my other blog is an economist
In which we give up some Google love to randomwalks, a budding blog by an economics student.
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.
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.
“Old people and children,” I point out, “get a free pass on fancy fonts.” “And family,” Amy says. “Right,” I say. Amy and I are on the same page here. My husband is staring at me. He disagrees? “Why do you use so many ellipses?” he asks, as if finally getting the nerve to confront me on this matter. I do? “Yeah, you’ll write to tell me about the kids having soccer practice, and then you’ll end with a whole bunch of periods.” Say It With Screamers!!!!! - washingtonpost.com
village voice > people > Savage Love by Dan Savage
I remember listening to the radio when Santorum said something obnoxious about gay couples: An anti-gay-marriage amendment was a homeland security measure, Santorum said, which makes gay couples terrorists. My son, who happens to be the same age as Santorum’s younger daughter (the one weeping and clutching a doll in that widely circulated photo), was in the room at the time, and he got pretty upset. So, yeah, we should all feel bad for Santorum’s kids – what kind of parent drags a sobbing child in front of the national media? – but let’s also feel bad for all the other kids that Santorum hurt.
You try to be realistic, but they won’t let you. You can’t touch corporate America. LA Weekly - The Meat of the Matter
This Macintouch Reader Report on Music Servers offers some deep and dirty real-world hacks involving network storage, multiple iPods, and other edge cases. As home networks get more sophisticated, the shortcomings of iTunes' single-user model become clear. The time I spend on dumb repetetive tasks, such as copying music to my wife’s computer, will soon be double as my children discover iTunes (it’s already my son’s number one “place to go on the computer” – he has a favorite podcast, you see). I hope the famous it-just-works ease and elegance we expect from Apple are brought to bear on this issue. In the meantime, here’s what the pioneers of family music management are cobbling together with their bare hands.
The media is increasingly ignoring the true American family, and instead is putting the dramas of affluent families on Page One. It would be okay if they delivered these portraits with a sardonic wink, so that we might laugh at the foibles of the well-off. But there is no wink. Instead, we are asked to sympathize with people’s self-made problems, and these affluent-family issues are held up as representative of us all. Po Bronson’s column shows how media transmits the fears of rich and powerful parents to a mass audience who are then affected by their (natural, but inappropriate) emotional response with negative material consequences. I think media’s amplification of irrational fear can be seen absolutely everywhere. Even this blog!
Van Halen on Everest – If I had been there, your iPod would not have worked because I would have ripped it off your skull and thrown it over the north face and said Wake up! You are alive! My favorite comment in response to an absurd essay in the Washington Post panning the iPod for failing under extremes of temperature and altitude. Presumably published in service of the chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl school of “objectivity” so popular among poor journalists today.
I do not know what “crozzled” means. Nor do I know what “kerfs” mean, or “grambeled” or “sleavings” or innumerable other words introduced into the narrative. I have a vague idea of what the word “claggy” means in the sentence sequence, “The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh,” but I don’t want to think too much about it. The end is nigh and woe is us (on The Road by Cormac McCarthy).
The Great Old Pumpkin, by John Aegard
You must know, Doctor, that I did not choose to seek psychiatric help. I have no faith that I shall exit this room a healed man; I know now that I have been destined for the asylum since childhood. No mere conversation with you can steer me clear of that fate. That said, let us proceed with this court-compelled farce before my mad prattle provokes your crabbiness further.
As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock – the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Bonus (while supplies last): It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
We have lost the war on torture. It’s devastating. We live in shameful times :: Rebecca Blood
When you’re making a garden you’re making art. Art is about one’s own experience, and the one experience that is universal is change, so when I choose a plant for the garden, it has to change. Paul Babikow’s is never the same garden twice.
I answered the phone the other day – and I really was ecstatic about this – I answered the phone and I couldn’t think of what my name was. If I could have totally forgotten about it for a longer than I did, I would have said I’d have made it. I was that close. But it came to me. Larry Gallagher profiles Griz, proprietor of San Francisco Brewcraft, where you “[can’t] get out the door without having a significant human interaction.”
The famously rebellious Jimi Hendrix played a legendary, electric-guitar rendition of America’s national anthem at Woodstock in 1969. Was this feedback-heavy anthem a symbolic rejection of mainstream American culture, or a celebration of the country and its values? Hendrix’s use of this prominent American symbol forces us to question just how far the hippies went in rejecting the dominant culture. Indeed, countercultures and the American mainstream make strange, but frequent bedfellows. Witness the adoption of one-time countercultures by corporate America: Could early punk rockers have guessed that music by The Clash and Iggy Pop would one day sell luxury cars and vacation cruises? How did the hippies go from rebels against 1950s materialism to fashion trendsetters? And what transformed a small, underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest into the lucrative grunge and “alternative rock” juggernaut of the 1990s? Jamie Jesson is teaching RHE 309K - Youth Rebellion and the Rhetoric of American Identity at the University of Texas at Austin.
