War Nerd on Israel vs. Hezbollah

eXile – Issue #243 – War Nerd – A Hezbollah Upon All of Thee! – By Gary Brecher

Gary “War Nerd” Brecher gives a war nerd’s perspective on the situation.  I’m not a war nerd, I’m just a nerd, so I can’t say much one way or the other about Brecher’s nerdly expertise, but I have found his stuff pretty thought-provoking in the past — if only because you can just tell from reading that the man’s thinking for himself, not toeing some party line.  Interesting to see a take on all this that is full of war nerdity, not angry politics.

Hear The Oldest Song In The World

The Oldest Song In The World

This popped up on Reddit.com.  It’s a Hurrian song written in Cuneiform, with musical instructions.  There are three MIDIs representing various scholarly interpretations of that notation.  Sitting here listening to my computer play a song that was written down thousands of years ago in Cuneiform on a clay tablet.  Who could have imagined that?

The site is Amaranth Publishing, and they have a whole page of links to cool and unusual historical music, mostly in MIDI form.

Wow.

Adorable Child Anecdote

My man Topher has been known to blog the occasional Adorable Child Anecdote. So has Jim, heck, Nate has a whole sub-blog for his fatherly adventures.

I have historically been leery of blogging about my family, so let me tell you a story about an unspecified five year old girl. Let’s call her “K”. Now, K has had a rough year dealing with death. Her most beloved grandparent died this year, and she was at the funeral and saw the burial, not an easy thing to deal with at age 5. She and her brother have had lots of questions about death and the afterlife and burial and stuff, which have been answered as well and honestly as possible. It’s still kind of a hot topic. She’ll talk sometimes about how much she misses her grandma, and her dearest memory is her grandma making her her favorite sandwich (jelly) with the crusts cut off. To her that is ultimate love.

Because of the circumstances, K’s father has avoided playing one of his favorite playstation games, Medievil, because it’s kind of a horror-movie game with a lot of zombie attacks, and the main character is an undead skeleton. Death and things rising from graves might be a little too real.

But he eventually happens across his copy and really wants to play, and it’s been a little while, and probably they won’t even make the connection between this whole fantasy thing and real-world death and mourning, so he plugs it in and plays one night.

And “K” has fun watching it, thinks it’s cool but scary — when she says it’s scary, her dad offers to quit playing but she doesn’t want him to — and he hacks his way, with a sword, through three or four levels of ravening undead, as “K” and her brother watch, enthralled. A couple times in the process he makes sure the kids are clear that there is no such thing, in the real world, as a zombie. They assure him they understand that.

And that’s when she comes out, quite cheerfully and matter-of-factly, with this, and I defy anyone to put together a rational, appropriate fatherly thing to say in response…

“Papa, if Grandma came out of her dead-place in the ground and was a zombie, I would TOTALLY kill her.”

Cool Discussion of Linux Kernel Myths

linux kernel monkey log — via Digg or something.  It goes through myths about the Linux kernel one by one and demolishes them.  The author is a kernel developer and so obviously has some bias, but he makes a good case; if nothing else he shows you why the people who think Linux is the best — and actually know something about it, not fanboys — think Linux is the best.

And You Thought Gopher was Old School

MPH, in his continuing descent into madness, has replaced his blog with a static page. That’s only a little old school. What’s really old school is that the static page is generated via a PHP script from his dot-plan file, which is conveniently written in Markdown.

And you can actually get the markdown version (if you’re on a unix box or the equivalent) by issuing the ‘finger’ command on his username mph at puddingbowl dot org. Truth.

c:/ $ finger mph@puddingbowl.org
[puddingbowl.org]
Login: mph            			Name: Michael Hall
Directory: /home/mph                	Shell: /bin/bash
On since Mon Jul 24 08:58 (PDT) on pts/4 from dsl001-133-198.pdx1.dsl.speakeasy.net
4 minutes 34 seconds idle
New mail received Tue Jul 18 05:30 2006 (PDT)
Unread since Mon Aug 29 13:25 2005 (PDT)
Plan:
### since you're just joining:

why have a blog when you can have a PAGE!? As it changes, new stuff'll be colored or something.  Old stuff will slide away, unarchived anywhere but the Overmind.