Tonight, I’d like to check out some of my assumptions and logic chains with you guys.

I have no idea what sort of response I might get to this posting, but I’m very much up for a vigorous and even acrimonious debate if it goes there. You have my explicit permission to be rude to me on this particular one. As if you needed permission.

Rachael (who is Awesome) and I were chatting about our value systems this weekend, as we sometimes do on road trips. Philosophical types, we are.

We both test out to be seriously lower-left on the Political Compass. You can argue about how valid this sort of categorization might be, but my personal experience is that most people who take the test end up muttering “Yeah, I guess that pretty much places me,” when they see the result. A few consider it to be a moronic attempt to describe complex human beliefs on a mere two axes, of course. They’re probably the smart ones.

But it’s a lot better than the simple Left vs. Right paradigm that’s prevalent in this country.

Rach and I are rowdy social-liberal, anti-authoritarian types. We mistrust and despise anybody who wants to be in charge, and we’re down with ‘Live and let live, I don’t care how weird your shit is, as long as you don’t intrude on my space with it’.

I suspect that most of the folks who frequent EOB have a similar attitude.

(Incidentally, people who test lower-left have ALWAYS despised George Bush and the Thug Party. It’s visceral, perhaps not even a choice on our part. We spit at people who test upper-right. It’s a mongoose-snake issue.)

But there’s a place that Rach and I and many friends seem to radically diverge from a lot of the traditional Left.

: Read More »

For the past few days, I’ve been ponderously pondering what to post today. Most of what comes to mind is fairly dark, because that’s what most often interests me. Big surprise there, right?

Anyhow, while I work my way though that, I thought I’d put something lighter up as a place-holder for the evening.

Last year, Sir George Martin, often called ‘The Fifth Beatle’, and his son Giles remixed a bunch of Beatles songs to create a soundtrack for a Cirque du Soleil show. The remaining Beatles and the estates of the departed ones approved the project.

You can find the resulting CD track listing here, with free streams of four of the songs:

Love

I’ve cruised several boards and checked the comments about it. Some people think it’s a cool thing that they did. Others consider it sacrilege. You can make your own decisions on that, based on your particular religious beliefs about the Beatles.

One comment did strike me as being spot on, though. The remix of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ takes from the softer demo that George did, and has absolutely none of the guitar line played by Eric Clapton.

Someone needs to be shot for that.

:

Which cleverly segues into my next post above.

:

In March of 1947, police were called to a dilapidated brownstone in Harlem. Someone had called in a tip that there was a dead body in the house.

This wasn’t the first time the police had been called to the premises. Five years earlier, the bank that held the note on the brownstone began foreclosure on the house for delinquent payment. After a confrontation with the police, the owner paid the remaining balance of the mortgage and vanished back into his house.

This was no ordinary house. The people who resided within were called The Ghosty Men by neighbors. By the time they died in 1947, the Collyer Brothers were a local legend.

When the police were finally able to enter the house, by dislodging several tons of collected effluvia, they discovered Homer, the older of the two brothers, dead. The younger brother, Langley, was missing.

Over the next few months, the police removed tons and tons of newspapers, baby carriages, fourteen grand pianos — and even a Model T — from the residence. In all, over 100 TONS of well, crap, was removed from the house. A month into the process, Langley’s rat-eaten corpse was unearthed.
Read More »

Here’s the thing. Capitalism is really, really good at generating wealth. What it’s not so good at (read: sucks) is at handling externalities.

So what the heck, you may ask, is an externality? In short, it’s the hidden costs of a transaction — costs that are not directly borne by the beneficiaries of that transaction.

Back when I was in college, we visited a copper refinery. I will never forget those big, swinging vats of molten metal, how the glowing stream poured down, how the dark, dirty slag was skimmed off of those beautiful, cherry-hot bricks. The sweat on our brows, in that hot building; the acrid tang in our nostrils. Big, industrial tech is impressive stuff. Think about it. We dig rocks up out of the ground, we heat it up and purify it, and next thing you know, we’re using it to build computers, rockets, and radiators. Holy satellite array, Batfans.

