...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
Oh, rejoice and be glad...there will be a season five of The Wire. "Balancing small audiences again critical acclaim, HBO has picked up a fifth season of drama The Wire." The season may focus on the media's role in politics. (thx, mark)
New version of Google Groups adds mailing lists to the Usenet archives. Maybe each group should have a RSS/Atom feed?
Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn't already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking "Post". As in: "Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead." Any ideas?
Sorry for the extensive quote, but this paragraph (along with the following one) in Malcolm Gladwell's article about health care in America does a fine job in laying out why it's failing:
The U. S. health-care system, according to "Uninsured in America," has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don't have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insurance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can't get better jobs, and because they can't get better jobs they can't afford health insurance, and because they can't afford health insurance they get even sicker. John, the manager of a bar in Idaho, tells Sered and Fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more--and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. "There are times when I should've gone to the doctor, but I couldn't afford to go because I don't have insurance," he says. "Like when my back messed up, I should've gone. If I had insurance, I would've went, because I know I could get treatment, but when you can't afford it you don't go. Because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you'll never get out. So you just say, 'I can deal with the pain.'"
You can point fingers at what's wrong or who's responsible all day long, but the facts remain, America's health care system sucks...well, unless you're rich, in which case nothing really sucks. The BBC put it well earlier this week in writing about the crisis in New Orleans:
The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.
Timothy Ferris has some excerpts from a new book by Neil Strauss called Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life. The book is an "encyclopedia for those who want to disappear or become lawsuit-proof global citizens".
I couldn't believe classes like this even existed. In the last forty-eight hours, I'd learned to hotwire a car, pick locks, conceal my identity, and escape from handcuffs, flexi-cuffs, ducttape, rope, and nearly every other type of restraint.
The course was Urban Escape and Evasion, which offered the type of instruction I'd been looking for to balance my wilderness knowledge. The objective of the class was to learn to survive in a city as a fugitive. Most of the students were soldiers and contractors who'd either been in Iraq or were about to go, and wanted to know how to safely get back to the Green Zone if trapped behind enemy lines.
Like Ferris' Four Hour Work Week, Emergency sounds both exhilarating and preposterous. I wonder if these folks might have been helped by such a book.
Three years ago, Jonathan Rauch wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called Caring for Your Introvert, one of my favorite pieces of magazine writing ever. He recently did an interview about the piece, which is the most popular article ever posted to the Atlantic's Web site.
Students blog after high school shuts down school paper for being "negative". School of Blog (featuring Jack Black) will be out next year.
In last Sunday's episode of Mad Men, Grandpa Gene ate ice cream right out of the container and salted each spoonful before putting it in his mouth.
It was an odd sight...salt isn't normally the first thing you think of as an ice cream topping. After the episode, Rex Sorgatz tweeted:
WHO THE FUCK SALTS THEIR ICE CREAM?
Salt has its own flavor when it's concentrated (if you salt foods too much or eat some all by itself) but used judiciously, salt takes the natural flavor of food and enhances the intensity. To use another dairy product as an example, fresh mozzarella tastes pretty good on its own but throw a little salt on top and it's mozzarella++. Salt makes ok food taste good and good food taste great. Along with butter, salt is the restaurant world's secret weapon; chefs likely use way more salt than you do when you cook at home. It's one of the reasons why restaurant food is so good.
But back to the ice cream. As food scientist Harold McGee writes, salt probably won't make ice cream taste sweeter but will make it taste ice creamier, particularly if the ice cream is of low quality, as the store-bought variety might have been in 1963.
I'm not sure that salt makes sugar taste sweeter, but it fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It's an important component of taste in our foods, so if it's missing in a given dish, the dish will taste less complete or balanced. Salt also increase the volatility of some aromatic substances in food, and it enhances our perception of some aromas, so it can make the overall flavor of a food seem more intense.
So that's why the fuck someone might want to salt their ice cream.
