It was a busy weekend with the tireless Harald that left me tired enough to sleep for 12 hours. I had a lot of interesting dreams, and when I woke up, the front panel of the CD tray on my stereo had been ripped off.

After seeing Kill Bill Vol. 1 as the final element of a day full of media that as well as movies included museums and live music, I of course immediately wanted to be a deadly viper assassin and master the Japanese steel. I'm very susceptible to these feelings and they usually fade within a day or so, but I realized this time that movies like this can be useful for a more general inspiration. Whether or not the film shows it, becoming as skilled and versatile as someone like the Bride or pretty much every other character in Kill Bill requires a huge amount of disciplined training. A lot of my interests require similar discipline, like the rare word dictionary or my own study of Japanese, and some other ones. Now 'discipline' has gotten some negative connotations of submitting to the man and all that, so perhaps I should find a different word, because this is not motivated by a desire to please superiors or measure up to the masses, the whole challenge is that I must motivate myself so that, perhaps in the distant future, I'll be prepared for whatever comes up. In other words, as my boss likes to say, I'll be dangerous.

For me certain movies are very inspiring toward this end; even if they don't explicitly show the preparation the characters have gone through, they do a good job of showing it implicitly. Some other movies have the opposite effect, showing that spending so much of life in preparation for something that may never come isn't worthwhile, and instead one should just have fun and let things happen, and one might even be better off unprepared in some cases, having an open mind going into it. I agree with this side of it to some extent, in that I'm not going to spend my whole life focusing on just one area, or even on one profession, I don't think. But since I generally enjoy my projects, I don't think I'm sacrificing much. Since I don't know how to have fun the way most people do anyway, the alternative for me would likely be doing nothing much at all (which some might argue has its own virtues, but I think I would tire of).

Going through my currently pitiable DVD and VHS collections, some of the movies that inspire focus in me are: "Ronin", "Grosse Pointe Blank", "Rushmore" and "Zero Effect." Curiously, I just realized that all four of these also contain the theme of love overcoming focus and objectivity in the end. Some movies that are more detrimental are "The Big Lebowski," "The Matrix" (who needs discipline when you can instantaneously beam knowledge into your brain, and it's all about destiny?), "Pi" (showing it only leads to madness), and "The Cruise." So I think I'll from now on watch the inspiring movies more frequently (something which itself doesn't require much discipline, since I enjoy them so much), and acquire more DVDs on this pretense.

***

It appears even when the first episode of the season is in November, the writers of the Simpsons can no longer do any better than to steal ideas from "Family Guy." The first third of this year's Halloween episode was a pretty good double of episode 13 of Family Guy, in which Death (hilariously voiced by Norm McDonald) gets injured while trying to take Peter, and after showng the world that no one can die and causing chaos, Peter has to fill in for Death. The ending differed, but that's about it. Since the rest of the Halloween show was somewhat amusing, I suppose I can forgive, but be aware Simpsons makers, there are actually other animated shows!

So is Disney's "The Haunted Mansion" actually a movie, or just a pretense for a theme park ride? The commercial somehow doesn't make it look much like a real movie. It even calls it "a thrill ride." I think it already is a ride, or it's already something. Looking into it a bit more, it hasn't actually come out yet. Imagine that, a likely ill-conceived movie about a haunted mansion coming out a month after Halloween. Brilliant!

Jonah brought to my attention an interesting translation issue. It seems in a UN discussion, a Japanese representative called North Korea..."North Korea," angering the North Koreans because they like to be called the 'People's Democratic Republic of Korea.' In retaliation, a Korean representative "repeatedly, and in English" referred to the Japanese as "Japs," befuddling the Japanese delegates who tried to explain that their statement was a simple matter of geography. It sounds from the way the incident was reported as though "Japs" wasn't the only English word being used, that the Korean delegate was speaking entirely in English at this time. The question then, is why? Surely there are suitable words in his native tongue that would have produced the desired effect, and it's a bit surprising that a Korean person would think to use "Japs" at all. Either there's something stronger about using English, or he wanted to offend a broader audience than the delegates present who have interpreters in their earpieces anyway. Speaking of which, one wonders what all the interpreters would do with this, whether they would leave "Japs" alone as a universally known slur, or try to find something equivalent in their language.

While discussing this I was reminded of a scene in "Kill Bill" in which Lucy Liu, making a proclamation to a group of criminal kingpins that she has just fiercely backed up by forcing one of them into 'early retirement,' says "To show you how serious I am, I'm going to say this in English." I thought this was strange at the time, particularly since an interpreter then translated her statement right back into Japanese for the people being spoken to. But perhaps there's something to this, though I can't think of any American analogue. We tend to keep our foreign-language utterances to words and short phrases, of which we may or may not know the literal meaning.

***

Ah, the six day week technique is a harsh mistress. One of the most annoying things about staying up is having to keep eating, or else suffering awful hunger pains. This gets especially dire at work and in the OR; for some reason they don't allow snacking in there. No Junior Mints for me.

