For Linda Dyer,
Bold Soul, Poet,
d. 7/28/2006


smile smile smile
by dan zanes

every time I think of you,
smile for a while
that's the one thing you always do
smile smile smile

acting out stories and hugging your friends
smile for a while
i know what i'll do when i see you again
i'm gonna smile smile smile

chorus:
like ripples in a pond
or runners who pass the baton
good feelings will go on for mile after mile
and your big heart circles the world
every time that you smile

doing those voices and telling your jokes
smile for a while
your crazy hairdos and your thriftshop coats
smile smile smile

every time you break into a broadway song
smile for a while
the whole world starts singing along
smile smile smile

well you know i love you and i'm glad you're my friend
smile for a while
you know what i'll do when i see you again
smile smile smile

(Thanks to Trish McKinney & the BPP Kubler-Ross musical series for introducing me to the song. Not sure about the video, however)

Is Donna Noble wearing the Master's ring? Not likely.

Snacking in the Floating World

This is one of my favorite prints, by the artist Masami Teraoka

McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan / Geisha and Tattooed Woman, 1975,
Watercolor on paper, 14-1/4" x 21-1/2"
Private collection, New York, NY

I Wish I Could Travel One Month Back In Time

Yesterday, I dropped into the Asian Art Museum in SF, and there are two exhibits that just opened.
History of History by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Renowned Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presents a number of works exploring the connections between different eras of mostly, but not exclusively, Japanese history.

This is an interesting exhibit - the installation itself was designed by Sugimoto, in accordance to his belief that the installation is as much a part of the artwork as the artwork itself.

I'm impressed by the way different historical eras are tied together by various bits of artwork. Among them is a 17th century etching by Rembrandt that is mounted on a Japanese scroll. One of the figures in the Rembrandt bears a physical resemblance to one of the major figures in Japanese Buddhism. The etching is itself mounted on a scroll using Japanese textiles that are roughly contemporary to that Rembrandt. Serendipitously, as the artist later discovered, the paper used by Rembrandt was, in fact, exported to the Netherlands from Japan. I was impressed by the superficial clash of cultural styles, but as one explores deeper, there is, in fact, a common context that's represented by the whole work.

Another exhibit, also at the Asian, is

Stylized Sculpture: Contemporary Japanese Fashion from the Kyoto Costume Institute, a collaboration between Sugimoto and the Kyoto Costume Institute. This is, perhaps, yet another of the "controversial" fashion shows to be shown in a museum. (There have been criticisms and controversy over the injection of couture into the realm of the fine-arts museums in San Francisco. What the fuck ever. If people can't figure out the artistry of, say, Vivienne Westwood (excellent exhibit at the deYoung, btw), then they're trapped in a rather narrow artistic paradigm, and I'd rather they spend more time doing oral performances of Cage's 4'33".)

Anyways, this exhibit aims to show the couture of Japanese designers (including many from Comme des Garcon) from 1983 to present as sculpture. Sugimoto's photographs of these fashion pieces are framed to minimize the human form. Interestingly, there is one piece that aims to distort the human form. Here, the body is but a frame for the clothes (and to make this point, there is a chair frame, a piece of furniture, that is upholstered by the same jacket that the adjacent mannequin is wearing). It's quite fascinating, but the exhibit, by design, has no didactics - the intent is to encourage the museumgoer to look at the artwork, not the little plaques about the art.

Sadly, about a few weeks too late, I just discovered that the De Young had shown a retrospective of Sugimoto's work. If only I had known, if only I had known.

I came across this while cleaning out old paperwork the other day.

Oops. I haven't posted here in over a year! I'll try to be better.

As for all for those spammers who posted a year's worth of bullshit for me to disposition? DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL, FUCKHEADS. Well, except for the Christian dating spam people: DARN YOU TO HECK, SINNERS.


More later.
-ywq

THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO RIPPED ME OFF!

I thought I'd provide a testimonial regarding my experiences with an online bookseller named bookstation.net.

In my opinion, they are a fraud.

