Trivia: What is the lifespan of orange roughy?

This is under the category of Obscure Stuff You Learn by Blogging.

Until today, I thought of orange roughy as yet another expensive seafood dish, like tilapia or flounder, remarkable more for price per pound than anything else. Fresh seafoods (or for those of us miles inland, fresh-frozen), well-prepared (meaning very lightly seasoned and not cooked too long) and eaten right away after cooking, are one of life's luxuries.
Now that I find that orange roughy might be over a hundred years old, I don't think I enjoy that high-end offering as well as I used to.

Found around the world, including the North Atlantic, where they were first discovered in 1889. Present in large numbers in specific locations around New Zealand between 800-1500 metres depth....Slow-growing, long-lived fish, thought to live up to 150 years...Most fish caught are 30-40 cm long and weigh between 0.9-1.9 kg. Maximum size is 50 cm and 3.6 kg. Diet: Mainly prawns, fish and squid. Breeding: Fish do not begin to breed until they are 25-30 years old.

LINK

Jay Gordon is part of the lunatic fringe making up the Arianna menagerie. Refreshing.

More on Korea

So many stories, so little time.
I want to blog about everything I read as I surf, but there isn’t time.
This piece keeps drumming in my head…

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At Lee's command, the factory's 2,000 employees donned headbands labeled Quality First and assembled in a courtyard. There they found their entire inventory piled in a heap - cell phones, fax machines, nearly $50 million worth of equipment. A banner before them read Quality Is My Pride. Beneath it sat Lee and his board of directors. Ten workers took the products one by one, smashed them with hammers, and threw them into a bonfire. Before it was over, employees were weeping.

Ritual purification at the command of a heroic leader is an ancient and powerful tradition in this part of the world. With a few superficial changes, this whole scene could have played in a Zhang Yimou costume epic. Certainly it had the desired effect: After Lee's visit to Gumi, shoddiness was not an option. Ki-tae Lee, then the Gumi factory manager and now head of Samsung's mobile telecom division, personally tests new models by hurling them against a wall or dropping them from a second-story window. Once he even ran over a handset with his car. It still worked.

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This happened in 1995.
It happened in a small factory town in South Korea.
The source of the story is Wired Magazine, via the Marmot.
Put it together with other observations of Korea and see what you get.

This is only one of many stories that the average American on the street would look at, blink, roll his eyes and keep walking.

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ALSO...

According to relevant authorities, North Korea has built military-related underground facilities in 8,200 places. North Korea is also moving major facilities beneath the earth, having moved about 180 major munitions factories underground in the late 1990s. There are even air bases where runways penetrate whole mountains. North Korea is evaluated at being among the world’s best at constructing underground facilities. [...]

North Korea spends a lot on building and maintaining underground facilities. Its underground munitions factories, the building of which began full-scale in the 1970s, suffer from serious problems due to the country’s antiquated power grid. This is related to the fact that the power grid losses about 30 percent of the North’s real annual electricity consumption of roughly 12 billion kWh (Unification Ministry figure). Intelligence officials figure there have also been a string of large-scale disasters involving explosives at the underground munitions plants, where the environment is poor due to dampness and other factors.

LINK

Am I the only one who thinks that behind the scenes there could be serious reservations about the reunification of North and South Korea? Real serious reservations.

What would happen if the technology and wealth of the South combined with the gritty, powerfully focused military intensity of the North? Just asking.

Update

In a lengthy post referring to a couple of Time articles, the Marmot comments:

South Koreans — particularly those in the Seoul area — have been living with the prospect of a very bad death for more than any people should, and given the numerous incidents and crises that have plagued the peninsula since the end of the Korean War, many may simply be desensitized to the threat. That is to say, North Korea has become a part of everyday life, and while nukes may represent a new twist in the equation for the U.S., for Koreans, many of whom are going to die regardless of the nature of the ordinance, North Korean nukes don’t really change things other than possibly make a U.S. attack on North Korea more likely.

More telling is this from the comment thread:

Many young Koreans I’ve talked to are not merely unperturbed by the Northern nukes; instead, they positively want the North to make them and keep them. The logic of this position seems that they see both the waning of the U.S. influence in East Asia and the re-unification of the peninsula as inevitable, and the possession of nuclear weapons as both a badge of national prestige as well as a weighty geopolitical chip against China/Japan when those scenarios materialize. Obviously, from this perspective the Northern nukes are considered to be somehow “ours” for South Koreans, and the possibility of its use v. the South most improbable–a fine by-product of DJ/Roh governments’ indoctrination.

My remark above about "what would happen if the technology and wealth of the South combined with the gritty, powerfully focused military intensity of the North" is not an entirely obtuse piece of fanciful thinking on my part. At least one other person using a Korean name profile advanced the same notion...

The power of words: RLP, Evangelical Outpost

[If I keep breaking rules this blog ain't ever gonna get off the ground.
One of the rules is (probably) don't change the subject so often.
People who like one topic will not likely be attracted to another, especially if you go from jokes to multi-media to politics to dismal comments about obscure observations on Korean history...
I guess that's one of the benefits, too. Mostly I'm writing for myself, so if I like it I know at least one person is paying attention. ]

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Real Live Preacher is on my list of places to visit. There hasn't been much action there lately because Gordon got caught up in book publishing and getting to be a regular contributor to a magazine. But before that he had one of the most effective and compelling ministries of anyone in the clergy: his on-line weblog.

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For a long time he kept his blog separate from everyone else in his life. The people in his church had no idea he was doing it, but judging from the comment threads he was reaching a lot more souls with his blog than he ever did in a church by the side of the road. His writing style is as scratchy as a hair shirt, but his heart is good as gold. I can't describe in a post or two the dynamic of his evangelism, but I am certain that it is every bit as important to the Kingdom as anybody else's.

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A few days ago Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost finally got around to mentioning RLP in his blog. I was reading RLP almost from the start, but only became aware of Evangelical Outpost in the last year. The names of the two blogs tell as much as I can write about their respective missions. And I always make it a point to check the comments to see who is reading and what the effect of the writing is on readers. My impression of RLP is that he has a small but dedicated following of caring people with good hearts, many of whom can relate to his stories because something he said has touched them in a way that lets them know, somehow, that God knows who they are and He loves them anyway. Comments left at Evangelical Outpost are smart, informed and clean as a whistle. But the environment is too polished, too pious, too well-informed to make a new Christian feel comfortable, unless he has been cut from exactly the right cloth.

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It is possible for a city dweller to be comfortable in the country, but it is likely that a country dweller is not going to be comfortable in the city. Typically, the city person in the country has the option of returning to the city. The country boy in the city, on the other hand, can't go back as easily. How can you keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree? That's why Crocodile Dundee is such an entertaining film. That's the appeal behind country music. And that's why, I think, the crowd at Evangelical Outpost is not comfortable with Real Live Preacher. it reminds them of a part of themselves that they thought had been left behind. (If they ever had it at all. Some people never cussed growing up. Just like they never peed outside or anything else that polite people just don't do. In some ways these are the ones who can be more tolerant than the ones who gave up bad behavior.)

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For a study in motes and beams, I recommend two posts and their respective comment threads, one from Evangelical Outpost and the other from Real Live Preacher, both written within the past week, and both with enough comments to be interesting. I enjoy reading them both. I have as much respect for one as the other. Paul's image of body parts describing the church is appropriate. I will let others debate about what parts of anatomy are at work here.

