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From a survey of Domino’s pizza delivery drivers:

best pizza tip $$ nights of the year:
1. capture of Saddam Hussein
2. Madonna/Britney kiss

most common fake names used:
1. Paris Hilton
2. John Ashcroft

Other interesting facts gleaned from the survey:

• “people with “Dean for President” bumper stickers on cars in their driveways tipped 22 percent higher than people with “Bush for President” bumper stickers”
• “Bush for President” bumper sticker holders 3x more likely to order meat toppings than Dean sticker folks

from a Reuters article

By their dramatic nature, earthquakes and catastrophic floods are the sort of human tragedies that always grab the world’s attention and evoke the sympathy that inspires individuals and governments to reach for their checkbooks.

…

And when an earthquake renders 70,000 people homeless on the day after Christmas, when people in Western countries are feeling especially comfortable, “it tugs on their heartstrings,” suggests Mr. Pearn.

(via Christian Science Monitor, December 31)

A South African beauty queen was mauled by a hippo in Botswana, and a large crocodile ate a young man in Australia. Piranha attacks were on the rise in Brazil.

A brief history of that devilish cow-spawned disease, gleaned from Harpers (the history gleaned from Harpers, that is—not the disease). Enjoy!

(note: dates refer to week, and not necessarily the exact day of events)

2000

Aug 1: British Health Dept Bulletin states that 500,000 people could die from BSE by 2030. Happy day.

Nov 28: Spain and Germany both discover their first cases of mad cow disease.

2001

Jan 16: US agriculture officials continue to insist that Americans are at little risk. Little risk! Little risk!

Jan 23: Italy discovers first mad cow.

Feb 27: Italy confirms its 3rd case of BSE; Sweden “insists on purity of its herds”; Russia’s veterinarian blames mad cow on Jews.

June 12: Mad cow rears its ugly head in the Czech Republic.

July 10: Greece finds a mad cow.

2002

May 21: Failing diagnosis, a vet in Japan does herself in: “I’m so sorry for my unforgivable fault as a veterinarian”

June 11: Israel confirms first case

Aug 13: A canadian death.

Oct 22: Woman in Florida dies… infected in England? Or…

2003

Apr 8: Three deer hunters—two of them friends—die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human variant of mad-cow); CDC declines to investigate whether disease comes from infected deer meat, because there’s no evidence the hunters ate the infected meat. How simple!

Dec 24: Happy holidays: Mad Cow Disease discovered in U.S.

Dec 25: The Nobel laureate who discovered prions (the rogue proteins that cause mad cow disease) contradicts claims of gov’t officials, and thinks the disease is already widespread. His words: “They treat the disease as if it were an infection that you can contain by quarantining animals on farms. It’s as though my work of the last 20 years did not exist.”

Dec 27: President continues to eat Beef. Yum. Officials hope to blame Canada.

2004

???

It was an ordinary traffic stop (I thought). Nothing unusual.

Only later, as I dined on caviar and spam, did it occur to me to wonder whether I’d imagined the whole thing: imagined driving a vehicle, imagined being pulled over, imagined running for the hills and being riddled with bullets.

Had I become so distanced from reality?

Or was this just another day in the life of a spineless fictional character, me another meaningless assemblage of facts freely rearranged at the slightest whim of some invisible creator more distanced from this simple existence than I could ever be.

I felt something like indigestion burning inside.

A special note: these are, for the most part, not movies that were released in 2003, but movies that I watched in 2003. Viola, I get to list movies like ‘Death to Smoochy,’ ‘Exotica,’ and ‘Boondock Saints’ alongside ‘X2′ and ‘Identity.’

What fun this is.

Categories are basically arbitrary. They are Foreign films, and movies I watched In The Theater (i.e., actual 2002/2003 releases), movies by director (for a select few: David Lynch, David Mamet, and Paul Verhoeven), the catch-all Miscellany, and the dregs.

In fact, the Dregs category, movies to avoid, may end up being more helpful to you than the sum total of my actual recommendations. Then again, maybe not.

Continue Reading »

Where were you when the world ended? If you were like most people—me included—you were tucked away in some corner of happy oblivion, maybe not so happy but definitely oblivious to the crude finality crashing down on everything.

How many times can you outrun the end of the world? There’s really no way to know for sure. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Or, depending on your viewpoint, billions?

Countless people die every day. Not countless because they are innumerable, but countless because no one bothers to count them. They become a statistic, sure, part of some calculated total deaths, fatalities, but not really a ‘real’ death. Not a real death like the ones that get written up in a newspaper real nice like.

