All Intensive Purposes

Ito had said that he wanted to build "a box that is not a box," and he proposed a rectangular building that would have an orderly colonnade around the perimeter but roof beams positioned randomly, as though scattered from above. Balmond disapproved. "It just didn't look right," he said last fall, in a well-attended lecture at Cooper Union, in New York. "It looked precious, in a way."

The pavilion as it was built was a typically Balmondesque transformation of the architect's original concept. Balmond began by drawing a square. Then he superimposed a second square, somewhat smaller and turned slightly askew, and then a third square, and so on, until he had filled the sheet. Then he extended all the lines until they reached the edges of his sketchbook. When he finished, the page looked like a pane of glass fractured into asymmetrical trangles and other polygons, but the underlying pattern was actually regular: a spiralled square. For the pavilion, Balmond and Ito folded the pattern to form a box, turned the lines into steel plates, and filled in roughly half of the polygonal openings with panels. The interior looked a little like a three-dimensional projection from a broken kaleidoscope -- a box that, to people sitting at café tables inside it, didn't appear to be a box. The building was described by the Financial Times as "one of the most beautiful and delicate structures seen in London in recent years" . . . .

For Balmond, the Ito Serpentine pavilion was a telling example of what he calls the power of algorithm, of a simple mathematical rule repeatedly applied. Nature builds structure algorithmically -- one call becomes two, two become four, four become eight -- and Balmond allowed the pavilion's design to generate itself in an analogous way. . . . A member of the A.G.U. who worked on the pavilion told me that the load path created by the algorithm had serendipitously turned out to be just as efficient as a traditional grid: despite its apparent complexity, the pavilion stood up by itself and was easy to construct. During assembly, a workman, using wooden blocks, propped up one of the corners, which looked precarious to him because it didn't touch the ground -- entirely unnecessarily, as Balmond was able to show him by kicking away one of the blocks.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:48 AM 0 Comments

The reason Cheney’s Office got to dominate the executive branch is because we -- America -- elected a neophyte who lacked the experience, knowledge, and judgment to be president. . . . Our nation’s political machinery elevated a grossly inexperienced and ignorant man to the Oval Office. The entirely predictable result is that he would be forced to rely on someone else to make the decisions he wasn’t able or willing to make. . . .

It’s pretty simple. When you elect someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, you’re essentially electing someone else to be president. Kerry and Gore had their flaws, but they would have been the Deciders. They certainly would not have tolerated a lawless, out-of-control operation such as Cheney’s Office. At the very least, they would have, you know, been aware of the debates and had some pre-existing knowledge to inform their judgment. Bush, by contrast, was simply no match for Cheney and Rumsfeld’s decades of experience. Thus, the failure that is Cheney is not merely an individual failure on the part of Bush. Cheney is an institutional failure -- a failure of our political system. That’s the key to understand. The rise of Cheney is itself an indictment of our political institutions and culture.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:21 AM 0 Comments

Today’s opinions in the Seattle school case feature the too usual lectures from conservative justices on the meaning of the “good” civil rights movement, the one which asserted that “the constitution is color-blind.” Of course, neither Chief Justice Roberts nor any other member of the majority were actually members of that “good” civil rights movement. To paraphrase Dick Cheney, they had other priorities at a time when police dogs were being set upon African-American children who dared insist on the right to drink at the same water-fountains as white children. Indeed, Roberts, Alito, and Scalia were proud to be in the vanguard of the movement that pried from the Democratic Party those who set the dogs upon the children (and those who applauded that behavior). They could do so in good conscience because somewhere in the late 1960s, the “good” civil rights movement was replaced by the “bad” civil rights movement, a movement which insists that persons of color be actual as well as pro forma, legal equals. Curiously, this transition took place even though the vast majority of participants in the “good” civil rights movement remained in the “bad” civil rights movement, included almost the entire leadership. By comparison, on this history, George Wallace became the person who best understood that the central principle of BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION was that no “innocent” white person could ever be harmed in the effort to secure racial equality and any person of color who claimed covert race discrimination would have to produce a smoking gun the equivalent of the smoking guns which convinced the Burger Court that the Alabama Constitutional Convention of 1900ish was committed to race supremacy. Recognizing that George Wallace and Strom Thurmond are the true heirs to Martin Luther King, Justice Roberts and his allies feel the need to direct lectures on BROWN to the “bad” civil rights movement in the hope that we may be converted.

