Blog Bilong Adam

June 8, 2010 California Voter Guide

2010-06-07T12:20:00.001-07:00

Instead of telling you how I think you should vote, I'm just going to share and consolidate some links to voter guides from different newspapers across the state. For some of these, the web page I linked to just lists their recommendations, but then you click on the particular race or ballot measure to read the editorial on why they made that endorsement.

Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Daily News
Long Beach Press-Telegram
Sacramento Bee
San Francisco Chronicle
San Diego Union-Tribune
San Jose Mercury-News - they also have a comprehensive guide profiling many candidates but not giving endorsements.
Orange County Register
Oakland Tribune
Riverside Press-Enterprise: Ballot Measures, Elected Officials
Fresno Bee

I suppose if I were so inclined, I could put together some kind of a spreadsheet showing what the different papers had recommended for each race, but I'd rather go out today (it's my furlough day).

(I have no idea what the original source of the painting was. I found it by doing a Google image search for "Vote.")

Paul Simon, "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"

2010-05-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

OK, the first thing most people will notice about this video is Paul Simon's hideous mustache. The second thing they'll notice is that it's a great song. The third thing you might notice, as you don't see them until late in the clip, is that the audience seems to display, in the words of a commenter on another blog, all the enthusiasm of a class at an Economics lecture.

But the real reason I'm posting this is to point out how this song is a case of false advertising. It's all set up to make you think it's going to be one of those "list songs" like "88 Lines About 44 Women" or "We Didn't Start the Fire." Our good pal Paul Simon is going to list 50 different ways one might leave one's lover, right? Wrong! Simon only gets around to naming maybe 5 ways to leave your lover, depending on how you count (is “Don’t need to discuss much” a distinct way of leaving one's lover, or is it just a corollary to “Hop on the bus, Gus?”)

When do we get to hear the other 45 ways, Paul? We've been waiting 35 years.

Incidentally, that Nails video I linked to is pretty freaky, and probably not safe for work unless you work for National Geographic.

Teens 'n' the Environment

2009-12-03T23:28:00.001-08:00

Hey, I'm back! First blog update in three months!

So, today at the City Hall Farmers' Market, some debate team students from Santee Education Complex south of downtown had set up "SMEELA," the Santee Mini Environmental Expo of Los Angeles. What this was is that several tables were set up with representatives from environmental organizations like Treepeople and government agencies like the South Coast AQMD. So, it was a nice way to get some info about environmental stuff going on in the City; I'm considering going on a tree-planting trip with the Treepeople. Also, the more mentions the kids get on blogs, the more points they get toward a competition to win a trip to the U.N. So, go Santee!

This reminds me of how much more environmentally aware kids are these days. There is actually an Advanced Placement test in Environmental Science now; until recently I didn't even know they even offered that subejct in high school at all.

When I was a teenager it was a major chore just to recycle, having to separate our waste ourselves and haul things over to Cal State Long Beach. Nowadays, in most cities you can just toss anything recyclable in a blue bin, and you should be able to recycle more than you throw away. Plus, there's all sorts of ways to save energy in your home, save water on plumbing, and generate electricity without polluting the air.

You probably know I'm a city planner, but what I do specifically is work on Environmental Impact Reports, making sure CEQA documents get written and processed properly in the City of L.A. So as much as there are a lot of things that need to be done, I'm also quite aware of how much progress we've made over the last decade. The City of L.A., for example, has grown from 3 to 4 million people over the last 20 years, but in total we're actually using less water now.

The Beatles - 2

2009-09-09T22:43:00.000-07:00

So, everybody's talking about the Beatles today because of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (which my wife says is on its way from Amazon) and their remastered CD catalogue. While the remastered CD catalogue is tempting, I already own everything in it in non-remastered form, and it's not $180 tempting to my non-audiophile ears. Anyway, the Beatles are going to be acquiring a lot of new fans soon, so my mind wanders back to the always-fun parlor game of figuring out how to re-compile the Beatles' catalogue.

This parlor game is engaging because there's such a long history behind it. Capitol Records famously "butchered" the Beatles' releases through 1966 by rearranging (and remastering) the tracks from the Beatles' original British releases into shorter albums that also made room for the hit singles left off of the LPs in the British market. Since the Beatles broke up in 1970, record companies have opened up the archives and repackaged already-available material every few years, often making a lot of money in the process. Recently, the mid-90s Anthology series sent three double CD collections of decades-old material to the top of the charts, and the greatest-hits album 1 became the best-selling album of 2000 worldwide.

I thought the success of 1 provided an obvious opportunity for a followup that never materialized, which I'll call 2. The compilers of 1 went the high-concept route and simply presented all 27 songs that hit #1 on the charts in either the US or the UK. That approach avoids the inevitable arguments about what to include, but the Beatles' catalogue is so rich that I think there's easily enough strong material to make a superb second volume of greatest hits.

The track list here would be a lot more subjective, but there are several singles that would be absolute no-brainers to include, like "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Revolution." Plus some albums --- Sgt. Pepper, for example --- had no singles released from them, so they're completely absent from 1. One list to start with would be the 27 tracks from the 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 compilations that didn't land on 1 (and which would conveniently result in a 77:12 CD). But it would be no fun to just do that, and regardless, I'm still puzzled why they decided to put "Old Brown Shoe" on 1967-1970.

Keeping in mind that this would be for the casual listener interested in getting deeper into the Beatles' catalogue without shelling out for all 13 albums (plus Past Masters), and keeping it to 27 tracks for simplicity's sake (I'm not going to total up the run times), here's what I would put on my theoretical 2 compilation:
1. I Saw Her Standing There* (from Please Please Me)
2. Please Please Me (Please Please Me)
3. Twist and Shout* (Please Please Me)
4. All My Loving (With the Beatles)
5. And I Love Her (A Hard Day's Night)
6. No Reply* (Beatles for Sale)
7. I'm Down* (B-side to "Help"!)
8. You've Got to Hide Your Love Away (Help!)
9. Drive My Car (Rubber Soul)
10. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Rubber Soul)
11. Nowhere Man (Rubber Soul)
12. Michelle (Rubber Soul)
13. In My Life (Rubber Soul)
14. Taxman* (Revolver)
15. Strawberry Fields Forever (double-A-sided single with "Penny Lane," later on Magical Mystery Tour)
16. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Sgt. Pepper)
17. With a Little Help from My Friends (Sgt. Pepper)
18. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (Sgt. Pepper)
19. A Day in the Life (Sgt. Pepper)
20. I Am the Walrus (Magical Mystery Tour)
21. Revolution (double-A-sided single with "Hey Jude")
22. Back in the U.S.S.R. (White Album)
23. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (White Album)
24. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (White Album)
25. Birthday* (White Album)
26. Here Comes the Sun (Abbey Road)
27. Across the Universe (Let it Be)

I hope that would fit on one CD. The tracks marked with asterisks weren't on the 1962-1966 or 1967-1970 compilations. These take the place of, from those compilations, "Girl," "The Fool on the Hill," "Magical Mystery Tour," "Don't Let Me Down," "Old Brown Shoe," and "Octopus's Garden." I know, it's heavy on certain albums (especially Rubber Soul), but that's partially due to what made it onto 1.

So what do you think? Do my selections make sense? Would a casual listener get a good feel for what the Beatles were about if they had this and 1? Am I just imagining that "I'm Down" was a popular song, or was its awareness only at a level commensurate with other Beatles B-sides of the era?

UPDATE (9/10/09): I'm thinking maybe I'd drop "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "I'm Down," and "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" and replace them with "If I Fell," "Blackbird," and "Helter Skelter." Maybe. Just a thought. UPDATE (9/11/09): Or maybe "Roll Over Beethoven."

UPDATE (9/11/09): Okay, I went ahead and totaled up the run times. If this site is to be believed, then my original listing of 27 songs runs 80:03, too long for a CD. But if you replace the two Help!-era songs and "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da" with "Roll Over Beethoven," "If I Fell," and "Blackbird," you get 79:38, which should fit on a high-density CD as long as the gaps between the songs are negligible.

This Boggles My Mind

2009-08-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

Robert Zemeckis is planning to re-make Yellow Submarine. This cannot be a good idea.
Incidentally, I think the new songs the Beatles released for Yellow Submarine are some of their most underrated work. One of the long-time Beatles parlor games to try to imagine what a single-disc White Album (as George Martin would have preferred it) would have consisted of. Google "single-disc white album Beatles" and you'll get a whole bunch of attempts; most simply approach the task as whittling away half of the album's tracks into something catchier and less noodly than the actual classic album the Beatles released.

Several years ago, though, I found online a much more detailed approach to the problem that I unfortunately cannot seem to find now. On this particular site, instead of just imagining that the Beatles would throw away half of the songs on the double album, they tried to figure out how those songs would have been released in a single-disc White Album world. They started with the Yellow Submarine soundtrack being instead released as a sort of "Songs from Yellow Submarine and other songs," with the first side identical to the original release's, and the second side using songs from the White Album that would fit better with the tone of the Yellow Submarine tunes. Unfortunately, I don't remember which songs they chose, but their picks seemed to make sense. Then they figured that "Revolution 9" would have ended up on a Plastic Ono Band release (sounds reasonable) and that a couple of other tracks would have made for a good single (remember that the Beatles frequently released songs on singles that weren't featured on the original British albums). Or maybe they split up the double-A-sided "Hey Jude"/"Revolution" single and chose a couple of other songs as B-sides to those monster hits.

Anyway, I don't remember which songs they picked for what, but I do remember that their reasoning was sound and that the end result would have been pretty good --- Yellow Submarine would have become a much better album, and the remaining White Album (maybe keeping the title A Doll's House) would have still been pretty good. A fun parlor game, but in the end, I think the Beatles were right to release the White Album as a double disc. The material's weird and unconventional and is a great example of the whole being more than the sum of its parts, as the odder songs seem better when seen in context as the result of a fruitful bunch of experimental studio sessions.

On a related note, I've long thought that one of the most successful and revered double albums of all time, Pink Floyd's The Wall, would have better had Roger Waters not made the "Wall" metaphor so danged literal and cut it down to about 50 to 55 minutes. That's a bit long for a single LP, but somehow Genesis pulled off releasing Duke as a 55-minute LP in 1980. Anyway, my idea is basically just to keep the good songs. There's no real reason for anybody to listen to Waters' wallowing whining in "Don't Leave Me Now," for example. And "The Trial" sounded cool to me in high school but is just too obvious now. Songs like "Vera Lynn" and "Bring the Boys Back Home" make some sense in the context of the movie but just make the album drag.

A Breakthrough!

2009-08-18T00:33:00.000-07:00

Last month I wrote of the strange preponderance of Washington Nationals ballcaps. A friend of mine at work noticed someone wearing one of these caps at his apartment building, so he questioned him, and the guy responded that he didn't even know that it was supposed to be for the Nats, and that he instead bought it to stand for "West Side" (or perhaps "Westside.")

Adam Villani, Master of the Overrated Tourist Trap

2009-08-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

So, today Yahoo has a little feature up called "U.S.'s Most Over-Rated Tourist Traps," where they list eight places that aren't as good as we would hope. I've visited all eight. I think if you're finding the places you visit to be overrated, then you aren't doing a very good job of managing your expectations. With a lot of these places, I'm not really sure what they expected to see that they didn't see.

Let's go through the list:

1. Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
Yes, it's very tourist trappy. No surprise there. On the other hand, as the article mentions, it does have the Musee Mecanique, one of the coolest attractions you'll find anywhere. It also has the boats to Alcatraz, sea lions, and clam chowder in sourdough bowls. And here's the kicker --- really, pretty much all of San Francisco is a theme park version of a real city anyway. Fisherman's Wharf is just more honest about that.

2. Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Okay, so it's not as spectacular as the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. Who ever said it was? There's a whole lot of petrified wood and some nice views of the high desert. It doesn't deserve the slagging the article gives it.

3. Wall Street, New York City
Who ever even said this was supposed to be a tourist attraction? It's a financial district. I visited on a Sunday, and sure enough, there weren't many people around. For all the times I hear about Wall Street on the news, I was just happy to be able to have a place I could fit a visual to for it. Sorry, Yahoo Travel, there's no interactive museum of capitalism.

4. Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts
Now for this one, I agree with them. For all I wrote above about managing your expectations, I don't think it's possible to set them low enough to imagine that this giant piece of American mythology is nothing more than a boulder smaller than a VW Bug sitting on the beach inside an enclosure. Really, that's it.

5. The Alamo, San Antonio
It's a Spanish mission where a battle took place, not some gigantic palace on a hill or anything. My sister and I got here in 1991 about 15 minutes after it closed, and for the rest of our road trip we would jokingly ask each other, "Hey, remember the Alamo?" in a blase manner. But really, our disappointment was that it was closed, not that we expected it to be bigger.

6. Hollywood, Los Angeles
I suppose if you're a complete rube, you might expect to see hordes of movie stars strolling Hollywood Blvd. and the streets paved with gold or something, but surprise! that's not reality. What is in Hollywood is several spectacular movie theaters, some good live performance venues, some tourist attractions, the Walk of Fame, handprints in the concrete, nightclubs, a bunch of shops, drunks, punks, etc. And it's a lot nicer and livelier than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

7. Bourbon Street, New Orleans
Is it full of drunk tourists and gift shops selling cheap gewgaws? Yes. Should you look beyond it to the other neighborhoods? Yes. But would your first trip to New Orleans be complete without it? No! Some of these travel writers need to step outside themselves every now and then and learn to appreciate tacky, touristy places. I'm not saying that touristy = good, I'm just acknowledging that some places are overrun with tourists for a reason. They're places they don't see back home. And guess what? If you're visiting New Orleans on vacation, you're no less a tourist if you avoid Bourbon Street than if you embrace it. Tourism is not a dirty word.

8. The Queen Mary, Long Beach, California
Long Beach is my hometown, and I would say that the Queen Mary does qualify as over-rated except for the fact that I've never heard anybody rate it very high, unless you count their own advertisements. It's a big, nice, historic boat, it looks very good across the harbor, they have fireworks in the summer, you can take an interesting tour, but... yeah, it's just not as good as it is big. I lived about three miles away for 28 years and visited maybe four times.

So there you go. I think only 2 of those 8 really count as overrated. For the rest, sure, anybody can imagine some perfected version of them in their minds, but to say something doesn't live up to some dream-world version of itself isn't really a knock against it.

Paris: More like Los Angeles than New York

2009-07-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

Human Transit has a nice post here with one of the author's "favorite urban heresies":

Paris is more like Los Angeles than it is like New York.

He goes on to explain that the New York metro area has its jobs extremely concentrated in the center, whereas L.A. and Paris have their job centers in multiple clusters.

He then goes on to note that the mass transit system in L.A. built over the last two decades (pictured above) has been very oriented toward Downtown. I've noticed that the system is like spokes without a wheel for a while now. With as much progress as there's been in the transit system, it's still in its infancy. I think starting soon, though, Metro is going to need to start thinking seriously about turning the system into a real network instead of just a bunch of lines going to Downtown.

Here's the Long-Range Transportation Plan and here is more detail on various ongoing projects. There needs to be a way to go north from LAX to the Westside... I guess we can blame Zev Yaroslavsky and Henry Waxman for the Westside being about 20 years behind where it should be.

Washington Nationals Fandom?

2009-07-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

So, I've noticed, from time to time, young people wearing the ballcap depicted on the right, which is for the Washington Nationals. Young people wear ballcaps all the time, of course, and obviously not everybody is a fan of the local teams. But there seem to be more people wearing this than one would ordinarily think. First of all, I live more than 2,500 miles away from Washington. Second, the Nationals are an awful team --- they've never finished higher than 4th place, and they currently have the worst record in baseball. They're also new (they moved to Washington in 2005), and I don't know of any legion of fans like the Cubs or Yankees have.

And yet I seem to see people wearing their cap more often than many better or more well-established teams in baseball. How did this become fashionable? Is there some rapper that wears their gear? Is this some sort of in-joke where the "W" stands for something else? Or are the Nationals just a lot more popular than I thought? What's up with that?

The National Park Service Teases the East Bay

2009-06-24T00:32:00.001-07:00

I'm heading up to the San Francisco Bay Area next week, and so in preparation I decided to take a look at the National Park Service sites in the East Bay, where I'll be staying. I'd been to various units of Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, but there are no fewer than four NPS sites on the other side of the Bay. You know the National Park Service, right? Stunning natural grandeur, amazing slices of history, memories to treasure, etc., right?

Well, I haven't been to any yet, but the National Park Service sites in the East Bay look kinda fourth-tier to me. They all certainly commemorate worthy people or events, but I hope you'll understand when I say that visiting them doesn't really sound like an experience up there with Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, or even historic sites like Independence Hall or Alcatraz.

Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park
It seems like a neat idea, but all it amounts to for now is a memorial that started as a public art project, a visitor center in the lobby of Richmond City Hall that's closed for the summer, and a self-guided auto tour of some old factories --- or sites of factories, none of which, of course, are making destroyers anymore. One of the ships is available to visit, so there is that.

Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site
One of America's greatest writers, this site is basically just his house, and most of the year it's open by reservation only. The annual festival in September celebrating his plays and life isn't even at the historic site, it's in town, presumably because that's where they have a theater.

John Muir National Historic Site
John Muir, mountain man, father of the National Parks and great naturalist, gets a National Historic Site, and, like Eugene O'Neill's, it's just the house he lived in. No, not some log cabin he built with his own hands in the wilderness, but his wife's parents' house on the edge of town where he managed their fruit ranch. At least it's open to the public. Not to be confused with Muir Woods National Monument.

Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial
Visiting this site of a WWII munitions disaster requires reservations made two weeks in advance to get security clearance, since it's on an active Navy base. If you do visit, you park outside the gate and get shuttled to the site, but the website is mum on what they actually show you once you get there.

Michael Jackson vs. Bob Fosse

2009-06-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

Wow... no doubt in my mind that Michael Jackson is (was?) an amazing dancer, but I had no idea how much he lifted his moves from Bob Fosse. Check out this compilation of clips of Fosse as the Snake from the 1974 movie version of The Little Prince set to "Billie Jean":

Sullivan and Coates

2009-06-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

This past week, bloggers Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nahisi Coates engaged in an interesting back-and-forth on Sonia Sotomayor and racial identity, which led into a discussion about the nature of conservatism vs. liberalism and blogging in general. Somebody at The Atlantic conveniently compiled the different posts into one web page for our edification. Thanks, somebody!

The Oprah Menace

2009-06-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

Recently Newsweek had a substantial article on the pernicious effects of Oprah Winfrey's influence. It covered a lot, but the main problem is that she provides a prominent platform for a lot of charlatans peddling unproven self-improvement and health ideas yet doesn't do much of anything to show that these ideas may be unsupported scientifically, outright quackery, or even potentially harmful.

Specifically, she's provided a forum for former Playboy bunny Jenny McCarthy, who used to just be an irritating media presence but has now become the public face of the movement against immunization. This is based on the idea that immunization causes autism, which has been soundly discredited. With parents undeterred by the evidence provided by actual scientists doing actual research and instead choosing to follow the brain-dead former host of MTV's "Singled Out," the L.A. Times is reporting that a number of schools in wealthy areas, particularly charter and non-Catholic private schools, have levels of non-immunization high enough to become a problem with herd immunity. In other words, it's not just a matter of personal choice, but a legitimate public health problem.

People are taking bad advice from a nude model and making it more and more likely that diseases that had essentially been eradicated in the developed world will once again infect and kill children. I hope they're proud of themselves.

Advice for Time-Travelers

2009-06-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

In December 2006, I asked the following question about time travel:

Say you have a time machine and wish to go back to sometime in the past. Now let's say you don't want to arouse suspicion by bringing back some kind of futuristic object... What should you bring with you that would enable you to make the most money in the past? ... What would be cheap today but recognizable and valuable in the past?

I think I have the answer: aluminum. Despite it being the most abundant metallic element in the earth's crust, before the Hall-Héroult process was invented in 1886, it was extremely difficult to extract from its ores. As a result, aluminum was considered a precious metal. As Wikipedia says,

Napoleon III, emperor of France, is reputed to have given a banquet where the most honoured guests were given aluminium utensils, while the other guests had to make do with gold.

So remember, before you step into your time machine to go back into the 19th century, pick up a roll of Reynolds Wrap and remember to toss out the packaging.

One Small Step for Man

2009-06-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I linked to a story about how some analysis of the recordings of the transmissions from Apollo 11 indicated that my namesake Neil Armstrong did in fact say, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" upon setting foot on the surface of the Moon, and that the "a" had been lost in the transmission.

Now the BBC is reporting that further analysis of cleaner recordings indicates that that was not the case, and that Armstrong did indeed flub his historic pronouncement. Well, nobody's perfect. The analysis of Armstrong's speech did indicate that he intended to contrast "a man" with "mankind," and not just "man," which in this context would mean the same thing as "mankind," and thus not make very much sense.

Regardless, it's a wonderful sentiment. Armstrong humbled himself by attributing the glory of the achievement to humanity as a whole, not just himself, not just the Apollo team, and not just the United States of America. And he did so with a poetic use of contrast remembered for the ages even with the dropped word.

Against Princesses

2009-05-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

The AP has an article here about how indulging little girls in their fantasies of being a princess has gone too far, and I wholeheartedly agree. The article focuses on how the ideals of princessdom --- basically, being entitled to get anything you want and having people serve you --- aren't necessarily the sorts of values we'd like to impart to our daughters. I would like to add to this criticism of the princess phenomenon by pointing out that there are actual real-life princesses in the modern world, and I have yet to see a single one of them wear a frilly pink dress covered in glitter and stars.

In real life, princesses tend to just dress like stylish, wealthy women. Here are Princesses Stéphanie (l) and Caroline (r) of Monaco at a Red Cross gala, looking like they couldn't be happier:Here is Crown Princess Masako of Japan along with her daughter, Princess Aiko. In America, Aiko would be the right age to "dress up like a princess," but even she has the good sense to instead just dress up like a little rich girl:Princess Anne of the United Kingdom isn't even all that stylish, renowned for re-using outfits as many as 27 years later. I don't know how many girls have this in mind when they play dress-up:
So the next time your daughter want to pretend she's a princess, just give her a navy-blue overcoat and have her attend a benefit dinner.

Addendum to the List of People Older Than You Might Think

2009-05-30T11:57:00.001-07:00

A worthy addition to my list of people older than you might think would be actress/poker player Jennifer Tilly, who is 50 and still looks great. She's dating a guy 14 years her junior and people are still jealous of him. She was hilarious in Seed of Chucky.

Feral Parrots

2009-05-29T00:17:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers of this blog should realize that I have a hobbyist's interest in taxonomy and enjoy trying to identify animals I encounter (or eat)*. Every now and then I come across flocks of feral parrots around Southern California, and I wondered what kinds they were. Well, lo and behold, The California Parrot Project has a very helpful website on feral parrot populations around California, listing 13 different species.

Unfortunately, they all pretty much look the same, green bodies with different colors on their heads. So it's pretty hard to figure out exactly which ones I've been looking at. They do say, though, that the yellow-chevroned parakeet is especially associated with floss silk trees, and sure enough, that's exactly the tree in which a flock had taken up home near City Hall last week. So it's a fairly good bet that that's what I saw there, though I've seen feral parrots in other places, too.

*For those of you who followed the links and may be wondering, I have now seen moose in the wild (two of them in Alaska, along with a bunch of other animals), and I have now eaten goat that was very good. A Nigerian guy at work had gone to a butcher and had one butchered fresh and brought some in; it tasted like very flavorful beef.

Honey vs. Vinegar

2009-05-28T12:48:00.001-07:00

In a case that sounds like it was lifted from an old Hostess Fruit Pies ad, it seems that U.S. interrogators were able to get a lot of info from a diabetic associate of Osama bin Laden by offering him sugar-free cookies. No torture necessary.P.S. Seriously, check out the link to Seanbaby's Hostess page, an amazing archive of Hostess comic-book ads.
P.P.S. No, seriously, Thor in "The Ding-a-Ling Family"
P.P.P.S. Just imagine a world before the dawn of Wikipedia, when we lacked this handy table of Snack Cake Cross-Brand Equivalencies.

