Hobbit Shoes

So, yeah, a few weeks ago I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers shoes - yep, those trendy shoes-with-toes. Allow me to explain...

The shoes were designed for runners, and particularly for those who want the feel of barefoot running, but the protection of shoes. I'm not a runner. I have arthritis. With medication, I do pretty well (last time I went without medication for a while, I needed a cane to walk). But if I'm stuck in one position for any length of time, joints still freeze up a bit. With other shoes, I was finding that by about 2-3 in the afternoon, I was having to take my shoes off and move everything around to avoid having really, really painful feet.

So when it came time to buy a new pair of shoes, I investigated the toe shoes. One of the big selling points is that the flexible sole, and separate toes, allow your foot to move naturally. Since my problem seemed to be related to lack of movement, this seemed like it was worth a try.

So, the verdict after several weeks of wearing them to work every day: At the end of the day, my feet feel better than they have in years. The pain I was dealing with from my old shoes is essentially gone*. Now, it's possible that part of it may just have been that I needed new shoes, of any kind, but I really do think the design helps. Wearing them does feel very different than other shoes, even brand new ones. Most shoes seem to take the approach of holding your feet rigidly in one position (except maybe allowing the toes to bend together as a unit), filling in arch support and heel cushioning to compensate, all of which, I think, was precisely the source of my problem. These go exactly the opposite way - flexibility, with no arch support or heel cushioning at all - and my feet are happier than they've been in a long time.

I'm posting this mostly because when I went looking for people similarly situated, I only found a couple of blog posts mentioning the Five Fingers shoes in connection with arthritis, and I wanted to inject another endorsement into the internet hive-mind. So, if you're reading this because you have arthritis, and you've Googled to see if these shoes have helped others: In my case, yeah, they definitely have.

*I can't say my feet are now absolutely 100% pain-free, but what pain I do have is much, much reduced, and it's not the same shooting, arthritic agony, but more like the semi-pleasant afterburn you get after a workout.

Insufficiently Pedantic Pedants Complain About T-Shirt

“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo”, attributed on this T-Shirt to “Shakespere”. Hilarity ensues, from people making fun of their spelling.

Thing is, that is one of the several ways his name was actually spelled during his lifetime. Spelling wasn’t quite so standardized back then.

“…of "non-literary references" in Shakespeare's lifetime (1564-1616) the spelling "Shakespeare" appears 71 times, while "Shakespere" appears second with 27 usages.”

Thus, in their haste to mock this clothing company for a typo, people have passed up an opportunity to show off even more their own obscure literary knowledge, by not being pedantic enough.

Plus, if you really want to be pedantic about this shirt, complain about the fact that every teenage girl who wears one will think that it means “where is (my) Romeo?”

Formal Zombie Poetry

Neil Gaiman recently tweeted that "There is not enough Formal Zombie Poetry." So here's one I wrote about a month ago. Sent it to the letter column in The Walking Dead comics, but I don't know if they've even looked at it:

Outside, Looking In

Not hunger, quite; but want no feast can sate
We who are dead so yearn for what we’ve missed
To taste, to feel, to fill the hollowness with weight
We’re pulled, and by your gravity we’re kissed

I call it love, this ache to join your life
With us, diffusing warmth throughout our chill
We see your eyes, haunted by some grief
And only wish your heartache to be still

And though you shoot us down, yet still we come,
Again, again, we die and resurrect
But never do we sink so fully numb
To fail to feel the pain of your neglect

One day, I will break bread with you, my friend
We cannot lose, we cannot win, in the end

-----

Well, it amused me to write a pretentious, formal Elizabethan sonnet from the point of view of a mindless zombie. And yes, the slightly "off" meter was intentional (it is a lurching zombie, after all).

And, as a bonus, here's a formal alien invader/delusional serial-killer poem:

My Secret

I hide my real skin inside a cask
Of nutrients, recording what I see
for those above. To implement my task,
I've learned to mimic well humanity.

