A friend of this column, Tim Smith, does research on perception and cinema; his PhD thesis, An attentional theory of continuity editing, is cited several times in a cool paper on shot rhythm that was plugged by kottke yesterday. How proud are we of Tim! Also we love that squinting picture of him on his academic home page.

Stuff you want but can't take.

Subject OFFER: Clawfoot Bathtub (Winchester)

I'm remodeling my bathroom and have removed the clawfoot tub that was in it. It's in good shape and can be used without beign refinished. It is ready to take.

Freecycle: "OFFER: Cream love seat"?

Jam Tamarah, Jam Yesterday, but never-ever Jam Today.

Mad chuckles on this video interview with Jim Reekes, sound engineer for Apple and designer of all the classic Mac sounds, in what looks like a San Francisco coffee shop. Something about the guy's demeanor is real familiar to me. Ironic. Trying to act like it don't matter.

Hey, I'm cooking and it's actually fun!

Terrific little film, Oscar nominated short:

En Français.

Never mind that Juliana character. I am going to watch this video for the rest of my life.

Keegan Meegan Press & Bindery from :::MAGNETIC ARCHIVES:: on Vimeo.

I learned something new today! The Japanese word "futonmushi: burying a person under a pile of futon in fun."

Not to be used if the experience were not fun, I suppose.

This guy Shane Koyczan is totally mesmerizing me. Can't stop watching his hands move around.

The good folks at Five Dials have slapped together this Valentine's Day card with a jaunty poem by one Joe Dunthorne—notable for its use of "LOL" and "old skool."

Work, work, work.

My privilege these days is teaching a class in Haskell to my workmates. Haskell is a remarkably elegant programming language that allows writing lots of interesting programs very clearly and concisely. I'm having fun making up slides and problems for folks to do, but it's taking lots of time and, on top of my real work responsibilities and all the rock-star partying I do, it leaves me fairly exhausted.

So much has gone unmarked in these pages over the last year and change. Would that I could rectify that.

Absolutely mesmerized by this:

(like a satchel in the sky)

[via Something New Every Day]

All hail Peter Schjeldahl, writing here on James Turrell:

As with Irwin, you register the unreliability of your vision, only with a bonus of beauty, replete with associations to music, savor, and scent. (No texture, though. Your meditative state is out-of-body, touchless.) Again, succumbing is optional. I have often resisted and even resented the blandishments of Light and Space art, whose oh-wow effects come with an intimation that the viewer has been cast as a laboratory animal. In this, I'm a New Yorker. In public places here, we are normally averse to letting our egos dissolve like sugar cubes in hot tea. In amniotic L.A., everybody goes around half-deliquesced already, as a matter of course. ... If, as a visitor there, you don't smoothly adapt, you may be as noisily wretched as Woody Allen in "Annie Hall." Practice the proper adjustment with works of California minimalism.

Peter Schjeldahl, " Way Out West." The New Yorker, 25 Jan 2010 (subscription required for online access, alas).

In usual fashion, every sentence adds a new layer of awesome.

I've felt the same way about some of Turrell's pieces—like a lab rat—but one of his blue rooms that was installed at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 2002 was for me a blissfully transporting experience. I had the sense of standing, with others, behind an ethereal waterfall, like in a movie's dreamy interlude, maybe representing a temporary afterlife. It was the kind of installation that made strangers blink and smile at one another.

In this connection, I want to note the Anish Kapoor piece at the Guggenheim right now. Approaching it from one side, you see what appears to be an enormous rusty steel egg that consumes a whole gallery, wall to wall. It's an interesting gesture in its own right, because of the rusty texture, the monumental weight, and the urgency of this thing apparently pressing at the edges of the gallery, as if wanting to grow out of it. But from the other side you find it has a rectangular opening onto another hermetic white gallery room: an opening on which, like one of Turrell's sky spaces, you can't see the edges, and hence the depth behind it appears in line with the surface. So it appears to be a black rectangle painted on the wall, and yet you sense it is hollow, it echoes sound, and you strain to see in the incredible blackness the inside of the urgent steel egg.

Robert Hass wrote this down, in 1989:

In the Bahamas

The doctor looked at her stitches thoughtfully. A tall lean white man with an English manner. "Have you ever watched your mum sew?" he asked. "The fellow who did this hadn't. I like to take a tuck on the last stitch. That way the skin doesn't bunch up on the ends. Of course, you can't see the difference, but you can feel it." Later she asked him about all the one-armed and one-legged black men she kept seeing in the street. "Diabetic gangrene, mostly. There really isn't more of it here than in your country, but there's less prosthesis. It's expensive, of course. And stumps are rather less of a shock when you come right down to it. Well, as we say, there's nothing colorful about the Caribbean." He tapped each black thread into a silver basin as he plucked it out. "Have you ever been to Haiti? Now there is a truly appalling place."

(from Human Wishes)

I'd not heard its sobriquet, "Wreck the Hoose Juice." Nearly as charming as the tipple itself.

As noted by the paper of record in my present home, "35 percent of the [litter] items identified were Buckfast bottles."

Had a quite nice Burns Supper, haggis and all, this past Monday. One bright chap brought along his Collected Poems of Robert Burns and shared this excellent rhyme, man:

A Bottle And Friend

There's nane that's blest of human kind,
But the cheerful and the gay, man,
Fal, la, la, la, la, la, la, lal
Fal, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

Here's a bottle and an honest friend!
What wad ye wish for mair, man?
Wha kens, before his life may end,
What his share may be o' care, man?

Then catch the moments as they fly,
And use them as ye ought, man:
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not aye when sought, man.

A question occurs to me: Why have I ever done anything else but tune in for Juliana Daily sing songs and play guitar?

There's a "Bad Romance", and an "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," "Fake Plastic Trees," "My Boy Builds Coffins" and numerous other splendid, beguiling, self-produced tracks.

Sylvain Chomet, auteur of The Triplets of Belleville, moved to Edinburgh about four years ago, and opened a massive studio (rumor quotes many dozens of animators worked on it) to work on his next film. That film, The Illusionist, is also set in Edinburgh and the Western Isles; Belleville is one of my faves of the last 10 years. I can't wait to see The Illusionist!

The scoop is in Herald Scotland, which quotes a nice bit of PR:

One of the things Sylvain said when he moved to Edinburgh was there was this extraordinary changing light.

Is there an "extraordinary light" in Edinburgh? Yes, with qualifications. Much of the time it's an extraordinarily dim light. But when it's good... The orange-pink sunsets I associate with Seattle are, in Edinburgh, flattered even more by the gray-gray stone which catches them, and all the spires and hilltops on the skyline.

Don't it always seem to go?

Spreading the duvet across the bed: most humanizing thing I do each day.

The Jan 11, 2010 New Yorker cover rings a lot of bells.

Like the Apr 30, 2007 cover, it shows a man and a woman faced with an exciting experience and playing with gizmos.

I complained about that earlier cover because of the exasperating gender roles the boy and girl play, and the fact that they let themselves be drawn away from the painting to the gadget—the digital camera. They seem more interested in remembering that they saw the painting than they are in seeing the painting.

Now on this cover, a man and a woman are poised on a quiet, beautiful ski slope, but the man is snapping a photo and the woman talks on a cell phone with her eyes closed. Again, their focus is drawn away from the beautiful landscape, which must be an extra-ordinary one for their lives, and that focus is brought to these gadgets, which are ubiquitous to their ordinary lives.

But the newer image is a world away from the older one. Here the man is holding out his camera to take a picture, rather than studying the image he's captured. He's not shown as distracted from the landscape, just taking a moment out to make this capture. The couple seem poised at this peak, just about to put their skis on and plummet down, and I can hope that they'll dive into that run in a whole-hearted, immersive way.

We don't know what happens in the next moment; perhaps, instead of my visceral vision, the photographer will perseverate over this image for the next twenty minutes or more, trying out different camera settings, deleting and re-taking the picture. We've all been around people who waste their time in the woods trying to get the right camera settings, who spend that time thinking and noticing details of the camera rather than details of the woods.

But here, I can imagine that this dapper young gent is smart enough not to let the gadget kill his outing. I like to think he's just "taking a snap" and not "playing with the camera."

The woman behind is a little more removed, closing her eyes and listening on the phone. And those irritating gender roles are somewhat echoed here, with she taking a lower and partly obscured position behind him, while he seems to lead the expedition, standing tall out front. But unlike in the 2007 image, the man is not defining her experience of the environment by choosing a frame and pointing her at it. He's taking his own snapshot, off to the side, as a souvenir, and she's phoning someone to share the lovely moment she's arrived at. In this image, the woman has a more confident posture, with those skis boldly slung across her shoulders, unlike the truly passive and demure mouse of the 2007 picture, who may never be able to contribute her own observations back to that dominant hipster in the blue jeans.

I like this image. It blends gadgets into a full life, treating them as peripherals rather than the main event. Also, let's hear it for skiing in khaki pants and a svelte cardigan or peacoat. Top of the world indeed.

I dream of code again, and this time I'm not scared. Before, it was a sign of something awful: it meant *too much*, I was too obsessed with this thing, this stuff, this code. Now I'm happy as a coder. And even still, it doesn't define me, as it never should.

Robbery stopped with bike. Rather more than what the title says.

Why lovest I type specimens so much? exljbris has made another good face with Museo Slab.?

I <3 Ivan Brunetti.

Boston starts to look decent when it snows a foot.

Hey it snowed amazingly and it's fluffily happy and drifty. I like it A++++ would snow again.

Pro tip: Clothes exhumed from your parents' attic after 4½ years of disuse may have a certain... piquancy... not favored by the more sensitive in your society.

It's snowing, so my optometrist just called to ask if I was planning to keep my appointment. She thought she might have no patients turn up. Since it's. Snowing.

Whatafah, Boston, I thought you were tough?

How did I miss THE SNUGGIE? Is this a product or a joke??

Charmed life: walked around Grand Army Plaza last night at 3am holding a smashed umbrella like a popsicle. Boarded a bus at noon and snoozed into snow shadows waiting on the woods of the freeway. Rolled on to a Bavarian Saint Niklaus party (mulled wine, good strong bread, divine light cheesecake) in Cambridgeport. Biked halfway home with a plucky French girl, crashing all the lights. Happy tonight.

First apartment where someone else set off the smoke alarm before I did! Grownup points!

Parents just came and brought five boxes of my books, which I haven't seen in four and a half years. Thunderclap.

My previous tenant seems to have subscribed to some sort of magazine called "Victoria's Secret." I wonder what the secret is...

First apartment I've lived in for over a month without setting off the smoke alarm! Sweet!

Terrific personal response, in prose and woven images, to the anniversary of the Wall's fall in today's New York Times.

Unknown, The leaves here are absolutely brilliant. Trees use these to collect their food! It's like a drug, the brilliance of these leaves. You know that, You all-knower. You know everything of the world's fecundity, but act so natural. A lawnmower buzzes, and helicopters—Acer seeds—fly upward past my window. I am back in my childhood's dream of adulthood. Boston: its tightly-wrapped mild antiquity, what passes for America's antiquity.

It's like a dog, unreasonably eager to great you.

Delighted to meet Mr Eaves Sans, a sort of Fred to Mrs Eaves' Ginger. The "Modern" variety looks a lot like our house fave, Gill Sans, but has a better 'a'.

I like the trend toward sans faces with italic "lips" at the terminals.

Hemingway is always my contemporary.

Desultor once told me he loves when the ancients pop out and speak to him as a peer, through the books.

And that happens sometimes, they become my contemporary, the ancients, but Hemingway, he is always that way. Here are some familiar things from early moments in A Farewell to Arms (both coincidentally priest-related):

"How do you do?" he asked. He put some packages down by the bed, on the floor. "All right, father." He sat down in the chair that had been brought for Rinaldi and looked out of the window embarrassedly. I noticed his face looked very tired. "I can only stay a minute," he said. "It is late." "It's not late. How is the mess?" He smiled. "I am still a great joke."

That particular sense of embarrassment, and then the flow of conversation.

And this, this is tremendously sweet; Lt. Henry ("I") has just come back from a furlough.

That night at the mess I sat next to the priest and he was disappointed and suddenly hurt that I had not gone to the Abruzzi. He had written to his father that I was coming and they had made preparations. I myself felt as badly as he did and could not understand why I had not gone. It was what I had wanted to do and I tried to explain how one thing had led to another and finally he saw it and understood that I had really wanted to go and it was almost all right. I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

"Winefully" :-)

It seems the internet will present me with nothing truly strange and terrifying today.

Aha, ha ha, sweet, sweet freedom!

After living out of my suitcase since June 21st, I've suddenly got my own place. My very own! Privacy galore. Space to spread my arms, and no one to call me on it. I could even do yoga. How 'bout that, bitches??

I got a bag of dry rice, a bottle of good Scottish whiskey, and no internet. Could it be better? No it could not, folks, no it could not.

And what am I doing tonight? I am flexing the squeaky hinges of the closet door, over and over, just because I can.

On waking, a most pleasant memory: one of my first real girlfriends; she lived in the CD, Seattle's less-glamorous, still central neighborhood. The apartment was frumpy but spacious; the drawers stuck, the outside stairs were plain and rickety, the shower was unsexy. But it was so peaceful: being there was timeless, like summer. We played Simpson's: The Boardgame (she won, hands down) and she dragged me to karaoke at a rowdy cowboy dive bar. We learned and were sweet to each other for a long time; then things broke down when I realized her response to Jeanette Winterson was not as complex as mine. I was the sort of person then to let things like that get between us. I hope I'm not anymore.

Life careens: I'm looking for an apartment, a headhunter called, the wildest-seed friend of my adolescence is having a baby—we saw the ultrasound—I wake up early and happy and I'm ready for those damn leaves going red. I think there is a lot of possibility.

Now oatmeal.

The best encounter yet in France:

In a street off a town square, two shadows lay down where the buildings meet the road.

One of those figures stood up and started toward my path, a long slow ten yards or so.

As I reached her, she said gently, " 'Scuse moi."

I began to raise my hands saying "Sorry..."

"Ah," she smiled, a sweet smile; "ok." And then, "Bon soir."

I answered "Bon soir," hoping this did not destroy my credibility.

Have this recurring dream that Disney's Funhouse is actually located in Edinburgh Castle.

Also there lots of ornately dressed clergy running around the place & the big bishop goes on a Segway.

You bite into it and you think, "Nah, that's not as good as I remember."

And then the flavor hits you. The juice, the sweetness. The high.

This kid in Portland had a cardboard sign:

RIVAL CLAN OF NINJAS KILLED MY FAMILY. ANYTHING HELPS.

Terrific map of where Golden Gate Bridge jumpers jump from.

Also this Japanese map of the world from 1850, when they were still shut off.

I go away for four short years and you turn half the money pink.

I shake my head at you, America.

Ha! To Providence and back in one day. It remembers the golden age of skyscrapers.

You know that thing when you send a shower stream right at the top of your spine and even though nothing's going in your ears, it sounds like you can hear a big river blasting right through your head?

That totally weirds me out.

And quoth the Mountain Goats:

On the last day of his life, Jimi Hendrix woke up.
And made his way down the hall.
And he adjusted the knobs in the shower till the water came out just the way he liked it.
It was hot but not too hot.
It was hot but not too hot.

On the last afternoon of his life, Jimi Hendrix went to the kitchen.
And he got himself a glass of water.
He put four ice cubes in to the glass.
There is nothing like cold water, there is nothing.

I just wanted to share that with you.

Northeast America: T-shirts at night. I could get used to this.

• cheap Mexican food
• not having to ask for the bill
• power sockets in the bloody bathroom where the bloody mirror is

SO I've been in California.

Great coffee over here.

Great Mexican food.

Great urban density. Enough restaurants so that most are reasonably priced.

Great design. Nearly everything is *designed*, and usually remains unsnobbish. People just like stuff to look like something.

There was a man who had just finished painting a wall brown. I was photographing a cream-colored paper against the flat brown. He appeared and said, "Are you admiring my paint job?" I had only noticed the menu; the wall was, really, just dark brown. But he was proud of himself and I was appreciative.

The bus driver said, "Last stop."

"What, last stop? Here?"

"Yup!"

"Is there another bus down to the Dogpatch, the regular end of the line?"

"Get out and look at the sign," said the driver grinning, "Then you can blame yourself or blame me."

The sign said 17th & Bryant.

"Awright," I said, smiling to the bus driver's smile. We were both awright.

They say Karnataka is the California of India—Bangalore, the Silicon Valley.

California:

Low-slung.

Bleached-out.

So easy.

The man with the hands is pouring the milk. I can only watch his hands—how does he do it?—with his hands like that? He will not be stopped. Boiling veggies, spreading butter, transferring crackers into a special cracker storage unit. Shifting from first into second and on up to fifth. Making a critical right turn. The man has opinions, myriad opinions on current events. MOREOVER he wants to know your opinion on the matter. Not your thoughts but opinion. A crudité for discussion. What would you do in this situation? he asks, rehearsing a situation told baker's dozens of times. We don't know what he really wants but he is very calm.

Why are those cars coming right at m—oh.

In the heavy rain, the kids are walking home from school.

Here's a good book: Peter Carey's His Illegal Self. It reads like a breeze, and it's the breezy story of something you probably never thought could happen yet soon seems entirely possible and even likely: the kidnapping, I'll say, by family, of a rich boy born to radical parents—illegal parents, as the book has it. It's with special skill that the opening pages bring us right into three different worlds: Upstate New York, Uptown Manhattan, and another far-flung locale which I'll not reveal for fear of spoilage. Thereafter, we're threaded rapidly through these three worlds with such speed and delicacy that we're not always sure where we are, giving the sometimes pleasing, always dreamy, sensation of those worlds mixing, perhaps mixing in the boy's mind, stirring up a thick smoothie of worlds. This narrative knitting reminds me of Jeanette Winterson, but with a delivery more matter-of-fact, less breathy and gushing, and hence more compelling, maybe, than Winterson's.

The titular "him" is a boy of 8 or so, just the sort of fictional character that my parents and relations used to describe as "a boy like you," which means, I think, that the character is blank enough to project some ideal onto and in which they can read some imagined boyhood struggles, which they suppose derive only from the boy's smallness of perception. Which they could cure with the grandiosity of their experience. But this boy is far too well-behaved, too plucky, and he suffers each change of fortune much too smoothly, without nearly enough gnashing of teeth, to be a real boy. My reckoning is that the book takes, ultimately, the mother's perspective; it is really about her struggle, wanting to own this kidnapped boy, wanting to make good on the motherhood promise, to live up to the innocence and childlike fortitude that he, marvelously, possesses—the challenge a child makes just by existing. Is His Illegal Self a parable of motherhood?

The occasional hints of his later life, the scintillae of the future that strike out from this closely trimmed narrative, expand the book beyond a sort of simple yarn, challenging but ultimately silly. Imagining what this boy, with these experiences, his privilege and insane uprooting, becomes in adulthood, is one of the book's final charges. You or I, Unknown, might know a boy like this, grown up; he wouldn't mention his special, disappeared parents but would be forged by his riches, his Manhattan, and his lost wildness, digging earth and knowing birds.

Quoth the Wiki:

His most famous work occurred on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) when he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach. He was armed with two Contax II cameras mounted with 50 mm lenses and several rolls of spare film. Capa took 106 pictures in the first couple of hours of the invasion. However, a staff member at Life in London made a mistake in the darkroom; he set the dryer too high and melted the emulsion in the negatives in three complete rolls and over half of a fourth roll. Only eleven frames in total were recovered. Capa never said a word to the London bureau chief about the loss of three and a half rolls of his D-Day landing film.

Mexican suitcase photos here

Man when Scotland gets fresh, it is fresh.

Shaderlab inspired me.

There once was a dash called Em,

With littlest brother called En.

  Said En, "You're a catch,"

  You'll give birth to a batch

of cute little dashes and hyphens.

A slight little lass called comma

Was thought quite a hot little momma.

  She got with a dot

  Semicolon they wrought

And went straight to the blog with their drama.

Cornish Yarg: Delightfully creamy. Would eat again.

UK Newcomers! Stick with me. I know the ropes.

Apparently, 'round here, you're not s'posed to put your return address on the front upper-left-hand-corner of the envelope.

You live here three or four years, you start to learn something.

A man in Bangalore found me on the street. I was carrying a camera and staring at some building.

Like everyone else, he asked, "Where are you from, sir?" and "Your good name, sir?" As usual I asked him his name—I've forgotten now—and one or two things about Bangalore.

Then he asked me what I wanted to see, and I mentioned some dull standard destination—the palace, or the government buildings. He said, "I'll take you there."

I like being alone. I dislike following anyone. But in good humor and a sense of openness I went and followed him; he took me to the government building, maybe a mile from where he found me.

Wasn't he working today? No, he said, he had worked in a call center but was just laid off.

What else did I want to see? I didn't want to say—in fact I had no plans and just wanted to wander—en flâneur—but nor did I want to be rude and I was duty-bound to make as much of my contact with local people as possible.

He took me here, there, and everywhere. Statue to a local man; largest branch of Mysore Bank; a new postmodern office building for Coffee Day, the coffee-shop chain. He knew lots about the local sights, though nothing especially remarkable. We walked about two hours; he would take me to the edge of a street and wait, then step out and say, "Please come." I was being led by the nose and my inner introvert was becoming very tired.

I had to shake him loose, so I set a final destination for our menage: the rail station. It was a long walk and hard to find, and I might not have found it without directions.

By then I'd realized I would have to pay him something. I planned my attack. When we got to the station, I told him I appreciated what he had done for me and said I wanted to give him something. I named a figure that I thought would be impressive, knowing I could go higher if I had to: 100 Rupees. This is about two dollars and change, enough for a decent meal. "Whatever you like, sir," he said very politely, and maybe sadly, which I took as a hint for more. I waffled a moment and revised: "two hundred." Then I looked in my wallet. All I had was a 500 Rupee note. Big money: something more than what an auto-rickshaw driver told me he makes in a day—gross.

He started pleading with me then, "Please sir, my mother is sick..." I didn't want to hear it. I had offered him good money for a simple service that I had never wanted. But I needed change. I started trying the stalls in the station for something cheap I could buy—I needed water after the walk in the sun—and managed to break my 500 note with something like a Rs40 bottle of Sprite-like beverage (foreigner price, I'm sure). To the man I gave two hundred and he pleaded with me more. I said "Two fifty, that's all I can give you." And that was firm. He took the two-fifty and I shook him loose in the station crowd (people camping out; mobs of people queueing; loudspeaker announcements in Hindi or Kannada).

Right at the starting gate, as soon as I set foot in Mysore Market (or I mean, Devarajah Market, the market in Mysore) Assan said hello to me. Or, he said "What country, sir?" As near to a hello as a body seems to get in India.

Everybody wants to know where you're from. "US" and "USA" are countries but usually produce a foggy follow-up: "USA ... America?" We Usonians come from a bureaucratic country, one properly named only by a three-letter acronym, like the UAE: it is a country of modern organizational convenience instead of an ancestral nation .

Assan asked what country, sir, and I told him what country, and then a small boy asked if I wanted to see him make incense. How could I not?

I followed him through the narrow market streets (its "overhead" tarps pitched at about 5'1") zigging and zagging, wondering if he would take me down some rabbithole next or if I'd soon be talking to Fagin & his orphan pickpockets. No: we ended at an incense and essential oils stall, numerous in the market as I would later find, and also peppered with a small sampling of those deliciously-colored cones of pigment powder that you'll have seen in Nat'l Geog'c or the like.

