Vampire lesbian girl scouts

Today my friend Greg had his birthday party. Andrea and I were responsible for decorations, which took the form of helium balloons and a collection of six different cakes painstakingly hand-decorated by us to depict Greg’s life.

One of the cakes commemorated an episode from when Greg and I and a few other friends worked together at a technology startup some years ago. For some reason the subject of lesbian-vampire fiction had come up. We guys all endorsed the genre — what’s not to love? — but none so heartily as Greg, who was promptly branded the resident lesbian-vampire fancier.

On a separate occasion Greg evinced what we playfully regarded as an unwholesome interest in girl scouts. So during one discussion of the technology we were developing — which among other things permitted users to find the overlaps between separate searches of one’s e-mail — we imagined that one such search that Greg might perform would be to find the overlap between “girl scouts” and “lesbians” and “vampires.”

Not long after that some of us found Greg crashed out on the couch after an all-night programming session. He was smiling in his sleep, and the consensus was that he was dreaming about vampire lesbian girl scouts. Hence a cutout of this drawing by yours truly gracing one of his cakes.

Speaking of helium balloons: some time ago it occurred to me that (a) when helium escapes from a balloon or elsewhere, it must float straight up to the top of the atmosphere where it is effectively unretrievable, and (b) being a “noble” gas, new helium cannot be produced via chemical reactions, only nuclear ones, such as during hydrogen fusion, which is prohibitively expensive. Ergo there must be a limited supply of helium on earth and we are using it up. This deduction turned out to be exactly right, and in fact we may have no more than a couple of decades before helium becomes too scarce and costly for whimsical uses like party balloons or talking in a chipmunk voice, alas.

Total paranoia

An unpopular ruling party is widely expected to be routed in an upcoming election. As voters go to the polls, election observers note numerous voting irregularities all favoring the ruling party. After the votes are counted, contrary to a substantial body of reputable (but unofficial) polling data, the unpopular party retains its grip on power yet again. But this time the anomalies are too blatant, the public does not accept the result. Protests flare up around the country. So the leader of the unpopular party imposes martial law to suppress dissent.

It’s an old story. It’s happened countless times in troubled countries all over the world. But it couldn’t happen here, right? Right? So I guess it’s only a coincidence that (a) the makers of most of America’s voting machines are in the Republicans’ pockets, (b) those machines are trivially easy to hack, and (c) just a week and a half ago, the Republicans snuck through in the dead of night a new law that specifically makes it easier for Bush to declare martial law, upending yet another inconvenient centuries-old tradition.

Happy birthday sis!

I spoke to Suzanne this morning to wish her a happy birthday. She had just woken up, even though it was after noon in New York. I told her I hoped that was because she was hung over from a big bacchanal in her honor, and she assured me it was. Partying until 3am — you go, Suze! Keep the dream alive.

As for me, I want to sit in a comfortable chair, and watch television, and go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Honestly I don’t think I know anyone who could keep up with my sister. But if you take the average of me and Suzanne you probably end up with someone pretty fun. Also androgynous, and living in Kansas.

Afternoon of the living(room) dead

One afternoon in the 80’s my friend Amy asked if I’d like to accompany her on an errand to the apartment of zombie-film director George Romero.

We were in college in Pittsburgh and Amy was housesitting for the famous filmmaker, auteur of the zombie classic (and disguised social critique) Night of the Living Dead and the other Pittsburgh-based “Dead” movies. Naturally I jumped at the chance to see how he lived.

It was an attractive but not especially distinguished apartment in an inconspicuous apartment building not far from CMU. In almost all respects it could have been the home of anyone who could afford the rent on a modest couple of hundred extra square feet of space. But three things about it were notable:

  • The refrigerator was full of champagne, at least twenty bottles of the stuff.
  • His vast collection of movies on VHS filled two walls of the living room. I drooled with envy as I read the titles. (Over the years, inspired by Romero’s living room, I too amassed a respectable collection of movies on VHS, or “Crapvision” as James Cameron famously called it. Within a decade those tapes grew all but unwatchable as the recordings decayed. Today you couldn’t pay me to store one tenth of Romero’s bulky old movie collection in my house. Funny how things change.)
  • Several walls were cluttered with photos from the sets of his films. Many of those photos featured actors in full zombie makeup relaxing between takes. My favorite was of Romero’s young daughter Tina bouncing happily on the knee of one smiling, hideously decaying ghoul.