By day I show my mask, and play my role.
At night, alone, I wear the patchwork flesh
And dream of specimens in my control
Probed within a cold containment mesh.

And now you've found the cask, and seen me dressed
In my own skin, as I am, not as I seem.
And though you say you're glad that I've confessed,
Your eyes betray a stifled urge to scream.

This private shame, which was but mine to keep
Has fouled your mind; so, slicing in, I weep.

Actual Quote From Radio

This is an actual quote* from a news teaser on the radio, heard on Tuesday:

Was the operator impaired on a thrill ride where an accident happened this week? We won't know until the police report comes out on Friday.

Well, by all means, let's speculate wildly until then. You could replace the word "impaired" in that report with anything: Was the operator asleep? Was the operator insane? Was the operator a kangaroo? We just don't know!

The other, more subtle, thing that struck me about this announcement was the helplessness of it: "We won’t know until the police report comes out." Because, apparently, they can't do any of their own investigative work, like, say, interviewing people who were there. But once the police report comes out, then we'll know, because police reports are issued by the Pope, and are the infallible Word of God.

*More or less - I'm quoting from memory, and it was a couple of hours before I took any notes.

Interesting Game

I recently finished playing a PC game, The Whispered World. It's definitely a throwback, and I mean that as a compliment, being an old-school point-and-click adventure game, done all in hand-drawn cel animation. It's more LucasArts than Sierra - none of the Sierra-style punishing death scenes. The art style reminded me a bit of Discworld II, though the overall feel is closer to a fairy-tale storybook, rather than the humor of those two Rincewind games. Certainly worth playing, if you like those sort of games.

Personally, since adventure games have been one of my favorite genres since Zork, I consider it important to buy any (reasonably well-made) games that come along, in hopes of supporting their development and avoiding another long drought of decent adventure games, like the one that happened after Grim Fandango sales tanked (despite being the closest thing to Literature the medium has ever produced), until finally The Longest Journey came out after a couple of years.

Customer Service Above & Beyond

Because I feel like this sort of thing ought to be noticed & celebrated, here (in probably descending order of interest to anyone other than me) are some companies who have recently gone above and beyond my expectations for customer service:

Over the weekend, Gamers Gate had a game expansion at 50% off, and I submitted a question to make sure it was compatible with the physical-disk version of the full game (the same product at Steam, for example, only works with Steam's download edition). By the time they answered, the sale had ended, but they let me buy it at the sale price anyway, despite the fact that it was arguably my own fault for not submitting the question until Saturday.

A while back I tried to subscribe to Better Software Magazine, but apparently the online order never went through. It took several attempts to contact the subscription department to check on it (I think the subscription coordinator may have been on vacation at one point), and by way of apology, they gave me a free 2-year subscription.

And PhilC kindly emailed me an updated data file pack for his Poser clothing converter, which I had purchased through an old online store that has since switched to a different system, because of which I don't think I had any way to actually prove to him that I had actually purchased the pack (unless he keeps his own records). I was actually prepared to re-purchase direct from him, and had just asked if the updates were significant enough to justify that.

So bravo, guys. For showing an interest in actually making your customers happy, this one thought he owed it to you to highlight that fact publicly.

Was the 'Lost' Island Hit By a Comet?

I'm not quite stoned enough to understand it completely, but I feel certain that the secret behind Lost was originally revealed by the Firesign Theatre in 1974. Hey, wait a minute: The release date of that album is the same year Sawyer and the others joined the Dharma Initiative. Coincidence? I think not!

Sending from his own mind to yours, here is Nino Savate with 'A Psychic Minute.'

Can I say, hello? This is Nino the mind-boggler with Occult In Your Head. Today, let's get into holes: The most mysterious, importantest and vaguest subject of them all.

