Holy

Posted on February 24, 2019 by d4vid

I used to refer to Academy Awards night as High Holy Day (although it’s lost most of its luster for me over the years.)  Thinking back to where I’ve watched the Oscars has been like a roadmap of the last five years:

  • 2015 – On the floor of a Beijing hotel room watching with Eli & Xiaohan.  (Birdman)
  • 2016 – At my desk at ODW, unable to find (even a pirated) stream of the telecast and instead just refreshing the winner’s page.  (Spotlight)
  • 2017 – In a rental house in Berkeley with Martin & Zoya, still jetlagged from having just flown back from Shanghai to move home. (La-La Land, no, oops, Moonlight)
  • 2018 – In a hotel room in Cedar City UT at the end of the very first day of my road trip around the country.  (The Shape of Water)
  • 2019 – In my penthouse apartment in Stamford CT.  (Green Book)

I wonder where I’ll watch it in 2020.

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Long

Posted on February 24, 2019 by d4vid

I remember loving this song when it first appeared in Season 2 of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” but it has been haunting me ever since hearing it again in the end credits of the series finale when it moved me to tears.  I think it should be my new theme song.

“Oh, the sun will rise in the morning
Or so I’m told, but who knows?
You could win a million bucks in the morning
And then get rolled by a mob of stinking hobos
Good news, you can’t lose
When you tell Mr. Blues that you choose to keep going
We’ll never stop, we’ll keep on moving forward
Even if we don’t know what we’re moving towards

They say life’s too short, but they’re wrong
It’s so long!
Sometimes the only way to go
Is to just go on

Keep a smile in your pocket when the wolf is rat-a-tattin’ at the door
Just lock it tight
Keep a dream in your heart and you’ll never ever want for more
Unless you’re in a knife fight
Chin high, spit in the eye
Of the folks who can’t stop laughing at the stupid things you’ve done
Don’t ever stop even if though your heart is breaking
Don’t look over your shoulder at the love you’ve left behind

They say life’s too short, but they’re wrong
It’s so long!
Sometimes the only way to go
Is to just go on”

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Enemy

Posted on February 20, 2019 by d4vid

It was time.  I finally bit the bullet and found a local doctor so she could refill my medications.  It was disheartening enumerating my health history, my parents health histories & deaths, and their parents health histories & deaths.  No, maybe not disheartening.  Sobering.

When I confessed that I still drink sugar soda every workday at lunch for the caffeine to get me through the afternoon, she was having none of it.  “You’re your own worst enemy.”

Stipulated.

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Valley

Posted on February 16, 2019 by d4vid

Alita: Battle Angel is a two hour tour through the uncanny valley.

Quite a letdown for a movie I’ve been waiting for since circa 2006.  However, I did enjoy the cameo stunt casting of the Big Boss, a famous actor with his hair styled to look exactly like…James Cameron circa 2006.

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Shit

Posted on February 7, 2019 by d4vid

I made the unwise decision to read all three of these on the same day:

  • News story about suicides in VA parking lots
  • News story about how Global Warming means “Everything is not going to be okay”
  • Live tweeting of the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on the DHS family separation policy

 

 

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Extrication

Posted on February 7, 2019 by d4vid

Reporter Kashmir Hill has written a fascinating series of articles called “Goodbye Big Five” (plus a technical follow-up with gory details) about systematically trying to block big tech companies from her family’s life, a week at a time.

  • Week 1: Amazon — “I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life.  It Was Impossible.”
  • Week 2: Facebook — “I Cut Facebook Out of My Life.  Surprisingly, I Missed It.”
  • Week 3: Google — “I Cut Google Out of My Life.  It Screwed Up Everything.”
  • Week 4: Microsoft — “I Cut Microsoft Out of My Life—or So I Thought.”
  • Week 5: Apple — “I Cut Apple Out of My Life.  It Was Devastating.”
  • Week 6: Blocking Them All — “I Cut the ‘Big Five’ Tech Giants From My Life.  It Was Hell.”

I found the thesis sentence in the last installment to be “Technology creates the problems that technology solves, and vice versa.”  Which, invariable, made me think of…

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Oink

Posted on February 5, 2019 by d4vid


恭喜发财!  新年快乐!

Today is Lunar New Year and, according to the Chinese zodiac, the start of the Year of the Pig!

According to the Chinese myth, animals raced to the Jade Emperor’s call and the order in which they arrived are the order of the 12 year cycle.  Pig was lazy and arrived last, so he’s the end of the cycle.

So, allow me to wish you a 猪年大吉 (zhū nián dàjí) which literally means “pig year big luck”!

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Tinnitus

Posted on February 4, 2019 by d4vid

I just realized that my tinnitus is the room tone of my head.

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Indie

Posted on February 2, 2019 by d4vid

I finally had a chance to see a movie at this adorable little indie movie theater a short walk from my house.

It has two screens and the walls are dotted with a series of backlit vignettes of 18th century New England life!

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Remembrance

Posted on February 2, 2019 by d4vid


At one point, Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicle says he has been given “a memory so clean and sharp I have to be careful not to cut myself sometimes.”

Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess of memory.  She was daughter of the Titans Uranus and Gaia and, interestingly, was the mother of the Nine Muses.

Lethe is one of the rivers in Hades (and sometimes, as in Hesiod‘s Theogeny, a goddess of the same name associated with the river and daughter of Eris.)  The word “lethe” means “oblivion”, “forgetfulness”, or “concealment” whereas the word “alethia” means “truth”.   There’s a chance you might recognize the word as the root of Lyra’s “alethiometer” in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

So, “truth” is literally “unoblivion” or “unforgetfulness” or “unconcealment”.   I’m fascinated by  how the Greeks defined truth as the opposite of something else.   I would have thought that it was so fundamental that it would be it’s own first order concept.  English has a similar situation where our term for “books which are true” is “non-fiction”.

The cult of Orphism, inspired by the poetry of Orpheus, believed in “metempsychosis“.  (This is related to the “transmigration of souls” discussed by Arthur Schopenhauer and Kurt Gödel and Friedrich Nietzsche.)  Dead souls would drink from the river Lethe to wipe out memories of their past lives when reincarnated.  However, Orphic initiates were taught instead to drink from a river (or pool) presided over by Mnemosyne—the river of memory—in order to stop their transmigration.

 

 

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Gigerpunk

Posted on February 1, 2019 by d4vid


I was quibbling with coworkers over lunch as to the definition of cyberpunk.  I said that it was marked by dystopia, a film noir aesthetic, and technology filtering down to a criminal underworld.  But a couple of guys insisted that it had to do with the merging of humans and machines.  When asked what I would call that kind of science fiction if it wasn’t cyberpunk, I replied, “I don’t know, Gigerpunk?”

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Wrought

Posted on January 31, 2019 by d4vid

My friend Stephanie and I had a good conversation about Mike Nichols‘ assertion that there are only three types of scenes:  “negotiations, seductions, and fights.”

She pointed out that this formulation excludes soliloquies or any sort of scene with fewer than two interacting characters.  I was uncomfortable with the three types, since seductions are just negotiations with a very specific goal and fights are just failed negotiations or negotiations with raised stakes.

We decided that Nichols’ comment makes perfect sense for the kind of plays he directed, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it said less about plays in general and more about mid-20th century American plays by people like Albee or Miller or O’Neill or even Neil Simon.

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Oligarchs

Posted on January 31, 2019 by d4vid

Know your Russia-linked oligarchs!

  • Roman Abramovich:  Russian-born, he exercised his rights under the Law of Return to attain Israeli citizenship, allowing him to visit Britain visa-free.
  • Aras Agalarov:  father of Azerbaijiani pop star Emin Agalarov (who is a client of music publicist Rob Goldstone) and boss of Ike Kaveladze, who was with Goldstone at the Trump Tower meeting.
  • Leonard “Len” Blavatnik (Ukrainian-born, dual U.S./U.K. citizenship, lives in London):  Donated to $7.35 million to McConnell’s GOP Senate Leadership Fund, PACS of Graham, Rubio, McCain, the RNC, and a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration.  Bought Steven Mnuchin’s stake in Dune Entertainment.  Hosted Steven Mnuchin and Brett Ratner on his yacht.  Business partners with Vekselberg.
  • Oleg Deripaska: Controls RusAl.  Backed Paul Manafort’s political consulting work in Ukraine and loaned Manafort $10 million after Viktor Yanukovych was ousted from the presidency.  Tried to collect his debt during the Trump campaign and was given internal polling by Manafort.
  • Pavel Fuchs (Ukranian):  Investor in oil, gas, luxury real estate, and banking.  Involved in Trump Hotel Moscow.
  • Semion Mogilevich:  Removed from FBI’s most wanted list by James Comey in Dec 2015.
  • Vladimir Potanin:  Secretly bought Maryland’s state voter registration platform in 2015.
  • Yevgeny Prigozhin:  Linked to Wagner Group and Internet Research Agency
  • Vladamir Putin:  President of Russia.  Might be dating Rupert Murdoch’s (most recent) ex wife, Wendi Deng, who is friends with Ivanka & Jared and may work for the Chinese government.
  • Viktor Vekselberg:  Proxy control of Bank of Cyprus.  Deposited money to Cohen’s porn payoff slush fund.  GOP donor.  Attended Inauguration.  Questioned by Mueller at a “New York-area airport”.  One of the 24 Russians sanctioned in 2018.  Business partners with Vekselberg.

Plus a bonus Russian mobster!

  • Alexander Torshin: Worked with assistant Maria Butina in cultivating ties with the NRA.

 

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Heliotropic

Posted on January 31, 2019 by d4vid

This is the view from my cubicle looking over my monitors.  That bright, sideways isosceles triangle is a sliver of window.  (I think I’m the only one happy that my department is moving a few floors down during construction for the next six months.)

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Crait

Posted on January 31, 2019 by d4vid


I woke up to find all of the streets white.  I genuinely didn’t know what it was.  Frozen rain from the night before?  Some sort of frost?

Turns out…

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