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Fermilab Statement on LHC Magnet Test Failure:
On Tuesday, March 27, there was a serious failure in a high-pressure test at CERN of a Fermilab-built "inner-triplet" series of three quadrupole magnets in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider. The magnets focus the particle beams prior to collision at each of four interaction points around the accelerator.
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The shows have been going very well at Yale Rep--two down, and one more to go. Audiences are very young and engaged, and I've been having wonderful conversations after the show--sometimes audience members feel compelled to tell a story back to you after the show, and almost every time they're extremely worthwhile, which I always feel is a good sign for the human race.
Today I'm teaching a workshop and master class on the art of the monologue, and I'm delighted--I love teaching, it's one of my great passions and not terribly different than the monologues in that it is a form of extemporaneous address used to connect with an active audience. I hope to teach a workshop like this while in residence at ART, but I'm not certain when we're going to be able to set that up--that's something I'll have to touch on when I arrive on the ground, which unbelievably is tomorrow.
One of the things that I'm concerned with at ART is the physical relationship between the myself and the audience--I've looked at pictures and schematics for the Zero Arrow Theatre, but it really doesn't mean all that much until I walk inside and stand in the space itself. This is something that very rarely impacts productions at ART--they're principally produced works that are forged and created for that space, and when transferred have ample time to adapt. We'll be moving quickly, and our bare and extremely minimal set (table, chair, water, me) can have a surprising number of variables in it--big decisions have to be made right at the top which dictate a lot of how the show will flow as we move through the run. It's a little like marrying someone you haven't met, but have excellent references for--at some point you close your eyes, trust your experience, trust your skills, and jump. To do anything else is impossible.
Crossposted to the ART blog
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The Connecticut Post Online - Daisey's "Invisible Summer" comes to town:
Mike Daisey has turned storytelling into a form of theater that has been amusing and exciting audiences around the country for the past decade.
Daisey explores wide-ranging material drawn from his own life and his observations of American culture in shows that have dealt with everything from his own employment at Amazon.com (during the dotcom boom) to the unexpected links between P.T. Barnum and L. Ron Hubbard.
The 33-year-old performer has been called the heir to legendary New York radio monologist Jean Shepherd, as well as "a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black."
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Boing Boing: Melting North Pole sends buried watch to Denmark:
Axlrosen sez, "A wristwatch buried in the ice at the North Pole three years ago was found by a boy more than 1,800 miles away after it floated ashore on the Faeroe Islands."
Niels Jakup Mortensen, 11, spotted a black box near his home on Suduroy, the Faeroes' southernmost island, his mother Anna Jacobsen said. Inside, she said, was a watch that had been buried at the North Pole by Joergen Amundsen, a descendant of Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen.
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It's been a couple of years since I blogged in a more conventional sense--I started blogging at mikedaisey.com in 2000, well before blogging had become ubiquitous, and perhaps because of that I grew tired of posting commentary about my life moment to moment. I'm also a professional monologuist, and I discovered that I got my autobiographical impulses fully realized on the stage, and didn't really relish the idea of working them out piecemeal in public. Instead of retiring the blog, I gradually let it take control, and posted what interested me--and over time it has become a virtual online scrapbook, the internet equivalent of bookmarks and dog-eared pages, keeping track of evocative images and articles I see online. The change has been great for the site, and great for me--now when I visit my own site I find inspiration in the juxtapositions, and I can search the archives to find things I might have lost track of, a kind of miniature Google. The Boston Phoenix recently did a preview piece in which they focused on the blog as an integral part of my artistic identity, and while I don't know if that's true, it has certainly been a fascinating project.
So when American Repertory Theatre asked me to blog on their site about my run at their theater I was intrigued--with a contained format, I felt that the entries could be an interesting exercise in following the process Jean-Michele (my director) and I go through developing the work, and since the run at ART covers three very different monologues, all at different places in their developmental life I thought a little hands-on commentary could be intriguing. So here we are.
And where we are today is New Haven, Connecticut, where I'll be opening INVINCIBLE SUMMER at Yale Repertory Theatre this evening. It's a special three-day engagement which will function as a kind of test-bed for the much longer run that immediately follows at ART--we got in yesterday and immediately rushed into tech, where we configured the lights, sound and all the rest in about six hours. My monologues use very particular lighting, with slow, almost imperceptible changes over stretches of time, so that a theatrical effect is achieved that, to my eyes, echoes the nature of story: shifting, chimerical but never overtly plotted or "dramatic" in a conventional sense. It's hell on dimmer systems that run the lighting, and in many spaces a lot of tech is spent coaxing the systems to deal with slow, slow, slow fades and making them graceful. Considering that this short run is the equivalent of a touring production, I'm very happy with what we've achieved--we're working with Melissa Mizell, whom we met at the Spoleto Festival the last few years, and she knows what we look for, which I think helped things enormously.
Tonight's show will be very stressful for me, as it is the first time I will have spoken the show aloud since the Public Theatre run in January. The monologues grow and develop like living things, and as a consequence there is an unpredictability inherent to the process of doing them again--they are never memorized, and due to the passage of time they naturally shift when put down, and I have to figure out where they've moved to. It can be hard to distinguish between what's inspiration in the changes, and what's simple unfamiliarity, but some of the best discoveries in monologues of the past have come on nights just like this, and I think I'm up for the challenge.
