SPOILER FOR TONIGHT: Man, it's a good thing Tony lives across the street from that security firm.

Oy, that's cheery.

Scientific American has this story, too.

Out devils! Out! The power of Christ compels you!

What's better than one open-source board game? Come on, you know: it's a whole magazine devoted to open-source board games.

(via Boing Boing)

Scientific American explains.

Step 1: Pass welfare reform that requires any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year to take any available job or lose her unemployment benefits.

Step 2: Legalize prostitution.

Step 3: Whoopsies.

The above image was painted by a man named Esref Armagan, who has been blind since birth.

Armagan was born 51 years ago in one of Istanbul's poorer neighbourhoods. One of his eyes failed to develop beyond a rudimentary bud, the other is stunted and scarred. It is impossible to know if he had some vision as an infant, but he certainly never saw normally and his brain detects no light now. Few of the children in his neighbourhood were formally educated, and like them, he spent his early years playing in the streets. But Armagan's blindness isolated him, and to pass the time, he turned to drawing. At first he just scratched in the dirt. But by age 6 he was using pencil and paper. At 18 he started painting with his fingers, first on paper, then on canvas with oils. At age 42 he discovered fast-drying acrylics.

His paintings are disarmingly realistic. And his skills are formidable. "I have tested blind people for decades," says John Kennedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, "and I have never seen a performance like his."

Not bad. But still, he's got nothing on Natasha Demkina, the girl with the x-ray eyes.

Wow.

By bomb No. 9, the former baseball minor league shortstop had become a good luck-bad luck icon and the awe of his 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment patrolling the so-called "triangle of death" south of Baghdad.
...

When you hear the explosion, that's actually good," Stevens said, pointing out that because sound travels relatively slowly, hearing the blast means you have survived it. "It means you're still in the game."

If you wrote it in a story, no one would believe it.

Jan. 30, 1972: Remembering Bloody Sunday.

Salon.com has a great review up of a new book about the directors behind the indie film revolution of the '90s, Rebels on the Backlot:

The more talented the young (or youngish) directors Waxman profiles are, it seems, the more obnoxious they are. Quentin Tarantino comes off as a ruthless social climber who has dropped all the friends who helped him when he was a struggling nobody, and won't take calls from his own mother. David O. Russell has infamously poor social skills, picks meaningless fights and is gratuitously mean to crew members on his shoots. Paul Thomas Anderson is a fathead control freak who treats any suggestion or criticism as an insult to his masterly creative vision.

But the book appears to be mostly devoted to exploring why the indie revolution didn't really change Hollywood much at all:

It's an era that, for better or worse, is now in the past: The once-rebellious indie spirit seems almost as remote from the mainstream movie biz today as it did 15 years ago. (Consider the two "independent" films up for Oscars this year, "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland"; whatever their merits may be, they're about as threatening and confrontational as a glass of milk before bedtime.) Despite her book's subtitle (which to any indie-film fan sounds suspiciously like a post-production decision by the marketing department), "Rebels on the Backlot" is less the story of how Tarantino and those who followed him conquered Hollywood than of how Hollywood conquered them, or, perhaps more accurately, how the two forces fought each other to a stalemate.

Sounds interesting. And bonus: judging by the review, my boy Wes Anderson (who, yes, is the true genius of the era, though I hate to give Tarantino short shrift) seems to come out completely unscathed.

PS: This line is funny too:

When he was pitched Charlie Kaufman's now-legendary screenplay, for example, New Line Cinema honcho Bob Shaye said, "'Being John Malkovich'? Why can't it be 'Being Tom Cruise'?"

Oh, corporate idiots in suits. I can't stay mad at you.

The answer, apparently, is yes.

A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.

The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine.

God help them if they ever start to use the Internet.

...proof that RFID chips and cell phones cause cancer still fifteen years away. (From The New York Times.)

That's a lot of LEGO.

Your conspiracy web for today. Apparently there's a bizarre copper coin from 400 years ago that appears to depict a flying saucer.

Here's the coin in question:



Keep watching the skies.

Now Erica Bernheim's "Summer Crookneck," also from BCR #1, is the poem of the day at VerseDaily.

This is too cool.

Click here. You'll probably need to maximize the .gif by clicking on the square near its bottom right corner.

Can you solve the world's self-proclaimed most challenging puzzle?

Arielle Greenberg's poem from BCR #1, "On a Return to Being a Polemic against Light Verse," is the poem of the day at VerseDaily.com.

Politics and fiction: Two great tastes that taste great together, or recipe for a shit sandwich? Salon is taking the age-old question head-on.

Personally, I don't mind getting a little political in fiction, but if you're not careful, this is who you wind up becoming. That's the risk, and that's why in my own writing I tend to focus strictly on metaphysics.

Some pretty good photoshop here.

How bizarre.

Uh, sure.

It's the most incredible amazing Jesus artifact story since the time they found that box with Jesus's name on it. Yeah, that one.

...when cromulent is in the dictionary.

What do you do when you bought a copy of the Worst Case Scenario Calendar for your father and Jaimee's father, but not for yourself?



This is stuff we all need to know.

And this one actually happened to me once:



In my particular case, the power steeling column on my Neon got loose from its housing and slowly wore through the brakeline, finally cutting through entirely while I was driving at 40 mph up Cedar Rd. in Cleveland at one o'clock in the morning. Jaimee may or may not have been in the car with me at the time.

All in all, I was pretty impressed with myself for (a) not panicking (b) not dying.

"A forgotten workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, complete with 500-year-old frescos and a secret room to dissect human cadavers, has been discovered in Florence, Italy, researchers say."

Bitchin'.

In Poetry, David Orr says "Yes."

(Also via MeFi)

...but I hadn't yet.

The train derailment in Los Angeles yesterday was caused by an aborted suicide attempt. Just awful.

(via MeFi)

UPDATE: The same thing happened in England last year.

Click here. Good god, click here.



(via Boing Boing. I don't really believe it's authentic, but I don't care.)

Some big BCR news:

Comic and fiction selections from the first issue are now online at backwardscity.net:

Comics
Peter S. Conrad, What's in a Name?
Jim Rugg, The Stoned Ape Theory

Fiction
Cory Doctorow, excerpt from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Adam Berlin, Speeding Away

Poetry selections will be added later in the week. You can find biographies of all contributors, as well as links to online excerpts, here.

You can now get Backwards City Review at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham and at Mac's Backs Paperbacks in my old stomping grounds on Coventry Road in Cleveland, Ohio, right next to the greatest restaurant in all the world. More bookstores should be added to that list in the near future. (If you're a bookstore and you'd like to carry Backwards City Review, don't waste another minute: email us.)