A couple of days ago a book called "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" was glowingly reviewed on Slashdot. It was described as the definitive work on making effective charts and graphs, from a rather more enlightened perspective than your typical modern-day guide to expressing every piece of information in the world using Excel. I thought it might be a good purchase for my workplace, since we are in the process of making many complex measurements to be put into reports to the military and National Science Foundation. I was shocked upon visiting bn.com to see that the book's overall sales rank was 95. It seemed like a cool book, but surely the visual presentation of data is not something that interests that many people. Then I remembered the Slashdot effect, and added one to the book's sales.

Yesterday at work I was in the elevator and thought about how great it was that due to B&N's super-quick Manhattan shipping we would probably have the book that day. Then I glanced up at the other elevator passenger and noticed he was carrying a box. Inexplicably curious, I looked a bit closer and saw that it was bound for our office. When we got out the guy was understandably confused about where to go, and I thought about directing him myself, but didn't want to freak him out. Instead I walked quickly back to the office and said to my coworkers that I had a hunch we'd be getting that book soon, a prediction that was briskly vindicated.

It is truly a wonderful book, and deserves a high sales rank (it now stands at 371). Its subject may sound dull, but the author brings a skill for storytelling and a dry wit to it, and of course plenty of illustrations, including many beautiful hand-drawn ones. An interesting aspect of his manifesto is that these are not things which should necessarily be immediately appreciable without thinking. They should be easier to understand than the array of numbers they represent, revealing patterns among the details, but he accuses most mainstream newspapers, especially American ones, of underestimating the intelligence of their readers when they design charts. Another fun note, the Japanese are extremely enthusiastic about statistics and graphs thereof, so much so that they have national chartmaking competitions for children. The book itself is also quite a work of art, and naturally exemplifies the many principles set out within. So we should have some very interesting Chartsengrafs coming out of RST soon.

Consider these things about Japanese phonetics (and forgive me if I am mixing up phonetics with phonology, phonemics, or phonotactics). There are five vowel sounds that combine with 10-odd consonant sounds to form the moras (basically syllables) that the kana represent. Four of those consonants (k, s, t, h) are voiceless (meaning there is no acoustic resonance involved in producing them), and have voiced versions, represented by the kana with two small lines in the upper right corner.

-Two of the vowels become voiceless (they are sort of whispered) when placed between two voiceless consonants, or after a voiceless consonant at the end of an utterance. These vowels are i and u. Hence, desu usually sounding like "dess."

-Out of the four voiceless consonants, three of them have allophones (different sounds) when in front of i and/or u. Instead of si there is shi, instead of ti and tu there is chi and tsu, and instead of hu there is fu (in fact not quite fu, but something close. Instead of the lower lip touching the upper teeth, the lips are brought near, and air is simply blown through them. But close enough.)

For a while I thought the first of these two aspects was simply a result of quick speech, and the second was just one of those weird things in language that you accept and move on. But language is so much more rational than we are often led to believe! I've just realized the clear relationship here. If all the voiceless i and u consonants were the same, it would be difficult to tell them apart when the vowels were devoiced. For example siki and suki sound quite similar when they are compressed to effectively both be ski, but when siki becomes shki there's no problem. The same goes for hi and fu. Chi and tsu provide a small problem if you're being strict, because it isn't necessary to change both of them from ti and tu. I think the answer here is that ti is simply difficult to say and moves naturally toward chi.
Ki and ku are more of a problem, with no allophones. The best explanation I can offer here is that it's simply not as difficult to tell those apart, for example in kiku 'to hear, to ask.' There's just something about the formation of k that requires clearer vowels, and doesn't allow them to be devoiced as much as with the other consonants.
Having done absolutely no research into this, it would be irresponsible to say there must be a direct causal relationship from the devoicing to the allophones, even though it seems like the simplest story. Language isn't that rational! Things get all mixed up, causes and effects are inextricably intertwined.

Meanwhile, I've begun investigations into learning Welsh, as I promised Gruff Rhys I would do starting at the end of the year. It seems that just about every source available, other than a few super-expensive CD sets, is written by a guy named Gareth King. He has produced such wonders as "Basic Welsh", "Modern Welsh", "Colloquial Welsh", "Intermediate Welsh", and "Pocket Modern Welsh" (Dictionary). Colloquial Welsh was co-written by Gary King. The two editorial reviews of it on amazon are from Alan King. There's something suspicious here, I can't quite put my finger on it...

The six-day-week technique threatens to turn into the Klein Model when I'm not required to eat dinner at a certain time...while sleeping from 5pm-midnight tonight I had the following dream.

It's World War II and a bunch of us are being put into some kind of holding area. The war setting is one of those things you just know in the dream, there isn't actually much evidence of it; no soldiers anywhere, no one being killed, we're all just going into this area. It's semi-outdoors with lots of separate, curvilinear pieces of roof overlapping, all made of different materials, some concrete, some canvas. It's raining, and so in walking around I have to dance a bit to avoid the random drainoff. Everyone else sits around looking sullen. They're mostly people around my age.

