tidbit

If you are in Austin and want to order a pizza from The Parlor (which you should–they’re quite good), and you don’t know their number by heart, you may have occasion to look in the alphabetical listings of the SWB yellow pages. If so, do not look under the Ps, because it ain’t alphabetized there. Look under the Ts.

Is it any wonder SWB has such a rotten reputation?

Some programming languages have a concept called a “stack,” which is sort of like a stack of trays in a cafeteria. Each “tray” represents a value; you can “push” values onto the stack or “pop” them off. This is handy for a number of reasons, but the programmer has to keep careful track of what’s at the top of the stack–that is, how many times he’s pushed and popped. Push too much stuff on, and you’ve got a problem, because the computer only sets aside a certain amount of space for the stack.

A few recent items leave me feeling as if we’ve been pushing the stack on reality too much and risk overloading it.

• The Onion reports on an “alternate reality TV show,” a brilliant idea that, as usual, captures something going on in the zeitgeist.
• A hilarious review of non-existent games in Wired mentions Maximum Gamer:
  

  In this role-playing game, you are Todd Kellman, a world-class cyberathlete from the US. (Japanese and European versions are pending.) Gamers experience all the thrills of sitting in front of a computer screen as Kellman sits in front of his computer screen controlling the destiny of a fully rendered, computer-generated nerd sitting in front of a computer screen. This one was really popular, attracting crowds of attendees waiting for a chance to play. Or to watch somebody play. Or to watch somebody watch somebody play.

• David Cronenberg played a character out of a David Cronenberg movie on Alias. David Cronenberg is the master of pushing and popping the reality stack so many times you get dizzy (cf Videodrome, Existenz).
• OK. So that’s all in fun. Then this morning, via an article linked in BoingBoing, I learned about There. There is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). This is not like most such games, like Everquest. Rather than going around fighting and accumulating treasure, in There, you spend real money to acquire fake money, so that you can go fake shopping. As the article puts it, “Why go There when it looks just like here?”

In short, I think we collectively may need to get out more [he wrote, while sitting at his computer]

I bought a jacket yesterday.

In itself, that is hardly worthy of comment. But in the process of trying on jackets–and I tried on quite a few–I learned something that strikes me as strange. I am “small.” In fact, I am 5’9″ and about 155 lb, which is the average height for an American man, and a healthy weight for my height. One might think this would make me “medium,” and in the past, that was the size I would grab first. But yesterday, the only jackets that fit me were smalls. I tried on a few mediums that might as well have been tents.

Sizes go way up–all the places I looked had XXL jackets–but what about guys who really are small? There were no sizes smaller than “small.” There was no short-men’s section tucked away in the corner of Dillards (though there was a big-men’s section there). What do they do? Shop in the boys’ department, the way Prince does?

I think it’s widely known that women’s sizes have undergone a radical deflation over the years. I was vintage-shopping with my sister once, and remember her trying on a 30s-era dress that was size 14. Going by modern sizing, she’d wear a 4. It seems that, as Americans get bigger, something similar is happening with men’s clothing.

Yesterday, I heard an ad on the radio encouraging the listener to use the Brand X yellow pages (as opposed to all those other yellow pages out there). These ads are not uncommon, but this was the first time I really gave them any thought.

What’s happening is really strange, if you think about it. The yellow pages is basically a book of advertisements; the publisher sells ad space to local businesses and gives away the book. In order for those ads to have any value (and hence, generate repeat business for the publisher), people need to look at them. How do you get people to look at them? Advertise the ads, of course. There’s something sort of circular at work here. The radio ad says to me, in so many words “this is an ad that we bought in order to get you to look at ads that we sold, so that we can continue to get good ad rates for the ads that we’ll sell in the future.”

I realize I am oversimplifying a bit, and that there are other ways to look at this, but I find this angle most interesting.

The National Lampoon Radio Hour, a precursor to Saturday Night Live, is making a comeback.

A couple recent threads on Metafilter have brought home a couple of basic realizations for me.

One, on cycling: many people have no problem with bigotry when its object is cyclists.

Another, on patriotism: Conservatives are quick to impugn the patriotism of progressives. There are actually two forms of patriotism. There are those who love their country in spite of its faults. These people are progressives. And there are those who love their country because of its faults. These people are conservatives.

Most days that I’m at my desk, I listen to music through iTunes for most of the day. For some time, I’ve been listening to one giant smart playlist that has all the tracks I haven’t listened to yet–which is currently at about five days-worth of music–played in shuffle mode.

Now, I’ve noticed in the past that occasionally this produces a long run of especially good music, or a run of not-so-great music. This kind of pattern is to be expected.

Today, it’s getting weird, though. It played three Banco de Gaia songs in a row (I have six tracks by them, out of a total track count of 6300). And two different renditions of Perfidia a few minutes apart.

In a sufficiently large set of randomizations (I’ve listened to thousands of tracks in iTunes), spurious patterns will emerge. Some people are led to believe this means that aliens, giant space fairies, or other metaphysical forces are guiding their lives, or their copy of iTunes, or whatever. I am not one of these people, but it’s interesting to see it in action.

I’ve figured it out: Bill O’Reilly is Coach McGuirk.

This spider has been hanging out at Gwen’s for the past couple of nights. It’s pretty big–about three inches long. It spins a very large orb that it dismantles every morning sometime between 7:30 and 8:30. No luck identifying it so far.

