Mustn’t Grumble

By: | January 24, 2014

The_ScreamLooking for fun things to do around London? Here’s an idea: Find a Brit on a first date with an expat from New York. Your task could be challenging — Americans don’t know this but British people don’t go out on dates until they’re in a relationship — but there’s every chance some hapless Brit has been cajoled into taking an exotic American girl out to dinner per her native custom. Just make sure the Brit under observation has never done this before and doesn’t know what to expect.

Watch as the New Yorker issues major alterations to the menu. “I’ll have the salmon, but can you do it poached instead of grilled? And instead of risotto, can you do a salad? Also I’m allergic to tarragon, so definitely no tarragon. Is the bread gluten free?”

Look past the polite smile, and you’ll see all the blood has drained from your Brit’s face.

When the salmon arrives, it will certainly be grilled and propped on a bed of risotto, surrounded by a flourishing thicket of tarragon. This is when the fun starts — you’ll witness at least three bounce backs to the kitchen, a tide increasingly loud, performative complaining meant to elicit sympathy from nearby diners (“Can you believe this place?”), and when the time comes to settle up, a heated exchange about removing the offending item from the bill.

Don’t take your eyes off the Brit, because you’re in for a treat. A man is about to rip off his own face. Continue reading →

24 Reasons to Ignore Best Places Lists

By: | January 23, 2014

BestPlace copy

The latest issue of Sunset Magazine arrived in my mail last week, and the cover story immediately caught my eye — “24 Best Places to Live and Work 2014.” “Looking for the perfect place to launch a career? Start a family? Just relax? We’ve found the ideal city, town, or neighborhood for you.”

For instance, if you’re “ready to put down roots,” the story’s handy flowchart offers you two choices — Issaquah, Washington (if “the burbs are calling”) or Sugar House, Salt Lake City, Utah, if they’re not.

Now Sunset is a fine magazine and they’re hardly alone in propagating these “best places” inventories. I understand the impulse to quantify a place’s attributes and size them up against other localities. But I worry that the proliferation of these lists have transformed place into a commodity rather than a commitment.

What I’ve learned from living in three countries and more than 20 locations is that there is no perfect place. Believing otherwise prevents the letting go of elsewhere necessary to create a home place where you are— a journey that takes effort and devotion. Continue reading →

Another Cup of Bull Honkey

By: | January 22, 2014

2695634651_0efbf53c0fGreg Mortenson is the subject and coauthor of the bestseller Three Cups of Tea, a book that chronicles his noble plight to build schools in far-flung parts of Pakistan. The tale is heartwarming, inspirational, and, according to allegations made by Jon Krakauer and 60 Minutes in 2011, rife with half truths and outright lies. In his lengthy takedown of Mortenson, Krakauer wrote, “The first eight chapters of Three Cups of Tea are an intricately wrought work of fiction presented as fact. … Mortenson has lied about the noble deeds he has done, the risks he has taken, the people he has met, the number of schools he has built.” I wrote about scandal here.

Yesterday morning Mortenson spoke publicly about the accusations for the first time since the 60 Minutes segment aired. In an exclusive interview with Tom Brokaw, Mortenson appeared neither contrite nor ashamed. He wouldn’t admit to fabricating portions of Three Cups of Tea. Instead he said this: “What I regret is that we were under tremendous pressure to bring about a million words down to 300,000 words.” That’s essentially the same thing that he told Outside Magazine after the scandal first broke: “In order to be convenient, there were some omissions. If we included everything I did from 1993 to 2003 it would take three books to write it. So there were some omissions and compressions . . .” Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Piss ‘Em Off

By: | January 21, 2014

a_wise_man_once_saidAG here, based on his examples, seems to mean that the best science undercuts peoples’ faith in their beliefs, thereby annoying them deeply.  I’m sure that’s true but I haven’t noticed it myself.  What I notice is when, for example, some observer tells some theorist that no, in fact the universe isn’t coasting along slowly, it’s tearing around with its hair on fire, and I feel a spike of deep, anarchic joy.  Probably that’s what AG means too.

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http://abstrusegoose.com/47

The Last Word

By: | January 18, 2014

The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards in 2015, perhaps? January 13 – 17

This week, a modest proposal from Helen: Golden Globes, science writing edition.

Cameron debated the merits of keeping a journal. Based on her observations on anemone, it’s a strong “yes please” from me.

No big bang, ever? Guest poster Jeff Kanipe introduced us to Halton Arp, his galactic pathologies, and his physics heresy.

Jessa once worked at a place where they had to slap their drug-addled users awake. What do drugs do to make this worth our while? Perhaps it’s the wrong question, Jessa says.

Why does bureaucracy ossify some countries ad galvanise others? Erik coined a term I’d like to see go viral: whydon’twejust.

 

The G-out Room

By: | January 17, 2014

nightclub hazeIt would start with tapping fingers on my bar, as the house music blared its inane, sometimes nonsensical, lyrics. The hands would be fidgety, the muscles straining for something to press against. Then his legs would start bopping and his face would start working and he’d launch into a violent dance. The shirt would come off, the sweat would pour, and a few minutes later came the overheating and the collapse. The rest went down off-stage, in the G-out room.

Oh, excuse me, the Green Room. Where the bands prepared on the rare occasions we had live bands. But mostly it was the room where patrons slept off the effects of a Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) overdose, watched over by the strangely sympathetic security staff. Perhaps “slept” is not quite the word, although they did lose consciousness for quite a while, and their breathing slowed. Most of the time, though, they were semi-conscious. Continue reading →

Naturalist Without a Notebook

By: | January 16, 2014

640px-Tagebücher,_die_Jakob_Unrau_während_des_Dienstes_als_Sanitäter_im_Ersten_Weltkrieg_geschrieben_hat.(sieh_Artikel_UNRAU).One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to write in a journal everyday. I’m terrible at it, even though I wished I loved to scribble daily. I can’t even keep up with my Planner Pad. (In fact, I’ve already lost my 2014 edition).

That’s not to say that I haven’t occasionally kept a notebook. I have one from the eighth grade that is sealed shut with duct tape and says DO NOT OPEN UNTIL YOU ARE VERY OLD. I am not sure when I plan on opening it. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Importance of Being Peculiar

By: | January 15, 2014

arp 2Halton Arp — “Chip” to his friends — died in Munich on December 28, 2013, and with him a cosmological banner has fallen to the ground. It’s a banner that younger astronomers may choose to take up. If they do, however, they should be cautious: it could mean the end of their careers. As a graduate adviser once remarked to me, “Any student or astronomer who pursues Arp’s work is asking for it.” Why? Because when it comes to standard cosmological theory, Arp is, or was, a renegade of the first order.

Quasars, he claimed, are not the highly energetic cores of very distant galaxies that astronomers declare them to be. They are actually fairly nearby, and ejected from active galactic nuclei. The big bang? Never happened. The universe, as his colleagues Geoffrey Burbidge and Fred Hoyle also contended when they were alive, has always been here in a steady state of existence. The cosmic microwave background radiation? That’s not the afterglow of the big bang fireball, it’s the limiting temperature of space heated by all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe. In the minds of conventional astronomers, these are the thoughts of an apostate, a heretic, a crank, and a crackpot, and Arp was called all these names and more. “Stay away from that lunatic,” an astronomer once pointedly warned me.

Continue reading →