A hodge-podge of mind-crossing thoughts.
Why does the Mercury run Maakies so small when Dwarf Attack so self-evidently sucks?
Please, dear God, someone tell me “text” isn’t poised to become the latest victim of verbification.
So if it is a “gravastar” and not a black hole, does that mean Lee Smolin’s brilliant ideas about cosmological natural selection are more or less likely? More or less testable? Anyone? (And can you come up with a name that isn’t so utterly geeky? I mean, gravastar. Come on.)
In related news, there’s a galaxy that’s spinning the wrong way, and some of that matter that’s been missing for a while turned up last year.
And I’m right, I think, in that the audience that got a kick out of Teenagers from Outer Space and Call of Cthulhu is vanishingly small in the scheme of things entire. Nonetheless—
Also, I was going to ask why nobody pays any attention to Michael Torke, but you know, I did hear “Bright Blue Music” first on NPR, and he’s done a piece for the friggin’ Olympics, so I guess they pretty much are. Still.
People who say that the art of correspondence is dying are also likely to claim that romance is dead.
Nope. Still don’t regret voting for Nader. Since 1992, thank you very much. (That didn’t come off too smug, did it? Did it?)
Oh, and, British Telecom? You can kiss my hyperlinking ass.
Döppelganger.
I like to imagine that he dresses better than I do, but I’m pretty sure when he’s at his computer he’s got cigarette burns on his T-shirt and cat hairs all over his sweater. We have two cats: one’s black and white, and the other a motley calico diluted with Russian blue (brindle, or so we’ve been told); upshot being no matter what I wear—the dark green, almost black sweater, the pale uncolored polar fleece—the cat hairs show up with little effort on their part. I imagine it’s the same with him.
I was writing something somewhere about love and domesticity, I was talking about (some of) the reasons why I dropped out of college, which had a lot to do with blond hair to the middle of an amazing back and a coyly winsome smile and a situation of achingly pure tragedy, or so it seemed at the time; I was going to make some point about the different kinds of love, and how the kind of love that’s usually celebrated, the kind that reaches its culmination just before the credits roll, after many wacky misadventures that end up mostly for the best and if there’s any screaming or crying it mostly involves a secondary character, somebody’s best friend, the grace note giving the whole thing its biting something of fragility, its pleasingly bitter affirmation of reality without spoiling the broth—do you remember how Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross turn to look at each other at the end of The Graduate? That’s what happens usually after most such loves burn themselves out all too quickly, that look, that empty, terrified, what-the-fuck look, and Edna may tell you that the candle burning at both ends makes for a lovely sight, but she knows, she knows that carefully husbanding a fire, building it with kindling and good dry logs with some foresight, red hair and a slippery snarky look that sneaks in under my radar, that opens and unfolds into something rich and new when I’m not looking and yet that I know, that knows herself, down to her toes; all that will last much longer, you see, and you know, fireplaces aren’t without their romance. —See? That was the point I was going to make, and then he walked in. I narrowed my eyes at him. (He still smokes.)
“I already said something with all that,” he said. And it’s true; I’d loaned him the anecdote for something else, another essay, and he’d been focussing on a different look entirely, a grin this time, or not so much a grin, from some other movie, or not from a movie, per se, but it was different; he hadn’t been making a point at all about love and domesticity, but about memory and the vagaries of sex and lust but nonetheless, there they were: the hair, the back, that smile, the unbearably beautiful angst I just wouldn’t put up with now, today. Different points entirely, but suddenly the point I was making went grey and listless; friable; ashen; and I put it away and never bothered to finish it. —Nor does it help matters much that he’s been making more money than me. Lately. Bastard.
“Whenever that pervert shows his face,” sings Momus, “my friends all think he’s me. They give him records by Squarepusher, and a box of Japanese tea.” Which isn’t exactly my problem, but I know what he means, or maybe I know what Nick Currie means. Whatever.
The thing about “Kip.”
It’s that there are so few of us, you know? I mean, there’s Kip Niven, and Kip Adotta, and Tom Hanks played a Kip once, and there was this football player named Kip something, and even if you start to add in all the “Kipps” out there, there’s just not that many. (There was a woman in one of Gene Wolfe’s novels named Kip, but I think that was short for Stanford.) —Anyway. When you’re watching a movie, and Katharine Hepburn keeps saying, “Kip, stop it,” and “Kip, behave yourself,” and “Kip, don’t do that,” and your name is Kip, well, you get a little twitchy, is all I’m saying.
