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Retro Toddler Propaganda

On 4th St. today, in a toddler shop, a pair of books caught my eye. Little Golden Book Classics The Good Humor Man (1964) and Scuffy the Tugboat (1946). The idea of of these reprints is to cash in on the sentimentality of people who were raised on the same titles and now want to share them with their own children. The pictures were groovy and the plots innocent (or so I thought), so we bought them.

Once home, it dawned on us that “The Good Humor Man” is not called “The Ice Cream Man” — that the book cover uses the actual Good Humor logo, followed by a trademark symbol. It’s the oldest example of product placement we could think of. The stereotypes inside are excellent: Mommy with her apron, Daddy with lawnmower and pipe, Tommy and his trains, Dinah and her dolls.

It takes a deeper read to uncover the insidious subtext of Scuffy the Tugboat. Scuffy starts out secure, at home, floating in the bathtub. But he soon grows discontent, wants more out of life. Gets his wish, ends up floating down streams, caught in a logjam, tossed in a flood. In the end, Scuffy is back home, in the tub, higher ambitions dashed, wings clipped, more than happy to conform to standard expectations for toy tugboats. “This is the life for me!,” Scuffy exclaims. One of the reviewers at Amazon cites the book’s “important lesson.”

Of course, for Miles it will be more like “bo!” (for “boat”). But it will be fun to pretend he’s being spoon-fed a diet of “the man”‘s pre-PC propaganda.

Music: Orchestra Baobab :: Ndiaga Niaw
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Class Schedules, Multimedia Training

Long stretches of time pass at work where I feel I’m work work working on things that never see the light of day — projects that end up waiting for someone else’s bits, or priorities shift, or… Today actually launched two projects that have been in lengthy germination.

Course schedules and descriptions have always been done in Word / Excel and then exported to ghastly spaghetti HTML (and PDF) for public consumption. Steps then taken to clean up code and add links. Every time there was a change, all that had to be redone. An ongoing battle last year I vowed to fix. This summer I databased all the course details, prof bios, etc. and built a PHP front-end for it. Descriptions too. The back-end was the larger project, but you can’t see that. No more Office docs, no more spinning wheels with menial conversion work.

The Knight Foundation funded a distance-learning site for mid-career journalists wanting to improve their multimedia reporting skills. So we produced a series of software and equipment tutorials and packaged them up with a course on multimedia reporting. There’s more there than meets the eye. We still consider it a work in progress, but good enough for jazz (I hate what that phrase says about jazz, but it sure rolls off the tongue nicely).

Music: Steve Lacy :: The Cryptosphere
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Fleischer on Being a Republican


“I guess if Ari had to rebel, being a Republican is better than being on drugs, but not by much.”

—Alan Fleischer , Ari Fleischer’s father, in The Advocate

Oddly, this much-linked-to piece seems to have gone offline. The same quote appeared in Newsweek, but isn’t online there either. Hmmm.

Music: Django Reinhardt :: DJangology
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Dedicated Box

All options exhausted — DSL too slow, Comcast seals off port 80, and we’re just outside range for 5.8GHz microwave. So colo it is. Scored a healthy G4 off craigslist and used Carbon Copy Cloner to image birdhouse hosting onto it, so our mail and web server is finally on a dedicated box. Transition went flawlessly. I’ll let it run for a week here to break it in, then haul it up to fortress geek (most likely) to ride on their T1. If anyone can suggest other East Bay colos, I’m all ears.

Music: Roots Radics :: The Death Of Mr. Spock
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Final Vinyl

Last night started to digitize some 20-year-old cassette tapes of unreplaceable music*. Have been threatening to do this for ages, then when I got it all together six months ago, couldn’t find the tapes! They surfaced in the move.

Old cassette deck –> RCA-minijack adapter –> Griffin iMic –> Final Vinyl

From there I’ll import the AIFFs into iTunes and add metadata, encode to MP3. Final Vinyl is a great piece of freeware, if a bit awkward. Gets the job done. First tape I stuck in got tangled in the capstan and detached at the spool. That one will need surgery once the hand is usable again.

* As a teenager I worked in a surf shop. “Al the reggae mailman” delivered our mail. He used to make these two-turntable reggae mix tapes with choice 70s cuts straight from the island. He would trade us tapes to play in the shop for wetsuits and other gear. This is not the reggae that shows up on Trojan and Studio One compilations – this is true rare groove stuff — music I won’t listen to often but that is burned in my soul from those years in the shop.

