Raise high the roofbeam, Carpenters!

Three Rare Views Of The Great Dictator

2011-11-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

So--who would've predicted that holding down a full-time job teaching little tiny children, tending to a loving girlfriend, and writing fiction every morning would leave me so little time to blog about facts, real and imagined?

Nevermind. I know that I have been an awful curator of this bloglet, and I will heartily try to add more scribbles soon. I promise. All I need is more coffee. And about forty-five minutes more to every single day.

But! I've come to you today to tell you something important! I want your money! No seriously. But you get words in return!

I write a lot. Mostly fiction. I think I'm good enough to actually merit a real paper and binding book, but what with the moribund economy and some predictable eccentricities re: my book's actual genre, I remain unpublished. No publisher nor agent wants to take a risk on me.

So tonight I tossed caution to the wind and decided to make an eBook.

AND YOU CAN BUY IT! From Smashwords.

The book is called Three Rare Views of the Great Dictator. It's about a dictator of an imaginary country. It's more fun than it sounds.

Leave a comment. Like the book on Facebook. And read it! Enjoy it on your ereaders! Tell your friends! Write a review! Even tiny acts of recognition can give my manuscript the little boost that it needs.

Thanks for indulging me.

Learning Today: How Do They Get Those Little Shapes On Oreos?

2011-06-14T06:36:00.000-07:00

The practice of stamping shapes on biscuits is actually practical--it helps the crackers achieve even puffiness in the baking process. It's called 'docking'. Bakers have used a wide variety of tools for this task--before factories, bakers used “a dangerous-looking utensil consisting of sharp heavy spikes driven into a bun-shaped piece of wood.” Find out more at this fascinating story on the blog Edible Geography. via The Browser.

Learning Today: How Long Was A Dinosaur Day?

2011-06-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

A day didn't used to be 24 hours. In fact, the rotation of the earth is slowing down. So back in the time of the dinosaurs, a day was only 22 and 1/4 hours.

So if you ever complain about there not being enough hours in a day, your solution is simple: travel back in time.

Found on the ever-enlightening, Dr Karl podcast (MP3 link).

Learning Today: Paris Syndrome

2011-06-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

Paris. If all you ever knew about Paris came from watching Hollywood films, you'd assume that as soon as you alighted from your plane at Charles De Gaulle your journey would consist of nothing but falling in love, eating scrumptious food, and marveling at the wealth of beauty and culture that Paris affords.

People who've been to the City of Love can tell you that despite the city's charms, the streets smell like piss. It's a great city--but it's still a city, inhabited by humans in all their sweaty variety.

Travelers need to inure themselves against disappointment. Those who don't might have some problems.

One of those problems is Paris Syndrome. Sometimes, when Japanese tourists visit Paris, they are so disappointed by the tawdry reality of the city that they can suffer from a mental breakdown. The problems with the language barrier, the informality of the French, and the horror of international travel all compound to make the victim of Paris Syndrome so disappointed that they crack. The Japanese Embassy in Paris reportedly sends home about 20 people suffering from Paris Syndrome each year.

Dan Carlin On Reddit

2011-06-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

The incredible podcaster Dan Carlin (creator of one of my favorite podcasts Hardcore History) is now on Reddit doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything.) Check it out.

Learning Today: Captain Kidd Was Framed!

2011-06-02T00:19:00.000-07:00

Captain Kidd's name occupies the highest strata of pirate fame--the strata that's festooned with eye patches, peg legs and parrots, the strata that's immortalized in millions of seven year olds' Halloween costumes. But recent research has shown that Captain Kidd might not have actually been a pirate after all. The poor man was probably framed.

There's an important distinction to make between piracy and privateering. Being a pirate is relatively easy. You outfit a ship (with lots of cannons and stuff), go out on the ocean, and every other ship you see--you try to steal their stuff. Privateering is another matter entirely. To be a privateer you get a fancy piece of paper from your government called a letter of marque and then you prey on other country's ships and it's all legal.

This was the distinction which Captain Kidd hoped would save his life. See, Captain Kidd was hanged for being a pirate. But he claimed that he had a letter of marque. He was a privateer.

The only problem was that Kidd's letter of marque had been issued in pretty dubious circumstances by a cabal of powerful men who wanted to personally profit from Kidd's privateering. The cabal which gave Kidd his letter of marque were all high-ranking members of the current government, and when Kidd was captured and tried, none of them would jump to the poor man's defense for fear of, you know, being disgraced for outfitting a pirate.

When Kidd was hanged the noose broke, leaving Kidd squirming, in pain, hanging from the scaffold--but not dead. At the time this kind of thing was considered a gentle divine suggestion that a miscarriage of justice was being committed, but people wanted Kidd eliminated, and so he was strung up again and sent to Pirate Heaven. Or Privateer Heaven, if you prefer.

I learned about Captain Kidd from Angus "Pirate Expert" Konstam's story on BBC History Magazine's June 2011 podcast.

Puts it all in perspective, doesn't it?

2011-06-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

In the Second World War, the Soviets suffered more casualties in Stalingrad than the total combined causalities suffered by the Americans and the British for the entire war.

Over the course of the war the Soviet Union lost about 15% of its population.

When we think about the Second World War we think of the battle in France, of troops marching through Berlin, of the atom bomb exploding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the real story of the Second World War happened along the Eastern Front--a brutal destructive stalemate where two dictators threw countless human lives against each other without regard for the death or carnage that ensued.

Statistics from the BBC History Magazine Podcast's story on the Eastern Front in their June 2011 edition. I also encourage everyone to listen to Dan Carlin's wonderful podcast on the Eastern Front, Ghosts Of The Ostfront. It will give you nightmares. Historically accurate nightmares.

Learning Today: June 1st 2011. The Times They Were A Changin'

2011-05-31T21:27:00.000-07:00

Before the Revolution of 1848 the tiny principality of Monaco had a really good deal going for it. Monaco was allowed to tax all the orange and lemon trees in Provence. The Princes of Monaco didn't need to do much more than sit back, look out at the Mediterranean, and wait for the farmers of Provence to bring them fresh lemon-scented money. But nothing is forever. In 1848 persky Revolutionaries put an end to many aristocratic privileges--including Monaco's right to tax those tasty citrus fruits.

What's a small principality to do? Countless other once-privileged elites across France and the rest of Europe took this opportunity to curl up into a vomit-stained ball of debauchery and decadence. The Princes of Monaco had a better idea. They would give other people a place where they could curl up into vomit-stained balls of debauchery and decadence. They would open a casino.

And it worked. Today, Monaco is still a country. The Princes of Monaco are still rich. And people still come to the minuscule country to waste their money and get drunk.

And every so often, the scent of lemon and orange wafts through the air, suggesting to the Princes the simplicity of a past time.

Found in C.A. Bayley's The Birth Of The Modern World, Chapter 11, The Reconstruction of Social Hierarchies.

Learning Today: May 31st 2011. Fact Smörgåsbord!

2011-05-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

Smörgåsbord, the legendary tableful of tasty edibles, comes to us from the Swedish language. It means literally Butter-Goose-Table.

Today, courtesy of the Canadian Science radio show Quirks and Quarks' annual Question Roadshow, I present a veritable Butter-Goose-Tableful of facts for you, my loyal readers. I encourage you to listen to the whole program.

The show answers burning questions, such as:

Why do Canadian Geese honk when they fly? (To let other geese know where they are.)

AND

How do lakes get fish in them? (In the past, lakes were connected to each other by rivers, and the enterprising fish swam up these rivers.)

AND

Are identical twins actually identical? (Yes and no.)

My fact-loving readership will devour this, I'm sure. Save room for the Butter-Goose, though!

Learning Today: May 30th 2011. Hello Stranger!

2011-05-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

In the Congo, "Stranger" is a common male name. Because babies come into their homes as strangers to their families.

From When You're Strange by Paul Theroux in the NYRBlog.

Learning Today: May 26th 2011. Suicide Freud.

2011-05-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

Freud was a suicide.

You can't blame him. First, he suffered from twenty years of painful cancer. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Other times it kills you.) Then, he had to escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna.

One day in his exile, he sat down, read Balzac's La Peau de chagrin (the Magic Skin) cover to cover, and then was administered an overdose of morphine. And he died.

Via Ivan Szelenyi's Foundations Of Modern Social Theory course, available on iTunes U.

Apologies for the lack of post yesterday, and the small post today. I am a tad busy!

Learning Today: May 24th 2011. The Kiddie-Diddling Tumor.

2011-05-23T20:46:00.000-07:00

Everything a person is--every thought, feeling, idea and memory--is little more than an instance of brain activity. This is a radical and unsettling idea. My feeling of love is correlated with a particular set of neurons firing. My appreciation of great works of art is identical with activity in a particular region of my brain. I am a meat computer, weighing about three pounds, engorged with blood.

Though it may be unpalatable, there's a lot of evidence that the mind is nothing more than the brain. For instance, brain damage can often cause profound changes in human behavior. Take the case of the 40 year old schoolteacher who suddenly became an uncontrollable pedophile. His wife discovered him downloading child porn. He visited massage parlors. He even solicited sex from children.

But he also complained of horrible headaches. He urinated on himself and didn't care. He was unable to copy writing and drawings.

A day before he was supposed to go to prison on child molestation charges, he was put into an MRI. Doctors discovered a tumor in the right lobe of the orbifrontal cortex. When the tumor was removed, his sex addiction vanished.

But wait! Later, the man complained of headaches again and started to secretly collect porn. A second trip to the MRI revealed that the tumor had only be incompletely removed. The doctors out the remaining tumor, and the man was better again.

I heard about this story on the Philosophy Bites interview with David Eagleman. Check out the rest of the episode--it's a fascinating look into the intersection of ethics and neuroscience.

Learning Today: May 23rd, 2011. Bill O's Hates.

2011-05-23T03:07:00.000-07:00

Turns out Bill O'Reilly likes Glenn Beck and hates Sean Hannity.

Ailes also faced internal resistance to Beck’s rise. Sean Hannity complained to Bill Shine about Beck. And it didn’t help matters that O’Reilly, who had become friends with Beck and can’t stand Hannity, scheduled Beck as a regular guest, a move that only annoyed Hannity further.

From this great piece on Roger Ailes, Fox News, and the Republican 2012 Nominee.

Sorry for the scant post today, I have a case of the Mondays.