Brand Extension: IMAX and Ball Aerospace

2009-05-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

Here are two examples of brand extension, one ill-advised and one mysterious yet successful:

1. IMAX: Two weeks ago, when looking for a theater in which to see Star Trek, I saw that Star Trek: The IMAX Experience was showing on quite a few screens around Southern California, including our nearby AMC Promenade 16 in Woodland Hills. I didn't recall there being an IMAX screen at that theater, and hadn't seen any construction going on that could have resulted in an IMAX theater. Armed with that knowledge, plus the fact that such a presentation would have involved a $5-per-ticket surcharge, I figured that something fishy was going on and we instead saw it at Pacific's Winnetka 21 in Chatsworth.

It turns out I was right. Actor/comedian Aziz Ansari (who plays Tom Haverford on Parks and Recreation) saw Star Trek: The IMAX Experience at one of the AMC theaters in Burbank and was d ismayed to discover that the theater was not a full-sized giant IMAX screen, but instead a normal-sized screen that was instead supposedly IMAX quality (also check out part two).Well, guess what, a screen and sound system can have all the quality they want, but if the screen isn't five stories tall, that's not IMAX! Well, OK, maybe the IMAX company had something to do with the setup, but that's extending the brand way beyond what people expect for IMAX. I mean, if Cadillac slapped one of their hood ornaments on a Chevy Cavalier, that wouldn't really be a Cadillac either, no matter what the owner's manual says. Companies should know that if their brand stands for exceptional quality, don't start putting it on inferior products if you don't want to hurt your image.

2. Ball Aerospace: You're familiar with Ball canning jars, with the logo seen here, right? Well, it shouldn't surprise you that the Ball Corporation, which got big making canning jars, has branched out into metal cans, aerosol cans, and other similar products. But it certainly surprises me that Ball Aerospace, which, among other things, built the science instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope, is a division of the same company. Reading the company's history, it seems they started in 1956, but I really have no idea how the transition was made. Did they start just making glass or ceramic electronic components or something? Bizarre how these things happen.

Power Laws, Cities, and Organisms

2009-05-24T12:25:00.001-07:00

Steven Strogatz has a brief but interesting article in the New York Times about how the amount of infrastructure needed for a city of a particular size scales up as a 3/4 power law, and that this is akin to the scaling of metabolism in large and small organisms. In other words, the economies of scale mean that the efficiency bonus that large cities have compared to smaller cities is similar to the calorie consumption of an elephant vs. the calorie consumption of an equal mass of mice.

Ready to Vote

2009-05-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

The real reforms I'm looking for aren't there -- 50%+1 to pass the budget, 2/3 to amend the state constitution, and eliminating term limits --- but after reading through the voter info guide, I'm actually inclined to vote yes on all the state budget props; most take earmarked money and free it up for the general fund so the lawmakers can actually use it for the budget.

Make no mistake, though, the lawmaking and budget process in California is seriously broken. The Economist has a good article summarizing the problems.

As for the other races, I'm voting for Jack Weiss for city attorney, because while he's been personally annoying trying to push projects through our office, ultimately he's on the side that recognizes that more densification and more development is the way to go; I'm afraid Trutanich would put control over land-use issues in the hands of NIMBYs.

I took a look at the Community College District candidates' web sites and decided to go with Tina Park for Seat 2 on the strength of her budgetary credentials* and Nancy Pearlman for Seat 6 on the strength of her environmental credentials.

*Also, it's hard to vote against a campaign photo like this:

Ventura vs. Hasselbeck

2009-05-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

Jesse Ventura schools Elisabeth Hasselbeck on torture:

Tuesday's Election

2009-05-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

Man, there's an election on Tuesday and I really haven't done my homework yet. State Propositions 1A - 1F are widely touted by Sacramento as being necessary to balance the budget, but I haven't yet figured out what they do, much less if they're really a good idea. What I'd really like to see happen is a wholesale restructuring of the state government, reversing some of the insanity that requires a 2/3 majority of the legislature to pass a budget while allowing the constitution to be amended with a 50%+1 majority from the voters. I mean, how dumb is it that they have to beg us to pass propositions to keep the state afloat instead of being able to fix it themselves?

So anyway, does anybody out there have good arguments or even just good information on these propositions?

I also have a runoff for City Attorney and two Community College District trustee positions to vote for. I've dealt with Jack Weiss at work; does anybody know anything about Carmen Trutanich or the people running for the LACCD seats?

Older than You Might Think

2009-05-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here are some people who are older than one might otherwise think.

1. Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, is 63. She was already 33 when "Heart of Glass" hit the charts. Wikipedia says that when "Maria" topped the British charts in 1999, she was the oldest female singer ever to do that. (The U.S. record is held by the slightly-younger Cher.)

2. One-hit wonder Toni Basil is 65. She was already 39 when she dressed up like a cheerleader for "Mickey." Singing was just a side job for Basil, who has a decades-long career as a choreographer and had small parts in movies like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.

3. Artist/musician Yoko Ono is 76. She was more than 7 years older than John Lennon. She was 70 when she had her first #1 hit, the remix of "Walking on Thin Ice," which topped the Billboard Dance/Club Play chart.

4. "Inside the Actors Studio" host and former pimp James Lipton is 82.

5. Christopher Lee is 86, turning 87 later this month. He was 82 when he dueled Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith.

Unanswered Questions

2009-05-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Mathematica creator and renowned genius Stephen Wolfram has a new project called "Wolfram|Alpha" whose goal is to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone." The idea is that instead of searching for somebody else's answers on the web, Wolfram|Alpha will instead compute the answers applying various methods and programs to a very large collection of data. So it's a "computational engine," not a search engine.

Pretty cool idea. I'm glad somebody's doing it. I'm also glad that he plans on continuing to improve it, because so far it hasn't been able to answer any of my questions.

First I saw that it does indeed have info on baseball, so I tried to find out all the people who had been caught stealing twice in one inning. This should be calculable, given enough data on major league baseball. I had heard that it happened to Don Baylor once, but an article I read once cryptically said that it had happened several times since without specifying anything further. So I tried all sorts of combinations of words related to that concept, yet Wolfram|Alpha kept returning a message that it "isn't sure what to do with your input." So I tried the much simpler query "most strikeouts baseball" and a few variants on that, and it was still just as confused. So its baseball database is, for now, quite limited.

So, a totally different question, "Where in the U.S. is mail delivered on Sunday instead of Saturday?" (and many variants on the same), which longtime blog readers may recall has been bugging me since early 2006. About the best Wolfram|Alpha could do is suggest that I might be asking something about the Sunday Mail.

It also can't verify that this Census block group in New York is the most densely-populated in the country.

OK, so I didn't have any hard mathematical questions to ask. Are any of the rest of you able to find answers to questions you have? Remember, part of the whole point of this project is that it's supposed to be for "everybody," not just scientists looking to calculate equations.

MORE (5/20/09): Farhad Manjoo at Slate is similarly disappointed.

Here Come the Warm Jets

2009-05-14T21:50:00.000-07:00

Two seasonal concession workers at Yellowstone National Park were fired after urinating into Old Faithful. The article adds the following helpful note:

The geyser was not erupting at the time.

"Mr. Cheney, you did not keep us safe."

2009-05-14T09:16:00.000-07:00

Paul Begala lays out the case against Dick Cheney and torture:

Perhaps what's most galling about Mr. Cheney is how, without irony, humility or apology, he holds himself out as someone who has protected America when in fact he shirked his responsibility before 9-11 and misled us into war after. The closest Dick Cheney has ever come to fighting for America is when he shot his lawyer in the face.

On Lawyers

2009-05-13T23:50:00.000-07:00

Arguing with lawyers is much easier when you realize that it's not personal with them. Members of the public will get all offended when you tell them something they don't want to hear. Lawyers will argue their cases but not get all offended when you don't tell them what they want to hear.

I suppose I might feel differently if lawyers were trying to sue me or something. But in my job, lawyers are mostly just trying to convince me of things, and I'm under no obligation to agree with them. It's not a bad thing.

Further Pondering

2009-05-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

So, why is it that deodorant commonly causes allergic reactions in people, but not other cosmetic or hygiene products? I mean, I've never heard of someone breaking out in a rash from their toothpaste or hair gel. Is it something inherent in the nature of the product, or is it because it's worn all day in a warm, moist, sensitive area of the body? Or do I just not know about people getting rashes from other things, like makeup or feminine hygiene products?

Blog Update

2009-05-04T23:30:00.000-07:00

If you check out the links to the right, they've been cleaned up some. If you come across any dead links, let me know. I also added SamLand's Disney Adventures, a new blog about urban design and Disneyland from my ex-coworker (and Disney enthusiast) Sam Gennawey.

Saguaro Question

2009-04-28T00:46:00.000-07:00

I'm heading out to the Phoenix area for the latter half of this week, and I can't remember if there is much in the way of saguaro cactus in the area. I last drove across Arizona about five years ago, and I definitely remember big swaths of saguaros down near Tucson, but I can't remember seeing many near Phoenix. If I check the various web pages on the saguaro, they show its distribution continuing up around the Phoenix area, but they don't really say how abundant it is there. Are there just isolated stands around Phoenix, or are there any big forests of them within an hour's drive or so? How about any big forests of them near other sights worth seeing?Photo from http://www.azwild.org/newsletter/2003_02_shortakes.shtml
UPDATE: I didn't see any saguaro forests as thick as the ones farther south in Arizona, but there are a lot of saguaros around town, and when I headed northeast of Scottsdale along AZ-87, there were a pretty good number of them as the elevation rose from maybe about the Fort McDowell Indian Reservation to a few miles before Sunflower, where they stopped abruptly.

Chrysler to be Ruled by Fiat?

2009-04-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

So, what do you folks think about the various plans for the American auto industry? Today's news says that Chrysler has reached a deal with the UAW and is nearing a deal with Fiat, while meanwhile GM will undergo a major restructuring where it'll be mostly owned by the UAW and the government, phase out the Pontiac brand, and sell or phase out Saturn, Hummer, and Saab.

I don't make any pretense about having any kind of expertise on this subject, just a few thoughts to bounce off of the rest of you to get your input. If a company (or bank) is too big to fail, they're too big to exist. Split them up instead of merging them. GM currently sells cars in the U.S. under the Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac, GMC, Saturn, Hummer, and Saab marques, while internationally they also sell as Vauxhall, Opel, Daewoo, and Holden. That's way too many and just screams "bloat" to me. It seems to me that we'd have a healthier manufacturing sector if we had many smaller auto manufacturers rather than three big ones. Here's why:

Fewer layers of management between the top and the design, sales, and labor side would make for more responsive companies,
More companies in the market would allow for more real specialization toward different niches, and more competition between companies,
Failure by one company would not create such an industrywide collapse, and
Barriers to entry by start-up companies would be lower.

Another point is that if the federal government is to be a big owner of GM, then GM needs to act in the taxpayers' interests. And part of that would be that GM needs to prioritize making cars that aren't as bad for the environment, ones that use less gas and/or alternative energy sources, create fewer harmful emissions, and are made from raw materials extracted using more environmentally sound methods. And hey, how about retooling some of the car-building factories and retraining some of the car-building workers to making buses or mass-transit systems?

Amusing Lists

2009-04-14T23:40:00.000-07:00

Cracked.com seems to have read my mind and determined that I'll read any online article as long as it's presented in the form of a numbered list. My favorites, thus far, are (not really in order):

Not Available on Amazon

2009-04-11T14:21:00.001-07:00

1. You can find DVDs of Don Hertzfeldt's great animated films on his own website, along with T-shirts, etc. Amazon only has used copies for much more money.2. This MySpace page features several unreleased Oingo Boingo songs as well as several video clips of the band.
MORE: Dig that 1982 clip of Boingo miming performances of "Nothing to Fear" and "Grey Matter" on MV3. MV3 was a local show that ran on Channel 9, featuring people dancing in a studio while bands performed and videos played. I didn't have MTV but would watch this just about every afternoon after school. Notably, it had more local music and a much stronger New Wave bent than was popular nationwide. The lineup of videos from the day of Boingo's performance, as seen in the credits:

ALSO: The same guy with the clips above has more stuff available here.

