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A.M. Dagoski: Pundit, Elitist, Knowitall, Librarian
Delivering Sound, Fury and a side of hot wings to your door since 1968 |
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The Unix make utility is neither a munition nor is it pornography. Stop making me prove I'm over eighteen to download the Developer's Tools. Oh, and I'll call the DOD Monday and have them fax you my security clearance. Happy now? Gimme my fripping make! And, while you're at it, can you hurry up make that coccoa port of xbiff availabble?
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It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm still doing about the same as my last updated indicated. Still looking for work or other opportunities in the upper Midewest to shorten my marriage commute.. I am, however, going to have to broaden my job search because I have a semi-solid departure date from my current job; summer, sometime. It's not like I can simply stay because I'm already training my replacement. That's a weird experience. He's a good match for the job since he's got an eclectic education along library and computer experience. In other words, he's a lot like me. Not nearly as good looking though. Ah well, my boss can't have everything.
I've been churning through books on social science and technology of late. I'm also outlining a pretty good sci-fi novel thingie. The small group of people I've shared the first fifteen or so pages with really like it. They're biased, but they're also honest and good judges of creative output so I'm pretty excited about that. I'll probably vanity press it and try to get it out by word of mouth since I don't think it'll be good enough to pass an impartial review. Ya never know, though.
I got sidetracked on my project by the holidays and cat issues. I have a new addition in the household. She's spayed and microchiped now. I guess she's now a Dagoski cat. Then one of the boys had a bad reaction to an anti-worm and flea treatment and stopped eating or drinking. I wound up making a cat soup and syringing it into him over this past weekend. He came through it fine, but I was pretty worried.
Now I'm getting ready to go down the Constructed Language Rabbit Hole. I just don't fall into the trap of ridiculous sounding names that many sci-fi authors fall into. That requires building a simple lexicon of phonemes. Turns out to be not so hard. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) paka gets the biscuit for sending me copies of those great D&D linguistics articles. With the help of those I've mapped out a simple algorithim for creating phonemes and turning them into morphemes. That goes together with a simple grammar that decides how affixes attach to roots and I should be able to develop an arbitrary number of imaginary words that I can use for proper nouns and perhaps even phrases. If I have to include any language samples, I am not going to do much work of my own when I can steal from South Asian languages. Early on, I decided that, should I need to develop a language, I was going to model it on Tamil. Tamil is as close to an extraterrestrial language as most Westerners will ever see. Even after editing two dictionaries on Tamil verbs, I'm really not sure I understand the concept of voices. BTW, I edited the structural parts of the dictionary as opposed to the content. That means I really don't know the language, yet. So I'll use my lexicon of fictional roots and affixes and assemble them according to a Tamil grammatical sketch which I have somewhere on my hard drive. Tamil and Yoruba are the two coolest languages I've yet worked with. Yoruba is also very different from English, so it's a good sci-fi language. Yoruba, however, is a tonal language and the orthography of that language is really hard to deal with. You run into the same problem any time you try transliterate a tonal language into Latin script. You need something to differentiate between tones because the same syllable means something totally different depending on the pitch it's spoken with. Mandarin gets around this by having a completely independent orthography. That means you can't just drop some glyphs in unless you want to confuse your readers. In any case, I don't want to have a whole lot of samples of my aliens' language in the text. I don't really like that because even local institutions and features would have meaning to the characters in that world and they wouldn't think about them in terms of a foreign language. Instead, I use English phrases to clue the reader into the meaning that that the aliens put into their world. Names, however, are very different. In my own case, I'm an English speaking US citizen with pseudo Russian pseudonym. My real life name is ls Latin and colloquial Italian. I speak none of these languages and therefore don't process the meaning of these words. They're just surrogates for me. That's what I need for my novel.
