Spilled Coffee, #2
He was in a friend’s downtown loft waiting for the rest of bachelor party to arrive. This was the warmup to his big night, and he had bizarrely mixed feelings about it. Everyone was playing a craps on a borrowed table. He walked away from the game, grabbed an appetizer off a long wooden table, then retreated to the windows and looked out into the Detroit evening.
Wayne, the wealthy brother-in-law to be, pulled away from the craps table a few moments later and huddled next to him. Wayne was married to Steph, the bachelor’s soon-to-be-wife’s twin sister. Steph had the perfect life: no job, living in a mansion, two perfect children. She had the staggeringly elite country club membership and tennis lessons. Everyone in the family joked that everything came all too easily to her, and that everything Wayne touched turned to gold.
The bachelor admired that about Wayne, and in his own way, thought that he would ultimately have these same luxuries by marital osmosis. Or something.
“You know, she wants to be just like Steph,” Wayne said of the bachelor’s future wife. This came suddenly, out of nowhere. On the list of things to say given the festive moods, this was like a bee sting.
“Yeah, probably,” the bachelor said, turning to look Wayne in the eye and smiling.
Wayne put a hand on the bachelor’s shoulder. “No probably.” He smiled cartoonishly wide. “Just so you know.” The smile slowly faded to a plaintive gaze.
“Well yeah. Who wouldn’t?” Anxious laughter.
A pause, still looking at each other. The hand fell away from the shoulder.
“OK then. Let’s go have a beer.”
“Yeah, OK.”
If the subtexts of life’s events had a voice that grew louder in accordance with their prescience, this one would have screamed.
I have a sprained ankle
And it really fucking sucks. I’d like to give a big shout-out to the clumsy hack who came three feet under the net last night so I could land on his foot after coming down from a block. Thanks man!
Facts can be pesky
My thoughts on Palin are as follows: she’s an inexperienced, shoved-into-the-limelight veep pick of an old man who is an unlikely and poorly-qualified presidential candidate himself. She’s got nothing much to offer besides admittedly-likeable aw-shucks persona that will resonate with the ignorant among us, and she’s been told to go into attack-dog mode right off the bat and trump up the ‘us vs. them’ idea to simply energize the uber-conservative Republican base. So much for standing off on the issues versus Obama/Biden.
(Wasn’t this election about the issues this time around? You know, because there are some big questions in need of answers?)
My thoughts on her debut speech are here, and I think everyone should understand the misrepresentation that she weaved into her rhetoric. Not that politicians don’t bend the truth from time-to-time, but just because she’s a newcomer woman and has five kids doesn’t mean she’s not held up to the same standards of accountability.
The biggest pass people are giving her is that she’s an attractive woman who tries, and largely succeeds, in identifying with the ‘everywoman’ via motherood, PTA and hockey-mom angles. That’s great when you’re trying to get elected to the school board, but it shouldn’t fly one bit when we’re talking about VP of the United States.
As y’all have talked about before, this election really is becoming an issue of smart vs. dumb.
Spilled Coffee #1
She had just moved into his house, and it was weird. Not weird because he had been Mr. Happily Single or HBO primetime I’m-afraid-of-commitment fodder or anything like that, but because they weren’t partners at all. They even had an awful sex life, where awful means once every two weeks and it was work, god was it ever work. It often resulted in crying. And they were going to be married in about a month at a fancy country club and it was going to cost upwards of $20K and the only thing he wanted out of the deal was a huge house in the right zip code to show everyone he had actually arrived, because that was what he had been taught was important. Of course, she wanted babies and to quit working, because that equaled an identity.
That was the deal. Unspoken and subtly hostile, but a deal nonetheless. Their future had an agenda, like a meeting or a conference. Or a trial.
So you’d think on the cold October night just after she moved in, when they were about to sleep in the soon-to-be marital bed, and she told him that if they didn’t fix their sex life then there would be problems down the road, one of them would get the hint. The ideas of big houses or kids or money or whatever would, just for a moment, take a backseat to the realities of not being connected at all in the way married people need to be, but no, it didn’t.
And that was one of the many red flags that were ignored. That was how dedicated they were to marching headlong into the icy wind, candles extinguished, propelled by the demons of their upbringings.
Dear Clusterflock
Where have I been lately?
!$title$!
!$text$!
A Look Into NFL Pre-game Flybys
NFL Films takes an in-depth look at the tradition of pre-game flybys, including some insight into exactly how precise the pilot crews must be to get the timing right and avoid land-based obstacles. Just amazing to watch.
(via GF)
It’s Called epMotion
I don’t know what epMotion is (and probably neither do you), but that’s not really the point. Here’s a scientific equipment company that figured out how to break out of its traditional image to do some really creative marketing. This video is everywhere right now.
Just because you work in what’s perceived to be a dry or conservative industry doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun.
Inquisitive
(via Arbrorath)
Newt: There Are 3 Ways to Lower Oil Prices
I’m a moderate in my views, but I think Newt Gingrich makes some solid main points that not only punish the speculators who continue to bet on the rising price of oil, but also announce to the world that we are taking our energy economy into our own hands while we search for alternative fuels. This isn’t a typical supply-side cry for drilling in our country and glutting the market, but instead a phased solution that ultimately winds up cutting our oil dependence, foreign and otherwise.
Newt Gingrich: 3 Ways to Lower Oil Prices
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
BlackBerry to iPhone 3G: Is Now The Time To Pull the Trigger?
