The joke that swept poker tonight:
Q: What do you get when you cross Ace of Base with Lords of Acid?
A: Veruca Salt!
Cai Guo-Qiang, Black Rainbow: Explosion Project for Valencia, 2005.
Journalizing today. Later I'll have a review up on Christopher L. Williams at Meat Market Gallery and a response to Jed Perl's TNR feature. Currently I'm preoccupied by fear of the ice on the ground outside and the threat of the corniceps fungus—either of which could fell me on the way to the interview I need to do. You never know.
If you can find a better cowboy hat than this'n, I'll eat it.
For your listening pleasure: The USAisamonster.
UPDATE: The review's up on Express.
. . . but Chicago's defense will! Hook 'em Bears! Sexy Rexy may very well be the spottiest, most frustrating athlete in the NFL (as if on cue, Grossman overthrows the end zone), but Chicago's got Cedric Benson and Nathan Vasher and when I don't have a stake in the contest, a strong Longhorn contingent is enough for me. In the AFC, the Patriots and Colts—really, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning—are both so intolerable that one can only root for injuries and penalties.
Pics from last night's party at the Heart of Dupont. Oh, and if you attended and left with my iPod, I'd like that back please and thank you.
Lust.
Before there was Project Runway, there was America's Next Top Model, and Elyse Sewell was its prophetess. It looks like she's walking away from her blog, forever shutting my window into her disgustingly charming life with Marty (of The Shins).
I just checked the official rankings, and PIFF is now the most popular Web site in the world. The Governess and I couldn't have done it without Tom and our parents/aunts/grandfathers/coworkers. Three cheers for PIFF!
Presented for your patriotic consideration: George Washington. (Via Unfogged.) Happy Fourth.
UPDATE: One of the two old hippie guys sitting next to me at Bus Boys & Poets just put on the video and made the other one watch it. It's viral whatever and I'm witnessing it! And I knew from the look on his face he was going to play that video. Also, Cindy Sheehan was here for most of the day with a very large protest group, and I thought about writing something about how I'm happy to be living in the capital today, how I sometimes love this town so much despite itself, but I really need to finish this article for tomorrow.
Meet the nation's other male Kristons: one Kriston Rehberg is a software engineer who lives with his wife and two children just west of Washington, DC. On his site he's posted some Castlevania ringtones, but the link is broken, so we each have an affinity for vampires and can't make Web sites work. Long has this Kriston battled me for the top of the Google rankings.
A friend alerted me to the presence of the other American Kriston, a Utah-born fellow living in Washington (state). My height, almost my age, nearly my Zodiac sign, and more disturbingly still, apparently a current or former employee of Kinko's, my place of employment during high school.
I'm sure I'd never seen the word "surd" before I read it today in a quote attributed to Robert Smithson (concerning his Alogon sculptures).
surd: 1. a sum containing one or more irrational numbers. 2. A voiceless sound in speech. Latin surdus, deaf, mute; used in mathematics to translate Arabic jadhr asamm [deaf root], itself a translation of the Greek alogos, speechless, irrational.It's also the name for the k, p, s, and t consonants (the ones that don't involve the vocal chords). Hell of a word.
Huh, this going places and writing things beat hasn't left me much time for blogging today. Fortunately, nothing I have to write just now competes with Alligators on MySpace. Those guys eat SoaMFP for their in-flight snacks.
Play around with this fun nuclear holocaust site for a second. Now, answer me this: Why is it that a jump from a 45- to a 50-kiloton nuclear payload registers a change in the immediate zone of destruction from raging fires to immense pressure blast? You can clearly see with the slide that there's some kind of function at hand, but it's 8:30 on Friday and I have dreadful work to do, and do you think this site delivers?
Because it's my blog, and I'll cry if I want to. As should be made clear below the cut, I won't be attending Scope or Armory this weekend and possibly may delay my next trip to New York until April at the earliest. Frankly, I'm wondering how I'm going to "attend" such must-not-miss venues as the grocery store for the foreseeable future.
