You will weep and know why
I have a big problem:
It’s that I’m a Jew—
A Jew that loves bacon
And sausages too!
And butterfly shrimp,
And scallops in butter,
And a bacon cheeseburger
Makes my heart go aflutter!
I’m my rabbi’s despair,
And my family’s shame —
But if treyf is so tasty,
Should I get the blame?
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend
Pass it over to me
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend
Pass it over to me
Roll another one
Just like the other one
You’ve been hangin on to it
And I sure would like a hit
Recently I undertook to convert Glenn Fleishman’s The Magazine: The Book from a beautifully laid out hardcover book into something that an EPUB reader could handle. The tool I used was Adobe’s latest version of InDesign, a program that I hadn’t used since it was a PowerPC application back in the long-long-ago.
When I fired up the application, I saw its latest splash screen, which looked to me like a fatal explosion in a type foundry:
After painstaking research, I believe I have found the inspiration:
It’s been nine days since my older brother Dennis died. Nine days before his sixty-fourth birthday, which would have been today.
We were very different, Dennis and I: at least, we both tried to think so. But right now I don’t think so much about that, nor the fights and squabbles we engaged in as children, nor the times he simply sat on me to win an argument. What I think about are the many times he did the big-brotherly thing.
He introduced me to baseball on the radio and the voice of Vin Scully during the hot dry days of a Las Vegas summer.
He saved my parents the agony of explaining the facts of life to me by explaining them to me himself as we perched on the tailgate of my father’s pickup truck. I thought he was kidding—our folks would never do *that*!
He gave me my introduction to computers, helped get me my first professional programming job when I fled graduate studies in English literature, gave me my first glimpse of an Apple Macintosh and shared with me the loose-leaf mysteries of the first release of *[Inside Macintosh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Macintosh)*.
He helped me get my first book contract, and later collaborated with me on several books. In the course of writing them, we sometimes argued, as we did when we were kids, but he no longer sat on me to win.
Who am I going to argue with now?
On Thursday, when I returned home after attending my brother’s Orthodox Jewish funeral, I had a Bacon Insider burger from Jack-In-The-Box.
It was delicious.
(I believe Dennis would have understood.)
I’ve been seeing a lot of astonishment and outrage at the reported casting of Jesse Eisenberg in the yet-to-be-titled sequel to Superman; even my friend Josh has evinced some disdain at the choice.
Yet, to me, Eisenberg seems a natural choice to play the Lex Luthor that I grew up reading about back in the early 1960s. This is how the Superman Wiki describes that Lex:
>In Adventure Comics #271 in 1960 (written by Jerry Siegel), the Silver Age origin of Luthor is retroactively revealed, along with Luthor finally gaining a first name, “Lex.” It was revealed that when Luthor was a teenager, his family moved to Smallville, with Lex becoming a large fan of Superboy. In gratitude and to encourage Lex’s scientific pursuits, Superboy built for Lex a fully stocked laboratory. There, Lex began an experiment in creating an artificial new form of life, along with a cure for kryptonite poisoning.
>However, when a fire caught in his lab, Superboy mistakenly used his super-breath to extinguish the flames. This rescue attempt spilled chemicals that caused Luthor to go prematurely bald and destroyed both his kryptonite cure and his artificial life form. Luthor attributed Superboy’s actions to jealousy and vowed revenge. First, he tried to show Superboy up with grandiose technological advancements to improve the life of Smallville’s residents, which time and again went dangerously out of control and required Superboy’s intervention. Unwilling to accept responsibility for these catastrophes, Lex rationalized that Superboy was out to humiliate him, and vowed to spend the rest of his life proving to the world he was Superboy’s (and later Superman’s) superior by eliminating the hero.
In other words, the young Lex was a boy scientist: a nerd! Not the thick-necked bruiser I have seen in more recent Superman cartoons and comic books, but a nerd!
Eisenberg would be perfect.
I’ve been experimenting with styles in Pages 5.1, and have finally figured out how to copy styles from one document to another. Figuring this out is important, because Pages 5.1 has no style import function, and to properly export an EPUB, for example, you really do want to have certain styles in your document from Apple’s EPUB Best Practices document (which, by the way, is still in Pages 4 format; it should be a template in Pages 5, but noooo…).
It seems there are a lot of little bugs in Pages 5.1’s styles, as the procedure I figured out demonstrates. First of all, the only way to get styles from one document to another is either to copy and paste the styled text from one document to another or to use the Format > Copy Style and Format > Paste Style commands, as I describe below. Note the same problems arise whether you merely copy the style and paste it or copy text containing the style and pasting that:
Pages 5.1 should really be categorized as a beta…
And tasty, too.
Forbes goes the extra mile in shoving an Apple reference into an article that is actually about something else completely:
The headline: “No iPhone Bump For September Retail Sales”
The first paragraph: “Even though U.S. shoppers raced out to buy the latest model of the iPhone, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates consumers kept an otherwise-tight grip on their wallets in anticipation of the dampening effect of the government shutdown.”
So it’s really an article about the U.S. retail sales report for September. But without an Apple mention, it’s just news, not linkbait.
If journalism is dying, Forbes is sticking the knife in, twisting it, and licking the blood off of it…
Vin Scully is doing the play-by-play announcing for the National League Championship Series on the radio. The series is being telecast by TBS, which has its own announcers. They aren’t national treasures like Vin Scully is.
A billion years ago, in the Analog Age, I would have listened to Vinny on the radio while watching the TV with the sound off. But I live in a place with very bad over-the-air radio reception, so that’s not possible. However, I do have the MLB app on my iPhone, and that does provide my local radio feed (KLAC). Problem solved?
Not quite. The MLB audio feed can be delayed anywhere from 6 to 20 seconds behind the TV broadcast. Luckily, my cable box is a DVR: if I pause the live feed for just as long as the MLB app lag, I can sync the video and the audio.
Dodgers playing for the pennant and Vinny on the radio. Some things are timeless.