Michael Pollan, who tells us to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” has a new Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Some excerpts follow.
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Question:
Tags: Michael Pollan
The opening of “From Cooling System to Thinking Machine,” Carl Zimmer’s excellent Being Human essay about historical attempts to understand brain function, from anatomical experiments to thought experiments:
“Hilary Putnam is not a household name. The Harvard philosopher’s work on the nature of reality, meaning, and language may be required reading in graduate school, but Putnam’s fame hasn’t extended far beyond the academy. But one of Putnam’s thought experiments is familiar to millions of people: what it would be like to be a brain in a vat?
Here’s how Putnam presented the idea in his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History:
Imagine that a human being…has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain…has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person…is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings.
Philosophers have wondered for thousands of years how we can be sure whether what we’re experiencing is reality or some shadowy deception. Plato imagined people looking at shadows cast by a fire in a cave. Descartes imagined a satanic genius. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers began to muse about what it would be like to be a brain in a vat, with reality supplied by a computer. The story circulated in obscure philosophy journals for over a decade before Putnam laid it out in his book.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Carl Zimmer, Hilary Putnam
The Chiba Institute of Technology has created a wheelchair that climbs steps.
Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was many things, and not all of them were good. But no one could deny he was a fascinating fashion designer. After fleeing the United States when charged with the attempted murder of police officers in Oakland in 1968, the revolutionary spent seven years hiding in a variety of foreign countries. A mostly forgotten part of his walkabout was Cleaver surfacing as a fashion designer in Paris at the very end of his exile. As shown in the print advertisement above, his so-called “penis pants” had an external sock attached so that a guy could wear his junk on the outside. I mean, just because your soul was on ice, that didn’t mean your dong had to be. Cucumber sales soared.
From an article Cleaver penned about the early part of his life at large for Ramparts in 1969, a look at the more serious side of expatriation:
“SO NOW IT IS OFFICIAL. I was starting to think that perhaps it never would be. For the past eight months, I’ve been scooting around the globe as a non-person, ducking into doorways at the sight of a camera, avoiding English-speaking people like the plague. I used so many names that my own was out of focus. I trained myself not to react if I heard the name Eldridge Cleaver called, and learned instead to respond naturally, spontaneously, to my cover names. Anyone who thinks this is easy to do should try it. For my part, I’m glad that it is over.
This morning we held a press conference, thus putting an end to all the hocus-pocus. Two days ago, the Algerian government announced that I had arrived here to participate in the historic First Pan-African Cultural Festival. After that, there was no longer any reason not to reach for the telephone and call home, so the first thing I did was to call my mother in Los Angeles. ‘Boy, where are you at?’ she asked. It sounded as though she expected me to answer, ‘Right around the corner, mom,’ or ‘Up here in San Francisco,’ so that when I said I was in Africa, in Algeria, it was clear that her mind was blown, for her response was, “Africa? You can’t make no phone call from Africa!” That’s my mom. She doesn’t relate to all this shit about phone calls across the ocean when there are no phone poles. She has both her feet on the ground, and it is clear that she intends to keep them there.
It is clear to me now that there are forms of imprisonment other than the kind I left Babylon to avoid, for immediately upon splitting that scene I found myself incarcerated in an anonymity, the walls of which were every bit as thick as those of Folsom Prison. I discovered, to my surprise, that it is impossible to hold a decent conversation without making frequent references to one’s past. So I found myself creating personal histories spontaneously, off the top of my head, and I felt bad about that because I know that I left many people standing around scratching their heads. The shit that I had to run down to them just didn’t add up.
Now all that is over. So what? What has really changed? Alioto is still crazy and mayor, Ronald Reagan is still Mickey Mouse, Nixon is in the White House and the McClellan Committee is investigating the Black Panther Party. And Huey P. Newton is still in prison. I cannot make light of this shit because it is getting deeper. And here we are in Algeria. What is a cat from Arkansas, who calls San Francisco home, doing in Algeria? And listen to Kathleen behind me talking over the telephone in French. With a little loosening of the will, I could easily flip out right now!”
Tags: Eldridge Cleaver
Morley Safer, who should always, always regret the awful posthumous piece he did on the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was much better in this 1981 report on conservative icon William F. Buckley, which aired just prior to Ronald Reagan assuming the Oval Office.
