Get Cynical

Short profile of David Sedaris from the Times Online (I have the audio book of While You’re Engulfed in Flames which I’m about to start listening to soon):

When so much clamour greets even D-list celebrities, it is curious that Sedaris, who has sold more than seven million books, been nominated for Grammys, filled Carnegie Hall, whose every volume of memoir begins with pages of lavish ecomiums comparing him to Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, lives in London almost unnoticed. Indeed, he considered calling his latest book Indefinite Leave to Remain after the British immigration status he was granted two years ago: “I liked the little contradiction in the phrase.” He passed his Home Office test on UK life: its quirky questions —“How old do you have to be to deliver milk?” — appealed to an American humorist fascinated by the oddness of the everyday.

Perhaps his low-key profile is intrinsic to his appeal: readers love him so intensely because they feel that they discovered him themselves. Sedaris rarely appears on TV (“I don’t want to be seen as just a personality with a typewriter”) although he travels the world giving huge, sold-out readings.

Mostly he writes about his upbringing in a loud, Greek-American clan in Raleigh, North Carolina, but his outsiderness — being gay, odd-looking, drifting between college courses and lame jobs into sundry addictions — renders his humour unflinching and often very dark. In his most recent volume, called When You Are Engulfed in Flames, he discusses the etiquette dilemmas arising from when a neighbour in the Normandy village where he owns a house is jailed as a paedophile, and the first time he told anyone he was gay ( to explain to a man who’d picked him up hitchhiking why he didn’t want to have sex, right there in the car, with his negligée-clad wife).

From his Wiki entry:

Borlaug received his Ph.D. degree in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.

During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.[5] He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

Harry Patch:

I never knew Bob [Harry’s friend and gunner] to use that [Lewis] gun to kill. If he used that gun at all, it was about two feet off the ground and he would wound them in the legs. He wouldn’t kill them if he could help it.

[A German soldier] came to me with a rifle and a fixed bayonet. He had no ammunition, otherwise he could have shot us. He came towards us. I had to bring him down. First of all, I shot him in the right shoulder. He dropped the rifle and the bayonet. He came on. His idea, I suppose, was to kick the gun if he could into the mud, so making it useless. But anyway, he came on and for our own safety, I had to bring him down. I couldn’t kill him. He was a man I didn’t know. I didn’t know his language. I couldn’t talk to him. I shot him above the ankle, above the knee. He said something to me in German. God knows what it was. But for him the war was over.

He would be picked up by a stretcher bearer. He would have his wounds treated. He would be put into a prisoner-of-war camp. At the end of the war, he would go back to his family. Now, six weeks after that, a fellow countryman of his pulled the lever of the gun that fired the rocket that killed my three mates, and wounded me. If I had met that German soldier after my three mates had been killed, I’d have no trouble at all in killing him.

(NANCY) LEE HIXSON of Danville, Ohio died at sunrise on June 30, 2009. She was born Nancy Lee Wood in Cleveland on April 17, 1944, baptised at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Valley City Ohio, and confirmed at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Independence Ohio. In addition to being a teetotaling mother and an indifferent housekeeper, she was a board certified naturopath specializing in poisonous and medicinal plants; but she would like to point out, posthumously, that although it did occur to her, she never spiked anyone’s tea. She often volunteered as an ombudsman to help disadvantaged teens find college funding and early opened her home to many children of poverty, raising several of them to successful, if unwilling, adulthood. She also enjoyed a long life of unmentionable adventures and confessed she had been a rebellious teen-aged library clerk, an untalented college student on scholarship, a run-away Hippie, a stoic Sunday School teacher, a Brownie leader, a Grange lecturer, an expert rifleman, a waitress, a wife once or twice, a welder, an artist, and a writer. She was in earlier years the president of Rainbow Systems Trucking Company, Peninsula Ohio, and she drove tractor-trailers over-the-road hauling freight commodities to startled customers from Minnesota to Florida. She was the CEO of the Cuyahoga Valley Center of Outdoor Leadership Training (COLT), where she lived in a remote and tiny one-room cabin in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Despite the lack of cabin space and dining table, she often served holiday dinners to friends and relatives and could seat twenty at the bed.

Clickez-ici for the rest.

(via TYWKIWDBI)

Pallbearers at Billy Mays’ funeral.

The online catalog of what was auctioned from Neverland.

Captain Eo on YouTube.

The King is Dead: Lefsetz on the passing of Michael Jackson:

He missed his childhood and now he’s gonna miss his old age.

How fucked up is that?

Michael Jackson never had a chance. He had to succeed for his family, his parents’ dreams were dependent upon him.

