And Now for Something Completely Different ...

Alas, I’ve had no time to do a proper post.  I’ve spent a bit of time exploring doing an improper post, but all those plans seem to have fallen through as well.  As a last resort attempt to come up with some actual content as opposed to just a lame excuse, let’s play a game of Last Two.  (I totally made this up, by the way, in case you were wondering why you’d never heard of it before.)

Last two movies I watched: Dallas Buyers Club and RED 2.  Both decent.  Nothing to write home about.

Last two audiobooks I listened to: Currently listening to A Game of Thrones, read by Roy Dotrice, which I’ve previously read in paperback.  I also read A Clash of Kings, but had stopped there because I didn’t want to read too far ahead of the series.  Now I’m trying to get through the first 3 or maybe 4 on audiobook.  Last thing I finished was The Dying Earth, read by Arthur Morey.  It’s one of the few books credited with helping to inspire D&D that I’ve never actually read, so I thought I should probably remedy that, finally.  Honestly, I wasn’t that impressed with it.

Last two physical books I read: Well, I’m currently rereading (for at least the third time) Lord Foul’s Bane, because my kid chose it to do a book report on (weirdly).  It’s a bit more pretentious than I remembered, but also more influential: I had never realized just how much Loial from Wheel of Time is a reflection of Saltheart Foamfollower.  Before that ... well, it’s been a while since I had the opportunity to turn actual pages.  Probably my latest reread of the Reign in Hell graphic novel.

Last two televison shows I watched: Hannibal and Penny Dreadful.  Hannibal I’m still enjoying, for the most part, although I thought this season has been straining credulity on Will Graham’s character; also, the number of scenes stolen from the books to jam into this series, which is supposed to be a prequel, is getting disturbing.  I mean, what are they going to do when they get to those points in the actual story?  Maybe they think they’ll never get that far.  But, they keep killing off people they’re going to need later, so I’m not sure how it’s all supposed to work out.  Penny Dreadful is new, of course (this was only the second episode), but I’m digging it so far.  I was concerned it would come off as too much of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen rip-off, which there certainly are aspects of (but our African explorer is played by a totally different James Bond!), but it’s a very different vibe, and so far I’m intrigued.  We’ll see if it can hold up.

Last two restaurant meals I ate: Let’s see ... Friday we ordered Chinese from Golden Tiger, which is our go-to Chinese place, because it’s one of the few places we can find East-Coast-style chow mein here in California.  Before that ... I suppose Tuesday lunch with co-workers at Vito.

Last two things I bought at the grocery store: Well, I went to Trader Joe’s on Friday and bought a whole bunch of crap.  The last two thing I put in my cart were probably plantain chips and a 5lb bag of seedless mandarins.

Last two albums I bought: My One and Only Thrill by Melody Gardot and Keep it Going by the Mad Caddies.  Both recommended.

Last two times I took the kids outside: Just today we spent quite a while in the backyard playing in or near the pool.  The pool is still a bit cold, although it’s starting to get hot enough around here that the smaller two at least will brave it (at least for short periods).  But mainly it’s just shooting each other with pool water from squirt guns and throwing pool toys like diving rings at each other and stuff like that.  Before that, hmmm ... well, we all went out thrift shop shopping on Mother’s Day last week.  The Smaller Animal found a pair of goggles and the littlest one found two stuffed animals for like a buck.

Last two meals I cooked: Well, the word “cooked” seems to preclude making a salad, which I do quite often, so it’s probably going to have to be my scrambled omelette.  That is, it’s sort of like an omelette except that I scramble it.  I use trinity and what we generally call “pizza cheese”.  I made some this morning and probably yesterday too.  Once I cut up all the veggies, I usually make it over and over again until they’re gone.

Last two non-work programs I worked on: Just today I was trying to write a script to take a playlist and automaticaly look up the Amazon URLs for those tracks.  This would make it easier to post playlists like I did last week; I make lots of playlists for myself and I would be happy to share them with you.  But Amazon failed me by not having one or two tracks that I was looking for, and YouTube never has all of them, annoyingly.  You’d think by this point we’d have a better situation for sharing music over the Internet.  But whatever.  Yesterday I worked on the help system for my VCtools program, which we use at work, but I still develop on my own time.

Last two web pages I looked at: Uhhh ... before I started this post, you mean?  I guess Amazon and MetaCPAN, according to my browser history.

Last two animals I saw in real life: Um ... well ... I can see two of our cats from here.  Also two of my children, which are pretty close to being animals.

Last two messes I had to clean up: I have a kid who’s potty training.  You really don’t want to know.

Last two multi-syllabic words I spoke to another adult: Okay, now we’re just being silly.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.  Hope your day/week/month is just as exciting.

Mother's Day Mix

For Mother’s Day this year, we decided to give The Mother a handmade gift.  This traditionally carries connotations of cards made of construction paper or plaques made of macaroni.  But, hey: we live in the digital age, right?  We can do something more exciting than that.

Accordingly, my eldest and I put together a playlist for The Mother.  Now, you might think this is a pretty trivial thing to do, but it’s a bit more work than you might imagine.  First, you have to come up with a list of songs.  For this mix, we wanted songs that The Mother would enjoy, of course, but it needed to be more than just that.  We were looking for happy songs.  Songs that perk you up and lift your spirits.  When coming up with a mix, one of the best ways to start is to find one sing that epitomizes the mood you want and then build around that.  For this mix, the Larger Animal suggested a centerpiece of “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, which you probably know better by its chorus:

Don’t worry about a thing,
‘Cause every little thing
Gonna be all right.

So now you have a theme.  Next, you have to come up with 15 to 20 other songs to go with it.  Better to come up with too many and then you can whittle it down.  You’re looking for songs that fit the theme, but also provide some variety.  It’s okay to have an artist or two repeated, but don’t overload with too much from one band.  In fact, I don’t like to overrepresent any one genre, or even decade.

Once you’ve figured out which songs you want, now you have to go find them.  Some of them you probably have digitally already.  If you’re like us, some of them you have on CD, but you’ve never gotten around to burning them.  Which means you have actually find said CDs.  And some of them you may not have at all, which means you have to go buy them.  Happily, that’s pretty easy to do without ever getting off the couch these days, unless you’re looking for something really obscure (we weren’t).

Finally, you have to put them all in order.  Many people don’t bother at all with this step.  They just throw everything in a pot randomly.  But this is foolish.  Songs need to transition from one to the other.  If you have multiple songs from one or more artists, you need to spread them out.  There’s no use in having a variety if you’re going to put all the fast songs in a row followed by all the slow songs.  To get it right, you’ve got to experiment, which means listening to all the songs, or at least pieces of them, and that takes time.

And, of course, once you get all that done, you have to burn it to a CD.  Preferably with a decent burning program, one which has volume normalization and can write the track info and an album title.  Nothing beats having your giftee stick the CD into the car radio and having it announce “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Anyhow, for those interested, here’s the playlist we came up with.  It’s only 3 seconds shy of 70 minutes, which is all a typical blank CD can hold.  So I think I’m not exaggerating when I say this mix is chock full o’ goodness.

Links go to Amazon in case you’d like to purchase them for yourself.

• Bobby McFerrin - Don’t Worry, Be Happy
• Sheryl Crow - All I Wanna Do
• Cyndi Lauper - Girls Just Want to Have Fun
• Queen - You’re My Best Friend
• The Turtles - Happy Together
• Katrina & the Waves - Walking on Sunshine
• B-52’s - Love Shack
• emmet swimming - Sunblock
• Smash Mouth - Let’s Rock
• Bob Marley - Three Little Birds
• Pharrell Williams - Happy
• Feist - 1234
• Sheryl Crow - Soak up the Sun
• No Doubt - Just a Girl
• P!nk - Get The Party Started
• Lou Bega - Baby Keep Smiling
• Modern English - I Melt with You
• Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

Here’s hoping you had the opportunity to do something nice for your mother today.