Soon it becomes evident that a train is soon going to leave this place, and it's one that everyone wants to be on. I'm one of the last to enter, and when I get to the entrance I see it's got a vending machine-type bill slot where you pay. Before I can do anything a guy sitting in front of the entrance puts in a $20 and pays for me; I thank him and enter. A few seconds later I panic, realizing I've left my jacket out in the holding area we were in. Somehow I decide the jacket is so vitally important that even though the train is about to start moving, I jump off and run to get it (the irony that it was the jacket I own in real life, a German army jacket, escaped me at the time). When I get back the train has indeed left the station, so I start running after it along the tracks. Soon I see two guys on the tracks, appearing to be holding the end of the train while waving me in. But when I get to them, I see it was some kind of illusional joke, and the train is actually way past them. They stop waving and walk away. But then the train does stop and wait for me, and I get on. All in good fun, I suppose.

The interior of the train is a bit like a cubist cafe, with pizzeria-type tables and chairs that are all of different sizes. Lots of people are sitting and standing about, chatting emphatically. I squeeze into the only available chair, which is way to small for anyone.

A while later the train arrives at a zoo and everyone gets off and starts walking through with a guide. Eventually we come to a huge bridge, which is the giraffe area. These giraffes, it should be noted, are about 100 feet tall, as a rough estimate. They're lined up in roped-off areas along the bridge, each with enough room to sit. The zoo guide is talking to us about how they have to be careful when bringing elephants by here. Then we come to a 100-foot tall 7UP bottle, in the shape of a 2-liter bottle. She says "see, we still haven't worked out how to get through here that way. You try to go through here and you'll get a shower of 7UP." Whatever you say, zoo tour guide.

At the end of the zoo tour there is apparently nowhere else to go, at all, so we sit down in a huge atrium that has a view of the giraffe bridge.

When Art Bell came back on the air recently for the weekend editions of Coast to Coast AM, my interest was rekindled. He's very refreshing--he actually acknowledges that some of the things said by his guests are hard to believe, and sometimes even has real scientists on. Weekday host George Noory seems to believe just about anything that anyone says with neither questions nor a hint of incredulity, or he pretends to for the benefit of the show. And certainly there is a balance to be struck, so as not to alienate the guest or the audience. Additionally there isn't much that results from expressing doubt other than to let people like me know we're not alone in it, since during the show there's really no proving or providing of evidence to be done (often the theories of the guests seem almost carefully designed that way).

The best thing about Coast to Coast are the incredible stories woven by the guests, unbelievable as they are. Not many talk show guests can talk for 3 or 4 hours, but these people never run out of material, even when their beliefs are confined to one domain. The worst thing is when they bring bastardized science into the equation, sneakily making their story sound much more believable to the layman. There were several examples of this in the most recent show, whose guest was a crop circles guy. He held the unusual belief that the most complex ones are all created by humans, but that some of the simpler ones are created by 'some mysterious force.' I was disappointed that Mr. Bell didn't at least discuss these a bit more:

Guest: When I've walked through and near crop circles, I have seen balls of plasma flying around them at very high speeds, seeming to be attracted to the circles, and definitely looking like they are being mechanically controlled by something.

Reality: This sounds a lot like relatively rare, unexplained, but normal ball lightning. It's not too surprising he would witness it being out in fields in the middle of the night a lot. The appearance of being mechanically controlled is one of those things you just can't argue with.

Guest: I heard a story of someone who was with a group walking in a crop circle. He went to get something from their car, and to get there he went through the middle of the circle. But he couldn't find the car, instead in the woods he came upon a group of men around a campfire who were dressed rather primitively and were speaking an ancient-sounding language that he couldn't understand. He went back to the group, and though he felt he had been gone for about 3 hours, they said it had only been 5 minutes. (The implication is that he travelled back in time in the middle of the circle), and this agrees with the Theory of Relativity and time dilation!

Reality: Time dilation (the gravitational variety) is a phenomenon in which time passes more slowly (from an outside observer's point of view) when gravity is increased. On Earth, this is just barely measurable with atomic clocks, one on the ground and one in an airplane. If you took a spaceship out and flew it near a black hole and then came back to Earth, you would probably notice that quite a huge amount of time had passed on Earth while you were away (time had passed more slowly for you). So this could be called traveling forward in time. But this would never allow you travel back in time and then forward again, and even so, it would be rather noticeable if a circle in a field of wheat were exhibiting the gravitational properties of a black hole.

Guest: It's been observed in experiments that if a person kills a plant in one room, and then goes into another room where there are plants, those plants will respond, by turning away or drooping a little or something. This agrees with quantum entanglement.

Reality: Quantum entanglement, as one might expect, applies on the quantum scale. Entangled particles, when spatially separated, seem to influence one another instantaneously. A measurement of one appears to cause the other one to acquire the same measurement. This is crazy enough on its own, seeming to imply faster-than-light communication (although it doesn't for reasons I don't understand), but applying it to entire plants is...yeah. Again, one can't really argue with the guest's cited "experiments" while maintaining an interesting radio show.

