A Pen-chant for Spinning

Waaay back in high school there was this Korean kid who had this trick he could do with a pen. He held it upside-down, and with a little twitch, he got it to spin around his thumb. This was a far more interesting event than whatever the teacher was talking about, so I buddied up to him and learned the trick.

He had a couple of other tricks, but I never bothered. I learned how to spin a pen around my thumb, and did so happily through high school, college, grad school, and plenty of boring meetings, until the boring meetings started to include vice presidents.

Over the years the occasional person would comment on my trick, and I taught it once or twice, but for the most part it was like juggling — something I learned during my misspent youth, which is of little value now.

Then the other day I saw a video about the pen spinning world championships. The … wha? Yes, it exists. And yes, there’s video:

Some interesting bits:

• The pens are very heavy
• The pens don’t write
• One competitor’s mom complains that “he spends a lot of money on pens.”
• For a bunch of kids from Hong Kong, they speak phenomenally good English.

So naturally I watched a whole scad of these videos, some of which are mesmerizing. And I found this one, with world-renowned pen spinner Kam Kuo, who shows some of the basics. Including … The Thumbaround, which is the trick I learned way back when (noo!! my secret is revealed!)

Funny bits here:

• He credits another spinner who “hurt his thumb.”
• “I don’t have my hand insured, I just try to take good care of it.”

It’s all very fascinating, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy a carbon fiber pen. If you watch the second video, stick around for his trick with a rubber band. Just sayin’.

New Age Beverages

I took this at a local supermarket. I could make a bunch of jokes about Ginkgo Biloba and such, but the photo sort of says it all, doesn’t it?

Strangely enough, there’s a company in Colorado named New Age Beverage. They sell drinks named Xyience Xenergy and Xydrate, Bawls, Whoopass, Rehab, Carmello Anthony, Crunk, and Kronik. I kid you not.

“A legislature matters more than the luge”

I grew up in Canada, and lately I’m wondering what the hell is happening to make it go so horribly off the rails. Let’s backtrack about a year, to when Slate.com ran a piece called “What’s the Matter with Canada? How the world’s nicest country turned mean.“

On December 30th, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued the government (it means discontinuing the session of parliament without dissolving it) for the second time in about a year. He did it the first time to avoid having his party’s minority leadership in parliament challenged by a vote of no confidence. (For those of you who somehow missed Canadian civics, if a vote of no confidence carries, the next step is a general election.)

When he did it a second time, it prompted Errol P. Mendes, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Ottawa, to write a piece that ran in the Toronto Star, which is really worth reading.

“The early decision to shut down Parliament was clearly to avoid the continuing scrutiny of a House of Commons committee over the mounting evidence of wilful blindness by the Harper government over the transfer of Afghan detainees to a substantial risk of torture. This is potentially a war crime and one of the most serious allegations any government has faced in the history of Canada.”

Mendes also outlines some of the other “unconstitutional behaviour” the Harper administration has been up to. What’s eerie is how much of it is reminiscent of the Bush administration. But even Bush/Cheney didn’t have the balls to shut down the government twice, just to get themselves out of hot water.

Enter The Economist, with its Olympian tone and unbylined stories. Now, The Economist is nobody’s ideal of a bleeding heart liberal magazine (even though they quaintly call themselves a newspaper), and they often profess their admiration for free markets.

However.

This is one of the colonies, and they are, you know, The Economist, and they see through your shady maneuvers, Mr. Harper.

His officials faced grilling by parliamentary committees over whether they misled the House of Commons in denying knowledge that detainees handed over to the local authorities by Canadian troops in Afghanistan were being tortured. The government would also have come under fire for its lack of policies to curb Canada’s abundant carbon emissions. Prorogation means that such committees—which carry out the essential democratic task of scrutinising government—will have to be formed anew in March.

(That means no governmental oversight until MARCH — after the Winter Olympics take place in Whistler, British Columbia, next month.)

Their rejoinder is in the form of a sub-headline. And I quote: “A legislature matters more than the luge.”

Amen.

The Day of the Cravat

I rented the movie “Day of the Jackal” from the library last week, since I remember it being a good thriller. In case you’ve never read the book or seen the movie, it has a pretty good premise:

Renegade members of the French military want to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle, and hire a British assassin to do the job.

The jackal interviews with the people hiring him. It's all terribly civilized. Note the pants.

But French officials get wind of the plot, and they appoint their best cop to stop him.

Michael Lonsdale as Claude Lebel, the cop. Note his dull clothes, befitting a flat-foot. Or perhaps his jacket matches his mustache. Fact: the cop sleeps on a cot in his office. The Jackal makes love to a rich woman in her chateau. Coincidence? Pas du tout!

