Get out of the house

There are some areas 'round Cincinnati that do some pretty cool things. These past couple of Saturdays, The Girl and I have headed down into Glendale to see a couple of nights of their summer concert series.

Turns out that there's some pretty cool free music going down in the tiny Village of Glendale. The groups set up in the side lot of the HWB Community Center and play from 'bout 6 'til 9pm every Saturday evening from June through August. We've seen Three Reasons Why (last week's rock) and the Ron Jones Quartet (jazz from the hometown of N'Albany - complete with piano from Glendalian Rob Allgeyer). Madison's bring out the portable gelato stand - mostly just a cooler. And a decent number of folks from 'round Glendale come out with their camp chairs (though the community center provides a number of wooden folders of their own.)

There's a bunch of people throwing picnics, tilting back a few cold ones (apparently endorsed as the flyer even suggests bringing a bottle of wine), and enjoying an evening of good music. Luckily these past couple of weeks have seen near-perfect Saturday evening weather. If you get a chance (I won't as I've got other plans), head down to Glendale this coming Saturday to see a band of PHS boys (and Glendalians in their own right) take their turn...and I'd also highly recommend the August 25^th performances.

And Then I Came to the End

With four flights in three days ('bout six flight hours total), I was able to dive back into the world of reading books without pictures. It's not something that I get to do a lot of during the school year as I always have things to do other than flop down and scan the black and white pages for the half dozen hours needed to read a good novel, but it's something that I dig doing. Luckily this time I got around to reading an excellent bulk of text in Joshua Ferris's And Then We Came to the End.

Ferris's debut novel tells the tale of a Chicago advertising firm in the years bridging the turn of the century. Ferris apparently comes at the topic from first-hand experience and even writes that...

Every agency has its frustrated copywriter whose real life was being a failed novelist working on a small, angry book about work.

...which suggests to me that he may just have been such a copywriter in his former career. The insight that Ferris provides into the corporate advertising world certainly makes me think that he had been writing this novel - in his head or in stages - for years while finding ways to draw us into what seems like it could be a very dry topic.

Instead, Ferris does a masterful job allowing us to see the balance between the distance that the coworkers keep between each other - constantly regailing each other with superficial tales of home and gossip of other office mates - and the real, honest caring for each other that develops through the years of shared experiences, a sort of foxhole friendship forged in what he calls fire drills - all night sessions where everybody pitches in to polish and finalize. The creatives and copywriters spend their time mostly spreading office rumors, wandering the office looking for donuts and coffee, and struggling with the power of the blank page.

The events that happen - the office manager hunting missing chairs, people being walked Spanish down the hall (their slang for the increasing layoffs), the office second remaining distant from their gossip, and their agency's partner struggling with breast cancer - aren't the real story. The tale rather centers around the day to day ways in which people pass their time, justify their jobs, and try to get a little work done on the side.

The book, which I stumbled onto - of course - via an NPR interview, has been described in a number of reviews as humorous and funny, but any portrayal of the book as simply a light-hearted laugher would miss the mark entirely. This outstanding novel is a wonderful exploration of human relationships - even going so far as to include the typically-trite-but-not-this-time final chapter of bringing the characters back together for a reunion five years after the bulk of the book fades away.

If you've got the time, this would be a great way to spend a few hours, folks.

Plus it's got some really cool first-person plural narration throughout...something that's pretty rare to pull off successfully but that works perfectly here as a means of communicating the office's democratizing and unifying power.

Baby tomato

In order to catch up from the recent vacation times, I offer you a couple of quick hitter posts...

First, the essence of Rachel Ray...

The Greene-ing of Kettering

I'm heading through a backlog of some topics from before vacation, so stick with me.

The girl and I headed up to Dayton just before the break (mostly picking up rental car #1) and headed down to the new upscale outdoor mall in Kettering, The Greene. We stopped into Potbelly for a bit of lunch before wandering the complex in search of commerce on a hot summer day.

The complex has a whole bunch of mixed-use space - restaurants, shops, central park space, movie theater, offices, and apartments - that makes for an interesting little stroll. It's a stepford sort of planned community with a balance of commercial and non-commercial space that could, in theory, make for an interesting and easy enough place to live and work.

