Following on Mike's post of yesterday, there's an interesting Metafilter discussion of the so-called finding in question. Glad to see that the media is awake to these important advances in science.

As for writing on the web -- it's hard to disagree with the notion that the restrictions, inconveniences, and limitations that come with reading electronic text have forced me to think harder about the sharpness of what I write. I wonder, however, if it's conversely ruining me as a reader, making me habitually attuned to the bite-sized, the freshly linked, the up-2-the-second, the quickly scannable. I worry I'm less patient as a reader, and simply less inclined to take excursions into dense arguments or truly thoughtful, lengthy description.

Also, I tend, when writing a post like this, to be focused on getting it done quickly. This is a simple intellectual mistake, of course, but because I don't usually plan out my posts well in advance, and write them (as it were) on the fly, I think I'm less likely than in other venues to be writing well.

Vicious Baby Gary sends you your Glam Name

All right. I spent way too much time yesterday reading this GuerrillaNews Special Report on Coca-Cola's legislative malevolence. It's too long, it's strident in places, it's too long, it could do with a little more balance, the characters and their attributes are predictable...it's too long....

And still I found it kinda fascinating. If there was a print-ready version I'd recommend it wholeheartedly. As it is, I almost do anyway.

The thing that's distinctive about writing on the web as opposed to paper is that it's incredibly unpleasant to read on a screen. It's at a strange angle, the typography is lousy, and I'm doing it at my desk. So writing on the web has to be more snappy (small chunks, annecdotes, funny bits, full of things for readers to do, like clicking) than it otherwise would be in order to keep my attention. And it has to be about sports, sex, or wombats.

Anyway, for the stuff I put on the web, writing this way took some getting used to. But I wonder if my academic writing isn't getting better as a result.

In other news, it turns out that scientists have discovered that consciousness really is seated in an immaterial soul and that the brain is just a fellow traveler. There goes the past hundred years or so of the philosophy of mind!

Woo-hoo...permalinks now in place. You can link to any post by clicking on the linkbat that follows it, and then linking to (or bookmarking, or emailing or whatever) the url that results. I don't know why I didn't bother to do this sooner.

Walking from GCT to the office on recent mornings, you'd have no idea that anyone considered this the Information Age. Heavy machinery is the dominating fact of life. Now that the former building at Madison and 41st exists only in the memory of its former super, the round-the-clock effort to build a grand new Palace of Commerce on that site moves along with an industrial energy that belies all this talk of recession. The most fascinating part, to me, is the expert, delicately managed maneuvering of the gargantuan rigs which must back in, at an odd angle, to the construction site, through a gate approximately one foot wider than the widest part of the truck itself. And they do it quickly, cavalierly, in heavy traffic, all day long.

I'm off to go speak to Aaron's technical writing class about good content on the web. And I feel as if, truly, I have absolutely nothing to say. "Write well..." Honestly, I'm at a complete loss.

The Chicago office is now back from London. Many thanks for the tips from various offices around the globe: all were greatly appreciated. Whoever put in the Soane museum is doubly praised. Best vacation tale is of trying to steal John Major's seat at a production of Ghosts. He was quite nice about it: apologized for taking his own seat back, gave me a two hander (handshake plus shoulder touch), and sat next to Sara throughout the second act. Two cheers for him! Alas, John Major was a bit more interesting than Ghosts: it's too easy to make the moralizing character (a preacher) look like a total fool and that's what the actor did. Plus they did a weird miking thing: when one character buries his face in his mother's lap, his voice suddenly booms throughout the theater and it echoes through her microphone. Oops. Still, the lead was good. A better play was Boris Gudinov with a Russian cast. Russian just sounds cool.

Back in the city of broad shoulders, I went to a Martin Amis reading last night. Something about it seemed familiar. Of course it did: I've read about it already. He begins with droll remarks about America, the reading is basically all about about fighting with Christopher Hitchens while visiting Saul Bellow. As in Canada, the show ends with a dog telling Kingsley Amis to fuck off. No remarks about our national speech impediments, however. Coulda saved the train fare.

From Kristin Thomas's site comes this story of laundry room revenge: part one sets it up, and part two knocks it down. (thanks to MeFi).

The whole story chiefly makes me reflect on the fact that, no matter how wronged I was, I probably would be too much of a coward to strike back.

harrumph! brings you the D.I.Y. nose job.

Just remembered that the time is nearly upon us for the Dancing of the Giglio. Not just another Catholic street fair, it's your chance to stand in the sweltering Brooklyn sun and watch a village ritual that's supposedly medieval in origin but is clearly rather older and somewhat pagan (not to say humorously phallic) in its characteristics.

