Garfield without Garfield

A few months ago, the blogger MackJ had a brilliant idea about Garfield: it would be funnier if the thought balloons were taken away. Garfield could continue to mug and mime, but he didn't have the words necessary to clutter up the joke. Jon becomes the central character; it's his strip, he's the human, and he's leading a pathetic, lonely existence where he talks to his cartoon cat from time to time. It points something out: Jim Davis is a hack who doesn't understand humor. He overladens it, and writes strips where he has to explain the joke to the reader because he's not sure he gets it himself.

Now comes an even more depressing look at Jim Davis: Garfield without Garfield. Now it's just Jon. Panel after panel of what Jon says, and only what Jon says and does. And it's depressing. Remember, the foil was just a cat: it doesn't talk, it doesn't really react except in Jon's mind. It doesn't even need to be there. And alone, Jon comes across as lonely, bipolar, schizophrenic, often manic.

XKCD made the point: Somewhere deep inside Jim Davis is a suffering genius, but I suspect Davis long ago ate him.

Spinach Beer

I mentioned some time ago that I was looking for a replacement beer for Stella Artois, a beer with obscene food-miles, and had found 1554 from the New Belgium Brewing Company of Colorado. Much closer. 1554 is not a replacement for Stella Artois; it has a very different flavor, but it's delicious in its own way.

Omaha and I went out to eat last night and one of the thing I ordered was a Mac & Jack African Amber, the restaurant's "house beer," and it was pretty good. Kinda complicated, kinda nice, touch of sweet and citrusy, but not too difficult.

I cruised through a few "beer review" websites and discovered, to my surprise, that Stella Artois is almost universally reviled as a "beginner beer." And as I read through the list of "recommendations" made to newbies, I realized that a lot of the people on these review sites weren't looking for the best-tasting or most drinkable brews; they were looking for bragging rights.

On the left hand, I suppose that it's okay that we've got so many microbrews and so much spare time on our hands that beer has started to reach the snootiness of wine. On the other hand, I can't stand the "Drink this, not because you'll like it, but because it'll be hard for you to wrap your head around." I want that from mathematics, not beer.

Weekend Updaterry.

Well, despite Omaha and I managing to get rid of both kids yesterday, we still managed to do not much more than go out to eat last night. We were too exhausted, too used up from a week of life. Omaha also forgot to take her meds that morning so she took the full dose in the afternoon and was pretty out of it anyway. Despite that, it was a lovely day of hanging out with my beautiful wife, and we had a good time despite it all.

Today, the weather was so helpful that after a quick breakfast of scrambled egg sandwiches I went outside and began cleaning up a winter's worth of damage, assessing what needed to be cleaned up. I swept part of the driveway and shoveled out the grass that was starting to grow up in the drainage nook in front of the garage. And I finally glued down that loose strip from the luggage rack on top of the car, comfortable in the knowledge that it was going to be dry and sunny long enough for the epoxy to set properly.

Omaha went out to some Democrat thing, and then later went out gaming with lisakit while I took Kouryou-chan up to the dress rehearsal for her play. She did very well and they were ready for the performance next Friday, so I think it's going to work out all right. While she was rehearsing, I went to the coffee shop down the street from the theater and, rather than write, outlined. I wrote almost three thousand words of outline.

A friend of mine had a T60 laptop like my own, and it died, and he ended up with a battery and no laptop, so he gave it to me. I finally charged and tested it. It's in brand-new condition. Which means that if I just want to write, and nothing else, I can turn off the wifi, sound system, and 3D drivers, and get a full 8 hours out of my laptop before I have to plug it in. Rockin'.

Altogether mellow, not much done today otherwise.

Emacs 22: "And to think... I hesitated."

Emacs 21 came out on January 9, 2001, and it has been what I've been using until just about a week ago. I had tried several times to upgrade to Emacs 22, but 22.0 was just not doing it for me: font management seemed to be screwy and it wasn't using the fonts I'd set. There were other problems with it as well. Fortunately for me, given that Emacs is often my operating system (and Linux is just its device driver), I was paranoid about backing everything up before upgrading, so downgrading was just a matter of swapping install and untarring (that's the Unix version of "unzipping") the old archive.

Well, Emacs 22.1 came out recently and I decided to try the upgrade again. I'm so glad I did. There are so many things that I love about Emacs 22, let me tell you about them:

Everything I used in Emacs 21 works

Gnus, Muse, Outline, W3M, LJComposer, LaTex, NoWeb, and Dired worked just fine out of the box. That made me happy. Even better, some of the programming modes are better, like the Javascript and Python modes, Ruby mode is new, and text editing now includes functional highliting and fill-individual-paragraph modes stock.

ACPI works

When I upgraded to my new laptop, which uses ACPI Configurable Power Interface, the battery status display, which depened upon APM Power Management, stopped working. Emacs 22 speaks ACPI, and my battery stats are back. Yay!

Regular Expressions are much improved

They were great in 21, and even better in 22. Especially the "do over" feature.

Org-mode rocks my socks off

I've used outline-mode for a long time, but it's clunky and difficult to grok. Org mode totally works, and fits my brain. It's an outlining mode that's very, very smart about "Do what I mean, organize it the way I want it organized," it speaks both an internal and external linking syntax (that's similar too-- but not exactly like, dammit!-- EmacsMuse's linking syntax, which again is similar too-- but not exactly like, dammit!-- EmacsWiki's linking syntax). I spent two hours organizing the Princess Jera and Prince Darwon stories using it, and was completely happy with it. There are external organizers for Linux, but a really, really good one inside Emacs totally fits the bill for me

Anyway, I'm just happy with it, and if you've been putting off upgrades because you heard 22.0 was buggy, well, 22.1 Just Works.