. . . pretending not to know what size Breathe Right strip your husband wears.
(If you must know: Magnum)
Unrequired Reading
I’ve decided to make Unrequired Reading a regular post on Friday mornings. It’ll consist of the same stuff I was posting at random in the past few weeks. Which is to say, thanks to the miracle of RSS feeds, VM goofs around online so you don’t have to.
As my friend Mitch put it, “You know you’ve bottomed out when Bobby Brown says you’re an unfit mother to his children.”
(It’s Mother’s Day, not All Everybody Day!)
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Here’s a slideshow about Jonathan Ive, the design guru at Apple.
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10 Highly Pretentious Musical Instruments
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Firing tons of people — even Japanese people — does not automatically make you a success. I can’t stress this enough. Restructuring by “cutting fat” is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily put a company in the position to succeed in the future. Carlos Ghosn is trying to stay ahead of the game by allying with an American automaker and firing a ton of people.
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A wide-ranging (by my lights) interview with U of Penn Architecture Department Chair Detlef Mertins, author of a book on Mies van der Rohe.
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Paul Wolfowitz is running into trouble as president of the World Bank, due to his policy of not lending money to corrupt regimes.
ZOTZ!
Because I’m an absolute freak, weird phrases stick in my memory for years. For example, there’s a paragraph that’s stuck in my mind from a New Yorker article about Mars exploration SIX YEARS AGO:
“It’s a difficult road to Mars,” Charles said. “There are many years of hard work ahead of us.” Already, though, there’s active discussion within nasa about what kind of astronaut would be best prepared for deep space. “If young,” he continued, “they may be the most fit. But then you run into the problem of radiation, which could zap their gonads, so they would not be able to have kids.” A case could also be made for choosing older astronauts, seasoned by previous missions, for the first Mars voyage.
Why did it stick out? Because of that line about cosmic rays zapping someone’s gonads. Just thought it was funny.
Until yesterday. That’s when I received an e-mail from a friend of mine in his mid-60s, in which he wrote
Sorry I’ve taken so long to get back to you. But yesterday morning at ten, I got my prostate nuked. (They fill you full of painkillers and antispasmodics, then do it — by sticking a microwave coil up your pecker — right in the doctor’s office. Takes an hour — and it’s a bitch!) Supposedly the sucker is now two-thirds the size it was before, and in two or three days I should be able to pee like a normal fellow.
I have nothing to add to that.
Will on Wal
George Will on the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Wal-Mart:
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.
Got crabs?
A slideshow of the Worst Jobs with the Best Pay. I think it’s funny that “IT Worker” ends up on this list, but hey.
What Hath Borat Wrought?
I was reading my new issue of Foreign Affairs yesterday and noticed a 4-page color insert ad touting the wonders of Kazakhstan. I laughed.
Evidently, it’s no laughing matter.
May we keep laughing
Happy six-month anniversary, my love.
Don’thitme
Here we are
We visited Ground Zero on Saturday, so we could see Jon Hyman’s photo exhibition: 9/11 and the American Landscape. We took the ferry over from NJ, then a subway down to the site. It was the first time I’d ever taken the subway to that area. The station is inside the pit, so we saw Ground Zero from a different perspective as we headed for the street.
This morning, I dreamed I was arranging a trip to Australia to see an Underworld concert.
I got my tattoo the Sunday after 9/11. While I was in the booth/studio/parlor (?), the girl at the front desk came in to ask if it was okay if a guy came in to watch. He was planning to get a 9/11 tattoo and wanted to see what we were doing.
I assented, and a burly guy walked in. He told us that he worked in WTC #7, and then related the story of Tuesday morning. After the first plane hit, his building went into lockdown. They didn’t want people running around in a panic while the first responders were getting into action.
When the second plane hit, the #7 workers revolted and started streaming out of the building as fast as they could. I don’t remember what he told me about the buildings’ collapse. I hadn’t slept much that week, and some details are lost. Others come back when I least expect them.
The exhibition had some wonderful photos, but it focused more on murals and graffiti, with only a half-dozen examples of 9/11 tattoos. It did, however, include The Big One, a tattoo covering the entirety of firefighter Tiernach “T.C.” Cassidy’s back, including sky-blue ink for the background. Jon showed me that one when we were going through his portfolio. I can’t find his picture of Cassidy online, but here’s another photo of him:
I’ll try to scan it from my exhibition program, but if you’re in the area, you really should go to the exhibition to see Jon’s pictures.
Amy & I had lunch at the World Financial Center after the exhibition and we talked about our memories from those days, intercutting world history with personal anecdotes, criscrossing apocalypses, affairs, paralyses, sightsoundsmells: The American Landscape.
I thought about the incalculable permutations of our lives, about all the things that had to go right for us to meet and fall in love.
WTC memorial
I’m working on a writeup of yesterday’s visit Jon Hyman’s 9/11 photography exhibition. Meanwhile, here’s a link to my pictures from the trip.
