Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

Tippitiwitchet (n):

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var. Dente

A tip of the hat to Lord Whimsy.

I’ve been getting a lot of hits on searches for Gabrielle Drake - something I find myself taking a perverse pleasure in. I thought I’d use the google and see what was coming up; before I got anywhere near DoaMNH, I encountered this essay, Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon, on the Ballardian. Yes, Ms. Drake appeared in a 1971 short titled Crash!, opposite some guy named J.G. Ballard. Click through and read the essay - meanwhile, I’ll just continue to shake my head in amazement.

Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

Mild warning - the film is titled Crash! after all…

Today’s word is from a discussion of eccentric bottom brackets - grubscrew:

…which bemoaned detents created in BB eccentrics by grubscrews. If hollow-point grubscrews fix that, then I can’t think of any other problem with them.

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I assume “grubscrews” is the UK equivalent of setscrews?

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Technically, a grubscrew has no head at all, and is turned by a small Allen wrench or screwdriver. Thus it can screw down below the surface against an internal sliding object.

A bad review that make me want to read the book.

Compare Kakutani:

Vanessa Cole is a parody of the crazy femme fatale, a woman, Mr. Banks would have us believe, so beautiful that men are willing to overlook her obvious mental illness.

with Bad New Hughes:

Sure, she’s good-lookin’. She’s also crazy. Crazy as a shithouse rat. Run for your life.

I’m with Uncle Patrick on this one. Parody? Hah.

While looking to see if the NYRB had weighed in on Mr. Banks’ latest, I came across:

In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles. *

Completely unrelated to Banks, but too nice a word to pass unmentioned.

Two good new (to me) turns of speech:

• onageristic analysis - an onager, as many of you already know, is a wild ass (and a type of siege engine - stop trying for extra points!). Analyses go hand in hand with predictions. What we have here is a dress-up name for a SWAG. Via an Aruba Networks training session.
• Lex Murphiae. Anything this ancient and constant should be rendered in Latin. Via Geoffrey Chaucer.

We took the son down to Pratt yesterday for his first year of college. He is in the Industrial Design program and is - I think - quite excited. My emotions are a bit of a stew: sadness, excitement, worry, anticipation, and more. Even if I were good at sorting through this kind of thing (typically I’m not), it certainly isn’t going to happen on four hours sleep. The dogs, understandably, don’t really care that I spent 10 hours driving yesterday - their chief concern is the fact that they had a really boring day and would like to go for a run. Now. Again. More.

We did have yet another bit of cosmic synchronicity hit us on campus. The lawn where we were served a cookout dinner last night is lined by sycamore trees. Tree identification is not my strong suit - I know the locals (red maple, poplar, red oak, hemlock, and pals), but get me out of the New England woods and I’m in trouble. I knew sycamores, though. Why? Because Pluvialis mentioned plane trees and lime trees recently and I looked ‘em up on Wikipedia. I had this suspicion that citrus (limes) might not be winter-hardy in Cambridge and was tired of not knowing anything about plane trees other than the assumed fact that they’re trees. If you don’t want to click through, here’s the key point - what are plane trees in Pluvialis’ neighborhood are sycamores here. While we were waiting in line for our picnic dinners, S (the boy’s mom) commented on the trees - the last time she was on campus was January and the foliage makes the area even more beautiful. I allowed as to how I thought they were sycamores; she looked at the leaves and noticed how maple-like they were. I wouldn’t budge and told her why I was pretty sure. Somewhere in my explanation, Jesus College in Cambridge was mentioned.

Aside - both the boy and I have been known to start with a reasonable sounding kernel and spin an increasingly baroque and improbable story out of it - absolutely deadpan. My son is much better at it than I am and does it to his mom regularly, but I’m a known offender as well.

At this point, S thinks I’m spinning a yarn. The Cambridge that springs to her mind is the one 30 miles away outside of Boston, not the one an ocean away. The existence of Jesus College is questioned, but before I can clarify, the man standing behind us (nice south-Asian accent) interjects, “Why yes, there is a Jesus College in Cambridge. I went there.” The sycamore identification went unresolved, but there is now general agreement that Jesus College exists and that the world is weirdly folded-up-on-itself small.

