stevengharms.com

I post well-considered, well, better-considered ideas here. For incidental thoughts, check out my Twitter feed.

This evening after my classes I was sitting outside of the school at the ‘Dillo stop waiting for the, uh, ‘Dillo to come round. While waiting I was reading a textbook when I felt something alight to my lower calf. I looked down and sow a mosquito.

I hate those bastards.

And so I thought: “By God, it’s a mosquito mid-suck! If I kill it i will have bug guts and, uh, until-recently my blood on me.” About the same time another more primal message came in “Kill that ugly thing stealing your vital hæmocytes.” Before I could be more than just barely conscious of these ideas I smacked the insect into oblivion.

Sure enough, and to my chagrin, said action resulted in a bloody smear on my calf.

So the addition is “When you know you have two choices, but that they will both lead to a disappointing / irksome / irritating end, and, having chosen one, you realized one of the said bitter ends and were, as you expected, disappointed / irked / put out.”

Guy 1: So my boss took us out to lunch Guy 2: Cool! Where? Guy 1: Bennigan’s Guy 2: Ugh, what’d you get? Guy 1: Well it was between the club and the burger, neither of which looked good and pretty much assured disappointment. Guy 2: So which did you get? Guy 1: The club. Guy 2: And it was…? Guy 1: Really average and a bit overcooked, just like I expected. Guy 2: What a total bekanntschlechtwahl Guy 1: I am full, but not content ( shout out SB )

Previous Additions to the German Lexicon

…When you do something thinking you will save yourself doing something you don’t want to do, but then forget that you were smart enough to do that and wind up creating more work for yourself, because you just did the thing you didn’t want to, so as to remember that you did something “smart” with the thing you wanted and now you must do it in addition….

e.g.

Guy 1: “I put my manila folder on the outside of my bag so that I could get to it without unbuckling the bag, Once I did that I remembered I’d put the folder in the convenient side access flap instead, so then I had to buckle the bag back up and then open the access flap to get it.”

Guy 2: What a total hossenfeffer.

Dedman has been on my case for many moons now to read this book and I finished it today.

Setup

The dead move to a city (the city) after undergoing a crossing which has no objective standard (wandering a desert, a forest, going underwater, etc.). The dead or, more precisely, the living dead, rest in the city until those who remember them die at which point they go into a different beyond.

Good setup.

The population starts swelling as a pandemic wipes out the population: sending people into the city by the barrel-load and, given the setup, the people who remember them, into death quite quickly. Thus the city swells and then empties, with only a few hundred survivors wondering why they’re still there.

The reason is that they’re still remembered by the last person on earth who is trekking across Antarctica trying to find some contrary evidence to the inescapable conclusion: “I am the last person on Earth”.

…et La Peste

As I was reading this story I was more and more reminded of Camus’ The Plague, which contemplates how humans relate to one another as a city vanishes ( in this case, the much more pedestrian aspect of the population dying ). In Camus’ Oran we watch as the people we love vanish bubo-covered body by body. In this we have a much more mysterious Nothing that erases parts of the city ( appropriate for the generation that grew up to The Neverending Story ). In both of these scenarios the intractable end can’t be avoided, and against Camus l’Absurde, the characters find the Existentialists resolve to be good, to live a jubilant life ( or afterlife ), even when there’s no reason to it.

Some of the Amazon reviews seem to forget there is a beauty in Brockmeier’s style of delivery, a calm sort of collected sobriety with a Romantic nostalgia that was what I liked best of the sci-fi / horror / Gothic romance The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The Last Man

I’d also say that there’s a certain similitude between this book and Vonnegut’s amazing Cat’s Cradle. You can read more about that after the jump, I don’t want to spoil your read of Cat’s Cradle.

In all, a fine book, but I’d suggest you wait for paperback or a library rental. At 250 pages without much re-read value you might be best saving a few dollars.

(more…)

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz, it’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by frank herbert where herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, i’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

I never much cared for Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there is a story of his called rappacini’s daughter (one of the first best gothic stories ever written) where he writes abotu a man who puts a poison in the lips of his daughter (who is of course, beautiful) and if she kisses someone she’ll kill the kissee.

In any case, there’s a story around that, but see she’s manufactured but natural.

In the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Deckard encounters a wild animal ( in this future vision, the animals are all gone: goats, horses, dogs, etc. Those that remain are venerated under the hyper Christianity of that world called “Mercerism”. The wild animal he encounters is a grasshoper, he turns it over and looks at the bottom and realizes that it is in fact a simulation, a machine grasshopper. This has some meaning relative to the previous experiences he went through.

