Back in June, 2003 I posted about how people are abusing the concept of freedom of speech. Now the cyber-law-star Lawrence Lessig addresses the same topic, making completely justified fun of Ralph Nader’s ridiculous assertion that people saying he shouldn’t run for President are somehow depriving him of his First Amendment rights.
An engraving on wood, or the product of printing using such an engraving. Often used for engravings of text. Xylo=wood, Graph=writing. Used as early as the eighth century. Gutenberg used this technique in the 15th century as well.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve placed “Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory,” my childhood memoir, under a Creative Commons license, making it available for anyone to read on-line.
It’s available here.
(View the original announcement.)
The Treo, of course, is Palm One’s little PDA phone. The latest version, the 600, is smaller and cuter than previous versions.
We won’t be buying any Treo’s though. Sakiko bought the very first one when it came out two years ago, the model with a flip cover (the second version, the 270, had this flip lid, too). It wasn’t a bad device, although a bit bulky. Unfortunately, one side of where the flip cover was connected broke about two months ago. But the brain-damaged design is that you have to unflip the cover in order to have a phone call. There’s a little wire going through the plastic connection that broke, so it’s still connected, like someone’s hand where the wrist bone got cut off but is still hanging on by the tendons. The phone is essentially now unusable.
What idiot designed a product with inferior materials at such an obvious point of failure? There’s no way to fix it, except to pay Palm hundreds of dollars, more than it would cost to buy a new phone. I find it absolutely irresponsible that Palm would not cover the cost of fixing a problem like this which was so obviously a result of its own design mistakes.
We’ve been buying the $2 Charles Shaw wine ever since Trader Joe’s set up shop just a ten-minute walk away from our apartment. It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s drinkable and hey, you can buy a case for $24.
No more. We unfortunately saw the TV special about the product. It turns out the man making it, Fred Franzia, is quite an unsavory character. He’s a convicted felon—and the crime had to do with wine and mislabeled grapes, and cost him $3 million in fines. He looks really unpleasant. He bought the label on the cheap from the ex-wife of the real Charles Shaw. He tries to pass his wine off as a Napa wine although the grapes come from all over.
Every time we drank the wine after that it tasted worse and worse. Now we’ve given Charles Shaw the boot and moved up to the premium $2.99 bottles.
The NYT editorial page today had an interesting article showing how having more choices could actually make people more unhappy. More choices mean you have to spend more time to collect information to hopefully make the right decision; and people with more choices spend more time looking back and regretting that they may have made the wrong decision.
Come to think of it, that’s one of the reasons I find Japan a congenial place in many ways—there are fewer choices in general. There’s usually only one choice as regards what kind of health insurance you’re going to get. There are many fewer choices, if any at all, as to how you’re going to invest your retirement money. You don’t have so many choices to make in how to run basic social aspects of your life. You spend less time worrying about choices in the job market since you change jobs less.
America seems to be going in the opposite direction. Now we even have too many choices of which anti-depressant to take to treat our unhappiness at having too many choices to deal with. So I have a modest proposal. People who don’t want to decide what stock to invest in can just put their money into index funds. We should apply the index fund concept to everything. For instance, it should be possible to go to an electronics site and just say you want the same digital camera in the $200-250 range that everyone else is getting. All stores would be required to report the information about what everyone is buying in a standardized form to a central location so all the people that didn’t want to spend all their time choosing among the 50 different models could just buy the most popular one.
Additional reading:
We’ve grown to love this simple way to make pork tenderloin. Mix mustard and honey and coat the tenderloin with it. Then roll it in a mixture of ground peanuts and whatever spices you like—we’ve found cumin to work well. Throw this in the oven at 350 for 30 to 45 minutes, until the internal temperature is about 155.
This works great for dinner, and the leftovers make great sandwiches the next day.
Continuing our reporting in this space on attempts to tear down the wall between church and state by a Catholic fringe element led by His Eminence Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, American bishops recently completely repudiated Chaput’s bizarre notion that Catholics should spend all their energy trying to elect anti-abortion zealots to public office while ignoring dead Iraqi children, giving him only five votes out of 230 in an election for president of the United States Conference of Bishops.
Elected instead was Bishop Skylstead of Spokane, in spite of criticism by the fanatics that he spent too much time talking about low-priority issues such as war and capital punishment. The same fanatics also tried to make an issue of Skylstead’s creative approach of taking the diocese into bankruptcy in order to deal fairly with the victimes of decades of priestly pedophilia.
There must be more gyms per capita around where I live in West Hollywood than anywhere else on earth with the possible exception of Manhattan.
Right up on Santa Monica, a 10-minute walk, is 24 Hour Fitness, a capable if boring chain. That’s the main place me and Sakiko work out.
But the training we do once or twice a week with Mike is in training gyms. We started off at Todd Tramp’s at La Cienega and Melrose, also a 10-minute walk away, a testosterone-oriented place with the eponymous Todd sitting at the front desk looking oh so muscular. Later, we spent six months working out at the trendy Angel City Gym on Melrose, just an eight-minute walk from our house, right past the Epicurean School of Culinary Arts where Sakiko and I have taken a number of cooking classes. This is the gym where they have $5,000 pieces of original artwork on the wall for you to gaze at while doing your gluteal extensions. Or perhaps you’d like to go out onto the second-floor balcony, complete with gazebo, to do your end-of-workout crunches.
Later we moved to Workout Warehouse, on LaPeer between Melrose and Santa Monica, a twelve-minute walk, the grunge gym par excellence, where they make a point of not decorating. Lots of celebs here, though; we’ve seen Tim Allen, Raquel Welch, Keanu Reeves, Brendon Fraser, Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina), Jennifer Tilly (the divorcee Jim Carrey represented in Liar Liar), and of course the stunning Rachel Weisz.
Most recently we switched to Exclusive, at La Cienega and Holloway, a block north of Santa Monica; this one might be a fifteen-minute walk. Too soon to judge this place, but it seems very laid-back.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The other day we peeked into a building across the street from the iconic Urth Caffe and found it was a gym, Libby Healthworks. Above the Starbucks on Santa Monica is Body Works. I’d guess in a fifteen-minute walking radius of our house there’s probably a total of fifteen gyms.
Bush is in initiative mode now. And obesity is the topic of the moment. Why not announce an anti-obesity “vision” for America? He could start off with tax credits for gym membership, workout equipment, personal training fees, and nutritional consultation. Or maybe this is something the Democrats should pick up on.
A dissenter; a nonconformist. Comes from the name used for the Roman Catholics in England who incurred legal and social penalties in the 16th century and afterward for refusing to attend services of the Church of England.