The 50 Most Loathsome People In America, 2007
December 28, 2007 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Possibly the most sarcastic link ever posted at Notio. Also probably the funniest; an instant classic. Via Kottke, with whom I post the following excerpt:
9. You
Charges: You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism -- it's nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over. You still think Republicans favor limited government. Your knowledge of politics and government are dwarfed by your concern for Britney Spears' children. You think buying Chinese goods stimulates our economy. You think you're going to get universal health care. You tolerate the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques." You think the government is actually trying to improve education. You think watching CNN makes you smarter. You think two parties is enough. You can't spell. You think $9 trillion in debt is manageable. You believe in an afterlife for the sole reason that you don't want to die. You think lowering taxes raises revenue. You think the economy's doing well. You're an idiot.
(Told you it was nasty. The other 49 are much funnier. Totally NSFW, language-wise.)
Shopping As Hero's Quest
December 27, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
To complete my cultural survey, today we went to the mall. Had this been a comparative cultural survey, we would have also gone to this mall, where they have valet parking, which could be quite handy given the size of mall parking lots.
Nintendo has done an amazing job marketing the apparently amazing Wii video game. For two holiday seasons now they have restricted manufacturing, so it is very hard to get. Here in the Daytona FL area, local Wal-Marts are getting 15-18 units each Wednesday, with un-crating and shelving at about 11:30 AM. After a month or two of looking around, my hosts finally got one yesterday. Amazingly, after all that questing, it sits awaiting connection 24 hours later. I suppose there's no rush, but it seems like getting it was more important than using it, a decent definition of excess consumption. I make no judgments—it seems like the first video game I'd be interested in playing. It looks like I won't get to find out before I leave, though I'm sure if I was all that interested we could have set it up yesterday afternoon or this morning.
Today the quest was for 1) lunch (Chik-fil-A); 2) Books-A-Million (really low-vibration experience); 3) Sunglasses evaluation ($180 for molded plastic?!?); 4) Camera evaluation (40D definitely fits my hands better than the XTi). And: Success! We did it! It took five hours, including about two hours of driving. I used the mall stop as an exercise opportunity, getting in three walking circuits before the time was up. Now, a little zoning before supper.
On the plus side, I highly recommend Colonial Photo and Hobby in Orlando, FL. Don't let the cheesy website fool you. They are a true old-time camera shop, with a lot of experienced sales guys who really know their stuff. They sell Leica, where the M8 is $5,000 (body only) and the typical first lens is $5,300. They had the Canon XTi and the 40D in stock, as well as all the lenses I wanted to try, and they were happy to put them on the cameras and let me shoot away. Bring your own CF card and take it home to evaluate. A truly great resource in this era of know-nothing Ritz Camera minimum-wage lackeys. Like most specialized retail, the web has decimated the photography market, so it's nice that Colonial is able to stick around, offering workshops, one-day and weekend photo trips, and generally pricing stuff within reason of the online shops. Yes, a bit more, but they're offering a real service. If I wasn't waiting to see what is released at PMA in January, I would have bought a package there today.
The Spectacle Has Not Quite Yet Been Supplanted
December 26, 2007 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
Based on my suppertime family viewing, I like Jeopardy better than Wheel of Fortune. I also note, based on a one-hour television ad review, that nobody can sleep, everyone has stomach upset, most people have aches and pains, and many people are depressed. You probably couldn't give away a Buick Lucerne to anyone I know, much less get them excited about a Red Tag Sale. The public seem to prefer fake gratuitous violence over authentic honest sexuality –nipple-slips, coochie displays, and butt flashes aside; celebrities are people who have nothing to offer but their appearance (c.f. above), and when you reduce complex interdependent issues down to 10-30 second "news" summaries, everything is banal, and frequently, simply, wrong. Thus, as has been my practice since 1980, I continue to have little need for television.
Instead, you might want to read this report (and followup discussion) by Howard Rheingold about the philosopher Jurgen Habermas' lack of thoughts "about the state of the public sphere, now that the broadcast era has been supplanted by the many-to-many media that enable so many people to use the Internet as a means of political expression." It takes half as long as a 30-minute tee-vee show, and has at least a million times more intellectual nutrients.
Also, untrained Shi Tzsu puppies are frequently annoying, though exceptionally cute.
