Stray Hawkeye

Two videos I bookmarked at different times, both because I’m sort of fascinated with resonance.  Strikes me that they fit pretty well together.

Metronomes on a board:

People on a bridge:

Such interesting parallels.  The way each metronome / person reacts to the result of the collective force generated by the individual movements of each of the others.  The mix of the purely physics-based and the physics / behavioral interaction.  The way, despite all starting fairly randomly, they all find their way to synchronization without trying to, just based on their interactions with their surroundings.  The way, in effect, each individual in the group exerts a tiny force on the group, and the group exerts its collective force on the individual until all individuals in the group are the same.  So many ways one could extend this metaphor / phenomena out to apply to other things.

Abridged scripts from the editing room are great 2-3 pages versions of popular movies.  And by abridged, I mostly mean 2-3 pages that narrate the plot and key scenes of the movie, while making TOTAL CRAP out of the MOVIE, while using STANDARD SCRIPT FORMATTING.

They’re pretty funny, especially for ones you’ve seen- most of them are mocking enough that you need to actually have seen the movie for them to make sense.  The Dark Knight is a pretty good one, though I’m not sure why they feel the need to make fun of Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think she’s kind of cute.

I just finished reading Requiem For A Dream (yes, it was a book before it was a movie), and I must say, it’s really good.  It’s a challenging read, for instance, Selby doesn’t separate what the characters say from the text around it with quotation marks, it’s just huge blocks of text, which takes a while to get used to.   And the subject matter is every bit as depressing as the movie, though in a sort of different way.  It’s one of the better things I’ve read in quite a while, though, have I mentioned depressing?

The reason I bring this up is not just to brag about still reading books occasionally and choosing challenging books (a little for that, but not enough for a post on it’s own :) ), or to recommend a book, but to point out a couple parallels between this and another work on the same subject matter of heroin addicted junkies in New York.  The musical Rent.

This is mainly because the morning after I finished reading Requiem For A Dream, I happened to have the soundtrack for Rent in the CD player in my car, and was listening to it on the way to work (irony of listening to Rent on the way to my corporate job aside for the moment).  As it so happened, I was near the end of the first disc, and some of the first lyrics were, in ultra upbeat, cheery musical theater style:

I’m Willin’
I’m Illin’
I Gotta Get My Sickness Off
Gotta Run, Gotta Ride
Gotta Gun, Gotta Hide — Gotta Go
And It’s Beginning To Snow

First I was struck by the absolute tonal dissidence of these two takes on the same subject matter.  Like a Sound of Music / Schindler’s List contrast.  (Okay, I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, but if you makes you want to die for about a week after watching it, we’re on the right track.)  Especially that song from Rent versus the chapters of pain and agony in Requiem of “trying to get one’s sickness off”.  I was a little clueless on some of the lingo and allusions in Rent as well, but Requiem expounds on it pretty well.  For example, “getting one’s sickness off” is taking another dose of heroin to stop the sickness caused by withdrawal symptoms when a junkie has gone too long between fixes.  From Requiem‘s description this sickness is gut wrenchingly nasty.

After getting past the style difference, and I started to notice more and more overlap in language and slang, it started to strike me that for the huge difference in tone and style, how many plot points the two works had in common.

A sampling of what I have picked up on so far, in roughly order that I noticed them rather than any sort of theme I’m trying to develop.  Note- there are lots and lots of spoilers in here:

• Both features heroin addicts living in New York struggling with addiction.
• Both feature somewhat prominently the phone calls (and lack there of) around rather one sided parent child relationships.
• The main protagonist is a male.  He has a love interest who is also a junkie.  The female has some amount of involvement in activities bordering on or venturing well into prostitution.  The male protagonist is fairly aware of this but generally turns a blind eye to, except for the isolated moments where it particularly sets him off into a sort of festering rage.
• The main protagonist has a male friend who is also featured rather prominently, who has a generally detached/ambivalent view of his friend’s love live / involvement, but generally tries to take some amount of care of the female.  This friend tends to be slightly more detached and unemotional in general.
• The main characters have dreams/plans of starting a dining establishment which will serve as an escape from their current situation and as a long term source of financial well being.  Slight attempts are made at getting started on the establishment of this restaurant, but are generally abortive early on and the goal is more or less forgotten by the end, clouded out by drugs and love (and lack there of).
• One main character is teetering on the boarder of death at the end, and has a near death experience where he/she goes towards and then come back from a white light.  His/her exact status of life/death is somewhat unclear at the end but it is likely safe to assume he/she is not long for this world.
• A trip to a distant, southern portion of the USA is planned as part of their long term financial success, though any sort of real though or plans are entirely lacking.
• There is a brief period of excitement and optimism just before exactly half way through, which leads to a long, slow decline over the second half.
• The events take place over almost exactly the course of one full year (slightly less in Requiem)
• The ability to pay the rent is featured as a prominent driver of action.
• The ease/challenges and burden/benefits of surviving with or without one’s significant other feature very prominently.  Especially as they relate to one’s own drug addiction.
• A fair portion of the action takes place in/around abandoned and dangerous areas of New York.  Only briefly does the city seem particularly alive.  For the most part it is closer to a battle field.