I don't do much on opening days--I had an interview this morning, then slept some more, and now we're headed to IKEA, where I'm hoping to find the perfect water glass for this evening's show, along with some meatballs and tiny red potatoes.
Crossposted to the ART blog
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thewest.com.au : Flaming space junk narrowly misses jet:
Pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean overnight.
The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm last night.
According to a plane spotter, who was tuning into a high frequency radio broadcast at the time, the pilot "reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris could be heard over the noise of the aircraft.
"He described he saw a piece of debris lighting up as it re-entered (the earth's atmosphere).
"He was one very worried pilot, as you would imagine.
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Why to Not Not Start a Startup:
The big mystery to me is: why don't more people start startups? If nearly everyone who does it prefers it to a regular job, and a significant percentage get rich, why doesn't everyone want to do this? A lot of people think we get thousands of applications for each funding cycle. In fact we usually only get several hundred. Why don't more people apply? And while it must seem to anyone watching this world that startups are popping up like crazy, the number is small compared to the number of people with the necessary skills. The great majority of programmers still go straight from college to cubicle, and stay there.
It seems like people are not acting in their own interest. What's going on? Well, I can answer that. Because of Y Combinator's position at the very start of the venture funding process, we're probably the world's leading experts on the psychology of people who aren't sure if they want to start a company.
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Hey, Terrific!: Best Show of My Life (part one):
Everything else is a little who fucking cares at the moment: work, Work, home--all a predictable soup; fuck the highs because i live for the lows. My back has been assaulting me for a couple of weeks now, leaving me physically incapacitated for a few days, then forcing me to walk with a cane. The cane is embarrassing in a way, but in another way it looks kind of perfect. Love remains a rude lodger, arriving unannouced and unbidden, pissing in the houseplants, kicking over chairs, blunting knives, threatening like to burn the house down, and I'm all, "thank you, you're so amazing, please don't leave!"
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Writing in the free world | Salon Books:
If you make stuff, it is not yours to command its destiny in the world. God help you, you should be grateful if it has one. It's fantastic if anyone cares. Every artist should be constantly reminding themselves how lucky they are if people are even bothering in the first place. If people do something that is not as interesting as I'd hoped with my work, or if they go and make a lot of dough, that's part of accepting that I've made a gesture whose conclusion is not mine to command.
But to be totally obvious, lyrics and even film projects are not novels. One thing I would always retain is the rights to my novels. With my new novel, I'm inviting some filmmaker to take a lover's leap with me, saying that five years after the release of a film, we make it a stage play or a comic book or a musical or make a sequel. I wouldn't probably choose to do that with every one of my novels. With some of them, some degree of control is still appealing to me. With this one I felt I would really enjoy giving that away. And it's my choice. That's the key. This proceeds from my choice. But I don't think 50 or 100 years after my death, someone should still have say over what someone makes of this stuff. It certainly doesn't follow. As Lawrence Lessig likes to point out, you can't provide incentive to a dead creator to make more art by offering him a copyright.
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Boing Boing: Happy tapir receives massage -- exclusive video:
I took my 3-year-old daughter to the LA Zoo yesterday and we were treated to the spectacle of a very relaxed tapir receiving a body rub by a gentle zookeeper. I videtaped the procedure with my digital camera.
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BlogChelsea » Mike Daisey, Part Two, Chelsea, NY, NYC, New York, 10011:
Daisey, in part two of Modern Living: The Terrors of Literature, a monologue performed at McNally Robinson Bookstore Friday night, told the audience why the written word is so problematic.
Books, he explained, are merely dead tree matter, filled with glyphs that your brain turns into images. They are pinned down in space and time. Words stay flat on the page, when essentially writers would like to “wave their hands over them and have the words rise up and hang in the air like a benediction.”
The written word infiltrates our lives like “a lattice work in front of our vision.” But spoken words are a living breathing aural experience. It can’t be nailed down to an exact time and place. It is also why, when trying to write down your failed love affair, you can’t do it. It can’t be seen from above, like light shining through a prism. Only in performance is it a different experience every time.
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The Numbers Guy - WSJ.com:
For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author.
New York public-relations firm Ruder Finn says it can propel unknown titles to the top of rankings on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble with a mass email called the Best-Seller Blast. Popular authors such as Mark Victor Hansen of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series recommend your book in messages to fans, and offer a deal: Buy the book today and you'll get downloadable "bonuses" supposedly valued at thousands of dollars -- such as recordings of motivational speeches and contact information for important people. Orchestrating even 1,000 book purchases in a single day can drive a title from obscurity to the top of the charts.
Rick Frishman, who oversees the campaigns for Ruder Finn's Planned Television Arts, also is a client. His 2004 book "Networking Magic" went from a sales rank of 896,000 on barnesandnoble.com the morning it was published to No. 1 at 4 p.m. He has a poster in his office showing the sales chart he briefly topped. "I'm a nobody, but I was somebody for a day," he says.