And not even people, but animals, too. Plants. Does it really matter? Even if it did, how could we know; how many kinds of shrub, epiphyte, tree, vine wink out of existence every day. Even if we could definitively pinpoint how much of a strain we add to the unknown (or known) plants and animals of the world with each air-conditioned electronically smoothed mile of highway, who would care? If you knew that a woman by the name of Ana would die at the age of 26 due in part to toxins spewed into the air by your burning garbage, sent to its aesthetically hygienic fate at the incinerator, would you care? Your contribution to her death: one-tenth of one percent. How many seconds would you hesitate before wheeling your trash can out to the curbside, just like you always do. Five seconds? If you positively, absolutely knew that you would be one-tenth of one percent responsible for Ana’s death. Without a doubt. How long would you hesitate? Or would you be one of the idiotic conscientious ones who didn’t put your garbage out at all.

Like that’s going to save Ana. What lunatic optimism.

Or: how long would you hesitate if you were the only one who knew? Like this would make a difference.

There are no right or wrong answers. Most times there aren’t any answers. Sometimes there are attractive-sounding arguments that we’d like to think are answers (really, that we’d like to think are the right answers).

If you woke up in the morning and thought: today I can stay at home and prolong the existence of a particular species of songbird, or I can press a button, kill the species, and enjoy hot water, television, convenient personal transportation; would it make a difference?

If, if, if.

Where were you when the metals for your car were wrenched out of the ground. When the stone for your highways was dredged out of the rock ocean. When the materials used to make your clothing were deposited in a river, when the people who made them died, young.

Where were you when the world ended? I was probably worrying about something wholly insubstantial, like why am I not rich and famous, or maybe what do I want to eat for lunch, soup or a sandwich?

Fiction (from a story):

…Jane Doe lived on North Street Drive when the CJD first would have manifested itself… Unlike its ‘partner-in-crime’ vCJD, Jane Doe’s form is not linked in any way to contaminated beef. Said Tom Hahn, of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, “people are scared of the littlest things these days. They hear one mention of this ‘mad cow disease’ thingy and they assume the whole U.S. is infected. Well, that’s not true. I think that… the facts of Jane Doe’s case prove that beef is indeed very safe to eat-and indeed, a necessary part of a healthy diet. While it doesn’t prove anything, I think it’s telling that Jane Doe was never known to eat beef. Maybe it was the lack of beef in her diet that brought this on, and maybe it wasn’t. Me, I certainly wouldn’t want to take the chance.” …

Not Fiction (from the New York Times “First US Case of Mad Cow Reported”):

“Only the brain, spinal cord and related parts can spread the disease to humans, [agriculture secretary] Veneman said, and she added that she intended to serve beef to her family at Christmas.” (New York Times)

I’m tingling all over. I can’t wait to find out if Santa filled my Christmas stocking with steak, just like I’d asked. I can only hope. Tomorrow I guess I’ll find out.

Please, Santa, please.

More top 10/best-of/favorites of 2003 lists than you can shake a stick at, courtesy of those fun DJ-type people at WFMU. Best experiences. Favorite music. Everything. Most-liked numbers.

I can only dream of living in Jersey City.

(And, as much as I dig WFMU, I’d basically like to keep it that way.)

Here it is, the thoroughly unnecessary year-end list that you haven’t been waiting for, i.e., some-books-I’ve-read-in-2003-and-think-you-might-like-to-read.

Split into two groups, you will find (1) books that I would recommend with blind fervor [“must-reads”] and (2) books that are fun, competent and/or generally good to read [“decent books”], and that I would recommend, but not as unequivocally as those in the first list. All the books in these somewhat haphazard lists are ones I’ve read this year. That said, those that I’ve read toward the beginning of the year I certainly do not recall as well as those I’ve read just this past week, so there’s inevitably going to be some skew to my comments. Add salt grain as desired. There are some books that didn’t make the rather slapdash cut, but for the most part I won’t bother finishing a book if it doesn’t pique sufficient interest-levels. This may make absolutely no difference to you. It may. I can’t imagine why it would.

Here are the lists.

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“Must-Reads” (in absolutely no order whatsoever) and why you should read them, in 25 words or less (excluding quotes).Upside Down by Eduardo Galeano (non-fiction) : brilliant. Highlights the absurdities of our world. I picked it up because I was keen on the cover. Inside, it reads: “This book now constitutes a threat to the English-speaking world. That would not have been possible without the fervent complicity of Mark Fried, Tom Engelhardt, Susan Bergholz, Bert Snyder, and the Metropolitan editorial team. One day, they will have to answer for their deeds.”

The Girl With Curious Hair [and other stories] by David Foster Wallace : glowing and wild. Daring and quick. Stories for any state of mind, that can be re-read forever; puzzles whose pieces have been warped and camouflaged.

This Place on Earth by Alan Thein Durning (non-fiction) : extremely readable. One person’s attempt to piece together a sustainable relationship between humans and the earth. Earnest.

