Seriously, Blogger has all the glitz and glamor of Geocities: it is the Internet’s tacky trailer park where people end up because they figure Google (or, in the old days, Yahoo!) must know something about managing blogs, but in reality it is just a neglected, wayward, red-headed stepchild from a former acquisition that one night that Larry Page got drunk after the company ski trip and woke up in Reno . . .

This from the “Blogger” forum after I had an issue posting a comment on one of their blogs.

I like to think they have gotten better over the years, but right now it looks like the way they handle errors is that they have replaced a vague, general error message with a series of codes, and if you feel really enterprising you may eventually learn that there’s a form somewhere where you can paste in details regarding the error code you encountered in to a Google spreadsheet. But no, linking the error display to the part where you describe how you provoked the error . . . that would be too obvious . . .

Yeah, anyway.

So, we were all of us walking down a mosaic-tiled road, as if towards the city of Oz, where we expected to learn from an all-knowing wise man why it was that Tim Gunn had become a racist potty-mouth. The mosaic-tiled road began to break up in to sand dunes, finally coming to an end. I looked around the desert and saw mushroom clouds blooming behind us in a regular pattern like a planted forest. The Earth was being carpet-bombed with nuclear weapons and I briefly wondered to myself if that was possible and practical: why would you carpet-bomb a desert?

I knew the end of everything was at hand, so as the bombs drew near I wrapped my arms around my lover and smothered her fall to the ground. As the heat arrived and I woke from my dream I wasn’t sure if I was holding my sweetheart or a large sack of cat food. I think my brain was trying to plan ahead, because I often feed the cats after I wake up.

Anyway, Tim Gunn, if you ever read this, please don’t ever start to use the N word, especially if Sarah Palin gets elected president.

I had another dream last night, where we stopped at Grand Army Plaza because I’d seen a Blue-Footed Booby lay a big blue egg and walk away. We were concerned for the safety of the egg, so I went to move it into the shrubbery and bury it a little, except first my companion stepped on it a bit, cracking the shell. I sat the egg upright so the yolk wouldn’t leak and on my companion’s advice we began covering it with leaves. I found the egg was kind of like a potato and I could cut some skin from one side to patch the hole over the yolk. Things were going well enough until my partner did something I don’t remember that caused the egg to fail. I was upset, mad, discouraged, but got over the tragedy quickly enough. When we got back on the bus The Oppressor started criticizing my partner for her failings. This made me mad. I got up in his face and reminded him about his karma.

That dream was a pretty obvious reference to an episode earlier in the week where we “rescued” a fledgling from another corner of Grand Army Plaza, but due to bad advice and my own complacency, and the inherent difficulty of avian rescue, the little thing perished. I was upset, mad, and discouraged, and my partner was mad at me for the whole thing, which made me mad at her. In the following days I had more sympathy for her view because she’s working in a difficult, complex, high-stress, high-stakes environment where saving weak fragile little newborns is their passion. And there is always the fear of screwing up, which means suffering and often death, for the meekest of human beings, followed by blame, criticism, lawsuits. She shouldn’t have brought that home and laid it on me, but on the other hand when you live in a pressure cooker the steam is going to find your cracks. This will happen sometimes in a relationship and it is important to handle trouble gracefully. And she is certainly forgiving of my own shortages of equanimity. We didn’t talk about it, but she made me some cookies.

I read somewhere that in interpreting a dream, it is less important to figure out the imagery and symbolism, and more useful to study how you react to situations. Where earlier in the week I had wanted to defend myself against harsh, unfair criticism from my partner, in my dream I wanted to defend my partner against harsh, unfair criticism. I was pleased.

My coworkers were discussing the “stateless” nature of our periodic weeks on the pager rotation. I said that on-call was like driving across the country, a space outside of the normal flow of life, where night and day are flexible and after the first few days the miles all blend together. We’re moving back to California, where I have a job as a senior member of my team. A lot of the crowd won’t recognize me, but the old timers at the end of the commute will be glad to see me.

“You got a sweethweart? How are they?” Boys are sweethearts, girls are sweethearts, husbands and wives are sweethearts, and maybe your sweetheart is a cat, or a video game, or your spinster sister, or what-have-you.

