Archives, eh
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# Shall I?
Hmmm.
So I sit here, early in the morning, debating the merits of telling you, dear reader, that I am flying out of the country today. Just leaving, getting out for awhile till things cool down.
On the pro side, it would explain the (probable) month-long absence that is about to occur on this blog. On the other hand, why should this particular month-long absence be explained? And it’s not like it will be a complete absence even when you discount the spammers. I’ll be around on the interwebs on email and IM and on our leaving-the-country-blog but not on Facebook since it is so stupid.
There are a variety of pros and cons to making some sort of announcement and in balance, I think it comes out as a con. So I won’t be telling you of my month long trip to the United States. Ha!
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# Links for 2007-12-18
- What’s better about Ruby than Python? – comp.lang.python | Google Groups
I could hardly disagree more vehemently with the second-last paragraph, but otherwise… ✴
- What’s better about Ruby than Python? – comp.lang.python | Google Groups
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# Links for 2007-12-12
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# Oh god, not you again
I sort of mostly remember when Twin Peaks first aired on Australian television. I was still in high school but only just barely, I think. It can’t have been too long after Bundaberg got a third and fourth television channel; I certainly remember it being strongly associated with Channel Ten, as opposed to the mishmash of Channel Seven and Channel Nine shows that the old local network, SEQ-7, used to buy.
Wow. I can’t believe I still remember the name of the old channel. SEQ. Those were the days, when it was just the ABC and SEQ – Dad would make me switch from SEQ back to the ABC for the cricket because he didn’t like the ads during the cricket but I preferred the stats that Channel Nine broadcast. Or a few years earlier he would come home in the evening and make me switch to SEQ from the ABC because he wanted to watch cricket and I wanted to watch Masaaki Sakai beating up those three stunt guys in that quarry. Sorry? What do you mean, ‘which episode?’
So anyway, my clearest memory of Twin Peaks is the advertising campaign that preceded it. Actually, one specific ad. And even then, only a small part of that ad. There was probably some random scenes from the pilot at the beginning of the ad, maybe even the shot from the opening credits of the buzz saw being sharpened since that gives me such a sharp feeling of deja vu. But then cut to Some Guy from Channel Ten who turns to camera from watching the show and burbles something about it being “quality television”. What, really? You’re not going to tell me that you laid out a sizable chunk of change on some shit dribbled onto the screen by monkeys dressed in chinos and ponytails? What a fucking shock, eh?
My sister loved it. I, on the other hand, distinctly remember killing myself, dissolving my corpse in acid and having resulting liquid sprayed over a thousand square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean so that I wouldn’t have to watch it, so that I couldn’t even accidentally see a moment of it and be driven insane by it’s unfathomable inanity. My quest, my long quest to insulate myself from it and its fucking dopiness has failed. D bought the god damn box set of it with all the episodes, both the US and International pilots and presumably a bazillion incomprehensible-because-there-is-no-there-there added extras which hint at content that only exists somewhere on the tenth dimension, hidden between two pathologically antagonistic vibrating super strings.
And I see I was right to avoid it; or at least I was right to avoid it then, back when I was a dopey teenager who didn’t know shit about shit. Now that I am a dopey thirty-something who doesn’t know shit about shit but with a better developed sense of the ludicrous, I can appreciate those bits of the plot that are so insanely fucking stupid that your mind can’t help but go boing when they hit it like a rubber express train. Like:
- That’s a biker bar? That place, where Julee Cruise, in a beret no less, is singing her two beats an hour, one hit wonder leitmotif to the floppy haired, shoe-gazing teenagers? That’s a biker bar? Man, if a real biker walked in he’d be contractually obliged to beat them all to death with a tire iron; not that he would need the contract, he’d probably do it on principle.
- The homecoming queen is a prostitute and nobody knows but her customers? Yeah, right. If that had happened in Bundaberg, a town considerably larger than Twin Peaks, the entire town would have known about it – and in some cases you wish weren’t quite so memorable, gone for sloppy twenty-seconds – within a week. Random marginalised senior girl, yes; prom queen, not so much.
- That guy is a biker? Andpried the astronomically damaged prom queen away from the football hero who, despite his cavernous arseholery, appears to be fucking half the surprisingly un-white-trash white trash girls in the town? Surely he’d be reluctant to be riding that bike and working in a garage for fear that he might damage his poetry writing hand.