Against hypocrisy

2009-04-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

Lawrence O'Donnell takes on Pat Buchanan over the opposition to Obama speaking at Notre Dame that didn't appear when George W. Bush spoke there.

R.I.P., Dave Arneson

2009-04-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

Just a little over a year ago, Gary Gygax died. And now we learn, via BoingBoing, that Dave Arneson, the other co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has passed away as well. Arneson wasn't as famous as Gygax and didn't popularize the game the way he did, but from all reports he was just as instrumental in developing the basic rules of D&D as Gygax was. That's understating things, though: he was just as instrumental in developing the entire concept of role-playing games as Gygax was. That's a pretty remarkable feat, if you think about it. Here's a nice cartoon tribute.

Another tribute to Arneson is that back in 2007 when I was collecting old D&D products off of eBay, I never did manage to win an auction for the DA ("Dave Arneson") series of modules; they were consistently some of the most sought-after (and, hence, expensive) titles out there.

In the news

2009-04-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

1. Johann Hari visits Dubai and writes about how it is a dictatorship built on slave labor.

2. Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex.

3. Parking guru Donald Shoup talks about Los Angeles.

4. Sasha Frere-Jones discusses differences between the American and British music scenes.

5. The Wyoming State Library promoted its online database of Chilton auto-repair manuals by distributing stickers and posters to auto-repair shops of the mudflap silhouette lady reading a book.

ALSO (4/9/09): 6. An old racist who used to burn crosses and beat up civil rights advocates is apologizing for his past.

It is very frustrating to try to play music.

2009-03-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

UPDATE (4/4/09): I figured out how to make noise with it. I was holding it against my teeth wrong.

Damn... I've got a Jew's harp here and can't make any sounds that can be heard outside of my head. And it doesn't sound like it's supposed to, just some humming. It's one thing to not be able to play an instrument well, it's another to not be able to even make a sound with it. Argh!

A while ago at my parents' house I complained about something that I've felt frustrated by pretty much my whole life. What that is is that I have music in my head but find it extremely difficult to be able to play that music on any kind of musical instrument. I have tried many different instruments.

I grew up in a musical family and have tried to learn how to play the guitar on many different occasions, yet have never gone beyond the most rudimentary level of skill. Like, I can strum a little and play a few chords, but changing between chords takes a lot of effort, the tone sounds wrong half the time because my fingers aren't holding the strings down hard enough, or they're damping the other strings, or I play the wrong strings, etc., and I'm pretty much useless at anything more intricate than just strumming.

My parents said that my problem in trying to learn to play instruments is that I never practiced anything for long enough to really get good at it. They're right. But my mom also said something insightful beyond that, that the reason why I never stuck with anything long enough was that my physical ability to play was always outstripped by my understanding of how, logically, playing the instrument should work. This is also true. I know how to play the guitar, I just can't do it. (I said the same thing about bicycles when I was a kid before my body learned how to ride one.)

It points to what I like the call The Lie of Rock 'n' Roll. That lie is that anybody can play rock 'n' roll; all it takes is a guitar and three chords. But that's not true. Even playing something simple like the Ramones takes some skill and practice. If you're like me and you have a song in your head and some chord diagrams in a book, you can pick up a guitar and play, but it won't sound like the song in your head; it will sound like crap.

I think The Lie of Rock 'n' Roll is something of a corollary to The Lie of Creativity in Art. That lie is that what really matters are ideas and creativity. In actuality, you need those to become good, but before you do that you need talent and skill. I've got ideas up the wazoo, but I can't draw. I can doodle, but I can't put a pencil to paper and make something that looks like what's in my head. Don't ask me to draw your portrait unless you want to look very ugly.*

You may be puzzled by the fact that I am a member of a band and have written a number of songs, a few of which are actually good. To explain, let me say three things.

Our standards of musicianship in Stale Urine are very low. We have a saying, "practice makes pathetic."
I do not play any instruments that play notes, just percussion. Percussion is simple. You hit something and it makes a noise. I can experiment with different objects, and they will make different noises, and that's pretty satisfying. But even there, I never use foot pedals, because I can't coordinate my body that way.
I am the least musically inclined member of the band and would be nowhere without my bandmates. When I get credit for "writing" a song, what they generally means is that I write the lyrics, sometimes with help from the other guys, and then I sing them in some sort of tune that makes sense to me. Then the other guys, who can actually play instruments, change what I sing into something resembling an actual tune. Jon Lange and I work particularly well together this way, but Jon lives in Seattle, so I don't see him much. Take this for what you will, but I have heard that this is how Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones used to work together.

With this Jew's harp, I'm not even sure I know how to work it. Oh sure, there are online tutorials that make it sound real easy. I dunno, maybe every sentence in the tutorial needs the caveat, "and you have to do it just right," or maybe there's just one thing I'm doing wrong, or maybe I've got a bum jew's harp, or what. Anyway, if any of you out there in Southern California know what you're doing with one of these and can show me, I'd appreciate it.

*I think I am actually pretty decent at photography. I've never studied it in depth, but I think I do a pretty good job of composing pictures and finding good things to take photos of.

Mid-Century Tract Home Brochures

2009-03-18T22:50:00.001-07:00

This is a pretty interesting Flickr photoset... somebody's got a collection of a whole bunch of Southern California tract home brochures from the 1950s-1970s and scanned them in. The graphic design is fantastic. The architecture... ehh. Really well-preserved examples of these houses are marvelous, but the fact of the matter is that prewar construction tends to hold up a lot better. My wife and I have been looking at houses around the Valley, and if the owners haven't taken good care of these things, they look like what they are --- cheaply made and now 50 years old.

Against Soccer

2009-03-18T06:12:00.001-07:00

It's hyperbolic, sure, but Stephen H. Webb writes one of the more amusing anti-soccer screeds I've read in quite a while.

Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption.

Question for dog owners

2009-03-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

Just wondering, as I've never owned a dog: If you're taking a dog for a walk, and you come upon some wild mushrooms, does the dog know not to eat them, or do you have to try to restrain the dog from gobbling them up?Photo from Cute Overload

Sir Eugene Kingsale

2009-03-11T00:09:00.000-07:00

Wow... not only did the Dutch improbably beat the Dominican Republic on Saturday, but tonight they did it again, eliminating the superstar-packed Dominicans from the competition!

Eugene Kingsale, after committing an error to allow the D.R.'s only run in the top of the 11th, was instrumental in the Netherlands' comeback walkoff win in the bottom half of the inning. He singled in the first run, advanced to third on a botched pickoff attempt, and then came home to plate the winning run on Yurendell de Caster's hard-hit grounder off of Willy Aybar's glove. What a game!
So you might think there'd be something big in it for Kingsale. But here's the thing... he's already been knighted by Queen Beatrix! Maybe there's an eligible bachelorette in the royal family they can marry off.

Oh, and take note of one of the stranger bits revealed in the Tom Verducci article above... Fidel Castro himself is blogging the tournament.

Beisbol Fever

2009-03-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

The 2009 World Baseball Classic is underway! Last time there were all sorts of off-the-field controversies, but this time it appears to be all about good competition. Last night I watched a remarkably improved Chinese team eliminate Taiwan behind American-born Pirates farmhand Raymond Chang, and the U.S.A. just beat Canada in a 6-5 nailbiter in front of a packed house at Rogers Centre (née Skydome) in Toronto. The biggest surprise so far is the surprising 3-2 upset of the Dominican Republic by the Netherlands. Don't fall asleep against the weaker teams!There are some welcome changes to the format this year. The teams are the same, but instead of a round-robin, the pool play is double-elimination, which eliminates the bizarre tie-breaker rules from last time. What hasn't been remarked upon much is that the venues are more international this year. In 2006, two of the four pools played in spring-training facilities in Arizona and Florida, whereas this time the opening round games are in Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Japan before moving to the U.S. proper in the second round. What's not welcome is the international extra-inning rule putting runners on base automatically in the hopes of scoring runs, but thankfully this doesn't kick in until the 13th inning, so it probably won't be an issue.

And of course, the participation of 16 teams from 6 continents is a stinging rebuke to the International Olympic Committee's elimination of baseball and softball from the Olympics, as well as any other idiots who think baseball is somehow only an American sport. The semifinals and final game are at Dodger Stadium March 21-23, and I plan to be there, regardless of which teams are playing. Who wants to come with me?

UPDATE: Wow, Pudge Rodriguez is having a 4-hit, 4-RBI, 3-run, 2-homers-a-double-and-a-stolen-base day. And he's still unsigned this year!

Loh on Class

2009-02-26T22:37:00.000-08:00

Sandra Tsing Loh writes about class stratification in America, defined less by wealth or birth but by taste. Personally I feel somewhere between the young urban hipoisie and the Joe Biden/Elliot Stabler working-class Catholics.

The Car of the Future?

2009-02-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

They say that this all-electric, all-futuristic Aptera 2e will be ready to deliver by October of this year.Check out video of a test drive here.

Aigghhh! My eyes!

2009-02-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

Barbara Bush chair, by Phillip Grace,
Washington, DC, ca. 1992
Gift to Barbara Bush from Mr. Grace
Painted wood,
52 1/2 x 26 x 25 inches

As First Lady, Barbara Bush championed causes such as literacy and aid to the homeless. Mr. Grace made this chair for her in appreciation of her good works for the country.

Bass piano?

2009-02-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

So, a bass guitar is pretty much just like a guitar, strung to play lower notes. Can someone more musically knowledgeable than I am explain why nobody's ever made a bass piano full of really long, thick strings? I would love to see (and hear) a giant bass piano.

UPDATE: My brother-in-law informs me that Bösendorfer does, in fact, make a piano with four extra lower keys.

Strange Maps

2009-02-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

Nope, not the Strange Maps blog. This time, I present to you a very strange version of the song "Maps," mostly performed by somebody named Rocco Privetera instead of by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

More: Though they could have used better singers, this live performance of The Wall at a club in NYC is pretty impressive, particularly the lead guitarist.

Happy Birthday, Lincoln and Darwin

2009-02-12T21:33:00.000-08:00

I knew that today was Abraham Lincoln's bicentennial, and also knew that Charles Darwin's 200th birthday was coming up, but I didn't realize until today that both men were born on the same day 200 years ago. I haven't rigorously checked all possible other dates, but considering that the biggest pair of twins I can think of doesn't really come close, that's got to be the biggest one-two punch of famous people born the same day of the same year.

This guy did some research and came to a similar conclusion; the one that strikes my fancy the most is George W. Bush and Sylvester Stallone on July 6, 1946. He also came up with some interesting coincidental death dates, although this discussion points out that Shakespeare and Cervantes didn't actually die on the same day --- Cervantes died on April 23, 1616 of the Gregorian calendar (which we use today), while Shakespeare died ten days later on April 23, 1616 of the Julian calendar, which England still used at the time.

The same discussion also brings up pairs of people who died on the same day non-coincidentally, such as Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett on March 6, 1836 at the Battle of the Alamo.

Concepts in Competitive Eating

2009-02-11T22:45:00.000-08:00

I really have no interest in competitive eating, but I have been watching some of the Travel Channel's "Man v. Food" lately and have a few ideas to freshen up the old formula of trying to cram as much food as possible into your belly in 15 minutes, or an hour, or whatever.1. Instead of seeing how many hot dogs you can eat in an hour, how about seeing how many hot dogs you can eat in a month? I would imagine this sort of "long distance" competitive eating would have a different set of techniques involved than the traditional "sprint" competition. The sprint is all about cramming things into your throat, but the month-long competition asks the question, "just how many hot dogs do you really want to eat?"

It goes without saying, of course, that this would also be really unhealthy, like "Super Size Me," only shooting for quantity as well. I'm trying to imagine who would participate... you'd have to be really bored, like maybe under house arrest or something.

