Young Mr. Lincoln is a really awesome 1939 movie starring Henry Fonda as Abe Lincoln, the badass lawyer who stands up to mobs and defends unpopular clients.

Related posts:

1. Darren Aronofsky ranked

What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.

“Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words like Love, that I never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

Hunter S. Thompson is one of my favorite writers, but it’s not because he and most of his characters drugged themselves to the brink of annihilation and made it sound fun. He was a great writer because he was able to dive into foreign, chaos-riddled, alternate realities and make clear, cohesive, insightful reports back to Earth. Most of Thompson’s writing was about dark, seedy elements of society — the Hell’s Angels, Las Vegas — where his “sharp, mean little words” were right at home.

But my favorite Thompson book is Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, a compilation of Rolling Stone articles covering the 1972 presidential campaign between Nixon and McGovern. The book follows Thompson as he struggles to balance the stress and hubbub of traveling with a presidential campaign with his estimable alcohol and drug intake. The result is a crazy fever dream, indiscriminately combining original, factual reporting with wild make-believe. Frank Mankiewicz, one of McGovern’s senior aides, called it “the least factual, most accurate account” of the election.

Despite it’s more prosaic subject matter, the book is not so different from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Drug dealers, Hell’s Angels, and politicians are the same for Thompson. “[I]f you’re a safe, happy, nice, young Republican you probably don’t want to read about things like dope, rock music, and politics,” he wrote in Campaign Trail (p. 202). There are no high-minded ideals or policy discussions. There is just McGovern, who Thompson sees as a rare innocent, lost in a Hobbesian sea of petty, vicious mercenaries.

To Thompson, politics is a disease; an addiction for adrenaline junkies. “Am I turning into a politics junkie?” he wondered. “It is not a happy thought — particularly when I see what it’s done to the others.” (p. 388). I particularly liked this passage describing the symptoms of “Campaign Bloat:”

a gruesome kind of false-fat condition that is said to be connected somehow with failing adrenal glands. The swelling begins within twenty-four hours of that moment when the victim first begins to suspect that the campaign is essentially meaningless. At that point, the body’s entire adrenaline supply is sucked back into the gizzard, and nothing either candidate says, does, or generates will cause it to rise again . . . and without adrenaline, the flesh begins to swell; the eyes fill with blood and grow smaller in the face, the jowls puff out from the cheekbones, the neck-flesh droops, and the belly swells up like a frog’s throat. . . . The brain fills with noxious waste fluids, the tongue is rubbed raw on the molars, and the basic perception antennae begin dying like hairs in a bonfire.

Exaggerated, but it is definitely a dark feeling to suddenly realize that cynicism is the most logical way to feel. But at the beginning of the book, Thompson still had just a bit of hope for McGovern. When it became clear that Nixon would be reelected, Thompson’s despair is palpable. A nation that reelected Nixon was “really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to by guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” (p. 389).

In 2008, Obama was a candidate who wasn’t afraid to use big words like “Hope” and “Change.” And it worked. But now he’s been governing, dragged down by the details of negotiating with Congress and spending more time in intelligence briefings than on speechwriting. I wonder how lofty his campaign will be this time around. I wonder if he’ll give in to the cynicism that surrounds him in DC. For sure, he’ll at least pretend to be the lofty reformer. But will he mean it, or will he just be phoning it in? To be honest, I’m a little scared for him either way. We’ve already seen from the Republican primary that even if Romney tries his hardest to project the nice guy, his super PAC has no trouble with mean little words.

With the economy looking up, albeit ever so slightly, and Romney sticking every possible foot in his mouth on the out-of-touch rich guy front, Obama has a really good chance to win reelection. The attack ads basically write themselves: “Mitt Romney and his Wall Street buddies have been ransacking companies, destroying jobs, and evading taxes for thirty years. Do we really want to let Wall Street loose in the White House?” I actually think these are bullshit attacks because the alternative to Bain is bankruptcy. But they are definitely effective and if I were advising Obama I wouldn’t hesitate to use them. If Obama goes down that road, will his big words be rendered meaningless? If he doesn’t, isn’t he just “priest or a fool” for ceding the ground?

2. I’m pretty cynical about celebrities making a “difference,” but this story has even me believing in Tebow.

3. This drone is $300, controlled by your iPhone, and takes HD video. On the one hand, holy shit I want one. On the other hand, kinda wonder how widespread these will become in police departments.

A $300 drone

4. Wanna read a cool sci-fi short story? The Last Question, by Issac Asimov

5. In honor of this week’s toilet seat argument: why people put stickers that look like flies in urinals.

6. And finally, why Gillette just keeps adding more blades.

Related posts:

1. Quick Links – 1/7/2012

A better system is one in which men put the seat up before peeing, but women are responsible for putting it back down when they need to. This reform redistributes both the inconvenience and the benefit in a fairer way. Because the seat will sometimes be left up and sometimes be left down, both women and men will find the seat in their preferred position at times. And men no longer have to remember to put the seat down after peeing, so the inconvenience is more evenly distributed.

