You may bleep when ready
LEGO is making products so amazing they have to censor how much their customers rave about them.
From a site-based e-mail to my wife that began “Holy shit!” and ended with some half-hearted rationale that we needed to buy this for our son for Christmas. (At least I’m self-consciously transparent, you know?)
Rouge light district
In DC tonight staying at the Hotel Rouge. All red, the theme. I was offered the “technology room” and of course took it. As I rode up the elevator I thought of the Tokyo I have mythologized all the times I’ve never been there, populated as I believe it must be with robot valets, voice-responsive bidets (which I would politely inform “no, thank you”), and theater-style seating in front of the TV. It is not this.
The technology room is, as far as I can tell, a regular hotel room outfitted with a tiny stereo crammed under the underwhelming CRT television, free wireless (unless you want a VPN tunnel), and a full computer in the corner.
Now, the stereo is nice; I like that. But it is so firmly wired into the under-cabinet that it is almost useless for playing music via iPod or connecting to your computer. Because, c’mon, who lugs around their CD collection to a hotel?
Free wireless but you have to pay $5 if you want to establish an encrypted connection. What the hell? Do scrambled bits really cost more to carry than plaintext? Please.
The TV? Who cares, they aren’t carrying the Cubs final week here anyway.
But the computer, oh, the computer. I approached it tentatively. As you might do in a seedy Internet cafe. It was a PC, of course, with a nice flat panel monitor. The desktop bore the imprint of befuddled room guests before. Aborted downloads, attempts to install AOL, files. There was one image file on the desktop. I hesitated to open. I went to the trash. Not sure why, but I did. You might as well have handed me one of those police-grade semen stain goggles. The trash was bulging with the downloaded porn of the previous guest, of course. And the file on the desktop: a lone piece of gay porn.
The first thing I thought was, ick. No way I am using this computer. (I have my laptop of course.) But really, how astonishing is it that the hotel will vacuum rooms in between stays, change sheets, and empty trash cans but not empty the room computer’s trash (at the very least)? Administrators of public computers have known for decades how to centrally manage terminals. It seems to me that a hotel room is the last place that you want to leave evidence of online exploits. I shudder to peek at the browsers’ histories. And can you imagine how many viruses are crawling around that thing? XP + hotel room = bad idea.
I’m not a prude. I know what goes on in hotel rooms. But I don’t want a computer giving me forensic evidence of it, thank you.
Upcoming whereabouts
Next week finds me in and around the District of Columbia. Any readers local to the area who would like to assert that I am or am not a basement-dwelling, mouth-breathing introvert are invited to contact me.
I’m excited about the week, actually. I’ll be presenting at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities on Tuesday. Here’s all the detail. Should be a good little session at a place that is doing amazing work. Drop by if you can.
Wednesday midday I will be in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities in some meetings. I’ve had a bit of a crush on IATH since grad school so I’m pleased to finally be visiting it via some medium other than the web.
Later in the week I will be manning a booth at the Congressional Black Caucus back in DC. There’ll be big news out of that, but right now mum’s the word.
By the way, for those of you using Dopplr you can always find my current travels there. Great for serendipitous meet-ups. I have a few invites left, if you’re not in on the beta.
Intense listening
Here’s an interesting idea for organizing your music library from my pal Len.
Instead of shoe-horning music into arbitrary and fluid genres or using the freeform grouping tag, Len uses the five-star rating field in iTunes as an intensity indicator. This breaks down generic distinctions entirely and focuses on the content of the music instead. It isn’t just BPM; determining a song’s intensity also factors in loudness.
One star is the most low-key: nearly all your ambient and new age tunes, some classical, some jazz, etc. Two stars would encompass things like ambient downtempo, much of the blues, etc. And so on up to five stars which contains your drill-and-bass and deathmetal.
But the point here is that the stars are not genre markers. Classical tracks could live in any one of the five star categories. As could most genres. You merely filter your music based on intensity. This makes sense to me because it represents how I feel before I put a song on. Rarely do I think, gee, I’d love to hear some smooth jazz right now. More often I am merely craving something downbeat and relaxed. This could be a country tune for all I care (though I certainly hope it isn’t).
