2008may20. Yes my friends, yes. The Mojave Phone Booth is now on Twitter: MojaveFoneBooth. My theory is that the more people pile on, the faster the book gets done. It’s like a book pressure flash mob. Join already. Or “follow,” whatever it is. And etc.
2008may20. How Many Fifth Graders Can You Take On: An Empirical Study. See original forum post (five-year-olds) which also begat this.
2008may19. Radar: The Last Round-Up. Longish article on Main Core, “rapid development of new programs,” American concentration camps, etc. So you’re in KBR Motel and you suddenly realize: “Hey, my tax dollars paid for this place! Kicky.” It’s going to be an exciting time for sure. Do ya do the false flag, then the dollar collapses, or vice-versa, or is the collapse by itself coming soon enough? Decisions, decisions. Macro: I’m sure Obama will fix all of this.
2008may19. XKCD: Fortune Cookie update.
2008may18. Awwwwwww ... I should have known the story of the contractor who read the plans a little too closely was half too good to be true. Here’s what is most likely an untouched photo.
2008may18. Seize the Daylight. The American Luxfer Prism Company and the revival of “daylighting,” using glass prisms to reduce dependency on electrical lighting.
2008may17. I got Miscellaneous Needs, man
2008may17. A review of the The Revolution: A Manifesto.
2008may15. It is definitely fascism when it happens to you. Feelin’ Safer Already, Part Nine Billion Something.
2008may13. U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration: Some Road Songs. Government: doing what it does, so well. Buy the seven CD set.
2008may12. I was idly wondering when ram air turbines started appearing on planes, but the wikipedia entry doesn’t help any. The oldest relevant patent I can find was granted the day of the stock market crash, and indicates that the patent was an improvement on the invention. Any mention of RATs of course requires a pointer to the Gimli Glider story, which is Essential Internet Reading. It reads like a movie. Of course they’re going to land on Family Day. Directly on.
2008may12. Government: They’ll break your legs and expect a thank you for the crutches. Or they’ll put you on the rack and then take a freakish photo of you celebrating your extra length. Hooray I’m longer!
2008may11. Cops are here to protect you. A disheartening round-up of inhumane fuck-ups.
2008may11. US says cocaine routes shifting from US to Europe ... the US knows a lot about cocaine routes. Don’t do hard drugs kids, you’re just putting more money in Unca Sam’s greedy little pocket. The more you know!
2008may11. Bush is going to run again because he wasn’t actually elected in 2004.
2008may09. Friday.
Darwin’s crazy moth w/12-inch tongue
theory on the money.
Schlieren
photography
Zowie! Coney Island
caviar! [5min]
[via doc]
Book of Spam advertisement featuring toast
animation.
The reviewer finds the new Pixar movie
unbelievable.
I already told you about this, but you didn’t believe me: synchronizing
metronomes.
The Phone: a freeform
get-to-the-next-screen “experience.”
Vectorpark: Spider.
Green Porno: Isabella
Rossellini. Bugs. Sex. Safe for work, as long as your boss is cool with
seeing Isabella Rossellini humping a giant fly, for example. If your boss
is not: get a new boss or be your own! Now who’s the bug porn-watching
taskmaster?
Smithsonian:
Hyenas!
(hyenas.)
Mango crash.
Awwww yeah ... you CRASH that mango. You know what makes me hot? It’s not a
woman smashing things underneath her boot, it’s not seeing a video of a
woman crushing objects beneath impractical footwear, it’s that this is
something that makes specific people hot. That’s a turn-on, right there. My
fetish: empathy. And world peace. Also: mangoes being smooshed. HOTT
2008may05. The Gospel of Consumption.
2008may01. Reason Magazine: Power From the People. Long article on Jim Mason, the shipyard, and his trials and tribulations fighting city hall. As long as America continues to have an overly-restrictive profit-driven nanny-state permit structure, smarter/greener/more creative ways of dealing with day-to-day living are going to get caught in the net. They’re trying to stop the future. They’re always the last ones to get it. We’re running out of time. [via doc]
Still, Mason feels crushed by the conflict – and radicalized. While others on his team are more optimistic that it will all work out, he thinks experimental living in a highly regulated context might ultimately be hopeless. Never any kind of libertarian, he was shocked to discover that giving someone the right to shut down a physical site is no less a significant power than giving someone the power to arrest me. The lives of 30 people have been stopped, and there is no immediate review of that decision.
I live life in economies based on what is interesting, he adds. I’ve found no matter what the rules or processes, in the end the thing that’s interesting somehow gets chosen. But getting beat down, I realized that is completely irrelevant. They will not listen or make consideration for interest in anything. They only care, what does the letter of the code say, and does that completely encapsulate the conditions they determine are sitting in front of them? It’s an impossible set-up in which to engage the messy flux of the world.
