xtcian

now that i've disappeared

8/31/04

While I was at Steve and Deb's wedding the other night, the band played a version of Norah Jones' "Don't Know Why," which was her breakout hit a few years back. Everyone on earth knew the song, but for some reason it had slipped through my cultural floorboards, and I heard the whole thing for the first time.

I was immediately struck by how beautiful it was, and how much it reminded me of this other band I loved called Once Blue, a little poppy-jazz ensemble who put out a CD that three people in American owned: me, Charlotte Walton and Carla Utrie. God knows I have a very soft spot for old-fashioned song structure and twee melodies, but Once Blue's CD is so gorgeous in so many ways that I couldn't believe it wasn't a national bestseller.

Rebecca Martin

Rebecca Martin was the lead singer of Once Blue, and nothing I can write on this blog comes close to the sexy, breathy, confusingly otherworldy way she has with a song. Jesse Harris was her collaborator, and they created these little vignettes that can turn an ordinary road trip into a seascape of different happinesses.

So I was doing a little research on Norah's hit "Don't Know Why," and turns out it was written by Jesse Harris. Which is absolutely great for Jesse, to labor that long (14 years in the business) and finally get a Grammy and the royalties so he can retire, and his grandkids probably never need to work if he invests wisely.

But what of Rebecca Martin? It is proof that the music business is totally arbitrary – there's absolutely no reason she couldn't have been Norah Jones. That's no knock against Norah, who seems very sweet (and Erin says she's cool), but her career could have easily happened to Rebecca, with whom Jesse had arguably better songs.

Well, I'll do what I can – if you're interested, go to Rebecca's site, listen to some of the songs, and buy the remastered "Once Blue" album, along with her new one. It's a delicious elixir in this presently-cruel world.

WE TO G.O.P: EAT POOP 'n' PEE

Dear Republican Party,

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY CITY!!!

*cough, cough*

Sorry. Let me start over.

I came to New York for the exact same reasons people did it in 1888 - it was the only place I could possibly have the freedom to be what I wanted to be. I took a room in the East Village, lived in a shoebox with the illustrious Lars Lucier and tried to start my life over. I'd had a disastrous time where I'd come from, and knew that New York was the sole point on Earth where my past didn't matter.

It was hot, the subway at 8am was demoralizing, and I was doing the kind of work I swore I'd never do. I also sustained a back injury that put me on crutches and a cane for two months. Note to single men: having a cane does NOT make girls feel sorry for you in a sexy Florence Nightingale sort of way - they avoid you as though you were a leper.

Anyway. My first week in the city, I was asked to write a play that went up on Bleecker Street and gave me the courage to write again after three solid years of humiliation. I began to understand New York as a town where you were lauded for intellect, could use words like "hegemony" without being made fun of, could have love handles and not give a shit, and eat the best pizza on earth at three in the morning.

No other town could house a spirit like Gill Holland, no city would satisfy the cultural ache of Dana and Lindsay, no other place could give succor to the talents of Virginia Heffernan and Nell Casey, and there is no other borough big enough to yoke the explosive energy of my then-wife-to-be Tessa.

On my 29th birthday, I did drugs off the tummy of a friend in the East Village, and went to the Museum of Natural History the next day. It is a town that accepts anything, purges everything, and is the success of the Great American Experiment. It is without judgment and is the last place many of us can go to find love and not be afraid.

In short, it is everything you are not.

We are truly living in shame-free times, an era without compunction, when you dared to have your National Convention here. Your administrations armed the muhajadeen, then ignored years of intelligence that told you Islamic militants were determined to strike our financial centers with planes. When our towers fell, you came down - THREE DAYS LATER if I remember correctly - and got on the bullhorn.

You disregarded the signs we put up in Union Square: "Our tears of grief are not cries for war." You attacked Afghanistan (fine, we guessed) but then attacked Iraq, thus insuring we'd never be safe again when we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. Then you cut anti-terror funding for our city - why? Because nobody in this place would ever vote for you? Why would you give fucking Wyoming $38.31 per person for terror funding, and leave the guy sweeping the floor at the NY Stock Exchange $5.47? HOW COULD YOU FUCKING DO THIS TO US?

Then, to dare put Ground Zero in your re-election campaign, when you fought tooth and nail AGAINST a commission to find out who was to blame... only to have a luke-cold response to their findings? Your henchmen have now dismissed the 9/11 widows as hysterical witches; if only you could understand HALF their misery, you cruel fucks.

Now you have chosen New York as your convention site, so you can play politics with the charred corpses of 3,000 office workers, 4 out 5 of which would never have voted for you. You hate gay people with a biblically-fueled intensity, yet you have placed your party nineteen blocks from Chelsea, home of the most thriving gay population in America. The Democrats didn't have their convention in Mobile, Alabama - why are you here?

Your cynicism and low-rent Machiavellianism slither so close to the ground that it's almost hard to see when you've hit a new low, but coming here to capitalize on the worst thing that ever happened to a city you actually hate is utterly shameful. I'm not following the rules; I'm not going to play nice with you. You are not welcome here. You can call me crazy or unhinged or batshit or whatever you want. But you don't get New York City, even for four days.

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY CITY!!!

we gather as not to feel alone

8/29/04

A few pics for those wanting to know the mood in Manhattan today:

a couple en route to the protest get encouragement from the street sweeper - 6th Ave, Brooklyn

Union Square: the never-ending drum circle for peace (bring your own cowbell)

they were selling anti-Bush baby outfits; his shirt reads "My Dick Would Pull Out of Iraq"

just by standing in one place, we ran into eight different people from UNC - randomly - including my former Pink House roommates Jay Murray, Allen Sellars and N'Gai Wright. Also Celeste. And several other people who only recognized us from campus years ago. How bizarre is THAT?

this has been Tessa and Ian reporting from Manhattan, where George Washington still holds ballons of peace. Back to you in the booth

goat

8/26/04

Let me tell you how bad I suck at basketball right now. I suck with the turgid methane-addled gloominess of a thousand Saturns. I am the biggest whiner spastic piece of shit to set foot on the courts of the St. Patrick Youth Center since its inception in 1922.

It's an embarrassment to myself, it's an embarrassment to the people I play with, it's an embarrassment to Tessa, and it's even an embarrassment to my future family. I will have to play flawlessly for the next month just to get back to "horrible."

Oh sure, I have a few moves in my arsenal that are effective. But I don't get back on defense, I get hurt on every other play, and in an effort to get out of my shooting slump, I have ball-hogged my way to infamy.