They've got all sorts of things going for them:

• loads of free parking (things that people in real cities lack)
• beautiful, scenic views (of I-675)
• nearby entertainment (the movies, the comedy club - both on site)
• loads of available food (not like that crappy downtown Cincinnati without any sort of grocery)
• a decent enough library
• good schools nearby
• a nearby rec center and disc golf course
• safety-ensuring police force (we saw one cop on a bicycle and one on a Segway - both seemed real nice and friendly)

Oh, sure, there's the fact that everything in the place requires you to drop cash and actually produces nothing whatsoever - as they have no industry and produce pretty much nothing of their own. But other than that it's like the perfect community.

In all honesty, walking around The Greene made me wonder what's in store for our cities in the future. If we continue to sprawl outward, building ever fancier and fancier mallspaces, drawing commerce from the city centers and leaving behind just empty buildings devoid of tennants, what are we going to have in a few decades? Are we going to end up with dozens of cities just like Detroit where the city is a hollow shell, empty of all but the heartiest downtown residents and nearly devoid of tourism in that formerly glorious heart?

How can we continue to build shopping centers that do nothing but give us more hours to kill and places to spend our money? Will we all end up in the service industry, selling imported goods simply so that in our off hours we can visit malls other than the one where we work to spend those earned dollars?

It was kind of a disconcerting way to spend an afternoon, honestly, when it should have all been about bumbling across the Gem City

A wonderful update

A while back, I mentioned that there was an online poll going on to find name the new Seven Wonders of the World, and I thought I'd go ahead and point out that the voting is done with the following seven creations as the new seven wonders:

• Chichen Itza, Mexico
• Christ the Redeemer, Brazil
• Great Wall, China
• Machu Picchu, Peru
• Petra, Jordan
• Colloseum, Rome
• Taj Mahal, India

In a minorly cool move, I can now say that I've seen one of the seven wonders of the world (the Colloseum).

Now, we all get a chance to vote for the Seven Wonders of Nature.

Today's proposition...

Today's proposition is probably an awful one...

Stevie Wonder is a weenie.

Arguments for the afirmative:

• "For Once in My Life"
• "Isn't She Lovely?"
• The Woman in Red soundtrack
• "My Cherie Amour"
• "You Are the Sunshine of My Life"
• "Ebony & Ivory" - counts double because he worked with Paul McCartney (absolute king of the weenies)
• "Part Time Lover"
• "You Will Know"
• "Redemption Song" (his cover)
• The cover of Talking Book
• His appearance on The Cosby Show
• "I Just Called To Say I Love You"

Arguments for the negative:

• "Higher Ground"
• "I Wish"
• "Sir Duke"
• "Superstition"
• "Uptight (Everything's Alright)"
• "Master Blaster (Jammin')"
• His release of an album called The 12 Year Old Genius
• The hats
• His Sesame Street appearance (possibly the definitive evidence)
• Membership in the Rock Hall
• His other Sesame Street appearance

Arguments that I'm not sure are positive or negative:

• "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours"
• "Do I Do"

The Girl argues that "He's blind" should give him a pass, but I'm not so sure.

Your thoughts?

Finally!

At long last the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal grand slam final lived up to its spectacular possibilities...

If you missed the Wimbledon final this morning, you missed a lot...

NBC ran an updated version of this commercial after Roger won the title this morning.

Caught Stealing Insights

There's a new obsession 'round the household: CSI.

We got hooked a while back and were really thankful that NBC moved the office to 8:30 instead of 9:00 because The Girl somehow wrangled the remote away starting at 9:00 every Thursday night so she (and me since we've only got one tv in the household) could watch CSI. After getting thoroughly engrossed in season whatever we're up to now (I think it's seven), we've headed back into the archives via PLCH and are up to season 2, episode 15.

I have been amazingly impressed with the writing on the show as they allow characterization of the leads to dribble out so achingly slowly over time while keeping each week's focus firmly on the case at hand. This makes for a show that can be very much self-contained, allowing anyone to drop in for an eopisode or two without feeling as though they're coming in on the middle of something (the polar opposite of the feeling I get that has kept me from seeing Lost, Jericho, or Heroes, for example). The drips and drabs, however, make for a much richer tapestry when the series if viewd as a whole - something we've been able to do thanks to the amazing DVD collection at PLCH.

