A triumphant Wanjiri in Beijing. (Image by 正在休渔期.)
In a sad and bizarre story, the great 24-year-old Kenyan long-distance runner Sammy Wanjiru, who became the first marathoner from his country to win Olympic gold, apparently killed himself in a leap from his home’s balcony after a domestic dispute. From the just-published Reuters report:
“Jaspher Ombati, the regional police chief for the area, said Wanjiru appeared to have sustained internal injuries after the fall and was confirmed dead by doctors at a nearby hospital.
‘It is not yet clear whether it was a suicide or if he jumped out of rage or what caused him to fall to the ground,’ Ombati said of Wanjiru, who also won the Chicago and London marathons.
Ombati said Wanjiru’s wife, Triza Njeri, had come home to find Wanjiru in bed with another woman and locked the couple in the bedroom and ran outside. Wanjiru then leaped from the balcony, Ombati said.
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Wanjiru in 2009, as he prepared to run the Chicago Marathon, which he won:
Physicist Leonard Susskind presents a TED Talk about the Richard Feynman he knew, the person and the scientist.
Feynman was the rare physicist famous enough to be featured in People magazine. From a 1985 piece: “As a young scientist at Los Alamos during the development of the A-bomb, Richard Feynman delighted in exposing security lapses by picking the locks on safes and filing cabinets that contained top secret information, leaving behind notes signed, ‘Same guy.’ But there were even earlier warning signals that the Nobel prizewinning physicist and California Institute of Technology professor had, as one friend says, ‘a mind that works differently from other people’s.’ As a toddler in Far Rockaway, N.Y., his father, Mel, a uniform salesman, read him excerpts from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And as a teenager he read advanced calculus for pleasure.
Now Feynman, 67 and considered one of the world’s top theoretical physicists, can claim another achievement: his deliciously amusing autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. Norton, $16.95). Co-authored by Ralph Leighton, a math teacher who started taping conversations with his friend Feynman seven years ago, the book spent 14 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, a surprise to practically everybody—including the author. ‘I had no purpose in doing the book other than to amuse my friends,’ says Feynman.
A picturesque, unscientific collection of anecdotes, including instructions for picking up a woman in a bar, Surely You’re Joking has earned Feynman $56,000 so far and has elicited reaction from some unexpected quarters. ‘I got a call from a topless dancer,’ he says, ‘who claims we had a mutual acquaintance 15 years ago.'”
"The man threw the bone in the cart, also an old shoe that had been brought to him by another dog."
Horse and cow bones were scattered all over Brooklyn in the 1870s. In its July 21, 1877 edition, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle used its customary sensitivity in profiling one bone collector who made his living from such refuse. An excerpt:
“A seedy looking German, with tangled hair and beard, propelled a small handcart slowly up Flatbush avenue on Thursday. At his sides were three large dogs of mongrel breed. When near the corner of Dean street the man spoke to the dogs, and they immediately quitted his side and began running through the gutters of the neighborhood streets. Soon one of the dogs returned with a large bone in his mouth, and this he deposited at the feet of his master. The man threw the bone in the cart, also an old shoe that had been brought to him by another dog. It commenced to rain and the man and his dogs sought shelter under a neighborhood shed. An Eagle reporter had his attention attracted to the man, and after considerable trouble engaged him in conversation.
The man gave his name as Herman Groschel, and said he resided in the Sixteenth Ward. Picking up a large bone from his wagon, Groschel said, ‘Bones like that are very best. I can get about a dollar and thirty cents a barrel for them. That is what is called a shank bone, and they are much sought after by bone dust manufacturers. When it is made into dust the bone is sold to sugar refiners. Rib bones are not good for making bone dust to be used in refining sugar; when they are burned they cannot be worked into as fine dust as the shank, head and back bones.’
‘Are the bones of all kinds of animals made into bone dust?’ queried the reporter.
"In neighborhoods where there is a large poor population I do very well."
‘No,’ replied Groschel, ‘the bones used are principally those of horses and cows. Common bone dust is made of all kinds of bone, but the small bones generally find their way to the fat renderer. Some of these bones in my wagon look very dry, but the bone boiler will manage to get fat out of them.’
‘Do you find many bones by traveling through the streets with your dogs?’
‘In neighborhoods where there is a large poor population I do very well. Take them wards where there is a large tenement population and a great deal of refuse is thrown into the streets, as the poorer classes very seldom enjoy the luxury of owning ash barrels.’
‘Do you pick up anything else but bones?’
‘Old iron or bottles,’ replied Groschel. ‘I used to do a little in rags, but some years ago I brought home some rags which were infected with smallpox and my girl caught the dreadful disease. Since then I haven’t picked any rags.’
‘What do you do with those old shoes I see in your wagon?’
Groschel smiled. ‘I burn them,’ said he. ‘They do me instead of coal.’
The stench arising from old leather when burning is almost unbearable, yet many of the rag pickers and bone gatherers use no other fuel. Without exception the bone and rag gatherers are either German or Italians. They live cheap, are generally saving, and many of them have accumulated considerable sums of money.”
Hunter S. Thompson in all his glory in Vegas and Hollywood in 1978.
From Lucian K. Truscott IV’s review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vagas in the July 13, 1972 Village Voice: “Hunter Thompson lived in Aspen then, and his ranch, located outside town about 10 miles, tucked away up a valley with National Forest land on every side, was the first place I stopped. It was late afternoon and Thompson was just getting up, bleary-eyed and beaten, shaded from the sun by a tennis hat, sipping a beer on the front porch.
I got to know him while I was still in the Army in the spring of 1970, when he and a few other local crazies were gearing up for what would become the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, a spectacular which featured Thompson as candidate for sheriff, with his neighbor Billy for coroner. They ran on a platform which promised, among other things, public punishment for drug dealers who burned their customers, and a campaign guaranteed to rid the valley of real estate developers and ‘nazi greedheads’ of every persuasion. In a compromise move toward the end of the campaign, Thompson promised to ‘eat mescaline only during off-duty hours.’ The non-freak segment of the voting public was unmoved and he was eventually defeated by a narrow margin.
In the days before the Freak Power spirit, Thompson’s ranch served as a war room and R&R camp for the Aspen political insurgents. Needless to say there was rarely a dull moment. When I arrived last summer, however, things had changed. Thompson was in the midst of writing a magnum opus, and it was being cranked out at an unnerving rate. I was barely across the threshold when I was informed that he worked (worked?) Monday through Friday and saved the weekends for messing around. As usual, he worked from around midnight until 7 or 8 in the morning and slept all day. There was an edge to his voice that said he meant business. This was it. This was a venture that had no beginning or end, that even Thompson himself was having difficulty controlling.
‘I’m sending it off to Random House in 20,000-word bursts,’ he said, drawing slowly on his ever-present cigarette holder. ‘I don’t have any idea what they think of it. Hell, I don’t have any idea what it is.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
‘Searching for The American Dream in Las Vegas,’ replied Thompson coolly.”
"Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump." (Image by littleBits.)
Anand Giridharadas has a really good piece in the Sunday Times Magazine this week about littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir and the American culture of manufacturing things, in the wake of the credit-default swap scheme that made nothing and left us nearly bankrupt. An excerpt:
“If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called ‘American Maker,’ sponsored by Chevrolet. ‘Of all things Americans are, we are makers,’ its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. ‘With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.’
Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning ‘put-it-togetherers.’ But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.”
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The 1961 “American Maker” trailer mentioned in the article:
From “Invasion,” Tom Junod’s 2010 Esquire piece about his house being besieged by an army of those tiny colonists known as ants:
“A few years ago, I interviewed the great biologist E. O. Wilson right before he and his colleague Bert Hölldobler published their magnum opus, The Superorganism. The book, a study of ant societies, was an exploration of the notion that ants are such organized organisms that they almost don’t count as individual organisms at all but rather as cells of the colony they serve. The colony is the superorganism, and as Wilson told me, ‘an ant colony is far more intelligent than an ant.’ I’ll say. An ant by itself is an inoffensive creature, at worst a crunchy annoyance, smidgeny and obsessively clean and, above all, dumb, with a pindot of a brain. An ant by itself is not going to get any ideas… the problem being that it’s rarely by itself, that it’s representative of something, and that what it represents not only has ideas — it has designs. Wilson’s book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.” (Thanks Atlantic.)
“A World for Women in Engineering” is an excellent 20-minute doc made by Bell Labs in 1975. It’s a look at a multicultural collection of women working for Bell during the age of feminist ascendancy and the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. A testament to the times as well as a love letter to science.
"Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)
Longform made an incredible find with “The Duke In His Domain,” a 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote. The former was already an icon thanks to Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront; the latter was still roughly a decade from publishing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote traveled to the set of Sayonara in Tokyo to interview Brando, who was at the start of a long personal decline, still somewhat accessible but increasingly less so. An excerpt:
“The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, ‘Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.’
Brando groaned. ‘Apple pie. That’s all I need.’ He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. ‘I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.’ Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself ‘I’ve got to lose weight,’ ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.
‘And appapie, Marron?’
He sighed. ‘With ice cream, honey.’
Capote, world-weary in 1959. (Image by Roger Higgins.)
Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.
‘The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,’ he said. ‘Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much.'”
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Dick Cavett interviews a reluctant Brando in 1973. After the show, Brando took Cavett to dinner in Chinatown, and the actor famously punched paparazzo Ron Galella, breaking his jaw. The photographer sued and ultimately agreed to a $40,000 settlement.
Yesterday, I put up a post about the neurological phenomenon Synesthesia, in which the senses merge, allowing some people to taste colors, smell words and identify numbers by their “personalities.” Here’s a Time video, featuring neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, which demonstrates this disorder.
Released the year after the Summer of Love, when the counterculture lost its warmth, George A. Romero’s low-budget landmark, a genre-definer about the undead feasting on the living, can be read as a parable of a culture run amok, feared by those with no desire to join it.
Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) are young adult siblings headed to a desolate Pennsylvania graveyard to place flowers on their father’s resting place, the way good middle-class children do. Conservative Barbra has no problem with the pilgrimage, but Johnny grumbles about such customs not being his scene. Suddenly he has an out, but not one he’d hoped for: A boneyard zombie seizes and murders him. Barbra escapes to a nearby house, empty except for a bloody corpse, but how long will she be able to stay in one piece since more and more of the undead surround the home? Misery loves company and the terrified woman gets some when a few other members of the living, including resourceful Ben (Duane Jones), also take shelter from the marauders in the humble abode.
Trying to find out what’s turned the formerly sensible world upside down, Ben gets a radio working and listens for information. Did a recent space probe emit radiation that is making the dead rise? Is it something else? The answer isn’t clear, but one thing is certain: A meat-loving legion is cannibalizing the uninitiated and is still plenty hungry. The radio announcer reports that “frightened people are seeking refuge in churches, schools and government buildings.” But none of these traditional bastions of respectability can provide much comfort in a society gone insane.
In one chilling scene, a small child, possessed by the zombie madness, approaches her cowering, pleading mother with a sharp object in hand and demonstrates precocious butchering skills. The following year this scene would be repeated with scary precision for real by sons and daughters of the middle class answering to a zombie named Manson. The dead would rise and the culture would change forever, and no one could ever truly feel safe again.•
"The employees families have to promise 'not sue the compan.'"(Image by Glenn Fleishman.)
If a new report on Think Progress is accurate, Apple is employing curious methods to deal with a series of suicides by workers turning out iPhones and iPads at a soul-crushing pace at the Taiwan-based Foxconn factories:
“In the wake of a huge wave of suicides at Foxconn plants, the company began reforming its practices related to the suicides. Among these changes included installing anti-suicide nets to catch workers who attempted to leap out of company windows. Yet workers are also being forced to sign a non-suicide pact as a condition of employment. As part of the pact, the employees families have to promise ‘not sue the company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage the company’s reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal operations’ in the case of a suicide.”
The opening of “Holy Water,” Joan Didion’s 1977 essay about H2O, a scarce and precious thing in Southern California, with its endless summer, omnipresent swimming pools and expansive deserts:
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons.
As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand — the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped before — and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.•
Only one supermarathon has been inspired by a prison break by MLK assassin James Earl Ray.
A brief history of the bizarre and creepy origins of the annual Barkley Marathonsin Tennessee, from “The Immortal Horizon,” Leslie Jamison’s new Believer account of the grueling 100-mile race:
“The first race was a prison break. On June 10, 1977, James Earl Ray, the man who shot Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and fled across the briar-bearded hills of northern Tennessee. Fifty-four hours later he was found. He’d gone about eight miles. Some might hear this and wonder how he managed to squander his escape. One man heard this and thought: I need to see that terrain!
Over twenty years later, that man, the man in the trench coat—Gary Cantrell by birth, self-dubbed Lazarus Lake—has turned this terrain into the stage for a legendary ritual: the Barkley Marathons, held yearly (traditionally on Lazarus Friday or April Fool’s Day) outside Wartburg, Tennessee. Lake (known as Laz) calls it ‘The Race That Eats Its Young.’ The runners’ bibs say something different each year:SUFFERING WITHOUT A POINT; NOT ALL PAIN IS GAIN. Only eight men have ever finished. The event is considered extreme even by those who specialize in extremity.” (ThanksLongform.)
A Michael Matas TED Talk about the coming evolution of e-books. The Kindle probably needs to be free and ubiquitous really soon in order to have a future. (Thanks Open Culture.)
The heft of Google’s wealth and influence is squarely behind the proliferation of self-driving cars, a concept which has been around since the 1950s and may be coming to Nevada roads in the near future.John Markoff reportsin the New York Times:
“Google, a pioneer of self-driving cars, is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state where they could be legally operated on public roads.
And yes, the proposed legislation would include an exemption from the ban on distracted driving to allow occupants to send text messages while sitting behind the wheel.
The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada’s Capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.
Last year, in response to a reporter’s query about its then-secret research and development program, Google said it had test-driven robotic hybrid vehicles more than 140,000 miles on California roads — including Highway 1 between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
More than 1,000 miles had been driven entirely autonomously at that point; one of the company’s engineers was testing some of the car’s autonomous features on his 50-mile commute from Berkeley to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.”
The opening of “Cities of New York,” from Pete Hamill’s excellent collection, Piecework, in which the writer recalls NYC’s mid-twentieth century decline, which didn’t reverse until new media technology businesses began to take root in the city in the 1990s:
“If I’d grown up in another city, I almost certainly would have become another kind of writer. Or I might not have become a writer at all. But I grew up in New York in the 1940s, when New York was a great big optimistic town. The war was over and the Great Depression was a permanent part of the past; now we would all begin to live. To a kid (and to millions of adults) everything seemed possible. If you wanted to be a scientist or a left-fielder for the Dodgers, a lawyer or a drummer with Count Basie: well, why not? This was New York. You could even be an artist. Or a writer.
As a man and a writer, I’ve been cursed by the memory of that New York. Across five decades, I saw the city change and its optimism wane. The factories began closing in the late 1950s, moving to the South, or driven out of business by changing styles or tastes or means of production. When the factories died, so did more than a million manufacturing jobs. Those vanished jobs had allowed thousands of men like my father (an Irish immigrant with an eighth-grade education) to raise families in the richest city on earth. They joined unions. They proudly voted for the Democratic ticket. The put paychecks on kitchen tables, asked their kids if they’d finished their homework, went off to night games at the Polo Grounds or Ebbets Field, and were able to walk in the world with pride. Then the great change happened. The manufacturing jobs were replaced with service work. Or with welfare. One statistic tells the story: In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.
With the jobs gone, the combined American plagues of drugs and guns came to the neighborhoods.”
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Pete Hamill discusses the legacy ofFrank Sinatraon local NYC news:
Meghalaya, India, is a very wet place, so the locals use roots from live strangler figs to build pedestrian bridges that are alive. Video from BBC’s Human Planet series.
The opening of Jesse McKinley’swell-written New York Times accountof the strange murder of Riverside, California, resident Jeff Hall, a representative of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party, who was recently shot to death by his tow-headed ten-year-old son:
“The day before he allegedly shot his father, the sandy-haired 10-year-old boy showed off a prized possession to a visitor. It was a thin leather belt emblazoned with a silver insignia of the Nazi SS.
‘Look what my dad got me,’ the boy said shyly, perched on the living room stairs, one of the few quiet spots in a house with five children.
A little more than 12 hours later, the police say, the boy stood near those stairs with a handgun and killed his father, Jeff Hall, as he lay on the living room couch. It was about 4 a.m. on May 1; paramedics declared Mr. Hall dead when they arrived.
The police say that the killing was intentional, but that the motives behind it are still not fully understood. But whatever the reason, it has cast fresh light on the fringe group to which Mr. Hall devoted his life: the National Socialist Movement, the nation’s largest neo-Nazi party, whose message stands in surreal juxtaposition to the suburban, workaday trappings of many of its members.”
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Hall can be seen at this creepy 2009 anti-immigration rally. He’s the speaker with the shaved head who’s on camera early in the clip:
