Game on

The block I live on is so quiet that any activity whatsoever can sometimes pass for a block party. At night, the streetlights turn everything a peculiar color, sort of like an artificial sunset that falls on the cars and the walls and the few people that make their way past my building.

One recent evening had more kids doing more things than I’ve ever seen on my street. Chasing one another, taunting, flirting against cars, and in the case of the jerk hiding behind that car above, trying to sneak in a quick piss in between rounds of hide and seek.

I heard his friend suggest that the stairs down to the garden apartment in my building might be a good place to do what I quickly decided was something I didn’t need done on the side of my building. I don’t think he was expecting me to come downstairs.

But when I politely asked what the fuck was wrong with him, he replied, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” “How sorry”,” I asked, as he ran up the stairs and tried to make his way out of the gate. “VERY sorry.” Good.

Ten minutes later, he was also very blurry, the game resumed outside my window.

the heir apparent

the opposite of the imprecision of language

"Sometimes a word is found so right that it trembles at the slightest explanation." -- Rita Dove

span

John Marin made dozens of sketches, etchings, and watercolors of the bridge that should still impress anyone who sees it in their day to day life.

I saw one of them for the first time when I worked in a museum in college, long before I'd ever thought to walk across it, long before I ever knew it would mean a lot to me. It was in an annual report the museum put out, and I promptly cut it out and kept it with me for a bunch of years.

Lost it somehow, but now there's the real thing. And walks like yesterday -- pondering the intentions of the Jehovah's Witnesses, wondering why so many of lower Manhattan's buildings are boring, remembering a black out walk with Susan, trying not to fall off the back of a motorcycle another time -- an after work trip home across it to visit a too crowded restaurant on the other side, will join those others lodged in my head.

My kind of Vet...

Bill Moyer, 73, wears a "Bullshit Protector" flap over his ear while President George W. Bush addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac) - via Eschaton...

A road, path, or highway affording passage from one place to another.

Way.

Just three little letters, one breath. But the gulf between said or written and heard or read is always there. That, we know instinctively, or are told in college by people with French names, but the point is the same. There's a slippage, even with words like way, that we can’t do anything about. Which way do you know, will you make?

So much a sign on a church and a moving van have in common, so much they don't. In two days, I noticed “way” twice. And stopped. Seeing both together, I wonder more what each meant. Both somehow more beautiful, even as they’re less clear.

Lots of thinking about negotiation and communication lately, and even though I didn't take the GMATs, I find I have a willing study partner these days. Families, governments, friends, religions, international oil conglomerates, art museums. They all think they get each other, even as they so often fail to. It's simple, but two minutes of the day's news or walking down the street offer a dozen reminders -- the ability of language to get at just at how we are thinking and feeling and communicating with one another is matched only by how far and how often it can fall wide.

Strange to be talking about the story of the Tower of Babel recently, and be reminded that maybe this inability to communicate is nothing new, that people are stuck with this gap between one another. That in life, as in shopping, this gap often sucks.

But, then, watch how sometimes you can finish a person's sentence, synapses seemingly fire at once, and feel that gap close a bit. It’s almost imperceptible, but it closes, nonetheless. And it’s a comfort.

As it turns out, there are lots of ways.

Santorum?

bear

a double

"floor polishers jammed deep inside"

In almost every case, he said, the problem was what he called "pilot error" - personnel who let ferromagnetic objects into the room or failed to detect them in scanned patients.

This would be much more impressive if captured on video, but it's strange nonetheless:

The pictures and stories are the stuff of slapstick: wheelchairs, gurneys and even floor polishers jammed deep inside M.R.I. scanners whose powerful magnets grabbed them from the hands of careless hospital workers.

Hospital monitoring equipment sucked into an M.R.I. scanner.
The police officer whose pistol flew out of his holster and shot a wall as it hit the magnet. The sprinkler repairman whose acetylene tank was yanked inside, breaking its valve and starting a fire that razed the building.

But the bigger picture is anything but funny, medical safety experts say. As the number of magnetic resonance imaging scanners in the country has soared from a handful in 1980 to about 10,000 today, and as magnets have quadrupled in power, careless accidents have become more frequent. Some have caused serious injuries and even death.

tilt

And then there is this.

As with most things, there's an interesting backstory that I hadn't the slightest knowledge of. Read it here, complete with more blurry pictures.

all spam, all the time

This is poetry:

Subject: *****SPAM***** Do you a sick person

Hello, my name is Janis Hodge

let me ask you a questi0n:

Are you afraid of "soft equipment" problems?

