Getting Gruntled

It’s interesting to see your own attitudes toward a given historical event change over time. A couple of days ago (Saturday, even) was Patriots’ day. This one has nothing to do with Amercan football, and the majority of Americans on the street wouldn’t be able to tell you offhand what Patriot’s Day is supposed to be about. It’s likely because there isn’t a tradition of buying copious amounts of sugar, or killing a bird to use as a centerpeice.

The high points of the Revolutionary War, including the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s Ride are very familar, mostly due to Longfellow’s poem, but the holiday isn’t.

More info on Paul Revere’s ride
Timeline from PBS

The PBS site makes me wish I’d heard about the film before it aired. I bet it was good.

This week, I found a band called Porchsleeper. They don’t have much in the way of detail on AmieStreet, but they are out of Ann Arbor, MI. The “Stinkeye” track I have in the player here really kicks, and has a pop-punk feel to it that reminds me of The Refreshments. Be sure to check out the “Bulletproof” track while you are here.

This is my first stab at web2.0 poetry, as a followup to the High ASCII post.


> dude, u there? che's 4me.
< y u say? ura n00b!
> 1, che friended, drops invites.
< invites... sure. brb.
> 2, alwys acc, no spam reply.
< still in bud zone there, n00b.
> 3, phone: vm rb, no dnd nvr perma-hold.
< that's btr. ne w/w, follows, links?
> Well, always avail/acc count?
I lightboxed and meta’d.


hrm. it’s a stab at any rate.

Just a little blast from the past here. Some of you were around back in the Hayes Volksmodem and BBS days, and will remember this as well as I do.

FYI - a “wahka” is the decidedly “proper” (by popular vote) name for
the characters “>” and “< ". This is in spite of INFOCUS readers of
Denver who still refer to them as "Norkies". The Michigan crowd
apparently has corrupted the spelling to "waka".

To wit, it is -
------------------------------------------------------------
"...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well,
perhaps---we're really not sure what the poem actually is
about. Here it goes:"

<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

original Leitner page
Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

I have been thinking back on this recently and was thinking that some new possibilities are possible nowadays with widespread PC usage, the internet, and all of our new web lingo. I’ll be posting a couple of attempts soon. If any of you want to take a whack, feel free to share.

I found a lot of good female vocalists this past week on AmieStreet. One of these was Karma Lively, who has “a hundred songs of peace and war,” is from “North to the Future” Alaska. Besides having a light, fun acoustic sound, and having something to say with her lyrics, She’s donating all of her music sales for the year on AmieStreet to charity. She has a sound that is somewhere in the neighborhood of The Cranberries, Jewel, and Sia.
It looks like she’s laying down all of the instrument tracks herself, which always gains a lot of points with me.

I was sitting with the girls and Tink (Tink is a wire-haired terrier whose fur is cornsilk blonde, and a bit scruffy in length). The girls were singing some made-up song about our breakfast and how excited they are to be going on a surprise expedition, then their attention turned to Tink.

Petting her, they started to notice similarities in a dog’s biology and their own. When they started talking about front paws versus rear paws, I pointed out the similarity in bone structure between hands and feet (tarsals and carpals, etc) and dropped another seed to pick up at another time (that half of the bones in your body are in your hands and feet), but otherwise left them to make the rest of the inferences themselves.

After noticing the limbs and some muscle groups, they started to mention more surface comparisons, and this one I just had to share:
K: There’s a lot of ways that I’m like Tink!
A: Hey, here’s another way that I’m like her even more. (puts her finger into her blonde hair, which has been darkening quite a bit over the past year).
K: Yeah! You both have a head!
A: (exasperated) NO! Blonde hair!
Me: Well, it’s true. you do each have a head…
A: I was talking about her fur and my hair.
K: Yeah. That too.

I was putting off the 2.5 upgrade for Wordpress for a few days, then I saw a list of the security issues it solved, and figured that I may as well go ahead with it. The upgrade was smooth and clean, as usual, and the look-and-feel changes in the admin area are going to need a few days.
The docs page at WP says that the admin area is totally widgetized, so I may be able to tweak the placement of things to an extent. The important thing is that the upgrade was minimally invasive, quick and relatively painless. All of my plugins seem to be working without a hitch, and I think that the load time of my homepage may have dropped by a couple of seconds, too. Bonus!

This week, I’m making a last minute entry because I’ve been listening to this album a couple of times over, trying to decide which song to highlight. Peter Salett has an acoustic sound and the stark, yet comfortable voice that brings the coffeehouse style to mind. The sound is akin to that of Shawn Mullins. This track, “Where We Lay” is about coming to a point in a relationship where everything is natural and unrushed. How appropriate for the first week of true spring weather, right?