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Man on the Moon
Thursday, January 6, 2000 Stockcharts is syndicating! I've been urging Chip for a while to create an RSS file, which is an XML table of contents type of thing. This file, a list of updated articles on our site, can be used at my.netscape.com (as soon as they get off their duffs and register the channel), my.userland.com, and other sites that syndicate news headlines. It wasn't difficult to put together, and the story flow on our site right now is such that doing it by hand isn't a problem. I was really pleased that this worked so quickly. The amount of traffic we'll get from it isn't big right now, but I'm sure it will only grow with time.
Wally sent me a note, reminding me about the Christmas tree burn this weekend. I'd already seen the talk about it on the Fremont Arts council list, and I want to go, if Jack is up for it and our schedule permits. "The tradition is to burn your tree on the 12th Night of Christmas, which happens to be today, but we felt Saturday was close enough....Talking about last year, we had 40 trees and lots of fun people. This year we want over 100 trees and at least that many people!"
I stayed late to do the site update. Chip has to leave early Tuesday and Thursday nights for now, to share childcare duty with his wife -- she's teaching a class at night this quarter. (I refuse to call this "babysitting"! That would imply he was taking care of a child that didn't belong to him.) When I was done, the traffic was still bad on both bridges, so I drove over to Crossroads Mall to see a movie. I had time to visit Barnes and Noble (bought the latest CJ Cherryh and Mary Jo Putney novels) and have a bite to eat. The deli where I bought my sandwich tried to pass itself off as authentic new york style, and the meat in my sandwich was good, but shouldn't a Reuben sandwich be grilled? I didn't specify that, but I didn't think I needed to! I was amused by the pastrami-filled hom-bows in the display case at the front, but I didn't buy one. Next time! The movie was Man on the Moon, the Andy Kauffman biopic. I enjoyed parts of it, but I would rather have seen more about how he became a performer, and less about the wrestling schtick in the latter part of his career. That never did interest me, even the first time around. Of course there was a lot of screen time given to his dying of cancer. It's a rare movie that can make that something I want to see; it's usually too close to home, since I was the principal caregiver for my mom over the last years of her life. Seeing someone on-screen dying of cancer or AIDS doesn't bother me out of all proportion, but I usually don't choose "heartwarming" movies like that. I did like the closing sequence, where Kauffman flew to the Philipines for "psychic" surgery. His laughter on the operating table when he caught a glimpse of how that conjob works was a good wrap-up of his life, I thought.
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