February 28, 2002
IPHC
An article by Todd Anderson called "Punk Rock = Capitalism" from Popshot is making the rounds. There's a glimmer of a point in it. Indie rock has created a thousand small businessmen and businesswomen; every kid in a garage who has ever pressed a single and then tried to recoup the money selling it at shows is a capitalist. But ignoring the ludicrousness of his examples (how many people in all the world ever think to themselves that they would like to start a peanut farm?), ignoring the only tangential relationship of his arguments to punk rock (it could be about starting a muffin shop, and then it could be titled "Muffins = Capitalism" or "Capitalism: Muffin as Fuck"), ignoring the well-known diddling that major labels deal out to the vast majority of artists who sign with them, ignoring the fact that every single person I've ever met involved in DIY music, even on the business end of things, is doing it for love and not money, Anderson is just not thinking things out.
(more...)
February 25, 2002
Antiquity online
Last week, I was chatting with dcehr about Frank Miller's 300, a comic book adaption story of the Spartan stand at Thermopylae. It veered into a discussion of Herodotus, the "father of history" (or, depending on who you ask, the "father of lies"), who records one of the great tough-guy lines of history; when Dieneces of Sparta was told that the Persians had enough archers to darken the sky, Herodotus records Dieneces cheerily responding, "Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade." And V. was discussing Arthur Golding, an Elizabethan Protestan who translated both Calvin and Ovid (Golding's Ovid is the one that Shakespeare used). "But Ovid is so naughty," I cried, though after some rather self-conscious discussion we decided that he is not nearly so naughty as Catullus.
(more...)
February 22, 2002
Corporate casualties
A largely sensible article in Fortune magazine (via Slate's Moneybox) dissects unintended consequences run amok in the tremendously complicated issue of asbestos litigation in America. It's tainted, however, by the incredibly deceptive description of the reason for W.R. Grace's bankruptcy. (For the record, it reads: "The chemical giant paid nearly $2 billion for using asbestos in its fire-protection products.") Poor Grace, a mere asbestos consumer, a victim as much as anyone! W.R. Grace, once a conglomorate involved in everything from cement to shrinkwrap, owned and operated a vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana, for 27 years; the vermiculite was contaminated with asbestos, and both the miners and the general citizenry of Libby have had health problems ever since. In 1999, the direct death toll was estimated to be 192, with hundreds more contracting severe cases of asbestositis, many of which will probably prove to be fatal. An award-winning article in Mother Jones suggested that executives at the mining company that Grace purchased knew about the effects of asbestos exposure on their workers' lungs as early as 1959. Grace knew by 1976. Neither company did a thing other than stonewall OSHA and write memos.
(more...)
February 19, 2002
A beer to call your own
Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond argues that a nation's wealth is in part determined by how well its producers can gain economy of scale, and he uses beer as an example. At the turn of the century, there were hundreds of independent American brewers, one or more in almost every major northeastern or midwestern city; almost all have now vanished. The ten largest brewers now dominate the industry (as cited by Beerhistory.com). What happened? Baltimore's National Brewing, maker of National Bohemian and smooth Colt 45, is representative: a few miscalculations, the dwindling importance of relationships between brewery sales reps and local publicans, a disastrous period of ownership by Black Label maker Carling Beer (itself recently purchased by Coors), and the rise of national television campaigns. Now the National Brewery building in Baltimore is being converted into condos and Mr. Boh is shipped in from North Carolina.
(more...)
February 17, 2002
Becoming alien
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine (which I discovered in a roundabout sort of way; it's a project by Golan Levin, which I discovered after he responded to a post by Graham about another one of his projects, the wonderful Secret Lives of Numbers) is a fun little toy, designed to take a user-entered scribble and run it through a genetic algorithm until it produces something akin to an alphabet. It's impressively neat -- I really admire it, especially because V. suggested the idea to me a year ago and I dismissed it as too hard -- but it doesn't quite look like a real alphabet. There are a heck of a lot of alphabets out there, and they all seem just slightly more complex than those I managed to create with the Synthesis Machine.
(more...)