I know that at least one of my regular readers has an issue with the science portrayed on the show, and I agree that things certainly move along at the speed of plot rather than at a realistic rate for most of the tests. That doesn't bother me, however, as the science is (to the best of my understanding) pretty good - it just wouldn't happen that quickly most of the time. I also understand that seeing main characters poop, pee, and stop by to pick up dry cleaning wouldn't be interesting but would certainly make things a little more realistic. Such is the nature of fiction.

It's also in the nature that the characters are perhaps more successful than they might be in real life and do a little more (in terms of polic work rather than CSI work) than their real-life counterparts would), but again, it doesn't bother me.

In the end, though, it's not a show about science or police procedures; it's a show about the main characters, and those characters are written well enough to carry the show. The actors also make sure that the characterizations hold true as they do a lot of off-camera acting, letting those who are paying attention see little things in the background and in minor moments - things that really add to the whole picture of the series.

One of my favorite episodes was this past season's "Lab Rats" as the minor character lab techs got center stage for nearly a full episode with the main characters dropping in and out of the labs to get tests run and make entertaining, non-important case revelations. The little guys got a shot at the big time, and the season's ongoing storyline of the miniature killer (warning: link contains spoliers).

I'd certainly recommend anybody hop on with the CSI train whenever they can and head back into the old episode DVDs at their leisure. For me, CSI ranks right there with The Office and Earl to make Thursday the only night of television to which I pay regular attention.

And don't go for the substitute of CSI: Miami as that's pretty much a one-note show.

Visual proof of the vacation...

In chronological order and with absolutely no captions whatsoever...feel free to ask if you feel the need...

Back and better than ever

No, I couldn't possibly care less that those trollops are back. They had one outstanding hit, and that was about it as far as I'm concerned.

No, the news is that the summer's big vacation (details to follow, keep reading) is over, and I am back to blog for you.

This post is gonna get the major details of the vacation out of the way, and tomorrow we'll begin with more of the same gorgeous blogaction that you've come to know and expect from me.

In order, beginning on the 20th of June, year of our lord, two-thousand and seven...

6/20...drove to Indianapolis...lunch with Googs...good to see 'im...onward to Madison, WI...great dinner at Frida (outstanding fish tacos)...wandering State St (walking mall six blocks long)...loved the city...walking around UW's campus...loved the city...

6/21...returned rental car #1 (broken air conditioning)...breakfast at Mickie's Dairy Bar (great, cheap breakfast)...drove to Spring Green, WI (tiny town, though we were staying there)...headed 15 mi south to House on the Rock Inn (where we were actually staying)...went to House on the Rock (which I'd been desperate to see)...turned out to be annoying, crappy, awful...just deplorable as a tourist destination...not enough bad things can be said (smelly, weird, cramped, strange)...dinner at The Shed...meh...boring dinner...round #1 of mini-golf...got The Girl to watch Office Space..

6/22...onward to the Wisconsin Dells...like Gatlinburg North...very touristy...Lower Dells boat tour - good time, little chilly that day, didn't want to see Upper tour because of the jumping dog...lunch at High Rock Cafe - best meal of the trip, so good we went back for dinner, amazing food (especially the Soprano sandwich and the Cusabi wrap)...rounds #2 & 3 of mini-golf at Pirate Cove (Pirate's Lookout & Challenge) - turns out that 36 holes of mini-golf is above The Girl's limit of patience and indulgence...cheesecake on a stick...hit a deer with rental car #2 just north of Loganville, WI - minimal damage, sheered off the rear-view mirror on the driver's side, left a dent in the driver rear door...called various insurance and rental care folks...

6/23 - back to Madison to get rental car #3 (thankfully our last of the trip)...great farmers' market - like six+ blocks of produce, cheese, baked goods - wonderful...wandered State St again...very cool Madison Museum of Contemporary Art - wonderful sculpture garden on the roof, great views of the city and lakes...lunch at Tutoo - decent, not spectacular...shopped through Urban Outfitters...picked up an Uglydoll...li'l snack at Paciugo gelato before heading to Natural Bridge State Park - big disappointment, only about 1 mile of trails, lame natural bridge...bad chinese takeout from Dodgeville for dinner...