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: 317 E, 32nd
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Miles’ Brush with Stardom

Almost forgot: A couple of weeks ago we were at Hidden City Cafe’ in Point Richmond, Miles between us in a high chair banging Cheerios into a fine powder, when suddenly he breaks into that huge smile he reserves for people who are really turning him on. We turn to see who’s eye he’s caught this time, and it’s Elliott Gould, stopping to make goo-goo faces at a baby on his way out of the restaurant. He grins at us and slips out the door, probably too soon to avoid hearing one of us stammer, “Hey, isn’t Robert Gould?” Doi.

Music: Reggae Disco Rockers :: Baby
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See an Orthopod

Before and after, one wrist/arm with twin fractures, the other normal. Click if not squeamish. Although the E.R. told me to “see an orthopod in a few days,” my PCP wouldn’t give me a referral over the phone. Tomorrow I go in, no doubt, to waste two hours and half a day of work, take my blood pressure, and get referred to “an orthopod.” I hate that aspect of HMOs — against all common sense, referrals always required. Actually worked today one-handed, which is NOT half-speed, but around 1/4 speed since left hand has to float and search for each letter. Patience wearing thin, going to file a police report tomorrow and am now considering suing after all. I can’t change Miles’ diapers, can’t even pick him up. Can’t drive, can’t ride, can’t pull change out of my pants. Amy has to tie my shoes. My life is screwed for a month while the driver is scot-free. It’s a moral imperative to get her off the road, that’s a given, but I’m starting to think compensation makes sense too … unless it would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Music: Fila Brazillia :: Asthma
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Polyester, Desperate Living

Part of the fun of breaking limbs (Amy commented today that I’m starting to look familiar in a cast) is staying home, checking out, and renting movies. Saturday brought home a pair of John Waters films.

Waters’ goal for years was to make sure that each film outdid the last in bad taste … though Polyester broke that tradition somewhat in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. It’s still my favorite, and I still have one of the original Odorama cards in a box somewhere.

Desperate Living somewhat harder to watch unless you’re thirsty for 90 minutes of extreme, wonderful trash. Picture Queen Carlotta as a “special” actress missing two front teeth, half-spherical, giant red hair, ruling prone from her perch on a four-poster cot held aloft by Castro boys in leather motorcycle caps and black mesh shirts.


Peggy Gravel: The citizens of Mortville are beneath contempt. Only the rich should be allowed to live.

Queen Carlotta: I like the way you think. I’ll give you a trial run. Your first duty will be to help my soldiers spread rabies to the whole town. Do you think you can handle that?

Gravel: Oh, yes, your majesty. And I know just the person I want to give it to first.

Now imagine 90 minutes of similarly insane scene making and you get the basic idea of Desperate Living. If you’ve already seen your share of Waters’ films, his directors’ commentaries on the DVDs make them worth re-watching.

Music: Count Basie and His Orchestra :: Broadway
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Accident

So 80% of my bicycle commute is off city streets. The remaining 20% is still in the car-o-sphere, as I discovered this evening when a woman with no insurance (of course) hooked a sudden left in front of me. Half a second to react, and I was looking at a horizontal Honda in my path. That quick pang of inevitability before my front wheel hit her flank and I went sailing over the trunk. Right wrist and forearm took most of the impact, back and ribs caught some too.

What pissed me off was the way she started yelling that she didn’t see me, as if that somehow made it my fault. It was broad daylight, the sun was at her back, and she wasn’t on the phone. So then… what? Why are bikes so damn invisible to cars? As she continued her stupid defensive rant, I lay on my back halfway on the sidewalk and told her about Matthew, and how that driver “just didn’t see him” either. It started to sink in and she started to cry.

A very kind woman (a theology prof) gave me a ride home. Turns out she was connected to Matthew as well. Eerie.

Spent the rest of the evening in the emergency room. Two fractures in my right forearm/wrist. In a splint and sling for the next long while. I feel a monstro cars/bikes rant coming on — the one I’ve supressed since Matthew’s death — but typing one-handed is too slow.

Music: John Fahey :: Knott’s Berry Farm Molly
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XServe Arrives

The XServe arrived at the J-School today. Sysadmin is out of town, so it gets to live in my office for a while, bootstrap it through the transition from Wintel. Surprisingly large. Surprisingly loud. A work of art. Packed with software, ready to rock. In the rack. Dancing blue lights on the front of the box monitor dual CPU activity, which I haven’t seen since the BeBox went bye-bye. Afternoon spent RTFM’ing and exploring config options. Tomorrow we get down.