On my old blog, I devoted a long post to thinking about moral and ethical responses to panhandling.

One economist suggested only giving money to those who are not asking for money; a playwright suggests giving when you feel charitable and holding back when you don’t.

I was reminded of that old post by this Yahoo News article on a street panhandler who, when arrested, claimed to have made $60,000 last year from begging.

What made the article more interesting were the sociological bits of how this subculture operates, such as the “Hobo Rules” (which is different from the Hobo Code):

As the man explained, the hobo rules include never making verbal contact with drivers unless to say “thank you” and taking turns with other panhandlers in a 30-minute rotation.

The Hobo Rules define the fine line between soliciting for a charity and begging:

Panhandling, or begging, is to “request a donation in a supplicating manner” versus solicitation, which involves asking for a donation. The “Hobo Rule” of not making verbal contact with people before a donation is given seems to be what differentiates what panhandlers do from solicitation.

And maybe it’s just me – and who are we kidding, it is – I found this paragraph fascinating in its explication of the city’s attitude to policing panhandlers:

Begging is a right held by individuals or organizations, according to the U.S. Supreme Court. Oklahoma City has an ordinance on panhandling four pages long and includes specifications such as: No one can beg or solicit using manners, gestures or words that intimidate a reasonable person to believe his person or property are in threat of danger; blocking or interfering with the passage of a person or vehicle; and no begging or soliciting of people entering public buildings, in line for tickets, riding on public transportation, at ATMs, within 20 feet of outdoor seating for cafes or restaurants, nor at mass transportation stops.

I have thoroughly enjoyed showrunner/head writer Steven Moffat’s fresh take on Doctor Who, and I’ve equally enjoyed Matt Smith’s take on the character and the deepening relationship between the Doctor and his new companions, Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill). Part of the excitement may have been being in on Seasons 5 and 6 as they’ve been broadcast; I came to the 2005 reboot late and gorged on Netflix streaming of the episodes as my school and work schedule allowed.

The problem with coming to the show late was that the conversations around the episodes had already happened, so it was like coming to a party late only to find the leftovers – paper plates, cups, empty bottles and cans, and handsful of snack foods strewn all over the counters and tables – after all the people have left the house and moved on to the next party. So part of my excitement about seeing the episodes as they’ve aired is also waiting to see what the reviews are like, whether I agree with them, leaving comments, and joining in the conversation myself.

I do have to often remind myself – this is just a TV show and there are reasons beyond reasons why stories and seasons work out as they do. Reading The Writers Tale by previous showrunner and the man responsible for the series reboot Russell T Davies showed just how haphazard and crazy-making is the production that goes on behind the scenes. I’m sure Moffat’s reign has been no different. That so many good episodes get made that delight so many people is something to be thankful for, and I usually find something to enjoy even in the so-so episodes.

Anyway – the final episode of this mini-season aired over the weekend, so here are my (I hope) capsule comments. And keep in mind I’ve only seen these episodes once, so, caveat emptor. Also – Spoilers!

Asylum of the Daleks

Well, I babbled on all about this episode in a previous post. I’ll reiterate that, despite the story’s longing to impress with its epic scale, it still felt like a small episode. Small emotionally, that is. I could never believe that Amy and Rory would have separated, so that seemed like fabricated conflict and it was never referred to again (much like Amy’s inability to have children; she adjusted to that pretty well, didn’t she?). But the Doctor’s discovery of Oswin’s true nature – and the show’s toying with the audience all the way through till the twist – is classic Moffat and was absolutely brilliant. He has a weakness for being too clever by half and loves high-concept structures (such as Donna Noble’s life in the library, which used the standard TV technique of jumpcuts as part of the storytelling method).

Still, a throat-grabbing season opener, written with his typical quickness and smash-panache. It’s probably unfair to ask other writers to create Moffat-type blockbuster stories; he’s really the only one who can do that kind of story justice. And he’s one of the few to actually play with timey-wimey stories, though I fear he over-relies on certain types of time-travel stories to the exclusion of others.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

A romp, which is what was called for, but not a story I’ll come back to often. The villain was the kind of unrelieved evil bastard that we rarely see in the series and I was frankly glad for the Doctor to send the guy to his reward, morals be damned.

What I liked most, though, was the interplay with Rory’s Dad, Brian, and the changes that occur to him due to his adventuring in the TARDIS.

Amy, particularly, finds herself still to be the girl who’s waiting for the whine of the TARDIS. Why is the Doctor’s gaps between visits getting longer and longer? Also, that chilling moment of dialogue that Steven Cooper captured so well in his review:

When Amy tells of her fear that one day he’ll simply stop showing up and she’ll be left waiting forever, he promises her, “Come on, Pond. You’ll be there till the end of me.” Amy cheerfully replies, “Or vice versa,” and then there’s an odd, rather horrible pause until the Doctor finally says softly, “Done…” He immediately pretends that he just meant he had finished what he was working on, but it’s obvious that something important has been set in motion. An ominous portent for the future, and a signal that the time for carefree adventuring is over.

Also, the way he looks longingly at Amy and Rory as they gaze down at Earth. The look of immense sadness on the Doctor’s face is a signal to me that he already knows their future. And this is one of his last chances to let that sadness show.

A Town Called Mercy

Not much of Amy and Rory in this episode, but a great setting and a moral quandary reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Doctor is better used here, and the acting and speeches are all done to a faretheewell. For such a talky episode, I found it absorbing. Definitely one I’ll see on a threepeat.

The big honking bash-us-over-the-head-with-it clue is that the Doctor was taking the Ponds to a Day of the Dead festival. Oh come on! Isn’t that a little too on the nose?

The Power of Three

Most reviewers commented that this felt like a classic RTD episode: invasion of Earth, big emotions, UNIT. Good stuff and props to the writer Chris Chibnall for delivering an episode that delivered on the emotions but not so much on the story.

