Only Funny Because the Truth Stings

From over at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal <permalink>:

Really, would this be any worse than what we have going now? 

Ruh-Roh.

Here it comes, shaped like a big hockey stick sweeping down out of Canada to drive a puck of ice into the Gulf Coast:

Take cover!  The Iceman cometh, and this time he's wearing a hockey mask.

On Programming

From The Master himself:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. – D.E. Knuth

Oh man, is that ever true.  I've been making intermittent efforts for about three months to modify/re-purpose a program I wrote about eight years ago.  Essentially it's just an averaging and re-binning code, nothing outlandish, but it's thoroughly bedded down with several other models for its I/O, and it has all been heavily optimized.  I mean, the original is as tight of code as I've ever written, and now eight years later... some of the subtleties escape me.  Only a small mod was now needed, just a slightly different averaging algorithm, and several of the other types of averaging had to be omitted.  But things had finally gotten to the point where I was about to pitch it all and start over on a fresh copy yesterday when I found the loose end of the yarnball and started gently pulling, and by early afternoon today I had a working program.

So for the next couple of days I'll bask in the glow of Having Made It Work Yet Again, before it's back to the gray salt mines of sorting out the next problem.  Pfft.  It's why they pay me the big bucks.

About to Cool Off

Hmm, looks like a low in the mid-20's Thursday night:

Yes, winter's definitely here.  Look at that little lobe of cooler green snicking down onto the coast right here for Mississippi.  We're forecast to be the coldest place on the entire Gulf.  You people from north of I-10 please take your damn weather back up where it belongs.

Full Wolf Moon Tonight

Sounds pretty ominous, but it's just the first full moon in January.  Read about it here over at The Old Farmer's Almanac's web site.  (Does that also sound weird, or what?)  Really, it's just a name.

On a side note, man, I am really craving a good rare steak for some reason today.  Maybe for supper, once the moon gets up I'll go find something.

Book Discussion: Marie Laveau, Voudou Priestess

First things first: the full title is "A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau."  But that wouldn't all fit in the blog title line, so here we go.

The author, Carolyn Morrow Long, does a fine job of digging through historical records and separating the hype from the facts.  In the end, she finds that there isn't much there.  Most of the lurid mythology swirling around Laveau originated in late 19th Century yellow journalism and early 20th Century sensationalism.  If anything, Laveau seems to have only done a little charm-making as a side business, and perhaps held some fairly high-test out-of-church prayer meetings.  But in the conclusion of the book, Long tells the real truth, not so much about Laveau but about her chroniclers:

What we can piece together from the published sources and oral histories is a silhouette of Marie Laveau, her mere outline, lacking all the detail and color of a real portrait.  Tantalizingly incomplete, she is perhaps even more magnetic than she would be if fully known.  Her enigma tempts us to shape her to our will, and her image has evolved over time in response to the shifting prejudices, fantasies, and desires of those who look for her.  As a mirror, Marie tells us more about the era from which she is observed than she does about herself.  She remains untouched and unknown, secure in her enduring aura of mystery.  [emphasis added]

Wow.  What a great book, and what a great job Long did in tracking down all of the major legends, tracking down the actual facts, laying it all out, then (finally!) summarizing only what is known – in a very spare five pages.  I added the bold emphasis in the quoted paragraph, because it is this tendency to distort Laveau by one's own biases that has given rise to her legend.  Honestly, this book is more of a historical slice of New Orleans than a work on either Laveau or Voudou.  Don't let that stop you, it's a great mystery read. (Thanks, V.)

Finally, a post like this wouldn't be any good without the obligatory links to:
the book itself at Amazon
the Wikipedia page on Laveau, 
and to the page on New Orlean Voudou, which seems to be pretty weak coffee in comparison to the Haitian variety.

2015 Re-Start

Hmmm, this will never do:

Much better:

Now, two more weeks until the ortho-doc takes a similar look at input-end of the steering equation.  Hopefully no torque wrenches will be required there.

That was one hell of a crash.