Flying Fruit

Plans are underway to float a giant banana in geostationary orbit over Texas.

Why Texas? Why not?

Magnetic Fields at Carnegie Hall

Great concert by the Magnetic Fields from NPR. They should put this out as an album.

Meditations on Time

In a recent interview with Mary Beard at BLDG BLOG, a book about Pompeii is mentioned:

it’s easier to spot political motives a generation or two after the
event.

Another thing: one of the most famous excavations in Pompeii was the
excavation of the Villa of the Mysteries and its frieze, first published in the
1930s. These were fantastically lavish volumes – you know, more expensive that
you would ever imagine, in a fantastic vellum binding – which my library in
Cambridge managed to get a copy of. The book's got Mussolini's fasces on the
back cover, in gold emboss, and, instead of being dated 1938, it's dated Era
Fascista VII or something.

So we got a group of students together and we passed the book round, and we
said, "Do you notice anything about this book? Now, don’t think of the pictures
– look at it as a book. Do you notice anything about it?" And most of the
students said, "Well it’s lovely. It's really expensive, isn't it?" It took them
about a quarter of an hour before a single one of them said, "Oh, what’s this
here?" pointing to the fasces and the dating by Era Fascista.

And, had all gone according to plan, the world would have ended up in Era Fastista M, sometime around 2931 AD, and we would now be in EF LXXVIII. Happily, we never got much past EF XI, but I hear the book is very well produced.

o

In Ethiopia, they've just passed the year 2000 since they live according to the Julian calendar, as well as the Gregorian, in part depending on what language you're speaking. Addtionally, as one man in this story from NPR puts it, we have just finished the second day since the birth of Christ, since every day is a thousand years to God. 6AM is midnight, the start of the twelve daylight hours, and midnight is 6PM, halfway through the nighttime hours.

The story also features Muligieta, the most beautiful girl in Ethiopia and the Black Eyed Peas.

o

Update: The grim legend of the master clockmaker of Prague.

In the Last Breath of Summer...

...take a long look back.

Two Nosed Dog

I initially thought this description of a two-nosed dog might be an April Fool's item on the part of the BBC, with a bit of Photoshoppery, but this appears to be real:

Colonel Blashford-Snell first encountered a Double-Nosed Andean tiger hound called Bella in 2005 when he was carrying out reconnaissance for this year's expedition in the area near Ojaki.

He told Radio 4's Today programme: "While we were there, sitting by the fire one night, I saw an extraordinary-looking dog that appeared to have two noses.
"I was sober at the time, and then I remembered the story that the legendary explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett came back with in 1913 of seeing such strange dogs in the Amazon jungle.

"Nobody believed him, they laughed him out of court."

Gibsonian

A few years ago, I saw William Gibson give a reading of Pattern Recognition in the St. James Cathedral in Chicago. With the gold leaf and religious imagery overlaid by a network of tech equipment and halogen lights, it seemed like a fitting locale for the author of Neuromancer. I wanted to suggest to him that he visit Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, another Gibsonian location, but didn't get the chance.

On Monday, I went to his reading of Spook Country, held in the much less Gibsonian Borders on Michigan Avenue. Attended by a large contingent of hackers and ninjas of a wide variety of age groups, the biggest surprise was the predominance of oddly named people (Cinchel, Aramigosta, 9Jane) and people from unusual countries (Latvia, Belarus) getting their books signed, often with really long notes appended, until his hand gave out.

It is seemingly hard to ask concrete questions of the man. I for one drew a complete blank. He had some useful advice for writers, though, beginning with Damon Knight's dictum on writing: "Alice in Wonderland good, Alice in weird Wonderland good, weird Alice in weird Wonderland bad". He also had a great story about his first writing teacher who had spent several years writing specifications for the military and whose idea of a good writing assignment was, "give me 500 words describing this pencil in great detail...wait, since you're a beginner, just do the eraser, or maybe that metal bit that goes around the eraser here at the end." This resulted in him being able to do great descriptions of little machines "like a particular kind of switchblade" but left gaps in the early novels that he can detect now.

Reason #54: It's fun

237 reasons to have sex, a comprehensive list from a University of Texas study. One must assume that not all reasons appeared with equal popularity. Somehow, one is also reminded of other stupendously long lists, such as the fictitious 548 facial expressions, and of long lists of possible sins in Medieval church manuscripts (which can now be used as lists of suggestions of possible ways to have sex which one has decided to have for one of the 237 reasons, much as one used to use the purity test list of questions as a compendium of ways to while away the winter evenings when one was in college).

YouTubery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVx9D7nMcqs
"This party is like...H'orgy, like horgy." -Terence Stamp on Fellini
I would quite willingly listen to Terence Stamp recite grocery lists and the ingredients insert of cereal boxes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=589YFCHu4Ag
"I love you, David"-Love and Human Remains (in ten parts)
This movie had a big impact on me. I wish they would put it out on DVD.

Volunteers

Fascinating profile of 11 post-9/11 veterans from Good Magazine.

Harry Potter 7 short review

Finished a couple of hours ago.

Summary judgement: She knocked that one out of the park. It pays off like the finale of the biggest fireworks show on earth and leaves the reader completely satisfied.

Harry Potter 7 Speculations & Spoilers

A large number of possible leaks and spoilers have gone up and down the Intertubes today in preparation for Saturday's release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Many of the big ones seem implausible given the narrative direction and texture of the first six books. If J.K. Rowling follows some sort of classic plot structure, there are three reasonale outcomes for the books, all of which follow from Harry defeating Voldemort:

1. Harry lives happily ever after. He goes on to become Hogwart's Headmaster, Minister of Magic or Quidditch world champion. Most likely, he marries Ginny Weasley, they have children who go off to Hogwarts and the cycle starts again.
2. Harry dies in the process of killing Voldemort or at the hands of someone else. I think this is unlikely to happen, especially due to JKR's large number of hints that this might happen; if she really wants closure, the worst way to go about it in this postmodern age is to kill the character off. (see also: Superman, Buffy Summers, Sherlock Holmes)
3. Harry lives, but somehow loses all of his powers, either because they're linked to Voldemort's, because he somehow "burns them out" or because he gets put into a situation where exposure to magic is deadly to him in the future. This is a fine classical ending, parallel to Prospero breaking his staff at the end of the Tempest.

Other predictions:

• Snape turns out to be good after all (come on, you have to have seen this one coming)
• Draco does something to redeem himself and/or gets saved by Harry
• It turns out that Dumbledore had been using Nicholas Flamel's Sorcerer's Stone to extend his own life until the end of Book 1, when his supply started to run short and he had just enough to "put his affairs in order"
• Who lives? The main three characters, McGonagle, the Weasleys, Luna, Neville.
• Who dies? Voldemort, one more baddie (Peter Pettigrew, maybe?), plus one of the remaining good guys (could be Harry, probably one of the Phoenix people, maybe Snape)

Strategy roundup

Possibly the best article on strategy in the global counterinsurgency effort to date. Some very sharp people are running around in the basement of the Pentagon. Sadly, they are way down in the basement until at least 2008.

The Heart is Deceitful

From the Washington Post:

If they ever make a movie of the life of Laura Albert -- and for reasons
we'll get to, that now seems unlikely -- the scene Wednesday in a Manhattan
courtroom would make a killer denouement...

