B12 Solipsism

And a thousand miles behind.

As you’ve probably already heard, Bob Dylan was recently picked up by a young police officer who had no idea who Bob Dylan was, and found his story of playing a concert later with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp implausible, at best.

The police officer noted that the gentleman looked nothing like the Bob Dylan she had seen photos of, like this iconic shot from his Wild Mercury days…

Instead he looked more like this:

[Photo by Rich Corzatt]

To police in a New Jersey seaside town, the rock legend Bob Dylan was merely an eccentric pensioner wandering the streets in the pouring rain. According to Dylan himself, he was just “out for a walk”. But now there is growing speculation that when the star was recently questioned by the police, he may have been in search of Bruce Springsteen’s old house, where he wrote the classic Born to Run.

Probing musicians’ backgrounds who influenced the world of rock in the 1960s and 1970s is a hobby for Dylan. Last November he turned up unannounced at a Winnipeg house where the Canadian rock star Neil Young grew up. Kiernan and Patti Regan came home from shopping to find him waiting on their doorstep and invited him in.

Then, in May, Dylan paid a £16 entrance fee and mingled anonymously with tourists at the childhood home of John Lennon in Woolton, Liverpool.

…

The location where he was stopped was close to the house where Springsteen wrote his hits Born to Run and Thunder Road three decades ago. Could he have been on the way to a visit?

[Click to continue reading Rambling Bob Dylan raises police suspicions - The Guardian]

Funny. Who knows, if I toured as frequently and consistently as Bob Dylan, I might wander around strange towns too.

A few interesting links collected May 17th through May 19th:

• New York State Aims for 100 MW of Rooftop Solar Power by 2015 : TreeHugger – photo: Seth Anderson via flickr.

  And thanks to TreeHugger staff for learning from their little mistake – proper credit to photographers is not difficult, makes everyone happier, fitter.

• The 1871 fires – Disarranging Mine – Did you know that on the night the Great Chicago Fire started, October 8, 1871, there were many more fires across the Upper Midwest?
• Gabriel Villa’s Mural Destroyed « mediating the medium – "I recently received a disturbing e-mail from the artist Gabriel Villa that began with “The city white washed my mural.” In it Villa explained how the mural he began in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood at Kaplan’s Liquors 960 W 31st St, as a part of Version>09 was destroyed by the city only days before its completion. I had been documenting Villa’s progress as a part of this year’s festival and I am sadden by the news of its destruction. He was granted permission by the owner of the building to paint the mural and this forces me to ask, what was the real reason for this censorship?"

  Despicable. Censorship at its most heavy handed. Welcome to Daley's Chicago

A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:

• CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)

  As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.

• Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
• TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
• Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.

  This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.

• An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

  I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."

  I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.

• Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.

  Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.

• Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
• The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.

  In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

  "Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.

• Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

  If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

• Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
• Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
• George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

  We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

  It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

• Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

  But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

Some additional reading February 10th from 19:19 to 21:03:

• Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about? – real time twitter feed of curse words. Not everything shows up, but still amusing

• 

• Ukulelia: Your Passport to Four Stringed Paradise – Performance artists Roger Geenawalt and David Barratt recorded and performed all 185 Beatles songs with 185 guest artists…on ukulele, natch.

  The performance was then cast as a benefit for Warren Buffett. (Head about to explode. Must. Keep. Blogging.) And they’ve now just delivered the cash to him in person. (Following is the BEST interview with Warren Buffett evar.)

We were laughing about Snuggies ’round these parts recently. Looks so much like a Jim Jones kind of garment, just missing the cup of Flavor-Aid or a pair of Heaven’s Gate Nikes.¹

The Snuggie blanket launched nationally on direct-response TV in October, just as the economy was slowing to a crawl, so the timing seemingly couldn’t have been worse. However, it turns out the timing couldn’t have been better.

The quirky little blanket with sleeves has become the raiment of the zeitgeist, with more than 4 million units sold in just over three months and more than 200 parody videos on YouTube.

…

[Scott Boilen, president of Allstar Marketing Group, Hawthorne, N.Y] said he’s heard reports of customers swamping stockers and grabbing all the Snuggies before they even reach the shelves at Bed, Bath & Beyond or Walgreens, the first two retailers to carry the blankets.

