You’ve heard of artisanal food, right? No? Good for you!
But surely you’ve been told not to play with your food. I see you nodding. You did it anyway, right? Good for you!
Sometime last year, some folks in Italy really went to work on some watermelons—you can see their handiwork here.
This carving isn’t even the best of the bunch. It just happens to have a bicycle in it.
The Dell Inspiron mini, maddeningly, does not include a numeric keypad. This is what you need to enter so-called Alt-codes to produce special characters (e.g., ê, —, “). The workaround you see most often is to use the Character Map and copy-and-paste. Frankly, that sucks.
You might also add an external keypad, but as one commenter online said, that defeats the effing purpose of having a netbook (emphasis added, all caps removed).
I started looking around for a virtual keyboard, after seeing one in action at Google Translate. Well, it turns out Windows has had on “on-screen keyboard” for several iterations of Windows as part of its suite of accessibility tools. It’s called osk.exe, and I made a shortcut to it in my taskbar.
Don’t think the trail ends here, though. There’s no way to hold down the Alt key on the virtual keyboard, so there’s no way to enter the multidigit code. I discovered that you can hold down Alt on the physical keyboard, but that in combination with the virtual numeric keypad didn’t work.
Back to searching …
Someone online had suggested the Alt-Fn combination with the regular number row, which didn’t work (surprise). But, what the heck, I thought I’d cobble that combination with the physical/virtual combo above (Alt on one, numbers on the other), and—I’ll be damned!—it worked. (See them dashes? I mean, see the em-dashes? Made on the Inspiron mini without the use of Character Map or any copying/pasting.) You have to press Alt first, then Fn (holding them both down), before hitting the numbers (i.e., Fn then Alt doesn’t work).
I’m still pissed off at Dell for not including the numeric keypad on the Inspiron mini. But I can now, finally, relegate that animus to a deeper part of my psyche.
From the You-Can’t-Make-This-Stuff-Up Dept.—headline, 28 December 2011:
Police storm Church of the Nativity to break up brawling priests
That’s the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem. Not Pennsylvania—the Holy Land.
It seems the Armenians wanted to use Spic and Span, but the Greeks insisted on Murphy Oil Soap. Neither of which works as well or as quickly as Mop & Glo, but if the Papists had been there and suggested that, it would have been a three-way melee, no doubt. (Scholars are not in complete agreement as to the cleaning agent Jesus Himself used most frequently—hence the opportunity for this particular doctrinal dispute to flare periodically.)
Some guy at Slate went to a lot of effort to let us know the ten worst catchphrases of 2011. I confess that the only reason I looked at it was to see if it included an annoying tic I see a lot, especially in online comments. It almost always closes the anonymous burst of brilliance, and it is this: “Just sayin’.” God, do I hate that.
Well, Mr. Slate Guy did not include it, and here’s probably why: some guy at Gawker complained about it in 2009.
I think I can confidently predict we’ll be seeing Mr. Slate’s 10 awful crutches (some of which aren’t so awful, but—whatever*) in 2013.
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*Banned in 1997.[citation needed]
Alas, poor Hitchens. I knew him. We all knew him, in a way we rarely come to know other journalists and pundits. I’d also met him, but that doesn’t give me special standing.* He met thousands of people, and they will all lay claim to a piece of Hitchens.
Even when he went off the rails about the existential threat from a homicidal sliver of Islam, or when he pointlessly betrayed a comrade in the service of his boundless animus toward the Clintons, he was interesting to read and even more fascinating to listen to—those long, sinuous sentences that came rumbling out of his belly. Anyone who has as many strong opinions as he had is bound to be wrong a certain percentage of the time. That wasn’t a problem.
The problem, I think, was that he was, first and foremost, a debater, with a debater’s ability to store up phrases and facts as potential weapons, marshall them smartly at the appropriate time, and destroy one’s interlocutor; not just best them—turn them into a spluttering mass of pathetic jelly. This tended to manicheanize his thinking, which made for a bracing spectacle, but could leave one hungering for gray shades, and lots of them.
The funny thing was, he seemed genuinely to like people, and the people he tussled with most ferociously seemed to like him back. He was a boozer with a boozer’s bonhomie, but I think it went beyond than that. Many commentators have noted his increasing tendency to personalize the big issues of the day, and there is likely a deep psychology of personal loss and a need to belong-without-belonging that helps explain this. While he was not the ideal poster boy for atheism (but then, who is?), he certainly went at it with gusto and élan.
For better or worse, Hitch was a man of words, and his death had unleashed a good-sized torrent of them. Slate, in particular, has put out a veritable flood of encomia and remembrances. He comes off very well, indeed, in his last journalistic home (why am I leaving out Vanity Fair? says something about me …). Gary Kamiya at Salon is more balanced; Dave Zirin in The Nation has a rather shocking tale to tell. I think the assessment that best reflects my own feelings is Katha Pollitt’s. At the end, she asks the same question my wife and I had mulled over together: will he be read in fifty years? We three think it unlikely. But he certainly affected us, now.
