SteamPunk Star Wars & CG Society

TechRepublic had a link to images from CGSociety's Hardcore Modeling Challenge.  The image of Princess Leia seems destined for the men's magazines.

Stumbling around the CG Society web site showed just how stunning computer graphics has become.  The page for the challenge showed  a busty, no nonsense Leia.

I Get a Parking Space at 9:30 AM. How Depressing

A few years ago the faculty/staff parking lot on the west end of campus would be filled by 9:15.  I know.

There's a pattern to college parking.  Student athlete's and coaches park close to the stadium near the edge of campus while commuting students park as close as they can to the south campus academic buildings.  Residential students - lazy residential students - drive from north campus to south campus so they can walk less.  (The total time it takes them to walk to their car, drive about half a mile, and then walk to class is more than the time than it takes to walk to class from their dorm.)

Faculty generally try to park close to their offices, except those who try to park near their last class of the day. There are administrative parking spots which are occasionally occupied by students parking "just for a minute" while they try to dart in to a building to drop off a paper or pick up a form.   It's rumored that the campus police now have web cams watching these spots and get extra points for ticketing students parked in those spots because the fines are higher.

I use to get to the campus between 9:30 and 10 AM (and stayed to 11 PM) so parking close to the buildings where I worked was never an option during regular school days.  I didn't mind.  It was aerobic exercise and, when the weather wasn't inclement, a nice 5 minute walk.

Oh, so why depressing?  The available spaces mean that there are fewer employees as the University makes a concerted effort to cut expenses by cutting budget lines.  I always assume the worst.

Ask not for whom the spot is for.  Pretty soon it might not be me.

Gerund and Oxymoron

In the film History Boys, one of the teenage boys knowingly asks if a certain word was a gerund.  I knew it was a part of speech, but made a note to look it up.  Grammar Bytes provided the answer.  (Grammar Bytes' URL is chompchomp.com and, when I accessed it, displayed the head of a roaring gorilla.

So now, I've set a minor task for myself: to listen for gerunds.  All gerunds end in "ing", so, if I understand what I've read, it's a matter of distinguishing gerunds from present participles in which those same terms act as modifiers instead of nouns.

This reminded me of  a story from a student at Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island.  He said his English instructor asked his students to cringe each time they heard an oxymoron, e.g., bittersweet.  I decided to verify that I still knew what an oxymoron is.

A quick look in Wikipedia turned up a several oxymorons I hear frequently: "objective opinion", "original copy", and "definite possibility".  It is only having seen it pointed out that it strikes me how we/I accept statements without question.  (I perhaps less than most, but still, I stand guilty as charged.)

"Original copy" seems to be valid, especially now that documents are created on laser printers.  What is the difference between the first copy printed, and the second copy printed?  The original might be bits in memory which was never stored on disk.  Or it could be on disk.  If two copies are printed at the same time, is one the original and the other a copy?

The two which had obvious reference to computer science were "virtual reality" and "constant variable". The first case seems appropriate. In the second, computer scientists have created computer languages to resolve the ambiguity.

A variable name is created to let the computer program store information. In some languages (and in some cases some incarnations of the same language) the language has no way to tell the computer that the data should not be allowed to change, i.e., that the variable is a constant. In other languages it can be explicit, the term constant is part of the declaration or the data type, e.g., a tuple in Pythonare immutable. (I just learned this.)

Back on the Range

For the first time in a long time I cooked dinner.  I was going to be home before the significant other and it was going to be Swai.  (I'd normally subject the reader to a long digression about my family's involvement with food, the games we'd play in restaurants (switching seats after ordering to see how server's recorded the orders, showing our knowledge by asking for rare steaks, playing Guess the Temperature (of the fryer), etc.), but I'll make it short.

I sauteed onions and orange pepper in a little oil, then, when there appeared to be no liquid to keep the onions from browning, I added some white wine (salvaged from a department party) to poach the onions.  As the onions looked soft enough, as an unhelpful description as I could manage, I used more of the wine to rinse out a garlic-flavored pasta source jar into the pan.  I plopped the defrosted Swai on top (God bless portion control!), sprinkled some cutup yellow squash over the fish, and allowed everything to poach for a few minutes.

My brother who knows his stuff advised me that the wine wasn't even good enough to be used for cooking.  I'm sure he's correct, but the people who eat his food are laying out a minimum of $80/cover and know  the difference between world class and good. 

I was so out of practice that I didn't remember to cook the potatoes to be ready when the fish was ready.  I used the microwave to nuke some quartered red bliss potatoes.  

