This is called Gato. Stealing power from public utilities. This was shot in the Rocinha Favela in Rio.

There’s an excellent post over at  Fake Steve Jobs about what, I expect, we all consciously or instinctively know about our culture right now. Fake Steve’s rant is inspired by this great comparison of the fears of Aldous Huxley vs George Orwell in comic form, the words of which were taken from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Stuart McMillen, which will definitely be going on my must-read list.

Brave New World is still one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read.

I recently finished Feed by M.T. Anderson, which was an incredibly adept, modern take on Brave New World and highly recommended.

Now then, I’m off to play Risk on my iPhone. And did I mention it’s efffking hot here?

WTF? I live in Portland! The city will drown in a sea of heat wave.

The racket they made was unbelievable.
Whereas the next pond over was completely empty:

Is this something I should know about? I find that with a season of very odd weather and climate change, I’m spending a lot more time looking for signs. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure it would be such a great thing to be forewarned about the apocalypse.

Also, along the lines of  apocalypse-thwarting news, happy inauguration day!

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Fantastic way to use search data and to watch an epidemic unfold.

How can communities utilize this data to minimize an epidemic?  It might be the case that by the time the data shows a danger- it’s too late, as the spikes indicate the epidemic has successfully spread.

Imagine if you could be alerted to any acceleration of  a trend. Say you limit the search to a region and see a doubling or tripling of searches over a 2 day period (click on Arkansas, for example, as of today). Would having a sort of ‘snow day’ actually increase net productivity for a given period of time, considering that if you didn’t, you’d have a larger portion of the populace infected? Though the flu is communicable over about a week’s time, it appears, and you can infect others before you experience symptoms. Would it be worth having a text-message alert system where residents could sign up to be alerted to accelerations in the data? – and could that be done without causing paranoia and/or causing people to remove themselves from society unnecessarily?

And what’s the difference between Idaho and Oregon – there’s no scale to measure by, but it appears they are hypochondriacs in Idaho. –actually, I’m guessing that’s the effect of a lower population density on the spread of the disease. Compare Idaho to California and you can infer that higher density in California enables fast-spreading infections, whereas the infection travels slowly in ID.

My kids have just gotten over fevers – and the teacher said it went around the school. It does make you wonder if there’d be a net-gain in school days if everyone were kept home from school for a, say, 3-5 day period, at the beginning of an upward trend, rather than having an infection cycle over a couple of weeks.

(from this nyt story)

In this case, a picture is worth about a hundred gazillion words.

But while the picture is fascinating, more than anything I’d like to know what those words were.

“So now, again, is this the way to the bowling alley, or the war room?”

Speaking of which, I’m guessing Barack will be improving his bowling. 

Correction! He already has a transition plan for that.

I have had a really lucky, great year – I have to keep reminding myself this as the rest of the world seems bent on spiraling itself into some kind of panicky little hole.

I’ve moved into a new house (with a wormhole in the center of the livingroom floor!), Couch is being published, Walker Tracker is going great, my kids are healthy and I’m happily married.

I hope you’re well and that you’re busy depression-proofing yourself too.

If not? Buy a bottle of red wine,  turn on the music loud and cook the New Brunswick Stew from this book.

Make sure to drink at least 5/8th of the bottle of wine while cooking.

That’s the best cure for the blues I know.

I mean depression-proofing in the emotional sense – but we do a lot of wealth building/depression-proofing here in the financial sense by making massive batches of soups and freezing them. Having stores of your own canned goods and frozen soups is one of the wealthiest feelings I think you can have. All that nourishment is stored away at your own home – not subject to bank runs or abstract financial instruments. It’s harvest time! Put away some of that summer for deep in the winter.

One of the most notable things about Wall-E is that it’s a children’s story set in a post-apocalyptic world, with extremely heavy anti-corporate, anti-consumerism messaging (though artfully enough done that it doesn’t feel heavy handed), done by one of the largest corporate entities in the world (Disney). You spend the first 10 (brilliant) minutes of the movie watching a cute robot in an absolutely horrific landscape, with massive piles of trash and toxic storms, where the only living things are a cockroach and a single plant (that grows because it’s encased in a refrigerator? radiation?).

You often see children’s movies pander to the parents by squeaking in a political nod or some softball message, but at the very core of Wall-E is human fuckup on an utterly massive scale, and they do not spare you from it. There was a Matrix-like quality about what was left of humanity, except contrary to the Matrix, there was no purpose to their existence. They powered nothing, and they did not even dream they led meaningful lives.

This domain used to be the playground of cutting-edge political satirists and artists and so it is amazing (read: disconcerting) to see it come from something like Disney (some might argue that Pixar is a different ball of wax, but this surely is going out with Disney oversight).

