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Trivial Pursuits
The Flying Ghoti: Unintelligent Design at work.
Tuesday the Twenty-Fourth of November, Two Thousand and Nine
Quote Paraphrase Game!
Okay, here's an idea which may be dumb, but may also be brilliant. It's like your standard classic quote game, except instead of quotes, it's wordy, awkward paraphrases of lines from songs! Points will be given for any combination of correct artists, titles, or original quotes, and I don't even have to tell you not to Google, because Google will not help you! Ha ha! To be slightly more fair, I chose only songs which any self-respecting human being should listen to on repeat for at least three hours out of every day. I'm really curious as to whether this turns out to be harder or easier. I wish to fornicate with plebians. I wish to fornicate with plebians... such as yourself. (Pulp, "Common People"—Mirabai)And I lack the inner fortitude to decapitate her, and sweeten my griddle-cakes. Curses, curses, curses, curses, curses, curses, curses! (Mary Prankster, "Breakfast"—Mirabai)- The Smoke is asphyxiating due to inhalation of liquid, and I live in a fluvial environment!
Due to my excess of rhythmic pulses, it is improbable that I will come to the end of my inventory. In addition, my brilliance is such that I render solar illumination tautologous. (MC Frontalot, "Braggadocio"—Mirabai)I was propelling myself through the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Creatures were concealing themselves behind stones. (The Pixies, "Where Is My Mind?"—Moss)She consumes her fellow monarchs; she is quite devoted to her faith. She refrains from the use of cutlery. (The Magnetic Fields, "Queen of the Savages"—Mirabai)I discovered you unconscious in bed with me when I had I been laboring under the impression that I was unaccompanied. You're having deleterious effects on my sanity; when are you returning to our house? (James, "Laid"—Mirabai)Mother, I have just committed homicide. I placed a firearm in direct contact with a man's cranium and activated the firing mechanism. As a result, he is currently deceased. (Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"—Mirabai/Mike)We pronounced our mutual affection. The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine provided us with the use of their vehicles. (They Might Be Giants, "She's an Angel"—Mirabai)You are fond of simians, and of diminuitive equines. Perhaps you are less partial to terrifying abominations. (Jonathon Coulton, "Skullcrusher Mountain"—Mirabai/Mike)
(The first three have been stuck in my head for days now; the others I just sat down and put together now. It's actually surprisingly fun!)
So please, be honest: is this the most annoying thing I have ever posted, or is this a glimpse into the very future of weblogging? (Or both!)
EDIT: Apparently I need to do another one of these featuring only music I have been listening to since the last time Mirabai and I shared our entire music libraries with each other.
inconsequentially posted by Martin Marks at 10:05 in the evening // thirty-four comments by:
Friday the Thirteenth of November, Two Thousand and Nine
Well, he was the nazz with God-given ass.
Coming home early on a Friday to eat pizza, listen to "Ziggy Stardust", and read about KISS elves making kinky boots is about as entirely correct as a life can get.
quintessentially posted by Martin Marks at 4:29 in the afternoon // two comments by:
Thursday the Twelfth of November, Two Thousand and Nine
This story has been told before, but usually with like spies or something.
Okay, story idea: Boy meets girl, right? Girl is beautiful and brilliant, and boy falls a bit short of both and knows it. But girl has a medical condition that causes uncontrollable flatulence. (Wait for it.) Girl is naturally very insecure about this, and, after years of first dates that rarely become second ones, believes that no one will ever love her as a result of it. But boy is crazy about girl, and decides he can learn to bear her frequent and noxious byproducts. They go out on a date and he completely ignores the smells, but it's obvious that she is so excruciatingly embarassed by her condition that she can't be at ease around anyone, and the date goes poorly. Still, he asks her out again, but this time comes up with a way to put her at her ease: during the date, he mentions in passing that he is completely anosmic—a complete lie. The moment she learns this, she suddenly relaxes and begins to open up to him. The second date is fantastic, and the third is the best night of either of their lives.
Cut to years later. The two are now happily married. Boy has gradually adjusted to girl's stench, and has continued to feign anosmia all these years. It has become second nature for him not to smell things. The lie is complete and perfect—every morning, for example, he holds out the milk carton for her to sniff and make sure it's okay. But one night, he gets up to get a glass of water and smells a gas leak in the kitchen. Suddenly the only way to save the woman he loves is to reveal he has been lying to her about an essential aspect of his identity for years. DUN DUN DUN!
venturesomely posted by Martin Marks at 5:38 in the afternoon // twelve comments by:
Wednesday the Eleventh of November, Two Thousand and Nine
The next version will definitely be more mobile-friendly, I can tell you that much.
Also, today is my eighth blogthday, and I have now officially spent half my blogging career on this very website. But this year I have the good sense not to celebrate by promising big improvements to the website and then not getting around to them. I do have dreams, though, and maybe, maybe by this time next year the harder better faster stronger version of flyingghoti.net will launch. But don't count on it.
agnostically posted by Martin Marks at 7:53 in the evening // comment? by:
11:00 AM, 11/11/18
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.—Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae (1915)
literally posted by Martin Marks at 5:35 in the afternoon // four comments by:
Monday the Ninth of November, Two Thousand and Nine
Working at home presents its own challenges.
The cat just climbed up onto the (musical) keyboard, so naturally I turned it on to see if she would play the cat fugue. Then all of a sudden, I heard this jazzy, uptempo music, and I was like "oh my God, my cat is a musical genius!" But then it turned out she had trod on the "DEMO" button. End of anecdote.
unintentionally posted by Martin Marks at 2:49 in the afternoon // comment? by:
Tomorrow is today, and today is yesterday!
The Internet at work is down, but I needed to send an urgent email. With seven pages of PDF attachments, which were on my work computer. And I didn't have as much as a USB cable on me. An impossible problem... which I just solved. I downloaded an app that allows me to transfer files over Wi-Fi, then sent the emails straight from my goshdang phone over the cell phone network. If that does not blow your mind even a little, then you are not me.
passionately posted by Martin Marks at 10:04 in the morning // eleven comments by:
Saturday the Seventh of November, Two Thousand and Nine
S0rry, n0n-haxx0rs. I'll bl0g s0mething y0u'll find interesting s00n, I pr0mise.
All right, here's the thing. Recently I accidentally told WinAmp to auto-tag my entire MP3 collection using Gracenote, despite the fact that I already had meticulously tagged all the files myself. Now it's doing stupid and aggravating things like making a mess of the "Fingertips" series and claiming New Boots and Panties!! is by Ian Dury and the Blockheads when EVERYONE knows that the Blockheads were officially founded several months after the album was recorded. Clearly, this is unacceptable.
Now, every file was named in the format "artist—title.mp3" based on the old, correct tag information (by TagScanner, not by hand—I'm neurotic, not insane). I figure it's simple enough to write up a quick Python script to strip out that data (though unfortunately any /s, \s, :s, *s, "s, |s, <s, >s, and most importantly ?s will be lost and will have to be fixed by hand, and I'll just have to live with Gracenotes's album titles), retag the files with the correct metadata, and Bob's your uncle.
Except, it occcurred to me, what if Bob wasn't my uncle? What if Bob was only my cousin? Regardless of whether the previous two sentences make any sense, my point is that there's a hell of a lot more I could be doing with all this information. What if, instead of just dumbly retagging the files, my script took all of their information and put it into a relational database? Information is power, baby! So here's what I'm thinking: first, a script scrapes my entire existing music collection to pull out all the metadata it can scrounge up and puts it all into a MySQL database. That script's essentially just a disposable one-time-use script to populate the database (though I'll use it with a few minor changes to scan new files too).
