“Cockfighting Remains Legal There”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s an uncommon sports-page paragraph, from Nick Cafardo in the Boston Globe:

“I was interested to learn that Juan Nieves’s father’s occupation was training and fighting roosters in the cockfighting arenas of Puerto Rico. Nieves grew up in that environment, and cockfighting remains legal there. Years ago, I ventured out with the late Ivan Calderon to some cockfighting events in Puerto Rico. Calderon had a stable of roosters, approximately 200, that he trained. The matches were gruesome. Calderon was murdered in 2003 when he wouldn’t give up his son’s whereabouts in a drug deal gone bad.”

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A Brief Note From 1901 About A Hard Worker

June 14, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 7, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paterson–Mrs. Leonard Shatem pf Vreeland Avenue was called to the door a few weeks ago by a man begging. He said his name was Charles Burk and told a pitiful story. She allowed him to go into the kitchen and gave him bread and tea. He asked for work. She told him to remain over night. For weeks he did chores around the house. Mr. Shatem said that Burk was a hard-working man, and he was glad that his wife had hired him. Now Mrs. Shatem has eloped with the tramp and left a note for her husband saying it was a case of ‘love at first sight.'” 

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“The Art Market’s Greatest Strength Is Its Ability To Co-Opt Any Radical Demands That A Work Of Art Makes”

June 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Project Syndicate, ethical philosopher Peter Singer, that necessary nudge, assails those who spend tens of millions of dollars on status-boosting art works. While I don’t agree with all of Singer”s ideas about art, I’m with his larger point about philanthropy. An excerpt:

“Perhaps, though, the importance of postwar art lies in its ability to challenge our ideas. That view was firmly expressed by Jeff Koons, one of the artists whose work was on sale at Christie’s. In a 1987 interview with a group of art critics, Koons referred to the work that was sold last month, calling it ‘the ‘Jim Beam’ work.’ Koons had exhibited this piece – an oversize, stainless steel toy train filled with bourbon – in an exhibition called ‘Luxury and Degradation,’ that, according to the New York Times, examined ‘shallowness, excess and the dangers of luxury in the high-flying 1980s.’

In the interview, Koons said that the Jim Beam work ‘used the metaphors of luxury to define class structure.’ The critic Helena Kontova then asked him how his ‘socio-political intention’ related to the politics of then-President Ronald Reagan. Koons answered: ‘With Reaganism, social mobility is collapsing, and instead of a structure composed of low, middle, and high income levels, we’re down to low and high only… My work stands in opposition to this trend.’

Art as a critique of luxury and excess! Art as opposition to the widening gap between the rich and the poor! How noble and courageous that sounds. But the art market’s greatest strength is its ability to co-opt any radical demands that a work of art makes, and turn it into another consumer good for the super-rich. When Christie’s put Koons’s work up for auction, the toy train filled with bourbon sold for $33 million.

If artists, art critics, and art buyers really had any interest in reducing the widening gap between the rich and the poor, they would be focusing their efforts on developing countries, where spending a few thousand dollars on the purchase of works by indigenous artists could make a real difference to the wellbeing of entire villages.”

 

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“Let’s Turn To That Miracle Of The Modern Age, The Electronic Brain UNIVAC”

June 14, 2014 in Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The Univac 1 computer got off to a good start in 1952 when it predicted that Eisenhower would win easily over Stevenson even though the press thought the reverse outcome was a near-certainty. It faltered a bit in the 1954 midterm Senate races and was mocked. (“Tilt!” was hollered in the newsroom by one wiseass when it became clear that the prognostications were errant.) But by the 1956 Presidential election, the computer once more nailed the Eisenhower triumph over Stevenson. No TV broadcast of any major election ever went without a computer again. 

In this 1952 clip, Walter Cronkite cedes the floor the machine which at this early point in the night thought Eisenhower was a 100-1 favorite to win. Nervous CBS brass were so concerned that the “electronic brain” was wrong that they initially pretended it had mechanical difficulties and was being unresponsive.

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 14, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Badly."

Any older women giving bjs?

Email me I need a bj badly from an older woman in the Queens area. If you’re interested please send me an email and I will get back to you.

