Those three scottish words translate, "Old Long Ago."

Was looking for some sites today that would supply me with lyrics, sheet music, and a good explanation of this song. Written (or recorded and added to) by, turns out, Robert Burns, famous Bard of Scotland, in 1788. A song that nobody knows.

And here's the best site I found.

Have a happy new year. See you in the aught five.

Two couples have been charged in a price-switching scheme that allegedly defrauded Wal-Mart stores in 19 states of $1.5 million over the last decade.

Authorities said the scheme involved using a home computer to produce UPC bar codes for cheaper products and slipping them over the real codes on high-priced items. The suspects then allegedly sold the merchandise, or returned it for refunds or store gift cards that also were sold.

I have to say -- that's not a bad scam. I'm surprised they only netted $1.5 million over ten years, though; that's barely $100,000 a year (though in fairness that's just the Wal-Mart number alone).

Here are some links:

From Salon: A fascinating conspiracy about Jesus transformed the cheesy thriller, "The Da Vinci Code," into a phenomenal bestseller. Too bad it comes from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," a masterpiece of bogus history.

Top Ten Paranormal Events of 2004

Top Ten Intelligent Design Theories Creation Myths. Myths of Creation from India, Norse mythology, Aztec culture, Japan, ancient Babylon, and of course, Islamojudeochristianity -- and several others. The potatoes taste a little too snarky, but the meat is good.

From the Department of Actually Readable New Yorker Fiction That Sadly Isn't Online: No link by definition, but the story in The New Yorker this week I found was actually worth finishing: "I Am a Novelist" by Ryu Murakami. It's the story of a Japanese novelist who gets a call from a bar in Yokohama with the news that someone has been impersonating him for free drinks, gotten one of the waitresses pregnant, and has now vanished. Good premise.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:42 AM  |

United States, 1 : Satanic Toy Terrorists, 0

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in Washington DC puts the smackdown on those commie-pinko-blue state-pushers in Los Angeles with this massive "toy recall" on December 28, 2004. Getting ready for the new year now involves stopping the importation of these dangerous, and evidently satanic-in-origin, cheap Hello Kitty knock offs.

I've been looking for this site forever: Breakdowns of various comic book continuities, from Superman to X-Men to the Authority. Go ahead, no one's looking, geek out.

A look at who's out there outside of the Big Two. Why not poke around?

This must be the worst idea for a movie ever. Yes, even worse than Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter.

It tells the story of a self-centered circus clown, Helmut Doork, who is sent to a concentration camp after a drunken impersonation of Hitler. There, he befriends the Jewish children of the camp, and performs for them, angering the camp Commandant. He is accidentally sent with the children on a train to Auschwitz, and there, he is expected to lead the children, like a Pied Piper, to the gas chambers.

Down the page, the site has links to reviews from people who have read the screenplay and interviews with the few who have actually seen it., which go about as well as you'd expect.

Seriously, this has got to be the worst movie ever made. I can't believe I've never heard of this before.

The Art of Controversy, by my third-favorite German and favorite native-Polish philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. It's The Art of War for the West -- this thing is like the Bush family playbook.

Click here. Play your cards right, maybe you can make the big board someday.

The following is a lengthy list of deviations to be found when comparing the text of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and the translation of those texts to film as undertaken by Peter Jackson, et.al.

I haven't had a chance to watch my Christmas-gift Return of the King: Extended Edition yet; maybe tonight, if I find I have four hours to spare. I can't wait.

This is outstanding.

John Anderson has been chasing an anomaly since 1980: why have the Pioneer spacecraft been traveling 8,000 miles per year slower than they're supposed to?

I don't know how else to describe this. [Flash] Fun. Totally pointless. Beats working.

...with cavemen. [Flash]

Neat site. Don't miss the Firefly timeline.

That's what you get when you mix 40 different Beatles songs into one mind-bending song. Great link from longtime friend-of-the-BCR Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

TheYear in Pictures. From The New York Times.

I spent the afternoon creating a sub-blog for reviews of books, movies, etc. It's a collection of the various reviews we've done on the site, which we're going to use as part of the relaunch of backwardscity.net (scheduled completion: 2008). But you're free to take a look at it as well.

It'll be updated alongside this blog with reviews as we review things.

The New Yorker reviews Jared Diamond's new book, which in many ways sounds like a follow-up to his previous, excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (previously mentioned here and here). The central thesis of that book was that the shape of the continents was the predominant factor in the success of Eurasian civilizations against the indigenous populations of Africa, Australia, and the Americas; the ability to spread across a wide, horizonal swath of territory without developing new agricultural techniques or technology allowed Europe and China to expand rapidly, while in the more vertical continents expansion was limited each time to about a 100- or 200-mile band of similarly climated land.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Diamond extends this theme to the disappearance of societies, tying the failure of populations to mismanagement of available environmental resources. Consider, for example, the Norse colonies in Greenland:

There was nothing wrong with the social organization of the Greenland settlements. The Norse built a functioning reproduction of the predominant northern-European civic model of the time -- devout, structured, and reasonably orderly. In 1408, right before the end, records from the Eastern Settlement dutifully report that Thorstein Olafsson married Sigrid Bjornsdotter in Hvalsey Church on September 14th of that year, with Brand Halldorstson, Thord Jorundarson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson as witnesses, following the proclamation of the wedding banns on three consecutive Sundays.

The problem with the settlements, Diamond argues, was that the Norse thought that Greenland really was green; they treated it as if it were the verdant farmland of southern Norway. They cleared the land to create meadows for their cows, and to grow hay to feed their livestock through the long winter. They chopped down the forests for fuel, and for the construction of wooden objects. To make houses warm enough for the winter, they built their homes out of six-foot-thick slabs of turf, which meant that a typical home consumed about ten acres of grassland.

But Greenland's ecosystem was too fragile to withstand that kind of pressure. The short, cool growing season meant that plants developed slowly, which in turn meant that topsoil layers were shallow and lacking in soil constituents, like organic humus and clay, that hold moisture and keep soil resilient in the face of strong winds. "The sequence of soil erosion in Greenland begins with cutting or burning the cover of trees and shrubs, which are more effective at holding soil than is grass," he writes. "With the trees and shrubs gone, livestock, especially sheep and goats, graze down the grass, which regenerates only slowly in Greenland's climate. Once the grass cover is broken and the soil is exposed, soil is carried away especially by the strong winds, and also by pounding from occasionally heavy rains, to the point where the topsoil can be removed for a distance of miles from an entire valley." Without adequate pastureland, the summer hay yields shrank; without adequate supplies of hay, keeping livestock through the long winter got harder. And, without adequate supplies of wood, getting fuel for the winter became increasingly difficult.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock -- particularly cows, which consumed an enormous amount of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status; to northern Europeans, beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from the Inuit the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter. But the Norse had contempt for the Inuit -- they called them skraelings, "wretches" -- and preferred to practice their own brand of European agriculture. In the summer, when the Norse should have been sending ships on lumber-gathering missions to Labrador, in order to relieve the pressure on their own forestlands, they instead sent boats and men to the coast to hunt for walrus. Walrus tusks, after all, had great trade value. In return for those tusks, the Norse were able to acquire, among other things, church bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, churchmen's robes, and jewelry to adorn their massive cathedral at Gardar, with its three-ton sandstone building blocks and eighty-foot bell tower. In the end, the Norse starved to death.

