Apparently, I’m not the only one who has started commuting by bicycle lately, as this article in the most recent Economist points out. I find it very easy to imagine some of the bicyclist/driver altercations they describe.

I was almost nailed at a four-way stop at the beginning of the summer by a guy who rolled through a stop sign while talking on his cellphone. He didn’t just roll; he looked like he was going to come to a complete stop, and then gunned it just as I was crossing. He didn’t even know I was there (despite my safety-orange shirt). Just last week some lady in a minivan decided that she really wanted to make the green light that we were approaching. We were on a four-lane city street with no shoulder. Traffic was flowing in the left lane, but I was occupying part of the right lane and she wasn’t sure if she should try to squeeze between me and the traffic. As the green light got more stale, she decided to try it. She gunned her engine, accelerating madly until she was right next to me, only to brake abruptly as she doubted she could get through after all. She practically sideswiped the car to her left and practically knocked me off the road. People like her knock the mirrors off parked cars by forgetting how wide the piece of steel they’re piloting is. I would really hate to be a casualty of someone’s misplaced overconfidence in their spatial reasoning. Such a pointless way to go. The risks of a driver’s misjudgment are asymmetric: He risks his paint job, while he risks my life, or at least my skin and bones.

Bumpy Roads

WITH petrol the price it is, more and more people are riding a bicycle to work. In Broward County, Florida, about 35,000 people a month typically put their bicycles on a bus bike-rack, thereby shortening a cycle commute. In May of this year, 68,000 people did so. Denver saw 25,000 people register for a recent “bike to work” day, up from 15,000 a year ago. In Seattle cyclists complain about a shortage of bike stands, while in Portland, Oregon, some 6,000 cyclists cross just one of the city’s many bridges each morning.

Bicycle-boosters are thrilled with the sudden popularity of their humble machine. “Ridership is just skyrocketing,” says Elizabeth Preston of the League of American Bicyclists, a Washington, DC, advocacy group (even cyclists have lobbyists these days). Performance Bicycles, a retailer with shops in 15 states, says bicycle sales in June were the highest ever recorded.

But cycling’s popularity has a downside. The people of Portland, for instance, have been entertained over the past few days by a series of altercations between bicyclists and motorists. In one, a motorist and cyclist came to blows after the motorist berated the pedal-pusher for ignoring a stop sign. The enraged cyclist used his bike to batter the motorist’s car until a bystander punched him.

In Seattle, meanwhile, two cyclists were arrested after they attacked a motorist during a so-called “Critical Mass” ride, events where large groups of cyclists ride through city streets to demonstrate their right to the road. New York cyclists are up in arms about an incident in which a police officer, for no apparent reason, knocked a cyclist off his bike and then arrested him and tried to pretend the man had run into him until a video recording proved him wrong. And in Colorado, reports the Los Angeles Times, cyclists have been feuding with the sheriff of Larimer County for his aggressive—cyclists say unreasonable—enforcement of bike-related traffic laws. More seriously, most bicycle advocates say cycling deaths are sharply up, although the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has no figures as yet for 2008.

After years of federal and local spending on bike routes and other amenities, most cities are ready to handle more cyclists. But many motorists simply don’t see their two-wheeled brethren or, when they do, find them aggravating. Managing more cyclists is going to take more than new bike paths or fresh stripes on the roads. It looks as though there is a need, on both sides, for a revolution in manners.

DC, by the way, is not one of the cities that has invested in infrastructure and is “ready to handle more cyclists.” Many of the thoroughfares do not have bike lanes or shoulders of any kind. I often have to resort to all sorts of side streets and shortcuts to get where I’m going, and some places I just can’t go by bike. Until roads are built with an extra foot or two for the rest of us, riders will keep getting killed in pointless ways (an intern was run down by a garbage truck just a couple of weeks ago), and people will keep throwing their bicycles through people’s windshields.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about No Country for Old Men. I went to see it for the second time on Sunday, to give the subtleties of the dialogue and screenplay a second chance to rattle around in my brain. Simply haunting. I’ve always dug the Coen brothers, but this one takes it to a whole new level.

I don’t have anything new to say about the film, at least not now, at midnight on a weeknight, but I did want to share the beautiful Carter Burwell song that plays as the credits roll. Once the song started, I decided to sit through the credits until I saw what it was. Only two songs are listed, one of them a Mexican traditional, and this isn’t one of them.

Carter himself (here) tells us that there are only 16 minutes of music in the movie, almost six of which are this as-the-credits-roll song. A little searching turns up the song title and artist, but finding more than the short excerpt he posts on his site is very difficult. It’s not on iTunes, and there doesn’t seem to be a soundtrack for sale. In the end, I dug through the HTML around his flash player and found the link to the mp3, so you can listen to it without having to pay the $9 to see the movie again. Although that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

The song is called “Blood Trail.” As it fades in, you think it’s just someone walking through the sand. Then you realize it’s a bit too regular to be footsteps, but you’re still thinking about Tom Ed Bell’s dream to pay much attention. If you stand up and leave right away, you’re probably out of the theater before the guitar, bass, and drums come in around the 1:45 mark. That would be your loss.

Of course, if I’d just done a little more diligent research, I would have come across a much better picture of the Hoff, one more suited to a pet adoption website. Maybe they would have left it up just a bit longer.

The Library of Congress now has a Flickr page, and they’ve been uploading all sorts of cool images from their archives. A lot of these pictures date back to before your parents were born, or at least to when they were kids. Sometimes I think that those WW II era propaganda posters portrayed a false idealization of the American type, but some of these photos make me think that life really did look like that. All men smoked a pipe and wore a hat. No women ever left the house imperfectly coiffed. Must have been exhausting.

I was cruising through my server stats a few nights ago, as I do every few months when I remember that I can. It makes for a few minutes of interesting reading. And it’s the only clue I have that people are stealing my photos and my bandwidth.

What I noticed was that a French pet adoption website was loading something many hundreds of times a day, completely dwarfing everything else happening on my site. The webmaster had apparently set the background image on every page to load a photo from my server. And the particular photo? Well, you see, a couple of years ago, I wrote a StrPrpn post about blanketing my cubicle at work with hundreds of pictures of kittens (don’t ask). And so I found this picture on the web somewhere, copied it to my server, and stuck it in a post:

It’s not my picture. I’m not attached to it. But when a web designer sets it as the background image on another website and it gets loaded many hundreds of times a day, that bandwidth can really add up. So I composed a polite email to the person, in French. Well, that’s not true. I composed it in English and then fed it to Google Translate. I studied French once, long ago. If you’d like me to translate any Rousseau for you, or perhaps some Flaubert or Pascal, I could possibly do it. But compose a straightforward email asking someone to stop linking to a picture on my website? You don’t learn the words for that stuff reading 18th century philosophy. And C was studying, so I didn’t want to bother her to translate it. So I fed it to Google Translate, which does a passable job. It probably came across sounding a bit like this to the French person at the other end:

Hello, excuse please my french bad.

