I live Santa Clara, California – not far from where I was born. I work in IT and make a lot of photos. I'm Jewish. My dream vacation involves sitting at a sidewalk cafe for hours, sipping coffee.
I live Santa Clara, California – not far from where I was born. I work in IT and make a lot of photos. I'm Jewish. My dream vacation involves sitting at a sidewalk cafe for hours, sipping coffee.
the brandensite is a vanity project where I collect all of things I've put onto the internet in a big, fat glorification of myself. I've maintained this monument to arrogance in one form or another since I was thirteen years old in 1995. This is my social media.
I love photography. I love learning about photography and making my own photos. I share my new photos on Flickr almost every day, and I have a photo portfolio website. I will talk about photography at the slightest provocation. This website is one such provocation. Beware all ye who dare:
I've printed out some of my photos on postcards and now they're just laying around my house. If you send me your address, I'll mail one to you. It's free.
As a kid I played action and strategy video games. But since becoming an old curmudgeon I've lost my patience for those. I've now grown fascinated with exploration and storytelling games, surprised to find there a fantastic wealth of hidden universes and subtle gameplay:
My recent favorite musical artists are VNV Nation, mind.in.a.box, The Decemberists, The National, genCAB, Project Pitchfork, Moby, purity ring, unitcode:machine, and Röyksopp.
I obsess over an extensive, curated, eclectic and growing library of music which is meaningful to me. I put the library metadata online (not the music) and it consists of 17,404 tracks from 2,131 albums from 870 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 509,197 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
In English, the days of the week are named after Germanic gods. All, that is, except Saturday, which is instead named after the Roman diety Saturn. How did the big guy pull off such a feat?
running commentary
David Neagle was one heck of a guy. Raised amidst the California Gold Rush, he was a gunslinger and prospector and saloon owner and mining foreman and marshal and bodyguard and when he was arrested, his case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where a precedent-setting ruling is now named after him. He was deputized as sheriff in the town of Tombstone, Arizona and worked alongside the Earps keeping the law, but most interesting of all is his involvement with Justices David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field.
David S. Terry was a monumental asshole who somehow became one of California's earlier state supreme court Chief Justices (voted in during a special election). Although when his pro-Southern Slave State politics failed to earn him re-election he blamed his good friend the free-soil Senator from California David Broderick, and then resigned his place on the bench to kill Broderick in a duel. A generally violent man, Terry was known for threatening people with a bowie knife he kept on his person. After a stint fighting in the Civil War (on the wrong side) he returned to California as a lawyer and represented in court a woman named Sarah Althea Hill against her former lover, William Sharon.
William Sharon was another monumental asshole (perhaps even a bigger asshole than Terry) who was a banker and also briefly the Senator from Nevada (although he rarely showed up to do anything). Sharon used his position as bank agent among the Comstock Lode prospectors to control their operations, loaning them money only to starve them out and forcing them into bankruptcy so that the bank could foreclose on the mineral rights. He also swindled his business partner William Ralston out of his fortune. The part relevant to this story, however, is that Sharon kept Sarah Althea Hill as a mistress.
Until he got bored of her, that is. Hill was significantly younger than him and something of a firecracker, having a reputation for threatening those who crossed her with a Colt revolver she kept in her purse. And so when Sharon dumped her, she filed a lawsuit claiming that he actually couldn't do that because they were secretly married.
And in that lawsuit she was represented by David S. Terry, the first asshole. Although Terry and Hill weren't just working together, they were also sleeping together, and soon got married.
Stephen J. Field was also a judge and also something of an asshole, although more known for being rude than for threatening people with knives of swindling them of their fortune. He was one of the judges in the Circuit Court that heard Hill's case, and the one who spoke the ruling that Hill's documents were forgeries. She did not care for this ruling, and screamed and reached for her gun. The marshals subdued her, and lawyer/husband Terry sprung to her defense with his bowie knife. David Neagle was there, however, shoving his gun in Terry's face and arresting the pair of them for contempt of court.
When Judge Field returned to California the next year, Neagle was assigned to protect him. Which proved fortuitous, as Field and Terry (along with Hill and Neagle) had the misfortune of catching the same train from LA to SF. When the inevitable happened and Terry confronted Field, presumably with some violent intent, Neagle proved himself once again quicker on the draw, shooting Terry in the heart and ear, killing him.
