France fest

/ Austin

Not sure how I got on this mailing list, but I just received a notice of an upcoming event at Escapist Bookstore called (in an unfortunate apparent confusion of Spanish and French) “Viva la France.” From the message:

Womens of Masse Production bring you Viva la France!, a party honoring French culture in particular and American diversity in general. With food, drink, live music by Dakota Smith, and readings of French literature by local notables. Thumb your nez at wine-dumping, the breaking of windows of French-owned businesses (in Austin, Chez Nous was a recent victim), and other anti-Frenchist stupidity, and celebrate open-mindedness and the human spirit.

The details are:
This Friday: March 2, 6–10 pm

Escapist Bookstore

2209 South 1st St., #D

$3 donation suggested, no one turned away for lack of $

Call 912-1777 or visit www.escapistbookstore.com for more info

In related news, I had lunch at the Fredericksburg Brewery yesterday, where the “French” in “French fries” had been blacked out on the menus.

Updated RSS feed

/ meta-blogging

For those who are interested, I’ve updated my full-text RSS 2.0 feed to include comments. To use this in Movable Type, open your template-editing screen. Click on “RSS 0.91 index”. Rename that to “RSS 2.0 index”. Replace the contents with this file. The output filename should still be “index.xml” unless you have a good reason to change it to something else. You may want to change lastn="10" to some other number–this shows the last 10 posts. The comments section is set off by blank lines, and can be tweaked.

This is based on the template provided by Mark Pilgrim at feeds.archive.org, but removes your e-mail address (which spambots might find) and adds the comments. It still validates.

[Later] Made a slight change to make the RSS feed friendly to foreign scripts: my template now uses the tag, which I believe is new to MT 2.6. For this to make a difference, you need to be using MT 2.6, and edit your mt.cfg file: de-comment the line containing PublishCharset and
set the appropriate charset (I’ve set mine to “utf-8”–unicode); also I think you need to de-comment the line NoHTMLEntities 1. This only matters if you use non-Roman script (Japanese, Cyrillic, etc).

[Later still] Fixed a few more minor things, including a link to extended entries (tip o’ the cap to David Nunez).

Wired at 10

/ tidbit

I picked up the tenth anniversary issue of Wired yesterday.

I remember when Wired came out (and still have a copy of issue 1.01 lying around somewhere). It was very exciting at the time. On a trip to San Francisco around then, I went to a party for Wired (which was headquartered in the same building as a friend of a friend). That was pretty cool. I subscribed. I enjoyed it, as did many people–I knew one couple that lived together but had two subscriptions so they wouldn’t fight over who got to read it first.

As the dot-com bubble expanded, Wired changed from a fairly experimental, counter-cultural, brash magazine to a neo-establishment, business-oriented, smug one. It was as if the vertiginous success of the way-new economy had validated all its earlier futurism, and so it redefined itself as the establishment. The graphic design became a lot calmer (probably for the best, on balance). With a few brilliant exceptions, the stories it ran interested me less and less. I stopped reading it.

I haven’t looked at it much since the dot-bomb, but decided to pick up this issue for old-time’s sake. Perhaps only for this issue, they’re back to the wild graphic design.

Wired seems as if it should be the first in line to be superceded by Net-based media. It speaks to, well, the wired population that can get all its news online. And after all, sites like Gizmodo do a better job of reporting gadget news than Wired ever could, personal blogs often have insightful and informed commentary on the world at large, and the Web offers more fertile ground for visual experimentation than print, right?

Well, yes and no. The fact remains that online journalism still isn’t really a going concern. A print magazine can still send reporters on assignments that bloggers would not be able to cover. And although there are some websites that are amazing design experiments, the fact is, most of the ones I peruse (to the extent I bother to leave my RSS reader) are using plain, quick-loading designs. Print still looks a hell of a lot better. And is much more portable.

Celis is back

/ Austin

At Central Markup yesterday, I noticed a familiar label out of the corner of my eye. I almost failed to give it a second thought, but realized “Hey, that’s Celis beer!” I asked the beer-and-wine guy about it. Turns out the Michigan Brewing Company has bought Pierre Celis’ copper kettles and recipes, and is running his exact formulas (apparently a condition of the sale). For the time being they’re just making White and Pale Bock; I’m awaiting the return of Grand Cru.

Just in time for summer.

Also spotted at the store: complete turduckens for $80. Quite a sight.

Democracy and war

/ current events

I ran across this chilling quotation yesterday:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

— Hermann Goering, April 18, 1946

This is exactly what is happening in this country.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

/ books

Finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Very enjoyable. Partly, to me, because of its involvement with the early days of comic books (I collected comics when I was younger), partly because it’s just an engaging story. Michael Chabon seems to have done a prodigious amount of research to fill in the details of the story he’s telling. I have no idea whether there was a Hofzinser Club for magicians in Prague, or what it was like, but Chabon’s account of it has the ring of truth. His writing style occasionally treads a blurry line between inventive and precious, and sometimes comes close to annoying me, but is mostly straightforward. The story–of the brief golden age in the days before the war as the USA emerged from the depression, of the closing Holocaust in Europe, of creating a comic-book empire, and inevitably of men and women–makes for a good read. The themes–of tragedy, of opportunities foregone, of emergence, and so on–are common enough but not less worth reading because of it.

The WiFi phone

/ technology

A prototype phone can open a voice-over-IP connection if there’s an open WiFi node available. Very, very interesting. If you had one of these and never left Manhattan, you’d probably never need to subscribe to cellular service.

Politics on the Net

/ current events

I don’t know where to begin when it comes to this ridiculous war. Everything about it is wrong. So I won’t even start.

Already ramping up for the 2004 elections, it is interesting to note that the Howard Dean campaign has a blog and is using Meetup to organize people. I don’t know much about Dean, but I like what I’ve seen (apart from these factors, which I like too).

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