6/24 - left Dodgeville via the Spring Green Arts & Crafts Fair and onward to camping in Buckhorn State Park - site 26 to be specific...good evening - marshmallows, graham crackers, mosquitos and flies, avoided the 100% deet in favor of 40% deet - which still wasn't good enough...

6/25 - gave up on camping because of the mosquito infestation...breakfast at McDonald's on the road...tried to stay in St Paul, but they were full...stayed in Minneapolis at Radisson right on UofM's campus...great location...did some laundry crashed at the hotel after wonderful dinner at Pop! including amazing crepes...

6/26 - to the Como Park Zoo...wandering 'round Dinkytown - neat neighborhood, good breakfast at Al's...picked up two new cds...walked all 'round campus, including across the mighty Mississippi and back...saw a cool museum designed by Gehry from a pretty neat walking bridge...

6/27 - to the Science Museum of Minnesota which was phenomenal...even played nine holes of science-themed mini-golf - amazing, truly phenomenal...dropped to Ikea - picked up bed spreads and a couple of other things...through Uptown - picked up The Girl's long sought larger wallet...caught up with friends in the Twin Cities...took in a ballgame on the carpet...

6/28 - slow day...nice to relax in a home instead of a hotel room...Minnesota Landscape Arboretum for a nice afternoon...

6/29 - Ah, commerce at its finest at the Mall of America including a Lego store...The Girl got to cook dinner (something she'd been missing) and there was a bit of wine had by all...

6/30 - to the Walker Art Center for some culture - easily my favorite muesum on the trip, amazing building, wonderful art, would love to spend days and days there...also to the sculpture garden (also amazing) across the street...dinner at Maynard's for some fresh fish...then a revelation that Wayne did voice work on an anime series - very, very cool...

7/1 - bit of gaming - loads of fun...and a dream come true - real grass mini-golf - I'm spolied...dinner at Floyd's...

7/2 - headed to Chicago...stopped in the Dells for another shot at the High Rock (sadly closed for the 4th - two days early?)...instead to Mexicali Rose for the single worst meal of the trip - avoid it like the plague...onward to Chitown...great music on the way in...tried to get a Taste but too late...so dinner was at the Italian Village...

7/3 - long day of walking but a good tour of the lakeside...morning at the Shedd - amazing to see the old girl in fine feather now, loads of fun...looked through lots of CoolGlobes...walked through Grant & Millenium Parks...up to Navy Pier for good times...wandered through Stained Glass museum - some very neat, some a little too liturgical...good pizza at Pizano's...and down to Taste to see the fireworks..

7/4 - checked out of the best hotel of the trip...breakfast at the Golden Apple and then homeward...slept in my own bed for the first time in two weeks...

Wherever you wander,
Wherever you roam,
Be happy and healthy,
And glad to be home...

Anything you want to know more about?

Culture is dead! Long live culture!

Yet again, today's post comes from a recent NPR story, this one about an Andrew Keen's new book The Cult of the Amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture.

The interview was fascinating - you can listen here - was fascinating, and not just because the author's got a fabulous British accent.

Keen's first lengthy statement, in response to a question asking "let's make sure we're all on the same page here...overall, just give us a brief description of the problem you have with this interactive version of the web"...

My problem is that [Web 2.0] fundamentally undermines the authority of mainstream media. We are seeing two things going on simultaneously: the rise of this user-generated content which is unreliable and often corrupt and a crisis in professional journalism, professional recorded music, newspapers, radio stations, television, and publishing. And that is the core of our culture. Once we undermine the authority and expertise and professionalism of mainstream media, all we have is opinion, chaos, a cacophany of amateurs.

This is an isssue that I have been considering for a fair while now: the move from professional creation of news, media, and entertainment to a society where all entertainment and news is created equally and amateurly, challenging us to sort through so much dreck to find any kernel of wisdom or quality news. The increasing volume of information out there, with a corresponding withering of, to quote Keen, the wisdom of the professional frightens me because the sheer volume of crap out there will likely make it tougher and tougher to find what matters, what is important.

In a professional culture, the ratio of signal to noise is managable. We know that some of what we see and hear is without merit, but so much of it is with merit that we can trust our media by default, knowing that the incidents of untrustworthiness are few and far between enough that they will be brought to our attention when the are found.