You can also order copies via the Writer's Center, though if it's all the same to you you might as well order them directly from us.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:06 AM  |

All About Samurai
Famous Samurai

(via Cynical-C)

Check it out, here.

Quite a bit, apparently. From Cinescape.

(Via one of my favorite blogs, Gravity Lens)

Photoblogging Las Vegas. (via Boing Boing)

Great link.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Neat.

Your phone call is being monitored for quality assurance purposes, even when you're on hold.

"The former Beatles drummer has undertaken a joint venture with Stan Lee's POW! Entertainment to develop a multimedia franchise in which Starr will play a superpowered animated version of himself."

(via Boing Boing. Xeni Jardin may be shaking her head, but I want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes.)

As I've said before, this is the real problem with immortality: Even on the off-chance that we can work out the bugs in the human genome and gain functional immortality -- which is something I'm very much in favor of, thanks -- we're all still gonna get nuked when the Universe explodes.

...unless we can somehow escape via wormhole and hijack some other parallel universe. Unless we can do that, we're screwed.

The Alternative Guide to New Books, Magazines & Music along with News & Views from the Net of Interest to Booksellers, Publishers, Librarians, Writers & Readers.

Found this on the 'net after getting a call from them earlier in the day requesting a copy of the journal. Looks like a good site.

Amazing. It's just too bad he picked chalk as his medium.

And is that PClem I spy in some of those shots? I think it is.

Coke vs. Pepsi?
Betty vs. Veronica?
Was Woody Allen wrong for divorcing Mia Farrow and marrying Soon-Yi Previn, her adopted daughter?

Woody Allen's son weighs in on at least one of these classic questions here.

--
Answers: Coke, Jaimee, and yes.

And nerds rejoiced.

In all seriousness, I think this guy must have eaten my friend Eric's brain. This is so close to his long-held notion of the Ultimate Science Fiction Planet, it's beyond reason.

If there were dinosaurs involved, I'd be certain of it.

Flip a coin:

Regular Sex Helps Students Succeed

but

Chain of High School Sexual Contact Includes 288 Separate People

So what's it gonna be then, eh?

I have to say, that 24's most seamless mid-season reboot to date. The new plotline has several advantages over its predecessors (highlight to read):

1. As I understand things, nuclear power plants must be shut down in a very controlled manner over a long period of time, so there's really no way to deal with this situation except to recover The Magic Device. Good built-in urgency there.

2. The broadcast-the-trial-on-the-Internet-to-mask-your-real-hacking thing doesn't actually make much sense, from a strict computing standpoint, but it's about as good as they could have done with the cards they gave themselves, so I'll pretend I buy it.

3. The Behrooz twist and overall situation is actually pretty compelling.

But of course I'm not completely satisfied, because (a) the nuclear power plant MacGuffin doohicky is a pretty ludicrous example of Kirbytech, with no real-world analogue whatsoever and (b) enough already with the CTU traitors (though at least this one was an outside contractor). All in all, after a bit of a slow start, I'm pretty excited for the rest of the season.

Now, get me Tony Almeida!

This is definitely the best high-concept collective art project I've seen so far today.

...which has been on a roll the last few days.

Game theorists demonstrate that altruism is an evolutionary stable (if rare) strategy, alongside selfishness and reciprocation. Additional commentary from Marginal Revolution.

Probability and Card Shuffling, Or Why You'll Never Get a Hand Full of Spades in Bridge.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews More Likely to Jaywalk

It has long been a matter of contention: Was the Aztec and Mayan practice of human sacrifice as widespread and horrifying as the history books say? Or did the Spanish conquerors overstate it to make the Indians look primitive? In recent years archaeologists have been uncovering mounting physical evidence that corroborates the Spanish accounts in substance, if not number.

Interesting article from The Guardian. Good stuff. I wonder if the effects described are analogous to what the effect of an all-female cast would be, or the effect of just swapping all the gendered roles one-for-one -- or if there really are some buried literary subtexts in the words that are only visible to us when we see the plays performed as Shakespeare would have.

(Via A&L Daily.)

From Christianity Today. Don't freak out, but it appears that some evangelical Christians may not practice what they preach.

I told you not to freak out.

In response [to increasing secularism], a renewal movement emerged, passionately championing the historic claims of the old religion and eagerly inviting unbelievers everywhere to embrace the ancient faith...

Not surprisingly, the movement's numbers translated into political influence. And the renewal movement was so confident of its beliefs and claims that it persuaded the nation's top political leader to have the government work more closely with religious social service organizations to solve the nation's horrendous social problems. Members of the renewal movement knew that miraculous moral transformation of character frequently happened when broken persons embraced the great religion. They also lobbied politicians to strengthen the traditional definition of marriage because their ancient texts taught that a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman was at the center of the Creator's design for the family.

Then the pollsters started conducting scientific polls of the general population. In spite of the renewal movement's proud claims to miraculous transformation, the polls showed that members of the movement divorced their spouses just as often as their secular neighbors. They beat their wives as often as their neighbors. They were almost as materialistic and even more racist than their pagan friends. The hard-core skeptics smiled in cynical amusement at this blatant hypocrisy. The general population was puzzled and disgusted. Many of the renewal movement's leaders simply stepped up the tempo of their now enormously successful, highly sophisticated promotional programs. Others wept.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "cynical amusement." It tastes a lot more like despair. With just a pinch of Schadenfreude.

Preparation instructions for Fugu: The Fish That Will Kill You If You Make It Wrong (last seen on an early episode of The Simpsons). Good luck!

Haven't poked around too much, but Japan for the Uninvited (that's everybody) looks like a pretty good site in general.

This has been going around, so you've probably seen it already, but just in case you haven't, today is the most depressing day of the year. Cheers!

Jaimee Hills edition. From Kennesaw Review:

Eurydice Depressed

Harpy

Ezra has something in the new Sonora, too, but it's not online.

Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database.

No Angel though? It's the same freaking universe. Come on.

Says the idea came to him in a dream.

This article from this local Canadian newspaper is so careful not to tip its hand as to whether or not the device actually works, one has to assume it doesn't. The reporter obviously got no demonstration, and all we have to go on is this guy's word that the scientific community is interested in him.

If it does work, though, way to invent a death ray.

Soon after, Hurtubise discovered the Angel Light had devilish side-effects.

He lost feeling in the finger of the exposed hand and began suffering an overall malaise.

