From the category archives:
After a moderately funny NPR April Fool’s piece on banning ringtones in New York, this sponsor announcement made me laugh out loud.
On the news headlines that followed, the lead item was that the U.S. was scrambling to complete a huge free trade deal (“the biggest since NAFTA”) with North Korea.
John McCain’s “MySpace page”:http://www.myspace.com/johnmccain “borrows” Mike D.’s page template and also hotlinks to images on his server. So he “makes a few changes to them.”:http://mike.newsvine.com/_news/2007/03/27/633799-hacking-john-mccain
Via John “You’re having a membership drive but you still haven’t mailed me my t-shirt, it’ll be three months on Friday” “Gruber.”:http://daringfireball.net/
I took a quick trip around “Fantasy Island”:http://www.dirtragmag.com/print/article.php?ID=441 this morning, a series of fast, fun mountain-bike trails about twenty minutes from downtown Tucson. To get there, you drive past “Davis Monthan AFB”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ and “AMARC”:http://www.amarcexperience.com/Scrapyards.asp, better known as the Boneyard. This is a huge complex of decommissioned, mothballed, cannibalized and just plain decaying U.S. military aircraft of all sorts. Here’s a Google Satellite Shot to give you a sense of the scale of the place.
As it happens, this is only one of three boneyards in the area. Up out past the northwest side of town past Marana is “Pinal Air Park”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinal_Airpark, which is a boneyard, storage and re-branding site for civilian aircraft, including many 747s. (It also has a history as a CIA Airfield.) And it’s here that St Kieran, an Aer Lingus 747, met his end some years ago.
Here’s a larger shot. This photo was taken in 1997. I don’t think he’s there any more, having probably been scrapped in the meantime. Like I say, you see some strange things in the desert. (Me on a mountain bike, for example.) Maybe I should do a series. Next up could be the local Titan II ICBM silo (missile included), where we take job candidates when they ask us where the Dean’s office is.
And I got this cool present:
These are Penguin 60s, the original (orange) series and the Classics, which Penguin brought out in 1995 for their 60th anniversary. (They recently issued a similar series for their 70th, though not in the United States.) When they came out I really wanted the Classics collection, but had no money. I remember there was a certain amount of snotty declensionist commentary on the sort of people who would only spend 60p for excerpts of Civilization rather than reading the originals entire. Well, you can always have The Complete Penguin Classics delivered to your house for a mere $7,989.50 (don’t worry, shipping is free). About 750lbs worth and 77 linear feet of shelving, apparently — according to an Amazon reviewer who actually bought it. If you’re not up to that, just take The American Collection or the 19th Century British Collection instead, which are a bit cheaper.
38°13’36.38″N, 112°17’56.59″W.
_Update_: OK, sorry, so there are lots more of these.
Via “Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/, comes a post about “The Boring Store”:http://www.methodsreporter.com/2007/02/27/826chi-boring-store-eggers/1/, which sells nothing of utility and definitely does NOT contain assorted spy equipment. Here’s a part of the awning:
Oddly, “3quarksdaily links”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/02/homeland_securi.html to a parody of “ready.gov”:http://www.ready.gov/ as though it had only recently appeared. “Here’s a post of mine”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/02/20/public-service-announcement from almost exactly four years ago about this. (Four years! Jaysus.) It was one of the earliest bits of blogging I did that got some circulation. Rereading it now, I think the narrative it presented holds up rather well in the light of recent history. Certainly better than the official version. So here it is for old times sake, below the fold.
I just took a cab to work, trying in vain to get to an interesting talk before it started, and got stuck in traffic. While stranded in a traffic jam somewhere around Connecticut and L I was somewhat bemused to see a whopping big advertisement on the back of the bus in front of me for The Hill‘s Pundit Blog. I tried to get a photo with my phone, but screwed it up. It made me feel pretty weird; it’s a very different blogosphere to the one that I started off in (I suspect the disconnect for the real old-timers is even bigger).
“Henry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/07/ip-law-and-bird-flu/ remarks that “my mental model of Tyler [Cowen] often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments.” This follows on from Tyler’s “own advice”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/09/the_phantom_me.html to his grad students:
bq. You have a model of me, a pretty good one, and you know what I will object to and what will delight me. The Phantom Tyler Cowen objects, in your head, before the real Tyler Cowen has much of a chance. That is why the real Tyler Cowen is sometimes so silent.