Learning Today: May 20th 2011. Celebrating The Proud And Invisible Professional Songwriters

2011-05-19T21:52:00.000-07:00

Eg White. Al "Shux" Shuckburgh. You've heard their music in your car, hummed along to their words in the shower. Just who are they again?

These men are professional songwriters. Pop stars--it turns out--don't actually have enough time to write their own material, so they hire other people to do it for them (a lovely example of the increasing division of labor, by the way.)

No doubt it' efficient. Here's the wonderfully named Eg White on his process.

Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: 'All right, shall we write a song?' And by six, they've gone home and we've fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.

Efficient, sure. But there's something dreadfully unsatisfying to know that many of the songs making up the soundtrack to our lives were made this way--like work. We want our art to be the product of pure feeling, not the product of a guy trying to get a paycheck. When the market gets involved, we feel like our art has been compromised somehow.

Tangent time. This is one of the reasons for the snobbery of modern art. There's plenty of fantastic and appealing commercial art. But since it turns a profit, we're hesitant to call it real art--'high' art. True art is the art that could not survive the market--the art that must be supported by museums and art schools, rather than by people actually buying it and hanging it on their walls.

Well I think that's an awful way of looking at art. The test of art is in our experience of art--how we hear the song, how we see the painting, how we read the novel.

So tonight when you open up iTunes, raise your celebratory beverage of choice to the invisible professional songwriters, those shadowy men who make the music we hum along with.

Source: "Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters." The Guardian, May 17th. Via Mefi.

Learning Today: May 19th 2011. Happy Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day!

2011-05-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Well folks, today here in Turkey it's Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day! Hooray! Everyone has the day off! Including me. So I'm going to slide into bed and rest enough to get over the horrible cough that's been plaguing me all week.

Learning Today: May 18th 2011. Bitcoin. The Eminent Future of Currency? Libertarian Pipe Dream? Finally A Way To Buy A Tab Of Acid Online?

2011-05-17T22:59:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, if you wanted stuff you had to give someone else stuff that they wanted. I want your goat, I have to give you twenty-five turnips. If you don't like turnips, tough cookies for me. Or tough turnips. I don't get your goat.

Slowly, and perhaps inevitably, people chose a particular good to exchange better than all other goods. It could be cowrie shells. Or barley. Or whiskey (in Revolutionary Era-America.) But the grandpappy of cool stuff to swap was gold.

Gold was nice and shiny. It didn't rust or degrade. And it was relatively light. This made trade a lot easier. If I want your goat, I don't need to bother with whether or not you want turnips. I can sell my turnips for some gold, give you that gold, and you can give someone else gold for that iPod touch you've been eyeing up.

But there was a big problem with gold: there wasn't enough of it. People wanted to trade, but they couldn't because they couldn't get the gold. People did all sorts of crazy things to get over the lack of gold. From the bill of exchange to the Ming banknote, getting over the problem of the scarcity of gold was troubling business. But what could you do?

Then paper currency came along. Paper currency was light, movable, there was (usually) enough of it. Soon people didn't really care about gold. And the world dropped the gold standard sometime during the Second World War.

We may be seeing a revolution in currency every bit as wild as paper currency. Say hello to BitCoin. The world's first electronic currency.

Could it really be one of the most dangerous things the internet has ever created? Even more dangerous than shock sites? Than Jay Beebs? Or is it all a bunch of libertarian hoo-hah?

I have no idea, because I just found out about BitCoin today. Via Waxy.

Learning Today: May 17th 2011. The Octopus Of Love And Death

2011-05-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

When you love someone, what's better than giving them a little reminder of yourself? A poem. A picture. Something that reminds your lover of you when you are gone. The male blanket octopus has found the perfect gift. He gives his mate his penis.

Well, it's not really his penis. Male octopuses have a special sperm tentacle which they use to give lady octopuses their sperm sack. Sounds lovely, I know, but it gets the job done. When Mr. Blanket Octopus hands over his bag of squiggly octopod love, Mrs. Blanket Octopus gets a little something extra. He gives her his entire love tentacle. And then he dies.

Isn't nature great?

Source: Sex Drugs and Sea Slime on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, May 14th.

Learning Today: May 16th, 2011. The Eight-legged essay of China.

2011-05-15T23:28:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Learning Today. I come across a huge number of facts in my daily procrastinating, and I thought--why not share those facts with the world? Or at least with the tiny number of humans and web-bots that read this blog?

Our inaugural bit of wisdom comes today from China's imperial examination system. Civil servants in Imperial China were chosen on the basis of their performance on a test. Hooray meritocracy, you say! Not so fast. This wasn't a test of actual practical things. This was a test of the Chinese classics. It was horrifically difficult. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, failed his examinations over four times--despite scoring in the top one percent of applicants. People would spend their lives taking the exams. Makes GRE test prep look peachy, no?

Why were the exams so hard? For an example, look at the dreaded eight-legged essay. Not only did the eight-legged essay give strict limits on the word count, structure and expression, but it demanded that writers not mention anything that happened after the death of Mencius in 298 B.C. From Wiki:

Words, phraseology, or references to events that occurred after the death of Mencius in 298 BC were not allowed, since the essay was supposed to explain a quote from one of the Confucian classics by "speaking for the sage"; and Confucius or his disciples could not have referred to events that occurred after their deaths.^[1]

That's what I call learning.

Back!

2011-05-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to be trying something new with this blog in the coming days and weeks, let's see if I can keep it up.

Entirely Subjective Reveiws: Shearwater

2010-06-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

Shearwater perfectly expresses a certain feeling: you're sailing with some friends and at some point a quietness comes over everyone so you look over the prow. You listen to the waves lap at the boat. You watch the proud sea. A bird flies overhead and looks lonely and beautiful. And even though you're smiling and you know that actually you are quite content, you feel a deep and bitter sadness. Then for a minute or two nobody speaks.

Shearwater's Rook
Metacritic: 85
Amazon: 4 stars
Pitchfork: 8

Entirely Subjective Reviews: The Pacific

2010-06-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

Like my grandma watching a Waynes Brothers movie, I can't tell anyone apart.

The Pacific is a beautifully shot TV show which tries to explode our heroic myths about war and I cannot understand it at all even though I tried really hard.

There's one big problem: I can't tell the characters apart. I know there's supposed to be an Italian dude and a southern dude, but after that--the characters are just all the same. Lots of men. Sitting around. And they are dirty and they eat food. And then there are explosions! IMPORTANT EXPLOSIONS! And then there are dead bodies and we feel bad because we know about the horror of war. But then there are explosions again! Whee! And we are in the past so we know that things are DIFFERENT.

I tried really hard to like The Pacific. I read episode guides to try to figure out which characters were which. But after about forty minutes through the second episode squinting trying to figure out whether there were two curly haired dudes or one and who the guy was who won the medal of honor and why he won it I put The Pacific on pause and went to do something else--and my life was not a single smidgen worse.

Metacritic Rating: 87
IMDB: 8.5/10
Amazon: 4/5

Octopus Kills Shark

2010-05-14T19:37:00.000-07:00

Via my dad via HuffPo via Boing Boing.

Reviews in the Age of Aggregation

2010-05-14T18:31:00.000-07:00

One of the most dramatic elements of the new internet age has been the rise of aggregation. Before the internet, data was limited. Now we have unlimited data, and the limiting factor on people's consumption of data is time. In the previous generation, important people may have been 'personalities' who provided interesting outlooks on the world. Now important people are collectors who organize data in useful ways.

I think that aggregation has fundamentally changed the role of criticism in our culture in a way which most critics have not yet realized.

First let's take a look at the role of criticism before the rise of aggregation. And here I am talking about friendly accessible newspaper criticism which people use to decide whether or not to consume a particular work of art. I do not care about ponderous useless academic criticism which people use to gain jobs as tenured humanities professors.

So here's how people's relationship to criticism used to look: You want to see a movie this weekend. So you open up the arts section of your newspaper of choice and you read the movie reviews. Maybe you pay attention to the byline of the reviewer, and certain reviewers--A. O. Scott, say, or Ebert--will influence your opinion more than other reviewers.

In this situation, the reviewer is trying to get at a kind of objective criticism of the work in question. Since the reader is only going to read one--or at most two--reviews of a given work, the reviewer will do his or her best to set aside their individual opinion and try instead for a more universal opinion. The reviewer does not answer the question "Did I like it?" but answers the question "Is it good?"

This stance was a result merely of a technological limitation. The collection of large sets of data about people's opinions was difficult and time consuming. So the reviewer had to take the position of the sole judge.

Yet now, with the rise of aggregation, that has all changed. Data is cheap and plentiful.

These days, if I want to judge a given work of art, I will look at a site which aggregates opinion. Sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes digest professional reviews into numerical scores which provide a good guess at how good a particular work of art will be. Other sites like Amazon.com and Imdb allow users to contribute their own reviews. Sites like Netflix and the iTunes music store use complicated algorithms to look at individuals' tastes and try to figure out what art and music will appeal to them. And then just look at the plethora of different top ten, top 100 and top 1000 lists out there. We love aggregation. Sometimes we might look at the reviews of a particular favorite reviewer, but that reviewer is no longer the only source we use to judge whether we give our time to a work of art.

So there is now no more need for the reviewer who positions himself as the sole arbiter of a piece of art. The reviewer can merely give his or her own personal opinion and then let the aggregation do the work of providing a more 'objective' criticism. There is no harm now in saying "I don't like this film because the actor reminded me of my brother-in-law." The peculiarities of individual opinion are leveled by aggregation.

But criticism has not yet changed. To show what I think modern criticism might look like, I will periodically post reviews of things on this site, giving the most biased and personal reviews possible. To balance out these biased reviews, I will also include as much aggregated criticism of the given work of art as possible--its Metacritic, Amazon, and if possible, Imdb rating. In this way I hope to show both sides of aggregation--the small-scale, personal and biased individual reviewer, and the numerical, sphinx-like and sage aggregated number.

Things Which Don't Suck, Part 1

2010-05-14T17:55:00.000-07:00

Rhapsody in Blue

My first sip of coffee in the morning.

Jess' jokes.

Gordon S. Wood.

Dostoyevsky and Salinger.

Dorris Lessing and Laurence Durrell.

Tulips and Irises.

Squids and octopuses.

Miyazaki and Pixar.

