Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself, a woodworking guide by Dale Power. People who bought that book also bought Animatronics: Guide to Holiday Displays.
Category: life
Lately I’ve been thinking about David Brooks’ essay from six years ago, The Organization Kid. “When I asked a group of them if they ever felt like workaholics, their faces lit up and they all started talking at once.” Definitely worth a re-read.
A short NPR story on the names on paper bags by Barbara Klein: “One of the names, ‘Alan Rumbo,’ intrigues her. She traces the bag back to its maker, and actually gets to talk to the line worker at the paper bag plant, Rumbo himself, who explains how the name on the millions of bags he makes propelled him to hero status with his kids.”
He’s Just Not That Into You (review: 4/5)
I’m fairly open to reading ‘girly’ books every now and then (see my reviews of Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge, How to Walk in High Heels, and The Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend). A friend of mine got me to read He’s Just Not That Into You: The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. It’s a quick, fun read, and I think both sexes could benefit from it.
Perhaps there are limits to the no-nonsense approach. Co-author Greg Behrendt (writing with Liz Tuccillo) doesn’t have a whole lot of room for forgiveness, but you have to admire that he takes happiness so seriously. If you don’t set your own rules, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. There’s a lot of motivational talk (you are beautiful, you deserve the best, etc.). But while the message is insistent, the book doesn’t take itself too seriously. The end-of-chapter “worksheets” are delightful parodies of the usual junk in self-help books.
Here’s a good bit on drug-addled relationships: “So, he’s always stoned when he’s with you… You’re going out with someone that doesn’t enjoy you at your full levels. That’s tantamount to him liking you better when you’re in the other room.”
So maybe he’s super busy with work and school and gets a little tense and lashes out: “I don’t care if he’s studying to become the next Messiah. There is no reason to yell at anyone ever, unless you are screaming ‘Look out for that bus!'”
On breaking up and futile waiting & wishing: “100% of men polled said that when they broke up with someone, it always meant that they didn’t want to go out with them anymore.” Cold, hard truth.
On resistance to marriage: “You are allowed to have aspirations for your future and to know whether the relationship you’re in is going to take you closer to those aspirations or be the demise of them.” And that’s just generally good life advice.
Rands tested some pens to try to find that perfect feel. I love how he parried the crucial topic of paper choice: “IÄôm going to avoid this entire debate and just use a Moleskine simply because if youÄôre going to have an argument about pens with anyone, chances are thereÄôs a Moleskine nearby.”
David Lee King used the new Twitter Tracking thingy to track what people are saying about libraries. That’s a pretty cool feature.
Hipster olympics, complete with ironic t-shirt competition. “—and they’ve gone back to the mirror!” [via moby]
So if the worst came to pass, Atlanta could be without water 4 months from now.
Andrew Blum has a great article on urbanism, environment, and change: Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change:
We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, TorontoÄôs Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density. When it comes to our homes, we are all justifiably afraid of change, especially when it feels like (or is) destruction. But we donÄôt often pair that truth with another oft-repeated one: Our way of life is unsustainable. In North AmericaÄôs most beautiful urban places, we unfailingly fight every new tall building in the name of Äúquality of lifeÄù and the Äúcharacter of the neighborhood.Äù We claim to have internalized the idea that itÄôs all connected, that slowing the warming of the planet is a global project, but the nature in our backyards remains sacredÄîoften to the point, perhaps, of self-destruction.
Seattle is an open and friendly place, but it’s apparently hard to form genuine relationships. The so-called Seattle Freeze is “the flip side of Seattle Nice… The dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: Polite but distant.”
A timeline of things that have gone or will go extinct from 1950-2050. [via kottke]
The new book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes looks like it could be a good one. More at MSNBC.
Cartoonist Adrian Tomine, creator of Summer Blonde among other things, shares a New York City moment:
I went out to dinner with my wife at a sushi place in Brooklyn. Right as we were seated at our table, the couple at the adjacent table begins the following exchange:
WOMAN: So, did you read that book I gave you?
MAN: Which one?
WOMAN: The comic. Summer Blonde.
MAN: Oh, yeah. I hated it.
Flannery O’Connor’s androgynous prayer
Written on the back of a credit card slip:
“Oh universe which is the all of being—reverence to you—your rule be known—and acceded to in darkness as in light. Feed us by the truth of our need. Let us not be deluded that we may transgress or be transgressed upon. Deliver us from the violence of the false. Amen.”
Sounds good to me.
The letters of Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester
Emory University held a Flannery O’Connor celebration this week. The highlight was the first public exhibition of the nearly 300 letters between Flannery O’Connor and Betty Hester, which had been under seal for the past 20 years. Brenda Bynum gave a dramatic reading of O’Connor’s letters. I was late for it, unfortunately, but what I saw was fantastic. In addition, lots of good material from her life is on display at Woodruff Library. Letters, notes, photographs, and things like her complaints about the cover chosen for A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I love it when schools do things well.
Bonus: Georgia Public Broadcasting had a show about O’Connor in August. And earlier this year NPR talked with Steve Enniss, the director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, about the O’Connor–Hester relationship.
Bonobos are in the news again. A while back there was a an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. And in the current issue of The Believer, an interview with primatologist Frans de Waal, who is gently criticized in the New Yorker article. It’s a good read, aside from lousy economics in the third section. The best part of the interview touches on moral emotions, and what we misconceive about morality & Darwinism. De Waal makes the distinction:
WeÄôve been fed a bogus ÄúDarwinianÄù position for thirty years, one that confuses the way evolution works with the things that evolution produces. Because the way evolution works, yesÄîitÄôs a nasty process. Evolution works by eliminating those who are not successful. Natural selection is a process that cares only about your own reproduction, or gene replication, and everything else is irrelevant. But then what natural selection produces is extremely variable. Natural selection can produce the social indifference you find in many solitary animals. But it can also produce extremely cooperative, friendly, and empathic characteristics.
Mark Larson 