For fans and onlookers, the unmasking of Albert, which happened in 2005,
was like finding out that John Updike is a robot. But it was a more serious
matter for the owner of Antidote Films, an indie-movie company in Manhattan,
which had acquired the film rights to "Sarah" back when everyone assumed that
LeRoy was flesh and blood.

A woman runs past me on Franklin St, wearing a black leather purse as headgear.
Is this the new fashion?

Diary of Indignities

Is what my memoirs should have been called but this man beat me to it.

Gutsy

Great song dedicated to YouTube and Shortbus guy Jay Brannan by the talented Matt Woolfrey.

The Origins of Minimalism

Short profile of Richard Serra, who had a "remarkably supportive mother".

In a chewy interview in the show’s catalogue with MOMA’s Kynaston McShine(who co-curated the show with Lynne Cooke, of the Dia Art Foundation), Serra tells of his mother’s first visit, in the sixties, to his loft on Greenwich Street. “It was barren, there was nothing in it but a mattress on the floor, I was living on maybe $75 a month. . . . She looked out the window at the Hudson River and said, Richard, this is marvelous.”

Update: More Serra
Update: Even more Serra
Update: Still more Serra

The Challengers

Our office did the Chicago Corporate Challenge...well, half of us did.

I think these pictures make us look like one of those third-rate superhero teams.

Nice flexing, Min.

Nice banana, Ethan.

The Profit Calculator

New York Magazine does a really good article on how various businesses from a yoga studio to Goldman Sachs make their money.

It shows further anecdotal support for the rule of thumb that an average, well run business is one that generates about 10% profit. High profit businesses are of two types: a) high risk, "winner take most" businesses where superstars rule (e.g., Goldman Sachs trading business, Nobu), or b) ones in early stage markets where risk and return are not yet well priced.

Hunt Slonem

Gawker reviews a NYT profile of Hunt Slonem:

At first blush, the article reads like an exquisite corpse.

"People come and go in the homes of the painter Hunt Slonem, both the quick and the dead... Lunch is Louisiana takeout: boudin sausage, pecan pie, a local desert called ooey gooey. The talk is of a portrait, just hung, of Catherine of Aragon... Then
Mr. Slonem's caretaker calls with word of an interloper: a voodoo head, or
something that looks like one, has been found in the third-floor ceiling earlier
in the week and tucked away in a kitchen cabinet. Mr. Slonem goes at once to
retrieve the head, a mud-colored walnut-size carving of a skull, with a tiny
straw hat and pointy appendages. Then he retreats to make a call."

As the intrepid reader continues, he realizes Slonem is completely insane—equal parts James Merrill, Liberace, Valentino, Lou Reed, Bert Sugar, Keith Haring, and Scarlett O'Hara. Also he owns five houses. Not only the Louisiana plantation that is the focus of the article but another one a hundred miles away. He also owns an 89-room New York studio, and it really is awesome.

Love the parrot.

My friend Lance is always telling me that if he decides to stay in Toledo, rather than running off to Dubai, he's going to become both a)filthy rich and b)completely bizzare. He's got some work cut out for him if he's going to move from the gifted amateur eccentric category into the professional leagues.

Yonge and Bloor

William Gibson, poet of cities (Chiba, New York Sprawl, Moscow, Naughties London) dreams of phantom Toronto:

It consisted largely, I found, of the most amiable sort of repurposed
semi-ruins. A vast Victorian colonial seashell of blackened brick, shot through
with big, grim grey bones of earnest civic Modernism. I marvelled that such an
odd place could have existed without my having heard of it. North of New
England, all this baroque, mad brick; sandstone gargoyles, red trams, the
Queen's portrait everywhere.

New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I'd only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.

This was mid-town, walking distance in various directions from Yonge and Bloor.

In my twenties, it always seemed that my friends lived in exactly these sorts of townhouses around Columbus (German Village, Victorian Village, Grandview). Grand, decaying, repurposed, sublet. Ornamental stairways made for midnight conversations, grubby marble bathrooms with eccentric plumbing. They're the Great Lakes version of loft apartments.

I seem to remember going to a lot of parties at these houses, talking to strangers (friends of friends of friends). Girls in black kilts & cat eye glasses and dudes in rock band t-shirts & week-old shaves. Home-dyed hair and beastie boots. The smell of old vinyl and cardboard from childhood record collections. Cigarettes and multicolored candles in big ceramic ashtrays.

How many of those parties did I actually go to? How many more do I just remember because someone told me about them? That was my Bohemia.

Great use of flash on this site: http://www.commonrotation.com/index.htm

The Super Troopers atop Pride Mountain

...with a BIG bottle. Sadly empty before I ever laid hands on it.

The Super Troopers

(SOO-pah TROO-pahs)
Intrepid aerialists in midflight

Hansel and Gretel

...are aliive and well/And living in Berlin.

We're back on the air, people, without converting to the New Blogger (TM).

Photos from the Napa trip and the visit to the Surgical Museum coming shortly.

Perge Mondo, Ms. Pleasant, and Ms. Disarray

Drama in the Whole Foods checkout line.

Mach 20

If a sperm were the size of a whale, however...

Why, Thank You!

It is cold enough for me.

Walking to the bus stop is like entering a Jack London story. I hope the tinder works, or I'll have to gut a dog to warm my hands inside.

Also, my sewage line froze due to global climate change, so I am taking showers in an apartment down the hall. The water lines for the hot tub situated over my apartment froze as well, so I have a plastic tent suspended from my ceiling. It's all very chic in a postapocalyptic sort of way.

New Year Me

Harold & Maudeland

The thing I love about the Bay Area is that you walk through bits of literature and history. Like the Sutler Baths, which burned down 30-40 years ago, and which were used to shoot a scene in the movie Harold and Maude. Elsewhere, you wander through the land of the Beats in the North Beach neighborhood around City Lights, see the literary ghost of Steve McQueen pitch down Nob Hill streets, and come across the settings of Tales of the City. You end up with a feeling that's the opposite of nostalgia--the feeling that if something happened here, and here, and here, you might be about to step into the middle of a story of your own at any moment.

The corollary of this idea, or maybe just its twin, is the sense you get from everyone you talk to that their career is just something to pay the rent; they're really in the middle of the story that's happening right at the moment you're talking to them.

Pacific

Somehow, the Pacific sounds more like an ocean should than the Atlantic. Maybe it helps that I was up near the Cliff House, where the rip tides and sharp rocks make a midnight winter swim an exciting experience.

San Francisco by Night

Chad invited me to a party at Dan and Donnan's place. Even with the address, the taxi driver couldn't figure out where the party was...he should have just looked for the crowd of guys standing around smoking and looking for something to blog.

As soon as I said hi, the crowd introduced me as "that blogger from Chicago" and themselves as "DanChrisMichaelChrisDaveandNick". They fed me on red wine and chocolate mousse, while Donnan sang holiday songs from Hedwig. Chad showed up just as I was leaving, so unfortunately, we didn't get to chat as much as I'd have liked. Still, I got to meet his cousin Scott, also from Chicago, and a number of SF's most interesting people.

I'd love to say that we all hit the Endup after capturing all their URLs and becoming BFF with each and every one of them, but jet lag got the better of me, and I collapsed until the morning.

San Francisco: the View

From the St. Francis Hotel overlooking Union Square and points east.

San Francisco, Day 1

Got up early in the morning after a late night flight to SFO. I decided to charge up the side of Telegraph Hill first thing off the bat, bundled up in a wool sweater, jeans and scarf. Appropriate for Chicago weather, nearly fatal in 58 degree, high humidity San Francisco conditions after going up 45 degree streets. By the time I reached the top, I was completely drenched.

On the way back down, I stopped in Cafe Zoetrope, and told the bartender, "I just climbed Telegraph Hill."

"Yeah," she said, "that's what it looks like."

Later in the day, I stopped in at Mea Cinis ("my ashes"), a newly-opened store that specializes in new hand made jewelry and Southeast Asian Antiquities. The store featured Chad's Venetian plastering job and the hand-strung pigskin hangings that looked like dreadlocks, as well as a kick-ass selection of art objects.

Dan, the owner, showed me around the place. When I mentioned that Chad's blog led me to visit, Dan shouted, and Chad appeared from the back, wearing a Geek Squad t-shirt. He seemed very surprised that anyone reads his blog...false modesty, judging from his site stats.

We started chatting about blogging and plastering and whatnot, and Dan showed me his twin brother's collection of 12th century bronze Khmer mirrors. A guy came in, wearing a massive pair of green galoshes, and started ooh-ing and aah-ing over everything, until he came to the mirrors, and gasped.

"Those are 14th century Khmer bronze mirrors," he said.

"No," replied Dan with a touch of pride, "they're 12th century Khmer bronze mirrors."

Just a standard day in North Beach. Always nice when you can find the one place where two people would come to argue over the dating of nine hundred year old art.

A bald woman came in next. I couldn't tell if she was bbald because of some ailment, or for religious reasons, or just as a fashion statement, but clearly, being bald worked for her. Dan went off to show her the bracelets made from something that looked like the mating between human bone and high-grade fractal rendering software.

Chad said, "look, since you don't know anyone in San Francisco...now you do. A friend of mine is throwing a party tonight, and I'd love it if you would come."

Despite jetlag and tired legs from the morning climb, how could I say no?

Weirdness Roundup

Well, with 2006 nearly done, it's time to bottle up as much of the weirdness as possible before it all floats away.

The 10 most bizarre people on earth (via kottke (via mr) (UPDATED LINK)
Including the guy with the mutated twin lodged in his abdomen and the guy who ate a Cessna. I was briefly disappointed not to be included in this list, but as a friend once told me, "Scott, you're a nice amateur eccentric, but we have professionals here to handle the heavy lifting."

Dominionist Christians in the Pentagon, and the People who Hate Them
A classic political rant. I recommend that y'all give this guy whatever it is he needs to take care of the problem, or we may be living in a Left Behind book in no time flat.

The fugue state of the Bishop of Southwark (via Neil)

What happened to the Bishop of Southwark last Tuesday night? Was he mugged on the way home to Tooting from a pre-Christmas party at the Irish embassy? Or was he found wandering in a confused state in Crucifix Lane, near his cathedral, having supped not wisely, but too well?

The Rt Rev Tom Butler, 66, one of the Church of England's most senior bishops and a pillar of Thought for the Day on the BBC Today programme, says he has no idea. Others say he was seen sitting in the back of a Mercedes chucking children's toys out of the window and announcing: I'm the Bishop of Southwark. It's what I do."

And of course, the Russian Spy Polonium Sushi Caper.
As Bruce Sterling likes to say, this one is fractally weird. As the press boys like to say, this one's got legs. This particular little article highlights the victim's dining companion. Nice reading.

Kick Ass Movie Pitches

What if the Internet turned into a Were-wolf? and other great ideas.

Lunaryuna & Magic Fly Paula's Star Diary

Ooh, aah.

More.

Bloody swimming pools

I give you...the Abode of Chaos

Crashed aircraft, fire-blackened walls, a swimming pool of blood and portraits
of Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden adorn a sprawling “shrine to chaos”
...
Demeure du Chaos (Abode of Chaos) includes a swimming pool of blood, top,
alongside a display of twisted metal, charred walls, burnt-out cars and
battlefield debris.

M Ehrmann’s celebration of the apocalypse, inspired
by his experiences in the Middle East and by the events of September 11, 2001,
has enraged residents, who are offended by its charred walls, twisted metal,
burnt-out cars and battlefield debris. A mock oil platform sits on one roof amid
camouflage netting. The garden includes a sculpture re-creating the remains of
the World Trade Centre.

“I have to pass by it every day. It’s morbid.
It’s horrible,” Monique Nietto, a neighbour, told Le Parisien. “M Ehrmann has
completely destroyed a magnificent property.”
The locals call the site “

Edward Tufte Lecture Notes

Edward Tufte Lecture 10/2/06: SG Notes
Presenting Data and Information

Use high-density data
· Allow audience to read. People can read 2-4 times faster than you can talk.

Minimize graphic flair
· Allows more space for explanatory material.
· Eliminate boxes on org charts when 2-D location of text already describes relationships inside organization
· Eliminate chartjunk (e.g., explosions; cf FEMA chart)

Annotate
· Explain what’s going on

Show causality
· Differentiate links/relationships
· Use whatever evidence is important
· Multiple levels of information in one exhibit
· Allow users to tell their own little stories

Presentation Methods
1. Don’t get it original, get it right
2. Model: NYT/WSJ
o News stories
o Sports page
o Weather page
o Stock page
3. This is a solved problem
4. NYT/WSJ are:
o High density
o Conventionally designed—designs that have worked
o Despite complexity of data, millions of people can read the sports page, get lots of information, so don’t underestimate the capability of your audience to understand

Two main problems in Information Display:
1. Multivariate problems
Subproblem: how to display in 2-D/ on paper
2. Information Resolution

Put your name on your work. Work is not done by organizations, it is done by people. Putting your name on it is a sign of pride in craftsmanship, and allows users to direct questions/criticisms back to the author.

Label data directly. Avoid legends & distant labels.

2-D workaround example: Euclid, 1st edition, 1570
· Use of 3-D popups, still functional in book copy almost 500 years later

The Grand Principles of Analytic Design
1. Use comparisons
Rulers, scale, normal ranges, etc
2. Show causality
3. Show many dimensions/levels of data
4. Completely integrate words, numbers and images
“The evidence is indifferent to the mode of production”
5. Document everything and tell people about it
This adds credibility and reasons to believe
Also enables further study
Show all of your data—don’t cherry pick
6. Content counts most of all
Serious presentations stand or fall on the quality, relevance and content of
information
7. Adjacent in space, not stacked in time
Don’t make users turn the page to see next result. It is easier to compare
adjacent things
8. Use small multiples (cf Galileo sunspot diagrams)
9. Put everything on a universal grid
How big is it?
Where is it?
What is its context?
These are the commonalities among all humans, regardless of time, culture

Low resolution of screens vs. paper
· Computer screen uses ~1/500th of human eye-brain capacity
· 1 glance = ~150Mb data
· 16 bit color (up to 20 bit for artists/designers)
· Paper 10-12 times better than screen for resolution

Aside: p.162 of Galileo’s Demonstrations features the only direct reference he made in print to the movement of the earth: “dal meuimento anno della Terra”. (“The annual movement of the Earth”) The church asked him not to repeat this.

Credibility:
You know what you’re talking about
You aren’t cherry picking

Give lots of handouts
· Lets people use their own cognitive style. People not paying attention to the speaker in order to read the handout is a sign the audience is awake

Respect the audience. Contempt leaks through.
To clarify, add detail
· Sounds paradoxical, but is true

To see best variation, scale average slope of data to 45°
· Avoids ceiling & floor effects
· Most useful for cyclic data; allows best detection of variation
· You want lumpy, not spiky or flat graphs

Use sparklines: intense, simple, word-sized graphics inline with text
· Software: Sparkline—shareware office plug-in
· Other software:
Stats program: SAS, SPSS, “anything that costs more than $500”
Design program: Illustrator
Page layout software

Resolution of words=Resolution of sparkline graphics

Usability tests: do people use something similar

John Tukey: “Better to be approximately right than exactly wrong”

Project management:
· Best to do wallchart
· Make it large, updated regularly
· Readable 2-3’ away

When reading a PPT presentation, ask:
· What’s the story?
· Does it establish credibility
· What’s the scope? Two problems:
o Overreaching
o Irrelevant Domain

PowerPoint Flaws:
· Low Resolution: 4 sheets of paper=50-250 PPT slides
· Chops all info into slide-sized pieces
· Encourages fake hierarchies (bullets)
· Encourages clipped jargon, non-English
· Discourages non-findings
· Encourages pitching, rather than reporting

Pitching out corrupts within (cf Iraq evidence)

Solution: use technical reports, built in word processor, instead of decks

Technical Report:
11”x17” paper, folded once, written on both sides

Start with 200 word intro:
What the problem is
Who cares (what’s the relevance)
What your solution is

Model is article in Science or Nature

Meant to be read through
High resolution data dump
Followed by discussion
If someone derails talk, at least you got through the 200 word summary

One handout means
50-250 slides of average density
1000-2000 words or
500-1000 sparklines

General presentations:
· Worry about content, rather than production values
· Practice, practice, practice
· Video of self reveals: verbal & gestural tics, placeholders, other annoying quirks
· Show up early
1 time in 20, this heads off a serious problem (double booking, etc)
1 time in 20, allows a quiet opportunity to prepare, talk to/greet audience
20 times in 20, you are not late

Presentation
Start with 200 word, 3 part summary from report
Never apologize (Don’t waste time talking about you, talk about the data)

For presenting complicated data/data display:
PGP=Particular, General, Particular
Give an example, then orient to whole of data, then give another specific example

Give everybody a piece of paper

Don’t condescend to your audience. Instead of “Knowing your audience,” which leads to underestimation: Respect your audience, Know your content.

Use body language

Finish early.

__________
Key readings:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Introduction and Ch. 1
Envisioning Information, Introduction and Ch. 2
Beautiful Evidence, Introduction and pp. 12-45

Bed Jump

Meme of the moment:

1. Jump on hotel bed.
2. Take photo so it looks like you're levitating.

Hey Ya!

The sad but inevitable sound of summer receding. Magical and true.

Obadiah Parker covering Outkast's Hey Ya!

audio version

via Jonathan Carroll

Leverage: My Hero

Guy Gabaldon, died at age 80 this week.

He grew up as part of a "multiethnic gang", moved in with a Japanese-American family subsequently interned in Alaska, and fought in WWII. Using a mixture of rudimentary Japanese and cigarettes, he successfully captured over 1,500 Japanese soldiers on the island of Saipan, earning himself the nickname of "Pied Piper" and winning a Navy Cross Medal in the process.

(Wikipedia Entry)

Double dipping

A second code has been found in DNA, controlling the positioning of nucleosomes.

Amsterdam

Just got back the pictures from the Amsterdam trip. Back after seventeen years...#1: View from the spooky-quiet trains.

Link Roundup

BibliOddysey features scores of scans of old and rare manuscripts. Beautiful & strange.

Likewise the Procedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society are a wunderkammer in print, existing at the intersection of science, magic and whimsy.

Good Words

"I don't believe we'll defeat the Axis of Evil
By putting smart bombs in the hands of dumb people."

-Billy Bragg "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward"

6 year blogiversary

As of the day before yesterday it's been 6 years off and on. Looking back on it there's been quite a bit of off--which explains the size of my readership. Even with all that time off for bad behavior I'm glad to see that I'm still going...and that the number of people with this bizarre pasttime continue to increase.

XXX
Scott

Notebooks & Letters

While wandering the web I came across one of those wonderful specialized blogs. The Moleskinerie page is dedicated to news of the Moleskine notebook. The uses to which people put these things inspires heavy note-taking, scrapbooking and sketching. The etries feature lots of close up shots of notebook pages with watercolor and pastel miniatures, in-depth discussions of good pens to use, hacks for organizing one's life around the little black book & etc.

Although I'm currently in the minority there with my use of the Miquelrius grid ruled notebook or the big sketchbooks, my current pen of choice shows up--the Pilot G2.

Among the great finds from the early days of the blog are the works of Nathanael Archer, a talented calligrapher who centers his work around the Tibetan language, but appears to also do work in Hebrew and Arabic styles. His Tibetan work is reminiscent of that of Chogyam Trungpa in its bold, fluid strokes and postmodern aesthetic.

Easter Beer Hunt

The Styn family holds its annual Easter Beer Hunt. Footage courtesy Halcyon.

Our family morphed the traditional Easter Egg Hunt into a Beer hunt when we got older. Here's some footage from the fun.

Easta

I'm such a big kid that when I came out of the church this morning and saw all the plastic eggs "hidden" on the lawn I had to physically restrain myself from picking them up.

I'm a grup

Somedays they just have you pegged. That's it--I'm off to the Death Cab for Cutie show at the Double Door. You guys read this.

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

Design Interviews

Karim Rashid interviewed in Fab. It's a nutty Warholesque interview that reminds me for some reason of Jubal Early in Firefly licking one of the struts of the ship's cargo hold.

[High heels]
High heels are kind of misogynist, so if I’m going to make women walk around in high heels I might as well give them some comfort. I made the most comfy high-heel shoe to be worn. It is made out of three-part injection mould and it has a vanilla smell that lasts for two years.

[Blue collars]
If you want to be a good industrial designer, you need to go to a lot of factories and see how things are produced. I used to go to trade shows for machinery, to look at the way things are made. I would look at a machine that would do thermaforming and I would be so inspired by it. To this day I allow machines to inspire me.

Bruce Sterling in Metropolis. It reeks of nostalgia for five minutes ago.

The Art Center kids were challenged with a small budget, a tight schedule, and a need to do something really good for their portfolio--something impressive, something worthy of public display. It was never made entirely clear to them what "good" meant. They had to sop that up from the thick smog of cultural values in the Art Center air while shut up tight with their teeming fellows in the Modernist steel monastery.

Those students work harder than oxen. By show time at the end of the term, they're physically collapsing from their own ambitions. They grieve. They tremble with burnout. They slumber on the library carpets. They change a lot. Designerhood steals over them. It's like character transformation in a novel. That ditzy illustration chick, who shambled in wearing her Goodwill dresses, somehow develops her own look; she's still a freak, but now she's all together about it. That digital-arts kid, twitchy from his misspent youth of computer games, somehow learns to exude geek chic. He once had a thousand-yard stare. Now he's got the polished arched-eyebrow look of the cell-phone techie on Verizon billboards. You can't teach that to anyone--it's self-inflicted. What happened to them? They have recognized certain aspects of their pre-designer selves that, to their newly trained eyes, are no longer apt and fitting. So they prune those parts off. They take the gum eraser to it. They X-acto it. They mill it down to sawdust over in the machine shop. It's spooky. Even their parents can tell.

Nobody ever told me or ordered me to do anything at Art Center, ever. This benign treatment truly fertilizes one's eccentricities. For my last term there I constructed a giant mobile out of steel wire and PVC pipe inside an abandoned wind tunnel. Why? Because it wasn't there, that's why. I'm laughing about this now, but it's a rueful, wiser laughter. I never learned so much so fast as I did while brandishing those pliers

The Un-interview

I the course of explaining why he doesn't like interviews Doug Coupland gives a great one to Morrissey.

One Love

We are all descended from everyone. Everyone who has descendants.

Now think about your direct ancestors living 40 generations in the past, in
about the year A.D. 1000. The size of that group is harder to estimate. But as
two co-authors and I explained in Nature in 2004, that group included many millions
of people. Forty generations ago, almost everyone living today had ancestors in
Europe, Asia, and Africa, and many present-day Asians, Europeans, and Africans
had ancestors in the Americas because of the continual exchange of mates across
the Bering Strait.
It gets even stranger. Say you go back 120 generations,
to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature
paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants
living today. And if you compared a list of your ancestors with a list of anyone
else's ancestors, the names on the two lists would be identical.

Best & Worst

This might be the worst thing ever--or just the funniest:

A stewardess caused panic by repeatedly screaming "We're going to crash" when a packed plane hit turbulance.
The Virgin flight hit bad weather three hours into a journey from Gatwick to Las Vegas.
Some passengers were sick and others thrown from their seats as luggage, drinks and trays were tossed around.
Those using the toilet at the time were stuck in the cubicle while others prayed and cried.
And their ordeal was intensified by the screaming stewardess.
Passenger Paul Gibson told The Daily Mirror: "She began screaming every time the plane shook.
"She shouted at the top of her voice, 'We're going to crash! We're going to crash! We're going to crash!"
The un-named woman - in her mid 20s - also lobbed sick bags across the cabin when poorly passengers screamed for more.

This really is bad:

Villanova basketball star Allan Ray had his eyeball literally poked out of its socket by an opposing player on Friday night. Ray has been treating the injury with eye drops, and he planned to meet with doctors on Monday to find out if he can play in the first round of the NCAA tournament. What should you do if your eyeball comes out of your head?

Get it put back in, and soon. The longer you remain in this rare condition—known as "globe luxation"—the more strain you'll put on the blood vessels and nerves that connect your eye to the rest of your head. Your luxated globes will also be susceptible to corneal abrasions or inflammation, and the feeling of your eyelids clamped down behind them won't be pleasant.
You should be able to get your eye back in place without serious, long-term damage. (If the ocular muscles tear or if the optic nerve is severed, your outlook won't be as clear.) The treatment for globe luxation is pretty simple: Doctors apply some topical painkillers, hold back your lashes, and poke your eyeball into its socket by pressing on the white part with gloved fingers. (In some cases, they'll use a simple tool like a bent paperclip to shoehorn it back into place.) You might get antibiotics, lubricating drops, or steroids to follow up for a few days while your vision returns to normal. If your doctors can't pop your eye back in—because you've got too much swelling in the socket, for example—they'll give you an eye shield and consider a more invasive procedure.

This guy is really really good:

The ambulance stopped and Jadick peered out at the first real fire fight of his life. There were not two wounded men, but seven. As a middle-class kid growing up in upstate New York, Jadick had avidly read about war, and even applied to West Point. But he flunked the physical—poor depth perception—and went to Ithaca College on an ROTC scholarship instead. He had served as a communications officer in the Marines, but left the corps after seven years, bitter that he had been left out of the fighting in 1991. Attending medical school on a Navy scholarship, he had never seen or experienced real war—the kind of urban combat that can leave 30 to 40 percent of a unit wounded or dead.

"I can't tell you how scared I was," he recalled. "My legs wanted to stay in that vehicle, but I had to get off. I wanted to go back into that vehicle and lie under something and cry. I felt like a coward. I felt like it took me hours to make the decision to go."

But he got up and went. He felt as though he were "walking through water."

And that's the beginning of how he saved 30 lives in the Battle of Fallujah.

Pre-ripped

I bought a new scale this week that has a bunch of bioelectric moitoring capabilities to it. It shows not only weight but also body fat, hydration, & bone density.

It should also insult you if you gain weight: "Hey, there Fatty. Watch where you're steppin'."

However, it looks like I won't be needing the insult function, as I've dropped ten pounds and cut a percent and a half body weight since last fall. This leaves me feeling much more myself, and a little more yummy.

Even more Tales from the EL

There is a madman on the train.

The man is tall and clothed entirely in the peculiar yellow color I associate with Carhartt jackets and Timberland boots. His rich accent and etched facial features are those I associate with East Africa or certain islands of the West Indies. His voice is louder than anyone's gets on the train except for tourists and madmen, and he is clearly not visiting.

"...In 1917. 1917. 1917. How can you not see, it has been going on since 1917. Every day it gets worse. EVERY DAY. Pan Am. Libya. The PLO, Amelia Earhardt. 1917, they killed Archduke Ferdinand in the street. IN THE STREET. A whole war. Planes falling from the sky. Nobody does anything," he argues vehemently, waving his arms, imploring. He is talking to the air, to the bones of the train itself.

Everyone riding in the car pretends nothing is happening, closed inside themselves, because that's the way sane people ride the train, when they'd rather not deal with shouting madmen on the way home from work, and think that if they can pretend nothing is happening then nothing will happen. I am one of these people. We are arguably crazier than the madman.

The man in yellow says, "they go on killing people. Nobody does anything. I am a Catholic and I am proud. I make $40 an hour, and I [something] the pipes FORTY STORIES UP. George Bush is the WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD. THE WORST!"

At this point, I'm starting to think maybe he's not crazy, just a Democrat. Unfortunately, my stop comes up before I can hear any more, but I watch the train pull from the station, the man in yellow waving his arms and shouting, the other passengers pretending not to cringe. I almost feel sorry for him because no one is going to try to stop him; his paranoia will go unfounded, making him both true completely mad at the same time. Oppression would at least mean that he's sane.

The next day, I saw a man wearing a bowler hat. So, it's true, there's something different every day.

Link Roundup

Photobooth Yearbook Rice 1970 (via Boingboing)

My coworkers couldn't believe that Posh Spice has never read a book. Its like not having sex or never having climbed a tree. One can conceive of it happening in this life--but why?

Malcolm Gladwell's blog.

I am huddled by the computer helplessly consuming the crack sold to me by a cluster of short pushers in khaki sashes with little badges on them. Mmm--minty.

Another Story from the EL

To the guy with the wandering hands standing immediately behind me on the Brown line this morning all the way to the Loop :

Either you developed a spontaneous crush on me, or you're the world's worst pickpocket. Since I've still got my wallet, I'm thinking its the former.

Stories from the EL

I sat next to Santa on the Red Line.

No kidding.

Older guy, in that hard-to-tell-what-age phase. He says, "Did you see that group of people who won the lottery? I think that's great. It's so awful when just one person wins."

"Yeah," I say, "once you've got past the first ten or twenty million, what're you going to spend it on?"

"I could spend it," he says.

"How?"

"Well, first, I'd go into work wearing my dad's coat," he heaves a sigh, "then, I'd buy bicycles for every kid in town, find out if people were in need, send a lawyer over there to make sure they were above board, and get 'em taken care of."

He continues, "I remember there was a guy who did that, you know, gave a bike to every kid in his hometown, rented out the football field, and had a truckload of bikes sent over there for 'em to pick out."

"That's awfully nice," I say.

