Organic Mutant Archives: September 2006
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28 September 2006
Used to be an athlete, now he is an aesthete
aesthete \ES-theet\, noun: One having or affecting great sensitivity to beauty, as in art or nature.
Beijing, with its stolid, square buildings and wide, straight roads, feels like the plan of a first-year engineering student, while Shanghai’s decorative architecture and snaking, narrow roads feel like the plan of an aesthete. — “Sky’s the Limit [...]
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22 September 2006
I’m a Mac
37 signals says: “What do 50 Cent, Hugo Chavez, and Steve Jobs have in common? They realize the value of a good rivalry.”
Controversy sells. Conflict sells. But what is just imporant is ‘human drama’. In other words, what people find compelling is the human narrative, manifested through bitter competition, love/hate, victor/loser. Rooting for 2Pac [...]
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22 September 2006
You said we were make believe and I thought you said ‘maple leaves’*
The internets is so funny. Sometimes I experience meta-jealousy about the cool lives that peoples lead. I think of my quotidian struggles that revolve around developmental milestones, diapers, and spills. Then a writer who makes interesting cultural commentaries on life, the universe, and everything makes a little err and I swoop in [...]
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21 September 2006
Jealousy.
Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn’t do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company’s 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.
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19 September 2006
Not good.
What does James Lovelock - the scientist who predicted the ozone hole - think we have in store ?
By 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return.
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16 September 2006
Stuck in the belly of the beast
A self-perpetuating nightmare.
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14 September 2006
Can I say that here?
Have I been silent on the O.M. blog for so long? Can it be? Yass, the new computer that we put together earlier this year took a giant dump and died on us. So we wuz without a computer for weeks, on the the other side of the digital divide. Our internet connection was [...]
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13 September 2006
The real ‘Path to 9/11′
From the thoughtful minds at In These Times, an unusual analyasis of how 9/11 impacted us. An exerpt:
Whatever the natural similarities between December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, the association of the two has led us to convert—first in rhetoric, later in fact—a battle against a small band of clever, murderous fundamentalists into a [...]
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12 September 2006
On the sad state of the Oakland Raiders
The following is the series of text messages exchanged last night as I witnessed the once-proud Raiders fall flat on their collective face on national television, where they proceeded to get shut out by the Chargers, losing, jeezuseiytchcryse, 27 to nothing.
7:19 Tracy: Do you think the men in black will be victorious?
7:24 Me: I wish [...]
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8 September 2006
On dirty money
From a New York City rental agent:
The more we talked, the more agitated he became, “I spent all my time showing junk apartments that they could get on their own. If I gave them one website or one phone number, they could rent it themselves. We were basically advertising no-fee apartments. It felt unethical. I [...]