BE BE: the bloggable brody

Test

2006-06-14T17:17:00.000-05:00

Test post. working on phloggable brody site

On Positive Affect

2005-11-13T13:49:00.000-06:00

I'm beginning to understand positive affect. For instance, this week I passed my qualifying exams. Though a big milestone and thus somewhat stressful, exams were easy, really. More like a check-up than an operation. After exams though I've noticed some subtle differences. People congratulate me more than they used to. Its more than ABD - where I used to brood now I converse. Where I used to be sarcastic now I'm witty. And suddenly pretty Lithuanian sociologists take notice. Frankly, it's taken me by surprise.

Positive affect extends to the smallest, most inconsequential, most tertiary aspects of life. Take my fantasy football team. I had a shit draft, lost my best receiver in the first week, and have been in the basement ever since. Yet things are looking up. While it's true that I'm a lowly eighth out of ten in the standings, eighth place makes the playoffs in our league. And come playoff time I should be the team to beat. How could this be? Because l-a-r-r-y-j-o-h-n-s-o-n spells TOUCHDOWNS. Look for me in the winner's circle, my friends!

A bloggable update

2005-11-09T00:29:00.000-06:00

The way our qualifying exams work, your committee gives you three questions to write over three days. A couple of days after submitting your written exam, you meet with the committee for an oral defense. I'm in the pre-orals purgatory stage, and can't help but feel nervous. I'm fine! I'm in trouble! I'm fine! I'm in trouble!

Really I'm fine. No problem. But still, I can't help but feel nervous. Its a gut reaction. I meet with my committee Thursday morning. It should be a good conversation.

I've been meaning to send a couple of posts - one on a Sam Peckinpah film and another on how I'm set to win my fantasy football league, but y'all'll have to wait with baited breath until this weekend.

Qualifying Exams

2005-10-31T19:25:00.000-06:00

I just got the questions for my qualifying exam. The written work is due this Thursday, with an oral defense the following Thursday. Well, in case you're wondering - and I know you are - I'm including the questions below. I mean, why start on the exam when I can just blog about it...

1. Peter Hall, in the book “Cities of Tomorrow,” states that in the U.S., social pathology has been divorced from any discussion of urban design solutions. What role could design, as conceptualized by both current and earlier generations of planners, play in addressing social problems like urban poverty and the permanent “underclass”? Discuss the various theoretical viewpoints about the role and limitations of design in addressing social problems. What are the methodological and empirical factors that complicate the attempt to use design in solving social problems? Discuss why solutions that have to do with city design are controversial. Construct a framework around which the many complexities can be organized and understood.

2. You have identified several approaches to design inquiry rational models, problem solving, conversational description, abductive reasoning, sense making that focus primarily on how design happens. Other normative approaches classical, modernist, new urbanist focus on content and form, on what should result rather than how it is designed. If your intent is to influence urban design through teaching, advocating, designing, or meta-designing which of the approaches to design inquiry and normative outcomes will be useful, in what ways, and why? What do we not know about any of these approaches that might be knowable and ease your task of influencing urban design? In other words, what can an urban design scholar add to what we know?

3. In addition to the scholarship on inquiry in design, which considers design as a process of inquiry, there is also a substantial body of work that is inquiry about design itself. As a complex, messy process, much of which is hidden from view, design represents a challenge for those seeking to study it. What are some of these challenges and how have they been addressed in the methods used in these studies? To illustrate how choices about methods might be made, please identify a very simple (even simplistic) question about design and discuss how you would deal with methodological choices in an empirical study of that question.

BB on DD

2005-10-25T16:46:00.000-05:00

who would have guessed that wysp, as good as it is already, could possibly eclipse itself? sure howard stern is pretty good, but soon we'll get david lee roth, and diamond dave is a kind of god among motrals. finally a radio format with the potential to be free -- free, people, truly free! infinity answered the prayers i never knew i had...

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1512155/20051025/
roth_david_lee.jhtml?headlines=true

Russian proposal spam

2005-10-21T17:50:00.000-05:00

I just got this email through Friendster. The capitalization is the best part...

I searched here for you very long and already thought, that was not existing for I suitable person. But when I saw your profile, me At once it became interesting and that it in my heart has pricked. I thought, That it - the mark from above also has decided to write to you this letter...

My name - Maria. I still very young, but very much restriction of the girl. Life of me checked up very much and now I write you this letter. Who knows, what with us will be tomorrow? But I want to get acquainted with you and Is simple to continue a stream of life. I very lonely girl also search for the same The lonely person who will steal my heart and will open for me doors In heart. My very serious purposes. I believe in love in, and I believe this The love always will spend fortunately and to creation fine families. Certainly, the love may bring and is torn, but I want it, these tears were only Tears of happiness. Probably you may represent me happiness, and I shall answer you The same happiness. I have chosen you from a set of people because you seem to me such person, With which it is possible to continue edge of light and to not be afraid for life. You seem To me very interesting and very clever person. I think, that you have feeling The humour and with you it will be never boring. The same as well as with me...