So I’ve just got one question.
Justice Scalia: should a jurist who believes abortion is murder resign, rather than simply ignoring duly enacted constitutional laws and sabotaging a woman’s right to choose? (Actually, I’ve got quite a few more questions than that, you sanctimonious, hypocritical, malicious, thieving thug, but we’ll leave it at that for now.)
Epiphanic mathomry.
So I think it goes that Shmendrick showed up a couple of days after everybody else, and the innkeeper was sweeping out the stable. Schmendrick asks him if there’s been a man and a woman, pregnant, stopping by. With a donkey. Maybe some shepherds. And these three other guys, dressed kind of like me, camels, Balthasar, Casper, Melchior, ring any bells? There was this star? And the innkeeper says oh, hey, you just missed them, nice guys. Good tippers. And Schmendrick’s like, oh, gee, really? Did they maybe leave some kind of forwarding address? I’ve got this stuff for them, see, the guy and his wife, the pregnant woman, I mean, except I don’t think she’s pregnant anymore, that what the star was about, you know? And the innkeeper shrugs and leans on his broom and says, you know, they said something about Egypt. And Schmendrick, he says, Egypt? Geeze. I mean, I can’t keep going all the way to frickin’ Egypt. Well, damn. And he kicks the dust and then he says, hey. You wouldn’t want some cinnamon and pepper, would you? Spices, you know, from the East? They’re good for if you’ve got some meat that’s gone a little gamey, you sprinkle it with a little of this, takes the edge off, very tasty. And I don’t really remember how it all ends, but anyway, that’s why we don’t celebrate Epiphany on Jan. 6.
As to why we celebrate Epiphany at all—
The first one was in Boston, and even though most of us had dropped out of college for one reason or another at that point (most of us would eventually go back, don’t worry), we were still on enough of a college schedule—and enough of us were still making Yuletide trips back home—that we couldn’t get everyone in the same room for a gift exchange until early January. So what the heck. Epiphany. And we’ve been doing it ever since, though now I think it has more to do with taking advantage of post-holiday clearance sales.
So: some pear brandy, and Ken MacLeod; a silk shirt in some lovely nameless harvest color; some plates with Warhol’s Monroe on them, a perfect fit our Hindipop kitchen; a fountain for the library (as soon as the library gets new paint and a new ceiling and new shelves, we’ll have a place to put it); some Poe, who is worth Becca’s hype (her squeals of delight at receiving Tomb Raider on DVD aside: remember, she can be cheerfully pragmatic about her entertainment), and whose brother all unknown to me is the guy who wrote that book, or assembled it, more like; a lovely Kahimi Karie EP from Spain, the jetset cosmopolitanry of which pleases me inordinately, and anyway, there’s a killer version of “Giapponese a Roma” on there; and ganged up and dropped in my lap, Taschen’s gorgeous reproduction of the Nuremberg Chronicles, and if I’m a little quiet here in my corner, well. —And if I miss the days when Barry used to wrap his presents in glass bottles and duct tape, I don’t so much miss the days he wrapped them in dirty socks, which was, all told, pretty much the same day. (It was a conceptual piece.) Still: books; music; software (pirated and otherwise); cheerfully useless toys, trinkets and oddments; a 20-gallon aquarium; services rendered or coerced; a copy of Plotto and a cast-iron lamp shaped like a giant housefly. You know: mathomry. But lovingly so. Epiphanic, even.
So it’s been slow.
I did some laundry. I downloaded some Cowboy Bebop and Tegan and Sara and that Nico song Wes Anderson used in The Royal Tenenbaums. I’ve been avoiding the news. (I haven’t been doing such a good job at avoiding the news, but my intentions are pure.) I walked all over downtown to a bunch of third-string temp agencies and dropped resumes off with people who all said, well, right now, you know, but hey, we’ll call you. I’ve written so many cover letters I’m getting writer’s block staring at my own letterhead. How many ways can you say “Give me the fucking job already”without, you know, seeming desperate?