Guest: If you arrange particles of certain materials on a surface, and project a sound on the surface, the particles form intricate and beautiful patterns. There's some mysterious energy within these particles making it happen.

Reality: We all saw this perfectly normal but interesting phenomenon in high school physics. He completely misrepresents it by saying it's the particles that matter, when of course it's the resonance properties of the surface material, and the sound, that create the patterns.

I don't want to be too much of a curmudgeon, of course part of the attraction of Coast to Coast is the ridiculousness. But things like this contribute to the sad state of science, and science education in particular, in this country. People clearly have some innate desire for the supernatural; no matter how strange reality is, if (somewhat) mainstream scientists are saying it, it's boring.

Later in the show, Art spontaneously called a British guy who disagreed strongly with the guest. The accent and vocabulary he used to trash the guest was hilarious. Unfortunately he ended up sounding like the asshole, an arrogant architecture professor who refused to believe that the charlatan circle-makers the guest said he had met were able to produce such beautiful patterns. Of course he didn't have any more evidence than the guest for his arguments, so it came down to bickering. He was hardly a voice of reason, since he thinks all the circles are being made by aliens. Of the crop circle that the guest said he had seen being made by normal people, he said: "I went and saw that circle. It's crap!"

I'm with a small posse on a mission: to stop a band from playing. The band is called Freak Monster or something like that, and it's not just that they suck: they are pure evil. If they play it will cause very bad things to happen. They are supposed to play tonight after Saturday Looks Good To Me, a good band who will surely perish at the hands of Freak Monster if we don't act. We have no physical weapons, only our own energy is effective against them.

We are on our way to the venue to prepare our plan, but we know right now we don't have enough energy between us to defeat them. So, in a subway station, we attempt to recruit some people. First we try telling some girls that they should make out with us, because this will increase our energy. Even though this is true (in the dream), we know chances are they will refuse in disgust, which they do. But then somehow, we manage to convince them to come along with us instead, and contribute their own energy. So we take the subway down to some single-digit street and then get out, and go to another train station. It's a station for the 1 train, but in the dream the train is elevated there, and the stop looks more like a real-life bus stop. When we get there, one of the posse's mother is involved in some kind of event with a street food vendor who is set up in a truck right beside the bus stop-looking train stop. The mother has brought many bags of food, and the event is some kind of food collaboration between her and the vendor. We just stand around and watch things happen very quickly, or maybe we eat some food. Someone remarks that a passerby would probably think the mother had "come to borrow some things!" Everyone has a good laugh.

After a while the event ends and we are all waiting at this now deserted train/bus stop, and I suddenly become frustrated that we have been here so long and no number 1 train has come. I say as much to the group, and just as I do a 2 train passes overhead, not stopping of course. I notice that the number 2 in the back window of the train looks as though it has been sloppily drawn by hand with a black marker on a white board, but I don't think much of it. I decide to break off from the group, at least temporarily, and try to find a thrift store, which had been my other goal for the day. I find one on Columbus avenue's 84th street block, which in the dream is somehow near 14th street. The place has a whole lot of magazines scattered around, and a lot of items that don't even look like anything, just strange sculptures. I see a newspaper article taped onto a window inside the front area of the store, and discover that the whole store is a piece of art created by the owner. It discusses the different dominating shapes and so on, a typical art review. I look around a bit more as I read, then decide the store doesn't have much to offer me at this point, since no individual items within it are for sale, and move on. As I exit I see the rest of the posse across the street, and am glad they were able to make the decision to simply walk the rest of the way to the venue, which evidently is near 14th street.

***
So unfortunately I never got to face Freak Monster in the dream, but I am going to see Saturday Looks Good To Me tonight, so who knows what will happen. I was also intending to go to a thrift store today, but I got angry when I looked at a list of them on the web and they seemed to all be way on the east side. So I took a nap instead.

Part 2 of the photos from the A+ Attitude Summer Tour are finally up. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but you can now click on the site title banner above for a rambling discussion of its meaning. And the entire rare word dictionary is now up, letter by letter.

I never quite made the decision not to sleep last night, it just happened. I had slept from 11am-4pm the previous day, so it wasn't the most difficult task. At some point I decided it was finally time to use the multimeter I purchased last summer but never bothered to put a battery in. When I removed the panel, I found a battery had been there all along, in a wrapper and therefore not connected. Turning it on I realized it was a rather complicated machine, and endeavoured to search for the manual. Although I obtained it without too much trouble, it sent me into a flurry of paper-organizing, a rare state for me. I accumulate a really large amount of paper, and a couple of big piles on my side table went back 2 and 3 years. It's all quite valuable to me. I especially enjoy finding tattered slips of paper of the type I carry in my pocket at all times, on which I originally scribbled what would become lyrics for some of my good songs.

This process lasted most of the night, at the end of which H joined me for a film double header, The Quiet American on DVD and "Master and Commander" at the Ziegfeld. Both are fine films with much to recommend them, and the latter is unfortunately being marketed quite poorly. How do you start a TV ad with Now, to stop them, he must sink them? But, I suppose the money is better spent on the film itself than the marketing. And now, my fingers find themselves near unable to type.

