Diego points out that Quentin Tarantino wants to make a Bond movie.#

The Kill Bill director told the New York Daily News that he is aiming to get the rights to make a new version of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel.

"I wanted it to be the follow-up to Pulp Fiction and do it with Pierce Brosnan, but have it take place after On Her Majesty's Secret Service, after Bond's wife, Tracy, has been killed," he said.

"From what I know of Brosnan, I think he'd want to go in the direction I'd want to take Bond," Tarantino said. "Though I'm not sure the producers of the series would agree."

Jane hits it up.#

The party was on the verge of breaking up. But I refused to let it. I don't know how the notion of a strip club had come up, but since it had, somehow, I insisted. In spite of the late hour and the flagging spirits of everyone I managed to convince the group that it would be a great idea to go look at half-dressed women dancing sultrily with poles.

Strip clubs are not somewhere you go with a boyfriend or girlfriend, I would say. Because strip clubs are after all about sex, and it's not necessarily to the advantage of your significant other to watch or be watched in that context. Souris went home, but Silvio stayed out. And the eight of us - seven boys and me - went to Flashdancers because it would, said David, be the cheapest.

Jessica suggests wearing your costume tomorrow at the Blogger's meeting.#

Jessica suggests having librarian trading cards to go with the action figure.#

Why not have librarian trading cards? That'd be a fun way to boost the profession. Then we'd need librarian gum to sell them with. (Oh, the irony.) Maybe gum erasers. Who'd be on your top ten list to see on librarian trading cards?

[...]

I can imagine a game like Magic with librarian cards. ("Oh no! Not a fireball!" "Wah ha ha ha! You've lost your Book of Kells!" "Not so fast! I've got a preservation librarian!")

The Ross notes a new Switch ad.#

(Cue cheesy music)

His ad might go something like this. "I was in the market for a new machine. I was hoping to get ten teraflops by the end of the year. I'd never used a Mac and had been looking at Dells and IBMs. Then Apple released the G5 on June 23. A week later I bought 1,100 duals online at the Apple Store. I'm Srinidhi Varadarajan and I build Supercomputers at Virginia Tech."

AKMA links to Richard Soderberg and his "Lessons learned from online journals."#

Write for an audience of friends.

When you have an audience of a million people, there's no way to anticipate what the best viewpoint to reach them all is; remember that your writing is an expression of your viewpoint, and express it as such. Express your viewpoint as if you were talking to a group of friends: clear, to the point, and perhaps a dash of humor.

AKMA's reason for linking:

Too many people want to pre-define what a blog can be, or how everyone has to write their blog; Richard just says, "This is what I learned." What he learned sounds right to me.

Randall Parker writes about how Upper and Middle Class people adopting lower class accents represents going too far with egalitarianism.#

The article,

None of this would matter very much — after all, only a fool would discount what someone said solely because of the accent in which he said it, or recognise that cultivation in speech is much more than a matter of accent — if it were not of a piece with other manifestations of the very marked downward cultural aspiration in this country. I have noticed, for example, that so great is the bullying ideological pressure on the young to manifest a thoroughly plebeian taste that even highly intelligent students feel constrained to distract themselves in exactly the same way as the semi-literates of their own age. Cultural refinement is suspect precisely because it is by nature elitist; almost no one makes the important distinction between elitism and social exclusivity, which are by no means the same. The one is made to stand for the other.

Randall,

Attempts to eliminate hierarchies cut against human nature. People arrange themselves into hierarchies every bit as naturally as do packs of wolves. The biggest damage comes when the process of judging and treating people as different - whether in abilities, moral beliefs, religious beliefs, ideological beliefs, conduct, or character - is blocked from operating. When drug dealers and toughs can't be thrown out of public housing or unruly students can't be removed from classes or applicants for positions can not be tested in the most efficient and accurate ways possible society functions less well. When some people make choices in life that impose more or less of a burden on others if that can not be pointed out then we can not encourage the best sorts of behavior and again society as a whole is worse off.

Wendy discusses power dynamics and relationships and attempts to subvert them - in the context of her screenwriting class.#

There's a person in the class who has subverted the student-student dynamic. I am not shy, and I've told this person how I feel about it. I haven't had a response yet. I think that what I did was subvert the power dynamic in exactly the same way, and perhaps that confused him. I fought fire with fire, hee. I want classmates and an instructor, not classmates who try to be instructors. I like feedback, but I have a strong aversion to having a classmate tell me what I can and cannot do. He chose to be in the class, rather than find a place to teach a class, and the class needs him as a peer more than they need him as a self-appointed ubercritic.

Sebastien Paquet has great quotes on his weblog all the time.#

"Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing."
- John Andrew Holmes

Real Live Preacher posts a story for the life of Jesus. Wonderful.#

Jesus, son of Joseph, what would you do if you met the smallest person in the world?

The smallest, Rabbi?

Yes, the person who matters the least. The person with absolutely no power. The smallest person in all the world.

How would I know this person, dear Rabbi?

Indeed, how WOULD you know this person? For when we speak of the smallest person in the world we are speaking of the very mathematics of God. It is only with the reckoning of The Almighty that we are able to make sense of a newborn infant, a fallen sparrow, a single hair on your head.

And yet God's math is not known nor can it be found. It can only be received in the instant when it is needed. It exists only in the present moment.

Bacchus links to an essay from the Wired Guy about how miscommunication and misunderstanding hurts the sex act.#

"Did you come?" We understand that you hate being asked that. We're not sure why this should be so, but we accept that it is. We hate asking, and we wouldn't, but it's important to us to know. Who's going to tell us if not you? Even the most liberated woman learns at an early age to keep men guessing.You go to so much trouble to do this that sometimes we don't know what an honest reaction looks like. Be honest with us. If you didn't come, say so, and either tell us it's all right, or tell us what we might have done differently. If you did come, the fact that we asked should tell you that the signs were too subtle or unfamiliar for us. No judgment is intended: tell us what the clues are, and we'll be happy.