Imran, who owned this stall, ushered me right in to the booth to watch this boy smallno more 8 thanroll a stick of incense. "It's a very interesting process," Imran said, and I ate it up. The boy put two small piles of powder, sandalwood and something else on a wood board. He mixed them with his fingers, then someone appeared with a drop of water or oil, which was worked into the powder mix. Soon he had a dark-brown putty-like substance which I lolled merrily on my fingers. The boy (whose name, god bless me, I've sorrowly forgotten) found a stick and started rolling the stick in the paste, twisting it round and round the stick, and at first I thought he, an amateur, would make a sub-standard item: not the smooth apportionment of scent-on-a-stick we're used to (nag champa from your bodega) but some crumby glop of goo wrapped around a stick. But the boy was not bad: he rolled and rolled and got a smooth coating after all, while Imran talked to me of scents and incense. "He slow ismeaning boy the"There is a woman in Mysore," he says, "who makes 10,000 a day. Ten thousand a day!"

He showed me synthetic American incense, asked me smell toI have no nose for the difference, but he claimed the synthetic stuff goes stale faster. As a hippie, I'm lapsed at best, but I like a spot of incense now and then; it gives a nice smell.

Then Imran started in on the scents. All these tinctures in little glass jugs, glass-stoppered. The first one he showed me was Calvin Klein's Essence. (Him: "Do you know Calveen Klein?" Me: "Uh... yes." Him: "This is Essence, by Calveen Klein. He imports this and adds alcohol.") Here it went by the name of "Nine Fowers." Half an hour later, I was burdened by a small fortune's worth of essential oils: not enough to give gifts to the important people in my life, but too much to allow me to buy lunch the next day. Rp 200/- each, not seemingly a bargain but what could I do? I'd fotograffed his wee boy making incense!

I escaped with my life. I wandered the market, snapping old men in diapers selling plastic toys (a small minority here, mind you) and stacks of coconuts ready to go. Lovely flower smells came intervals atit's a flower market as much as a vegetable one, with a few of the incense/pigment/scent vendors.

Everyone in market theor at least the scent vendors, maybe not the garlic-and-ginger specialists or the guys coconuthave bound notebooks of their tourist customers, organized by country. I fell into one called "USA" (fancy that!) but Imran had about 20: Germany, France, Sweden, Turkey, . . . .

So many people ask "what country" that I try to answer and get on with things before a discussion can develop (the dilemma of whether to answer US, my home country, or UK, where I live, fell by the wayside last week, when an answer of "USA" gave me a more enthusiastic reply than I could ever imagine; UK is alright for these folks, I guess, but has certain Imperialist overtones, the Commonwealth notwithstanding). Many are quite happy with the simple answer of "What country?" (or in the case of well-educated schoolchildren, a more articulate "What is your native country, sir?") and don't press on, though a few will do, asking "Your good name, sir?" and more.

But at another scent stall I got waylaid. The guy had a certain charm. He asked "country WhatUSA, which produced a gleam contentedthen "What is your name?" and my answer, "Ezra," produced quite a frightful excitement in him. I worried he had the same misconception of my name as a couple of lads selling flowers a few minutes back: "Are you Muslim? It's a Muslim name, Wazziru." Then I worried more, because he said, "I think you met my brother when you came in." What sort of crazy pitch was this? I'd heard it all. And I couldn't afford any more essential oils. "My brother, Assan," he said. Oho! New game! Assan from the market entrance. "Assan came here some time back and said, 'I just met someone, called Ezra.' " I was suitably flattered. This, too, may well have been an elaborate sales game, by my man soon proved to be something better.

He saw the pink flower drawn on my hand by another pigment-vendor and cried, "Oh! Who did this? You know it will last for three months!" I was mildly shocked. "He didn't tell you?" "Really?" and "No..." were my nonplussed responses. He rushed to rub it off with a cotton ball and, indeed, it wasn't coming off. "You aren't worried?" he said. "Well, no," I said, which I wasn't. "Why not? It's pink." I bluffed: "You just have to be confident" (when meeting people with a pink flower on your hand, is what I meant). "You're not worried?? Three months!" "Really??" I asked, starting to get worried, and showing it. "No!" he said, "I'm kidding! I play this joke on everyone!" and I knew I liked him. In a land of so many bitter hustlers, this guy had a sense of humor. "I tell everyone this, like the French, I say 'trois mois'! [in a convincing French accent] and they say, 'Non!' " And so I met Neel. (Or whom I will call Neel.)

He wanted to know what I thought of Bush and why no American who he meets likes Bush (yes, well...), and how he got into office if no one likes him (long story, that).

We talked about the Mumbai attacks and more. Everyone is up in arms about that here: it has spurred a profound nationalism, uniting Indians against Pakistan. Some say India has been "soft on terror" and that this is what led to the attacks. I struggle not to translate this into American terms or think where such rhetoric led for the US.

I can't think now how it first came up, but Neel was hoping to write a book. I asked what about. It was hard to catch his answer, since he put it under his breath: it was about "homos" India ingay folks. Because, he said, many people can't talk about it, there are no books about it. It is still illegal here. I want to show what it is like; many people would read it because they can't speak about it, but they could buy the book. We talked a great deal more about this; he had met some American bloke with a connection to the publishing industry, who had encouraged him to be in touch. He invoked the holy name of Arundhati Roy: first-time author cum best-seller. I told him I thought his chances were good, that many in the West would want to read what the situation is like for gays in India. I was probably being a bit loud toohe cast furtive glances toward the neighboring sellers coconutbut I didn't use any specific terms and so held his cover.

Neel was appalled I'd paid Rs 200/- a vial for essential oils from Imran. He charges only 100/-! Every vendor in the Mysore Market seemed to have another story that layers on top of what came before. It seemed to be a maze of personalities: either a very human community where people happen to be trading, or a very sophisticated soft sell, a place where vendors know just what they can get, how they can weave a story on top of one another to entrance buyers, without ever crossing the line to pushy. The state of Karnataka, I understand, lies on the fertile Deccan Plateau, sheltered from storms; people there are laid-back, unexcitable, apparently content. And the Mysore Market was the perfection of that pleasant atmosphere in a kind of trap touristbut I may have been the only there touristso downplayed as to seem like just a market.

PLAYING INSIDE THE LALBAGH
GARDEN IS PROHIBITED DO NOT
LITTER USE DUST BINS

Bangalore airport, 3am: a porter takes my bag to a parking lot, stares in the darkened window of a car, starts knocking, knocking, knocking. My driver is asleep in there, fully reclined.

We peel down the two-line highway, riding directly above the dashed line, one of the last visible lane dividers I'll see in India. Signs along the road remind us to "Use lane discipline." It's warm in December, like Florida or Hawaii.

He wants a cup of tea so we pull off at a roadside shanty where a few guys are tailgating and others stand around smoking. He goes behind the car and pisses in a gutter, then disappears into the speakeasy for a long while. "Two minutes," he says. He comes back ten minutes later and we zip into town.

I thought we were still in the outskirts when we arrived in the city center: low, ramshackle buildings hung at the sides of the streets. The Comfort Inn sign blazed out of nowhere. Hotel staff snapped to attention and ushered me to my room. Except that the shower was not divided from the toilet, everything was as in a Western hotel. I slept like a dead dog.

Terrific time-lapse video of Edinburgh's Princes Street at Christmastime, with Damien Rice's "Older Chests" as soundtrack. <3

Great sunshowers here.

But no! There was Ogham. Looks like it has some hella busy glyphs. I don't blame them for dropping it. Still I like the regularity of the forms.

Feast your eyes also on the marvelous concept of a 'kenning," which is something like a (Homeric) epithet, or a convential poetic way of referring to something—but specifically for Old Norse. Wikipedia gives the rather awesome example of "wound-hoe" for "sword." It relates to our word "ken," to know.

P.S. If there's not a law firm called "Ogham and Kennings" there oughtta be.

Via the new-discovered daidala type blog, a delightful introduction and encomium for Matthew Carter (he of the ubiquitous Verdana, among other things):

When faced with the task of describing what Matthew means to the field of typography, the usual glowing adjectives and substantives naturally flow into one’s mind. One of the best of these comes, we confess, not from the two of us, but from one of those aficionados of whom we speak. You see, after the Minneapolis conference, a survey was sent to all of the attendees, to which one of whom responded in the general comments section, in large caps, MATTHEW CARTER IS THE SHIZNIT!!! Upon reading this comment, we apprehended immediately that this was an expression of considerable appreciation and awe, but we admit that we did not quite know at the time just what SHIZNIT meant.

So we did a bit of research, and we found that SHIZNIT has a dual etymological path. The first, Yiddish: provenance otherwise unknown, but meaning “the best.” This survey respondent clearly meant to tell us that Matthew Carter is the best, and we couldn’t agree more. Interestingly, the second etymological path has a markedly shorter, but much more recent, and complete, history. Date of inception: 1993. The originator? An entertainer who is likely known to many of us: One Snoop Doggy Dogg. Translation: The Shit. Truly, Matthew Carter is the shit. And we mean this, of course, with all the admiration and respect in the world. His contributions to the typographic arts are unparalleled, and his legacy will endure forever.

—Jon Coltz, "boston day 2: praeludium and allegro." daidala.com, 8 Aug 2006.

On 8/11/08, Ezra <e—@e—.—> wrote:

Aaron--

How's life in Georgia just now?

Ezra

Aaron wrote:

I am in Bulgaria at the moment. But life in Georgia is really fucked up at
the moment.

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 6:05 PM, Ezra <e—@e—.—> wrote:

So I gather.

Did you have to evacuate? Or were you already out at the time?

Ezra

I luckily had planned a vacation and left the night fighting broke out.

Aaron

Essence of the Fringe, II: Sitting in my front room having a chat this afternoon, something akin to a tremondous boombox seems to be coming down the street, drowning out my own music. As it looms oppressively close and loud, my interlocutor and I look out into our quiet residential side street to see the front of what looks at first like a gigantic tour bus, but then turns into a flatbed truck carrying a scaffolding and six or eight rubber-clad performers, cheerily waving at the few terrified people who might be peering out the windows of our sleepy gray apartment block.

Presumably they took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Essence of the Edinburgh Fringe: We go down a side street past two bars to a door unlabeled, except for "Fringe Venue 29," file in to a brick room with four rows of seats, facing the "set," a propped-up bit of plywood with a sheet draped over and title scrawled on. For forty-five minutes, makeshift puppets—most of them off-the-shelf action figures & stuffed animals—make gags, shout and beat one another, swearing and whimpering. A woman behind the curtain intones section titles. Some pub is recycling their glass outside, making the puppets inaudible; so they shout louder and ad-lib gags about the clatter. This is "Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre's Guide to the Arts." Hoping to see "Shitty Deal Puppet Theatre's Complete History of Oppressed People Everywhere!" next week.

Vaclav Havel:

I have had a very adventurous life, but not because I have an adventurous nature or yearned for a life full of adventure. Fate just wanted it this way.

Lately, Edinburgh's Blackford Hill has been thronging (for those who look very, very closely) with tiny frogs migrating up from Blackford Pond towards—what?—the tall weeds in the higher elevations of the hill, I guess.

They seemed like insects, scurrying on the dirt walk, at the corner of your eye, hiding in their brown skin against the brown earth.

The frogs are so tiny—they fit crosswise on my index finger and I couldn't feel their weight. Yet each one had four hair-thin frog legs, two bulgy eyes, and a throbbing throat. They held utterly still on my finger, except for that underjaw going croak, croak!

Previous trips to Grolier Poetry Shop in Harvard Sq., I found there a wiry older proprietess, mid 50s maybe, with specs tied round her neck on cable, who whirled around the poetry shop—that tall, square room—plotting with regulars over the affairs of various contemporary poets and their sporadic releases.

This time, as I walked at first away from the ajar front door, with its "Monday: closed" sign, a gentle man with considerable presence hailed from behind. "Did you want to go in?" he asked unassuredly. The sign and the door's ajarness conflicted, I noted. "The rule is, if I'm here, its open." He must have been watching across the street. He set his long, fat stogie on the doorstep, lit tip down, and waved me into the tall, square room.

Poetry is a foolish pursuit—reading it, I mean, and shopping for it, even worse. A poem can amaze you; sometimes it can, in tiny but vital doses, liberate you, but only when in very close contact with it, and even then, unlikely. But even so, if you've got the stomach, it's worth keeping a small poems shelf, because it does still fill the role it always had: musical language, thus memorable, and so you can take it with you on your travels, into the wilderness. I got slim volumes of Robert Hass and Henri Cole.

In situ note: Tommy's is now a convenience store—no pass-through pizza parlor there anymore for pish-drunk freshmen! Still called Tommy's, though!

Now go read this Miranda Gaw joint, "The Fiji Mermaid," in the Swarthmore Review.

The lead photo in the slide-show on this article about news-stands looks just like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Chez H&FJ, "The Smallest Letter in the World," a "Diamond" (4pt) from 1785. Nice sample, too!

Best flyer imaginable:

Olgagarchy: Rule by Olga.

Slogan: Borscht for all!

A line of cyclists is careening through Amsterdam, an off-center, sleepy part.

The leader shouts, "Ze smallest park from Amsterdam!"

I looked. There was a little park. Pretty normal-sized.

"Oh, eet's smallest park from Amsterdam," says someone in the line.

"What did he say?"

"Ze smallest park from Amsterdam."

Well, then. Everybody's got the message.

Then someone standing on the sidewalk says, "Did you know that's the smallest park in Amsterdam? ... That one right there."

The Fall is an amazing and scarcely flawed film: a monument to the pleasure of having eyeballs (for "the visible" as John Berger would say, but more for the phenomenon of vision than for just things that are visible) and a paean to the act of storytelling.

The film unravels as a story told by a man in a hospital bed, mid-1920s L.A.—orange groves and that—to an unusual girl housed in the same hospital. The rapport between the two is comfortable and spontaneous—you realize it can't have been scripted quite like this. They go back and forth saying sensible nonsense: "What?" "What??" and misunderstanding each other; it can only be a document of two people reading each others' faces. This turns out to be the case: the girl (age six) was cast as a non-actor, someone the director, Tarsem, had (from oodles of footage shot at schools around the world) recognized could improvise, who did not know English when they began, confronting the other actor, an unknown called Lee Pace, on the set while shooting.

Tarsem (Singh) had fallen out of my consciousness as the director of the noteworthy Deep Forest video, "Sweet Lullaby" and the R.E.M. video, "Losing My Religion," both remarkable pieces of work in the desert of music videos; now he's back. In public, he first comes off like an excited but slack Californian, albeit with an Indian accent. Asked to talk about his film, he unspools a diarrhea of rambling explanation, but it soon becomes apparent he knows his junk backward. He's full of sharp references to the history of cinema and attuned to the necessity of telling stories visually. Most of his career has been spent on commercial shoots, but he could be mistaken for a slightly mad film professor. Answering a question about the music of The Fall, he starts off on the difference between the hospital and the location shoots, and you're sure he's blowing off the question. Five minutes in, he begins wrapping up by saying that the theme of Beethoven's 7th was chosen after the hospital shoots and before the locations, that it was one of the anchors that guided those shoots and the editing. He must have a mental conversation stack four or five points deep.

Most insightful of all was his description of the film's impetus. He recalled a school he attended "in the Himalayas" where the teacher would tell captivating stories, feeding off the kids' expressions and reactions, continually working them into the story. Here's a man who, throughout a career of commercial film directing, has kept a fascination with the elemental flame of spontaneous storytelling, and the communion between teller and audience that kindles it.

This anthology film, Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet, has some gems. I particularly liked the documentary segments by Werner Herzog (about a Brazilian tribe contacted by the government in 1981, apparently the last such contact in history) and Spike Lee ("We Wuz Robbed," about the 2000 election).

Jim Jarmusch's bit, with Chloe Sevigny playing "an actress" was also nice: like an acting exercise, just ten minutes of time, one person living those minutes, waiting in a trailer. Don't forget that creating such a scene, as an actor, requires observation and craft.

A director I don't know, Victor Erice, put in a nice period tone poem sent in early-40s Spain (and featuring a song in the Asturian language)

The interstitial music, a jazz combo, is also terrific (glories of the upright bass). Interstitial footage, of shimmering water, was filmed on the River Cam.

BARBER: What do you think about this Obama fellow?

BARBEE: Oh, I think he's a pretty good candidate—

BARBER : Do you think he'll make it?

BARBEE : I think he's got a pretty good chance.

BARBER : Because, there's a lot anti-black sentiment in the States, eh? He could—pop

BARBEE : Oh, well. I think he'll be well-protected—

BARBER : Reagan had protection. . . Kennedy had protection. . 

It was already surprising to find an entry for "bollix" in the American Heritage English Dictionary. But the root is traced to Old English "beallucas," noting an Indo-European root "bhel-" meaning "to swell." "Derivatives include boulevard, boulder, phallus, balloon, ballot, and fool." See for yourself.

Triffic.

In the dream I'm on vacation in a child's room ("The play takes place in a room of our childhood.") and on vacation I'm trying to sleep but when I sleep there are enormous cockroaches in the room; they crawl on me; they are a foot long, jet-black, with hard shells and sharp edges. I destroy one with a tool; it cuts my hand. I need to clean out the closet of my childhood toys, but it's so big, like an attic.

A break.

Then I'm playing frisbee on a beautiful beach in the middle of Edinburgh. Everyone is barefooted and wearing shorts. I keep coming and going; the regular players are inside playing games and my other friends are out on the beach playing Frisbee. They're playing in the wrong place! I have to walk all the way over there to tell them they're playing in such a bad place. On the way I have to crawl up a small neoclassical facade, where I catch a postcard glimpse of the Edinburgh monuments. The facade is crumbling apart in my hands, and the young lady who is following me gets a rain of stone and dirt. They won't stop playing games inside.

Thanks to The Grimmelman, these old (and one new!) Carissa's Wierd videos have hit my radar. (Warning: quality poor. Completists only.)

See Sympathy Bush for a fairly typical, if unusually audience-friendly bit of show (Is Mat standing up? Looking past the front of the stage?). Even a bit more audience-friendly is this "S with Mat Brooke" take (from 2008!) of One Night Stand. This one is the only YouTube video I've seen where I can get behind all of the comments (all four). They both seem sort of healthy and happy. Finally, the wovewy Wierd in the beloved Baltic Room in 1999. It's even a pleasure to watch, that one, with its colors and its lights.

Trawling around the internet for further Carissa's Wierdiana, I found this amusing nobbet:

At some point there came the infamous letter to The Stranger (May 10th, 2001), pointing out that the Stranger had plugged Carissa's Wierd 38 times in the last year and half. The letter wasn't written to cry overexposure, but to express concern that the Stranger wasn't doing nearly enough because, "...this situation is clearly unacceptable. Carissa's Wierd is still nowhere near as famous as they deserve to be. The Stranger is just going to have to try harder in the future." This was the spirit of the times.

[Three Imaginary Girls](http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/imaginaryboycarissawierd.asp)

(The Stranger's not known for being easy to please.)

It was a time in our lives that came, and went.

FREE TO A GOOD HOME said the wicker chair by the big bin on the corner. I touched it; it rocked back and forth. Uneven pavement there; the chair itself was steady. I couldn't use it, of course, but was getting ready to start thinking about whether I wanted it. When came a noise, like, "Noo!" It was the girl with the short pants on the bike that had passed me slowly, coasting and tapping the stone wall with her hand. "Do you want it?" I said. I have become much more easy with strangers in the last eight years. I said it encouragingly. "Oh, I was just thinking," she said—her accent, she's an immigrant like me—"because at work we just sit on these boxes, and it's." Without pity. Man I had nothing on that. I was thinking, Maybe would this be better than my other straight chair? But I hadn't gotten that far, cause I knew I couldn't use it. Was it unsteady? she wanted to know. No it wasn't! I told her cheers, yes really, and she took it and it was pleasant walking in the warm night under the crescent moon.

Friday's yoga session left my lower back sore but loosened. I celebrated by running across town to pay the yoga teacher. That night we had an extra-long game of Ultimate on the rain-softened Meadows; the sky was clear. Our pizza-and-beer followup was unusually satisfying.

Next night, potluck dinner. We went up on the roof and got an Edinburgh panorama: Arthur's Seat, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh Castle (lit up and dignified on its rock), the carpet of pink-gray rooftops and chimneys, and a bloody red-orange sunset in the west. We went to the fenceless edge and peered down into people's flats, where they played Wii, knitted, and folded laundry.

I had to run to Diane's Pool Hall, described by one patron as "not a pool hall but a fightin' hall." First game: rubbish. Second game: run. Third game: rubbish. Our hammered Basque friend called someone a postcolonial motherf_cker, to our great amusement. After closing, we set out across the Meadows and turned up in a children's playground, new and sturdy, its resilient rubber sheets holding our feet still. The swingset seats were wide and the chains strong. The zipline held sure and zipped well. Someone fell over; "Basque down!" was the call. A cute young French couple was called to the scene: A swingset is called a balançoir. Jane Birkin speaks perfect French but sings in a crummy English accent to sell records. We surrounded ourselves with wheezes: What would a James Bond villain say if they had their final showdown in a kid's playground? The cops drove by and said nothing.

Bright and early the next day I went mountain biking. My old chum Jamie brewed a huge cup of strong coffee and loaned me a bike. We cycled along the canal, passing the two songs (mother and daughter) I got to know last year on canal trips. We cut over to the Water of Leith, a strangled little trickle coming down out of the suburbs. We got up into the farmland on the edge of the Pentland Hills. Sheep baaed. The pasture was amber and the heather green. The hills rolled.

Up and down the hills we went, along gnarled rocky paths and loose gravel tracks, up and over the first pass into a quiet valley with a reservoir. Blip said the fish and ba said the sheep. There were the gorse bushes with their coconut-smelling flowers. We kept going and going, up and down tracks until the last peak was too high and the mud was too thick and the view was too sweet, then we rolled down the hill and back along the Water of Leith. Near a gaggle of teenagers playing, we roused a heron from the water; he was great and blue and I've never seen a heron at full span from above: terrifically smooth, those wide wings slowly pulsing.

Back in the city, all were out on the town. Among the cyclists on the canal was one riding an ordinary, or penny-farthing. Another graceful thing. I ate a craload of trail mix and went home and slept.

Things I saw today:

• a wee hawk
• a blue heron, looking enormous from above with outstretched wings
• an ordinary bicycle, cycling pleasantly along Edinburgh's Union Canal.

Sascha Frere-Jones on Portishead: "all that womb-like bass."

Last week, astronauts on the International Space Station got to handle original handwritten manuscripts of novels by Jules Verne. The manuscripts were delivered there by a robot spaceship from Europe, itself called the Jules Verne. The manuscripts are meant to come back to Earth at some point, rather than burn up on re-entry as the ship will do.

I didn't realize how jaded I was about the existence of space travel in our time until I saw that Wikipedia has a banner template for articles about in-progress spaceflights. In other words, there are enough in-progress spaceflights over time to make it worthwhile to design a special banner warning people that the article might change during the mission.

Guys, we're sending handwritten 19th-century books into space with robots. That deserves a what-what. (Jetpacks still to come, of course.)

The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not

I was impressed that any sound at all came out of Ranjit's rotten-stick saxamaphone, let alone the fairly sonorous one that actually did!

There’s a lovely pattern to these words, which come from astronomy:

The perigee, for example, is the nearest point to Earth on some orbit, and the apogee is the farthest point on such an orbit. (Thanks to Garth of perijove.com for pointing this out to me.) The apogee is also the peak of a trajectory, which is of course also the farthest point from Earth on an “orbit”; and metaphorically, the apogee can be the best point of something, like a career.

I didn’t recognize the peri- or apo- prefixes before this investigation, but there are lots of words that use them. Peri- is used a lot by anatomists to refer to areas close to something in the body—I read about the "perisylvian region" of the brain, which is adjacent to the Sylvian fold, one of the many folds of the brain. Apo- means “away,” generally, and here are some interesting uses:

Sadly I couldn't find any more pairs as in the first table.

