Go soon with John Lurie and friends on his amazing adventure series, Fishing with John. Our hero hunts shark ("When it comes to the shark," the narrator intones, "man is on his menu") with Jim Jarmusch, gets seasick with Tom Waits, does a mystical fish dance with Matt Dillon and takes a deadly trip to Maine with Willem Dafoe. John doesn't actually know how to fish, but that's not the point.

When you watch (Netflix has it), listen for three key moments:

• At one point, the deadpan narrator says, "I'd love a bite of your sandwich." There's no sandwich, and no real reason to say that.
• Tom Waits at one point goes into the differences between the chicken fish, the goat fish and the cheese fish. The cheese fish, of course, is what you catch in France
• Their guide in Thailand, says the narrator, "has wooden legs, but real feet."

Watch the Tom Waits episode in full. YouTube rocks.

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I just need to tell someone, anyone, that the borders on the boxes of the charts of the appendixes of the dissertation that has already been read by all of the people likely to ever read it in this form really don't concern me, except, of course, that I am very concerned about them because it is a lenghty pain to remove all of them and I have been told I need to for some reason. Borderline insanity. Fun Fun Fun

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Holy shit. Only weeks after Hellx moves out do I realize we were living with a hipster! The Morning News offers a handy guide for detecting a hipster infestation:

Have you recently found yourself asking any of the following questions?

-- Whose fixed-gear bicycle is that in my garage?

-- Where do I keep misplacing the charger for my iPod Nano?

-- Why are there vast amounts of food mysteriously not missing from my pantry and refrigerator each week?

Yes? Then, chances are, you've got hipsters.

Freaky. Just freaky.

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This weekend I flipped the rear wheel on my Raliegh from the freewheel to the fixed gear. It's hard to overstate the popularity of fixed gear bicycles New York. They're everywhere. I was able to resist the peer pressure for almost two months, but switching to a fixed gear will help me in my job. I'll be able to stop more quickly and things will be easier on my hands since I won't need to rely on my brakes everytime I need to stop. I'll also be able to talk to my dispatcher more safely while I'm riding.

My first ride was a couple of loops around Prospect Park, but that quickly go boring and wasn't very helpful. It's very much akin to me driving from Kansas to New York in a manual car but never really learning how to shift well. You don't need to shift often on the Interstate. Around Prospect Park, I never really had to stop and start like I do normally. So I went to the supermarket and picked up groceries. Going down streets with stuff on my back in the rain helped me start to get a better feel for the ride of a fixed gear.

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Recently, via direct correspondence, a couple of you posed the question: What are you doing these days? Since I spend a good deal of my working hours thinking about the scattered Norlosers as I wield my manual post hole digger, piercing the rocky soils of Central Texas under a burning sun, I decided to be uncharacteristically expository and post about myself:

Like my allonym, I am a harbinger of doom.

I am a Herald of Sprawl, Standard-bearer of the Faux chateau and various imperial clothiers, bane of NIMBYs, BANANAS, and CAVE people.

Can you guess what I do?

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Ran across an interest idea recently that, while not a happy one, seems perfectly true to me.

So, everybody agrees that climate change is here -- environmentalists, politicians, scientists, oil companies, business groups, everybody except Rush Limbaugh. They also all agree that humans play a role. What's in dispute is whether humans are the main cause of climate change and whether climate change is cause for alarm. ("What's in dispute" is not totally fair, since it's a very small number of scientists who say "no" to both statements disputing the findings of a very large number of scientists who say "yes" to both statements. But that very large number themselves can't agree on a forecast, and climate change is tough to predict, so it seems fair to me to say there exists a fog of uncertainty.)

So let's say we enact rules to restrict our use of the fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases. And let's say it works -- our energy consumption drops significantly. Heck, at the rate our consumption is rising, staying flat could be considered a victory.

What does that mean for global warming? If we become a more efficient nation that moderates energy use, we will have... no effect at all on global warming. In fact, it could make things worse*.

Ask me how!

*There are other, significant advantages to reducing our energy consumption.

