RIP auto-posting

Sometime after Sunday, I realized that my posts weren't automatically publishing to Twitter. After a bit of investigation, I learned that dlvr.it ended their free tier. Oddly enough, I was informed that my "trial" had ended, though I've been using the service for years.

Well, that's annoying. It's their business, of course, but one of my pet peeves is when long-established free services on the Internet start demanding money out of the blue.

And then I thought, "Wait a minute, I'm a programmer." Why can't I roll my own auto-poster? Polling the site and grabbing the title and URL for new posts is easy, so the only thing I really need to learn is how to access the X API. (And in so doing, I realized I'd inadvertently been "spamming" for several months, by posting substantially identical tweets to both my accounts. I'll be a bit more creative with the second cross-post, I promise!)

Not that the Faithful Readers will necessarily notice, but automatic posting will resume shortly. That is all.

Friday in the Wild: December 22, 2023

Happy Friday! After a couple of dry weeks, and now being away from home for the Christmas season, I wasn’t sure that there’d be a Friday in the Wild this week, either. Nonetheless, the Internet came through.

In today’s A la Carte post, Tim Challies linked to his 2014 post about the two kinds of blog—content creation and content curation—and why he started doing both. He writes, “I am a pretty normal person and have pretty normal tastes. If I find it interesting and worthy of a few minutes of time and attention, I suppose other people are likely to as well.” I highlight this because that’s basically my philosophy, also. If I find something interesting or helpful or funny, probably someone else will, too.

Friday in the wild: December 1, 2023

Years, ago, I used to fill out space on the Crusty Curmudgeon with a series I titled "Friday in the Wild," for showcasing blog articles from the previous week or so that I found interesting or thought-provoking. Now that I'm blogging more enthusiastically again, I thought it was appropriate to reboot it. It gets me writing … but it also gets me reading. So I present Friday in the Wild for the first time since 2014.

Ceci n'est pas un book blog

I am not a book blogger. I promise.

2023 Reading Challenge (and it's still November)

On and off over the last few years, I've engaged in a year-long "reading challenge" as part of my regular reading. Sometimes, this is of my own making: I'll choose some books or set a target of reading a certain number of books on a theme, and try to get through them by the end of the year.

In other years, I came across a reading challenge from a book blogger and followed along. Typically, this kind of challenge consists of a list of categories, about a dozen, say, and the goal is to read a book from each category: a biography, a book of poetry, a book written by a woman, and so forth.

2023's challenge was the latter kind. I came across the list on Ramona Mead's blog, While I Was Reading. (In August, I noticed the site was offline. I've periodically checked in since, and it has returned a variety of error messages. I've seen no explanations elsewhere. Apart from the technical issues, I hope everything's all right.)

Normally when I do a year-in-review post at the end of the year about my reading habits, this is the kind of thing I would tack on the end. Why would I summarize a year of books when the year still has a month left? But since I filled in the last category this morning, I thought, why wait? It gives me something to write, too.

This is a test to see what MathML looks like on Blogger. $$x=\frac{-b\pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$$

As you were.

It's October . . . Please resume normal reading

I always love Science Fiction Free September. Not only do I get to read some great books I wouldn't otherwise consider, but it's a great time to see exactly how much of a failure I am at this.

For example, when I started this month, I intended to read through Andrew Roberts' history of World War II, The Storm of War. Granted, it's a longer book at 700+ pages. But I've read longer, in less time. Granted, the public library has lost or removed its copy. But I found another.

So, how far did I actually get?

About 30 pages.

Heck, the Battle of Britain hasn't even started yet.

Given that I started the book about two weeks into September, that works out to an average of two pages a day. Worst SFFS showing ever.

Still, it's a good read, and I'm looking forward to finishing it. I might even get a good run at it by the end of the weekend.

Science Fiction-Free September XV1

Been a while. When I said I would be updating this blog more frequently, I didn't mean every nine months as opposed to every two years. Nonetheless, there's the letter of the law and there's the spirit . . .

It's September, albeit a quarter of the way through. That means it's again time for Science Fiction-Free September, in which I place a temporary moratorium on reading science-fiction novels, my preferred genre, and generally stretch my boundaries a little bit by reading something I wouldn't normally pick up. Over the past few years, though I haven't blogged about it, I've still held to it, if only by the technicality of happening to be reading something else at the time. Again, there's the letter of the law.

