ICE-9.
Did you ever read Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut? In the book there’s this stuff called Ice-9, which is water that is frozen at room temperature. And if it touches any other water, it turns it into Ice 9. It’s the ultimate doomsday weapon, since a tiny drop could turn all the oceans in the world solid.
So I got this stuff yesterday called “The Heat Solution” from a company called Prism Enterprises. It’s so cool. There’s a plastic pouch filled with transparent liquid. Floating in the liquid is a small metal disk. You flex the disk, and suddenly the liquid turns solid at the disk, and the “solidness” quickly spreads like a blooming flower until the whole pouch is solid white crystal. It also heats up to 130 degrees F for half an hour, which is the selling point. Afterwards, you can boil it in water, and it turns clear again.
MOVIE REVIEW: NOVOCAINE * 1/2 (1 and a half stars out of 4).
I’m never clear on whether this Steve Martin movie is a murder mystery or a black comedy, and in trying to be both, it winds up being neither one satisfactorily. As a murder mystery, the plot is too contrived to be believed, but as a black comedy, it’s to gritty and not that funny. Interestingly, I watched the deleted scenes on the DVD, and all of them had a much more comic bent than the movie. Without being laugh-out-loud funny, they each at least set a tone of macabre humor that might have made the movie more watchable. Still there were a few clever and amusing scenes (the scenes with Kevin Bacon are great), and also some really disturbing scenes at the end.
THESE ARE BAD HEADLINES.
I’m about two thirds through “Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy. He gives two tips for headlines, to make them easy to read and effective. 1) Don’t put them in all capital letters; and 2) don’t put a period at the end. Ah, well.
I SHALL RETURN.
I just bought my return ticket to New York City. I’ll arrive Wednesday evening, August 21. It will be good to be back. Florida is depressingly dull. I’m not really into the beach or the club scene, and there isn’t much else to do. I should try to do a little shopping while I’m here. My New York dollars go really far in this part of the world.
BOOK REVIEW: FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE BY TOM WOLFE * * 1/2 (2 and one half stars out of 4).
Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House delivers a scathing critique of American architecture in the 20th century. It is fascinating to observe the disconnect between architectural theory and aesthetics. And Wolfe is surely correct that this disconnect is a bad thing. Yet, I think, there are some beautiful buildings out there that were built in the 20th century, and that doesn’t really match up with Wolfe’s view about how architecture gets built. Further, I am particularly a fan of the “glass box” skyscrapers he decries. Still, the book was fascinating and entertaining. It was probably my least favorite Tom Wolfe book, but that’s still pretty good.
SAD CLOWN.
I drew this sketch, and I kind of liked it. I think it would make a good tattoo.
I SHAVED OFF MY GOATEE.
After about 8 years, or more than 1/4 of my life, I finally shaved off my goatee. This would be a very appropriate spot for a picture, but 1) I don’t know how to upload pictures to my blog; and 2) I don’t have a picture of my shaved face yet.
INSTITUTIONAL RACISM.
My brother’s girlfriend, Rachel C. has something to do with the Florida Department of Children and Families. She noticed the following language in one of their brochures which has the headline on its cover: “Having a family should be more than a child’s dream.” It says:
Who are the children waiting for families?
Children waiting to be adopted are of all ages. They are in foster care and cannot return to their birth families because they:
• are survivors of abuse and neglect.
• have been abandoned.
• are members of sibling groups who need to remain together.
• are of racially mixed or black heritage.
• are physically, mentally, or emotionally challenged.
So, what’s up with that fourth one? “Children are in foster care and cannot return to their birth families because they are of racially mixed or black heritage”? That is the government of Florida talking. That is my tax money being used to print this brochure. I really don’t think they should be saying that, at least without some further explanation of what on earth they are talking about.
HAPPY ANNIVERSARIES.
Yesterday, August 11, was my parents’ wedding anniversary, and also my company, Charge.Com’s, anniversary. My parents were married 34 years ago, yesterday, and Network Solutions completed the registration of our domain “charge.com” 7 years ago yesterday. “7 years ago yesterday” sounds just right, because it was 7 years ago, but it feels like yesterday. How strange that Charge.Com is more than a fifth as old as my parents’ marriage, which, being before I was born, certainly does not feel like yesterday.