I agree with most of the reviews that say the ending did not live up to its promise, but when does that ever happen in most stories? The premise is always the best part, with Acts 1 and 2 exploring the implications of the premise. Act 3 usually comes up short. It’s even worse in genre stuff like science fiction or Doctor Who (I like The Moff’s description of the show as fantasy and fairy tale). As Harlan Ellison has said of writing science fiction, the emotional and intellectual content has to always sink below the level of the rococo furniture of plot, pacing, logic, etc. How many really great Doctor Who endings have there been? RTD hit the reset button multiple times, as did The Moff in “The Big Bang,” so let’s just be glad the ending didn’t take up more time.

The A story for me was the Ponds finding that they enjoyed real life, non-Doctor life. I couldn’t quite believe that Rory missed the running around and adventuring; he always struck me as the one most likely to want to settle down and live a normal life. And Brian’s pointed question to the Doctor of what has happened to his previous companions was gloriously and gravely delivered by Matt Smith.

“Some left me, some got left behind, and some—not many, but… some died. Not them, Brian. Never them.”

Does the Doctor know at this point what will happen next? If he does, how dare he look at Brian in the face, and smile, and salute? Even so, that final moment is gracious and wonderful.

The highlight, the sheer emotional pinnacle of the season thus far is the conversation between the Doctor and Amy, where he confesses his love for both Rory and Amy – “you’re imprinted on my hearts” – and that he’s never running away from things, but running to them before they fade – as Rory and Amy will fade. It’s a heart-choking moment as they simply sit and enjoy each other’s company. Amy is the companion whose life has been the most affected – even abused – by her time with the Doctor. It’s astonishing how Gillan lets Amy absorb those experiences and still find peace and happiness with both Rory and the Doctor.

Again – is this the Doctor stealing one last moment of closeness with the Ponds after the New York adventure? Just because we see these stories in a particular order doesn’t mean Moffat isn’t playing timey-wimey games with us.

The Angels Take Manhattan

Oh. My. God. I had to watch the last 20 minutes standing up as I was too anxious and scared to sit without squirming. Typical Steven Moffat story! Timey-wimey, breakneck speed, fabulous images, chilling plot twists, and darker, more jagged emotional edges for the Doctor. I was aghast at how he left River to get herself free of the Angel and then not noticing the price she paid to get free – and her determination to keep him from knowing the price all of his companions pay. Although River didn’t play a big part in the story’s big moments, her presence made this a family episode and she lent considerable weight to the emotional moments.

Amy and Rory are getting older, as is River – but not the Doctor. The Doctor loves Amy and Rory but we know he also likes the company of the young and can’t bear to see these short-lived humans he loves wither and die. How to resolve this? And – the actors playing Amy and Rory have stated they don’t want to do any cameo appearances on later episodes. The Ponds’ farewell has to be final, and Moffat must craft that type of story. (Unless he’s lying. Rule One: Moffat Lies.)

Yes yes yes, there are plotholes. (How come Amy and Rory aren’t scooped up the big Angel when they’re not looking at her? Why aren’t the Doctor and River taken by the graveyard angel? Where do Amy and Rory wind up when they’re sent back?) But as Moffat has said, the scene on the roof with Amy and Rory is where they grow up, where they come into their own and are free of the Doctor. The Doctor offers little help to anyone in this episode and suffers the most loss. The cleverness that enabled a reboot of the universe and escaping death on the beach is not present here. Amy’s final scene, as she has to say good-bye to the Doctor and give instructions to River without turning to look at them, was powerful and wrenching. I’m sad that Rory didn’t have a similar farewell scene, but his moments on the rooftop made up for that.

Notice how the headstone didn’t include their years? Probably not significant. The point was to show that they had lived long, full lives – without the Doctor. And continued to help him with the writing of the novel that provided the clues he needed to get him out of the dilemma with the Angels. That device is so reminiscent of what Sally Sparrow does in “Blink”; Moffat really loves to pieces and overuses the Bootstrap paradox of time travel, and I dearly wish he could think himself out of that device and play a little more.

I so, so want a few lines in a future episode where he looks them up in old newspapers or books – why did they stay in New York? How did they survive their first days in New York with no ID, no money, no friends, no comforts of home? How could two people used to the comforts of the modern era adapt to mid-20th century life? But then, hadn’t they survived much worse? Maybe it’s enough to know that they lived happily ever after and – though they didn’t decide it on their own – had stopped waiting and started living.

Final stray thoughts

• I’ve enjoyed Moffat’s series-long arcs, with all their clues and secrets that only made sense after the season was up and I saw the episodes again. Despite Moffat’s contention that this mini-season would be made up of standalone blockbuster episodes, I still think he has laid clues and elements that tie the stories together into a whole. I can’t wait to watch these episodes again, now that the Ponds – I should say, the Williams – have well and truly left the scene.
• One of the visual motifs many commenters noticed was that each episode had blinking, buzzing light bulbs on the verge of going out. I don’t think that has any deeper significance than being a visual/sonic element to tie these stories into more of a thematic whole. I will note that Moffat likes buzzing light bulbs; just watch “Jekyll.” Also, I remember Francis Ford Coppolla talking about a scene in “Godfather II,” where Vito Corleone’s first victim pauses in a hallway to screw in a lightbulb that’s blinking and buzzing. Coppolla’s contention, as I remember it, was that something odd has to happen just before a major explosive event, something out of the ordinary that signals the extraordinary that is about to come. Think about those eerie moments before Sonny is killed in “The Godfather”; he knows something is wrong but doesn’t know what. Similarly, I think Moffat told the writers or production team to throw in some buzzy light bulbs to signal to the audience that something was about to happen, so keep watching.
• One of the thematic motifs for this season has been endings, growing older, and growing up. Amy and Rory are aging faster than their friends, she needs reading glasses, River needs to keep up a bravura front (wasn’t she supposed to be growing younger?). But the Doctor hates endings and the Doctor never ages. As one reviewer has remarked, series 5-7 have been about the companions – these stories have been about Amy and Rory’s journey.
• I think the blockbusters idea sounded great on paper and made for great-looking episodes – better than anything seen in the RTD era – but their size and scale failed to deliver what a good bottle show like “Amy’s Choice” could. The stories were so big and so swift, yet had to compressed to less than 45 minutes. that there was no time to let the emotional moments breathe. I missed those moments.
• Various reviewers made much of Amy’s repeated warnings to the Doctor not to travel alone, that traveling solo unmoored him from his moral bearings. No one ever mentioned that Donna Noble said this to the Doctor way back in “The Runaway Bride.” So I couldn’t help but think this was simply reiterating a point that had been made very effectively years ago. And I couldn’t see right off what Amy’s observation added to it.
• Also, let’s remember – it’s early days yet. After I’ve lived with these stories for a while, and seen the episodes again, I may feel very differently. Moffat’s stories have always rewarded repeat viewings.
• Can we have a round of applause please for Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill? I was not impressed by Gillan in “The 11th Hour” but by the time of “Amy’s Choice,” I thought she was great and she only got better, with “The Girl Who Waited” being her masterwork. And Darvill, stuck with a potentially thankless part, made the most of it and became a great source of decency, strength, humor and humanity in the stories.