Salon recently ran an article on the relatively new school of thought about traffic management called second generation traffic calming. It involves improving traffic flow by incorporating, under certain circumstances, automobile traffic back into the flow of other human activities:
Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.
The idea, borrowed in part from behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology disciplines, is that traffic will become safer and move more smoothly if drivers are forced to pay more attention to their driving and be on autopilot less:
Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.
At the beginning of the article, the author observes traffic working like this in China:
It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.
In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.
But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets.
When I was in Bejing a few years ago, I observed the same thing. Traffic was an amazing thing to watch there. One day as we toured a temple a few stories off the ground, my dad and I broke away from the rest of the group to watch traffic on the 5 or 6-way intersection below us for several minutes. It was a marvel of self-organizing behavior, with buses, pedicabs, pedestrians, cyclists, taxis, cars, and motorcycles forming temporary lanes of traffic that would weaken and yield to newly formed lanes of flow.
I've observed this phenomenon in NYC as well, especially in dense areas of Manhattan like Midtown. People are always in the street, crossing against the light or jaywalking across even busy avenues or through stopped traffic. Cyclists run red lights, charge through busy crosswalks, and barrel down one-way streets the wrong way. Everyone pays a lot of attention to what they're doing, regardless of what the signs say or where the crosswalk is marked. And for the most part, it seems to work. New York City has a relatively low pedestrian fatality rate, about half that of the city with the highest rate, a remarkable fact considering the pedestrian density involved and how fast traffic moves in Manhattan sometimes (I saw a cab zipping down 5th Avenue this afternoon doing at least 50 mph, slaloming through jaywalkers as he went).
This Word suicide note looks like a cheap ripoff of Paul Ford's Word suicide note (from his essay on Word).
In response to my post on onomatopoetic words, Neel sent in this wonderful word: abecedarian. It refers to either an alphabet enthusiast or to a list of words in strict alphabetical order (like Apple, Be, Compaq, Dell, &c...), and when you say it, it sounds like you're reciting the beginning of the alphabet. Abecedarian is my new favorite onomatopoetic word.
Wikipedia has a series of maps showing the political and social boundries of the world in 2000 BC, 1000 BC, 500 BC, 323 BC and so on.
Two independent groups of scientists have recently confirmed that the universe does exist when we are not observing it.
The reality in question -- admittedly rather a small part of the universe -- was the polarisation of pairs of photons, the particles of which light is made. The state of one of these photons was inextricably linked with that of the other through a process known as quantum entanglement. The polarised photons were able to take the place of the particle and the antiparticle in Dr Hardy's thought experiment because they obey the same quantum-mechanical rules. Dr Yokota (and also Drs Lundeen and Steinberg) managed to observe them without looking, as it were, by not gathering enough information from any one interaction to draw a conclusion, and then pooling these partial results so that the total became meaningful.
That's a relief, although the head of one of the group called their results "preposterous", so perhaps we're still not really here.
Avalanches were used as weapons in World War I.
Some unknown person got the idea that avalanches could make a highly effective weapon. The avalanche war had begun. Avalanches could be started and even directed by just bombing a mountain. History has not yet calculated the exact number of deaths. Deaths have been estimated as high as 40,000 on each fighting side.
Jason's 4th of July wrap-up: made blueberry pie and potato salad, consumed world's largest hot dog at a party, took lots of pictures (none of them digital), got a bit of sunburn, made a *really* bad joke involving patriotic pinwheels (one of the pinwheels fell down and I said there had been a death in the family), and heard, but did not see, some fireworks.
Web design and airplane food design have some things in common. On the Web, one often designs for 640x480 and on the plane, one has to make the food tray, beverage, and utensils all fit on the little fold-down tray.
Many thanks for all the kind birthday greetings yesterday (and today). :)
Birthday wrap-up: I got virtual cards from both of my parents, a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate from my co-workers, got to bust open a pinata whilst wearing a sombrero after lunch at work (don't ask), my dad took me out to lunch (today), and Nichol surprised me with flowers, dinner, and a movie (Run Lola Run). Great day.
