We’ve reached a milestone here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense. As you may have surmised from the title above, this is my 500th blog entry. Not too shabby considering that when my buddy Jack presented me with a website for a Christmas gift, my initial reaction was something to the effect of, “Cool! What the hell am I going to do with it?”
If you’re looking for something to read during your Friday morning java break, there was a nice article in the LA Times a few days ago about the legendary pin-up model Bettie Page. Virtually forgotten for decades, she became a cult figure after comic artist and illustrator Dave Stevens included a very Bettie-like character in his classic Rocketeer stories. Her notoriety was further enhanced by cheesecake artist Olivia de Bernardis and the revival of interest in all things retro. Now, at the age of 82, she’s probably the best-known model of her time (the late ’40s and ’50s), next to Marilyn Monroe.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about Bettie. In some photos and poses, I find her very attractive; in others, there’s something odd about her appearance that leaves me wondering what all the fuss is about. (To her credit, Bettie herself would probably say the same thing.) But I do like vintage and retro-style pin-up art, and I also like a good story, and Bettie’s life has definitely been one of those. It even has an effective ending, at least if you’re a sentimental old schmuck like me:
Page had one request for this story — that her face not be photographed.
“I want to be remembered,” she said, “as I was when I was young and in my golden times… I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”
But this much can be shared. Her face remains smooth and fresh, and one can still see the face of the young woman in the old. Her eyes, bright blue, still sparkle.
According to Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune, the old Avalon Theater in South Salt Lake is being converted into a live-music venue. I haven’t been to the Avalon in years — I think the last film I saw there was a documentary called Microcosmos about a decade back — and I didn’t even realize it had closed, which, apparently, it did some time ago. Still, I mourn its passing. If I’m not mistaken, the Avalon’s repurposing leaves the Tower as the only single-screen theater still operating in the Salt Lake Valley. And I find that terribly sad.
It’ll be four weeks this coming Friday since my basement flooded, and, believe it or not, I’m still working on cleaning up and putting my house back together. The ridiculous length of time it’s taking me to finish this job is a sum of many factors: the sheer magnitude of the job, which I’ll talk more about in another entry; my easy distractibility and tendency toward procrastination, which is a fancy way of saying I haven’t been working on it steadily; a recent bout of the flu that left me not wanting to tote boxes up and down stairs; and the fact that I’ve actually been trying to save many of the things that got wet rather than just tossing them, especially a number of books that I’ve been reluctant to part with.
To go along with my previous entry, here’s an amusing photo I’ve had kicking around in my files for a while:
Why is this amusing, you may wonder? Because it demonstrates how far we’ve come just in my relatively short lifetime: According to the e-mail in which I received this photo, the big object being wheeled around by the guy in the bunny suit is a 1975-vintage hard disk good for only about 500 KB of data. By contrast, even the smallest capacity digital-camera memory stick on the market these days — which is physically smaller than a credit card, remember — stores roughly sixteen times as much data (8000 KB, or 8 MB).
In the interest of full disclosure, however, I’m not sure how accurate my information on that photo is. I tried to verify the 500 KB figure, but I encountered a lot of dispute over whether or not the photo is even real. One confident-sounding person claimed this hard disk came from an old IBM storage system that would’ve had a capacity of between 5.4 and 11.2 MB. Which would still make this monster only equivalent to one of those low-end modern memory sticks, for all of its size. That’s something, isn’t it?
Once, a long, long time ago, I wrote on this blog that I remembered “when computers were large metal cabinets that contained spinning tape reels and lots of blinky lights.” If you remember that, too, and want to reminisce, or if you’re one of them youngish whippersnappers who can’t imagine what those zinc-plated, vaccuum-tubed days of yore must’ve looked like, head on over to James Lileks’ latest offering, a collection of vintage promotional computer photos enlightened by his wry (and unabashedly geeky) commentary.
I especially liked the commentary on this one, in which Jim manages to reference Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Terminator, Young Frankenstein, and Star Wars in less than 300 words. Gotta admire that.
For the record, I did not write the following. Somebody sent it to me via e-mail, along with the usual daily batch of unfunny joke-type spams. However, this certainly seems in the spirit of something I would write, and it amused Anne when I showed it to her, so I’m going to post it up here. I’ve done some minor editing to correct eccentric capitalization and such, so apologies to whoever originally wrote it:
Space journalist James Oberg comments on yesterday’s news about the discovery of liquid water geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and why it matters:
But why? Do improved science textbooks and even exciting news headlines offer rewards for the effort needed? If there are signs of life — past, present, or even future — on Enceladus, or Europa or Titan or even below the bitterly-cold ice shells of Pluto or the newly discovered Sedna, what does that benefit us?
The fundamental and potentially infinite benefit is that we, too, are “life,” with our particular biochemical processes that allow us in a time-tested but slapdash fashion to grow, survive temporarily, replicate and occasionally stare at the stars. To understand this process that briefly keeps each of us alive, we study the examples we have — ourselves and our cousins from the same creche — and speculate. But examples from another creche could show the range of possibilities that was irreversibly narrowed here on Earth as this particular DNA-based “life form” spread and dominated.
How would another microorganism pass on blueprints for progeny, and how does this other process compare to the successes of “our” life, and how does it fail? How does it repair itself against environmental hazards? Do cells on Europa get cancer? Do they even have DNA-tagged “counters” that on Earth enforce cellular death after so many divisions? Do they allow some — but not too much — replication variation that enables environmentally-driven or behaviorally-driven evolution?
The answers to these and other questions will tell us about the potentialities and design limits of the life processes that comprise ourselves. And that, most definitely, we want to know, and take advantage of.
The “answer book” to all these questions isn’t just lying out there at Enceladus already bound and decoded, for us to go out and pick up and read at our leisure — but pages, or even paragraphs of it, could well be. And this lucky concurrence of watery geysers and of current space capabilities offers a rewarding strategy to do what humans have done, and benefited from, since they became humans: wonder, and then go find out.
Wonder, and then go find out… that’d make a pretty good motto, don’t you think?
Saw something interesting on Lileks’ Daily Bleat today. (Why, yes, things are kind of slow for me at work today; how can you tell?) If you click on over there and scroll down a-ways, you’ll see that he’s scanned a wonderful old newspaper photo of Times Square, circa 1952. But that photo isn’t quite what it seems…
I’ve been wanting for some time now to vent my spleen about one of the more insidious political strategies currently in play by the right, namely the campaign to convince the average, not-too-well-informed and not-terribly-thoughtful voter that “activist judges” are wrecking the country, but naturally Scalzi has beaten me to the punch. His basic thesis is the same as my thinking on this subject, namely that those who use the term “activist judge” only seem to bring it out when a particular ruling doesn’t go their way. It’s sour grapes, in other words, but it’s also a cynical (and, unfortunately, effective) effort to sway public opinion into thinking the right’s agenda is the natural default setting for the country. It’s also nonsense, since, as John points out,