Air Guitar Nation is a recent film about the U.S. Air Guitar Championships. Could be a lot of fun. Reminds me a bit of The King of Kong, what with the whole rivalry-within-a-niche-culture thing.

Liz Danzico analyzes the closing phrases we use in e-mail. My most common reflex closings: Thanks, Later, Rock and roll, Don't stop believin', Heh, See you soon, Etc., Ciao, Yours. I do like to mix it up every now and then with a tongue-in-cheek rendition of the earnest and baroque.

"Before a game of tournament Scrabble, the tiles being used that game are set out on the board, so that people can make sure that none are missing. One typical way of doing this is to make four 5x5 groups of tiles in the corners of the board... Dan Stock has recently determined that it's possible to use the 100 tiles in a Scrabble set to form four 5x5 word squares where all the entries are Scrabble-legal." [via jessamyn on twitter]

Here's a nice bit of birthday motivation: things other people accomplished when they were your age. Other 25-year-olds have flown across the Atlantic, starred in Citizen Kane, and broken the 4-minute mile.

Did a little housekeeping around here...

• I restored the link to subscribe to the RSS feed for this site, which I took away some time ago in an inexplicable fit of madness.
• The sidebar now reatures a running list of what's playing in my iTunes, updated every 10 minutes or so. I suppose you can get the feed for the music, too, if you need immediate and comprehensive information.
• I refreshed the about page with better copy, linkage, and a handsome photo.

And I did some screw-tightening here and there in the background. Then again, I'd not be surprised if I simply screwed something up.

I screwed up another book I was making, so I just swapped the text block into a perfect-bound cover (with French flaps, to boot). The cover art comes from Mark Rothko's 1951 "Violet, Green, & Red."

A friend at work got a RipStik. They're like skateboards, except they've got two wheels and you can take really tight turns and you don't have to keep doing that annoying foot push-off thing to keep moving. Watch some of the videos. Might be a good Christmas gift.

I've never watched the show before, but after reading this article about The Wire, I think I need to track down a few episodes. [via andrea harner]

Tim Walker writes about meme entrepreneurship. I love it. Go read it. Unless I misunderstand the point, it seems like a lot of folks are already working in that vein---writers. Just glancing at my bookshelf, there's Florida and his Creative Class, Friedman and his Flat World, Weinberger's Miscellany, Anderson's Long Tail. I don't mean that to sound flip, because I think these all occupy an interesting middle ground. The ideas aren't quite as heady and broad as, let us say, praxeology (brilliant though it is). But they're a step up from the mundanities of something like Six Sigma. For the most part, the far ends of that bell curve can be safely ignored, unless it happens to be your pet interest. But if you're paying attention, strong arguments in that middle ground can force a conversation. That is what great memepreneurs do well.

Tim brings out a political example to contrast bad memes with fruitful memes. "Bush is stupid" vs. “Bush pursues dangerous ideas---expensive dangerous ideas.” The latter is more effective because it comes across as not a simple couched argument or opinion, but an invitation to explore. Provocative, sure. Good memes usually are. But more than that, it's actually a functional starting point. The best memes are forward-looking.1 That's one reason I always liked political theory more than any other field of political science. I get to escape those messy details of policy and history and think about what could be.

I'll let Tim close it out:

We need better memes in the world to counter all the stupid ones that drive so much of our behavior. I would say “that drive so much of our thinking,” but in fact the purpose of many of these memes is to relieve us from thinking, so that we reflexively reach for the products we’ve had marketed to us, or reflexively reach for the attitudes that favor certain special interests within the society. (Note that these special interests can be political, commercial, religious, or what have you. I take the broad view here.) But those of us who are awake to these tendencies can work to shape them in other, better directions.

--- 1. Bureaucrats and pundits are not. Though I'm willfully ignorant talking-head culture, I've seen enough to convince me that they tend to be far more concerned with digging up old grievances and winning now than actually caring about the future. It's the nature of the gig. See "Property Rights and Time Preference" [pdf]

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." ...umm... [via jaquith]

A long essay on Errol Morris' long, three-part investigation of a Roger Fenton photograph: "Fenton's mild rearranging of some cannonballs presumably went unremarked because no one at the time would have thought it worth remarking on. To subject him to the standards of our own time is otiose; it's like complaining that Wagner's Ring cycle is missing a backbeat." But, then again, that's rather beside the point: "I don't care why he chose to pursue this particular topic at such fantastic and disorderly length. It's a great thing to find in a newspaper."

