Where I’m @

20030128

Opera’s version 7 browser is out (get it for Windows via FTP or HTTP [you’ll have to choose mit or mitout Java yourself]), thankfully. Not that we don’t like Opera 6 (or 5, for that matter), but the new one surpasses the old one in many ways, most notably proper DOM support and expanded CSS 2 support. Let a thousand standards-compliant browsers bloom!

Web Evolution

Not having been around so much for the super early days of the Web (beyond hearing about this thing called a “web browser” and these things called “bots” and a company called “Netscape” going public and making scads of money), it’s interesting to see the evolution of a peculiarly web-based phenomenon. We refer, of course, to the various ways of playing with Google, which will soon change its name to Master Control Program to correctly identify it as the controlling force of the Web. In particular, Googlebombing has been enjoyable to watch mutate, from idle concept to consumer direct action and now into OMPG(?). This last phenomenon seems not to be that new, but it’s new to us, and we first saw it with the competition to get the top position on Google for “Jennifer Garner naked”, among Blake Ross, Ian Hickson, and Ben Goodger. Once again, pr0n leads the way.

20030123

In continued news of the dying and dead, Nell Carter died today in Los Angeles. Carter was one of the original cast members of Ain’t Misbehavin’, which reintroduced America and introduced us to the genius of Fats Waller. One of the few Broadway shows that we like wholeheartedly. Sure, she was in Gimme a Break for six years, but that’s better forgotten, in our opinion. Just because a show manages to run for that time doesn’t mean it’s good. (Kinda like how making it to the later rounds of American Idol doesn’t mean you have talent.) In fact, Carter had talent despite where her career took her. In a better era for her type of singing (we’re thinking of the Bessie Smith era or even the later Big Band days), she would have regularly had hit records. But a “belter,” as she called it, is no longer appreciated, and thus her high points were behind her. Think we’ll give the soundtrack a listen tonight.

20030122

No Links, Please, We’re Peevish

Right, so we’re back from Florida and all that. Sorry for the slip into first-person singluar last post; lost our composure.

“How was Florida?” people ask us. We are tempted to snap back “How do you think it was? It’s the third funeral in ten months, Pop flippin’ shot himself in the head in his car behind some strip mall somewhere and had on the car seat a scrap of paper with nice comments made about his wife (and, perhaps, quite literally his reason for living) after her recent death. He hadn’t even completely unpacked after moving from the place where he lived with her. He had no friends and a sense of honor and shame that wouldn’t quit. You should have heard his voice the last time his elder grandson was unemployed, expressing how he wished he could do something. He felt old, useless, friendless, scared, bereft of some of his favorite people in the world, and he was very possibly clinically depressed.” But that would only be part of it.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, funerals can in fact be quite a good thing. Beyond the textbook benefits (catharsis, sensory finality, etc.), it’s a good time to see family and remind oneself why one cares about the surviving people (if one in fact does care). We love our family very much, even the ones whom we don’t see very much. They’re different, but that’s because they are separate individuals. The concept that Reality is a figment of our imagination has a lot of merit, but being forced by blood and notions of familial responsibility to interact with people whose lives are so different reminds us that everyone everywhere is different. That we have something to learn from and teach to everyone. Banal? Perhaps, but it’s no less a hard concept to keep in mind and practice.

So how was Florida? Well, there was the moderately unpleasant Splitting The Belongings portion. Only moderately because while it felt odd to be playing eeny-meeny-miney-moe with the detritus of a life, we can’t say that we are unhappy to be the new caretaker of such things as the Please Don’t Kill Me patch from Pop’s flight jacket from WWII; the pocket watch belonging to our maternal grandmother’s father, a contractor and the source, along with Pop, of what carpentry ability we have; some of Pop’s pipes, which we are ambivalent about using; some photos from long ago; and some china that nobody else seemed to want.
There was the See The Family portion, which was great. We get along for the most part, and the not getting along is kept pretty private and is worked out with no repercussions. Food is hard to agree on, since we could be divided along lines of Cheap, Picky, and Semi-Gourmet. Additionally, we were in Florida, fercryinoutloud, not exactly Land of 1000 Good Restaurants.
And there was the Interment Portion, which wasn’t entirely our bag this time. While it was nice to have only a graveside service, it felt at the same time a little perfunctory. (Not in time, since the minister at the deceased’s church tends to meander a bit. Very frequently, in fact.) We declined to view the body, since we wouldn’t have been able to forget that it was mutilated. Apparently he did not look like he used to, but only because the embalmer was not on the A-list of embalmers.

