Donkey Hottie

Adrift and up in the air

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:47:31 +0000

Is Up in the Air (or, as it is called in France, In the Air) a complicated movie? Or is it simply a sloppy one? Bryan called the movie too long, but then he also called it depressing. But I felt uplifted at the end, largely since I was very excited to finally see a [...]

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:56:36 +0000

Holy smokes was I not surprised by the decision this week by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC. I was always suspicious of the argument that “money is not speech, it’s property,” though I repeated it several times. I agree with Bryan, in that I can’t really imagine that a pesky little thing [...]

The Gun and the Bible carved this nation

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:58:19 +0000

When Free came out in 1993, “The Gun and Bible” was instantly my favorite track. It’s a funny and absurd song, funny and absurd in the way that genocide is funny and absurd, that manages, by twisting and repeating one bizarre sample (discounting the coda about drinking and shooting), to efface the cold objectivity of [...]

Task managing a dissertation

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:57:39 +0000

The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n individuals to manage to fire in unison? Our applications for dissertation fellowships are due at the end of February, which means that I’ve had my sole chapter on the mind quite a bit lately, even while wasting most of yesterday [...]

America is turning into Baltimore

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:54:58 +0000

My love of The Wire connects pretty well with my interest in David Harvey, who taught at Hopkins for a long time and treated Baltimore as an immense site for empirical geographical work. I also suspect that the show’s taking place in Baltimore is part of Walter Benn Michael’s fascination with it, which he’s polished [...]

The Kid A poundup

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:14:23 +0000

Quickly. I oversold the IDM-ness of Kid A. I let “Idioteque” speak for the album as a whole (this is probably largely since when the album would come on at parties, it was when it reached this song that I knew for a fact that it was Radiohead. Up until then, it was just noise). [...]

Kid A and why this is going to be hard

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:53 +0000

Fellow combattant Chris broke down with a few sentences the entirety of the Radiohead œuvre in a comment to my last post, in which I announced my new year’s resolution: to finally listen to some Radiohead and see what the fuss is all about. To figure out, in other words, what I’ve been missing. What’s funny [...]

My resolution: See what Radiohead is about

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:49:49 +0000

It’s New Year’s resolution time. Last year’s resolution, to get hooked on coffee, was a runaway success to the degree that I’ve quit coffee for a week to see if I’ll sleep better (early reports: yes). The first helper in the process was the Bodum travel French press I bought from Amazon for like $12. [...]

Integration and halal foie gras

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:15:13 +0000

Libération had an interesting article yesterday about the explosion in popularity in France of foie gras that has also been certified as halal. The stuff is flying off the shelves, apparently. The issue of whether foie gras (which involves torturing the animal before killing it) can actually ever be halal aside, the readings of the [...]

Unsubscribe

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:57:28 +0000

About a month ago, I quit Facebook. I didn’t delete my account, nor do I never log in; I have obligations that keep me returning to the site (namely in the form of having people use the message feature to contact me–people whose email addresses I don’t have). But I don’t write on walls, poke, [...]

Frisson, the party’s on!

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:56:16 +0000

Enjoying my final grasse matinée before knuckling down to get some writing done, I had a series of dreams circulating around Riunite wine. There were two narratives interleaved, Possession-style. In the first, French administrators were trying to figure out how to use the partially sparkling nature of Riunite as a weapon against the English in [...]

(10+2)*5 web script for procrastinators

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:30:49 +0000

About a year ago, I stumbled upon Merlin Mann’s procrastination hack, the (10+2)*5. Simply put, it posits that one should focus strenuously on tasks for ten minutes, then take a two minute breather, and then return to the tasks. The few times I’ve consciously used it, it’s been rather useful, making the day go by [...]

Kraftwerk powers the European Union

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:55:01 +0000

It is hard for a way of life whose priorities are secular, rationalist, materialist and utilitarian to produce a culture adequate to these values. For are not these values inherently anti-cultural? This, to be sure, was always a headache for industrial capitalism, which was never really able to spin a persuasive cultural ideology out of [...]

Astérix and the coupon collector’s problem

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:24:45 +0000

Obviously, I suppose, my previous post about the likelihood of getting all 8 anniversary Astérix figurines in only 14 tries of Kinder Surprise eggs was related to a classic statistics problem, the Coupon Collector’s Problem. The problem assumes a uniform random distribution of coupons (I guess, in cereal boxes, or something), and then goes about [...]

Joyeux anniversaire, Astérix!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:58:56 +0000

In my last post, I described my new effort to collect enough Kinder Surprise eggs to win all eight Astérix figurines. I’ve done it. What’s more, I managed to do so having only gone through 35 eggs! That’s almost hilariously quickly, if you think about it. I wish I had kept track of how I was [...]