Category: Thoughts

On further reflection, the problem with Fast Company is not the silliness of pretending it’s not about Ducatis, or the unfortunate title (the same as the much-parodied business magazine) but that it’s simply a mediocre story, ill-structured and ill-told. I’ll accept less-than-stellar writing to read a really compelling story like Ultramarathon Man, and great writing can make anything seem interesting, like Paul Theroux’s account of being bored and drunk on the Trans-Siberian railway. But Gross manages neither. His memoir meanders through the moderately successful relaunch of the company and his frustrating relationship with a closeted boyfriend, then stops without ending: the boyfriend is still closeted, the company is muddling through, and Italy is still charmingly different from the US. The only things Gross learns are how to ride a bike and how to buy expensive custom shoes. His readers are even less well served: we don’t learn anything at all from his experience and are barely even entertained.

Bookdwarf brought home a motorcycle-related galley for me. Scheduled for publication in May 2007, Fast Company: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Motorcycles in Italy is the story of a man who goes to Bologna to do marketing for a struggling motorcycle manufacturer in the mid-90s. This manufacturer is carefully unnamed, but it’s obviously Ducati. Ducati is known among motorcyclists for several things, all of which are described in the book: making high-performance motorcycles that are expensive to maintain, the mid-90s meltdown and turnaround led by brash Americans, the “naked bike” craze being led by the Monster series, and the unconventional desmodromic valves in its engines. Changing the trademarked words to “Beast” and “cosmodromic” doesn’t make it less obvious. Nor does putting the silhouette of a 1980s-style Japanese cruiser on the cover– not when the author is shown on the back page posing next to a Ducati 996 and wearing Ducati-branded leathers. Least effective at hiding the identity of the company is the Library of Congress cataloging in publication data, where the entry “1. Ducati (company)” has been carefully crossed out with a black magic marker.

The book itself is OK. Gross goes to Italy, gets some fancy clothes, a hot skinhead boyfriend, and drinks coffee in a colorfully stereotypical Italian town. He’s a reasonably good writer, but I’m still unsure why they’re pretending the book isn’t about Ducati.

Via Crooks & Liars, a pointer to WaPo article on a boy who died for lack of dental care.

Now, in defense of the US private medical system– the medical system did not kill that child. It merely failed to care enough about keeping him alive. And you know, it sucks. Kids die. We can’t save them all.

But given the choice between an $80 tooth extraction and a $250,000 intensive care stay for an abscess which has spread to the brain, which will you pick?

I mean, aside from “leave him in the street to die more cheaply.” We may be talking about a poor black kid in the DC suburbs, but it’s not like it’s New Orleans, where the medical system can get away with euthanizing the uninsured and using their bodies as a substitute for sandbags to hold up the levies.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding. There’s no medical system in New Orleans.

There’s quite the history of people using their feces to express rage and disrespect for employers– see Urban Dictionary for details. In the case of Central Square, though, it’s more likely to just be one of the homeless people needing to answer the call of nature. In the stairwell of my office building.

Sadly, none of us had the presence of mind to take a picture.

There’s something to be said for the sad nobility of this David Shrigley+Blur+Shynola animation, which depicts the doomed romance between a fairy and a squirrel, but in the immortal words of Morrisey, “it says nothing to me about my life”.

Who was it that first said go eat a bag of dicks? Because that says something to me about my life, as does this video of two incredibly cute puppies doing puppy things:

Credit for being first probably goes to Best Week ever. Still, some time after November 23, 2011, when tween America’s sweetheart becomes yet another piece of meat in the machine of celebrity destruction, I will here in the Google index with the phrase “the inevitable Hannah Montana sex tape.”

… even the Japanese diplomatic corps is rude to you.

… ministers in allied countries are routinely murdered for failing to veil themselves.

… you’re the only major industrialized nation to boycott the International Criminal Court, because you’re afraid of being held liable for war crimes.