It was this act of self-defense which landed Neagle in jail, as prior to this instance what Neagle did was not technically legal. But to nobody's surprise, when Neagle's case reached the Supreme Court, the judges were happy to rule that someone like Neagle defending their lives was, in fact, quite legal actually thank you very much, even though Field himself recused himself from the vote.
Neagle's reputation now well-cemented, his later years were spent as a bodyguard for hire, working for various wealthy and powerful men. He finally passed away in 1925, at 78 years old in Oakland.
They probably teach you this if you go to school in New Mexico, but somehow this information is new to me. "New Mexico" predates the country of Mexico by several hundred years.
What even is a bucatini? (It's a pasta in the shape of a straw.) Why was there a shortage during 2020? (All pasta was running out, and bucatini is both more involved to make and under less demand.) Why am I linking this article now? (Because it's writing is amazing.)
Non-integer timezones aren't unheard of, but all of India being on India Standard Time five-and-a-half hours ahead of UTC is certainly the largest example. How this happened is steeped, apparently, in the history of Britain's colonial past, the East India Company which dominated affairs on the subcontinent during the dawn of timezones, and the railroads which dominated affairs in the East India Company's administration. Why India has stayed on this unusual timezone, well, that's because it's become something of a national pride. There was a proposal recently to add a second timezone to India, however. It stemmed from those in India's far east having clocks that don't closely match the rise and fall of the sun. The proposed solution was to introduce a second timezone which was UTC+6.5.
It was shot down for "strategic reasons."
Yes.
But Dr. Bret Devereaux (a history professor) over at ACOUP wanted to be a little more academic about the question, so he brought in Merriam-Webster's and Umberto Eco's definitions of fascism and compared them against what Trump has done and said. The Professor's conclusion: Yes, Trump is a fascist.
I love Devereaux's writing in general, and this piece in particular. It's his closing remarks urging people to not vote for Trump (a rare blatant political opinion from a Military History blog) I find the most worth echoing here:
A Flickr contact of mine has his job description listed as Lebenskünstler which my extremely rudimentary German was enough that I saw "life" and "art" in there, but could make no more sense of the word. Internet translation automata rendered it in English as bon vivant. Which... believe it or not, is actually French, not English. And is also a phrase I cannot define. M-W to the rescue: But I also found the linked blog post, which disagrees with that translation of Lebenskünstler. It is an article specifically about the inherent difficulty in translating Lebenskünstler into English, quoting the juicy bit here: Is there no English word for that? The author suggests hedonism, a word coming from the Greek word for pleasure, but which now fully means "self-indulgent." Hedonism carries too much negative connotation for me to accept it as a translation for Lebenskünstler.
We strike gold in the article's comments, though, where someone attempts the word Pollyanna. Yet another word I don't know the meaning of. Resorting once again to M-W, a Pollyanna is "a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything." This word comes from the title character of a 1913 children's book. From Wikipedia: Curiously, the dictionary always capitalizes Pollyanna but Wikipedia does not. A mark of this word's recent entry into our language, perhaps.
This comment is meandering enough already, but I feel compelled to also throw into the mix the word epicurean, not as a translation of lebenskünstler, but as a properly English alternative to bon vivant. Coming from the philosophy of Epicurus, the word has drifted over the years (and lost its capitalization) to now have the definition: "one with sensitive and discriminating tastes especially in food or wine." Relating all this above language trivia will be sure to make you an instant hit at parties and soirées. Indulge me one last excerpt:
While browsing the Etymology Dictionary, as one does, at the end of the entry for college comes the note "College-widow is attested by 1878." What the heck is a college-widow?
Enter Sadie Stein on this The Paris Review article: The rest of the article is worth reading, too, especially this pull from the now-defunct blog Paper Pop: I should've known sexism was involved.
Hard to tell where the 3D renders stop and the cyberpunk renditions of Manila begin, Lucius Felimus's website offers a breathtaking smorgasbord of neon scenery that skews heavily into high tech low life.
This is a 2019 article which tracks down and interviews dozens of people who helped create "Office Space", the 1999 Mike Judge cult classic about the absurdity of cubicle life. I've seen the movie a lot. So nostalgia like this is interesting, to learn what the creators were doing and why they were doing it, long since freed from having to promote the movie and sing only its praises.
Literally. Ctrl-F in Outlook is broken because billg himself told them to do it this way.
older!