Dave Brown

I blame my iPod

This night, my iPod decided to present me the following sequence of music:

1. Loreena McKennit: The Mask and the Mirror
2. Nigel Kennedy: The Four Seasons
3. Tom Waits: Mule Variations

Let me tell you, sandwiched between Loreena McKennit and Tom Waits, poor old Nigel Kennedy suffered. One of the big things that leapt out at me was that as his obligato instrument, despite all of the choices available to Nigel Kennedy in the science fiction year of 1999, he still chose, out of all the possibilities available to him, a harpsichord. He could have chosen an organ, or a piano, or for crying out loud, a synthesizer. Heck, he could have gone with an accordion. The obligato instrument is entirely up to the arranger, and deliberately so—when that music was written, a lot of stuff depended on what musical instruments happened to be available at the time. But despite the deliberately-open choice available to him at the tail end of the 20th century, he chose a harpsichord.

As far as being compared to Loreena McKennit, her biggest hit is a song called “The Bonny Swans” which was written in approximately 1564 by someone so thoroughly forgotten to history that the song is ascribed to the ever-prolific “Traditional”. One of the appealing features of her rendition of this song is that it features some seriously-understated, but still vital to the song, flourishes on that well-known 16th-century instrument, the electric guitar. Indeed, without the electric guitar bits, her song would be significantly diminished, even though they, at best, at embellishment to the material.

On the other hand, Tom Waits’s “Mule Variations” is an album that is highlighted by the Grammy-Award-winning song “Hold On”, which is quite obviously a song recorded in the dead of night, which is according to the liner notes from The Black Rider, Tom Waits’s preferred recording time. It’s pretty obvious from the recording that it was recorded at, if you go from Waits’s preferred hours, about 5:30am—Tom Waits himself sounds tired, and his backing band sounds worn out. The instruments are more-or-less improvised at this point, and the recording is obviously much lower-tech than, say, Nigel Kennedy’s harpsichord-and-caffeine recording of The Four Seasons.

For all its primitiveness, Mule Variations manages to sound much more vital than Nigel Kennedy’s Four Seasons. And I do acknowledge Kennedy’s Four Seasons as being the best recording of the work in the last twenty-five, and possibly fifty years.

Another thing I just noticed

My edition of Terry Pratchett’s Making Money ends on page 419.

Coincidence? I think not.

In which I find out...

…where works.

From this article comes this bit of deathless prose:

Best-selling author and filmaker Michael Crichton died unexpectedly in Los Angeles Tuesday, after a courageous and private battle against cancer, his family said in a statement.

They said it in a statement. With words. Using speech.

Maybe something worth attaching to gurgitate-mail

I just discovered the Bayesian Networks for Ruby library.

On the recent American election

Welcome back to the team, America.

Looking forward to seeing what Obama does now that he has the keys to the
kingdom.

Bodge

I was riding along today in the midst of traffic, and noticed that my right mirror was a little out of whack.

I reached over, started to adjust it, wondered why I’d apparently made things much worse, and then realized that the actual mirror had fallen right out and was lying in traffic somewhere behind me.

Maybe it didn’t appreciate it when I dumped the bike a while back, even though I landed on the other mirror which is just fine thank you (a minor amount of scratching on the housing notwithstanding). Or perhaps it was just reacting to my driving style (if you’ve seen The Dark Knight, I drive not dissimilar to the Batman).

So I called up my friendly dealer, gave them the exact part number I wanted (the Internet is a lovely weapon sometimes), and when it gets in, I’ll have a nice new mirror.

In the meantime, since it was the right mirror and Japan drives on the left, I needed to have some kind of mirror pronto.

Here’s what I did:

A cheap makeup mirror, a roll of electrical tape, and suddenly OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE EXACTLY AS CLOSE AS THEY APPEAR. Which was more than a little startling because I’d gotten thoroughly used to the normal convex mirrors.

Goodness

So I’ve apparently been walking past a used-panty store every single day without noticing, and while doing so I’ve been wondering why on earth someone would name their store after a disease-causing bacterium.

Charlie Stross will get a kick out of this

Woman jailed after killing virtual husband

TOKYO—A 43-year-old player in a virtual game world became so angry about her sudden divorce from her online husband that she logged on with his password and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday.

The woman, who has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his ID and password to log onto the popular interactive game “Maple Story” to carry out the virtual murder in May, a police official in the northern city of Sapporo said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of department policy.

Scary criminals

Last night, when I was nearly home, I was waiting at a red light, and spotted a boy and a girl who seemed to be conspiring. The girl was dressed in the best Slutty Schoolgirl outfit she could manage (the skirt had practically disappeared), and the boy seemed just kind of generally skeevy, so I figured I knew what they were up to.

