Electric Josh

The Nation: "What we're really seeing is the final nail in the coffin of the mass market and of one-size-fits-all media." I doubt this, but an interesting article anyway.
[permalink | tb ]

From the Things That This Space Isn't Creative Enough to Make Up So They Must Be True Department comes news that

1. Barbara Walters has produced an episode of 20/20 that involves five childless couples pleading to adopt a 16-year-old's baby. Four couples will lose on national television.
2. Uri Geller (yes, Uri Geller) has a friggin' patent pending on the very idea of such a show, and is threatening to sue ABC.

I shit you not. May they both lose and be (further) humiliated (if that's possible) before God and their families. I'm throwing away the TV before it gets my baby.
[permalink | tb ]

Roland has something of a review article posted that covers a couple of subjects near to this space's previous life's heart, including Lehigh University, scanning [fill in the blank] microscopy and very small particles.
[permalink | tb ]

The Times has an article on Asperger's syndrome [non-paywall copy here], which is apparently a form of autism that affects only one's social skills. Sounds almost too ridiculous to be true, but if it leads the paper of record to print things like this, then it's okay with me:

Neurotypical friends had been invited to serve as "expert" panelists to field questions on the evening's topic: flirting. But the best advice came from the Aspies.

"I find that sometimes shutting up and just not talking often makes them think you're a good listener when in fact you're just not talking," said one participant.

Note that you can't make up anything as wonderful as the following:

"She'll say something about how terrible her clothes look," Mr. Jorgensen explains. "I'll say, `Yes, honey, those are terrible-looking clothes,' when really she's wanting some affirmation that her clothes don't look terrible."

At those moments, Ms. Jorgensen now tells her husband that he is acting like an "ass burger," a running joke that defuses anger on both sides. But such exchanges have mostly disappeared because Ms. Jorgensen knows that she is unlikely to get what she wants that way.

Learning to be more direct herself was not so horrible.

Proposed logo for this space, made with my handy new $40 graphics tablet. Gimp is fun again.
[permalink | tb ]

Man, there's something awfully demoralizing about a baby that screams pathetically if and only if she's lying in her crib.
[permalink | tb ]

Okay, so it turns out that Montpelier is even nicer than I remembered it, which is kind of the message I end up driving away with every time I go back now. This cute baby (more pictures of whom will be added soon) liked it so much that she decided to do her best to avoid sleeping at night while we were there, lest someone fail to punctuate the silence with earsplitting screams. We saw Lib's soccer game, which was wonderfully brutal, with high school girls flattening each other into the boards and throwing elbows in between plays that were mostly excellent: kids running to open space, passing back to their defenders and (sort of) running set pieces, all sorts of stuff that causes this space to realize that it needs to find a men's league down here. We are refreshed.
[permalink | tb ]

Since bills now contain more junk mail than bill, how's about just returning the junk with the bill?

I think it's time to turn the tables and start getting paid to insert flyers and upsell messages back to the companies we all do business with. Time to pay the local San Diego Gas & Electric utility bill? Fine, here's the check, and oh, here's a coupon for 15% off on your next meal at our favorite restaurant. Time to pay the phone bill? No prob, here's the check, and here's a flyer from the very nice people at Jiffy Lube

Yet more Get Your War On. What's your problem? You don't even sound grateful. (My week is completely made, now, by observing that he's using Bill the Cat in the strip.)
[permalink | tb ]

Todd, who gave me a copy of the Grey Album, which is pretty interesting, and who should himself be writing a space like this one, instead just points us to Beatallica: "The mashup craze continues. I haven't heard any of these songs, but I love the titles—my favorite is The Thing That Should Not Let It Be." I, myself, am partial to Got To Get You Trapped Under Ice.
[permalink | tb ]

This space would be way easier to maintain if my life were actually ridiculously interesting rather than mundane and computery like most of these sorts of spaces. This is quickly understood by reading, for example, EFF guru and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow's account of how he plans to get in shape:

Ordinarily, I would no more be able to afford months of Canyon Ranch care and supervision than mount my own private Mars mission, but I am the beneficiary of a providential intervention by Alexander Tsiaras, a huge-hearted Greek who is probably the world's leading artist in 3-D medical imagery. His company, Anatomical Travel, has recently embarked on a series of television productions aimed to deepen public understanding of how the body works (or doesn't) by giving detailed interior tours of the region.