The Disneyland drumbeat

Andrea has continued beating the drum for planning a family trip to Disneyland soon, and with the kids in the prolonged grip of a combined Pirates of the Caribbean and Peter Pan frenzy I am similarly inclined. There’s just one problem: Disney is the enemy and I will not give them aid or comfort.

They have an excellent chance to redeem themselves by firing the jerk who said that the mainstream media is too liberal and it’s his job to slant news coverage to the right “so conservatives don’t have to be concerned.” That jerk is Mark Halperin, ABC’s political director. (ABC is owned by Disney.)

The major news organizations in this country have forgotten that it’s their job to be adversarial. To promise one group or another that they “don’t have to be concerned” is to abandon the mantle of journalism.

Mark Halperin must go. With that one gesture I would be willing to let bygones be bygones.

Well Disney? The country seems to be getting ready to return from its wandering in the arch-conservative wilderness. Will you get back in touch with the real Main Street U.S.A. or ride the Republican machine over the impending cliff? One family’s vacation plans, and the health of our republic, hang in the balance.

That was quick

No sooner did I hit a milestone birthday than the inevitable cognitive decline began. First there was me giving Andrea bogus driving directions from the Bay Model to the Bayside Cafe: “Go left. Now left again.” In fact the Bayside Cafe, where we’ve gone for breakfast at least a couple of times every month for years, is a straight shot to the right up Sausalito’s main street from where we were. Andrea was confused by my directions but thought I had something tricky up my sleeve. The trick was on me!

(This reminds me of a story from college days. I had rented a car with my friend David and our girlfriends Michelle and Julie. We drove from Pittsburgh to Julie’s house in Maryland, with me at the wheel, Michelle beside me, and Julie and David in the back. As we neared her house, Julie called out the turns to navigate her tangled residential neighborhood, but she kept mixing up “left” and “right”! After half a dozen U-turns I told her, “Never mind ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Say ‘Bob’ for left [since from Julie’s vantage point I was seated on the left] or ‘Michelle’ for right.” Guess what — Julie then mixed up “Bob” and “Michelle”!)

Later Archer needed a diaper change. By now I’ve changed uncounted thousands of diapers, so as usual I put him on the changing table, took off the old diaper, wiped him up, and threw the diaper away. Then I crossed to the bathroom, washed my hands, and walked into the living room — with Archer still on the changing table half naked, needing a new diaper! Fortunately he was either too mellow or too diplomatic (or both) when I returned to him a moment later to act as if anything was amiss.

Speaking of sex

While we’re on the subject of sex, might as well mention my next-door neighbor. He moved in about a year ago. His license plate read, “I♥BDSM.” Sure enough, we noted an interesting variety of people coming and going from his house, a few wild-seeming parties, and the occasional vividly suggestive sound effect in the middle of the night. I got a glimpse through his window of the first movie he watched after setting up his big-screen TV: Secretary.

But in just the last few days we’ve noticed that his car no longer has the “I♥BDSM” license plate. Now it’s a normal non-vanity alphanumeric sequence. We’ve had fun speculating why this might be. Does he no longer ♥ BDSM? Did something horrible happen when someone forgot the safe word? Maybe he got a stern talking-to from some prudish supervisor at work? Or a new girlfriend or boyfriend laid down the law?

We don’t know the answer and we don’t know him well enough to say anything other than “hi” when we see him. But we do know that if you live in California and you ♥ BDSM, a new license-plate option has just opened up for you.

For Ursula: Sex

At my birthday party yesterday, my friend Ursula asked about this blog and was disappointed when I said that it has very little sexual content. So here, for Ursula, is something sex-oriented from my archives. (I can’t wait to see what this will do for my Google hits.) It’s an (illustrated!) e-mail message I wrote to a mailing list when my friend Don let everyone know he’d attended the 2003 San Francisco Masturbate-a-thon. One highlight, he wrote, was

the nice pretty lady who chose a spot right next to me, whose method of masturbation was to take a dildo with suction cups on the back end, attach it to the mirrored wall (<SLAM!> have I got everyone’s attention now?) and fuck it face-to-face and doggie-style for an hour.