As my debit card and my checkbook were both stolen, and because the powers that be froze my account last week in response to charges made in London and Istanbul (even though I totally called before my trip and had my account annotated to reflect the fact), Bank of Fascism has not merely suspended but revoked that checking account. That's the top-level frustration in the nightmarish matrioshka of nested bureaucratic dead-ends that promises to define my life for the next month. By the time I've found my way through this labyrinth of crises that beget crises, that chick from There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly will be buying my rounds at the bar.
Indulge me, if you have a sympathetic ear: In order to start the new B of F account—and, for that matter, access the money in the old account, which is all my money, at least until my replacement credit cards arrive (in 10–14 soul-crushing business days—if only debt in America could be accessesed as quickly as it grows! )—I need identifying documentation. In order to get said identifying documentation, I need identifying documentation. A District driver's license is out of the question, since I was never licensed in the District. There's simply no getting my Social Security card, passport, or health insurance card without a photo ID or my birth certificate. Even that taped-up student ID that shows me bone skinny and believe-it-or-not blonde would help, but it's all in the hands of the person who fulfilled some rather extravagent consumer impulses at the gas station at 14th and Euclid at 4:45 a.m. this morning.
Now, I gather from the fact that my mom answered my increasingly frantic inquiries as to the whereabouts of my birth certificate with "still looking, dear," shortly before she stopped answering at all, that that search through the Capps annals and vaults is just as likely to turn up the Ark of the Covenant as anything useful. (Seriously, Mom, what t f.) So it all hinges on a non–driver's license identification form to be issued by the state of Texas, a slip of paper, the sort they give you while you're waiting for your real replacement license to arrive. Apparently that, in concert with a few tax forms, will suffice to earn my District license, assuming I can scrounge up the scrylla to pay the fees.
But it should be said that Texas, for all its charms, so many of which I've gone to great lengths to ennumerate on this here Web page, is not the most efficient provider of social services among these fifty, nifty United States. Sue and I joke about a woman that she encountered when she was working in a more tedious capacity than she does these days, at a former job that required her to interact occasionally with the county court. Once, after combat with a court employee via telephone (the prize being contested: a document that the court was obligated to provide to her), Sue took the fight to the courthouse. There she asked her opponent face to face for that which was rightfully hers, and she was met with the best bureaucratic verse since they-pretend-to-pay-us-and-we-pretend-to-work: "I am not getting up."
Let that serve as context for the fact that the Lone Star State, one of the most populous states in the Union and a hell of a friendly place to boot, has just one telephone line for driver's license replacements. I hadn't heard a busy signal in years before I listened to that jingle all day long today. For a really fucking frustrating time, call 512-424-2600. Assuming I finally get through? I'm looking at three to four weeks to process.
But it wasn't my laptop that got snatched, so I know I'm obliged to quit bitching and look on the bright side. Probably there's some angle that I haven't considered, and it won't take a full month to get my life in order. But I think we can go brighter than that. So here goes: I can no longer prove that I exist to the State. I can't go to bars any more. Surely this is the time in a young man's life when he assumes an identity as a conservative vigilante anti-hero. Anyone have a copy of Darkman I can borrow?
So we were robbed or burglarized, however you want to say it, during the night while roommate and I were sleeping. The sorry, sorry part of it is that fearsome Wreck was curled up on my bedroom floor last night until about 3 or 4 a.m., when he started barking like madness. That's characteristic Wreck crazy, so I groggily threw some pillows at him and plugged my ears. When I got fed up with his noise and let him downstairs, I guess it was too late.
Now, my wallet's been stolen in addition to my trusty satchel, so at the time, I have zero forms of identification—no driver's license and no passport, which was still with my stuff post Istanbul. Also, my Social Security card, and it was only even in my wallet because I'd discovered it in a big mess of files and meant to put it some place more secure. This burglar in fact just stole my identity!