Sounds fascinating.

Susan Sontag has died.

In a diary at Daily Kos. Includes links to before-and-after satelite imagery and video of the waves hitting a beach. I'm just awestuck. This is so horrible.

When I was in college, I once stopped by the Old Navy at the mall to buy two shirts. It was the first time I was ever in the store; the shirts were on sale. I still have them, actually, and they've held up pretty well. But what I've really carried forward from that day is the memory of leaving my car and walking to my dorm with the shopping bags, where I was suddenly confronted by a friend of mine, who began yelling: "You shop at Old Navy? Gerry Canavan shops at Old Navy?"

I haven't been in an Old Navy since that horrible day five years ago -- until today.

But I'm glad I went. I got two nice wool winter hats...for $4.83. Total.

You can't beat that.

What can you say about a Wes Anderson movie, immediately after having seen it? Not much, besides "I'm going to see it again, wanna come?"

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is just like The Royal Tenenbaums in exactly the same way that The Royal Tenenbaums is just like Rushmore -- Anderson has managed to create a repertoire for himself (signature cuts, signature fonts, signature sounds, signature stars, even signature dialogue fills like "by the way"), with elements that run through every movie, without ever repeating himself.

In terms of plot, character, and theme, The Life Aquatic is both unlike every other Wes Anderson movie and unlike every other movie you've seen this year. I've been thinking about it, and I think this movie may be, in its own way, simultaneously Anderson's most and least grown-up movie ever. In fairness, I can think of ways that distinction applies to Rushmore and Tenenbaums too, and even Bottle Rocket to an extent. But I think it applies here. This movie unflinchingly leaves wounds open in a way no other Anderson movie has, all while taking place in his most fantastic (and hilarious) imaginary universe yet.

I understand that the critics aren't really digging this movie. I think Ezra said it best as we were leaving the theater: "I understand why this movie's getting bad reviews. People are idiots." See it for the unbelievable soundtrack. See it for William Dafore's greatest performance ever. See it for America's sweetheart, Bill Murray.

I can't wait to see it again. Maybe then I'll have more intelligent things to say about it.

There's only one problem: where was Mr. Littlejeans? Where was the Pagoda?

Just two years until The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

When I went home to Gainesville, FL for the holiday, I realized how lucky I was to grow up in a town with only 3 television stations. Firstly because stations 1 and 2 really stunk (TV-20, an abc affiliate, and Channel-51 which only turned to a Fox affiliate when I was in middle-school, around Simpsons season 3 or 4) and secondly because WUFT, the University of Florida PBS station, was so freaking terrific. I watched it all the time. I think 78% of all my knowledge came from my formative years glued in front of all the programming there.

Gainesville actually has at least two PBS signals now. WUFT, which has the normal stuff, and PBSyou, which has instructional "tele-classroom" shows (like cooking with Julia Child, lots of Language courses, and the odd guy in a workshop using a router).

Anyway, over the break I watched quite a bit. Most notable were the last episode of NOW with Bill Moyers and some great reports by Frontline. Click on some of the stuff here, as most are viewable online in full or by segment.

For Moyers'retirement episode he dutifully relcaimed the aesthetic and philosophy for what a true journalist should be, and slammed/condemned the heads of the New Conservative Media. He also had a great interview with director of the ACLU, Anthony Romero.

Frontline was also great. And I'd like to point you to some really good episodes. Last week "Is Wal-Mart Hurting America?" (answer pretty obvious) and the week before, The Persuaders (which is mostly about advertizing and subtle marketing strategies, but winds up its thesis also slamming the media tactics used by the Neo Cons and democrats alike - very cool).

Tonight should prove a good PBS night as well. NOVA has a good looking show called "Our elegant Universe" all about Gerry's favorite thing, String Theory. I'd normally have to set the VCR, as I'll be watching Life Aquatic tonight, but, looks like PBS is doing well to have this show online, too.

Great post from MonkeyFilter about the surprisingly widespread Icelandic belief in "hidden folk."

According to surveys, 10 percent of Icelanders believe in elves. Another staggering 80 percent will not say they exactly believe, but neither are they willing to totally rule out their existence.

Another link from Monkeyfilter puts the elf-belief number near 70%, and still others talk about the various road-building and home-buying procedures necessary to appease the hidden folk. Great stuff.

And don't get smug, Americans -- after all, 34% of us believe in ghosts, 24% in witches, and a whopping 78% of us believe in angels.

Elsewhere on the site, Monkeyfilter is leading the world in discussion about gay penguins.

Followup: Asteroid 2004 MN4 is gonna miss us.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal is doing what nobody ever does: calling out the psychics who were way off in their predictions for 2004.

If you're interested, Boing Boing has been posting a lot on this, including some first person accounts. Sounds so horrible.

How Walmart Is Destroying America And The World: And What You Can Do About It is now available for preorder at Walmart.com.

(via Metafilter)

Drugs can ease pain and reduce anxiety, but what about the more profound issues that come with impending death? The wish to resolve lingering conflicts with family members. The longing to know, before it's too late, what it means to love, or what it meant to live. There is no medicine to address such dis-ease.

Or is there?

This month, in a little-noted administrative decision, the Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to a Harvard proposal to test the benefits of the illegal street drug known as "ecstasy" in patients diagnosed with severe anxiety related to advanced cancer.

I've got some profound issues with my impending death, though I don't even have terminal cancer yet. Where do I sign up?

Following up on this post from earlier in the month, here's Gregg Easterbrook in TNR takes New Line to task for neuturing the His Dark Materials movie trilogy. He's also got a pretty good summary of what the books are all about:

But what do the kids and the professor find out as they travel to multiple realities? That God is a fraud. There exists a powerful ethereal creature, The Authority, who claims to be divine, but is a phony. The Authority was the first intelligent being to evolve to an advanced form. This being, now extremely ancient, realized he could masquerade as God, demanding worship by telling those who evolved after him that he created the firmament.

Next we learn that God is immensely evil--in fact, the very source of evil. The Authority wants people to suffer. All church structures, especially something extremely similar to the Roman Catholic Church, have been designed by The Authority to cause misery in life. The Vatican-like hierarchy casually engages in murder and torture, employing fanatic priests who kill with impunity. This includes murder and torture of children--scenes describe adults killing children or inflicting pain on them--and remember, the trilogy is marketed as children's literature.

Easterbrook also links to an interesting article from an angry Ursula K. Le Guin, about how the Sci Fi Channel botched their adaptation of her Earthsea books.

I can't wait till I'm famous enough to complain about the movies butchering my work.

Huh.

According to these tourists remote viewers are seeing world powers in the course of self-destruction. They also see that the world will not be destroyed. Between now and 2012 the world super powers will continue to engage in regional wars. Terrorism and covert war will be the main problem. In world politics something will happen in and around 2010. At that time the world powers will threaten to destroy each other.

...

In 2012, the world will start plunging into a total destructive nuclear war.

And at that time something remarkable will happen, says, Buddhist monk of Tibet. Supernatural divine powers will intervene. The destiny of the world is not to self-destruct at this time.

...

When asked about recent UFO sightings in India and China, the monks smiled and said the divine powers are watching us all. Mankind cannot and will not be allowed to alter the future to that great extent.

Finally, some good news!

Here's "Kai Tek Casualties." I actually read this story a few months before I came to Greensboro at my friend Eric's insistence -- Eric is a McSweeney's early adopter from way back -- and we both really enjoyed it, so it was funny and a little ego-deflating to find out she was in my workshop.

The red-faced man by the window curses, surveying the Asian Wall Street Journal. The blond woman in the aisle-seat reads a romance. The plane taxis but does not take off; it belly flops into the South China Sea. Water floods the cabin. Newsprint blurs. He escapes through a gash in the roof, worrying some about sharks, but more about the men in Kuala Lumpur who are waiting for him. Everyone survives. He's got to get another flight.

It's still a good story.

Reviewed in The New York Times.

Thank god for Puma, Lori's friend in the hills near Unawatuna. A forwarded email (thanks Anne) from Lori's mother confirms that she is safe. Christmas is un-cancelled, and New Year's can happen now too.

That's what a dog says in China.

International onomatopoeia. (Via Metafilter)

As expected, The Complete Peanuts is absolutely gorgeous. Watching as the icons "gel" is neat, too.

Unbelievably, it's good. It's not high art or anything, but it's funny, and much like Meet the Parents I enjoyed it a lot without really intending to.

If you've ever wondered what it's like when the Hillses interact with the Canavans, the St. Pierres, or the Chants, you should probably see this movie. General consensus was that it's better than the original.

And tomorrow (or the next day) it's The Life Aquatic. Thank heaven.

With the toll already at 2400, and supposedly millions who will be homeless or displaced, Sri Lanka is hit hard by those massive earthquake-induced tsunamis that rocked most of Southwest Asia in over the weekend. (The largest (8.9) earthquake ever recorded world wide? It's big news everywhere; go to whatever news source you like.)

Our own beloved, beautiful, and very bright Lori Reese is over there right now either thinking that her Fulbright Exchange was the best or worst idea she's ever had.

If you pray, pray she's safe. If you don't, then just imagine really really hard. And Lori, call home.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

PS: The Seinfeld DVDs are probably the best DVD sets I've ever come across. In addition to the usuals -- uncut episodes, deleted scenes, selected audio commentary, a blooper reel -- you're also looking at an "Inside Look" featurette for nearly every episode, with the entire cast as well as Larry David and others.

The bits where Larry David interacts with Jerry Seinfeld are particularly great, philosophically, because it's so difficult to disassociate their characters on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm (respectively) from who they really are, leaving the viewer with the feeling that they're watching a few different layers of reality colliding into one another.

We haven't watched them yet, but every episode also contains a "Notes about Nothing" annotation track, which should also be really interesting. If you're a fan, these are definitely worth picking up.

Unreal.

Underneath a German bus terminal, archaeologists have found the remains of a 2,000-year-old Roman roadside rest stop that included a chariot service station, gourmet restaurant and hotel with central heating.

...

Historians theorize that similar road stops were located approximately every 20 miles along the Roman Long Road, which linked the North Sea coastal region to the tip of southern Italy.

Is this stuff written in our genes?

Funny stuff. From Salon, c. 2001.

2004 MN4 is currently a 4 on the ten-point Torino scale, which puts the probability of impact at 1 to 63 against. Better clear your calendar for April 13, 2029, just to be safe. (Via MeFi)

Quantum darwinism. Interesting stuff.

On the Internet, everyone is famous for fifteen minutes.

On January 13th, I am going to kill myself.

I am going to be posting daily about my fears, anxieties, and state of mind. If, in the month I have allotted, someone shows that they truly care, I will not take my life. This may seem odd to some people. Hell, it even seems odd to me. But even though I do not want to live, I need to know if someone can care. If someone could reach across the void of chance and make contact, I will consider it a sign that someone (God, Allah, anyone) does not want me to die.

I hope this is a hoax.

You know you're gonna get it anyway -- so why not use our clickthrough and give the journal a couple dollars in the process? Last time around, Amazon was very good about getting these books to people on opening day; I imagine your book will be on your doorstep on July 16th.

How else can you find out whether Albus Dumbledore is really a stranded-in-time-Ron-Weasley without leaving the comfort your home or even removing your bathrobe?


(Happy Holidays!)

Well, I'm off to Wilmington in a few minutes, and only four hours later than I intended to leave. I'll be around sporadically over the next week or so, but probably much less than usual. Look to mad blogging addict PClem and BCR website monkey ninja guru DonEzraCruz to pick up the surfing slack.

For those about to rock, we salute you.

I think this year's #1 is actually the greatest Bushism of all time. Behold:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

Four more years! Four more years! Sigh.

Shouldn't you be home by now? It's Festivus Eve. In the meantime, here's a linkflood:

Malaysian entrepreneur opens Tropical Islands, a huge indoor beach resort in Eastern Germany; Baudrillard's head explodes

"Amazon's customers probably don't consider what it takes to get their orders to their doorsteps. But as soon as they click the buy button, a frenzy of activity is set in motion at facilities like this one in Fernley, a small town in the sagebrush 30 miles east of Reno."

How great is the Greensboro blogging community? Supergreat, that's how great it is. (Followup. "Are we Greensboro yet?")

Slate endorses the creation of the sarcasm point (¡) -- but will it go the way of the interrobang?!?!

How people park. My father was a classic search-and-destroyer, and I've picked up a little bit of that from him, as well as a tendency to stalk from my mother. But mostly, resenting the slowness of both approaches, I very quickly give up any hope on a good space and take whatever I can get.

Jaimee, on the other hand, is the most aggressive "see it and take it" parker on the planet, willing to take a spot three shopping malls over if she sees one. So somehow we still manage to argue. That's the transcendent beauty of our love.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:44 AM  |

...because now it's on a billboard outside the Holland Tunnel. Classic.

You can get a good look at the picture (much better than the Reuters photo at Yahoo) here. (Once you're there, be sure to hit 'reload' once to remove that ugly white bar.)

