To the Algonquin for a lunch in the Round Table Room today. A dinky little place, the Algonquin, full of dinky undistinguished-looking people, but that is part of its appeal. My event today was a literary “MeetUp” group that a rotund little lady put together in impromptu fashion, mainly by contacting her Twitter pals. I’m not sure how I got on her list. Anyway, there were 60 or 70 of us, mostly women, mostly Caucasian, mostly middle-aged. Arriving just before luncheon was served, I got put at one of the outlier tables, boasting several younger-than-average people and two women of color, one of them in a wheelchair.

For the main course we could choose between mustard salmon en croute and chicken paillard. Most people had the salmon. It wasn’t that great.

“This is what it’s like when you get old, I guess,” I remarked to the young publishing bunny on my left. “Lunch with lots of women and hardly any men.”

“That’s the publishing world,” she cheerfully replied. “Mostly women.” (Is this because it doesn’t pay for shit, or because it’s so femmed up that any male in publishing feels he should be a fag?)

One of the published authors at the table was a lady diesel engineer who has piloted both a tugboat and riverboat. She definitely had the most interesting story to tell, though like a tugboat her tale was modest in size and kept close to home. The one male at the table kept urging her to read a really ripping book he’d picked up recently. Life on the Mississippi, by Mr. Mark Twain. Tugboat Annie made a note.

Me. I explained I did a little copyediting for Penguin Putnam, but that paid little under the best of circumstances, so mostly I worked in ad agencies as a Flash developer. Amazingly, most of my companions seemed to know what that was. So I warmed to the theme: I am the world’s worst Flash developer! Yes, ladies and gent. I get jobs and then lose them when my employers discover my incompetence. This usually takes a few weeks. Fortunately there are many many ad agencies doing pharma Flash development, and they can’t afford to be too picky.

The colored woman in the wheelchair and the PR bunny were wide-eyed at my brazenness. “How do you get away with it? Don’t they test you or anything when you start?”

“Test! Who has time to test? Ha ha! You know, this is a pretty good idea for a book!”

And they all agreed that yes indeed it was.

It rains again.

It takes your excellent (or not-so-good) images and turns them into Polaroid-style images circa 1978.

Immensely silly. Extremely useful if you need to waste a whole morning. Requires Flash Player 10. From OneByOneDesign, I think.

I never went to the ones in Brighton but I may go to South Beach, since I have never been south of Daytona. I have over four months to save my pennies. Damn these things are expensive.

[SWF]http://www.catherinesanderson.com/banners/bed_uk.swf, 100, 133[/SWF]

I was wondering how to use swfObject in WordPress, and it occurred to me to search for existing plugins. Surprise! Here are two. First, the wp-swfObject plugin, which I try out above. It consists of one simple line that you add to your post–just the url, width, height, between open and close SWF tags.  Like many WordPress plugins and mashups it can sometimes seem buggy. When you add it to your post you have to be in the Visual tab, not the HTML one. Below, a video swf placed with this same wp-swfObject plugin:[SWF]http://www.podsnap.org/uncontrolledTV.swf, 240,180[/SWF]

Below, we test out the Kimili kml_flashembed plugin. Supposedly this one has the advantage of being able to work in sidebars as well as in the main body of posts and pages, but I haven’t tested that yet.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-swfobject/

http://www.kimili.com/plugins/kml_flashembed

See also links to Aral Balkan’s explorations of the same subject: http://aralbalkan.com/606




Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block has just posted a very useful article on the “Chromeless Player” that shows your .flv-format videos at your own site or on YouTube. The player was written in ActionScript 2, but nowadays is asked to perform in an ActionScript 3 environment. AS2 and AS3 are not compatible on a code level. The workaround: they pass information to each other via JavaScript.

Matthew’s article describes the process, gives you do-it-yourself instructions, pastable code, and access to necessary source files.

The basic idea is essentially the same as that used in swfObject, the snippet of js/html code that is now the standard for inserting Flash .swf files into standard HTML web pages. Conveniently enough, the creator of swfObject, Geoff Stearns, now runs YouTube development for Google. Even less coincidentally, he used to work with Matthew Richmond at The Chopping Block. It is a very small world.

Twelve years of Internet and six (?) of Wikipedia have made me very flabby mentally.

Once upon a time, if I wanted to know something, I would gladly scour libraries’ card catalogs for many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. Now I just Google, and if it’s not there…it’s not there.

Nevertheless there are at least a couple of things NOT found in Google or Wikipedia or YouTube:

1) The mid-1950s M&Ms TV commercial. I know I’ve seen this, years afterwards, possibly at the Museum of Broadcasting.  It starts with a live-action shot of a little girl with a dirty face. A male voiceover goes, “Susie! You’re a chocolate mess! You should eat M&M’s chocolate candies!” Switch to an animated cartoon of the talking Plain and Peanut candies. The Peanut is lying in a chaise longue by a swimming pool, sunning herself and talking in a Southern Belle voice. “I’m an M&M’s Peanut. Fresh roasted to a golden tan, then drenched in creamy milk chocolate–” whereupon she jumps off a diving board into the milk-chocolate swimming pool.

2) Conjecturism. This was a somewhat cranky mail-order art-history course, advertised in places like the NY Herald Tribune Book Review, circa 1960. “Don’t Learn About Art This Way!” was the hed, above a Fitzpatrick-style heavy-ink-style editorial cartoon showing the rear view of a big thug wielding a club before a cowering little man and saying, “Now look, I’m an Authority on Art, so you better listen to me–or else.” The National Lampoon or some other publication did a parody of this back in the 70s, when it was still fondly remembered. But you can’t find any reference to Conjecturism on the Net these days. At least I can’t.

Possibly 1) was plunked down the memory hole for reasons of taste and political correctness. I’ve written the M&M’s people for the whereabouts of the commercial, but have received no reply. Even the Prelinger Archives have no record of it. But what happened to 2)? Surely Conjecturism was no flakier than Esthetic Realism.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

*** ***

POSTSCRIPT: Well whaddya know? I Google again…and there…in the December 1964 issue of Commentary magazine…in amongst the ads for self-help books, flash cards, and Bank Leumi…we have an elaborate two-page spread for Conjecturism! Alas, the double-truck does not include the thug with the club. But fascinating.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewpdf.cfm?article_id=10438

Mr. Theodore L. Shaw, it would appear, had a certain amount of money and an unlimited grudge against some long-departed art-history teacher he crossed swords with around 1923. Surely there’s a book in this.

You must save and continue editing a wordpress post in order to get the FLV button. Very obscure feature! This is the flv player on one of my own sites. I thought I had replaced the original skin of the latest Jeroen flv player with another skin, but no, this is the factory model:

The old lady watched bird dogs, and there is your story.