… one of the most popular television shows among your people is a weekly apologia for torture.

Need I go on?

Everybody loves a funny t-shirt. OK, many people, including me, like funny t-shirts from time to time. But I am growing tired of the fact that none of these hip t-shirt companies that keep popping up have ideas of their own: Derek Zoolander Center for Kids t-shirt at Noisebot, Derek Zoolander Center for Kids t-shirt at Snorg Tees. Let’s Hug It Out t-shirt at Snorg, Let’s Hug It Out at Noisebot.

According to the Noisebot “About Us” page, “Every one of us here at NoiseBot.com is in our 20’s. We don’t just sell this stuff. We live it every day.” Wow, man. That’s deep. You youthful entrepreneurs sure have hit the nail on the head. Your entire business is making ugly screenprints of other people’s stupid jokes. You’ve got a real sustainable brand there, because nobody else has ever thought it would be funny to do a half-assed Will Ferrell impression.

This is popping up everywhere, but I’ll jump in too: Talking Points Memo and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution both cover GA state legislator Ben Bridges’ memo stating that all of contemporary astronomy, physics, and biology are actually an ancient Jewish conspiracy based on the Kabbalah. Although Bridges now denies writing the memo, he also refuses to say he doesn’t believe it. This is a memo which actually promotes fixed-earth cosmology. Next up, Lamarckian evolution!

I suppose that science is complicated enough now that Arthur C. Clarke is being proven right, and people just throw up their hands and think of it as magic. But for those dedicated to, you know, accuracy and truth, have a look at the Scientific American guide to debunking creationist nonsense.

I’d love to see what RedState has to say about Bridges and the teaching of science in science classes, but they seem wholly immersed in cheering on the Iraq bodycount this week.

The first two are by Paul Theroux, and detail long, exhausting voyages to all kinds of places. Theroux is a brilliant observer of people and places, well-informed about history and literature. Most importantly, he’s got an attitude I like: he’s traveling because it’s difficult, and he takes the long way around almost every time. The Great Railway Bazaar covers the longest train trip he could arrange in 1975: from London to India, then a plane to Japan, a few trips on the high-speed lines, then back to London via the trans-Siberian. It takes him six months. For Dark Star Safari, which I haven’t yet finished, he begins in Cairo and heads south by land to Cape Town, talking ruins and neglect and the contrast with the hopeful Africa of the early sixties, when everything seemed possible just after independence.

Traveling not just despite, but because of the inconvenience and difficulty really stoked my desire to take a long motorcycle trip this coming spring. There’s a similar theme in Bookdwarf’s current reading, which I’m likely to pick up next: Ultramarathon Man, in which the author runs hundreds of miles not for the fun, but for the pain. OK, he does it for the sense of achievement and the endorphin rush, but that still translates to doing it to prove he can stand the pain.

Next up: a galley I snagged from Bookdwarf, about what the world would look like without humans. It’s called, naturally enough, The World Without Us, and the key illustration is this chart of what collapses and what sticks around. The answers are not all obvious: yes, plastics and nuclear waste are forever, but cockroaches won’t do so well without heated buildings, and our pet cats will do better as wild predators than our dogs. The World Without Us touched on a lot of themes I was already familiar with, but in new ways. I’d recommend it to anyone who liked An Inconvenient Truth, or that New Yorker article about the guy who tracks rubber ducks in the ocean.

Finally, the funny one: The Spellman Files, the debut novel by Lisa Lutz. It’s about a family of private investigators and the ways that their work interferes with their family life. You thought your parents were suspicious of your new date? Try having them run a thorough background check on every man you meet. Think you can keep your sister out of your room? Not if she’s a 12-year-old with a lockpick and a grudge. It’s a great concept, and Lutz does a good job with it. There are a few places early on where I think the narrator’s voice slips a little, but the characters take hold very quickly and build into something which is laugh-out-loud funny but also really sweet. I’d recommend this to anyone.