Copper in particular is extremely important. It’s in our coins; it’s the wires and brass fixtures in our homes; the radiators in our cars; it’s in the computer you are using to read this post.

So, let’s say you have a home improvement project. You have decided to convert your garage to interior space. You swing by Home Depot to buy a lot of stuff, including, say, copper wiring to add some power outlets out there, a new air conditioning unit, and your stereo set and your computer; whatever. Well, Home Depot probably bought that copper wiring from an electrical parts manufacturer, who in turn bought the raw copper from a metal smelting company. The metal smelter either bought raw copper ore from a metals extraction company, which dug it out of the ground, or dug it up themselves.

At each step of this process, money changed hands. The smelter paid the mining company, the electrical parts manufacturer paid the smelter, Home Depot paid the parts manufacturer, and you paid Home Depot. Game room complete. Go, you! (Seriously; go you. Finding time to make your space more amenable, when the demands of the workday and making sure your family is taken care of exact such a price, is no small feat.)

Read More »

Before there was iPhone…

Read More »

I’m a snob. I’m a snob about a lot of things (American Idol? Really? Why?), but one of the things I am a snob about is type. I come by it naturally: my father was a graphic designer, and there were books and books of type samples and type design in his studio (he designed the odd face in his time, too) and many of his friends were designers or artists, so type was sort of a language around the house. And then, my brother letters comic books for a living. And I spent a good part of the eighties designing catalogues and users’ manuals and that sort of thing (on a computer–I am not good enough at translating what my brain wants into something my hands can carry out). I like nice looking type–I do all my writing in Palatino, a graceful, old-fashioned serif face, and change it at the last possible moment to Courier, which I detest but know is preferred by publishers’ production departments. Sound crazy? Sounds like snobbery to me.

Our local pharmacy closed its doors last week, selling all its prescription rolls to a competitor. This should be an unmixed blessing: Rite Aid (the old pharmacy), to which we transferred all our scrips when we moved to San Francisco from New York, was inconvenient as to parking, and the store had been looking a little down at the heels in the last six months or so. But my first thought was: eew. Their logo is ugly.
Read More »

I’m in Cleveland visiting my mother. She is 91 and lives in an assisted living place here. She has dementia. It doesn’t appear to be Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. She’s had MRIs and even been tested to insure it isn’t tertiary syphilis. (They apologized to me, but frankly, I think our parents are a bigger mystery to us than we ever suspect. Although I wasn’t surprised she tested negative.) She lost memory first, and then cognitive abilities. Her language has been impaired for a few years now—she has trouble with nouns. Before I moved to Texas last November, I saw her twice a week and although she has forgotten most of the family, she always recognized me, even if she didn’t have any language to describe our relationship. She would tell me about how her dad came from down there up to here and then he went up (she gestures with her hands to indicate someone going upstairs of climbing) and then bam, down he went. She’s very sweet, which although charming, is not a characteristic my mother ever exhibited. In my family, when the going got tough, the men got out of the way and the women took care of it. My mother was impeccable, competent and occasionally difficult.

Read More »

Doug Potter pointed me at these amazing pieces of jewelry.

My childhood spent with Barbie cultivated my interest in adornment. Extensive play with the doll and her miniature world strengthened my dexterity. This is a skill imperative to the art of jewelry making. Hence it feels natural for me to make art on a small scale.

I enjoy the funny juxtaposition of wearing the body, on the body. Barbie has become the accessory instead of being accessorized. I take pleasure in the contrast and contradiction of something mass-produced being transformed and revealed as a unique, handmade, wearable piece of art.

- Margaux Lange

Link.

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction — or “speculative fiction” or “SF,” or whatever you’re supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-’70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir.
–Slate Magazine, Troy Patterson, 13 October

Stick with me, we’re going to wander a bit here.
Read More »

Warning, Will Robinson–Political Post.

One in eight of Iraqis have now left their homes, with up to 50,000 people leaving each month, the UNHCR said.

It said the exodus was the largest long-term movement since the displacement of the Palestinians after the creation of Israel in 1948.

Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon are hosting most of the country’s refugees.

–BBC News

Okay, here’s what’s really chapping my ass.
Read More »

Looking back on this post after writing it, I think I should warn you that I kinda sorta free-associated my way through it. I had a plan, but it didn’t survive contact with the enemy keyboard. I blame the tobacco withdrawal symptoms.

It wasn’t unusual for me, a hippie-freak, child of the Sixties to get deeply into music during my youth. But I don’t seem to be able to outgrow the obsession, despite receiving quite a bit of feedback from the real world that I could likely find a more productive way to spend my time.

I’ve banged on guitars since I was fourteen years old, have been in a half a dozen bands, starting with one that played only one gig, in a roadhouse on the Old Beaumont Highway when I was seventeen. The drummer was my best friend from high school, Mark Magaziner. His dad was a big band drummer, and Mark was damn good.

(He was the only person I’ve ever known to cook down marijuana and inject it. Mark turned me on to both acid and weed. He charged me twice the going rate until I got hip to what he was doing. He got so heavily into drugs, both dealing and using, when I was living with him, that he once grabbed the kitchen salt-shaker out of my hand in a panic as I was about to sprinkle something on my french fries. I still don’t know what was in the shaker. But that’s another story.)

Read More »

I’ve started taking Maggie on long walks. We’ve watched enough Cesar Milan and read enough articles that we know a well-behaved dog is a tired dog. One day I’m certain I’ll take her on a walk that might actually achieve this.

On our trek, I see ladies pushing strollers, lots of cyclists, kids on skateboards, and plenty of other dog walkers. We’re a very doggy/kiddie neighborhood. There’s some traffic, but the only heavy traffic is at rush hour.

This is a core neighborhood called Allandale. It was one of the first “northern” neighborhoods built in Austin. “Dazed and Confused” was filmed here — and it still has that period flavor to it. We’re not going to wow anyone with our fabulous bungalow Mission-style homes. These are late-50s, early 60s tract houses.

We even have our very own “dead” mall: Northcross Mall. Northcross is home to one of two ice skating rinks in town and it also has a Guitar Center, a place The Dude knows all too well, and a number of other businesses. There have been attempts to renovate the property over the years, but none that was exceptionally successful. However, there have been lots of small, neighborhood-centric locally-owned businesses opening over the last few years around Northcross. They’ve done well here.

The owner of Northcross Mall has made a deal with Wal-Mart to put in a 24-hour, 220,000 square foot Wal-Mart Superstore. This is, to put it mildly, cluster fuckage for Allandale and about six other surrounding neighborhoods on a pretty epic level.

Read More »

Well, most of the snow has melted (though we might get some flurries tonight and tomorrow) but on New Years Eve when we were driving around in it, Laura’s cousin took the photo below. We all said, “Well, look at that dog–that’s no dog!” It’s Maureen’s favorite animal, looking for a roadrunner.

(Click on the picture to see a larger shot.)

… can be found here.

Three-dimensional tissue constructs built by bioprinting.

Bioprinting is an evolving tissue engineering technology. It utilizes computer controlled three-dimensional printers for rapid and high-precision construction of three-dimensional biological structures. We employed discrete and continuous bioprinting to build three-dimensional tissue constructs. In the former case bioink particles – spherical cell aggregates composed of many thousands of cells – are delivered one by one into biocompatible scaffolds, the biopaper. Structure formation takes place by the subsequent fusion of the bioink particles due to their liquid-like and self-assembly properties. In the latter case a mixture of cells and scaffold material is extruded from the biocartridge akin to toothpaste to arrive at the desired construct. Specifically, we built rectangular tissue blocks of several hundred microns in thickness as well as tubular structures of several millimeters in height.

–Jakab K, Damon B, Neagu A, Kachurin A, Forgacs G. Department of Physics, University of Missouri

The above is from the abstract but it’s looking less abstract and more concrete all the time. That’s getting pretty SF and I don’t mean San Francisco.

I’m wondering if they can make me an extra bladder for those really long meetings.