More importantly this frees you from the shackles of taxonomy. Is that ambient or electronica? Can I call a mashup rock-and-roll if it contains a Mangione interlude? Etc.
This method is labor-intensive, no doubt. Instead of marking a whole album with a genre you have to listen to each track and note its intensity. But it can be done programatically. Tangerine is an OSX app that will crawl your library and pop the BPM into track metadata. It also allows you to create playlists by choosing intensity curves. You could imagine a smart playlist (actually I bet it would have to be an applescript) that assigned star ratings to all tunes in a certain BPM range.
How do you organize your library? Or, more specifically, what is your route into it? By artist, by genre, by intensity?
A game that would displease the range safety officer
OK, so here’s an inspired idea, the kind of thing devised by idiots who’ve been drinking all weekend.
You know the game called 500? Basically you throw a tennis ball into the air. Players then run under it, pushing, shoving, and perhaps groping for the ball as it comes down. You get 100 points for catching it on the fly, 75 for one bounce, 50 for two, etc. If you touch it on the fly and drop it you lose 100 points, with negative points for touching the ball mirroring the gains for catching it. (At least that’s how I grew up playing it.)
So this weekend. My college friends and I were gathered for our annual Fall session of telling stories like none of us had ever heard them before and being demonstratively juvenile. We discovered that the house we were staying in contained a model rocket and loads of propellant. Of course we had to shoot it off.
I had not done this since I was little. I was soon reminded that the key to the whole thing (or rather the key to doing it more than once) is the secondary charge that goes off to spring the nose cone and deploy the parachute which floats the whole fuselage* back to Earth.
We were doing in this in the middle of a prairie. It wasn’t exactly parched, but I’m not sure Smokey the Bear (or NASA or the FAA) would have approved. As soon as the first one went up a small group of the inebriated ran out into the field, matching — or attempting to match — the trajectory of the descent with their own jagged strides. Just like 500, you see. But the problem was that it was dusk and the rocket went way the hell up. At it’s apogee (yay, SAT!) it was lost from human eyesight. Only a few hundred yards up did it become visible and usually it was hurtling down with a half-opened, if not outright flaming, parachute. Dangerous as all hell. If you’re not pegged in the face with a rocket strut you’re scalded by the hot cylinder itself. It was pure comedy.
Try it sometime and remember where the game was invented, right here on Ascent Stage. For added difficulty play in an urban area with lots of obstacles.
[*] A descent stage, you might say. But you would be wrong. A descent stage is a powered rocket whose purpose is to counteract gravity during a descent (as in to the moon). But that’s a great idea. Where are the model rockets with descent stages!?
“A cross between horseshoes and sodomy”
Summer in Chicago is technically over, but winter seems not to have gotten the memo and the The Greatest Ninety Days in any city seems to be rolling on.
As such, the sidewalks are alive with a simple game. It is called baggo, or bags, or bag toss, or as it is most unfortunately known around these parts: cornhole. (The bags are filled with corn kernels, you see.) Any game that enables you to play it while holding a beer in one hand and making endless sodomy jokes is bound to be good fun, no?
All it takes are two boards with holes, placed about 25 feet apart (the standard width of lots in the city — handy), and a couple of bags. Oh, and beer. See I believe this game was made specifically so that you could engage in a competition without putting your beer down. Which makes it perfect for tailgating and frat boys. But damn is it fun. The rules are simple: three points in the hole, one for on the board, you can knock others off, first one to 21. (There is a cancel-out variant of the rules where you have to do better than your opponent per turn to score at all, but that’s just, you know, complicated.)
But the real reason I like it is that it is an engine of social interaction for passersby. You’re blocking the sidewalk and the game makes a natural conversation point. I have met more neighbors in the past months playing baggo than I have in the past five years. Recently one evening when I was playing with my father-in-law (there’s a streetlamp right in front of our house) two drunkards spilled from the corner bar and slapped $5 on the far board. They managed to say something near “sink it in one throw.” I did. Not sure how I did, but I did.