Tags: Jean Michel Basquiat, Morley Safer, William F, William F. Buckley
“Two wheels of the cab passed over his head and body.”
New Yorker Henry Hale Bliss was the unlucky soul to be the first recorded fatality of an American automobile accident. His demise was covered in the September 14, 1899 New York Times. The story:
“H. H. Bliss, a real estate dealer, with offices at 41 Wall Street, and living at 235 West Seventy-fifth Street, was run over last night at Central Park West and Seventy-fourth Street. He was injured fatally.
Bliss, accompanied by a woman named Lee, was alighting from a south-bound Eighth Avenue trolley car, when he was knocked down and run over by an automobile in charge of Arthur Smith of 151 West Sixty-second Street. He had left the car, and had turned to assist Miss Lee, when the automobile struck him. Bliss was knocked to the pavement, and two wheels of the cab passed over his head and body. His skull and chest were crushed.
Dr. David Orr Edson, son of ex-Mayor Edson, of 38th West Seventy-first Street, was the occupant of the electric cab. As soon as the vehicle was brought to a standstill he sent in a call to Roosevelt Hospital for an ambulance, and until its arrival did all he could to aid the injured man. When he was taken to the hospital Dr. Murray, the house surgeon, said that Bliss was so seriously injured that he could not live.
Smith was arrested and locked up in the West Sixty-eighth Street Station. It is claimed that a large truck occupied the right side of the avenue, making it necessary for Smith to run his vehicle close to the car. Dr. Edson was returning from a sick call in Harlem when the accident happened.
Mr. Bliss boarded at 235 West Seventy-fifth Street. The place where the accident happened is known to the motormen on the trolley line as ‘Dangerous Stretch,’ on account of the many accidents which have occurred there during the past Summer.”
Tags: Arthur Smith, David Orr Edson, Dr. Murray, H.H. Bliss, Mayor Edson, Miss Lee
An Israeli inventor has successfully designed and built a cardboard bicycle which figures to retail for about $20. For poor people in desperate need of transportation it could improve lives–even save them. From Reuters:
“Izhar Gafni, 50, is an expert in designing automated mass-production lines. He is an amateur cycling enthusiast who for years toyed with an idea of making a bicycle from cardboard.
He told Reuters during a recent demonstration that after much trial and error, his latest prototype has now proven itself and mass production will begin in a few months.
‘I was always fascinated by applying unconventional technologies to materials and I did this on several occasions. But this was the culmination of a few things that came together. I worked for four years to cancel out the corrugated cardboard’s weak structural points,’ Gafni said.
‘Making a cardboard box is easy and it can be very strong and durable, but to make a bicycle was extremely difficult and I had to find the right way to fold the cardboard in several different directions. It took a year and a half, with lots of testing and failure until I got it right,’ he said.”
Tags: Izhar Gafni
“We can do it too.”
Attempting a World Record & We Need Your Help (Everywhere)
Hello. I’ve just launched a new social network site (LIKE FACEBOOK) with my 3 children. It’ offers Totally Free Sign Up, and the ability to upload and share photos, videos, music, create private friends groups, chat, play games, share political views and comments etc…. JUST LIKE FACEBOOK! And YES It’s FREE to sign up, no cost at all!So just about 7 years ago, a college student, who dropped out, started facebook. Yes just 7 years ago! So WE can do it too. So with your help by signing up, and inviting ALL of your family and friends to join you as well, we can make this happen. It takes about 4-5 min of your time to sign up. THAT’S ALL WE ARE ASKING OF YOUR HELP! And ask your family/friends to sign up with you.We are attempting to become the Fastest growing Social Network Website in History!We Currently have Members from 13 States in under 4 weeks so far….CRAZY! Started in PA, then NJ, DE, NC, SC, FL, ME, MO, NV, OH, MD, CO and growing!
I Know we can do this. Would you be willing to be a part of our World Record Attempt? Five minutes of your time, and that you pass the word to everyone…..Family, Friends, Co-Workers, Neighbors…..EVERYONE!
Thanks so much for your help. Create your profile today……and we will offer you 100 stock shares in this company for FREE. No obligations, no gimmicks.
nimaol.com
“It’s The Socially Correct Thing To Do!”