10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

June 13, 2014 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • 10 Signs You’re Dating An Asshat
  • WATCH: Surprising Danger Of Peeing In The Pool
  • Pool Repairman Saves Squirrel’s Life
  • Awww: This Cat Thinks It’s A Baby
  • You’re Putting On Your Bug Spray All Wrong
  • Justin Bieber Turns To God, Gets Baptized In A Bathtub
  • Woman Reveals Her Vulva At Museum… For The Sake Of Art (NSFW)
  • Penis Size Study Yields Surprise About Women’s Preferences
  • Duke Porn Star Donates Her Panties For A Good Cause
  • Doc Accused Of Sexting During Surgery
Let's get nasty, baby.

Let’s get nasty.

But youre about remove my husbands gall bladder.

But you’re removing my husband’s gall bladder.

He looks healthy enough for a three-way to me.

He looks healthy enough for a three-way to me.

I wouldnt say "no."

I wouldn’t say “no.”

Good. I went commando under these scrubs.

Good. I go commando under my scrubs.

I hate you, Obamacare.

I hate you, Obamacare.

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

June 13, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink


10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. what is the greatest invention since the printing press?
  2. what are americans obsessed with?
  3. john delorean interviewed after his fall
  4. pieta vandalized
  5. telephone newspaper 1900
  6. wolves attack bridal party
  7. how much were executioners paid?
  8. ty cobb being interviewed
  9. have american workers become more invisible?
  10. people dying of thirst in the desert

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

June 13, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

This week marked the official start of guys-getting-kicked-in-the-nuts season.

This week marked the official start of the season of guys getting kicked in the nuts.

  • Howard Hughes died for many reasons but likely not aspirin abuse.
  • Steven Pinker looks at writing from cultural and neurological angles.
  • Elon Musk rescinds all of Tesla’s EV patents.
  • Uber might, perhaps, decrease private-car ownership.
  • Globalization has had a mixed effect on the World Cup.
  • Some PEDs should perhaps be permitted in sports.
  • Jack London built a futuristic piggery in California.

“To Test This Theory In The Real World, We Can Study Penalty Kicks”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The effect of the World Cup on the Brazilian economy will be studied from every and any angle, but even within the game itself, some economic principles can be tested. From Ignacio Palacios-Huerta’s New York Times article, “The Beautiful Data Set“:

“The economist John Forbes Nash Jr. analyzed how people should behave in strategic situations in which it is not optimal to repeatedly make the same move — like the children’s game rock, paper, scissors, in which selecting one move again and again (rock, rock, rock …) makes you easy to beat. According to Mr. Nash’s theory, in a zero-sum game (i.e., where a win for one player entails a corresponding loss for the other) the best approach is to vary your moves unpredictably and in such proportions that your probability of winning is the same for each move. In rock, paper, scissors, for example, the optimal strategy is to mix your choices randomly among the three options.

To test this theory in the real world, we can study penalty kicks, which are zero-sum games in which it is not optimal to repeatedly choose the same move. (The goalie has an easier time stopping your shot if you always kick to the same side of the net.) Unlike complex real-world strategic situations involving firms, banks or countries, penalty kicks are relatively simple, and data about them are readily available.

I analyzed 9,017 penalty kicks taken in professional soccer games in a variety of countries from September 1995 to June 2012. I found, as Mr. Nash’s theory would predict, that players typically distributed their shots unpredictably and in just the right proportions. Specifically, roughly 60 percent of kicks were made to the right of the net, and 40 percent to the left. The proportions were not 50-50 because players have unequal strengths in their legs and tend to shoot better to one side. Shooting 50-50, in other words, would not take full advantage of their better leg, while shooting any more often to the stronger side would have been too predictable.

In accordance with Mr. Nash’s theory, penalty kicks shot to the left were successful with the same frequency as kicks shot to the right — roughly 80 percent of the time.”

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“The Appeal Of Vinyl Is A Mysterious Thing”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I don’t collect books or records or anything. I love well-designed, beautiful things that make me happy, but I don’t have a deep need to own them. (Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, photographed in 1971 by Julian Wasser, disagreed with me on this matter.) From a Guardian piece about the value of vinyl by Marc Maron, who seems wonderful from a distance:

“The appeal of vinyl is a mysterious thing. Even when you talk to people who make records, who know how the sound gets from the groove to the stylus into the amp and out through the speakers, it’s still kind of magical, in some weird way. The idea of analog, even with its crackle and pops, the idea of this sound being pulled off this rotating disc through these other elements, I think there’s integrity to that, as opposed to this mystifying sequence of zeroes and ones that make that digital sound. I have no idea how the hell that works. It seems detached, inhuman.