A decade after they were introduced, online book-sales rankings remain an object of obsession for authors. Because they're unrestrained by shelf space, the Web stores give millions of books a ranking. These are updated hourly and displayed on the book's sales page and on best-seller lists. This "democratic" potential is celebrated by compulsive watchers of the numbers. Cindy Ratzlaff, vice president of brand marketing for Rodale Books, has noticed that Amazon seems to refresh its numbers 35 minutes after every hour and she makes it a point to check the page soon after, every hour during the workday. "It's really pathetic and extremely addictive -- and we all do it," she says.
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The Ecstasy of Influence (Harpers.org):
In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
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Along Those Lines: Beauty Lies in the Eye:
I didn't really get to say everything I wanted to in this 100-word blurb on Mike Daisey. Mainly, I'd like to reiterate here that Mike Daisey is the most ingenious guy in theatre right now, at least in my opinion. Sure, he is slightly lacking in the rugged good looks of Liev Schreiber, but the fact that he maintains the challenging crossover of acting and writing is absolutely astounding. Even more impressive is that he improvises most of his monologues while using the verve of a sweaty, overzealous southern preacher man.
1:57 PM
City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention - New York Times:
At the other end of the threat spectrum was Joshua Kinberg, a graduate student at Parsons School of Design and the subject of four pages of intelligence reports, including two pictures. For his master’s thesis project, Mr. Kinberg devised a “wireless bicycle” equipped with cellphone, laptop and spray tubes that could squirt messages received over the Internet onto the sidewalk or street.
The messages were printed in water-soluble chalk, a tactic meant to avoid a criminal mischief charge for using paint, an intelligence report noted. Mr. Kinberg’s bicycle was “capable of transferring activist-based messages on streets and sidewalks,” according to a report on July 22, 2004.
“This bicycle, having been built for the sole purpose of protesting during the R.N.C., is capable of spraying anti-R.N.C.-type messages on surrounding streets and sidewalks, also supplying the rider with a quick vehicle of escape,” the report said. Mr. Kinberg, then 25, was arrested during a television interview with Ron Reagan for MSNBC’s “Hardball” program during the convention. He was released a day later, but his equipment was held for more than a year.
Mr. Kinberg said Friday that after his arrest, detectives with the terrorism task force asked if he knew of any plans for violence. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I know other artists, who make T-shirts and signs.”
He added: “There’s no reason I should have been placed on any kind of surveillance status. It affected me, my ability to exercise free speech, and the ability of thousands of people who were sending in messages for the bike, to exercise their free speech.”
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City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention - New York Times:
For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.
From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.
They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. Other investigators mined Internet sites and chat rooms.
From these operations, run by the department’s “R.N.C. Intelligence Squad,” the police identified a handful of groups and individuals who expressed interest in creating havoc during the convention, as well as some who used Web sites to urge or predict violence.
But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.
These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports.
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TALK OF THE TOWN By MICHAEL KANE - Entertainment - New York Post Online Edition:
Jean Michelle Gregory is 29 and lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. She's a director who specializes in autobiography.
"I was just a regular little straight kid, weepy over the absence of my boyfriend who'd gone off to college, when I fell in love - or was it lust? - with this 21-year-old woman who wore a leather jacket, had just returned from backpacking around Europe, had a wicked tattoo crawling up her wrist that she'd designed herself and who took to calling me 'Jailbait' every chance she got. So what did I do? I invited her to my senior prom, of course. And when it became clear we weren't welcome there, she sweet-talked a bouncer into letting me into my first bar - which also happened to be a gay bar - and we ended up dancing the night away. The evening was ultimately as wholesome as it was sexy."
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Al Nye The Lawyer Guy: So What Really Is In A McDonald's Chicken McNugget?:
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is a fascinating book that details the changing eating habits of Americans. I can't recommend it highly enough. It explains how, over the last 30 years, we have become a nation that eats vast quantities of corn – much more so than Mexicans, the original "corn people."
Most folks assume that a chicken nugget is just a piece of fried chicken, right? Wrong! Did you know, for example, that a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget is 56% corn?
What else is in a McDonald's Chicken McNugget? Besides corn, and to a lesser extent, chicken, The Omnivore's Dilemma describes all of the thirty-eight ingredients that make up a McNugget – one of which I'll bet you'll never guess.
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Can You Afford to Spend $50 a Month on Birth Control? | Slog | The Stranger's Blog | The Stranger | Seattle's Only Newspaper:
Neither can I. And I sure as hell couldn’t when I was in college, where I relied on the student health center to provide cheap, effective birth control pills for between $10 and $15 a month. I can only assume that these days, when tuition and book costs are higher than ever before and rising, a $500-or-more annual hike in birth control expenses is a bigger burden than ever before. Which is why it’s such terrible news that Congress is eliminating an incentive in the Medicaid rebate law that encouraged companies to provide low-cost contraceptives to college campuses. The change will boost the price of birth control as much as 300 percent.