After years of heartache and struggle, I'm the proud owner of a Suzuki Omnichord System 2. This is a musical instrument from the 80s, an electronic thing which I believe is meant to most closely match the Autoharp on the acoustic side. There is a keypad with 36 chord buttons, one for each key in major, minor and 7th. When you press multiple buttons at once in the same key you get major 7th, minor 7th, augmented and diminished. Then there's the key to it all, what they call a "SonicStrings Strumplate," a magical strip that you can touch in different places and activate the notes of the chord you're pressing over 4 octaves. The cool part is you don't have to apply much pressure because it works on conductivity. So you can lightly run your finger along it for very nice arpeggios. The target market of this was non-musicians who want to play music without knowing anything. It has automatic bass and drums accompaniment for that purpose, the type one finds on old family organs. I don't know how many people actually bought and used it for that purpose. It's such a wonderfully quirky instrument, and has a pretty cool sound. It's the omnichord, it chords all.

***

In high school, there were strange circumstances surrounding our sports team names. It seems that most teams, understandably, were not satisfied calling themselves "Peglegs," but there was no common alternative, so everyone chose their own name and we had a bewildering array of them. There were the (baseball) Hitmen, the (male swimming) Pirates, the (female swimming) Penguins, the (female soccer) Tempest, the (male volleyball) "Men of Steele," the (ultimate frisbee) Untouchables...of course I was blissfully unaware of most, well, all of these while I was there. But that's not the point...there is a point here. On the way home tonight, I saw a family walking, and the father was carrying a couple of sports-team-cheering posters. They said "GO STUY VIXENS."

***

This weekend's guest on Coast to Coast made rather a fool of himself. He was a surveillance expert and kind of boring overall, but the problem came when he veered over to computer territory. He talked of a laptop he purchased used, and how he put everything he didn't need that was on the hard drive "in the trash." "Now," he said, "I know most of your listeners probably think that when you put something in the trash, it's gone, right? Well let me tell you something unbelievable. Believe it or not, at a security and surveillance conference, someone demonstrated to me how they could obtain 800,000 files off the computer that I thought were gone, and believe it or not, there was PORNOGRAPHY on the computer. EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF PORNOGRAPHY. Let me give you a moment to absorb the shock."

A day after I received the wonderful Omnichord, I got a kit from PAiA to make the Ring Modulator guitar pedal from the Electronic Projects for Musicians book. This will be my second attempt at effect production, after my clone of the MXR Distortion+ in 2001 for my Physics of Music class. That pedal worked the day I finished it, and then never worked again. It also featured some of the worst craftsmanship ever seen. I officially gave up on it when the leads snapped off the $3 blue LED I had gotten as a purely cosmetic luxury. I plan to put significantly more effort into this one. The Ring Modulator is an unusual effect that alienates the signal quite a bit, by summing the input frequency with a frequency produced at semi-random by a phase-locked loop...or something.

At work I was whining about how much cast aluminum boxes for pedal projects tend to cost ($15-20 for one big enough to fit a non-professionally made project into), and my boss suggested carving something out of foam and covering it with fiberglass, which he can provide the materials for. I was intrigued by this, since a fiberglass case would undoubtedly look really cool and unique. Later I got an idea to make one in a shape inspired by Gehry's architecture. The advantage of the foam, after all, is that it's very easy to work with. I'll probably regret it if I come up with a really complex shape, since fiberglass requires an ungodly amount of sanding even when the shape isn't an 8-dimensional Gehry madness.

Once again I've noticed that despite my intentions, it inevitably takes some external stimulus for me to restart the songwriting process. In the past it's been upcoming open mic nights, which I always want to write a brand new song for. In this case it's the presence of a new potential collaborator.

One of the best things about having control over one's own site is being able to see all the things people Googled to find it. I hesitate to comment on these findings too much, because it will affect future searches in a sort of artificial way. But one that I found recently turned out to be enlightening, so I'll make an exception.

A relatively long time ago I had an entry about acquiring a book that had previously belonged to an architect named Primo Castrillo. The primary reason for mentioning this, I think, was simply that it's such a cool name. But it turns out this is a person of some note, as I discovered after someone found that entry by Googling for his name (I'm the #1 result, probably because I titled the entry after him). According to this he was a poet in addition to being an architect, and had a film made about his very last days. None of the 20 books he apparently published are available at BN.com, one is listed but out of print at Amazon, but plenty can be found at Abebooks. Actually many of the books found there are possessed by Dawn Treader Book Shop, where I obtained the copy of "Why I am Not a Christian" that bore his personal sticker. It seems they got a piece of his collection when he died. One of the books they have is signed from Anais Nin to Primo. I wonder if Castrillo shared Bertrand Russell's sentiments about religion.

Deciding I needed more real world Japanese practice, I yesterday turned to the Japanese comic books I got many months ago at the Ann Arbor Library bag sale. Up for translation was "Margaret Comics #17," looking by the cover to be some kind of Japanese Archie type thing. The title I later was able to translate as "Romance Catalog."

