is a blog by Brendan
Brendan: So which is better–dragon princesses, or dinosaur princesses?
Maria: Oh, definitely dragon princesses.
Brendan: You think so? I don’t know…
Maria: Oh, come on. Dinosaurs only happened because the dragon bloodline got watered down.
Maria and I (and Michael and Danielle) are going to New York! On a trip! Ballers: You can come over on Tuesday, but we won’t be here, so you may have to play games in the hall. I am pretty sure that is illegal!
My uncle John offers a rhyming take on Atlantis, and my mom gently reminds me that of course I didn’t invent the form: both “California” and the game were inspired by a picture book she read us when we were young, called Whose Mouse Are You, by Robert Kraus.
Also, saved from the LJ comment thread:
Will:Where is Atlantis? Under the sea.
What’s under the sea? Not you, and not me.
Well then, where are we? The internet.
How’d we get there? Zeroes and ones.
What do those stand for? Video fun.
What is flypaper?
Me: Sweetness that kills.
David: What can’t be killed?
Scott: Everything dies.
Josh: Why do they die?
William: They run out of time.
Beth: What is time?
Kevan: Memory. [Then, because of a crosspost:] Curse you, time!
Ken: What time is it?
Stephen: It’s hamburger time.
David: Do hamburgers rhyme?
Scott: Not on my dime.
Me: OKAY NEW ONE. What is a curse?
Scott: Bad karma, realized.
William: How is it realised?
Ken: Through the teachings of the Maharishi.
Beth: What is the Maharishi?
Me: A teacher of hunger.
Scott: Where is the hunger?
David: In the bowels of the cursed…
Which seems like a neat place for a cutoff.
How many is seven?
For better or worse, (Ultimate) The Office is the new Arrested Development. The Tuesday Night Ballers gave it up after four episodes last year, when it came on after Scrubs; the first season was like watching a Christopher Guest movie with all the jokes surgically excised. But Yale, persistent fan, got Maria and me to try it again last week. And it got funny! Funny and poignant! They put the jokes back in!
It’s not as edgy or fast or thick as AD, and probably no show on network TV will be again. But it’s self-aware, filmed with handhelds, and clever. It’s good.
Also, I think Jim from the show is the subject of Jimmy Eat World’s name. Not because he eats the world. Because he angsts charmingly.
David Flora requested restaurant recommendations of me for a nice, sit-down, dress-up dinner with his family. Lisa had already plugged the Mayan Gypsy, which I could only second, but I tagged in a few of the other places Maria and I have come to regard with naked hunger in the past couple years. I’ve never done a broad-spectrum restaurant writeup before, so I’m stealing my letter back; if you are in Louisville looking for great food, these places will not do you wrong.
The Gypsy has my highest recommendation, especially the dish which is either called the “Tierra y Mar” or the “Beef and Shrimp Diablo,” depending on the day, with the beef cooked medium rare. It is god-food. Be sure to order the fried plantains, and Maria recommends the sangria if you’re drinking.
I also had some fantastic food (baked provolone, fresh bread and a steak) at Palermo on Bardstown, which is one of Evan’s favorite restaurants–you may want to ask him about it, since I’ve only been there once. Lilly’s, also on Bardstown, is fantastic, but dinner there will cost you a shit ton (lunch is more affordable). Palermo is Argentinian, I think, with a lot of spicy pasta; Lilly’s is a kind of combination of French and Kentuckian (eg duck spring rolls and chicken pot pie).
If you want something simple like really good barbecue, the best onion rings in the world and microbrewed beer, there’s the Bluegrass Brewing Company (BBC) on Fourth Street–did you go with us last time you were in town? I can also recommend Third Avenue Cafe in Old Louisville, which has imaginative sandwiches and sweet potato french fries, Trivial Pursuit cards on the tables, and Elvis.
My personal favorite restaurant in Louisville is North End Cafe on Frankfort, which has a little of everything; its specialty is tapas (Spanish-style appetizers), of which you can get three or four and make a meal for three people–the baby back ribs are amazing. They also have salmon, half a roast chicken, cheeseburgers, etc.
Oh, and you know about Lynn’s Paradise Cafe on Barret, right? It’s… different. Breakfast is their specialty, as is being very brightly colored. Maybe not the place for a nice dinner, but atmospheric and fun.
You’ll definitely want to make a reservation ahead of time at any of these except maybe BBC and Third Avenue, and maybe there too, for a Friday. Also, next time you’re in town alone and want to try something farther afield, remind me and Maria to take you to Saffron’s, Safier, Maido, Le Relais or Ramsi’s Cafe on the World (have you been to Ramsi’s? Everybody’s been to Ramsi’s…).
