My dad is an engineer by trade (or was, many moons ago) so he's inclined to pick up things technological. That's fine by me, I've seen too many friends having to help their parents with this newfangled internet. IM is no exception, though I'm left a little bewildered. I'm glad to have an avid user for a father, it's a time-saver, and that plus his calling while stuck in evening rush-hour traffic constitute the body of our communication these days (which is above average for the terse men folk in our family), but what's odd is he seems to have adopted not only the technology but the quirky lingo as well. I understand the need for brevity with say, SMS messages from one phone to another - there's a 160 character cap, and not everyone has a Treo 600 with its expansive QWERTY awesomeness. With a nice luxurious desktop keyboard with which to fire off instant messages however, I wouldn't expect my dad to be ending chats with l8r's, asking questions like "y iz dat?" and dropping emoticons on my ass left and right. Don't even get me started on proper capitalization.
When did I become the old fogey and my dad the adolescent LiveJournal user? I know there's typically a parent-child role reversal later on in life but still...
My office is located in a less than desirable location. Next door, the patrons of a women's shelter occasionally offer their, um, services (<- innuendo) in exchange for hard currency. Oftentimes there will be men propped up against our service entrance (<- not innuendo), content at having spent the entire night there with a warm can of beer for companionship. The after-hours entertainment landscape is dominated by multiple Blarney Stone establishments and even more storefronts purveying "all kinds of videos" (speaking of innuendo, these stores usually have titles of questionable tact but unimpeachable applicability, like "DVD Explosion"). I can attest from one curious expedition that they are not limited to selling videos.
The dinnertime dining options are almost nonexistent, and lunchtime likewise suffers from a dearth of good eats. There are some saving graces: a Chipotle, tasty Italian deli, and the short walk to Korea Town (which should more accurately be called Korea Block, though I suppose if you had it excised, transplanted to the suburbs, and spread about at the appropriate density, it might qualify as a hamlet). And then there's the neighborhood Pakistani joint.
The culinary Ike Turner to my Tina digestive tract, I can't but help return there week after week, even though I suspect it was the culprit behind a case of food poisoning some months back, and despite walking to lunch one day two weeks ago to find it shuttered by the health department. It's open again, and now they store their food at higher, legally-mandated, and tastier temperatures.
It's just something about the way the sister looks at me with those longing diasporic eyes. Or the way the brother gets irate when he relays the anecdote about his sister failing to check properly for counterfeit $20 bills. Or the big-screen television which, save for a brief stint during the Cricket World Cup, shows some of the more surreal choreographed dancing known to man set to a Bollywood soundtrack.
It's a shame I'm going to have to drive them out of business to make way for my new strip club. As honest businesspersons, they just don't fit in around there.
The CBC has a neat little Sims-inspired refugee camp flyover, complete with defecation fields!
Defecation fields are meant to serve as a quick, temporary solution in an emergency because without a designated place, people will defecate wherever they please.
Demetri Martin is publishing a once-a-day journal to Slate this week - very bloglike, but yet not officially a blog. It's hilarious (and brilliant - see this palindrome poem), just like his stand-up performances, and just like the man himself. But wait, did I say this weeklong daily journal was not a blog? Proof otherwise:
This morning I was once again reminded that the guy who lives next to me likes to listen to hip-hop. That's cool. He plays his stereo very loudly. That's not cool. The bass resonates through my walls. I'd like him to stop, but I don't like confrontation, so I haven't said anything to him about it. Yet. My initial plan was to get to know the guy first. I figure once we're homeboys, then I could just casually mention it sometime. " ... Yeah, I can definitely relate to your point about bitches and fancy cars. Been there. By the way, dog, could you turn your music like way down when you play it? Maybe even don't play it all? That would be dope. Also, when you do play it, could you rap along to it just a little less forcefully? And by that I mean maybe don't scream the words at the top of your lungs so much. And I was just wondering—are you rapping directly into the wall when you do it or ...? Oh. So, you have a megaphone pointed at the wall? That makes sense." He'll get the hint, we'll both chuckle, and then engage in some kind of elaborate handshake. Sometime later he'll have me over for a 40 or something. We'll talk about all kinds of things: like how we're both skinny white guys who probably have never been in a gang or even near a gang, but how one of us is working on it, starting with his carefully selected wardrobe. I'll lend him a bandana, he'll give me one of his extra fake AK-47s. Problem solved. It'll be great.
