Month: March 2005

If It’s Friday This Must Be Fréjus

Signs that you need to step away from your computer: you have feverish dreams riddled with double square brackets, featuring a sinister looking librarian who chases you around with a huge encyclopaedia whilst singing the Alphabet Song. Whereupon you oversleep, come in late for work, overdose on cafeine — and post Fréjus, May 29 ’82.

Zappa, Dweezil, and Naming Conventions

So, let’s say hypothetically, you’re working on this thing called a wiki, right? Let’s say it’s a wiki on Frank Zappa, and you’re setting up a basic structure (bio, discog, videog, …). All goes well until you hit a bit of a brick wall: naming conventions.

When setting up an alphabetical index of names for instance, how do you list them? The way a librarian would — that is “Zappa, Dweezil”? An inbetween form, like “Zappa Dweezil” (no comma)? Or just plain jane “Dweezil Zappa”? For reading through the list and quickly finding what you’re looking for, I’d say the former is the way to go — there’s a reason why librarians do it that way.

The downside of this however is that it also forces you to mention those names in this form for every article about the person. An article on the Dweez would then read: “Zappa’s first son, Zappa, Dweezil, went on to become an acclaimed guitarist.” Bit awkward that, eh? Same would go for songtitles. You’d have sentences such as “There’s a track on Chunga’s Revenge called “Clap, The”. Hmmm…

So my hypothetical question: how should this be handled in your view? Any librarians outthere reading HotPoop?

Memories Of El Monte

Shocking news from the world of Little League Baseball:

The team says El Monte is 12 and has a Web site to prove it. Born on April 7, 1989, Kenny’s mother was a groupie who traveled with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention in the early seventies. He was born where his mother was conceived, at El Monte Legion Stadium. […]
However, an aide to famed Nazi hound dog Ellie Weasel reportedly provided Little League officials with an affidavit Monday that indicated Kenny El Monte was actually born Carmen Miranda in Moca Colon, a laxative smuggling center in the Dominican Republic, on April 7, 1889, league spokesman and poet laureate Lance Anger said.

(thanks Duncan!)

Zappa And Linux

Duncan writes:

My son has just informed me that a programme on TV last night mentioned FZ getting a credit in the Linux manual…. He seems to be all over the Linux world. Did we know about this already?

No we didn’t!

This concludes today’s geeky intermission…

Zappateers Radio

I’m a bit late with this, but if you tune in to Zappateers Radio you’ll be able to listen to some FZ-related gems such as a ’72 KMET interview, a concert in Toronto from ’84, some acoustic Project Object — and more. I’d listen in myself but I’m currently trying hard not to tell a pain in the butt client to go fuck herself at the office, working.