see
Believe
I’m better than this

Don’t leave me so cold!
Or buried beneath the stones!
I just want to hold on
And know I’m worth your love
Enough
I don’t think
There’s such a thing

It’s my fault, now I’ve been caught
A sickness in my bones
How it pains to leave you here
With the kids on your own
Just don’t let me go!

Help me see myself
‘Cause I can no longer tell
Looking out from the inside of
The bottom of a well
I yell –
It’s hell –
But no one hears

Before I disappear
Whisper in my ear
Give me something to echo
In my unknown future’s ear

My dear –
The End –
Comes near –
I’m here –
But not much longer

[Fuck.  Ed, you bastard.  So close to making it without tears.  And you ended an album with this.]

In the immortal words of Johnson, “I remain, &c.“,

Vedder Tuesday

[No, really, Johnson would literally write "I remain, &c.."]

• Oh wow, is #Tanqueray #Rangpur (lime) #gin amazing.  Yum — and dangerously smooth; drinks like soda. #
• Still watching it, but it will be simple genre bigotry if #Halloween2 doesn't get an #Oscar nomination for best makeup #horror #movies #film #

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For what it’s worth, even with the 2.0.1 firmware upgrade that (as of this writing) iTunes will insist on putting on your iPod if you restore it from a Windows box, you can get it working on Ubuntu Karmic.  The trick is the program ipod-read-sysinfo-extended, which you execute after attaching (and initializing) your iPod with the drive id and the mount point, for instance, ipod-read-sysinfo-extended /dev/sde /media/IPOD.  This writes an XML files to your iPod.

You may need to run the program with root privileges

I’ve been trying to think of something spectacular for the twentieth Vedder Tuesday, for the milestone.  But, in all, I think I was thinking about it backwards: multiples of ten are arbitrary, and I should have gone with my intuition of choosing without regard to the milestone.  So I’ll choose relative to the grief-inducing — real grief — of the right-wing gains this week.  They declared the culture war.  I think we’ve had enough.  Now they need to get their own scars.

Whipping

Don’t need a helmet, got a hard, hard head
Don’t need a raincoat, I’m already wet
Don’t need a bandage, there’s too much blood
After a while seems to roll right off

Whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping

Don’t need a hand, there’s always arms attached
Oh, don’t get behind, I can’t fall back
Why must we trust all these rusted rails?
They don’t want no change, we already have

Whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping

Don’t mean to push, but I’m being shoved!
I’m just like you, think we’ve had enough
I can’t believe a thing they want us to
Oh, we all got scars, they should have ‘em too

Whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping
They’re whipping

Back next week — and maybe even on time.

• #TheSmokingGun's (unexpected) expose of @Wyclef Jean re (alleged-by-them) malfeasance w.r.t. #Haiti charity. http://bit.ly/7ptOTi @tsgnews #

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• Entirety of user-contributed #Yelp restaurant review: "sav urself some $ by goin during happy hour." http://bit.ly/8poa6J #
• The #Republican argument is that corporate attack-ad spending is protected speech and an individual's burning of a flag isn't? #
• We shouldn't care about #Leno vs. #Conan, but we should care about your article explaining why we shouldn't care? http://bit.ly/6CTI5T #
• My space heater just melted my computer speaker. Not a joke. Whoops. #

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• McGee's Ninth Law: Alienating half your potential audience quadruples the respect from the other half. http://www.mcgees.org/the-laws/#9 #
• Tomorrow, overflow #closegitmo with a message to @BarackObama @Whitehouse. #guantanomo #p2 #
• OFFS. #Mongolia has mothballed the #deathpenalty. The country of Genghis Kahn is more liberal than the U.S. now. http://ow.ly/WA7s #
• When I started http://mcgees.org, I urged people to check out #Google, as no one knew what it was. What's an "Internet year"? A century? #
• They forgive everything but greatness. These are scoundrel days. — a-ha #aha #music #
• Valu-Mart in San Gabriel, CA is selling bottles of 151° rum for $7.99. In related news, I am drinking too much 151° rum. #

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• McGee's Ninth Law: Alienating half your potential audience quadruples the respect from the other half. http://www.mcgees.org/the-laws/#9 #

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Woot?  You, know, Woot?  That wacky corner of e-commerce where, each day, they offer (many of) one wacky item and write snarky copy to get people to buy that one thing?  Once in a while they’ll grab a bunch of their odds and ends and sell them, without disclosing the contents, as a “Woot Bag of Crap”.

With me? 

A Woot Bag of Crap just saved the life of someone in Haiti during the earthquake.

If this random weirdness gets you in a place the former news hasn’t, there are links to donate to charity on the Woot blog where this story showed up.

As sick as the Scott Brown win in Massachussetts makes me — I love how Republicans, self-styled patriots, flee to the anti-constitutional technique of filibuster whenever it looks like equality is on the horizon, as if 41% minority were somehow a majority — this AP text makes me all the more nauseated:

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Coakley’s loss won’t deter his colleagues from continuing their practice of blaming George W. Bush’s administration … Wall Street watched the election closely. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 116 points … Across Massachusetts, voters who had been bombarded with phone calls and dizzied with nonstop campaign commercials for Coakley and Brown gave a fitting turnout despite intermittent snow and rain statewide

Since when did the Associated Press start allowing Bill O’Reilly to write wire service copy?  They even fell for “tea party” being grassroots.  And NPR posted it rather than their own content.

