Month: December 2009

Happy Christmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year to you!

Brunch with Granny was delightful, and we even managed to suck up the fact that the heat wasn’t working in the restaurant, keeping our coats on while we ate eggs bennie and other breakfast comestibles and chocolate apricot ganache for dessert. All of her descendents, less Jeff, were present; he will go after Christmas. Much thanks to Garry and Loki for subsidizing the event.

I also got to meet the new granddog, Charlie; my cousin Greg has acquired a pug.  There was a picture of Charlie in a Christmas outfit, which given that Charlie is less than six months old is pretty funny.

The smell of sausage stuffing cooking is filling the whole house, borne on the aromatics of browning onions….

I took one biscotti loaf to Victoria to cook once we arrived; again, a Christmas message carried via the brain by the nose, as the gorgeous smell of baking fills the house.

Watched the intro to a new game, Borderlands, last night, and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Margot’s introduction to the grandprimates was a success.  However she only ate two teaspoons of food and drank maybe four tablespoons of water while she was there, so she was pretty upset.  She also figured out who the boss primate in that household was PDQ and thus serenaded pappa for about half an hour at dawn yesterday from the other side of the bedroom door.  She was lucky she didn’t get punted down the stairs.  She was certainly more vocal than I’ve seen her in quite a while.  She was an angel on the trip home and when I put her in the driveway trotted straight to the stairs to be let in.  The boys ignored her absence and pretty much ignored her arrival.  She went straight to her water dish and tanked up.

I have to get back to encouraging ingredients into the shape of a meal.  Everybody play safe and don’t slip on those frost covered steps.

I know nothing about modern music

Jeff and I recently listened to Pet Sounds.  There were a lot of things I didn’t know about the album (I had previously heard it at 15 in my girlfriend Liz’s bedroom) but I sure as hell knew nothing at all of the existence of this bassist. This one’s for you, Peggy.

Thus the title of the post.  I can’t believe I never heard of this woman; her list of credits is so long and so impressive that it’s just painful.

Jeff, Paul and I watched Glory. Matthew Broderick is magnificent as Shaw.  The supporting cast is superlative.  And it’s another one of the MANY movies Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman are in (Washington won a best supporting actor for his role).

The eternal question

The eternal question can be compressed into three words.  Is it crap?

I force myself to ask this when I read paragraphs like this.

About halfway through I think, could Zittrain’s Thought Experiment (ZeeTeeEee(=) be a good band name?  I think, anh, it’s too arty even for me.  A little after that I think, well, hasn’t human intelligence always been a commodity?

Makes you wonder who the first man was who got paid to be smart, and what he got paid in, and what the hell he was paid to do.  If it was a woman, I hope she was a midwife and they rubbed her feet.

With no further excuses, herewith the paragraph.

Crowdsourcing’s power to compartmentalise and abstract away the true meaning of tasks turns human intelligence into a commodity. Zittrain’s thought experiment shows how it could potentially entice people into participating in a project that they otherwise wouldn’t support.

Can you find anything wrong with the foregoing?  I mean, this paragraph ignores that the commoditization of human intelligence is a frequent occurrence; has been for millennia as best I can make out. The scale it’s happening on is something new.  The article this paragraph was culled from is here.

Uh, no thanks

The other day my new beau said something in plain English.  It had absolutely no curse words. It was just about the funniest thing I have heard in ages, funny in that “OOO, ya got me sonny”, kind of way.  And I can’t post it.  Grr.  Believe me, it was good.

The other thing he says is “Blog it!” whenever something particularly outrageous, funny or bizarre happens.  And I have to respond, “If I can figure out how to do that without sounding like too much of a cheesewit, I’ll get right on it.”

One two three

Jeff’s car is at the Krankenhaus for rotors; Margot is quacking like a duck because that is actually an inhalation noise vibrating against her soft palate and she is otherwise ludicrously healthy; I have finished putting “Written in Water” into sheet music format; I am now off to Richmond to chill with my new friend.  Xenon is being played in the basement as I type.

Ever since Gilgamesh (happy Solstice) (caution, language)

Now this is not your ordinary movie review.  I am not going to address the plot holes in Avatar, two of which you could fly a phalanx of Bell choppers through.  I am not going to praise or damn the movie, as I have previously made it obvious that I liked it.  What I am going to do is re-vision this work in the context of a bilious question that was posed on io9.

