Had a pair of interesting dreams I want to record. They were odd enough to stay with me once I awoke, and interesting enough (at least to me) that I want to record them. They seem possibly related to my current job situation.
(NOTE: This post is intended more for me — a true web log — than for any putative readership, so you may not find it very interesting. This is your one and only warning!
Continued reading may lead to a why am I reading this syndrome!)
When I wrote the first rant about television commercials over a year ago, I promised I would return to the subject repeatedly. Better late than never, here’s another entry towards keeping that promise.
As I mentioned last time, I’m not a big fan of marketing and advertising. Of course companies need to market and advertise their products.
It’s the way they go about it that I sometimes (in all honesty, make that frequently) find repulsive.
As fall slowly falls upon the region, the smell of wood smoke is in the air. Much as it evokes great times around countless camp and bonfires, the smell has been strong enough recently to really set off my sinuses. Two nights in a row (wait: sniff, sniff… make that three), it was less the fragrance of wood smoke and more the acrid nostril-irritating stench of wood smoke.
An age-old metaphor for life, perhaps.
Too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing.
A while back I wrote about Yin & Yang and how some opposites are truly opposing (positive and negative) while others are actually the presence and lack of a thing (light and dark, for example). In that article I cited men & women as being genuine opposing pairs, as you can’t consider either one the absence of the other.
That, understandably, generated some comments. Many would not choose to see women & men as being opposites at all, but as two variations on the theme of human. I think that is absolutely correct. Our two human sexes have far more in common than they do in opposition. (And note that gender is a different concept than sex. Gender is about how your mind works, about who you are; sex is about your genetic code.)
And yet… Anyone who lives in the real world knows that the “Mars & Venus” thing has some substance.
Before the age of blogs (or even web pages), those of us on the internet had other places to hang out and exchange thoughts.
In fact, in many regards, the “Bulletin Board Systems” (BBS) and “internet news groups” (USENET) were more conversational than blog or Facebook comments. They were more like chat rooms where conversations took place over days and weeks (and months).
Like chat rooms, they involved a group of people having a conversation. I miss those days… blog comments are too brief and passing to be a conversation. At best, brief remarks are exchanged for a half-dozen rounds or so, and then the river flows on.
Okay, any Star Trek fan knows that Gene Roddenberry invented the transporters so he wouldn’t have to deal with the special effects necessary to show a landing every time the crew visited a planet. It also cut out any time needed to show the launch, travel time or landing, and that moves the story along. Both of those are smart and good, so let me start by saying, “Gene, that was awesome! And so is the horse you rode in on!”
There’s also the simple fact that, in science fiction, you have to grant a few “gimmes” in order to tell the story you want.
The canonical example here is warp drive. Do you want to explore strange new worlds, and seek out new life and new civilizations? Well, you’re gonna have to find a way around Mr. Einstein, who laid down the Universal Speed Limit, a little thing we like to call c.
This has been a stick in my craw since the earliest days of the original Star Trek series. This one way predates my notorious Holodeck Hatred. And there is no hyperbole when I say “earliest days” because we’re talking about the third Star Trek episode ever aired, Where No Man Has Gone Before.
(While this was the third episode aired, it’s actually the second pilot, which is the one that got the show on the air. Did you know we can thank the great Lucille Ball for that? Read the linked Wiki article!)
The stuck stick is none other than the [big space voices] Barrier At The Edge Of The Galaxy (the BATEOTG, or maybe you prefer BatEotG).
If you knew immediately what the title of this article means, you are almost certainly a Star Trek fan. You also know that a full list should contain DS9 and VOY. (And that, actually, there should be a ST: in front of each of them.)
If this all seems alphabet soup, here’s the deal. They’re all three-letter acronyms (TLAs) for the six different Star Trek TV series. This first article today begins “Star Trek Saturday” (a one-time event) here at Logos con carne. There are two or three ships still in dry dock… (big voice: …In Space) getting finishing touches for a launch later today.
To tantalize your taste buds, I’ll just mention that they concern galactic energy barriers, transporters and replicators. Those are ships of war; photon torpedoes loaded and primed. There is a third ship with a different mission that may also launch today. (Tantalized? Terrific!)
There are things you can’t unsee. I don’t mean the walking in on your parents kind of sights. And I also don’t mean certain movies, such as Cop Out or MacGruber (two movies I had to stop watching after about 15-20 minutes least my brain melt; oh, Bruce, what were you thinking).
I mean things that, once you know they’re there, you can’t look at that same context ever again without seeing it.
This post was triggered by a, what I believe was a tongue-in-cheek, post on (if I recall correctly) io9. [The qualifications here come from not being able to find said post anywhere, even though I know I saw it this year. Even paging deep into Google results digs up nothing.]
While I’ve always — and I do mean always — been a “class clown,” I’ve never been much of a joke teller. Mostly because I have trouble remembering them. I don’t mean the punch line. If I can remember the joke, I can remember the punchline. It’s generally the entire joke I can’t remember!
Which is somewhat odd considering all the joke books I read in my younger days and all the comedians I’ve enjoyed in my older days (RIP George; you were the greatest of them all).
The mind being the associative wonder that it is, sometimes some part of a conversation triggers an association, and that surfaces a joke from my mental archives (think Damian Lewis’ memory library from Dreamcatcher).
And sometimes when a new joke I’ve really liked is fresh in my mind, I go around telling it to everyone.
Which takes some doing, liking a joke that much. As I said, I’ve been reading joke books and following comedians a very long time, so it takes something a bit special to impress me. Most new jokes are just variations of old jokes.
But I heard one recently that cracked me up… and managed to be a truly new joke. Maybe it’ll have the same effect on you. Plus, it’s Friday and time to start goofing off.
So, without further ado, I give you…
Posts pertaining to programming!
Logos con carne 