isoglossia

A few mornings ago I heard that the little stickers on our fruit are soon to go the way of the buggy-whip. Time Magazine has announced the “Most Amazing Inventions” of 2005 and fruit-tattooing is apparently among them. As with many of these “Most Amazing” technological leaps, I was completely underwhelmed by this announcement; pretty much, if the press release doesn’t begin with the phrase “Japanese researchers have developed a robotic…”, I’m tuning this invention out — unless it’s something about beer.

This could lead me off on a complete tangent about my brother-in-law’s brilliant idea to open up a chain of college town stainless-steel hose-downable saloons staffed completely by robotic bartenders (I think “SwillMonkey’s” was the name he was tossing around), but I won’t let it.

So it looks like in the future all of our fruits and vegetables are not only going to be genetically modified to contain flounder DNA, but will also have enough body-art to be freshmen at the University of Montana. On the very same day I heard about this shocking dystopian development, I brought some of those embarrassingly outmoded, old-school pieces of fruit with the backward, schoolmarmish sticker “technology” home from the market. Check out the lemons:

I doubt you missed it, but just in case, look really close. What the hell is this?

Along with the tattooing, can we look forward to Superman Red Deliciouses? Green Lantern Limes? World Tae Kwon Do Federation?

Evening. Magda types at computer. Television turned low in background, tuned to “Top of the Pops” or similar.
Magda: [head jerks upright] Is Adam crying?
Me: No, what you’re hearing is Oasis. Liam Gallagher or whatever can sound a lot like Adam crying. Or Nigel? What’s the other one? Which Gallagher is worse?
Magda: [in front of TV, giving the Gallaghers the double-bird] It’s not ‘Nigel’, it’s ‘Noel’. Honey, they both are fucking idiots.

A theory about Diana

Nursery rhymes

Eurovision

Magda, ever the sentimentalist, can’t remember our first date, but she did save her bride’s bouquet from our modest little civil ceremony one year ago this morning. For the last year we’ve managed to keep the brittle precious thing out of the hands of the destructor.

Here’s what the same flowers looked like one year ago, in my love’s hands and face:

Happy anniversary, Honey. Thank you for this year.

My favorite Slovenian web log recently posted an entry on the high percentage of Firefox users in Slovenia: over 30%, well above the global average. Michael, the media genius behind The Glory of Carniola, and I often post on similar topics, and I can be pretty sure that if I have something in mind to write about, Michael will do it first and better. The benefits of using Firefox is one of the many topics we agree on.

A look at the admittedly scant statistics of this site shows that more than half of our visitors are using some version of Firefox. To you I say ‘well done’. To the four percent using Safari or Opera, I say ‘right on’. To the 45% still clinging to the anti-trust defying IE, I invite you to be lectured at a little. I admit that I have ranted about this before, but this screed is a little less judgemental and more informative.

BoingBoing recently pointed me to a thoroughly entertaining site devoted, even fanatically so, to converting people to Firefox. (The name says it all: “Kill Bill’s Browser”, complete with Tarantinian color scheme). The 13 reasons offered for switching are hilarious and worth reading even if you have no intention of fooling around with your browser choice, but as Homer Simpson says, “It’s funny because it’s true”: “Your computer won’t spend its free time telling the world about Viagra soft tabs”. The security advantages Firefox has over IE are alone enough reason to switch and never look back, but lately we’ve been enjoying some of the really powerful browsing muscle of Firefox. A short list of things we love about Firefox that have nothing to do with supporting open-source software or railing against The Man:

• Tabbed browsing: simple enough, but having various pages open in new tabs, rather than new windows, keeps your taskbar clutter to a minimum, which translates to a clearer head while doing exhaustive research, reading Slate, or comparing six different brands of gloves at Sierra Trading Post.
• Extensions: easy-to-add extensions to Firefox allow you to customize it ad infinitum. Or not. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but in a few seconds you can ban Flash ads completely, which means pages load faster and you don’t have to watch annoying animated trailers with dwarves. Especially good if you’re epileptic.
• Greasemonkey: this is by far my favorite new computer toy. Installs in seconds and really leverages the customizable aspect of Firefox. Open-source geeks are constantly writing tiny little scripts that you add to Greasemonkey, each one performing some small but invaluable custom tweak to web pages you use daily. Or to all webpages; our favorite is called “Qwikify extended”. This script makes every letter-key a hot-key, so all you need to do is highlight a word or phrase in any web page, then hit, say, ‘G’ to instantly Google the term in a new tab. Or ‘D’ to look the word up in the Free Dictionary. Hit ‘W’ to look it up in the Wikipedia. And so on. These scripts themselves are easy to customize, too, so if you don’t use eBay (key = ‘B’), it’s easy to change it to something you do use. The time it takes to open Google or Wikipedia, type in the word or phrase, and get the results may seem small, but if you do these searches more than once or twice a day, the installation time of Greasemonkey will pay for itself in a few days. If you use Flickr, Greasemonkey will let you add drop-down menus where Flickr hasn’t thought to, or enhance batch-operations, and on and on. Gmail thinks that you have enough memory never to delete anything, but I still want a ‘DELETE’ button on my inbox page. Greasemonkey makes it so, and also adds a drop-down message preview that Gmail should have thought to include but didn’t. All this is just the beginning. I learned about Greasemonkey from an article in Slate, which gives more reasons you should take a few minutes to install it, as well as good instructions on where to go and what to do.

