A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

It's pictures like this that make me perfectly comfortable with idolatry.

[AfterElton.com]

It's 2 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Contribution to Global Mercury Poisoning Is?

It's like ... ten thousand sick Nigerians when all you need is a clear desktop.

The day after we dropped off a non-functioning printer and a bag of old cell phones and chargers at the recycling center, we found this from the AP:

America Ships Electronic Waste Overseas

An excerpt:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Most Americans think they're helping the earth when they recycle their old computers, televisions and cell phones. But chances are they're contributing to a global trade in electronic trash that endangers workers and pollutes the environment overseas.

While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.

"It is being recycled, but it's being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine," said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, the Seattle-based environmental group that tipped off Hong Kong authorities. "We're preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world."

Beautiful. You think you're saving the planet, but really you're just killing Chinese babies. Uhm ... It was emotionally wrenching enough to get rid of my old Power Mac G3 in the first place (not to mention my dear departed iPod). I was hoping not to add unwilling complicity to murder into the bargain.

You just can't win ... so it would seem.

Lucky for us, we live in the civilized borough of Queens, and we dropped off our junk at Build it Green NYC's collection site in Astoria. In association with the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Build It Green provides a drop-off center for disposing of electronic equipment — the right way.

From their Web site:

Is any of the recycled material sent overseas?
No. We share your concern about dumping electronic waste on developing countries. Therefore we require that our vendors recycle all collected materials in the US and provide us with documentation about their down stream vendors. We audit this information to confirm validity.

Yay! We win.

For more information:

• Build it Green NYC


• Lower East Side Ecology Center


• Basel Action Network


• Computer Take Back Campaign


• International Association of Electronics Recyclers

B CRFL W YR TXT MSGS

For the ultimate in introverted passive aggression, you can't beat text messaging. Who knew the technology would become so indispensable to me?

But be careful. When too hastily thumbing a note to someone, it's far too easy to muddy the message with entirely the wrong word. If you can train your phone well enough, that word-suggestion feature can be handy — for proper nouns and unusual spellings, especially. I, on the other hand, still can't find the quotation marks or parentheses on my phone. There is little hope for me.

For instance, I can't really use those abominable abbreviations so common among nearly everyone younger than me. (The title of this post is somewhat misleading, then.) I have to teach my phone almost any abbreviation. It can backfire, though. I taught my phone the abbreviation "VM" for "voice mail."

Clever, eh?

Not when you're trying to type "to" ... a word that comes up, I have found, an awful damn lot.

There is some comfort at least in knowing that my phone expects something closer to Standard English from me.

Worse, I have somehow managed to program in some completely ridiculous substitutions. Whenever I type "at," the number 28 appears. Instead of "can," I get "226" — which is considerably less useful.

Often the effect is just comical. Once while thumbing out the word "pimp" I got "shop." (I forget the context. Does it matter?) Clicking through the substitutions was almost almost poetic:

Shop
Sins
Pins
Pimp

Here are a few more interesting accidental substitutions I have come across recently:

• Hate yields have


• Male: make


• Save: rate


• Season: reason


• Soon: room


• Note: move


• Go: in


• Fat: eat


• Doll: folk


• Brian: asian


• Home: good


• Stick: quick


• Saloon: salmon


• Kind: line


• Of: me


• If: he


• Mine: mind


• Much: ouch


• And my favorite... Pew: sex

East Meets West

Today, the best-looking ground beef we could find at our local supermarket was halal. Reminds me of one of my earliest memories of the neighborhood. Standing outside a Rite Aid while Jeff was buying a pack of smokes, I saw a white-robed man wheeling a metal shopping basket heaped with goat carcasses across 37th Avenue. He disappeared into a restaurant. I knew I was in New York.

Dinner tonight was Swedish meat balls. Swedish meatballs with halal meat. Why is this funny to me?

The Emperor's Children

	I can't say I don't recommend it. Just be prepared to take some time with it.

Messud's writing style is dizzyingly parenthetic. I lost count of the sentences I had to read over two or three times before I could disentangle the syntax. It's like a photocopy of exact thought at times: It may have made perfect sense to her, but not everyone can follow along. I accepted it early on as a stylistic quirk, but often it seemed gratuitous, a mishmash of clauses that could have existed happily as separate sentences, whose unholy union only complicated and obfuscated rather than providing any deeper meaning.

She uses several turns of phrase that just don't parse for me. And I think she hit the thesaurus a few too many times. I am not an unintelligent reader, and I have my own fondness for good words, but what's the point when it obscures rather than reveals meaning? It's inexcusable, especially considering her consistent misuse of the very simple word "comprise" throughout. Sometimes it's not so much the fault of the writer as it is her editor.

That said, the novel is engaging. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a one of the principle characters, yet the voice is a consistent coherent narrator. The variety keeps the story from getting too dull.

The one thing that binds all of them to each other is their tremendous self-indulgence. (I'm sure her own self-indulgent writing style was not nearly as intentional.) I recognized people I dislike in these characters. And isn't it always the case — I recognized qualities I dislike about myself in them. It kept me from liking them too much to remain objective, yet it made them familiar enough to keep me paying attention.

What drew me to this book was my curiosity about the new spate of novels and short stories that have come out in recent years in which 9/11 plays a significant part. It annoyed me at first that anyone would reduce that day and its aftermath to a plot point — even if it was done well. Six years on, it can still be a ballsy proposition. But like all such events, it is a plot point. It is our history, our story, our plot. I admire the way Messud uses it at the end as a means of releasing &$8212; shattering — the characters out of their illusions, while still capturing the horror, panic and disbelief of those days. I think it had a similar effect on all of us, however short- or long-lasting it may have been.