Okay, that’s enough about old Christopher. Time to read Glenn Greenwald’s latest.
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*Nor does our exchange of letters back in 1989—his charming, mine jejune. I had shared a letter I sent to the New York Times defending him against a dumb attack by A.M. Rosenthal that, unsurprisingly, went unpublished.
Addendum 2011.12.22: Hitchens would have had a good snort over this. Not sure what he would have thought about dying on the very day the Iraq invasion is declared over. Maybe another snort. (“Over? Riiight.”) Also, I hadn’t noticed that Greenwald had written a long piece about Hitchens on the 17th. Sobering stuff.
Will Occupy Wall Street be able to keep up the pressure through the winter? Well, that depends on a lot of things, and not just the weather. Even if enthusiasm remains high, you’ve got mayors and police forces to deal with.
Among the innovative approaches OWS has taken, one in particular caught my fancy: bicycle-powered generators. I want one of them!
Steve Jobs died on October 4, and much is being said about him. There’s no doubt he was an interesting guy. Although I have never owned an Apple product, I don’t care to get into the hoary and endless Mac vs. PC debate, or offer a tedious analysis of what Apple once was compared to what it is now.
No, I’ll just drop a Steve Jobs quote and get on with it:
I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list … That didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That’s what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
The image is from an online article about a carbon fiber–based bicycle that will be operated through brainwaves. It was not developed by Apple. But! But!
The biker will be able to shift the gears with the help of a neuron helmet. The special helmet is equipped with electrodes to detect brain activity to transmit signals to the gear shifter fixed under the seat. But initially the cyclist will have to train his ride to obey his mind. This guidance can be done through an iPhone application in which a cube remains in motion until the technology matches it with neurotransmission. [emphasis added]
Now will you bow down to your Cupertino overlords, WorldWideWeber? “Get on with it,” indeed.
There’s nothing like an execution—especially the execution of someone who is probably not guilty of the crime he was charged with—to give the lie to the claim that America is a “Christian nation.”
There’s no need to belabor the point. We don’t turn the other cheek; we don’t trust Samaritans, good or otherwise; we certainly don’t love our enemies, and we are fully capable of turning a blind eye to all manner of injustices committed in our name, across the ocean or right in our backyard.
Oh, we can be generous—when we can spare it. We do feel sorry for starving children in far-off places, and kitties that face euthenization. But when push comes to shove, we Americans shove—and then some.
When faced with a difficult decision, one that tries their moral core, some people are guided by a simple question, invoking the name of the sweet, forgiving, loving person they profess to adore and strive to imitate. But due to a diabolical twist of the tongue, an unconscious communal speech defect, it comes out this way: “What would Genghis do?”
It’s not that nothing interesting happened in August.
Maybe because it was unusually busy, or maybe because I’m becoming increasingly lazy, it will all go unrecorded for now—my faithful reader will have to wait.
Bits of August 2011 will undoubtedly get stuck in with other bits of experience and show up in this space eventually as a woven object of some sort.
For now, it’s all being held in reserve, maybe even fermenting without my knowing.
And, once again, a month will appear in the archive list with an embarrassed look on its face.
I have to admit, though, that as I watch the world through my own little eyes, more and more often I am simply speechless. And more and more I feel as if I’m drowning in other people’s words.
Random stuff from a recent brief visit to New York City …
There seemed to be more bicycles on the streets than in years past. Two things set them apart from the DC variety: many seats are covered with plastic bags, and most of the bikes sport kick-ass locks and chains.
A doorway on West 17th—maybe you can make out the boobs for eyes. (Unfortunately, the rise of smart phones has led to a resurgence of poor-quality photography. Since I was lugging all my belongings around Manhattan in a backpack for two days, I decided to leave my real cameras at home. I suppose the phone camera is better than nothing …)
Some kind of bird in the pond at the south end of Central Park—a crane? (Yes, there’s a bird somewhere in there.) I was just a little surprised to see it in the middle of the city.
Also in Central Park: a nice rock resting on one of the many outcroppings. The temperature was in the nineties, so the breakdown of people moving and people reclining/sitting in the shade was about 50-50. I spent half my time doing each.
Despite the heat, you were rarely out of earshot of music being played on various instruments. I have no idea what this one is called—it had a single string attached to a board at one end and a flexible stick at the other. It was amplified, and the player changed the pitch and vibrato by manipulating the stick. (He was also accompanied by canned music.)
Addendum 2011.07.22: Forgot to mention our visit to the Society of Illustrators on East 63rd, which had a show devoted to the cover art of pulp fiction from the ’30s–’50s. Also had a great buffet lunch in the Society’s dining room, courtesy of cousin Nishan, who is a member.
