Stuff I've been consuming

Saw City of God this weekend...quite a movie. A little depressing, but very well told, not unlike Mystic River, although City of God has much more style. I'm very curious to know more about the true story...someone was telling me that tourists actually tour the slums in Rio. Also saw Casablanca at the Brattle...much better than I remembered, I think I must been half-asleep when I saw it last.

I've also been eating at new places, like East Coast Grill (the vegetable entree was actually really interesting!) and Joshua Tree (pretty average) and Bomboa (snazzy atmosphere). Also went to Bertucci's and Peach Farm again. Last night, hit Pour House (much nicer than the last time I went, now has a tap!) and LIR (a little too loud and grown-up-frat-partyish).

Still on the prowl for a new album to buy. In the meantime, Jonathan pointed out the gray album.

Paris Hilton

The buzz aggregator says that, this week, Paris Hilton was the top query at both Yahoo and Lycos. Sadly, Google hasn't updated Zeitgeist in the past 2 weeks, so we can't tell what's going on there. I just thought this was interesting. Plus, if I put "Paris Hilton" in my blog, there's a chance that desperate, porn-thirsty searchers will end up here instead. Poor things.

If you thought you were cynical about romance...

...get a load of this article (via danah): "Moreover, dating is often a bloodsport driven by egos and sexual appetites." Of course, watching Average Joe has (surprisingly) convinced me it's true....(and, yes, you read that URL correctly, there is a realitytvworld.com. it's like heaven!)

Jeez

Speaking of conservatives making things bad for the rest of us, The Atlanta Journal Constitution took flack for a picture of Britney Spears kissing Madonna. Give me a break.

Also interesting are this story of Microsoft malfeasance and an essay about height-increasing drugs. "Short men, in particular, are paid less than tall men." To say nothing of the Maxim survey that said almost no women prefer short men. ;-) (I wish I could find it! Though all sorts of other interesting surveys turn up when you search the maxim site for "survey".)

Dasypygal

Wednesday's word of the day was dasypygal, which the Google dictionary doesn't recognize, but which produces 107 results. What does it mean? Hairy buttocks. Apparently "[From Greek dasy- (hairy, dense) + pyge (buttocks).]" A related word is "callipygian, having a beautiful behind."

Today's fun link: Hall of Technical Documentation weirdness

Friendster update: 0 friends. I think they have some sort of bug. ;-)

Strange survey results

Interesting survey by the Horatio Alger Association reported in CNN finds that 47 percent of high school students have confidence in Congress, and only 26 percent in the media. Even weirder, 75 percent of students get along very well with their parents. "Asked how they'd like to spend more time, more teens said they would rather be with their families than hang out with friends, play sports, listen to music or do anything else."

Two fun links

Andrea pointed out that Mike is on the Polo Jeans site.

Sarah sent me yet another weird dating-related article (earlier ones have covered arranged marriage, match.com, etc.), this time about quiet parties.

Also, got to meet Clay Shirky today. He was as awesome as I'd expected.

Two bits don't make a byte

I've run across some interesting odds and ends lately...

For example, I saw a link from the Yahoo! newsletter to Dressed to the Nines, an exhibit about baseball attire. I don't really care about baseball attire, but it did make me wonder where the phrase came from, especially given my recent foray into etymology. I found this cool site which points to "1793 in the poetry of Robert Burns: 'Thou paints auld Nature to the nines'."

I also love it when my reading happens to randomly coincide. For example, there was a New York Times Magazine article about how stimulating parts of the brain can lead to savant-like activity. (I found some some good pointers to related material.) And just yesterday, I read "Funes, His Memory" (in the translation I'm reading) or "Funes the Memorious" (in others). Here's the text of it. The similarities between Funes ("He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas.") and those with an autistic infant ("whose mind 'is not concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.'"). I've always considered myself the sort of person who thinks better conceptually than in detail, and yet many computer people exhibit autism-ish symptoms. If there's a spectrum, how do I figure out where I am on it?

Lastly, I thought the Nicholas Lemann article about the Michgan case was fascinating. The heart of it (for me) is that: "Nor do universities share the public's view of admissions as a rewards system, which must be conducted with absolute fairness to each applicant. Instead, universities consider themselves to be rarefied autonomous institutions." I've often been annoyed with admissions and hiring policices because they seem an un-meritocratic disbursement of awards. But if I accept that university admissions are shaping an inevitable elite class, I suppose I'm willing to afford them more latitude. Questions about whether privilege is inevitable keep coming up in conversations I'm having.

Why Richard Stenlund Should Go To Vegas

I was reading this article about Vegas and getting all excited for my trip. And then I started reading about a MMORPG addict who complains "I think people are generally false. Even sitting here with you, we are putting on a front. But in A. O. you can really let your true character out. If I want to be a pervert, I am able to do that in A. O. and be a pervert right off the bat." And I thought, if this guy is sick of being in this small town in the middle of the country, he should go to, say, Vegas. And lo and behold I get to the end of the article and he is moving there. Creepy.

Propaganda

I saw this link to remixed propaganda on a klog apart. I'm a huge fan of this style of art for some reason. Which is why I ordered a propaganda poster calendar from Poland. There's a web page that has some of the images somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment. Also, I have to agree with some of the posters' sentiments.

fun with evil bureaucracies

this past week i learned a valuable lesson....asking if harvard vanguard dental accepts a given insurance plan is not the same as asking if they are a preferred provider. i was quite shocked to be billed for medical treatment i thought would be covered by my insurance. i could have gone to any dentist anywhere and gotten this level of "coverage." and when i called to suggest i had been misled, an incredibly rude and unhelpful supervisor named michelle explained that it was all my fault for not knowing enough to ask the person booking my appointment my question more precisely. (this was not much better than her underling, who explained that by signing their waiver, i had ceded my right to complain.) but now i've learned the error of my ways. thanks harvard vanguard!