That was my initial strategy. Because, I figured you can't have your first interaction with your neighbor be about asking him to turn down his music. That would set a bad precedent. It would sew seeds of resentment. And that equals louder bass, more passionate rap-a-longs, and no chance for elaborate handshakes. The thing is, in the four months I've lived in my apartment, MC Neighbor and I have not really run into each other at all even though I'm in apartment 21 and he's in 22 (the more palindromic one). We've passed each other on the stairs a total of four times. That hardly gives us an opportunity to be down with each other. Because I've seen him so infrequently, when I have run into him (say, the last two times) I think I've overdone it with the friendliness. (MC Neighbor, going up the stairs: "Hey." Me, going down the stairs: "Hey! What's going on? How are things? I like the gold tooth. Is that new?") I don't mean to be disingenuous. I think it's more that I've built up the plan in my head and tried to force it too much. So, instead of coming off like a tightass or a tough guy, I'm sending more of an "I'm going give you a pamphlet about something cosmic next time we meet" vibe.
See that? It's tucked away right at the beginning of the second paragraph. "Sew" instead of "sow".
If you post to a website once a day for five days, your posts are organized chronologically, and you make a trivial typo (or don't have a copy editor), it's a blog. Welcome Demetri!
A bizarrely random, not entirely representative sampling of pictures from the long weekend spent attending a family graduation and seeing some ol' pals (plus one equally random shot of Tony while visiting NYC).
In an odd turn of coincidence, Thomas Friedman (recently of "Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column" fame - a meme I'd been following just this past week) gave the commencement address Friday at my alma mater. I was forced to listen to each painful word while enduring a heat index in the upper nineties. Had he and the chancellor better grasped the genius of brevity, I would not be the unfortunate recipient of a ghastly sunburn that I currently am. Note to those I come in contact with over the course of the next week or so: I realize just how awful the sunburn appears to be. Several people have pointed out both its sickening color tone and patchy randomness; repeating this to me is not required and you may proceed directly to the "mocking and humiliation" phase.
Side note: why I attended commencement three years after my own graduation.
When I was a junior in college, my brother and two cousins were conducting their college search as high school seniors. My brother settled on Northwestern fairly early on, but the cousins - fraternal twins - took until the spring to decide which of the schools granting them admission they would attend. One candidate university happened to be mine, so they and my aunt came to visit for a long weekend. They arrived, I showed them around campus, and we all grabbed dinner, during which I excused myself early due to indigestion. Knowing I would be spending all the following day engaged in more of the same tour-guide activities, and uncomfortable from the indigestion, I decided to forgo the usual Saturday night bacchanal, head home, and rest. Before I could say "ominous foreshadowing", the "indigestion" had turned to "lying half-naked and semi-conscious on my bathroom floor in excruciating abdominal pain interspersed with surprisingly regular periods of vomiting". This lasted for about five hours. One ambulance ride*, a bucket full of bile, an ultrasound, some IV Demerol, a rectal probe, twelve hours of nervous waiting, and a laparoscopy later, my inflamed appendix was lying comfortably in a bio-waste bag and I regained my ability to do anything other than crouch over in a pouty grimace hissing profanity (there was a lot of wincing involved too). When it came time for my relatives to depart, they had spent the better part of their research trip in the hospital with me and trying to contact my immediate family, who were, nicely enough, in Alaska at the time. The whole episode taught me a useful lesson: emergency surgery is a sure-fire sales pitch. Four years later, here I am watching both of them graduate from the school I pitied them into attending.
Back to the point: Thomas Friedman not only gave me skin cancer, but was smug about it.
Having enjoyed the hullabaloo surrounding the formulaic nature of his columns, I prepared myself for something truly special, and was not disappointed. Here are, in the order in which they were spoken, some of the highlights:
While I didn't think it would go unmentioned, Friedman dropped 9/11 on the crowd in the second paragraph, contrasting it with "11/9". That's 11/9/89, the date the Berlin Wall fell. This is called "constructing a lazy dichotomy almost entirely on the basis of numerological coincidence". It worked for Aristotle.
Here's a ever-so-inspirational quote (best read with lingering, thoughtful pauses): "Imagine. Imagine." The word or its derivatives would pop-up 40 times throughout the speech (really - read the transcript).
Friedman noted that the internet, instant messaging, and Microsoft NetMeeting were drawing the world together as never before. He. Name-dropped. Microsoft. NetMeeting. Because when I want to stay in touch with my family, I schedule a teleconference.
Hey, have you heard about this new economic trend called "outsourcing"? Apparently some people feel quite strongly about the issue.
Oh, by the way, he has a new book coming out.
Original career advice to graduates: "do what you love" and "follow your heart". I'm not making this up, I took notes.
Friedman decided to grace us with an anecdote about the value of being a teacher (CEO to teacher: "So what do you make anyway?" Teacher: "A difference." OH! CEO got served!) which I'm pretty certain was curbed from an email forward. As the crowd responded with rousing applause, I felt a strange compulsion to watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" and subscribe to Newsweek.
"Imagine. Imagine." Imagine what though? Not one for vagueness, Friedman gives us some hints. How about imagining, like that teacher with the witty rejoinder, that you can make a difference? Or perhaps imagine that politicians might surprise you pleasantly.
"Listening is the key to life."
Here's an earth-shattering revelation which threatens to tear the blogsphere asunder: the internet creates echo chambers. You should alleviate this by surrounding yourself with people who strongly disagree with your opinions. I believe Friedman has personal experience in this matter.
Maybe being better listeners will make us better imaginers.
Oh, by the way, he writes a column for a very prominent publication.
Only a matter of time: here comes the Abu Ghraib mention.
Americans are generally optimistic. This may or may not correlate with our imaginations, but regardless it's a good thing.
The world today is much more dangerous than when his college-aged daughter was born. Because back then the middle east was blessed with peace and tranquility, Haiti enjoyed unending political stability, and the threat of nuclear apocalypse was really just a big red herring.
Did he mention he writes for the New York Times, and has a new book coming out? He wrote some books before, too, if you want to check those out.
Not long after finishing his commencement address mad-libs/dart-board topic-selection rambling he was awarded an honorary doctorate. In Law.
EMT: You're a student?
Me: Yes.
EMT: How much did you have to drink?
Me [delirious]: Nothing.
EMT: What drugs did you take?
Me: Nothing.
EMT: Hm... so how much did you have to drink?
I'm a "syndication" zealot (quotation marks thanks to Kottke), and in the midst of exhorting the virtues of Bloglines as a nice way to ease into the habit, I discovered Bloglines mobile, which now allows me to read my feeds (109 and counting) on my Treo 600. CURSES BE TO BLOGLINES. I WILL NEVER HAVE FREE TIME AGAIN.
[business proposition redacted, but the gist is that I was asking them a small favor]
In exchange, I will write you in to the plot of my next blockbuster teen comedy war epic. Your part, played with an "earnest" believability by Ernest Borgnine, will be that of the meddling next-door neighbor and chief naval advisor to the queen who overhears a snippet of dialogue out of context and mistakenly thinks that the protagonist (I have yet to determine whether this will be Amanda Bynes, Hillary Duff, or Lindsay Lohan, though given the success of "Mean Girls", I am leaning towards Lohan) is up to some nefarious deed. Ultimately, QIS realizes the error of its ways and steps in at a moment of need to assist the hero by providing a convenient, if somewhat far-fetched, alibi. It's called "Doctor Pennyfarthing, the Opium Wars, and the Power of Love", and I've allotted a provisional budget of $500 Million, making it the most expensive film ever conceived. Don't worry though, take a look at these numbers! It's a sure money-maker!
Projected take:
Domestic box office: $350 Million
International box office: >$500 Million (huge in Japan)
Product placement: $30 Million (deals with, Burger King, Mountain Dew Code Red, Halliburton)
Revenue sharing from Carnival "Love Doctor" theme Cruises: $5 Million
Exclusive co-branding deal with Schwinn for 21st-century penny-farthing bicycle: $2 Million
DVD sales, rental residuals (global): $100 Million
Focus groups reacted poorly when pitched the original ending, whereby the ship carrying the entire ensemble cast is boarded by Ottoman raiders who mercilessly slaughter the women and children to make belts from their entrails, so I've replaced it with a much less agitating one, where the ship happens upon Gumdrop Island - the sweetest place on earth (TM) - and drops permanent anchor in Caramel Cove.
-morland
You can find more information on the penny-farthing here (be sure check the "external links" for pictures).
The alley outside my window allows a restrictive view. Save for a small gap, not easily visible given the current seating arrangement of the living room, it is an expanse dominated entirely by the rear of a single apartment building. There are perhaps 35 windows thereof within sight opposite the dividing alley, usually revealing very little beyond an incandescent glow behind drawn shades or the common, slightly undernourished houseplant. Very rarely is there movement of any sort, so when the bland patchwork springs to life, so too does my peripheral vision.
Today was supernaturally beautiful, the kind of weekend day on which being able-bodied and failing to go outdoors at least once serves ipso facto as proof of clinical depression and/or agoraphobia. The bark of my melancholic haze being far worse than its bite, I managed to venture out for several hours, but exhausted my tolerance for ambling about purposelessly amongst the throngs and teeming masses of hypoapathetic human beings cursed with the misfortune of not possessing my divine ambivalence. I returned to my apartment, rued my boring state of affairs, and began to decompress* on my couch.