As they say, I report, you decide.

Real Live Preacher...
People send me email regularly, asking how a preacher can use such language.
USE LANGUAGE? USE IT? USE WORDS?
I don't know what to do with a question like that.
Sometimes I try to explain.
Sometimes I say, “I don’t know.”
Sometimes I say, “Why don’t you leave me the hell alone.”

Evangelical Outpost...
This mix of fideism and heroic existentialism probably appeals to the same immature crowd that appreciates a preacher who cusses. (“Dude, he doesn't know if God exists and he says F___ a lot. He’s my kind of Christian.”) Personally, I find such dumbing-down morally repugnant. When did Jesus say that we should leave our brains at the church door? Did I misunderstand that part about loving God with the whole mind? RLP's view of faith certainly seems peculiar.

By their fruits...

Don't neglect the comment threads.

That's where the rubber meets the road...

Korea perspectives

This is important. The Marmot's Hole is the preeminent blog about Korea in English.
I hope someone in the State Department is paying attention because most Americans don't have a clue.

A poll by the Munhwa Ilbo and KSOI revealed that the South Korean public was strongly opposed to unilateral U.S. military action against North Korea. How opposed, you might ask? When asked what the South Korean government should do if the U.S. bombed the North without Seoul’s approval, only 31.2 percent said the South should stand with the U.S., while 47.6 percent said Seoul should take the North’s side. Even among conservative Grand National Party supporters, only 38.6 percent responded that Seoul should take the U.S. side, while 41.1 percent said Seoul should stand with Pyongyang. Support for the North was higher in all regional, age and class groups.

This is consistent with a survey given on February 13, when 56 percent of respondents said the solution to the nuclear issue was for the “U.S. to guarantee North Korea’s system (regime).” 74 percent said “North Korea needed to be persuaded” to give up its nukes, while only 23 percent said North Korea needed to be pressured.

LINK

I said it before and I say it again:
Koreans do not think in terms of two countries. That notion is a tragic and misleading construct deriving from the unfinished business of the Korean conflict.

When Columbus discovered the New World the capital of Korea was already many centuries old. Events of the last century are but a small part of Korean national history. The word nationalism as used in the West is not adequate to describe the unity of the Korean people. When the day comes that DPRK and ROK become one there will be a power on the Asian landscape that will parallel both Japan and China.

WMD Found

This caught my eye because I was born in Richmond, Kentucky.

RICHMOND, Ky. - Vapor from the deadly nerve agent sarin leaked from a stockpile of old rockets at the Blue Grass Army Depot, but officials said it posed no danger to the public.
The sarin vapor did not escape the sealed container, or 'igloo,' where the weapons are kept. Officials were filtering the air inside the igloo Tuesday before trying to enter the structure to secure the leaky rocket.
Workers discovered the leak when they tested the air inside the igloo, said Richard Sloan, public affairs officer for Blue Grass Chemical Activity, the Army unit charged with monitoring and securing chemical weapons.
The igloo, which contains about 2,500 rockets, is monitored daily because rockets there have leaked in the past, Sloan said."

My family moved away from Kentucky when I was a kid, but the roots are still there. I've been thinking lately about how well Kentucky has managed to reconcile vice and virtue, politically, economically and socially.
Think about it. When you hear the state mentioned, the first three associations are horses, whiskey and tobacco. We used to joke about "fast women and beautiful horses." But I can tell you from personal experience that none of these vices did much to damage the integrity of faith and family values. I don't know exactly why that is. All I can tell you is that the people who earn their living making whiskey, raising tobacco or taking care of horses don't see those enterprises as vices. They are the way the rent is paid, just like working in famously dangerous, dirty, polluting coal mines. Or quietly stewarding the nation's dirty little defense secrets.

I guess that's part of the reason for my own political detachment. You can't live without faith and you can't live without a roof over your head. When your livelihood and your faith collide, all you can do is embrace both and hope for God's grace. That's why farmers who produce narcotics from Mexico to Afghanistan to Columbia to who-knows-where are not, for the most part, addicted to the substances they bring to market.

Vices are a luxury. Whether gambling or smoking or drinking the best whiskey, you gotta have money to do it right. Rarely do those who service those vices allow themselves to indulge.

Credit where credit is due: I got this link from South Knox Bubba who is on my Bloglines aggregator. Local blogs are a repository of information that is "under the radar" for most other places. I keep an eye on Knoxville thinking that something in the water might be contributing to the breathtaking and ongoing success of Instapundit. So far, no clues, but SKB makes for a great read.

Anyhow, he had another interesting link that illustrates how the servicing-vice/paying-the-rent connection works. The Oak Ridge facility has quietly been taking care of the nation's nuklar business for decades now, but apparently not without some environmental risks. Lots of folks around there also pay the rent by servicing this enterprise. Here's another interesting piece...
Don't miss the comments.
And don't be fooled by all that good ole boy talk. There's no flies on them.

Update, November 2006
The original links no longer work, so I put another link into the first one that provides the same information.
The Oak Ridge reference from South Knox Bubba is probably out there somewhere, but I didn't take time to look it up. The reader can get the idea anyway. Pretty much the same old story. This link is about the same topic but without the Good Old Boy talk.

Multimedia: Do your best for a better world

Yeah, I like little multimedia stuff.

Here's another one via 3Quarks.

Quickie from Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut is so reclusive that I sometimes forget he is alive.
Too bad. He has put together some of the smartest, most original fiction of our day. When I remember Galapagos I want everyone I know to read it so we can talk about it. Unfortunately, I am the only one I know who has read it.
Paul Krassner I never knew about, but apparently Kurt Vonnegut sends him mail from time to time. He is writing at you-know-where.
This is his latest:

Dearest Iraq: Act like me. After 100 years of democracy, let your slaves go. After 150, let your women vote. At the start of democracy, ethnic cleansing is quite OK. Love you madly!
Uncle Sam

Care and feeding of blogs

Couple more people offer advice about blogging.

nykola says...

I began Nykola.com in January of 2004 with a paltry 12 visitors a day. Thirteen of those 12 visitors were me. Every now and then someone would stop in because they did a Google search for "black girl," or "Seattle buses," but for about 1 month, I was my number one fan. To be honest, I never really cared who stopped by. The act of blogging was cathartic. Eventually, things changed, and when I had 30 hits a day, I thought I was the stuff Remember...success is relative. Stop comparing yourself to other people.

John Hawkins says...

10) If you're going to talk about something that everybody else in the blogosphere seems to be talking about, at least try to say something original about it. If you sound just like everybody else, why should anyone come back?

Adrian Warnock says...

The most important decision you have to make before you begin your blog is will you be an anomynous blogger known only by a "nickname", will you be a blogger with a nickname who also makes your name public (eg the Jollyblogger by David Wayne) or will you be known by your own name like I am. Placing your own name on a blog reminds you that your blog can be read by anyone who knows you. Using a nickname only may not protect you from being found out especially if you start blogging things you shouldnt! Everything you ever write online could be read by your boss at work, your wife or your best friend.

Of course all of them have lots more to say.
Bloggers are still evangelical about blogging. Does that have something to do with misery loving company?

TCS: One more take on the filibuster

Alright, I'm going right to the punchline.
The column at Tech Central Station is a bit long (fifteen or so screens?) but worth reading. I doubt that any American politician would ever want to be remembered as anyone associated with doing away with the filibuster. (TCS is not famous for being Liberal, you know. This is from the "right of center" crowd.)

