Category: etc.

I’m not sure, but I think the references to porcupines and garage doors in this editorial in the Anchorage Daily News is some kind of GOP code.

Keep right, quills
I’ve never seen a porcupine sprint.
The other night I almost hit one while riding a bicycle home. Waddle and roll, old quills was in a hurry on the right side of the trail just shy of the overpass that leads to the landfill outside of Eagle River. Headlamp light caught his tail a few feet before my front tire would have. I swerved. Quills kept going in a straight line.
No dash to the safety of brush and shadow. Just straight on, huff and puff and still slo-mo.
I had a vision of a leg full of quills if I’d hit the critter and fallen on it. Having pulled quills from the swollen muzzles of yelping dogs, I’ve got no desire to feel their pain.
Quills can kill, but the porcupine never seems to mean any harm.
Good thing they’re nocturnal. They don’t move fast enough for daylight living.
“Death on dogs,” is how an acquaintance once described them. He recommended shooting them. Another old Alaskan once told me they were walking wilderness survival kits. Easy to kill with a stick. Fresh meat.
Deal death to a porcupine? Its very nature rules out fair chase. I once watched one go up a birch tree to escape a dog. The leaves grew faster than the porcupine climbed. Fortunately for both dog and porcupine, it was already out of the dog’s range by the time the dog saw it.
Another time a porcupine huddled, head tucked between front paws against a garage door as I walked up to it in the dark. It raised its head once and looked back to see if I was still there, then put its head back down. It seemed to be thinking that if it didn’t see me, I wouldn’t be there anymore.
So I left. I waited half an hour before checking to see that it was gone. I figured the porcupine needed at least that much time to get away.
— Frank Gerjevic

I’m sorry, but I think the deracinated, uncredited, untraceable image orgy Ffffound to be the nadir of the eye candy, surface-uber-alles design world. And the people at Things offer my contempt a half-full glass of niceness:

We’ve always known that the object in isolation is not as fascinating as the object within its cultural context. The internet provided not just a new context, but a new way of looking at existing contexts. It took a while to realise it, but the collection, presentation, and curation of objects has become an intrinsically revealing way of tracing the ins and outs of modern culture.

“Just from what little I’ve seen of [Michelle] and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,” Westmoreland said. Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”
-Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, Republican congressman from Georgia’s 3rd District, as quoted in The Hill

You know, I was going to make a joke about how John McCain had said, “We’re all Georgians now,” but then I realized Westmoreland is the guy could only come up with three of the Ten Commandments on The Colbert Report. And I can’t top that.
This is the classic, Southern good old boy in the building industry racism that we have in North Carolina, too. Only stupider.

These British losers sound awesome, but I guess I missed the part of the article where they force the bars to sell them eight drinks for a euro or whatever:

Reports of scandalous incidents rumble on regularly here [in Greece’s Redneck Riviera] and elsewhere, helping to cement Britain’s reputation as the largest exporter of inebriated hooligans in Europe.
Earlier this summer, flying home to Manchester from the Greek island of Kos, a pair of drunken women yelling “I need some fresh air” attacked the flight attendants with a vodka bottle and tried to wrestle the airplane’s emergency door open at 30,000 feet. The plane diverted hastily to Frankfurt, and the women were arrested.
In Laganas, on the Greek island of Zakinthos, where a teenager from Sheffield died after a drinking binge this summer, more than a dozen British women were charged in July with prostitution after taking part, the authorities said, in an alfresco oral sex contest.
More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth. Her companions say they returned later to find the baby dead; she has been charged with infanticide.

And I missed the part where they’re too unruly, so they’re not allowed in.
Some Britons Too Unruly for Resorts in Europe

That’s a very non-elitist-yet-gravitassy typeface you got there, Senator.

Wow. Turns out the arrangements of the national anthems being played at the Beijing Olympics are unauthorized, uncredited, and uncompensated copies of the 2004 Athens games. The Beijing Olympic Committee apparently transcribed and re-recorded the unique orchestral arrangements, over 200 pieces, by composer Peter Breiner. Though anthem melodies themselves are [mostly? all?] in the public domain, the orchestral arrangements and interpretations constitute new compositions under copyright law. Breiner’s label Naxos is currently getting the Great Stonewall of China over the issue.
Anthem Arrangements Raise A Red Flag Over Authorship [washpost]

I’ve never been enough of a fashion trender or a socialite for him to really need to know me, but my office used to be on 57th street, and I’d see Bill Cunningham all the time. Then I’d see him at parties and such, so I’d always say hi. When he came back to work after his bike accident, I told him, “Welcome back!” and he smiled and said “Thanks!”
So it’s been a grinning pleasure to listen to him narrate his weekly On the Street photocollages for the NY Times:

Here we are, the first week in August, and the New Yorkers are all in black clothes! Well, not all, but you know what I mean.

