Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Computer me literate not
I had to laugh when, in a recent email, Eugie Foster rejoiced over me being a WordPress blogger. She thought I might be able to bail her out of certain problems she’s having with The Fix’s reviewer interface.
But if you had a moment, I’d appreciate any insight you had that would keep me from having to wade into the code and hack it up from scratch.
And a moment later she’s talking about tweaking Stylesheets, like that’s something I know how to do. I guess I’m flattered. And I guess this makes me more sympathetic to my patients who greet me with blank looks when I lapse into Medicalese.
Anyway, I’m wondering whether to upgrade to WordPress 2.3, but I don’t understand what any of the improvements mean. Not a single one. How can I appreciate native tagging support when I don’t know what a tag is? What are canonical URLs? And what is TinyMCE? It sounds like a midget rapper.
And I’m sure this post of Dean’s is funny, but I don’t even have the knowledge base to make a mistake like that, let alone understand why it’s so moronic.
Bottom line? All I want from WordPress is the ability to post videos. Lyvvie figured it out. Time for me to try, too.
D.
I love this guy.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a blog, and now that he has a new book, you can no doubt look forward to appearances on The Daily Show and Colbert Report.
Watch him not hawk his new book, Supercapitalism.
Interestingly, on his blog he recommends tax cuts to help avert the coming recession — but not tax cuts for the wealthy, who he correctly points out already spend as much money as they please:
It’s middle and lower-income Americans who spend more when their taxes are cut. And because the biggest tax they face is the payroll tax, the payroll tax needs to be cut in order to keep them spending and avoid a recession.
I say exempt the first $15,000 of earnings from payroll taxes for a year, starting as soon as possible. Sure, this may cause the budget deficit to widen a bit. But if the economy goes into the tank, the deficit will be far bigger.
Makes perfect sense to me . . . and we could easily offset the tax cut by rolling back some of W’s breaks to the super-wealthy.
D.
Saturday Flickr Babe: Dominatrix
Dominatrix Submissive Gimp, originally uploaded by fishsuckeggs.
I love the composition here, the heavy emphasis on narrative, the beauty of the sub. Reminds me a little of my friend Kenney’s paintings.
Live Blogging tonight: I expect I may be a little late, perhaps 8 PM PST. I hope some of you can make it!
D.
This disturbs me.
Oh, you say, but it’s only doll shaped like a cute li’l miniature baby.
No, it’s not. It’s a doll shaped like a 14 centimeter-long premature infant. That’s an 18-week gestational age, not-quite-200 gram premature infant. According to the site I just linked, the survival of premies 21-weeks gestational age or younger is 0%. Zero. So the person in the ad is holding a doll shaped like an infant that has no chance whatsoever of living to see his first birthday.
The manufacturer, Ashton-Drake Galleries, calls their creations “Heavenly Handfuls” and “Tiny Miracles.” One of their dolls is the “God’s Greatest Gift Tiny Sleeping Baby Figurine.” I hear choir music.
Is it just me? Do you have to be a doctor to see in this “tiny miracle” a world of parental grief, the suffering of a truly helpless and hopeless infant, and medical costs that could easily bankrupt a family?
No, I’m not the only one. Follow that link (a blog entitled “A Little Pregnant”, circa 2005) to witness this cruel joke of a doll as well as the blogger’s photoshopped spoof. From A Little Pregnant’s comment thread,
You forgot to mention that the baby should come with realistic hardened skin patches and white scars on its cheeks, from the surgical tape used to hold the baby’s oxygen tubes (CPAP and canula) in place. And underneath the adorable cap–which should, of course, be a tube of stockinette pulled off a roll and tied with curling ribbon–there should be another IV bruise, from the head IV done after all the little arm and leg veins had bruised and collapsed.
EXACTLY. But I doubt the target audience, whoever they might be, would think of that.
It gets worse. Far, far worse. Another “artist” apparently creates lifelike dolls to memorialize deceased preemies. The doll is described as “reborn” and has been given what I suppose might be called a “rebirthdate.” The “artist” is proudly Pro-Life.
Reality check: here is a premature infant born at gestational age 27 weeks, weight 280 grams.
I’m suspicious that the Ashton-Drake people have a political agenda, but I can’t prove it; so, for the time being, I can’t make this a Pro-Life (hah! riiiight) vs. Pro-Choice issue.
It’s a simple matter of poor taste.
D.
The beat-yourself-up meme
Dan tagged me. Here’s the idea: I’m supposed to identify my most frequent writing mistake, then tag five other bloggers to do the same.
Trouble is, I don’t make mistakes. But I do have a tic: I love exotic punctuation. Colons, dashes, ellipses, parentheses are like an irresistible plate of hors d’ouevres. Why stop at one? I’d rather fill up on them!
I think I have this tic because I’m a control freak, and I love controlling rhythm. I want the reader to hear the same linguistic tune that’s rolling through my brain, and I don’t trust mere commas and periods to do that for me. Why is this a bad tic? Because it draws attention to the writing. As I’ve said in the past, I would prefer the writing to drop away and leave the reader with nothing but story. Anything that calls attention to the writing (or, God forbid, the writer) breaks the meditation. For example, yesterday I looked at a column written by Christopher Hitchens, in which he not only used a two-bit word (etiolated) but linked it to its Dictionary.com definition. “Blanched” or “anemic” would have worked just as well, but Hitchens went with etiolated.