If you look at their textbook prices, they seem to have AMAZING prices, about 50% of what you can get from Amazon used sellers or just about anything else on the web. So how do they do it? Well, here is their apparent scam.

I ordered two books from these people. Both technical textbooks, US street value about $150 (Microwave Engineering by Pozar and Signals and Systems by Oppenheim for those who need the deets. I know who you are). For these two books, "BS.net" was selling them for a total of $75 for BOTH. Not bad, since textbooks are waaaay overpriced anyways.

I ordered the books, and received the confirmation mail (twice, actually - they screwed up the order by perhaps trying to bill me twice, but after a quick and responsive email exchange, they cancelled the redundant order). I waited for the 2-week ship time, and as expected, a package arrived. It had a return address from Kolkata (aka Calcutta) India!

NOWHERE on the web site, to the best of my knowledge - perhaps it is very obscurely buried somehwere - NOWHERE do they declare they are based in India. Which is fine, but it would have been nice to know. I opened up the package, and it is indeed one of the two books I ordered, but unexpectedly, it was the foreign Indian-market version, and not the US version, with the price magic markered away. It's a paperback, and it has the very very inexpensive and fragile thin paper that you can see through. No sign of the second book, however. I talked to a friend of mine who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, and he said that I paid way way way too much for that copy of the book, and that this is not an uncommon scam these days.

I waited a few days for the second book, but nothing arrived. I sent them multiple queries and email, NOTHING. It wasn't until I started a complaint process with PayPal before I got any response - they claimed there was an error, and they would ship the second book or if I desired, they would credit me for the book. I asked for the credit. No response. More queries, nothing.

So the deal with PayPal is they do not track this kind of apparent fraud (they would if there were no shipment, but in the case of a partial shipment of an apparently misrepresented item) not so. Even if they were to track fraud, it has to be done within 90 days, and unfortunately, because I trusted bookstation's lying asses, it exceeded the 90 days. ARGH.
In my opinion, bookstation.net is fraudulent. I believe they are: crooks.

It turns out that at the time, they had a link to bizrate.com. Geniuses! I go to the site, and noticed that there were maybe half a dozen of more reviews of bookstation that were all 1 or zero stars out of 5. I was, apparently, not the only person burned by these lying motherfuckers. So I posted my experiences with them and my description of their apparent business model, and gave them the lowest possible rating.

A week or two later, I noticed that bookstation.net (aka the people who seem to have RIPPED ME OFF) were no longer linking to this consumer review site. Heck, if I were a lying, piece of crap swindler, I sure wouldn't link to a site where people could post their experiences.

So, I got burned. I went for the cheap price and ended up paying, essentially, full price for the super low-cost version of a book that I could have bought new with much better quality and longevity in the states for the same price.

You have been warned.

OK, I am the world's lamest blogger. In fact, it's reasonable to ask the question: am I a blogger at all?

For those who answer yes, I must ask: whaaaaa???? are you nuts? I've made maybe two posts here, one of which is of the "tap tap is this thing on" variety. You must have a liberal definition of what is considered a blogger. To you, I ask: are bloggers journalists? And, if you were to apply the laws of transitivity, does that then make me a journalist as well?

For those who answer no, I must ask: whaaaaaaaa???? Are you nuts? I have maybe 2, 3 no, sometimes FOUR views of this site EVERY WEEK. I'm guessing that YOU, you UNFAITHFUL DOUBTER, are probably among those who come back week after week (all four of you), saying to yourself, what the fuck: doesn't this lameass person ever update their blog? I wonder if he is among the living? Well fuck you and your monkey. I live, I breathe, I blog. OK, well, I sort of blog. Come back in 6 months, and you'll see: I might even have another post.

Until then: entertain yourself with this.