"Sure, I'd do that all the time...I play Santa Claus every Christmas, why not do it the rest of the year?"

"Well," I say, "this is my stop, but I hope you win."

"And if I don't, I hope you do," he says.

So I bought a ticket, and if I win, it's bikes for everyone.

I've seen things

First run of the season, due to a persistent series of upper respiratory hoohah. Valentine's Day, and a very clear night with a full moon rising out over the lake. Two lines of planes making final approach to O'Hare--one on either side of the moon--hanging against the sky like strands of Christmas lights. It reminds me of my favorite quote from one of the all-time great movies:

Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. -Blade Runner

When I woke up at 5 in the morning, my first coherent thought was, "I miss waking up at 10 in the morning."

In Cold Blood

My friend Joyce is a hard woman in many ways. Her husband, the Platypus, likes to bounce quarters off her abs.

Tonight, she called me and asked, "When are we going to do our dive bar project?"

"It's not our project, Joyce," I said. "It's more something you and Eric want to do. I don't like going to dive bars. I end up getting into fistfights and waking up next to women in Jagermeister hats."

"Yeah, sure. I bet you go to dive bars all the time."

"I'm trying to cut back."

"Have you seen Capote yet?" she asked, "because you remind me of him."

I'm shooting for Viggo Mortensen levels of manliness, but I'm willing to accept that I come off as, say, Matthew Broderick. Truman Capote is not where I'm placing the energy, thank you.

The woman is hard, I tell you.

Groundhog Day

Sixty children on a field trip
Jump out of their skis with excitement
'Cause, Hey, they're on a fieldtrip
Standing outside the Corner Bakery
About to eat lunch out and what's
More there are window washers
Above putting on a show just for them
Business people walking by in formation
Talking into cell phones just for sixty
Kids jumping out of their skins watching
The floor show

The guy outside the Borders looks like Jesus
He's holding breath mints
Not asking for money
Jesus looks tired
Jesus looks tired
(and maybe a little misplaced)
You'd look tired too at two thousand and five
Mother Theresa used to say
Every day I try to see Jesus in everyone
I meet, Jesus in all his uncomfortable disguises
So all the way back from lunch
Even the people who don't look
Like the guy who looks like Jesus
Look like Jesus to me

Except the old woman
Selling papers from a wheelchair
If it were a little warmer
She wouldn't need the jaunty hat with
Many peaks and wouldn't look
So much like the moon wrapped in a patchwork
Rainbow coat
Nor so much like a fairy grandmother

After I get off the train
Because I tripped and slashed
A single fingernail across
The bindi of a kindly Indian lady
The three punk kids
One with prodigious sideburns
Tells stories of nomad classrooms
Our school is too full they say
So whole classes just wander the halls
Following a teacher
The second with a backpack full of
Sketchpads asks If I fell on the tracks
Would you catch me? Would you give your
Life for me? For a stranger? The first one says
No, runs slowly in a circle
We are all running
We are all running to our death
Slowly, slowly
The third points at the incoming train
Asks where do all these businesspeople come from?
From floorshows for schoolchildren.

RIP Nam Jun Paik

"The future is now."
- Nam Jun Paik
(1932-2006)

He made the future with video art before anyone. You couldn't stare at his art too long without vertigo or eyestrain--but you felt compelled to look around it for a very long time indeed.

Mark Rothko's Seagram's Paintings

The story of how nine paintings commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant ended up at the Tate:

The Rothko murals at Tate Modern are lovely in their oppression, erotic in their cruelty. These are paintings that seem to exist on the skin inside an eyelid. They are what you imagine might be the last lights, the final flickers of colour that register in a mind closing down. Or at the end of the world. "Apocalyptic wallpaper" was a phrase thrown at Rothko's kind of painting as an insult.

I think Apocalyptic Wallpaper would be a great name for a band.

Snapshots II

• An elderly black man sits in a wheelchair, propelling himself backwards along the street with his feet. On the back of the chair, a tuba, stuffed with plastic and flowers--to protect the instrument from the rain, or to use it as a planter?
• Along the lakeshore, the trunk and branches of a tree support a fine frosting of snow. During the day's thaw, a three inch gap has melted between branches and trunk, turning the snow into a holder of negative space, an exoskeleton.
• The sign in the picture says: "If you see something suspicious, that's how New York got started."

Snapshots

• New job kicking my ass as expected.
• On the EL two young women serenade the crowd with Imogen Heap's Hide & Seek.
• The woman threw her arm in the air to wave goodbye, flinging her engagement ring into the space behind a row of file cabinets. When we came across them, a crowd of ten of her coworkers were trying to retrieve it using coathangers. Two or three of the women were perched on top of the cabinets. Others stood around, laughing and chattering. If it had gone on much longer, I suspect that they'd have ordered pizza and canapes. As it was, a guy with a dolly inched the cabinet out, and a piece of gum on the end of a wire hanger did the trick, to the sound of a standing ovation.

We live in a Twisty World

This video has been around the net a couple of times but it's still worth checking out (broadband recommended). Russian teens running Le Parkour.

These guys verge on the unbelievable.

Thai Surprise

The fortune cookie reads: "The smart thing to do is not be yourself."

Is this Engrish? A bad fortune? Or maybe good advice?

Are the people at the Thai restaurant trying to tell me something?

Last words of the year on the War on Christmas

Using my advanced knowledge of molecular biology and grammar I have converted ifs and buts to candy and nuts.

So now every day is Christmas.

US Teen Does "Immersion Journalism" in Iraq

Whoo. This kid has guts. You've got to give him that.

All Star Superman

Beautiful critque of All Star Superman #1. All That and a Bag of Bradbury.

I must have a Quintum jacket.

Christmas with the Wilsons

Cintra Wilson preaches the gospel on Christmas:

We are, to put it mildly, an ecumenical group. My mother, a jazz pianist who calls herself "The Duchess," was raised by Christian Scientists but now subscribes to a self-invented theology she calls "Ishta Devata," an unformed, New Age, quasi-Buddhist mysticism involving psychic visions from an inner network she calls "Channel 12." My father was raised by members of the Anthroposophical Society and is believed to be telekinetic. My aunt on my mother's side is a hardcore Scientologist, who until recently was exiled from Christmas for her tendency to hard-sell the guests on the divinity of L. Ron Hubbard. My sister, whose husband is Moroccan, recently converted to Islam. My mother complains bitterly that she's no longer allowed to call my sister during the five times a day she is praying toward
Mecca, which, considering how often Mom likes to phone, has inspired me to the revelation that Allah is most kind. I am a Santeria initiate, which means I endure jokes every year about sacrificing chickens. If I happen to be at the buffet table, I usually smile, grab the electric carving knife and walk toward the cat. But most of our extended family is Jewish, apart from my best friend Mark and his boyfriend, the Episcopal priest.

We all come together for Christmas under our one unifying conviction that Christmas is less a religious holiday than the one day a year we all start drinking before noon.

Yark!

For the second time while visiting a particular set of friends I have fallen prey to the strange microbes of the foreign country of "Cleve-land".

As a result I spent every half hour between midnight and 6AM involved in a version of bulemia without the guilt.

The term "technicolor yawn" has taken on increased significance because for some reason all of the emissions from my body have taken on a full spectrum of vivid colors--and never the ones you'd quite expect. (I'm only waiting for, say, blue earwax or bioluminescent spittle to appear so that I can complete the set. It's feeling very Harry Potter.)

More scenes from the "War on Christmas"

I.


Last December, a group called Public Advocate for the United States (which claims to defend America's traditional family values) sent some Christmas carolers over to sing in front of the ACLU offices in Washington.

Carrying signs reading "Merry Christmas" and "Please Don't Sue Us!" - they also seem to have carried with them some rather strange imaginings about an assault on Christmas. I don't know what the carolers thought might happen.

To tell the truth, the ACLU is not often serenaded by Christmas carolers. So it was with some excitement that the staff went outside and joined in the singing. They brought with them cookies and warm drinks to share. One staff member, who is an ordained Baptist minister, did a little witnessing about his faith to some astonished proponents of family values.

Fox News did broadcast the event (as a part of its "war against Christmas" campaign). Although the visiting singers were shown, the cameras failed to include any footage showing that everyone had participated in the caroling. Rather than reporting the facts, the anchor preferred the propaganda: "We believe the ACLU heard the message loud and clear, but they don't care."
...
(By T. Jeremy Gunn USAToday)

II.

The other day Giblets was shopping for presents for his closest friends and vassals when an elderly mall greeter said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" forcing Giblets to beat him insensate with a vanilla-scented gift candle. Why must our relentlessly secular society attempt to obscure The Reason For The Season! Yes there are non-Christmas holidays but those are the sissy holidays. Christmas can beat up Hanukkah, Eid and Kwanzaa without breaking a sweat.

(Brad deLong Fafblog)

Science & Creation

Great speculative article on why children have rich fantasy lives.

Chicago Business Forecast 2005 Notes

Two weeks ago, the University of Chicago GSB presented its annual series of Business Forecast Luncheons in major cities across the country. The BFLs offer a chance to hear leading economists predict the major economic figures and political risks for the coming year.

The Chicago session prognosticators were Michael Mussa and Randall Kroszner for the macro side.

• The basic message: next year will look exactly like this year.
• Short term indicators are mildly positive, with little long term effect on the economy due to energy price shocks, hurricane Katrina, and the continued war in Iraq.
• Consumer confidence is down, which is not in line with other indicators, but which may be due to the fact that real median income has been flat to declining over the next few years.

On the major indicators (GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, etc.) both were in close agreement with real growth in the 3-3.5% range, inflation at 2.5-3% and unemplyment at 5.1%. All of these are close to both our standard national levels and also close to our current situation.

In general, Mussa's predictions are more believable wherever the two had a disagreement, where, for example Kroszner forecast that the trade deficit would essentially remain flat or shrink in real terms, Mussa predicts a move from ($624.1B) to ($640.0B) or about 5% growth, which seems plausible in light of current trends and continued growth. Mussa also sees the US economy coolling down slightly from this year--and no other economies worldwide heating up more to pick up the slack.

Marvin Zonis provided political risk insight. Key points:

• India represents a great foreign investment opportunity, with blockbuster growth, relative political stability, an English speaking population, heavy investment in education, and a rapidly growing middle class.
• China has pinned a lot on the 2008 Olympics. The government views this as their announcement of superpower status on par with the US. So, at least in the near term, they will continue to put a premium on political stability. Due to the large component of the Chinese economy that relies on exports to the US, it is unlikely that they will try to restrict debt financing the US deficit. The two countries are in an economic embrace.
• Iran is a country which is undergoing titanic internal stresses. The current hard-line president is viewed as a nutcase even by his fellow clerics. Dissent is widespread, and Persian is the second most common language for blogs (tied with French) worldwide.
• Russia's vast oil wealth is being used to finance the country's transformation, and can be used to buy off internal dissent through social programs and other methods.
• Brazil has so far failed to gain traction on its internal economic problems but has immense potential for growth--just not in the near term.
• Positive signs in the Middle East: Sharon has shifted Israeli policy from "maximizing territory held" to "defensible position". Prediction: he will abandon all but the largest West Bank settlements, consolidate his hold on all of Jerusalem, and throw a fence around all of Israeli territory. The Palestinians are unhappy because this is going on unilaterally.
• Postive sign #2: Muslim revulsion at violence carried out in the name of Jihad against other Muslims. Jordan being the latest example.
• US presence in Iraq is generating terrorists faster than we can kill them. Bush will find a way to declare victory and 40K-60K troops will be pulled from Iraq "before the 2006 elections".

In the roundtable discussion that followed, rising healthcare costs alarmed the panel the most. With Social Security and Medicare rising from 5-6% of GDP now to ~20% over the next 15-20 years, this will put enormous pressure on the economy as a whole. No near-term solutions exist, at least none that anyone is prepared to accept.

So to sum up:

• Near term: fairly rosy. Maybe a little slower.
• Long term: uncertain as always.

Elsewhere: US Economy's slow growth still getting 'no respect'. Contains full transcripts of remarks by all three presenters.

Most Played

Am I the only one who feels guilty over the Most Played selections in iTunes, as though I should love all my music equally?

Frank Quitely

Frank Quitely looks like one of his own drawings. Don't you agree?

Post #419

An important message from Zefrank.

Incompetent Design

I'm beginning to feel sorry for the Intelligent Design folks. It hasn't been a very good year for them. First, their pet school board gets voted out en masse. Then, they get pooh-pooed by their fellow evangelical academics. I won't even go into the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster thing. Now, geophysicist Don Wise comes out with his theory of "incompetent design". He sites the bend at the base of the spine, the excessive number of teeth in the jaw, and the structure of the sinus drainage system. To which I'd add the shock system and the design of the knee.

You must have received some serious criticism of your somewhat jestful theory? Well, I got one, which I showed at the Geological Society of America (GSA) meetings. An envelope postmarked Minneapolis, with monkeys all over it and inside it, with a great big blue ribbon, a note saying I had been awarded the "Moron of the Month" award, that I was a dork, an idiot, that only someone who thought their ancestors were monkeys would be dumb enough to say what I had, asking me if I wanted to debate it. It left an email address at darwinistsaredumb@hotmail.com

These are the kind of things you NEVER really answer, but I couldn't resist. So I used the H.L. Menken approach:

Dear Sir, You should be aware that some idiot is writing absolute nonsense and signing your e-mail address to it. You should take action on this before your reputation is further sullied!

But most of the things I've gotten have been positive.

The Power of Cheese

I may have misplaced several personal items in classic absent-minded fashion, but this is something truly special--a nearly deadly cheese caper. Even for queso fresco, this seems to be going overboard.(via Neil)

Woman Allegedly Hires Hit Man for Cheese

The Associated PressTuesday, December 6, 2005; 7:01 PM
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- In an unusual case of mistaken identity, a woman who thought a block of white cheese was cocaine is charged with trying to hire a hit man to rob and kill four men. The woman also was mistaken about the hit man. He turned out to be an undercover police officer.

Jessica Sandy Booth, 18, was arrested over the weekend and remains in jail with bond set at $1 million on four charges of attempted murder and four counts of soliciting a murder.

According to police, Booth was in the Memphis home of the four intended victims last week when she mistook a block of queso fresco cheese for cocaine _ inspiring the idea to hire someone to break into the home, take the drugs, and kill the men.

News Flash: Mr. Pointy Recovered

Mr. Pointy has been safely recovered, after a couple of days of hiding beneath Mr. Can Opener.

In other news, Mr. and Mrs. Boots were found in the trunk of my car beneath the emergency blanket.

I am therefore almost certainly senile. Or Mr. Senile to you.

Mr. Pointy

After a week long vacation, I'm back in Chicago.

