One of the reasons I love Ask Metafilter so much is for deliciously educational threads like this one. Note the topic, then note the username of the first commenter.
And here’s my followup thread, on scientific names for boogers.
Enterprise Cancelled
Star Trek: Enterprise is cancelled. And good riddance to bad rubbish. This cancellation comes about four seasons too late, considering that the hammer should have fallen as soon as the words “Temporal Cold War” were uttered. It could have been good: they could have built a show about the newness of adventuring into an unexplored galaxy — instead, this awesome potential took a back seat to convoluted time travel plot lines and a messy divorce from the continuity of the original series. Sadly, the abrupt end comes just when Manny Coto is picking up the pieces and fulfilling the show’s earlier promise as a true prequel to Classic Trek. The series was just getting good when they cut it down!
So farewell, Enterprise. When all is said and done, I can’t say I’ll miss you all that much, though I’ll certainly mourn this passing much more than I did Voyager’s.
(And farewell to Captain Jonathan Archer, a pathological liar who can’t seem to get out of any predicament without staging some kind of elaborate acted fiction to fool aliens into one Corbomite Manuever after another. Not to say that Scott Bakula did a bad job of the character: he’s a talented actor and a fine addition to the captains of Star Trek. If you ask me, the fact that he performed so well on the one-dimensional writing that plagued the first three seasons puts him on the level of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart. I don’t know about Avery Brooks, though, since I never watched any DS9.)
Flash back to May, 2001, when news of the upcoming prequel series first came out.
Spam from SMS.ac
When I started getting repeated and persistent SMS.ac invitations from old friends — and even from an ex-girlfriend — I knew something was up, so I looked into it; you may have noticed the related links I posted to my del.icio.us spam tag. More details now from Joi Ito and Community Mobilization.
The gist of it is that when you sign up with SMS.ac, it apparently asks for your Hotmail/Yahoo Mail password, spams people in your address book with invitations appearing to come from your own name and email address, then continues to send those invitations even if you are not actively inviting people — and even if you unregister from their service. The invitations do include an “unsubscribe” link, but since when can you trust unsubscription links from a spammer?
SMS.ac, if it is indeed a legitimate service, is getting off on a seriously wrong foot here. I can see how their suits may have thought it would be a cool “feature,” but now I’m marking all email that appears to be an SMS.ac invitation as junk, and warning other people not to use it. Needless to say, I won’t be signing up at all.
Update: Comments on this entry are now closed, and the topic continues here: Update on SMS.ac spam.
Notes on Camerata Trajectina
Sunday night, the Dutch music consort Camerata Trajectina performed at the National Gallery, with a repertoire of popular Dutch songs from the 17th Century. It was a lovely evening of early music, both sacred and secular, instrumental and vocal, with majestic performances from Saskia Coolen’s recorders, Louis Peter Grijp’s lute and cittern, and the surprisingly versatile — and whimsical — tenor voice of Bernard Loonen. I must make special mention of Saskia Coolen: she is one of those rare recorderists who brings out an unprecedented power and clarity one hardly expects from such a small, humble instrument; so much so that it brought tears to my eyes.
I could write on and on about the rapturous polyphonies of the evening, but instead of exhausting my vocabulary of superlatives, I’ll let you enjoy browsing the raw, cluttered notes I was taking in the programme. Just click on the image below to see the full spread:
(105KB JPG image. The arrows indicate changes in the sequence, and “vdg” stands for viola de gamba.)
Nominated but deRandomized
Evangelical Underground seems to have nominated me for a weblog award in design. Yay! The thing is, I just killed the CSS randomizer to overhaul some of my code, so I’m not sure the design for which I was nominated is the same design that’s up right now (01/01).
Why’d I kill the randomizer, you ask? I’m tweaking the CSS in each one so I can post photos as wide as 400px without breaking the layout. Look for the random layouts to come back sometime next week.
On the Elections in Iraq
Um, what Gideon said, pretty much.
Snowy Sunday: Followup
I have a big Snowy Sunday Photo Album coming up, complete with panoramic shots of various DC landmarks, and I also wanted to write about today’s reading on The Beatitudes, and about the wondrous hidden corners of the National Air and Space Museum, and about tonight’s wonderful performance of 17th Century Dutch popular music by Camerata Trajectina… but I’m tired from this lovely snow day, it’s past midnight, and my feet really, really hurt from all the walking. So not tonight, dear.
Snowy Sunday
It began late last night as a wintry mix of snow, rain, and ice pellets, but by morning it was steady snow: huge, damp flakes falling into early afternoon. After church and choir practice, with the snow still falling, I walked to the White House, down to the National Mall, Constitution Gardens, the World War II Memorial, the frozen-over Reflecting Pool, and Lincoln Memorial, snapping photos all the way. Some highlights:
The White House, even whiter than usual. I had to go around two inaugural platforms, each three stories high, to get this shot. I hope they take down those eyesores soon.
From afar, I thought, “Aw, how cute, those kids are making a little snowman!” Then I got up close and realized that those weren’t kids, and the snowman was over seven feet tall.
New Metro Signs
My resolve to skip the Metro has, of course, dropped with the temperature, so I’m back to taking the subway almost every day now. I’m glad to say that their service has improved greatly since the horrors of last year, and they continue to improve, now with a new sign format announcing train arrival times.
Passing a Cold Capitol
I walked by the Capitol this afternoon on my way to the nearest walkable Safeway. (SW Waterfront Safeway.) Clear, but gray and cloudy, temperature hovering just around freezing, with a light breeze bringing windchill down below.
A photographer pauses to snap the Robert A. Taft Memorial near the Capitol. More on Robert Taft and his memorial at DCist.
A cold duck warms herself up within her coat of insulating feathers by the frozen-over and fenced-in Capitol Reflecting Pool.
The Capitol grounds are still a mess of fences and barriers and inaugural debris, even a week later. it’s been my experience that AOC and NPS tend to drag their feet on cleanup after major events. The fences from last 4th of July were all over the Mall as late as August in some places, so don’t expect to be able to walk on the Capitol Lawn or Lower Terrace for a couple more weeks at the very least.