kip/bot/blog

There’s a small park just east of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’ve played chess at the tables near the entrance literally dozens of times over the thirteen years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. But it was only today, while I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, that I looked at the memorial.

The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:

It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.

Other interesting things about McNair:

• Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura of Star Trek, was helping NASA recruit more diverse candidates to the space program in the 70s and McNair was one of those recruits
• He had a black belt in a form of karate and was regional champion several years
• He was an accomplished saxophonist and composed a piece of music with Jean-Michel Jarre before the 1986 mission. (McNair was supposed to record the saxophone part on the mission.)

Things learned from the trip:

• go that extra step — I’ve been in that park many times but never took the extra steps to find out who it was named after
• ride a bike — having a bike meant that I didn’t have to take extra steps to see this
• the internet needs a memorial project to remember people who inspired the dedication of parks, but not quite enough to maintain those parks.

My Name is Earl is my new guilty pleasure TV viewing (still on iTunes, so each episode is only 23 minutes of my life that I could have spent reading Tolstoy).  (And, yes, I know I am very late to this, like every other, party.)

Julia was baffled as to why she was having trouble following Catalina’s jags in Spanish.  Turns out, context is everything.  The translations turn out to be the kind of self-aware gags that made Earl famous when they screwed around with the border space and easter eggs for HDTVs:

In “Barn Burner”(1.11), while it appears that Catalina is cursing out Joy, she is actually saying: “I want to thank the Latino audience that tunes in towatch the show every week. And to those of you who aren’t Latino, I want to congratulate you for learning another language.”

“In “Number One”(1.24), Catalina appears to be matching Joy’s drunken insults with insults of her own, but she’s actually saying:  “With this, we conclude our first season of Earl! We’re very grateful for your company, and we hope to see you next fall!”

In “Robbed a Stoner Blind”(2.8), the cartoon version of Catalina delivers this message: “This was going to be me taking my head off to dust with it, but animation is so expensive, it’s better you see me dance!”

In “The Trial”(2.23), after being asked to be a character witness for Joy, Catalina replies: “Thanks for watching our show; we will miss you this summer.Doesn’t it seem funny to you that Earl thinks I’m saying how much I hate Joy while in reality I’m saying how much I love you?”

In “The Frank Factor”(3.4) Catalina explains that a continuity error was noticed by the producers.

In “Frank’s Girl”(3.6) Catalina says after being photographed in the bathroom: “if you were offended by these jokes, we’re very sorry but we thought they were funny.”

Seen in Dumbo just this morning:

A very special moment.  This Dumbo bus stop has been moved to yesterday . . . until previous, or should I say advance, notice.

The Mars rover Spirit is being put to sleep, or “infinite hibernation” mode, as reported by the AP. Now begins the long process, where across decades and lifetimes, the small pulse of energy from the sign will be self-directed towards Spirit’s sentience. Like Vee-ger before it, Spirit will come back and let’s hope it’s not pissed. In ten years, someone will write yet another Mars colony book, in which it the colonists — a multi-culti mix of scientists, jocks, babes, nerds, a bureacrat, a rogue unfairly disgraced military, and an artiste of some sort — are terrorized by an uncaring, mercilessly logical machine that calls itself Brit.
This is a serious bummer, really. These Rovers have already lasted 16x as long as planned and it’s made very cool discoveries, took the highest res picture of Mars, and had Marvin the Martian on its mission patch. Cheap government wankers . . .

A Martian sunset, brought to us by Spirit.

A great, under-sung (at least in the US) favorite actor of mine Paul Scofield died yesterday.  No reason to call it out here, except that he had one of the more elegant handlings of British knighthood:

Scofield reportedly had been offered a knighthood, but declined.

‘’It is just not an aspect of life that I would want,'’ he once said. ‘’If you want a title, what’s wrong with Mr.?'’

I’ve got a small collection of screenshots on flickr — interactive moments that I screengrab that are sometimes interesting, exhibit good design, or, most often tickle me. Here are some in the last couple weeks:

This is the exit screen after setting up my team on ESPN’s fantasy baseball, a league I’m doing with high school friends. Characterized by Alex as a “Calgon take me away moment for dudes”

From Assassin’s Creed — a strange mix of “can’t we all get along” and “hey, it’s from history, don’t blame me if it pisses you off”

Of course, Rhino would be the ones to sell adagios as classical beats to sleep by. These soporific tracks are dope.

I was so guilt tripped by Visual Bookshelf’s questioning of the veracity of my shelf listings that I spent 20 minutes moving things from reading to to-read.

He doesn’t have many friends, I am honored to be among them.

The folks at OLPC have PC down (seriously): they recognize that hangman is a freaky image to base a wheel of fortune like game on, but they’re cool enough to make Doom available on the XO.

Reading Michael Pollan’s nifty books, I finally learned the origin of corned beef.  Corn was such a prevalent grain, that the word itself became synonymous with grain.  Corned beef is made by treating the beef in salt (grains of salt, corns of salt).  Less elegantly, corn hole comes from using corn cobs in outhouses.

Back to refinement, I learned last week that putting something “on a pedestal” stems from  taking once-intimate, eye-level, close-up, 360 sculpture on a pedestal, a controversial practice introduced during the renaissance.

I just learned that marble burns.

Who knew, huh?  But there’s more.  I found this out while watching a lecture series about Michelangelo, specifically, the chapter where he goes to Rome.  At this time, Rome was a wreck of a city, much of its art buried and decaying.  Turns out that farmers actually burned marble statues to get lime which they used as fertilizer.

I’ve decided that, when the time comes and I’m a global warming refugee, I will have the following three things: my eReader, my iPod, and a solar charger. Not only will I need books and music to hold my sanity, but I will be one of the keepers of western civilization. My eReader will have Shakespeare, the sacred texts of various cultures, lots and lots of the Western Canon. My iPod will preserve Beethoven, the history of jazz, Edith Piaf, the operas of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, the Brandenburgs and the Goldbergs.

I like to think that with these devices, I can ensure that there will be more left of civilization than TV jingles for people to sing around the campfire. (That’s a reference to “The Postman” a pretty interesting book, and sad, sad movie.) That said, depending on my last synch, I may have preserved whatever culture is found in a Robert Heinlein/Elmore Leonard/William Gibson pack on the Sony Connect store, or whatever ‘essentials’ lists I downloaded hoping that I might get cool by listening to them.

In any case, I’m ready to play my part is preserving civilization. And I’m going to take my synchs a little more seriously.

my WP theme from eLance kinda sucks …
I really, really don’t have time to screw around with CSS/WP files …
more truthy: I no longer find it fun to find the time to screw around with CSS…
I’m not sure I should bother doing this anyway …
this has added up to weeks of not doing it, so screw it.

As the late revered Kesey said: “the intrepid traveller just gets up, goes, and he’s there. so here’s a blog intro. my first post won’t be an inaugural post, won’t be coherent, probably won’t have a clear conclusion or reason for having been written, but it would be unintrepid to not do it. the first post will be about a NYT article that tickled me and fit in with some stuff that I’m reading.