One common argument I’ve heard against this system (yes, I’ve had this debate multiple times) is that it creates a risk that women, possibly in the middle of the night, will forget to check the toilet seat and fall in. That sounds terrible, I admit. But in the 21st century, I think women should be self-reliant. They only fall in because they’ve learned to rely on men to put the toilet seat up for them. If the system was changed, it would be rote habit for them to check, and the risk of falling in would actually be decreased.

But when Lifehacker ranked Downcast as the best podcast app for iPhone, I decided to give it a try. It’s way better than Instacast for one key reason: playlists. Downcast lets you create smart playlists of new, constantly updated episodes from only certain podcasts. So, for example, when I get in my car (and connect through bluetooth) in the morning I can hit play on my “news” playlist and Downcast will play the newest episode of the Wall Street Journal’s What’s News, followed by the newest episode of the New York Times’s Front Page. With Instacast, I’d have to play each episode individually. Small problems, I know, but annoying when I’m driving. And, as far as I can tell, Downcast does everything else Instapaper does just as well.

1. I really dig this post about what it’s like to get a PhD from Matt Might:

Apparently human knowledge amounts to a boob with a penis on it. Sounds about right.

I can’t follow his computer science stuff, but his more general posts are really great for anyone who writes a lot.

2. The government filed their brief [pdf] in the upcoming Supreme Court case about the universal health insurance mandate. No pressure or anything. A good summary of the issues is here.

3. A really interesting article about how Facebook deals with users who post suicidal thoughts.

4. How Ken Jennings felt about losing to Watson.

5. Likely voter screens in political polls are pretty much useless.

6. How’s this for a lede:

The first sign of trouble was a mysterious signal emanating from deep within the U.S. military’s classified computer network. Like a human spy, a piece of covert software in the supposedly secure system was “beaconing” — trying to send coded messages back to its creator.

 

An elite team working in a windowless room at the National Security Agency soon determined that a rogue program had infected a classified network, kept separate from the public Internet, that harbored some of the military’s most important secrets, including battle plans used by commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq.

7. An anonymous NHL player on what players think about player safety rules.

8. How the feds can track your cellphone:

9. Life on Europa?

CD’s have been dead to me ever since I got an iPod and figured out how to play mp3′s in the car (this is the best way) and I hadn’t looked through my collection in a really long time. Some made me cringe with shame (*cough* Goo Goo Dolls), but mostly I was surprised that my music taste hasn’t changed very much since 8th grade. I listened to a lot of Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, etc in high school which I don’t listen to much now. I’ve also added a lot of newer bands e.g., LCD Soundsytem, Arcade Fire, The Walkmen. But then and now, the core of my music listening has been the good side of “classic rock”: Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, the Band (but not Journey or Foreigner). Also, Wilco.

So, over several visits home over about eight months, I ripped everything I wanted to keep into iTunes. When I was done, I sold everything. I ended up using SecondSpin.com. The process was pretty painless, you just enter a big list of ISBN’s from the CD labels and Second Spin figures out what you have, then makes you an offer. Some CDs sold for much more than I expected, like $10 or $15 bucks; some only got $0.25. It averaged out to about $3 per CD, which was actually more than I expected given the state of demand for CDs these days. They refused some titles, which I guess they didn’t think they could sell. Then I boxed up and sent in the CDs with a printout from the site.

You have to pay for shipping yourself, which is kind of a bummer, but they reimburse you, and for me the reimbursement was actually a buck or two more than what I paid. About a week after I sent my CDs in, SecondSpin sent me an email saying they would accept about 75% of the CD’s and they made a deposit for the amount in my PayPal account. They sent the remaining CDs back to me for free. Honestly, I have no idea how much more or less I could have gotten on eBay, or going to a used CD store, but the process was so painless it seemed well worth it to get $3/CD and get them out of the house.

If you write on the web, what are your criteria for a via link?

I’m just getting started here on Galactic Synapse, so I don’t really have a set pattern or rules for what links to include in different kinds of posts. I think it is crucial to acknowledge and link to the original creator of any content. If you don’t it is plagiarism. On the other hand, I see the “via” link, a link to an intermediate site where I found the content, as a nice courtesy. It’s not cheating to leave it off, but it’s not polite, so I’ll follow the golden rule: I’d like to get the acknowledgement, so I’ll try to acknowledge others. And content curation and distribution is important, so people deserve credit for that work.