Better Living Through Phrenology

Don't be so quick to ice that head wound. Build up enough subdermal scar tissue, and you might just change your personality!

	What I couldn't do with some clippers and a Sharpie. [ferris.edu]

My friend James would be quick to point out that this is actually a pretty lame misunderstanding of the lost medical science of which he is a practitioner. James is a bona fide Phrenologist. That means he can measure the bumps and indentations in your skull and, based on the readings, make certain educated guesses about your personality.

The motto of Phrenologists: "Know Yourself." A worthy pursuit, yes? Better be honest, though. The only way to cheat this test is to hit yourself in the head — and that's no fun for anyone. (Unless you're into that sort of thing.) I hesitate to think of the revelations that would result.

As one intrepid reporter from Twin Cities alternative weekly The Rake recently discovered, all the benefits of craniometric examination are yours to be had at the Science Museum of Minnesota in sleepy St. Paul.

You can see James giving this guy's dome a good once-over.

(Those benefits, we learn, incidentally, do not directly include improved sexual prowess. But of course one must always ask, mustn't one?)

The device James uses, a psychograph, is one of hundreds of items acquired by the formidable museum when it absorbed Minneapolis' Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, where James gave demonstrations, in 2002. (Why should Minneapolis have all the fun, right?)

As one of the few experts in the discipline, James was rightfully retained by the science museum.

Some call it quackery, some call it a pseudoscience (James calls it a weekend pastime), but phrenology still has its proponents. If not phrenology, this site certainly believes very strongly in itself.

So, the next time someone tells you that you ought to get your head examined, rest assured you have nothing to fear. James is a very nice guy. (And kinda cute.) And he handles his instrument with a gentle and expert hand.

Put down that mallet. No cheating!

Is this what Michael Tolliver calls living?

Armistead Maupin may be indispensable for gay men of a certain generation, but he is not a good writer. There. I said it. May I burn forever in the fiery pits of hell.

What made him famous — no, what made him essential was his ability to encapsulate a city and a decade and a moment in gay history, American history, within the pages of his original novels.

Michael Tolliver Lives rides on the coattails of an important literary achievement. But it need not have been written. It reads like an extended epilogue, neatly placing all the characters in their uninteresting fates, betraying the imagination of readers the world over who thought they knew what happened to the inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane. It's like one more season of Absolutely Fabulous that gets yet farther away from the characters and the audience and, while it may get the auteur some brief attention and a bit of money, ultimately does a disservice to the original phenomenon of the work that inspired the most recent re-visitation in the first place.

To start with, there's not much of a plot. It is one of the fastest reads of my life, and the book is kind of boring because, really, nothing happens. Upon turning the last page, I thought: Is that it? The title Michael Tolliver Lives says more than the whole collected 277 pages. If Maupin is trying to make a statement about life — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? — no thank you. I will just live my own and leave Michael Tolliver's alone.

The Tales of the City series was at least notable its convoluted plots and excellent character studies. And part of their charm was Maupin's insistence on placing them in time with very specific cultural references. This time around, however, it is clear that it is he, and not his characters, who are behind the times. There is too much laborious explanation of things that are already quite clear. His dialogue is wooden. Night Listener was a marvelous little novel. This one fell far short of the mark. Maupin would have done better to have left the inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane back in the late '80s, where they were relevant and interesting and significant. These days, unfortunately, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver is nothing more than a slightly bitter, self-indulgent, over-sentimental, unfunny, but loquacious shadow of himself.

But at least we know he lives.

I'll Walk, Thanks.

Reading about the recent death of marathoner Ryan Shay, it strikes me how incredibly out of shape I am yet how relatively unbothered I am about it. At age 28, at the top of his game, he collapsed at the 2008 Olympic Marathon trials.

It absolutely can happen to anyone. Yet how disgusting that it should happen to him. If the good Lord comes ringing for me before my time, I hope I have the good sense to screen my calls.

He is from a family of runners, which I take as a testament to the dearth of amusements available to a growing boy up in Central Lake, Michigan, population 1,000. Every sibling runs or has run. His sister stills holds some sort of obscene high school record. Plus his parents coach. Is it dedication or obsession? Whatever it is, it's bloody impressive.

"Trials" is an appropriate word. In today's Times article about the tragedy, his coach's training scheme for such trials is described thus: a 14-week training period, peaking at about 130 to 140 miles of training a week, with workouts including 8 x 1 mile at 4:45 to 4:50 pace at 7,000 feet (in Arizona) with two minutes' rest in between.

Yikes! (Two minutes' rest? They are so fat and lazy. What hope do they have?)

People who are driven to be the best at what they do have to work for it, no doubt. And I respect that. But I don't want nearly as much. So I am perfectly content not to work nearly as hard as Ryan Shay, who can run a marathon in 2 hours and 15 minutes, proposed to.

Even a friend of mine, finishing last weekend's New York Marathon in 4:09 (a personal best for him, I think), leaves me in the dust. I wouldn't even try it. I detest running. I can't even think of something I enjoy doing for four hours and nine minutes!

I am just this side of hopeless. Truly, I miss my rugby team, which dragged me kicking and screaming into the best shape of my life over the last couple of years. Having taken a season away from the team, I am reduced with amazing speed to a quivering white pudding, winded by the staircase ascent from the subway, aware of every aching joint and wondering how long it will be before I end up an Old Man. This is how it starts! I think.

UPDATE: I stand corrected. From the horse's mouth: 4:04:27. Yikes!

Green Lit

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