Vacation Observation #427: You know you have too much time on your hands when you start recognizing known contemporary actors in bit parts on bad TV programs. In the space of 24 hours, I recognized the actor who plays Meldrick on Homicide as the leader of the Lords of Hell in Adventures in Babysitting and caught Michael Dorn, Worf on Star Trek: TNG, as a cop on CHiPs.
Vacation Observation #285: You know you have too much time on your hands when you beat Super Marios 1, 2, and 3, all in the space of 24 hours.
The whitewater rafting was awesome. I'll have some pictures of the trip up sometime in the near future. It's good to be home, though. I have no idea what 9 days of laziness and goofing around is going to do to my work ethic. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.
A dream of journalism without advertising. From E.W. Scripps' experiment in Chicago to A.J. Liebling's vision of newspapers funded by endowments.
Butterfly team colors may discourage inter-species mating and pave the way for the development of separate species. "This process, called 'reinforcement', prevents closely related species from interbreeding thus driving them further apart genetically and promoting speciation."
Print out your stock quotes on toilet paper or browse recipes on an Internet-enabled cutting board.
A just-concluded eGullet conversation with Ruth Reichl, currently editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and former food critic for The New York Times.
- Pruning the list of RSS feeds I follow.
- Digging.
- Writing about hoes.
- Keeping deer out of the <p>s.
- Growing my traffic.
- Worrying about bees.
- (Com)posting links?
- Weeding out spam from comment threads.
- ^s.
- There's never enough thyme.
- Wondering about the weather.
A short video animation of Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware. (via waxy)
Update: Vimeo has pulled the video offline. (thx, paul)
Update: The video is back online again.
The main thesis of Nonzero is that social complexity of human culture has been increasing since the dawn of man and will continue to do so until forever. Wright argues that non-zero sum games are the culprit: societies get more complex (moving from tribes of hunter gatherers to mutli-trillion dollar global economy) because in order to play ever more lucrative non-zero sum games with an increasing number of people, that's the way it has to be. It makes a lot of sense.
When you reach 25, it's finally time to fully grow up and be an adult.
You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.
The best advice: "Be interested so that you can be interesting."
Statetris: "Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location." There are versions for the US, Africa, Europe, the UK, and more.
More men are taking their wives' last names in marriage and are getting more shit for it too. "Van Hallgren received a scathing note from a longtime listener with a subject line that read, 'Sam, turn in your man card.' The listener asked what 'sissy juice' the host was drinking."
Last night as the election results were coming in online, I took screenshots of a bunch of the now-familiar red/blue electoral maps being used by the larger media sites to show election results and posted them all on this page. (There are currently 25 maps...I'm adding more in a few minutes.)
Hit me on my burner if you run across any others. A couple of quick notes:
1. No one strayed from the red and blue. The red/blue combo is overwhelmingly symbolic but there are plenty of other colors in the crayon box; I would like to have seen someone try something different.
2. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, the red/blue map was the focal point of the media coverage. People were fixated by it. This time around, it didn't matter so much. The maps were interesting for 3-4 hours until the overwhelming nature of Obama's victory became apparent and then, not so much. By this morning, the maps are already shrinking or disappearing from the home pages of the Times, CNN, and the like.
3. Nate Silver and the rest of the 538 guys nailed it. They got Indiana wrong and there are a couple more states that are still too close to call, but they got the rest of the map right. Their final projection had Obama getting 348.6 electoral votes and they currently have him at 349.
Hydra lets people work on documents together via Rendezvous. Right now, 5-7 people are taking collaborative notes in the same document on Eric Bonabeau's talk on Biological Computing. With the permission of the other participants, I'll either post or link to the resulting document here. (Ok, here are the notes we (there were 7-10 of us) took during the session. Oh, and here it is with Hydra's color coding intact.)
