Pop Culture
On the albums of The Clash
Passing thoughts on the discography of The Clash that is not London Calling:
- Brian and I had a conversation that randomly veered onto the Clash which prompted to me to listen to all of their studio albums
- I have listened to London Calling a few times before, and recall some story about its producer encouraging them to go broader with the album so as to reach a wider audience; basically that it’s not much like their other albums
- I enjoy London Calling, but I’m not sure what to expect from a categorical English punk band
- I like the punk ethos of don’t wait for permission and build it yourself
- I strongly dislike when punk music is simplistic shouting
- Enough about me, let’s talk about the music
- I was pleasantly surprised!
- Their early albums don’t sound like the learned to play their instruments an hour before they started recording
- They probably listened to music outside of their genre even before London Calling 👍
- The albums after London Calling sound like they were trying to walk a line between keeping to their punk/ish origins and exploring integrating other genres into their sound
- I should mention that their “Guns On the Roof” is exactly the same riff as The Who’s “Can’t Explain”
- Would listen again!
This has been 🔥 takes.
A bold, future-retro Audi dash
I’m officially intrigued by the Audi TT and R8 going with no center display. The look is retro and functional. Will it annoy passengers, or do passengers who want to change the radio or see the map even matter in those cars? Worth noting that the 2016 A4 has the same display for the instrument cluster and a giant center display.
Another cool design detail: the A/C controls are on the center of the eyeball vents. Pretty cool!
I love when snares don't keep time
In the majority of music you’ll hear after 1960, the drummer does most of the time keeping with their snare. On 100% of Bruce Springsteen songs, time is kept entirely with the snare. I listen to a lot of The Boss; it’s a little surprising when I don’t here a consistent 1/3 or 2/4 snare keeping time.
That makes the drumming on most jazz albums pretty delightful. For example, Cannonball Adderley, “Games” (Roy McCurdy on drums):
We should make jokes about tech millionaires
I try not to respond to the bullshit in this world with “this person is awful and they should feel awful”. Except for politicians. I try not to participate in witch hunts. I cope via jokes and satire.
After making a few jokes about Paul Graham at RubyConf, a fellow asked me why I made fun of that poor kingmaker (not his words). In short, I think everyone should make jokes about multimillionaires, especially Paul Graham. He’s a celebrity-of-sorts, making the idea of Paul Graham completely open to satire and ridicule. My favorite such satire was a composite character from Silicon Valley who, due to the actor’s passing, will sadly not recur on the show. So it’s up to us, the unwashed internet people, to poke sticks in his platonic sides.
The thing to illuminate is how past Paul Graham used to have the analytical and rational skills to tell when someone like current Paul Graham is acting a fool. Graham suffers from confirmation bias and billionaire bias. He thinks his rational skills are still sharp enough to help him write about extremely tricky and irrational topics like diversity or inequality and he thinks his monetary success makes him doubly qualified to write about these topics from his own first principles. In other words, Past Paul Graham should know enough to tell Current Paul Graham when he’s out of his league.
I feel Paul Graham is an example of the geeks-shall-inherit-the-world and corruption of money that is bullshit in this world and everyone should apply satire to him whenever possible.
Things I’ve noticed San Franciscans deeply despise:
- housing prices
- nearby events that aren't actually held in San Francisco (e.g. the Super Bowl)
Word processors, still imitating typewriters
Right after we finish ridding the world of “floppy-disk-to-save” icons, I propose we remove this bit of obtuse skeumorphism from the default view in word processors like Google Docs:
[caption id=“attachment_3570” align=“aligncenter” width=“660”] Who uses this anymore?[/caption]
I vaguely remember using one of these to adjust margins and such on a real typewriter once. Its possible I used one to eek out an extra page in a school report during junior high. Since then? Wasted screen space!
Act like a modern device, word processors. Hide that stuff in a menu somewhere!
"Everybody Wants to Rule the World", too much of its time
I really dislike “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears because it’s a perfectly written song that sounds exactly like the year it was recorded, 1985. Five years earlier, it would have sounded mildly seventies-ish and been great. Five years later and it would have had a little more grit and sound very late eighties.
What I’m saying is, if I could un-invent certain musical sounds, the bass on that track would appear on the list.