But the movie was made in 1973, and it was amazingly obvious how much thrillers have changed. In the first hour of the movie there are scores of tedious scenes where the assassin commissions his rifle, goes to get a fake passport, returns to get his finished rifle, returns to get his passport, etc.

Meantime, the police are on the job. We get to see Top Cop ask for an assistant, then ask the assistant for them to put a cot in his office. He also has to go to a lot of committee meetings, where he delivers reports to a dozen anonymous bureaucrats in suits who smoke cigarettes and harrumph about various setbacks and the deviousness of the assassin.

There are so many scenes in offices and harrumphing in smoky board rooms, that this movie could have been subtitled “The Triumph of the Civil Servants.” People smoke like chimneys throughout the whole thing, so “Day of the Chain Smokers” would have worked, too.

Despite the languid pace — which includes the Jackal’s tepid affair with a married woman — The Jackal has a rather fascinating wardrobe. First, he’s got these taupe-colored high-waist pants, seemingly his only pair, and he wears them in every scene in the first half of the movie. They’re clearly miracle-pants, surviving scene after tedious scene, including scenes that are sorta action-y, with nary a wrinkle or a stain. These pants are the pride of the British Empire. They have a stiff upper inseam.

Even when The Jackal is repainting his car, his stalwart trousers are up to the task. But if he’s always wearing the same pair of pants, you ask, how can his wardrobe be fascinating?

Answer: cravats.

Fact: you shoot better when wearing a cravat. Proof: at the end of the movie, he's not wearing one -- and he misses his target

I didn’t think about counting all his cravats until well into the movie, but I’ll bet if you had a cravat drinking game, you’d be staggering drunk long before you took a shot at de Gaulle.

There’s a lovely clip on YouTube of the Jackal buying his gun and playing with it, which is notable because it has no less than two cravats, including a dazzling close-up! Feast your eyes on this:

You can also view the movie trailer online, and know the best part? Not only is there footage from one of the committee meetings with the smoking nabobs, there’s a close-up of … one more cravat!

Fact: You'll get more -- if you wear a cravat

It’s a little late to ask Santa for Christmas gifts, but next year I’m asking for taupe-colored miracle asssassin-pants … and lots and lots of cravats.

Blogging for Good

Like a lot of other writers, I follow a blog by a literary agent named Nathan Bransford. His blog is so popular, he recently recorded his millionth unique visitor. And I thought, “Well, that’s nice.”

But this morning, Nathan showed what a stud he is by putting that web traffic to good use. This is from his post today:

You may have already heard of Heifer International, an organization that works to fight hunger by giving needy families around the world and in the United States livestock, training, or other assistance that helps improve their livelihood. Heifer has been recognized for its work in Fast Company and Forbes, among other places.

I know we’re going through tough economic times, but if you have anything to spare this holiday season I hope you’ll consider making a donation. And, in order to encourage people to spread the word, for every comment someone makes in this post between now and 5PM Pacific time, my wife and I will donate 50 cents $1.00*.

Now that, my friends, is a good use of your web traffic! Five other bloggers followed suit (they’re listed at the bottom of his post), and are matching various amounts.

Since my blog is just a pastime, I don’t get that kind of traffic. So I just donated $50, and hope other people will do the same.

Oh, and if you think you don’t have the money? You do. Go visit Global Rich List to see how rich you actually are, and how changing your spending patterns a little would make a huge difference:

$8 could buy you 15 organic apples OR 25 fruit trees for farmers in Honduras to grow and sell fruit at their local market.

$30 could buy you an ER DVD box set OR a First Aid kit for a village in Haiti.

$73 could buy you a new mobile phone OR a new mobile health clinic to care for AIDS orphans in Uganda.

$2400 could buy you a second generation High Definition TV OR schooling for an entire generation of school children in an Angolan village.

Happy holidays!

What English Sounds Like for Foreigners

There’s an interesting experience you have with foreign languages, which is that you can experience them aesthetically. French, German, Portugese, Japanese … even if you understand a little, when any one of them gets going full speed, the sounds are coming too quickly to process, so you’re left only with the quality of the sound, without being encumbered by the meaning.

(On a related note, when I said I liked a French song, a co-worker once commented someone snidely that it might be because I didn’t know how banal the lyrics were.)

But what if you’re an English speaker? What does English sound like? That’s a problem, because as soon as you hear it, you’re also making sense of it, processing the message, which makes it impossible (or almost impossible) to judge the sound aesthetically.

An Italian singer named Adriano Celentano thought of this too, and wrote a song with gibberish to sound like English. Ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like? Probably a lot like this. And dang, that’s a catchy tune. And good video.

Hat tip to Nancy Friedman for the link.

Ye Olde Petroleume Treee

Today on FPI, photojournalism! (well, maybe that’s a stretch). Anyhow, this here photo is of an apartment across the street from my office. I thought I’d share it with you, because nothing gets me in the holiday mood like a tree decorated with an enormous plastic bag.