All in all, I can say with some assurance that, the meal was non-toxic (my highest rating).  Salad would have been nice, but there was  no salad stuff at hand.  Nobody complained.

The evidence that I am not destined to be a food photographer is shown below: 

 

Suze Rotolo: The Girl on the Cover of Freewheelin'

My main squeeze told me that Terry Gross had replayed an interview with Suzie Rotolo.  My heart sank.  "She's dead?"  "Yes."

At one point, just knowing who Suzie Rotolo was marked you as hip.

For a significant number of us Suzie was an icon of a celebrated time, when folk music, "protest music", was the cutting edge of hip.  It was Suzie who open Bob Dylan's eyes to radicalism and art.  She was the girl on Bob Dylan's arm on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

(In an interview on WNYC-FM Steve Earle said he spent a lot of time pointing German tourists in the right direction when they try to position themselves on 4th Street to look like Bob and Suzie.  Suzie herself said that she thought the picture made her look like a stuffed sausage.  She was bundled up because their flat was so cold.  Suzie thought Bob was under dressed to enhance his image.  But could it be that it was because he was from Minnesota?)

It would be hard to underestimate what she did for Bob Dylan or give her enough credit for just being herself.  The photo below is typical of an ordinary photo evocative of the time: legends of the scene with Dylan on the left, Suzie in the middle, and Dave van Ronk on the right. Now only Bob is left.

Pardon me as I blither on:

I first heard Cocaine Blues sung by Dave van Ronk and, in my mind, his version remains the definitive version with that great lyric:

"Cocaine's for horses/ and not for men/
They say it will kill me/ but won't say when/
Cocaine.  Run all around my brain."

It ranks right up there with  Willie Dixon's "If it wasn't for bad luck/I'd have no luck at all" and BB King's:

"Nobody loves me but my mother.
I said nobody loves me but my mother.
I say nobody loves me but my mother.
And she could be jiving too."

The Ex Outlet (Selling Your Ex's Stuff)

The concept of a web site to sell stuff associated with you ex seems obvious.  It's not clear that it is a viable business.  The stories of longing, betrayal, and remorse are nothing special, but might serve as object lessons for teens.

I was curious to see if the aggrieved parties were disposing of music, but music was not even a category.  Maybe the site's sample is too small, but I would expect that music plays as big a part in young people's lives as it did in mine.

I remember a women at a party looking through the host's record collection (it was many years ago) when she pulled one album from the shelf.  She stared at it for a couple of seconds, shook her head, before replacing it.  "I can't believe I slept with that guy." she said.  No one asked.

Maybe the exes took their music with them.  If the relationship was in the post physical media era there was nothing to leave behind except perhaps a docking station.

Adele and Steve

I found directions to Carol Nash's house while going through some 25-year old stuff.  I have no idea who she was.   I'm guessing she was one in a chain of associated friends in dogs: Oh, you're going to the Framingham show?  Would you mind taking something to give to Barbara who'll give it to Peggy at the Gorham show next month?  These would be scrapbooks, pedigree charts, etc.

Another something lost from memory.

On the other hand, an old ATT and bill had a phone number in Connecticut.  Probably Adele.  What the heck, I had just unearthed a cell phone with over a thousand hours.  Why not dial and see who answers?  When he recorded message said calls without caller ID were blocked I was pretty sure it was them.

And sure enough.  Steve answered.   We spent 28:35 catching up on 20 or so years of stuff.  Verizon made him an offer he couldn't refuse about 10 years ago.  Adele's story was less happy: she was forced out of her teaching position.  She's got a nice pension, but she loved teaching.  The adjustment's been rough.

Many years ago, when I first met met Adele she had a boyfriend who worked as a prison guard and seemed to spend most of his time on the second floor of her house talking on the CB.  In the first few years I knew her Adele had an anxious way of sucking her breath in through her teeth.  She said she was looking for a man who would keep her in chain link. 

Several years later day when I dropped a guy I never saw before came out to greet me.  "Hi, I'm Steve."  Seemed nice enough.  I didn't ask about the boyfriend.  Adele appeared a few minutes later.  (It would have been hard to sneak onto the property - they had, and still have a 3 dozen dog siren.)  She was smiling and for the first time I knew her seemed relaxed.

I said to myself, I don't know who Steve is, but he seems good for Adele.

About a year later I drove up and saw a change in the kennel.  As I related to a friend who met Adele when I met her, "Adele's found the man of her dreams."  It only took my friend a beat: "Chain link!"

Life was simpler then.