I'm a constant source of distraction for my own team - nay, I am a legion of barnacles attached to the bottom of their ship, keeping them from moving swiftly through the ocean. In the last three weeks, I have won 2 games and lost eighteen. You don't need a biostatistics degree from M.I.T. to deduce the common denominator of those losses.

Tonight, I was fouled hard on a breakaway layup, and in my ensuing rage, I toppled the industrial fan that sat on the stage. The blades spun and threatened to chew up the floor - in a CHURCH for AFTERSCHOOL CHILDREN mind you - until some other player yanked out the plug.

Back at Carolina, I was reviled on the court as a guttermouthed shithead. Years later in Carrboro, I was reviled as a guttermouthed shithead. In Los Angeles, I went on Prozac, then went to the West Hollywood courts and acted like a guttermouthed shithead. Now I have been on Celexa for two years, got married, and I'm 37 and STILL a guttermouthed shithead.

When am I going to be free of ego? When am I going to shrug off a bad move as one of life's little lessons? Perhaps I should just fucking call it a day. I've played for 18 years, made everyone miserable since Reagan's last term, perhaps that's enough. After next week, I'll be in LA for two months - perhaps I'll begin a workout regimen and Buddhist training to increase both my stamina and puncture my bloated sense of importance.

If not, I should just let the game go, leave it to younger players who aren't so fettered to their own self-love and don't have some wounded inner brat that lashes out at the first botched layup.

I'm disgusted with myself. I'm going into the yard, finds some worms and shove them into my mouth.

kinetic energy

8/25/04

Okay, I need to enlist the collective brainpower of the blogosphere here, so put your Theoretical Universe™ Caps on. I'm trying to make our barn a little more cozy in the winter – we put in a nice forced-air furnace that keeps things bearable when it goes below 20 degrees, but I want to make retain heat better and save energy.

I'm in Brooklyn right now, so I can't give you a better picture, but the interior looks like this:

...only it's cleaner than that because I was more of a slob back in 2002. Better yet, here is a rough floor plan of the downstairs of the barn (some of you have already been there):

The pink area is the main "hangout" area that I'd like to keep warm, and there are several heater vents in there. However, this barn was built in 1884 and is un-insulated. The biggest problems are shown by the purple arrows – heat is flying up the staircase to the second floor (there is no door, it's wide open) and heat is rushing out of the main barn door (it slides into place and has all kinds of holes).

So...

I need to find a way to stop heat from escaping those two places. Last year, I made a foam "door" that slid horizontally at the top of the stairs, but it got beat to shit and left plenty of gaps. Also, I tried putting stuffing the barn door with insulation, but it kept falling out, and we needed to use the door.

So what I'm looking for now is some sort of flexible insulation, like an "insulating curtain" I can hang up over the barn door's joists, and also hang at the top of the staircase. It needs to be rugged, mildew-repellent (meaning no straight-ahead cloth) and easy to replace via hooks or Velcro or something.

I have an idea percolating in my head, but would love to know what YOU would do.

4th and 47 with 25 sec. left

8/24/04

People who are getting upset with John Kerry's perceived lack of nads regarding the Swift Boat controversy have to understand the bigger picture here. You may not know it now, but the Bush campaign is entering into a very dangerous, desperate phase, and I think – hope – it will be the Hail Mary pass that ends up in the hands of the defense.

Let's look at facts: John Kerry has a number of distinguished medals from Vietnam, all of which were corroborated – at the time – by a number of independent sources. His military record, for anyone with half an understanding of how war works – is beyond question.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, was doing lines of cocaine off the wing of his unused airplane, sitting poolside at the Chateaux Dijon watching ambitious secretaries play water volleyball.

So what do you do if you're Bush? That's right, attack Kerry's military record. To paraphrase Fred from "Scooby Doo," it's a plan so mind-numbingly moronic that it just might work. The Republicans have been doing this for years; it's a cousin of the "brazen it out" strategy, which means "doing something unbelievably cruel or nonsensical and then telling detractors to FUCK OFF in the name of WE KNOW BETTER THAN YOU DO."

The Swift Boat Liars have a cozy relationship with the Bush campaign, just as MoveOn.org has a cozy relationship with Kerry. Everybody knows it, and their winking nudge-nudge denials are there to prove a point: We, the Republicans, can play the 527 game as well as you can.

The problem is, Kerry's 527 group, MoveOn.org, doesn't lie. The worst thing they ever did was sponsor a contest challenging their readership to make an anti-Bush video. One of the entries compared Bush to Hitler, and was quickly disowned by the group. But comparing Bush to Hitler is an opinion, which, although misguided, is much better than a lie.

Sure, the Swift Boat people have agreed to lie, but not for the reasons you think. They don't want you to vote for Bush; they want you to vote for NOBODY.

The Republicans know that any time a truly horrible piece of shit is thrown at either opponent, voter turnout goes down. And when voter turnout goes down, Republicans typically gain power. The GOP wants nothing more than for this campaign to dispense with the sunny disposition of Kerry/Edwards and turn into an ugly, disillusioned brawl.

It is when you enter this phase of your campaign that you are truly bankrupt of ideas. This is the last desperate lunge of a dying villain. If Kerry can rise above this mess and stay positive, it will truly be his first act of being Presidential.

rilkean heart

8/23/04

In August, you enter what Douglas Adams called the "long, dark teatime of the soul," that languid patch of nothingness that fosters a curious mix of complacency and anxiety. In Chapel Hill, the days were endless and deliriously hot; we made sure not to spend too much time by ourselves, lest the inner demons contribute to the rot that had already desiccated our self-esteem.

I think I will die in August. I feel like I foresaw it as a young kid, wandering around the streets of Cedar Rapids on my bike, the sun making yellow patterns in the bushes as it threatened to set earlier each day. I saw some sort of existential maw open up, something quiet, still and hazy let me know there would be a day, perhaps 90 years from then, when I would be looking at an August day as my last.

You must keep moving. Make it to September each year, and you might be okay. Three years ago, in 2001, Tessa and I both remarked that the city was behaving strangely, as if something wasn't quite right. We saw Alex and Wendi at a store in midtown and all of us remarked that the mood was weird, very still, as if the town was holding its breath. We thought it might have something to do with the internet bubble bursting so terribly, but a few days later some planes hitting the towers downtown answered questions we didn't know we asked.

