Gulfstream

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29keillor.html “There’s no reason for it to exist in English”: Garrison Keillor is very unhappy with Bernard-Henri Lévy’s survey of America. One complaint seems to be that Lévy (who comes across as quite sensible in his Salon interview) has focussed on the outlandish, extreme, supersized aspects of America: “You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there’s nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food.”

(I don’t think this is terrifically meaningful complaint—travellers fixate on what’s different, not what’s similar. It’s not the sensibly-sized drink portions you write home about, it’s the really really big ones.)

In reponse, Lévy’s basically accuses Keillor of being a Francophobe; in his review, Keillor says, “as always with French writers, Lévy is short of facts, long on conclusions,” though this comes just after he complains about Lévy’s sweeping “as alwayses,” so it’s probably a joke.

Update 3rd Feb: added Lévy’s reponse, softened Keillor criticism. 13:46

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/44701 Agenda for Iran’s Holocaust Conference. 12.15pm: Famous Jews in History: Were They Really Jews? 11:52

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060206ta_
talk_mcgrath Amongst journalists, Tab is an improbably popular drink. 11:04

http://www.theonion.com/content/radionews (Podcastable) Radio News from The Onion. e.g. “Report: Lab Monkeys 96 Percent More Likely To Use Cocaine Than Those In Wild.” 15:47

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/
01/18/AR2006011801434.html Great profile of a very successful and very good children’s entertainer called the Great Zucchini … who also, as it turns out, has a gambling problem, an organisational problem, and (most likely) some psychological problems as well.

A live discussion with the author of the piece addresses some of the obvious questions, like what the Great Zucchini thinks of the story, and whether the piece is likely to mess with his career, in the same way that David Friedman’s career was apparently damaged by Capturing the Friedmans. 01:13

http://www.thesuperficial.com/archives/2006/01/27/brad_pitt_
is_a_chameleon.html Brad Pitt looking like Jennifer (when with Jennifer), Gwyneth (when with Gwyneth) and Angelina (when with Angelina). 01:08

http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/blog/01138428456 Blurring images to make them look like shots of miniatures. 01:05

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/1/lettertoeditor.asp Great, informative, exchange between Valerie Lawson, the author of a book on the creator of Mary Poppins (Pamela Travers) and The New Yorker. Lawson felt that a recent article about Poppins carried insufficient acknowledgement of her work, given that it contained many details about Travers that could only (Lawson says) have come from her research.

What seems to be the case is that: (a) The New Yorker did do more original research than Lawson had anticipated; (b) some of the facts uncovered by Lawson were subsequently repeated in documentaries, etc. about Travers, and not sourced in ways that made clear they were due to Lawson, and this made it possible the New Yorker to argue that they had alternative sources; and (c) overall, Lawson should have been given more credit. Anyway, all this is couched in extremely delicate and precise language (particularly that of the letters from The New Yorker, who necessarily needed to be more careful) that makes wonderful, fascinating reading.

(I don’t think Lawson should have sent the final letter for publication; it doesn’t seem to reflect her feelings about the matter, and now The New Yorker have her printed complaint reduced to what the CJR describes as a “relatively benign effort.”) 11:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4643678.stm “Man lives in tree after domestic spat.” (India crazy.) 23:24

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4647018.stm Until the 50s, heroin was a legal, and relatively commonly prescribed drug in the UK. 12:24

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/23/features/rlesage.php On the dwindling numbers of craftsmen working in haute couture. “Since the 1920s, when there were about 10,000 French embroiderers, the population has shrunk to about 200, Lesage said.” Some of it does seem unnecessarily inefficient: “… it is common for Michel to send a hat to Lesage for embroidery and then to Lemarii for plumes and petals.” (Oh! to work in plumes and petals!) 23:55

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/press-centre/press-releases/press-
releases-content.asp?prID=670 Haha, first London snatches the 2012 Olympics from Paris, now this: “London set to host the start of the Tour de France in 2007.” 23:36

http://www.popmatters.com/columns/sawyer/060120.shtml Mostly thoughtful and sincere criticism of Sarah Silverman’s comedy: “Silverman’s inconsistencies also extend to the convenient shield of her meticulously crafted persona of the oblivious racist, which she fades in and out of during every single interview.” 19:27

http://www.slate.com/id/2134497/ The issues surrounding Iran and its (apparent) run for nuclear weapons. (Fred Kaplan is not hopeful.) 20:27

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/books/20audi.html Re audiobooks: how to read footnotes, and other textual annotations? (David Foster Wallace apparently says “dot dot dot” when he hits an ellipsis.) What to do about “I{heart}NY”? 11:24

http://goodweatherforairstrike.blogspot.com/2006/01/top-
65-music-videos-of-2005.html Awesome: some guy’s list of the best 65 music videos of 2005. A lot of bands I’ve never heard of, but good descriptions, and every single link goes directly to a QuickTime-compatible download. Even more impressive: as of now, none of the links are broken! The no. 1 pick—Sigur Rós’s Glosoli—is one of my favourites as well. 22:39

http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/articles/060116sh_
shouts The Wish FAQ: “Hint: Avoid phrases that are open to catastrophic interpretation, such as ‘for the rest of my life.’” (Sadly no ruling on this situation (Overheard in New York): “Teen boy #1: I’m starving. If I had three wishes, I’d ask for three David’s bagels. Teen boy #2: Why not just use one wish and ask for three bagels?”) 23:46

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/manufacturing_reality/
the_omarosa_experiment.php Good piece on how reality TV shows choose contestants, how the shows are run, and how contestants and failed contestants are affected by the experience. The conclusion seems to be that the producers: (a) don’t actively manipulate people, because they don’t need to—they do put prospective contestants through a lot of tests in a (largely successful) attempt to predict how they’ll behave; and (b) they will selectively edit to highlight aspects of a contestant’s personality. (Also, a psychologist involved in the screening process explained his involvement by saying: “… I saw it as a social-psych experiment, something that’s almost impossible to do now because the experiments might cause people emotional strife or discord. I was given the chance to look at people’s personalities and make predictions about their behavior and perhaps do some good in protecting someone from being put on the show who shouldn’t be.”) 17:07

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article338686.ece Eurasians are more beautiful, healthy, intelligent, etc.? (Nice theory, not very convincing.) 02:28

http://www.slate.com/id/2134294/ The Red Cross is apparently running an ad that ridicules almost all well-meaning attempts to “save the world”—except donating blood, that is. (I can’t get the ad working on my Mac.) Whilst I do believe that every charity needs to think seriously about why it is more important than its brethren (as with religions, if they don’t believe they are more worthy than the others, they should close down), and anyone trying to get money for e.g. Greenpeace, say, should certainly be able to explain why theirs is a better cause than, say, e.g. Unicef (and vice versa), directly attacking other charities seems unproductive, ill-mannered and unbecoming. 13:58

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200601/df20060116.jpg The right way to sell RFID (cartoon). (I didn’t know Dr. Fun still existed! Some others: beavers, Knuth.) 12:01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4470516.stm Some cute fake signs. (Matches English signage pretty accurately, actually, particularly the tube ones: “In case of train delay / please snap stresstwig.”) 10:33

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html Some young Japanese are shutting themselves into their rooms, and effectively never coming out. 01:29

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/24/meikle-history-
plastic.html Interview with author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, on how plastic’s reputation has changed over the last hundred years. 13:40

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/200401/200401_gate_
crasher_1.html Profile of Bode Miller, the maverick skier somewhat notorious for telling 60 Minutes that he’s raced drunk. 02:23

http://www.slate.com/id/2134225/ Surreal: once upon a time, prospective al-Qaida recruits filled out enrollment forms that included fields for what the applicant wanted to do after training (“Train and return,” “Jihad,” “Work within a group.”), and the details of an emergency contact. 01:11

http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2006/
feature_dibbell_janfeb06.msp Julian Dibbell makes $11,000 selling items on Ultima Online, asks the IRS if this is taxable income, or what. They don’t know, and suggest that he pay $650 + lawyers’ fees to find out. (I think part of the problem here is that some of this money is bound up in virtual objects still held within UO—although fundamentally I don’t see why the issue is that different to the issue of taxing stock market gains, another self-contained system of completely virtual “goods.”) 14:29

http://www.slate.com/id/2134055/entry/2134056/ Dahlia Lithwick is reporting on Sam Alito’s confirmation hearing. “There are, it seems, better and worse ways to game your Supreme Court confirmation hearings. … Sam Alito has chosen to simply bore his way through, and as a consequence, two days into the hearings, the Democrats on the judiciary committee have hardly laid a glove on him. … There are some tangible benefits to this approach: For one thing, Alito has thus far generated not one flash of heat. There has been no clash, no argument, no losing of his temper. He is like a very, very smart rock.” 16:31

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/11/itunes_update_spies_
.html iTunes 6.0.2 phones home to Apple with your listening history? Turns out that it only does this if the “MiniStore” pane is open, but the fact that it does this at all, and never made it particularly clear that it does it, is kinda dodgy.

I do find it interesting, though, that there are people who are upset and concerned about this sort of behaviour, and there are also people who are happy to record their listening history on last.fm—and these are often the exact same people (!). Cory Doctorow, for example (who wrote the Boing Boing post), has voluntarily given last.fm almost 25000 tracks’ worth of his listening history. There are clearly significant differences between the last.fm and iTunes cases, but the practical difference seems slight. For some reason people think they are getting something from sending their listening history to last.fm, but not to the iTunes Music Store. I guess it’s that last.fm seems more … grassroots, open, community centered—but why does this make such a difference? (And can last.fm, Flickr, and so on continue to have this feel?) 13:31

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2006/1/6murray.html The 4-Year-Old on a Blind Date. 17:54

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/firstgoatse/ Check out the Ron Jeremy version! (In the kinder, gentler, pre-Internet times, people took photos of passers-by being startled by a backfiring van.) 12:28

http://www.xraylab.org/NedTroide/NedTroide.htm Furniture in the style of minor historical figures: artist Paul Davies, inspired by a single image of a sturdy and stolid-looking 80s video-game champ called Ned Troide (once played Defender for over 60 hours!), has created a line of “Ned Troide” furniture. (e.g. combination fake fireplace and hot dog cooker.) 15:32

http://www.snopes.com/glurge/miner.asp Self-sacrifice is evidence of God? Email claims that mostly older Buckhannon miners gave some of their oxygen to the one survivor, a young father, and says that this “could only be the work of the Lord.” (Uh, no.) 12:23

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002462.html Are take-away pizza menus good design, or bad? “The fact is, pizza flyers set up precisely the right expectations about the product and the service: cheap, cheerful and quick. The choice of visual language any graphic designer makes should be appropriate both to the message and to the intended audience.” 11:34

http://slate.com/id/2133316/ Somewhat eager analysis of SNL’s infamous Chronic of Narnia. “The Narnia rap doesn’t use the MCs’ extraordinary whiteness as a comedy crutch. Rather than invite easy laughs by reciting a tired checklist of ghetto stereotypes, Samberg and Parnell ditch the bling and Cristal to riff enthusiastically about the stuff they like—Magnolia Bakery’s ‘bomb frostings.’” 17:30

http://nobelprize.org/games_simulations.html Flash games produced by the Nobel Prize’s education/outreach division, completely inexplicable in purpose and design. Michele puts it well: “high-minded yet fail so hard.”

For the Lord of the Flies game, for example, you not only need to have read the book (you are warned about this), but—unless you have a very good memory—need to have read the book in like the last month, because the very first thing you need to do is drag icons of various different objects (hats, glasses, etc.) and speech bubbles onto named characters. 10:55

http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=1837641 Pictures of Volkswagen’s extremely pretty “Glass Factory,” which contains the production line for the Phaeton. It has wooden floors. (Or at least it looks like it; actual wood doesn’t seem much out of place, though.) 02:49

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4583670.stm (Largely silent) documentary about a (largely silent) order of monks is popular in Germany. 02:17

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/shouts/060109sh_shouts This is No Game: “You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana. Or what it’s like to go to a factory and put in eight long hours and then go home and realize that you went to the wrong factory.” 15:36

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/
01/02/AR2006010200282.html The inexplicable popularity of Chuck Norris. (CHUCK NORRIS!) 12:46

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43957 “Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results.” Letter to the editor: I sympathise… 11:03

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,392850,
00.html The restaurants in Ikea’s German stores are apparently very popular: there’s only 37 stores, but they have the 11th highest revenue.

“Flocks of people wait outside early every morning in order to storm the buffet at 9 a.m., when the store opens its doors. Long-distance drivers like to use IKEAs as rest stops since most of the stores are easy to see from the highway and are located close to an exit.” 11:31

http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/laptops.html Somewhat interesting report on the reliability of Apple laptops, a subject somewhat close to my heart. I suspect the absolute numbers aren’t reliable—people would have been more likely to actually complete the survey if their machine had required a repair—but the differences in failure rates between machines, and components of machines, is interesting. The hard drive on my model of 12" PowerBook, for example, is about twice a likely to have been replaced as the average. (I had to get mine replaced.)

(Someone should also use this data to figure out if the (extremely expensive) extended warranty is in fact worthwhile.) 10:42

http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/reviews/lone_star_
statements.php Lone Star Statements: One star Amazon reviews of notable books. 14:58