Lee Harris has put together a complete history of the filibuster.

If there is a sacred tradition in American politics, it is the willingness of otherwise prudent men to bluff their way up to the very brink of disaster, and then back down. We have done so over and over, and let us hope that we will do so again. The alternative, after all, is nothing short of a divided society, and an uncivil war in which the very political process itself is nullified by an excess of partisan passion.

Arianna is off and running

She didn't just hit a nerve. Apparently she wielded a ball peen hammer on each and every elbow. I can't find any evidence this morning that anybody in the blog world thinks that Arianna Huffington's entry into the blogworld is anything but a gigantic disaster.

A few years ago this woman was one of the darlings of the political right. It seems that every time I turned on C-SPAN there was her smiling face parroting the party line du jour, whatever the topic happened to be. Well it took some time for this wide-eyed little Greek to see the big picture in this paragon of freedom and prosperity we call America, but the more she read and studied, the more populist she became.

After what turned out to be no more than a honeymoon, she emerged on the other end of the political spectrum as an articulate spokesperson for the enemy. Nobody bothered to tell her that changing your point of view about something will do nothing but marginalize your influence for the rest of your public life. Oh well, some people never learn.

The Huffington Post is only two days old and already it is receiving slings and arrows of outrageous fortune far out of proportion to its novelty. No need to cite any links. They are in wide agreement that we are about to see another lead balloon. The more gentlemanly among them keep their comments to a few quiet, thinly-veiled sneers. She must be doing something right.

Looking over the opening pages I found most of what was there tepid and predictable. High-profile people are typically circumspect, not given to a lot of brimstone and such, so I was not surprised. This piece by Larry David I thought was cute:

Why I Support John Bolton

I know this may not sound politically correct, but as someone who has abused and tormented employees and underlings for years, I am dismayed by all of this yammering directed at John Bolton. Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it’s like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.

"You stupid ignoramus," I screamed, doing all I could to restrain myself from tossing the luke-warm liquid in her face. “There's too much freaking (I didn’t say freaking) milk in here! What the freak is wrong with you?!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she stammered. Like sorry’s going to fix everything. I’m not interested in sorry. Sorry doesn’t cut it with me.

“Look, you idiot,” I continued, “I wouldn’t mind so much if you gave me too little milk. Little can be fixed. We can add to little.”

“Shall I get you another cup?”

“No, I’ll suck on my thumb. Yes, get me another cup, you douche bag! And chew on this -- it’s going to cost you a dollar!”

This, of course, brought on the requisite tears. At which point I'd had enough and began chasing her down the hall where she took refuge in the bathroom. Boo-hoo. Poor thing!

Meanwhile, I’m the one who had to go into the kitchen and make my own coffee! And guess what? I missed a very important phone call from this masseuse whom I’d been trying to get an appointment with forever!!

(Sorry about all the exclamation points, but you can see how worked up I get over this Bolton business!)

There is one thing, though, I’ll guarantee: that will be the last time she puts in too much milk. So get to work, Bolton. Show these other countries who’s the boss.

Filibuster on trial

I still remember a cartoon from 1964.
Congress was debating whether to pass what was to become the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, with its far-reaching implications for de jure segregation.
The arguments were loud and passionate. States rights. God's law. Would you want your sister to marry one? We'll have to move to Australia. They don't know their place. On and on. And the Southern Senators were staging a filibuster to keep the issue from coming to a vote, because a majority would pass the bill in a New York minute. And everyone knew that. That's exactly what happened, by the way. And a cloture vote by the then-larger super majority underscored the will of the country in a way that no simple majority would have achieved.

The cartoon depicted a scene from Alice in Wonderland, a scene by the seashore with a walrus addressing a mess of clams. It was the face of Senator Everett Dirksen (the same guy who said "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.") He was addressing the clams:
"The time has come," the walrus said, "to speak of many things...of civil rights, and cloture votes and Martin Luther Kings..."

Cloture vote. That's what it takes to close a Senate debate if a steadfast minority is staging a filibuster. The number of votes required according to theSenate rules is three-fifths of the Senate. Sixty votes.
There is a Republican majority, so a cloture vote requires eight additional votes. Eight more than fifty-one is all we are discussing.
This is showdown week.

Tom Watson sums it up well...

Funnily enough, the GOP tally in the Senate stands at 55 with a couple of wobbly centrists and mavericks bringing Majority Leader Bill Frist's lock-step votes down to around 51, and the upcoming mid-term elections throwing that 55-45 lead up into the air. But Frist knows far better than these Senate leaders from the past: Mike Mansfield, Robert Byrd, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, George Mitchell, Tom Daschle, and Trent Lott. The cloture rule must go. People of faith demand it, and they're the perceived base for Frist's 2008 run for the Presidency. This is the week, folks - a great week for American politics in the true sense of the word. Dramatic. Vitriolic. Telling. This week will give you a true sense of the ethics and American spirit of Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee. It will also say a lot about the future of the Republican Party, which - from time to time - occasionally finds itself in the minority in the Senate and desirous of a traditional tactic to block what it considers the more radical notions of its opposition. Pay attention.

What's that the blogfather says?
Indeed.
Yes, indeed.

Homework: Elizabeth Kolbert on Climate Changes

Good news and bad news.
The good news is that she has put together a very comprehensive article on global climate changes. It's too long to read at one sitting. Nineteen pages when "printer-friendly." This is why some stuff on paper - like books, magazines and long essays - is still superior to a computer monitor.
The bad news is "(This is the first part of a three-part article.)"

It is now twenty-five years since the Charney panel issued its report, and, in that period, Americans have been alerted to the dangers of global warming so many times that volumes have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem. (The National Academy of Sciences alone has issued nearly two hundred reports on global warming; the most recent, “Radiative Forcing of Climate Change,” was published just last month.) During this same period, worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions have continued to increase, from five billion metric tons a year to seven billion, and the earth’s temperature, much as predicted by Manabe’s and Hansen’s models, has steadily risen. The year 1990 was the warmest year on record until 1991, which was equally hot. Almost every subsequent year has been warmer still.

(...damn ecologists...)

On my second day in Fairbanks, Romanovsky picked me up at my hotel for an underground tour of the city. Like most permafrost experts, he is from Russia. (The Soviets more or less invented the study of permafrost when they decided to build their gulags in Siberia.) A broad man with shaggy brown hair and a square jaw, Romanovsky as a student had had to choose between playing professional hockey and becoming a geophysicist. He had opted for the latter, he told me, because “I was little bit better scientist than hockey player.” He went on to earn two master’s degrees and two Ph.D.s. Romanovsky came to get me at 10 a.m.; owing to all the smoke, it looked like dawn.

Any piece of ground that has remained frozen for at least two years is, by definition, permafrost. In some places, like eastern Siberia, permafrost runs nearly a mile deep; in Alaska, it varies from a couple of hundred feet to a couple of thousand feet deep. Fairbanks, which is just below the Arctic Circle, is situated in a region of discontinuous permafrost, meaning that the city is freckled with regions of frozen ground. One of the first stops on Romanovsky’s tour was a hole that had opened up in a patch of permafrost not far from his house. It was about six feet wide and five feet deep. Nearby were the outlines of other, even bigger holes, which, Romanovsky told me, had been filled with gravel by the local public-works department. The holes, known as thermokarsts, had appeared suddenly when the permafrost gave way, like a rotting floorboard.

