Sesquipedalianism: Yesterday’s word of the day was the delightfully scatalogical Japanese word, “Chuugi”, proof that given enough time and boredom I will always be drawn to the lowest of the low that the Internets has to offer.

Art Film:  I have “cut the cable” in my NYC apartment (there wasn’t one to begin with) and spend my evenings edifying myself either via Hulu’s excellent catalogue of the Criterion Collection or Mubi’s generous $6.99 monthly all-the-art-film-you-can-watch plan. Last night’s flick was Elim Klimov’s “Come and See“, a 1985 Russian war film about the horrors of Byelorussia under the Nazi Einsatzgruppen pograms that is about as downright brutal and horrifying as anything I’ve watched, including Kon Ichikawa’s Fire on the Plains. I’m very fond of Soviet/Russo flicks, mainly the work of Tarkovsky, and Klimov pays homage to the master in nearly every frame. Not one for the kiddies.

Ebert's review

Second, I was reading Jesse Richard’s manifesto for the Remodernist Movement, which encompasses the work embodied by Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Ozu and other wonderfully moody auteurs who prize messiness, sentiment, melancholy over digital precision, snappy dialogue, and plot arcs. Interesting stuff I hope to dive deeper into now that I have a MoMA membership and the annual film pass (my NYC pad is directly behind the museum on W. 54th Street.

Product of the day:  Thanks to Timothy Ferris’ advice in the Four Hour Body (which I take with a grain of skepticism) I Amazoned a tiny little humidifier so I don’t suffer the usual winter desiccation.  The Air-O-Swiss is the size of six stacked smartphones and uses a half-liter water bottle as a reservoir. Under $50 and does the trick.

Know Your Polluters:

The EPA has an interesting Google Maps mashup that lets you checkout how much greenhouse gas is spewing out of the local power plant or landfill. Here’s a link to Massachusetts.

And finally ….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Editor & Publisher ®.

Alan Mutter, one of the smarter voices on the transformation of the newspaper industry, decries the lack of good newspaper apps on the iPad. I read the New York Times on mine religiously and love it. Hate The Daily. Wish the Cape Cod Times would get on the bandwagon, but evidently News Corp’s love of the new doesn’t extend to its podunk newspapers.

The issue would appear to be no in-house experience or expertise in building an app, the expense of third-party development, and indecision over waiting for HTML 5 to transform the reading experience and give the newpaper’s designers full control.

“Publishers have to start doing better, because iPad owners, who represent the vast bulk of the tablet computing market, look an awful lot like newspaper readers. 

In a study released last year, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 90 percent of tablet owners — who are concentrated among wealthy, highly educated adults between the ages of 30 and 49 — regularly use the gizmos to consume news. Significantly, 59 percent of respondents said the tablet has taken the place of “what they used to get” from a print newspaper. 

In other words, tablet users represent not just a potentially valuable audience for publishers, but also one they can’t afford to lose. ”

The New York Times reports on the impending launch of the Global Jukebox, a realization of the vision of Alan Lomax, the man who roamed the United States in the 50s and 60s recording the folk music that went on to influence the pop music revolution.

I was unaware that clips from those hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings had been excerpted by, among others, Moby in his decade-old album, Play and in the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers film, O Brother Where Art Thou?

Lomax had a vision of creating an accessible digitized collection of the recordings, and up until his death in 2002, experimented with PCs and other digital music technologies to create a “global juke.” Later this month that vision will launch as the Global Jukebox.

Here’s a link to a compilation of some of the recordings Lomax made.

Sad news in Marstons Mills, as Kevin Galvin, 63, owner of the magnificent red colonial on the mill pond at the herring run on Route 149 and Route 28 and the blogger who’s maintained the Marston Mills River herring count blog, has passed away from rabies contracted from a bite from a brown bat.

He was a big friend to the herring, along with my former Latin teacher and his wife, Tom and Pieter Burgess.

He’s the first person to die from rabies in the state since the 1930s according to the Cape Cod Times.

I like this post of his on how he knew when to check the run for herring in April:

“I’ve lived right beside Mill Pond for 10 years now and have developed a pretty good sense of the events and cycles that occur at the pond and the behavior of the swans, the blue herons, migrating birds, osprey, turtles, frogs & toads, owls, etc, etc.

I learn more and more as time goes by, but one thing I’m certain of is this: the only time of the year that the aptly-named Herring Gull is on Mill Pond is when the herring are running – and the gulls arrive on Mill Pond exactly when the herring do.

What’s even nicer about this is that I don’t even have to look for the gulls, as I can simply just listen for them. And that unmistakable screech is notice to me to get the folks out to start countin’.

Now sometimes the gulls will show up a few days early and kind of just poke around, but there isn’t any noise, because there’s to nothing to fight over. But when the herring arrive (yum!) the fighting and associated screeching begins, because as with many animals, the easiest way to find food is to try to steal it from one who’s already found it.