You use a picture of my web site as your foundation. Near half of bandwidth is used as readers of your Web site load this file on my server. The image is not up to me, so I do not worry if you move to your server. But do not please link to my site. The image that you link is:

http://www.strangeproportion.com/images/friends1024X768.jpg.

It is kittens.

Thank you.

I never got a response, and after a few days, I checked again and saw that this picture was still being loaded hundreds of times a day. So I decided to activate the .htaccess. This is a file you can put on your website to control what gets served up in response to various types of requests. With a little internet research, I figured out how to set it up to serve up a substitute picture when anyone links to an image file that’s stored on my server.

I spent a while trying to pick just the right substitute. I have some funny anti-Bush stuff lying around, and some inappropriate humor and whatnot. But these seemed like overkill. I wanted to send a clear message—“Hey, quit linking to my photo”—but do it with a sense of humor. I wanted to be on the edge of inappropriate without veering into lewd or tasteless.

Google had some choice images in response to my “hairy man in a speedo” query, and after perusing a few pages of hairy men, I found that one that called my name. David Hasselhoff in a speedo with a bright red background. What more could you ask for?

I grabbed it, loaded it up, and then checked the results. As perfect as I could have hoped. I was very pleased with myself.

(Click for a better view.)

They’ve since taken the picture down. But for at least a few hours, I bet there were a few French potential pet adopters who were a bit confused.

Sometimes I think eBay should be more careful about their auto-generated Google ads. Sometimes they’re a bit random and nonsensical, but sometimes they’re downright creepy:

I found a website yesterday called picturesofwalls.com, which is devoted to collecting clever or contextually interesting graffiti. There are a lot of gems amid some rubbish, such as these:

Wholly apart from the disturbing news about a life-threatening disease striking workers who are exposed to the chemicals commonly used to flavor food artificially, I stumbled upon the best name for a magazine ever. I bet it has millions of subscribers based on name alone.

THURSDAY, April 26 (HealthDay News) -- Eight cases of a rare and life-threatening form of lung disease have been discovered among those who worked in food flavoring plants in California between 2004 and 2007, a new study finds.

In addition, levels of lead are elevated among women who work in plants that make batteries, according to a second report in this week's issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Having a copy of that lying around would get you more goth points that having the full Throbbing Gristle discography in your collection. More here.

This article from BBC News is a delightful read for anyone who has received an email from the personal assistant to a prince in Nigeria who is waiting to wire you millions of dollars, if only you’ll supply your bank details. I am filled with such joy when creative people find clever ways to turn the tables.

For instance, the pictures at right come from freewayblogger.com, a site that used to be a voice in the wilderness. But after a few years of daily reports of death and destruction in the news, public opinion has circled around and freewayblogger looks sort of tame and mainstream. Sort of. What surprises me is how Lee Iacocca, liberal fruitcake that he is, has come out with a book that, from what I can tell, is intended to emphatically make the case that our current adminstration are a bunch of incompetent buffoons, and in so many words. Good. (We knew that already, but thanks for chiming in, Lee.)

And of course, I’m with the BBC: Reprinting the email exchanges that go along with such endeavors is a hoot. My most recent, in case you were longing for closure in the copyright infringement story, has been taken off the main page and out of the post list, per my agreement with the gentleman who borrowed the photo. It is now sequestered away here: I Never Thought the DMCA Would Be My Friend.

Last night I was trying to track down some fact or another about my web traffic, so I made a rare visit to the server-side web stats page, which lists all the activity on the website: failed loads, most common referrers, browser share, viewer screen resolution, and countless other useless statistics, each presented in a little pie chart or bar graph. In the top referrers section, I saw a bunch of MySpace profiles linking to this site, as well as some other sites I didn’t recognize. So I went on a little tour.

It turns out that some of the photos from my various travel destinations are popular to post as comments on people’s MySpace profiles. And I guess a lot of people know enough HTML to hotlink straight to Strange Proportion when they post comments. Annoying, I suppose, but a minor infraction. This is what you get for posting your personal life on the web. However, one of the hotlinkers turned out to be a commercial website, some sort of inside sales site for insurance brokers [link removed]. On that page, at the lower right, was a picture I took during my trip to the Croatian coast in 2004.

This is not okay. I do not bother to copyright any of my pictures or text (except through the implicit copyright that comes from it being posted on this site by me), and I do not think much about intellectual property rights when it comes to my stuff. I post songs I’ve written, knowing that anyone can download them and play them and laugh at them. I post photos I’ve taken. I post all sorts of text (or at least I used to) without protecting it in any way.* If someone wants to share, be my guest. If it’s something I want to keep private or proprietary, I don’t post it on the web.

But this is different. This was a commercial site using a photo I took, to sell life insurance. Not that there’s anything wrong with life insurance. Many people find it useful. But that’s not the point. It just felt wrong to know that my photo was being used in this way. So I clicked around until I found an email address and wrote to whoever was on the other end. A transcript of our conversation is posted below. He seemed like a really nice guy at first, and by the end of the night I thought we’d solved the problem.

Begin transcript

Hi. You’ve hotlinked to a picture on my website from yours. That’s not okay.

This page:
     [URL removed]
steals this picture:
     http://www.strangeproportion.com/images/IMG_2339.jpg
from my website. Please copy it to your server and give me photo credit (as strangeproportion.com), or remove it promptly.

Thank you,
Paul

Pardon me,
I surely am not hotlinked to any of your pictures.
I think there is a mistake.
How can you be so sure?

[name redacted]

Because my site statistics show that your website repeatedly pulls that photo from my website.

Here’s the HTML code from your page:
<div style="display:block" ><div style="display:block" ><p align="left"><span class="body_text"><img style="WIDTH: 360px; HEIGHT: 265px" height="513" src="http://www.strangeproportion.com/images/IMG_2339.jpg" width="800" /></span></p></div><div style="display:block" ></div></div></td>

That means that your website directly loads that picture from my website. This (1) uses my bandwidth and (2) does not give me proper credit as the photographer.

Thanks,
Paul

Oh I see.
Let me get to the bottom of this with my designers and I shall fix this issue immediately.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

How do you check if someone is using your web pictures?

[name redacted]

Hi, thanks for being so responsive. I appreciate it.

Your webhosting company must have some sort of site statistics feature that you can visit. In that, you will see the top referrals to your website, the hosts that request the most data, search queries, etc. When you see a website listed as a referrer, you know that there is something on that website that links to yours. If it’s not a text link, they’re probably using a photo or movie or some other media file without permission.

-Paul

Paul,
Do you design websites?
[name redacted]

No, I’m afraid not. I’m just an amateur.