Aliens through the eyes of boys
On screening Aliens for a slumber party of 11 year old boys:
"I like the way this looks," one said. "It's futuristic but it's old school. It's almost steampunk." "This is like Team Fortress 2," another remarked. "Dude, shut up, this was made like 20 years before Team Fortress 2," said the kid next to him. "This is, like, every science fiction movie ever made," another said, as Ripley operated the power loader for the first time.
I love works of culture that bisect their genre. There were symphonies before Beethoven, and symphonies after Beethoven. There were comedies before Animal House and comedies after Animal House. For action and sci-fi action movies, there were movies before Die Hard and Aliens, and there are movies after.
In all of these cases, the pieces after are a wholly better ballgame because the piece bisecting the genre changed it so completely.
New Pro Bowl selection explainer
Pro Bowl rosters selected by Michael Irvin and Cris Carter:
Last year, the NFL did away with the AFC vs. NFC format and began using "captains" to oversee a fantasy draft to fill out the teams. In 2014, Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders were the honorary captains, with this year's choices being Hall of Fame receivers Michael Irvin and Cris Carter.
In other words, they took the one thing fans can control about the sport, choosing the team in the game that means nothing, and gave that responsibility back to millionaires.
Besides the dozens of other terrible things about the NFL, this is the most NFL thing I’ve heard all week.
Is SNL trending up?
Has SNL been getting worse? Viewer ratings say, nope. If anything, it’s becoming more consistent and slightly better. Previously: how to understand SNL. Always: nostalgia bias.
(BTW, know how yes/no question headlines are always answered no? But this one is yes? LOL.)
Commercialeering
Things you might hear in commercials/promotions for software and beer:
“The first 96-calorie Pilsner” “Invented the smooth-pour top” “Next-generation build system” “The database that beats the CAP theorem”
American software and beer, much innovation, many hands waving. Solutioneering!
Sportsball Deciphered (II)
It’s Thursday. Sadly enough, this year, that means there’s football on. We’re far from peak football, but it’s getting closer. Prepare yourself, and tell your kids of the days when Sunday was a special day because no other day had real football. Now, on to more no-nonsense, jargon-free definitions of football jargon.
A Hail Mary is the most desperate offensive play. If you’re doing poorly, the end is near, and you need a miracle, your Hail Mary effort is the low-odds, high reward manuever to save the day.
You start executing your plan with the snap.
If someone inappropriately prevents someone else from doing their job, you could say they have committed pass interference.
If you’re not making progress forwards or backwards in your plan, and are instead moving laterally, you may have gone sideways.
If you want to commend a teammate for doing well, and you’re comfortable around them, you might give them an ass slap, but be careful; everyone watching will notice it and wonder things.
Coaching in the NFL is now sufficiently complicated that coaches often have a list of plays that resembles a laminated take-out menu in-hand at all times on the sideline. This is addition to the radio headset that makes them look like they’re working the drive-through at your local burger joint.
A strategy that involves taking medium-to-high reward, low probability chances all the time is not too dissimilar from always passing the ball. If you were instead going for lower reward but higher probability tactics, you’d be always running the ball.
If you run out of chances and don’t even succeed at a small incremental goal, you’ll have to punt. The other team will get a chance and hopefully you’ll get to try again, but your tactical progress will probably be reset.
A strategy that emphasizes protecting against big losses over smaller losses is not unlike a nickel defense.
If you fail to protect the leader, you have given up a sack.
For more, revisit Part I.
Vegas, America/Starbuck's playground
I’m going to Vegas this weekend with my wife on a real vacation where we’re going to do as little as possible. Not run around Disney World all day, not drive up and down the southern California coast. Based on this little bit of research, I can’t wait.
Put. The phone. Down.
Nick Quaranto has Too many streams:
There’s just too many things to pay attention to. I get questioned pretty frequently about this: how do you pay attention to nearly 1,500 people on your Twitter timeline? Here’s an easy answer:I don’t.
Nick’s conclusion, in short, is to put the phone down. There will always be too many things seeking your attention. You can never Read the Whole Internet. You can only hope to mark it as unread and go on with your life. Hence, just put the phone down.
I came across this little trick where you get all the stuff you tinker with off your phone’s home screen. All functional apps, no social networks, no web, no mail, nothing that’s going to grab your attention. Software calmness, per se. I’ve done it for a week and love it so far. I highly recommend it, if you have the means.
