I rented a few DVDs, and now you get to read about it.

I got the first disc of ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ which just rules. Three episodes, lots of commentary, deleted scenes and stuff like that.

The series follows a brother and sister through their high school experience in 1980. He’s a nerdy freshman who quotes Star Wars with his geeky friends, and she’s a brainy.. uh.. I’d say sophmore or junior, who’s trying to shed her nerdy image and hang out with the stoner freaks and be a bad girl.

It’s so delicately balanced, so well written, and so unlike any other TV show about high school that it’s no wonder ABC pulled the plug after only one season. Can’t leave anyone with raised expectations, now can we?

Well worth seeking out.

The other thing was ‘Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex,’ which is another TV series, this time from Japan. It’s based on a movie and a manga (comic book) called ‘Ghost in the Shell,’ and it’s ‘hard’ science fiction about the implications of computer neural implants and artificial intelligences. It’s an espionage/police type thing, with lots of government-funded gadgets and dialog that happens over computer networks.

Totally lapped it up. The third episode, about a disturbed individual who falls in love with his sex android, is weak (he hacks into all the other existing sex androids of the same model and programs them to self-destruct, so his will be unique). But the other three eps are great, especially the tank that wakes up and goes on a rampage.

What’s interesting to me about this show (and the whole ‘Ghost’ franchise) is that it’s just beyond the edge. There are times when you can’t really decipher the dialogue, and you have to sort of teach yourself the language of this future time, based on context. Newspapers are written in UPC bar codes for people with visual implants. Hackers can steal your soul by taking over your cybernetic mind. Stuff like this.

Very imaginative, and somehow very authentic.

That last entry about the autism news came in an email from my mom, who has other shocking news: My parents have a Kerry/Edwards sign in their front yard!

The whole time I lived there, they never had any kind of signage like that. And we never really talked about politics (perhaps why I’m making up for it now), up until I was out of high school. And my dad always voted R, and my mom often voted D, and that was the end of that.

But I have to say that if Bush made it OK for there to be a Kerry/Edwards sign in my parents’ yard, then he really, really screwed up.

Their city is pretty much a lock for Republicans, so I don’t know that it’ll matter, but I’m glad to see them coming around.

Autism news from July: Scientists Discover Biological Basis for Autism.

This web site needs a makeover. There’s a doc in a surgical mask glaring at me in the banner section! Eeek! Big Doctor is watching you! But, on with the discoveries:

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, the researchers have found numerous abnormalities in the activity of brains of people with normal IQs who have autism. The new findings indicate a deficiency in the coordination among brain areas. The results converge with previous findings of white matter abnormalities in autism. (White matter consists of the “cables” that connect the various parts of the brain to each other).

The new findings led the researchers to propose a new theory of the basis of autism, called underconnectivity theory, which holds that autism is a system-wide brain disorder that limits the coordination and integration among brain areas. This theory helps explain a paradox of autism: Some people with autism have normal or even superior skills in some areas, while many other types of thinking are disordered.

Ya know… I just got a spam email. Which is no big news. And some of them are enjoyable, with their semi-random subject lines and so forth…

But this one really peeved me off.

The message body, viewed in my email program, said this:

Get a capable html e-mailer

Now, if all they had said was “This email is in HTML, and here’s how to view it…” it would be one thing, but this email is telling, nay, DEMANDING that I change email clients so I can read some spam!

So, being the geek that I am, and knowing, as I do, the magic of MIME and HTML, I viewed the email source, which is just some random words. Plus an attached GIF image (which is a one-pixel white square), and a link labelled ‘no more,’ presumably so you can click it and be removed from their mailings.

All of which is pretty standard stuff (unfortunately). None of it would have been that big a deal, except that when I opened it, it demanded that I change email clients to read it.

My mail client is capable, dammit! That’s why I use it so I don’t have to read HTML spam!

Some words to go along with the picture: The Devil And John Edwards. A small excerpt:

O, how the Devil is a liar, a fraud, a misshapen freak in a suit. The reason that people believe the Devil is that he speaks his lies with low, soothing voice of one who is telling the truth. And with the conviction that his lies are reality. Many of the lies have already been dealt with [..]

Instead, let’s deal with this bright, shiny lie: that El Salvador was a beacon of democracy that the Devil adored back during the Reagan adminstration. The Reagan-backed Jose Napoleon Duarte was “elected” in 1984 after years of left-wing guerilla action and right-wing government-backed death squads killed tens of thousands of people. The United States provided El Salvador with the largest Air Force in Central America, which in the first quarter of 1985, made more than a hundred bomb attacks of civilian opposition areas. Thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands were turned into refugees. One can be sure that the vast majority of those people didn’t give a happy rat’s ass about democracy. But the Devil was there, he assured us last night, the Devil was there to make sure it happened just the way it did. Goddamn, how those souls must have felt like fresh air being inhaled by the Devil. And, motherfuck, if he doesn’t tell us he’s gonna do the same in Iraq.

WorldChanging is on a roll:

First I learn that NASA has a project called World Wind, which is a profoundly sophisticated 3D model of the earth, with 1 pixel per km resolution. It uses satellite photos and other data sources gleaned from orbit. Downside: Windows only (at this point).