But this wasn’t supposed to be about that. Any of that. —I could tell you about Wil Wheaton. You know how he looked in Stand by Me? Especially that moment in the swamp or whatever, they’ve just done something exciting, and he leans back against the tree and closes his eyes. I looked just like that when I was that age, or maybe a little younger. Even had that striped shirt, except it was the ’70s and not the ’80s pretending to be the ’50s. None of which really means much of anything except I’m curiously touched he’s still, you know, keeping it real, or whatever you call it. Not doing anything that’s likely to land him on E! anytime soon. And if he isn’t as funny as I sometimes think he thinks he is, who is? He’s managed to retain some small scraps of dignity,which is an impressive feat in this day and age. —So you’ve probably read his blog before and everything, and the line about the 50,000 monkeys is pretty good, but you maybe didn’t know he swept his categories in the 2002Bloggies (hey, I didn’t know till five minutes ago),and you probably haven’t read this amusing article about his blog. And yes, the bit about who would win, Anakin or Wesley, is pretty much exactly as funny as I think he thinks it is.
Hey! The only other thing I could think of was this joke from a humor magazine somebody I knew or maybe it was the brother or cousin of somebody I knew, or ex-girlfriend or something, the linkage is unclear to me now, but anyway, they went to Emory, and maybe they sent it to my roommate (who looked like a young, scruffy Billy Joel, so), and anyway, I thought it was so funny I scribbled it on my dorm room door froshling year. It’s a poster for a late ’80s superconcert:
Squeeze
The Firm
Hooters
INXS
—with—
XTC
See? Like I said. Slow.
Bandwagons of outrage.
I’ve been resisting the urge. It’s sordid. It’s—actually—deeply embarrassing, to any American, whether at home, or on the foreign stage. Why call attention to it? —But some things must needs be bandied about, and I cannot, in the end, resist such bandying. I tried to be strong; I’m weak. I tried to be above such politicking and mud-slinging; I’m below it. Far below. So: the link you’ve doubtless seen a hundred times already across the web: John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, proclaims that “Negroes, Asians, and Orientals; Hispanics, Latins, and Eastern Europeans; have no temperament for democracy, never had, and probably never will.”
No, wait; that’s not it. Here it is! John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, had himself anointed with oil upon his accession to the Senate in 1995, an homage to a ritual used to mark the coronation of ancient Israeli kings.
Actually, that can’t be it, either. Creepy and megalomaniacal as that might seem, I don’t think I meant to make fun of the man for his religious convictions. Oh! Right. John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, has said it’s perfectly okay for some employers to discriminate on the basis of religion.
Hmm. Serious, yes, and it greatly calls into question how fit he is to uphold this nation’s laws, but that’s awfully dense material to plow through. Not neat and flashy and streamlined enough to be a swift and supple meme. Maybe—aha! John Ashcroft, our Attorney General, steamrolls over state laws, despite his party’s commitment to states’ rights.
Oh, but that’s old news. Can’t be right. What on earth—I just had it in my hand before the phone rang and I had to deal with that yahoo from the credit card company—oh! Found it. Right. The thing that’s buzzing all over the net, has people ridiculing our Attorney General, John Ashcroft, calling for his resignation; the thing that’s generating so much heat and outrage:
Half-naked statues in Hall of Justice hidden behind $8,000 drapes.
There. That’s it. I knew it was around here somewhere.
Elephant dung, not cow dung.
What? We went with John and Becca and Chris and saw Brotherhood of the Wolf which is (impressively) the closest thing to a Hong Kong historical action flick I’ve ever seen take place in 18th century France, and then cooked dinner for Steve and Sara (asparagus with egg and cheese, right out of The Moosewood Cooks at Home, and kukkakaalialaatikko, and bread-machine bread), and then it snowed, I mean it actually frickin’ snowed for the first time in like two years, and the cats hated it, and anyway, whatever; none of that is really worth talking about, because people enjoying themselves and laughing and cracking off-color jokes over chopped cauliflower and laughing (and yelling, but laughing) at the antics of people who can’t remember how exactly it is you drive in this snow stuff, none of that makes for gripping literature, precisely. Schadenfreude, that’s what puts butts in seats.
So: without further ado: some highlights from the New York Times’ corrections over the past 30 years or so.
(PS: Don’t tell Jenn I told you, but she’s working on some character art and I’m writing some copy for her for Dicebox that should be going up soon. Prepping to spread some word of mouth at APE—or at least, to have some lucky friends who are actually going spread it for us. But mum’s the word, for now.)
More glaze for your eyes.
Yes: more on Enron. James K. Galbraith, this time, whose basic point is simplistic and charmingly naïve (but idealistic—and I like my politics charming, and naïvely idealistic), but whose angle of attack is commendable. So many conservative commentators (to paint with a broad, broad brush for a moment) have shrugged at the Enron meltdown, claiming not to see any cause for political concern. After all, they say, Enron asked for help, and the administration didn’t give it to them. See? Case closed. But, as Galbraith points out, the point at that point wasn’t to save the company. The damage had already been done, the henhouse already looted, the cash yanked out and socked away—and all with the complicity and willing aid of the Bush administration and the Clinton administration and more members of Congress than you’d ever want in the same place at the same time. The scandal isn’t the illegalities they tried to get away with (though those are horrific, and endemic: “There are a hundred more Enrons waiting to happen,” you keep reading, and no one seems too surprised by this statement); it’s all the crap they managed to get legalized, with a wink and a wad of cash.
At least this much of Galbraith’s Veblenian vision is coming true: there’s a lot of second thoughts out there about the wisdom of applying the brutish volatility of passes for a free market to services that ought to be constant, consistent, and secure, like power (and pensions). —Except, oops, Texas is deregulating its energy market, and another 22 states are tottering in its wake.
Hey. I’m sure California was just a fluke.
Camryn Manheim.
Amy and Aaron, over for beer and pizza, and in goes The Great Muppet Caper, the Empire Strikes Back of the Muppet trilogy. (Should I be putting a ™ after every Muppet™? —Ah, screw it.) Amy, of course, is on tenterhooks (after announcing the “Best. Musical number. Ever,” in her best. Comicbook guy. Voice, which is pretty darned good), waiting for the best. Line. Ever, but—as Miss Piggy, duped by the deliriously itchy Charles Grodin, takes the runway in the latest of Diana Rigg’s awful swimsuits—Amy pauses a moment and pontificates in that peculiarly Amy way: “You know, it was a hell of a long wait from her to Camryn Mannheim.” Which—ignoring the intended ironical recontextualization, and the idea of a man’s right arm in drag, and the whole host of bendings over backwards you have to perform to read just about anything the way you want to read it these days—that says something, you know, in its own modestly profound way.
And I’d forgotten how squiffy the Muppets can make me feel. And I’d forgotten John Cleese’s bit. And the best line ever? “You can’t even sing! Your voice was dubbed!”
Yes, the movie was disappointing. But this?
Christianity is safe for the moment in Penryn, PA, thanks to the efforts of the entire police force (all eight of ’em), who’ve decided protesting the teaching of witchcraft is more important than their sworn duty to protect and serve. So, they won’t be directing traffic around an upcoming YMCA triathlon since, you see, the YMCA reads Harry Potter books to kids. —The YMCA shrugs and says they’ll just hire cops from some other municipality; secular humanism marches on. Further news and updates on Harry Potter boycotts courtesy the ever-snarky LACK (Librarians Are Corrupting Our Kids! —And a damn good thing, says I).
The shah always falls.
The ever-erudite Erik Riker-Coleman (well, he always seems erudite over on Plastic) points out an article by Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, (USA, Ret.), in the Winter ’01-’02 issue of Parameters. It’s—it’s interesting reading: the long-sought goal of stability in America’s foreign policy, it seems, is a sham, a betrayal of our fundamental values, a detriment to our own wealth and power. Shockingly sane, well-argued, clear as a bell, a tad too patronising, though bracingly radical at points, or at least, what passes for radicalism in these benighted times, too fond from time to time of literary excess, problematic in the way of most polemics these days, to wit: how, exactly, do you define “terrorist”?—and curiously objective: what, pray tell, is the “local, organic rate of change,” and how does one measure it, as they say, “on the ground”—but: well worth reading. If only so you can say at your next cocktail party, “I was reading this article in Parameters—you know, the US Army War College quarterly—and it said—”
Note: just because the shah always falls doesn’t mean the ayatollah must always replace him.
