Our neighbors, pulling out all the stops. Yes, that is Santa in his sleigh up on the chim-i-ney. Note how the lights bounce off the hood of the Cadillac SUV.
Music: Gong :: Selene
Amy Egg at KQED
Amy entered one of her pieces into KQED’s Local Life gallery, where they’re having a public show / contest themed “Food as Art.” Amy has created a lot of work in this vein; it was tough to choose just one image.
Music: The Fall :: The Aphid
LJ Stats
LiveJournal has posted some recently updated stats, showing that of their 1.5 million registered users, about half are in some way actively posting / blogging on the LJ system. What surprised me most though is that users are 63% female, 36% male, and are overwhelmingly teenagers. Which in part explains why I always felt a bit adrift in the LJ community – it’s comprised primarily of 18-year-old girls. Of course there are tens of thousands of adults there as well, and it was with them that I formed community bonds, so I wasn’t really aware of the demographic skew toward teenagers at the time.
As many limitations as LJ has, it remains the only major blogging service with genuine threaded discussions, and the only service that makes sure that commenters see responses to their comments via email. These two features result in discussion activity that eclipses what you see on any other blogging system.
We’ll see what surprises the long-promised MT Pro has in store. So far… vapor.
Music: Robert Wyatt :: Lullaby For Hamza
Pet Kitty Gentle
Miles has learned to “pet kitty gentle,” which means Plato now lets Miles approach. Unbelievable patience on the part of the cat. Yesterday Miles walked up to Plato, who was lounging on the couch, petted him a few times, then took the pacifier from his mouth and tried to stick it in Plato’s mouth. Kitty was not interested and ran away, but I can’t help but think he appreciated the magnanimous gesture. I know I would have.
Pictured: Climbed up on the chair himself!
Music: Tom Tom Club :: L’elephant
LinkSys/Zyxel Alchemy
Unhappy with your DSL speed? Physically separate your LinkSys router from the modem by 2-3 feet and power cycle. Amazingly, we got 50% more speed this way. Apparently, there is some kind of body chemistry between LinkSys routers and some modems (ours is Zyxel) – an EMF bleed that interoperates in just the wrong way. We’ve always stacked these things before, no problem. But no longer. Amazing.
Music: New York Dolls :: Give Her A Great Big Kiss
Music of the Spheres
Reading a fascinating article in the current Wired (not online) about autistic savants and similar. The article quotes a section from Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” about a pair of twin boys who could not multiply or divide, and had great difficulty with addition and subtraction, but who nevertheless entertained one another for hours by reciting prime numbers up to 20 digits long to one another. They did not know how they knew the primes — they “just saw them.”
The article also refers to the young Andre’-Marie Ampere, who as a toddler could lay out complex arithmetic equations in stones and cookie crumbs, even though he could not yet read numbers.
To me, these are such amazing illustrations of the innateness, the universality of math. It’s not just a human construct. It’s out there, it’s real, it can be “tapped into” without any knowledge or advanced understanding of “how math works.”
Other prodigies tap into music in much the same way, like little Mo Kin the 3-yr-old xylophone prodigy. “Music is my favorite way of thinking,” says one child. The music of the spheres. Music, math, inspiration, we’re just floating in the plasma of them, grasping tendrils as they go by.
Music: Hakurotwi Mude, Cosmas Magaya :: Dande
Braxton at Victoria
Last-minute invitation to usher tonight’s Anthony Braxton show at the Victoria Theater (same place Matthew’s Hedwig shows were, also the venue for the benefit show with Tom Waits a few months ago). Billed as a ten-tet, but there were 12 musician on stage. Braxton as always the chess-playing, leather-elbow-patch jazz composer genius surrounded by crazy virtuosos. Not sure who all was on stage, but recognized Dan Plonsey, Jon Shiurba, Scott Rosenberg, Gino Robair, others? No bass, interestingly — out of respect to Matthew? (Matthew was on Braxton’s last album). Multi-layered orchestral improv, more cerebral than bodily (I know some people bristle when Braxton is described that way, but it rings true for me). Braxton has been a hero for years, but I’ve somehow managed never to have seen him before.
Music: Joe Jackson :: Kinda Kute
Post Written While On Hold (I Hate Our Health Care System)
I need to see a dermatologist about a funny dot of skin under my eye. My doctor tries to expedite a referral. But I have to wait two weeks for it to arrive. The number on the sheet that arrives yields a busy signal every day for a week. I call back my primary and am told that my doctor isn’t authorized to make a referral to a dermatologist and I need to call my insurance and get temporarily assigned a new primary care physician in order to get a working referral. Call my insurance (wade through interminable voice-activated phone tree, which of course does not transmit any of the information I’ve entered over to the worker who ultimately responds), who has no idea what I’m talking about. I give them number of my doctor’s office, he puts me on hold, calls them, I wait on hold for 11th time today. He gets back to me, then says my doctor doesn’t exist. He names a doctor I had two years ago, not my current. Everyone totally confused. Finally it’s (presumably) straightened out. Now I just have to wait another week for a replacement referral sheet and then make the appointment.
Seems like this kind of stuff happens every time I need to do anything in our medical system beyond having my blood pressure taken. And yet people continually refer to our health care system as “the best in the world.” I don’t get it.
Music: Sunny Ade :: Ja Fun Mi
Hate Comments
I regularly delete spam comments from this blog via MT-Blacklist, but have a policy of not removing non-commercial comments no matter how weird or off-topic, and regardless how much I disagree with them.
But this morning I awoke to find “white power” comments scattered across some older (totally out-of-context) posts, linking to a historical revisionist site “debunking the myth” of Martin Luther King. New policy: I leave up everything but commercial messages and hate speech. I guess “no matter how much I disagree” does have a threshold after all.
Music: Cab Calloway :: A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ But A Bird
Stephanie Reynolds
Just received news that a childhood friend has passed on. Fallen to metastatic breast cancer, most likely a result of treatments for Hodgkin’s disease, aka lymph cancer, which she had dealt with for more than a decade. Stephanie was in her mid-30s. Stephanie and her sister and me and my brother used to play together when we were neighbors in Santa Clara in the 70s, and our families were friends. Aside from a reunion in the 90s, we had mostly fallen out of touch. I had heard that she had beaten the disease a while ago, but apparently it returned with a vengeance. Stephanie (on the left, above, with her daughter and mother) was living a very holistic life in Hawaii with her boyfriend and their young daughter Aurora. Her mother tells me that Stephanie faced death with total acceptance and love, and that her guru guided her out of this world. Of course I find myself wishing we had stayed in better touch through the years. Blessings, angel. You were a very bright star. You still are. The s’mores were great.
Music: Tom Waits :: Grapefruit Moon