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…
Maria McLaughlin emailed me an article from today’s Chronicle about EcoTimber. Nice to see the logo I designed sixteen years ago remains basically the same. So much of my work is completely ephemeral: a presentation that gets seen onscreen for one live event and then is forgotten forever. The EcoTimber brand has outlasted the participation of the company founders. I’m also glad that Jason, Aaron and Eugene went with EcoTimber rather than “Arbus.”
EcoTimber sources sustainably harvested woods for floors, in case you know of anyone remodeling a house…
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.
Perhaps there’s something to the idea that designers are more prone to sarcasm than the average person. According to Katherine P. Rankin’s new study of Alzheimer’s patients, the part of the brain we use to appreciate sarcasm is not in the left brain where most of us process our primary language, but in the right hemisphere. As explained in the New York Times:
…the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.
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.