Why should we cede a celebration of the earth to dirty hippies, luddite lefties, and their assorted anti-progress fellow-travelers? I love this beautiful planet. The oceans with their rhythmic surf, coral reefs, tide pools, and lightless trenches; the alpine meadows with glaciers, flowers, and deep blue skies; forests of all kinds; and the bustling cities where most of us live. If we are to survive in the long term, I believe we must move out and upward into the solar system and beyond. And as we move out, I know we will look back and remember this lovely cradle of humanity, perhaps hoping to return someday:

The Green Hills of Earth

Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet
Of the cool, green hills of Earth.

We rot in the moulds of Venus,
We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles,
Crawling with unclean death.

. . .

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

-- Robert Heinlein

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I wonder if Rob the Llamabutcher is in any of these pictures?

Do these people look like they're having fun?

(Via BoingBoing).

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I wonder if Virginia Postrel has seen this article in Slate yet (not sure how long the link will be viable).

From the opening sentence, Andrew Blum's article drips with condecension and scorn on commercially-motivated style (all emphases mine):

Like insecure teenagers, malls keep changing their style.

Once you get past his sarcasm, you actually learn that malls are updating their style, adding open-air plazas, sidewalks and street-side parking, and re-dubbing themselves "lifestyle centers." (I've been to one of those centers a few times here in Plano, called Legacy Town Center (or The Shops at Legacy). A near-perfect model of New Urbanist design if there can be one). A good thing, especially for a lefty writer at Slate, no? Well, actually, no:

[W]hile these new malls may appear to be public space, they're not public at all—at least if you want to do anything but shop. They represent a bait-and-switch routine on the part of developers, one that exchanges the public realm for the commercial one.

Got that? The commercial realm is exclusive of the public. It doesn't matter whether the style conforms to all the objectives of the (largely leftist) New Urbanism, it's all just a bait-and-switch routine because the developers want you to spend money in their shops.

Hmmm. I'm confused -- are developers just supposed to create these little New Urban oases without any thought of commerce? Does Blum's tone mean that he thinks the big sprawling suburban mall is better than this kind of development? Hold that thought -- next he goes on a walking tour of a few lifestyle centers and manages to get in a very subtle dig at Starbucks:

Parking my rented Chevy in front of a big-box emporium called Barbeques Galore, I walked through the arched portals that decorate the marketplace entrance. Inside, there were restaurants and stores lining a winding and narrow outdoor pedestrian street that opened up onto a series of little plazas. Padded wicker chairs were strewn about in a studied, casual way, and a huge fieldstone fireplace had benches built into it for those cool desert nights. This was a delightful place for a Frappuccino....

[At another lifestyle center], it immediately felt like a real, bustling neighborhood. The sidewalks were shaded from the sun by flowered trellises, and the streets narrowed at the corners to give pedestrians an implied right of way. An urban plaza with a good café and a band shell provided a central gathering place.

Blum seems uncomfortable with the success of this kind of development, but fortunately he recognizes and acknowledges the irony of commercial developers implementing New Urbanism:

This is civic life in America, circa 2005, and it's spreading....

[Old-fashioned indoor malls] turn their backs to their surroundings and concentrate activity in and on themselves. By contrast, lifestyle centers gesture toward their environments....

More incredibly, lifestyle centers do all the things that urban planners have promoted for years as ways of counteracting sprawl: squeeze more into less space, combine a mix of activities, and employ a fine-grained street grid to create a public realm—a "sidewalk ballet," in Jane Jacobs' alluring phrase. The irony is almost too perfect: Malls are now being designed to resemble the downtown commercial districts they replaced. What sweet vindication for urban sophisticates!

But now we get to the core of his concern, the fact that these developments are privately-owned, "carefully insulated from the messiness of public life," in his words. Blum has issues with the lifestyle centers' codes of conduct:

The list of forbidden activities includes "non-commercial expressive activity"—not to mention "excessive staring" and "taking photos, video or audio recording of any store, product, employee, customer or officer." "Photos of shopping party with shopping center décor, as a backdrop," however, are permitted.