Don't even get me started on politics right now. The policy muddle is tragic right now and that's even without the idiocy of the supreme court. Corporations are not associations of people, they're property. You can join an association, even pay fees to get in. However, association memberships may not be subdivided nor traded except in rare cases(apartment co-ops for instance). Generally associations grant their members voting rights on the order of one member, one vote. A corporation is composed of shares of a whole which may be traded, bought and sold. The shares confer votes to the tune of one share one vote. A single person may own many shares and obtains a voting privilege in direct proportion to the shares owned. In the case of my long lamented defunct company, I owned all 65,000 or so shares that Michigan let me issue upon filing Articles of Incorporation. I was benevolent dictator for life. Let's say I started selling shares. I sell 5,000 to my bud, KK, another 10,000 to Jessie because I ran out of cash to pay her royalties. It's an association of three in which my supposedly equal fellow persons can never override my wishes. Indeed only those wishes of theirs I deem good can get through my deadlock. In fact, I can largely ignore their issues because I still own the controlling share by far. They would have to sue their own association in order to be adequately represented. Does this sound like any kind of association you're familiar with? Not at all. Corporations are a very special sort of property but property nontheless.
Anyway, I just finished as much of Bijker's Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs as I can digest just at the moment. This is a supremely good book that attempts to develop a sociological framework for understanding technological innovation, invention and the evolution of such inventions as they propagate through society. There's a lot to absorb in terms of concept. The frame work that Bijker proposes contains the inventor, his social groups and the social groups of users while modeling their feedback. He develops this framework through an examination of three inventions we know and love, bicycles, plastic and fluorescent light bulbs. I just finished the second one and need to come back to his discussion of technological frames when I have a clearer mind. His examination of the evolution of the bicycle is riveting. We regard the bike as a toy these days, but in its time, the bicycle radically changed the way people in Europe thought about distance. I would go so far to say it's one of a group of industrial inventions which change the scale of communities and set the stage for the development of modern nationalism. In any case, the invention of the safety bicycle assisted the birth of feminism by providing upper class women with a means of getting out of the house under their own power and supervision. I never knew this. This new consumer group created a demand for safer and better bikes which further spurred the development of what was then called the Safety Bicycle. You and I think of this novelty as the way bikes have always been and should be. Victorian England regarded the Penny Farthing style bicycle as the archetype and the Safety Bicycle as the aberration. Bijker skillfully maps out the interactions of the key inventors amongst themselves and the consumers of their inventions as well as the ways in which inventions shape social reality.
Hollowing Out the Middle is another great book. This is a sociological study of young people in the rural midwest that sheds light on the decisions they make as they leave their hometowns or stay in them up hitting adulthood. Small town America lives or dies by its young people and the contributions they make to their communities even more so than metropolitan areas. These days, small town mostly die from the flight of their most talented young people. Hollowing Out the Middle explores the social conditions which encourage and force young people to leave their homes. The politics of the past few election cycles cannot be understood without understanding what has happened to small towns in the US. Don't bother with Thomas Frank's books on heartland politics; he mostly just calls names. Instead, read Hollowing Out the Middle. This books details the economic and social changes that have invisibly reshaped the rural US.
Speaking of books, I have to thank kyrademon for giving me Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossed. I read it every other year or so for different reasons. This year I'm reading it to learn how to tell a gripping story without the sound and fury that most writers use move plots along. It's a big story told from a small perspective.
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Just found out about a new roleplaying game that sounds fun, it's Monsters and Other Childish Things. From the web page:
Have you ever secretly wanted to be best friends with a magical unicorn? His name would be Dewdrop, and he would talk to you with his thoughts, and he would carry you on his back away from bullies and parents and kids who don’t get you, and you’d have such wonderful adventures! This game is pretty much like that. Except — well, Dewdrop is a little scary. In fact, if you drew what Dewdrop really looks like on your Trapper Keeper, they would send you to the principal’s office, then to the school counselor, and then perhaps to a place with a name like Morning Meadows Home for Disturbed and Psychotic Youth. How an game like not be cool?
