The city of Bonn, trying desperately to make up for budget shortfalls, has instituted a tax on prostitution, which is legal in Germany. Since many sex workers are from overseas and don’t understand the language, Bonn officials have come up with a solution in the form of a “sex meter.” FromSpiegel:
“The budget is tight in Bonn. So tight, in fact, that city officials instituted a new ‘sex tax’ for prostitution this year. They hoped to raise up to €200,000 per year in additional revenues.
Yet while it might sound straightforward enough, the sex tax has been difficult to enforce among those prostitutes who do not work in established brothels and sex clubs. Leading the city to come up with plan B: an automated ticket machine in an area frequented by prostitutes and their customers.
Since Monday, freelance sex workers on the city streets have been required to pay €6 per night into the machine, which resembles an automated parking ticket distributor. This machine, however, emits nightly permits to practice prostitution.”
The metaphor is too obvious for someone else not to have also thought of it. There were a rash of news stories a few weeks back about the numerous fake Apple stores popping up in China, and the question is this: Can China, with its present government and business structure, ever turn out a company like Apple? One that’s innovative and leads the market?
It’s obviously a generalization, but China seems more like Microsoft Nation, appropriating ideas and managing them with brutal efficiency. And that can certainly be very successful for a long time, but can that success be sustained without the fuel of original inventions? Perhaps that nation is about to file a huge number of patents, and I just know nothing about it. But for all its many strengths, China doesn’t seemed to be positioned to nurture free-thinking entrepreneurs.•
Only in the Bizarro world of 2011, when the Republican Party is essentially the de facto Tea Party, can Jon Huntsman seem too liberal to be the party’s Presidential nominee. He’s ultra-conervative on social issues and has the type of sophisticated intelligence that could be attractive to Independents who’ve wearied of Obama. But because he believes in global warming and thought the debt ceiling shenanigans were ridiculous, he has essentially no shot at the nomination. You will accept the self-defeating ideology without question or else. An excerpt about Huntsman’s formative years at the American Conservative:
“Huntsman Jr. had a rebellious phase. He dropped out of high school to focus on his progressive-rock band, Wizard. Ask him about those days and he slips into semi-seriousness. He describes Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, and Genesis as ‘highly impactful in terms of [his] view of the music world.’ And he jokes that the ’80s were a mostly ‘lost decade’ in terms of music when explaining his fondness for ’90s acts like the Foo Fighters and Ben Folds Five.
He eventually completed his GED and went to University of Utah; he also went on a two-year mission on behalf of the LDS church. Assigned to Taiwan, he quickly set to learning Standard Chinese Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkein. These years proved pivotal. He not only acquired the skills that would allow him to expand his father’s business in Asia, he also found himself an unofficial diplomat.
‘It was not just the effort to learn the language, the effort to learn the new highly structured system,’ he recalls, ‘I learned a lot about Asia, and I learned a lot about the United States.’ Huntsman arrived in Taiwan in the years following the Shanghai Communique, during which U.S. relations with mainland China began to normalize, a development that angered the Taiwanese.” (ThanksMarginal Revolution.)
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Prog rock, via Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe:
Brian Wilson created a fantasy world of endless waves to escape his demons, but eventually drugs and mental illness caused him to wipe out. Interviewed by Mike Douglas in 1976.
I’ve never been a fan of comic strips, even as a child, but apassage at the Los Angeles Review of Booksby Brian Doherty about comics curator Bill Blackbeard caught my eye. It woud seem that one man’s obsession is responsible for much of the trove of pulpy panels still available to us. An excerpt:
“The historian, editor, and collector Bill Blackbeard made the world of modern comic strip reprints possible by his dogged efforts to rescue them from far-flung newspapers being systematically destroyed by libraries. With his masterful co-edited Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics anthology in 1977, Blackbeard exposed a generation of fans and cartoonists to the fact that moldering, disappeared old comic strips were cool and desirable.
Blackbeard personally clipped and collated over 350,000 Sunday strips and over 2 million dailies, stored them in his own home for decades, and eventually donated them to Ohio State University. Jenny Robb, who now curates the archive Blackbeard created, says that Blackbeard’s careful preservation, contextualization, and editing ‘transformed comic strips into objects with legitimate cultural, historic and sometimes even aesthetic value.'”
"He preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto." (Image by Olivier Ezratty.)
If you haven’t had a chance yet to read Rebecca Mead’s great New Yorker profile of souped-up self-help guru, Timothy Ferriss, don’t let it slide. Ferriss is the best-selling author behind the 4-Hour Workweek and other similarly alluring titles. The article is hilarious and sums up the age we live in, the desperation people feel to find some way to the other side of this very discomfiting paradigm shift we’re experiencing. An excerpt;
“Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was turned down by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Crown, and he recounts this statistic with pride. But it’s easy to understand the caution of those twenty-six. Ferriss’s aesthetic is a pointed rejection of the culture of constant BlackBerrying, corporate jockeying, and office all-nighters that is celebrated in most business-advice books, and in films such as The Social Network.The 4-Hour Workweek was inspired by a personal epiphany. In 2004, Ferriss, feeling burned out as the C.E.O. of a sports-nutrition company, where he worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, discovered that he preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto. He also found that, by automating his business operations to the largest extent possible, he was able to pull this off. (To a point, at least. Kane Ng, a Hollywood executive who is Ferriss’s friend, told me, expansively, ‘Tim is a total fraud, you know. ‘Four-hour workweek’? He is constantly busting ass.’ Of course, it was Seneca who said that hyperbole ‘asserts the incredible in order to arrive at the credible.’) Ferriss advises would-be members of the New Rich to check e-mail no more than twice a day, and to set automated responses advising correspondents of the recipient’s unavailability. (Anyone who e-mails Ferriss these days immediately receives in her inbox an automated response, with the cheery sign-off ‘Here’s to life outside of the inbox!’) The book counsels readers to take what Ferriss calls ‘mini-retirements’ now—a month in Costa Rica, three months in Berlin—rather than saving up the prospect of leisure for the final decades of life. And it recommends funding all this by discovering a ‘muse,’ which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as ‘an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.’
Finding one’s muse, like catching one’s rabbit before cooking it, is more easily said than done, but Ferriss’s advocacy of liberation from the workplace has had a wide appeal, especially among younger people to whom the workplace may be unattainable in the first place, given the unemployment rate. Similarly, his latest book, The 4-Hour Body, speaks to the peculiar obsessions and insecurities of the young American male. Ferriss tells readers how they might lose twenty pounds in thirty days without exercise—eggs, spinach, and lentils are crucial—and how to triple their testosterone levels. (Gentlemen, put your iPhone in the pocket of your backpack, not the pocket of your jeans.) The book, which is five hundred and forty-eight pages long, contains a lot of colorfully odd advice—he recommends increasing abdominal definition with an exercise he calls ‘cat vomiting’—but it also reassures readers that they need not go so far as to have Israeli stem-cell factor injected into the cervical spine, as Ferriss did in the name of inquiry. Nor need they necessarily incorporate into their regimen Ferriss’s method for determining the effectiveness of controlled binge eating: weighing his feces to find out exactly what kind of shit he was full of.”
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“The four-hour workweek is possible, but you need to completely unplug and reset”:
"She put a broom in it with a man's hat on top and a man's trousers in front. It was shocking."
A legal case of great national importance, involving a couple of ninnies, was covered in the June 10, 1887 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“Miss Monaghan, a delicate refined looking lady, dressed in black, called at Justice Rhinehardt’s court this morning, in company with another lady, evidently her sister, and sought the magistrate’s advice as to how she should proceed in order to abate what she termed a nuisance. The lady, who is over 30 years old, resides in the dwelling 30 South Eleventh Street, and next door is a tenement in which Mrs. Murphy lives.
‘I have been,’ said Miss Monaghan to the magistrate, ‘in rather delicate health for a short time and my physician ordered me to sit in the yard where the sun’s warm rays could reach me. I obeyed instructions. From my position in the yard I had to face Mrs. Murphy’s windows. The latter annoyed me a good deal in consequence. She never ceased in throwing all kinds of missiles and refuse into my yard. The nuisance became so great that I was unable to stand it and wrote her a polite note, asking her if had injured her in any way and expressing my willingness to apologize if I had. I asked her also to call upon me but she did not. She continued annoying me and placed all manner of things in her windows which I could not avoid seeing.’
‘What did she place in the windows?’ asked the magistrate.
‘She put a broom in it with a man’s hat on top and a man’s trousers in front. It was shocking. Well, I tried to settle the matter in some way and have the annoyance stopped. I belong to Father Malone’s church and so does Mrs. Murphy. I waited upon the priest, but he said that Mrs. Murphy had not spoken to him about the matter. I came, to you, Judge, as a last resort.’
Clerk Schleuter, at the Magistrate’s suggestion, addressed Mrs. Murphy a note requesting her to cease her annoyance of Miss Monaghan or a warrant would be issued against her.”
I found a crate with some medical supplies in them. I hope to just find the rightful owner and return it. Is a blue crate marked Zimmer on it. It has some things for the human knee. I looked it up and these things are pretty expensive so I didn’t want to throw them away just like that…
Hope I help what ever doctor find his/her stuff so they can continue saving our lives. Thank you….
Stetson Kennedy, the civil rights activist and folklorist, justpassed awayat 94. Kennedy wrote the book, I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan, in the 1950s, which was an eye-opener for America, but he was later acccused (rightly, it would seem) of exaggeration and sensationalism. He even brought his anti-KKK struggle to the airwaves while working as a consultant for theSuperman radio program. Kennedy ran (unsuccessfully) for governor of Florida, and Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him. Quite a life.
Alexander Masters has a interesting profile at the Guardian about his downstairs neighbor, math prodigy Simon Phillips Norton, who, yes, is brilliant and very eccentric. An excerpt;
“The Monster is Simon’s special area in mathematics, a field known as Group Theory, or the study of symmetry. In 1980, mathematicians discovered the largest symmetry: the most convoluted symmetrical atom of them all. Because of its size and complexity, the final atom was dubbed ‘The Monster”.’Mathematicians study symmetry using grids of numbers. A sudoku table has nine rows and nine columns of numbers. The Monster has 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000.
It’s essential to emphasise that in no sense of the term is Simon mad. He’s covered in facial hair and wears rotten shoes and trousers for the opposite reason: too much mental order.
He burps; he thinks you won’t mind knowing about the progress of his digestion; he goes on long, sweaty walks, and doesn’t change his clothes for a week. But what else can he do? Everybody is messy somehow, and there’s no other place for Simon to store his quota. Inside his head there’s no room: all the mess has been swept out. It’s as pristine in there as a surgeon’s operating theatre.
Simon’s mother, now dead, taught him maths, up to quadratic equations. Astounding, for a British housewife in the 1950s – no one in the family can explain it. Simon says he’s a fluke of genetics. Every birth is a gamble by nature, a throwing in the air of infinite possibilities. In Simon’s case, ‘The molecules settled in my favour. Neither of my brothers is particularly intelligent.'” (ThanksLongform.)
From Jon Gertner’s excellent New York Times Magazine article about the burgeoning lithium-battery market and the future of manufacturing in America:
“On both sides of the world, the fundamental appeal of expanding manufacturing is jobs. It is a curiosity of modern life that information companies can create extraordinary social disruptions and vast shareholder wealth but relatively few jobs. Facebook has about 2,000 employees worldwide. Google has about 29,000. Even in its new, slimmed-down state, General Motors, a decidedly less valuable company, has about 200,000 employees. What’s more, that number represents only a fraction of the people behind the production of a G.M. car. ‘When you’re manufacturing anything, even if the work is done by robots and machines, there’s an incredible value chain involved,’ Susan Hockfield, the president of M.I.T., says. ‘Manufacturing is simply this huge engine of job creation.’ For batteries, that value chain would include scientists researching improved materials to companies mining ores for metals; contractors building machines for factory work; and designers, engineers and machine operators doing the actual plant work. By some estimates, manufacturing employs about 65 percent of America’s scientists and engineers.”
I was taken into custody because a cop thought I was pissing. I was intoxicated, but not pissing. They scanned my thumb with a portable device and took my photo right on the street. I am a professional, white male with no record. I was released and not charged with anything. They put me through the ringer. I didn’t even go to central booking. They held me for 5 hours. Honestly, I don’t recall, but I think I gave them a DNA swab as a bargain to get released. Do they have the right to do that if not arrested? Can they store my DNA? This is bs. I am open to any legal advice from an attorney. Thank you.
From a page of obituaries about electrical genius Nikola Tesla, who died alone and in modest means in 1943 at the New Yorker Hotel:
“Tesla’s ideas bordered increasingly on what some considered the fantastic as he advanced in years. On his seventy-eighth birthday he announced in an interview that he had invented a ‘death beam’ powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a distance of 250 miles and annihilate an army of 1,000,000 soldiers instantaneously.
On his eighty-fourth birthday he declared he stood ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of the ‘death beam’ that, he said, would build an invisible Chinese Wall of defense around the country against any attempted attack by an enemy air force, no matter how large.”