Second, they link to ReclaimDemocracy.org, and their proposed Constitutional amendments which would reduce the power of corporate entities to determine elections (among other things), a move I completely endorse. I’m not sure I agree with all their specifics, but I like to see the effort being made. Lots of meaty stuff, with nice side dishes of rhetoric. I’d like to see a more academic version of this site.

Trippy web art. My suggestion: zoom in first.

A condensed history of Saddam Hussein. Sing it, Bing!

A couple months ago I got a call from the sexiest voice that has ever tried to sell me anything.

I was busy with other stuff, so I was a little distracted, and I inadvertently confirmed a whole bunch of her information. Of *course* I told her I wasn’t married, since the unspoken assumption of her seductive vocalizations was that I’d get laid if I just told her everything. I agreed that she could send me a packet of information about… Estate planning.

Yes, sex appeal for estate planning.

I got the packet shortly afterwards, and leafed through it. A couple of interesting things, but not all that much to think about, really. Into the recycle bin…

Fast forward a couple months to now. I just read on boingboing that William Shatner has a new CD out, called ‘Has Been,’ and that you can listen to parts of it on the CD web site. I clicked over and it played a snippet from a really funny song called ‘You’ll Have Time,’ which is about how embracing your certain demise can bring freedom. This from William Fucking Shatner. (If you go to that site, you can click on the little menu pulldown dealie at the top left and find that specific track.)

While I’m listening, the phone rings. And guess who’s making a follow-up call? It’s the estate planning succubus. I imagine her as Neil Gaiman’s Death, the most attractive and sociable woman ever to exist (eventually she meets everyone). I’m talking to Death on the phone. She’s whispering in my ear like a phone sex operator. She wants my money and my body, but only after I die. And… man… What I want from her…

Finally, I wake from the trance. I manage to blurt out… Please take me off your call list, get rid of my information, and don’t sell it to anyone. It was like ending an affair. She says, “We can do that.” Can we still be friends? Honey, we weren’t friends to begin with.

TRASH TALK

A friend of mine emailed me because I know the magic of the unix command line.

See, Mac OS X is basically a unix operating system with a nifty user interface. You can open a terminal window and do all kinds of unix-y things with it. But the point here is that my friend has a very specific problem that keeps arising, and which shows up all the time in the Mac world. And that is:

The Trash That Wouldn’t Empty.

Often, files end up in the trash (or elsewhere) that the Finder won’t delete, because they have the wrong permissions set. ‘Permissions’ is a unix-y term for how the file-system figures out who can delete (or change, or write to) a file or directory. So somehow these files get set so you can’t delete them, and they stick around forever, or until you email your friend who knows The Magic Incantations.

Here, in the spirit of openness, are the Magic Incantations for all to know, use, and love. But as with all magicks, they are dangerous, and you might destroy everything you ever held dear by using them. Seriously.

The Why-Are-You-Deleting-This? Solution:

Some files you just plain shouldn’t delete. So don’t delete them, foo! If it’s not in your home directory, you shouldn’t monkey with it, with obvious exceptions like applications you’ve installed.

The Are-You-Sure-You-Understand-The-Problem? Solution:

Some files won’t let themselves be trashed because they are in use. For instance, mounted disk image files, or word processing documents you’re currently editing. Unmount disk images, and quit programs that might be using the files.

The CYA Solution:

This is the solution I list first because it will solve the problem, but not quickly. And it’s the ‘official’ solution from Apple. The advantage is that you might not have to learn what ‘sudo’ means, and if you don’t already know, it’s probably best to remain ignorant. How does it work? You run Disk Utilities, select the mounted volume in question, and click on ‘Fix Permissions.’ This problem is so pervasive that Apple made a utility to deal with it. You might be able to trash the file after executing the CYA solution, or you might not.

The Mac-Like Solution:

Get a little program called BatChmod. This program exists to make it easy to change file permissions. It also has a menu item called ‘Force Empty Trash,’ which should sum up nicely why this is one of the solutions. Plus it has a neeto icon. There are probably other little apps for just this problem, but this is the one I have laying around my hard drive, so you should be glad it’s laying around yours, too.

The Unix Solution:

Warning. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! If you mistype this, you might do serious, that is, SERIOUS damage to your computer, your emotional state, and your sanity. Booga booga! In fact, I doubt my sanity for telling unix newbies to type ‘sudo rm anything.’

Now that you’re properly freaked out, run Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type the following:

sudo rm -r ~/.Trash/*

That’s: sudo space rm space minus r space tilde slash period T-r-a-s-h slash splat (splat is what you get when you type shift-8)

At this point, you will either be told you aren’t an administrator, which means someone wiser than you has decided you shouldn’t be allowed to use ‘sudo,’ -or- you’ll be prompted to enter your password. Enter the password… IF YOU DARE!!! muaaaahahahaha!!

And then your Trash can will be empty. Voila.

It’s a shout out, yo!

My friend Karen has finished editing a book called ‘Secrets & Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women’s Friendships,’ for Seal Press/Avalon. She’ll be promoting the book in Berkeley/SF and NYC over the next couple months, and it would warm my cockles if she told me some xanga person showed up because they read about it on my ‘blog. Click the link for specifics.

Congratulations, Karen!