Know these common warning signs!

1. Refrigerator full of… man, what is that exactly some sort of stew or is it soup or do you spread it on things:

2. Ashtrays full of cigars.

3. All the Black Label vanishes:

The Barsgahye

Indigenous to the metro Tehran area and the lands to the north of the city, these normally gentle creatures began migrating to Western Europe and America in search of more lenient Scotch import laws in the mid-1970s. You can easily find them near layered luxury clothing and German cars.

Is that a Barsgahye?

If you suspect your house has Barsgahyes, the first step in confirming their presence is to call for them softly: “Ed-vin? Ed-vin? Ed-vin Jan?” Once the possible Barsgahye emerges, you can confirm by saying to it “Parev” If you get a blank stare, try “Baaa-rev, Ed-viiin Jan.” If it begins to speak to you, you have a Barsgahye.

Getting rid of Barsgahyes in your house

While generally good guests, you may  find a Barsgahye free house desirable from time to time. Simply run out of whiskey and hang a few no smoking signs around the patio. Your Barsgahye will migrate on in search of a new source of mysterious Persian stews and Black Label in no time at all.

I even used some Earth-destroying Monsanto product on my driveway and sidewalk grass and it still defies me. I’ve probably contributed to the bee die-off and amphibians being born without fully formed legs, but that grass is still there.

It’s time like these that I really get the appeal or urban or rural living. Urban: keep the plumbing and AC going, don’t worry too much about the six square feet of landscaping. Rural: Mow the lawn, cut the tall grass with the tractor, the woods start there. Everything else  is supposed to be covered in dirt.

Suburban? Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors. A few weeks back a friend remarked that he hated vinyl siding. I invited him over to see mine. Tonight, as I started to melt it, I realized that it really is just a folded over thin sheet of plastic over the shell of the house. How cheap can you get? The whole lifestyle is all mulch and depreciation covering up everything.

So far my favorite example is in a friend’s basement in a neighboring town. It’s a nice town. It’s a town, we would aspire to live in. It’s a nice house. Older. Lots of nice living space without being McMansion-y. You’d have to be a respectable citizen to live in a place like this, even more so in this still-inflated market. In the garage/pantry part of the basement, next to the door in, the previous owner had wanted a hook or peg, I guess to hang a coat on… something like that. So… he jammed what looks like a nail the size of a railroad spike in at a 75 degree angle through the sheet rock about six inches off the door. Just pounded it in. “Screw it! Got my coat hook right there.” You’d have to have either given up or be a total sociopath to pound a foot long nail in that spot at whatever angle. I’ll bet I’m about three months off from making decisions like that.

Shoot, I really do need to weather proof that garden door thing before it rots away.

Occupy has been back on Wall St. They’re now on the steps at Federal Hall. Since it’s not NYPD’s turf, the protestors seem to have a much easier time of it although the Federal Park police have mustered all their forces to hang out across the street and have a chat. It looks like they’re discussing easy overtime. They appear to be the least militarized police force in America right now. They don’t even have goofy helmets. They don’t even have SWAT inspired uniforms. They seem cheerful and upbeat so far.

To handle the banner carrying hippies, the monument has helpfully produced the above map, showing you where you still have First Amendment rights. Presumably the Congress is busy “establishing” in the rest of the building.

Whoever wrote the strace manpage is at least as good as Tolkien. Right in the middle, we find:

Here the three argument form of open is decoded by breaking down the flag argument into its three bitwise-OR constituents and printing the mode value in octal by tradition. Where traditional or native usage differs from ANSI or POSIX, the latter forms are preferred. In some cases, strace output has proven to be more readable than the source.

Structure pointers are dereferenced and the members are displayed as appropriate. In all cases arguments are formatted in the most C-like fashion possible. For example, the essence of the command ”ls -l /dev/null” is captured as:

lstat("/dev/null", {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0666, st_rdev=makedev(1, 3), ...}) = 0

Notice how the ‘struct stat’ argument is dereferenced and how each member is displayed symbolically. In particular, observe how the st_mode member is carefully decoded into a bitwise-OR of symbolic and numeric values. Also notice in this example that the first argument to lstat is an input to the system call and the second argument is an output. Since output arguments are not modified if the system call fails, arguments may not always be dereferenced. For example, retrying the ”ls -l” example with a non-existent file produces the following line:

lstat("/foo/bar", 0xb004) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

In this case the porch light is on but nobody is home.

Good stuff.

The Dropkick Murphys released a new one, Going Out in Style. I liked the title song, I liked the video even more. Their cover (of the music video of the Pogues and the Dubliners doing) the Irish Rover was decent as well. The problem with the band as they get even more long in the tooth is that every song they do is a swing for the fences Boston working man’s epic. They should just release a rock opera album about how the Red Sox found Whitey Bulger and saved the Union’s pension fund and get it over with. The title will be “USA! USA! USA! Boston! Ya ‘membuh the time we killed freakin’ Osama Bin Laden on the pitchuh’s mound at Fenway?”

They’re already on the list for a song I like more.

I liked the Keiki song Full Body Wolf off of an EP I got to hear some new Bee And Flower. The lyrics are from a taxidermy.net forum post. Their other track was quotes from a character called the Crimson Executioner in a 1965 movie, Bloody Pit of Horror. I don’t want to accuse them of being a novelty act, but I only know that they’re from Belgium and call themselves a Satanic Pop Duo. I don’t endorse taxidermy as a hobby or 1960s horror movies.

Jay-Z and Kanye made an album. I have no words.

I liked some stuff on the Jean Grae Cookies or Coma EP, especially the marzipan references at the end of CaseBaskets.

Puscifer aka the band that is just Maynard from Tool and his friends released an album at the end of the summer.

No complaints here, but it made me wish for a good new Tool release. Carina Round’s backing vocals are a highlight.

Why was the new Roots album, Undun, about 36 minutes long? They actually discuss each album getting shorter as some part of their artistic process. It seemed like a real album on first listen. The first half is better. The last track isn’t even needed. But… they can really put a song together. They’re a band who knows how to produce the hell out of something without sounding totally overproduced. The only problem I have in the end is that the poetic little backing lyrics and intros are sometimes more interested than the actual songs they surround.

The King is Dead by the Decemebrists is one of my two favorite albums of the year. I was expecting to hear it had outsold everything and won the Grammy. Apparently that wasn’t really what happened. I thought everyone would be “it’s like today’s indy rock and REM and country all in one!” It sold well and got a lot of critical acclaim. I’m not alone here, but I don’t think they’ve gotten nearly enough credit.

Besides, they made a video based on Infinite Jest and nailed it:

I didn’t quite get the video for This is Why We Fight. I thought the song was stronger without it:

The other favorite album was the Black Keys’ El Camino. I’ve never listened to them before this album started getting pushed on me.

“And as we wind on down the road!” Oh wait, no. Still an awesome song, probably the one that goes on the life playlist for 2011. I would toss a coin between that and the Decemberist’s Rox in the Box. You know what, Rox in the Box for now, I can always switch it out.

Initially, my plan had been to keep on top of endurance training by hitting the bike hard enough to be able to bounce back into high mileage of the foot improves and hopefully make my April and May races. But now I think a better plan would be to wander around the house in my bathrobe with a half empty bottle of Bailey’s and a half smoked double corona muttering “can you hear the loons?” It’s no worse for my dignity than a spinner bike in front of the TV, but it has the added feature of being a priceless investment in future family support for any volume of training.