Author: shacker

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Ukes for Troops

Uke Players Ramadi Iraq Best sounds to come out of Iraq in a long time: Ukulele-playing Marines. Thanks to world-wide donations to Uke Jackson’s Ukes for Troops campaign, 15 ukuleles have already been delivered to marine bands stationed overseas. “In little corners all across Fallujah and Habbaniyah, Marines are plucking the sing-song strains of the South Pacific.”

“When I first opened the box, I asked myself, ‘What are these things doing in Iraq?’” said Gunnery Sgt. Jay D. Dalberg, a euphonium and electric bass player … “These are usually related to tropical beaches like Hawaii, not Fallujah, Iraq.”

George Harrison writes in the intro to one of my uke songbooks: “Some are made of wood and some are made out of armadillos – everyone I know who plays one is crackers.”

Music: The Beach Boys :: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
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A Love Supreme

SF Chronicle’s Greg Tate pays tribute to John Coltrane on his 80th birthday.

[McCoy] Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted. An avowed atheist and libertine friend once told me that when he wanted to hear God, he listened to Coltrane. He was hedging his bets that the religious ardor Trane’s music invoked in him would be deliverance enough for his sins.

Miles and Coltrane share a birthday. On the eve of Miles’ “fourthest” birthday, Miles greeted me home from work with a lovely bush in a rattan basket, so that “When you die and go away you won’t get lonely” (seems to be some Egyptian philosophy going on here). We then talked about life and death for a while, on the way to the park. Suddenly he stopped at a corner, looked around, and asked, “But daddy, why is our world THIS world and not another world?” Always knew kids ask a lot of hard questions, but was unprepared for this kind of cosmological probing.

Music: Patricia Barber :: Call Me
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Marquee Comes Home

Cerrito Marquee Back in the 1930s, an avenue near our house was graced by a gorgeous art deco movie house. It closed its doors in the 1960s and became a furniture warehouse. The marquee was nuked, and the entrance stripped down. We never thought much of it. In 2001, the building went back on the market, and locals found, to their amazement, that all of the original deco murals and mirrors inside had survived.

Around the time we bought our house, citizens organized a group to manage restoration of the theater, and we’ve been eagerly awaiting its re-opening. We don’t have any theater in El Cerrito, and the new owners also run a groovy theater in Oakland with couches in place of chairs, beer and pizza (ushers bring food right to your couch). Plans for this theater are similar.

We’ve been watching the slow construction of the marquee mount, architected from old photos. and this week the crowning jewel arrived from the manufacturer – the new marquee, exactly like the original.

Now we just need time to go to movies — and a cheap babysitter — and we’ll be all set.

One of our students did a multimedia piece on the restoration a few years ago — great resource for additional history and interviews with people who remember the the heyday.

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Chronicle Reporter Statement

A federal judge has sentenced two SF Chronicle reporters to 18 months in prison for refusing to betray sources in their coverage of the BALCO case. Lance William’s statement to the court is worth reading. Excerpt:

They demand that I give up my career and my livelihood — for if I betray my sources, I cannot work any longer in investigative journalism, work that requires above all the ability to keep confidences. … And now we have reached a time in our country when the prosecutors say they have the power whenever they choose to subpoena reporters and make them government witnesses, and that they are going to exercise that power. Judge, I despair for our Free Press if we go very far down this road. Whistleblowers won’t come forward. Injustices will never see the light of day. Our people will be less informed and worse off.

At the end of the day, a judge has to weigh the benefits to the public of gaining critical evidence for a particular case on one hand and of upholding values that are critical to a free society on the other. We allow hate groups to assemble because the right to assemble and speek freely is a paramount concern, and this case weighs a similar tension. But I think this judge is failing to clearly see the far-reaching consequences of his decision. Open this door and you’ve removed a brick from the wall of free press.

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Meat Water

As if bottled water for humans wasn’t already one of the most successful hoaxes in the history of capitalism, there’s now apparently a cottage industry in selling bottled water for dogs (and cats).

Mark Morford, Dog Water, Tastes Like Chicken:

Yes, it is meat-scented water. Even your dog is right now going, WTF? Like Britney Spears to new moms, like Dubya to presidential integrity, like Hot Pockets to actual food, they make all sensible dog lovers look bad. It’s also just sort of embarrassingly unnecessary. As if quenching his sheer dumb animal thirst at the garden hose wasn’t enough to make your dog blissfully happy. As if a world teeming with roughly 1 billion unclassifiable odors wasn’t already a wondrous canine olfactory buffet. Did you know that dogs have over 200 million scent cells? And that humans have a mere 5 million? The last thing dogs need is for their water to smell like synthetic cow. I’m just guessing.

Music: Tom Zé :: Sonhar
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Thin Air

Thinair This makes me happy. Bicycle air hose snaking out the mail slot of The Missing Link bicycle cooperative on Shattuck in Berkeley, free for the taking (shot with phone cam). Unfortunately, if you have Presta valves, you still have to go in the store to use the adapter, but they’re always cool about it. They even have a bike mount in the shop for public use so you can get your ride up in the air to work on. No need to ask, just go for it. Unfortunately, if you do need repair work done, you’re going to have to wait for the love – asked about a drop-in tune-up today and walked out with an appointment card for October 4.

Music: Screaming Headless Torsos :: Kermes Macabre
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Why I Love My Wife, #311

We’re engaged in pitched battle with a double invasion — raccoons and gophers. Discovered last weekend that the roof of our metal shed was blanketed in raccoon crap, though we have garden hose fights with them a couple times a week now.

As for the gophers, we heard recently that, as vegetarians, they hate the smell of meat, as well as that of feces. So stuffed cat poop and old hamburger into some of their holes. The technique has been amazingly effective (more so than the vibrating gopher stakes we’ve traditionally used), but the neighbors look at us funny. And we’re still seeing some new evidence of their presence. I had thought Amy felt squeamish about the idea of killing them, but that “delicate flower” of mine is full of surprises. From an email I got from her yesterday:

I saw the ground moving in the backyard today, something pulling on the grass from down below. Gophers. First, I clobbered the thing with shovel when the ground moved, but it came up again in a new spot, so the second time, I stabbed it with a pitchfork, and the pitchfork went right into the ground! I think I may have killed it. A very Bill Murray moment for me, minus the explosives.

Maybe nuclear deterrents aren’t off the list after all.

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: G Minor Complex
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Why HTML in E-Mail Is a Bad Idea

I receive email frequently on a piece I wrote many years ago, Why HTML in E-Mail is a Bad Idea. It was written before the days of weblogs, so that page doesn’t allow comments. I no longer have a whole lot of interest in the topic and don’t feel like keeping the page updated, so thought it might make sense to create a page here so the public could leave comments on the topic — agreement / disagreement, tips and tricks, etc. Feel free to leave your comments on the above-linked piece here.

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Heatmaps

Crazyegg-Heatmap Just-launched crazyegg has an interesting twist on site traffic analysis – the emphasis is on where users are clicking on your site, with an eye toward enhancing design to match visitor behavior. The heat map shown here shows area of highest clicks in warmer colors. Other views display similar perspectives, but numerically.

Contrast what crazyegg is doing with heatmaps to what the Poynter Institute does with them — both let you see where visitors are focused on a given page, but Poynter does it by watching your eyeball with a laser as it moves across the page, while crazyegg focuses on actual clicks. Which is a better metric of actual attention? Probably a pointless question, since not all attention points need to be clickable.

Music: Cat Power :: Shaking Paper

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