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Saturday, June 15, 2002 |
Did Bush say it?
To keep myself honest, I'll report the recent skepticism about whether Dubya actually ever asked whether there were blacks in Brazil or not. The superb Snopes site has a great rundown of it, pronounces it "undetermined." When you look at the specifics, it's clear that the original story in Der Spiegel was pretty thin. One certainly has to hope the story is wrong.
While I'm at it, a couple of good words for the Snopes site. I love getting their update newsletter (wish they had an RSS feed). They are always sensibly skeptical, and the site is a good antidote for the gigabytes of foolishness that floats around the web, email, and newsgroups. Besides the Dubya idiocy, this issue also deals with the $20 bill/WTC foolishness and the silliness about GeorgeWashington and the Angel. These folks are fighting the good, but probably somewhat futile, fight.
11:20:24 PM Permalink
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Graduation Day
Richard Michel graduated from Albany High School yesterday. I took some pictures, and they're at the Ofoto link in the title above. It's exciting to see how this event affects Richard. He's really happy, as who isn't happy to get out of high school.
11:12:21 PM Permalink
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Kesey Wisdom
"The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer—they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek the mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." [RobotWisdom]
10:55:05 PM Permalink
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What's So New in Newfangled Science
Interesting piece on the Stephen Wolfram book: "Science is a cumulative, fairly collegial venture. But every so often a maverick, working in self-imposed solitude, bursts forth with a book that aims to set straight the world with a new idea. Some of these grand schemes spring from biology, some from physics, some from mathematics. But what they share is the same unnerving message: everything you know is wrong." Wolfram's ideas aren't totally new, and the author points to some others who have gone done some of the same paths. His book looks really fascinating, but after reading a bunch of books on "complexity" in the early 90s and not really getting anywhere with it, not much in the way of new insights for me, I'm going to wait a while before I consider maybe reading it.
10:05:33 PM Permalink
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Jay, Mamet, Hirschfield
A Memory of Houdini and, No Escaping It, It's a Gabfest. Ricky Jay and David Mamet went to sit for a portrait by the artist Al Hirschfeld. A discussion of Broadway lore and vaudeville legend ensued. By Jesse Mckinley. [New York Times: Arts]
Interesting conversation. Ricky Jay has a new show in New York, and I bet it would be fun to see. He was most recently in Mamet's movie "Heist," and is author of the wonderful book "Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women," a great book and nearly always an antidote for what ails you.
9:56:39 PM Permalink
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NYT on Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick's Mind-Bending, Film-Inspiring Journeys. To call Philip K. Dick, whose 1954 story "The Minority Report" is the basis for the new Steven Spielberg movie, a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. By David Edelstein. [New York Times: Movies]
It's really great seeing Dick acknowledged like this in the New York Times, but at the same time mighty strange. I've been reading Dick for about as long as I can remember. The first novel of his I remember was The World Jones Made, when I was in the 7th or 8th grade. As the world becomes more like a Dick novel, then the rest of the world catches on.
Still, in the Times line above, there's some of the old condescencion towards Science Fiction. "If this is so good, then it can't be Science Fiction." So writers like Vonnegut said they weren't SF writers when, of course, they were. And of course it's sad that Dick, "our homegrown Borges, " in Ursula LeGuin's (another sf writer-not-an-sf-writer) nifty phrase, turning out a body of work that will stand next to anyone, was getting just a couple hundred dollars a pop for these novels, and having problems feeding his family. I guess it will always be that way, that there are unsung geniuses working alone without acknowledgement or reward.
9:47:33 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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Totally spectacular collection of vintage consumer-goods packaging. I would so totally buy packaged goods that came in wrappers like these. I miss this look and feel. 