Ahab Has A Blog.

Ah well it's another in an endless stream of grey days and so there are many unlovely things we'll leave to rest beneath the grey smooth waters.

So we'll just say instead we know what Joanna Newsom's "The Sprout and the Bean" is about. The easy part is that she's kinda mopey and down.

I railed and I raved
At the difference between
The sprout and the bean
It is a golden ring
It is a twisted string

A parallel list of nouns: sperm, embryo, egg, DNA. Or, alternately, embryo, child, life, DNA. This is the imagery of conception. So why the "endless dreams of lead"?

And the danger, danger
Drawing near them was a white coat
And the danger, danger
Drawing near them was a broad boat
And the water, water
Running clear beneath a white throat
And the hollow chatter of the talking of the tadpoles
Who know th'outside

Doctors, crossing a river (e.g. Styx, the River of Death), a swan (sometimes a symbol of death), the sound of the children - who were born and so know "the outside". So: a miscarriage. The chorus is addressed to the child who might have been, an invitation to join us in life:

Should we go outside
Should we break some bread
Are y'inter-ested?

Wipeout hee hah haha ha ha aha a ahh wipeout!

First, Perl 6 is on the road to going somewhere. They are fixing the substantive criticisms of Perl 5: a syntactically ugly (though eminently flexible) OO system; and general obscurantism (though the latter applies wherever the users of a language will test its capabilities severly, which is to say: wherever things aren't boring). They seem to be ignoring (thankfully) the less substantive critiques: Too Much Freedom, Insignificant WhiteSpace, and Punctuation. I've never understood that last criticism, personally, but it seems to be very popular among the Significant WhiteSpace and B&D OO programming advocates. That these "problems" seem not to matter in practice recalls the (possibly apocryphal) French Academic "joke" (see the Sunday NY Times: we don't need no stinkin blodges) that goes something like "yes, that is true in practice, but the problem is, will it be true in theory?"

Second, the most interesting thing (to us) on this graph is that around day 30, there's an innput of new committers and a temporary flattening of the number of commits. A micro-visible example of Brooks' LawUpdate: Autrijus pointed out I seemed to have the lines reversed. Either that or I was seeing a signal in noise - frankly I can't remember enough to distinguish. Anyway, I can report that Pugs works (and there's even a FreeBSD port), which is cool. I think Perl 6 looks very promising and I'm starting to believe it will happen in time to keep Perl from being slowly overtaken by Python.

Also, Autrijus is apparently Taiwanese. Also interesting, if you know what I'm talking about, which you probably don't.

Also, this pretty much sums up this entire content zone: Warnock applies

It's like watching the world's stupidest zombie rise from the grave and barbeque itself on an electric fence. Hillary Rosen - yes, that Hillary Rosen, the face that lawsuits, has the fucking gall (no, it's not chutzpah, it's just shameless bile) to call someone - anyone (even Chairman Mao would be too much) "anti-consumer".

Yes, read it all right here>. Steve Jobs is, in her squinty view, "anti-consumer" for having his software comply with the very legal environment she did so much to foster. And now she is asking Jobs to expose Apple to infinite liability and zero benefit in order to give a free ride to a company as rapacious as any in existence. She is apparently so totally irony-free that she can say all this with no thought to how Microsoft licenses software and access to rivals. It's as simple as this: she bought an iPod, she wanted to download something onto it (I'm imagining Steely Dan, which she takes for intellectual), and she couldn't. She didn't stop to ask why Apple couldn't just admit more filetypes in, or why she couldn't transfer MP3 files bought from another service. Baby say waaah.

People, that is the quality of thinking going into policy decisions regarding intellectual property these days. If this doesn't stop, we'll soon be entering a New Dark Ages (I believe there are many countervailing reasons this is not so, but that's a longer discussion that makes this particular triumph of ignorance no less dark).

Clearly, Hillary Rosen, lesbian or no, is the sort of person who feels the only kind of power that is good is unaccountable to individuals, remote, disciplinarian, and corporate. The only conceivable motivation for this asinine writing of hers is that she, in the deepest depths of her tiny little heart, believes that the real offense is that Steve-o doesn't bend over and take it for Big Daddy Bill. The person with the power, in this sycophantic, might-makes right view, must be appeased at all costs, and anyone who thinks different must never raise his voice. It is truly difficult to imagine anything more anti-consumer than any single brain-fart she pppphhhhttts.

She is, in other words, a total brown-nosing asshole; a little nothing, a mere ass-mouth, a filthy alimentary canal, in between the asslickers below and shit-dumpers above. Eliminate any party in the equation and you have the spectacle of a dog licking its own ass.

There's a bankrupcty reform bill currentlly winding its way through Congress. The bill makes it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy, even though the the two main reasons for bankruptcy in the US today are medical bills (even for those with insurance) and shady lending practices by credit card companies.

The funny thing is, the avowedly religious President and many who style themselves as both Christians and conservatives are driving this bill onward. The reason it's funny is that they deflect criticism of the bill by saying, well, if people buy too much crap on high interest cards, it's their own fault. The reason that's funny is that, well, the Bible is pretty clear that usury - the charging of excessive interest - is a no-no. Back in the day, see, that was one of the main forms of debt servitude. Not much changes. Except that many so-called Christians seem to think it's a great idea.

It's funny, for a minute I was going to ask how the administration gets away with pretending to be observant Christians when their actions say otherwise at every turn. Oh, that's right, it's because they are fucking liars.

WFMU Marathon Time Keep real radio alive. Commercial free. DJs playing you stuff they like. No mandatory playlists. No payola. No media oligopoly. Internet streaming. Downloads of interesting tracks. Streaming from the archives. Insane, criminal, politically-motivated government censorship. Don't let freedom die. Pledge now. Eclectic, freeform, essential.

Linked is just one story about local legislators protecting corporate interests, killing capitalism, and royally fucking the public. There are many more stories like this, these days. They reveal a concerted policy on the part of communications companies to prevent competition: apparently, they can't even compete even with volunteer efforts.

Apparently, communications companies have found local legislators easier targets when trying to make it illegal to give away Internet access for free. Let us be clear about this type of policy: it is not captalist, it is not free market, and it is not good for the public. We are certain that if you probed deeply enough, you could find grounds to jail these servile toadies for bribery and send them to pound-you-in-the-ass prison.

By the logic these companies employ, there should be legislation against public water fountains. If, say SBC communications has such a problem with legitimate capitalism, they should establish operations in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or any number of other countries where government power and private interests conspire against We The People. But as far as we are concerned, these companies can go fuck themselves.