Friday, May 31, 2002

It has always interested me that Christian Orthodoxy (i.e. fundamentalists) openly decry eisegesis and yet practice it so openly themselves. Here's a satirical example regarding Noah's Flood that actually had me laughing. Where's Hank Hanegraaf when you need him?
Melodyhound is a site devoted to people, like me, who wnat to know the names of every tune they hear or find themselves humming. At the same time intriguing and unsettling, they use the "Parson's Code" to identify and catergorize melodies. Intriguing because of its simplicity and usefulness; unsettling because of its simplicity and usefulness: Parson's code reduces each melody line to simple directional movements between adjacent notes, and then discards all other information. I think this is especially unsettling for me after taking a year and a half of music theory and ear training to distinguish between intervals and chord progressions and keys. All this time it was just up-down-up-up-repeat...


Dad has given me one more reason to dislike Stephen King: he killed John Lennon! Actually, I was quite impressed by King's response to these accusation - he seems level-headed and sympathetic considering the obvious volume of mail he must have received before replying.

Thursday, May 30, 2002

Best get started.


My father inundates my mailbox with his free online time, devoting my mornings to catching up with his latest finds. Today, a few standouts: The Web's First Japanese Pizza Place was sent without comment. Knowing his tastes in food, I think he would agree that while the pictures are interesting, the header commentary is a bit provincial. Maybe it's just growing up in St. Louis, home of the thin-crust, provelone pizza, that makes me overly sensitive to defenders of "real pizza," but I always feel smug when I hear someone describing their trip to Italy: "well, the stuff THEY call pizza is just terrible; thank God for Mc Donald's and EuroDisney!" Domino's is already worldwide, so hopefully them dang ferners will start makin' pizza right, and stop eating Christian babies!


Next up is The Magnetic Theory of Sculpture. Some very interesting effects generated by applying an electromagnet to a colloidal suspension of iron powder in brake fluid. I can't wait till I can get one of my own at Spencer's Gifts.

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

I'll try to get some real content on here as soon as I'm sure the servers and templates are all functioning properly - we need to maintain full Industrial!® standards.
Well, welcome to the "blog". I'm not sure why I'm writing this, since I'm the only one here, but welcome anyway. How's it going? You?