Writers Guild To Strike: FEMA Will Send Replacements
FEMA employees posing as strikers rough up a film tycoon crossing the picket line.
Los Angeles, CA – With the threat of an imminent walkout Thursday, 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America could be replaced by substitutes provided by the United States’ FEMA disaster relief agency. The powerful WGA union represents the writers responsible for typing America’s strategic reserves of TV and movie scriptwriting.
Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers spokesmogul Cecil B. Sony insisted that talks between the WGA and entertainment industry executives were continuing “in good faith”, and FEMA writers would only be used to prevent “a disaster of blockbuster proportions”.
This sentence was in the NYT
In a voice-mail message left for a reporter, Gloria Steinem said she hopes the women using vajayjay are doing so because they think it is more descriptive than vagina, not because they are squeamish.
Franklin
Andrew Bird - Spare-Ohs
flocker in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article about women and blogging and it featured a brief interview with me!
Ms. Perry … learned to draw a few years ago.
“People told me that the way to learn to draw was to draw every day,” she said. “So I did.”
Ms. Perry hasn’t stopped since. Every day, she posts a watercolor or drawing, delicate yet sharply observed, from her life: a glimpse of her feet on an ottoman, a sunflower losing its petals, the Clarion County Courthouse.
“I follow G.K. Chesterton’s philosophy, which is, ‘If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,’ and this sketch blog is a thing profoundly worth doing, even when I do it badly,” she laughs. “I believe that sitting still and simply looking at something allows me to slow down and appreciate my ordinary surroundings in a new way. Drawing daily lets me take chances, make mistakes, and model that process in public.”
(I’m delighted that the editors chose to print one of my drawings with the article, too.)
Superest
At The Superest:
Player 1 draws a character with a power.
Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.
Okay
What is the most beautiful car ever made?
I have a couple thoughts, but I’ll hold off until people have had a chance to think about it.
How Apple Stores Work
Once on staff, I learned the difference between a gigahertz and a gigabyte, but more important, I saw that, like the iPod’s user interface, training of Apple Store employees has been carefully designed. A series of podcasts I listened to and watched showed that selling was all about the approach. I shadowed other workers as they executed the company’s three-step sales process. They explained to customers that they had some questions to understand their needs, got permission to fire away, and then kept digging to ascertain which products would be best. Position, permission, probe.
All this sets the employee’s on-the-job attitude. At an Apple Store, workers don’t seem to be selling (or working) too hard, just hanging out and dispensing information. And that moves a ridiculous amount of goods: Apple employees help sell $4,000 worth of product per square foot per month. When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond.
The Economics of the Mouth
…the anecdotes described suggest that people who lack teeth may have trouble finding jobs.
Trick or Treat at the Holden’s
We had as much fun as this kid.
Nick the Dude passes out candy and Hot Wheels.
Vier wears his costume year round.
Dear Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access,
How are you? I am fine. Your email program is the third one I’ve had to use in nearly five years at my current place of business. The company’s brisk employee turnover rate is the only thing that compares to how often it adopts and dismisses email systems.
Weekly Picture 98
Ghost, Austin, TX, 10.12.2007
Michael Haneke’s Cache
I mentioned a couple weeks ago my astonishment at the visual perfection of Michael Antonioni’s Blowup and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. They are as close to perfection as any two movies I have seen in terms of the care taken with each shot — in terms of making sure that the visual components of each moment are as perfect as the director can make them.
I watched Michael Haneke’s Cache a few nights ago, and it comes as close to perfection structurally and narratively as any movie I have seen. Whereas the Kubrick and Antonioni movies are visually breathtaking (and, I would argue, structurally magnificent) Haneke’s Cache (while visually beautiful and lacking nothing in terms of image or framing) achieves its perfection with the essentialness of every moment in the script.
Things that seem offhand and amusing at first resonate with terrific meaning and implication when viewed against future events. A joke here becomes something spine-chillingly horrific there.
It’s hard to imagine an American sensibility being able to make a movie like this, and even some of the criticisms of the movie I have read today reflect more strongly against the intellect of those levying the criticisms than on the movie itself, but this is the type of film — or anything really — that people concerned with quality and its implications should attune themselves to.
A Morse code translation of a haiku by Issa.
.. /_. /… /. /_._. /_ / … /, ._ _ /…. /_._ _ / _._. /._. /_._ _ /?
._ _ /. / ._ / ._.. / ._../ _ _. / _ _ _/
_ /…. / ._ / _ / ._ _ /._ / _. _ _ /
A Visit to the Body Farm
From a short distance the male figure almost appeared to be napping among the hummingbirds and squirrels, draped as he was over the pebbled ground. But something about his peculiar pose evoked a sense of grim finality– the body language of the deceased…
Hey, Spinozaheads
I remember that a couple of people around here (Andrew, Deron, Daryl?) were reading or planned to read Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza, which happens to be copublished by the nonprofit for which I work. So I thought y’all might like to know that for the month of November, Ms. Goldstein will be discussing her book online with all comers. It’s hosted by B&N, but it’s free as in beer and, possibly, also speech.
The Ancestors Archive
Photograph by Susan K. Tiss.
“An evolving digital altar.”
From An Ear In Bartram’s Tree
My friend Rick loaned me a copy of this book of poems by Jonathan Williams (New Directions, 1969; Introduction by Guy Davenport), and here is a wonderful bit from it:
John Chapman Pulls Off the Highway
Towards Kentucky and Casts a Cold Eye
On the Most Astonishing Sign in Recent American Letters:
O’NAN’S
AUTO
SERVICE
Holding Up History
Before his disastrous turn as the nation’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales was the White House counsel behind some of the administration’s most egregious legal maneuvers, including President Bush’s 2001 executive order unilaterally repealing the presumption of public access to presidential papers enshrined in the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
The executive order, which Mr. Gonzales drafted, made it significantly harder for historians and the public to gain access to a former president’s official records, and it provided an early glimpse of two Bush White House themes: a mania for secrecy and a dangerously inflated view of presidential authority to override existing law.
Sled Hill Voices
a conversation between Mike Topp & Derek White
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility Cherenkov Radiation Hanford Site, U.S. Department of Energy, Southeastern Washington State
The work of photographer Taryn Simon is haunting and secretive. She has gained access to many sites, and sights, that few others do. Formal and still, the portraits in the Index work present an inventory of both the aesthetic quality of high level clearance and that which is hidden in plain sight. Regarding the above photo,
Submerged in a pool of water at Hanford Site are 1,936 stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules containing cesium and strontium. Combined, they contain over 120 million curies of radioactivity. It is estimated to be the most curies under one roof in the United States. The blue glow is created by the Cherenkov Effect which describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle, giving off energy, moves faster than light through a transparent medium. The temperatures of the capsules are as high as 330 degrees Fahrenheit. The pool of water serves as a shield against radiation; a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds. Hanford is among the most contaminated sites in the United States.
October field
The weather is turning colder, and the leaves will be gone soon.
Gluyas Williams
If Gluyas Williams is new to you, here is an introduction.
Dear Clusterflock
Paris or Britney?
Page France - Chariot
I think those who consider themselves musically “in the know” should pay attention to Page France. I don’t think they will be huge but they might be important sometime in the future. They remind me of Neutral Milk Hotel, the band nobody knows but everybody likes.