There are a lot of weird people on the internet. Take, for instance, these people, who are absolutely convinced that Albus Dumbledore is a time-traveling Ron Weasley who somehow got stranded in the 19th century.

It's a bizarrely tempting theory, once you get past the strangeness of it. The physical resemblance stuff is strange, particularly the two characters sharing a knee injury. There's the fondness for sweets thing, and an apparent continuity error involving a vomit-flavored Every Flavor Bean. I'm also fond of the notion that Dumbledore's yearning for socks is an old Ron yearning for Molly Weasley's Christmas gifts, as well as the idea that in the end it's Ron (who always trusted Snape the least) who now trusts Snape implicitly.

Like I said, it's oddly compelling, once you open the door.

If you poke around unplottables.net, you'll find a lot more about it. (You'll also find a lot of other X=Y character theories. Ignore those. Focus on Ron=Dumbledore.)

Weird.

Mentioned below, but this really deserves its own post. Because it's cool.

The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle -- Workshop for Potential Literature -- is responsible for all your favorite po-mo texts, including A Void (which doesn't use the letter 'e' in either the original French or the English translation) and perennial Backwards City Notable Book of the Year If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. And now you can create your own great masterpiece by making use of their insane techniques.

(Via MeFi, which also points us to this OuLiPo-zation of comics, as well as the world's greatest Italo Calvino fan site)

(So that's where Marcus's band of poets got the name Lucipo...)

Are we alone?
Why are we here?
Are we real?

Sir Martin Rees, astronomer, is looking into it.

Pretty bitchin' flash puzzle. One of the best in the genre, that I've seen, anyway.

The New York Times has the story:

Archaeologists have traced the development of religion in one location over a 7,000-year period, reporting that as an early society changed from foraging to settlement to the formation of an archaic state, religion also evolved to match the changing social structure.
...
The Oaxaca Valley was home to people who around 7000 B.C. were hunters and gatherers with no fixed abode. By 1500 B.C., the Oaxacans had developed strains of maize that enabled them to settle in villages that were occupied throughout the year. The earliest village societies were probably egalitarian like the foragers who preceded them. But by 1150 B.C. the first signs of social hierarchy appear, with an elite who lived in big houses, wore jade-studded clothes and deformed their skulls, as a sign of nobility, by binding their children's heads. The Oaxacans flourished and in 500 B.C. founded a populous and warlike society at Monte Albán known as the Zapotec state.

The religious practices of each of these four stages of society can be inferred from the structures that the archaeologists have excavated and dated.

And here's the part that should sound a little bit familiar:

But when elites and kings emerged, they did not dispense with the religious systems that were the previous source of social authority. Instead they employed religion as another mechanism of social control and as a means of maintaining their privileged position. "Ritual becomes part of the justification for being politically elite," Dr. Marcus said.

Interesting stuff.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is finished, and goes on sale next year. The exact release date will be announced tomorrow.

Rowling has said that one of her characters will not survive her sixth book, but she refused to identify that character.

It has to be Dumbledore, right? Who else could it be?

What if Calvin took Ritalin? The world would be a far worse place, that's what.

(waxy.org, via Linkfilter)

If your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.

Aw, crap.

Follow your earnings in real time. God that's depressing.

From The New York Times. Don't forget the feats of strength.

Are you hungry? I'm hungry. Hungry for geometry.

Page also has a link to the delightful parable of the Taoist farmer. "What makes you think this is good?"

Christmas edition.

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

By James Thurber in The New Yorker, 1927. It's pretty excellent.

“Is Saint Nicholas asleep?” asked the children.

“No,” mamma said. “Be quiet.”

“What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?” I asked.

--
Via MeFi, which also points us to this other classic Hemingway parody:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: To die. In the rain.

The subscriptions have been pouring in these last few weeks -- thanks to everyone who's subscribed so far! You have our gratitude, and in a couple weeks you'll have our magazine. And if you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?

Here's that lineup again for our first issue:

Adam Berlin Erica Bernheim Tom Chalkley Peter S. Conrad Cory Doctorow Johannes Goransson Arielle Greenberg Gabriel Gudding Paul Guest Kristin Hall Kent Johnson Stephen Kuuisto John Latta Sarah Manguso Joyelle McSweeney K. Silem Mohammad Ander Monson Alix Ohlin Karri Harrison Paul Michael Parker Jim Rugg Mary Beth Sanders Mark Bradley Shoup Marcus Slease Tony Tost Kurt Vonnegut Greg Williamson

Thanks for all your help in keeping this place going!

When I was much younger, before I really understood anything, I used to think about a lot the first human -- that fully conscious, fully human baby born to monkeys -- and wonder how he or she managed to get through life. It must have been extremely lonely, I thought.

It probably would have been. Except, of course, that there really wasn't ever any "first human," or first mammal, or first anything. We tend to think of evolution in these cartoonish terms -- holy crap, that fish just turned into a bird! -- but that isn't how it works at all.

I'm reading River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins now, and he handles this particular concept wonderfully, explaining how these sorts of big changes really happen in just about the easiest-to-understand manner I've ever seen:

When we think of the divide leading to all the mammals -- as opposed to, say, the stream leading to the gray squirrel -- it is tempting to imagine something on a grand, Mississippi/Missouri scale. The mammal branch is, after all, destined to branch and branch and branch again, until it produces all the mammals -- from pigmy shrew to elephant, from moles underground to monkeys atop the canopy. The mammal branch of the river is destined to feed so many thousands of important trunk waterways, how could it be other than a massive, rolling torrent? But this image is deeply wrong. When the ancestors of all the modern mammals broke away from those that are not mammals, the event was no more momentous than any other speciation. It would have gone unremarked by any naturalist who happened to be around at the time. The new branch of the river of genes would have been a trickle, inhabiting a species of little nocturnal creature no more different from its nonmammalian cousins than a red squirrel is from a gray. It is only with hindsight that we see the ancestral mammal as a mammal at all. In those days, it would have been just another species of mammal-like reptile, not markedly different from perhaps a dozen other small, snouty, insectivorous morsels of dinosaur food.

The same lack of drama would have attended the earlier splits between the ancestors of all the great groups of animals: the vetebrates, the mollusks, the crustaceans, the insects, the segmented worms, the flatworms, the jellyfish, and so on. When the river that was to lead to the mollusks (and others) parted from the river that was to lead to the vertebrates (and others), the two populations of (probably wormlike) creatures would have been so alike that they could have mated with one another. The only reason they didn't is that they had become accidentally separated by some geographical barrier, perhaps dry land separating previously divided waters. Nobody could have guessed that one population was destined to spawn the mollusks and the other the vertebrates. The two rivers of DNA were streamlets barely parted, and the two groups of animals were all but indistinguishable.