2. If gorging yourself isn't your bag of tea, how about just an open-ended "consecutive" eating contest? The way this would work is that the winner would not be determined by the number of hot dogs eaten, but just how long one can go eating no food other than hot dogs. I suppose you could use lemonade to wash it down.

Obviously, this is unhealthy, also. How long would people go? A week? A month?

3. A variant on #2 above, how about instead of exclusively eating hot dogs, what about just requiring the consumption of at least one hot dog at each meal (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and then just seeing how long the competitors can do that.

This one wouldn't be all that unhealthy, at least compared to the typical American diet. This test would be more mental than anything else... I can imagine at some point you'd get sick to death of hot dogs, but if you held on through that phase, eventually you'd reach the level where you don't even notice you're eating hot dogs anymore. It'd be like breathing air or drinking water. This competition could go on for years.

Once again, I should note that I have no intention of trying any of these things. I'm just sharing the ideas that pop into my head.

Yikes

2009-02-09T06:13:00.000-08:00

This Yahoo! Finance list (or maybe it's from U.S. News and World Report) of 15 companies that might not survive 2009 is pretty sobering, although I don't have any kind of knowledge on how accurate this list might or might not be. I do notice that they don't list Yahoo! itself; I know they've been making cuts themselves. And I'm glad we cashed in those free rental days from Thrifty Car Rental in Anchorage last year.

Mugshot Fail

2009-02-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

From FAIL blog, this is both tragic and funny:

Well, this is odd.

2009-02-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

Here's a blog by a guy claiming to be the rightful emperor of China. Not a descendant of the Manchurian Qing Dynasty that ruled until 1912, but the much earlier Zhou Dynasty. For some reason, he also claims to be Hebrew. I don't get it.

Balloon Twisting

2009-01-18T19:48:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I attended a birthday party for my wife's co-worker's 2-year-old son. For entertainment, they had hired a balloon twister whom we were are really impressed with. I don't think I'd ever seen balloon twisting more complex than a simple single-balloon animal, but this girl really elevated things to a new level. Not only did she employ myriad techniques I'd never thought of, but she was able to make her balloons with lightning speed, all while doing a good job of handling the children. We asked her how she had learned to do all of that, and she said she had taught herself when she was 12 and had been doing it continuously since then. Now all of her friends are balloon-twisters, she goes to balloon-twisting conventions, which I had no idea existed, she does competitions, etc. Who knew?So anyway, I'm just passing along a recommendation for Malinda the balloon twister, and if you want to see her handiwork in person, she does her thing at Cafe Tu Tu Tango at the Block at Orange every Friday and Saturday evening. I have no idea how much she charges.

Bush's Team

2009-01-16T13:05:00.000-08:00

During the Presidential election, I always liked to keep in mind that we weren't just electing a President, but the President's team, too. So remember that we're not only trading out Bush for Obama, we're also getting rid of his godawful team of staffers, cabinet secretaries, and other appointees. Think Progress compiled a handy list of the 43 worst Bush appointees, and it's quite sobering to run through such a list, remembering 8 years of running the country into the ground.

I always find it confounding how Republicans can appoint cabinet secretaries to head agencies like the Department of Labor or the EPA who seem diametrically opposed to the agency's mission. It'd be as if a Democrat appointed an ideological pacifist to head the Department of Defense or a radical anarchist to Attorney General or the Secretary of the Treasury.

Rickey

2009-01-13T23:53:00.000-08:00

Congratulations are due to the greatest leadoff hitter ever to play the game, Rickey Henderson, as it was announced yesterday that he was voted into the Hall of Fame. You can see his stats here; as statistician Bill James once said, "If you could split him in two, you'd have two Hall of Famers."

Of course, Rickey didn't just produce runs on the field; he produced excitement. And anecdotes. And quotes. My favorite from that wonderful collection was a message he left to San Diego General Manager Kevin Towers:

"Kevin, this is Rickey. Calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball."

The only sour note on Rickey's story is that the Baseball Writers Association of America still has 28 voters (out of 539 cast) who saw fit to turn in a ballot without Rickey's name on it. Are these people insane, completely ignorant of baseball, sore losers who resent his ego, or are they just contrarian jerks who have a weird sense of honor about not letting anybody in unanimously?

If you ask me, that's the voting equivalent of a player throwing a game. As a voter, you're charged with voting honestly for people whom you feel have earned their place in the Hall. Leaving someone off your ballot "just because" is idiotic and should get your right to vote revoked.

New National Monuments

2009-01-12T23:43:00.000-08:00

After going through the trouble of tallying up all of the National Parks, National Historic Parks, Wilderness Areas, etc. that I've visited, I'd be remiss not to mention the three new National Monuments created by George W. Bush last week: Marianas Trench Marine National Monument, Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, and Rose Atoll Marine National Monument. These are essentially a bunch of big marine sanctuaries surrounding some small islands in the Pacific, which is a good thing, so, hey, there you go.

Here is a big .pdf showing the official boundaries of the new Monuments. I'm pretty sure these will, similar to Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not the National Park Service, though I'm not positive.

This seems like as good time as any to point out that while I've never been to any of these areas, I'd sure like to sometime. You know how I like learning about and categorizing all the geographic and political divisions I can, right? Well, I also think it would be pretty fascinating to visit one of these little uninhabited islands. Can you imagine that, a little speck of dry land with almost nothing on it, surrounded by miles and miles of open ocean? It's amazing to think that these places still exist in the world, but they're really out there, and some of them are owned by the U.S. We tend to shunt them off into the obscure category of "United States Minor Outlying Islands," and this designation should at least raise some awareness of their existence.

Kingman Reef

Here's a few fun facts about these places:

A history of Kingman Reef basically consists of a record of the various ships that have run aground on it. For a while it was appropriately called "Danger Reef."
A number of these places were acquired under the Guano Islands Act of 1856.
Palmyra Atoll, despite being uninhabited and unorganized politically, is an incorporated territory of the United States, just as much a part of the Union as the 50 states and the District of Columbia. This is a weird remnant of it having been part of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and then specifically excluded from Hawaii statehood.

Now, that's not to take anything away from remote islands that are actually inhabited. It's a long-running joke with my wife that I always suggest we take a vacation in Kiribati*. How different life must be on a tiny island like that... I remember on Maui remarking how beautiful it was, but how I might go stir crazy if I lived so far away from the mainland. But the level of isolation there is really quite mild compared to the isolation of somewhere like Kiritimati.

*Kiribati, incidentally, is pronounced "Kiribahss," as its name is a Gilbertese transliteration of "Gilberts," i.e., the Gilbert Islands. Kiritimati, similarly, is "Kirismas," i.e., "Christmas Island." Here is the flag of Kiribati:Photos and the flag are all from Wikipedia.

Some Obama Marginalia

2009-01-09T17:49:00.001-08:00

1. In 2001, Barack Obama appeared on public TV to give a restaurant review.

2. This coming Wednesday, he'll be appearing in the new issue of Amazing Spider-Man. One commenter says that Marvel didn't alert the retailers beforehand, so they didn't order any extras and should sell out quickly (at least until the inevitable second printing comes along).

Here's a big list of cameos by real people in comic books... my favorite was Henry Kissinger coming in on Dr. Doom's side in Super-Villain Team-Up #6-7.

Mistaken Identity

2009-01-05T09:21:00.001-08:00

Illinois Senate appointee Roland Burris, who faces a challenge from Harry Reid over whether he will be seated as a Senator, seems to have forgotten who appointed him to the position:

"We are hoping and praying that they will not be able to deny what the Lord has ordained," Burris said.

Umm, that wasn't the Lord, Roland. That was disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Big difference.

Special thanks to Conan O'Brien for pointing out the resemblance.

Tallies for 2008 (Parks)

2009-01-03T17:39:00.000-08:00

A little more than a year ago, I tallied up all of the U.S. National Parks and related areas that I'd visited. Let's see what I added in 2008.

National Parks: This year I visited Joshua Tree, Glacier Bay, and Denali National Parks. The two in Alaska were new to me. That brings my total to 19 National Parks visited (including 4 visited only cheesily) out of 58 total.

Other National Park System units: I also visited Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, bringing my total to 13 out of 42, including 5 cheesy-only visits. The two new National Parks I visited are also National Preserves, so that brings my count of National Preserves visited to 5 out of 20 total, although I've only visited 2 out of 9 that aren't part of some other unit. I also moved about five miles from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which I've already visited on multiple occasions. My total number of official National Park System Units visited, then, goes up from 62 to 67 out of 391 total.

(Updated 1/5/09)
State Parks: I did visit some state parks outside of California, which is fairly unusual for me. In New York, I visited Niagara Falls State Park and drove through (cheesy visit only) Buckhorn Island State Park. In Indiana, I made a cheesy visit to White River State Park, which I had previously visited more fully. In Washington State, I went through Peace Arch State Park, which I guess only counts as a cheesy visit. Likewise, I passed through British Columbia's Peach Arch Provincial Park. In Alaska I made a full visit to Denali State Park and a drive-through-only visit to Chugach State Park.

Back at home in California, just in the course of going about town, I visited Los Angeles State Historic Park, Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, Malibu Creek State Park, and Topanga State Park, all of which I've made full visits to at some point. I didn't make any special trips to any local state parks.

National Forests: I didn't tally up the National Forests I've visited on that previous tally post. For those of you who might not know, National Forests are not managed by the National Park Service or even any other agency within the Department of the Interior. The U.S. Forest Service is a branch of the Department of Agriculture, which should be a clue to tell you that the objective of the National Forests is not to preserve natural resources, but to manage them. Historically, you can personify the difference between the two as John Muir vs. Gifford Pinchot.

Anyway, this year I visited Chugach and Tongass National Forests for the first time (both in Alaska), as well as the local Angeles and Los Padres National Forests for the umpteenth times. I think the total number of National Forests I've visited is 37 (out of 155 total), though sometimes it's kind of hard to tell, and the line between a full visit and a cheesy visit is blurry.

Wilderness Areas: Despite a lifetime of camping and hiking, I've really only visited a handful of official Wilderness Areas, which one encounters many more of if one is a more hardcore mountain man like Mike Benedetti. Basically, anywhere it is possible to drive in is not a wilderness area. I did newly enter the Denali Wilderness Area this year. I'm not really sure how many Wilderness Areas I've stepped over the boundary of, but I know I've at least been to these others, all in California:
Golden Trout Wilderness
Mecca Hills Wilderness
Orocopia Mountains Wilderness
San Gabriel Wilderness
San Gorgonio Wilderness

So, as few as only 6 out of 702. I'll bet Benedetti's been in at least 50.

Robbie Maddison

2009-01-03T13:29:00.000-08:00

Donna Bowman directs us toward this video of motorcycle daredevil Robbie Maddison's amazing New Year's Eve jump. That's what I should have been watching instead of Miley Cyrus on MTV.

Hm, has anybody been to Las Vegas for New Year's Eve? How much do they jack up the hotel rates? Did you try to see any stunts like Robbie Maddison's or a hotel implosion, and, if so, was it easy to see or was the crowd just too much to be able to get a good view?

Vintage Muppets

2009-01-02T01:16:00.001-08:00

Mark Evanier, always full of fascinating show-biz stuff, has an interesting blog post about digging up 1960s Tonight Show archives that includes a video of two pre-Sesame Street Muppet sketches.

Today's Real Estate Question

2008-12-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

So, in the Taschen Icons book on photographer Edward Weston, the text tells us, on page 14:

In 1929 Weston rented a cottage in Carmel, an isolated seaside village in northern California with a history of being an artists' colony. There he lived simply and inexpensively, close to some of the most spectacular landscapes in the American West...

That's all well and good, but if an up-and-coming photographer today wanted to do the same, he'd probably have to spend something in the neighborhood of $2 million to buy a house there. Carmel is only really open to artists these days if they're superstars.

And it's not just Carmel. Those of you who saw Dogtown and Z-Boys know that Venice in the 60s and 70s was a rough, downscale neighborhood (it's still kind of skeevy, just full of million-dollar homes). Even a place like Manhattan Beach was full of layabout surfers a few decades ago; when I was a toddler my family actually lived in a small rented house there when my dad got his first job out of grad school. I once visited an open house for a large yet much-in-need-of-renovation house on the beach in Seal Beach that was listed for $4,995,000.