Men only have one kind of orgasm, and it's fairly obvious when it happens. You have a variety of orgasms centered in various body parts, of various intensities, from a mild shudder to a raise-the-rafters full-throated ejaculatory out-of-body experience. I can't tell you how envious we are of that.

Kevin announces his new website.#

The political landscape is in sad shape. Maybe it's always been that way, and I'm just waking up to it. Either way, it disgusts me in a way I've never felt before. I'm angier than I've ever been about anything in my life. I have a feeling that I'm not the only one. They say that the country is polarized between Right and Left. I think that for a very vocal minority, that's true. I think for a good portion of the country, they could care less. For everyone else, which I have a feeling is a very large percentage of the country - the so-called "silent majority" that both parties try to claim - we feel helpless and unrepresented because the parties have moved so far to the deep corners of the political spectrum and are beholden to groups that we just can't stomach supporting.

Now that I've told you how I feel, let's talk about what I want to do about it. I want to create a community. I don't want a community defined by political parties, toxic buzzwords or preconceived notions. I want to find the silent majority. I have a feeling that it's this great chunk of the American populace in the middle places of the political spectrum that's just waiting to find a way to do something, or so disgusted with the process that they've dropped out of it. How do I find this mythical group? Since I'm not a terribly smart guy, or that organized, I'm falling back on what I do. I build websites and applications.

RPGamer reports on Tetsuya Nomura discussing the new Kingdom Hearts games.#

Regarding the Game Boy Advance title, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Nomura promised that it would have the same essence as the first title of the series, with the exception of some new features like the deck of cards. The story will fill in the gap between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II, and it will follow the adventures of Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they search for the enigmatic Chain of Memories.

As for the PlayStation 2 title Kingdom Hearts II, the story will take place one year after the events of the first game. Nomura pointed out that the series is not like Square Enix's successful Final Fantasy series. While each Final Fantasy features a new cast in a new world in every game, each Kingdom Hearts game will continue the story of Sora. In other words, the series will last as long as Sora's story goes on.

John, your weblog is great. Why don't you get an RSS feed?#

Dave Winer writes about how any medium is used and what it means to "Stand up."#

I get to see the worst of this medium. When people say it's nirvana, I laugh. It's humanity, and the power of the tools works for the worst of our species as well as they work for the best.

To me, standing up to help a person being attacked is the best we can do. If it's the US government or a BigCo trying to keep people from talking about them, or a lout with a website, trashing good people's reputations. I not only remember who did the deeds, but I remember who stood by and did nothing. And that's almost everyone. And that's our shame.

Brad DeLong explains the real reason that unemployment is up in the United States and why the Bush administration is pining it on China.#

It's a nice little representative thumbnail of how Bush administration economic policy is made: (i) See an economic policy need. (ii) Pretend that you're addressing the need while actually enacting big tax cuts for the $200,000-plus-a-year crowd and unbalancing the federal government's finances. (iii) Get into trouble. (iv) Lie about the source of the trouble. (v) Pretend that you're fixing the trouble by trying to do something that will not work. As the Financial Times's Gerard Baker put it, the "Bush administration's economic team... shoot[s] itself in the foot while trying to extract the same part of its anatomy from its mouth.... Since it took office, its economic policy pronouncements, from taxes to currencies and interest rates, have been opportunistic, ill-thought-out and incoherent..."

Every political-appointee economist working for the Bush administration needs to start thinking very, very carefully about what they are doing. Did they come to Washington to be a part of a project to blame U.S. unemployment on sinister manipulations by Asian governments? Is it not much, much better to be a professor teaching your courses than to be a bit player in the current remake of The Revenge of Dr. Fu Manchu?

Shelley links to Mark Morford writing about the new "Wiccan Barbie."#

Secret Spells Barbie is, despite her potential and much like every one of the 150,000 weird sub-subniche Barbies on the market, entirely pointless and disposable and, unless the girls who end up with her somehow tap into their inner badass witchiness and suddenly get inspired by some divine funky moonscream to rip off Barbie's arms and paint her hair bright red and tattoo her nipples with a Magic Marker and impale her on a red-hot hair pin and suspend her upside down from a dreamcatcher, well, she does nothing to further the cause of funky gorgeous goddess-thick witchness and nothing to further the cause of earthly luscious pagan interconnectedness or divine feminine power.

Not that she claims to. Not that this was ever Mattel's point, or Barbie's raison d'etre, really. And I suppose it's sort of wildly unfair to hope that Barbie might actually inspire girls beyond the hair-twirling saccharine fetishism of shopping and friends and cars and boys and shopping and money and dye jobs and shopping and fake careerism and shopping.

Doug Miller wrote my favourite comment on the Michael Hanscom thing.#

This poor guy wrote a post on his blog concerning how even Microsoft, his then current employer, was using Apple G5's. The next day, they canned him. What actually appears to have caused the termination were details he provided in the post concerning what building he worked in, along with an accompanying picture. Microsoft Security seems to have been behind the action.

In all fairness to Microsoft, I can easily see this happening at many another large company. Having said that, it's certainly ironic that a company that produces an operating system with an incredibly bad security record, which exposes millions of companies and individuals world-wide to security threats, would get so spooled up over an innocuous blog post.

Richard writes about emotional affairs.#

The article:

"The new infidelity is between people who unwittingly form deep, passionate connections before realizing that they've crossed the line from platonic friendship into romantic love," she wrote in "NOT 'Just Friends': Protect Your Relationship From Infidelity and Heal the Trauma of Betrayal."

