This week, I had reason to visit the San Francisco headquarters of The Gap. The company's founder, Donald Fisher, is a huge art lover and has a jaw-dropping collection of contemporary art. I really respect that he and his wife spend so much of their wealth on art, and want to share it with the public. The company lobby itself is like a Lichtenstein gallery. For example, the fantastic portrait of Swee'Pea seen above, titled "Reflections on the Scream," is hanging right in the entryway. And there are a slew of great pieces by Warhol, Calder, Oldenburg, and other modern Western artists throughout the building. For the last two years, the Fisher family had been aiming to build a public museum for their full collection in San Francisco's historic Presidio, a former military facility that's now a national park. Apparently though, historic preservationists and conservationists were upset with the Fishers' plans. Now it's not clear where their collection will go, and it may very well leave the city. From the Los Angeles Times:
"It would be an absolute crime if it left San Francisco," said Dede Wilsey, president of the board that oversees the De Young and Legion of Honor, two of the city's major art museums. "No one could amass that collection now. They couldn't afford it, even in a recession."
The collection, housed in a warehouse and at Gap headquarters in San Francisco, is open to scholars, and Fisher routinely loans pieces to museums. But until an agreement is reached, most of it will stay behind closed doors.
"You could very easily teach the history of art over the past 50 years with this collection," said Hilarie Faberman, a curator at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Faberman said nearly every piece deserves to be displayed.
Former French President Jaques Chirac says that in 2003, President Bush asked him to send troops to Iraq to stop Gog and Magog, the "Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse."
From James A. Haught's piece in the Council for Secular Humanism:
It's awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who "got saved." He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.
For six years, Americans really haven't known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn't in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq's oil—or to protect Israel—or to complete Bush's father's vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.
Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.
60,020 people submitted doomsday picks in Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" interactive feature (Here's my post about it). "Loose Nukes" was the top pick, with 10.5 percent of readers choosing it.
While "Israel-Arab War" (picked by 7.6 percent of users) represents another worry that's generations old, the "Peak Oil" (9.3 percent) and "China Unloads U.S. Treasurys" (8.2 percent) scenarios are new apocalyptic visions. Peak Oil—"Petroleum production reaches terminal decline. Oil becomes too expensive to extract, and alternative energies can't maintain our fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle"—is the hobbyhorse of widely read collapsists James Howard Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. It's the scenario of choice for the modern doomsayer who thinks Western civilization has industrialized its way to destruction. Fears of an economic collapse triggered by China pulling out from the American economy are a symptom of both our worries over the current economic crisis and anxiety over America's place in the world.
I have a post you may enjoy, from the ever wonderful Life Mag/Google Archives. It's from 1950 and it shows the artists of Nancy, Smokey Stover and so on drawing on scantily clad young models. It's kinda creepy but sort of endearing in that old time girdle fetish way, too.
It reminds me of an event Craig Yoe would produce.
Florida law enforcement agents have charged 48-year-old Keith R. Griffin (shown at left) with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after a detective found over a thousand such images on his computer.
In his defense, Mr. Griffin told detectives "he would leave his computer on and his cat would jump on the keyboard. And when he returned there will be strange material downloaded."
He is jail, with bail set at a quarter million dollars. His cat roams free.
Above, Bling Teeth, which sell for 75 cents a pop in vending machines. This image has nothing to do with what follows in this blog post, other than humor and a tangential association to the cultural trappings of hip-hop.
Alrighty then. "Snacks and Shit" is a blog dedicated to the appreciation of "rap and hip-hop lyrics that are absolutely absurd, ludicrous, nonsensical, ridiculous, basic, basically stupid, basically bad, basically basic, or preposterous." The authors "take some lines and examine them literally." Critics call them "willfully obtuse," I call them "funny."
"No room service just snacks and shit." - Jay-Z, Hey Papi
This is the line that started our whole obsession with rap and hip-hop lyrics. Honestly, this sounds more like something my dad would say. "Remember, no ordering room service. It's too expensive. Plus, I brought snacks."
Kill Or Cure explores the UK Daily Mail's obsession with hysterical headlines about what causes and/or cures cancer, with a link index to stories on the subject:
affluence both causes and prevents cancer * Wealthy background can raise the risk of cancer for teenagers * Middle classes 'face twice the risk of skin cancer' * Is your lifestyle giving you breast cancer? * Well-off children 'more at risk of cancer' * Why affluent women in the South are more likely to die from breast cancer * Gap between rich and poor women who survive breast cancer grows as disease progresses
There's been much media attention this month around Manson family: August 10, 2009 marked 40 years since the Tate/La Bianca murders. One former Manson Family member, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, is scheduled to soon be released on parole from a federal prison in Texas. She has served 34 years for attempting to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975, and did not participate in the murders for which Manson and others were imprisoned in 1971.
Paul Krassner was investigating the story of those murders back in 1971. Over at the Huffington Post today, he retells the tale of how he came to drop acid with Ms. Fromme at a house in Los Angeles before she tried to bump off the president, and before she went to jail for that act. It's a fascinating read. Snip:
Manson had stepped on Sandy's eyeglasses, thrown away her birth control pills, and inculcated her with racist insensibility. Although she had once been a civil rights activist, she was now asking me to tell John Lennon that he should get rid of Yoko Ono and stay with "his own kind."
"But," I said, "they really love each other."
"If Yoko really loved the Japanese people," Sandy replied, "she would not want to mix their blood."
The four of us ingested those little white tablets containing 300 micrograms of LSD, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.
Squeaky's basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn't know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. He may even have gotten a touch of contact high. I engaged him in conversation about movies. We discussed the fascistic implications of The French Connection.
Image: Dick Schmidt, Sacramento Bee. "Sacramento Police and Secret Service men handcuff Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme under a Capitol Park tree after she tried to shoot President Gerald Ford Sept. 5, 1975."
UCLA urban planning teacher Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking makes the case that urban parking has a high, hidden cost:
The free parking that Americans love isn't really 'free' at all. A recent parking garage project in New Haven, Conn., for example, cost more than $30 million for almost 1,200 spaces - that's more than $25,000 per space. If you were to finance it using a mortgage, the actual cost would be over $40,000 per space. This breaks down to roughly $135 a month, or $1,600 a year per space - not including externalities like the air pollution and congestion created by increased trips drawn by cheap parking. Even when garages and meters charge for parking, they rarely charge the real value of the parking space. (In Vauban, by contrast, drivers must purchase a parking space in the garages at $40,000 each.) All this amounts to a massive subsidy. Shoup calculates that in 2002 the total subsidy just for off-street parking was between $127 and $374 billion (for comparison, the budget for national defense that year was $349 billion).
Who pays for this? Everyone. The cost of building all that parking is reflected in higher rents, more expensive shopping and dining, and higher costs of home-ownership. Those who don't drive or own cars thus subsidize those who do.
Free parking can become a drain on city coffers. According to a study (PDF) by Bruce Schaller, deputy commissioner of planning and sustainability at the NYC Department of Transportation, the city was losing more than $45 million in parking meter revenue annually as a result of the free parking privileges commonly offered to city employees. But the costs are more than economic: free parking also changes behavior, encouraging us to take more trips and drive alone more often. According to the same study, without that free parking, 19,200 fewer vehicles would enter Manhattan every day, easing congestion.
In what appears to be a beauty pageant held at a prison in Russia, scores of women gather around a makeshift runway in the courtyard as their fellow inmates strut their stuff. I don't read Russian, but the photographs alone tell a great story.
