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adapted from Eric Henriksen's phblox.
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Still just as hideous: The tables on the third floor of Frist still have those dehumanizing battleship-gray full-length lamps. You can’t see the face of person across from you. You can’t see the faces of the people at the other tables. You can only see their heads and their bodies. You are aware of the presence of a person, but not who they are. They belong in a French science fiction film.
Will he someday start making movies? The title of this piece is suggestive:
Haley, 12, is a Travel Team Girl, who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly pony-tailed, strongly calved soccer marvels. Cody, 10, is a Buzz Cut Boy, whose naturally blond hair has been cut to a lawn-like stubble and dyed an almost phosphorescent white. Cody’s wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X-Games. In his vision, Patio Man can see the kids enjoying their child-safe lawn darts with a gaggle of their cul de sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys. It’s a brightly colored scene: Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti-strap tops on the girls and ankle length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys.
(Incidentally, these were exactly the brand of children I mentioned in the last entry, except that the hair was longer.)
I just noticed that this blog wasn’t negative enough. That’s easily fixed.
Reliving another private Princeton tradition: while hacking on a broken program, struck with overwhelming urge to sleep. Something about the sub-three-hours last night probably had something to do with it. Threw coat over head, set alarm on phone, collapsed onto Frist couch. Spent very little time wondering what the older alums would think.
Now I know what Gordon Zellaby felt: while elbowing my way through a crowd of septuagenarian alums and their silent, blank-staring, flaxen-haired grandchildren. Thankful that whatever the admissions office means by “diversity” in a given year, it never means more of these people.
Another miserable failure of the Chimpoid administration: the marriage initiative. Many of the older married alums are displaying tumor-like beer guts. Can there be anything worse than an institution that apparently encourages this? Maybe marriages, like laws, should require periodic reaffirmations to remain in effect. (I can’t imagine that this crowd sees much divorce; there’s too much money involved.) Whatever the social cost, it would force more people into the gym.
Sampan, a freebie paper in Boston, carried this comic on May 6:
…which followed a string of purse-snatchings and other delightful urban foibles in Chinatown. (Documented here and here)
What does a law-abiding citizen do when the police are unable to be everywhere at once? I’m reminded of what happened during the L.A. riots of 1992:
As she watched, the news featured vivid images of Korean shopkeepers defending their stores with shotguns and pistols.
“I thought, ‘Where are the police? Why are these store owners having to protect their own property with guns?’ ” she recalls.
There may be a lesson for the law-abiding denizens of Boston in this — but probably not. If you’re a permanent resident, rather than a citizen (as I’d imagine many Chinatown residents are), it’s completely illegal to carry so much as a can of pepper spray in Massachusetts. (You have to be a citizen to get the appropriate permit.)
I need some self-storage for a month. Google Maps named 10 places in the 02138 zip code:
If you need to do any graph-wrangling, I highly recommend NetworkX, a handy graph library written in Python. (This is for graphs in the nodes-and-edges sense, not graphs in the bars-and-charts sense. For the latter, I’d use Ploticus or Gnuplot.)
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To: joseph barillari
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Mmm, now there’s nothing like threats to make me want to waste five minutes of my life reviewing a web merchant…
Do you think grad school is too hard? Oh, for the glorious fifties:
[snip]I arrived with my wife, Helene, in August 1951 from the University of Alberta, to try for a Ph.D. in chemistry. The Butler Tract was filled with veterans from WWII, so we had to seek housing elsewhere. Our first room was with a family on Ewing Street and later with another family on Princeton-Hightstown Road. My assistantship paid $1,200 from which $700 was deducted for tuition. Health care? Dental care? Never heard of them.
Helene is a nurse and worked at the Princeton Hospital for $120 per month, meals included. We had to buy an ancient Buick so that we could get from our quarters to work - thank goodness insurance was not required!
And the Castle on the Hill - after about a year or so I heard of it but never during my three years was I so much as invited to share a meal, let alone to be immersed in a Princeton experience. I did have many rewarding experiences with undergraduates in my laboratory classes.
We had our first child in 1952 and got a discount from the hospital because Helene worked up to her final day, and walked down the hall to deliver. A kind obstetrician also gave a discount. Helene continued on the night shift while our daughter and I burned the midnight oil.
[snip]
G. William Goward *54
Clinton, Conn.
Tucked away in the back of the Wiesner Art Gallery in the student center at MIT is an absolutely delightful exhibit:
(Foreground: American flag, ripped. Reflective lettering on surface: “ALLIES OF EVIL.” Background: American flag. Reflective lettering on surface: “BIN LADEN FOR PRESIDENT.”)
Even better is the artist’s statement:
Protest Flags
These were the confluence of two separate plans - one to dye flags black, in order to convey a very different and unfamiliar visual impression of these well-known icons, and the other to use ‘sacred cloth’ as a medium for other messages, in order to attract more attention. Fortunately, September 11 2001 provided an almost limitless supply of these banners on every street corner, and subsequent manipulation of these events to commit further mass murder for political gain provided a moral imperative to protest. Unfortunately, many variants of the flags did not receive the dye well; I therefore saved the well-dyed ones for their naked visual impact, and applied lettering to the fainter ones. I made several slogans, wearing and carrying them in protests in New York and Boston. My goal was to attract strong initial attention from the visual effect of the lettered flag, but then to act as a challenge by having the slogans be slightly ambiguous and more than slightly provocative, forcing viewers (protester and protested alike) to pause and query whether or not they truly understood and agreed or disagreed with what was being expressed.
(emphasis mine)
The aforementioned dye-dunked flag is here. I couldn’t find the artist’s name anywhere, but I wonder if it’s the same person who was responsible for this high-minded postering campaign:
The text at the bottom reads “Only fascist apologists for war crimes have the instinct to tear down this poster.” (Zoom in to see it.)
Or maybe the artist was behind this campaign, which presumably has something to do with the MIT flag debacle:
In case you missed the punch line, it’s “Flags are a one-way message of hatred.” And, in case you didn’t know, “Flags promote the common misconception that US citizens have the right to free speech.”
(N.B.: I suspect that the second poster was in jest. I’m not so sure about the first. And as to the flags – well, if that’s irony, it’s certainly over my head.)