Camel Children

You never truly know how long your children can hold their breath until you tell them they can have “just one swallow” of your drink.

In the pool, when you’re trying to convince them that going underwater isn’t going to kill them, anything over 5 seconds is a major accomplishment, to be praised incessantly and talked about for days afterward.  But when they get hold of your straw, they can go 3 or 4 minutes, easy.  When they finally release it, there’s a great gasping intake of air—their lungs are practically bursting with the effort.  Sometimes they look a little blue.  It takes them several whole breaths to recover so they can dive back in for another try at the world record.

In our house, we refer to small humans who do this as “camel children.”  For some reason, all three of our kids have this trait.  It can become disconcerting to take two sips out of your drink and then realize you need a refill.  But after a while you get used to it.  And you yell a lot.  It’s a bit like a bad comedy skit, actually.

“Hey, put that back!”
“No, wait, don’t actually spit it back into the ... no, never mind.  Drink all you want.  I’ll just get another cup.”

My dad always had a bit of germophobia when it came to my brother and I drinking out of his glass.  Not that we wanted to very often—he always drank tea, which we thought was disgusting.  Not as disgusting as coffee, of course, but close.  Oddly, tea (and water) is pretty much all I drink these days.  Although I will admit to spiking my tea with fruit juice.  Keeps it from getting boring and it’s better for me than sugar.  Probably.  Anyways, straight fruit juice is too sweet (and expensive) to drink with any regularity, and straight tea is too strong to drink without sweetener and too close to water to drink at mealtimes, for me.  I drink water all day long, but, at meals, I need something with a bit more character.  Tea is better than water for this purpose, but not by much.  So, combine the two, and voilà.

Anyway, I never understood the whole germophobia thing, at least not from a parental point of view.  When you first bring home that first child, all scrubbed and pink and perfect, you probably have visions of everyone washing their hands before they touch the baby, regular bleaching of all the nursery toys, and compulsive disinfection of all surfaces your baby might ever touch, or, worse yet, lick.  By the time you get to child three (and usually long before), you’re happy if you can just keep the Windex and Pine-Sol out of their mouths.  They drool and spit everywhere.  They get sick and bodily fluids spew out of nearly every orifice.  They pee on the floor when you’re trying to potty train them.  And they poop: regularly, spectacularly, at inconvenient times, in inconvenient places, and in every possible color and consistency you can imagine (and some you can’t).  My daughter pooped four times a day for months.  Wash your hands before you touch them?  Yeah, right.

So I’ve never quite been able to grasp how you can maintain any fear of germs as a parent.  Your entire life is germs when you’re a parent.  The most you can hope for is that, every once in a while, your partner is willing to deal with the germs every once in a while, long enough for you maybe grab a bite to eat between poops.  Drinking out of your glass?  Man, I got over that one a long time ago.

So it’s not any fear of germs I have when my children come for my beverages.  It’s mainly the inconvenience.  Having to get back up and refill my glass or cup constantly.  ‘Cause, you know: they can drink it, but refill it?  Suddenly they’re magically incapable of operating the cup.

“I can’t get the lid off!”
“Oh bring it back here and I’ll do it.  And don’t forget to put the ice in first this time, okay??  And don’t spill it!”

Yes, only your oh-so-clever children are capable of spilling an empty glass.  They’ve drained it completely dry, yet somehow they can still find at least a few last drops to dribble on the carpet.  It’s okay if they have to turn the glass completely upside-down in order to do this.  They’re industrious that way.

This is part of the reason I use a cup with a lid on it.  A Starbucks cup is one of the best, but most anything that is difficult to break, difficult to spill, and gigantic will do.  For many years, I would use super-size drink cups from McDonald’s.  You know how hard it is to convince McDonald’s to give you a super-size drink cup with water in it?  It completely blows their minds.  When you ask for water at McDonald’s, they want to give you a container of water roughly the size of a Dixie cup.  That’s all they’re willing to give you for free.  Of course, nowadays, they’ll sell you bottled water, because the brilliant marketing people at the bottled water companies have managed to convince everyone that their own tap water is so disgusting that they really need to pay to drink somebody else’s tap water.  But that’s another rant.  The point being, back in the days when I used to go to McDonald’s, I would spend quite a bit of time negotiating for a super-size cup with water in it.

“And I want a super-size drink with that.”
“What kind?”
“Water.”
[On the little computer screen they have at the drive-through in an attempt to subvert the apppropriate Joe Pesci meme, the following line appears:]
1 Bottled Water: $1.50.
“No, not a bottle of water, a cup.”
[The line on the screen changes:]
1 Courtesy Cup: $0.00.
“No, a super-size cup.  Like I said.”
“Sir, we can’t do that unless we charge you for a full drink.”
“Okay, that’s fine.”
“What?”
“That’s fine.  Charge me for a drink.”
“So you want a super-size drink? what kind?”
“Water.”
“But, sir, you have to pay for the drink.”
“I don’t want the drink.  I want the cup.”
“But we have to charge you ...”
“Yes.  Charge me.  Charge me whatever you like.  I’ll pay an extra service fee if I have to.  Just give me the damn cup.”

Because that cup could last for months.  They were sturdy.  They were essentially unbreakable.  They could survive the dishwasher if you felt a compelling need for that, but, since I never put anything other than water in them, I didn’t really feel the need to wash them that often.  Sure, they had my germs in them, but they were my germs.  You don’t like it?  Don’t drink out of my cup.

Like that would ever stop my children.

But nowadays I use the Starbucks cup, or something similar.  They’re far more expensive than the McDonald’s cup, and not as sturdy, weirdly—oh, they’re impossible to crush, sure, but they’re brittle, and one good tumble onto concrete generally does them in.  But they can survive most falls, and they rarely spill.  They’re double-walled, which cuts down on the sweating and keeps the water cold longer.  And the straw has a little ring at the bottom which keeps little people from yanking it out and running away with it.  And it’s 24 ounces, which is only a bit more than half the size of the Mickey D’s cup, but still large enough that I don’t have to refill it that often.  Assuming, of course, my kids aren’t around ...

And I’m not the only one with this problem.  You know how they say you need to gets lots of water while breastfeeding?  The Mother has recently taken to claiming that she’s going to keel over dead from dehydration, because her water cup is always empty.

It’s not like we don’t give them their own cups.  Ours are just more fun to drink out of, apparently.

Well, in the grand scheme of things, there are worse problems to have, definitely.  If the worst thing I could think of about my children were their beverage thieving habits, I’d be a pretty damned proud parent.  No doubt about that.  And, it can be sort of majestic, when you consider it ...  The camel child, taking on gallons of liquid at a time so that they can go for days without further drinking, which enables them to play videogames in marathon stretches that would kill a lesser mortal.  It’s like having your own nature channel.

But enough about my children.  I must take my leave now.  I’m out of water again.

Big Heart Son

My second son (whom I often refer to as the Smaller Animal, or occasionally the tadpole) was born with a heart conditon.  At the time, I didn’t have a blog (were blogs even invented back then?^*), but I did have a website, since this was during the time I ran my own company.  So I took advantage of that and wrote a series of web pages about the experience.  Of course, my company is long gone, as are all its servers, and thus its website, but you know what they say ... the Internet is forever.  In this case, the Wayback Machine provides the trip down nostalgia lane.  The pictures are all gone, but the links all work and all the text appears to be there.  You could go read that, if you’re interested in a lot of details about the birth and medical stuff.

But it occurred to me that I haven’t really discussed the condition on this blog.  That occurred to me as I was telling people at my new work that I was taking the boy for his first treadmill test.  Of course, this being a new(ish) job, some of them had no idea what I was talking about.  (Some of them did, since I’m not the only person from my old job to land at my new job.)  Thus I was inspired to track down that very link to the Wayback Machine I threw out above.  Which is nice and all, and may be interesting to some, but it’s also pretty darned verbose—even for me—and very outdated.  The situation today is a little different.