“MIT told me every time I turned it on there must have been splash-back hitting me,” Hurtubise said.

A test on a tank of goldfish was even more disturbing.

“I turned the beam on it and within minutes all the goldfish died,” Hurtubise said.

For your PC. Minutes upon minutes of confusing fun.

Adventure page (with map and easter egg).

(Via MoFi)

The short version. All the great classics of Western Civilization, condensed into readable bits.

In the comments to the Straight Outta Compton thread, Neil says, rightly:

Of course, everyone knows that the king of this genre is Gin & Juice [MP3] as covered by The Gourds. (Ignore the fact that the file is called Phish.mp3 -- the song is by The Gourds despite whatever lies the Internet may tell you).

I'd actually heard this cover before, probably off Neil's computer, and he's right, it's the tops, Amy. Right up there with Rodeohead [MP3]. Maybe even better.

Over time (particularly over the last few days) I've been updating the sidebar with new links, some random, some of our contributors' blogs, so give that a look and see what's going on.

Also, seriously, bookmark SlickDeals.Net if you haven't already. In just the last two or three months that I've been going there regularly, the site's saved me at least $150. Indispensible.

More like awful:

Evoking comparisons to "Romeo and Juliet," a husband in northern Italy killed himself out of grief for his ailing wife, hours before she came out of a coma, Italian state TV reported Friday.

RAI state TV said the husband visited his 67-year-old wife daily, sometimes coming to the hospital in Padua as much as four times a day, after she went into a coma after a stroke in September.

On Wednesday, the 71-year-old man committed suicide at the couple's Padua-area home, according to RAI and the Italian news agency ANSA. About 12 hours later, the wife emerged from the coma and asked for her husband, ANSA said.

That's what the Feb. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases wants to know.

Nina Gordon (who?) has recorded an acoustic folk version of the NWA classic, Straight Outta Compton. (Direct link to MP3 download.)

Not bad. But it's got nothing on Rodeohead, the incredible, oft-mentioned, never duplicated bluegrass tribute to Radiohead. (MP3.)

I'm going to hell.

"An international team of scientists believes it has found cancer's master switch with the discovery of a gene they dubbed 'Pokemon.' "

No joke. Hope they're right.

Mystery compound in beer may help fight cancer.

I'm not kidding. This short history of lobotomy starts out with Phineas Gage and, yes, it comes to this:

During the winter of 1945, Freeman tried to develop a transorbital approach to lobotomy, practicing on corpses. Watts cooperated, believing that ultimately he would do the surgery, and Freeman would, as usual, navigate. The two men came up against a familiar problem; the instruments they were using were not strong enough to penetrate the orbital bone and kept breaking off inside the head of their experimental corpses. They needed an implement that was slender, sharp, and strong.

One day, mulling over the problem at home, Freeman remembered that the apple-corer had been a source of inspiration for Moniz, and began to rummage through the contents of his kitchen drawers. Soon he found precisely what he was looking for: a cheap, mass produced ice pick for stabbing pieces of ice off large commercial blocks.

Unbelievable. And they wonder why some people don't trust doctors.

(via Cynical-C)

UCI scientists 'prove men and women use different brain areas to achieve similar IQ results.' Morons, already tasting their next forty years of glorious misrepresentation, rejoice.

Everything you could ever possibly want to know about the Knight's Tour. But where's the page on the dreaded homey fork?

"Full Moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. Those tribes of a few hundred years ago kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. " What bad sign were you born under?

I have no idea what this is or why it exists, but it's great. As far as I can make out it's Muppet-like creatures celebrating/denying the death of their creator.

Once again the Onion A.V. Club scoops us with this interview of acclaimed comics artists, Los Bros. Hernandez. (You know, the creators of that comic I shouldn't have read when I was so young, Love & Rockets)

So. I really haven't seen either of Nightmare Before Christmas, or James and the Giant Peach in their entireties. But I do like the animation style of both of them.* And while it's probably old news to you, Tim Burton is making a new movie called the "Corpse Bride." The toy license (and it looks like lots of other merchandise) will belong to those wacky folk at McFarlane Studios. A very good match.

Also, a funny article in the most recent Toy Fare: How 2005 toys are exactly the same as the 1993 toys. Nightmare Before Christmas being one of the major brands mentioned. (Could be wrong on the dates - the article isn't online. You'll have to look at it in the store. Don't let yourself be seen!)



* (Can anybody figure out whose style is used for the animation? I know I've seen some of the work they did pre-Nightmare Before Christmas, but I don't know who they are to find it again)

That's just what the dust mites want.

What?

Seriously?

No.

Yes?

I kind of wish that title was a clever metaphor for some more interesting subject, but no, take it at face value: Scientistis have found that some people let out a scent that naturally repels mosquitoes.

Four from Gravity Lens:

Today in Alternate History (good blog)

From Modern Drunkard Magazine, The Role of Alcohol in the Star Trek Universe

Hilarious Posed Photographs of Bill Gates from Tiger Beat in 1983. I saw this the other day and chose not to link to it, but it's funny, and it must be linked to.

And the number one Gravity Lens-linked website today is:

Medical Reviews of Comic Books. Details the accuracy or inaccuracy, from a mostly medical perspective, of various, mostly superhero comic books.

All you nerds should be checking Gravity Lens regularly.

Oy.

Oy, oy, oy.

Do yourself a favor and don't turn on the TV today.

Click it or don't. It's your choice. Or isn't.

Lots of alternative designs for Lenin's Tomb. If you're a fan of Soviet Realism art, you should be heaven. Lots of other Russian art, too.

For comparison's sake, here's what the real one looks like.

Mysterious fan visits Edgar Allan Poe's grave bearing three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac...for the 56th time.

New Haven's St. Thomas Episcopal Church will not perform any marriage ceremonies in order to voice their support of gay marriage, the church announced late last week.

I had a friend in college who refused to get married until gay marriage is legal for the same reason.

I like this a lot. I hope it catches on.

I am Craig's many possibilities.

Seems to owe some artistic debt to Scott McCloud's excellent Choose Your Own Carl, from back in the day. (Yes, which wouldn't be complete without my own lame suggestions.)

Some very good scans of some very neat industrial drawings.

"If someone were to write a history of the future as it has been dreamed up by Hollywood over the years, the chapter on today's tomorrow would belong in large part to Philip K. Dick." Yep.

Good article about the way Dick has influenced our culture's understanding of the future and the present, as well as our understanding of our own minds.

As is well known, I love Dick -- but the depth of this praise from Art Spiegelman surprised even me:

What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th Century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.

Worse things have been said about a drug-addicted, paranoid, borderline schizophrenic deeply troubled science fiction writer who never achieved the type of financial success or literary recognition he desired within his lifetime. One way or the other, I guess he's not sweating it anymore.

Computer analysis of a 17th-century painting shows that the artist did not, as has been claimed, use optical devices to project a perfect image of the scene onto his canvas. The researcher behind the analysis believes his findings undermine many aspects of a theory recently put forward by the painter David Hockney.

The article also points to another problem with Hockney's projection idea: a mechanical, not optical way for two paintings to be very similar.

Obviously, Hockney's not going to go down without a fight on this, as the article makes clear -- but his thesis is certainly taking on water.

You sound like a damn fool when you write it wrong. Interesting idea, but I really think the e. e. cummings ship has sailed. Via Metafilter via LanguageLog (followup), which is really the important part of this post, such as it is, in that I've never stumbled across this group blog before and it's got a pretty interesting focus.

LanguageLog

The Hasselhoffian Recursion.

Heh.

Whoa.

Richard Hatch -- the guy who won the first Survivor -- didn't report to the IRS the million-dollar prize everyone in America saw him win. The Smoking Gun has the details.

Just wow.

Justin Estes, who already helped us get the much-beloved comic work of Peter Conrad and Jim Rugg in our first issue, is further earning his advisory editor's credit by pimping us old-school at The Comics Reporter.

Justin rocks. That's why Jaimee's letting him read with her at their thesis reading on April 15th at St. Mary's House in Greensboro.

PS: And be sure to check out the Comics links I just added to the sidebar.

Scott McCloud
The Comics Reporter
Fantagraphics
Image
Dumbrella
Exploding Dog

More to be added soon, I'm sure.

So cold.

Fascinating seven-page profile of Aubrey de Grey, the controversial scientist with the very long beard who believes that scientists will cure death and aging within our parents' lifetimes:

By July 2000, further assiduous application had brought him to what some have called his “eureka moment,” the insight he speaks of as his realization that “aging could be ­described as a reasonably small set of accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular changes in our bodies, each of which is potentially amenable to repair.”[emphasis mine]

Dr. de Grey's theories have previously given hope to my bleak world of thanatophobic despair here and here.

All you will ever need to know about craniopagus parasiticus conjoined twins. Interesting and horrible. Warning: Link includes medical illustrator's sketches of two-headed babies that could disturb some people. (Via Boing Boing)

Because the ladies love it. Ability to speak Finnish a must.

Be sure to stay for (or skip ahead) to the advanced group lesson at the end.

(Via Metafilter. I must say, this video has easily been the best part of my day so far. Don't screw yourself. Click the link, damnit.)

From Salon.com. What a country!

(As well as a few of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.) Turn-of-the-last-century maps of the town I've been trying and failing to live in for the last seven years.

From The Globe and Mail.

Oh Christ:

The president of Harvard University prompted criticism for suggesting that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers.

Lawrence H. Summers, speaking Friday at an economic conference, also questioned how great a role discrimination plays in keeping female scientists and engineers from advancing at elite universities.

This is going to be ugly.

UPDATE: Summers's First Law of Public Relations: When you're in a hole, never stop digging.

Super. Way to go, wingnuts. Another slam dunk for the right.

Cool site. Basically the gimmick is that every blog post mocks something appearing on the daily comics page in your local newspaper.

He's even somewhat willing to poop on Peanuts. A man after my own heart! Though I feel obligated to say again that The Complete Peanuts is amazingly good.

Ooh baby.

What the...? [flash]

This one and the last two are all from Metafilter.

Great new webcomic. Only the first issue is up now; it's the pilot for guanteed hit Science Cop.

The US is now operating militarily (in secret) in Iran and as many as 9 other nations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, says Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Hersh has previously broken the My Lai and Abu Ghraib stories, so his word on this is nothing to sneeze at.

I guess all roads really do lead to Rome.

God that's addicting.

Enter your choices for the top five slots. The Discovery Channel will be airing a countdown in May.

My picks, off the top of my head, roughly in order:

1. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. Bob Dylan
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
5. Clark Kent (aka Superman)

From the homepage of Senator Mike Crapo.

Rampant copyright violation, all in one place? That's a paddling. Check it out before the copyright police show up.

The site has playable versions of basically every old-time video and arcade game ever.

"Read Chekhov. All of him."

Those were the last words of advice given to me by my former writing teacher Steve Lattimore. I figure 201 Stories by Anton Chekhov should be a good start.

Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker tackles the life of Leonardo. Pretty good week for the New Yorker this week. If I'd liked Lorrie Moore's story, it would have been a grand slam.

"...Northwestern University neuroscientist Aryeh Routtenberg has presented a provocative new theory that takes issue with that view. Routtenberg, with doctoral student Jerome L. Rekart, outlined the new theory on memory storage in the January issue of the journal Trends in Neuroscience.

Rather than permanent storage, there is a "dynamic, meta-stable" process, the authors said. Our subjective experience of permanence is a result of the re-duplication of memories across many different brain networks.

For example, one's name is represented in innumerable neural circuits; thus, it is extremely difficult to forget. But each individual component is malleable and transient, and as no particular neural network lasts a lifetime, it is theoretically possible to forget one's own name.

This is seen in the most advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, the researchers stated."

From Wikipedia. Surprisingly interesting reading.

(Thanks, Boing Boing)

America's most bizarre flash game.

Metafilter is right: it's just like Terry Gilliam and Rube Goldberg had a baby.

Norman Mailer on corporations and The Big Empty, in Adbusters.

The war against the corporations is profound. They are deadening human existence.

...

To win this war will take, at least, 50 years and a profound revolution in America. We’ll have to get away from manipulation. What we’ve got now is a species of economic, political, and spiritual brainwashing, vastly superior to the old Soviets, who were endlessly crude in their attempts. Our governmental and corporate leaders are much more subtle.

To the barricades! But can it wait until Tuesday? 24 is new this week.

Click the photograph for more. And don't worry, we're equal opportunity; we've got British propaganda posters too.



(via Cynical-C)

From Space.com:

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.

Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled 'Fermi’s paradox.' It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there," and interstellar travel -- these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi’s paradox even today.

Now a team of American scientists note that recent astrophysical discoveries suggest that we should find ourselves in the midst of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, they argue it is a mistake to reject all UFO reports since some evidence for the theoretically-predicted extraterrestrial visitors might just be found there.

