11:24 AM
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10:33 AM
10:33 AM
Subtraction: Plastic, Interrupted:
One thing that I like about my new iMac (in spite of its problems) and my iPod— is that they’re both basically hunks of cheap plastic — and neither tries to be anything else. This is a beautiful thing.
By way of contrast, consider my Treo 650. Or, for that matter, consider any of the many, many pieces of digital hardware currently available on the market that, like my Treo, share the absolutely cringe-worthy characteristic of being pieces of plastic that are painted to look like metal.
10:29 AM
SHEILA CALLAGHAN - blog:
This one morning is the kind where every person who steps foot out her door will inhale in unison and feel like crying a little. Hats and gloves thrown into purses or in backbacks for the evening, but not for the day... the walk to the subway, the walk at lunchtime, pumpkins on doorways and spicy hot drinks and cider, too many apples...
But the 70 degrees is the thing that kills. As you walk down the leaf-coated street you think of the one person whose lover you should have been. You think of jumping into a pile of leaves with him in Central Park, though never in your adult life have you jumped into a pile of leaves and especially not in Central Park where there could be rats lurking beneath and CERTAINLY not in the light fall coat you just got back from the dry cleaners... but anyway today there are no rats and coats don't get dirty and the air was meant for eating and strangers are there for you to touch yes that lady with the beautiful knee-high brown leather boots and the chocolate corduroy skirt is yours and yes the man with the square-toed shoes and the Times folded beneath his arm blowing on his coffee waiting for the light to change he is yours too.
And your lover, the one you never had... he is lying in a pile of leaves around the bend, breathing heavily from the exertion of his leap. His arms are outstretched. He's waiting for you.
12:41 AM
9:24 PM
7:54 PM
Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Vive La Resistance:
I was chatting with some friends after the Maher show. They'd been against the war from the beginning. They were African-American and said it was obvious to them that the WMD argument was what they called "game." They weren't surprised. I was. I believed George W. Bush. And I trusted him. And as the evidence has poured in that my faith and trust were betrayed, my surprise has turned to rage. I'm not a generally angry person. But if I have placed my trust in someone on a matter of this gravity and I find out they lied, bungled and betrayed me and others who trusted them, then all I can say is: they picked the wrong guy to bamboozle.
You don't send 19 year-old kids to risk their lives and die to protect your own political power or advance your own partisan purposes. You don't abandon thousands of innocent Iraqis who also trusted you to marauding gangs of terrorists and murderers, and stand by and tell critics to "back off". You don't ask people of good faith to support you in a critical war and then secretly breach the Geneva Conventions and torture people and blame only a few grunts on the ground for your war-crimes.
The anger of the left, I realize, was always there. But the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper. Some readers think my anger has gotten the best of me. Maybe on occasions it has. But I'd rather be too angry than too afraid to call these people what they are.
7:49 PM
7:36 PM
I want this!
Technology Review: Motorola's Dumb Phone:
Mobile phones in the United States are more power-hungry and complicated than ever. But one of the latest phones from Motorola, aimed primarily at other markets and due out by the end of the year, is just the opposite. Looking for more customers, the company did extensive market research in poor countries. The result: the company's slimmest phone yet, boasting cutting-edge technology that--rather than adding complexity--extends battery life and makes the phone simpler to use.
5:30 PM
11:47 AM
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11:35 AM
Gresham's Law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Gresham's law is commonly stated as: "When there is a legal tender currency, bad money drives good money out of circulation".
Gresham's law applies specifically when there are two forms of commodity money in circulation which are forced, by the application of legal tender laws, to be respected as having the same face value in the marketplace. It is named after Sir Thomas Gresham, an English financier in Tudor times.
11:33 AM
Social Security Cards Issued by Woolworth:
The most misused SSN of all time was (078-05-1120). In 1938, wallet manufacturer the E. H. Ferree company in Lockport, New York decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was inserted in each wallet. Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher.
The wallet was sold by Woolworth stores and other department stores all over the country. Even though the card was only half the size of a real card, was printed all in red, and had the word "specimen" written across the face, many purchasers of the wallet adopted the SSN as their own. In the peak year of 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda's number. SSA acted to eliminate the problem by voiding the number and publicizing that it was incorrect to use it. (Mrs. Whitcher was given a new number.) However, the number continued to be used for many years. In all, over 40,000 people reported this as their SSN. As late as 1977, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN "issued by Woolworth."
2:17 AM
12:48 AM
Tonight is the final night of HELL HOUSE--for all who've worked so incredibly hard, I salute you!
8:07 PM
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8:02 PM
Boing Boing: Bush legalizes martial law -- what Constitution?:
On Oct 17, George Bush quietly signed a bill allowing him to declare martial law. The Toward Freedom website summarizes it:
For the current President, "enforcement of the laws to restore public order" means to commandeer guardsmen from any state, over the objections of local governmental, military and local police entities; ship them off to another state; conscript them in a law enforcement mode; and set them loose against "disorderly" citizenry - protesters, possibly, or those who object to forced vaccinations and quarantines in the event of a bio-terror event.
The law also facilitates militarized police round-ups and detention of protesters, so called "illegal aliens," "potential terrorists" and other "undesirables" for detention in facilities already contracted for and under construction by Halliburton. That's right. Under the cover of a trumped-up "immigration emergency" and the frenzied militarization of the southern border, detention camps are being constructed right under our noses, camps designed for anyone who resists the foreign and domestic agenda of the Bush administration.
It's easy to get scabbed over about the Bush White House's assault on the Bill of Rights, but every now and again, they rip loose with an attack so egregious, it rips the scab right off. Between the right-to-torture bill and this one, it's clear that Bush intends to bring back the pork-politics glory of the Cold War by reinventing the Soviet Union on American soil.
1:25 PM
11:36 AM
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11:28 AM
Book Paints Escape-Artist Houdini As Spy:
A new biography of the legendary performer suggests that Houdini worked as a spy for Scotland Yard, monitored Russian anarchists and chased counterfeiters for the U.S. Secret Service - all before he was possibly murdered.
"The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero" will be released on Halloween - the anniversary of Houdini's untimely death at age 52. Chasing new information on the elusive superstar eventually led authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman to create a database of more than 700,000 pages.
"There's no way in the world we could have done this book without it," said Sloman of the huge electronic index. "It would have taken 30 years - maybe."
The biography lays out a scenario where Houdini, using his career as cover, managed to travel the United States and the world while collecting information for law enforcement. The authors made the link after reviewing a journal belonging to William Melville, a British spy master who mentioned Houdini several times.
11:26 AM
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
- George Bernard Shaw
TRUTH
{the heart is a million little pieces above all things}
Ars Nova
8pm
4:27 PM
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1:00 PM
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12:25 PM
Butley - Theater - Review - New York Times:
This production has moments that hint at the “Butley” that might have been, brief glimpses afforded by Mr. Lane of pure pain and savagery that make you sit up and go “Whoa!” It seems telling that most of these moments are silent. For this “Butley” is one of those Broadway shows that achieves a state of paralyzing self-consciousness by trying to live up to its English accent.
Everyone in the cast, with two prominent exceptions, is plagued by an affliction that might be called the Importance of Sounding British, which causes actors to speak with the corseted plumminess associated with American productions of comedies by Wilde and Coward. This disease plays a large role in preventing the production from achieving the effortless-seeming continuity of a life being lived (and gutted) before our eyes.
12:21 PM
3:05 AM
In Clean Politics, Flesh Is Pressed, Then Sanitized - New York Times:
That has become routine in this peak season of handshaking, practiced by everyone from the most powerful leaders to the lowliest hopefuls. Politics is personal at all levels, and germs do not discriminate. Like chicken dinners and lobbyists, they afflict Democrats and Republicans alike. It would be difficult to find an entourage that does not have at least one aide packing Purell.
