WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Robo-Clones Replace DJ's at NJ Radio Station

Just like Santa Claus, Thunk Tank cannot be everywhere at once, and so we do what Santa does—we hire some homeless men to dress up like Jay. But not anymore! Now Scientists and Experts in Japan have found a new answer to this age-old problem: the Robo-Clone.

We are not talking about 3-D–print dolls from the Clone Factory—Clone Factory dolls are so pre-tsunami! Plus, they’re small! They are not life-sized, unless you are only about a foot tall. Here, this video explains everything:

 

(You may want to fast-forward to see the Fat Guy’s tween harem get creeped out by the doll.)

Update: Banda Banditos

After our post on Banda Music, Thunk Tank received an email from Listener Reeshard, directing us to a news story about the growing problem of California tuba raids. Banda relies on the tuba, and tubas cost, like, $2,000–$7,000 each. So thieves are breaking into high schools and stealing all the tubas and sousaphones from the band rooms, but leaving all the other brass instruments, the computers, electronics—they only want the tubas, because playing the tuba is cool. If, you know, you’re into banda.

Thunk Tank supports the music, but not the thievery. Look! You can make a perfectly serviceable tuba out of an empty plastic jug and some pvc piping and some other stuff I don’t really understand the Spanish words for:

 

 

All Your Holiday Belong to Us

As ThunkTank continues to inject itself into all pop culture like a prion from outer space, it was inevitable that we would begin to take over holidays. This Tuesday happens to be a holiday, a holiday in which you puny humans express your affections with heart-shaped pieces of flavored chalk imprinted with slogans—everything from PITCH WOO to FAX ME* And so we have created Thunk Tank Conversation Hearts; but, being Thunk Tank, ours are enormous: Eating one is like putting your entire fist into your mouth.

 

*actual examples

The Music We Would Be Playing, if We Were Playing Music

Besides being WFMU’s first callerless call-in show, Thunk Tank rarely features music. Every week we go through the new CDs that have come into the station, and find a few we like, and bring them into the studio, and then don’t play them. If we were playing music, though, right now we would be playing a lot of banda, a style of brass-heavy oompah music from the Mexican state of Sinaloa—also home of the pointy boots!

 

But that's tribal music, not banda. Banda instrumentation includes accordions, tubas, sousaphones, slide trombones, clarinets, and a drum with no kick pedal and a manual hi-hat. Diligent viewing of Mun2 TV has convinced Bronwyn that banda songs are mostly about fat pizza delivery guys who get beautiful girls, and young busboys who get beautiful girls, and school janitors with beautiful janitress girlfriends who can’t stop looking at the high school girls.

more videos beneath the fold...

Entr’acte: The Rodeo Clown

 

So: Bullriding. You get on the bull in a chute, and the gate opens, and the bull comes out and bucks, and you stay on as long as you can, and then you fall off. Or, if you manage to stay on for eight (8!) seconds, then they blow a horn and you can jump off. And then what happens? You’re on the ground, in an enclosed area, with a pissed-off 2200-pound animal with big testicles, big horns, and also possibly ’roid rage. (There was a bull-doping steroids scandal in 2007.)  For your protection, they bring in the clowns.

Attention, Shoppers!

Good news this year as the Wal-Mart Shopping Season revved into high gear on the Friday after the Macy's Day Parade: Although there were plenty of police-on-shopper beatings, shopper-on-shopper violence, and in-store tramplings, at least no one died this year, as did Jdimytai Damour, a Wal-Mart temp employee, when he was trampled to death by a bargain-frenzied crowd in 2008.  (Well, actually, Walter Vance of Charleston, West Virginia, did die in a Target store this year, but that was from a heart attack and at least it didn’t impede any of the other shoppers, who just stepped over him and continued scooping up those half-price Cars 2 videos.)

Shopping: The Most Dangerous Sport is a relatively new phenomenon, but now Scientists and Financial Experts have an explanation: It’s just a manifestation of The New Prosperity! Yes, Americans—especially Americans without jobs—are rethinking their options, and redefining their values, such as the importance they’ve placed on things like food, clothing, and shelter. “Let’s get off this hedonic treadmill!” they cry, as they go to live in a cardboard box outside Penn Station. Scientists at the Ministry of Prosperity say that if we just redefine our terms, everything will be fine. Poverty is Prosperity! War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Who wouldn’t pepper-spray another person for the chance to buy a $2 waffle iron?