Finally, his thesis, buried at the end:

There's something a bit unhealthy about faux public places designed to attract rich people and make them feel comfortable. (At least the traditional mall didn't try to hide the fact that it was a shopping center.) The lifestyle center is a bizarre outgrowth of the suburban mentality: People want public space, even if making that space private is the only way to get it.

There's so much wrong with that, I just don't know where to start.

Would it be healthy instead to create faux public places to attract poor people and make them comfortable? Or is it OK to create "authentic" public places to attract rich people? Are New Urbanist developments only to be allowed in the central business district of an existing city? Would it be OK if the money to develop these lifestyle centers was public money rather than private?

Well, go read it yourself. Some people are just impossible to please.

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Virginia Postrel points to a fascinating site that mines old patents for examples of striking industrial design. They have a "what's new" blog, too, which I have added to the "Between Planets" section of the blogroll.

I also found a mother lode of incredible early aircraft designs via the site.

Some examples in the extended entry:
more...

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I am not much of an expert on the modern visual arts. I trained in college as a performing musician (classical organ), so I feel much more comfortable discussing musical aesthetics.

When it comes to the visual arts, I like representational paintings, abstract sculptures, and modern architecture. But I don't like any art that needs a written explanation of its "concept" (this includes music, too, btw).

That's why I laughed out loud when I saw this Peter Bagge cartoon in my print version of Reason last year.

Bagge is a polarizing comic artist; you either love or hate his strips. In this sense, he is like many modern artists. On page 2 of this strip, he says what I have long thought about contemporary "fine" art:

My feelings toward the contemporary fine art world have always been a mix of bemusement, resentment, and contempt. 95% of what they're hyping is pure crap yet if you dare to say as much out loud you'll be looked upon as a clueless Philistine.

He points out that much of modern art criticism discounts the value of "craftsmanship," since those "self-appointed arbiters of taste feel compelled to denigrate anything that the average shmuck can recognize as quality work."

This issue exists in all arts, not just the contemporary ones. 2Blowhards touched on this with their brief acknowledgement of Julia Childs' passing last year:

By knocking the snobbery out of French cooking and bringing her own enthusiasm and her wonderfully eccentric character into living rooms, she made class and taste accessible and attractive to millions. The food revolution that has transformed middle- and highbrow American eating owes no one a greater debt.

I'm glad that technology and a prosperous economy allow more and more of us normal people to not only enjoy, but learn and practice arts that were once the sole province of artisans and artists or their wealthy patrons.

Posted by: JohnL at 12:35 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Via Rocket Jones, a very cool site featuring some pictures of lovely young ladies from early in the twentieth century. Even if you aren't interested in the pictures, you should check out the site layout -- the music and interactive interface. If you're not careful, you can even tear pages out of the photo album. As Ted says, this is a really well done site.

NSFW, but in a classy manner.

Posted by: JohnL at 11:27 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Nation of Islam firebrand Louis Farrakhan was once-upon-a-time a calypso singer known as "The Charmer." One of his 1950s albums, Calypsos From The West Indies, contained a real gem of a song: Is She Is, Or Is She Ain't?, a song about a transsexual. I kid you not.

Where did I learn this? Well, I first heard it on James Lileks' third online installment of The Diner. I couldn't believe it, frankly, so I googled around until I had confirmed its authenticity.

If you want to sing along with any other of Calypso Louie's hits, click here.

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Virginia Postrel asked this question a long time ago, though I didn't answer her at the time.

Her statement the other day that she's adding a section on Glamour to her website reminded me to finally take a crack at answering her old question.

As a first step in defining glamour, I would point to one woman who clearly exemplifies it: Audrey Hepburn. I haven't seen her in many films, but was struck by her amazing, classically glamourous beauty in Roman Holiday, which my wife and I rented a few months ago.

Her character in the movie is a princess who tries to escape public scrutiny for a day to enjoy Rome as a normal person. The interesting thing is that, even when her character's hair is mussed and she is wearing ordinary clothes, there is an aura of glamour about her. Something of a casual confidence and poise that is hinted at. She appears just as comfortable later in the movie, when dressed in full royal regalia.

So for me glamour connotes more than just flashy or expensive beauty. It encompasses an underlying confidence or ease of manner that shows in all kinds of situations (common and formal both).