Keroro Gunso

What else doesn't suck?

The Narrative Fallacy

2010-05-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

We tend to look at the events of our lives as stories. While our stories will fit the data of the world most of the time, there will be rare but significant moments when our stories about the world will fail. These incidents are as distressing as they are inevitable.

Anyway. Here’s something I thought of on the bus today.

Since we understand the world in terms of stories, we judge the validity of particular storylines not only by how well they fit the world but also by how successful they are as stories.

This isn’t a huge problem when we have a lot of data (in our own life, for instance). Since we have a lot of data we’re probably constrained to make storylines which are a closer fit to the world.

Where this effect is really significant, I think, is in parts of our knowledge where we rely mostly on hearsay—where we don’t have a lot of easily available data to whittle down our storyline options.

Now tons of stuff we believe in relies on hearsay. Our beliefs about the nature of the universe, our beliefs about politics, and history are mostly formed by stories other people tell us rather than from our own observation.

In these situations since we don’t have a lot of data with which to falsify or verify these stories, we will tend to choose stories which provide more narrative satisfaction.

For instance, I am interested in the US health care debate, but I do not have time enough to adequately educate myself about it. But I still need some kind of opinion about it. So what opinion do I choose? I will choose a story which makes sense to me. “President Obama is selling us out because he is a liar.” Or, “President Obama is standing up for me and he will choose the best possible policy option.”
Now this problem is especially pernicious when it comes to journalism. The success of a journalist is dependent on his or her ability to construct meaningful stories out of the data of the world—not on their ability to construct more accurate stories about the world.

You can see this in reporting on the stock market. The condition of the stock market effects the well-being of many people, so it is a story which we have to tell. So when there is an unusual movement of the stock market journalists have to explain it. “The stock market crashed and then recovered very quickly today because of a computer error.” “The stock market rose today because of investor hopes of a change in the interest rate.” But the stock market is a notoriously complex system which defies easy analysis. The same conditions which are used today to explain a rise in the stock market will be used tomorrow to explain a crash in the stock market. The real reasons for these rises and falls are too complicated for non-experts to understand (and probably too complicated even for the experts to understand.) So we tell ourselves stories about these events which make sense but don’t actually convey the nature of reality.

This narrative fallacy can explain religious and political enthusiasm, too: having a particular storyline which can explain everything in the world is very comforting. “Everything would be better if people just followed Marx.” “The world is bad because nobody is a real Christian.” “America is corrupted by special interests.” All of these ideas provide very compelling stories which explain the world in narratively satisfactory ways. The problem is that they don’t accurately reflect the world. Since we don’t actually have a lot of commerce with data about politics, we are able to keep these inaccurate beliefs safe from recalcitrant experience. In our personal lives we are held to greater accuracy about our stories because we are more likely to encounter recalcitrant experience.

Here is Tocqueville talking about something similar. He's discussing how pre-Revolutionary France was led by its writers.

When we study the history of our Revolution, we realize that it was prompted by precisely the same outlook which inspired so many books on the theory of government. They reflected the same attractions for universal theories, comprehensive systems of legislation and an exact summary in the laws; the same contempt for existing facts; the same faith in theory; the same taste of the original; the ingenious and the novel in reshaping institutions; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution at one and the same time following the rule of logic and according to a single plan instead of seeking to reform it in its separate parts. A frightening spectacle! For what is a good quality in a writer is a failing in a politician and the very themes which have often produced fine books may lead to great upheavals.

If I was Malcom Gladwell I’d call this something like ‘The Storyteller’s Illusion’. But I’m not. So it’s ‘the Narrative Fallacy.’

ALL CAPS LINKAGE

2009-05-04T23:58:00.000-07:00

MEMES FROM AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION

VIA WAXY

HAPPY ALL CAPS TUESDAY.

Time For The Times

2009-05-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

Doing too much at the same time, even at the risk of failure, is a core American trait that built the nation. It’s as American as Benjamin Franklin, “Moby-Dick,” the New Deal and a double cheeseburger with all the toppings.

David Foster Wallace And Hypertext

2009-05-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest just might be one of the most popular things on the internet. There are so many websites devoted to reading and re-reading IJ that I am refraining, right now, from linking to any of them, because it would just take too much time. There's a small irony here, because DFW's serpentine, infinity-recursive prose is just about the exact opposite of what you'd want you polished blog prose to be like, which is clean and concise. Anyway. I apologise if you've never read IJ; I encourage you to, and I also encourage you to join us here again tomorrow, when we might--MIGHT--talk about something interesting. Because if you haven't read IJ you just probably should stop reading this post right now, because it is inside baseball, at best.

My argument is that IJ is the first great novel of the internet age, even though it somewhat preceded it. Now. There's something interesting you can say about Infinite Jest's take on mass media, something very interesting, especially in the hypertrophied entertainment culture of O.N.A.N.ite USA. But that's not what I'm going to be talking about today.

I think that the densely allusive, footnoted prose of IJ is an almost perfect hypertext, in that original sense of hypertext which was an infinitely referenced network of texts, the ideal of the internet before the internet became real. I will show you what I mean. Here's just one paragraph, taken pretty much at random, which I have gone about and annotated as best as I could. It's from the brochure for the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, as read by Madame Psychosis on page 187 of my book, for those of you at home, following along:

'Those with saddle sores. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic,. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag's-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptoic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.'

Infinite Jest has the sort of hyper-referenced information overload that swamps all of us these days in 2009, those of us who read lots on the internet. Though Wallace wrote before the wide-spread popularity of the internet, he expressed well the information overload of us blog-seeped netizens. I see a fully-referenced hypertexted version of IJ as entirely possible, and I could encourage anyone with connections in the publishing industry to pitch this idea. Hard. Just give me some props if it ever comes true.

Am I Internet Famous Yet?

2009-04-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

My Kickstarter project might get a buck from Choire.

Someone should convince him.

Now Is Time To Help The Starving Artist

2009-04-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

So I've recently finished a novel, and I'm trying to get it published. Writing a novel is pretty easy, all things considered. Getting it published is hard. I'm also pounding away at another novel. It is really a beautiful life, writing, I assure you.

But there's a problem. You see, normal human beings use money to buy goods and services, including housing and food, which are considered by most to be necessities. Writing fiction--especially when it is fiction whose only laurels to date are some absolutely glowing rejection letters--does not provide much of this money.

Yet, there is a solution. It is called the internet.

There's this neat website called Kickstarter, and I've started a project up there. The idea of Kickstarter is this: you give artists money, and you get stuff in return. If you give me five bucks--ONLY FIVE DOLLARS!--you will get an electronic copy of my novel when it is finished. If you give me seven dollars, I will chuck in a copy of my already completed novel. Wow! There are many other wonderful things you can get, including me being your personal writing slave, so I encourage you to check it out.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF ALL CAPS LITERATURE

2009-04-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

ALL CAPS HAS A BAD REPUTATION. ONE WISE IMMINENCE RECENTLY ADVISED ME THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS SUGGESTS MENTAL UNBALANCE, ILLNESS, AND NOT AWESOMENESS. THAT IS WHY WE HERE AT RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM, CARPENTERS HAVE PUT TOGETHER THIS BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO ALL CAPS LITERARY PRODUCTION, TO RAISE CONSCIOUSNESS AND ALL THAT, IN HONOR OF ALL CAPS TUESDAY.

MF DOOM

RAPPER MF DOOM'S NAME IS WRITTEN ALL CAPS. "ALL BIG LETTERS BUT IT ISN'T NO ACRONYM."

STEPHEN CRANE

BEST KNOWN FOR WRITING THE PERPETUALLY BOOK-REPORTED RED BADGE OF COURAGE, STEPHEN CRANE ALSO WROTE SOME PRETTY ALL CAPS POETRY. AND BY ALL CAPS, I MEAN LITERALLY ALL CAPS. CRANE'S COLLECTION OF POETRY, THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES, WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ALL CAPS, THOUGH LATER EDITIONS HAD NORMAL CAPS, WHICH SUCKS. I THINK THAT THE ALL CAPS VERSION IS MUCH BETTER, EMPHASIZING THE STARK, POWERFUL IMAGES IN CRANE'S LINES. HERE'S THE THIRD LINE, MY FAVORITE SINCE I WAS A LITTLE BOY:

IN THE DESERT
I SAW A CREATURE, NAKED, BESTIAL,
WHO, SQUATTING UPON THE GROUND,
HELD HIS HEART IN HIS HANDS,
AND ATE OF IT.
I SAID, "IS IT GOOD, FRIEND?"
"IT IS BITTER BITTER," HE ANSWERED;
"BUT I LIKE IT
"BECAUSE IT IS BITTER,
"AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART."

THE TELEGRAPH

DID YOU KNOW THAT BECAUSE IT WAS AWESOME, THE TELEGRAPH SYSTEM WOULD ONLY SEND MESSAGES IN CAPITAL LETTERS?

DO YOU, MY FRIENDLY READERS, KNOW OF ANY OTHER ALL CAPS LITERARY PRODUCTIONS?

What Makes A Compulsive Song Compulsive?

2009-04-26T19:11:00.000-07:00

Right now I am listening to Okkervil River's Calling And Not Calling My Ex from their latest album, the Stage Names. (The embedded YouTube vid above is, in fact, a live recording of the song.) I have been listening to this song a lot. And by a lot I mean maybe three, four, five times a day, whenever I find a spare moment.

Now it doesn't take a Master's in psychology to figure out the etiology of this compulsion. I have been thinking a lot about an ex of my own. But we might find some interest in the details. What first drew me to the song was the line "I'm feeling pretty stupid now for ever having said goodbye." Which is exactly how I feel when I'm feeling, well, however it is that I feel. The sympathy I felt at that line made me stop, rewind the song, and start to listen again. Now, one way of explaining great art says that great art expresses what we otherwise find inexpressible. That great art alone can express these feelings because those feelings are too refined to be explained by our own poor powers of expression. But the emotions I find reflected in the song remain unexpressed by me, not because they are too ineffable or complicated, but because they are too cliched, too mawkish. I miss you. I never wish I said goodbye to you. The beauty comes from a simple sentiment, expressed simply, but a sentiment that if I actually said it would encourage my friends wonder whether I had turned emo on them. (Maybe, perhaps, I have.)

