Longtail This

Have you heard of this "longtail effect"? It's the name for the trajectory that any interesting idea or item follows, first through the internet and then out into the world at large. I believe it can be graphed as follows:


Note: This is why I've stopped sending links to Glark, who usually replies to my efforts to be "web savvy" and "with it" by saying something along the lines of, "Oh, Doppelganger, you're so cute. What's it like living in 1997?"

But anticipation of ridicule is not enough to stop me from sharing this with all of you. Because it made me laugh, and even if you've seen it already, maybe it'll make you laugh again:


Welcome to 50 Books, the repertory cinema of the web! Sure, the floor is sticky and the seats are hard, but the ushers are always willing to look the other way if you feel like groping your movie companion.

You're Soaking in It

Three things not to ask yourself when looking at the Library Bathtub...

1. How do you get in and out of it?
2. How do you keep the books from getting wet and mildewy?
3. Why does it look like something from a medieval dungeon?

And one thing you maybe should ask...

1. What kinds of books would a library bathtub absolutely need to keep in stock in order to be credible as, you know, a GOOD library bathtub? Moby Dick? The Old Man and the Sea? Mutiny on the Bounty? Jaws? Voyage of the Dawn Treader? The Log from the Sea of Cortez? 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)? You couldn't just check any old book under there, could you?

[Thanks, Stephie, for the link!]

Survival Guide

Rusty sent me this link (by way of Metafilter, I believe) the other day. It's the full text of a book, entitled Coping: A Survival Guide for People with Asperger Syndrome.

The book's author, Marc Segar, was killed in a car accident almost ten years ago, but someone close to him decided to make his book widely available. Many passages, such as this one, from the chapter "Distorting the Truth", are unaffectedly -- and I'd imagine unintentionally -- poignant:

Sarcasm is when someone says one things but means the opposite. For example - in response to hearing someone burp, someone else might say 'how polite'. The easiest way of picking up on sarcasm is by listening to the tone of voice. You may need to defend yourself against sarcasm at times and this will be covered in the following chapters.

A Meme of One's Own

Hi there! Welcome to Monday! I saved you a seat!

I am feeling not so smart right now. It might be the fact that I spent the better part of the afternoon re-caulking the bathtub and shower. (Also: I spent the better part of the day egregiously abusing the word "caulk" in conversation.) It might be the fact that I forced Rusty to watch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas last night. (Oh, did I forget to tell you? I love Dolly Parton.)

Nonetheless:

toxic fumes x (Dolly Parton + Burt Reynolds + a musical)
= a killer recipe for dumb

I need to get my head back on straight. Hence, a list -- or better yet, a WHOLE BUNCH of lists. Feel free to play along at home!

Five most recent books you've bought for yourself:
Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje
The Island of the Day Before - Umberto Eco
Short Stories - Leo Tolstoi
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - David Sedaris

Five books you've most recently given other people:
Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund
Two Towns in France - M.F.K. Fisher
You Remind Me of Me - Dan Chaon
Baby Bargains - Denise Fields
The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis

Five most recent books you've loaned other people, and their status:
Ha! Now I think to make a list.

Last five kids' books you bought:
Madeline's Rescue - Ludwig Bemelmans
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel - Virginia Lee Burton
White Snow Bright Snow - Alvin Tresselt and Roger Duvoisin
Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin - Lloyd Moss and Marjorie Priceman
National Geographic Encyclopedia of Animals

Last five books you looked at on Amazon/Chapters/Powell's/etc.:
100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37)
Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund
The Prostitute in the Family Tree: Discovering Humor and Irony in the Bible
bills open kitchen
Tokyo: A Certain Style

Top five books on your "to read" pile:
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
Alternadad - Neal Pollack
Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert
Animals in Translation - Temple Grandin
The 100-Mile Diet - Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon

Bottom five books on your "to read" pile (I don't know about you, but I had to move some stacks just to get all the way through the pile -- yikes):
The Areas of My Expertise - John Hodgman
I Have Landed - Stephen Jay Gould
Sermons and Soda-Water - John O'Hara
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir

Hm. I don't know if I feel better now, exactly, but I definitely feel different.

How to Increase Your Word Power

This is just one of many onesies and toddler t-shirts available from SATees. Also available are loquacious, itinerant, and of course puerile.

I'd get one for Sam, but first they'll have to come up with a single word for "obsessed with excavators to the point that they're the first thing one talks about upon waking up, and one would happily marinade in one's own poopy diaper for hours rather than be dragged away from one's toy heavy equipment, kicking and screaming, to have said poopy diaper changed."

