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Sometime in the Past: Mr. X makes $1 million sending spam—hundreds of millions of e-mails for porno and college degrees and what-have-you; all your favorites, doubtless.

Sometime more recently: Mr. X buys a Porsche celebrating his newfound vocation (above).

Even more recently: Mr. X loses Porsche through his newfound vocation (still above).

The Future (?): Previous spam-victim of Mr. X wins Porsche in a raffle run by AOL.

(via BBC News: Spammer’s Porsche up for grabs [March 30, 2004])

Maybe. Possibly.

It’s well and good to stay informed, but sometimes news is nothing so much as arterial spray: here one minute, gone the next, and what the hell can we do about it anyway? E.g., the blogfolk at Pandagon are thorough and tend to very often bring up salient points, but the problem is kinda the oftenness, i.e., they write too damn much.

But whatever. That’s actually not my point. (Or it is—part of my point, anyway—but it’s not the meat of my point.) My point is that it’s good to read something that has merit in&of itself, that doesn’t hinge on your ability/inability to act on the knowledge presented to you.

So, my point is you should read White on rice or Elephant, two excellent and short posts at the somewhat inexplicably labeled onepotmeal. Why should you read these two posts?

I’ll let you come up with the reasons.

“The United Nations opened a global environment summit Monday, warning about the growing number of ‘dead zones’ in the world’s oceans but painting a picture of a greener planet with an increase of vegetation in many regions.

…

“But so-called ‘dead zones’ – oxygen-starved stretches of ocean that are devoid of life – topped UNEP’s list of emerging environmental challenges.

…

“There are nearly 150 dead zones around the globe, double the number in 1990, with some stretching 27,000 square miles.”

(via the San Diego Tribune: “U.N. environment summit opens, targets ocean ‘dead zones’ but sees greener earth” by Hans Greimel, AP [March 29, 2004])

World Press Review is always a good place to see what kinds of things are getting printed in newspapers around the world (often including pieces translated into English from other languages, which is helpful in revealing a wider range of perspectives than might otherwise come across). The newest feature on their web site is a sampling of editorials from Arab newspapers in response to the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

There’s really no way to make an educated guess as to what this formula refers, and even though you’d almost certainly be better off not knowing, I’m going to tell you anyway:

Yes, high heels.

Why? Why? Why?

No, that’s not an explanation.

So it turns out, maybe, that smoking and stupidity are not only linked by correlation, but also by causation, i.e., smoking makes you stupider. Dig? Dieses Artikel ist auf deutsch; wenn Sie es auf englisch brauchen, Google hilft (ein bisschen).

Which of the following captions goes with this picture? Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question: one of them actually does fit the picture, believe it or not.

A) Like many redbone coonhounds, Cal is eager to try out new things;

B) Jesus said that we should help others and that means our parents too, so I have chores to do around the house like mowing the yard and keeping my room clean;

or C) Are you desperate to avoid mowing your own yard? Don’t let this happen to you! Call Hollis Landscaping now!

Answer here.

(Sorry, there’s not really a prize, unless you consider the pursuit of knowledge a prize in and of itself. Besides, how would I know you didn’t just click on the link to the answer without guessing first? I wouldn’t, is the sad truth. So there. Hope you had fun guessing.)

(via memepool)

(1994) dir. Roger Avery - w/ Eric Stolz, Julie Delpy, Jean-Hughes Anglade, and a bunch of wholly insignificant figures, most of whom die (particularly one who plays a stupid American)

Synopsis: A bank-heist in France. You know how it is: one last job before everyone buys his own private island, resting in the lap of luxury, etc. Surprise, something goes wrong! Imagine that.

Review: Not exactly a standard-issue heist film. Sure, things go wrong. Sure, there are a number of standard-issue heist film elements. Fortunately for this movie (and for you), things go wrong in sometimes unexpected ways, and the outcome is never entirely certain. Also, there are interesting detours and digressions that the film takes; interesting side-conversations and the like. Drugs, sex, and violence are prominent. The violence especially so, in fact; you could probably cue in on this by realizing that the director, one Roger Avery, also happens to have co-written Pulp Fiction (which is still vastly, vastly better than Killing Zoe. Sorry, but it just is.). All in all, KZ is mildly to moderately refreshingly different, if sometimes poorly done and aimless. Yeah.