There may well be others, but that struck me as a whole lot of similarities for two works that are so different on the surface.

• Boating
• A reflective Lake Todd ripples on entry
• Playing with butterflies
• F18 Cockpit
• Clouds

In the course of the last two days we’ve had someone with Pink Eye come in to work, and someone else with Strep Throat come in to work.  Both of them knew it, knew they were contagious, and came in anyway.  It took repeated pleas/orders from the Strep Throat one’s boss to get her to go home, and she still stuck around for a good hour before leaving.  Pink Eye has come in to work every day, and has not gone home at all.

Now mind you, our company gives everyone a laptop as their computer so you can work from home, or from other cities (it’s consulting), so it’s not like working from home means you’re burning you PTO / vacation hours.  You’re just working and don’t have to commute or dress up.  And yet people still keep coming into our cube farm when they’re knowingly contagious and almost refuse to leave.  Something is seriously wrong with attitudes towards work around here.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to stop by the day care and find some toddlers to sneeze on me.

A while ago at work I was working on a rather dull programming issue.  I had been working on it for several weeks.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but and it largely consisted of going through a tremendous number of computer generated files produced in an incredibly archaic and unreadable format, and trying to make sense of them, with no documentation.  Things like establishing that if a line started with “ARFTJ|PRU|742|X” it meant that it was the start of a customer’s address, and the zip code would be somewhere in the next line.  Or that if it had “890-439,UIC,<something>,qw94″, the <something> would be a single letter indicating if the address was new, old, being updated, or being deleted.  In filtering through all this gibberish, I was also polishing off my command line skills (as you’ll see if you’re a complete dork and critique such things, they’re still quite rusty in the below.  Also, blurred in a few spots for security’s sake).  In particular I was trying to find out what all the <somethings> in the above were.  At least narrow down all the possibilities to work through.  I knew “D” and “N” where quite common, and I had seen one or two others here and there.  So, I cut all the relevant lines out of the originals files, and then made an alphabetically sorted list of the possibilities I was dealing with.  I have now bored you with the details.  At this point your mind should be roughly as numbed as mine was when this popped up on the screen as my result:

That’s right.  DINOZ.  I think it’s trying to tell me something.

• Tetris brownies.  If you eat enough of them just right, you’ll clear a line in your stomach.
• Someone made an incredibly high resolution version of tetris, proving that not everything is better in high resolution.  Someone else then decided to let it run until they finally lost, and posted the results as it went, here. If you click through that one, I would point out that the other tabs that are open and the text in the search bar in the screen shots are equally interesting to the actual content.
• Good at geography and like Tetris?  Try Statetris.  Okay, now try one that’s not the USA.  Makes you kind of sad for your self doesn’t it?  Or is that just me?

I made the usual rounds of the art fairs this weekend, and they’re just like I remembered.  Uptown’s expensive, crowded, and pretty.  Powderhorn is cool, laid-back, local, and affordable.  Loring Park is generally in between and where I ended up buying something.  Specifically a print of Broken Wing by Timothy Kobs.  I’m not usually one for fairy themed art, but I love the color and the mix of really pretty and really sad in it.  Just such a cool contrast and the little touch of red/orange on the wing really sets it off.  Also, talked briefly with artist and a woman with him at the booth, really nice people.

Other favorite art fair moment for the year.  While I was taking the art hop bus between Uptown and Powderhorn, there was a husband and wife with several small kids next to me.  From the bits of conversation I overheard, they were pretty obviously from the suburbs and not very familiar with the area.  As the bus turned right off of Lake onto Lyndale, the wife looked at the window and, with a chuckle, said, “The Smitten Kitten!  What a great name for a store!”   I’m pretty sure she was unaware of their line of business (NSFW), and given the age of the children she had with her, I refrained from informing her.

There is a tree in Athens, GA that owns itself.  And all the land within 8 feet of it’s base.  The article is rather interesting just for the oddness of it all.  Especially in light of the general strictness of most property laws and claims.  One of my favorite pieces of interplay between official law and law as people actually deal with it:

Athens-Clarke County confirms that the tree is in the right-of-way and is thus “accepted for care” by municipal authorities; according to city-county officials, local government and the owners of the adjacent property jointly serve as “stewards” for the care of the tree, while Athens’ Junior Ladies’ Garden Club serves as its “primary advocate.” Regarding Jackson’s deed, one writer noted at the turn of the last century, “However defective this title may be in law, the public recognized it.” In that spirit, it is the stated position of the Athens-Clarke County unified government that the tree, in spite of the law, does indeed own itself.

My question then, is what the tree does for a living to pay the property taxes on itself?

via Pundit Kitchen

Via Graph Jam

Via Pundit Kitchen

Via Pundit Kitchen

Via Pundit Kitchen