more bike head injuries (nyt)
"Still, with fewer people riding bicycles, experts are mystified as to why injuries are on the rise... Some cycling advocates contend that rising numbers of aggressive drivers are at fault, while others suggest that many riders wear helmets improperly and do not know the rules of the road. Some transportation engineers say there are not enough safe places to ride."

There is also talk in this report about "moral hazard," which is when people take more risks once they have some sort of protection. This probably has some effect, but I would argue that it has more to do with drivers than bicyclists: new cars are engineered to give drivers a sense of safety. This sense of safety, unfortunately, stops at the edges of the car.

Obey the law and ride. Drive carefully, please.
(Sunday, July 29, 2001)

why do things? (nyt)
"I love [the Tour de France], even though I've been suffering on the mountains. When I crossed the finish line in the last stage in the Pyrenees, I said, 'How can something that I love so much, that is so beautiful, hurt me this much?'"

And yet Sorensen keeps riding, in 142nd place, because it's what he loves. There's a lesson here.
(Friday, July 27, 2001)

lawrence weiner manhole covers! (nyt)
"Installed last November, 'N.Y.C. Manhole Covers,' by the Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, is thoroughly woven into the urban fabric and here to stay. "The last permanently commissioned work in New York of the 20th century" is how one of its sponsors, the Public Art Fund, describes it.

"These are real cast-iron pry-and- hook covers for real New York manholes. They cut a narrow swath across downtown Manhattan, from Tompkins Square to Bank Street, usually clustered near parks. Each is stamped with a typically elliptical, prepositional Weiner phrase: 'In a Direct Line with Another and the Next.' The words offer hope that one is in exactly the right spot and moving in the right direction."
(Friday, July 27, 2001)

be the seat
i suppose this is one way to get into the country.
(Thursday, July 26, 2001)

take transit!
this is super useful if, like me, you live in the bay area and do not own a car. i just discovered that i can get to ikea in an hour, for under $4 each way, taking public transportation.

now if only vindigo had this... hmmm.
(Thursday, July 26, 2001)

sf slows down (nyt)
"The summer of 2001 will be remembered here as the season San Francisco returned to normal, or at least its own version of normality... In the South of Market neighborhood most heavily populated by dot-com businesses, the change has been more dramatic, with commercial vacancies rising to 20 percent, from a record low of 0.6 percent only 18 months ago. In the rest of the city, 'normal' means only that rents, commercial and residential, are tapering off — remaining some of the nation's highest — but at least apartments are available."
(Thursday, July 26, 2001)

murakami = superflat global (nyt)
"It does, indeed, seem a moment of stunning possibility for Mr. Murakami, who is trained in nihonga, the Western-influenced style of traditional Japanese painting (he even has a doctorate in it from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). But it is not for lack of motivation that he has turned over his paintbrushes to his minions. On the contrary, he is simply too busy for the endless sedentary hours required for his obsessive technique, which involves layer on layer of acrylics applied to create a flawless, seamless surface."
(Wednesday, July 25, 2001)

self-generated financial aid (nyt)
"In exchange for the $40,000 for the first academic year, they are expected to wear their First USA clothing whenever they make public appearances on their campus or others for the company. Each has to maintain at least a C average (Mr. McCabe was a straight-A student in high school; Mr. Barrett got A's and B's) and live up to the terms of a moral clause — if they misbehave, the deal is off. But Mr. Filak said he fully expected to "re-sign" them for the full four years of college.

"The deal, marketing experts say, represents the evolution of The Sell, with companies analyzing how best to reach their target audiences."

