February 28, 2003
James Joyce's Ulysses and 2001
There's an interesting question in this week's edition of Roger Ebert's Answer Man column. Reader Alberto Diamante wonders if the following passage from James Joyce's Ulysses was the inspiration for the final image in my favorite movie, 2001:
"Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever would he wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets ... to the extreme boundary of space ... he would somehow appear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and ... return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors ..." (Penguin edition, P. 858).
Very interestering. Ebert emailed Arthur C. Clark, who said he never read Joyce, so it may be just a coincidence. On the other hand, Clark and Kubrick collaborated on the plot, so the influence may have come through Kubrick.
I find the passage quite intruiging, but I'm still not going to read Ulysses.
February 27, 2003
Why free archives are a great thing
I found on Plastic.com a great old article from MSNBC describing the Republicans circa 1999 anti-war arguments. It really goes to show how it's all about politics, not logic. Aren't free archives great for quickly exposing hypocricy?February 26, 2003
I wish I spoke Spanish
I want to speak Spanish. Not just to communicate with all the latinos in the Bay Area, but I've noticed that the Spanish channels on TV are crystal clear (I have no cable, I only get broadcast signals), and the movies they show are great. I mean they are as good as a decent cable movie channel. Just today I saw they were showing Raging Bull (dubbed in Spanish). (Hey, look who wrote the plot summary!).
So, obviously I could see some good movies on TV for free if I knew Spanish. But I actually took 5 years of Spanish in Junior High and High School. I really sucked at it, and to this day can only order a burrito (and barely that). And I don't want to ever deal with learning the "past pluperfect" irregular form of something again. So I think watching good movies in Spanish will have to remain an idle fantasy.
More on emacs and weblogger.el
I was able to get the vanilla, out-of-the-box versions of xml-rpc.el (version 1.6.1) and weblogger.el (version 1.2) to work on my work machine. But my home machine still has problems. I wonder what the difference is. Probably a discrepancy in the url package versions, I'm guessing.Buffy ends this season
This year I finally started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a regular basis. It really is a great show, although my wife claims that only teenage girls like it. But, as usual, I get into something pretty much as it's all played out - it was just announced today that Buffy is ending as of this season. Not a huge suprise, it was rumored for a while, and it seems that this season would be a good one to end with, them trying to fight the "First Evil" and all. I'm sure much carnage will ensue. Well, now the season can end with a bigger bang then I was expecting...
February 25, 2003
The last minority that it's OK to make fun of
Hillbillies are a minority, no doubt about that. And it's always been OK to make fun of them as far as I an recall. But a new reality show based on The Beverly Hillbillies has irked a Southern Senator.
Is it OK to make fun of hillbillies? Well, we probably shouldn't make fun of any group. And they are poor and disadvantaged, as much as any minority. And although Southern rural areas are known for racism, it certainly isn't confined to the south (rural Oregon used to be particularly bad), or to rural areas (there were many anti-black riots in old New York). However, I would believe that the rural south is pretty much as bad as it gets. Still, discrimination is discrimination, and this show would be offensive if it was about any other ethnic group. And it basically is just another way for the middle class to laugh at the lower class. So I think the senator has a point.
February 24, 2003
Blogging getting co-opted?
Salon reports on a new trend on Hollywood blogging from the set of new movies. However, the one example is an independent film, so it's unclear whether it will ever catch on. With behind the scene movies to make, interviews, award shows to attend, and now bloggers getting in the way, it's just amazing any movie can ever get made.
Yes, this may mean that the grassroots phenomenon of blogging will eventually get co-opted by the corporations. However, as with the web in general, the independent sites should remain the most interesting. Corporations will always be hindered by being big corporations with policies controlling outbound content. It's a bit hard to blog under those conditions, as the article points out.
Switch to a different emacs interface
I found that besides blogger.el there are a few other packages to blog from emacs. I found mt.el and weblogger.el. I found that weblogger.el has a good UI, but could not upload if you had any tags. mt.el got around that problem by escapifying text, but I found the UI was not quite as easy as weblogger.el. I've modified weblogger.el to do the same escapification, and it seems to work well for right now. I'll send my modifications to the author and hopefully the next version will just work.
February 20, 2003
Ben comes to visit
My friend Ben Hsu came and visited the Bay Area last weekend. We went out and ate a Little Sichuan. Here's a picture of him holding Annelie. You can tell he's not quite comfortable with babies yet.
February 17, 2003
My first protest
I'm ashamed to say that today was the first time I've been in a protest march. But I've been progressively more and more dismayed at the seemingly inevitable invasion of Iraq. When I heard about the anti-war rally in San Francisco, I knew it was time. Plus, my father was in town, and although he's not anti-war, he knew it would be a great experience to go there. So we went. The march started, haltingly at first, but we slowly marched down the street to City Hall. There was many interesting things to be seen. The crowd itself was interesting, a mix of age groups, from mere babies to fairly old people. The signs were great. My personal favorites were one that said "I want to live in a democracy, not an empire". Another, along the same lines, had a quote by Thomas Jefferson: "The destiny of America is not empire, but light". One sign said simply, "No". There were many other interesting signs, too many to list here. Besides the signs, there were also dancers depicting bombing victims, sharply dressed men in suits covered in blood imploring people to give up and go back to shopping, and a whole line of people in George Bush masks. I have pictures of the last two. When we got to City Hall, there was a massive crowd. It took at least a half hour to get close to the stage. Danny Glover was MC'ing the event, and Joan Baez was also there, along with other luminaries of the protest world I didn't quite know. My feet eventually got tired and my father and I went back to BART, where it was about 100 times more crowded then I've ever seen it. I happend to run into a researcher I knew at NASA, who was there with his wife, daughter, and parents. He was always running around the halls at NASA ranting about Republicans, so I probably could have expected to see him there. According to the SF Gate article about the protest, about 200,000 people showed up. I can believe that. Of course the "liberal" CNN's headline on the main page of CNN.com says "Thousand rally in San Francisco to Protest War". Way to play down the numbers, CNN. Going to the actual CNN article the headline changes to "Tens of thousands in San Francisco say no to war". Shouldn't 200,000, or the 150,000 of the prior police estimate actually qualify as as "hundreds of thousands"? It just goes to show how the media is actually fairly conservative. And then we get to hear about how all the protests, all over the world, have not swayed the administrations opinion. What's worse, even formerly respected allies like France and Germany are being insulted by US officials. Evidently, it is not important that most of the world, and large segments of the US population feel so strongly in opposition to the war as to march on the streets. Can someone explain how America loves democracy when we don't listen to world opinion, and don't listen to opinion at home? At any rate, here are the pictures:
