2004

Beyond Black Rock

/ Austin, fire, movies / 1 Comment

Last night Jo’s Coffee hosted an advance screening of Beyond Black Rock (surprisingly, not in the IMDB), a documentary by Austin locals about Burning Man.

Quite a crowd turned out: the entire parking lot behind Jo’s was jammed full–perhaps 500 people. Some of my fellow fire freaks and I were going to provide a little pre-show warmup; as it turns out, I was the only one of the people slated to perform who actually did show up; the guy who was supposed to be coordinating this (and shall remain nameless) called me at the last minute to inform me of his non-appearance and, implictly, to hand off the baton. There were plenty of fire people there, though not many actually had their rigs with them, but in the end, four of us went up and burned, and there was much rejoicing.

Oh yeah, the movie! Enjoyable. Focused a lot on the people who organize it and the organization of it; also featured at some length a couple of artists (including the amazing David Best) who were putting in installations there.

H2Hos

/ Austin / 1 Comment

Synchronized swimming. What can you say? Well, the Ho’s website (actually, that’s a dated version–the current one seems to reside only in Google’s cache) has some pomo feminist claptrap, but basically it’s campy good fun. Elaborate costumes, live band, big friendly crowd.

I dug up some pictures from a 2003 performance

Work Gossip

/ tidbit / 2 Comments

I work at home, alone. I don’t get any water-cooler gossip. But I just translated some pretty juicy insider stuff. Too bad I can’t tell anyone about it. Directly, at least.

Setup: I have several steady clients–small translation agencies. These guys have very large household-name companies as their clients. Let’s say that one of Agency A’s regular clients is Company 1. One of Agency B’s clients is Company 2.

I just did a translation for Agency B of a document that originated with Company 2. It’s an internal memo describing the company’s dealings with Company 1, as well as Company 1’s dealings with yet a direct competitor of Company 2, which, in a creative outburst, I have decided to call Company 3. Now, Company 3 is much bigger than Company 2 (or Company 1, for that matter)–they’re really the 800-pound gorilla of their industry, and Company 2 is the “we try harder” outfit.

Story: It seems that Company 3 keeps close tabs on Company 2’s dealings with Company 1, and has successfully applied pressure to Company 2 to curtail its dealings with Company 1. Getting the inside scoop on this stuff–one executive saying “this decision was made at a higher level” and his boss saying “gee whiz, sorry about that”, or Company 3 finding inventive ways to really screw over Company 1–is riveting. Based on my limited understanding of the law, the facts here should be solid grounds for legal action. It’s also interesting to see a job that sort of crosses from one client’s “space” to another (though this has happened before).

Writing tools for the web

/ net stuff / 2 Comments

We’ve come so far, and yet, we have so much farther to go.

When I set up my first website, all my HTML coding was manual. Creating a new page meant opening up a copy of an empty web-page template I had created, writing the page, saving it, uploading it by FTP, editing my local copies of any other pages I wanted to link to it, saving them, and uploading them (and any graphics that might be involved). Using Japanese at all was fraught with peril, because there wasn’t a single browser that could handle the three prevailing encoding methods for Japanese (Shift-JIS, New JIS, EUC). There were some primitive web tools that allowed you to edit pages directly on the server via the web browser, but the browser provided a miserable interface, and I didn’t have the cash or the technical chops to install one of these.

Today, we’ve got content-management systems and blogs that handle most of these tasks. Modern browsers have tolerable editing interfaces and are vastly smarter about international characters (and in any case, we’ve got Unicode). Right now I’m typing this in a small program that runs on my computer and talks to my blog’s software to upload my posts.

But some people want more. They want an editing tool that gives them smooth control over HTML and CSS, and somehow gets out of their way to make this all transparent. Something like Microsoft Word for the web. Well, that’s a poor analogy, because Word is terribly intrusive. Like how it goes and creates bulleted lists for you when maybe you don’t want one (unless you go to considerable trouble to get Word to cut it out). Interestingly this kind of thing is considered a useful feature in blogging tools, which may say something about the state of editing tools, or the difficulty of writing HTML. I’m not sure.

Back in the bad old days of personal computing, word-processing for paper output was about as bad as writing HTML is today: you had to type tags or special codes to make text bold, italicized, or centered. With the exception of some hardcore XyWrite enthusiasts, WYSIWYG was acclaimed a great leap forward for word-processors.

So great has been WYSIWYG’s hold on our imagination that it is promoted as a worthy format for web-writing tools. It ain’t. Although my handy-dandy blogging tool will do a tolerable job of wrapping <p> tags around my paragraphs, it can’t do much more than that, so there’s clearly room for improvement. But how do you deal with hyperlinks wizzywiggily? Or the clever abbreviation above, that shows its full expansion when you hover over it (in a decent browser)? There’s no way. HTML is not presentational, it’s structural. You need a way to show the structure of the document as you write. For presentation, we’ve got CSS, which determines the presentation of content for different media: screen, paper, even speech-synthesis. In the land of print, you might have a rule that document titles are always 24-point bold and centered. In the land of HTML, all you know is that a chunk of text tagged as <h1> is at the top of the document hierarchy (and there’s room for dispute on that). That same chunk of text could have completely different forms of presentation because HTML is not tied to any form of output; it contains different forms of meta-data that will often be presented identically (but might be useful to search engines), and contains some that simply isn’t meant to be viewed by humans.

So we’ve got to deal with HTML, content, and CSS. I can imagine a writing program that lays things out like this:

Tag Content CSS
h1 Here is a heading Screen
font-family: helvetica;
color: #600;
font-size: 18px;
Print
font-family: helvetica;
text-align: center;
font-size: 18pt;
p Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent consequat, nibh at aliquam convallis, sem arcu sodales mauris, et sagittis risus wisi ut dolor.. default

Perhaps there would be popup menus in the Tag and CSS columns, or perhaps some intelligent prediction that writers can override (when we get intelligent prediction in the Content column, watch out).

Of course, even this is still too simplistic. In terms of HTML handling, this model is OK for block elements, but does nothing for inline elements. Dealing with nested elements could be tricky. For CSS, it gets very hairy. CSS is complicated: styles can reside in the tag, in the head of the document, and in other documents, all pulled together in different ways. Styles may apply to a tag universally or contextually. So this putative tool would need to analyze the document structure to determine which contextual CSS rules to show. And if the author serves pages dynamically , or uses dynamic includes to assemble a page from multiple fragments (as I do), it will need to take that into account.

I don’t see an easy way out. A program that is easy to use and allows fine-grained control and generates smart, well-formed HTML and CSS will be a serious challenge for interface designers and coders.

The Story of the Weeping Camel

/ movies / 1 Comment

Saw The Story of the Weeping Camel with Gwen last night. This is the first Mongolian movie I’ve ever seen (unless you count Genghis Blues, which I don’t). It’s not clear whether this is a documentary or a work of fiction that just happens to be made with real events and real people who are basically being themselves. Subtitling was very minimal, telling just enough to keep the audience from getting confused.

It’s a slow-moving movie. Not much happens, and the things that do happen are small things. But it gives you a feel for what it must be like as a nomadic camel-herder living in the Gobi Desert. It’s astoundingly bleak: it’s hard to imagine that there’s enough vegetation to support the goats and camels in the flock, and it’s hard to understand how human beings came to inhabit that part of the world. But the people don’t seem to have bitter lives, or much desire to do anything different.

At one point a couple of boys head out to the nearest town; Gwen and I just looked at each other and asked “what do they steer by?”

More on music storage

/ technology / 2 Comments

Some time ago, I wrote an essay on music storage options (mostly on how bad they are).

We’re at a point today where even a big music library–say, 1,000 CDs–can be easily archived on a single hard drive using high-quality MP3s–say, 192 Kbps encoding. Some people claim this encoding rate is indistinguishable from CDs; others claim it’s barely adequate for listening. Whatever. It sounds good to me. In any case, at this rate, one hour of music is encoded as about 83 MB, meaning that 1,000 CDs (which are usually somewhat under an hour) will fit onto the 160 GB hard drives that are now available (as bare mechanisms) for under $100, with plenty of room to spare.

Purists will argue that lossy encoding is a bad compromise. We don’t need to use lossy encoding–a lossless format called Shorten has been around for years, and Apple’s iTunes now comes with something called “Apple Lossless Encoding.” These can shrink a CD’s data down to a little less than half its original size, meaning about 250 MB for one hour of music. The fact that ALE is built into iTunes means you have a nice interface for dealing with these tracks (as opposed to the more arcane software required to deal with Shorten files), making lossless encoding a practical option. I have no idea if there are converters that recode ALE as Shorten to avoid lock-in.

Anyhow, at that rate, it would take three 160-GB hard drives (and some kind of enclosure) to store a 1,000-CD music collection, but assuming Moore’s Law holds, in a few years, we’ll be back at the $100 mark.

Smaller MP3s still have their uses, though: If you have an in-car MP3 player that reads MP3 CDs, you’ll still need to recode your lossless files to MP3 in order to take advantage of it. If you have a portable MP3 player for jogging, likewise (though if you splash out on an iPod, you won’t need to bother).

Before Sunrise

/ movies

In 1995 (was it really that long ago?), Richard Linklater made Before Sunrise, where two young people, Jesse and Celine, meet and spend a night in Vienna, having a “My Dinner with Andre” — style rambling conversation. They agree to meet six months later at the same train station where they separate.

I always wondered what happened to them. In Waking Life, there’s a segment showing Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (who played the characters in Before Sunrise) in bed together. When I saw that, I thought that it answered the question in an oblique way.

Apparently not. Before Sunset answers the question directly. It’s another two-person gabfest, this time in Paris. The movie almost feels like it was filmed in a single shot–the conversation almost never pauses, and it does have some very long shots (something you don’t see much anymore). I especially liked one that wound up up up a staircase.

The story is bittersweet and wonderful, and like it’s predecessor, ends without answering its big question.

Tangent: in finding links for this entry, I discovered that there was a movie titled My Dinner with Andre the Giant. It strikes me as funny that Wally Shawn, who was in My Dinner with Andre, starred in a movie with Andre the Giant, one of my favorites, The Princess Bride. If anybody should have made My Dinner with Andre the Giant, it’s him, but Andre the Giant is no longer with us.

Spider-Man 2

/ movies

Saw Spider-Man 2. It’s as good as they’re saying–not just good as comic-book movies go, but good as movies go in general. The special effects don’t dominate the movie, but they’re damned entertaining.

Doc Ock’s tentacles are pure genius–good enough that I didn’t bother asking myself “how’d they do that?” and just enjoyed the effect.

Who hates what?

/ current events / 1 Comment

It has almost gotten to be a joke: a progressive criticizes G.W or one of his policies, and a conservative fires back “Why do you hate America.” (It’s gotten to the point where it may be more likely to be another progressive asking the accusatory question, except in jest.)

This is a neat trick for changing the terms of the debate–rather than answering the criticism, you put the critic on the defensive by questioning his patriotism–but it is also evidence of a kind of dangerous L’état, c’est moi, or more accurately, L’état, c’est lui kind of thinking, which I thought went out of fashion with Louis XIV. Who knew the Republicans were such Francophiles?

Ten years

/ personal / 2 Comments

Looking through some old e-mail, I just discovered that I’ve had the “crossroads.net” domain name, and this e-mail address, for exactly ten years as of a few days ago.

Firedancing goes uptown

/ fire / 1 Comment

If you have plenty of money and fancy yourself a bit of an enthusiast for some activity–any activity–there’s a luxury tour to accommodate you. You go to some wonderful location, you stay in a nice place, do some sightseeing, eat a lot of really great food, and oh yes, indulge in a little bit of that activity.

It seems this phenomenon has come to firedancing: I just got a piece of e-mail advertising what can only be considered a luxury firedancing tour. In Florence, Italy. I don’t know what to think. I’m sure that whoever participates will have a great time, but whoever is going to participate? For the most part, firedancing appeals to people who don’t have that kind of money to throw around. And I have…conflicted emotions when I consider the people who do have that kind of money and want to spend it on this kind of tour getting into firedancing.

Simultaneous invention

/ technology / 1 Comment

Liebniz and Newton invented the calculus at roughly the same time.

Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both invented the telephone at the same time, and filed with the patent office a few hours apart.

While it takes smart and insightful people to make these things happen, inventions are also the product of their time, and of other trends that are more or less well-known. Often the invention is a matter of recombining existing technologies in a novel way.

Apple’s recent demo of Tiger got a lot of people thinking “gosh, Dashboard looks an awful lot like Konfabulator. Apple must have ripped off those Konfabulator guys.”