Update: there's now a chat as well...using Hydra as a ad hoc chat system. Hydra just connects with a place for people to plop in text. Very little imposed heirarchy which makes it very flexible (what Howard was talking about this morning in urging developers to "create tools that amplify collective action").
Chi Chi Valenti is a NYC Nightlife Empress, but in this interview for Gothamist, she throws down some great general advice:
Since someone's always hooking up, getting wasted or starting a fight these days, my standard for a great party is somewhat higher. Most importantly, there must be a MIX - Vampires and diamond dealers, legends and New Kids, fetishists and objects of worship, romantics and cynics, geeks and pop stars, boys, girls and everything in between. Historically, New York's best parties (and club nights) have combined all ages, gender prefs, income levels and style schools. A roomful of one kind of person is boring and predictable - it is the mark of the provinces.
What's true for parties is also true for ideas, friends, and experiences; diversity is a good thing.
Roommate Wanted: Share My West Village Pad. "Ideally, you do not have 'a lot' of friends (i.e., any). But if you do, they cannot visit the apartment at any time."
Taking a cue from auto insurance, Safeway has devised a healthcare insurance plan that emphasizes personal responsibility.
Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.
The result is that Safeway's healthcare costs have held steady over the past four years while the costs at other American companies have increased almost 40%.
Long piece on the opening titles of The Wire. Contains nearly endless seasons 1-3 spoilers. The site also offers comprehensive weekly episode recaps...here's the one for episode 40.
Update: Edward Copeland also does The Wire recaps.
So, how the heck do you pronounce Gnutella? I've heard people pronouncing it NUH-TEL-LA, but I thought that with its GNU heritage, it would be pronounced more like GUH-NUH-TEL-LA. Does anyone know for sure (the operative phrase here being "for sure")? I'll post the answer once I get it.
The hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers will soon relaunch as a 4-star boutique hotel.
Photos from the 2008 International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest...AKA fancily decorated aquariums. (thx, dustin)
Jason D. O'Grady, who "broke" a product announcement that turned out to be a false rumor, on his legal problems with Apple: "What if a company with US$14 billion in revenue and 14,000 employees wanted a piece of your ass?" -dj
Cut your own vinyl with the VRX-2000. There was a time when I would have given up a toe for this machine.
Just looking at the Grand Canyon Skywalk (more info here) makes me go all queasy. 70 feet out from the edge of the cliff and 4000 feet down? No thanks! Genius idea though.
On the NASCARing of Boing Boing and what the hell are they up to anyway?.
Bilbao, Rio, Taichung. Guggenheim announced for Taiwan?. Zaha Hadid did the moving (literally) design. via Archinect
Psychology Today talks with psychologist Robert Epstein about his book, The Case Against Adolescence:
In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing -- 30 is the new 20 -- and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.
The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.
Epstein says the infantilization of adolescents creates a lot of conflict and isolation on both sides of the divide. Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Tyler Cowen adds:
The problem, of course, is that a contemporary wise and moderate 33 year old is looking to climb the career ladder, find a mate, or raise his babies. He doesn't have a great desire to educate unruly fifteen year olds and indeed he can insulate himself from them almost completely. He doesn't need a teenager to carry his net on the elephant hunt. Efficient capitalist production and rising wage rates lead to an increased sorting by age and the moral education of teens takes a hit.
You can read the first chapter of the book at The Radical Academy.
Update: Bryan writes to recommend Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood, saying that "Postman argues that the idea of childhood is a cultural phenomena that comes and goes through the ages". (thx, bryan)
Last 100 posts is a semi-regular follow-up to stuff that I've posted about on kottke.org recently. The last such update was from May 10. Now, on to the shiny and new.