 

 

Cyrillic Tiny-Voice Death Metal Techno

Sluggo sent me these, and that's all I know about 'em, except that they're amazing.

 

My RadioVision of the Great Icelandic DJ

Back in 2010 I posted the video for the Best Party's campaign song here on Beware of the Blog. The Party—which was started as a satire of regular Icelandic politics—actually won a majority in their local election, and their founder and chairman, Jon Gnarr, became mayor of Reykjavik. Now, through the magic of Benjamin Walker, and due to some mistake that no one can explain, I am to meet His Honorableness, Mayor Gnarr, and his chief strategist and campaign manager, Heida K. Helgadottir, when I introduce their keynote address on Saturday at the WFMU Radiovision Festival.

I became an Icelandophile when I worked at the dog magazine, whose offices were two blocks from Scandinavia House. I often went there for lunch at the AQ Café, and would check out their art exhibits and excellent film series. It was at Scandinavia House a few years ago that I saw the documentary Kurekar Nordursins, and became a huge fan of the great Icelandic radio DJ, the Cowboy of the North, Hallbjorn Hjartarson. The film records (in what feels like real time) the 1984 Icelandic Cowboy Festival, which took place in a tiny northern fishing village and seemed to consist of a lot of drinking, some music, and occasional attempts to ride shaggy little Icelandic ponies while drinking or singing, but mostly drinking. I was so inspired by it that I tracked down Cowboy DJ Hallbjorn and wrote to him, hoping I could get him as a guest on WFMU. I imagined gathering up donations of moldy country vinyl at the Record Fair and shipping it off to Skagastrond, Iceland, and becoming radio friends with this international superstar.

But then months passed, and I had given up before I finally got a reply. DJ Hallbjorn had to go to a great deal of trouble to find someone who could translate my email into Icelandic and then translate his reply into English to send to me. Of course, I had no idea he didn’t speak English. He plays all these American country-western songs on his radio station, so I just assumed … Plus, I’m American, which is also why I just assumed… Anyway, I felt bad for putting him to so much trouble, so I didn’t write again. But now, every year when the Record Fair comes around, I think of Hallbjorn Hjartarson and wish I could send him some Little Jimmy Dickens records.

And this year, tomorrow, I will get to meet real Icelandic People and ask them if they know Cowboy DJ Hallbjorn—it’s a very small country, plus he is extremely famous, so they might! I just hope Jon Gnarr and Heida K. Helgadottir speak English.

 

Try to Remember the Days of September

  

I skipped all the coverage of the 9/11 commemorations today. The message seems to be “Never forget,” but what is it that we’re supposed to remember?

I remember 9/11 very well: the immediate realization, when the second plane hit, that this was no accident, the WTF moment when we heard the Pentagon was burning. I remember trying to get to WFMU to do my first show afterwards, and being turned back by NJ State Patrol officers until I figured out an alternate way into Jersey City. I remember insisting that Sluggo and Dog Baxter go with me to the station, because I did not want to be separated from them again … just in case. I don’t remember exactly what I said on that first show, but I know that one longtime Listener was so upset by it that I had the archive deleted. So now I never will know for sure, but I can’t imagine I expressed anything except bewilderment and deep anxiety. 

I remember seeing TV news reports—with video—of the small plane coming from the west, hitting the west side of the second tower, the man with the British accent describing it to the female reporter as a small plane, like a Piper Cherokee or Dakota. I haven’t looked for that footage on the 9/11 Television News Archive because I suspect it’s not there.

