Tom e-journal

Tommyjournal  archive    August 2007

Thursday  30 Aug 2007           1 comment

From Wikipedia:
Insomnia can be common after the loss of a loved one, even months or a year after the death, if they are not grieving correctly (pretending they are over it when they are not).
If only my dead friends would start grieving correctly, maybe I could get a good night's sleep.



Wednesday  29 Aug 2007           4 comments

Two years ago, I wrote about a proposal to outlaw sagging pants in Virginia. That didn't go into effect, if I remember correctly--but since then, Delcambre, Louisiana has adopted this ordinance:1
It shall be unlawful for any person in any public place or in view of the public to be found in a state of nudity, or partial nudity, or in dress not becoming to his or her sex, or in any indecent exposure of his or her person or undergarments, or be guilty of any indecent or lewd behavior.
Not becoming to his or her sex--says who? Can men can be busted for wearing silk?

How much exposure of undergarments is indecent, anyway. The waistbands of mine show sometimes; does that count?

Man, some laws are vague. Senator Larry Craig pled guilty to disorderly conduct2 as follows:
... I did the following: Engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment or [sic] others  which conduct was physical (versus verbal) in nature.
Craig now says he's innocent, he says the guilty plea was a mistake. He was arrested on June 11 and pled guilty on August 1; he'd had time to think it over.

Glenn Greenwald has a great essay about how rightie blogs have reacted to the Larry Craig story.



1. Several other municipalities in Louisiana have enacted similar ordinances.

2. The full statute:
609.72 DISORDERLY CONDUCT.
   Subdivision 1. Crime. Whoever does any of the following in a public or private place, including on a school bus, knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know that it will, or will tend to, alarm, anger or disturb others or provoke an assault or breach of the peace, is guilty of disorderly conduct, which is a misdemeanor:
...
   (3) Engages in offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others.
A person does not violate this section if the person's disorderly conduct was caused by an epileptic seizure.

3. There is no reference to a footnote 3, but as long as you're reading the fine print: I've noticed that Google Maps no longer gives driving directions from New York to Paris like it used to.




Tuesday  28 Aug 2007           comment?

I woke up at 3:19 this morning and went outside to look at the eclipse. It was raining, there was lightning nearby, but the sky to the south was clear and the moon was on display.

Two rare events at once: an eclipse, and water falling out of the sky.



Saturday  25 Aug 2007           comment?

Horseshoe Meadows Road It rained today, hard enough to make rocks slide down the hillside onto the switchbacks of Horseshoe Meadows Road while a bud and I were driving home from an afternoon in the mountains; I had him get out of the car, in the pouring rain, to move rocks--some about the size of bowling balls--out of our way, all the while watching other rocks rolling down toward us.

Other than that, it was a simple, pleasant afternoon.



Thursday  23 Aug 2007           comment?

From a Namibian AIDS prevention pamphlet:
Sex is probably the most intimate and private thing that two people can do together.
"probably" (it's a toss-up between sex and rock climbing)
If you are bored, lonely or in need of sex (Ngele Wahala iipala) play cards, football or pool, read this book, exercise, discuss with friends or sleep.
...or OGC.



Wednesday  22 Aug 2007           1 comment

  Emoticon, not an acronym:    OGC
  what do you think it depicts?

  (see today's Dinosaur Comics for the answer)



Sunday  19 Aug 2007           3 comments

peach shirt The pic to the right (larger version here) is five years old; the shirt, which I'd dyed to get the peach color I wanted, has since faded a bit.

So, I was walking on the street in Vegas yesterday, wearing that shirt, and a scruffy street-persony person passed by and asked, "Where's your boyfriend," i.e., you must be a fag to be wearing a shirt that color.

Dweezil Zappa's concert last was great.

When I got back to my car after the show, I found that someone had parked another NSX in front of mine, nose-to-nose, as if to keep my car company. I asked my car what it and the other NSX had done to pass the time while I was gone, but it didn't say a word. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

I was gonna try climbing at Mt. Charleston in Nevada today, but I didn't feel up to it and came home instead.

It was only 112°F in Death Valley around noon.

I passed by that "removel" sign on the way home; it's been replaced with one that's spelled right.



Saturday  18 Aug 2007           1 comment

I like economy of expression, in any medium.

I'm especially impressed by good interviewers. If the goal is to not say much--that is, to let the person being interviewed do most of the talking--whatever commentary the interviewer wants to offer needs to be short and to the point. To be concise on the spot--that's a skill.

Herewith, two fun examples of short responses.

From a 1978 interview in Playboy magazine:

Anita
Bryant
:
Why do you think the homosexuals are called fruits? It's because they eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of life. God referred to men as trees, and because the homosexuals eat the forbidden fruit, which is male sperm... There is even a Jockey short called Forbidden Fruit. Very subtle. Did you know that?
Playboy:No. We've heard only of Fruit of the Loom.


A 9-second excerpt from NPR:  (more at Language Log)



And. The smoke that I'd said was gone yesterday is back, worse than before. But I have a plan for how to escape it: point the car toward Vegas and step on the exhilarator.