Peter Schjeldahl knows art, he relishes it, and he sees it with a keen critical eye. He can scarcely write an unmoving line. Take wit:

"Be they ever so cool, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, and Blinky Palermo can't help stirring the heart, through the eye, with hues as cleanly gladdening as French horns in the morning."

(Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, March 24, 2008, p. 16)

"Courbet's drenching seascapes should come with towels and his steaming nudes with towlettes. He revels in the quiddity of paint: moist dirt. His art isn't about life; it is life precipitated, with raucous panache. Nothing could be better therapy for a bodiless society of cybernetic narcissicisms than the mad wallow of this show."

(Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, March 17, 2008, p. 22)

Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" holds up really well against DJ Spooky, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Boards of Canada.

Dreamt. I was checking out some student flats and out the back were these enormous and beautiful fjords, one after another that you could climb to, and filled with these fantastic carnivorous fish. “I had no idea these were here. Right in Edinburgh!” I said. “These are the ones used in the movie Juno,” said the guy there. Looking out to the ridge of the next fjord, I realized I was hallucinating the mythical-looking beasts that were prancing along there—because of the auras that surrounded them, that tipped me off—and I was irritated because I had hallucinated the same thing while watching the same fjords in Juno. To get from the entry hall to the first floor of the flat you had to jump up through a little trap door in the ceiling. I wasn’t sure about that at first—the practicality of it—but I warmed to it. But the students there were very immature undergrads, and I wasn’t sure about living with them.

Our local newsrag of choice, The Guardian (né Manchester Guardian, né Guarniad) has its own font family, of 96 individual faces, commissioned in 2005 for its redesign and switch to smaller, more manageable pages. This much you know. But further, the font has been licensed for exclusive use by The Guardian, and this license expires this year. (This comes on the high authority of the typographica blog.)

I admire large public institutions that commission major typeface designs, particularly unassuming but distinctive ones like this. Whitney, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for the Whitney Museum, is another chic example. To call for a major type family design is something like commissioning a great city building, or a great work of public art. It adds to our cultural heritage, while making a mark for the institution.

The Guardian is a fine paper, not so much for the news—that part is alright, maybe—but for the extras. For much of the past year or so they've been putting out posters, one a day, according to weekly series, cataloging various examples of some category. For example, one week might be themed "Birds," with each day's poster covering a subcategory like "Gulls" or "Hawks." The poster would just be a scattered arrangement of slightly dull drawings of the things, name attached. Not fascinating, but cute.

Just now they're running a series of handsome little chapbooks of poets:

That's from a few days ago. Note how the diversity of weights in the Guardian font family allows them to set the "20" so large while keeping the strokes about the same weight as the rest of the heading.

Today's book collects from Ted Hughes, with intro by Jeanette Winterson (read it online). Each book has an author photo, a reproduced manuscript page, and original reviews from the Guardian pages.

Why do they offer these gifts? It's not in their remit as a newspaper. Perhaps it's for entertainment, to compete with the page three girls offered by every other British daily. I know which I prefer.

I really like this poem, "The Magic Kingdom," by Kathleen Graber, in The New Yorker of Feb 11 & 18, 2008.

Isn't it interesting how, when I started this column in 2002, I had to copy out poems from the New Yorker by hand, but now all the poetry is online and all the authors have their own blogs?

It's tarnicious out there. High winds to be sure; umbrellas inverted. Bins & receptacles strewn across the road. Dogs and cats living together. I'd like the placid haar back, please.

THE AUTHOR'S AUNT writes:

Reminds me of when my nephew was editor of his high school paper. I asked how he chose which letters to the editor to publish. I found out my nephew had written them all, to prime the pump, because the editor had received none.

This is the bowling green I wrote about in January, 2006:

To magnify, click.

Looking back at journals from two or three years back moves me to rapture. I can't believe I went through these things—and in this sequence! How did I survive? Often I look back on a time as idyllic, yet I wrote at the time like things were miserable. This means, for sure, that when things seem bad, they're more fun than they seem. You remember the good things, and the learning experiences; you forget about the stresses. Old Hemingway says, trying to be deep for once, "I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

2005 was a big year for me. Some amazing things came into my life. And through calendar trickery, nothing left my life until early 2006. Then everything came apart and left hiss and steam.

In March 2005 I went to Santa Cruz to play Ultimate Frisbee with my college team, and all the old rivalries were gone and I played well and the weather was good and you could see the ocean from the fields and we had a great time playing. A few days later I put in a grad-school application to a long-shot school called Edinburgh on the other side of the world. Next I had a shallow relationship and got accepted to Edinburgh. At the end of May I recorded a vivid, prescient dream of a woman I loved in friendship, loved in a distant, delayed, and hopeful way, and later that year she delighted and sustained me and I had the chance to love her properly, to show her what she meant to me and how we could spend our lives together in blissful contentment. But I bollixed that, or she did or somebody did. That's why in February, 2006, something really good left my life and left an emptiness that has yet to be replaced.

I worried about so many things that were good things nonetheless. I'm so grateful to myself for keeping a record, for sending signals to the future me, so that I can later, somewhat, understand.

I found a pretty good pattern. Check out this table:

Discussing this last night, someone conjectured that the name 'shallot' might come from a longer French word like 'shallotte'—which answers.com confirms: "Obsolete French eschalotte, from Old French eschaloigne, from Vulgar Latin *escalōnia. See scallion." The modern French is found to be 'échalote.' So, what at first seems a curious exception turns out to have roots.

The accent I'm calling "No. of England" is, in all likelihood, not that at all but some other, more mysterious cross-section of British society. I will attest that I've heard these pronunciations among several people, in meatspace and on telly, too.

Repudiations & criticisms are heartily encouraged.

From Tesco Metro, showcase of local life:

THE MOM: What are these?

THE KID: They're cookies. Cause it says, "biscuits," so they're really cookies. [Ed.: A! Le petit, doux Américain!]

...

THE MOM Hey, come over here; I see toys!

THE KID: Mom, I know where the toys are.

From Artkrush #76:

Six artists are vying for the opportunity to erect a sculpture on the empty 1840s plinth in the northwest corner of London's Trafalgar Square. Competing for the commission are Bob & Roberta Smith, with an eco-friendly sign promoting art, not war; Anish Kapoor, with an arrangement of five concave, colored mirrors; Antony Gormley, who seeks volunteers to stand on the structure for an hour at a time; Yinka Shonibare, who proposes an enormous glass-bottled replica of the HMS Victory; Tracey Emin, with a life-size model of a meerkat; and Jeremy Deller, who wants to install an actual destroyed car from Iraq.

I think that's the same plinth where was the larger-than-life statue of multiple-amputee Alison Lapper (depicted pregnant).

The BBC has the further scoop on the new shortlist.

I've been studying French. On my recent trip to France I made use of both of my phrases:

• merci
• Je ne parlez Français! (smiling)

The latter was so perfectly delivered that the response was, "Italiano?"

Turns out the skiing in Les Hautes Alpes is a bit better than in the low hills of Western New York State. Who new?

"Clapham Junction?? It's not even a terminus! (small pause) I'm sorry, did that sound incredibly geeky?"

This came in a dream. It is free for your use.

Five rectangular tanks of water, each about one meter deep, five feet wide, ten feet long, and open, stacked on top of one another, with a small gap in between for air to pass. Some kind of minimal struts holding them up. Each one is chock full of plant life: leafy and cactusy, but not choking with seaweed. In the center of each tank is a fragile, rounded, glass bowl where a catfish (two feet long) makes its home; the catfish is free to swim throughout the tank. In one of the tanks, a middle-aged man, just greying, sits still on a chair, eyes level, head above water. From time to time the man climbs out to take a break. Display in a a public place where people can watch from various heights. Should last for several days.

The city looks sweet, mornings like this. There's no one about and I plow quick down the slick black paths over The Meadows into the office. The green grass is hoary-haired, and scratchy too; pigeons nibble down their chow. Those old criss-crossed cranes (cross-gartered?) stand proud above the Quartermile. All them students have buggered off and lone great-coats shift up Jawbone Walk.

Mid-day today, with the clear sun hitting its zenith at the 20° mark, I saw how the frost on the Edinburgh roofs matched the shapes of the chimney-shadows. Warming, I guess, it slipped away as the sun crossed over. Then at 15:30, with the sun going down, frost came back the other way, covering the tennis courts and bowling greens below my office balcony.

A body could almost grow to love this city.

Overheard at a barbershop, in reference to the Nintendo Wii's multiple-games deal (buy one, get several others you don't want at additional cost):

"Oh, that's a con, ay."

At this party, it seemed, no more than two people hailed from any one country. There were two Dutch people, two Welsh blokes, two Italians, two Americans, one Frenchwoman, a Quebecois, and a girl from the Basque country.

Around 1am, someone put on the O, Brother Where Art Thou, soundtrack, loads of people dancing, and to my amazement, several people were singing along.

The spitting is everything. Cacao has peculiar rain-forest dependency. If the pod is not removed, it shrivels and the seeds die. It needs to tempt whatever happens by—monkey, man, squirrel, rat—to stop, wrestle it off its stubby stalk, break it, drink the nectar, eat the pupl (or try to), and cough out the seeds. No creature likes the seeds; the fruit's future is in its immediate ejection. The seeds that end up on the rain-forest floor sprout within hours of exposure to the air.

—Bill Buford, "Extreme Chocolate," The New Yorker, October 29, 2007.

There's a huge crack in the floor of the Tate Modern. It was put there by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, and it's not clear how. Impressively, it runs the entire length of the building, in a concrete floor that, surely, was there before and will have to be there later, when the next artist comes to fill the Turbine hall with something else momentous.

It seems that Salcedo has been inspired by her contact with people involved in the Colombian Civil War. Another work of hers in the gallery (Untitled, 1998) is made up of a chair cemented into the back of a dresser, the two structures flush. Uncannily, it evokes the feeling that something awful has happened here, and that we're shutting it up and papering over it. The redundant, asymmetrical lines piercing the surface also bring to mind a human being with a mutant skeleton, just visible beneath the skin. Another creepy piece (Unland: Audible in the Mouth, 1998) fuses together two long wooden kitchen tables of slightly different shapes; they are made to depend on one another to stand, and to compromise their shapes to fit together. There are long human hairs stretched into the surface, cutting into it with meticulously parallel lines. It seems like a torture device, or what's left over in the torture room. In both cases, the effect is especially uncanny because it inhabits such common objects—like the dresser, table and chairs in my childhood home.

The crack, called "Shibboleth," is still more approachable, more playful. I liked watching children look deep down into it ("It's deeep!" they would say), sticking their hands in, wondering how it could be and what it was like. Like myself, they seemed to like moving along it, looking into different bits, not believing, or expecting, that it's all the same. At kid scale, it's an imaginary landscape, something the mind, or a mental spaceship, can soar over, perch on, and otherwise play in. At grown-up scale, it's still a pleasing perplex, but the sinister side comes through as well: this is a division, a marring, a breakage, a catastrophe, a borderline, and a shibboleth, too: it separates us. Something awful happened here, though this time it's not papered over.

As always, the best show is in the crowd, in the reactions. I satisfied my curiosity by walking the full length of it, checking it, repeating to myself, "Yep, it's a crack all right, a real crack." But as I walked out on the mezzanine level, which overlooks the piece, a woman with kids was coming in. I overheard: "...but it's not a real crack, it's a fake crack."

To operate ChipWits, you will need a 128K or 512K Macintosh with the mouse and keyboard connected. ChipWits will also work on a Macintosh XL operation under Macworks XL. An Imagewriter printer must be connected if you with to print the Workshop and Environments screens. However, a printer is not required for using this system.

(Thanks, ftrain!)

Disclosure: I lusted over this game via a blurb in the Whole Earth Review in the mid-’80s.

Alice Waters brings her own capers (puff piece for her new book).

Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants.

—"Languages Die, But Not Their Last Words," John Noble Wilford, New York Times, September 19, 2007.

Mr. Mroué, 40, belongs to a tight-knit generation of artists, writers and filmmakers that has put Beirut back on the cultural map since the end of the civil war in 1990. They have learned to maneuver on the margins of mainstream society, striving to create works of formal precision and political insight with as little interference as possible from Lebanon’s fragile, divided government.

—"Lebanon Bans Tale of Fighters in Militias ," Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, New York Times, August 17, 2007.

Finally, we were motivated by the artistic enjoyment to be derived from designing the wide variety of glyphs found in the Unicode standard. It is an opportunity to contemplate the past, and take part in the future development, of thousands of abstract graphical forms that have been developed through several millennia by generations of scribes in different civilizations.

—Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, "The design of a Unicode font."

The Unicode font in question is Lucida Grande, a handsome and unfussy font that comes with MacOS X. It boasts more than 1700 glyphs.

Here's a Scottish scene:

Two men are at the trough in a pub loo. A third comes up between, says, "Ey, could you move tha' way a bit." He scoots over, accomodating. The third man goes on, "Used to be, we'd get four blokes on here. Now it's only three. Course, those were shorter, skinnier blokes." The other two chuckle. He says, "With that booth over there, we can get a few more in." He waves at the single stall, protected by a floor-to-ceiling door. Inside, the walls are wheat-pasted, every square inch, with pinups from lad mags—centerfolds, or Page Six girls, as you like. The effect is vaguely revolting. "It's me that put that in, as manager, when I was managing the place a few years ago. That's the best thing I did for the place. Sometimes a Saturday night, it'd be covered in puke..."

Finished with my business, I left him to tell his story to the other gentleman.

Here are some drawings.

A newspaper article the other day talked about decimalization and the brief trauma it wrought on British society. Decimalization, as I'm sure you know, is the event in 1971 when the UK switched from a monetary system that broke a pound into twenty pieces and each of those into twelve smaller pieces. Since then, there are one hundred pence in a pound, basta.

In this article was a big photo of a couple of babushka'd old ladies standing before an informational sign which helped you convert between the old and the new currency. It was neatly designed, and had two columns of figures, running like this (I draw your attention to the headings):

Now, I was perplexed by this. I knew that the new system, £p, was pounds and pence. I knew that "s" had to be shillings, and I knew there were a load of other coins in the old system: halfpennies, farthings, florins, crowns, et cetera. So I was scratching my head as to what could be the "d" in "£sd." Some other coin than the penny? But what?

Turns out to be more peculiar than that. "£sd" is short for "librae, solidi, denarii," and there you get your explanation for that crazy pounds sign—a hashed "L." "Libra" is a Latin word for "pound" as a unit of weight, and the other two are Roman coins.

There are at least two kinds of slashes in typography, one (the virgule) more of a prose slash, as in "let's have pudding/dessert", and the other (the solidus) more of a fraction slash (as in 3⁄4). The name "solidus," as you now realize, derives from the old British notation for shillings and pence, as in figures like 3⁄6 (the original price of a John Le Carré book I just bought, now valued at £2).

Does the US dollar sign have an origin in some Latin term? Unclear. Wikipedia lists no fewer than eight origin myths for the dollar, all a bit dubious. It seems that the sign itself does predate the republic.

Finally, please enjoy this sign appearing in St. Andrews, Scotland, just an hour or two from where I write.

"Almonds, in particular, have extremely high pollination requirements ... and so California's increasingly large ... almond industry is almost entirely honeybee-dependent."
—Elizabeth Kolbert, "Stung." The New Yorker, August 6, 2007.

Do we live in a fairy-tale, my Unknown? I think we do.

P.S.: I <3 Elizabeth Kolbert.

Unknown, please inspect this swell picture of a bonobo.

I want you all to know about the pensive lemon.

Packed my bag yesterday morning for a beach day in the town of Aberdour, just North of Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth. Out there it was spitting the rain, and there was a sweet gray fog stretching across the water, so we couldn't see the city. A squat little lighthouse, red-turreted, stood on a wee headland nearby, proudly asserting our beach's existence against the gray. Later in the day, someone called, "Look, it's lightening up a bit," and this meant just that we could see the definition of a cloud against the gray sky, and the dim silhouette of the city across the water.

There was much comment on the poor choice of weather for a beach trip, even as we switched into shorts and tossed a disc on the sand. A young lady called out (unironically I thought at first): "I judge the sun to be past a yardarm, so we can drink." But I had underestimated British dryness (even Scottish dryness), as the woman soon proved herself of cunning wit.

The water was not cold, not from the cold air at least, but no one induldged a swim, not even I, who was keen. Instead we huddled in a gazebo and ate lunch, swigging wine from a bottle. Conversation was happy and general. Catch-phrases were made and used within the session.

A few middle-aged picnickers turned up in the gazebo, then, and laughed at finding others "as crazy as us." They were merry, too, and drinking, too—it always surprises me when people over 40 have fun. Is there not a rule against that somewhere?

We retreated to a pub, drinking tea, whiskey, coffee, and ale (not necessarily in that order). An old man at a nearby table tried to tell us some miscellaneous facts; we watched the rugby (rousing rough, that stuff is) and dried and warmed.

Once ready, we trained back into the city and bussed up to someone's flat in the far nether regions of Leith. There I learned of the Wii, a late-model gaming console from Japan. It's games are atheletic, simple, and fun—much unlike the fiddly, cerebral games of yore.

One of the upsides to living in a foreign country is never knowing whether you're looking at something familiar or strange. Were these people geeks? Country people? Snobs? Slobs? I knew not, I couldn't read them; I didn't need to. They were my companions for the day, and fine ones, too.

I sat in a pub last night in a group of six people—we were all enjoying each other's company, happily; and then we realized that none of us knew the whole group, in fact no on knew more than two other people, so our relationships were linked strictly in a chain, like this:

V — E — Al — B — C — An

We were six degrees of separation, spanning the social globe at one pub table.

I was quite pleased at this—not for the geekery of the number six, but for the pleasure of connecting up people who enjoy one another. August in Edinburgh is lively and everyone seems to be having a good time.

Just after seeing Studio Ghibli's Tales from Earthsea. A lot is lost in the translation (to Japanese, to anime, to a PG film) but it brought back good memories for me. I was staggered by those books when I read them, at the low end of the acceptable age-range. They expanded my vocabulary, and my sense of wonder, and (I think) my sense of ethics and my place in the world. Until seeing the movie, today, I'd forgotten what a poetic world Le Guin created, populated with the Archmage and True Names and the Tombs of Atuan (which I still remember as the scariest place I'd ever imagined, and the book where I learned the word 'eunuch'). I desperately want to re-read the books, now.

Jessamyn captured the Free Wi-Fi splash screen of a Unitarian church in Portland. After noting that the church is a liberal community of faith, it invites you to "reach out to the world with a message of healing, hope and transformation."

I'm currently using a linksys community network somewhere in Somerville, MA, and I've done nothing to earn this connection. I'm in a similar boat to the users of that church's Wi-Fi. As a result, I'd like to reach out to you all with a message of healing, hope and transformation.

First, healing. I'm reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. It documents bizarre cases of neurological diseases—for example, where a woman loses her proprioception (or sense of body position), or "witty ticcy Ray," a manic drummer with Tourette's—but, in many of the cases, Sacks helps the patient learn how to cope and become functional. The woman who lost her proprioception, for example, was able to cope by using her vision to keep track of her limbs by focusing hard on them. Sacks is a clear and enjoyable writer with a lot of great stories to tell. I'm glad that these people can be somewhat healed, but even more compelling is the sense he conveys of what a human being can be, even though lost of memory or possessed with wild outbursts like witty ticcy Ray.

As for hope, I read this from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, an account of his time in Auschwitz:

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day.

When it comes to transformation, I point you at Miranda July's book of wonderful short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You. Nearly every protagonist in the book undergoes a transformation. I think particularly of the man in "The Sister," who works at a leather-goods factory and for whom, "The new life came easily after this, a growl." To find out after what you will, of course, have to read the book.

Too me, perhaps uniquely, the view of the Charles River at sunset, as seen from the Red Line train when it crosses the bridge, is one of the more beautifully affecting sights to be seen in the urban world.

The hostel I'm staying in has an 8th-floor "city-view lounge" with a view of the Charles River, the MIT dome, and the skyline of Boston. Sometimes I'm leery of hostels, of them being scummy, anxiety-producing places full of noise, cross-traipsing strangers, and (who knows) collapsing beams. But at times—moments like these, looking over the calm blue flow of the Charles and proud flotillas of clouds above—I find that the universe is surprisingly generous in what it offers.

Boston's North End neighborhood is much as I pictured it from Jane Jacobs' description. Running around the outside are big roads, with strip malls and condos here and there; but inside, the architecture seems unreconstructed, and to some extent, the culture is still here, too.

She described it as one of Boston's most alive neighborhoods, and not in spite of, but because of its high destiny, and its narrow streets in their irregular pattern.

Here, I've seen men standing in the middle of the sidewalk, telling jokes and their friends listening carefully to the setup and punchline, men with their chairs set out in the road; families chatting about their affairs on alleys, just off the main street. Great corpulent families cut slowly into the flesh of watermelons. It is a hot day. Everyone seems to be outside.

At an intersection, an old Chevy is blocking the way while waiting for a UHaul to start up; behind him another car wants to get through; he honks (typical for Boston) and yells (less typically): "Just move over! Just move over there!What the <expletive deleted>." And then, with resignation, "Moron." As the Chevy pulls away, I see he is smoking a cigarette out the window, unperturbed.

Just then, seeing me coming, a woman said to her son, "Come here, hon, the street's too skinny." The kid parrots back, "Street's too skinny." The streets here are indeed skinny, in a rather delightful way.

Unreconstructed in most ways, but changed in a few: The woman in the window of the cafe is checking her LinkedIn profile.

Hey, Unknown. I'm rediscovering music. I'm rediscovering listening to music, on my own, without doing anything else. Just clapping on a pair of headphones, laying down on the floor, and letting some disc roll. Letting those sounds fill up my head without any other distractions, not as a distraction from something (like work) and without anything distracting me (like any internets that might come by) from the music.

I like it. I like to just close my eyes, and get wrapped up in sounds. I like remembering that old experience of putting a needle on a record, laying down, and waiting out the pauses between tracks. I like being alone in that dark space, just grabbing on to each chord and each hi-hat and each quiver of the singer's voice. Grabbing on with my mind, I mean. In case you have forgotten about this, please try it again.

Stop me
won't you
If you heard this one before
The one where
I surprise you
Showing up at your front door.

It's light past ten every day now, Unknown, and that makes me think of you. It rains a bit every day and it feels soft.

The best thing about Scotland is the air.

"omg my mom joined facebook!!": a quite good NY Times article on social networking and moms.

Hey, I saw a seal today! At least, I think it was a seal.

I had walked out to this island off Cramond in Edinburgh and was hanging out, enjoying the sunshine by myself.

Something looking like a big rock (about the size of a big person, and jet black, mottled with white splotches) was a few hundred yards out, near some buoys. It was quite blockish in shape, not much resembling an animal. I figured it was a big rock. At some point, though, I noticed its head moving, and thought, "rocks don't move their heads." Stared at it for the longest time trying to figure out what it could be. I thought of:

• A big piece of wood, broken, with one part floating separately from the other,
• A dog on a raft,
• A person (covert agent?) in a strange-animal suit,
• The Loch Ness monster.

Then twenty minutes or so after I noticed it was moving, it disappeared with a big splash! There was no rock left there, but there must have been one just under the water.

I watched the water, and a few minutes later, its head surfaced some ways away for about a minute (this is when it most convincingly looked like a man in a really lousy costume). Then disappeared again and I couldn't track it.

After looking at seal pictures on Wikipedia (e.g. fur seal, eared seal, and earless seal), I feel it was the right size and shape to be a seal, although none of those picture have the mottled black-and-white color of this thing.