The first big piece to translate was a half-page block of text facing the title page that, as I was proud to be able to decode on my own, laid out what happened in the first 16 issues. The rest of it took 3 or 4 hours, and would have been a complete loss without finding this site for the first time. Previously I had been stuck with horribly annoying Kanji shareware that, in addition to having bugs even within in its constant registration reminders, had some ridiculous flaws that ensured I would never pay for it. How hard is it to make a popup dialogue large enough be default that the text it is supposed to display is visible? Not that hard, especially when you used Visual goddamn Basic Script to program it. Anyway, with the above-linked wonderful site at my disposal, the effort was only mostly a loss. Here are the results, in ultra-literal translation form because any interpretive attempt on my part would almost surely obscure the real meaning and inflate the appearance of my language prowess. Stuff in parentheses indicates particles that tag the words they follow, stuff in brackets indicates stuff I couldn't translate at all, and the ?! and !? are part of the original text...

"What’s been told so far…
Because Takada (object) “man” (with) doing know first time, hurry (to) is doing awkwardness [kita] Mika’s romance. Such middle, the result is to Takada’s house to stay over especially?! Why the place (in addition) fearful Takada not accepting [ra re] Mika, to Takada how coping with [ii no ka] worrying… One alternative, abortion, to the occasion Asuka and Otsu’s relation/connection (subject) rapid expansion, to talk of marriage (in addition) toward definite [tsu te ki te i ta]. Such a certain day, Mika welcoming the kind at Takada’s house, becomes a misunderstanding, Takada getting into a fight with 2 people. [ki mazuku natte] this because returning to Mika, Takada runs into his own feelings, his efforts are just futile. Takada having reached the limit of patience, forces Mika into the house and… !?"

Almost as good as Babelfish, eh? Some surprisingly adult themes going on here, I guess Archie is not such a good point of comparison. Now, I don't quite understand how abortion came to be an alternative, unless they suggested in some subtle way how the "staying over especially" led to pregnancy, that I didn't pick up on. It's also suspicious that after abortions and marriages and such, now in this issue is when Takada finally runs out of patience to have sex with Mika, which I can tell you is what the last part is referring to. One would think that point had been passed. One of my other comics is issue 16 of the same series, so perhaps that will clear things up a bit. Point in the process at which I felt most stupid: when after translating the Kanji compound "truth/reality fruit/result" 5 times or so and wondering why that was such a focus of this story, I finally realized it was the character Mika's name. How am I supposed to know that if they don't put "-san" after it? And who the hell is Margaret?

On a slightly related subject, I've been unable to stop myself from reading Galvin Chow's extremely thorough JET blog, from the beginning, at the rate of one month per day, so that I can eventually catch up to the current stuff. This is the first time I've been a stranger's-blog-reader, and I think it's because it makes excellent vicarious living after I abandoned being a JET this year, besides being pretty funny. As I read I'm mostly glad I declined, because I doubt I would have been able to handle a lot of the situations he describes. If I were it would be only after a major transformation, possibly accompanied by a nervous breakdown. Also, I have a feeling I wouldn't have been able to study Japanese as diligently/obsessively as I am, because there I would have been doing it because I was supposed to, and you know, screw that.

Sometimes I'm so entertained by the Engrish in Japanese advertising that I risk forgetting how ridiculous American advertising can be. Also that uh, it has funny typos sometimes. Lately I've been considering a purchase to replace my long broken computer speakers with some nice monitors suited for recording. As such I've had occasion to once again flip through the endless supply of catalogs I receive from the likes of Sam Ash and Musician's Friend (or as I prefer to call them, Musician's Fiend, or Musician's Foe), and ponder their stupidities.
I'll present the first one Conan O'Brien funny ad skit style (except not made up---because seriously, you cannot make this stuff up). Here I was browsing the site of "Zzounds," which I am unable to say without cringing, and I took a look at these Event Monitors.



Pretty normal, right? But take a closer look at the section where they have the pricing and shipping information:



Apparently the marketing geniuses at ZZOUNDS! have decided that it's not enough for the consumer to think they are saving money on shipping. It's much more satisfying to know the company is losing tremendous amounts of money as a result! Really though, I can't say they're completely off; I have no great liking for this company, in fact one could say I hate them a little, for adding another stupid name to the list of homogenized music equipment sellers that always have the same price for just about everything, and at any given time are having about 5 separate BIGGEST SALES EVER! depending on what page you're looking at. But to come out and say this only adds to my aversion; it's like receiving a gift from someone who then proudly declares "I really went out of my way to get this, it was horribly inconvenient, and BOY did I spend a lot of money on it."

Next we have the other end of this specialized spectrum, the case of the misplaced savings. Here's an ad for the classic cheapo, in my experience surprisingly decent, Boss DS-1 distortion pedal:



Fair enough. But if you look closely at the pricing info (you'll have to squint this time, no zoomed-in picture), you see the pedal has been reduced to $59 from...$39. Ah, I see. It's a $20 savings, they simply neglected to specify that the company gets to save $20, not you. Typos are funny, see?!

