The perfect gift for your literary friends … with a warped sense of humor.
October 29, 2008
October 26, 2008
Itzhak Perlman: Vote NO on Proposition 8
“The Constitution of California currently sees all of our children and grandchildren as equal … Why would you change that?”
August 26, 2008
And so it begins … Balsa Man, A Diminute Effigy For A Reduced Community
Folks I know remember the original Burning Man events out on Baker Beach and … refuse to go to the what-now-it-is experience out in the Nevada desert.
(Shout out! to Don who’s off on his post-significant-bday Burning Man experience! and to those folks his nibs worked with in the Exploratorium tech haven who are burners in their off-hours!)
Here is an alternative this Saturday out at Baker Beach for those in town.
We’ll be up at Donner Lake with the Bixby Creek crowd who soon (well, now, obviously) will no longer have a Bixby Creek place to gather because our illustrious hosts are selling their place and none of the rest of us — much as we love the place and the memories — have the wherewithal to buy it.
Alas.
[via Laughing Squid]
August 19, 2008
John Cleese — available 24/7
… A taste of Cleese. [via laughingsquid]
August 18, 2008
FORA.tv – Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues
FORA.tv – Videos Covering Today's Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues
FORA.tv is advertising for unpaid interns on CraigsList.
Toddled off to see what’s up with that. I’d seen a stack of FORA.tv lit over at the Commonwealth Club offices on Saturday.
Long Now talks. Aspen Institute talks. Commonwealth Club talks. …
Here’s a Roger Rosenblatt interview with Amy Tan at the Chautauqua Institution on July 10, 2008. The interview is broken out in sections. If you only want to hear Tan speak on “Writer’s Memory” you can click straight to the spot.
E.L. Doctorow on the Problematic Nature of Writing Novels
The indexing is superb. You can select one of the broad subject ranges and then one of the sub-sections. You can search for subjects. You can find all videos from the Hoover Institution.
Brilliant stuff.
July 30, 2008
Prop 8 update
Prop. 8 backers sue to change ballot wording
Seems Jerry Brown (formerly Governor Moonbeam, currently State Attorney General perhaps Governor again after the next election, who knows …) has authorized the following ballot language for Proposition 8: “eliminates the right of same-sex couples to marry.”
Says he, since the time the petition signatures were collected, the court confirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry. Therefore, Prop 8, which reads “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” would disenfranchise those who just May 15th got the right to marry and his wording is fine and good and valid.
Prop 8 proponents claim Brown’s verbiage is “inherently argumentative and highly likely to create prejudice” and they aren’t eliminating anyone’s rights. They’re simply trying to reinstate the definition of marriage that existed in California before the judicial decision in May.
Ya. Right.
Yay! hooray! for Jerry Brown. You go, guy!
June 26, 2008
Karolina Kurkova Labeled Too Fat (VIDEO)
Karolina Kurkova Labeled Too Fat
Her walk is at the 8: marker, mas o menos.
Fat?
Too fat?
Oh, puhleeze. No wonder we have Olsen twins and the girl next door worrying about their body images.
June 24, 2008
PopCo, Stuff and Uncrate
Finished PopCo while I was away.
Like The End of Mr. Y, this Scarlett Thomas book had a to-me sympathetic main female character who roamed around in her head and jumped from subject to subject and landing pad to leaping-off-point in a manner I’m quite familiar with. Thomas’ heroines remind me strongly of Cayce Pollard, the heroine in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
The books are filled with consumer culture, philosophy, and weird, quirky bits of trivia. PopCo specifically has enough code breaking arcana to keep you going for a while. Alice Butler, the main character, creates sleuth kits for kids for a megacorp called PopCo (#3 in the world after Mattel and Hasbro) and finds herself stashed away in a corporate getaway with other PopCo creatives, tasked with finding a brilliant product for the teengirl market, which is notoriously hard for toy companies to crack.
I took pages and pages of notes of clever phraseology and references I had no clue to (the Riemann Hypothesis, the Voynich Manuscript), book titles I need to check our bookstash for (and buy if we don’t have a copy) (Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers by Fletcher Pratt) and more.
Thomas even gave a brief explanation to another character of how public key encryption works, an explanation my aunt Ethel would be able to understand!
Is this really the way toy companies are run? Is marketing really as cynical about tapping into the pocketbooks of teens and pre-teens as the book suggests? Could be.
I try not to buy stuff I don’t =need=. This book made me even more aware of how you, me, and Mr. McGee are sold to.
Witness: Uncrate | The Buyer's Guide For Men Talk about cool stuff you don’t really need!
We won’t even begin to explore Archie McPhee and Things You Never Knew Existed.
I received an offer in the mail the other day. Because I’m a special person (because of my W subscription? because of my ZIPcode? because of the stylish, fashionable things I buy at the Goodwill?), ELLE offered me a year’s subscription (normally $48! or something close thereto) for only $8!
Well, hey, yes! Of course, they’d love to have me on their subscription rolls.
But we talked about our dear mailman and all the mail he has to bring down the steps and then up our stairs to our front door. And then we talked about the bags of recycle we have to take down our stairs and up the steps to the recycle bin on Montgomery. And we decided that I didn’t really need ELLE that much.
We aren’t getting a stimulus check from the government. No manna from heaven $$ for stuff. I guess they figure we stimulate the economy as much as we ever will.
The younger niblet, who is doing his Peace Corps stint until June 2010, got his check, though. We’ll put it in his bank account and maybe he’ll be able to tap it at some point if he is in desperate need for something while he’s there. At least it will still be available when he comes home.
Somehow I think his check would go a lot further there than it would in San Francisco. Be more appreciated too. Somehow I think there’s less “stuff” where he is and more “Do we have enough food for dinner and breakfast tomorrow?”
