David Byrne – you might have heard of his old band – has an installation at the Battery Maritime Building in New York called Playing the Building. Basically, he placed an old organ keyboard in the middle of a big room and rigged it up so that each key makes noise by banging, blowing, or grinding some part of the building. It’s a great effect and a lot of fun to play. When I was there, Saturday afternoon, there was only a 15 minute or so wait to play it, and everyone was in good spirits and having fun. The building itself is in poor shape and you need to sign a release form to enter. Probably not worth a trip to NY by itself, but if you’re already there, stop by and have some fun making noise.
“Mr. Marks, by mandate of the District of Columbia Prepardon Division, I’m placing you under acquittal for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin that was to take place today, April 22 at 0800 hours and four minutes.”
I like the way in which, thanks to Bush, Republican government inevitably entangles us in serious moral dilemmas: “Wait—can a president really pardon someone who hasn’t even been charged with a crime?”
And you thought that Republican science fiction was all about Intelligent Design.
UPDATE: In my defense, I didn’t really think this could work. I just wanted to call the post that.
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Via Jim Lindgren at Volokh, some article from the Rocky Mountain News about Al Gore’s recent call for the U.S. to be fully running on renewable energy within a decade. The piece itself is hackery (though it does deftly compare Gore to Chairman Mao) but contains the following gem:
Stanley Lewandowski, the general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, is one of the few utility officials willing to suggest that the prophet of global warming is strutting about like an emperor without his clothes. “Al Gore’s statement of obtaining 100 percent of our power from renewables in 10 years has as much a chance of happening as the sun shining 24 hours a day,” Lewandowski quipped. “It’s nonsense.”
Excellent.
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“Beware Finland” jokes Matt Yglesias in a post about education policy. But, frankly, this is good geopolitical advice. Just ask the Soviets. Or consider the following statistics.
I’d watch out for them, if I were you.
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I think that over the last few years, the view has quite frequently been expressed in comments on CT and other blogs that it is rather a shame that Christopher Hitchens has suffered something of a decline in his talents as a writer even as the general direction of his politics has coarsened and moved rightwards. How we wish, a significant proportion of the readership lament, that there was somebody around writing exhilarating and scabrous left-wing polemics with a contrarian twist!
Check out “Savage Mules” by Dennis Perrin, guys, you’ll like it.
[click to continue…]
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Henry beat me to the punch by about five minutes, dammit. Here’s my wordley representation of my book, Last Best Gifts.
I didn’t look at the site closely enough to see if I could get a PDF of the output, but it would be nice to have one.
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I’ve seen various textcloud applications before, but “Wordle”:http://wordle.net/ (via “Steve Poole”:http://unspeak.net/) is the first one that I’ve seen that makes it easy to produce aesthetically attractive pictures of the information. Below is the textcloud of my book, “The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation” which I’m preparing for publication in Cambridge’s Comparative Politics series (click on the graphic to see the full thing). I want to make a poster of this and frame it for my office.
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Further to earlier posts on this topic, the BBC website “has a short clip of a voice coach training an Englishman to sound American, together with an accompanying article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7509572.stm . (To my ears his American sounds slightly Irish.) There’s a priceless first comment below the article from a Texan who writes: “It never occurs to us that there is such a thing as an American accent.” Well now you know.
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I’m moderating a discussion at “Firedoglake”:http://www.firedoglake.com on Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother, starting about now (with Cory himself as main attraction). If you’re interested, drop by.
The folks who brought you Frozen Grand Central now bring you Human Mirror. These ideas are great and they do a good job with them. Fun stuff!
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Matthew Yglesias was kind enough to link to my Necrotrends post. In comments over there I explained that, in all false modesty, I actually hadn’t worked out whether I thought it was a seance story or a zombie story. Is it Mark Penn as the kid in “Sixth Sense” – ‘I poll dead people’. Or is it William McKinley stashed in a shed like the former roommate at the end of “Shaun of the Dead”? Unclear, is all I can conclude. (One commenter suggested BOTH: si se puede! Fair enough.) But mostly I bring this up because Bruce Bartlett showed up in comements over there. As there was considerable speculation in comments to my original post as to whether the man could say such things with a straight face … I report, you decide: [click to continue…]
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Crooked Timber is five years old this month: our inaugural post was on July 8th, 2003. That seems like a long time. Why, I remember when all this were nowt but HTML text fields. Seeing as five years is a long time to go without getting a haircut, we’ve revamped the layout — hopefully for the better. I await reports about how the new look is broken in Internet Explorer.
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Steve Fuller gets “a good kicking”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2290401,00.html from the excellent Steven Poole:
bq. … Fuller happily adopts ID’s rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists’ “faith”; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn’t available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the “vicissitudes” of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to “action at a distance”, except that the distance is in time rather than space. It’s intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.
(Hat tip: SO)
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Huh? It’s a play about “a group of outsourced Japanese Ninjas hired by China to infiltrate the American Psyche by taking on roles in the Media, Pop Culture, and Politics”. Go see it at the Zipper Factory Theater in NYC on Saturday, July 26th at 10:30pm. It’s a fun, fast-paced, multi-media production that will appeal to CT readers. (It’s also directed by one of my oldest and dearest friends.) I thought the actors were great, for example, they were superb with the various accents (from BBC anchor to ninja).
The play also has an improv segment with guests, two this time: Paul Rieckhoff (executive director and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and author of Chasing Ghosts, a personal account and critique of America’s war on terror) and Hunter Bell (a writer and performer of the new Broadway show [title of show]).
While you wait to be seated, you can enjoy a drink at the bar or simply engage in some people-watching from one of the comfy/funky seats in the waiting area. Also, the two guests will be around after the play so this is really a play-plus-party event, all for $20.
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Check out the “1960s dance track”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm (scroll down, after the Dr Who theme).
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