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Back to Balthazar - Diner’s Journal - Dining & Wine - New York Times Blog:
Arguably the hottest restaurant opening of early 2007 is Morandi, if you bear in mind that Gordon Ramsay at the London opened in late 2006, as did the Waverly Inn, which officially never opened — at least according to the coyly articulated position of the Graydon Carter Fabulosity Institute. It may never open, instead remaining content and profitable in some hyper-exclusive limbo where phones are never answered and hoi polloi are reduced to quivering, pointless supplication.
Morandi’s heat comes not from its chef, Jody Williams, who’s no slouch, but from its owner, the restaurateur Keith McNally, now trying his hand at an Italian venture. His proving ground was French: Odeon (which he no longer owns), Balthazar, Pastis. Especially Balthazar. Above all Balthazar. It represented the three coolest restaurant syllables since Indochine, and it’s still cool, a full decade into its existence.
But how’s the actual experience of it? I stopped by in a gearing-up-for-Morandi mood and frame of mind, and on this visit — and do I emphasize it was just one visit — I didn’t have such a wonderful time at all.
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jamYe waXman. seX matters.: Babies.Blood.Period.:
South Carolina's Legislature yesterday approved a bill which requires a woman to pay for an ultrasound, view the picture of the fetus with her doctor, wait an hour after seeing the ultrasound, sign a piece of paper saying she has seen the picture, and then and only then can she decide that she still wants an abortion. There's no exceptions, not even in cases of rape, health or incest. If the house approves this bill (again) it goes back to the Senate and if they approve it, it will pass. This is totally emotional blackmail and beyond the scope of what is choice.
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Excerpts from Stephen King's "On Writing" - (37signals):
Even if you’re not a fan of Stephen King’s fiction, his book on writing is filled with insightful advice on the craft. (Btw, it was also the inspiration for the title of the “On Writing” posts we publish here.) Some excerpts below.
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BlogChelsea » Mike Daisey, Chelsea, NY, NYC, New York, 10011:
Mike Daisey, in a hilarious and brilliant talk, raved about computers, Steve Jobs and vibrators for about an hour at Tekserve last night.
...
Not only are we addicted to having the newest technology, but, “There is nothing on earth that works less well than a computer.” He compared computers to the most basic of home appliances, the vibrator. “The Wahl 9000 is a marvelous instrument. It never crashed. It never blue screened. Off, low and high are each what you expect it to be. Every time. And I don’t have a special sleeve for it. We throw it under the bed.” After encouraging us all to get one, he said that computers are basically unstable.
“Computers are not appliances. They are environments, a playground for making shit happen. You can do things the creator of them never even thought of,” he said. He compared them to an abusive relationship, where your partner, who is creative and wonderful, just sometimes, for no known reason, completely freaks out. Computers are so complicated you can’t really know what is going on. And your pour your whole life into them.
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TONIGHT!
Mike Daisey: The Terrors of Literature » McNally Robinson NYC:
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Culturebot.org: NYC Theatre Spaces and More:
This just in on the handy-dandy space-finding sites of NYC Performing Arts Spaces.
NYC Performing Arts Spaces has launched nycTheatreSpaces.org, the free online resource of New York City rehearsal and performance spaces suitable for actors, playwrights, directors, producers and theatre companies.
Plays, musicals, literary readings, sketch comedy and other theatrical performances can be accommodated by the many rentable spaces -- large and small -- in NYC Theatre Spaces' extensive browseable database. You can also search for spaces appropriate for auditions, film and photo shoots, special events and parties.
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New York Press - CHARLIE ANDERS - Cold Metal Turkey:
Not everyone is excited about Shutdown Day. “My first instinct is to flinch,” says blogger, writer and sex guru Rachel Kramer Bussel. “I just can’t imagine a whole day. I could imagine half a day maybe.” But, she admits, she’d feel better about it if she absolutely knew nobody would be trying to contact her online during her stint of cyber-deprivation. Even then, “I would feel really antsy about it.”
Kramer Bussel has friends who freak out as though she may have fallen down a well if she doesn’t answer their emails within a day. She does all her work online, and productive time is mixed in with messing around.
Five minutes in the “real world” are like 10,000 years online. Civilizations rise and fall, philosophies flourish and collapse under their own contradictions. Most of all, your own reputation can turn from crap to gold and back again—several times. Step away from the Internet for a day, and you may come back to find everybody else’s tag clouds have gone carnivorous. And people are speaking Urdu.
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Letter forwarded from a friend with an account of a visit to Clearwater, FL: Just back from Clearwater, FL -- a wealthy suburb of Tampa/St. Pete -- where the Eckerd Theatre Company was workshopping my civil war drummer boy musical.
Eckerd Hall is a performing arts center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was leased over the past weekend by Scientologists -- (Clearwater is their east coast headquarters) -- celebrating the Birthday of L. Ron Hubbard! What a thrilling coincidence! While we're toiling away in the conference room over scripts and designs, John Travolta was appearing on the mainstage; there was a humongous party tent in the parking lot.
Scientologii snipers were posted of the rooftops; Scientologii bomb-sniffing dogs prowled the halls; Scientologii bodyguards (ineffectual looking guys in black with earpieces) eyeballed the entrances and exits. A very unusual space to be workshopping a new musical for three days! On Saturday morning, the festivities had ended -- and laborers were dismantling the party tent. Scientologii laborers had constructed it and you could tell they were scientologists because they were lean, clean-shaven, close-cropped and dressed like postal workers. Normal laborers were tearing it down and you could tell they weren't Scientologists because they had mullets and beer bellies.
