Two Ideas

I’m sick of articles like this which report data as follows:

The 20-city slice of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price index recorded a drop of 0.6% from March to April, compared with a 2.2% drop in the prior month. The index has declined every month since July 2006.

The problem is, as Seattle Bubble is fond of pointing out, there’s normally a bump in housing prices from March to April due to the seasonality of home sales.

A more fair comparison would be comparing the year-over-year price changes from March and April. The Wall Street Journal reports that the 20-city index reported a year-over-year decline of 18.7% in March, and The New York Times reports that the 20-city index reported a year-over-year decline of 18.1% in April.

The numbers CNN reports sound as though we saw a 72% improvement, but once you remove the seasonality and look at the year-over-year numbers, the improvement is only 3.2% better. That’s quite a difference.

And in either case we’re looking at a second-derivative number here: the change in the rate of decline. We’re still talking about a very significant decline, which appears to be ongoing. Even if we see a few months of positive changes, Japan saw several multi-month periods of positive improvement in their housing market before it bottomed out.

A friend made some comments about the economy, which basically amounted to the notion that the problem was the decoupling of consequences in the mortgage market — people were “playing with monopoly money” and behaving irresponsibly due to the invention and application of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. I think what he said is more or less true, but I’d make several observations:

You didn’t need the CDSes to get from “mortgages are safe” to chaos. You needed three other things, which we had:
Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry about the spam that some of you might have seen — I’ve cleaned it up. Color me concerned as I’m running the latest version of WordPress — I suspect there must be an as-yet-unpatched hole that spammers can use.

If you see any more spam here, please let me know.

In other Spam-related news, I’m learning Python so I can contribute patches to existing software at work, rather than just poke around the edges by writing little Perl scripts here and there. Not that my job officially involves writing software, but sometimes it’s the most straightforward path to a solution. I’m about halfway though Learning Python and it’s going pretty well so far. I’m taking a break from the book to rewrite one of my aforementioned peripheral scripts, as a learning exercise.

Within a single week, I’ve passed two milestones with regard to my writing.

First, I’ve gone into positive territory on my royalties for Think Unix. Yes, after nearly eight and a half years I’ve earned back my advance, and am now owed approximately three dollars seventy-five cents by the publisher.

I’m exceedingly pleased that people continue to read and purchase this book, and that except for the two chapters on Unix GUIs the book has remained useful. I wanted to write an “evergreen,” and I feel like I succeeded. Not that I couldn’t improve the book, or that there aren’t things I wish I’d done better, but I think I did pretty well.

Second, I’m pleased to announce that a short story of mine is being published. I’ve waited until the magazine was printed and ready to go, as I’ve had things fall through in the past – but you can buy issue one of The Ne’er-Do-Well Magazine, which contains my short story “Lodestar.”

If you’ve read previous versions of this story, I’d encourage you to buy the magazine and re-read it, as it’s been substantially revised. Sheila, the editor, is exceedingly perceptive, and her input did the story a lot of good. I’m looking forward to my copy arriving, and reading the rest of the pieces too.

As a teaser, an unrelated short-short, I still get pictures from him sometimes is on the magazine’s site, along with short-shorts from other contributors.

The opposite of smart isn’t stupid. The opposite of smart is stubborn.

This is probably true even when you’re both stubborn and technically correct: standard is better than better.

Reading the Slate end of year round-up regarding pop music, I went into iTunes and discovered that I bought only two albums this past year: Lou Reed’s Berlin and The Black Angels’ Directions to See a Ghost. I didn’t buy any single tracks in iTunes, either, though I did download a handful of freebies from Starbucks.

For a man with a collection of seven hundred CDs, give or take, that’s a startling reduction in the amount of music I’m buying. And it’s not as though I spent this year delving deep into my archives and playing a lot more music from there, either.

Most of my music-playing came via iPod while on airplanes.  And even then, I probably listened to more non-musical podcasts than I listened to music.

So what gives?
Read the rest of this entry »

Many apologies if you get spammed via RSS. I just upgraded to WP 2.7, and ended up moving the files to the root of the tree instead of in a /wordpress subdirectory. I’ve got a rewrite rule in place, so no links should be broken, but I don’t know what the consequence of any of this will be for RSS readers.

And yes, I do plan on posting more soon. Or soonish, anyway. I Have A Plan. (Then again, I always seem to have a plan…)

This morning, I saw someone selling Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler on vinyl, at a weekly scavenge market. Three things occurred to me:

1. Kenny Rogers seems to exist in a sort of irony-gap or retro-gap, where it’s not quite possible to enjoy it ironically based on its perceived badness, nor good enough to listen to sincerely. If anyone is left who does listen to Kenny Rogers with great sincerity, they’re undoubtedly not the kind of snob who still digs listening to records.
2. When I listened to the song “The Gambler” as a kid, it wasn’t lost on me that it was supposed to be a metaphor for how to live. But thinking about the song recently, I realized that they’re not even playing cards at the beginning, just sitting on a train in the dark — but the narrator is still, in the eyes of the gambler, “out of aces.” So he’s only out of aces metaphorically, not literally.
3. On my copy of Kenny Roger’s Greatest Hits, I always misheard the words to “Lucille.” Even as a kid, I was pretty sure that “four hundred children” was too many.

