It’s been a weird day. Spring has sprung, whoo-hoo! and that’s great, but it also brings allergies, and it was rainy, but not enough to really clear the air, so everybody was sneezing and coughing and blowing their noses, all kinds of ugh. I did some out-of-the-ordinary digital chores, like researching Mac OSX terminal commands to split the files of a folder into batches of 100, then name those subfolders “parentname_001”, something that comes in useful when you have 1,000+ photos in a folder and the Bridge app groans under the weight. I want to interject here that geeks are wizards, casting spells on melted sand to create our endlessly fascinating illusions. Look at this piece of code, written to split the files inside a folder into subfolders:

i=0; for f in *; do d=dir_$(printf %03d $((i/100+1))); mkdir -p $d; mv “$f” $d; let i++; done

Those are the incantations that rule our world. It’s really wild, if you think about it. Geeks = Wizards, Stregone, in Italian. They truly are.

So I took the easy road out tonight, but it’s a good one: Nat and Cat and a huge new graffiti mural down by Bar San Calisto in Trastevere: “Monna Lisa, Lisa!”.

First, the spelling of the mural title is a play on the word nonna, which means grandma in Italian. Second, the use of “Lisa, Lisa” is – in my world – a reference to Cat Steven’s “Sad Lisa”, a song from his gorgeous Tea for the Tillerman album, which rocked my house on both vinyl and 8-track tape throughout the 1970s. I even wrote a short story for a 9th-grade creative writing assignment based on “Sad Lisa”. Do not miss this album. It’s essential.

Then, I thought of “Mona Lisa and Mad Hatters” from classic Elton’s Honky Château – another don’t miss – but ended up going with Nat King Cole’s video of “Mona Lisa”. Nat King Cole was a very strange-looking man. His face is otherworldly, even without the horrible white-face makeup, and as beautiful to watch as the Mona Lisa’s. It’s a fascinating study.

So yeah, sometimes lazy days are good. I literally pulled this post out of nothing, nihil, this evening. I guess that makes me something of a hacker after all. A hack hacker!