On hiatus. Back June 1.

I'm going to Kerrville, Texas, for a week, to help the folks move out of the house they've lived in for ten years and into an apartment. It's a positive thing; it's something they want to do; but I'm not at all looking forward to this.

Anyway, I'll be back on June 1. Though probably I won't post for a couple of days after that while I'm taking care of whatever has to be fixed after I get back.

Gadzooks.

From NewYorkish: The Department of Sad, Sad Hobbies

More Smile info

The Official Brian Wilson Web Site: News:

BRIAN WILSON READIES ALL-NEW RECORDING OF LEGENDARY 'SMILE'
Long-awaited Masterpiece to be Released by Nonesuch Records on September 28
Recording Follows Triumphant 'SMILE' Performances in Europe With U.S. Tour Planned For The Fall

Despite the hype, there's no question that this is good news. It would be even better if Wilson's Gettin' In Over My Head album (to be released in June) turns out to be a solid work like most of Brian Wilson and not just a placeholder like much of Imagination. Do I dare hope?

Date night

RP finally felt like leaving the house, so we went out and saw Troy last night. Silly Hollywood fluff--Helen isn't even the most beautiful woman in the movie, and the dialogue, to use RP's word, was abysmal.

Thanks, Anton!

Ooh, yay, an external link. This could get really incestuous.

The maddening "slippery slope" argument against gay marriage

I've been hoping somebody would cover this. Dahlia Lithwick holds forth in Slate: "Since few opponents of homosexual unions are brave enough to admit that gay weddings just freak them out, they hide behind the claim that it's an inexorable slide from legalizing gay marriage to having sex with penguins outside JC Penny's."

I'd thought of a few of Ms. Lithwick's points myself, but she argues them better than I might; she also covers many points I'd never think of. Interesting links, too.

My problems are over

Well, not all of them, but at least Anton Sherwood and Quark are both back, their absence having been noted in this previous entry.

Hometown blues

I don't envy RP's next-younger sister Rhonda. She's the one who stayed in her hometown while all the other sibs moved to bigger cities. So when their parents need care she gets stuck with a lot of the work.

Well, last Friday, RP's mom went into the hospital with pneumonia, and today RP's dad went into the hospital with a whole sequence of ailments. (He's at the stage of life where he stays healthy only by a delicate and precarious balance of meds, and if he misses a dose he suffers for a week. Same as with my dad, only probably worse.)

Neither situation is life-threatening, but we fret anyway. RP's mom has contracted iatrogenic illnesses before.

RP considered going home, but fortunately another sister--the one who came to help RP and me for a week when he broke his leg--is going, so RP feels better about staying here.

I wouldn't begrudge him going if he needed to, but Kathy's great in these situations; you couldn't ask for a more generous and helpful sister-in-law.

Same-sex marriage becomes reality

Of course RP and I are thrilled that Massachusetts now issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples. What's amazing to me is that large protests like the one that took place here in Phoenix don't seem to be all that common--at least I didn't see stories on such things in any of the major-city newspaper web sites I looked at. (Granted that I didn't look in places like Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, or Bakersfield.)

And this story from CBS News provides some interesting statistics:

A Gallup Poll taken in early May shows the public backing of an amendment is decreasing while the support for same-sex marriage is increasing. The nationwide poll found that 55 percent oppose same-sex marriage (down from 65 percent in December) and 42 percent favor gay marriage (up from 31 percent in December).

Opposition to same-sex marriage went down ten percentage points and support went up by eleven, and in only six months? That doesn't even seem possible. Wow. I might get optimistic about my chance to marry the person I want to in some state that I live in if this keeps up.

May all of those marriages, and all marriages everywhere, be happy and long.

When press aides get uppity

If you weren't watching Meet the Press Sunday, you may not have heard that one of Colin Powell's press aides tried to cut short Tim Russert's interview with Powell. (RP was, and he woke me up to tell me about it.) The aide, identified as Emily Miller, claimed it was because the interview was running long, but it's hard not to think that she was trying to shield her boss from a semi-tough question (which Powell, to his credit, answered and answered responsively).

Here's Wonkette on it: "...disrupting an interview with the nation's highest-ranking cabinet member on national television is not exactly a firing offense in this administration."

We interrupt this program...

For months I've been following Anton Sherwood's blog but it appears to be gone this morning. I do hope it's not gone for good.

I also notice I'm having trouble getting to Quark today. I expect that's temporary as well.

Rich, beautiful prose department

From Echoes magazine, found on the November Music web site: "They weave evocatively heated echoes of Africa, Asia and the Far East in among cooler strains of the European classical tradition."

EphemeraNow

I couldn't have put it better myself: EphemeraNow.com -- Broadband content for 1958.

Aha!

From Macintouch, a solution to a problem that has vexed many: "Font Permissions Cause Print Problems "

Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind

Two months later, I catch up to this article from MSNBC, via Altercation: "Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

Zarqawi is reputed to be behind a lot of the nastiest stuff that's happened in Iraq recently, including the barbarous murder of Nick Berg.

Portfolio 7 now out

Here's the product page. I downloaded the trial, and my immediate reaction is that it's unbearably slow. Of course, everything is unbearably slow on this computer.

[several hours later]

Portfolio (and the computer in general) seem to work a great deal better after I killed some of the spyware infesting it. Geez, make one thoughtless click and you pay for it for the rest of your computer's life.

Quark prepares for come-back

From Print Media News, courtesy of Paul Andrews (on a QuarkXPress mailing list): "As a result, QuarkXPress 7 is due out this Autumn with eagerly awaited new features to address the balance with Adobe's InDesign which has been picking up significant business from former XPress users. "

Merriam-Webster's top ten favorite words

Here they are. Defenestrate is number 1 on the list. I was asking RP just the other day which Eastern European leader it was that was defenestrated. We never did figure it out.

XML Hell

Susan Glinert's informative and amusing article on XML at creativepro.com: "Given the diametrically opposite approaches programmers and designers have to creating output, it boggles the mind that anyone bothered to invent a publishing solution that plunges both right- and left-brained people into absolute chaos. I am referring, of course, to XML, short for eXtensible Markup Language."

I can just hear the Big Boss demanding that our materials be marked up as XML. I can just hear it.

And wasn't the GUI invented to spare normal people from stuff like that? I mean, I use Quark or InDesign or Illustrator specifically so I don't have to write PostScript code.

And yet more you didn't want to hear

From Guardian Unlimited: "The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources."

So they're not only abusing the prisoners, they're doing it incompetently. Words fail me.

(Via Radioactive Quill.)

Eleven months and counting

Eleven months after Quark took down their user forums, ostensibly for a revamp/upgrade, this notice : still appears on Quark's web site: "Note: User forums are being restructured. Check back periodically for updates on this effort."

Now Quark doesn't owe the world user forums, but they're so easy to implement that a great many software developers--and more than a few scattered individuals--have done so. (Creating decent manuals is one thing that probably ought to take a higher priority.) I just wish they'd be honest and admit that the forums are gone for good.

More stuff you didn't want to hear

From CNN.com

"Appearing on CNN's "American Morning," an attorney for Pfc. Lynndie England said they were "staged" by intelligence officials who were running Abu Ghraib at the time.

England was photographed holding a what appears to be a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi prisoner

"They are psychological operations photos," said attorney Giorgio Ra'Shadd. "Those were instructed and the ones that were not specifically instructed were inferred by the civilian intelligence people who took control."

Another attorney for England, Rose Mary Zapor, said the photo, "is not a picture of our client abusing a prisoner in any way.'"

Oh joy, lawyerspeak. "No Iraqi prisoners were harmed in the making of this video." Riiiiiight.

There was a bit more elaboration on the "American Morning" program that isn't quoted here, including something to the effect that whatever orders Pfc. England received from civilian intelligence were inherently unlawful.

Now since I'm civilian and a nonlawyer, I may be missing some fine point, but the question that leaps to mind immediately is, "Why was she following unlawful orders?"

Odd dream last night...

I walk across the border into a section of occupied Iraq (a section which has been relocated into Arizona for security reasons, as everybody knows) and am directed by a polite Iraqi policeman up a very long flight of stairs to what suddenly proves to be the most famous roller coaster in Iraq.

The stairs are there, I realize, because Iraqi roller coasters start high, descend to a low point, and come up again.

I find myself riding the roller coaster, very much against my will (in the dream as in real life I hate coasters). However, the experience is nowhere near as bad as my experience on real roller coasters.

Update

Ron lost his iTrip and replaced it with the accessory mentioned in this previous entry. I must say it works even better than the iTrip. The fact that the latter is independent of the car's power supply (drawing instead off the iPod's power) makes it the accessory of choice to use in the office, though.

Lost in translation?

The Czech typefounder Storm Type Foundry is notable both for their excellent types and their commentary on the types, evidently translated from a Czech original into very good but occasionally stilted and cryptic English: for instance, "Tenebra Shaded and Old Face decorate, but do not refine."

I imagine some designers won't care for the individuality and eccentricity that draw me to my faves, but you folks who came to graphic design because you love the shapes of letters will find a lot to look at. Very reasonably priced, too.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Afro-British Composer

I thought KBAQ's announcer was talking about poems set to music and just got the name wrong, but apparently this guy was all the rage around the turn of the last century.

Drat!

I left my iPod at home today. So I guess it's going to be NPR and classical music today.

New photos of prisoner abuse emerge

"Mild rebuke"?: "Two Bush aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said today the president stood firmly behind Rumsfeld despite what one characterized as the 'mild rebuke.' "

Pariah Burke on the Quark vs. InDesign thing

I couldn't say it better myself, although I've tried: "Adobe won't kill Quark, Inc.; Quark, Inc. is the architect of its own downfall and, unless a radical change of direction happens soon, its own demise."

Yeah, what he said.

Attorney says fair trial impossible in Iraqi abuse case

Res ipsa loquitur:

"'I would like the president to quit tainting my jury,' said Guy Womack, the attorney for Charles Graner, one of the soldiers who appears in photographs that have ignited international controversy. "

Two new ones via Adobe's forums

Well, I hadn't heard them before, anyway...

1. Poster A: "I should have told him to RTFM." Poster B: "How would the Kama Sutra help?"

2. "It looks like a huge wombat." From context this appeared to be one of dozens of terms generally comparable to snafu, fiasco, and so forth--and it is, but it's also attached to an amusing acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.

Disappearing Act

One heck of an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: "There is something deeply, structurally wrong with a profession that allows and even encourages the use of cheap, contingent labor."

It happens that the anonymous author of The Invisible Adjunct quoted in the article is talking about academe, but she might well use those words to condemn graphic design, where it seems that any sophomore with a pirated copy of Photoshop can low-ball their way into paying if not profitable work.

Man gives Jackson's underwear to prosecutors

Oooh, gross. The underwear itself is bad enough. But do we really need to know that Michael Jackson addresses his little friends as "rubbers"?