Of course if you play on a weekend night you’re going to encounter idiots. One of the tactics in baggo involves deliberately trying to get your opponent’s bag off the board with no hope of scoring yourself. This involves an overhand throw, pitching-style. Of course, if you miss, the bag sails down the sidewalk.
This is precisely what happened a few weeks ago when, as our annual neighborhood party let out for the night, a few inebriated revelers strolled by. Can you piece together what happened next? The fellows thought we were trying to hit them. Took the bag and walked. Luckily I had a gigantic brit friend in town and he was right behind me as I negotiated the return of my precious corn-bag. Friend stared and grunted menacingly behind me, like a thug from a Guy Ritchie film. Bag returned, all OK. The magic of cornhole.
As with anything simple, it can be made less so with gadgets. Wife has not allowed me to purchase the LED tubing to light the hole at night, but damn it is tempting. And where is pimpmycornhole.com? That is money on the table, people!
You ask, all good fun, but is there a governing body of this nascent sport? But of course there is.
Post title from Stephen Colbert. Here’s the (w)hole truthiness.
Editorial
The good folks at Coudal Partners have asked me to guest edit their wonderful, ceaseless flow of linkage known as Fresh Signals (feed) for the month of September. I’m jt.
Apparently I didn’t scare Coudal too badly at dinner last week. Or perhaps that secured the job for me?
This should be fun.
Update: I probably should take this opportunity to remind readers that I have my own fresh signals (lowercase), called Marginalia, which is a list of interesting stuff found around the web. It’s in the right column on the web or you can subscribe to it separately or as a feed blended with the posts.
Nature, 4. Tolva family, 0.
Microscopic to macroscopic, we’ve taken it the hard way across the full spectrum of natural world nastiness in the last two weeks. Powers of 10 gone bad.
Let us start with the tiniest of living evils, the virus. A few weeks ago we headed out on our first truly long-haul road-trip adventure and final hurrah of the summer. All five of us crammed into one car. Luggage everywhere. Fishing rods strapped to the roof. Hello, Clark Griswold. We left Chicago at 9PM on a through-the-night journey to far northeastern Oklahoma, a friend’s lakehouse. Strangely I had never considered OK to be drivable, but in fact the border is only as far from St. Louis as St. Louis is from Chicago. Doable, if miserable.
3AM. All three kids asleep. Bliss. Then, our one-year-old daughter awakens with a cough straight out of a horror flick and inhalation distress that was truly terrifying. She was sick, clearly. Wife says, that’s croup. Just a nasty little virus that we usually combat at home with a steamy shower, a jaunt out into the cold night air and/or medication. We had none of these. So, wife then says, we need to pull over right now. I agreed that we needed to, but, see, we were on the freeway squarely bisecting East St. Louis, the city that began the tradition of Illinois towns on the east side of the Mississippi being hellish mirror images of their counterparts on the other side. I protested, citing the well-being of all of us in the face of the well-being of one of us. But thelovelywife threatened my well-being if I did not pull off to assist our youngest and, you know, I’m selfish about my own personal safety, so I did. Here’s a short video I shot at this moment.
We survived this escapade but decided we had to stop over the bridge at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital. I went to grad school at Wash U. so I knew this was a quality institution, but I was unprepared for just how amazing it was when you need it, even in the wee hours of the morning. Still, seeing your toddler in a hospital gown is a troubling thing. Sleepless and with two other kids in their pajamas in the ER it was all we could do at this sight to keep our composure. She got some steroid shots and we were on our way. But we couldn’t go all the way to Okie. Just didn’t seem right with Typhoid Mary in the car. So we decided to re-route to Galena, Illinois a small town in far northwestern Illinois where my parents have a place. We rolled in at 8:45 PM the next day. Just 15 minutes shy of 24 hours (minus ER) in the car. More on this at the conclusion of this saga.
Scale up, if you will, from the dastardly virus to the sustaining yeast fungus. As a culture, we owe much to this little bugger, but I’m currently greatly dissatisfied with it. I decided to embark on a raspberry wine fermentation last weekend. (You may recall the bloody mess that was picking these delicacies on my parents’ property, the aforementioned Galena residence.) So I squashed and squashed. You can’t run these things through a grape press, alas, and have to squeeze them whole in a cheesecloth bag. It was open-heart surgery.
We ended up with five gallons of juice. It smelled heavenly. I added the sugar, took the temp, measured the specific gravity, had the concoction positively yearning for ferment then added the yeast and … nothing. OK, not a problem, might take a night. But no. No foam, no gurgle, no incipient smell of alcohol. This was a problem because I did this after the kids were asleep hoping to avoid their bacteria-laced touch and endless questioning. It was not to be. The next morning I checked the fermentor — still no hot yeast-on-sugar action — and my kids were all over the thing. I had to explain it all, which resulted in this classic quip from the six-year-old: “Mommy, mommy, did you know that yeasts are little critters that poop alcohol!?” I’ve done nearly everything I know to get the fermentation going, but as of today, no luck.
Scale up again to the charming urban indigene known as Rattus norvegicus. We’ve had a bit of rat problem of late. Early summer storms knocked our garage door off its track. We fixed it, but the fix left a gap at the bottom where the little nasties let themselves in nightly. We saw them scurrying out when we’d lift the door but only understood the extent of the problem when we peered into the corner where we store some of the 19 strollers we own. Rat shit everywhere. In every nook, every cranny. Son said “Hey Daddy, look at all the rotten raisins in the baby seat.” Um, not exactly.
As soon as they banished the thoughts of the cute vermin from Ratatouille and Flushed Away the kids were immediately obsessed with helping me rid ourselves of the bastards. But of course, as with the wine, they had to be right in the action playing away in the rodent feces. I finally shooed them away and fired up the leaf-blower to shoot out the very last of the Bubonic particulate matter. Stupid. I was immediately in the eye of a small hurricane of enclosed, whirling crap. (Woke up the next morning with a sore throat and some truly Dickensian snot.)
No rat spotted as of today, though we’ve identified their lair in the foundation of the couch house next to us. Next weekend promises chicken wire and concrete poured into their holes. Take that, suckers! Good fun.
Scale up now from the natural to the Natural. As in Mama Natura. (Bitch.) And rewind to the aborted trip to Oklahoma. We’re on our way to Galena moving up the western edge of Illinois through such metropolises as Peoria, Galesburg, and Savanna — a trip worthy of a Sufjan Stevens album. Just two hours from the blessed relief of a home we know the skies turn apocalyptic. Wife and I were barely coherent from lack of sleep. This was hour 22 of 24 awake. It all went straight to hell as an amazing supercell unloaded on us. We were on the Great River Road that snakes up the Mississippi through tiny towns so at least one cardinal direction, west, was cut off for our escape route should we have seen a twister. Luckily we didn’t but it was a biblical torrent. In a way maybe it was a good thing. The adrenalin powered us through the last hours of our odyssey from St. Louis in our roving petri dish of a car.
Moving eastward these storms were on a bee-line for Chicago. They slammed the city as we all convalesced from our road trip in Galena. We didn’t realize the extent of it until we arrived home that Sunday. There was evidence of the maelstrom everywhere: trees down, transformers blown, standing water. We arrived in time for our annual block party. A small affair, literally one block of the thousands in Chicago. The funny thing is that because of the storm one side of the street had power, the other had none. Being rather neighborly around these parts about a dozen homes from my side had strung extension cords across the street to power certain vital gizmos on the other side. This ad hoc wiring was made more surreal because there were no cars on the block due to the party. I’ll remember this show of support when we’re all irritable and threatening each other with a shovel-based death for parking spots come winter.
Scrolling further out I’m sure you can find a meteor headed straight for my home, but this has not happened yet so please post it as a comment when I am but a mixture of carbonized ash and interstellar dust. Thanks.
Mythopoeia
No story exists as an island these days. Books beget movies and vice versa. Sequels, prequels, and tangentially-related storylines are published and consumed. Graphic novels, anime, television series, and videogames flesh out the rest of the universe.
This is all market-driven, which is why it isn’t new. But the web and the low barriers to user-created content have sent a small exploded moon’s worth of fictional ephemera* into orbit around popular stories. Alternate realities, fan fiction, 3D worlds, even amateur video series fill in any remaining gaps. Narrative today abhors a vacuum.