BB readers may remember the amazing Golden Mean snail car and Boiler Bar, created by blacksmith and oilpunk artist Jon Sarriugarte. For years, Jon has also built beautiful fire pits, flaming zen gardens, and patio heaters. Sometimes he sells them, but he's always encouraged folks to make their own. Finding the right fittings, regulators, and tubes can be a hassle though, so now Jon is offering fire pit kits. They start at $95. From Jon's Form and Reform site:
(For a fire pit,) in addition to these kits you will need a container that is able to handle high temperatures and be fully sealed underneath (leaks or drain holes will also allow gas out). A 55 gal drum works good. The weldable coupler provided will need to be welded though the bottom, legs added, then simply attach the fittings, ring, hose, propane BBQ tank and add sand. Sand should be 3-4″ above the ring. This is a match light system and I like those plumbing torches to light mine. Light the torch, then turn on the gas with the flame above the sand. It will take several seconds for the sand to fill with gas and rise to the top. Once lit it's time to play in the sand with simple tools. This works best after dark when you can turn the flame down very low tell you only see a blue flame.
In 1979, Robert Crumb created "A Short History of America," depicting the rise of the urban landscape from the wilderness. The art first ran in the Whole Earth Catalog's offspring CoEvolution Quarterly. The animation of the original black and white artwork seen above is from the movie Crumb. Several years later, Crumb added three new panels showing possible future scenarios: The Fun Future (above), Ecological Disaster (above), and The Ecotopian Solution. You can purchase a color poster of the full 15 panel version from Steve Krupp's Curio Shoppe. (Thanks, Jason Tester!)
This Egyptian bust has become a popular attraction at Chicago's Field Museum because it's a spitting image of Michael Jackson, complete with a tweaked nose. It was carved between 1550-1050 BCE and depicts a woman. "Statue's a Dead Ringer for Jacko" (NBC Chicago)
Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."
On a recent flight to Rome, I found my sleep-deprived thoughts turning to the question that has launched a thousand doctoral dissertations: Why is Hannibal Lecter an Italophile?
He wasn't always. When we first meet the debonair, serial-murdering doctor, in the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, he's curled up with a copy of Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. We can see from the class signifiers he flashes---waspish wit, feline grace, courtly manners, and refined, Old Money tastes---that he's a highbrow degenerate (in the evolutionary, Max Nordau sense of the word), struck from the mythic mold that gave us real-life archetypes such as Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, and the Marquis de Sade, as well as their fictional kin (most notably, Count Dracula (with whom Lecter shares many supernatural traits). His unabashed Eurocentrism would gladden George Will's wizened heart, but he hasn't yet outed himself as a flaming Italophile.
By Silence of the Lambs, however, the Lecter of the first book, who was little more than a few memorably zingy lines, glued together with attitude, has evolved into a suave, mordantly witty bogeyman for the age of the branded lifestyle: Milton's Satan in a Prada suit. This is a man-eater who would never use the wrong knife when slicing out your sweetbreads and sautéing them in a beurre noisette before your dying eyes. He's a card-carrying member of the cultural elite, a status that Harris signals through Lecter's exhaustive knowledge of Italian high culture. His tastes in interior decoration, in his cell in a prison for the criminally insane, run to pencil sketches of Florentine scenes: "the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, as seen from the Belvedere." He admonishes Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee who's interrogating him, to look up the early Italian Renaissance painter Duccio if she wants to see an accurate depiction of a crucifixion, and to pay Titian's Flaying of Marsyas a visit, at the National Gallery, if she wants to study the fine points of human-skinning. He famously eats a census-taker's liver with "fava beans and a big Amarone" (a signature Italian dish, paired with an Italian wine) and offers Starling a clue to her case in the form of a quote from the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
In Hannibal, Lecter might as well work for the Italian national tourism board. His manor-born elegance, classical erudition, and, most of all, pitch-perfect taste are inextricable from his deep immersion in Italian culture, which for Harris (and presumably his mass audience) is shorthand for the profound knowledge, as sensual as it is intellectual, of all that makes life worth living---a cultural patrimony bequeathed to the world by the land that gave us the Roman empire and the Renaissance, Verdi and the Vespa, Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano, la dolce vita and menefreghismo (the Fine Art of Not Giving a Fuck, according to Nick Tosches). Lecter lives in Florence, where his nonpareil mastery of Dante, Florentine history, and archaic Italian---he demonstrates "an extraordinary linguistic facility, sight-translating medieval Italian and Latin from the densest Gothic black-letter scripts"---wins him the position of curator of the Palazzo Capponi. (Well, that, and the fact that he hastened the former curator's shuffle off this mortal coil.) Lecter shops for exquisite unguents at the Farmacia of Santa Maria Novella and tartufi bianchi at the gourmet emporium Vera dal 1926; reads himself to sleep with the piquant correspondence of a 15th century Venetian; accessorizes his mental Memory Palace with the Riace bronzes. Naturally, his mother is "a high-born Italian, a Visconti." It's all very Ted Bundy-under-the-Tuscan-Sun, Lucrezia Borgia-meets-ladies-who-lunch.