Some people find that unseemly in itself.
“It’s condescending to the voters,” said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat.
A fervent nonuser of hand sanitizer, Mr. Richardson holds the Guinness Book of World Records mark for shaking the most hands over an eight-hour period (13,392, at the New Mexico State Fair in 2002).
Indeed, what message does it send when politicians, the putative leaders in a government by the people, for the people, feel compelled to wipe off the residues of said people immediately after meeting them?
2:47 AM
2:43 AM
The Stranger | Seattle | Slog: The Stranger's Blog | The Empty Space is Dead: The Update:
From the press release: “With deep regret, The Empty Space Board of Directors announced today that The Empty Space Theatre will cease operations effective immediately… The Empty Space does not have the financing needed to manage cash flow over the coming months.”
10:19 PM
5:14 PM
5:14 PM
3:44 PM
things i know for sure: FIRED!!:
No. No. Screw my temp job. Yes. Screw my temp job--or shall I say, my OLD temp job, my EX temp job--screw it. Screw the shall remain nameless idiotic foreign bank that sucked my life force for the last nine weeks and then threw me away like so much tissue paper. Screw them. Screw every boss who's forgotten how to smile, every analyst in his aligator shoes, every HR slug who slinks into the collar of his over-starched Banana Republic knock-off shirt every time I walk by, screw the guy who watches me walk to and from the bathroom and thinks I don't notice. Screw the senior executive assistant who nearly spit on me when I told her I was an actor, her in her pantsuits and her nails that click and her long long stares as I pick at the corner of her particle-board cubicle with my fingers and stumble as I ask her where to order lunch how to get supplies where is the mailroom? Screw the online locks and the long lunches that were okay and then weren't and were watched and then weren't. Screw conference rooms and conference calls and conference meals and conference voices and conference eyes and coffee stains along the rims of conference room mugs. Screw the salaries, ten times mine, that buy the shoes that go on the feet of the people who aren't me who surround me who ask questions of me who wasn't told anything before I began was just shown to a desk shown to a closet shown some files that meant nothing and forced then for days to look busy when I wasn't busy and I'm sorry I'm so fucking sorry that I got a fucking commercial and it interfered with your fucking phone calls and didn't I tell you didn't I fucking lay it out like crystal like a glass fucking tabletop didn't I tell you I was an actor and didn't you say it was okay and so what right does that give you to let me walk out on a Thursday and not say a word and let me leave my things in drawers, what right does that give you to skulk around and make decisions about how it's not working out and not say a word to me and let my androgenous temp agent rep tell me I was not to return!! SCREW YOU!
12:10 PM
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11:50 AM
11:40 AM
mediabistro.com: FishBowlNY:
Speaking non-stop for over an hour while seated behind a simple desk on stage, Daisey weaves the saga of Frey's literary rise and fall into his own personal recollections and feelings about bending the truth when telling about one's life. Not unlike an extended verbal essay, Daisey's performance draws us from one topic to the next, from his father's disappointment at his own bending of the truth to a friend's death, commenting on the importance of personal integrity and the evolution of his thoughts on the subject.
11:35 AM
5:34 AM
3:50 AM
Tonight, as though for the first time:
TRUTH
{the heart is a million little pieces above all things}
Ars Nova
7pm
and immediately following, I'll be a guest on
CREATION NATION
Award-winning alternative talk show
Billy Willing and Robin Lord
Ars Nova
10pm
See you at the show!
2:33 PM
Popular Science Blog - Flight of the Pole Dancer:
Newton’s First Law of Motion states that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. The same holds true for rotating bodies and, as we see in the video below, doubly true for rotating, gyrating bodies.
Consider the body of the body in question. After a quick shake of the head right and left, she leans backward to begin her rotation around the pole. Her pivot points include her right hand, held fast to the pole, and her left foot (disastrously clad, we will soon learn, in three-inch heels). She now has a sizeable amount of angular momentum moving counterclockwise around the pole, and this can be halted only by an external force.
1:59 PM
1:02 PM
Great review from TIME OUT NEW YORK--
Time Out New York / Truth:
While Daisey is unforgiving of Frey’s melodramatic style, he offers a more nuanced view of the process though which personal memoir, as a genre, can come to be fertilized by bullshit. Over the course of 100 minutes or so, he artfully weaves diverse narrative strands into a complex Daisey chain that ultimately argues for the paramount importance of honesty. His truth may not be simple, but it is, in its own way, pure.
12:51 PM
12:45 PM
11:02 AM
Ronald D. Moore on Battlestar Galactica - ComingSoon.net:
Q: Who is the worst person you've ever worked for?
Moore: I worked for a crazy man once. The late great Toby Halicki. There once was a man named Toby Halicki who did two films. He did the original "Gone in 60 Seconds" and he later did a film called "The Junkman." Essentially Toby was a car thief and he told us. He stole cars like in the early 70's and then made a film about it called "Gone in 60 Seconds." He was stealing cars to finance his film. He was a guerrilla filmmaker. Toby would shut down the freeway and just shoot a stunt without asking anyone's permission. He was truly a guerrilla filmmaker. He made a mint off the original "Gone in 60 Seconds." Many years later he decided to make a sequel…Toby was looking for someone to writer the sequel to "Gone in 60 Seconds" so I went and I helped write it and Toby said "sure you can come write it and you can also come manage my toy business." Toby was sort of insane. I mean he was very litigious. He sued people at the drop of a hat and he was a madman. He ran around screaming at the office all the time. He had this compound down in Gardena where you drove up to this big wooden fence that screened it from the road and you pressed a button and you went in and Toby had constructed a full western back lot for himself and he had never shot a western before in his entire life. Then he had this gigantic airplane hanger filled with toys from top to bottom and these exotic cars. It was a crazy crazy experience. Ultimately what happened was Toby and I went to upstate New York to scout locations for this movie. We were at this big industrial park and there was this big water tower. Toby wanted to bring the water tower down for a stunt. We had this screaming match. Toby was going to bring this water tower down with his buddies at the welding shop and I was upset about this. We had a screaming match about how insane this was and subsequently Toby fired me. I went back to Los Angeles and Toby went on his merry way. I got my "Star Trek" gig. It turns out Toby went on to shoot this film in upstate New York and Toby's brother called me said "I've got some bad news. Toby is dead."
12:20 AM
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5:03 PM
The Stranger | Theater Is Not Virtuous:
KUOW’s Marcie Sillman is doing a multi-part series on Seattle theater that is mostly harmless, if superficial.
But one theme in her series really gives me hives. There is nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada, null set, NOTHING virtuous about attending live theater. There is nothing secret or mystical about the connection between audiences and performers. A bad night of theater is no more salutary than a bad night of TV. It’s that kind of snotty, self-righteous attitude that turns people off theater. (Well, that and the terrible productions they’re being asked to improve themselves upon.)
4:06 PM
The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day:
Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn’t mean I can’t be the first. So every day for months and months I tried new tricks to regain my voice. I visualized speaking correctly and repeatedly told myself I could (affirmations). I used self hypnosis. I used voice therapy exercises. I spoke in higher pitches, or changing pitches. I observed when my voice worked best and when it was worst and looked for patterns. I tried speaking in foreign accents. I tried “singing” some words that were especially hard.
My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.
2:17 PM
2:17 PM
Studio 60 Jumps Shark, Rapes Shark's Corpse, Feasts on Remains:
Last night….last night was when Studio 60 officially became the Showgirls of network television—one of those near-miraculous works of failed art, recognizable by crappy plotlines you see coming a mile away, that end up veering off into horrifying places you never dreamed of.