(...pinko, commie, extremist...)

For the same reason that it is sweaty in a coal mine—heat flux from the center of the earth—permafrost gets warmer the farther down you go. Under equilibrium conditions—which is to say, when the climate is stable—the very warmest temperatures in a borehole will be found at the bottom and they will decrease steadily as you go higher. In these circumstances, the lowest temperature will be found at the permafrost’s surface, so that, plotted on a graph, the results will be a tilted line. In recent decades, though, the temperature profile of Alaska’s permafrost has drooped. Now, instead of a straight line, what you get is shaped more like a sickle. The permafrost is still warmest at the very bottom, but instead of being coldest at the top it is coldest somewhere in the middle, and warmer again toward the surface. This is an unambiguous sign that the climate is heating up.

(...panic mongers...)

The printer is about finished now, but you get the idea.
She goes from Alaska to New Hampshire to Iceland to who-knows-where...
At this point I have only scanned the article.
Those who are interested can follow up. You know who you are.
To the rest of you, buh-bye.

UPDATE: Several hours later...

Well, I read it. I also plan to read parts II and III when published.

I am not optimistic that much will be done as a consequence of these articles. About the bottom of page seventeen she finally got around to mentioning politics. It seems the administration has a few, shall we say, reservations about the hard science involved in the discussion of global warming. Yeah, the words "climate change" is another way to refer to "global warming." So we enter the battle of rhetoric and spin, leaving behind whatever scientific questions may have merit.

Last fall there was a symposium in Iceland convened for the purpose of discussing and looking at global warming, with the aim of creating some level of awareness to bring about policy changes aimed at curbing some of the more disturbing practices contributing to climate changes. I believe I heardNeal Boortz making reference this meeting in a very sarcastic tone.

Global warming is routinely described as a matter of scientific debate—a theory whose validity has yet to be demonstrated. This characterization, or at least a variant of it, is offered most significantly by the Bush Administration, which maintains that there is still insufficient scientific understanding to justify mandatory action. [...] The policy document remained unfinished because American negotiators had rejected much of the language proposed by the seven other Arctic nations. ...This recalcitrance left those Americans who had travelled to Reykjavík in an awkward position.

Okay, then. We have full disclosure. No surprise ending, so here are some choice quotes anyway...

Any piece of ground that has remained frozen for at least two years is, by definition, permafrost. ...Fairbanks, which is just below the Arctic Circle, is situated in a region of discontinuous permafrost, meaning that the city is freckled with regions of frozen ground. One of the first stops on Romanovsky’s tour was a hole that had opened up in a patch of permafrost not far from his house. It was about six feet wide and five feet deep. Nearby were the outlines of other, even bigger holes, ... known as thermokarsts, [which] appeared suddenly when the permafrost gave way, like a rotting floorboard. ...Across the road, Romanovsky pointed out a long trench running into the woods [which] had been formed when a wedge of underground ice had melted. The spruce trees that had been growing next to it, or perhaps on top of it, were now listing at odd angles, as if in a gale. Locally, such trees are called “drunken.” A few of the spruces had fallen over. “These are very drunk,” Romanovsky said.

A few blocks beyond the drunken forest, we came to a house where the front yard showed clear signs of ice-wedge melt-off. The owner, trying to make the best of things, had turned the yard into a miniature-golf course. Around the corner, Romanovsky pointed out a house—no longer occupied—that had basically split in two; the main part was leaning to the right and the garage toward the left. The house had been built in the sixties or early seventies; it had survived until almost a decade ago, when the permafrost under it started to degrade.

[...]

No nation takes a keener interest in climate change, at least on a per-capita basis, than Iceland. More than ten per cent of the country is covered by glaciers, the largest of which, Vatnajökull, stretches over thirty-two hundred square miles. ...Oddur Sigurdsson heads up a group called the Icelandic Glaciological Society. ...composed entirely of volunteers. Every fall, after the summer-melt season has ended, they survey the size of the country’s three hundred-odd glaciers and then file reports... In the organization’s early years—it was founded in 1930—the volunteers were mostly farmers; they took measurements by building cairns and pacing off the distance to the glacier’s edge. These days, members come from all walks of life—one is a retired plastic surgeon—and they take more exacting surveys, using tape measures and iron poles. Some glaciers have been in the same family, so to speak, for generations. Sigurdsson became head of the society in 1987, at which point one volunteer told him that he thought he would like to relinquish his post.
“He was about ninety when I realized how old he was,” Sigurdsson recalled. “His father had done this at that place before and then his nephew took over for him.” Another volunteer has been monitoring his glacier, a section of Vatnajökull, since 1948. “He’s eighty,” Sigurdsson said. “And if I have some questions that go beyond his age I just go and ask his mother. She’s a hundred and seven.”
In contrast to glaciers in North America, which have been shrinking steadily since the nineteen-sixties, Iceland’s glaciers grew through the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Then, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, they, too, began to decline, at first slowly and then much more rapidly. ...In 1996, Sólheimajökull crept back by ten feet. In 1997, it receded by another thirty-three feet, and in 1998 by ninety-eight feet. Every year since then, it has retreated even more. In 2003, it shrank by three hundred and two feet and in 2004 by two hundred and eighty-five feet. All told, Sólheimajökull—the name means “sun-home glacier” and refers to a nearby farm—is now eleven hundred feet shorter than it was just a decade ago.

I found this piece to be interesting and informative even though the outlook is not good, either scientifically or politically. The points are compelling. I deeply want them to be wrong. All I can ask is: what if they are right?

J. Budziszewski on opinionated professors

From Boundless Webzine via titusonenine...

"Do you know Muito Egregious, the Spanish and Portuguese teacher?"
"Only by reputation."
"Well, I'm a Spanish major, and I can't avoid taking his courses."
"Does he live up to his name?"
"Sure does. He never misses an opportunity to be insulting or obscene — if possible, both at once. What he said this morning about Mother Theresa was unspeakable. I wish I could clean out my memory with soap."
"You think you've got it bad," said Don. "My Modern European teacher, Peccata Mundi, is a woman with a mission. Did you know that Christianity is responsible for all of the evils of the world? No? Well, that's what she says. Oppression of women? We did it. Slavery? Our fault. The Holocaust? We did that too, according to her. Stalin's purges? Before becoming a Communist, Stalin was a seminary student, so again we're to blame. Terrorism? We're just getting what we deserve."
"I can top that," said Peter. "My public policy professor, Prentice Schlange, isn't just nuts -- he's a sadist. Yesterday he opened class by saying, 'All of you here are too intelligent to be pro-life, right?' A girl in front of me said, 'I'm pro-life.' He tore her down for five minutes."
"You didn't tell us about that," said Theresa. "What did he say?"
"He figured her reasons were religious, so the first thing he did was label her a 'fundamentalist.' It was downhill from there on. A lot of his diatribe was recycled quotations from other people. I recognized a couple of them, like H.L. Mencken's line about uneducable people who belong to the species homo boobiens. By the time my teacher was finished, the girl was in tears. Then he asked, 'Would anyone else like to say anything?' Of course no one else did, so he smiled nastily and said to her, 'It seems that you're a minority of one."
I raised a judicial eyebrow. "Are you saying that all of your teachers are like these three?"
"Yes and no," replied Theresa. "Not many faculty are that extreme. On the other hand, there's a persistent left-wing, anti-religious bias in almost all of our classes. Sometimes mild, sometimes not."
"Make that anti-Christian bias," said Peter. "They hardly ever criticize, say, Hinduism or New Age religiosity."

