r o b o t m i n i o n

Literary Map

Randy Cohen, aka "The Ethicist" from the New York Times, is putting together a literary map of New York. What a fantastic idea.

I remember walking around Manhattan and stumbling onto streets that I remembered from books I've read over the years. Even now, as I'm finishing up Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle Trilogy, I find myself wanting to go back to London because the city is so vivid (early 1700's London) in the books.

From the Times:

READERS ARE INVITED to submit the address of the home (or office or hangout) of a character from a novel, story, children's book or poem that is set in Manhattan. Include the title and author and the sentence or two (with page number) that provides the clue to the location. Send to The New York Times Book Review, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y., 10036, Attention: Bookmap; or e-mail to bookmap@nytimes.com. Entries are due by Wednesday, May 11. The Literary Map of Manhattan will appear in the Book Review on June 5, the Summer Reading issue, and on the Web at nytimes.com. Of course authors are encouraged to reveal the home addresses of their characters.

It would be great if they did this with a Google Maps-like satellite toggle so that you could zoom in close and get a feel for what the blocks look like. Or maybe some sort of hover for historical pictures of the area.

 

DVD: Supersize Me

Last weekend when it snowed at the end of April and it was too cold to walk the dog, we rented movies and stayed inside. The best movie we rented by far, was Supersize Me.

I read Fast Food Nation a couple of years ago and enjoyed it tremendously. This movie was very much in the same vein. There's an extra interview on the DVD with the author, Eric Schlosser.

We bought the DVD today for the office because we're thinking about doing some sort of unit on food. I've been collecting sources for the past three years of so, and we've got a lot of material (enough for a course) to work with. Might be a little summer project...

Survival of the Fittest

There was a great article by John Merrow in yesterday's New York Times about the state of undergraduate education at big, impersonal research universities. Most of the article focused on student at the University of Arizona, which I visited (well, the bars, anyway) when I was in Tucson earlier this month.

It looks like the Times has teamed up with PBS to do a documentary on the subject, airing June 23. It's on my iCal now.

Tom Fleming, a senior lecturer in astronomy on a yearly appointment with the university, is another professor who sees value in trying to shake up the reluctant underclassmen in a required course. “I can’t sit here and rant and rave and complain that, ‘Oh, our standards are low and the students don’t learn in high school what they used to.’ The fact of the matter is I have 135 students here now, and I can’t go back and change history as to what sort of high school education they received. If I publish a paper in the Astrophysical Journal and 12 people in the entire world read it from cover to cover, that’s a high readership. On the other hand, every semester I can affect the lives of 100 to 150 people, and it’s much more gratifying.”

Truth Serum

I've been feeling dangerously truthful and that may not be a good thing when you can hit a button and publish your thoughts for the whole world to see.

[delete! delete! delete!]

I have heard some ridiculous things out of the mouths that (metaphorically) feed me this week. I've been trying to distance myself from some of the insaner people around me. Oddly enough, I am in better spirits than you might imagine. The weather lately has been beautiful and I've been outside a lot.

The boy calls it "healthy disengagement." The university euphamistically refers to it as  "Work/Life Issues."

The Long Emergency

Last night we went to see James Howard Kunstler speak about his new book "The Long Emergency" in a very packed Knowlton auditorium. Kunstler was a good speaker — by which I mean he was good at being funny while delivering a lecture about the impending collapse of our society.

Kunstler's very much a critic of suburban sprawl and has extrapolated his own sort of Bowling Alone-esque theory on the collapse of society at large as indicated by unfriendly  architecture and the zoning failure of the suburbs. That's not really anything new and it's pretty close to what I believe myself. It's why I ran screaming to NYC as soon as I was out of high school and it's why I live in one of the great urban neighborhoods in the mid-west.

Kunstler's new book is all about the impending energy crisis and what will happen to the US when we finally run out of oil. Or at least get close enough to running out of oil that buying Hummers stops being a tax break. Kunstler says that the big cities will retract, people will become more dependent on agriculture and agricultural animals, and that there will be a lot of "economic losers," and those losers will be the basis for some ugly politics of fear. One might argue that's already occurring...(cough, cough, issue one in Ohio...cough cough).

My question for Kunstler is about his time line. He clearly (maybe even a little gleefully) thinks that this will happen in his lifetime and since he's no spring chicken, that means my lifetime. How long does it take for an empire to fall? How long until the Long Emergency?

Vignettes

I've been busy this past week getting my life back together from vacation and taking care of a sick puppy (he's fine) so I haven't posted very often, but I've been thinking about it a lot without actually connecting to a computer to do it.

- Do you have any idea how hard it is to clean Pepto-Bismal off of a white dog? Thank god there has been gorgeous weather this week so I could kick his filthy ass outside to clean up and dose him. Even after two baths, his paws are still pink.

- Yesterday I had to have my eyes dilated for an optometry exam, and I was reading Brenda Laurel's Design Research (thesis reading) as I waited. The encroaching light sensitivity wasn't nearly as freaky as the loss of close-range focusing ability. My vision isn't the best, and I had better not lose any more because I would be a terrible blind person.

- While my mother and sister were on vacation in Florida over spring break, the house was egged. My father was home at the time, and in typical Jones-style pursuit of vigilante justice, he decided to create a "steak-out" scenario to catch the perps. When my mother came home from vacation she saw his set-up: His hunting-blind chair attached to a milk create with a yellow wiffle ball bat. He's been patrolling from behind their fence with their poodle every night after. I'm totally turning this into a T-Shirt called "The Mike Jones Security Detail."

The Obligatory "I'm back from vacation and had a great time, but too tired to post about the great time I had, so here's a picture of me having a great time, in the meantime" Post

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Originally uploaded by robotminion.

Back from Tucson. Had a great time.