In Which I Have a Really Weird Dream

I'm at this Phillies game with my little sister, and the Phillies promotional marketing folks have this gimmick where they randomly select a person from the crowd to take an at-bat during the third inning--facing the opposing pitcher, actually a part of the game. The victim wins a car or something if he/she manages to get on base, sort of like those half-court shots they do at basketball games. It took me until 15 minutes after I woke up to realize that this would be a really, really bad real-life idea. My sister somehow gets selected, and she goes down onto the field and promptly hits a home run to center. The crowd goes nuts, so she's inserted into the lineup for the rest of the game as a designated hitter (that's the nightmare part of the dream--the designated hitter rule has been extended to the NL).

She hits another dinger before the game's over--a two-run shot. Then the next morning, I look through the sports section of the Inquirer to see what they had to say about the game. Nothing. Then I woke up.

I didn't say it was an interesting dream.

In other news, we went to visit my aunt, uncle, and two cousins yesterday. My five-year old cousin was pounding on the chest of this battery-operated frog toy that wasn't working, yelling, "RBI! RBI!" Took a few seconds for us to realize he meant CPR.

Crane Guy

CNN.com - Suspect refuses to budge from atop Atlanta crane - May 27, 2005

Have you been following this? This one guy is singlehandedly bringing this Atlanta neighborhood to a standstill by refusing to come down from a crane he's holed himself up on. He won't come down off the crane, but he also is refusing food and water. He's been up there three days. Sooner or later he's going to weaken and fall off...

Update: He's down and in custody. It seems the police were finally able to coax him over with an offer of water before tasering him into submission. Murder charge pending.

The Fine Art of Consulting

Both of these links come from the same guy. I love this industry.

An Open Letter to Men Everywhere

I can't keep silent about this any more. I mean you when I say this. From now on, when you are sharing a public restroom with me, don't ever do any of these things:

• Spit into the urinal. I don't know why you do this--maybe you just like to spit and the urinal is better than spitting on the bathroom floor, but it's gross. I don't need to see it, and I definitelydon't need to hear that snorking sound you make before doing it.
• Interlock your hands behind your head. I really don't know what this is all about. Are you trying to demonstrate to your fellow urinators that you don't need to wash your hands when you're done? You're not lying down on a couch, and if you're not careful, you're going to miss. Put your hands down and pay attention to what you're doing. Also, don't sigh with relief so loudly. That's really creepy.
• Always go for the urinal right next to mine. There are 20 of them, and only 2 are occupied. Go for one out by itself and give yourself some privacy. If you need a tutorial on proper bathroom etiquette, take this test.
• Take a zillion paper towels. It's wasteful. Your hands aren't that big. Take one towel, dry what you can with it, and repeat as necessary.
  

Thank you. You'll be a better bathroom citizen for it.

Linked Again!

Thanks for the href, Mike. Looks like I haven't posted anything in a month. That's not too good. It's a good thing I don't have anything important to say!

So I was thinking about words again. There's a fairly recent prefix that's entered the popular lexicon in the last decade or so: meta-. In the computer industry it's been around for longer than that. Databases have metadata, Unix-style keyboards have the meta key, and HTML documents have <meta> tags, which you use to give special directives to the browser.

In general, application of meta- to a word means to take the word and apply it to itself. Metadata literally is "data about data". It's frightfully important stuff. In a database table, the data itself may look like this: "Jones", "Jack", 27, 1324, 6. Meaningless unless you know the metadata, which tells you what those data mean: "LastName", "FirstName", "Age", "SAT Score", "Number of magazine subscriptions currently held."

In the psychological realm, metamemory is memory about memory. Metaphysics is the study of how physics works. In theory, you could (and I'm sure many have) study Metametaphysics, or the study of how metaphysics works. I have a book in my office by Strunk and White called The Elements of Style, and it's a work of metawriting.

I find it interesting that you can take items like this and declare that they are not the last word on the subject. You can go a level higher up and take the view of the field from 30000 feet and think, "Now where can we go from here?"

It's not every word that lends itself to metazation, either. Only certain concepts merit the kind of recursive cognition that allow you to land on metaconcepts. On Friday, I had to participate in a metameeting, where we planned what we're going to do in a future meeting we're going to have with a customer. Right now, I'm blogging into a meta-website. It's all around us.

OK, now I can shut up for another month. Just kidding.