I shall look forward to hearing from you very much. Please, write to me on mine e-mail: [I deleted this] I necessarily shall answer you, and I shall inform more about me directly, and also I shall send Photos. I have made a choice and it - YOU. Now you make a choice and Do not leave my letter without the answer. Will entrust to heart, and listen only Directly.

Have good time of days, it is sincere and with
the big interest, to you - Maria.

Netflix

2005-10-11T20:10:00.000-05:00

I'm a new Netflix customer. I love it! I love the convenience, I love what I'm watching, and I love the packaging. Those envelopes are cool!

Netflix has helped feed my West Wing obsession. I watch it in three hour, four episode marathons. I think like Sam Seaborn and Josh Lyman, in smart and biting tones. I've even started dreaming in West Wing: the content is the same - I still lecture to my students and question the authority of science, but now I dream about lecturing to my students and questioning the authority of science in the confines of the White House, and its the chief of staff's daughter I'm kissing instead of, well, nevermind...

Do you run Netflix? We should exchange reviews and whatnot.

2005-10-04T18:14:00.000-05:00

Speaking of, I'd like to recommend the music oriented blogs of a couple of friends in case you don't know them or haven't checked out their blogs before. Links to Dough and Anne's blogs are on the right. They're good! Informative! Suitably knowledgeable and esoteric! I especially like Doug's recent post making fun of rockers with bad teeth...

Birth of an aesthete

2005-10-04T18:07:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about the first songs that I ever picked out as liking on my own. I mean the very first songs here, even before I got a sense of what kind of music I liked, long before I had favorite bands. When kids are young - say in third or fourth grade - they haven't yet formed a personal identity, about anything really. So there are worlds to be explored. Because my parents hadn't yet gotten cable, I had to test the waters of Philadelphia radio: WMMR, WYSP, that pop station that was at the top of the dial (I forget its name - I think it went oldies or talk radio by junior high).

Anyway, here are the goods:

1. I wanna dance with somebody/Whitney Houston
2. Aqualung/Jethro Tull
3. California Girls/David Lee Roth... Okay I'm lying on this last one. (Would that I had been so cool!) Acutally its more like Taco's Puttin' on the Ritz.

This goes a long way to explaining my curiously bad taste w/ certain things...

The evils of caffeine

2005-09-28T18:04:00.000-05:00

Closely related to the whole napping-is-evil thing is that caffeine is evil too. One vicious cycle feeds into the other, mandelbrot-style, until life is pocked by bursts of insomnia, wiredness, crashing, naps, wired naps, crashing insomnia, and dreaming about insomnia and waking up from naps and being wired.

In college caffeine was a kind of necessary evil. It is only in the past couple of years that I've come to like coffee - only as I discovered things like La Colombe, the New York Times, and pretty girls who like coffee. Now I really like coffee. It's a part of life. There's little disconnect between the aroma of coffee and the feel of books and newspaper. When I taste 'coffee', my mind tastes 'smart', and I'm a man of the wor(l)d.

Pop is similarly set deep in experience. It tastes good, sure. It's sugary sweet. But moreso it tastes like my youth, and like summer, like the REM green tour or ballgames at the Vet, or picnicing. The taste of pop is comes with an American appeal, one that's familiar, innocent and likable.

So while napping is a bad habit, caffeine is more insidious. Not napping becomes another kind of habit: it might be tough to make the transition, but napping and not-napping are reasonable substitutes. Not caffeine, though, means a loss of me.

The evils of napping

2005-09-13T21:37:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago in Chicago Fresh Water Mussels was talking about how bad napping was for you. The problem, for her, was that naps were habit forming. Take a nap one afternoon, and you can't help but want to take one the next. And soon you're like Rip Van Winkle, Sir Sleepsalot, Nappy McGee. I remembered it being kind of funny and endearing, because later when we got back from the 40-year old virgin and discussed meeting friends for drinks she said she was just going to take a nap for a bit to rest up. I thought she was kidding. A midnight nap? Hopeless! I'll talk to you in the morning I said (correctly).

Lately though I've been trapped in a sick kind of marraige of insomnia and narcolepsy, and it's affecting work. So I'll concede her point: naps really are evil. And habit forming. Buckminster Fuller, he of the extemporaneous fourteen hour lectures on Spaceship Earth, once maintained that he had trained himself to exist on six twenty minute naps a day and nothing more (think of the efficiency!). Let's face it though - Fuller is a less than ideal role model.

As soon as I can get a good night's sleep, I'm quitting naps. I swear it.

So I joined a bike gang...

2005-09-11T18:20:00.000-05:00

I recently joined a bicycle gang. We're calling ourselves the Hill Street Bike Gang - Hill St. is our territory. This all started around a month ago, but yesterday was our real debut. We made iron-on shirts with menacing looking images (dead squirrels, wolf's heads, and crows flying in for their kill) and 'represented' at a couple of the local bars. You don't want to mess with HSBG.