I’m having some trouble picturing face-to-face mirror-dildo fucking. (Not for lack of trying!)

Doggie-style is obviously no problem…

[Aside: why “doggie style”? It’s also “kitty style” and “horsey style” and “rodent style.” Doggies have no more of a claim on the position than do the French on French kissing. I mean freedom kissing.]

…but face-to-face against a wall?


Fig. 1a

Fig. 1b

Normally the lady’s legs want to protrude beyond the plane where the phallus originates (see figures 1a, 1b). But there’s nowhere for her legs to go when that plane is real — viz., a wall — and not imaginary (figure 2).


Fig. 2

Furthermore, being pressed upright against a wall with nothing to hold onto — and wiggling around vigorously to boot — wouldn’t it be hard to keep from falling over backward?


Fig. 3

I can easily see how missionary style could work, with the lady supine and the dildo attached quite low to the floor (figure 3), but I wouldn’t exactly call that face-to-face.


Fig. 4

The best I can come up with is a kind of deep squat (figure 4), but that makes the task of balancing seem even more difficult and the whole venture more trouble than it’s worth. Unless the lady considers the visuals in the mirror to offset the difficulties…

Ibid: Incremental backups to infinite disk

You back up the files on your computer regularly, right? You don’t? You’re just asking for trouble. But you already knew that, didn’t you? You’d do periodic backups if you could, but there just are no good backup tools, right? They’re too complicated to use? You don’t have enough CD-R’s to hold all your files? Or you already have too many and are drowning in the clutter?

Well now you can save the lame excuses for why you don’t floss. I’ve written ibid, a simple tool for performing incremental backups on Linux and Unix-like systems — possibly also Mac OS X, I haven’t checked yet. And who knows, maybe it can even be made to run under Windows.

Incremental backups

An incremental backup is a backup of just those files that have changed since the last backup.

Many people use mirroring for backups, periodically duplicating essential files to some destination, such as a spare external hard drive, replacing those copies with fresh copies on each backup. This approach is economical in terms of the storage space used, but it only allows you to restore the latest version of a given file. If you have a file called my_novel.doc and you mirror it to a spare hard drive, then you accidentally delete half of it but don’t notice until after the next time you mirror it to that hard drive, then the pre-accident version of my_novel.doc is gone forever.

With a true backup system like ibid, the pre-accident backup copy of my_novel.doc still exists; the post-accident backup copy is separate. The main drawback to this safer approach, of course, is that the more backups you do, the more space you need.

For a long time I used a makeshift system that backed up files to blank CDs or DVDs, but it was slow and difficult to use and it required my constant attendance (for swapping discs in and out) and very often the disc burner would crap out at the last minute after half an hour of burning and produce an unreadable disc. I didn’t trust the archives that I created with this system; it was annoying to have to render botched discs unreadable with scissors all the time (for privacy reasons); and the more backups I did, the more crowded with discs my safe-deposit box got.

Then I discovered Jungledisk, a commercial “infinite filesystem” service that’s easy to use and has good privacy and security features, not to mention reasonable fees. In conjunction with davfs it can be made to act just like a mounted filesystem.

Ibid doesn’t care if you’re using Jungledisk or some other destination service or media. It simply copies the files you ask for to the target directory tree. The backed-up copies are just plain files residing under their original names in a plain filesystem, so retrieving old data is simple.

Here are ibid’s other main features:

  • Written as a single Perl file, no complicated build/install process;
  • Limit sessions by size;
  • Exclude files and directories by pattern (using Perl “regular expressions”);
  • Files with multiple “hard links” stored only once — link names stored separately;
  • Files re-backed up when they change;
  • Files not re-backed up if they’re merely renamed (the new name is stored separately);
  • Can run unattended, and even at automated intervals (e.g. via cron).

You can download it here. At some point soon perhaps I will create a proper website for it, at which time I will update this blog post with the new information; meanwhile, this is the definitive home of ibid (and I will keep the copy at the above link up to date with bugfixes and other changes).

Here is the documentation for ibid.

Continue reading “Ibid: Incremental backups to infinite disk”