two years ago leah and i got married. There’s even some audio. And more.
(the best kind of) ONWARD.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2006.
- Appreciations of the power of JavaScript are coming out all the time.
- clever clever.
- project tracking. open source. better than bugzilla?
I think I mentioned that the San Diego web sites are no longer in my hands. Well, here’s yet more evidence that my letting go was the right move—WebSanDiego.org is set for more changes.
Very exciting stuff.
- Great PDF on how eBay scales the way it does.
I kid you not, this morning on my commute to work I saw the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile travelling south on the 101 around Newbury Park, California.
It was a delightfully surreal moment for me.
One of the great cliches of Christmastime is the airing and re-airing of It’s a Wonderful Life. Jim Kunstler, writer of the excellent Geography of Nowhere he of with a blog name that is not safe for work. writes about the parallel universe vision of George Bailey’s Pottersville, and how it bears a close resemblance to Las Vegas.
Clusterf*** Nation by Jim Kunstler : Not So Wonderful
At a crucial point in the story, Clarence the guardian angel takes George Bailey on a tour of Bedford Falls as-if-George-had-never-been-born. Only the town is named Pottersville now. Main Street is lined with gin mills, strip clubs, and dance halls instead of wholesome banks, groceries, and pharmacies. (Oddly, casinos are absent, because in 1946 we lacked the vision to see how truly demoralized our nation could get.) Prostitutes ply the busy sidewalks. Now the weirdest thing is that Pottersville is depicted as a busy, bustling, lively place—the exact opposite of what main streets all over America really became, thanks to George Bailey’s efforts—a wilderness of surface parking, from sea to shining sea, with WalMart waiting on the edge of every town like Moloch poised to inhale the last remaining vapors of America’s morale. Frank Capra could imagine vibrant small towns turning their vibrancy in the direction of vice—but he couldn’t imagine them forsaken and abandoned, with the shop fronts boarded up and the sidewalks empty, which was the true tragic destiny of all the Bedford Falls in our nation.Most ironically, today America’s favorite main street town, Las Vegas, is Pottersville writ large, and most Americans see absolutely nothing wrong with it. How wonderful is that?
Kunstler is an alarmist. He explains America as a morass of gasoline dependency, and when the price and availability of oil reach crisis point American suburbia will implode in a way that will truly undermine our culture. I have hope his predictions are incorrect, although his explications of how suburbia evolved, and how genuinely toxic it can be are powerful food for thought.
When we lived in San Diego, we lived in a house built in 1896. We were walking distance to a Church, and to a corner store. We now rent what my father describes as a McMansion, built in the 1980s. We don’t have a Church within walking distance. No corner store either. The 1896 house was far more humane in many ways. Our current home is car-dependent. It assumes cars. Without cars, it does not work.
Recipe for disaster? JHK’s work predicts an end to easy gasoline, and then cars, and then, a catastrophic end to suburbia. Is it plausible? It makes logical sense. But is the first part of the prediction realistic? An end to easy gasoline?
I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
- The letter to Turner makes the point that there are “two fundamentally different visions of the Library”: a neutral space for unbiased academic research conducted by scholars, or a conservative think tank and policy institute that engages in legacy polish
- I like the Cathedral very much. This is a nice photoessay.
- That lady is wearing tribbles. That’s weird.
- interesting take on what’s available free.
- The author was killed by an IED. He had fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. A gifted officer, he spoke numerous languages, including Arabic. His PowerPoint is the essence of what Thomas PM Barnett describes as the SysAdmin force.
- Say what?
When I was a teenager, these men were my heroes. Byrne is gawky, nervous, perhaps not entirely there, and a bit spooky. Letterman is a lovable jerk, always projecting a detached, superior irony.
I saw myself in them at the time. What does it mean that my teenage self (age 13-17 mostly, and beyond) it meant for me to be an intense fan of a neurotic and a smartass? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
And I’m not kidding about them being heroes. For about 10 years I collected every magazine with interviews with them. Those magazines are in the garage now, in plastic bags. Perhaps I’ll sell them on eBay.
Pre-internet, being a fan meant always being on the hunt for such materials. It meant scouring tv guide to see who was on when, and keeping an ear on the radio for news of who was touring when. I visited magazine stands, bookshops, record stores. I was a collector. Now such obscura is a few keystrokes away on google or youtube.
Tower Records, touchstone of my youth, is bankrupt. World Book & News on Cahuenga in Hollywood, which continues to be magazine mecca for me, is too difficult to park at. I’ve tried to go about three times in the past year, and each time the parking is too terrible to contemplate stopping. C’est la vie.
I don’t know what I expected of the future, but here we are.
All these moments, lost in time, like tears in rain. Only not lost, they’re preserved on youtube and eBay.
Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.
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