The particular challenge this year is that as part of my planned reading, I'm going through all the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novels chronologically, starting in 1953 with Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and most recently wrapping up with 1969's Hugo winner, Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. It so happens that the next book on my to-read list is Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, the 1969 Nebula winner. Alas for Mr. Panshin, it is not to be.

Let me say in passing, and by way of closing off discussion of SF for the remainder of September: Three of the last five SF novels I've read were boring. The late 60s were, apparently. not good years for science fiction. Well, at least after Panshin comes selections by le Guin, Niven, Farmer, Clarke, and Asimov, so for a time I'll be in familiar territory.)

This month, after wrapping up my current book—The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, which is nearly finished and quite short—I plan on tackling something on my backlog: The Storm of War, a 2011 history of World War II by Andrew Roberts. This is a book that's been on my planned list for years. (In fact, if, heaven forbid, you've been paying attention to the sidebar on this oh-so-active blog, you'd have seen it listed as "In Progress," practically for ever, until I decided a book I had returned to the library and never borrowed again for two or three years was not, in any meaningful sense, in progress.) Assuming 700+ pages aren't enough to keep me occupied till October, I'll probably read something by an author I've never read before, to be determined later. (Update: I've settled on Allan Bloom's venerable translation of Plato's Republic.)

And at least I'm posting something rather than nothing. That's also a good start to the month.

Footnotes

¹Well, let's call it that, since I've been doing this since 2004 anyway.

So . . .

-

I just happened to notice that while I've been keeping the reading log on the sidebar up-to-date, more or less, I haven't been too bothered of late to write anything here.

Of course, there was never a conscious decision to give up blogging. Other things just got in the way. In the 18 months and change since my last post, I've returned to school and since graduated with a two-year diploma in computer programming. So I've written hundreds of lines of Java and Python code, if not thousands, but not a line of English for this blog.

In the meantime, since my last post on this blog, I've also discovered the serenity Minecraft. So I've recreationally and virtually laid tens of thousands of blocks of dirt and stone constructing Asian-themed buildings, but not a single block of text for the Crusty Curmudgeon.

Of course, I remain ever hopeful that my personal recreational life will return to its old normal in the new year. I can't promise new posts every day like when the blog was at its peak, but I can probably promise something. Maybe jump-starting Saturday Superman or my lightning book reviews will be the tonic I need. We'll see. Until next time.

September means back down to earth

Welcome to September, everyone!

If you've kept up reading this blog for more than a few years, you know what September means: it's time for my 12th annual Science Fiction Free September. Back in September 2004, I decided that I spent too much of my reading time with science fiction, so I declared a month-long moratorium on the genre, and instead used the time for something I might not read otherwise: classic literature, nonfiction, maybe just even a bunch of books I had started but never got around to finishing. (This year to date I've read three SF novels—about half what I've read in nonfiction. As the years go by the SFFS has either outlived or fulfilled its purpose, but I keep it up anyway, just for fun!)

This year, my big September reading project will be themed around the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. My primary objective is to complete a very long book that I have had for a number of years, but never gotten farther in than, perhaps, one-tenth. This book is the blockbuster history of Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by CBS war correspondent William L. Shirer. This is a popular history rather than an academic one. Shirer was present in Berlin from the Nazis' coming to power to the first year of WWII, when he left after he heard that the Gestapo was trumping up espionage charges against him.

I actually started two days ago, since my last book finished up conveniently on Saturday night (Dolores Claiborne, the latest in my read-all-the-way-through-Stephen-King project). By page count, I am now 2% of the way in, and if I can figure out how to HTML-ize a progress bar, I'll add it to the sidebar.

At ths time I have no secondary objectives, but there's no shortage of unread books in my collection, so I'm sure I'll work something out.

The shocking truth about the basic necessities of life

I used to make a hobby out of reading and collecting examples of various kinds of crackpottery. At some point, though, I lost interest. I think I just became overwhelmed (and not a little bit discouraged) at the sheer volume of anti-intellectual nonsense that floats around on the Internet.

My latest thing to follow in that vein is Vani Hari, aka The Food Babe. Hari is a crusader against all kinds of foodborne injustice. She is arguably best known for her campaign that pressured Subway into removing the additive azodicarbonamide from their sandwich bread. However, this additive decomposes when baked into gases such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide—all of which are harmless when eaten—as well as a harmless amount of ammonia gas. Hari is not a food scientist, medical doctor, nutritionist, dietician, or any other sort of expert in the field, and it shows. Her recent tirade against Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte complained that it contained "[a]bsolutely no real pumpkin in ingredients." (Of course not: it is flavoured with pumpkin spice, the spice mixture used to flavour pumpkin pies: typically some combination of allspice, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.) To date, however, her most hysterical raving has been against microwave ovens, in which she decries "unnecessary daily exposure to radiation": "Afer all, human cells are made of molecules and molecule bonds are broken and destroyed when exposed to radiation." She clearly does not understand the difference between ionizing (e.g. X-rays, gamma rays) and non-ionizing radiation (e.g. microwaves, radio waves, visible light).

Another site that similarly takes the cake is Realfarmacy.com, which exposed the "horrifying fact" that Big Macs contain, of all things, cellulose. You may never want to eat a vegetable again.

Health sites may very well raise legitimate concerns about the food we eat. Fresh food prepared yourself is probably better for you, and fast foods do contain a lot of salt, sugar, and fat that we can all probably do without, at least on a regular basis. But all too often, any legitimate concerns get buried in a sea of pseudoscience that takes a number of forms, including:

• "Chemicals" are bad for you, and if you can't pronounce it, you probably shouldn't eat it. (Never mind that even a fresh, organic fruit will naturally contain as many, if not more, unpronounceable "chemicals" as part of its intrinsic makeup, as anything you buy at a McDonald's.)
• This substance has been proven toxic to rats. (But usually in amounts that are orders of magnitude beyond what humans will come in contact with. Also, remember that substances that are toxic to animals might still be safe for humans: daylilies are harmful to cats, but edible for people; chocolate is awesome for humans, but very dangerous for dogs.)
• A food substance or additive is also used in the manufacture of non-food items, e.g. azodicarbonamide used in commercial bread is also used in the manufacture of yoga mats. You don't want to eat something that someone's sweaty butt has rubbed all over, do you? (This particular argument commits the logical fallacy of division: that each component part of a whole shares the same properties as the whole. Just because eating a yoga mat is bad for you, doesn't mean everything used to make the yoga mat is bad for you. For example, the puffed corn starch used to make biodegradable packing peanuts is the same stuff used to make cheese puffs.)
• A food substance or additive can also be found in other non-edible or unpleasant substances. (Cellulose is found in wood, therefore Big Macs are really bad for you. Cellulose is a structural component of plant cell walls; want to bet that a Big Mac's cellulose comes from the lettuce, onions, and pickles?)
• A food substance or additive is derived from non-edible or unpleasant sources. For example, shellac (used to make candies or pharmaceuticals shiny) comes from bugs, and the musk glands of beavers have been used as a source for natural vanilla flavouring. (Here, at least, we have a somewhat legitimate concern: if you are squeamish about eating insect secretions or beaver butts, you would be wise to read the label. However, keep in mind that the source of something does not necessarily determine how safe it is to eat.)
• This food is, or contains, a genetically modified organism (GMO). (Never mind that a comprehensive study of 100 billion animals has found no issues with a diet of genetically engineered feed.)

These fallacious arguments are often accompanied with (and made palatable by) attractive-looking graphics. I've wanted to try my hand at building infographics for some time—so, I thought, why shouldn't I get in on the scaremongering game? Behold the infographic that will completely change your life! You'll be shocked at what you put in your body over 20,000 times per day.

The worst thing about air, however, is this: It isn't even organic or vegan.

The anniversary and the moratorium

Welcome to September 4. This is the official 11th anniversary of this blog—though it was actually created in July of 2003, the first post went up in September. This has traditionally also been the date on which I rolled out a new look for the Crusty Curmudgeon, though this is something I've done very little of in recent years. Ever since they rolled out Blogger 2.0 some years ago, re-skinning a Blogger blog has meant more than just writing up a new HTML template and style sheet. I already know what I want the next iteration of the CC to look like, and plan on learning the new language. Sometime.

September 4 is one of two times of the year that I tend to reflect on the state of the blog, the other being New Year's Day. Usually I don't have much to say in September, either than that my writing hasn't been as prolific as I hoped, but I expect to get better, and despite my decreased output, I'm not going anywhere just yet. So, by way of my twice-yearly status updates: Unfortunately, my blogging hasn't been as prolific as I would like (though it has increased recently), I expect to post more in coming weeks, and despite my decreased output, the Crusty Curmudgeon is not dead yet. So there.

The deaths of Superman

You bruise, but you don't kill, do you . . . Clark? - Batman, Justice League: War

Everybody knows Superman is the Big Blue Boy Scout. Sure, he and Brainiac might level half of Metropolis while duking it out. In the end, though, he'll find a way to banish the villain without destroying him. Superman doesn't kill his enemies, except when he absolutely must, and even then it's a shocking and traumatic experience. Witness, for example, his reaction to killing Zod in Man of Steel, or even accidentally causing Doctor Light's death in last year's "Trinity War" story arc.¹

However, it wasn't always that way. Supes began his career as a bruiser, right from Superman #1 in 1939. In one story in that magazine, he kills a military torturer by flinging him over the horizon, then causes the death of an enemy pilot by wrecking his plane in midair.² The body count just goes up from there.

Clark Kent, badass

It can't be easy being Clark Kent.

It's very easy being Superman. Everyone knows he is an alien, possesses the powers of flight, super-strength, and super-speed, laughs at bullets, and sees through walls. And he doesn't wear a mask, so everyone assumes he has nothing to hide. Superman can do whatever amazing things he wants, and no one is surprised.

However, when Superman arrived on Earth, he was not quite ready to reveal himself to the world. He assumed the alias of Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter, so he could walk among its citizens unnoticed. Meanwhile, as an employee of a major metropolitan newspaper, he can observe the citizens of his new planet, know when his aid is needed, and has an excuse to get close to the action.

This occasionally—well, pretty frequently, actually—leaves Superman on the horns of a dilemma, or even a trilemma. Danger strikes, and Clark is faced with three options. One, he can dive into a nearby storeroom or phone booth, transform into Superman, and do what he does so well. However, he risks exposure. In the early 1940s, Superman is still a mystery man by choice. Two, he can remain in the guise of Clark Kent, meek everyman, and do nothing. This preserves his secret, and no one really expects better of Clark. Unfortunately, it's also out of character for someone who has "sworn to devote his existence on Earth to helping those in need," if he ignores those in need because it's inconvenient.

Option three—the one we hear so very often in radio's Adventures of Superman—is to take action as Clark Kent.

Friday in the Wild: May 23, 2014

This being Friday, once again it is my pleasure to present the various goodness from the Web that made me laugh, pay attention, agree heartily, or just think.

I don't agree with Douglas Wilson on the finer points of theology, but I enjoy reading his writing; he uses well-pointed sarcasm as an art medium. He makes a very good point in last Saturday's post about the whole Michael Sam gay-kiss thing, the revulsion of some at the kiss, and the revulsion of the leftist literati at the revulsion:

As to the charge that I am fighting for Christian privilege, the reply is “you bet I am.” When the Christian faith is privileged, then freedom for everyone becomes a possibility. When Christian privilege is made illegal, and its denunciation mandatory, as it has been in our time, the first thing that happens is that we see the essentially coercive nature of unbelief revealed. Unbelievers have never built a free society and they never will. They have been running this one for just a few minutes now, and they are already driving up and down the streets with their Coercion Trucks, loudspeakers blaring that it is past curfew and we are all supposed to go inside now, place our noses on the specially designated freedom wall, and think grateful thoughts about how much Uplift Congress will be able to generate next session. When we wake up in the morning, we can all have a breakfast of liberty gruel, designed by the first lady’s personal nutritionist and national sadist.

[Read The Gaylag Archipelago]

Friday in the wild: May 16, 2014

Another Friday means another great opportunity to share all sorts of goodness from the Web and blogosphere. Out there, they do FridayFollow; here, we do Friday in the Wild. This week, three articles caught my attention.