A very neat artist/caddis collaboration (via ectoplasmosis). I guess at nugget and wire scale the density of gold isn’t an issue. Any fisherpeople visiting New Hampshire in late June should make a point of getting up to Errol to catch the Alderfly hatch - Alderflies are medium-large caddis that emerge in huge numbers. Also - I’ve got to get a subscription to Cabinet!

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Goldfarming was a popular topic last week. I heard a reasonably good explanation on NPR in the context of South Korean gaming and some law-making around same. Then a BoingBoing post (great title - “Gold-farmers beat ad-ban by spelling URL in dead gnomes”) pointed me at this crazy video.

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Charlie Stross weighed in with a great little essay about explaining the video above to someone from the distant past - say, 1977. I can’t end a goldfarming item without a hat tip to Cory Doctorow’s great story on the topic - Anda’s Game.

Finally, on a personal note, things are going well (knock wood) with Luz, preparations are being made for the shorthair pup, and the summer is flying by. My energy has been very critter directed over the past few weeks - expect posts to be either linky (like this one) or snapshots of falcons, dogs, etc.

Every so often, the conditions are right and half the world’s population of internet users decide to go ape over the same silly thing simultaneously. As Prof. Harold Hill would say, “Mass-steria!” The shared memetic obsession this time around? Cat macros, also known as LOLCats or image macros (including the saga of the lolrus and the bukkit). The first rumblings were apparent as early as last Saturday - see the caption to the zombie picture on my AM cleanup post. The big seismic event, as far as I’m concerned, was on Wednesday when the LOLbots site went live. rstevens (the prime mover) on the rollout:

LOLBOTS.COM went up last night and promptly rode such a big wave of meme that we overloaded two servers. My admin Don got us back up and running and helped me optimize some code. The dude’s Bat-Man with a command line.

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Originally, I was just goofing on the concept of icanhascheezburger-style kitty macros from the perspective of someone prefers machines to animals. I didn’t really think it would catch on, but 40,000 visitors later we have almost 200 robots posted and a backlog of dozens more. In a word: Insane. *

The quotes above are from a post dated Friday, June 1st - 2 days earlier rstevens had an idea and sat down at the keyboard. The fun continues - it will be interesting to watch the meme-seismograph for aftershocks.

Herewith, my faves from the frenzy…

If you know what the Camel Book is, you have - like me - spent too much time in front of a screen.

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You may have noticed that I like Schrödinger’s cat jokes - I love this one:

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And last, one that ties to another post currently floating around the wide-open spaces of my cranium - it will be a mashup of Google Street View and Charlie Stross (that’s a cat in Mary Kalin-Casey’s window).

Credit where it’s due - the lolcats phenomenon was showing up on my son’s radar even earlier than it did on mine. I think he told me about memecats at about the same time I told him about “I can has brayn?”

Update - didn’t want to leave out creative powerhouse, Mr. Lex10 - he did some LOLPresidents for a fark contest early in the lolnomenon. You should blast over to the Glyphblog to check out the baseball cards; they are (as we say up here) wicked pissah.

Update II - c’est encroyable. The LOLCode version of Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

May 30, 1593 is either the day that Christopher Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer after arguing over who’d pick up the tab or the day he faked his death and was spirited off to the continent. I’m not a big one for conspiracy theories; they seem to me to have a lot in common with ‘not a sparrow falls’ religions - the desire for some kind of purpose underlying the random horrible (and wonderful) things that happen. That being said, you have to admit that the Marlovian’s theory is quite the rippin’ tale. Whether you like the theory or not, the connection to Francis Walsingham looks quite likely and from there it’s just one more hop to the preeminent cryptographer of the day, Thomas Phelippes. Rakehells, spies and code breakers - sounds like a reason to celebrate the day to me!