Origami, origami is amazing. I found this page at Discovery and was amazed by this stunning dragon and then i was even more stunned by the origami flower. As amazing as the dragon is, the flower is more amazing because it’s natural, it’s unnatural natural. It’s like Zen gardens, the goal is to mirror the natural ways and assemblages of natural foliage, but to do it in a way with patterns that show human intervention was involved, the natural unnatural as it were.

And that’s a lot of typing without much sorting into a coherent post. Maybe it’ll turn into something more solid later.

It has been said that he who has much knowledge has much worry.

Sayeth Steven: He who has sexy laptop has much interest in bags.

Following my new favorite lusty consumerism for guys site: Uncrate, I found this bag.

What was particularly interesting to me was this comment:

“Product of Australia - Assy in China”

And suddenly I thought of a half-Chinese, Dickensian Australian reflecting upon his life and thinking this line.

“It was in late 2005 that my father found himself working in Guangdong province as an advisor to the then-nascent Huang textile plants. After 3 months in the Chinese industrial capitol, he found himself sharing the evenings with my mother, a manager at the Huang assembly facility. After a hasty decision to engage in the holy estate of matrimony, and an even-more-hasty return to Queensland, I was born in Brisbane where the provincial Chinese heritage was to run head-on against the rough-and-tumble easy of Australian life. My life could be summed up in the tags of so many textile products shipped to Australia from Guangdong: Product of Australia, assembly in China.

“All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that
the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if
you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all
means, do not use a hammer.” — IBM maintenance manual (1925)

In an email thread the following was written by me:

———————————————————————————————————————— From: Steven Harms (stharms) Subject: RE: NPR Story - “Google’s New Message Service Includes Voice” And their lightweight, open-standard (Jabber, etc.) and play nice with new platforms. Google’s making Andreesen’s predictions come true. Works great on my Mac

You see that I made an error there, I typed their instead of they’re. That’s just what can happen when you type quickly and don’t proofreed.

I noticed the error and re-replied:

From: Steven Harms (stharms) Subject: RE: NPR Story - “Google’s New Message Service Includes Voice” Egredious spelling error i was thinking “their lightweight client” but the situation called for they’re. I apologize. steven

Responded a recipient:

To: Steven Harms (stharms) Subject: RE: NPR Story - “Google’s New Message Service Includes Voice” grammar, spelling - what’s the difference.

Is it grammar when the intent (thinking “they are”) was right but the spelling (their) was wrong? Or was it spelling when it ruins the grammatical intent?

Strikes me that this is a question of the locus of the intentionality of the subject. If I intended one thing it becomes a grammar error, if I knew the difference between the contraction of they are and the possessive form their then I made a spelling error. It’s a presentation error that changes dependent upon the mindset of the author.

So I talked to my gal, she’s a copy writer by profession, whether this was a spelling error or a grammatical error. After about 5 minutes of sucking down pearl tea she said, “I think you have a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there.” I told her i was proud to be a linguistic ouroboros.

+

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Within the last week I’ve seen two movies (Secretary and Thirteen) that feature girls with the “cutting” obssessive-compulsive behavior (self-mutilation).

What a horrible, horrible (day I say again, “horrible”) affliction. I’ve been reading up on it and it’s so foreign, incomprehensible, and strange. At least bulemia or anorexia or agoraphobia all have a place where I can understand where the afflicted is coming from…this, no, no point of reference. There be no maps of those territiories.

I also heard that Garbage chanteuse Shirley Manson was a sufferer as well - simply beyond me.

Ex-girlfriend and reportatrix EC Barnett and I discussed it and I was counting her double X chromosomes to fill me in and explain the female psychology behind this (for it arises far more often in women than men) and she was likewise stymied.

:: shrugs ::

In the parlance of Internet Relay Chat:

/me Addendum: I realize I used the word “horrid” to describe the sickness. When I say horrid I mean it’s something that’s shocking and terrible and foreign. By all means if, for some reason, you are afflicted with this sickness, and you are searching on the web for help and for some cosmic reason came to this site, please, please get help.

Note, Self-Abuse is not the Catholic euphemism

S.A.F.E (Self-Abuse Finally Ends) http://www.selfinjury.com/ Alternative Information Line 1-800-DONT-CUT Provides information on dealing with self-abuse and self-mutilation and treatment options.