Avram's journal

One thing I really like about the show King of the Hill is the clever use of names. For example, the massive, oppressive Walmart equivalent on the show is the Mega Lo Mart. This works both at the character level — you can imagine the owners talking about how their prices are not just low, but mega-low — and also at the audience level, by evoking megalomania. (Are there technical names for those two levels?)

The other day, Adult Swim re-ran one of my favorite episodes, “A Beer Can Named Desire”, in which the B plot is a Tennessee Williams pastiche involving Hank’s friend and neighbor, perennial loser Bill Dauterive, visiting his family in Louisiana.

What I just now realized is that the name of the Dauterive estate — Chateau D’Haute Rive — while being a plausible source for the name Dauterive (and literally meaning “house on the high river”), also evokes the words cat, hot, and roof.

Google Video: Search recent TV programs online. (Set your ZIP code in the preferences.)

I’m missing the Obama-Keyes debate on CSpan2!

I watched the first half of Zell Miller’s speech at the GOP convention before I couldn’t take anymore, and not just because the compression of the video stream made it seem like the turncoat was being applauded by an army of giant alien insects. Then, minutes ago at the pizza parlor, I heard a bit of an old speech by some al Qaeda bigwig, and I wondered: Is someone else’s rousing rhetoric always creepy?

King’s “I have a dream” speech — surely one of the most stirring pieces of political rhetoric in the modern English language — must sound like a nightmare to a racial separatist. I guess Objectivists and anarchists must find Kennedy’s “Ask not” inaugural address pretty creepy.

BoingBoing linked to this great article examining the economic underpinnings of Gilligan’s Island, “The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III”. Along the way, the author passes along this bizarre observation:

After the invasion of Iraq, there was no more central bank printing dinars and no more Iraqi government to put the fiat behind its fiat currency. The American military started handing out US$20 bills and expected the Dinar to fade from existence. Instead, to the chagrin of the occupation force, the Dinar's value doubled against the Dollar in two weeks. Statues of Saddam Hussein were being toppled, but his face was still on the preferred currency, and gaining in popularity. Some saw this as patriotism: a silent protest by the occupied population against the invading force. But we need only look further north, to the Kurd-controlled areas, to find a more economic explanation.

After the first Gulf War, Iraq changed its currency from the so-called Swiss Dinar to the more recent Saddam Dinar. When a government changes its fiat currency, it announces a transition period during which the old bills can be brought in and exchanged for the new. After the window closes, the old notes are declared worthless.

To no one's surprise, the rebel Kurds did not visit the Iraqi government to make such an exchange. They just kept using the old money. It was familiar, hard to counterfeit, and in its post-fiat status, it was no longer inflationary: that is to say, the relatively fixed supply of notes made the currency a better store of value than the new Saddam dinars being printed (and printed and printed) further south.

I’m watching the Democratic Convention. Missed it last night, so I didn’t get to see Clinton and Gore.

Howard Dean seemed a bit lackluster; I was hoping for more fire. I got the fire from Barack Obama, an assemblyman a state senator from Illinois who’s running for the Senate. Man, what a speaker! I’m not the only one who’s impressed; his campaign website’s just gone down, presumably under the load of millions of people checking him out at the same time right after his keynote speech. Here’s a taste:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

(And yeah, that’s Obama.)

If you missed it, here’s a RealPlayer stream.

This guy over here? He was walking past the Starbucks right next to Yuka while I was sitting there sketching yesterday, while waiting for the other folks to show up for feiran’s short-notice stuff-yourself-full-o-shushi fest. We had fifteen people, clearly a larger group than the restaurant was used to dealing with, and wound up around a series of tables strung together leaving us with two groups of all-you-can-eat people placing separate orders, and the waitresses bring one group’s stuff to the other end of the table, and vice-versa, somehow leading to everyone eating more than they’d intended. But anyway, doesn’t that guy have a great face? One that cries out to be sketched?

Afterward a bunch of us headed off to bigscary’s place to watch his Farscape DVDs. Bigscary has hit upon a novel way of avoiding having to organize and store his DVD collection, by having me borrow most of it. The first four Farscape disks have joined the pile.


Oh, note to self: Y’know how you keep putting off clearing off your drawing table during the day, in favor of going out and doing daytime stuff, figuring you can do it in the evening, and then when evening rolls ’round, putting it off to the next day? Well, you’ve been doing this since Friday, and the table ain’t getting any cleared-off-er. Just sayin’.

Today’s waste of time was sitting in Ground, reading more of Mason & Dixon (which continues to be way drolly humorous) and doing still more sketching while putting off actually starting a web comic or a submission for SPX. (Also, see above about drawing table.) On the up side, I am getting the hang of that Japanese brush-pen, and I almost like how Melorne’s jacket came out in the sketch below.

( Big, color Melorne sketch )

Somewhere among all the myriad parallel universes and alternate timelines, there’s one where The Muppet Show was still being produced into the ’90s. Yesterday, during the CthulhuPunk game, someone from that universe got hold of a thought projector and inserted into my brain the video of Miss Piggy’s performance of Brittney Spears’s “(Hit Me) Baby One More Time”.

Y’know what that Angel episode needed?

Counting.

One: You’ll need Windows Media Player for this video file, probably taken from some funny home videos TV show, of cats being accidentally amusing. Enjoy your inter-species schadenfreude, with your oh-so-superior opposable thumbs! (Via Ampersand)

Two: No video software needed for Scott McCloud’s latest Morning Improv strip: A Bucket Full O’ Kittens!

Now for some sleep!