_My_ mental model of Tyler Cowen says, “This sounds like a rationalization to me.” Meanwhile, “Brad DeLong asks”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/is_henry_farrel.html,
bq. Is Henry Farrell especially sane or especially insane?
for having a model of Tyler sitting on his shoulder making comments. My mental model of Brad DeLong says to my mental model of Tyler Cowen, “Why oh why are we ruled by this idiot?” My mental model of Eugene Volokh says, “This is much worth reading.” But my mental model of Orin Kerr replies, “My sense is that this is much ado about nothing.” My mental model of Bitch, Ph.D begins to object that she is not a brain on a stick before realizing that, being a mental model, in fact she is. Uniquely, my mental model of Dan Drezner has his own mental model of himself, which he refers to as “Ed.” Finally, my model of Cosma Shalizi has the unusual property of being smarter than I am. This ought to be impossible, but of course _I_ can’t understand its explanation of how this could be the case.
Sign seen here in Tucson while on the way home, outside a pizza joint on Broadway:
bq. Mooninites Eat Free.
Insidious. Someone call the mayor of Boston. But — what they don’t know is that I ate there once and the pizza is terrible. Ha! Who’s laughing now, you little bastards.
An under-appreciated genre, from the golden age of Irish television before the arrival of foreign channels in the early to mid 1980s. I was trying to remember these today because they came up in conversation for no very good reason. I’m sure I can’t have remembered them all. Help me out.
1. _The Safe Cross Code_, with Judge.
Obviously the most famous one. All Irish people between the ages of about twenty and forty can sing this. If I remember, there are long and short versions. The long version includes the mythical Safe Cross Code wardens in their white plastic macs, and Judge saying “Unless you live next door to the school, you’ll have to cross the road sometime.” I believe it opens with Mr Crow complaining about Foxy’s abysmal efforts to sing the song.
Spotted off Wisconsin Avenue yesterday
Exhibit A, Yale freshman Jian Li. He filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton for “rejecting his early application”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/13/news/16544.shtml, alleging bias against Asians in Princeton’s admissions process. Exhibit B, an “Op-Ed”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2007/01/17/opinion/17109.shtml by “Lian Ji” in the _Daily Princetonian_’s joke issue. An excerpt:
bq. Hi Princeton! Remember me? I so good at math and science. Perfect 2400 SAT score. Ring bells? … What is wrong with you no color people? Yellow people make the world go round. We cook greasy food, wash your clothes and let you copy our homework. Brown people are catching up, too but not before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Plus, two Princeton professors showed that racial preferences for black people and Hispanics hurt admission opportunities for me. I mean, Asians in general. The Great Wall Street Journal support my case. What more you want? … Princeton claims that it increase diversity by rejecting an Asian-American. You make joke?
I think that penultimate sentence should read, “Princeton claim it increase diversity,” not “claims that.” If you’re going to write Chinglish, at least make an effort.
What I like about these cases is the Kabuki-like quality of it all … here come the angry protests, there are the inevitable anti-PC people, here is the Dean late at night with a stiff drink, here’s the Asian guy who says he thinks it’s just hilarious and what’s the big deal, and so on. Let the fun begin.
I wrote a column for the _Daily Princetonian_ for a while in grad school, and as I recall (from the hate mail I got), the kids weren’t nearly so easily amused if you “made fun”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/clones.html of their “beloved traditions”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/bicker.html, “odd religious movements”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/crusade.html or “high grades”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1998/03/09/Edits/column.html. Some things are sacred, you know. Oh, and I once wrote a piece in “broken English”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1998/02/03/Edits/edits1.html as well, so I know whereof I speak.
On the side of this box of McCann’s Oatmeal here it says: “Tip: Add liquid to oatmeal a few minutes before cooking. It will cook faster.” Now, I can see the benefits of doing this in terms of energy conservation. But the fact is, I’m not going to get my oatmeal any faster, am I? Sure, it’ll spend less time on the cooker, but the amount of time I spend preparing it will be the same, or maybe even longer.
This tip seems related to that recent finding that people were irrationally much more tolerant of an increase in shipping fees than the same-sized increase in the price of the good being shipped.
Happy 2007! I wonder whether some marketing company did a survey of the top-5 of new year’s resolutions. Doing more excerise, stop smoking, losing weight, working less, spending more time with friends, perhaps? Apart from my resolution to finally get my act together and start writing the book that I’ve been wanting to write for the last 4 years, all my resolutions belong to the category of the ordinary and boring (alright, perhaps the book-resolution belongs to that category too).
Did you make any less boring good resolutions for 2007 ?