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Daily Blah for... Monday, January 24, 2005
Life in the Fast Lane
California is considering allowing hybrid cars like my Toyota Prius in the carpool lane, which would make my semi-regular visits to Silicon Valley a dream to drive. Eat my voltage, gas-based cars!
Here Comes the Slump, doo doo doo doo
Hello and welcome to the dreariest day of the year! According to the Guardian, a Cardiff University researcher designated January 24 for this dubious honor by creating "an elaborate formula expressing the delicate interplay of lousy weather, post-Christmas debt, time elapsed since yuletide indulgence, failed new year resolutions, motivation levels, and the desperate need to have something to look forward to." Amazing how easy it is for any previously anonymous drone at a halfway decent university to get his name splashed in the papers by pulling some formula out of his abacus, isn't it?
For the record, nothing seems particularly dismal at my end (even though it is not, as the Guardian suggests, a public holiday in the US -- that was last week). The east coast may be digging out from a blizzard, but here in San Francisco the sun is shining through the nippy January air. I've got a bit of a head cold and sore throat thingie, but don't feel particularly dreary about it. It's all a matter of perspective, after all.
Note to my UK readers: I'm heading home for a week as of January 29, so you've got another five days to get over your post-Christmas blahs. Got it?
Daily Blah for... Friday, January 21, 2005
Life + More Life = Smart
IQ is linked to whether or not you're likely to commit suicide,
according to a Swedish study: "those wth the lowest scores were three times more likely to take their own lives."
On behalf of the world's clever people, I just have to say: well, duh. That whole thing about tortured genius and ignorance being bliss, that's just propoganda invented by romantic poets who were whooping it up in their garrets and didn't want competition from the hoi polloi. William Blake was the one democratic dissenter, who felt it his duty to inform the masses that the path of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom (which is a beautiful place, let me tell you -- 33BR, lg lv room, eat-in kit, all mod cons).
Those who stumble across this fundamental truth know well how to suck the marrow out of life. Why, when marrow is everywhere, would they ever want to loose it?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Do the Shuffle
Perceptive readers might suspect that hidden under my review of the iPod Shuffle (below) lay a suspicion that it was a bit of a swizz, and that you would be better off buying the full-sized and full-priced thing. For such is what I thought at first, so fiercely loyal am I to my 60GB iPod Photo. But yesterday, accompanying me on my Martin Luther King Day walk around the city, the Shuffle won me over. First of all it was incredibly easy to plug it in and load up with exactly the music I wanted -- I'll take this playlist, please, and that one, and that one, and then fill the rest up with random music. Happy to oblige, says the Shuffle. Just give me a minute or two.
Then, with the soap-on-a-rope attachment, I slipped the incredibly light thing around my neck (which is one of the less interesting places the Shuffle has been since it arrived on Thursday night; my housemate took it on a walk herself, and came back declaring she had discovered what her cleavage is for). It was very nice not to take up precious pocket space with my iPod, and dangling it around your neck is -- for the next month or so, while they're still novel, and thanks to Apple's famed inability to meet demand with supply, extremely rare -- quite a fashion statement. I got a lot of looks and questions. In six months time, of course, the only fashion statement you'll be making wearing it this way will be "I've got $99 to spend on an iPod."
Luckily, someone has already come out with a jewel-encrusted Shuffle cover to help up that particular ante. Or perhaps you prefer the idea of taping it to your sunglasses?
I'm Shrinking!
My original headline was "honey, I shrunk the Mac." But I like my editor's Wizard of Oz reference better.
With its new cut-price computer and iPod Shuffle, Apple hits the small time
Until last week, Steve Jobs was not known for going after budget-conscious shoppers. Instead, $3,000 CPUs and $600 iPods were more the Apple CEO's speed. But after his company's strong holiday sales and the quadrupling of its first-quarter profits from the year before, Jobs can afford to be generous. As of next week you will be able to buy an entry-level Mac for $500 and a scaled-down iPod for $99. The new iPod is no heftier than a pack of gum, while the Mini Mac is smaller than your average Harry Potter hardcover.
Of course, you're making some sacrifices for those prices. The Mini Mac is what Jobs calls BYODKM--bring your own display, keyboard and mouse. That makes it ideal if you're a Windows user who wants to switch teams and already has those peripherals (the Mini Mac will work with just about any recent brand). But BYODKM is not such a bargain if you're starting from scratch--especially if you want extras like a wireless Internet card, which will set you back another $79.
The Mini Mac is a surprisingly powerful beast for its size. It has roughly the same memory and hard-drive size as a low-end G4 Power Mac and comes with the latest version of Mac OS X. Plug in the peripherals, and you will rarely notice the difference. The $99 iPod Shuffle, however, could never be mistaken for its larger cousin. There's no screen on which to view the song currently playing, and it holds only 126 tracks. (A $150 model doubles that capacity.) It's called the Shuffle because that's the best thing you can do with it: stick it into the USB port of your computer, and it will quickly download a new random selection (or a particular playlist) from the iTunes jukebox. This is great if you're a passive music listener but infuriating if you like to find particular songs.
Ultimately, there's a reason these products are called entry level: they exist largely to tempt you to upgrade to pricier Apple wares. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing--especially if your name is Steve Jobs.
From the Jan. 24, 2005 issue of TIME magazine
Strike a Post
Speaking of Bill Gates, Slashdot dug up some cheesy photospread snapshots he did for something called Teen Beat in 1983. Dig the grey trousers and the natty wool sweater! Swoon at the awkwardly positioned legs! Wonder what he was smoking to get that dreamy faraway look in his eyes! And don't drink coffee while clicking this link unless you want to spray all over the screen.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, January 13, 2005
Paradox of the Day
From the latest installment of Gizmodo's interview with Bill Gates:
Gizmodo: But I think we just disagree.
Gates: No, I actually don't think we disagree.
That tells you a lot about Microsoft, right there.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Judgment Day
Disturbing word from the Register:
London is being menaced by DVD players and TVs that burst into flames. This follows truly bizarre news, also mentioned in the article, that fridges and mobile phones in a Sicilian village autocombusted. The Register, tongue firmly in cheek, files this all under its ongoing Rise of the Machines™ coverage. They may be closer to the truth than they realize. How on Earth can an army of unplugged fridges, utterly unconnected to each other, catch fire? Is Skynet becoming self-aware? If so, has anyone noticed the appearance of a muscular, Austrian-accented robot from the future, perhaps in some prominent position from which he can hold sway over the lives of millions of humans?
UPDATE: Actually, it would seem he's been located in first-century Judea.
Now with 100% More Vaporware
Anyone who's ever suffered or snoozed through a Consumer Electronics Show hypefest -- on either side of the media line -- will enjoy today's Engadget spoof, Fond memories of CES Press Conference #417:
This year, we are pleased to introduce you to the world’s largest and most realistic television ever. In fact, you’ve been looking at it since you entered the room. It’s exactly the height and width of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I am not real, but am actually a televised image, as is everything behind me. We figured this would be cheaper than actually buying a lot of booth space. What name could signify such grandeur? Yes, it’s Model EMR091204, Rev. B.
Earth 1, Comets 0?
After painting that depressing pre-Christmas picture of the asteroid threat to Earth, I was heartened to read of the Deep Impact mission -- the purpose of which, next July, is to test our ability to smash comets to bits. Some knee-jerk environmentalists may be shocked at the idea of our interfering with the neighborhood in this way, but please -- this is no wafer-thin biosphere we're talking about here. The 10,000 black holes we just discovered at the center of the galaxy do a better job of smashing up cosmic matter than we ever will.
As Dr. Duncan Steel writes in today's Guardian: "Whichever way you feel, Deep Impact is a significant milestone in the development of civilization. No longer are we limited to observing from afar: we can go out there and give the cosmos a kick, to see how it responds."
Finding the Flood, part 2
So once I realized my little hammock-sleeping bag cocoon wasn't protecting me, I moved back to my tent. A tent for which, based on two years of Baja experience, I had not bothered to bring a rain fly. But there was some protection from the palm trees, and if I moved the air mattress into one corner, I could avoid the puddles that were forming around my baggage. That earned me a couple of hours of sleep, until the wind started flinging the side of the tent I was sleeping next to in my face. I went and grabbed some large rocks to stick in the corners of the tent, and the wind started playing ping-pong with them.
What really irked me was that, through the mesh where the rain fly should be, I saw a perfect night -- stars and gently swaying palms. Not a hint of cloud, not a single dramatic thunderbolt. It seemed as if this were some microstorm parked on top of my tent. I could withstand this misery, I thought in my sleep-deprived state, if only nature would play by its own rules. What the hell was going on?
When morning came, little rivers had formed around the rocks and the clothes and the luggage on the tent floor. Outside, the deluge had decimated our little utopian community. Much of our food was ruined and the larger tents, like mine, had turned into sails. My friends Dan and Kathleen had, sensibly, packed theirs up at the first sign of wind and gone off to sleep in the back of their car. And still the rain came from what seemed like a clear sky. I did what I could to help and went off to where I should have spent the night -- in the hot tub, where your happily-soaked body barely notices the rain. This is what my friends Lisa and Stewart had done, and then returned to sleep in a tiny, dry, unmoved cheap-ass Wal-Mart tent. They were leaving the next day, so I promptly bought it from them and junked my sleepless sail.
It is a humbling thing to be surrounded by camping veterans when the environment turns harsh. To see that environment with new eyes. To learn that most of the later rain had actually come from the palm trees as the wind bounced off the canyon walls and whipped through them. And to understand how relatively lightly nature had let us off. The canyon was, after all, prone to flash floods. That was how it had been formed over the last few millennia. That was how these boulders, these chunks of mountain, had ended up scattered at our feet.
