free variable

HOLY COW! I CAN MAKE A MUPPET THAT LOOKS LIKE ME^* AND USE IT TO TEACH MY SON ABOUT LETTERS, NUMBERS, AND SHARING!!!

(via benbrown dot com and then the rest of the internet)

^* pending (unlikely) spousal approval

Below is the lower part of a poster-sized advertisement in a local parking garage. Similar advertisements are on billboards, etc., throughout Madison.

I suspect it is impossible for others, as it is for me, to read the URL without immediately locking on to “infertility.com,” which is probably not what these folks want unless there are some Secret Branding Techniques that cover such subtle reverse psychology. (It could be worse.)

Thomas is fascinated by the guitar, and despite my best efforts with Bach transcriptions on the classical guitar, he seems to love the electric (”the orange guitar,” as he calls it, in particular) more than anything. A couple of days ago, I moved my amp up from its exile in the basement to the home office so that Thomas and I could play together, and we’ve since spent some time making sounds with the guitar in the evenings after I come home from work.

When I was just about to put him to bed tonight, he said “Downstairs, Daddy! Downstairs!” I asked him what was downstairs, suspecting that he heard the furnace or wanted to watch TV or something. Nope. “The other amplifier, Daddy. And the bass.” Oh, right. Should I bring that upstairs tomorrow, so we can play the bass together? “Yes.”

I guess if WT turns into a superdork, we’ll know who to blame. Sorry, sweetie.

Yesterday, I saw an enthusiastic young woman on State Street who was handing out stickers to passers-by. When I got within earshot, she asked me if I had “voted for change.” I had voted — and indeed, I had voted in favor of several specific changes — but more-or-less politely declined the sticker, since I am only willing to provide free advertising for burger joints, not particular candidates.

I know what she meant, but honestly, it strikes me as an abuse of language to think that one might have voted, but not “for change,” in an election with no incumbent. What would such a vote consist of? “Actually, no. I wrote in W. for a third term. Here’s hoping we can get that pesky term-limit issue ironed out in time for January 20!”

I just saw the much-hyped halftime interviews with the two presidential candidates. As you might expect, Berman’s quesions were largely breezy and insubstantial. Sen. Obama had a far better answer to the “What would you change about sports?” query (college football playoffs, vs. Sen. McCain’s concern about winning the war on performance-enhancing drugs) and seemed more vital overall, but he did egregiously misuse the first-person reflexive pronoun when he urged everyone to be sure to exercise their franchise “whether you’re supporting Sen. McCain or myself.” I’ll call it a push.

As much as each ad for Monday Night Football increased my dread for the prospect of ESPN injecting itself into the political process — it’s not hard to imagine the rush to the l.c.d. there¹ — I think the format worked well for both candidates and served as sort of a palate cleanser before Election Day. Each was offered an opportunity to banter, elevate himself above the sludge of the campaign season, and give a weary republic, for an instant, a glimpse of why anyone liked either of these guys in the first place.

¹ e.g. “What’s the most tired sports metaphor you can think of for your campaign?” “Next question.”, or an endless bracketed tournament of “Greatest Campaign Gaffes of All Time!” with commentary by Stephen A. Smith, Joe Thiesmann, and Eric Wynalda.

This BBC News article about a vacationing Welsh translator and a road sign is all kinds of awesome:

Swansea Council became lost in translation when it was looking to halt heavy goods vehicles using a road near an Asda store in the Morriston area
All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”.

The reply duly came back and officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.

The Welsh translation, apparently, says “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

(Image credit to the BBC; article via Language Log)

I’ve been meaning to post about the Pepsi re-brand since I saw it on Brand New. I’m no marketing expert, but this looks terrible and generic to me.

Look at the logo marks for the three Pepsi drinks, which are different, but probably not different enough to be readily distinguishable outside of context. (Is Diet Pepsi supposed to be “thin,” or “strained and horrible?”) One certainly couldn’t argue that these are iconic — instead, they have the feel of that ubiquitous “gently upturned arch” logo element of the mid-90s, which was tired even before it was part of absolutely every corporate logo everywhere. (Hey, some people are still using that one. Retro!)

Speaking of “retro,” let’s consider that cloying, noxious typeface. Instead of getting “hip” or “timeless,” this font looks like an amateurish, postmodern riff on art deco faces (or perhaps ITC Avant Garde, depending on the extent of the riffing) to my eye. Several decades ago, there were a lot of all-lowercase wordmarks that looked sort of like this if you don’t really pay attention. This face features some similar proportions to those used in the older marks, but has enough bizarre tweaks to avoid the “dated but classic” look. Instead, it merely appears dated.

True story: one of my favorite kid-friendly restaurants in Madison has good-to-excellent food and typically offers great value, but the presentation is often a little off and the staff sometimes seem flaky. I once became convinced that the soda fountain was contaminated with cleaning fluid, because the Diet Pepsi I had ordered on several consecutive meals featured an overwhelming “industrial solvent” flavor. I was pretty worried about this until an understocked vending machine gave me occasion to drink a bottled Diet Pepsi. As it turns out, Diet Pepsi from the bottle sort of tastes like cleaning fluid, too.

I got my copy of Bill Dudney’s Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone yesterday.

I pre-ordered this book in March, but the Pragmatic gang decided to include coverage of iPhone topics at the 11th hour and ran into a snag with Apple’s now-lifted iPhone NDA, which delayed the book’s release from midsummer until now. (I note that the iPhone chapter, which was directly responsible for the delay, is 14 pages long.)

I really don’t have any time for recreational programming right now, but I read the first few chapters last night. It reads well, has an approachable tutorial style, and makes me wistfully look forward to some point in the future when I have more free time.

In the past few weeks, Andrea and I have been ensnared by two furtive attempts to introduce natural-but-fake-tasting banana flavor into our yogurt: namely, the “Vanana” and “Banilla” flavors. (Blame Trader Joe for the former and Stonyfield for the latter.) Seriously, there should be a warning label on this kind of thing.

(Perplexed? See Who Moved Daddy’s Ontology? and Time-Out for Contingency.)

Benedic, Domine, hunc potum, et haec vasa sicut benedixisti sex ydrias
lapideas capientes metretas binas vel ternas, et vinum factum de aqua in
Chana Galileae, sic benedicere digneris cervisam istam, ut sint sani et
inmaculati omnes qui ex eo bibituri sunt, per invocationem nominis tui,
Domine, qui regnas in saecula.

It’s an eighth-century “blessing to purify beer in which a mouse or weasel has drowned” from Egbert’s Pontifical. I suppose I am thankful that I’ve never had occasion for such a prayer.

(source here, via Andrea)

From a snarky column on “people who have ruined Britain” comes a delightful indictment of Graham Kendrick, composer of the violently banal hymn “Shine, Jesus Shine.” Choice quote:

Kendrick, who has a personal website complete with an efficient shopping section, is the nation’s pre-eminent churner-outer of evangelical bilge….

The sturdy hymns of England, musical embodiment of the stoicism, resolve and undemonstrative solidarity of our nation, are in severe peril, and all thanks to ill-shaven remnants of the late Sixties — grinning inadequates who have never got over the fact that they weren’t Cat Stevens.

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. SOLUTIONS ARE PROGRAMS.

I don’t know why, but this kind of thing — stilted passive-voice dialogese combined with numbingly inane neologisms — always cracks me up.

I’m relieved to see that my local Coca-Cola bottler has an answer for rising soft drink prices.

Last week Sen. Obama’s campaign released an iPhone application designed, as far as I can tell, to help people more efficiently annoy the living crap out of their friends. The reaction from weblogs I read and twitter users that I follow was overwhelmingly positive, and given the pedigrees of the programmers involved, I have no reason to believe that the application is not well-designed and effective at what it does. However, I find myself almost completely creeped out by the whole thing. Honestly, random people who insist that I make a public confession of faith in their preferred candidate have had no trouble finding and pestering me even before I could be an “Insufficient zeal” item on a smoothly-animated, multi-touch enabled bullet list.

The first non-positive comment on this application I encountered in my feed reader came from Wolf Rentzsch, who noted that the use cases for the application seem to reduce one’s friends to “resources to exploit to further [one's] political ideology.” Rentzsch compares Obama’s proselytes to “religious crazies,” which I think is unfair. I’ve had far better conversations with the kempt and friendly members of various cults who come to my door than I have ever had with the clipboard-addled, talking-point-infected scumbags who want me to vote for someone or to sign something without reading it.

I was curious, so I installed the Official Obama ‘08 iPhone and iPod Touch Application, but it made my phone go haywire: repeatedly calling everyone in my contacts list who isn’t a U.S. citizen or is recently deceased; applying some bizarre Shepard Fairey halftone effect to all of my photos in the Camera Roll; replacing Marker Felt in the Notes application with what I am pretty sure is an unlicensed version of Gotham; etc. I had to remove it.

The experience got me thinking, though: while there are clearly a lot of useless iPhone applications, there aren’t that many that are actively socially hostile like this. I wonder what other applications might fit in this model?

(Click the image for a larger version.)