“Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted.” — From William Gibson’s 1996 novel, Idoru
Drone video of New York City
The three days I spent in NYC last May were great. (One day with an experienced native-NY’er guide.) But the video below shows a NY I didn’t see. Couldn’t see. But one day will.
What would I be willing to pay for a real-time virtual drone tour of NY (or Paris or Rome or Tokyo)? I thinking high-quality goggles with nat sound (drone motors someone filtered out) or real-time voice-over by pilot/guide. Or just music bkg if I choose.
[Stipulation: There is no substitute for being there. “Real” experiences are superior to “virtual” experience. For now.]
Poor Person Baton
There’s a sad little woman
with a cardboard sign
standing by the off-ramp
pretty much rain or shine.
The sign says “god bless you”
but I never look too close.
She wears those long dresses
that say I’m a child of god,
you can forget about my legs.
When I miss the light
and have to stop
I hold up a bill and she trots over
“God bless you, god bless you”…
Whoosh I’m gone.
When the light is green
I go sailing by, “next time” say my eyes.
Or we try a daring hand-off move
like passing the poor person baton.
Buddy Shively (1948-2014)
Buddy died in his sleep last night. Heart related, I assume. From his page on The Basement Diaries:
Buddy (did we call him Shive?) always seemed more grown-up than everyone else. Sure, confident, directed. Buddy helped me get my first job in high school (at Liberty Supermarket). While the rest of us were farting away our lives during the Basement years, Buddy was building a career. He played with us but I always felt like it was the way an adult plays with a child. Another very good poker player. Here’s his first entry in The Basement Diaries:
“I remember when we first started playing poker it was for real money and for some pretty big money (for the time, at least) and then the markers started, and got worse and worse (for some reason I blame Larry Miller for starting the markers) and after a while, every time you lost some money, you dug into your wallet and picked out an appropriate IOU and used it like money. I remember once piling up all my IOU notes out of my wallet and having 50 or 60 IOU’s totaling more than two hundred dollars! Occasionally (not often) we declared an “actual cash” game and didn’t allow the IOU’s. Someone discovered that whenever Mullen was bluffing, he’d say “up a buck,” and when he had it, he’d say “up a dollar”. He lost lots of IOU’s before we told him.
What history can be complete without mention of THE BROWN DERBY. I’m talking about the original Derby across the street from the Cotton Bowl Hotel. It was run by an old man named Kirk who made a great bowl of stew and grilled delicious hamburgers. Kirk had a cute little trick where he pretended to flatten the burger patty by squeezing it in his armpit. I’ll bet no one knows his last name or what ever happened to him.
Mullen was the best at snooker… Miller was a wannabe. The best shooters at the Brown Derby were “Sudsy” Southern and Steve Reagan’s older, left-handed, red-headed brother, shooting those $5 games of nine-ball on the back table.”
Buddy correctly points out that most of the early poker games and snooker/ nine-ball games at the Brown Derby took place while we were still in high school and predate The Basement Years. These events are, however, very much in the spirit of the The Basement Diaries.
Bobble Head Elvis
IBM Watson User Modeling Service
“The IBM Watson User Modeling service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through text messages, tweets, posts, and more.”
So I took one of my longer posts and had it analyzed. It identified my “Big 5” as follows:
Openness – 50%
Conscientiousness 4%
Extraversion 65%
Agreeableness 54%
Emotional range 86%
Then it breaks each of these broad areas down further. Continue reading
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
“It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren’t worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.” — Paul Graham
True Size of the Universe
Dog eating at table (Please pass the rancid squirrel)
A typical work day for Stephen Colbert
The interview below might just be the best interview I’ve heard. (Listen to the Real Stephen Colbert Explain How He Maintained his Flawless Character for Nine Years) Plotz asked really good questions and they were short (I hate long, windy questions).
It was like meeting Stephen Colbert for the first time. I hardly recognized the voice or the person speaking. He takes us through his working day and it was fascinating. And grueling. Difficult to imagine doing this 160 times a year (1400 total).
I’m gonna miss the character but it feels like the right time to stop. Maybe as it was for Seinfeld. I’ll record Late Night (as I did The Colbert Report) once Colbert gets behind the desk. I’m a little nervous about it. Like discovering your wife of twenty years is really a deep cover mole for a foreign government. Will I like the real Stephen Colbert as much as I liked the character I’ve come to know?