How's that?

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Today, Virginia Postrel talks about too many choices on her blog and at Forbes. More accurately, she deconstructs the negative take on freedom of choice propounded in Barry Schwartz's recent The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, as applied to the current debate on giving Americans more control over their Social Security.

In his book, Schwartz takes a hard look at the multiplication of choices available to Americans, and contends that the overload on our psyches requires us to eliminate choice. According to the Publisher's Weekly excerpt at Amazon:

Like Thoreau and the band Devo, psychology professor Schwartz provides ample evidence that we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis, providing an illusion of a multitude of options when few honestly different ones actually exist. The conclusions Schwartz draws will be familiar to anyone who has flipped through 900 eerily similar channels of cable television only to find that nothing good is on. Whether choosing a health-care plan, choosing a college class or even buying a pair of jeans, Schwartz, drawing extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that more options ("easy fit" or "relaxed fit"?) will make us happier, but Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being. Part research summary, part introductory social sciences tutorial, part self-help guide, this book offers concrete steps on how to reduce stress in decision making. Some will find Schwartz's conclusions too obvious, and others may disagree with his points or find them too repetitive, but to the average lay reader, Schwartz's accessible style and helpful tone is likely to aid the quietly desperate.

As Ms. Postrel points out, Schwartz does not prescribe any governmental policy solutions to this perceived problem in his book, but in a recent op-ed on Social Security, he wrote: "[w]hether people are choosing jam in a grocery store or essay topics in a college class, the more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice."

In her Forbes article, Virginia examines the experiment supporting Schwartz's "jam" thesis and discovers that he has conveniently omitted one of the three outcomes -- the one that would undermine his argument about Social Security. According to Ms. Postrel's summary of the experiment, the subjects had to select a chocolate from a group of Godiva chocolates, based on the name and appearance of each type of chocolate. One half had only 6 chocolates to choose from; the other half selected from 30. Then, half of each group (i.e., a quarter of the overall subjects) received the chocolate they'd picked, while the other half got a different sample, which was chosen for them by the experimenter.

The results showed that the people choosing from the group of 6 who received what they wanted were most satisfied. The ones receiving the chocolate they chose out of the group of 30 were less satisfied, as they were worried they hadn't selected the best. But the result omitted by Schwartz was that the group who received the chocolate chosen for them by the experimenter were the least satisfied of all.

Kind of knocks the legs out from under the one-size-fits-all ponzi scheme we have for Social Security right now, doesn't it?

I think it important to note that at some level I sympathize with Schwartz's thesis that we are faced with many many choices, and that learning to distinguish where there may be no real difference can cause fatigue. But I am not a passive consumer. When word-of-mouth fails, I can educate myself online, whether shopping for the best combination of price and features in a gas grill or checking out reviews at epinions.com on digital cameras. Virginia specifically points this capability out in her Forbes article as an entrepreneurial opportunity. Services like Amazon.com's reader reviews and, heck, blogs help give us new means of making informed choices.

The only real frustration I have with new choices is when they eliminate some of my old ones. But that's just the looming old fogey in me. And, ending on this personal note, I can state with certainty that my family is not afraid of choices. Check out the toothpaste we keep in our bathroom drawers:

Posted by: JohnL at 11:13 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Recently, Random's thoughts about his girl child's fourth birthday prompted me to muse about the passage of time.

Michele Catalano recently posted some similar thoughts of her own on the subject.

Last night, I found this video of a hilarious (but unaired) XBOX ad that really encapsulates the feeling I've been having recently. (Via New Links).

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Graham at Point2Point points out this archive of colorful illustrations from the 1940s and 1950s. Looks like the kind of place where Lileks would feel right at home.

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Kathy the Cake Eater has a thoughtful and thought-provoking post on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz today.

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<sarcasm>

I'm sure this particular issue has not received the attention it properly deserves!

Write your congressmen!

Now!

I mean it!

Forward this to everyone in your address book!

I really, really mean it! This is so much more important than Kid Rock and Spongebob!

</sarcasm ends>

Via Rand Simberg, with whom I agree 100 percent on this.