For their anniversary, my brother and I and my brother’s girlfriend, Rachel C., took my parents to “The Melting Pot: A Fondue Restaurant”, here in South Florida. It was delicious, but it’s very easy to eat too much there. We also got them a combination VCR / DVD player. It was perfect, because they’ve wanted a DVD player, but had no place to put one, and they didn’t even know such a device existed. I didn’t either, until Friday. Plus, we hooked it up for them, which is the real present, because they are totally helpless when it comes to that kind of thing. Also, Rachel framed a very lovely photograph of them taken from my balcony in Manhattan when they visited me last month.
PITHY PARTY.
My “insaaaane” friend Dav C. thinks that you don’t know what the word “pithy” means.
Actually, I just wanted to give him a shout-out for being the first blogger to link to my blog that I know about.
TATTOO CONVENTION.
My friend David B. is a very famous tattoo artist, and he is in Florida for the weekend for a tattoo convention. So, I went with him yesterday and saw the convention, and watched it walk by his booth. I know that anything I say about it (other than that people into body art are a very tolerant, accepting community, and that much of the body art is objectively beautiful) would piss him off. And certainly, that bit in the parentheses is true. But for me, I repeatedly got the same queer feeling that I get when I see the freak show in Coney Island. And when I say that I get that feeling, I’m not trying to say anything about the people there; I’m just saying something about me.
Oh, guess who I walked past while I was at the convention! Ron Jeremy, the famous porn star! I was going to ask him to autograph my chest, but he walked off into another room for some kind of photo or film shoot. I saw they had those silver colored umbrellas with lights shining into them that I associate with photography or video, but I won’t presume to speculate about what they might have been filming there.
I’M LEAVING ON A JET PLANE.
I’m off to South Florida for a couple weeks, where I grew up. I’m leaving for the airport in half an hour.
RESTAURANT REVIEW: REPUBLIC * * * (3 stars out of 4).
Jessica D. just took me out to dinner at Republic, on Union Square West between 16th and 17th. They have good, fresh Thai food at reasonable prices, with lots of dinner entrees under $10. My two complaints are that 1) it is much too loud, and 2) there is communal seating, where you sit at a table with a stranger, which I don’t always necessarily love to do. Together, there is a decided lack of intimacy that would make this restaurant totally unsuitable for a date or even a very meaningful conversation, unless you can score a table outside, time and weather permitting.
FRANK MILLER.
I just met Frank Miller, the famous comic book writer and artist, at a book signing at Midtown Comics. It was from 5 to 7. I got there before 5, and only got to get my book signed because he stayed at least a half-hour late. That line just didn’t move. How long does it take to sign “Frank Miller”? I can do it in about a second and a half, and it’s not even my name! And he doesn’t write out “F” “R” “A” “N” “K”. He just makes an F with a squiggly line.
I HATE SPAM.
I am so sick of spam. I get about three or four hundred spams a day to my various e-mail addresses, and it costs me hours every week. Just now, I got a spam advertising child pornography. I’ve gotten a lot of such spams before, and they, of course, are particularly upsetting, as far as spam goes. Normally, I just hit the delete key. But I felt so fed up that I decided to report them to the FBI. They gave me an e-mail address to forward the spam, and I did. I figured they must get thousands of complaints like that every day. But I kept getting transferred around, and nobody at first seemed to know quite what to do about my complaint. So, maybe not very many people do report this kind of thing. I think that’s too bad, but it does make me feel like maybe my one report will make a difference.
MOVIE REVIEW: DOLORES CLAIBORNE * 1/2 (1 and a half stars out of 4).
I recently rented this (See my July 31, 2002 blog entry on my Blockbuster experience), and I was disappointed. I’d heard good things about it, but I found the movie not very believable, even though I also found it very predictable. Also, it suffers from the all-too common fault of having the bad guy go silent when attacked, unable to think of a response. We all know, in real life, that no matter how clever we are, the person we’re talking to will have a comeback, even if it’s not a very good one. But here, Dolores’s not-so-clever quips always seem to go unanswered. Likewise, her daughter’s arguments at the end of the movie, are unanswered. Though, they are hardly unanswerable. There are some very clever lines “Don’t ask me for help; all my money’s tied up in cash” was my favorite, and Dolores does have a few zingers. But it’s long and a little slow, and not very plausible.
BOOK REVIEW: RICH DAD, POOR DAD * * (2 stars out of 4).
“Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!” by Robert T. Kiyosaki makes some interesting points about how our attitudes about money are shaped by our parents, and how this is part of the reason why rich parents have rich children and poor parents have poor children. My own father is a very successful business owner, and was also an accountant. We frequently discussed issues of money at the dinner table and during other social activities. Now, I am a successful business owner, and I agree with the premise of Rich Dad, Poor Dad that this is not a coincidence. But the book, while long on philosophy, is a little short on the specifics, in terms of concrete advice you can use. It talks about attitudes about money that rich people have and teach their children, but, it seems to me, the important thing is the nitty-gritty specifics about how to, say, leverage an arbitrage opportunity or factor in the cost of money or evaluate whether a stock is undervalued. In short, the only conclusion I’m really able to draw from the book is that, if you want to be rich, make sure to go back in time and have rich parents.
GOT ‘EM ALL CUT.
Sid, the guy who cuts my hair at the downtown Vidal Sassoon on 5th Avenue at 14th is a genius. I mean, you know, about cutting hair. Not that he’s dumb about other stuff. Just, you know, so, anyway, having curly hair, as I do, it is very hard to get a good haircut. Most stylists have relatively little experience with curly hair, and it’s also just objectively very difficult, since it doesn’t really stay where you put it. And when I first went to Sid, about 2 years ago, he confided that he wasn’t as confident about cutting curly hair as he was about cutting straight hair. But he works magic with his little $400 scissors. The only downside is that it’s a little pricey at $120, including tip. But compared to what many people spend on clothes, I think that hair, which is much more important to your appearance, is not the place to skimp. I recommend him highly. Vidal Sassoon downtown is at 90 5th Ave (212) 229-2200.
A CRAZY MCDONALD’S COMMERCIAL.
On my TV screen appears a picture of a Big Mac followed by a cartoon smile. Then, a picture of a super-sized order of french fries, followed by a cartoon smile. Next, a picture of a large regular Coke followed by the smile. A cheerful announcer asks, “What could make you happier than a Big Mac Extra Value Meal? An appetizer before it. Like our cheesy mozzarella sticks [pictured, deep fried] or a tasty fajita [pictured, dripping with cheese]. Happy now?” And then the cartoon smile integrated with the McDonald’s logo, and the word “smile”. Now, I’m not one of those people who tell other people what they should eat (although I certainly used to be). But this is nuts! A Big Mac, super-sized fries, and large coke already has about as much fat and sugar as I normally eat in a week. But apparently, if I want to SMILE and BE HAPPY, then I also should let them take some breaded cheese, and deep fry it, and eat that first, in order to whet my appetite for all that other stuff. And another thing: a fajita is not an appetizer! You know, when I heard about that guy suing all the fast food places because fast food was bad for him, I was not very sympathetic, but that commercial really made me think that maybe something should be done. I mean, there’s probably hundreds of very obese people who saw that ad, who are going to start ordering some fried mozzarella sticks to go with their Big Mac Extra Value Meal from now on, because a commercial told them that that was an okay thing to do in order to feel happy. And they’re not going to understand why they are so obese when they are just eating the same stuff it says in the commercial that it’s normal to eat.
BOOK REVIEW: THE TEMPTING OF AMERICA, BY ROBERT BORK * * * (3 stars out of 4).
The book, by defeated US Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, is very smart and well-written, but plagued with logical inconsistencies. The “tempting” that he condemns is the temptation to use result-driven pseudo-legal reasoning to interpret the Constitution to say what liberal judges want it to say. To the extent that Bork’s claim is that sometimes judges choose between a number equally plausible choices based on the policy result they may wish for, his claim is well-supported, and his argument against the practice is well-reasoned.
But Bork reaches much too far. Often his complaint with the Supreme Court is that their way of interpreting the Constitution isn’t exactly the same as his way. Thus, he thinks that the Court invented new law when it found a Constitutional right of privacy implicit in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th, and 14th Amendments. But here, I’m doing Bork too much credit, for he fails to acknowledge the 9th and 10th Amendments, stating respectively that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” which are central to the argument. What do these two Amendments mean, if not that US citizens have other substantive rights, in addition to those enumerated in the Bill of Rights? And if those rights don’t include a right to privacy, so implicit in the other rights of the people, then what specific rights does Bork think we do have? Now, I’m not saying that this argument ends the debate over abortion, but Bork’s view, that the Supreme Court is just making things up that have no textual basis in the Constitution, is just overreaching. And so that leaves us with Bork saying one thing about what the Constitution means, and the Supreme Court of the United States saying a different thing about what the Constitution means. But the Constitution itself says that the Supreme Court has the authority to interpret the Constitution, not Bork. So, it really seems to me that Bork, and not the Supreme Court, is the judicial activist, making up new law, when he says that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution.
