Hotel Zero

The Very Model of AWESOME Blog Post

John Holbo has posted what might be the Platonic ideal of a blog post over at Crooked Timber: on Winsor McCay. Guaranteed to gobble up—but by no means waste—thirty or forty minutes of your day.

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a great distributed computing idea, a joint effort between The Internet Archive and Carnegie Mellon to use captcha's to correct OCR errors in scanned texts. I wish TypePad would implement this. Any chance?

Houellebecq

I'm still thinking about my responses to The State We're In series I did at kottke.org (maybe I'll have something up this weekend), but in the meantime: kudos to Mark Sarvas at Elegant Variation for getting this hilarious response to a French academic conference on Michel Houellebecq translated (by Doma Khazeni, who also translated Houellebecq's H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life for McSweeney's):

Day 1
SPERM

Wednesday October 24. 10:30 a.m.

The day’s first lecture sounds very promising: Cunnilungus and fellatio: the sexually correct in Houellebecq’s work. Murielle Lucie Clément, an independent academic, has inventoried the sexual practices in Houellebecq’s work. Today, we are beneficiaries not only of her meticulous study but also of the aphorisms she has gathered, such as this one by Romain Gary: “Fellatio may be used as caress in the usual progression of the embrace, but certainly not as a first-aid method.”

Go read the whole thing... and thanks to Mark for doing this: fantastic stuff. If you're curious, I reviewed Houellebecq's Platform and his H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life for Rain Taxi.

Brother Can You Spare a Comment?

OK, quick thread-rescue/reminder/bleg.

1) I'll be closing comments on the kottke.org interviews on The State We're In at the end of this week. If you've got something to say (or, in this guy's case, mock) this is your last chance.

2) Only one person in running for the Hotel Zero Godard/Breathless give-away: comment for your chance to win.

3) Really: one of the 5,000 or so of you who've been here in the past couple weeks must have at least one favorite political book not on my list. Would be great if there were, oh, I don't know: two of you?

Yglesias at Free Darko

Combine one of my favorite political bloggers (Matthew Yglesias @ The Atlantic Monthly) and one of my favorite sports blogs (Free Darko), along with my favorite spectator sport (Hoops) and you get... uneasy satire? I don't know what to make of this piece:

... an alternative does exist: liberal internationalism or, as they say in the sports world, basketball (hockey, of course, represents a dystopian vision of Canadian global hegemony, I don't know anything about soccer, and cricket is the rotting corpse of British imperialism) . Basketball, like baseball, is a global sport but it rejects baseball's domineering imperial mien. Instead of spreading through conquest and invasion, basketball spreads through Joseph Nye's soft power, gaining adherents through the inherent appeal of this American cultural product, marking out of sphere of influence wider than the American military into the heart of rival great powers like the Soviet Union and Communist China.

Some would see mere coincidence here, but internationalism is in the game's very bones -- invented as it was by a Canadian living and working in the United States, basketball has always been a sport capable of looking across national boundaries and doing so in a spirit of cooperation.

I do, however, know of one movie scene that serves as a kind of complicating counter-example to much of Matt's (only possibly serious) piece. It's from Srdjan Dragojevic's exceptionally-twisted (and possibly brilliant) Pretty Village, Pretty Flame:

Within minutes of this shot, Halil on the left and Milan on the right are going to find themselves on opposite sites of the Bosnian conflict, ca. 1992.

Meantime, in the spirit of "the sport that really is the world's sport," I was going to post some highlights from Arsenal's AMAZING games these past two weeks (1-1 v. Liverpool and 2-2 v. Man U), but seems as though every single one that's not a bunch of drunken Gunner fans has been replaced with this message: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NetResult." It's been a few years now that NetResult has been doing this and I wonder: Is this really helping the Premier League?

Kottke.org

If you haven't noticed yet, I'm guest-blogging at kottke.org this week (except: 90% of you are probably coming from kottke.org anyway--in which case, see: GoTo Statement Considered Harmful (hmmm... we do have visited hyperlinks--but what about more robust, stateful hyperlink objects with n-node lookahead? Is there a Firefox extension that tells me I'm linking around in a circular graph?)). I'll be taking several friends and otherwise interesting folks out for a test-drive in Jason's Porsche until next Tuesday, at which point I'll have to hand over the keys and return to this little VW I'm driving here at Hotel Zero.

I will, however, be posting a few things here this week--so don't just up and disappear altogether.

Craziness.

OK, folks... noticed traffic is going down to a trickle--need to feed the RSS meter here with a little update.

Been crazed getting ready for big guest-blogging event next week: will post with details when things are finalized/announced there. Looking forward to it & think it'll be a blast.

Also, my pal Mickey Kross of the FDNY called this morning to say he's flying into town on a surprise visit. He's one of my biggest fans & can't wait to show him the Twin Cities. Meantime, here's a nice YouTube clip of an interview Mickey did on surviving the collapse of the WTC North tower on 9/11:

All right, I'll be in touch in next couple days with details on guest posting gig for next week.

Where a Meme Goes to Die

OK, so I see that my pal Kevin has meme-tagged me: I'll bite.

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?

I actually have an algorithm for this...

If CLASSIC & STUDY then one each: hardcover first for sentiment; paperback for savaging with Post-It flags and pencil;

If CLASSIC & NO STUDY then hardcover first;

If REVIEW & LIKE then hardcover first;

ELSE paperback.

Like all algorithms related to human affairs, this one is extremely fragile: I break it all the time (especially when the hardcover first edition is priced at $1200-1500 or some similarly outrageous sum).

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…

"Crazy Bird and Cat Piss Books," because it would be a used book store.

Quick Hits

Still getting up to speed on Typepad, especially the "under the hood"/"make it cherry" options... Googling around but still haven't found what I'm looking for: if you have Typepad customization tips, pass 'em on.

Meantime, a few quick hits from the last day or so.

A Thousand WTFs: Over at Metafilter, fantastic post on Israeli military's embrace of Deleuze & Guattari. Now, I knew some dumb guys, a lot of average guys, and enough really smart guys in the Marine Corps to annoy the shit out of me anytime someone makes blind assumption that Marines are morons... but Eyal Weizman's reports would have bent the minds of even the smartest. I'll be revisiting these pieces.

Dereliction Now Redux: It's a kind of dark joke that Col. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty, is one of Petraeus ideas guys in Iraq... but then: what is life in the military, most days, if not a dark joke? Philip Carter previews the upcoming Petraeus report over at Intel Dump and provokes usual rants against the U.S. leadership--civilian and military. What's so great about the Intel Dump rants, though, is that they're usually exceptionally well-informed by guys who spent years commanding grunts--and nobody bitches better than a former grunt.

Reporter at Loss: George Packer gives our looming exit from Iraq the New Yorker treatment: lots of experts expertly quoted between snippets of profile and sprinklings of perceptive character treatment. A nice piece, but it's strangely hesitant... as if Packer still hasn't made up his mind about how wrong he was about Iraq--or what to do about it.

"Hello World"

Two simple words: "Hello World." But so hard, sometimes, to type. But there, I've done it. I'm now blogging.