My Quiet Life

Remember my little rant about April Fool's Day? About how it's ruined by people that don't understand what makes a prank funny? Latest example:

Photos of an aspiring broker purportedly telling off her boss garnered widespread news coverage and more than 105,000 Facebook "likes" Tuesday. Too bad the story was published by two guys who have pranked the media before.

Oh man. You conjured up something totally plausible and got people to believe it. OH MAN. GOOD ONE. Congratulations, you're an idiot.

The following youtube compilation is presented in the hopes that we never, EVER allow the scientists behind these various projects to get together in the same room. We'd have Skynet on our asses in a matter of minutes:

.. that toddlin' town. Went to hang out in the windy city with some friends this weekend. Sadly, I think we brought the heat with us, so there was no balmy Midwestern summer to provide relief, but it was fun nonetheless. This was my first time spending any real time in Chicago. The one thing that really struck me about the city is that unlike other larger cities I've been to, I was really struck by the scale. It's really in your face just how big Chicago is. NYC is big too, obviously, but the way things are divided into boroughs minimizes the overall impact somewhat. And the architecture in Chicago is just so much grander: the massive old mailorder catalogue offices/warehouses, the civic opera house, etc. Big, big, big. Brief recap of the highlights:

• Flew in to Chicago on Thursday, only to realize my friend Cary Ann was rocking the House of Blues with her husband and musical partner-in-crime, Michael. So we made a B-line to see them there.
• Closed down the historic Green Mill jazz club -- music, dancing, and possibly a few too many whiskey sodas.
• Mandatory Cubs game (they won), with some much-needed hair of the dog Old Style.
• Rib festival.
• Oysters at Shaw's. Our gracious host Stephanie's beau Terrence also introduced us to a shooter I'd never had before -- basically vodka, bloody-mary type fixins, and an oyster. I approve. Stephenie did not approve, so I got two. I double approve.
• Drinks at the Signature Room in the Hancock center, with a nice view of the city. I practiced my Russian with our waitress. (ya nemnoga govoryu po russkiĭ). She was very impressed. And by "impressed" I mean that she rolled her eyes and walked off, muttering "ochen horosho". She should be glad I didn't test out the only other complete sentence I know, which means basically "would you like to have a drink at my place or yours?" Thanks a lot, Pimsleur.
• Architecture-oriented river tour (architecture not pictured).
• Up-to-no-good beer-drinking on abandoned rail lines
• .. and, in a complete 180, later that night: drinks, dinner, and dressed to the 9s at the incredibly gorgeous Palmer House hotel. (actual 9s not pictured)
• All manner of shenanigans at Estelle's in wicker park.
• Obligatory visit to Millenium Park to see the big reflective thingie.
• Learning to foxtrot in Grant Park.
• Grillin' out and then a Local Natives show at Lincoln Hall. Hipster-heavy, but fun nonetheless. Seriously, though, I think the lead singer even had tiny girl jeans on his ironic mustache. (this joke shamelessly stolen from Melissa.) I need to get their album, because even though I thought their show was a little too sterile/clinical, I suspect I might kinda like their record anyway.
• And, after all that, and a harrowing delay-ridden flight back to BNA, who do we go right from the airport to go see play at the Basement? Why, Cary Ann Hearst. Apparently we are her newest groupies.

Rest of the pics are here. Can't wait to go back!

So, anyone following my flickr or twitter stream is probably well aware that I've been doing a project on the Nashville Roller Girls this last 6 months. It was their last year at the fairgrounds (movin' on up!) and I wanted to try to document things as they lead up to the next level. Those of you following my flickr stream will be glad to know the weekly inundation of pics should slacken a bit, as the easy part (taking pictures) is over. Now I just have to edit everything down into something coherent. It was hard through this process not to become a pretty die-hard roller derby fan, though. This weekend was their first bout at Municipal Auditorium, and although everyone was sad to leave the fairgrounds, it was clear after this bout that this is a major step in the right direction. If you didn't go, here's what you missed:

• An unprecedented 2,384 person crowd -- nearly double the maximum capacity of the old fairgrounds location.
• HalfBrass performing the national anthem, as well as an impromptu jam session outside after the bout.
• Lady Fury staying out of the penalty box for (most of) the entire game, delivering an awesome performance.
• Rambo Sambo breaking her own personal record for a 28 point jam. (Most jams have point tallies in the single digits -- and most records I know of are in the 30-40 point territory, so this is impressive, to say the least.)
• A kid sponsored by the Make-A-Wish foundation that wants to be a drummer jamming with HalfBrass at half-time
• Jenny "the Jet" Rodriguez killed a guy. (Not really, she was fine -- wind knocked out of her from a devastating hit.)
• The BBC (yes, that BBC) showing up to interview the team.
• Oh yeah, and victory: Nashville: 159, Tallahassee: 70

So, if you missed it, well, as Jay-Z said: "I feel bad for you, son." Make sure you get tickets for the doubleheader on August 7th. Be sure to check the website for info on local vendors that will have tickets or find your favorite rollergirl, so you can avoid getting bent-over by Ticketmaster.

(Sidenote: this post marks the THIRD time I've used the "sports" tag on a blog post. As I understand it, there was also some sort of soccer tournament this month? Did anyone hear about that?)

I have this great idea for a concept super-band that would be composed entirely of "the other guy" from popular Duos -- you know, the less-talented member of the duo you've never heard of unless their name was literally in the band name. Some starter suggestions:

• John Oates
• Curt Smith
• Andrew Ridgely
• Art Garfunkle

It'd be easy to joke about how it'd be the worst band ever, but if you think about it, years of toiling behind the scenes of a more talented egomaniacal partner would mean they are primed for collaboration on a massive scale -- leading, possibly, to the greatest rock band of all time!

Who else?

Adamantium claws, skeleton, healing ability, and near-invincibility are pretty cool, for sure. But let's be honest. This is the side of Wolverine's character we all most enjoy and relate to:

And yes, that's real -- it's from Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1, written by .. guess who? Joss Whedon.

There have been a lot of weird emergent side-effects of twitter's unique 140 character limit, e.g. the viral spread of @[name] as reply shorthand. I think one of the more bizarre, though, is the nameless phenomenon that I am now calling the "hashtag parenthetical".. What is a hashtag parenthetical?

This is a good example of a hashtag parenthetical. #maybenot #badexample #usuallyfunnier

It's this emergent form of derived humor by adding in a hashtag on twitter what would, in a more traditional form of writing, be placed in a parenthetical of some sort. But I see it cropping up all over the place lately. Weird, isn't it?

Hilarious preface: I just found this draft sitting unpublished from 6 months ago. Ironic that I'd write a long post about the brain, memory, learning and information ability and then ... forget about it entirely. I rule.

I've joked with friends a lot in the past about how smartphones have become the ultimate conversation-killer. Gone are the days of yore when over a casual beer with friends, hours of conversation could be stoked by asking a trivial question: "Who was it that played Frankenstein's monster in Young Frankenstein again?" Hours of conversation later, you've argued about who it was or wasn't, you've covered Mel Brooks' films, discussed the best and worst, and embarked down countless tangents, before finally coming around and remembering who it was. (Peter Boyle, by the way -- RIP) These days, it's more like "Who was it that played Frankenstein's monster in Young Frankenstein again?" Everyone whips out their iPhone, googling furiously. "Peter Boyle." "Ah.. Ah, yeah. yeah, that's right." *awkward silence* *checks twitter* "Alright, you guys are boring, I'm outta here."

I'm jokingly focusing on the negative aspect, and obviously information availability is not inherently a conversation killer (although anyone that has sat down to a table full of people staring at the iphones checking into 4square, twittering, or googling something can quickly make you long for the days before the smartphone). But really, the whole phenomenon actually fascinates me. Like anyone else, I consider myself a pretty curious person.. I'm motivated by, if nothing else, the desire to constantly keep learning. Most of my shower time is spent mentally iterating through the list of trivia/questions I keep meaning to look up but always forgetting. (This morning: does the Coriolis effect actually affect drain spiral direction or not, I can't remember!) (Answer: no). Unfortunately I've inherited my father's capacity for memory, so I usually forget I even wondered about it between the shower and the computer.

So, it's one thing now to be able to sit down at a computer or whip out a device and look up basically anything I'd ever want to know -- but can you imagine what a gamechanger this will become once the dawn of embedded/wearable/integrated computing really breaks? When the answer to "I wonder ...?" is literally instantly available to your brain? Further, forget what this means for an old, used-up, caffeine and booze-addled brain like mine -- can you imagine what this means for children with brains that soak up information like a sponge? It fascinates me. Scientists have been forever hypothesizing on the information capacity of the human brain in various ways (a straight neuron-to-bit analysis puts estimates at somewhere between 500 to 1000 terabytes), but I think we're on the verge of actually being able to test this out via sheer information overload.

Also, think about the weird social dynamics this changes. When you're sitting around shooting the shit with someone, and someone asks "Who was it that played Frankenstein's Monster in Young Frankenstein again?" and the douchebag across from you answers, is it because he's actually seen and appreciated the majesty of Young Frankenstein, or did he just google it on his Apple iBrainSync? Do those sorts of conversations even happen anymore? What's the point, if it's a given that everyone has the world's knowledgebase at their fingertips? Is there even a point to actually learning facts at all? Or, to put it less despairingly: how does this change the approach we take to true learning? Anyone familiar with computer programming can tell you that there's a difference between programming skill and knowledge of programming language specifics. A good programmer will probably have no idea if PHP's strstr() argument order is needle/haystack or haystack/needle. Actually learning this is hard, because of PHP's woeful inconsistency. Looking it up, however, is trivial. (Unsurprisingly, this makes interviewing/hiring a good programmer difficult -- it's not something that is easily tested for via evaluating trivial minutia/specifics. I'm looking at you, Brainbench.) Now imagine this sort of dichotomy applied to ... everything. How do we decide what's important to actually learn versus merely knowing how to look up?

The future's gonna be weird, man.

This is one of those blog posts that I'm only making because it didn't fit in 140 characters. So, I went to the "Way Late Play Date" at the Cumberland Science Museum Adventure Science Center. It was fun. A few thoughts, though:

• I thought serving food was dumb. It wasn't really even food -- it was chips, salsa, veggies, fruit and cheese. Hardly worth wasting your time grazing on, and it encouraged people to sit down, wasting valuable time that could have been better spent on SCIENCE!!
• Either ditch the booze entirely or beef it up a little. They only had beer (as far as I know?), and some people don't drink beer. The staff also had obviously never poured a beer from a keg in their entire life, resulting in cups of foam and awkward "yyyyyeah, could you do this again?" type conversations.
• The Sudekum planetarium is pretty amazing since its revamp in 2003 or whenever. The last time I saw it was in 6th grade, and it's come a long way -- although I do not approve of getting rid of the full arcade version of Lunar Lander they used to have. I do not approve of this AT ALL.
• If you didn't do the planetarium show, however, and feel like you missed out on something, don't worry: you didn't, really. It was a brief tour of the astronomy capabilities (which are amazing and awesome) and then a couple of commercials and two stupid laser shows (which were not amazing or awesome). I will never really understand the appeal of a laser show. I guess I could sortof see the appeal, if I were on acid. and 14. and .. stupid. and had terrible taste in music. Plus doing it in a cool facility like that planetarium -- I dunno. It's kindof like building a world-class stage theatre and then instead of doing Beckett and Shakespeare and stuff, you make shadow puppets on the wall and drool on yourself. More astronomy, less Floyd.
• UPDATE: Lastly, I forgot to mention: the Skies over Nashville show does actually sound really cool -- and they should do these shows (and more) on a schedule that is more adult-friendly as well.

SCIENCE!!

Foreign Policy has a great photo essay detailing Afghanistan in the 50's and 60's -- highlighting a harsh contrast between the modernizing Afghanistan then to the Afghanistan of today, after a half-century of imperial meddling and religious idiocy. I think it's important that people see this, because a lot of people seem to have a very short memory when it comes to things like this. Afghanistan wasn't always a war-torn medieval hell-hole. I encounter this sentiment a lot with regards to Ethiopia, as well. For everyone in my generation that grew up with We Are the World and other benefits, the mental image of Ethiopia seems to still be of some primitive famine-stricken wasteland. It's important to remember that it hasn't always been that way -- and I don't just mean that in a "it was the cradle of civilization!!!" sense. As recently even as the '60s, Ethiopia was a relatively progressive scene -- complete with a booming jazz/R&B music scene that rivaled and paralleled our own. This is why I cringe when I hear people making jokes about Ethiopians being starving ha ha -- because for one thing, that's not even the case anymore (Ethiopia is the largest economy in east africa at this point -- it's Sudan, among others, that is truly fucked right now), but western imperialism and communist encroachment are largely responsible (combined with the famines) for everything going to hell.

I know it seems like I'm stating the obvious to point out that Americans have a particularly short-lived geopolitical/historical memory, but it's incredibly annoying to see people characterize Ethiopia as a starving wasteland, Afghanistan as a barren haven for cave-terrorists, or Haiti as some backwards autocracy, without even a remote understanding of the history behind it, or a smidgen of acknowledgement of responsibility for how things got that way.

(And before I get attacked for it, I realize that the US is not entirely or even predominantly responsible for all of the things I've mentioned above. This is not an "AMERICA SUX" post, it's a "know history, and take responsibility" post.)