The Recursive Muffin

Help me out: Hammer dulcimers, pianos, harpsichords: string instruments or percussion instruments?

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:57:52 -0400

Help me out:

Hammer dulcimers, pianos, harpsichords: string instruments or percussion instruments?

Thought for this evening, from an interview with Ferron: If you are not following your dream, you...

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:00:04 -0400

Thought for this evening, from an interview with Ferron:

If you are not following your dream, you are definitely following someone else’s.

http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/breakdown_advice/carcough.html

Sun, 19 May 2013 19:44:54 -0400

http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/breakdown_advice/carcough.html:

This is some cool. It’s a library of audio clips of cars with different problems. Much more useful than going in to the mechanic and trying to sound out your brake pads, which I’ve done a few times.

I heard that if Yahoo buys Tumblr, they’re gonna ban GIFs of cats. And Cumberbatch.

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:53:16 -0400

I heard that if Yahoo buys Tumblr, they’re gonna ban GIFs of cats. And Cumberbatch.

OK. OK. There are only four frames in this GIF. With a little...

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:13:26 -0400

OK. OK.

There are only four frames in this GIF. With a little trial and error, I can:

Make the train move away from me, towards me, or back and forth.
Freeze on any of the frames for at least a second.
Slow down the train by one half. I can’t do one quarter yet, but I bet it’s possible.

The second two of these perception modes would seem to involve my mind discarding a large amount of sensory input, which is a little disturbing. On the other hand, I can’t freeze a frame for a long period of time—three seconds or so is my best. So even though I can choose to dump lots of input, part of my mind is fighting me on that.

I would love it if one of y’all who knows more about GIFs than I do work out how many frames per second this thing is displaying at…

kunstkammery: Got it…if I let my eyes unfocus, and try to...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:28:29 -0400

kunstkammery:

Got it…if I let my eyes unfocus, and try to percieve the train as sort of jiggling back and forth rapidly, rather than moving continuously in one direction, then after a few seconds it stops. And I can keep it stopped for quite awhile…maybe two seconds?

This is freaking me out. I’ve been driving around looking at windmills and trying to decide if I’m aliasing them. I think I am. I think I am.

kunstkammery:

OK, serious question here. Can you make them stop? I’ve seen it happen about three times, for maybe half a second each. I don’t know if the GIF itself is getting hung, or my eyes are aliasing it (do eyes even work that way? I thought humans had continuous optic flow). Or maybe I am Neo and this is the Matrix.

fuckdanielmaitland:

migrated:

change the direction of the train if you concentrate

Holy shit that’s cool

kunstkammery: OK, serious question here. Can you make them...

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:01:50 -0400

kunstkammery:

OK, serious question here. Can you make them stop? I’ve seen it happen about three times, for maybe half a second each. I don’t know if the GIF itself is getting hung, or my eyes are aliasing it (do eyes even work that way? I thought humans had continuous optic flow). Or maybe I am Neo and this is the Matrix.

fuckdanielmaitland:

migrated:

change the direction of the train if you concentrate

Holy shit that’s cool

Little girl in the general store wants to buy a bottle of water. Dad: We have water in the...

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:26:44 -0400

Little girl in the general store wants to buy a bottle of water.

Dad: We have water in the truck.

Girl: But this water is cold.

Dad: Well, it was pretty cold last night. I bet our water is cold, too.

Girl: [very serious] But this water is enhanced.

Reading the hater over on Magnus’ tumblr, and it suddenly dawns on me that I’ve had,...

Sat, 18 May 2013 23:07:23 -0400

Reading the hater over on Magnus’ tumblr, and it suddenly dawns on me that I’ve had, like, entire conversations with people who weren’t born in the same millenium as me.

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

“kosher insects” gets slightly more Google hits than “vegan roadkill”.

Sat, 18 May 2013 21:36:00 -0400

“kosher insects” gets slightly more Google hits than “vegan roadkill”.

Well, that worked. Feeling overly romantic. Decide to take preventative measures. Go see...

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:33:19 -0400

Well, that worked.

Feeling overly romantic.
Decide to take preventative measures.
Go see Gatsby.
Start driving home.
See cute bunny rabbit.
Impulsively decide to run over rabbit and eat it.
Immediately recall house rule against running over things in order to eat them.
Stay in lane, bypass rabbit.
Note disturbing similarities between rabbit dilemma and Gatsby plot.
While pondering this, almost hit two cats.
Arrive home.
Take bath.

Yuuuup. S is in Tortonto, and I think I’m gonna go see Gatsby. I’m in a mood....