A swell day!

Some interesting women from the May 7, 2007 New Yorker cover, "Style Sheet," by Ivan Brunetti:

Things I learned today in a talk about long-distance navigation in desert ants:

• This kind of ant can find its way home or to food, without pheromones, for millions of steps across a flat desert with no significant visual landmarks. This is "like a person walking for 14 hours and then knowing how to get home."
• The theory is that they do this through "path integration," that is, they keep track of where they are in their heads by adding up all the little movements that they make, one step at a time, and they know the direction of each step by making use of the polarization of the light from the sky.
• Navigation by robots without landmarks is called "dead reckoning."
• Robots tend to do it poorly because any error in measuring single steps will be magnified enormously over a large number of steps. This means that a robot trying to get home this way would have a large error in any direction, and would be likely to end up anywhere in the general (or not-so-general) vicinity of where it started.
• But remarkably, these ants have a consistent bias to one side when returning home. The theory is that this makes it likely that he'll cross his outbound path, thus possibly re-encountering any visual landmarks, which might be useful after all.

In a nutshell: ants are awesome!

This enormous silver thing—a sheet of tinfoil as big as the door on your house—was hovering in the air, three stories up, on my street.

I watched and it shimmered and shifted, hovering up there by the third-floor windows. Then it swooped down, wrenched itself into two other shapes, and zoomed low over the cars passing on the big street.

Before it went out of sight, it jumped up again, up and up, to the third-floor windows again, and it hovered and shimmied, then jetted off around the corner, out of my sight.

I had to chase it! I had to pull down this pending danger before it slapped its bulk across some driver's windshield, causing havoc!

After rounding the corner, I saw it sliding crosswise from high above the street to low above a plaza off the street. A cul-de-sac! My chance to nab it, surely. It floated to the ground, a hefty mass of foil, just light enough to remain an inch above the pavement and drag one corner off and off, out of my reach. Now I could see its plan: it was going to slop around in a big circle, following some circle of wind brought about by this cul-de-sac. Now the real clown act would begin: I'd be chasing it around, always a step behind, as it orbited me and I orbited it. I could see it happening.

But! I was too cunning. I aimed for a point a few strides ahead! In this way, I managed to walk around in circles no more than twice before grabbing hold of that delicious shining cloth, crumpling its lightness in my fist, and binning it into the nearest safe litter bin. A traffic disaster was surely averted. All in a day's work.

A: I learned a new word?

B :Yeah?

A: Cookie-shine?

B: Oh, not this again.

A: Yes! It's real! It means "a tea-party."

B: Wot rubbish! You're more full of rubbish than anyone I know!

A: I would believe that, but...

B: On this particular point... ?

A: Right.

B: "Cookie-shine."

A: "A tea-party."

B: This is from the same dictionary with "skew-whiff" and "pebble-dash"?

A: Yes! It's real!

The Australian girl on the bus is college-age, say 20. She spent the winter here. Now she's escorting her grandmother, and aunt, I think, from the airport. She tells them something about her life, and then laughs, to show how much she loves it. The grandmother has a mischevious smile and her hair is dyed blonde, as she says. They sound Austrian, or German, the older women do.

The girl wants to know if they want to do tourist stuff: see the castle, hike up Arthur's Seat. She's been saving herself, she says, until they come. The grandmother wants to do it all, she is courageous, wants adventure, like the best twenty-year-olds. The grandmother is very curious, wants to know about all the people she's met, wants to know where she's traveled, which country was the nicest, wants to extract a good story from the younger girl with her puckish smile.

She, the girl, worked in a diner until recently; she quit a couple weeks back and now works two hours a day at her hostel, to pay the bill. Loads of Australians at her hostel, she says—they always go out to pubs together, or hang out on the patio, or have barbecues. Two of the guys are chefs and so they all get good meals cheap.

She quit working just to take it easy, she says. Next winter she wants to spend in the Alps, working there, for something different. She quit working at the diner, but her best friend in town, a guy, works there now so she goes back. "Your boyfriend?" asks the grandmother in her Austrian accent. "No, just a a friend," the girl says, and laughs loudly.

With few exceptions the main technical inventions of the first industrial phase had not required much advanced scientific knowledge. Indeed . . . they had been within the grasp of practical men with experience and common sense. . . . From the mid-century this ceased increasingly to be so. . . . The artificial dye-stuffs industry, a triumph of mass chemical synthesis, though its first product (the color mauve) is not universally acclaimed aesthetically, came from the laboratory into the factory.

—The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, Eric Hobsbawm

I went with a friend to some place, called notionally "Chattaqua" or "Chappaqua" in the NE US, some place which is faiirly densely populated but, in this dream, you get something like an acre to yourself, for you and your buddies to pitch a tent in relative peace and harmony. And, they told us that there could be bears, but we take that with a grain of salt. So we pitch our tent and start enjoying ourselves; the first day, I'm sitting in the tent and this bear comes along and starts browsing around; I'm a bit scared but playing it cool. At some point he lays down right next to me. I'm rather nervous, but I figure that being calm is the best thing to do. So I keep going about my business, washing a pot, or relacing my boots, or something. Pretty soon, though, the bear starts talking to me. He says stuff like, "Who are you?" (He talks kind of like Eeyore, in that lazy falling tone that Eeyore uses.) And I start talking back to him. My friend is not around at the moment. We start having a whole conversation; he's real lazy and calm but I have that constant sense that he could swing his paw around and poke open my chest. I want to ask him what he's going to do that day, but I don't want to be the kind of human jerk that things every kind of animal is trying to Get Things Done, so I avoid that topic for a while, until I run out of other things to say. Then I ask him what he's going to do and he sighs, "Lay on the grass; look for food, I guess" (Remember he talks like Eeyore). This goes on for a while but eventually he wanders away; I go to find my buddy, and I remember that Flanders is also with us, but he took his family inside, to a small room inside a building, because he was too scared of the bears. When I see Flanders I want to tell him all about the bear, but he's too freaked out about something (maybe bears) and he talks a mile a minute before running off. I decide to go back to the main camp and tell somebody there. They say, "Oh, of course you got a bear," laughing. "Didn't we tell you there were bears?"

And then I start to see:

The screen is divided into nine sections, each with a looping Simpsons gag. I can only watch two of them, and I only remember one:

A guy is putting together some kind of school newsletter; he sits in the upper bowels of the school by two conveyor belts. One has "Inserts" floating by—some kind of announcements for parents—and the other one pitches downward to where the other students will come and pick up the newsletters. Our guy sits there by a little flap, taking the wide sheets, folding them over the inserts, and sticking them in the slot where they are carried down to the students below. At the moment, one of the bullies is down there waiting; he keeps throwing his backpack up the conveyor where it knocks open the slot for a second. We keep hearing the bully shouting for just a second, when the slot opens: "—DOHNAD—" (rhymes with gonad) "—DOHNAD—" "—DOHNAD—" the bully is getting more and more irritated, and the kid at the top is getting more concerned, thinking, "What is he talking about, —dohnad—?" But he keeps faithfully churning these things out. Finally, he holds the slot open for a second and hears what the bully is saying: "Don't add the announcements!" This in that mildly resentful voice that the The Simpsons bullies use. At that moment I woke up, laughing to myself over the idea that I'm Simpsons gags are being invented by my dreams.

Man, I had some weird dreams last night.

I meet this girl at a cafe or pizza joint. She gives me this newspaper, like an "alternative weekly"; it has a contest in it for "Guess our secret critic's favorites" in five different categories. They're all kinds of musicians, but odd ones, like "Singer-Rocker" and "80s glitter band," and they're all supposed to be female. The girl in the cafe tells me that she publishes the magazine, and they need to find a secret critic before tomorrow, so that they have some answers, and would I be the one? I agree. She goes away and I meet a couple more girls; they turn out to be her fellow publishers. They tell me about the contest, too.

Now they're feeling me out on my musical tastes... I think they know that the secret critic is supposed to be a man, and they want to see what a man's secret tasts might be. Meanwhile, I know that they're with the newspaper so I want to see what kind of stuff they're looking for; so we're both circling around each other, trying to figure each other out. I'm trying to think of acts that are appropriately obscure but not too obscure, trying to think of someone in between Joanna Newsom and Rosie Thomas, for example. At some point one of the girls says, "You wouldn't go for a quick shag, at all, I suppose?" And I shrug and say, "Actually, a quick shag might be just the thing"—which I have no intention of doing, I assure you, even in the dream. Rather, I'm being crafty: I realize that I could parlay some more time with these girls, to figure out their secret tastes. So they take me back to their flat and disappear somewhere, and I'm left alone with the newspaper, trying to figure out what to put for these five categories of female musicians! I woke up as tired as a rotten stone, and as dehydrated, too.

A word to the wise: Do not watch the film Howards End in advance of reading the book. The writing is strong, but the particular images of the film will still win, will still invade your reading. Awkwardly enough, the film is very good, and the book is very good. But if you were to read the book first, then the film, you'd have two good things, while I only have one, having done them out of order.

Dreamt that I got a dog. I was rather pleased about it, in spite of my (real-life) deep aversion to dogs. It was small and slightly shaggy, but not too much so; it was friendly and cute without being too exuberant. I don't know where it came from.

For two days I kept it in my room, and was pleased that I remembered to give it plenty of water. After about two days, though, I realized I hadn't given it any food. It was looking a bit worse for wear. I decided to go out and get some dog food. First I just had to get ready to go out: find my wallet, pick a shop, and all that. And while I was looking for that stuff, some people came wanting to talk and cooed over the dog, and seemed to notice that it was a bit skinny. They said, "Are you feeding it?" I said, "Yes, just going now." They were taking my time but I wanted to go out and get the food right away. I shooed them out and then went back to getting ready to go out. Again some people came, and took my time, and again I was back to preparing to go out. This kept happening, this fretful cycle, until someone dropped a spoon in the kitchen and I was bolt-awake.

Ah, London! That's a ripping good town.

How was it? Lessee if I can remember. I turned up Friday evening and found my hostel, easy as pie. By surprise, I had a rather large room with just one bed. In Manhattan last December I paid more to get a 1/4 share of a room half that size. In London I was well placed, in a safe neighborhood, near a row of nice restaurants and with easy access to the Tube. If you're headed to London, I recommend the Belsize House in Belsize Park.

That first night I ate at a pizza chain—but, like, an upscale pizza chain. I wolfed down a mediocre pizza with a great salad (Was it lima beans? Those big lumpy green things? Why were they so good?), two good beers, and an absolutely smashing dessert: figs in sweet wine plus ice cream, and coffee on the side.

Next morning I began my exploration at a randomly-chosen Tube stop ("Bank": not recommended for this purpose) and wandered up to London Tower, and thence to Tower Bridge. Turns out London Tower's not a tower at all! It's more of a castle; explains why I couldn't pick it out in those Elizabethan drawings in my Shakespeare book. Unlike most castles, it's a creamy yellow/pink color, making it somewhat more appealing to the eye.

Near Tower Bridge I found a thing called the Design Museum. Not having much time, I only browsed the book shop, but I did find some nice things about typefaces, book design, and architecture. Then I was off to the fabled haunts of Homerton.

"Wot's that?" you ask? "Homerton? Not heard of it." I was there to check out a photo exhibit of bhikku's, and others. Quite nice, that. I'd have taken an armload of those photos, if I could've. It was great meeting the ol' bhikku, a Friend In Blogspace, and seeing bhikku's scene.

Bhikku exhorted me: "Write about whatever you do next," so here's goes. By rail I went to the South side of this Thames River (River Thames?) and wandered down along it, pondering each huge museum as I passed. There were life out there: loads of people out walking, and buskers. Like, some bozos banging on a tin pan, but they were only pretending; I wasn't fooled. Further on was a woman painted to look like a statue, and holding very still. I was fooled at first, but meh. Then—ooh, then—there was a Bobby in a black vest, white tutu, white stockings, and a white umbrella. When a coin was dropped in the hat, s/he would magnificently gesture thanks to each person in turn, then make some other uberelaborate performance of, saying, pouring tea for her/his kind guests. They'd run off, and s/he'd stop. That was quite good; it was something about the tutu.

Now then, listen up for this bit: further along was a kid tapping with a mallet on what looked like two woks clamped together. It made tin-pan sounds and I nearly ran away, remember the faux-buskers from moments before. Then I noticed he had a friend with a snare drum and cymbals, another with an upright bass, and with them a sax too; I decided to stop and listen. As it turned out, they were rather good. They had me and a big crowd in their thrall for several pieces. To give you the idea, imagine that Dave Matthews Band (at its best) swallowed Sigur Rós, and got ten years younger. They're called Portico Quartet. Don't neglect to see them play if you have the chance.

After that, I went down to this little gallery they have, called the Tate Modern—but oh, ah, what a gallery. I spent 3 1/2 hours on two floors (of four) and could have spent more another day; detailed descriptions and exultations are deferred to another post, in the interests of keeping this one bite-sized (okay, meal-sized).

The Tate is open late on weekends—a nice trait for a gallery. Even at 9:30pm, I found a nice restaurant along the water, where I could watch the city lights on the far side, and eavesdrop on young, well-off Londoners having their dates and bullsh|tting with their friends. There, I got a roasted butternut squash covered by a rather good salad, and a nice Côtes du Rhone wine, to boot. The salad, with rocket, tasted very good, and the squash was nice, too, though really, it was nothing more than a roasted squash. I count it a Good Meal and am surprised that it only cost as much as a similar meal in Edinburgh, in spite of the much better surroundings.

Sunday morning, I hit up Paddington Station. I did not find there any toggle-coated bears, not from darkest Peru nor anywhere else.

From Paddington I wandered through Hyde Park, saw the Statue to Physical Energy (which was not, as I'd hoped, a rendering in stone of an electrical dynamo or of the atom, but just a guy on a horse), and then found myself at the Natural History Museum. They have loads of rocks, as well as this helpful sign explaining tool use in humans:

Had lunch at a very nice bakery, called I think Paul, at South Kensington on Thurloe Street. Highly recommended.

Wandered Buckingham Palace—surprisingly, a great many kinds of birds hang out there. I watched them, and the other tourists, for a spell. It was a wet day, and everything closed early, so not much else happened that day.

The last highlight was dinner at The Mango Room, just near the Camden Town tube stop, a "carribbean" place (carribbean ingredients, that is). This was the best dinner of the trip: a risotto with baby spinach, fried plantains, and "crispy leeks," that is, strands of finely cut, toasted leek—very scrumptious. It was presented with such flair that the two demure young German guys at the next table were driven to distraction when it arrived; I volunteered, "It's the risotto," and they looked it up with interest on the menu. With it I had a terrific wine from Portugal, known as "Vista TR" (but does that make any sense to any one?), and for dessert, bananas flambéed in rum with cinnamon. I'll be making that at the homestead.

Dark and wet, all tired out from walking, I tubed back up to my hostel, merrily merry now for the third evening in a row, and resolved to do this—take a vacation, treat myself to such pleasure—again and again and again.

About a year after moving to the UK, I had the sudden, disappointing revelation that (seemingly) every bit of print in the entire country was set in Gill Sans. Attentive readers of Letters to an Unknown Audience will realize that Gill Sans is the face in which I (cannily, I thought then) chose to set the type of this very column some five years ago. After my awakening, I was everywhere surrounded by bus adverts, corporate logos, directional signage, hand leaflets, and all manner of other printed matter, all of which taunted me with the unoriginality of my choice, which had seemed so novel, so daring, back in the America of 2002.

Imagine my relief, then, when I realized that most of this stuff is not set in Gill Sans, but rather in the iconic face designed by Edward Johnston for the London Underground. The London Underground, you'll recall, was the first subway to have a schematic map and its own "corporate" brand. You'll immediately realize this is true—that circle with the band across its waist is known the world 'round, and who can say the same for the New York MTA's forgettable, inconstant logo? Johnston's typeface, too, is immediately recognizable; although you might not know how to name it, you surely do perceive this face as itself whenever you see it associated with the Underground.

Well, if I thought Edinburgh was plastered with the stuff, London is absolutely three sheets to the wind. The skin of London is made of Johnston's face. Every letterform in the entire subway system, of course, is set this way (and it is massive, the London Underground, with text everywhere), but also most of the signage for roads and tourist attractions, plus a whole load of kitsch that tries to cash in on the London brand (micro-museums, knick-knacks, etc.). I must have spent about 1/3 of my weekend in London watching the signs and noting how many of them were printed in this font (and, a funner sport: trying to discern the digitally set signs from the old skool, the stuff someone painted or smithed out by hand a hundred years ago).

More grostesk typographic trivia that I happened to gather: In a book called Book Design, found in the Museum of Design near the Tower Bridge, I saw a snippet of the (very snazzy) 2002 redesign of the prayer book (was it?) for the Anglican church, which was set in Gill Sans, "A choice," said the marginal note, "which was described by ————— as 'wearing its Englishness on its sleeve.'" (Yet, according to my handy Encyclopedia of Fonts (thanks, Matija!) Gill Sans is "the only typeface designed in Wales"!) Gill Sans was designed ten years after Johnston's face, this time for the "London & North Eaastern Railway" (so says Identifont; I wonder if that's related to the GNER which carried me to London?) The take-home message: it seems that my little Gill Sans is far more British, and far more ubiquitous, than I'd imagined—a blow against me.

Yet, I still find Gill Sans, in this digital, 13pt variety, an exceedingly attractive face. In this setting, and not in all-caps as the railways favour, it works as a text face: It's reasonably readable while keeping the jazziness set to medium-cool. Here at Letters to an Unknown Audience, we practice "slow design," a curmudgeonly resistance to changes—oh, I mean a thoughtful care in overall design. We plan to let the site design evolve slowly, to ever-so-gradually absorb the needs of its author(s) and constituents, without ever rushing to embrace the newest fad or eschewing a style gone apparently out of date. We are here for the long haul, O Unknown.

Woke up convinced that the phone was ringing. It was only the springtime birds singing.

So there's a movement called Slow Food. Have you heard of it? I hadn't, really.

It's the opposite of "fast food," like. Something about slowing down and taking time to eat, with people, indulging in the pleasures of the table, yadda yadda. These are values that I hold so I figure I had to see what it was all about.

There's a chapter in Edinburgh that has monthly Slow Suppers in a restaurant somewhere in town. It's meant to be £10, including a main and a glass of wine—not so bad as meals go in Edinburgh. I screwed up the courage to go down there tonight alone—although the flyer casually, slyly suggested "bring a friend or a colleague along!" After a long day of stating theorems and translating calculi each to each, I cycled home, ditched the bike, then walked up to a place called Wigham's Wine Cellar. Inside, what did I find but a bunch of people hanging about in a restaurant.

I expected the average age to be older than my own, but there were some unwrinkled faces here and there, so I didn't *quite* feel like the only cock at a hen party.

I bumped into the organizer, who helped me feel a bit at home and suggested I take a seat. Each table had about 2 or 3 empty chairs, which all turned out to be spoken for. I set my jacket at the empty table near the front and perused the literature ("Food Production Communitites" was one hefty tome).

Soon I noticed a—dare I say—attractive young lady talking to the organizer. He was making her feel at home, telling her to find a seat, etc. Now I was set! She'd make the rounds and fine no seats empty, then fall back to the same small table as me. But dashed! Instead she inveigled herself into one of the tables I'd found unwelcoming. Blast and bollocks! Sorted asunder.

But then ahoy! another organizer came along and asked if it was my First Time. It was! Well, let's find you a seat, then, she said. Perhaps right at this table over here—she led me to the seat next to the attractive young lady, which somehow now had its coats and scarves lifted away from it, and I was seated.

The woman on my right was a primly made-up, though friendly, middle-aged woman, originally from Belgium. She asked me several times how long I'd been in Edinburgh. The man across was an affable Australian, an engineer who just got work here. He was with his wife—together they cut a fine figure of what age 39 and two halves could be like. They were world travellers, with experiences from all over; but they weren't pushy with their experience, nor show-offs: just two secular humanists on the road of life, enjoying it in their turn.

Finally I got introduced to the solitary lady on my left. She looked just like the girl from Trainspotting (though maybe ten years on) and had nearly the accent to match—that is, charmingly Glaswegish or something thereabouts. Turns out she spent 7 years in Japan, and quite loved it: first teaching English, then recruiting for corporations. Her first degree was in Spanish, and she lived in Madrid for a spell. She described her favorite cafe there: with hams hanging all around, blue tile walls, and good strong coffee.

While she talked about a sauna on an island in Finland she'd visited, where you could run straight out and jump in the sea, I daydreamed about what it would be like to love a girl just for the way she talked about islands and cabins and experience, and not have any ambition that she should APPRECIATE ME. But I soon shook my head clear of it, remembering what I need, remembering how I've discovered my needs these past years.

The food was okay, not quite as good as one might think from an organization dedicated to the pleasure of food. I had the "onion tart"—the vegetarian option—which came on a bed of rocket. Just rocket. They could have put some nuts in the salad, is all I'm saying. Those who ordered the salmon were also disappointed, though the beefeaters reported success; theirs was a heartier dish if nothing else, with a potato concoction on the side. The prim woman on my right had eschewed the salmon for the same reason I did: you can't get wild salmon in this part of the world, certainly not in restaurants in February.

Though things seemed awkward at first (What did we have in common, after all?), we had gotten going over the food, and by the end of it we almost seemed sad to leave one another. I'd found out all about the likes and dislikes—eminently reasonable—of these strangers: what made the Scottish girl leave Japan, where in Asia you had the best balance of good food, with good temperature. When I got up and returned to the table, the Australian women was telling someone about the film Tampopo. I only overheard, "It's a cowboy thing, and they open a noodle shop..." and I knew right away what she was talking about. Our girl of the countryside was quick on the uptake, "Sure; that's what everyone's dream is, in Tokyo, they all want to open a ramen shop..."

I took a slow leave of them, and walked home on my own, now pleased, and chuffed, and floating a bit.

I went to Germany. It was quite alright; you should go there.

Saarland is the region in Southwest Germany where I was. It's pretty; there are bike paths everywhere. The people speak lots of English but it helps to have a comrade who can speak a little German.

The manor house where my cohorts and I stayed is quite posh. There were umbrellas and bicycles near the doors—for your borrowing convenience—there were bottles of wine in racks which you could drink and settle up later. There's a castle on the hill above; a computer science library; good automatic espresso machines.

A short documentary on letterpress. Nice filmmaking—not much insight into the process of printing.

The Gödels finally secured all of the necessary travel documents in January 1940. They feared taking the direct route to America across the North Atlantic. The British might attack and sink their ship. If the Brittish captured them, they would be interned because they were German citizens. Consequently, the Gödels came to America the long way around. They took the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, one ship to Yokohama, Japan, and finally an American flagship to San Francisco. All told, the journey took seven weeks.

—Stephen Hawking, God Created the Integers

The most splendid dream: I was in Seattle, and snuck into "my old apartment" which was one in a dense block of them stacked up in sheaves just above the beach. I had a marvelous view from there of the water at night, and I snuck down to the beach "like I used to" and, over and over again, paddled my way out on a small raft and rode the tide in, and in, and in, feeling utterly content and not cold, alone on the beach at night. "This is only possible," I said to myself, "because Seattle is not an island, so it's not crowded." For a long time, I rode those still waves though the tide was disappearing, and eventually I lay in a dry concrete park and some skater kids came and circled around me.

As I walked along the street high above the water, I ran into my old friend Hawkeye. I was so thrilled to see him! We walked around some more until we found this thing which was a bus or boat or theatre and thought we'd sneak inside. We were surprised: it was packed with people at this hour! Every seat taken, and the aisle packed with people. We pushed through, and everyone was having a good time, packed in there at some small o'clock in the morning. It turned out they were all there for forgiveness, though in some non-religious way. Some community occassion where all these people got together and someone was going to help them feel better about themselves. They seemed to be doing alright; it was like the easiest-going, most friendly grown-up party you've ever been to, everything calm and easy in the middle of the night.

