Bloody Mary

So, the guys from South Park have done what they do best and taken their particular art form to a new level with the "Bloody Mary" episode, which raised howls of protest (well, a press release) from Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who were concerned that the Holy Mother not be depicted with blood spraying from her vagina. They demanded action from Comedy Central, and got it. The episode is now being censored, a scheduled rerun of the episode having been pulled from the schedule.

None of this is that surprising because it's no secret that freedom of expression has never been a particular concern of the Catholic Church. For much of their history, Catholics have engaged in the censorship, torture and murder of those who disagreed with them and said so, therefore I suppose this can be seen as a step in the right direction.

I have a few observations on this matter, though, that I'd like to work through.

First of all, I have seen the episode in question. I don't watch South Park religiously (intended) any more and hadn't watched it when it aired. However, after Mr. Donohue's fuss spread through the internet/blogosphere, I became aware of it and downloaded it immediately. This is the delicious irony of this kind of attempt at censorship in the 21st century: not only does it not work, but it most often has the opposite effect that the commotion acts as high-quality advertising. This episode will certainly live forever on the net as the "censored" episode. In that respect watching Mr. Donohue "protect" his religion by using the weapons of press release and censorship is something like watching a dog trying to program a VCR.

Second, I must take issue with this quote:

“Already, we are being deluged with hate mail that is as obscene as it is viciously anti-Catholic. All because we exercised our First Amendment right to request that Comedy Central not offend Catholics again! But we’re used to such things and will not be deterred.”

Presumably by "First Amendment right", Mr. Donohue is referring to freedom of speech, although there are several other rights described in the First Amendment. In other words, then, Mr. Donohue is complaining that South Park fans are using their freedom of speech to protest the fact that he used his freedom of speech to squelch someone else's freedom of speech. (Never mind that the first amendment is irrelevant to all of this, since it only prohibits the Government from making laws that restrict speech.)

Third, let's assume that, hypothetically, there is a large subset of the population that are tremendously offended by images and other works depicting torture, execution and pain inflicted upon innocents. Would Mr. Donohue advise representatives of this group to pressure television networks to censor such images from the airwaves? Of course, depictions of crucifixion would easily fall into this category of imagery.

Bottom line: If you don't like something, just don't watch it. Stopping me from watching it just makes me curious and annoyed.

Golf

Rules of the card game "Golf" as taught to me by my Mom over the holidays:

A game for two or more players, although you could probably play it solo by trying to get a score below 100 points or something.

• Choose a dealer somehow.
  
• After each hand the person to the dealer's left becomes the next dealer.
  
• A game consists of 18 hands. The goal of the game is to get the lowest score. Scoring is as follows:
  Pairs of cards of the same rank count as zero points. Single cards are worth their rank value (ace=1, two=2, etc.) with the exception of Kings (0 points), Jacks and Queens (10 points), and fives (-5 points). Additionally, the Queen of Spades is worth 13 points unless paired with another queen.
  
• The dealer deals 4 cards, face down, to each player.
  
• Each player chooses two of their four cards to be "hidden" and they must not look at these cards. Players may look at the other two cards but only until they have taken their first turn. The play starts with all four cards face down.
  
• The remainder of the deck becomes the stock pile and is placed face down so that all players can reach it. The top card is turned face up to form the discard pile.
  

Play begins with the player to the dealer's left. On each turn a player may do one of the following:
(a) pick up a card from the discard pile and replace one of his face down cards with it. The new card is turned face up in front of the player and the old card is placed face up in the discard pile.
(b) pick a card from the stock pile and either discard it, or replace a face down card as in (a). If the stock card is discarded, then one of the player's face down cards must be turned up.

That's it. Quick to teach and play. Each hand consists of four turns of drawing/flipping/discarding a card and then you add up your score, low score winning. It's fun because there's a certain amount of strategy in the decisions you make in drawing and flipping cards, but there's also a strong element of chance. Try it.

The Next Wave of Outsourcing

Pac Man Evades Ghost At U. Mich.

Watch This.

Brilliant! Now imagine the amount of planning and effort that went into dreaming up that stunt and making the costumes. All to create a few minutes of comic stress relief for your fellow students during exams. These guys should get a medal. More people should do stuff like this.

The image above is a piece called Race Condition whose title appeals to me because I'm a geek. It's part of a collection of Pac Man Art by Jim Davies.

pltool

In past months I've been doing a lot of work that required using shell scripts to automate build procedures and the like. It seemed that I frequently needed to be able to edit Mac OS XML property list files from these scripts, which isn't exactly easy to do in a safe, predictable way from a bash script. So, here is my solution: pltool, an OS X command line utility that lets you crack open property list files and create/modify/delete various kinds of values within these lists.

