Joe Stracci's blog. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: writing, art, technology, Apple, food, fatherhood, parenting, and music. And photography. And design. And sports. Oh, and probably some politics too.
Posted in: Links
CANCELLED PLANS
“Hi, it’s [tenuous friend]! I know we were supposed to go to [horrible activity] at [terrible bar] in [Queens], but I’ve been reading between your tweets, and . . . I just think you deserve an evening eating Popeyes in your underwear. Do you want my HBO GO password?”
Just—yup.
Within a minute or so, my attention was drawn to a sort of commotion on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which hung on the door. I gazed intently at this, and as I did so it resolved itself into a miniature but microscopically detailed battle scene. I could see silken tents of different colors, the largest of which was flying a royal pennant. There were gaily caparisoned horses, soldiers on horseback, their armor glinting in the sun, and men with longbows. I saw pipers with long silver pipes, raising these to their mouths, and then, very faintly, I heard their piping, too. I saw hundreds, thousands of men—two armies, two nations—preparing to do battle. I lost all sense of this being a spot on the sleeve of my dressing gown, or the fact that I was lying in bed, that I was in London, that it was 1965. Before shooting up the morphine, I had been reading Froissart’s “Chronicles” and “Henry V,” and now these became conflated in my hallucination. I realized that I was gazing at Agincourt, late in 1415, and looking down on the serried armies of England and France drawn up to do battle. And in the great pennanted tent, I knew, was Henry V himself. I had no sense that I was imagining or hallucinating any of this; what I saw was actual, real.
After a while, the scene started to fade, and I became dimly conscious, once more, that I was in London, stoned, hallucinating Agincourt on the sleeve of my dressing gown. It had been an enchanting and transporting experience, but now it was over. The drug effect was fading fast; Agincourt was hardly visible now. I glanced at my watch. I had injected the morphine at nine-thirty, and now it was ten. But I had a sense of something odd—it had been dusk when I took the morphine, it should now be darker still. But it was not. It was getting lighter, not darker, outside. It was ten, I now realized, but ten in the morning. I had been gazing, motionless, at my Agincourt for more than twelve hours. This shocked and sobered me, and made me see how one could spend entire days, nights, weeks, even years of one’s life in an opium stupor. I would make sure that my first opium experience was also my last.
If you like good writing, and you like reading about drugs, you’re in luck.
Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn't mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn't happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn't what you'd expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.
More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn't be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.
This piece focuses on six major areas: health care, financial reform, the economy, the environment, national security, and social change. It isn’t all positive and there are many “points” made that some on the right will never warm up to even believing as a factual statement. But I think it’s important to read this, supporter or not, to begin to have an understanding of how the past eight years will look through the scope of history.
To begin the naming process, Placek and a few members of his staff interviewed commuters riding the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, where Lexicon’s offices are situated, near the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. They wanted to know how, in those early days of the digital revolution, people felt about the prospect of being able to receive e-mail everywhere. “When you said ‘e-mail’ to someone, it wasn’t a joyous thing,” Placek said. “The way I explained it to Research in Motion was ‘Blood pressure goes up.’ ” Placek told the executives that the device needed a name that would soothe this stress response. MegaMail, with its connotations of an unstoppable avalanche of virtual messages, was definitely out.
Most projects at Lexicon start off with free-associated Mind Maps—large diagrams of words that spread out like dendrites from a central concept. A map of hundreds of words, generated at the pace of a brainstorming session, can take less than ten minutes to produce and can resemble a Cy Twombly scribble painting. The maps help to stake out linguistic territory, and to bring forth the deeper associations that a particular product evokes—“the words underneath the name,” as Placek puts it. For the Research in Motion device, he said, “we had teams working on ‘things that are natural,’ ‘things that are fresh,’ ‘things that are fun.’ At a certain point, we got into the area of ‘things that are enjoyable.’ ” On a Mind Map, someone wrote “strawberry.” Then someone wrote beside it, “Strawberry is too slow.” Placek pronounced the word—“Str-a-a-a-w-w-berry”—drawing it out. “This technology is instantaneous,” he said.
