Half of babies born in rich world will to 100. That’s going to be hell on social security. New York City’s PS22 Chorus is really surprisingly great. I especially love their version of The Cure’s Pictures of You. I guess Ashton Kutcher does, too, which means I am cool or a tool, and I am not asking you to decide which. Meanwhile, thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on. I never would have thought to put a hyphen in bumblebee anyway, so I’m not going to be a crybaby about it, and neither is my pot belly.

And just so you know, information really is beautiful — just look at where all our money goes. So basically, um, we give most of our public money to the military industrial complex and the banking/financial sector. These appear to be incredibly efficient means to transfer public dollars into private hands. OMG I love this country!

Speaking of which, whatever you think of President Obama’s Nobel Price, you have to agree with the U.S. State Department that we’re making progress when the world is throwing accolades at our leaders instead of shoes.

Also, They Might Be Giants are making music for kids and they performed and talked about it on Science Friday a while back. I did not know the sun was no longer a mass of incandescent gas, but now I do. This information makes me a little sad, but I think I will survive.

Oh, and also also, a year ago today I moved to Chicago. sigh

John Krasinski, who is really probably the biggest star of “The Office” — I mean, wouldn’t you really rather watch him and Pam than Michael? — has made a movie adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Of course it will be painful to watch, and therefore, you must go see it. I command you.

So, when the actors, who are trained to sound off-the-cuff and extempore, read these constructions as definitive lines in the script, they are actually reading seriously premeditated, semantically irregular approximations of normal speech that, if the actor is given no leeway and is required to recite the line as such, end up sounding not like a person talking, but like a writer writing like people talk, which results in a singular kind of falsity this viewer has never encountered before.

Talk about trying too hard!

Ok, I’m kidding. Good job, Mr. Cohen, that’s a great Wallaceian construction for which we can all be thankful. It just doesn’t sound as great coming from you, but hey, it’s still well done.

So again I ask, why did DFW go and kill himself, dammit!?

I hardly know what to say to this:

A Billings man driving home from work around 5 p.m. Monday spotted his car that had been stolen from him that morning. He chased the car until it stopped on the 2600 block of Fourth Avenue South and managed to hold one of the passengers at gunpoint until police arrived.

“He was actually going home from work at the time of the call,” Billings Police Sgt. Scott Conrad said. “It was a red Suburban. He chases it down and there’s four occupants in the vehicle. Three run. He catches one of the passengers, with one hand at gunpoint and one hand on the phone calling police dispatch.”

Really? And the guy who chased a car through town (at what speeds!?) then pulled a gun and threatened to shoot a teenager walks away w/o being charged with the crimes he just committed? Really? Because somehow, suddenly it’s legal to use deadly force in defense of property? What!? And out of 75 comments, only about 4 even express skepticism that this is a good idea? Really?

Do you feel safer thinking that anyone could point a gun at you and threaten to kill you with impunity? Is this the society we really want to live in?

Wow.

1. A federal judge deporting a woman who was living in the U.S. illegally for six years and was about to marry an American when she accidentally crossed into Canada for about 30 seconds and then tried to return to the U.S. More ridiculous are the comments on that story, and more ridiculous still is the general xenophobia of the U.S.
2. The so-called “health-care debate.” No one should have their lives destroyed by a health crisis and the way to prevent that is to make sure everyone has quality insurance. Single-payer would do that just fine. Instead, as Brian Unger points out, we are “too busy, lazy, a bit stupid perhaps, lucky, unsympathetic, in-denial, really rich, hypocritical, selfish … and patriotic.” Awesome. See also Glenn Greenwald on the misdirected anger and resentment of the teabaggers. The poor are not our enemy! Corporations are!
3. U.S. Marshalls continuing to “hunt” for three men who may or may not have survived an escape from Alcatraz 47 years ago. We can’t pay for healthcare but we can pay for stupidity like this? If these guys survived and have not committed any new crimes, leave them alone! The point of law enforcement should be the safety and well-being of society. How are we safer or better off as a society if these men are recaptured? (Assuming, of course, they are even alive, which is highly unlikely.)

But giving up? Really? Come on.

Of course you’ve heard all the criticism recently of Acorn, the non-profit that everyone is all angry about because some undercover Republicans filmed some of its employees appearing to condone prostitution. Glenn Greenwald brilliantly describes the bigger picture here:

Apparently, the problem for middle-class and lower-middle-class Americans is not that their taxpayer dollars are going to prop up billionaires, oligarchs and their corrupt industries.  It’s that America’s impoverished — a group that is growing rapidly — is getting too much, has too much power and too little accountability.  …
If one were to watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh — as millions do — one would believe that the burden of the ordinary American taxpayer, and the unfair plight of America’s rich, is that their money is being stolen by the poorest and most powerless sectors of the society. An organization whose constituencies are often-unregistered inner-city minorities, the homeless and the dispossesed is depicted as though it’s Goldman Sachs, Blackwater, and Haillburton combined, as though Washington officials are in thrall to those living in poverty rather than those who fund their campaigns. It’s not the nice men in the suits doing the stealing but the very people, often minorities or illegal immigrants, with no political or financial power who nonetheless somehow dominate the government and get everything for themselves. The poorer and weaker one is, the more one is demonized in right-wing mythology as all-powerful receipients of ill-gotten gains; conversely, the stronger and more powerful one is, the more one is depicted as an oppressed and put-upon victim (that same dynamic applies to foreign affairs as well).

I’ve talked recently to a couple off well-educated, professional people who have given up on politics altogether. This whole Acorn “scandal” is just the type of thing to make a person think that’s really the only sane thing to do…

Sad.

Roger Federer has fallen to Juan Martin Del Potro at the U.S. Open. I would have loved to have seen that match. But, of course, I can’t help thinking, what might David Foster Wallace have possibly written about this? Just three years ago, he wrote about Federer as Religious Experience. It was an awesome essay, typical DFW, highly entertaining, educational, littered with ingenious and spot-on analogies, chock full of minute little observations that are so acute and precise that you just suck them in with “yeah” after “of, course, yeah!” gratitude — simply awe-inspiring stuff. And, of course, DFW’s whole huge magnum opus was about tennis — and addiction, and families, and drugs, and geo-politics, and feral hamsters, and wheelchair assassins, and cults, and…. But, and so, it just makes me wonder: what would he say about Federer and Del Potrol and tennis now, today? We will never know, and that is very sad. It’s so sad it’s almost infuriating. As John Moe recently put it:

David Foster Wallace hanged himself and robbed us of all the work he would have produced in the future. Our homes were stocked floor to ceiling with the promise of the best goddamn writing people could make and Wallace fucking ripped it off. I’m still walking around wanting to punch someone.

Yeah, me too.

One reason I rarely post here anymore is b/c the design does not reflect what I’d really like to do with this page. I’d really like to make some minor changes, and maybe over a longer term redesign the whole thing, but I never seem to find the time. Plus, I don’t really remember what I was thinking when I put this together. I made few notes to myself about how all the pieces fit together so now if I start digging around under the hood it’s like starting from zero. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start.

Or not.

Maybe this says something about the public defender organization for which I work: It scheduled its annual “meeting” (at which attendance for all attorneys is “mandatory”) for the same dates as this year’s NLG Law for the People Convention in Seattle.

You think?

Hey look, my law school class president just won top honors for an iPhone app he helped design for a Micro$oft event. Awkward is right. I love it. Congratulations, Eric!n (via DF)

It’s a little bit funny that someone decided to do a big group read of Infinite Jest this summer because I just read it last summer (after first getting about halfway through it in about 1997 or 1998). I’m now dipping into it again and am surprised to find what a good friend it seems. It’s strangely comforting. I’m sure this is going to sound over the top, but the book is just so fracking brilliant it makes me almost laugh with joy and gives me hope that, yeah, there’s still so much possible good in this world. And that’s despite how sad the book is in so many ways, how sort of fully empty it leaves you when all is said and done, and how sad it is to think that its author is dead, eliminated his own map at such a tragically young age. What more could he have contributed to this world before he died?

So yeah, despite all that, Infinite Jest still makes me smile. If you haven’t given it a shot yet, you should. Let the first couple hundred pages wash over you. Don’t demand that it make too much sense. Every time you read something and think, “Wait. Where did I see that character or reference or image before?” go back and find that place. The book is so self-referential you have to flip back and forth constantly to really begin to understand what he is doing. So give it some time. Really give yourself over to it. You won’t be sorry.

Oh, and there’s still time to catch up with the readers who are doing Infinte Summer. They’re only 10% in, so what’s that? 100 pages? Come on! You know you want to!