If you'd find this useful, please help yourself.

Update: Version 2 is now posted, fixing a bug with date handling, and adding some support for time zones.

WTF?

If you're a programmer, you'll enjoy The Daily WTF. Either that, or you'll not understand what the point of the site is, in which case, you suck.

One Post Per Day

During my brief period of unemployment, I've been trying to come up with one blog post per day, in order to exercise my very-rusty writing skills, blow out the dust on my blog pages, and give me something to do.

Of course the hard part about posting something every day is finding something to write about. Generally, I'll write a new post:

1. When I have some modestly interesting question or point to make.


2. When I think of a story to tell or there's something on my mind.


3. When I think I can add something to some debate/discussion.


4. When I find something that I think is worth linking to.

With regard to item (d), today was easy.

Best 404 Ever

I found it via this URL: http://www.beoworld.co.uk/myidealsystem.htm

Update: Two more candidates from Dete:

http://www.homestarrunner.com/bogusurl.html

http://www.homestarrunner.com/systemisdown.html

RAV Line In Our Backyard

Well, for better or worse, the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver light rail line construction project is under way and sometime between 2007 and 2009 we'll have a station here in Yaletown right at the junction of Mainland and Davie street. Of course, there's no room for a transit station there, so like the rest of the RAV line downtown, this one will be underground. They're going to use the "Bored Tunnel Construction" method, which means using a Tunnel Boring Machine, much like the process that was used to build the Channel Tunnel between England and France in the early 90's.

Despite the potential for annoyance during construction (the RAV line passes one block from my home and directly under my new office a few blocks away), I think this is pretty cool. For one thing, this puts us directly on a transit line to Pacific Center, which will be quite convenient for getting downtown quickly if we need to avoid the rain. I'm not sure if/how they'll link them, but the stop at Pacific Center is just one block from the Granville SkyTrain station, so that could make catching the SkyTrain a little less of a hike -- right now we have to walk down to the Stadium, which is seven or eight blocks. And of course, we'll have a convenient transit link right to the airport and down into Richmond, which I haven't really had a need for up to this point, but who knows....

Of course, besides the downside of construction, there's the added potential for crime in the vicinity of a transit station, so having RAV in the neighbourhood might turn out to be a bad thing. But with gas prices where they are, I'm all for more transit in this town.

Dean Gray Tuesday

So, today is Dean Gray Tuesday, in which various websites are hosting copies of a remixed version of Green Day's American Idiot album entitled "American Edit" -- a "mashup" with other artists' songs. This is in protest over Warner Brothers (Green Day's label) sending a Cease & Desist letter to the remixers.

I'm not a huge fan of the art of the DJs who produce these mashups, but I do appreciate and understand that they're doing something uniquely creative and interesting, if nothing else. I've downloaded "American Edit" and think it's at least a listenable compilation -- better than the few other mashups I've been exposed to.

Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow casts Warners' action as censorship, which seems a little harsh to me. To my eyes they aren't "censoring" the work because they don't like the content and wish to suppress the work. They own the rights to make money from Green Day's album, and they're not getting anything from this album. I suppose that in some respect, this mashup is taking up space on people's iPods that could be used for a Warner album.

The defense offered by Doctorow is that American Edit is a non-commercial work and that Dean Gray requested no money for their work, and even suggested donations to charities that Green Day supports. Furthermore, he argues that the existence of American Edit will not hurt sales of the original album, and could in fact help it. I'll grant all that, but isn't it kind of irrelevant? Warner owns the copyright, and you need their permission to use their work.

On the other hand, I think that the mashup artists are legitimate artists and that they deserve to be able to produce their art, and even make money off it. Unfortunately, their 'instruments' are samples of other artists' songs which are subject to copyright, so there ought to be some way for this to happen without them having to go hat in hand to all the copyright owners' lawyers looking for permission. This, I imagine is the point of this whole stunt.

In some sense, all music is a 'mashup'. Imagine if the companies that make musical instruments were to 'copyright' the sounds of their products. Any musical composition would then be a mashup of a little bit of this guitar sound, this synth, that drum, etc. and those companies would be in a position to demand control over all works produced with their products.

On the other, other hand, I think Warner's C&D is a little unimaginative. What they should have done, in my sarcastic opinion, is to grab the album from americanedit.org, use their legal department to clear copyrights to all the sampled tunes, and then rush a CD to market in time for Christmas. That way they'd get paid and it'd be Dean Gray suing them.

Dreaming of a Fright Christmas

Message of Christmas Marred by Violent Santa Displays

The Worst Seuss

I've always enjoyed Dr. Seuss's children's books. Before I had a child I had not read very many of them, but the ones I had read always struck me as jovial, funny, silly and interesting in a quirky sort of way. I had a friend roughly my age who was a big Seuss fan at the age of 3, and this never seemed odd to me. A couple of years ago I read Oh, The Places You'll Go! and thought it was just great because it wasn't just a happy-happy isn't-life-always-wonderful joyfest of unrealistic puffery. Fox In Socks is really fun too. In our culture, your sort of supposed to like Dr. Seuss, so I just did.

But I have to admit, the more Seuss I read, the more I believe that sometimes the good Doctor wasn't really trying very hard. The worst I've found is There's a Wocket in My Pocket where Theodore completely phones it in with a deluge of made up rhymes. A WOSET in the CLOSET? Sure, the appeal of some of Dr. Seuss is the images of strange and wonderful places and creatures that have unusual sounding names to go with the other-worldly scenery. But come on... have you noticed how often these names conveniently form a rhyme? I mean, a NOOTH GRUSH on my TOOTHBRUSH? Seriously, it seems even Dr. Seuss considered it a bit of a stretch: the subtitle calls it a "Book of Ridiculous Rhymes". I'll say.

And while I'm on the subject of bad Seuss books, let me rant a bit about the atrocities committed by Random House with their two flap-book versions of The Foot Book and the magnificent classic Green Eggs and Ham. These are both wonderful books in their standard binding. If you don't know what a flap book is, it's one of those books with thick pages with flaps cut in them so a child (or parent) can work on some fine motor skills by opening the flap to reveal some hidden text or picture. Now, the thing about young kids is that they don't know how to read and couldn't care less about the order in which the flaps are explored. The various Maisey books understand this and are quite fun for an adult to share with a child.

But the Dr. Seuss flap books are maddening, as your child will randomly open and skip flaps, turning Mr. Geisel's usually delightful poetry into a choppy word salad. If that weren't bad enough, the folks at Random House have desecrated The Foot Book by pointlessly editing and adding verses (not to mention sloppy art, which is a lesser problem, although noticeable). The end result for the literate half of the reading team (especially someone who has long ago memorized the text of the book) is a grating, random, dissociated mess. Awful.

Parking Wager

I thought about this the other evening when we were out returning a few mispurchased/defective gifts. Here's the bet: You give me $75 and go away for awhile and then come back. If you win, you get $77, if you lose, you get nothing. The odds of you winning get smaller the longer you stay away. If you come back in 5 minutes, you're probably 99.9% certain to win, but stay away for a couple of hours and the odds drop quickly.

This is essentially the wager (restated a little weirdly) that you make when you park at a meter and don't pay. I started wondering: how big would the fine have to be before you wouldn't park for five minutes without paying? This probably varies from person to person. What's your number?

Christmas Blanket

I've never been a fan of the Christmas tree. Some people like them, but it always seemed such a pointless exercise to me. Go get a tree (or buy a fake one), move all your furniture around, stick the tree in your living room (where, if real it serves as a fire hazard and drops needles into your carpet), decorate it garishly, leave it up for a month and then take it down and dispose of it.

So, one of my first ideas for modifying Christmas was to eliminate the tree in favor of a Christmas Blanket. The blanket would be circular, and designed to occupy roughly the same amount of floor space as a tree. If you wished, you could decorate the blanket with little patches or other fabric ornaments, perhaps add a new patch every year if you were so inclined. You'd pile the gifts up on the blanket (more room, because there's no tree in the way). Then, on Christmas Eve, you'd pull a drawstring and close the blanket up into a big Santa's Sack that contained all your presents!

When Christmas is over, you just fold up the blanket and put it away for next year. Much simpler!

Four Kinds of Christmas

I once heard someone on the radio discussing the four different celebrations that take place around the time of the winter solstice, and which all travel under the name "Christmas". I found it interesting because popular culture conflates the various parts, and that makes it difficult to talk about it if, like me, you don't care for certain aspects.

As best as I can remember, here are the four parts of Christmas, with my thoughts on each.

• The Christian Festival. The festival celebrating the Birth of Christ, featuring mass or church attendance, pageants, nativity scenes, etc. Although I don't participate in this fairy-tale celebration, I don't begrudge anyone their right to worship as they see fit, just leave me out of it.


• Secular Holiday. The "fun" part of Christmas; the Christmas that kids love. Featuring Santa Claus, reindeer, elves, Christmas carols, the Christmas tree, giving and receiving of gifts, etc. Most of these traditions have little or nothing to do with the Christian festival and the rest have only a tenuous connection. A good number of them predate Christianity itself. I am certainly not against having fun, so this part of Christmas is (mostly) fine with me. I'm not a big fan of decoration, though, so you won't find a tree and its ilk in our house. Also, I find most overtly religious Carols kind of sappy and sickening.


• Commercial Orgy. The commercial part of Christmas is an outgrowth of the gift-giving tradition and as far as I can tell, it's only features are shopping and stress. I despise this aspect of Christmas and it's more or less caused me to throw the baby out with the bathwater in my approach to gifting. It's worth noting that buying merchandise to give as gifts is only one way to give a present: You could make something, re-gift something that you no longer need (i.e. recycling in non-Seinfeldian terms) or perform a service for someone. The Commercial Orgy is also responsible for the extension of the start of the Christmas season out to mid-November in some cases, which alone is


• The Charitable Season. I suppose this is in a similar vein to gifting, with links to the Commercial Orgy too: while you're out spending all your cash on DVDs and iPods, why not toss a few bucks to the homeless, or fire a can or two of baked beans in the direction of the Food Bank? My issue here is with the seasonality of it: the homeless and hungry need help all year. I take a somewhat sour view of giving at Christmastime just because it's Christmastime. I guess something is better than nothing, but it just strikes me as sort of counterfeit charity, somehow impure: giving because it's customary rather than because deep in your heart you want to.

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While I'm figuring out Blogger, please visit my older blog at Brent's Two Cents.

NetNewsWire Is The Enemy

I've had a few days off, and despite a very strong desire to get some stuff done, nothing's getting done. Well, hardly anything. I am managing to stay up-to-date on my RSS news feeds.

It goes like this: Get coffee, sit down, read through my news. That takes about 30-40 minutes the first time. Then, click 'Refresh' and get another batch of updates. Read those. In the morning, sites get updated pretty frequently, so there's maybe another 10-20 minutes of reading to do there, depending on what other sidetracks are hidden in the news articles. Repeat until the refresh steps leaves me with nothing to read.

Once I have nothing to read, I can get moving on some work, but the moment I get delayed or sidetracked, up pops the RSS reader and I go back into the cycle.

This has got to stop. I've tried taking NNW out of my dock, but that only slows me a little. I've actually considered zipping the application into an archive after using it to make it a little more difficult to run. I need a rationing system or something. Any suggestions?

Feeling Old

I'm still a few months shy of my 40th birthday, but I've already started to feel very old. I've been involved in technology for most of my life, so the new gadgets don't usually phase me. I try not to be too closed-minded about music, and am wary of making snap judgments about people based on the number of piercings and tattoos that they have. So, I thought I was doing pretty well.

But then, culture shock: literally. I read last month that genetics experiments that won scientists Nobel prizes twenty years ago are now routinely performed by high school students. I was shocked, I had no idea that such sophisticated work could be done in high-school labs. I was jealous. I mean I want to play with DNA too.

And then, while wandering the aisles at Toys-'R'-Us, I found that, for $70, one can buy the CSI: DNA Laboratory. That's right. Your own little lab for doing 10 different DNA experiments. Comes with a working centrifuge and electrophoresis chamber. Electro-what? Eh? In my day we mixed stinky chemicals together to make something fizz, or combined a red liquid and a blue liquid to make a clear liquid. What's next? Build your own Space Elevator?

Coal for Sony

I'm adding my voice to the thousands of outraged folks who are various levels of pissed off at Sony for their unconscionable behavior in installing "rootkit" style software to enforce their odious DRM. If you're not familiar with the story, you can read up on it here.

I don't know that very much more needs to be said on this issue: It seems clear that the people making decisions at Sony have no respect for their customers and can't be trusted to behave responsibly. They deserve some sort of punishment. The courts will take care of part of that, but I'm going to do my part, too.

I've got lots of Sony stuff that I'm quite happy with, and I've been thinking recently about getting a PSP to see what all the fuss is about. But I won't be getting it for awhile. I'm joining the boycott of Sony products until I'm satisfied that they've learned something from this fiasco.