Donald: Will fire you but you better not quit.
Donald Trump hasn’t been told the truth very often in his life. He won’t allow it. He demands utter loyalty even when he is utterly wrong. And without honest feedback from those around him, his behavior hasn’t been held in check. He’s become a classless disgrace, someone willing to profiteer from racism, a bigoted Birther. He makes a target of the first African-American President not on political terms but on racial ones. In doing so, he mocks the very people who have historically had the rawest deal in our nation.
It’s funny that you never hear any of his children criticizing their father. Could it be possible that every one of them is also a racist buffoon? Not likely. So why don’t they, regardless of whom they support in the upcoming election, distance themselves publicly from their father’s racism? Why don’t they scold dad? It’s likely because they’re not permitted to. Like most deeply vengeful people, Donald Trump is frightened and insecure. He will lash out and dismiss those he feels have crossed him. He can accept no dissent.
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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
When an employee leaves me and begs to come back–I never let them. Loyalty is very important.
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Donald Trump is part of an executive overclass who thinks employees owe him complete fealty. His catchphrase which he delivers with relish is “You’re fired,” but he doesn’t feel employees should have free will. The Washington Nationals shut down their brilliant young pitcher Steven Strasburg before the playoffs because he was coming off surgery and they were afraid he would get hurt. It’s a debatable decision, but it wasn’t made merely for Strasburg’s well-being. The team has him contracted for several more seasons and wants him to be healthy.
But Donald Trump will have none of it. When Strasburg becomes a free agent in a few years, he will be “disloyal” to the team. You know, by making the best financial decision for his life and family. Trump doesn’t like it when employees benefit from a free-market economy, only owners. He thinks Washington should have worked the potentially “disloyal” player into the ground.
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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
When Strasburg leaves in a couple of years under free agency Washington will say “what were we doing”.
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You will not likely declare undying loyalty to wealthy people like Donald Trump? You will not put their interests above your own? Then you should be used and abused before they discard you.
Ivana: You were very loyal to me, Donald.
Marla.
Tags: Donald Trump, Donald Trump Is A Moron, Ivana Trump, Marla Maples
A classic Al Jarnow animated short, “Cubits,” made in 1978, which uses a geometrical shape to make a paper representation of a computer. It plays in a loop in my head. From Donna Shepper in Film Quarterly Library: “‘Cubits’ fuses the use of plastic visual concerns and logic with animation. Every aspect of the animation is measured and systematic. The filmmaker has set up a closed visual system based upon a total visual analysis of the single, simple geometric form, the cube. The music composed especially for ‘Cubits’ by Brenda Murphy, lends a feeling of humor.”
Tags: Al Jarnow, Brenda Murphy, Donna Shepper
I posted a brief Jeremy Bernstein New Yorker piece about Stanley Kubrick that was penned in 1965 during the elongated production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The following year the same writer turned out a much longer profile for the same magazine about the director and his sci-fi masterpiece. Among many other interesting facts, it mentions that MIT AI legend Marvin Minsky, who’s appeared on this blog many times, was a technical consultant for the film. An excerpt from “How About a Little Game?” (subscription required):
By the time the film appears, early next year, Kubrick estimates that he and [Arthur C.] Clarke will have put in an average of four hours a day, six days a week, on the writing of the script. (This works out to about twenty-four hundred hours of writing for two hours and forty minutes of film.) Even during the actual shooting of the film, Kubrick spends every free moment reworking the scenario. He has an extra office set up in a blue trailer that was once Deborah Kerr’s dressing room, and when shooting is going on, he has it wheeled onto the set, to give him a certain amount of privacy for writing. He frequently gets ideas for dialogue from his actors, and when he likes an idea he puts it in. (Peter Sellers, he says, contributed some wonderful bits of humor for Dr. Strangelove.)
