Tag Archives: web sites

High Summer Hiatus

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Saw a few fireflies the other day, a certain sign of that nebulous period, high summer. The days might be getting shorter, but you don’t notice that yet — like the long moment at the top of ballistic trajectory. Back to posting around July 7.

Usually I rely on rain to wash my car or, if absolutely necessary, a hosing down on a warm day. But after our recent summertime jaunt to central Illinois-Indiana, enough bugs had met their insectoid maker against the leading edge of my car that I ponied up for an automated car wash. Half price ($5), though, since I had a coupon.

I find the journey through the car wash, at less than two minutes, visually and sonically interesting. I get that for my money, besides the removal of bug splatter.

So I held my camera as steady as possible during the splashing and blooping and hissing and flapping, along with elements of a minor light show.

The dog spent some time this morning trading insults with a resident squirrel. At least that’s how I want to think of it. The dog spotted a squirrel in the major back yard tree around 9 and immediately started looking up and whining at it, as she often does. Soon the squirrel was making its own noise, something like a duck with laryngitis.

Age has slowed her (the dog) down a little, but not yet when it comes to guarding the back yard against other creatures. Earlier this year, she spent time trying to scratch through the deck to reach what I suspect was a brood of possums. They seem to be gone now, since that dog behavior has stopped for now.

Chanced on a site called Yarn the other day that purports to offer a search “by word or phrase for TV, movies, and music clips.” So I decided to test it.

Why that phrase? Just popped into my head like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Thursday Debris, Online Edition

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As part of my work, I spend a fair amount of research time on sites devoted to news in specific cities, and besides the items I’m looking for, I see a lot else besides. It doesn’t take long to realize that murders and traffic accidents and fires still lead, even in the age of digital media. Pop any major city name in Google News and that much is clear.

Sometimes the headlines, or the lead paragraphs, are a little lighter. Even if violence is involved.

Wanted Akron Pimp Shot through the Ear in Cleveland

Painful, I bet, but with time and maybe plastic surgery, the Akron pimp might recover. He’ll also have a story to tell at the pimp conventions.

Then there’s news about things I’m only vaguely aware of. I don’t mind it if they stay that way.

Sharknado 6 is set to be released on July 25, 2018… the film will feature time travel, Nazis, dinosaurs, knights, and Noah’s Ark.

Six? Anyway, the movie will be full of things any 12-year-old boy might want. Left out were cowboys, astronauts, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle, though I guess boys aren’t quite as interested in those things as they once were. There’s always Sharknado 7.

News about thrill seekers. Type T people, I’ve heard them called. Nuts, that is.

Your Facebook and Instagram feeds are full of it: People on vacation pushing themselves to extremes by diving off rocks, skiing dizzying backcountry drops, walking rickety paths above death-assuring canyons.

My Facebook feed is full of no such things. But I do remember interviewing a real estate executive well over a decade ago, and the most interesting part was off the record — and not directly related to commercial real estate anyway. It was about him rafting on some river in Mongolia. Off the record because he didn’t want the other investors in his projects to think he was doing anything they’d consider dangerous.

And other oddities.

Saint Louis University is seeking a name for a Midtown district that straddles part of its north and south campuses and includes the Foundry and Armory projects. Voters can choose from Prospect Yards, The GRID, The Circuit, The 1818, or write in their own name.

I don’t much care for any of those, except maybe 1818. I suggest “Bob.”

Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler

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Found an interesting thing on Merriam-Webster’s web site the other day, a function called Time Traveler. It says: “When was a word first used in print? You may be surprised! Enter a date below to see the words first recorded on that year.”

Elsewhere on the site, the lexicographers are careful to point out that “the date most often does not mark the very first time that the word was used in English. Many words were in spoken use for decades or even longer before they passed into the written language. The date is for the earliest written or printed use that the editors have been able to discover.”

Still, that’s the kind of thing I find interesting. Naturally, vanity got the better of me, so I looked up words introduced to print the same year as I was introduced to the world, 1961. Quite a collection.

There are words that reflect scientific progress: ampicillin, dehydroepiandrosterone, isospin, lawrencium, messenger RNA, mid-ocean ridge, neurotransmission, radioimmunoassay, spark chamber (is that last one a milder version of a Star Chamber?)

There are also words clearly specific to space exploration: A-OK, biosensor (maybe), capcom, clean room, geostationary, low earth orbit, and probably solar panel.