HIM: Blen's dee-ah eer.

ME: Sorry?

HIM: Ballen's dee-ah theer.

ME (looking at the coated peanuts, sack of cookies, and trail mix in my hands): Oh, right. All four food groups!

HIM: Ah's a geem-ars dee-ah, thah is.

Patricia Marx v. Nancy Franklin:

"Anyone who has a dietary restriction can’t come over, unless you’re a really good cleaner."

Unkown—

Faith again. Down to the RSA, they had video pieces, a big elephant slowly turning, laying down and standing up, its eye, its small eye. Its big legs, seeming light, lifting and setting them down, so softly. And setting its trunk down, too, just the end of it, to rest lightly on the ground. All the while symphonic music blazed from another room.

Went down South from Rochester an hour last night (borrowed ride from neighbors I never knew were there) for a New Year's party at a nice old farmhouse in the Finger Lakes. We had a big bonfire, and launched hand-made tissue-paper hot-air balloons (an armspan tall). We had a FARMHOUSE KITCHEN and LIGHT ON TWO SIDES OF A ROOM and OLD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE (I had thought "YOUNG AND OLD TOGETHER" o well) and some good fun and interesting people.

On the bonfire was a box of back issues of New Yorker mgaazine. Said the paterfamilias, over 60, county coroner, beer in hand, "That's a ritual box of New Yorkers. Finally decided to get rid of 'em! You can get it all on CD now." They went up slowly, a page at a time, peeling away in the hot air and then flying off in flame.

The hot air balloon, after it caught fire, came down in the middle of a vineyard and a landing party went out to fetch it. It was a good eve of the new year. I'm not ready to give up 2006, but ready for 2007, for more life, always more.

Trying to find Penn Station at 6am on a dark morning, I looked up and saw this giant ad photo: a guy shaving in a car.

I thought, "Hey, I know a guy who did that."

Then, "Wait a minute... That's Marc Horowitz!"

On Mess.

I was in some kind of workshop and when I came out there was a guy sleeping in my car. He looked like Dave Chappelle. Also the roof had been sanded down and the plates changed, but I didn't realize this yet. I woke him up and told him to "get outta here." He said, "Alright, but can I just take the number plate with me?" "Yeah, whatever," I said. He took off on a moped.

When I realized I had two plates that were different and the top of the car now had a confederate flag on it (because of sanding, apparently), I took off after him. I could see him, but he was riding on the wrong side of the street and so hard to approach. At some point I switched over to his side, and luckily I became vary narrow so I could fit in beside the oncoming cars like he could. I grabbed him with my hand and gave him a chilly look.

Standing there were some policemen. I was relieved. "I said, this man stole my car, or my numberplates, or something. I want to turn him in." The Chapelle look-alike was quiet and sheepish this whole time. The cop said, "Talk to them inside," sticking his thumb in that direction. Inside there were a bunch of cops using a converted space to work on their robotics project. They were thrilled when it suddenly worked, extending a tiny shaft to poke through a piece of fabric, and angry at the Japanese nuns who'd won the prize money before. They would win this time.

Here are some triangular shapes that move around in a three-dimensional space for your entertainment.

I was with Gordon Ramsay (Ann Coulter was his sous chef) and he was screaming at me after finding a fly in the food. "What do you føcking think you're doing putting a føcking fly in the føcking food? You think your føcking customers want to find a føcking menagerie in their dinner? What in the føck were you thinking about?"

Later at another venue we are cooking again and I'm looking at a cake he's made. Half of it has been eaten so the inside is showing. There's a little bug embedded in the cake; I free it with a finger and say, "Gordon, there's a fly in your cake." Ann Coulter and I exchange a meaningful glance.

I have one fondness for Rick Moranis.

Before today, I'd never heard of the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal in 1989.

I was looking up "misogyny" to find out if I could spell it with "mys-." The answer is No.

Toward the Grassmarket.

Ahead a young man is shouting. He's pressing against another. The other is shouting LISTEN TO YOURSELF. LISTEN TO YOURSELF. He pushes him; he pushes him back. They begin to fight as I pass. A girl cuts away from the one who holds her—"John, John, no, John!"

Along a ways, two cops in their flourescent safety green vests stroll along. They should know about the fight. I compose. "There's a bit of a fight going on just down there." Another man is talking to them. He is pointing at the fight.

Ahead further is a club; loads of people wait outside. A press. Clamouring. Past run two girls in minis (20? 23?). They shuffle to run in their encumbering shoes. She laughs to her friend, "It's like Trainspotting!"

A man is kicking a broken road sign. Two others in kilts, fine young lads, walk up. "Where are you taking that?" "Wot?!" "Let him be, mate."

A woman has slipped out of her shoe. "Are you from Ireland then?" says a man. "Yeah, I've got it," she answers. Cutting across the road, I am stopped: "Eh, mate, you know where the Grassmarket is?" "Yeah, it's just along this road, back that way."

Finished marking all the midterm exams and was quite pleased with myself. Walked into a light rain with a whole load of nice thoughts about how to spend the afternoon.

First, lunch. I crossed the road to Susie's, my favorite east-side lunch spot; it's vegetarian and feels like New England (is cozy, has DIFFERENT CHAIRS).

Ahead of me in line was a man who seemed to be standing in an inappropriate, annoying place. I couldn't squeeze past him to see my options. I couldn't hear him, only the counter-man's responses: he was getting black coffee, £1.40 or something (that's a lot for black coffee). He had with him a bag that was torn at the seams, it looked like a hand-me-down or a find-me-somewhere.

He was taking a long time to order; he was moving slowly. Searching and searching in his pocket for the money. I noticed he had a heavy brown beard and several layers of clothes; he was middle-aged and had a lined face; he seemed weary. The counter-man put the coffee up after payment was finally produced.

I ordered lunch & paid. It was easy to find the crisp cash-machine notes in my wallet. At Susie's, you get 2 entrees and one salad—I got a "Belgian-style" ratatouille, spinach lasagne, and a salad of grated carrots and red cabbage. I regret this policy of Susie's because usually I'd be happy with just 2 entrees, or just 1. Normally I'd be happy with smaller portions, too. But I didn't ask for less.

The man was sitting alone at a corner table with his cup of black coffee. It was the kind of table I'd choose, and the kind of coffee I'd choose. I could see myself in this guy. He just sat in the corner, keeping to himself, slowing working down that warm black coffee.

I had to choose a seat near him. I realized I'd be sitting in front of him with my huge plate of warm, tasty food. I didn't want to make eye contact but I felt his presence—unassuming but huge. I looked up once or twice and saw he was looking down, seeming slightly sad, sitting in this posh hippie cafe with people doing work or socializing in other corners. As I ate I kept sending my gaze out the window, though it was frosted over.

I knew I didn't need all this food. I felt hungry going in, but just half of what was on my heaping plate would have satisfied me. I wondered when this man had last eaten, or had a nice warm lasagne with melted cheese on top. Maybe often—maybe not.

They say homeless people have internalized their marginal role, have learned they're not supposed to do things uncouth; not to take food off someone's plate in a commercial establishment; even if no one were hurt.

The large busboy hovered nearby in flourescent green, waiting for an opportunity to establish order.

If I left my plate half full, the busboy would collect it. Which is the greater affront—to greedily eat more food than you need, or to leave good food to waste in front of a hungry man? That old saw about the starving children in Africa is rot—there's no way to send your table scraps to Africa, after all (Africans need strong local food production and an economy that can distribute it successfully). But this man was within an armspan of me and my delicious, unneccessary lunch. I thought of saying, "Are you hungry, sir?" But I too was held back. I walked out with food left on my plate.

"Bolsheviki Seize State Buildings, Defying Kerensky," New York Times, November 7, 1917.

Pop quiz: what do Eskimos have 32 different words for?

(Watchers of QI not eligible.)

Long-time readers of Letters to an Unknown Audience might remember Coffee in the Park, a conceptual art piece-cum-community project perpetrated in SF in 2004.

I was taking a stroll around my neighborhood one day when I saw a man in a striped jumpsuit and a bouffant flinging a long orange cord around. "Free coffee in a minute," his companion called out. I made the rendezvous and hung out for a couple of hours. He had strung an extension cord (1250' of it) from his kitchen window, around the corner, across the street, and into the middle of a modest park. He also had a Mr. Coffee machine and two large jugs of water and was ready to brew some coffee for the neighborhood. The video from that day has been newly edited and captures a bit of it.

Before long it was an institution, brewing from about noon to 4:00 every Saturday afternoon. Many people in the neighborhood didn't get it. "Free coffee," one of us would say, and they'd say, "What's this for?"

"It's for coffee," I remember saying, or "It's for you."

One time an older tourist couple came by and chatted for a while. They were so impressed that they went away and came back with a panettone—that's a fancy kind of European bread/cake.

Two Saturdays in a row I spent a couple of hours talking to a soldier who'd fought in Vietnam, Korea, and Bosnia. After Bosnia, he retired.

I also met Andre, the middle-aged novelist who could often be seen walking two beautifully-manicured long-haired dogs (identical except one white one brown) around Alamo Square Park. He told me about the love affair that led him to live in India for ten years before it came apart and he came back to San Francisco and wrote novels.

Marc took a Polaroid of everyone, or nearly everyone, who stopped at coffee in the park, and somewhere he has a huge book of hundreds of people raising a disposal cup of Joe served out by his Mobile Cofee Unit. The residents of the Alamo Square Park neighborhood are poorer now for the absence of Cofee in the Park.

A significant fraction of the people I knew in San Francisco I met through Coffee in the Park. It ran for about half a year, then became more sporadic, then Marc went off on a project called The National Dinner Tour (he made dinner appointments with strangers through a Crate and Barrel catalog).

If you live in the US, you can now see Marc in a series of ads for [CAR MANUFACTURER], showing how he's living out of the car (I knew he was a starving artist, but I never thought it'd come to this) for 7 days.

Except for the real-life branding, this project has the stamp of Marc on it (Marc's always been a big promoter of his own brands, like Sliv and Dulet Enterprises, the company he founded as an art project (which he claims had 17 employees at its peak)).

The spots (which integrate lots of footage of other Marc projects past) feel slightly odd, mostly due to the soundtrack, which makes it seem as though Marc is just having a blast all the time, on a constant buzz, like a 24/7 beer commercial. Marc does know how to have fun, but he's more on the slo-burn, taking life as it comes and making the best of it. He listens well and he understands bad news. The ads make him seem like the kind of guy that would just graze over a bummer and crank up some cheesy music. But that's not the Marc I know.

According to [CAR MANUFACTURER]: "Marc's blog content is not necessarily consistent with [CAR MANUFACTURER]'s views."

So I'd like to take this opportunity to point you at some Marc projects that are not necessarily consistent with those views, such as the TP Tornado (I'd like to try this sometime; anyone have a ceiling fan?) the rental-truck brake-test, Fun with Paper Towels, and the Sacramento Lawn-Sprinkler Documentary Proposal.

I also like the plunger experiment.

Big Sky Theory revisited.

Tim Bray mentions that there is a rose called "Parkdirecktor Riggers." It was introduced in 1957 and is "an excellent climber."

At the Ultimate Frisbee games I go to every Friday in the Meadows, I met a guy who works at the Scottish Executive. He's in a special line of work—he works on a "bill team." That is, he writes the legislation that the politicians argue about. His particular focus is "Corporate Killing and Prostitution." He says, "Before I worked in Prostitution I worked in Local Government Boundaries"—that is, gerrymandering; on the "against" side, I assume (or maybe that post was less morally desirable than Prostitution?).

This guy graduated Edinburgh around 2000 with a degree in Computer Science. He worked for a startup for about a year, decided he didn't like it, and applied for the first job in government that sounded interesting. Five years later he's on a bill team, pushing bills through the Scottish Parliament.

I just remembered that Melissa Etheridge is my power animal.

People keep saying that deep-fried Mars bars are distinctively Scottish. People keep saying that in Scotland, you can get everything deep-fried. People keep saying that Scotland is the most fried place on Earth.

People are wrong.

Definitewy Fwee [via hchamp].

Two drunk fellows accosted me while walking my bike along Leith Walk, a busy street.

HIM: 'Ey mate, what's up with the bicycle at this hour?

ME: Sorry?

HIM: Bit late for a bicycle, en't it?

ME: Well—

HIM: Edinburgh's the most dangerous place, mate, take it from me. I've seen guys run red lights and all kinds of stuff.

ME: Yeah.

A taxi approaches.

HIM: Hey! Hey!

The taxi's light goes off.

HIM (to his mate): ot's'up wi'him, eh? Ye'd think e'd want a fare. (to me) Don't drive drunk, alright, cause it's dangerous, and you could get hit. Lemme tell you, he's drunk (pointing to his friend) and he'll kill you.

MATE (grinning cheerily): Well, I apologize in advance if I ever do in the future.

ME: If you ever kill me, you mean?

MATE: Yeh.

ME: Oh, thanks, I'll appreciate that.

A bicycle rickshaw approaches.

HIM (ecstatic, to the rickshaw pedaller, who is stopped just beside us): Hey! Hey! Hey! Arright, we got it. (to me again) So listen, don't drive drunk, and you'll be fine. We gotta go. Cheers.

ME: Cheers.

The Edinburgh Festival is on, and the city is a zoo.

Those of you familiar with Trainspotting, the film, might remember the scene, partway through, which shows our gang sitting slumped at the bar in dim light, with a caption, "First day of the Edinburgh Festival." They are still, then after a moment, a cheesy bloke with a sun visor comes in and says, in American, "Excuse me, can I use your bathroom? (brief pause) Thank you!" Then he jogs off to the toilets; the four principals run after him and, sadly enough, beat him up for his wallet.

The festival I know has been unlike that—more like a constant party, the streets and squares filled with drunk people seemingly on their way somewhere, but not getting there very fast.

So far the best act I've seen (of just a few) was Reggie Watts, best known as leadman of Maktub, the Seattle-based ultra-smooth neo-soul band. Turns out he does comedy, too, and does the funniest beatboxing/live-looping set you're likely to see. Watts is a master of accents and funny voices, and to be honest, that's about where all the humor comes from in his set. He's a pasticheur extraordinaire, able to imitate the style of a sci-fi villian, or a director's commentary, at the drop of a hat. I laughed out loud; that's all.

Dreamt I bumped into Jon Stewart and he let me be on the show. I was co-anchoring, with him—but there were loads of people around the table, like a panel. I was a little funny, but he had to bail me out a lot.

Dream: After sleeping at a new apartment, burgled at old apartment (bike stripped, apartment key gone). By chance, run into bike thief sleeping at neighborhood garage. Hit him with my bike wheel (good weapon!). Then he seems congenial and willing to give back my stuff. While walking to get it, I ask him if he knows anything about my keys. He says, let's see. We go into my old building (he unlocks it). In the lobby two friends of his are sleeping on mattresses that have appeared overnight—they take up the whole foot of the stairwell. Thief explains: his girlfriend is an artist but needs to cram, hence all the stuff in their otherwise bohemian lifestyle. He lets me in to the 3rd floor apartment—not mine. Heading down to the 2nd floor I wake up. Voices in the hall.

Wow; people, lateness; talk; grass; learning; fun; frisbee; sharing; curiousity. Call/cc is double negation.

Wish I could share it with you all.

Girl (LOUDLY, to cell phone): Oh, hiii! Our plane just got in; we were super, super delayed.

Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees is a splendid act of art writing, one of the finest examples of journalism I've read. It is "a life" of Robert Irwin, the artist (What does that mean, "a life"? Is that different from "a biography"?). Robert Irwin led a difficult career to capture, since he prohibited photographs during most of it, photographs can scarcely capture his mostly-white objects, and for about half of his career he didn't make discrete objects at all but only altered the character of given spaces. But Weschler makes it all pellucid with his clear writing and close research. Most writing, about more familiar art classics, is not half as readable as Seeing Is Forgetting.

Irwin began as a teenager with figural drawings and paintings, and was quite accomplished at it, and then proceeded with a process of inquiry that asked what each element was doing; anything that wasn't doing something went. The first thing to go was the figure, then the line, then the frame, and so on through the object. Yet it's important to realize that Irwin was not just throwing these things away for the cleverness of it; he cultivated particular aesthetic qualities in the pieces he created. In the abstract paintings, he cultivated spontaneity, as well as precision. Later on, it was various qualities of presence and ambiguity that he was more interested in cultivating. A scientist trying to determine the mechanics and psychology of the human eye might use methods, and create objects, similar to what Irwin made. In fact Irwin collaborated with a physiologist briefly in the middle of his career. Also part of that collaboration was James Turrell, whose work is a helpful correlate.

The James Turrell installation I came across at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, circa 2003, remains one of my own favorite art experiences. The most interesting piece was a huge room of eerie blue light. Viewers removed their shoes and stepped up to a higher plane to enter the room, which from afar seemed to be a flat blue screen; even with people standing in the opening, they looked silhouetted against this flatness. Inside, I was surrounded by this even blueness, whose walls seemed to have no particular position or corners. The far end plane of the room was a completely different shade of blue, which gave several strong associations. One was of a drive-in movie theatre: this large, glowing, oblong surface looming above and illuminating your friends nearby. Stronger even than that was the sense of standing in a cave behind a waterfall—but somehow, the Ultimate waterfall, as in a science fiction movie, at the core of the Earth or at the edge of some interstellar crusier—a waterfall made of an alien material, subject to unknown forces, put there perhaps by devious beings. There was a faint hum which made me think the whole thing might be powered by dilithium crystals, or might be giving me brain cancer on the spot. There was a vague sense of danger, seeing this even, glowing surface a few feet away, not knowing if it was solid or if it represented a space, a dropoff. And it was utterly, utterly blue.

Besides the space itself offering an intense experience, the world outside takes on a new character after leaving the room. Colors change, of course; things seem oddly stable; tree leaves rustling in the breeze seem impossibly detailed, impossibly natural.

I wonder what is the fate of art after delivering such intense, such primal, minimal and necessary experiences as this. What can anyone hope to accomplish by painting a face, or making colored mobiles, or for that matter animated LED installations or dramatic films?

There is an answer to this question, and I'm excited to find out, but I don't know yet.

"The past is safe because we know how it ends."

Wener Herzog hit with air rifle while giving an interview for the BBC.

In this dream I call Michael Moore and tell him there's someone he might want to interview—an activist and artist (I know her only online). He's interested, so I get in touch with her and set up a meeting. They show up at my house. I'm pleased to meet them both & they start interviewing. He uses an 8mm camera propped up on the table while he asks intense questions; She is a kind of activist and an artist. Moore looks at me once they get going as if to say, "This is good." Later there is a huge film crew in my house (grips run around in tasteless shorts). I go in and out fetching tea and cookies for everyone and I'm very pleased. Then Moore realizes she flunked jazz class and shows me the charts to prove it. He is very disappointed: He now realizes she has no organizing principle, no main purpose in life; there's no story here, he says. The film crew starts packing up and my friend shrugs at me. I think he's being unfair and I still think she's a-ok.

OMG luv it. I wish there were a URL for the 5am hour on this thing. I'd use it now.

So it was high rhubarb season here in Edinburgh and the shops were just busting with rhubarb. It looked so good sitting out in the sunshine at the corner shop that I just had to take some home with me, although admittedly I thought it was something else, something less bitter.

My flatmate said it could be fried in butter and would achieve the texture of melting. I wanted the texture of melting. I fried the rhubard in butter and threw spoonfuls of sugar on top, and it came out a bitter, bitter paste. I put it on rice with some tomatos and it was just about tolerable. I don't recommend this particular recipe.

Tartan Army fans insure for £1m against England win.

Mmmm, cherries.

I was at the BART en route to the train station to set out cross-country on bicycle. On the BART was a conveyor belt with a load of stuff on it, mostly mine, and I was frantically going through, trying to get what was mine. N. had gotten me a box to put plays in, and some New Yorker mags from like 1939. What great gift! I was thinking as the musical alarm woke me up. Other people had heaped me with CDs and minidiscs of music, but I was sure I'd picked up some unopened commercial products in the mad dash to get on the train as it was pulling out.

I was taking the BART because I had already left my car at the train station when I set out on bicycle the day before. It had been fun biking along the road at night, knowing I could get in the car at any time. But I had left the car at the train station. As I was biking down the road in suburban California I kept finding myself in a driveway, then in a mall, then cycling into a mathroom & going, this isn't the main road! Then trying the other bathroom & saying the same thing, then finding my way back out to the real road, going Easy across America. People were looking at me funny but not too funny, for biking in the mall. I don't know why it was so hard for me to stay on the road. Anyway it was after not a full day of that when I got sent back to San Francisco and had to rush to get on the BART with all my stuff. Oh and my stuff kept showing up on the open-air BART cars going in the other direction. And I had to grab it precariously thinking I'm glad that turned up.

There were squashed fly bodies all along the sidewalk. It seemed odd there should be so many of them lying there dead (). Then I saw one alive, and another, and knelt down and looked at one. It was moving slow. Had they been drugged?

I poked it's behind with my finger to see if it would flit away; it just fluffed its wings. I poked again. Then a voice came from behind me; a Northern European voice, like something Dutch or Finnish or something: "What did you discover?" she said.

"It's a bug. There are a bunch of them squooshed along the sidewalk*. I was trying to see why they didn't just fly away. Instead of getting stepped on."

She knelt too and poked another one. It was as lazy as the first one. We looked at them, and at the mangled fly bodies. "I like them alive. I don't like them when they're dead," she said. I felt the same way.

* For British readers: "sidewalk" is a "footpath."

I've been reading Richard Feynman's letters to his first wife, Arline. Here is a fine man. I have always admired his contributions to physics, to the teaching of physics, and to general coolness and with-it-ology. Now I find out what he was to the love of his life—would that I'd read this book years ago.

His wife is dying the whole time, from before they get married. She has TB but he's not fazed. He knows what she is to him and he does not apparently hesitate in marrying her. There is an articulate letter to his parents warding off their disuasions and explaining his reasons—essentially, just love.

I am perplexed how a relationship could be so apparently functional & happy, with Arline lying inert in the Sanatorium while he works long hours in Los Alamos. But there is a clue in the saddest letter: "I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. . . . We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector."

The letters are so immediate to me, so eminently understandable in a way that so much writing from bygone days leaves me puzzled. Much like W. N. P. Barbellion's blog journal, I can't believe life was so real, so rich, so natural, in a time before color photography. I expect everyone to talk like a Humphrey Bogart film, or write in some stately prose out of the US Constitution, say. But they, the people of the 1910s or the '40s, have ordinary, understandable thoughts to say to each other. And the problems are like ours! "Dear Mom," says Feynman, "Don't feel so bad about your typing. It is OK and getting better all the time." Another time: "The town council elections are coming up soon again. I hope I will avoid—and will try to avoid—being reelected." In 1945: "I think I've been working a little too hard again this week. I got enough sleep usually but I went to bed at 3 and got up at 11 most of the time."

In other past-blasting news: today a colleague of mine found, left on a shelf somewhere, an edition from '44 or so of a math book by J. E. Littlewood. For those not intimately acquainted with mathematical lore, Littlewood was a famous mathematician of the early part of the 20th century—one of the guys who showed up just as things were getting really good and knocked out loads of theorems before everybody started signing up for mathematician school. The book was full of those charming affectations they used to put even in serious math books, saying e.g. that this would be a clear and general treatment, that it would assume only the logical axioms, and that "every effort has been taken to avoid a philosophical speculation..."