Case in point: Last night’s storyline involving (great) elderly actor Eli Wallach, who showed up babbling backstage at the TV studio. As soon as he appeared, I thought, “Dear God, the last thing this show needs is an Olde Comedian to teach us the value of Laughter and Today”—but then he turned out to be a sentimental World War II vet TOO! As my friend Mindy put it: “I couldn’t even figure out which tired old plotline we were trotting out—confused elderly comedian who thinks he’s coming to work to write for Dick Van Dyke with Rose Marie again? WWII veteran to teach us what the Greatest Generation thinks about sketch comedy? Bradley Whitford’s elderly coke dealer/grandpa with Alzheimer’s? WTF?”
11:49 AM
11:44 AM
11:40 AM
The Ultra-Extreme Calorie Restriction Diet Test -- New York Magazine:
It’s 7:30 p.m. in Soho, that magic hour when the scent of first-course dishes wafts heavenward from the tables at Savoy, the anxiety of last-minute meal planners courses through the aisles of Dean & DeLuca, and a grown man’s fancy turns to thoughts of food. My own thoughts, at the moment, are of practically nothing else. Half-sprinting through the Prince Street crowds, I am late for a dinner party I’ve been planning for weeks, and I’m starving.
I’ve been starving for the past two months, actually, and that’s precisely what the party is about: My dinner guests—five successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austere—have been at it much, much longer, and I’ve invited them here to show me how it’s done. They are master practitioners of Calorie Restriction, a diet whose central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer you’ll live. Having taken this diet for a nine-week test drive, I’m hoping now for an up-close glimpse of what it means to go all the way. I want to find out what it looks, feels, and tastes like to commit to the ultimate in dietary trade-offs: a lifetime lived as close to the brink of starvation as your body can stand, in exchange for the promise of a life span longer than any human has ever known.
10:49 AM
A new statement from my offices, clarifying my relationship with J.T. LeRoy.
10:28 AM
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10:24 AM
Tar
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a
hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake
at seven
when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders
shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making
little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance
of order.
Surely we suspect now we're being lied to, but in the meantime, there
are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on
the curb across, gawking.
I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrow-
ingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are
bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the
underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey,
chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a
cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth
wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on
your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with
burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost
from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention
in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br'er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch
along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shim-
mers and mirages.
Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was
upon us.
However much we didn't want to, however little we would do about it,
we'd understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon,
then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an at-
mosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits
and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear
to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should
hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking
absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Sus-
quehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, cling-
ing like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck
the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was
scribbled with obscenities and hearts.
C. K. Williams
10:21 AM
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10:09 AM
Dear Hunting - New York Times:
One mission of On Language is to call attention to subtle changes in common usage that offer linguistic clues to vast cultural change. Today we deal with the threatened abandonment of the symbolic embrace inherent in an old Teutonic word. Dear was born about a thousand years ago, meaning “honorable, worthy,” and took on the sense of “esteemed, valued” and ultimately “beloved,” gaining a sense of “high-priced” along the way. As a form of address in written communications, the O.E.D.’s citations progress from the 1250 “Fader dere” to the 1314 “Mi dere frende” to the 1340 “Dere god” to the 1489 “Dere syre.”
10:08 AM
12:02 PM
Wired 14.11: The Perfect Thing:
And, of course, the Apple people had full-contact sessions with Jobs. He would pick up the device and say what he liked and didn't like, and he would fire questions at everyone, pushing hard: "What are you going to do about it?" It was Jobs who told everyone what the device would be called. "He just came in and went, 'iPod,'" says one team member. "We all looked around the room, and that was it. iPod. And we're like, 'Where did that come from?'" (Excellent question, and one that proved increasingly elusive the more I pressed people at Apple. I was finally able to corner Jobs on it, and he said that to the best of his knowledge the name sort of emerged, not exactly in a form of immaculate conception but in a lengthy back-and-forth between him, his marketing people, and TBWAChiatDay. "The ad agency loved it," he told me. But I get the distinct impression that the iPod moniker won out not because of its brilliance but because Jobs had had enough of the naming process and the hour was getting late.)
12:01 PM
11:08 AM
O'Reilly Radar > The Problem of Email:
I have a problem, and its name is "email". Many people have the same problem. Not many have it quite as badly as I do. When I say "my inbox is out of control", people respond "Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better." I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.
11:08 AM
10:47 AM
"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower." -Albert Camus
10:46 AM
KINETIC CARNIVAL: Thor begins to stomp out development foot print on Coney:
First structure to possibly go to make way for the new Coney is the Henderson building on the corner of Stillwell Ave./Henderson Walk & Surf Ave to the Bowery. The property now owned by Thor Equities, which as early as last week assured their tenants not to worry about being evicted for the next year has now turned around and handed most of its tenants a 90 day notice to vacate the premises.
...
With that, Zigun confirms that Thor has given notice to most of their newly acquired tenants in the Henderson's building and beyond! Those include owner and operator of the Zipper and Spider rides on West 12th, McCullough's Kiddie Park at Bowery & West 12th, Caesar's games on the Bowery, and Slim who operates Balloon Racing game on the Bowery.
10:45 AM
10:45 AM
It's a Mandate! - Wonkette:
Buried in this Newsweek story is the news that 51% of American voters want Bush impeached — 28% say High Priority, 23% say Low Priority, 44% against, 6% undecided or don’t know what a president is. And only 78% of Republicans oppose impeachment, proving something or other.
Didn’t Bush come back in ‘04 claiming 51% was a “mandate” for all kinds of new fun?
10:38 AM
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11:37 AM
"This is what men do when they believe they have absolute knowledge"
Dr. Jakob Bronowski
7:47 PM
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11:04 PM
The Imperfectionist - New York Times:
DAN HO likes to get rid of things. For the past eight years he has committed himself to a project of aggressive divestment, letting go of houses, sofas, refectory tables, electric mixers, Georg Jensen silverware and a collection of ceramics. Earlier this year, a failed marriage behind him, Mr. Ho, 40, decided to reduce the sum of his possessions and eventually winnowed them down to about 55. Motivated neither by debt nor by environmentalism but simply by a compulsion to unburden himself, he moved from a 1,200-square-foot house in Portland, Me., to a rented apartment one-quarter the size in Greenwich Village, where he now lives with two roommates (one of them a retired judge who sells purses), 47 items of clothing and a backpack, suitcase, television, computer, bath towel, single set of sheets, toothbrush and bottle of witch hazel.
11:04 PM
11:03 PM
"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill."
--Robert A. Heinlein
8:53 PM
Tonight, for one night only--
Monopoly!
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Church Street Center
October 20th at 7:30pm
Details
8:46 AM
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10:40 AM
An ongoing saga of Apple's customer neglect | By Dave Rosenberg:
Me: "Hi, I have this weird squeak in my spacebar, do you know if you can fix it? And my trackpad thing seems to be sinking."
Genius #1: "I've never heard of such a thing."
Me: "It seems fairly common - I found many other people with the same problem. "
Genius #1: "Everything seems common when you are looking for it."
For a brief moment I contemplated if perhaps this guy actually was a genius. He had addressed one of the worlds' universal theories - that the truth is out there, you just have to look for it. Had I stumbled on the next Camus, Kierkegaard, Sartre? An existentialist wizard of some sort?
10:38 AM
10:38 AM
This is it--THE UGLY AMERICAN happens twice tonight, back to back. I'm a masochist to some degree, so I can't wait to see what it's like--I've done doubles, and even triples, but I've never done them this close together in one evening. Word is that both shows are nearly sold out, so if you're coming get there early to ensure you get a seat.
The Ugly American
Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College
Two shows on one night!