I may yet have another Doctor Who related post up my sleeve at some timey-wimey in the future. Until then – waiting impatiently for the Christmas episode!

Wikipedia has become such a daily part of my online life (like email – remember life before email? Anyone?), that it’s both startling and a little thrilling to find outré articles or even stray sentences and paragraphs that make me do a double-take and read them again to make sure I read them right.

There’s something about that flat, unemotional, just-the-facts style that makes the bizarre content even more absorbing and, in some cases, hilarious. Like in high school, when we were first introduced to the thesaurus and promptly looked up all of the synonyms for “prostitute.” (Forgive! We were kids! The words sounded funny!)

Herewith, a selection of Wikipedia articles that have caught my eye over the years. And stuff that I spent way too much time this evening discovering for this post.

Some excerpts are just sentences that I found worth keeping or pondering; others will, I hope, lead you to click through and read the full articles. There are many funny, weirdly interesting, unusual, poignant, and even downright creepy stories lurking within Wikipedia’s vast and lightly inhabited archive.

At the bottom of this post are some links that can help you with your own explorations.

Polybius (video game)

Polybius is a supposed arcade game featured in an Internet urban legend. According to the story, the Tempest-style game was released to the public in 1981, and caused its players to go insane, causing them to suffer from intense stress, horrific nightmares, and even suicidal tendencies. A short time after its release, it supposedly disappeared without a trace. Not much evidence for the existence of such a game has ever been discovered.

Walter Cronkite

Cronkite trained himself to speak at a rate of 124 words per minute in his newscasts, so that viewers could clearly understand him. In contrast, Americans average about 165 words per minute, and fast, difficult-to-understand talkers speak close to 200 words per minute.

Florence Foster Jenkins

From her recordings it is apparent that Jenkins had little sense of pitch and rhythm, and was barely capable of sustaining a note. Her accompanist can be heard making adjustments to compensate for her tempo variations and rhythmic mistakes. Her dubious diction, especially in foreign language songs, is also noteworthy … Despite her patent lack of ability, Jenkins apparently was firmly convinced of her greatness. She compared herself favorably to the renowned sopranos Frieda Hempel and Luisa Tetrazzini, and dismissed the abundant audience laughter during her performances as “professional jealousy.” She was aware of her critics, but never let them stand in her way: “People may say I can’t sing,” she said, “but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.”

Doll Man

The covers of Doll Man’s comics frequently portrayed him tied in ropes or other bindings, in situations ranging from being tied crucifixion-style to a running sink faucet, to being hogtied to the trigger and barrel of a handgun. The persistence of this male bondage motif in Doll Man comics among others can be contrasted with other comic books which historically portrayed women in positions of vulnerability and submission.

Um, the er, um, f-word

Battle of Ryesgade

The Battle of Ryesgade was a nine-day series of street fights in mid-September 1986, in the Copenhagen street Ryesgade. It was the most violent event in a long-standing conflict between the Copenhagen city council and the city’s community of squatters. Faced with an ultimatum to leave their illegally occupied housing or face eviction, the squatters instead fortified the streets around their building so strongly that it became a cop-free zone. They took advantage of this lack of control by burning down a building belonging to the Sperry Corporation. For nine days, massed police unsuccessfully attempted to evict the squatters. The civil disorder was of a magnitude never before seen in Denmark. After communicating a manifesto through the media, the defenders finally abandoned the squat and dispersed without being apprehended.

Outsider music

Lucia Pamela (1904-2002) was a St. Louis, Missouri-born multi-instrumentalist and former 1926 Miss St. Louis who, in 1965 recorded the album Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela. The self-funded album (released in 1969) consisted largely of Pamela breathlessly telling listeners of her adventures in outer space where she meets intergalactic roosters, Native Americans and travels upon blue winds.

Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion

The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking in Chicago, Illinois, on the evening of November 22, 1987. It is an example of what is known in the television business as broadcast signal intrusion. The intruder was successful in interrupting two television stations within three hours. Neither the hijacker nor the accomplices have ever been found or identified.

Scroll down to the external links section of the Wikipedia article and watch a recording of the video on YouTube.

Henry Darger

Henry Joseph Darger, Jr. (ca. April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously-discovered 15,145-page, single-spaced fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.

Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon vividly recalled being in the same room with L. Ron Hubbard, when Hubbard became testy with someone there and retorted, “Y’know, we’re all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion!” Reportedly Sturgeon also told this story to others.

Pen spinning

Pen spinning is known as “pen mawashi” (compare for example mawashi-geri, “round-kick”) or, more disparagingly, “ronin mawashi” “college student spinning” in Japan where the pastime has been popular since at least the 1970s, and where the Pen Spinning Association Japan is now dedicated to promoting the aspiring art form.

Ishi

Ishi (ca. 1860 – March 25, 1916) was the last member of the Yahi, the last surviving group of the Yana people of the U.S. state of California. Widely acclaimed in his time as the “last wild Indian” in America, Ishi lived most of his life completely outside European American culture. At about 49 years old, in 1911 he emerged from the wild near Oroville, California, leaving his ancestral homeland, present-day Tehama County, near the foothills of Lassen Peak … Ishi means “man” in the Yana language. The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber gave this name to the man because it was rude to ask someone’s name in the Yahi culture. When asked his name, he said: “I have none, because there were no people to name me,” meaning that no Yahi had ever spoken his name.

User:Ardonik/I ate my cat

I’m using this page to record translations of the English phrase “I ate my cat” in (hopefully) every written language ever conceived by man.

Michael Fagan incident

Michael Fagan (born 1951) was an intruder who broke into Buckingham Palace in Central London and entered the Queen’s bedchamber in the early hours of 9 July 1982. The unemployed father of four children managed to evade electronic alarms as well as both palace and police guards.

The Game (mind game)

The Game is a mental game where the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which, according to the rules of The Game, must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game; players can only attempt to avoid losing for as long as they possibly can. The Game has been variously described as pointless and infuriating, or as challenging and fun to play. As of 2010, The Game is played by millions worldwide, although in theory, the whole world is playing it.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs.

Boston Molasses Disaster

The Boston Molasses Disaster, also known as the Great Molasses Flood and the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy, occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. A large molasses storage tank burst, and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. The event has entered local folklore, and residents claim that on hot summer days, the area still smells of molasses.

 Lenna

Lenna or Lena is the name given to a 512×512 pixel standard test image which has been in use since 1973, and was originally cropped from the centerfold of November 1972 issue of Playboy magazine. It is a picture of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model, shot by photographer Dwight Hooker. The image is probably the most widely used test image for all sorts of image processing algorithms (such as compression and denoising) and related scientific publications.

Five Tibetan Rites

The Five Tibetan Rites is a system of exercises reported to be more than 2,500 years old which were first publicized by Peter Kelder in a 1939 publication entitled The Eye of Revelation. Although practically nothing is known about Kelder, one source reports that Kelder was raised as an adopted child in the midwestern United States, and left home while still in his teens in search of adventure. In the 1930s, Kelder claims to have met, in southern California, a retired British army colonel who shared with him stories of travel and the subsequent discovery of the Rites.  Originally written as a 32-page booklet, the publication is the result of Kelder’s conversations with the colonel.  The Rites are said to be a form of Tibetan yoga similar to the yoga series that originated in India. However, the Five Rites and traditional Tibetan yoga both emphasize “a continuous sequence of movement” (Sanskrit: vinyasa), whereas Indian forms focus on “static positions”. Although the Rites have circulated amongst yogis for decades, skeptics say that Tibetans have never recognized them as being authentic Tibetan practices.

Cool Wikipedia lists

Wikipedia:Unusual articles

This page is for Wikipedians to list articles that seem a little unusual. These articles are valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something you would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica.

The motherlode of pages to while away many a carefree hour or twelve!

List of lists of lists

On Wikipedia, many lists themselves contain lists.

Certainly, this has to count as both a ridiculously recursive title, yet an oddly noble example of Wikipedian organization.

List of common misconceptions

This is a list of current, widely held, erroneous ideas and beliefs about notable topics which have been reported by reliable sources. Each has been discussed in published literature, as has its topic area and the facts concerning it. Note that the statements here are the correct facts, not the misconceptions themselves.

Sources/References

Wasting time with Wikipedia?. A great great great collection of links contributed by Web surfers like yourself. Start here.

Best of Wikipedia. Sadly, looks like a cobweb site now, but hosts a good archive of topics.

Metafilter links:

• http://ask.metafilter.com/19941/Favorite-Wikipedia-Entries
• http://ask.metafilter.com/90222/Best-of-Wikipedia
• http://www.metafilter.com/58169/Unusual-oddness-at-Wikipedia?

The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump (WikiDumper.org)

From the bold to the beautiful, from the wicked to the wise, every day the Wikipedia team relegates possibly “inappropriate” submissions to the garbage dump of time. Here, we make selected “potential” rejects immortal and preserve them for posterity. (All of these entries have been nominated for deletion at the time of posting.)

Seven Most Bizarre Wikipedia Articles

Strange Wikipedia Articles - U2 Community Blog post

10 Interesting And Unusual Wikipedia Articles

You. You who are reading this blog post.

You have already spent an ungodly number of hours sitting down, hunched forward, staring unblinking into this screen.

Do we really need your computer to remind you that you need a break every now and then? Sadly, yes.

MacBreakz (site | YouTube) is the more sophisticated of the two. I used this software extensively when I was spending 4-6 hours a day writing my thesis. It offers a good variety of stretches and ergonomic tips. It also monitors the intensity of your activity; if you're mousing around a lot or furiously typing to beat a deadline, it will pop up a reminder to take a micro-break of a few seconds. It nags because it loves. It's more expensive ($25) than most shareware, but worth it if you spend a lot of time on the 'puter.

Joe Ergo (App Store) is lighter weight, but also much cheaper ($2). Set a time for when you want to receive a reminder to take a break and then minimize the window. Joe Ergo offers fewer stretches, but that's OK -- it's the break that counts. I set the interval at 25 minutes (yes, like the Pomodoro). If I'm only on the MikeBook for an hour or so on a weekday night, then I'll use Joe Ergo.

I guarantee you will be surprised at how swiftly the interval you set passes and how irritating you will find these reminders. Starting the software and setting the interval is your calm, wise self looking out for the impulsive, in-the-moment, future self who wants to keep clicking those YouTube links until well past your bedtime.

In addition to giving my body a break, I also want to give my eyes a break. One of my eye doctors said that, when you stare into the distance, the muscles that focus your eyes relax. But when you focus your eyes onto a bright screen only a foot or so away from your face, the muscles tense up and "go all out like a Masseratti." Both programs above remind you to do eye exercises as well.