Neil Gaiman gets vicious about Disney’s plans to replace Christopher Robin. I wonder if he ever read Checkerboard Nightmare.
As seen camwise, we have a really awesome Advent calendar, of which a couple friends and relatives have copies. Maria found it at a German Yahoo! store, along with several other varieties, all of which she bought and gave away. Last night we glued and folded the little houses by twinkly lights while we watched Rudolph and Veronica Mars. This afternoon I opened the first house and ate the chocolate inside it.
Sometimes I talk about technology and copyright too much, and not enough about how happy I am. I am very happy.
Ian has been and gone, leaving giggles and makeouts in his wake. Thank you very, very much to Deb Core, Sumana Harihareswara, Joan Wood, Sharon Calhoun, Lisa Brown, Scott Stauble, Kyle Neumann, Angel Brooks, Ken Moore, Monica Willett, Sean Hoban, and especially Maria, whose idea this was in the first place. You guys are the champions of friendship!
Okay, so DC beat me to posting about Sony’s big fat recall, but now I’m scooping him: the rootkit contained GPLed de-DRMS code by DVD Jon! I know that makes no sense. Give me a second.
“DVD” Jon Johansen is a Norwegian hacker who likes to take things like DVD encryption and Apple’s iTunes digital rights management (DRM) software and meet them in a steel cage (and win). He releases the software he writes under an open-source license called the GPL, a legally binding agreement that says “hey, you can freely look at and reuse this source code, but only if you release code derived from it under the same license.” Like the Creative Commons license I use, the GPL is just working within existing copyright law.
Now, the XCP software that’s causing such a fuss–because it installs itself on your computer without your consent when you pop in a Sony music CD, is very difficult to find or remove, deprives you of your fair use rights and makes you vulnerable to a whole new brand of virus–needs a way to interact with the CD-ripping functionality of Apple’s iTunes. iTunes creates AAC files when it rips a CD, which are locked to specific authorized computers (although some of those restrictions may be lifted for ripping–I’m not sure, as I haven’t used it to rip CDs myself). XCP doesn’t want you to authorize any other computers to use the copies you make, though. It doesn’t want those copies to leave the ripping computer ever, at all. So the people who wrote it used DVD Jon’s open-source code for messing with iTunes DRM to make that happen.
In doing so, they created derivative software and kept it closed-source. They did not release it under GPL, violating the terms of the license under which they obtained the code. And they sold it millions of times over.
Here’s the point: this is a massive act of copyright infringement and piracy, on the same scale as the giant duplication rings of Southeast Asia that record labels and movie studios have been trying to stomp out for decades. First4Internet Software, which developed the technology to “stop piracy,” is one of the single biggest software pirates on the planet. Sony BMG paid them millions to be so, and distributed the results.
The Slashdot post I linked above says this comes from the “when-will-it-end dept.” This story is amazing. If we had plotted a fantasy scenario to bring down a record label, we probably couldn’t have come up with anything this good.
Basketball tonight is TURKEY DINNER FROM HELL! Night. We are making a turkey and all the fixings. Do not attempt to remind us that literally weeks remain before Thanksgiving. Your Earth time cannot hold the turkey. FROM HELL!
Speaking of conspiracies, we are going to go see HARRY POTTER ON THE DAMN IMAX and you should come with us. The November 18 2330 hrs (Stonybrook) show, to which a few of us have tickets, appears to have already sold out. I’m going to go out on a limb here, however, and say that my girlfriend might want to see it more than once. I’ll post the second showtime when I know it.
When I put on Facebook that my music preference was “whatever you liked two years ago,” I wasn’t kidding. I finally bothered to count this morning and noticed that “Hey Ya” is in 22/24 time. And I’m getting really into the original Extraordinary Machine, the unreleased Fiona Apple album that leaked onto the interweb and got everybody all hot and bothered in 2003. Now the album has been retooled and actually released, and I’m just starting to listen to the stuff I ripped off Maria’s pirated CD that she got from Graham.
Expect a lot of stories that sound like Fiona Apple in a week or so, when I cycle through my current buffer. The buffer is why yesterday’s and next Wednesday’s stories are about outer space, because last week I was getting really into Firefly (on which I was a little behind–it came out in 2002).
In other stuff about music, I can’t stand Harvey Danger, so I’m upset that I have to buy their album. Values versus taste! Does anybody want a Harvey Danger album for a Christmas present?