Great read.
A bit long, but quick reading.
Be sure to read both parts.

***

We don't agree about capital punishment, he and I, but Budziszewski is clearly one of the giants of the faith today. I would never presume to engage him in an argument.

Slippery Slope

What if your perfect partner only comes to you in your sleep? And how do you persuade a dream to replay?

LINK
Tip to Imshin

Getting Flat, Part 2, and lots, lots more

Following through on yesterday's post referring the long tail, I have been reading Doc Searls blog and links.
Time and space don't allow me to do more than cut and paste a few choice pieces, but for anyone interested in the growth of the internet, open source, Tom Friedman's flat world, the impact of IT on society...this is great reading. These topics draw my attention like a magnet.
Doc has a lot to say about learning and education, also...

Work matters, but curiosity matters more. Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid. And nothing works harder to disable a kid's curiosity than the narcotic we call television. LINK

That idea should be drilled into the hearts and minds of all parents and caregivers (isn't that what we call it now when children get farmed out for day care as their parent -- or parents, plural, in the event they are fortunate enough to have both) go about the business of "supporting" (another misused term) the children they had no business trying to rear.
Forgive me if I come across as cynical.
Google this phrase in quotes and see what comes up: "education is too important to be left to"
I rest my case.

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

*

Hoot's Syllabus to study Doc

You might want to print this off if you're really interested

...but I doubt anyone but me is really interested.

First off, You gotta read Doc's comments in Linux Journal, Getting Flat, Part I.
Here he says mostly good things about Friedman's book and insights, but ends with a couple of enjoinders, including...

So it looks as though Microsoft has convinced him, at least for now, that open source is somehow anti-business or anti-capitalism, when it is neither.

The fact is, or will be, far more money will be made because of open source than will be made with open source--or with any of the infrastructural (in Tom's words, vanilla) software it replaces. Think of open-source infrastructure as a huge, flat cake on which you can build a vast new market for any kind of topping you like. A cake which, by the way, only gets bigger.

We have another word for that cake, one I know Tom likes: a marketplace. [&c.]

That's gonna take a long time, especially if you study the comments thread. In most cases comment threads are tedious, but this one should be mined for nuggets.

Next go to Part II.

In Part 2, I want to examine the human origins of the open-source materials we're using to build this new world. And I want to start by distinguishing them from corporate origins. Again, this is not to diminish the importance of big-company contributions to the flat-world revolution but to subordinate them to the profound work being done by individuals and small groups.

Here is a great quote from Friedman's book.

Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: "Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you."

Doc replies:

What's wrong here isn't simply the focus on Microsoft in a country where open source is a huge phenomenon. It's that both Tom and Microsoft continue to believe IQ tests are important ways to measure citizens in a flat world. Because if there's one thing the world is flattening fast, it's the old caste system we call The Bell Curve.
[...]
I can save Microsoft a pile of time and money by reporting a fact no school wants to admit, one that will flatten the world far more than any other factor: pretty much everybody is smart. What's more, they're all smart in their own ways. Meaning that the sources of innovation in China are a lot higher than 1,300 out of 1.3 billion.

He cites John Taylor Gatto, educator, who said...

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. ... In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.

I don't know about you, but I find this stuff to be really exciting. Anybody who has reared a family and paid attention to children's learning and development will understand the passion, even if they don't agree with the conclusions.

Doc uses himself as an example of how education does not always serve the best interests of the student:

By the end of junior high, the school system wanted me to join the other academic failures at the local vocational-technical high school, where they taught how to fix cars and work a drill press. Fortunately, my parents believed in me and sent me off to a Lutheran prep school, which I only half-jokingly called an "academic correctional institution". My grades still sucked, but at least I had a good time and learned a lot anyway.

By junior high I was already a ham radio operator and a committed geek. And, like geeks and misfits everywhere, I worked constantly to increase the delta between my soul and the bell curve. In other words, I educated myself, just like Franklin, Edison and the rest of history's productive misfits.

Damn. Just, damn.
That's really good. The rest of the article is just as good.

Finally we get to yesterday's blogpost.
Here Doc begins by replying to someone who doesn't agree with what he said in Part I.
This person is also named Friedman -- Dave Friedman -- so don't confuse this Friedman with the first one.

For starters, the nub of the argument about IQ testing...

IQ distributions are a bell curve: there are very few people at the low (retarded) end of intelligence, and there are very few at the high (genius) end of intelligence. Most of us are bunched in the middle.

Nope, says Doc... my IQ has been measured everywhere from very smart to very dumb.
Intelligence is complicated, conditional and hard to measure.

Dave Friedman (not Tom, remember) admits to the point about IQ testing, sort of, but concludes that Doc's thinking is "utopian." Doc replies...

First, the open source movement doesn't advocate ending corporate hierarchies. It advocates good code. ...

Second, I'm not consigning academic degrees and pedigreed qualifications to "anachronistic times." Or to anything. Those are terrific honors, and useful to have. They are also beside the point. ...It's about those the old system missed or squashed, and that will find fresh advantages in a flat new world that rewards the growth and practice of intellegence, regardless of whether or not it shows up in grades, SAT scores or IQ tests.

Third, the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of freely available services that make possible what we're doing here ... Pretty freaking amazing, if you ask me. Go back fifteen years and imagine the Internet we have today: something nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve. ...

As for alternatives to IQ tests for selecting employees, how about this advice, provided by one of the best bosses I ever had: Recruit for the position, but hire for the person.

Big ending...

... when I got out of college, I was spared boring jobs at two insurance companies by flunking IQ tests. One was Aetna. That was administered right at the employment agency. No waiting. Impressive. I forget the name [of] the other one, but I remember the setting vividly. It was in Newark. Nice offices, friendly people. The guy who interviewed me told the employment agency something like, "I was so impressed by the interview. He seemed real smart, and knew an awful lot of stuff. But then when we got the IQ test back we found out he was really dumb."

He said "discuss."
Okay, then.

Follow-up

I see Doc Searls noted my little site.
Thanks for the mention.
Visitors are always welcome, although my range of interests is almost too arcane for anybody but me. Doc says...

Now, you'd think if anyone has been in a position to see the fat parts of bell curves at work, it would be Hoots. Hey, I've done food service work myself, and lemme tell ya, if you're looking for work that will make you cynical about your fellow man...

Yet Hoot buys the case, put forward by John Taylor Gatto and seconded by myself, that most kids are born smart, genius is common, and the bell curve is a crock.

Right about that. Many very gifted people are born into a situation that will never, and I mean never either see, appreciate or develop whatever natural gifts they may have. It has been my privilege to work with a handful of very fine people whose lot in life has kept them among the working poor, not by any deficiencies on their part, but because they were/are simply trapped. But being trapped does not stop them from doing simple, hard, honorable work consistently well. These people are the foundation of this and every other economy in the world.

I have also seen what can happen when people come into this country as immigrants - torn from their homelands for any number of reasons, unable to speak English - and become very high achievers. I learned long ago that what we like to think of as "intelligence" is nothing more than an intellectual construct, normally used when we need to put someone down and don't have the courage to admit that what is really at stake is our own inability to help them.