Sportsball deciphered
It’s September and football season is upon us. Thus, I will soon annoy the snot out of people who say “sportsball” and generally ignore sports. Some will be able to mute me on Twitter and avoid most of the annoyance. Others, however, work with me on teams and will have to put up with the times when I slip and work a football metaphor in to the process of software development.
What follows is a glossary of things I may say that are football and/or sports related and a simple explanation of what they are. I’ve omitted what the term means in football so you don’t have to learn any sportsball if you don’t want to!
Move the goalposts is when you change the rules so it’s easier for you to achieve your goal. It’s like how Captain Kirk solves the Kobayashi Maru test. (Ed. David Romerstein pointed out that moving the goal posts often means someone constantly changing the parameters of success such that it’s impossible to succeed. Beware!)
A lead blocker is someone who precedes a person trying to get something done and removes impediments to their goal.
If you start doing something before the official start time, or you start doing it and then have to stop and start over almost immediately, it’s a false start.
If you fully succeed in the task at hand, you have scored a touchdown.
A penalty flag, or just flag, is thrown when you break the rules.
If you force so many mistakes on your adversary that they run out of room to retreat, you have scored a safety.
If you’re doing really well, and you don’t mind giving up a few small victories to get closer to winning the overall game, you are running a prevent defense.
You might attempt to run out the clock if you’re winning and want to use a strategically conservative plan until the game is over and won.
A blitz is an aggressive plan to overwhelm by speed and force. Just like the blitzkrieg, but with less actual war.
The draw is about the simplest tactic you can apply on offense. You rely on one person to get the job done and everyone else supports them.
A read option is one of the most complicated offensive tactics where you prepare multiple different strategies and the leader choses which one to execute at the last possible moment depending on what they see in the situation they face.
More definitions coming soon! Leave a comment if there’s a sportsball term you’ve always wondered about and want a no-nonsense answer.
Jerry Jones: slightly human, mostly Faustian
The best thing you will read about Jerry Jones this year. Slightly humanizing, even. What Jerry Jones wants, he cannot have:
I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want to win the next Super Bowl.
The owner of the Dallas Cowboys is his own worst enemy. His general manager, Jerry Jones, is able to make decisions good enough to prevent the team from sinking too far. He is not, however, able to make the decisions needed to return the team to legitimate contender status.
If you somehow made it this far without knowing much about football, let me clarify. Jerry Jones is Jerry Jones. Owner and general manager. Everyone who has watched football for more than a few years knows that Jones’ ego is what prevents him from separating the wildly successful owner Jones from the wildly sub-par manager Jones. And yet: it never happens.
That said, it does sound like somewhat Faustian fun to hang out with Jones, as the ESPN reporter who wrote this piece did. On the one hand, it’s obvious that a billionaire is using his considerable resources to come off as a reasonable, alright dude. On the other hand, he stands on the side of not renaming the Washington football team, so you know that Jones is subtly awful in ways he can’t even begin to wrap his brain around.
A chunk of paper
So I’m in rehearsals for a comedic musical. I love comedy. I’m very “meh” about musicals; I don’t know much about them. I like combining familiar and strange things, so it’s great so far.
I carry a big chunk of paper around what has the lines written on it. Some of the pages are typed, some of them are photocopies of the script from the original production in 1995. It’s held together with brads. It’s completely archaic.
The director is kind of a “most interesting man in the world” kind of character. Mixed in with a little bit of the least organized person in the world.
We have yet to receive the actual music for this musical. We learned the closing song for act one last night. The whole song has fewer than ten words in it.
Basically, this is the opposite of all the computer things I do and it’s just about perfect.
Tony Romo media circuses over the years
2011: should not have thrown that pass 2012: should not have allowed that pass to be tipped and intercepted 2013: should not have allowed his back to become herniated 2014: should not have gone back for that last donut
The Romo singularity is nigh! Soon Romo’s every facial expression will trigger wild fluctuations in betting lines. Prepare yourself.
This is how you chalkboard
By pal Brandon Keepers, who I had no idea had that kind of talent. Well done!
Toot a horn while you test
Someone make me a thing that plays horn samples as my test suite runs. Every time a test or assertion finishes, toot the horn sample. A fast suite would sound like Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound (i.e. awesome), a slow one would sound like a grade school marching band (i.e. kill it with fire).