April 30, 2006
Cows and Convex Sets
At least once a week I get an email titled something like "Enrollment
Information", that generally includes a paragraph such as this:
Bachelors, Masters, MBA, and Doctorate (PhD) available in the field of your
choice - 100% Verifiable Documents will be shipped to you within 2 weeks.
I finished my Masters in Computer Science while in the PhD program in (of
all things) the Business School. I really liked Computer Science better,
but there was no higher degree offered at the time, and the B School had a major
in Operations Research and Statistics with some excellent profs, so there I
remained. One thing that always tickled and perplexed me was the fact
that, though OR and Computer Science were about the same age as disciplines,
they had developed side by side with little interaction among the researchers
and mathematicians. Computer science greats such as Edsger
W. Dijkstra were dreaming up ways to characterize synchronization in
parallel computing, using metaphors such as the semaphore switches used on train
tracks to avoid wrecks. Operations research specialists were inventing The
Traveling Salesman problem and procedures (most of them based upon linear
programming) to optimize assembly lines. Back in those days, large firms
had whole departments of OR people to figure out the optimal placement of
natural gas networks or minimum amount of dough necessary to make a giant batch
of Fig Newtons. At some point in my sales job to get dissertation proposal
accepted (between the Blackjack strategy proposal and the one my committee
finally accepted), I was working on a formal strategy to compare the algorithms
between CompSci and OR, since I knew there existed many commonalities, but no
grammar with which to discuss them. My last effort, prior to abandoning
the project, was a comparison of the optimal CompSci algorithm to computer the
elements of a closed convex set and an OR routine similar to the
Traveling Salesman Problem, in which you design a route for which a salesman
visits every city on his list in the shortest number of miles.
Surprisingly, the TSP is an NP Complete combinatorial problem, meaning that for
a large enough number of cities, there will never be a computer large enough to
solve the problem. Which leads me to blog-walking, a traversal of the
graph of blog nodes, for which it would be interesting to map the convex set.
It's probably easier to just web-hop and report (you decide):
Jordan has an unbelievable number of videos hyperlinked to the recent Flarf
Festival. The man's a blogging machine. He also notes that we're all
obsessed with CDY's marriage, successfully executed and reported on
today. Also a nice
review of Jeannine and
Gina's recent work. Gina sent
me over to Josh's review
of DB-Q's Spell, which I keep forgetting to order, as I'm the only person
I know who's actually read Moby Dick three times and would love to see how Dan's
riffing.
Kasey sent me to Both Both thanks to
Hot Whiskey Press, which is (for
god's sake) in Boulder (though the owners profess to be moving back to Austin at
some point) and not on my radar, much less my bloglist. Sounds like a good
investment of $7, as you'll be reading Linh Dinh, Dale Smith, Hoa Nguyen, and
Lisa Jarnot among others. Speaking of whom,
Lisa notes that
Belmont is open (favorite horse names include Mass Media, Sir
Greeley, Little Thunder, Vicarage and Noble Causeway) and talks up
Matt Hart and Amanda Nadelberg reading at
Pierogi Gallery
in Williamsburg, and I'm thinking tri-cornered hats and your kids posing for
pictures in the stocks, but I guess it's in Brooklyn. Speaking of
Brooklyn, I think that's where Jimmy lives, rabbit ears and all. Finding
where Jim is hanging out
has become this year's Where's Waldo.
Posted by jbahr at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2006
Spooky Shanna
I have received the most recent American Poet: The Journal of the
Academy of American Poets and I like what I find inside. Louis Begley
writes An Appreciation of Donald Hall which entertains me because it
confirms his genius in writing what many people value and what I find to be
emotionally parasitic. As is par for the course with this journal, a few
poems of his and the contributing author trail after the article, including a line
from The Painted Bed that I found appropriate: "grisly, foul, and
terrific". The odd thing about Matthea Harvey is that the poems of hers
that I like the most are not those that have won prizes or
served as stand-ins
for her short list of popular books. Ms. Harvey waxes upon the history and
recent deployment of the abecedarius by such poets as Harryette Mullen, Carolyn
Forché, and Karl Elder — followed by four poems titled alternatively
Terror of the Future and The Future of Terror, all of which proceed
in a leisurely abecedarian manner, sounding a bit like channelling Mary Jo Bang
alphabetically (that's a compliment) : "We wore gasmasks to cross the gap. /
Goodnight, said the gravediggers, goodnight. / We looked heavenward but kept our
hands / down when they asked for volunteers / so they simply helped themselves."