First, the executive precis for those who don’t want to have to read all the gory details:

Your heart has 4 valves in it; their job is to open and close as the heart pumps so that blood can move forward where it’s supposed to go, but not backwards.  To do that job, they have flaps called “cusps.”  If the cusps don’t open all the way, that’s called “stenosis.”  My son was born with aortic valve stenosis, which means that blood couldn’t flow normally into his aorta because the valves weren’t opening all the way.  As a result, his heart had to pump much harder than usual.  That’s not sustainable, however, so doctors performed an emergency procedure on him to force the cusps open.  So now he has no problem getting the blood to move forwards.  However, when they force the valve open like that, it inevitably causes some tearing, so now the valve can’t close properly.  So the blood leaks backward (which is called “regurgitation”), and the flow can’t achieve full efficiency.  This is still a problem, but happily a much less serious problem.  The doctors estimated that my son’s heart wouldn’t last much more than a week with the stenosis.  With the regurgitation, it could last years, perhaps even decades.

It could last that long ... but perhaps it won’t.  In practical terms, that means that we’ve taken our child to get an echocardiogram (which is a bit like an ultrasound, except on your heart instead of your unborn child) every six months for his entire life, and it likely won’t be stopping any time soon.  This leads to an interesting cognitive dissonance: on the one hand, it becomes routine, almost commonplace; on the other, your stress level goes through six-month cycles of peaking to insane levels because you dread that this time is the time when they’ll finally tell you he needs the surgery.

Because the chances are very very good that my kid will, at some point in his life, need to have that valve replaced.  Which is a pretty scary prospect.  But there are important reasons for waiting.

First of all, whether it’s replaced by an artificial valve, a valve from a pig, or a valve from a human donor,^** replacement valves always wear out and have to be replaced again.  And, on top of that, replacement valves aren’t going to grow along with the patient.  That means that if you have to replace a valve before the patient’s heart is fully grown, you’ll have to replace it even before it wears out because eventually it will be too small.  So, the sooner you do the replacement, the more often you’ll have to do it.

The second important reason is that, if we had replaced his valve when he was born, that would have meant surgery, and any time you use the words “open-heart surgery” and “newborn” in the same sentence, that’s pretty damned scary.  Even today, if they tell us it’s time to do the replacement, we’ll still be talking surgery—specifically, a Ross procedure, which means swapping the aortic valve with the pulmonary valve (because the pulmonary valve is in front of the aortic valve, it’s easier to replace; therefore, you replace the bad aortic valve with the patient’s own pulmonary valve, which will grow along with his heart, then the replacement, which you know won’t grow and will eventually wear out anyway, goes in the pulmonary position where it’s easier to get at for the next surgery).  However, today they can also replace a valve without surgery: it’s called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, and it means that, instead of having to cut the patient open, they can use a cathether (small tube) threaded through the arteries and into the valve, and replace the valve via the catheter.  Now, today, they will only use this procedure if the patient absolutely can’t handle the surgery for some reason.  But, in the 8 years my son has been alive, it’s progressed from “theoretically possible” to “a viable alternative that’s almost as good as surgery.”  If we can wait 8 more years, maybe it’ll be better than the surgery.

So we wait.  The doctors assure us that it will be a very gradual change; we won’t be in a situation where we go in to get a check-up and they end up rushing him to the hospital (which is what happened when he was 2 days old, so thank goodness we won’t have to go through that again).  In fact, they told us that, if they identify the problem during the school year, they’ll most likely schedule the surgery for the following summer.  You’d think this would make it better, and I suppose in some ways it does.  But it also means that you tend to memorize every number they throw at you (thickness of the heart wall, pressure gradient between systole and diastole, size of the area allowing the leakage, etc) then freak out whenever one of them gets bigger.  Even though, of course, you have no real concept of scale for any of these figures.  Also, there isn’t just one number to focus on: there’s lots of them, and they interact in non-intuitive ways, and just because one gets worse doesn’t mean you should panic.  But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either.

So now that my son is 8 years old, his cardiologist recommended him for a stress test.  Just like an adult would, he runs on a treadmill, all wired up on a continuous EKG, and then they do an echocardiogram after he gets tired to see if heavy exercise is likely to cause any problems that they couldn’t detect while he was just laying quietly on the table.  We went for this test two days ago, and I think he did pretty well.  His heartbeat didn’t get too high, and, from what limited ability I’ve picked up to read an echo over the past 8 years, I didn’t see anything to be concerned about.  His breathing was never labored; at his age, they stop the treadmill after getting up to 3.4MPH with a 14% incline, but I think he could have gone on to the next stage.  We still have to wait for the cardiologist to review the results, but it seems like, for now, we’re back to waiting.

One thing that struck me as I reread what I wrote 8 years ago is this quote from near the end:

We choose to believe that kharma, or the cosmos, or maybe even some supreme being somewhere (your “deity of choice”, as I am wont to say) is trying to tell us something.  We’re not entirely sure what it is yet, but we’re tentatively operating under the assumption that it has something to do with appreciating each other more, and letting go of the little things.  After this experience, some of the things that might have upset or worried us before seem a bit petty now.

And, hey, if that’s the wrong lesson, or even if it turns out there’s no higher power running around the universe at all, it’s probably still a decent attitude to cultivate.

I’d like to tell you that we took this lesson to heart and never let petty things get to us any more.  But I’d be lying.  Perhaps it’s the routine of the continuous tests that never seem to get easier but happily never bring bad news.  Perhaps it’s our attempts to make sure we treat our middle child just like our other two children—it’s desperately difficult not to spoil a child with a life-threatening condition hanging over his head, and I’m not entirely sure we’ve succeeded.  Perhaps it’s just that anything—even the terror we went through after his birth—can be internalized, categorized, and put behind us.  We move on with our lives, and that means we fall back into our normal behaviors, for better and for worse.  Sometimes I think that, as stressful as that time was for us, we’d do well to keep it close.  Most of the family arguments we end up having really do seem silly in the light of this sobering truth that we live with (and mostly ignore) every day.

But it’s also true that I feel lucky that we can have those silly arguments.  Without him, I don’t know that we’d be having those arguments, or even any arguments.  We wouldn’t be who we are.  No more so than the other two, but certainly no less so either, our leaky-hearted son is part of what makes us us, both individually and collectively.  I’m glad we got to keep him.  Hopefully that will continue for many years to come.

* Wikipedia says they were.  Happily, I was blissfully unaware of them.

** Interestingly, pig valves are more commonly used than human ones.  This is partially because replacing human valves is more complex surgically, and partially because heart valves are in short supply.  I guess that latter is because it’s pretty rare that you’d find a heart where the valves are working well but the rest of the heart is damaged, and, if the rest is not damaged, they’d want it for a heart replacement and not just cut the valves out of it.

Ponderings of the Season

Easter’s a bit of a schizophrenic holiday, when you think about it.  On the one hand, it’s Ēostre (sometimes called Ostara): a festival of fertility, associated with eggs and rabbits.  On the other hand, it’s Pascha: the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.  I suppose these two are vaguely related; there’s possibly some correlation between the rebirth of the world in spring after the deadness of winter and the rebirth of Christ after being more literally dead for three days.  Perhaps that’s why the early Christians absconded with the established pagan holiday (where “pagan” here has the traditional Christian meaning of “non-Christian infidel”).  Early Christians were good at absconding with holidays.  One of the reasons they were so successful.  Sort of like cuckoos.

Anyhow, in our house, we definitely celebrate Ēostre more so than Pascha.  No offense to our Christrian brethren and sistren; we’re just more into the whole stuffed bunnies and plastic eggs full of candy thing.  The kids dig getting Easter baskets.  Woke me up at the ungodly hour of 9am to gush over their candy and books.  And the stuffed bunny as big as my daughter’s head.