I have cleaned out the barn, both literally and metaphysically. It took all day, but now you can see the pool table, and the adornments from last year's wedding look awesome again. I am throwing away all of my socks and half of my boxer shorts. I am finishing my next screenplay. I have to un-tether myself from what August wants to do to me.

gold medal in betrayal

8/22/04

Okay, so this is the blog where you tell me to go back to Mother Russia. You've been warned.

The United States is winning the most medals at this Olympic Games, and you know what? I'm embarrassed. Our country has behaved so reprehensibly in the last four years that I cringe almost every time I see them hoist the Stars and Stripes aloft.

Obviously there are a few exceptions. I liked our woman who won the bronze in the marathon, and the swimmers seem like very nice people (except for that Hall guy, who must be kind of a cock). And I was sad for the American rifleman who accidentally shot his opponent's target.

But let's face facts: our athletes have more equipment, more money and more product endorsement deals than any other country on the planet. Our basketball team - who, to the crowds utter delight, just lost to Lithuania - has $678 million in contracts and is sleeping on the Queen Mary.

With a tin ear for world politics, the Bush campaign released commercials featuring the Iraqi soccer team, to which the members of the Iraqi soccer team said, "fuck off, murderer." I hope the rumors of Bush going to Athens to see a soccer game come true; he'll be ridden out of town on a rail.

It really has come to this for me: my country's government is so morally bankrupt that I can't cheer for people representing us, even if they're honest, hardworking platform divers. I'm with Meghan over at Slate - Carly Patterson may have won the gold, but her milky-pudding-white visage is wholly uninspiring. Give me the stork Svetlana ANY day of the week. Her petulant pride in being a Russkie was about the only honest emotion I saw.

SportsCenter complains about how bad our basketball team is, when they're the ones that turned the sport into me-first cockfight. ESPN bemoaning a bronze medal is like Fox News being surprised when Bush does something awful. The only thing that keeps me from actively hoping our basketball team fails is the coaching staff, all of whom are from Chapel Hill.

And that's when it hits me. I have no "home team" feeling for America anymore. It may come back, but for now, it's lost. My tribalism, which kept me so delighted and psyched and deliriously happy to be an American for 33 years, has vanished. I have just as much joy when France, or Namibia, or Eritrea benefit from either a gold medal or a scientific breakthrough. I'm on the home team of the "world," for lack of a better phrase, and the Americans just keep fucking it up.

I have but one team left for all of my heart: the North Carolina Tar Heels, a university and sports team I love that just happens to be in the United States. You will have to pry my cold dead fingers off my replica of the 2005 NCAA Championship Trophy.

Oh, and Misty May's ass.

forward as one

8/19/04

I tend not to go to things like the Fringe Festival in New York – I much prefer to read Sean's cruel admonitions instead of having to sit through any live theater. Tonight, however, I ventured into the duodenum of Manhattan – Pace University – to see an operetta conceived by my high school confidante, Sherry Boone.

Pace University, like anything else south of Chambers Street, is nowhere to be hanging out after dark – it's an unfortunate confluence of unsafe and boring. The windows at Pace were shortened into arrow slits because people kept firing rounds from the Brooklyn Bridge. I mean, you're in a car, you're going over the bridge – why not take potshots at a university?

Sherry's play, "Ellen Craft," was absolutely FANTASTIC. The story of a slave who disguises herself as a white man to escape the South, "EC" was a straight-ahead modern opera in the style of "The Secret Garden." This meant hardly any actual spoken words, which can be a landmine for lesser talents, but the book was fabulous and the music gorgeous.

Sherry conceived and wrote the piece, and the place went bonkers when it ended. She and I were the first interracial prom couple in the history of Norfolk Academy (a school chartered in 1680s Virginia, thanks for asking) and she made my senior year at NA bearable. She was the first person to come over to my place after I'd collapsed from malnutrition (true story for another blog), and her spirit has obviously multiplied 19 years later.

I was a total bonehead when I was 18, still not having kissed a girl, pent-up and shut-down emotionally, and I was easily the worst prom date on earth. But it feels good to see her again, both of us still taking our artsy fartsy stuff seriously, purporting to string words together for a living. It makes all those grandiose ideas we had on weekends, riding in the VW Beetle listening to "Tenderness" by General Public, not so goddamn silly anymore.

east german judge screwed me

8/18/04

There are no doubt other bloggers out there doing a bang-up job of blogging the Olympics, but I just have to say a few things.

Actually, wait a minute. There should be some sort of shorthand for that kind of sentence, because I find myself using it all the time in here. In other words, I guess it's some sort of fear of being predictable, of saying what thirty other people at my subway stop haven't already said, with more feeling, about fifteen hours before. When you write about politics, TV or anything else to do with culture, there's always this voice that says "some blogger in North Platte, Nebraska had the final word on this already." I guess all I can hope is that I bring something to the table. As Sting said, "Anyone can sing 'Slip Sliding Away,' but only Paul Simon has that voice'."

Where was I? Ah yes, the friggin' Olympics. I have been silently obsessed with the Olympics since 1976, when as a randy 8-year-old, I had a crush on Nadia Comaneci that could fuel a hundred thousand suns (she's still gorgeous) and thus spent every waking moment at the tube, even thrilling at archery and the triple jump.

The 1980 Olympics sucked for obvious reasons (because of Afghanistan, if you remember) and the 1984 Olympics awakened some uncomfortable feelings I had about abject American jingoism. To me, the '92 Barcelona and the '96 Atlanta Games brought back the same breathless childlike anticipation. Even now, I can gauge the effects of the Celexa by seeing if I get choked up at any awards ceremony (I do – unlike 2000 when I was on Prozac and a total robot).

There is one constant annoyance throughout the years, however: the commentators. It's almost always a network shill paired with the "color" announcer, usually some gold medalist from years past. The problem is, the shill NEVER knows what the hell is going on ("Would you say that was a good jump?") and the color guy is ravenously judgmental.

I know it's the only time they get a national audience for the thing they've obsessed about for 40 years, but come ON. At the beginning of every race or routine, the color commentator will launch into a five-second tirade of invective about how that athlete has ALREADY FUCKED UP.

The gymnastics guy is the worst: four seconds into the routine, he'll say something like "well, his medal chances are over." I mean, give the gymnast a break! He might do a Thomas Flair and then pull an original edition of "Look Homeward, Angel" out of his ass!

The way they eviscerated Paul Hamm for fucking up the vault, you'd think he gave the nuclear launch codes to the North Koreans. It was sweet revenge when the cheese-fed Hamm stormed back for the gold; the commentators totally blew a gasket. Served them right for writing him off.

I could do without the "dolphin kick controversy" in swimming (boring!) and the endless musing on why our basketball team blows green donkey dicks. Everyone knows why this team sucks; it's been a long time coming, and god knows we deserve it. All I can hope is that Roy comes back to Carolina and says to our guys, "okay, you see what happens when you play like selfish, trifecta-clanging narcissists – may I suggest the Carolina way instead?"

squashing hopes

8/17/04

Okay, I take it back: apparently I CAN enjoy something I've grown this year. Whilst dorking around the Union Square Farmers Market this spring, I saw a tiny seedling that said "butternut waltham." I stuck it in the ground, and two months later the bastard took over my garden.

The fruits (I guess it's a fruit) grew to the size of bowling pins and I started hauling them into the kitchen, not knowing what the hell to do with them. Then Tessa sliced one in half, baked it with a little butter for 20 minutes, told me to put brown sugar on it, and JESUS CHRIST that shit is good!

I now have enough Waltham Butternut Squash to power the town of Marion, Iowa. And I was thinking, if you can make banana bread and zucchini bread, can't you make squash bread? I mean, assuming you stuff it full of rendered hogfat and high fructose corn syrup? If any of you have recipe ideas (something you like), please let me know, and I'll post the results.

hello cruel world

8/16/04

Ladies and gentlemen, my family. I despise people who play up their family in that sort of "my big fat" precious oh-so-wacky kind of way, so suffice to say THANKS FOR FILLING IN! My hope is to someday have the sort of blog that Kos has, where a revolving cadre of respected guests gets a spot every week or so. Obviously, I can't do this current format forever, and neither would any of you read it forever, but I'd gladly give my mom a day a week here. As you can see, she's awfully culturally literate for 72. And cute, too!

My beloved blonde and I just got back from Maine, where we like to go every chance we get, because, well, we're white. We stayed at the Black Point Inn, and speaking of white people, that place is The Inn That the Preppie Handbook Never Forgot.

Tessa said it best: it's as if every prep in America were waiting for Izods and braided belts to come back into fashion and breathed a HUGE sigh of relief when they did. We saw periwinkle sweaters tied around necks, madras pleated shorts and docksiders with no socks, Laura Ashley dresses and school ties from Exeter. They were not fucking kidding around.

Of course, Tessa and I eschewed our preppie past and covered ourselves in drawn butter and the deliciousness of a hundred lobsters. The beach, a craggy, intense shard of twisted rock straight out of the wreckage of Pangea, was insanely beautiful.

We found out we must ship out to Los Angeles for September and October, which is fantastic career-wise, but it also means I will not get to taste one thing I've grown all year in the garden. Hours of backbreaking labor, and it will all go to the deer, or to houseguests willing to try heirloom tomatoes.

This sounds stupid, I know, but the one thing that kept me sane this spring - while we were being dumped, courted, raved about, ignored and blessed in Hollywood – is that no matter what happens, I can always just go raise pumpkins. Our soil is perfect for it, and you can average about $10 a fruit.

During one meeting with a very high-strung mean-spirited studio guy, I actually drifted off and thought about various pollination techniques I'd use. If only I had that defense mechanism in my arsenal in 1999, I might not have had a nervous breakdown.

today's view - post-storm - driving up the Taconic Valley on Rt. 22 (click for bigger - thanks, Dan H.!)

Sean in New York

Savin' the best for last, as usual. It's me, Sean, and I have my own damn blog in which I like to bitch. In fact, I made a promise early on in my blog to not tell what I did that day, because all I usually do is knit, take care of my cats, practice origami and wonder when Mr. Right's finally gonna break down and call.

But, since this is Ian's blog, I can break my promise and give you a breakdown of an average day in a bohemian jackass's life.

I woke up this morning before my wife did and I thought, "this'll be awesome. I'm gonna wake her up by pulling the hair out of her face and telling her I love her. It'll be just like the movie I'm always pretending I'm in." So I brushed her little mini payes off her Ojo Brojos and whispered, "I love you darling..." She smiled in her sleep, opened her eyes, frowned, figured out who I was and then said, "I was just dreaming about Trey Parker. We were making out."

Fifteen minutes later, Jordana came back in the room (she had lept out of bed to micromanage something) and said "Okay, you have two choices. You can make me breakfast, or you can take me out to breakfast." So, naturally, I did the latter. We're both doing shows right now (separate shows, it turns out) and neither of us have time to clean the kitchen. By which I mean, she doesn't have time to clean the kitchen, and I'm a bum.

Over breakfast, we talked about the show we saw last night... oh, wait, I was *in* that show. Gutenberg! The Musical! is a show that has been running for about a year at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater, and I was asked to be in the show last night, because I'm AWESOME!

But The Bullet and I were discussing how great the UCB theater is versus the Fringe as we perused the Fringe catalog and decided which shows we would try to go see. At one point this week, I am going to hopefull see three shows and be in a fourth all in one day.

Again, because I'm awesome.

We talked a little bit about the fringe show I'm in Suicide/Joke. Actually we didn't, but I want to mention it here, with the link, so the poor slobs who are producing the show will actually get an audience. The Fringe Festival aint gonna help 'em, that's for sure.

I'm not going to talk shit about the Fringe for two reasons. One, because I'm telling you about my day, and my day as far as the Fringe goes was awesome and two, I have my own damn blog for talking shit. Click on the link on the left where it says "awesome".

After Jordana's mandated breakfast, I stole away for a moment and caught the last half hour of "A Mighty Wind". When Mitch and Mickey start playing their song and the rest of the musicians are so moved they have to gather in the wings just to hear them... that's what it is. That's why you practice your damn scales, why you memorize your lines. No hyperbole, to me it is one of the most beautiful moments in recent film memory.

The afternoon was Jordana's rehearsal for Mac Roger's play "Roll" where I was being their stage manager. I had forgotten how gorgeous that play is, I guess because since I originated the role of Tim in its first production, I couldn't really appreciate it from the audience until today. This particular production, the third for this piece, has the strongest cast I've seen in it, and Jordana is a perfect director for Mac's words. The combination of Mac's fearlessness and Jordana's affection when it comes to character development is a perfect marriage. Especially when I'm one of the actors.

Want to know why I originated the role of Tim? I think you know why.

We then made our way downtown for the first Fringe show I've seen this year (the third one I've *tried* to see, but I'm not here to bitch). It was called Gork! The Retard Always Wins.

I broke my own rule in going to see the show, as I had promised myself that I wasn't going to see any one person shows where people learn. But there was an Iowa connection, the retard was the actor's brother, they were telling a true story and there was a fairly good chance they were going to shoot straight.

