S.KRAUSE

Option+s, Alt+225

Wicker Park at night

In the middle of a drawn out grammar and orthography rant in each section Monday morning/afternoon I digressed to the Eszett for some reason. My favorite origin of the Eszett is as a ligature of a sharp s and z, for this ties it to sz in Hungarian. The typography-geek in me cares more about its rendering in various typefaces.

Plant beverage of the day? Westsoy Unsweetened Almond Soymilk—a mouthful, that. It was on sale at the Co-Op last week so I purchased a few bricks of both the almond and the chocolate. On the back they do provide an “Almond Cream Pie in Coconut Crust” recipe.

The lesson learned is that one's privacy is slightly improved if one views resources on MyWebspace when one is not actually logged in to such service, else one's login ID becomes part of the logs, which otherwise likely contain only the usual suspects (IP, timestamp, client ...). Did you know that you're broadcasting your IP on the IntarWeb?

The Bean at night

TV show of the season? Heroes—it is not that it is necessarily the best show or even best new show on network television this season, and frankly, that is not even a question or category that interests me, for I am not on the lookout for new shows to watch ... I am happy with one or two, which just happen to tide me over while the Stargate franchises go on hiatus. By best I loosely indicate an interesting setup, good mix of known and unknown actors, competently-performed roles and interesting characters, good subplots to go with the main plot(s), and a high concept. It is not Lost, though—lost takes jerking the audience to a level that becomes art; Heroes is just mass-marketed pulp (with website tie-ins, etc.), but a nice diversion. And, even there ...

Leena and
The Bean

... looking back on it—as I did a bit this afternoon while riding the 38 home from Van Hise and passing The Saxony, my old place of residence—I find it amusing that in my circle of friends/colleagues, only DE and perhaps FL watch more popular culture than do I, but I am hardly an excessive or even average consumer, and that which I do consume, while fitting a demographic profile of some sort that includes white males between 18 and 35, I suspect, is not entirely mainstream. But, and this was the looking back part, this consumption on my part goes back only to 2001 at the earliest (since we had a TV at the Johnson Street house), and really dates, perhaps, to the 2004–2005 academic year, when I inherited J&C's television.

The Bean
and background

At the house I picked up occasional episodes (first watched Buffy, caught the well-written West Wing stuff, saw one Alias episode), but watched very few things with any regularity, and even J&C's TV received little use (I was more likely to attach my DVD player and VCR to my old Mac's composite video input), but that was the year that I watched the old seasons of SG-1, started Veronica Mars and Lost, and joined the BSG and Doctor Who craze.

Truly creative Nigerian scams would become postmodern. Mr. Morris Thompson, his wife, and his daughter would have perished on an Oceanic flight from Sydney. They might have $48,151,632 to deal with. It would not be Philip Müller writing to me but someone named James or Sawyer.

Ivana with
the War Criminel

That such criminals and fools do not go to such lengths saddens me; I at least want entertainment value from my poorly executed scam attempts.

And back to popular culture. Heroes continues its march forward, though disappointingly it contained dialogue straight out of daytime soaps this evening, especially when Mohinder encounters an old flame—quite uninspired. In contrast, Hiro's encounter with the waitress was touching and cute. It is my current comic book fix, since I have fallen behind when it comes to a few of my favorites.

Miniature at Art Institute

As of this evening I have only about thirty pages left in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which has been a truly wonderful if a bit slow and delayed read. I began it so long ago in Berlin, probably after finishing Never Let Me Go, one of the best short novels I've read in recent memory, but between Fulbright and dissertation obligations, not to mention visitors, and the pure length of the novel itself, it is only now that I approach its end, and it wasn't until several chapters back, when—spoiler warning of sorts—Strange produced his Venetian warning to Norrell and others, as told to Lascelles, that a momentary chill accompanied the reading experience; it as a moment out of a thriller, or perhaps that point in a fantasy or adventure novel when the protagonist turns the table after countless challenges, and the reader believes, now it is serious, now it's time for the ass-kicking to begin.

The Raven King's appearance is Gaimanesque, and there is more than just a little Morpheus in him.

—November 13 2006