Turns out Santa has few fewer things to worry about. Here are six common medical myths that surface during the holidays debunked in the New York Times health blog:
1. Sugar makes kids hyperactive.
2. Suicide increases over the holidays.
3. Poinsettias are toxic.
4. You lose most of your body heat through your head.
5. Night eating makes you fat.
6. Hangovers can be cured.
Two weeks ago, before flying to Vienna for a week of work, I saw the premiere of “The Eight: Reindeer Monologs” written by Jeff Goode and directed by my friend Vic Chaney. It’s a tiny production at the Exit Theatre. But it’s fantastically well acted and directed from a hilarious script involving Santa and his reindeer in an North Pole workshop sex scandal. If you read this before December 20, try to get tickets and go see it. You will not be disappointed.
A couple of days after I got back from Vienna, napping Wednesday afternoon from jet lag, Deb called to see if I’d join her and some friends for an evening of storytelling. It turned out to be this month’s installment of the Porch Light Storytelling Series whose theme was “all that glitters is not gold.” What a pleasure it was to sit with an audience of a few hundred San Franciscans listening to people get up and spend ten minutes telling touching, funny stories. The setting was the Verdi Club, which is this quaint old italian social hall which can be rented out for weddings and (apparently) storytelling events.
There’s a tiny stage like you used to have in your grammar school auditorium. The lighting is terrible. But the voices are clear. The stories are wonderful and the organizers Arlene and Beth make everyone feel even more at home than Ira Glass does his guests on This American Life. There were live musical interludes to keep the evening moving including a heartbreaking rendition of Christmas Time from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special by a duo called Willow Willow.
And last night I went to Caffe Triest in Berkeley to see my friend Sonia Caltvedt play with Brian Wood’s jazz band. Live music should be a part of everyone’s week. More pictures from that night are in the gallery…
I danced with friends, neighbors and total strangers on Valencia Street tonight in celebration.
More photos may be found in the the gallery…
In this morning’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd recasts our presidential race in classic chick lit terms:
Like the leading man of Jane Austen and Bridget Jones, Obama can, as Austen wrote, draw “the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien. …he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased.”
While she does no great service to addressing really pressing issues of this campaign, it’s a nice distillation of questions concerning Mr. Obama’s character, and of ours as a nation of suitors.
Grist has just published an article by Gregory Dicum, with my photographs, about a group of people squatting in a train station in Buenos Aires. These people from both Paraguay and Argentina, had lived in towns and villages which were displaced by the construction of a hydroelectric dam project on the Paraná river.
If I am to be forgotten for anything, perhaps it should be my brief tenure as the J. Walter Thompson ad agency’s first “webmaster”.
Well, for those very few of you paying attention, the articles on this site have been restored. Photo banners will be back shortly as well. Banners are back now too. But my HTML validation is completely whacked. Ah well.
I must have missed the memo
. To my great pleasure, I discovered today that the New York Times has recently made access to their archives free of charge. In addition they’ve abolished their irritating Times Select experiment, where certain columnists and content was offered for a fee. I hope that this change proves to be a profitable one for them. I think it will. I think that institutions like the Times must learn to deliver their service free of tiered corrals of “premium” content. My intuition is that the more obscure that information becomes, the less commercial value it will retain over time. Of course not all information is like this. But particularly for art and opinion, the value comes in sharing the experience.A perfect example is the guest blog by Maira Kalman called The Principles of Uncertainty, which was previously only available to Times Select subscribers. Enjoy it now for free online. Or wait a few weeks and buy the book.
“THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: Language as a Window Into Human Nature” is a new book by Steven Pinker reviewed by William Saletan in today’s New York Times.
The medium isn’t just reason; it’s language — and language isn’t the manifestation of one mind; it’s the joint manifestation of millions. The reason language works is that it reflects the world as we jointly experience it.
Donald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, maintains one of the homelier homepages on the web. But he has a refined eye for design. I’m fascinated by his photographic collection of diamond road signs. Knuth is known for attention to minutia. He invented TeX a system for typesetting and Metafont a format for creating and encoding typefaces on computers. Perhaps it’s his eye for typographical detail that drew his eye to the distinctiveness to be found in common road signs.