The whole Earth might be called a hole, if you're on the inside, looking out. And whole golden cities might be hid at the bottom of a bottomless pit. Even wholesome humans have holes, though we're hardly whole at all. In fact, we're wholly hole-y. As the Holy Book says in the Book of Holes, Chapter 1: 'And they knew not their holes from an ass on the ground.'

Holes are positively attractive. Let's go inside one and see... This is a typical hole. Not a hole in the wall, but a hole like a well. Well, well, what the Hell? That's the sun at the center of the Earth, and that's where this hole leads to. Heh-heh! What a nice, warm fire.

Next time, I'll think to you about gravity, and its opposite, comedy. Until then, this is Nino saying, can I say, goodbye?

Thought for the Day

It seems to me that, to be consistent, anyone who is a socialist ought also to be a creationist, and anyone who is a creationist ought also to be a socialist. Because deep down, both socialism and creationism (or "intelligent design", at least) are based on the same rejection of the concept of emergent phenomena, the same refusal to accept the idea that order can arise spontaneously from the interactions in unplanned complex systems. And yet, I generally get the impression that in the Venn diagram of socialism and creationism, the overlap is quite small.

I Guess I'm a PC

I started using iTunes recently (mostly because there are two official Frank Zappa albums that are only available through iTunes). I have been somewhat of a luddite about it - part of me likes purchasing physical media (even though CDs appear to be useless for archival purposes - some of my earliest purchases have already corroded). But in general, I like the idea, but the execution doesn't thrill me.

Now, I know there are thousands of people using and enjoying iTunes, so maybe I'm just too stupid to figure out how to solve the problems I ran into. So let me list them, and maybe someone out there can tell me what I'm doing wrong:

• I can buy albums, and look at the albums in my music library. But if I want to burn a CD, I can't just select an album and burn it, I have to first move all the songs on that album to a playlist, and then burn that playlist to CD. Fine if I'm making a "mix tape", but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might want to treat an "album" as a unit of music.
  
• After burning, a little chime plays to let you know it's done. Unfortunately, if the burn was unsuccessful for any reason (as happens from time to time with CDs), the same chime plays. There is no error message or any other feedback to let you know the burn failed.
  
• After burning successfully, the selection focus moves to the newly-created CD. When you eject the CD, selection focus returns to the Music library, not the playlist you just burned. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that anyone might want to burn more than a single copy at a time.
  
• There is a nice feature to print CD case inserts. But there are no customization options at all - you either print one of their preset formats, or shove it. Too bad if you wanted to do something like print an album name above the track list (see first point above).
  
• The software doesn't recognize my (non-iPod) MP3 player at all, which means I have to manually convert all my songs to MP3 (since it doesn't play their proprietary format), and then manually move them to the player.
  
• When you export songs to MP3, it puts them all in the same directory. By default, the list doesn't show file types (though it can be made to do so), so in the default configuration, every song you've converted is listed twice, with no indication of which is which.
  
• After moving the MP3 files to the player, I don't care about having that format in my iTunes folder on my PC hard drive, so I delete them. The iTunes software can, if you tell it to, detect that some of the files it thought were there are now gone, but it isn't smart enough to just remove them from the list automatically, you have to select and delete them from the iTunes list by hand.
  

It's almost as if they've deliberately designed the software to be as inconvenient as possible for anyone who hasn't purchased one of their iPods. And more generally, it seems like everything is fine and works great as long as you stay inside the little box of things they want you to do, but you start running into problems as soon as you get outside that box. Keep in mind, too, that this list came out of using iTunes basically over only two weekends. And that has been my experience generally with Apple products. Thinking back over the years, it seems like every interaction with any Apple product I've ever had has been dissatisfying in one way or another. From the locked-down feeling from the ancient Macs I had to deal with one semester in college, to the way Quicktime just never really "fit" well into a Windows environment, to this latest bit with iTunes, none of it has ever really felt right to me.