In addition to writing and directing, Kubrick supervises every aspect of his films, from selecting costumes to choosing incidental music. In making 2001, he is, in a sense, trying to second-guess the future. Scientists planning long-range space projects can ignore such questions as what sort of hats rocket-ship hostesses will wear when space travel becomes common (in 2001 the hats have padding in them to cushion any collisions with the ceiling that weightlessness might cause), and what sort of voices computers will have if, as many experts feel is certain, they learn to talk and to respond to voice commands (there is a talking computer in 2001 that arranges for the astronauts’ meals, gives them medical treatments, and even plays chess with them during a long space mission to Jupiter–‘Maybe it ought to sound like Jackie Mason,’ Kubrick once said), and what kind of time will be kept aboard a spaceship (Kubrick chose Eastern Standard, for the convenience of communicating with Washington). In the sort of planning that NASA does, such matters can be dealt with as they come up, but in a movie everything is visible and explicit, and questions like this must be answered in detail. To help him find the answers, Kubrick has assembled around him a group of thirty-five artists and designers, more than twenty-five special effects people, and a staff of scientific advisers. By the time this picture is done, Kubrick figures that he will have consulted with people from a generous sampling of the leading aeronautical companies in the United States and Europe, not to mention innumerable scientific and industrial firms. One consultant, for instance, was Professor Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., who is a leading authority on artificial intelligence and the construction of automata. (He is now building a robot at M.I.T. that can catch a ball.) Kubrick wanted to learn from him whether any of the things he was planning to have his computers do were likely to be realized by the year 2001; he was pleased to find out that they were.•
Tags: Jeremy Bernstein, Jeremy Bernstein A Space Odyssey, Marvin Minsky, Stanley Kubrick
Two quick excerpts from Jonathan Chait’s just-published New York piece about the post-election agendas of Mitt Romney and President Obama:
Romney’s plan:
“Let’s first imagine that, on January 20, Romney takes the oath of office. Of the many secret post-victory plans floating around in the inner circles of the campaigns, the least secret is Romney’s intention to implement Paul Ryan’s budget. The Ryan budget has come to be almost synonymous with the Republican Party agenda, and Romney has embraced it with only slight variations. It would repeal Obamacare, cut income-tax rates, turn Medicare for people under 55 years old into subsidized private insurance, increase defense spending, and cut domestic spending, with especially large cuts for Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs targeted to the very poor.
Few voters understand just how rapidly Romney could achieve this, rewriting the American social compact in one swift stroke. Ryan’s plan has never attracted Democratic support, but it is not designed for bipartisanship. Ryan deliberately built it to circumvent a Senate filibuster, stocking the plan with budget legislation that is allowed, under Senate ‘budget reconciliation’ procedures, to pass with a simple majority. Republicans have been planning the mechanics of the vote for many months, and Republican insiders expect Romney to use reconciliation to pass the bill. Republicans would still need to control 50 votes in the Senate (Ryan, as vice-president, would cast the tiebreaking vote), but if Romney wins the presidency, he’ll likely precipitate a partywide tail wind that would extend to the GOP’s Senate slate.”
Obama’s plan:
“On the morning of November 7, a reelected President Obama will do … nothing. For the next 53 days, nothing. And then, on January 1, 2013, we will all awake to a different, substantially more liberal country. The Bush tax cuts will have disappeared, restoring Clinton-era tax rates and flooding government coffers with revenue to fund its current operations for years to come. The military will be facing dire budget cuts that shake the military-industrial complex to its core. It will be a real-world approximation of the old liberal bumper-sticker fantasy in which schools have all the money they require and the Pentagon needs to hold a bake sale.
All this can come to pass because, while Obama has spent the last two years surrendering short-term policy concessions, he has been quietly hoarding a fortune in the equivalent of a political trust fund that comes due on the first of the year. At that point, he will reside in a political world he finds at most mildly uncomfortable and the Republicans consider a hellish dystopia. Then he’ll be ready to make a deal.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Jonathan Chait, Mitt Romney
The wild card in the future of technology is quantum computing, which would allow us to place heretofore unimaginable power in every shirt pocket. From Adam Frank in the New York Times:
“Classical computers use ‘bits’ of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider ‘qubits,’ quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time. Logic circuits, made of qubits directly harnessing the weirdness of superpositions, allow a quantum computer to calculate vastly faster than anything existing today. A quantum machine using no more than 300 qubits would be a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times faster than the most modern supercomputer.