Kind of makes you wonder where the first Cockroach sapiens is living right now.

Best advice: rather than clicking on each face, pause your mouse over each face and let the roll-over tag do the work. (via Linkfilter)

This is the single greatest thing I have ever seen. It starts off slowly, so be sure to do yourself a favor and wait until the big synchronized zombie dancing scene.

I actually read this in a big comedy anthology years ago. I was a kid then, and I'm supposedly a writer now, but it's amazing the way a thing like this sticks with you.

Lesson 2-The Ending
All too often, the budding author finds that his tale has run its course and yet he sees no way to satisfactorily end it, or, in literary parlance, "wrap it up." Observe how easily I resolve this problem:

Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck.
-the end-

If the story happens to be set in England, use the same ending, slightly modified:

Suddenly, everyone was run over by a lorry.
-the end-

If set in France:

Soudaincment, tout le monde etait ecrass par un camion. -finis-

You'll be surprised at how many different settings and situations this ending applies to. For instance, if you were writing a story about ants, it would end "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a centipede." In fact, this is the only ending you ever need use.

I think every story I've ever written has been built around this principle.

Click here.

The 1914 Christmas truce is probably the greatest Christmas story ever told. Almost enough to give a fellow hope. It's just too bad they started up shooting again.

Manipulate Dali's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, A Second Before Waking Up" to your liking. Pretty wicked.

The following list of questions is meant to aid authors of fantasy fiction who are seeking to create believable imaginary settings for their stories. Definitely a good starting point for would-be world-creators.

Post title comes from the excellent Philip K. Dick essay, previously blogged here.

McKay's came through for me in a big way today with The Authority: Relentless and The Authority: Under New Management, the first two books in what is widely considered to be the best superhero comic today. The Authority is playing off the WildStorm superhero world, which I'm only barely familiar with -- but you don't need to have read StormWatch or anything else to know what's going on.

Basically, it's the true story of seven superpowered strangers picked to live together on a transdimensional Carrier to find out what happens when superheroes stop being polite and start being real. The Authority isn't content to restore the status quo. It wants to change the world. Remake the world -- in its own image.

Great stuff. From what I hear, the series doesn't always live up to its promise, but these two early books have been great.

Because traditional superhero teams always put the flag back on top of the White House, don't they? They always dust down the statues and repair the highways and everything ends up just the way it was before...

But what if? What if the superheroes really decided to make a few changes according to a higher moral authority?
-- Grant Morrison, from the forward

There's a world of great comics it's time I caught up on; I'm years behind the times. And it looks like I'll be starting with The Authority and Planetary.

WildStorm graphic novel homepage.

Wonderful.

Interesting site.

The Shinichi Fujimura story in particular is astounding. It's hard to believe an archeologist would fake discoveries like this. Why would you enter the field in the first place, if you had so little respect for it?

(via Cynical-C)

That's the extremely unlikely rumor on the 'Net.

Although we sadly missed it in the theater, we made up for our failing tonight by renting Hero, a gorgeous martial arts epic out of China. Everyone should see this movie for its visual excellence alone. This is a beautiful film.

The movie is the story of Nameless, a sword-wielding hero in the era of Chinese unification. The movie is structured around a conversation between Nameless and the King of Qin, the man who will unite the nation, become China's first emperor, and build the Great Wall -- Nameless has killed the three Zhao assassins who have hunted the King for the last three years. Before Nameless can receive the promised reward, the King requests that he recount the tale of how he bested the assassins.

As we circle around different versions of these flashbacks -- in a technique I've seen referred to as the Rashomon effect -- we find that the truth may be unexpectedly complicated.

Jaimee's favorite scene -- probably the movie's most visually stunning -- was the wonderful leaf fight between Snow and Moon (you'll know the one when you see it). I liked that one a lot, but my favorite remains the early battle between Nameless and Sky in a place called a "chess house" that is seemingly really a Go house -- and the structure of the fight itself is suggestive of a Go battle, filled with attack and defense, move and countermove, anticipation and retaliation. It made me want to play some Go.

The movie's calligraphy scenes are also incredibly well-crafted. Who would have thought calligraphy could be made to seem so essential?

The movie has been widely criticzed (both in China and by many American critics) as a "paean to authoritarianism," but I think these people are failing to read the movie properly. These characters are facing tragedy regardless of what they do, because the choices they make are impossibly complicated ones. The movie -- as with any successful work of art -- doesn't blindly ratify anything. All these characters are flawed; all their choices might be second-guesed.

The claim of many critics that the emperor is the movie's ultimate hero -- that the movie uncritically ratifies the authoritarianism of Chinese empire -- is needlessly reductionistic, and completely misses the point. Things are infinitely more ambiguous than that.

For more on this, check out this article (WARNING: contains spoilers): Is Hero a paean to authoritarianism? (The short answer: No.)

In any event, highly recommended.

All the ancient maps you'd ever want to look at, including the oldest surviving detailed map of the world and a reconstruction of Homer's view of the world.

(via LinkFilter)

Your surprising poll results for today. Who knew so many senior citizens were unrepentant reefer addicts?

Important work is being done. Sponsored by the online international journal of Buffy studies, Slayage.

Their Angel Department is a little neglected. Typical.

Click here. Do you remember those summer days when you were young, and your hair smelled like vanilla -- vanilla, Christopher! -- and how sweet life seemed then? Did you ever think that we could come to be as we are now? So separated by time and space and having never met?

Water on mars? Bah! You know it was the hobbits.

So let me get this straight. The male members of America's rich and powerful elite gather yearly in a grove in California and prostrate themselves before a giant stone owl before ritually enacting a mock sacrifice...and I'm only finding out about this now?

Ladies and gentlemen, Bohemian Grove.



In addition to the heads of various corporations, attendees include every Republican president since Coolidge, Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, Nelson Rockerfeller, Alexander Haig, James Baker III, Bob Novak...

Wikipedia
HierarchyPedia (which includes a list of attendees)
Article in the Sacramento News and Record
Dissertation from UC-Davis on Who's Who in the Bohemian Club
Article from FAIR
Bohemian Grove Action Network
Google Search (Warning: This gets extremely tinfoil-hatty almost immediately -- we're talking "They're all Reptile People from Outer Space!" crazy.)

Write off entirely the nutty tinfoil-hat paranoia and focus just on what's actually been documented...and this is still pretty weird. And it's actually true.

In the world of the warrior, seppuku was a deed of bravery that was admirable in a samurai who knew he was defeated, disgraced, or mortally wounded. It meant that he could end his days with his transgressions wiped away and with his reputation not merely intact but actually enhanced. The cutting of the abdomen released the samurai’s spirit in the most dramatic fashion, but it was an extremely painful and unpleasant way to die, and sometimes the samurai who was performing the act asked a loyal comrade to cut off his head at the moment of agony.

All about seppuku.