Alex and I met last summer in Toronto where we were both speaking at a conference. We took to one another immediately. Alex, a former Olympic athlete, was concerned that my physical modus operandi was not long-term sustainable. To his empathic eyes, the wear already visible on my chassis was hard to behold. He and Liponis had been thinking about how to convey what Liponis had been discovering about health and aging to a wider audience when they hit on the idea of a TV special that would be a cross between a medical documentary, a reality show, and a remake of Incredible Voyage using an actual body. The body they selected was mine.

Nervous as an ocelot on meth, I rushed outside and smoked a Marlboro Light 100 to the root.

Me getting in shape means jogging, and maybe swimming. No being on television. No smoking, obviously. I won't bore you with the details.
[permalink | tb ]

In honor of the beautiful day—it was in the 80's and dry today, and we took the baby for a jog—this space is taking a day or two off. Back to work!
[permalink | tb ]

Todd loaned me Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, which is great. The writing style is deadpan, and rewards, but doesn't require, deep thought. In this interview he sums it up nicely:

This might sound funny after all that I've said above, but I hope that readers won't be conscious of any of the abstract themes that I've been talking about here. This book is meant to work as a yarn. I hope that readers will take it as such. If they also want to go think deep thoughts about currency fluctuations during the 1690s, then there's plenty of that in here for those who want to read it on that level. Everything I've talked about above took place in a world full of pirate ships, sword fights, seductive courtesans, picaroons and other staples of the bodice-ripping and swashbuckling genres, which I have not been above putting into these books.

(This is about one of his more recent books, which I suppose I'll now have to read.) He's technical enough to prompt non-plot-related musings, but doesn't spend pages on long sentences whose only use is to forward one or another peripheral literary hack. Which is kind of nice. Literature for the non-Literary rabble.
[permalink | tb ]

I was asked today what I'm doing next weekend (the weekend after next, the one that starts in nine days or so). And I don't even know. I can't keep all these friggin weekends straight. Do you remember when we used to plan things less than one week in advance, or maybe more if it was something huge like a wedding or a graduation or something? Does that time exist only in my imagination? This problem is unrelated to parenthood, and existed well before this cute baby came along. I don't mind having no free time as long as some (not even all) of it doesn't get booked six months in advance. I mean, I'm resigned to having no free days for the rest of my life, but I just wish that they at least be filled according to something less rigid than a Five Year Plan. At least provide myself the illusion of spontaneity, or free will. Not that this is your fault, gentle reader, but, I mean, geez.
[permalink | tb ]

Lib: "What are family dinners for if not singling out one person and irritating them?"
[permalink | tb ]

Hot Ukrainian biker chick visits Chernobyl, rides fast, and takes lots of pictures. "A story about a town that one can ride through with no stoplights, no police and no danger of hitting any living thing." (Thanks, Steve.)
[permalink | tb ]

Onion Taken Seriously, Film at 11. Stories from The Onion (in the sidebar) reported as fact, including the Deborah Norville thing this space noted the other week. A must read. (via boingboing)
[permalink | tb ]

Not that it isn't amazing that it's still on at all, but it looks like The Simpsons might fizzle out this year. Greedy actors wanting to get paid proportionally [non-paywall link] to the value they provide the network or something, the network claiming that they could hire a bunch of randoms off the street to do the voices and no one would know the difference. Of course, it's obvious that changing the characters' voices would ruin the show, which threatens to wither every season anyway. Fun to see what happens.
[permalink | tb ]

Why must the President talk so slowly?
[permalink | tb ]

Happy birthday, Mom!
[permalink | tb ]

The guy at the parking booth this morning gave me perhaps the stinkiest five dollar bill I've ever owned. As soon as I rolled the window down I smelled something out of context: there in the middle of the railyard parking lot in rainy east Cambridge was the smell of about ten million lahmajunes that had gone slightly bad. The smell had a direction, like a sound, and changed as I swiveled my head. It was emanating from the money. I smelled each bill (warily, from some distance) and concluded that it was the five. Nasty! I'm trying to think of an excuse to go spend it as soon as possible.
[permalink | tb ]

Not everybody loves Raymond: "Why do inventive comedies get the guillotine every season, while the banal "Everybody Loves Raymond" is one of TV's most-watched sitcoms?" (One might also ask, "Why do you watch so much television to begin with?")
[permalink | tb ]

Ooo! A federal budget simulator! Try your hand at reducing the Federal budget deficit. Mom, does this even remotely resemble the actual process?
[permalink | tb ]

Dad points us to the fact that the fruit of this space's previous job (well, a really direct descendant of said fruit) won Best of Show at MacWorld this year. Holy crap!
[permalink | tb ]

Jay Rosen enunciates (better than I've done) why I'm not reading Op-Ed pages and trying (pretty successfully!) to ignore the presidential campaign:

Our scandal culture is a deeply set formation. By now virtually anyone with a modicum of political awareness knows how to set it in motion. "Scandal" today is a mode of discourse, a tone for talking in, as much as the events that are proximate cause. Cliches like "what did he know and when did he know it?" and the suffix "gate" added for naming purposes are examples of that discourse. So are comparative declarations like this, "Can you imagine if a liberal said anything remotely like that in regard to a crime issue?" which generate the resentment required to keep the cycle going. It's a way of talking.