Going even further is the seemingly science-fiction possibility of ‘quantum teleportation.’ Based on experiments going on today with simple quantum systems, it is at least a theoretical possibility that one day objects could be reconstituted — beamed — across a space without ever crossing the distance.
When a revolution in science yields powerful new technologies, its effect on human culture is multiplied exponentially. Think of the relation between thermodynamics, steam engines and the onset of the industrial era. Quantum information could well be the thermodynamics of the next technological revolution.'”
Tags: Adam Frank
More people are opting to live alone, choosing to not have families. It’s mostly because we suck, and being in close proximity to other people who are similar to us reminds us of this fact. But there are other reasons. The opening of a piece about this significant societal shift by Joel Kotkin at New Geography:
“For most of human history, the family — defined by parents, children and extended kin — has stood as the central unit of society. In Europe, Asia, Africa and, later, the Americas and Oceania, people lived, and frequently worked, as family units.
Today, in the high-income world and even in some developing countries, we are witnessing a shift to a new social model. Increasingly, family no longer serves as the central organizing feature of society. An unprecedented number of individuals — approaching upwards of 30% in some Asian countries — are choosing to eschew child bearing altogether and, often, marriage as well.
The post-familial phenomena has been most evident in the high income world, notably in Europe, North America and, most particularly, wealthier parts of East Asia. Yet it has bloomed as well in many key emerging countries, including Brazil, Iran and a host of other Islamic countries.
The reasons for this shift are complex, and vary significantly in different countries and cultures.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Joel Kotkin
I’ve posted a couple of clips of John Lennon and Yoko Ono being interviewed by David Frost, but here is the full-length version of their 1972 encounter. Brace yourself–there’s a “Box of Smile.”
Tags: David Frost, John Lennon, Yoko Ono
I read Richard Ford’s most famous novel, The Sportswriter, when I was a teen and liked it, but I was probably too young to fully appreciate it. (The same goes for Saul Bellow’s Herzog.) I always felt old for my age on the inside, but some cultural experiences require life experience. Ford presents a clutch of ideas about America in a new Financial Times diary. His take on the condition of the modern Republican party:
“Before President Obama scored his unhappy ‘own goal’ in the first debate, I was thinking about what might happen to the Republicans if they lost the election. More than in most political seasons, the rightwing has staked it all on being able to create an ‘entity’ out of comically ill-fitting parts – nutcase birthers, gay-marriage haters, anti-government and anti-tax fanatics, gun nuts, a smattering of reluctantly legitimate Romney supporters, plus a few grumpy GOP moderates who can’t think of what else to do with the vote they inherited from their old man. Quite a colourful circus tent. Nobody, including the Republicans, thinks this comprises a real political party – the kind where members sort of think the same about stuff. All they jointly hold dear is a race-tinged abhorrence of our not-inept, but not-entirely-ept-either, chief executive, whom they can’t believe was ever elected in the first place. But if Obama gets elected again, and their cocked-up contraption teeters over on to its side, then I was thinking they don’t really have much left for the future, except cross-eyed bitterness. But I now think that’s wrong. They’ll just throw a few of the noisier birthers and gay-bashers over the side, spasm smilingly back toward the middle and call that ‘new unity.’ This may bespeak an actual virtue of a vast, ungovernable country like ours, able to absorb most discords into an accommodating mediocrity. Though there’s the new question now: what happens if the bastards win? Do they actually govern? How?”
Tags: Richard Ford
Before 2001: A Space Odyssey became screen legend in 1968, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke struggled forever to complete the project that was originally entitled, Journey Beyond the Stars. From a 1965 “Talk of the Town” piece by Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker (subscription required) about the work-in-progress three years before its release:
Our briefing session took place in the living room of Mr. Kubrick’s apartment. When we got there, Mr. Kubrick was talking on a telephone in the next room, Mr. Clarke had not yet arrived, and three lively Kubrick daughters–the eldest is eleven–were running in and out with several young friends. We settled ourselves in a large chair, and a few minuted later the doorbell rang. One of the little girls went to the door and asked, ‘Who is it?’ A pleasantly English-accented voice answered, through the door, “It’s Clarke,” and the girls began jumping up and down and saying, “It’s Clark Kent!”-a reference to another well-known science-fiction personality. They opened the door, and in walked Mr. Clarke, a cheerful-looking man in his forties. He was carrying several manila envelopes, which, it turned out, contained parts of Journey Beyond the Stars. Mr. Kubrick then came into the room carrying a thick pile of diagrams and charts, and looking like the popular conception of a nuclear physicist who has been interrupted in the middle of some difficult calculations. Mr. Kubrick and Mr. Clarke sat down side by side on a sofa, and we asked them about their joint venture.
