My friend Tom has contracted a parasitic disease rare enough that it merits a write-up in the local paper.
Three students and a teacher at Kirkwood High School are being treated for a tropical disease, months after a spring-break trip to Costa Rica.
The four must undergo daily intravenous treatment for 20 days. People with the disease, called leishmaniasis, must take an investigational drug that is available only through the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to one man on the scene, the 90-minute treatment each day results in "bad diarrhea, an itchy face, and nightmares about flying trucks and people shooting him from rooftops."
Don't let fame go to your head, Tom. And get well soon.
Conspiracy to interfere with the fourth amendment const...
This is Lenny Bruce's last communication to the world, imprinted with an IBM typewriter halfway down a sheet of paper that, like most in the year leading up to his death, contained part of the manic (but lucid, and cogent) logorrhea he thought would help overturn his conviction on obscenities charges, exonerate him and lead to his redemption. Ever the innovator, he didn't stop in mid-sentence, he stopped in mid-word. Actually, his last words before he stuck the needle in his arm and pumped his veins full of heroin were probably "Now that's some killer smack!" but no record past beyond the typewriter exists for posterity.
Bruce wasn't just a pottymouth stand-up, he was a social critic. Think Andrew Dice Clay but with satirical... wait, strike that, don't ever think of Andrew Dice Clay.
Bruce made powerful enemies, notably in the Catholic church and within the law-enforcement / judicial communities (after being arrested in Philadelphia and informed that a small bribe to a judge would ensure his release, Bruce went public with the information, humiliating the judge and virtually guaranteeing a life of legal harassment). He became a liability to prospective club owners who, fearful aiding and abetting actionable "obscenities", blackballed him into destitution.
Why am I bringing him up? Because of Bruce and legal precedents that resulted directly from his appeals process entertainers today can't fall victim as he did. They can say whatever they desire, no matter how profane or offensive, in a comedy club or drama theater, and enjoy protection under the first amendment. Bruce was a free speech martyr, like Jesus, except his downfall was stigma, not stigmata. And he chain-smoked, and cursed a blue streak, and had orgies.
But anyway: free speech is something I'm going to observe personally over the next week, starting tomorrow as I walk to work one block away from the RNC. Things today went smoothly, and I honestly don't expect that to change. Regardless, it will be good to be reminded that Bruce's words, right down to his last, made a lasting impression.
I'm an overly-ambivalent person (but I don't have a strong opinion about that) so in general I find most pursuits if not enjoyable, neutral or only mildly distasteful. Sometimes this trait is mistaken as diplomatic or unassertive (once I was even charged with being "scheming"), which I suppose it can be, but that's a secondary and situational effect, not the driving cause.
But: this rule has exceptions and one of them is bowling. God I hate bowling.
I love bowling alleys. I love the lights, sounds, smells, those little claw machines in back, the old-school lights-lenses-and-mirrors score projectors and the new computerized ones. I can't imagine a better place to chow down on a cheeseburger and wash it down with some cold suds. I even like bowling shoes.
But I derive no pleasure whatsoever from the act of bowling. Quite the opposite: it's interminably boring to me.
I used to think I was a happy-go-lucky guy, and I couldn't reconcile the uneasy feeling that would stir inside when I acquiesced to go bowling. Only recently have I come to understand that I was forcing a generality into an absolute, a square peg into a round hole, or rather an adult male finger into the grip-slots of a 7lb ball meant for children. I've finally come out of the gutter, and it feels liberating.
[I was going to title this entry "I don't like getting pinned down so it's going to take balls to set the right frame of mind (hope I don't strike out and have to split, I'm on a roll)", but I thought I'd spare you.]
From Variety comes truly disturbing news (stoopid registration req'd, so you might have to just trust me... wait, actually I'm just going to copy n' paste the whole thing):
U makes some online friends Studio logs on for laffs
Universal Pictures and Double Features partners Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher are logging on to the online service Friendster.
Studio and producers have made a rights deal to use the service as the centerpiece for a comedy that will follow relationships formed by fictitious users of the site.