State of the Music
December 24, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce
Wired Magazine has done us a public service by hiring David Byrne to report on the current state of the music industry. It results in two feature articles: David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music (with a striking photo!), and David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars. Both articles include long audio clips of the conversations, with Thom Yorke, Brian Eno, and others. It's what modern online journalism should be.
In other music news, Daniel Lanois has started a grand experiment, with Red Floor Records. Hi entire back catalog is available for download, with mp3 and high-res wav versions each available for the same $10 price. He has a new movie arriving in March, with the soundtrack available now.
Our first new project available on the site is 'Here is What is'. This music is a direct soundtrack representation of the music that exists in our feature length documentary film also titled 'Here is What is'. For those of you who might not know, the film is a camera following me around over the course of a year, in and out of recording studios documenting once and for all the way it really happens.
I'm very excited by his Omni Series:
For every song of mine that gets released there is an abundance of material that does not. These pieces, often favorites of mine remain unheard, so Red Floor and I have decided to release this body of work as The Omni Series. At the moment we are planning six cds. Each will be thematically assembled to represent a certain part of my work.
The SSEYO guys, makers of the generative music software Koan (no longer available) have launched two new products via Intermorphic: noatikl furthers the generative music cause, and liptikl does the same for lyrics.
And finally, every year or two I tune into the Brian Eno wavelength, which is best done at the news page of Enoweb. There are dozens of interesting links there for your deep-fringe avant-garde reading pleasure. Good diversions from the family dynamics this time of year. ;)
See Change, Part 1
December 11, 2007 | Life | Technology
I remember when I started wearing glasses, in third grade (1970). These days I think they test kids a lot younger, but back in the day that was the first test I took and I needed glasses pretty badly. I used to always sit in the last row of class, and on that first day with glasses I went to my normal seat and was amazed when the teacher started on her material.
I couldn't believe it – she was writing stuff on the wall up there!! All this time I thought she was just telling us stuff, I had no idea she was writing things on a "blackboard" and pulling maps down from rollers. Wow.
I told her this at morning break, and she looked at me funny, in a way I ow recognize as disbelief, and moved my seat to the second row, permanently. I forget if it was her or my Dad who said, "No wonder your handwriting is so bad." [And people ask, "How did you decide to study psychoacoustics in college?"]
Today, 37 years later, my prescription was nearly -10 in the right eye and nearly-11 in the left, including some astigmatism in the left eye. If 20/20 is normal" vision, this corresponds to approximately 20/2,000. What other people could see at 2,000 feet, I could only see at 20 feet. The problem with lenses this strong is that the light is distorted by the lens except at the very center. With a strong lens, that center area is very small. So as my eyes scanned across a page of text, the eye would see distorted, then focused, then distorted text. The brain can process it, but it takes more cycles, and it's fatiguing. I used to be the fastest reader I know, these days, not so much.
Of course, there's all the usual reasons why wearing glasses sucks: Raindrops in the rain, fogging up when you walk inside during the winter (six months, here in New Hampshire), and getting smudged with every kiss, etcetera.
So, after five years of occasional research and consideration, last Thursday I had Lasik surgery at Laservue in Montreal. Technically, in their marketing-speak, thin-flap, high-definition, custom-wavefront Lasik. Here's the story.
It's a very modern clinic, on the second floor of a medical office building. The area I saw was about half the floor. It appears they have most of the whole floor, but we weren't in the other half.
I checked in at 1 PM. I gave them the patient consent form, checked my basic information, and gave them my hotel information. After a short wait, a technician took me to what would be the first of six testing and treatment rooms. She started with the CRS-Master wavefront measurement and a standard refractive test. This created a computer map of the topology of each eye, and programs the laser how to do its work. We moved to a second room and she measured the thickness of my cornea (and the curvature too, I think). Then we went to a third room, much like a standard optometrist office, where, in fact, an optometrist conducted the standard subjective eye exam.
After confirming that indeed I was a candidate for surgery (verifying the pre-testing dne by my local eye doctor), and confirming that indeed I would like to have the surgery done, they sent me to billing where I signed the billing release and ran the Visa card. $2,400 Canadian, currently with a ~10% discount rate to the US dollar.
