WWdN: In Exile

dawn

I woke shortly before the alarm went off. At the foot of my bed, Ferris heard me stir, and thumped her tail against the floor. Riley climbed off of Nolan's bed, and her collar jingled in the hallway.

I rubbed my eyes, climbed out of bed, and put on my robe. My dogs walked with me through the cold and quiet house. The aroma of freshly-brewed coffee met me in the kitchen, as the sun peeked over my neighbor's house.

"Every morning," I thought as I watched it climb the sky, "we trade the warmth, comfort, and safety of our beds for the mystery of a new day."

shuffle

For Christmas, my boss at Revision3 gave me a new ultra-tiny 1GB iPod shuffle. It's something I'd never get for myself, and I was a little embarrassed to accept it, but I've grown very fond of it over the last few weeks.

The whole point of the shuffle is to just let it randomly serve up music for you, so when I set it up, I told iTunes to load it up with random songs from my library, set it on shuffle, and hoped for the best. So far, it's doing really well.

This afternoon, while I drove around town doing some errands, the following songs came up in the following order:

Tool - Stinkfist
REM - Driver8
The Damned - New Rose
Charlie Parker - Relaxin' with Lee
Wilco - Summerteeth
Joy Division - Atmosphere

It's like it was reading my mind, man.

night

I know a lot of you read this via syndication and never get to see
comments (you're really missing out, by the way.) This was so
beautiful, I thought it deserved its own post.

In my last post, reader jamenta left the following quote:

"White Sirius glittering o'er the southern crags,
Orion with his belt, and those fair Seven."

L244 Prelude, Wordsworth

  I know this may sound pretentious, but when I read that, it took my breath away. I know that this may also sound pretentious, but I actually gasped out loud. It reminds me of Hemingway's six word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

When I wrote dusk earlier tonight, I thought that I'd follow up with a "night" post later this evening. I thought I'd write about how when I look up into the dark night sky from my back yard, I automatically look for Sirius, Orion and the Pleiades. Having read Wordsworth, I will just lamely add, "What he said."

dusk

As the sun set, beginning a long, cold night, I stood in my driveway, and looked around the darkening sky.

To the North and East, the mountains stood out against a purple and pink backdrop. To the South and West, a golden orange glow shone behind the leafless limbs of trees, black silhouettes that looked like cutouts in a grade school diorama.

Jets streaked across the sky, their contrails turned to gold. I looked straight up, and the first stars began to poke through, as daylight's veil faded away.

The air was cold against my face. The crescent moon showed a Cheshire Cat grin.

The Frantics

I took the title of my dirty words post from a Canadian sketch comedy group I have loved since high school. They're called The Frantics, and they absolutely rule.

I first heard a sketch of theirs called "Last Will and Temperament" (colloquially known as "Mister Muldoon's Will") on Dr. Demento in 9th grade, and drove my parents crazy by quoting it all the time, adding "and one for Jenny and the Wimp" to every possible conversation.

I only owned one of their albums, which though titled Boot to the Head sadly didn't contain the Mr. Muldoon's Will sketch (they make up for it with sketches like Ti Kwan Leep, Making up Dirty Words, and Driving Chicks Mad) and I played it so much I actually wore it out. (I later discovered that it is on a few Dr. Demento albums, and is also on Frantic Times, but back then, I only had it on a cassette tape that my friend made by recording KMET one night.)

The Frantics played a major part in my eventual decision to write sketch comedy and perform Improv because I would spend hours listening to that record, laughing my ass off, and thought, "Man, this must be so much fun to do; I'd like to do this one day.")¹

The Frantics' official website is awesome. They have YouTube videos of some classic performances, audio from Frantic Times Radio, and one of the sketches from Boot to the Head, A Piece of Pie (mild language, put earmuffs on the kids.) You can also buy all of their albums, including Boot to the Head. I bought myself a CD copy last year, and I thought it held up really well . . . but you damn kids today will have a very hard time understanding who Mrs. G. is, and why they wrote a song about her.

¹Major influences of mine as I got older and pushed me past the tipping point were the British Whose Line is it Anyway? and MST3K, both of which I came across in my early 20s.