The timing worked well on many fronts for Snuggie. With conventional advertisers pulling back, remnant time for direct-response ads has swelled. And because apparel and other consumer-product sales are down, plenty of idle Chinese factories are eager for business.

Ads tout the Snuggie as a way to cut heating bills and let folks curl up on the sofa with their hands free. With a growing number of consumers hunkering down and looking to save money, two Snuggies and two book lights for $19.95 is starting to look like a pretty good deal.

And something about the Snuggie just matches the spirit of the times. “It’s a tremendous value in today’s tough economic times,” Mr. Boilen said. “In this type of economy, people are looking for a value, and this is certainly a value at the price point. … People are staying home more, and it makes them feel good.”

[From Humble Snuggie: Marketing's New Red-Hot Seller - Advertising Age - News]

Is your life shrouded in a cold blue haze? Do arrows with $ symbols appear when you try to raise the thermostat? Is your blanket slightly too small? If so please join us, the Cult of Snuggie. There will be punch and pie.

1. no, it wasn’t Kool-Aid, stop saying it was [↩]

Alex Boese of the Weird Universe blog adds a counterpoint to the Scottish origin of rap theory we ridiculed a few weeks ago:

The more conventional theory is that the roots of rap music trace back to ancient West African poets called “griots”. From Wikipedia:

the griots of West Africa were delivering stories rhythmically, over drums and sparse instrumentation. Because of the time that has passed since the griots of old, the connections between rap and the African griots are widely established, but not clear-cut. However, such connections have been acknowledged by rappers, modern day “griots”, spoken word artists, mainstream news sources, and academics.

Actually, given the big gap in time between these two possible origins and the emergence of rap in the 1970s, both theories sound a little iffy to me.

[From Weird Theory: The Scottish Origin of Rap]

What a strange thought to have when giving a fluff-ball interview about a television series being filmed in Chicago! Patrick Swayze worries that the Soviet¹ hordes are going to invade the US, and Chicago would be their target. Or something.

I felt that Chicago added so much, just in terms of the energy. If you read any Tom Clancy novel, Chicago is much more a dangerous point in this country than people realize. Tom Clancy says, if you want to invade the U.S., come through Mexico and come through Chicago, and split the country in half. Chicago has much deeper-reaching fingers, from a national security point of view, than most people realize.

[From Swayze feels at home in Chicago -- chicagotribune.com]

Ok. Will make sure to stockpile weapons and canned goods, thanks Mr. Swayze.

1. sic, of course, but maybe he thinks the Venezuelans are coming? Unclear who this invading army might be as I’ve managed to avoid reading any Tom Clancy novels [↩]

I’ve never had the urge to sample dog meat, probably for the same reason that I am mostly a vegetarian. I’ve lived on a farm, so I have an inkling of an idea where meat comes from: pig meat, cow meat, even chicken flesh all originates from the body of a friendly critter. In the US anyway, most of our meat comes from factory farms.

THOSE who hope to taste dog meat when they visit Beijing for this summer’s Olympics may be disappointed. The Beijing Catering Trade Association has ordered all 112 designated Olympic restaurants to take dog off the menu, and has strongly advised other establishments to stop serving it until September. Waiters have been urged to “patiently” suggest alternative dishes to customers who ask for dog. It’s all part of a wider campaign to avoid offending foreigners during the Games. (Beijingers have also been told to line up nicely, to stop spitting and even to avoid asking tourists questions about their ages, salaries and love lives.)

The order is not likely to bother many residents. Though dogs have been raised for food in China for thousands of years, you have to hunt around to find the meat on modern menus. Certain regions, like Hunan and Guizhou Provinces, are known for their canine predilections — but even in these places, dog is a relative rarity. And in Beijing itself, you hardly find it except in a few Korean and regional Chinese restaurants.

Dog eating, in any case, tends to be a seasonal pursuit. According to Chinese folk dietetics, which classify every food according to its heating and cooling properties, dog is one of the “hottest” meats around, best eaten in midwinter, when you need warmth and vital energy, not in sultry August.

