Gramarye

Okay, so Kevin and I have been talking about putting together a collaborative blog of some kind, primarily as a way to cut down on the link-spam we forward each other and others.

Of course, the primary problem was finding a name. After literally weeks of discussion, we settled on a procedure, by which we each chose six names each, then ran them through a multi-stage elimination process: First, two rounds of elimination via “googlebattle”:http://googlebattle.com, selecting the less popular — and thus more brand-recognizable — phrase. Second, two rounds of elimination via “Lulu.com’s Titlefight”:lulu.com/titlescorer/fight.php. Third, two more eliminations by direct selections. Then, we would roll a six-sided die.

Our original system was turn-based, in what Kevin termed the “Pokemon” method. However, this created a problem when Kevin offered an arbitrary batting order and I did not (i.e., I won every round). In the interest of expeditiousness, I used an arbitrary order of my own, and the results were as follows:

h2. Round 1A (Googlebattle)

Crush/Tear/Curl: (191,00)
*Blowfish Deadly: (47,800)*

h2. Round 1B (Gooblebattle)

*No Forewonted Lodehead: (20)*
Very Low Sodium: (6,490,000)

h2. Round 2A (Lulu)

Relativistic Kill Vehicle (69%)
Slippery Crescendo (69%)

*Tie*

Googlebattle Tiebreaker: *Relativistic Kill Vehicle*

h2. Round 2B (Lulu)

Discontinuity of Meaning (64.8%)
*Friendly Tentacle Monster (69%)*

h2. Round 3 (Arbitrary

Nick eliminates Manus Incorrectus
Kevin eliminates No Forewonted Lodehead

h2. Round 4

Mr. 1d6 chooses: *Friendly Tentacle Monster*

“This”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/27/watch_displays_cheek.html is absolutely brilliant. I want one.

“The comments here,”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/29/diss_songs_go_back_t.html while interesting, tend to indicate a genetic relationship where almost certainly we’re looking at sociolinguistic convergent evolution.

“The Commonwealth Club”:http://www.commonwealthclub.org/, which I had never actually heard of until recently — when they started an advertising campaign on AC Transit buses with people saying, “I asked Yahoo’s Jerry Yang what name came in second,” or “I asked Jordan’s Queen Noor some question about the middle east.”

But now I see they have a “podcast,”:http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/weekly.xml and suddenly I’m interested. I listened to the most recent one, an interview with literary critic Marueen Corrigan, who has a book out about reading and how cool it is, or something.

Actually, Corrigan seems like a cool person, but interviews with her tend to devolve into trivia-swapping about the literary industry and discussions of how cool Terry Gross is. (Am I the only one who can’t stand her? Probably.)

There was one point that I latched onto, however, in the Corrigan interview — Corrigan discusses what she calls the “female extreme adventure genre,” in which women undertake impossible inner/emotional journeys, usually suffering in silence. Which, despite its stupid name, made me wonder just how seriously I ought to be taking Joan Ryan’s assumption (which I referenced in “a previous post”:http://kukkurovaca.textdriven.com/gramarye/archives/gender-and-suicide) that there’s a strong and essential difference between isolationist male stoicism and fully socialized female coping mechanisms.

• My Lifehacker comment on CP Notebook
• Tom Morris’s comment
• My objections
  • Most outliners have crappy UIs.
    • Crappy enough to distract me from what I’m doing, or just off-putting enough to slow me down. A good example of this is the very popular OmniOutliner, which just turns me the hell off. The spartan aspect of the OPML editor turns me on, but also makes me a little uncomfortable. Sort of like your mother.
  • Hierarchical organization is still, essentially, chunk-based rather than -string- stream based.
    • Admittedly, not to the same extent as CP Notebook. But outliners still operate on nodes, and while of course you’re not going to write a document without including discrete textual units (sentances, paragraphs, etc.), interacting with them in an outliner emphasizes the discrete over the continuous.
    • I don’t think containment really has what I’m looking for in terms of applying metadata. This is why modern tagging beats old-school categorization; a thing is frequently not just one thing; it is quite a few things. This is where Ted Nelson’s “Zigzag” file system looms prophetically. How can that guy have so many unimplemented ideas?
    • Thus, the ideal editor would have the ability to mark up text diversely in situ, without forcing it into any overall structure. Ironically—for me—this sort of functionality can probably be most closely replicated in, of all things…MS Word, with bookmarks and highlighting and comments. But, of course, I’ve declared a personal proscription against all MS Word use (outside work, of course)..
• Summary:
  • The quest for a Nick-compliant text editor continues.

Just saw the “trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brick/trailer/ for “Brick”:http://www.brickmovie.net/home.html. Preliminary conclusions:

# Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be in high school for the rest of his life
# Is that Claire from ??Lost??? Apparently.
# Also, that other girl, who seems eerily familiar. IMDB tells me that’s Laynie from ??Everwood,?? god help us.

Also, the movie looks surprisingly good.

There’s a piece by Joan Ryan in today’s Chronicle (it just happened to be sitting on the table next to me) about the “puzzle of male suicide.” Basically, it consists of being surprised that men commit more suicides than women. Of course, it also acknowledges (eventually) that girls attempt suicide more often than men; it’s just that guys usually succeed when they try and women usually don’t.

In other words, women just aren’t that good with simple tools like ropes and knives, or more complicated tools like cars and guns. We knew that. All that’s needed to make the numbers balance out is encourage more women to cultivate manual dexterity and a functional knowledge of household devices.

Just kidding. As some have pointed out, there is often a difference between not just the result, but also the intention, of an attempted versus a succesful suicide; attempted suicides often deliberately choose slow-acting or less effective techniques because, basically, they want someone to find them and save them, while succesful suicides want to cut to the chase and actually get dead.

This Ryan person suggests that the basic distinction between men who commit suicide and women who try it is that women are acculturated to be comfortable needing help and showing vulnerability, while men are not. There’s probably something to do that, and you can probably tie it in to a broader distinction between the more social character of many women, as opposed to the (aspirational) rugged individualism of many men. Nor, I think, is this just a question of human culture — in the primate world, males are more likely to end up outside the social network at one point in their lives or another.

I’ve occasionally pondered (though not generally seriously considered) suicide, and I have a number of objections to most implementations of it, many to do with methodological difficulties (i.e., squeamishness and a low budget) and others to do with the message a suicide sends to the people around one — essentially, the real victims in a suicide are the loved ones who are left with your remains and estate and a tasty fun grieving process.

The only solution I ever came to regarding the moral problem was finding a way to vanish off the board for a while (i.e., a very long vacation to a remote area) and then just disappear, ideally after arranging to have someone periodically mail some pre-prepared post cards at regular intervals. Of course, it would be tricky to get this to work just right, and it would probably require the help of some factotum who was in the know.

Of course, no one has to worry about this in my case, because we all know how much I hate to travel. People would see right through me.