dietsch ::

Macgasm

The new, all-in-one iMac G5 is one of the sharpest bits of product design I've seen. I love the look of the display, the angled aluminum stand, the port array on the back, and even the way the power supply connects to the machine. Get the wireless keyboard and mouse options and set it up with wireless internet, and you've got one of the cleanest computer setups around. I just wish I had the $2400 or so to get the 20-inch and set it up the way I'd like.

The family-values party

No to same-sex marriage; yes to two girls at once.

Boswijck

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Forgotten Bushwick

Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood, at Forgotten New York.

Cremation justification

Multimedia site showing what happens during decomposition. Just incinerate me, please.

Remake remake remake

I don't know what's a worse idea: This one, or this one.

Rent Girl

Laurenn McCubbin has illustrated a new book: Rent Girl, a collection of autobiographical essays written by Michelle Tea. Laurenn talked to Reyhan Harmanci of the San Francisco Chronicle about the new book. Harmanci says of Rent Girl:

In tracing Michelle's journey from Boston to San Francisco, with a stop in Arizona, "Rent Girl" doesn't flinch from showing the physical and emotional cost of sex work. "Rent Girl" also tells of the allure of such an outlaw lifestyle. McCubbin's drawings stick with you. Her style is so natural, it looks as if she could have drawn her images in one sitting. This is far from the case. McCubbin took "hundreds and hundreds" of photographs after setting up elaborate staging of the scenes Tea described. To create the drawings, she would meld the photos together, taking an expression she liked and pairing it with an especially effective pose.

The Chronicle also talked to Michelle Tea.

Drinking makes you smart!

A study conducted by researchers at University College London has found that moderate alcohol consumption increases cognitive function. From the abstract:

Of people who reported drinking alcohol in the past year, those who consumed at least one drink in the past week, compared with those who did not, were significantly less likely to have poor cognitive function. The beneficial effect extended to those drinking more than 240 g per week (approximately 30 drinks).

...

The authors concluded that for middle-aged subjects, increasing levels of alcohol consumption were associated with better function regarding some aspects of cognition. Nonetheless, it is not proposed that these findings be used to encourage increased alcohol consumption.

Rats.

Freshmen report

January 28, 1986 -- The space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after takeoff. 1986 -- The year of birth for most of the 18-year-olds among this year's batch of college freshmen.

Saving Peanuts

Here's something cool from a while back: Adam Kempa blogs about Nicholson Baker's connection to the recent Fantagraphics reprints of the Peanuts comic strip. Baker made recent headlines with his new novel Checkpoint, in which two men discuss an assassination attempt against presidential fuckchimp George W. Bush. But in 2001, Baker released Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper [excerpt and review at NYTimes.com], which documents the destruction of newspaper and magazine archives. Baker discovered that the only existing copies of hundreds of periodicals were being discarded in favor of microfilm. Baker formed a foundation to rescue these print archives from destruction, and he donated the archives to Duke University. This is where Fantagraphics comes in. Co-founder Kim Thompson, posting on the Fantagraphics message board, writes that the company was able to find most of the really rare strips from the first two years of Peanuts in the Duke archives. So if not for Baker's work, many strips from the early years of Peanuts would now be lost.

Living in Brooklyn

Long but worth every word: Maud Newton discusses Brooklyn apartments and orgasmic neighbors:

New York City apartment living is a lesson in lowered expectations. My first Brooklyn residence featured new wood floors, shiny porcelain doorknobs and a view of the Chrysler building.

...

One night, after about a month, things turned sour. I woke to what sounded like metal balls rolling, or heavy chains being dragged, across the floor. “Fuck,” the man yelled. There was a furious clattering before he yelled it again three more times. Then there was the sound of someone kicking something. And then he was crying – weeping, in fact – and moaning.

“I’m your fucking wife now,” she screamed. “You motherfucker.”

Mayor confuses "right" with "privilege"

Next thing you know, he'll tell us that food, water, and shelter are "wants" and not "needs."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, already under fire for his tough stance against anti-GOP protest groups, Monday suggested that First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly are "privileges" that could be lost if abused.

[link]

Internet vs. internet

Wired News chooses to downcase internet--editors and long-lost cousins take note, everyone else snoozes.

Solar boat to sail through space

The Planetary Society hopes to launch a solar-powered space ship this year, propelled by solar rays striking large sails. Solar sails, long a component of science fiction, should allow scientists to save money by avoiding the need for rocket fuel. The mission, sponsored by Cosmos Studios, is designed as a test of concept--to prove that solar sails can work as a means of propulsion. Cosmos Studios is the baby of Ann Druyan, wife of the late science-popularizer Carl Sagan, a hero of mine. Sagan urged the Planetary Society, and other private organizations, to fund spaceflight research and stop relying on government agencies to launch spacecraft. This long-delayed flight, if it proves successful, will finally fulfill a dream of Sagan's and take humanity one step closer to the stars.