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner : sentences that you would never expect to read and combinations of words that you would never, ever expect to see. Exquisitely fast and fun; brash. Read previous (and worthless) comments.

Trespassing by John Mitchell (non-fiction) : an impulsively anti-authoritarian take on property and the lines that draw it. Traces a fascinating history with entertaining and sometimes troublesome vignettes. Rambling and illuminating.

Beyond Growth by Herman E. Daly (non-fiction) : principles by which we might be expected to survive; read it and think. Some heavier economics, but with elegant explanations.

The Names by Don DeLillo : possibly my favorite DeLillo book. Evocative of Italo Calvino in a roundabout way. Mysterious and cool, violent and strangely quiet. Nearly perfect.

Americana by Don DeLillo : a strange kind of road trip. The best first novel I’ve ever read. Parallels, in some ways, Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama, written decades later.

Underworld by Don Delillo : a rich and involving novel, full of detail and texture. Unquestionably ambitious. Indescribably wonderful passages.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver : epic, sweeping, fantastic

Still Life With Woodpecker and Another Roadside Attraction, both by Tom Robbins : playful

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Decent books. Commentary where available. Individual mileage may vary.

• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood : I kept expecting it to get better. What kept me going was the excellent writing and the ascerbic wit (sometimes exceedingly dry and subtle) underlying the entire narrative. (And the nested stories.) The book came to me used; I’m not sure I would have sought it out new.
• Inamorata by Joseph Gangemi : see previous thoughts & comments.
• Command, and I will follow by Alberto Moravia : Short stories translated into English from Italian (unless, of course, you find yourself reading the Italian). Fantastic.
• King of Fish by David Montgomery (non-fiction) : a salmon tale; read past review.
• Why I’m Like This by Cynthia Kaplan : immensely entertaining autobiographical short stories. Very worthwhile.
• Found in the Street by Patricia Highsmith : well above and beyond average. A rather unexpected kind of suspense/mystery book. Atypically good. But not atypically enough to become a must-read.
• Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol (non-fiction) : While taken from experiences in the late 1980s and very early 90s, this book remains highly relevant to the state of highly unequal education in the US. Kozol isn’t a fantastic writer, but he has devastating insight and an eye for poignance.
• Southwesterly Wind by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza (March 2004) : an interesting, low-key murder mystery of a slightly unusual sort. Set in Brazil. A curious resolution.
• Hot Plastic by Peter Craig (March 2004) : Decent. A fiery start winds down as the book draws on and the plot thickens. The thickening is irregular, like lumpy gravy, but the story is relatively fast-paced and exciting.
• Beulah Land by Krista McGruder : short stories, some of them intriguing, others, not so much. I liked the first half (give or take) much more than the tail-end of the book.
• Thinking Ecologically by Marian Chertow, Daniel Esty, eds. (non-fiction) : a collection of essays (essentially) written by different authors, it’s only reasonable that some of these pieces are more interesting than others. At times academic and dry, there are still numerous nuggets of wisdom in this green-covered book.
• The Body Artist by Don Delillo : my least favorite DeLillo book, and not a place to start if you haven’t read other DeLillo. Still enjoyable, though.
• Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole : disappointing, given the spectacular Confederacy of Dunces experience. To be able to put things into context, however, you should know that Toole wrote Neon Bible at the age of sixteen. For this, NB is extraordinary. It’s a short, quick read, and mildly entertaining at that. Not something to seek out at the far corners of the globe, but a nice read in the dentist’s waiting room.
• Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins - I found the narration not too gimmicky (nor too distracting), but others might disagree. Read the first three pages (or so) and you should more or less be able to figure out which camp you belong to.
• The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler (non-fiction)
• Mao II by Don Delillo
• Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner (non-fiction) : Oh, the things we fear. Illustrates the disconnect between what we fear and what’s likely to happen.
• Men in Black by Scott Spencer : an oddly entertaining book, I’m not sure why.
• Players by Don Delillo
• End Zone by Don Delillo : there are few occasions when I expect to find myself reading a book about (or at least involving) football. This is one of them.
• Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and other essays by Gore Vidal (non-fiction)
• Libra by Don Delillo
• Running Dog by Don Delillo

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Coming later: movie ratings and other crap.

The year draws to a close, even though it’s just another way of adding segmentation to a river: a little curious, maybe a little vain, but at least it’s something that allows us to keep on with the pretense that we know what we’re doing. Another line in the laughably egocentric ledger of human progress. The year 2003 becomes 2004, and there’s no question about it. We are going forward. There is progress. We are in a new age. We can laugh at all those things we didn’t know, or we can cry, sputter. We impose linearity on a chaotic process, developments on which we have a massive impact without exactly understanding how or why.

Christmas is a time when things once miraculous have been turned into plasticized mass-produced re-creations whose meaning is incorporated into a wholly self-serving dogma of a Holiday of Consumerism. The sacred and the diverse have been blended together into the mundane. Gift-giving has transcended symbolism to become both an ends and a means, a cycle of greed that takes advantage of a genuine current of goodwill and hopefulness.

Today the geese did not attack, but they well could have.

Instead of trumpeting their numbers, they fled as individuals, or as members of a disparate horde. Instead of driving onward out of sheer willpower, they relented, succumbing to the urge to flee to safety. What safety was confidently theirs. Instead of testing the limits of their opponent, they chose to live another day in uncertainty. Instead they perpetrate petty vandalism, excrement and dirt.

A squirrel on North Maple Street had a dangeous glint in its eyes but then ran like the wind.

On the opposite bank of the river, ducks watched. I didn’t trust them, not as far as I could throw them.

Tomorrow, who knows. A crow may announce the first volley.

Update: for the moment we’re safe from the ducks; there’s too much infighting, it’s preventing them from hatching competent plans. Hasbert tried to drown Roland—I saw this as I walked—though he was not successful. Be wary, though.

When I grow up real big-like I’m gonna walk right over the top of this mountain till I find someplace where they’re gonna think I’m an evil spirit and cower in fear, someplace where they haven’t seen the kind of things my shoes are made of or heard the kind of sounds I make in my throat when I’m happy; what I’m gonna do is when I leave to find this place I’m gonna take all that’s tradition and expectation and norm and let it hang on the top of the mountain I walk across, I’m gonna find some gray snag of a tree and hang it on the highest branch all jagged and cruel so that when the others come up to this holy spot to make sacrifices to the kind of thing they think I am, they’ll see the wretched beast I’ve slain and quiver in their bodies.

Either that or I’m gonna buy myself a tie, real nice-like, and I’m gonna sit down in a restaurant and eat one big dinner all alone and proud. I’m gonna tip the waitress a thousand dollers, or waiter if it’s a man, and I’m gonna walk right out of that restaurant and never look back.

From an article about Wes Clark in the Washington Post, we learn the assets of certain other Democratic candidates:

• Wesley Clark: $3 to $3.5 million
• Sen. John F. Kerry: $500 million
• Sen. John Edwards: $13 to $16 million
• Howard Dean: $2.2 to $5 million
• Rep. Dennis Kucinich: $2,000 to $32,000

(article via RandomWalks)

• “The Museum currently has over 80 aircraft and dozens of space artifacts on display including the Space Shuttle “Enterprise”; an SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft; the Dash 80 prototype of the Boeing 707; the B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay;” and the de Havilland Chipmunk aerobatic plane, to name a few.”
• “As a frequent history-channel watcher and WWII history buff and American, I was outraged at the Japanese delegation this week protesting the Enola Gay display at the Air and Space Museum.”
• “It was not clear if the Enola Gay was damaged.“
• “‘If they want to show these planes, that’s fine but we can’t help but also demand that they show the damage and the stories that take place behind these weapons,’ said Terumi Tanaka, 71, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack which occurred three days after Hiroshima. A total of 230,000 people were killed in the two attacks. Japan surrendered unconditionally six days after the Nagasaki bombing.”

“It’s like electricity. Everybody wants it, but nobody wants to see the wires in their backyard. It’s the same with crematories,” says Jack Springer, spokesman for the Chicago-based Cremation Association of North America.

Inamorata by Joseph Gangemi: On a scale from brutal to brilliant, this falls somewhere in between but generally on the positive side of things. My greatest complaint—a minor quibble, really—is with the phrase “never fall in love with a medium,” which first assaults the reader on the back cover: “…the man of science breaks the cardinal rule of psychic investigation: Never fall in love with the medium.” Fine, okay, great. Two times? Okay, that’s understandable; even three times in the entire scope of the work would be a decent amount of repetition. But in the last sixty pages (I’m guessing), this phrase crops up probably seven or eight times. Which, despite its marked relevance to the story, it simply isn’t a particularly astounding phrase. Otherwise a good, generally well-paced and entertaining story. Historical to the 1920s, the story of Scientific American’s investigation of purported psychics is inspired by real-life events and transposed (among other things) from Boston to Gangemi’s Philadelphia.

Pretty women scramble men’s ability to assess the future (New Scientist)

and

Pentagon: Rocket Fuel in Your Lettuce is Safe (Environmental Media Services)

I left my heart in Plano, Texas. Nothing turned out like I’d expected it to. I paid for a safe deposit box, a 5″ by 10″ by 22″ receptacle. I went to Plano because I’d heard they had an organ discount. Turns out I was wrong, but I paid for the box anyway. After all, I had to keep my heart somewhere. Plano seemed as good as any place else.