She directed me to a second waiting room, and soon the two doctors came out to have a discussion about my supposed allergy to Proparicaine HCL, a common eye numbing solution. Long story short, they were pretty darn sure I wasn't allergic, but had a vasovagal syncope, common among young men, which is when I was originally diagnosed. They asked a few other questions, nodding and looking at each other knowingly, until one finally said, "Classic." They would put a single drop into each eye and look for a reaction, but didn't expect one.
They took me to another room where a paramedic asked me to lay on the table. I said, "This is it, right? This is probably the last chance to use the bathroom before surgery?" It was happening kind of fast at this point, and it suddenly occurred to me that, you know, there was a certain amount of fear, and, well, peeing my pants would be unfortunate. So I ran off to the restroom, whilst Kathryn, the nurse, and the doctors had a brief laugh. "That's certainly a nervous pee," he said. As it turned out, I'm glad I went.
So then I'm back in pre-op, laying on the table, being told, "Okay, look straight up (drop into each eye), look up toward me [she was standing behind me, at the head of the table] (another drop), look down at your shoes (drop, drop)." This went on for several rounds, and if you go read anything about the Lasik surgery procedure, you will know why they want the eyes good and numb. At one point I was unable to look down at my shoes. I tried, but couldn't seem to do it, and I think at that point they know they've got enough in there.
Next, stand up, a little weirded out by the heavy eye numbing, and the next thing you know I'm laying on the table of the Zeiss MEL-80, an excimer laser.
At this point you can see my sleeve rolled up – they had given me a shot of Atropine, to control that vasovagal syncope, and on the television screen you can just barely make out a close up of one of my eyes under the laser. And how does the laser work, exactly?
Rather than burning or cutting material, the excimer laser adds enough energy to disrupt the molecular bonds of the surface tissue, which effectively disintegrates into the air in a tightly controlled manner through ablation rather than burning. Thus excimer lasers have the useful property that they can remove exceptionally fine layers of surface material with almost no heating or change to the remainder of the material which is left intact.
Here is what I remember of the surgery itself. All of this happened in less than ten minutes, maybe five or six. I lay on the table, and they put the bolster under my knees. The table is motorized and it rotates me under the laser. I get the shot. I am positioned to work on the right eye first. They put a clamp on my eyelid to hold it open. They tell me to look at the green spot – which is actually a wide green pattern, kind of like a snowy TV screen, or a 2D barcode. The nurse says, "Now we will let you hear the sounds of the surgery, so they will be familiar. First, the [name I forgot] will position your eye, then the microkeratome will make a sound [buzzing sound], then, finally, the laser will make a high-pitched sound." The doctor held my head. The second doctor took my pulse. The microkeratome was lowered toward my eye. The nurse called out two numbers, something like, "436, 528." The doctor said, "Lower," which I took to be a confirmation, or a "Go" statement, rather than a directive.The buzzing started. My sight went very blurry. "Keep staring at the center of the green dot." I thought, "No turning back now." Funny time to think that, but whatever. The buzzing stopped. Through blurry vision I saw a clear sheet with a hole in it placed over my eye, probably a sort of bib to protect the eye from debris. The high-pitched sound began.
I did a lot of reading about all this, over five years, but no one, nowhere, told me there would be a smell, like burning hair. So I stopped breathing through my nose.
A few seconds later, at most a minute or two of ablation, the doctor said, "Perfect." The laser stopped, he removed the protective sheet, the flap went back onto my cornea, and he started putting drops in my eye while it sealed in place, which took maybe 10 - 30 seconds. The table repositioned me for left eye treatment, and we began again. The left eye took a bit longer because it was a stronger correction. I was twitchier, and tried to focus on my breathing.
And then, the table moved me out from under the laser, and the doctor said, "Aren't you glad you don't have four eyes?" which is a very funny double entendre, if you think about it. Even at this moment, through blurry, wet eyes, I could tell the light was entering my eyes totally differently.
They walked me across the hall to a typical optometrist setup, and did a close inspection of each eye. My left eye had a 'piece of mucus' he carefully brushed away – this could have been a euphemism for making sure the edge of the flap was not curling up. In any case, he did that, said, "Perfect," and they taped plastic shields over my eyes, which I wore until the next morning. I got some basic instructions, and we walked down the hall, got our coats, and some water, and drove out of the parking lot at about 2 PM, one hour after checking in.
Chocolade Haas
December 2, 2007 | Arts & Culture
Poignant, funny, weird, sad: Chocolade Haas (2:35)