Thurston Moore is in the Times (or here after the paywall) talking about whatever he wants, presumably because someone noticed that Kurt Cobain—junkie, songwriter and loud-quiet-loud singer whose popularity totally fixed music for about three years—has been dead for a nice, round number of years. He's one of the main guys in Sonic Youth, who are sometimes excellent.

Before being labeled alternative rock, Sonic Youth, the band I started in 1980 (and continue in still!), was called "post-punk." By the early 90's, we existed as a sort of big brother (and big sister) group to Kurt's generation of underground America. When Nirvana became popular, we were all called alternative rock — a less threatening term than anything with punk in the title (though with Green Day and Blink 182 in the late 90's, punk ultimately became accessible and extremely profitable — at least for the new MTV punks). The original alternative rock bands — Nirvana and Sonic Youth included — never had any allegiance to alternative rock.

So the massive near-closure of I-93 South turns out not to have been such a terrible thing for your narrator, as the bottleneck inside the tunnel nearly eliminates the much more serious bottleneck that had previously plagued the tunnel's exit. In other words, instead of a single mixing bowl in which six lanes of traffic merged into three—including a large fraction of the traffic entering the left-most lane needing to cross the other five lanes in order to exit on the right side—we now have a mixing bowl that sucks a little less because of the traffic crossing from the left to the right across four lanes, all preceded by one underground semi-merge from three lanes down to two. (I call it a semi-merge because the dropped lane flows on the surface just as fast as the other lanes underground). Astonishingly, this goes more quickly, which just goes to show how serious an error it was (and still continues to be) not to erect Jersey barriers to prevent the traffic entering left at the tunnel's exit from crossing all the way right to exit. They erected similar barriers just after opening the underground sections of I-93 North, so here's hoping that someone (finally!) figures out the importance of duplicating this trivial effort. At any rate, the traffic isn't noticeably worse than before (and is way less frustrating), so this space won't start taking the T again, probably, so you'll have to just imagine reading a guy who reads the New Yorker instead of a guy who sings ridiculously along to CD's and yells at other cars. So it goes.
[permalink | tb ]

The nastiest traffic I'll have ever experienced starts this weekend. They're narrowing my fifteen billion dollar highway to two lanes for the rest of the year. My dad and like four other cars share two lanes across the wilds of Vermont, and now half a million cars a day are expected to fit into the same amount of road underground, only with lots and lots of exits. Let me be understated, and suggest that this is a real drag. Looks like this space will be taking the T again.
[permalink | tb ]

Exciting speculation about the ridiculous sums of imaginary money that this space has tied up in its dwelling:

...We're in the midst of a huge housing bubble, on a scale only seen once before since the Depression. Worse, the inflated housing market is now in an historically unique position, as the motor of the rest of the economy. Within the next year or two, that bubble is likely to burst, and when it does, it very well may take the American economy down with it.

World's dullest weblog. [Standard disclaimer: I hate the word weblog.]
[permalink | tb ]

More Get Your War On.
[permalink | tb ]

Roland (in the sidebar) has decided to publish his twenty favorite blurbs, which is good news for us, fellow readers, because I've been thinking about ratbots—not these thinking ratbots, which he thought were pretty cool, but these rat go-bots with Borg implants that make them driveable via remote control—and I tend only to remember stuff like this when I'm nowhere near a computer. (Huh? you're thinking, When are you ever not in front of a computer? It does happen; shocking, but true!) Think of all the fun you could have with a steerable rat. [Update: Here's a mirror of the full Nature article.]
[permalink | tb ]

More pictures of the baby in the sidebar.
[permalink | tb ]

Tom Tomorrow got to go see Neil Young, which is something that this space has always wanted to do. Links there also to the two-part interview he did on NPR this week, which was worth listening to during the commute.
[permalink | tb ]

Totally forgot to say, "Rabbit, rabbit." Must have been the rain.
[permalink | tb ]