Man, was it great. It was just fantastic. There was a flicker or two that let you know this was opening night, and the Fringe had failed to provide any box office help (what the hell do you people do?) and it was still the best one person show I've seen in years and years. Autumn Terrill was fantastic, the show was gorgeous and heartfelt. Even Jordana's icy heart started to melt right away. I wish to God I had time to see it again.

Hey, seriously, if you're in New York go see this show, or something like it. There's a lot of crap, I know, and Ian will tell you that the seats are uncomfortable, but the hour you spend in the theater watching this show, or a show even half this good, stays with you and changes who you are. So you really should go.

Unless you are already awesome.

On the way home I called my sister Melissa in Iowa City to see if she knew the Terrill's, as they live in her town and she owns a hippie clothing store that counts as the local five and dime. Melissa might know the family, her description (Nordic, gorgeous) certainly seemed like the right family. After I got off the phone, Jordana realized that our friends Lori and Adam are producing a series of one woman shows at those really bitchin' theaters on 42nd Street, and that Gork would be great there.

Man. How do I know all these fascinating people and have all this amazing stuff happen to me? Why, Sean? How is it that you get to do all this incredible stuff and there aren't any celebrities around to photograph?

I'll tell you why. It's because I'm awesome.

Flotsam

The Mom here...

There has to be some middle ground between Kent’s internet-o-rama in Tuesday’s guest blog and Steve’s comprehensive essay of last night. I’m in the mood for something less funky than the dwarf people but not as erudite as the joys of open-source software. And I’m really lazy. So, I’ll borrow a page from Ian’s book and post my own personal LIST.

Of late I seem to be butting up against anomalies in the popular culture and conventional wisdom. So I’ll begin there and see where it goes. I promise that I will digress at will.

1. Movie that was supposed to be terrific, but was actually pretty wretched:
The Manchurian Candidate
Echhhh, Even though I would watch Denzel in almost anything. My advice? Rent the original. No comparison. The ‘04 version is just another remake that inspires a heartfelt “WHY?” Ebert loved this movie, but then he’s the guy who called “Kill Bill 2” the best movie of the year, so it figures.

2. Movie that was supposed to be bad, but was actually just fine:
The Village.
No it wasn’t “Sixth Sense” but it was quite evocative and stylish, with wonderful photography, an agreeably funky premise, mostly good acting. It had a great cast. Joaquin Phoenix was practically mute throughout, which is the way he does his best acting. The old folks were just fine. But the entire screen lit up with each appearance of Bryce Dallas Howard, one of the most luminescent presences to grace the multiplex since … well, since ever. Incredible. Reviewers and some of my friends hated this movie, but again, I’m baffled as to why. Maybe their expectations were dashed: No “dead people,” no breakable people, no aliens, no surprise twist, unless you consider a a bit of vague mystery regarding time and place a “twist”. Anyway, I liked this one. So there.

3. Singer who was great with the band “FACES” in the UK back in the day, but went solo and turned into just another weird rocker with a bad case of laryngitis, funny suits, and perfectly awful hair:
Rod Stewart ,
Heard some “Faces” clips today on “Fresh Air.” Good stuff.

4. Books that are even better as audio, especially with the author doing the reading:
Anything by Molly Ivins.
(but check out the Harry Potter series. Splendid reading by Jim Dale)

5. Japanese dish that is clearly sublime, but only if you get it at that little Sushi restaurant on Franklin Street in Hollywood:
Spider Roll
Get it there, it’s worth a trip to L.A., anywhere else it’s merely delicious

6. “Ad” for GW Bush that cured my migraine, gave me hope for the world:
http://kintera.sitestream.com/ferrell_qt_hi.mov

7. TV show worth getting cable for:
Six Feet Under
Who knew funerals could be this much fun?

8. Album that still holds up after twenty years:
Peter Gabriel: "So"
In spite of the vintage synthesizers.

9. American town I had always thought was a bit of a joke-- probably crime-ridden, full of gangs, mafia, and roaming packs of killer dogs; no doubt a complete slum and the worst place in the world to hang out; but which instead has become one of my several homes and a place where, to my astonishment, I am sublimely happy:
Queens, NY
Astoria, to be more specific. Let me count the ways…. Aside from transportation convenience and trees and the good Chinese food, I just have to mention the Greek neighbors that fill their yards with flowers, and with so many Virgin Marys, Saint Christophers, and Baby Jesi that you know God must be watching out for the neighborhood.

10. Finally, the weighty tome I thought was sure to put me to sleep, but instead gave me hours of amusement. And a whole new view of the Founding Fathers:
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Isaacson)
Who knew the old boy was such a cut up? Ian always says that the great politicians, the ones that win elections and high office, are not the ones that are the smartest, but more likely the ones you’d like to spend time with in the hot tub. Well, our Ben…. But you should really check it out for yourself.

Speaking of Ian. Take heart. He’s on his way back, and will resume his regular ranting post here next week.

And while I'm at it: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KENT!

The Facial Expressions of Dumb Terminals

Steve, here, again. Ian's older brother, and the host of most of the family web sites, (except for Kent's LiveJournal).

And the one sibling who doesn't actively blog. Why? I'm too much of a perfectionist, still seeking the perfect blogging tool.

I last wrote in this space last year, when Ian was detained as a security threat or a drug addict or something, we're still not sure, trying to return from Canada. He's in Maine, now. Don't know whether he's planning to drive up to the border to moon that Customs officer before returning to Columbia County.

When Ian asked me to set up Michelle to stand in here a couple of nights ago, it took me several minutes of cognitive struggle to remember which blogging tool Ian uses. He started out with Blogger, back in the days when Blogger had occasional outages and no comments. Sean and Michelle still use Blogger, making good use of the new features added since Blogger was bought by Google.

But Ian couldn't wait for Google to accelerate Blogger's growth, so, after he wheedled me at length, I finally converted this site to Movable Type. Oh, we evaluated TypePad, too, but it just wasn't flexible enough. (Primarily, TypePad couldn't preserve Ian's many inbound links. We weren't willing to give up our position as the sole Google result for "Lisa Kudrow's shady film career.")

Only a few weeks after the move to Movable Type, Ian phoned me in a panic. This blog was the victim of severe comment spam. After a long, bi-coastal session deleting comment spam, we installed MT-Blacklist. I was skeptical, but it seems to be working well, and I see that Ian still does the one-click thing to delete comment spam when it happens.