At some point in the last two years, I got a renewed interest in playing records. I’d had turntables before, and I had a box of records that I’d been carting around since high school. I always knew in the back of my head that records had more integrity than digital music. I went to interview Jack White at his place in Nashville, and he’s a real analog guy. He had these Mackintosh tube amps, and I got hung up on the idea of getting a tube amp, but the ones Jack had were $15,000. There was no way I could spend that kind of money on stereo equipment and enjoy it; I’d always be thinking, does this sound like $15,000? I don’t think so.

I’ve got around 2,000 records now, and I play music constantly.”

_____________________________

“Are you fed up with constantly searching for the records you want?”

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“Apparently We Can Bounce Back From Some Awful Experiences”

June 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some people with tremendous struggles are happy and some with uncommon good luck are bitter. A lot in the latter group have egos blocking out the sun.

And expectations also matter. They can often be adjusted as we respond to the stimuli we encounter, as we grow to accept a new normal. But there are some things that make us miserable no matter how we look at them. From Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece about so-called “happynomics”:

“It turns out that we grow accustomed to some conditions, happy or unhappy, but not to all.

The study which sparked the idea that we can get used to almost anything was published by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in 1978. It compared the happiness of paraplegic and quadriplegic accident victims to that of lottery winners – and discovered that the disabled people were scarcely less happy than the millionaires. Apparently we can bounce back from some awful experiences. (It is sad and troubling that a few years after making this discovery, Brickman killed himself.)

But how exactly is this apparent process of habituation supposed to work? Here’s where happiness economics has the long-run data to help. Consider bereavement: we cope by paying less attention as time goes by. A friend said to me, months after my mother and his father had both died, ‘You don’t get any less sad when you think about them but you think about them less often.’

The same is true, alas, for the nice things in life: we begin to take them for granted too. But there are experiences – unemployment is one of them; an unhappy marriage another – that depress us for as long as they last. What those experiences seem to have in common is the ability to hold our attention. Commuting, although shorter and less serious, is a classic case – annoying but also stimulating enough that we keep noticing the annoyance.

This suggests that we should look for the opposite of commuting: positive new experiences that are engaging enough to keep being noticed.”

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“You Don’t Know Who You’re Gonna Get, But You Know It’s Going To Be A Celebrity”

June 13, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

That joker Alan Abel plays pranks that work because beneath the ridiculous set-ups and crude one-liners there’s an understanding of our desires and fears. In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, he satirized our wish for fame, youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be a star and live forever.

A Note From 1929 About Huge Robotic Fireflies

June 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 20, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Artificial fireflies the size of turkeys which will give off brilliant perpetual light without the vexation of meters, monthly bills and repairs were forecast last night in an address on ‘Living Lamps’ before the American Institute in Cooper Union by Dr. E. Newton Harvey, professor of psychology at Princeton University.

And whereas the firefly of nature only flashes, burning up the tiny amount of ‘oil’ in its lamp and then staying dark again until it has reformed its ‘oil,’ the robot firefly would be so contrived as to give a continuous glow, reforming a part of its ‘oil,’ which is technically called ‘luciferin,’ while it was burning the rest, this being an incessant process.”

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“Is This Girl Going To Have A Normal Life?”

June 12, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Fertilizing a human egg in a test tube was considered verboten and scary by many when the first child to be conceived in this fashion, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. Ethicists and religious figures questioned the process. All the fuss seems silly in retrospect, and the procedure is now just another way to have a baby. Louise indeed has had a normal life, as a nurse and postal worker and mom (the in vivo kind), despite a continuous crush of press interview requests. Here she is a lively child of 14 months on a Canadian talk show with her mom and dad.

