Quote of the day
From Paul Ford, writing in Harper’s e-mail weekly:
“A broken heart,” explained a brain imaging research scientist, “looks different in somebody old.”
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AmaZune
Color me entirely underwhelmed by Amazon’s Kindle. For one thing, the thing is fugly. Wickit fugly, as we say in New England. The thing looks like it was designed by the people who did my thermostat. A tricorder looks more modern. So for four hundred dollars, I get a basically single purpose machine. I can pay more money to get DRM’d content onto this machine (It’ll hold 2 grand worth of ebooks!,) or I can jump through hoops to get my own content onto it, including paying yet more money (“conversion fees”) to get the most widely available eBook format (PDF) onto it. Plus did I mention it’s really ugly? I happened to run across my old Sony Magic Link yesterday while doing some cleaning, and it’s much more attractive than the Kindle.
But wait! you say. It’s got an always-on network connection, via EVDO. Yes, an always-on connection to Amazon.com. But, you say, it will vastly expand the act of reading. It will finally provide the rich information contexts that that poor old slob the printed codex book has lacked on its dance card for centuries. So even better – I can take one of the few activities – book reading – where I can hear myself think without having to incorporate the contributions of the Teeming Millions, and now i can see what other people thought of the book? I want to see what I think of the book.
So, this is sort of like an always-on iPod with no iTunes that only connects to Apple with really tight DRM on the content you buy for it.
Hey – it’s the Zune for books!
Sorry, but I remain skeptical. You can spend the same amount on the OLPC Give One Get One program, get a much more versatile machine that’d make a terrific eBook reader, and do some good in the world.
The uncultivated odd
Frank Viola, Leader in Sport of Racing Pigeons, Dies at 87 – New York Times:
Today, pigeon racing is mostly an old man’s game. In the postwar years, there were scores of racing clubs in the greater New York area; perhaps a dozen survive. But even now, on certain fine Saturdays and Sundays, one can see men tautly poised on the city’s rooftops, scanning the sky for a few distant specks winging home.
I liked that last sentence a lot; it put me in mind of Joseph Mitchell. That New York City – the NYC of the mundane, the quirky, the unself-conscious eccentric – seems lost forever.
Assault with a deadly sticker
Via StreetsBlog, Running Out of Space to Park, and Places to Walk – New York Times:
Mr. Panopoulos recently guided four new members, including a blind physical therapist and a surgeon in training, through a district awash with illegally parked cars, explaining the group’s rules.
“We’re not subversive. We’re not confrontational. And we don’t want to cause damage to anyone’s property,†he said, slapping a sticker on the windshield of a Jeep squeezed across a sidewalk on a narrow passageway called Arahovis Street.
The driver was nowhere to be seen. But a few feet ahead on Arahovis Street, they spotted a red Peugeot backing over a strip of ribbed paving that helps blind people with canes navigate sidewalks. The middle-aged motorist, who had just emerged from the car, was aghast when a pair of Streetpanthers swooped down, pasting a donkey sticker on his windshield.
“That same stunt cost my fiancée a broken rib cage over the summer,†the blind Streetpanther, Stathis Zachariades, said to the driver, as a handful of bystanders cheered him on before asking the Streetpanthers for some of their stickers.
Of course there are those people who will claim, often quite hysterically, that slapping a sticker on the windshield amounts to “damage to property.” The story reminded me of the “I’m changing the climate – ask me how!” SUV stickers from changingtheclimate.com. The site seems to be gone, though. Maybe someone should start slapping stickers on cars parked in bike lanes in NYC – or is someone doing that already?
Technorati Tags: commuting, cycling, environment, parking
Mood knob
If only it were that easy. Great pic by BKWellcome on Flickr.
“Your hate only makes me stronger”
Via dinosaur comics, pretty funny: Kate Beaton’s Comics. I especially liked this one:
“They’re just going to think that you’re a whackjob.”
Q&A With Katie of Don’t Eat Off the Sidewalk | Jewcy.com:
There’s a fringe group of vegans being dubbed “vegan-sexuals,” who abstain from physical intimacy with non-vegans. What are your thoughts on this?
It’s infuriating, because this is the kind of stuff that gets a lot of media attention. The general public doesn’t want to hear that vegans are happy and healthy, they want to hear about how we’re elitist snobs who are picky about who we sleep with and that we starve our children. It confirms their belief that vegans are an insane little cult. I’d like to see some mainstream news stories that shatter that stereotype.It makes sense that a person who is vegan might not want to be in a long term relationship with an omnivore, but to say that you won’t even have sex with one? Where do you draw the line? Can you not be friends with people who eat meat?
I believe in the saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you tell someone you won’t sleep with them because they’re not vegan, they’re not going to think about their diet. They’re just going to think that you’re a whackjob.
Interesting interview. I bought issue #1 of Don’t Eat Off the Sidewalk (now sold out — nyah nyah) and loved it. I just ordered issue #2.
She’s completely right about the media – it seems like it’s a pretty standard technique. You take the “whackjobs” — I nearly spit tea when I read that one — and use them to conveniently marginalize the whole group. It’s not they’re not whackjobs, it’s that they’re not really representative. Though think about it for a minute – there are any number of religions with dietary restrictions, and no one would suggest that there’s anything wrong with their wanting to associate with people who follow the same guidelines. Food is a pretty basic part of life, after all, and it’s a lot easier to deal with if your family’s all on the same culinary page. Certainly most people wouldn’t refer to them as “insane little cults.”
Technorati Tags: vegan, vegetarian
Cagers do the strangest things
Commuting via bike this morning through Mount Vernon and the Bronx, I was once again pondering the bizarre behavior of people in cars. A portion of my commute is along Bronx River Road, a very wide road that is 2 lanes on either side for a good deal of the time I’m on it. I stay “as far to the right as is practicable and safe,” as the law puts it; most of the time this puts me about 8-10 feet from the curb. It’s far enough to avoid being doored, but not smack dab in the center of the lane. I should also add that it’s not a particularly busy road; there are stretches of time where I have it mostly to myself, with regular bursts of 3-5 cars.
Given these conditions, I cannot for the life of me figure out this scenario:
A car appears far behind me in my mirror in the right lane. The driver accelerates, comes up behind me fast, beeps when he is about 20 feet behind me, and then swerves at the last minute into the left lane to pass me, missing me by what feels like about a foot. This is generally accompanied by more honking and an occasional imprecation out the window. From the time I saw them in my rear-view to the time they pass, the left lane was completely and totally empty. I do not understand this. At all. And it happened twice this morning.
Technorati Tags: bicycling, cycling, commuting, bike commuting
The Jobst Brandt Show
I’m as retrogrouch as the next guy, but I thought this (from BikeSnob NYC) was pretty funny:
The Jobst Brandt Show
The irrascible author of “The Bicycle Wheel†begrudgingly allows guests into his home and systematically berates them while extolling the virtues of non-anodized rims. His imperious browbeatings are interspersed with impossibly tall tales of his Alpine cycling exploits such as: the time he descended so quickly his brake pads burst into flames; the time he found himself without a spare tube, killed a bear, and fashioned one from its intestines; and the time he accidentally created the Loire river by dragging his frame pump behind him.
And I haven’t even read rec.bicycles in years.
WordPress upgrade adventures
Just updated the site to 2.3.1, a bugfix release. In the process, though I did backup the db, I managed to wipe out both my plugin and theme directories. So I went looking for an AdSense plugin, and found out about WP widgets. I could basically just make my own damn AdSense widget, which I did. However, when I reinstalled the simpla theme, I discovered that it isn’t widget-aware, but then also discovered that someone else had already made a widgeted version. So everything is pretty much as it was, and more easily maintained too, I’m hoping.