Quit stalling, scientists! I want my aliens already.

I have seen the face of evil.

I just thank God every day that my life's path didn't take me down the long, lonely road that leads to Rocky Horror fandom.

What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

The long, glorious reign of Mars Attack pinball at New York Pizza is no more.

All hail Elvis pinball.

It's the end of an era.

I didn't think anyone was against Michael Jordon, but Slate is, apparently.

A basketball legend's soulless retirement caps his soulless career.

Burn.

I rented the extreme unrated version of stoner classic Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which is many ways is the worst movie of all time, but in many other ways is the greatest movie of all time, not least of which because I went to high school with the screenwriters.

Leave it to Hurwitz and Hayden to be far, far grosser than any other big screen comedy ever. And leave it to them to get the thing actually made.

Listen, it's funny. Is it high art? Only if high art can encompass the concept of Battleshits. (And answering that philosophical question is far beyond the scope of this review.) But if you think you'll laugh, you'll probably laugh. You'll cringe -- oh, you'll cringe -- but you'll laugh.

"I've looked at some of the roadsigns up there, and it looks like the cheetah took us in the wrong direction." It made me laugh.

Here's Shankar's review from way back, which fails to note that there's a character in the movie named after him, as well: the Indian guy who gets beat up in Newark near the start of the movie. But we can forgive him for not mentioning it, I guess, since you'd only know that if you listened to Hayden and Hurwitz's audio commentary on the DVD (which I just did, and which is totally surreal). Check it out.

UPDATE: Still watching the commentary, and thought I should note that the giant bag of weed fantasy montage cracked us up, too. It's a good flick; almost unbelievably, it's a good flick. I don't know if they'll ever get to make Harold and Kumar Go To Amsterdam, but I would like to see them make Rosenberg and Goldstein Go to Hot Dog Heaven. A midquel like that is a hell of a good idea.

Bullets...my one weakness...how did you know...

Anthony Lane's review of The Life Aquatic in The New Yorker is one of the few reviews of the movie I've seen that actually seems to get it.

Hey: when are we going to see it again?

Via Boing Boing, I see that the new Battlestar Galactica begins tonight. Having never really watched the first one, I wonder how much I'd get out of watching -- but since this series is supposedly a "revisioning," rather than a sequel, knoweldge of the old continuity probably won't be needed.

You'll probably want to rent last fall's miniseries (SciFi channel recap here) first. Or you could just watch the original series and see how the whole thing all turns out.

The nerds, particularly the nerds in Britain who have already seen much of it, are saying the new series is excellent.

And neat: the creators have a blog. I wonder if this series will be as Mormon as the last one.

This site keeps exceeding its bandwidth allowance, but it's pretty funny if you can actually get through. It's an advertisement for an imaginary line of philosophy action figures. My favorite? Nefarious Nietzsche, of course, though I have a fondness for Vindictive Wittgenstein as well.

(Speaking of Nietzsche, there's been a renewed interest in my Nietzsche + Pixar = The Incredibles post today for some reason. It was linked to by idleworm.com. Sure hope some of those new visitors enter our contest, or subscribe.)

The art exhibition project that kind of sort of asks, are we living in a computer simulation? The artist redraws real-world events (or well-known fantasy events like The Sound of Music or The Godfather) as if they were occurring in The Sims.

Some of there are really amazing, particularly the Vietnam Era and civil rights movement ones, and particularly particularly Columbine. The Tiananmen tank is good too.

Here's my favorite, needless to say:



[ruby]Oswald![/ruby]

So it turns out the the government almost tried to build a homosexual bomb:

The Pentagon considered developing a host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would disrupt discipline and morale among enemy troops, newly declassified documents reveal.

Most bizarre among the plans was one for the development of an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, the proposal says.

Other ideas included chemical weapons that attract swarms of enraged wasps or angry rats to troop positions, making them uninhabitable. Another was to develop a chemical that caused "severe and lasting halitosis", making it easy to identify guerrillas trying to blend in with civilians. There was also the idea of making troops' skin unbearably sensitive to sunlight.

There'd be a certain justice in all this if we did develop these weapons, did use them, and then got ourselves whupped by a VERY pissed-of army of bad-breathed, unwillingly homosexual, all-stung-up troops who couldn't go out in daytime anymore.

Actual PDFs of the report here.

(via MetaFilter, which is predictably having a ball with this)

With everyone thinking that upcoming Starwars movie Revenge of the Sith is going to be the last film in the "saga," looks like every single brand of toy is jumping on the bandwagon.

This frightening installment, Darth Tater. Something I think I'm pretty glad to not be able to take credit for. (although, I'll certainly take one, if anyone out there is buying)

GC UPDATE: Amazing link, Ezra. Here's the photographic proof, kids:

It's horrible, but I think I want one.

By Kamiel Proost. Isn't this supposed to be a crime?

Big scoring word syzygy, used correctly, at CNN.

(Hat tip: Neilbear.)

This page is a gallery of pictures. The pictures are simple enough: the people in the photos have been digitally removed and replaced with drawings. Yeah, I know... anyone can trace a drawing. But so what? I am doing it, and you're not. You're sitting at home doing nothing.

Courtesy of my mother and stepfather. There are some pretty astoundingly embarrassing pictures of me in that bunch, so you don't want to miss it.

Leaders of the Church of the Brethren say they will follow through on a request from the Selective Service to have "alternative service" programs in place for conscientious objectors if a draft is reinstated.
...
In follow-up meetings, draft officials urged the church to dust off long-standing "alternative service" programs that allow conscientious objectors to serve in two-year domestic service projects in lieu of military service.

Hey, Middle America: Are you sorry yet?

Prince Harry is a Nazi? What?

(via Boing Boing)

(except, you know, for maybe the soundtracks for the original Zelda, the original Final Fantasy, and the original Metroid -- it's really a four-way tie)

What's better than the soundtrack for the original Super Mario Bros. played on a piano? The soundtrack for the original Super Mario Bros. played on a piano while blindfolded. This is pretty cool, even after he takes the blindfold off*.

--
* Warning: May not actually be cool.

How to Read Your Fortune in Coffee Grinds.

Truly, they are the king of beasts:

At 8:40 a.m., firefighters responded to the two-story building, at Orient Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, after hearing the explosion from their firehouse about a block away, Johnson said.

The woman, who is in her mid-20s, opened three defoggers in her home and as they released their insecticide spray, she walked out her front door, Johnson said.

The gases ignited, blowing out a large bay window and slamming the front door shut behind her, Johnson said.

Despite the blast, firefighters found that the roaches had survived, Johnson said.

"The roaches were still alive on ceilings, all over the place," Johnson said.

And they'll kill us all.

I have semi-official confirmation from Ezra that the new and improved BackwardsCity.Net is "100%" "done" and ready for public pimping.

You can check out sample pages from the first issue, our fiction and poetry contest guidelines, the Backwards City Bazaar, our mission statement, and much more. Still more is on the way, in fact, including online content -- which we'll of course mention here when it's up -- but this is the start.

(By the way, have you subscribed yet?)

I found this article fascinating; it gives good insight into a completely different morphological system, while making you wonder what speakers of the seemingly incomphrensible Chinese or Japanese languages must think about English and its own bizarre twists.

One section in particular also opened up a lot of possibilities for interesting syntactical slippage:

Thinking in yingzi

The nature of the writing system would encourage lexicographers (and English speakers) to think of everything in the language as built out of yingzi. There wouldn't seem to be a great difference between "words" like storehouse, storage, restore and "expressions" like shoe store, store up, store detective, store manager; or between blackboard and black eye, or between alphabet and alpha male.

Many morphemes that now live out a shadowy existence, forever bound to other morphemes, would take on an independent existence; for instance the volve in revolve, evolve, involve, devolve, which would have its own yingzi, and would seem as much a "word" or component of the language as the match in rematch, mismatch, unmatch. There would be a tendency to describe the meanings, vague or miscellaneous as they might be, for such characters.

This might seem sensible and even wise for a morpheme like volve, which after all derives from a real Latin root meaning roll; but there would be other, more dubious applications. For instance, the son in person was represented by [ideogram], which happens to be the yingzi for son. It will be almost impossible not to assume that person derives from son; but historically it's just a coincidence; person derives from Latin and has nothing to do with son.

Worse yet, the -cuit of biscuit and circuit might be written with the same character (a derivative of kit), and a meaning sought for it-- perhaps 'round', since biscuits are round and circuits involve going round. Again, etymologically this is nonsense.

Not just that, but once a component syllable like -cuit got its own, semi-rigorous definition, it would start to subtly alter the definitions of the words it makes and the morphemes it's related to. After all, language is a feedback system, just like anything else. What if the -la in cola and latte got tapped as a morpheme? What would happen to the definitions -- and particularly the subtle connotations -- of words like gala and llama?

Seems like yingzi would make it a lot easier to be a poet.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sleep (But Were Afraid to Ask). From Circadiana, a blog devoted to circadian rhythms, operating right here in North Carolina.

Still the greatest book ever written.

This has got to be the most frustrating flash game ever.

(via Little Fluffy)

Man, I've been waiting so long for this. I just hope society lasts that long.

Truly an innovative approach to law enforcement:

The world may be better off if Osama Bin Laden remains at large, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s recently departed executive director.

If the world’s most wanted terrorist is captured or killed, a power struggle among his Al-Qaeda subordinates may trigger a wave of terror attacks, said AB “Buzzy” Krongard, who stepped down six weeks ago as the CIA’s third most senior executive.

Random factoids from the BBC.

28. The word "celeb" is not a recent invention - it was used in a letter to Woodrow Wilson in 1913. The word "sex", used to mean sexual intercourse, was first used in 1929.

Seriously? 1929? Was everyone just calling it "the beast with two backs" before then?

43. In 1911, Pablo Picasso was one of the suspects arrested for the theft of the Mona Lisa.

Wow. Neat.

70. And reports of UFOs have dwindled since the late 1990s. In the UK, sightings have gone from about 30 a week to almost zero; it's a trend echoed in the US and Norway.

They must have lost their funding.

Presenting the winners of the "I Look Like My Dog" Contest.

Sadly, I think I actually understand a few of these.

Ooh baby:

When the Huygens probe lands on Titan later this week, the pioneering space mission could encounter a bizarre form of life, a scientist claims.
...
The search for water has guided efforts to find life on Mars, on Jupiter's moon Europa and further afield. Titan is too cold for large quantities of unfrozen water to exist but Dr Steven Benner, of the University of Florida, says that life could flourish without water.

In the journal Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, he and colleagues describe how organisms could survive in exotic environments.

The Florida team identified two absolute requirements for life to exist a suitable temperature range to allow chemical bonding and an energy source (for example, the sun or radioactive decay). Titan meets both requirements.

"This makes inescapable the conclusion that if life is an intrinsic property of chemical reactivity, life should exist on Titan," Dr Benner says.

"Indeed, for life not to exist on Titan, we would have to argue that life is not an intrinsic property of the reactivity of carbon-containing molecules under conditions where they are stable."

Will this be the greatest week ever?

5,000 more: Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of Puzzles.

It's a pretty good list.

A man is lying dead in a field. Next to him there is an unopened package. There is no other creature in the field. How did he die?

So. You've been dying to play a massive multi-player online role playing game, but haven't found the motivation to shell out 50 bucks to try it? A couple of solutions here. An old classic, Anarchy Online, is giving away free memberships to their basic program, now until Jan 15. You'll get to play for free for a year. All you need to do is download the program (must have bit torrent installed) and set up an account. None of the expansion packs are offered, but I played the first installment back in the day and enjoyed it immensely. For a futuristic science fiction universe that is immensely popular in europe, Anarchy Online can't be beat. (especially not at this price)

For real gluttons, you can get the free 10 day trial of Star Wars: Jump to Lightspeed by Lucas Arts and Sony. I've wanted to check this one out, just for the character creation tool. Had I been sony when this game launched, I would have released the character Generation tool alone as a demo. But, from some accounts, the character Generation is perhaps the best part of this game. If I had a computer that would work the game, I'd definitely check this one out, although it probably means two solid nights of downloading all the client software from Fileplanet first.

Screenwriter John August, writer of a whole goatload of screenplays including Big Fish, Titan A.E., and the completely-unnecessary-in-my-opinion-but-still-probably-very-good Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake, has a blog in which he gives advice to prospective screenwriters. Very cool.

(This and the last couple were all via MetaFilter.)

From Scientific American.

Fun little logic puzzle game. Not enough free levels though; just when you've got it figured out, it's over. Use the arrow keys to move.

UPDATE: Acno's Energizer is better, with many more free levels to boot.

Just another cheerful service we provide free of charge here in the Backwards City.

