Northern Song

I feel that way about the internet, sometimes.  I also can’t resist a telegram monkey.

great quote

Originally uploaded by New River Head
Last weekend was the 2008 Maker Faire, and Alyssa and I went both days. It’s a celebration of people who make things, run by the fabulous Make Magazine. We had a great time, and will definitely go back next year. We’ve been to all three, and there have been some changes.
1. There were fewer straight ahead science geeks. A lot of the people there are using science in form of technology, but there weren’t a lot of tables devoted to amateur science, I thought. There was a great science demo talk but it was tucked into a fairly obscure corner. The first year there were a lot more crusty old guys with their slide rules and a lot more biologists.
2. There were a lot more families, and a lot more first time visitors. The Make folks clearly made a push to get more people there, and it worked. Unfortunately, it made it very crowded.
3. There was a big increase in the amount of Steampunk.

4. There were a lot more people selling things, and more big companies.  I’d like to see more space carved out for the small people who don’t have anything to sell, or who are one-person shows.

Alyssa and I got our first wedding present! It’s a very nice espresso maker that we put on our registry at Target.  Unfortunately, there was no name on the box, or anywhere inside.  Thank you, mystery person (or mystery people)!

They have this beautiful exhibit at the Exploratorium where you can blow bubbles into a large acrylic tank with dry ice at the bottom. The CO2 from the dry ice is denser than air and forms a cushion of gas. As gravity pulls the bubbles down, they sit on this cushion, showing where the invisible air/CO2 boundary lies. Slowly, CO2 will diffuse into the bubbles and they sink to the dry ice. The final touch is that the water in the bubbles freezes, leaving little frozen bubbles.

This video is a more extreme example using sulfur hexafluoride, which is 5 times denser than air. Watch the foil boat float on an invisible sea!

Yesterday morning I checked my email only to discover a dozen comments posted to my blog.  My excitement quickly dissolved when I realized that everyone was a spam post.  All of them originated from websites and email addresses consisting of random assortments of letters (adfjkei@aeourm.com, etc.) , making me wonder what the scam was?  Do they look for people that respond?  Will visiting the websites tell them they’re onto something?  Do the look to see if the spam is deleted (which I did)?  I just don’t understand what they’re after, nor how they got to me since I think I have zero web presence.  Just weird.

Between the falls

Originally uploaded by New River Head

Alyssa and I had two free plane tickets that were set to expire, so we decided to take pre-honeymoon to Niagara Falls. We chose Niagara Falls since neither of us had been there, we thought it would be romantic and/or cheesy, and we thought we could tackle it in a weekend (since Alyssa had barely any vacation time). Plus Southwest flies to Buffalo, half an hour away. It was a really nice trip. We got a deal on a convertible, which was a treat for me. We spent most of our time on the Canadian side, which is much less depressed. Our first night was at a hotel a bit away from the Falls that featured a Garden of Eden room. It was a 70s delight, with eye-numbing wallpaper and a full size hot tube decorated with fake flowers. The falls were a short walk away and were definitely worth the trip. They are amazing — 20% of the fresh water in the world flows through the falls each year. Since most folks can only watch the falls for a hour or so at a time, the town is filled with chain restaurants, wax museums, souvenir shops, and miniature golf places. Lots of people watching to do!
The second night we stayed at the Marriot, directly opposite the falls. We got pleasantly upgraded to one of the top floors, with a spectacular view and yet another hot tub. It was probably the nicest hotel room I’ve every stayed in — new, spacious, great view, and comfortable. It had a sitting room at the window so Alyssa and I could watch the falls, and we did for hours.
We got to go behind the falls. Standing next to the falls at the top is impressive; standing next to them at the bottom is awe inspiring. There also seemed to be a beauty pageant touring the tunnels behind the falls at the same time as we were. It was odd to see all these beautiful, elegantly and minimally dressed women with sashes in a dim utility tunnel.
On the last day we returned to the American side of the falls, which seemed positively sober and classy compared to the Canadian side. The gift shops did not have nearly the range of crap that their Canadian counterparts did. The American Falls feature an island next to the two branches of the falls and you can take a short bridge to the island. It’s not as spectacular as the Canadian Falls, but you can get closer to the action. It was also interesting that all the fences were just waist high. In our litigious times, it was nice to see that both America and Canada feel that people will be more or less responsible for themselves.
We went to an IMAX show that focussed on the history and legends of the Falls. It was rather cheesy, and historically suspect, but the theater featured a large collection of ‘barrels’ that people had used to go over the falls. While I am attracted to a certain amount of danger, going over the falls just seems stupid. I suppose I’m glad that someone did it, just prove that it’s possible, but not worth doing more than once.