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Plantnerd successfully defended her dissertation last week. Unlike many of her colleagues, she still thought her study organism was darned cool by the time she defended*, and even thought her research was meaningful, or at least really interesting.
In order to finally finish her doctorate, all she needs to do is complete some fairly minor, albeit tedious, revisions. She tried earlier in the week. She didn't care. She decided to give herself a full week off from prairie turnips to focus on other things, like pig dissections. It has been a week. Today she managed to flip through the 1,000 pages of returned dissertation copies. She didn't manage to care.
Maybe next week?
*Plantnerd does not intend to suggest that her colleagues ever thought that prairie turnips were darned cool. However, many colleagues had considered their own study organisms cool at one point, but most gave that up long before their defenses.
Maybe next week she will quit writing in whiny third person.
One can always hope.

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We bought it in 1997 or so at an otherwise peaceful mall in South Dallas that was widely feared by suburban folk. It fueled the soundtrack for many parties, played thousands of awesome tunes and generated its weight and more in static-loving dust bunnies. But our $450 stereo proved too big for our little New York apartment and for Dr. No's home-decorating ambitions. On the block it went.

We've actually tried to sell it before, for $150, but no nibbles. So I halved the price and added some multimedia to the listing. It read like this:

Rock out with this complete Sony CD-tape deck-receiver set-up. Ready to hook up to your TV or DVD player, and I'll even throw in the audio/video modulator. Consists of STR-De315 Dolby-surround digital receiver, 5-disk CDP-CE105 CD player and TC-WE471 dual tape deck. Also includes two 200-watt speakers and one 120-watt extra speaker, plus working remote control. We've used it with TVs, turnables, PCs and Macs with no problem. Only getting rid of it because it's too much sound for our little place! Includes cabinet, though the original glass door long since bit the dust. Play it to your heart's content before you buy.

Here's the stereo:

Here's how you can rock out with this setup:

this is in or around Park Slope -- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

I finally sold it 15 minutes ago to a scruffy, pleasant-looking young guy from Jackson Heights, home of Jebus, TSI! and Caroline. While I'm sure the price had something to do with it, ultimately the photo of me rocking out sold the piece. Said the buyer in an email:

i have something late morning and then tomorrow evening 6-9pm in the city, so if early or late afternoon could work for you that would be very cool. if that is not good for you, saturday is a similar set-up, so that could work for you. i'm not expecting a long looking/listening process. for the record, the picture sold me.

Then, 20 minutes ago I got this email:

the pic of you rocking out in your Kansas shirt kills me! too awesome! just wanted to say.

This settles it. I totally rock.

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What is Mrs. Soul up to these days, you wonder? Well, I was in Seattle this past weekend attending my spring residency- for distance ed folks, this is when we get to sit in an actual (versus virtual) classroom and do group activities like come up with a classification system for juice boxes (I'm not kidding). I'm taking a pre-cataloguing course and reading article with titles like "The Bibliographic Universe", "The Objectives of the Catalog" and "A Taxonomy of Bibliographic Relationships" In between readings, I'm doing more reading. And much sleeping, as DoubleOh can attest. More interesting, though, I get to travel to Amsterdam this summer as part of an interdisciplinary team of grad students and undergrad honors students from UW. I'm going to be researching something about the information dynamics and behavior of the Muslim community within Amsterdam. For those interested, I have a separate Amsterdam blog which will be much more interesting to look at when I'm there in August. I recently read a book called Brilliant Orange by David Winner which is is great insight into Dutch football as well as the general culture there.

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Depositions are awesome. They make for entertaining reading. This may be the awesomest. Watch as the Monsanto scientist, old coot that he is, start up to kick the ass of famously obstreperous attorney Joe Jamail. I also like how all these old Texans call each other "boy."

The Morning News is on a roll today.

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It first helps to know who the hell Dale Peck is. He's a book reviewer with a schtick: He eviscerates writers. Actually, that sort of understates matters. He is to literary criticism what Genghis Khan was to travel journalism, razing whole university English departments and putting entire villages of University of Iowa creative-writing graduates to the sword. Why so vicious? I suspect in part it's because he grew up in Kansas. Consider his review of the works of Rick Moody, who wrote the novel that was the basis for the movie The Ice Storm:

Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation...