Now I get to tag five blogger-writers. I’ll link y’all later, when I have access to a computer that’s not Flintstone-aged. (There we go!)
Blog about it if you like, or answer in the comments. (Oh, and if you’d like to play and I haven’t tagged you, be my guest.)
With any luck, I’ll have something truly disturbing for you, either later today or sometime tomorrow.
D.
Falafel Boy is gonna hunt you down!
“[N]o longer will these smear merchants be allowed to get away with it, as long as I’m in the chair. As long as I’m here, I’m hunting them down. And that means everybody.”
Here’s the question. Has Bill O’Reilly finally lost it, or is this business as usual?
More from Media Matters (the Bugs Bunny to O’Reilly’s Fudd):
“I’m going to go right where they live. Every corrupt media person in this country is on notice, right now. I’m coming after you.” He went on to warn: “You smear somebody and you can’t back it up, you’re gonna get it. … You go after somebody’s family, you go after them and smear them with defamation that you can’t back up, I’m coming to your house. I’m coming to your house. You’ll have a camera up your nose. OK?”
Thirteen Ephemeral Thoughts
For several months, I’ve thought of doing this Thirteen, but it’s a treacherous theme. It’s not as bad as “Thirteen Things I Forgot,” but it’s close.
These are memories which flit into my skull unbidden. They usually have no relationship to the moment; I’m not getting food memories when I’m hungry, nothing that comprehensible. I suspect a mild case of temporal lobe epilepsy.
The only way I can write this is incrementally. Just as I cannot induce these memories, I usually can’t remember them for very long, either — until they come again. And they do. My memory is a vinyl record with more skips than music.
Let’s allow this one to grow over the course of the day. I’ll add to the post when the memories occur, so it may take me a while to reach thirteen. Onward!
Tangent on Sabbatical
Don’t forget the CONTEST!
If you’re not (A) a Tangent Online reviewer, (B) a friend of a Tangent Online reviewer, or (C) a friend of one of the main combatants, then you probably don’t know about the amazing shitstorm of the past 36 hours. You certainly won’t learn anything by checking out the Tangent site, nor has former editor Eugie Foster spilled on her blog. And you won’t get much enlightenment from me, either.
In Eugie’s words, she was “summarily dismissed.” I gather there were irreconcilable differences at the top echelon. Anyway, in the last twenty-four hours . . . wow. LOTS of people using their “REPLY ALL” button when they ought to have used their “REPLY” button, and as a consequence, we’ve all been witnesses to and participants in this mass desertion from Tangent. Turns out lots of other people feel the same way I do — wait. No. There’s a hell of a lot of emotion out there. I think I’m one of the few Vulcans.
***
I had a 2.5 hour general medical staff meeting this evening. Don’t ask. But the dream I had last night strikes me as a premonition.
It’s my mom’s Mustang, only it looks a hell of a lot better than my mom’s Mustang ever looked. And it’s mine now. But for some damned reason, I decide to drive it out of the parking lot while sitting in the passenger seat. Not surprisingly, I can’t control the car. Can’t steer worth beans, and I’m having a hard time getting my foot to hit the brake rather than the accelerator. I need to do a three-point turn to get out of the parking lot, and at each point, I’m bashing one thing or another — industrial garbage can here, some badass’s fancy truck there. I’m in big trouble now.
And my Mustang doesn’t look so hot anymore.
No, no major disasters at the meeting, but I feel like someone’s cleaning my ears with ice picks.
D.
P.S. Know what’s depressing? If it weren’t for this boob photo, the fact that I linked to these nude photos of Heather Graham, or my posting of J. Lo’s big ass, I’d be getting something like twenty hits a day.
Don’t believe me? Post those three photos to your blog (or just link the Heather Graham nude photos, like I did) and watch your hits shoot through the roof. It’ll take some time, but it will surely happen.
PPS: This cheered me up: Itzhak Perlman Plays Klezmer.
The maestro joins four klezmer groups: Brave Old World, The Klezmatics, Andy Statman and the Klezmer Conservatory Band for a joyous get-together with unforgettable Klezmer melodies. As he says of the experience, “I caught the bug!”
. . . maybe now I can get to sleep.
Birthday Cake for Kate
It’s Kate‘s birthday today (and mine). Y’all know I want pie for my birthday. But Kate?
She wants cake.
Challah!
Enter my Challah baloo contest (scroll down a bit, you’ll find it) and you, too might win Baking with Julia, the best baking book ever written. As an example of its awesomeness, I’m going to give you Julia’s challah recipe.
Julia calls challah “Eastern European brioche.” Egg bread, in other words. Few breads have a richer taste, save perhaps a good pumpernickel. Challah isn’t great sandwich bread — it’s a bit too sweet for that — but it’s unsurpassed for bread-and-jam, French toast, bread pudding, or dessert panini. (For my dessert panini recipe, see the comment thread for the contest.) It’s also my bread of choice for just plain eating, no adornments, although I wouldn’t sneeze at a shmear of butter.
In addition to the ingredients below, you’ll need parchment paper, a pizza peel (or a cookie sheet without a raised edge), a food-safe paint brush, an instant read thermometer, and lots of loved ones to share with. This recipe makes TWO big loafs.