This whole bike gang idea really is just as stupid as it sounds. Still, making t-shirts is fun. And we're actually not the only gang in town: surprisingly, we came across a rival gang from Urbana (the Cobras) on our very first night out. Now we have to rumble. We meet next Saturday in downtown Champaign.

Santorum Suggests Stick

2005-09-07T08:07:00.000-05:00

The problem in New Orleans, apparently, is that dysentery, starvation and possible death aren't significant enough disincentives to staying.

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/
special_packages/hurricane_katrina/12577970.htm

Our future president is an asshole. Have some compassion Rick. Some people have their homes, their lives, their souls in New Orleans. An evacuation seems like a good idea, sure, but that shouldn't mean that people should be punished for not doing what they're told.

the saints come marching in

2005-08-30T21:28:00.000-05:00

I have a morbid fascination with watching natural disasters unfold. I admit it. After calling Jen Sunday I was glued to the computer looking for updates. Yesterday it looked like Katrina might not be as bad for New Orleans as feared, but today it seems worse.

A massive hurricane is only the start for New Orleans. In most places floods recede over time as water travels downhill. New Orleans, though, is the downhill. Katrina not only flooded New Orleans directly, it also damaged levees enough that both Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi are draining into it. Recovery doesn't start until the water subsides, and it will have to be pumped out. In the mean time, a city has no electricity and no potable water, and detritus from oil refineries, chemical plants and, grimly, cemeteries is sifting through the Mississippi delta.

SoI keep watching, spellbound. It's a lotfiller in real life. And much like the last American disaster I think about the planning implications. Will this push the country into a recession? Will they valmeyer New Orleans onto higher ground?

Virgin is the New Rich

2005-08-23T16:11:00.000-05:00

I saw the 40 Year Old Virgin this weekend with oh let's call her Fresh Water Mussels. I expected this to be funny, but was surprised that it was so good. Steve Carell was able to carry the movie as a lead, although he never quite broke out of his comedian's mug. Catherine Keener was more than we deserved. The overall arc of the movie was painful when it hit close to home. And the details were good - Carrell's character's Comeauesque toy collection, e.g., was more than fodder for mockery: he uses it as a crutch during a burst of frustration.

The thing is that since Wedding Crashers I've been whining about lotfiller comedies that are merely kind of funny without being anything more. Movies like Animal House in its exuberance or Ferris Bueller in its exuberance and moments of teen angst transcend feature length sketch comedy. 40 Year Old Virgin manages to transcend this as well, at least to a degree. Without giving much away, my favorite part might just be the movie's ending, a bit of incongruity reminiscent of the ending of Slapshot or other films from cinema's golden era.

Lose Weight Now!

2005-08-18T21:13:00.000-05:00

Ask me how!

I'm so entertained by the content driven advertising that Google has been sending lately. They're all about weight loss, even though I gave up the Lohan-related branding. It makes me wonder what else I can get to the blog. I might go for pharmaceuticals next.

The bloggable brody is up to $1.88 in revenue, in case you were wondering...

Guns Germs and Steel

2005-08-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

After a couple of months, and a couple of disparaging posts, I've almost finished the Dan Brown I mean Jared Diamond book Guns Germs and Steel. To his credit, Diamond is pretty knowledgable. A couple of thoughts, though:

1. Guns, Germs and Steel is a shitty name for this book given its emphasis on the ecological forces shaping human societies. A better troika lies in the concluding chapter, where Diamond recaps themes of Environment, [intra- and inter- community] Interchange, and Scale. Diamond's emphasis on the ecological/processural rather than technological/object-oriented is useful and fitting, so it's disappointing that he apparently felt the need to juice up the title.

2. Others could correct me if I am wrong, but this approach isn't exactly groundbreaking, is it? I would think that Braudel's A History of Civilizations is likely an earlier, more significant contribution to historiography. (Of course this wasn't necessarily Diamond's intent).

3. Back to the title, well, I think it matters. In calling his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Daimond calls attention to determining factors in the superiority of one community over another in matters of war. (Even here the title does not reflect Diamond's thesis, as it ignores literacy and both guns and steel cover the same territory.) Never mind that Diamond likely picked the title merely to pander to a popular audience. What should we make of this book? What should we take from it? From one reading of Guns, Germs, and Steel, we might gain an awareness of ecology, and seek to interact with our environment in a more sustainable fashion. From another reading, one might view human history the development of separate competing communities in which common ecological concepts of dominance, invasion, colonization, etc. are accepted as a matter of course.

4. Science - particularly written to a popular audience - is a servant of human activity. If one insists that science has a kind of objectivity to it, surely one would acknowledge that how we persue scientific activity, how we write science, and how we choose to make use of it are all matters with an ethical dimension.

Many times I found Diamond's line of questioning incomplete and misguided. When we study human societies we should, first, not seek merely knowlege but also understanding and second, participate in an ethical discussion that considers whether actions are good or right. We shouldn't let science overtake the responsibility inherent in human volition. Too often throughout this book, Diamond asks why X conquered Y, giving intelligent, detailed, well-articulated answers that sum up to "because X could".

