Apparently, my hometown has been “long known for its compulsively clean streets.”
Well, Milwaukee is furthering that tradition with a GumBuster. Huh.
Category: Life Page 7 of 13
Did you know?
Apparently I’ve never posted a link to this essay by George Orwell. Now I’m rectifying that situation. Read it now.
From George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, white papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In “Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling”, to be published in the next New York Times Magazine and available now online, a troll reveals the secret of how not to be trolled:
…the Theory of the Green Hair.
“You have green hair,“ he told me. “Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”
“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”
“What do you mean? What did I do?”
“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.
Aha!
So I’m finally posting this raw footage, roughly cut together, from the very end of my trip to Minneapolis at Christmas 2006. Enjoy?
I was very tired.
I just heard about The Long Now Foundation (via this interview about innovation, which in itself is worth reading, via the interviewer).
From the Long Now website:
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
…
The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.
…
[Footnote:] * The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, [sic] the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
The organization’s board members include the illustrious Brian Eno.
I like the idea. Despite everything, hope and an overdeveloped sense of duty to try to make things better are two things that the world probably isn’t going to destroy in me.
I just found this out today: Rory Root, owner and proprietor of the great comic bookstore Comic Relief in Berkeley, died in May at age 50.
I loved his store and spent more than a few bucks there over the last few years. I actually didn’t even realize he was the owner until I heard this news today. And now I kick myself for never giving myself the chance to get to know him as a person. But his legacy lives on in Berkeley. See the site linked above for memorial service information (June 21st).
I’ve been meaning to write about rock shows for a while now.
This kind of thing (previously) seems to tend to happen right around the time I’m about to take a long trip on Amtrak. Or maybe that’s when I most notice it.
I did ride 13 hours on Amtrak last Thursday, and it was pretty uneventful and relaxing. It was also supposed to be an 11-hour ride (which is a fairly typical delay, I think). And I’ve had a great time in North Carolina with my family. But how long, I wonder, will my scheduled 13-hour trip from Kannapolis to Manhattan take tomorrow?
Speaking of NYC, I enjoyed Yankee Stadium way more than I expected to.
I was a little embarrassed that only a few days after scoffing at how dangerous Oakland is, I got shot. I intended to post about it, but I just never got around to it. Each time I thought about it, it moved farther away from “kind of scary” and closer and closer to “old news,” but it never quite became a blog entry.
Anyway, one Wednesday night last fall,