August, 2006

This time a fascinating little gem from the cover article, The Expert Mind, of this month’s Scientific American: The month you were born plays decisive importance into whether you’ll become a professional soccer player or not. That’s a fact.

I’m reminded of Steven Pinker’s wonderful, mocking account of how he became a scientist (which appears in John Brockman’s Curious Minds, a book I’ve praised lavishly already).

OK, pardon the profanity. I had been following the Net “Neutrality” argument from a perplexed distance for some time (as I’ve chronicled about before) but this month’s Scientific American editorial on the subject and its disgusting rhetoric is just too damn much. Perverting George Orwell’s masterpiece on the dangers of imposing equality, Animal Farm^WP, so as to defend that very same imposition is off-limits, it’s too low, it’s too devious. It’s repulsive. Yuck.

There are several more gems sprinkled throughout. Here’s another one:

Of course, forget the silly “caprices” and blind moneylust of the pesky owners of the cable themselves. Who could know better about the cable business and its needs than casual passersby like ourselves?

To respond in kind, I propose a different appropriation of George Orwell, this one from his other anti-totalitarianism classic, 1984^WP:

One good thing came out of that editorial though, I found out about Hands Off The Internet, a sane organization against government intervention on the net. Pay them a visit.

William W. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity (PDF and HTML versions available), a summary of his same-titled book^AM, has only grown on me since I read it a month ago. It’s main thesis, that wealth hinges on productivity, has come to resonate inside me like few things have of late.

It was, for instance, what lead me to finally accept the possibilities of technology and, shortly thereafter, to naively proclaim I’d one day have a massively profitable company with less people than my then-age. The whimsical limit, I believe, will force such a company to be always awake, always flexible, always smart, always doing technological judo. It would force it to value people in a way we’ve barely explored at all.

I enjoyed a birria^WP orgy this Sunday at El Chololo, a popular restaurant near Chapala^WP, and just as I was entering the bathroom two brown, impossibly small indian kids were chasing each other out of it. The (slightly) bigger one yelled to his mate: ”Kevin, ‘perame!” (“Kevin, wait for me!”).

I think it was a moment to amber, because surprised as I was of the Irish name having found its way into this beautiful brown boy, beacon of a brown new world, my surprise was really at how Mexican it sounded, how accustomed I had become to hearing such Anglo-Saxon names (Celtic Brian is very popular too) in young Mexican children.

This past week was frantic and exhausting (not boring!) but yesterday it was all worthwhile: we—my sisters, cousins, and me—threw mom one helluva birthdayparty. Preparations started Sunday, August 20, at a virtual meeting of the Parra Cardenas where a Jewish theme was decided, an impossibly long menu was agreed upon, and (since we wanted something picnicky despite the monsoon that is August) we were all set for a tenting-camp dinner at the new store’s roof.

“I have this great illusion of dying exhausted rather than bored” has become of late something like Andrea’s personal slogan. I love the phrase—wrapped in downbeat words, it’s a souvenir of our own mortality that still manages to resolve in cheerful (maudlin) upbeatness—and so I thought it was time for a personal logo too. This came out after some fiddling and I quite like it, if I say so myself. (You will notice I’m still deep in my Bembo phase.) Tomorrow we’ll see if Andrea likes it.

The girl’s Sandman’s Death, which adds a nice layer of meaning (and copyright infringement for good measure) to the logo.

I used to dig Greek mythology as a pimpleless child and one of the myths I recall more vividly is the one of Arachne^WP—I still remember my childish confusion and anger at the Greeks’ twisted moral sense.

Imagery’s multilingual feedback^ELZR has been the best, most rewarding part of it all. I was feeling down with Domburi the other day (and with how hard it is to get the interface just right), but then a new review came in and things are bright and beaming again:

Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.

She was somewhat obsessed with Suede^WP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday Night^MP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.

Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.