This has led me to think about obsessional songs. My housemate is currently listening over and over again to a verse by the British hip-hop legend Jehst (his verse starts at 1.10). In my sophomore year of college I listened to Mirah's song Mt St Helens every single morning when I woke up, much to the chagrin of my roomate, who at first hated the song, then grew to despise it, silently, while still in bed, trying to sleep, every day. (The song's first lines, "From the morning when I rise from my bed / to the evening when I lay my head in slumber" outright encouraged obsession--indeed, the song was compulsive because it was about compulsion. I blame you, Mirah, for mornings of moody music-listening, and for the discomfort you caused my roomate.)

These songs, I think, are just proxy obsessions: in my case, I am trying to find some way to channel my care for girls who, for whatever reason, are far away from me. In my housemate's case, he listens to Jehst ten times in a row because he is obsessed with the sheer skillful exuberance of the English language, with hip-hop, with speech.

Which is a little healthier, perhaps.

I don't know if what I'm talking about here is the already much talked-about earworm, but I suspect there is some difference. The earworm comes into your head unbidden. These songs, you invite them in.

I had first planned these paragraphs as an introduction to an open thread, and so will conclude:

TL;DR: What songs are you obsessed with, and why?

And again, the Times

2009-04-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

An interesting thing is happening in this Times article on Jackie Chan's inadvertent reactionary activism--there's a YouTube link! In the lede! Since when did the Times start including external links in its web versions of print stories?

I feel like I have missed the boat on this one.

And here's a funny sentence, for your pleasure:

As the storm gathered, words turned to action: the mayor of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, dropped Mr. Chan as an ambassador for the 2009 Summer Deaflympics in Taiwan.

More Red Flag Words

2009-04-23T17:40:00.000-07:00

1. "Let's catch up soon."

2. "Whatever does not kills you makes you stronger."

3. "My personal philosophy."

4. Gratuitous use of scare quotes.

5. Chocotinis.

6. "X pokes you!" (On Facebook.)

7. "I'm sorry but I just have to be selfish right now..."

8. "I finished writing my novel."

A Fact So True I Wish I Had Made It Up Myself

2009-04-22T18:11:00.001-07:00

Detroit hockey octopus throwing tradition. It exists.

Via mefi (thread contains MANY more octopi links, like my new favorite blog [sorry, Brendan!] Today In Tentacles.)

HAPPY ALL CAPS TUESDAY

2009-04-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

IT'S TUESDAY AGAIN, THE DAY WHEN WE RITUALLY HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY, AND THE WORLD--SUDDENLY, MIRACULOUSLY, BECAUSE OF THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES OR SOMETHIN--BECOMES MANY TIMES MORE AWESOME THAN IT WOULD BE OTHERWISE. YOU GUYS KNOW THE DRILL. WELL, IF YOU HAVE NOT YET RECEIVED THE ALL CAPS MEMO, I WILL TELL YOU THE DRILL:

EVERY TUESDAY

ALL CAPS

SO, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE SOME MEMES THAT I MADE.

ARE YOU ENOUGH OF A BADASS TO MAKE YOU OWN MEMES AND POST THEM ON THE ALL CAPS TUESDAY FACEBOOK GROUP? PROBABLY NOT.

I MADE THE DEPRESSION DOG AND ADVICE DOG MEMES USING THE TOTALLY ALL-CAPS MEMEGENERATOR.

A Papal Fact

2009-04-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

Of all the popes, the most curious must of course be Gregory the Uncertain, who was pope for only three years, between 1012 and 1015.

Gregory entered the papacy enamored with the fashionable superstitions of the time, such as miracles performed by holy men, the wondrous properties of relics, and the existence of and communication with demons. In fact, in his first year as pope, Gregory entertained a near-record number of pilgrims, con-men, and supplicants, who filtered in and out of the halls of the Vatican presenting the finger-bones of famous historical figures, odd growths on their foreheads that looked like cauliflower, and talking animals who got suddenly shy standing in front of the pope himself and would barely be able to talk about the weather. Gregory was quite amused by all these visitors, and was often seen clapping his hands and laughing.

However, Gregory was a weak-willed man, chosen more for his political connections to the powerful Florentine merchants the Snarkerellis than for his spiritual or organizational might, and he soon grew tired with his amusements and began in earnest to think of the nature of worship. This initiated what were known as the Months of Confusion, as Gregory would issue decree after decree, almost daily piling up new ordinances and suggestions, often confusing, mostly contradictory. For instance, on one day, Gregory, after studying some scrolls made the more obscure by his poor Aramaic, proclaimed that Christians should not keep cats. Duly, there were many devout families who, on hearing the news, tossed out their cats to the night and praised god for it. However, not more than eight days later, Gregory issued another statement proclaiming that the keeping of all pets, cats included, encouraged the love of Christ, and was a blessing, confusing all those who had so callously tossed our their family pets not eight days before. Gregory’s fiddling touched topics as diverse as haberdashery, accounting, archery, meteorology, cooking (especially the drying of fruits and fish), alchemy, the training and up-keep of house-squid, the naming of children, and a spectacular, daily, three-week-long clusterfuck of decrees relating to the wearing and washing of undergarments whose various twists and turns of argument are utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Pope Gregory, however, ensured his obscurity when he pronounced his last bit of advice, in which he, in mealy-mouthed Latin, proposed that maybe the whole dogma stuff of the Catholic church should be taken as a metaphor or something, because it really makes more sense that way, right? He was found dead three days later. He was canonized in 1456, and is considered the patron saint of stutterers and the indecisive.

This pope fact was requested by reader Melanie Poole. Request any sort of fact in the comments, and there you go, I will write you one.

Metaphor

2009-04-18T21:54:00.001-07:00

Can I Has Relaunch?

2009-04-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

So. I am posting more in this here blog. And I changed the title image. What do you think?

Also--tell your friends! Drop some comments.

Carousel

2009-04-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

via Mefi

Why You Should Want Higher Taxes

2009-04-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

Check it out. My colleague Ilan Moscovitz at the Motley Fool proposes that the financial crisis was caused, in part, by investors focusing on short-term gain rather than on the long-term health of the businesses they were investing in. He proposes a tax on short-term sales of stock to provide an incentive for long-term rather than short term investing. But why am I telling you this? Go read it yourself.

Nine Red Flag Words

2009-04-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

Here at Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters! we are committed to providing you with the most up-to-date in conversational technology. That is why we present you today with this handy list of red-flag words, phrases which lift a metaphorical red flag to announce the potential approach of conversational danger. When your conversational partner utters any one of these phrases, we advise you to take care, plan your escape routes, and calmly assess the situation. Remember: don't panic! If you are prepared and watch for the warning signs, you too can avoid the pitfalls of interlocutory disaster.

1. "I'm just at a point in my life when..."

2. "Deconstruction" to mean destruction or taking apart.

3. "Deconstruction" to mean "Deconstruction".

4. "Vis a vis", also, "qua".

5. "I don't mean to be [racist/insensitive/stupid] BUT..."

6. "Yeah, I know that X is an asshole, but he's really nice once you get to know him."

7. "I only [dance/sing/talk to girls/go out] when I'm drunk."

8. Anything to do with quantum mechanics or neuroscience (fMRI studies in particular) when the person's only source is "Some article I read..." or, in a more extreme case, "Some video my friend told me about..." that 'scientifically proves' [telepathy/time travel/the existence of god and/or the afterlife] ESPECIALLY when included in a discussion of recreational psychedelic drugs.

9. "Yeah, I wrote something about that on my blog."

Please suggest your own red flag words in the comments.

Local Media Me

2009-04-15T18:02:00.000-07:00

I will be an audience member on SBS' Q&A tonight. I won't be doing any Aing, nor will I be doing any Qing, but if you tune in you might be able to see my interested, beautiful face.

Nostalgia

2009-04-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm living in Canberra, where I went to high school. I left six or seven years ago. At the bars I crane my head around, looking for ghosts of people who knew me in high school, or who I used to know, and I often find them. Someone came up to me in the supermarket who used to buy my zines. People ask me when I cut off my dreadlocks (about eight years ago).

One of the questions people ask me is whether it's strange to be back, since so much has changed. The city center of Canberra, which is really the social heart of the city, and the only place that mattered to me as a kid, has changed dramatically. A mall has grown up around the edges of it, where once there were big thirsty parking-lots, and embraced the open square of Garema Place with a stone-face curtain of shops and movie theaters. That has changed, certainly. But the strange thing is more how everything has stayed the same. There still sits the same sleepy Vietnamese restaurant you never saw anyone eat in, that you were sure was about to go out of business, with the same faded plastic sign, the same sun-faded menu. The same streets and trees and the same faces. The same feeling of gentleness.

But for me this place is haunted. And each place has for me a memory. I remember driving by this empty lot nearing to the Braddon Club, heading up towards my home just a couple weeks ago. It was just gone autumn and the gutters were beginning to brim with leaves. And I remembered, so immediate that it hurt, walking down that very street, going home, in the cusp of autumn, with a beloved ex-girlfriend, just as we were beginning to court each other. The memory was so close, it was surprising that it was seven or eight years old. The fact that she wasn't next to me, that I couldn't call her, that our relationship had grown older, more complicated, and adult, just struck me for that brief moment as impossible--how could she not be waiting just outside of my vision, about to take my hand? how could it have changed. And yet I looked around and in the car were strangers, absolute strangers. (I had hitched a ride home with some acquaintances.) She wasn't there. Once I made it home I touched that place with my mind again, hoping to find her, but could taste only a dim memory, half-cold and unappetizing. For the twentieth of thirtieth time that day, I wished to go back in time, and wished at the very same moment to be right exactly where I was.

Robert Caro On LBJ On Charlie Rose

2009-04-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

Something to chew on

2009-04-14T02:39:00.000-07:00

Are we then not beasts to call the labor which makes us bestial?

...Perhaps we are right to condemn ourselves for giving birth to such an absurd thing as a man; right to call it an act of shame and the organs which seem to do it shameful.

--Montaigne, from On Some Lines Of Virgil

Hitting the gym!

2009-04-13T14:42:00.000-07:00

Guys, this blogging thing is pretty tough! I'm gonna go training!

via waxy.

What's The Use In Talking?