Well, the boy took his bicycle and ducked into the parking lot of a nearby building and slunk into the back, lending weight to my theory. Then he came out and beckoned the girl in.

And then they hid out there for a while. The lights changed, and the cars started going, including a police cruiser.

As soon as the police cruiser was well out of sight, they emerged, and then committed The Terrible Crime.

The boy hopped onto his bicycle, the girl hopped onto the luggage rack, and they rode off together.

Denizens of Tokyo's roads (and what they see): A Guide

Japan’s roads are populated by a far greater variety of vehicles than roads in other places like, say, Saskatchewan. (Saskatchewan roads are populated mainly by tractors, pickup trucks, and huge rusty station wagons from 1973.)

Here’s a little list explaining what sort of vehicles you’ll find, and—this is an important detail—what things they’re capable of seeing.

Pedestrians

Pedestrians generally tend to stay on the sidewalks or, on smaller streets, the sides of the street. Occasionally when there’s a traffic jam clogging up a street in both directions, some daring pedestrian will jaywalk through the jam, thereby risking being hit by a motorcycle.

They can generally see other vehicles coming when they’re just starting to cross the road, unless they’re at a light-controlled pedestrian crossing. In that case, all they can see is the light telling them it’s okay to cross.

Car drivers

Car drivers are usually found on the roads, to one side or the other of the lane they’re in. Because Japanese roads get cold, car drivers like to huddle together as close as they can for warmth.

As for what’s visible to car drivers, it depends on the situation. When a car driver is at an intersection, a miracle happens: He can see the spirits of his dead ancestors! So as to avoid harming the spirits, Japanese car drivers always pull out from a halt disproportionately carefully.

But once actually moving, the spirits give way and the car driver’s vision becomes such that he can only see the lines on the road, between which he generally very carefully stays (albeit tending to wobble back and forth within his lane slightly drunkenly), and the car immediately ahead of him. His eyes are a little dim at that, so he has to get up really close in order to see the car ahead properly. Motorcycles and bicycles are completely invisible to the Japanese car driver.

When it comes to traffic lights, the car driver has to squint to see the traffic light, and will often come to a halt at a red line well over the line, quite possibly blocking the intersection for cross traffic altogether. However, once a red light is acknowledge, there is no Japanese car driver who would dare disobey it, even for such trivialities as clearing out of an intersection.

Truck drivers

Truck drivers, like car drivers, are usually found driving on the road. Quite often, though, truck drivers will take advantage of the fact that major thoroughfares are several lanes wide, and use the left-hand lane as a parking lot while they take a leisurely nap. They take advantage of the Japanese traffic rule that if you turn on your hazard lights, any existing no-parking and no-stopping rules evaporate like mist.

Truck drivers have much better vision than car drivers, quite possibly because they’re placed much higher up. They can not only see more than the car immediately ahead of them, they can use this information to act on it. For instance, they can let rip with a blast on the horn to let a motorcyclist know that trucks are more important than motorcycles.

Their eagle eyes also allow them to see traffic lights from much further away than car drivers, permitting them to stop at a red light as much as fifty meters before the line.

Motorcycle riders

Motorcycle riders are generally found in the miniscule gaps between cars on busy roads, although you’ll occasionally see one riding in the middle of his lane with cars before and after him. Lane-splitting is a highly-valued skill in Japan, and a motorcyclist who could fit his bike into the spot between two cars with fully three millimeters to spare and who doesn’t do so is met with scorn and derision from the bikers around him, some of whom will attempt to lane-split between the bike and one of the cars it’s already between.

They have very good vision, especially when it comes to judging distances between things to determine whether their bikes will fit or not. Not only that, but unlike the other denizens of the road, they can see other motorcycles most of the time. Unlike car drivers, though, motorcycle drivers aren’t capable of seeing the spirits of their ancestors, so when lights turn green, they tend to take off in a way that horrifies the car drivers.

Bicycle riders

Bicycle riders can be found anywhere and everywhere. They’re not legally allowed to be on sidewalks, but you’ll find them there all the time. There are actual rules set down in Japanese law that says where bicycles are and aren’t allowed to go, but nobody pays them the slightest bit of attention.

Bicycle riders are oblivious to everything. They don’t see cars, motorcycles, pedestrians, lines on the road, the general flow of traffic, or traffic lights. They drift through all of these things like they are just as much mist. Things they can see include the screen of their phone, the display of the iPod that they’re adjusting, and the newspaper that they’re reading because the intersection of Aoyama-Dori and Meiji-Dori at 5pm is so dull that they need something to combat their boredom.