TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simple because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality.

…David Foster Wallace in his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction [pdf], collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which I am loving so far.

cursivebuildings:

COOKING IS A BLAST WHEN YOUR FIFTIES STOVETOP GOES TO INFINITE

At one point back in college I had a numbered kitchen dial like this, except it was on the oven.

Prison Treadmills.

Treadmills came into English jails following a 1779 prison reform act. That act said that prisoners should be given “…labor of the hardest and most servile kind in which drudgery is chiefly required and where the work is little liable to be spoiled by ignorance, neglect, or obstinacy…”

Maybe, subconsciously, this is why I’m not able to run on treadmills for any length of time.

Simmons + Gladwell

Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell talk about sports and such. My favorite bit:

We had lunch a few weeks ago and discussed the parallels between music and basketball. The structure is fundamentally the same: You have a lead singer (the NBA alpha dog, like LeBron or Kobe), the lead guitarist (the sidekick, like Pippen or McHale), the drummer (an unsung third wheel, like Parish or Worthy), the bassist (a solid, reliable and ultimately disposable role player: like Byron Scott or Anderson Varejao); and then everyone else (the other rotation guys). Bands can go different ways just like successful basketball teams. McCartney and Lennon were two geniuses who ultimately needed one another (like Young Magic and Older Kareem, or Shaq and Young Kobe), whereas MJ and LeBron were more like Sting or Springsteen (someone who could carry the band by themselves). And if you want to drag hip-hop or rap into it, the best parallel would obviously be Jordan’s post-baseball Bulls: MJ was Chuck D, Pippen was Terminator X, and there is no effing doubt that Rodman was Flavor Flav.

I’ll tumble for ya

I set up a separate tumbly thing on this domain. Here’s the feed for the tumbly thing. This whole operation was no doubt inspired by the blog/tumblr separation that Austin Kleon and Ryan Coleman have been doing for a while. Not too long ago Ryan also shared some thoughts on rolling up your content that helped decide the matter.
The tumblr will be a nice place to gather bits of influence and inspiration—hopefully both more frequent for you and less time-consuming for me; I’ll reserve the home page here for personal stuff and bigger projects TBD. I might clean up the tumblr styling later, and will probably break things in the process, but it’s up and running and good enough for now. Enjoy.

It’s official, the world’s most remote place is on the Tibetan plateau (34.7°N, 85.7°E).