This created a stir on Mac sites, with some claiming it’s a ripoff, some suggesting that the gracious thing for Apple to do would at least be to compensate the Konfab people for pulling the rug out from underneath them, and others pointing out that in fact, there was plenty of prior art to Konfabulator. John Gruber, astute as usual, pointed out that Apple in fact is not ripping off much of anything.

What do all these things do? They give you a simple way to script mini-applications–both Dashboard and Konfab use Javascript–and a method for skinning them. Konfabulator uses a somewhat unfriendly XML format; Dashboard uses straight HTML/CSS, but the two are pretty similar.

Here’s the thing: neither one is even a little bit original. Mozilla uses this idea already: it has a markup language called XUL for painting the browser’s “chrome,” and Microsoft is working on it’s own version of this, XAML. These use javascript to build application interfaces and javascript to handle user interactions. Gosh, that sounds familiar. In fact, when MS announced XAML, there was some hand-wringing a while back over how it was ripping off XUL.

Ideas like skinning, making scripting more accessible to more people, using standard markup languages to generate interfaces, etc, are ideas whose times have all come in the computing world. Lightbulbs lit up over lot of people’s heads, and they combined these ideas in similar ways. Konfabulator clearly beat Dashboard to market (though I find the product all-but unusable), but it is original only in the sense that its creators had the idea on their own (if in fact that is so), not in the sense that its creators are the only ones to have the idea.

Fahrenheit 9/11

/ movies / 5 Comments

Though we planned on seeing Supersize Me, Gwen and I arrived at the theater a few minutes late, so we decided to catch Fahrenheit 9/11 instead. Not exactly the feel-good movie of the summer, we both walked out silently and barely said a word on the way home. There was very little in the movie that was news (though the bits about James Bath were interesting), but the impression they make when taken together is one of horror.

Anything Michael Moore does is automatically controversial, if for no other reason than he’s the one doing it. That said, I suppose there’s plenty to take issue with in the movie, but still, it’s very strong.

There are facts and there are stories. Moore uses facts as building-blocks for stories, and he’s clear about where he’s troweling in the mortar of speculation to make them hang together. Critics can and should fact-check Moore’s ass, and Moore knows that: he’s pretty meticulous about backing up his facts. And critics can take issue with the edifice he’s constructed. But the building-blocks fall into place pretty snugly in this movie without a lot of mortar to hold them there. That says a lot.

Sputter

/ Austin / 5 Comments

Spotted the premiere edition of Spot Magazine sitting on the free-literature shelf at Flightpath today. For those who have not heard of this ground-breaking, earth-shattering, epoch-making periodical, it is a content-lite lifestyle magazine for trendy Austinites and their dogs (though there’s a token article for cat-lovers too). This is almost certainly the most unnecessary exercise in print onanism I have ever seen.

Do we need this? Does anyone need this? Has there been any unmet need for a designy magazine that advises you whether you should take your dog in for reiki treatment (for crissakes), reports on the way dogs fit in with the local music scene, or profiles of pet-friendly workplaces? Going out on a limb, I will answer that with a No. I am amazed that this wankfest made it past the five-minute “wouldn’t it be neat if” bull-session, and not only that, somehow actually got made. Anyone want to bet on whether we’ll see an Issue 2?

The Chinese Room

/ language / 9 Comments

The Chinese Room, sometimes referred to as the Chinese Box, is a thought-experiment invented by John Searle to debunk “strong AI.”

Searle’s argument is that you put an English speaker in a little room. Slips of paper with Chinese are passed in; the English speaker refers to a huge compendium of rules for analyzing and responding to these slips; he follows these rules, produces new slips in response, and passes them out of the room. To a Chinese speaker on the outside, these would appear to be perfectly reasonable responses to the statements on the slips inside, but (according to Searle) that doesn’t mean that the guy in the room understands Chinese.

Jenny and I have long used the Chinese Room as a metaphor for the translation process in some of our knottier jobs–not so much in terms of our weakness with language but with the field of knowledge. I was recently asked to do a mercifully short job on seismology (about which I know almost nothing) that put me in mind of this. The job contained terms that I don’t know in Japanese, and when I found their English equivalents (or in some cases, what I was guessing to be their English equivalents), I dutifully typed them into my translation with only the most superficial idea what they might really mean. Chinese Room. When we find ourselves in situations like this, we just clench our sphincters and hope that the eventual target audience will know what the hell we’re talking about, because we sure don’t.

