Archive

Things to Read

“The Rise and Fall of Dr. Frasier Crane” by Stephen Winchell, SplitSider

March 14, 2013
Things to Read

“Frasier” logo / wikipedia.org

SplitSider is one of my favorite comedy blogs, and one of the reasons is that they don’t just feature news stories and reviews – they also have interesting, funny essays, like this character study of Frasier Crane from Cheers and Frasier.

Over those twenty years, his story evolved in steady steps. If you watch any one episode on it’s own, it’s easy to miss the slow climb to happiness in Boston, or the slow spiral into loneliness in Seattle. But it’s there. Through Lilith, joy and stability. Through Niles, frustration and deterioration. He’s a man who had nothing, got everything, and lost it all again.

“The Rise and Fall of Dr. Frasier Crane” by Stephen Winchell

“I Have Placed My Sickness Upon You” by Karin Tidbeck, Strange Horizons

March 12, 2013
Things to Read

“This Native of Randolph Center, Vermont, Quit a Job as an Auto Mechanic to Return to the Family Farm” by Jane Cooper / National Archives at College Park (via Flickr)

This great story by Karin Tidbeck in the speculative fiction magazine “Strange Horizons” introduces into the lexicon (or my personal lexicon, at least) the concept of a “Sadgoat” – a literal scapegoat for all your troubles.

Dr. Andersson was in the office already. She took a chair in what was supposed to be the cosy corner: two armchairs, a little table with a box of tissues, a vase of flowers. On the wall hung a painting of a moose cresting a hilltop. Dr. Andersson looked like she usually did. Today, her bowl haircut and shapeless green muumuu were complemented by a necklace of wooden zebras. She was holding a leash. At the end of the leash, standing beside her chair, was the goat. It was small, reaching up to my knees, and jet black with floppy ears. It was nibbling on the armrest. I sat down in the opposite chair.

“This is your new treatment,” said Dr. Andersson. “It’s the latest in experimental therapy. I thought we might let you have a try, seeing as you’re a bit hesitant about ECT.”

“I see,” I said.

Dr. Andersson adjusted her glasses. “Do you know the origins of the word ‘scapegoat’?”

“Sure,” I replied. “Old Hebrew stuff. A goat sent out into the desert for everyone’s sins.”

“Exactly.” Dr. Andersson scratched the goat behind the ears. “This is a Sadgoat.”

I looked at the goat. It looked back at me, its horizontal pupils narrowing.

“I’m confused,” I said.

“I Have Placed My Sickness Upon You” by Karin Tidbeck

@pentametron

March 5, 2013
Things to Read, Writing

at

All hail the Pentametron.

This nifty algorithm, which was the subject of a story on NPR, crawls twitter to find tweets written in iambic pentameter. When it finds two tweets that rhyme, it retweets them to form a Shakespearean couplet, like so:

No hotdogs at IKEA so upset 😦
Regret regret regret regret regret

The Pentametron website collects these couplets to form sort-of sonnets out of them, which can be quite beautiful in their own right:

Eye contact is a privilege, not a right

Play secretary, I’m the boss tonight.

That was the fastest half an hour yet

What’s better? Bacon or the Internet?

 

Cheese Macaroni *offers* anyone??

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE ESSAY DONE

I kinda wanna smoke tomorrow tho

so Jerry springer has another show ???

 

Regretting that decision from before

Is everyone asleep already or??..

I absolutely hate a bugaboo!

There’s never gonna be another you.

 

What if forever isn’t long enough?

Especially lying over stupid stuff.

