How to Stop Receiving Phone Books and Yellow Pages – thanks Dru!

I may have been the very first black person – certainly the first black person I ever noticed – to appear on TV as an expert on something that had nothing to do with being black. This was 1988. That’s tragic. Heir to Carl Sagan’s role as explainer of the universe, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium. Star Power - washingtonpost.com

When I first saw it in the field: ‘Shiiiit, that’s a really well preserved dinosaur.’ Wired Science: Rare Mummified Dinosaur Unearthed: Contains Skin, and Maybe Organs, Muscle

I think sometimes when you see the writers marching up and down and laughing-–because that’s what we do, those of us who write comedy tend to laugh about horrendous situations-–I think sometimes that can look bad because it may look like people are taking it lightly. But no, it’s a horrible situation. Gothamist: John Oliver, Writer

In the art industry, it’s extremely difficult to be successful without turning yourself into a cartoon. Even Hunter S. Thompson knew this. God knows Duchamp and Warhol knew it. Some artists are turned into cartoons and others do it themselves. I prefer to do it myself. At least then I can control how my cock is photographed. stereogum: Of Montreal Talk T-Mobile: "Selling Out Isn’t Possible" by Kevin Barnes (or, as my kids would say, “Bar-NEZ”).

What I think is that the universe is pure geometry – basically, a beautiful shape twisting around – and this shape is described by mathematics. This is a slightly different view than believing the universe IS mathematics, but it’s close. Since E8 is perhaps the most beautiful structure in mathematics, is very satisfying that nature appears to have chosen this geometry. FQXi Forum: An Exceptionally Simple FAQ See also: Backreaction: A Theoretically Simple Exception of Everything

He’s wearing Gucci shoes and carrying The Wall Street Journal. She’s a looker. Neiman Marcus clothes. Vanity Fair under her arm. So I told them, ‘Tomorrow is Labor Day: the holiday to ‘honour the unions.’ The guy gives me the kind of look Noel Coward might have given a bug on his sleeve. ‘We despise unions.’ I fix him with my glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner, and I ask, ‘How many hours do you work a day?’ He tells me eight. ‘How come you don’t work 18 hours a day, like your great-grandparents?’ He can’t answer that. ‘Because four men got hanged for you.’ I explain that I’m referring to the Haymarket Affair, the union dispute here in Chicago in May 1886. The bus is late. I have him pinned against the mailbox. Then I say, ‘How many days a week do you work?’ He says five."

Terkel laughs, and takes a sip of water. “I say: ‘Five €– oh, really? How come you don’t work six and a half?’ He isn’t sure. ‘Because of the Memorial Day Massacre. These battles were fought, all for you.’ I tell him about that massacre of workers, in Chicago, in 1937. He’s never heard of these things before. She drops her Vanity Fair. I pick it up, being gallant. I am giving it to them now: the past. Studs Terkel: The world’s greatest interviewer - Independent Online Edition > Profiles

Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect. If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture-flak hailing on you wherever you go. A classic piece of rock criticism, Lester Bangs' 1979 “White Noise Supremacists” takes punk to task for “acting like racism is real hip and cool.” To read the essay, download the PDF from Lester’s Legacy under “Lester reprints online.”

People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface. As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades - New York Times

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us - New York Times:

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII - Washington Post: “During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

BLDGBLOG: Greater Los Angeles

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you’re fine: that’s just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.

That’s how we dooz it.

Flickr: The In Rainbows Album Art Competition Pool

This is a spiritual story, written by an American Catholic who loved the disillusioned sadness of life just as much as youthful exuberance.

What makes this book an American masterpiece is how beautifully Kerouac blends the two. To claim otherwise just perpetuates the 50-year misinterpretation of this American confession. New York Times' letters to the editor regarding an October 4 David Brooks column.

I love that Kerouac and company picked up the notion of Beat from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and writer who had picked up the phrase from carnies, small-time crooks, and jazz musicians in Chicago and who used the word to describe the “beaten” condition of worn-out travelers for whom home was the road. Paperback Writer: October in the Railroad Earth

randomWalks: Justin Quinnell’s bath, as seen by his tongue This picture is making the rounds again, and prints are for sale on Quinnell’s site as well. I might pick one up.

English 115F: Worlds of Wordcraft Fall 2007

Are online games generating new interactive modes of narrative? How do multimedia environments transform the age-old patterns of quest romances that structure much game play? Is the line between virtual and real experience erased by the fusion of online communities, role playing, and escapist fictions? Can computer games be pedagogical tools, as some academics maintain, or are they only addictive, sedentary, and antisocial activities? These questions will animate our consideration of digital narrative forms. You can audit this AWESOME course as a podcast through iTunesU.