Story: When I first started in the cafeteria business I noticed one day the contrast between a very old employee and one of the high school kids working part-time.

The old lady was slow and physically limited. She wobbled as she walked and trembled so badly that we couldn't let her serve vegetables because she would either get burned or burn someone else with spilled hot vegetable juice from the little bowls. But she could serve bread okay and keep up with the dessert station. She also answered the phone nearby with "Thank you for calling [company name], this is Blanche. How may I help you?" Unfailingly gracious and polite, her uniform always neat, she was a model employee who would do anything I asked cheerfully and to the best of her ability.

High school and college kids are a wonderful resource because they are quick to catch on, fast and efficient, and much easier to cross-train than older people. So this kid was all over the place, carving meat, back in the dishroom rolling silverware, out in the dining room clearing tables, learning to do the checker's job making tickets for people at the end of the line...whatever was needed. I realized two things. First, the old lady had been there for years and the kid was just hired, probably just for the summer, yet their pay was only slightly different (we are paid for the job we do, not our abilities, and the rate is set by the marketplace, not the proprietor). Second, the actual productivity of the kid was a lot more than that of the old lady.

Thinking about that I came to the conclusion that the gracious manners, mature example and model attitude of one was a fair tradeoff for the measurable productivity of the other. I decided that my expectations should be changed from "Do as much or more than everybody else" to "Bring to this job your individual best, whatever that might be. "

You might notice that what we call "intelligence" has nothing to do with valuable contributions. Those who think in those terms need to take a closer look at how they assess people, beginning with the "mentally-clallenged" individual bagging groceries and continuing until they will themselves face challenges, if they are lucky, as the result of getting old.

Chris Anderson - The Long Tail

...the day when most of America watched the same things on the same night is long gone...Today's top shows have Nielsen scores that wouldn't have put then in the top twenty two decades ago.

Likewise for music. By my count only ten of the top 100 best-selling albums were released in the last decade, and only four of those were in the last five years....

So instead of the office water cooler, which crosses cultural boundaries as only the random assortment of personalities found in the workplace can, we increasingly have our own tribes.

Tribes. That's what's happening. Somebody with the much-maligned MSM, that librul conspiracy, has something on the ball.
Lost. Survivor. "Reality" shows (Yech!). Idol. Hmmm...
Just keeping up. The tail keeps growing...From Chris Anderson's blog.
Tip to Doc.

Andrew Cusack blog -- new find

New to me, but this is great.
According to his CV Andrew Cusack is only trwnty-one years old. He reads Touchstone, already.
Here he quotes one of the contributing editors.
He's commenting on Patrick Henry College in Northern Virginia.

...this De Tocqueville Society is made up of a group of students at the new Patrick Henry College, founded by Mike Farris, the President of the Home School Legal Defense Association. More than ninety percent of the college's students were homeschooled. If there's a Roman Catholic in the bunch, I've yet to hear about it, and I've been to that campus twice to give lectures.

The young men stand tall and look you in the eye—they don’t skulk, they don’t scowl and squirm uncomfortably in the back chairs as they listen to yet another analysis of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, or one of the healthier poems of Sylvia Plath. They’re frank and generous and respectful, but they hold their own in an argument, and they are eager to engage you in those. They are comfortable in their skins; they wear their manhood easily. And the young ladies are beautiful. They don’t wither away in class, far from it; but they wear skirts, they are modest in their voices and their smiles, they clearly admire the young men and are esteemed in turn; they are like creatures from a faraway planet, one sweeter and saner than ours.

Makes me feel much better about the future.
Tip to Steve (aka Freddie) at Southern Appeal.

Gold teeth as a fashion statement

Lessons in life: We don't have a lot of control over what happens to us, but we have some measure of control over how we respond.
At some point we all come to the understanding of the importance of role models and how they affect our development.

So who are the role models? Who is informing these choices?

No longer just for rappers and street toughs, gold teeth have gone to the girls. For prom or a day in the park, girls from the Bay Area to the Bayou to the Bronx are accessorizing their smiles. Bay Area makers of the removable mouthwear say teenage girls are the fastest-growing segment of their customer base.

Tip Michelle

Buster is covering for his sick Mom

The Anchoress is sick.
Luckily she has a good copilot in Buster, her son. He's blogged before.
Quick read. Go.

Don't try talking to her and telling her not to write. She writes all the time. This afternoon she told me she has a whole book in her head that she wrote this afternoon but she's too sick to type it out. Then she laid around shivering and asking for blankets. She loses the remote, she loses her glasses which are on top of her head. She whines that there is nothing good on tv and then makes me put Pride and Prejudice on the one tv in the house, then she falls asleep, but if I try to turn if off she wakes up and tells me she is watching it.

Morning reading and rant

Today I am copying true grit, another blog.
It's not easy, because she has some kind of demon in the template that causes the copy/paste feature not to work, unless you grab the whole damn webpage (which is what I did) then edit away what you don't want to use.
I don't know who ilona is, but she was good enough to agree to something I said in a Parableman thread. I figure she must be pretty smart if she can agree with me on anything, so I want to return the favor.

This morning's post announced she is taking vacation, but before leaving she wonders about the blogging thing, asking what makes a blog interesting.

What makes a blog interesting to you? Can you really quantify it? I have been trying to find new blog venues because I tend to stay on the same ones with the same narrow scope. I have been trying to "branch out" ...you can let me know your thoughts if you like. I'd like to know.

I don't really know. It seems to be a very individual appeal, not at all the same for any two people. If we look at the population in terms of blogger and bloggee, it seems the blogger is in the business of trying to say something, reach out, or connect. The readers, however, tend to be mostly other bloggers, so I'm not sure that among the audience there are very many people really looking to receive anything by reading. There will always be that ulterior motive, that lurking desire, that as we read, we might come upon something to claim part of. A meme or scoop or juxtaposition of ideas that will strike a chord if we blog about it.

Here is an enigmatic line:

I have another blog cooking to take the place of Spiced Tea, which hardly anyone knows about. I don't know what to call it, though.

I looked it up. There is another blog by that name which looks more conventional.
Ilona, if you read this, I think you have a good aptitude for blogging and writing, but the form is less important than the content.

When I got my nerve up to do anything on the internet it was on a Yahoo message board. At Yahoo you can register a bunch of different "profiles" by way of maintaining anonymity. A lot of people, however, use that capability to plant deceptive messages using different profiles, so the reader is left wondering who these different people are. It's all very silly when you think about it, since even the first profile is already nothing but a handpuppet. I found multiple profiles to be confusing as well as deceptive, so early on I decided to stick with one.

It seems to me that unless the blogger is using his or her "real" identity, one blog is probably enough. There are exceptions, of course, for keeping professional interests separate from personal interests. Also, the current trend to group blogging calls for individual blogs to be repositories for content that might not be appropriate to a group objective.

In the case of Spiced Tea versus true grit (or any other effort underway) I would like to gently and respectfully suggest that putting all your energy into one blog will be quite enough. The added benefit will be removing the temptation to compartmentalize one's life and thinking. That temptation is how we resist listening to a Divine whisper that says our mortal being and our spiritual being are inextricably entwined.