Okay, so here's the killer part. I make another table in the database of playlists, and I write up a simple interface that lets me choose what songs go in what playlists (a many-to-many relationship, obviously). These are both playlists and sync lists: for example, one list will be of songs I want to sync to the flash drive I play in the car, and another will be of songs to sync to my new (and incredibly sexy, but I'm trying not to blather on about it) Droid. Then Python will both write M3U files for the playlists (They're just plain text! Who knew?) and synchronize my music collection with the various aforementioned external devices.
The only tricky part about the whole thing is the interface, particularly when it comes to assigning the songs to playlists. I mean, over six thousand songs, maybe half a dozen or more playlists/sync lists—that's pushing 40,000 possible combinations. I can't do that with a command-line interface, not without experiencing madness very quickly, and my brief experience working with Tkinter to create a Python GUI was enough to make me swear off windowed GUIs for good. A spreadsheet would be a kludgy but workable solution. Python could probably export a CSV which could be opened with OpenOffice—or, better, I could probably figure out how to use the Google Docs API with Python (I've done it in PHP). But clearly a spreadsheet is the Wrong Answer. What I need here is a web application (though only running on my own two-computer "intranet", obviously).
Which isn't all that scary, really, given that the only programs I've ever finished have all been web-based (you're looking at one now), and now that I'm getting used to Ajax I've started making almost functional ones. But that's all been PHP, and while PHP is certainly capable of the sort of thing I'd like to do, I'm not sure it's really the tool for the job... which is kind of a nice way to say that I'm damn well sick of it (I'm working on a big PHP project for work) and was really looking forward to coding in Python for a while. In a pinch, I could always write the interface in PHP and have it run the Python scripts, but that's just ugly. No, I'm 27 years old, and it's about time I learned how to write a web application in something other than PHP.
So I've done some very quick research and it sounds like there are several web application frameworks for Python. I find frameworks scary, because they talk a lot about "architecture", which sounds to me a lot like "planning" and "abstract thought", neither of which are really cornerstones of my haxx0ring technique. I know my code is ghastly and redundant and ghastly, but I understand it. I mean, I'm looking at web2py's slide show thingie and it's all talking about models and controllers and views and oh gosh it's all so scary. For $12.50, I could get the 341 page manual, which I will not understand at all. Maybe if I just jump into it I'll figure it out? Or not? Sigh.
clandestinely posted by Martin Marks at 1:04 at night // comment? by:
Wednesday the Fourth of November, Two Thousand and Nine
I want to post about this on Facebook, but don't really want to hear what my former schoolmates think.
I just discovered, serendipitously, that during my last year in high school, an alumna of that school, Suzan-Lori Parks, was getting a Guggenheim Fellowship and was nominated for her first Pulitzer. She got a Genius Grant the next year and became the first black woman to win a Pulitzer the year after that. For four years I was involved in the theatre community at that school, was President of the Thespian Society—hell, one of the English teachers did a reading of my first play, and yet no one in all that time happened to mention the fact that an alumna of the school had been winning awards as a playwright for the past ten years! In 2001 or 2002, I think, they opened a new "art wing" at the school—did they even bother inviting her? This is not a school with a lot of famous alumni to look up to.
Granted, if someone had told me, my immediate reaction would be to move hell and high water to try and put on one of her plays, which would have presented problems since, among other issues, they seem to all have black protagonists and my high school admitted exactly one black student every year. (And also because the more influential of our two directors considered Fiddler on the Roof too depressing and serious for a high school production. I had to threaten to organize a boycott of South Pacific to get it. I doubt she would have gone for The America Play. I bet I could have at least managed a reading, though.)
Grr! I am furious about this! Was it because they just didn't care about drama? Because she transferred in from a German high school and only graduated from John Carroll? Or was it because neither she nor her writings fit with the image the school has in mind for itself? Are they just not proud of her?
painstakingly posted by Martin Marks at 10:51 in the evening // three comments by:
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