So now Mom’s brother and sister have no parents. True, they also have no middle sister, but what a strange world, to have no parents. At ages 62 and 54 to be the top generation (almost, since they have two aunts left on this side of the family) — that will be an adjustment.

20030112

Somebody Please Stop this Broken Record

For the third time in ten months, I’ll be at a funeral in the coming days. This time it’s the remaining maternal grandparent, my grandfather. Like his own father, he died by his own hand, a shooting. These things seem to come in threes, so by all superstitions this should be the end, but really — can somebody just make it all stop?

20030107

We’ve been quite enjoying reading Simon Willison recently, and have been finding his interests to overlap with ours. Not as displayed on this blog, but still. A punctum of particular interest in the past few days was his link to a short report on how IE and IIS cheat collude to make each work faster on the web. Unlike the author of the short report, we do not admire Microsoft’s arrogance. Arrogance has been responsible for many of the world’s great disasters, like the institutionalization of Catholicism and Ayn Rand, and very few great successes.

20030106

We saw, for only five bucks fortunately, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers last week. Yes, Cecil B. DeMille would be proud, and it’s all very stirring, but it just didn’t seem that different from the first one, except in plot, and yet it also was very disconnected from the first one. What overrode even that for us, though, was an awareness (embarrassingly belated) of the racial overtones of the movie.

Certainly, we’re aware that Tolkien took a lot of the symbols from older myths, that there is more to the dark–light duality than retro-projected notions of race, and that not everything has to do with race. The fact that Gandalf comes charging down the hill on a white horse to vanquish all the black Orcs and Urukhai doesn’t bother us. People everywhere are afraid of shadow and pleased by light. There’s even an entire movie coming out soon which has as it’s premise that death comes to those who step out of the light.

Nonetheless, where are the dark-skinned humans in Middle Earth? Surely, for example, Tolkien knew that some of the best equine combatants in the world were in the Arab world, yet the Rohanians are to a man, woman, and child Nordic as the driven snow. But beyond that, since Tolkien can be casuistically written off as a product of his time, what of the casting for this movie? Surely it wasn’t explicitly written in the original literature that every character on the side of good was white? How is it that Peter Jackson’s casting agents couldn’t manage to make some of the white-hats less so underneath their hats? Non-traditional casting takes a lot of guts, though, and New Line was, most likely, not willing to pony up the moolah necessary for something other than proven box-office strategies.

And why does this matter? Surely filmmakers are entitled to make the movies they want and we’re not attacking our own sacred cows for their lapses in racial equality. All true, and yet. First, LOTR is a fantasy. Fantasies are positive things — not necessarily 100% positive, but visions in which we are supposed to want to take part. And this fantasy displays Good being upheld by white people and Evil being upheld by some white people but mostly by non-human dark creatures.^* Is this the ideal world, one in which white people are the only ones with nobility?

Second, there are very valuable lessons in LOTR, and for it to continue to be relevant to the world (not just to England of the 1940s), the values must be shown to be universal. We believe that the vast majority of people are experiential learners, which leads us to believe that this universality of representation must be visual as well as metaphysical. In the same way that the United States has some difficulty on the one hand in teaching that it is “a nation conceived in liberty” and on the other in admitting, inter alia, that the Constitution declared slaves and Native Americans only to be 60% of a person, so LOTR supporters will have a hard time keeping the literature alive if the roles are only played by Europeans. Shakespeare performers have gotten the message; why hasn’t Hollywood? We like the LOTR stories and do want them to be heard and learned from, but we want everyone to see themselves represeneted in the stories, both metaphysically and visually.

Further, as a friend at a gathering this past weekend reminded us, the humans soldiers on Sauron's side toward the end of the trilogy are depicted so as to make them seem Moors.