Fun

Food. Hands down.

Though, strangely, if it’s between hunger and lust, then lust. Hands down.

You? Food or Sex? Hunger or Lust?

134 sayings by John McCarthy^WP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.

Here 8 of the very best:

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to produce an ordered list of all the reasons you can think for Starbucks’s use of cash cards. (They’ve just been introduced in Mexico, though they’ve been around in the US for some 6 or so years). Something like:

Remember, this is about why Stbx does this, not why customers buy the cards (which is another mystery onto itself).

The winner will be announced at elzr.com/posts/Marketing-Challenge on Monday, September 24th. All lists shall be published in said post. The prize will be 25 dollars in Starbucks card credit.

It may prove a fun marketing challenge. Happy listing!

Resolution:

Adolfo Rodriguez Navarro

I rather like this challenge-making thing, it’s like outsourcing thinking! Besides, it’s just nice to give things away.

It’s watermelon season here in town. Which means the cheapest, sweetest sandias of the year. The green bellies crack open at the slightest cut, roar, and out bulges sweet, sweet candy-cotton. I tell you friends, it’s a good time to be a frugivore^WP mammal.

Yes, it’s roundabout, but it’s due to the nature of the languages: Javascript does stuff, HTML displays stuff. When you want the browser to do things (instead of merely displaying dumbly what it receives) and when these things themselves involve a lot of displaying, you end up writing HTML through Javascript.

HyperScript is a bizarre and quixotic attempt to write French in English; that is, HTML in Javascript. Basically, you do what went on in the Norman conquest of England^WP: you anglicize as many French words as you can; that is, you turn into Javascript as many HTML words as you can.

function each(a, f) { for(var i=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) };
each('a big blockquote br b center code div em form h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 hr img iframe input i li ol option pre p script select small span strong style sub sup table tbody td textarea tr ul u'.split(' '),
    function(label){
        window[label]=function(){
            var tag=document.createElement(label);
            each(arguments, function(arg){ 
                if(arg.nodeType)                                         tag.appendChild(arg);
                else if(typeof arg=='string' || typeof arg=='number')    tag.innerHTML+=arg;
                else for(var attr in arg){
                        if(attr=='style') for(var sty in arg[attr]) tag[attr][sty]=arg[attr][sty];
                        else tag[attr]=arg[attr];
                };
            });
            return tag;
        };
    });

Instead of

now it’s,

And so on.

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

My feverish mind—à la…

Always have loved them. Always have obsessed about them. I treasure my favorites and revisit them again and again—I could barely think without them. I have a tag for them in this blog (here) and I almost started “a collection of beautiful definitions” to go with my eemadges website (“a collection of beautiful descriptions”).  A good definition more than justifies a whole book. A good book always has many good definitions in it. Good people always carry several good definitions with them—you just have to know how to tease them out.

You see, most people seem to never have moved over the idea of a definition as distilled truth—the one true essence which both captures everything that should be captured and leaves nothing that shouldn’t be left out. Definitions as platonic ideals—the perfect divine forms of which we only see shadows. The one golden fiber that runs trough all the thread.

In their supposed perfection, definitions only become cages. And we easily get to the point when not only it isn’t believed that things like “love”, “mind”, “conscience”, or “happiness” could ever be defined (again, as if there was one true definition to rule them all), but the very possibility is viewed with dread. Dread that what once was magic and alive is cramped and crippled into a cage.

Definitions are semantic flashlights, casting light on some meaning corners, shadow on some others. That everything be alight is only one criteria (ultimately impossible; only emptiness can be shadelessly illuminated), there are others—that it be bright, that it be dim, that it illuminate (or obscure!) a particular patch, that it be pristinely white, that it tint its subjects with its color, that it be diffuse, that it be focused, that it be favorable, that it be unfavorable… We say, teasingly, that an American is a “man with two hands and four wheels” not because we believe that it happens to be a perfect embodiment of what it means to be an American, but because we believe it casts them in an interesting light.

Here some definitions—some funny, but all out of sadness. «Whimsical» to be (mostly) understood in the not so standard sense of “subject to our whims”—of course.