Mere days before I got ‘Steering the Craft,’ I got another all-time classic: ‘Objective-C: Pocket Reference‘ by Andrew M. Duncan.

Objective-C is an object-oriented variant on the C programming language. It predates C++ by a very small (almost non-existant) margin. It’s more like Smalltalk than C++. I like it a lot.

I learned Objective-C by accident while trying to learn Cocoa, Apple’s application framework, which natively uses the language. When I say ‘by accident,’ I mean in that in the worst possible way.

I wish I’d been able to buy ‘Objective-C: Pocket Reference’ way back then… So much more would have made sense. There’s not much literature out there for ObjC, beyond Apple’s documentation and mailing list archives.

I wanted to mention this book because it’s very well written, succinct, to-the-point, and has zero extraneous fluff. It’s almost as poetic as well-written Objective-C.

Mac Things: If you wish Mac OS X had tabbed windows like Mac OS 9 did, then you want to look at DragonDrop. It doesn’t play with the Dock as nicely as we’d hope, but it’s free.

Another program that doesn’t play as well with the Dock as we’d hope is Meteorologist, but it’s still kinda cool. Instead of using the dock, Meteorologist puts an icon in your menu bar with the temperature, and the forecast in a menu.

‘Steering the Craft,’ Exercise 6: The Old Woman

The exercise is to write a story about an old woman who is doing something, and at the same time remembering her past. Switch verb tense for the two time periods of the story. Then, re-write the story with the tenses reversed.

I’ll only bore you with one of the stories. Much of this was inspired by my mom, who, I guess, counts as an ‘old woman,’ if you’re crude enough to evaluate people in such ways. One important difference: My mom loves potatoes.

–

She struggled, just a little, to hoist the clippers over the arm of her wheelchair, over the lip around the edge of the raised garden bed. She had struggled with the gloves, her fingers sending notfications of arthritic pain back to the rest of her body, and now those fingers squeezed as best they could on the clippers. A satisfying muffled ‘snap!’, and the bay leaves fell into her other, cupped hand.

She looked at the raised bed. Her son-in-law had built it for her, after her legs had decided not to move any more. She had loved gardening, ever since the 40s when her family had a victory garden. Now that her options were a little more limited, she could often be found wheeling around the greenhouse, caring for the plants in this small platform.

Her father smiles and wipes the dirt off her face. She feels the warm sun through her skin, her muscles just a little work-sore from weeding the rows. They sip lemonade on the porch. The sun is setting and it’ll soon be time to water again. “We don’t want to water while the sun is high in the sky,” he tells her. “We don’t want to steam the shoots until after they’re in the kitchen.” She laughs, maybe a little more than she should at such a joke. She hasn’t enjoyed learning to spot airplanes by profile in the sky, or thinking about men going to Japan to kill people, even if they did attack first. She laughs at her father’s joke and sips her lemonade.

She maneuvered her wheelchair up the small ramp, through the dining room and into the kitchen of her house. The pot of water was about to start boiling; she had timed it right. She placed the herbs in the water. She put her other ingredients in, as well. Chicken, potatoes, peas, some tomatoes that were getting too ripe, past-prime celery…

She says, “I hate potatoes.” Her mother sighs, says, “They’re what we can afford, and we’ll have other things when that garden starts producing.” Her father says, “Clean up your plate.”

The Nokia ad got me thinking about advertising, and when I think about advertising, I read Stay Free Magazine. Which I did; I went to that website.

Clicking around, I got to the Rough Guide To Manhattan’s Outdoor Advertising, which made me recoil in horror, and remember why I like Seattle so much.

From there I navigated to Howard Gossage’s ‘How To Look At Billboards, which is the point of this ‘blog. Go read it.

So someone sent me a link to an MPG file of a recent Nokia ad, where a little kitty cat gets caught on a ceiling fan and is flung into a wall while teenagers gawk and giggle.

Depraved subject matter aside (it was funny when Monty Python was flinging cats), the creepiest thing about this ad is how believable it is. Not the special effects that simulate the cat, but the general numbness and apathetic cruelty of the young people watching (and recording onto their video phone) while the cute kitty suffers needlessly.

I get the feeling that we’re at a place in human history where, unless something is recorded and transmitted, it isn’t real. And even then, it’s only allowed to be real because we’re powerless to do something about it after the fact. As a result, disgust and outrage seem hopelessly outdated, since they’d require sincerity.

Put down the damn videophone and grab the cat, you dumbass!

On this lovely Monday morning, I give you, from the Casa Loma Orchestra, ‘The Dance of the Lame Duck.’ Click the link to listen. I like the way everything about this tune is bouncy and kind of silly and naive, except for the solos where the individual musicians try to out-cool each other, and the blue-notey bridge section, there for contrast so you’ll know the arranger was cool, too.

The Casa Loma Orchestra is credited as being the first swing band, and this recording of ‘The Dance of the Lame Duck’ was made in 1932 for the Brunswick label.

One of the most depressing things about being an American is that you know the following questions are mostly rhetorical:

Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

Why did George Bush delay the docking of the USS Lincoln in order to make a speech to say what everyone knew anyway?

Where are Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?

Why does the White House want to disproportionately tax poor people?

Back when Tom Ridge was telling us to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape, did he know there wasn’t really a WMD threat, or is he a dupe like the rest of us?

What does the term ‘opposition party’ mean?

I got some momentum together to go outside and do some yardwork, for the absolute minimum value of ‘work.’

Mostly, I wanted to prune the rose plants. The landlord has a zillion of them, all over the place. I’ll be amazed if I can coax any flowers out of them, but they’re still nice. I pruned a few. Some have black spot, so I trimmed those leaves, keeping in mind that the plant needs leaves to remain living.

It rained last night, and is still overcast and drizzly. The plants have beaded dewy drops on them. Tres sexy.

I still haven’t mowed the back yard. It’s about two and a half feet tall. Some of it is flowering. Must. Cut. Grass.

There’s a ton of work out there. Lots of invading plants to yank, plenty of pruning to do, and generally high levels of maintenance. I can barely keep the indoor plants alive; I have to decide if it’s just going to have to fall by the wayside. I don’t pay rent to be a gardener.

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Steering the Craft exercise 5: Chastity.

The goal is to write 200-350 words without adjectives or adverbs or dialogue.

The alleyway is behind my house, and the cedar tree is in my yard. Literary historians of the future will debate whether the boy is me or not.

–

The alleyway wasn’t an alleyway like you think of one. It was more a path, almost like a forest path, except lined by fences and trees that had been manicured, pruned by professionals.

A boy, raingear glowing like a piece of the sun, squatted by the side of the street where it crossed the alleyway. He watched the puddle define itself, drops of rain pushing ripples outward toward the edges. He sat for a while and watched it. Boys do this sometimes.

The edge of the rainclouds was nearby, to the south. Looking up, he could see the thin stripe of blue on the horizon, hinting itself into being, obscured by the hills and the houses of the neighborhood.

He stood and continued along the alleyway. This section was bordered by a wire fence on one side, and he could see the yard beyond. The alley came closest to a cedar tree that seemed, to the boy, to have been there since the beginning of time. Its branches shaded the path from the rain. The boy shook the beads of water off his raincoat, leaned up against a fence pole.

The rainclouds were breaking up. Patches of white and gray traded status with patches of blue. The sun came out and shadows stretched as if awakened from sleep. Sunlight filtered through the cedar branches and mottled the ground.

The boy felt a kind of contentment that he hadn’t realized was possible. He filled his lungs with the scent of cedar and rain. He stood there for some time, breathing, observing. A crow came and chastised him. He laughed and walked along.