Mooning

The full moon had Jupiter keeping it company tonight. I was keeping both of them company, but stayed well hidden. Now that the mulberry foliage has grown dense, I can lurk in its deep shadow through most of even the brightest moonlit nights. The nights remain pleasantly cool, too, and that seems to keep the pollen to a minimum during those hours. I'm glad I'm nocturnal. During the hours of darkness I can almost recover from the days.

I spent some time poking around on Classmates.com, reading message boards from high schools I didn't go to but which were located in neighborhoods within a few miles of mine- all of them neighborhoods somewhat more well-to-do than the one in which I grew up. It was depressing. They were full of crotchety old farts flaunting their ignorance, their bigotry and their sour hostility toward anything outside their narrow experience. The really depressing thing was that most of these grumps were younger than I am.

Here's the problem; When do I get to turn into an obnoxious old curmudgeon? I'm beginning to think that I've got some sort of glandular disorder that prevents me from acting my age. And I was so looking forward to shaking sticks at kids someday. Instead, I feel like shaking sticks at stupid people much closer to my own age. I guess things just never work out the way you expect.

Free Bits!

Good heavens! 7 MB of Boing Boing (17 MB uncompressed!) For their fifth anniversary, Boing Boing is making all 17,000+ of their posts available for download as a single HTML file in Movable Type export format, and all of it released under a Creative Commons license. I wonder how many of the links in all that content are now dead? I'd guess the majority. That's something which will be a major problem with Internet content as archival source. Stuff goes away without warning. When the Internet isn't displaying symptoms of ADD, it's displaying symptoms of Alzheimer's. It's one big addled brain, most of its synapses dead, many more prone to misfire, and a large percentage of the new connections that form each day destined to have the life span of Mayflies.

These facts certainly limit the usefulness of all that Boing Boing Backwash now available in a single convenient download. Still, a lot of the site's content remains funny, even without access to the original sources to which it refers. If I weren't on slow dial-up, I might download it myself, though I have no idea when I'd ever get around to actually looking at more than a few fragments of it. And, of course, I have to congratulate them on not attempting to monetize their archival content the way so many sites have done. But the fact that so much of its utility is gone turns the big file into sort of a digital tchotchke, destined to gather virtual dust on countless hard drives. Sic transit mundi, sic transit gloria. And happy anniversary, Boing Boing.


Oh, it was nice today, but there's still too much pollen in the air.