People seemed to like the site refresh. The most popular question I received in response was, "why the heck don't you change the color on visited links?" This is a good question that I don't have a good answer for. I recall having a good answer for it several years ago, but I can't remember what it is. Or maybe it was never a good answer. At any rate, changing the color of the visited links is something I'll be looking into.
I removed the dropdown menu from the front page. From the emailed reaction to its absence, it is not missed. (But it will still be back in some form soonish.)
Apple switched to Intel chips. I suspect you've heard more than you care to about this, so I'm going to leave further research on the topic as an exercise to the reader.
Unsurprisingly, your music collections are a lot more diverse than mine. Galego, Uzbeki, Putonghua, Gujarati, Swahili, and Phil Collinese were among the languages that people found in their music collections.
Look ma, I was in Time magazine.
When I got back from Ireland, I posted a picture to Flickr of an Irish breakfast we had one morning. That got quite a discussion going about if the breakfast was in fact Irish or if it was English or even Scottish and which nation was ripping what breakfast idea from whom. In the end, Flickr user esteban speaks the truth when he says, "God bless the fry up no matter what you call it."
In case you missed it, reader Peter vanDerbeek made a 2005 summer movies calendar for us all to enjoy.
Still pursuing various rural internet options. The only thing we've learned for sure is that Verizon employees are quite nice and helpful. I'm planning on compiling all of the responses and information into a handy guide for folks looking for internet access in the rural US.
The 50 Fun Things to Do with Your iPod feature was quite popular, despite its non-appearance on Slashdot. (What, they don't like fun? Time to read How To Get Slashdotted again, I guess.) Someone suggested that with the addition of 50 more items, it would make a good book(let)...which isn't a bad idea at all.
In compiling the ordering strategies for How to order food in a restaurant, I neglected to include Chris Anderson's forthcoming book on The Long Tail. The LT ordering strategy would probably only work in a place like Shopsin's, with a menu of hundreds of different items or at places with really large wine lists.
I got sick earlier this month (I've still got a cough I can't get rid of) and wondered who got sick in June. Turns out quite a few of you, including a fairly high proportion of my friends. Many blamed allergies, which probably had something to do with my own ailment as well.
John Brockman has asked his Edgy band of scientists, futurists, writers, and philosophers about "some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you", like those of Newton, Moore, or Murphy. Here are the results.
The more general of such laws are the most interesting because they can enrich our understanding of diverse subject areas and can be very instructive in how they fail. I think maybe this is what Alan Alda was getting at with his First and Second Laws of Laws:
1. All laws are local.
2. A law does not know how local it is.
Here's a few of my other favorite laws from the list, general and not:
Pimm's First Law: No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.
Gopnik's Gender Curves: The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity). (see the graphs)
Morgan's Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.
Pöppel's Universal: We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or "time windows" have a duration of approx. 3 seconds.
Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Kai's Example Dilemma: A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.
Rushkoff's Law: A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it--at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence.
Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
Minksy's Second Law: Don't just do something. Stand there.
Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
In the 1960s, a young Al Gore had the good fortune to study under Roger Revelle at Harvard University. Revelle was one of the first scientists to claim that the earth may not be able to effectively deal with all of the carbon dioxide generated by the earth's rapidly increasing human population. The American Institute of Physics called Revelle's 1957 paper with Hans Suess "the opening shot in the global warming debates". Gore took Revelle's lessons to heart, becoming a keen supporter of the environment during his government service.
Since losing the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, Al Gore has focused his efforts on things other than politics; among other things, he's been crisscrossing the world delivering a presentation on global warming. Gore's presentation now forms the foundation of a new film, An Inconvenient Truth (view the trailer).
In organizing my thoughts about the film, I found I couldn't improve upon David Remnick's review in the New Yorker. In particular:
It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scene. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone--or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room--for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, "An Inconvenient Truth" is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. "An Inconvenient Truth" is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.