Then, during the hubbub over Six Apart's changing the pricing of Movable Type, I started to read comments by people who bit the bullet and converted from Movable Type to WordPress in order to ensure they were using a platform guaranteed to be free and open for good. I was especially influenced by Mark Pilgrim's clear explanation of why Movable Type, as a proprietary product, and Wordpress, as an open product, each serve valid markets. As a longtime tinkerer, I realized that an open source product would suit me better, so I knocked up a WordPress blog on one of my servers. I've only begun to hack that tool.

So, when Michelle called and asked for the password to Ian's blog, I couldn't remember where it was! Wordpress, right? No, wait, Blogger? No, oh, yeah, Ian's on Movable Type. Then I couldn't remember my password.

All these tools floating around in my head made unexpected connections with last night's BayCHI program, a panel of several internet application visionaries talking about and demoing cutting-edge stuff that makes our blogs look like green screens. Oh, sure, blogs are a good example of plain old hypertext documents, accessible, linkable, searchable.

But authoring a blog through a web browser? Yech. Blog authoring, indeed any sort of document authoring, is like any other interactive application. It's fun to have a blog, but it'd be a lot more fun if we didn't have to struggle with web forms, snippets of HTML, and uploading images. Web forms are a return to the old green screen dumb terminal days. The web is a huge step backward for applications, even if it gives great document.

Which is why it was fun to see Ethan Diamond's demo last night at BayCHI of Oddpost, the innovative rich email application that preceded Google's Gmail by a couple of years. I tried Oddpost when it first became self-aware, but never signed up for a paid account, primarily because it only worked in Internet Explorer for Windows. Oddpost is all built in complex, browser-specific DHTML, so Mac users and those who prefer not to run Microsoft Virus Culture need not apply.

And, more interesting parallels: Google bought Blogger, Blogger improved quickly, and then Google made a big splash by announcing Gmail, which, like Oddpost, is far easier to use than the current crop of web-based email services (Hotmail, Yahoo!, and so on). And what just happened? Yahoo! just bought Oddpost!

And now Oddpost is improving quickly: Last night, Diamond demo'd lots of new Oddpost features, with lots of drag and drop and, notably, an RSS aggregator and (ding!) one-button blog posting: Want to post a comment on an friend's interesting blog entry (or email)? Read it and add add it to your Blogger/TypePad/Movable Type blog, right in Oddpost, with drag and drop. Now that's not like using a clunky web form.

But Oddpost is, I can only imagine, a deep and sticky morass of browser-specific code. (Or, now, two morasses, since Diamond demonstrated Oddpost running in Firefox last night. But maybe it's all valid XHTML and DOM, what do I know?) I doubt that kind of effort can be sustained every time somebody wants to build a new application, even with Yahoo! doing the hiring. Is there a better approach? In particular, what will we be authoring blogs in next year?

The BayCHI panel also included Mike Sundermeyer, a Macromedia V.P., and David Temkin, founder of Laszlo Systems. Let me tell you why they made interesting dance partners. We all know that Macromedia makes Flash, a.k.a. the bane of all web surfers. Macromedia will burn in hell one day, but that's not fair, really, because any tool can be used for evil. Flash is just a more powerful tool for good and evil.

Wait, no, Macromedia is a little evil: They don't give me control over which Flash animations may run on my computer. It's all or nothing (unlike most web advertisements, which are easily and selectively disabled by Junkbuster). Nothing, in my case, as I've removed the Flash player from Internet Explorer. I switch to Firefox if I need to use a real Flash site.

If Macromedia weren't at least a little evil, they'd give us a buttons to disable ads but enable useful Flash apps. I'm a true Flash hater, but lately I've become enthusiastic about Flash applications that replace green-screen web forms with interactive, responsive applications like we had on our desktops before 1995.

Imagine a blog authoring tool that's WYSIWYG, with drag-and-drop images and links, interactive searching, actually useful calendars, and so on. The blog itself should still be a simple web document, since it's meant to be read (and searched and copied and used in derivative works and parodied), but authoring, yes, authoring is an application.

So, given that Macromedia is slightly evil (and wholly proprietary), what's a web developer to do? That's where Laszlo comes in. Laszlo's framework supports attractive, animated applications delivered as Flash applications. But they're not built in Flash. Rather, Laszlo applications are built in a more open, transparent framework that compiles to Flash today, but tomorrow they might compile to a different (hopefully more open) client. ("Client," that's what we programmers call your web browser, Flash player, whatever.) Laszlo uses what's out there in millions of web browsers today, but lets us developers stay independent of that slightly evil client, and promises a more open world tomorrow. I know little about Laszlo specifically, but it gave me a vision of how we may build this stuff in the future.

Naturally, David Temkin had no ill words for Macromedia, especially as they were sitting right there. And Flash does work, for good or evil, after all. But he made a few sly comments that I took as healthy independence of Macromedia.

I see good things ahead. The green-screen web is a good place for our collective knowledge, accessible to us all (and to Google-like entities). The web was never meant to be a one-way "publishing" medium, from the authors on high to the readers below. The web was meant to be an interactive medium. But green screens just don't work for most people, and we didn't have the CPU horsepower or the vision of the framework that would support more interactive applications, until just about now. We're on the cusp of making our 'puters useful again, this time with networks. That's exciting stuff.

Now, if I could just remember that password…

Guest Host

Hi, I'm Ian's oldest brother Kent. Some of you may have met me, at Ian's Wedding, or Sean's Wedding. Some of you haven't. Yer loss.

I could tell embarrassing stories about Ian's childhood, but as near as I can tell he's already done way better than I could ever do. Or, I could go off on one of the patented Williams Family political rants, but it would be preaching to the choir, and the few right-wing nutjobs who got here by mistake. I could teach you how to make an attractive bookend out of a shoebox and a brick. But I won't.

Instead, since most of you probably don't read my live journal I'm just going to recycle some of my Amazing Discoveries from the World Wide Interbahn.

Before the InterWebbe, there was Usenet News. Usenet was (and is still) a completely free, chaotic sort of international rugby scrum made entirely of ASCII text. The easiest way these days to see most of it -- minus the pirated software and pornography is through Google Groups

That's where I found this exchange: Suddenly and without warning, John Kerry comes into your bed !

What do you call a cold refreshing carbonated beverage?

Ever wonder what a goth guy from Des Moines who writes songs of gloom and dispair looks like? PS he isn't kidding.

And who hasn't wondered what famous actors and musicians would look like if they were achondroplastic dwarfs?