If you’re the kind of person who watches Mad Men for the ad pitches, you need to read this piece. Also, if you listen to StartUp, a podcast I wrote about recently, Lexicon is the company that Blumberg enlisted to come up with his company’s name.
Seventeen years ago in New York City, brooding chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down to take on an opponent he had vanquished just a year earlier: the IBM computer, Deep Blue.
Like the earlier match, which Kasparov won four games to two, the rematch spoke to a fundamental question of the digital age: Who has primacy — a tangle of circuits and silicon, or a reasoning, feeling human being?
FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films follow the drama of those nine days in a short documentary film, “The Man vs. The Machine,” directed by Frank Marshall. The story — part of FiveThirtyEight’s new digital short series, “Signals” — hinges on a single move, the 44th move of the second game.
Fittingly, it involved the king.
For some reason, the internet’s cutting-edge site for data-backed narrative writing is still embedding their videos using Adobe Flash, so I can’t embed it here, but follow the link anyway. It’s a pretty interesting story. I especially loved the point made near the end about how quickly this became a pointless feat.
One more short doc for the day, this one by way of Spike Lee and Chevrolet. And they can show her coaches, her parents, and that’s all well and good, but she’s just got—it. Whatever ‘it’ is, she’s got it. I can’t wait to buy my daughter a Mo’ne Davis UCONN jersey in 5 years.
/via SB Nation
In 2013, Seattle became ground zero for the heated national debate about increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour. THE VALUE OF WORK gives voice to supporters and the opponents, including the mayor, an activist city councilwoman, small business owners, and minimum-wage workers affected by the unprecedented legislation.
Directed by Steve James (‘Hoop Dreams’), this is an important 8 minutes of narrative. I don’t agree with every sentiment in it, but it’s not meant to provide the economic rationale behind the opposing views. Knowing who it is that you’re talking about when you talk about minimum wage legislation is important though. This short doc clarifies that.
/via Devour
Think about what they’re doing. They’re turning off NFC payment systems — the whole thing — only because people were actually using them with Apple Pay. Apple Pay works so well that it even works with non-partner systems. These things have been installed for years and so few people used them, apparently, that these retailers would rather block everyone than allow Apple Pay to continue working. I can’t imagine a better validation of Apple Pay’s appeal.
If you’re an iPhone user, you absolutely must read this.
They were the ones who had called him “naughty” during the worst torture. They were the ones the hostages called the Beatles.
They instituted a strict security protocol.
When they approached the cell holding Mr. Suder, the Polish photojournalist, they called out “arba’een”: Arabic for the number 40.
That was his cue to face the wall so that when the guards entered, he would not see their faces. Several hostages were given numbers in Arabic, which appeared to be an effort to catalog them — not unlike the numbers American forces had assigned to prisoners in the detention facilities they ran in Iraq, including Camp Bucca, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, was briefly held.
“When the Beatles took over, they wanted to bring a certain level of order to the hostages,” said one recently freed European captive.
It seems that The New York Times has taken to releasing their big Sunday pieces on the web on Saturday night to drum up some click buzz. This is one time, at least, that the buzz will be warranted.
There were several times while reading, before the section that I quoted above, when I was was taken back to the brutal interrogation scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, to the details that were leaked about Iraq and Afghanistan after the fact about the real thing. This is why the way we conduct ourselves as a nation is important. The world—the good and bad parts of it—is always watching.
The quote used in the comic is taken from Smith’s memoir/self-help book Tough Shit: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good. It’s from a chapter where Smith writes about his 2011 movie Red State, a 100% independent film he released and distributed. Sick of dealing with movie studios where the marketing budget for the film would have cost more than the actual film to make, Smith produced and screened the movie himself, touring America with the film and screening it to sold-out theatres across the country.
Another excellent comic from one of my favorite inspirational sites on the internet.
