JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

A small shop of developers in Australia got treated unfairly on Amazon’s App Store and wrote about it on their blog; the post was carried by Gizmodo, which then generated a series of laugh out loud comments:

JonThomasDesigns
How is this even a Story ? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Post i have Ever read

Matt Buchanan @JonThomasDesigns
How is you even a Commenter ? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Comment i have Ever read.

Brian Barrett @Matt Buchanan
How is this even a Reply ? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Reply i have Ever read

AgentRockstar @Brian Barrett
How is this even a Thread? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Threads i have Ever read

Joe Brown @Brian Barrett
How is you guys even have jobs? This is seriously one of the Stupidest Employment Situations i have Ever read.

Philip.J.Fry @AgentRockstar
How is this even internet? This is seriously the stupidest internet I’ve ever experienced.

So after trying to access Netflix streaming we were finally requested to reset our password. When that did not reconnect us we followed the Wizard of Trouble and found it was not Netflix that was to blame, but rather Samsung. So Netflix said. So, knowing that was unlikely, we kept trying and finally logged in via Sammy app. Or not. Because each device had to be reset. This covered, intermittently, a six hour period.

Now we’ve read today online that we were not the only ones with Netflix issues. In fact they are offering, via email, a whopping 3% refund. If you get the email. And if you click the link. This would amount to say, thirty cents. We never received the email.

Netflix has raised its prices in an ungainly fashion. They have raised those prices 3%. I mean 60%. Netflix made no online effort when there were problems to tell customers; let them eat cake and waste time. And today, the coup de grâce, we received a DVD which was cracked.

Stuff happens, but this begins to accrue to a bad smell.

Well I was about to stop my regular checking of Steve Martin’s tweets, but then Steve put out a heartfelt appeal for an opening line for a “new scurrilous stand up” act.

Steve came up with,

Hello, muckel fucles. I see a lot Scurvy Bar Nuns here tonight. Sweet Haile Selassie, barn f’narkin, Milk-a-Whats. Kiss my sassafras.

Now this is good, in the sense of good, but I suggest,

Wellcum, my lively anacondas. Serve your muster with luffin and please stop muckin’ with my pecka-dillos if you want my so-sweet san souci!

It’s, it’s…nice. I think it is the exclamation mark that resolves to the purity that is Steve.

After a battle with WordPress and obstinate plugins — which resulted in Jolly Days loading as a blank page; and a battle with a cell phone company about its online payment implementation, and not being able to run today —  I’m feeling pecked to death by ducks. Until you realize the context — the greater tribulations of the world — the Arab world in turmoil with uncertain outcome; the devastation in Japan; our president who seems one step behind too often and the Republicans in disarray, the ominous future for the economy if something is not done — it doesn’t make you feel perky.

I’ve been working hard to publish more books at the iBookstore; not satisfying creative work, but rather meticulous, mind numbing work. I’m very proud of the result though:

iPad Sketchbook 3
Ira Altschiller: Works on Paper
Ira Altschiller: A Retrospective

and two more to come: picturebooks is what Apple calls them, which are fixed layout books for a better presentation of books which have an emphasis on images.

I did want to mention a funny link provided at Jason Kottke’s site

Someone at Yahoo Answers uploaded a page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as his own and asked for comments.

Rated as the best answer / criticism:

You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.

Comment sections are always pretty funny. Some people don’t like the snarkiness, and I’m not a big fan of that aspect, but often there are interesting ideas and commentary as well. It is the mosh pit after all. A financial journalist at bloggingheads said that she always felt that people weren’t asking questions or engaging ideas  in comments sections of weblogs, they were trying to appear smart.

The idea of sending great literature as if written by sender to an established publisher has been done over the years. Rejection letters for masterpieces like War and Peace leaves one agape — like the audience watching The Frankie singing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Saul Bellow stopped sending his stories to the New Yorker after a full of himself young editor told him how he should correct his piece. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize.

At instapundit Glenn Reynolds notes,

I think that things that involve practicing balance are very valuable. I’ve always had excellent balance, but I no longer do the stuff I did as a kid and when I did a balance-intensive routine at the gym a while back — involving standing on balls and the like — the two things that struck me were how much worse my balance was when I started than it was when I was a kid, and how rapidly it improved. I could almost feel the neural networks recalibrating between sets.

I remember years ago on a radio show hearing someone say, “Oh, I don’t want to be one of those guys who has to sit on the edge of his bed to put on his socks like an old man.” Ever since I heard that I always stand when putting on socks — more because it is something of a game than for balancing purposes. But I have gotten good at it — Glenn’s right, there is a learning curve.

Reynolds also offers a NYT link for preventing falls in older people.

The football announcer just said the quarterback had great pocket presence. Something we should all have.

To be filed under Something Else To Worry About: Municipal bonds used to be the safest of bets but this article says maybe not:

Municipal bankruptcies or defaults have been extremely rare — no state has defaulted since the Great Depression…

But the finances of some state and local governments are so distressed that some analysts say they are reminded of the run-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown or of the debt crisis hitting nations in Europe.