Partykausa

Shawn sent me the URL of his latest artistic endeavor, Parykausa, and I figured I'd link to it here. Not quite sure what to say about it, though. It's par-for-the-course-ishly intriguing.

I(')M Away

So, the war may be dominating all the blog-watching sites, but the big news today is clearly the Times's recognition of our obsession with away messages. This made me think, maybe we need a purity test for IM.

Have you ever...

• ...procrastinated by...
  
  
  
  • ...reading away messages?
    
  • ...reading away messages about procrastinating?
    
  • ...writing away messages?
    
  • ...writing away messages about procrastinating?
    
  
  
• ...written more than 5 away messages in one day?
  
• ...written an away message about showering?
  
• ...written an away message to...
  
  
  
  • solicit pity?
    
  • confirm your popularity?
    
  • beg for help?
    
  • brag about your exciting life?
    
  • pretend to have an exciting life?
    
  • manipulate a MOS? (if you don't know what an MOS is, you need to stay in more)
    
  
  
• ...written an away message that...
  
  
  
  • ...quoted a real-life conversation?
    
  • ...quoted an IM conversation?
    
  • ...quoted an away message?
    
  • ...responded to an away message?
    
  • ...continued an earlier away message?
    
  • ...quoted a song?
    
  • ...quoted a web page?
    
  • ...quoted an email?
    
  • ...quoted poetry?
    
  • ...quoted your homework?
    
  • ...quoted your professor?
    
  • ...quoted an overhead conversation?
    
  
  
• ...left an away message up when you were actually there?
  
• ...responded to an away message?
  
• ...been sad that nobody responded to your away message?
  

I think I've done pretty much all of these. Good god.

Fun with acronyms

So, I ran across this acronym MEGO, and I was like, what is that? But, handily, Merriam-Webster (as linked to from Google) included results from computer and acronym dictionaries, and within seconds I had discovered:

/me"goh/ or /mee'goh/ ["My Eyes Glaze Over", often "Mine Eyes
Glazeth (sic) Over", attributed to the futurologist Herman
Kahn] Also "MEGO factor". 1. A handwave intended to
confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement because
the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what
is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by
engineers and contains a high proportion of TLAs.
2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics. 3. Among
non-hackers, often refers not to behaviour that causes the
eyes to glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which
may be triggered by the mere threat of technical detail as
effectively as by an actual excess of it.

Neat!

Life and happiness

Danyel and I were talking about our experiences with online personals (which both Wired and the Times have praised, but not my friend Sarah), and I mentioned how Brooks's article on The Sims described most users as preferring to live in little kibbutz-like/Friends-ish groups that de-emphasized romance. He said he had read something in the Times about groups of friends that end up dating one another. I couldn't find that article, though I did run across this urban tribes stuff.

Meanwhile, this month's Wired discusses some of the philosophical implications of people's obsession with MMORPGs. Among other gems...

Take a moment now to pause, step back, and consider just what was going on here: Every day, month after month, a man was coming home from a full day of bone-jarringly repetitive work with hammer and nails to put in a full night of finger-numbingly repetitive work with "hammer" and "anvil" - and paying $9.95 per month for the privilege. Ask Stolle to make sense of this, and he has a ready answer: "Well, it's not work if you enjoy it." Which, of course, begs the question: Why would anyone enjoy it?


And then Fast Company had this interesting article about choosing jobs that was very popular on Daypop, claiming...

Asking What Should I Do With My Life? is the modern, secular version of the great timeless questions about our identity. Asking The Question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering The Question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone you're not. What is freedom for if not the chance to define for yourself who you are?

So what does this all mean? I guess the common thread here is that there are a lot of people unsatisfied with the dating scene, their work life, and life in general. And if I ended it there, it would give more fodder to Sarah, who claims my posts are depressing. But the other half of it is that new norms are evolving that might change things. Still up for grabs is whether our sense of past communities and lifestyles is overly-nostalgic, or if we're only applying patches that will never match the past.

Simulacra

One thing I find interesting is our fascination with "reality."

Recently, The Sims has been attracting media attention because of the insights it purportedly provides into our own society. Most notably, everyone's favorite over-generalizer, David Brooks, had a piece in the New York Times Magazine. He writes, in part,

I confess I sometimes don't know whether to be happy or depressed when I dip into Sims world. Sometimes you get the sense that these Sims fanatics are compensating online for the needs that aren't met in their real lives...But the other and more positive sensation you get in Sims world is that some mass creative process is going on, like the writing of a joint novel with millions of collaborative and competitive authors.


Time also searched for deeper meaning. "The Sims Online might be exactly what America needs right now: a virtual sandbox where we can play out our fantasies and confront our fears about what America might become."

The paradox is that people are fleeing reality for virtuality at the same time that they are embracing reality television. Even more confusingly, movies like The Truman Show, eXistenZ, Dark City, The Matrix, Star Trek: Insurrection, Vanilla Sky, and The Thirteenth Floor all dealt with the concept of reality, mostly suggesting that real reality was preferable to any conjured virtual reality, no matter how much better the latter might be.