So! How's your day starting?
Scene: Holding elevator door for delivery man, who pushes a cart stacked with boxes advertising new computers, printers, and speakers.
[elevator door closes]
ME: So, all those for me?
MAN: Ten, please.
END SCENE
"Hidden Valley Ranch Bombed by Balsamic Extremists." Why won't they lettuce have peace?
James W. Bailey is always berating me for being an iPod-toting art fag. Now it's actually true! Yesterday I trekked up to FedEx to pick up a package—one spanking new iPod, courtesy of the g-friend. That's just what I got her for her birthday (though my generation is nicer). Yes, we are happy yuppie couple scum, destined for an adult-contemporary hell coordinated by Sharper Image and Williams-Sonoma.
If you have any particular ownership insights, have at. How often am I supposed to walk it? Am I doting on it too much? This one takes video as well as music, and it's probably time I tackled the world of podcasts.
Quarter centuries of my life, that is. It's my birthday! (I'm still in my 20s. I'm still in my 20s.) Probably won't hear too much from me today, since I'm running around and then, then, bowling, like the vibrant still-a-20-something that I am.
Read about the northern bottle-nosed whale that's swum up the Thames into London? Londoners are calling him "Big Ben." Great story. Well, it will have been a great story if the city is able to return the guy to the ocean. The reaction of the man who purportedly spotted the whale first was something right out of Master and Margarita—he refused to believe his eyes.
Not to fire a shoot across the bow here, but really, a whale is a much better metropolitan mascot than a panda.
UPDATE: Sad.
I just got two press releases from local art galleries, and I wouldn't have noticed anything special about them had they not arrived one after another—but come on, people! It's Friday, 4:30 p.m., and no one has done anything more productive than reading the 24 forum. Don't junk the news 'cause you're trying to get everything off your desk before happy hour.
And speaking of 24, as we ever so coincidentally were, make sure to check in with Mr. Drezner before you leave the office. On the Department of Justice 's demands of information from Google:
The DOJ wants to show that online searches lead to inadvertent stumbles into porn. It is true that the best way to show this would be to retrieve a sample of searches. However, almost as good would be for the DOJ to commission some social scientist to do the research for them. It would not be hard for a researcher to run an experiment to gather this kind of data, and the results would be just as useful to the Department of Justice.Did door number two send shivers down your spine? Mine, too. I think it was one of the Crooked Timberites who said that he intentionally diversifies his media providers—e-mail by Google, search by Yahoo!, that sort of thing—so as not to become too beholden to any single company's liability or dominance.There's something else that disturbs me about this request. If Yahoo! and other search engines have already complied, then the DOJ doesn't really need Google's data. . . . So why continue to press Google?
I see one of two possibilities:
1) The data they have doesn't support the administration's supposition, and they're hoping Google will bail them out;
2) They don't care about the data for this case as much as they do about establishing a legal precedent and/or intimidating Google into compliance.
Usually, with these kind of things, I try to remind myself: why assign malignance when incompetence will do, and is in such abundance? After all, the man who previously sat in Alberto Gonzales's chair used the office to conduct the War Against Statue Boobs. Not exactly Dr. No we're talking about.
But if that was an aesthetic departure from the normal day-to-day over at the Dee Oh Jay, then this is curiously legislative one. These data—if the DOJ in fact played nice and did not use them to ID millions of users—would tip the Department off on all sorts of ways that people might find illegal pornography in the future. Based on my watching The Wire (three seasons, multiple viewings), I don't quite see the criminal threat that warrants the use of the federal subpoena for a massive cache of privately owned data, one which they've already been given more or less by another company. But I don't really know what I'm talking about here, and I'm sure I'm out of touch anyway—I can nearly hear the defenders of the Unitary Executive, Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito: "I'll allow it!"
Back to speaking of 24: I haven't watched much of the series, but judging from the first two episodes of this season, it's clear that it's a proven predictor of U.S. political trends. Last season? Torture. Everyone, for any reason, you looking at me?, time bomb's a-tickin'—just willy nilly. Season 5: data mining. Data mine that phone call, damnit. I couldn't data mine this morning's Sudoku. Marion Berry, caught data mining the rock again! Don't know whether "data mine" is different from "look into" or "read" in any sense whatsoever, but it looks like it might be hard to remember how things ever got done before.
I know when it's time to strap on the tinfoil before tuning into TiVo, so I'm keeping my eyes peeled. If I see Jack look something up on Baidu, I'm going to call that a spoiler for 2006–7.
Oh man, I didn't mention the Pay It Forward Forward Blog before, but it's imperative that you see it now. It's brought to you by me and the Governess and more or less all our relatives.
Your correspondent very nearly got logged out for good today. I'm crossing this intersection in Bethesda on my way to the Metro when a driver races through the red light, taking a wild left turn onto the street just where I'm walking. He doesn't see me, and this intersection has bad visibility, and none of this really matters in the two seconds it takes me to suck in my breath in order to prepare to begin freaking right the fuck out, because driver swerves, slams on his breaks, hydroplanes but then kind of fishtails, and crashes his Cherokee against the curb. Swoosh, his bumper nearly grazes my bag. The whole exchange: two, maybe three lousy, excruciatingly drawn-out seconds.
Now the guy who walking to my left has it worse—he actually hops out of the Jeep's path when it careens by me. It wasn't expertly athletic or anything, but it was still so fast. Both of us hustle across the street, cursing earnestly while Cherokee drives away. Both of us clearly stunned, we commiserate for only a moment and then walk off.
A few minutes later, he steps onto the elevator to the Metro just as the doors close. It's just us in the car, and when the elevator moves we turn to one another with the same look on our faces—a grimace, primed for volcanic blasts of profanities and shared indignations. And of course all that pent-up consternation, carefully considered and mentally rewound and replayed, has hilarious effects on the human face: scrunched-up, puffy red features, ears steaming and brow furrowed and mouth drawn up in a muscular, tight-lipped frown. We get as far as Can you believe—? and That guy—! before this face that we're mirroring registers, and it all folds and we just laugh.
Now, I bet laughter's just the automatic, visceral response to a scary experience. But in my limited experience with this kind of adrenaline spike, the mind records everything in crystal clarity and it feel as if you have minutes to process seconds—and I really did get a good, long study of this guy's facial features just as he opened up his mouth to cuss the air, and the look on his mug was hysterical, just too much to take. He must've seen the same angry baboon staring back.
Georgia's English language daily scores a major exclusive with the GF. Read it, it's great! Featuring words like "Akhalkalaki" (a place!) and also a clear, cogent overview of ethnic integration issues in GE. If you know her, it will make you proud.
Just days ago, the United States Postal Service was listing the same physical address for God and Santa. Roommates? Perhaps a single supernatural construct, who happens to take on seasonal employment? I know the distinction was lost on me when I was little—I used to pray to Jesus before praying to Santa, and only later realized that the theologically sound approach is to pray to Jesus to intercede on your behalf with Santa.
Putting aside the larger metaphysical mystery, as of this writing the Postal Service only lists an address for Santa—no Big Guy.
Fortunately, this bear's LiveJournal archives the original USPS page ("How do I address a letter to Santa Claus or God?"). The FAQ entry explains the protocol for sending letters to Santa. (Use either "Local City, State, ZIP Code" or "North Pole, AK"—which is so stupid, the North Pole isn't in Alaska and all children know that—plus a return address.) Formerly the page added that "[l]etters to God can be addressed in the same way replacing 'Santa Claus' with 'God.'" Just pick your reason for the season and don't forget the stamp, right?
So why is the Postal Service whitewashing the baby Jesus's address from frequently asked questions about holiday mail service, one of His most important outreach programs? Consider also the feds' disinformation campaign against Santa:
Santa enjoys candy canes and cookies, and his reindeer enjoy fresh hay.Bull. Only if you intend to give Santa's reindeer stomachaches are you going to leave them fresh hey. New Hampshire Public Radio speaks truth to power:
Reindeer Lichen, sometimes incorrectly called Reindeer Moss, grow abundantly throughout the reindeer's natural habitat—the arctic tundra and northern woodlands. You can even find them locally in open mountain forests and along roadsides. There are several common species, but all look like mounded gray or greenish miniature shrubs and can grow in dense, extensive mat-forming colonies.That's news you can use. Also notable: New Hampshire is one weird fucking place:Reindeer lichens are highly adapted to their harsh arctic environment and are a major winter food source for reindeer. The reindeer use their hooves to paw through the snow and ice to reach the lichen, and may even fight over particularly good patches. Lichens provide important carbohydrate energy, particularly when little else is available. These complex carbohydrates are broken down by special enzymes produced in the stomach of reindeer or caribou but in few other animals.
Humans can't digest reindeer lichen very well, and eating uncooked lichen can even make us sick. However, partially digested lichen from the stomachs of freshly killed reindeer can be eaten, and it is even considered a delicacy in some arctic cultures [do NPR personalities have to live in northern climes to be considered "arctic"? —ed.]. In this form it has much greater nutritional value. It is said to taste pretty good—something like fresh green salad. But don't worry—we're pretty sure that Santa prefers gingerbread cookies.No worries, little children, Santa's not so big on greens, so it's unlikely that he'll butterfly Rudolph before Christmas Day. Unlikely.
As you see, I'm on this. You just try to have a merry Christmas. I'm going to find out how far down this rabbit hole goes.
Hope it's a good one for you. I'll be in Baltimore getting crazy on tryptophan with this guy. More stuff on the page (promise!) this weekend, and some interesting developments next week.
I'm really quite busy right now, and probably won't have an opportunity to post all the awesome content I'd planned to this week. I'm in a real spin, but my situation isn't so frantic as Drunken Bee's:
That was maybe the most crazy scene in which I've ever found myself. Bitches were grabbing and yelling, and some photographer kept flashing in my face, capturing my lovely expression, which I'm sure was a mixture of grasping greed and total fear. Some dude flexed on a mannequin and it went crashing to the ground. Near the front window, a group of ladies decided to forego trying to negotiate the racks and opted to start clawing the clothing off the mannequins. Store employees rushed over to pry their fingers from the cheap silk, the mannequins now standing disheveled, plastic nippel-less breasts exposed for all Michigan Avenue to see. The situation around the center table (upon which all the skinny-fit jeans had been piled) was not unlike Heysel stadium, where we enacted some bizarro game of Pit, all wild hand gestures and cracking "I got a Small, who's got an Extra Small? I need an Extra Small, I'll trade you? What do you have? Oh a medium? WHO HAS AN EXTRA SMALL?!?!" Most remarkably, over all the din was the booming voice of a friendly employee pleading "Ladies? Ladies? WHOSE CHILDREN ARE THESE?" in reference to a double-stroller that had been ditched in a corner, containing two little motherless and sobbing toddlers.That's funny to me, not just because it's hilarious, but because I just read Valerie talking about the same clothing line. And obviously quite a few more than these two contributed to the Summerslam scene at H&M. Valerie even wrote, "i've decided against partaking in the h&m/stella mccartney opening day madness," knowing full well what was going to happen.
I've been shopping probably, oh, three times since I started college in nineteen ninety-harumph-hrumm, so I know I'm not the person to ask. But how do hardcore shoppers even come by this information? Does H&M have an RSS feed?
UPDATE: Three's a trend, of course, and I shoul have waited until I'd heard Fey Accompli's "Stella!" before I ran with it. You ladies, you're something else.
Finally saw Options 2005 for a second time, and I'll post my review on Monday. (Reviews should never go with the Friday dump.) But I wanted to note one gaffe in curator Libby Lumpkin's essay/catalog that caught my attention:
[George] Tkabladze, who began his rigorously classical studies in art at age nine, and who left the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to settle in the Washington, D.C. area in 2003, is not your typical thirty-something M.F.A., 3-D artist. [emphasis added]Even before the Rose Revolution in November 2003, Georgia was not a Soviet Socialist Republic, of course. Georgia SSR was renamed the Republica of Georgia when it staged its first democratic, parliamentary elections in 1990; the country formally broke from the USSR, oh, around when the USSR dissolved in 1991. In 1995, the Republic of Georgia dropped the formalities and became Georgia. Of course, Georgians call their nation Sakartvelo, so it's a little hard to know for sure.
If we could simply recognize the place as Sakartvelo, I wouldn't have to do a kabuki dance to explain where Susan's studying: not-Hotlanta Georgia; Georgia the Republic of; post-Soviet Georgia; Georgia by the Black Sea. (As if any of us could find the Black Sea on a map.)
An update for Susan-watchers: She's somewhere in Azerbaijan monitoring elections, her last known coordinates placing her in the capital, Baku. Azerbaijan is an immensely wealthy oil country sandwiched between Russia and Iran, a melting pot or proving ground for the unique cultural attributes of both. The nation's oil-rich designation grants it a certain degree of lenity from the U.S. government, despite the highly repressive regime currently holed up in Baku. The Azeri campaign season has seen its share of fingers broken by police during interrogations, shakedowns of demonstrators, government harassment of opponents and their sympathizers, arrests of opposition leaders and parliamentary candidates, and even one assassination—of a leading investigative journalist. (For sure, I don't love that Sue's there, but no one's tougher or smarter.) Freedom might have a better chance of reigning and marching and what-not if the world's leading democracy exporters—e.g., the United States, known for its Rose-sympathetic boutonnieres and purple finger–stained congressmen—would say a kind word for the teeming Azeri opposition; but, mmm . . . oil.
In other news, I'm sorry to report that Susan may have lost her wonderful camera. Nicked or neglected, she doesn't know, but it's not in her possession. I suspect she'll have another one soon, but it was a rough way to start what may not be the best vacation evar.
Yglesias and I didn't take seriously the Halloween admonition to stock up on candy—we sort of thought we'd buy a pizza crust and use some toppings from the garden instead to make dinner. That's us: at home on Halloween with lights on and Monday Night Football playing and no candy—the biggest assholes on U Street.
As we enter into the tricks stage of the evening, we know we deserve what we get. So far it's been mostly middle fingers; I just hope that the flaming objects that will be tossed at our house throughout the night are still primarily dogshit based. I don't expect any mercy.
I drunk-dial internationally.
A very brief work by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, from Borges's A Universal History of Infamy:
"On Rigor in Science"A fiction and a forgery* but also a prediction. Behold! Google Earth, the dimensionful version update of and successor to Google Maps. A devastatingly neat little desktop application and a quick and painless end to that productive day that's been pestering you. (Thanks to Eszter for passing it along.). . . In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
—J. A. Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
. . . you know, the site is all well and good, but I would greatly appreciate it if the architects at Google HQ were to develop a Google Earth handheld. Nothing that calls your mom and coordinates your photo albums or anything, just a slim, digital map and compass. I suffer from an absolutely debilitating lack, no, void of a sense of direction, and so long as I'm going to be lost all the time, I could get a lot of use out of a device that at the very least directed me toward the nearest coffee shop.
UPDATE: A screenshot with callouts:
* If you aren't familiar with the story, now you are: That quotation is the whole shebang, first published by the authors under a psuedonym (B. Lynch Davis, sez Google (always flexing its muscle)). I'm not sure how Cesares got nudged out of the picture, but I always see that story attributed to Borges (e.g., in Foucault's The Order of Things). Apparently the idea preceded Borges, appearing in a Lewis Carroll story called Sylvie and Bruno in which Carroll describes a map featuring "the scale of a mile to the mile."
You say simulacrum, I say simulacrum, let's call the whole thing off.
The Dean, one of the gents from the Cleveland Park Men's Club, posted his routine for today, the eve of the Virginia Cup Gold:
Ice cold. After being accepted at a number of graduate programs and finally choosing SAIS, Susan hears word that she's been granted a Fulbright to study ethnic separatist groups (or something) in Georgia. (No, not Atliens. I'm talking about the nation of.)
Congratulations are certainly in order, but it's all rather obvious to me, and I couldn't be prouder anyway—so stop by and giver her her due, will you?
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
I heard a story on the radio coming home and knew I had to write about it; get to the computer and I find The Gurgling Cod beat me to it. I firmly reject the suggestion this could only happen in Rhode Island; the offer surely would have more appeal in Texas.
(I'm actually more intrigued by Fesser's cuban sandwich story, as the details - near Classical, post-Columbine - suggest he used to haunt my old, bodega-rich neighborhood while I still lived there.)
Given the opportunity to upgrade aspects of our Jungian hivemind, I think I'd start with the teeth motif frequently featured in our dreams about mortality. That was a good if obvious symbol representing a formidable fear, one that was viable right up until the advent of the welfare state (or dentures, whichever came first). I've had that dream in which all my teeth shatter, but really, the message is lost on me—I've never even had a cavity, I brush my teeth, I'm doing okay.
But I'm rapidly approaching the age at which point it will be true that, for most of my life, my kidneys have served during the day as overtaxed coffee filters and at night as auxiliary livers. This is an unsustainable situation, but I can't convince myself to do anything about it, i.e., drink water. Not even a glass. Were I to dream of the Sisyphusian stones that are surely depositing, left and right, as I write this (and sip my coffee; and make plans for happy hour), I would probably be shaken to my paranoid, primate-brain core. At the very least, I would cry all morning.
So, um, what mythomorphological connection would you alter? Fun new blog meme, right, eh? . . . yeah, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
After reading through some of Jessica's design links, it occurred to me that the chair I found some time ago on V Street may in fact be a Wassily chair by Bauhaus design Marcel Breuer.
Marcel Breuer, Wassily, 1925.
I knew it was familiar! If you're envious, take comfort in the fact that it's probably a fake. But probably not, because I'm a design philistine, and that's the way that luck goes. Regardless, I should maybe give it higher priority than the back porch grilling seat.
Susan and I at The Gates. We stage highly elaborate Air album-cover photo shoots whenever we travel together. Think Juergen Teller and Stephanie Seymour.
Congratulations are in order for Todd Gibson! He gives us the snowy view of The Gates from the stork's ward but neglects to tell us the name or sex of his newborn. Which is it—Christo or Jeanne-Claude?
Answer: Christo.
Link courtesy of Tyler.
Apropos of nothing, I highly recommend this story from the Washington Post Magazine from a few weekends ago. I am always amazed by the degree to which truth resembles fiction under extraordinary circumstances—it's as if irrevocable change forces people to respond by adhering to form. There's nothing in that tale that hasn't appeared in every screenplay ever written about money, but it's astonishing nonetheless to identify such a comprehensive pastiche of these themes in one community.
You'd think that after submitting myself to two hours of Music From the Kazakh Steppe, I'd've built up some substantial credit with my girlfriend, worth maybe a few NCAA-chicken-and-beer tokens or a Saturday night special feature or possibly even a Get-Out-of-Picnic-Free card. But you'd be surprised how much political capital you can spend while walking through the central concert hall of the Kennedy Center with one ill-timed comment about the good people of Kazakhstan and their goats. Now I've got nothing but the memories. I'm still not convinced I was wholly offbase. . . .
So I was under the mistaken impression along with such benefits as reduced car insurance and being able to rent cars in America, turning 25 meant that you were no longer eligible for the draft. Turns out that I was wrong—I could still wind up in Tehran or where-have-you. Whatever—birthdays aren't about war! Today is about football and the ridiculously great charcoal smoker that Susan got me.