I stopped using cursive in eighth grade. For quick notetaking I use a modified (and largely illegible to others) hybrid of print and script. Whenever I have tried to "fancy up" a thank you note by writing it in cursive, it looks like an eighth-grader's messy writing. Much better to print legibly than to adhere to a pointless old tradition.

I do almost all writing (including outlining and drafting, when applicable) on a keyboard these days. I occasionally plot out visual works (slideshows, web pages) with pen and ink, but do all content at the computer.

I say give the kids typing lessons for most of the time spent on cursive, and use just a small amount of time to teach them how to read cursive, which is still a valuable skill (the reading, that is). Let them learn it with calligraphy as an elective for occasional use. Otherwise, pitch it overboard.

Posted by: JohnL at 10:44 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Nothing much tonight. Lots to write about but no energy. The stress of the week has strangled my muse.

Here's a link to Michele, who came up with the idea of summarizing your favorite movie in exactly seven words -- no more, no less. At last count, she had well over 400 comments (2 by me).

My movie, in seven words:

Jail. Mission. Reunion. Concert. Car Chase. Jail.

Know which one it is?

Posted by: JohnL at 09:42 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Via Crooked Timber, yet another reason (#957?) to love the Internet:

I'm not a huge fan of Wagner, but the Goethe Institute has prepared an interactive multimedia site covering his Ring of the Niebelungen. While aimed at youth, the site is quite rewarding (and presented in German or English).

I paged through some of the comic strip version in German and found it quite entertaining and interesting. This would definitely be a great resource for anyone seeking greater familiarity with the Ring, with the German language, or both.

Posted by: JohnL at 11:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I coach my sons' recreational soccer teams. My daughter (age 5) played soccer for the first time in the Fall in a different rec league. A referee made a good call in one of her games that led to the other team's not getting a goal. At the end of the game, which they tied, the other team's coach was telling his little girls that it was all right, they won anyway, and the score was really one for his team, one for their opponents, and one for the ref.

Five year olds.

Ass.

Fortunately, most parents, coaches, and refs over the five years that I've been coaching have been very positive. They want the kids to learn to play and to play their best, but only as a means of having fun and getting some exercise. They have not been fanatical about winning or ashamed of losing.

So I'm glad to see that Hockey Canada has assembled a set of wonderful public service announcements to drive home the message that parents should be good sports.

If you've got a fast internet connection, check out the videos here.

The kids are watching. And they repeat what they see and hear.

(link via Bad Jocks).

Posted by: JohnL at 09:41 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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I saw this slogan on the bumper of a car this morning: Some Things Exist Whether Or Not You Believe In Them. It was black with an eldritch white script. Made me think of something a neo-pagan or wiccan would sport.

I usually don't parse bumper stickers too closely, but this one really got the neuronic flywheel spinning. I'm sure it was meant to assert a reality beyond this one, whether or not you believe in it. But if you take it literally, it really describes nothing mystical at all.

I mean, the Internet exists, whether or not I believe in it.

And that table exists, whether or not I believe in it.

Her car exists, whether or not I believe in it.

You get the idea. I guess you could just say that existence exists, whether or not you believe in it.

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Today's Geekpress contained a link to this fascinating article explaining how to write English like Chinese (Hanzi or Kanji).

I've been beating my head against Kanji and the Kana alphabets of Japan for the past few years. This article really enlightened me on the radical-root system for listing Chinese characters. Check it out.

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Cheesecake, electric organs -- what more could you ask for? All this and more from this great gallery of album covers (mostly from the late-50s to early 60s, judging by their look). It doesn't have Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass's Whipped Cream and Other Delights, which was the raciest-looking album in my parents' collection, but I won't hold that against them.

(Via J-Walk, via RocketJones).

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A cool book meme (from Lintefiniel Musing aka Jen Speaks, via the Llamabutchers). Remove the names of the authors you don't have currently on your bookshelves and bold the ones you've added.

1. Michael Crichton
2. Neal Stephenson
3. Tom Clancy
4. Robert Heinlein
5. CS Lewis
6. JRR Tolkien
7. Ayn Rand
8. Larry Niven
9. Yann Martel
10. David James Duncan

Posted by: JohnL at 10:36 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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