Deal was made with Jonathan Abrams, CEO of Friendster, an advertising-supported site formed in 2003 that links millions of computer users on a daily basis.
Shamberg produced "The Big Chill," and he and Sher were producers on "Reality Bites""Reality Bites" as well as the recently released "Garden State." He said each of those tapped into a specific demographic segment. He and Sher feel the Web site plugs them into a generation now accustomed to meeting and socializing by computer.
"Every 10 years of so, there is a great comedy to be done about the way people live, and Friendster fits perfectly into that setting," he said. "There's this electronic community where friends come together, people meet when they are not in the same physical space. The best way to do a relationship comedy accurately is to concentrate on what is going on now. There hasn't been one done like this."
Abrams said he'd been approached for film deals before, but liked the track record of the producers. The film will be helped, he said, by the fact Friendster users aren't anonymous strangers. They use their real names to connect with and make new acquaintances. They often wind up in physical proximity, which will be integral to the film.
"The idea was to merge off-line and online worlds, for people who have real relationships with each other," said Abrams, whose service is a privately held corporation headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and backed by Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital, Battery Ventures and other individual investors.
The film will deal with a multitude of characters using the site in search of love and friendship. Some alliances work out well, some are disastrous.
Shamberg said he and Sher will secure a writer by early fall and U's Damien Saccani will steer the film.
Really, I can't add anything to this without taking something away from it.
We come thus, as it were by two routes, to the third advantage Dennett extracts from his pattern theory, namely an explication of his famous "three stances'' which we adopt to explain and predict (in sound positivist fashion: mostly predict) what something will do. Consider, for instance, a computer running a chess-playing program. To figure out what move it will make next, one could assume that it knows the rules of the game and the configuration of the board, and wants to check-mate you with minimal risk of being mated itself (the intentional stance); or, given the algorithm it's running, work out what it will do if everything works as it should (the design stance); or actually simulate the circuitry at some suitable level of detail (the physical stance). Each of these stances amounts to betting on a certain pattern in the behavior of objects, and each is a safer better than the last: considerations of design trump those of intention, and physical considerations trump both. Now, in the intentional stance we work by attributing to the object of our interest certain beliefs and desires; these are (at the very least) patterns in its behavior. But we've just seen that two (or more) different patterns can both describe the same data equally well, and two different attributions of belief-and-desire may be equally successful in psyching somebody out. One or the other set of beliefs-and-desires, may correspond reasonably directly and concretely with something going on in the little grey cells, as, say, the abstract patterns of Mendelian genes correspond to DNA sequences, but then again none of them might, just as pre-scientific idea of heredity, while they certainly had some predictive power ("Neither the maid nor her husband the butler have red hair; the maid's new baby has red hair; my husband has red hair...'') have only a very complicated and tenuous relationship to the molecular realities of inheritance.
For the Bechtel Phil 311 alums out there, do read on, there's some juicy sentimentality to be found in the nerd-polemic phrases "folk psychology" and "mental contents".
I used to spend a great deal of time studying this in college, as it helped to relieve the weighty pressure of drinking, taking drugs, and being a sexy, sizzling bundle of BMOC hotness. I knew what "heterophenomenology" meant. I attended seminars on error detection in the anterior cingulate cortex and context maintenance in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Sometimes these were accompanied by colorful fMRI printouts. I photocopied journal articles for my post-doc and helped him gather data on the emotional modulation of cognitive control (Weird: we tried to influence subjects' performance on short-term word-remembrance tasks by showing them video footage from truly top-notch shows like "America's Funniest Home Videos". Weirder: it worked).
It was interesting, but a very isolating island unto itself. The politics were always personal and sometimes nasty. To really pursue cognitive neuroscience you have to be a hard-core academic, and a life-long one at that. So along with my other major I cast it aside to see the world. I found: pan-seared cynicism topped with a creamy ennui glaze, garnished with a little disposable income and served with a side order of whorin'-it-up!
Anyway, I came across Dennet's name today and thought of his stances for the first time in a while. They struck me suddenly as impressively applicable, having worked for a software company for almost three years. We do, in fact, tend to adopt an intentional stance - even the programmers - when trying to quickly communicate or understand broadly how systems work. Programs "try" to do this and "expect" that something else will be in place. After the initial construction, it's only necessary to resort to a design stance when trying to elucidate a very fine uncertain point or re-familiarize with some ancient forgotten code.
This isn't unique whatsoever. Stock markets "await" interest rate announcements, metals have "memory", information "wants" to be free. It's more than a simple anthropomorphic fixation. It's a testament to the brain's "love" of efficient metaphor, intentionally speaking.
The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stat-ing his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but oc-curs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."
Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.
I've been thinking about this lately. I'd just begun reading an edition of a book brandishing a fawning quote by Michiko Kakutani on its cover the day her father died, and not just any book, but one preoccupied with exactly the sort of mathematical exercises and puzzles Shizuo Kakutani devoured his whole life. It was a provocative coincidence.
A few weeks prior, I'd been poking around on IMDB only to find that one of the child costars from an obscure movie I'd vaguely recalled seeing over a decade ago was now the lead singer of a band to which I'd only recently started to listen. Had my IMDB time-killing occurred a mere fortnight earlier, or my introduction to the band a couple of weeks later, the connection would have passed me by.
A month or two before that, I'd chanced upon an acquaintance from college on a street nearby my apartment after not having seen him for over three years. The next day I bumped into him again in an entirely different neighborhood, also without its being planned. While this might have been unusual if he were a fellow NYC resident, it crossed over into the realm of cosmically improbable when I learned he was living in Washington DC at the time, and only visiting for the weekend (the very two same days we'd seen each other).
This last example lent credence to an idea I'd been mulling over for some time, but reading Dyson's review today pushed me over the edge. These coincidences are as inevitable as they are unpredictable, and documenting them might prove to be a fun endeavor. Noting some random quote or bit of obscurely intersected knowledge would be of little interest to others, but maybe not so with recording these lucky run-ins, if only because I could include a goofy picture. So be it. Henceforth, I will attempt to capture them in accordance with some basic, but discretionary, rules:
Subjects will be identified by first names, pseudonyms, or initials only, for privacy's sake.
I must not expect to encounter the subject in question. If I'm walking by his/her apartment building and out they emerge - no dice. If I know he/she is the world's most reputable food-processor critic and I happen upon him/her at a Cuisinart convention - no dice. This is, admittedly, a highly subjective rule, but so are some legal definitions of pornography, and they're good enough for the Supreme Court.
The subject in question can be anyone I know, from a dear friend to a near-stranger I might have met only once, provided I do not think acting weird(er) will apply undue strain to the relationship.
A photo must be taken commemorating the event, preferably a wacky one.
I'd heard NBC's Olympic coverage wasn't outstanding, and in particular that their commentators were insipid fools, but I hadn't yet experienced it for myself. Today I watched the US men's water polo team's aquatic confrontation with their Russian counterparts, and was treated to the insight that in the course of preparing for the XXVIII Olympiad they'd traveled to every continent excluding "Arctica and Antarctica."
DOW CORNING 3179 dilatant compound is a coral-colored silicone polymer that exhibits high elasticity, high bounce, and a unique combination of rheological properties. It offers ease of movement under low mechanical force and yet exhibits excellent resistance to slump or flow when at rest. It is virtually nontoxic and nonirritating to skin or eyes.
My coworker just purchased five pounds of the above substance, better known by its brand name Silly Putty, and broadcast a come-n'-get-it email to the company. Now the office is rife with plastic-y little pops and the normally frenetic background clacking of keyboards has mellowed as people struggle to type with one hand, a struggle from which yours truly is not exempt.
Another coworker tells me he's just purchased Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys for his little girl.
Adulthood is nice. I've got these killer pecs. I get to stay out late on weeknights and drink 24oz Natural Light tallboys. But Silly Putty and Lincoln Logs... damn.