There are hints of things to come, for good or ill: affirmative action, anti-harassment, Black Friday, compassion fatigue, computer science, Eurocurrency, fiber-optic, lip-synch, military-industry complex (hey, Ike), operating system, paparazzo, read-only memory, skyjack, SST, telenova, toaster oven, and wayback machine.

That last one popularized by Sherman and Peabody? The time would be right.

New things to eat and drink: Bibb lettuce, fettucine Alfredo, mai tai and, if necessary, your pot-bellied pig.

There are a few I would have guessed would be older, but apparently not: AA battery, black ice, hard-edge, no-holds-barred, no-win, race-baiting, redistributionist.

And what about chocoholic and wazoo? They’re on the list. I would have placed them later, as inanities of the ’80s.

Thursday Residuum

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No overnight freezes yet, though it can’t be long. Thus a lot of greenery is still hanging on. So are blood-red blooms in our back yards.

I don’t know the species, but the plant produces late-season flowers that are so heavy that the blossoms face the ground. Of course, that’s a human interpretation; no blossom is obliged to orient itself in any particular direction to please a human sense of aesthetics. Even so, I held it upward for the picture.

I discovered a giant cucumber on the ground recently.

It was hiding — again, a human perspective (it’s the only one I’ve got) — under the many leaves of the cucumber plants we’ve been growing near the deck since late spring. So we didn’t notice it when it was green. As you can see, it devolved into a yellow Hindenburg of a vegetable.

“Many people wonder, why are my cucumbers turning yellow?” asks Gardening Know How. “You shouldn’t allow cucumbers to turn yellow. If you encounter a yellow cucumber, it’s usually over ripe. When cucumbers become over ripe, their green coloring produced from chlorophyll begins to fade, resulting in a yellowing pigment. Cucumbers become bitter with size and yellow cucumbers are generally not fit for consumption.”

Ah, well. Guess I’m a failure when it comes to that cucumber, though the mother plant did produce small and tasty green cucumbers this year (as tasty as possible with cucumbers, anyway). The giant yellow cucumber was indeed unfit for human purposes. It’s been returned to nature to rot.

A couple of weeks ago I read about some seasonal haunted house in the western suburbs, and looked up its web site. Its advertising mascot is a zombie scarecrow or some such. It’s an ugly face, anyway.

I can’t count the number of times since then that I’ve seen that ugly face pop up on all kinds of other web sites. It’s an insane amount of digital advertising, an exercise in overkill, and I’m really tired of that face. I’d toyed with the idea of taking Ann to the place, but I’ll be damned if I will now.

Another little annoyance: about a week ago, I was driving along not far from home, and I heard what sounded like an aluminum plate rolling near the car. I thought I’d had a near-miss with some kind of round metal object in the street until about 15 minutes later, at home, when I noticed my car was missing a hubcap.

That’s what that sound was. I drove back to look for it. Gone. Hell’s bells. That’s never happened to me in any car I’ve ever driven, not over the course of many, many thousands of miles. Go figure.

Best to end with a more upbeat note. Somehow, our dog’s more photogenic on the stairs. She sits there often, but only when we’re nearby.

Maybe she likes to sit there to be more-or-less as tall as we, the rest of her pack, are. Just speculation.

CineFix

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I was able to eat lunch on my deck on yesterday, and sit there and read after I mowed the lawn. There’s some chance those things might not be possible again until some unexpectedly warm day in March. Or there could be a string of dry, warm days throughout this month. You never know with October.

CineFix does a nice job on YouTube of the usually vapid format “Best 10” lists about movies, certainly a lot better than the dimwitted WatchMojo, though it does use the annoying construction “Best X or Most Y of All Time.” That’s always bothered the nitpicking editor that I am. It should be the “Best X or Most Y So Far.”

Still, the production team behind CineFix, whoever they are, clearly knows a good deal about cinema, and they write well about it. The lists are organized not so much as a countdown, but as a collection of movies that share certain characteristics (more or less). For instance, Movie Villains includes outright evil characters, likable bad guys, repulsive villains, amoral killers and so on. Each of these subcategories is illustrated with a handful of movies, with one ultimately picked to illustrate the point best, in the opinion of CineFix.

Though the majority of the picks are English-language movies, as befitting the audience, CineFix isn’t afraid to praise movies with (gasp) subtitles, old movies, even silents, or black-and-white movies. I’ve never understood the prejudice against any of those kinds of movies. Quite a few of all them are included in the videos. As illustrated by Character Arcs or Rule-Breaking Movies or Most Beautiful Animation.