InDigital Episode 10 - CES part 1

The latest episode of InDigital was released sometime between when I checked on Friday, and late last night when I saw it on our website.

How's that for specificity? Yeah!

I like this episode a lot. It's got some very funny moments, and the gadgets we looked at while we were at CES are either totally cool or totally ridiculous¹, so either way it should be worth your time to check download the show.

Links:

InDigital Episode 10 - CES Part 1.
InDigital discussion forum at Revision3.
My blogs from CES Day 1 and CES Day 2, Geek in Review from CES.

I hope you have the time to download and watch the show, and I hope you enjoy it. I'm always interested in feedback, so if you have something to say, you can say it here or in our Rev3 forums.

 
¹The ratio is heavily weighted in favor of totally cool, if you care about that sort of thing.

fun with dirty words

I carried a huge box of firewood through the store, resting it upon my shoulder so it would't give me a hernia.

When I got to the checkout, when Anne was waiting for me, she giggled.

"What?" I said.

"You've got wood."

"Nice." I said.

We got all of our items scanned, and as I was typing in my PIN to pay, she said, "Oh shit! I forgot to get orange juice!"

She bolted down the aisle, and ran to the back of the store to the juice cooler.

She came back a minute later, red faced, out of breath, and laughing uncontrollably.

"What's so funny?" I said.

"I almost picked up two, because they were on sale if you got two," she said, "and when I was running back through the store I realized that I would have been running through the store holding my jugs."

"Hey," I said, "I've got wood."

the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys

As a life-long science, astronomy, and science fiction nerd, I've looked up into the skies and wondered not if there's life out there, but where.

In the early 80s, when I was about 11 or 12, I was really worried about the possibility of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, and after watching The Day The Earth Stood Still on my friend's Betamax player, I hoped that we would have a similar extra terrestrial intervention which would force humanity to stop fighting among ourselves.

Two decades later, we still haven't been visited by V'Ger, and as far as I know, there aren't a lot of people building models of Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes. Personally, I don't believe we're alone in the universe (man, what myopic arrogance to think that we are) but people who are much smarter than me have been asking for a long time why, if we aren't alone, haven't we run into the Vogons yet?

The question was originally posed by Enrico Fermi, and has become known as the Fermi Paradox:

The extreme age of the universe and its vast number of stars suggest that extraterrestrial life should be common. Considering this with colleagues over lunch in 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi is said to have asked: "Where are they?"^[1] Fermi questioned why, if a multitude of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist in the Milky Way galaxy, evidence such as probes, spacecraft or radio transmissions has not been found. The simple question "Where are they?" (alternatively, "Where is everybody?") is possibly apocryphal, but Fermi is widely credited with simplifying and clarifying the problem of the probability of extraterrestrial life.

A Danish researcher has come up with an interesting answer (if not a complete solution) to the Fermi Paradox:

Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven't had enough time to look.

Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.

Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the "galactic habitable zone" of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation.

He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.

Of course, there are cynics (occasionally I count myself among them) who say that we're just not interesting enough for a species who has achieved advanced space exploration to bother with, but that's such a gloomy outlook, I'll trade Human Behavior for Bjork on this one.

(Story via Warren Ellis. Image via ecology.com)

scalzi on writing

John Scalzi has earned a spot on my very short list of Authors I Love And Will Read Anything They Ever Write Because They Rule. He's also earned a spot on my even shorter list of People I'd Really Like To Have A Beer With Because I Respect Them So Much.

Not only is John a brilliant writer (witness Old Man's War and The Android's Dream, both which deserve full reviews from me at a point in the near future) but he is an accessible writer, who clearly loves his craft, and is willing to share advice and discuss ideas with his readers. In fact, I've linked to his before, when he wrote Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want To Work at Writing.

If you're a writer, or just want to understand some of the creative process for writers, check out John's advice for newbie writers, and how long should you write each day. As I said last time I linked to him, John takes what could be boring and dry HOWTOs, and makes them interesting and informative.

regarding the infamous clown sweater

I never thought that the Infamous Clown Sweater picture would become a FAQ, but it has.

So if you're wondering exactly what the hell is up with me and Michael Chiklis, where that sweater came from, and why I was wearing it, I have your answer here: undone (the sweater post)