I'm amused and happy to finally recognise a song I used to love when I was younger - the version of "Zombie Jamboree" I remembered was by Rockapella (and not Harry Belafonte, who incidentally is another one of those socially active musicians who's done a lot worth respecting but is also a bit crazy). A lot of Rockapella's other music is also really fun, and they did covers of a really wide variety of songs. I've always loved "Mr Sandman" in all the forms I've heard it over the years, and theirs is pretty spiffy. Also, according to Weird Al's mailbag, Don McLean (who wrote "American Pie")'s kids sing Weird Al's parody enough around the house that McLean sometimes has trouble keeping his lyrics straight while performing it in concert - amusing (especially to me, given my "endearing" habit of singing the Weird Al lyrics over McLean's version whenever I hear it). I just heard Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise" for the first time, and had no idea that Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" was a cover before. I'm not sure, between those two versions, which I think is better. Sometime I need to find my Walter/Wendy Carlos CDs - that genre-bending music is pretty distinct and interesting (either that, or I haven't heard of some musicians I should've and my readers should aim to help me remedy my ignorance).

I'm not actually that proud of the paper I wrote for my Hitchcock class - this was one of those cases where I wanted to write a lot more than there was room for, and the style of what I was trying to say would've better been supported by moderately deep analysis of several seperate parts of the film rather than deep analysis of a few (which I didn't do, but maybe should've) or shallow analysis of several (which I did). In geeral, when I have to cut things for size, I prefer to handwave a bit rather than chop ideas - it feels to me like less possibility for creativity is usually lost because expanding things that are present enough is a reliable, almost-rote process, while excluding ideas entirely to well cover those I choose feels like choosing to forget some cleverness. Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong way though - when I'm not given the assignment I like, I need to avoid turning what I hand in into some form of philosophical protest..

I'm still frustrated at the low frequency of people I'm interested in being interested back, my cowardice in trying to start up friendships/social relations, and the presence of stupid hopes for relationships with people who are either unavailable or otherwise not suitable. I sometimes wonder if non-jewish-centric shadchanim would be a very good idea for the secular movement or not, although at least locally I don't have any ties to that movement per se. Maybe I should actually go to one of the meetings I hear about to stir things up. All these ideas of moving, wanderlust, loneliness (interesting article BTW, although I am *not* implying anything about myself with it), and changing nature of some of my friendships are leading to a kind of paralysis in my thoughts of my future...

News:

• Pagans can have pentagrams at military graves. I'm amused that American Atheists managed to get their logo on the list of approved symbols too - it's not a religion so much as a philosophical group, and I wonder if they can (or should) draw a firm line between AA and political movements or other types of self-expression. Should people be able to express themselves in their graves? How much? I imagine some people might want to be buried with readonly USB keys or similar - perhaps some commercial cemetary will do just that sometime. The complexities of taking it further arn't that relevant here - this is simply a good thing if markers of faith are to be on graves.
• On that topic, I don't really want a grave, nor do I care what happens to my body after I die. If other people wanted me to have a grave, I would probably go with what makes them happy (hopefully without any cross/crescent/whatever - a hammer and sickle might amuse me, but unless I meet a number of other red who are still sentimental enough for graves, I wouldn't care so much).
• Someone made a RAID with floppies. Given how unreliable floppies are, it's delightfully right for being so wrong..
• Commentary on upcoming British and French elections
• Having just heard of Beryl/compiz for the first time, I'm starting to play with getting it running on some of my systems to play around with it..
• I really enjoy teaching people C, gdb, make, and related stuffs. I'm just about to introduce gdb to the person I'm helping out (if I can inspire his interest), and something about doing so is a rush...
• I'm not generally geeky about math, and I've often found its deepest fans to have strange ideas about the world, but this mildly-NSFW pic is rather cool in its geekdom. I am also amused that there is a fair overlap in my larger set of books and that on their(?) bookshelf.

Something that strikes me as odd while watching all these old movies is that people in the past were much better dressed than today. I wonder how true that actually was - I had a conversation with Kavita on impressions people of other countries get of the United States from Hollywood, later to repeat in a different form at the Zets gathering, and I wouldn't be surprised if get similarly inaccurate impressions of the past from films of the era.. but then perhaps people really did dress more nicely in public in the past (e.g. wearing a tie to the park).