Rating: [•••] out of [•••••]

Etc.: US Gross $418,953; imdb info

Blood!

A new report (*.pdf - requires Acrobat Reader) produced by the Fritz Institute and Reuters Foundation’s AlertNet paints an interesting picture of the relationship between media coverage and humanitarian crisis. Most of the findings are hardly surprising (more press coverage = more private donations? incredible!!!), but the report is significant in that it’s (apparently) “the largest, most comprehensive survey ever undertaken of this symbiotic relationship [between journalists and humanitarian aid organizations].”

So maybe it’ll make people think.

The report’s called “Toward New Understandings: Journalists and Humanitarian Relief Coverage.”

It has lots of interesting points (which I’m hardly going to cover—read the story on AlertNet for an overview of the study’s findings if you’re interested in a quick summary), but one of the most interesting sections details What Makes A Humanitarian Crisis News. Some of the things mentioned:

• High death toll was mentioned by almost half of all the journalists (49%) as the “best reason to run a relief story”; among North American respondents, that number jumped to 61%.
• Children suffering was mentioned as a significant reason by 40% of the non-North American respondents, but only by 18% of the North American journalists.
• North Americans were more likely than other groups (34% vs. 23% non-North Americans) to mention a story if it featured people of the same background as those suffering.

There are a thousand things I could say about this, but the thing that comes to mind first is: what is it about a high death toll that makes it captivating to us? It seems so obvious so as to be self-evident, which is part of the problem.

The problem of 1,000 people being killed in the space of a day being so much more compelling to us than 1,000 people being killed, gradually and subtly, over the course of the year.

The obvious response is, but these things are different.

But are they?

The report brings up interesting points far above and beyond this; go read it if you have a chance.

(via AlertNet: “Charities face dilemma: food parcels or press releases” by Mark Jones [March 3, 2004]; and Fritz Institute/Reuters Foundation: “Toward New Understandings: Journalists and Humanitarian Relief Coverage.”)

Easy come, easy go.

At least we’ll know what the dragonfish look like before we wipe them off the face of the planet.

Good luck little guy.

Draco Carsten Muyskens said on the television, he wanted to get the people who did this to him. He didn’t say it, but everyone knew what ‘this’ was. He appeared on The Television, sitting in a wheelchair and wearing an expensive blue suit and a neat white mask that hid his face. When he spoke, you had the impression that it wasn’t really him speaking, but someone else, someone in a sound-room somewhere with a bottle of water sitting next to him while he read from a meticulously crafted script, the finished work of virtuoso speechwriters. But of course you couldn’t prove it; you couldn’t see Draco’s mouth, and the presentation made it impossible to tell if he was the one doing the speaking. By design, of course. Naturally you could tell if it was him if you knew what his voice sounded like (couldn’t you?), but who knew what his voice sounded like? So Draco sat there, in his wheelchair, saying he wanted to get the person, the people, who did this to him. He wanted to make them pay, he said. This is the voice of Draco, he implied.

Revenge boiled in his blood, etc.

He wanted their head(s), etc.

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Incredible! No, scratch that; it’s more than incredible, it’s brilliant! What geniuses.

A new study finds that Teen-rated video games contain significant amounts of violence and death.

You can heap praise upon books until you run out of clever adjectives and you’ve used up all the permutations of classic book review phrases you can think of, but the fact remains: when it’s all said and done (and discussed and written about and beat into the ground with a dead horse), there are some books that leave you regretting your decision to read them, and then there are books that, well, don’t. Books that, to put it bluntly, kick ass.

This, I think, fits comfortably in the latter category.