Like the TV archive, lots of information is suddenly appearing on this 10th Anniversary: the Marine Major who was in the command bunker under the White House when Robotic Lord Vice-President Cheney gave the order to shoot down Flight 93. (But then the passengers crashed the plane, so they didn’t have to shoot it down after all. >Whew!<) The “eyewitness video of the Flight 93 crash site,” released only now that the anonymous videographer has died—shot from a hilltop 15 miles away and showing some smoke on the other side of faraway trees. The audio of all but a big missing 30-minute chunk of FAA and NORAD recordings made that morning. The FBI explaining that they simply forgot to tell anyone about the wealthy Saudi family who, shortly before 9/11, disappeared without a trace, leaving their luxury home and all their luxury belongings—except for a computer and the contents of a safe— after meetings with Mohammad Atta. Do you remember how no airplanes were allowed to fly for days after the attacks? Do you remember reports that President Bush made an exception for a planeload of wealthy Saudis who wanted to return home? Because I do. I remember that.

We are supposed to Never Forget, but there are also things we are never supposed to remember. The former “Freedom Tower” is now “One World Trade Center” because, says Chris Ward, director of the Port Authority, the name Freedom Tower would be likely to recall “painful memories of the 9/11 attacks.” So, never forget that we were attacked, but just make sure you remember those events in a way that’s not, you know, in any way uncomfortable for you. The Port Authority and Mayor Bloomberg are working hard to “rebrand” Ground Zero. It’s the World Trade Center now—and don’t you forget it. 

The Cerberus of September from David Zung on Vimeo.

 Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

Wars and Movies of Wars

Memorial Day brings cable channels full of war-movie marathons, but mostly these are not movies about war. War is the wholesale slaughter of those Other people you’ve come to believe are not even human, and is very tedious to watch. If the Viewer wants entertainment, then torture porn, where people are killed off one by one, is far superior. But of course Hollywood “war movies” are just character dramas in a war setting, so, you know, Pearl Harbor.

I have seen a couple of genuine war movies lately, though. The first, City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chen, depicts the massacre of 300,000 unarmed people and the rape of between 20,000 and 80,000 women by Japanese soldiers in the six weeks after the Chinese capital of Nanking was captured by the Japanese in 1937. I read Iris Chang’s book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, a few months ago, and it is truly shocking. The Japanese atrocities against the people of Nanking were so extreme that a Nazi party leader based in China petitioned Hitler to ask the Japanese government to stop the massacre. The Japanese atrocities against the people of Nanking were so extreme that after researching and writing their history, Iris Chang committed suicide.

City of Life and Death is an extremely beautiful black-and-white film of extremely ugly scenes. The film introduces specific historical characters, such as the Nazi German businessman John Rabe, who established a “safety zone” for Chinese civilians trapped in Nanking when the city fell. Chen tries to show the events from many points of view, including a rather sympathetic portrayal of a fictional Japanese soldier named Kadokawa. But that character gets mired in a clichéd love story involving a Japanese comfort woman that is unnecessary and detracts from the film. Still, in the depiction of unrelenting horror and tragedy bludgeoning helpless people into numb despair, City of Life and Death seems like a pretty accurate war movie.

Restrepo, which I saw last week at a screening that featured a Q-and-A with the film’s editor, is a documentary shot and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington over the course of a year they spent with an American platoon in northeast Afghanistan. Juan “Doc” Restrepo is the likable platoon medic who’s introduced in the first scenes of home video of him goofing around with the other guys being deployed. A few minutes into the film, after the platoon’s reached Afghanistan, one of the soldiers makes a remark in passing about “when Restrepo got killed,” and I was like, What? But yeah, he was one of the first two soldiers killed, and the others ended up naming the outpost they built after him: Operating Post (O.P.) Restrepo. (It reminded me of Forward Operating Base Tillman, named after Pat Tillman, who I learned about in the excellent book Where Men Win Glory.)

Restrepo is a 93-minute film constructed from 180 hours of raw footage brought back by Junger and Hetherington, who shot all of it themselves—no helmet-cam footage, they were really there. In one of the first scenes, Junger is riding in an armored vehicle that’s attacked—pretty harrowing. The Korengal Valley, where the platoon establishes O.P. Restrepo, was known as “the most dangerous place on earth” while they were there. Knowing that the U.S. has now pulled out of the valley, in spite of everything these soldiers went through, increases the sense of futility—for me, and for other viewers in the audience that night. But editor Michael Levine assured us that the Army loved the film, so who knows. Watching Restrepo, you can see that the soldiers are there because they believe they’re doing the right thing and fighting for their country (USA!), but Junger and Hetherington are there … to make a movie? Plus the soldiers have guns, but the only thing J&H are shooting is a video cam. Restrepo was nominated this year for a best-documentary Academy Award; Tim Hetherington went to Misrata to cover the Libyan civil war, and was killed there on April 20.