When the coast was clear, we braved trekking across the astroturf carpet to ogle the remains of L. Ron Hubbard's birthday cake -- a triple-tiered affair with yellow frosting and gold roses (ick!) -- it appeared to be vanilla with lemon filling but we didn't take a taste -- it was going stale in the sun -- and it didn't appear to have been a huge favorite at the party. It was pretty well mangled but you could still read "Happy Birthday Ron" on top of the cake -- and someone had swiped a finger through a couple of the gold roses. On the ground next to the cake was a huge and rather tacky photo portrait of L. Ron himself -- long since dead now, of course, but apparently frozen in state somewhere waiting for the Scientologist Judgment Day -- and he was smiling and standing next to a birthday cake that looked exactly like the mangled cake on the table. Like it's somehow the traditional L. Ron birthday cake on Scientology Christmas.
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The Gowanus Lounge: Going Postal: Kensington Post Office Redux:
“Why is it so hard to contact a supervisor at the Kensington Post Office?” Rosenblatt asked. “You can’t find a phone number. You can’t find an email address. You can’t even find out where to send a letter of complain.”
In front of him, Brooklyn Postmaster Joseph Chiossone and newly appointed Kensington Station Manager Raymond Schweikle stared into their notes. Finally, the meeting’s organizer and moderator, Assemblyman Jim Brennan, addressed Rosenblatt’s question.
“I used to list those numbers in my monthly newsletter,” Brennan said. “But the post office kept changing the numbers as soon as I listed them.”
A chorus of boos ensued, until finally Postmaster Chiossone promised that supervisor’s phone numbers would be displayed in the Kensington Station within a week.
Such was the mood Thursday, as Kensington residents swapped war stories about what one person called “The Worst Post Office in America.”
Complaints from the feisty crowd of over 200 – many of them senior citizens – included allegations of identity theft by postal employees, and descriptions of lines running out of the Kensington Station and onto MacDonald Avenue. Many recounted instances of rudeness on the part of employees, others described missing packages, two month delivery delays, and chronic understaffing.
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Tasting Rachel Ray.
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Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News:
The word has only been in the English language for two decades, but the hamburger chain McDonald's would like to see the word "McJob" McEliminated from the dictionary -- the fast food firm is not lovin' the OED's definition.
It's a bit of job-seeking advice that parents have been dishing out to their aimless, unskilled, post-high school offspring for decades: You can always work at McDonald's.
And many have taken that advice. It is estimated that fully one out of every eight workers in the United States has put in stints behind the counters of the fast-food McGiant. Most of them have been eager to leave as quickly as possible. Low pay, poor prestige, and less-than-haute cuisine combine to make the job of a burger flipper McSpurned.
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Spring Awakening - Onstage Seating - Theater - New York Times:
IT doesn’t always take talent to be on a Broadway stage. Sometimes all you need is $31.50.
At “Spring Awakening,” the rock musical by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, that fee, along with some courage, is all it takes to sit in one of 26 seats arranged on the sides of the stage at every performance.
In some ways these places are the best in the house. The sound and sightlines can be spotty, but there are other, rarer benefits. Seated on a plain wooden chair, you are close enough to the actors to feel the stomping of their feet and hear their natural, unamplified voices. And in what could be the highlight of the evening or its most uncomfortable moment (or both), a stageside seat also offers a chance to see a frenzied teenage sex scene, including some frenzied body parts — the actors range in age from 16 to 24 — in revealing proximity.
At the performance I attended last weekend, though, I was more fascinated by a different bodily function: spitting.
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Pharyngula::The proper reverence due those who have gone before:
That's another thing; a bone isn't just beautiful operational engineering, it's a trace of a person. It's a melancholy memento of all that's been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that's the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that's left is abstractions. For most of us, there won't even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we'll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.
Maybe, though, while we are personally unacknowledged, there will be some trace left in the genes of several times great grandchildren, or in a few words preserved in a library, or in some tiny nudge we've given history. That's all I aim for, that I can sow a seed that will in turn sow a seed that will sow a seed that…and so it goes. That's enough.
I am not a religious person by any means (that is a bit of an understatement), but I can feel something of the same reverence for the Bible that I do for a piece of bone. It's a record, spotty and incomplete and flawed, of human lives, that leaves out far more than it includes. It's not as pretty as a bone, but then it is representative of some of the ugliness of human history, as well as of some of the poetry. I can appreciate it as a slice of a few thousand years of the events and beliefs of one fairly influential tribe of people. There are a lot of lives and time, mostly unmentioned, bound up in that book.
2:36 AM
2:36 AM
TONIGHT!
5:43 PM
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4:36 PM
Gozi Trojan - Research - SecureWorks:
Russian malware authors are finding new ways to steal and profit from data which used to be considered safe from thieves because it was encrypted using SSL/TLS. Originally, this analysis intended to provide insight into the mechanisms used to steal that data, but it became an investigation into the growing trend of malware sold not as a product, but as a service. Eventually it lead to an alarming find and resulted in an active law enforcement investigation.