The dormant apartment building loafing in the fringe of my vision stirred. I glanced over to see a head pop out from window #11 (numbered sequentially from left to right, top to bottom beginning with the upper-left-most whole window in view of the right-most couch's seat). Soon after, a whole female body emerged onto the adjacent steel platform of the fire-escape, then three more. The four women were, to a "t", gorgeous in a free-spirited, late-20's way, archetypes of the paradoxical Alphabet City style consensus blending art-humble (though never shabby) DIYness and fashionista regalia. Their body language conceded hesitant excitement and, as the four heads craned upwards, they began a timid ascent to the roof up a structure built for panicked descent, giggling nervously as people do in the midst of minor amoralisms. They had apparently hacked the stairs and ladders, repurposing them for leisure like millions before.
Upon reaching their destination, a tar-laden city roof, they leaned over the edge to fully admire the extent of their conquest, giddy smiles all around. The grins had not yet faded when twenty minutes later they retraced their earlier steps and returned through their window of origin, the last conquistadora shutting it behind her.
I just sat and stared, jealous at how they could escape for a moment the progressive extinction of serendipity plaguing me at every turn. The nerve of them, being so tauntingly spontaneous, like that fire-escape was a loophole exempting them from adulthood and all its known quantities - a "get out of jaded, free" card.
Then I came to my senses and realized how inane it was of them to get so worked up about climbing their own stupid fire-escape. That's when it came to me: a plan to prey upon this facet of human weakness for my own monetary gain. I would build an amusement park of venial perceived transgressions.
Come! View with mild discomfort the hall of jaywalking! Experience the almost nonexistent rush of letting a potential business vendor buy you dinner without ever intending to purchase goods or services! Satisfy your appetite, but not entirely your conscience, in Free Sample Land! Feel slightly better than indifferent as you fail to hold elevator doors, or enjoy the ambiguous thrill of delinquent parking ticket payment! Put "sarcastic" quotation marks around words you're using sincerely!
*normally, but not in this case, a euphemism for "drink".
Since no one decided to take me up on my offer to go out (or maybe that was the point) I fulfilled my promise to consume one onion, one pound of frozen spinach, a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, and a six-pack of Bud Light "tallboys" pantsless in my bedroom, alone. Read on for photo-documentation.
I added this to my del.icio.us linkbar, but I'd like to delve a little deeper.
Two Penn undergrads have analyzed price movement of various goods in a virtual world - in this case Final Fantasy XI: Online. I have no experience with FFXIO, nor Everquest, nor any other of the MMORPGs out there and, though they possess proven appeal (witness their millions of subscribers/addicts) and I scary levels of dorkitudeinality, I cannot tell the difference between them - but this is tangential. I digress.
Gathering the data proved to be difficult; it's not the kind of information FFXIO would give out freely, even if they were keeping tabs on it. The two lads, in a rocking display of sleeve-rolling-up DIY moxie, took periodic screenshots of game auctions in action, used OCR software (developed to convert images of scanned words into actual character data) to read the IM-style price notifications flying back and forth from those images and dump it into text files, and finally wrote a parser to interpret all that text and store it in a database. Then they took the data and went wicky-wild with Excel charts. That's awesomely subversive.
Also amazing and potentially lucrative is their discovery of price differentials. Identical items fetched notably variant prices depending on the location and time of the sale revealing a market rife with potential for arbitrage. This is no joke - there are already virtual currency exchanges and these denominations hanging in the ether correspond to real-world value. Everquest and Ultima Online users buy and sell their respective virtu-bucks (called, in dual strokes of creative genius, "platinum" and "gold") on Ebay for actual US dollars. The question arises: who will emerge as the John Meriwether of virtual currency arbitrage?
For more information on John Meriwether and a healthy dose of "Behind the Music"-style loss and redemption (albeit heavy on the loss), read When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein.
Hi! I'm bored and it may or may not be raining outside.
Tomorrow, because it might or might not be raining, there are two events which I'm considering attending: a "take back the white house" benefit (coworker's band in the house - support a good cause) and a listening party (a block from my where I lay my head - two dollar Bklyn's).
Here's the deal: if anyone makes contact and expresses interest in accompanying me, I'll go to whichever they choose. Otherwise, I'll buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, one pound of frozen spinach, an onion, and a six-pack of Bud-light tallboys and consume them all pants-less on my bedroom floor (on the condition that I pre-heat the spinach and onion first). I'm not joking. I'll take pictures.
So right this moment you need to decide: does the opportunity for some delicious sadism outweigh the potential glee you might receive from a nice spring evening about the town?