So, my question is not "Why is real estate so expensive along the coast," because that's obvious---the weather's great, recreational opportunities abound, the culture is relaxed, and there is, of course, "some of the most spectacular landscapes in the American West." My question, rather, is how was this land ever cheap? Why was Carmel affordable for simple-living artists in 1929 instead of only for captains of industry? Why did wealthy people in Southern California not drive up the price of coastal property beyond the reach of surfers and recent grad students until recent decades?

And are there any affordable places to live on the coast in California now? Ventura? Somewhere farther up the coast? A lot of beach cities used to be working-class towns. Are there any working-class beach towns remaining?

R.I.P., Dock Ellis

2008-12-29T22:03:00.000-08:00

Former Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis, who famously pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD, has died at the age of 63. Obviously from his record he had a pretty good career and was known for a number of colorful incidents, but when you throw a no-hitter on acid, that's what people remember you for, at least outside of Pittsburgh.

Pope

2008-12-26T09:48:00.001-08:00

I like this image:I gather from the fact that the prints were in a limited edition of 666 that the artist isn't too fond of Benedict, but oh well, I think it looks nice anyway.

Obama Trivia

2008-12-21T12:40:00.001-08:00

A few days ago I realized that Barack Obama is the first person elected (or otherwise becoming) President who was born in what was, at the time of his election, the newest U.S. state (Hawaii). Check this list of Presidents and their birthplaces against this list of U.S. state admissions.

Now, it's been 49 years since the last new admission of a state, the longest such gap in history, so that makes that somewhat more probable now. Imagine if, say, Benjamin Harrison (actually born in Ohio) had been born in what was the newest state when he was elected in 1888, Colorado. Obviously it would have been impossible for him to have been born in a post-statehood Colorado, since that would have required him to have been 12 years old at the most. But more importantly, if we allow for him to have been as old as he was (born 1833) and born in territorial lands that later became Colorado, we would have to then consider that only about half of the state was U.S. territory at the time, and the part that was hadn't been settled by white people yet. So he would have either had to have been a Native American or the son of a mountain man's wife.

Not many Presidents have been frontiersmen; even Kentucky had already been a state for more than 18 years when Lincoln was born there. Checking the same references as above, we can see that Obama is also the first person elected (or becoming) President who was born in what was at the time of his birth the newest U.S. state. Additionally, since the country was established (i.e., since the States ceased to be British colonies), no U.S. President has been born in a territory rather than a state, even though it's perfectly legal. You'll recall that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and the other Republican Senator from Arizona who unsuccessfully ran for President, Barry Goldwater, was born in a pre-statehood Arizona Territory. I don't know of any other territory-born Presidential also-rans, but I suppose I could do the research.

Here's some extra trivia for you: Obama is the only person elected President while the state of his birth was the current U.S. State Quarter design. In fact, the Hawaii quarter was released just the day before the election!

Krigstein's "Master Race"

2008-12-21T00:14:00.000-08:00

Note: to avoid spoiling the ending, don't click through to any of the links discussing the story until reading it yourself.

Bernie Krigstein's "Master Race,"* which appeared in EC Comics' Impact #1, is deservedly one of the most famous and acclaimed comic stories. Not only is the art top-notch and the techniques striking, but it's quite remarkable that this shocking story was published just ten years after the end of World War II, before the Holocaust had been widely depicted in popular media, much less in comic books. My copy of a reprint of this is in storage right now, but some helpful soul made high-quality scans of the 8-page story and posted them on their Geocities page (click on the scan to go to each next page).
Read (or re-read) the story first and then check out these essays on it and Krigstein by Martin Jukovsky, Paul Gravett, and Art Spiegelman.

*Krigstein illustrated the story and is most associated with it, but Al Feldstein wrote it.

Santa representation question

2008-12-20T12:22:00.001-08:00

In all the depictions of household encounters with Santa Claus that I can remember, he's depicted as flying in to the encounteree's house from some distant point and then, when he's finished distributing gifts, flies away again to some other distant point. This despite the fact that said encounteree's house is generally depicted as being in a neighborhood of other, similar houses.

Are we to believe that being selected for delivery of Santa gifts is thus a rare thing? Or does our encounteree live in a Jewish or Muslim neighborhood? Or just one full of bad boys and girls?

Or does Santa's distribution method simply defy all logic? Does he hit a house in London, make his next stop in Japan, then Canada, etc. all before hitting the next-door neighbor of our first encounteree in London? Just what is the method to his madness?

Michael Jackson, Inventor

2008-12-12T02:03:00.000-08:00

You know Michael Jackson as a singer, dancer, and sleepover pal, but did you know he was an inventor, too? Jackson is one of three names listed on U.S. Patent #5,255,452, "Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion." What this is is a special boot that can be anchored into a stage floor so that the performer can do the extremely low lean featured at the end of the "Smooth Criminal" video. In other words, Michael was so amazing that he really did have a patented dance move.

Presidential Trivia

2008-12-09T22:47:00.000-08:00

When I was born, there were no living ex-Presidents. Nixon had yet to resign. Kennedy, Hoover, and Eisenhower had died in the 60s, and then Truman and LBJ had died within a month of each other in 1972 and 1973. But then there was not another Presidential death until Nixon's in 1994 when I was 20. In the meantime, the ranks of living ex-Presidents had grown from zero to five: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George Bush I. You'll remember that Robert Smigel made a pretty funny cartoon about it.

You should not be surprised to learn that one can see this information in convenient tabular form on Wikipedia. It turns out that there were previously periods of no living ex-Presidents during the administrations of George Washington (obviously), John Adams, U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover. There have never been more than five living ex-Presidents, but it has happened three times:

March 4, 1861 to January 18, 1862, during Abraham Lincoln's administration: Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan;
January 20, 1993 to April 22, 1994, during Bill Clinton's administration: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and the first George Bush; and
January 20, 2001 to June 5, 2004, during George Bush the Less's administration: Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush's dad, and Clinton.

OK, so what if we expanded this inquiry not just to former Presidents, but to the current and future Presidents, too? In other words, when were the most number of men alive who, at some point in time either before or after that time, became President of the U.S.? Before checking, let's think some. It's obviously not going to be right at the beginning, and it also wouldn't be any time in the very recent past, because there are at least several people walking this earth who will be President some time in the future whom we don't know about yet. And while life spans increased during the 20th century, so did the length of Presidential administrations; there were 23 Presidents from 1801 to 1901, and only 17 from 1901 to 2001.

Wikipedia comes in handy again, this time with a timeline. They don't tally things up for us, but if you go through and add things up, you can figure out that there were four periods of time when there were 18 men living who at some point in time had or would become President of the United States:

October 4, 1822 to July 4, 1826, Rutherford B. Hayes' birth to the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson;
August 20, 1833 to June 28, 1836, Benjamin Harrison's birth to James Madison's death;
March 18, 1837 to April 4, 1841, Grover Cleveland's birth to William Henry Harrison's death in office; and
January 29, 1843 to June 8, 1845, William McKinley's birth to Andrew Jackson's death.

So there you go.

*This is one of the most remarkable Presidential trivia tidbits: founding fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died within five hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

University of Phoenix Stadium

2008-12-06T18:11:00.000-08:00

Here's what looks like the world's easiest sports trivia question:

What football team plays its home games at University of Phoenix Stadium?

The answer, of course, is the NFL's Arizona Cardinals. Huh? Yes, that's right, it's not the University of Phoenix. The University of Phoenix is a for-profit university specializing in adult education, and has no intercollegiate athletics program. They bought the naming rights to the Cardinals' new stadium shortly after it opened in 2006, just like corporations like FedEx and Qualcomm do. Weird.

Another odd thing about this stadium is that it has a retractable grass playing surface, the first stadium in the country to do so. This lets them keep the natural grass in the sun more and host other events without damaging the turf.

This Kid is the Mack

2008-12-02T22:12:00.000-08:00

Nine-year-old Alec Greven of Castle Rock, Colorado, has written an advice book called How to Talk to Girls. Here's some of his advice, as seen in the article's slideshow:

Girls win most of the arguments and have most of the power.
A crush is like a love disease. It can drive you mad.
If you are in elementary school, try to get a girl to like you, not to love you.
Control your hyperness. (Cut down on sugar if you need to.)
Make sure you have good friends who don't try to take the girl you like.
Girls always like the smartest boys.
Class clowns never make a good love story with a girl, if you catch my drift.

Photos from Around California

2008-11-30T23:36:00.000-08:00

Last year, while I was unemployed, I took a few short driving trips around the state where I visited some small towns I hadn't been to before. On the first trip, I forgot to bring my real camera and thus just took a couple of camera-phone shots, and on my second trip, my camera broke about halfway through. What few pictures I have from the latter trip I just uploaded to my Picasa Web Albums site and added captions, so you can see the complete set here.

One shot I should include from that first trip, when I managed to visit all the remaining California counties I hadn't yet visited, is of this wrong-way duplex sign of state routes 49 South and 89 North in Sierraville.
In case you're curious, the road there is actually heading roughly west-by-northwest.

So anyway, the trip where I actually had my camera was one where I decided to see some of the Gold Country towns along Route 49 I hadn't been to before. Some trivia here: not only was Route 49 named after the 49er miners, but the shape of the California highway shield (seen above) was chosen so that the sign would look like a miner's spade.

First stop is Bakersfield, which is generally kind of a pit (I was employed there for a month in 1996), but which has some nice architecture downtown, including this art-deco Nile movie theater.In Sonora, which has a fairly bustling downtown for such a small place, I came across an old CSAA parking sign from back in the days when the Auto Club would post signs:A little ways up in Calaveras County is a favorite for connoisseurs of sophomoric humor, the Glory Hole Center:Nearby is Moaning Cavern, a deep hole in the ground full of limestone formations:In Amador County you can find the ruins of the Butte Store, which doesn't look like much from the outside, but on the inside (you have to peek through a fence) is a fascinating example of nature reclaiming a building:Farther up in Sutter Creek, the Sutter Creek Cream Emporium is a charming knickknack-filled ice cream shop with a player piano and a proprietor who came out from behind the counter to play a couple of piano rags himself:So then, up in Placerville, my camera seized up and I couldn't take any more pictures of my trip, which took me as far up as Nevada City. I used my wife's camera for about a year after that (I'll post narratives of my trips to Toronto and Alaska soon) and just yesterday bought a new camera of my own, which I haven't used yet.

Really Awful Music Videos

2008-11-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

Yahoo has a little feature on really horrible music videos, with the requirement for inclusion that the video had to have been intended to be taken seriously. They start off with a Beyonce video that's merely subpar, but the truly awful ones are the videos attempting to be mini-movies. Michael Jackson's "You Rock My World" made me want to claw my eyes out, and MC Hammer's "2 Legit 2 Quit" made me want to shoot the screen.

Saab Suite

2008-11-26T22:26:00.001-08:00

You can watch 8 and a half minutes of Saab 9000 Turbos from 1987 performing "car ballet" here.

Adam Villani 2, Ben Stein 0

2008-11-25T00:28:00.001-08:00

Some of you may know that eight years ago I beat Ben Stein on his TV show Win Ben Stein's Money.

Here is a link to a ten-minute montage (I won't take up the space embedding it here) of TV appearances by investor (and Ron Paul advisor) Peter Schiff back in 2006 and 2007 expressing prescient warnings about economic collapse, and being subsequently mocked for his pessimism by various mainstream-conservative talking heads, including Ben Stein. Taste the juicy schadenfreude as they make predictions of ever-rising housing prices and an ever-rising stock market.

Now, I wasn't on TV or anything saying that I thought the housing bubble was going to burst (although a comment I made a year ago supports my assertion that I knew high housing prices were not a good thing), but let me assure you, if you had asked me about housing prices a couple years ago I would have told you that that the rate at which the growth of housing prices had outstripped the growth on incomes was unsustainable. If nothing else, I didn't do what Ben Stein did and give advice to the world that turned out to be blatantly wrong. So I will count this as yet another victory for me over Ben Stein.