In an amateur culture, however, the signal to noise ratio shifts drastically in favor of the noise, meaning that we must, by default, distrust our media, hoping to find the tiny amounts of worthwhileness that rise above the miasma.

But how will we find that?

Who will point out what is good, what is worthy, what is trustable if the only people I hear from are people whom I trust no more than I do myself?

If I am the news media (I've already begun blogging. What's to stop me from newsblogging?), then why would I trust the words of someone else's news? I know my biases. I know when I'm stretching the truth. I know when I'm talking without a lot of facts to back up my opinions. How do I know that the other people talking back to me aren't doing the same?

I look forward to reading Keen's book, and I continue to wait for 2014.

If you're living on earth, then enjoy Living on Earth

I love NPR, in case you hadn't noticed. I mean that I love it to the point that I get probably 80+% of my news from its dulcet radio tones.

I love turning on WVXU at any time and catching a show that is going to teach me something about my world, something that I probably didn't know. It might be Morning Edition on the way to school or Fresh Air on the way home, Talk of the Nation a little later in the evening or Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me on a Sunday afternoon, This American Life on a Saturday or Diane Rehm's less than dulcet tones in the middle of the day. I am going to end that hour smarter than I began it.

And this past weekend was no different.

I was out of town, catching my NPR fix on WFPL. There I got a dose of Living on Earth, a weekly environmentally-themed program. I learned about the phasing out of metal coat hangers, an environmental challenge that I had never before considered; home wind farms, something that The Girl and I have considered a few times; and the EPA's embarassing heal dragging on testing pesticides for possible hormone disruption in humans.

And so much of the programming on NPR is available in full streaming or downloadable audio - or in transcript form. Their job is to inform us, so they're thrilled to give their content away free. After all, if they get you to their website from a simple web story, you're hooked and interested in something new.

It's wonderful.

If you haven't tuned in to NPR, please give it a try.

If you love NPR already, remember to give them a donation.

If you already donate, buy something.

This radio resource is too valuable to squander.

Top five returning

It's been a long, long while since I dropped my top five movies...five times in a day...

My favorite movies about reality tv...

1. The Truman Show
2. Quiz Show
3. Natural Born Killers
4. Running Man
5. Yeah, I'm stumped on another one. If anybody can help me, I'd be appreciative.

My favorite James Bond movies...

1. Casino Royale
2. Goldfinger
3. Diamonds are Forever
4. From Russia With Love
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

My favorite John Cusack movies...

1. Grosse Point Blank
2. High Fidelity
3. Better Off Dead
4. The Thin Red Line
5. Bob Roberts
6. The Ice Harvest
7. Stand By Me
8. Say Anything
9. The Grifters
10. Fat Man & Little Boy
11. Eight Men Out
12. Must Love Dogs
13. The Sure Thing
(there were too many to stop at five...sorry...)

My favorite movie musicals (note: I haven't seen lots of the nominated films, and I discounted any cartoons.)

1. The Muppet Movie
2. Moulin Rouge
3. White Christmas/Holiday Inn (They're the same as far as I'm concerned.)
4. Chicago
5. Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Honorable mentions to: Fame; South Park:Bigger, Longer, & Uncut; Viva Las Vegas; Grease

Favorite films nominate for Best Picture Oscars in the 2000s...

1. Lost in Translation
2. Fellowship of the Ring
3. Traffic
4. Moulin Rouge
5. Brokeback Mountain
Honorable mentions to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Gosford Park; Return of the King; Munich; Capote; Good Night, and Good Luck

In honor of...#7...

If ever there was a science guy who has used the medium of television (and more recently the magical interweb) to promote both himself and science, that science guy would have to be Steve Spangler.

Spangler was a classroom teacher for a dozen years but has now moved on to be the Director of the National Hands-on Science Institute in Denver and a consultant for the Littleton Public Schools near Denver.

And he is the current media scientist darling, and rightfully so.

Spangler's media savvy and affable personality - as well as his regular appearances on local morning shows and national network shows - has sent him into a decent amount of fame, particularly among the science teacher community. Spangler has even begun to parlay that into marketing science products in his name.

Spangler maintains a blog where he points out interesting science things, though the blog isn't all that interesting as he knows he's fully in the public eye. Luckily that same website has a large repository of experiments from Steve...