So we have a few gulls poking around the pond today, and they’re quiet as expected. But my guess is that within a couple of days two things will happen: there’ll be the sound of screeching gulls and we’ll be counting herring…”

It’s been while since I’ve had cause to commit a clamming post. This recent CapeCast tells the tale of one unfortunate Provincetown clammer who stepped into some sucky mud and lost his boots. I did the same thing years ago on Sandy Neck while cruising around for steamers and years ago my youngest, while wearing waders, got seriously stuck in the muck inside of Seapuit River and needed to be pulled out of the waders to be released from the suction.

Cape Cod muck is horrible stuff, especially the black goo up inside of the bays that smells like the clams that live in it. This is Jurassic muck, black as night and has the consistency of entrails.

The video is notable for the guest star appearance of Provincetown’s shellfish officer, Tony Jackett.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally I’m back to typing, the voice recognition thing wasn’t doing it for me.

The surgical dressings came off Tuesday at Mass General, where the surgeon pulled the sutures out of the incision on the back side of my elbow, and then had me fitted into a tron-like Range Of Motion brace that the physical therapist can add a few degrees of flexion and extension to every week. No gym induced sweat for another ten days (which is causing me to climb the walls in frustration), and no real weight on the arm for another three months. But I can type and no longer have to disturb the peace with my slow-paced, head injury dictation. “Open parenthesis. And then the quick brown Flax … strike that … Frack …. strike that ….. Fox. Close parenthesis. New paragraph …..” Dictation has to be the godawfulest form of writing in the world, a last resort for the era of Mad Men with Dictaphones and winsome stenos who took shorthand and batted their eyelashes. I realize I think through my finger tips and not my mouth.

This is pretty amazing. I’ve heard of messages in bottles travelling long distances, but never abandoned boats. This tale of the little center console that could is going to be some lucky boat builder’s dream advertisement very soon [update, it's on the manufacturer's homepage]. Thanks to Joe Nick and Charlie for figuring out it is a Regulator 26.

Link to video

Link to story

Voice recognition software has been around for at least 20 years. I first played with the technology in the 1980s but was very unimpressed by its abilities, horrible set up a process, and general applicability as a technology of last resort for the handicapped were truly keyboard allergic.

I’ve tried to use the technology transcribe dictation made during long car commutes, but that never worked either. A combination of too much background noise, a lack of discipline on my part to stick with the process of correcting and training the software to recognize my voice and my peculiar way of dictation, and voice-recognition software joined they heap of otherwise optimistic stuff that science fiction promised would be useful but practice proved otherwise.

This post is being dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11 running on a ThinkPad T410s and using a phone headset as a microphone. Since my arm surgery on Tuesday, I’ve dictated about 2000 words and so far am pretty impressed.

Dictation is a foreign mode of writing for me. I’ve used a keyboard in one form or another since I was about 10 years old and my atrocious handwriting condemned me to a typewriter. I never learned how to touch type, but over the years got up to what about 100 words per minute using a frantic index finger/thumb method that over the years as developed a sort of muscle memory of the keyboard which permits me to type without looking at the keys. When word processing technology first emerged in the late 1970s, some writers complained that the electronic ease of deletion, cut and paste, and general speed of composition reduced the value of the word put on the page, and led to a certain compositional laziness that had been moderated by the penalties of working with paper, white out, carbon paper, and the other manual vestiges of writing in the early 20th century. One can writers said the same thing about the typewriter in the 19th century, claiming it made writing “too easy” compared to pen and ink on paper.

Voice technology has come a long way in recent years, especially on android phones where Google’s voice-recognition technology in its maps and search tools are excellent. In the pre-android era, if I wanted to set a destination on the cars GPS, I needed to tediously punch in numbers, cities and states before I could put the car in motion. Attempting to set an address while underway was a recipe for a head-on collision. Now, if I want to get to my office, I simply press the microphone icon and say “go to W. 39th St., New York, NY” and Google does the rest. Voice-recognition is a lifesaver, literally, when I need to respond to a text message while driving, yet my son is fond of a pending the word “bitch” to my dictation.

My biggest complaint with voice-recognition is it forces me to enunciate and be choppy and my diction, where as when typing, I am able to pound away with relatively fluid ease and no concern over misunderstandings and goofy transcriptions. That said, I am a terrible typist and spend a huge amount of time on the backspace key correcting typos and mess ups. Another drawback of dictation is lack of privacy. I hate it when someone looks over my shoulder while I’m writing, and now my voice bellows through the house making me very self-conscious of whether or not I could be overheard by my wife or son. If I were in a cubicle in a typical office I would literally be dumbstruck.

I have no choice but to continue dictating for the foreseeable future, until my doctor gives me the all clear to start typing again.

But at least I can blog and work on memos and have some productivity that otherwise would be completely lost due to surgery.

(This entire post was dictated straight through with nothing corrected)

This blog will go dark on January 18 in support of the campaign to stop SOPA.

please visit http://sopastrike.com for more information and please sign an online petition or write your congressidiot directly.

arm surgery went well. recovering thanks to wonderful wife and son, a nerve block, and pain killers. let the healing begin.