The only place where I see this maybe falling down is with poly-amorous people who have multiple sweethearts, but in my experience these folks are so busy getting laid that they don’t have much energy to take offense at the most superficial of trivialities. Sweet!

The driver said he had lived in Fresno for a few years, picking grapes. He has done all sorts of work over the years: fields, restaurants, construction. He likes anything that pays American money, and has been driving for the car service for five years. His family has lived in Brooklyn on Avenue C for many years, paying less then $900 for a large two bedroom apartment. He likes his neighborhood but now too many white people are moving in.

He has two sons, American born. They understand Spanish, but they speak in English. He says they’re good kids, and their teachers love them, but he worries that in Junior Highschool they may be exposed to bad influences. He says he warns them every day to be careful to make good friends and to avoid drugs. There is a third child on the way.

Some years back he drank too much but that has changed. He loves to work. You see people, they speak good English, standing on the streets, asking for a dollar, fifty cents, five cents? “That is no way to make money.” He showed his sons that on a hot day you get some bottled water and sell it at red lights. It is always better to work.

One group that might really benefit are strippers: you really can’t stuff a Sacajawewa into a g-string: $5 would become the new standard for tipping. But if that is too steep for the clientele the house could offer change in old one and two dollar bills, which are offered to the dancers, who sell them back to the house. Imagine small bills forever consigned to circulate around the groins of a low-end strip club.

I think the Death of Paper Books has been predicted with the advent of newspapers, radio, television, microfiche, books-on-tape, CD-ROMs, the Internet, portable computers, e-books readers, and smart phones, but it still hasn’t happened yet.

I like books, I like holding them in my hands, and I like stacking them on shelves along the walls of my apartment. I suspect that this love of books will be transmitted to my children, much as it was inherited from my parents. I doubt we’ll have an “unabridged dictionary” or a set of encyclopedias like when I grew up, but hell yeah, as long as I and my descendants have the money to spend, paper books aren’t going to die out.

I think eBooks will serve a particular role, especially in lightening the load in school backpacks. For my normal routine of reading one book at a time, though, and then palming it off to a friend or family member, I am fine with having the pulp copy to thumb through, though access rights if I later want to search the book digitally would be nice.

I don’t entirely grasp Google’s strategy here, but if a plucky technology company that I admire wants to goad an autocratic government, I’m naturally inclined to sympathize with them.

So, while it is still around, I figured I’d translate Google.cn‘s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: 手气不错

手 shuo3 is a pictograph for “hand”
气 qi4 is a pictograph for curling clouds, meaning “air”
不 bu4 is a pictograph of a bird rising to heaven, which once meant “to soar” but today means “not”
错 cuo4 etymologically combines “metal” and “dried meat” for the archaic meaning “gilt” which nowadays means “mistake”

But don’t get hung up on hand-air-not-mistake as the characters combine to form two words:

手气 means luck
不错 means “not bad” as in “pretty good”

So, 手气不错 translates for me as “luck not bad” and that is what I hope for both Google (谷歌) and the 中国人.

Some people wonder at the recent Achewood story arc, in which Todd, a substance-abusing squirrel, attempts to “piss up a rope” and thereby triggers his transportation into a text adventure game in which he and Kim Jong-il together flee North Korea to found the “PEOPLE’S KINGDOM OF ECSTASY AND WRATH!”

To quote a friend: “Man, Achewood, WHAT THE FUCK . . . I don’t know if [Chris Onstad] is ignorant or nuts.”

So, leveraging my International Baccalaureate high school education, I explained:

He is riffing on a Latin American literary convention known as “magical realism” popularized in the English canon by translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

An example of magical realism can be found in Marquez’ “One Hundred Years of Solitude” when the town of Macondo comes under an insomnia plague. At first, people don’t have to sleep, but then they realize they are losing their memories. So they start putting labels on things to remind them what what they are. And they put a big sign over the main road that says GOD EXISTS. In case one might forget.

In the context of magical realism, it is entirely reasonable that Todd should type with a stutter.

Intelligence is the product of basic brainpower, passion, and education. The brain is like a car engine: whether you have a little two-stroke or a V-12 you still aren’t going to get anywhere without some passion fuel, and the going will be really tough without some nice, smooth educational asphalt to help guide you to where you want to go.