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And, that's not really a good thing. I like the idea of a day of service, but I just don't connect with any of these nice, sanctioned activities. I guess I don't believe so much in charity. I believe in government. Charities are elective while governments can compel, can design the structure of society and implement it. I believe in activism that changes government and compels it to act. Many of the activities organized on Martin Luther King day are safe. King took risks, courted controversy and asked us what meaning of America(the US part of it anyway) really was. And I think that's what this year's holiday is for me, a question asked, a demand made. It's a belated New Year's resolution to take some risks and to get involved on the ground the next place I live. Philly is a late stage transient dormitory for me right now. I have to be gone come summer even if I don't where I'm going or what I'll be doing. When I get there, though, I have to take more of stand than I have. I also need to get involved in something that contributes to the community. A big part of this will involve maintaining some sort of work-life balance. I tend to redefine any job I land in. This is good because it builds one helluva professional reputation. It's bad because I get too tied up in work. I was talking a little about this with Michelle. I was bitching about receiving a mere "meets expectations" on my job evaluation. This is not because I do lackluster job, but, rather it's because my boss came in after I had radically redefined the expectations of my job. She'd always been used to my managing six major projects while preparing monthly publications and administering an entire technological infrastructure built largely from spare parts laying around. My boss has always seen me yanking apart and rebuilding complex machinery to perform better all on my own initiative and with no special training. I basically do the work of an entire department and I generally do it within a fifty hour week. At the end of the week, I'm mentally tired from being so fired up and sharp at work. I need to channel this capacity into something that does something for people. I'm a techie and my career troubles me because it so often winds up feeding The Machine rather than making The Machine work for humans. Thankfully, if they go through, my graduate school plans do help with the change. My research interests will help formal information systems(technological and organizational) work better for people, especially those on the other side of prosperity. If those don't go through, I have to find a way to do something that isn't Feeding the Machine even if I do it in my off time.
In other news, I am becoming less enamored my bike's disc brakes. They work great, but man, are they ever a pain to adjust and tune. Avid brakes use these little adjustment wheels to tune the caliper gap which is what determines, in part, how responsive your brakes are. These wheels should turn freely with finger strength. However, get a little gunk in there, which is what happens with rear brakes, and those wheels don't turn very well. Why the heck could they not have used a little hex bolt or screw for that adjustment. That gives you a positive lock and provides leverage ot turn even the gunkiest mechanism.
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According to the local traffic report, the Four Riders of the Apocalypse have been loosed on the local highways. The good news is that they're stuck in traffic on I-76 between the Conshohocken Curve and the Manayunk exit.
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Someone is auctioning the very same make of baritone sax I played in high school for only $315. Can't do it this month, though. Especially since I'd have to put several hundred into fixing it up at the very least. Still, I'm closer now to being able to play along with Morphine than I ever dreamed possible. Put that together with a used turntable and the prog-roock LPs I'll buy, the whole apartment complex trembles with fear at the prospect of me winning even a consolation prize in the lottery.
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I saw the cover in a discussion thread on IO9. The title alone made me giggle and the Amazon reviews said it was really funny.
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Michlle's gone back to Toledo Containment Zone. I'm here listening to WXPN's all day 1970s Prog Rock show. The only thing better than listening to it would be listening to it with Michelle. I might even write some more musical memoir today in an effort to find something to fill the space she left. Next year, though, I'll be listening to 24 hour 70s prog rock marathon over a high speed internet connection with Michelle. One way or another.
We didn't do much over break, just sat and read and ate cookies. But we did it together and that's what made the difference. No, actually we did a lot now that I think about. Day 1, we rescued a kitten from the blizzard and found her a good home, our home. Her name is Jago and she spends a lot of her time sitting in whichever lap is available. The funny thing is that, looking at her and her behavior, I'm coming to think she's the granddaughter of the other cat we rescued off the parking lot, Desmond. He was not neutered when we got him, so it could happen. Now I'll need to get the kitten itno the vet and make an appointment to get her spayed if she isn't already.
We also went to see This is The Week that Is by 1812 Productions. They're a good, make that great, comedy theater group. This is The Week that Is is their current news satire. They are easily in Jon Stewart's league. However, the show is live and modern news headlines are so preposterous that the cast sometimes breaks up before they can can really the sketch underway. Each show is different because it's topical so they probably have only minimal rehearsals for some sketches. Anyway, each show we've ever seen has been hilarious.
We finished the year out with SloMo's New Year's Eve party. They're a local band with a really unique sound. They go good together with Ozomatli. Their live shows are fantastic especially locally because they seem to be your neighbors. Anyway they pair an electic slide guitar with a rapper who's more like a beat poet and bring together a talented bunch of accompanists to create a big, warm sound. This tour and album, though they've brought the rest of the band into its own and they're playing a lot tighter than before. Check 'em out.
