In media res

Nu, it's a Saturday night, and Amanda Wilde is on the air, and the tea is hot, so it must be time for blogging.

I keep getting tagged on Facebook™ for my 15 (or 16 or 23 or 25) Things about Me meme. Hey, I was the only who responded to Apple's tag, like, two weeks ago. We were meming before meming was cool! So, dig out the note, or just read this blog instead.

I'm heading into the tail of a whirlwind time at work. The submission of my second annual tenure portfolio coincided with a particularly busy stretch of grading, so I have been humping it for about a week and a half now. No rest for the wicked, either; another assignment just came in on Friday, and I should get it back by Monday if I want to keep my Cool Teacher® status, so there's still plenty to do.

I did take time out yesterday for the weekly D&D game. We have been trucking along nicely since we started back in late November. DM Johnbai created a great world for us to play in: he took the typical D&D high fantasy structure, moved it to a desert environment (consistent with the geography from the campaign last year), layered on some semi-steampunk, lost civilization technology, and then crafted a complicated realpolitik for the adventure to play out against. All this and bigger fireballs for Soapy, too! Otis is thrilled because her druid can now talk to and change into various animals, Dingo's rogue has been kicking some serious butt, and my new monk character has been a ball to roleplay. The only downside to the whole thing is that John took all the good ideas, including some that are rather too close for comfort to things I had been contemplating for our next Fudge game. Now I have to cast about for something new and good!

Hey, while I was out with a slug of tenure-trackers the other night, I ordered a pilsner, as is my typical contrarian wont in an alehouse. I think it was a Rademacher, but I wish I could remember for sure, so I could make sure never to order it again, because it was terrible! I sent it back, and through a concatenation of circumstances wound up with a bottle of Fox Barrel Black Currant Cider. I was dubious, but, man, was it good. I think I may have a new favorite drink. Of course, I am sure it's so unusual that I will rarely be able to find it when I go out, but maybe that will just make it all the more special. If you ever run across some, give it a try.


And now, let me clean out the link bin:

Well, it's not a jet-pack, but I'll take one of these any day! (It wouldn't take much to steampunk it out, or to turn it into a Whirly-Bat, either.)

Of course, one of these might be even more practical, if only slightly less cool.

Here are some cool pictures of food, in 300 and 200 calorie piles. Besides just being fascinating their blandness, they would provide a great diet plan: just eat seven (or ten) selections a day!

Here's a more artistic picture: a 100 meter by 78 cm photo of people on a bridge called We're All Gonna Die.

And finally, is this stupid or awesome? I haven't decided. (Here's the .com.)

[apparatus] American pop

Y'know, back in the day, like, six or eight months ago, I used to blog every day. I would often hie myself to a local coffee shop, crack open the laptop, and let the world know what I had for lunch. I reported on much more than that, of course, but that was the code for the diary-blogging that sustained so many posts, covering which movies I had seen, who had come over for a visit, what games we had played, and similar escapades.

I guess some people actually enjoyed reading all those quotidian details; at least, some have told me since I retired HKC that they miss them. In some ways, Facebook takes the place of diary blogging, but the Status Updates, one- or two-sentence "what I am doing now" notices, always written in the third person, are short and cryptic and lack even the minimal perspective that even a late night blog post has. I guess I could turn my Facebook page into a full-blown blog, writing Notes on my Wall instead of posts on my blog, and uploading photos and videos, but it doesn't seem that the system wants that. I don't get the sense that anyone ever visits anyone else's page, but instead everyone just read their feeds (and let's not get into all the poking and sending of virtual gifts and such). In the end, Facebook (or any other social networking site) is doing something different than what a blog does.

But it's not really the lack of a proper outlet for lunch-posts that I am concerned with; the world is not poorer for the loss of updates on the minutiae of my life. It is rather that that river of information that I created with those simple posts provided a medium for other writing - and other thinking - to happen in, and I miss that. My new format was intended to encourage me to try more developed pieces - longer texts with more complicated treatments of their topics. That is all well and good, but I have discovered that what is missing from the process now is what we call writing to learn. Sketching out those low-key responses to daily events helped to generate more developed thought; the act of writing modifies the the act of thinking, and lunch-posts sometimes beget true essays.

In an amazingly self-referential way, this one did. I had intended to just jump in with a few pop culture references and links to have some fun, but as I was drafting and revising the introduction, I realized I had more to say about the blogging itself than I thought I did. Hence this ever-lengthening rumination.

I guess what I need to do is make myself some space to some writing. Hmmm.... y'know, I might have said that before. I should listen to me.

Now back to our regularly scheduled post, already in progress:

Otis is all excited about the inauguration, so here's her own hope-ful poster:

Get your own at Obamicon.me

Isn't this how every old Flash Gordon serial started?

For everyone who had a crush on Winnie Cooper: she's a math geek now!

And I can't tell if this is a fake or not, but either people were doing parkour before there was a word for it, or it is a totally cool little fraud:



And we love us our steampunk here, and I think this qualifies:

[apparatus] Like a moth to the Flam (& a Francophone challenge)

For my birthday a couple of years ago, Otis hit me with a superhero-themed surprise party. To help set the appropriate mood, she downloaded a bunch of superhero-themed music. Among the usual suspects (John Williams' Superman theme, the Wonder Woman TV show theme, Jim Infantino's Ballad of Barry Allen, Crash Test Dummies' Superman's Song, &c.) was a peppy little number we couldn't identify.

The song was in French, and other than a repeated "Capitaine" we couldn't suss out the words at all, but it had laser noise in the background and was clearly heroic-anthemy. We were playing the CD again last night, and this song came on, catching the attention and piquing the curiosity of pals Dingo and the linguistical Wheylona. A little intarweb research later, we had an answer: it was the theme music for the French edition of a 1970s Japanese animated version of the adventures of a 1940s American pulp science hero, Captain Future. But you gotta check out the music yourself:



Cool, innit? One of the sources said it hit the pop charts in France, contributing to the relative success of the show there. There was apparently an American condensed "movie" version, but the TV series itself was popular across the globe.

Italy:



Germany:



The Arab world:



I don't think any of those other themes have the hook that the French version does, though.

I haven't had a Francophone pal be able to keep up with the lyrics on any given listen to offer a decent translation, so here's a transcription I found on the web. Post in the comments your best and most poetical translation to win some sort of prize, or at least the esteem of your peeps.

Chantal Goya on 6Lyrics.com

Capitaine Flam! A new hero for a new era!


Footnote department: Wheylona did guess that the French version became "Captain Flame" because the best sense of "future" in French is captured by "avenir" and that sort of conflicts with the big ol' F on the Captain's belt buckle.