Together these books amount not so much to an oeuvre as to a career, one whose success, though fascinating, is inexplicable to me. In fact, I have to confess that I consider myself unequal to the task of analyzing Moody's writing. Its faults strike me as uniform and self-evident and none of them are complex enough for a sustained analysis. My gut feeling is that if you honestly do not believe that this is bad writing, then you are a part of the problem. When I finished The Black Veil I scrawled "Lies! Lies! All lies!" on the cover and considered my job done. Like all of Moody's books, it is pretentious, muddled, derivative, bathetic. His much-touted compassion strikes me as false (in his fiction he makes his characters suffer in order to solicit your pity, and this seems no less true of the self that he describes in The Black Veil); his highly praised prose -- "rhythmic" and "evocative" are the tags that you see most often --comes only at the expense of precision, which is to say, of truth.

Ouchie! (Read the whole thing.).

Naturally, this make him an appealing judge for The Morning News' annual Tournament of Books, which is something like the NCAA basketball tournament but without the cheerleaders and overactive pituitary cases. It works like this: Readers select the books to participate in the Tournament. Then the books are seeded into bracketsand judged in a single-elimination tournament by reviewers.

A quirk in this year's Tournament gave two books -- "The Accidental" by Ali Smith and "Saturday" by Ian McEwan -- a second attempt to crack the contest. Dale Peck was tapped to judge. His review is predictably harsh to both:

... speaking more generally -- hell, you're all just waiting for the pull quote anyway -- books like these make me want to join al Qaeda. It's not so much the books themselves that make me wish our way of life would come to an end sooner rather than later, but, rather, the fact that seemingly intelligent and educated people find reasons to praise them.

Then he refused to pick a winner!

The lovable lugs over at The Morning News responded in two ways. First, they flipped a coin and gave the contest to Ali Smith. Then they laid into Dale Peck big time. Says one staffer:

My first attempt at this commentary was probably twice as long as Dale Peck's review and included phrases like "intellectual poseur," "retarded knob," "narrow as a childless panda's urethra," and "all the nuance and sophistication of a Rage Against the Machine baby-doll tee."

Says the second:

In order to outdo Dale Peck in the B.R. Meyers "everything created after a certain date is crap" sweepstakes, I'd like to declare that everything published since Og scratched out "Fire Make Meat Easier to Chew and Also Kills Worms That Live on Meat" on his cave wall using a stick and the blood of his best mate is worthless puke that gives comfort to al Qaeda.

Like Mr. Peck, I am supposedly a teacher at an accredited institution of higher learning, and one thing I have learned during my career is when someone hasn't done their homework and, in this case, it seems clear that Mr. Peck read neither book. His "I can't be bothered to choose" attitude is the critical equivalent of someone pointing and saying, "Hey, look over there," before running away.

Honestly, what primarily impresses me here is the number of kickass emo band names I can pick out of his commentary. "Bourgeois Illusions," "Troubled Conscience," "Assuaging the Guilt," "Social Compact," "Species Suicide," "Mea Culpas."

I'm eagerly watching Dale Peck's blog for a response. Can the big boy eat what he dishes out?

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The Web site Cabspotting seems like a cool-in-concept, not-so-great-in-execution kind of idea: It tracks individual cabs in San Francisco overlaid on a ghostly map showing the most common routes of the city's taxi fleet. I pulled it up and forgot about it. When I went back to that window, I was amazed at the little tales each one told. Some cabs sat for hours without a fare. Some zipped all over town. And nearly all avoided certain neighborhoods.

Thanks, MetaFilter.

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A New York Times story profiles a presumably off-Off Broadway show about William Patrick "Willie" Hitler, the son of Adolf's half-brother. What happened to this man? Well, he tried to win a sweet position in the Reich through his uncle, didn't get it, tried to extort the guy, gave up, and -- you probably saw this coming -- finally settled in Long Island.

J. Edgar Hoover's files on Willie tell more of the tale. He joined the Navy during the war, then fathered four children. Apparently, at least three are still alive today, though I'm astonished by (and a bit skeptical of) the "taken a pact so they will have no children" claim. OK, so Hitler is inarguably worse than just about any family's craziest relative. Doncha think a few generations might dilute the Adolf essence?