Then our new arrivals, who had trekked through the night and the worst part of the storm, brought word of a far more merciless act of nature. A tsunami had hit the coast of southeast Asia, they said. Many thousands were dead. Where, exactly? How bad? Was our storm connected somehow, the tail end of a massive meteorological upset in the Pacific? Was there worse to come? They didn't know. We didn't have the Google. All we had were snippets of news from travelers, like a medieval village. In the spirit of gallows humor, we visualized a tsunami rising up from the coast and smashing through the canyon, snapping palm trees like twigs and carrying us all in its irresistible wake.
The weather returned to its standard Baja beauty. We settled back into the slow rhythm of idylic isolation, albeit with the uneasy awareness of something having gone terribly wrong in the outside world. On New Year's Eve, I threw an impromptu masked ball in one of the papalas and we counted down to midnight with the aid of GPS. A couple of days later, we packed up and left. Waiting in line at the border crossing, Dan and Kathleen and I watched in horror as a cat became overly curious about the traffic and got knocked down dashing into the fast lane immediately to the left of us, its paws kicking helplessly in the air. In the midst of life, I thought, we are in death.
We drove to Santa Monica in pouring rain, bedded down at Souris and Sylvio's for the night and trawled the Internet. This was after the first round of tsunami stories and before the full scale of the disaster was known; there was a kind of lull, a calm before the media storm. That's why I wrote it was like finding a time capsule. I was hungry for news, but my usual sources were surprisingly nonchalant, as if the tsunami had happened decades ago in a far-off country. My best source for the disaster's true emotional magnitude was email -- in particular, my J-school class list, where I could watch my classmates try to wrap their heads around it as more information came in -- in real time, as it were.
The rain thrashed at the windows. I sat by the fire into the wee hours, thinking of how irked I had been by those tiny puddles and damp clothes in my tent while, on the other side of the ocean, a giant wave was in the midst of wiping out more than 150,000 lives. There was nothing I could do to express the mixture of gratitude, awe and dread I felt -- except to donate, and to start writing.
I'm Not Okay, You're Not Okay, and That's Okay
The Art of Unhappiness is an essay in this week's Time from the peerless Jim Poniewozik that crystalizes an essential truth the modern pursuit-of-pleasure America has been avoiding:
What we forget--what our economy depends on us forgetting--is that happiness is more than pleasure sans pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is O.K. not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper.
Daily Blah for... Monday, January 03, 2005
Finding The Flood
It was like coming across a terrifying time capsule -- terrifying in terms of how recently it was buried.
I just this hour returned to Santa Monica from the amazing stillness and peace of Guadalupe Canyon, Baja California, all boulders and palm trees and majestic canyonside mountains and playa and natural hot springs under the stars.
Guadalupe is a resort, but an incredibly remote, bare-bones one -- considering it's just across the US border. To get through the final three miles of the journey, though, you pretty much have to have four-wheel or all-wheel drive. There's a long washboard playa road that will make your singing voice sound like Cher and shake your car to mush, followed by rock stairs fit for a giant's lair. It's not for the weak-hearted or anyone with loose fillings.
Once you get there, you see how the campsite wears this unfriendly moat well. Here civilization seems a distant memory, a bad dream. Here, the stars seem to say, is paradise. Here's a full moon rising, like a torchlight that turns the canyon into a patchwork of powerful deep blues and dark pastel greens. Here's a gentle breeze lapping the water around your neck, reminding you that this is where nature's thermostat is turned -- at least in winter -- to what feels in each hour of the day to be pretty damn near the ideal for human comfort. Here's a fireplace for when you get out of the hot pool. And here are good friends who insist on seriously Epicurean camping. Engineers, writers, programmers, lawyers, teachers, all heaping generious servings of the most sinful BBQ meats and treats (think crumpets and butter, and better) out of their coolers, cooking them on a dutch oven or propane stove, and serving to everyone else with relish.
A physical therapist brought hammocks. An electrical genius hung a multicolor array of Christmas lights round each of the three palapas, all powered by a battery in his van. If we'd wanted, we could have powered my laptop and watched DVDs. But for what? Didn't we have everything we needed? For entertainment, we explored each others' twisted sense of humor, played card games, and read books. We read books for hours without moving so much as a muscle, absorbed in only the way an utter nonelectronic, cityless peace will let you.
The cast-iron rule of the Mexican owners is NO MUSICA, NO ARMAS. This stentorian all-caps message was hand-painted on signs all around camp, and the distubing necessity of the second phrase -- culture shock if ever I felt it -- was the only hint of menace in this sea of tranqulity on my first two trips there. And this, my third -- at least until the second night.
Our second day there, also known as the first day we stopped naming days, passed with blissful lack of incident. I set up my tent, but ultimately elected to sleep out on the hammock again. (The stars are too nice not to look at; rooves are not necessarily civilization's best contribution to quality of life). Raindrops woke me at 3am. There'd been a light shower the previous night that the palapa protected me from, so I pulled cotton blankets over my head and carried on sleeping. It hardly ever rains here. This is a desert.
I was too far from the epicenter, too far from civilization, to know that the deluge had begun.
To Be Continued ...
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