On the Street | Ravenwood [nyt]

We’re in Southern Utah at the moment, visiting family outside St. George, which you may know as the city with the Polo Outlet outside Zion National Park.
Last night, we went to my second cousin in-law’s wedding reception at a Mormon stake center in Santa Clara. [a stake is made of several wards, or congregations. a stake center is the same as a ward meetinghouse, only bigger. There’s a wardhouse roughly every ten blocks in this part of Utah.]
It was a very casual affair, with a western theme. The new couples’ lassos hung on a coat rack made with horseshoes at the entrance to the cultural hall. Centerpieces of rusted iron hardware, horseshoes, bandannas, and cowboy hats sat on each table, as did a bowl of butter mints the color of over-farmed soil. I’d say they were khaki, but except for me, this was not a khaki crowd.
Men were wearing plaid shirts, jeans, and boots. Kirkland Jeans were surprisingly popular. While I got the belt buckle right–I’d changed from my turquoise truck buckle to my Montana Silversmiths “G” buckle, it’s a wedding after all–and those madras Jack Purcells that have been on clearance sale at J. Crew since about five minutes after they were released. I could not imagine a more out-of-place pair of footwear if I tried. If it hadn’t been a family affair, I would have–should have–had my ass kicked, just on principle.
After the celebration, we came home and watched our pre-ordered Dark Knight tickets become worthless as the kids refused to sleep on schedule. I snuck an Almond Joy from the 36-count case and a Mexican Coke in a glass bottle, and we sat outside in the pitch black desert, spotting what we believed to be two satellites passing overhead.

HE never got in to Juillard, which always rankled, but still ended up with an entirely respectable Ph.D. in Music History and stints as both Associate Professor of Music and Composer-In-Residence at two midwestern universities. He had even had his Second Piano Concerto performed by the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, and had a CD of it pressed at his own expense. He married a member of the ensemble he played in: she was ten years his junior, and one day he came home to an empty apartment. After that, he gave up teaching and, after going to Paris to study for a while, settled down in the Northwest, dividing time between being a velvet-voiced announcer at a classical music station and giving music lessons to a few students. He married again, this time happily, to a professor of romance languages that he met at a Do-It-Yourself-Messiah concert one Christmas. They adopted a child, a little girl.

just one from Peter Gillis’s How it turned out” [mac via waxy]

Look, I love Car Talk as much as the next guy, but holy smokes, the excerpt from their new, animated sitcom for PBS, Click and Clack: As The Wrench Turns, is utterly unwatchable. It’s three minutes long, and they have maybe 25 words between them; what’s the point of having these two supposedly great characters if you don’t use them?
I’d much rather watch them drive around the LA freeways looking for car trouble. Which happens to have been the pitch for their first TV show:

Their initial foray, some two decades ago, was to be a show in which they roamed the freeways in and around Los Angeles, looking for broken-down cars. But after numerous missteps, including taping before obtaining a permit, the project was shelved, Ray Magliozzi recalled.

Welcome to Toontown, Radio Guys [nyt]

Piggly Wiggly Updates Tagline For Teh Internets Age, originally uploaded by gregorg.

spotted while driving back from the Outer Banks yesterday.

I haven’t bought any yet, but since Jil Sander was sold to Change Capital Partners a couple of years ago and Raf Simons began designing it, the label has mostly moved out of the way of my grudge against Prada for ruining it. I only hope the sale price [EUR50 million] and the reported losses are real, so that in the end, the whole deal cost Prada a shitload of money.
Which is all unnecessary rationalization for my saying I like Simons’ work for Sander.
But what I like most about this suit is the photographic dissonance of it. As Marcio Madera’s runway photo shows, the black-in-back makes the model look like part of a collage of magazine cut-outs, or a rough cut-n-paste job with Photoshop’s lasso tool.
Like those t-shirts with pre-pixelated logos or the sunglasses shaped like black censor bars, the suit transposes the photo-mediated consumption of fashion into real space.
At least that’s what it does from head-on. From the side, you’d probably look like a total dork.
image: Spring 2009 Jil Sander collection [men.style.com]

In a guestblogger post on the NY Times’ The Moment, some guy in Berlin named Nick Currie, claims that the Japanese word for Muji addicts is Mujirers.
This is wrong. And by mixing up the L and R, it is wrong in a way that boomerangs nicely on people who poke fun at Japanese speaking English. [Not that I think that’s what Currie, of all people, was doing.]
Mujirer is a transliteration of Mujiraa [ムジラー], which is, in fact, what some people call Muji addicts. [As a 10-year-plus Muji obsessive, I confess I’ve never heard or read this term, but it’s out there, so I’ll go with it.]
The Japanese syllable ラ, is the one that’s used to transliterate both L and R. Sonically, it’s somewhere in between. Where Mujiraa is easy and smooth to say in Japanese, in English, Mujirer sucks. Before this Mujirer thing gets too far, I suggest using comparable Japanese words to come up with a better Roman spelling:
One possibly etymology for Mujiraa [ムジラー} is Gojira [ゴジラ], the Japanese name for Godzilla. Compare that to Mozilla, which is transliterated as mojira [モジラ], and except for the long A at the end of Mujiraa, you could make the case for Mujilla.
But I think there’s a better option. The Japanese transliteration of killer–and killah, for that matter, as in Ghostface–is kiraa [キラー]. This pattern would transliterate Mujiraa as either Mujiller or Mujillah. Either one of those is more accurate and sounds better than Mujirer. Use the former for Muji nerds, and the latter for badass Mujihadin who are smuggling suitcases full of that no-label stuff back from the mothership in Yurakucho on a regular basis.