Today I saw Went the Day Well? an Ealing Studio “unofficial propaganda” film by a one-named Brazilian director, made from a Graham Greene story, filmed in 1942 but set in a near-future England where the war is finally over, and it was pretty crazypants so probably not really a “war movie,” but I recommend it, especially for the performance of Muriel George as Mrs. Collins, my new hero.

 

 

 

Something's Wrong at the BBC, But I Don't Know What It Is.

I only know that it involves a clown, and fire, and numbers chalked on a wall.

 

War Horse, Unpleasant Horse, Grass Mud Horse, Zoo

On St. Patrick’s Day, Sluggo and I went to see War Horse at Lincoln Center, just because it was puppets and it was so incredibly expensive that it seemed like the sort of thing we should do for our 20^th wedding anniversary. We knew pretty much nothing about it, so it was a happy surprise when we found out it features South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company.

We’d seen their puppets in exhibits in 2006 at the World Financial Center and last year at the Katonah Art Museum, and we’ve always wanted to see them in action. They did not disappoint. The life-sized horse puppets were fantastic: not realistic, yet completely convincing. The puppetry was truly astonishing, not only capturing the lifelike movements of the horses at different ages, but actually imbuing each one with a distinct personality. The staging was great, the lighting was great, the music was great, the animation was great. The acting was a little shouty; I sort of expect that when I go to the thee-uh-tuh but, as Sluggo pointed out, everything’s mic’d, so why? But: The other thing we didn’t know until we got there was that the story is taken from a children’s book. The book is told from the point of view of the horse, but apparently no one could figure out how to do that onstage, so the show is just a straight narrative—linear and obvious. I can’t imagine who the audience is supposed to be: The battle scenes are probably too intense for little kids, but I think most adults are already aware that War Is Bad. So if you are dotty about puppets, you will want to see War Horse, and if you’re not, you won’t.

If you are really, truly dotty about puppets, you’ll want to join me this Wednesday at 6:30 at the New School to hear Basil Jones and Brian Kohler, Handspring Company’s founders, discuss a bunch of academicized stuff about puppetry with Dan Hurlin and Yvette Christianse. At least it’s free.

Grass Mud Horse is a Chinese dissident thing on the Interwebs. Apple won’t let you play Unpleasant Horse on your iPhone. And the poster for War Horse reminds me of the poster for the movie Zoo. 

Thanks for reading my blog post this time, and may God bless.

 

Of Benjamins and Biebs

Many Listener Blog Readers are familiar with Bronwyn C.’s longstanding fascination with numismaticism, especially the Ron Paul Dollar—the second most popular currency in the United States! But many don’t realize that the number one most popular currency, Federal Reserve notes, aren’t the only option. 

Briefly, the U.S. government does not issue money, the Federal Reserve Bank issues money, and the money is a “fiat currency,” which means it’s not backed by silver or gold, it’s backed by your delusional belief that it’s worth something. Section 411 of Title 12 of the United States Code provides that Federal Reserve notes “shall be redeemed in lawful money on demand at the Treasury Department of the United States, in the city of Washington, District of Columbia, or at any Federal Reserve bank”—but what is “lawful money”? Well, in this case, it’s debt. 

But you don’t have to use Federal Reserve notes if you don’t want to! You can use any of a number of alternative currencies, all of which are perfectly legal. If you’re in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, you can use the widely accepted local currency called BerkShares. Just look up “alternative currency” and you’ll find a lot of them, all perfectly legal—except, ha ha, the Ron Paul dollar, which was backed with actual precious metals and so the FBI raided the issuers’ office and everyone got indicted and now there has to be trial. 

