February 05, 2004

i forgot tonight was survivor night, and as usual, i will never get that hour back.

i was midway through my pile of reading for work (incidentally, if anyone has gone through the macromedia flash black belt thing, drop me a note) and mr man comes in and aside from the crazy ramblings of someone punch drunk on 2 beers and hours of bad tv, he starts in about something... what was the beginning... maybe something about that article going around about how CSS sucks. i say something drooly and happy about CSS. i love CSS, it's the beautiful and intelligent supermodel cousin of html. mr man insists that it's broken, that the function is not there. defensively, and with all due respect, i say "honey that's bullshit". just because the browsers can't handle it doesn't mean it's not worthy of adoration. the browsers are broken, not CSS. (fwiw, mr man is on safari, i am on IE - but let's not get into the PC vs Fisher Price thing just now).

anyway. he continues to pursue the line of thought that there's a problem with function. i said 'so, let's take language - language has a pure form (oh, for the sake of this arguement, again, skipping obvious linguisic and semantic arguements) but then when people speak with bad grammer, or misspell things, it "breaks" the function aspect of language?' he says yes. i make some riled-up english major grunting noises and he trundles off, but not before confusing jennifer anniston with suzanne sommers. i say that it's kind of hard to mix the two of them up, and he says not really. that's an easier pill to swallow than this whole form and function melee.

so, now, distracted from long articles on time based video and various action scripts to make said animation work properly, i've gathered up a couple of slim volumes in the hopes that i can make sense of my aesthetic indignity via the words of others - hoping that kandinsky, santayana, polanyi or christopher alexander will be of some aid, not yet invoking the names of others. maybe it's the gemini (x)ntp in me that is just feeling like a good philosophical argument (the meyers briggs book, not inacurately, states that NTs will happily argue either side of an issue).

there's no resolution yet, you, my 6 readers will certainly be the first to know, but i do like this quote, and as is common lately, i read it wrong the first time.

which is so much better than the reality on some level.

side note: did anyone else hear the thing on npr about weird japan-glish, in particular the crazy sounding quote on some japanese or korean stationary? they read it and i thought to myself, if that's a weird translation of something it has a dark beauty to it. turns out that what was mistaken for a bad choice of words was an excerpt from ts eliot. i wish i could remember just what. i think it was part of the wasteland.

second side note: i've been watching dooce rather obsessively for news of child - go see Leta!

Posted by rosebaby at February 05, 2004 11:29 PM