Not Yet, But Soon

Sorry for the total lack of rambling for most of the last month. Still under the gun and not feeling write-y (my correspondence has also crawled to a stop), but in the meantime, something nice to look at: The website for jazz musician (and much more) Noah Baerman, which I've been working on in fits and starts over the last few months, and then did a big push on in the last two weeks to get something up there. Still a few pages need to be done, but he disliked his old site so much that he preferred to put up an incomplete new site to it.

D.

Calendar Boy

Suddenly, everything is due at the same time - including the big calendar for the Jamaican patty company. Meaning that I've been working since 9 AM at the paper, then home at 7 PM and working on the calendar, and it's midnight now and I have another hour or so on this, then back to the paper at 8 AM tomorrow (today, as you read this), then back to the calendar to wrap up the complete first draft tomorrow afternoon.

Drumroll, please...

D.

Postponement

The algebra teacher tonight decided to delay the test for another week. I'm on the fence as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Oddly, for me, the most difficult material in the entire course is one the first test, being word problems in general and mixture and interest problems in specific.

Here's a mixture problem, from the text:

"A jeweler mixes 15g of a 60% silver alloy with 45g of a 20% silver alloy. What is the percent concentration of silver in the resulting alloy?"

Which I at first kept getting really funky and non-sensical answers for. And it turns out, as always, that the problem was one of the simplest arithmetic. Because, you know, 45 and 15 do not, in fact, equal 65. Once I realized that, it fell into place - like so:

Let X = the percentage of silver alloy in the final mix.
.6(15) + .2(45) = 60x
9 + 9 = 60x
18 = 60x
x = 18/60
x = .3 or 30%

30% was much better than the answer I was getting the first two times around with the 65g mix - 27.65%. Thankfully, the textbook authors know that the end users are likely to be idiots, so the correct answers are generally nice, round numbers, so my sloppy percentage was a tip-off that I'd fucked it up somewhere.

The issue I have with these problems is two-fold; I trip over my feet in my inability to abstract from language into math, and then that general unsureness tends to obscure whatever computational mistakes I make. Big car wreck, really.

D.

True to Lifeish

A strong recommendation for the new NBC sitcom Community, pairing contemporary professional snark Joel McHale with vintage professional snark Chevy Chase. The second episode use of Aimee Mann is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time.

The setting is a community college, and, boy, is it funny. Please do yourself a favor and ignore the Dave Factor on this one and start watching. You can catch the first three episodes on Hulu, but for those of you who might know a Nielsen family, I'd suggest crashing their entertainment center Thursdays at 8, to help drive up ratings.

KARL: You have been put on notice. Trust me.

D.

Bracing

My office smells like it's just had a shave. Which is because there was a large spill of a gooey aftershave lotion on the rug that I was only partly able to clean up. The reason for the spill is that I rolled my chair over a full container of Gillette Series After-Shave Gel. The reason that was on the floor in the first place is that my office is a huge mess, and every damn thing that I have no need for ends up in here, taking up space. The reason I had the stuff in the first place is that someone (I'm thinking my stepmother) bought if more me as a stocking stuffer last Christmas. I didn't want it, but I didn't toss it or deliberately take it with me on a trip and leave it in a hotel somewhere.

And now I'm paying the price for both my chronic indecision and my inbred slovenliness. See, if I'd just thrown it away - knowing full well I'd never be using it - OR if I'd put it in the bathroom closet where it could be more appropriately ignored, then I wouldn't be where I am now. Which is with tingling nostrils and slightly stinging eyes, as well as an ironic three-day growth on my chin that needs shaving.

Seriously, this stuff smells awful. Is this supposed to be attractive to women in some way? Perhaps it's aimed as an aphrodisiac at female lab-workers who have had their olfactory glands burned out by too many chemical interactions, and can only feel at the outer extremes of scent.

D.

Noah's Top Ten Weblinks, Inc.

Spending the day with friend Noah working on his site - this Rambler entry is actually being composed as an illustration of how to work in Blogger, which is something he may use to update content on his site. In other words: move along, nothing to see here.

D.

Slower than Light

I've mentioned in the past my admiration of Richard Linklater, a director who seems to swing between smaller independent projects and larger crowd-pleasing fare with impressive ease; making strong personal artistic statements with the former and not seeming to slump through his Hollywood projects.

Steven Soderbergh is Linklater's twin, but he's the boring one (not to be confused with the slow one, Gus Van Sant). I've gotten nothing out of any of his films that I've seen, small-scale or large, and even when the concepts sound intriguing (as The Girlfriend Experience does), I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be like all other Sooderbergh films - claustrophobic, slow, and completely obsessed with its own self-importance.

His remake of Tarkovsky's Solaris (being closer to that film than the original novel) is more of this. Where Tarkovsky uses extended cuts and slow pacing to build an air of sentimental existentialism (you'd have to see it to know what I mean), Soderbergh's film is just turgid. I could probably go on about the issues with Soderbergh's take, but I'll just say that the man perhaps needs to do a few projects where he serves as D.P. for a real storytelling director, and then bring those chops back to his own work. Much as Nigel Tufnel points out that there's a fine line between clever and stupid, there also is a line between artful and fucking dull, and Soderbergh seems to slide over it every time out of the gate.

D.