[...]

"An emotional affair to me can be as damaging as a sexual affair, because an emotional connection is what people really want," says Rona Subotnik, a marriage and family therapist in Palm Desert, Calif., and author of books on infidelity, including Internet relationships.

Richard:

I imagine guys don't hang out with their friends—especially their female friends—nearly as much as when the guys get girlfriends because they're worried about what the girlfriend might think, or what the answers to the questions might be (the "wrong" answers would be "yes" to questions 1, 2, 6 and 8, "no" to the other questions) might say about the guy. That goes for women too, I imagine.

Yes, it's the year 2003, and we're supposed to be civilized and mature about these things, and people are supposed to have unproblematicly platonic relationships with friends of the opposite sex. But when it comes down to perceptions, well, perceptions, as they always have, matter.

Dave Winer talks about on of the goals of the Thursdays at Berkman.#

One of the things on the roadmap for Berkman-Thursdays is a series of mini-BloggerCons, half-to-full-day salons in Cambridge and/or San Francisco (maybe NYC), where we discuss the art and science of weblogs. As the culture and technology grow, the topics grow to be more inclusive. Being at Harvard has expanded my horizons, and I've tried to pass that on as much as I can. Now I'm thinking about having the first salon, possibly as soon as mid-November, to talk about weblogs and democracy. It's pretty clear, based on discussions we've been having with the campaigns, and with journalists covering the campaigns, and with academics covering both the journalists and the pols, that the shifting of power isn't done yet. Dean was a good first step. Clark clearly has missed some opportunities. Edwards is doing some things right. What we haven't done is define what over-the-top would be. What do we want? Should we be lining up behind candidates yet, or should we be figuring out what our new democracy will look like? And what about the rest of the world?

The Onion is genius.#

VATICAN CITY—As Pope John Paul II enters his 26th year as pontiff, the world is stopping to reflect on the legendary funnyman's career as one of the most influential performers in modern history. Standing staunchly against contraception and women's equality right through the turn of the 21st century, the pope and his quirky, deadpan comic persona still entertain audiences around the world.

Revered by multiple generations for his weird and wonderful wit, the 83-year-old pontiff is perhaps the best-known stand-up alive today. Throughout an amazing two and a half decades as head of the Catholic Church, the pope has produced, in both his live appearances and his published works, a treasure trove of humor second to none.

"I can still remember seeing him do his classic 'Galileo' bit in the early '90s," said fellow comedian George Carlin, referring to the pope's 1992 declaration that the church erred in condemning Galileo. "Here was this man, appearing on televisions around the world, making a proclamation that the sun does not move around the earth. I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks."

Ed Cone points out how weblogs have a role in campaigns.#

Elizabeth Edwards commented here that comments on her husband's campaign blog serve to inform him about people's real concerns. I ask for an example. She replies with a specific example about the Earned Income Tax Credit that led to Edwards refocusing on the issue:

"Scott was on top of it and let us know through the blog, and the criticism that John had expressed earlier but that had been dropped from more recent speeches has been reinserted...

"John and I actually read the blog. When there is something there he finds useful or intriguing, he picks it up. If more research is needed, it goes to Robert Gordon's policy operation. If not, it can got straight into his speech or his answers to questions."

Halley Suitt re-imagines her life and questions the choices are women is supposedly forced to make.#

Caterina has done a wonderful post below about knowing early on that she wanted to be a writer, reading books about women writers and getting the fairly well-informed opinion that being a woman writer and having kids was a tough act to pull off. I agree completely, but ironically, just as she read a book about being a woman writer in her youth which suggested being childless was the best path to follow, I read a book in my youth about how many successful women writers had one child! Colette, the French writer comes to mind as one of their examples. This book did have an influence on my life.

For this reason and many others, I've always been so glad I did have a son and I would say he has probably improved my writing ten fold, although as Caterina reasonably discusses, having a child has probably hindered my writing career in many ways too. There's no point in comparing one way to the other. I make no judgements. I know what worked for me. I would be very sorry not to have become a parent, but I really don't believe that's the best path for all people (men or women).

Via Jessa Crispin is an article in Flak Magazine about how Kill Bill is like James Joyce's "Ulysses."#

In this incomplete state, it's impossible to tell whether all of this adds up to anything. The piles and piles of allusions, ranging from Busby Berkley to Brian De Palma to Sergio Leone to Akira Kurosawa to a 20-minute anime interlude, certainly enrichens the texture of the film, and to his credit, Tarantino manages to agglomerate these styles into a unique cinematic voice. For the unskilled director, this type of meta-homage becomes disaster, but when a virtuoso like Tarantino is involved, the effect transcends the traditional tonal limitations of cinema. This happens to be precisely what exalts a wordsmith like James Joyce. Unfairly labeled as indecipherable by some critics for his excessive wordplay or pretentious for his volumes of mythological and literary references, a master like Joyce can create a phrase like "the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" and couch a stream-of-conscious day-in-the-life narrative as an immortal mythological journey. The ambition of great artists is to create works that encompass everything — like the Sisyphean quest of quantam physicists to find that unified theory of the entire universe. Joyce pulled the trick and created what is considered the best English-language novel of the 20th century.

Tarantino shows the same kind of talent not just for finding relevant tangents in seemingly random associations, and also for puns and invented language — virtuosic compared to any other Gen X director. Who else could transition his main character from a Leone-style Woman With No Name to Foxy Brown kung fu artist to Kurosawa-style samurai warrior to Bruce Lee and make it work? Joyce once remarked that "Ulysses" would "keep the critics busy for 300 years," and the same could be said for Tarantino.