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“It Has The Potential To Decrease Private Car Ownership”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo wonders whether Uber, for all the very reasonable doubts about the service, could cause a serious decrease in private car ownership, which would have huge ramifications for not just transportation but also housing and environment. An excerpt:

“It is impossible to say whether Uber is worth the $17 billion its investors believe it to be; like any start-up, it could fail. But for all its flaws, Uber is anything but trivial. It could well transform transportation the way Amazon has altered shopping — by using slick, user-friendly software and mountains of data to completely reshape an existing market, ultimately making many modes of urban transportation cheaper, more flexible and more widely accessible to people across the income spectrum.

Uber could pull this off by accomplishing something that has long been seen as a pipe dream among transportation scholars: It has the potential to decrease private car ownership.

In its long-established markets, like San Francisco, using Uber every day is already arguably cheaper than owning a private car.”

“I’m Actually Not A Big Fan Of The Term ‘Sixth Extinction'”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At Vox, Brad Plumer interviews Duke biologist Stuart Pimm about his new paper on the acceleration of extinctions in the time of human beings. But he didn’t publish only about what will perish–he believes there’s also the option for us to avoid destroying diversity and perhaps our own species. An excerpt:

“Vox:

So extinction rates are higher now that humans are around. Why? What are we doing?

Stuart Pimm:

There are four big factors here. The first one, which is overwhelmingly important, is habitat destruction. We’re destroying the habitats where species are. About two-thirds of all species on land are in tropical rainforests — and we’re shrinking those rain forests.

In the Americas, the greatest numbers of species on the brink of extinction are in the coastal forests of Brazil and the northern Andes and Ecuador. If you look at the coastal forests of Brazil, east of Rio de Janeiro, something like 95 percent of all forest has been destroyed. So it’s not surprising that that part of the world has an unusual number of endangered species.

Second, we’re also warming the climate, and as it gets warmer species either have to move toward the poles or up mountains. This could be a big one in the future.

Third, we’ve been incredibly careless about moving species around the world. I’m in the Florida Everglades, where there are an obscene number of Burmese pythons slithering around, which can not do any good. So invasive species is a third.

Finally, particularly in the oceans, there’s just overharvesting. We’ve depleted the oceans by fishing and more fishing and yet more fishing, and driving species to the very brink of extinction.

Vox:

So the historical record shows that there have five mass extinction events in the Earth’s history. And lots of people keep suggesting we’re on the verge of a sixth. But what’s the criteria for this? How would we know?

Stuart Pimm:

I’m actually not a big fan of the term ‘sixth extinction.’ But we are certainly seeing a highly accelerated rate of extinction.

If that continues — and continues for many decades — then by the end of the century we are going to lose one-third or one-half of all species. And that kind of loss in biological diversity hasn’t been seen in 60 million years. The last time we lost that many species was when an asteroid plowed into the Yucatán in Mexico. So if trends continue, then yes, we are going to lose a large fraction of species.

But what the paper is about mostly, is ways in which we can avoid that. So yes it’s bad, but the paper is full of important news about how we can make a difference.”

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“Technology Leadership Is Not Defined By Patents”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’ve been rumors for awhile that Elon Musk was going to withdraw the patents for all his Tesla EV technology and open-source the previously proprietary information. That has come to pass, and it makes great business sense as well as being altruistic and progressive. If you were trying to popularize electric cars, wouldn’t you want a robust industry to be a part of? That way other companies will be producing innovations and nurturing talent and providing competition. It might be different if large manufacturers were deep into the game, but, sadly, they’re not. Also: Fewer patents mean fewer lawsuits. The Tesla press release:

“Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.”

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“We Will Need Robots To Help Us Deal With This Reality”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological progress has historically meant more jobs, but is the new normal of potential mass automation the first exception to that rule? Maybe, maybe not. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the focuses of Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, believes we won’t see a net loss. From Brooks at the Harvard Business Review:

“Over the next 40 years, we are going to see a dramatic drop in the percentage of working-age adults across the world. And as baby boomers reach retirement age, the percentage of folks in retirement is going to change dramatically in the opposite direction. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services, and fewer working people available to deliver those services to them.

We will need robots to help us deal with this reality, doing the things we normally do for ourselves but that get harder to do as we get older. Things like getting groceries, driving cars to visit people, and helping us move around more safely and efficiently as physical ailments settle in.

Before you dismiss this vision for a highly automated society, think about it the next time you put a load of laundry into your washing machine or hit the start button on the dishwasher as you head off to bed. These are tools that have automated unpleasant and time-consuming aspects of our lives, and given us more free time to pursue more productive or pleasurable activities.

A generation ago, these machines were looked at with skepticism and sometimes ridicule. Today, they are staples of modern life that most of us would be hard-pressed to live without. I hope and fully believe we will be saying the same thing about robots a generation from now.”

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Old Print Article: “Office Serves Coffee in Pneumatic Tubes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

June 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“I have my manias, and I impose them.”

Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s Air Minister, created an experimental office environment that was a technocrat’s dream, humming with gizmos, even if it shared some of the fascist tendencies of his politics. There was an Automat-style lunchroom and a tubing system that delivered coffee to desks, which was wonderful provided you weren’t aging, sickly or disabled. Then you weren’t allowed to work there. An article from the February 23, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paris–Fascist Air Minister Italo Balbo of Italy, soon to fly to America with 20 planes, has hot coffee shot up to his office through pneumatic tubes. So in fact do all the 2,000 clerks and other personnel of his ministry.

This is but one of the fantasies that the 36-year-old, prematurely bearded air minister (possible successor to Mussolini) has incorporated in the newest of Rome’s government buildings.

In spite of his youth he is probably the dean of the world’s air ministers, since he is in his sixth year of office. To Claude Blanchard whom he showed around the building, he stated that he had deep dislike for ordinary government offices.

‘I have my manias, and I impose them,’ he laughed. ‘There is not a drawer in the building.’ He explained that his first four years in politics gave him a horror of desk drawers.

Blanchard describes the ministry as a combination of ‘factory, museum, laboratory, gymnasium, restaurant, bank, university and storehouse.’

Every desk has a telephone and a pneumatic tube such as department stores use to shoot change from customer to cashier and back. The elevators are endless chain affairs which never stop; and on and off which passengers leap while they are in motion.

No Gray Hairs In Sight

There are no paralytics or rheumatics in the ministry. Blanchard said that he did not see one gray hair. 

Balbo, while visiting Chicago, 1933.

Balbo’s own office is a wide bright room, the walls of which are decorated with huge maps painted in the seventeenth century manner. While they were talking something like a steamboat whistle blew; and the minister invited the guest to lunch.

After a descent in the non-stop elevators they came out in an immense stand-up lunch room, in which everybody from the minister down to the workmen in aprons and overalls eat at once. They all pay for it, the minister and upper ranks paying 32 cents and the men in overalls seven. Forty-five minutes are allowed for lunch. Blanchard, between Balbo and a high staff officer, lined up at one of the long nickel and porcelain shelves, opened the small nickeled doors in front of him. There, kept hot by electricity, was the whole meal.

It was not a completely standardized meal. The menu had been circulated earlier in the morning and everybody had shot back his order by pneumatic tube.

In fifteen minutes the lunch was over and everybody flowed around to a colossal bar filled with glittering coffee ‘espresso’ machines. Each made his own coffee; and it was there that Balbo showed with some pride the system by which the clerks get coffee in their offices without leaving their desks. A clerk shoots an order down the tube with his desk number on it; and in a moment a sealed bottle with the coffee in it plops out of the tube.

It is a good ministry to work in. It closes at a quarter to four.”

 

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1 Thing About Eric Cantor’s Defeat

June 11, 2014 in Politics | Permalink

  • It’s difficult to stress too much what a small election Eric Cantor-David Brat was in terms of reflecting any larger picture about America and how disproportionate the ramifications will likely be. The final vote tally was 36,120 for Brat and 28,907 for Cantor. That’s barely more than 65,000 ballots cast. It’s in no way a bellwether of America nor of Virginia outside of the 7th Congressional District. It probably says as much about universal dislike of the soon-to-be-deposed Majority Leader as anything else. But because of the stunning nature of the upset, it will likely tilt the GOP further right at a time when the Tea Party pull had been flagging. Smooth sailing for Lindsey Graham against party “purists” won’t make a ripple against Cantor’s Titanic. It certainly will make governance more difficult for President Obama for the rest of his term, but his goal of establishing a transformative administration rather than a transitional one has always been somewhat predicated on having a Democrat succeed him. This jolt to the right for Republicans makes that more likely, especially with the sharp demographic challenges that they have in national elections where gerrymandered districts can’s serve as a bulwark. Nothing could be more satisfying than Cantor being done in by the extremists he marshaled to scuttle good government, but his loss will likely be given far greater significance than it should.•

