So there’s been controversy over whether this story reported by 2600 is true or bogus. In a nutshell, Denver guy claims he was harassed at length for the “crime” of taking photos near the VP’s hotel;Denver PD and Secret Service claim it didn’t happen. 2600 bemoans the lack of a “smoking gun” to settle the […]

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Tom Palmer recently blogged about his visit to Britain’s “Eden Project,” where to his incredulity, he found a largely spurious piece of spam presented as “educational material.” The spam purports to describe what the composition of a “global village” would be like if we compressed the world’s population into a hundred person town. A little […]

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To my suprise, Dad offers the following commentary on the mall piece below: About the malls, you fellows are going the wrong route. Malls are the replacement of the “agora,” the “plaza mayor,” or the “forum Romanum.” With suburban changes, the places of trade or exchange of ideas have shifted. Teenagers, or other more rational […]

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I’d expected, on the basis of an earlier tangential encounter, to be rubbed the wrong way by later Wittgenstein. As I keep on through Monk’s biography, though, I find myself reminded of something I think Robert Nozick tried to do. The title of his second book, Philosophical Explanations, refers to his idea of a “second […]

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Malls are much worse when you see why they make sense. Typically, I waited far too long to do most of my Christmas shopping. I had hoped to take a good half day ambling about Manhattan looking for cool, interesting gifts for the various people on the list, then realized I had to be somewhere […]

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The final twelve issues of the epic comic book series The Invisibles have finally been compiled in the trade paperback The Invisible Kingdom. Like the final episode of The Prisoner, a series itself frequently referenced in the comics, it requires a certain amount of backtracking and rereading before it makes much sense, but it’s well […]

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An unsettling thought: now that major media are crediting blogs with having taken Trent Lott’s cojones and served them up on a silver platter after mainstream news dropped the balls, so to speak, will the blogosphere use its powers for good? Because this has certainly pointed a spotlight on, e.g., Josh Marshall and Atrios — […]

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Reading Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein put me in mind of Tom Lerher’s quip about the “people who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.” Lerher said it was sobering to contemplate that “when Mozart was my age… he had been dead for two years.” Well, when Wittgenstein was about my age, he was […]

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Mike Doughty hasn’t gotten around to posting the lyrics to his new tune online yet, but since he typically does so, I assume it’s OK for me to post this transcription. (If not, someone drop an email & I’ll take it down; no legal nastygrams required.) AMERICAN CAR by Mike Doughty My circus train pulls […]

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A week home in suburban New Jersey, doing nothing more spectacular than sleeping late and spending late nights talking over a drink with an old friend or two, has been supremely rejuvinating. Even at my age, really old friends — people who knew you in (say) early adolescence, as an embryonic but recognizable precursor of […]

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