Also, in case you're wondering, those Merril Lynch stocks that Stein was saying were a bargain at about 75 bucks a share closed yesterday at 11.35. Another guy there said that Goldman Sachs was low somewhere around 150; it closed at 67.54. And as for the guy who recommended Washington Mutual, the less said the better.

And remember, here was the conservative reaction to Paul Krugman warning of the housing bubble in 2005.

So anyway, just remember all that the next time somebody tries to insinuate that Republicans are the ones who are smart about the economy.

Minnesota

2008-11-24T15:03:00.000-08:00

Two things about Minnesota:

1. Minnesota Public Radio has a feature where you can be the judge on various challenged ballots in the Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.
2. The American Planning Association's national conference next year (last week of April) will be in Minneapolis. I have never visited Minneapolis, or actually anywhere in the Upper Midwest. So this sounds like a prime opportunity to visit for the conference and then take a few days to drive around the area, seeing scenery and visiting states and counties I'd never been in before. I am thinking maybe of going up into the North Woods area and/or going along the Mississippi River.

So, does anybody have any tips on what to see around Minneapolis besides the Mall of America (which I do plan to visit)? I really don't have much of an idea about what there is there.

Also, any favorite places around Minnesota or nearby states? Tips on where to go driving, see scenery, and/or visit interesting small towns? Have any of you been to Voyageurs National Park?

My Prediction

2008-11-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

The election may be over, but we political junkies who were following the election news day and night don't have to go cold turkey now; there are things like recounts in Minnesota and speculation over cabinet posts to satisfy our cravings.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to make a prediction for an obscure cabinet post, said obscurity making me look smarter if I turn out to actually be right, and also insuring that nobody (including myself) will care if I am wrong. My prediction is that Tammy Duckworth will be selected for Secretary of Veterans' Affairs. Why?

She is an Iraq War veteran whose criticism of the war is similar to Obama's,
She is a double amputee due to war injuries,
She is female,
She is Asian-American (half Thai, half white),
She narrowly lost a race for Congress as the Democratic nominee in 2006,
She was appointed to head the Illinois Department of Veterans' Affairs after losing the election, and I have not seen any evidence of there being any major problems with her administration, and
Illinois is Obama's home state, so he either knows her or knows people who do.

So there you go.

UPDATE: I was wrong. He is Asian, though.

Pete Drake and His Talking Steel Guitar

2008-11-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

Via BoingBoing, this is one of the few things I've ever seen called "Lynchian" that truly lives up to the concept:

The song, "Forever," is actually quite good. According to the comments and Wikipedia, Drake was a big session player in Nashville during the sixties (this track dates from 1964), and the talk box technology he's using dates as far back as 1939! Like a lot of TV appearances, it seems this was a lip-synch job. I don't know what the TV show is nor the identity of the emcee.

Election Maps

2008-11-16T23:50:00.000-08:00

Of course, there are a ton of interesting maps showing the results of the election in different ways. Considering how many of my posts were on the election and how many are on maps, I'd be remiss without featuring some of them here. Sylvia Cabus (Hi, Sylvia!) pointed this one out for me:What this shows is the 2008 Presidential election results at the county level on a color scale ranging between blue (for the Democrat) and red (for the Republican), with the size scaled to the population of the county, and the shapes distorted to connect everything contiguously.What do we learn from this map? Well, at the most basic level, we learn that this notion of a "Blue America" and "Red America" is a vast simplification.

On the other hand, it's a little hard to tell what we're looking at here, because things are so distorted. One pattern you should be able to make out, though, is that there are a whole bunch of bluish discs (cities) surrounded by a matrix of thin red areas (rural counties). We can lose a lot of nuance but see this urban/rural split more clearly by looking at a non-distorted map with a straight red/blue split:Here those thin bands of red between the blue shapes look like a vast red sea peppered with little blue islands (cities and college towns), framed by some more solid masses of blue in the Northeast, West Coast, and Upper Midwest. Obama won the cities, but there are also some significant rural areas that he won, too. Besides those mentioned above, there's also the heavily-African-American counties in the South along the lower Mississippi and then in a wide band from central Alabama up to North Carolina. There are the heavily-Mexican-American counties along the border. There's also a lot of Indian reservations and other areas with a lot of Native Americans in the Southwest and places like the Dakotas.

Kind of hard to spot, and mostly unremarked-upon, is the fact that a number of rural mountain resort areas also voted for Obama --- check out sparsely-populated Alpine and Mono Counties in California; Summit County, Utah (home of Park City); and a lot of the mountainous counties of Colorado, which are contiguous with both the urban Colorado counties and areas with a lot of Indians and Latinos.

To put it another way, the Republican base is white, rural America, with some exceptions. The suburbs are a battleground, and the Democrats have everything else.

But the same thing using the graduated color scale seen in the first map helps us see things a bit differently:
Here the states from Indiana to Pennsylvania look very purple; these places are pretty evenly split between Republican and Democratic voters. The Great Plains below the Dakotas range from mostly-red in their east to bright red within a couple hundred miles of the 100th parallel or so.

I got all of these maps from this great page by Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, where he has more maps, more analysis, and similar information on the 2004 election, so you can see where the extra votes came from.

Here's an alternative way of scaling things, with a straight red/blue split, but with the brightness tied to population:I like the concept here, but it needs some tweaking. First off, it's mostly just too dark; he needs to tweak his scale to something a bit more legible (maybe a white background). Also, because large counties with more population are displayed both larger and brighter, in a sense we're double-counting them. A better method might be to scale to population density, which would eliminate this problem.

How about showing the size of the margin between the two candidates? The L.A. Times has a nice interactive site showing just that for California, as well as a bunch of other state election info here.

Remember that band of Democratic voters through the rural South? Stran ge Maps has a fascinating overlay showing the relationship between just that and a map showing cotton production in 1860. The correlation is very strong; this is where black people lived 150 years ago, and where they still live today:
And finally, not really related to the election, but an interesting test to see where the dividing line between the North and the South is, culturally, can be seen in this study of which McDonalds restaurants in Virginia have sweet tea available and which don't:Ouch! It turns out that tea map is a fake. Neat idea, though.

MORE (11/17/08): Wikipedia has a nice cartogram with the states sized according to their electoral votes and shaped in discrete blocks. I have no idea what their source was, but the map is pretty good:

The Rock-afire Explosion is Back!

2008-11-15T23:19:00.000-08:00

Back in June I blogged about a guy who had done a remarkable job of re-programming his Rock-afire Explosion audio-animatronic band before lamenting that the videos seemed to have disappeared from the Web. Well, they're back. They explain the bidding process to request new songs here. And here is "Pop, Lock, and Drop It."

Birthday Trifecta

2008-11-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Here's a fun fact for you: 1980s musical superstars Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince all turned 50 years old this past summer.

A New WPA?

2008-11-14T18:54:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine proposes a 21st-century Works Progress Administration. Considering how much of FDR's WPA we still use, and how cool much of the design is, I'd be all for it.

Incidentally, if you're wondering who the Santiago Calatrava the article refers to is, he designed the Olympic Stadium for the 2004 Games in Athens. He's also done a lot of bridges, including the Sundial Bridge in Redding, which I visited last year.
MORE (11/15/08): The writer of the article does seem a bit obsessed with "starchitects." I think some of the beauty of the WPA and CCC work was that a sense of good design so permeated the program that even minor projects like an electrical substation or a guardrail on a mountain road would have a distinctive look, monumental yet in touch with its surroundings. It wasn't the work of a handful of superstars but an army of people who knew how to make civic buildings look and work right. I'd be interested in reading more about how they managed to do that, if anyone has any good pointers.

Golly, thanks

2008-11-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

Turkish villagers slaughtered 44 sheep for the election of Obama as the 44th U.S. President.

San Diego Mayor on Gay Marriage

2008-11-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

Wow... check out San Diego mayor (and Republican) Jerry Sanders discuss his change of heart on gay marriage:

Wikipedia dates this conference to September 19, 2007.

November 4, 2008

2008-11-08T00:43:00.000-08:00

Good illustration here by Patrick Moberg, discovered through Andrew Sullivan's blog.

More Advice

2008-11-08T00:38:00.000-08:00

Tips on remembering whether or not you've turned the stove off.

Pop Music Quiz

2008-11-07T00:38:00.001-08:00

Wikipedia maintains a list of musical artists ranked by how many #1 singles they've had on the Billboard U.S. Hot 100 singles chart. Don't search for it right now, because that would spoil this quiz! The list counts group releases separately from solo/duet releases, so, for example, Beyonce would be counted separately from Destiny's Child, but if Beyonce did a duet with, say, Slim Thug, it would count under the Beyonce total (it's just an example; neither she nor her group made the list).

What I would like you to do for this quiz is to guess the artist based on four pieces of information: the number of #1 hits, the total number of weeks at #1, the year of the artist's first #1 hit, and the year of their most recent #1 hit. There are nine artists with ten or more #1 hits.

1. 20 songs, 59 total weeks, 1964 - 1970
2. 18 songs, 79 total weeks, 1990 - 2008
3. 17 songs, 79 total weeks, 1956 - 1969
4. 13 songs, 37 total weeks, 1972 - 1995
5. 12 songs, 32 total weeks, 1984 - 2000
6. 12 songs, 22 total weeks, 1964 - 1969
7. 11 songs, 31 total weeks, 1985 - 1995
8. 10 songs, 33 total weeks, 1986 - 2001
9. 10 songs, 25 total weeks, 1963 - 1986

Note that this is for singles, not albums. Some of these should be a lot more obvious than others. Also note that there was a lot more volatility in the chart in the old days... the average number of weeks at #1 per song gets a lot longer for the more recent artists. Oddly enough, if you study the album charts, you'll notice that the opposite holds true --- albums used to spend longer at the top of the charts but now often only spend a single week at the top.

Post your answers in the comments. Feel free to do research on artists, but for this question, avoid the page that shows this compiled information until after you've posted your guesses. Have fun!

SPOILER WARNING! - Two people have made very good guesses so far in the comments. Refrain from looking at the comments if you don't want a lot of the answers spoiled.

UPDATE (11/8/08) - We have a winner! Check the comments.

How 'bout that?

2008-11-05T22:53:00.000-08:00

So, as you may have heard, Barack Obama won the election. Pretty remarkable. I, and a lot of other people, never really thought I'd see a black President. But there he is. And it's not just that he's black --- he's young, relatively inexperienced, the son of a foreigner and a single mom, he's got a funny name, said funny name involves the word "Hussein," he was born in Hawai'i and lived in Indonesia, and he ran as a straight-up liberal, not a centrist. So he had a whole slew of electability negatives, and he was running against a well-known, well-liked long-term Senator and war hero with a reputation for independence and bipartisanship.

And yet, from about midway through the primary contest, I began to become fairly confident that Obama could actually win. Why? Because the more people saw of him, the more they liked him. The Clinton campaign tested him, and he didn't succumb to it. He got people excited, and that excitement translated into activism and, finally, votes.

Meanwhile, John McCain won his party's nomination mainly because of his opponents' negatives more than his own positives, and that party had the albatross around its neck of an extremely disliked incumbent President. But that's not to say the election was a foregone conclusion. Obama had to worry about whether his primary opponent's supporters would "come home" to him. And if McCain had run like he did in 2000, with a refreshing, independent spirit, he might have won. But while McCain tried to distance himself from George W. Bush the person, he tacked hard to the right to win the primaries and ran on George W. Bush's policies. As the campaign wore on, and especially during the debates, Obama seemed cool and confident while McCain seemed irritated and erratic.

The selection of Sarah Palin as his VP nominee briefly injected a lot of excitement into his campaign, and I was afraid that they might be able to carry that over into the election. But after a few weeks it became clear that Palin had a lot of problems and that picking her reflected poorly on McCain's judgement. My gut feeling was that it was a couple weeks after the Palin pick that the media's coverage changed, too. While they consistently reflected the excitement that Obama's campaign was generating, until September they were far too willing to run with any of the stories generated by the McCain campaign or his surrogates about Obama, no matter how irrelevant or sleazy.