Customer Satisfaction

So, like an idiot, a couple of weeks ago I went into my local GameStop and put in a preorder deposit on Dragon Age: Origins. At the time, no one bothered to ask whether I wanted the regular version or the Collector's Edition. When I went to pick it up, naturally all they had was the regular version, because only enough to cover the preorders were shipped to the store. As far as I can tell, this was also true of the regular version, since there were none out on the shelves.

And yet, somehow, the Best Buy not 200 yards down the street managed to have plenty of both versions on the shelf, available for anyone to just walk in off the street and purchase. So I did, and got my preorder deposit back from GameStop. Neither the poor clerk, nor the store manager standing next to him, even bothered to ask if there was anything they could do that would let me leave the store satisfied (not that there was, at that point).

Now, there are plenty of places to buy video games. Why in the world would I even want to set foot in GameStop ever again, when they clearly (A) aren't interested in selling new releases to walk-in customers; and (B) don't much seem to care about customer satisfaction in general? What does GameStop offer that I can't get anywhere else, with none of the aggravation? What kind of business strategy is this?

Upbeat Happy-Time Music

I'm finding lately that I am more and more impressed with musicians who can produce upbeat music. I think it has something to do with that Bart Simpson quote: "Depressing teenagers is like shooting fish in a barrel" - the sort of angsty-young-person vibe is too easy. Happy music takes some effort.

For example, this:


Or this (and yeah, I know, it the song of theirs you always hear). And to me, I can even hear some pain behind here, but transformed into a cry of joy at the world:

Can't Sleep, Robot Will Eat Me

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

So, not just a man-eating robot, then, but a steam-powered man-eating robot?

Man, that's almost as cool as that billion-dollar dragon-shaped tank project they just cancelled.

"Big Man Japan"

Holy crap, this movie sounds like the awesomest thing ever. The official synopsis:

A middle-aged slacker living in a rundown, graffiti-ridden slum, Daisato’s job involves being shocked by bolts of electricity that transform him into a stocky, stick-wielding giant several stories high who is entrusted with defending Japan from a host of bizarre monsters. But while his predecessors were national heroes, he is a pariah among the citizens he protects, who bitterly complain about the noise and destruction of property he causes. And Daisato has his own problems –an agent insistent on branding him with sponsor advertisements, an Alzheimer-afflicted grandfather who transforms into a giant in dirty underwear, and a family who is embarrassed by his often cowardly exploits. A wickedly deadpan spin on the giant Japanese superhero, BIG MAN JAPAN is an outrageous portrait of a pathetic but truly unique hero.

Official website/trailer
"The Strangling Monster" clip
The Stink Monster" clip

Puzzle From Hell

Someone gave us this puzzle for Christmas. Now, before you read any further, follow that link. Looks like a perfectly ordinary puzzle, apart from the funky shape, right?

Here's what makes this particular puzzle a form of torture:

• There is no indication whatsoever on the box that it is a shaped puzzle. Looking at the packaging, it appears to be an ordinary rectangular puzzle. It's hard to start by finding the edge pieces when the box art lies to you about what shape the edge actually is.
  
• The pieces fit together very loosely. We semi-jokingly said that the easiest way to tell if two pieces were a fit was if they fell apart when you touched them. When it's all done, there is a full inch of play across the entire puzzle - you can squeeze the pieces together and stretch them apart by a full inch. I measured.
  
• The title, "Snowy Trees", is a misnomer. It should be called "Snowy Tree", because whoever created the picture only bothered to paint one tree, and then used Photoshop to copy and paste that tree everywhere else. Oh, sure, he transformed some of them a little: One of them is squished down really squat and wide, another is stretched out tall and skinny; one is flipped to a mirror image of the rest of them. But it's the same goddamned tree, over and over.
  

We didn't let it beat us, though:

What the Hell?

Is it just me, or does this article summary from the front page of CNN.com sound more like an Onion story?