Next up is an article by Robert Pinsky on Anne Winters (about whom I knew
nothing), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for The Displaced of Capital
(which sounds rather Cloverian), verse about "the glamorous monster of New York
City", pieces of which I found diverting, if prosey. Louise Glück
discusses the work of Jamaica-born Clauda Rankine, including her most recent
Don't Let Me Be Lonely, which is subtitled An American Lyric but
which Ms. Rankine dubs "prose fiction". You can't get through a litmag
without a Classical reference, so there's Louise's A Myth of Innocence
starring an ambivalent Persephone. Hey, there's Gerald Stern's smiling mug
(and why not, he's won the Wallace Stevens Award) and a few poems: "Never
went to Birdland, so what, went to the Y / danced all night for a quarter, girls
sat down / on bridge chairs, can't remember if they were smoking,". The
Golden Age of Radio contains excerpts from letters exchange between Dean
Young and Mark Halliday. Young writes prose as delightful as his poetry,
and Halliday's parts are filled with interesting metaphors ("Sometimes the
canoes must be turned over and painted"). Richard Wilbur suggests
Stevenson, Frost and Dickinson for young audiences. Legitimate Dangers
gets a boost with a two-page article excerpted from the book by Dumanis and
Marvin, followed by poems by some of those anthologized: Robyn Schiff,
Joshua Beckman, Terrance Hayes, Dan Chiasson, and Paisley Rekdal. New
Academy chancellors (selected by current chancellors for a six-year term)
include Rita Dove, Kay Ryan, and Gerald Stern (poems follow by each).
Re: Print offers up "Poems from Nine Remarkable Recent Books", including
work by Brian Turner, Naomi Shihab Nye, Camille Norton, David Romtvedt, Adrienne
Rich, W.S. Merwin, Simone Muench, Robert Creeley, and Bob Hicok. The Books
Noted section contain micro-reviews including one of
Shanna's Down Spooky.
Posted by jbahr at 07:33 AM | Comments (1)
April 27, 2006
Quoi? L'Eternité
Continuing
to execute a perfect second term of incompetence and arrogance, Bush has
appointed the controversial and conservative pundit Tony Snow as his next
press secretary. Snow's hyperbolic rhetoric and
contortions of the
truth might be a little harder to pull off when he's facing a recently
obstreperous Washington press corps instead of delivering a one-way message via
radio and television to people already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Rolling Stone
weighs in on Bush.
TT shares his notes on an Alfred
North Whitehead conference. Whitehead is best known as the co-author (with
Bertrand Russell) of the monumental
Principia
Mathematica.
Rebecca finishes her first chapbook and we all want a copy already.
Tricia's sister gives birth to
a tiny pope. Coincidentally, it's the 25th anniversary of the attempted
assassination of Pope John Paul II. He was shot four times, proving to be
one tough old bird.
Robert must be on holiday . . .
I miss his blogging. The terrorist
tires and dreams of smoked horse.
Ana gives two readings this
month. Joshua
writes
the instruction manual. Johannes
opines that the center will not hold.
Kelli suggests that quantity leads to quality. Jeannine
reports on Wordstock.
AAA's magazine, EnCompass, picks the Mazda 3 as the best car under $15,000 and
the Honda Accord Sedan as the best under $20,000. Curiously, the Dodge
Charger wins in the next slot.
The Bolder Boulder, now the 3d
largest 10K, is a month away. About the same time every year is the
Kinetic Conveyance Race,
which is always hilarious and preceded by the Kinetics Parade where the various
conveyances compete for prizes. The rules clearly state that the judges
can pick winners based upon any criteria, and bribes are allowed. Kinda
sounds like some poetry contests I know.
Posted by jbahr at 07:23 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2006
Philatelic Faces
I
really do think that poetry trading cards are a good idea, but in the
interim, how about postage stamps? You can make them yourself
here. Why wait until the 100th
anniversary of your BAP masterpiece to see yourself on an envelope flying to
Peoria?
Notes from Smithsonian: It's the 95th birthday of test pilot
John Myers, who championed the P-61 Black Widow, a plane the size of a mid-sized
bomber designed to destroy enemy planes at night and in bad weather. An
increasing number of archeologists believe that man may have first come to the
New World by boat, not a Bering Straits isthmus. Studies of the water flea
suggest that sexual reproduction is ultimately better (though more costly in
terms of energy) than asexual because genetic mutations occur less frequently
(also, it's more fun.) A rodent thought to be extinct for 11 million years
showed up as bush meat at a Laotian market. The assumed remains of
Copernicus, who died in relative obscurity, are being authenticated by matching
the skull up with the only known portrait, and by DNA testing of a descendant.
A new exhibit at the Smithsonian honors Native American veterans of Vietnam,
including the artist's uncle, Afraid of Nothing. The National Museum of
Natural History is collecting artifacts for a hip-hop retrospective. The
fork, in regular use for only the past 200 years, was regularly condemned by the
church as un-Godly. 380 years ago the director of a Dutch colony traded 60
guilders for Manhattan, real estate now valued at $1,002 per square foot.
In China, like many other nations, the rich are getting richer, with 13% of the
population living on less than a dollar a day. Paleontologist Mary
Schweitzer has become famous for her discovery of soft tissue inside the large
bones of a 68-million-year old T. Rex, only to have her discovery hijacked by
Creationists who insist the discovery argues for a young earth. Israeli
archeologists, assisted by the government and military, continue to "discover"
sites that correspond to the expectations of Old Testament literalists, but many
mainstream researchers are skeptical that "Israel ... [uses] ... biblical
archaeology as a colonial ideology". Excellent visuals from the
Smithsonian's Dada exhibit. When completed, the gigantic Crazy Horse
Memorial will dwarf nearby Mount Rushmore, standing 563 feet tall. Good
article on Civil War battle sites, including Manassas, once pristine, but now
surrounded by suburban mega-homes. Pictorial reviews of Sitka, Tombstone
and Minneapolis. Many American slaves joined forces with the British
during the Revolution in exchange for contracts guaranteeing their freedom.
On The Last Page editorial, Donald Dale Jackson proposes that Rhode
Island be eliminated and folded into Connecticut.
The Academy of American Poets sent a CD with spoken poetry by Gerald Stern and
Heather McHugh, which I will listen to over lunch.
Posted by jbahr at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2006
Game Theory
It's
actually kinda hard to believe that they're siblings. Emily likes to be
petted with one finger, between her ears. Fat, black Rimbaud like to be
pounded on his back and rubbed on his belly and have his head hair messed up.
My friend Kevin Meagher used to have a big old cat like that, and Kevin would
treat him just like a dog, pounding and rubbing and messing just as I do with
Rimbaud. Kevin is the only person I know who took aspirin as if he were in
a poker game. Sometimes he would see his headache and raise it 4
aspirin. Other times he would try to bluff with 6 aspirin or limp in with
2 aspirin. I even saw him go all in one day, emptying the entire bottle of
7 remaining aspirin and gulping them down. I was watching High Stakes
Poker last night, which is on The Game Network. My other choices were:
Swapping Wives
Honey, We're Killing the Kids
The ACLU Freedom Files
Knives Collection
How I Met Your Mother
Simatalu: House of Spirits
The International Paintball Championships
Cow Belles
The Ultimate Coyote Ugly Search
so you can see why I was watching poker greats playing with lots of their own
money: "Kid Poker" Daniel Negreanu, Barry Greenstein, Howard Lederer ("The
Professor"), Sam Farha, "Dolly" Doyle Brunson, Barry Greenstein, and anybody who
is anybody in the high stakes poker world (even Jerry Buss, the Lakers' owner).
The heavyweights would cycle in as others dropped out, and in all that time
there was only one woman player, Jennifer Harman.
She and
Annie
Duke are the only women I've seen at the final table of the dozens of poker
tournaments I've watched this year. As in amateur athletics, women have
their own tournaments and Duke is one of the few woman players who refuses to
play in them. I got to wondering if there was a weak analogy here to the
earlier inter-blog scuffle regarding women poets and their blogs.
World-class poker is nearly perfect example of game theory in action. This
involves strong personae, the projection of power, and a lot of bald-faced
lying. I don't know if that's an obstacle or not.
Posted by jbahr at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2006
The Sortilegist
It
almost hit 80 this weekend, so of course it's snowing lightly this morning.
Typical Colorado spring weather.
Among the many good articles in this month's Harper's is the cover
article The New Road To Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide to the Coming
Real Estate Collapse. There's nothing particularly new in the data,
but the illustrations and ordering of facts are revealing. Basically, the
economy has been as good as it has been due largely to refinancing, jobs created
by housing construction, and the "sense of wealth" among homeowners that has
driven consumption. All that is going to change, and half of all mortgage
payers have zero-down loans (many interest-only) and little discretionary income
if things get tough. Swine of the Times instructs us how pork
became the "other white meat" with megafarms of sows, almost all now
artificially inseminated by one super-boar, living their lives in a 3' by 7'
cage. As pork production increased by 6 billion pounds from 1979 to date,
the number of farms has gone from 650,000 to 70,000
— 50 of which producing most of the pork for the country. The Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (who brought you, among other things, the
Internet) is evaluating proposals from researchers to raise insects with
embedded electronics for use on the battlefield to send back sound, video and
environmental data. Harper's excerpts by General Gregg Martin
(recently confirmed by the Senate as a commander in the Army Corps of Engineeers),
who penned a War College tract entitled "Jesus the Strategic Leader". A
poem by Geoffrey Hill (the "difficult" English poet) called Improvisations
for Hart Crane ("Super-ego crash-meshed idiot-savant. / And what have you.
/ This has to be the show-stopper. Stay put. / Slumming for
rum and rumba, dumb Rimbaud, / he the sortilegist, visionary on parole /
floor-walker watching space, the candy man,"). From Harper's Index:
Eight towns have passed resolutions calling for the impeachment of President
Bush; Al Qaeda operatives must request vacation time 10 weeks in advance;
there are almost exactly as many high school teachers as Walmart employees;
Jesus's mother is referenced 19 times in the Bible and 34 times in the Koran;
52% of all Chinese white-collar workers have personal blogs.
Posted by jbahr at 07:16 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2006
The End of Sloth
Some people tell you when they're taking a blogger's holiday. I just let one day slip to the next, most of which were involved in the Wisconsin trip.
Poets
and Writers features Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka on the cover, who
is also a noted political activist and frequently jailed opponent to
dictatorships in the region. The Literature of Lies recounts recent
memoir fakery, including the popular works of JT Leroy, the HIV-positive teenage
prostitute who turned out to be a middle-aged couple who carried on the hoax for
5 years. The Law of Diminishing Readership restates the abundantly
clear observation that the supply of poetry vastly outstrips the demand and that
we should be out there converting "passionate readers" of poetry. Finally!
The Collapse of Neil Azevedo's Zoo recounts the press's difficulties,
abandonment by Kenyon Review and Paris Review, and eventual failure
— something about which rumors have been
flying for a year or more (CDY is
quoted about his own disappointment). Literary MagNet mentions that
Global City Review, Bat City Review, and Backwards City Review
include a comics section, and that One Less Magazine almost lives up to
its name with a format that includes "letters, rummy scores, found poems,
paintings of shoes, and a map of receipts". The Art of Reading looks at
Joan Didion's work up to The Year of Magical Thinking. Why Truth
Matters in Memoirs drags us through the same Frey-inspired arguments.
Ken Gordon on improvisation and revision, quoting Glück:
"most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment:
wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being
unable to write differently, ..." An article on non-fiction author of
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschler. Caitlin O'Neil on
Inside Publishing reminds authors that the publication of your book is
only the beginning — without book tours, readings,
and lobbying of local book chains for adoption, most books won't sell.
There's a funny piece called The Joy of Collaboration: A Ten-Point
I-Told-You-So Guide: 1. Everything will start out hunky-dory.
2. You will argue. . . . 5. The manuscript means diddly.
... 9. Critics happen. 10. You're in this for life. Whoa.
Rattle is giving away $5,000 for first prize in their poetry contest
(entry fee $16).
Poetry this month is all new translations. No letters, no reviews,
no articles. More on that tomorrow.
Posted by jbahr at 07:22 AM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2006
Celebrity Deathmatch
Well, at least I discovered what some of the hubbub was about at Jessica's
blog:
Jessica: Eric and I were discussing why there are more boy
bloggers than girl bloggers and his theory was that girls are more visual. Seems
like bullshit to me, although I'm not much one to argue with it since I feel I'm
much more visual than whatever the alternative is (aural?). But I would also
argue that there are lots more girl-bloggers out there than people know, maybe
because most girls don't use their blogs to be assholes the way that many male
bloggers do, making sexist and racist jokes and putting people down. That kind
of behavior does, granted, get lots of attention. Plus, girls seem to get
a lot of negative attention in the blogosphere. Anyway, there are plenty of girl
bloggers on the list to your right if you're interested.
Seth:
I've been
involved in on-line posting for 8 years now, and poetry-blogging for about two
years in total. I've seen rampant sexism in the political blogging community,
and occasional/infrequent sexism in the poetry-blogging community. I've seen
occasional racism in the political blogging community, and absolutely no racism
in the poetry-blogging community. And I'm an ultra-liberal constantly on guard
for either sexism and/or racism in the on-line world: in fact my blog contains
hundreds of pages of screeds against both racism and sexism, including
controversial assessments of how both racism and sexism play into the criminal
justice system and the immigration system in this country. As to whether there
are more female bloggers than male bloggers, or vice versa, I have no idea,
though I caution anyone here from making final assessments based on their own
blogrolls--as we are all aware, there are multiple poetry-blogging
"standard"-type blogrolls: for example, one for New York School poets, one for
LangPo poets, one for Silliman acolytes, one for performance poets, one for
so-called "mainstream" poets, and so on. Do these overlap? Of course, in fact
enormously so. But certainly I've seen a general trend with regard to who
blogrolls whom and why.As to whether males are visual or aural or females visual
or aural in terms of their preferred learning processes, I don't know that
either, and I'd hesitate to make such an overgeneralization without having the
scientific data at my disposal.As far as sexism towards women goes--one of the
primary topics of this thread, as near as I can tell--I'll say, as one of the
few males on this thread, that some of what's posted here is unabashedly sexist,
and I'm not particularly inclined to dismiss that sexism or say that it doesn't
bother me just because it's directed at men rather than women. I understand
enough about critical race theory and seminal feminist tracts to understand that
some would argue "sexism" can never operate upon a man, only a woman, but even
if so, I'll nevertheless say that there's some aggressive chauvinism on display
here which is appalling. Comments like--"...like men...are just trained to have
this auto-response dismissal of anything women have to say (esp. young women,
esp. blonde women, etc.)..."; or"the way that men are able to bond...";
or"...boys are taught to be united (like they're preparing for military action
when they're 2)..."; or"...most girls don't use their blogs to be assholes the
way that many male bloggers do, making sexist and racist jokes and putting
people down..."--are not only totally devoid of any probative content whatsoever
(by which I mean to say, in no uncertain terms, that they are bullshit) but
they're also really quite offensive, and I'd no sooner patronize you all and
give you a "pass" because, say, "you're women," than I would patronize any group
because others in this society are sexists and racists and homophobes and I can
choose, if I so desire, to adopt--as certain of the posters have, here--the most
odious of the traits exhibited by our society's majoritarian cabals.I read and
enjoy blogs written by both women and men--perhaps because I'm usually spared
asinine commentary such as what I've seen here. It's disappointing, too, as the
folks on this thread are some of the brightest bloggers and poets around and
should know better than to stoop to this nonsense.