4:36 PM
4:36 PM
TROUBLE IN PARADISE: Google's second-class citizens - Valleywag:
Valleywag Exclusive-1-3Picture 84No doubt the Googleplex in Mountain View, lavishly equipped with massage chairs and snack rooms, is an earthly paradise, at least for engineers who joined early enough to benefit from the company's public offering. Fortune named the search engine giant the best employer in the US, so it must be true. But try telling that to those employees who will on April 1st be recategorized as hourly workers; ordered to take at least 30 minutes off for lunch so that they don't rack up billable time while grabbing a sandwich in their cubicle; and made to get approval for expensive overtime. What?
4:35 PM
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4:04 PM
Gawker, Manhattan Media News and Gossip:
Mike Daisey explains why Apple ≈ crack.
3:53 PM
3:53 PM
Coming up Daisey - Arts - The Phoenix:
Mike Daisey has a blog. So do millions of other people. But unlike those millions, Daisey has an archive that goes back to 2001. (That’s before Gawker!) He posts excerpts and links to everything that interests him. Subjects range from the FBI’s breach of the Patriot Act to David Eggers to gadgets to the decline in confession among Catholics.
“It was intended to be unfiltered,” he says over the phone from his Brooklyn home. “I make it a point not to edit, just to post things. Over time, it starts to assume its own personality. It’s funny how things transmute into art. . . . I follow a lot of open-source things, and I think it’s interesting to disclose an on-line version of the internal stream of things.”
Daisey’s monologues work the same way. In Invincible Summer and Monopoly!, both of which he’ll perform here courtesy of American Repertory Theatre, he takes seemingly incongruent topics and mixes them with personal experiences to create the dramatic equivalent of a classic cocktail: there’s a balance of strong, sweet, and sour components and a few dashes of bitters.
2:50 PM
2:44 PM
Curbed: Coney Island Condos vs. Amusements Smackdown Update:
Some interesting info on the first day of Spring about the ongoing condos vs. amusements fight in Coney Island. Developer Thor Equities, which has floated a $2 billion redevelopment plan, continues to say there's no way it can build an amusement park without condos. Its plan is based on drawing 1.4 million visitors a year (compared to Astroland, which gets 350,000). The plan includes four towers on Stillwell Avenue, one of which would be 50 stories tall. Apparently, Thor's purchase of Astroland was a surprise to the Coney Island Development Corporation, which wasn't planning on it buying an operating Coney amusement. This all comes via a long story in the (subscription only) Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which has been posted on the Coney Island Message Board.
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6:22 AM
Twitter (kottke.org):
Playing with Twitter reminds me of blogging circa 2000. Back then, all weblogs were personal in nature and most people used them to communicate with their friends and family. If I wanted to know what my friends were up to back then, I read their blogs. Now I follow Twitter (and Flickr and Vox).
The reaction to Twitter mirrors the initial reaction to weblogs...the same tired "this is going to ruin the web" and "who cares what you ate for dinner" arguments.
Also like blogs, everyone has their own unique definition of what Twitter is (stripped down blogs, public IM, Dodgeball++, etc.), and to some extent, everyone is correct. Maybe that's when you know how you've got a winner: when people use it like mad but can't fully explain the appeal of it to others. See also: weblogs, Flickr.
6:21 AM
6:21 AM
Heavy Metal | Theater | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper:
On Friday and Saturday, Mark Boeker will perform his very good Hell Songs from the Floating World (seen at On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival), a series of sketches that begins with his "Sensitive Zombie" character—a sad-sack, brains-eating romantic who is nostalgic for his pre-zombie days, back when he used to dance and love his girlfriend. Boeker also plays a waiter in hell, a survivor of an alien invasion hiding underground, and other macabre clowns.
6:21 AM
6:17 AM
TONIGHT:
"In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." – F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber!" -- Lord Byron
The Moth invites you to
The Late Late Show: Stories of Life After Dark
Join us for tales of the nocturnal. Discover what happens in the dead of night, when the sun has been down for hours and hours, but a select few are wide awake. Hear stories of people who find comfort in the cloak of night, as well as those who find themselves stranded in a murky world, still hours away from the daylight.
Wednesday, March 21
Sponsored by TNT
Stories told by:
Paul Bacon
David Carr
Ted Conover
Mike Daisey
L. Gabrielle Penabaz
Host:
Andy Borowitz
Violinist:
Mazz Swift
Curated by:
Meg Bowles
7:00pm Doors Open
8:00pm Stories Start on Stage
at The Players
16 Gramercy Park South
$20 tickets available at www.smarttix.com or by calling (212) 868-4444.
Tables are $150 for non-moth members and $135 for members.
Please call the Moth office at 212-742-0551 to reserve.