Well you do have a good website, why dont you start?
You are going to college and can make some extra cash doing this.

Pause transcript

This all happened within a hour or so. The guy was apparently sitting at his computer, and I was at mine, so it passed back and forth in real time. By this point, however, I had finished setting up my .htaccess file so that a hotlinked request to any file on Strange Proportion instead served up this photo on the other website:

I figured this would give the guy an added incentive to fix the problem quickly, and would give a surprise to the several girls who stole a picture of cute fuzzy kittens cuddling as a background for their MySpace pages.

Having solved the problem, I puttered off to bed. This morning, I realized that it would be funny to get a screen shot of his site with my substitute picture on it. But when I pulled it up, the original Croatia picture appeared. Was my .htaccess not working right? Or had he copied my photo to his server?

Turns out it was the latter. I checked his code, and he had just copied it and renamed it. Same photo. I dropped him a note.

Resume transcript

[name redacted],

I see your designers have copied my picture to your server. While that solves one problem, it doesn’t solve the other. That is still my picture, and I didn’t intend it to be used on commercial websites, especially without proper credit. Can you please find another picture of some beautiful place?

Thanks, Paul

Paul,
I appreciate ur concern and I was assured that is a differnt picture which at first looks the same. You did not want ur website being bogged dowb with traffic and it won’t because this new picture is no way connected to ur picture at all. I myself compared it and it is a different picture similar Looking to urs.
U pointed to me an issue u had and I immediately took Care of it now u are asking for too much.

[name redacted]

It’s very interesting that the exact same boats are parked in the harbor and exactly the same wave patterns are visible in the water. Someone must have been standing right next to me taking that picture at the exact same moment I took mine.

Find another picture. There are 10,000 pictures of Croatia on the web.

End transcript

Now, the funny thing is this: If you look closely (below), you’ll see that, rather than finding some other photo to put in that spot, he (or his “designers”) took the same photo, stretched it vertically, and painstakingly photoshopped several copies of the same boat into the harbor. But if you look at the wave patterns in the water, and every other boat in the harbor, you'll see that it's the same photo.

Is this photo really so remarkable that it’s so worth keeping? Surely not.

The original picture from Strange Proportion: Croatian Adventure III.

The copy from [URL removed].

So consider this post what you will. Revenge, you might say, and you’d be right to a degree, since I took some pleasure in linking to his website with the phrase "life insurance spam site" [links now removed] three separate times. I hope certain web crawlers find that one soon. But consider that it could be a public service announcement to guard your personal life on the web a bit more closely. Not only could there be stalkers out there, lurking in the shadows to steal your identity; worse, there could be shysters out there stealing bits of your life for their own personal gain.

* Actually, I do protect some of my text. This paper on The Scarlet Letter from the Writer Droppings section of Strange Proportion contains a sentence at the end of a paragraph about two-thirds of the way to the end: “Attention educator: If you are reading this as fulfillment of an academic assignment, you should know that it was lifted straight from the internet.” If you're going to plagiarize from the internet, you should at least read it very carefully before you hand it in. One of Mrs. Erickson’s high school students in Lincoln, NE wasn’t quite careful enough, apparently.

Resume transcript, because it just keeps getting weirder

Paul,
What's the matter with you? We were talking this morning and now I see a whole blog of our conversation. Look you want credit for a picture that my designer's used, I can give you that but you can not go around defaming my character. Defamation is a serious crime.
I was in a meeting the whole day and when I saw your email and checked your blog I felt very upset. If you like I can give you credit for the picture on my website. You must send me an email stating that you will not defame my name and will remove anything negative from your website.

[name redacted]

Hi [name redacted],

Nothing is the matter with me, and there is nothing defamatory about my blog post. I am expressing my opinions, not claiming anything to be fact. I happen to believe that my opinions are valid, and accurately describe the events as they occurred. You did hotlink to my website. You did copy the photo to your own server, and you did alter it. You did refuse to remove it from your website. I believe it would be difficult to claim that posting our email correspondence verbatim is defamatory, given that I am simply publishing an exchange of words without addition or deletion.

If you feel upset, imagine how I felt when I discovered that you stole my photo and used it for profit without asking permission. Then when I asked you to remove it, you simply copied it to your server, altered it in Photoshop, and then insulted my intelligence by claiming that this was a different picture that just happened to look like mine.

To be clear: You do not have my permission to use that photo.

However, I have become attached to my blog post. I think it makes an interesting story. So I will make you an offer:

If you want to use that photo on your website, you can accept either of the following:

(1) Pay me $200 in exchange for unlimited use of that photo. In this case, you do not have to credit me. In return, I will delete the blog post.
(2) You may have unlimited use of that photo, but in exchange, I will leave my blog post in place with some edits to remove negative comments. Specifically, I will remove "blowhard" from the title, and I will remove all "spam" references and the part about "luring suckers into some life insurance scam". But I will leave the correspondence in place.

If the photo is important enough to you, you may accept either of those options. Otherwise, I'll expect it to be removed before Tuesday morning 4/17/2007. When the photo is removed from your website, or when I receive your $200, I will delete the blog post. I reserve the right to refer to the incident later, but I will not refer to you by name or by company name, website, or any other identifying information, and I will not link to your site.

Please let me know what you decide.

Thanks,
Paul

This is extortion. Now you have not only used defamation you are extorting.
Do you really want to extort money out of me even though you don't care about the credit to the picture?
Let me know what you feel about that. I am asking you politely to remove unnecessary and defaming references from your blog about a legitimate business.

No it's not extortion. You stole my property. Pay for it or don't use it. It's that simple. I'm not stopping you from choosing any other photo on the entire internet. Just don't use mine. As soon as you remove the photo from your website, I will remove the blog post.

Do you see what I'm saying? To me it's clear.

I don't want my photo on your website. However, if you really want to use it, I suppose I am willing to sell it to you. I named my price. If you pay me that amount, I'll give you the right to use it. If you do not want to pay for the photo, then you can't use it.

If you walk into a grocery store and then try to leave with a dozen eggs, they will stop you on your way out. You either have to pay them for the eggs, or leave the eggs in the store. You cannot have the eggs for free. The eggs don't belong to you until you compensate the store for them. Similarly, you can't use my picture unless you compensate me for it.

Instead of cash, you could also compensate me for my picture by allowing me to tell the story of how I found my photo on someone else's website. To me, that's worth something, so I'm willing to give up the cash for the right to tell that story. However, that story involves talking about your website, so I'm giving you the choice to compensate me in whatever way you like. If you want, you can give me cash. Otherwise, you can let me tell the story. Those are two forms of payment I'll accept.

Of course, you can also take my photo off your website. In that case, you obviously owe me nothing, since then you won't be using my property. This choice is like leaving the eggs in the store. You don't have to pay for the eggs if you don't take them home.