Christ powerless over rice, Catholic church says

An eight-year-old celiac sufferer in New Jersey has had her First Communion revoked after the Church learned that the host used in the ceremony was made from rice flour, not wheat flour. The girl suffers from a disorder that makes gluten consumption potentially fatal. The Church, which offers low-gluten hosts, insists on following church doctrine, which teaches that hosts must be made of wheat, in keeping with Church tradition. Even the low-gluten hosts can be harmful to some celiac sufferers, though, and the Church requires that they either drink wine instead of taking the host or abstain from Communion entirely. Now, at the risk of sounding flippant, I have to wonder at this. The point of Holy Communion, within the Roman Catholic faith, is that the host and wine are transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus. Why can God transform only wheat-based hosts and not rice-based hosts? Is rice somehow Christ's Kryptonite, or is this an example of a Church sticking too stridently to tradition?

Delacorte, behind the scenes

Central Park's Delacorte Theater, home to Shakespeare in the Park:

Recipe for oblivion

2 gin and tonics 6 McSorley Dark Ales 1 Red Stripe 1 blue kamikaze 1 scotch Swill around in the belly of one 35-year-old man who should know better than to go out drinking on a school night.

Oh my god!

We're going to see the Pixies! I'm seriously so excited I could piss myself.

Random iPod 8

The next 15 shuffled songs on my iPod: Tighten Up, Lee "Scratch" Perry Don't Love You, TV on the Radio Namaste, Beastie Boys I Concentrate on You, Ella Fitzgerald Look for Me (I'll Be Around), Neko Case Honky Tonk Heroes, Waylon Jennings Moral Kiosk, R.E.M. Adore, Prince A Kissed Out Red Floatboat, Cocteau Twins Six-Sixty-Six, Frank Black & The Catholics Cream, Prince Runnin' Out of Fools, Neko Case To Love Is to Bury, Cowboy Junkies The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight, R.E.M. Lonesome Town, Rick Nelson

Vonnegut loves the librarian

"[T]he America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

--Kurt Vonnegut, I Love You, Madame Librarian

Americans aren't the world's only morons

Six percent of British youth identify Gandalf as the hero who led the defeat of the Spanish armada, the Guardian reports. Thirteen percent credited another fictional character, Horatio Hornblower, and twenty percent fingered Christopher Columbus for the job. Our across-the-pond cousins shouldn't feel bad, though. Sixty-seven percent of American schoolkids think that Spider-Man led American forces in rebellion against King Arthur in 1492. Okay, okay, so I made that last sentence up. But it's plausible, you gotta admit.

Graffiti, Iggy's

Regenerative reading

[T]he best way to think about reading is as life's grand second chance. All of us grow up once: we pass through a process of socialization. We learn about right and wrong and good and bad from our parents, then from our teachers or religious guides. Gradually, we are instilled with the common sense that conservative writers like Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson thought of as a great collective work. To them, common sense is infused with all that has been learned over time through trial and error, human frustration, sorrow and joy. In fact, a well-socialized being is something like a work of art.

Yet for many people, the process of socialization doesn't quite work. The values they acquire from all the well-meaning authorities don't fit them. And it is these people who often become obsessed readers. They don't read for information, and they don't read for beautiful escape. No, they read to remake themselves. They read to be socialized again, not into the ways of their city or village this time but into another world with different values. Such people want to revise, or even to displace, the influence their parents have had on them. They want to adopt values they perceive to be higher or perhaps just better suited to their natures.

--Mark Edmundson, The Way We Live Now: The Risk of Reading

American anti-intellectualism

Or, why are we so proud to be so dumb? Two writers discuss the anti-intellectual tide in American culture. First, Lawrence M. Krauss discusses science education with Claudia Dreifus of Scientific American magazine. Kraus makes two points that I find significant:

We live in a society where it's considered okay for intelligent people to be scientifically illiterate. Now, it wasn't always that way. At the beginning of the 20th century, you could not be considered an intellectual unless you could discuss the key scientific issues of the day. Today you can pick up an important intellectual magazine and find a write-up of a science book with a reviewer unashamedly saying, "This was fascinating. I didn't understand it." If they were reviewing a work by John Kenneth Galbraith, they wouldn't flaunt their ignorance of economics.

Why is this a problem? Because the more ignorant Americans are about science, the easier it becomes for politicians to distort science to their own ends. Krauss continues:

Because we're living in a time when so many scientific questions are transformed into public relations campaigns--with truth going out the window in favor of sound bites and manufactured controversies. This is dangerous to science and society, because what we learn from observation and testing can't be subject to negotiation or spin, as so much in politics is. The creationists cut at the very credibility of science when they cast doubt on our methods. When they do that, they make it easier to distort scientific findings in controversial policy areas. We can see that happening right now with issues like stem cells, abortion, global warming and missile defense. When the testing of the proposed missile defense system showed it didn't work, the Pentagon's answer, more or less, went, "No more tests before we build it."

Next, Henry Louis Gates Jr., discusses black anti-intellectualism in aguest column for the New York Times. He reports on a conversation with Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Obama told Gates:

Americans suffer from anti-intellectualism, starting in the White House. Our people can least afford to be anti-intellectual.

I'll never fully understand the problem of anti-intellectualism among black Americans (for that matter, I'll never understand why anyone is willfully dumb, no matter their ethnicity or country of origin), but it seems to me part of a larger societal problem affecting all Americans--from, as Obama points out, a White House that seems to scorn intellect, to a popular culture that mocks as nerds everyone from scientists and mathematicians to music theorists and political scientists.