Best of all, I’ve come away from some of the lists wanting to watch some of the movies mentioned. Some I’ve heard of, a number I knew nothing about before. Not a bad use of YouTube at all.

Guy Fawkes & Martians &c

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One more warm day. Then no more. Unless the forecasts about next week are right. What kind of November is this?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day again, and not a burning effigy in sight. It’s really something we should import. Lately I’ve been reading What If? 2, a collection of counterfactual history essays that I picked up used for 50 cents, but “What If Guy Fawkes Had Succeeded?” isn’t one of the subjects. Naturally that question’s been taken up elsewhere.

All of us went to see The Martian on Sunday. All in all, a well done bit of hard SF. Titanium hard, though considering the story, the focus on the technology of space travel and survival in a hostile environment isn’t misplaced. The movie also managed to present its exposition — and there was a lot of it — in a way that didn’t goo up the narrative, which is no small trick.

One thing (which the author of the book has acknowledged): the Martian atmosphere is so thin that a raging storm of the sort that got the hero in his jam would be impossible. The planet does have dust storms, of course, but not hurricanes of dust. Never mind.

There’s no overt indication of when the story takes place, so I figured it was either 20 years or so from now — very optimistic indeed, considering the sluggish pace U.S. manned space exploration these days — or in a present-day world in which a program to send people to Mars got started in earnest in the 1990s (it was, after all, something the elder Bush proposed). The flags on the spaceships and shoulder patches, I noticed, had 50 stars. A nice detail would have been to use the 51- or 52-star designs.

I suspect the only way U.S. astronauts are getting to Mars in a few decades is if the Chinese decide to attempt it.

From a web site I’d never heard of before but happened across recently, purporting to cover real estate news (all sic): “According to Investor Daily, TIAA-CREF’s Phil McAndrews has recently stated that the United States economy is under fairly good state that tantamounts to the continuing optimistic forecasts for the commercial property segment.”

That’s a sample from an item laid out like a real article, but clearly not written by a native speaker of English. The item, in fact, is a little hard to read, and larded with advertising links and other annoyances. And then it crashed my browser with an irritating “Unresponsive Script” message. I’m not overly worried about competition from such Mickey Mouse efforts as this.

Does anyone use “Mickey Mouse,” as in amateurish, any more? I had a teacher in junior high, our band director Mr. Fields, who was fond of the term. Now it sounds like it belongs to an earlier generation — Mr. Fields’ generation, or about the same age as Mickey himself. Maybe in more recent years, Disney minions have made trouble for anyone who uses Mickey like that. I’d better watch out.

The Automatic Readability Assessment

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I needed to know the word count of a story of mine today, so I consulted a site called Word Count Tools. No Word on my machine yet, so I’m making do with primitive word pad programs without automatic word-counting. WCT not only counts the words, but it assesses your writing in terms of “readability level.” I wondered what that meant, aside from a subjective impression you might get reading text. Helpfully, it says at the bottom that it calculates something called a Dale-Chall score.

“[The Dale-Chall] formula is used to assess the readability level of a given text, which is described below:

0.1579 (difficult words/words ) + 0.0496 (words/sentences )

Difficult words do not belong to the list of 3,000 familiar words. The formula adds 3.6365 to the raw score if the percentage of difficult words is greater than 5% to get the adjusted score.”

Sure. I see. Anyway, a score of 4.9 or lower (for example) is “easily understood by an average 4th-grade student or lower.” A score of 10 or more is “easily understood by an average college graduate.”

I couldn’t resist putting yesterday’s post through the count, just for fun. It’s 335 words, 1898 characters, with a readability level of “easily understood by a 11th-12th grade student.” The most used words are “time” and “clock,” four times each, then “yard” and “now,” three times each. Clearly, I was writing about time and space. There were 100 “difficult” words and 211 unique words, with 26 sentences of an average length of 12.9 words.

What about the Gettysburg Address? Famously, it’s short: 271 words, 1462 characters, “easily understood by a 9-10th grade student.” Its top word is “nation,” at five times, or fully 8.3 percent of the total. Other top words are “dedicated,” “great,” and “dead.” There are only 47 “difficult” words. Clearly a speech for the common man, or at least the 19th-century common man.