Passive-aggressive notes.

The calculus of saying "I love you."

Matthew Brown has a wonderful and wide-ranging essay on reading. His topic is "undisciplined reading" in particular, reading that is non-linear, fragmented, discursive. This essay matches well with a couple other essays by Lethem and Gough that I've enjoyed this year. They all touch on or orbit the same ideas of influence and remix and pastiche and story-telling. There's also a bit on constrained writing towards the end. Brown offers the perspective of an active, creative reader. In contrast with the fairly recent tradition of following an unbroken narrative in a novel, Brown writes,

A more enduring practice and one equally generative of surprise might be called collative reading. Early New England clerics would collate passages from various tomes in their libraries to compose sermons. Yet it wasn't only the learned who would follow such nonlinear reading methods. Typology, where readers traced Old Testament foreshadowings of New Testament events, is profoundly collative, and the comparing of Hebrew Bible and Christian Gospels was at the heart of practical piety. If you think those prescribed schedules that allowed the devout to complete the bible in a continuous read over the year were the norm, think again: Cotton Mather recommended in his 1683 almanac that readers spend each day discontinuously sorting through the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Psalms. Commonplacing—the collection and transcription of discrete passages from one's reading under alphabetical or topical heads within personal miscellanies—was as important to Reformation pietists as it was to Erasmian humanists. Each of these nonlinear methods was a source of fresh insight, which would help the reader create oratory, apply scripture, or deepen faith.

Now there is a connection I'd never made before. Along with thousands of others, I do a modern variation on commonplacing pretty much every day---on del.icio.us.

Brown goes on to quote another great line ("a book was an outdated means of communication between two boxes of index cards") before talking about the effects of mass printing... synergy!

Put less dismissively, the intellectual historian James Burke explains collative reading in terms of the equation 1+1=3. For the active reader, two disparate pieces of information—found in separate items across the shelves of a library or even across the leaves of a single reference work—add up to a third, unknown category of thought. The real thrust of the Gutenberg revolution lies here rather than in movable type, mechanical reproduction, or standardized knowledge. The product of the printing press meant there were radically expanded opportunities for nonlinear access to written ideas.

A Toyota factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, has a fairly relentless culture of improvement: "Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing. This is what it means to come to work."

I'm a pretty good morning person, but I save at least 3 hours of staring into the closet by choosing a shirt the night before.

A few days ago I watched La Jetée (on Google Video). It's almost entirely composed of still photographs, just a half-hour science fiction montage with narration. Not bad.

It's amazing what a 9k text file will do for your peace of mind. I finally got around to making a list of Projects like I've been meaning to. While I'm nearly religious about keeping a task list, I've never bothered to capture those multi-step projects in one place. What bothers me is why I waited so long. For one, it's not as fun. Friends see me all the time whipping out my notepad to jot a little tidbit down. I admit, there's an addictive element to it. I'm writing shit down. Then I go and check them off. It's enjoyable. I'm on top of things. But when I'm faced with all my Great Ideas that I can't do in 2 minutes... Eek. I'm basically procrastinating on a larger scale. I'm choosing workiness over fulfillment.

David Allen talks about this in Productive Talk on procrastination that he recorded with Merlin Mann. Allen paraphrases some ideas from the book The War of Art. Listen to it, right around the 2:30 mark:

The thing that is closest to your soul is the thing you're going to avoid the most. The thing that will tap into the part of you that has not yet come to the fore but wants to be expressed but you're so afraid of it: you will absolutely find every single thing in your life to avoid doing that... You might actually have to show up.

It's just plain embarrassing to see what I've neglected. About 85% of what I have on my Projects list is over 2 weeks old. Ouch. While none of it has blown up, it's still broken promises to myself. It's just me and Projects.txt and the Deep Truths™ of my existence.

The upside is, while Projects.txt is currently a chronicle of failure-to-date, it can also be a manifesto. Onward and upward.

I've been pining for this book since March. At long last, the Amazon Fairy turned a pretty crappy day into... well... Friday!

Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself, a woodworking guide by Dale Power. People who bought that book also bought Animatronics: Guide to Holiday Displays.