February 14, 2002
Flowery language
If I were to offer my sweetheart a bouquet of heliotrope, hollyhock, and ivy, I wouldn't just be offering her flowers on the day when florists do 30% of their annual business: I'd be sending her a message more specific than "I love you." Everyone knows that roses are for love and rosemary for remembrance; if we think about it long enough, we may recollect Ophelia saying that pansies are for thoughts. But the Victorians had a whole extended language of flowers. As an article in the delightfully named Collier's Cyclopedia of Commercial and Social Information and Treasury of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge put it in 1882:
How charmingly a young gentleman can speak to a young lady, and with what eloquent silence in this delightful language. How delicately she can respond, the beautiful little flowers telling her tale in perfumed words; what a delicate story the myrtle or the rose tells! How unhappy that which basil, or yellow rose reveals, while ivy is the most faithful of all.
Pity the nineteenth-century lass who received belvedere and striped carnation from someone she wished to pursue.
(more...)
February 12, 2002
The mysterious island under the sea in 80 days
I hear via Kathryn that a new edition of Verne's The Mysterious Island will be surfacing soon. My knowledge of Verne's work is limited to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days, and I'd rather watch a movie adaptation (the 1956 Around the World in 80 Days David Niven, John Gielgud, and little-known actor Noel Coward) or read Alan Moore's cracked take on Captain Nemo (and others, including that symbol of capital and individualism turned monstrous and destroyed by the common people, the Invisible Man; he is, of course, an invention of the other oft-cited grandfather of science fiction, H.G. Wells, and the Wells that I've read, stiff though it is, has been more enjoyable than the Verne). Bruce Sterling has written a pair of essays (1, 2) linking Verne to photographer, caricaturist, writer, and portraitist Felix Tournachon (also known as Nadar); the 1848 Paris Revolution; the Bohemian movement; and other interesting French things of the time, so I should probably give Verne another shot. The really fascinating thing about the new Mysterious Island is that the translation was largely prepared by a non-professional fan, Sidney Kravitz, a retired engineer from Dover, New Jersey. It's as if AnimEigo decided to turn to fansub creators for its next project, only more so, this being a world of literature almost completely dominated by professional scholars and translators. I'll probably give The Mysterious Island a looksee for just that reason. Long live the amateur enthusiast!
February 09, 2002
Patent pending
How do you extract money from an idea? You can keep it secret and make sure that other people are reliant upon it. When Samuel Slater, father of the American industrial revolution, came to America, he had to diguise himself as an agricultural laborer. Trained mechanics were not permitted to emigrate from England, lest they share their knowledge and ruin the mercantile system that forced colonies to be importers of processed goods. You can make sure your ideas will be paid for by someone else -- John Harrison, inventor of the chronometer, was working for a prize of £20,000. However, it took a personal intervention by George III, more than ten years after Harrison had successfully demonstrated his device, for Harrison to be awarded even a fraction of that. Since 1449, however, the English-speaking world has had another method: the patent.
(more...)
February 05, 2002
Steak and eggs
Good food is capable of moving diners to tears of joy; bad food is capable of moving diners to tears of a different sort. But there's surprisingly little information online about how we used to eat. If you're looking for a medieval Norweigan cookbook, you're in luck. Fanny Farmer is out there, and The American Matron, or Practical and Scientific Cookery (1851) and Mrs. Goodfellow's Cookery as It Should Be (1865) are available as scanned pages, though not searchable (or easily downloadable) text. The Feeding America proposal to digitize and make web-accessable a dozen or two of America's most important cookbooks is apparently waiting on a grant. But how did the average Betty or Joe eat in, say, 1950?
(more...)
February 03, 2002
Hungry like the wolf
Rachel Laudan is a food historian, and she has a bone to pick with (in her phrase) the culinary Luddism of the Slow Food Movement. I first read Laudan when she tackled the question of authenticity in Mexican cookbooks (link via the website for the highly recommended newsletter Simple Cooking) and came up with the answer that authenticity is a sham. Her central points seem to break down into two concerns: first, that food wasn't so great back in the day; second, that the very notion of authentic cuisine is problematic.
(more...)