Snacks4theBrain! 51 - weird vocal science...


Gravity Defied Goo Video...


His mentos & diet coke compilation...


From Donald Duck to Barry White...

Hydrogen and Oxygen...

Pop Rocks science...

Make Your Own Bubbling Lava Lamp...

Bernouli's Principle...

Instant Worms...

Go check out more yourself...

Wii are thoroughly amused

So I finally broke down and bought into my first game console since Sega hockey was rockin'ly cool back in the early 90's...

I...make that we (The Girl was seriously involved in this purchase, too)...bought a Nintendo Wii.

There are all sorts of logical reasons for us to have bought a Wii:

• There are these little people who visit from time to time and like to play things.
• It's a social kind of thing where The Girl and I can both play at the same time.
• It doesn't take up much room there on top of the DVD player.

But the biggest reason that that I played a Wii at a friend's house just after school let out, and it was fun.

So we sunk in a few hundred bucks - gotta get that second controller and a couple of extra games, doncha know - on not much more than a whim, and after visiting a dozen stores over a three or four day tour of West Chester and Mason, we got a Wii.

And it's a blast.

The weirdness of not having the more traditional video game controller (with it's ever-increasing number of buttons) is such a cool novelty that playing a Wii is amazingly different from playing any game system before it. The controller slips on your wrist, and you do whatever motion you want the character on the screen to perform. If you want to swing a golf club (my best is even par over nine holes), you move the controller like it's the grip of the club. If you want to swing a tennis racket, you just swing the controller like it's the racket handle. Very cool.

Now I just have to get the girl good enough at Wii tennis that it's a match between the two of us.

In honor of...#6...

I'm away on vacation and will posting infrequently for a few days...enjoy this belch of postings until then...

Some of the finest of the media scientists come to their time in the spotlight from the magic of being science educators. Lee Marek, for example, is (or maybe was) a chemistry teacher in Naperville, IL, near Fermi Labs ourside Chicago.

Marek has won numerous awards as a teacher, but at this point, he's mostly headed beyond the classroom and become a bit of a celebrity in the science teacher world. He's been on David Letterman - usually with his students, sometimes without -at least four times that I can count (#1...#2...#3...#4), though sadly video is a bit hard to come by - and what I was able to find is pretty small format stuff.

Marek also has videotaped a number of his most impressive demos and posted them online as well - though in a Real Player format.

And, most impressively, Marek just might be the guy to discover the mentos / diet coke geyser.

Meandering through the miasma

In wandering through the blogsphere of late, here are the things that have entertained me...

• These people rock - somehow I can see Joey organizing such an event, and it look like they're hiring (be warned, inappopropriate t-shirt appears at about 1:59)
• The ultimate burger has now been crafted...everyone else can stop trying
• Covers of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - will the song never die?
• This new John Cusack movie looks like a horror hit to me
• More horror masterworks are coming
• A bit of pointnless happy gaming
• I'm still trying to wrap my head around this video
• Another trading system (like Lala), but this one's for books
• Looks like the new, tallest building in Cincy is back on the docket
• I've been doing a lot of this lately. My best is solving a medium puzzle in 459 seconds.

In honor of...#5...

And this, then, is how far we've sunk with some of the new scientists in the media, the British show Brainiac.

The premise is simple: they take some scientific conept, find how it explains something in real life, and they blow up a caravan.

At least they nearly always blow up a caravan.

They're much more about the explosions and much less about the science - not that they ignore the science entirely, just that they lean more toward explosive stuff.

They do have an online collection of videos, but here are some housed on other sites.

Alkali metals in water...

How to beat the crane game...


Racing fireworks...


Touching an electric fence...

Thermite explosion...


Paint can in a microwave...

A big egg in a microwave...

The dangers of nylon...

How to make Doner Kebabs (?)...

Playing blackjack against a monkey...

Making ice cream...


Helium's effects on wind instruments...

Back yard cannons...


Colour words...

A moment of seriousness

I'm pretty much a shill here...



I understand the seriousness of the issue, and the blankness of arguing which row we're in doesn't make a lick of sense.

So I'm throwing my hat into the ring and doing like the end of this video asks me to do.