But it soon became clear that Palin was entirely unfit for office and that McCain's weak response to the failing economy meant that his talk of the country needing a "steady hand on the tiller" was an argument for his opponent, not him. The public and the media stopped buying the cracked narrative being sold by the Republicans, whose bounce in the polls quickly subsided. Obama took a statistically significant lead early in October and ran down the clock the rest of the way, and on election day his ground game carried him to the win. Good job. ADDED (11/6/08): Giving credit where it's due, McCain's concession speech was quite moving.

As for the rest of the races... Democrats seem to have made strong gains in both houses of Congress, though not quite as many as they might have hoped. Al Franken is trailing slightly in a recount for a Senate seat in Minnesota... it would tickle me pink if he were elected. UPDATE (11/6/08): Watch Swing State Project for updates on undecided races.

Here in California, the passage of Proposition 8, banning gay marriage 52-48, is certainly a bummer, but considering that a similar measure passed eight years ago by a 61-39 margin gives hope that this particular fight isn't over.

But after Obama's victory, my most pleasant surprise was the passage of the two rail transportation propositions here in California, both of which I thought voters would be scared away from by their price tags. The statewide Prop 1A, to float a $10 billion bond for high-speed rail across the state, passed by a 52-48 margin. Even more surprising, considering that it needed a 2/3 majority to pass, L.A. County Measure R, authorizing a sales tax increase to build mass transit and other transportation improvements, won 67.4% of the vote. These are all long-term projects, but they'll both do a lot of good toward increasing transportation options.

ALSO (11/6/08): Message to Obama and Congress: Don't govern from the center. Or, more precisely, don't make governing from the center your strategy. Voters won't reject you in 2010 because you're left-of-center, they'll reject you if you fail. With solid control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, the Democrats have no excuses for note executing their plans. If those plans work, you'll win again. If they fail, you will be voted out of office --- and deservedly so.

How I'm Voting

2008-11-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

County Measure:
Measure R: YES!
This sales tax increase will fund a wide variety of desperately-needed transportation projects in the County. We're way behind on infrastructure and this will help us get back up to speed. Metro has a whole bunch of info on R here; it funds a lot of mass transit as well as things like grade separations, signal synchronization, etc.A lot of the opposition to this seems to be picayune crap by politicians whining that their part of the county is getting slighted. Well, guess what? This is a regional planning measure, and in regional planning, some areas are going to be favored over others based on need and effectiveness. The Westside is getting a lot of this money because lots of people live there, lots of people work there, and there's currently no rail there and horrible traffic.

Measure R needs a 2/3 majority to pass, so be sure to vote YES on R!

President and Vice President: Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Democrats

U.S. Representative, 32nd District: Hilda Solis, Democrat
State Assembly, 49th District: Mike Eng, Democrat
A classmate of mine in grad school said that Eng "sounds like a Baptist preacher" when he speaks.

Judges of the Superior Court:
Office #72: Hilleri Grossman Merritt
Office #82: Thomas Rubinson
Office #84: Lori-Ann C. Jones
Office #94: Michael O'Gara
Office #154: Michael V. Jesic
On the judges I'm going off of the evaluations from the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, a legal paper in L.A. Also, I believe I spoke with Mike O'Gara on the phone this week at work, unless the Mike O'Gara who's the president of the Sun Valley Area Neighborhood Council is a different person. He seemed reasonable.

State Propositions:
1A: YES (High-speed rail. This bond measure would be a great infrastructure investment.)
2: UNDECIDED, PROBABLY NO (Makes chicken cages bigger. Would be a nice thing to do, but would result in a lot of eggs and chicken meat being trucked in from Arkansas instead. I spoke with an agricultural grad student about this, and she said that she didn't have a strong opinion pro or con on this, but she did note that this would probably result in more chickens living on the ground, where they're more susceptible to infections and parasites, and thus use twice as many antibiotics. The basic premise of treating the animals we eat better is sound, but I'd rather see less-drastic improvements or a consistent rating system, maybe at a national level.)
3: NO (Bond for children's hospitals. Sends public money into private hands; there's still money left over from a previous bond measure for the same thing; has annoying ads with kids singing "Imagine" to evoke pathos.)
4: YES (Family notification for teen abortion. This would probably prevent some abortions.)
5: YES (Rehab for nonviolent drug offenders.)
6: NO (More money for cops... how about more oversight for cops instead?)
7: NO (Poorly-written clean energy bill, would be counter-productive. Environmental groups and even the Green Party oppose this.)
8: NO (Eliminates right of gay couples to marry. Discrimination should not be written into the state constitution.)
9: NO ("Victims' rights" law; makes the law about vengeance rather than justice, rehabilitation, and the protection of society as a whole.)
10: NO (Another poorly-written alternative energy bill; basically just gives a big wad of cash to T. Boone Pickens; long-term bond for a short-term benefit; opposed by environmental groups.)
11. YES (Takes redistricting for state legislators out of their own hands. Won't affect our representation in Congress.)
12. YES (Low-interest loans for veterans. Pays for itself, is a nice thing to do.)

L.A. Community College District Measure:
Proposition J: YES (Bond for classroom building; L.A. Times says it's well-written and the Community College District is good.)

San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District
Board of Directors, Division 3: John C. Reichenberger (Reichenberger is an experienced civil engineer and professor; his opponent is just an administrator.)

So there you go.

Poll Closing Time Map

2008-10-31T17:37:00.000-07:00

This is a nice map from SwingStateProject.com showing what times the polls close across the country. Times shown are all Eastern, not local.I like how we even learn that the 459 persons living in the Alaskan part of the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone are the last to vote, at 1:00 A.M. Eastern (8:00 P.M. local).

My Voting Annoyance

2008-10-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

So, my wife and I moved over the summer, and a month or so ago I mailed in our new voting registration forms. A week ago, my wife got her sample ballot and voter pamphlet. I didn't get anything. So today I checked things on the County Registrar-Recorder's website to verify my registration, and it turns out I'm not registered at my new address. I am, however, still registered at my old address (same county), but getting over there on election day would be a pain in the butt. Thankfully, though, I was able to order a vote-by-mail package, and today was the last day to do that. I'm kinda doubtful my vote-by-mail stuff will arrive in time to return it by election day, but we shall see.

Still, though, that was annoying. Why didn't they register me? Did my form just get lost, or did I make some sort of mistake on it? Is it even legal for me to vote at my old address when I don't live there anymore, or is this one of those diabolical voter fraud schemes that Republicans are so worried about?

I'm also, of course, in different local districts, but I'm more familiar with the state assemblyman in my old district (Mike Eng) than the one at my new residence. I'm fairly positive on the congresswoman in my old district (Hilda Solis), but she's literally the only person on the ballot, so there's not much point in voting in that race. The Republicans didn't even field a candidate. My new congressman is Brad Sherman, and there's not any plausible scenario where he loses, despite the presence of two other warm bodies (a Republican and a Libertarian) on the ballot.

Ancestry Map

2008-10-27T00:38:00.000-07:00

The Census Bureau's website is full of valuable data. One particularly good repository is their selection of Census 2000 Briefs and Special Reports. Brief #35 analyzes ancestry data, which is more specific than race or Hispanic origin. This is really fascinating... here's the big map, which you can see in more detail in the big .pdf:What this map shows is the largest single ancestry within each county. That is, a plurality, not a majority. The big swath of light blue over much of the northern half of the country represents German. The light red along the Mexican border is, of course, Mexican. The wide band of dark purple across the farmland of the South --- and in many urban counties of the Midwest --- is African-American. The pale yellow dominating the Appalachian highlands and some other areas is, interestingly enough, simply "American."

So what does that mean? The interesting thing about the ancestry question on the Census form is that it's self-reported and open-ended, not multiple choice. So you're free to declare your ancestry however you see fit (you can report up to two ancestries, which is, curiously enough, three fewer than the number of races you can claim). So I think what "American" represents is white people whose ancestors have been in this country long enough that they've lost their identification with their ancestors' country of origin, which is probably England, Scotland, Ireland, or a combination thereof.

You may note that English and Irish ancestry seems underreported, considering this country's history. First, let's look at English, represented by the light purple you can see in northern New England and Utah. A friend of mine at work suggested that people with multiple European ancestries, like myself, are apt to report the more "interesting" of their ancestries, and English loses out because it's the default. People want to identify with the ancestry that makes them more interesting. Personally, I tend to identify with my Italian side, even though I'm actually more Irish than Italian (I believe I reported those two on my own Census form, though that leaves out my German, Swiss, English, and Spanish heritage[and Canadian, if that counts]).

I think the predominance of English in Utah may support this idea. Maybe people in Utah are just more likely to be of English ancestry, but I think what also may be at work here is that Mormons are really big into genealogy, and so it's possible that they're just more knowledgeable and accurate when reporting their ancestry. Just an idea; I don't know how I would test this theory.

Irish ancestry may suffer a bit from the same reporting bias as English, but to a lesser degree. On the map, Irish is the medium purple color that dominates Massachusetts and the Hudson River Valley of New York. Surely there are a lot more Irish in this country, right? Take a look at Table 3, Page 6 of the report. This shows the top five ancestries reported in each state. Irish ancestry is #1 in only three states, but is #2 in 19 states, plus the District of Columbia and the country as a whole. So what seems to be the case is that Irish ancestry is very dispersed. Just about everywhere you go in the U.S.A. there will be Irish people, they just don't dominate anywhere outside of the Northeast. Plus, I think, a lot of the irish ancestry is getting rolled into "American."

There are some other interesting tidbits... the light pink in northern New Mexico is for "Hispanic" or "Spanish," differentiated from the Mexican ancestry found more along the border. A lot of these people are probably those whose ancestors were here before the U.S. acquired the Southwest in 1850. Which brings us to the Native Americans, whom you can probably figure out are represented by pale orange; you can find many of the largest Indian reservations in the country by looking for that color. The white "other" category carries some interesting info, too... Cuban dominates Miami-Dade County, of course, and Chinese still has a plurality in San Francisco. The largest single ancestry in New York County (i.e., Manhattan Borough) is Dominican.

Neat stuff.

Helium Zeppelin

2008-10-26T00:41:00.000-07:00

A company up in the Bay Area is going to start offering rides on a zeppelin. Yes, a zeppelin. The only problem? No, not hydrogen --- they've fixed that. It's that rides are $495. Damn.

Newspaper Endorsement Map

2008-10-25T14:34:00.001-07:00

Here's a neat map (interactive if you go to the site) showing newspapers across the country and their presidential endorsements in 2004 and 2008. The blue rings show papers that switched from a Republican to a Democratic endorsement, and the red rings show the opposite, while the solid discs show consistent party endorsements in the two elections.There are a lot more blue rings than red rings. The only papers I can see that endorsed McCain this year after Kerry in 2004 are located in Newport News, VA; Bradenton, FL; Jackson, TN; and Corpus Christi, TX. Prominent blue-ring papers, on the other hand, include the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and all of the L.A. Newspaper Group papers.

UPDATE: The Anchorage Daily News has endorsed Obama, though it looks like they went with Kerry in the last election.

Separated at Birth?

2008-10-21T00:00:00.001-07:00

Red Sox third baseman Kevin Youkilis...

...and Matthew McConaughey in Reign of Fire?

More Useful Advice

2008-10-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

If you're delivering CPR and are wondering at what tempo you should be doing the chest compressions, just run the song "Stayin' Alive" through your head, (or instruct the DJ at the club you're in to play it) since it runs at the right speed.

I suppose this assumes that your mental mp3 player will run at the right speed when you're in a life-or-death situation... that could be a possible direction for future research.

Unusual Boxing Advice from Vitali Klitschko

2008-10-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

Boxer Soothes Fists with Son's Wet Diapers

"I wrap nappies filled with my three-year-old son Max's wee around my fists," he said, adding he got the idea from his grandmother. "The nappies hold the liquid and the swelling stays down."

Man-Thing Observation

2008-10-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

It's long been established that 1970s double-length Marvel swamp-creature quarterly Giant-Size Man-Thing had a pretty funny double-entendre of a comic book title. I assume it was unintentional, but who really knows.What hasn't been discussed, I think, is that 2000s Marvel swamp-creature compilation The Essential Man-Thing has a title that sounds like a philosophical treatise.