Mr. Clarke said that one of the basic problems they’ve had to deal with is how to describe what they are trying to do. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters and sex, so we have tried to find another term for our film,” said Mr. C.
“About the best we’ve been able to come up with is a space Odyssey–comparable in some ways to Homer’s Odyssey,” said Mr. K. ‘It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation, and that the far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them that the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us. Journey also shares with the Odyssey a concern for wandering, and adventure.”•
Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, Jeremy Bernstein, Jeremy Bernstein A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick
“I do not drink, smoke, take drugs or cohabit with Women (or Men).”
Good Neighbor Sought. Lovely Rural/Safe Area. Vacation Home? – $3000 (Blue Ridge Mountains North Carolina)
In an effort to get a good neighbor in place on my property, I have Lowered The Price To Lease This Land From $3600 to $3000 Per Year. I realize that even a few hundred dollars may prove to help a potential neighbor. I am hoping to find a (Sane/Stable) family or retired person/couple who needs a good place to live and thrive. I have a few acres of land in Rutherford County that I will soon be moving to and I would truely enjoy having a good neighbor nearby on my property.
The land is bathed in sunlight most every day and it also gets good wind so the property would be ideal for someone who wants to be “off grid”. I would not mind if someone wants to dig a root-celler. I also would not have an issue with someone who is a prepper type (as long as they are Not Are Not Unstable Or A Kook). One would have use of several acres of land for walking/hiking/picnicking or other non desructive activities if so desired and plenty of room for a nice lawn and a huge garden space. There is also a large volume of wildlife that pass through this land such as Deer, Rabbits, Wild Turkey, Various Birds, Butterflies and others…If you enjoy shooting wildlife (only with a camera) this is an affordable Eden. At some point I plan the build a pond for fish, ducks and Peace. Currently there is only One Home On Kirby Road and it belongs to a Dear Lady who has been in place for many years.
As for me and my one day being your neighbor I will give a brief overveiw of myself…I am a 46 year old divorced Man with no vices whatsoever. I keep to myself and I mind my own affairs. Though I am a bit gaurded I am kind, decent and moral. I do not drink, smoke, take drugs or cohabit with Women (or Men) and I will keep my home (a modest cabin in the spirit of Thoreau) neat and tidy. I am a large bearded Man whose appearence does not match my heart and mind. As for my potential neighbor I have no unreasonable prejudice as I do not care if you are plaid in color. The only prejudice I realy have is with drugs, criminal activity or people who let drinking or vice effect me or my safety. The land would be ideal for a cabin, modest home or perhaps a mobile home if it were done in the spirit of a retirement park…meaning fully underpinned with two porches and neat and clean in appearence. I must be honest and say that I am no fan of mobile homes but I understand that a real home is not the srtucture, It is what lies within.
From the March 12, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Attleboro, Mass.–A well dressed young man who refused to give his name and wore a black cloth mask arrived here Saturday night and created something of a sensation. He engaged a vacant store and filled the windows with pictures of himself and announcements that he was Paul Pry, just starting on a trip around the world. He stated that he had agreed to make the trip in one year and was to wear the mask for that length of time. The store became filled with a noisy crowd and he was forced by the police to discard the mask. He has left town.”
Tags: Paul Pry
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Happy to know there’s at least one person who’ll actually be able to laugh at the new Kevin James comedy.
- Old Print Articles: Arizona millionaire becomes Chicago pauper (1896) + Wyoming prospector is also a snake charmer (1897) + Bearded lady dies (1862).
- Featured Videos: Rod Serling discusses TV writing with college students + Jimmy Breslin sells Grape-Nuts (1970s) + Ikea furniture assembled by robots + Braniff ad is fashionable, sexist (1960s) + Bell Labs film concerning TVs and PCs connecting us (1979) + Navy doc about SEALAB 1 (1965) + Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is Ponce de León as a technologist + James Day interviews Hugh Hefner (1974) + Brian Eno documentary (1989) + Alpha the Robot in action (1934) + A fledgling film that is stranger and truer than Argo.
