stevengharms.com

Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago, was a whistle-blower who prompted the raid by tipping off the F.B.I. to suspicious activity at the company where he worked, including possible weapons trafficking. He was arrested and held for 97 days — shackled and blindfolded, prevented from sleeping by blaring music and round-the-clock lights. In other words, he was subjected to the same mistreatment that thousands of non-Americans have been subjected to since the 2003 invasion.

Even after the military learned who Mr. Vance was, they continued to hold him in these abusive conditions for weeks more. He was not allowed to defend himself at the Potemkin hearing held to justify his detention. And that was special treatment. As an American citizen, he was at least allowed to attend his hearing. An Iraqi, or an Afghani, or any other foreigner, would have been barred from the room.

This is not the handiwork of a few out-of-control sadists at Abu Ghraib. This is a system that was created and operated outside American law and American standards of decency. Except for the few low-ranking soldiers periodically punished for abusing prisoners, it is a system without any accountability.

New York Times

Ho ho howdy.

I saw a horrible movie from the 80’s. “Slam Dance”. Terrible.

I saw a very good, albeit intense movie from a few years back, “Mean Creek”. It was a bit like “Stand By Me” but with a body count. I have to give incredibly praise to the adolescent and teen actors in this movie. They all showed skill beyond their years. Particularly impressive was Josh Peck playing a bully with more complexity and depth than such a character is usually given when Our Hero is the smaller picked-on kid.

A lot of great and heavy questions were asked: who has the right to judge, if you could kill your tormentors would you, the bond between brothers…it was all there and very, very real.

I saw some good lighthearted fare as well. My sister and Lauren and I went over to the Alamo and caught the new Will Smith movie. It was, of course, pretty by the numbers. Hard situation, adversity, more adversity, and through pluck and luck and determination it all works out. It’s good for the holidays and I left with a smile.

To be perfectly honest I was feeling a good bit burned out Saturday and seeing a movie like that was precisely what I needed.

Sunday we headed down to the outlets in San Marcos and, having arrived there, I thought we would make a visit to old San Antone for an early dinner. We drove into town and parked near the riverwalk. After a stroll we ate at Rio Rio and then wandered about some more before heading over to the Alamo, the real one, not the movie theater.

I also had the chance to read a bit more of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Having seen “The Hours” I was inspired to pick up the source. It’s very slow going, being proper ‘litra-chuh” and all, but it’s good to do hard things

I love them all! They’re all so mysterious and baffling. Each of them invites you to think a little bit differently.

(+ 1 2)

This is LISP. Lisp is a programming language from the 194060’s that’s still used today. Growing up I learned that 1+2 evaluates to 3. That’s what the above says too, but the operator is at the beginning of the statement. This is called Polish notation. Man. Talk about stretching your mind, that’s like asking you to think in reverse.

Speaking of thinking in reverse, on an HP12C calculator, my dad showed me that it uses Reverse Polish Notation. That’s cool too you say. ( 1 2 +)

You say so what. But what if you had a whole string of numbers to enter ( before you had Excel ).

( 32.44 152.16 0.32 +). See you only had to enter the “+” token once. Pretty handy. You would have had to hit a lot more “+” buttons if you needed to enter a long string of numbers.

Know what else is amazing about LISP, is that it’s functional programming. You know like you did in 7th grade math. A function

f(x)=x^2+3x+6

But that’s pretty cool too, because in LISP you could write programs like this

(* 2 (+1 2))

work from the inside out:: the answer is 6 [ or (*2 3) ] .

That’s pretty neat. Programming wise you could do something like

(decide_if_mail_is_spam(process_the_email an_email))

And that’s a very organized way to think about programming, process it, and then send the result to ‘decide_’.

And that’s just Lisp. There are other languages that do functional programming, languages that describe languages, languages to parse language descriptions, some are functional ( as I described above ) some are not.

It’s just like learning a new human language invites you to think differently about your syntactic structures and your brain is changed afterwards forever.

I think that the apple is red ( english )

Ik denk dat de appel rood is ( dutch)

1+2=

(+1 2)

…or….

(1 2 +)

Astounding. The verb inversion order of my dutch example above really makes a fun point. That you think differently when working in different languages - programming languages included. I realize this is no great realization for those is the code-mangling professions, but this is such a powerful idea I just wanted to say it here too.

And what about other languages like C or SmallTalk or Java or Ruby or Perl or … there are just so many. So many that can say different things about you and how you feel and how you think about the problem. They’re just so wonderful.

What a wonderful world I happen to live in where little squiggles and ideas of categorizing little squiggles makes me so happy. I guess this was really why I took Logic in college ( besides having to ). Symbolic logic has the coolest squiggles.

