Magic and mystery
    Are part of their history,
Along with the secret
    Of gummi berry juice.
The magic is growing,
    They take pride in knowing
They fight for what’s right
    In whatever they do!

Bouncing here and there and everywhere!
High adventure that’s beyond compare!
They are the Gummi Bears!
They are the Gummi Bears!

I’m not even going to question it.

I was curious, first, what it would look like “under the hood.” I knew they were putting together a new user interface, and I wondered what that looked like. I knew they were planning some new features, and I was curious about those, too.

Well, after much uploading of files, I am running on the 2.7 Release Candidate and…

It’s different.

The new interface I like. I didn’t like the 2.5 interface a whole lot. This new interface is softer on the eyes — lots of blues. And on the Dashboard, the first screen I see when I log into WordPress, it’s been massively rearranged. In fact, I’m writing this post from the Dashboard. I don’t have to click a button for a new post. Instead, there’s a composition box right there.

The “Recent Comments” window I see is more useful; it has excerpts and Gravatars for the five most recent comments, and hovering the mouse pointer above the comment gives me the option to mark as spam, approve, even reply. Things are color-coded, too. Approved stuff is green. Spam stuff is red.

There are drop-down menus everywhere. I see a button, I click a button, and a menu drops down. It’s pretty intuitive.

My complaints are two.

First, WordPress has become massive. The file was 1.7 megabytes. What happened to the lean, mean code machine that was early iterations of the software? It used to be that you could install WordPress in like fifteen minutes. Not anymore. I wonder if the code has grown too big, and I wonder if a smaller, WordPress-Lite product would fill a vital niche, for people who don’t need lots of fancy bells and whistles. The only thing is, I don’t know what I’d cut. *shrug*

The other complaint? Some stuff looks wrong, probably because I’m in Opera. There are a couple of links in the Dashboard that overlap one another. My guess is poor coding; it probably looks fine in IE and Firefox, and those of us using Opera have to suffer. It’s not the first time WordPress has stiffed the Opera user; earlier versions of the software had browser sniffing that wouldn’t serve parts of the Write screen if you were using Opera.

But those are minor things. It’s pretty, and I like it.

And I’m going to need to recode the “Revolution” plugin; it’s a altered version of the standard “Hello Dolly” plugin that comes with WordPress, only I replaced the lyrics of “Hello Dolly” with the Beatles’ “Revolution.” The reason for the recode? The lyric goes someplace it shouldn’t now. But, as the line from the song I’m seeing on the screen right now says, “Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright.” And it will, that it will.

New toy. Go me!

I must write like the wind.

Deadlines. They are fun things.

And they make such wonderful sounds as they fly by.

First up. Stephen King.

Except when they don’t.

This evening was one of those times.

South of Lutherville, the lights on the train went out and the train slammed to a halt on the tracks. The compartment smelled of ozone. The train was restarted twice, but nothing happened. The train was stranded, somewhere in the wilds between Lutherville and Falls Road. Eventually, another train came up beside, and the passengers from my train crossed over to that train. Something burned out. Hopefully, tomorrow, everything will be fine.

Then, the subway.

There was a drug bust on my car. Two plainclothes transit cops took a man into custody, and this held the subway train up for a good five minutes.

All told, a half an hour was added to my commute home. And I’d already done the Sudoku puzzle in the paper…

Fortunately, I had other reading material. Like Andrew Sullivan’s editorial in the Sunday Times on the need for a Nuremburg-like Truth and Reconciliation Commission to make public the crimes of the Bush administration, not only to close the book on a shameful chapter of American history, but to demonstrate to the world that America stands for something better than the last eight years of lawlessness, of torture, of inhumanity.

In the stairwell there hangs art. It is, indeed, a veritable museum. I did this on Labor Day, hanging posters, prints, and other items. There are Lord of the Rings posters, LEGO posters, Batman posters, even a poster of Wrigley Field. It’s nice to contemplate, from a stylish depiction of Gandalf, to one of The Dark Knight’s teaser posters (in particular, the one of Batman standing, and in the background a skyscraper is on fire in imitation of 9-11), to a glittering map of Middle-Earth in the late Third Age.

I describe this, to set the stage.

From the bottom of the stairwell, my grandmother shouted up. “Do you need me to turn out the light?”

“If you want,” I said. “Or I’ll just turn it out later.”

“There are two lights.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’ll turn off the one down here.”

“If you want.”

From where I was sitting, I could see the light at the top of stairwell went out.

“Oh!” my grandmother exclaimed. “The switch turns out both lights.”

“It does, yes,” I said.

She turned the light back on.

“And it turns both on, too.”

She went away.

She came back a few moments later, wanting to know if I needed or wanted anything to drink. I told her I’d come down later, if need be.

She noticed the light in the stairwell was on.

And we proceeded to have the exact same conversation. With her flipping the lightswitch, her surprised discovery that both bottom and top turned off, and then flipping the switch again to turn the lights on.

I got up, turned the lights off myself. Hopefully, this will keep her from another round of flipping the lightswitch.

I’m sure that the lightswitch at the bottom of the stairs has, for fifty years, turned off both bottom and top. Yet, it’s suddenly a mystery to her.

As I looked at what I had, as I made notes on a notepad about moving a plotline ahead and roughed out a scene, I made a shocking realization.

I’d somehow set myself up with a four-act structure.