My (refreshingly non-hipster despite all the name-dropping and hackneyed interests) door is open. Do say hello.
UPDATE: ok, obviously, it will be way, way funnier if I'm forced to stay in and pathetically document my loneliness, but help a brooder out.
I should probably talk more about working at a tech startup - the foibles, quirks, and hep management acumen, not to mention that new-economy zing! Suffice it to say - and this is no big surprise - there are advantages and disadvantages. Advantage: having a foosball table in the lounge. Disadvantage: not having the budget to install a backup air-conditioner in the server room. Advantage: being undaunted and resourceful enough to whip up a makeshift replacement. Disadvantage: realizing that for a moment, your livelihood depends on a couple household fans - and one of them oscillates.
There are blogs on travel, there are blogs on economics, there are oodles of warblogs, and no shortage of music blogs. Often times I stop myself from posting on subjects I know will be covered ad nauseum elsewhere, but I can't help it this time. Watch as I slip out of my haughty pedantic smoking jacket and sink down to the level of slobbering fandom. Look at this picture of Kraftwerk. Just look at it.
One day, my vast accumulated fortunes, I will build a Kraftwerk castle, or "Kastle" - in German: Kraftwerk Schloß (that's an eszett on the end). It will be a stark palace filled with whirring automata, a magical, industrial place.
It's just short of three weeks before the third anniversary of my college graduation, and the delusional bubble I've managed to create, in which yours truly is not a corporate worker-bee but instead a free-spirited iconoclast making a pit stop before finding his vision and moving on to Greater Things, has been popped by the arrival of one (1) box of business cards - my first. Snazzy ones too, to add insult to injury.
Upside: already an indefatigable chick-magnet, I now have one more weapon in my arsenal with which to leave a bloody trail of broken hearts and paternity suits. Its electric effect is soon to be as well-documented as it is irresistible. Buy stock in Kleenex.
I periodically export my syndication (RSS, Atom) subscriptions to synchronize my work feed-reader with its counterpart at home. Today I realized a byproduct of that process was a repository of date-stamped files with which I could track the cancerous growth of my habit (via the number of feeds). The initial phase was one of near-stagnation:
But once I grasped the miracle of it all, it accelerated, more than doubling in a span of three months:
At this rate, plotting a trend line, I'm scheduled to hit 150 feeds sometime in September:
Still undetermined is the point at which reading all these feeds wholly subsumes all other activities. Judging by my recent hermitic behavior, it is nigh.
Somewhere, back in Mesopotamia or Egypt or some other ancient land, people discovered that certain grains could be ground up into mash, and then hardened through heat to create a bland but low-effort diet staple. Then someone discovered that throwing a little yeast into the mix made the resulting substance fluffier.
Later on, some monks got creative and used this technique to create little treats for children, shaped either to represent the tykes' hands clasped in prayer or to represent the holy trinity... maybe even both, depending on whom you talk to. To season these, they used salt, a mineral with a storied history as a nutrient/preservative too long to go into here, but suffice it to say that they had to dig deep, dangerous mines into the earth to get it and at one time it was of greater political and economic value than gold and even opium.
Many years of shipbuilding innovation passed, and imperial ambitions became totally hip. This trend resulted in myriad discoveries, but let's choose two at not-so-random. Some colonists realized that a hitherto obscure little cane brought to Spain from Asia via those culture-mixing Moors called sugar really took to the climate of their new surroundings, and damned if it didn't taste so sweet, so they imported some slaves and set up big fields under the hot sun next to plantation houses where they could drink sugar-derived liquor and inter-marry to pass the time. This netted them a tidy profit. Meanwhile, some conquistadors had befriended sundry indigenous Mesoamerican peoples who pointed them in the direction of the cacao tree and its spicy seeds. They were so delicious, in fact, that the conquistadors ultimately thanked their new pals for the tip with some of their trademark rape and slaughter.
Eventually, some bright person back in the Old Country got the idea to mix all this newly-abundant sugar with the cocoa power derived from the cacao seeds, our old pal salt again (which by now was less expensive), and the lactose-rich secretions of domesticated bovines for good measure so that it was all gooey when heated but fairly solid at room temperature. Oh, yeah, and it tasted like God's tits and could be used by lots of lonely people as a quick-fix surrogate for intimacy. Score.
Light bulb: why not dip those salty prayer-thingies in the goo?
The five most significant continents plus a couple thousand years of tinkering plus some sextants and a few limes to stave off scurvy equals one fantastic snack.
To those who say globalization is underway I respond: it happened centuries ago, its name is the chocolate-covered pretzel, and if the mood is right, I'll suck down four at a time.