Doug Miller describes a day in the life of a Realtor. It's amazing how quickly things can change in the timeline of a deal.#

After that, it was back to the office. By now, it's around 4:00 PM, so I spend an hour or so finishing up calls and other to-do items I have, returning a few e-mails, and generally just cleaning up from the week. A little after 5:00 PM I head home.

I'm still not done, though. The family and I went out for dinner, and then drove over to Borders afterwards. On the way, I get a call from one of my clients. She and her family are headed out of town for the weekend. She wants to tell me that their home is ready for showings this weekend if we get any, but doesn't know if she should call the office to let them know she'll be gone, since showings on her home are by appointment only. I let her know that I'll take care of it, and call the office. I catch the night office staff just before they head out, and have them make a note in her file that showings this weekend are permitted without confirmation from the owner.

Repeat that, times six or seven, and you'll have a good idea of the life of a Realtor.

Michael Feldman discusses Dana Blankenhorn's post on politics in the blogosphere.#

An interesting post last week from Dana Blankenhorn, questioning the preponderance of political pontificating in the blogosphere. He points out that the majority of Blogstreet's 100 Most Influential Blogs are about - Politics. Dana makes a number of astute points (including concurring with the Dowbrigade in hailing Thomas Paine as a Natural Born Blogger). He also points out a number of similarities between blogging and talk radio, mainly that they are both the voice of authentic individuals, real live people with private lives they mention from time to time, and who make no pretense of presenting an "objective" take on the issues of the day.

Now, obviously a lot depends on which end of the blogosphere one inhabits. True, most of the most-linked-to blogs that people like US read revolve around politics. But what about the hundreds of thousands of hypothetical (or are they apocalyptical) 13-year-old girls blogging crazes and crushes in their 6th grade homerooms? They may not have as many inleading links as Glen Reynolds, but they are part of the phenomena, and behind them are many thousands of other blogs which serve personal, family, business or academic purposes and which have nothing at all to do with politics.

Richard links to Anne Kingston on What Women Want and the Feminist Backlash.#

We've done a 180-degree swing here. The mythical housewife Betty Friedan portrayed as being imprisoned in a plate-glass cage in The Feminine Mystique has been replaced by another commercialized myth -- the domestic goddess living a life of affluent leisure filled with lattes at Starbucks, Pilates classes, meetings with the feng shui consultant and romantic evenings with her rich, handsome and devoted husband.

It's ironic. Twentieth-century feminism is routinely trashed for having assumed all women wanted a hard-driving career. Even Friedan came to recognize the error of that presumption, writing in her memoir, Life So Far: "I couldn't define 'liberation' for women in terms that denied the sexual and human reality of our need to love, and even, sometimes, to depend upon a man."

Richard linked to me some awesome girl/boy advice:#

c) Never approach a woman assuming that, because she is cute and in a club, she is not intelligent. Never condescend and go on about subjects that you think make you look smart - there is a chance that she actually knows more than you do. Also, don't assume that all women will be impressed by how much money you make, what kind of car you drive, and how you will retire by the age of 30. If a woman did care, would you really want to be with her anyhow?

I love the idea of considering people who make you upset, not the type of people you should let make you upset. If some one pisses me off, they retroactively become a person who's actions don't bother me because they are so clueless.

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun.#

As is apparent from the title, this essay discusses where Western Civilization and how bad the Decadence really is.#

Sooner or later, the sophisticated person who reads or hears that Western civilization is in decline reminds himself that to the living "the times" always seem bad. In most eras voices cry out against the visible decadence; for every generation-and especially for the aging-the world is going to the dogs. In 1493-note the date-a learned German named Schedel compiled and published with comments the Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages was drawing to a close and it supplied several blank pages at the end of the book to record anything of importance that might occur in what was left of history. What was left, hiding around the corner, was the opening up of the New World and a few side effects of that inconsequential event. A glance at history, by showing that life continues and new energies may arise, is bound to inspire skepticism about the recurrent belief in decline. [pg. 161]

What is the Decadence of the Modern Era? Why is there so much disbelief in old institution and ideas?#

How deep goes the disbelief? For history shows both big and little decadences. Decadence means "falling off," and it is possible for a civilization to experience a lesser fall from trust in its own ways without wrecking the entire fabric. The passage from what we call the High Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation was one such falling away and new beginning. The time just before the French Revolution was another. At these moments-roughly the end of the fourteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century-Europe saw old institutions crumble, long-accepted thoughts dissolve, feelings fade away, and new ones take their place. [pg. 163]

The idea of decline should not be assumed to mean revolution, devastation, a complete destruction of civilization, or a loss. It is simply a change caused by failings in the old regime. It is not necessarily sudden, it can just be a "falling off."

Jacques tours through things that are seeing their support fade, starting with Governments as personified by their enforcers and enforcements: police and prisons.#

The police are often considered a corrupt, ineffectual part of the body politic, just as that body itself is felt to be a domination by evil forces over simple human nature. These changes mark the end of the liberal ideal, which saw in universal suffrage the key to self-government and in the rule of law the promise of a good society. So far has this ideal sunk that the rightness of any minority has become an axiom, and more and more people feel themselves to be not sovereign, but shamefully oppressed-a desperate minority.

In the place of the former attitude toward the state stands what might be called for short the Marxist analysis. It does not stem from Marxist propaganda alone; but its spirit is that which informs the literature of Marx and his disciples, the spirit of exposure and revelation, the animus of a war against appearances, the search for a reality made up of conspiracies and their victims.