Watching the film, I realized -- far too late to move to Florida and vote for him in 2000 -- that I'm a fan of Al Gore. He's smart & intellectually curious (the latter doesn't always follow from the former), understands science enough to explain it to the layperson without needlessly oversimplifying, and despite his reputation as somewhat of a robot, seems to be more of a real person than many politicians. As Remnick says:
One can imagine him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions and explaining them in the language of a confident adult.
The film has some small problems; many of the asides about Gore's life (particularly the 2000 election stuff) don't seem to fit cleanly into the main narrative, the connection it makes between global warming and Katrina is stronger than it should be, and the trailer is a little silly; this is a documentary about Al Gore and global warming after all, not The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon. But the film really shines when it focuses on the presentation and Gore methodically and lucidly making the case for us needing to take action on global warming. An Inconvenient Truth opens in the US on May 24...do yourself a favor and seek it out when it comes to your local theater.
A croque monsieur is a sandwich consisting of two slices of white bread, ham, cheese, a bit of cream (or cheese) sauce, and yet more cheese melted over the top of it after the whole thing has been grilled. I somehow missed this miracle of French cuisine the last time around, but am taking full advantage of it now. I've even written a little song about it, quite unintentionally. It just popped into my head and every time I see le croque monsieur on the menu, I can't help singing it:
Croque Monsieur, Croque Monsieur
uh huh huh**, Croque Monsieur
(repeat)
A chart topper for sure.
** The "uh huh huh" here is what I think of as typical French grunting (gathered mostly from misrepresentions of snooty French characters in movies and cartoons), a sound that when followed by a "monsieur" could be thought of as playfully condescending in tone.
I would henceforth like to be referred to as "Jason from the block".
I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. As it happens, the subject matter of the book mirrors this business with pipe-bomber Luke Helder. Reading through the text of letters Helder left with bombs in mailboxes and the manifesto (mirror) he sent The Badger Herald, I was reminded of the writings, mutterings, utterances, and internal dialogue of C&P's Raskolnikov.
In the book, Raskolnikov writes an article for a newspaper in which he states that "extraordinary [people] have the right [that is, not an official right, but his own right] to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary." He goes on to say that great people can do great deeds, whether right or wrong, because they bring about great change in the world. In his madness (or is it?), he tests this theory and himself. Is he an extraordinary man? Can he kill and steal because he is extraordinary? What changes might he be helping bring about? Can he get away with it? Can he drop hints about his crime and still not be caught?
There are glimpses in Helder's writings that hint that he might be of Raskolnikov's mind and considers himself an extraordinary man out to change the world, preaching his gospel. "I'm here to help you realize/understand that you will live no matter what!" "You have been missing how things are, for very long." "I'm happy because I know. I often wonder why anyonewould be so content with believing when they could know." "I'm here to help you, to expose you, to inform you, to provide for you the answers for where to look, so the 'spiritually sleepy mass' can transform themselves from believing to knowing, to have an awareness to life, and to begin understanding."
(Or maybe not. Maybe Helder is just a dumb kid that smoked too much pot and watched The Matrix one too many times. Either way, the whole situation is horrible and fascinating, as was Dostoevsky's account of Raskolnikov.)
I got my copy of Rushmore on DVD today. Whee! Please, if you like films and you didn't catch this one in the theatre, do yourself a favor and see this movie. Rent it, buy it, whatever, just see it. It's funny, interesting, and smart in ways other movies aren't.
It's Friday. Let's have some fun. Our mission? To elevate the status of this otherwise unremarkable photograph to the #1 spot on Yahoo's most viewed content list. Click on the link two or three times. Post the link to your Web site and urge others to do the same. If you've got a mailing list, mail it out to everybody. Why? Because we can, I guess.
Update: the photo has made it onto the "most emailed" list. Keep clicking.
Update #2: the photo is now halfway up both the "most emailed" and "most viewed" lists. Click on!
Update #3: the photo is #1 on the "most emailed" list and #4 on the "most viewed" list. Almost there....
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