I do not understand why this is so difficult. I'm offering you several choices, and I'll be perfectly happy to accept whatever choice you make. Personally, I'd just take the picture down and replace it with some generic picture of a beach, or a sunset, or anything else, as long as it doesn't belong to me.

-Paul

What did you do to my website?
Its all screwed up
Did you hack into the site?

Fix my website immediately and remove the defaming blog otherwise I will take legal actions against you.

I didn't do anything to your website. I don't know how.

See the attached picture. It looks fine to me, as of 2:52 on Saturday afternoon. Except for the fact that my picture is still there.

Stop talking about this like I'm the aggressor. Remove my picture from your website, and we will have a happy resolution to our disagreement.

So on day 4 of the adventure, I wrote a letter to his web hosting company

Hello,

I am writing to report that this website [URL redacted] has used, without permission, an image for which I own the copyright. Under the terms of the DMCA, I'd like to request that you remove the photograph from his site if he will not comply with your request to do so. If I have sent this request to the wrong email address, can you please forward it to the appropriate party?

The offending photograph is on the lower right of this page: [link removed]

The image on my website is this one:
http://www.strangeproportion.com/images/IMG_2339_tn.jpg
which appears on this page:
http://www.strangeproportion.com/archives/2004/07/croatian_advent.html.

It was originally hotlinked directly from my website, but when I contacted the owner and asked him to remove it, he copied it to his own server and altered it slightly, claiming that this was actually a different picture that just looked similar. He has since been uncooperative.

You can see a transcript of our entire conversation here:
http://www.strangeproportion.com

Thanks for your help, [my name]

You haven't fixed my website or removed your blog.
I am getting very irritated with this childish behaviour.
Once again I am asking you kindly to fix my website and remove any negative and defaming comments from your blog or any blog.

This must be handled carefully and immediately.

Thanks
[name redacted]

Hi [name redacted],

How are you today? I had a long day at work, and I have a lot of homework to do, so I'm afraid I don't have much time to talk this evening.

You still haven't removed my picture. I thought that was going to be the first step.

I'm sorry, I really don't know what you're talking about when you say your website doesn't work. I honestly didn't do anything, nor could I have done anything, since I am not a "hacker." It seems to work fine in my browser. What exactly is broken about it?

As for my blog, I don't intend to make any changes until you remove my picture from your website. Once you remove my picture, I am sure you will happy with my edits.

FYI, I sent a request to your web hosting company today asking them to delete my picture from your server, per the terms of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). I'm sure they'll be in touch shortly. You can refer to this document (DMCA) if you have questions. On page 11, you'll find the relevant text:

Limitation for Information Residing on Systems or Networks at the Direction of Users. Section 512(c) limits the liability of service providers for infringing material on websites (or other information repositories) hosted on their systems. It applies to storage at the direction of a user. In order to be eligible for the limitation, the following conditions must be met:

• The provider must not have the requisite level of knowledge of the infringing activity, as described below.
• If the provider has the right and ability to control the infringing activity, it must not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity.
• Upon receiving proper notification of claimed infringement, the provider must expeditiously take down or block access to the material.

Have a nice evening,
Paul

Look Paul I don't have time to go back and forth with you on this.
I had my web designer readjust the site, Now remove any and all negative comments immediately from your blog.
I have spent too much and time and effort going back and forth on this and it isnt worth the headache.

Thanks
[name redacted]

The post has been removed. Thanks for finding a new picture.

End transcript, finally

So that was my adventure with copyright infringement. If you happen to have visited before I removed all the links and references to the offending website (part of our agreement), you can go there and see that, in fact, the picture has been replaced by a lovely picture of a beach. I actually prefer that one. Since it was taken by a professional photographer, the lighting is striking, the focus is crisp, and the composition is second to none. I'm sure the gentleman will be much happier in the long run with that photo.

So what's the moral of my story? I’d like to say it’s something about the little guy and his victory over the machinations of the behemoth of corporate America, a kind of Paul Brockovich moment or something. But the other guy was a little guy too, just a bit of an unscrupulous little guy. That said, I bet if you troll through the archives of Strange Proportion, you might find a hotlinked photo somewhere. But the difference is that, upon request from the copyright owner, I will gladly remove any image or text that I have wrongly usurped. Luckily The Economist is pretty cool with fair use.

So here’s to the DMCA, and how it, or at least the threat of its use, helped me, the little guy, to win a pivotal battle in the uncharted seas of intellectual property rights against, well, another little guy. Not really much of ring to that one, eh? But at least we do have a happy ending:

The post has been removed. Thanks for finding a new picture.

Can you please send me the post? I want to show that to my web designers. Thanks

Something makes me think I shouldn't, but here you go. I don't have the original anymore, only the edited version.

Don't worry you kept your word and I am fine with that.

Apparently, a popular game played around Lexington, KY is called “cornhole.” It’s called that, I’m told, because it involves a small bag of corn that the players try to throw into a hole. All fine and good. But if you knew that the name of your new game was already taken by anatomical slang, wouldn’t you try to find a new name for it? If I wanted to name my new game "Captain Brownstar" or “Hot Carl,” I’d hope someone would warn me.

While I understand that it's fun to spell stuff phonetically on signage, and it certainly demonstrates good marketing sense, one should take care not to use intentional misspellings that are easy to confuse with sexual connotative words.

Also, um . . . , what are “Raw Fries,” and why would I want to pay for those?

Strange Proportion will receive its 25,000th visitor this evening. If you are that visitor, email me to claim your free gift.

Our records indicate that 24,967 of those visitors were directed here by search engine results involving cubicle decoration. The other 33 are related to me by blood or marriage. Oh, and one of you was searching for “somethings I can do while watching super models.” I won’t ask.

This was posted on one of the professors’ office windows in the math department building. Oh, look at the cute kid drawing! Look at the puppy. Or is it a turtle? Oh wait, pathalogikle feer.

That’s pretty surreal. None of my art student friends could have come up with something that cool if they tried.

Here’s a good use for the otherwise useless digital camera you have on your cell phone: chronicling the funny shit you see when you're out and about. Since I don’t have any time to write anything these days, but I occasionally have time to laugh at the goofy stuff I run across, I can at least share that so you know I'm alive. Here's the first: a beauty shop where you can get a “man haircut.”

This is the coolest thing I've found in a long time. I wish I knew who made it.

From this week’s Economist, an brief article looking back on what we learned from the Larry Summers debacle.

In most intellectual areas, such as vocabulary and verbal reasoning, the differences between men and women are statistically insignificant. But the long tail of mathematical genius does tend to be male, along with higher rates of idiocy and masturbation.

The article is not so much about Larry Summers and his downfall, nor does it criticize political correctness or its opposite, whatever we choose to call that. Instead, it points out that (1) in some cognitive areas, men and women do actually tend to differ in statistically significant ways, and (2) none of these cognitive areas are particularly important anymore in the developed world, except the one in which men tend to lag behind their brighter peers.