It's not a big department. But I actually got a good email forwarded to me today. From SPY Magazine: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

(Hat tip: Big Daddy Aufrance)

Hans Keirstead is making paralyzed rats walk again by injecting them with healthy brain cells sussed from a reddish soup of human embryonic stem cells he and his colleagues have created.

Keirstead hopes to apply his therapy to humans by 2006.

It's the devil's work! The devil's work!

Poor guy has a thyroid problem. Oh, also, he's got schizoid personality disorder:

(a) few, if any, activities, provide pleasure;
(b) emotional coldness, detachment or flattened affectivity;
(c) limited capacity to express either warm, tender feelings or anger towards others;
(d) apparent indifference to either praise or criticism;
(e) little interest in having sexual experiences with another person (taking into account age);
(f) almost invariable preference for solitary activities;
(g) excessive preoccupation with fantasy and introspection;
(h) lack of close friends or confiding relationships (or having only one) and of desire for such relationships;
(i) marked insensitivity to prevailing social norms and conventions.

Old School.
Slightly Newer School.

Pampas grass, now dry,

once bent this way

and that.

Via MeFi.

Pour your 40 on the ground tonight, because the Love Shack burned down.

Song Meanings, Song History, Song Facts.

Where else are you gonna find out that Hootie and the Blowfish's "Only Want To Be with You" was lifted from "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Idiot Wind," or that Dylan sued Hootie and settled out of court?

To be honest, I don't think I ever even realized that song had lyrics, beyond the words "Only Want To Be with You" over and over. Yeah I’m tangled up in blue / Only wanna be with you

What happened 5,200 years ago? A major climate shift that could happen again ... if it's not already happening.

Yes, that's right, we're all doomed.

(via Waving at Myself)

...by making it seem less safe.

Riding in his green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. It's the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior - traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings - and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn't contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it's unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous - and that's the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. "I love it!" Monderman says at last. "Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can't expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road."

See also this post from way back. Social psychology is fun. Too bad our society is too stupid to ever take advantage of it.

...the end of the world? Great article on millennialism from The Economist. Don't forget to check your handy Apocalypse Chart.

(via MeFi, which has more)

Click here.

Christmas is the deadliest day of the year for Americans with 12.4 percent more deaths than normal, researchers said on Monday.

More Americans die from heart attacks and other natural causes on Christmas, the day after and on New Year's Day than on any other days of the year, the researchers reported.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

The regular junk science / pseudoscience column from The Guardian. This week: The 2004 Bad Science Awards.

PClem was right, that was a pretty good movie. Just nine days until Zissou.

And it's be a pretty good list, too, if it didn't have Paris Hilton on it.

The frightening, borderline NSFW picture of Paris on the main page doesn't help matters, either.

God I hate Paris Hilton. And I'm not crazy about the inclusion of Lindsey Lohan, either. If Barack Obama and Howard Dean could make the list, surely they could have squeezed in Teresa Heinz Kerry. Who mourns for the non-skank?

Cursing is against the rules? I know a lot of UNCG professors (and lecturers) who would be surprised to find that out.

Complete the circuit. [Flash game]

"Businesses don't wish you well and don't respect the values they champion. This book will explain why it's in your interest to work as little as possible and how to screw the system from within without anyone noticing."

Click here. Be sure to internalize the 10 Commandments.

More on Aubrey de Grey's controversial theory that we're going to cure aging, and that we'll all live for thousands of years. Makes you care a little bit more about global warming and peak oil, doesn't it?

San Francisco is considering renaming the Oakland Bay Bridge after its beloved Emperor Norton I (more here and here). I say go for it. America's only emperor deserves all the accolades we can give.

(via MeFi)

At AICN. I'm very excited about this. Firefly was a great show that was canceled way too soon, and if Serenity does well, we may get the Buffyverse movie or tv movies we've all been praying for.

Is it September yet?

Disneyland memorabilia, 1955-2005.

I think the simulacra just ate itself. Pretty amazing site, though.

(via Boing Boing)

The cheap Fight Club tie-in game that no one asked for is apparently as terrible as everyone knew it would be. The irony here is that no one who identifies with the whole idea of Fight Club would be caught dead playing this kind of commercialized sludge in the first place. Who was this game for?

A symphony concert series based upon the music from the Final Fantasy video game series is coming to the States.

Scoff if you will, but it'll probably be great. Those games always had great soundtracks; the theme from the original Final Fantasy (all these years later, still one of the best games ever made) is burned in my brain. And the Boston Pops does a kick-ass Legend of Zelda (their Super Mario Brothers is even better, but I couldn't find it anywhere).

Looks like the whole Washington Nationals thing could be in jeopardy. DC's city council doesn't want to pay for the entire stadium.

Here are my thoughts, in order of relevance:
1) Cities should never pay a dime for private stadiums. It's always a losing proposition. Always.
2) The Washington Nationals remains nearly as dumb a name as any in sports, edged out only by the all-time "dumb name" champ, the Houston Texans.
3) Yankees suck.

You may need an attorney.

...at the Green Bean. Here's the lineup.

me
Clay Sturges Jaimee
Brian Crocker
Allison Seay
Leslie Youngblood

(Not necessarily in that order.) The excitement agonizing tedium begins at 8 pm.

Frequency distribution of onomatopoeic words in Batman fight graphics. Batmanologists worldwide rejoice.

What you'll need to know if you're ever turned into a Japanese cartoon.

#11 - Law of Inherent Combustability: Everything explodes. Everything.

#12 - Law of Phlogistatic Emission: Nearly all things emit light from fatal wounds.

#18 - Law of Hemoglobin Capacity: The human body contains over 12 gallons of blood. Sometimes more.

In the Bible version of The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus Christ was crucified at Calvary and rose from the dead three days later to save mankind from sin. Not so, says local legend in Shingo; that was his brother Isukuri. In reality, Christ escaped the clutches of the Romans, fled across land carrying his brother's severed ear and a lock of hair from the Virgin Mary and settled down to life in exile in the snowy isolation of Northern Japan.

Here he married a woman called Miyuko, fathered three daughters and died at the age of 106. Two wooden crosses outside the village mark the graves of the brothers from Galilee and a museum makes the case that the man we call Jesus Christ the carpenter was known around these parts as garlic farmer Daitenku Taro Jurai.

Now Christ is buried in that small village in Japan, with 30,000 visitors annually.

The website for this traveling exhibit of propaganda posters has some great images.

They're from the government, and they're here to help. Be sure to check out their Virtual Academy.

Not overrated.
Not underrated.
Just right.

"Nico Declercq of Ghent University and his colleagues have shown how sound waves ricocheting around the tiered steps of the El Castillo pyramid, at the Mayan ruin of Chichén Itzá near Cancún in Mexico, create sounds that mimic the chirp of a bird and the patter of raindrops." Neat.