Crazy People run for seats on the Michigan State Bench.

From there to here, from here to there. Funny things are everywhere.

Blog Intruder

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, IAN AND TESSA!!!

Howdy, folks, Ian's little sister Michelle here, giving Ian a break as he and Tess go cavorting off for a little year-anniversary lovin'. If you weren't at the wedding a year ago today, you missed one heck of a good time. In fact, of all the five-day events I've witnessed in the last several years, it was the best. It's really hard to believe that it was a whole year ago. Tonight, one year ago, I had a wee too much wine and tore the lining of my dress cuz I just couldn't stop dancing. Tonight, this year, I ate a zucchini from my garden and I'm going to bed early. Ha-cha-cha! But if you wanted to read about my blooming garden and less fertile romantic life, you'd be wasting time at MY blog, not Ian's. So let's move on to a much more interesting topic: that's right: my cat Fezzik.

Now I understand that many pet owners are a little nutty, a little overboard, a little loony when it comes to their pets. i don't mind being treated like one of those loons when I go to an animal hospital, because I know that these people have to win over the crazies. Also, I've spent my fair share of time blubbering over a little animal while just waiting for them to get their shots, so I guess I am a little weird, too.

But... when I went to pick up Fezzik from his surgery last Wednesday, I noticed that there was something all over his Elizabethan collar. I was about to ask why they gave me a dirty one when I realized that it was covered in stickers. Shiny, colorful stars and hearts, and right where you tie the bandage, a big 'ol sticker of Babar the Elephant. I certainly read all the Babar books when I was a wee thing, and I probably even had some Babar stickers. But those stickers clearly aren't for Fezzik. He does not suffer the indignity of a lamp shade around his neck a little less because of the sparkly stars. Those stars are supposed to be for me. Somehow, they are supposed to ease the pain of the welts on my legs that are Fezzik's "thank you" for the medicine I've been giving him twice a day. Somehow, those stickers are intended to make me feel better when Fezzik is head-banging me in the middle of the night with his lamp shade because he feels it is time to be petted. Those stickers are meant to make it easier for me to look at the stitches in my sweet cat's ear and not be nauseous at the thought of how much it hurts him.

I mean, it's not even funny anymore when he runs into the wall, face first, and stays with the Elizabethan cone pressed into the wall for minutes at a time because he's not quite sure what to do next. He has to wear that collar for over two more weeks. Babar isn't cutting it.

Anyway, happy day, Ian and Tessa. I hope Chopes is having a better time on your anniversary than Fezzik is. Buckets 'o' love to both of you.

i fancy a brandy

8/8/04

I know this doesn't make me a very good shoulda-been-gay slightly-twee married fop, but I'd never experienced a Noel Coward play until Sunday. Along with the enchanting Geoffrey Nauffts, Michael Mastro and Julianne Hoffenberg, we went to see "Design for Life" in Williamstown, MA and I found it positively a hoot. Funny how a comedy about bisexual threesomes could keep you from starving during the Depression.

Tessa, Marisa Tomei, Julianne, Geoff

Marisa Tomei is a friend of Tessa's crowd (she was a Naked Angel back in the day) and she gave a remarkable performance alongside Campbell Scott and Steven Weber.

I saw Campbell Scott's glasses after the show, and instantly recognized his crappy eyesight as my own: -7.5 at least. He said he was -7, and I told him that LASIK is the best chance I ever took. He said he was too scared to get it done, but I'd just like to put out a public service message to everyone out there in blogland: if you have shitty eyes, get your ass down to a reputable hospital and have them lasered. You've got a better chance of going blind while driving there.

My life from 1975 to 1999 was a constant misery of dopey eyeglasses, scratchy contacts, migraines, saline solution, and lost prescriptions. I hated my glasses so much that I rarely had my picture taken in them. They fogged up in the winter, and slid down my face in the summer.

I looked like a... well, shit, why don't I just show you:

That was my senior yearbook picture, and NO, it wasn't taken in 1970. It was 1985, and everyone else looked normal, it was ME who maintained a zork-spaz relationship with haircuts and eyewear. Why nobody intervened... I dunno. Perhaps everyone was busy.

Anyway, I got contacts the next year, and though I looked like I had a body wave:

at least I was presentable. So all you glasses and contact lens sufferers, please, borrow money from your parents or 401K and get zapped.

more Impressionist picture fun with Tessa's Treo 600 "camera"

pangea? i hardly know her

8/5/04

I'd like to talk about something that has been creeping me out for a long time. Of course you know the topic: I'm talking about PANGEA.

Fans of tectonic plate shift (party mothafuckas in the house say HO!) know what Pangea was – the time in the Triassic period when all of the continents gathered together on the Equator and got to know each other really well. I'm all for brotherly love, and god knows Africa and South America's relationship is downright sexy, but Pangea totally gives me the heebie-jeebies.

First off, I hate the distorted way North America looks on all the Pangea maps, like a twisted version of the continent I've grown to love. It is rather ironic that New York City was once attached to Morocco, but the queasy liquidity of it all – dunno, it just makes me uncomfortable.

Secondly, isn't there something a little existential and despondent about being on Earth, looking out over the ocean, and realizing that there's nothing on the other side of the world but yourself? One of my favorite things about being on the beach in California is knowing that Australia is somewhere far over the water. On Pangea, the only thing over the vast ocean is the back of your own ass.

Sure, there were great things about Pangea. The Second Collision of the Appalachian Oregeny created the sloping mountains we inhabit in upstate NY. And if it weren't for all those dinosaurs eating tropical ferns in West Virginia (you know, back when WV was on the Equator), there'd be a lot of coal miners out of a job.

But I don't mind telling you Pangea makes me more than a little unnerved. What's worse, it wasn't the first time the continents all got together, and it won't be the last! Apparently we have Pangea Ultima to look forward to, when New York will be stuck with freakin' Namibia. I was Namibia during the Model U.N. in high school, and it sucked!

sexyvoltaic cells

8/4/04

Ann asked a very good question about solar power – namely, "how the hell do you get it?" and "will it work for me?" I don't confess to be an expert on this issue, but I have learned a couple of key things in the last few months. In a related story, the Citibank Building seems to have been targeted by terrorists at some point in the last four years. How are these things related? Read on, MacDuff!

1. Call a solar dork. You can choose to go the route of contacting BP Solar, but I wanted a dude who loved this shit, so I found an independent contractor up here in the country who will find all the right equipment and install it for me.