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:41:49 -0400

Yuuuup. S is in Tortonto, and I think I’m gonna go see Gatsby. I’m in a mood. I’ve been listening to Dead Can Dance, Ferron, Talking Heads, and my sister all day long, which constitutes an overdose. Two and half hours of Leonardo DiCaprio will paralyze my irony cortex, a crucial safety measure in dealing with maudlin romanticism.

I have this collect-them-all adoration for the apologia that people on Youtube and Tumblr throw down...

Sat, 18 May 2013 15:33:19 -0400

I have this collect-them-all adoration for the apologia that people on Youtube and Tumblr throw down for what is obviously piracy. My absolute favorite, for its succinct not-clear-on-the-concept innocence, is the phrase “no infringement intended” (now kicking 10.6 million Google hits). I want to see that one applied to crimes that involve an actual taking: “sorry about this carjacking, ma’am, but no infringement was intended.” Anyhow, today I am pleased to see the following on a full-length rip of Stop Making Sense, clocking at an hour and a half:

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. No profit is made on this audio/video, strictly for comment only.

Uh-huh. I don’t have much beef with honest piracy, but if this is fair use, so is carjacking.

Um...who vanished in the OP's story about a dog?

Sat, 18 May 2013 07:08:06 -0400

Sorry, that was kind of an off-the-cuff response last night. No one vanished. The name of Brunvand’s book is “The Vanishing Hitchhiker”, but the story about the dog is a modern version of a story that folklorists call “The Purloined Corpse”. Sometimes it’s a dead person, but very often it’s a house pet in either a bag or box, which gets stolen en route to burial, or sometimes switched by mistake. The dog story is almost identical to versions that go back to 1906, except, obviously, for the laptops.

Of course, it could still be true. When a piece of folklore comes true in real life, that’s called “ostension”; if it was done deliberately in order to reproduce the storyline, that’s “pseudo-ostension”.

Google thinks I’m Latino, Netflix thinks I’m gay, and the VFD thinks I live one town...

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:15:00 -0400

Google thinks I’m Latino, Netflix thinks I’m gay, and the VFD thinks I live one town over.

blein: sO my friend’s dog died and she lives in new york city and so she had to take it to the vet...

Fri, 17 May 2013 21:09:00 -0400

blein:

sO my friend’s dog died and she lives in new york city and so she had to take it to the vet by the subway and she put the dead dog in the suitcase on the subway and it was a pretty big dog and some dude saw that she was struggling with the suitcase so he asked if she needed help with it and he said do you mind me asking what’s in it and she didnt want to say a dead dog so shE SAID IT WAS A BUNCH OF LAPTOPS SO HE TOOK THE SUITCASE AND RAN AND I JUST

Clearly not true, c.f. Brunvand (1981) The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Some version of this story has been going around since at least 1953, possibly since 1906.

A belated thought: The article from the Sedalia Weekly Bazoo that I reproduced back in March is...

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:48:00 -0400

A belated thought:

The article from the Sedalia Weekly Bazoo that I reproduced back in March is written by “A Wisconsin Female-Husband”, presumably Frank DuBois. Allowing for plenty of definitional latitude, this makes it the first case that I am aware of in which someone who self-identifies (in effect) as trans is publicly writing about another person they identify (in effect) as trans. That gives it, I think, a certain claim to be the zero point for modern transgender as a community of solidarity.

12/11/1883, yo. Mark yer calendars.

Dialect poetry is out of fashion, thank god, except maybe within greater hip-hop. But it has its...

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:13:00 -0400

Dialect poetry is out of fashion, thank god, except maybe within greater hip-hop. But it has its gems. I’m thinking of Louise Bennett’s Jamaica Labrish:

Me got intelligency, yuh

illiterated fool

Labrish writes (in 1966) about strikes, shortages, Jamaican involvement in the second World War…good stuff. In C.J. Dennis’ 1915 Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, he writes mostly about having lost the love of Doreen, whom he did wrong on account of perpetual drunkenness:

The world ‘as got me snouted jist a treat;

Crool Forchin’s dirty left ‘as smote me soul;

An’ all them joys o’ life I ‘eld so sweet

Is up the pole.

Fer, as the poit sez, me ‘eart ‘as got

The pip wiv yearnin’ fer—I dunno wot.

Three New Articles

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:44:00 -0400

On the other blog:

London to Paris in 49 Days - About airline pricing and economics.
Validating Identities - Some Preliminary Notes - About a fake personality test, a serial killer, astrology, Lake Wobegon, and the DSM-5.
Three Apocalypses - About the different ways the world ends, and how they’re cross-marketed.

More Botanica.

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:20:00 -0400

More Botanica.