October 18th at 7pm and 9:30pm
Details
2:12 PM
11:04 AM
11:03 AM
11:02 AM
MrBellersNeighborhood - Loaded Hallways by JB McGeever:
The campus of my public school building in New York City is a fortress these days. Gazing through the mesh caging of any stairway window, I can spot faculty deans, campus security (a branch of the NYPD with arresting powers), as well as regular NYPD uniformed officers patrolling the grounds like medieval sentries. As I move through the halls of this majestic, seventy year-old building, I’m forced to sidestep a quartet of firefighters in full regalia, escorted from the building by two police officers, nine millimeter Glock handguns bouncing off their hips. The students are unfazed, just part of life in the big city, but imagine, New York’s Finest, Bravest, and Brightest, all right here in one high school-- and no one’s quite sure why. Was there a fire in the building today? That’s really none of your business. Information will be doled out on a need-to-know b
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We're performing a minitour of New England this week, and just arrived at Dartmouth College for some residency activities and to teach some workshops, followed by performances on Wednesday of THE UGLY AMERICAN. Here's the front of the theater complex where we'll be performing--
I think this is great because it sounds like the special at a pub bar:
BARBEQUE BEEF MONDAY
RADISH SOUP TUESDAY
MIKE DAISEY WEDNESDAY
TACO GRANDE THURSDAY
For those who need details, here you are--
The Ugly American
Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College
Two shows on one night!
October 18th at 7pm and 9:30pm
Details
Hope to see some folks at the show, if you're in the area...and if you're up for it, I'm doing this on Friday--
Monopoly!
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
October 20th at 7:30pm
Details
I am also performing next week in a gloriously bizarre happening--I'm playing Satan, the Prince of Darkness, for just two nights in Les Freres Corbusier's sin-sational and controversial HELL HOUSE. You can check out the site here, or read Ben Brantley's review over here.
We're creating a fundamentalist Christian Hell House in NYC, just as it exists in over 700 locations across America every year, which strive to demonstrate all the ways that gays, atheists, sluts, Muslims, Jews and everyone who doesn't accept Jesus will burn in eternal, unending, unyielding hellfire.
This will be my first straight theatre role in a regular productions since 2001, and I couldn't have a better vehicle for returning to ensemble performance. Get your tickets here.
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Wal-Mart agrees to buy Chinese chain: WSJ - Yahoo! News:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT - news) has agreed to acquire a Chinese supercenter chain for about $1 billion in a move that would give the world's largest retailer the biggest food and department store network in China, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The deal is for the 100 Chinese supercenters owned by Trust-Mart, a closely held Taiwanese company, the Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition, citing unnamed people familiar with the deal.
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All Predictable, Some Fun | Theater | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper:
All H. P. Lovecraft stories follow the same structure:
1. Something horrible is going to happen.
2. O, God! Something horrible is happening!
3. Something horrible—too horrible to explain—just happened.
It doesn't help that his dialogue is horrendous. In the play, an earnest farmer describes a dead animal: "The face bore an expression the likes no woodchuck ever bore."
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NewYorkology: A New York Travel Guide:
How to hold a (stealth) wedding at the Met Museum
"The Plan ... Get married before they get kicked out."
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Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Cirrus SR20 crash in Manhattan:
My preliminary best guess (and at this point it can only be a guess) is that the two pilots on board the accident SR20 were cruising slowly up the East River. At some point, they decided that they’d reached the end of the little cut-out tongue of uncontrolled airspace over the East River. They attempted a 180-degree turn in an attempt to get southbound down the river toward uncontrolled airspace. An airplane in a sharp turn stalls at a much higher airspeed than when straight and level. Merely by putting the airplane into a steep bank and trying to hold altitude, they could have gone from flying to an aerodynamic stall (wings at too high an angle to the relative wind or, in simpler terms, air not moving fast enough over the wings) in a matter of seconds. At this point, the airplane is not easily controlled and a lot of bad things can happen. Low-speed low-level maneuvering, which typically happens when aircraft are trying to land, is the leading cause of plane crashes.
[It is possible to turn an airplane tightly and safely and is commonly done inside mountain valleys in Alaska (where guys just love to take off and head towards a pass to see if there is any separation between the clouds and the terrain; if not, they turn around and go back to their cabin). The trick is to slow down as much as possible. An ice skater going fast will use up a lot more ice in a 180-degree turn than an ice skater going very slowly. In an airplane, this means putting out flaps so that you can fly slower without stalling and slowing down to maybe 1.5 times stalling speed (in the Cirrus SR20 this would be about 75 knots with two people on board). At a slow speed, you have to be somewhat careful with bank angle because you are closer to the stalling speed. On the other hand, you don’t need a steep bank angle to make a tight turn because you’re only going about as fast as a car.]
8:25 AM
New York's Premier Alternative Newspaper. Arts, Music, Food, Movies and Opinion:
Finally, I did what every single, twenty-something, heterosexual, agnostic Jewess would do. I panicked. I freaked out, feared the worst and decided that I must be pregnant. My boyfriend at the time was chronically calm and unruffled, but I feared the whole pregnancy scare might be more than even he could handle so, I, uncharacteristically, kept it to myself.
Almost. My best friend “G” chatted supportively from her office at a major women’s rights organization. “No babies,” she typed firmly. “Big money,” I replied, “big money, no babies, no babies,” invoking that shining beacon in hard times, Game Show Network reruns of “Press Your Luck.”
12:45 AM
Tonight at 7pm—
TRUTH
{the heart is a million little pieces above all things}
Ars Nova
511 W 54th St
New York, NY 10019
(212) 489-9800
Tickets available here.
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NYO - Slope Opera:
RELIEF IS ONE REACTION to a boutique. The other might be anger. And somewhere in between lies pure anxiety: For a certain type of Brooklyn renter, $200 black-and-white flannel dresses (Samantha Pleet, the I Woke Up With a Lumberjack), $410 forest green silk-chiffon café dresses with puckered sleeves (Lyell) and $378 wedges (Loeffler Randall again—so pretty!) are merely a reminder that the party is over.
Women who live in Brooklyn chose “creative fields” over law or Wall Street. The boutiques make them regret that decision, even though they tailor themselves to the tastes of those who made it. From the lushly lit storefronts of Smith Street, Seventh Avenue and now Lafayette, the message is: Even freelance graphic designers deserve Diane von Furstenberg.
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Speaking of lying...
...head on over to the Aleksey Vayner Archives, where you can read about the most bizarre Ivy Leaguer in the world--apparently he runs around all day long making up very strange stories about himself.
A few excerpts:
The Aleksey Vayner saga continues this week, and we're happy to report: It just keeps getting better. A quick preview of this entry for the Adderall set:
1. Vayner's fraudulent investment firm
2. Vayner's fraudulent charity
3. Vayner's fraudulent book about the Holocaust
and wait, there's more--
If you thought Vayner's credibility was shaky after seeing the video, wait til you read the profile. It is devastating. For starters, his name back then was Aleksey Garber. He claimed to have spent much of his childhood in a Tibetan monestary in post-Soviet Uzbekistan before moving to the United States, where he was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA. He was also a tennis instructor whose students include Harrison Ford and Sarah Michelle Gellar. And oh yeah: he met the Dalai Lama along the way and is the second greatest martial arts fighter in the world.
and even more--
A member of the Yale tennis team wrote in to dispute Aleksey's claim that he competed on the Satellite tour: "I played for Yale tennis, and he tried to walk on the team. He got cut the second day. I had one conversation with him, and he claimed to have KILLED 24 people in the caves of Tibet."
(Other great comments: "I too played for Yale tennis, and Vayner/Garber claimed that he has trouble flying on planes because he has to register his hands as lethal weapons each time he goes to an airport." And: "The giveaway on the investment firm was that he said his firm specialized in "risk-aDverse" strategies. The other giveaway was that he's fucking crazy.")
(Thanks, Dave.)