But not everyone is convinced. For one, there's really no way for us to know if the Mayans had a way to predict what the accoustics would sound like once the pyramids were finished, much less figure out which particular sound they were after in the first place. Also (though this isn't in the article) it's a lot of work for not much payoff. So we should probably stick with the UFO landing pad hypothesis for now.

I'll do some research on my cruise and I'll get back to you.

Burn.

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue," one of his winning sentences begins.

"But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns -- oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest -- no, the hand was cupping her entire right -- Now!"

MP3s of the rare Christmas comedy albums the Beatles released to the members of their fan club between 1963 and 1969. (via Boing Boing)

A series of photos without words, for the mysterious beauty and contradictions of China. Fantastic site.



(Via Mefi, which is simultaneously planning our coming war with China)

i wish we could talk like we used to

Pretty hot.

"Biomedical researchers have found a way to rev up the metabolic machinery and thereby keep excess weight off -- using genetics instead of the gym." Exercise in pill form is something I could handle.

The world's best (and/or worst) ethicist, certainly its most controversial -- a vegetarian who radically opposes both meat-eating and animal-testing on ethical grounds; a radical who goes beyond supporting abortion rights to permitting the 'mercy killing' of incurably sick and disabled infants with the parents consent; a supporter of voluntary euthanasia who says Americans fail to fulfill their moral obligation to help the world's poor when they don't give away all their disposable income to overseas charity organizations -- Peter Singer's beliefs are a remarkable example of how far a single moral principle can take you.

In his case, it's a principle that seems on its surface to be non-controversial: Given a being that is capable of suffering and feeling pleasure, we have a moral obligation to prevent that being's suffering and increase its pleasure. You'd buy that, wouldn't you? But all the rest, both right-sounding and horrible-sounding, follows from that one premise.

Peter Singer Links, both For and Agin

Wikipedia.

To my mind, the most sound objection to the extremes of Singer's philosophy is the one contained in this piece, which ultimately argues:

Perhaps there is nothing special about humans, or infants, or innocence – but there is very probably a great deal of happiness in the world that is dependent upon the belief that there is.

To put it another way: if it is not the case that people quarrel with Singer the way they do because he is wrong, then, lucky for them, Singer is wrong because of the way people quarrel with him.

Of course, that argument leaves open the possibility that Singer's views will someday permeate society to the point where the "But A Lot Of People Will Be Unhappy Then" defense will fail. Then we're in for a world of Singer.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:29 AM  |

...isn't looking very bright.

Ironically, although the Y-chromosome has become synonymous with male aggression, it is intrinsically unstable. Far from being vigorous and robust, this ultimate genetic symbol of male machismo is decaying at such an alarming rate that, for humans at least, the GM experiment will soon be over. Adam, it seems, is cursed. Like many species before us that have lost their males, we run the real risk of extinction.
...
But when? By my estimate, the fertility caused by Y-chromosome decay drops to 1% of its present level within 5,000 generations, which is about 125,000 years. Not exactly the day after tomorrow — but equally, not an unimaginably long time ahead

Humanity will survive, of course, in the peaceful all-female paradise we always knew was coming.

Should be an improvement.

The latest from Angry Alien. This one's all right, but their The Shining is still by far the best.

What tools.

I was previously enchanted with scholar.google.com here.

Suggested glossary for discussion of the physics of time travel.

"You can't buy any better heroin in the world than you can buy in New Jersey."

One valuable thing that came out of my jury experience happened around lunchtime, when I snuck a glance at my absent neighbor's newspaper and discovered awareness during surgery, an absolutely horrid thing that can happen to people when they're improperly anesthetized.

The first thing Sidney L. Williams says he heard when he awoke in the operating room during open heart surgery two years ago was the insistent whine of a bone saw cleaving his sternum. As doctors began discussing his badly damaged heart, Williams wondered whether he was eavesdropping on his own death: The surgeon had warned him before surgery that there was a 50 percent chance he would die on the table. Seconds later, Williams said, he felt jolts of searing pain as the doctor shocked his heart, which had stopped. "I once almost severed two fingers with a table saw," Williams, 56, recalled. "This was much, much worse."

Worst of all, said Williams, who lives in Austin, was his utter helplessness, his inability to let anyone know he was awake. Williams couldn't make a sound: A breathing tube had been snaked down his throat. He couldn't move a muscle: He had been given standard paralytic drugs that rendered him motionless during surgery. And he couldn't cry: His eyes were taped shut and the drugs he was given stopped tear production.

"I remember just screaming and screaming, 'This is killing me,' but it was only in my head," Williams recalled. "It was like I was being buried alive."

I am so never having surgery. More from Wikipedia, which says this happens 4000 times a year.

God, that sucked. We didn't even get called in to do anything; I just sat in the Jury Room reading the greatest novel ever until they told us at 3 pm we were free to go.

In which I explore the effects of psychological transference on justice. Who do I blame for having to waste my day at the Courthouse: the prosecutor, the defendant, or the judge? And what can I do to hurt them the most?

Sure, other people invented all the great art forms, but we invented improvisation.

Brando didn't make a good film for a quarter of a century, but to the end he had a profound influence on modern culture. He is one of three artists who define what is distinctively American about American creativity. No American art, literature, music or performance has mattered since the late 1940s unless it accepted their influence. The two others were Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker. The American trait they epitomise better than anyone else is the compulsion to improvise. Improvisation is America's art, its self-expression - and its disaster.

Their new Suggestions feature is unbelievable. You can read more about it at the Google weblog, and of course you can always keep up to date with the latest Google features in development at Google Labs.

You know, I'm starting to think that maybe it's true what they say. Maybe Google is God.

Called stereometric models, they were manufactured in turn-of-the-century Germany to help scholars grasp complex mathematical formulas. Last year, the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto shot each object, the tallest of which is less than a foot high, from below at close range so that they appear monumental. His series of photographs, ''Mathematical Forms,'' reimagine these scientific models as things of wonder. They embody Sugimoto's belief that art is possible even without artistic intention.

On the day that the members of the Electoral College officially meet to cast their votes, John Kerry has made his tinfoil-hat-wearing demographic very happy by writing a letter asking for eleven recount actions, including visual inspection of the 92,000 ballots for which no vote for president was recorded and independent evaluation of voting machine programming and calibration. More from Google News. All parties involved say it won't change the results of the election -- but of course they'd say that.

Now, of course it's true that in 99% of all possible worlds, nothing at all comes of any of this. But in that one...that sweet, sweet one...

...is not an oceanographer. He's a lawyer from Queens who just had the right name.

On a single page.

From The New York Times Magazine.

What you need to know. After all, you don't want to end up like this guy.

In This Magazine, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (authors of Rebel Sell) comment on the way consumer culture co-opts those who would seek to subvert it.