You should deal with your difficulties now

Supplies are limited! http://easyrx-4u.com/index.php?ref_id=766

thanks

xwxouez

No, thank YOU xwxouez!! soft equipment - that's nice.

I'd like that in bullshit bucks, please...

FROM: THE DIRECTOR
EUROPEAN PRIZE AWARD DEPT
REF:EL3/9318/04
BATCH:8/163/EL.

Attn: Dear Sir/Madam

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the Lottery Winners International programs held on the 30/12/2004. Your e-mail address attached to ticket number :EL-23133 with serial number: EL-123542,batch number: EL-35,lottery ref number: EL-9318 and drew lucky numbers 7-1-8-36-4-22 which consequently won in the 1st category, you have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of US$2,500,000.00 (Two Million, Five Hundred Thousand United States dollars).

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

Due to mix up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep your winning information confidential until your claims has been processed and your money Remitted to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program by some participants. All participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from over 40,000 company and 20,000,000 individual email addresses and names from all over the world.
what a nice e-mail to start the day

Editorial Logic

41 Days in Jail and Counting - New York Times

I'm not sure this would work for anyone else in any other situation...it's crystal clear reasoning, but maybe a bit flawed?

If she is not willing to testify after 41 days, then she is not willing to testify. It's time for the judge and the prosecutor to let Ms. Miller go.

unauthorized Dia insect

We should all be so lucky as to be buried in a Judd box. This poor guy couldn't quite make it.

Lest we forget that he has a brother...

who is similarly out of touch with this universe:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Gov. Jeb Bush criticized NCAA officials on Tuesday for their decision to penalize Florida State for using an American Indian nickname and symbols, saying they instead insulted the university and a proud Seminole Tribe of Florida.

The NCAA's finding that the school's Seminoles nickname is 'hostile and offensive,' instead of honoring American Indians has the opposite effect, the governor said, because the tribe supports the school's use of its name.

'I think it's offensive to native Americans ... the Seminole Indian tribe who support the traditions of FSU,' Bush said on his way into a Cabinet meeting. 'I think they insult those people by telling them, 'No, no, you're not smart enough to understand this. You should be feeling really horrible about this.' It's ridiculous.'

Meanwhile, attorney Barry Richard, who successfully led the legal challenge on behalf of Republican George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential recount in Florida, has agreed to represent the school in its case against the NCAA, Florida State President T.K. Wetherell said Wednesday."

house boat

When words fail,

or sometimes just because, there may be more of this. It's been awhile, and I'm out of practice, but sometimes a picture of a woman in a bus station is a good place to start.

for A

"I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves."
- Bruce Grocott"

adult swim

So I'm off to the sea now, or is it the ocean? A little 4x6 inch bit of it hangs above my computer, and next to me a piece of a shell from an earlier trip. And I look at that, and know that it's the ocean, and I know this because I used a sharpie to label it as such. As if I needed a reminder.

put in my place

Point taken.

Philip Larkin

"One reason for writing, of course, is that no one's written what you want to read."

google gives me a quote

this one:

 

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

kaboom!! part two.

Balloon Bazooka the Ultimate Water Balloon Launcher Um, wow.

Nine o’clock on a Monday night, and it’s like study hall in a library all over again. People working, people pretending to work. Caffeine and strange hours, tacky décor, and distraction just barely kept in check.

The Yo La Tengo song in my earphones is competing with Connecticut Muffin’s soundtrack for the evening. It’s Celine Dion’s proclamations from a sinking Titanic, and I get lost in the shuffle between years, the strangeness of the overlap.

I notice someone reading Ulysses, then reach for my coffee, distracted, checking my watch. I remember how easily my concentration wandered, and still does. People talking about test scores are talking too loud for this non-library -- maybe high school kids wondering what it’ll take to get into Smith. Not too long from now, they will wonder what will it take to get through it.

Attention wanders, and I’m captivated by the half dozen duck decoys this place has hanging on the walls, apropos of nothing. Across from me, more books being read: Riding the Waves of Culture – I can’t see any pictures. She looks smart, intense.

And it’s all just so great that I almost wish I was in that library again, except the girl across from me in the very real present just looked up and smiled. Understanding Diversity in Global Business never would’ve made me think twice before.

Fast forward, and Roxette goes head to head with the Shins. I’m 28. I’m something-teen. It’s nice.