The Blue Microphone company has been making oddly shaped, quite expensive mics for a little while now (this is the cheapest one yet). They've had the Blue Bottle, the Blue Mouse the Blueberry, and now...uh, yes.



Make that just "The Ball."

Finally, an example of the lengths and heights these places go to, to accommodate ridiculous musicians who love equipment more than music. The Coffin Case, now not just for goth-looking Warlock guitars, but for drum hardware:



It's very Goth, and functional too! Because lord knows, it's always a compromise for the gothically inclined musician. Should one go for the rectangular case that just doesn't express one's personal style, or the pentagram-shaped case completely covered with spikes that can be used for sacred rituals, but only holds one drumstick and hurts like hell to carry? Now, there's another option. I especially like that "Goth" comes before "functional", because really, anyone can make a functional case.

While I'm on this subject, I don't have a picture of this, but I saw a TV ad for Lowe's hardware store that featured Christmas trees that come with lights (and possibly other adornments) already on them. "You mean it comes like this, with the lights and everything already on?" the customer inquired, eager and hopeful. "With the lights and everything," the sales associate reassured him with a smile.

Thank heaven, and Lowe's its retail form, we are spared from the toil and trouble of applying Christmas lights to the tree! How often I have spent time with my family putting the lights on and thinking "Couldn't someone do this for me? Just give me the goddamned presents already." Why stop there? Couldn't we genetically engineer our Douglas Firs to grow their own lights, melded with their needles? Then we could have whole forests of Christmas trees. Well, it appears I've gone full-circle in my sarcasm back to sincerity; that would actually be pretty cool.

I've won half the battle of building guitar effect pedals--constructing the circuit and making it work. The other half is putting it in a box that looks good and will withstand stomping on a regular basis. This will have to wait until I receive my order from Small Bear Electronics, which has an...interesting...e-commerce setup. The pedal I made is a Ring Modulator (of sorts) and it sounds like one serious motherfucker. One can see easily why it isn't used so much, or at all, in pop music. It pretty much creates instant atonal music. But I'm very happy with it. I've been considering rock-attitude names to put on its eventual box; possibilities include "Dead Ringer," "Ring of Power", or simply "The Ring." Other suggestions are welcome. Bonus points for working in "Phase-Locked Loop," which is the main chip used in the circuit and a more accurate name for this pedal.

Digging a bit deeper into the world of DIY effects has given me more of an appreciation for the incredibly complex things people are adventurous enough to construct, and how puny my effort is by comparison. For example, I've been considering obtaining an Octave pedal, either by buying one or making one, but making one would certainly be cool. Then I ran across a schematic for the Boss OC-2, and Holy Sweet Goddamn.



Yeah, I think I'll just buy one.

I also saw one project by this fellow (Warning: numerous incredibly annoying Tripod popups unless you have a cool browser) called the Interlarding Fuzz, which is fairly simple and I kind of want to make it just so I can incorporate that word into conversations. For those that haven't read my entire rare word dictionary, interlarding is a process in which strips of lard are inserted in the middle of pieces of meat before cooking, for enhanced flavor (the above linked site has a more general definition). Some of the instructions further down that page are pretty amusing, and make it seem like not so simple a project after all.

Perhaps I should calm down a bit on the pedal-making and just get into circuit bending.

* * *

Tonight I finally satisfied my curiosity and watched a used DVD of "Panic Room." I had read about it, sort of, on Adam Kempa's site. To be more precise, I saw that he was talking about some theory and being obsessed with it, and immediately skipped the section because I still wanted to see it, mildly, even though I'd heard only ambivalent things about it elsewhere. I found it amply entertaining on the surface and less Hollywood than I expected; as for subtext, it's not hard to imagine that something was intended, since the surface story was so straightforward and plain, and David Fincher is pretty cool. But there's something not quite right about the theory espoused in Kempa's June 25, 2002 entry (get ready to do a lot of scrolling, or reading, it's all good stuff, and don't bother trying to resize the browser window), because usually movies with the element described either explicitly reveal it (Fight Club, Mulholland Drive) or are so artsy and abstract throughout that you'll believe anything about it. It's hard to think that a movie that seems so straightforward and Hollywood is actually the subtlest and sneakiest thing around. But, you may be right.

Coming up next, a core dump of the incredible overthinking of music I've unintentionally undertaken recently. In the meantime, consider agathism or nosism. But first, as the fancy strikes you, look over to the total word count at right. EVIL.

So this will be a rambling presentation of my recent thoughts about writing music, in the form of a bunch of paragraphs on different topics with likely little logical flow between them. The overarching theme is what kind of music I should make, and problems encountered in the process of making it. I don't intend this to be egotistical, although it will probably sound that way much of the time. It's just an attempt to get these thoughts out of my head by putting them down here.