Now that The New York Times has weighed in on the Boing Boing versus Violet Blue imbroglio, a topic where I didn’t realize I had much to say, I realized that I did have a couple of words.

I think it’s really very good when people reconsider the things they’ve said in conversation. My goodness, you can still find things I wrote on the Internet ten or fifteen years ago, and I certainly don’t think all of the same things now. I think that the evolution of personal viewpoints is normal, and healthy, and should be welcome.

However, I think it’s really bad when you pretend not to have said the things that you previously did. To enforce this kind of ex post facto internal consistency is dishonest. Maybe not to-the-core dishonest, but certainly untrustworthy, and in general not the kind of conversational partner I want to have.

I think that de-publishing is much closer to (but not the same as) pretending you never said something than it is to reconsidering previous viewpoints. It does strike me as uncomfortably Orwellian, even if it is a private group doing it, rather than the government. I mean, how would people feel if the New York Times decided to remove every mention of Monica Lewinsky from their archive due to poor behavior on her part? If Warren Ellis is right, and Cory and Xeni are the “cut and paste editors of the Internet,” then it matters, regardless of whether that job was thrust upon them or one that they willingly embraced.

Finally, wading through blog comments on this whole issue reminds me why it’s a good thing to keep your conversations small in the first place.

Warren Ellis very nearly gets at something I’ve tried to get my head around for some time.To butcher his argument, the Web is, or should be, moving beyond the era of linkblogs like Boing Boing “curating” the net. He thinks it’s easy enough getting linked, and that “half the web” shouldn’t just be links to the other half.

But I think Mr. Ellis, who I hold in the highest esteem, misses something: link curation is a type of collage, which comes from the French word coller, meaning “to paste.” So when he writes, “Cory and Xeni [of Boing Boing] are the copy/paste editors for the internet,” he’s actually describing what they do as collage.

Linkblogging is only one kind of collage, or more broadly assemblage, which some people have begun to think of as art. We all know, or have been, that guy who thinks that his mix tapes are art, or his DJing is art, or that his mashups and submissions to I can has cheezburger? are art.

And maybe they are. I don’t want to be in the business of telling people what is or isn’t art. But then, if all collage, all “remix culture” is art, so is wearing the right combination of designer clothes (wardrobe design, not fashion design), stuffing your house full of the right stuff (interior furnishing, not interior design), and listening to the right bands are art. Because you’re assembling them, transforming them into something new through combination and personalization. And I don’t want to go down that road, myself: consumption and self-selection through purchasing aren’t art, at least not to me.

So if these things aren’t art, or are art only incidentally, what is their primary function?

The astute reader will guess my assertion by checking my post title: I think these things are a conversation, an ongoing conversation.

Now, conversation absolutely can be cultural production in the Warren Ellis-approved sense: good book reviews, or film reviews, are part of a conversation between the author or filmmaker, the critic, other critics, and the reader or viewer. Mixtapes achieve their power through comparison and contrast, reinforcement and juxtaposition. The best LOLcats, as Anil Dash has argued, achieve their power through a consistent grammar of repetition and variation changing through time. Isn’t that just a fancy way of describing a conversation?

This is one reason that blogs with comments seemed to be the thing just a little while ago. I remember, at the one Seattle Bloggers meetup I can recall attending, that Robert Scoble criticized my metablog design for not making comments obvious. I felt, and still feel, that the best response to a blog post isn’t a comment but another blog post. Now Scoble says that blog comments are dead. I can’t figure out if I’m on the bleeding edge, or so far back that I only look like I’m in the race. (Or maybe the universe wraps around on itself, and I am so far back that I’m in first place. Or vice-versa.)

In the end, it might be nice to separate the web into content and remixed indices to that content, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think we’re going to keep surfing the wave of remix culture for some time to come, and that the waves will be made of old and new alike. Sorry Warren, the linkblog is probably here to stay, at least for a while.

In his review of the new production of The Bacchae, starring Alan Cumming as Dionysus, Charles Isherwood compares Cumming’s appearance to Shirley Temple and Boy George, missing (or ignoring) the obvious debt to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s Frank N Furter. So when Isherwood writes that the production’s “insistent playfulness makes the transition to the horror of the final scenes troublesome,” I wonder if he’s watching the same play that I’d be seeing. (The use of pop R&B songs written for the production increases my sense that this production owes more than a little to Rocky Horror.)

In other words, if I magically end up with a couple of extra hours one night in New York, I’d love to see this. (Aw, crap, it ends on the 13th, several days before I make it to New York.  Maybe I come down from Connecticut over the weekend? Anyone in New York want to see this next Friday night?)