Artistic Director: Catherine Burns
Senior Producer: Sarah Austin Jenness
Curator and Producer: Jenifer Hixson
Associate Producer: Katie Miller
Executive and Creative Director: Lea Thau
About the Storytellers:
Paul Bacon is a writer and cartoonist whose work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Dictionary of American History (Scribner), Inside.com, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, PBS Online, Pindeldyboz, POV, Salon, San Francisco Examiner and Wired. While currently working part-time as a scuba diving and CPR instructor, Paul is also writing a nonfiction book about his three-year tenure as an NYPD patrolman, to be published by Bloomsbury USA. Paul is a former staff writer for Might magazine and Modern Humorist, and has appeared on NPR's "This American Life" (2006), John Hodgman's "Little Gray Book Lecture Series" (New York, 2001 and 2005), and "The Americana Project" drama series (New York and Boston, 2000-01).
Andy Borowitz (host) is a comedian, actor and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and at Newsweek.com. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won five Dot-Comedy Awards for his website, borowitzreport.com. He appears on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Sunday, CNN's American Morning, VH1's Best Week Ever and has acted in the films: Marie and Bruce starring Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick and Melinda and Melinda starring Will Ferrell and directed by Woody Allen. He is the author of five humor books, including Who Moved My Soap?: The CEO's Guide to Surviving in Prison, The Borowitz Report: The Big Book of Shockers, a 2005 Finalist for the Thurber prize for American Humor, and the recently published Republican Playbook. His new show, Next Week's News Starring Andy Borowitz, premieres at Caroline's on Broadway on April 26.
David Carr writes a media column for the Monday Business section of the New York Times and also works as a general assignment reporter in the Culture section of The New York Times covering all aspects of popular culture, including film. During Oscar season, David works as The Carpetbagger, writing a daily blog about the movie awards and filming weekly video segments. A writer turned editor turned writer, David has worked at The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine and Washington City Paper. David is currently working on a book for Simon & Schuster about the nature of personal narrative and the stories we tell about ourselves. The book will include reporting on his own personal history and he has been traveling and recording video interviews with people from his past. He loves scary stories as long as they end in a hug.
Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing describes the ten months he spent working undercover as a guard at the famous prison. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Newjack was initially banned by the state and now is censored before inmates are allowed to see it. Conover's writings are frequently based on first-hand participation: he is also the author of Rolling Nowhere, an account of riding the rails with modern-day hoboes, Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, and Coyotes, a classic tale of life among Mexican migrants. He contributes to the New York Times Magazine and other publications and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is at work on a book about roads.
Mike Daisey has been called "the master storyteller" and "one of the finest solo performers of his generation" by the New York Times for his monologues, including 21 Dog Years, Invincible Summer, TRUTH, Great Men of Genius, Monopoly!, The Ugly American, I Miss the Cold War, Wasting Your Breath, and All Stories Are Fiction which he's performed Off-Broadway, across the country and around the world. He's been a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, his work has been heard on the BBC, NPR and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, and his groundbreaking series All Stories Are Fiction is available through Audible.com. Currently he's a commentator for NPR's Day To Day, a contributor to WIRED, Slate and Salon, and his writing appears in the anthology The Best Tech Writing 2006. His first book, 21 Dog Years: A Cubedweller's Tale, was published by the Free Press and he is working on a second book. He'll be performing two full length site-specific monologues this week: The Pleasures of Technology at the Macintosh store Tekserve, and The Terrors of Literature at the independent Soho bookstore McNally Robinson. For full details check out his site, mikedaisey.com.
L. Gabrielle Penabaz has extracted a multi-media artist's career out of necessity. Avant garde event planning and the theatrical rock band, St. Eve, led to performance art with video. Writing about it is probably the best way to distill it all. Now, able to create unusual liqueurs in fantastical make-up before a show, while rendering files to burn a disc, she can only list herself as "Instigator" on her business card without feeling overwhelmed at other people's parties.
Mazz Swift (violin) made her solo public performance debut at Alice Tully Hall performing alongside members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and later attended the Julliard School of Music. Since leaving in her third year to pursue a more organic approach to music making, she has performed and recorded with artists including Perry Farrell, Dee Snider, Moby, Yhe Yohimbe Brothers, Kanye West, Common, and Jay-Z. She devotes her time to three personal projects: Brazz Tree, Trigger and The Spondoolix. For more information, visit www.mazzmuzik.com.
4:24 PM
4:20 PM
urbaniak: Actor Emotions:
I also had a voiceover audition today for a radio commercial. It was a humorous scene between a man and a woman. One exchange in the script went like this (dialogue is paraphrased; original punctuation is exact):
WOMAN: Where were you? I was waiting all morning—
MAN: My car broke down. I had to walk here.
When we recorded the first take, the woman I was auditioning with did the following (dialogue is paraphrased):
WOMAN: Where were you? I was waiting all morning for you to arrive! You had me worried sick! Why didn't you call?!
ME (waiting a second to make sure she's finished): ...My car broke down. I had to walk here.
There is a certain school of actor that takes a dash at the end of a line to mean "make up more words." Anyone who has ever taken a college acting class has met the confident young thespian who riffs like crazy at the sight of a dash. When his scene partner is momentarily flummoxed into silence the Dash Riffer breathlessly tells him: "You better cut me off or I'll keep on talking!" (Dash Riffing is always very high energy for some reason.)
