Ramblings & ephemera
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
Levy writes that when this happens, the music becomes a “soundtrack” for the scenery, which is a good way to put it. The iPod turns ordinary life — riding the bus, waiting in line at the post office, staring at a [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, art, business | Comments Off
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
… though iPods can store thousands of songs, the average iPod user’s library numbers just about 500 well-worn tracks.
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Russian music sites
Portable music turns life into cinema
Patenting is hurting scientific research & progress
More validation of the Long Tail
Info about the Internet [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business | Comments Off
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
There are very few consumer products about which you’d want to read a whole book — the Google search engine, the first Mac, the Sony Walkman, the VW Beetle. Levy proves that the iPod, which turns five years old today, belongs [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Technology, business | Comments Off
From Erica Goode’s “Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills” (The New York Times: 18 January 2000):
Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things [...]
Posted on October 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Webster U: InfoSec Management, science | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Chinese fugitive leaves cave after 8 years” (5 October 2006):
A Chinese man wanted by police on gun charges has given himself up after hiding in a cave constructed at the back of his house for eight years, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The 35-year-old man from the southeastern city of Fuzhou had tunneled [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, law, weird | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Body found in bed 5 years after death” (4 October 2006):
Austrian authorities have discovered the body of a man who apparently died at home in bed five years ago, a Vienna newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The corpse of Franz Riedl, thought to have been in his late 80s when he died, went undetected for [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, True Stories, weird | Comments Off
From Chris Suellentrop’s “Scooby-Doo: Hey, dog! How do you do the voodoo that you do so well?” (Slate: 26 March 2004):
The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the “Scooby worldview” when the first live-action movie came out: “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it.”
Related [...]
Posted on October 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, art | Comments Off
Vidi et Scio (”I saw and I know”)
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Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Language & Literature | Comments Off
From James Surowiecki’s “The Tastemakers” (The New Yorker [13 January 2003]: 31):
… it’s one thing to foist a fad on people, and another to have a deep and enduring impact on their everyday customs and habits. In the late eighteen-eighties, when George Eastman invented the Kodak - the first point-and-shoot camera - photography was the [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, art, business, history | Comments Off
From Louis Menard’s “From the Ashes: A new history of Europe since 1945″ (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 168):
[Tony Judt, author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945] notes that France, a country with a population of some forty million, was administered by fifteen hundred Nazis, plus six thousand Germen policemen. A skeleton [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, history, law, politics | Comments Off
From Tom Reiss’s “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 112):
The [British] army was given responsibility for domestic intelligence, which became MI5; the Navy was put in charge of a new foreign espionage service, which became MI6.
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Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | Comments Off
From Tom Reiss’s “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 108):
… the first mini-boom in invasion fiction began in the seventeen-eighties, when the French developed the hot-air balloon. Soon, French poems and plays were depicting hot-air-propelled flying armies destined for England, and an American poem [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, art, history, science, security | Comments Off
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 70):
There is one section of “The Maltese Falcon” that could not be filmed, and for many readers it is the most important story Hammett ever told. A dreamlike interruption in events, it is a parable that Spade relates [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Language & Literature, security | Comments Off
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 70):
In March, 1928, [Hammett] had written to his publisher, Blanche Knopf, about his plans to adapt the “stream-of-consciousness method” to a new detective novel. He was going to enter the detective’s mind, he told her, reveal his impressions [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, art, business, history | Comments Off
From James B. Stewart’s “The Real Heroes Are Dead” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 58):
… he was simply following the “Eight P’s,” a mnemonic that had been drummed into them in the military: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”
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Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Language & Literature, Writing Ideas | Comments Off
From Jay McInerney’s “White Man at the Door” (The New Yorker [4 February 2002] 57):
[Matthew Johnson, head of Fat Possum Records, has] got a damaged lung, bad teeth, a couple of hernias, and a back catalogue of death threats. His dentist once held up a toothbrush and asked him if he’d ever seen one, to [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Fiction, Language & Literature | Comments Off
From Evelyn Nieves’s “Slab City Journal; For Thousands, a Town of Concrete Slabs Is a Winter Retreat” (The New York Times: 18 February 2001):
Every winter, when the Winnebagos and pickups shake the desert off Beal Road like a small earthquake, Ben Morofsky gets wistful for the 120-degree days of summer, and the peace of living [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Fiction | Comments Off
From Charlie LeDuff’s “Parked in a Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life” (The New York Times: 17 December 2004):
Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Fiction | Comments Off
Cthulhu in ancient Rome
Tennessee farmer David Lang’s disappearance into thin air
Lovecraft’s victims’ tendency to write in diary/account as things happen to them: “It devours me!”
A forgotten skeleton
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Writers take a while to attain full power
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Stonewall Jackson’s respect for Sunday
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Macaulay in 1841: copyright a tax on readers
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Fiction, Musings | Comments Off
Memories are passive fragments.
— Scott Granneman
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You always remember your first time
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Musings, Writing Ideas | Comments Off
Stayed up late finished Charlie Huston's vampire noir Half the Blood of Brooklyn. Highly recommended ... but not for the kiddies.
Yep - The Dark Knight is as good as everyone says it is. Easily the best comic book movie I've ever seen. And Ledger is Oscar material.
Drum solo. Hopefully he won't explode, a la Spinal Tap. Dave Grohl is funny, a good guitar player, & quite the rock 'n roll screamer.
Arrghh! Does anyone know if the Windows desktop client of Google Talk interops with any other IM networks? Besides Jabber? Tks!
Bookmarked 3 links
At a party where we really only know 2 people. Been doing crosswords on my iPhone. Time to go!
Bookmarked 3 links
I think I found the house I'm going to buy. 125 years old in downtown St. Louis, but very modern on the inside. Wish me luck!
Added 2 products to their wishlist:
