To from whence it came

Sources are ambiguous about the precise meaning of Hollanderize in Adelaide’s line from “Take Back Your Mink”:

So take back your mink
To from whence it came
And tell them to Hollanderize it
For some other dame.

While most indicate that it is simple cleaning and reconditioning, Seymour Kass, in a 1992 letter to the New York Times and speaking from a position of authority, points to a subtler connotation:

The common meaning of Hollanderize, when I worked as a furrier for my father (“King of the Muskrats”) in the 1940’s and 50’s, was to dye the cheaper, plebeian, widely worn muskrat coats to give them the look of mink.

It’s all the more confusing, because when the verses are repeated in the fast, dance section of the song, the Girls sing instead “and go shorten the sleeves/For somebody else.”

This week’s photographic narcissism

what's in my pockets
My entry for Lifehacker’s Show Us What’s in Your Pockets gallery:

Arranged in the top of the handmade jewelry box that I use to collect it all at the end of the day, here’s what goes in my jeans pockets, shirt pocket, and on my wrists. Starting at 3 o’clock and going clockwise:


  • Casio multifunction watch. With this I can time a rehearsal, or check my elevation gain when I’m hiking.
  • Wrist band worn to remind me of Leta’s celiac disease.
  • Palm Tungsten E2 organizer in a scratched-up case. This is the third Palm I’ve owned, but I don’t like it as much as the Tungsten T that it replaced. I keep the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary loaded on an expansion card in the PDA. I use the two storage slots in the case to hold weekly backups of my must-have documents (since I back up my computers to disk as well, these are backup backups).
  • Souvenir coin purse. Absolutely essential to my well-being. I go through one of these about every ten years, and when one wears out and cracks apart, I try to find the cheesiest one I can to replace it. I still have the fragments of the first one I owned, which I brought back from the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
  • Rollerball pen. Rollerballs rule!
  • Pencil/stylus/ballpoint combo, the kind that twists to change tips. I’m hard on these things, and it’s becoming more difficult to find replacements. The combos that use gravity and a button don’t do it for me.
  • Keys to the house and one of my cars, on two rings. On the house key ring is a Leatherman Micra multi-tool. I’d like to find a nicer fob for the car key, ’cause the one I have just touts the dealership.
  • A gentleman always has a clean handkerchief.
  • A nicely worn wallet from Coach. You didn’t really think I’d show you inside that, did you?

Best efforts

Cory Doctorow forms an interesting analogy about dealing with the firehose of internet information flow:

There was a time when I could read the whole of Usenet — not just because I was a student looking for an excuse to avoid my assignments, but because Usenet was once tractable, readable by a single determined person. Today, I can’t even keep up with a single high-traffic message-board…. I’ve come to grips with this — with acquiring information on a probabilistic basis, instead of the old, deterministic, cover-to-cover approach I learned in the offline world.

It’s as though there’s a cognitive style built into TCP/IP. Just as the network only does best-effort delivery of packets, not worrying so much about the bits that fall on the floor, TCP/IP users also do best-effort sweeps of the Internet, focusing on learning from the good stuff they find, rather than lamenting the stuff they don’t have time to see.

In a lot of ways, I feel the same. Time was, I could be a completist about what I read and listened to: in college I bought every album released by Chicago (and after the first one, they were conveniently numbered) and I set myself the task of reading all the William Faulkner in print. Now, I am content to cherry-pick an author or a band. I really liked Graham Swift’s Last Orders, but I didn’t like his next book that I picked up, so I’m done.

Lime green

David Pogue reviews a beta version of the XO, the controversial “$100 laptop” device from One Laptop Per Child. As has been reported elsewhere, to help drive down unit costs, a donate-one-get-one program will be in place for a limited time. I’m thinking a solid-state Linux box with web browser would be a cute thing to have around the house. And the tax deduction wouldn’t hurt.

Upgrades: 3

After an irritating couple of hours fumbling about with the WordPress documentation, I came up with this fragment to draw the dynamic part of my left sidebar:


<!-- Begin - Links from the 'Links Manager'-->
<?php
$link_cats = get_categories('type=link&orderby=ID');
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
?>
<div class="left-widget-title"
id="linkcat-<?php echo $link_cat->cat_ID; ?>">
<?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?>
</div>
<div class="left-widget">
<ul>
<?php wp_list_bookmarks('categorize=0&category=' . $link_cat->cat_ID . '&orderby=name&title_li=0') ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php
}
?>
<!-- End - Links from the 'Links Manager'-->

The assignment of the id= attribute to the widget title <div> is mainly there for debugging purposes.

Man oh man, it’s miserable work extracting information from the WordPress docs. And I’m not really happy about an app that breaks existing code every time a point release comes out. Oh well, it didn’t cost me any coin.

I used these doc pages: category, wp_list_bookmarks, and get_categories.

Upgrades: 2

Once again WordPress has reworked the category system:

WordPress 2.3 introduces our new taxonomy schema. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly. Plugins that use the category API should be fine.

This means that this code in my left sidebar, which I modified from the original Tiga theme:


<?php
$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->categories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
if (get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '', '', '', FALSE, 'id', FALSE, FALSE, -1, FALSE, FALSE)) { /* anything to show? */
?>

needs some work. Looks like this evening’s project is figuring out how to use category filters.

But you knew that


You Are Bert


Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you loveable – even if you don’t love them!

You are usually feeling: Logical – you rarely let your emotions rule you

You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil

How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

(Link via Living the Scientific Life.)

What it means to be civilized

The center-right Economist takes an unexpected but eloquent stand against torture in a leader this week:

A hot, total war like the second world war could not last for decades, so the curtailment of domestic liberties was short-lived. But because nobody knew whether the cold war would ever end (it lasted some 40 years), the democracies chose by and large not to let it change the sort of societies they wanted to be. This was a wise choice not only because of the freedom it bestowed on people in the West during those decades, but also because the West’s freedoms became one of the most potent weapons in its struggle against its totalitarian foes.

If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world’s sense of what it is and wants to be.

Hollywood calling

From the very start of his career, [Michael] Haneke’s films have been calculated to shatter the viewer’s complacency to a degree rarely seen since the early work of Mike Leigh or perhaps since the politicized days of the French New Wave.

John Wray profiles the Austrian director, who made The Piano Teacher and Caché. He is remaking his Funny Games in English with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts.

A man to be reckoned with

I’m enjoying reading Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Newby, perhaps the last of the rank amateur explorers, has perhaps seen a small bump in sales of his books as a result of his recent demise. Newby and his friend Hugh Carless set off to explore the remotest bits of north-east Afghanistan in 1956, and the book is the record of the trip.

The whole ill-prepared Newby-Carless expedition reminds me of my friends Chuck and Mike during the Three Mile Island disaster in the 1970s. Chuck and Mike were living in New York, downwind of the crippled reactor in Harrisburg, Pa. (Anne and I were living in Philadelphia then). At the height of the crisis, when we all thought the dang thing might blow, in the middle of the night, Chuck and Mike said, “let’s get outta here,” and jumped in their car. They were on the road for several hours before they realized they were driving west, into Pennsylvania.

Anyway. Having honorably failed in their attempt to get to the top of Mir Samir, a 19,880-foot mountain, Carless and Newby wanted to push on to the province of Nuristan, but met with resistance from their local horse drivers, who feared its Wild West-style reputation. Nuristan was converted to Islam only recently, and by the sword. After arguing with the porters for several hours,

…Hugh lost his temper.

‘Go back then!’ he said. ‘Go back to Jangalak and tell your people that Newby Seb and I have gone to Nuristan alone—and that you let us go alone! They will call you women.’

As soon as he had said this is was abundantly clear that both Abdul Ghiyas and Badar Khan were prepared to let us do this very thing. Hugh was forced to try a more subtle approach….

‘When I return from Nuristan… I shall demand audience of General Ubaidullah Khan and tell him what you said about “idolatrous unbelievers.” General Ubaidullah Khan is a man of importance and …he is also a Nuristani.’

The effect of this was remarkable. At once all opposition ceased. Before we finally fell asleep long after midnight I asked Hugh who General Ubaidullah Khan was.

‘So far as I know,’ he said, ‘he doesn’t exist. I just invented him; but I think he’s going to be a very useful man to know.’

At the park: 11

I got some good information at the public meeting on September 21 on the planned wetland restoration project at Huntley Meadows Park. We heard from Park Manager Kevin Munroe, FCPA staff naturalist Charles Smith, and Park Resource Manager Dave Lawlor.