Seth (later): Wait--you deleted my comment?
Jessica: Sorry, Seth A., but you've lost your voice in this space.
If you'd like to say something constructive you may do so, but if anyone led you
to believe that my blog was a democracy in which all opinions no matter how
"asinine" might be heard, they woefully misled you.
That pretty much left only comments that agreed with her.
~~~~
I have done my own analysis of the effects of gender on weblog participation.
Using my own blogroll, I have concluded that nearly 60% of poetry bloggers are
male. Looking at these data more closely, however, it appears that there
is some relationship between gender and surnames. Clearly, female bloggers
dominate F, K, L, U and W — and hold their own
generally in the first part of the alphabet.
In the range from M to nearly the end of the alphabet, however, female blogger
representation nosedives, resulting in very low percentages. The obvious
solution to this problem is the targeted recruitment of women bloggers in this
subset, an active program to provide Blogger and Typepad training to the Cate
Marvins, Paisley Rekdals, Larissa
Szporluk, and Natasha Tretheweys of the poetry world.
Posted by jbahr at 08:26 AM | Comments (8)
April 13, 2006
FlyDay
Got
to get up, get cracking, get some work done, and get to the airport to get to
Wisconsin to close on the house. Of course, everything happens at
the last minute with house closings, no matter how much lead time you give the
responsible parties (mortgage brokers, title companies, insurance agents).
It's a competition to see who can make you sweat bullets. I leave for the
airport in 6 hours, and I still don't know exactly how much to get a down
payment cashiers check for, but I'm supposed to hear this morning.
Tricia has a revelation about a
one-eyed kitten.
Ange finds Garrison guilty of "affable liberal sexism", and points to
Chiasson's
article on Marianne Moore. Hey!
Seth's back with another
4-screenful post on immigration policy (you know, they don't pay us by the word,
doncha Seth?) to which Scoplaw (who is currently
riffing on "obnoxious poet behaviors")
will probably post a comment longer than the book of Ecclesiastes.
Mike is conducting his own
poetry NaNoWriMo, attempting to change
form with every poem. Was Jimmy
really on Can't Get A Date? Hannah talks
about Hecht's Funny and DST that was good enough for Jesus. Who
is Jessica Smith and why are
Tony,
Seth, and Josh talking about
her?
22 million people live in mobile homes, and they're fast disappearing as
developers
buy up the valuable land under them. The defense
begins
its case in the Moussaoui trial, trying to prevent him from achieving his
apparently desired martyrdom. And why does the judge allow the playing of
9/11 cockpit recordings, unless one of the terrorists is going to name Moussaoui?
It's like when they have a victim's relatives testify in a trial
— what's the legal justification?
Posted by jbahr at 06:41 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2006
Duck!
Jordan
reminds me that, if I had an iPod, I'd have Bill Withers in the mix.
Also, if you're in or near NYC, Joshua Clover will be
on Jordan's Million Poems
Show.
Bill Knott has a new blog, whose masthead reads "poems and musings of a failed
Mainstream poet, a SOQ-hack whose verse has no venue but this":
an excerpt: "The Olds/Levine/et al Autobiographical-Narrative-Anecdotal poem
valorizes the particulars of one's personal history. What's wrong with that, I
ask."
I think we should all invent
them. When
discussing this with a friend, he offered up "Restless Dick Syndrome".
Was is it this week with weird duck recipes: this from
Rebecca.
Well, sure.
That's before people walked their worms and brought along a plastic bag.
Posted by jbahr at 01:56 PM | Comments (2)
April 11, 2006
Duck Embryo
I had a discussion with an insurance company rep yesterday that caused
flashbacks to
Five Easy Pieces. I kept asking over and over again why I had to
insure my new house for more than twice what I paid for it.
The
Atlantic's cover story is a fascinating piece on Desert One, the 1979
military operation to rescue American hostages in Iran. Even with all the
planning, excellent execution and a very brave Delta One team, it was "the
definition of a debacle". James Fallows opines that the worst thing we
could do about Iran's impending nuclear weapons is a military strike, for a
variety of good reasons (most of all, because it wouldn't work). There's
an eerie photo of the Treasure Bay Casino, a floating Biloxi gambling
establishment, on its side in the mud. The Numbers War notes the
similarities between the Vietnam War Era body counts, and current Administration
estimates of "insurgents", which are consistently estimated at "20,000", even
though we have now killed 47,970 of them. They must be good at replacing
themselves, or perhaps our numbers are wrong. Democratic leaders, when
queried, believe that Cheney is the "most influential" of Bush's advisors,
Republicans think it's Rice by a wide margin. I keep wondering what
anybody sees in that naive schoolmarm. The Benefits of
Brutality reminds us that Europe is much less divided on issues of
immigration (they want them to either leave or be a permanent underclass).