The question is: How did we get here? At what point did Italian culture become the capstone of the taste/class pyramid, morphing seemingly overnight from lowbrow to highbrow? At what specific historical moment, and by what cultural logic, did the fickle alchemy of mandarin taste transform balsamic vinegar into Bottled Essence of Snob Appeal, fetishized by status-conscious bobos who dole it out at dinner parties with the sort of breathless reverence they used to reserve for lines of Peruvian blue flake?
Not long ago, in the racialized anthropology of the late 19th century and the eugenic "science" of the early 20th, the "Mediterranean races" were demonstrably inferior to Nordic man. In 1924, congress passed the Johnson Act, which radically restricted immigration from the Mediterranean countries (as well as Eastern Europe) in an affect to forestall further pollution of the Anglo gene pool.
In the '70s, when I was a teenager growing up white and middle-class in the ardently Aryan suburbs of Southern California, "Italian" was a mama-mia, that's-a-spicy-meatball punchline, an ethnic caricature sketched in bold strokes: Mama Celeste frozen pizzas; Dean Martin singing "That's Amore"; the LaBella family, proprietors of the local Italian restaurant, the one with the inevitable rainbow-colored candles in the straw-wrapped Chianti bottles. Squid---no one called it "calamari"---was bait; pasta meant spaghetti---no one called it "pasta"; and radicchio, arugula, and fresh parmesan were unknown, at least to WASPs. (To this day, my suburban relatives obligingly produce a can of plastinated Kraft cheese dust when I ask for parmesan.) When did things change? Their problematic mix of ethnic stereotyping and ethnographic fact notwithstanding, were the Godfather movies (1972, 1974) instrumental in introducing WASP America to an Italian America that, for all its internecine bloodletting and dese-and-dose goombah-ism (as reflected in the Hollywood eye) also preached a conservative gospel of folkways and famiglia values (gangster family values, ironically, but no less traditional for that) and hard work? To a teenager adrift in the suburban badlands of San Diego, whose psychic geography was cratered by divorce and PTSD'd by Vietnam and Watergate and Helter Skelter, Connie's wedding, at the beginning of The Godfather, offered a seductive glimpse of an ethnic otherworld---the Old World teleported to the New World, with all its close family ties and cherished traditions magically intact.