[via Poppytalk]

The Legend of the Olmec Head

I'm a couple of days late on this one, but given the tone of my week, where I've been a couple of days late on everything, that puts me right on schedule. (I know. With reasoning skills like that, I should have been a lawyer. Or a Republican. Cue rimshot!)

Karen posted about this Raymond Carver-esque madlib on her site, and I was helpless against its thrall. Not that I tried to resist. And here's the result. (Note: If you want to do this madlib yourself, don't read mine till you're done. Also: Don't forget your Number 2 pencil.)

THE LEGEND OF THE OLMEC HEAD*

Bruce was a sewer worker. But his wife, Lucinda, was a sewer administrator. This made Bruce feel bad. One night, after diving in the Maldives, he decided to change underpants. After putting out his cigar and finishing his Mai-Tai, Bruce felt a crushing ennui. He said to his wife, "What would Jesus do?"

Lucinda said, "Meh."

This made Bruce feel a vague dread. So he left her and went to the basement. While he was there, he saw a woman. She looked like a sleek jaguar. He decided to try to floss with her.

"Hey, how's it hanging?" he said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she said.

"What do you think?" he said.

"Go to hell," she said.

I'm already there, he thought. But instead he said, "Later, gator."

After that, he left. He walked to the emergency room. On the way, he stopped to buy a pina colada. But instead he saw something he hadn't expected. It was an Olmec head. He surprised himself by stealing the Olmec head. The shop owner didn't notice. He was too busy cleaning the cat box to notice.

He took the Olmec head home and showed it to Lucinda, who was just putting out her hand-rolled cigarette and finishing her Sex on the Beach.

"What the Jiminy Cricket is that?" she said.

"It's my flarbnut," he said.

"What the Christ on a cracker is a flarbnut?" she said.

"This," he said. And with that, he used the Olmec head to do his taxes.

*The madlib gave me the title "The Olmec Head", but I like mine better. Screw you, madlib! You're not the boss of me!

Yum

[From People's "Cakes from Every State" photo essay. Thanks for the link, Jody!]

More Overheard in Vancouver

"You know, for a methhead, she's very self-possessed."

ETC: More Artsy AND More Fartsy

So how's this for a set of unrelated circumstances perfectly designed to minimize my sleep:

• Last night, an old friend, whom we rarely see because he lives on the other side of the country, drops by unexpectedly. We get so caught up in our conversation that it's almost 2:00 am before we realize how late it is. But no worries. Sam's been sleeping in till 8:00 most mornings, so we can still count on a half dozen hours of solid Zs, right?
• No! That final set of molars decides to rear its ugly head and wake Sam up, irritable and in pain, at 5:55. And we're up! But he naps in the afternoon, so we can catch some shuteye then, wouldn't you think?
• You would be wrong, mon frere! There's a street festival happening in our 'hood, and of course a twelve-person experimental jazz troupe sets up stage less than a hundred feet from our house. Were they good? Well, let's just say that what they lacked in skill they more than made up for in volume and stick-to-it-iveness.

It's kind of a miracle, isn't it. But, like, a shitty miracle.

I'm so friggin' tired right now. I'm experiencing first-six-weeks-of-parenthood déjà vu. Old school. The thing about me and fatigue is that it makes me uncharacteristically clumsy. You wouldn't believe how long it's taken me just to write these few words, because I keep hitting the wrong keys. Also, earlier today I stubbed my toe quite badly, and I must confess that I dropped the F-bomb in front of an impressionable toddler. More than once. Loudly.

The other thing about me and fatigue is that it makes me stupid. But I'm not one to let mere stupidity keep me from posting. I'm the George W. Bush of the blogosphere.

But I don't want to assault some poor helpless book with my subnormal dribble. It seems to me that images can do a better job of standing up for themselves, so for today I'm going to let pictures do my work for me. (I've heard they can tell a story worth a thousand words. Can you IMAGINE?)

I've become a total Etsy addict in the past couple of months. I've ordered some cute handmade toys and tees for Sam, and lately my attention has turned to the many fine pieces of visual art for sale on the site. I've been bookmarking like a fiend, because that's what I do, and along the way I seem to have collected a little slideshow of prints designed especially to appeal to book lovers and assorted other word nerds.