Yesterday, May 15, was the 30th anniversary of the death of my personal favourite Christian apologist, Francis A. Schaeffer. (As I write this, I have two of his books, The God Who Is There and The Church at the End of the 20th Century, on loan from the library.) I first read Schaeffer in my university years; he was the first step toward my trying to adopt a comprehensive Christian worldview. Over the years I've adopted a certain number of his frequent catchphrases, including "true truth" and "brute fact." Ray Ortlund at The Gospel Coalition expressed his gratitude for Schaeffer's ministry:

All my life I’d been exposed to conventional people using conventional methods, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I had the privilege of knowing men of true greatness, like my dad. But Schaeffer was just different. He located the gospel within a total Christian worldview. He talked about modern art and films and books. He spoke with prophetic insight about cultural trends. He worked out fresh ways to articulate old truths, even coining new expressions like "true truth." He had a beard and long hair and dressed like a European. He had Christian radicalism all over him, called for by those radical times. I found him non-ignorable. To this day, I dislike conventionality, partly because I saw in Francis Schaeffer a man who made an impact not by conforming and fitting in but by standing out as the man God made him to be, the man the world needed him to be.

[Read Gratitude for Francis Schaeffer]

Friday in the wild: May 9, 2014

Hello! This might be a longer installment than usual, simply because I was unable to post last week, so I have about two weeks of interesting (and now, slightly stale) stuff to pass around. Which is fine with me.

First, an intriguing article from The Art of Manliness, which promotes traditional masculine virtues. It's intriguing not merely because of the subject matter—though as someone who enjoys the occasional glass of whiskey, of course I enjoyed reading about a shared interest—but because the blog owners are Mormons, who would not normally drink alcohol. It's a guest post. Obviously there's plenty of room in the tent for varying views on masculinity! (AoM featured articles on cocktails and pipe smoking as well in the past.)

In spite of its sometimes tumultuous history (see the Whiskey Rebellion), whiskey is a drink that men have enjoyed for centuries. Men like Mark Twain, Winston Churchill (often accompanied with a fine cigar), and Clark Gable imbibed regularly. When one thinks of masculine images, you often conjure up a picture of a man in a tweed coat with a glass of whiskey in his hand by the fire. If you’ve ever wanted to be that man and explore this manly tradition, you’re in luck. While we’ve given you a primer on Scotch whisky, today we’re going to broaden that and talk about whiskey as a whole—especially how to enjoy it!

[Read How to Drink Whiskey]

Happy birthday, WWW

On March 12, 1989, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a new, hypertext-based information management system at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to address the problem of long-term information loss due to employee turnover. His solution was a non-linear pool of information interconnected with hyperlinks. And hence the World Wide Web was born.

Today, 25 years later, of course the WWW has evolved into a repository of Justin Bieber, pr0n, pictures of cats with amusing captions, and blogs like this one. Occasionally, academic research does still get done.

The original WWW went "live" in 1991. Although it's changed locations, it's still viewable. As an HTML coder, I was eager to view the source just to see how different the original HTML markup was from the current 5th version.

The Web has come a long way in 25 years from those plain grey pages we all discovered back in the early 90s. Sites like Blogger or Facebook simply wouldn't have been possible with the technology of the time; it took about a decade for that. I need to leave a note for myself for March 12, 2039: how will we share our LOLcats then?

Boom

I've often planned to take on the bodily-autonomy argument for abortion rights (aka the "violinist argument" formulated by Judith Jarvis Thomson) as a blog project. I may still do so, but not too soon. It would seem too much like getting on the bandwagon, after Matt Walsh blew it out of the water.

Read. Learn.

I Am Afraid of This Indisputable, Pro-Choice Argument

F5 #4: Writer's block

Yes, not only am I late, I'm so late (How late was he?) that I'm writing the last post of February a week into March.

Well, I began this year's F⁵ theme, pet hates, with good intentions: spend the month when I'm most personal on the blog talking about things I dislike, rather than things I like. I had a pretty good idea what I wanted to say for the first three weeks of February. But I never came up with a fourth topic. My most hated books, music, or movies? Wouldn't know; never had to read, listen to, or watch them. I don't waste time disliking what I don't have to be exposed to.

Which leads me to believe that I'm a lot less cynical or curmudgeonly than I thought. In that case, perhaps I'll just voluntarily close the series off a little early this year, and start thinking about next time. No one's keeping score, right?

On the other hand: I really, really hate not knowing what to say.