MovableType, Celebrity Morphs, Monkeys, and Memory

jelewis8 — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 21:21:29 +0000

MovableType 3.2 is out. Wait. Before you stampede off to log into TypeKey (or am I the only one here who actually uses MT?), you may want to consider the following:
Check out the front page of the MovableType site. The grinning Drew Barrymore lookalike on the lower right side of the screen–see her? It’s deceiving, isn’t it. You’re tempted to think, what a nice person, what a nice smile! Who couldn’t love the adorable pixie cuteness of a younger, drug-softened Drew Barrymore?
But look closer. It’s not Drew at all. There’s been some strange amalgamation of Drew and the imminently floatable Angelina Jolie. Or more precisely, those river barges tacked on her face that are sometimes called lips. And with the glasses of Ashley Judd, she’s three parts of a celebrity trio famed for beauty, if not acting skills.
But fitted together, she’s like those old celebrity clone images, the morphed “what would happen if so-and-so had a kid with such-and-so” photos. They always look slightly repulsive, a description I don’t usually apply to people. But technically, they aren’t people, they’re photo manipulations created by a computer morphing program to whet the humour buds of people who think fart jokes are funny.
Ah, but you say, this is an advertisement for Typepad, a different service from MovableType. Even barring the difference, Typepad is built on the MT interface and uses the same protocols. For all I know, Typepad is simply an automated, sleeker, more user-friendly MT. But, let’s call it a different product completely.
Scroll down.
Featured on the left hand column, hawking MT “threads”, is a monkey with a baseball cap. No, I’m sorry. It’s Joey, a guy I knew from fourth grade on who was tall and lanky and had stringy, Gollum-like hair that always looked as if it had been plastered to his forehead with undercarriage grease from a 1940 Buick. His head appeared to have been elongated to eggplant proportions, and his nose had been broken in a fight, so it puffed out enormous, as if it was attempting to consume his face.
Oh, I really shouldn’t be so mean-spirited. Joey was an interesting guy. He ran off to join the Peace Corps, but came back a year later. He never went back to school, and last I heard, he was working at a pulp and paper mill in my old hometown of Franklin. His sister Krystal had a crush on me and we danced together at senior prom. I’ll never forget that, because one of the biggest computer geeks was there–Andy–and he told me I couldn’t dance. Wow. Talk about your all-time humiliations, being slam dunked by a computer geek. I wasn’t a star athlete, and I wasn’t a geek, and I wasn’t a genius. I made very little impression on most people I met, and so I passed through high school like a ghost.
Joey was similar to me, thinking back. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and the ones he did have were outsiders. Like me, he sort of drifted through school, not doing poorly, but not doing as well as he could have. Joey was smart, but book learning wasn’t one of his gifts. He could fix cars though. I often saw him outside his house working on the engine of a Corvette that perpetually sat on cinderblocks in front of his house. He’d even work on it mornings, before school started.
I know for a fact that at least a few people from my old high school days read this site on a semi-regular basis, so I won’t do biopics on them…yet. Still, the days of yore sometimes rear their heads, a twinge of memory struck like ore in a mine, and flow until tapped. It’s always in’erestin’ to see what settles in the sieve.
“Look Ma! Gold!”
Fool’s Gold, maybe, but still, at least it’s shiny. And even monkeys love shiny things. One of these days, I’ll dig up an old elementary school photo of me in bowtie. I truly looked like a monkey (some would secretly, or not so secretly, say I still do). Something impish in that smile, made you wonder if I wasn’t about to throw some metaphorical feces at you or hand you a banana as a gift.
At this point, I have no idea what I’m writing about, so I’ll end before this post explodes from incoherency. Oh yeah, have a good weekend.

The Day After The Day After

jelewis8 — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 17:50:29 +0000

The day after Easter has always seemed like an anti-climactic day for most people, especially if they fail to realize the significance of the Resurrection. I suppose it’s why I didn’t post anything yesterday–just couldn’t get up the punchiness after such a joyous remembrance of our saving grace. It’s a bit like anticipating being in a massive automobile accident, only to realize that you didn’t have your glasses on, and the oncoming car was in the right lane after all.
Question is, were you in the left lane?
Most people don’t get sentimental about Easter. I certainly don’t. But it’s funny the people you see or hear about who celebrate, in their own ways. Like the lesbian who suggested drinking Rolling Rock beer at twelve midnight to my two compadres in honour of our Lord rising and encouraging the stone that closed off His tomb to gather no moss. That came out of left field, but it seems a fantastic way in. I mean, you’re at a bar, he or she’s at the same bar, you’re both drinking beer. To have the conversation turn on such a simple and mundane beer title…stranger things have happened, but not nearly as cool, or fraught with potential.
I spent Easter inside and finalizing Zero Sum, hitting the evening church service to avoid the crowds and extra parents, and generally being anxious about how ZS would turn out. I started noticing strange correlation between the part of the day I spent editing and how much antipathy or enthusiasm I felt for the film. Morning found me despondent and moody, disliking my choices of shots, grimacing in auditory agony over a perceived sound sync problem. Evening would roll around, and somehow, the doomed film from the morning turned into a near Rembrandt, where those same problems are justified by the tone of the story, the loving caress the soundtrack places at just the right moment to really punch the scene home. Who knows what it means…?
Now that it is officially “done”, I’m hoping life will return to a somewhat more normal state. Whatever that means. I’m a closet compulsive without the obsessive, so if there’s not one thing, it’s another. Most likely, it will entail getting my affairs “in order” in preparation for my move to Los Angeles in August. Scary stuff. It’s almost like death, in that I’m leaving behind all my friends here and going on to a bright and shiny place. Hmmm…but is it heaven or hell you refer to, you ask.
Good question.
I never offered up a recounting of my week-long trip out there. So tomorrow? Yes. Tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m actually going to get some work–legitimate, money-earning work done. Hey, someone’s gotta do it.

» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

MovableType, Celebrity Morphs, Monkeys, and Memory

The Day After The Day After