Blackmoor Vituperative

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

In 2002, Susan and I went to Las Vegas for the “5th Dr. Laura 50th birthday party”. It was Susan’s idea. I have no tolerance for Dr. Laura. I think she’s a judgmental harridan. Susan finds her entertaining. We are different people, and it’s okay for us to like different things.

Anyway, the Dr. Laura thing was just one night, We spent the rest of the week walking up and down the strip (the new part, where the Paris Las Vegas hotel is, which is the hotel where we spent half of the week), getting free stuff from casinos, and seeing some shows. The shows I particularly remember liking were Showgirls Of Magic and Skin Tight. We also got a kick out of the fountains at the Ballagio, and the all of the interior decorations of the various casinos.

While in Las Vegas, we took a day trip out to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. That’s where we got this mug.

Unlike Niagra Falls, the Grand Canyon was every bit as huge as I’d imagined it. If you ever get a chance to go see it, you really should. It’s just astonishing. I was also astonished at the ravens. They are huge, and apparently they are one of the most common animals at the Grand Canyon. I did not know this.

We were not at the canyon long enough to go down to the bottom. It’s 7,000 feet from the edge where we were to the bottom, and we were only there three hours. Maybe some day we will return, and trek down to the bottom.

On the way back to Las Vegas, the bus crossed the Hoover Dam, which was also quite amazing. The dam itself is still open to visitors, but you can’t drive across it anymore. So if you have never done that, too bad — you can’t.

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

We spent the night in Virginia Beach because we were going to our niece’s “graduation” that evening. While at a gift shop, we saw some pirate shirts. Susan bought a really cool pirate shirt in Savannah, GA years before, but it was in storage. We found the exact same pirate shirt, and some similar pirate shirts, so we each got a new pirate shirt. Then we purchased a couple of pirate mugs, because we did not have any, and we thought that would be a cool thing to have. This is one of those mugs.

The girl at the counter said, “Y’all must really like pirates,” which still makes us chuckle.

I also got a half-pound of fudge, which I am pretty sure I ate all of before be made it back home.

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

This is another mug from Disneyland in 2009, the 40th anniversary of the Haunted Mansion.

I love this mug. It’s black with white non-water-soluble paint, so it’s dishwasher safe, and the design is Edward Gorey-esque. It’s also large enough to dunk a large cookie in, which is important.

When Susan gets old, she wants to move to Florida and get a job working at Disneyworld, so she could go to the Haunted Mansion any time she likes. Doing what, I don’t know. Perhaps seating people in the rides, or working at the gift shop.

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

From 2007 until 2009, I played World Of Warcraft (although I was pretty inactive for the last year of that span). I met some interesting people through WOW. Some of them, sadly, I no longer talk to. Of the handful I still am able to keep in touch with, one or two make an effort to meet up at the Maryland Renaissance Festival in September.

The first year I went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival was in 2008, and that’s when I got this mug. It’s not technically a coffee mug, but it’s one of only two steins I own, and it has sentimental value in addition to being really pretty. It’s numbered 159/300, but really, that should be 159/299, because the first one I bought had a crack in it, and I swapped it for this one. So there are, at most, 298 more of these out there.

I hope the weather is better this year. So far, it has rained every year I have gone. A wool cloak gets really heavy when it’s wet.

Nikita Lolita Chiquita Banana Maria Conchita Alonso Blackmoor
“La Femme Nikita”
1995-10-01 — 2011-08-17

Black Cat

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

— Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

In the early to mid 1990s, when Military Circle Mall was more well known for the muggings in the parking lot than the upscale shopping (it’s called “The Gallery at Military Circle” now: ooh, aah), Susan and I would go there from time to time to see movies. What can I say: we are fearless. It was on one such occasion that we were roaming the mall, killing some time before the movie started.

We stopped at a dollar store (not “the” Dollar Store — Military Circle was circling the drain at that point, and all it had was a store run by an Indian or Pakistani family that sold pretty much the same things as the Dollar Store) to get some snacks to take into the movie theatre (yes, we do that). Susan saw this mug, and she immediately fell in love with it. It says, “Don’t piss me off! I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.” It’s one of a handful of mugs that we consider “hers”.

I have been saying for years that passwords, as a concept, need to go away. As implemented, passwords don’t work, and the ludicrous “complexity” requirements imposed my many companies are little more than a guarantee that the user will write their password down, which is one of the easiest ways for a system to be compromised.

Here’s a cartoon from xkcd that illustrates why ridiculous password policies don’t even make sense from a security perspective.

The gist of it is this: long passwords (passphrases, actually) are more secure than short ones.

I am going to post a photo of a coffee mug every day in August, and talk a little bit about where we got it and why I like it.

In August of 2006, Susan and I went on a road trip up to Cedar Point amusement park, “the roller coaster capital of the world”. On the way up, we stopped at Fallingwater, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs. It’s nicer from the outside than from the inside, honestly. On the way back, we visited Harpers Ferry, which was fascinating. I had no inkling of any of Harpers Ferry’s history. We spent an entire day just wandering around, touring buildings, and reading signs.

This mug came from Cedar Point, obviously. Susan and I both love cobalt blue glass.

I have two distinct memories of Cedar Point. One is being on a stairwell leading up to some attraction, looking out over the crowd at the park, and thinking how very, very white everyone was. It was kind of eerie and unsettling, like if you walked into a huge crowd of redheads all of a sudden. It doesn’t matter if you are a redhead: to see only redheads in a huge crowd is still pretty freaking weird.

My other distinct memory is riding the Top Thrill Dragster, which was billed as the tallest and fastest coaster in the world at that time. Like every roller coaster, they give you the standard warnings about securing loose articles and so on. I put my sunglasses in my pocket, assuming they would be safe there (they always had been in the past). The ride was very fast, and very short (well, duh — I guess that’s what “fastest in the world” gives you). As we left the ride, I went to put my sunglasses back on, and discovered they were no longer in my pocket. They were gone. I never even felt them leave my pocket. I hope they didn’t kill anyone in the cars behind us.

I have an update on that poem I was looking for.

I finally found a single reference to this poem, through Google Books, in The Columbia Granger’s guide to poetry anthologies, a book which is itself a listing and review of other books. The poem is called “Where the Neuter Computer Goes Click”, and it was contained in the anthology Of quarks, quasars, and other quirks: Quizzical poems for the supersonic age, edited by Sara Westbrook Brewton, John Edmund Brewton, and Quentin Blake, published in 1977. That’s not where I encountered it: as I mentioned, I read it in a literature textbook.

The anthology is out of print, but used copies are really cheap, so I went ahead and bought one.

Controversy continues to rage over the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District’s unilateral decision to follow in the footsteps of Egypt’s now fallen dictator Hosni Mubarak, by cutting off cell phone services in an attempt to quell protests (in BART’s case, a protest that didn’t actually occur).

The “Anonymous” group has today already hacked BART’s external Web sites in response, and more protests triggered by BART’s actions may be forthcoming.

Is comparing Mubarak and BART unfair? Over the top? After all, various U.S. observers have been supporting BART’s decision, saying that riders really didn’t need cell service at those locations, didn’t have it in those locales a relatively few years ago, and have suggested that pretty much anything was acceptable in the name of proactively preserving “public safety” — even in the face of nonexistent protesters.

And since luckily it appears that no critical phone calls (“Sorry, I can’t reach the doctor’s cell phone!”) were blocked as a result of BART’s action, it’s no harm, no foul, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

[…]

(from BART, Cell Phones, Lenin, and a Steel Cage, Lauren Weinstein’s Blog)