It is a democratic spirit insofar as the passion for equality naturally stimulates envy and suspicion; but it is alos a racist spirit in that it attriubtes virtues and violated rights to one group, wickedness and wrongful supremacy to another. In this sense, visibly, women are a race oppressed by the race of men; the old, the white, and the "bourgeois" are races unjustly dominant over the race of the young, the colored, the poor, and so on down a long list. [pg. 165]

Jacques notes that a sign of the distrust of government is the completely indistinguishable forms of governance that are put to practice in this past century.#

No new ones, no practical or utopian schemes of society, have emerged in the present century. This lack may have a bearing on the prospects of Western civilization. Besides being unoriginal, the ideals and doctrines now at war are also undisputed in the sense that they continue to exist without support from deep philosophical conviction. Just as all regimes are "for the people," so groups and classes are "for equality and justice" and "against poverty and discrimination." Imperialism (colonialism) has no proponents left; racism as an official policy is restricted to the southern tip of Africa; and capitalism has been so modified that it is at many points indistinguishable from communism, itself also hybridized. Nobody supports the view that the poor are necessary to society or that "inferiors" exist or have a role to play in some hierarchical order. Egalitarianism is affirmed as universally as pauperism is condemned. [pg. 169]

Jacques points out that those being blamed for the "evils of the age" are the victims of the paradox of Egalitarianism.#

This verdict which condemns the middle class as responsible for the evils of the age is not being uttered today for the first time. Nor was it first pronounced by the Marxians or their predecessors and successors in socialism. It is not a purely economic indictment in any case. When the anti-bourgeois commonplaces, now nearly two hundred years old, are repeated today, they imply something other than a call to rescue the proletariat from the oppression of the powerful. They imply guilt for failing to create a better world, the great, rational society. After all, the conception of the general welfare springs from liberal thought itself as it turned away from laissez faire in the nineties and followed the lead of Bismarck and the socialists toward a state affording complete social security. And liberal-socialist thought is a bourgeois invention. Similarly, the "rights of the people" are not in opposition to the "materialism" imputed to the bourgeois as a sin, for surely these "rights" include the people's material prosperity. [pg. 173-174]

Jacques writes that the defining characteristic that our current state of culture has is it's supreme self-consciousness.#

The civilized frame of mind is always self-conscious, but perhaps none before ours has attained such an extreme of self-consciousness. We owe this sensitivity to our long historical memory, even if buried; to the breadth of our information, which gives us no respite to enjoy the present, for it continually turns into something else; to the peculiarity of our literature and our psychology, alike introspective and ruthless in imputing bad motives, suspicious of the leas self-satisfaction; to the bleakness of our science, which shows a purposeless universe of not even harmonious design; and finally to the fears that our great cleverness has raised up-fear of atomic destruction, fear of overpopulation, fear of our massed enemies and, in daily life, fear of all the diseases, mishaps, and dangers that technology creates and incessantly warns about. [pg. 178]

In the closing of this essay, Jacques looks at another diagnostic of our culture: control.#

The next diagnostic point is the question of morals and religion. Morality, like religion, has the double aspect of satisfying an emotional need and serving a social purpose. Without morality-some inner restraint-society must assign two policemen to watch ever citizen day and night. And without a religion which organizes the facts of life and the cosmos, men seek in vain for the meaning of their existence. Not all can find in art or science a substitute justification; and pure, unreflecting ambition or calculated hedonism is rare and demands special gifts. [...]

On second thoughts, art and science seem to offer better grounds for complacency. In our time, both have gained enormously in prestige and support; their practitioners are the only admired leaders. Ostensibly, the, art and science are flourishing, which argues a "healthy society." The metaphor of health is misleading-a health malignancy kills the patient. The arts are not malignant, but they are either hostile or ambiguous. They mean to awaken the complacent and they succeed. [...]

Science too has little to say comprehensively. It is none too well integrated within itself. The proliferating specialties, each with its private language and its stream of discoveries, do not cohere and settle large subjects; it has become a matter of pride that science is never done. If that is so, science is not what is founders expected and promised: a solid edifice of knowledge soon to be completed. Rather it is for a few an absorbing activity whose results can never give its patron civilization a cosmos fit for contemplation [pg. 180-181]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun.#

This essay talks mostly about the failure and ridiculous nature of "linguistics" and of the fallacy that everything can (and should) be "scientific," whatever that means.#

The source of the "Scientific Obsession"...#

In naming their work science, the linguists of that time or philologists, as they were called, meant that is was systematic and not fanciful. In every European tongue except English, the phrase "scientific work" still means just that. After all, the root meaning of science is simply knowledge. But by 1865, when Max Muller, the transplanted German lecturing at Oxford, offered a course on the "science of language," something had happened to the key word. Thanks to agitation about Darwinism, science and scientists had become objects of worship; the older terms naturalist, natural philosopher, went out of use, and the conviction spread that nothing was true or sure except the findings of physical science. The adjective scientific became a judgment of value and a source of pride. [pgs. 144-145]

Jacques refutes Professor Allen Walker Read's claim that "No native speaker can make a mistake" and that language is founded upon science-everything having a completely rational, consistent explanation.#

Language, like history, like the human mind, belongs not to science but to the realm of finesse. New words do not appear when needed; centuries pass without their creation. Existing words do drop out when still needed and clearly used. The success of new coinages depends on vogue, which is largely accidental, like the success of a play or a book. As with books, a popular novelty suddenly dies, with or without competition, with or without replacement.