Corporate interests often establish advocacy groups with names intended to mislead the casual observer into thinking the group’s goals are the opposite of what they actually are–so a coal-mining lobby might set up Concerned Citizens for the Environment or something similarly bogus.

I propose that actual do-gooder organizations should adopt this tactic in reverse. The Rainforest Action Network should rename itself the Tropical Hardwood Exploitation Board, get haircuts and suits, rent a mailbox on K Street, and go on doing what they always do. People will see press releases coming from these guys, think “Gosh, if the Tropical Hardwood Exploitation Board of all people thinks it’s a bad idea to do this, it must be really awful.”

Now that there’s an all reality show, all the time network, they are no doubt casting about for programming concepts. The makeover show, which has had its most notable success in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, is a popular sub-genre, what with Trading Spaces and many others of that ilk. Also popular are the “hideous challenge” type shows, where participants wind up eating cockroaches and that sort of thing.

I propose a blending of these two types: a professional decorator is required to make over a home using nothing but materials bought at Hobby Lobby, Lillian Vernon, or equivalent. Kitsch is not allowed as a theme.

The makeover shows seem to be based on A) an “intervention” by well-meaning friends, followed by B) generous servings of smugness by the rescuing decorator, and finally C) the intervenee admitting the error of his/her past ways. In this show, the tables would be turned: the decorator’s friends would stage an intervention on him, saying “Alphonse, you’ve become too smug, and too reliant upon $6000 wall coverings.” Being forced to work with schlocky material would take Alphonse down a peg or two, which is gold, I tell you, television gold. Imagine Alphonse’s horror as he minces through aisles of synthetic plants, tchatchkes that mix farmhouse and patriotic themes, pre-decoupaged gewgaws, etc, afraid to touch anything. I don’t expect the decorators will embrace a new design ethic as a result, though.

Hell, I’d watch it.

I know that this blog’s loyal readership includes many of the movers and shakers in the rag trade, who reverently respect my sartorial pronouncements–a subject on which, as those of you who know me will attest, I am eminently qualified to expound.

A conversation with Gwen and my sister Lissy got me thinking. Lissy recently stood up at a wedding, and was obliged to buy a plaid pink taffeta shmatte. Friends of Gwen are going to be standing up in several weddings each this year, with outlays for similar aesthetic crimes. Bridesmaid dresses are a stale joke. Most seem designed to make the bride look that much better by comparison. Bridal gowns are worn once, for obvious symbolic reasons. Bridesmaid dresses are also worn once, because they’re too ugly to wear any more.

Although it’ll sell less product, the fashion industry could do itself and women all over the country a favor by coming up with a standard bridesmaid’s dress design. Men have tuxedos; women should have the equivalent. Something black and simple that looks reasonably good on most women. Brides wanting to inject color into the ceremony could have the bridesmaids wear a certain kind of ribbon in their hair, corsage, or the like.

Just something that travelling has forced me to re-learn. I haven’t used a modem regularly since 1997. I’m accustomed to an Internet connection being like water. It’s not the same.

At Chango’s, if you want just water to drink, that’s just what you’ll get.

A trip to Fiesta is always entertaining. There’s just so much weird stuff there. On our most recent expedition, Gwen and I noticed a large display of various luck candles. Some with images of saints, some with images of Pancho Villa or other unidentifiable secular figures, but most explicitly promising some kind of specific effect, like JOB. I noticed one that read
ALLEGED SPELL BREAK
Leaving aside snarky observations of the ambiguous reference–is it the spell that is alleged, or the breaking of it–you’ve got to laugh at the legalistic ass-covering implied by that weasel-word. Seriously: is someone going to burn the candle and then sue the maker because whatever spell it was supposed to break had not been broken? I guess stranger things have happened.

When we got to the checkout line, we were behind a couple of young women buying some of these candles (along with various good-luck oils), apparently in earnest.

A fun pastime is inventing goofy names for bands–one of my favorite creations is “Jackal Overpass.”

Lately, Gwen and I have taken to coming up with silly names for drugs. A new competitor for Viagra? Rigiditrex, perhaps. Yesterday I saw an ad for some drug to relieve menstrual constipation. I can’t remember the actual name of the product, but we had a field day with that. My favorite: Period Colon Dash.

Spotted last night: the Michael Graves George Foreman Grilling Machine

Results of the 2003 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest are in.

There’s been a spell of hoaxes making the rounds on the Net lately.

Michael Savage, a right-wing tele-blowhard lost his job after a call-in prankster gave him just enough rope to hang himself. This story got a lot of play in Blogistan.

There was Baby Ink, the website for a toddler-tattoo parlor. Done with a completely straight face, it was revealed as a hoax.

There is the amazing robot cop spec video (bah, annoying redirects: click on “Neil’s domain,” then “reel pt 3”) that some people took seriously. This is not a hoax per se–this simply reveals the credulity of some people.

Now there’s Hunting for Bambi, which purports to be a, ahh, service that allows men with some serious issues to paintball-hunt naked women. Although there’s actually a legitimate news story (and video) on this, it appears to be a hoax.

The thing these hoaxes have in common is outrage, in both senses of the word: they are outrageous (incredible), and they are outrages (atrocious). They get us into a sputtering fit for a moment, until someone pins down that they are, in fact, false.

Of course, when hoaxes appear elsewhere in the public arena, the revelation of falsity provokes even greater outrage.