As an old-fashioned sixties liberal I like what you wrote in the post before:

In Defense of Mercy

I have often said I would advocate the Liberal if they could give me anything remotely worthy of it. This may or may not happen, but I will say this, the Conservatives may yet give me cause to stand against them. and I won't care if they have banners of Christian Right emblazoned upon their chests or if they have self-righteous emptyminded platitudes about how "reasonable and right" they are.
Because, so help me God, I have given my allegiance to one Lord. And I am taken back by the self-righteous mob pleasing catcalls of "Right and Wrong" if it is not predicated upon truth. You will not gain any acquiesence from this corner. Not one quarter.
God is a God of justice, yes, -yes, He is, but I have an admonition for you who seek an absolute justice that will impale the target with no remonstrance of mercy:
Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! to what end is it for you? the day of the LORD is darkness, and not light.
I wonder sometimes... is this the Age of Enlightenment's legacy, this Directoire with gleeful guillotine crowds? Is this the impasse we will find ourselves at? Our very humanity sacrificed in the name of Human Reason.
Where is the mercy that met the adulterous women- the one at the well and the one presented for one last imprecation before stoning? Where is that mercy if you call yourself Christian? Where is the knowledge that we are all flesh, and prone to its folly? Does this take anything at all away from the fact that justice will be done? It does not.
Will you call Christ unjust, you who would justify yourselves? And isn't that all we do in our frenzies of infuriated feeding on the stories of the day.
I have stood at the lines of good and evil in the black and white of matters, and I don't apologize for that, but there is a difference between understanding social issues and applying strict no-mercy, no allowances rules to our fellow man. Just witness some of the zero-tolerance fiascos that policy has provided.
Didn't anyone else ever read Les Miserables? You were all on Inspector Javert's side, right? And you subscribe to that mode of thinking: right is right and law is law and let's get to the good part and stone the poor fool. They deserve it!
We have lost our moorings... and the Christian voice is truncated in demanding Righteousness!
Well, how about sowing a little of the real righteousness and throw your cloak over the poor fool, and get them some help.... and how about giving some thought and reason to dividing the issues in such a way that real criminals who work the system and literally get away with murder have some controls and more than virtual punishments...
Just one last thing on this rant... can we remember that it is the hue and cry of the inflamed mob that injustice may most hide under and justice may most be lost? And it is before the quiet, and reasoned Man who wrote the convicting letters in the sand, who brought both true justice and mercy into a volatile situation? Give truth some time and space, and render some mercy in the meantime. Who knows when you will need the same, in one court of justice or another?

In a fairly short space you have covered a lot of ground and raised a lot of valid and provocative questions.

The first thing I read this morning was Jim Gilbert's post at @ Large.
I like what he says and have only the greatest respect for his professional standing as a theologian with obvious credentials. Sometimes you don't need to see the diploma to know that someone has a degree in music. All you need to do is hear them sing or play an instrument. Same is true of him.
However, he is trying in a short space to put a universe of topics into a single nutshell. His generalizations are correct, I think, but as a self-confessed "liberal" I wince every time I see the word in print, because I know it is someone who wants to define me without my permission. If it is not a voice of the "Right" (and these are terms I rarely use, because I hate the polarizing effect they have on any discussion) preparing to excoriate me in absentia, it is instead a voice from the "Left" purporting to speak on my behalf without my consent.

The reason I like what you wrote is that it doesn't presume to cast anyone into a stereotype. You seem to be holding the gate open for anyone, from any politic, to persuade you one way or another. On that, if that is what is happening, you and I can agree.

Some of my current complaints are these:

***There is a story going around about a soldier in Iraq who decided after he was there that he is a conscientious objector. The term is being tossed around carelessly, mostly by journalists and uninformed pundits who have no idea what it means. This is not the place to elaborate, but I can tell you as someone who served a full tour of duty in the Army as a conscientious objector that the issue(s) is/are not as straightforward as readers are being led to believe.

***The election of George Bush to the presidency is being hailed as God's putting a Christian into that job. In my estimation Jimmy Carter is also a Christian who strives to discern God's will. But Jimmy Carter is being vilified for his performance as president by a lot of people waving the Christian flag. Is it ever possible that a Democrat can be a Christian?

***I'm tired, weary to the end of optimism, of having to read and hear the word "liberal" in the pejorative. The more I read it, the less energy I have. It is hard enough to be part of a minority. It is harder still when the acknowledged majority seems unrelenting in their efforts to use that minority as a whipping boy. What happened to the idea that a loyal opposition is important to any discussion?

Robert Fulgham writes from Crete

Sorry, but this isn't from a blog. No permalinks, so if you want to find it you have to look at the Journal for Tuesday, May 3. I am not using italic because there is italic in the piece which would vanish. Besides, plain font is easier to read. Blue means it's Robert Fulgham's work, not mine.

AGENT X

Next Sunday, May 8, is Mother's Day in the United States. (But not here in Crete.) I will observe the occasion from a distance by telling a story I have been saving since last October.

My host for a weekend conference had put me up in a new high-end hotel.
The Ritz.
In the reception area was the concierge desk, manned by two young men in frocked coats, bearing the crossed keys of their profession.
Sleek as seals – handsome Italianate faces right out of an Armani ad.
Enthusiastically eager to be of any help I might require.

All I needed was a new leather band for my reliable old wristwatch. And a new shoestring for my shoe.
If I had wanted to buy a new Ferrari, they could have helped me right away.
If I had wanted a private jet to take to me Dubai, no problem.
If I had needed a table for ten to honor a Grand Duke, done.Tickets for any opera in the world, piece of cake.

But a watchband? A leather one? For an old watch? And a shoelace?
One moment, please.
Consultation in English, Italian, and French of computer, Rolodex, and telephone books.Nothing.

A third character entered the pursuit:The lovely young blonde female front desk manager. She has monitored the situation.
"Marcel," she calls, raising her eyebrows. "X?" she asks.
Marcel writes a few words on a piece of paper and passes it to her.
"Please wait a moment, sir," says Marcel. "Please take a chair."

Meanwhile, the young woman smiles at me, makes a phone call, writes a note, and passes it to Marcel, who glides over to my chair.
There are two addresses and a small map on the piece of paper.
"What you wish is nearby. Shall we send someone for you or shall we make an appointment? Would you like us to arrange a car and driver to take you?"

If I had replied that I wished him to carry me piggyback, he might have.

So. What had happened?
When I returned with my new watchband and shoelace I noticed that the concierge desk was momentarily vacant, and felt free to ask the young woman who she called.

"What does 'X' mean?"
"Promise not to tell," she said.
"I will be discreet," I said.

"When all other information resources of the concierge desk of the Ritz Hotel fail, we call my Mom."
"Your mother?"

"Yes. She's a retired schoolteacher, lives in this area, knows everybody, and is out and about in the world. We have not stumped her yet. I never realized how much my mother knew until I got this job. Occasionally the hotel invites her to stay as our guest as thanks. We refer to her as Agent X."

Thanks, Mom. Happy Day.

Dynamist Blog

Try to connect this remark by Virginia Postrel with politics:

As long as movie creators get to see their work on screen, reap the profits, and get credit for their ideas, I don't see any reason they should object to private remakes. It's just another example of user innovation. Maybe moviemakers should try to emulate other industries and see how they can tap, rather than stamp out or grudgingly tolerate, user ideas.

She is commenting on the recent signing into law The Family Movie Act.
Already the law of unintended consequences is coming into play as the marketplace jumps into action. This is from Forbes Magazine...