2008apr30. A conversation with Tim Keller.
2008apr29. Excerpts from Citrus by Pierre Laszlo. A strange book.
The navel variety of orange is reminiscent of castrato singers – outstanding, but without progeny. Originally, the navel was a sweet orange in Portugal by the name of Seleta, or Selecta. It was brought to Brazil, where, in the state of Bahia, a chance hybridization produced a limb sport. A structure at one end of the fruit, similar in appearance to a navel, led to this novel variant being named umbigo, Portuguese for “navel.” Outside of Brazil, it came to be known at first as Bahia. [ ... ] In the aftermath of the Gold Rush of 1849 and the Civil War, numerous Easterners settled in California. [ ... ] Fellow colonist Luther and Eliza Tibbets had grown tired of the cold, rough winters in the Northeast. In 1873, Eliza wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC. She asked for advice on trees to plant in her front yard that might thrive in the California climate. She was sent three seedlings of the umbigo Bahia orange from Brazil. Eliza planted the trees. One was trampled by a cow, but the other two prospered. Legend has it that she used her dishwater to water them: Luther Tibbets was too lazy or too cheap to install irrigation. One of these two trees still survives in downtown Riverside at the intersection of Magnolia and Arlington avenues. ¶ As the story goes, Eliza served her oranges at a housewarming party, and they were an instant sensation. In any case, she started a mail-order business, selling budwood at five cents a bud, according to some sources, or up to five dollars each, according to others. Eliza Tibbets, a Queen Victoria look-alike, made money and became very influential. Her three orange trees were the foundation of citriculture in California, first in Riverside and later in the whole citrus belt extending from Pasadena to Riverside. [pg 37]
At the Brookhaven National Laboratory, [Richard A. Hensz, a Texas horticulturist] began to irradiate grapefruit seeds with thermal neutrons, or with with X-rays, in the hope of inducing further mutations. In 1965, he produced the Star Ruby variety, released to growers in 1970. But you can’t win ‘em all: the Star Ruby tree, resistant to damage by frost, proved to be unusually sensitive to damage from herbicides, and it bore fruit with unpredictable regularity. ¶ Back to the drawing board, and to the BNL, went Dr. Hensz. In 1976, he came up with yet another new variety, named Rio Red. It is “the paragon among red grapefruits” it is advertised to be, at least so far. Made available to growers in 1984, it is now grown nationwide. [pg 43]
Orangeries are buildings providing winter shelter for citrus trees. Their survival hangs on the air temperature not dropping below freezing for several hours. The northern Italian constructions combined protection against the wind and its chill factor with a southern exposure, as well as the use of materials such as stone or brick to store and reradiate solar heat. Sometimes, auxiliary heating by wood- or charcoal-burning furnaces was used. [pg 45]
The Sun King, Louis XIV, was the grandson of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis, her frenchified name. The design of his new palace at Versailles, especially of its gardens by Le Nôtre, merged an Italian style of garden architecture with French ideas of order and rationality, a synthesis known in French history as the Classic age. ¶ What do the hordes of tourists visiting Versailles seek? Many visit out of a sense of obligation. Versailles is a must on the tourist’s checklist. [ ... ] Little do they imagine what the place really looked like in the time of the Sun King – a mix between an American political convention and the San Firmin fiesta in Pamplona, with, on any day, about 30,000 courtiers milling around, eating and sleeping, fighting, gossiping, showing off, whoring, urinating, and defecating on the rugs – and out the windows – and, in general, spending most of their time just being idle – which, indeed, was exactly the King’s intent. ¶ To return to the present: tourists at Versailles flock to the ticket booths, then invade the inside of the palace. In so doing, they miss the whole point: Versailles was built primarily as a garden. The originality of Versailles is in the park – to which, furthermore, admission is free. Accordingly – and paradoxically – few tourists bother taking more than a few perfunctory steps outside. [pg 47]
And then there is canker. The very name of this disease, with its echo of cancer, strikes fear into the hearts of citrus growers. It is a bacterial infection by Xanthomonas axonopodis, of which there are three strains, spread by wind-driven rains. One of those strains, the Asiatic citrus canker, has infected about a million trees in Florida. ¶ Canker shows up as brown and yellow spots on citrus leaves and on the rind of the fruit. And that is all. Nontoxic to humans, it does not affect the taste of the fruit, nor its maturation. It is ugly, period. Only the outward appearance of the fruit is altered. ¶ Citrus canker thus might be just an external symptom of the striving for perfection endemic to American society. The consumer is king, and he is spoiled. American corporations endeavor to provide only the best products. Destruction of canker-affected trees and fruit costs growers in Florida an estimated $350 million per year, representing about 4 percent of the yearly income from citrus. [pg 55]
When economic forces are involved in the effort to protect citrus crops, things get complicated. In the year 2002, facing an outbreak of citrus canker in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush made an executive decision to destroy diseased trees. Thus, 1.5 million trees in commercial groves were sacrificed. In addition – you can imagine the outcry – another 603,000 trees were destroyed in the backyards of about 250,000 homeowners. ¶ This poses the dilemma, familiar to political theorists, between the prerogatives of the state and the freedom of the individual that is familiar from issues such as the wearing of safety belts or cigarette smoking. Yet Governor Bush’s decision seems a little different. He was invading the privacy of a relatively small fraction of the Florida electorate in order to preserve the well-being of a politically better organized segment of the population: the citrus growers to whom the state of Florida owes a substantial part of its prosperity (its other main economic resource being tourism). [pg 57]
For many years, in the 1920s and the 1930s, California was producing about 50 percent more oranges than Florida. ¶ During these golden years, overproduction of oranges in California again became a problem. The growers destroyed surplus fruit in an attempt to stabilize the price, burning tons of oranges with kerosene-fed fires. Such actions were considered shocking during the Depression, when many Americans were starving. [pg 96]
The Sun Up Foods scam netted that company between $10 and $20 million. In 1990, an employee went to the hidden room that pumped liquid beet sugar into the orange juice it was processing. Stainless steel pipes hidden in the walls were set up to appear to be part of the sewage system. In the event of a government inspection, the sugar-carrying line could be turned off, and the outside pipe closed to conceal the illicit sugar pipeline. [ ... ] The main adulterants are corn syrup and beet sugar, since 98 percent of the total soluble organic content of the juice consists of sugars, predominantly sucrose, glucose, and fructose. [pg 105]
A major aspect of Chinese alchemy was potable gold. Chinese proto-chemists had devised procedures for turning the precious metal into aqueous suspensions of tiny particles, colloidal gold that one could drink. The notion was that the inalterability of the noble metal would be transmitted to whomever drank it, conferring on the drinker good health and immortality. [pg 130]
2008apr29. Entry #498271a in my fictional Big Fat Book of America: The Incredibly Painful History of a Country That Can Yell Louder Than Any Other.
2008apr25. Electric car round-up.
2008apr25. Clublife: The Meta VIP Area.
2008apr24. Your astrology sucks: an examination of why all astrology sucks. Astrologers: dicks. Well, now I guess everyone will shut up about astrology and astrological signs, etc.
2008apr24. Secreted deep within an ask.metafilter post about a “travelling” party game is this gem:
There’s an exceptionally difficult-to-get version of this which goes as follows. You ask any question which has a yes or no answer, and anyone who’s “in” on it can reply with a yes or no.
Typically the questions are about a journey like “Can I go to Dundee?,” “Can I go to Zimbabwe?,” “Can I go to Boston by train?,” “Can I go to Boston by train now?” and so on.
The game is very confusing because the answer to the same question can change, and yet everyone who’s “in” on it will agree on what the answer is.
Of course, the poor victims come up with increasingly elaborate rules about vowels, starting letters, longitudes, latitudes and so on, until they finally get it.
It’s best played slightly drunk and with more than one person in on the secret, because otherwise people tend to suspect that there IS no secret. But there is. And it’s this:
If the person says “um” or “err” in the question, the answer is yes, otherwise it’s no. So, “Can I go to Paris?” is no, but “Can I go to, um, Paris?” is yes. Typically, when people think they have it cracked, they start to “um” a lot more, so get a string of false positives.
It’s viciously cruel, but fun.
2008apr22. NYMag: Your shoes suck: an examination of why all shoes suck. Shoes: dicks.
2008apr19. A piece of mail I recently received indicates that I’ve been “pre-selected” for an American Express card. So I’ll just wait here until I get a piece of mail indicating that I’ve been selected, I guess. Send food.
2008apr18. Texas.com. What a boring site. It should be Texas-sized. Body font size = 27 points. You should only be allowed to access it if you type it in caps. TEXAS.COM. Bold. Lawless. Insane. I wasn’t even thinking of Commander Dipshit when I wrote that last sentence. These are my Texas rules for Texas-based web browsing. Texas.
TEXAS.
2008apr13. Gary Pettis looks into his own soul. [via doc]
2008apr11. Out-of-control car injures six on courthouse steps. Noted for last sentence.
2008: jan feb mar apr may 2007: jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec