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“He Wanted The Woman – And Two Cats – To Be The First To Walk On The Moon”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of the Guardian, that publication’s Karin Andreasson’s has a new article about Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a Don Quixote of the Age of Aquarius, who was the self-appointed leader of Zambia’s unlikely entry into the 1960s Space Race. He desired not only to go to the moon but to establish a Christian ministry on Mars. An excerpt:

In 1964, when Zambia gained its independence from the UK, Nkoloso, a science teacher, decided to prove that his country was just as important as the world’s leading nations. It was the height of the space race and he decided Zambia should take part. He designed a rocket and a catapult system to launch it, which he tested on Zambian Independence Day. He recruited 10 men and one woman as astronauts. He wanted the woman – and two cats – to be the first to walk on the moon.

Training took place on a farm near the capital, Lusaka. Nkoloso asked for £7m of funding from Unesco, but didn’t get it. That was one reason why the programme didn’t have a chance. Then the woman became pregnant by one of the other astronauts and her parents came to take her back to their village. And that marked the end of the space programme. People I have spoken to who met Nkoloso say he was very charismatic: a dreamer who took his project very seriously, maybe even with the same serious approach Nasa and the Soviet Union had.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 11, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

I saw some guy walking with a live cat on his head on fifth ave today 

you thought i was kidding but i am not. he walked right past me and i called him back and he walked back and the cat didn’t move. he asked me for a dollar. i gave it to him. 

“If You Had A Bad Run…For A Moment It Hurts”

June 11, 2014 in Sports, Videos | Permalink

Here’s the full 22-minute version of Paul Ryan’s excellent 1969 documentary, “Ski Racing,” which uses bold editing and FM radio rock to help profile that era’s world-class downhill racers. One of the pros included is Vladimir “Spider” Sabich who would die horribly in 1976 in an infamous crime.

From the 1974 Sports Illustrated article, “The Spider Who Finally Came In From The Cold“:

In selling the tour, the sales pitch is not pegged strictly to exciting races and the crack skiers but also to its colorful personalities. There is Sabich, who flies, races motorcycles and figures that a night in which he hasn’t danced on at least one tabletop is a night wasted. Jim Lillstrom, Beattie’s P.R. man, also enjoys checking off some of the other characters.Norway’s Terje Overland is known as the Aquavit Kid for the boisterous post-victory celebrations he has thrown. He’s also been known to pitch over a fully laden restaurant table when the spirits have so moved him. Then there is the poet, Duncan Cullman, of Twin Mountain, N.H., author of The Selected Heavies of Duncan Duck, published at his own expense, who used to travel the tour with a gargantuan, bearded manservant. And Sepp Staffler, a popular Austrian, who plays guitar and sitar and performs nightly at different lounges in Great Gorge, N.J. when he isn’t competing. The ski tour also has its very own George Blanda. That would be blond, wispy Anderl Molterer, the 40-year-old Austrian, long a world class racer and still competitive.

Pro skiing’s immediate success, however, seems to depend on an authentic rivalry building up between Sabich and [Billy] Kidd, who are close friends but whose living styles are as diverse as snow and sand. Sabich is freewheeling on his skis as well as on tabletops. Kidd is thoughtful, earnest, a perfectionist. Spider has his flying, his motorcycles and drives a Porsche 911-E. Billy paints and now drives a Volvo station wagon. Spider enjoys the man-to-man challenge of the pro circuit. Billy harbors some inner doubts regarding his ability to adapt to it.•

“His Is An Absolute, Pre-Modern Sort Of Power, Faith-Based And Exclusionary”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his latest compulsively readable GQ article, “What Does the Future Hold for the Guardian?” Michael Wolff analyzes the British publication’s attempt to globalize itself and win the United States, to less-than-mixed financial results. The Snowden story, as important as it may have been, could not be monetized, and the company continues to hemorrhage cash. Wolff finds the the Guardian’s singular editor, Alan Rusbridger, “unpleasant” in his lack of transparency, whereas Wolff is unpleasant for the opposite reason. An excerpt about Rusbridger, who, by virtue of the publication’s unusual financial arrangement, is a throwback to an earlier era:

“While the Guardian has a business staff with a CEO, and is overseen by trustees with ultimate responsibility, it has one real power centre, strategic thinker and moral compass: its editor, Alan Rusbridger. (A kind of preternatural consensus surrounds Rusbridger, but underneath him the Guardian is a fraught political cauldron, with underlings struggling to align with him, stay in his favour and undercut everyone else who is trying: ‘a nest of vipers,’ in the description of an outside consultant brought in to work on one of the paper’s big redesign projects.)