Pop quiz: why are you such a Pussy? A Moment of Silence

Back in the early 2000's, there was a wonderful tool called the Burn Maker. It was a sophisticated text filter. The Timid You would enter some benign text into a form, and hit the "Oh Yeah?" button, and your mild mannered text would be transformed into a wonderfully ribald, obscenity-laced version, revealing the Fucker Inside.
For example, here is a Burn Maker version of a friend's business letter to her bank, converted by the Burn Maker to reveal her inner fucker. The letter dates from 2001, I believe.

---

Alice,

I received a motherfucking letter from you and your hand-job today to fuckin' confirm our phone conversation regarding direct deposit, along with the fucking letter for my stupid ass to sign agreeing to that shit.

Unfortunately, fucking what you and your sluts refer to in the fucking letter is a "wire transfer" which is not fucking what I requested. Fucking what I requested was direct deposit, and I would still like that piece of shit to be done that way. Savor the brimstone. I presume this bullshit can be done through ACH. I also (in addition to the fact that you're a shit) imagine this bullshit would save us the fucking "wire transfer" fee.

I do not want a wire transfer. Pop Quiz, why are you such a pussy? Please set that bastard up as direct deposit as we requested. Are you ready to burn? I'll follow this bullshit up with a fuckin' paper letter with a motherfucking signature so god-damn you can go ahead and proceed with this bullshit.

Also (in addition to the fact that you're a bastard), the fucking letter I received today was addressed to fuckin' Madam "Little pussy" B--- L---. For the fucking record, my fucking name is Ms. "Has-been fuckmonster" B--- L---.

You are a fuckmonster.
Thank you,
B--- L---

---

The Burn Maker was put together by the founders of what is now SparkNotes, Chris Coyne (and Justin Kester?), then undergraduates at Harvard. The Spark was quite a fun site - there was the "Date My Sister Project" and a variety of quizzes and personality tests. Very humorous. What was nice about the Burn Maker is that it was more than a text filter like "jive" or the Swedish Chef filter (bork bork bork), but it actually had a relatively sophisticated algorithm to parse the grammatical structure of the source text and substitute/insert appropriate (or inappropriate, if you will) phrases.

In 2004, tragedy struck. OK, not necessarily tragedy for the founders - the mission of The Spark was apparently always to have an educational component - but at some point in that annus horriblus The Spark was acquired by Barnes and Noble and it became SparkNotes, a purely educational site, for teens, and other young impressionables, who, I'm sure, had never ever had their sensibilities assaulted by the obviously damaging language that the toxic Burn Maker was built from. The language of the Burn Maker could obviously lead to the eventual decline of America into some subservient colony beneath the heel of a prurient gutter in today's developing world (AKA the nation states of tomorrow's Great Overlords).

As far as I can tell, the Burn Maker intellectual property is completely owned by Barnes and Noble, and not for sale. I can only hope that somehow, somewhere, a new Burn Maker can arise from the ashes. But frankly, unless somehow someone can take a huge number of Fucker Inside texts and reverse-engineer the conversion algorithm, I'm afraid we will have to be content with our fading memories of this brilliantly important web tool, snuffed out before its time. The graphics can be found at archive.org, but like an online Terry Schiavo, the brains of the Burn Maker are no more.

Rest in Peace, Burn Maker, I ought to slam you and your monkey's ass.

Here we go.

OK, making some progress here. I suppose my obsessions will begin tomorrow. This is my first blog! I kept asking myself, what should I blog about? The things that happen to me every day? Good gosh, I can't imagine anyone would be able to stay awake after the first couple of posts. I could blog about the things that go on in my workplace, but I'm sure HR would come by with a hard copy of my posts, so NO.


One idea I had, was a blog about the RING OF FIRE. Yes, about the Johnny Cash song and all of its covers. But also about, well, how should we say, the after effects of eating food that's way way way too spicy. I'm not talking about the heat when you eat, I'm talking about the BURN several hours later. You know what I mean, and if you don't, it's probably better that way.

But jeez, how much can anyone write on that one subject? So instead, I'm just going to write about whatever my latest obsession turns out to be. If you don't like my current obsession? Wait 10 minutes.

Testing testing. I haven't figure out what I'm doing here yet. Stay tuned.