The Sum of All Fears
From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008:
The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.
The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.
White would be stuck in the elevator for 41 — forty-one! — hours. A “security” camera captured his entire stay in the Hotel Car 30. Afterwards, he managed to obtain a copy of the tape:
He has watched it twice — it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
Here’s the video, the whole 41 hours viewable in about three minutes:
[Read more…]
Attach Imagination to Mouth. Turn Ignition. GO.
When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)
For instance, a story (told, and told, and told… from the back seat of a car) might go something like this:
Once upon a time Frankenstein was walking through the woods AND THEN it started to rain AND THEN Dracula flew down and got Frankenstein AND THEN Dracula and Frankenstein went to a party and monsters were all there AND THEN the sun came out and it was like Sesame Street…
And so on, and on, and on, all the AND THENs providing the transitional links between hundreds of what might otherwise seem, to my unimaginative adult mind, to be discontinuous stories. (They also, and perhaps by unconscious intent, made the plot as a whole uninterruptible.)
I loved that.
This urge to free-associate stories seems a common phase which kids go through — not all kids, but many of them. Should you need evidence I offer, first, this brief and enormously popular (over nine million views and counting!) video from earlier this year: a three-year-old little girl summarizes the plot of Star Wars, Episode IV (this was the original film in the franchise, remember, first released in 1977 simply as Star Wars).
More recently, along came the next one — likewise destined for online-video classic status. (I encountered it the other day, among the weekly 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks entries.) The monologue (a little over four minutes long) is in French, but the clip also includes English subtitles. Some of the characters will be familiar (vaguely) to anyone who’s been around little kids in recent decades. But as far as I know the plot is based on nothing at all other than what emerged, spontaneously and moment-by-moment, from the storyteller’s mind.
Knock me over with a feather. Plucked from the wings of a hippopotamus — in HEAVEN.
The Internet and Dogs
I was working on the weekly whisky river-driven rumination — which I’ll deliver a little later — when I came across something I just can’t keep to myself. Actually three somethings. And *WARNING*WARNING*: these are spit-take funny.
Most recently, and the item which led me to the other two, we have this: an Open Letter to President-Elect Obama, re: Goldendoodles. Excerpt:
I’m sure the first coupling of a Golden Retriever with a poodle was an accident, and likely the fault of the dogs themselves. Then, some idiot without a social conscience sold them by saying that the dog is similar to a Golden Retriever, only smarter.
…
A smarter Golden Retriever? This just means that you have a dog that is obsessive-compulsive about retrieving to the point where nothing else exists. Nothing. They don’t want affection, they want to chase a ball. Toby plays fetch while he’s eating — he has his own personal game of jacks where he drops his ball, grabs a mouthful of food, drops the food on the floor, and eats however many kibbles he can before the ball stops bouncing (For science, I once threw a ball while he was taking a dump… if you do acquire a Doodle I strongly advise against this).
A comment on that post led me to 2007’s I Has a Sweet Potato. This is simply an account of the author’s adventure at home while “Best Beloved,” the author’s S.O., is elsewhere. It is presented “in conversation form.” Excerpt:
Dog: I am starving.
[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.] [From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.
Finally, reaching way back to 1999, there is the classic Dogs in Elk. This has been reproduced at various locations around the Web, but according to the author, originally appeared on Salon. (She also affirms that yes, it is true.) However, I read it here. It’s a transcript of a forum conversation; the subject is how to handle odd dog problems. Excerpt:
Anne V – 01:01 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Okay – I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.
AmyC – 01:02 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – Um, can you give us a few more specifics here?
Anne V – 01:12 pm PDT – Sep 9, 1999 – They’re inside of it. They crawled inside, and now I have a giant incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with 2 dogs inside of it, and they are NOT getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to 1. put up a tent over said carcass and 2. hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6:40 this morning.
Have fun, but remember: swallow beverages first. No liability here.
Bart Seinstein
Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.
(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)
Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.
(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)
Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:
“A Guy I Know Once Told Me…”
The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I suspect I’m not alone in my certainty that many of these have influenced my understanding of the universe, of people, of life. And I may have lots of company, too, in having no idea what portion of it might actually be true, as opposed to simply fun, convenient, or dangerous — and little intention (or time) to check it all out.
In the rest of this post I thought I’d try a little experiment. What follows are three urban legends, two “true” (in the sense that “a guy I know once really DID tell me”), and one made up just for this post. Furthermore, I won’t tell you which are the real ones and which, the impostor.
(One interesting possibility: that someone, somewhere, will (a) find this post via a search on a keyword which figures prominently in the bogus urban legend, (b) do a “find” within the post itself, looking for the keyword and hence skipping over all this background, and eventually (c) spread the false rumor as his/her own bit of “a guy once told me” folklore. Ah, posterity…)
Here goes:
Surprising (But Welcome) (But SURPRISING) News
Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn’t that be “the average blogger‘s“? Does “81% shorter than” mean “81% as long as” or does it mean “19% as long as”? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his/her posts)? Surely it can’t mean “…as compared to the entire universe of blogs”?