Cause of Death (Lifetime Odds)
Heart Disease 1-in-5
Cancer 1-in-7
Stroke 1-in-23
Accidental Injury 1-in-36
Motor Vehicle Accident* 1-in-100
Intentional Self-harm (suicide) 1-in-121
Falling Down 1-in-246
Assault by Firearm 1-in-325
Fire or Smoke 1-in-1,116
Natural Forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc.) 1-in-3,357
Electrocution* 1-in-5,000
Drowning 1-in-8,942
Air Travel Accident* 1-in-20,000
Flood* (included also in Natural Forces above) 1-in-30,000
Legal Execution 1-in-58,618
Tornado* (included also in Natural Forces above)1-in-60,000
Lightning Strike (included also in Natural Forces above)1-in-83,930
Snake, Bee or other Venomous Bite or Sting* 1-in-100,000
Earthquake (included also in Natural Forces above) 1-in-131,890
Dog Attack 1-in-147,717
Asteroid Impact* 1-in-200,000**
Tsunami* 1-in-500,000
Fireworks Discharge 1-in-615,488

* Odds indicated with an asterisk (*) are based on long-term data. All other odds are from 2001.
** Perhaps 1-in-500,000.

--
Shamelessly lifted from livescience.com. Some of these are a little silly -- to take the most extreme example, right now my odds of being killed by legal execution are effectively zero -- but still, good to know.

(via GeekPress)

This is a hella cool site I meant (and forgot) to blog before I left on my trip, which you can read about below if you haven't already.

It's all about novelty t-shirts.

Subscriber copies of Backwards City Review #1 are going in the mail tomorrow morning, which means time is running out for you to get your first issue. Subscription requests postmarked by February 15th March 1st will be credited towards the first issue (while supplies last); any subscription request postmarked after that day (unless specifically requesting otherwise) will begin with Issue #2. So don't delay; you don't want to miss out on owning this important piece of Backwards City history, do you?

Check out our new webpage, while you're there -- isn't it something? We're still ironing out a few last kinks, but I'd say Ezra deserves a pretty big hand. And have we mentioned our first annual fiction and poetry contest lately? A ten-dollar entry free gets you a year's subscription to the journal, as well as a chance at the grand prize of $250 + publication. Second- and third-place winners will also be published in Backwards City Review #2 (expected publication date July 2005, and we mean it this time.)

Classes start again tomorrow. Already.

English 101 syllabus.
English 105 syllabus.

Our last stop was Ocho Rios in Jamaica, spiritual homeland of Brangborf Bosco Webstah III (and thus, in a very real sense, the spiritual homeland of the entire Randolph High School debate squad, 1996-1998). Jamaica was great: probably the second-best stop after the Mayan ruins (and it's a close second). We spent a good chunk of the day climbing Dunn's River Falls, which was excellent, even if it did ruin my old running sneaks. Unfortunately I couldn't get any picture of it, because you can't bring anything to the top you don't want totally waterlogged and ruined.

But that was awesome.

Then they took us to (yes) a private beach, which was also unbelievable.



Back Sunday. Teaching Monday.

Just stopped by the Caymans to check on a few of the BCR's offshore accounts. We're not sweating it, either.

And then it was time for the beach.



You probably can't tell this from the pictures -- notice how all the trees on the beach look to be in pretty terrible shape -- but something like 95% of the buildings on Grand Cayman were damaged or destroyed during Hurricane Ivan last September. Nearly every building's roof was plainly damaged -- some buildings had no roof at all.

Our taxi driver told us that across the entire island only two people were killed, and with a direct hurricane hit like this that's something of a blessing -- but still, even months after you can tell that this place was hit very, very hard.

He was a big heavy man of the hairy sort with a somewhat Beethovenlike face. He had lost his wife in November. He had taught philosophy. He was exceedingly virile. His name was Adam Krug.

As I've said before, Nabokov is the one writer who can always be counted on to make me feel terrible about myself, and although I consider it to be one of his secondary titles Bend Sinister was no exception. The book, in some ways reminiscent of Invitation to a Beheading (or The Trial, The Castle, or We for that matter) is a parable about an intelligent, intellectual man who more or less suddenly finds himself living in George Bush's America. That the book was written in 1947 is therefore no small feat. While some of the anti-communism stuff may ring a little hollow today, the mockery of bureacracy, anti-intellectualism, political cowardice, and political banality in general are still dead-on.

Everywhere in history, it seems, there are those who will pay their undying loyalty to The Ruler, whoever he may be.

It's funny; I haven't thought too much about Ulysses after originally finishing it, but I've been thinking about it lately in connection with some other ideas I have, and lo and behold, Ulysses (and Ulysses) pop up in Bend Sinister, in a scene that is very reminiscent of that Stephen Daedelyus Shakespeare scene in Joyce's book, Krug says:

Take 'Telemachos,' he says, which means 'fighting from afar'--which again was Hamlet's idea of fighting. Prune it, remove the unnecessary letters, all of them secondary additions, and you get the ancient 'Telmah.' Now read it backwards. Thus does a fanciful pen elope with a lewd idea and Hamlet in reverse gear becomes the son of Ulysses slaying his mother's lovers.

The scene even takes pains to read against the text of the play in an intriguing fashion, much as Daedelyus does:

The real hero is of course Fortinbras, a blooming young knight, beautiful and sound to the core...

The real plot of the play will be readily grasped if the following is realized: the Ghost on the battlements of Elsinore is not the ghost of King Hamlet. It is that of Fortinbras the Elder whom King Hamlet has slain ... Thus, old Fortinbras, disguised as his enemy's ghost, prepares the peril of his enemy's son and the triumph of his own offspring.

One little keepsake you can buy at Tulum is a little Mayan calendar, with specific information about any particular date you provide. We got two, one as a present for a writer friend of ours and one as a little preview for our wedding date.

This was her Mayan birthday prophecy:

Ah, Dzunacat, the Happy and Jolly is his Omen. Master of all the Arts. Very good. Speaks at an early age. Of holy words too.

Not bad, huh? Then we read ours:

Brave Jaguar. Bloody his mouth, bloody his claws. Predator. Devouring of meat.

Save the date!

After a short but terrible ride on the good ship Pukey McFerry, we arrived in Tulum on the Yucatan (Mayan for "I can't understand you") Penisula, the site of our Mayan ruins excursion today.



The ruins of Tulum (Mayan for 'fortress') are remarkably well-preserved -- built in 967 C.E., the temples on the site have survived almost entirely without upkeep. This was a small Mayan city; at its height only about a thousand people lived here, as opposed to 40,000 at a midsize city like Tikal. But it's the most popular Mayan ruins site, with almost two million visitors a year -- probably because it's the only Mayan city to be built on the ocean. The Mayans didn't sail; they only found out about boats after being conquered by the Aztecs, which is also when the culture started undertaking human sacrifice.