I also put wetting drops in my eyes when I take my break. My cataract doctor recommended keeping a wetting agent of some kind nearby and to use it often. He said he was horrified to see his wife working on her laptop and not blinking for minutes at a time. As he explained it, when the eye is moist, its surface is smooth as a marble. But when you stop blinking, the eye's surface begins drying out here and there and the surface gets rougher. The result is more refraction of light, glare, and squinting.

I recommend GenTeal liquid gel drops; I keep a bottle by my monitor at work and at home. It's tough to remember to do it regularly, but your eyes will thank you.

I use a lot of bookmarklets to make my browsing faster and more convenient. I use them to stop blinking text, subscribe to RSS feeds, post to this blog, hide all images on a page, and so on. One of the most important bookmarklets I add to my browser is one I found at MacWorld that enables you to search for text throughout the site you're currently viewing, not just the current page.

Just today, for example, I wanted to know whether I had ever blogged on the topic of boredom. So I navigated to the blog and clicked on the Google Site Search bookmarklet in my Links toolbar. In the dialog box that popped up, I entered "boredom|boring" and hit OK.

The bookmarklet piped my search text through Google's "site:" search filter and the browser returned a list of pages from my blog that contained the search terms.

I find the Google site: search to be more reliable than most web sites' built-in search facility. It's a fabulous addition to any Web user's research toolkit.

• Will tablets kill PCs? Daniel Lemire thinks tablets more than satisfy the mainstream (non-techie) user's needs. Jeff Atwood opines about his spiffy new ultraportable laptop, which is everything he wanted in a laptop 10 years ago.
• A great animation showing the secret law of page design harmony (scroll down).
• The oldest self-help book: a 19th-century American grimoire, or collection of magic spells and incantations. The writer explores the  American zeal for DIY and self-reliance as expressed in this once-popular book, which includes many features of modern self-help books, such as testimonials. "Within the pages of self-help books are recipes not just for healing but for divinity, a promise that every American can be individually complete and autonomous."
• Whatever you think about in the shower is where your attention is -- so make sure you're thinking about something worthwhile.
• Lemire on peer review and this salient quote: "The editor-in-chief of a major computer science journal once told me: you know Daniel, all papers are eventually accepted, don’t forget that."

From today’s News & Observer’s Horoscopes by Jeradine Saunders:

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): You are perched on the brink of success. Have faith that precious plans for the future are viable even when it seems that core values are briefly opposed by others.

A glorious rant from one of the keystone authors of my first couple of decades on this spinning rock, Harlan Ellison. This is a clip from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which is itself quite good. (I’d forgotten that I’d linked to this clip before. Forgive me!) I was pleasantly surprised to see that almost all of HE’s books are available in Kindle format via Amazon and at great prices.

www.youtube.com/watch

In moments of great emotional stress, we revert to our worst habits: we dig in and fight harder. The real trick is not to get better at fighting — it’s to get better at stopping ourselves: at taking a deep breath, calming down, and letting our better natures take over from our worst instincts.

makingabetterme:

Murray The Nut » Blog Archive » The creative process 2

makingabetterme:

After discovering the world of custom screensavers I couldn’t find anything motivating enough, so I made my own.

You need the screensaver hack to use these images and, of course, a Kindle.

Download here.

Someone famous (Samuel Johnson? Aristotle?) said that in writing (and here I paraphrase because I’m too lazy to hunt for hours for the exact quotation), “Something should be revealed and something should be concealed.” For any writing students out there, that means that in those short essays for your high school or college classes, don’t list in the introduction every point you plan to develop.

Oliver Burkeman writes about a woman who actually visits all of her Facebook friends to see if they’re really friends. She’s writing a book about the experience, of course. It’s one of those stunt ideas that will become a book whose message we will skim, we will blog and tweet about it for a week, we will stroke our chins thoughtfully, and then we will toss the book into the pile going to the library’s book sale.

Burkeman uses her story as a lens to explore the popular research on social ties, friendships offline and on-, and the idea of “decluttering” your life by letting go of the “friends” we accumulate as easily as we accumulate books, shoes, knick-knacks, and other physical clutter. How many friends can you really manage? How can you measure the quality of a friendship, either online or offline?

Burkeman writes:

“Friend clutter”, likewise, accumulates because it’s effortless to accumulate it: before the internet, the only bonds you’d retain were the ones you actively cultivated, by travel or letter-writing or phone calls, or those with the handful of people you saw every day. Friend clutter exerts a similar psychological pull. The difference … comes with the decluttering part: exercise bikes and PlayStations don’t get offended when you get rid of them. People do. So we let the clutter accumulate.

I’ve written before about the idea that electronic connections keep relationships going that, under ordinary circumstances, we would probably slough off. (Keeping in mind, of course, that sometimes I am the person who someone sloughs off.)

That said, I do have certain rules when I “friend” someone:

• On Twitter, it hardly matters. I have few friends or acquaintances who have Twitter accounts and I hardly ever check my Twitter account. Twitter seems like more of a public noticeboard and at this point in my life and career, there’s not much there for me.
• On LinkedIn, I usually only connect if I have worked with the person or have some personal knowledge of their character such that I could vouch for them as a resume reference or could at least write a recommendation for them. Sometimes, though, people think of LinkedIn as Facebook for Grownups, and I resist using it in that way.
• On Facebook, I’ve slowed my friending. I check FB every other day or so, and have friended neighbors, classmates, etc., but I rarely reach out anymore. Facebook, again, was something I used heavily in school but not so much these days. I don’t post any pictures or much in the way of personal information, anymore. I tend to post links to news or web sites of interest. I unfriended one person whose comments on my posts annoyed me to the point that I said, “I don’t need this grief.”

Were I to start a business on the side, I’d re-examine my relationship with these services. But for now, this is a picture of how I manage my online relationships.

