Author: Peter

Stirred, not shaken

The Floating World is the working title for Pink Martini‘s second CD. It’s a little late: it was originally scheduled to come out in July 2002, and is now tentatively scheduled for the Spring of September 2003 early 2004. (I’m beginning to detect a pattern.) I wish I didn’t know any of this, because now I know something’s in the works it’s killing me that I can’t get it yesterday.

And I must say I’m shocked (and stunned… but mostly shocked) to learn that Pink Martini and Weird Al Yankovic have both covered the same song: the theme to George of the Jungle.

Otherwhere

There are three types of websites that I can discern: those that attempt to keep users from browsing outside them, those that encourage users to leave them, and those that strike a balance. Of these, the ones I most regularly find useful or interesting, and the ones that I return to, are the ones that point elsewhere.

It’s not coincidental that most of my favourite sites are created by individuals. Most companies have a vested interest in keeping eyes on their products and away from their competitors’; it’s a rare one that will point to another and say they do good work too. Personal sites, on the other hand–especially weblogs–are all about sending readers to other places that have more information or different perspectives, or that the author just finds interesting, at appropriate points.

Hardly a revelation, I know, particularly to anyone who reads this irregular little screed and others like it, but I thought it needed saying. Now go away and find something more interesting.

Trendy

Mark Pilgrim and Jeffrey Zeldman have put big round things on their home pages. Eric Meyer provides two choices of round thing. Jason Kottke has a square thing. Combined, are all of these perhaps a nod to simpler web design?

Probably not. But maybe. After all, two points form a line; five points are a trend. As Kottke says, If someone else is doing something that works, why change it?

And who am I to buck a trend? Here’s a bunch of round things (in rectangular things), some writing about other round things, and Rosalita Whyte of The Third Floor demonstrating the correct use of even more round things. At least I’m not inflicting this round thing on you on every visit:

A photo of my shiny bald noggin.

Wide World of Words

I’ve updated the code behind the pages to a more modern and flexible system and at the same time amended the design to make pages quicker to load and less fussy in appearance. An additional benefit is that the site is now more accessible to visitors with disabilities.

Michael Quinion, World Wide Words

In other words, WWW is now–almost–a valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional site. (Those darned character entity references in URLs… happens to the best of us.)

Mark Pilgrim and Ian Hickson might not be overjoyed. There’s lots of semantic information in the classes, what appears (to me, at least) to be appropriate use of the meta element, and even Dublin Core metadata; he even uses curly apostrophes. However, there are two things I think Mark and Ian would recommend: respectively, using the cite tag to mark up words and phrases quoted for themselves (particularly instead of <em class="citedform">), and using heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) in place of structures like <p class="heading"> and <p class="sectiontag" style="margin-top:0.5em">.

But you know what? (That’s you as in all y’all, of course.) It’s still a cool site, and I go back again and again. Content is king, and Michael Quinion has some 1250 pages that say he da man.

Synchronicity

I threw open the door and there stood a lovely, tall, rather shy man holding an egg. Hello, I said. Hello, he said, I am wondering if I might borrow an egg. You see, I only have one and what I really need is two.

Lenni Jabour, The Story of the Third Floor (December 2002 edition)

[Relationships are] totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but, uh, I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.

Woody Allen, Annie Hall

The appearance of Lenni’s egg story in December, shortly after I created my Eggs category (named as such after Allen’s quote), fits the definition of synchronicity exactly: events which coincide in time and appear meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection.

(Hey, it’s been almost two months since my last Lenni entry of any substance. Y’all were thinking I’d forgotten, weren’t you?)

Al Hirschfeld, 1903-2003

I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I didn’t recognize Al Hirschfeld‘s name when my coworker Claude mentioned he’d died–it was familiar, but I couldn’t come up with the association to the artwork he’d created across nine decades. But when I saw his picture of Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood in City Heat in the paper, I knew exactly who he was–given only a quick glance, his drawings are as identifiable as those of Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) or Charles Addams.

Given the revelation above, I’ll leave the accolades to Some Who Know:

He always knew precisely how to lay it down, and how to contour and bold it just so, the better to denote not only the look of his subject but some perceptive, vital quirk of personality or posture.

Mark Evanier

How the hell does he do that? How does he get the essence of a person down so perfectly with linework that has next-to-no literal resemblance to the person he’s drawing? How does he know the exactly perfect place each line goes?

Barry Deutsch