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Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity."
- Lester Bangs
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The reviews for TRUTH are in!
NEW YORK TIMES:
"Elegantly woven...Engaging and intellectually curious"
"A spontaneity and freshness missing from many confessional pieces"
"Mr. Daisey is rarely obvious. His stories resist easy conclusions and cheap laughs. There is nothing as simple as a thesis here, but Mr. Daisey ultimately makes a case for the importance of trying to tell the truth."
Read the review.
VARIETY:
"[Daisey's] description is consistently evocative, capturing a psychology of the everyday that's subtle and smart...a show that's more than the sum of its controversies."
"The ethics of literature isn't typical fodder for any drama, let alone a one-man show...What helps him avoid the pitfalls of didacticism is an eye attuned to the absurdity of daily life. In assessing the story of Frey and Leroy, Daisey comes to a judgment that is strict but sympathetic; he suggests that if people are often the least reliable narrators of their own lives, they are also sometimes the most engaging."
Read the review.
METRO:
"Watching Daisey sort out anything on stage is a delirious, brainy, hilarious, infuriating experience from which one emerges perversely hopeful: the world may be screwed, but for one moment, it seems, at least one guy gets it."
Read the review.
NYTHEATRE.COM:
"This story is not just about truth, it's about mortality. It's about loss, but it's also about connection. It's about storytelling itself, a story familiar to Mike Daisey, and, of course, to all of us. This story is comical without ever being smug. This story is redemptive without ever being maudlin. This is a true story in the best and fullest sense of the word."
Read the review.
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Boing Boing: China unblocks Wikipedia, even though it won't censor:
China has unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools -- the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents.
If only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the same courage as Wikipedia, the same confidence that their search-engines were valuable enough to be indispensible.
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User experience fuck-up: the New Yorker is splitting up their longer pieces into multiple pages (kottke.org):
Fuck, this pisses me off: the New Yorker is splitting up their longer pieces into multiple pages (for example: Ben McGrath's article on YouTube). I know, everyone else does it and it's some sort of "best practice" that we readers let them get away with so they can boost pageviews and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience, but The New Yorker was the last bastion of good behavior on this issue and I loved them for it. This is a perfect example of an architecture of control in design and uninnovation.
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Bad taste | Salon Life:
Jean Sawyer took a single, small, thin steak from her deep freeze. To this day, we are not sure what it was; before we had the chance to examine it, we beheld a fascinating food-prep technique. Sawyer ran tap water onto a grayish washcloth she took from next to the sink. She wrung it out and wrapped it around the steak. The steak was then placed in the oven, where it cooked for 40 minutes. That was to be dinner for us. For her and Dumbo and the kids, she grabbed a box of Hamburger Helper and started cooking that in a skillet on the stovetop.
A dozen hungry eyes watched as steak à la washcloth was unwrapped for the esteemed guests. Feeling a little like characters in "Suddenly, Last Summer," we sawed at the meat and masticated as best we could. "Is it good?" came the plaintive whine of the youngest kid, who had already wolfed down his allotted Hamburger Helper.
"Have some," Michael said, cutting a hunk of the meat and reaching out to plunk it on the kid's plate.
Jean Sawyer's red-nailed hand swept in like a falcon coming down on prey. "Leave it be," she yelled. "Steak is for company. Where's your manners?"
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Off the wagon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
A horse-drawn wagon initiated the idiom a derivative of "off the wagon," which as of the early 1900's has meant to swear off drinking alcoholic beverages. The "wagon" in "on the wagon" refers to an icon of North America's past, the water wagon. Before roads were routinely paved, municipalities would dispatch water wagons to spray the streets in order to curb the clouds of dust that traffic would otherwise raise. Anyone who had sworn abstinence from alcohol (presumably drinking primarily water henceforth) was said to have "climbed aboard the water wagon," later shortened to "on the wagon."" To "fall off the wagon" was a logical metaphor for having failed in one's decidedness to eschew alcohol only to resume its consumption.
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The Blog | Danny Miller: Audrey Hepburn: Dead is the New Alive | The Huffington Post:
I know I should reserve my outrage for more important matters, but I just saw the new Gap commercial featuring Audrey Hepburn and my mouth is frozen in a silent scream. As part of their new "Keep it Simple" campaign, the Gap uses footage of the late actress from the Stanley Donen film "Funny Face." We see Hepburn in a Parisian café saying, "I rather feel like expressing myself now. And I could certainly use the release." She then starts dancing wildly and after a few seconds jumps out of the film onto a white Gap-like background and continues her frenetic dance to the tune of the AC/DC song "Back in Black." According to Trey Laird, creative director of the Gap, "We wanted to do something really special to re-launch our skinny black pants and thought who better to showcase them than actress Audrey Hepburn--an iconic woman famous for dressing with sophistication and classic style." What did he say? I couldn't hear that last part because it was drowned out by the sound of Audrey Hepburn spinning in her grave.
I have to assume that the Gap secured the rights to Ms. Hepburn's glorious image and I don't want to pass judgment on her family members who I assume held those rights. But even though the commercial is a technical marvel and fascinating to watch (you can find it on YouTube), it begs the question, "Just because something is possible to do, does that mean we should do it?" It's not the first time a major movie star has posthumously starred in a TV commercial. In an even more unsettling ad campaign, Hepburn's "Funny Face" co-star Fred Astaire appeared in a 1996 Dirt Devil commercial dancing expertly with a vacuum cleaner. Astaire's young widow was roundly criticized at the time for selling out her husband's reputation for a buck. Astaire's daughter, Ava McKenzie, unleashed her fury in a letter to the manufacturer. "Your paltry, unconscionable commercials are the antithesis of everything my lovely, gentle father represented, " she wrote, adding that she was "saddened that after his wonderful career, he was sold to the devil."
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Logotopia, and the Little Twisted Nerve: Truth! - part 4:
There is a great deal of denial that goes into eating healthy. Brown rice is not delicious. It'll do for nutrition, but it's not delicious. Claiming that brown rice and fruit sweetened desserts and carob and soy cheese and garden burgers taste as good or better than fried food, butter, processed sugar, wheat, and non-soy real dairy cheese is a transparent and pathetic lie. The greatest culinary scientists in human history have devoted their collective intelligence to making the bad-for-you food taste better, because if you eat it they make money. That's just the facts. Claiming that health food tastes better is like claiming that third world sweat shop labor isn't cheaper. It is. It's horrible, but it is cheaper (for those of us that don't work there anyway). Eating healthy is a great thing to do, but you don't have to lie about it.
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The Believer - Waiting for the Bad Thing:
Any minute now Michel Houellebecq, the bad boy of French literature, is going to do something very, very bad. It’s true I’ve been on the road with him all week and his behavior has been impeccable, but something’s got to give. There’s too much history. What about his purported obsession with sex clubs and prostitutes? What about his penchant for hitting on female journalists, explaining that only one night with him will guarantee the real story? What about the time he called Islam “the stupidest religion”? Surely, the man’s going to bust out with something reprehensible, and now, in his smoke-filled semi-suite at the Bel Age in L.A., is as good a time as any. He flies back to Europe tomorrow.
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Bog Face: Russia's shame:
Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Putin and of the situation in Chechnya, is THE THIRD REPORTER from her paper, Novaya Gazeta, to be murdered since Putin took over in 2000. Reporter Igor Domnikov was beaten to death with a hammer that same year and Yury Shchekochikhin was poisoned to death in 2003. In 2004, the American editor of the Russian Forbes magazine - who was investigating the misappropriation of Russian funds in Chechnya - was shot to death. And according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 12 journalists have been murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power.
And not one of the murderers has been caught.
It's a campaign of terror clearly levied from the highest circles and designed to inspire strict self-censorship in Rusian journalists. What other conclusion can be drawn when 12 journalists critical of the Kremlin are assassinated in six years and not a single killer gets caught?
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Most awesomest voicemail left for my friend Cabel's company, Panic.
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Harry Potter: Pampered jock, patsy, fraud:
Simple: He's a glory hog who unfairly receives credit for the accomplishments of others and who skates through school by taking advantage of his inherited wealth and his establishment connections. Harry Potter is no braver than his best friend, Ron Weasley, just richer and better-connected. Harry's other good friend, Hermione Granger, is smarter and a better student. The one thing Harry excels at is the sport of Quidditch, and his pampered-jock status allows him to slide in his studies, as long as he brings the school glory on the playing field. But as Charles Barkley long ago noted, being a good athlete doesn't make you a role model.
Harry Potter is a fraud, and the cult that has risen around him is based on a lie. Potter's claim to fame, his central accomplishment in life, is surviving a curse placed on him as an infant by the evil wizard Voldemort. As a result, the wizarding world celebrates the young Harry as "The Boy Who Lived." It's a curiously passive accomplishment, akin to "The Boy Who Showed Up," or "The Boy Who Never Took a Sick Day." And sure enough, just as none of us do anything special by slogging through yet another day, the infant Harry didn't do anything special by living. It was his mother who saved him, sacrificing her life for his.
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Dude, where's my cross? | Salon Life:
Now Baldwin has released a memoir, "The Unusual Suspect," a reference to the one critically acclaimed film for which he's known. The book, the "Gospel according to Stevie B.," is part testimonial and part evangelical manifesto, a cocktail of anti-intellectualism and a biblical interpretation that would have Jesus spinning in his grave, had he stayed there. Baldwin preaches that free will is a lie of Satan -- we must shut off our brains, he says, and be led by what God tells our hearts. Furthermore, he writes, efforts to end global poverty and violence are just the sort of "stupid arrogance" that incur God's wrath, which we'll be feeling any day now in the coming apocalypse. I suppose when the star of "Bio-Dome" is advising the president and converting kids by the thousands to his gnarly brand of faith, the end is, indeed, nigh.
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Boing Boing: Grey Goo melting online world Second Life:
A "griefer" -- person who disrupts video-games -- is attacking the online world Second Life with self-replicating "grey goo" that is melting down the Second Life servers. "Grey goo" is shorthand for an apocalyptic nano-gone-wrong scenario wherein nanoassemblers replicate so profligately that they reduce the world to slurry.
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"No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."
--E.B. White
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Be A Drop Out | Pullout | How To... | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper:
Where I come from, the idea of dropping out of college is like volunteering for homelessness.
Like many of you, I had it drilled into my skull from a very early age that a university degree was the only hope a person had of succeeding in the world. Without it, the best you could look forward to was ditch-digging, dissolution, and despair. I believed this when I applied to a half-dozen colleges. I believed it when I got into every college I applied to. I believed it all summer before I went off to college. And you can bet your sweet life that I believed it when I dropped out of college for the first time. I may have even believed it when I dropped out of college for the second time.
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The World As Best As I Remember It : Broken Windows Theory:
Deep in the bowels of Windows, there remains the whiff of a bygone culture of belittlement and aggression. Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth.
When a vice president in Windows asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit. The answer to the question is deeply meaningful to them. It's certainly true in some sense that they genuinely want to know. But in a very important other sense, in a sense that you'll come to regret night after night if you get it wrong, there's really only one answer you can give.
After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team's key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don't-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules. Turns out they're actually great project managers. They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to "figure out how to make it work." The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy -- and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. "You're smart people. Find a way!" This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. "Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. Vista by August or bust. You got it, boss."
Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings. When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.
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Dan Fogler - Voyage of the Carcass - Theater - New York Times:
So they went with plan A, looking at acting conservatories, which for a person who had grown up with what he called a “healthy sense of my girth” turned out to be a shock.
“I’d get, ‘You’re fantastic, the next Nathan Lane, we’d love to have you if you lose 30 pounds,” Mr. Fogler recalled. “Or the nicer version: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll help you lose those 30 pounds.’ They said it would just ‘come off’ from the rigors of the program, but I said, ‘What if it doesn’t?’ ”
Mrs. Fogler added: “I won’t name names, but at one place we visited, Dan said, ‘I don’t like it here, there’s no diversity.’ And I, who ran a diversity program at his high school, said, ‘What do you mean? I see people of so many different ethnicities, races and sexual orientations.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but no one with any body fat.’ ”
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Very nice comments on TRUTH over at Theatre Conversation. Thanks to everyone who came out to the show this weekend, and to the fine folks who kept us out until 6:30 (!) this morning--that rocked.
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Smirkin' USA:
Something was a tad off about the chuckles that erupted in the taped-off section of media VIPs at an early press screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, renegade comic Sacha Baron Cohen's new feature film. Something just a little too smug and overeager. It began just as the opening credits rolled: Done in faux naïve style, they evoked the chintziest of state-sponsored graphics and were set to a jaunty Central Asian folk-music score.
Hilarious!
Was the laughter coming from that clutch of young New Yorker staffers? Or from Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and his crew? It was everywhere, really, the self-satisfied chortling of an audience so antsy to demonstrate they were in on the joke that they couldn't wait for the joke itself. It was laughter that said, basically, Reminds me of my year abroad! This guy's really nailing it! And: By the way, I'm much smarter than those flyover assholes he's going to be hoodwinking for the next hour and a half, just in case anyone was wondering!
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Dane Cook:
There's an inherent problem with Cook's act, however: There's doesn't seem to be anything at stake. Not every comedian needs to be explicating a high-minded moral code (like, say, Bill Hicks) or a blessedly mundane one (like Jerry Seinfeld). But every great comic must use his act to create friction—some value must be rubbing up against another value. When Cook begins to crack wise, he seems merely to be describing the benign hang-ups of the college/post-college set rather than actually weighing in on them. In Retaliation, for example, Cook confesses that he desperately wants to own a pet monkey. He would give the monkey a sword and dress him in a suit of armor, he says. "How pumped would you be driving home from work knowing that some place in your house that there's a monkey you would battle?"
Give Cook points for giving voice to the secret dream of 22-year-olds across the land. (It's like Dane knows me and my friends!) But once you've passed the age where you're charmed by the comedy of recognition, you realize that Cook doesn't add very much value. There's no philosophy underlying the joke, even a goofy dorm-room philosophy. So, why do we want monkeys, exactly? Why not some equally exotic creature? Is this why we constantly fail with girls? Dude, hello?
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TIME.com: The Secret Letter From Iraq:
All: I haven't written very much from Iraq. There's really not much to write about. More exactly, there's not much I can write about because practically everything I do, read or hear is classified military information or is depressing to the point that I'd rather just forget about it, never mind write about it. The gaps in between all of that are filled with the pure tedium of daily life in an armed camp. So it's a bit of a struggle to think of anything to put into a letter that's worth reading. Worse, this place just consumes you. I work 18-20-hour days, every day. The quest to draw a clear picture of what the insurgents are up to never ends. Problems and frictions crop up faster than solutions. Every challenge demands a response. It's like this every day. Before I know it, I can't see straight, because it's 0400 and I've been at work for 20 hours straight, somehow missing dinner again in the process. And once again I haven't written to anyone. It starts all over again four hours later. It's not really like Ground Hog Day, it's more like a level from Dante's Inferno.
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For those looking for fun on a Saturday night--
TRUTH
{the heart is a million little pieces above all things}
Ars Nova
511 W 54th St
New York, NY 10019
(212) 489-9800
Tickets available here.