No good way to tell kids they have cancer
When her mom and dad called her into the den, 9-year-old Gigi Pasley thought they were going to tell her a big surprise, "a good surprise" she said. Instead, they told Gigi she had cancer. "She burst out with this awful sound, a moan, a scream of complete and utter agony," said her mother, Jessica Pasley. The Pasleys learned that day there's no good way to tell your child she has cancer. full story

Gimme gimme gimme

My Amazon.com wish list:

Review

Juno - Not bad. Mostly, it works. It does try too hard to be hip &mdash seriously, you actually wrote a character saying the line, "Honest to blog?" And isn't that song Juno and Bleeker play together at the end awfully contempo-indie-folk for someone who spends the rest of the film talking about Iggy and the Stooges and the 1977 punk explosion? But, on the trying-too-hard-to-be-hip, aggressively-quirky score, it's nowhere near as bad as Napoleon Dynamite, so there's that. The always-watchable J. K. Simmons does good work as Juno's dad. Overall, worth seeing once, anyway.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Her name, we think, is Binky:


I say "we think", because when we got her at the Milwaukee Humane Society, they said her name was "Monty", but since rabbits tend to be difficult to sex when they're young, we suspect someone probably told her original owners she was male. So she needs a new name, and she's been shy about letting us know what it should be, but "Binky" seems to be the one that's sticking most.

She and Buster seemed to hit it off pretty well when we took him to the Humane Society to meet her, but there have been some altercations since we got her home. They're currently in separate (but adjacent) cages, and we're taking it slow with supervised play dates.

Oh, and this guy was there, too. His name is Babyface Joe, apparently:


Well, we had been watching Verminators, and it kept making me want another pet rat to keep in my computer room, so he can sit on my shoulder while I'm up here. Yeah, I'm a little strange.

RIP, Suzi

She passed away some time last Sunday night.

Movie Review

Across the Universe - Easily the best [fictional movie musical focused on other people performing Beatles' music] ever made. Of course, since the only other entry in that particular genre is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the bar is set kind of low. Across the Universe makes it over that bar merely by not being an atrocity against man and nature.

It's... not great. The part where an Uncle Sam recruiting poster sings "I Want You", followed by American troops carrying the Statue of Liberty through plastic Vietnam jungles singing "She's So Heavy"... yeah, that's taking the symbolism a bit too far. The scenes in the bowling alley, with shots pretty much cribbed directly from The Big Lebowski were bad enough, but then to later call back those scenes with ten Vietnamese women painted white, falling over... I had to pause the TiVo long enough to exclaim: "Did I really just watch a metaphorical representation of a Vietnam war atrocity as bowling?" Um, wow.

On the other hand, Eddie Izzard was predictably entertaining as Mr. Kite. The actor playing Jude was good, and performed his songs quite well. And I was glad to see they were able to fit Joe Cocker in.

But the story never really coheres. As a film, for the most part, it's basically just a strange hybrid of Moulin Rouge!, Hair, and, for some reason, Dreamgirls. With, yes, just a pinch of the aforementioned Sgt. Pepper. It's really obviously not a depiction of the real 1960s, but rather of some kind of mythic-'60s, where Jimi and Janis were in a band together until they were split up by an evil record producer, only to later get back together for a rooftop concert. Where Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters tripped on a bus to Timothy Leary's home. Where people got high by miming smoking a joint, and where the negative consequences of heavy drinking and drug use are only obliquely hinted at. Where all the young men were drafted, sent to Vietnam to witness horrors, and returned home broken. All of which may have been mythically true, but reality was never that simple.

Oh, and during all the Liverpool scenes, I kept wanting the extras to start singing "Every Sperm is Sacred".

As an aside: Why is it that no movie made since about 1980 seems to be able to get '60s hair right? I'm not even sure exactly what it is, but all of the hair in this film, from Evan Rachel Wood's long-straight-hippy-chick 'do, to her brother's "what is Kurt Cobain doing in 1972" look, is just somehow obviously modern. I don't even know exactly what it is they're doing wrong, but if you look at Woodstock, or other movies actually made at the time, it's just not right somehow.