2009-04-12T15:02:00.000-07:00

So Thucydides is writing about the Spartans' debate about whether to go to war against the Athenians, treating us to pages and pages of arguments for and against, well-argued and cogent. Yet in the end the argument that wins the day is a quick paragraph so full of platitudinous cliches it makes a Hallmark Birthday card look like Winston Churchill. Thucydides says this:

The Spartans voted... that war should be declared, not so much because they were influenced by the speeches of their allies as because they were afraid of further growth of Athenian power....

This made me think of Lyndon Johnson, who in the position of Senate Majority Leader, saw the magnificence of public speaking much like the way you or I would look at a sledgehammer, that is, a blunt tool, to be used by someone else.

Eloquence on the floor of the Senate didn't matter because it was not eloquence that changed votes. It was Johnson with his promises, threats, and compromises. Even after hearing the most moving speech, a Johnson crony would still vote, not with his conscience, but with Johnson, for voting with Johnson was how people got things done. Johnson's early success as Majority Leader came by way of limiting debate on the floor: he made the entire Senate much more efficient by using a hitherto little-used parliamentary technology called a unanimous consent agreement, which forced the entire Senate to vote on particular bills at a particular time, clearing up the traditional speechifying logjam of Senates past. Indeed, the only real importance that speeches had on the floor of the Senate in those days was the threat of the filibuster, and comparing the filibuster to normal eloquence is like comparing a fancy dinner with a competitive eating championship.

This happens in the critical moment in the debate about the 1957 Civil Rights Bill:

Once, when Everett Dirkson of Illinois rose to support [House Minority Leader William] Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence ('I have been thinking much of Runnymede'), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.

That was Stewart Alsop as quoted in Robert Caro's magnificent biography, Master of the Senate. Here's Caro's quick gloss on Alsop:

The speeches didn't matter; Johnson's every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes--and he had the votes.

And he had the votes not because of speeches, but because he appealed to practical things. Yet still I think rhetoric is important, speeches are important, eloquence is important. Why?

The Secrets of An Exclusive Secret Society Revealed

2009-04-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

It's the first day of the Easter long weekend here in Canberra, and I am sitting in my bed with an espresso battling the cloying demons of memories of previous Easter long weekends. So, here I will give you a quick squib I wrote a while ago. Enjoy.

“Is that the office of some sort of a secret society or something, that ornate building you guys are exiting now?”
Me and Ronnie were dressed in lavender robes leaving the Osiris Temple. It was two in the morning and we were being accosted by some drunk too lonely to know not to talk to strange men late at night. Ronnie shook his head and told the guy that we were just renting the place out for a convention and so we didn’t know if it was a secret society or not, but wouldn’t it sure be funny if it was a secret society now, wouldn’t it!
And that’s one of the best things about being in a secret society: you get to tell people you are most definitely not in a secret society.

Conversations I get to have now that I’m in a Secret Society
GIRL: Wow, look at this, this guy at the Exclusive Hollywood Party, a photo of whom is in the tabloid entertainment magazine I am currently reading, he certainly looks a lot like you, isn’t that strange?
ME: Yes that is strange.
GIRL: And is that Scarlett Johannsen giving him a rather amorous kiss on his cheek?
ME: Yes. It appears to be so.
GIRL: That guy is very lucky, isn’t he.
ME: I agree wholeheartedly.

COLLEGE FRIEND: I didn’t know that you knew my (boss / girlfriend’s father / pastor) so well. Thanks a lot for getting me out of that jam I got myself into through of a startling lack of foresight and wisdom that unfortunately is well within character. If it wouldn’t have been for you I would have lost my (job / girlfriend / position in the church choir).
ME: It was no problem.
C.F.: And you know what’s weird, I just got my utility bill today, and there must be a problem with my meter, because now they’re actually giving me money. Can you believe that?
ME: Yes. Yes I can.

GUY AT A BAR, TO ME AND RONNIE: What was that elaborate, acrobatic handshake you guys just did? It wasn’t a secret handshake for some sort of secret society or anything, was it?
RONNIE: Of course not.
G.A.A.B.: Because whatever it was, it looked really awesome and I wish you could teach me.
RONNIE: We could, but then we would have to kill you.
ALL:
RONNIE: That was a joke. We wouldn’t have to kill you.
ME: We’d just have to poke out your eyes.
ALL:
RONNIE: Actually, we wouldn’t have to do anything. We have an army of thralls to do our dirty work for us.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: I bet you guys get up to some weird stuff. Probably with celebrities. And that it’s kinda gay.
And I’d say to you: The rituals of the Secret Society, while being continuously updated to reflect the changing times, are based on a proud tradition that dates back to the very founding of the Secret Society itself – which is a really mind-bogglingly long time ago (I can’t tell you how long ago, exactly, except that it pre-dated and was responsible for some pretty major milestones in the development of human culture, you’d be surprised) and while a few of these august rituals might seem a little, well, baroque to the outsider – even cruel – it’s still part of our tradition: and plus, they give the whole thing a sort of dangerous mystique which is so very integral to the proper coolness of a secret society.
And of course there are celebrities. But not the ones you’d expect. And they all go by their real names. And are a lot of fun at Charades, which, while not our official party game, is pretty close. Our official party game is one of our closest guarded secrets.

You know, the power, the celebrity friends, the parties – all of that is great. But it doesn’t make me happy.
What does make me happy is this. I get to go through the boring shit I have to do every day to keep up appearances and I know that underneath it all, behind the hours of work, beneath the restaurants and bars and strip-malls, lurking inside the television news broadcast smiles and the scientific discoveries there works a hidden but understandable intelligence. And it’s especially cool to know that I have some power over this intelligence. I live a parallel life in which the curtain hiding the truth of reality has been pulled back, and I can smile at the futility of it all, and the majesty. Which is pretty cool.

An Australian Fact

2009-04-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

One of the most successful medicinal hoaxes of English-speaking history was perpetrated against the nascent Australian settlers in the mid-18th century. Posing as a Hindu yogi named Adulakar, the disgraced Scottish physician Dr. Sam Arkman sold a snake-oil cure for "recidivism, onanism, and malingering, used exclusively by the Hindoo Prince for upwards of three millennia, now for the first time available for purchase or barter to the White Man, whose industry has now made him a fit subject for this miraculous mixture, this potent brew, available for only 2d, or equivalent in goods or specie." Although the exact composition of Hindbrew, as the drink was called, is for the most part unknown, it was no more than a mixture of hastily distilled spirits, mud and tincture of semi-medicinal herbs. However, due to Dr. Arkman's intense charisma, and the penchant of the Australian people for drink, Hindbrew became a staple of the Australian landscape, only being removed from school lunches in New South Wales, for instance, in 1979. After a series of exposes by the Sydney Morning Herald, which bravely revealed the truth about Mr. Arkman and his popular cure in 1981, Hindbrew was quietly removed from the Australian marketplace, being replaced by an alcohol-free solidified substitute known as 'Vegemite'.

Books I Am Reading

2009-04-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

Thucydides
David Mitchell--Ghostwritten
Jon Elster--Ulysses Unbound
Montaigne

Any other recommendations?

Daily posting will resume now.

Bad Metaphors Department

2009-02-24T14:51:00.001-08:00

Wherever you go, money's the same color.

ALL CAPS TUESDAY

2008-12-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

TUESDAY WHEN YOU WAKE UP AND SIP YOUR COFFEE JUST HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY ON YOUR KEYBOARD. EVERY TUESDAY. ALL CAPS. IT'S MORE AWESOME THAN ANYTHING ELSE YOU COULD HOPE TO DO ON TUESDAY DON'T EVEN WORRY ABOUT THINKING ABOUT THAT SHIT YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE BECAUSE I SAID SO.

HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE ALL CAPS THIS TUESDAY MORNING:

LBJ
FOOD THAT HAS A FACE (GUMMI BEARS, FISH, EASTER BUNNIES)
MULTI-VITAMINS

YEAH! WHAT DO YOU RECKON IS ALL CAPS?

SPECIAL ELECTION COMMENT

2008-11-04T13:55:00.001-08:00

The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace

2008-10-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Finally printed in full on the internet, for all us slackers.

"He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud."

Perfect Sentence

2008-10-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove, appearing as a convention panelist, was accosted on stage by a drunken hippie who tried to arrest him for treason.

The problem with anecdote

2008-10-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

Anecdote is one of those things that we use to understand the world. But there's a problem, because while anecdote can help us understand stuff on the minor scale of our personal lives (to prove that a particular person is flighty, for example, we don't expect any more than one story of that person canceling a date*) anecdotes suck about things any larger than our own small circle of friends and relatives. There's always going to be an anecdote to prove both sides of any issue. More than that, it's just kinda an inane way of understanding the world when you get down to it, telling illustrative stories. Check out the latest Brooks column to see anecdote at its worst. The anecdote doesn't add any insight into the situation, and is, well, just kinda weird.

*We can believe something, of course, almost in spite of all evidence if we'd want to. Though we might decide a person's flighty after hearing a single story about them, it might take us three or four or ten or twenty instances of flightiness (or a whole three months' worth of flightiness) in our own experience to come to the same conclusion, because we are wedded to the idea that this particular person is much less than flighty, indeed that they are especially kind, we think, and very concerned about our well-being.

McCain Begins

2008-10-19T17:44:00.000-07:00

After reading this New Yorker story about how Palin became McCain's VP pick, it struck me that Palin was kinda like Batman-Begins-era-Katie-Holmes. I mean you've got this product--McCain and the movie--and the product is trying its best to make its case for itself, but then on the sideline you've got someone charismatic, who the media loves, whojust keeps on sucking the juice from the main story. Coverage of Batman Begins was overshadowed by Holmes' 'association' with the sofa-jumping Tom Cruise. Coverage of McCain is similarly overshadowed by his bright-as-a-penny Tina Fey impersonator.

All Koans Are Broken

2008-10-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

All koans are fixed.

Boring Stories

2008-10-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

You know when you're hanging out with one of those profoundly lonely people and they start telling you a story, only it's about this ridiculously inane thing because they actually have no stories since they're so lonely? Like they start telling you about how they met a man once, right, at a bar, and he we really drunk. And then you're sitting there, waiting for the story-like information, the novelty to hit, but it never hits--that's it?

The worst part about being lonely is that you have the nagging suspicion that when a person spends time with you they will judge you to be just about as miserable as you feel. Like with teen-age self-hatred, the sad part is that this sentiment is, more often than not, justified.

Such as: That rosy-colored distorting lens

2008-10-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

Ideology makes us biased. That's pretty easy to admit. We read newspapers that confirm our opinion, we focus on the stories that do not test our beliefs, and we presume the idiocy of anyone who is the other side of an idea. And while we're very comfortable affirming this truth abstractly, I am loathe to admit it personally. I know I read biased sources of information and that I read 'unbiased' information through the distorting lens of my own bias. But I think that I'm above the indignity of being wrong.

Now that's all fine and good . If we second-guessed our every interpretation for signs of bias we'd be closer to going crazy than we'd be closer to the Truth. But it's surprising the extent to which our ideology distorts our views of the world. And it's good to confront this distortion for two reasons. First, ideology's distortion of evidence can explain why reasonable people can so sharply differ in their opinions. The fact that people can believe in the sanctity of a religion or the free market, the sagacity of a particular politician and the saintliness of another , the mystical benefits of Tibetan Buddhism contra the Secret--it's always a bit of a puzzle to me. But such gulfs in opinion are not proof of maliciousness of stupidity (or need not be proof of maliciousness or stupidity), it's proof only that when you believe something you are more likely to see it confirmed. If you believe that prayer can heal diseases, you are that much more likely to read the newspaper story about the healing power of prayer. If you believe that Obama is a vampiremuslimterroristabortionist then you are going to treat news stories about Ayers and Wright differently than if you believe Obama is already President but for the graceful and ineluctable election. That's the first reason why it might be good to admit the distortion of our own ideology.

The second reason is more uncomfortable. Admitting the distortion of ideology we admit we are wrong. And when we are proven wrong we will be as stubborn and as bull-headed and as frustrating as those people who drive SUVs and proudly affirm that global warming doesn't exist. Their problem isn't that they are assholes. (They might be assholes.) Their problem is that they're human. And when you tell a human being they're wrong they are not going to admit they are wrong, as a first reaction--they're going to tell you why you're wrong, slopjob.

What got me started thinking this way was reading a piece by Camille Paglia. This thing stood out to me as one of the most obvious examples of ideologically distorted thought I've ever seen.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant. [Emphasis mine.]

(And here to admit my own susceptibility to distortion, when I first read this I skimmed over the bits where Paglia supports Obama, and thought that she was just another conservative. When drafting this essay, I thought of Paglia in that mode, too, even though she is more complicated, certainly. I faced disconfirmation of my belief, and instead of throwing up my hands and admitting ignorance--I ploughed on.)

Now. I'm wondering now whether to mount a frontal attack on the meat of this quote, or to go from behind. First, the frontal attack, as quickly as I can make it. Sarah Palin's ineloquence isn't striking just because it's hilarious; it's striking because it reveals a lack of detailed thought filled--not with policy knowledge of a deep or shallow variety--but with sound bites. Shakespeare's English wasn't great because it was experimental, but because it more perfectly communicated the human condition. Sarah Palin didn't communicate anything. Her ineloquence is a secondary problem, just as Shakespeare's eloquence is only secondary to his charm.

Now the attack from behind, which is more amenable to my thesis. Paglia approached the debate from the angle that Sarah Palin was "as powerful new [symbol] of a revived contemporary feminism." From that lens, what looks to me as Palin's idiocy looks to Paglia as Palin's brave stabs at unconventional communication. Now I don't get paid to express an opinion, which leaves me in an envious position compared with Paglia. I don't need to have an opinion, and if I do have an opinion, nobody really cares whether it's interesting or not. Paglia gets paid to have opinions that people care about, and so she cannot rest in the middle ground, this led her to servery misinterpret Palin's public performance.

Differences in interpretation are going to be so vast because we select which data to notice based on our beliefs, and so different people will be more or less likely to notice different information. Paglia's gush about Palin is akin to the review we would expect from the parents of Miss Teen South Carolina. Where we see indubitable failure, they, through those rosy-colored distorting lenses of affection, see excuse, interpretation--certainly they don't see a witless bimbo but a charming and nervous girl struggling through a stupid question--they pick out the evidence which supports their love.

Not that I'm ragging on just Paglia. No doubt I have committed far graver epistemic sins, only I'm lucky or unlucky enough not to have those sins survive in print. We all are guilty. If you have a crush on a girl you're much more likely to focus on the things she does which convinces you that your feelings are reciprocated. If you like a sports team you are going to think that their chances in a given season are so much higher than they really are.

The question is, when it comes time for us to face the moment when our beliefs do not match reality, will we go to the tribunal of experience kicking and screaming , or will we go bravely under the cowl of our own ignorance. It is far easier to kick and scream, and better for the ego. It is my personal hope, though, that when it comes my time I will be brave about it, bite my tongue, and agree that I can be every bit an idiot.

The Problem of Synecdoche

2008-09-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

Poll question that popped up on my screen watching the MySpace coverage of the presidential debates (paraphrase):

Do you think that another 9/11 will happen on US soil?

I sure hope so. Every year, right after September 1oth.

Ponder this:

2008-09-25T04:31:00.000-07:00

Why is it that when you're on a date, suddenly everything seems cheaper? Like two scoops of ice cream at Baskin Robbins is something like three bucks, which I'd never ever spend on my own. But suddenly I'm on a date and three bucks is nothing. Go wild! Put whipped cream and nuts on that shit if you want. I'll pick up the tab for everyone. Then when I'm alone again I will think long and hard about shelling out sixty cents for a candy bar.

The world is vast...

2008-09-25T04:30:00.000-07:00

Question asked to me today at lunch:

"At what age do American students start to use mechanical pencils?"

LOLEXPERIENCE

2008-09-23T14:43:00.001-07:00

A Fact About Our Bodies

2008-09-23T00:58:00.000-07:00

Victims of Havenffeld-Snarksburg Syndrome, a congenital neurological disorder, are unable to understand or display self-deception. Otherwise normal HSS patients find simple statements like "Be honest with yourself..." or "He's pulled the wool over his own eyes," completely incomprehensible. Oddly enough, HSS seems to coincide with deep depressive tendencies. Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRIs) neuro-scientists studying HSS are trying to pin-point the part of the brain devoted to self-deception. Hopefully they will develop a drug to help those of us who are wholly or partially unable to slip into states of pleasant self-delusion.

My Financial Plan

2008-09-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

Well, US 'Mericans, it's been a bad couple of weeks. DFW's dead, the stock market has officially come unloosed from any tethers that once held it to the Beachhead Of Empirical Evidence causing stock prices to do a fairly good visual impression of my emotional maturity level at a high falootin' party (unpredictable huge rises and falls, with a severe downward trend), and added on top of that people don't seem to want to buy books, which makes my dream of eating with the money people paid me for my books seem unrealistic, so there's little left to do these days but wait for the upcoming season of 30 Rock.

Given these circumstances, US 'Mericans, I give you my Brendan Mackie-Brand Financial Plan. If John McCain wins the election, that's it, I'm short selling the US. You heard me right. Naked short selling, too.

I'll put my short order in naked. Take that, disappointing 2008!

Snip From The New Yorker

2008-09-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge—from the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.

Indeed.

COME ON MEDIA

2008-09-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, reading the Times' comparison of the campaigns' stances on science issues presented a moment which illustrates the frustration of this presidential election cycle. They compare McCain and Obama's climate change policies thusly:

In terms of 1990 levels of carbon emissions, Mr. McCain would ultimately have the nation’s output drop by 60 percent and Mr. Obama by 80 percent.

BUT THEY NEVER MENTION THE MECHANISM FOR CONTROLLING THESE CARBON EMISSIONS. Which is, of course, you know, KINDA IMPORTANT. And the candidates have very different plans. McCain, for one, favors the public auction of carbon credits, which, as I understand it, is just a huge money giveaway which won't actually help reduce emissions at all, in comparison to an actual cap and trade scheme.

It's not like explaining anything like this would take more than ten words. It seems disingenuous at best to compare the two candidates and yet somehow escape any actual comparisons between the two. Perhaps, when you get a detailed enough comparison of policies so that people can actually judge the merits of them it violates journalistic objectivity or something. Because the facts would obviously favor one side. How else do we explain the continued belief that Alaskan oil drilling would have any effect at all on domestic gas prices?

UPDATE 10/6: Umm , it seems that I got confused about the differences between McCain and Obama's plan. Obama does favor the auctioning of carbon credits. I know that there are substantive differences between the two plans, only I am, unfortunatly, unclear as to what those differences are. Also, somewhat lazily, I will use this ignorance to further bolster my original point: we need more policy information in our news sources.

David Foster Wallace Dead

2008-09-14T01:09:00.001-07:00

As far as public figures go, this death feels personal to an embarrassing extent. Usually I am somewhat callous towards death, especially about the death of people who one does not actually know personally. But it's not just insensitivity to the public lamentations around Heath Ledger and Princes Di--barring it befalling close friends and family members, death fails to move me. Throw a friend in my lap, inconsolable that her sister's best friend died, and I'll look at them with the condescending incomprehension fitting the observation of forgotten and ecstatic religious rites of some minor deity of the Roman pantheon. But then I read that this author has died, David Foster Wallace--who I have never met and who I have had only the most tangential personal relationship with--I can't do anything but fall to my bed.

Enough of this personal stuff. Well, one more thing. In my senior year of college when I was worrying whether or not I should try to "make it as a writer" I wrote David Foster Wallace with a story of mine. I got a postcard back a couple months later, and he said that my style was "clear and unpretentious" (I can remember that) and he wished me luck in a way that I interpreted as meaning that he saw some promise in me. My number two most recurring fantasy about my novel (number one is having ex-girlfriends and -crushes call me and tell me how my they like me) is that I would get it published and sent it off to DFW and he'd read it and appreciate it and we could become friends.

Of course that's not going to happen.

But that brief brush with the man himself is not enough to warrant my feeling upset by his death. Even taking into account the place that DFW's writing held in my own personal story, his death is not enough to make me fall on my bed and not want to get up and, at a Korean Thanksgiving I was attending, invited by the Tae Bo teacher I have a ridiculous crush on, his death should not make me nearly sob over the tiggim that "My favorite author has just killed himself"--a sentence which elicited nothing but bemused glances from my dining companions, English- and non-English-speaking alike.

The thing that makes Wallace's death so poignant is that it shouldn't of happened. First, we all wanted more. Wallace's was the kind of writing that was perfectly compulsive. The loss of his voice, of the chance of another novel, that's baffling to me.

But there's more, and here's where we might have to get a bit more personal again. Wallace seemed to have struggled with the demons that come with being a smart, sensitive person in the world. And he'd seemed to really conquer them. An aside that will make sense further in this paragraph: You know how you can tell the difference between someone who gets Wallace and someone who doesn't? Someone who doesn't get him will talk about his verbal acuity (or, pretentiousness) those footnotes, that flair. Someone who gets him will talk about his observational acuity. How he seemed to be able to frankly talk about the dark corners of life with such off-putting, shocking accuracy. Like he just peered into your secret, crazy thoughts, described them just right, and told you what to do about it. And so he peered into those crazy thoughts, understood them, and didn't like what he saw.

Is it a cliche to say that the choice of our lives is whether to live or whether to off ourselves? It's something I've thought about. Does the periodic bed-bound wordless sadness that sometimes strikes me--is it worth sitting through to get to the other bits? To get to those times that rank with eating chocolate cake or hearing that your friend gets promoted or sitting at Korean Thanksgiving and having the Tae Bo instructor who may or may not want to date you hold your hand. Does the banal difficulty of life merit the pleasures? Now, sometimes I haven't dared think about that reckoning. But most times I think, pretty solidly, that the pleasures by far outweigh the indignities.

But Wallace, who I respect, who I understand, who I thought got this stuff better than most people out there--he thought otherwise. He thought that life was just too painful to keep going.

And so Wallace's suicide makes me afraid!

I'm not angry at him. I'm not going to throw around any pablum about how it's grossly selfish to kill yourself or anything like that and I'm not going to try to call him crazy for doing what he did. Because if you can't understand why he'd do it, then you're not trying hard enough. And even though those things are true, that suicide is selfish and never the right answer, just saying that doesn't make sense of his death, it doesn't give any sort of comfort.

The tough part is thinking that with all his sensitivity and intelligence, this was his answer. Not another book, no more courses teaching students, not even an easy life reading somewhere eating cake. A rope around his neck. That was his answer. And it's that answer which hurts. Like if you hiked up a huge mountain to meet an enlightened master and asked him what you should do with your life and he turned his eyes towards you and slowly, proudly, asked you what brand shoes you wore.

HOLY SHIT

2008-09-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

What's Liz Lemon doing with Colonel Tigh?

... Oh wait.

UPDATE: Huh? (via waxy).

How Training A Dog Is Like Teaching A Korean Schoolgirl

2008-08-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

Check out this cool video from the perma-cool TED talks about... dog training. Not the most interesting subject ever, I know, but this must be the most genius dog trainer you'll see. Ian Dunbar, the dog trainer in question, has a really neat perspective on canine discipline. It's pretty simple, like all great things are. You have to make the dog's desires line up with yours.

This is great because I think we can take everything he says about dog training and apply it to the rest of our lives, translating the advice about teaching "sit puppy" to "now learn some English." So many times in the classroom do I find myself making the mistakes Dunbar ascribes to bad dog owners. I punish the kids by yelling at them. I fail to understand why the kids want to talk with each other instead of listening to me patter on in a foreign tongue. Dunbar's strategy is all about empathy--about seeing 'bad' behaviour as something logical and understandable, not as evidence of metaphysical malfeasance. This requires making a greater-than-usual effort to understand another being's perspective, but the pay-off is huge: instead of seeing my students as THE ENEMY who I must forge into a disciplined English-learning machine, I can see them as creatures with their own desires and needs--I just have to somehow shoehorn English learning in there. If he can understand why a puppy acts up, then I can understand why my students want to talk with each other instead of studying English.

Now, what's the practical upswing of all this rarefied theoretical bullshit? My biggest discipline problem teaching is that my (all-girl) students often want to gossip to each other in Korean. So if I can take their relentless social urge and somehow filter it into English learning, then my classes will be significantly easier, and more fun. The great thing about teaching a language which you won't get from teaching math or literature, is that language-learning is hard-wired in our brains. It is as natural as eating. The pay-off is instantly satisfying: communication. Now how to harness that communication, that's the hard part, but I suppose I will spend the better part of my weekend thinking this through.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

2008-08-25T15:59:00.001-07:00

One of the reasons why I am the odd critter I am has to be hours of my most impressionable youth wasted soaking up Ren and Stimpy. I was always a little disappointed that real life was nothing like Ren and Stimpy.

THE POLLS ARE IN!

2008-08-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

Horse-raceish campaign coverage reminds me of a guy tasked to cover the summer swimming hole who wastes his word count dragging his fat big toe through the water skittishly reporting "The water here at the swimming hole is still cold"--but who never actually girds his swimmers and swims, refusing to grace his exasperated readers with even the most cursory splash.

Times for a Quote

2008-08-24T15:02:00.001-07:00

More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth.

Octopus Love

2008-08-20T04:15:00.000-07:00

It's sweet. And no, I'm not thinking of the Dream of the Fishmonger's Wife.

(via Drawn.)

Wither?

2008-08-08T23:20:00.000-07:00

I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself.
“I manufacture opinions,” I said.

“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”

“By the number of people who strongly agree or strongly disagree with me,” I said. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly inaccurate, there is somehow a perception that I am being successful."

-via Fimoculous

Richard Nixon's gremlin.

2008-08-08T19:53:00.000-07:00

From the obviously-beloved Museum of Hoaxes comes this story of Dick Tuck, a man who--for reasons which go unmentioned in the article, but will be readily imagined by anyone with a prime-time-television understanding of American history--decided to make Richard Nixon's life miserable and so dogged the pol with simperingly quiescent pranks. My favorite prank: a whole nursery of pregnant women, bellies bulging, holding signs outside a campaign appearance saying "Nixon's the one".

We should totally Tuck McCain.

Who is more dangerous? Bin Laden's driver? Or the guy on the corner smoking crack.

2008-08-07T18:17:00.000-07:00

Today Osama bin Laden's driver was sentenced to spend the next five months in prison (he's already served about five years waiting for a trial.) Now this is big, front page news because it's a nice and tidy important judicial victory that comes tantalizingly close to global fear-or-ist number one himself. But one huge glooming thing stretches over this conviction for me. The man is being sentenced, really, for his proximity to bin Laden. The actual charge-this guy is now a war criminal for this-is "providing material support to a terrorist organization." This man was no terrorist mastermind, no idelogical firebrand. He was a driver.

But there's a double-take-worthy sort of twilight justice going on here. On the one hand, the courts declared this guy a war criminal. On the other hand, they don't see his war crimes as eliciting any more than five years in prison. Just to put that into perspective, that's the mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine. In fact, the average sentence for someone convicted of first-time trafficking of crack cocaine is ten years. So your local rock-slinger is TWICE as dangerous as Osama bin Laden's driver. Who is a war criminal. Isn't that a bit strange?

"Thought Experiment"

2008-08-01T16:10:00.000-07:00

What if there was a gangster mystique about selling cookware instead of crack?

What Book Are You Ashamed Of Not Having Read?

2008-07-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

A bunch of cultured Brits answer that question in this amusing video. How is it that while these people are proclaiming their ignorance about the classics of Western Thought I still feel like they are infinity more cultured, intelligent, and dinner-party-worthy than your current humble bog writer?

Wednesday Morning Video Blogging

2008-07-01T14:12:00.000-07:00

First, I totally have an internet crush on the delightful cooking-puppet-crazy TV show FOOD PARTY, the Christmas episode is embedded below.

The second mixes one of my true loves--bluegrass--with one of my kinda loves--indie music--HERE WE GO:

Charming links, right? Well they're both from Metafilter. Which explains why Metafilter is more popular than this here blog.

Scratched the surface of the treasure trove.

2008-06-26T01:07:00.000-07:00

I have a strange hobby. Now, it's less of a hobby and more a potential for a hobby-an interest I have which I've only surreptitiously and half-heartedly started to follow. I love vintage music. Especially pop music. Hearing the worn-out strains of 1920s popular songs on my iPod is such a magnificent confusion. The songs seem so immediately familiar in their usual poppiness, but they sound like pop from another world, from a distant America, which is true, they're from a completely different America, one we can never know, a passed, strange America which wore hats.

All this is an introduction to today's find: two large treasure troves of vintage music (via WFMU's Beware of the Blog).

The Greatest Literary Hoax (Or One Of Them)

2008-06-25T17:20:00.000-07:00

Check out the story of I, Libertine, a literary hoax to end all literary hoaxes (via Boing Boing.)

Gosh, I wish I could make a hoax like this one.

How Smart Is The Octopus?

2008-06-25T06:05:00.001-07:00

Readers of this blog will know: very smart.

NO DESPOT, PLZ

2008-06-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Like any sensible man, I've been thinking about Henry Timrod this morning, the poet laureate of the Confederacy--reading his poems shows just how batshit crazy the Civil War was. Here's a particular gem:

A CRY TO ARMS.

Ho! woodsmen of the mountain side!
Ho! dwellers in the vales!
Ho! ye who by the chafing tide
Have roughened in the gales!

Leave barn and byre, leave kin and cot,
Lay by the bloodless spade;
Let desk, and case, and counter rot,
And burn your books of trade.

The despot roves your fairest lands;
And till he flies or fears,
Your fields must grow but armed bands,
Your sheaves be sheaves of spears!
Give up to mildew and to rust
The useless tools of gain;
And feed your country's sacred dust
With floods of crimson rain!

Come, with the weapons at your call -
With musket, pike, or knife;
He wields the deadliest blade of all
Who lightest holds his life.
The arm that drives its unbought blows
With all a patriot's scorn,
Might brain a tyrant with a rose,
Or stab him with a thorn.

Does any falter? let him turn
To some brave maiden's eyes,
And catch the holy fires that burn
In those sublunar skies.
Oh! could you like your women feel
And in their spirit march,
A day might see your lines of steel
Beneath the victor's arch.

Let's conversate in this space.