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Slashdot | Three Years in Prison for Posting Hatespeak:
"In the UK, a man has been sentenced to three years in prison for posting inflammatory messages to a website. Pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred on a site dedicated to the memory of a murdered black teenager, the 30-year old accused stated that he was not racist, and had intended to stir up an argument on the website, but did not believe in what he had written. The defending lawyer described her client as 'isolated and living in a fantasy world, spending hours on his computer in his room where his persona could be as he made it, good or bad.'"
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Criticizing Cheney to His Face Is Assault? | The Progressive:
Howards says he was taking two of his kids to their Suzuki piano camp in Beaver Creek, Colorado. They were walking across the outdoor public mall area when all of a sudden he saw Cheney there.
“I didn’t even know he was in town,” Howards says. “He was walking through the area shaking hands. Initially, I walked past him. Then I said to myself, ‘I can’t in good conscience let this opportunity pass by.’ So I approached him, I got about two feet away, and I said in a very calm tone of voice, ‘Your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.’ And then I walked away.”
Howards says he knew the Administration has a “history of making problems” for people who protest its policies, so he wanted to leave off at that.
But the Secret Service did not take kindly to his comment.“About ten minutes later, I came back through the mall with my eight-year-old son in tow,” Howards recalls, “and this Secret Service man came out of the shadows, and his exact words were, ‘Did you assault the Vice President?’ ”
Here’s how Howards says he responded: “No, but I did tell Mr. Cheney the way I felt about the war in Iraq, and if Mr. Cheney wants to be shielded from public criticism, he should avoid public places. If exercising my constitutional rights to free speech is against the law, then you should arrest me.”
Which is just what the agent, Virgil D. “Gus” Reichle Jr, proceeded to do.
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Hard Rain
After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people
quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.
You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed --
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time --
and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.
Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth --
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.
Tony Hoagland
1:24 AM
1:23 AM
"State of Denial" | Salon Books:
As Woodward tells it, Nebraska GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran turned war critic, cautioned Bush after a rare invitation to a presidential luncheon in June 2005, "I believe that you are getting really bubbled in here in the White House on Iraq. Do you ever reach outside your inner circle of people, outside your National Security Council?" Surprisingly, Bush responded, arranging for Hagel to make his pitch to NSC staffers about the need to face up to the mess in Iraq. But this brief window on reality was quickly slammed shut after Hagel was branded as disloyal for repeating his critique in an on-the-record interview with U.S. News & World Report. Hagel's original warning to Bush that he was being "bubbled" (a wonderful verb) on Iraq fits with the familiar portrait of a dangerously out-of-touch president.
But, elsewhere in his narrative, Woodward provides compelling evidence that the real problem may be worse -- the rogue's gallery of outside advisors who do have regular unmediated access to the president. It is not accidental that "State of Denial" begins with a reprise of the Bush family's intimate relationship with a former Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar. At the instruction of his father (Bush 41), Bush (soon to be 43) met with Bandar in 1997 and confided, "I'm thinking of running for president ... And I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international foreign policy." You do not have to be a Michael Moore-style conspiracy theorist to find it worrisome that a Saudi prince is put in charge of giving a future president his worldview.
1:22 AM
1:21 AM
The White House Warden - Los Angeles Times:
BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.
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The Amateur's Revenge:
In a recent experiment of his design, British sociologist Harry Collins asked a scientist who specializes in gravitational waves to answer seven questions about the physics of these waves. Collins, who has made an amateur study of this field for more than 30 years but has never actually practiced it, also answered the questions himself. Then he submitted both sets of answers to a panel of judges who are themselves gravitational-wave researchers. The judges couldn't tell the impostor from one of their own. Collins argues that he is therefore as qualified as anyone to discuss this field, even though he can't conduct experiments in it.
Collins' feat startled the scientific community. The journal Nature predicted that the experiment would have a broad impact, writing that Collins could help settle the "science wars of the 1990s," "when sociologists launched what scientists saw as attacks on the very nature of science, and scientists responded in kind," accusing the sociologists of misunderstanding science. More generally, it could affect "the argument about whether an outsider, such as an anthropologist, can properly understand another group, such as a remote rural community." With this comment, Nature seemed to be saying that if a sociologist can understand physics, then anyone can understand anything.
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Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish:
Every time I hear some Republican flack claiming that any previous attempt to discipline Mark Foley would have been viewed as homophobic by the media and Democrats and gays, my jaw drops to the floor. Memo to Gingrich: It is not homophobic in any way to stop a grown man preying on teens in his care, whether that guy is gay or straight. No gay person would object to stopping that; we'd all insist on it; and I have found no gay people excusing Foley since. The premise behind this excuse is itself homophobic, and shows what little clue these Republicans have about gay people in general.
Secondly, since when is the GOP skittish about appearing homophobic anyway? The only gay people they have any time for are those prepared to give them cover to pursue gay-baiting as an electoral strategy, like Mary Cheney. The Republican party, in state after state, has demonized gay couples for years now, focusing especially on our desire to create families and stable relationships. They don't seem too worried about appearing homophobic when it comes to winning elections, do they? Gay backers of Bush in 2000, like me, were told he was different, he wasn't a bigot, he wasn't going to gay-bash to maintain power. We were lied to, and, in retrospect, we were fools to have believed any of it. And now they have the gall to defend their lack of basic responsibility to teens by blaming political correctness? In other words, blaming us? Puh-lease.
5:22 PM
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The Providence Journal | An electric event at RISD:
Don’t call Mike Daisey an actor. He’s a monologist.
“It’s a great title that means almost nothing to everyone,” he says.
Daisey speaks alone. He speaks the truth. And he’s speaking Saturday night in RISD Auditorium, the opening performer in the five-week FirstWorksProv Festival.
Think of Spalding Gray combined with John Goodman. Highbrow meets lowbrow.
“My work is funny, and it tends to be brainy,” Daisey says. “Our culture doesn’t think of these things happening simultaneously. We have a hard time with smart comedy.”
When’s the last time you laughed about electrical standards?
12:05 PM
4:24 AM
Life, examined - Arts - The Phoenix:
Solo performer Mike Daisey has been described as a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black, Spalding Gray and Robin Williams and — my favorite — “Jackie Gleason meets Franz Kafka.”
One of the privileges and delights of interviewing and writing about such oversized personalities is having the above sort of fun describing them. I will add “the love child of Chris Farley and Susan Sontag” to that list, but Daisey inspires delving deeper.
1:45 AM
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It's opening day—there's a piece in METRO today on the show, along with mentions at FishbowlNY and Jossip. METRO had very nice things to say:
"Watching Daisey sort out anything on stage is a delirious, brainy, hilarious, infuriating experience from which one emerges perversely hopeful: the world may be screwed, but for one moment, it seems, at least one guy gets it."
METRO
Longtime followers of this site will be familiar with the holiday that is opening day; the funny thing about how we now work is that we have multiple openings, because while the show is conceived and first delivered at first preview (the birth, so to speak, on September 15th) tonight is when it comes of age--the show is having its Bar Mitzvah, if you will. They grow up fast, don't they?
I'm going to take myself offline to finish preparations, but for those who may have forgotten, tonight's performance is at 7pm...I'll be seeing you.
md
12:07 PM
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9:10 AM
The Daily Show is as substantive as the "real" news:
The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.
The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.
9:06 AM
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8:43 AM
Another Life
My mother, 18, the summer before she married,
lounges belly-down in the sun,
books and grass all around, her head on her hands
propped at a jaunty angle.
She smiles in a way I've never seen
at something beyond the camera.
This photograph I come back to again and again
invites me to re-write her life.
I keep resisting, certain
I'd have no part in it, her first born
though not exactly. A boy first,
two months premature, my brother
who lived three days, was buried in a coffin
my father carried. "The size of a shoe box,"
he said, the one time he spoke of it.
And my mother, too, offered only once
that she was pregnant and so they married.