But thinking about the original Chinese Room argument (and surrounding debate, which is extensive) is frustrating because it is so perfectly hypothetical. Searle’s point was to create an analog to the Turing Test (digression: I just learned that, quite fortuitously, today would have been Alan Turing’s 92nd birthday) that would show up the absurdity of AI. The problem with his argument is that it’s so procedural, so mechanistic. The idea is that there can be a rote response for every input. (This is pretty much the same problem that machine translation today has.) The Chinese room would probably need to be infinitely large to accommodate all the rule books, and it would certainly take an infinite amount of time to prepare those books.

One of the primary arguments against Searle was that the guy in the room might not know Chinese, but the system (of which he is a part) does know it. OK, Searle responds, suppose the guy memorizes all the rulebooks so he doesn’t need to be in the room anymore: he still wouldn’t know Chinese. Aside from it being an improbable memory feat, I’d argue that yes, actually, he probably would. How can you memorize all those characters and rules for dealing with them without developing some kind of internal model of how the language works? One that would allow you to consolidate all the redundancy that would need to be present in the rule books, etc. Sounds a lot like language acquisition to me. In order for Searle’s argument to work, the human would need to be as dumb as the computer, in which case, he’d be undercutting his own argument anyhow. (Digression: I’ve always been struck by how much native fluency in language is basically a matter of following a script: I noticed in Japan that whole conversations would sometimes follow a script with only one or two decision points along the way–other than that, they were entirely ritualized. But in English as well, there are so many ritualistic utterances used in specific situations, or in response to the last ritualistic utterance, that one could probably pull off a pretty good simulation of English fluency by following a rule book with instructions like “when it’s very hot out, greet people by saying “Hot enough for ya?”. Etc.)

I realize this is a tangent to Searle’s original point, but perhaps it can pertain to AI in some way after all: perhaps what the machines really need to be smart is the capacity for abstraction, induction, and deduction. I know this is what some AI researchers are working on.

Japan Trip 2004

/ Japan, travel / 3 Comments

I’m posting my writeup of the Tokyo trip as a series of entries back-dated to the days they refer to. I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not, but there’s so much here that Movable Type chokes if I try to post the whole thing as one monolithic entry. For best results, start at May 20 and work your way forward. I’ll eventually be posting some observations from the trip as well, as part of the regular flow.

I’m using Japanese text for place names and wherever else I feel like it: hover over the text to get the English. This trick may not work in Internet Explorer. Sorry (actually, I’m more sorry if you’re using IE than that this doesn’t work in it).

Photos are online: Log in as adamguest/adamguest if need be.

Reader’s Digest version: We had a great time. We walked an incredible amount–Gwen estimates about 10 miles a day–and our legs protested at the end of every day. Because of the somewhat constraining conditions where we were staying, I felt ready to be getting home when we left, but if we’d had a little more slack, I would have been happy to stay for a solid month. I want to visit again, soon.

He’s dead

/ current events / 1 Comment

More 80s nostalgia. Now everyone’s talking about Reagan. The revival of the Flashdance look was bad enough.

Through much of the Reagan administration, I wore an “Impeach Reagan” button. And I meant it. So I’m a little disconcerted by the almost universal hagiography upon his death, and slightly cheered by the occasional writer who will call a spade a spade.

But one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, so I’ll say this: in his two terms in office, Reagan was less destructive than G.W. has been during his one.

Not dead yet

/ personal / 3 Comments

I’m still here.

Shortly after departing for Japan, my site was hacked. I’ve gone around and around with my web host, which has been unwilling to reactivate a compromised site–which I can understand, but they also haven’t exactly been johnny-on-the-spot about helping me to secure it. For the moment, at least, it’s live again.

Gwen and I returned from Japan last night. We had a ball over there. More on this later.

Coming home

/ Japan, travel

Hung out. Had pastries. Went to airport. Found a Lawson Station from which we procured more nigiri. Found our gate, and on a lark, I decided to see whether there was a free wifi node. There was, though I suspect this was through oversight, not intention. Got on plane. Baby cries for 6 hours, but eventually settles down. Arrive in San Jose. Claim checked bags and passed through an alarmingly casual customs interview:

Inspector: What’s in the box?

