Suggestions for the Improvement of Hipster Music

Modest Mouse reminds me of the Pixies, but without any of the goodness that flows from Kim Deal. Maybe they could build a robot Kim Deal! Or call in a guy with a bass saxophone! Or Zombie Billie Holliday! Or put some duct tape over the lead singer's mouth, leaving a hole just large enough for a kazoo!

yami · 16:00 · 9 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Music

Friday Rock Blogging: Schist

schist from the Riverside MountainsDon't'cha hate it when you have to do work at work? My style, it is the severely cramped!

Here's a lump of schist. Also, check out the magma party at Revolving Duck!

yami · 15:47 · 8 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Friday Rock Blogging

Only Terrorists Go to Canada

Department of Homeland Security Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative - to require that Americans without passports stay the fuck home, and Canadians on vacation without passports stay the fuck away. (Mexicans without passports will still be welcome to crawl across the Sonoran Desert, provided that they don't complain when they die or almost die or the people-smugglers break their children's kneecaps.)

The language in this cute little Homeland Security FAQ has blown past even my elevated barriers of cynicism and growing distaste for the word "Orwellian":

  • Preventing us from re-entering the country on the only form of ID we routinely carry around will "facilitate entry for U.S. citizens".
  • travel document options - so okay, that's not Orwellian, it's Marketroidy.
  • The advanced notice of proposed rule making will allow these affected publics to voice concern and provide ideas for alternate documents. - I like how voicing concern isn't tied to any suggestion of actually altering the policy if the public deems it necessary.

Wired recommends wrapping your future passport in aluminum foil. Incidentally, my current passport has a little page where you can enter your address in pencil. What on earth is the point of coding an address in an RFID chip on a document that lasts for ten years? Even normal people change addresses on that kind of time scale!

Bleah. [from Rana]

yami · 16:00 · 5 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: USian Politics

Special to Fellow WordPress Blogtinkers

From here on out, I intend to document everything snazzy I do to this blog on my Codex user page. Tonight, that means writing a bit about how to rename wp-comments-post.php (it's really not that tricky). Readers who are interested in this sort of thing are encouraged to hop over there and join the fun!

Also, I killed off the two alternate themes. They were crap and it wasn't worth even the five minutes it would take to change all the comment script references in them. But the theme competition has ended, and it has all kinds of awesome new themes, some of which I've downloaded. I'll soup up and install 'em any day now, really.

So consider this an open thread with emphasis on blogtinkery.

yami · 20:13 · 4 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Code, Design, Announcements

Links to Daylight’s Rescue

This year, I'm actually happy about Daylight Savings Time: I've been waking up half an hour before my alarm, due to the excessive sunlight, and it's time for that to stop. So this morning I woke up abruptly to loud beeps, instead of gradually to the dawn; cha-CHING! As a result, I'm feeling all linky today.

Music!

The Air Force Wind Ensembles have free mp3s, including Johan de Meij's Lord of the Rings symphony (which I've been chasing for quite some time) and a whole buncha other stuff I remember (fondly or not) from high school. Thus far I've only really heard this stuff performed by the kind of band that was willing to have me as a member, it's nice to hear it done by professionals. Via MeFi.

Unions!

They're in trouble again, says Henry Farrell. This time, from a set of regulations designed to make it difficult for them to operate as a political force and behave more transparently, where "transparent" will certainly be taken by the current administration to mean "smushed to ineffectiveness by any means necessary". I find myself in partial agreement with some commentators that unions should be subject to extra scrutiny iff membership is a condition for employment, and regulations to that effect could plausibly be a good idea... but (1) I don't know enough about such wonky shit to judge yet and more importantly (2) what kind of fool trusts the Bush administration to act in good faith when regulating a classic stronghold of the opposing party?

Henry argues that [i]f blogs can organize a boycott against Sinclair Communications, and can play an important role in pushing back against efforts to destroy Social Security, then they can certainly do something to help fight against this. - which is a pretty fuckin' ginormous "if". I don't expect blogs to do more for the labor movement than they did for Kerry's campaign. In fact, I expect less, because the big-name liberal bloggers are still too busy puffing up their place in Social Security wonkdom to give labor issues more than the briefest of occasional nods.

What have I read recently on labor issues that hasn't filled me with cynicism and ennui? The story of the Coalition of Immolakee Workers. Operating without federal recognition, they organized (and won!) a boycott against Taco Bell, to get tomato suppliers to increase tomato-pickers' pay. Rad Geek People's Daily has a good account of the effort (with special coverage for libertarianistes). If The Powers That Be want to render conventional labor organizations irrelevant and ineffective, well, it behooves us to start looking at unconventional organizations.

Friends with blogs!

Tiny Purple Elephant is now one such, and with super fabulosity!

yami · 12:14 · 4 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Links, USian Politics

Friday Rock Blogging: Hypertufa

hypertufaMost geologists are familiar with tufa, which is a type of calcium carbonate. Tufa is precipitated from calcium-rich water in low-energy environments (lakes, ocean-bottom sediments, etc.) - and if you're anywhere near California, it's worth driving up to Mono Lake to check out the fabulous tufa towers.

Hypertufa is similar to tufa, but it's precipitated from high-energy environments, like mountain streams and rocky intertidal zones. In such a turbulent depositional setting, grains of sand and silt, along with miscellaneous bits of debris, are often mixed in with the carbonate deposits.

[Update, April 2: Why yes, this was an April Fool. No, it wasn't a tremendously funny one. Hush, you. Anyway, hypertufa is a popular type of fake rock made from peat, perlite, and Portland cement.]

yami · 8:06 · 1 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Friday Rock Blogging

Today’s RSS Zeitgeist: Cheapskates

Two good posts on the cultural forces that discourage us from re-evaluating our vast piles of crap, one by Flea (who is, as usual, hilarious along the way):

I promise, if Alex had been with us (Christopher was, but in utero form only, so he missed the whole thing) the mighty bird fight would have been the one thing he remembered. Not the hot stone massage, not the putt putt, not the expensive restaurants or the fact that the gift shop sold couture.

Because of this, I tend to lean toward the dirty hippie style of parenting. It's easy to puff up and spout clichés about how it's not the money you spend on your kids, it's the time you spend with them. That's one of those things that rich people say. Money helps. You get treated like shit when you're poor, and your kids do, too.

And the other's at Living on Less, set up as a blatantly humanitarian concern:

It pained me to see the man spend $30 on haircuts for himself and his son, and give his son $20 as a gift for a birthday party he would be attending, but what's the alternative? To look like slobs, or show up at the party with some weird homemade gift? The only way to live affordably in our culture, even on incomes considerably higher than those of these two examples, is to be eccentric, but most people, by definition, don't want to be eccentric. Adhering to cultural norms is strongly reinforced, not just by the corporate-controlled media, who have an interest in keeping up people's spending, but also by one's own peers and even one's own self.

It's one thing to live in a weird apartment, maybe with a bunch of other people, wear thrift store clothes, dumpster dive for furniture and home accessories, and forego expensive commercial entertainment and goods when you don't actually have to. Choosing to live a lifestyle that resembles poverty is drastically different from being forced into it by actual poverty. But if only it were not so stigmatized, living like an oddball could provide some real financial relief to those who most desperately need it.

Which, well, yeah! Whenever we enforce our variously shitty consumerist cultural norms, we're doing real harm to those who must choose between conforming and eating, or conforming and paying down credit card debt, or whatever. These bullshit incentives don't just create a culture of waste and environmental catastrophe; they help perpetuate poverty. Why haven't I seen this put so clearly before?

yami · 12:11 · 31 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Cultural Criticism

A Personal Ontology of Bagels

I promised I'd bring bagels:

yami · 22:10 · 30 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Quizzes

Pharmaceuticals

The smartest take I've seen on these so-called "conscience clauses" for pharmacists is most of the way down here:
Four states already have laws that specifically allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that violate their beliefs.

Here's the plan for when I get canned:

1. Move to one of these four states.
2. Become pharmacist.
3. Convert to Christian Science.
4. Get paid for doing NOTHING and they can't fire me!

Posted by Sarcastro at March 28, 2020 04:23 PM
Goddamn! I shoulda taken more biochemistry in college.

But, y'know, pharmacists need these provisions for the same reason people need to be able to file for Conscientious Objector status within the military. Like soldiers, pharmacists are required to serve the full terms of their contracts (which are subject to unilateral extension or "stop loss" policies at the whim of the Department of Health and Human Services); pharmacists who leave their jobs during an epidemic are subject to the death penalty. Moreover, all high school chemistry students must register with the Selective Health Services department and will be subject to a draft in the event of a severe shortage of pharmacists. So it's a testament to this country's commitment to religious freedom that we allow Christian Scientists to perform community service web-surfing, rather than conscripting them into passing out drugs!

Free! And! Democratic!
yami · 20:03 · 30 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Feminism, USian Politics

New Athletic Allegiances and the Advanced Study of Mud

It's official, signed, sealed, and if not quite delivered, at least dropped in the mailbox: I'm off to UC Berkeley next fall for a Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. Do not hesitate to fail to withold your applause!

Topics to be covered in the next 5+ years may include (in that nested list format that's so trendy this week):

  • Mud:
    • Its squooshiness.
    • Its jiggliness.
    • Its squooshiness when jiggled:
      • On Earth.
      • On Mars.
  • Beating civil engineers over the head:
    • Sometimes simplifications are necessary for projects to proceed efficiently.
    • Sometimes they clearly haven't been paying attention to:
      • Seismology.
      • Statistics.

I'm still working out the implications of this decision in the hypothetical case of a Stanford-Iowa State playoff. It's a good thing I have a Division III alma mater and don't really follow college sports at all, or my head might explode.

yami · 13:08 · 30 Mar 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary, Announcements