NEVERTHELESS, in our quest to boldly violate the false dichotomy between jokes and serious shit, Thunk Tank is issuing Thunk Tank Notes just in time for the WFMU Marathon! Listeners will be able to exchange Federal Reserve notes for Thunk Tank notes 1:1. We intend to make the Bieb the second-most popular currency among WFMU Listeners, and we figure as long as we don’t issue coinage or claim to be legal tender, we probably won’t get indicted.  

 

The Poodle Wins Again (or not)

The Westminster Kennel Club dog show is today and tomorrow, but this year I won’t be there. Back before magazines ceased to exist, I worked as an editor at a dog magazine, and part of my job involved attending the Dog Writers of America awards dinner on Sunday night, and going to Westminster on Monday and Tuesday, and having Wednesday lunch at Sardi’s where the Best-in-Show winner was served a plate of steak. I am not kidding when I say that meeting Rufus, the colored Bull Terrier who won in 2006, was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me.

Westminster is the first dog show a lot of people go to, because it’s famous and on TV and in New York, but I bet it’s pretty confusing if you don’t know what’s going on. Basically all the individual breeds are judged during the day on Monday and Tuesday, and then the winners of each breed compete in their groups at night—Toy, Hound, Non-Sporting, and Herding groups on Monday night, and Terrier, Working, and Sporting on Tuesday night. The winners from each of the seven groups compete for Best in Show at the end of the night’s judging on Tuesday. So if you want to see, for example, a lot of Boston Terriers—the best breed there is, proudly owned by WFMU DJs X-Ray Burns and Bronwyn C.—you would go to Ring 5 at 1:15 on Monday, and there would be 24 little champions right there. Each breed is judged against a specific standard, but there is a definite element of subjective, figure-skating-type interpretation going on. The judges tend to say things like the winning dog “would not be denied” or that the dog had “the look of eagles.”

The dog-show world (or fancy, as they call it) is a very weird subculture, and the best way I can explain it is to say that Best in Show is one of the most realistic documentaries I’ve ever seen. There are a lot of crazypants rich ladies, secret eugenicists, and people with control issues left over from their tragic high-school careers in the fancy. But there are also some fantastically interesting people who really love dogs. It’s a subculture in which older women are revered and gay people are accepted warmly. Plus, David Frei is just the nicest, smartest, most charismatic guy around.

One of my genius ideas when I was at the dog magazine was that we should start a Fantasy Dog Show League. Dogs already accrue points as they win shows over the course of a year, and are ranked monthly, so it would be pretty easy to set something up. And for the past few years a Las Vegas sporting book has been posting odds on Westminster Best-in-Show. The Smooth Fox Terrier is this year’s favorite, at 6:1, but I’ll take the sucker bet: Boston Terrier, 75:1.

UPDATE 2/15: Okay, so I lose. But also, the Poodle did NOT win the Non-Sporting Group, a Chinese Shar Pei named Miss Jayne Hathaway won, which was a major upset. In fact, the Shar Pei was 110:1 to win Best in Show—even less likely than the dog that should have won the group (i.e., the Boston Terrier).

Enter Putin's Ass (A Putin Pals Adventure)

“We knew this day would come,” said Paul I, as he floated in his glass tank, methodically prying apart the halves of an oyster shell.

Putin smiled a bit as he looked over at his psychic cephalopod companion. “Perhaps you did, old friend, but I fear I’ve been distracted by business matters. I barely paid any mind to this growing menace until you brought it to my attention.”

The menace of which Mr. Putin was speaking, of course, was the enormous wolf pack, 400 beasts strong, that was terrorizing Siberia. Never before had such a terrifyingly large band of carnivores been seen. For months this massive pack had been roaming the countryside, devouring entire villages, leaving carnage in its wake on the scale of Kahn and his Mongol hoards. Russia had not known such destruction since the Tunguska event, that mysterious explosion that devastated almost a thousand square miles of Russian forest back in 1908.

Putin pinched his eyes shut, remembering that awful day. “Never again,” he whispered to himself, before looking back at Paul, who was deftly scooping the meat from another oyster and slipping it into his beak. “Scientists and experts say the pack’s massive size has been caused by this brutal winter. With less game available, the wolves have banded together in order to take down larger prey. But we know differently, don’t we, gadalka?”

