Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

I believe that it is not hyperbole to say that the existence, even in conceptual form, of the Chompr is the final clear sign that Western society has slipped completely into decadence. First of all, if you can’t hold a sandwich in your hand, you shouldn’t be trying to eat it. Second of all, you [...]

A couple of quotations from my web reading recently: “I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.” –U.S. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder (via) “Watch half a film. Ring someone up, ask them about their dreams. Make your life as patchy a discourse as possible.” –M. John Harrison, explaining something about writing “If only [...]

And here we go again… I’ve been reading Jeff’s daily reviews of the books in the Penguin Great Ideas series. While I don’t think I’m interested in trying to read all sixty of them in sixty days (despite Jeff’s examples and the exhortation of the Harvard University Press) I am very impressed with the presentation [...]

As I write this I’m downloading five new tracks by my oft-mentioned-here pal Danny Michel. It appears that just before Christmas Danny made a deal to get digital rights to his back catalogue back from the label in exchange for giving them the rights to retail physical copies of his new indie CD. At least [...]

If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people. I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is [...]

“Demanding a significant investment of time and energy on the part of the consumer, it [the book] has always fit somewhat awkwardly into the world of mass entertainment.” You know, it seems like every one of these “end of publishing” articles has a couple of nuggets in it. Like Englehart’s noticing that the book is [...]

“Books are not Hollywood, to the general astonishment of agents and corporate suits. They are intimate, unpredictable agents of delicious rebellion.” I’m not sure I buy the thesis in Osborne’s piece, but I really would like the believe I live in the world that this quote from it describes.

You know all the noise from the right about Obama’s plan to make US income tax more progressive? (Which, sanity forces me to note, amounts to “return them to Clinton era levels”.) In the midst of all the arguments about who should be paying what share of the costs, why is there no big loud [...]

I have survived the day of endless meetings. As soon as the last evening meeting ended, I hauled ass down the road to the bookstore to unwind with some browsing before it closed. I made some weird purchases that I suspect I might not have made if I weren’t dazed and confused from the meeting [...]

I think I’m going to soon look at setting up the site with “asides”, so that instead of gathering up large buckets of links that I have only a few comments on, I can just drop them in as “asides” between my longer and more content-y posts. In the meantime, another (possibly final) agglomeration of [...]

Yes, it’s time again for an original-content free collection of pointers to things that amuse, interest, or frighten me. I believe I have to mention the opening of Knol, Google’s attempt to take on Wikipedia with “authoritative articles” that have specific owners, rather than the anonymous wisdom of crowds. I admit, I have no idea [...]

I read a lot of news. I read magazines. I follow news blogs. I make a very concerted effort to keep up with what’s going on in the world, and to get the information from several perspectives. And yet somehow I’ve found myself thinking, quite frequently, over the last month that this whole “food shortage” [...]