The sun is out, and so are the homeless

Drunk at 4pm
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Ah, the joys of living in the big city. Now that the sun has come out, so too have the homeless and in droves. Aggressive panhandling, signs in the parks now include "No urinating / no defecating" warnings (gross!) and every once in a while you find someone passed out on your doorstep. This photo was taken just about three blocks from my office, in a section of town that includes a lot of homeless assistance and drug recovery programs, barely a block from the new Seattle Art Museum sculpture garden. People were stepping over her. You can't see the 40oz can of malt liquor she's got hidden behind herself.

There is something objectively frightening about photographs like this: the voluntary helplessness, the abject self-degredation, the apparently willful quest for self-annhilation. Images like this don't make me want to help; if anything, they make me want to avoid ever being anywhere near her condition.

Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your litterbag handy!

Big Brother is Watching
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We've made a lot of noise and not a lot of progress in battling the oncoming universal panopticon, worried mostly about what governments are going to do with the information. Still, the phrase "Big Brother is Watching You" has been kept warm in everyone's imagination, which is why I find this roadsign so damned creepy. It's as if the Washington State Patrol wanted to twig you. Are you watching out, citizen!? Others are! Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!

Look, I don't like litterers any more than the next uptight Seattlite (who, dammit, went away on a "macrobiotic holistic retreat" just as I asked my question), but this billboard does nothing to make me want to turn in my fellow man to the authorities. I'm personally a fan of a certain level of citizen involvement in keeping neighborhoods orderly without having to invoke armed officers, and I don't believe that keeping an eye out for lawbreakers is just the job of the cops.

However, when the cops remind us that they want shifty-eyed peeping tops armed with cellphones calling in every minor infraction on which they can generate revenue for the state, I go into rebellion mode.

What do loons get out of their looniness?

What's in it for him?
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Okay, by now, with the Easter season come and gone, most of you have heard the riff about the definition of Christianity:

A cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father will let you live forever if you pretend to eat his flesh, drink his blood, and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that he put there a long time ago as punishment for all humanity because a rib-woman made from a dust-man was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magical tree.

As deliberately offensive as this accurate assesment may be worded, I have to wonder what believers like this guy get out of their lonely, abuse-filled ritual on public streetcorners. I mean, he just stands there once in a while, holding up this sign and waving at passersby. I mean, does he really think he's going to get anyone who's not already on board with his tribal message to sign up right there and then? I mean, come on: one out of every five self-identified Christian college-age kids thinks Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple in the Bible. What's the point?

Cat blogging!

Zombie cat.
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I have to remember to have my camera in hand when I leave the house. The other morning as I walked to the bus stop I saw a pair of raccoons high-tailing it (quite literally) up one of the pathways out the greenbelt behind my home. They were quite large, probably around 15 kilos or so, intimidating beasts. Yesterday I saw one of them again, but as I fumbled for the camera it was in the wrong mode and I got nothin'.

This morning I got this photo. It's kinda creepy, of a mangy grey long-hair that's been living in the greenbelt for the past couple of weeks. The light was very low so there's not much to see there but a smear, but the reflection from his eyes gave back such a solid and suggestive reflection that I decided to keep the picture anyway.

What money can't buy

Kids develop odd tastes as they grow up, and one of Kouryou-chan's was, for a brief while, the Red Robin restaurant chain. (Yamaraashi-chan, in contrast, is fond of hibachi-style Japanese food.) The food's okay there in an American "family restaurant chain" sort of way, although the place is loud and tries to hard to appeal to manly men, but it's tolerable.

There are photographs on the walls of the place, kitschy appeals to history, famous photos from Life magazine like Einstein with his tongue hanging out or John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed. There are two there that I suppose I should be familiar with but which I found fascinating the last time I saw them.

The first is J.R. Eyerman's famous at the movies photograph from 1952. What intrigues me about this picture is that everyone is wearing a tie and jacket or an evening gown. I can't imagine people getting dressed up this way for such an experience, especially when the presentation is insensate: the movie doesn't care how you're dressed. If it were a play or a concert, perhaps your mode of dress would be important, but not a movie.

The other, equally interesting photograph (I can't find a copy on-line, sorry) shows Clark Gable behind the wheel of his car in 1940, when he was at the top of his career in the old studio-star system Hollywood. As I looked at the photo I became more impressed by what Gable didn't have than what he did: he didn't have a radio, an automatic transmission, a breakaway steering wheel. This man could have had damn near anything he wanted, but he didn't know to want some of the things we now have, and even if he wanted them, they wouldn't have been available to him.

Both of these things prick at the writer in me: what kinds of events create dress codes? What wants do we have at each setting of our day (the work computer, the personal computer, the car, the kitchen, the bus, the bathroom, the family room, the television set) that we can't have? Are there any we can think of that we've never wanted before, but now make sense in context?

What is "geeky"?

Anyone who reads XKCD will recognize this moment in their lives. I have this sensation all the time. The other day I was deep into a conversation with some people over the difference between needs, feelings, and emotions and I had exactly the sentiment XKCD expressed. So here it is.

There's an emotion in the LJ palette, geeky.". I've been trying to figure out what this means, "geeky," even though I've used it myself from time to time. And I've come to the conclusion that geeky is a feeling all its own.

Geeky is a sense of focus and a sense of anticipation. It has a unique charactersitic, the sensation that one has grasped a live wire of insight and by following that wire to its one one will find generators of knowledge. It is awareness of a reward that potentially has no real world application and yet a reward that we willingly seek for its own sake. Geeky is an emotion that compels us to action, that meets a need for discovery.

Furious at Gentoo

I am about as furious as one can get about a programming decision as I can get right now. For years I have used the Japanese input program canna, which has been supported GTK, and was the recommended toolkit for Gentoo.

I upgraded to the newest version of GTK last weekend and now canna doesn't work. It's "no longer supported." Great, just freakin' great. I figured I could just upgrade the Japanese input toolchain and it would work, right? No good. There are certain dependencies and they go all the way to the bottom. All the way down to glibc^[?].

I have to reinstall the entire freakin' laptop. 584 programs.

Needless to say, I am not at all happy.