I blame decades of watching Doctor Who.

There is Cliffhanger, Cliffhanger, Cliffhanger, End.

I didn’t plan it that way. I noticed, in writing the outline, that the second act seemed really long. Maybe I was just being overly detailed, I thought. Maybe I’m just being wordy.

No, about midway through, there’s a dramatic rise, the plot turns, and it sets the stage for the next major plot turn, a turn that then takes the story to its conclusion.

Four acts. Not three. Like a classic Doctor Who story. Only, without all the pointless running around in the third act to pad the thing out.

It’s now just a matter of getting this finished up.

As I am wont to tell people, I need outlines. I flail otherwise. About the longest I can write without an outline is 4k. That 4k is about all I can keep in my head, like an object. Anything longer, and I need at least a sketch of where I’m going.

I had this partial outline. And I’d gotten stuck. I’d written myself into a corner, and I couldn’t see where to go. I’d figured that out; I just had to backtrack some, rewrite, and write down new words to get me there. I also needed to do some anthropology reading.

Today, I cut three hundred words. I moved five hundred words. I added a new fifteen hundred words. So, a net gain of twelve hundred words on the day for this outline.

I need to move more stuff, but the brain is feeling a bit mushy at the moment.

Mostly, that move entails moving a plotline forward slightly, then adding a little more to that thread in the middle, where it can drive the sense of jeopardy to the characters. And that takes me to the end of the second act.

Also, I discovered a font today that I had on my computer that I doubt I have ever used — Maiandra GD. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why I have it. It looks nice, it looks sharp, and maybe I’ll use it in the future on a semi-regular basis.

That’s the problem with being a font whore; there’s too many fonts and too little time.

She’s been sleeping more of late. She’s also been keeping odd hours, and her perception of light and dark seems to be non-existent.

The new television remotes confuse her. There’s one for the television, and one for the digital converter box. (And if anyone knows codes for the Insignia converter to control it using an RCA universal remote, please let me know. A single remote would make things so much easier.) And sometimes she’ll unplug everything and leave a mass of wires, antennas, and boxes.

Work last week involved much keyboard pounding.

The Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday threw a spanner in the works, deadlines were pushed up, and there was much angst at the office. I was a bit Zen; someone in another department fell afoul of the deadline pressures, and I was able to work around that without difficulty. By the end of Friday, the only thing left on my plate for the week unfinished was an article on Stephen King, but the people I needed to run it past for approvals weren’t even in the office, so I left it for Monday.

I watched some Monty Python during the week; I needed the laugh. On Saturday, I watched instead Do Not Adjust Your Set, the pre-Monty Python show that starred Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and a few others. It’s also notable for featuring The Bonzo Dog Band in each episode. Do Not Adjust is pretty enjoyable, if you like Python, though I thought the Captain Fantastic segments dragged, and in one episode where the Bonzos performed in blackface I was seriously weirded out.

Someone surfed into my blog earlier in the week with the following search phrase — “My Favorite Things” is not a Christmas song. And no, indeed, “My Favorite Things is not a Christmas song. I don’t understand why I hear it this time of year. There’s nothing Christmassy about “My Favorite Things.” Maybe it’s that I don’t really like The Sound of Music that much. Maybe I’m just a hater. But it’s not a Christmas song, dagnabbit!

It’s rainy.

Posters for Transporter 3 were given out at work. I noticed one hanging in one of the graphic designer’s cubicles. “You know,” I said, “if they ever made a biopic of my life, they should get Jason Statham to play me.”

The designer gave me an incredulous look.

“No, really! I think a shit-kicking Cockney could do me justice!”

Ten minutes later, another graphic designer brought me a copy of the Transporter 3 poster. But instead of saying it was for Transporter 3, it had become The Allyn Gibson Story.

I wrote to a friend of mine at the time:

My favorite Beatle depends as much upon what day of the week it is as it does upon my mood for that day. Some days my Beatles-sense revolves wholly around John, other days Paul, sometimes George, sometimes Ringo. I have a favorite Beatle to the same extent that I have a favorite Doctor; I like and appreciate each on their own terms. John could no more write “Something” as George could write “Yesterday.” Different songs, different styles, different states of mind.

I don’t know that I can write much on George Harrison. The words just don’t seem to be there. Even knowing that he was ill doesn’t make the loss any easier. The local Classic Hits radio station did a “Beatles A-Z” day today; I’ve had George’s first and last solo albums in the CD player.

For information on George’s illness.

For information on George’s final album.

The Beatles now number two. I’m tempted to watch A Hard Day’s Night, just to remember them all as they once were.

(NOTE: Those links may not necessarily work. They were fine in 2001, which was an epoch ago in ‘net terms.)

It was a George Harrison song that was atop the music charts on the day I was born. “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” the lead single from Harrison’s second solo album, Living in the Material World. In these troubled times, that’s not a bad message for the world:

Give me love / Give me love / Give me peace on Earth

I’ve had to disable the “Let It Snow” plugin for the blog. That plug-in created gently falling snow. It was pretty. It was hypnotic. It also caused problems for people browsing with Internet Explorer. (And really, if you’re using IE, why don’t you upgrade to a real, robust browser? Like Opera? It’s fast. It’s standards compliant. It has everything you need, built right in, with no need for plugins.)

Finally, as of three hours ago, I am an uncle.

Be well!