Ceaseless Prattle

Big questions

2010-02-02T10:16:00.000-05:00

The bank's 'Quick Help' sidebar has moved into answering existential crises.

The questions on page 2 include "Who do I need to know?," "How can I be sure?," and "Why?"

bonnes chausseurs

2009-09-20T11:58:00.000-04:00

At one point – I think it was around 1996 or 1997 – I had a pair of shoes that I really liked.

It's why I don't fly Icarus airlines.

2009-09-19T23:17:00.000-04:00

An NYT sidebar the other day mentions that Senator Franken, among a few others, is opposed to elements of the Baucus health plan because they'd tax the high-tech medical developers among his constituents. Among the firms mentioned by name is "large device maker" St. Jude Medical.

Hear me now and listen to me later: if I ever need a pacemaker – and that's not unimaginable; my grandfather has worn one for more than thirty years – if I ever need a pacemaker, I don't want one that's named after the patron saint of "desperate cases and lost causes."

Protein

2009-08-27T14:12:00.000-04:00

Hey, you know that fork? The fork you just mouth-cleaned while you were on kitchen patrol?

Did that fork taste like pinto beans, or more like chicken and rice?

Do you feel lucky, punk?

They can do that?

2009-08-26T22:36:00.001-04:00

A client wants a counter on her site, so I used the first free one I found by Googling 'free counter." When my variables were put into the code generator, and it spat out my html, it was branded below with the following warning:

Note: If you alter the code above your account will be disabled or we may show ads on your site or a big image that tells everyone you have stolen this counter or we will call you names and take away your birthday.

Aigs

2009-04-11T21:46:00.002-04:00

Egg04
Originally uploaded by RichMilNix

Hoppy Eatser.

Stuck in an elevator with Murray Gell-Mann

2009-04-03T07:20:00.001-04:00

Murray Gell-Mann
The NYT did a profile last weekend on Freeman Dyson, which remind me of the crush I had on that whole crowd of midcentury white men – Dyson, Gell-Mann, Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, of course Einstein and Feynman. Brilliant to a man, they made a sort of secret fraternity, which peaked (in secrecy and importance) with the MAnhattan Prpject but also pre- and post-dated it; if you read a memoir by any one of them, every six months they seem to be keeping each other's company in meetings at Caltech and MIT.

Anyway, I'm not qualified to actually understand their scientific work, but I've always had a fantasy that if I could spend a couple of hours with any one of them, it would be like touching the godhead. And that's about one bout of stuck-elevator time.

Of course, they're all ninety, so if I was really stuck in an elevator for them, I'd spend all of my time fanning them and feeding them salt tablets for their hypertension.

TV funhouse

2009-03-31T15:37:00.002-04:00

Turned on the hotel teevee this afternoon long enough to form these two impressions:

1: The Disney Channel seems to be airing a teen sitcom whose dreamy high-school protagonist is named Dean Moriarty.

2: On Family Feud, the question "Name a country whose inhabitants are thinner than Americans" prompted the same number-one response from both contestants: France. Since the second contestant couldn't repeat the response of the first, she volunteered: Italy.

What's wrong with Cambodia? Or, y'know, Chad? Or E) All of the above?

Grab a hold of a Holdengräber

2009-03-31T10:16:00.002-04:00

I'm in Arlington for three days, on the day job, attending the annual Computers In Libraries convention. This morning's keynote speech was an interview with the NYPL's Paul Holdengräber; while I'm not sure I learned anything about computers, he dropped a few mots bon enough to jot down (all paraphrased from my legal pad; the thing was streamed, and is probably online somewhere if you want to look):

~~~~~~~~~~

I don't think it's a bad thing to feel small, walking up the steps of the NYPL between Patience and Fortitude. I don't think it's a bad thing, in the library, to feel the weight of five, ten, fifteen thousand years' collected knowledge, the weight of 52 million books, which no one in one life could ever read. But then you have to get past it.

~~~~~~~~~~

Paul's mom's maxim about being a good listener: "There's a reason you have two ears and one mouth."

~~~~~~~~~~

Digression is the sunshine of narrative.