Read a personality study done on Hitler by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

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I'm generally in favor of Brooklyn's borough president, Marty Markowitz. That's because he embodies a quality necessary to hold the office of a borough president: He's mostly harmless. Many borough presidents use the office for grandstanding and furthering their careers -- and yes, Virginia Fields, I'm looked at you. Marty's a realist. He knows the job's essentially a cheerleading position. And this guy can shamelessly pom-pom. Recently, he celebrated Forsythia Day. Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

But I suspect he's behind Brooklyn's latest effort to play up local flair, and I'm not happy about it. There's no photos, but my latest edition of "Brooklyn!!," a free mailer likely paid for by my city tax dollars, carries a headline of "Aw Yeah!" over a news story about the latest entering/leaving Brooklyn sign. Like the sign above, Brooklyn has a couple of cute ones. Over the Williamsburg Bridge, the sign says "Leaving Brooklyn -- Oy Vey!" But this new one -- an entering-Brooklyn sign, over the Jackie Robinson Parkway -- says: "Welcome -- Brooklyn's in the House!"

This shows Brooklyn is in touch with its vibrant hiphop community -- if the year was 1989. It's been years since I've heard anyone use "in the house" without a considerable dash of irony. The free mailer goes on to say, "Pump your fist or high-five every time you pass it, because in the BK that's how we roll." Indeed.

At least it wasn't spelled "In da House."

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i just learned that while discussing blogs in my ethics course i should not bring up norlos--as everyone when to check it out and immediately found hellx's keep it rollin' entry.
this quickly labled me as a bad person and generated an uncomfortable feeling in the room. this happnened about 10 mins ago--and i am still in the class now.
just thought you should know.

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I've been working on a theory lately. It was inspired by a recent article (Oregonian?) I read describing the Hipster Yuppie. This creature is in his 30's, enjoys a well-paying professional job and proudly spends his free time chasing after the obscurer-than-thou indie band du jour. This group has the power to sway pop/rock music and explains the rise of groups like The Shins and Death Cab for Cutie which have a certain indie-cred, but rock out about as hard as say, Seasons in the Sun. The old people just aren't moving aside to let the nihilistic youngsters in to root out the old and bring in the newest jazz/rock/punk/metal/grunge whatever.

My theory: we've tapped out the music as rebellion parade. There's no where left to rebel to. Death metal? Got it. Lounge-core? Done. Gangsta rap? So 90's suburban white kid. The next rebellious generation has nowhere left to go but away. What can be more rebellious against my generation than to simply say, "no thanks, I'd rather not" when given the chance to musically offend their parents.

Case in point - this week's Willamette Week includes the following interview (excerpt) with one Honey Owens, performing as part of Valet, makers of "extreme psychedelic music". The interviewer says, "At the same time that psych music is catching on, noise is as well. Do you see your style as being in truck with the broader noise movement?..."

And Honey's response:

"Noise is another expression of ambient music, only louder. It is definitely a body experience, the way the frequencies hit you - sometimes at the neck annd head, sometimes in the stomach. Definitely chakra music! i think we have similar goals as far as the assault being loving and the aggression being on the same side as opposed to against the listeners, like the sound of revolution with resolve."

As Jim Morrison says, "This is the end. This is the end, my friend."

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Mr. Guapo has something to tell you. And you know Mr. Guapo means it, because he's referring to himself in the third person.

I think testicles are OK.

Let's discuss our recent trip to the homeland. Our itinerary somehow came to include a fundraiser for the athletic department at Butler County Community College. And really, what could possibly raise more money than a calf fry, catered by Albert's Nut Wagon?

We gathered with a couple hundred Butler boosters at the 4-H building a few blocks from downtown. Those who prefer not to fill their mouths with virile balls could pack in some fried catfish and cole slaw. I dug on the cole slaw. The stuff is pretty much unappreciated. But I've never had a Rocky Mountain oyster. And let's face it: Trying one is no light matter. Before I tucked in, I had to see how it was prepared.

It seems first that a young person attending the college needs to prepare them in the proper manner.

Then they're carefully coated with breading, but not before they're peeled from their wrappers like the petals of a daisy in the hands of a wistful young girl.

But how do they taste? you ask urgently. Being willing to try the things you don't (unless your name is Garmr), I moved in for the ultimate test.

Just kidding! That's a hush puppy. The actual oysters were sliced into undecidedly un-ball-like shapes. Disappointing.

But I did try. And you know what? They taste like... fried. Just plain fried. You could serve prairie oysters at Long John Silver's and America wouldn't know the difference. Perhaps... they already are...

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