More Bad News for Talking Steam Engines

Thomas the Tank Engine made the news again this week, and not in a good way. Thomas is a series of TV episodes about talking steam engines. With faces on them.

A couple of months ago a friend and I were discussing it, so I pulled up something I’d written in grad school about it:

the stories emphasize the importance of responsibility, discipline, order, respect for authority, and work ethic. The highest compliment that [the controller] Sir Topham Hatt bestows, for example, is to announce in utilitarian fashion, “You’re a really useful engine.”

This time it’s a political science professor named Shauna Wilton at the University of Alberta in Augustana who’s built up a head of steam about the program. In a story in the Toronto Star, Wilton says Thomas broadcasts a “conservative political ideology that punishes individual initiative, opposes critique and change, and relegates females to supportive roles.”

“The female characters do tend to be a bit sidelined,” Wilton told the Star. “The show comes out of a particularly historical time period when society was hierarchical and there was a blind following of authority. I want my daughter to think for herself.”

Since then she’s received 30 angry emails she’s received from Thomas fans, who think she’s anti-Thomas. Being an academic, Wilton’s response is nuanced.

“My daughter loves the show and loves playing with trains. There are a lot of really positive themes in Thomas, but parents should be aware of the messages that are there.”

Well, sure, that sounds about right. But The Star needed the a quote from the pro-Thomas lobby, so they hauled Britt Allcroft, the show’s former producer, out of the shed for a helpful non sequitur.

[He] dismissed the allegations back then, saying, “Thomas and friends are neither male nor female. They’re magic.”

Riiight.

Wrack & Ruin

I finished Don Lee’s novel, Wrack & Ruin, not long ago. It’s about a sculptor turned brussels-sprouts farmer whose life starts falling apart one weekend when his feckless brother comes to visit.

I enjoyed the book, though I’m no brussels-sprouts farmer, and I only sculpt using Play-Doh, and then usually destroy my creations in fits of artistic pique when my creations fail to live up to the genius of my artistic vision — or my son is done playing, whichever comes first.

But I never thought the book would serve as foreshadowing for the past week.

It all started the week before, when my wife was traveling for a conference, leaving me at home with our two little brussels-sprouts. For three days I hung in there with the cooking and the dishes and the laundry and the carpool and the work and the dog walking and dog feeding and vacuuming.

Then it started, though it took me a while to notice. See, the clothes weren’t dry. So on Sunday morning, I cranked it and started it again.

Then I went to open a blind — and the cord broke in my hand.

The chaos remained at bay for the rest of Sunday. My wife made it home safely, I walked the dog, and before dark, we tried to finish hanging our Christmas lights. That went fine, too, until I was up on a ladder and I went to tuck one of the extension cords behind a porch light.

And the porch light came off in my hand. With my left hand I held the light, which was kind of carriage lamp style, and noticed that none the four screws supposedly holding this lamp to the wide of the house were attached.

I then tried to reattach the screws, only to find the two holding the base to the wall wouldn’t thread. Since I couldn’t very well let the light dangle from its own wiring, I unwired the light, leaving me with a hole and exposed wires.

My smartass friend suggested putting in a nativity scene.

We dried a lot of clothes indoors (hanging them under a ceiling fan works remarkably well), paid a whack of money to get the dryer fixed, and now that the week is winding down, I’m finally heading to the hardware store to get parts to actually re-hang the light.

The cord, however, will have to wait for tomorrow. That’s also when I go looking for a book titled Prosperity & Reliable Household Products.

The “Piano Stairs” Experiment

In many situations, escalators are just stupid.

Exhibit A: One really stupid escalator

In an article called “Taken for a Ride: The Insanity of Escalators,” Jeffrey Hill rises to the challenge of describing how wasteful they are:

The national energy use of escalators is estimated at 2.6 billion kilowatt hours per year, equivalent to powering 375,000 houses; its cost is roughly $260 million. What’s harder than stomaching these statistics is finding sources to back them up.

The escalator industry is extremely secretive about pricing and energy specifications on specific models. Even though Kone Inc. provides detailed CAD drawings on their website, their cheery phone representatives claim they can’t verify the figures: “it’s a 9-11 thing.”

Hill notes that the treads are extremely heavy, and quotes a sales rep who claims that each job has to be customized (which adds to the expense). Here’s my favorite quote:

Although quiet and convenient, escalators unfortunately cost more money to install, operate, and maintain than raising a child, and there are 30,000 of them in the United States.

So I was cheered this morning to see Joseph Rose’s Hard Drive blog, where he posts this great video of a little experiment in Stockholm:

What happened afterwards? The video more or less speaks for itself. Those humans are having fun! They’re also using the stairs 66% more than normal. Good for them.

Why can’t we have more keyboard stairs instead of escalators?