2008-06-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

To the stakeholders of the Super Naarkatron project,

We need to touch base about this offline, but in order to pre-prepare and get some forward planning as we are going forward together, from the get-go we’d better not let the grass grow too long on this one and get all of our ducks in a row, we need to start actioning 110% of our human capital if we don’t want to have egg on our face because we didn’t pick the low-hanging fruit when we have the chance and we ended up being stuck at the close of play without even looking under the bonnet to conversate about how we could solve the challenges we faced: the fact is that we are in negative territory in this space; we need to have some 360-degree thinking idea showers because we all know you can't turn a tanker around with a speed boat change—I assure you I have a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach on my radar but my door is still open with respect to this—but let’s loop back on this: the fact is that you can't have your cake and eat it too, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music; I know that there have been rumors to the effect that we don’t have enough bandwidth to come to the party and really live the values of our company, but at the end of the day that’s a way to wrongside the demographic—why don’t you take a business 2.0 approach to that and learn to sprinkle some magic on our challenges and incentivise our paradigm shifts?—also in addition if anyone wants to get their fingers down the throat of the organization of that nodule tell them you’ve got leverage it was auspiced by me, Rupert Naark: to feed it back, not only do we need to become project evangelists we must capture our colleagues and hope for the strategic staircase will cascade into the target demographic, but I digress; taking a high-altitude view I assure you the business is still a really cool train set, and we continue to be optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline, but despite drilling down, we must make drastic reductions in our workforce in this space.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Rupert S. Naark, CEO-at-large, Nark Industries

This sentence has every single one of the BBC News' 50 office speak phrases you love to hate.

A. O. Scott, you are my favorite person in the world.

2008-06-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

Seriously, A. O. Scott. I would really like to be you. Reading an A. O. Scott review is like eating chocolate--WHILE READING AN A. O. SCOTT REVIEW. It's so good, it's fucking recursively good. Check out this gem from his review of "The Love Guru"

No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.

And here's another one:

I’m not opposed to infantile, regressive, scatological humor. Indeed, I consider myself something of a connoisseur. Or maybe a glutton. So it’s not that I object to the idea of, say, witnessing elephants copulate on the ice in the middle of a Stanley Cup hockey match, or seeing a dwarf sent flying over the same ice by the shock of defibrillator paddles. But it will never be enough simply to do such things. They must be done well.

A. O. Scott, can we be friends?

How To Nap

2008-06-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

We humans make everything more complicated than it needs to be. Just to expend our excess brain power, I suppose. In that proud tradition, here's a handy infographic on how to nap. I encourage you to practice at work today.

Gore Vidal Is A Badass The Only Problem Is He Knows It

2008-06-14T17:20:00.000-07:00

Do you read a lot of contemporary fiction these days? Like everyone else, no, I don’t.

Signs That You've Been Bit By The Travel Bug

2008-06-10T14:19:00.000-07:00

If you read this list of tourist spots Americans can't visit (via Kottke) and you begin to plan how, indeed, you could visit them all.

I think that Kumgangsan is a bit within my reach, right?

This Time, The Times

2008-06-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

The recipe didn’t run in the magazine. Nor do ones that call for glove boning, which is a way to turn a bird inside out to bone it without cutting into the skin.
“It’s a marvelous technique, but who is going to do that?” Ms. Minifie asked.

In South Korea, Students Study So Hard They Have To Leave South Korea

2008-06-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports on the curious phenomenon of South Koreans sending their kids to English-speaking countries to study English. Don't think for a second when you're reading this that this is at all rare. In every single class I teach there is at least one student who has lived in Australia or Canada or New Zealand (usually Canada). Sometimes there are two or three. And these students have a definite edge over the other kids, at least when it comes to English.

The demand for English education in Korea is huge. There are about 300,000 of us native English teachers here (keep that number in mind when you read that Lee Myun Bak wants to add an additional 10,000). And part of the reason why the demand is so great is that there exists a sort of low-level desperation about English. Everybody knows that it's important, and everybody studies very very hard, but learning good English, the sort of English expressed on test scores, seems almost Sisyphean.

And the problem I see is that the high cost of education is driving a wedge between rich and poor. After-school kids are expected to go to private academies (which cost a lot of money) and these kids will do better in class. And so in the public school classroom, the bar is raised a little higher--perhaps so high that the kids whose families cannot afford academies or private tutors or trips to Australia will fall behind. I know in my classroom sometimes the only kids who can understand me are those who have been to America, go to two English academies a day.

And it's not like the kids who can do well are enjoying themselves. My students--middle school students--study so much that when I ask them questions like "What are your hobbies?" they tell me "Sleep." "Video games." Indeed, after the last vacation I asked my students: "What did you do?" and many told me "I went to Bangkok."---This is Korean slang for staying in the house all day. (Bang means room, and I think Ko means corner [I'm not sure.]) Anyway. The kids are being educated ragged. Without the freedom to let their minds play, get creative, rebel, create themselves.... Just so they can speak good English. Damn.

Korean Food: A Crash Course

2008-06-05T04:03:00.000-07:00

Today at an impromptu teacher's lunch/dinner (the proceedings stretched continuously from about eleven thirty in the morning until five in the evening) I ate the following, in order.

FIRST SNACK
Kimbap.
Coffee.

SECOND SNACK
Korean lunch-box (including pork cutlet, rice, soup, and a variety of other things whose name I do not know.)
Coffee
Coffee-flavored cookies.

THIRD SNACK (speared by the P.E. teacher as he waded into the ocean in a SCUBA suit--literally killed by the P.E. teacher not more than three minutes prior to the food sliding into our mouths--did I mention that we were eating this all right on the beach?)
Fresh sea cucumber.
Assorted fish.

APPETIZER
Mussel soup.

SECOND APPETIZER
Live! Sea! Cucumber!
Live penis fish. (I do not know what this is in English, but it looks like a penis, and it's most certainly an invertebrate, because even after you kill it and chop it up it continues to writhe in agony suggesting it has no central nervous system. It looks pretty much exactly like a penis.)
Live octopus.
Some sort of crustacean that tastes like sea water that we certainly do not eat in America.

MAIN DISH
Fresh scallops (still moving) cooked on a table-mounted barbecue. (The first cooked thing we ate all day!)
Some other sort of fresh shell-fish.
Kim-chee.

AFTER-MAIN DISH SNACK
Eel. (Now, there were many things I ate which the Korean teachers suggested would give me 'stamina', basically all the phallic fish which you ate still alive fall into this category, for obvious reason, but the very most potent stamina-boosting food was the spine of the eel, served separately from the rest of the eel, and I ate about ten of them, these spines, and though you might think that the whole stamina thing is bullshit, I'm having heart palpitations right now, and I blame it squarely on my eel-induced male power.

I managed to get home somehow but some of the P.E. teachers want me to come out and drink with them. But I can barely move.

And I thought I haven't had any action for a while.

2008-06-04T03:24:00.000-07:00

The bdelloid rotifer, a tiny transparent puddle-dwelling animal, hasn't had sex for 85 million years.

You know, if celibacy was really god's will, these little creatures are guaranteed to be the divine's chosen animal.

In South Korea, It Never Ends

2008-06-02T04:54:00.000-07:00

The it meaning work. My humble host nation topped the list of the hardest working countries. The average South Korean works six and a half hours a day EVERY DAY OF THEIR LIVES.

Thankfully, this workaholism does not transfer to the large English-teaching population. Although if you counted my literary pursuits as 'work' I am probably pretty high up there, as far as total hours spent in work each day.

Just to emphasize something that they mentioned in the article, here you are often given a title depending on your job. Instead of Mr. Mackie I am Mackie-Teacher, or, in proper South Korean, Mackie San Sang Nim.

Back in the days before the internet...

2008-05-31T02:46:00.000-07:00

I had a zine. I would sell this zine on the street after school. The zine was mildly successful, and having consistent and direct communication with people who would read--and enjoy!--my writing was really the biggest encouragement I ever got to take up writing as my vocation. The most frustrating thing about working on my novel is that while I am writing it nobody else sees it. Until I finally get it written and edited enough to be fit for human consumption, it's mark in the lives of the people around me comes simply through me being absent because I am working on the novel. I can't come out tonight because I have to write. I am staying in Busan these holidays because I have to write. I post on the blog irregularly because I have to write the novel. I wish that I could post every day's work here and have you all fawn over it--and there's a lot of words that I've written--but writing a novel I am consistently aware that what I am making at the moment is crap that will need the polishing of three or four intensive revisions before being at all fit for other people to read. All of this is a really long introduction to this discovery I just made. Some of my old zines are cataloged in the Australian National Library!

The Great Leap Go Straight One Block

2008-05-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

Oh China, you've tried a bunch of crazy shit in the past seventy years. So many naively ambitious projects that end up, you know, causing mass famine. I don't reckon for a second that you're latest unrealistic goal will kill anyone, but it will certainly make life awkward.

China is trying to get 30% of all Chinese to speak English in time for the Olympics.

This means that there are a thousand flowers of EFL teachers blooming in China. But the only problem is that the Asian style of learning language, often focused on rote repetition, can be a poor way of teaching English. Check out this article from the Times about the trials of teaching English in China to see what I'm talking about. It's similar in Korea, but without the pervasive nationalism.

I am lucky. When I teach I'm able to give my students activities where they actually use English, where they talk with each other, construct sentences, and struggle to impart some sort of English-language meaning. But they also have to memorize stacks of semi-obscure vocabulary every week (one particularly improbable vocab word--for a middle school girl--was child restraining belt). English is not only a subject to study so that one may speak with foreigners and participate in the global economy, it is an activity for itself often, an abstract mark of success counted by TOFEL scores, grades, and proficiency tests. But then the kids who communicate with me the best, they're often not the kids with the best English, they're the kids who are the bravest, the most willing to make a mistake. So I want to do two things when I teach. I want to help them construct proper sentences telling me how they're feeling and how to find the post office; but I also want them to test their bravery.

Quotes From The Times

2008-05-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

“Either he’s absolutely demonic or stupid or crazy,” Mr. Neal concluded.

About R. Kelly. But is Mr. Neal talking about Mr. Kelly's new album or about his penchant for pubescent urolagnia?

The Internet Times Four

2008-05-18T04:19:00.000-07:00

I was looking through Slate's procrastination packet [via Fimoculous] which includes a cool round-up of how different professions waste time. The whole list is great, but one stood out for me: the CIA-agent talking about how he wastes time surfing the CIA's databases. Here's a snip:

It was always pretty shocking to me just how deep the abyss of information actually was. It’s like the Internet times four.

Just think of that. Four internets worth of information. I wonder what they've got on us!