Mark Warner, Democratic aspirant for President, ex-cellphone permit huxster,
ex-governor of Virginia (the first Democrat in decades) and all-around
glad-hander, is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and looking forward to
2008. Marital Differences: even with the Republican push to
make sure DOMA initiatives are on the ballot during elections, gay marriage and
civil union rights will progress slowly through an arbitrated consensus in the next
decades to achieve the results that eluded Pro-Choice because of relying upon
judicial intervention. Of the 10 worst traffic bottlenecks in the America,
4 are in Los Angeles, accounting for 85 million hours of lost time. If
global warming actually happens, expect a 3.4% increase in agricultural
productivity, though Colorado, Oklahoma and California will lose billions in
profits. The Horsemen of The Esophagus documents the amazing sport
of competitive eating. Though there are a few 400+ pound major
competitors, the world champion is the 120-pound Takeru Kobayashi, who smashed
the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest by eating 50 (the previous record was 25),
including the bun in 15 minutes. Not to mention, Sonya Thomas (also just north of 100
pounds), the U.S. champ for eating pulled-pork sandwiches, asparagus, baked
beans and grilled-cheese sandwiches. She made her name by demolishing the
reigning 322-pound Buffalo Wings champion in 2003. The
Buffoonish Unstable Impassioned
Talented Mr. Chávez (yes, that's the
actual title) tells us why Hugo is one smart cookie.
Another thing that fascinates me about poker tournaments is how not a chip is
lost, like some kind of gaming-world conservation of mass. At the 2005
World Series of Poker, 5,618 people bought $10,000 in chips and for the rest of
the competition there was $56,180,000 in play. At the end, Hachem faced
Dannenmann, each with about $25,000,000 in chips. As a side note,
Dannenmann shared his $4.25 million winnings with a friend who put up half of
the $10,000 entry fee. That's a pretty good return on your money in 7
days.
The University of Nevada actually runs the
Center for Gaming Research. Where were they when I submitted my first
dissertation proposal on the multidimensional hypergeometric distribution?
My advisers saw right through that one. I was researching blackjack
strategies.
I think
Tony just found one of the few
things that
I probably wouldn't eat. Hey, hey,
Rebecca
is in Rhino. People are always
visiting Jonathan.
Caterina is on the
money about SkyMall. Jack
mentions Barrett's
article on Wikipedia and Language Poetry. Jeannine's book is
out.
Posted by jbahr at 06:17 AM | Comments (1)
April 10, 2006
Oi, Oi, Oi
I'll
be off on Thursday to close on this lovely little house with Junie. It's
got everything my house in Colorado doesn't and should: hardwood floors, a
real fireplace, built-in bookshelves. And the garage is big enough to hold
a barn dance in.
Last night, I watched the World
Series of Poker 2005 final table, narrated by Steve Dannenmann (second-place
winner of $4,250,000) and Joseph Hachem (first-place winner of $7,500,000).
Dannenmann is a CPA, an amateur who says he's the "4th or 5th best player at his
home game". Hachem (Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, Oi, Oi!) is an
Australian chiropractor. In recent years, the WSOP winners have all
been highly-skilled amateurs, and many have gotten their experience on
Internet-based casinos.
In 2003, Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name) won and he hadn't been in
a brick-and-mortar casino in years. The names of famous players that
haven't made it to the final table includes anybody who is anybody: Johnny
Chan, Doyle Brunson, Scotty Nguyen, and dozens of others. The reason that
the big guns haven't made it to the top is Sheer Numbers. The 2005 WSOP
had over 5,600 players who had to play for almost a week, sometimes 12 hours a
day. Even with the advantage of experience, it's almost impossible to
overcome the probabilistic effect. A few of the 5,600 players are going to
get fabulously lucky — too lucky for even the pros
to overcome.
Paul McCartney is on the cover of AARP, The Magazine. It was a
surprise to see Katie Couric on the cover last time, but not Mr. When-I'm-64
(which he is, this year). McCartney trivia includes: Paul doesn't
own the rights to many of the early songs, Michael Jackson does. The
original lyrics to Yesterday were "Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love
your legs" (easy to see why they dropped it). Paul first played lead
guitar in Taxman. BTW, did you know that Katie Couric played a
prison guard in Austin Powers' Goldmember?
Wired is a bit tired this month. Jargon Watch includes the
word "futility music", which is the sanctioned aural torture conducted on
military prisoners by playing Eminem, Metallica and Britney Spears. The
nauseatingly irrepressible William Shatner has started his own DVD club with
offerings hand-picked by Bill and his staff. The Chinese government is
spending $25 million a year funding programs overseas to teach Mandarin.
The Malaysians are crazy about setting national records, including the longest
underwater juggling, world's longest pizza, and the world's longest pencil.
The regulation TopGolf ball contains an RFID to locate it in the weeds more
easily. The newest thing is online explicit cybersex multiplayer games.
In the battle game, Re-Mission, you go inside your body and fight cancer.
Although Tolkien is generally thought to have invented the "orc", William Blake
named a rebellious hero "Orc", and Beowulf refers to Grendel as being "orcnéas",
an Old English term probably derived from Orcus, the Greek god of the dead.