The 60-year-old Rusbridger is, surely, among the most talented newspaper editors of his generation (the other, at the opposite end of the news and philosophical spectrum, is Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and, as well, the most opaque, sending cryptic messages in a cipher which no one person can completely decode.

An hour with him is both unpleasant in the exertions required to penetrate his lack of transparency and fill the conversational void and, yet, at the same time, uplifting and restorative. The vacuum that surrounds him somehow seems to represent moral superiority and it draws you in. Six different people of high rank at the paper have said to me, on different occasions, the following words: ‘I would do anything for Alan.’ These are not words you usually hear in a modern company; they are not even credible. But they suggest the Guardian’s sense of purpose and the potency of its Kool-Aid. (I once sat next to Rusbridger’s wife at a Guardian dinner; she kept referencing what seemed like a wholly different person, a normal, fallible, workaday chap named ‘Al.’ Weird.)

His is an absolute, pre-modern sort of power, faith-based and exclusionary. You believe or you don’t. You are in or you are out. You are family or you are not. Emily Bell, once a potential Rusbridger successor, who was at the Guardian for the better part of two decades (coming in through the Guardian’s acquisition of the Observer- ever an unresolved relationship), told me, after she left several years ago to take a teaching position in the US, “I never really was an insider.”

Rusbridger has run the place since 1995 and, in some less-than-rational way, its future exists wholly in his head or at his whim. Not only is there enormous deference to him and dependence on him, but a sense of the abyss at any suggestion that he might leave (he is often suggested for eminent positions at places like the Royal Opera House).

Rusbridger has maintained two dominant ideas about the Guardian’s future: going digital and going to the US.”

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“Sport Originally Evolved As A Way Of Showing Off Our Genetic Fitness”

June 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

There are hundreds of baseball players who’ve gotten special dispensation to use amphetamines in one form or another for “medical reasons,” which makes little sense. Yet a player trying to rehab from a legitimate injury with use of HGH under a doctor’s guidance isn’t allowed to do so. There are enough loopholes and inconsistencies in every sport’s drug policy to boggle the mind. 

From “A Doping Manifesto,” Julian Savulescu’s Aeon argument in favor of the allowance of some sorts of PEDS:

“Sport originally evolved as a way of showing off our genetic fitness. Displaying great speed, strength, intelligence, ingenuity and co-ordination in public demonstrated to potential mates your capability to survive and reproduce. It appears that we haven’t come far. One French study by Charlotte Faurie, Dominique Pontier and Michel Raymond published in Evolution and Human Behavior in 2004 reported that: ‘Both male and female students who compete in sports reported significantly higher numbers of partners than other students, and within the athletes, higher levels of performance predicted more partners.’ Perhaps because of the status bestowed by athletic prowess, sportsmanship – the spirit of sport – has come to embody the values we promote in society as a whole. As Dick Pound of WADA said: ‘You respect the rules, you respect your opponents, you respect yourself. You play fair. I think that bleeds over into life as well.’

The values behind the spirit of sport are defined by WADA as: ethics, fair play and honesty; health; excellence in performance; character and education; fun and joy; teamwork; dedication and commitment; respect for rules and laws; respect for self and other participants; courage; and community and solidarity.

Sport is meant to show humans ‘at their best’. It allows us to demonstrate determination, striving, struggling and conquering. Sport is also meant to capture the human spirit. That’s why, the argument goes, if doping were legal it would still be cheating, because sport would no longer be testing those fundamental human virtues and capacities, but would merely showcase the wonders of the modern pharmaceutical industry (or your other favourite supplier of dope).

Yet doping is not always contrary to these values.”

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