After college, in the mid-'80s, I would go East, to be part of the advancing guard of bohemianization making the Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn safe for alt.culture. Raised in the land of puka-shell necklaces and huaraches, where real-life Malibu Barbies and Bitchen Dudes disported themselves in the Endless Summer, I marveled at the studiously sullen young guys (codeword: guido) in the regulation tight T-shirts; equal parts greaser, disco stud, and hip-hop homeboy, they seemed to be channeling John Travolta's Tony Manero, some Italian-Stallion take on Mailer's white negritude, and, incomprehensibly, a collective memory of the Doo-Wop '50s. Shrines to patron saints sprouted throughout the neighborhood; in one front yard, a life-sized Saint Lucy held a plate with her plastic eyeballs glued to it, like a waiter serving canapés. I was enthralled by the thinly veiled paganism of the annual feast and procession of Maria SS. Addolorata, in which celebrants (just like the revelers in the Feast of Saint Rocco in The Godfather II!) carry a sad-eyed statue of the Blessed Virgin through the streets, where the devout festoon her gown with paper money, as they have done since 1948. The parade ends at the neighborhood's symbolic heart, the Mola Di Bari social club, which takes its name from the Southern Italian town to which many of the neighborhood's earliest Italian immigrants can trace their bloodlines. At the same time, there was an ugly side to this picturesque translation of smalltown Southern Italy into Brooklyn's doo-wop vernacular, exacerbated by the culture wars between Italian-American locals and the hipster homesteaders gentrifying the hood. After one too many encounters with carloads of goons yelling "faggot," and a horrifying episode in which a bat-wielding gang attacked a longhaired Asian-American guy, my wife and I joined the bobo exodus to the upstate burbs.
To be sure, Our Friends from Corleone also packed their blood feuds and backwater ignorance in their psychic baggage when they boarded the ship for Ellis Island. But the occasional horsehead in bed seems a small price to pay for idyllic afternoons in the sun, sipping Trebbiano d'Abruzzo while the accordions play "C'é La Luna Mezzo O Mare." Harry Lime had it right in The Third Man: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed---but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." (Never mind the fact that, as my Swiss friends point out with some heat, the cuckoo clock is a German invention. You get the point.) In the popular imagination, mythic Italy draws its symbolic voltage not only from its relatively newfound role as a bobo emblem of gracious living and good taste, brought to you by Williams-Sonoma, but also from the delicious depravity of all those Borgias and Medicis, not to mention the Caesars, whose sybaritic excesses thrilled the pants off Gibbon's readers. Lecter loves his tartufi and his Amarone, but he also loves the operatic passions and gothic brutality of the Quattrocento, when rough justice for, say, conspirators against the Medici capo Lorenzo the Magnificent meant being hung, naked, from a high window in the Palazzo Vecchio, as an object lesson---and guaranteed crowd-pleaser---for the rabble. The Mythic Little Italy of our multiplex fantasies, from Goodfellas to Moonstruck to The Sopranos, is among other things a wish-fulfillment fantasy for WASPs---middle America's dream of giving its superego the one-armed salute and partaking of the emotional catharses enjoyed by those passionate Mediterraneans. Of course, there are two sides to the Return of the Repressed: heads, you get Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, indulging in a nighttime dip in Rome's Trevi fountain; tails, you get Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, beating another mobster to bloody jelly because the guy insulted him.
All of which is to ask: What does Italy mean? What does it signify, in the dream life of the West? A hopelessly knotty question, too complex to be teased out here. During my recent travels in Rome, Florence, and Bologna, I wondered if I was ever really seeing Italy, or if a million media apparitions---the Italy of The Talented Mr. Ripley and HBO's Rome, Death in Venice and The Monster of Florence---would always swarm before me, obscuring the thing itself, like those transparent overlays depicting the musculature and the nerves and the lymphatic system, in anatomy textbooks. In his masterful 1964 study The Italians, a cultural critique that is to Italy as Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude is to Mexico, Luigi Barzini is thoughtful on this point. In a poetic, unsettling meditation on the siren song of Mythic Italy, he talks about foreigners who visit the country and never leave, metamorphosing into that liminal being, the expatriate, suspended in that Phantom Zone between cultures. Many attempt to go native; some succeed in becoming more Italian than the Italians themselves, in some paradoxical sense. And many, as Barzini notes,
find, at one point, like Hawthorne, that they can no longer leave... They can no longer face the harsher world where they came from, where they see things perhaps too clearly, and where every word in their familiar language has a precise meaning. They have become hopelessly addicted to the amiable and mild ways of Italy. Many also have nobody left to go back to. They cling to their little lair, the view of the sea from the hill, the view of the Coliseum from the window if you turn your neck far enough to the right, the view of the Grand Canal, the roofs of Florence, the decayed villas of Rapallo... Italy is filled with people growing old, who can no longer think of leaving, living alone, comforted by a cat or a dog, waited on by a servant, an honest person at times but often enough an unscrupulous maid who feeds her family with what she steals. A day comes when these old people grow ill and helpless, far from the familiar sights and sounds of their youth, self-exiled for reasons which have become dim in their memories, in an alien place which they never really saw as it is and quite understood... Many die every year and are buried hurriedly in the corner of an Italian cemetery reserved for heathens or heretics; some bodies are shipped home to practically unknown and indifferent relatives. Many die without having really discovered why they chose to live the last years of their lives in Italy, of all places.