This is exciting, though it has been mostly theoretical for me. I mean, I know it is out there, but I rarely encounter it. As with so many things, it takes the perspective of a child to really make clear how powerful an idea can be. My six-year-old son is a huge Star Wars junky. He can’t get enough. He’s seen all six movies, both Clone Wars animated series, has dozens of books, has thoroughly mastered LEGO Star Wars I and II, and consumes any other info he comes across. Wookieepedia has changed his life.
Here’s the thing. My son knows that Star Wars isn’t real. He really does. But he also believes that it is a complete fictional universe. The movies? Oh, well, they’re good, but in his opinion they are just slivers of the stories in this galaxy (from A Long Time Ago) that someone happened to film. The movies don’t have any real precedence over detailed articles in Wookieepedia about, say, the massacre at The Battle of Rodia, the fallible Jedi Set Harth, or the renowned Sullustan journalist Den Dhur. No, I hadn’t heard of any of these either.
Clearly there are limits to this sense of completeness. My son will ask a question about a planetoid or something that none of the games, videos, or wikis can answer. But in his mind it isn’t that the fact or storyline doesn’t exist. It is that it has not been found yet. And isn’t this how we think in the age of The Google? That wanting to know something is more a matter of locating it than wondering whether it exists to be known?
The Star Wars universe is Borges’ Library of Babel and my son is lost in the stacks. Happily so.
Of course, you’ll argue, the best fiction deliberately leaves things out, opens a space for the imagination. One could no more know everything about a given fictional world than one could know everything about real life.
Well, I think of Lost. The world of that island is meticulously crafted; half of every show is backstory. But obviously there are massive gaps in the storyline. This annoys lots of viewers, but it is also what keeps people coming back and, of course, is precisely what enables the universe to expand, whether by ABC scriptwriters (alternate reality game, “official” in-world websites) or by fans (an archive of over 3500 fan-created videos, a dedicated wiki ).
Soon I’m sure my son will arrive at where the sidewalk ends. Some Star Wars story path he’s on will hit a dead end. He’ll confront an incomplete world and will be required to suspend a new kind of disbelief. But if he’s anything like me this will also be the moment when he realizes that creating is even more fun than finding.
[*] Odin Soli has called these overlapping stories “fictional ecospheres.” I like that.
Do you kill people for hire?
If so, you might like this dish.
Spaghetti All’assassino (Spaghetti of the Assassins) is possibly the best pasta dish I have ever eaten. On our last night in Matera, we had dinner with friends and they introduced me to this devilish concoction.
Like many traditional Lucanian dishes it is simple with a twist. In this case the twist is heat — of all kinds. Basically you undercook a bunch of spaghetti then throw it into scalding hot oil olive. (Stand back, it pops.) This chars the outer “nest” of pasta and cooks the inner pasta to completion. As this is happening you dump in cooked tomatoes and peperoncino in powder. That’s it. A fiery combo of crunchy on the outside and al dente in the middle.
I cooked the dish last night and screwed up approximately half of it. The tomatoes burned and I got the outer shell a bit too hard. But this is how we learn.
Spaghetti All’assassino
Ingredients
- 400 grams spaghetti
- 300 grams fresh baby tomatoes
- 1 cup virgin olive oil
- powdered peperoncino
Instructions
- Cut the baby tomatoes in half and fry in very hot oil for about 6-7 minutes, they should get a bit mushy but not brown, add salt. You need to do this in a large deep frying pan.
- Cook the spaghetti until really 'al dente' – if it says 8 minutes on the pack, take them out at 5.
- Drain the pasta really well and pour into the tomatoes and boiling oil (if the oil is hot enough it will make a big noise). Add peperoncino and stir a little to get oil around all the spaghetti.
- Leave for about 2-3 minutes before stirring/moving around/turning the burned parts around and then leave again for another 2-3 minutes. If you stir continuously the crusty brown bits don't get formed.
- Do not add parmesan cheese.
Thanks for Mikaela Bandini for introducing me to the dish and for the recipe.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
