Charles Foster Blog.

Some more spam poetry. "Freya carthage bowl meteor egypt," by one "Phoebe Melvin." Then the message from a "Forest Hathaway," noting: "Re: Decrease Schlesinger," which is a nifty name that reminds me of Increase Mather. Decrease's parents, however, were clearly not very optimistic. Maybe they were members of the Lost Generation.

"Lost Generation" I can live with. Maybe it's my fondness for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, or maybe because they’re almost all dead, and there are no fatuous newspaper trend pieces about the Lost Generation. (But then again, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote: "But the hell with her [Gertrude Stein's] lost-generation talk, and all the dirty, easy labels.")

Other generational nicknames are just annoying, mostly because of the stereotypes that stick to them like syrup. "Greatest Generation" is a pandering term, invented to sell books; defeating the Axis was certainly a noble thing, but you can't tell me that human beings of that generation were more noble than any other -- if fighting in a bitter war is all it takes to be the greatest, why not the generations that fought the Revolution, the Civil War or World War I? "Baby Boom(er)" almost guarantees that some silly notion is being discussed, unless it’s how that demographic is going to be shorted by Social Security. "Generation X" caught on, I believe, because people wanted a place to hang stereotypes about people born after 1964, or however it's defined.

Watched about a quarter of Citizen Kane last night because Law & Order was a rerun. The stop-motion feature proved itself during the "News on the March" newsreel-within-the-movie, when the significance of Kane's death is illustrated by flipping newspapers one atop the other, each with a headline about Kane. Several English-language papers flip by first, to anchor the scene with an English-reading audience, and then there's a rapid succession of other languages: French, Spanish, Russian and lastly Japanese.

I froze the image to look at the Japanese paper, and I could make out several words -- the katakana for "Kane" and the kanji for "newspaper" and "world" and "die." I asked Yuriko to read it, and sure enough, she confirmed that it read like a real paper, with headlines about the founder of the world's biggest newspaper company dying. Nice touch, Mr. Welles.

DVD blog.

Video has been on my mind lately, since we've acquired a DVD player, which I made fully functional just last night. This took some doing, since our television was manufactured back around the founding of Ur -- well, actually ca. 1995 -- and the instructions for connecting the DVD to the TV assumed that the TV has certain female connections that it does not. Complicating things was the fact that we wanted to maintain the VCR, too.

The DVD instructions didn't acknowledge that anyone with a DVD could even have such an old TV. Remarkable that something as dry as a consumer electronics instruction manual can have a subtext, but it does, and this is it: Go out and buy a new TV, old man. It will be obsolete in about six months, by the way.

Which in turn makes me think of the push toward high-definition television. What for? Cui bono? I've never seen a satisfactory explanation of why it matters if TV pictures are so much clearer, and why it's worth spending any money to achieve that end. The argument for HDTV seems to boil down to this: It's the wave of the future because, well, just because it is. Go out and buy a new TV already.

Anyway, I didn't buy a new TV, but instead an RF modulator, which I learned about by running "DVD VCR Connection" through Google. This turned up a number of articles, all of which pointed to the RF modulator as the solution. It sounds like the device Marvin the Martian used, but it's essentially a box into which all the relevant cables from the TV, VCR and DVD connect. It then sorts things out.

Amazingly, I hooked it all up, and it worked. Just amazing. No mysterious failures not explained in the manual, no crucial steps overlooked by me, no need to go out to buy some missing auxiliary part. I then took Lilly to the video store, and rented her choice of disc: Barbie as Rapunzel (not as bad as it sounds). The store we went to had almost nothing older than about 1960. Grrrr. I got one of the few older titles they did have worth seeing with a clear stop-motion capacity: Citizen Kane.

Leap blog.

The Academy Awards is somewhere near the top of my list of events I pay no attention to. Or it would be, if I compiled such a list. But if I compiled it, that would be paying too much attention.

I'm not absolutely indifferent to the awards. In 2001, I found myself in Hollywood, and I did take the time to wander into the Roosevelt Hotel, and briefly see the Blossom Room, where the first awards were held in the late '20s. As far as I'm concerned, dead movie stars are a lot more interesting than live ones. Bet the Roosevelt Hotel has some entertaining spooks.

I'm more interested in the fact that today comes but once every four years. It also happens to be my mother-in-law’s birthday, so she's one of those people who has a Leap Year birthday. Her birth year can be cast into a riddle: Today is her 16th birthday, and she was born in Showa 15. What year was she born?

Leap Year brings to mind the lore of King Numa reforming the early Roman calendar, Julius Caesar (and Sosigenes) replacing lunar with solar, Caligula trying to name a month after Germanicus (at least according to Robert Graves), Pope Gregory ordering his change but the Protestant parts of Europe ignoring it, and so on. When I was a kid I was fascinated by calendars, and would draw my own sometimes. In high school, I read about the history of the calendar on my own time, because it wasn't part of any class. Even now I have some interest, though not as much as a fellow I know who spent time calculating the dates of Easter in the far distant future -- thousands of years further than the standard Easter tables. I think he even wrote a computer program to do that for him.