Men, studies show, are exceedingly good at rotating three-dimensional shapes in their head. Perhaps women once stared open-mouthed in wonder as their mates juggled pyramids of imaginary polyhedra. Such tricks are also quite handy for engineers who specialise in building large bits of machinery, digging tunnels or slinging bridges across rivers. But, now that the rich world has about as many tunnels and bridges as it needs, and the large bits of machinery which aren’t made by computers and robots are made by the Chinese, their usefulness is limited.

Modern professional life is dominated by management, which these days sets high store by emotional intelligence, empathy and communication. Wise chaps seeking professional advancement should therefore spend their free time with groups of women, boning up on how to undermine somebody’s confidence while pretending to boost it, and how to turn an entire lunch table against an absent colleague without saying a mean word. Such skills are likely to have a greater influence on their lifetime earnings than the ability to spin an icosahedron.

I hate MySpace, and so do you, I bet, even though if you're under 30 you probably at least have an account, if not an active MySpace life. If you're 20, you check it at least 40 times a day, if the public computers in the Georgetown Leavey Center are any indication. Sometimes, if you're 20, you post comments on the profile of your friend who's at the computer right next to you, making it very annoying for people who actually have something important to do on the internet, like check Apple's share price. Come on, people. MySpace is for dorm rooms.

I think this quote from a friend of mine pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole MySpace thing. To set the context, I'd just sent him a link to a cool human space invaders short on YouTube, which has since apparently been taken down by its cranky copyright owner.

I love the internet. YouTube is so much more fun than livespacebookfacejournal. It's just like "here's some shit, dig." No bullshit "friends" and crap, just music and art. I know the only redeeming value of MySpace is to get your music out there, but who cares when it hardly ever works right anyway? And, sure, I get the fact that the intraweb's beyond fucking huge now and that the need for multiple, more focused directories is inherent but still... At least MySpace keeps a lot of [morons] in one spot instead of shittin up the rest of my internet.

If you also hate bullshit "friends" and crap, you would probably also love these:

• isolatr
• snubster
• introvertster

But that brings up an interesting question . . . . What do you call a community made up of people who hate the notion of community? An anticommunity? An acommunity? A loose collection of nonaffiliated individuals? Not catchy enough. It’s the old “wouldn’t-be-a-member-of-a-club-that-would-take-me-as-a-member” problem. Or the set of all well-defined sets (sets that do not contain themselves). Is it well-defined? If so, then it’s a member of the set of well-defined sets, and it contains itself. But then by definition it’s not well-defined. How can the set of well-defined sets not be well-defined? That's like saying a moral authority figure could be immoral. Logically impossible. Just ask Ralph Reed.

My brother tells me that I might have a copyright infringment suit on my hands.

Suit. Heh heh.

“While human leather may be repulsive to contemporary society, libraries can ethically have the books in their collections if they are used respectfully for academic research and not displayed as objects of curiosity.”

I'm not joking. More here: The Boston Globe.

No, not me, silly. A couple of months ago I mentioned here the poor guy who chronicled his miserable cubicle drone life in the City Paper. Well, in an update here last week, he chronicled his getting fired for being the guy who chronicled his miserable cubicle drone life in the City Paper, though his employer called it “sexual harrassment.” I definitely have it better than that guy, poor guy.

My new single, Checkered Borracho, is hot of the presses and scorching the earbuds off iPods from here to California. The critics have weighed in already: “SPACE AGE! It’s like what the future looked like in 1980!” Check it out yourself. Free download, while supplies last.

Sure it happens to everyone at some time or another. And I for one am glad that I do not have cameras aimed at my slightest movements, both day and night. Nonetheless, I get a big kick out of W getting caught asking Condoleeza Rice if he could pee at a UN summit.

A recent survey by Harris Interactive commissioned by Verizon found that 87 percent of respondents didn’t know what VoIP was. Twenty percent thought it was a European hybrid motorcar and 10 percent said it was a low-carb vodka.

But that only sounds ridiculous to somebody as tech-savvy as you and me. The more disappointing figures come from CNET (via Logical Extremes). A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 38% percent of Americans said creationism should replace evolution in public-school curricula. At least most of those wouldn’t confuse VoIP with a low-carb vodka, nor might they know what a hybrid car is. “You mean like corn?” But that 20% might overlap with the 20% who think the Sun revolves around the Earth.

D'oh! Every truck for every blue collar trade for 1000 miles around Chicago sports a JULIE bumper sticker. That’s the Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators, whose motto, “Call before you dig” isn’t particularly catchy or interesting, but that motto has nonetheless averted any number of disasters that would otherwise have been caused by moronic, tired, distracted, or overzealous guys who need to dig trenches or pits for something or another. Had those couple of guys slapping their foreheads in L.A. this afternoon taken the time to go through the steps

4 STEPS TO SAFE DIGGING

• CALL before you dig.
• WAIT the required amount of time (2 workings days).
• RESPECT the marks.
• DIG with care.

then most of L.A. wouldn’t have been without power for a chunk of this afternoon, and you, gentle reader, wouldn’t have been without this website, which is hosted by L.A.’s Dreamhost.com, who, aside from city-wide power outages, provide excellent webhosting services for ridiculously cheap prices. Sorry if you were jonesing.

First it was the activist judges and mayors. Now it’s the activist bipartisan legistlative majority! Will this madness ever end? Pretty soon it will be the activist majority of citizens! We need to keep our values safe!

This guy knows what I’m talking about, vis-à-vis the whole cubicle drone thing. Though I have to admit, reading his sad cubicle story made me realize that I have it pretty good.

Google makes everything easier.

As soon as it’s available, I’m going to have the Google search bar implanted in my arm. There are few things more frustrating than being in a coffee shop or bar, or in “nature” or some similar technologically unequipped place, and getting into a dispute that can only be properly resolved by googling.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about this evening. See that strip of Google ads down and to the right? Maybe you thought I’d sold out when you saw them unfurled for the first time. I probably have. I do, after all work for the Man now. My friends tell me so, the ones who continue to define themselves by how disenfranchised they can keep themselves. Now, I’m all for remaining disenfranchised, at least on the inside. “Poets should arrange to remain thin,” I once read, but I can’t remember where. I think it was in a poem. But it’s such hard work, you know. Exhausting.

My brothers have taken to taunting me with accusations of yuppie, though I can’t think of a less accurate description for someone who at 31 lives in a basement and shops almost solely at Ross. But that’s not the point. I have now made over forty-two cents from those carefully placed and highly relevent text ads. As soon as I break $100, they say they’ll send me a check. Now, I have some friends who stuffed envelopes at home for a while, and their checks never arrived. One of them instead set out to demonstrate that you can earn more than minimum wage by spanging at the local strip mall, and he did. He also set out deliberately to become homeless and ride trains just like the real hobos of yore, and he did. Nonetheless, as far as the check goes, you’ll have to excuse me for remaining sceptical.