But I’m reminded of the South Park episode “Simpsons Already Did It.” If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the episode (with commercials) for free here. Evil villain Butters keeps trying to think of cool ways to terrorize the town, only to find out that all his ideas have already been used on the Simpsons. Ultimately, the lesson he learns is that everything is derivative and anything he tries to do has probably been done before (on the Simpsons), so he should just go for it. I think it’s the same thing here: if there’s something cool on the internet kottke has probably already linked to it. If I can’t remember where I found that open tab, I’ll put it up without the hat tip, and if that means I’m copying someone to some degree, so be it.

The things I like about this workout are:

• It’s scalable: the fitter I am, the harder I push, the more calories I burn in the same short 23 minutes. If you want more, you could either do the whole rotation again, or else extend the rotations to one minute easy, one minute hard. On the other hand, if you’re out of shape, your easy and hard are just much further toward the easy side. If you don’t like intervals you could do all easy or all hard, and just move the resistance every minute.
• It’s short. I don’t have a lot of excuses not to do it. But it’s effective: the counter on the machine says I burn between 400 and 600 calories per 23 minutes depending how hard I push.
• Paying attention to the clock so I can switch from fast to slow and change resistance helps distract me from the fact that working out kinda sucks. The downside is that its hard to watch tv or listen to podcasts and also keep track of time constantly. But for 23 minutes I just listen to music.
• You always know exactly how far along you are toward a very clear goal. This makes it almost impossible to give up early once I’ve started. It feels like utter failure if I do, much more so than if I cut off a run early. Plus, once you’ve hit twelve, it’s all downhill.
• Hitting high heart rates in the hard intervals speeds up your metabolism for the whole day, but the slow intervals make it seem not that hard.

• The FM transmitter is pretty powerful, and I have no trouble getting clear sound on a couple of different stations in major cities. This is definitely not true of other fm transmitters I’ve had in the past. The GOgroove has a feature to automatically find a clear station, but I can usually do better manually. For some reason, I’ve had very good luck with 97.7 in the mid-atlantic region.
• Once you’ve matched the GOgroove to your phone it will connect automatically and you can use the play/pause and skip buttons on the device to start playing music. I don’t think its much of a break-in magnet, so I leave the GOgroove plugged in most of the time. With my radio on and set to 97.7, and bluetooth enabled on my iPhone, I can start my car, wait a couple seconds for the GoGroove to connect and hit the play button and my iPhone will play my library on random over my car’s speakers without ever having to take my phone out of my pocket. Any app that uses the iPhone’s native audio controls should work just fine.
• The GOgroove also has a built-in mic, and it works great as a speakerphone. People can tell I’m on speakerphone, but they have no problem hearing me.
• There are headphone jack inputs for audio in and out. If your car radio has an aux in, you can skip the fm transmitter and just use the bluetooth features. If your friend wants to play his iPod, he can connect it directly and just use the fm transmitter. There is also a usb port to plug in a charging cable for just about any kind of electronic device.

A couple of minor drawbacks:

• Every once in a while, the GOgroove will fail to connect, but turning it off and back on has always taken care of it.
• My unit produces a lot of feedback when I use it to charge my phone and play music at the same time, unless the phone is in contact with me. I guess this grounds it? I don’t usually need to charge my phone in the car, so it doesn’t affect me much.
• Obviously, playing music over bluetooth will drain your battery. With the iPhone it’s not a problem, but when I had an Android phone the battery drain was pretty significant. If you keep a charging cable handy, you can plug it in if need be.
• It is a pretty cheap plastic device. I’m sure a spilled drink or hard drop could take it out. But, at least for me, other than an occasional trip into the glove compartment when parking in a sketchy neighborhood, the GOgroove doesn’t move from its spot so there’s not a lot of opportunity for wear and tear. If you’re switching between cars a lot, this might be more of a factor.

I was pretty skeptical this thing would be worth $50, but the amazon reviews were downright glowing so I gave it a shot. A year later, totally worth it. Compared to fumbling with pants pockets and headphone jacks while driving, it’s just such a sweet feeling to get in my car, turn the key, push a button, and hear music. And man am I glad to leave scratched cds and radio commercials behind.

Rdio also has Pandora-like radio stations. It’s a small thing, but one of my favorite features is that when you play an album in Rdio, instead of just going silent when it’s done, Rdio switches to artist radio and keeps music flowing. The one feature I really miss is the ability to play a random album from your collection like you can with Alfred’s iTunes mini player.

Rdio’s social features seem really cool, but I don’t have many friends on it. Though with some of my friends, I’m not sure I’d want their music showing up in my network anyway. The ability to follow critics and sites like pitchfork is pretty sweet though.

All in all, highly recommended, at least for free, easy, ad-free music.

My plan is to review and link to stuff I’ve enjoyed and throw my own stories, thoughts, and research into the world. I’m mainly interested in iphone apps, good tv shows, cool ideas, and figuring out the nature of the universe. A bit broad perhaps, but I get bored too quickly to rule much out.

I hope you’ll follow along. From my neurons to yours: Have a fantastic 2012!