Friday, December 5, 2008
Chocolate Debunking
This is apparently (much-loved) ancient web history, but since I missed it, you might have, too. Hence, I point you to the priceless and brilliant debunking of pricey/snobby Noka Chocolate. Definitely read all ten parts.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
"Bag of Hurt" Watch: Part 5
The phrase "Bag of hurt", which had very recently drawn just over a million Google results, seems to have mysteriously receded to just 879,000 results.
Coincidentally, this mysterious backtrack occurred immediately after I requested payment on a bet I'd made with a Google employee, six weeks ago, right after Steve Jobs more or less coined the phrase, that it'd shoot over a million within a year.
Never bet the people who manage the algorithm...
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Bush Doctrine Better for Goose than for Gander
We've had the expected ratcheting up of tensions between Pakistan and India, now that it's clear Pakistan-based terrorists were responsible for the Mumbai attacks. Hey, the Bush Doctrine settled this, didn't it? A nation has the right to aggression against states harboring terrorists threatening that nation (clunky syntax, I know, but much web surfing found no smoother versions).
Like its use of torture, the Bush Doctrine was an unthinkably reckless meme to circulate into the world. It will only lead to massive destabilization - the sort of climate provocateurs are aiming to create. Why shouldn't India do to Pakistan what we did to Afghanistan and Iraq?
Before: "That ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."
After: "Smite down with all your might whosever so much as associates with anyone who might ever smite thee on thy right cheek."
All said, I do hope Pakistan rounds up those monsters immediately (especially Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed, whom the Pakistanis once had under house arrest but subsequently released, and who, as late as 2006, was said by Pakistan's foreign office to "not [be] involved in any subversive and terrorist activities."), and that it doesn't devolve into civil war as a result.
Like its use of torture, the Bush Doctrine was an unthinkably reckless meme to circulate into the world. It will only lead to massive destabilization - the sort of climate provocateurs are aiming to create. Why shouldn't India do to Pakistan what we did to Afghanistan and Iraq?
"I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the President" -- George BushYep, he's been in it, all right!
Before: "That ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also."
After: "Smite down with all your might whosever so much as associates with anyone who might ever smite thee on thy right cheek."
All said, I do hope Pakistan rounds up those monsters immediately (especially Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed, whom the Pakistanis once had under house arrest but subsequently released, and who, as late as 2006, was said by Pakistan's foreign office to "not [be] involved in any subversive and terrorist activities."), and that it doesn't devolve into civil war as a result.
Not So E-ZPass
I've been suspended from the E-ZPass program for 60 days for going through a few m.p.h. faster than the posted limit. I only discovered this because, on an impulse, I opened my first E-ZPass statement envelope ever to discover the notice. If I hadn't opened the envelope, and attempted to use my E-ZPass during the suspension period, I'd have paid a steep fee and had my E-ZPass revoked.
Who on earth actually opens letters from E-ZPass? But, more practically, where does one get a whole bunch of one dollar coins?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Why People Read Restaurant Reviews
I'm amazed to discover that my Google map of Obscure Street food in Eastern Jackson Heights has had nearly 100,000 views. I haven't updated the map in ages, yet people keep streaming in.
It reminds me of when I wrote my first book, a guidebook to lesser-known NYC eateries, which earned great reviews from journalists who clearly didn't know and hadn't tried any places mentioned in the book. On what basis were they praising my work? Well, they enjoyed the vicariousness of reading about interesting-sounding places.
I nearly killed myself rechecking every single place before handing in my manuscript to ensure that my opinions were as timely as possible, given publishing's long lead time. Checking 150 restaurants, even briefly, is a herculean undertaking. But I'm not sure it was worth the effort. The fact is, I could have invented half the restaurants in the book, and it would have received the exact same reception. Over the course of my career, I've learned that while a few great finds passionately reviewed may ignite a furor and get lots of people to actually go eat somewhere (Jackson Diner, Sripraphai, Kabab Cafe, Charles Southern Kitchen, Mississippi BBQ Shack, etc., in my case), the vast majority of restaurant review readers never visit the places written about. They read solely to be transported.
Rereading my notes on the Jackson Heights street food map, I guess they are pretty entertaining. But isn't it daft to constrict one's writing to a niche as confining as food when people are just reading along for the writing, anyway?
UPDATE: Ah, I see the problem. Google, suckily, doesn't include a year in its "last updated" date. So as time passes, the map never seems more than 11 months out of date, and that's why no one realizes how out of date the damned thing is. I suppose I can either add a disclaimer...or else eat a hundred tacos and update the info. I wish there was some way to open up the map, wiki-style, for marking up and comment. It's so 1998!
It reminds me of when I wrote my first book, a guidebook to lesser-known NYC eateries, which earned great reviews from journalists who clearly didn't know and hadn't tried any places mentioned in the book. On what basis were they praising my work? Well, they enjoyed the vicariousness of reading about interesting-sounding places.
I nearly killed myself rechecking every single place before handing in my manuscript to ensure that my opinions were as timely as possible, given publishing's long lead time. Checking 150 restaurants, even briefly, is a herculean undertaking. But I'm not sure it was worth the effort. The fact is, I could have invented half the restaurants in the book, and it would have received the exact same reception. Over the course of my career, I've learned that while a few great finds passionately reviewed may ignite a furor and get lots of people to actually go eat somewhere (Jackson Diner, Sripraphai, Kabab Cafe, Charles Southern Kitchen, Mississippi BBQ Shack, etc., in my case), the vast majority of restaurant review readers never visit the places written about. They read solely to be transported.
Rereading my notes on the Jackson Heights street food map, I guess they are pretty entertaining. But isn't it daft to constrict one's writing to a niche as confining as food when people are just reading along for the writing, anyway?
UPDATE: Ah, I see the problem. Google, suckily, doesn't include a year in its "last updated" date. So as time passes, the map never seems more than 11 months out of date, and that's why no one realizes how out of date the damned thing is. I suppose I can either add a disclaimer...or else eat a hundred tacos and update the info. I wish there was some way to open up the map, wiki-style, for marking up and comment. It's so 1998!
Brazilian Bus Driver Syndrome
I mentioned in a previous entry that governments are amoral (consider, for one thing, that we've never had a president who wasn't a mass murderer). And this reminds me of Brazilian Bus Driver Syndrome, a phenomenon I noticed during a trip to Rio de Janeiro several years ago. Bus drivers there have an unwritten but firm agreement with gangs and drug lords: they do not interfere with or testify against crimes and violence perpetrated on their buses, and, in exchange, they themselves are spared.
The question is: what does this situation do, psychologically, to those drivers? It would be hard to make a moral case against them. They're poor, their jobs feed their families, and they never, themselves, do anything evil. They couldn't personally stop anything that goes on (they're not police, they don't carry guns), and, with their attention occupied with the safe piloting their vehicles, they're rarely in a position to testify against perpetrators anyway.
The drivers are not Bad Guys. They're not even true accomplices, as they reap no share and actively facilitate none of the activities they're forced to endure. But I couldn't stop looking at them. They had grim, hardened, harrowed faces, all of them, with dead eyes. They were withered, even the young ones.
The faces of Brazilian bus drivers, in fact, show the same degradations famously seen in the faces of presidents at the end of their terms. It's usually chalked up to premature aging from the rigors of office. But that's not it.
The question is: what does this situation do, psychologically, to those drivers? It would be hard to make a moral case against them. They're poor, their jobs feed their families, and they never, themselves, do anything evil. They couldn't personally stop anything that goes on (they're not police, they don't carry guns), and, with their attention occupied with the safe piloting their vehicles, they're rarely in a position to testify against perpetrators anyway.
The drivers are not Bad Guys. They're not even true accomplices, as they reap no share and actively facilitate none of the activities they're forced to endure. But I couldn't stop looking at them. They had grim, hardened, harrowed faces, all of them, with dead eyes. They were withered, even the young ones.
The faces of Brazilian bus drivers, in fact, show the same degradations famously seen in the faces of presidents at the end of their terms. It's usually chalked up to premature aging from the rigors of office. But that's not it.
Monday, December 1, 2008
A Call to Eat
Concerned that Moslem restaurateurs would find themselves stigmatized and alienated, I organized, shortly after the World Trade Center bombings, a "Call to Eat", which encouraged food lovers to patronize Moslem restaurants.
Moslem restaurateurs in Mumbai could use the same right now. If you agree, please pass it on.
Moslem restaurateurs in Mumbai could use the same right now. If you agree, please pass it on.
Transcending Tom & Jerry
In the previous few entries I've written about how so much antagonism in the world is actually pushed by an aggressive minority. The tolerant, peace-loving mainstream of any society has more in common with its counterpart in supposedly antagonistic societies than with the hawkish element of its own society. The problem is that the element which responds to provocation with canine energy rather than human wisdom tends, by virtue of its very snarling aggression, to be the element that's clawed itself into authority.
One option is for the pacifists to match the intensity by turning militant. Elements of the anti-war struggle in the 1960's demonstrated the moral subversion and horrific results of this paradoxical approach (the Right falls into the same rabbit hole, e.g. when militant reverence for human life leads to the murder of abortionists). As Christ, Ghandi, and King spectacularly proved, the most moral strategy is also the most efficacious: step back from the Tom & Jerry cartoon and behave in a high-minded, disciplined manner and unilaterally decline to escalate injustice into a cycle of self-defeating aggression (as any four year old knows, two wrongs don't make a right, but adults are cloudier).
The problem is that the strategy of provocation is now everywhere, and governments, which barely even recognize its contours, are ill-suited to maintaining a rational, moral course through its distinctive emotional echo chambers. However virtuous individual leaders might be, governments themselves are amoral. Governments, after all, are the Toms and the Jerrys. We, the people, are neither Tom nor Jerry. During the cold war, Russian plumbers never posed the slightest threat to my auto parts store-owning American father, or vice versa! The Pakistani dentist who'd be killed in a war with India did not train Lashkar-e-Toiba.
International relations are like soccer matches, and, as in soccer, the vast majority of onlookers delude themselves by imagining greater kinship with the competitors on the playing field than with their fellow onlookers, regardless of affiliation. Once the delusion is dropped, the crowd in the bleachers easily recognizes their affinity. If reasonable Israelis and reasonable Palestinians, reasonable Democrats and reasonable Republicans, reasonable Pakistanis and reasonable Indians, all of whom are brothers and sisters by virtue of the unity of their peaceful aspirations and the tenor of their temperaments, are ever to conspire to break the demented cycle of provocation, it will be via direct and personal contact rather than via the proxy of their respective authorities.
It's tempting to imagine that Obama might be cool-headed and high-minded enough to resist being manipulated by provocation (though his bellicose - and fatuous - vow to drive through Pakistan's tribal frontier gives pause). But when America is provoked into a vengeful tizzy, it will be politically impossible for any president to take a higher road. For one thing, the Christian right would never cotton to a truly Christian approach.
One option is for the pacifists to match the intensity by turning militant. Elements of the anti-war struggle in the 1960's demonstrated the moral subversion and horrific results of this paradoxical approach (the Right falls into the same rabbit hole, e.g. when militant reverence for human life leads to the murder of abortionists). As Christ, Ghandi, and King spectacularly proved, the most moral strategy is also the most efficacious: step back from the Tom & Jerry cartoon and behave in a high-minded, disciplined manner and unilaterally decline to escalate injustice into a cycle of self-defeating aggression (as any four year old knows, two wrongs don't make a right, but adults are cloudier).
The problem is that the strategy of provocation is now everywhere, and governments, which barely even recognize its contours, are ill-suited to maintaining a rational, moral course through its distinctive emotional echo chambers. However virtuous individual leaders might be, governments themselves are amoral. Governments, after all, are the Toms and the Jerrys. We, the people, are neither Tom nor Jerry. During the cold war, Russian plumbers never posed the slightest threat to my auto parts store-owning American father, or vice versa! The Pakistani dentist who'd be killed in a war with India did not train Lashkar-e-Toiba.
International relations are like soccer matches, and, as in soccer, the vast majority of onlookers delude themselves by imagining greater kinship with the competitors on the playing field than with their fellow onlookers, regardless of affiliation. Once the delusion is dropped, the crowd in the bleachers easily recognizes their affinity. If reasonable Israelis and reasonable Palestinians, reasonable Democrats and reasonable Republicans, reasonable Pakistanis and reasonable Indians, all of whom are brothers and sisters by virtue of the unity of their peaceful aspirations and the tenor of their temperaments, are ever to conspire to break the demented cycle of provocation, it will be via direct and personal contact rather than via the proxy of their respective authorities.
It's tempting to imagine that Obama might be cool-headed and high-minded enough to resist being manipulated by provocation (though his bellicose - and fatuous - vow to drive through Pakistan's tribal frontier gives pause). But when America is provoked into a vengeful tizzy, it will be politically impossible for any president to take a higher road. For one thing, the Christian right would never cotton to a truly Christian approach.
Read, if you'd like, this follow-up article.
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