Will Hines Dot Net

Interesting comment about advancing technology in spam on web blogs at Dr. Dave’s site.

Dr. Dave — who I think is a student, or an about to be student currently living in Japan — wrote Spam Karma 2, which is the anti-spam package protecting this blog from spam comments (comments automatically added to blogs as advertisments for mortgage rates, copy machines, cialis substitutes, etc). It was easy to install and works amazingly well. It caught, as far as I could tell, 100% of spam comments and incorrectly flagged only 4 comments in the history of this blog (1 by Chris Gethard that mentioned a series of ninja weapons, and 3 by Erik Tanouye for reasons I do not understand).

But in the past few weeks, the programs that generate spam have gotten SMARTER, and Dr. Dave explains why. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, his post is pretty interesting.

Tonight, Channel 102 has a screening. Mine and Matt DeCoster’s child, The Block, will show its second episode. It features John Gemberling. Dave Thunder directed and edited, with Terry Patrick Jinn bringing his steady-cam-ish goodness to the fold. Come check it out. Anthology Film Archives at 2nd Avenue and 2nd street at 8:30pm, fool!

Speaking of blocks, I’m revising my computer programming style. I used to demark blocks of code like this:

foreach ($episodes as $single_episode) {
     $single_episode->get_show_info();
     $entry = $single_episode->get_title_and_description();
     $xml = $single_episode->get_rss_feed_link();
     while ($moreepisodes) {
        $total++;
     }
}

The opening curly brace is at the end of one line, and the closing curly brace on its own line, indented as far as the line that started the block. But lately, I’m doing this:

foreach ($episodes as $single_episode)
{
    $single_episode->get_show_info();
    $entry = $single_episode->get_title_and_description();
    $xml = $single_episode->get_rss_feed_link();
    while ($moreepisodes)
    {
        $total++;
    }
}

…dropping that opening curly brace onto its own line. You use more lines, but It somehow looks markedly neater to me.

Come see The Block!

Can’t seem to get to this blog lately. Just wait, though! It’ll explode with longer meaningless banter one of these days.

Currently listening to “Drivin’ On 9″ by the Breeders.

Hooray.

If we’ve got Theo, you can keep Damon.

I am looking at the bottle of water.
I do not want to drink it.
I would like to drink that bottle of Diet Pepsi.
You heard me, Diet Pepsi. Yes, you. You.

It is looking at me.

I thought about it, and for the most part I have 2 cups of coffee a day. One in the morning, then a decaf after lunch.

But I have soda, too.

And I suck on caffeine rosin bags at all other times.

My improv team Arsenal did a show tonight in Brooklyn. I parked in a deserted alley next to a not-at-all reassuring sign that said “Stripping Cars Will Bring Police Attention IMMEDIATELY.”

I checked the car every hour. It was fine.

Yes, I’m still giving it away. Soon.

Inspired by Glennis’ call for new slang…

When Hines Bro Brian and I find ourselves playing the same song over and over and over because we love it so much we CANNOT STOP LISTENING, we call it “Freedying.” That is because in 1997, when we were driving up to Cornell to see Hines Bro Kevin graduate, Brian played a mix tape which had the Freedy Johnston song Bad Reputation, which I had never heard, on it. I made him play it at least six times in a row, because I loved it and NEEDED NEEDED to hear it again.

So now it’s very common for Brian to call me or IM me and say “Been Freedying on the new <whatever> song.” That is a normal thing to say. Perhaps you, music lover, could incorporate this word into your vocabulary. Brian once gave me a mix titled “Freedying-Ready.”

A postscript: I had a chance to tell Freedy Johnston this story after watching him perform in Manchester, CT a few years ago. He was both wonderful and terrible in concert. His songs were great — he has what I consider to be a magically good voice. But his in-between song banter consisted of the most petty and juvenille bitching and moaning. “Uh, I was SUPPOSED to have been brought out here earlier, but no one got me, that’s why there was a long pause after I was introduced,” and “This guitar is so hard to tune! You know what I mean?” No, Freedy, I don’t. Shut up and sing. Then he sang the Dolly Parton song “Here You Come Again” and it was so good I forgave him and all jerks everywhere for everything bad they’ve done.

Afterwards, I approached him and told him how my brother and I say Freedying. He seemed only mildly creeped. Then I brought up that the last time I saw him perform was in front of the World Trade center in August 2001, which depressed everyone. And I criticized HIS banter.

Preparing to close down spitemag.com. It’s the home of Spite Magazine, which my brothers and I used to produce on a kind of regular basis. But we don’t do anything there anymore, and I’m not going to get back to it, and it’s a waste of money to have up there each month. So the site will close, and all the content is now available on this server here: http://www.willhines.net/spitemag.

I re-read a bunch of stuff while moving it. There’s some funny stuff in there, all right.

As an Xmas present, Eliza took me to see They Might Be Giants in Williamsburg on New Year’s Eve. I was disproportionately excited for this show since there was the strong likelihood that there would be mostly adults in the crowd. Most people who love TMBG begin doing so when they are 13-19 year old honor students. The odd thing is that the fan base never seems to age. For 17 years (!) I have gone to TMBG shows and while I (and the band) get older and older — the majority of the crowd seems to have arrived straight from their Calculus AP tests.

My devotion to them has ebbed and flowed over the years. It’s hard to listen to a LOT of TMBG in a row — and I have many other places to go for the sensibility I once depended on them to provide. And my personality has long since solidified, while their concerts are filled with teenagers, trying to figure out their own senses of humor. But the opening notes of Flood can still — no shit — bring tears to my eyes, and I will sometimes break out my handwritten log of what was playing on their Dial-A-Song in 1988, just to remind myself of how far (or how NOT far) I’ve come.

It’s good to remember that when TMBG hit the scene — it was before Mr. Show, Kids in the Hall, Ben Folds, Barenaked Ladies, The Onion, Seinfeld, Liz Phair, Nirvana, The Pixies, The Simpsons, Phil Hartman, even before the world wide web and cell phones. Was it before Ween? I think it might have been before Ween. In the late 1980s, if you were a verbal, nerdy, funny sort with decent taste in things — you watched David Letterman and you listened to They Might Be Giants — and everything else you did you did only to make fun of it, and that’s all there was to it.

So I was excited for this show, and it did not disappoint. The band passed out lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, with parts separated for men, women and cro-magnon humans. They counted down to midnight, passed around a bottle of champagne. They played the best of their “Venue Songs” (they had written a new song for every place they played in 2004), with hilarious narration introducing each song (“with this final song, they had proved they were indeed Might Be Giants.”). It felt much like I was recharging my personlity against a huge green lantern which also happened to be playing Ana Ng.

Seeing them in their hometown of Brooklyn — in their home neighborhood of Williamsburg — which is now MY home — was thrilling. Having an actual girlfriend at the show, who had indeed bought the tickets to attend, was amazing and also meant I had finally become the man I once envied from afar.

I should note that even though there were for-real grown-ups throughout the crowd, there were still healthy handfuls of Nightmarish Alternate Versions of Myself everywhere. Foremost among these was a pudgy, curly-haired geek in line behind us who sighed loudly to no one that the early show had been great, and grumbled with fake weariness that only the truly sheltered can affect. Inside the concert, Eliza reported that he had sat down by the wall, belligerently demarking a too-big area all to himself with some bottles of beer. He was wearing, to my dismay and delight, an Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre t-shirt.

I looked down on this man as I simulataneously thought “I can’t wait to write about this show on my blog.”