I imagine street bums, with all that time spent on the street, must be witness to countless criminal acts, from drug/prostitution deals to gangland massacres and even the occasional crime against humanity (or fashion). As such, they probably get questioned by the police if they happen to loiter around the scenes of these crimes, and loiter they very well might, seeing as a great many of them are plowed beyond the point of self-locomotion. Now what about the bums with jobs? If someone can't keep their substance abuse problem from interfering with work, well then that's grounds for dismissal. But if they keep showing up late because they had to give a deposition to a grand jury or sworn testimony for an affidavit, then does that makes you, their boss, the bad guy for terminating their employ because their attendance problem was really in the service of the greater public good?
Not that I speak from experience, I'm just saying...
Can you put a price on five years of the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of several score people? Evidently, yes: $36.5 million. That's not bad, for a startup - about $37 per person-hour - especially when compared to the going rate for tribulation, bile, and slings of outrageous fortune, which is around $0.75 / day.
sorland: wazzup? morland: hello morland: not much morland: you? sorland: not mucho sorland: wx? morland: what? sorland: wx? morland: I don't know what that means sorland: weather morland: oh. cloudy. not raining morland: you? sorland: cx = cancel
dx = Distance
fx = lousy movie channel
ix = old Netcom prefix
lx = something you may be able to afford someday
px = army post exchange (heap gas)
rx = hopefully don't need many
tx = transmit(ter)
wx = weather
xx = fairly good beer
zx = old Nissan suffix sorland: fairly hot, little humid morland: did you make that up yourself? sorland: sure, on the spot sorland: why? morland: just wondering where I got it from sorland: u got what from? morland: the weirdness sorland: ur mother sorland: of course morland: above evidence to the contrary
Bartender [slightly hesitant]: Can I get you anything? Morland [equally hesitant]: Yeah... it's my friend's birthday. How about a couple shots of tequila? B: Sure. Any preference? M [<-- cheapskate]: No.
[Bartender fills two shot glasses with paint thinner. Morland and bartender exchange a few curious glances. Suddenly, a light-bulb appears over Morland's head.] M: Hey! You bartend at [BAR NAME REDACTED]. [FIRST NAME REDACTED], right? B: Yeah! I thought you looked familiar. How's it going, I haven't seen you around much. M: Good, good. You? B: Good. Well, stop by sometime, we miss you. M [paying, reminded of why he abstained for a month]: Will do.
They say chivalry is dead, but how exactly did it die?
Chivalry was hanged until dead, Texas-style, from a primitive, angular dead tree under the hot sun by a cabal of Lego Cowboys.
But it did not go quietly. I've created a page that lets you, the reader, choose chivalry's last words. Chivalry is represented by the DVD cover to A Knight's Tale, starring Heath Ledger.
:: Step 3: The distilled essence of blogging, in which Morland pontificates on pop culture
As little as I've been watching television recently, I'd forgotten just how good of a time-waster it could be. On a lazy Sunday, deathly hungover and recovering from a night spent singing karaoke (Joey TOTC was right) and casing the mean streets for a fix, it's a bleary-eyed man's best friend.
I learned about the construction of the Oakland Bay Bridge. I found out the band Europe were Swedish, which I should have guessed for myself. And I watched almost all three hours of Patton, during which I heard him praying, trying to allay the barbs of his critics:
My soul has kept very close behind You: Your right hand has upheld me. But they vainly sought after my soul; they shall go into the lowest parts of the earth. They shall be delivered up to the hand of the sword; they shall be portions for foxes.
I had little ecclesiastical inculcation as a child, a result perhaps of the highly dissimilar faiths of my parents (they knew not to "cross the streams" religiously - did I mention Ghostbusters II was on Comedy Central this afternoon?), so I had not heard this before. It stuck in my brain because of the phrase "portions for foxes", which happens to be the title of a track from the upcoming Rilo Kiley album. I felt the compulsion to look up the full passage.
The level of theatrical bombast in the psalm at first stuck me as quaintly anachronistic, but as I watched Patton I began to notice echoes of the same hyperbolic posturing, from which moody indie rock as well certainly suffers no shortage. And why not? Art is all about addressing the epic. Even when tackling the mundane it does so epically.