Bork’s view is that when the Constitution is not perfectly clear about what it says and means, then the courts should defer to legislative majorities, which are the part of our government, unlike the courts, which is supposed to make policy decisions. So, it is ironic that Bork spends so much time at the end of the book expressing his disdain for the legislative process that defeated his nomination to the Supreme Court in the Senate. He complains bitterly of lawmakers’ distortions of the facts, their unyielding loyalties to special interest constituencies, their backroom agreements to vote together in regional blocks, and–most ironically of all–of their lack of familiarity with and understanding of Constitutional law, sufficient to understand the issues involved in his nomination. It seems as though Bork’s only occasional desire to defer to legislative majorities is, itself, result-driven.
This brings me to the fundamental dishonesty of the book. Bork insists that the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the Constitution is result-driven, and insists that his doctrine of original intent is result-neutral. I don’t believe this to be true. The Constitution, it is often said, is “a floor and not a ceiling on individual rights”. Thus, the more narrowly the Constitution is interpreted, the less freedom and rights for individuals, and the more power for states and for the other branches of the federal government to criminalize otherwise-protected conduct. And that’s the conservative agenda– to limit the right to privacy, to limit the right to free expression, to limit the right to speak out against the government, to expand the powers of the police, and to dictate Victorian sexual practices. Thus, I submit that the original intent doctrine is every bit as result-driven as any liberal reading of the Constitution– the desired result being to curtail individual freedom.
There are many other errors in the book, some more obvious than others (particularly ill-composed is his attack on First Amendment protection for flag burning: he says that the law restricted only the manner, and not the content of the expression, even though burning flags with different patterns than the US flag would have been permitted by the statute, and even though burning any representation of the flag, no matter it’s size or material would have been outlawed; yet he goes into a vigorous defense of why the image of the flag is so sacred in our culture and deserves special consideration, based on the content of the message it conveys). But Bork makes many good points as well, and, as I say, his early arguments against result-driven decision making are very thought provoking.
I am an attorney, and found the book easy to follow, but I think it may have been a little too dense for most non-attorneys.
THEATER REVIEW: A.S.S.S.S.C.A.T. * * * * (4 stars out of 4).
The best show in New York City, for as long as I’ve lived here, is A.S.S.S.S.C.A.T. on Sundays at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. I just saw it Sunday night with Debbie W. It is totally improvised; that is, the performers make up their lines as they go along. Most weeks, at least two or three and occasionally all four of the performers from the Upright Citizens Brigade TV Show on Comedy Central are there performing: Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Amy Poehler (now of Saturday Night Live), and Matt Walsh (now of The Daily Show). Most weeks, SNL’s Horatio Sanz is there performing. Other famous frequent performers include SNL’s Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, and Jerry Minor. More rare guests that I have seen there have included David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, and Andy Richter. Conan O’Brien once participated, but I missed it. Collectively, they and many other guests do long-form improvised comedy better than anyone else in the world. The very worst A.S.S.S.S.C.A.T. shows I’ve seen (and I’ve seen more than 50 all together) are still better than almost any other comedy show I’ve seen, and the best ones are truly magical.
The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater is on 22nd Street, just east of 7th Avenue. There are two A.S.S.S.S.C.A.T. shows every Sunday. The 7:30 show costs $7, and the 9:30 show is free, with tickets given out at 8:15, though you’ll need to get there no later than around 7:15 PM to get a free ticket. You’ll need reservations for the 7:30 show, which usually disappear by midweek. Personally, I always prefer to just spend the $7 than to wait in line for so long. They have lots of other shows there, too.
FOREIGN LANGUAGES.
Language is effortless to learn before you’re 6, not that hard to learn before you’re 13, and extremely difficult to learn after you’re 13. I think that’s a really big, important idea, and one of the half dozen or so major, big, important ideas that I personally don’t think society pays near enough attention to. The dumbest guy in Mexico can speak Spanish, but I had to struggle so hard with it in high school, even though I’m a pretty bright guy. If someone would have just talked to me in Spanish when I was 4 or 5, it wouldn’t have even been work to know it now, and I’d speak it today better than I ever could, even if I devoted the rest of my life to the study of the Spanish language. But instead, in America, we start teaching foreign languages when students turn about 14 or 15– the worst possible time! I’m going to make it a point to make sure my kids (when I have kids) learn at least two foreign languages when they are very young.
