Tag: randomness

Holiday Madness

I was going to write a letter about this, but I’m not sure who I should write a letter to. I would like to adress a serious problem in christian traditions. That problem is that they got the holidays in the wrong order.
Let’s look at Easter. First, look at the pre-christian aspects of it. The symbols associated with it are eggs, chicks, baby bunnies, flowers, etc. This holiday is clearly about fertility and birth. Obviously. It’s spring time! The leaves are coming back on the trees! Sumer is a cumin in, loudly sing cuco! The bulls now farteth, etc. It’s time to mate your livestock and dust off your plow. But what is the christian holiday about? Death! Death and resurrection. It’s a great theme for midwinter, or even autumn, but it has no place in springtime.
Now, take a peek a Christmas. The pre-christian traditions associated with the solstice are harder to sort out, as the non-christian aspects of it continue to evolve. Santa Clause is a new figure on the Christmas scene. But some symbols, like stars and Christmas trees and wreaths and evergreen stuff is part of a very old tradition to remind us that even though much of the world is dead, life will return. The Christian holiday, instead of being about something sensible like death and resurrection is a birth holiday. How does that tie in to the winter solstice??
The autumn holiday, at least makes sence. Halloween (Sam Hain) is not a major holiday on anybody’s calendar except for Mars candy company. But the Christian feast of All Saints and All Souls (Day of the Dead) is about death, as it should be. There, at least, things are as they should be.
I know my analysis here is terribly northern-hemisphere-centric. Does a birth celebration make more sense at the summer solstice instead of the winter one? At least Easter works with the seasons there. It’s almost as if the folks scheduling the holy calendar had a hunch that the season were backwards someplace else that they might one day sail to, colonize and convert. And they thought to themselves, “some part of this thing has to make sense, or the folks with backwards seasons will never sign up.”
Now, as a legacy of some counsil held hundreds and hundreds of years ago, it seems like we’re stuck with a non-sensical system. But we can work together to change this. Write your Cardinal! We must demand that the Easter and Christamas be switched around in the norhtern hemishpere and appropriately re-ordered to match the seasons in the southern hemisphere.
Write your archbishop! Write the pope! We must lobby at all levels!

Dreams

Last night, I dreamt that I was watching TV ads for BeOS. They were combination personal ads/pleads for people to buy the software. Like the Apple switch ads, but more extreme. All these cute hipster girls with moodlighting explaining how BeOS was in trouble and they were going to be out of a job and they really wanted to date BeOs hackers.
But I guess Steve Jobs wanted to save NeXTSTEP more than BeOS. I’ve just discovered that if you pass a FTP:// type URL to the command-line ftp client, it does the right thing. This is good because Safari seems to barf on FTP, even from Apple’s member sites.
I like electronic music because it’s as nerdy as you want to be. If I feel un-nerdy, I could go write a string quartet. Moderately nerdy, I can do something with my synthesizer. Even more nerdy, I can edit stuff with pro-tools. Or if I get nerded out, I can download source code for a MAX competitor and compile it on my machine (as soon as I FTP down the latest version of the development kit from the Apple Developer Connection) and write software to do some nerdy real-time sound thing. Not that I don’t like MAX. But it isn’t a real programming language and this new thing, made by Stanford, apparently is closer. C-sound does everything, but it’s like command-line Unix. MAX does just about everything that C-sound does, but in a hands-off kind of way, like OS9. this new thing, who knows what it is. It claims to have more access to nuts-and-bolts, making it the OSX of audio software. Will it live up to the hype? It’s cross platform. Link: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/osw. I love new software. It’s like bright and shiny objects. I see it something new exists and I think, “wow! a new thing! It must be better because it’s NEW! I’ll abandon something I know works to spend hours trying to see if this one works too!”
It’s more fun than debugging MAX code, at least.