I therefore resolve that this week will be epically mundane. I will not "take care of that right away", I will "make alacritous haste, as Hermes o'er the Aegean Sea". Instead of walking home I will stride with certainty of the highest order. I will beseech the currymonger for a Pad Thai bereft of iniquity as there is light yet still in the heavens.
Let he who stands in my way be, um, mincemeat unto opossums. At the gallows. With lice. And plague. Plaguey lice.
A few days ago, I was walking home from work, cursing the high dew point and pondering how many rich socialites I would need to glad-hand in order to fund my new brainchild: the Nonprofit Order of the Society Wishing for the Eradication and Abolition of Humid Torridness (NOSWEAHT - our plan is to replace hobos with dehumidifiers during the summer, collect the extracted water, and then bathe said hobos to "give back" to the community, though mainly it's about re-empowering evaporation). Headphones inserted snugly and brain brimming with seating plans for fundraising galas, I failed to hear a jogger overtaking me from behind, and zigged from my direct course to avoid a sidewalk planter, resulting in a jarring collision between jogger and aspiring philanthropist.
Lo, I thought, I am undone. Was she upset? Even worse, was she injured? Litigious future realities flashed before me, replete with charges of assault and harassment, punitive damages, and possibly an ass-whooping. What a disaster. How could I begin to...
Before I could finish my train of thought, I realized she was now several yards ahead of me, stride unbroken and with no intention of slowing down. It was a complete non-incident. For all my worrying, she hadn't even shot me a dirty look. I stood nonplussed for a moment, the same song playing in the background, before resuming my walk home. Everything was the same as before.
Vindigo, my workplace for the past 32 months, was acquired today. If you can read Japanese, enjoy this terse PDF document stating as much. I'll probably talk about the details more at some point, maybe even scrounge up an English press release.
Learning about the potential acquisition was just like running into the jogger, time-dilated over the course of several weeks. Surprise. Confusion. Panic. Anxiety. Ultimately, the creeping anticlimactic realization that everything is the same as before.
The only notable difference is that this event brings with it a personal financial windfall of literally dozens of dollars. Who would have thought I'd be a dozenaire at the tender age of 25 (and a baby-faced 25 at that)?
James Broadwater appeared on the eighth episode of HBO's Da Ali G Show, originally airing July 25th, in a segment with the character Borat Sagdiyev, a fictitious Kazakhstani television reporter. Broadwater was by all accounts punk'd and served. He has posted a public defense on his web site:
I don't watch HBO, but I definitely got duped by them back before the March Primary. I was lied to and told that a reporter from Kazakhstan wanted to interview people running for office in America, and that these interviews would be played back in his country and maybe in other countries as well, because the people there were interested in the American political system and wished to shape their system after ours. I, as well as others, were excited about being able to share with people in other countries not only about the American political system, but also about Jesus Christ, the Lord of everything and the Savior of the World. What has happened instead is that my interview has been used to make Christians look bad and to make me look like a person who hates Jews. But then, what else can you expect from people who are so anti-Christian and anti-God?
The segment also featured Broadwater canvassing houses while accompanied by Borat, who claimed the candidate was a strong man and would "crush his enemies". Interestingly, Broadwater makes no direct effort here to dispel that assertion (in the episode he balked at Borat's tributes only after being compared to Stalin).
Rem Koolhaas has been kicking it into high-limelight gear in the past few months, with the opening of the new Seattle Public Library, another Prada "Epicenter" in Beverly Hills (I realize the title was determined before constructing their LA and Tokyo stores, but really, that's like opening a chain of "Ash Parts Per Million" and having one of your first locations be in Pompeii), and a flurry surrounding his China Central Television headquarters (left). Today, Wired lets the man himself address that last project, in a giant, colorful PDF begging for printout on a cutting-edge dye-sublimation printer costing tens of thousands of dollars. Or, I guess, you could buy the magazine from a news-stand.
Rem Koolhaas has been kicking it into high-limelight gear in the past few months, with the opening of the new 