After the guys who lift the thing -- and a cool little oompah band -- have exhausted themselves making it thrust frenetically as they parade it down the street, you'll share their proud enervation. (Oh, yeah, the schedule info is here.)

I have the sweetest Fed Ex guy in the world.

Looking for Older Wombats?

Sadly, there seems to be a Blogger-related problem with the archives -- the links to most of the past weeks of WF brilliance have vamoosed. While the posts are all still, um, there, if you follow me, you can't get there from here just now.

Update: They're back, and very refreshed from their little nap in serverland.

Take A Deep Breath, Everyone

Celebrities are beautiful people -- looking out for one another and all. It's like being on a team: a really famous team. I think the rest of us can all learn something from this attitude.

Now Showing at Grand Army Plaza

This is an art alert.

Lexington Ave Line, Southbound from Grand Central, 6:45 PM Tuesday

It's the ebbing edge of rush hour and two guys, teenagers, wheel a huge boombox strapped to an old luggage cart to the middle of the car. After a brief spiel concerning the amazing dance act we were about to see, they turn on one of those James Brown songs you can't remember the title of later.

The first kid starts into his moves, and they're not at all bad, but nothing particularly impressive – the intensity of his scowl seems in inverse proportion to the difficulty of the relatively modest body-rocking he seemed inclined to. However, it soon becomes clear that his steps are just a warmup for his partner's moves, and a way to clear a little room.

I'm about to look back down at my book when Kid B starts in with the handspring-backflip combinations. It looks impossible in the confined space of the aisle: he's between two packed rows of seated people, who look more stunned than anything else. I'm convinced that any moment he's going to fall on someone, break his neck, break multiple necks. The train is rocketing along. I look out of the window – the juxtaposition of his aerial maneuvers with the sight of stations whipping by in the darkness is powerfully delightful.

He and his partner finish up by linking their bodies into a kind of doughnut shape, heads poking up, innocently, between one another's knees. We slow down and pull into the Brooklyn Bridge station. They collect funds, dart off, leaving the car generally, it can't be denied, lifted marginally out of the torpor of a humid June night's commute.

This is a test.

Which of the following did my co-worker claim to see just now over the West Side of Manhattan?

(a) Giant Face of Dean Stockwell, whispering "The Tooth! The Tooth!"
(b) The Concorde
(c) Cloud shaped like a plate of chicken marsala
(d) Black helicopters

Update: It was the Concorde that Winnie thought she saw. Needless to say, there were lots and lots of clouds shaped like chicken marsala, and she didn't notice a one of 'em!

Chariots of Wuss

Last night I was one of 45,000 extremely sweaty partici-panters in the {Name of Big Gigantic Bank} Corporate Challenge, a 3.5 mile race in Central Park. There's nothing like waiting in a massive crowd of your fellow perspiring yupsters for the chance to run in weather that forces the sane into powerfully air-conditioned saloons and movie theaters.

The first mile was an exercise in broken-field running. We started at the very front of the supposed "non-competitive" start, about 300 yards short of the starting gun. The idea was that ahead of us should be the "elite" and "competitive" runners, who expected to run times under 8 minutes a mile. The reality was that the titanic mob between us and the real starting line was composed at least 3/4 of people who were planning on strolling through Central Park with a buddy, collecting a hideous t-shirt, and retiring to one of the aforementioned saloons. To have any room to run, one first had to navigate a slow, soggy horde.

Which isn't to say that I'm fast – but I wasn't planning on a brisk trot. The first mile was an exercise in broken-field running, not unlike the experience of dashing for a seat on an Amtrak train leaving Penn Station at rush hour. Elbows flying, sometimes, stumbling and squeezing between stock traders with amazingly corny corporate t-shirts ("Who Let the Bulls Out") and Upper West Siders wearing their headphones (as if they had simply been joined on their evening run by forty thousand strangers –and maybe they had), I managed to move up to where there was some oxygen and a steady pace. The sky darkened and the wind came up, and for a while it seemed like we'd be dramatically downpour'd, but it didn't happen.

Even with the cooling wind, by mile 3 I was feeling the strain. I have been running about 4 miles twice a week for a while, but the effort of accelerating through the crowd, and the equatorial atmosphere were humbling my early confidence. But when I looked at all of the investment banking yutzes pushing past me on their tree-like legs, the potential humiliation of crossing the finish at a slow jog carried me (and my Blogger t-shirt) through the final quarter mile. 34:45 official time – although I think I had been shuffling along for 4 or 5 minutes by the time I actually reached the start line, that'd be guessing.

From the back of a ream of Hewlett-Packard Multipurpose Paper:

HP Multipurpose paper is a great paper solution for all your everyday office needs.

HP Paper solutions are designed and engineered for the demands of modern technology.

They're not pieces of paper -- they're components of a paper solution.

Ah, for the love of Myles Na Gopaleen, Bloomsday came and went on Sat'day, and I didn't even post a link to the classic Ulysses for Dummies. Thanks for the reminder go to the always-invaluable Textism.

Here's an Update from the good people at the Bizness Buzzword Factory.

This past few days in brief: hangover, Oznot's Dish (for the love of god get the octopus cooked in tea), Low/Dirty Three doing "Down By the River", thanks to Other Music, running in the remains of tropical storm whatever on Sunday, playing the word "hectare" in Scrabble, watching the confirmation of Gavin's theory about The Weakest Link (it's very structure ensures that the smartest will likely be voted off).

There's much of a darker nature to discuss here. But until I can face the task please enjoy these Notes from STYX by Tommy Shaw. Find out what Billy Squier and the boys were singing together in the dressing room after the show.

The axe is falling at a little consultancy I know. And the only good thing about it is that people are being, on the whole, extremely nice to each other as we wait, collectively, for the blow.

The Botching Hour

It has been a bad day; luckily, it's only got fifteen more minutes to go.

One of the less serious botches on my part in the essay on Suck below (and believe me, I don't know how to begin detailing the more serious ones; maybe tomorrow) is the implication in the note I appended as an afterthough:

"how come two tracts in strong defense of elitism, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Vonnegut's"Harrison Bergeron" become the beloved works of so many extremely non-elite thinkers?"

In the context of the essay, it may appear that in some peculiar fashion I esteem these two texts, and even characterize them as pearls cast before swine. Oh, how I wish I had been clearer -- "tracts" seemed sufficiently perjorative at the moment of composition, but the sentence seems to leave open the possibility that I think they're nifty but liked by the wrong people. No, no, no. Maybe "irritating tracts" or "famous examples of propaganda" would have done the trick. Of course, those just sound awful. And I can't think of anything better right now.

So much for the new feature, "The Sharing of Editorial Afterthoughts."

Sorry for those of you using Netscape: the PowerPoint memoir on an insignificant episode from my past doesn't work for you -- working on some alternate access method.

Meanwhile, here's a few thoughts on Suck's Enforced Vacation. In plain old HTML, no fancy-pants formatting.

Blogger is also having some problems with the template editor, which means I can't publish any new revisions to the links at left. Once it's fixed, the above item will have its place in the permanent column. Until then, you can only get it here.

This week there should be plenty of material to make up for the gap in Wombattery since last Thursday. Blame it on the heat. For now:

1. If you haven't been there, consider a trip to Vectorpark. Hours of amusement playing Levers and exploring the Robyn-Hitchcock-like animated universe.

2. A new Peregination, presentation-style: Shoplifting: a Brief Memoir in PowerPoint.

If you're like me -- and you are, aren't you? -- you've spent many a morning chuckling over the rewarding NPR bloviations of David Frum. You may enjoy a quick skim of this followed by the perusal of this. Thanks, Mr. Allen.

The Times Breaks an Important Story

It's good to know that serious business of journalism still dominates the front page of the Gray Lady. And the Today's Papers guy at Slate didn't notice.

If you have a little bandwidth and Shockwave installed, you really should try le piano graphique. Unfortunately it doesn't provide a means to record the mixes and designs you create, but it is otherwise abominably cool. I had to make myself stop.

It was a weekend of suspense media: Dominik Moll's new film With a Friend Like Harry (Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien) on Friday night, and then reading Peter Ackroyd's twisted historical thriller Hawksmoor yesterday. WAFLH is wonderfully Hitchcockian, elegantly simple, and leisurely in its pacing. While it doesn't have the kind of clever conceit that drove Memento, WAFLH has wound up lingering my minds eye for much longer than any of the scenes in Memento did. One moment in particular -- a dream of the protagonist featuring a dentist office and a flying monkey -- is simultaneously creepy and delightful. The whole thing will, however, make you reconsider that fantasy of buying an old house in the French countryside to relax in.

I started reading Hawksmoor because Alan Moore cites it as a reference for his Masonic history of London outlined in From Hell. I'm only a few chapters in, but I'm already hooked. Devil-worship and architecture in early 18th-century England: the perfect summer reading, as far as I'm concerned.

Tiny Fontland

Have you looked at ockham's razor yet? Samantha Randall's site dedicated to design, aesthetic philosophy, and the sort of substantive reflection on work & ideas that makes my pathetic attempts at posting here look like the mutterings of a hungover sophmore who woke up halfway through class. Today's letter from her father is rather wonderful and makes me miss the pleasures of Open Letters, the archives of which are, happily, still active (a good one to start with incidentally is Samantha Shapiro's double letter about losing and regaining a laptop in Israel).