Mayan culture was extremely stratified, and our tour guide was pushing the belief that the Mayan civilization's collapse happened when the agricultural peasantry (which comprised about 80% of the population due to inefficient farming techniques and poor land quality) finally revolted against the upper classes.



The Mayans lived in wooden bungalows, which have all been destroyed. Only the temples remain. Back in the day, Tulum wasn't stone-colored; these buildings were once bright blue and orange, but the paint has worn away.

Mayan ruins are among the best for archeologists because much of their territory was never resettled; after the collapse, the area was just abandoned. When the site was rediscovered in 1842, trees were growing through the rooves of the buildings, spider monkeys were the majority population, and a pair of jaguars were making their home in the high temple.



Another interesting thing about Mayan culture is its cyclical calendar; one "life" (or one "era") ends every 52 years, when the solar and lunar calendars coincided. The temple pictured above actually has a smaller temple inside it, and in other locations you could have four or five temples stuck inside each other like
Russian dolls; one way the Mayans symbolized the birth of a new sun was to destroy, bury, or obscure the previous era's temple. For what it's worth, the next new sun begins on December 22, 2012.

The entire site, like many Mayan sites (or the Pyramids, or Stongehenge), acts as a little astronomical calendar -- the temple becomes illuminated by the sun for 15 minutes every March 17.

We also got to watch a reenactment of a Mayan ritual in which four men thrown themselves off a fifteen-foot pole to symbolize the journey of the sun's beams to Earth.





This Incan statue bears more than a passing resemblance to images of Buddha and Kali, which some amount of sense, because the Mayans originally came from Northern Asia. (One of the most popular last names among the indiginous Mayan population still around today is "Chang.") This is probably the goddess of the honeybees. With no domesticated animals, honeybees were incredibly important to the Mayans. (It may also be a diver, representing the plunge of the setting sun into the ocean.)

Their number one god was the rain god, however, and that's who'd you be sacrified to if you were a "volunteer" from the lower classes.

Here's a picture of the ocean nearby:



(The water is that color because Tulum is sitting on the second-largest coral reef in the world. All the waves are breaking way out at sea.)

This man had a monkey on his shoulder:



After we were done at Tulum, we hit the lagoon at Xel-Ha, which are also pretty excellent.



Xel-Ha was formed when part of a semester of underground rivers collapsed. The rocks now at the bottom of the lagoon were the top of the cave. This was a pretty wonderful place to spend a few hours.

But the day's best photographs weren't of old buildings; they just sort of happened.

Bed now. Pat, Jaimee, and I are going to the Mayan ruins of Tulum and the Xel-Ha Lagoon tomorrow on Cozumel, starting at the crack of dawn. I'm expecting hugely great things from this part of the trip.

Yeah, Costa Maya.

Jared Diamond's essay (lucky you, you can read it online) in Best American Essays turned out to be as great as expected. Coincidentally, it's all about the sudden collapse of the Mayan civilization and how that situation is eerily reminiscent of America's own unsustainability.

Some of us have faith that new technologies will succeed in cleaning up the toxic materials in our air, water, soil, and foods without the horrendous cleanup expenses that we now incur.

...

In fact, technology merely constitutes increased power, which produces changes that can be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.

The final misconception holds that environmentalists are fear-mongering, overreacting extremists whose predictions of impending disaster have been proven wrong before and will be proven wrong again. Behold, say the optimists: water still flows from our faucets, the grass is still green, and the supermarkets are full of food. We are more prosperous than ever before, and that's the final proof our system works.

Well, for a few billion of the world's people who are causing us increased trouble, there isn't any clean water, there is less and less green grass, and there are no supermarkets full of food.

It's just like Ishmael says: a few thousand years ago, civilization rolled its giant flying contraption off a cliff -- and we think it's flying just because it hasn't hit ground yet. Enjoy our seats in first class.

Star Princess Fact Sheet
Built: 2001
Port of Registry: Hamilton
Call Sign: ZCDD6
Official umber: 733709
Gross Tonnage: 109000 tons
Net Tonnage: 71763 tons
Length: 951 feet
Breadth: 118 feet
Full Capacity: 2649 tons
Fresh Water Capacity: 2731 Tons
Normal Passenger Capacity: 2600
Normal Crew Figure; 1150
Cruising Speed: 22.5 knots

Just got on the boat a few hours ago. Stateroom E121 rocks hard:



That's Jaimee's legs and part of her arm. Those are my books near the bed. The only one you might be able to make out clearly is Best American Essays 2004, which I brought by accident (I'd meant to take Stories instead), but it turns out to be pretty good and I'm glad I brought it. I think Essays succeeds where Stories sometimes fails, even though it's still comprised of at least seven pieces from The New Yorker each year -- because while The New Yorker too often has a certain type of story it likes to publish over and over again, it publishes a much wider variety of nonfiction.

Next up is the Jared Diamond essay, so I'm especially excited about that one. I also brought The Fortress of Solitude and Bend Sinister and Break It Down, which I've wanted to read ever since I realized that hte only thing I'm even halfway good at writing is short shorts. That may seem like a lot of books for a cruise, but I require a large variety of books when I travel -- you never know what you're going to want next

Yesterday on the plane I looked at children's lit superstar Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, and it's actually fairly interesting. What's best about those books so far is not the anti-religious perspective but the notion he's come up with of an alternate earth where humans have a psychic connection with a talking, animal-shaped magical companion from birth. The psychological complications of this situation are sort of interesting. I really got the impression (unlike, say, Harry Potter) that the His Dark Materials trilogy was not originally intended for children, but instead that a decision to market it to that demographic was made after the fact of creation by the publisher. It's not high art or anything, but it's not unbearably awful, either. It was good plane junk reading.

Long digression aside, that's the basic setup of our room. But I know what you really want to know about, and here it is right here.

The weather in Fort Lauderdale is unreal. Here's the view from our hotel room:



and here's a funny sign we saw.



and here's Jaimee as a superhero. This was a test picture of one of her paintings we made when we were trying out the camera, but I liked it so much I made it the background of this computer.

Everyone's probably already heard this, but Will Eisner (100% better than and not to be confused with Walt Disney or any of his eisner cronies) died on January 3, 2005.

Sometimes called the most influential comics artist of all time, this short bio only hints at some of the amazing contributions Eisner had on the art we call comics.

Link : DC comics Spirit Archives.
Link : www.willeisner.com