A couple of items are missing from my apartment: my best paring knife and a pair of boots. Either some psychotic is out on the streets stalking people after having broken into my apartment, or I'm going to wake up one morning having "found" the knife hiding somewhere in my bedclothes.

As We Recover...

As we recover from the Thanksgiving food overload and general giving of thanks and appreciation, I can almost hear the clanking of the chains dragging my roller coaster car to the top of the big first hill. If all of the proposed engagements for December hit, I will be having a very busy couple of months.

Busy as in no sleep 'til March. Busy as in Oh my gosh I've got myself into something this time.

The only thing worse than working all the time is not working all the time. The not working bit is coming to an abrupt end. Fortunately, for the first time in a long time, I at least have managed to get a little vacation in right before the deluge hits. Cross your fingers, and I'll see you all in March.*


*That doesn't mean I'm going to stop posting for three months. I mean, come on, what's more important: sleeping or dumping personal details on the internets?

Media Concentration

THESIS: The copyfight is being fueled in large part by an oligopoly structure within the major media sectors. The search for pricing power rather than the fear of piracy is the motive for DRM and anti-peer network initiatives.

Chart of the top 10 media companies' holdings.

File under: future research topics.

Spankin'

Spanking children is correlated with more aggressive and anxious children. (Reuters)

Not surprisingly, in Thailand, a country where peace-promoting Buddhist
teachings predominate, moms were least likely to spank their children or use
other forms of physical discipline.
In Kenya, on the other hand, where use of physical discipline is common and considered normal for the most part, moms were most likely to spank or engage in similar disciplinary tactics. In a study conducted in Kenya in 2003, 57 percent of grandmothers reported caning, pinching, slapping, tying with a rope, hitting, beating, and kicking as forms of discipline they had used on their grandchildren.
One question the findings raise, according to Lansford, is whether being physically disciplined more frequently causes an increase in aggression and anxiety or whether children who are already aggressive and anxious are simply physically disciplined more often. "On the basis of other work conducted in the United States, the answer is probably some of each," Lansford said.

Those are some tough Kenyan grandmothers.

Kenyon College's Answer to Gawker

Frat parties reviewed in case you didn't make it to all of them.*

Good to see that nothing has changed.


*e.g. if you woke up in a field the next morning after your "punch".

Breathing

The sign on the wall of the public bathroom said,

"Every time you think how embarrassed you will be,
Think instead about how long you will have to be dead."

And underneath there's a tiny tiny dot:
.
Labelled "Your Life"

And a long line:

---

Labelled "The Rest of Time"
Which stretches all the way across the room.

Link Roundup

The only good fight is a pillow fight. Pictures from the Toronto flash mob pillow fight. (via boingboing)


"If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
-Jose Saramago (via Jonathan Carroll)


TRAVELING EUROPE IN STYLE WITH AUCKLAND DINGIROO,DARK-AGE TOURIST AND CRITIC OF FOOD AND DRINK. "There are numerous inns in and around the city that are comfortable and reasonably priced. My favorite is Mon Petit Chou (My Little Cabbage). It is a picturesque cottage along the Seine run by an elderly prostitute named Genevieve."

Cool is for Kids. " I am a middle-aged man dressed in a little Whistles skirt/Monsoon jacket combo and look a bit like an off-duty Duchess of Cornwall. I don’t get many opportunities for leisure trannying these days so I used the occasion of shopping for my wife’s birthday present to don a housewife-up-from-the-’burbs number.

"Now as a rule I would say that if there is one group of people that transvestites need to avoid, it is early-teenage girls."

Tiny Cities

Some albums mustbe purchased as soon as they are seen. All of Mark Kozelek's work is in this category.

The new Sun Kil Moon album Tiny Cities is a luminous reworking of Modest Mouse songs with all of the hallmarks of Mark's artistic sensibility down to the grainy cover art. Each album he does gets a little better as he gets subtly more comfortable with his talents and palette.

Imogen Heap on the other hand is an albnum that you pick up based on hearing a free mp3 on Salon's Audio File. It's got that Frou Frou thing butcoming in from a different angle. Great semi-poppy tracks but the attraction is in the vocals not the backing track.

A world without commas

Last night I opened a bottle of Coke while sitting at my desk. Unfortunately someone had shaken the bottle vigorously before I picked it up. As a result I have lost the ability to type commas on my laptop keyboard. This is not as bad as it sounds. Last night I thought I would have to do without m's n's and spaces. An unacceptable turn of events.

Also for some reason the page down button had developed the capability to initiate a search function within the Firefox browser.

I asked my computer repair-savvy friends how to fix the problem and they recommended that I put the keyboard in the dishwasher and then let it dry for a week. These are the kind of people who grow moustaches for fun and are therefore not to be trusted.

Meh.

The last couple of weeks have been a flurry of interviews for me, which is in one sense flattering. In another sense, it's like business travel--not as glamorous as it looks from the outside.

Meanwhile, everyone I know is down with a cold. Maybe they're practicing for the bird flu pandemic.

On the upside, I found a cool little mission-style bookcase, so my reading materials no longer have to live in stacks underneath the desk. Now I just need to find a permanent home for the stacks of clothes currently living on the side table.

Gettin' Twisty

I've been doing a weekly yoga class at Chicago Yoga since the beginning of the year. After coming in with the standard-substandard level of flexibility that comes from a regular running program (tight hamstrings, leading to tight back) and growing up playing lots of tennis (asymmetrical back, shoulder, and arm development), it took a long time to get to a place of reasonable flexibility. Even now, God help me if I show up for class after a night of drinking, or with low potassium or hydration.

With practice, though, I'm occasionally progressing to the more advanced forms of some of the poses. Once, I managed to do Crow Pose, which if improperly done results in an impromptu somersault. This weekend, I pulled off a really nice Extended Side Bend with backward noosed arms. I'd never been able to get my arms around my leg and back far enough before, so something in my shoulders seems to have loosened up nicely.

Truth or Dare?

I'm in the process of filling in a personal profile on a dating site, but it's giving me a lot of trouble. Specifically, how much I need to lie in order to tell the truth.

For example, I'm 6'0", but if I put that down, I always think that people are saying to themselves, "oh, this guy's really 5'11" and trying to fool us with the extra inch," so I tell people I'm 6'1".

Or, if I say I'm in "average" shape, does that mean average for a 35-year old, or a 35-year old in Chicago, or for everybody? Does it sound like I'm actually a "needs a little work", angling for an "average", or should I say "above average" or "well toned"?

Does all of this questioning make me look like a "self absorbed" or "poor body image" when what I really want to be is "well adjusted" or "self confident"?

How much should you lie in a personal ad to account for automatic grade deflation?

Halloween Parade

The Halstead Street Halloween Parade is notable not for its size, but for its blurry outlines. While the main padade went north, occasional clusters of performers, bands, and cars went south along the same route, producing a weird sloshing movement within the parade route itself.

Meanwhile, the question of "who's in costume, and who just dresses funny all the time?" kept coming to mind. Is the guy in the fireman outfit going to a costume party, or just home from work? Is the kid in the floor length overcoat and platform shoes a vampire or just a goth? Is the six foot tall woman next to me a parade contestant, or a drag queen, or a WNBA player in an evening gown? Has the guy in the Santa hat got the wrong holiday, celebrating the release of Jarhead, or is he just trying to keep warm? When we play with identity year round, and eccentrics abound, Halloween is every day.

Trick or Treat.