There is, of course, something deeply hypocritical about persons who, at best can be called conscientious objectors during the Civil Rights movement, lecturing the actual participants on the true meaning of their cause. But if one remembers that Roberts and Alito were probably hand picked by Dick Chaney, hypocrisy is exactly what we should expect of them.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:16 AM 0 Comments

The words people, popular, populist, which had been monopolies or near-monopolies of the Left for one hundred and fifty years at least (in Hungary "people" had been a Leftist and "nation" a Rightist term), now became adopted by the a new radical "Right." This development had begun in Germany a few decades earlier (assisted by the peculiarly tribal and mystical German word Volk). It was taken up by Mussolini in 1914 when he called his radical nationalist new newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. Twenty-five years later, when the Second World War began in Europe, folkish and populaire became the favorable designations of Fascist and Nazi sympathizers throughout the Continent. These, as indeed the newfangled nationalist populists in Hungary, began to attack those men in the establishment and government who were "old-fashioned" (that word, in Hungary as well as in the United States, had a definitively pejorative connotation at that time), "reactionaries," that is, ossified representatives of an antiquated order.

// posted by t.s. @ 9:20 AM 0 Comments

[A]s Gellman and Becker relate, the Vice President consistently prevails in the internal debates. He wins virtually every battle -- or at least bollixes things up sufficiently to prevent others from prevailing. (A good example was last week's short-lived story, when certain high-level officials leaked word of a meeting the next day at which the fate of Guantanamo was to be decided, and a consensus to close it had all but been reached -- a leak obviously designed to make the closure virtually inevitable. By that very evening, Cheney had successfully caused the meeting to be cancelled, and had stopped the "Close GTMO" forces in their tracks -- forces that included high-level players such as the Secretaries of State and Defense.)

This is the great mystery of the Bush Administration, and the question that no one, including Gellman and Becker, has answered: It's not very newsworthy that the Vice President has strongly held views, and that he fights hard for them. (So did Vice President Gore.) Nor is it even terribly notable that he is constantly opposed by others in the Administration. What is remarkable is that time and again, Cheney wins. And in so doing, he makes mincemeat of Powell, Ashcroft, Gates, Rice, etc. They are constantly beaten back -- indeed, in many cases, they're not even briefed into the process or the substance of the decision making.

Why do strong figures such as Rice, Gates, et al., continue to allow the Vice President to run roughshod over them and make them look like fools?

// posted by t.s. @ 8:02 PM 0 Comments

Many people living near Lake Superior don't buy drought or warm weather as the reasons for dropping water levels — a conspiracy theory is more popular. They say Lake Superior was drained through the St. Mary's River to raise the levels of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.

// posted by t.s. @ 6:40 PM 0 Comments

Paper Cuts will be a daily round-up of news and opinion about books and other printed matter. Make that an almost daily round-up. There won’t be posts on weekends. Or holidays. Or on the mornings after the Book Review’s bimonthly drinks nights at Jimmy’s Corner, a bar in midtown Manhattan.

// posted by t.s. @ 9:41 AM 1 Comments

In Glasgow, the city council has long sought a way to beat back the countless concert advertisements that are stuck and stapled to every spare, flat, and visible surface, but without luck. At least until they started slapping "CANCELED" stickers across the advertisements, prompting hordes of angry phone calls to concert promoters and turning away others who would be interested. Chris Uggen: "I give them 10 out 10 for style, 10 out of 10 for creativity, and maybe 3 out of 9 zillion for enforcement priorities. but dang that's clever."

// posted by t.s. @ 9:34 AM 0 Comments

The precise nature of the darkening of Russian politics under President Putin has been too little noticed in the West, and too little understood. The West has worried too little, in part because the Russian economy has been doing so well thanks to high oil prices. The assumption has been that rising living standards and foreign investment will encourage a more liberal political order, though there is no sign of this yet. The West has also had other things to worry about -- such as the Iraq war and the rest of the Middle East, global warming, and the rise of China. Its governments hesitate to speak badly of Russian policy when they need Russia's cooperation in the "war on terror," as an ally against nuclear proliferation, and as an exporter of energy. And, crucially, there have been few domestic critics of Putin equipped with the authenticity and charisma needed to hold the world's attention. One of that small number was Anna Politkovskaya, an American-born journalist who was a special correspondent for an independent Russian newspaper called Novaya Gazeta. She was a dogged critic of Putin and of the antiliberal political system he favored. And she was shot dead in the entrance to her apartment building, seemingly by a professional assassin, on October 7, 2006.

// posted by t.s. @ 4:23 PM 0 Comments

It's hard to read the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami's dislocating novels without occasionally wondering what's lost in translation. . . . On Murakami's Web site, you can read an e-mail exchange between a few of his translators; they discuss the joy and heartbreak of getting his work into English. Food seems to be a special problem. Jay Rubin writes: "In general, the Japanese have a far more sensitive and sophisticated awareness regarding food than most Americans. ... So when a Murakami character makes himself an egg salad sandwich, Japanese readers are going to feel something a little different from what American readers are going to feel about it. There is no way to convey the cultural context regarding that sandwich in a translation, except perhaps through some scholarly footnotes." (That must be some egg salad sandwich!) Another Murakami translator, Philip Gabriel, writes that when he was working on Murakami's novel "Sputnick Sweetheart," he had to deal with a scene in which a character was eating a "Mont Blanc" in a Tokyo cafe. "I originally just left this as 'Mont Blanc,'" Gabriel writes, "but Murakami was worried that people in the West would think she was eating an expensive fountain pen instead of a type of cake, so we decided to make it a generic 'cake' instead." A Japanese Mont Blance cake, by the way, is usually topped with sweet chestnut cream extruded to resemble noodles. . . .