Also: In the fantastic, splendid film Army of the Shadows, by Jean-Pierre Melville, the French Resistance is led by a fictional Luc Jardie, whose claim to fame is having written pretty mathematical monographs with titles like Transfinit et Continu.

Last and least, you will be wondering about the "Pastoral" in the title of this post. To that end, let me only remark that many days, such as today, when leaving the building where I "work," I see one to seventeen bunnies hopping around on the grassy spots. I thought you would enjoy thinking of that.

The work I have done has already been adequately rewarded and recognized. Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature's pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed. That was my reward.

Then, having fashioned tools to make access easier to the new level, I see these tools used by other men straining their imaginations against further mysteries beyond. There, are my votes of recognition.

Then comes the Prize, and the deluge of messages. Reports of fathers turning excitedly with newspapers in hand to wives; of daughters running up and down the apartment house ringing neighbors' door bells with news; victorious cries of "I told you so" by those having no technical knowledge—their successful prediction being based on faith alone; from friends, from relatives, from students, from former teachers, from scientific colleagues, from total strangers; formal commendations, silly jokes, parties, presents; a multitude of messages in a multitude of forms.

But, in each I saw the same two common elements. I saw in each, joy; and I saw affection. . .

The Prize was a signal to permit them to express, and me to learn about, their feelings. . . [E]ach note of affection released thus one upon another has permitted me to realize a depth of love for my friends and acquaintances, which I had never felt so poignantly before.

—Richard Feynman, notes on a speech to the Nobel Banquet, from Don't you have time to think?" ed. Michelle Feynman.

On the field of sport, I've often heard the word, "juke," meaning to fake or jump in one direction: "I snagged the disc and ran straight at him, then juked to the left and he was totally on his ass!"

The word comes from Old Scots, "jouk," meaning "dodge."

It crops up, too, in the excellent phrase "jiggery-pokery," a corruption of the Old Scots phrase "joukery-pawkery," meaning dodging and trickery (a perfect name for a hacker's hack). The "pawk" part I'm not familiar with.

I first heard "jiggery-pokery" from one Mark Paschal, whose linguistic roots, I believe, hail from Tennessee.

We were running around a big deep hole, a big lap, all of us lined up single file and jogging in perfect synchrony, following the next one's movements precisely, none of us ever erring. I was so proud. Then we crowded up on two sides and each group watched the others. On their side, they were big colored dots (Were they wearing something? Sandwich boards?) and they stacked up into pyramids and then formed themselves into big colored M&Ms with arms! And they were waving at us! How did they make such good M&M shapes while standing on each others' shoulders? It was so funny and I was so glad of them being so funny. When I woke up I slipped around in a puddle off nap for a good long while with nothing but bliss, really.

Bugs are a difficult ethic for me. My first, closest friend wanted to be "an entomologist" at age 6. I was always squeamish and was known to run shaking and screaming from a winged thing on my arm. I was very close to a girl whose greatest daring was in relation to bugs. She braved a scorpion on her face and grew moths in a jar.

In the shower a six-legged Daddy was vibrating its damp legs helplessly. I blew air across its back and it froze. I blew again and it didn't move.

What to do? I thought. Leave it alone. Living is its own business. But I went back and squeezed its back legs between my fingers—it spangled like I would have if it had landed on me, and not me on it. I could feel it wriggling against my two fingers. I brought it in here and it lies still—tired? dead?—on my sleek black notebook.

I am amazed there's so much pollen in the world; that it's so strong; it's apparently an army of sorts; an infestation; a begottening. I'm amazed there's pollen at all; what does it look like? How do you know it's coming? What does it do when it comes? I'm amazed, too, and glad, how many words there are for talking on pollen, how many aspects, how many body parts—bronchioles—are affected. What a fine excuse to write it makes.

I found this nifty one-page zine on a counter.

Stepped outside of work and happened to breathe in. It was so fresh I nearly fell over. Like dying on a bed of wet moss.

Friday afternoon and 6:00, with still three hours of light to go, at least, & hey I'm a bachelor and whatnot, I went up Blackford Hill, site of the observatory of the University of Edinburgh. The road up is a nice steep road with houses along both side—with nice little yards that are being landscaped, or terraformed, or something—yards like Capitol Hill in Seattle, rather than yards like the Mission, San Francisco, which is more the tune of most Edinburgh "gardens"* I know.

Turned up near the top of Blackford Hill and what did I see but a big copper-roofed observatory with its own nice yard (think Coit Tower for the style of this yard). There's a bunch of offices there, and maybe this is where you sit if you're a grad student in Astronomy? If so, not bad. It's fresh and open and regal & stuff.

Took a grand tour of the premises. Walked along a little road and terrain kept surfacing, just over the next rise. Big mounds of rock, as big as a corporate headquarters. Yellow insistent flowers admonishing me in big dilligent stands. A woman walked three big black dogs. Two fought while one sat aside, licking its paw; then it ran to catch up. A little radio tower installed itself in the hillside like something from Tintin or G. I. Joe. I didn't want to go inside the radio tower so I routed around the high side of it, taking a little dirt path and across some grass and rabbit droppings. Then I got to the top of the hill.

And I laughed. Out loud. Laid out are Arthur's Seat and Edinburgh Castle, perched up there like plants on your grandmother's windowsill. The sea in the distance. The copper roof of the observatory raising its eyebrows at you on the right. A city in stone at your feet; gardens ("real"* gardens, with plants; vegetables). And over on the left, the sun was doing that thing where it pokes its fingers through the clouds and you get those awesome shafts of light, like a Romantic landscape painter was making the whole thing up. But it happens; it actually does, you know it does.

Then I set my bike wheels on the rough pavement in front of the observatory and observed my way down the hill at high speed, pedalled home increasing my cardiovascular health. Sauteed some vegetables and et 'em up, throwing in half a poblano pepper (and what the hell you only live once—let's break out the feta, dated Dec 17, 2005). That's all, man. That's all. But then I might go see Odetta at the Triptych Festival. You never can tell, man, you never can tell.

Eternity has its demands, indeed, Zag, indeed.

* Those are American quotes.

I hadn't seen it in decades, but now I remember that there are few things in life better than the Eleven Twelve film from Sesame Street. [via Howie]

I didn't remember that the numbers were all out of order when they're spoken. How did we ever learn to count?

UPDATE: link was horribly broken. Fixt.

After writing about Henry James and Colm Toibin, I hear that a girl upstairs in my flat-block got knifed (two gashes in the side) and there's blood on the staircase.

Playing with guns is dangerous. More 4 News, a British news show that runs right before The Daily Show, picked up this story last week. That night, they had the scoop oon Jon Stewart.

I awoke to hailstones rattling against my windowpane. The dream had floored me. I was at a kind of birthday party in honor of myself, but everyone there was an elder or a stranger. The food was good, the wine was good, the dessert was great, and the coffee was fantastic. Then there was a 16mm film, projected on the wall. It was a street in Manhattan in the early 80s. The camera tracked down the street as everything slipped past: people walking, people running, watches sold, clothes worn. A movie was being made on a side street. Someone was mugged. The light was increasing so it must have been dawn; "The Sounds of Silence" faded in and played against the scene. Then we, the party, slipped down a side street and were at the edge of a cliff in pitch blackness. A country road wound around us and boxy Jettas cruised past with no lights on. We crossed the road and realized that the drivers couldn't see us, all the time talking, talking, like a great family party should, like The Cherry Orchard. We crossed back and entered the Manhattan street through an alley where a dozen men crouched. It was lighter there. Then the hail came.

Regarding Bryson, Judith pointed out I hadn't used all 26 letters, and gave me permission to use her official pangram

But why stop there?

☛ Jim asked about the slash, ampersand, and ligatures, so here:

This is a font I made, called Bryson (big ups to ll for making that possible). It's a humanist sans-serif along the lines of Optima, but jumping off in several places. It's a bit too light for setting text, although it may work a bit better if I could figure out how to do hinting [1]. I'd be interested in feedback (in the comments, or email ezra at this domain).

I've had a lot of trouble with the numbers; in my defense they were much worse before.

Here's what it looks like:

If I can work it out a little better, I'll release it under a Creative Commons license.

[1] Does anyone understand hinting? I play with the hinting tools all day long and it doesn't seem to make a shade of difference: the stem of the F is solidly on a pixel boundary, but the stem of the T is split half and half between two. I think my app (TypeTool) offers hinting but doesn't really do anything with it.

By the way, Pica, criticism is just that communal dining room table on which we pile our stories about stories! Isn't it?

"Should we always make it clear whether we are telling stories or not?" I should hope not. It's your task as a literary critic to ascertain the genres (e.g. truth or fiction) that a text moves in, and to guide us poor nature-lovers to recognize just a few of the animal tracks we need to know whether we're in danger. [Block that metaphor! —Ed.]

Anyway, to me "story-telling" is an effect of writing that should be deployed whether you're making up the story or telling one that you fully believe. "Story-telling" is organizing events to emphasize the central thread, and go lightly on the side-plots, thus to keep it interesting—and that's as important in truth as in fiction. I don't want to read criticism that reads like a table of census data.

That was the climax, as far as India admits of one. The rain settled in steadily to do its job of wetting everybody and everything through, and soon spoiled the cloth of gold on the palanquin and the costly disc-shaped banners. Some of the torches went out, fireworks didn't catch, there began to be less singing, and the tray returned to Professor Godbole, who picked up a fragment of the mud adhering and smeared it on his forehead without much ceremony. Whatever had happened had happened, and while the intruders picked themselves up the crowds of Hindus began a desultory move back into the town. The image went back too, and on the following day underwent a private death of its own, when some curtains of magenta and green were lowered in front of the dynastic shrine. The singing went on even longer... ragged edges of religion... unsatisfactory and undramatic tangles... 'God is love.' Looking back on the great blur of the last twenty-four hours, no man could say where was the emotional centre of it, any more than he could locate the heart of a cloud.
(A Passage to India, E. M. Forster)

They sang not even to the God who confronted them, but to a saint; they did not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct.
(ibid.)

One of the things I love about reading metameat is guessing whether pica or paul wrote the piece I'm reading (my newsreader doesn't tell me). I had a bemused moment today wondering which one "couldn't be bothered to code the diacritics" in Hélène Cixous' name. I guessed Paul, wrongly.

One of the things I don't love about reading metameat is that I have no idea what they're talking about, half the time. But it makes me feel smart to think that I have friends that read books.

The temperature in Edinburgh is between 3 and 6 degrees celsius. Hours of sunlight yesterday came in at 0.0. It's 21°C in Tenerife, and –1 in Warsaw.

Air pollution is listed as "low" in sixteen different parts of the British Isles, both today and tomorrow.

Copenhagen is the hottest property in Europe, but so is Estonia.

Elsewhere, kite fliers have become competitive, sharpening their strings in an effort to cut each other out of the sky. Punjab has banned kite-flying, at least temporarily, due to seven deaths.

Nine hundred students are hitchhiking from London to Morocco, raising money for education in Africa. The Guardian reports that setting up a blog "takes barely two minutes to set up if you decide on a unique password in advance." The stock-market float of British real-estate website Rightmove resulted in an 18% increase in value on its first day, and Madonna described kissing Britney Spears on stage as "passing the energy" from "the mommy pop star to the baby pop star."

"As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping." —Caring for Your Introvert

I'm an introvert who's assimilated the extrovertist oppression of introverts.

Two passages on math from The Nothing That Is, by Robert Kaplan. First, on the yearning for generalization:

[W]e always expect it to come, being the children we are of the Great Paradigm shift, where autonomous species are bound to be subsumed under a just if distant genus.

And, on the role of intuition:

You may have guessed this wasn't the only time a procedure—such as the shrinking of h to 0—has been used in mathematics before it was formally justified: it has happened over and over again, from Archimedes on, because it springs from the ever-present tension between intuition and proof. These are the two poles of all mathematical thought. The first centers the free play of mind, which browses on the pastures of phenomena and from its ruminations invents objects so beautiful in themselves, relations that work so elegantly, both fitting in with our other inventions and clarifying their surroundings, that world and mind stand revealed as each the other's invention, conformably with the unique way that Things Are.

"He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. . ." [Wikipedia, in reference to Alexander Grothendieck].

At the Gallery of Modern Art there is a swirly land form on the front lawn. Grassy earth spirals gently upward, and two pools twist inward beneath them; it's as if someone with enormous hands just reached down and twirled the ground around. In a better season you can walk on it.

I visited the gallery yesterday and saw some nice cloud paintings, and some nice graphic works with type, some about Scottish history and some by Damien Hirst satirizing food labels.

There was a video called "Most Women Never Experience," and I wonder why it is that half our race should be confined to boredom, if it's so.

Then I stood in the colonnade beside the rain and looked out at the land form. A swan was in the water, feeding at its edge, and gusts of wind blew areas of water toward the swan. I thought how silly art is; then I thought what it would be like if all of our lives were like this: standing in shelter from rain, looking out at a fanciful landscape inhabited by single elegant creature.

I have this new stereo. I can hear music throughout my room. It doesn't matter what my computer is doing or failing at, I can still hear music throughout my room. This is wonderful.

I like the track that's playing. It is by Natalie MacMaster. I walked over to the stereo and thought, "Yes. Yes, I like this. I want to hear more of this."

I am motioning at the stereo, making a clicking motion. I am trying to rate the track so that my liking it will be remembered.

Seems I will have to trust memory again.

And the Oberlin Math Society was a hip bunch of squares in 1927.

It has been snowing in Nantes. My friend in San Francisco has named her pending child Gargle, and her cat is a backseat coder. Miranda Gaw is taking a poetry class. And 1913 is a lot like today.

Down the road, turn right, past the dive shop and across the wee canal with swans. Into the roundabout hurly-burly with buses bustling past and cars and no one stopping. Out of there, down the long row of B & Bs and past the old sign welded on saying "Burghmuirhead" because of the swamp it once headed. Then you just ford easily through a back street and you're on the Meadows.

Glorious Meadows, Hope Meadows. I take the North Meadow Walk today and thread in through the back way up to Buccleuch Place, cobblestone street of Extreme Parking. The flat blocks alongside it are little departments now, academics with signs like "Department for the Study of Disappearing Language," and yet on top floors you see clotheslines hanging inside the rooms. Someone lives in this bundle of visual noise.

At 2 BP I hop the tall steps and throw open the old-knobbed door. The stairs inside are marbled to hide what looks like little cuke slices thrown from untidy salads. Inside on the fourth floor you can see all the way to the Royal Observatory, its sharp outline one of the gray cards stacked in the diorama-distance. The land here is wrinkled, as layers of bed clothes sharply pressed. Nearer, straight down, some club for Bowls cuts its wet green figure at a rakish angle against the line of the street. But it's perfectly square, that Bowls court, utterly square and manicured and never used.

Exiting all that, its cross the street and down the way, past the Human Be-in and all its merry coed pre-meds, down further to the edge of West Nicolson Street where Susie's Wholefood Diner has fresh tomatoes, falafel, spruced broccoli, and stir-fried vegetable—Southerly foods, all. I eat well here for £5.50 every time I'm near. They have a texture of DIFFERENT CHAIRS and SMALL PANES that make large-than-life soft light inside. Here the touchy-feely, big-thinking coeds congregate, my kind.

From there it's off again, heading home, to work well in the privacy of a place my own, as it were. For fun I head round the top of Teviot, that citadel—only student union in the world built like a cathedral—and down that way and into the Middle Meadow Walk ("NO BARBECUES"), into that wide, lavish promenade, Hope Meadows, nothing but trees, nothing but air and grass and distance. I've got things to do but hang it all, I'll sit for a minute; the distant shush of cars on the Southern bow of the Meadows lulls me; calls from footballers amuse me (are these Czech?); and walkers too, in longcoats, grand, black and shock-red, they people my view, they stick to paths but break out, too, crossing and crissing the crisp swathes of the near space or the far, all the vaulted cells framed by these stately rows of trees, this sweet honeycomb.

Work calls. Up from the bench, I leave my footballers back, catch the eye of curious strollers up on the North Meadow Walk (my new shoes are very yellow) and tuck myself down into the wedges between there and Home Street, where City is full-on and the shop-awnings are starting to come down on their long polls. The B & Bs in their long procession are tawdry and vacant by turns; the occassional babyware shop or the Oddball Mall (so-called, a tiny vintage joint) pop out like strawberries in a dust bed. When I come into the tight contention of that old familiar roundabout I've dropped almost all the way home (what's the street called? who can say? who can know the arcane streetmap mind?). From there it's just across the slight canal, edging the dive shop, and the easy slide of my own home street, past the overgrown lot and up to the door, key in the lock, and have at water.

From a list of skills in a modern-day RPG that my friend Lisa and I are hoping to develop:

SKILLS

In the spring of 1941 Alan [Turing] developed a new friendship. It was with Joan Clarke. . . .

If he came up with some scheme or entertainment then they would both join in with gusto. He had learnt how to knit, and had progressed as far as making a pair of gloves, expect for sewing up the ends. Joan was able to explain how to finish them off.

The joy, or the difficulty, was that the enjoyeed so easy a friendship. They were both keen on chess, and were quite well matched, even though Joan was a novice. . . . Alan used to call their efforts 'sleepy chess', taking place as they did after the nine hour night shift. Joan had only a cardboard pocket set, and proper chess pieces were unobtainable in wartime conditions, so they improvised their own solution. Alan got some clay from one of the local pits, and they modelled the figures together.

—Alan Turing: The Enigma, Andrew Hodges

Flickr member icons that riff on the über-neutral default.

I used to live here.

(I know, I'm slow. I'm foreign now.)

Salt.

It was somebody or other's 21st birthday, and my flatmate was going, so I tagged along. We were on beer detail, and the nearby shop had a choice between low-end six packs and high-end 22s*. I chose the high end. After I'd consumed three of those, someone brought out the tequila & the room did shots. Judging by the taste, this tequila may have been less expensive than the beer. I'm not much of a hard-partier, but when in Edinburgh...

Somehow or another we repaired to an Irish bar that was crowded and alive. A band was doing covers, and doing them well, helped by the inclusion of a fiddle player on stage right. At around 2:50 am, the band knocked off and on came "Ole." You know this song. It goes, "Ole! Ole ole! Ole ole, ole ole. Ole! Ole! (really high in this part) Oleeeh! Oh-oh-leh." Then I think it repeats.

Myself and everyone else in the bar were crowded together, arm on arm in circles, screaming at the top of our lungs "Ole! (etc.)" Someone looked at me and said, "Et's a football song, hew cin you not love it?" I'm not sure what I was doing to indicate that I did not love it—perhaps my volume was merely throat-threatening, not truly throat-shredding, or perhaps the fire in my eyes was only just a candle to his roaring flame. Perhaps he just wanted to catch me up on the background, which I appreciate. I didn't know it was a football song! Everyone poured out of the pub and into the cobblestone streets and kept carousing all the way home. For half a mile through the old town the streets were hopping with drunk, happy, young Edinburghers.

* Are fluid ounces metric at all? Maybe they were 650s.

Actual names of Edinburgh neighborhoods:

• Duddingston
• Portobello
• Gorgie (both Gs are saying "guh")
• Musselburgh
• Storeyhill
• Clovenstone
• Comely Bank
• Silverknowes
• Inveresk
• Pinkie
• Dumbiedykes
• UPDATE: The Jewel

I am on a large sailboat full of thieves and one of the things we steal is a prize bottle of wine. Someone on the boat decides to steal the prize bottle of wine from the hold and secretly serve it to everyone else over dinner. Later the captain discovers the chewed-up cork in a bag and there is a terrible row.

There's a cat on board and late, late at night, after the row is all sorted out, the cat is purring. Gradually the purring sounds more & more like sentences and we all think this is the most adorable thing. I go to sleep on the couch and the cat sits near my head, saying some awfully coherent things and I am so siked. Soon the cat is saying disturbing things: forceful, controlling things, and the cat how one long claw (like a talon!) stuck in the back of my head. I try to shake it off and it raises its loong second talon like an index finger of warning. I shake and shake and shake my whole head all around and the force of shaking wakes me up.

I'm alone in a room in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In this last dream I'm putting on a play. It's about man's struggle with nature and for some reason we have to use all kinds of live animals. After the performance I'm onstage and the snake keeps striking at me, possibly because I'm holding the preserved dead pig. Someone realizes he can feed the snake its own tail and so we watch as it bites down hard, severing its own body and yielding dark red blood.

During the show, we lose a CD and put in a different one in order to keep going. I am not sure whether it works (I am mortified that it may not) because I am backstage pulling the ropes; the curtain keeps blowing back from an inexplicable wind and threatening to reveal me. I am far too lazy about avoiding it and eventually it blows way up above my head so I stand very still. At some point my mother, in the audience, yells, "What is he doing back there?"

In the previous dream I am hiking alone on a steep rocky place. The view is fantastic--I see stony ridge after stony ridge stretching into the grey, diffuse distance--but then I see an arete crumble into the valley. A huge boulder slides down on the crumbling dust, then shatters instantly at the end. I sleep there and wake up in the morning, to see more of the aretes beginning to crumble, each one closer than the last. I decide to run down the rocky slope. Small, strange animals appear: one twisted, bevelled, smooth creature is hopping around on the brush, taunting me. It turns out to be a cellphone and I wonder if I'm hallucinating but it doesn't matter: I've got to get out of there.

When I get home, all my best friends are there, cooking, and they don't want to hear my story. It is boring to them and can't believe I'm going on.

In the dream after this I am in a clean wood-floored studio room, with about thirty other people, doing "movement" in some kind of workshop. We are trying to encounter one another without words. After dancing around for a bit, two large black men who are in the workshop catch me at the side of the room and ask me to sit down. Their eyes are serious, critical. I am sure they're going to confront me about my racism. Instead the man says he likes my movement.

There was a lecture by Tim Berners-Lee, and afterward I walked out to expansive patios; I thought, I'll just grab some coffee and head back to the office for a few more hours.

The first coffee shop was on Buccleuch Place, a cobblestone street, and there's a bookshop on the corner there, Pickering's Books, and out front was a sign: coffee! tea! etc. and an iron railing around stairs to below street level. So I went down and in and what was there but a wee cafe with a couple of raggedy, bearded blokes playing go.

Were they open? They were. But the coffee machine was defunct, so I took a cup of green tea. The go game was on a 9 × 9 board, and looked to be almost done. Near by was a copy of Attack and Defence, an go book I've been looking to get my hands on, so I flipped through. Did I play, the barrista wanted to know? A bit. Would I play a game? I guessed I would. This guy, by the name of Robbie, took on a 19 × 19 game with me while finishing the little one. Did I study math or CS, he wanted to know? CS. He's on break from his CS program, having apparently flunked out from playing too much go. How good was he? 5 kyu. And how long has he been playing? 8 months. "But I played a *lot* of go. Hence why I'm on my resets." (?)

I'd actually stumbled into a weekly session of the Edinburgh Go Club, and the many boards and books in the room belonged to the EGC. I got my hiney whooped in the game against Robbie, owing to a great many small mistakes and an overall lack of skill. But a few others walked in, attached to the cafe or the go club (generally both), and we played a few small-board games to some amusement. I'll be turning up there again.

Last night, around 21:00 or 22:00, I saw a small red fox in the suburbs of Edinburgh. It was on an ordinary residential street, with lots of walled gardens along, and there were others around with cellphones or cigarettes, preoccupied by those vices and taking no notice of the fox. Or perhaps foxes are commonplace here?

I know it's a fox because its tail was too bushy to be a cat, and it was too red and too pretty to be a possum.

This fox was only slightly bigger than a cat, which I can easily judge as it had a cat friend following closely behind. The fox made better time over land than the cat, and I was able to overtake the cat myself, even while stealthily slinking after the fox.