That eating dog is seen as an issue says more about Western preoccupations than Chinese habits. Since time immemorial, Westerners have had a morbid fascination with the weird fringes of the Chinese diet. Marco Polo noted with distaste that the Chinese liked eating snake and dog; modern Western journalists just love to get their teeth into a juicy story about some revolting delicacy like the assorted animal penises served at the Guolizhuang restaurant in Beijing. And for gung-ho foreign tourists, a skewerful of deep-fried scorpions in the night market in central Beijing has become a rite of passage.

[From In Beijing, It’s Too Hot for Dog on the Menu - Fuchsia Dunlop - NYTimes.com]

Speaking on that topic, there’s a show dedicated to such conspicuous consumption of oddities called Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmer (blog here). We watched several one day, an oddly fascinating travel show.

This cracks me up.

July 27, 2004, a friend invited Guru Raj to create a Google e-mail account. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia, Raj, then twenty-one, was watching the Democratic National Convention on a television in his parents’ basement, in Norcross, Georgia. The beta version of Gmail—available by invitation only—was less than four months old at the time, and largely unproved, but Raj’s U.V.A. e-mail account was set to expire in a few weeks, so he decided to give Gmail a try.

At first, Raj tried to create an address using his own name, but, remarkably, both gururaj@gmail.com and rajguru@gmail.com were already taken. So he tried the name of the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV. To his surprise, it worked, and, moments later, barackobama@gmail.com was quietly born. “I’m not some cute little Indian boy who grew up in America with political aspirations,” Raj, the first in his family to be born an American citizen, said recently. “I just thought it would be kind of funny to create an e-mail address based on a random senator whose name no one could spell.”

Over the next four years, as Gmail became the third most popular Webmail provider in the U.S. and Obama became a serious contender for the next President of the United States, Raj used the account for his personal e-mail. In the fall of 2006, he received, for the first time, a message intended for the Senator. By February, 2007, when Obama formally announced his candidacy, Raj was daily receiving dozens of misdirected notes from all over the world.

[Click to read more of Squatters: Obama’s In-box: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker]

I’ll bet a lot of crazy stuff gets sent to that email address.

The Dark Lord, Robert Novak, apparently didn’t notice he had run over a pedestrian, and kept going, even though the victim was on Novak’s car. Sounds like a hit and run to me.

Robert Novak says he has been issued a $50 citation after hitting a pedestrian while driving in downtown Washington.

Witnesses say the collision occurred about 10 a.m. Wednesday as the 77-year-old Novak was traveling near K Street in his black Chevrolet Corvette.

Novak tells WJLA-TV he was cited for failing to yield the right of way. He says he didn’t realize what happened and continued driving until a bicyclist stopped him.

David Bono, the bicyclist who witnessed the incident, told The Associated Press that the pedestrian was hit in a crosswalk and was splayed across Novak’s windshield.

[From The Raw Story | Video: Columnist Robert Novak issued citation after hitting pedestrian]

Novakula in a black Corvette sounds appropriate somehow. Novak shouldn’t be allowed to mingle with humans.

TalkLeft adds:

The bicyclist was David Bono, a partner at Harkins Cunningham, who was on his usual bike commute to work at 1700 K St. N.W.when he witnessed the accident.

As he traveled east on K Street, crossing 18th, Bono said a “black Corvette convertible with top closed plowed into the guy. The guy is sort of splayed onto the windshield.”

Bono said that the pedestrian, who was crossing the street on a “Walk” signal and was in the crosswalk, rolled off the windshield and that Novak then made a right into the service lane of K Street. “The car is speeding away. What’s going through my mind is, you just can’t hit a pedestrian and drive away,” Bono said.

Visible to visitors to/from Roswell

ELEVA, Wis. – Carlene and Duane Schultz decided to use Brett Favre’s image in their corn maze after he announced his retirement in the spring. And even though Favre’s desire to be released from the Packers has created controversy, Carlene Schultz thinks people will be open to going through the maze when it opens Sept. 1.

The maze at Schultz’s Country Barn in Eleva reads “thanks” and shows Favre’s upper body holding a football, with his No. 4 jersey.

[From Wisconsin family creates maze to thank Brett Favre - Yahoo! News]

I still hate football.