February 20, 2007
A fish tale ...
Those who know me well know that I have an unnatural affection for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. This usually manifests itself late at night after I've had a few drinks, but I've also been known to indulge my Filet addiction at lunchtime. My most recent bout was during a 5 a.m. rampage in Las Vegas, but there was no Filet-O-Fish to be found. I had to settle for fried oysters. It wasn't the same ...
So it was with delight and submarine satisfaction that I found this story in USAToday about the birth of the Filet-O-Fish. Turns out, it was born the same year as I, and it was created to pander to Catholics who were trying to observe their Lenten rituals. Very cool. There even is a "Filet-O-Fish Facts" sidebar.
Posted by Bob Benz at 5:12 PM | Comments (2)
February 18, 2007
The happy hound
Gilligan waits impatiently in the truck while I gas up after taking the pack to the lake this morning. It was another incredible, crisp morning with a dusting of snow on the trails. As we walked into the rising sun, thousands of tiny sparkling snow flecks danced around in the wind like a swarm of brilliant insects. The snow must have been blowing up off the ground since there wasn't a cloud in the sky at the time. The effect was pretty amazing. Maybe I shouldn't spend so much time gazing into the sun ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 6:31 PM | Comments (0)
Best in show ...
A Portland art gallery celebrated the Westminster Dog Show with its own take on canines, asking artists to do their interpretations of various breeds in what it is calling the Wurstminster Dog Show.
I liked Driscoll Reid's Newfoundland so much that I purchased it. And I almost bought a really, really strange take on the Maltese by Jason Vivona. When I e-mailed the link to Lara, she responded with a terse: "I don't want that." Hmm. Maybe I need to reconsider. It certainly captures the psychedelic nature of Mully the Maltese ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 6:23 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2007
What the dormouse said
I just finished John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." It's been on my list for a while. Overall, it was a great read.
Some of it is a rather dry account of the rise of the personal computer in Silicon Valley. And at times Markoff seems to generalize about the connection between the computer innovators and the counterculture. But there are strong ties in many spots, especially in the way LSD and the counterculture affected the worldview of these folks and their attitudes. It goes a long way to explain the open source movement and some of the collaborative approaches to development that have characterized the rise of the personal computer.
A few interesting notes:
• In the intro, Markoff details an interview he had with a somewhat peevish Steve Jobs, who "explained that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in life, and he said he felt that because people he knew had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn't understand. He also said that his countercultural roots often led left him feeling like an outsider in the corporate world of which he is now a leader." Amen.
• He talks about the first real "online" newspaper, when a bunch of folks at the SAIL lab streamed AP and New York Times content into their system and made it highly searchable. Before Google. Before Alta Vista.
• Before Ebay and other Internet commerce plays emerged, these geeks used their computer network to transact a marijuana deal between the SAIL folks in California and people at MIT's labs in New England. Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess.
• "It's the next thing after acid." Ken Kesey, after spending several hours seeing the text editing and information retrieval capabilities of Augment oNLine System in 1969. This was a major breakthrough in computing, where Doug Engelbart envisioned and demonstrated computer capabilities that went well beyond straight numerical computing. Kesey's observation was, to my mind, prescient.
• I find it stunning how much I take the current state of computing for granted. These folks were struggling to send 30 characters per second through modems. Today, 40 years later, I'm downloading entire episodes of Dragnet. It seems so long ago that I was driving an Amstrad word processor with 256k of memory and a flittering amber screen, and now I'm sitting in front of a Macintosh with gigabytes of storage and hundreds of megabytes of memory. There are times during the book when I was thinking this is so obvious. Why wouldn't someone use a computer for word processing and graphics? Why would folks cling stubbornly to mainframes? It's really hard to keep in mind the framework they were operating within, and it makes you appreciate that much more the visionaries who pushed the boundaries.
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:25 PM | Comments (0)
February 8, 2007
Genealogy of influence ...
I found this cool site today that shows the links among various writers, artists and philosophers. It's called Genealogy of Influence. Just click it and it's pretty self-explanatory from there. It uses a neat Wikipedia mashup to flesh out details on each person listed. The creator, Mike Love, also has a blog where he discusses the project. Good stuff ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:04 PM | Comments (1)
February 4, 2007
Black Books
Here's something to have your Tivo fetch for you: I've become addicted to Black Books on BBC America, the tale of a prickly Irish bookstore owner and his crapulous antics with friends, customers and unsuspecting bottles of wine in London. The humor is hateful and biting but never too dark. Dylan Moran is great as Bernard Black, and Bill Bailey does a massively amusing job as Bernard's hapless sidekick, Manny.
BBC America is cycling through series one now, which is helping me fill in the blanks from the second and third series, which I've already seen. This is one of the funniest BBC America series I've stumbled across since Canada's Trailer Park Boys.
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:06 PM | Comments (0)
I see London I see France ...
Caroline Weber launched an awesome opening paragraph in her review of "Paris: The Secret History" in today's New York Times Book Review:
"Years ago, while strolling through a Parisian flower market, I was accosted by a man with a posy in his hands and a poem on his lips. “Here are some fruits, some flowers, some leaves and some branches,” he declaimed, quoting the poet Paul Verlaine, “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” At which the stranger dropped his bouquet, unzipped his pants and presented me with an organ quite different from his heart. In Paris, I reflected as I hurried away, the boundary between lyricism and squalor is as fragile as a rosebud, and as permeable as a man’s fly."
Nice. I've also added Andrew Hussey's "Paris" to my reading list. Sounds like a fascinating book ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 7:04 PM | Comments (0)
February 2, 2007
Joyce's Dublin
Gridskipper highlights a 10-stop tour of Dublin focusing on key places in James Joyce's writing. Makes me want to book a trip to Ireland ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 4:05 PM | Comments (0)