It is this strictly human waywardness, in speaking as in writing, that makes it foolish to look upon language as a self-justifying oracle. Professor Read's maxim is refuted by the evidence of common practice. Native speakers do not believe him, for they frequently correct themselves and sometimes each other. Then, too, babies are native speakers and the plentiful mistakes they make are steadily corrected by their parents, by themselves, and by the rest of the community, until all parties decide that the infant (which means "nonspeaker") has at last learned to speak right. [pg. 149]

A complaint that Jacques has with linguistics, and indeed many forms of science, is that the teachings "leave out one essential: pedagogy, the art of teaching."#

Up-to-date-ness has tended to blot out the fact that beginners must begin at the beginning with what is simple; subjects must be artificially simplified-if need be, falsified. The refinements, the exceptions to rules, the depths discoverable by advanced analysis must come after a basis has been solidly laid. Anything else is like wanting to carve the ornament before the pillar is built-pre-posterism. [pg. 153]

So language is not science and is more like art.#

To put the case another way, unless language is regarded as a work of art and treated as we treat efforts to paint and compose music, there is no tenable reason for setting themes and demanding precise diction, correct idiom, economical syntax, varied rhythm, suitable tone, adroit linkage and transitions-in short, no reason for good writing. Some may object that it is hard enough to get plain, decent prose from average students without asking for "art." The rejoinder is that plain and decent, simple and direct are already "are"-and difficult. Since we teach Art in the usual sense-drawing and music-why should we cast the art of language and unequal role? [pgs. 156-157]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay Jacques criticizes the notion that history can be explained by referencing a few "Single Causes" that enabled certain events to take place. This relates to what he wrote in another essay that human life is a net, where every string pulls every other. There is no epicenter for change, the whole system must be in the right state.#

Jacques continues another one of the themes of his writing, that life, and thus art, and thus history, are not scientific and cannot be explained completely in a scientific manner.#

The assumption of a sole cause, let me repeat, is a scientific idea-in particular, a principle of physics-which in the nineteenth century became an obsession in other fields than science. That is why Karl Marx, along with many other social theorists, looked for such a cause and all believed they had found it; that is why Darwin was celebrated as the discoverer of the single cause of evolution-and is still thought to have done so, although he himself acknowledge several causes. Darwin, it may be added, is one of the classic discoverers that Webb [a historian who Jacques admires for his form of history orthogonal to Jacques'] said he would wish to be ranked with.

The appeal of the single cause is linked with the conception of history as a vast process which overwhelms any individual will. The triumph of democracy in the last third of the nineteenth century certainly contributed to making that view prevail. It seemed self-evident when large anonymous masses migrated from Europe to American and within America to the West; it seemed confirmed when those same masses, by agitating and voting along geographical, regional, social, or economic lines, moved the nation in one direction or another. At such a spectacle historians gave up the earlier conception known as the Great Man theory of history, the idea which Emerson, for example, discussed in his esay on self-reliance and summed up in the dictum that "all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." [pg. 132]

The biggest problem with single causes, Jacques says, is that they take the power of cultural changes out of the hands of the men and women who exist in it.#

Narrative history presupposes men and women whose motives lead to action ad result in event. But we no longer believe in the importance, even in the reality, of active men and women; we think they are moved by other forces, of which they are not conscious-by economic, dialectic, material determinism; by a thing called "their society"; by the unconscious, individual or collective; or, as Webb decided, by the environment. These accounts put the motive power behind history and unmistakably point to the single cause. For no matter how much the narrator hedges by admitting lesser or secondary causes, the one he calls principal or fundamental is the one that drives the human crowd and commands the march of events.

The scheme looks so plausible: in an age of politcal democracy and mass culture, of world trade and interlocking industries, how can one believe in the Great Man and his directing will? The answer is, no need to believe in him, even though one has actually seen a few rather recently: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Gandhi, Churchill, De Gaulle (great does not mean good). But leave them aside and forget the label "great." The question is not that of supreme power, and not even of power, but of action. [pgs. 135-136]

The belief and desire for a single cause arises from a confusion of purpose on the shoulders of historians. Their quest is not for meanings and answers, it is for ideas that will help understand.#

For a philosophy, a meaning, is by definition a principle that does not accommodate exceptions. It is like a stencil laid over the map of events: only what shows through the holes can have significance, and unfortunately it is inevitable that what the stencil shuts out is often more important than what the philosopher needs in order to establish his principle or meaning. Does this imply that history is meaningless? If so, what about the "original idea" that helps to organize confusion? Well, an idea is not the same as the meaning. The organizing idea may serve well for a modest portion of the past, modest in geographical range or in timespan. There is then no need to suppress or belittle great chunks of reality. And the bearing of an idea need not be exclusive; it may be offered as highly suggestive, a pragmatic explanation in the technical sense of pragmatic. It is a view, a convenient pattern, a tenable interpretation, not a system or a stencil. [pgs. 138-139]

What then, is a great history to Jacques? One that is "thick with the deeds and aims of many individuals" and that does not attempt the impossible and try to tell the story of every person ever of a certain class. There must be Great Men.#

To sump up, the value of history does not consist in explaining by formula, in "revealing" some potent principle that governs one or twenty-one civilizations. The value lies in the spectacle itself. [...] [T]opics that lack a spatial and chronological unity, such as "the history of the Irish in America" or "the history of Asia" do not yield books of history. The former subject has no continuity, the latter has no unity. On the same principle, there can be a history of feminism, but not "a history of women." When the late Philippe Aries wrote Centuries of Childhood, he supplied interesting vignettes of changing attitudes toward children, but he did not perform the impossible task of writing a "history of children," any more than he could have written a history of redheaded people. [...] A History of the Idea of Progress is possible and has in fact been written, whereas a History of Human Stupidity cannot be, plentiful as the source material obviously is. [pgs. 140-141]

Why would you not want to study and write history after this:#

[Knowing] history endows everything we see and touch with additional meanings-not a single overarching one, but a multitude of associations as real as the object or the scene itself. Life is made thicker, richer, of weightier import because other beings than ourselves-yet kindred-have passed where we walk. [pg. 142]

makeoutcity.com was down from 01:41 this morning until 08:25, ick. Also there seems to be some weirdness with my RSS feed where if I edit an old post it shows up on the feed. I dunno why? Whoops.#

Christopher Lydon posts the second part of the Stirling Newbery interview.#

The model of politics and culture is shifting, he observes, from the pyramid to the sphere. In conversation he trumped my reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Circles" as a sort of key to the Internet transformation. "The eye is the first circle," Emerson wrote in 1841. "The horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world."

