Trivial Pursuits

The Beatles = Benny Goodman?

If I have kids in the next decade—which is the general plan, though a few minor details, most notably the identity of their mother, have yet to be ironed out—then they will view music from the aughts the way I view music from the seventies.

peevishly posted by Martin Marks at 2:18 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Tanya

 

His blog is called "Great Books, Half Read"!

Okay, that's just disturbing.

bashfully posted by Martin Marks at 11:05 at night // nine comments by:

• Martin
• anonymous
• Tim
• Fafner
• Martin
• Fafner
• Fafner
• Tim
• Tanya

 

And ODF is XML-based!

I wish word processors worked like HTML/CSS. I prefer to write in a print-like format, with text in a proportional font and emphasis indicated in italics. But a final manuscript should (by silly industry convention) be in typewriter-like format, with text in a monospaced font and emphasis indicated with underlines. Now, it's easy to tell OpenOffice to change the "text body" font style (and line spacing, and indentation, and all of that stuff), but why is there no way to tell it to change how emphasis is indicated?

Okay, twelve seconds of research indicates that you can in fact use the extended options in "Find and Replace" to select all italicized text, but that's not the point, now is it? It just makes sense to have a style-dependent "emphasis" and "strong" mode. If I wrote in HTML with a CSS stylesheet, I could restyle the whole thing in seconds without altering the text. Why can't you do that in a word processor?

needlessly posted by Martin Marks at 10:25 in the evening // six comments by:

• Sumana Harihareswara
• Mike
• Martin
• Martin
• Martin
• Martin

 

None of the results are rappers.

At a cursory glance, it looks like just about all the results on a Google for "morpheme drip" (and there are only twenty results) are people who don't know how to spell morphine. I count three results—two comment threads and a blog with a single entry—that appear to be at least half-heartedly making what seems to me to be an incredibly obvious pun.

unintentionally posted by Martin Marks at 6:13 in the evening // comment? by:

 

Neither of the people voted "most likely to succeed" has left any web impression whatsoever.

I never used to take out my high school yearbooks before Facebook. Maybe because this year will actually be ten years. I wonder if they'll be able to find me to send an invite for the reunion. I've always said that I wouldn't go to a high school reunion until I can arrive in a helicopter with an entourage of at least three, but if I actually sell Trogs, that'd be worth rubbing in one or two faces at the least.

Anyway, I guess I really have nothing better to do tonight than read the comments people wrote in my yearbooks, and I have to say, none of them can possibly beat this freshman year gem from someone who was in my class (and barely knew):

Martin,
What can I
say—It's been
"Interesting" to
say the least—work
on responsibility
- Craig L—

Thank you, Craig. Your completely un-asked-for advice is as relevant now as it always was. Although judging from a quick Pipl search, it seems you've loosened up over the years and are happier for it. Good for you.

One of these days, I'm going to do a detailed statistical analysis of my senior year's class portraits, finally settling such crucial questions as "exactly what percentage of my classmates quoted the Dave Matthews Band?" and "damn, did any males in my class NOT have a caesar with frosted tips?"

heartily posted by Martin Marks at 10:04 in the evening // comment? by:

 

"Come on, let me see your semicolon smile."

Have I mentioned before how much I like Dale Chase's work? You may have seen "Coder Girl", which was sort of a breakout hit amongst a very, very, very small subset of the world's population. He took a ridiculously infectious little loop, cut it up, and decided to put incredibly geeky lyrics about computer programming over it. None of which is new, obviously; nerdcore hip hop is a decade old this year, and Kool Keith et al were laying the groundwork years before that. But "Coder Girl" is just so dang good that it deserves special mention. It's sweet and charming without being cloying, it avoids both self-deprecation and braggadocio, and above all, it's a song about how awesome creative and intelligent women are. Awesome.

Given that his other songs include lines like "blow it out your ocarina, Ganon / Hyrule's spoils to the last one standin'", "so now I'll switch my styles up like CSS", and "while you're laid out there on the mat / I'm a play you off like that Keyboard Cat", I think it's pretty clear that Chase's geekiness is by no means limited to "Coder Girl". I'm not sure if Chase considers himself nerdcore—it's essentially an opt-in genre—but I kind of hope he does, if for no other reason than it's kind of embarassing that it's probably the only American hip hop genre where basically all the prominent members are Caucasians (one of whom is actually named YTCracker). (There are, of course, plenty of persons of color making nerdy hip hop—Dr. Octagon is a person of several colors—and I stand by my claim that hip hop is by both its nature and its culture the second most nerd-oriented musical genre after filk.) I think Mr Chase has the talent to bring a new sound to nerdcore, which in my experience tends to get stale every few years unless Frontalot gets some press or a really brilliant voice comes out. Dale Chase could be such a voice. I thought Nursehella could have been too, but then she didn't really follow up on her debut track, "Nursehellamentary". Chase's whole EP is solid, though "Coder Girl" is clearly the standout.

scrupulously posted by Martin Marks at 8:08 in the evening // two comments by:

• Mike
• Martin

 

Posted for posterity.

Q: How do you measure out a given volume of a liquid of unknown density to a reasonable level of accuracy, without any kind of graduated cylinder or other volume measuring tool?
A: Take an empty, unlabeled cup and tare a gram scale to that weight. Fill the cup with water until the weight in grams equals the volume in milliliters that you're trying to achieve. Mark the level of the water and dump the water out, then fill the cup up to that mark with the liquid.

I'm happy to hear other suggestions, but this one seemed pretty clever at the time.

passionately posted by Martin Marks at 4:00 in the afternoon // one comment by:

• Liz