As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, taste is first and foremost distaste—disgust and “visceral intolerance” of the taste of others. This makes it easy to see how the critique of mass society could help drive consumerism. Take, for example, Volkswagen and Volvo advertising from the early 1960s. Both automakers used the critique of “planned obsolescence” quite prominently in their advertising campaigns. The message was clear: buy from the big Detroit automakers and show everyone that you’re a dupe, a victim of consumerism; buy our car and show people that you’re too smart to be duped by advertising, that you’re wise to the game.

This sort of “anti-advertising” was enormously successful in the 1960s, transforming the VW bug from a Nazi car into the symbol of the hippie counterculture and making the Volvo the car of choice for an entire generation of leftist academics. Similar advertising strategies are just as successful today, and are used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to clothing. Thus the kind of ad parodies that we find in Adbusters, far from being subversive, are indistinguishable from many genuine ad campaigns. Flipping through the magazine, one cannot avoid thinking back to Frank’s observation that “business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching.”

Once again, my dad's way ahead of his time; he's been making this exact point since I was a kid, about everything from Bob Dylan to punk rock. Sadly, he's right.

The This Magazine article includes analyses of Fight Club and American Beauty, as well as copious amounts of sticking-it-to-Naomi-Klein. And the excerpt from the book is good too:

September 2003 marked a turning point in the development of Western civilization. It was the month that Adbusters magazine started accepting orders for the Black Spot Sneaker, its own signature brand of "subversive" running shoes. After that day, no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between "mainstream" and "alternative" culture. After that day, it became obvious to everyone that cultural rebellion, of the type epitomized by Adbusters magazine, is not a threat to the system -- it is the system.

So what do we do? The same thing we do every night, Pinky; try to get legislation passed through Congress. Back to This Magazine:

This is why a society-wide solution to the problem of consumerism is not going to occur through personal or cultural politics. At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action. If we were really worried about advertising, for example, it would be easy to strike a devastating blow against the “brand bullies” with a simple change in the tax code. The government could stop treating advertising expenditures as a fully tax-deductible business expense (much as it did with entertainment expenses several years ago) ...

Of course, tweaking the tax code is not quite as exciting as dropping a “meme bomb” into the world of advertising or heading off to the latest riot in all that cool mec gear. It may, however, prove to be a lot more useful. What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another, and that we will continue to do as long as we have no incentive to stop. Rather than just posturing, we should start thinking a bit more carefully about how we’re going to provide those incentives.

Of course, Congress has been bought and paid for by corporations, so nothing like this will ever happen, but it's nice to think about.

(via Metafilter, which has a pretty nice discussion going that you might want to check out, as well)

Virtually fulfill your mother's dreams by performing virtual total knee replacement surgery on the Internet.

What an bizarrely specific site. Neat, though.

Which of these two games you don't have time to play is better?

Why this movie needed to be remade, I'll never know, but in any event here's the trailer for the upcoming Johnny Depp Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Running roughly in order of mind-blowingness, from least to most:

Out of Control (mentioned below): On the complex, chaotic interconnectedness of all things. You'll start to see just how little we really know about how to build complex things.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: How self-reference and paradox is built into the structure of language and thus into the very structures of our minds themselves.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (previously referenced here): Why the shape of the continents is the determining factor in the fate of human societies. This book is the definitive answer to the question, "Why is it that Eurasia prospered and Australia, the Americas, and Africa did not?"

The Selfish Gene (referenced whenever I or anyone else uses the term "meme"): How evolution works, not simply in biology, but in everything. This book will cause you to apply evolutionary thinking to all aspects of life. At least, that's what it did to me.

Consciousness Explained and/or Kinds of Minds: Either of these books by Daniel Denett will show you that the way you think you think isn't really how you think at all. These will make you wonder whether "you" really exist in any meaningful sense at all.

Of course there are other pop science books I love, like Hyperspace and Chaos -- but these five are the ones that have quite literally fashioned the way I view the world.

Are there any I missed? Leave them in the comments; I'm always on the lookout.

I don't think we're seeing speciation here, yet, but it's still very interesting: the bodies of snakes in Australia have changed in the last 70 years to adapt to the introduction of the toad down under. The smaller heads and longer bodies keep them from eating the toads, which are poisonous.

The toad situation in Australia is a classic example of the central thesis in one of my absolute favorite popular science book ever, Out of Control, which argues that the environment is far more interconnected, complicated, and chaotic than we generally think. Seemingly minor changes, like introducing cane toad to Australia to control agricultural pests, lead to unpredictable results -- the overrunning of Australia with toads, the threat to indigenous animals and wildlife, and, now, the beginnings of evolutionary change to deal with it.

Basically, OoC argues that the Biosphere is a fine-tuned, highly complex machine, and we have absolutely no idea what the effects will be when we muck around it. In this case, in few thousand years, Australia will probably be in balance again -- but in other cases, we may be doing significant, permanent damage to our ability to live on this planet, without even realizing it.

San Francisco Weekley interviews a man who says "a small step toward moving the world in a better direction would be for the state of California to strike off on its own."

The blog.

Wacky roommate adventures in the Big City.

I was in the elevator on my way out of the doctor's office when a woman pushing a stroller noticed the book in my hand: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto.

"Good book?" she asked.

"It's a great book," I said. "It's a horrible story."

She said, "It's about Ernest Hemingway?"

"Huh?" I said. Tucked away deep in the back of my mind I already had some photograph of Ernest Hemingway as a young man in a dress that was struggling to come to the surface, but at that moment I really had no idea what she was talking about.

"I heard on the radio that Ernest Hemingway was raised as a girl."

"Wow. I've never heard that before," I said, even though as soon as she'd said it I was pretty sure I had. "I'll have to check that out."

Wikipedia confirms it, of course. Grace Hemingway dressed her son as a girl for at least two, possibly six, and as many as thirteen years. (That last one can't possibly be accurate -- it's Wikipedia, handle with care.)

It explains a lot about him, actually.

In any event, the Colapinto book really is a horrible story. I couldn't put it down. When a pair of twins is born and the circumcision for one is horribly botched, doctors conclude that the best option is to remove what's left of the penis altogether and fashion simulated female genitalia in the infant's nether regions. Bruce was raised as Brenda for 14 years, until she was finally told the truth about her past and allowed to reclaim a male identity as David Reimer.

It's a true story, and Colapinto does an masterful job of letting you into Brenda/David's private, confusing hell.

All these bad things happen thtough the pernicious influence of the book's villain, an insane sexologist named Dr. John Money, who is convinced that biology plays absolutely no role in assigning gender difference, and that intersex or disfigured children should be subjected to radical sex-change operations in infancy and then reared as the new gender. And that's the least crazy thing he believes.

Like I said, it's all true. It's an unbelievablely awful, gut-wrenching story, and an astounding book to read. And googling for links I just found its sad coda: this past summer, David killed himself.