Dana Gould as Maurice Evans as Dr. Zaius as Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain
Wormhole
When I lived above that chocolate shop on Haight Street, it was impossible to receive a package or a repairman. I had to be at home at the exact moment the doorbell rang, then I had to tear down the hallway, around the stairs, and fling myself outside before it was too late. Often the delivery man had such poor luck with this building, (s)he wouldn’t even ring the doorbell. Which was great. I’d stay home all day, waiting, and emerge at dusk to find the “Sorry We Missed You” slip right there, taunting me. Nine times out of ten I had to take public transportation 20 miles out of town to pick up the package.
Now I live two blocks away, one block off the Haight, and my apartment complex has this awesome, fancy doorbell system that calls my cell phone to buzz open the lobby door. When I see the right number calling, I answer the call, press “9″ and in goes the delivery man. It works great.
So a few days ago I had my iPhone in the back pocket of my jeans and, oh!, it fell in a coffee shop toilet when I sat down to pee. After a couple days of the rice trick failure, I surrendered myself to fate and late last night I ordered a refurbished iPhone from AT&T.
Just over 12 hours later it dawns on me: I need a cell phone if I’m going to buzz in the delivery of a cell phone.
A Little Skipper…
Reminded me, by way of Jean in Deron’s post.
Seems I’ve failed to embed it. Nor link it for that matter. Nevermind. It isn’t that good. Don’t take up your time.
Fanfarlo – Shiny Things
I did the wardrobe styling/costumes for this video.
Behind the scenes fun: I sewed all the bracelets/hairpieces the night before, as well as hand painted the shoes. To get the leotards I went to a magical warehouse called Danny’s Warehouse where everything is 10 dollars and dug through bins that are taller than I am, looking for six matching leotards. I couldn’t find the kinds of judges outfits that I wanted, so John drove me to Walmart at midnight the night before. We ate Sonic, it was freezing cold in Lancaster. By the time I arrived on set the next day I’d slept two hours out of the past thirty-five. It was a beautiful shoot.
Repost of a Post Past
Going down the rabbit-hole of Cece’s post. Great rememberies here, following “flockers.”
from the comments
I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.
He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.
The Whitest Kids You Know
This is just a log for today, January 6th, 2012. Please write down the most privileged thing you’ve said or thought today. Multiple entries accepted. My first of the day is below.
9:35a – “Did you listen to that Adventure episode of This American Life? It was pretty phoned in, in my opinion.”
She had a nose ring.
She slides the papers across to me and asks if I am so excited about my new car.
I do not look up, I say: “It’s just another material posession.”
She laughs brightly and I sign my name twenty times or more.
quote out of context
I suppose you’re right, but from my experience, writing a novel is like having sex with a gorilla. You ain’t done till the gorilla’s done. You might think, Well, when I’m done, I’ll be done. But you’re not done.The gorilla’s still going.
How It Came to Pass
“Why,” I asked, “is there an Essex, a Wessex, and a Sussex, but no Nessex or Nussex?”
“Well,” he replied, “there’s an interesting story behind that. Edward I was king at the time the regions were all laid out, and he gave them their names. But he suffered from a terrible neurological condition that prevented him from turning to the north. And because he was the king, nobody wanted to say, ‘King, you’re forgetting one of the cardinal directions’.”
quote out of context
Someday the Occupy Wall Street protests will end, and the only question is whether they will go out with a bang or a whimper—or a lot of loud banging followed by whimpers.
And then nothing happened.
Last night at dinner, John and I were trying to decide if I should get the two enchiladas. I went through a thought process in my head, “Well, they have flour tortillas so I’d have to ask for the corn tortillas, which are smaller so they’d probably only make two but then they’d be smaller than the flour ones unless they made a third one to compensate, but I doubt it.” So I chose to get the fish tacos. Later on, John said the exact. same. thing. as above, as a reason for me not getting the enchiladas. I stared at him in wonder and said, “I literally thought all that like ten minutes ago.” Which he took the wrong way and said, “Well I guess we just don’t need to talk anymore.”
Later:
We’re standing outside the restaurant as he tells me a story from childhood, of which the ending result was that someone got divorced. “That’s true though isn’t it? Half of all marriages end.” We stared into the street for half a second and then he said “…in sweatpants.” To which I replied, delightedly, “You’ve been reading billboards again!”
tweet of the day
fragment
I didn’t have the milk-to-cereal ratio right so I got back up.
Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?
Slate Magazine is discussing the question, citing several experiments during the 50′s and 60′s that seem to point to LSD as a catalyst for innovation and creative thinking:
Taken as a whole, the studies suggested that people who are creative to begin with may experience a slight increase in inspiration or insight during and after an acid trip. That’s not true for non-artistic types, although psychologists did find that most participants thought they got more creative on LSD, regardless of what the tests actually showed…
Despite the relative paucity of rigorous scientific data, Steve Jobs—who once suggested that Microsoft products would be better if Bill Gates “had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger“—is far from alone in his belief. Francis Crick reportedly claimed to have envisioned the structure of DNA during an acid trip. John Lennon attributed the Beatles’ album Revolver to the group’s acid use.
Connecting the dots, the author doesn’t seem convinced by the studies, but it’s still a fascinating idea. Jobs was obviously a visionary, predicting technologies years or sometimes decades before they would be fully realized by Apple (this 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air seems to include prediction for both the iPad and Apple TV). That’s either serendipitous prescience or the product of some very constructive acid trips (or more probably, a combination of both). Either way, it reminded me of something Deron once shared (or maybe a book he was reading) that discussed the proposition that human culture evolved through the use of hallucinogens. Humans have had the same DNA for something like 250,000 years, yet only developed complex societies and culture in the last 15,000 or so – Steve Jobs just took it all a massive step further.
So I can’t sleep
It’s probably because of a variety of internal and external stimuli, but I suspect one of the larger factors might be the dude who is always yelling at a Bobby I’ve never met. This neighbor has the strange habit of screaming “fuck you you you you you you you you” around two in the morning. This repetition somehow finds the nexus of hypnotic, tragic, hilarious, and enraging.
Related news: I now have the Kansas City Police phone number in my favorites on my iPhone.
the art of bullshitting
A great story about thinking on your feet:
Twisted Pixel chief creative officer Josh Bear had responded with abounding confidence, if only to mask the truth. Because the fact of the matter, the fact that he and CEO Mike Wilford were all too aware of, as they sat in Redmond, WA Tex-Mex restaurant The Matador, was this: The idea wasn’t “awesome.” It was nonexistent.
The developer had scored a major meeting with Microsoft to pitch a new game developed exclusively with Kinect (then “Project Natal”) in mind. It needed to be big, it needed to be smart and — most pressingly to Wilford and Bear at that exact moment — it needed to exist.
It wasn’t that Wilford and Bear weren’t prepared. It’s just that the original idea they wanted to pitch (one that was actually first conceived for the Wii) wasn’t a good fit for the device, which they only became aware of once they saw it for themselves.
“It was really cool, but it didn’t have the fidelity to do what we wanted, it couldn’t really track finger movements,” Bear said. “I was like ‘Oh shit, we’re going to pitch this whole thing and they’re gonna know that it’s not possible with the hardware.’”
(thanks, Rich)
Whitney Cummings on lady writers
I talked to Whitney Cummings last night at a Paley Center event for her new sitcom Whitney. I asked her about her views on lady writers having difficulty in the industry and she had this to say:
“I don’t know, I guess I’m confused when people say that, I guess I don’t see that. I know the numbers might say that. I don’t think its because they’re not qualified, I think it’s because they don’t want to do it because it’s a shitty gig. It’s the same reason women don’t play football, because we’re not stupid enough to play a sport that you have to put on a helmet to get in there, it’s a bad idea. I think a lot of women are qualified to higher level writing jobs but they’re kind of like “This is torture, I’m going to do something that’s easier and more fun.” I think it’s the same reason that there’s less female comedians, it’s just a really grueling life and they are not masochistic, they’re smarter.”
I don’t know what I think about that, exactly.
boxercising earthquake
A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made wide metronomic swings. Thing was, there had been no earthquake registered in the area. It was a mysteriously super local event. After a two-week investigation, the epicenter had been narrowed down to the building’s twelfth floor gym where the side kicking, upper-cutting, and fist-jabbing of seventeen middle-aged Korean women boxercising to Snap’s 1990s hit “I’ve got the Power” seemed somehow to have hit the building’s resonant frequency, sending the whole structure into convulsions.
(thanks, David)
What Happened When We Moved Out Here
It’s a little out of the way. We love our new home but the location is relatively remote. Not Montana prairie far, and not Desolation of Mordor far, but you have to drive for almost fifteen minutes to get a gallon of gas or milk. We’re twenty-five minutes from the Interstate, so for the first time in decades I cannot sit on my porch and hear the hum of highway traffic. Are these the metrics that define civilization? Do you choose isolation or insulation?
‘In this study, all they had to do was introduce competition for resources and summer camp became Lord of the Flies’
Some of the Eagles boys discovered the Rattlers’ flag standing unguarded on the baseball field. They discussed what to do and decided it should be ripped from the ground. Once they had it, a possession of the enemy, a symbol of their tribe, they decided to burn it. They then put its scorched remains back in place and sang Taps. Later, the Rattlers saw the atrocity and organized a raid in which they stole the Eagles’ flag and burned it as payback. When the Eagles discovered the revenge burning, the leader issued a challenge – a face off. The two leaders then met with their followers watching and prepared to fight, but the scientists intervened. That night, the Rattlers dressed in war paint and raided the Eagles’ cabins, turning over beds and tearing apart mosquito netting. The staff again intervened when the two groups started circling and gathering rocks. The next day, the Rattlers painted one of the Eagle boy’s stolen blue jeans with insults and paraded it in front of the enemy’s camp like a flag. The Eagles waited until the Rattlers were eating and conducted a retaliatory raid and then ran back to their cabin to set up defenses. They filled socks with rocks and waited. The camp staff, once again, intervened and convinced the Rattlers not to counterattack. The raids continued, and the interventions too, and eventually the Rattlers stole the Eagles knives and medals. The Eagles, determined to retrieve them, formed an organized war party with assigned roles and planned tactical maneuvers. The two groups finally fought in open combat. The scientists broke up the fights. Fearing the two tribes might murder someone, they moved the groups’ camps away from each other.
The story of two groups of boys, under the supervision of psychologists, left to fend for themselves, in Oklahoma’s Robber’s Cave State Park in the 1950s.
(via Aaron Cohen at kottke, and the browser)
funeral for man entombed for 27 years in chimney
Daryl, did you write this?
from the moderated comment spam
Slam dunkin like Shaquille O’Neal, if he wrote informative airctles.
Update:
Way to go on this essay, hleeped a ton.
‘As a result of several short conversations with him, officers believe he may not be from Utah’
With a little editing, this could be worked into something:
“This is really a strange case,” said Lt. Dennis Harris with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. “He just doesn’t want to be found.”
Drop me in the water
Was at a wedding this weekend. At dinner someone asked who I was there with, when I said no one, they said “You are so brave!” I made my face a cascade of nothingness and said with a bit of confusion I said “Why?” Later on a bottle of champagne was my dancing partner.
Earlier in the evening someone told me that it was better for children to grow up in an orphanage, rather than let them be adopted by gay parents who would teach them about the “alternative” lifestyle.