What are the odds these guys are going to make some real money when they get out of school? I'd say they're damn good.
(Thursday, July 19, 2001)

how to cope with a layoff (fortune)
"Don't think spending your severance pay on a vacation will recharge you. It won't. Moreover, you'll waste the entire vacation worrying about your future."
(Tuesday, July 17, 2001)

free agency is over (fortune)
"Leaving your job--voluntarily or involuntarily--can make you more vulnerable to job loss the next time. Farber's research indicates that half of all new full-time jobs end within the first year; two-thirds are over within two years. Job loss, he writes, 'results in substantial and persistent earnings loss.' Farber's research is supported by a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of 3.3 million workers laid off from 1997 through 1999. Of the 2.2 million who had found new jobs by February 2000, only 58% had work that paid the same or better--at a time when the labor market was as tight as it gets. As for the notion that job mobility is a liberating and desirable 21st-century career path, Farber says, 'I am going to throw cold water on it. Workers who stay in one place tend to do better than those who move around. Workers have always really liked stability.'"
(Tuesday, July 17, 2001)

adonal foyle makes good (nyt)
"After years of taking part in their politically charged dinner-table debates, he recently expressed an interest in campaign finance. 'They immediately sent several books and a bunch of articles for me to read, so I'm going around the N.B.A., from plane to plane, with a computer and all these books in my hands,' he said. 'The players are looking at me like I'm certifiably nuts.'"

foyle is funding democracy matters, which is a dman good name for a nonprofit. he could be the next bill bradley, maybe. too bad he plays for the warriors and has been fighting injuries.
(Tuesday, July 17, 2001)

sam from explodingdog.com (morning news)
i hope sam gets a book deal for his explodingdog drawings. that would be so awesome.

i ordered the 3-pack of t-shirts today.
(Tuesday, July 17, 2001)

cheney wants navy to pay his energy bill (nyt)
"[T]he White House has cited the large and unpredictable energy bills of the vice president's official residence in urging Congress to relieve him of using any of his official budget to pay for electricity. The entire electric bill — an estimated $186,000 this year — would be shifted to the Navy, which owns the house... Language to transfer the cost is contained in an appropriations bill that is expected to be debated and approved on Tuesday by the House Appropriations Committee, which is controlled by Republicans... The appropriations bill also includes a provision that allows the Navy — on Mr. Cheney's behalf — to accept from corporate donors or others "consumable items, or funds for them," for use at official functions at the residence."

So in short, not only does Cheney want a free ride on his energy bills, but he wants to be on the corporate gravy train, as well. Shades of Karl Rove! (Who seems more and more like the second coming of John Sununu.)

Less flippantly, why doesn't Cheney learn that much-maligned "virtue of conservation," or better yet, turn the Vice Presidential mansion into a showcase of energy efficiency. I can't think of anything more stirring than a large windmill turning in his yard.
(Tuesday, July 17, 2001)

organic style (nyt)
"How big a market is there for organic high style?" the reporter asks. This is the wrong question, or at least the wrong slant on it. The question isn't how much consumer demand there is for it, but how much designer demand there is for organic, sustainable materials.

It's like food: if you tell people it's good for them they immediately think they won't like it. Just make the better things and sell them. Make it transparent to the consumer. Make it right.

"Next year [Nike] will begin to phase organic cotton, which is grown without water-polluting pesticides, into women's apparel, with the ultimate goal of becoming the largest purchaser of organic cotton in the world."
(Monday, July 16, 2001)

michael lewis on kids and the internet, redux (nyt magazine)
"I recall the feeling when it first dawned on me that the ground beneath my teenage feet was moving. I did not enjoy the premonition of doom in my father's world. But what troubled me even more was that some part of me wanted my father to have his own billboard beside the highway -- which of course he would never do. My response was to leave home and invent another self for myself. Had the Internet been available, I might have simply gone online."

this article is taken from a forthcoming book. i'm gonna have to buy it.
(Monday, July 16, 2001)

chainsaw al's sordid history (nyt)
"After leaving Scott, [Dunlap] wrote his autobiography, 'Mean Business,' which became a best seller after he joined Sunbeam. 'Most C.E.O.'s are ridiculously overpaid,' he wrote in the book, 'but I deserved the $100 million I took away when Scott merged with Kimberly-Clark.'"