Friday  17 Aug 2007           1 comment

The air is finally clear again. For the past few days, we had smoke courtesy of the Zaca fire some 170 miles southwest of here. But winds have shifted, I can see the mountains again, and go out for a bike ride without feeling like it's doing me more bad than good.

My web hosting service tells me that some time tonight, the IP address for tommyjournal.com will change. If it goes well, it shouldn't be noticeable to readers.

I'm off to Vegas tomorrow to see the Zappa plays Zappa tour. From reviews of the last few shows, it looks like Uncle Remus and G-Spot Tornado--two of my favorite FZ songs--are on this tour's usual set list. I am so stoked.



Tuesday  14 Aug 2007           2 comments

When newspapers report on topics I know something about, I can see how often they get stuff wrong--which of course makes me suspicious of their reporting on other topics.

A year ago today, I wrote about the NY Times screwing up a math topic. They've done it again:
One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. ...

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.
Dear readers: can you spot the error?
(If you need a hint, read the html source for this entry.)



Monday  13 Aug 2007           5 comments

Bishop (probably not California, though) The (US) Federal Highway Administration has chosen a new set of typefaces for road signs, already in use in some states (it's optional, so far). The new typeface family, Clearview, is a replacement for the ubiquitous Highway Gothic.

Designer James Montalbano responded to complaints that Clearview is not beautiful:
But it isn't supposed to be.
By which, I assume, he meant that legibility was the overriding goal.

And, from a comment in an online discussion of Clearview:
I've come to believe that form and function can never fully overlap, and a certain aesthetic "ugliness" can actually be necessary in some situation, especially lo-fi cases like newspapers and high-speed signage.
I agree more with Adrian Frutiger that "legibility and beauty stand close together"--if you're as good a type designer as Frutiger, anyway.

Clearview is OK, but it doesn't grab me. I think it's a less charming typeface than it could have been without sacrificing legibility. Just my opinion--and who knows, I may feel differently after seeing it on some signs.

I've always liked the old Highway Gothic, with its quirky slanted tops on lowercase b, d, k, l, and t. I mean, the Tommyjournal logo (above) is in Highway Gothic (more specifically, the free Roadgeek 2000 Series F version). Clearview is more legible, but not as cool:
Tommyjournal (Clearview 6W)
And--not that it's related, but--the line "clearly, we should have sex" was used, to great effect, in xkcd a couple days ago.



Thursday  02 Aug 2007           comment?

Some Wikipedia articles are labeled as substandard, e.g. containing weasel words, reading like an advertisement, and so on.

Maybe Wikipedia should also have a label along the lines of "this article uses a not-so-well-known slang word without even putting it in scare quotes or anything", for articles like this one that uses the word garburetor.

Carburetor is one of those words that just tempts you to have fun with it (not that I think garburetor is a particularly cool variant). Carburetor comes up as a (counter)example, along with bureaucrat, in linguistics discussions; Hilary Putnam wrote
To have given us an innate stock of notions which includes carburetor, bureaucrat, quantum potential, etc., as required by Fodor's version of the Innateness Hypothesis, evolution would have had to be able to anticipate all the contingencies of future physical and cultural environments. Obviously it didn't and couldn't do this.
I suspect Fodor picked carburetor and bureaucrat for their entertainment value (why not--it makes the examples memorable), and I note that they are almost anagrams.

And. The Mozart sonata (KV 331) whose last movement is the Rondo Alla Turca is featured in today's Dinosaur Comics. Yes, 331 is prime.

And. If you have photos that show numbers, I'd be interested in considering them for inclusion in my factorization server's collection (e.g., see the results for 9, 53, and 4750).



Wednesday  01 Aug 2007           3 comments

A while back, about domain names, I said "All the good ones are taken." The same goes, albeit with a measure of hyperbole, for personalized license plates in California: many people compete for the few good allowable plates.

I mention this because I saw a car today with California plate XVII, i.e. 17 by any other name. (Last year, I wrote about the (prime) number 17.)

The XVII on the plate was set in an older font that had no serifs on the Is, with yellow letters and a blue background--meaning that it was issued in or near the 1970s.

Circa 1983, I saw California plate XIX (19, the twin prime to 17) on a yellow Ferrari.

Moral of the story: if you want a California plate with (Roman numerals for) a nice, low (maybe even prime) number, you're out of luck; it's probably been taken for decades, from back when California had about half the population it now has.

Another possible moral: of all the California plates bearing roman numerals, I've happened to see the ones for 17 and 19. My memory is imperfect (and other numbers would make less of an impression on me), but I don't recall seeing many other California plates with roman numerals, if any. Make what you will of that.

N.B. I have an XIX plate on my wall here, from when I lived in a less populous state (Colorado) where "All the good ones are taken" wasn't so true.

current journal
contact
rss/xml
atom/xml
FAQ




archive

2003
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2004
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2005
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2006
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2007
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2008
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2009
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2010
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2011
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2012
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2013
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2014
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2015
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2016
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2017
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2018
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2019
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2020
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2021
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2022
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2023
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2024
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec

2025
jan feb mar
apr may jun
jul aug sep
oct nov dec