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After having had an extremely busy last few weeks workwise and lifewise I decided that I needed a visit to my chiropractor, Dr. Ron Burnett on 6th street.

Finishing up my 5 o’clock appointment, it was clear that the traffic back to my apartment would be more pain than it’s worth so I asked Lauren, who had accompanied me to Dr. Burnett’s Austin Funky re-hab office-in-a-house, if she was up for grabbing a margarita and dinner at Guero’s. She was game.

We shared the fajitas for two and then I made an amazing discovery I recommend you try. I ordered coffee and a praline for dessert. I put a bit of the praline in the coffee instead of sugar and it made a really rich, smoky, nutty ( pecan ) flavor. It was the great compliment to that finely bitter Ruta Maya roasted coffee.

Also this week I made it to a meeting of the Austin Cocoa Software Developers meetup group. It was a really good time talking Cocoa and Mac with some other interested parties.

Other than that I hit my head on a limitation in LDAP because my company is using 2.2x OpenLDAP versus 2.3x OpenLDAP. Some points of frustration I was facing stem from this problem. I’m hoping to get the upgraded code put in place … but I’m also not relishing the prospect of additional learning curve. I’ll see how it goes.

Good news, I’m taking an introductory Java class in Houston the 2nd week of January. I took a Java class back in college, but somehow it seems to have kinda dimmed out — and I suspect that things have progressed significantly in the last 6 years, so it’s probably good to get resynchronized.

Also, last weekend we were guests at The League of Melbotis’s Christmas party and it was great! We had a great time visiting with Mr. and Mrs. The League, playing with their dogs, talking to folks, eating their food, and draining cups o’ spirits. ‘Twas a fine evening. For my money the best moment was when Mrs. The League played the Charlie Brown Christmas Song “It’s Christmas time” in sock monkey slippers on the keyboard while I got to hold my girl in the crook of my left arm. That was the best.

You can place a unicode character at the front of HTML, and, if you’re running an intelligent browser, it will

‮present everything as if mirrored.

One of the movies that flicked across my radar this last year, but which I did not see in theaters was the indie noir/high school movie “Brick”.

Noir and high school? Yes, the very same. I’ll explain how the homages are done.

Brick occurs in a nameless burg in Southern California ( Orange County, if my eyes deceive me not ) where the cliques of high school are all the more pronounced; more like gangs. There’s the dope crew, the jock crew, the drug kingpin and his muscle, and our outsider protagonist, the information gatherer, Brendan.

The crew speak in noir-ese, Sam Spade style, ya see? Brendan finds himself on the receiving end of several knuckle sandwiches and manages to rough up when he needs to rough up. In this, we see all the rules of the noir film lovingly re-created.

Now, the high school angle..Hm. Well, it’s interesting because it takes school from the mundane frustrations about homework and parties and drug use, and puts them all as the tip of a seedy noir iceberg. This is very good. On the other hand, the reality of high school is silly because the kids never wind up at school, the kids never wind up in detention. School is really only a backdrop.

ALTHOUGH it provides the venue for another noir convention: the rough meeting with the chief. In the noir movie this is when the PI meets up with his old police boss. The one that thinks he played it too loose when he was on the force, who toed the line when our hero trampled over the nice and neat bureaucratic machine.

And who else plays the chief, er, the principal. Richard Roundtree, that’s right SHAFT (John Shaft…) himself. That was excellent.

It was a fun movie and I recommend it.

What happens when you combine Bill Keane’s safe-as-mother’s-milk comic strip standard The Family Circus and cross it with the 19th century’s most aphoristic, volatile, and poetic thinker? I present to you The Nietzsche Family Circus.

Back in the winter of 2002 when I was living in San Francisco I went to see the amazing City of God which featured the trailer for the then soon-to-be-released Raising Victor Vargas.

It was one of the movies that first broke out after high quality digital video became available to the masses of independent-minded film makers.

Unlike that phony and pretentious cynical aethetic called Dogme 95 ( by anti-humanist scab-picker Lars “von” Trier ), the natural light, the unsteady cam served to underscore the genuine moments when a macho boy decides to start trying to be a grown man.

The movie explores Victor’s sweltering summer as he becomes interested in “Juicy” Judy Gonzalez: the block’s resident hottie. At the beginning Victor is all swagger and boast. When trumped bravado prove to be his undoing he undergoes a series of setbacks which invite him to discover the man inside versus the posturing veneer he thinks he needs to express.

Along the way Victor’s Dominican family environment, his relationship with his grandmother, and his siblings is shown with a tender and realistic dialog. The subtle points of life in the Lower East Side are meticulously pointed out.