Alright. It’s 1:10 am and I really should go to bed. In fact, that’s imminent. I have to pack and get ready to leave for Guatemala for a week. Why Guatemala? Because it’s there. I’ve been trying to remember my Spanish for a couple of days, but all that’s coming to mind is Czech. That’ll just be nonsense.

Hola. Como esta?

Dobrý Den. Samozřejmě.

Como?

But on a wholly different note: Isn’t it really about time to give it up? Always on the cutting edge, Robert Smith now has a MySpace profile.

Microsoft hates freedom.

Since the second Gilded Age is fast approaching, it seems fitting to reintroduce Andrew Carnegie’s essay, entitled “Wealth,” which was first published in North American Review in 1889. In it, the übercapitalist himself argues that—it being in the nature of wealth to accumulate itself in the hands of the few—the wealthy have a moral imperative to disperse their wealth to the community at large. Realizing that the wealthy since history dawned have often opted instead to siphon their wealth directly down their children’s gullets, he advocates tax law and public policy to enforce the imperative—specifically in the form of the estate tax, which he calls “the wisest” form of tax. “Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share.” Now many might dismiss this as heavy-handed social engineering, but it’s an intriguing notion, especially considering the source.

We accept and welcome . . . as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves great inequality of environment, the concentration of business—industrial and commercial—in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these as being not only beneficial but essential for the future progress of the race. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions. The experienced in affairs always rate the man whose services can be obtained as a partner as not only the first consideration but such as to render the question of his capital scarcely worth considering, for such men soon create capital; while, without the special talent required, capital soon takes wings.

Such men become interested in firms or corporations using millions; and estimating only simple interest to be made upon the capital invested, it is inevitable that their income must exceed their expenditures and that they must accumulate wealth. Nor is there any middle ground which such men can occupy, because the great manufacturing or commercial concern which does not earn at least interest upon its capital soon becomes bankrupt. It must either go forward or fall behind: to stand still is impossible. It is a condition essential for its successful operation that it should be thus far profitable, and even that, in addition to interest on capital, it should make profit. It is a law, as certain as any of the others named, must, of necessity, soon be in receipt of more revenue than can be judiciously expended upon themselves; and this law is as beneficial for the race as the others. . . .

We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few. Thus far, accepting conditions as they exist, the situation can be surveyed and pronounced good. The question then arises—and, if the foregoing be correct, it is the only question with which we have to deal—What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few? And it is of this great question that I believe I offer the true solution. It will be understood that fortunes are here spoken of not moderate sums saved by many years of effort, the returns from which are required for the comfortable maintenance and education of families. This is not wealth but only competence, which it should be the aim of all to acquire.

There are but three modes in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It can be left to the families of the decedents; or it can be bequeathed for public purposes; or, finally, it can be administered during their lives by its possessors. Under the first and second modes most of the wealth of the world that has reached the few has hitherto been applied. Let us in turn consider each of these modes.

The first is the most injudicious. In monarchical countries, the estates and the greatest portion of the wealth are left to the first son that the vanity of the parent may be gratified by the thought that his name and title are to descend to succeeding generations unimpaired. The condition of this class in Europe today teaches the futility of such hopes or ambitions. The successors have become impoverished through their follies or from the fall in the value of land. Even in Great Britain the strict law of entail has been found inadequate to maintain the status of an hereditary class. Its soil is rapidly passing into the hands of the stranger. Under republican institutions the division of property among the children is much fairer, but the question which forces itself upon thoughtful men in all lands is: Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection? Observation teaches that, generally speaking, it is not well for the children that they should be so burdened. Neither is it well for the state. Beyond providing for the wife and daughters moderate sources of income, and very moderate allowances indeed, if any, for the sons, men may well hesitate, for it is no longer questionable that great sums bequeathed oftener work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients. Wise men will soon conclude that, for the best interests of the members of their families and of the state, such bequests are an improper use of their means. It is not suggested that men who have failed to educate their sons to earn a livelihood shall cast them adrift in poverty. lf any man has seen fit to rear his sons with a view to their living idle lives, or, what is highly commendable, has instilled in them the sentiment that they are in a position to labor for public ends without reference to pecuniary considerations, then, of course, the duty of the parent is to see that such are provided for in moderation. There are instances of millionaires’ sons unspoiled by wealth, who, being rich, still perform great services in the community. Such are the very salt of the earth, as valuable as, unfortunately, they are rare; still it is not the exception but the rule that men must regard, and, looking at the usual result of enormous sums conferred upon legatees, the thoughtful man must shortly say, “would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar,” and admit to himself that it is not the welfare of the children but family pride which inspires these enormous legacies.

As to the second mode, that of leaving wealth at death for public uses, it may be said that this is only a means for the disposal of wealth, provided a man is content to wait until he is dead before it becomes of much good in the world. Knowledge of the results of legacies bequeathed is not calculated to inspire the brightest hopes of much posthumous good being accomplished. The cases are not few in which the real object sought by the testator is not attained, nor are they few in which his real wishes are thwarted. In many cases the bequests are so used as to become only monuments of his folly.

It is well to remember that it requires the exercise of not less ability than that which acquired the wealth to use it so as to be really beneficial to the community. Besides this, it may fairly be said that no man is to be extolled for doing what he cannot help doing, nor is he to be thanked by the community to which he only leaves wealth at death. Men who leave vast sums in this way may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all had they been able to take it with them. The memories of such cannot be held in grateful remembrance, for there is no grace in their gifts. It is not to be wondered at that such bequests seem so generally to lack the blessing. The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. The state of Pennsylvania now takes subject to some exceptions one-tenth of the property left by its citizens. The budget presented in the British Parliament the other day proposes to increase the death duties; and, most significant of all, the new tax is to be a graduated one. Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.

It is desirable that nations should go much further in this direction. Indeed, it is difficult to set bounds to the share of a rich man’s estate which should go at his death to the public through the agency of the state, and by all means such taxes should be graduated, beginning at nothing upon moderate sums to dependents and increasing rapidly as the amounts swell, until, of the millionaire’s hoard as of Shylock’s, at least—The other half comes to the privy coffer of the state.

This policy would work powerfully to induce the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life, which is the end that society should always have in view, as being that by far most fruitful for the people. Nor need it be feared that this policy would sap the root of enterprise and render men less anxious to accumulate, for to the class whose ambition it is to leave great fortunes and be talked about after their death, it will attract even more attention, and, indeed, be a somewhat nobler ambition to have enormous sums paid over to the state from their fortunes.