Also, to those endlessly debating nature-versus-nurture, the answer is usually “both” . . . you start with a certain genetic baseline, then a childhood you don’t have much control over, and you make of your life what you will. Some folks receive a terrible start in life and are going to have it hard whatever they do, but most people have something they can work with, and with the right sort of ambition, positive attitude, and tenacity, can achieve some sort of success in life.

We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the Devil’s bargain, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden!

私たちはスターダストには、金色のは、我々は悪魔の駆け引きに巻き込まれ、私たちは庭に自分自身を取り戻すぞ！

We are stardust, golden, we are involved in a devil’s bargain, we’ll get back to the garden itself!

私たちは、黄金の、我々は悪魔の取引に関与している、私どもの方では庭そのものを買ってあげるスターダスト！

We are golden, we are involved in the transactions of the devil, for us is to buy the Stardust Garden!

我々は、我々は悪魔の取引に関与している、私たちは、スターダストを購入する金色の庭です！

We are, we are involved in trading the devil we are to buy a garden of golden stardust!

我々は、我々は我々黄金のスターダストの庭を購入している悪魔の取引に関与しています！

We we we are involved in the transactions of the Devil’s Garden to buy the golden stardust!

私たちは、悪魔の庭の取引に関与している我々ゴールデンスターダストを購入する！

We are, we are involved in trading in the garden of the devil and buy GORUDENSUTADASUTO!

我々は、我々の取引では、悪魔とGORUDENSUTADASUTO購入の庭に関与しています！

We have in our business, and the devil is involved in the garden GORUDENSUTADASUTO purchase!

我々のビジネスでは、とて、悪魔の庭園を購入GORUDENSUTADASUTOにかかわっている！

In our business, and bought the devil’s garden GORUDENSUTADASUTO be involved in!

私たちのビジネスでは、とに関与するGORUDENSUTADASUTO悪魔の庭を購入！

Our business is involved in the garden of the devil and GORUDENSUTADASUTO Purchase!

当社の事業は、悪魔とGORUDENSUTADASUTO購入の庭にかかわっている！

Our business is the devil’s garden GORUDENSUTADASUTO be involved purchasing!

購買関与するGORUDENSUTADASUTO当社の事業は、悪魔の庭です！

Be involved purchasing GORUDENSUTADASUTO Our business is the devil’s garden!

GORUDENSUTADASUTOを購入することが当社の事業関係は、悪魔の庭です！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO our business relationship to purchase is the devil’s garden!

購入するGORUDENSUTADASUTO私たちのビジネス関係は、悪魔の庭です！

Buy GORUDENSUTADASUTO our business relationship is the garden of the devil!

私たちのビジネス関係を購入するGORUDENSUTADASUTO悪魔の庭です！

Buy GORUDENSUTADASUTO our business relationship is the devil’s garden!

私たちのビジネス関係を購入するGORUDENSUTADASUTO 、悪魔の庭です！

Buy a business in our GORUDENSUTADASUTO, is the garden of the devil!

私たちのGORUDENSUTADASUTOで、ビジネスの購入は、悪魔の庭です！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO in our purchase of the business is the devil’s garden!

ビジネスGORUDENSUTADASUTOの購入には、悪魔の庭です！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO business to purchase is the devil’s garden!

GORUDENSUTADASUTOビジネスの購入には、悪魔の庭です！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO to buy the business, is the garden of the devil!

GORUDENSUTADASUTO 、悪魔の庭されているビジネスを購入する！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO, to buy a business that is the devil’s garden!

GORUDENSUTADASUTOは、悪魔の庭園でのビジネスを購入する！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO is to buy a business in the gardens of the devil!

GORUDENSUTADASUTO悪魔の庭園でのビジネスを購入することです！

GORUDENSUTADASUTO is to buy a business in the gardens of the devil!

Here’s what the kids are doing on Facebook:

1 – Click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The title of the first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use Gimp or similar to put it all together.

Obviously I’m just killing some time. It is a quiet rainy Sunday. I’m making bread and have plenty of domestic obligations.

The above image could well be construed as lèse majesté in Thailand.