I would not have expected such an institutionalized and conservative offering from the editor/owner of Arthur Magazine. I love reading an interesting blog entry only to find it upstaged by an outstanding comment. Ah, civil discourse. The ARTHUR Blog > Nothing Left to Lose: What Happens When Music Becomes Worthless?

White privilege plays no small role in a laptop that kept shutting itself down, as though he didn’t get it. Obviously a great post and any kind of useless. The family won’t tell great-grandma that we’re married with a graffiti “problem”. We only get wordy from here) what I said in my previous post. A random yet readable recombinatory sample of my comment history on MetaFilter, via MarkovFilter. Awesome.

“I have negotiated several business deals recently without even using a telephone.” The Executive Computer; A Web of Networks, an Abundance of Services - New York Times, February 1993 (via kottke)

I read it in the decade of Dylan and the Beatles, and in its boozy, self-conscious, priapic posturing it seemed a boy’s book, as it does to this day. Its central conceit, Sal’s adoration of Dean, means that if you don’t dig Dean, the book is lost on you, and, frankly, Dean is very hard to dig if you’re a woman. – Marianne Wiggins Some people remember being blown away by “On the Road” when they were young but then find that it doesn’t stand up to mature scrutiny. My experience has been completely different. It gets better and better–the heartbreak more pronounced–with every rereading. – Geoff Dyer The LA Times asked thirty writers about the significance of On the Road: The ‘Road’ much traveled.

The parting of the Gray Lady’s payveils reveals a bunch of articles about Jack Kerouac. Here are some of my favorites. A recent essay on a 1964 “great American pilgrimage on Kerouac’s ‘holy road’."

What I quickly learned was that buses were the way poor people traveled long distance, people who couldn’t afford planes, trains or cars. Many of my fellow passengers, and more and more the farther south I went, were African-American. Unpacking the single sentence in chapter two of On the Road recounting Kerouac’s first faltering steps, this is probably my favorite thing written about the book in the last ten years. In all probability, his journey began at the elevated train station at Liberty Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park. There, according to Joe Cunningham, a subway historian, he would have boarded a train consisting of six old wooden cars and taken it to Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn. Ozone Park has largely forgotten Kerouac. “I never heard of him, but I went to school in Ecuador,” said Adriana Loga, 24, who then dialed her boss and handed over the phone. “You’re wasting your time,” the boss said. “No one there even understands what you’re talking about.” On Kerouac’s dénouement in Northport, Long Island, from 1958—1964: We used to wonder how he’d get so drunk on just a couple of bar drinks, until we found out he was taking swigs of his own bottle in the bathroom. Well, we ended that.

… no friend will wander down no one arriving brown from Mexico from the sunfields of California, bearing pot they are scattered now, dead or silent or blasted to madness by the howling brightness of our once common vision … Inscrutable Muses: The Women of the Beat Generation. Miss-Vintage.com

As I get older, there are fewer and fewer situations where I need to suck it up to do anything or accomplish anything. I’ve sort of created my life this way and overall I’m pleased with that. jessamyn.com: Vermont’s oldest lifeguard

Elephants might graze upon the Great Plains, stalked again by lions. Camels might wander parts of the American Southwest. And cheetahs might once again chase after pronghorn antelope. While I realize that monkeys might also fly out of my butt, I do so love the notion that we might one day be able to trade our global fear of imminent ecological collapse for the much more personal, rational, and managable fear of being eaten. Recall of the wild, San Diego Union-Tribune

Informed by the mathematical random walk and the Situationist dérive, or “drift,” these fantastic roller shoes harvest energy from your motion and direct you via toe-mounted LCD on a random walk.

Instructions for Disassembly

Digital Humanities Quarterly: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky “Section 2 of this article is a formal examination of Crowther’s original source code files, offering, for the first time, a clear understanding of Crowther’s innovative blend of simulation and fantasy, as well as a better appreciation of the creative contributions of Woods. Section 3 compares the game to maps of the cave site, presents photographs of an excursion to Colossal Cave, and offers testimony from experienced cavers. These key sources – the code and the cave, analyzed here for the first time – establish that Crowther’s original was not only faithful to the geography of the real Colossal Cave, but was also a fantasy remediation of that site.”