I always thought foxes were big, like big dogs, and ruthless, but no, I see they're dainty and sleeker than imagined. I see now why doe foxes need axes. (Ay.)

Whether twas vixen or tod, I know not.

Have you noticed that in the US, a store is named after the stuff you get there, while in Scotland it's always after the person who provides the service? Here you go to a newsagents, a confectioners, a tobacconists (apostrophe optional). Back home, in the US, you go to a news stand, a candy shop, or a cigar shop.

Here, too, are lots of places labelled "Vintners • Victuallers." That latter word I've elsewhere seen only in Cambridge, Mass., and then only on official documents.

The thing is not so much that people drive on the wrong side of the road. That much is easy to handle.

The problem is that everyone, on both sides of the road, is driving in the exact wrong direction. This becomes a problem when you go to cross the road on foot. You've safely looked leftward, stepped into the road, and begun crossing with your eyes on the far side toward your right. What happens then but someone is honking at you from behind (and not slowing down, by any means), since you're looking away from the oncoming traffic.

At the beginning of the security conveyor belt is a black man with a TSA polo shirt who is helping us get our things on the conveyor. He banters.

I forget to take my shoes off; he says, "That's required in every airport in the US. (beat) Even the crappy ones. (beat) Like Chicago." I chuckle.

The other TSA agents wear white uniforms with shoulder bands. Someone is returning the first agent's small talk: "How come you don't have to wear the uniform? These guys all have to wear the uniform."

"He gets paid more, that's why," say the uniformed guys.

"Nah," says the first agent, deadpan, "I voted for Bush, that's why."

I am standing in the hallway looking at a photo­graph. It is a black and white, 11 × 17 print; it shows three pigs in a white pen.

"How about an apple?" shouts my aunt as she rushes past me into the kitchen. I do not want any fruit. I have been stuffing my face in preparation for a twelve-hour airplane journey. The pigs are collected toward one corner of the picture; they're set off against a dark background of mud. It is a kind of picture that makes me think things are going to be alright.

"This picture—" I say. I am trying to get my aunt's attention, to ask her where it's from.

"And, you know," she shouts,, "You have to have your passport with you. You can't have that in your checked bags." She zips past me in the hallway again; I point at the picture before she is gone.

"Whose picture is—" I mutter.

"OK. Do we have everything?" shouts my aunt from the vestibule. I am packed. I have been packed for roughly three weeks. I am ready to go. I want to know who took this picture, who printed it.

I point at the picture, hoping to grab attention in the quiet of this question.

My uncle, 73.5 years old, shuffles into the hallway. I am pointing at the picture.

"Yah fahthah's," he breathes, him a lifelong native of Boston.

"Do you need any more food?" shouts my aunt from the vestibule. There is no pause. "The pigs?" she adds. "Your father gave us that."

Praise Internet!

If you're just tuning in, the post office mixed up some of my books with someone else's.

The news is this: someone (a nice couple in Berkeley, CA) found my books in a box they received. In my books they found my name, and my name, as it turned out, was also findable on the Internet. They "Googled" me and found this page, with my description of the problem, and immediately recognized their own books, which I'd found in my box.

Praise People! This nice couple emailed me and described some of my books in detail, enough to establish that most of what they'd found was really mine, and at least two were someone else's. We're working on getting those sent to me.

Now, I'm just trying to get their books sent along to them. Unfortunately, I left their books at the P. O. If you are in this situation, never leave those books at the P. O. The P. O. does not know what to do with them. The P. O. does not have a central "database" or "network" through which to coordinate claims of lost items. If you are in this situation, note that you yourself do have a database and a network, and some impressive algorithms (!) (!) (!) that allow you to find people who are having similar problems. Oh, you should also have a weblog in order to take advantage of that network. A weblog is your place to share online, and it puts the things you want to share in context so that people know who you are.

Luckily, early indications are that the P. O. does still have the books I left with them, so I'm hoping to get those to the nice folks who are sending me mine.

There is a buzzing from the trees, which I remember is called "cicadas." I've returned from an exile without insects and now nature seems flush with beings. The cement seems to be sprouting grass—but those are called "yards." There are bees, and oily compound eyeballs underfoot. Crabapples occassionally fall from the tree, and mowers come to cut back long-toothed grass.

There are empty places on the shelves of the convenience stores, and there are things they don't have, like shaving cream—but every store has hair extensions, and lots of 'em. The CVS is a big block with just those simple letters on the front. So much space is not advertising!

My parents' house has translucent paper on the windows, lending light everywhere, and the piano still makes sound.

Bruce Wilcox designed a famous early Go program, and also designed a strategy called Instant Go, and generally terrorized the Go scene with his cocky personality. I first heard of him when my dear aunt gave me a copy of the program at about age thirteen.

Digging through boxes this week, I found this "interview," tucked in behind the floppy. This bit of text had a rather significant impact on my own character development. I used to read it over and over, wondering at the nature of the person behind it. It's easy to recognize a few characteristic features of a certain culture here; you know who you are.

For a few years there, Bruce Wilcox, along with Will Wright (the creator of SimCity) were my heroes. They were creating toys that were thoughtful and imaginative, things which didn't have any obvious commercial value, but which were popular just because they were creative and elegant.

I met Bruce Wilcox once, briefly, when his program was competing in a computer Go tournament in my home town. While the game played, dialog boxes kept popping up that said things like "Can't free already freed cons cell" and he kept swatting them away. "That's a flaw," he would say—never a "bug," always a "flaw." My coworkers may recognize that turn of phrase has crept into my own diction.

Bruce Wilcox designed a famous early Go program, and also designed a strategy called Instant Go, and generally terrorized the Go scene with his cocky personality. I first heard of him when my dear aunt gave me a copy of the program at about age thirteen.

Digging through boxes this week, I found this "interview," tucked in behind the floppy. This bit of text had a rather significant impact on my own character development. I used to read it over and over, wondering at the nature of the person behind it. It's easy to recognize a few characteristic features of a certain culture here; you know who you are.

For a few years there, Bruce Wilcox, along with Will Wright (the creator of SimCity) were my heroes. They were creating toys that were thoughtful and imaginative, things which didn't have any obvious commercial value, but which were popular just because they were creative and elegant.

I met Bruce Wilcox once, briefly, when his program was competing in a computer Go tournament in my home town. While the game played, dialog boxes kept popping up that said things like "Can't free already freed cons cell" and he kept swatting them away. "That's a flaw," he would say—never a "bug," always a "flaw." My coworkers may recognize that turn of phrase has crept into my own diction.

Marc is unstoppable. Don't forget to set up dinner with him, no matter where you are.

Unknown:

Remembered, this weekend, how every so often there is a bounty afflicting our lives, called Summer—it seems to occur about once every two years—and the stores are flush with cherries, and heirloom tomatoes appear, and the air warms over and over and for a day or two you have nothing to do but what needs to be done and even the Internet is an egregious superfluity.

Got cherries and coffee at the store; wrote emails and vacuumed and organized the room and scanned photos and picked through recipes. Noticed how much of my life, normally, is given over to hunting some kind of insight, some enlightenment. Whatever happened to "Chop wood, carry water"?

Tonight, done chopping the water, I'm reading "Simon's Luck" by Alice Munro. She keeps one on one's toes, and yet it's like being at home, being with someone you trust.

Eddie's Cafe is good news for people who love bad news. The family that runs the place will greet you with a shout within seconds of your crossing the threshold, put your food in front of you within about two minutes of your ordering, and have your check waiting quietly by the sugar thing within about fifteen minutes of your sitting down.

Here an old man can sit down and, when the proprietress asks cheerily, "How are you today?" he can answer, "Not too bad, I guess," without a look askance. At the counter, hipsters mingle with leathery working men, pointing to each others' food in signal of what they want, and there's always a short line outside the door. The coffee is bottomless, though not particularly fresh, and the eggs are always decently greasy, if undercooked. Eddie's Cafe is a place you feel good about eating alone; here you feel good nursing a hangover, cavilling to a buddy about a girlfriend, or just generally feeling like shit.

Northeast Corner of Divisadero and Fulton.

(December 4, 2004)

Two girls on the bus, about 15. Chewing gum; eyeliner.

One: My bus.
Two: What? No.
One: It's my bus I called it.
Two: You can't call animals.
One: Yes I can you can call anything.
Two: No cuz remember Andy kept trying to call people and we decided.
One: No. Everything he was calling was stupid.
Two. Well, anyway. (long pause) That bus emptied out quick.
One: Yeah, everybody got off that bus.
(long pause)
Two: Our parents are like totally in it for us, huh? We have the same curfew, and they're talking to each other all the time. They're like best friends and we didn't even know it.
(long pause)
One: I can't wait 'til my parents go to Burning Man. Cuz I got the key and there's nothing—they can—do a—bout it.
Two: Does your Dad let you?
One: Yeah, but he doesn't really care.
Two: My favorite thing now? Is that I know the password to the answering machine.
One: Oh, you do?
Two: Yeah, I can totally check all the messages. Do you guys have an answering machine?
One: No.
Two: I thought you did.
One: We do but it never like picks up and you can hear it. It's like (stretches arms wide) out there in cyberspace. It sucks dick.
(long pause)
Two: Yeah, when your parents go to Burning Man we should hang out.
One: Yeah, totally.

1936

the experiences i am having at the moment are not without value. i thought i could learn to write for films, but i see that it would take more than just a morning's work; the technique is at a quite primitive stage. however i am learning something different. although kortner treats me as an absolute equal, the nature of the work means that i am beginning to feel like an employee. i have not chosen the subject i am working on for myself, i can't relate to it and i don't know what will happen to my work when it comes on the market. i only have my labour to sell, and what is done with it afterwards has nothing to do with me. my interest are quire opposed to those of my employer. since i am on a weekly wage, it is not good for me if the work progresses quickly, quite the contrary. already i even catch myself taking out my watch as evening approaches; i want to get away, it's time for real life to begin. real life is quite separate, and incidentally quite unappealing. but in 'my own time' i don't waste a single thought on my daily work. i leave with the little englishman who works alongside me as translator and we strictly avoid touching anything that might remind us of work. i feel a sense of total solidarity with him when he refuses to work on sundays. kortner seems to have noticed this incipient class consciousness, for he often says on the phone, when he is canceling an appointment, that with his job he has work to do—just as any boss might. whenever he can, he makes mock of his employers, points out their inferiority and laziness, whereupon we are both silent.

at lunch—i eat at his place and hanna kortner is very nice—it all stops and i am the great poet once more. i have the privilege of being able to take a nap, but then, after coffee, the situation changes once more. the paper i am using to write this is from work: i pinched it.

—Bertolt Brecht, Journals, 1934–1955

This last Friday eve I had the chance to catch the band Menomena, which shared a bill with Robbers on High Street and The Nationals. Menomena is something special. Where the Robbers on High Street are a good indie band—distinctive but formulaic, Menomena is a unique blend of techniques, genres, and influences. Theirs is an experimental programme, tempered by a knowledge of true pop, true rock. They can frustrate expectations—indeed every track does so—but they're no strangers to musical pleasure or tasty hooks.

Menomena lyrics can be awfully boyish and vaguely self-absorbed—there's a lot of "I" in these songs—but the vocals don't dominate and the band's not pretentious; they're just infused with an anxiety of identity. They're artists wondering who they are and where they stand.

The sound of the group culls from places where I expect to find Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins, but also Múm and the landscapes of Kinski and Labradford, even a valley of Björk. Their drummer is of the first order (certainly in athleticism, probably in beat-keeping too) and it's exciting to hear a martial drum beat intermixed with an ingenuous xyllophone melody that might have come from the mobile above my crib. When the bari sax enters, syncopated against all that, you know Menomena has arrived.

Check out their disc, "I Am the Fun Blame Monster," an anagram of "The First Menomena Album."

In which the cat is somewhat too large.

Unknown, you asked how discpline's acquired; I don't know and you must know I don't know. For me discipline comes only out of emptiness, out of times when you want nothing except to walk into the emptiest field around even the field lacking emptiness the one marred by gray brush, with lengths of metal and dull hills. And there's no discipline there's hope, there's hope that in a marred gray field evidence might strike. And when you've seen something—those rabbit's ears flicking, that anise in the gravel—there's no discipline; there's only fear of stopping. Succumbing to the fecund field.

Walked into what was apparently a nice garden store in a small room packed with greenery and tanks at every level, with windows overlooking the inside of a larger urban mall. It seemed nice enough.

Then a row of short plants (spinach? carrots?) started wiggling and chattering together, just as they might in the presence of locusts, but this startled me.

Then a small black monster ran across the floor, and immediately thereafter a snake slithed its way across the plants and up to my face.

For the next... half hour? hour? I was successively terrorized by every manner of wild beast or cretin that has ever walked the earth.

All the while, Judith was there, sitting in a corner, unterrified, chuckling at my wild fear.

Eventually, Judith left me to me devices, saying, as she always does, "This is one of my favorite places in San Francisco."

And the shop's owner, a sweet, thin older lady, floated serenely nearby, watching me. Every once in a while a light rain would fall briefly, or some plant's tail would spin on its own.

It was a very long time before I got the idea that this was a sort of Museum of Jurassic Technology, a place where anything could be real but almost nothing is. It became clear when the snake returned and the owner encouraged me to pick him up; I snapped his head as if he were made of the frailest plastic. Even then, though I was prepared for the shocks, I was able to repeatedly abuse myself by looking under some low terrarium, say, and finding a platoon of advancing mice there, all ready to crawl on me.

I awoke throat-parched and wild. Listening, I heard some tiny scratching noise off in the corner. I put on the lights and got a glass of water.

In Praise of Thinking

Thinking is much maligned! How often does one hear admonishons against thinking, or does someone trample with noises & cooings into your aerie of still bliss?

Thinking, it seems, is thought of (ha!) in any number of salubrious ways—as an attack by the left brain on the right, or by Word-mad Europeans on more tranquil, thoughtless First Peoples. There are those who suggest that any thinking is an imbalance, or a constriction of the spirit.

No, I say! All persons are thinkers, for there are so many different kinds. Thinking is more than some mechanical application of logical rules to statements of language—no, that is just cogitating.

What of considering, that easy gesture to hold in mind some events or people, turning them around, noticing and appreciating each facet in its fullness? To consider is to absorb things, to store what experience gives you.

Contemplating is what I have learned to call my attention to nature, such as it is. To "contemplate flowers" is to witness them and marvel at their making.

How about musing, which seeks after some faint inspiration caught on the wind, to toy with it and tease it out?

And musing, it sometimes gives way to full-blown imagining, a gale-force fury to flesh-out an image, to limn it with details and to make it scintillate in the mind.

This could hardly be confused with weighing, the judge's act of taking some incompatible observations and feeling out their heft, the better to inform further action. Weighing is what any of us does in the face of a mighty decision, when all ways cry "Yes" or all of them "No"; how could weighing be left to overwrought philosophers?

To say nothing of ruminating: deftly to duck into a forgotten corridor of memory, where scenes appear and have now a new impact, a new weight, in the light of ensuing experience. Who could count rumination as the logician's sole province?

Fathoming could cover the act of guaging a new-met stranger, sounding his depths, not to know him or prejudge, but just to know him, in the first days of the acquaintance.

If there is a universal among these species, I hope it is plotting. He who has never plotted an April Fool's gag or some delicious comeuppance is a lost man. To plot is to think, for sure.

Then there is reflecting, another maligned variety; but this too is essential, as it is every being's chance to see inside herself, to watch the feelings like a fire and discern the causes of their flickerings.

When courage is needed, I do a jot of summoning—summoning of powers, that is. By concentrating the mind, by reviewing the causes, the slights, the needs, that drive me to action, I can act with a firm resolve.

In this class I even count meditating, which clears out the mind and waits, and notices, and avoids taking hold. It is meditators, above all others, who condescend to my "thinking," but I count them my allies in this.

Thinking is not all (it is not meat, nor drink). But if you see someone silent, don't assume she's cogitating; she may be considering, or plotting, or summoning her powers.

Skype has some neat cartoons on their site about why you should share.

It made me feel like sharing.

Had a dream this morning that the alleys near my house were workshops.

Walking through I saw a guy locomoted himself about in a big chair using long poles with casters fixed at the ends. He was wearing a serious bright yellow helmet, like a motorcycle helmet, but with a big eye painted on the front. He looked like a big tubby cyclops. The effect was something like this:

Later, I saw the apparatus alone so I hopped in and gave myself a tour around the neighborhood. Ha!

On waking, my roommate said, "Sounds like Burning Man." No, I wanted to say, Burning Man sounds like dreams.

My roommate was watching The Fifth Element. When I walked out, Milla Jovovich had been born in a glass jar, wrapped in six pieces of masking tape, and was writhing, speaking unintelligibly, and running from a group of amiable men.

When I came back, an hour and a half later, Milla Jovovich was wrapped in fabric and rubber, writhing in a stone temple, speaking in fragments, while Bruce Willis wrangled her into the center for a dramatic kiss.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

If any proof is still needed that industrialized people are no more, and no less, complicated than non-industrialized people, look no further than Lawrence Osborne's article, "Strangers in the Forest," from the April 18, 2005 New Yorker. In this, the myth of the Noble Savage is swiftly debunked, and we are bettered by a recognition of strange people.

Probably there are finer ethnographic studies at hand, readings from which I could learn more even than from this short article, but Osborne did more in these roughly 7 pages than any such in my undergraduate curriculum, certainly more than those officious old studies from the turn of the 20th century. Contemporary anthropology, I sense, is more humble in studying that grand old Other, than anything from Malinowski to Levi-Strauss, just to pick some fenceposts. The newer stuff seeks to study similarities as much as differences between cultures, and recognizes that for any of the fictions that we live by in one culture, there are equally fictious mandates in any other.

Hippies and Apologists of Westernism (right back to Rousseau) are wont to see an admirable simplicity in that Other, while arrogant Structuralists have at times seen their science as encompassing, therefore transcending, all the "simpler" machinations of the target culture. And most of us have long presumed that non-technological cultures have remained unchanged for thousands of years, marking a primitive, frozen state of our own culture—but it's quite plausible that all societies do change, although not all have a relentless pressure to change; not all societies have "progress" has their prime directive.

After reading the article, I jumped up to come here and write this. I imagined myself explaining to a Kombai man by the fire, "I have a machine that allows me to instantly contact anyone that I've met before, because in my society, everyone is always near one of these machines, . . ."

Him: Do you see a bus down there?
Me: (looks) Nah. I think one just came a minute ago.
Him: Did it?
Me: I think I saw it as I was walking up.
Him: I just walked all the way down here from Market.
Me: And you didn't see it?
Him: No. (pause) They come pretty frequent, though, don't they?
Me: Fifteen, twenny minutes.
(Pause.)
Him: I just got a bunch of tennis rackets. My buddy, his ex-girlfriend left him, he didn't wanna have any of her stuff around, he said, "Take it!" I said, some of this got's money in it, he said "I don't care, I don't want it!" He said he was gonna turn gay cause his girlfriend left him, I said, "Don't turn gay just cause your girlfriend left you, she ain't a wife or nothing." But he said, take all this stuff, I don't want it.
Me: Do you play tennis?
Him: No.
Me: You just gonna sell 'em?
Him: No, I don't know what I'm gonna do with 'em.
Me: (shrugs)
Him: I'm Darnell.
Me: Ezra.
Him: Israel? Spiritual man?
Me: Nah—maybe.
Him: Yes you are. Spiritual's better than religious.
Me: (shrugs)
Him: I'm a shaman myself.
Me: Ah.
Him: I try to help people as much as I can, help human beings, cause that's what I am, a human being. I hate to see these people dyin', folks all around us dyin', I just hate to see that. And I was told, baptised when I was eight years old, and I was told I was gonna live forever, and I can't help but believe it. That's what they told me. And when I started preaching, ordained preacher, I started preachin' in all-black Baptist congregation, I went in there and I said, why would you have a church, preaching what you preachin, love and charity, and won't let a white man in to your church? I said, I can't do that. I will not be a hypocrite. That's what I told my mother, she cried, I said, I'll heal the nations, minister in my own town, but I will not be a hypocrite. I think the black people did something wrong at some point, that's why we got so many problems. You see how AIDS ain't the gay disease anymore, it's—well it's Africa, now, it's *my* people. Shaka Zulu did something wrong when he sold off his own people, he should have sold off the queen instead, but instead he sold off his people. You know he had eight million guards all around the country?
Me: That's a lot of people.

(bastardized, apologies to the kosmos)

April 18 is the wedding day of Esme, of "For Esme with Love and Squalor."

Url-encoding is an operation that takes something called a string and turns it into something different: a url-encoded string. This operation never trips up—there is no string you can feed it that will make it say “I can't encode that.” At the same time, every encoded string that it emits is so perfectly encoded that it can be fed to another operation (decode) which emits the original string—exactly.

Encode and decode are a perfect team, of cook and eater: there's no way for the eater to digest something that the cook can't make, nor can the cook make something that the eater can't eat.

Unless you mix up their roles, and feed the eater a recipe, or point the cook at a finished meal. These guys don't know what to do with the kind of stuff that the other one routinely consumes.

With strings, similarly, you should not feed an encoded string to the encoder. Why not? Because it doesn't need to be encoded; therefore you probably made a mistake somewhere. A typeful programming language with distinct types for encoded and unencoded strings would force you to recognize this error up front. The encoder operation could have the type

  encoder : rawstring -> encodedstring

meaning that it only accepts a raw string as an argument and only emits encoded strings. If you then try to apply it twice to a raw string:

   temp = encoder(str);
   encoded = encoder(temp);

The language would balk at you, saying, “function 'encoder' cannot have type encodedstring -> encodedencodedstring!” or something like that. If the two encoding steps are so close together, as above, this might seem foolish—“I can see that myself just fine, and why should it gripe at me?” says the skeptic. But if there is some complicated plumbing in between, it might not be clear whether the output of the first encoder() call would ever get fed to the second encoder() call. Here's a contrived example:

  temp1 = encoder(str);
  temp2 = decoder(temp1);
  if (some_remote_test()) {
    temp3 = temp2;
  } else {
    temp3 = temp1;
  }
  return temp3;

Is the return value (temp3) encoded or not? It depends on whether some_remote_test returns true or false. But that operation never makes sense! Whoever's consuming return values of this function needs to know how to interpret those values. If it's going to stick that value into a URL, should it encode the value? The consumer will never know.

If, on the other hand, the above function were defined with a specific return type, either rawstring or encodedstring, then the compiler would complain that the wrong type had been assigned to temp3, either in the “if” clause or the "else" clause.

On the other hand, what if you want to write a function that really does use some external determinant to decide whether to decode a given string? Maybe some wire protocol contains a flag that indicates whether some string is encoded. Fine—our language should support this. Then I'll posit two new functions:

  forget : encodedstring -> rawstring
  inject : rawstring -> encodedstring

These functions have the same types as encode and decode, but the operate differently. “forget” turns an encoded string into an unencoded one by simply “forgetting” that it was encoded in the first place. It effectively reinterprets the same bytes as not being encoded.

Similarly, “inject” throws a rawstring into the encoded world without actually encoding it. This is useful if you know it's already encoded. If it's not encoded, the resulting value might be bogus, but you can always handle that as an error case whenever convenient.

The essential insight that typeful thinking brings is this: type determines interpretation. If a certain sequence of bytes sits in a variable of the rawstring type, I know I should interpret "%20" as a percent, followed by a 2, followed by a 0. If the same bytes are in a variable of the encodedstring type, then I should interpret "%20" as a space character. type determines interpretation.

