Too Absent Herald

I just realized that the post below about technical manuals is right in line with how Andy used to laugh about “Bright Lights, Big City” which was apparently written in 2nd Person. “You go to the China Club, you meet…”

Seeing as the Academy Awards are on right now, and I’d still rather be fending off ankle bites (from a hungry cat) and watching A Room With a View (no cable), — you might guess I was in a sour mood. And, for the most part, you’d be correct.

I was also, again, unable to attend the Johnny Cash Birthday Bash in Brooklyn. sigh

But yesterday I met a guy who went to school with Eskey, and had one of the shirts.

You read that right. I’m venting a bit with Apple Inc [fromerly Apple Computer].

In my never ending quest to understand just for what I started this blog, this rant takes the tone of what one finds on many a blog: The reflexive rant. I have something on my mind that bothers me, no immediate audience to share it with, and no other reason to commit such annoyances to paper. So,

This is the problem: I’m moving into more advanced DVD production for the school. So I moved up to the application DVD Studio Pro. For those unfamiliar, “Moving up” is geek jargon for installing the application on a computer.

INSTALLING, of course, is 21st century jargon for a long apprenticeship with a craftsman, followed by application to a guild, (all followed by a life of work interspersed with bouts of procreation and illness, ending around the age of 46), ah, the quaint Middle Ages…

The problem in moving up to a new application is the quite steep learning curve. Unfortuantely, APPLE always prepares its manuals with the idea that someone wanders into a store and picks up a $5300 video editing suite.

Naturally, all tech companies do this. But I just get so sick of turning to the chapter on “Importing SD 60i frame-rate footage” and seeing sentences like this.
“DVD Studio Pro allows you to import SD 60i frame-rate footage.

I’m slowly moving posts from the old MovableType Herald to the much keener Wordpress site. For now, you can search for posts from Gammon and Battles.

Here’s the Archives page

For the last couple weeks a few of us at the school have been caught up in a penchant for interjecting the phrase “That’s what she said” after any statement that can even remotely contain a prurient meaning. Notwithstanding the valuable linguistic and semiotic researches this exercise supplies, I am here setting myself up for a zinging…

I’ve been sitting in with an English class, and I have to read the June 2, 1910 (Quentin) section of The Sound and the Fury. The first part, Benjy’s, went well. I read seventy-some pages at a sitting/laying, which I haven’t had to do in years. But, just as before, Quentin puts me to sleep.

The excitement, however, has not been wanting. Right from the top, page one, things are sharper and clearer than they were when I was (which makes it understandable) trying to squeeze a decent 12th grade reading syllabus in between keeping up with Greek, Euclid, Tinbergen, and Homer.

Right here, the second paragraph of the first page, when Benjy hears the golfers yell “Here, caddie.” It’s just…

[Now that I am upon the point of putting this down, I am actually embarrassed] I was able to pick up on the “hitting” and that that means golf, and that that means they sold the land that Benjy loved to a golf course… And the selling of LAND is, well, a big thing… I’ve even written (at SJC) a parody of the Benjy section, with “they were hitting” as a refrain.

But, hand to heaven, I never realized (if realized is even the word [and it is not, but to get the true sense I'd have to use Greek]), or became fully aware of — the fact that the golfers’ say “CADDIE.” That is, Benjy follows them because they say the name of his lost sister, constantly.

This is one of the big drawbacks, so to speak, of having had an education that focused ONLY on the primary sources. I am (usually) blissfully unaware of the norms of literary criticism. This usually comes up with Joyce, who, excepting the ability to read Latin, had a poorer education than I have had.

But man, . . . it freaked the kids out when I couldn’t stop talking about he fact that “caddie” is Caddie.

So as I was formulating this post in my head, just as I came in the door, I thought that I would wrap up my observation with a maxime along the lines of: Everything’s better the second time.

When such a maxim comes to mind (mine, at least), I quickly run through other situations in which this maxim might apply (“Can I make this law a Law for all mankind?”). I decided that I could apply it. And thought that I would end the post with

Every thing is better the second time around. Everything.

And thus the coda: That’s what she said.