Further, it’s not just Victor who gets to evolve: his love interest, his siblings, his grandmother, his would-be girl’s best friend, his own best friend….everyone seems to be breaking through from a childhood reality to an undsteady, realistic, adult conception of the world.

It’s amazing, the vocabulary is still that of children, but the actions are those of adults. Sometimes the words are those of adults but the heartbreaks are befitting to innocent children.

It’s a very positive movie that is neither sentimental, dreamy, or pie-in-the sky. At the end I wanted to know what happened next and whether the characters would be happy.

I recommend it, unlike Dancer in the Dark or Breaking the Waves which exist to build straw men of humanity and make you feel bad.

When I was in my last year of high school, The Social B and I saw a hilarious movie, a hilarious movie beyond hilarity. A film which introduced to us the idea that a great many people lead lives of quiet desperation while waiting, discontentedly, on other people. They were people who, given no other options, were simply passing time wherever they were at and while they were doing that they’d had some funny thoughts about Star Wars, deviancy, rapping, and culture.

I knew that there were rogue movie makers out there, people who had guts and vision, people who wanted to tell the world about what their bit of America ( or wherever ) was like. They wanted to use that little corner as the backdrop for the tale of the economically underpowered in the blighted wasteland of American suburbia.

The movie that proved all this to me was Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

I can barely remember all the scenes, but I remember laughing so hard that I thought I might die during Berserker or during the magic number 37.

The characters, Randal and Dante ( the voyager of Hell, anyone? ) were a bit like Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern: each aware that there was a richer plot of life happening around them, but seemingly powerless to break out of the limited and narrow story arc life had planned for them. No, instead as the clock wound past, the best these guys could come up with was an insightful debate as to whether the Rebels were actually bad guys in the Star Wars series because they blew up the Death Star II, which, as it was under construction, likely was full of some average Joes out for a paycheck and not expecting to get detonated as they did whatever they had to do to pull an Imperial check.

Regrettably, this legacy has been tainted by the horrid abortion that is Clerks II. Geez where to start? Let’s just say it’s terrible. The insightful, Stoppard-esque look into the life of clerking was rent asunder because Smith tried to give the characters depth.

No, no, and no.

I felt like the androgynous Matrix Girl: “No, no, not like this.” Please don’t have Randal do this: Not by having an 11th-hour, you’re my friend, as much as I tortured you moment.

Then there was the impossibly hot store manager Rosario Dawson. Wrong.

Somehow through the schmalz and the entirely unnecessary “donkey show” scene the message comes through: anyone can take control of his life, and stop being passive, and can choose a life of their own desires.

OK, great message, not like it’s new, but as most of humanity has yet to get it, it bears repeating.

…but why did you have to make the characters discovering this the merry, profane, let adorably addled characters from “Clerks”? Why not have Gigli do it?

Not like this, Kevin Smith. Not by taking your detached, beloved, victims of fate and putting them into a script any script-o-tron-2000 in Hollywood could have churned out. There were a few highlights.

Some great discussions were….

• Is “Porchmonkey” a racial epithet, can a white man claim it back
  • Wanda Sykes as an offended black patron hearing porch-monkey.
  • Randal’s listing of racial slurs that are worse than porchmonkey. Way to go, Smith! Getting that past the MPAA is this age was worthy
• Jay channels Jame Gumb’s (in-)famous “tuck scene” from “The Silence of the Lambs”
• Rosiario Dawson’s general not un-hotness
• Elias was totally awesome
  • The vaginal troll in his girlfriend
  • The mouth troll in his girlfriend
  • Randal dissing Lord of The Rings’ “total gayness” and multiple endings from the “Return of the King” so harshly that a Rings loving fan tosses cookies.
  • Elias likes transformers, that’s pretty good.

But that these points are not enough to make for a good movie. If, by some chance you go over to someone’s house and they rented it, you might watch it, if you’ve got some good nachos and a few beers ( both are required ), but this, in no way, approximates the brilliance of the original “Clerks”.

I’ve been in the closet about this for too many years. I was afraid that stating the following would put me into a repressed minority. I feared I would be laughed at by the intelligentsia, I feared that I would be a type of “free-thinker” iconoclast that is vilified by the conservative part of American life.

I suppose I was merely afraid. But I will be afraid no more. Let me say what I’ve known in my heart for oh-so-long.

Doonesbury is simply not funny.

Every time I read it I keep thinking there will be something funny happening. Or perhaps it’s not supposed to be funny ha-ha but rather funny poignant or funny boy-that’s-just-how-it-is. When I read it I think. Hm, that’s pictures with voice balloons.