I don’t unfriend or unfollow many people because I believe that I’m careful about who I let in to my life. I try to keep a certain number of people who I can stay in touch with fairly regularly and whose company I would enjoy. I try to have lunch or a meal or a coffee with local friends fairly regularly; it’s important to me that I see my local friends face to face. I don’t put such things on a calendar or anything; the prompt for these get-togethers is usually, “Hm, haven’t heard from X in a while. Wonder how they’re doing?”

I send distant friends birthday cards and letters a couple of times a year, sometimes longish emails, rarely longish phone calls. I and most of my friends are at stages in our lives where we’re superbusy with families, careers, etc. and so staying in touch takes conscious effort. We all know this, so once-in-a-while updates are OK with me.

I can’t remember where I got this quote, but I remember saying it at my 50th birthday party: “Whoever dies with the most friends, wins.”  I said it to a roomful of friends on a warm September night who chose to spend their Saturday evening celebrating with me and it was one of the happiest moments of my adult life.

Dear Ones, it’s beautifully simple. Surrender. Go with the flow. Spend time doing what brings you joy. Focus on what you want more of. Love. Practice gratitude. Humans love to make things more complicated than they need to be. If you simply focus on those basic aspects, you will be living the life of your dreams in record time. ~Archangel Gabriel

At a recent mastermind meeting, my fellow blogger Mike Uhl asked what I felt about having crossed the halfway point of writing 50 M-F blog posts. Did I feel great about accomplishing that milestone? Was I having fun doing this thing? I’ve always had a tough time with “fun.”

I was once asked years ago what I did for fun, and I really had no answer. I don’t think I’m a drudge or mechanical person, but this was a question I never thought to ask myself. There are many things I enjoy – reading, comics, museums, eating out, sitting on the back porch during a thunderstorm – but “fun” is a different type of word that suggests abandonment of self, losing oneself in an exciting activity. I’ve always thought or believed that people were referring to roller coasters or white-water rafting or some other intensely physical activity when they referred to fun. It was just something I never really noticed in myself.

(Perhaps my life has been lived minimizing pain rather than maximizing pleasure? Discuss.)

So, let’s overthink about this. I like the idea of breaking “fun” into “fun-fun” and “serious fun.” This paper defines serious fun as “play with a purpose.”

Serious fun goes beyond the apathy of strict order and the over-excitement of chaos to generate an ordered chaos that permits freedom within structure and fun within limits.

Fun-fun has no purpose beyond itself. Which is great. We need this. For me, that can be laughing till I hurt at a Flying Karamazov Brothers show or, from my distant past, performing in a play. The most fun I ever have, I think, is talking to friends, losing myself in conversation and connection with other people. My 50^th birthday party last year was one of the peaks of 2011 and I enjoyed every minute of it – the anticipation, the singing, and the remembering it later.

And while I enjoy watching a movie or TV show or most performances, I don’t call that fun-fun. My years as a theater and movie reviewer, and as someone who enjoys thinking about writing fiction, have enforced a habit of judging, balancing, guessing where the narrative or performance is going, and then evaluating its execution. It keeps direct experience at an arm’s length.

When I think about how I spend my time, I lean more toward “serious fun.” I enjoy losing myself in an activity, but I want that activity to have a result. I can happily lose myself in emptying my bookshelves and then putting all the books back in some new ordering scheme. I can rename a folder full of PDFs so they sort just as I want, and time flies. I can also easily lose myself in writing, whether it’s fiction or a blog post, and enjoy seeing what I produced.

I can’t say that I have fun-fun writing these blog posts; there’s no sense of physical abandon to the writing (more like stiffness and eyestrain).

But I have serious fun. I enjoy finding something out and sharing it on my blog. I enjoy taking an inchoate idea and surprising myself by shaping it into something like a mini-essay. I enjoy documenting the Byzantine curlicues of my baroque thought processes, though I am often dismayed at how complicated I make my life. I like documenting my little habits and routines; each post becomes a message in a bottle that I will look at years from now and go, “Huh. I forgot all about that.”

Merlin Mann had this great P.S. to a 43Folders.com blog post:

Has anyone ever figured out that 90% of the posts on this site are actually (notes|pep talks|reminders) to myself? I sometimes think not. The site definitely makes more sense once you get this.

I enjoy losing myself in the activity of writing, in creating this object. The fun at the start of the writing, which is playing with the idea and being surprised at the words it collects around itself, eventually gives way to the more serious business of making this machine work. From the first paragraph, the reader enters a contraption from which the only escape should be the last paragraph.

The crafting of that machine, the polishing and fixing – it takes focus and time. Even for short posts, I think about placement, context, wording, sentence rhythms, etc. What I hope is that, after I hit Publish, I can feel good about the time and energy I spent. The result of my efforts can be several hundred words of adamantine prose and unblockable metaphors, plus a feeling – a satisfied feeling – that my time was well-spent.

When I look at the calendar to the left of the post and see another day in bold italics – signifying a new post – I am pleased with myself for sticking to the plan.

When I peruse the finished object later in my feed reader, I hope to lose myself again in what I created –  this time, as a reader.

When I scan my ideas and drafts for the next post, I start feeling that little tingle of excitement – what will I write next? What do I want to share? How long do I want it to be? What’s interesting to me today? What idea has been ripening for a while and is ready to fall?

That moment just before I decide – like the moment the curtain goes up just before the show begins – is probably the most fun moment of all.

Of the 52 Killer Tricks for Your Kindle, some are useful only for the first 3 series (#’s 2, 3, 5, 6), others for Fire only (#8), others are so arcane and specialized as to be almost nonsensical (#’s 9, 15), some are DIY and may require more nerve than even I have (#’s 1, 14, 26, 42), some are only tangentially related to the Kindle (#’s 16, 30, 36) and on and on. So right away, you can simply skim this list and reduce it to something more manageable. Is it possible that your humble correspondent may have a few tricks that didn’t make it to the list? Verily, I saith unto you: Yes.