2010 looks to be off to a confused if good start. We've got jobs that advance our prospects for the future, a new kitten and the economy is said to be rebounding. With any luck, I'll be ensonced in a PhD program at University of Michigan by fall and I'll have my first paper out by spring.
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So the end of the year is upon us and what do I have to say about it? Not so much at the moment. I've been doing a lot of reading to try and figure out what the heck's going on and I'm as at a loss as everyone else is. There's simplistic answers and satisfying villains: the bankers, the Republicans, inbred religious hicks in flyover country. None of them, though really comes through if you ask me. You can read people like Thomas Frank and get a lot of progressive red meat, but he misses so much in his history of Middle America's conservative revolution. First off, my own memory makes it pretty clear that it was an evolution as much as anything else. Second, Frank misses big events in the nation's modern history that led to the growth of the Right Wing word salad going by the moniker of "conservatism". What sorts of things am I referring to? Nixon's agricultural policies, the ones that encouraged the grown of corporate farming and led to the decline of the family farm. Now I'm not throwing blame here. Nixon was responding to a rapid run up in the price of food. His administration developed a solution that fixed the problem of the day in exchange for creating other problems down the line. However, that led to consequences which contributed to the emptying out of the US Heartland. Then there was the shaken national confidence following Vietnam and the debacle of the Iran hostage rescue attempt. Many writers underestimate the importance of the later, but it was the talk of the adults in my memory and I grew up in liberal coastal stronghold which LA was in fact not in the 1970s and 1980s. And, Franks completely omits Stagflation which messed up a good many middle income families. Then, under Reagan, there was a massive deindustrialization that engulfed pretty much the entire Midwest and Pennsylvania. Franks misses it all in his What's the Matter with Kansas. Instead he pitches a story of culture wars fomented by religious leaders and conservative businessmen who attacked the cultural trappings of the educated and intellectual. He misses the many valid grievances the people of the heartland have with the business elite of the coasts and their representatives in DC. I contend that the culture warriors could not have found a foothold without the chaos of the 1970s. There were a lot of policy failures in that time that led a great many working class people to distrust the professional classes and their institutions, both educational and political. Plus, the Democratic party swung towards the right and supported policies like NAFTA which burned a great many people in the interior of the country. While globalization is the inevitable consequence of transportation and communication technologies, it is a change that needs to be managed. In other words, we should've had a plan that sheltered the people and regions caught up in the change. Markets do automatically correct themselves, but the process of correction is a bitch for the people in the middle of it. Anyway, after a conservative swing to the interior Right, the US swung to the coastal left this past year. Population changes are likely to increase that swing throughout the teens, Unfortunately, the cultural shifts in the interior will continue to set the coasts at odds with the heartland. So I'm trying to find insight into all this. As I've mentioned before, I've been talking a deep dive into the literature of Nationalism since that seems to be at the heart of the current debates of policy, politics and culture. I'm also doing some deep reading into sociology. Here's what I'm finding informative right now:
- Nations and Nationalism by Ernest Gellner; great anthropological look at the evolution of modern nations,
- Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 by Eric Hobswam; survey of literature on the subject from Marxist historian. Good coverage of everything that goes into the process of the formation of nations. He covers language ,religion and technology. However, he dismisses each because Marxism does not have any way of dealing with them. Good survey, but draw your own conclusions from what he summarizes.
- Hollowing Out the Middle by Patrick Carr; this is a sociological study of the population shifts in the rural US.
In other news, Michelle is visiting this holiday break. We're not doing a whole lot except reading books in each other's company. In other words, we doing the normal things we do as a married couple when we live together. This economy keeps us apart due to the availability of jobs or lack thereof. For this week at least we're able to live like a married couple. Lastly, we have new Christmas Kitten. We pulled her out of the snow on the eve of Christmas Eve. She's settled in very nicely and we've gotten attached. Her name is Jago. Yeah, I've been reading the latest Foreigner book. Anyway, naming a cat after a character in a sci-fi series does not make one a geek. Discussing whether Erma Felna or Pyanfar Chanur is hotter makes you a geek. I'll leave it to my readers to decide whether or not I'm a fan or a geek. How're y'all doing? What's up? Reading anything interesting?