Now, my children are 15½, 8, and 2.  Which makes hiding Easter eggs a challenge.  This year I hid them in 3 distinct groups: stupidly easy (like, if you’re not careful you might trip over them), moderately tricky (like, you’ll have to work a bit to get these), and heinously evil (like, good luck pal).  We let the sprite out first to recover all she could, then the tadpole followed to find what he could, then the demonspawn, playing cleanup.  I hid 58 eggs (who knows what happened to the other two?) and we recovered 57.  The other one will probably sit out there until next Easter.  Or until the ants find it.  Of course, at that point, it’ll be easy to locate: just follow the line of hyperactive sugar-junkie ants.  So that’ll be nice.

Other than that, it’s a nice lazy day.  The pool is finally warm enough to get in, so I’m sure there will be some water activities later in the afternoon.  And lots of jellybeans and chocolate to make my children impossible to live with.  Hopefully there’ll be some reading too, at some point along the way: books for Easter is a family tradition that we fervently uphold, even though none of the kids seem as interested as we were at their ages.  The youngest, perhaps.  She’ll bring you a book and demand you read it over and over again.  If she’s in the mood.

So that’s my day today.  Hopefully all you reading this will have a lovely Easter as well, or whatever springtime celebration you favor.  Next week may bring us a fuller post.  Or perhaps not.  But, as the world is being reborn after the dying days of winter, so too may this blog see a rebirth of creativity.  Then again, I live in California, where “winter” means it got down to the 50s a couple of times.  So it’s not like I have any excuses anyway.  But that’s why I tell you not to read this blog.  Or one of the many reasons, at any rate.  But you’re very persistent, apparently.  I’ve always admired that about you, you know.  It’s one of your better qualities.  Keep up the good work.

Smoke and Mirrors

or, Why Do People Have to Suck?

It’s been a while since I had a good old-fashioned rant on this blog.  As one gets older, one must keep one’s blood pressure down, you know.  So perhaps I’m just overdue.  But this new ban on e-cigarettes by the Los Angeles City Council is just too much.

(Warning: If crazy ranting and/or dropping the F-bomb offends you, please bail out now.  I must remind you yet again of the name of the blog.)

Some background: I started smoking at 18—later than many, I suppose, but long enough ago now that it’s unlikely that my habits are going to change at this point.  I was in my freshman year of college, my first time living away from home.  I had a roommate who was a bit of a dick, college classes were tough (not unexpected, but it’s one thing to know how tough they’re going to be and quite another thing to experience it), my grandfather had just died, and my situation with my parents was very rocky at the time.  For some reason, walking around campus late at night one night, feeling pretty crappy about life in general, I had a sudden urge to smoke.  I have no idea why: the only time I’d ever even tried cigarettes before was under the bleachers when I was 14 or 15 once, and I’d absolutely hated it.  No one in my family smoked: not parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nor cousins.  My grandfather’s elder brother was a 3-pack-a-day man, so I’d heard, but I’d never even met the man, or didn’t remember if I had.  Both my grandparents on my mother’s side used to, I was told, but they quit well before I was born.  My dad had one friend who did, and we all felt it was disgusting, myself included.  There is no earthly reason I can come up with why I would have thought smoking would help relieve my stress, or that I wouldn’t choke to death just trying it.  But, for whatever reason, I had a sudden urge, and I went to the store, and bought a pack of Yves St. Laurent menthols.  And, if you know anything about cigarettes, you’re probably snickering to yourself about now, because YSL is typically considered a “woman’s” brand.  But I quite liked them, as it turned out, and never had a problem with smoking “girly” cigarettes (nor with drinking “girly” drinks, although that’s a whole different topic).

For about 8 years I smoked anywhere from half a pack to a full pack a day of menthols.  Then a friend (and fellow smoker) convinced me to try CigArrest with him.  I found that all the herbal/homeopathic crap was totally unnecessary for me; the behavior modification tips were what really worked in my case.  Soon I was smoke-free, while my friend had relapsed.

I stayed off the smokes for 3 or 4 years, but stress has a way of creeping up on you.  And I still had that weird urge that I couldn’t shake whenever I got stressed.  I picked up a pack of cloves one night, telling myself that they weren’t “real” cigarettes.  But of course cloves have just as much tobacco as other smokes, plus they tear your throat up.  (This is because the eugenol in the cloves temporarily numbs your throat, which allows you take in more smoke more directly, which leaves you in a pretty sad state once the mild anaesthetic effect wears off.)  I eventually made a deal with myself: I would go back to smoking, but not menthols any more.  I would smoke ultra-light regulars in the hopes that I wouldn’t enjoy them as much and therefore wouldn’t smoke as much.

Believe it or not, that actually worked.  For the next roughly 15 years, I smoked no more than a pack a week, on average.  During stressful times, I would creep up to perhaps two packs a week, but during calmer times I might drop as low as half a pack a week.  I was pretty happy with this level of smoking.  It kept me calm and sane, and it fulfilled my worldview of “everything in moderation.”  (Yes, even smoking isn’t all bad.)  So everything was good until another friend convinced me to stop smoking with him, and this time the method was e-cigarettes.

I love e-cigarettes.  I can smoke whenever I like, for as little as I like.  It used to be a chore to have to finish a cigarette, but I also hated wasting them, especially since they’re stupidly expensive.  Now I can have a puff or two and put it away.  Or I can smoke for half an hour straight if I want to.  Except I’m not actually smoking: e-cigarettes use flavored water vapor.  So not only do I not get any smoke, neither does anyone around me.  It’s just water vapor, which my exhalations contain anyway, except you can see it ... no different from when I breathe out on a cold day.  And I’m paying less now, and I’m back to menthols, and I’m “smoking” more while smoking less, ’cause I’m not smoking at all.  Also, I’m not even inhaling any nicotine.  Oh, sure: many—most, even—e-cigarettes have nicotine.  But you can get them without, if you so choose.  And I do so choose.  As it happens, I don’t need the nicotine any more than I needed the herbal whatever-it-was: once again, it’s the psychological aspect that’s key.  I just need something to puff on.

So I’ve been doing e-cigs for a few years now, and you can see why this kind of crap from the LA City Council really chaps my ass.  First the anti-smokers told us that the tobacco companies were adding all sorts of horrible crap to cigarettes and that’s why they were so terrible for you.  The tobacco industry responded by coming out with additive-free brands like American Spirit, and even changing some existing brands to be additive-free, like Winston (both of which I’ve smoked).  The anti-smokers promptly freaked out and pursued legal action against both brands.  These suits were designed to force the companies to admit that additive-free cigarettes were ”‘no safer or healthier’ than other tobacco products.”  So, wait: the additives make them bad for us, but taking them out isn’t better?  What kind of fucked up logic is that?

And now somebody comes along and invents a “cigarette” that doesn’t even involve any actual smoke.  The anti-smokers were counfounded by this new developement for a while.  Inhaling and exhaling water vapor certainly isn’t bad for you.  It isn’t even bad for anyone standing next to you.  How the hell can we object to this, they wondered?  We better find some way: if people continue to exercise their freedoms in this way, anarchy will surely ensue!

So, here we are, with the LA City Council apparently not the first nor likely the last.  It was damned difficult, but they finally thought of something to object to:

Foes of e-cigarettes said they threaten to make smoking socially acceptable after years of public opinion campaigns to discourage the habit. Young people who get hooked on the nicotine in e-cigarettes may then turn to tobacco use, said Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Ah, yes, the classic “slippery slope” argument.  We all know how awesome those are.  Because they don’t require any proof.  Hell, they don’t even have to make any sense.  Allow gay marriage and pretty soon people will be wanting to marry turtles.  That follows, right?  Let me ask you this: what is more likely?  That e-cigarettes will get people off smoking in such numbers that it will radically reduce the amount of second-hand smoke you’re exposed to?  Or that, by exposing children to them, we’ll teach them that there are ways to be responsible with your vices in such a manner so as not to endanger yourself or others?  Oh, wait: those are both positive outcomes of staying the fuck away from my e-cig.