And voilà:

I've always liked the idea of using pages from old books in collages and whatnot. From Etsy seller myfolklover's description of this piece:

This little girl is rather forgetful and has befriended a bird who has taken up home in her hair... to remind her of all the little things that she has forgotten! This is a print of an original ink and watercolor drawing on the page of an old Enid Blyton book. It is part of a series of original artwork titled "Remembering to Think of Things".

Everything about that description is just right.

I feel like this sometimes. Such as right now.

(In addition to artwork, this seller, curster, also has a bunch of crazy stuffed toys for sale. If this print speaks to you in a very special and ever-so-slightly creepy way, you should check them out.)

It's Story Time! But in a way, isn't it always story time?

Hey, everybody! Remember TYPEWRITERS? Me neither! But I like Typewriter Girl's mary-janes-and-striped-kneesocks combo so much, I can forgive her for having a dress made out of an obsolete technology. Also, it makes me feel better about the fact that I'm the last woman in the Western world still clinging to bootcut jeans.

Nobody ever thinks to feel bad for animals because they're illiterate, but how would you feel if that were you? Hang this little guy on your wall to serve as a daily reminder of just how lucky you are.

ETC: Oodgay Ommunicationcay

"So you're going to take Sam to the park and come back in about half an hour, when dinner's ready?"
"Thatsay the planway."
"What?"
"Uh, atsay the planskay?"
"..."
"..."
"You have no idea how pig latin works, do you."
"Nofay."

BOOKS: Barbara Kingsolver Is the Seventy-Fourth Most Dangerous Person in America*

It's really hard to talk about liking organic, free-range, local food without sounding like (a) a flaky hippie, or (b) a yuppie asshole. For all you know, I may be both, but I have a sufficiently well-developed sense of shame to not want to broadcast these facts. So before I proceed, let me just confess that earlier this evening I ate a fast-food veggie burger and onion rings, and then chased it with a soft-serve frozen yogurt. So, you know. You know.

Still, this next book has kind of changed my life. Plus, it has recipes.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
by Barbara Kingsolver (#16)
Yes, THE Barbara Kingsolver. The same person who wrote a novel that many consider will go on to become an honest-to-god classic. That very same writer has now written a book whose title gave me inexplicable déjà vu, until I realized that I think it was also the name of the unit my grade three class did on ecology back in '78.

That aside, this book is a bit of a miracle. It explores the modern food industry in depth via a narrative of a year in which Kingsolver and her family attempt to eat only food they grow themselves or purchase from nearby farms on their homestead in the southern Appalachians. The miracle is that a book like this could come off as preachy and smug, or as dry and didactic, and yet it doesn't. Instead, Kingsolver invests it with the same warmth and humanity with which she imbues her fiction writing. She also involves her family directly in the book: her daughter Camille contributes recipes at the end of each chapter, and her husband, Steven L. Hopp, provides information-dense sidebars that support Kingsolver's narrative. (Kingsolver is no slouch in the research department herself: her training as an evolutionary biologist comes to the fore in this book.)

Here are just a few of the many fascinating (and by "fascinating" I mean "interesting, potentially demoralizing, and occasionally terrifying") facts I took away from this book:

• Thanks to poor lifestyle and nutritional choices, we have dealt to today's kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents (which would be us).
• Over the last decade, the U.S. has lost an average of 300 independent (i.e. not owned by corporations) farms a week.
• However, organic growers, farmers' markets, and small exurban food producers now comprise the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. food economy.
• Though many eligible mothers may not know it, the U.S. assistance for women with infant children (WIC) gives coupons redeemable at farmers' markets to more than 2.5 million participants in forty-four states.
• Similarly, the Seniors' Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) awards grants to forty states and numerous Indian tribal governments to help low-income seniors buy locally grown fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
• U.S. citizens on average spend a lower proportion of their income on food than people in any other country, or any heretofore in history.
• The constituent ingredients in an average North American meal travel about a gazillion miles before getting to our tables, consuming insane amounts of fuel. (Sorry I couldn't provide exact numbers; they're buried somewhere in the book and I forgot to pencil them.)
• Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains generates about three times as much money for your local economy.
• Supermarkets accept only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached, cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply. Therefore, every crop yields a significant proportion of perfectly edible but small or oddly shaped vegetables that are "trash" by market standards.
• No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as the U.S. does. As Kingsolver says, "U.S. consumers may take [their] pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistent bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance."
• If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, the U.S. federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary.
• Not a single case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as BSE, or "mad cow disease"), anywhere, has ever turned up in cattle that were raised on pasture grass or organic feed.
• Free-range beef also has less danger of bacterial contamination to humans, because feeding on grass maintains normal levels of acidity in the animal's stomach.

Here's the thing about all this information: it's scary. It's also totally overwhelming if you take it in all at once. I can totally appreciate the knee-jerk desire to go into denial and write all this off as the ranting of a loonie back-to-the-lander. Except Kingsolver isn't a loonie. She's eminently rational and down-to-earth (no pun intended... I think), and it's hard to write off what she's saying.

But at the same time, for most of us, buying a few acres and sustaining ourselves through our own agrarian efforts isn't exactly a viable option, no matter how appealing Kingsolver's gorgeously written passages about harvesting zucchinis or watching her flock of heirloom turkeys mate (a notably rare event, since most turkeys, even free-range ones, are created with syringes and bottled, uh, "turkey juice").

So what's an average urbanite/suburbanites/superurbanite to do? Fortunately, Kingsolver breaks it all down:

1. Support local farmers' markets, and ask vendors how they farm their products.
2. Ask your local grocery stores where their produce comes from, and let them know you're interested in local organic food. Their business is to respond to market demand. You're the market. It's your responsibility as a member of the free enterprise system to clearly state what you want.
   
3. Resist the urge to buy out-of-season produce, knowing that if it's out of season, it's probably had to travel long distances to get to you.
   
4. Re-train yourself to accept lumpy, oddly shaped and sized produce.
5. Buy free-range meat, eggs, and dairy if they're available to you. (Please, please don't make me regale you with the horrors of factory milk production. I don't think my stomach could bear thinking about it twice.)
6. If you can, try growing some of your own produce, if for no other reason than just to remind yourself that growing food is real work, and that farmers deserve to be compensated fairly for it.
7. And, you know, go easy on yourself if you don't hit the mark 100 percent of the time. It's not a contest.
   

Oh, crap. I just re-read this post, and it does come off as preachy. So much for good intentions. This is why you're just better off reading Kingsolver's book yourself. And on that note -- and because I'm feeling a middle-school book report vibe coming on -- I'll end with a quote:

We will have to change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.

I don't know about you, but I want to.

*But as she says, "When you're seventy-four, you try harder." (Seriously, though, this book actually lists Kingsolver as one of the hundred most dangerous people in America. I hear she wields a mean hoe.)

BOOKS: And Now Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Book Blog

Chinua Achebe wins the Booker Prize for fiction.

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction Wednesday, beating such celebrated nominees as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan.

The $120,000 prize is awarded every two years for a body of fiction. Achebe, 76, is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), and Anthills of the Savannah, published more than 30 years later. He has written more than 20 books, including novels, short stories, essays and collections of poetry.

"Chinua Achebe's early work made him the father of modern African literature as an integral part of world literature," said Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, one of the three judges for the award.

I'm blown away by the talent among this batch of Booker contenders. In addition to Roth, Atwood and McEwan, Achebe was up against Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, and Peter Carey, to name just a few.

I haven't read anything by Achebe since I read The African Trilogy -- which includes his celebrated first novel Things Fall Apart -- almost fifteen years ago. Man. It sure doesn't seem like that much time has passed. I think I need to revisit his books. (I think I also need to read something by Doris Lessing. Should I be embarrassed that I haven't already?)

[Thanks to the Cap'n for the link, and for keeping me on the up and up with this whole "book blogging" business.]

ETC: I Learn the Hard Way So You Don't Have To!

I'm in wait mode at work, so I thought I'd whip up a super-fun-bonus weekend post. No, no, no... thank me later.

I've been thinking about wisdom lately, and how one goes about accumulating it. I don't know if I've actually made any progress in this area, but the years have definitely given me a few bits of hard-won practical knowledge. And here, in no apparent order, they are:

1. Don't wear a white bra underneath white or light-coloured tops. Every lady (and some gentlemen) should invest in a couple of beige bras. Unless your skin isn't beige. Then I'm afraid you're on your own. I'm only qualified to give bra advice for beige people.

2. How a person is when they're ten is probably the best indicator of what they're like as an adult. So if you make a new acquaintance and you want to know what they're really like, just sneakily ask them what they were like as a kid. If they tell you they used to rat out their friends or blow up frogs with fireworks, watch out. If they tell you that they built awesome treehouses every summer and taught their cat to dance, get their number!

3. Forget expensive laundry pre-treatments. A splash of ordinary dish detergent on a fresh stain will get most stains out later in the wash. Also, a cup of plain white vinegar added to your wash will do wonders for getting stink out of your laundry.

4. You know that angry email you just composed? Sleep on it. Nine times out of ten, you'll change your mind about sending it in the morning.

5. Regular toothpaste will help bring that huge, painful, beneath-the-skin zit to a head. Important note: You'll need to apply the toothpaste to the zit, not eat it. Also: Don't forget you've done this and then go grocery shopping. Not that this has ever happened to me.

6. Saying whatever is on your mind all the time is neither "being true to yourself" nor is it "just being honest." It's "being an asshole."

7. Everyone should own a pair of rubber boots. You'd be amazed at how much more you can do.

8. When in doubt, keep your fool mouth shut.

9. You can make soup out of pretty much anything.

10. At some point, you have to get over your childhood crap. Or not. But then you have to suck up the fact that you're going to keep being unhappy.

11. Three things that, if you get right, allow you to slack on pretty much every other aspect of your grooming: haircut, watch, and shoes.

12. Be on time. People may say they're cool with it when you're always late, but they secretly resent you. As they should. Who do you think you are?

13. Organic food tastes better.

14. People hate unsolicited advice.

BOOKS: Maybe a Thneed IS Something That All People Need

"Congratulate me."
"Why's that?"
"I just got all the way through The Lorax without crying... for the first time ever."
"Yeah. The Lorax gets to me, too."
"I'm a little worried about Sam, though."
"Why?"
"Well, is it a bad sign that his favourite part seems to be when the Thneed factory goes into heavy production?"

ETC: Blog Posts Don't Get Much More Stereotypical Than This

It's been a busy week. Which is probably why my dreams ran amok all last night. Zombies, mutants, cannibals, hidden underground bunkers, deadly meteor showers. Good end-of-the-world stuff. And at the end of it all, the sun went supernova. Pretty awesome, especially from someone who usually dreams about shopping for shoes. Sensible, brown shoes.

ETC: Three Things I Learned About Excavators This Weekend

1. Excavators are useful.
The Caterpillar 345B Demolition Excavator can "dig with its bucket, break up asphalt or cement with a hydraulic hammer attachment, and lift large blocks of material with a cable attachment. The body of an excavator can swing 360 degrees around, and the tracks can carry it over tough, uneven ground, making this an especially versatile, powerful machine." (From Big Trucks and Diggers in 3D by Mark Blum.)

2. Excavators are beautiful.
This is actually just the scale model created for this stunning installation, entitled "Gothic", both by artist Wim Delvoye. According to the write-up in this book (which I recommend, by the way):

The exaggeratedly decorative structural forms of the diggers, with their quatrefoil perforations, finial-topped arches, and lacy rosettes, confounded their essential ordinariness; with their unmistakeable overtones of church architecture, these emphatically secular apparatuses were somehow made to seem almost sacred.

Funny, that's exactly what I was going to say.

Every time I see an installation like this, it automatically begs the question: Why does all the most amazing public art happen in other cities, while we just get those damned Spirit Bears? And Vancouver can't get all crybabyish and whine, "Well, of course that's a cool piece of art. It's in New York CITY," because this next piece is from Newfoundland, and it fucking rocks. (Pardon the pun, Newfoundland friends.)

3. Excavators dance better than your prom date.
Two words: In. Credible.

BOOKS: The Ultimate Bedtime Story

The Morning News contributing writer Jessica Francis Kane laments that having a young child has seriously curtailed her reading. Invariably, she says, when she finally settles down to read late at night, she falls asleep after ten pages.

But she has a solution:

But where can you drop off your kids if you’d like to read for an hour or two? Shouldn’t reading be as important as getting groceries, exercise, or Swedish furniture? Why don’t bookstores have a room (the Baby Bindery?) where parents can leave their children while they enjoy some literary solitude? Even if the store turned the place into a marketing extravaganza — Harry Potter tie-ins everywhere — parents would no doubt be so giddy with gratitude for the sunlit reading time, they wouldn’t mind.

As I told my friend Libby when she sent me this link, I feel oddly guilty. Other than those early kookoo-bananas months right after Sam was born, my reading habits have remained pretty much the same. This is where chronic insomnia is your friend. Also sloth. Not to mention indolence.

But my heart goes out to you parents who aren't lucky enough to be a lazy insomniac with low-to-middling cleanliness standards. Hence my counter-solution. Until bookstores come through with reading rooms for parents, I offer you the ultimate bedtime story:

(Via Apartment Therapy)