Cue the Godfather Waltz.
Image: Hannibal Lecter, taking the air in Florence. From the movie Hannibal. Reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.
This gentleman is George Vera, 25, who managed to smuggle a 9mm handgun and 2 clips with him into a Houston area jail. The 600 pound fellow allegedly hid the contraband between layers of his body fat. From Click2Houston.com:
Houston police said... Vera was arrested Aug. 2 and taken to the city jail. He spent a day there before being transferred to the Harris County Jail. After being there for 14 hours, going through intake procedures, he was taken to the showers, the final step before going to his cell. There, Vera told police he had a 9mm handgun on him, along with 2 clips.
(Former Harris Counter Detention Major Mark) Kellar said Vera should have been searched at least three times before getting to the jail.
Houston Police Officers Union President Gary Blankinship said cadets are trained how to search morbidly obese people.
"We teach officers to lift up and look under," Blankinship said. "The officer may not have arrested anyone this big before."
Mario Cacciottolo came to Los Angeles and took my photo for his "Someone Once Told Me," photography project. He has taken 700 photos of people holding hand-lettered signs quoting something someone once told the subject.
My quote was something my grandmother told me when I was very young. Her parents were killed in Russia during the revolution and she had to forage in the forest for a while. She developed a fear of snakes there, probably Vipera berus.
The photos and signs are a lot of fun to browse through.
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
Well this is bad news. I had a hunch the stuff was evil, even though I've been slathering it on like skin cream when I travel to malaria-infested places. Some 200 million people a year use the stuff, and apparently it's bad news for the brain and nervous system, particularly when combined with other repellents that have similar toxic effects. Snip from a Science Daily article:
The active ingredient in many insect repellents, deet, has been found to be toxic to the central nervous system. Researchers say that more investigations are urgently needed to confirm or dismiss any potential neurotoxicity to humans, especially when deet-based repellents are used in combination with other neurotoxic insecticides.
Vincent Corbel from the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in Montpellier, and Bruno Lapied from the University of Angers, France, led a team of researchers who investigated the mode of action and toxicity of deet (N,N-Diethyl-3-methylbenzamide). Corbel said, "We've found that deet is not simply a behavior-modifying chemical but also inhibits the activity of a key central nervous system enzyme, acetycholinesterase, in both insects and mammals".
Terry Pratchett, who has early-onset Alzheimer's (and whose mental acuity is still fine) has written a stirring editorial on the need to legalize suicide in the UK. He avows his intention to commit suicide, to "jump before I am pushed," and explains why.
More than 100 Britons have travelled to assisted suicide clinics in Switzerland, and their loved ones face prosecution for accompanying them.
I write this as someone who has, regrettably, become famous for having Alzheimer's. Although being famous is all the rage these days, it's fame I could do without.
I know enough to realise there will not be a cure within my lifetime and I know the later stages of the disease can be very unpleasant. Indeed, it's the most feared disease among the over-65s.
Naturally, I turn my attention to the future. There used to be a term known as 'mercy killing'. I cannot believe it ever had any force in law but it did, and still does, persist in the public consciousness, and in general the public consciousness gets it right.
We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn't get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive...
I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.
Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'
Who could say that is bad? Where is the evil here?
This American Society for Information Science and Technology paper by Yahoo's Christian Crumlish has a tidy little cosmology of dumb things that social media does:
Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work...
Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response...
The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information...
The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity...
Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths)....
Danah boyd has a sober second look at some widely cited research from Nielsen (reported on Mashable) that states that "teens don't tweet." Bottom line: teens tweet.
We have a methodology and interpretation problem. As Fred Stutzman has pointed out, there are reasons to question Nielsen's methodology and, thus, their findings. Furthermore, the way that they present the data is misleading. If we were to assume an even distribution of Twitter use over the entire U.S. population, it would be completely normal to expect that 16% of Twitter users are young adults. So, really, what Nielsen is saying is, "Everyone expects social media to be used primarily by the young but OMG OMG OMG old farts are just as likely to be using Twitter as young folks! Like OMG."
We have a presentation problem. Mashable presented this report completely inaccurately. First off, Nielsen is measuring 2-24. My guess is that there are a lot more 24-year-olds on Twitter than 2-year-olds. Unless Sockington counts. (And she's probably older than 2 anyhow.) Regardless, the Nielsen data tells us nothing about teens. We don't know if young adults (20-24) are all of those numbers or not. If all 16% of those under 24 on Twitter were teens, teens would be WAY over-represented in proportion to their demographic size...
There's more, be sure to read it. File under lies, damned lies and statistics.
Marilyn sez, "Naples has developed an innovative ex-offender program that sends former convicts back out on the streets-- with maps and tourist brochures."
But what's most innovative is that they've also given 80 former convicts gigs offering tourists advice on staying safe in the city. The (mostly) men, clad in yellow vests, can now be found escorting tourists attempting to maneuver through dodgy neighborhoods, helping with heavy luggage, and offering suggestions to avoid becoming a target of a petty crime (you really shouldn't be wearing that flashy watch, now should you?). Their services are all free, and tipping is discouraged (let's not even talk about bribes).
Tim sez, "I made these goggles for the dust in the desert at Burning Man. I am posting these images as instructions for those who might want to try making some of their own. Good goggles for the desert are hard to find and they are very expensive if you do. These are made from an old leather jacket, and from two pieces of tempered and UV resistant glass that I got from the halogen 'puck style' lights. I popped the glass out of the plastic ring. They also sell tinted circles that can be used for torch brazing which would be great. I wanted these for night also, so I'm leaving them clear. The whole process took about 3 hours. If you have any questions please email me. You can get the address from our website."
It's awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who "got saved." He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars. 
The free parking that Americans love isn't really 'free' at all. A recent parking garage project in New Haven, Conn., for example, cost more than $30 million for almost 1,200 spaces - that's more than $25,000 per space. If you were to finance it using a mortgage, the actual cost would be over $40,000 per space. This breaks down to roughly $135 a month, or $1,600 a year per space - not including externalities like the air pollution and congestion created by increased trips drawn by cheap parking. Even when garages and meters charge for parking, they rarely charge the real value of the parking space. (In Vauban, by contrast, drivers must purchase a parking space in the garages at $40,000 each.) All this amounts to a massive subsidy. Shoup calculates that in 2002 the total subsidy just for off-street parking was between $127 and $374 billion (for comparison, the budget for national defense that year was $349 billion). 
Houston police said... Vera was arrested Aug. 2 and taken to the city jail. He spent a day there before being transferred to the Harris County Jail. After being there for 14 hours, going through intake procedures, he was taken to the showers, the final step before going to his cell. There, Vera told police he had a 9mm handgun on him, along with 2 clips. 
Mario Cacciottolo came to Los Angeles and took my photo for his "Someone Once Told Me," photography project. He has taken 700 photos of people holding hand-lettered signs quoting something someone once told the subject. 
I write this as someone who has, regrettably, become famous for having Alzheimer's. Although being famous is all the rage these days, it's fame I could do without. 
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