What I can’t understand is how I became a persecuted minority.  And not only a persecuted minority, but one that it is perfectly socially acceptable to persecute.  Encouraged, even.  Let’s think about this for a minute. Every day, you breathe a metric fuck-ton more car exhaust than you do second-hand smoke (and that was still true back in the days before smoking was banned everywhere).  But we don’t disallow driving in public, do we?  And then there’s alcohol: even if you believe the wildest statistics about the dangers of second-hand smoke, they pale in comparison to your danger of being hit by a drunk driver or shot by a drunk gun-owner.  So do we ban alcohol?  God forbid we let the little children see us driving, or drinking ... who knows what that could lead to?

I don’t work within the city limits of LA, so I’m not banned from using my e-cigarette at work.  Nonetheless, my boss asked me to stop because of complaints (more likely a single complaint) from one or more co-workers.  On the one hand, this doesn’t bug me that much.  Hey, I go around everywhere with no shoes on: I’m already used to people being dicks about my lifestyle choices.  But on the other hand, it’s really dispiriting to be punished for making such a positive change in your life.  Imagine that you embarked on a fantastic new effort to get into shape by riding your bike to work every day, and, just when it was starting to work and really show some positive results, your co-workers started a campaign to keep big, clumsy bikes out of the office.  They’re unsightly, and you could bump into people with them, and who wants potential customers having to come in here and see bicycle parking?  (Before you laugh and say this is a ridiculous example that would never happen, I have to tell you this actually did happen to a friend of mine at my last job.)  So, of course we would never tell you that you can’t ride your bike to work; you just can’t bring it into the office.  Park it outside.  Where it might get stolen.  Or rained on.  Or vandalized.  You’ll probably need to buy an expensive new bike lock, if you can even find anything convenient to chain it to.  But, you know, definitely keep riding your bike to work.

This is exactly how I feel.  Sure, I can still use my e-cig by going outside.  Just like the bad old days when I was actually smoking.  I can interrupt my train of thought, go down three stories, hang around outside for a while, then come back, try to figure out where I left off, and eventually get back up to full productivity again.  I don’t have to wonder if that’s how it will work: I’ve been there.  I already know how it works.  So, sure, I could do that.  It’ll cost me time, effort, and mental capacity, which means it will cost my company money, but I can do that.  At least my co-workers won’t have to ... well, what?  They won’t have to breathe my second-hand smoke?  They’re already not doing that.  They won’t have to breathe my second-hand nicotine.  Nope, already not doing that either.  They ... won’t have to breathe my second-hand water vapor?  Ummm ... I got news for you, people: you’re breathing my second-hand water vapor, every day, whether you can see it or not, just like I have to breathe yours.  My boss, casting around for a rational reason, vaguely suggested that perhaps it was the smell that bothered people.  But, remember: I smoke menthols.  The smell of my “smoking” is a variation of mint.  So that one doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

I suppose the primary benefit to my co-workers (or more likely one particular co-worker) is the smug sense of satisfaction they’ll have that they successfully trod on someone’s freedom of expression.  Speaking as a fellow who’s gotten kicked out of a hell of a lot of places for being barefoot, I can tell you with some authority that you should not underestimate this.  I was once kicked out of a record store by a guy with about 15 earrings in one ear and blue hair, essentially for being non-conformist.  There are some people who enter the service industry to actually be helpful to people, but there are plenty who find a great comfort in being able to tell people what to do.  Makes ’em feel powerful.  Makes them feel like they control their world, and I’m guessing they have a desperate need to feel that.  And I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have that issue and yet don’t go into retail.  Whatever will they do?  In my experience, they generally become middle managers for medium-to-large companies, where they can boss people around and feel really important.  So I sort of feel like I have a co-worker (or two) who’s missing their calling.  But, hey: there’s yet time.  This is a great start towards their lifelong dream.

Best of luck to ’em.

Another Birthday Weekend

This weekend marks the end of our March birthday season.  We still have a Virgo birthday season coming up, and then a single birthday soon after that.  But the March season is our busier time, as both those birthdays are children’s birthdays, and those are more exhausting to deal with than parent birthdays.  Parents tend to have moderately sedate birthdays.  Probably from being so tired after dealing with all the children’s birthdays.

In our family, we have the tradition of “the birthday weekend.”  This is a weekend, typically either the one before your birthday or the one after, where you call the shots.  You say what food we eat, what outings we do (within reason), and what activities we do at home.  If there are games to be played, you pick ’em.  If there are movies to be watched, you say which ones.  You say when we go outside and play with chalk on the patio, or get in the pool or jacuzzi, or just fire up the bubble machine.  Or you can decide that we should sit on the sofa and chill out, in which case (naturally) you get to control the remote.

So your birthday weekend is all about you, which is as it should be.  In a family of five, you’re constantly fighting for attention, so there ought to be at least one time in the year when you can get it for free.

This birthday weekend is for our youngest, who’s just turning two.  At that age, it’s a lot more difficult to figure out exactly what she wants us all to do, but we do the best we can.  We let her pick out a bouncy castle, which we had planted in our driveway all day Friday, and we invited over our Sister Family to share the bouncing, the jacuzzi, and some cake.  It was a rainbow cake, with rainbows on top made out of Twizzlers.  The Mother made a rainbow fruit plate out of watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple, green grapes, blueberries, and red grapes (which are of course purple).  We had rainbows coming out our butts.

Yesterday we chilled at home and ordered pizza and pasta for dinner (which are two of her favorite things to eat).  Today we went out shopping.  We went to a Toys “R” Us, which currently has a bunch of stuff on clearance.  Typically “sale” prices at TRU means only slightly more expensive than everywhere else (as opposed to way more expensive than everywhere else), but we got some pretty good bargains today.  Maybe Amazon is about to put them out of business too.  Wouldn’t surprise me.  (Or disappoint me, really.)

This particular Toys “R” Us that we went to is a combo TRU and Babies “R” Us store.  This meant that our two-year-old got to go clothes shopping.  She picked out about 15 dresses, which we finally managed to whittle down to 3.  After dealing with that, she found the shoe section.  She immediately plopped herself down and started to take off her shoes so she could try new ones on.  “Oosh!” she said, pointing, which is how she says “shoes.”  Stop and think for a moment about how terrifying that is.  Two years old and she’s already excited about shoe shopping.  This is a long, expensive adolescence I have ahead of me.

In any event, that’s been my weekend, so I’m pretty exhausted at this point.  Being at the beck and call of a two-year-old ain’t easy, ya know.  But at least now we’re good until late August.

A Worthy Successor?

I’m currently listening to the third book in the Iron Druid Chronicles via audiobook.  While checking out what Wikipedia had to say about the book, I ran across this quote:

In their review of Hammered, SFFWorld said that “Hearne and Atticus could be the logical heir to Butcher and Dresden.”

Now, I’ve talked before about my enthusiasm for the Dresden Files (twice, even).  So obviously I’m keen to evaluate anything that might live up to that standard.  Does the Iron Druid fit the bill?  Well, the short answer is, it’s in the same vein, and it shows some promise, but (at least so far) it’s still a significant step behind.

First of all, of course, one must ask if Butcher and Dresden need an heir: the series is still ongoing.  I’m not exactly desperate for something to fill a void, seeing as the void doesn’t yet exist.  And secondly, we have to recognize that Dresden is pretty much the top of that game.  Something can fail to meet the excellence set by Butcher and still be pretty damn good.  It’s somewhat like comparing (say) Artemis Fowl to Harry Potter.  There’s no doubt that Colfer has written a damn fine set of books, and they’re interesting, engaging, and immersive.  I highly recommend them.  But, as good as Rowling’s masterpiece?  Let’s be reasonable here.

It’s also instructive to compare and contrast.  Dresden is classic urban fantasy, meaning that it’s like the best supernatural fantasy combined with the best detective noir.  The Iron Druid takes a small sidestep; it’s still urban fantasy, surely (although Tempe Arizona is never going to be mistaken for a major modern metropolis), but Atticus owes nothing to Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.  While there are definite callbacks to Butcher, I actually see more similiarties to Gaiman—American Gods in particular.  And, since that’s Gaiman’s masterwork, that’s a pretty high compliment.  And, while there’s a strong comparison to be made, it isn’t just a cheesy rip-off either.  It’s an interesting take on the concept, exploring different avenues than Gaiman did.  (Although, to be fair, that’s a particularly large neighborhood, so Hearne and Gaiman and several other authors besides could all wander around in there for a few odd decades without needing to do more than cross each other’s paths occasionally.)

Iron Druid retains the general shape of urban fantasy—the vampires and werewolves are present, but slightly backgrounded, and the other legends and monsters are focused on for variety—but by mining the mythological vein that Gaiman struck with Gods (and, to a lesser extent, Anansi Boys), Hearne opens his story to epic quests such as those of Ulysses, Gilgamesh, or Bran.  The latter of whom is the most relevant, of course, since Celtic mythology is the source of the druids in the first place.  So it’s going in a slightly different direction than Dresden.

Additionally, Atticus is a very different man than Harry.  Atticus is over 2,000 years old, first of all, which puts him in a whole different category of wisdom and experience.  He remains surprisingly relatable (and modern) for all that, which sometimes works to the disadvantage of the story, as it can make him harder to swallow than Harry, who’s just an ordinary joe who happens to have some magical powers.  Atticus has very different goals than Harry as well, hiding from supernaturals as well as mortals, whereas Harry practices his magic openly.  And when Atticus goes into full-on diplomacy mode, mainly to deal with beings more powerful than himself, you definitely feel that Harry would be hard-pressed to match it.

On the other hand, both have a homebody streak, and seem constantly surprised and a bit annoyed that trouble keeps finding them, sort of reminiscent of Dante’s cry of “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”  And both have more than a dash of what I described previously as “insouciance,” although dictionary.com uses a definition that doesn’t capture all that I mean when I use the term.  What I mean is an irreverance—almost to the point of being ridiculous—in the face of serious, even life-threatening, situations.  Last time I talked about it, I specifically drew a parallel to Shawn from Psych (who completely removes the “almost” from that definition); if Shawn is at one end of a spectrum of what I’m calling “insouciance” and Harry is in the middle, Atticus is on the far side of Harry ... but not by that much.  So there are certainly parallels in characterization as well as genre.

And in overall story arc: in the first two Iron Druid books, just as in the first two (or so) Dresden Files books, there’s nothing much serious going on.  Just a typical sort of “monster-of-the-week” type plot.  Then, in the third book (pretty much the same time as in Dresden), things are starting to get more serious and world-shaking quest-y.  Although I have to say that the Iron Druid books feel more “fluffy” than the Dresden Files, and thus far I’m having a hard time taking the serious as seriously.  But perhaps that will improve if I stick with it.

I will give Hearne one leg-up over Butcher, though: as awesomely cool as Mouse is, Atticus’ Irish wolfhound Oberon is an amazing character.  Maybe it’s just the way Luke Daniels reads him in the audiobook versions, but I suspect Hearne’s writing deserves most of the credit.  Although I can’t recall if it’s specifically stated in the books, Oberon is most likely older and more experienced than a normal dog, and Atticus has taught him to speak English.  As a result, Oberon has a unique voice, a bizarre combination of canine wisdom and doggie innocence.  One moment he’s making insightful comments on the nature of mortality; the next, he’s begging for sausages.  Here’s a typical quote—in response to Atticus’ query about which movie Oberon would like to watch while he’s gone:

I think The Boondock Saints, because the Irish guys win.  Plus the cat ends badly.  It affirms my worldview and I feel validated.

So Oberon is damned entertaining whenever he shows up, and maybe even just a bit more fun than the conversations Harry has with Bob the skull.  But I would say that’s the only area where Atticus can edge out Harry, and even then it’s not by much.

Still, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some value to the Iron Druid Chronicles.  If you’ve caught up on all your Dresden and you’re looking for something else to fill some time, you could do far worse than this.  Particularly if you’re looking for an audiobook series—Luke Daniels is a great reader and does a fantastic job with bringing the books to life.  My only complaint is that they’re pretty short compared to a lot of the audiobooks I listen to, so I blast through them much too fast.  But they’re enjoyable, and I’m glad I discovered them.

Twice as long to get half as far

As promised (or perhaps threatened) last week, I’m taking a break this week to concentrate on getting a few other things done.  Of course, given that last week’s post was twice as long, you could just go back and read that again and it should work out the same.  Assuming my math is correct.

At any rate, I’m sure you have some cat video to watch or somesuch, so I shan’t keep you further.

What Morris Wrought

So, this week I’m going to talk about the titles I came up with for my 13-part blog series on my relationship to Perl that I did on my Other Blog.  When you do a long series like that, you have a number of challenges: presenting the topic concisely, laying the groundwork for the following week, the simple grind of cranking out the next 1500 words.  But there’s also the issue of coming up with titles.  Naming things is hard.  In my technogeek life, it’s probably the thing that we fight most about.  In fact, there’s a famous quote we’re wont to trot out at times:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton

Sometimes you see people online wondering why this saying is famous: naming things is easy, they say.  These are invariably young programmers who have never had to deal with users who can’t understand why a feature doesn’t (or can’t) work because they’re confused about what it is because it’s so poorly named.  Or the pain of having to use a word in one sense when talking to sales (because they use the industry standard definition) and a different sense when talking to fellow techies (because they use the literal meaning) and an altogether different sense when talking to management, because they use a completely arbitrary defintion that they got from the guy before the guy before the guy before you, who was invariably a young programmer who didn’t understand that naming things is hard.

So, yeah: coming up with good names for things is hard.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things is harder.  Coming up with consistent, good names for things 13 weeks in a row is very difficult indeed, and so hopefully I can be forgiven for doing only a mediocre job of it.

The first two or three came to me fairly naturally, and they established the pattern: quotes, either direct or paraphrased, that referenced different cultural things.  These might be songs, poems, television shows, movies, quotes by famous people, or whatever.  Several of them were as easy as the first few; some of them were so hard that I almost spent longer searching for a good title than I did writing the post in the first damn place.  Some of them are so obsure I don’t expect anyone else to know what the hell I’m on about; some were obscure enough that I didn’t know them myself until I Googled them for the purpose of the series.

Here’s the 13 titles I came up with, along with the hints I gave out last week.  Honestly, some of the hints are fairly obscure as well, but I didn’t want to make it too easy.

1. The Road So Far: a Winchester recap
2. The Power of OOP: Johnny Colla would have done a mean sax solo
3. A Møøse Once Bit My Sister: I apologize for the obscure references; those responsible have been sacked
4. A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read: also, profited in strange concealments ...
5. Speaking with the Speech of Coders: a present from Vietnam
6. Perl is Engineering and Art: what’s to learn? it’s a snake ..
7. The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World: according to Tata, not Perl at all ...
8. Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: there was grandeur in his view of life from the Beagle
9. That’s Why I Failed Recess: it was funnier when Rudy said it to Fat Albert
10. What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM: involving two couples and a bottle of gin
11. Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?: a plea to m’colleague Hugh
12. The End of the Beginning: once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives”
13. Here’s to Future Days: why are they called “twins” if there’s three of them?

Now let’s look at which each one references, as well as discussing its relevance to the particular post it ended up tagging.