Stirling Newberry had Emerson's next line by heart, it turned out: "St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere... " In his own voice he continued: "That's the image you should have of what's happening on the Internet. Anyone on any given day can be the center if he has the best observation that resonates. There is no boundary of the circle... You get to sing a song and listen to the echo. You get to hear... how other people have taken what you've done and turned it into their center."

Ryan McGee doesn't like a few people. I don't think anyone does.#

Going to a superfly gym has its benefits, but also means you're dealing with an economic class who's used to getting their way. And if they wanna watch 10 minutes of FOX News while gathering strength for their next set of butterfly presses, then gosh darn it, they are gonna do it. I'm fairly passive-aggressive in general, but even more so at the gym. Mostly because most of the guys there could take a 50-pound dumbbell and hit me with it. That tends to dull my overt rage.

So, only every other day do I want to condemn those people to eternal damnation. Twice daily, however, I want to take a sledgehammer (the non-Peter Gabriel type) to any and all who deign to enter or exit the same subway door as myself. Most people who come to Boston marvel at the speed at which we live our lives. We walk fast, talk fast, drive fast. However, within a 4 foot radius of a subway door, everyone for some unknown reason starts to move in bullet time from "The Matrix". Just mind-blowing. The entire world seems to crawl to a halt, as we move….achingly…slow…into…the…car. It's not even just when it's crowded. There can be no one in the door, no one coming out, and a perfectly healthy 20-something in front of me suddenly moves likes she's just fallen and can barely get up. Wanna strangle her with that imaginary Medic Alert badge.

Peter Lindberg posts an excerpt from Umberto Eco refuting what Marshall McLuhan said about light as a medium.#

To say that light is a medium is a refusal to realize that there are at least three definitions of light. Light can be a Signal of information (I use electricity to transmit impulses that, in Morese code, mean particular messages); light can be a Message (if my girlfriend puts a light in the window, it means her husband has gone out); and light can be a Channel (if I have the light on in my room I can read the message-book). In each of these cases the impact of a phenomenon on the social body varies according to the role it plays in the communication chain.

Michael Feldman writes about the megalomaniac in control at Boston University.#

The problem, as it has been at BU for the past 32 years, is John Silber, the acerbic meritocrat who has ruled the University like his own personal medieval serfdom, while masquerading as a liberal Democrat.

In fact, one of the quintessential Silber moments came when he ran for governor as a Dem in 90 and was in position for a slim victory over Bill Weld when, on election eve, in an attempt to make himself appear more "human", he invited TV reporter Natalie Jacobsen into his home to report on Silber and his family relaxing after the hard campaign. Natalie had the temerity to ask him some tough, political questions, and Silber had a meltdown, on camera. He excoriated the poor reporter for "invading his privacy" and "crossing the line" and basically threw her and her camera crew out of his house.

The next day he lost the election by a narrow margin. The BU community was devastated, realizing that ascending to the Governors mansion was the only way they were going to be rid of the man before the end of the millenium.

Silber has undoubtedly dragged BU onto the top shelf of American universities, and deserves credit for that, but sheesh, the guy has been in power for longer than Fidel Castro, and has outlived his usefulness to a similar degree. Like many stellar figures in outmoded institutions, he has come to think of himself and the university inter-changeably, and can't imagine it having any worthwhile existence apart from him.

Alexander Payne needs to get it out.#

I have the privilege of feeling things very deeply. When I'm happy, which as I've moved towards adulthood has essentially meant when I'm in love, I am positively blissful. I also feel the joy of family and friends quite tangibly. These things are by no means unique, but they are set in relief from other people I observe. American men are not supposed to feel, and they are not supposed to show or acknowledge if they do. I do both of those things, and rightly or not I see that as a difference on my part.

So when I'm happy I'm exquisitely and self-consciously happy. But, in yin-yang balance, that happiness burns briefly and brightly. The trade-off is that I'm stupidly, crushingly depressed when most folks would (should?) just be sad. And, shockingly enough for all you readers suffering through my turgid personal posts and obnoxious lyrics jaunts, I'm very depressed these days.

Gordon Weakliem also points out to Richard Tallent that he wants Scheme/Lisp.#

Tony Pierce has fans who think he has super powers. I'm one.#

After 9/11 I did a few stories for the Times about how the internet handled the event. And I ended up talking to Evan Williams who said whatever, but the main thing that shocked me was that i tried to engage him in a conversation (dear to my heart) along the lines of how he is better enabling the free press to be the nexus of a democracy. and was that a goal when he set out? and maybe he took a nap during my question, but he was all groggy and said something like he had only recently started to think about those types of implications and he felt humbled by it but that he wanted to think more about it, and he's just a little programmer guy, and didn't think about what this technology could really do.

There's all this new technology right now Tony, but no great use of it yet. You are so clearly one of the few guys full of ideas. You can show, you can inspire, you can lead.

Doug Miller shows that the rest of the world isn't as fast as we may want it to be.#

A crew just came through the office, clearly doing planning for installing a bunch of new ethernet drops back here in the cubicle farm called "the bullpen." The bullpen is where all we rookie Realtors sit until we hit $1M in volume, at which point we're eligible for a private office. Sort of a Darwinian incubator for baby real estate agents, as it were.

I can't help but wonder why we don't skip the whole wiring nightmare and just put 802.11 WAP's throughout the building. That's the real estate business, striding boldly forward into the 1990's in terms of technology.