Still, the word “shorter” is inarguably seductive. (In this context, anyhow.)
And then of course, for you anarchists out there, it’s easy enough to manipulate the results, just by goofing around with the underlying HTML:
Reassuring, though. Even if it IS a fantasy.
(Click the image to check your own blog posts’, er, stature.)
Update: Be sure to read Kate Lord Brown’s comment, below — and my reply — to understand why you almost certainly should not panic about this. I’m pretty sure the results, well, verge on the bogus. Misleading, let’s say.
Placeholder Post: Defeating the Aliens
[Working today on tomorrow’s post — my contribution to tomorrow’s Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y’know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]
Software I’d Like to See: Fotōpic
It makes no difference that I’ve been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years now. There are computer programmers and there are computer programmers. If your assignments (actual or potential) don’t require you to use a given technology, chances are you’ll never learn that technology. Meanwhile, the world passes you by in the form of all the folks (generally younger) who can make the technology sing.
Still, it’s nice to fantasize about the sort of project you’d like to work on, someday, if you only knew enough…
In Merry-Go-Round, I did this with a few wholly imaginary (as far as I know) pieces of software. Of these, the one I like the most is called Fotōpic. In the passage which follows, Fotōpic’s general nature is explained, and one character is shown using it.
Background: The character in this passage, Abbie, is on a mission on behalf of an underground/resistance movement which goes by the name of ACME Universal. Her mission: travel by train one night to the (fictional) town of Jessup’s Cut, Maryland, where she will make contact with a man whose description she knows, but whom she has never met.
There’s one problem: Abbie needs to get to Jessup’s Cut, make the contact, and get out of Jessup’s Cut as fast as possible. But she’s never been there, and she can’t go in advance. How’s she going to navigate her way around a town’s building, trees, streets, street lamps, obstacles which a GPS unit or satellite photos won’t help her with?
Here goes. From Merry-Go-Round:
Salvaging the Honey at Heaven’s Edge
You know how in the Warner Brothers “Road Runner” cartoons, the coyote is forever running (or riding a rocket, or pogo-sticking, or being launched by an ACME Giant Slingshot) off a cliff? and at some moment he realizes that he’s done so, and as soon as he realizes it he loses all forward motion, waves morosely to the audience, and drops out of the bottom of the frame?
For this Friday’s meditations from whiskey river and elsewhere, I wanted to do a “theme post.” This is a tribute to people who’ve recently shot off the edge of a personal or professional cliff, with plenty of forward momentum — and who know better than to look down.
From whiskey river:
It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.
(Kenichi Ohmae)
…and:
Nothing can hold you back — not your childhood, not the history of a lifetime, not even the very last moment before now. In a moment you can abandon your past. And once abandoned, you can redefine it.
If the past was a ring of futility, let it become a wheel of yearning that drives you forward. If the past was a brick wall, let it become a dam to unleash your power.
The very first step of change is so powerful, the boundaries of time fall aside. In one bittersweet moment, the sting of the past is dissolved and its honey salvaged.
(Tzvi Freeman, The Illlustrated Encyclopedia of an Imaginary Universe)
…and:
Withered vines, gnarled trees, twilight crows,
river flowing beneath the little bridge,
past someone’s home.
The wind blows from the west
where the sun sets, it blows
across the ancient road,
across the bony horse,
across the despairing man
who stands at heaven’s edge.
(Ma Chih-Yuan, “Meditation in Autumn”)
Finally (lyrics below — not from whiskey river), a sort of meditation on dilemmas in general:
Crossfire
(words & music by Tommy Shannon, Chris Layton,
Reese Wynans, B.Carter, and Ruth Ellsworth;
performance by Stevie Ray Vaughan)Day by day, night after night,
blinded by the neon lights
Hurry here, hustlin’ there,
no one’s got the time to spare
Money’s tight, nothin’ free,
won’t somebody come and rescue me
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire
Stranded, caught in the crossfireTooth for tooth, eye for an eye,
sell your soul, just to buy buy buy,
Beggin’ a dollar stealin’ a dime,
come on can’t you see that I
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire
I am stranded, caught in the crossfireI need some kind of kindness,
some kind of sympathy — oh no
We’re stranded, caught in the crossfireSave the strong, lose the weak,
never turning the other cheek,
Trust nobody, don’t be no fool,
whatever happened to the golden rule?
We got stranded, caught in the crossfire
We got stranded, caught in the crossfire
We got stranded, caught in the crossfire
Stranded, caught in the crossfire
Help me
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