2. Check out the south-facing part of your property. I've been to Ann's house, and though it is pretty shrouded by trees, the garage or some part of the roof might do. We're lucky that our farm is south-facing and gets sunlight all the live long day. If that's not an option, you can do a ground-based grid, but remember, the farther the electricity travels, the less you'll get. That's why roofs are so good.

3. Choose either survivalism or something simple. Basically, that means choosing if you want a battery backup system or not. With a big battery, you can store up power for rainy days. We chose something that will give us three days of (minimal) power if the entire grid of New York goes out – and if it's sunny, we could go on indefinitely. However, you may want something tied to your grid, so that you're only reducing your dependence on Duke Power without replacing it entirely.

4. Efficiency. Somebody (Oliver?) may be able to explain this better than me, but solar panels have roughly 14% efficiency – which means you can get 14% of the sun's rays turned into electricity for your house. Doesn't sound like much, but remember that the sun gives off enough energy to power the entire world every 60 seconds. Shit, even spinach has 12% efficiency. Kyocera just came out with the world's most efficient solar panel ever, which might be laughable in 20 years, but the future will just have to cut us a break.

5. Understand why you'd do it. You'll likely cut your power bills drastically, but the system may never pay for itself. So you have to go solar for another reason. Me, I'm a spaz, so this technology gives me a hard-on, but it is also in reaction to the events of the world. Simply put, Tessa and I are fucking sick of being part of the problem.

Sanctimonious, perhaps, but at least we can die (hopefully in 2070) having said that we gave a shit. Which leads me to the Citibank Building in midtown Manhattan.

Terrorists studied it for obvious reasons: it's a 60-floor beast on stilts. The builders discovered something worse, though – apparently every 16 years, a storm would be capable of knocking it down. So they went in at night and re-welded the entire thing back together, all secret-like so the employees wouldn't know.

But the best part of the Citibank Building never happened – that sloping roof, facing southward, was supposed to be a massive array of solar panels. That many panels could have made this skyscraper the most efficient in the world, but then the 1980s came, and everyone was doing too much coke to know the difference.

The lesson? Stick to your guns. There's always a reason NOT to hassle with solar, but if you do, you'll fucking ROCK!

wireless über alles

8/3/04

It has taken me three years of work, but we've finally done it. Anyone who knows me can vouch for my wireless fetish, but at the farm, we have truly raised it to an art form. A place like this, with fucked-up floorboards first fastened in 1830 doesn't take well to internet cables, so the first thing we did was install some Airport Expresses to beam the internet everywhere.

Then we got tired of having only 14 channels on cable TV (three of them QVC-related), plus I wasn't getting the Heels games on television, so we jumped on the satellite bandwagon.

Of course, both Tessa and I have cell phones that kinda sound like shit up here, but they still work, goddammit.

And then our land-line phones started sounding like a squirrel was being constantly electrocuted, so I went on eBay and got us five refurbished 5.8 Ghz cordless phones from Panasonic for cheap.

Then Chopin the dog turned 14 years old - yet was still more than happy to sprint out of our yard at 45 mph en route to the dumpster next door. Biting the bullet, we had to get an Invisible Fence that administers what the trainer called a "correction" but what he calls a "ghastly ordeal." Training him to respect the invisible line has been a little twitchy, but I confess there's been a little sadistic joy in it too.

And now, with some healthy tax incentives and a middle finger directed straight at Dick Cheney and his henchmen, we have decided to go solar, which I suppose is the ultimate wireless solution. Sharp makes these awesome dark blue solar panels that come in triangles so you can follow your roof line exactly.

Pretty soon, we're not going to have one wire in the house, and we will all be in a state of gamma ray bliss.

Oh, except for Chopes, who will continue to get zapped every fortnight or so to keep him honest. Yay!

why does IOWA start with "10"?

8/2/04

I am up WAY too late to have anything coherent to offer you, but I can say that we finished a potential pitch to our TV pilot tonight, and neither Tessa nor I can keep our eyes open.

We do have very good news, however: we're pregnant! Just kidding. A JOKE! A JOKE!

No, we really do have good news: Tessa and I just got signed to one of the best agencies in the world. I won't say which one, because a boy doesn't kiss and tell, but it has three letters and will allow us access to worlds as yet unconquered.

Even though we're at the age when such news will no longer usher in a night of woo-woos, Cape Cods and Dead Nazi shots, it's still an amazing vote of confidence. If you fancy yourself an artist, you really do get very few instances when some large, respected body of peers decides to tell you that you rock.

Funny that artists choose a career guaranteed to be bereft of affirmation, when they are the very people who crave it the most. Oh, the ironing.

as long as I get my named spelled right

crowding of wisdom

8/1/04

Sean, Tessa, Dana, Kelly, me, Scott, Mom, Michelle, Lindsay

Topics of dinner discussion:

1. Is North Carolina a swing state? Recent polls suggest maybe, but most of us didn't believe it.

2. Is "Fahrenheit 9/11" sorta racist against Arabs? And if so, why are Sean's in-laws so hellbent on not seeing it? Does it matter that Kerry is half Jewish?

3. The corn is local, and unbelievably delicious.

4. Is it a critic's job mainly to say whether something is good or bad, or is it to just say what it is so that smart people can make their decision from there?

5. Take two exampled of "printed directions for artists": a musical score, and a script for a play. In overall terms, which of the two give more total information? It was argued that a musical score gave an artist much more information than a play script.

6. What exactly is the difference that two different musicians can bring to a piece, you know, really? To most people, doesn't Beethoven's 5th sound the same no matter what orchestra is playing?

7. Jim Surowiecki's awesome book The Wisdom of Crowds has cool examples about how humans are remarkably good at cooperating without rules.

Take this example: You have to meet somebody in New York City. You don't know who they are, where they are from, nothing. All you know is that they are looking for you too, and they know nothing about you either.

Where in Manhattan do you go to meet them?
What time would you go there?

When you have formulated a response, click here to see what an overwhelming percentage of random Stanford law students said. Basically, it means that two random people trying to find each other in Manhattan have a pretty good chance of doing so, which is a nice thought.

Want another one? On a piece of paper, draw a cross like this:

Then put an "X" in the quadrant you think everyone else would pick as well. Remember, they are trying to guess which quadrant YOU would pick too.

Then click here to see which one was picked by a huge percentage of respondents. Fun, huh?

8. If Bush loses in November, it will be a colossal fuck-up by people who were supposed to be good at controlling everything.

9. Singing "California" by Joni Mitchell is fun, but really hard.

10. The pregnant person in the room is tired! Time for bed...