There remains, then, only one mode of using great fortunes; but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor—a reign of harmony—another ideal, differing, indeed, from that of the Communist in requiring only the further evolution of existing conditions, not the total overthrow of our civilization. It is founded upon the present most intense individualism, and the race is prepared to put it in practice by degrees whenever it pleases. Under its sway we shall have an ideal state in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense the property of the many, because administered for the common good; and this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves. Even the poorest can be made to see this and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.

Poor and restricted are our opportunities in this life; narrow our horizon; our best work most imperfect; but rich men should be thankful for one inestimable boon. They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives. The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi gives us but, while animated by Christ’s spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner.

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the sum of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves. . . .

In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do, except in cases of accident or sudden change. Everyone has, of course, cases of individuals brought to his own knowledge where temporary assistance can do genuine good, and these he will not overlook. But the amount which can be wisely given by the individual for individuals is necessarily limited by his lack of knowledge of the circumstances connected with each. He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in almsgiving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue....

Thus is the problem of rich and poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left flee; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race in which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good.

This day already dawns. But a little while, and although, without incurring the pity of their fellows, men may die sharers in great business enterprises from which their capital cannot be or has not been withdrawn, and is left chiefly at death for public uses, yet the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away “unwept, unhonored, and unsung,” no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. of such as these the public verdict will then be: —The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. Such, in my opinion, is the true gospel concerning wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the rich and the poor, and to bring “Peace on earth, among men goodwill.”

I think I find this very disturbing. I don’t particular enjoy James Joyce, except for Dubliners, but C. stumbled upon The Erotic Letters of James Joyce yesterday and mentioned his fart-huffing fetish at breakfast this morning. I didn’t believe her at first, but sure enough, there in his letters to his wife, we find

You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

Thank God for the internet, that’s for sure.

In a sense, there is no such thing as a random number; for example, is 2 a random number?

—Donald Knuth, quoted in Knuth 3:16

Ok folks, help us out. Strange Proportion currently has #11 Google rank for “cubicle decorating guidelines” and we would really like to get a bit higher. And we can’t do it ourself. We need your help. Click the link and (unless you have your results per page turned up) head to page 2. Click on Strange Proportion. Come on! It’s so easy, and it’s for science! And meanwhile, while you’re hard at work on that, we’ll work on a little lesenwerte Schrift.

We offer the following as an additional bonus: If our faithful reader(s) manage (and by all means, use proxies!) to get Strange Proportion to #1, we’ll actually post an entire page devoted to clever ideas for decorating a cubicle. And we mean clever.

Update [04-15-2005]: We’ve brought it out of beta and into production: The Official Strange Proportion Feng Shui Cubicle Design Course has been launched! The Google seach result now links to there, not here.

Update [04-20-2005]: You thought it was all a joke, but it’s not a joke!

I have available to me, for being such a loyal subscriber, a free six-month gift subscription to The Economist website (not a print subscription), which I will give to the first person who provides a worthy motive for wanting one. Why don’t you give me a 200-word essay laying out your reasons for wanting one and how it would help you to improve the world? Post a comment below or email me. You do want to “take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress,” don’t you?

I just love it when foreigners analyze Americans. Often I love it when they criticize us for being prude or ignorant, because we are, and it would be so much easier to admit it than to go to all the trouble of taking an absurdly anti-French stance just because they know more about wine and cheese than we do. But one of the joys of traveling abroad is to get a perspective about your country and culture that just isn’t possible when you immersed in and surrounded by it. And so it is that I particularly liked this week’s Economist’s take on the American notions of success and failure (though I do take exception to the claim that “the barriers are lifted” that prevent blacks from succeeding in America, and I said as much in my letter to the editor (or I will, as soon as I post this). So, without further ado,

An Ode to Failure: Here's to the Great American Loser

There will be plenty of cuddlier films at this weekend's Oscars than Clint Eastwood's “Million Dollar Baby”. The film tells the story of a young woman, played by Hilary Swank, who escapes from a life of drudgery by spending her every spare hour in a boxing gym. For a while, it looks as if she is talented enough to escape. Then the fates deal her a terrible blow: she loses her championship fight, is horribly injured and persuades her trainer, played by Mr Eastwood, to kill her.

Dirty Harry's former friends on the right have reacted with horror to the film's unAmerican enthusiasm for euthanasia. In fact, the film is most remarkable as an extremely American parable on success and failure. When Ms Swank gets injured, her trainer is eaten up with guilt. But she tells him not to be so hard on himself: she is far happier to have tasted a little success and ended up a cripple than to have remained a nobody.

Americans have always been excessive worshippers of what William James called “the bitch goddess success”. Self-help gurus have topped the bestseller list since Benjamin Franklin published his autobiography. Americans are much more likely than Europeans to believe that people can get ahead in life so long as they are willing to work hard. And they are much more likely to choose a high-paying job that carries a risk of redundancy than a lower-paid job that guarantees security.

But you can't have winners without losers (or how would you know how well you are doing?). And you can't broaden opportunity without also broadening the opportunity to fail. For instance, until relatively recently, blacks could not blame themselves for their failure in the “race of life”, in Abraham Lincoln's phrase, because they were debarred from so many parts of it. Now the barriers are lifted, the picture is more complicated.

All of which creates a huge problem: how exactly should a hyper-competitive society deal with its losers? It is all very well to note that drunkards and slackers get what they deserve. But what about the honest toilers? One way to deal with the problem is to offer people as many second chances as possible. In his intriguing new book “Born Losers: A History of Failure in America” (Harvard), Scott Sandage argues that the mid-19th century saw a redefinition of failure—from something that described a lousy business to something that defined a whole life.

Yet one of the striking things about America is how valiantly it has resisted the idea that there is any such thing as a born loser. American schools resist streaming their pupils much longer than their European counterparts: the whole point is to fit in rather than to stand out. American higher education has numerous points of entry and re-entry. And the American legal system has some of the most generous bankruptcy rules in the world. In Europe, a bankrupt is often still a ruined man; in America, he is a risk-taking entrepreneur.

American history—not to mention American folklore—is replete with examples of people who tried and tried again until they made a success of their lives. Lincoln was a bankrupt store-keeper. Henry Ford was a serial failure. At 40, Thomas Watson, the architect of IBM, faced prison. America's past is also full of people who came back from the brink. Steve Jobs has gone from has-been to icon. Martha Stewart has a lucrative television contract waiting for her when she comes out of prison.

A second way to deal with losers is to celebrate them—or at least sing about them. Perhaps in reaction to the relentless boosterism of business life, American popular culture often sympathises with the losers. In Arthur Miller's “Death of a Salesman” Willy Loman chooses to commit suicide rather than spend the rest of his life “ringing up a zero”. John Updike's “Rabbit” Angstrom is a lecherous car salesman whose best days were on a school basketball court. Scott Adams's Dilbert is a diminutive Everyman trapped in a cubicle. Where would country music be without broken hearts and broken-down trucks?