How To Take Better Photos with Your iPhone

Struggle. He had a Vulcan father and a human mother — so there’s great logic and deep emotion and a great struggle between the two poles. That’s a great gift to hand an actor. It’s a struggle we all go through. Leonard Nimoy, on Spock’s internal life. ‘‘Star Trek’’ exclusive: The Spocks speak! | Star Trek | The Q&A | Movies | Entertainment Weekly | 2

For a while, Mr. Hoogestraat, sitting at his computer, stares at an image of his avatar sitting at his computer. Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? - WSJ.com

The visual voicemail is something that made me realize just how bad voicemail was until now, and just how accommodating we’ve become of truly wretched UIs. Information Week: Review: Two Weeks With An iPhone

I think it’s important, even now, to look at the ways African-American people tried to carve out a place for themselves in the Reconstruction period. It took an enormous amount of imagination and courage to do that, and it’s something people need to know and understand. The Kingdom of the Happy Land was a community founded by freed slaves in the western Carolinas mountains at the end of the Civil War. What remains is a small pile of stones, the remnants of a chimney.

Penciled In: Intel, Racism Inside (via Anarchaia)

These tips for keeping distracting people out of your office appeal to the productive misanthrope in me.

A lot of people who are down on the river a lot, they know who I am. They’re like, “Hey that’s the trash man.” And people come up to you, and they are like: “That’s so great that you’re picking up trash. How can I get involved?” And I’m like, “You see some trash, pick it up.” First Person Singular: Ezra Duong-Van, Volunteer with Potomac Riverkeeper - washingtonpost.com

The Femmes were eating dinner at Doyle’s Seafood in Sydney. Ritchie ate a live lobster served sashimi style. When Gano saw the arms of the lobster waving around while Ritchie munched the raw flesh he called a taxi and went back to the hotel. The next day Gano announced he was becoming a vegetarian and has never eaten meat since then. VIOLENT FEMMES Band Info is full of tales seemingly too good to be true.

Freakonomics Blog: If Public Libraries Didn’t Exist, Could You Start One Today?

Given the current state of debate about intellectual property, can you imagine modern publishers being willing to sell one copy of a book and then have the owner let an unlimited number of strangers borrow it? (via librarian.net by Jessamyn)

I just finished reading Book 7 and am now back online. apophenia: processing Harry Potter

NPR : Dean Reed: The Man Who Rocked the Iron Curtain — NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Reggie Nadelson, author of Dean Reed biography Comrade Rockstar.

Binary America: Split in Two by A Digital Divide - washingtonpost.com

Declare the Internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways.

I’ve been honestly kind of freaking out about the spoilers this week. Eager for Harry and ‘The Hallows’ - washingtonpost.com

And we shall call it “maclet” -dj

Macintouch Reader Reports: iPhone

With the earbuds in, using the phone function, the caller’s voice is now comfortably in the middle of my head, in the center of my aural space. This makes talking on the phone SO much easier, since I don’t have to automatically shift my attention to one ear, and exclude the other. It feels like telepathy, really.

What a dramatic change in how I talk, done so simply, and found so unexpectedly…

“Fixing a small iPhone annoyance” with a bookmarklet which opens links in new windows.

Trying to schedule your sequestration this weekend so the end of Harry Potter isn’t spoiled for you? Me too. Let’s see. The book will be 784 pages, and I read about 300 words per minute. (How Many Words-Per-Minute Do You Read?) Now if I had a copy of one of the Harry Potter hardcovers handy, I’d count a few pages to get a figure for words per page. Anybody got a good guess?

To do what I’m called to do, I need to have a human body. I live in a body in order to bring man closer to God.

This is the first time I have been needed in 2,000 years. This is a critical point. Only when mankind becomes one family on Earth will the doors to the universe become open to them. Seventeen years ago, a young man in Siberia realized he was the second coming of Christ.

The interface for completing a form in Safari on iPhone is quite nice. “Previous” and “next” buttons swoop the focus through the form elements, so there’s no need to zoom when moving from one input to the next. The magnifying loupe is a brilliant solution to the daunting problem of intuitive cursor control, and as I type this, I’m delighted to find that simply tapping a word places the cursor smartly at the end of it. Which means it’s pretty easy to post to your weblog when you’re sitting on the toilet.

A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket - New York Times

“We have good clocks in our heads for roughly three minutes,” said Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, a retail consulting firm.

“Once we get beyond that, time expands wildly,” he said. “If somebody is there for 4.5 minutes and you ask them how long they waited, they will say 15 minutes.” We do! Whether counting or not, most people are very good at estimating periods of 30 seconds and one minute. (I demonstrated this in 8th grade for the science fair.)