You can not generally tell, by looking at it, whether a string is encoded or not. The string "Albert%20Hall" might be encoded or not; likewise "Albert" might be encoded or not. On the other hand, "Albert%2525252520Hall" might be encoded lots or not at all! It only depends on the intended interpretation. "Albert%20Hall" might be intended as a sequence of 13 characters, one of which is the percent character; or it might be intended as an encoded form of an 11 byte string, namely "Albert%20Hall". If you said, “Encode this, but not if it's already encoded,” I wouldn't know what to do, because I can interpret it either way.

So let's revisit the idea of a function that takes a string, encoded or not, and a boolean that tells us which. The function must return a rawstring that represents the same string, when the right interpretation is implied. In order to do this, we have to forcibly reinterpret the raw bytes—that's what "forget" and "inject" are for. So the function could look like this:

  function maybe_decode(str : rawstring, is_encoded : boolean)
    if (is_encoded) {
      result = decode(inject(str));
    } else {
      result = str;
    }
    return result;
  }

As I said, "inject" can actually produce an encodedstring value which isn't actually legal in the encoding ("decode" would choke on it). But that could only happen in this case if the is_encoded flag were incorrect—if the flag were set but the string were not really encoded. This function is trusting the caller; in that respect the type system doesn't help us catch errors. But the advantage is that, throughout the rest of the program, the types will help us find places where someone tried to pass an encoded string where a raw string was expected, or vice versa. This happens a lot. A lot a lot.

The key premise of all this is that every location where a string will be stored has just one interpretation: encoded or not. This forces you to encode and decode when moving data from a location with one interpretation to another; it also prevents scratching your head and cursing your co-workers for not documenting whether a given location holds raw or encoded data; and it prevents you from unintentionally double-encoding. Most important, it prevents having a variable with both possibilities, so that you'd need to expect (conservatively) that either might appear.

You might think this is pedantic, but I'm not done yet. Tune in tomorrow for “Monads Functors and Double-encoding.”

The rain is slamming loud into the windows and the house is quiet. It's a night I should be in the warmth with my lover, toil-tired and reading Tintin books.

In case there is a young bachelor out there who cooks pasta sometimes, I wish to impart this wisdom to you (O Bachelor):

When replacing an opened bag of pasta to the top shelf, do not place it with the open side toward the back of the shelf (thinking "Oh, the closed end will portect it from spilling out")—instead, place it with the open side toward the room, thinking, "Ah, when I lift the bag, the pasta will come with the bag and not remain partly on the shelf, falling onto my head."

Dear Unknown,

I had a perception I wanted to share with you. It's long; bear with me?

I was thinking of my friend Carrie, who moved to Seattle right after falling in love with a boy. This in itself has perplexed me, but that's not what I was thinking about.

Wow. I played so much Twister last night.

I'm in the spare two-flat I once lived in as a wee one. Person L from my history has come—for Christmas, I guess. We have a small tree in the empty front room and I am taking little wooden Christmas trinkets from a box. "Trim lightly," says L wrily from another room. I make a small assembly of trees, animals, and melty-shaped hobgoblins in front of the tree.

My mother comes home and sees L from the threshold. She smiles and says, "Hello," then crosses the room, to set down her bags and take some things out. "That's awkward," blurts L. I giggle nervously. "What's awkward?" asks my mother in good humor. "That she took so long after crossing the room," says L. I awake into a miasma with stretching.

As I was walking down Townsend street, from 4th to 5th, a tall fellow coming the other direction was opening garbage cans and looking inside. Just as I passed him, he got one open, took a big whiff of air, looked straight at me and said, (↑)

This one restaurant seemed a fine dark place, just shrouded by its windows. I stepped inside and found myself in Willy Wonka's factory for dining experience: small tables were laid with napkins in ornate white patterns. Women removed tawny coats with their sharp furry frillings and set them in neat but un-fussy piles by the carved umbrella stand. Waiters in white aprons spun past with demitasse cups, and the cook was just visible, working dilligently through a small window. The dull din of talk kept every conversation private, each pair or triple of diners was lit closely with miniature spotlights, hung from delicate steel cords just over their heads, and the wall, from the woodwork to the windows, was washed a sweet auburn. Wanting a dynamic view of what passersby might come, I took a single seat at the window counter, and folded my hat to one side. I breathed deep in the pleasantries of the waiter's recitation, and after ordering, set my menu down, to feast my eyes outdoors. All throughout this I had the vague sense that I had forgotten something, as when you are walking around looking for your hat and keys and, finding your keys, proceed out the door but asking yourself whether you had phoned the bank.

But soon the salad came, which was mercifully light on the ever-present lettuce but gill-filled with walnuts, almonds, fresh and sun-dried tomatoes, obscure and obscene cheeses, and a generous helping of sesame-tahini-and-honey dressing. I devoured it in due course. Next came a swift, hot bowl of soup: thick with lentils and squash and softened by hours on the stove.

At long last came that most momentous of arrivals, the main course, a sincere concoction of mahi, caked finely with small amounts of orange-soy sauce and deft grantings of cheese, and like a milkshake of old, it was capitated with a gracious red cherry—dessert in advance. As I shovelled the last forkful in of this delicious, happy meal, I looked up and realized with a start what I'd been missing all along: my love was beyond the glass.

Dear my Unknown, I was wanting to write to you. I was wanting to write to you about all the things that I was thinking about. I was wanting to write to you about the patterns in music and how they're abstract, how they mean nothing. That listening is a supreme act of faith, since there's nothing to those patterns but patterns, and that a young man our age in Russia in 1985 made an index card for each person he found in the national archives who had disappeared, and he made a card file of 200,000 people. Did you know there were 300,000 people at Woodstock in 1969? Can you picture them in the field there, as shown in the film, as caught by the cameras, recorded by the apparatus, 300,000 skating on mud naked? Can you imagine them all assasinated in a single shot? If you imagine this happened every summer, 300,000 people killed in one go, every summer for twenty years, this is something like what the Holocaust was: The biggest Woodstock every summer, all wiped out in a stroke, that many times. And if you imagine this happened every summer: 300,000 people killed in a moment, if you imagine this happened every summer for one hundred years, our entire lives and longer, then you know: this is what Stalin did to the Soviet people, united in Socialist union, devoted to perpetual revolution.

Mathematics is the study of patterns such as they exist in the mind; it is a collection of truths which need no validation in concrete experience. The ordinal numbers are innumerable because you can imagine them and because the things you're imagining can't be brought in correspondence to the natural numbers. If the things you're imagining can be given such a correspondence, you're not imagining the ordinal numbers.

I wanted to write to you about how I feel these days which is loaded with privilege and unchallenged, just like you. I want to spend my time as I used to, working and living, rather than as I do now, commuting and waiting. If I could find my place to work I would work; this way of life doesn't bring challenges but it doesn't bring the executioner in a leather smock, either, holding his pistol to the back of your cousin's head.

Listening is a supreme act of faith; you don't know that it will lead you to feel things. But if you don't listen you won't feel things. I was wanting to write you this but instead I went to Yoga and cleaned the house and boiled couscous for dinner.

(further Hurstoniana)

• Hurston typewrote her letters, and she wrote to the dean of Morgan College that she wanted to meet him, because someday the world would need a biographer for him, someone who knew him as a dean, a husband, a father. . .
• She had an acquaintance with John Lomax, brother of Allan Lomax, whose ethnomusicological recordings were used to such fine effect in Moby's Play. This gives me the sound for Tea Cake's "box," which he was always plucking in Their Eyes Were Watching God (was it Tea Cake on that box?).
  

From a letter written by Zora Neal Hurston, to her godmother:

At a church dinner the other night a man offered to buy me some chicken. He was informed that there wasn't any more chicken. This embarassed him, and he said, "Well, I swear, there was some chicken here before. . ." The woman there said, "Oh, so you wanted to offer her some chicken-was."

A last smatter.

Another spate of books for gift.

Hi.

I'd like to set some books free. Over the next few days, I'll make a series of posts describing the books. Any of these are available for a song—in exchange, absolutely anything will do. I'll ship them anywhere in the US; international shipments might be negotiable.

Two of the books are very fine books and are very dear to me; it's important that these go to a good home. The others can go to any taker. None are complete duds—except maybe for Nihonsense. The rest have had at least some value to someone at some point in history.

There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he though about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him—least of all the things that should have.

"It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time," he remarked one day as he walked dejectedly home from school. "I can't see the point in learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February." And, since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all.

—The Phanton Tollboth, Norton Juster

So you aren't famous yet, but you know you will
be...you're Pre-Bikini Kill Kathleen Hanna

Which Kathleen Hanna Are You?

This flickr tag is underpopulated. What can we do about that, folks?

UPDATE: That's a start. Thanks, Mike.

This turned out astonishingly good. I was only trying to get myself fed with a minimum of effort, but I'm now thinking of moving to a diet containing nothing else.

Fry up the onion and squash in some oil. Put a little zing in there—I recommend pepperoncini. Also splash some sherry on at some point. Just a little.

Meanwhile, cook the soba as suggested on the package: boil water, add soba, let it boil, stirring, for five minutes, then add cold water, return to boil, cook five more minutes, turn off heat, let sit for five minutes.

When all that's done, drain the soba and scoop it into bowls. Drop the charred veggies on top and garnish with big slices of avocado. Splash with soy sauce.

I think it's really the "extra fancy" soba that does it. Don't skimp on that soba, kids.

There was a ruckus at city hall. The rubrick was "World Cyber Games." I counted myself ethically responsible to stop and observe the proceedings.

This being only the opening ceremonies, there was no actual game-playing on display. Too bad. The first speaker was a former football star, who stated that San Francisco is a city of champions and that he was once a champion, because he once took a pass from Jerry Rice, and that the players this weekend should trust their intuition in order to become champions as well.

The MC vamped the gap to each successive speaker with a deep voice that seemed about to break into: "This summer.... they're going for the ride of their lives... (whaaaaa) one week... two friends... and the videogame championship... of a lifetime."

Presiding over the affair was Gavin Newsom. Yes, that Gavin Newsom. His words were to the effect that Mr. Yung made a very good choice in hosting the 2004 World Cyber Games in San Francisco—the first outside of Korea, mind you—because this is a great city of opportunity in the area of video games. When he finished speaking there was a salvo of fireworks from immediately behind the platform. Then we endured the ceremonial passing of the trophy from Mr. Yung to Mr. Newsom (more like a casual handoff, by my lights). Finally a procession presented the flag of the World Cyber Games, and (much more ritually, with plaid uniforms and horns in full blare) raised it over Civic Center, to fly there proudly for the four days of the Games.

Excluding twenty plaid-uniformed flag bearers, the male-to-female ratio was somewhere in the high three digits. I tried to tally the women present but I lost track after "five."

I did stand near one of these heterosexual couples; his arms were wrapped possessively around her body even while they walked. During one silence she jumped up and down excitedly and was heard to say, "... siked to go play Grand Theft Auto?" When a very distinctive techno track came on the PA (I think it was melody B over beat A) she pushed away and moved her rumpus in a rhythmical fashion, tossing her head coyly over her shoulders to check his reaction. I give them the thumbs up: fit for coupling.

As for that, it occurred to me that in the last 29 years, I have cried 17 times. It was in 1975 that I turned eighteen and began marking down each good cry as a tally mark in the front page of a journal. Between 1982 and 1985 was a total hiatus: I was working my first real job, I was loving the music (Go-Gos, yes!), there was no opportunity to cry. One memorable weep was early in 1990 when Jamie Lee Curtis hosted Saturday Night Live and her first words on stage were these: "Ladies and Gentlemen, as of one hour ago, Nelson Mandela is a free man!" The cheering that came after was as long and as strong as any ever given by that audience, and it took me over. I had met Nelson Mandela once—I grew up in a village in the Transkei near the one where he was born; he attended a Little League game in which I pitched. He must have known one of the players on the other team. After the game he said to me, "That was a fine pitch." Today I remember the tone of his vowels, which sound like a foreign accent to me now because I have adopted the voice of my new home, America.

Some cries went unmarked, undoubtedly, and there may have been more than one time I made a mark, only because I wanted to believe I'd been affected. When I lost my first girlfriend, in 1979, to a woman with a thicker beard, I went straight home and made three violent tallies, then scratched two of them out, had ice cream, and felt fine.

Some went unmarked because of the austerity of the road. When I travel light I bring only a toothbrush, a change of underwear, and a set of brass knuckles. When I travel heavy I bring two suitcases: one full of clothes and the journal, and one packed with fist-sized rocks which I leave along the route, as my way of undoing the damage I did to the Earth by topping my kitchen counters with marble.

I have a tendency to sob deeply and meaninglessly when deep in my cups. I had three glasses of red wine in a dark tavern in Sioux City once, driving from Seattle to Chicago for a convention of spinsters, and at the bottom of the third glass I looked up and saw the clock, which was painted like a 78 rpm record, and where the numbers should've been, I realized, were 12 disco Apostles. I couldn't stop bawling for a minute and a half. I was watching the second hand. This was a "heavy" journey; I made a mark inside the front cover and left a rock on the front door of the tavern.

It is said since old times that great loves arise when people share their passion. I wonder if this is true, or if it's not instead that they come when two folks share the same pain or fears.

A woman asked me once (under heightened circumstances) what it was I wanted a relationship of love to be. I answered stupidly with some quality I wanted my other to have; she transcended me. What she wanted: an alliance. It has been a year and I'm still staggering from this realization.

An alliance; two individuals who see one another's potential and work to bolster each other in their pursuits. That's a fine vision of love going forward.

There were those days when the Planetarium seemed like all that heaven would allow. It was the only time in a school year full of half-assed exercises and dull books that you could be with your compatriots in rapt silence, awed by the great swilveling machine, lifted into cosmic consideration, and not have to plod through some dull exercise or dodge the cruelties of the "play"ground.

Even the ENTRANCE TRANSITION was majesetic: You'd walk up the pitch-dark walkway and pass through the searing red laser line that counted occupants, into those deep, cradling, leather chairs and quickly be alone in your knowledge of My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nice Peanuts (or Pistachio Nuts, depending on the epoch), you'd be exalted in your neophyte's calculation of the planets' elliptical motion, your reckoning with the enormity of emptiness from our sun's outermost planet to the next nearest star; you were made tiny, philosophically insignificant, by the orders of magnitude that separated all your earthly perception from even one small corner of this galaxy—but you were made huge, elated, by the near grasp of so many billions of stars, the ability, if nothing else, to witness this vastness of vastnesses, and the privilege to contemplate.

There were those days.

London, Paris, Unreal.

Given a dag, how many distinct ways are there to topologically sort it? (A topological sort of a dag is a sequence of vertices of the dag such that if there is a path from u to v in the dag, then u appears before v in the sequence).

I don't know the answer. I was able to figure it out for the limited case of trees.

Consider the subtree of some vertex v. Suppose that v has n children and that we've already managed to sort the subtrees rooted at v's children. If the subtree of each child i has q_i distinct sortings, then we can choose a sorting for each of n children in \Pi_i{q_i} different ways. Given such a choice of n sortings, we want to know how many different ways there are to intertwingle them. To that end, think of each sorting of a child as a queue. To form an overall sorting of these $n$ sortings, we repeatedly choose a queue, remove its head element, and use that as the next element of the total order. The number of ways to do this depends, of course, on the sizes of the various queues.

Think of the sizes of the queues as a vector (q_1, q_2, q_3, ... q_n). Choosing a queue and popping its head is equivalent to reducing one co-ordinate of this vector by a unit.

Thus, the number of different ways to choose all the elements from all the queues is exactly the same as the number of minimal paths from (q_1, q_2, q_3, ... q_n) to the origin in an n-dimensional lattice. Let P(v) be the number of such paths from a vertex v. I'll build up a recursive computation for P(v) based on some examples below.

size(v) is the length of any minimal path from v to origin, which is also the sum of all the coordinates of v.

P(0) = 1

P(d, 0, ... 0) = 1 (if we are on an axis, there is only one path to the origin: along the axis)
P(d, 1, 0, ... 0) = d+1 (if we are one step off an axis, we must traverse that step, but we can do it at any point along the path parallel to the axis)
P(d, 1, 1, 0, ... 0) = (d+1)^2 (if we are two steps off an axis, in two different directions, then we must traverse each of those, and the choice of where to traverse them is independent)

[further details omitted until they can be corrected]

the last words of Fahrenheit 9/11
were tucked at the bottom of the screen:
because of our actions

How would you like to be called REVEREND?

The fly was here for several days.

Today I blew on it. It barely moved: a tired, old fly.

An old fly doesn't look much different from a young fly. Does it?

According to this, ezra ranks way higher than ovipositor.

The note on the front door said,

TO OUR WATER CONSUMERS:

Water supply improvements being made in your area will require a brief interruption of your water supply. We regret this necessary inconvenience and would like to suggest that you fill suitable containers (pails or tubs can be used) to meet your water needs during this period.

May we also suggest that you give particular attention to the prevention of flooding by making sure that no fixtures are inadvertently left open at the time service is restored?

Thank you for your cooperation!

What the note did not mention is that just after water service would be restored—just as the men were climbing in the lorry and jotting off to their next errand—the toilet of your neighbor would begin continuously and indefinitely to spew forth water.

Nor: that by the time the sweet sounds of running water and agitated voices would reach you, there would be a puddle inch-deep on said neighbor's hardwood floors.

Nor: that the girl downstairs of the flood (herself newly dripped upon) would arrive breathless to tell everyone present, "Oh wow I'm so fucked up, I'm so tripping right now." No doubt!

Nor did the note mention how much fun the building would have in banding together, contributing mops and towels and buckets, and finally, after eight months of occupancy, introducing themselves to one another.

I met a jovial fellow at a party last night whose name was "Less Stress."
Maybe it was "Les Stress."

He was short with a thick gray beard streaming away from a friendly smile.

He said, "A lot of times, your last name is the thing you're focused on. I think it should be that way."

"You're focused on stress?" I asked.

"Well, I'm focused on less stress."

There was apparently also someone at the party with the first name "Trauma" (last name something like "Rhinoceros"). I'm starting to like California.

Melissa S. W. had appeared out of nowhere, and we went to some pastoral campgrounds with sweet wet grass.

At the fringe of these swart hills we sat down in a swampy pond. Though it was reedy and gloumphy with mud, it was pleasant to sit in it with friends. The afternoon was summery and cool and it was like a barbeque where you don’t know anyone but there's a good free story on each one's lips and everyone is opening up.

From the swamp there, we saw a tiny town, and Melissa and I went roaming in its little library. Before long, we were riding on each others’ shoulders, careening up and down the stacks. She plucked a book out while atop my shoulders, and then I dropped her at the checkout. For no visible reason, she was taking forever. I had fun, though, riding the little train back and forth to the head of the line.

It turned out there was a tray of sugar water on the back table. Thousands of fruit flies were dead in this small tray, their bodies engorged, swollen to a full inch or more, the springs in their bodies long black coils.

I killed them in swaths, throwing water down or taking a step.

It turned out there was a pool of water that was free of them--the toilet--and I began scheming to harness this power to fend off the brutes.

I awoke to a report on the roles of women in traditional tales and in the haze before setting feet on the floor, I was convinced I could write a non-sexist fairy tale.

On the train home there was a peculiar mood of jubilation: voice were talking below and were merry.

Four girls stood outside the bathroom, giggling and talking unabashedly amongst themselves. Was there someone in there, they wondered?

"A couple of 'em!" said someone from the rows.

The girls giggled some more. When the two who were in there exited, the four went in. The boys on the train made good fun at this, but without malice: "I always heard California was kinky, but I never thought I'd see this." Inexplicably, the conductor, a broad woman, appeared and knocked on the door.

"Is there a couple of people in there?" she asked. To check, she pulled open the bathroom door and several gasps were heard from within.

"Yes!" averred the boys.

"Hey! It's one at a time in there! I don't know if this is what you do regular, but not on my train," insisted the woman, weridly serious amidst all this good cheer.

Continuing inexplicably, she then waited and they exited, "Sorry!" "Sorry, we didn't realize." No more comments from the peanut gallery were heard, while three waited for the one occupant.

Off the train, then, I saw a sign reading "BONDS 679." Unfamiliar with the going rate of financial instruments, I thought nothing of it. I walked past men shouting "$75! $80!" Curious, although laden with a heavy backpack, I stopped into a brewpub under the promise of veggie quesadillas. I procured that much, plus a barleywine, and sat at the bar. When I sat down there were some people playing baseball on television, and the next thing the stands were scrabbling for a long ball; then the screen flashed "BONDS 680 BONDS 680" and replayed the hit several times. "Yeah, that's what he does," murmurred someone. There was a kid in the bullpen who had a huge bubble-gum bubble on his cap and didn't know it. We had great fun laughing at him until, three innings later, someone told him and he swatted it off with an effort to look like he knew it all along. The radio played the likes of U2, Iris Dement, and late-model Dylan. A yuppie couple from the neighborhood laughed about the notion of an 8-track player. It was all very American and I was enjoying a rather good vegetarian quesadilla, two days before the 228th anniversary of the signing of my country's declaration of its independence from an oppressive foreign power. That's all.

Think Outside the Oven

Life: it's not just fryingpan/fire anymore.

Marc pulled off his errand feasibility study. Shout-outs to Marc.

Phase II, errand running atop a pack mule, will explore some of the common misconceptions of running errands, challenge traditional errand running techniques, . . .

—Marc Horowitz's "errand" project

Note especially the helpful services of the reference librarian (very bottom of the page).

And the light! For God's sake the light. Here it is on the ridges of my curdoroys, there on the white page; here the window is light, and the luminous gray curtain above.

My mother, once, drew a picture of her mother. It looked like she was frowning, a very stern woman, like in old portrait paintings before people started grinning for the camera. We looked closely and the curve of her lips was concave upward, like a smile—but still she was frowning.

"My mouth corners turn down," she remarked. I'd been wondering what scourge of pain ran through my family to cause so many frowns: hers, my mother's, my own. Grandmother's epiphany, then: "That's why people always think I'm unhappy. My mouth corners turn down" That was 88. In 91 or 92, the scourge began slowly to lift off me; today I find incredible light shocking my corduroys, and fields of pink hiding behind trees.

I love these men: these balding, bespectacled men in their little cars, which they bought used in, say 1993 (probably the second car he bought himself, after one ill-advised mid-70s Fiat and, before that, parents' and uncles' hand-me-downs), driving from place to place with political bumper stickers (bold but not incendiary). He holds on his face something not a smile, certainly not a grin, but something like thoughtful contentment: perhaps not enjoying the moment outright, but imagining that when he gets home, he'll have a chance to check on his arugala, trim the orchids, or that when he gets to his drumming group he'll be interested to see how Bernita is doing with her new job at the elementary school, or whether Jacob has found any more photojournalism work, or if either of the two have any new insights into Go tactics.

He drives alone. His car is spacious without being large, and it lets in lots of light without being hot. He has a variety of unusual hobbies, none of which require much capital (not sky-diving or anything like that). He has a number of loving relationships, little knots of people with whom he shares his thoughts and for whom he is a good listener. He has changed jobs every few years, never quite having a specific career, but always tending to find things which are both challenging and yet not too stressful—not more stressful than what he can stand, anyway. He has done manual labor and he has done counselling; he has done creative work and he has done mechanical things. Each fall, he thinks of a new small seasonal activity: pressing leaves in wax paper, or cultivating bonsai, or learning to kayak. He built his own toolshed, and hopes to someday build a house.

Probably a recent girlfriend left him, because she was moving to Australia, and he was sad but accepting. He has met a few women recently whom he is excited to get to know, and there are one or two men in his life that he might be interested in knowing romantically. He is concerned about national politics but not despairing; he is active in local government and has considered running for city council, declining for what he sees as his lack of charisma (though there is a woman who is secretly very charmed and wishes she could get him to run).

He drives alone.