Homoland Security Update

Tom Midge of Finland today altertered casaninja’s Nun Alert status from Full Habit down to Mini Skirt. The system of warnings is designed to alert Ninja’s of a possible need to access sudio time in the middle of the night. Last night’s Nun Alert level was prompted by sound engineering that went on until past 2:00 AM. Tonight’s reduction to Mini Skirt, a level designated to mean that it would be all right to go ahead and invite the UC Cheerleading tea over for an all-night orgy, came about because the project is basically done and the sound engineer expects to be tired tonight.
The system was recently instated to ensure better warning and communication between Ninjas who wish to use the bed area and Ninjas who wish to use studio space late at night. Critics have blasted the system, calling it overly complicated and claiming that the very name “homoland security” is problematic and possibly biphobic. Tom Midge of Finland defended the system, pointing out that naked women appaear twice in his collected comics, thus demonstrating his committment to bisexual inclusion. He went on to state that he expected to have to raise the Nun Alert to Pantsuit some time within the next two weeks as intelligence indicated that other deadlines are fast approaching and late time studio access may become necessary.
The four levels of Nun Alert are:

• Full Habit: The studio will be in use past bed time.
• Pantsuit: The studio may be in use past bedtime. Be alert and on gaurd, but continue to consume and go about your businiess.
• Miniskirt: The studio will not be in use. Feel free to invite over the UC cheerleading team.
• Leather Suit: The studio-users expect to be able to use the bed area with you!

The Free-associative Press contributed to this report.

Synthesizer Madness

All of the synthesizer people went insane today. I got ranty email from all sorts of insane people. Crazy all-customer list rants. Random spite. Weird people. Everyone is very eager to helpfully point out everyone else’s flaws and perhaps spit on their ancestor’s tombs as well. Crazy people. I’m not opening any more email. Nobody sends nice email. Until the internet decides to play nicely, I’m staying in my corner of the sandbox.
Now I’m paranoid that somebody will stumble across my blog and get upset and send me flamey, ranting email. I wasn’t talking about you, hypothetical reader! I hate peole who always think that I’m talking about them!
I failed to get my Mills application in the mail before the last pikcup. Were I applying for studio arts, I would be automatically disqualified from applying. Hopefully the music people are more lax about timing (they usually are (bad joke goes here)). I’ll drop it off on Monday morning.
One time, when I was an undergrad, a concert started five minutes late. The head of the department was angry about the timing. It was record-breaking. He didn’t show up until ten minutes ater the scheduled start time. It was the earliest a concert had started in anyone’s memory. Maybe I’m just repeating old rumors. Grad school is insane. I dodn’t know whether it’s better to be ranted at over email or in person.
I got email asking if Christi and/or I wanted to be composers for somebody’s “Composer Spotlight.” Since the composer immediately previous would be Trimpin, I feel a bit underqualified. Maybe they normally have um… emerging artists.
I have a score prepared to submit to Bowling Green’s call for scores. I hate my printer. I ran the utility to do seomthing about the double-printing it was doing. Everything had two images. It makes things fuzzy. anyway, I ran a utility to fix this. Everything lines up perfectly . . . on the left hand side of the page. It’s wonderful on the far left. The right side is worse than before, but the left side is photo quality. Although it’s grossly unfair, and I’ve just been complaining about people unfairly targetting each other for rants, I beleive my printer problems to be Mitch’s fault.
First of all, Mitch owns a t-shirt with the name of the company that makes the printer written across the back. Secondly, Mitch said their printers were ok. There’s no thirdly, but it’s clear already that Mitch must steal me a printer from his work. They’re a printer company. they must have tons of decent printers lying around.
Were I not a highly conscious environmentalist, I would have thrown my printer into the bay by now. The stupid printer was only five dollars more than the print cartridges. This is obscenely wrong. I am not just going to go buy a new printer. I’m going to rant at Mitch instead. No, I’m going to print extremely ugly and somewhat hard to read documents, in at least 12-point font. Maybe 13 point.
I need to print my Bowling Green score. (I also need a title for it, sicne the working title “Trainwreck after one minute, thirty seconds” is probably not the best.) I think I will end up at kinkos or something. It needs to be in the mail monday. On mondays unlike saturdays, you can mail things until midnight and get a postmark on them with that same day. Saturdays, things shut down at 5:00.
Will anyone read through all these paragraphs of rantage? I feel grossly unhappy. I think I will mope all day tomorrow.
Last thought: I have a small flag that flew about the space shuttle Discovery in the first flight after the Challenger disaster. I got it for an essay I wrote on why the US should have a strong space program. Anyway, I remember sitting in my fourth grade classroom and hearing a school-wide announcement that the Challenger had blown up. Sister Magdelena told us to pray for the crew and their families. We turned on the TV in the classroom and watched replays of it blowing up.
This is not why I’m bummed. Maybe I caught depression from Christi or something. She sneezed on me the other day.
Mitch should fix my printer.