The central wetland at the Park constitutes the only large, non-tidal wetland in Fairfax County. (Tidal wetlands can be found along the Potomac in places like Dyke Marsh.) A number of factors—siltation from runoff from housing construction in the 80s and 90s, drought, and the migration of the beavers once they had consumed the desirable trees—has meant that the wetland is going through its natural succession to wet meadow on its way to becoming woods. Along the way, the ecology of the wetland has simplified, with the near-disappearance of crayfish (a foundation species in the food web); the dominance of native but aggressive cattails and rice cutgrass; and the loss of standing dead trees (whose presence supports a variety of species). A consultant’s report in 1993 indicated that, to preserve the freshwater marsh more or less as it was then, as an island of diversity in burgeoning suburbia, water level management would be needed, eventually. Eventually is now.

The new dam across Barnyard Run and its accompanying water control structures will raise water levels as much as two feet. The high-water mark will be 33 feet above sea level. In addition, plans (as yet unfunded) call for four pools to be excavated to a depth of three feet (which means a maximum water depth of five feet), which will enhance habitat diversity. Munroe and staff made it clear that water levels on the wetland will follow the healthy natural cycles within the year (drawdowns in summer, recharging in winter) and across years.

There will be downsides, both short- and long-term. Munroe stressed that the racket of chainsaws and bulldozers will be part of the park experience when construction begins after the 2008 breeding season, next July (per plan). There may be some preliminary work and tree removal as early as November. The expectation is that excavated trees and soil remain inside the park, to be used as habitat. Long-term, the state-mandated access road to the dam will link up the trails leading in from the two entrances of the park (South Kings Highway and Lockheed Boulevard). This historical gap was by design, in order to discourage mischief-makers and joy-riders. Munroe has mitigation plans; I rather like his idea of a fence and stile as a barrier to bikes.

It’s a big, disruptive project, and I suppose that it has to be done. $2 million isn’t a lot of money to preserve a really special place in the county. Munroe seems to be on the ball and he’s doing a great job of citizen outreach.

Movie picks

Edward Copeland has released his collaborative 100-best list of foreign films. I’ve no real quibbles with anything in the top 25, but I find the high ranking of Wings of Desire at #41 inexplicable. This movie is perhaps the art-house version of The Princess Bride or The Gods Must Be Crazy in its overratedness.

I agree with many of Copeland’s committee that the Kieslowski Three Colors trilogy should be considered as one movie, not three: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Here’s an edited version of the note that I sent Copeland, with my picks:

I think that I have seen about 40% of the films on the list, albeit some of them not since college. Many of them are perfectly good, but I’m not sure that I would give them a 1-25 ranking. So here are my top 12…, including a few write-ins:

#1 M, Fritz Lang [#3 on the Copeland list]
#2 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy [#65]
#3 Three Colors: Red, Kieslowski [#39]
#4 Three Colors: Blue, Kieslowski [#62]
#5 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodovar — write-in
#6 Ran, Kurosawa [#16]
#7 Repulsion, Roman Polanski — write-in
#8 The Conformist, Bertolucci [#18]
#9 Three Colors: White, Kieslowski [did not make the Copeland cut]
#10 The Vanishing, Sluizer [did not make the Copeland cut]
#11 Open Hearts, Susanne Bier — write-in
#12 Fantastic Planet, Rene Laloux — write-in

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, Ki-duk Kim, should also be on the list, but I don’t think it meets your release-year criterion.

The voting has served as a prod to get Das Boot and Jules and Jim onto my Netflix queue.

Il miglior fabbro

Having recently chided a local reviewer, I think it’s appropriate to give some props to another local critic who does a damn fine job: Bob Mondello, who reviews for NPR’s All Things Considered and the Washington City Paper. Consider his recent write-up of two shows that I also viewed, 33 Variations and The Unmentionables.

Compared to my sketches, Mondello sees in sharper, more vivid colors; he chooses his words more precisely (prig, amanuensis, decency) without losing a conversational tone. Writing for both radio and print, he knows how to put a button on the end of a piece. He is one of the writers that I have to avoid reading before I see a show in hopes that I will appreciate a work and express myself without undue influence.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that he and I agree on the merits of a lot of shows—these two, for instance. Granted, he has his formulas, but he makes them work (“Original? Well, not entirely.”) for him. His compact yet avuncular style works just as well on the air as on the page.