Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

One of the cool things about having kids is when they turn you on to something you might have missed on your own and vice versa. The other day my 15 year old told me about Pandora , a new music streaming music service that lets you build custom channels by giving it artists or songs. It then plays music that meets your preferences, based on attributes your song or artist has. This is based on work by the Music Genome Project . While not infallible (it can't read your mind), Pandora is still pretty cool. The player is web browser/Flash-based and should work on any platform that support Flash. I've tested on Windows (XP) and Linux (Mandriva 10 and SUSE 10). Presumably MacOS will function as well. The music selector does a reasonably good job. You can add additional sample songs/artists to fine tune the criteria used to select. It tends to play a good mix of the fairly well known and somewhat obscure (nice from my point of view), and occasionally makes some interesting connectio...

I do my best to avoid taking delight in the misery of others. It's an ugly pastime, and you never know when the tables will turn. The Germans have a word for this urge (they always do): Schadenfreude . Still there are times it's hard not to smirk. For instance the other day I crawled along the freeway, finally exiting, only to have a upwardly mobile MBA type in his BMW convertible whip around and cut me off, his hair and power tie flapping in the breeze. I could swear he smiled at me, the bastard. Suddenly the police cruiser that had been crawling along behind me flipped his lights on and pulled him over. BAM. I wasn't sure exactly what Beemer had done, but what ever it was, he was busted. I smiled back as I passed him. Schadenfreude. And so it was with the news that a jury in Houston found Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling guilty of a total of 29 criminal counts in the Enron debacle. Lay, who had cultivated an avuncular public persona, apparently came off as an arrogant a...

I'm making slow but steady progress on the rewrite. I'm about half way through the ~400 pages. It's interesting how much it has changed. One previously secondary character (a heavy at that) has become a sympathetic primary character. I'm deleting vast sections and writing whole new scenes. This is a good thing. The issue before long is going to be that I'm going to have to re-write the first third of the book -- again. But again, this is a good thing. Complicating all this is that I've started painting again and have let my charming bride tell people I'm having an "open studio" at the end of the summer. So that I don't publicly humiliate myself by having nothing new to show, I'm busy making art AND writing. If only I didn't have to work, I'd be a pretty successful person. My writers' group has universally judged the title --"Eye Pee" -- to be sucky. So I'm trolling around for a NEW title. So far, "No Resistanc...

I saw The DaVinci Code the other day. It wasn't near as bad as the reviews would have you believe--really--although I can see how if you were a member of Opus Dei you might have cause to be pissed. Or if you were into self-flagellation. The Local Paper (nameless, thank you) said that NOAH (the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation) took exception to the fact that the Killer Monk (played by Paul Bettany) was portrayed as an albino, and this portrayal continues a trend in recent years to give albinos a bad rap . Anyone remember the albino twins in the Matrix Reloaded? When I was in high school, I had a classmate who was an albino, as was her younger brother. Both had extremely poor eyesight, one of the hallmarks of albinism. As I recall, the major impediment to her social life was her lack of fashion sense, not pigmentation. A co-worker was aghast that I went to see DaVinci Code at all and said he wouldn't be caught dead in the theater. Sort of the way my wife ...