The Walmart digs were overt and powerful, as was the commentary on our obese, fast-food culture. Either corporate America has so thoroughly adopted the language of their critics as a means of self-empowerment, or someone at Pixar is doing some very daring, very impressive work. I can only hope the latter.

Now, to follow-through on the superb messaging of the movie please, Disney, abstain from selling us this crap.  

I suppose I can take some hope in that they’re not yet selling plastic cubes of fake junk, junk in the shape that Wall-E crushes. That would really hurt my brain.

Floor map of Book Expo America 2008. See that green dot? That’s Small Beer Press on May 30th, #2120. Corner lot, yo.

It looks like the cross section of the death star or maybe the preferred cuts of a piggy bank.

Here it is, traversing deep space, the giant small press battlestar. Going where all booksellers are going simultaneously.

At any rate, these people have been tasked with doing something there, probably involving powdered ice cream or eating tea with chopsticks in microgravity.

Among Saturday’s more poignant images was a tiny 4-year-old boy who held a sign that said, “This war’s older than me.”

Link to article: Five years of duty, dissent and war

Go Coen!

—

And thus the sign we made him, This War is Older than Me! He also thought ‘Poop on the war’ would be a good one.

I shipped my family off to the protest in downtown Portland today (still editing), and was awfully proud watching them go.

It’s very depressing to think that he has never known a time where we aren’t at war. Since we listen to a fair bit of radio, he has often inquired about such-and-such market bombing, and we’ve taken care with the language and have begun to censor the radio a little. At any rate, at just over four, he’s well aware of the war going on on the other side of the world and how we feel about it – and of course he’s also quite familiar with Adel Hamad/Project Hamad and thus Guantanamo. Not that each age doesn’t have its craziness, but these are strange times to grow up in.

At any rate, just for fun we did a search on Flickr tonight to see if he turned up anywhere, as Laura said quite a few people took his photo.

What do you know, he’s here:
http://flickr.com/photos/36254855@N00/2336481760/

and here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomlechner/2336714908/

side note: I’m sort of mixed about posting photos of Coen – I probably won’t do this a lot. There are various opinions from other blogs I respect – Tim Bray’s ongoing makes a point of not naming children’s names or posting photos, and the Granades are very open about this sort of thing. I like the idea of being open about it, but I’m naturally secretive and again I think this is a strange time to be growing up. But since this seems like an exceptional case and many others took his photo, and, I admit, I’m proud to think of him carrying a protest sign, I’m going for it.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THIRD INSTALLMENT OF THE 1,000 WORDS READING SERIES: THE FUTURE
MAIDEN IN THE MIST, 7PM MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2008. FREE
CONTACT: MEL FAVARA 971-506-3340, mel.Favara@gmail.com
More info at 1000wordspdx.blogspot.com

In this innovative reading series, five participants each present 1,000 words of prose written for the occasion. Writers agree to produce 250 words per week for four weeks leading up to the reading; they are given a theme at the beginning (THE FUTURE, this time), and must include certain phrases and words in each weekly effort as capriciously assigned by the host. A stunning variety of fresh works result from the writers’ wildly divergent interpretations of the prompts, and the rapid-fire presentation of short pieces make for an entertaining reading. Reading:

Benjamin Parzybok: Ben founded Gumball Poetry, a literary journal published into gumball machines, co-founded Project Hamad which helped free Adel Hamad, a Guantanamo inmate, runs the treasure hunt/caper into the underbelly of the city known as Peachblow (via the Black Magic Insurance Agency), and runs a startup around walking(walkertracker.com). He has a novel, Couch, forthcoming from Small Beer Press in the fall of 2008. He lives with his wife, the writer Laura Moulton, and their two kids in Portland, OR.

Daniel Thomas: Now in the full bloom of manhood, Daniel embodies the wisdom and perspective of the formally trained philosopher, the earthy humility of the former junky, the vulnerability of the natural born aesthete, the taste and style of a foppish dandy and the inexplicable ownership of very strange purebred dog. For bread and wine, he builds houses with Hammer and Hand.

Jill Stukenberg: Fiction and nonfiction star Jill Stukenberg recently relocated to Portland from New Mexico, where she earned an MFA from New Mexico State University. She writes and teaches at Clark College and Clackamas Community College.

Series curator Mel Favara will also read. She teaches English and hosts other literary hybrid events in Portland. Her work has appeared in the Willamette Week, No Slander, Columbia Poetry Review, and in her zine, teen sleuth.

Special guest Matthew Hattie Hein, formerly of the band New Bad Things and currently performing all by his lonesome and teaching English all over town, will play the guitar and sing.