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: We’re probably not going to have grandchildren + No dumber than the Kardashiians + I probably should get out of the neighborhood now and then + Another good use for PayPal.
- In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan became a media star with a message.
- Catskills maître d’hôtel Irving Cohen was a matchless matchmaker.
- The current technologies aren’t the first ones to alter reading habits.
- The art of handwriting is lost. Is that a bad thing?
- William S. Burroughs imagined the intersection of sex and technology.
- Edward Glaeser thinks Wall Street dynamics can inform urban planning.
- We have an emotional disconnect from digital technology.
- Thousands of smart cars in Ann Arbor are communicating.
- Autopsies used to be performed in front of live theater audiences.
- A tidy description of Ray Bradbury’s youthful education.
- Automobiles could be used to produce, not just consume, energy.
- In the 1950s, the Air Force was building a flying saucer.
- Chinese boy born with blue eyes causes sensation.
- 3D printers will interrupt more than pure-information businesses.
- In order to save nature, we may need to rethink preservation.
- The spiny mouse may be hold the key for regenerative human medicine.
- Marek Kohn has an excellent essay in Aeon about long-range planning.
- Carny does Ask Me Anything on Reddit, gets mocked.
- Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner falls from space.
- The more we can explain, the more we want things beyond explanation.
- Picture of a tube-based fire escape from 1924.
- Parasites can influence behavior of host, whether it’s a bee or human.
- A brief note from 1886 about a family dinner.
- A brief note from 1875 about a baker’s arrest.
- A brief note from 1897 about a corncob.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
As Argo is released, documentarian Judd Ehrlich has taken to Kickstarter to raise money to finish a stranger and truer film on the topic. It was begun long before the Hollywood version.
Tags: Judd Ehrlich
From the January 24, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Cleveland, O.–Michael Browloski, a Bohemian, and his family, consisting of his wife and six children, are lying very sick at their home on Union Street from the effects of eating raw pork. Browloski, a few days ago bought a quantity of pork, of which the family partook liberally, and were immediately made very ill. A physician was called and an examination showed that the meat was strongly impregnated with trichinae. Medicines were administered, and yesterday the family had so far recovered that they were thought to be out of danger, when they again partook of the diseased pork and Browloski and his wife are now lying at the point of death.”
Tags: Michael Browloski
From a 1979 People Q&A with Wilbur Thain, who was the final doctor to treat Howard Hughes, a singular American character who lived in fear of the outside world but was betrayed from within:
People:
Was Hughes an impossible patient?
Dr. Wilbur Thain:
That’s a masterpiece of understatement. He wanted doctors around, but he didn’t want to see them unless he had to. He would allow no X-rays—I never saw an X-ray of Hughes until after he died—no blood tests, no physical exams. He understood his situation and chose to live the way he lived. Rather than listen to a doctor, he would fall asleep or say he couldn’t hear.
People:
Is that why you didn’t accept his job offer after you got out of medical school?
Dr. Wilbur Thain:
No, I just wanted to practice medicine on my own. I understand that Hughes was quite upset. I didn’t see him again for 21 years. He was 67 then. He had grown a beard, his hair was longer. He had some hearing loss partially due to his work around aircraft. That’s why he liked to use the telephone: It had an amplifier. He was very alert and well-informed. His toenails and fingernails were pretty long, but he had a case of onchyomycosis—a fungus disease of the nails which makes them thick and very sensitive. It hurt like hell to trim them. For whatever reason, he only sponge-bathed his body and hair.
People:
What was the turning point?
Dr. Wilbur Thain:
After his successful hip surgery in August of 1973 he chose never to walk again. Once—only once—he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom with help. That was the beginning of the end for him. I told him we’d even get him a cute little physical therapist. He said, “No, Wilbur, I’m too old for that.”
People:
Why did he decide not to walk?
Dr. Wilbur Thain:
I never had the chance to pry off the top of his head to see what motivated decisions like this. He would never get his teeth fixed, either. Worst damn mouth I ever saw. When they operated on his hip, the surgeons were afraid his teeth were so loose that one would fall into his lung and kill him!