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With this trade show featuring armed baby strollers.
No, not really. But, with the political and cultural turmoil going on these days, you're never sure about the line between satire and reality. This is actually an art show by Shi Jinsong.
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Man, buying a car is stressful. I just got the small loan I need approved and will have it disbursed tomorrow. I inspect and hopefully purchase Saturday morning. Found myself a nice little Jetta with low miles for its age. They have some reliability problems that year. After my experience with the Saturn I am undaunted. The Jetta's problems are nothing compared to the garbage that GM foisted on the public with the Saturn. I'm wound up from that. I'm wound up because I've been real sick the past two weeks and I'm finally feeling okay. And, now, I'm overwound because I decided to take drastic action against my Civilization addiction. It wasn't enough to simply uninstall the game. I reinstalled it a while back. This time I froze the disc under bowl full of water in the freezer. I probably should've microwaved the damned thing. So far, I've cranked out about fifteen pages in a novel I've been taking notes on for almost a year. I've also plowed through about 100 pages of Marxist analysis of 19th century nationalism and part of a book on Science, Technology and Society. That, by the way, is an awesome discipline. It combines history with engineering, economics and sociology. Now I'm sort of just bouncing off the walls because I want to get the darned car purchase over with. I can't focus enough to do anything useful. I desperately need to find a gaming group. That'd help immensely.
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I'm buying a car this weekend. I'm dreading the expense and what it will do to the old bank accounts, but I'm nervous about not owning a car. Two things are driving this anxiety. First, Septa may go on strike just because their union leader is irrational, homicidal, suicidal and enjoys torrid, non-consensual sex with the minds of Philly commuters. Second, I have asthma and, should I get the flu(either of them), I may have to get myself to an ER to deal with respiratory complications. So a car sounds like a pretty good idea right about now since winter can cause me asthma problems just by being cold.
Then there's a psychological component as well. If you live in Center City, mass transit is great. It's a short hop from anywhere to anywhere. The buses and trains are not so very crowded. Now take a bus from, say, University City into the neighborhoods. Sardine time! And there's a class issue as well. You are riding with poor people, specifically, poor black people. I'm generally the one white person on the buses I ride and my fellow riders do not know what to make of me. I generally have an empty seat adjacent to me until half the standing room is occupied; I usually get on at the far end of the line. Things have improved lately. I've ridden the bus enough times that people recognize my face. They know me as the guy who flags down old people to give them my seat and who helps mothers with kids and strollers get in, out and seated. On the 40, they're stand offish because they know the only white people who ride that bus past University City are going to the methadone clinic. And, man, there's a reason to be standoffish. I saw one bunch of heroin addicts simulate a routing problem perfectly in their conversation. They could syn. They could ack. But there just weren't any tables to exchange.
So, that's the mass transit experience from work to home and the other way. When I lived in Manayunk, the buses that went from there to Penn or from there to Bala Cynwyd were much more democratic. You had bankers giving up their seats to welfare moms and professors chatting with sanitation workers. Not a bad ride even when it was standing room only. Those two lines went along streets that had many different kinds of neighborhoods on either side. My current choices both go through some of the most egregiously impoverished communities in Philly. The problem I'm having right now is that my buses are the way that suburban, middle class America perceives mass transit in general. It's just poor people who look different than them who use mass transit. Guess what happens when you try to fund it by taxes? They say "No way!" They ain't racist and some of their best friends are... But, one way or another funding never comes through the political system. That creates a feedback where crowded buses serving poor communities get more crowded because demand always increases while the number of buses and routes never do. All this means that mass transit gets horribly depressing. Especially this time of year. You also start to feel like a loser. At least I'm feeling this way. It boils down to the fact I'm a fairly well paid professional and I have no other option. This is what it feels like to be poor, that not having any other option. There's a stigma attached to that state of being. No one wants to be perceived as poor because that means lazy, not having the smarts to move up or being just plain morally deficient. I can even remember this one toothless white couple explaining to Michelle that they weren't 'bus people' when she explained that the easiest way to University City was the No. 9 bus. When toothless ex-felons avoid the stigma of the bus, you know that its there. The frustrating thing is that, by riding the bus, I can claim to be greener than thou, claim to practicing a Franklinesque level frugality and all that. Yet, it doesn't feel like I can claim the same moral high ground I did when I rode my bike during the warmer months. And yet, a six mile bike ride is nowhere near as taxing as a ride in the motorized fish tins that serve my community. To think that, on a good, day you start off your work day by doing something very unpleasant. And that's just a day where no one pukes, pisses themselves, talks to Jesus at the top of their lungs or attempts to use the bus as a get away vehicle during a robbery. Yeah, who's lazy now? Plus, I have an easy ride. Half the people on my route wind up at the transit center where they transfer to another bus. This is what they have to do just to get to work. As for the smarts, they have to string together buses that may or may not have coordinated routes. Then there's morally deficient charge that seems to lurk just under the rhetoric of the Right; sometimes it comes right out. Man, you need to see how the folks on the bus look out for the regulars. I practice courtesy because I'm a seasoned bus ride from a long line of bus drivers. I grok this stuff. The other people form a bit of community for the ride. The people who're holding it together prop each other up with quiet whispers of encouragement and reassurance. The exchange assistance and sympathy as needed. The truth about being poor in America is that you need to be hard working, smart and have good moral center if you're going to survive.
I've only been taking the bus about three weeks now and I already need a vacation. The association of poverty with mass transit and the stigma that attaches just kills any serious development new rail and bus systems. You simply can't sell it to the middle class honkies who vote reliably. Poor minorities came out in droves to vote for Obama and they got a lot of progressive types in on his coat tails, but they're not going to come out for the 2010 elections and the ones who vote know in their hears that poor people don't deserve all the wealth that they get from the government. That means no new investment in anything communal. That means the mass transit that could relieve traffic congestion and environmental overstress won't become reality.
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Friends, geeks, countrymen lend me your experience. I'm laboring through the development of a large and complicated form for a cataloging system. I'm doing it by hand as it were and that is just so mid 1990s. I hear tell of these things called Frameworks that automate this kind of development. Anyone here have a PHP Framework they like? Anyone have any recommendations for further reading on Frameworks?
In other news, I am buying a car.
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As I've noted elsewhere, history is a great gold mine of themes and characters for science fiction. One of the best events for inspiration is the Meji Restoration. Japan had been completely isolated from the world for two hundred years. Larger powers ignored them because the island didn't have resources to arouse the avarice of the English, Spain had long since declined in power and the Dutch traded with Japan only through a special zone. All that changed when Perry sailed into Uraga Harbor. Until then most Japanese never really thought about the world outside. The world outside was almost literally an alien planet. Suddenly isolation is broken and they have to catch up with a world that's been active for the two hundred years that Japan's been cut off. Into this breech stepped Katsu Kaishu, the man who went on to become Japan's first modern naval commissioner. He was also of the Tokugawa's chief diplomats. All you really have to do to turn his biography into science fiction is replace sea travel with space travel.
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"Self-submission is not a new form of autoeroticism.
--PHP5 and MySQL Bible
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Every good science fiction story has a huge spaceship coasting through the inky black between stars. It might be sublight, warp driven, capable of folding space, tearing a hole in the space time continuum or it may use a transcendental quantum McGuffin to get between the known here and the undiscovered there. Depending on who's telling the story, it'll range anywhere from the size of an aircraft carrier to a small moon. The ship could have an AI personality controlling vital systems or it might even be alive. Anyway, I have science fiction story. I might even been good, but time will tell on that one. Naturally I have a badass spaceship in the story. So far, it hasn't developed a personality. Mostly because the people on it tend to think of it more as a base of operations than ship. It's part of a fleet. I've given a fair amount of thought about how its made and so on. But I'm stuck. What do I name it? The name of a vessel tells you a lot about the people that commissioned it. The Germans named their WWII ships after great war leaders, the battleship Bismark, Admiral Scheer. Great Britain named their capital ships after kings. The US named them after states. Right now I'm trying to imagine what a future, united Earth might call the flagship of their expeditionary fleet. They're optimistic and out to sincerely save the galaxy. What do y'all think they'd name a ship after. Here's some thoughts:
- Continents. Always good, but that does that really represent a people who have colonized solar system and a couple of other stars, a people who build ships out in the Kuiper Belt?