File under abstract

2005-08-15T14:20:00.000-05:00

A rather disconcerting bit from anotherbrody's blog:

Instead, I've been visiting friends and my brother all across the midwest, which is just as good -- a lot of these people will disappear into the abstract "people I used to know" part of my life soon.

I'll try to stay concrete.

Anyway, I've taken him to our world class university computing labs so he can catch up on stuff, so I'll try to catch up too. I've been meaning to write.

Four Brothers

2005-08-15T13:54:00.000-05:00

Anotherbrody and I saw Four Brothers last night. Anotherbrody found the plot tiresome, reminiscent of trite TV crime dramas like Cold Case that seem to involve an endless string of police interviews. But I liked the movie. It's a good entry in the modern cowboy genre, where the protagonists take justice into their own hands.

We also both saw The Island separately within the past week. (You might have seen adverts for this one right here on bloggable brody.) I liked it overall but, again, anotherbrody didn't. But then I'm the cinema optimist of the family...

Design and Corporations

2005-07-28T22:54:00.000-05:00

Because all you ever hear about in school is individual genius, and because I like design, and because it's earnings week and I read the Journal, I've been thinking about great design companies. Let's recognize firms that design well, or for whom design is central to their organization. It's a top three list for now:

3. Toll Brothers: They're detailing is way beyond what, e.g., Hovanian is able to do. More importantly, they've been good at developing whole new categories of residential development (think 50+ active living communities).

2. Apple: No other company is as closely identified with design. And they're products *are* good. The ipod, itunes, ilife: they're transformative. And I generally like the packaging.

1. Starbucks: Okay, first they helped introduce coffee to the mass market - or moreso changed where and how we consume it. But it's not about the coffee (and Starbucks knows it). Starbucks is giving people a third place that you can visit during the day.

Honorable mention: Proctor and Gamble, IKEA.

Lindsay Lohan to fight Duran-Duran

2005-07-21T21:16:00.000-05:00

Rumor has it that Lindsay Lohan is slated to play the, er, titular role in a remake of Barbarella. She better start snacking again. It's not like you can save the universe on an empty stomach, Lindsay...

Food for Thought

2005-07-18T19:39:00.000-05:00

Like most of the world, I'm disappointed with Lindsay Lohan. Her trajectory from young girl to young woman to young celebrity is an ugly camel's hump. The Hayley Millsesque wholesomeness of her early years was endearing enough, and the milk-fed beauty she displayed in recent pictures is a kind not often seen in Hollywood. Between filming and publicizing her recent lotfiller Herbie: Fully Loaded, however, she's gone downhill. Her well-publicized weight loss is, at best, a questionable career move.

Miss Lohan's argument that because she is a celebrity she should be shaped like one carries little weight. Rather it feeds a growing crisis in our society as the gap between the images we promote in the media and the snacker's lifestyle we maintain becomes ever wider. I have been hoping that the national publicity surrounding Miss Lohan's recent evolution would turn into national outrage. Perhaps blogs like this may help.

I, for one, am the kind of person who hungers for real, natural, healthy beauty. Are our ranks so thin?

The Bloggable Brody in Review I

2005-07-15T18:01:00.000-05:00

As this blog is coming up on its one hundredth day, I wanted to review its progress. All in all, it has turned out better than I expected. Just as intended, I have infrequently published a mix of posts about both me and topics that interest me -- though I should note that I'm publishing less infrequently than some other bloggers that I follow. I have found writing to be a rewarding experience that sharpens my thinking about important subjects. What do you think? Is there something more/less that you'd like from the bloggable brody? Have there been particular posts that you've enjoyed more than others?

The Bloggable Brody in Review II

2005-07-15T17:49:00.000-05:00

I started working with AdSense a couple of weeks ago - no doubt you've noticed the tastefully unobtrusive content-linked ads on the site. I see the ads as a first step in monetizing the bloggable brody brand. Not much happened the first week, but on July 8th, bam!, I made my first 41cents.

In case you're wondering, this site has totalled 221 page impressions, 12 clicks, and $1.03 in total earnings since I first placed ads on the site July 1st. Peak numbers were 40 impressions, 4 clicks, and $.63, all on different days.

$1.03 is a start, but I intend to make much more. Though I'm no expert, I think my 5.4% click through rate is actually pretty good. If I can significantly scale up the number of page impressions while maintaining this rate I should be sitting pretty. I'm going to work hard on this - look in the coming week for new content and a subtle rebranding of the site so that it will reach a broader audience.

Yankees at Midseason

2005-07-12T15:24:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of pessimism about the Yankees' prospects this year. At the all star break, we were stuck in third place in our division, behind Boston and Baltimore, and our record is not much better than .500. Several Yankee observers cite the team's age, defense, pitching, and farm system as causes for concern.

I am more sanguine. Though streaky, the Yankees' chances for a World Series title are better than they've been in a couple of years. Five things are coming together for us that few seem to appreciate:

1. Derek Jeter has turned into the legitimate leadoff hitter that we've been missing for a while.
2. The team's on-base percentage leads the majors, and we've drawn 146 more walks than we've given out. With Stottlemyre and Mattingly's help, the Yankees work the count better than any other team.
3. The Yankees have gotten significant contributions from rookies (Cano, Wang, and now Cabrera) for the first time in a number of years.
4. Though only three deep, the bullpen has stabilized. Rivera remains a top shelf closer.
5. With Womack, Jeter, and Rodriguez, the Yankees can now balance power with speed.

Yes, our outfield defense has been frightful at times, and our starting pitching brittle. But we have Al Leiter again - a decent bandaid - and we'll have seven starters by late August when everyone is healthy. Is there anyone else who wouldn't mind seeing eminently available Corey Patterson in a Yankees uniform come August?

This Past Week

2005-07-07T19:38:00.000-05:00

Here's some stuff that I did this past week:

1. War of the Worlds: We saw Spielberg's take on the classic L. Ron Hubbard story at the drive-in. It was only so-so. Tom Cruise's ivory toothed charisma wasn't a good fit for his character, a working class schlub, and the special effects were unmasked and disjointed. On the other hand, everyone who is going to see War of the Worlds should see it at a drive-in theater. Spielberg holds close to Cruise's character's point of view, so that the audience only knows as much as Cruise does. It was unnerving. I half expected tripods to take over Gibson City.
2. Kieran's Wedding: Kieran rocks. The wedding was generally low-key and whimsical. I was seated at a table of mathletes and felt at home. It was good fun.
3. Champaign County Freedom Celebration: The local fireworks were surprisingly good. Apparently they send out mailers to everyone soliciting $15 donations, so the budget was larger than you might expect for an area Champaign's size. We staked out an area just past the fallout zone and huddled under a blanket to wait out a rainstorm before the show. It was worth it. Because we weren't in the official viewing area we managed to avoid the patriotic soundtrack that accompanied the fireworks.

Lotfillers

2005-06-29T21:55:00.000-05:00

Blockbuster is one of the words coming out of movies that is most embedded in our everyday language. It refers, of course, to a product that is so widely popular that it results in enormous sales (a blockbuster drug) or, perhaps, information or an event that is so important or newsworthy that it becomes ubiquitous in conversation. Living above an old movie theater helps me appreciate what the term means. When movies are popular enough, people arrive in numbers and early enough to they can be assured of tickets. The line that forms extends past the theater and around the block. Blockbuster lines stop traffic, disrupt neighboring businesses, and become events in themselves. While the Art Theater (the one I live above) doesn't generally book the kinds of movies that become blockbusters, the Virginia Theater just a block away does, and the crowds that have come there for blockbusters are certainly memorable. It's something I like about my neighborhood.

Downtown Champaign is an exception, however. The very movies that made blockbuster common parlance also pushed it beyond its literal meaning. Blockbuster movies like Jaws and Star Wars helped fund the last great round of theater building. The multiplexes they helped birth, with Dolby surround sound and stadium seating, have been located in suburban locales - first on the outlots of shopping malls and now as stand-alones in power centers. These venues are no longer sited on blocks. Because the facilities are separated from neighboring uses and the surrounding community the disruptive effect of blockbuster movies has become, well, less disruptive, and blockbusters lose the 'big event' kind of excitement that they used to generate. At least locally.

A more appropriate word might be lotfiller. Opening weekends for the big movies now help fill the multiplex parking lots that are often mostly empty for all but the peak times. The significant experience in a lotfiller is not the wait but also comraderie of standing in line but rather the anxious tedium of driving down aisles looking for a parking spot. The effect most notable on its surrounding environs is the concentrated traffic loading that happens when the movie lets out. There are three differences between blockbuster and lotfiller. The experience changes from pedestrian to auto-oriented, and the impact and excitement of the crowds are isolated and minimized. More subtly, the term connotes a feeling of 'filling up' rather than 'overflowing', a nuance that may have value in a world of systems built for redunancy and excessive capacity.

Lotfiller: it's a new term. Let's put it to use.

Top Six Picks

2005-06-29T21:46:00.000-05:00

Because Josh and Mike both asked me to, here's six songs that are in my car stereo:

1. The Weight : The Band
2. Judy Blue Eyes : Crosby Stills & Nash
3. Seymour Stein : Belle & Sebastian
4. Only in Your Heart : America
5. At The Dark End Of The Street : Clarence Carter
6. Mr. Brightside : The Killers

I'm supposed to get six people to pick the same. You can self-select yourselves.

Ron and Suzy

2005-06-23T14:44:00.000-05:00

I've been entertaining my parents here for the last couple of days. It's been fun. In other places when people come to visit everyone becomes a tourist, but in Champaign there isn't much to see. We've looked at the university campus, my office, and the local historical museum, which is housed in the oldest building in the county and currently has a quilt exhibit on display. Yesterday we drove to Springfield to see the Dana Thomas House. Afterwards I took them to a Dairy Queen. Mostly it's been like a regular vacation, and we've spent a lot of time sitting around, playing cards, and talking. Dad's a lot more pessimistic about the Yankees season than I am.

2005-06-23T14:38:00.000-05:00

Sometimes stuff just doesn't go right. Little things. A habitual editor, I've found myself sending messages before they were finished. I'll send snarky commentary on a funny link, but without the link. I forgot the rent was due. My internal monologue is slightly less attuned to the world than it should be. I'm blaming this on the stuffy summer heat. In grade school my childhood friend used to insist that we not use our brains over summer vacation - "No thinking!" - this because school was out, and because we didn't have to, so that we really shouldn't waste the energy...

Bistro Temple Buell

2005-06-18T22:15:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this, you probably find snack packaging as fascinating as I do. A couple of items available in our department vending machines:

1. Foster clued me into the late semester appearance of the "Gourmet Big Az Boston Creme Honey Bun". The packing of this is actually pretty conventional, if plus-sized. But you have to agree that the name is something else. I like the use of the 'z' because it leaves you open to the double meaning of Big Ass and Big as Boston without directly pointing to either. I haven't tried one (yet) but it looks like a conventional honey bun, with no actual Boston Creme.

2. Doritos. The Frito-Lay company is in a tough spot here. They flirted with superlatives a couple of years ago when they changed the name of the nacho chesse flavor Doritos to "Nacho Cheesier Doritos" and the cool ranch flavor to "Cooler Ranch". The next logical step is introducing Nacho Cheesiest, of course. But this presents the company with a conundrum, because it would imply a finality in their ability to innovate (and, concomitantly, raise prices). Instead, this year's packaging update included the uninspiring slogan "Now better tasting!". Remarkably, however, this text is set in a black picture that is clearly meant to be a POWER STRIP. There are cables plugged into it and everything. WTF? Maybe they wanted to go high tech. Yet they took one of the least glamorous images of technology you could find to do it. One other possibility is that the chips are supposed to be supercharged. At any rate, I have bought these new Doritos a couple of times. "Now better tasting!" would be more to the point if it instead said "Now more coloring!". They're not natural.

God Help Me

2005-06-15T19:35:00.000-05:00

when I have to get a day job for real. I was good the first two days this week, but couldn't sleep last night and didn't make it into the office until three today. THREE!

I came in unshaven with big bags under my eyes, and with my trousers hanging a bit because I was never able to get my belt back from Esther. I got predictable ribbing from my temporary coworkers (Late night last night? Miami beach get a little wild? Oye! El esta aqui!). I walked in to see RD working at the conference table/my temporary desk. He wasn't supposed to be in until tomorrow but cut his Hawaii vacation short because 'Hawaii is awful'. We talked about the project for a couple of hours. Fortunately RD was jetlagged, so we were more or less at the same level of coherency.

I couldn't even make it a week getting to the office on time. Ugh.

Miami/Work II

2005-06-10T17:16:00.000-05:00

I'm going back to Miami tomorrow to finish stuff for the code book project. Now, I'm a smart guy. I've been doing good work at two good libraries. Still, scanning stuff at the DPZ office is the top priority. For some reason no one else but me can do it.

Haven't they heard of Manpower? It doesn't take a phd to operate a scanner. As far as I can tell they're paying less for my labor than they are for my travel expenses.

One positive: I'll be able to get to the beach this time around.
Another positive: The heat has been stifling in Illinois, and I've been useless. Like a dog that can't be bothered to lift their head. God bless hotel air conditioning.

2005-06-03T17:49:00.000-05:00

You can pretty well capture the drawbacks of Champaign by doing a jdate search: there are but six female jdaters between the ages of 22 and 36 who live within sixty miles of Champaign, and only one is an active member. Of course, this search is just as indicative of the low proportion of esthers as it is of the small pool of women overall. If you are open to shiksas, as I am, Champaign would probably look much better. Still, Champaign *is* a small pond.

Will have to start onlybrodydate.com so I can get better data on this...

2005-06-03T17:40:00.000-05:00

Lately I've come to realize that I've shed some of the rage and angst that characterized my early years. To wit: I like my program, and I like Champaign. Things are pretty much okay here. Sure the department is a little, er, disorganized, but I'm moving along. And yes, Champaign is both small and flat. But it's not a bad place really. There are things like coffee shops and friends that make it likeable. I'm less of a complainer than I used to be.

Damn Good Fruit

2005-05-29T15:01:00.000-05:00

Here's my latest good idea: breeding/engineering fruit to be naturally salty! Because nothing tastes better than sweet and salty combined.

Think about how good it would taste to bite into a sweet, juicy orange and get a taste of salt as well. It'd only make you want to eat more.

I'm going to make a mint. We're calling the venture Damn Good Fruit, as in "Damn Good Fruit: sweet naturally, and naturally salty" or "Damn Good Fruit: it's about you." There could be Damn Good Apples, Damn Good Melons, Damn Good Plums... I'm getting hungry just thinking about it!

Seriously, why hasn't anyone thought of this before? It can't be that hard to make fruit salty. We make fruit lots of stuff already.

Wake Me Up Before You Go Go

2005-05-29T14:30:00.000-05:00

I pulled into a BP station yesterday to get gas for my Mazda. The thing is, the pump handle was jammed: it took some finagling to get it going, and when the tank was full the handle didn't snap back enough to trigger the computer to complete the sale (although it did stop pumping gas). I tried to fix the situation but squeezed the handle a little too tightly and shot a stream of gas across the station lot. And damn, I really zoolandered my car. The worst part is I left the driver's side door open, so the inside of the door took most of the gas. The interior reeks.

No metaphors here, just the straight, honest truth. It's been a long couple of weeks..

Miami/Work

2005-05-15T17:58:00.000-05:00

I'm in Miami working with a renowned designer on a case-based history of town planning codes.

RD explains the project: "Codes are so interesting, you know. The problem is that nobody finds them interesting. That's why we need to do this book, you see, to explain codes to people so they become interested in them." It's going to be a coffee table book.

Miami, btw, is great. I am once again staying in South Beach. South Beach is better, more inviting than one might imagine from the tv commercials and true crime stories. There's fancy people and fancy things, but grit as well. There's lots of deco architecture, homeless people, and aspiring models. In some respects it is like what Center City Phila and/or Wildwood would be like, if the two were next to each other instead of 60 miles apart. Curiously, I hear Paula Abdul songs everywhere. My music jam for the weekend, though, is Lisa Lisa with Cult Jam.

Ooh baby, I think I love you. From head to toe!

Fu Manchu

2005-05-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

For a long time I had patchy spots at the sides of my lips, around my dimples, where my facial hair didn't grow evenly. In the past year, though, it started to fill in. Now I'm finally able to live out my dream: a kick-ass fu manchu mustache, the kind with sides that grow down towards the chin. The kind that says DANGEROUS. I've been working on it for about a week.

If you're guessing that I look more like Freddy Mercury than Lee Van Cleef, you're probably right. But I'm sticking with it anyway. Mike and Heather's wedding here I come!

Illinois Hydrology

2005-05-09T17:54:00.000-05:00

Central Illinois is so goddamn flat.

I took a drive yesterday. The land is flat for miles around. Not Tom Friedman flat, but the real deal. There is some undulation in the farmland, but mostly it looks like a crumpled up paper that's been flattened out again: there are some creases there but no change overall.

This is the richest farmland in the world. Until the nineteenth century though most of it wasn't even passable in the summer months. Central Illinois is so goddamn flat that the winter snow and spring rain didn't drain until well past summer. The Native Americans farmed only to the south and east, along the river banks where the soil was still soft but the slope greater. When it was settled by whites they had to build networks of underground pipes to help drain the land. It's a giant sewer system. Most of the region is still covered in a series of taxing districts that go to maintain it.

Anyway, the only place I've seen that is similarly flat is the shore, and when I drove down the county roads in the heat yesterday I thought of it. I mean I felt it. Like the twinge of salt beneath my eyes. Like the haze of distant asphalt was ocean...

News for Numismatists

2005-05-02T23:35:00.000-05:00

Recently the snootiest bar in town began giving Kennedy half-dollars in change when paying for drinks. Now, this was clearly intentional. I checked by subsequently ordering drinks that cost $X.50. Their business manager had to have made a decision to order half-dollars instead of just quarters at their bank. As if they thought the half-dollars would make them just a little more sophisticated than they were before. AND IT WORKS. For me at least. I felt like I was in a casino. I tipped the (pretty) bartender an extra fifty cent piece and kept a couple just to put into circulation later.

Mike Castle and those other ninnys in Congress should keep this in mind when they think about making another forty-odd versions of the dollar coin. We don't need another form of commemorative stamping. This fosters collecting but not use. If you really want to replace the dollar we need coins with a) utility or b) cache.

Pavement Schmavement

2005-04-26T17:48:00.000-05:00

or Burn Arcade Fire Burn

I have a confession to make: I'm no indie rocker.

I've come to this conclusion only recently. I mean, I like music - a lot. The friends I have and seek are also likely to like music, a lot. When I first got here I was happy to find a colleague who used to do A&R for matador, because I knew I'd be at home. Still, indie rock, it just isn't me. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the low fidelity, or the haircuts, or maybe it's that I just can't keep up with everything.

Yo La Tengo, Pavement, GBV: sure, they're good bands. I listen to them once in a while. But I'm more likely to listen to the Cars. Really my indie rockness peaked with Superchunk and Bettie Serviert. There, I said it. I hope we can still go to shows.

Esther's Cat

2005-04-22T14:10:00.000-05:00

This girl I just met has a cat who's ugly and lovable. There was a while when we were sitting together where she stroked the cat's back, and talked to him. I was jealous of that cat.

Questions that come to mind during the quiet parts of first meeting someone:
1. Should we get to know each other well will she still be so quiet?
2. How long is she going to have these cats?
3. How long will it be before she notices I'm awkward?
4. Could I get used to this?
5. What does she think?
6. What would it be like to get in her pants?

Pizarro vs Atahuallpa

2005-04-21T17:38:00.000-05:00

Maybe Guns Germs and Steel fans can help me with this. In Chapter 3 Diamond asks the questions "How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca? Why didn't Atahuallpa instead try to conquer Spain?". Diamonds answer, paraphrasing roughly, is that Spain had guns, ships, literacy, and centralized political organization. The Incas only had the latter, and this actually ended up working to their disadvantage.

It seems to me that Diamond confuses 'how' and 'why' questions. When we ask 'how' we might answer with technical factors that explain. 'Why' is more of an ethical issue. Just because Spain had guns does not explain why Pizarro vanquished Atahuallpa. Possession of technology [can suggest/influence but] does not determine its use. When we make sense of, say, Nazism, we cannot merely point to military technology and centralized decision making, even though these were an important part of Nazism's history. Questions Diamond avoids are "Why did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca? Why did an imposition of Christianity mean a slaughter of the Incas? How is it that imperialism came to be seen as serving the church?"

I'll keep reading Guns, but I remain a skeptical reader...

Steroids and Baseball's Walks Record

2005-04-20T18:02:00.000-05:00

There has been talk of appending an asterisk next to the records of hitters should they be discovered to have used steroids. Of all the records destroyed in baseball's frankenball era, none is more deserving of an asterisk than Barry Bonds' career record for bases on balls.

The walk is a curious statistic. In pitching it is a clear demerit, a mark noted on the record as an indicator of a pitcher's lack of control. What the walk signifies for batters, however, is less apparent. In one sense a career record for walks is indicative of the fearsomeness of the hitter. This is the case with Bonds. Particularly after he bulked up, he was so dangerous to opposing teams that the team's manager would rather give him a single base than chance giving up a home run. In another sense, though, the ability to draw walks is the hallmark of a batter with a good eye and patience at the plate. Because a walk is often as good as a single, a crafty hitter will test a pitcher's control: he'll make the pitcher earn an out. Ricky Henderson, the previous record holder for career walks drawn, was this type of batter. He was in many ways the greatest leadoff hitter of all time.

A leadoff hitter's main job is merely to get on base and position himself to be driven home. Henderson excelled at all the little things required of leadoff men: he could work the count, steal a base, and advance on a deep fly or a hard grounder to first. The rather arcane record for most walks drawn in a career can be seen as a record of such little things.

Of course it would be unfair to Roger Maris should Mark McGwire and the rest have overtaken his home run record while using steroids. The steroids issue is more insidious, though. Abuse of steroids has caused an explosion of home runs throughout baseball. In doing so it has changed the very nature of the game. Where teams once sought to get a runner on base, advance him into scoring position, and hit him home, they now look for scoring from a single swing of the bat. The subtlety and pacing that make baseball magical have suffered. Though Maris' record certainly deserves its rightful place, that it was broken is a matter of one man illegitimately hitting more homers than another. Bonds' eclipsing of Henderson's walks record is indicative of power hitting overwhelming the rest. That is the real shame of the steroids era.

All about the Esthers

2005-04-13T16:49:00.000-05:00

This weekend I have a date with, uh, Esther. It's my first J-date.

Now before you get too critical, I have already been accused of exploiting my tenuous Jewishness for romantic gain.

It is true that I'm a secular Jew at best. I more or less moved on from the religious part when I was a teenager. But I prefer to think of the last half of my life as a kind of rumspringa. Now that I'm older, and more mature, it seems only appropriate to revisit Judiasm. Even if this takes the form of an online dating site for us chosen people.

Guns Germs and Steel

2005-04-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

At the insistence of a friend here I've started reading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Dan Brown I mean Jared Diamond.

I've actually had the book for a couple of years, but have never been able to get going with it. This time I think I understand why: it reads a bit like a manual for imperialists. Diamond searches for reasons why one group progresses faster and further than others. He discusses processes of domination and conquest spurred by environmental affordances and organizational dynamics. Tim says that the book is more even, that Diamond simply doesn't write from a moral perspective, but maybe that is the problem.

I'm only halfway through the chapter on Polynesians, though. I'll let you know how it goes.

Welcome to my blog!

2005-04-08T18:57:00.000-05:00

Hello all:

Welcome to my new blog. I promise to post infrequent messages about 1: me and 2: things of interest to me. I expect significant interest from readers - I figure I'll be able to adsense this thing into an early retirement within a year or two. Anyway, stay tuned for posts on awkward exchanges with coffeeshop employees, phronetic research, and the Illini's recent championship run.