November 2007
42 posts
“to produce a book that would be naked structure….A piece of mathematics,...”
– this is from Jennifer Szalai’s review of Don DeLillo’s new book, Falling Man, in the July Harpers. i think this combines common frustrations with “postmodern” writing (ie it’s too formulaic) with the concession that it’s reflecting the fractured aspect of the...
“So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate,...”
– douglas adams
“Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to...”
– david foster wallace, introducing best american essays 2007
thanks, soulja boy!
so… despite the fact that soulja boy’s album is uniformly horrible, with the sole exception of the single - Crank That (Soulja Boy) - it did the service of reminding me with it’s title - Souljaboytellem.com - of the earlier and far greater web-inspired rap album - www.thug.com - by Trick Daddy. I hadn’t listened to this album since 1999 or thereabouts. It’s pretty...
“1) Weather control is the future of urban design.
2) If a city wants to...”
– geoff manaugh
yahoo and google definitely have lots of room to improve email… or, to augment it and enrich the experience… it’s a hassle, as it is, managing online relationships over the exploding conduits of social interation on the web. something like this, with an open social, or FOAF framework could be seriously experience-enriching. email seems such a good starting-point, because, it...
make that car hum
kottke posted a great bit on japanese engineers making roads that play melodies as you drive over them, i love the idea of highway hackers : Japanese researchers have developed “melody roads” that play tunes when you drive on them. You could use this technique for traffic calming…i.e. the road plays music only when you’re driving the speed limit and hope that...
citi bank manages home depot's portfolio
this information is probably public, so… whatever - what isn’t generally known is that if you call citi bank because your mastercard account was compromised and you need to make a payment to the account, but can’t because your web access has been shutdown and you want to make a phone payment then, after talking to a guy for 15 minutes - during which you desperately scour the web...
kid's got some credit card fraud up in his grillz
so… pretty geeky admission for you - whenever i call the credit card company and they ask me for the password for my account or like, my address or other information to verify that it is indeed my account, i feel sort of like a secret agent.
“Don’t forget the small statistics, which are often the most striking....”
– that first statistic is mind boggling. a quarter of a million bullets per bad guy? john wayne is turning in his grave. this is why all wars should be fought with six-shooters. from a tyler cowen article in the washington post.
tv is crazy over here
you can go, literally, sequentially through the following on tv : - televangelism, but since everyone is catholic, i’m not sure what they’re doing - sex phone operators with live! models waiting for your call - a movie in japanese with italian subtitles - a black and white movie from the 50s(?) featuring an old man (playing a doctor?) having sex with women (patients?) who come...
“do you think Soulja Boy knows what a W-2 is?
I heard he has a hidden track...”
– j!
the water we use. →
i saw this and think it’s swell. i had heard a while ago about a drought in india that was severly affecting the country and that, contemporaneously, coca-cola was producing some astronomical quantity of waste-water to produce coke at their india facilities - you can read about that here, at the sanfran gate. anyhow, when i read that.. it got me thinking about what goes into what we consume...
oh! bondage, my dear. →
some fantastic N64 nostalgia, 10 years later… pistols, license-to-kill & the facility. or… grenade-launchers in complex. (thanks bug)
laughing my chat off
e: new sitcom idea...."martyrville" about the 911 hijackers living in heaven, each with 72 virgins.
me: hahahha
me: i don't know if it's edgy enough
e: they realize shortly that 72 virgins is a lot of virgins, and not all is easy in heaven
...
e: nyc is mad decent. the hotel i am in is absolutely nuts big ol suite with a big ol balcony 22 floors up in midtown
e: theres a "sleep concierge" - did she tell you that?
e: you call him and he talks to you about your sleeping habits and styles and he brings any of 15 different types of luxury pillows to suit your needs
me: it'd be best if he could tailor dreams for you
e: yes, i should ask him that
me: aromatherapy, tell him you want to dream of brownies baking all night
e: yes! and then fresh brownies delivered in the morning
e: theres also a list of foods the sleep concierge approves for bedtime snacking: warm milk and cookies, banana bread, and such
...
me: you know the phillipe starck machine gun lamp?
e: i do know
me: wong made a bulletproof armoire to accompany it... HIGHlarious
me: SO tongue-in-CHEEK
me: so... provocative
me: what is safety?
e: i like my furniture to ask probing questions
me: haha, literally
me: mr show
e: yeah, my nightstand randomly plays .wav clips of important metaphysical and social problems in question form
me: ha
me: the mit media lab has a blender that you have to growl at at different volumes/pitches to get it to chop/mince
e: i want a toliet that you have to pray to
me: haha ... plllllleeeeeeez flush
e: i have company coming!
e: pleeze!
me: haha
e: sometimes it doesnt listen
e: the toliet works in mysterious ways
e: mom: "why is there feces on the floor?"
me: hahaha
e: me: "im learning about faith mom"
me: oh SHIT
me: ha
me: man, good laugh
do yourself a favor this weekend.
saw live free or die hard last night (in italian) …. blew my muthaflipp’n minds. people needa see this.
unbelievably large hp printer →
check this the *uck out! surrealists woulda gone NUTS.
dropp'n (victorian) science
the gentleman scientist is ripe for a major comeback…
your mission:
think of some hummus/humus puns…
Paolo Breaks
so… Paolo and i have been shirking some serious Italian cafe etiquette this week in celebration/preparation/mourning for his pending departure to Helsinki for some undisclosed period (1-3yrs). We’ve been consuming between 2 and 3 cappuccini everyday. Today we’re at 3 relatively early and aiming for 4. It’s going to take a concerted effort. Italian custom (and this is...
in a cursory mode
sometimes i think i’m capable of generating original thought, but then… inevitably i re-read something, which i first read in some time out of mind and … well, i invariably find thoughts which i’ve only just had and fooled myself into believing where novel. ah well… with that in mind, here’s something on the serial comma, via wikipedia. i just really liked the...
being honest can be ugly
Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great...
dumb robots
if a computer is going to attempt to guess what i want it to do - and that guess will require changing the state of my interaction with the computer (e.g. altering the display, keyboard actions, etc.) - it better be really good at guessing what i want it to do. additionally, there should be system-level settings that supress any attempted program-level intervention if the user chooses. i.e. it...
“The generative part of the creative process needs to be as distinct as possible...”
– two quotes from Paul Budnitz, over on the h line. Nothing profound, but I think they’re accurate and hit to the heart of why people halt the process of creation before it comes to fruition. too much thinking, too much criticism. i think it’s particularly difficult in our current context,...
“When I start seeing rap stars flashing euros instead of U.S. dollars, I know our...”
– from here via buzzfeed. so… awesome! additionally, apparently Gisele Bundchen only wants to get paid in euros, now… extra special is that this reminds me of an article i just read - not sure - but i think in the economist which suggested that by releasing a 500 euro bill into public...
why are you tho thad?
eric: why did so may early emo lead singers have lisps?
eric: someone needs to explore that question...
eric: maybe a lisp makes you emo
me: haha
me: a lisp predisposes you to psychic torment
“So, the fact that the Internet makes it possible to enforce against certain...”
– cory doctorow in interview with, yes… joel turnipseed on kottke. i agree with his reduction of the copyright issue… though i know it’s full of problems. whenever i see an issue of Time for Kids my mom is giving to her class of Fifth Graders which presents some ludicrous...
“To put it another way: “distance from the center” presumes not only...”
– douglas wolk, again, from the interview with Joel Turnipseed on kottke in reference to the decentralized nature of the web, our modern culture, etc.
symmetrically referential
the symmetry of nature continually astounds me, however, equal and opposite to that amazement, i’ve more or less come to expect it.
“If you don’t like the idea of gigantic metaphors in brightly colored...”
– douglas wolk, regarding the super-hero comic genre, from this interview on kottke
“Can we get some more ‘Cello Shots?”
– a guy named dick, who i had lunch with this weekend. dick organizes culinary tours of europe, has a quick-wit and is SUPER gay. in reference to limoncello - the lemon liquor. (oh! dick also hooked up with the chef at the restaurant!)
“i had my italian class tonight. we read and translated a few paragraphs about...”
– my mom who is taking italian lessons, planted 5 trees this weekend and who i am proud of.
“I would like to start looking at places, so can the...”
– joe, who’s the ski-trip planning champion of the year
singular joys
the fact that high-fives can only be satisfyingly performed with two people seems compelling evidence that god wants us to celebrate in tandem. (if you prefer to steer clear of implicit intentionality when discussing abstract gods, then… suffice it to say that the blind hand of biology has exhibited evolutionary preference for shared five-slapping.) relatedly, if you could execute a solo...
5 tags
pun of the day
here’s the pun of the day from this great piece in mit’s technology review on the mortgage situation. this is the first article i’ve read which offers both a great background on how the CDO (and, in general, derivative) markets operate, as well as, describes the dynamics of what happened (is happening). In fact, the summer might be described as a time when too many investors...