The New Rules of Sustainability

When I was younger, living sustainably was called “being poor.” You lived in a small space and shared resources with other people—sometimes unknowingly, like that incident with my bath towel—and bought stuff used, and patched things up, and made do. Not that you couldn’t have a perfectly fine life, being poor in New York; I remember an article from the Village Voice, back when people would pay for a copy of it ... Aww, crap! I’m starting to sound like Andy Rooney! …  Anyway, I believe the author used the term “privileged poor” to refer to people who made, like, $20,000 a year as entry-level writers or p.r. assistants, and who ate for free by going to press parties, and dressed for free with swag from designer photo shoots, and took awesome free vacations by convincing someone they were travel writers, etc. But now the term “privileged poor” is mostly used to refer to rich kids who go play artist in Williamsburg for a while, kinda like those jerks in La Boheme. Plus, nobody’s giving away all that free stuff anymore.

Sluggo and I tend to describe our deal as “sustainable living,” and I can give you the whole spiel about why we don’t replace the 85-year-old falling-apart wooden windows in our house (“heat loss blah blah manufacture new blah carbon blah footprint”) or why we bathe out of a plastic bucket like it’s a choice. But really we're just broke. Sluggo just finished reading a book by a guy who went to live in hole, which he thinks sounds pretty good. Of course, this was a hole the guy built himself, not a hole that he just found, like the one Sluggo’s friend D. lived in, which was a caved-in sidewalk next to a building on the Lower East Side where D. went to live after a knife fight with his dad. Apparently, the trick with living sustainably is to live in an intentional hole.

The main problem with living sustainably is that you have to learn all the rules, and sometimes the old rules are replaced by new ones. For years, I’ve been refusing to buy those bags of chemicals that people put on their slippery winter sidewalks; instead, I buy plain kitty litter, because I learned that it was the Good Environmental Thing and also would not eat away your 85-year-old brick front steps. But then today here comes our fine County Government with their free Stormwater Rules refrigerator magnet that says, “Salt before it snows and never use cat litter or sand to melt ice.” So the rules have changed! But why? How come cat litter was Good, and now it is Bad? Or was cat litter always Bad, and kitty litter is still okay? (I don't think there is a difference.) Or what happened? And what am I gonna do with the 10-pound bag of kitty litter that Sluggo just bought? I can think of only one way to recycle it, and we don’t have a cat.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

Random Reading

My Grammy Carlton always said, “You can never have too many books!” and sometimes we owned as many as 20 all at once, including the Bible and a volume called The Library of Universal Knowledge (the Practical Self-Educator). Since I intended to know everything when I grew up, I began working my way through the Great Books on a recommended reading list I found somewhere. It was a good list, in that I read some books I would never have considered, or even known existed—Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand and Stars, for instance. It was good to have a plan and a focus, although I didn’t understand that my list wasn’t THE list; I didn’t realize that the list of books considered great would change over time, and that Saint-Exupery might not be the immutable cultural touchstone I assumed he was.

Before I found the List, I went to our little local library to browse and check out any book that interested me. But once I had my Plan I went to the library only to order certain books, or pick up books, or put books on hold. It’s only lately that I’ve rediscovered the joys of random reading. I have three main sources for books nowadays, and have very little, if any, control over what is available to me. I get books from the “new” shelf at our small public library, from the “take-one-leave-one” at the train station café, and from a friend of mine who sends me discarded review copies from her job.

The “new” shelf at our library features recent acquisitions from the county library system. This means that most of the books won’t actually end up in our library, although we’ll be able to order them later, if we want to go to the trouble. I usually don’t. Sometimes the selection seems like a total hodgepodge, and sometimes it’s like the autobiography of one of the librarians. Suddenly there are several books about couples therapy and divorce mediation; after a few months, those are replaced with a bunch of books about menopause and cooking for one. But occasionally there is a book that makes you wonder how it slipped through: I found The History of White People on the New shelf, and was very glad for that. Author Nell Painter is a historian who retired from Princeton, and while she obviously means this book to be an accessible introduction to some concepts from whiteness studies, I suspect the major points I took away are a little too glib. But here’s what I got out of it: The whole concept of “race” was made up by 18^th-Century Germans and there’s no science to support it, IQ tests are crap, anarchist beliefs were a sign of racial inferiority, and my ancestors weren’t considered white until fairly recently. Except for the annoying way illustrations are cited in the text, The History of White People is a good read and feeds my confirmation bias pretty well.