For anyone out there who is considering moving to the iPhone 3G from a BlackBerry (as I am), I have posted a lengthy consideration of making such a jump over at my employer’s blog. If you are considering such a move or have done it in the past, I SO would like your comments.
IRS Spam Is Clever, Dangerous
I just had a pretty scary piece of spam show up in my inbox. It appears to be from the IRS, implicates my employer, and comes immediately on the heels of the US tax season. All in all, very well socially-engineered.
Long story short, it’s spam, but you need to be careful. There’s more where it came from.
More details here.
Watermelons and Sex
The next time you want to make sexy time with your woman, consider watermelon instead of Viagra or Cialis:
A cold slice of watermelon has long been a Fourth of July holiday staple. But according to recent studies, the juicy fruit may be better suited for Valentine’s Day. That’s because scientists say watermelon has ingredients that deliver Viagra-like effects to the body’s blood vessels and may even increase libido.
Hot. Imagine the games you can play with the seeds.
Business spam evolves
I found an interesting spam email in my inbox this morning that’s basically a personalized approach that hints at a risk to an online trademark (domain name) due to a foreign application being made for the trademark name in country-specific versions (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). It looks valid enough to hook a reader at first glance, and only when some research is done do you discover what it’s all about.
This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark (miproconsulting) due to a foreign application being made for our trademark name in country-specific flavors (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). Being the nice foreign domain registrar they are, the sender of this message, SK Holdings, is asking us if we want to do business with them and secure all of the miproconsulting variants listed below so that we can protect our Internet brand from this foreign applicant.
This is pretexting: it takes a known fact or truism about an individual or business and uses that piece if information to get someone to divulge information or carry out some other action. In this case, the spammer wants the victim to purchase the extended domain names before the foreign applicant does, thereby allowing the victim to protect his Internet trademark. Not exactly the most aboveboard way to do business, but it is clever. I’ll grant them that.
Zero Dollar Bill
Artist Brian Romero invested many hours to create the monetary vehicle we’ll all need if things keep up at this rate: the zero dollar bill.
Embiggened version here, and it’s very worthwhile. Check out the detail, typography and signatures.
(via Neatorama)
Things are NOT fine and they’re getting worse, in case you’re wondering
Everything seemingly is spinning out of control:
Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.
Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.
The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.
Like Kottke, I first thought this was an Onion headline. Then I realized it wasn’t. Then I realized it must not be very hard to get a job as an AP beat writer.
(via reddit)
How to Become a Writer
“First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age–say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She’ll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She’ll say: ‘How about emptying the dishwasher?’ Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Acccidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.”
(via GracefulFlavor)
BS-free business
How instead of this, we agree to this:
This spot only gets better as it ages.
(via swissmiss)
How to resign from a job in the social media age
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, has tendered his resignation letter to Yahoo, as has his wife and fellow co-founder Caterina Fake. Check it out:
Put simply, Yahoo lost focus and Butterfield doesn’t feel he has a place anymore. The metallurgical storytelling is just clever metaphor. But that’s not the point.
A great many people are familiar with the ins-and-outs of corporate HR and workplace drama, so resignations and their accompanying letters are nothing new to them. But what do you most notice about Butterfield’s parting shot?
Tiger Woods to Miss Rest of 2008 Season
To all the morons on the radio who speculated that Tiger was faking the severity of his knee condition for the sake of self-promotion and marketing: suck it.
NYT: Tiger Woods to Miss Rest of 2008 Season
In other news, it’s a sign of how powerful Tiger has become — as an athlete and a brand — when news of his withdrawal from the remainder of the 2008 tour gets categorized under World rather than Sports in the NYTimes. Think about that.
(via GF)
Senator John McCu*t
Why isn’t this piece of 1992 McCain history being Reverend Wright-ed all over TV and the headlines?
(video via Cyn-C)
Bird balls prevent urban cancer water
LA’s Ivanhoe Reservoir contains millions of gallons of drinking water for LA residents. In the summer, however, problem presents itself: the water can potentially become contaminated with bromate (depending on daily outbound flow rates, one would presume), which is a natural reaction between solar light, chlorine (a treatment chemical) and naturally-occurring bromide.
Seeing how chlorine is a necessary treatment additive and the bromide is a natural element within the water, Ivanhoe officials got creative and decided to keep sunlight away from the water by dropping over 3 million black spheres (called bird balls) into the reservoir. This effectively created an opaque layer atop the water that serves as a solar shield, which eliminates the solar component of the reaction. Problem solved. Yay, right?
Check out a video of the action here.
But allow me to think out loud for a second: Ivanhoe is preventing the formation of a carcinogen by interrupting the photochemical reaction that forms bromate, the threat in question. But is anyone thinking about the potential toxicity of millions of plastic balls leeching into the drinking water supply, especially millions of black balls that take the beating of the LA sun all summer? To me, this seems like you could be trading one problem for another.
A bunch more photos at Curbed.
(via Unfiltered)
Want to Know How I Know the World as We Know It Is Ending?
(via GF)
Police Markedly Improve Earth’s Gene Pool
Now that I am a father, I can’t bear stories like this anymore.
TURLOCK, Calif. – Police killed a 27-year-old man as he kicked, punched and stomped a toddler to death despite other people’s attempts to stop him on a dark, country road, authorities said.
I post it here because I want to celebrate the fact that there is one less piece of shit walking the planet.