Scottunder

Quotes

Here are some random quotes I wrote down over the last few years.

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

-Stephen Roberts

Most people don't consider that in choosing their religion, they necessarily reject all the others. Within religions, too, are schisms, which are rejections based on dogma or doctrines. Each group defines themselves more by what they don't believe as by what they do. Those who've converted from one faith to another (or none), and those few who seem to find the good in all religions, are the outliers.And most seem to continue the faith of their families and may rarely have opportunity to question their habits of faith.

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

-David Foster Wallace

That's very wise, I think, and it's a good reminder to not to judge others based on what little you knw of their tastes. I mean, it's still unlikely that most, say, Dancing with the Stars fans would enjoy opera, but that's no reason to feel all superior to them because you do.

In Architecture, as in all other Operative Arts, the end must direct the Operation. The end is to build well. Well-building hath three Conditions: Commodotie, Firmeness, and Delight.

-Sir Henry Wooten (1642)

It's "Delight" that I enjoy the most about this quote, and it shows that the classic ideas behind design thinking have a long history.

There is a period of time when it is clear
That you have gone wrong
But you continue
Sometimes there is a
Luxurious amount of time
Before anything bad happens

-Jenny Holzer

Holzer creates aphorisms like this in a lot of her work. I'm not sure why I've continued to enjoy this quote so much -- I think I mostly dwell on that period before you know you've gone wrong.

The final one comes from Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Jim and Tom are discussing useful life lessons. Tom tells a story about a man who fell down a chimney and broke hs back -- but he didn't learn a useful lesson, because he couldn't climb chimneys anymore and he didn't have any other backs to break. (I prefer the original wording to the edited and inaccurate versions found all over the web, so I'll quote from the book.)

"But, on the other hand, Uncle Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn`t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn`t ever going to grow dim or doubtful."

-Mark Twain

There is nothing like direct experience.

Muppets do Queen

Really, I assumed I could go for the rest of my life without hearing this song again, but this is pretty much the best cover version of any song, ever.

Watch it full-screen in HD.

The Baroque Cycle

 Hoo boy.

I've completed a marathon of reading comprising 2600-plus pages of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle. The work is divided into eight novels, bound into three volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. It's all one story, though, and I don't think a single segment would stand alone, though it would entertain.

Stephenson is most well known for his science fiction classics Snowcrash and The Diamond Age. But he followed those up with Cryptonomicon, which takes place during World War II and the present day, and has little or no speculative aspects at all. (I read it when it was first released, and, tempted though I am, I won't be rereading it just now.)

Cryptonomicon is part historical novel, mixing fictional characters with real-life figures such as Alan Turing, Douglas MacArthur. and Winston Churchill, and part techno-thriller, as characters set up a complex data haven and money deposit center. Both stories discuss and use cryptography and cryptanalysis extensively, and a recurring theme involves the spread of information and disinformation and the burden of secret knowledge that can't be acted on.

The Baroque Cycle is a sort of prequel, though not really. Its timeframe involves events from the late 17th and early 18th century involving characters whose otherwise unrelated descendants star in Cryptonomicon.

There are three main characters in The Baroque Cycle: "Half-Cocked" Jack Shaftoe, an illiterate "mudlark" from London who lives a charmed and charming life as a vagabond. In his early twenties, while serving as a soldier during the Turkish siege of Vienna, he meets Eliza, abducted as a young girl from North English Islands and raised as a harem slave. From there they journey across Europe and meet the great German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. Eliza's quick intelligence and beauty take her into the courts and salons of Europe, while Jack's foolhardiness and luck take him literally around the world.

The third character is Daniel Waterhouse, son of a Puritan dissenter who helped put Cromwell on the throne. As a young man, Daniel rooms with Isaac Newton at Cambridge. His religious and political past and love of the nascent field of Natural Philosophy -- what we'd now call science -- put him at the center of multiple and overlapping movement in England, in Europe, and in the American colonies.

A fourth character is the mysterious, wise, funny, and literally ageless Enoch Root, who shows up throughout the series as well as in Cryptonomicon. He gets some of the best lines.

As background to all this, our characters (and thus we) are witness to:

• the shifting allegiances and power of Europe's interrelated ruling classes, who spend decades at war with the nonchalance of chess players
• the bitter rivalry between Newton and Leibniz, which is superficially about who invented the calculus
• the related birth of Natural Philosophy as both a more mechanistic view of the universe and a reaction to the religious and mystical underpinnings of alchemy
• the rather alchemical properties of money, as trade moves from barter to cash to credit, and money's value becomes less tied to the intrinsic worth of specific metals, especially gold
• the degradations and sheer filth of everyday life in Europe.

Stephenson has done some amazing homework to create this work. It's both a rollicking adventure (I'm reminded of Dumas's Three Musketeers) and an educational tour of life at the beginning of the age of enlightenment, a la Braudel. As always, what I loved most was seeing the origins of things we daily take for granted.

I'll finish with an excerpt featuring Enoch Root, who was the only Western member of a ship allowed to visit Japan, which at that time had kicked out all foreigners and closed itself off from Western trade.

To Jack the only thing he said was, "It is a very strange country."

"How strange?" Jack asked.

Enoch shook his head and answered "Enough to make me understand how strange Christendom is."

Four weddings and an ordination

Several years ago, my good friend John wanted to get married, and he wanted me to perform the ceremony. I looked into this and discovered two things: one, that some states run a tidy little business allowing non-ordained people to perform marriages for a fee; and two, that the Universal Life Church ordains ministers for free, and they are allowed to perform weddings in all fifty states.

This has a long and slightly complex history that depends on the very definition of marriage: a legal contract between two people that is recognized by the state. This is, of course, a civil marriage; a religious marriage is not recognized by the state at all. In the US, states recognize the civil ceremony as happening simultaneously with the religious service, and religious leaders -- priests, rabbis, ministers -- are legal officiants in addition to sacred ones. In other countries, for instance France and Belgium, a civil ceremony must be held before the religious event. 

So, in order to allow a religious leader to be a legal officiant, you have to back up and define this person. A Bucks County, Pennsylvania, case quotes the relevant statute as "a minister, priest or rabbi from any regularly established church or congregation," which leaves the definition of those terms up to individual judges, but ULC ministers have been upheld as legitimate officiants in several cases.

In 1959, Kirby J. Hensley, acting on the First Amendment clause stating "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," decided to establish his own church, the Universal Life Church.  He came up with a religion with a single creed, Do only that which is right, and an underlying respect for whatever other spiritual beliefs people want to hold. Some take this more seriously than others. Some have unsuccessfully tried to use their ministerial status to avoid military service or income taxes, but most ordained ministers just want to perform marriages and other services.

Personally, I love the idea of a church with a single creed. Let's see it again:

Do only that which is right.

That's a fine basis for a religion. Lots of personal responsibility there, and it avoids bringing those messy "others" into play, as the Golden Rule does. Plus, no need to suspend disbelief on a wide variety of supernatural beings and events that may or may not be allegories. Taken to an extreme, I can find the principles of Buddhist thought in this one sentence, and even spin it to advocate a lifetime of mindfulness practice.

Anyway, I became a ULC minister in 2002, and I've now performed four weddings. The first was the marriage of John and Amanda shortly after that date in Dennis on Cape Cod. This was an excellent wedding, maybe my favorite ever, with a lot of music integral to the service: John played a song to Amanda on his twelve-string, and Amanda sang a song to John with her bridesmaids a cappella. (In a sort of belt-and-suspenders action, we also paid the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a small fee that allowed me to perform this specific wedding for these two people at the set time and place only. This was unnecessary, but I only discovered it later.)

A few years later -- 2006? 2007? -- I officiated at a "short and sweet" ceremony for Rachel, the daughter of one of my oldest friends, Dave Martinez, and his wife Judy, at the Grange Hall in south San Jose. "Short and sweet" because that was the name of a ceremony we adapted from a book of examples I got from the library. And it was a sweet ceremony, outdoors, with lots of old friends from my generation in attendance.

In August of 2007, I performed a wedding for two folks I didn't know, Dave and Debra Ashby, the neighbors of my father in Santa Clara. Dad and I drove to the beach in Capitola, and I read their ceremony on a structure at the edge of the water while Debra's mother and daughter, as well as a couple surfers, looked on. They seemed quite happy, high school friends who had reconnected years later. A few months later they moved away. I wonder if they think of me from time to time?

On Halloween of this year, at the Rose Garden Court behind the Disneyland Hotel, I officated for the wedding of Gabriel and Crystal. Gabe is the son of those same old friends Dave and Judy, and the older brother of Rachel. This was easily the most traditional wedding I've done, with rehearsal dinners and receptions and Mickey Mouse ears and Venetian masks and such like. G&C adapted their ceremony from a commitment service they found on the web, so the words had a nice contemporary ring, with none of the built-in servitude found in some others. It was a lot of fun, it was over quickly, and all the various constellations of people around them made it extremely interesting. (As an aside, Gabe and Crystal had already done a civil wedding and so my presence was merely ceremonial. However, I think in the eyes of the Do What's Right god, I played an important role. Here's a picture of me looking approriately ministerial.)

Lots of good memories, right action, and spiritual comfort for a free five-minute ordination.

Mimicking inferior technology

Here's a thing I've noticed: new technologies sometimes mimic the kind of "mistakes" that older technologies allowed. It as if, having created and mastered a new medium, we long for the old days and the errors our old gear used to make, so we copy the most vivid of them into the new.

Note what happens about 54 seconds into this lovely movie of the artist Chris Piascik -- what is that? It's film trailer stock, added by the filmmaker, perhaps to underscore the sense of craft revealed in his behind-the-scenes look at an artist at work. But, it's a little goofy, because not only does the director show it "accidentally on purpose," but he's not working in film at all: it's a video. In fact, a lot of this video has washes of discolor that look something like film that's been overexposed or had a bad wash in the chemical developer, but no film was harmed in the making of this short movie.

