Skip to main content

Stop making sense

Several students at a college radio station responded to David Lynch's death by playing David Byrne's music, and i think they all acknowledged their confusion while announcing their songs. that seemed odd to me, and it still does.

Byrne and Lynch are/were both unconventional, white men. they both attended multiple art schools without graduating, receiving honorary degrees afterward. they were other similarities, but there were just as many differences.

for example, Lynch's name reveals an historic English/Irish connection whereas Byrne is actually a citizen of Ireland and the United Kingdom. (not caring about such details might be a good thing.)

Byrne's Bicycle Diaries is a byproduct of an active lifestyle, whereas Lynch was homebound because of his emphysema.

this confusion preceded Lynch's death. if i had to guess, he didn't mind because it's not malicious. but when you know you're confused, why go on?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Improper english

Before retirement ended my last spell of unemployment, i wondered if the timing of that dismissal was ideal. one month earlier or later might have been better? improving a server log was my last assignment. like many other companies, their senior management believed in their culture, technology, and tools. like other well-funded companies, they used Splunk and wanted to use JSON format. nobody reviewed the pull request that would have established a baseline for my work. their Splunk dashboard code was not versioned. Overcommunicating JSON can be ideal, and creating a data structure to discover if a log entry describes an error is easy and reasonably fast, but computers find strings very quickly. a faster algorithm uses less electricity; computer activity is human activity. ...

Obsolete versions

Once upon a time, upgrading packages was just downloading and installing files. after a while, it also entailed compiling source code because my operating systems no longer received first-class support. Descent Into Madness after a while, upgrading a package also entailed upgrading the tools needed to make it and their dependencies. i felt like i had installed every (meta-)build system. on one of my MacBooks, Homebrew maintained two versions of Python and two versions of llvm . as projects migrated from Autotools to CMake, library versions became inconsistent. these inconsistencies puzzled me, because the first test one should perform after adding support for another build system is determining if the result is the same. any differences should be eliminated/explained. in real life, most people didn't ...

Cat's whiskers

Online forums are good sources of information and/or habitats for groupthink. Jean Valjean ignored the smell; so can you :-) forums are biased in various ways. for example, woodworkers' opinions about linseed oil are informed by wood finish products. in another forum, we might find a recommendation for finishing wood with linseed oil sold by an art supply store. sauce for the painter is sauce for the woodworker? Slippery when wet when i became interested in safety razors, forums were invaluable sources of information. they are still helpful, but i learned enough to continue on my own. at one point i bought cheap shaving soap thinking that it couldn't be as bad as forum contributors claimed. they were right, but the soap was/is still useful: it stays at th...