Space is the place Fred

                                                            If only...

This is just too good to not share: Fred Sanford meets Sun Ra. To truly appreciate its brilliance you need to be familiar with both Sanford and Son and Sun Ra, which probably rules out most everyone under forty--and many over forty if we're being honest, but its specificity just makes it that much better. Hearty thanks to whoever created it.

Tip o my hat to Jesse Walker.

Sambo's

I'm not sure why but today I found myself remembering Sambo's. We did not have them in Philly or Jersey that I recall but my dad often worked in upstate New York and I spent some time there as a kid and that's where I got to eat at Sambo's. I believe I was familiar then with the story of "Little Black Sambo" but I don't think I was old enough yet to understand why it might be an issue as the name of a restaurant. In my mind I thought I remembered that Sambo was African rather than Indian but of course our memories are thoroughly unreliable as documentary devices. As Roger Clemens would say, I misremembered. I did however correctly recall the tigers and pancakes part of the motif. Things were different in the 70's.

the mystery at owl creek bridge

Taleb's tips

Life tips from Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. He sounds like an interesting guy, I've been meaning to peruse his stuff for a while now. I especially like his opinion of economists: they're shite. I'm inclined to agree.

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

You can read the whole profile here.

I'll drink to that

Not sure how I managed to miss this over the years:

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.

~ William James, 1902

It's true. It's not the whole story--drunkenness has been known to do a few other, less appealing, things now and again--but there is truth to it.

scrapple

Speaking of Philadelphia, we had breakfast at Bob's Diner on the Ridge with its scenic view of the cemetery next door. My dad had scrapple, a Philadelphia specialty. The name is descriptive in a literal sort of way.

And like any dish named for scraps, it contains offal. Indeed, the ingredients in my supermarket's leading brand of scrapple read as follows: "Pork stock, pork livers, pork fat, pork snouts, corn meal, pork hearts, wheat flour, salt and spices". I found a recipe for scrapple in a cookbook published in 1869 that begins, "Take eight pounds of scraps of pork, that will not do for sausage." Once your meat has descended in size and quality beyond sausage utility, you are at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Sometimes I worry that there will come a day when I cut a thick slice for Sunday breakfast and find an angry embedded eyeball staring back at me from the frying pan.

I think I ate it when I was a kid until I found out how repulsive it is. But some folks, like my Pa, think it's scrapalicious. Interestingly, the author makes the case for eating scrapple on ethical grounds. Makes sense but I don't know that I'll be eating any scrapple.

card trick

My new card! I just ordered them from Moo. They do some pretty neat stuff. And it's surprisingly affordable too, especially considering that everything ships from London. I'll definitely be using them again as long as the cards show up as advertised. I opted not to use the nostrum peddler image that I've incorporated into the new banner because I just felt better, copyright-wise, using an image I had created.

Trickgnostic services offered are listed on the back of the card. Keeping with the brevity kick I tried to sum up everything I pursue in just six words. I think I succeeded:

1. Strategies
A. Suffering
B. Strength
2. Lines
A. Words
B. Notes

Yup. That's pretty much it.

Hmmm. Maybe for birthday presents I'll design cards for my pals. That could be fun.

Roberto Clemente

My favorite baseball writer Rob Neyer points me to this column by Joe Posnanski, another well respected baseball writer. I note it here because I like its prose poem about Roberto Clemente.

I’m infatuated with Roberto Clemente. And I know very little about Al Kaline. I doubt this makes me very different from most baseball fans. I’ve mentioned this here before — I believe it was while reading an essay by Nick Hornby that I heard about a prose poet whose poems would be everything they could think of (off the top of the head) about some person or some city or whatever. So …

Roberto Clemente

Born Puerto Rico
Had a fabulous arm.
Was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Branch Rickey drafted him for the Pirates.
Was called “Bob” on his early baseball cards.
Moody and proud.
Considered hypochondriac in early years.
Ferocious bad ball hitter. Pitchers couldn’t figure him out.
Wasn’t especially fast, but ran bases with abandon.
Doubles became triples.
Hit with heavy bat.
Hit .300 every year of the 1960s. Except crazy ‘68.
Often had nightmares. Couldn’t sleep at all.
Stood up for Latin players. Was as proud and fierce as Jackie.
Could not say no to people in need.
Wore No. 21. Some want that retired for every club.

Cool bones. I think I'll have to give this particular literary technique a try.

and then everyone called it skeleton town

I put this over on the other blog, but I like it so much I'm putting it here too. I found it in this long article, which is interesting in and of itself if you are so inclined, but the story of skeleton town stands just fine on its own.

Once there was a dragon who went poo poo on a house and the house broke
then when the house broke the people died
and when the people died their bones came out and broke and got together again and turned into a skeleton
and then the skeletons came along and scared the people out of the town
and then when all the people got scared out of the town then skeleton babies were born
and then everyone called it skeleton town
and when they called it skeleton town the people came back and then they got scared away again
and then when they all got scared away again the skeletons died
no one came to the town
so there was no people ever in that town ever again.

That's by a four year old. Consider me impressed. This one is pretty fun too, and it's by a two year old:

The Monkeys
They went up sky
They fall down
Choo choo train in the sky
The train fell down in the sky
I fell down in the sky in the water
I got on my boat and my legs hurt
Daddy fall down in the sky.

2/17/08: Thelonious Monk Death Day

Today is Thelonious Monk death day. If you wish to celebrate, go out and maunder in the crepuscule. I would but it's pouring rain here. I'll have to maunder inside under the fluorescent lights.

1/31/08: dim vocabulary

another vocabulary favorite:

crepuscule
twilight
dusk
nightfall
gloaming

any others?

musical accompaniment: Crepuscule with Nellie by Thelonious Monk

1/9/07: soothing vocabulary

An old vocabulary fascination of mine: synonyms for...

ointment
poultice
salve
liniment
demulcent
unguent
unction
emollient
embrocation

anybody know of others?

1/2/08: maundering monk

My word for the day: maunder.

I like the word maunder because I don't have to remember what it means, I just have to picture Thelonious Monk and I know exactly what it means.

12/19/07: The Wire

I finished the fourth season of The Wire this past weekend. I can't begin to describe how good this show is, and how...important, without it all sounding like hyperbole and I like to think I'm not prone to that. But damn--The Wire is great. And important. This fourth season will be its masterpiece I think. By the end it was heartbreaking. I can't imagine how television could be any better. Now I know that television is not taken "seriously" in cultural terms, and I would agree that most of it is terrible (and not nearly enough of it is terrible in a good way), but cinema, hell, even most literature, cannot match the depth and complexity of narrative and character development that a show like The Wire can provide by virtue of its format. And of course its quality. The Wire deserves to be discussed alongside the great American novels and films that make up the best of our cultural heritage. And that ain't hyperbole.

11/12/07: Hitchens, Islam, Pubes

Why are British papers so much better than ours?

Here's an article about Christopher Hitchens, Islam, Western culture and the disappearance of pubic hair.

I'm still trying to figure out what this sentence means (I think it has to do with getting teeth cleaned): he also traded fag-stained British hat-pegs for twinkly Hollywood gnashers.

You can read it all here.

6/10/07: tidbits

just some pithy tidbits from the last few weeks:

On Atlanta: “In the beginning, Atlanta was without form, and void; and it still is.” Roy Blount Jr.

On America:

"Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary Colossus—to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato—then the image may be worth pondering."

Niall Ferguson

On aging:

But resisting old age makes you old. It makes your losses serious. When you accept those losses, on the other hand, they become comic. You defeat old age by making friends with it. By letting it win. And you might as well, because it's going to anyway.

By comedy, I don't mean simply cracking jokes about our impending decrepitude and doom -- although that's an excellent idea. Nor do I mean an approach to life that refuses to acknowledge tragedy. I mean a spirit of regeneration, one that paradoxically springs from an abandonment of illusions. The comedic attitude offers a kind of resignation, a calm surrender to the inevitable. And it's regenerative because it doesn't see change as the enemy. It's an invincible, self-fulfilling belief, one that bubbles up from somewhere unseen.

Gary Kamiya

vaginas fail to meet standards...

It's a cool, rainy day and I am at work. The perfect sort of day to go through one's email box and do a little housecleaning.

Here's a troubling article about the growing prevalence of female genital plastic surgery. Elective surgery without medical justification mind you. Another example of the depressingly ubiquitous influence of pornography in American culture. First pubic hair begins disappearing en masse, and the disappearance reveals a new problem for women: their vaginas are not up to the standards of pornstar aesthetic perfection. In a thousand years, that'll merit a mention in The Decline and Fall of America. Before long those who still admire the old fashioned vagina, free of surgical alteration, will be odd primitives relegated to sober religious communities and the fringes of the interweb.

smoochin

Some fun kissing tidbits in the Times today:

1) The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss "making up for kisses that have been omitted." (The Germans are also said to have coined the inexplicable phrase "A kiss without a beard is like an egg without salt.")

2) According to some cultural historians, it is only within the last 800 years, with the advent of effective dentistry and the triumph over halitosis, that the lips were freed to become an erogenous zone.

3) All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting. Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale.

4) To this day, public kissing is still seen as indecent in many parts of the world. In 1990, the Beijing-based Workers' Daily advised its readers that "the invasive Europeans brought the kissing custom to China, but it is regarded as a vulgar practice which is all too suggestive of cannibalism."

5) For Freud, kissing was a subconscious return to suckling at the mother's breast. Other commentators have noted that the lips bear a striking resemblance to the labia, and that women across the world go to great lengths to make their lips look bigger and redder than they really are to simulate the appearance of sexual arousal, like animals in heat.

6) Whatever its origins, kissing seems to be advantageous. A study conducted during the 1980's found that men who kiss their wives before leaving for work live longer, get into fewer car accidents, and have a higher income than married men who don't.

Now go collect your Nachkussen pals.

THE FUTURE is now?

A very interesting biotech roundtable over at Reason.com. Worth the read.

By 2100 the typical American may attend a family reunion in which five generations are playing together. The great-great-great-grandma is 150 years old, and she will be as vital as she was when she was 30 and as vital as her 30-year-old great-great-grandson, with whom she’s playing touch football. After the game, she’ll enjoy a plate of salad greens filled with not only a full day’s worth of nutrients but the medicines she needs to repair the damage to her aging cells. She’ll be able to chat about the academic discipline—maybe economics—that she studied in the 1980s with as much acuity and depth of knowledge and memory as her 50-year-old great-granddaughter who is now studying the same thing.

No one in her extended family will have ever caught a cold. They will be immune from birth to the shocks that human flesh has long been heir to: diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her granddaughter, who recently suffered an unfortunate transport accident, will be sporting new versions of the arm and lung that got damaged in the wreck, and she’ll be playing in that game of touch football with the same skill and energy as anyone else in the family. Infectious diseases that terrified us at the beginning of the 21st century, such as HIV-AIDS and the avian flu, will be horrific historical curiosities for the family to chat about over their plates of super-fat farm-raised salmon, which will be as tasty and nutritious as any fish any human has ever eaten: “Grandma, what was it like when people got colds?” Though few of them will actually think much about it, surrounding them will be a world that is greener and cleaner, one more abundant in natural vegetation and with less of an obvious human footprint than the one we live in now.

Not only will this family enjoy all these benefits, but nearly everyone they work with, socialize with, and meet with will enjoy them as well. It will be a remarkably peaceful and pleasant world. Beyond their health and their wealth, they’ll be able to control things such as anti-social tendencies and crippling depression. And they’ll manage these problems by individual choice, through new biotech pharmaceuticals and personalized genetic treatments.

AARRGH I'm dead...

Happy Blackbeard's Death Day! Blackbeard was killed on this day in 1718 in a battle with the British Navy at Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Recent revisionist scholarship claims that Pirates were not so much roving murderous sodomites as floating autonomous communities that offered freedoms otherwise unavailable in that day and age. Either way, Pirates are cool dude.

On the mental jukebox: Ennio Morricone--I don't know the name of it, but it's from a spaghetti western soundtrack and the last line is "we are fearless men..."