Category Archives: Fabulous Wonder

Miscellany and commentary, with a technical and social bent

In slap to Microsoft, Massachusetts requires open document format

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Oooh, the Romney administration is doing something I can agree with. It is requiring that state documents be saved in an open document format:

Massachusetts’ shift to the so-called OpenDocument format seeks to ensure the state’s electronic records can easily be read, exchanged and modified now and in the future, free of licensing restrictions and compatibility problems as software evolves.



This move is rather grandiosely being called the software equivalent of “the shot heard ’round the world.” (Never mind that many other places in Europe and in America have already moved to open source.)

Star Wars as post-modernism

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This is a provocative read:

[Lucas] makes explicit his theoretical interest in the mechanics of plot. As viewers, we take pleasure in the implausible events that must happen for the narrative contraption to snap shut in a satisfying way. But the characters come to understand that there is another agent, external to themselves, that is dictating the action. Within the films’ fiction, that force is called … er, “the Force.” It’s the Force that makes Anakin win the pod race so that he can get off Tatooine and become a Jedi and set all the other events in all of the other films in motion. We learn that Anakin’s birth, fall, redemption, and death are required to “bring balance to the Force” and, not coincidentally, to give the story its dramatic shape. The Force is, in other words, a metaphor for, or figuration of, the demands of narrative. The Force is the power of plot.

On dressing appropriately

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Miss Manners on proper attire:

Unlike beauty or other physical characteristics, dress is presumed to be subject to some degree of choice. You may choose to be as close or as remote from the prevailing convention of the time and occasion as you like, but the distance will be read as reflecting your attitude. This is why movie stars and hip-hop musicians dress so differently when they go to court. Such symbolism is powerful, and those who use it to lie should not be surprised or offended when others take these statements at face value and presume them to be childish or criminal.