Year: 2002

Arts blogging

Scott Andrew LePera writes: I was going to write something here about how more indie artists should keep weblogs, but I’ll save that for later. I’ll take that ball. I know of a few musicians (mostly indie, but with a few exceptions) who keep diaries, although only Emm Gryner actually writes in hers regularly. (I can’t speak for the timeliness of Dayna Manning‘s diary, because hers is inside a Flash 6 app that I can’t view.) Lenni Jabour actually keeps two (sort of), and if you’ve read either you’ve gotten a perfect insight into her performances and personality.

For the most part, though, I agree with Scott: more artists–of all kinds–should keep weblogs. My reasons are slightly different, though: they’re completely selfish. These people are interesting, and I want to know more about them; if someone else discovers them because of their online presence, it’s all the better (but it’s really just about me).

Ferinstance. Based on his e-mail, I’d love to read a blog by local playwright and actor Jayson McDonald; his cohort, Jeff Culbert, runs Theatre in London, and I’m sure he’d write a good one himself (and, better yet, be able to host a common blog area on his site). Any or all of the Sirens should, and Pete and Andrea of Double Whammy/Anderson Briefcase, and my sister’s boyfriend Chris (of Lost Relics).

Heck, even people I work with blog, or are thinking about doing so, and I read them too. (We’re not a particularly social company.) I’m probably (probably? ha!) the least interesting of the bunch, what with all of the tech stuff I post here that’s nominally work-related, but at least I make up for it in quantity.

Day of the Dead Frogs

Apparently today is All Saints’ Day. I’ve always known that Hallowe’en was an abbreviation of All Hallows’ Even, but understood the modern version to be essentially All Souls’ Eve, or the night before All Souls’ Day. As it turns out, All Souls’ Day is tomorrow. (My friend Murray Watson, former Reach for the Top teammate and current Catholic priest, would be so disappointed in me.)

How Stuff Works has lots of other interesting facts about this time of the year, although they don’t mention that All Souls’ Day is also known as the Day of the Dead.

An interesting tangent to this is the word calaveras, which refers to poetic living obituaries of jovial or satirical tone… making Calaveras County, California the perfect setting for Mark Twain’s first book.

Leaping off from there (sorry), it’s natural that Angels Camp, CA (aka Frogtown) would host an annual Jumping Frog Jubilee, but why does the local small town of Ailsa Craig, Ontario, have turtle races (and why are there no useful links for the town or the event)?

Clearing some backlog

I’ve had 16 tabs open in Phoenix for several days now, full of good links (mostly discovered through blogs) that I need to get around to reading. Tonight I finally made it to Joe Clark’s In-Valids, and the rest of his NUblog site. (Oddly, his editorial we doesn’t bother me as much as Zeldman’s does. Go figure. [I do like the new design of the Daily Report, and he’s always got interesting links… except, again oddly, recently while he’s been focused on the redesign.]) Still outstanding: the San Francisco Chronicle’s ChronicleWatch and The Pragmatic Programmers’ Software Entropy (both from a single site that I neglected to record), Web Nouveau’s CSS Tableless Sites (linked from various sources previously mentioned that I don’t want to list yet again), an SF Chronicle infographic showing why it’s clearly impossible to hit a baseball and (Michael) Palin’s Travels (both via Rebecca’s Pocket), and a bunch of others.

Also having trouble with AmphetaDesk which may be related to my web proxy–it doesn’t actually retrieve channels that are updated, even when I kill it and restart, so I have to physically delete its cache. After I dissed it (more than I intended, upon re-reading the post) and got a nice response to the post from Morbus Iff, I’m hoping to figure out the problem and contribute it back instead of just complaining. (Had it worked, though, I would have seen Mark’s post that a new version is available or the announcement itself. Ironic, no?)

Finally, yesterday I delivered 50 copies of a CD project that I’ve been working on for a few weeks to Sirens… and promptly discovered that it doesn’t work properly on Windows XP (even though it did on Windows 2000). As a quality assurance person by day, you’d think I might be smart enough to actually test the thing before burning tons of copies and releasing it into the wild. Sigh. Donna discovered the error while showing it to Amber, and we determined a workaround that they can tell people to use, but I’m more than a little embarrassed that it’s there in the first place.

Shades

I put Dayna Manning‘s CD back into my car player today, and was struck by how quickly her songs had become not just familiar, but comfortable, as if I’d been listening to them for years. Oddly, most of the (few) other groups I’ve had that experience with have been ones I’ve only discovered recently: Sirens, The Great Uncles of the Revolution, and the exception that continues to prove every rule, Lenni Jabour and The Third Floor.

I’ve also decided that when it comes to recent music, objective genres such as jazz, rock, folk, country, etc. mean very little. The closest general term I can come up with is fusion, which has its own semantics in the biz. Really, there are only two very subjective categories that matter, and they’re ones that can’t be easily defined: stuff I like and stuff I don’t.

Irony x2

I don’t particularly like Macs (remnants of my Amiga days, mostly), but this retro hack could get me to switch just out of sheer geekitude. [via Dive Into Mark]

Also from Mark’s entry is Clay Risen’s editorial on branding. I think life insurance company Clarica (formerly The Mutual Group) beats any of his examples–not only did they adopt a meaningless name, they flaunt it with their Clarity ads, where their insurance agents explain seemingly incomprehensible things like hoedown calls, opera, and popular music. I think I need one of those brilliant minds to explain to me just how Clarica means insurance… the name sounds like a brand of contact lenses.