People:
What kinds of things did he talk about toward the end of his life?
Dr. Wilbur Thain:
The last year we would talk about the Hughes Institute medical projects and his earlier life. All the reporting on Hughes portrayed him as a robot. This man had real feelings. He talked one day about his parents, whom he loved very much, and his movies and his girls. He said he finally gave up stashing women around Hollywood because he got tired of having to talk to them. In our last conversation, he told me how much he still loved his ex-wife Jean Peters. But he was also always talking about things 10 years down the road. He was an optimist in that sense. If it hadn’t been for the kidney failure, Hughes might have lasted a lot longer.
People:
Do you have any regrets?
Dr. Wilbur Thain:
Sure, sure. I wish I could have treated him the way I wanted: Fix his teeth—that would have been Number One. It would have helped his diet. I wish I could have treated him just like any patient in a county hospital who comes in with a broken hip, bad teeth and rundown health. At the end Hughes was shrunken, wasted—he was 6’1″ and weighed 93 pounds. When his kidneys failed in Acapulco, a major medical center like Houston was the only hope. But knowing Hughes, he would have refused to be placed on dialysis. He always said, “I don’t want to be kept alive by machines.” Howard Hughes was still imposing that tremendous will of his—right up to the last.•
Tags: Howard Hughes, Wilbur Thain
Lenny Bruce understood that there were few things more obscene than a society full of people making believe that obscene things never happened, since pretending and suppressing and hiding and shushing allows true evil to flourish. The opening of Ralph J. Gleason’s emotional 1966 obituary of Bruce in Ramparts:
“WHEN THE BODY OF LEONARD SCHNEIDER—stage name Lenny Bruce—was found on the floor of his Hollywood hills home on August 3, the Los Angeles police immediately announced that the victim had died of an overdose of a narcotic, probably heroin.
The press and TV and radio of the nation—the mass media—immediately seized upon this statement and headlined it from coast to coast, never questioning the miracle of instant diagnosis by a layman.
The medical report the next day, however, admitted that the cause of death was unknown and the analysis ‘inconclusive.’ But, as is the way with the mass media, news grows old, and the truth never quite catches up. Lenny Bruce didn’t die of an overdose of heroin. God alone knows what he did die of.
It is ritualistically fitting that he should be the victim, in the end, of distorted news, police malignment and the final irony—being buried with an orthodox Hebrew service, after years of satirizing organized religion. But first, in a sinister evocation of Orwell and Kafka and Greek tragedy, he had to be tortured, the record twisted, and the files rewritten until his death became a relief.
Lenny was called a ‘sick comic,’ though he insisted that it was society which was sick and not him. He was called a ‘dirty comic’ though he never used a word you and I have not heard since our childhood. His tangles with the law over the use of these words and his arrests on narcotics charges were the only two things that the public really knew about him. Mass media saw to that.
When he was in Mission General Hospital in San Francisco, the hospital announced he had screamed such obscenities that the nurses refused to work in the room with him, so they taped his mouth shut with adhesive tape. The newspapers revelled in this and he was shown on TV, his mouth taped and his eyes rolling in protest, being wheeled into the examining room. Words that nurses never heard?
What new phrases he must have invented that day, what priceless epiphanies lost to history now forever. Once, in a particularly poignant discussion of obscenity on stage, Bruce said, ‘If the titty is pretty it’s dirty, but not if it’s bloody and maimed . . . that’s why you never see atrocity photos at obscenity trials.’ He used to point out, too, that the people who watched the killing of the Genovese girl in Brooklyn and who didn’t interfere or call a cop would have been quick to do both if it had been a couple making love. ‘A true definition of obscenity,’ he said, ‘would be to sing about pork outside a synagogue.’
Bruce found infinity in the grain of sand of obscenity. From it he took off on the fabric which keeps all our lives together. ‘If something about the human body disgusts you,’ he said, ‘complain to the manufacturer.’ He was one of those who, in Hebbel’s expression, ‘have disturbed the world’s sleep.’ And he could not be forgiven.”
Tags: Lenny Bruce, Ralph J. Gleason