~~~~~~~~~~

(Regarding the role of library higher-ups: ) The books are there already, okay? They are there. I have to make people desire them. And that's what I do: generate desire.

~~~~~~~~~~

Bonus thought from an excerpt of Malcom Gladwell at the NYPL, speaking at a thing Holdengräber curated, and expressing something I've often tried to say, but with much more pith: Let's reverse it for a minute. Let's imagine we live in a world with computers, and iPods, but no paper. And I say, I've come up with this great new technology called paper. It's cheap, and it's easy to use, and it's durable if handled correctly, and it works without electricity. And you'd say, wow, that's a great idea!

Realpolitik

2009-03-31T09:47:00.000-04:00

Grandpa Gene is visiting, and asked Declan about the departed pup.

Do you remember Lawrence?

Oh, yes.

And he's in dog heaven now?

No, he's in the ground.

What I've been up to

2008-09-12T16:59:00.001-04:00

This isn't the long-threatened explication of what I've really been up to, like for the last thirty years. But for one or two good reasons, I've got a couple of last month's posters hosted here. (2MB .pdf)

Hey, Bo Diddley

2008-06-13T08:01:00.002-04:00

I've had this video up all week. I'd never seen it before and don't know what it's from (but Robin probably knows the name of the concert movie, and probably ate lunch with its DP at Katz's in 1976, just before seeing Marc Bolan sit in on a Stooges set at Max's Kansas City).

ANYWAY, I think it's best summed up by the YouTube tags associated with it:

Tags:
Bo Diddley Amazing Wow best video ever awesome greatest guitar live

Metatextual efficiency expert

2008-05-29T08:33:00.003-04:00

I just sent an email to myself with a list of all the other emails that I have to respond to today, along with their authors. Did I say that clearly enough? When I arrive at Venue Two this afternoon, I'm gong to find several emails on my desktop, one of which is a note from myself, teling me to answer all the emails on my desktop.

This is one step closer to having a little robot version of me living inside my head, barking orders at myself and threatening to get out the shock collar. Which, to be honest, is where I suspect I'm really heading.

Pouring water on a drowning man

2008-05-24T19:39:00.002-04:00

Okay, seriously. Who thought it would be a good idea for me to work at a library?

This is an actual, literal photograph of my poor, overworked bedside table.

Good dog unhappy man

2008-05-20T12:53:00.000-04:00

RIP beast.

Lawrence the dog died in my arms this morning, which will surprise a lot of close-but-distant friends, because he was smart and strong. As a friend remarked a few weeks ago when I mentioned that the dog was seriously ill, “That seems like the kind of dog that you’d want to be lost in the woods with, if you had to be lost in the woods.”

The pup endured two separate bouts with Lyme disease. The first time, in summer 2007, the treatment almost killed him, but he finally rebounded nicely; when he got it again (again! vet’s blood tests confirm that he was clear in the interim), it went straight to his kidneys. With no working tool to screen out waste, the uric acid backed up into his bloodstream; full of poison, he lost all his appetite, got weaker and skinnier. For a month he’s been on K/D, and I’ve been administering fluids via an IV, and that probably bought us a month.

It was a pleasure going through all the photographs that I’ve posted here, because his weight and health have been so precarious for the last few months, I had sort of forgotten what a strong, smart buoyant presence he was for most of the five-plus years that I had with him. He was so lean that dog run confederates in the city used to speculate that one of his anonymous parents might have been a greyhound. I don’t suspect that that was true, but when I watched him take off after those lacrosse balls, I was impressed – the way you’re impressed by a well-designed industrial machine.

I plan to write more later, and maybe I will, or maybe I’ll spare you. How many times do you need to read Marley & Me? Lawrence was Brian’s fourth-favorite dog, and he was my favorite dog. He has slept in my bed for the last two thousand consecutive nights, and I’m going to miss him tonight.

errant art

2008-05-16T13:07:00.003-04:00

Just wrote this in an email to ol' Ozzy:

Harper's has their entire (160-year) history online and searchable, and free to subscribers, and maybe something like that is the future of print v. web. Because a subscription to Harper's only costs me about $15 a year, and though I've grown frustrated as, during the Bush presidency, it's grown into less of a thinking polyglot journal and more of an educated liberal/progressive/anarchist/paranoid rag, it remains good enough to buy, and this isn't the first time that I've gone online looking for something I read ten years ago. But what I want to actually say about that is: the end product is scans of the actual magazine pages, which have been scanned and OCRd to be searchable. The pages are big image files, so load somewhat slowly, so when you want to read something, you copy the text out and paste it somewhere else as straight ASCII data. And this works great for the bulk of the article, but where text is used as a graphic element – big, small, italics, what have you, in the interest of laying out the page or, in this case, the author bios – that ASCII data sometimes has a hard time keeping up, and what results are lovely little word poems. I've attached four.

I'll probably copy this into a blog post, since I never update those damn things, so no one ever reads them. The only thing I ever do when I feel like writing something is send email to Robin.

Another ten percent is ketchup

2008-03-30T20:43:00.006-04:00

All the people who say this critical darling (above) is just a laundry list of statistics alternating with anecdotes about the author's 97-year-old father: yeah, that's true, but as usual, what matters is how you do it, and Shields is falling with style. It's a marvelous read.

