General

As always, I am grateful for the kindness with which you reacted to our tragedy.

As always: thank you, world.

I wound up calling this guy. The number listed was his home number but his wife kindly gave me his work number. He sounded pretty confused when I talked to him, so I just recommended that he contact his local FBI office and complain that someone was using his name for fraudulent purposes. At the time, there was no telling if he was lying or not. I figured recommending the cops would work either way. ...

[gallery] Closeup of a Sambral elevator. The pair of bravos below contemplate cutting the elevator ropes.

I am currently the proud owner of the Twitter accounts SarahPalinUSSR and SarahPalinEU, to offset SarahPalinUS, but I’m not quite sure what I should do with ’em. Any ideas? Although now that I look at it, she seems to have gone back to her old account (original). Darn it.

So I wander into my break room at work today and I see this: “Golden French Toast.” On one of those little cups you stick in the coffee machine and it makes coffee. We have a bunch of various types. This is new to me. I figured it was a joke. “The comforting flavors of warm, buttered French Toast with a touch of cinnamon, drizzled with sweet maple syrup.” ...

Pandas don’t have just one religion, but probably their most popular religion is this: There are many gods. The goal of all the gods, except for maybe a few twisted ones, is to create the most perfect object possible in our universe. In fact, this is the sole reason our universe was created; any object created in the palaces of the gods, which lie beyond, is perfect by definition. The universe we live in was fabricated as a testing ground of sorts. ...

The MacArthur Fellows always cheer me up, as much for the people I don’t recognize as for those I do. It must be such a neat surprise to be named. And look! David Macaulay. I love his books. Josiah McElheny! I don’t know you but you’re not Dale Chihuly. Terence Tao, way to be smart. Luis von Ahn, thanks for inventing CAPTCHA. I love that people invent stuff that seems obvious afterwards. And John Zorn, yeah, there’s a lot right about that. ...

Not that it’s likely we’ll forget. That string of pictures has, for the last five years, meant the most to me.

Seoul’s defeated me. Ten San Franciscos, a dozen Bostons, the third largest urban sprawl in the world. I’m in the megacity, and it has no reason to bother speaking my language. Coming in from the airport, driving at sixty miles per hour, it wasn’t more than half an hour before the apartment buildings began. Buildings? High-rises: concrete masses rising fifteen or twenty stories into the sky, with three story high logos painted on one side. Samsung, Hyundai, others I don’t recognize. We pass high-rise after high-rise in rows along the highway, stacked close together and stretching far back from the road. It’s another twenty minutes before we get off the highway and enter the district where my hotel is. The apartment buildings continue the entire way. ...