As I’m using a Kindle Touch, some of the “killer tricks” (which I daresay would reveal themselves with a skim of the manual) don’t apply. Some of the tricks reveal themselves with a simple read of the manual: keep the wi-fi turned off to save your battery, email PDFs to yourself, play MP3s, and so on. And I have, of course, already thoroughly documented my screensaver workflow.

There were a few things the original article missed, so allow me to add to the conversation.

For web pages

I would add Readability to #11 (Readability can include images and photos, Instapaper can’t – or didn’t the last time I looked).

For ebooks

For public domain books in Kindle format (#3), I’d also recommend Project Gutenberg, which offer Kindle versions of its texts in .mobi format. You can download the Magic Catalog (.mobi file) and get a list of all the books and texts they offer. Click on a book title and it’s downloaded to your Kindle in the background.

Even better: use your Kindle’s browser to navigate to m.gutenberg.org, where you can have a more interactive experience searching for and downloading ebooks.

Another neat way to get Kindle-formatted public domain books is to navigate to this page on the MobileRead forums site and search the page for “MobileRead’s Download Guide.” Download that file and transfer it to your Kindle (or download it directly from the MobileRead page), wait a bit while the Kindle indexes it, and then you have a file containing a list and descriptions of 11,000+ books formatted by MobileRead members; click on a link to download the book in the background (wi-fi has to be on, of course). The file is updated daily. There’s overlap between the MobileRead and Gutenberg lists, sure, but it’s fun to compare them and see what they offer. I use both and sometimes just have fun browsing the lists.

I also like the Delphi Classics site, mainly for just knowing that it’s possible to download the complete works of most any “classics” author.

Keep your Kindle software up to date

Bookmark the software update page and set yourself a reminder to check it monthly or whenever is convenient. You won’t get any notice from Amazon that updates are waiting for you.

See what other Kindle owners are highlighting

One of Kindle’s features is that you can highlight passages from any book or article you’re reading and it’s saved in a file called clippings.txt. Findings lets you upload your clippings.txt file so others can read what you’ve highlighted, and you can read what other Kindle owners found worth noting. It started as a Kindle-only hangout, but they’ve since rolled out bookmarklets and such so that you can highlight anything you see on the web and have it posted.

Convert clippings.txt to more readable formats

The clippings.txt file contains the contents of all the highlighted passages from everything I’ve read on the Kindle. So it includes tips and tricks, quotes I want to remember, procedures, beautifully written passages, etc.

You can open and browse the file from the Kindle home screen and it’s easy enough to copy the file to my MacBook and open it up in a text editor, but it looks ugly and there is no easy way to browse the collection. So a lot of what I’ve highlighted is trapped in a file that is difficult to navigate, read, and use.

The amazing and free Clippings Converter site will transform the clippings.txt file into more attractively formatted Word, PDF, or (my favorite) Excel files. It provides a much better and easier method to process and re-use this text in other ways.

Yet, for all my snark…

The 52 tricks site convinced me to download Calibre (#16) and give it a try, and I’d not heard of the KIF project (#40) that lets you play old Infocom games on the Kindle, nor did I know of the justification hack (#44). Off now to do some minor-league hacking…

This is why the potential is always there for me to get nothing done. Here are some of the top links that caught my eye from today's Arts & Letters Daily and Marginal Revolution sites. I could have spent a happy hour reading all of them, but I decided to confine them to my Readability queue instead. I may actually get around to reading these items in the next few months. We'll see if they're as interesting  to me then as they are today.

• Literary self-publishing. An indie band that releases its own CD or album gets street cred. Not so for those who publish outside the mainstream press.
• New books on fairy tales. What makes these archetypes so durable? Why do books on a theme come in threes?
• "The fantastic pervades the world’s literatures of every time and place; our much vaunted realism is the sport, the mutant." Gore Vidal often derided the grey American naturalistic prose style of the '50s (his early novels were written in that style).
• Simon Schama on the writers who inspired him.
• Gladwell on Jerry Sandusky and how child molesters get away with it.

For many years, I’ve taken shameful (or shameless) advantage of Top Shelf’s annual $3 web sale of comics and graphic novels from their catalog. Not everything is $3, of course – but a large number of selected items from their catalog are remarkably discounted, with some inventory they’ve never been able to shift cut down to $1.

I scanned the list yesterday and started filling out my mental list of stuff I wanted: Eddie Campbell’s omnibus volume of the Alec stories and a Jeffrey Brown collection, and a few others.

But I caught myself. I didn’t feel that little thrizzle I used to feel when anticipating the comics I wanted to buy. Sad to say, I felt a little hollow in there. I also felt a little sad knowing I didn’t really need any of them.

Beyond the financial calculation, I’d also computed the space, time, and interest calculations. Space: I’m already maxed out on my bookshelf space and have dozens of great comics and graphic novels I haven’t processed yet. Time: I’ve had some of those books for literally years, yet I haven’t read them. So what makes me think that I would treat new books brought into the fold any differently? Interest: I’m certainly curious about these books, but the visceral interest just isn’t there. I’m simply more interested in other things now.

I think the time for profligate reading is behind me. At least for now. I feel more drive and interest in solidifying my career (as a contractor, I always work on shaky ground), spending more time with family and friends, and generally being more active. In some ways, I’m reading as much as ever, but the time I can devote to reading is shrinking and I am finding it easier to shrug off some items that I previously considered necessities.

Getting out of one’s comfort zone by trying some new behavior or activity is the modern panacea for self-improvement. I’ve certainly adopted it in the last few years by taking on leadership roles, trying new activities, and taking on bigger responsibilities – all while feeling anxious and ill-prepared. Moving out of my comfort zone by doing these new things stretched me and expanded my sense of what I could do. I’m glad I did them.

A slightly different aspect of expanding the comfort zone is not doing things that previously brought pleasure. Addicts of all stripes know that abstaining is an active struggle; it’s the struggle that moves you out of the comfort zone.