Joy links to an OS X Transition Article about Pixar.#

The lesson that the administrators at Pixar learned during their migration to Mac OS X is that there are many options for automation within Mac OS X and that Mac OS X fits in well with a Unix Infrastructure. Benveniste said that without their tools, it would have taken several hours per Mac to upgrade to Mac OS X. With their tools, a Mac out of the box can be fully configured to work at Pixar in 15 minutes. The longest part of the installation for existing users was the Rollout portion, which Benveniste said depends on the user's files.

Agent000 at Kuro5hin.org proposes a "No-Shopping Christmas."#

Somewhat similar to Buy Nothing Day, No Shopping Christmas is a simple, yet heavy concept: buy no gifts for Christmas out of obligation, and inform others of your intent so that they do not feel obligated to buy you gifts in return. Don't waste money on lame decorations, and thank you kindly for not killing the trees. Spend time with your family and friends instead of spending money on them. Participate in the traditions of your religion of choice. Or not. Accept Christmas as a time for rest, relaxation, and spending time with people outside of shopping malls.

Implementing this concept, I see a world with much less stress and much more value. A world where children would receive fewer cheap plastic toys, but have their college education paid for. A world where we plant a tree in our backyard, not our living room. A world where time is valued more than money.

mpt proposes that something good come out of Microsoft's browser monopoly.#

From: Microsoft Corporation
To: Web authors everywhere
Date: March 1st, 2004

As of September 1st 2004, Internet Explorer will no longer allow new windows to be opened using JavaScript or VBScript.

As some of you have noticed, Internet Explorer 6 SP2 already prevents windows from opening via scripts when the system date is set to September 1st 2004 or later. This is by design. The delay is intended to give Web developers time to update their pages.

In future versions of Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer will block scripts from opening new windows regardless of the system date.

For eight years, we let you use JavaScript and VBScript to open new windows. But you overwhelmingly abused this ability, to display rubbish our customers have told us they do not want. So we won't let you do it any more.

Jill Walker suggests a reason why more European women aren't online.#

Online shopping is better in the States than in Europe. I reckon that's one reason. More interestingly, the same goes for online communities: Europe has so many small countries and small languages that it's far harder to reach the critical mass you need for any topic. I signed up for American mailing lists when I became pregnant, and found a hundred other pregnant women with due dates in July '96, all as eager as I was to share their hopes and worries. There still isn't an equivalent in Norwegian, though there are now Norwegian language forums about pregnancy in general. If I'd not been comfortable in English I wouldn't have found any online community to support me during my pregancy, not in a language I mastered, not in 1996.

Wendy writes about her class, how they respond to her writing.#

They had a lot to say, but I could tell they were hesitant at first. I write graphically, I don't hold back with my language. So there's a little bit of the f-word thrown in there, and discussion of anatomy, briefly. But after our instructor asked a question and I started to talk cheerfully and openly, they warmed up and started asking a lot of questions. I didn't feel attacked, a couple of them were afraid I felt attacked. But only at one specific moment did I feel any animosity, and it was when one classmate said "You can't do that in a film" or something like that. I don't like being told I can't do something. Particularly in film, which is a medium in which you pretty much can do anything you damn well please. But other than that I was blown away by their willingness to dive in. And, frankly, having gone to a women's college, it's pretty new for me to have a lot of male voices in a room (the class is about half male) talking about rape. We didn't get into the politics of rape - that's not what the class is about, it's about the writing - but I'm always fascinated by men when they talk about it, and what their faces look like when they say the word. Yes, there's a rape in my script. Why? My classmates asked the same question. My answer? I wanted to write about rape. It's important to me that films explore rape from various angles. My character experiences it differently from other characters I've seen in film. I'm really looking forward to writing the scene, as difficult as it will be.

Richard can't really help his friend get through a break up.#

having dated the guy for so long, I have no idea how comfortable she'll be with single life. If she's cool with it, then great, cool. One of the few things that really gets on my nerves—no, really, I can absolutely not tolerate this—is when those who are what I consider successful daters (compared to me, that would be those that can get a second date) complain about their singletude. Why? It's been almost 8 years since I've kissed a member of the opposite sex! There are surely those who have a track record is worse than mine, and they not only have every right to complain to me, and they deserve to be relieved of that burden. But those who are better off do not have that right.

I can't complain to Richard, but I like to read when he complains.

Via Richard is an article by Naomi Wolf on the havocs of Pornography called "The More You See, The Less You Want."#

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual "mission creep" of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

The Daily Grind responds:

In cases where it affects one's social interactions with others, rampant porn consumption is the symptom of insecurity, not the result.

For those that are insecure, porn is an escape and an excuse. Porn is their way of hiding out from the world. Let's face it — genuine intimacy is an incredibly intense and intimidating thing, and it's something that's very hard to approach. When you allow yourself to be that open with someone, you're vulnerable — and many of us in this generation have grown up believing that vulnerability is a sign of weakness rather than a character strength as it really is. As a result, we hide our true selves away from one another, especially in the bedroom… because when are you more vulnerable than when you're naked with another person? And so the walls go up, and so the sex is more aggressive and less passionate and connective, and so we wind up retaining that strong veneer that we saw ourselves as entering into the experience with. It's easier to hide that side of ourselves from someone else, just as it's easier to watch porn and jack off to it rather than venture out into the world and try to hook up with someone real. Likewise, it's easier to blame porn for our issues with how we look and feel than it is to look within one's self and say, "You know, I'm not happy with my ass and I can't figure out why that is, so maybe I should change that." Whether it be a change in exercise or a change in attitude is up to the individual. But to blame porn for this isn't constructive at all. That's like blaming Ben and Jerry for making someone fat. Nobody said you have to eat ice cream to the exclusion of all other foods, you chose to do it… so why are the ice cream makers at fault for your inability to govern yourself accordingly?