“Take it easy, but take it.” | Studs Terkel, 1912-2008
I have a few random recollections of charming encounters with Studs Terkel, but then most everyone who lived in Chicago for any stretch has those. It was hard not to run into Studs Terkel.
Just over a month ago Stuart Lifson paid tribute to Studs on his Hello Beautiful! Today he posted a sad but inevitable update.
Go read.
And go vote Tuesday, if you’ve not done so already.
So long, Studs.
trick or treat
Here at the RV park
I’ve got yet another identity–Jessie’s cousin BR. Not that I’m not already known as BR to various persons, but not as Jessie’s cousin BR. A bit of an adjustment. And, judging from a brief conversation I had today, yet another identity may be resurging: the Walker. I walk a lot.
“Stitches don’t help at all”
Possibly the first John Cale record I bought, Guts is a sampler from the ‘74′-’75 Island years. The Island anthology that came along in the ’90s presents the whole of his three regular issue Island albums, with a few bonus tracks, but Guts — with only 10 tracks — probably does the job almost as well. The title track (source of my title above), “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend,” “Leaving It Up to You”–first-rate material. And he’s wearing a hockey mask.
Happy DrawMoween!
Tomorrow will be the start of the third annual DrawMo!—a thirty-day challenge for those who wish to draw more.
Who: People of the Internets
What: Try to make at least one drawing a day for a month
Where: Offline, online, on blogs, on Flickr, wherever
When: November 1–30
Why: Because it’s fun
To join the DrawMo! group blog, send me an e-mail or leave a comment here or there. You can also join the Flickr group.
Who’s in?
Studs Terkel. Gone. Today.
Chicago Tribune photo by Charles Osgood. May 16, 2007.
“I’m still in touch, but I’m ready to go,” he said last year at his last public appearance with the [Community Media Workshop], a nonprofit that recognizes Chicago reporters who take risks in covering the city.
Write about him later, okay?
Meantime: Rick Kogan, in the Chicago Tribune.
And: Division Street: America.
Thomas Friedman Explains a Bar Fight
It was then that I realized all power came from the Sun. As I stumbled from my car to a roadside saloon a PowerPoint graph slid into my head of what organisms need to do to achieve PhotoSynthesis. I call them the PhotoSynthesis Superchargers:
- Be a living organism: Sitting on the fence between “dead” and “not dead” won’t cut it any more.
- Maximize your access to carbon dioxide and water investment.
- Be willing to absorb solar energy and change.
In the post 9/11-world, there are what I call Plants and Animals. Animals can’t make Glucose and Oxygen from the Sun. But a Plant can. I was thinking about this as I ordered a drink from the bar, when I ran—literally—into German finance minister Peer Steinbrück. Mr. Steinbrück demanded an apology.
“It doesn’t look like the Thai baht is going to recover any time soon,” I said, slamming the business end of my Zima bottle into his head.
~ Alesh
Found
. . . floating down a canal.
Kaki King – First Brain
From Shoot the Player a site clearly inspired by a favorite of mine, La Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows (via Waxy)
A Hair-rowing Journey
A look at the many hairstyles employed by the actor Robert Pattinson.
The Mousse-oline! For this look, Robert probably rolled out of bed, flipped his hair to one side and brushed a healthy handful of mousse through it.
It’s a tampon
(Hat tip to erin!)
Microcosm
Pfft:
The financial condition of the world’s most exclusive dining hall and its affiliated Capitol Hill restaurants, cafeterias and coffee shops has become so dire that, without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won’t make payroll next month.
The embarrassment of the Senate food service struggling like some neighborhood pizza joint has quietly sparked change previously unthinkable for Democrats. Last week, in a late-night voice vote, the Senate agreed to privatize the operation of its food service, a decision that would, for the first time, put it under the control of a contractor and all but guarantee lower wages and benefits for the outfit’s new hires.
The House is expected to agree — its food service operation has been in private hands since the 1980s — and President Bush’s signature on the bill would officially end a seven-month Democratic feud and more than four decades of taxpayer bailouts.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Rules and Administrations Committee, which oversees the operation of the Senate, said she had no choice.
“It’s cratering,” she said of the restaurant system. “Candidly, I don’t think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn’t need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses
Happy Birthday, My Friend
Yes, today is the birthday of one of my longtime friends.
This fall he shipped the Crazed Hag, together with the rest of his puppet collection, to a cousin, whom he charged with distributing them to the twenty-first century generation. Here’s what he wrote me:
The dude at the mailing place thought I should spray them with Febreze® because they smelled like an old person’s house!