The law came about in part due to the efforts of William Aho and his tiny Salt Lake City software company called ClearPlay. For years, Aho had scratched his head and wondered why Hollywood refused to release on DVD versions of its most popular movies that would be slightly altered to appeal more to squeamish parents. Sensing an opportunity, he founded ClearPlay (see "Monster In A Box"). [William Aho's software easily remakes racy DVDs into family fare--but scares the living %#!$ out of Hollywood. Love that sub-title. Hoots. ]

Aho's software, when installed onto a DVD player, makes the player mute or skip ahead when something objectionable happens in a movie. (The software isn't smart enough to recognize curse words or violence; Aho employs teams of editors who watch movies, find the objectionable bits and program a movie-specific filter to excise the bad stuff frame by frame.) Aho successfully lobbied to create the Family Movie Act after billionaire director Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Steven Soderbergh, 13 other famed Hollywood directors and eight large studios sued ClearPlay in U.S. District Court in Denver, claiming its software violated copyright laws. The new law is a direct blow to them.

Her Sunday post about auto design is a case study of how design, social tastes and commerce interact. Nothing is as simple as it seems. The smart designer is involved in lots more than lines, shapes, materials and colors.
(That Sunday post, incidentally, drew insta-interest. Wouldn't I love to note such a thing in just two lines?)

Drilling into another link, we find Meta Cool.
Here are some choice quotes...

There is nothing more powerful in the visual vocabulary of an artist than the power of establishing contrast. Anything big and fat appears bigger and fatter when placed next to something flaccid and skinny... (from another blog focused on design)
LINK

"Good Enough" is a worldview. It's a way of approaching challenges where the appropriate solution path is not obvious.... Perfection equals paralysis, and the way to reach a more innovative mode of existence is to accept "good enough" as permission to go ahead and get stuff done. Life is short.

In reality, taking a "good enough" approach to developing your offering is the key to reaching greatness. ...if you view "good enough" as a one-shot deal and ship a turd to market and leave it there to fester, you're only fooling yourself into a state of perpetual mediocrity. But, if you say "this is good enough today, and I have a plan for good enough in a week, a month, a year," then you'll be iterating your way to success, learning all along the way. The first generation iPod was a "good enough" effort done quickly, and it taught Apple a lot about a new (to Apple, at least) marketspace. Subsequent iPod offerings capitalized on those lessons learned -- real information from real customers in a real market. The "good enough" worldview allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants of your own making.
LINK

There's a lot of creative thinking going on in the design world.
Braking stereotypes is a way of life for some people. It is their pathway to individual and collective progress, spreading win-win dynamics all the way.

How does this square with the world of politics?
Not too well, I would say. Any time you have to get a lot of people to agree about something, the common denominator has to be pretty low. That's the chasm that divides the world of politics from the world of design.

Best wishes to Josh Marshall

Josh Marshall is going on honeymoon. Really, not a figure of speech.
While he is away, Matthew Yglesias is helping mind the store and he's off to a good start:

Warren Buffett, who knows a thing or two about investing, comes out against the phase-out (see last item) along with Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger, "a self-described right-wing Republican" who thinks "Republicans are out of their cotton-picking minds on this issue." It's not entirely clear if he thinks Republicans are insan[n]e because their plan is so bad on the merits, insane because their plan is so politically self-destructive, or insane because it's simply absurd to be having a national conversation about restoring "solvency" to the federal government's best-financed element. Perhaps it's all three! LINK

He warns of a red herring tossed into the Individual Security debate (I can't call it "Social" security as long as the aim of the administration is to torpedo the social aspect of the program) in a Nicholas Kristof column which refers to the work of Laurence Kotlikoff, whom he calls "the chief useful idiot of the privatization drive."
Please, Matthew, tell us how you really feel.

Kotlikoff, as you can tell from Kristof's column, is very concerned that the government spends too much money on the people who are old right now, and the people who will be retired soon, and not enough on younger people. The phase-out crowd is a great fan of his book and mentions it constantly. I spent the day a couple of weeks ago at a Heritage Foundation event on Social Security where, naturally enough, you had a lot of privatization advocates, and several of them mentioned Kotlikoff and the analysis presented in his book as an important reason to support the phase-out. Funny thing, though, was that none of them said anything about Kotlikoff's views as to what we should do about it.

Kotlikoff favors replacing Social Security with something that's been given a name that sounds like "private accounts" or "personal accounts" or whatever it is we're supposed to call them nowadays. But his accounts are nothing like the ones Bush is pushing for. Individuals have no control over them -- each and every citizen's money is going to be invested the exact same way according to a formula devised by a government computer somewhere. In essence what he's proposing is simply that the Social Security administration invest the Trust Fund partially in stocks and other private assets. In order to overcome a couple technical problems with that plan, he splits the money up into a whole bunch of pseudo-personal accounts as a kind of accounting device.

[...]

What Bush is pushing -- and what's being pushed with many a reference to Kotlikoff's book -- does the reverse. If you're 55 or older when the plan passes, nothing changes for you. If you're 50 or 45, you do face some benefit cuts, but they're not all that big. That's because the way switching from price indexing to wage indexing (whether fully or, as we're now being asked to swallow, partially) works is that there's a little cut the first year, then a little cut the next year, then another cut, then another cut, then another, and so on down the road until quite literally the end of time. Once you get to somebody Josh's age, the cuts are looking pretty steep. If, like me, you were born in 1981, they get even steeper. My younger brother's benefits will be cut even more, and our little cousin Rebecca gets the biggest cuts of all. LINK

Orson Wells and frozen peas...

There is another biography of Orson Wells. If I had time in my life for more recreational reading I would definitely buy it, but I will have to satisfy myself with a review, and a remembrance if an entertaining little snip I found on the internet a few years -- Orson Wells making a radio commercial.

[Wells is] the tragic hero, whose greatest weakness is his integral strength, his bone-deep inability to compromise -- as we find in ''Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios,'' a devoted and meticulously researched work. Does any name come to mind more insistently than Welles, that Don Quixote of film directors? Small wonder ''Don Quixote'' was one of Welles's favorites in that frustrating group of films he would work and rework with demon energy over the years, only to give up finally and raise the white flag. Then somehow he would find the strength to move on to the next film. ''I believe that the only good work I can do is my own particular thing,'' Welles once said. ''I don't think I'm very good at doing their thing.''

Nothing illustrates the point more than this audio. Despite his genius, Wells had to pay the rent like everybody else. To make ends meet he was reduced to prostituting that world-class voice by making radio commercials or TV soundtracks. It's rather sad when you think of it. I think of a weary musician who for practical reasons might leave the stage of Carnegie Hall to play for diners in a restaurant, moving from party to party in a little trio, grinding out "requests" and playing "Happy Birthday" ad nauseum, for tip money.

A recording technician let the tape so we can hear the transparent greatness and impatience of this giant of stage and screen as he worked. Even in the most pedestrian tasks his standard of excellence was so high that ordinary people were incapable of understanding it. Parts of this tape are muffled so turn up the speakers to listen closely to the details. LINK and enjoy. After you hear it the first time, the second time through is better.

Wikipedia also has an entry with a link.

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Update, March, 2007
You Tube has a video.

This is a re-enactment of the Findus Food commercial outtake from the WFMU-TV reel that came out in 1994. Mark Rudolph of WFMU-TV plays Director #1 and Orson Welles. Director #2 is played by Dave Shelton.