Then again, language learning may be obsolete by then. Here’s my idea. Here are four things we already have: 1) pretty good speech recognition software, 2) pretty good translation software, 3) pretty good text-to-speech software, and 4) pretty good hand-held computers. Hey, are you thinking what I’m thinking? We ought to have a hand-held computer that uses speech recognition in one language to make text, runs the text through the translations software, and then uses the text-to-speech software to say the result, in order to provide unlimited real-time two-way translation between any two languages in the world, for under two hundred bucks. Can you imagine holding up one of these things on the street in Bangkok or Tokyo or Paris, and being able to say anything you wanted to in English, and have them hear you in Thai or Japanese or French, and reply in their own language, which you would hear as English? Now THAT would change everything. And we already have the technology. Someone just has to put the pieces together.
“THAT’S TERESTING!”
I was talking to a friend the other day, and she said that an executive where she works was very ill-mannered. So I asked, “Would you say, then, that his manners are ‘peccable’?” “Oh, as opposed to ‘impeccable’?” she laughed, getting the joke. So, I made the same joke the next day to Andy M., and he laughed, and then he replied that he found my comment completely “turbing” (as opposed to disturbing). Staring at him intently, I warned him that I was easily “tracted” while talking with him. “This conversation is very ‘teresting,'” was his witty reply.
We kept having to explain the joke to our friend Sophie W.,telling her that “tracted” was the opposite of “distracted” and that “teresting” was the opposite of “interesting”. It only occurs to me now as I am writing this, that the problem was probably that she isn’t a native english speaker. She speaks perfectly (though with a slight Shanghai accent), but English isn’t her first language. More on this BIG IDEA to follow (above).
BOOK REVIEW: THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS: SCIENCE IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY * * (2 stars, out of 4).
It’s hard to judge a book of essays as a whole. There are some four star essays and some no star essays in this book. But taken as a whole, there is very little flow to the book. Rather, it is both extremely repetitive and contradictory. Practically every writer has to mention Moore’s Law, and define it again and again for you (it is the empirical prediction that computing power will double every eighteen months). Practically every writer has to rehash the same ramifications of the Human Genome Project. And practically every writer makes the same prediction: that the particular unproven hypotheses that they are currently working on trying to prove, will, in fact, be proven in the next 50 years.
One interesting theme of the book is that we know a lot about what’s going to happen in the next 50 years, because it takes at least a generation for new ideas to be accepted in the scientific community, because what has to happen first, is that all the old people who’ve made and staked their careers on the old ideas, all have to retire or die. This makes a lot of sense when you think about psychology, or child-rearing, or even medicine, but the various experts claim it to be true of physics and mathematics as well. Only computer science and astronomy, it would seem, are genuinely open minded to receive totally new ideas. One researcher, for example, says that the evidence is already great that cancer and some heart disease are primarily caused by contagious infections, which could be treated. He says, the only reason that idea isn’t already accepted is that too many doctors have too much invested in the old models. Amusingly, he points out that the refusal of the medical establishment to accept the idea of cancer and heart disease as being caused by contagious infections will hasten the day when new doctors more open to the idea will be at the helm of the medical establishment. This is because, ironically, their stubbornness will cause them to die of heart disease and cancer, which could be better treated with a new paradigm.
All in all, the book is too long and too often obscure. Cut the book in half (keeping the best half, and not a random half), and you might have a very good book.
MOVIE REVIEW: AUSTIN POWERS 3 * * 1/2 (2 and a half stars, out of 4).
I just saw Austin Powers 3: Goldmember, with Jin K. She liked it a lot, but I was disappointed. Perhaps it’s not fair to judge it against the other Austin Powers movies, which I thought were really great. But by that high standard, this one comes up short. It’s really striking how much money they obviously put into the movie. There’s one stunning, beautiful set after another, each appearing on screen for only a few minutes. But this constant switching from one scene to a new, almost totally unrelated one, gave the movie a dreamlike, frenetic pace, which made watching it a little bit of a chore. Still, it did make me laugh several times, and the celebrity cameos were really great.
« Previous Page — Next Page »