Though I should mention that, in the same way that non-drowsy Dramamine and scrapple and facial tattoos are simply not for some people, this is a book that, quite frankly, is not for some people. This book (ToB) starts off with an execution in New Jersey and proceeds more or less from there with reckless abandon. ML veers off on tangents at an almost imperceptibly-fast rate, writing one moment about a “postmodern sentencing structure” (’discretionary’ execution where an inmate is released but may be executed at any time [and in any manner], depending on a number of more or less random variables) and the next moment about a locker room painted with bare-breasted Valkyries with laser guns. And I’m not even making that up. The only thing that makes this a ‘novel’ and not a series of loosely intertwined short stories and essays is…

Well, nothing, I guess. But still, it’s billed as a novel, so you’re more or less inclined to read it as such. Part of what makes Leyner’s stuff so brilliantly funny is the fact that it’s simultaneously unbelievably self-assured and fanatically self-deprecating; that it’s both above the reader—prone to spates of almost uninterpretable medical and general technical gibberish—and also below the reader; that it’s dead serious and unnervingly hilarious; that it’s self-referentially painstakingly non-referential. (I don’t even know what half of this means, but rest assured, it’s all true.)

An example might help you get a sense of what I’m talking about. So:

“Let’s not be naive. Kids are going to experiment with drugs and alcohol, vandalism, callous violence, semiautomatic handguns, chemical weapons, and neofascist hate crime—it’s inevitable behavior for adolescents trying to determine what ‘truth’ is in a world torn between the self-replicating apocrypha of the Internet and the info-hegemony of Eisner-Murdoch-Turner.” (p 202-203)

I don’t really know what more I can say. Let’s not mince words. This is a work of superhuman skill. If it were written two centuries earlier (or even one), we’d be teaching it to kids in high school (Assuming, for a moment, that if this were written 2 centuries earlier, most of its brazenly vulgar [yet infinitely comedic] references would be banal enough that they could be taught in HS w/o offending too many people—which I guess begs the question as to whether part of the kick-assedness of this work has to do with just how offensive it manages to be without being too serious.). Anyway, it’s good. It’s amusing, in a way, how a book this witty compels its reviewers to attempt some kind of emulation, albeit vastly inferior, of that dazzle. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just saying it’s kind of funny, you know?

Here’s another good bit, one I’ll leave you to munch on as you decide whether or not to run out and read this book right now. (It’s your decision, after all.)

“Len Gutman was not only considered technically virtuosic in his craft, he was deemed a visionary genius. In the course of his career, he garnered every significant award bestowed by his colleagues, and was ultimately designated a ‘Living National Treasure’ by the American Signage and Display Association (ASDA). His work is so ubiquitous and prototypical that it smacks of the primordial, as if it’s somehow existed always, independent of human artifice.

Use Other Door—one of the very first signs that Gutman wrote as a young man—became an immediate classic. Gutman went on to write a stunning series of signs that fundamentally redefined our sense of public language, including: Out of Service, Visitors Must Sign In, and Push to Start. Then—in what is considered Gutman’s annus mirabilis—an astonishing burst of creativity in which masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession: Do Not Enclose or Obstruct Access to Meter, Turn Knob to Right Only, Right Lane Must Turn Right, and the sublime Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work. (That same year, Gutman also wrote We Deliver, Totally Nude, and Void Where Prohibited.)

There’s an austere beauty to much of his work, pared down to its irreducible essence. In a famous television interview with Gutman late in his life, a critic is standing with him in front of a restaurant’s lavatories, admiring what is indisputably Gutman’s most popular, and arguably his finest, sign: Men.

They then move over to the distaff door.

‘You didn’t write Women?’ asks the critic.

‘No, I wish I had,’ Gutman smiles wistfully.” (p 84-85)

A theatre group in Britain is putting together a play in which the star role will be played by a dead body.

Not an actor portraying a dead body, but an actual, real dead body.

It sounds wicked brilliant.

The play is called “Dead: You Will Be” and is looking to examine society’s attitudes towards death; and despite the fact that the theatre group doesn’t plan on having actors actually touch the body during the show, and that the group (for obvious reasons) is seeking a consenting donor, I’m betting this is something that will stir up some people’s indignation.

Company director Jo Dagless:

“The use of a body in this piece is integral to the direct confrontation of the issues that 1157 [the theatre group] want to encourage in the audience and the company and will, we hope, reawaken a collective response to our inevitable fates.”