My struggle this year in deciding what comics to buy at the Top Shelf sale turned into a non-struggle. I found it sad, necessary, and surprisingly easy to set aside my desire for a yearly jolt of color and novelty. I wondered what I would replace that activity with. Which is when I started writing this post.

Map of Rain Hitting Water by Mara Gibson

Treat your ears right. Listen to this hypnotic piece from composer Mara Gibson.

• Those big dogs!
• Chatting about art, the art instinct, the artist's life, etc.
• I found that when I practiced every day, even if just for 15 minutes, my playing got better. Weird.

Mara held an annual recital for her students at the back of Boyce Piano Emporium on 15-501. I didn't realize up till then that she mostly taught elementary- up to high school-age kids, who sat at the front of the room, with about 7 or 8 of her adult students sitting behind them (along with all the parents). After the last little person played his song, Mara called my name and I could hear the titters and amused murmurs from the audience as I lumbered up to the piano to announce my recital piece.

"Hi," I said, "my name is Mike Brown and I started taking lessons with Mara about eight months ago. I'll be playing three short pieces by Dmitry Kabalevsky. And," I paused, looking around the room at the kids and parents, "I believe I'm the first person playing today who is over 6 feet tall." That got a nice laugh and Liz said later it definitely broke the tension.

Many parents came up afterward to congratulate me and expressed their wonder and admiration at my performing a recital piece in front of a room full of people. I thanked them and then waved my hand at the kids -- who had just done the same thing that I did. The parents seemed to think that performing was something children naturally did, whereas putting oneself in a position where one could fail (or succeed!) publicly was something they couldn't conceive of an adult doing.

Mara eventually left Duke with her husband, the artist Brett Reif, to finish her PhD. Since 2004, she has been on the faculty of the  Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City. She leads the life of a busy artist, academic, and mother and I'm so happy to see her making so many big contributions to her art and her community.

Mara has also started selling some of her compositions digitally: Canopy and the hypnotic Map of Rain Hitting Water (embedded below). You can listen to the full pieces and then purchase and download them to your computer. It is so cool to have a Mara Gibson playlist on my iPod!

[O Fortune, changing and unstable, your tribunal and judges are also unstable.
You prepare huge gifts for him who you would tickle with favors as he arrives at the top of your wheel.
But your gifts are unsure, and finally everything is reversed:
you raise up a poor man from his filth and the insufferable bullshitter then becomes a consul.]”

(via Chamber Music Today: medieval)

I start a post with the intent to keep it brief, but I too often fall in love with the sound of my writing voice, and – as if I were having a conversation with myself – think about this or that idea which simply must be mentioned. I need to curb that tendency though; in technical writing, the worst thing you can do is to dump every thing you know into the documentation. It shows a lack of discrimination in understanding what to include and what to leave out. This makes the reader’s experience less pleasant and their job even harder.

For the longform essays, I try to follow the advice of academic writing coaches and start a post by writing a key sentence for each paragraph. When I see the thread of the argument, I can thicken the blessay with more detail and supporting evidence. Having decided what I will include, I am more likely to stay on track and let go of ideas or witticisms that don’t fit.

I try to. More often, I simply start typing and ramble away, generating huge rafts of text that need to be considered, pruned, tossed out, refined, etc. Whichever method I use depends on my mood, time, energy, and so on. I am consistent in my inconstancy.

I find that writing about my personal systems for organization or productivity or techie stuff are usually fun and easy to write. They can be long, though. When I write about things that are a little more personal and ruminative — such as my information packrat nature or what I find inspiring and why — I touch more chords with my reader(s). In the end, I write about whatever I want to spend time thinking about and playing with. I find that I’m not reading as much as I used to , but I’m writing more, and I think that’s a fair tradeoff.

One of my goals for the blog reboot was to burn through a lot of ideas that had piled up during the years when I was not blogging regularly. Then, after I’d gone through those, my plan was to see what was left for me to write about. But as I predicted in my first post, the more I write, the more I find to write about. I do sometimes raid the old list, but I as often pluck new ideas to think about as well.

Of course, the real topic of a personal blog is me, my life, my interests, and my exploration of my thoughts. And journaling the process of “learning as I go.” These posts are cups drawn from a well that, so far, thankfully, seems bottomless.

I seem to have two speeds when it comes to posting: the quick hit-and-run post with a link to something interesting, or a more in-depth musing that benefits from my walking around it every couple of days and judging how it looks from all angles.

What is also happening is that I find myself thinking about writing posts all the time. When something crosses my path, I wonder if it will make good blog fodder (blodder?). Newspaper columnists face the same situation; the column becomes a hungry beast that demands incessant feeding and attention.

My tools adapt themselves to the kind of writing I'm doing that day or week. I discovered I'm fine composing my quicker posts with the WordPress editor. Longer posts tend to start out in nvALT and may move to Microsoft Word, if I want to use the tools there. (I also keep a long list of ideas in nvALT and add to it all the time.)

I thought at one time I'd buy MarsEdit or some other desktop app to write my posts off-line, but I find that it's not really necessary. I build my posts up in layers, so the tool I use is independent of the writing/gestation process. I work on the words in several passes, move the text to WordPress, layer in the links in another, and then use the Zemanta plugin to suggest images or to spur my quest to find better ones. I don't always use the same tool for the initial drafts.

Before I publish, I preview the post and read it again in the browser; I regularly find formatting, typo, and phrasing problems that way.

This process is not bulletproof, of course. I would like a more scheduled, routine time to write and edit my posts, rather than the pockets of time I spend on it throughout the week. My drafting process feels too haphazard and too subject to disruption.

I'm at that point on the mastery curve where I've plateaued. The big a-HA! discoveries of technique and content came in the first 2 or 3 weeks, and I'm now trying to establish a regular writing routine, an assembly line that can crank out widgets in the shape of blog posts. The a-has are rather slower in coming and I need to be content waiting for the idea or insight that kicks me up to the next level.

Until then: make lots of pots.

gulliver-arkham:

Sweeney Todd on Flickr.

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ilovecharts:

The Secret Law of Page Harmony