it turns out he falsified his employment history, having been sued for the same kind of fraud he allegedly purpetrated at sunbeam. and that quote from his autobiography shows how he feels above everyone else. what an asshole.
(Monday, July 16, 2001)

easy on the hooptedoodle (nyt)
elmore leonard's ten rules for writing. they're good.
(Monday, July 16, 2001)

msft finds another way to get more of your money (cnet)
"Microsoft will provide the resources for ripping MP3 files in Windows XP after all. But there is a catch: Consumers will pay extra for it... Mark Rush, a technical support technician from Raymore, Mo., described Microsoft's approach as a 'blatantly transparent attempt to steer the market in a direction wholly favorable to Microsoft. Rather than let the merits of the Windows Media format speak for itself and win over converts by its superior quality...they chose the rather underhanded approach of limiting the quality and performance of a competing file format.'"

Will the Feds look into MSFT some more? After all, the remedy for their monopolizing ways is still to be determined. I'm not gonna hold my breath.
(Sunday, July 15, 2001)

how dubya stole the election (nyt)
all this does is reinforce the notion that republicans are much better than democrats at strategy, and reinforce the idea that pragmatism beats idealism every time. it also makes it very clear that what happened in florida was a wholesale miscarriage of justice and every single thing the republican party says it stands for.
(Sunday, July 15, 2001)

wild join nhl's top five in season tickets sales
"The Wild announced Friday that they have sold 16,000 season tickets, joining the Detroit Red Wings, Toronto Maple Leafs, Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers among the NHL's top five in sales."

1. 16,000 people are committed to seeing an expansion team play
2. Why'd the North Stars leave for Dallas again?
3. The cities I'm thinking of moving to populate most of that list. This does not bode well for Richard getting season tickets to the home team's games wherever he moves to. :(

heroes (nyt)
i have nothing to say about this, other than firefighters are angels on this earth. please treat them nicely.
(Friday, July 13, 2001)

are salgado's photographs too beautiful? (nyt)
"Resistance to the work, which after all exists ostensibly to gain recognition for overlooked masses of destitute people, is fueled by signs of vanity. It is also fueled by the cult of appreciation around Mr. Salgado, which has tended to equate doubt about the photographs with lack of sympathy for their subjects, if simply because of the sanctimony of its praise for him. It's a tricky business to get people to look at other people they may have spent a great deal of time trying, consciously or otherwise, not to notice. That said, the good photographs are so stupendously gorgeous that they make you forget everything else while you are looking at them."
(Friday, July 13, 2001)

jagr to caps (post-gazette)
"The Penguins probably did Jagr a disservice by giving him so much latitude, by not forcing him to adhere to the rules that governed his teammates. Jagr is intelligent and proud and a proven self-starter; he could have adapted to any circumstances, and might well have excelled even more than he did if the Penguins had compelled him to operate strictly within a team structure."

I'm sorry to see the Pens fall victim to the tight-pocketbook syndrome that killed the Oilers' dynasty. Their market is just too small to have someone as good as Jagr earning 25% of the team's payroll. (Though Jagr is far better than all of those overpaid Knicks veterans sitting on the bench, so it's a bit different, but still.)
(Wednesday, July 11, 2001)

ads expand out
to parking garage walls. as seen in today's WSJ.
(Wednesday, July 11, 2001)

gil scott wasn't kidding (nyt)
"'You keep sayin' kick it, quit it, kick it quit it! God, did you ever try to turn your sick soul inside out so that the world could watch you die?' he wrote in 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is.'" Turns out he's been in the grip of cocaine for years, but denies having any sort of problem at all.

