A weblog about stuff and junk by Jake Sutton
Did you know Dickie and the boys are doing a Mighty Mighty Bosstones reunion thing with a series of shows at the Middle East?
The gang is all 40-ish now, but it seems most of them couldn’t find anything else they wanted to do.
This video got me a little misty for my BU days. Like the time I saw the Bosstones tear up the CollegeFest shindig at Hynes Convention Center (probably in 1993…?).
Go get ‘em boys!
For the record, my legs have chosen the first option, though the second could be imminent the way things are going. (Also for the record, there’s no point to this post. I’m just whining about how hard it is to get in shape after letting myself become a fat bastard. Feel free to ignore or tease as you see fit.)
You see, some stupid section of my stupid brain decided my walks weren’t good enough and that I should try to jog for as much of it as I can. At this point, I’m walking/jogging a loop that is just under 3 miles and all of my jogged chunks add up to a mile or so. I do this on the weekends only, because the days are so short now that it’s pitch dark by the time I get home, and my little loop lives in unlit open space with coyotes and junk running around in it.
Continue reading ‘You want I should freeze or get down on the ground?’
The Monkey Clone Wars are not far from us.
Begin training your children now, for they shall serve on the front lines against the Simianista menace.
When I switched my home computing empire from my dying home-built, full tower PC to my new 24-inch slab o’ sex iMac everything went pretty smoothly. I managed to transfer all the files I cared about over, and Google Browser Sync made setting up my new copy of Firefox so easy I was kind of left with a “that’s it?!” feeling. I left the PC running, but I haven’t had to jump on it yet, so I’m about to rip out the hard drives and toss it.
The biggest part of the move from my perspective was my iTunes library. Firstly, let me say yes, I use iTunes. I know some ubergeeks who scoff at such an idea, but I don’t know what they are trying to do with their digital music that I can’t do in iTunes. Most importantly, I figured out some sweet-ass “smart” playlists that made it easy for me to play the sort of thing that suited my mood at any given moment.
Which brings us to the point. Continue reading ‘Goal Oriented’
I’ve been intrigued by synesthesia since I read The Man Who Tasted Shapes sometime in the second half of the 90s. It seems so bizarrely wonderful: numbers might have colors, musical notes might also have distinct hues - or perhaps shapes… It’s just freaky to imagine, and more significantly, it illustrates how seemingly arbitrary the brain’s powers can be.
Now Kottke points us to this post, which in turn quotes a Scientific American article about a wonderful phenomenon:
We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as “Martian colors.� Although his retinal color receptors cannot process certain wavelengths, we suggest that his brain color area is working just fine and being cross-activated when he sees numbers…
Martian colors! That rules.
Is it wrong to be jealous of an “abnormality”?
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Track o’ the Post: Bright As Yellow from Glow by The Innocence Mission, because I’m a little girl sometimes.
Having spend a number of years in/around Boston, I can testify that it becomes increasingly believable that the Irish may have invented the world.
Perhaps this tendency isn’t only a Beantown phenomenon, as illustrated by this NYTimes article about tracing a large portion of the modern slang dictionary to the Irish Gaelic tongue. The book, for which the article is basically an advertisement, is actually called How the Irish Invented Slang.
Like I said, though, it’s kind of easy to fall for these types of hypotheses (for whatever reason). Luckily, the intarwebs are full of differing opinions on just about any subject you could imagine. In this case, the counterpoint is solid:
In January 2005, I challenged Cassidy to present all of his evidence. I told him that I’m the descendant of three strains of Irish, four strains of empiricist, and the son of a bluster-catcher, and I said he was going to have to do better than trot out the same-old “they’re all against me!� argument of every perpetual motion inventor.
To date, what he’s provided as evidence is flimsy and fouled by scholarly incompetence.
Just fair warning, if you’re at all like me and tend to fall for the various romantic myths of the various Celtic peoples. Besides, everyone knows the Scots invented everything! ;^)
Here’s tae us
Wha’s like us
Damn few,
And they’re a’ deid
Mair’s the pity!
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Track o’ the Post: Erin Go Bragh from Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth. (Dick Gaughan, it’s worth noting, is a Scot and something of an internet geek. Nice!)
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