But even in the loser-loving bits of popular culture, the American obsession with success has a habit of winning through. More often than not, born losers turn out to be winners in disguise. In one version of this idea, the loser turns out to be a winner by virtue of his very ordinariness. The hero of Frank Capra's “It's a Wonderful Life” is a small-town plodder who hovers on the edge of ruin; but in the end the film concludes triumphantly, “No man is a failure who has friends.”

In another version—the one that burst on the scene with James Dean and was rapidly institutionalised by the counter-culture—the loser turns out to be a winner because he is a rebel against society's repressive norms. He is freer than the average American because he isn't encumbered with property (he has nothing to lose); or he is more genuine because he lives according to his own lights, rather than artificial conventions. Bob Dylan was a master of counter-cultural inversion. “The loser now/Will be later to win”, he rasped at one point. “She knows there's no success like failure/And that failure's no success at all”, he moaned at another.

H.L. Mencken had a grumpy verdict on this attitude to success and failure: for him, the typical American was “vexed, at one and the same time, by delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex”. Delusions of grandeur are certainly common: “American Idol” presents a limitless supply of talentless narcissists, each convinced he is the next Frank Sinatra. Inferiority complexes are common too: America is also full of perfectly successful people who are obsessed by their failure to live up to their self-help manuals. But Mencken still seems too cynical. The worship of success inspires not just extraordinary achievements but also worthwhile failures. That is the unsettling but very American message of “Million Dollar Baby”.

“Kyrgyzstan, like many other former Soviet states, allows voters to choose the option of voting against all candidates in a race. If a majority of voters take that course in a particular district, a second round would have to be held.” [ABC News]

Now wouldn’t that provide a mandate? Something like 24% for Kerry, 25% for Bush, and 51% for “Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Ass on Your Way Out.”

The Guardian reported today that an unmanned British research submarine was lost under an Antarctic ice shelf last week. I was reading the article, science blah, lost blah, yada yada yada, had almost hit the back button, and then I notice way down at the end of the article, in the second to last paragraph, after they’ve mentioned the little human interest details like that the researcher really likes snow peas, that this 21-foot-long sub, which had successfully completed 382 missions, was powered by 5,160 D-cell batteries. Now that’s science! Forget the ice shelf. I want to know about more stuff that can run on thousands of Duracells, like a car. If you fill the trunk with batteries, can you drive to the moon?

Shouldn’t this have been on the news or something?

Indeed, what else can we say about the flowers of victory, if not that pardon is the choicest? Not much, I’m sure you’ll agree. I’m still trying to figure out the meaning of my fortune-cookie fortune from tonight’s dinner at the Uptown Cathay Restaurant, but I have made little progress. I’ve identified it as a bad and perhaps overly-literal translation of what is probably a poignant Chinese aphorism, but I can only assume it’s something about the humble exercise of power or having mercy upon the vanquished.

I didn’t realize just how speechless the election left me until noticing that it has been over five weeks since my last post. Sorry to leave the audience hanging like that. I have very little to say in my own defense. In some ways, I have to admit that there’s less to write about these days. Though I have already lapsed in my vow not to read the news until 2008, I am proud to say that I am not as glued to Google News as I was from March through October. That’s a good thing. While comparing multiple versions of the same story can be very enlightening and provides an interesting study in media bias, it takes a shedload of time to do it right. Having semi-unbumpily transitioned from the glamorous lifestyle of a shorts-and-sandals freelance professional into a more straight-laced and conservative kind of professionalism, and having committed to spending an hour and a half on most weekdays days at the gym, and given that my girlfriend has finally joined me in DC after all her travels, and given further that I enjoy joining the residents of the house where I live in their undertaken task of cleaning out years of accumulated trash, junk, and sediment from long-gone tenants in an attempt to turn it from a place where we crash into something we might term a ‘home’, there hasn’t been much time at the end of the day to write. I’m endeavoring to make more time for seeing to the meaningful arrangements of words on screen. Be assured, I’ll keep you abreast of the developments. Coming soon . . . collected musings on the accumulation of various kinds of sediment in the lives of humans. For homework, start here.

By the way, ‘shedload’ is perfectly acceptable in British English, so there’s no need to correct me on it. I’m just doing my part to internationalize the vernacular.

From this morning’s New York Times:

“Mr. Bush used all the trappings of the presidency to generate enthusiasm and dominate Florida's airwaves. In the morning, in the first of four scheduled appearances in the state, Mr. Bush swept over a crowd of 12,000. As his helicopter, Marine One, landed in a jammed stadium, the music from “Top Gun,” the movie about a risk-taking Navy pilot, blared over the loudspeakers. And it wasn't just any stadium: It was the field where the Boston Red Sox—hometown team of his rival—play their spring training games.”

So was it “Highway to the Danger Zone”? Or did Karl think “Take My Breath Away” more appropriate?

This may appear to violate a cardinal rule, but what follows is not, despite its appearance, poetry. I found it today when I was sitting on a cafe patio reading as the storm approached. It blew past, a long thin strip of paper, the left two inches of a letter written in the tiny meticulous handwriting of a woman. I grabbed it out of the wind. I reconstructed what I could of partial words. Inferences are welcome.

Don’t
you and
behavior
couple

relieved
recurring
silent, or
interfere
said,
to chat
disappear
late, some
accompl[ish]
Something
made up
impossible
interfere

what I
heart.
that all
honest
explain
to rid
trying
only to
Above
really I
vacant
to blam[e]
now
didn’t
stares
enemy
any
presence
cautious.
a little

Too ma[ny]
that I
time to
that you
hell, and
I’ve been
because
to you.
confusio[n]

People are actually selling these things on eBay, and I can barely give them away. And they apparently multiply like rabbits. I now have sixteen (16) Gmail invitations to give away. The first sixteen groveling sycophants to email me get ’em. I mean it. Even if you have never met me, even if you have no idea who I am, even if you don't even know why you're reading this page, write me and take one off my hands. Please.

Today was a beautiful day, as warm as a cat’s dream on a window sill, not too humid with a bright blue sky. It’s a nice change from the miserable wring-the-moisture-right-out-of-the-air kind of swampy nastiness we’ve been having since I arrived. It promises to be this way all week long.

It was a wonderful day to end up completely unexpectedly at the National Zoo. (I guess that gives away my “undisclosed location on the east coast.” Oops.) A friend picked me up at my house and we went exploring the town. At the zoo, we came across a diagram of the panda gestation process, and the first step in the process just looked so charming I thought I’d share:

My friend Kas just sent me this: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. I’m honestly not sure whether the results are more or less funny than the fact that such things are studied in the first place. You tell me.

Um. . . I'm not sure where I was or how I missed it, but it has just come to my attention that John Ashcroft, the Attorney General of the United States of America, performed on my birthday in 2002 a very nice song that he had written himself. You should watch.