"To his younger half brother, Denis Heron, that ability to get by is the problem. 'I guess we were hoping he would hit bottom, and we could jump in,' Mr. Heron said. 'But he's a survivor. He's learned how to hover right above crashing.'"
(Tuesday, July 10, 2001)

Baudrillard
Mike is the coolest. Look closely.
(Sunday, July 8, 2001)

frank rich on dubya (nyt op-ed)
"The real ideology that drives Mr. Bush remains less that of the hard right than that of his soft character, which is a product of a biography full of easy landings. A man who has never faced adversity — who has finessed Andover, Yale, Vietnam and brief careers in business and politics with well-placed connections and sweetheart deals — is not conversant with reality as most Americans have experienced it. The problem isn't that he's wealthy — so were F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, whose hard knocks in life gave them an empathy for their fellow citizens — but that he's out of touch. He doesn't know how much he doesn't know and is in no rush to find out."
(Saturday, July 7, 2001)

atkinson's ten rules of drinking, or the bar bar (texas monthly, 1983[!])
"Atkinson's Fourth Rule of Drinking: Liquor was not meant to be consumed in the presence of light, either artificial or natural.

"This is to say that good bar bars are a lot of things, but first and foremost they are dark. How dark? Mine shaft dark. I don't mean just shadowy or atmospheric or even dim. I'm talking about total pupil dilation."

it's worth noting that mr. atkinson is now sober, and writing primarily about health issues. [link from jim romenesko's media news]
(Thursday, July 5, 2001)

"you've got maelstrom" (nyt)
e-mail is one of those things that you want to deal with just once. i try to, but sometimes things need to be kept around as reminders.

right now i have 49 unfiltered messages in my inbox. i try to keep it below twenty, so this afternoon is going to require some filing and deleting.

oh, the mundane details of my life.
(Thursday, July 5, 2001)

free the dolphins (nyt)
Apparently the success of American waterworld dolphin shows has led to the illegal capture of dolphins in Central America, so they can be part of similar shows there. It's sad.

"'They are self-aware animals that make decisions and choices,' [Flipper's fprmer trainer] said. 'They're entitled to freedom of choice. Thus they are entitled to freedom.'"
(Tuesday, July 3, 2001)

a ponzi scheme crashes (nyt)
"But with a list of as many as 56,000 gullible investors, EE-Biz attracted other get-rich-quick schemers. According to court depositions, Mr. English and several other EE-Biz founders met at a Florida hotel with a man promising to engineer a giant currency trade. For the deal, the group was told that they needed to raise more than $1 million, which would be used to "lease" $100 million from a shadowy Hong Kong entrepreneur.

"The proposal was ridiculous on its face — why would anyone put his own money at risk so that others could take huge profits? But the EE- Biz investors sensed nothing wrong, and forwarded several hundred thousand dollars. The money has since disappeared."

Amazing how the desperate man who started this scheme was just as greedy and gullible as his victims.
(Tuesday, July 3, 2001)

"parasite singles" (nyt)
Any article that discusses changes in Japan's culture is by definition interesting. This is one of them: gender roles, population decline, possible changes in immigration policy, and economics.
(Sunday, July 1, 2001)

mainstream films go through the pornolizer (nyt)
"That name directors have chosen to venture into risky territory has confused audiences and critics alike, who may be used to seeing anatomical closeups of the sex act only in pornography. In struggling to talk about the subject, some moviegoers and film writers have posed an old question, "Is it art or pornography?" But that philosophical debate might be a safe haven for our discomfort. It should be evident by now — except maybe to the pre-teenagers who have learned everything they know about sex from pornography — that pornography is a parallel world where smooth-skinned, perfectly proportioned ladies say no until they mean yes, a factory line of moving bits and parts, simulated bliss acted out to a symphony of moans. Whether or not they succeed critically or artistically, let alone at the box office, movies in which sex is placed in the context of a developed story and acted out by characters blessed with the facility for language and emotions is a more threatening and intimate proposition. It is perhaps a testimony to the power and pervasiveness of pornography that films have a hard time mixing artistic pretensions with images that much of the audience still thinks of as dirty."
(Sunday, July 1, 2001)