Posted by jbahr at 10:47 AM | Comments (2)
April 08, 2006
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
Browsing in Wikipedia is as addictive
as paging through hard-copy dictionaries and encyclopedias. There has been
some hoohah lately regarding Wikipedia's reliability (particularly since the
Nature article
that found Wikipedia as accurate as the Britannica, or
not), but it's
where I go when I want more information than I can Google about a topic or
phenomenon that is too recent to be in other sources. What happens, of
course, is that you end up following links (like the one to
backronym
— an acronym that has been retrofitted to an
existing word or abbreviation). In case you didn't realize it, there is
also a Wiktionary and
WikiSaurus.
Me-Tube:
South Park was very funny on Thursday. They're doing a number on
Family Guy, while at the same time metaphorically mooning Western media for
their actions vis a vis the Muslim cartoon blowup. Meanwhile,
The Colbert Report continues to bore me. It seems about one-quarter as
funny as Daily Show. It's probably just me. As if the Burger
King weren't creepy enough, now they have him waking up with a mask on and
handing out breakfast sandwiches to the Village People.
Time this week focuses on Who Gets To Be An American. There
are four or five articles, but if you've been listening to almost any news
source, you know the story. Strains are showing up in the Anglo-American
relationship as the Brits discover that we won't be releasing access to the most
sophisticated software on the Joint Strike Fighter that Great Britain helped
foot the bill for. Joe Klein recounts Bill Frist's latest gaffes and
quotes a Republican insider as saying that Frist isn't built for the "heavy
weather" of presidential campaigning. Many feel that the U.S. patent
process is out of hands (including the courts) after the Patent Office issued
patents to such technologies as the "Buy It Now" button used by eBay. Good
article and pictures on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that left 3,000 dead
and a quarter of a million homeless. Analysis of the three faults in the
Bay Area yields the prediction that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater
will hit before 2032. The top moneymaking chef is now Mario Batali,
multiple restaurant owner, top Food Channel host, and "chef to Nascar".
Three of my four magazines this week had an article on the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs
(Karen O is going solo, they're breaking up, they're not, ...), including
Time.
Posted by jbahr at 06:45 PM | Comments (2)
April 07, 2006
Brucie
OK, I'm back and no I didn't sit right down and blog, which somehow reminds
me of the South Pacific song, "I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair".
My parents were very big on Broadway shows, so to this day, I find myself
humming songs from Carousel and Kiss Me Kate and The King and I. Well, not
humming, actually, just this background music in my head, keyed off by God Knows
What. Anyway, before I left, I got my hair cut by a New Person. My
Old Person, Kathy, had been cutting my hair for 12 years, and moved to Durango.
The New Person asked me dozens of questions to which I had no answer, such as:
where should my sideburns be? how long on top? clippered or boxed
off in back? How the hell should I know, Kathy took care of all that.
I would traipse in every 10 weeks or so and she would take me over to the sink
and get my head all wet, and then clip away, and then put Bed Head on and mess
it all up. It was our little joke, as she knew it would last exactly one
shower, but she liked Rebelling me up a bit.
Now for some BusinessWeek, which leads off with Buyer (and Seller)
Beware, a journalistic cautionary tale about the housing market. Most
of the long article is about how some places seem to be very overpriced (e.g.,
San Diego) and some don't (Detroit, Atlanta, all of Texas, and most of the
Midwest), and why the reptilian part of our brain kicks in when it comes to
buying and selling homes. Researchers have begun modeling large lawsuit
trends using the same risk analysis methods that are applied to natural
catastrophes (NatCat's in insurance lingo). High-end designers are
lobbying congress to include fashion designs under U.S. copyright protection
(which they aren't) to match the protection afforded in Europe (where they are).
The new thing is 100-calorie mini-snack marketing, with Nabisco, Campbell, and
Pepsi Food Division leading the way in this $100 dollar business.
Advertisers have moved tens of millions of dollars of product placement
advertising from TV and films to video games. GM is a mess with its forced
assumption of much of Delphi's debt and legacy costs and a threatened UAW
strike. The newest "rootkit" viruses, many of which specialize in identity
and financial information theft, are eluding a majority of the largest
anti-virus firms for days after their launch. Wal-Mart is making a big
move in organic foods (many of the sources out of country), and organic farmers
are worried about the squeeze on margins. Many Indian call-centers are
switching to email and instant-messaging service to avoid the "accent problem".
Steve and Barry's Rules the Mall and, of course, I've never heard of
them. YouTube could be the next Napster (bad) or the next NBC (good), with
a phenomenal growth rate (over 500 million videos viewed in February), but
increasing potential legal problems as patrons share copyrighted material (e.g.,
clips from the Olympics, excerpts from Seinfeld). Marc Fleury should be
everybody's hero as the CEO of the largest open-source (i.e., free) enterprise
software firm, but the fact that he is a completely self-centered, hype-master
asshole seems to bother people. Sotheby's will be auctioning off places in
line to buy the soon-to-arrive Bentley Continental GTC convertible, estimated to
go for about $200K. The volume ends with a disgusting Q/A with Jack and
Suzy Welch, the former the ex-CEO of GE, both of whom blame board directors for
the obscene retirement packages of their exiting management. You know,
like Welch, whose retirement package includes $800,000 a month, Red Sox luxury
box seating, a Manhattan apartment for life, country club memberships and free
use of a corporate jet.
I use Plaxo, which is a contact organizer.
Even the free version is pretty slick, and even coordinates with Microsoft
Outlook to keep track of your email list. Every so often, Plaxo asks if
you want to mass-blast a request for update to everyone, which I do about one
every year or so. When I do this, a number of things amaze me:
- Many people just fill out the form and send it back. People I haven't spoken with in years. People who I can't remember who they are or how I met them. People who probably hate me.
- Some people decline to update their email address and vital statistics. Even people I've spoken with recently and know me well.
- Not a few of my tech-savvy friends are the most suspicious. They backchannel me to make sure it's from me. They ask me not to distribute their home address. They mention "viruses" and "spam" and "identity theft". Normal people do not do this.
- Some people find this the opportunity to call me and say that they weren't sure the email was from me, but they'd like to touch base anyway. Just yesterday, Brucie left a message on my office phone to that effect, and I'm happy he did, as I'll call him tonight to touch base after a number of years. Brucie is a very smart cookie who got an MBA and then became a professional gambler. He also went on my second honeymoon with me and Lisa. We were all sitting around playing charades and I said, "Hey, let's ALL go to Europe for my honeymoon", envisioning a bus-full of friends who would take the same flight and then tag-team a bit through Europe. Considering the level of alcohol and controlled substances in play that night, everyone thought it was a great idea, but only Brucie actually showed up at the airport on the specified day. Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Trieste, Rome, Venice, Zurich, and countless cities later, we had shared a fair number of pensions, as it always seemed profligate for Brucie to have to pony up for a room of his own when he could share one with us. He spent most of the time trying to convince us to take a train to Albania so we can say we saw one more country, or finding the perfect thing to say to a French cab driver who was so incensed that he stopped the taxi and threw our luggage out into the street, or jumping up and down on our bed swatting hummingbird-sized mosquitoes in Florence.
I happen to think that one of the most wonderful gifts that one poet can give
another is a little saffron. Peter apparently
agrees.
Posted by jbahr at 07:58 PM | Comments (4)
April 05, 2006
Flying As We Speak
I thought I would do that trick of Jordan's, where you see the great photo and come back all day to see if there will be some commentary to go with it. While we're talking about Jordan, there's a excerpt clip here of his Million Poems show for your You-Tubing pleasure.
Posted by jbahr at 05:56 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2006
Lazy Bones
Anderson Cooper gives MSM another
reason
to be embarrassed: "Any way you shape it, Congress won't be the same
without the "Hammer." For some people, that's a good thing. But DeLay is one of
those characters, who, love him or hate him, is a rich part of the American
political process, one of those colorful figures whom history remembers."
Thanks
to Paul Guest for telling
Jeannine and me that we're going to be in Verse Daily this week. I am
always the last to know. Am I on a roll or what? My goal next
month is Anecdote Daily.
All week I've been reading blogs where a blogger mentioned that he just deleted
his last post, having come to his/her senses. I didn't know we were
allowed to do that. Hmm. I'll have to go back and look for places
where I come off as a complete idiot.
I'll be off to San Jose tomorrow for a day or two (I know, I've said that
before). It's my turn to buy the wine when I stay at Casa Paulsen.
One of these days, I need to take an extra day off and see a couple of fellow
bloggers in the Bay Area.
On the culinary front:
Lisa, I want to
know more about red cabbage risotto and Laynie's roasted kale.
I received a Cook's Illustrated today. Chinese vegetables are on
the back, as if they're a genus or food group. Sheesh. Good recipes
for Moroccan chicken, though, and which cuts to use for London Broil.
("London Broil" is to cow meat what Chilean Sea Bass is to fish, a marketing
term).
Joshua cracked me up commenting on Basic
Instinct 2: "This is the best movie ever. My cat can read. I am the King
of France." When I saw it was released, I thought "this will never work".
And is that gal with the cigarette the same one who was engaged to an athlete
who recovered from cancer? Oh, yeah, that was Sheryl Crow. I'm
always doing that.
NPR was running a segment on the Dada
exhibit that is
running at the National Gallery of Art. One part of the story mentioned
Tristan Tzara's formula for poetry, which involved cutting the words out of a
newspaper article, shaking them in a bag, and "meticulously" transcribing them
as they fell out randomly. Sounds like low-tech frarf, doesn't it.
Of course, it's not a random process: there's the institutional bias of
the newspaper article's contents, the hand of Industry on the construction of
the bag which affects the word-shuffling, ... Excuse me while I go pee
into a fountain.
Reb, Laurel and Danielle are mentioned in this
review. Kevin moves his blog
and explains what an aquatarian is. I wish
Suzanne would drop by and start
a garden for me. Ange isn't all that
bothered by the whole Bishop
thing.
Posted by jbahr at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)