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

(via The Guardian: “Would you be seen dead in this show? Now’s your chance…” by Vanessa Thorpe (March 21, 2004))

Noam Chomsky, MIT Linguist and Anarchist:

“Kerry is sometimes described as ‘Bush-lite’, which is not inaccurate. But despite the limited differences both domestically and internationally, there are differences. In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes.” (The Guardian, March 20)

Mel Gibson, on George Bush:

“I am having my doubts, of late. It mainly has to do with the weapons (of mass destruction) we can’t seem to find (in Iraq).” (NBC6.net, March 16)

(so I realize two items isn’t a great list, but it’s all I have for now)

…and many other weird and often irreverently profane band names, found on the The Canonical List of Weird Band Names. Which, yes, restricts the list to actual band names. Skimming the list, I recognized maybe 11 or 12 names, but I’m not too sure whether that’s a particularly good thing. It might be, it might not.

The list includes such beauties as the following:

The Band Formerly Known As Sausage
Biff Hitler and the Violent Mood Swings
Big Fat Pet Clams From Outer Space
Bobby Joe Ebola and the Children MacNuggits
Cream of Whoop-Ass Soup
Freud Chicken
He’s Dead Jim
Jim Jones and the Kool Aid Kids
Mate/Spawn/Kill
Not With My Camel
Rats of Unusual Size

And also includes such sage advice as:

Goldfish Don’t Bounce

(found via diepunyhumans)

Which is fortunate, because previously there was that grim spectre of mercury-laden tuna that frightened away prospective mothers, mothers who wanted to gain the benefits from eating seafood while eschewing the dangers of methylmercury poisoning. Now, at least, people can know that what they’re eating is safe. Somewhat. Maybe. Well, at any rate, they can know it’s not as dangerous as what they might be doing absent any kind of guidlines.

(From the FDA & EPA’s press release: “[A]s a matter of prudence, women might wish to modify the amount and type of fish they consume if they are planning to become pregnant, pregnant, nursing, or feeding a young child.”)

There’s something to be said for acknowledging that nothing is perfectly, 100% safe; for acknowledging that women should maybe take extra caution when their food’s going to someone else. But when guidelines for fish that pregnant/soon-to-be-pregnant/nursing women provide explicit (”Do not eat” is not exactly ambiguous) advice against eating Shark, Swordfish, King Mackerel, or Tilefish “because they contain high levels of mercury,” you’re driven to wonder: and these fish are safe for the rest of us why?¹

But anyway, it’s good to know that the FDA/EPA are strictly set on the cautionary principle. Except that they’re not.

Sez the FDA/EPA, in recommendation #3:

“Check local advisories about the safety of fish caught by family and friends in your local lakes, rivers and coastal areas. If no advice is available, eat up to six ounces (one average meal) per week of fish you catch from local waters, but don’t consume any other fish during that week.” (emphasis added)

Oh, and the recommended fish noshing—i.e., a pregnant woman eating the maximum fish allowed—would actually possibly push the mercury levels in the consumer’s bloodstream above what the EPA says is risk-free. But at least they’re still not in real danger as far as the FDA is concerned; FDA officials pointed out that women are unlikely to really see any problems until the mercury levels in their bloodstream exceed the risk-free level by 10 times.

Which isn’t to say that this new advisory isn’t some kind of improvement, however slight: previous advisories, apparently, didn’t include any mention of tuna. Chalk one up to the vast wheels of social progress.

(via FDA/EPA Press Release: “FDA and EPA Announce the Revised Consumer Advisory on Methylmercury in Fish” (March 19, 2004); USTF Press Release: “Government Advisory Provides Clear Guidance to Pregnant and Nursing Women about the Importance of Canned Tuna in Their Diets” (March 19, 2004); BoGlo: “2 agencies urge limit on eating tuna,” by Alice Dembner (March 20, 2004); Mercury Policy Project: Exposure To Mercury)

Note
¹ So, technically speaking, the kind of mercury found in fish is typically eliminated from an adult’s body fairly easily. But—insofar as I understand it—the elimination is a gradual process, and pretty obviously can’t be independent of the amounts of mercury being ingested; there have to be levels at which mercury can’t be safetly eliminated from a healthy adult’s body (gradual reduction in the amount of mercury in your body relies on you not constantly eating Hg-containing fish). Yet the FDA does not regularly test for mercury in fish, so the safety of mercury in fish for adults is mostly by assumption. Which, in short, seems like it’s not exactly the most brilliant policy ever devised.

Fact: Every day, more people die from road traffic accidents than from drugs, war, and violence, combined.

(via World Health Report 2002; comparisons based on estimates from 2001: daily deaths = 3200 road traffic, 1300 violence, 630 war, 186 drugs)

(2002) directed by Spike Jonze, starring Nicolas Cage, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, and a few people as themselves, etc.

Synopsis: A nontraditional, nested story (set of stories, actually) about a screen-writer, writer, etc. Promising, but.

Review: Probably the worst well-done movie I’ve ever seen. The acting, for what it’s worth, is extremely on-target. Functionally, the script may work. But on the whole, this is a movie that is painfully, gruesomely awful. Some movies have redemptive qualities. Some movies, however terrible, at least give you something to enjoy. Some movies reward you for what you’ve endured. This is not one of those movies. It is different, yes. It is creative in a ‘different’ way, yes. But this is not a clever movie. The phrase “pretentiously self-aware” comes to mind. (For the record, I didn’t care much for Being John Malkovich [also by Spike Jonze], either, though that film at least had some enjoyable parts.) The more I think about it, the less I like Adaptation. So it gets just one star (or pip, or whatever you want to call it). Out of five. Terrible. Unfortunate. Abysmal.

Rating: [•] out of [•••••]

Etc.: US Gross $22,498,520; imdb info; allmovie info

I’ve heard the story of Easter Island used many times as a cautionary tale. Recently, I’ve heard it used in a slightly different, and immensely thought-provoking, incarnation.

Here’s the story, more or less:

the people of Easter Island, quite obviously, were not born there but arrived there on boats. Liking what they saw—and being able to go no further—they stayed. They built up a society that could be considered, by many different standards, quite complex. Social order, advanced living structures with all the (then) possible creature comforts, art, domestication of animals and cultivation of crops, boat-making (they made large, sophisticated canoes for fishing) and religion. A religion that, for whatever reason, caused them to cart giant stone heads large distances (relatively speaking) across the island. What task they couldn’t accomplish from sheer manpower, and certainly not from any ‘beasts of burden’ (the largest animals on the island, other than humans, were pigs); moving the stone heads, then required logs. Lots and lots of logs. Fortunately the island was fairly well-equipped with trees. This religion didn’t require moving one stone head, though; it required the moving of many, many stone heads. Many trees were cut down. More were cut down. In fact, all the trees, eventually, were cut down.

So somebody must have realized, cutting down the last tree: this is the last tree. The island was not insurmountably gigantic. It would have been difficult to trick yourself into thinking that there were more trees. But the last tree was cut down, despite trees’ vital role to the society.

And what happened?

Society collapsed. Regressed. Population crashed. It became a feudal-warlike society of primitive tribes. Language crumbled. People moved from living in huts and other structures to living in caves, eking out a very borderline existence.

The cautionary tale usually pulled out of all this is, use your resources wisely, because they’re so important to the functions of society.

Recently, however, I’ve heard it put in a different light. “Consider it,” the person said (I’m paraphrasing here), “a case study of a worse-case outcome for society continuing to use resources unsustainably.”

Okay, nothing so surprising so far.

“An important thing to note, though, is that the people did not disappear. They didn’t die off. When explorers came to the island, they found a group of people vastly more primitive than the original Easter Islanders would have been; but they didn’t find an empty island. Their society survived, even if the culture suffered greatly.”

Lesson: if society continues to use resources irresponsibly, until it’s too late, humans won’t die off. They’ll pay a very dear price, but they won’t become extinct.

Which simultaneously says something about human adaptability and human stupidity. It seems a pretty logical conclusion to draw, but it’s not really one I considered before, not really. I’d always considered a more binary “people will survive in their current form or die off”. Which is monstrously simplistic, but somehow believable.

But this re-framing of Easter Island makes me think.

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