Yes yes, it is supposed to be “quirky” i. And it is television, that highly accurate mirror of reality. There is a line, though, past which quirky, funhouse reflections cease to allow disbelief to be suspended, when disbelief comes rushing back in waves of irrepressible stone monkeys. Twin Peaks didn’t just cross that line, it went so far beyond the line that it clocked reality and ended up back at the beginning, only to come up behind all of us at the line trying to see if we could spot it, and ran us over in the twenty-four metre long stretch limo it bought with all the money paid out to by the Julee Cruise dance remix (a jitter-bugging five beats a minute) and the Laura Palmer brand plastic tarpaulin.
i Yes, and thanks so much for that, Lynch. You just had to open the gate for all the rest of the quirk that washed over us after we’d kicked over the traces of the eighties and numbed us to the point that we ended up thinking the cast of Friends were charismatic and Colour Me Badd were cool instead of illiterate. I’m looking at you, Northern fucking Exposure.
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# Links for 2007-12-10
- Jash bookmarklet ✴
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# The irony is I found this transcript on Google
“Did you hear about these Austrian researches who claim that Google is creating unacceptable monopolies in many areas of the worldwide web?”
“Like what?”
“Well, duh! Search.”
“What? Search? Google has about a 57% market share. That’s a monopoly?”
“And Gmail”
“The web mail client used by one fifth as many people as Yahoo Mail or Hotmail each?”
“They are accessing knowledge about individuals and companies.”
“The knowledge that those individuals and companies put on the internet?”
“They operate many other services and are probably colluding with other players!”
“Probably? Is that, like, they are probably being run by a conglomerate of the Russian mafia and Detroit auto manufacturers intent on sabotaging alternative fuel vehicles?”
“Derka Dur!”
“Uh huh.”
“Where are you getting these
facts anyway?” “I Googl…oh. Shit!”
“Exactly.”
”...what’s that?”
“Oh no. Oh no, it’s Google! Run, save yourself!!”
“It’s too late. Oh I’m sorry I doubted you, I’m sor&^#signal lost
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# Please sir
Further World of Warcraft commercials I would like to see:
- David Hasselhoff and KITT, plays a Human Paladin and his black, strobing-red-eyed horse
- Gary Coleman, plays a Troll. Or a Draenei. Something tall, anyway.
- Alf. Both the alien and Summer Bay identity.
- Mark Harmon. “Hi, I’m an Elflord…but don’t tell McGee.”
- Mark Hamill. Wizard. Plays up the casting of sword enchantments.
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# ∗sigh∗
There’s comes a moment in everyone’s life when they look around at the detritus gathering at their feet like so much crumbling biscuit-constructed domicile and think ‘What the fuck am I messing around with someone else’s search algorithm?’ When you cast around for ideas and notice that there is this spunky, funky little company who have a search mechanism that might just work out, do some cool things and find a niche market all its own.
Of course, this moment always comes to me when the ‘someone else’s code’ has broken and I am trying to work out why. Previously it has been because a) Australia lost against England and I needed a way to stop Khendon commenting, or more likely b) I did things that required the indices be re-indexed. And, distressingly, it somehow always seems to happen on the same night that my net account gets shaped down from ADSL2 to 1996; I’m not even sure my current connection is reaching the dazzling, dizzying, asphyxiating speeds of your 56K modem.
I assure you, trying to fix the problem over a sub-56K connection is roughly as satisfying as delivering the Gettysburg Address to a crowd of Southern White Men – or Dr John Ray, same diff – via carrier microbe.
How did I use up all of my expansive allowance of twelve gig? I downloaded The Matrix 2.
Actually, no. I downloaded Das Matrix Zwei. You know the funny thing? The movie is so much better in German. Now I have an excuse to not understand the blizards of bullshit and I can, in all happiness and good conscience, cue up each action scene one after the other. Frown away, Neo. Rave, you hippy Zionites. Look for Walt, you very teutonic sounding Link. I won’t know about it cause wheee!!! Tight-leather clad Trinity just put a motor cycle through the roof of a building.
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# Willful obtuseness is alwas the funnest way to live
Tony Abbott conceded he was simply last – and pulled out…
See, now that’s why he was never going to get to be leader of the Government or the Opposition. Always trying to push his Catholicism on the rest of Australia; at least this time he had no power and had to merely lead by example with his demonstration of official Vatican sexual health policy.
...of the three-man leadership battle.
...oh.
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# Blackhawks?
There’s a lot of helicopters passing over my place at lowish altitude, lower than the news choppers normally fly. Half a dozen so far this evening by my count and D reckoned there were three earlier this afternoon.
Military coup? Brendan Nelson must really want the Prime Ministerial office.