The Road So Far

This is what they put on the title card when they do a longer recap on the TV show Supernatural.  The card looks like this, or maybe like this.  The protagonists of the series are the Winchester brothers, thus this is “a Winchester recap.”

This was a fairly natural choice for the first post in the series, which told a highly abbreviated version of my programming life, from age 14 or so, up to the present.  It’s a cool reference if you get it, but it still works well if you don’t.

I think a lot of people think of Supernatural as a teeny-bopper series, probably because it’s on the CW along with other teeny-bopper series like Gossip Girl, or The Vampire Diaries.  Of course, I was watching Supernatural when it was on the WB ... which was the home of Charmed and Dawson’s Creek, so I suppose I’m not digging myself out of that hole very well.  I dunno; I suppose it is a teeny-bopper series in many ways, and it’s probably gone on far beyond when they should have called it quits, but I still enjoy it.  Call it a guilty pleasure.  Besides, every now and again Felicia Day shows up, and that just makes it all worthwhile.

The Power of OOP

My second post in the series was about object-oriented programming, or “OOP” for short, and what makes it so useful.  So it seemed natural to harken back to Huey Lewis & the News’ classic 80’s song, “The Power of Love”.  The hint refers to the great sax player of the News, Johnny Colla (who was also a co-writer of “The Power of Love,” as it happens).

I’m not actually a huge fan of “The Power of Love,” nor its companion piece “Back in Time,” both off the Back to the Future soundtrack.  As far as I’m concerned Lewis & the News peaked with Sports, and it’s all downhill from there.  By the time Huey was declaring that it was “Hip to be Square,” I was embarrassed to admit that I’d ever seen them live.  (But I did, with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble opening, and it was a great show, I gotta tell ya.)

A Møøse Once Bit My Sister

No self-respecting programmer should have missed this one, which is of course is a reference to the ultra-classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  As you probably know, all the credits of the film are at the begining, and the Pythons couldn’t let it get too boring, so they peppered it with lots of moose references (for whatever reason).  The title is a direct quote from the credits, and the hint is a paraphrased version of a later credits quote.

For a post extolling the virtues of Moose, but also lamenting a few of its warts, there was no way I could pass up this title.

A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read

This is one of the ones I spent a lot of time trying to find a good reference for.  The post was about legibility: the idea that a good program should be able to be read like a good story.  After several fruitless Googles, the phrase “well-read” popped into my head.  I wondered what the origin of that phrase was.  Of course, if you’re a native English speaker and you spend any time at all poking at the origins of common phrases, you know what the answer is 80-90% of the time: Shakespeare did it.

As it is here.  I paraphrased the relevant bit for the title, and I used the surrounding context for the hint.  Here’s the full text, from Henry IV, Part 1:

In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read, and profited
In strange concealments, valiant as a lion
And as wondrous affable and as bountiful
As mines of India.

This is Mortimer speaking about Glyndwr, whoever that is.  I never read Henry IV, personally.  Still a good quote though.

Speaking with the Speech of Coders

Every once in a while we Americans wake up out of our egocentricity and remember that not all our blog post readers share our Western heritage.  By this point in my blog series, I felt it was time to pick a reference from the other side of the world.  I spent some digging through the Tao Te Ching, which is normally my go-to source for pithy quotes from the Orient.  I poked around The Art of War and Hagakure, both of which I also like, but they weren’t very helpful for this post, which was about linguistics.  I think I even explored the Analects briefly, but I lean much more towards Taoism than Confucianism, as you might imagine of one so obsessed by balance and paradox.

Then suddenly, after long and futile searching, it hit me: I already had a great source which would be perfect for this.  “The Red Cockatoo” is a short poem by Chinese poet Po Chu-i (also romanized as Bai Juyi), who lived in the Tang Dynasty and is very popular in both China and Japan (at least according to his Wikipedia page).  There are several different translations, but I prefer the one by Arthur Waley, the great British sinologist who gave us excellent translations of both the Tao Te Ching and the Analects.  Here it is in its entirety:

Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.

Beautiful, and piquant.  The hint refers to the fact that “Annam” is an ancient Chinese name for Vietnam (or part of what is modern Vietnam).

Perl is Engineering and Art

This one was obvious to anyone who read this particular post, which spent a good deal of time analyzing a sidebar from the O’Reilly book Learning Python entitled “Python is Engineering, Not Art.”  I almost didn’t use this title, actually, as it’s so much more obvious than all the rest.  But then I decided that this title was just too good to pass up.  The hint is obvious as well, or at least is so in hindsight.

Fun side note: the animal on the cover of Learning Python is a rat.  Write your own joke here.

The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World

Another tough one to title.  This post covered several different subtopics that didn’t really fit anywhere else, so there wasn’t a great choice for a title anyway.  One of the topics I covered was my school experience with programming, so I started looking for quotes on education and ran across this one by Nelson Mandela:

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

There’s a bit of contention on whether he actually said this or not (and whether he used the word “which” in it if he did), but overall it seemed solid enough.

The hint refers to one of Mandela’s nicknames: “Tata” means “father” in Xhosa.  His other nickname is “Madiba,” but some have argued that it’s inappropriate for non-South-Africans to use that one.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful

This one was a little easier.  The post was about evolution, so it made sense to peruse the words of Charles Darwin, who was not only a very influential scientist, but also an eloquent writer.  The full quote is:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This is from the conclusion of Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species, and is in fact the only time Darwin ever uses the word “evolve,” in the first edition.  (And, in the second, he added the phrase “by the Creator” to make it clear what he was talking about.)

The hint, of course, is a bit of the quote above, combined with a reference to the famous ship that Darwin sailed on, HMS Beagle.

That’s Why I Failed Recess

The ninth post in my series was about Getting Shit Done, and, when I was trying to think of a title for it, I kept remembering a joke from my childhood.  As the hint suggests, I’m pretty sure the first time I heard it was on Fat Albert.  It might have been Rudy who said it, or then again it might have been Russell—he was always a smartass.  Then again, we’re talking about 40-odd years ago, so I might be misremembering altogether and it was never in Fat Albert at all.

Anyways, here’s how I remember the joke:

A: I don’t play.  That’s why I had to quit school in the third grade.
B: Whaddaya mean?
A: ‘Cause the teacher said “recess,” and I said “no, I don’t play.”

There are countless variations of this joke, including the more concise version I used for my title, used in the common venacular, multiple rap songs, blog posts by other people, Facebook user names, tweets, and Internet memes.  In fact, this is a meme from before we knew what memes were.

Plus it’s really funny.

What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM

Along about Part 10 I wrote a post that was so damn long I had to break it into two pieces.  Originally the title of this post and the following one were going to be switched, so that the title of this one could be a callback to the mention of “m’colleague” which I had dropped into the text.  (Instead, I ended up using that for the hint for Part 11.)  But eventually I made the switch to the titles that we have now because it just made better sense: this post was a fairly long digression in the form of a story from my college days, and this title fit that perfectly.

The title, of course, is a paraphrase of the title of a famous short story by Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” as well as the book which contains it.  In the story, two couples talk about everything but love over a bottle of gin (thus the hint), but really love is all they’re talking about.  You see the parallel in my post.

Really, though, I’m not a huge Carver fan.  The best thing about “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is probably the title.  “Cathedral” is better.

Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?

If you are a connoisseur of Britsh comedy, the television series at the very top of your must-see list is of course Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  After that, it should be The Young Ones and Blackadder, although we might quibble over which one should come first.  Next on your list, before Fawlty Towers, before Red Dwarf, and, yes, even before AbFab, should be A Bit of Fry & Laurie.  If you think of Hugh Laurie simply as House, or (even worse) as the insipid father of Stuart Little, you really don’t know Hugh Laurie (in fact, you may not even realize he’s British).  Likewise, if all you know of Stephen Fry is his voice—he’s the Cheshire Cat in the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, the narrator of Little Big Planet, and a prolific audiobook narrator, including the UK version of the Harry Potter books and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—you’re missing out.