When are guilty white people going to stop making movies like Avatar?

Continue reading Ever since Gilgamesh (happy Solstice) (caution, language)

#Avatarbacklash

The intarwebs are buzzing with excoriating reviews of Avatar, and the haters are out in droves.  American conservatives hate it because of the political tenor of the movie, SF fans hate it because it’s like SF before cultural relativity was examined in any kind of critical detail, and film fans hate the … pick one … score (which I liked, sorry, always been a fan of James Horner), script, plot holes (two of which are so immense that they render the action impossible), acting, artwork, and you name it.

I am very glad that my capacity for innocent enjoyment is greater than theirs.  The haters may be telling the truth, but I don’t care.  It may be a half billion dollar mashup of Ferngully meets Dances with Smurfs.  It’s still worth seeing.

Food

Last night I fed Tom, Peggy, Ben, Paul, Keith and Jeff pork roast done with garlic, bacon and bay leaves (it made the house smell REALLY GOOD) and many, many vegetables, including beans and cauliflower and broccoli and beets and potatoes.  Katie and her housemates were invited, but Katie was already on tap to do shrimp and spinach canneloni that night so she turned me down with thanks.  It would have been an ‘add two leaves to the dining room table and where the hell are the chairs going to come from’ evening if they HAD come, so I don’t complain and I added some chairs to my want list.

Margot quacked like a duck for the folks.  She has a doctor’s appointment on Monday; she needs to be checked out for heart problems, which are quite common in Persians and don’t necessarily show up during the work up prior to neutering; her quacking and breathing issues may be normal Persian noisiness or it may be something more sinister.  She’s so placid, except when I’m brushing her, that she doesn’t appear to have any problems otherwise.  I keep telling myself that she’s like a kid… I get to look after her for a while, and then she’ll leave my life; I’m attached to her but I hope not too intransigent on the subject.  And it’s my own damn fault that I brought her into a household where it would be impossible to keep her as an indoor cat.  She gets FILTHY sometimes, having all that fun out in the rain and dirt.  If it’s really pouring she won’t go out, but light precip doesn’t seem to register.

Back to the Friday Feast.  I said to Ben, “There are two pinball machines downstairs.”  He said, “I’ve never played pinball in my life.”

shock,  horror!

We fixed that. Obviously he must play pinball before he goes to Hudson’s Hope.  (He got a job with Hydro).

After Tom Peggy and Ben went home, I decided I needed both air and exercise, and Paul and I wandered around the neighbourhood looking at the Christmas lights (Keith and Jeff were busy killing zombies in the trial version of Zombie Apocalypse). There are some spectacular displays, especially close to the school.  Then we came back after about half an hour and I picked up the guitar and composed another (what, another frakking tune, what the ???) song, which I think is going to be called “God Willing” and be about the immigration of my ancestors to Canada. No lyrics yet.  I know; for an atheist, I’m such a sucky accommodationist.  But you would be too if you had so many religious relatives, who also happened to be pleasant, intelligent and hard-working.

That’s the single biggest issue I have with the media atheists (I FLATLY REFUSE to use New Atheists.  That’s like calling people who are Christian NEW CHRISTIANS. Atheists are atheists, there’s nothing novel about them, and you can see their lineage throughout history from Epicurus forward.)  They are on the “All theists are stupid” train, whereas I am on the “All human beings have cognitive biases, and atheists may have at least one fewer than theists” train.  Also, many media atheists have the distinct advantage of not giving two shits what their religious relatives think of them, an advantage I don’t have.  It’s why I don’t give vent to some of my more shocking opinions (yes, hard to believe, isn’t it?  But much goes on behind my face that doesn’t come out in my blog).  I was a lot more venty when I started this blog, as I recollect.   I don’t usually go back into the old format portion of the blog unless I’m trying to figure out what happened in say, July of 2005.

Keith called up the optician’s office he was still working at on Saturday (he didn’t give that other job completely up, the wise soul) and hopefully he’ll be getting more hours later this month.  It’s hard to be a young person these days.

Today, AVATAR.  I am very stoked.  Now to check the hellacious mess that is the Translink site and plan my trip itinerary.

I so enjoy feeding people.  It makes me feel good, and that was a damned fine roast.  I miss the rosemary bush from the front of my old house.  A sprig of rosemary in the roasting pan would have made it even more wondrous.