Thanks to those of you who braved the aftermath of yesterday's absurd snowstorm last night to come by for the party. Stop by next weekend for smoked ribs! And be sure to ask Catherine about her new partisan bathroom policy—it's going to change everything.
Courtesy of Fresh Paint, (I am in your debt for this one, Cynthia), comes the Rapture Index, one of the more wonderful things the Internet has produced. Part of a comprehensive Rapture-preparedness resource center, the RI is a system that aggregates weekly data related to signs suggesting whether that Sweet Chariot is, in fact, coming forth to carry us home. The system behind the RI is, well, a couple of guys named Todd & Terry. The Lord did say that man shall not know the hour of His coming, but Todd & Terry sure as hell intend to have the over/under.
The Rapture Index, a "Dow Jones Industrial Average of end time activity," a "prophetic speedometer," is your source for methodology in eschatology. Let's take a look a few significant indicators:
| Index | Value |
|---|---|
| False Christs | 2 |
| Occult | 4 |
| Leadership | 5 |
| Unemployment | 2 |
| Inflation | 3 |
| Gog (Russia) | 4 |
| Beast government | 4 |
| Oil supply/price | 3-1 |
| Anti-Christian | 4 |
| Liberalism | 1 |
Until I give you the go-ahead, anyway. Looks like I caught the mononucleosis from Typhoid Sue. (I have to come clean—we've been known to kiss from time to time.) If I am ever able to move from this spot on my bed again, I will go to the doctor. If.
It's hard to describe that overwhelming loss of energy that comes with mono. I always thought that was a useful fiction mono sufferers worked up to sucker people into giving them spongebaths and what have you. As if your bones have been swapped out for Fruit-Rollups, or your shoulders were tasked with holding up the atmosphere. Not sleepy, but pretty fucking tired.) Don't know if this means I'll be doing more or less blogging . . . the provisional plan is to use this space to throw an altogether unprecedented pity party. And to get Susan to bring me comic books.
How come they made the new twenties?
Cause I got all the old ones.
Noted atheist thinker Antony Flew is casting off his athiesm in favor of the "fine tuning" defense of a Creator—i.e., were any of the universe's natural laws slightly changed, life would not exist, therefore the universe works just so in order for life to exist. (Among some circles, that sounds a lot like affirming the consequent.) It would seem that Habermas finally got to Flew, which is too bad—the holidays are such a terrible time for gloomy news. But Julian Sanchez is spreading some (I can't resist) xmas cheer:
What's befuddling is why any of these considerations are supposed to provide any support whatever for the God hypothesis. To think that they do seems to rely on a kind of ignotum per ignotius: We have no satisfying account of complex phenomenon X, so we explain it in terms of, even more complex phenomenon Y, a mind capable of consciously producing X. Why is this supposed to be satisfying? Why, in the absence of a culture in which religion is pervasive, would anyone resort to this kind of explanation? Indeed, why would anyone count it as an explanation at all?That is indeed one problem with the deus ex machina: the process by which universal preconditions leads to intelligence is no less insoluble with a Creator at hand. One eventually wants to come to terms with the mechanism by which the Creator Created, so there still exists a need for a scientific account of the process. Having arrived at that description, the need for a magical Creator will have been obviated, unless magic is a crucial law of the universe—which watchmaker theists reject. Problem A attenuates both the atheist and theist routes to explanation, but the latter introduces an even more intractable problem B.
Now, an intelligent Creator certainly makes for a satisfying parallelism between the rise of human consciousness and the natural origins of the universe (being intelligent as well). But again, a sufficiently descriptive account of the universe will proceed from natural laws to intelligent thought in a not-seamless way—the universe is a hostile quark soup for a long time before it becomes the seat of the genius of man—so this parallelism becomes less satisfying the more descriptive your account of the universe gets. Still, I really love that we have Christmas, so it's not all bad.