Analysts fear that at some point — no one knows when — investors could balk at lending to the weakest states, setting off a crisis that could spread to the stronger ones, much as the turmoil in Europe has spread from country to country.

We saw a sign on a garden today that said “Do Not Pick Crops” which we at first misread as “Do Not Pork Chops”. There really should be and probably is a web site devoted to misread signs.

This article discusses “Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead”

This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid.

We just watched the movie Zombieland. Most excellent — Bill Murray’s appearance a great bonus in this playful movie.

Two end-of-thread comments @ask.metafilter:

OMG. Clearly the most amazing site thread of all time. So glad all is working out.
—
I just stumbled across this 10 minutes ago. To all who offered their help: thank you for restoring some of my lost faith in humanity.

The thread: “Help me help my friend…” turned into an online transcript of a rescue mission.

Amazing.

Wikipedia editors are leaving.

One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe — particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

“Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment,…Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again.”

Wikipedia’s struggles raise questions about the evolution of “crowdsourcing,” one of the Internet era’s most cherished principles. Crowdsourcing posits that there is wisdom in aggregating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users. It has been promoted as a new and better way for large numbers of individuals to collaborate on tasks, without the rules and hierarchies of traditional organizations.

I’m dubious about crowdsourcing myself. But Wiki speaks for itself. If Tim Berners-Lee is being suggested for a Nobel Prize then Jimmy Wales and team should get two for Wikipedia. With all its problems, patchiness, drift, Wiki is an enormous contribution to the betterment of the world. Wiki is an Ancient Library of Alexandria brought up to date and democratized (to some extent — there have been discussions about just how large the significant cohort of contributors truly is [see Aaron Swartz]). If you take Wiki with a grain of salt you will do fine. But that is true of Britannica as well. It’s true about most things.

We often see pelicans flying above as we run. The flocks we see are usually of 7 or 13 birds, flying in synchrony — a wistful, gliding, effortless flight. They are noble creatures.

According to wiki pelicans are gregarious and attentive to their young. The young can exhibit an odd behavior: “Before or especially after being fed, [the young] may seem to have a seizure that ends in falling unconscious; the reason is not clearly known.”

Like pigeons, pelicans are so common it would be easy to miss what amazing creatures they are. We take too much for granted, in this luminous, teeming realm of our lives.

We once saw a pelican standing on a pier. Just standing there, with people going by. There was some refuse at its feet and a seagull wanted to have a look. But this meant approaching the giant bird. The seagull would dash in, peck-at-refuse, and rush back. The pelican continued to stand impassively, in alpha state. Eventually, the seagull got its hard won prize: juicy refuse pulled from the shadow of the looming, inscrutable pelican. A tale of derring-do to tell its seagull mates.

Much as I like the show House I have to admit I grit my teeth until I get into the narrative. The formulaic characters, the quick-talk affectations, the fact that House is never wrong and the fawning sycophants are always wrong is a lot to navigate for the fun in their banter.

The show is at war with itself: It is supposed to be, according to its creator, a mystery, where the bad guy is the disease, but devolves to conventional “character” driven formulas, which then further deprecates into silliness — the cheap thrill of a good line — rather than revelation about the characters.

You never fully understand what the House characters are discussing medically and the final outcome where patient is saved and endearingly grateful to an indifferent Greg House (who cares only about solving mysteries) makes you want a site to go to where you can read about the medical premise and leave the ego laden crew behind.

Turns out the NYT has a more satisfying alternative, as a doctor recounts what are essentially medical short stories, which happen to be true. Informative. Provocative. Nutritive. No bloat.

These tales of medical sleuthing and the vagaries of diagnosis (often pure luck in that the right intern was there to see the presenting patient) leave you amazed at the cleverness — and feeling vulnerable that the successful outcomes hang by the frail thread of pure chance encounter.

From the moment Palomba first laid eyes on the wasted and febrile patient, she knew she had to do something fast. “It was clear he was dying,” she told me. Looking through his chart, Palomba concluded that he probably wasn’t having a recurrence of his cancer.She went back to the idea suggested by the medical student. Could he have HLH? In this disease, the balance between the body chemicals that suppress macrophages and those that turn them on is somehow lost, and as a result, these primitive fighter cells ramp up into a frenzy and consume everything in their path.

As it turns out, the doctor who writes this Diagnosis series for the NYT is a consultant for House. She should write the shows.

This NYT article about the OED explains how many archaic definitions are being buried in the graveyard of ancient meaning.

There is a sort of mourning mixed with understanding at such inevitable change, evinced in people who love language; the writer asked if, “the editors might feel a twinge of regret over…changing” some definitions,

Gilliver also pointed to the word prothodaw, which has had its spelling changed to protodaw and lost its definition of “a prime simpleton, a noodle of the first rank.” Eschewing the pejorative noodle and embracing brevity, the O.E.D. now defines it as “a complete idiot,” which I find a bit brusque. The original definition was the only instance in which the improbable phrase “noodle of the first rank” was used in this dictionary, and now it has gone, most likely never to return. Sadly, I expect that when the word boodle is revised, it will lose its definition of “a stupid noodle.”