Downloading, installing, and getting used to a new browser may not sound so exciting to some, never mind the idea of ‘extensions’ and ’scripts’, but moving to Firefox from IE may change your relationship with the web. And it’s the work of just a few minutes and mouseclicks. Firefox will import your bookmarks, and the interface is similar enough to IE’s that you will barely notice the difference. Except for the crashing, pop-up ads, hijacking, infections, and other nuisances native to Internet Explorer. And if you don’t like it, there’s nothing stopping you from going back. If you’re interested, you can be enjoying the benefits of Firefox within minutes of clicking on the pretty button:

Not that the internet has been raising a gigantic hue and cry over this, Adam, but your month 11 report was sub-par in both information and images. Now that you and your mama are back from Poland, I can set things right. I’ll start with the medical “news”. Yesterday your mother took you to see Dr. K at the Stara Gora hospital, and he pronounced you “well-fed”. This came as something of a relief after the previous night’s supper: your mother painstakingly stuffing skuta into tortiglioni, only to have you squish the soft cheese out and deliver the limp, empty pasta tubes directly to the floor like so many soiled prophylactics. You have decided that SPOON = SATAN and you will have no further truck with it. If you can’t jam it into your mouth directly with your shaking tiny fists of rage, you don’t want to, indeed WILL NOT, eat it. End of story. Oh, and you’re not so big on milk or formula, either, so getting you to ingest anything with calcium (yogurt, skuta, etc) is a big deal, and ongoing struggle. So hearing from your doctor that you’re eating well was pleasant news.

“Spoon, schmoon” — eating blueberry yogurt with his hands
He also told your mother something else, not so nice, but in its way less surprising than the lepoprihranjen part. Your mother passed this news on to me when I got home from work yesterday. “Dr. K says that there’s a small possibility that Adam is a ‘hyperactive baby’. So now it’s official.”

Dr. K also speculated as to how it just may be that the earth revolves around the sun, and it’s possible but by no means a clinical certainty that bees are the primary producers of honey.

Never stops moving — whizzing across the parquet, early morning
From the very moment you awake, Adam, until your fitful limbs succumb to your mother’s insistent lullaby and tourniquet-like embrace, you are ON THE GO. Your crawling is incessant and high-speed. At eleven months, you have mastered the ability to hoist yourself up onto the sofa and the coffee table at lightning speed — faster if the remote, a mobile phone, or a fresh magazine is up there — and once there you flout the law of gravity. You take loud personal offence if thwarted, whether it’s me, your mother, or gravity doing the thwarting. Protecting you from yourself is just barely within the ability of one attentive, competent, sober adult human, but 14 hours of it can be a bit much even for two of them to share. Particularly if one of them meets all of the above criteria only rarely. Your mother recalls the pastoral bliss of America’s pre-Columbian era, as she must wear you on her back, papoose-like, in order to vacuum the wigwam. She waits all day for me to get home just so she can go to the bathroom without you crawling into the toilet like Ewan MacGregor.

Crazy in the bath
All of this is to say that Dr. K’s second bit of news didn’t shock us. Rather, it was something of a relief to have a medical explanation for why your mother has aged 75 years in the last eleven months. Also to have some clinical underpinnings for some of the analogies drawn previously in this space, like, say, robotic beetle and Tasmanian Devil.

Drying time with Grandma
Routine events have become more and more of a struggle. In the bath you now want to pogo all the time. Food-hurling is becoming a favorite activity (of yours, not ours). Your mother recently announced, “Adam has a new hobby: putting his head in the washing machine.” Charming except during the ’spin’ cycle. And last night putting a new diaper on you made me think of nothing so much as frantic mariners putting a reef in the mainsail in a gale while rounding Cape Horn. Only with poop.

Growing up fast — a pensive look. With Uncle Tomek

In spite of all this mayhem, I am very happy to have you both back. I am also glad that your mama took the camera to Poland. Smile.