Drawn to this saw-edged snapshot,
I'm almost convinced to put her in art school.
Single, she'd have a job in the city,
wouldn't marry. There'd be no children
if that would make her this happy.
But I'm not that unselfish, or stupid.
And what then, too, of my beloved sister,
her son I adore?
So let me just move her honeymoon
from the Wisconsin Dells to the Caribbean.
Let the occasional vacation in a Saugatuck cabin
be exactly what she wanted. The house
she so loved she won't have to sell.
Winters, there's enough money to pay the bills.
There are no cigarettes, no stroke, no paralysis.
Her right hand lifts a spoon from a bowl
as easily as if it were a sable-hair brush
to an empty canvas.
And the grass that summer day
on the cusp of another life
is thick, newly mown, fragrant.
Deborah Cummins
8:38 AM
2:59 AM
11:38 PM
Freakonomics Blog » The value of commitment — reflections on my 10 year wedding anniversary (as it relates to poker):
Anyway, back to my 10 year anniversary. My wife wanted to spend our last hours in Las Vegas together playing in a poker tournament. Because I am a loyal husband, I agreed to do it. It was a $430 buy-in tournament at the Mirage and 20 players were entered. It started at 5 pm and we figured there was plenty of time to catch a flight at midnight. Since neither of us had ever played in a live tournament, we had no idea how long these take to complete. It took about three hours to narrow it down to a final table of ten players. I was still in the tournament at this point, although Jeannette got knocked out on a bad beat relatively early. Two hours later, there were still five players left, including me. I had about an average number of chips among the remaining players. I also had a dilemma. My flight left in two hours. It was the last flight of the night. I really wanted to catch it. On the other hand, having just played this tournament for five hours, I was hoping to get a nice payoff and maybe some bragging rights.
So it was 10:15 pm and I figured the latest I could leave for the airport and comfortably make my flight was 10:30 pm. I decided that I would go “all in” with any hand that was decent at all. This would give me a chance to either lose quickly or maybe win quickly. I didn’t announce this strategy to the table, I just adopted it. Over the next 12 hands I was “all in” about 6 times. Four times everyone else folded. I won one of the other two hands, and lost one against someone with fewer chips. That left me with a lot more chips than before, but no one had been knocked out.
8:41 PM
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8:32 PM
Microsoft will cripple PCs running pirated copies of Vista - Engadget:
We all thought that Microsoft was asking for trouble when the company announced previously that it would be including all the versions of Windows Vista on a single DVD, setting the stage for those in the know to crack the disc and save themselves some cash by installing Ultimate when they likely bought (ok, probably pirated via BitTorrent) a Vista DVD. Well, Microsoft has fired the first salvo in this war on pirates -- according to The Associated Press, the Redmond crew will be taking "much harsher steps to curtail piracy" than in years past. First, the company will "deny access" to some of the "most anticipated features," including Windows Aero, the new GUI. Then, Vista will start issuing ransom demands (we're not kidding about this part), demanding that a legitimate copy be bought within 30 days, or else. What would such consequences entail? How about limiting Web access to an hour at a time? Further, what about not being able to open documents from the desktop or "run other programs such as Outlook e-mail software" ?
4:28 PM
3:48 PM
A Hell of a Time: Les Freres Corbusier brings the controversial Hell House to New York City:
A woman undergoing a late-term abortion; a gay man dying of AIDS; a young woman losing her virginity. All of them are going to Hell, at least as depicted in Les Freres Corbusier's Hell House at Arts at St. Ann's. This theatrical event is modeled after the evangelical Hell Houses that were originally staged by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s and popularized by Pastor Keenan Roberts, who has written the script that is now performed in hundreds of Hell Houses across the country and is being used for the New York presentation.
Structured to resemble secular haunted houses, Hell Houses have proven extremely controversial. Roberts and his supporters claim that they are a useful, albeit unorthodox, conversion tool; his detractors charge that they are filled with misinformation and promote intolerance. Alex Timbers, artistic director of Les Freres Corbusier and director of the New York production, claims that the company is presenting its Hell House "faithfully, without a wink, and without irony."
3:30 PM
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village voice > nyclife > Fly Life by Tricia Romano:
There was a naked woman covered in fake blood, a punk rock marching band, two slutty Catholic schoolgirls on a wooden cross, and two towers flowing with sumptuous liquid chocolate, where you could dip your dirty little strawberries. It might have seemed especially hedonistic, but it was par for the course for a party thrown for John Cameron Mitchell, director of the much-talked-about movie Shortbus, which opens in New York Wednesday.
3:20 PM
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2:50 PM
A Q&A is up at Maud Newton's site where I discuss and debate my new monologue, TRUTH--read it all here.
2:50 PM
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9:25 PM
Parent criticizes book 'Fahrenheit 451':
Alton Verm, of Conroe, objects to the language and content in the book. His 15-year-old daughter Diana, a CCHS sophomore, came to him Sept. 21 with her reservations about reading the book because of its language.
"The book had a bunch of very bad language in it," Diana Verm said. "It shouldn't be in there because it's offending people. ... If they can't find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn't have a book at all."
Alton Verm filed a "Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials" Thursday with the district regarding "Fahrenheit 451," written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.
"It's just all kinds of filth," said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read "Fahrenheit 451." "The words don't need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class."
He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain. He said the book's material goes against their religions beliefs. The Verms go to Grand Parkway Church in Porter.
8:32 PM
BREITBART.COM - French smokers fume as public ban looms:
French smokers were making a painful mental adjustment as a parliamentary committee recommended a ban on smoking in public areas from next year and the government indicated it will act quickly on the advice.
It means that from September smoking in French bars, restaurants and nightclubs could be completely prohibited -- unless they provide hermetically-sealed "fumoirs" into which serving staff are not allowed to penetrate.
8:30 PM
6:46 PM
Museum Field Trip Deemed Too Revealing - New York Times:
“Keep the ‘Art’ in ‘Smart’ and ‘Heart,’ ” Sydney McGee had posted on her Web site at Wilma Fisher Elementary School in this moneyed boomtown that is gobbling up the farm fields north of Dallas.
But Ms. McGee, 51, a popular art teacher with 28 years in the classroom, is out of a job after leading her fifth-grade classes last April through the Dallas Museum of Art. One of her students saw nude art in the museum, and after the child’s parent complained, the teacher was suspended.
Although the tour had been approved by the principal, and the 89 students were accompanied by 4 other teachers, at least 12 parents and a museum docent, Ms. McGee said, she was called to the principal the next day and “bashed.”
She later received a memorandum in which the principal, Nancy Lawson, wrote: “During a study trip that you planned for fifth graders, students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations.” It cited additional complaints, which Ms. McGee has challenged.
The school board suspended her with pay on Sept. 22.
In a newsletter e-mailed to parents this week, the principal and Rick Reedy, superintendent of the Frisco Independent School District, said that Ms. McGee had been denied transfer to another school in the district, that her annual contract would not be renewed and that a replacement had been interviewed.
6:42 PM
Man questioned and misses flight for speaking Tamil:
A 32-year-old man speaking Tamil and some English about a sporting rivalry was questioned at Sea-Tac Airport and missed his flight Saturday because at least one person thought he was suspicious.
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David Lynch - Inland Empire - Movies - New York Times:
As it turns out, some of Mr. Lynch’s online experiments found their way into “Inland Empire,” which, despite his claims for the speed of direct video, took three years to make. It was shot in fits and starts and, for the longest time, on his own dime and without a unifying vision. At the outset, “I never saw any whole, W-H-O-L-E,” he said. “I saw plenty of holes, H-O-L-E-S. But I didn’t really worry. I would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another idea and shoot that. I didn’t know how they would relate.”
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Dilettante Archives