They ARE really great and they are now all on their way to Washington, D.C. where I have appointed my cousin . . . Puppet Czarina! She really likes the witch and the crazed hag a lot — oh, and also the skeleton, the king, and the bearded man. I like a lot the witch, too, and the crazed hag, but I also really like the skunk and THE SHAGGY DOG! Well, Donald Duck is fantastic, too. My Aunt Nina . . . gave me all the puppets except for the marionette, which was a gift from my grandmother in San Antonio.
I liked how accidentally in my photo the bearded man seems to be eyeing lustily the T-shirt’s sexy woman illustation — I only wish I’d been that clever to stage that, but it was like 100 degrees out the day I did the photo session and I became fatigued after a couple of hours in the sun!
Reverse Geotagging
Flickr has been playing with geotagging data (via jimray):
We have a lot of geotagged photos.
Almost ninety million, as I write this, and the numbers keep growing especially as nearly every new smart phone released to market has not only a camera but also the ability to capture location information with it.
For every geotagged photo we store up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to the continent. This process is usually referred to as reverse-geocoding.
Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can.
I’m ready for the little tykes…
got a 55-gallon drum of Skittles and cartons and cartons of candy cigarettes.
turn that frown upside down
Botox makes us happy?
People with Botox may be less vulnerable to the angry emotions of other people because they themselves can’t make angry or unhappy faces as easily. And because people with Botox can’t spread bad feelings to others via their expressions, people without Botox may be happier too.
Transparent Mask
Wassup 2008
Sodom and Gomorrah
When do abstinence pledges work?
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Dear clusterflock
If we were each to don a disguise today and post as “Christopher Walken”, would our identities be visible through transparent masks?
A Ghastly Tale
The time: Mid-to-late 1960s. Summer holidays.
The place: South West England.
A disused civil defense structure on the playing fields. It had long fallen into disrepair and so was the perfect place for small boys in shorts to play. I was there with a bunch of friends, exploring unlit rooms deep in the bowels of the place, when all of a sudden we spotted ghostly shapes.
Arms. And legs.
We all stood riveted to the spot, each egging the other to go closer to look. I seem to remember being there for an hour, staring into the darkness. I would love to be able to say it was I who broke the ice, but I’m sure that it was one of the others. We all moved forward to look closer . . .
U.S. Economy Inflates and Recedes Simultaneously
America’s turgid economy has finally oozed over the brink of a deep financial chasm, the likes of which has not been seen or smelled or imagined for decades.
The world banking crisis, rising commodity costs, and an uncertain energy supply have combined to ignite a paper bag of dog poo left on the doorsteps of hapless consumers.
At the same time the world monetary supply tightens, prices continue to soar. According to gifted moneyologist Warren Buffet, the costs of luxury yachts and Moet & Chandon champagne have risen nearly 400% in just seven years, although according to Mr. Buffet the inflationary spiral hurts the very wealthy “not one damned bit — we’re too rich.”
Smells like . . .
Sometimes one wonders.
The following from one of my archival colleagues’ online forums.
Does anyone know what makes some photographs smell like band-aids? Is there anything that can/should be done for that? Vinegar I know, and matches I know, but not band-aids, and I’ve recently come across several prints, on a different kind of paper (feels a bit Polaroidish), that look fine (a bit of a tendency to curl is all) but smell strongly of band-aids.
Any explanations would be most welcome.
I couldn’t say for certain that I know what band-aids smell like, be they Band-Aid brand or any adhesive bandage. I suppose I do, come to think, as I can now concentrate deeply and conjure up a faint aroma of . . . something. Still, I truly cannot think of an instance when I’ve taken a whiff of anything and thought, “Wow! Smells like band-aids!”
I also like the adjectival coinage “Polaroidish”.
Just So You Know
When you define a word, the word being defined is the definiendum.
Just thought you should know that.
Carry on.
Listening to Bill Bishop on NPR this Morning
Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort : Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart has been mentioned here a number of times, as I recall, and I heard the man interviewed today as I drove to work. It was a call-in show, and I have never called in to such a thing but often want to. The premise of the book is this (as stated very well by reviewer John L. Borden):
“The Big Sort” refers to the fact that lifestyle choices are leading like-minded folks to live together in communities where they feel comfortable and perhaps unchallenged. That has significant ramifications for our country’s political and social development. To quote the book, “The lesson for politics and culture is pretty clear. It doesn’t matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal, or a federal appeals court judge. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward extremes.”
I happen to agree that living in mixed company is a good thing, believing as I do that fear of difference often leads to a stunted personal and social development. But I found myself wanting to ask this question: How am I not contributing to this tearing apart when I decline to go live in a gated community, just as I would be if I did decide to live in one? The issue of inclusiveness can’t be seen as a ground state that is being disrupted by divisive opinions and lifestyles when the virtues of inclusiveness itself are so broadly questioned. What do you think?