Perfect one-arm

Originally uploaded by New River Head

Just a really pretty thing to see. Fleeky (that’s his name) worked many hours a day for many years to get to that. Sigh.

After my long ramble on MAD, Zippy, and American Satirical Surrealism, here’s something short and cute.

When I was a teenager in the early 80s, Zippy the Pinhead seemed so… something.  It didn’t feel like anything else out there — its main character was a pinhead, first off — and I sort of liked it.  It ran in the Chronicle and because of its San Francisco connections (Bill Griffith lived in the Bay Area for years), the strip seeped into local popular culture.   I remember Bill Griffith’s illustrations (which were always very Zippy-like even when they didn’t feature Zippy) in lots of books and magazines.  I remember Zippy T-shirts, and Zippy cartoons clipped out and posted in the student lounge at my high school.  In retrospect, I think Zippy felt like a big secret that a certain group of people shared.  It wasn’t that Zippy necessarily had meaning to me, but the people that liked Zippy were usually a lot more interesting than the people that didn’t.  I also liked the way its art stood out on the page.  Even by the early 80s, artistic realism (or even strong art talent) was disappearing from the comics pages.

The strip relied on a sort of surrealism, where actions in one panel might have only the most tenuous connection with the next.  Indeed, sometimes it was better to ignore two out of the three panels and focus on the one that meant something to you.  The humor relied in part on a technique developed by MAD magazine where elements of pop culture were combined in unusual ways.  Zippy is always name-checking snack foods and often the panels are modeled after photographs taken from the 1920s to the 1960s, evoking random moments in the past.  Zippy often works a type of nostalgia for the days when America was a warmer, safer place (at least in theory).  A time when we manufactured what we used, when advertising was not planned to the last detail but was whatever the owner wanted (why else would we have muffler men and roadside ducks?)

Detour: MAD has a lot to answer for, actually.  The MAD writers and illustrators of the 1950s and 1960s were so good that they made their work look easy.  They mixed up a lot of pop culture references into their work, but they knew that the material had to be funny on its own.  The reference could be a joke, but it couldn’t be the only joke.  I found 1950s MAD magazines hysterical, even when I only vaguely got the references.  Early MAD was so saturated in jokes that I only needed to get a small fraction and it was still funny.  A lot of the jokes aged well not because the products and people they were satirizing were still around 30 years later but because the types of products and people were still around.  I’d never seen an episode of Medical Center, but the tropes of a hospital drama had barely changed.  Look, there’s the young handsome doctor!  Look there’s the risky medical procedure that might not work, but it does! MAD magazine also served as a history lesson for me.  As I read more and more of the old stuff, I started putting together what the old shows must have been like.  I now know more about 50s TV and culture and politics than I should.

I went looking for some samples of early MAD but found this instead.  The editors of that picked great quotes.  MAD really was scathing in a way.  Just as the jester is the only one who can point out the absurdity of the king because he means nothing, MAD could point out the absurdity of America because it was just a comic book.

Anyway, back to Zippy. It lasted in the Chronicle until the early 00s.  I liked it as a touch of weirdness on the comics page, a place that is often less weird than reality these days, but often found the jokes flat.  I doubt that it was any less funny, just that its humor was less in tune with me.  Occaisionally there would be funny panels, and every once in a while the strip would break character and Bill Griffith would say something as himself.  Those were often the most affecting and effective strips.  Here’s a panel about Jean Shepherd, a great radio personality and a cousin to MAD magazine.  He’s mostly known these days as the writer and narrator of A Christmas Story, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I recently saw Garrison Keillor performing a one man show and he made an offhand comment that he (Keillor) will be considered a radio genius only when every person that knows about Jean Shepherd is dead.

At some point, Zippy got dropped.  I think it was replaced by the equally weird (and consistently funnier) Pearls before Swine.  Eventually I got an itch for Zippy and subscribed to the mailing list.  Bill Griffith is still cranking out 7 comics a week and the strip is still syndicated in papers.  It’s still a mostly hit or miss affair, but I liked this strip.  Again, the connection between the first two panels and the last one is elusive and it’s really the first panel that speaks to me.  Sorry for such a long ramble.  I’m on Spring Break and technically abdicated from my adult responsibilities.