The statistic, though, that got me up out of my chair, walking around the house barking it at everyone (including the confused four-year-old Boy, who didn't deserve that): according to Shields, one-fourth of all the vegetables consumed in the United States are French fries.

Does that leave you as gobsmacked as it does me? Why or why not? Discuss.

Radio nincompoop: Finally, sled pie.

2008-03-29T12:55:00.002-04:00

Some things, when you get to heaven, you can measure in terms of Actual Time Spent (washing cars, 164h; attending births, 22h). Other things are so pervasive and enormous, you measure them as Percentage of Life Spent (sleeping, 31%; commuting / work-related travel, 4.5%). For a little while there, "making mix tapes" was threatening to move from my list A into my list B.

In high school, it makes sense to make mixtapes for girlfriends. In college, it's still sweet. When you're 35 years old, and you just can't decide whether the next song should come in on the two or the four, and you're auditioning it this way and then that way, then playing the entire previous song trying to figure it out ... as Dennis Miller once said, "you've probably made a serious vocational error somewhere along the line."

So here you go. For best results, iTunes. And to all those who are too cool for Bruce Springsteen, I offer: When a man is tired of Rosalita, he is tired of life.

I'm sure they're just happy to be asked

2008-03-27T17:18:00.003-04:00

Portrait of the Gonzo journalist as a swimming fool: who knew?

2008-02-18T21:21:00.002-05:00

All quotes from Gonzo [Wenner / Seymour], which is overall better than you've heard; like most "oral biographies" I've seen (especially Plimpton's Capote thing from a decade or so ago), its primary fault is rhetorical flab.

Who knew that the good doctor was so crazy for chlorinated water?

Richard Goodwin: But at Hickory Hill, i'd wake up and look out the window, and there would be Hunter in the swimming pool. I found out later that Ethel (Kennedy) was a little worried about Hunter's presence around the kids – but mostly he just swam. [p189]

Ralph Steadman: On the night of the fight [Ali-Frazier in Zaire], Hunter had a big bag of marijuana, and he took a bottle of Glenfiddich I had bought him down to the pool with a bucket of ice nd the bag, threw the marijuana into the pool ... and dived in and just hung by the side of the pool, smoking and drinking and loving the whole meaningless nature of it. [p 191]

Patti Stranahan: ...we used to let him swim in our pool every night. He was quiet, and he could do whatever he needed to. [p 275]

Marilyn Manson: ...he really, really wanted to come to my hous eto get in my swimming pool, which I had told him was as hot as a Jacuzzi. [p 407]

Felicitous adjacence

2008-01-16T20:03:00.002-05:00

iTunes, coupled with a home FM transmitter and about 2.5 TB of hard drive space, has made my life not so much perfect as fully realized. And as silly as that is, it's not really a joke. In the nineties, I used to make MiniDisc mix tapes because the MD's shuffle function played back without gaps. (If you are not sufficiently a nerd to understand all of that, you have no business on the Internet. Go read Robert Fulghum.)

My entire day around the house is accompanied by iTunes' Party Shuffle function pulling from a list of about 12,000 songs. It just chugs through them, like the big custom jukebox that it is, playing Curtis Mayfield after Charles Mingus after Frank Zappa, never tiring or asking me to turn it off (both of which services the wife provides in spades). And occasionally, just like all those little monkeys crouched tirelessly over their little typewriters, it comes up with a segue that merits a headline.

I was served both of these sequences today.

A:

The Residents: In between dreams
Bill Frisell Quartet: Stand up, sit down
Violent Femmes: Jesus walking on the water

B:

Big Star: Holocaust
Sondre Lerche: It's our job
John Wesley Harding: I can tell (when you're telling lies)

Give 'em the evil look, son.

2007-12-28T19:56:00.001-05:00

I don't know these people. I don't know this baby. I'm posting this here, having seen it on Boingboing, because every single time She sees it, she laughs so hard she nearly wets her pants.

Parents have trained baby to "give 'em the evil look" on command.

High praise: The correct ingredients of bottom

2007-12-12T20:51:00.000-05:00

In the event that I ever die, I want you to volunteer to write my eulogy. And what I want you to do is just plagiarize this section of Sly Stone's liner notes from Dance To The Music, plugging my name in for Larry Graham's:

I am grateful to Larry Graham who constantly adds the correct ingredients of bottom whether it be on stage, in the studio, or swappin' fives on a street corner. Larry can sing anything, play anything and do anything. Larry is as funky as nine cans of wet magic shave. Gone Larry!

Please, don't hurt 'em

2007-12-09T21:09:00.000-05:00

If the reference doesn't make you smile, you are either too old or too young; you are either too hip or insufficiently hip.

If it does: you are just right.

Triborough Bridgecam

2007-12-09T20:56:00.002-05:00

I always loved this. After the southbound Harlem River Drive connects with the FDR, just before you emerge under the Manhattan legs of the Triborough Bridge, there's a street sign.

A street sign that reads FDR DR n one side and TRIBORO BR on the other.

Let's be clear, for our nonnative friends, that the FDR drive is a ten-mile-long, six lane highway bracketing the east side of Manhattan, and that the scale of the Triborough Bridge can be discerned from its moniker: it's not even a thing, it's several things, it's a series of bridges that, taken collectively, spans Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. It must weigh, I don't know, a million tons.

Let's be clear: if you ever got close enough to this sign, on foot, that it could do you any good by telling you where you were, you would be dead.