Firstly, I realize it may seem silly to worry so much about the music I make being 'good' in some imaginary objective way, and other people liking it. Making music is enjoyable for me, so who cares if it also pleases others? This is perfectly valid, but the fact is I've passed that point--though I still enjoy the process, I want other people to enjoy the result of it. So, you have to accept that as a premise. Also this question will come back later.

A weakness of mine is the inability to listen to very good music without becoming temporarily convinced that I should make music in the same style, that this is really the way to go. It's almost a kind of temporary insanity from some enyzme entering my brain. Even though generally speaking I hold originality as very important (well, at least intended originality...of sorts), I can't help but think this (whatever I'm listening to) is really the ultimate, really the thing to do. The effect lasts even longer when I go to a concert--in those cases it can last for days. This is why two summers ago I, for the most part, stopped listening to modern music and only listened to WQXR, the classical radio station of the Times. I may do something similar now. In the past couple of days, as I've worked a lot on some new songs, I've had a few songs stuck in my head and unduly influencing me: "Keep the Dream Alive" by John Vanderslice, "Alcohol" by Saturday Looks Good To Me, and one I don't know the name of by the Microphones. It's insidious what these songs are doing to me.

Lyrics are really goddamn hard to do well. Even a lot of the bands I like, I think their lyrics could be better sometimes. Most of these lyrics are probably being written by people who are musicians first and lyricists second, so the main priority is getting the line to fit into the beat and get on to the next chorus, and sometimes that results in slightly awkward or not very substantive, or cliched lyrics. Notable exceptions off the top of my head are David Berman of Silver Jews, and Elliott Smith. I always try to police my lyrics and make sure each line is actually saying something new, so I don't end up with a whole song whose meaning could have been said in two lines. I also try to change things up with interesting words, the way any writer does. Recently I've been noticing how difficult it is to use polysyllabic words in rhymes, and trying to do that more. But often the result of those processes seems pretentious, and too literary and stiff and unnatural. So, I don't know. The other way to go is absurdist, which is fun sometimes but also hard to do well.

When I hear about extremely prolific artists, I'm always impressed, even though I know quality is more important than quantity. Unless you can really churn it out according to a formula, you've got to have a lot of ideas in you head, and the ability to follow through enough on them, to put out a few hundred songs. Also there's something attractive about doing it that way, because it's dangerous to spend a lot of time and effort on one song, and then present that to the world for opinions, and be crushed if it's not liked, and have nothing else to offer. It's like putting all one's eggs in the same basket. If you have a lot of songs you don't have to be as emotionally invested in each one.

One of the reasons I think an artist's early work is often considered among their best, is that during that period, the artist was making the music for themselves, and not worrying about whether people would like it. There's a certain purity to it, because it was exactly the music the artist wanted to make. Once the music is receiving enough attention that the artist is aware of it on a daily basis, it's psychologically very difficult, unless you are Radiohead, not to be affected by it and desire to give the people what they want (or what you think they want). I realize the irony that I'm already worrying so much about this when I'm supposed to be in the stage where I don't care. And it's true, such overthinking is probably a mistake. But, I simply can't help it.

I've long debated with myself over whether to make music that's more toward the pop, or the experimental end of such a spectrum. The same thing happens as I talked about 4 paragraphs ago: whatever the last CD I listened to, that's what I want to do, but in this more general sense. The good thing about pop is that it sounds nice, it's clear that I'm trying to please people. I'm not being pretentious, not trying to fool anyone. The bad thing about it is that every time I wrote a pop song in college and then played it at an open mic night, I would realize I sounded just like everyone else, and no one liked it much because it was obvious to them too. The good thing about experimental is that you are different, you're potentially doing something exciting and fresh. And people still enjoy it, though perhaps in a different way from pop. I see people enjoying it all the time at shows, and I'm one of them. The bad thing about it is that sometimes it is pretentious and cold. Some people don't want to realize that experimental music is just as hard to do well as pop--they figure as long as they stay away from pop, they're good. They also use the frequent lack of lyrics and familiar melodic structures to make music that's devoid of emotion, because emotion, like going pop, is a sign of weakness and desperation to be liked. There's also the danger of pretending too well that you don't care what other people think, and forgetting that people have to relate to the music somehow.

Now, why can't we have it both ways? That's really what's going on in the 'experimental' music I like anyway. When I finally did an experimental song that had pop elements at an open mic night, people loved it, and it was the beginning of a very good time. Some would say I still haven't surpassed that song. So yeah, I think that is probably the way to aim. When I do pure pop, it's not good like the indie pop that I like, it's stupid and mainstream-sounding. But I don't think I have the strength of will to be completely obnoxiously experimental and eschew the familiar.

The mildly functional endpoint of this is that I'd like to start putting up some recordings of the new songs I've been doing, and perhaps soliciting feedback and ideas about them, with regard to the issues I've been talking about, in some nice web-based way. Probably the easiest form for this to take would be a sort of music blog, with songs as entries. So, perhaps that will happen soon. I don't have any recordings yet, but am developing a decent catalogue of 2/3, 1/2, and 1/5-finished songs.

Keep the dream alive.