And a boy with that much pressure delivers. He works truly hard, so he will be loved. That’s all Michael Jackson was looking for, love.

He wanted to be accepted. Wanted to be so good that he couldn’t be denied. But you can’t change family history, and the public no longer treats you as human, as an equal, once you break through. People want to rip you off or tear you down, or shower you in faux love that’s more about their unfulfilled desires than yours. It gets so confusing that you retreat.

Slog: The Last Time I saw Michael Jackson:

His art will not redeem him. He’s a one-of-a-kind musical genius who went crazy, played with morphing his race and gender, slept with children, was repeatedly acquitted of child-molestation charges, and then died, alone and broke.

It’s enough to make you cry.

Twitter and Michael Jackson:

“My Twitter search script sees roughly 15 percent of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson. Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over 5 percent,” observed Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Beckman Center for Internet & Society.

Marco.org takes a look at Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for Sega Genesis.

It’s weird. It’s creepy. It’s comically absurd. It really doesn’t seem like kids belong there. Yet, I can’t see anything malicious about it — I’m not even sure that anything here is inappropriate. But it seems like something about it should be, which maps eerily to the tragic battle that Michael Jackson had fought against society for nearly two decades.

David Carradine died:

BANGKOK (WABC) — Reports say Kung Fu and Kill Bill star David Carradine has been found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok.

Carradine, 73, was there to shoot a new movie, his agent said.

His agent confirmed his death this morning, saying the actor had been was in great spirits.

He said he believed Carradine died of natural causes.

Update:

From MSNBC:

It said a preliminary police investigation found that he had hanged himself with a cord used with the room’s curtains. It cited police as saying he had been dead at least 12 hours and there was no sign that he had been assaulted.

A police officer at Bangkok’s Lumpini precinct station would not confirm the identity of the dead man to The Associated Press, but said the luxury Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel had reported that a male guest killed himself there.

The Belgariad was one of the first fantasy series I read and I still read it every so often. It doesn’t break much new ground in the genre but the characters jump off the page (Silk FTW) and by the end of the five books they feel like family. The Mallorean wasn’t quite as good, but familiar, like spending time with old friends after not seeing them in a a while. Here’s his wiki entry for those who haven’t read him.

(via SFSignal)

From The NY Times:

WICHITA, Kan. — Authorities said they had a suspect in custody Sunday afternoon in the shooting death of George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who was one of the few doctors in the nation to perform late-term abortions.

Dr. Tiller, who had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion and had survived a shooting more than a decade ago, was shot inside his church here on Sunday morning, the authorities said. Dr. Tiller, 67, was shot with a handgun inside the lobby of his longtime church, Reformation Lutheran Church on the city’s East Side, just after 10 a.m. (Central Time). The service had started minutes earlier.

Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.

Dr. Tiller had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. In the latest such effort, in March, Dr. Tiller was acquitted of charges that he had performed late-term abortions that violated state law.

From Cosmic Variance:

He arrives with an entourage of five care givers to tend to his physical needs, one or two family members, several graduate students, and a “graduate assistant” who handles logistics and serves as general fixit-person for his computer system and mechanized wheel chair. His current chair is new and sophisticated. At the flick of a switch, its hydraulics can lift him up to a standing person’s eye level or slide him down near ground level for high-speed chases — he has been known to take pleasure from running over the toes of university presidents.

Hawking’s Pasadena sojourns are rather like Einstein’s in the 1930s. Caltech is an intellectual magnet – a crossroad for ideas about the cosmos and the fundamental laws of nature, which are Hawking’s passion. He contributes mightily to the ferment, and partakes. Our California night life (LA, not Caltech!) is also pretty good; and Hawking, like Einstein, is a party animal, only more so. During his annual month here, my own social life intensifies five-fold just from being his closest California friend. He loves opera, theater, jazz clubs, barbecues that he hosts in the patio of his Pasadena home, and dinners with fine wine – especially an Indian Feast prepared for him by Caltech undergraduates. Yes, we geeks can cook up a storm – well, not me, but the younger generation.

Conversation with Stephen is slow, about 3 words a minute, produced by Stephen moving a muscle in his face (imaged by a lens and photodetector) to control a cursor on his computer screen. It’s slow, but rewarding. You never know, until his sentence is complete, whether it will be a pearl of wisdom or an off-the-wall joke. Faster speeds are on the horizon: computer control via brane waves, without drilling a hole in his head (he’s opposed to that). But he resists changing technology, even without drilling, until forced to. “I can’t believe it’s as good as what I have.” (It actually is; my wife has a friend with ALS who proves it so.)

And if you don’t know who Kip Thorne is, you need to read Black Holes and Time Warps which is an incredible read.