Defender of the Free Word

Doc Ezra goes off on the increasingly common butchery and misuse of his beloved mother tongue. If you cringe when you hear words like proactive or envisioneer, this article is for you.

I’ll be away from Friday until Monday, so Kaedrin could be frightfully inactive this weekend. I say “could be” because you could change that. Yes, YOU. You could go add a chapter to one of the active Tandem Stories, or check out the ever fascinating Kaedrin Forum, where you can sympathize with my horrid Boston Public experience or just chat with the regulars (they don’t bite… hard).

I Care Because You Do

Richard D. James, the genius/lunatic behind Aphex twin, acts almost as wierd as his music sounds. The man lives in an Bank and he owns a working Tank that he drives around town. A real tank, it even fires (but he uses this function sparingly as he only has 4 rounds of ammo left). When asked what other purchases he plans to make, he says he’d like a submarine. “I don’t know anything about submarines. I just know I’d like to have one. It would be wicked for parties, and stuff like that.” As if his music wasn’t unique enough, he goes on to explain that the acoustic possibilites for recording on a submarine are incredible. Wierd guy, cool ambient/technoish music. [via Metascene (i think)]

Theater or Film?

Why Act in Theater? The famous film and theater actor Willem Dafoe addresses this issue quite frankly in this article. Basically, theirs ups and downs in both mediums, and sometimes when he’s on stage he longs for the camera, and sometimes when he’s sporting the Green Goblin costume in the upcoming Spider Man movie, he longs for the stage…

Netscape Crashes

The Day The Browser Died, a tragic shortcoming of Netscape 4.x. CSS is a wonderful technology, in part because it fails gracefully (at least, its supposed to) in browsers that don’t support it. Except Netscape. Netscape tends to crash when you use CSS. I recently encountered this problem with these very pages. I seem to have fixed the problem (it had to do with the padding property being applied to a table cell), but that’s no excuse for Netscape’s failure.

I like Netscape. Really, I do. And you know what, as you can see in the follow up article at A List Apart, Netscape has been really cooperative with this bug. Netscape has been a consistant innovative force on the internet. However, their 4.x browser has become an embarassment, and 6.0, though standards compliant and faster, isn’t what is could have been (I look forward to future releases).

I apologize to anyone who still can’t view this site in Netscape, and I beg of you to consider switching over to IE (or better yet Opera). That is, if you can even get to this page to read it.

memespreading

I’ve been trying to take a more novel approach recently, but I find the urge to spread some quickly growing memes is overcoming my good senses. I apologize in advance if this is the millionth time you’ve seen these links:)

First comes a cool Avatar maker called storTrooper. Its a nifty little java applet that lets you choose a body and clothes for a virtual representation of yourself (an avatar, if you will). I made a rather bland one (on your right), but you can make an outrageous one fairly easily. If you buy it you get lots of other clothes and styles to choose from (including the goth collection), and it would make a great supplement to a virtual community site like 4degreez, letting users goof around with their appearances…

Second is IT. What is IT? It’s IT. Actually, no one knows what IT is, but IT will change the world. Some good coverage and commentary on IT can be found at Boing Boing. IT is the invention of 49-year-old scientist Dean Kamen, and IT is also code named Ginger. Of course, everyone’s intrigued, including metafilter and slashdot visitors (of course). Some think it is a revolutionary form of transportation, or perhaps an infinite energy source. Steve Jobs thinks cities will be built around IT. Can IT stay a secret for long? I don’t think so. We’ll know what it is soon enough; no one can keep something that is supposedly this big a secret. Until then, IT is an intriguing mystery…

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming…

Ghost Stories

Not too long ago I recieved a book of Ghost Stories as a gift. The book introduced me to M. R. James, who is known as one of the originators of the modern ghost story, and I must say, he is quite talented. I stumbled across this gem, containing a few of James’ short stories in their entirety, including my favourite: Count Magnus. An excerpt:

‘So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. At first they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone–you know how far away it is–they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of his soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they hear someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him laugh out loud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and, indeed, they have all of them said that it was not any man at all. After that they hear a great door shut.

It is not so much the scream that evokes fear, but rather the laugh at the end. Why is that? I’m not really sure… As for the other stories, I have only read Casting the Runes, which I enjoyed as well.

Love between man and corporation

The Delivery of a Lifetime describes an exchange of emails between Daniel Arp, a Pittsburgh high school teacher, and the customer-service department of Amazon.com. Daniel fervently proclaims his love for the corporation with a verbose fanaticism worthy of psychological study. I wonder what he thinks of Amazon’s new logo? Personally, I like the new logo, and in my opinion Amazon is the best company in the history of American business. Uh, yeah.

Synesthesia

What is the colour of five? What does blue taste like? Believe it or not, some people can answer these questions. These people have an rare variety of perception called synesthesia. Synesthesia literally means joined sensations, a condition that causes certain sensations to “leak” into one another. Its much deeper than a simple association or metaphor; synesthetes don’t think about a sound when they see a colour, they actually hear the sound! This raises all sorts of questions regarding our view of the world and reality. Do we all have an innate form of synesthesia, possibly repressed? Who knows, but the more I think about this condition the less I’m suprised (and the more I realize how little we know about ourselves). Yet another bizarre scientific discovery…