The take-one-leave-one (the "tolo”) is a large bookshelf at one of our local coffee shops. You can take any book you see there, and keep it for as long as you like—forever, if you want—as long as you replace it with another book you don’t want. It seems as if a good number of people in our village work in publishing, so there are often some pretty interesting books at the tolo. That’s where I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an 800-page historical fantasy about Napoleonic-era English magic (or, you know, magicke). I did read the whole thing, and concluded that author Susanna Clarke can write, but she can’t tell a story to save her life. A reader who hangs around for 800 pages wants a well-constructed plot. When I took Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell I replaced it with Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (which I’d bought and read after my latest disfiguring face-cancer surgery). But after I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I put it back on the tolo.

My friend A., who works at a great metropolitan newspaper, has access to the book reviewers’ discards, and often sends me little packages of books. This is not quite random, since she has an idea of the types of things I like to read, but it is actually more random than the New shelf or the tolo since I have no say in the books that she picks for me. Recently she’s sent me The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum. It’s a history of forensic medicine in New York City in the early 20^th Century, featuring New York’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, and toxicologist Alexander Gettler. It’s like a true crime-science thriller-history mash-up, and thoroughly enjoyable. Good science, good writing, good story—a good book!

Although I’ve come to prefer getting books for free via random reading, I do sometimes break down and buy something I’m especially interested in. This week I bought and am reading Molecular Gastronomy and The Black Swan. I’m not far enough along to review them yet, but I think I want to marry Nassim Taleb.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

 

 

Thunk Tank's Top 10 List for 2010

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The TSA Question

On the last Thunk Tank show, we talked about Thanksgiving travel and the TSA. Listener Steve emailed us the following:

“You guys are having fun at the expense of new travel security measures.  And they are a pain in the butt, no doubt.  But there is a problem and you're not offering alternatives to a real problem. Why aren't you in any way critical of the reasons for the necessity of these things? Just wondering.”

Since we’re having a special guest (Rudy Delson!) on our next show, we thought we’d answer Listener Steve here on the Blog.

1: The TSA scanners are a virtual strip search. The Fourth Amendment says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...” How is it reasonable to require every single traveler to submit to a strip search?

2. The TSA scanners are not safe. Jason Bell, a molecular biologist and biophysicist, has reviewed the TSA’s own safety reports, and has concluded that people should opt for the pat-down search rather than go through the scanners. Here are some (long) quotes:

“Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? …These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction …”
And also:
“… the statement that one scan is equivalent to 2-3 minutes of your flight is VERY misleading. …relating non-absorbing cosmic radiation to tissue absorbing man-made radiation is simply misleading and wrong. ... a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. … Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children, or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!”

There is much more, including Bell’s call for the TSA agents to be equipped with radiation badges to monitor their own exposure. You can read Bell’s full post here.
(Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)

3. BUT! You don’t have to go through the scanners, you can opt for the “pat down.” Still an unreasonable search, and guess what? The TSA agents don’t change their gloves for each one! That hand going down your pants carries the cooties of 1,000 junk-touchings. The  TSA’s own blog has a lot of posts about the problem they’ve had with spreading scabies at Boston’s Logan Airport. Scabies today, flesh-eating bacteria tomorrow, n’est-ce pas?

Finally, to address Listener Steve’s question about the “necessity” of strip searching all travelers: What is the reason for it, really? Does it really make traveling safer? Really?

Ask yourself: Are you safer today than you were on September 10, 2001?

 

Thunk Tank Reenactors

Jay's out of town this weekend and is expecting me to post something about Putin, but I thought I'd feature the Thunk Tank Reenactors doing the opening of the 10/12/10 show instead.