// posted by t.s. @ 7:59 AM 0 Comments

Anthony Barbieri

Anthony ("Tony") Barbieri is an American comedy writer whose work has appeared on television programs such as Crank Yankers and the Jimmy Kimmel Live show.

Born in Framingham, Massachusetts, his long-running Monroe series has appeared in more than 100 issues of Mad Magazine.

Jake Byrd

On the Jimmy Kimmel Live show, one of the things Barbieri is best known for is insinuating himself into major news stories, as a fictitious character. Among other names, he has called himself Jake Byrd when doing this. He has successfully fooled major media outlets, including The New York Times and Court TV.

One of his most recent famous stunts was posing as an obsessed fan at the 2005 trial of Michael Jackson. During the arraignment of Michael Jackson he fooled The New York Times. During jury deliberations, he similarly fooled Court TV, as the same character, with the same back story ([1]). The Jake Byrd character ostensibly works in a pet store in southern California.

He was heard screaming "No, No, No, No!" at the Paris Hilton News conference, when Paris Hilton was sent back to Jail for driving on a suspended License, on June 8th, 2007 and was referred to in news reports (without any mention of the fact that he was "performing") ([2]).

// posted by t.s. @ 1:53 PM 3 Comments

"There is only one question here," says the former senator. "Did he raise his right hand and lie about it and then lie again? Lying under oath -- that to me is all there is. Did this man, whether he is head of the hardware store or the president or applying for a game and fishing license, raise his hand and say, 'This is the truth'?"

Scooter is not some hard-hearted partisan who delights in subterfuge, or "cover-up" or mendacity. He is a splendid human being.

I shall always remain puzzled how the situation ever "came to this." Some are of the opinion that he has 'fallen upon his sword" and yet, it is my perception that the sword has fallen on him.

When I think of what had happened to him --- words fail me (and who of my friends would believe that one?!) because all of this is so totally inconsistent with the basic attributes and the reputation of the man I know... From my knowledge of him, I say without equivocation or hesitation whatsoever that he is a very good man.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:06 PM 0 Comments

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy From Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater. Not only does Pinkwater leave the whole Mars business mostly unexplained, but the central device in the book is that famous “lost” places like Atlantas and Mu exist in the same physical space as our world, and through various techniques, the two fat Jewish teenagers who are the stars of the book can travel between them by tuning out our world and tuning in the other. There’s a wildly psychedelic scene where they’re halfway between one and the other and everything in our world becomes transparent and permeable.

Figgs and Phantoms, by Ellen Raskin., by Ellen Raskin. This one went completely over my head when I read it as a kid. Raskin did the far more normal Westing Game, but this one, about a family of eccentrics who have had their own personal afterlife (Capri, they call it) for hundreds of years, bears little similarity to it, or to anything else I read as a child. You do get to see Capri—sort of—but the ultimate message is that we make our own afterlife. Haunting.

Needless to say, these both read well at any age, and they’re far easier than Finnegans Wake.

// posted by t.s. @ 1:53 PM 0 Comments

Last night I fell asleep reading. By my calculation, this has happened approximately 1,000 times since my daughter was born. She’s four years old, so I get the thousand nights by subtracting from her total days all the holidays, sick days, and visits with family and friends when I would have been too busy to read. Then I estimated the number of nights I’ve been too tired to even try and subtracted that. What is left, I believe, is about 1,000 nights I’ve tucked her in, reheated some morning coffee, and settled down with a book. With few exceptions, I almost always fall asleep before I’ve read a satisfying amount.

What is a satisfying amount? Let’s say 10 pages. I’m not trying to set any records.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:10 PM 0 Comments

Technology isn’t destroying journalism. “It’s simply destroying the business that subsidized journalism.” Finding another source of subsidy is what [journalists] should all be doing....

// posted by t.s. @ 7:21 PM 3 Comments

During Viking times, the islands of the Norse Kingdom of Mann and the Isles were called the Súðreyjar or Sudreys ("southern isles") in contrast to the Norðreyjar ("northern isles") of Orkney and Shetland. This became Sodor. The Church of England diocese is still called the Diocese of Sodor and Man although it only covers Mann. When the Rev. W. V. Awdry wrote The Railway Series, he invented the island of Sodor as an imaginary island located between the Isle of Man and the Cumbrian coast.

// posted by t.s. @ 1:07 PM 0 Comments