A Bit of Fry & Laurie is at once similar to Monty Python and also removed from it.  There’s still a certain amount of the surrealism (perhaps a bit less), but very little of the physical comedy such as the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Gumbys.  Most of it was like taking the best verbal humour of the Pythons (such as the Argument Clinic, or my all-time favorite, the penguin on top of your television set) and cranking it up to 11.  Stephen Fry would often do the heavy lifting in such sketches—playing the Groucho, or the Abbot, role—but Hugh Laurie had many talents other than just being an outstanding straight man.  One of which is an amazing range of musical ability: he plays guitar, drums, harmonica, sax, and, of course, piano.  At the end of every show, Fry would turn to Laurie (who he often referred to as “m’colleague”) and say: “Please Mr. Music, will you play?”  To which Laurie would respond by playing the piano in a loungy sort of way, usually while Fry mixed ridiculously named cocktails such as the Swinging Ballsack.  Occasionally he would elaborate the phrase to enhanced levels of flowery silliness; my favorite of these was:

I say, as I like to on these occasions, those six refreshing words that unlock the door to sophisticated evening happiness. I say: Please Mr. Music, will you play?

If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, I highly recommend it.

The End of the Beginning

Here at Part 12 I finally decided to start wrapping things up.  However, I knew it would take me (at least) two posts to conclude satisfactorily, so I needed a title to reflect that.  “The End of the Beginning” is (appropriately) the final track on the sophmore album of the Darling Buds, Crawdaddy.  Although Crawdaddy came out in 1990, it definitely has that late 80’s sound, including a remarkable similarity to the Primitives, particularly their first two albums Lovely (‘88) and Pure (‘89).  Although technically speaking the Primitives were English while the Darling Buds were Welsh.  But to us stupid Americans that subtle distinction is lost.

Although it was a Brit who made the comparison I reference in the hint: specifically, Dave Kendall, creator of MTV’s 120 Minutes.  He made the clever observation in his review of Crawdaddy, and I couldn’t help but agree, even though I probably like the Darling Buds a bit more than the Primitives.  But it’s a close thing.

The first track on Crawdaddy, “It Makes No Difference,” has one of the coolest hooks of the 80’s.  Too bad you’ve never heard it.

On the other hand, if you want to hear this track, YouTube is your friend.

Here’s to Future Days

And finally we reached the end, and I decided to touch on my thoughts about Perl’s future.  The title for this one took absolutely no thinking or searching at all.  While there can be no doubt that Into the Gap is the pinnacle of the Thompson Twins’ career, Here’s to Future Days is also a great album, the last of the good TT records before they transmogrified into Babble (whose debut was better than the last three efforts from the Twins put together ... not that that’s saying much).

Here’s to Future Days was also (probably not coincidentally) their last album as a threesome: it may not have seemed like Joe Leeway was adding much other than standing around looking cool (much as Andrew Ridgely did for Wham!), but apparently that was an illusion, because they sure sucked without him.  Definitely most people think of the Thompson Twins as a trio, and wonder what’s up with calling themselves “twins.”

But of course the truth is the name has nothing to do with the number of band members.  The first (little known) TT album was recorded with four members, and the second featured a whopping seven, before they trimmed it down to the famous three, who would go on to produce the Twins’ three great albums: Quick Step & Side Kick (known simply as Side Kicks in the US), Into the Gap, and Here’s to Future Days.  Nope, the name was simply a reference to Thomson and Thompson, the detectives from The Adventures of Tintin who only look like twins.

“Future Days” is the track on this album that contains the lyrics “Here’s to future days / Here’s to future ways,” which is what I hear in my head whenever I read this title.  If you’d like to have it stuck in your head as well, YouTube can arrange that for you.

In Conclusion

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I spent quite a bit of time mentally wrestling with a title for this post itself.  Should it be some sort of self-referential thing, being that it would be the title of a post about titling posts?  Should it somehow proclaim to the world that it was a meta-title?  Should it be a quote about naming things, or about clever wordplay?

In the end, I decided to make it a shout out to one of my favorite book-gifts as a child.  I got my fair share of fiction, certainly, but my family also recognized that an aspiring writer must have a love of language, so I got a fair number of dictionaries, thesauri, etc.

I was eleven years old on Christmas in 1977, the year that my grandfather presented me with the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, which had been published for the first time that very year (although much of it was derived from the earlier version, which was similarly titled but without the “Morris”).  It’s a “dictionary” only in the sense that the entries in it are alphabetized.  Lovingly crafted by husband and wife William and Mary Morris, it’s not so much a reference work (although it can be used as such) as it is a mishmash of fascinating tales of how English expressions came to be; I was fond of just opening it to a random page and reading whatever I found there.  I was rarely disappointed.

The Morris’ youngest son Evan carries on the family tradition on the web, writing as the Word Detective.  On his “about” page, he quotes fellow etymologist John Ciardi:

The more words I traced back through time for our readers, the more I appreciated Ciardi’s observation that each word, no matter how humble, was “a miniature fossilized poem written by the human race.”

And that’s what this exercise in naming was like: a verbal archaeology expedition, a paleontologist finding words trapped in amber.  My love for this sort of thing is certainly directly traceable back to the Morris dictionary, and the many hours I spent perusing how words and meanings become bent and reshaped to suit new ends across the generations.  Yeah, I was a weird kid.

So, this week’s installment, while longer than I’d anticipated (and probably longer than you’d hoped), at least may provide some insight into how these titles get here and where they come from, and why I tend to obsess over them more than is probably healthy.  Next week I probably won’t be so garrulous, most likely because I’ll be busy catching up on all the things I didn’t do this weekend because I spent too much time on this blog post.  But it’s been fun.  For me, anyway.  For you ... well, didn’t anyone tell you not to read this blog?

Perl blog post #32

Well, it’s finally happened: my never-ending blog series on my relationship with Perl has ended.  You can check out the final installment over on my Other Blog.

For 13 weeks, I had to come up with clever titles for my blog posts, and I decided to lift them directly or paraphrase them from various sources: books, movies, songs, TV shows, poems, quotes from famous people, etc.  I knew that some people would instantly recognize some and scratch their heads over others, and different people would do so with different entries.  I figured perhaps no one would recgonize them all, as they were quite an eclectic mix ... from the the Bard to the CW (though of course I might be wrong about that).  So I thought it might be sort of fun to give everyone a second chance at guessing them.

Next week, I’ll do a blog post (here, not there) explaining all the miscellaneous references.  In the meantime, feel free to guess at them and see how many you can get.  I’ll include the hints I left on the Other Blog:

1. The Road So Far: a Winchester recap
2. The Power of OOP: Johnny Colla would have done a mean sax solo
3. A Moose Once Bit My Sister: I apologize for the obscure references; those responsible have been sacked
4. A Worthy Program, Exceedingly Well Read: also, profited in strange concealments ...
5. Speaking with the Speech of Coders: a present from Vietnam
6. Perl is Engineering and Art: what’s to learn? it’s a snake ..
7. The Most Powerful Weapon Which You Can Use to Change the World: according to Tata, not Perl at all ...
8. Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: there was grandeur in his view of life from the Beagle
9. That’s Why I Failed Recess: it was funnier when Rudy said it to Fat Albert
10. What We Talk About When We Talk About DWIM: involving two couples and a bottle of gin
11. Please Mr. Perl, Will You DWIM?: a plea to m’colleague Hugh
12. The End of the Beginning: once described as “sounding more like the Primitives than the Primitives”
13. Here’s to Future Days: why are they called “twins” if there’s three of them?

I rewrote one hint to make it work for people who may not have read the actual blog posts.  Have fun, and tune in next week for the answers!