Now with a 41% minority and astroturfing, millionaires are going to be allowed to tell tens of millions of other Americans and me that we don’t deserve health care.

• Recall of some Motrin, Tylenol, Benadryl, Rolaids, Simply Sleep, and St. Joseph products: http://bit.ly/63k5Py Please RT #
• #LandonDonovan's #Everton shut outs #ManchesterCity http://bit.ly/7ZrI92 w00t! #football #soccer #ManCity #

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Here’s an freeze-frame output from lame while encoding using variable bitrate on Ubuntu:

LAME 3.98.2 32bits (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: MMX (ASM used), SSE (ASM used), SSE2
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 17249 Hz - 17782 Hz
Encoding pj2007-08-05d1t03.wav to pj2007-08-05d1t03.wav.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III VBR(q=4)
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA
  3500/10289  (34%)|    0:05/    0:15|    0:06/    0:19|   16.994x|    0:12
192 [3481] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%****************************************************************************************************************
224 [  11] %
256 [   7] %
320 [   1] %
----------------------------------------------02:57---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   kbps        LR    MS  %     long switch short %
  192.3       12.1  87.9        95.9   2.1   2.0

Specifically regarding this:

192 [3481] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%****************************************************************************************************************

What does the ratio of % to * mean?  It shifts around as the encoding progresses.  Is it something like “placeholder for 100″ or something?

Conversation just now with Sebastian [cat]:

S[c]:  Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at me!
JHM:  What?  What do you want?
S[c]:  [runs to the window, looks out it, then turns back to me:] Come here!  Come here!
JHM:  [goes to cat:] What about it?
S[c]:  [withering gaze]
JHM:  That it’s raining?
S[c]:  MMMMMRRRRAAAAO!
JHM:  Yes, I’m aware that it’s raining.  It’s raining on the side you haven’t checked, too.
S[c]:  mraaaaaaaao-o?
JHM:  Sorry.  Nothing I can do about it.

• If we had spent a FRACTION of our #Haiti relief funds on Haitian infrastructure PRE-earthquake, how many lives saved? #
• Persuade the world to drop Haiti's debt. Add your voice now. http://www.one.org/r?r=273 #

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Here is a recipe for printing 8.5″ x 11″ pages four to a page (two landscaped on the front of each sheet, 5.5″ x 8.5″, and two on the back) such that when the pages are folded perpendicular to the long axis, they form a booklet that one can flip through.

1. Print the document as a PostScript file

Open up whatever program you want to print from: oowriter, acroread, evince, firefox, gedit, whatever.  Go to File→Print (or equivalent), select “Print to file”, choose “PS” as the format, give it a filename (I’ll assume you choose “document.ps”), make a note of the directory you’re printing it to, and click “Print”.

2. Get the PostScript utilities and viewer you need

In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install psutils evince

3. Rearrange the pages in booklet order

psbook document.ps document.signature.ps

4. Render the files “2-up”

psnup -l -pletter -2 -s.65 document.signature.ps > document.2up.ps

Option #1: Your printer prints double-sided

Just open document.2up.ps in evince (evince document.2up.ps) and print it.

Option #2: Your printer does not print double-sided

pstops "2:0(1in,0in)" document.2up.ps > odd.ps
pstops "2:-1(1in,0in)" document.2up.ps > even.ps
evince even.ps odd.ps

Print odd.ps, flip the pages over, then print even.ps (Keep track of how your printer flips your paper.  The direction the top edge is facing will stay the same, but you may have to load the pages face-up the second time, or maybe face-down.  Tip: make a small mark with a pencil on the top surface of the top page in the paper tray.  After printing, look at the page you put your mark on.  Is the text on the side with the pencil mark?  Load the pages face-down for the second pass.  Is it on the bottom?  The pages get flipped internally, so load your pages face-up.)

[Slightly modified from recipe at dsl.org]

• ← has made the most ghetto #advocaat ever: 2% milk, malted milk powder, #brandy, 3 sugar cubes, and a raw egg, shaken in a milk bottle. #
• "Desecration of a venerated object" is a crime in Pennsylvania state/cities? http://bit.ly/6fPXtc #catholicism #atheism #religion #
• Lesson for today: "#Shopdropping" is wickedly-cool-subversive-guerrilla-'n'-all, but don't fuck with food: http://bit.ly/5hpXIk #
• In 2030 people will wonder why this wasn't taken as a declaration of war http://bit.ly/5ftRd8 #Google: late w/ the "don't be evil" this time #

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OK, so, once again we come across McGee’s First Law, which states “Everything is more complicated than it at first appears to be, even when McGee’s First Law is taken into account.”  This is occasioned by McDonalds’s reintroduction of Styrofoam cups for some of their beverages.

