Dr. Frank's What's-it

You can't live without salt, you know.

I've got to assume that the bill linked in this post on the Reason blog prohibiting the use of any salt at all in the preparation of food at all restaurants in New York state has to be a satirical "modest proposal"-type bill meant to underscore the absurdity of food-banning legislation. I mean, right?

ADDED: well I guess I was wrong. The guy who sponsored this is evidently a dedicated anti-salt activist.

Notebook

London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

-- Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude.

I don't know if that's the absolute best opening for a novel that I've ever read, but it sure is up there.

Misty-eyed

I just came across Reading for Robin, a new book blog with a touching origin:

My mom passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on February 2, 2010. As people gathered to mourn her death, the topic inevitably turned to books. Her friends remarked that she had always been the one they looked to for recommendations. I know that I certainly went to my mom first whenever I needed a new book to read. Now that she’s gone, she has left behind a devastated husband, two devastated children and countless devastated friends. But she has also left behind her reading list. On it are 50 books and authors she intended to read. While she may not still have the chance to get to them all, I do. And I will. And it will all be chronicled here on “Reading for Robin.”

I may not still have my mom, but at least I still have her advice on what to read.

King Dork is on Robin's list, and Tom's father's reading list is posted as well, which is how I was google-alerted to it. I have to admit, the whole thing got me a little choked up.

I'm Looking at You, Entire World

Andromeda and Booklist against the world.

With Your Love

Unusual Alignment

Somehow, Andromeda Klein has made her way in to the Urban Dictionary.

The Sum of Its Tropes

TV Tropes does King Dork.

Another Weird Book

W. B. Yeats's Golden Dawn journal.

(via hermetic.com.)

A Weird Book. Very American.

Bookwitch reads Andromeda Klein.

"Later in life I saw the movie "Conspiracy Theory" with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts, and then it hit me: the book was about MK Ultra and the CIA."

Here I am blathering a bit about the Catcher Cult on the Huffington Post.

(This post's title is from a comment left on that post.)

I learned some stuff

Check out this extensive, photo- and link-laden interview with my super agent, Steven Malk.

Getting in Tune

That Prozac Moment

Matt of 41 Gorgeous Blocks on the uke.

With Features like These...

Are you aware that Safari 4.* saves two snapshots (a png and a jpeg file) of each web page you visit, as well as some seemingly random ones from your history or bookmarks? I wasn't, till I accidentally stumbled on it yesterday.

The culprit is an executable file called Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher in the Safari package. Its only function that I can see is in aid of the Top Sites feature of this release of Safari, a cool-looking but more or less useless routine that displays sites in a table, and illustrates the browsing history with images. I haven't found an easy way to turn only it off, though "Private Browsing" does knock it out along with everything else it knocks out. There's also an option to "stop loading previews" when you're in Top Sites, but that doesn't prevent the images from being generated and saved when you visit sites. The "Reset Safari" dialog box has a checkbox to clear the files that are already accumulated, but it doesn't stop new ones being generated. It's less hassle to remove them manually, but it is still a hassle.

These files can take up a great deal of space if this thing is left running over time. My folder of previews was over 2.5 GB on a machine I've had for two months; and only a few minutes of routine browsing can quickly accumulate hundreds of these files. It is also a potentially awful security risk if you use webmail, especially since, as I assume, most people who are using it have no idea that it's there. Counter-intuitively, clearing your history and/or cache has no effect on it, even though the directory in which the images are saved resides in Library/Caches.

Anyhow, I thought people might like to know.

UPDATE: In the comments, Sigivald points out this Apple Support discussions thread with a few work-around type solutions. The easiest one is simply to empty and then lock the $HOME/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Preview folder manually in the Finder. That doesn't turn off the Web Page Preview Fetcher, but it prevents it from writing anything to that directory. It will still try to, though, which is a waste and which will generate an error for every single webpage you load. But it's not as much of a waste as constantly writing thousands of big, useless files in the background.

Another solution mentioned is to enter the command in the shell:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

This is supposed to shut the whole thing down. I haven't tried it, so I can't verify that it works. If it's valid, I would guess the way to reverse this simply to delete it (i.e. "defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy") but I'm not sure. I'd be careful about editing defaults you don't know how to reverse, because that kind of thing can cause havoc when future updates are applied.

As some commenters point out, even just locking a folder in the library can have "side effects," but it's easy to uncheck the box. It's not ideal, but until they write a way to toggle it in the preferences into the program, the locked folder approach seems like the way to go.

My uncle used to love me but she died

The "…and I will be with you" 7" is featured in this post on my band and the history of the concept of the novelty song from the excellent Music Ruined My Life blog.

Don't Send Me No Flowers, I Ain't Dead Yet

As the Valet Reader mentions, I'm doing a reading thing at the Ferry Building Book Passage store in San Francisco on Thursday, Jan. 21. 6PM. Come on by. I'm gonna bring my guitar and books and just kind of see what happens.

Gone Gone Gone

Gone Gone Gone

Better Take an Ax and Bust 'em

The mind is a funny place, or thing, or whatever it is.

Don't ask me why, but yesterday I was trying to see if I could remember the lyrics to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I couldn't remember much of them, and, as might be expected, my memory of the genuine lyrics soon elided into the much more familiar kid song parody about the "burning of the school" where the "teacher hit me with a ruler" and gets shot with a "loaded .44" in the end.

I'm pretty familiar with this version of the song. In fact, I'm not at all sure I didn't think the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "John Brown's Body" weren't spectacularly unfunny parodies of it rather than the other way around when I first encountered the original.

But in the background of these vague images of my little kid self imagining a burning school and being hit with a ruler and getting revenge with a gun while actually sitting, gun-less, in a non-burning school, a very strange image began intrude. This was of a giant insect, like a mantis from a Japanese movie, but made of metal, looming over a cartoon-like girl with a big smile on her face. The girl looked a little like Nancy from the comic strip.

Suddenly, new lyrics made themselves known:

Mine eyes have seen the folly of the automated age
where computers write the checks and put employers in a rage
when they find out their employees have been paid a triple wage
the bugs are still not gone

Glory glory you can't trust 'em
even though you fix 'em and adjust 'em
better take an ax and bust 'em
the bugs are still not gone

I'm pretty sure it is from MAD Magazine. I mean, it has to be right? And I'm pretty sure I haven't seen it or thought of it since I first read it way back whenever that was. I believe the cartoon girl image came from the magazine, too, meant to illustrate the only other line I recall, which is: "when they send five gross of girdles to a five-year-old in Maine."

As for the giant mechanical insect, I suppose at the time the notion of "computer bugs" didn't mean enough to me to imprint in my mind as a functional metaphor, even though I doubt I really thought the song was literally about bugs. Or perhaps my memory was just punning of its own accord, just to mess with me.

I could well be wrong about the source. I couldn't find it via google, though I did find this, which seems to be a garbled version of the one I remember. (Mine seems like the original because it scans and rhymes properly.)

Anyway, in view of all that, this seems worth the $35.

Martian Dunes

(from here.)