2:43 PM
2:43 PM
Reunited, And It Feels So . . . What?:
At this point, I overrode my usual instinct to never Reply To All, and Replied To All my confession that I did, in fact, still have possession over all four yearbooks from high school days, and offered to provide a list of student names. Another CC'd former classmate then wrote to say, "You have the yearbooks! What spirit!" I did not point out that I didn't keep the yearbooks ("annuals," we called them) out of any sense of lingering spirit or nostalgia, but simply because as comedy qua comedy, they were indispensable. For one thing, since they were created by high school students in rural Idaho, the overall quality of these editions are stunning in their incompetence--and I am also happy to report that I had a hand in their creation. For another thing, the photos are simply shockingly funny: we were all so astonishingly ugly. Most strikingly, me. My freshman year, I resembled some sort of rodent that had been soaked in denatured alcohol and then aggressively combed; my spectacles were apparently borrowed from Martin Mull while he was on break at Fernwood 2Nite. I am also wearing a velour sort of proto-Izod-thing. Collar not up, due to uncoolness. And my senior photo--taken by my father, in an aggressively soft-focus manner, the better to obscure my puzzling, ghastly Richie Rich haircut--is not unlike a portrait of Cybill Shepherd's transsexual doppelganger.
2:16 PM
2:16 PM
Why I Was Fired - New York Times:
WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.
Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.
United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.
Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.
2:04 PM
2:00 PM
Fashionista.com:
Janice Dickinson is officially banned from all IMG related events, including Fashion Week in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.
The outrageous model and reality TV star took an unassigned seat in the front row of the Ed Hardy show and refused to move - even though the seat belonged to IMG Vice President Fern Mallis, the woman whose team produces all the Fashion Weeks. Smashbox owner Dean Factor had to speak with Janice himself before she would move.
After the show, Janice claimed she'd broken her toe, and stuck her foot into a giant tub of ice reserved for sponsored beverages backstage.
2:00 PM
2:00 PM
The Women's War - Sara Corbett - Iraq - Soldiers - Women - Abuse - New York Times:
A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking health care through the V.A. said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service. Of that group, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times, and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped. Perhaps even more tellingly, a small study financed by the V.A. following the gulf war suggests that rates of both sexual harassment and assault rise during wartime. The researchers who carried out this study also looked at the prevalence of PTSD symptoms - including flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbing and round-the-clock anxiety - and found that women who endured sexual assault were more likely to develop PTSD than those who were exposed to combat.
1:54 PM
Hughes H-4 Hercules - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The Hughes H-4 Hercules ("Spruce Goose"), dubbed "The Edsel of Aviation", is an aircraft which was designed and built by Howard Hughes' Hughes Aircraft company. Its first and only flight took place in 1947. Hughes himself detested the nickname "Spruce Goose". The nickname arose as a way of mocking the Hercules project due to Hughes' alleged misuse of government funding to build the aircraft. The Hercules is the largest flying boat, and still holds the record for the largest wingspan of any aircraft in history. Only one was ever built.
Due to wartime restrictions on the availability of metals, the H-4 was built almost entirely of laminated birch, not spruce as its nickname suggests. The aircraft was a technological marvel of its time. It married a soon-to-be outdated technology, flying boats, to a massive airframe that required some truly ingenious engineering innovations to function.
1:45 PM
1:45 PM
Daring Fireball Linked List: March 2007:
David Chartier at TUAW expounds upon his role covering the MacBook Wi-Fi saga. I just don’t get why George Ou ever was, let alone still remains, so upset about Chartier’s TUAW post or Jim Dalrymple’s Macworld story.
The truth is Maynor and Ellch must have “falsified” something, because at various times, to various people, they both claimed to have an exploit against the MacBook’s built-in AirPort driver and not to have an exploit against the built-in driver. Chartier’s “SecureWorks Admits to Falsifying MacBook Wireless Hack” story wasn’t exactly right, but it was more right than wrong.
5:55 AM
Clarification on the MacBook Wi-Fi hack 'conspiracy' - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW):
The reason I bring this all up is that George Ou of ZDNet, perhaps one of the few - or only - valiant defenders of Maynor and Ellch over the months is at it again, after catching up on his X-Files episodes it would seem. Ou's latest on the drama - which, believe me, I wish would go away just as much as you - is a claim that I, and other bloggers, were working with Lynn Fox (Apple's PR director) in a conspiracy against David Maynor and SecureWorks. While I'm flattered at the possibility of Apple even talking to me, the truth of the matter is that the company pretty much ignores TUAW, and most other Apple-related blogs, entirely. Honestly: Fox and I never exchanged so much as a "mwahaha" over email, or any other form of correspondence for that matter. I've never been contacted by anyone from Apple regarding anything besides the fact that one of my older PowerBook's warranties was about to expire, and that AppleCare would be a great way to stay within their graces. If selling that PowerBook on eBay back in the day so I could switch to an iMac denotes conspiracy in my blood, then by all means, Ou himself should probably be the one to strip me of my underhanded blogging credentials.
5:54 AM
» How Apple orchestrated web attack on researchers | George Ou | ZDNet.com:
When I finally got Fox back on the phone, I