Me: Um, two pair of shoes and some paper products. [forgetting, in my jet-lagged fog, to mention some kitchenware, a really big sharp knife, and a candy bar]

Inspector: [waves us on]

We then had to immediately pass through another security inspection. Now, at no point had we left a secured area. The implication here is that they don’t trust Japan’s security inspection–in which case, they really should have just turned back the plane.

Recheck our box of goodies, find our gate (for-fee wifi there), and wait. Get on the nerd-bird back to Austin. Catch cab home, and try to sleep.

Returning to Austin from Japan is always weird. We left Tokyo at 5:15 PM Saturday local time, and landed in Austin at 5:30 PM Saturday local time. The human body doesn’t know what to do with this.

The dead

/ Japan, travel / 1 Comment

Our last full day in Tokyo.

We had acquired enough trinkets and tchotchkes to bring back to friends to fill a decent-sized box. I was planning on mailing this, and today would be our last chance to, but Gwen suggested we be parsimonious for a change and bring it home as checked luggage. Despite my deep aversion to baggage carousels, I assented.

Graveyards. Gwen has a thing for them, seeing signs of how people live in the way they bury their dead. We made our way to a shrine in Brian’s neighborhood, 代々木八幡宮, walked around the grounds (which, interestingly, included a reconstruction of a stone-age thatched hut that apparently stood in the area in 4000 BC or something), took in the cemetary there.

I suggested we go to the 都庁, the city hall. Saying “city hall” makes it sound kind of quaint, and not at all like a tourism destination. Wrong. Tokyo’s population is in the same ballpark as Australia’s, and the Tocho is two 48-story towers plus a surrounding complex, done in an intimidating style by 丹下健三 that Joseph Stalin would have approved of. It’s very much a product of the bubble economy, trumpeting Tokyo as a world financial capital, and although Japan’s economy has been in the shitter ever since it was built, it seems to have been the harbinger of many more audacious mega-construction projects that have followed, including Minato Mirai, Roppongi Hills, the underground expressway, and so on. Apparently 10 more projects on the order of Roppongi Hills are in the works for the next 20 years.

Anyhow. The cool information displays that were once installed on the second level were gone and replaced by shops. We hit the observation deck. Gwen observed “no wonder we’ve been doing so much walking!” The city goes on forever in every direction.

Back in the funereal mode, we made our way to the granddaddy of cemetaries, 青山墓地. Extensive enough to have numbered lanes and picturesque enough that for one day a year, it’s Tokyo’s favorite picnic spot (with people having pizzas delivered graveside), there also seem to be a lot of interesting people buried there, judging by the headstones. We noticed a couple of unkempt graves (upkeep is the responsibility of family members) that had signs posted by the management saying, basically “use it or lose it.”

We noticed some really enormous monuments, standing 20 feet tall or so. One in particular caught Gwen’s eye, and there were three guys in front of it discussing something, two in suits and one in some kind of maintenance uniform. This monument was especially huge, and had an explanatory plaque telling a few facts about the interred: apparently he had been a major military muckety-muck in the early days of modern Japan, having been an admiral in the Russo-Japanese war. There were several graves that were perfect stone hemispheres, which reminded me of stupas somehow.

Aoyama Bochi is near to Julia’s office, so we stopped by there to visit for a bit. Stopped at the nearby 時代屋 restaurant, which was having a 釜めし定食 for lunch. It looked pretty good, so we went in. Quirky place. In the basement, with a waist-high door you need to crouch to pass through. The interior is filled with antiques (hence the name of the place), many of which have little explanatory cards hanging from them. After lunch we did some more wandering around Roppongi, which is never seen in its best light by day. Eventually we made it back to the apartment, and had dinner at another quirky place, アホアホ, which specializes in dishes made with chili pepper and garlic: each item had a garlickiness and spiciness score. Although we enjoyed the garlic bulb deep-fried whole, we found the spiciness ratings to all be inflated. The owners apparently have a Jackson 5 fetish: they had an apparently original concert poster from a Jackson 5 gig in 1971 and Jackson 5 figurines over the bar. The music was strictly Motown, and there was a breakdancing video running on the TV.