“Eeek!” some of you have said.  I’ve heard you.  Three vowels, a stop plosive, and a bang.  Gotcha.  So many of us for so many years shunned polystyrene.  We’d crumple if an event used Styrofoam cups instead of, say, Solo cups.  We might not even pour a cup of coffee into a Styrofoam cup, but punch into a red “plastic cup”?  Sure!

So, a few things:

1. Polystyrene is no longer produced with CFCs.  Those are what were destroying the ozone layer, not the plastic itself.
2. We’re not supposed to burn polystyrene, right?  Cancer?  Well, that’s still true — some nasty PAHs are released — but with a high enough temperature of a furnace, burning polystyrene is cleaner than burning a lot of other things.  The biggest nastiness is the carbon soot.
3. Polystyrene is recyclable.  Check the bottom of the clamshell in your refrigerator.  It’s “#6″ — PS.  Most of it is not recycled, because it is so bulky relative to its weight, but there is a dearth of polystyrene scrap such that that the construction industry, which could consume a great amount of it, has to buy virgin PS to make into groundsheets and filler.
4. Here’s the kicker: Solo cups are also polystyrene.  For real.  Check the resin identification code if you don’t believe me.

So, “more complicated” indeed.  What I recommend is that you recycle PS (especially if you have a place within walking distance, which I do), but don’t buy it — “Styrofoam cups” or “plastic cups” — for your parties.  What do I suggest?  Well, polypropylene (”#5 plastic”) rocks.  It’s what Rubbermaid containers are made out of.  It’s easily recycled, is strong, durable, resistant to heat, moisture, and corrosion, yet is more easily broken down by UV rays than many other plastics.  You can get polypropylene cups at the 99¢ store for, um, 99¢, but the best choice for me is a fast-food joint, where you can also get them for about a buck, and they’ll even throw in a free fill-up of Coca-Cola for you!  (Polypropylene is what the “plastic drink cups” are made of.)  If you don’t go to fast food “restaurants”, go to their trash bins.  If that’s icky, go to garage sales, where you can usually get them for free, or a dime apiece.  Wash them, store them, give them to guests at parties to use.  If you are embarrassed to do this, I don’t think you’ve really grokked the whole recycling thing yet.

When the film Dead Man Walking was in production, director Tim Robbins commissioned tracks from a number of artists for the soundtrack.  Vedder shows up twice, once with a version of “Long Road” and once on a wonderful track called “The Face of Love”, both with the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.  This week’s VT is a song that was passed over in favor of Bruce Springsteen’s (much less impressive-to-me) “Dead Man Walkin’”.  My favorite moment is when it is ambiguous whether “across” or “a cross” is being sung.

Dead Man

Sailing on my every step
Inching off of the earth
It’s magnified by the things I’ve done
The thing that I’ve become

Every lift of my hand –
Coffee cup up and back –
Is magnified by the things I’ve done
The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve caused
I’m a dead man walking

The hammer that I once brought down now hovers over me
Casts a shadow, across/”a cross” onto me

The hallways are all mocking me
What I’ve become — they’re all mocking me

I’m a dead man walking.  A dead man walking.  A dead man walking.
I’m a dead man walking.  Dead man walking.  Dead man walking.

Same bat-time!

All Vedder Tuesday

Having gotten a humorous wrong-word error in a text message spelled out with a cellular phone number pad, I started to wonder about collisions of this sort in general.  What keystrokes match the most words?

Well, I turned to my trusty bigwordlist.txt, a big dictionary file I pieced together from multiple places, particularly orchy, and I wrote a Perl script to look at it.

If a phone were to have this dictionary (there are a lot of reasons it shouldn’t, mostly because a lot of the words are of much lower frequency than others) there would be more than 20,000 collisions — places where the phone would have to guess, whether by a stupid algorithm (”pick the lowest alphabetically”, say) or something more sophisticated (”rank by frequency of occurrence in the wild”) or something very sophisticated that took grammar into account.

Here are some facts I found:

* The most troublesome sequence is 2666.  That can stand for ammo, amon, anno, anon, bonn, bono, boom, boon, cmon, comm, como, comp, conn, coom, coon, or coop (16 possibilities).
* The most collisions for two-, three-, and five-letter words are for 66, 466, and 46637 with 13 possibilities each (that “66″ — “[mno][mno]” — shows up a lot, yes?)
* My mom’s allergic to shrimp, so would that make them a “non-mom-nom”?  Spell it out.
* A lot of long medical words collide, because the ending “-ia” is the same as “-ic” in T9 (”hypercholesterolemia”, “hypercholesterolemic”).  Below that, “-ser” and “-ses” and “-zer” and “-zes” in verbs cause a lot of collisions.  The longest not-trivial pair looks to be “unreasonableness” and “unseasonableness” at 16 letters, but I’m not sure those are standard usages.
* Any requests for more info?  Raw files?

• Borrow Bush rhetoric? If the Christmas Day bombing attempt delays closing of #Guantanomo, terrorists WILL HAVE FUCKING WON. #

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