So this is a vestigial inclusion, a knowing nod backward as the art form of movies jumps from one media, film, to another, video. Is it because the old media had more characer, even if it was more complex and less forgiving?

Photographers seem to love this. The look of Polaroids is popular: check out the Fake Polaroids group in Flickr; some digital photo albums will place your images in a Polaroid frame, or even break it up like a David Hockney photocollage. Another group on Flickr exposes the 35mm sprockets, and this Lomo photographer created fake vignetting.

TiltShiftMaker can turn an ordinary photo into one that looks as if you took it with a special lens designed for another purpose entirely (which lens itself mimics an effect possible with older view-type cameras, where you could shift the film frame).

Away from video and photo works, other examples exist. For instance, it's common to hear the sudden scccrrrrttcch of a needle on a record being inelegantly grabbed when some action has to come to a sudden, unexpected stop, like when Dad storms into your party and tells all your friends to go home. For instance, near the start of the movie A Series of Unfortunate Events, the fake squeaky-clean intro scratches to a stop (ffwd to about 1:44) to reveal the movie's real (and much darker) beginning. This sound has become an accepted trope even as vinyl disappears. (Well, of course, vinyl is still in use by hip-hop turntablists, obscure sample-seeking DJs, and Neil Young, but you get my meaning. How many 12-year-olds have ever used a turntable?)

Another cliche occurs whenever anyone in a movie or TV show has to make a speech into a microphone: the short, uncomfortable burst of feedback. This vestige is more about our former ignorance of technology, but after fifty or so years most public-address systems work pretty flawlessly. Here's a scene from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (ffwd to 0:34). This wasn't even used to create a moment of embarassment or to attract the crowd's attention. It just occurs to let us know there's a PA system.

Others? What about an iPhone app that lets you use a rotary dial to make phone calls? (It's not even well done: higher numbers like 8, 9, and 0 should take longer to dial.) Or adding sounds to otherwise silent electric cars? 

I'm sure there's more of this out there, now that I have my eyes open a little.

The Return of the SG

So, when I was 16, I took my friend Paul with me to buy my first quality guitar. I started playing on a cheap nylon string when I was 7. When I was 13 I bought a 12-string from Paul's sister, and I later traded that to my sister's boyfriend for a cheap Japanese electric and a small amp.

But at 16, I had a job and I could drive, so we looked in the 1978 equivalent of Craigslist, which was called the newspaper. The classified sections of newspapers were really pretty interesting in the days before eBay and Craigslist -- in big circulation papers like the San Jose Mercury-News, they ran for several pages, and were filled with all sorts of stuff that people felt was worth paying the cost of a For Sale ad to get rid of. Ads ran for a few days only, so you kept checking to find the thing you were looking for.

I was looking for a Gibson SG, I think because Frank Zappa played one. Pete Townsend played one at Woodstock, and Angus Young, but Frank was my guitar hero then. Plus, none of my friends had one, Les Pauls being the preferred rocker guitar. I found a 1970 or so SG Standard with the chrome Gibson Lyre tailpiece and the Vibrola tremolo bar. It looked like the photo on the right when I bought it.

I loved it, but I didn't treat it well. About that time, I saw Adrian Belew play with King Crimson, and he bent his neck while hitting harmonics quite a lot, so I did too. I dropped it one day and the neck cracked at the headstock, so I got that repaired. Later, another drop broke it at the neck joint, so that was another repair. I unsoldered the pickup covers, because that's what we did, and I swapped the tremolo bridge for a standard tailstop, because the thing wouldn't stay in tune. I cut my own plastic pickguard. I took it to the beach a lot, where I'd play through a Pignose, so some of the metal got rusty.

The worst thing I did was give it to my friend Tom to refinish. For some reason, Ford Truck Yellow seemed a good choice, and my friend, an amateur, did a predictably amateur job. No regrets, just a bad decision. Somewhere in there -- maybe 1984 or so -- I dropped it again, breaking it at the headstock again, and I put it back in the case and tucked it away in my dad's rafters. (I had meanwhile taken up bass, so I mostly didn't miss it.)

In late 2008, I traded in a bass amplifier I wasn't using to Subway Guitars in Berkeley, and mentioned I had an old SG that needed refinishing and repair. Subway handed it to Dimitri Tenev, a nice fellow in Albany who took quite a while to refinish it, because of bad weather, vacations, and the difficulty of getting the recent primer coat out of the curvy spots. I mostly wanted it back so I could play it again, so I wasn't worrying about authenticity or perfection. He suggested a tobacco sunburst finish, and I agreed. It's a subtle color that doesn't show well in the photo, but I'm pleased.

After 25 years away, I have my first axe back. I still prefer my Strat, but this is pretty schweet.