Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression, panic disorders, and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samual Beckett, Worstward Ho
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 702
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
[Returning Real Soon Now]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Tom Ricks presents Jim Gourley on post-traumatic stress disorder, Of lepers and caves.
[...] Here's what PTSD is like, and why people kill themselves over it. Think of life like a cave. If I send you into a cave with a lantern and tell you there are no bears in the cave, you feel safe. You will walk around the cave and enjoy yourself. Now what if I give you a lantern and a gun and tell you that there is a bear in there? You can still go down, but you'll be careful to look for the bear and ready to run or shoot if you see it. Now, what if I send you down there with a gun but no lantern and simply say "bear" to you? Pretty soon, you're in there, you can't see the way out, and every rock you bump into feels like a bear. After a long enough time being down in the cave, you realize you don't have enough ammo to shoot everything that might be a bear. It has nothing to do with running out of food or water or feeling like you're fighting some unwinnable battle with the bear. You just get sick and tired of the uncertainty. Are you going to live through the night? Are you going to wake up to a bear gnawing your intestines? You get to the point where you just wish the bear would come along and end it. And when he doesn't come, you decide to do it yourself.
Suicide isn't a surrender, it's a reassertion of power.
Excerpts from Taibii's new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America:
[...] After a few years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend their oil billions.
Aside from the hot weather, it wasn't such a bad gig. But on one of his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work had gotten a little, well, weird.
"I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ."
I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?"
He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you know about this?" 7
NOTHING TO SEE HERE as the weekend link-dump begins. There's no Stuxnet in Iran, and what was has all been taken care of, and it was never there anywhere, even though those responsible have been arrested.
Can it be that American military bases abroad, usually thought of as 'stabilizers' in tough neighborhoods, are really the primary cause of radical terrorism against the US and its allies?
My answer: yes, or a significantly large secondary cause so as not to matter.
[...] Pape and his co-author Feldman have broken down every recorded suicide terrorist incident since 1980 and noted an eruption of such incidents since 2004. From 1980-2003, there were 350 suicide attacks in the world, only 15% of which were anti-American.
In the short five-year period since, from 2004-2009, there have been 1,833 suicide attacks, 92% of which were anti-American.
Pape argues that the key factor in determining spikes of suicide terrorism is not the prevalence or profile of radical Islamic clerics or mental sickness but rather the garrisoning of foreign troops, most often US troops or its allies, in these respective countries.
Pape and Feldman show for example that even in war-torn, beleaguered Afghanistan, suicide attacks surged from just a handful a year to more than 100 per year in early 2006 when US and military deployments began to extend to the Pashtun southern and eastern regions of the country beginning in late 2005. Pakistan also deployed forces against Pashtun sections of western Pakistan, which Pape and Feldman note also saw large spikes in suicide attacks.
I'm sure having a Chinese or Russian military base sitting adjacent to my town/city, with only a few rapes and fights per year, would absolutely make me feel more secure and in love with China or Russia.
Doesn't everyone feel more secure with armed foreigners with overpowering force living in your neighborhood, while not being subject to your laws?
NELL is working on the semantic web. NELL still needs occasional teaching, though:
[...] When Dr. Mitchell scanned the “baked goods” category recently, he noticed a clear pattern. NELL was at first quite accurate, easily identifying all kinds of pies, breads, cakes and cookies as baked goods. But things went awry after NELL’s noun-phrase classifier decided “Internet cookies” was a baked good. (Its database related to baked goods or the Internet apparently lacked the knowledge to correct the mistake.)
NELL had read the sentence “I deleted my Internet cookies.” So when it read “I deleted my files,” it decided “files” was probably a baked good, too. “It started this whole avalanche of mistakes,” Dr. Mitchell said. He corrected the Internet cookies error and restarted NELL’s bakery education.
Speaking of cookies, I also use the Firefox add-on BetterPrivacy to eliminate LSOs, and you might want to, as well.
Snippets of spider genes let mutant silkworms spin silk stronger than steel. Scientists have coaxed miles of spider-like silk from a colony of transgenic silkworms, opening the door for large-scale production of super-strong, tough and flexible fibers. [...] In the wild, some spiders’ silk can be up to 10 times tougher than Kevlar. A spider recently discovered in Madagascar spins threads tougher than any known biological substance.
“We haven’t gotten a hold of that sequence yet, but you can bet that’s going to be something we’re going to engineer into our silkworms,” Fraser said.
The researchers attached another fluorescent protein to the spider genes to make the silk itself glow green. The silk was just as strong, tough and flexible as before, indicating that scientists could attach other genes without diminishing the quality of the silk. One potential application of this feature is making bandages that stimulate the growth of regular skin instead of scar tissue.
Now to adapt them to human wrists.
It's Monty Python Day; on October 5, 1969, the show premiered. On this anniversary, AmygdalapresentsMonty Python's Flying Circus's most important contribution to our culture:
The survey confirmed several attributes of the Tea Party movement. Compared to the general population, they are more likely to be non-Hispanic white, are more supportive of small government, are overwhelmingly supportive of Sarah Palin, and report that Fox News is their most trusted source of news about politics and current events.
But the survey challenged much of the other conventional wisdom about Americans who consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement:
Nearly half (47%) also say they are part of the religious right or conservative Christian movement. Among the more than 8-in-10 (81%) who identify as Christian within the Tea Party movement, 57% also consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement.
They make up just 11% of the adult population—half the size of the conservative Christian movement (22%).
They are mostly social conservatives, not libertarians on social issues. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, and less than 1-in-5 (18%) support allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry.
They are largely Republican partisans. More than three-quarters say they identify with (48%) or lean towards (28%) the Republican Party. More than 8-in-10 (83%) say they are voting for or leaning towards Republican candidates in their districts, and nearly three-quarters (74%) of this group report usually supporting Republican candidates.
In the department of pay attention:
A majority (54%) of voters say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported health care reform, including 51% of independent voters and 79% of Democratic voters. Nearly 6-in-10 (59%) Republican voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported health care reform.
Nearly 6-in-10 (58%) Americans favor a policy that provides a future path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for several years. Three-quarters of Americans also say immigration reform policies should be decided at the national level.
Public support for same-sex marriage increased by 8 points from 2008 to 2010 (29% to 37%). Half of Democrats, 4-in-10 independents, and less than 1-in-5 (17%) Republicans support allowing gay and lesbian people to marry.
Over the past five years, significantly more Americans report their views have shifted on the issue of rights for gay and lesbian people than on the issue of abortion (25% to 14% respectively).
On the whole, outliving wrongheaded views is slowly working. Slowly.
[...] There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience. But Akerlof saw the experience, for all its familiarity, as mysterious. He genuinely intended to send the box to his friend, yet, as he wrote, in a paper called “Procrastination and Obedience” (1991), “each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” He was always about to send the box, but the moment to act never arrived. Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking and that it could teach useful lessons about phenomena as diverse as substance abuse and savings habits. Since his essay was published, the study of procrastination has become a significant field in academia, with philosophers, psychologists, and economists all weighing in.
I have to get around to finishing reading this story.
Just kidding. Finishing reading is rarely something I have a problem doing, so long as it's under novel length, and I have at least three days, even though I typically have 7-8 tabs open at once.
It's doing stuff beyond reading that I procrastinate about.
[...] As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”
[...] What would happen in the many communities now allowing medical marijuana had been a subject of much hand-wringing. But few predicted this: that it would be a boon for local newspapers looking for ways to cope with the effects of the recession and the flight of advertising — especially classified listings — to Web sites like Craigslist.
But in states like Colorado, California and Montana where use of the drug for health purposes is legal, newspapers — particularly alternative weeklies — have rushed to woo marijuana providers. Many of these enterprises are flush with cash and eager to get the word out about their fledgling businesses.
“Medical marijuana has been a revenue blessing over and above what we anticipated,” said John Weiss, the founder and publisher of The Independent, a free weekly. “This wasn’t in our marketing plan a year ago, and now it is about 10 percent of our paper’s revenue.”
It is hard to measure what share of the overall market they account for, but ads for medical marijuana providers and the businesses that have sprouted up to service them — tax lawyers, real estate agents, security specialists — have bulked up papers in large metropolitan news markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver.
“This is certainly one of the fastest growing industries we’ve ever seen come in,” said Scott Tobias, president and chief operating officer of Village Voice Media, which publishes alternative weeklies across the country.
It's only going to keep, er, growing, with Colorado leading the way for the time being.
[...] After months of negotiation and delay, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are on the verge of an agreement that would allow the director Peter Jackson to begin shooting a two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Hobbit” early next year.
Barring further hitches — and there have been many, as the studios wrestled with their dual ownership of the project over the last year — a financial deal should be in place over the next few days, according to several people who have been involved in the bargaining.
And JRRT thought the paperback book was a tawdry thing to see his work associated with.
Read The Rest Scale: as interested in the other details. This is another daily link-dump post, to be added to until midnight, so check back.
Connecticut halts all foreclosures for all banks. Timeline. Although I think this is a good thing, one can't help but notice the coincidence that these varied steps come a month before the elections.
Thomas Nephew on The Great Betrayal, judicial activism, and a living Constitution, a terrific piece that mirrors much of my own reading and opinion on the Slaughter-House Cases, Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan Act, and the evisceration of the 14th Amendment.
The Iraqi government is making it harder and harder for reporters to report.
[...] Hamid Alipour, an official at the state-run Iran Information Technology company, has said that the worm is spreading. “This is not a stable virus,” he said last week. “By the time we started to combat it three new variants had been distributed.” He said his company hoped to eliminate it within “one to two months.”
[...] The other, Gliese 581 g, lies in the habitable zone and has a 37-day orbit. Its mass is between 3.1 and 4.3 times that of Earth.
Its relatively low mass means it should be made mostly of rock, like Earth. [...] The host star is a low-mass red dwarf that is just 1 per cent as bright as the sun.
Because it puts out so little light and warmth, its habitable zone lies much closer in than does the sun's. At such tight distances, planets in the zone experience strong gravitational tugs from the star that probably slow their rotation over time, until they become "locked" with one side always facing the star, just as the moon always keeps the same face pointed towards Earth.
That would mean perpetual daylight on one side of the planet and permanent shadow on the other. A first approximation suggests the temperature would be 71 °C on the day side and -34 °C on the night side, though winds could soften the differences by redistributing heat around the planet. [....]
[...] A flake of exotic carbon a few atoms thick has claimed a record: the speck has been spun faster than any other object, at a clip of 60 million rotations per minute.
And, yes, I'll keep adding to this post all day, as time allows, so check back for unspeakable excitment.
[...] He points out that photovoltaic liquids will only become commercially viable if they can convert at least 7 per cent of the energy in the light shone on them into electricity.
Korgel admits his team is not there yet. "Our best efficiency in the lab is just over 3 per cent," he says. To try to squeeze out more electricity, they are now working to eliminate irregularities in the sprayed nanocrystal layers.
The team has also come up with a partial workaround, namely to stack the spray-on cells on top of each other. This can increase the efficiency to about 4.5 per cent.
[...] In a test of short-term memory skills, only users of "skunk"-type strains exhibited impaired recall when intoxicated, whereas people who smoked hashish or herbal cannabis blends performed equally well whether they were stoned or sober.
The findings suggest that an ingredient more plentiful in some types of marijuana than in others may help to reduce the memory loss that some users suffer.
[...] What the researchers found is that the intelligence of individual group members was not a good predictor of how well the group as a whole performed. The teams that did best rated high in social sensitivity: their members interacted well, took turns speaking and included more females than groups that did poorly.
[...] The Sadrists present on Friday did not explain their drastic and sudden swing, but in a statement two days ago, issued from Iran, where he is studying theology, Mr. Sadr himself sounded a pragmatic theme. He cited a saying of his father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a revered Shiite leader who was killed in 1999 under Saddam Hussein.
“Politics has no heart,” Mr. Sadr said, in response to a letter from a follower. “Be informed, politics is giving and taking.”
From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.
If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics.
“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M. Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.
The revelations were made public on Friday, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to the government of Guatemala and the survivors and descendants of those infected. They called the experiments “clearly unethical.”
“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health,” the secretaries said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices.”
In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.
His unpublished Guatemala work was unearthed recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee. [....]
DRONING ON. Day two and three of link-dumping. As yesteray, I'll simply keep updating this post until midnight (Thursday), as circumstances allow, with new links, so check back and scroll down, as you like.
[...] Virtually all the liberal bloggers who have taken a critical stance toward the administration have one thing in common: they place principle above party. Their complaints are exactly the same complaints they lodged against the Bush administration. Contrary to the straw man posed by Obama supporters, they aren’t complaining about pie in the sky wishes but about tangible acts and omissions, from Gitmo to Afghanistan to the environment to gay rights to secrecy and executive power.
The essence of their critique is that the White House lacks a moral compass. The instances where Obama displays a flash of moral authority – the mosque speech comes to mind – these bloggers cheer him with the same fervor as his most ardent fans.
[...]
The constant refrain that liberals don’t appreciate the administration’s accomplishments betrays deep frustration. It was a given the right would try to destroy Obama’s presidency. It was a given Republicans would be obstructionists. It was a given the media would run with sensationalist stories. It was a given there would be a natural dip from the euphoric highs of the inauguration. Obama’s team was prepared to ride out the trough(s). But they were not prepared for a determined segment of the left to ignore party and focus on principle, to ignore happy talk and demand accountability.
As president, Obama has done much good and has achieved a number of impressive legislative victories. He is a smart, thoughtful and disciplined man. He has a wonderful family. His staff (many of whom I’ve worked with in past campaigns) are good and decent people trying to improve their country and working tirelessly under extreme stress. But that doesn’t mean progressives should set aside the things they’ve fought for their entire adult life. It doesn’t mean they should stay silent if they think the White House is undermining the progressive cause. [....]
[...] Ever since the 1930s, something very much like the tea party movement has fluoresced every time a Democrat wins the presidency, and the nature of the fluorescence always follows many of the same broad contours: a reverence for the Constitution, a supposedly spontaneous uprising of formerly nonpolitical middle-class activists, a preoccupation with socialism and the expanding tyranny of big government, a bitterness toward an underclass viewed as unwilling to work, and a weakness for outlandish conspiracy theories.
Yup.
UPDATE: 9/29/10: This being short, I'm combining yesterday and today: MacArthur Foundation Honors 23 including David Simon and Emmanuel Saez.
[...] You had Bob Dylan here. How did that go?
Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played "The Times They Are A-Changin'." A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I'm sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.
[...] That use of the word “Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.
Pakistan shuts border to U.S. and NATO military after cross-border raids.
Matt Taibii: Tea & Crackers: "How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster."
[...] The Treasury never tapped the full $700 billion. It committed $470 billion and has disbursed $387 billion, mostly to hundreds of banks and later to A.I.G., the car industry — Chrysler, General Motors, the G.M. financing company and suppliers — and to what is, so far, a failed effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosures. [...] Now Treasury reckons that taxpayers will lose less than $50 billion at worst, but at best could break even or even make money.
But almost no one, if anyone, will campaign on it.
[...] From 2002 to 2009, 25 illegal immigrants died while passing through the refuge’s rolling hills, which are flanked by mountains and are home to pronghorns, coyotes, rattlesnakes and four different kinds of skunks. Throughout southern Arizona, the death toll totaled 1,715 from 2002 to 2009, with this year’s hot temperatures putting deaths at a record-breaking pace.
But they're lazy bums who want to live on welfare, you know. Just like your ancestors did when they worked hard to move to America.
[...] In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges".
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like "the scientists say" to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist. [....]
RTRS: 3 out of 5.
Two Iraq veterans who left the military after surviving charges of crimes against detainees are running for Congress.
[...] In April 2004, Pantano killed two unarmed Iraqi detainees, twice unloading his gun into their bodies and firing between 50 and 60 shots in total. Afterward, he placed a sign over the corpses featuring the Marines' slogan “No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy” as a message to the local population.
Pantano said that he acted in self-defense and that the two suspects were charging at him, but the military accused him of premeditated murder.
He is the Republican nominee for Congress in North Carolina's 7th District. RTRS: 4 out of 5.
[...] But if you truly want to support Christopher Hitchens as he undergoes treatment for esophageal cancer, don't pray for him on any day.
One of the most well known biblical commandments is to love one's neighbor as one loves oneself. Rabbinic sages spanning the ages have offered a variety of ways to understand and observe it. Hillel, one of the greats, interpreted the verse this way: "What is hateful to you do not do to another. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it."
[...] The poll found that 81 percent of those polled get their news about the midterm elections from cable channels, like Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or their websites, compared with 71 percent from national network news channels, such as ABC, NBC or CBS, and their websites. [...] Among cable news channels, Fox was the clear winner, with 42 percent of respondents saying it is their main source, compared with 30 percent who cited CNN and 12 percent who rely on MSNBC. [...] when it comes to news on the upcoming election, with 72 percent of respondents saying they turn to newspapers or their websites.
Local news did better, at 73 percent, and conversations with friends and family was the second-most-cited source, at 79 percent. Radio was cited by only 58 percent of respondents, and non-newspaper websites and blogs by 39 percent. [...] Bill O’Reilly was rated as having, by far, the greatest positive impact, with 49 percent of respondents rating him positively, and 32 percent negatively.
Glenn Beck was the second most-positively rated personality, with 38 percent of respondents saying he had a positive impact, and 32 percent saying he had a negative impact.
Limbaugh was third.
[...] MSNBC’s personalities were largely ranked as unknown by respondents: 70 percent said they had never heard of Ed Schultz, 55 percent said they had never heard of Rachel Maddow and 42 percent said they had never heard of Keith Olbermann.
Thank goodness that with Citizens United, corporations can spend as much as possible to counter this dreadful liberal bias in the media.
[...] Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year [...] But as an example, one official said, an investigation into a drug cartel earlier this year was stymied because smugglers used peer-to-peer software, which is difficult to intercept because it is not routed through a central hub. Agents eventually installed surveillance equipment in a suspect’s office, but that tactic was “risky,” the official said, and the delay “prevented the interception of pertinent communications.” [....]
[...] Personally, I can hardly wait to watch Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his allies, for whom raising the barriers to standing is a core part of their agenda, figure out how to respond when one of the new issues reaches the Supreme Court.
[...] Although on its face a peace deal with the Taliban appears to be a necessary ingredient for the withdrawal of international troops, a rapprochement with the insurgents is also so controversial among many Afghans that the United States is in a delicate position in supporting it. At this point, though, it seems there is an awknowledgement that it would not be possible to win against an insurgency of this scale and that a peace deal may be the only way out.
Italics mine. The always essential Steve Hynd comments at greater length.
[...] A June 2007 memo says that the FBI's Deployment Operations Personnel were instructed to "deploy a CIPAV to geophysically locate the subject issuing bomb threats to the Timberline High School, Lacy, Washington. The CIPAV will be deployed via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address posted to the subject's private chat room on MySpace.com."
An affidavit written by FBI Special Agent Norman Sanders at the time said that CIPAV is able to send "network-level messages" containing the target computer's IP address, Ethernet MAC address, environment variables, the last-visited Web site, and other registry-type information including the name of the registered owner of the computer and the operating system's serial number.
The FOIA documents indicate that the FBI turns to CIPAV when a suspect is communicating with police or a crime victim through e-mail and is using an anonymizing service to conceal his computer's Internet protocol address.
[...] If you begin having sex in the great state of North Carolina, want to stop, and your partner forcibly restrains you to continue having intercourse, well, you should have made up your mind beforehand. Once you've initially consented to the act, you relinquish the right to your own body, according to a 1979 state Supreme Court ruling: "no rape has occurred though the victim later withdraws consent during the same act of intercourse." If your partner ignores your pleas to get off you or causes physical injury to keep you from leaving, that's still just not rape.
[...] This study, undertaken by Stacy Smith and Marc Choueiti at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, analyzed 122 family films (rated G, PG, and PG-13), including 50 top-grossing ones, between 2006 and 2009 and found that only 29.2 percent of characters were female. And one in four female characters was depicted in “sexy, tight, or alluring attire,” compared with one in 25 male characters. The female characters were also more likely than men to be beautiful, and one in five were “portrayed with some exposed skin between the mid-chest and upper thigh regions.” Because you wouldn’t want to take on the world without baring your midriff—girl power!
RTRS: 3.5 out of 5.
I favor California Proposition 25, to let the budget pass with a majority vote. That's a no-brainer.
If you have to have remakes, sure, let's have the Coens do them all. That coward Tom Chaney deserves what's coming to him. Harry Warner, Jr. would never have held for this, though.
LIFE IS FULL OF SURPRISES. I'm moving to Oakland, Californa, circa November 1st, through at least mid-August of 2011.
More about this later.
ADDENDUM, 9/27/10, 12:05 p.m. It's hard to restart the habit of posting here. I'm sorry about that.
So: I'm going to be long-term house-sitting for my friend Doug, who will largely be off sailing the South Seas in a tall ship -- really -- or on a South Sea island, doing ham radio things, until mid-August of 2011, if nothing goes wrong. I'll see what I'm doing then, then.
I need, first thing on getting to Oakland, to re-establish psychiatric/psychological care, medical care, and all those other good things. And, of course, I have lots to do in preparing to, and arranging to, move.
I still need the support of my subscribers, I'm afraid; I'll update you here when I have another substantive change in my life, but otherwise more frequently than I have in the last year, I hope, including something about moving just before and once I've done it!
I've had a bunch more cancellations of $5 subscriptions in the past three months, as expected, and accelerating, but I'm okay for now, even though moving will use much of my savings, and hoping that there will be few more cancellations in the near future. I'll have to see how my finances look once I'm re-settled.
So, I'm going to try something new at Amygdala, in an attempt to get me back to frequent, though not substantive, blogging here, by instituting, at least on some days, daily link-dump posts, in which I create a single link-dump post for the day, and then just add to it as the day goes along, with simple links to stories I've found interesting for one reason or another.
I may add a few words of description. I may add a couple or few sentences. I may add nothing at all.
[...] As for his politics, Davison has served as a Republican member of the Minerva Council for 13 years, but, despite the boiling anger that characterized his speech, describes himself as a “liberal.” He also identifies with the activist energy of the Tea Party movement, and proposes forming “a new radical branch of the Republican Party that does bring in the Tea Party activists, and that does bring in, perhaps, liberal Republicans.”
"I can guarantee with one hundred percent certainty that what you are seeing from me tonight is what everyone outside those doors is going to get over the next eight weeks!"
The video is hilarious, but also quite interesting as an example of confused anger in the Republican heartland.
View The Rest Scale: 4 votes out of 5.
ADDENDUM, 9/10/10, 1:18 p.m.: Special bonus video! Tom Lehrer does "Instant Elements" using Google Instant Search:
[...] "I went home and had a ham sandwich and went to bed and thought that was the end of it," Davison said when reached at home this afternoon. "A friend called, and well, I'm not very good with electronics, is there a YouTube? It was on some kind of electronic server."
THE SHORT VERSION. It's actually a huge pain in the ass to reformat text from use in Typepad to Blogger, or vice versa -- at least, it is for me; there may be wonderfully quick ways to accomplish this I've not yet found.
Meanwhile, I've committed blog posts at Obsidian Wingshere, here, and here.
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT is what will be coming this way in a few days, with a major update on what's going on with me, what's been going on, why, wherefore, what I'm about to do, what I'm about to ask for tips and guidance and help with, and all that there.
BETTER LUCK THAN YOU WOULD HAVE HAD WITH ARTHUR CLARKE. Ray Bradbury is not my greatest sf writer ever, though I do greatly admire much of his work, but he's certainly the greatest sf writer to many.
And we all have our chosen ways of showing our appreciation.
View The Rest Scale: only if you're amused by potty-mouthed songs about ancient skiffy writers. NSFW, primarily via language.
Ed Earl Repp just doesn't get the respect any more.
Digressively, your newfangled idea of "written language" sucks:
[...] But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.
And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Plato putting words in the mouth of Socrates.
In sum, people who can't memorize all their literature are weak-minded, and your so-called "writing" is simply a crutch for those unable to memorize and truly appreciate literature. Our society and its standards continue to collapse.
[...] What is it about Ray that you find so attractive?
First of all, the number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer.
And:
[...] 12:48PM Update: It has been reported to me that Ray Bradbury has watched the video twice and liked it.
ADDENDUM, 8/25/10, 2:15 p.m.: Penn Jillette says Rachel Bloom should be President of the United States, and explains his views about the video are at length, while confessing he didn't know if Ray Bradbury was alive or not.
[...] The peak of this year's Perseids is forecast (for North America) to come during the afternoon hours on Thursday, which means that greatest number of meteors will probably be seen late that night into the predawn hours of Friday. At these times a single observer might count anywhere from 60 to 100 per hour.
But don't overlook late tonight into early Thursday morning, when about two-thirds of that number might be seen. And even late on Friday night into early Saturday hourly rates will still be respectable, though probably numbering about one-quarter to one-half of the numbers seen on the peak night. Over this weekend you can still probably catch sight of a lingering few.
RANDOM OBSERVATIONS ON ATTENDING RECONSTRUCTION, THE 2010 NASFIC
1. I am an old fan, and tired.
2. Some things in conventions have changed, but many things plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Significant numbers of fans still like to go by one name on their name tag, like "Doug" or "Jane," which certainly helps make them memorable. Not so much.
3. I have no significant complaints or criticisms of the con committee or con; generally I commend them on a job pretty well done, as viewed from the outside.
4. The primary problem of the con was the smallness; I gather there were about 700 attendees, perhaps 800 max, and walk-ins amounted to in the neighborhood of 100 or a bit more. (If this is wrong, please correct me!)
5. As a result, spreading the con out over two hotels and a convention center ended up being... highly excessive. Ditto with that many programming tracks, audiences tended towards the the small, as in 8-40 or so, in the rooms I looked in, which I must say was a very sporadic sampling, and I did not attend any of the relatively Big Events, such as opening or closing ceremonies, or any of the GOH presentations.
6. Parties -- sorry, there were no parties, only "Meet and Greets" allowed -- were, as a rule, not overwhelmingly crowded, and were almost entirely conveniently grouped on the 16th and 17th floor, save for Bill Patterson's on the sixth floor, all in the Marriott, which was directly connected to the convention center, so the party circuit could hardly have been more convenient.
7. I ended up skipping the SFWA suite, since I really have no particular business being there these days, and skipping Toni's Baen Party, as it was the one party that seemed crowded, and I'm just shy, and didn't want to be presumptuous, and all that there.
8. Established that James Bacon doesn't know me from a hole in the wall, which is no surprise. All con long I played "do you recognize me?" with everyone. Most didn't. Said "hi" twice to David Hartwell, until on the third time, when we were chatting briefly, I made sure to let his eye catch my name-tag, and we had a couple of nice, if brief, chats after that.
9. Most of my chats tended to be brief. I really didn't know more than a couple of dozen people at the con, it felt like, although I also had that experience of quite a few people I either don't know, or have forgotten, greeting me with considerable familiarity, and as if we knew each other, so it's a two-way street. Still, there at least a dozen folks I'd hoped to run into, and never did, much to my regret, including particularly Brett Cox and Ranger Craig. Would have loved to have talked more with most of the folks I did talk some with, including Mike Walsh, Ben Yalow, Elspeth Kovar, Bill Patterson, Ed Dravecky, Bernadette Boskey, Arthur Hlavaty, and a number of others, but, oh well. Some folks I barely got to speak with in passing, such as Bruce Newrock, Tony Parker, Tim Illingworth, Joni Dashoff, a bit more with Judy Bemis; chatted very briefly with Steve Miller (see photographic proof on my Photo Album). I got to say only hello and goodbye to a few, such as Dave Cantor and Bruce Newrock. Saw, but did not get a chance to speak to, Joel Zakem, since I saw him at Bill and David's little biography panel, and not again. And so on.
But mostly I'm as not-very-comfortable-at-parties, unless I really know a bunch of people, and the party is pretty quiet, as ever.
And I think I was reverting to a considerable degree of shyness that I used to have in my early years, but have gotten vastly better at having less of, in the past twenty years. But the environment somehow made me much shyer again, in some curiously environmentally-induced way causing me to revert to older, poorer, habits.
11. Programming doubtless pleased many folks. I'd more or less say that I've certainly seen worse, and I've seen better. Off-hand, I'd call it kinda middling, but they also had a relatively limited number of folks to use. On the other hand, I couldn't help but notice that there were at least a couple of panels where I knew a hell of a lot more about the subject than the panelists.
Notably, a very nice seeming woman named Jennifer Liang, and Chris Garcia, did a panel on "Efanzines and blogs," which although I missed the first fifteen minutes of, by half an hour in they were saying they'd run out of things to talk about, after already engaging in a lot of digression into talking about online fandom in general, with very little talk about blogs. I did learn more about Robert Jordan fandom than I previously knew.
I tried a bit of goosing from the audience with leading questions, such as "so what would you say was the first sf blog, or the first significant sf blog?, and got "uh, I have no idea" responses. Man, they needed a moderator. And, you know, if you feel you're running out of things to say, you can go to questions, rather than repeatedly declaring the panel is probably over half way through, and every few minutes thereafter. Also, just not a great practice in general.
I may have misunderstood Jennifer Liang explaining that Tor.com was now a blog. Doubtless she said that the front page showed blogs, and the site had much else besides; my hearing isn't great, and my attention may have wandered for a moment.
12. Tiniest art show I've ever seen at any sf con of any sort.
13. The Chicago bid party had, among other decorations, a quite large blow-up of the program book of Chicon IV (1982). I was chatting with Mr. Yalow and Mr. Walsh at the party, and established that with Ben having been the Services Division head at Chicon IV, where I wore two hats as both Assistant Division head, and head of the three department Operations sub-division, and Mike was one of my Shift Supervisors, that we were the only three members of the Chicon IV committee at the party, and apparently at the con. (I'm probably wrong on the latter, so please correct me!)
14. Britain probably had the nicest party overall, although the frequent repeats on the very large screen tv of the bid video was slightly problematic for those well familiar with it online months ago, who found crowds of people constantly crowding in front of the screen.
There was a nice other video of famous British sf writers, though.
It couldn't help but occur to me that I had been the original American agent for the Britain Is Fine In '79 bid for Seacon '79, where I had even bent fannish ethics slightly by giving the bid a free function room at SunCon to throw the bid party -- although I would have done the same for the competition if they'd asked -- but none of the current British bidders would know that. As I said, old and tired. As ever, always amused to have other people explain fandom to me, or fanzines, or how conventions are run, or what they're like, etc. I pretty much nod and smile.
Not a soul at the British party recognized my D. West art tee-shirt. Or my BSFA tee-shirt. Or anyone at the con, for that matter, at least in terms of mentioning it to me.
On the other hand, my "RTFM" tee-shirt got a bunch of comments about how wonderful it was. And my "I'm not ignoring you; your comment is awaiting moderation" tee-shirt also got a few compliments, and one person's request to take a picture.
15. Overall, I had an okay time. I suppose it was worth two room nights, and the $120 membership; I was very glad to see some old friends.
I also realized that smoffing talk is of limited interest beyond a certain point when one isn't working on cons any more, but primarily because it's the exact same smof talk about how to run a con, what's gone wrong and right, etc., I already filled up on in the Seventies and Eighties, and very little has changed since then, save for some proper nouns, and relatively trivial details.
16. I remain unconvinced of the need for a NASFiC. But, hey, as long as enough people want to go to one, and put one on, it's fine with me.
17. Slightly regret not taking the cane, as a visual sign to folks that I needed to sit, not stand, and also for minor use, but was lucky that the hip pain and twinging stayed minor enough to merely make for mildly painful slight limp, with occasional oww twinges; no gout, yay.
18. Established that my preferred temperature in my hotel room is 63 degrees F.
19. I can make a few nitpicks about room for improvement in what the con did, but they're pretty nit-picky. (I would have made more spots where the daily newsletter could be found, but, as I said, this is highly trivial, and in any case, there wasn't much vital news, anyway. Stuff like that.)
20. I'll try to fill in the names of more folks I at least briefly chatted with, as I remember: met Nancy Collins finally. More to come. LATER: Saul Jaffe. Dick and Nicki Lynch. Warren Buff. Said hi to Scott Dennis. Said hello and about twenty seconds of conversation with John Hertz. Said hello to Hank Davis and received expected nod and slight grunt. Chatted at mild length with George Wells on Friday afternoon in the Fanzine Lounge, after not having seen each other since approximately 1976 or so. Heard Don Lundry was at the con! But never ran into him, drat it. Missed running into Tom Veal, unless, as is likely, I didn't recognize him; I was in the Chicago party several times on both nights, but only asked if he was there once or twice, I'm afraid. Exchanged a sentence or two with Brad Foster at the British party, but didn't get to any kind of "hello, nice to finally meet you."
21. Further random observations to come after I've rested some; I didn't have the sort of con experience that makes for a funny or amusing narrative -- I'm not saying I had a bad time, and insofar as there were negatives at the con, they were almost entirely personal, not the fault of the concom; but the con didn't provide a storyline for me worth writing up in more organized form.
22. My #1 insecurity: I have stained, bad, teeth at this point. Very visible if I open my mouth; this makes me terribly self-conscious about that until such time as I can at least get a cleaning. Also constant worry about bad breath and administering of breath minty things and mouthwash, but I'm sure some folks must have thought "ew, bad breath"; I did what I could.
Hey, and Joni Dashoff, I think it was, pointed out at one point that my fly was open, and was not being metaphoric. Oh, the shame of it all. Not to mention I noticed it happening slightly two other times; damned shorts zipper.
23. I reverted terribly to wandering self-centered anecdotes and losing my train of thought in substantial conversation; this is why I prefer to express myself in writing if I wish to be clear at any thought more complicated than a one-liner. Which even that I can mangle through the accidental word-substitution I'm more and more prone to in recent years.
24. Chatted twice with Rusty Hevelin! (If you don't know our history, I ain't tellin' ya now.)
25. Bagpipes should always be barred from sf cons as dangerous weapons. Jeebus fucking Ghu and Roscoe screwing together.
I'm talking with Elspeth and Mike at their table in the huckster room, when no less than about twelve feet away, at the table opposite, this motherfucking bagpiper opens up, and golly that helps conversation nearby.
Someone later confessed to me that he was the person who asked the guy to start performing right then, but I'll pretend I've forgotten who, for their sake, and because I have definitely forgotten that it was Steven Silver, since he has repented; so let's all pretend we don't know it was Steven's Fault. (Alternatively, to quote one of the late rich brown's favorite sayings: Or Maybe Not.)
26. Doing balloon sculptures for people is great; doing so by parking yourself in front of the escalator down to the huckster room/art show could work fine if you stood more than a foot away from the escalator entrance. Two whole feet would have been nice; three, outstanding. (Subnote: someone from the convention might have mentioned this to the fellow, but to be sure, traffic was so light it was merely a trivial annoyance, and nothing resembling in the faintest degree any kind of serious traffic blockage; you just had to say "excuse me, please," every time.)
27. Oh, yes. Many of you are familiar with: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
—James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992
This has long been passed around as by anonymous and typically shortened to "English not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
A couple of women whose company was selling tee-shirts (one of several such tables in the huckster, room, Not That There's Anything Wrong With That) had a tee-shirt with that. No attribution. I asked them if they knew who had written that. Nope. Heard of James Nicoll? Nope. Suggested they might at least send him a courtesy copy. They took down contact info for him; I took down their contact info.
Belatedly, I realize I should have taken a picture.
To be clear, they said they were selling this particular tee-shirt as produced by a third party, and it's entirely possible, and far and away most likely, that James has always known about this.
28. Two conversations with Chris Barkley. He put me on the Worldcon subcommittee mailing list to Officially Recommend WTF To Do About The Semi-Prozine Category (without my in the least asking, which I didn't have the chutzpah to do!), which pleased me no end, since I'm one of the four co-writers who created that category. That is, I wrote a motion and got Craig Miller to co-sign it, and, I think, and I need to check this against the BM minutes, because I may be garbling slightly, and Marty Cantor and Mike Glicksohn had his version, and also Dick (I know his last name perfectly well, and it will come back to me momentarily [LATER: Richard Russell]) of Madison threw in some modification, and the resulting kludge came from a compromise between these motions, and produced the Best Semi-Prozine Hugo we have all loved and cherished for centuries now, worshipped beyond reason, particularly since I co-wrote it.
29. Was disappointed to miss the "Men Write Feminist Fiction" panel, as it clearly sounded like the panel with the most potential for disaster. Alas, missed it. Heard one second-hand version that made it sound dire, but it was only a single source.
31. I amused myself in the Fanzine Lounge, particularly on Friday, while the SFC part of the display was still there, noting of zines: yup, mentioned there, loc there, mentioned there, mentioned there, several dozens of times.
I'm reluctant to note that the Fanhistory Display and Fanzine Display (incidentally combined with my invention of the independent fan programing track, and also combining the Fanzine Fan Lounge, which I also invented), all in one mini-area of the hotel, I did at SunCon in 1977, with only Susan Wood's "All Our Yesterday's" room at Torcon II as any kind of precursor (unless you count the N3F), was, er, a heck of a lot more elaborate than what Reconstruction had. Ditto the fanhistory display I did for Avedon Carol at Constellation in 1983, or the one I co-did with Joe Siclari in 1986, and even the ones I did at Lunacon in 1976 and 1977.
I'm talking major displays of material from the 1930s and 1940s, partial runs of Hyphen, Quandry, Dimensions, Spaceship, Skyhook, dittoed Psychotic, Roger Ebert's Stymie, a zine by Gene Klein, aka Gene Simmons, and on and on with so many more zines from every era, but a focus on the older the better, along with elaborate displays on apas, an entire major section on Lee Hoffman, and just dozens of immensely rare items of the pre-1960 era, as well as wall displays, pictures, mimeos, historical artifacts, program books of the forties, distributions of current fanzines, a separate display of popular recent zines, on convention history, and on and on; I had a considerable amount of granularity, and explanatory text for context, as well as carefully considered exhibits, rather than a purely random spread of zines.
Chris is a lovely and enthusiastic man, and I certainly can't say that I think NASFiC overall would have benefited in any significant way from any kind of more significant fanhistory display; I doubt more than a dozen or two dozen people at most would have cared, if that many.
But it did seem a bit on the minimal side.
Lastly, the hours seemed to be "whenever Chris or someone decided not to leave." It was open a fair amount of the time, but a heck of a lot less than the posted hours. But, again, in fairness, aside from a brief hour on Friday, when some 20-25 people were there, I never again saw more than 8 or so folks in the room at an given time, if that many. But let me stress that my sampling, which certainly amounted to well over fifteen times over the course of Friday and Saturday, and four times Sunday morning, was hardly comprehensive. And, again, not any kind of major criticism, and no kind of complaint! Just, you know, observing. And although I would have been agreeable to holding down the room for an hour or two if that would have helped, no one asked me, but it's my fault for not specifically saying any such thing to Chris.
And, of course, Filthy Pierre. Whom I said hi to, noting that he wouldn't remember me, but we'd been at many cons together in the Seventies, and he indeed noddedly blankly, which is perfectly fair, because I don't remember ever having a conversation with him of much more than a handful of words, more than, hmm, come to think of it, that time I had to tell him (at either 1976 or 1977 Lunacon, or Iggy or SunCon; probably not Chicon IV or any of the others)) that I couldn't help him get his portable organ back from the hotel until the morning, after he'd left it locked up in a now-locked function space. Or something like that.
35. Other notable parties included a Capclave party, Texas in 2013, ASFA (didn't get to that), something for or by "1984" that I didn't go into and don't know who they were, a Renovation party (where Ben Yalow was mostly glued), Friends of Liad, the aforementioned Chicago bid party, and, um, a couple of others.
36. I maintained discipline, and did not spend a single penny in the huckster room, or buying anything at the con whatever!
I did this exactly by swearing to myself that I would buy nothing, or I'd have trouble drawing a line thereafter. I gave brief consideration to the notion of a lesser rule, such as "nothing subsequent to 1972, or 1960, or 1950, and over $5 a piece" but that might still have been dangerous.
And you know what? I again, over the course of the past decade, between books sent to me for review, and abebook.com purchases of books for $.01 and $3.99 shipping, own several dozen yet unread books, many of them door stops, all of which I desperately want to read. So there's no point to adding to my to-be-read shelves, and I damn well don't do myself well by owning more possessions to move.
So my sense won out: go, me.
Although, y'know, still wistfulness and some frustrated lust. Booooks. Fanzines. Pulps. Old paperbacks. My first loves. Great fiction I haven't caught up to. Nonfiction on sf I haven't caught up to. So many books by friends I haven't caught up to.
But, hey: sense over compulsive fannishness. Yay.
37. I wish I could remember who it was who I met in person for the first time who was telling me how they'd heard so much about me, and it was all either really really good, or really really bad; I agreed that I had one of those polarizing personalities.
I had one or two other variations of that conversation over the weekend, which was fine, because it's true.
ADDENDUM, 8/10/10, 6:23 p.m. [modified at 9:06 to delete some now pointless information]: Specifically to entry #27: Unsurprisingly, this turned out not to be true. That is, James Nicoll's permission had not been asked, nor had he been even sent a courtesy copy.
Here are the folks whom the people at the table said they got the shirts from.
It does give off-shirt credit -- but the shirts are still unauthorized, and James Nicoll gets nothing from them:
English Doesn't Borrow from Other Languages T Shirt
100% Cotton Ash Shirt
This shirt has a paraphrase of a quotation made by James Nicoll. "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
