A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

http://fjgallagher.wordpress.com/

Blog of Frank Gallagher, the dedicatedly brilliant personality who brought UMaine's student newspaper, The Maine Campus, to statewide prominence in the early-mid 1990s. He also made it an exciting place to work, enough to become the reason my undergraduate career took an extra year to complete.

Looks like he's joined the ever-growing crowd of people I know in Portland, ME, though he clearly keeps strong ties to his beloved San Fransisco.

In some ways he was the first real boss-slash-colleague I ever had, and I have been looking for this guy off and on for ages. He dropped me a LinkedIn invite just yesterday! I look forward to reading him once again.

Gene Weingarten is my favorite active print journalist because of features like this [warning: disturbing subject matter]. This story is as gripping and engaging a read as it is a hard one, dealing with a horrifying subject. (And it is very different from the violinist-in-the-subway feature he won the Pulitzer for last year.)

I was witness to his thinking about this topic out loud in one of his weekly washingtonpost.com chats some months ago, so I was able to take the subject in stride as I began the story. I still had the wind knocked literally knocked from me by the note it closes on. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing through.

Are you, or is anyone you know, a Wii owner living in Maine?

I just got a note from a Portland Press Herald reporter who'd like to speak to you-or-them. If you're interested, please comment and I'll hook you up.

Steven Colbert presentation at the White House Correspondents' dinner. Rather long; if you're pressed for time, skip ahead to the "press conference" bit towards the end. Jaw-droppingly funny. It makes you wonder how he even got invited; did someone in charge of booking think he was an actual conservative comic? God love them, at any rate.

Also amazingly igry because of the lack of laughter throughout; strained chuckles, occasionally. For some reason a tossed-off line about how the glaciers will all melt away soon brought the house down. WTF?

But all the headlines about the dinner on Google News focused instead on Bush clowning around with an impersonator or some shit. Dur hur hur he can poke fun at himself what a guy. There is a rule of comedy here that I do not think is put into words often: like a sort of inverse of the rule that a member of a given ethnic group enjoys particular freedom to poke fun at that group, an individual person famous for being actively incompetent to global-disaster levels cannot poke fun at how dumb they are; that's better left for another comic to do. Because otherwise it sounds like they're making light of their own utter contemptibility, which sounds rather to me like gloating. And the thought of the president gloating sounds too much like me wishing to eat a puppy, so that I may then vomit the puppy onto him.

From an AP story on Aaron Sorkin criticizing GWB:

Sorkin, who was allowed to enter a drug treatment program last year instead of serving prison time for possession of cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms, said in the magazine that he believed Bush was handling the current crisis well and that "it's absolutely right that at this time we're all laying off the bubblehead jokes."

Drugs do not factor in any other part of the story -- at some point someone just decided to drop in this fact about the guy. It sounds like the writer pauses to lean in confidentially to say with a wink, "Oh, by the way, he's a convicted druggie, and, well, you know how they get." It reminds me about how we'd joke about adding the clause "noted Communist" after people's names, at the Campus. But it was a joke! Argh!

I feel this cuts both ways, by the way: I got steamed at the Globe when, covering some decision that pre-911 GWB was making, snuck in a reminder of his death-penalty record as governor, when the story's topic had nothing to do wiith capital punishment. Jeepers creepers.

Was up until 4 am writing. I really got into a state of mind that I don't think I've visited for years, feeling mental stimulation from the awareness of things coming together just slightly faster than the gradual drop of the deadline pendulum. The last time I remember giddiness and motivation coming from that particular race condition was during the summer of 1995, when I worked as a freelance writer for The Weekly, a free Bangor newspaper (in biz lingo, a "shopper"). I covered the Hampden Town Council meetings, and twice that summer managed to spin this off into separate feature stories that focused on strange and interesting things brought up at them... one about a horrible intersection with a highly expensive and highly broken stoplight, and another about the residential outcry against curbside recycling plans (cuz that would mean closing the drop-off depot, which lots of people used as a social hangout while pawing through each others' junk).

(Hmm... I wonder if I still have those stories on my hard disk? I'll have to check. The other day I came across, in my piles of stuff, a Xerox of one of my best pieces of student journalism, a feature about the University of Maine "drunk bus", a volunteer-operated van that shuttled party kids home from their party-kid parties, written "Cops"-style, talking to the drivers while riding around with them and witnessing a night's worth of shenanegans. And somewhere, unless I threw it away in my destructive stuff-purge before my move, is my portfolio of all my proudest Maine Campus clippings. I suddently hope I still have it.)

The bad news is that I'm gonna miss Mostly Looney Game Night tonight. Too much homework to do... gotta finish chapter 8, and edit chapter 1 (the latter at Linda's specific request, which is nice... schedule is too tight for Erik and I to combine talents within each chapter, like we were originally hoping, but she specifically wants me to help punch up this introduction that Erik wrote.)

From 4 am email to Erik and Linda:

I have never felt such recurrent short-term violent mood swings about 
anything ever as I have about this project.

---

Met with the Lab prof today. Very quick meeting, just chatting on a couch in The Cube for a bit before he had to run off to his next appointment. I think it went well, because he gave me some homework to do, and told me twice at the end of it to stay in touch and follow up with my opinions about such-and-such once I get a chance to play with it. Very cool. I have to say that I find encouragement in his statement that the sorts of projects I'm interested in pursuing address things that he feels are lacking in one of his group's major projects. (He also invited me to walk with him to his next appt. so that we could finish our conversation, which I also interpret as a positive sign.)

A side-effect of the meeting was that my preparation for it (which took the form of talking to myself (over coffee) during the half-hour walk between Chez Chestnut and the Lab) forced me to finally draft up a list of the projects I'd like to pursue, were I a grad student there. It turns out that many of the projects simmering on the back burner are perfect candidates for this list, once you realize how they might apply to the Lab's goals (or more specifically the goals of the specific research groups within the Lab that catch my interest). This is, in fact, awesome, and saves me a lot of worry, because I have no trouble talking at great length about all this stuff, to say nothing of the fact that viewing these personal projects in a new light spawns off all sorts of related ideas. Yay