“The Last Man Up” by Christopher Solomon, Runner’s World

March 4, 2013
Things to Read

“Mt. Marathon Feet” by Ron Niebrugge / Niebrugge Images

Great story in Runner’s World about a death during the Mount Marathon race in Seward, Alaska, which has become famous for its brutality:

Why would anyone do this? you ask. The answer is that the peril of the Mount Marathon Race and the pain it inflicts are the very things that give the event its enduring allure; you could even say they are essential. Decades before Tough Mudder began roughing up paying customers, people were slapping down their money, then falling down—hard—at the Mount Marathon Race. On the flying descent, runners have fallen and had to have six-inch spear points of shale extracted from their hindquarters. Seward Fire Chief Dave Squires, who has aided injured racers for 26 years, told me he has seen everything from dislocations and neck injuries to angry tattoos from sliding down snowfields. A woman once rolled her ankle while evading a pissed-off bear. Another year a man was impaled by a tree branch. One roasting July 4 in the 1980s, 53 people were treated for heat illness. Squires has seen racers suffering from compound fractures—bones actually jutting from their bodies—still running toward the finish line. “Sometimes not very good,” he said, “but they’re still running.” Among three serious injuries in last year’s race, an experienced mountain runner from Anchorage chose an unusual line above the Cliffs, tripped, fell—and suffered lasting brain trauma. A pilot from Utah slid 30 feet down a muddy ramp and off the Cliffs, lacerated her liver, and was hospitalized for five days—saved only from graver injury by a quick-thinking EMT who broke her fall

“The Last Man Up” by Christopher Solomon

“Caring for Your Introvert” by Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic

February 8, 2013
Things to Read

“Extrovert vs. Introvert” by Jeff Wysaki / Pleated-Jeans.com

This old piece from The Atlantic does seem to get a little overblown in spots (“Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts.” Really? Not arrogant, huh?) but I think it’s still a great explanation of some of the things introverts such as myself struggle with.

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”

“Caring for Your Introvert” by Jonathan Rauch

“In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh” by Mary Kaye Schilling, Vulture

February 7, 2013
Things to Read

In a new interview, Steven Soderbergh shares some of his thoughts about the film business and his impending retirement.

[…] So that’s when I started thinking, All right, when I turn 50, I’d like to be done. I knew that in order to stop, I couldn’t keep it a secret — so many things are coming at you when you’re making films that you need to have a reason to be saying no all the time.

And what was that reason?
It’s a combination of wanting a change personally and of feeling like I’ve hit a wall in my development that I don’t know how to break through. The tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me, or at least narrative as we’re currently defining it. I’m convinced there’s a new grammar out there somewhere. But that could just be my form of theism.

Is it similar to how you were feeling in 1997 when you made the satire Schizopolis — an attempt to “blow up the house,” as you put it?
Yeah. If I’m going to solve this issue, it means annihilating everything that came before and starting from scratch. That means I have to go away, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take. And I also know you can’t force it. I love and respect filmmaking too much to continue to do it while feeling I’m running in place. That’s not a good feeling. And if it turns out I don’t make another one, I’m really happy with this last group of movies. I don’t want to be one of those people about whom people say, “Wow, he kind of fell off there at the end.” That would be depressing.

“In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh” by Mary Kaye Schilling

“Holding Pattern” by Tech. Sgt. Matthew Bates, Airman Online

February 6, 2013
Photography, Things to Read, Things to Watch

Great story in Airman Magazine about the “Boneyard” – an Air Force base in Arizona that looks like a plane graveyard, but actually gives old aircraft new life:

The planes range from older ones, like the F-86 and B-52 Stratofortress, to newer ones, like the C-5 Galaxy. Though retired from active duty, each aircraft still performs a vital mission.

“Parts,” said Bill Amparano, an aircraft mechanic with the 309th AMARG. “These planes offer parts to the fleet. If a unit can’t find a replacement part for one of their aircraft, they’ll send us a request and we’ll take the part off one of our planes and send it to them.”

In other words, the AMARG is like a giant “pick-and-pull” for the Air Force, offering hard-to-find parts to units around the world. And, while it’s said the Boneyard is where planes go to die, it’s the opposite that’s true.

“They don’t come here to die, they’re just taking a break,” Amparano said.

