radio

Saturdazed

Just another Saturday that seems to have disappeared much too quick. Where does the time go? I think it’s at least partly the shorter days in winter, the early sunsets, of which I’ve never been a particular fan. At least we’re well past the solstice at this point.

I didn’t do a whole lot today besides potter around the house, around the internet, and around the town on a short afternoon walk. I spent the walk listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, one of my favorite podcasts. Their whole “Wonder of Physics” episode was fascinating, but I was especially intrigued by their interview with Mark Oliver Everett. Everett is the frontman of the indie rock band the Eels and, as it happens, the son of physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. (And who was, therefore and sadly, many decades ahead of his time.) The younger Everett recently worked on a documentary about his father for the BBC. “Everybody should be so lucky to get to make a documentary about their father,” he says. It looks like his is online at YouTube, so I may have to check it out in full.

I also listened to a segment of the Leonard Lopate Show, which I’d heard a little of last night as I waited in the car to pick my parents up at the train station. It’s an interview with neuroscientist Douglas Field about glial cells, which apparently makes up the vast bulk of our brains but, until recently, weren’t at all understood. I was especially struck last night by this exchange near the end of their conversation:

Lopate: In a passage of your book where you describe the way that glia interact with oxygen, you describe oxygen as lethal. Well, I thought oxygen was what gives us life.

Field: Yes, it is what gives us life, but for a biologist, we take a long view. I mean, oxygen is relatively new in this planet’s atmosphere and wasn’t there —

Lopate: It killed off a whole previous group of living organisms —

Field: It’s a byproduct of plants. It’s a toxic byproduct, and organisms who could not adjust to that didn’t survive.

I had never looked at it quite like that, and it’s why I went back and listened to the entire interview this afternoon.

All of which is considerably more exciting than the afternoon itself. I think now I’m just going to watch the premiere episode of Caprica and then do some late-night capping.

It’s already the second week of January?

When you get right down to it, Arthur Dent was right about Thursdays. They really are impossible to get a hang of.

Beyond my mild shock that the work week is almost over, there’s not a whole lot to report. Last night, right before bed, I read a short story by Dan Chaon called “The Bees.” I seem to think I’d read it once before, but it’s a masterful piece of work and an incredibly disquieting ghost story. Which, you know, maybe isn’t the best thing to read late at night.
It’s collected, among other places, in the Peter Straub-edited Poe’s Children: The New Horror, if you’re interested in tempting nightmares yourself.

I somehow managed to get a pretty good night’s sleep, despite that, and I caught the earlier train into Manhattan this morning. On my walk from Penn Station, I started listening to this This American Life show about the problems with alcohol at Penn State. It’s hard not to feel a little sad for the place I went to school, and where I worked for several years, and it’s hard not see the fraternities as a big part of the problem. The amount of alcohol a lot of these college kids consider “not a big deal” and a common, every-night occurrence, is maybe more than I’ve ever had to drink in my entire life. Honestly, three drinks over several hours is about as crazy as I ever get, and I was 21 long before I had anything more than a sip of alcohol.

Meanwhile, one of my co-workers was being shadowed all day by a student from his own alma mater who’s interested in publishing, and I spoke with her for a few minutes about what I do as a developmental editor. I always worry, when I explain my job to fresh-faced hopefuls like this, that I’m making it sound boring. But it’s always nice to discover that I do in fact genuinely like what I do. It really is satisfying to take a good book and, with the author, make it better.

And hey, we got word about our end-of-2009 bonuses and (small but still appreciated) raises today, so that’s something, right?!

Tuesday various

  • I actually don’t have a problem with new Winnie the Pooh stories by a different author, even if that means the introduction of a new character. I’m not in love with the idea, and would prefer to see something new — if Lottie the Otter is a worthy character, give her her own damn book? — but I’m more concerned with this being done to extend copyright, to prevent other new stories from being told.

  • So if God didn’t create heaven and earth, that begs the question: who did? (From a Biblical standpoint, that is. If you take the there-is-no-God, the-universe-was-not-created route, obviously it’s sort of a moot point altogether.) This seems more like a case of semantics, but interesting semantics nonetheless. [via]

  • “A van carrying beehives crashed into a truck on Monday, and huge swarms of bees broke free and stung the injured and rescue workers at the scene.” Yikes! As if the car crash wasn’t bad enough. [via]

  • Next week, my mom and I are going to see Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! at Carnegie Hall. Tickets are sold out, but you still have time to bid on a pair (for charity) if you’d also like to be there.

  • And finally, I really loved these Superhero Status Updates. [via]

Monday various

  • Michael Chabon’s essay on the Wilderness of Childhood got a lot of attention when it was first posted, back in July. (It’s been sitting in my saved links since then.) I think Chabon made some interesting points, but I also think Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky’s response is worth repeating [via]:

    I’m not really arguing with Chabon here: he may be right that all children are instinctively adventurers, and he’s certainly right that limiting their exploration of the world in the name of safety threatens their creative imagination. But let’s be clear: the maps we draw for our children are not the maps that guide their lives. They draw their own maps, but it’s a mistake to confuse them with the nostalgic – or anguished — images produced by adult memory. Childhood is a foreign country to us. We once knew its landmarks, but they’ve grown wild in our imaginations, so that the “adventures” we remember are now just stories we tell. Adventure is what we call it when we show the slides. The natives just call it life.

  • Leaving aside the silliness of a religion based on Star Wars, or the questions that are maybe raised about established religions when you ask why this one is silly and they’re not — or even Tesco’s valid point that plenty of Jedi(s?) in the movies don’t walk around in public in their hoods — why can’t you wear a hood in their store? [via]

  • Well, at least he wasn’t wearing this flip-top zombie shirt… [via]

  • Permanent Bedtime, which plays a complete recording from BBC Radio’s late-night Shipping Forecast. Warren Ellis describes it as such:

    • The latenight edition of the Shipping Forecast has long been praised by the British as a gentle aid to restful sleep. And dream-filled sleep, too, because the Forecast is famous for listing “places” that are entirely notional, a virtual geography inhabited only by ships and the wondering minds of people drifting off into sleep. Sleep districts of the British imagination: Fastnet, Rockall, Dogger, Cromarty, Viking…

    It’s quite interesting to take an afternoon nap with that playing in the background.

  • And finally, I’ve only watched a couple of episodes, but I quite like NASA’s IRrelevant Astronomy video podcast, particularly the Robot Astronomy Talk Show. [via]

    • I quite liked the most recent episode with Linda Hamilton and Dean Stockwell, super genius:

My Friday night

Last night, I attended a live taping of a public radio show about things that are awesome, The Sound of Young America. Guests on the talk show included rock star Andrew WK, Scott Adsit from 30 Rock, singer Nellie McKay, comedian Kumail Nanjani and director Rik Cordero. McKay and WK were a little weird, but overall it was a great show.

It was downtown at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC. I had some time to kill between work and the show, so I went and visited the High Line, a new city park that opened back in June. While I was there, I took some pictures.