The long and winding ‘Road’

Here’s the published version: “My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

In the scroll, the section runs four times longer and wraps with: “If these men stop the machine and come home - and get on their knees - and ask for forgiveness - and the women bless them - peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.”

“Holy moly, man,” said Canary. “That’s a whole different book.”

Last year’s launch of Leopard’s Time Machine featured a video that contained files and contents from a user named “Rose”, which was a notable coincidence as Rose Tyler was the name of a time-travelling companion who had just been “lost” by the world’s most famous fictional time traveller, Doctor Who.

This year’s WWDC has an updated video of the Time Machine feature, and shows a backup being created on “Sam’s Disk”. Coincidentally or not, Sam Tyler is the lead character in the ’70s cop show “Life on Mars”, which features a young 21st-century detective who wakes up from a coma in 1973, and has to work with the people and practices he finds at his old police station 30 years ago.

By the way, Sam Tyler is not related to Rose Tyler, either officially or as an in-joke; however, one of the writers of “Life on Mars” asked his daughter for a suggestion to help him decide a surname for Sam. Later on, she admitted that she chose the name “Tyler” because she was a fan of “Doctor Who” and liked Rose’s surname. Macintouch Reader Reports: WWDC 2007

J Freedom du Lac (what a sweet name!): He Is a Rock - washingtonpost.com

Surely, Stevie Wonder is on the short list for the next Gershwin Prize. Yes?

List of artists signed to EMI - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dear David, I recall your fond desire of a way to blog all open tabs. The post and comments at “Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » Wanted: convert Firefox tabs to links” will point you to some tools which may bring you closer to your goal. Yours, Adam

In which we give up some Google love to randomwalks, a budding blog by an economics student.

I just did the 10.4.9 upgrade on my 15″MacBook Pro (Core Duo, 2GHz), with no unusual behavior or problems. I downloaded the Combo updater and used it for the upgrade, even though I was already running 10.4.8. I made full clones to two different external drives with SuperDuper! beforehand, and I also ran OnyX’s automated housekeeping functions. The RAM in this machine is Apple factory-installed, and I chose good music for the update: Copland’s Appalachian Spring. I think a lot of upgrade problems result from playing inappropriate music during the process. Eric Bergman

When Champion approaches the first turn, he slows a bit. “Now see, here,” he says, reaching to the top of his head, where his youthful dark brown hair stands in haphazard disarray. “I’m starting to feel something.” Often when he walks a labyrinth he feels nothing special; the walk is just a tool for meditation. But sometimes the stroll brings Champion to the outer reaches of metaphysical rapture: He’ll be overwhelmed by the sensation of energy from the earth or local spirits, or he’ll have visions. “A labyrinth experience happens when you don’t expect it to,” Champion says. “Those are the nature of labyrinth experiences. Those are what people keep coming back to.” SF Weekly: A Winding Path.

People couldn’t believe it, man. They were ready to have us locked up and put on Thorazine. It just occurred to me to give up all the hassles – money, car insurance, bouncing checks, going to the bank, traffic tickets, late fees at the library. The Other American Dream - Washington Post Story on Twin Oaks Community

There are times when I think we’re out of our depth here. There are things that you don’t want people to know about you and things you don’t want to know about yourself. My friends and I used to suppose that, when we die, we find ourselves in a private theater, watching the entirety of our life projected onto the screen. In some versions, that’s all the afterlife was, and the film was repeated eternally. I guess the point of that meditation was to encourage one to carpe diem. The researchers in this article on lifelogging are discovering the value and risks of becoming your own TiVo.

Of Montreal
Uploaded by Malavagma.

leyink says:
I felt like I was watching all of the epic rock acts -- Bowie, Sgt. Peppers Beatles, and some glam theatre troupe all smooshed onto the stage at Great America.

Intense. Awesome.

“In celebration of the 50th anniversary of On the Road, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics will share news of Kerouac celebrations around the world, updates about the School’s own Kerouac Festival on June 30 and July 1, 2007 and perspectives of special guest bloggers.”

Japan’s long been a music geek’s paradise, a Valhalla of reverent remasters of American and British albums that time and fashion have passed by in their native lands. … There’s a small but ardent underground economy among Americans in dummy addresses and e-mailed scans of Japanese iTunes Cards, picked up by friends in Tokyo convenience stores or openly sold online. Slate Magazine: The insanely great songs Apple won’t let you hear, by Paul Collins.

The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again. But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime. MAGPIE » NEARER THE HEART OF THINGS: Erik Davis on Joanna Newsom, from Arthur No. 25/Winter 02006.