“Holding Pattern” by Tech. Sgt. Matthew Bates

“Life in a Lumber Camp” by George Austin Woodward, Munsey’s Magazine (1894)

January 29, 2013
Photography, Things to Read
Photo: "Cedar stump house, Edgecomb, Washington, 1901" by Darius Kinsey / University of Washington Libraries

Photo: “Cedar stump house, Edgecomb, Washington, 1901” by Darius Kinsey / University of Washington Libraries

I’m working on a writing project with a friend of mine, and I’m still in one of the most enjoyable parts of the process: research. The story takes place at a logging camp, and in doing my research I found this great piece of source material – “Life in a Lumber Camp,” a piece from Munsey’s Magazine in 1894. The writer, who undoubtably visited from some place more urban and “civilized,” describes life in the camp:

Camp customs, while many and varied, are not so strictly observed as they were a few years ago. In some camps, in the evening, singing, dancing, and rough games are kept up until a late hour. It is an amusing sight–a couple of sets of great, clumsy men dancing the quadrille or “stag dance,” and keeping time to the “tweedledee” of an old, squeaky fiddle, apparently having as good a time as if they possessed every advantage of the modern ball room. Hazing, which was a common practice a few years ago, is no longer tolerated to the extent it once was. Formerly all newcomers must either sing a song or buy a pound of tobacco– a rule which, I am told, kept the drowd well supplied with to luxury. Strangers were often subjected to a good deal of ill treatment. A common practice was for six or eight men to seize another and toss him up in a blanket. Stealing was practiced to such an extent that socks were stolen from the feet of sleeping men.

“Life in a Lumber Camp” by George Austin Woodward

“A Pickpocket’s Tale” by Adam Green, The New Yorker

January 26, 2013
Things to Read, Things to Watch

Last month, The New Yorker had a fascinating profile of a man named Apollo Robbins, who may be the world’s best pickpocket:

In magic circles, Robbins is regarded as a kind of legend, though he largely remains, as the magician Paul Harris told me, “the best-kept secret in town.” His talent, however, has started gaining notice further afield. Recently, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and the military have studied his methods for what they reveal about the nature of human attention. Teller, a good friend of Robbins’s, believes that widespread recognition is only a matter of time. “The popularity of crime as a sort of romantic thing in America is profoundly significant, and Apollo is tapping into that,” he told me. “If you think about it, magic itself has many of the hallmarks of criminal activity: You lie, you cheat, you try not to get caught—but it’s on a stage, it has a proscenium around it. When Apollo walks onstage, there’s a sense that he might have one foot outside the proscenium. He takes a low crime and turns it into an art form.”

A Pickpocket’s Tale by Adam Green

The story really stuck with me, and this video on The New Yorker‘s blog brought it up to the forefront of my thoughts again. It’s amazing to watch Apollo at work, and just a little bit scary that we offer up so many little opportunities to be duped in the course of a conversation.

Alastair Humphreys’ Year of Microadventures

January 25, 2013
Inspiration, Things to Read, Things to Watch

Alastair Humphreys is an author, motivational speaker, and adventurer. In 2011, he made a resolution (actually, it was more of a manifesto) to spend a year seeking out “microadventures.” These were all adventures that he could find in his own backyard, without completely abandoning his life and becoming an adventuresome vagabond.

“I started to think that it was possible to have an adventure anywhere,” he told National Geographic when they recognized him as an Adventurer of the Year 2012. ” That it was really just a state of mind, committing to get off your backside. If that were true, I figured you could do this anywhere.” He continued:

I decided to do the most provocatively mundane adventure that I could think of—the M25, the highway that goes around London. It’s filled with traffic. Everybody hates the road. I walked a lap of the M25. I set off in January. It was cold. It was snowy. It was physically challenging. I saw new places. I saw some beautiful places, which I hadn’t expected to find at all. I met interesting people. That week ticked all of the boxes that my four-year bike trip around the world ticked. I came back buzzing. It was quite stupid and silly, but it had been a genuine adventure.

That M25 hike inspired Alastair to embark on his year of microadventures, which he documented on his website.

I’m lucky enough to be able to live and work in Portland, Maine, a small city on the southern Maine coast. It is still, however, the largest city in Maine, and a whole lot larger than the small rural town I grew up in. The city honestly seemed quite daunting and metropolitan to me when I arrived (what with its trash pick-up, public transportation and ferry terminal). Small as it is, Portland still isn’t the country, and it’s good to have a reminder that adventure is just a few miles away.