Why, yes. It is brand new. How nice you noticed.
Some random entries below, typed up more to play with style and form than anything else, but hey, they’re still, y’know, cool. I supoose. Still working out the kinks. Archives? Um. I’ll stick ’em somewhere, when I figure it out. Did I mention I can’t code for shit and I’m doing this all by hand? Well. With Dreamweaver, and Dean Allen’s invaluable Apple Scripts. But otherwise: hand-made. Whee.
It was never about the coffee.
[Being a post made to Plastic.com I wish for some bizarre reason to see preserved, shorn of context, for some small modicum of posterity.]
Once more, someone confuses quantity with quality; what on earth can you say to someone who can only measure worth in currency?
When Starbucks was a tiny coffee shop in Seattle, buying small amounts of coffee to satisfy their local clientele, they could make some claim that theirs was a premium product. But their explosive growth means that they have to buy more and more (and more) coffee. And anyone with any sense at all can tell you that at some point you’re going to run out of good coffee to buy. Your standards are going to decline. You are going to purchase larger and larger lots of crappier and crappier coffee.
You cannot claim to purvey premium coffee when you’re slapping bags of your product on the shelves of major grocery stores throughout the country. There just isn’t enough good coffee out there.
Now: this is true of the explosive growth of coffee consumption in general; even if it were merely driven by locally owned mom’n’pops springing up on every corner, instead of corporate outlets. But with mom’n’pops you have diversity in purchasing, in the source of the coffee, and a greater chance that someone’s going to hit on the right combination of source, process, and service to deliver good coffee. With Starbucks, you get what you get with McDonald’s: the same damn crap no matter where you go, spread into a thin uniform paste across as much of the land as they can reach. And the larger it gets, and the larger its economy gets, the worse the quality will be, overall.
(Have I had Starbucks? Yes. It’s better than Seattle’s Best, which tastes like burnt Folger’s. It isn’t as good as Coffee People. I vastly prefer Stumptown, though.)
You aren’t a true free marketeer, Anonymous. (You rarely are.) A true free marketeer would be appalled by the ways that large corporations use extra-market tactics to bully competition out of the running before their products ever have a chance to directly compete. You, Anonymous, are a worshipper of power, nothing more; you fetishize sales reports and profit margins and box office returns and TV ratings as if they were a magical process, as if, through contagion, their success would rub off on you like some minor mirror of their wealth and power. That’s why you love millions of sales and tax cuts for the rich and box office blockbusters and shoe companies that pay a single megastar more to preen in a couple of commercials than their entire Asian workforce that actually makes their products—even if their aggrandizement hurts you directly. That’s why you sneer at people who try to get something back when they’ve been cut or burned or driven out of business by these giant bullies—you’ve got to distance yourself from their pathetic loss as much as possible, lest it drag you down. Even if in the final analysis you have far more in common with those “losers”; even if it’s shown to you how their cause would benefit you and make your world a better place. You are superstitious and ignorant, knowing nothing of the true workings of what you term the “free market,” and desperate to remain that way.
And you wouldn’t know a good cup of coffee if I threw it in your face.
Assume, for a moment, that I want to fling a haggis across a Canadian river.
Rather like—well, like meatmonger Gordon Sinclair. But let’s further assume that Sinclair is a smart, even ruthless businessman, familiar with current trends in intellectual property law. So let’s assume he didn’t just patent the device he’ll use to fling the haggis across the river. After all, why do that when you can patent the entire concept of transriparian haggis delivery? I highly doubt anyone has ever filed a patent for flinging a haggis across a river before; I doubt anyone has even written a sketchy monograph on the subject. There would therefore be no prior art to contest Sinclair’s claim that the idea sprang fully formed from his head, and that he thus deserves sole ownership.
So: assuming I, too, want to fling a haggis across a Canadian river, I’d be shit out of luck. —Unless, of course, I’m willing to pay Mr. Sinclair a hefty licensing fee.
But all this assumes that the Canadian Patent Office is as literal-minded, ignorant, dunder-headed, compliant, and—to be fair—underfunded as the US Patent and Trademark Office.