- Famous leaders. Fraught with politics and memories of dissension.
- Famous explorers. Depends on who viewed themselves as explorers and who viewed themselves as exploited by the explorers. Besides who actually owns the memory of a person?
- Famous librarians? My personal favorite. I know that someday there'll be a USS Dagoski.
Please share your thoughts with me.
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I really ought to start keeping a journal on the bedside table. Of course that means that I have to obtain a bedside table first. Anyway, I tend to dream in sci-fi movies. Last night's dream was a cinematic masterpiece depicting the exodus of the galaxy's Hair Metal bands. All of them. They'd packed themselves into huge, sublight generation ships and were leaving the galaxy for, I don't really remember. I can't remember much more than that now, but remember thinking in the dream that this movie was the coolest thing ever. There were epic battles, denouement and... guitars. Lots of them, some of them on fire and stuff. Oddly enough, the soundtrack in my dream was by Dead Can Dance. Waking, I think I've got even money of selling this treatment to Hollywood. They greenlighted 2012 after all.
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Back from the holiday. Visiting the inlaws was good, spending time with my wife was also good. The bad was realizing that thirty years of conservative Right Wing misrule and its infection into the Democrat party has utterly ruined the Midwest. The prospects for actually getting to live with the woman I'm married to are not good given the unemployment situation. Luckily my CV evens the odds a lot. So I'm hopeful that I'll get a job in the region soon. The bad also comes in the form of Airline Crud. Luckily its no H1N1, but I still feel like crap. I've been reading up on nationalism and its history and development in Europe. If you want to understand the politics of our current time, you need to read Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism along with Hobswam's Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality. None of the debates which raise hackles on all sides have anything to do with the substance of policy. Rather all our current debates are about the constituency of the nation; who's in and who's out. This theme also reverberated throughout the 2008 election.
So, anyway, I was watching one of my favorite, feel like crap and can't spare the mental energy for anything movies, the Chronicles of Riddick. Explosions, armored metal fans, improbable martial arts on molten low g planets and set design by Games Workshop, the movie has it all. Well, everything except plot and character development. Who cares when you're sick, though. I was enormously disappointed when the movies first came out because I thought it was a Warhammer 40k movie. I was hoping for something like Dune, complete with self immolating muad'dibs and a sound track by the Mars Volta. That's how I would've done it. In my movie, there would've been no Riddick. I would've gotten into the Necromongers. They're really interesting. In the first part of the movie, the king bad guy and his chief minion laid out their beliefs to the defeated. I had always thought this sounded familiar, but this viewing I finally put together the Maximillian style armor the bad guys wore and their theology. The Necromongers are militant Cathars. That made it all make sense. This time, the Cathars aren't fleeing the Rex Mundi by mortifying the flesh and celibacy. This time they're murdering every living thing under the rule of Rex Mundi. The movie would've been so much cooler if it had been about this clash of gnostic and orthodox theologies. That would've been epic. As it was, the movie was just what this geek needed to recover from Airline Crud.
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There's a job at Wayne State that's a real good match with my experience, education and interests. There's another at EMU I could do if I could convince the hiring people of that fact. I'd prefer that one, natch. However, the Wayne State U job is actually better. Aside from that fact that it's in Detroit, that is. Question for David and the other folks who know the area: Would I be able to live in cycling distance of the job without having to weld a hard point onto my handlebars and mount an FN MAG? And, which is worse in that regard, crime or traffic? Also, what's in the general of area of Wayne State that makes living and working there worthwhile? I simply don't know the area at all.
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Whenever I want to test some sort of cataloging system or scheme(mine or someone else's), I always catalog the Necronomicron. Since I don't quite know the Library of Congress Classification System well enough to shelve it off the top of my head, I figured I'd turn to OCLC's Worldcat to see if there's a catalog record in some other library. Sure enough, I turned one up: Necronomicron: 18 aphorisms for clarinet and piano.
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cranky