The Indigestible

…however, the news that Nickelodeon is considering a show dealing with the subject of sex and love just makes me groan.

Their absolutely ludicrous treatment of the subject of youth romance with the inane, pointless Naked Brothers Band alone should warn parents about the "value" of anything else Nick execs might have to say on the topic. And to make matters worse, Britney seems to be in denial about the whole thing.*

As for the entire Spears family:

1. I can't imagine anyone being surprised by the news in the first place;
2. What sort of a sad commentary is it that the Spears are apparently distraught because they were relying on Jamie to provide the family with income — I mean, how hard is it to get a job at Wal-Mart?; and
3. A sixteen-year-old girl is pregnant. Under virtually any other circumstance this would not be news; but apparently the topic of sex is just too delicate for some parents to cope with. Parents who are worried about talking to their kids on the subject might just need to do a little growing up of their own first.

It appears the train wreck of the Spears franchise is just going to continue.

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* Though, given her tenuous grip on reality of late, this isn't exactly surprising either.

I mentioned last week that I'd assembled a few tabloid-sized posters for Yoshi's room, in what I hope will be a successful attempt to instill wonder at the nature of … well, nature.

Below the fold is the first set of those posters, as JPEG previews with links to the PDFs (for high-res printing; these are pretty big files), in case anyone else wants them too.

There are other posters; I'll put them up later. Enjoy!

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A 10-year old Ocala [Florida] girl brought her lunch to school and a small kitchen knife to cut it. […] The student now faces a felony charge for the possession of a weapon on school property and the principal suspended her for ten days.

There's no real need to read farther, is there?

Almost sometimes, almost
I can feel you there beside me, as I walk
along the aisles in the store and select produce,
fruits and vegetables crisp
vibrant and bright — and there
almost, in my vision, another vibrance

unanswered by the full gaze but almost, almost there, and I wonder how I can miss someone
I have yet to meet.

In the car, on the drive, my palm
rests open on the seatedge beside me
where your knee might be as I think
of what we might say as the world rolls past beneath
flashing and flaring in wild desert tans and reds and
dusky greens, and

with the theater seat beside me as empty I wonder if the ice bears would scare you. Or if they have already,
for you are alive now, a name, a face, a breath, held with mine in unspoken hope.

And if, after a day weaving light and dark in the depths of this samsaric exercise, you
would open your hands to direct the flow of cloud and rainbow,
the spat of rain on glass taking you back to the narrative and your eyes, dark or light
alight
as you say you want to learn music
just like August.

— the roll of time passing parsed in the beat of one heart,
and yours, unknowably distant, and the flashes past, beyond, outside the chill glass.

Eyes closed to the twilight emptiness of your vacant room
made more so by the made bunk
unsullied, unused unwrinkled and unexplored,
I feel and know the misfire, the flashes fading into dysthemia’s tarbaby pull,
the drawing off of day into a world of shade and autumn’s withered hope
— another season to weather, the mantle light but lifeless

the ceaseless pointless futility of waiting has had its effect, the course has shifted into
the chill currents, and the mast has heeled over under the cold disc of the distant dark.

This season of such importance to family, the drive that,
one year ago, brought me to this place of waiting
and which remains, still,
unfulfilled:
Another time best shared is passing, the shape of you in my life
still almost

but not yet
filled.

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Sir Arthur Eddington said this of our cosmos: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine." I was reminded today of that fact by an image I'd forgotten.

In an effort to reduce the bareness of the walls in Yoshi's bedroom (as well as in an effort to lay the foundations for his ultimate nerdification), I went on an image hunt, aiming for some good planetary graphics that I could turn into tabloid-sized posters. I googled Mars, the Moon, Venus and so on, and went looking for some Hubble shots as well.

I found some great artwork, including cylindrical-projection topo maps of Mars and Venus. This page yielded some great pics particularly, suggesting what Mars would have looked like if it still had water on its surface. Most of the continental mass would have been in the southern hemisphere, with the ocean a more or less solid body of water utterly dominating the northern half of the planet.¹

But I also came across this page from ESA, and specifically this image on that page:

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...well, if you're a graphics person. Who likes to get his work done on a stable OS. That doesn't harass you all the time with dialog boxes like a needy, attention-hungry child (I printed the file! I sent your memo! I installed the program! Do you like me? Can I please be even better? Huh huh huh?). And especially if you dislike viruses, Macs are better.

Anyway, each year the hospital does a gathering for its employees called the Snowflake Ball. Last year it was at the fairgrounds, and I put together a (sigh) PowerPoint slide show recap of the year. For this year, the gathering was at a casino outside of Laughlin, and instead of a PPT we were asked to do a DVD. The request came from the casino's side of the event; they were set up for video playback but a PPT presentation would have been problematic.

Fortunately Macs have iMovie built in, as well as DVD authoring software. (I know, a lot of PCs have that too, but the Apple tools are pretty quick to pick up and have a tolerably useful set of features.)

The loop part was pretty straightforward, but the title sequence gave me pause. It was something that really needed to be seen with attention, ideally just once for maximum impact. It was decided to use that for the program opener rather than as a bit of eye candy running in the background form time to time. The piece I did follows the fold; it's a 3.1 MB QuickTime video.

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Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time — update the work Mac to OSX 10.5 to take advantage of the new features, particularly Spaces (the virtual desktop manager) and Time Machine, the automatic backup engine.

Aha, ha ha, silly me.

I use Adobe's Creative Suite 2 to do most of my work. This includes the big three tools: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. PS is great for bitmap hacking; AI is a nonpareil vector editor, and ID is a pretty damn good page layout program. CS2 is one version down from CS3, the current release, but CS3 didn't do much for adding features so much as it changed the way a lot of the tools functioned, making them more accessible to relative novices.

Oh, I also use Acrobat 7 to print to PDF, because when your work is sent to press, that's generally the format desired.

Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the 10.5 upgrade, InDesign began behaving like it was running on Windows, complete with random crashing and unpredictable printing behavior — by which I mean that sometimes a document would print, and other times the exact same document would not print. OSX Leopard: Bad, bad kitty!

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