American Idle

The Real Purpose of the Church?

"You can't just go around fucking boys in the street. People get mad"

(for those on FB, here's a link to the video.)

My brother, his wife, who is from Quito, and my mom are headed down to Ecaudor in the next few weeks. For my mom and my brother, it will be their first trip to South America. I'm very excited for them, and, well, a little jealous, because I've never been to Ecuador.

I can't make it on this trip, but I will make it some day. Instead I took a virtual trip courtesy of Tom Miller's, The Panama Hat Trail, one the hundreds of unread travel narratives on my bookshelves.

The premise of the book is that Miller is going to follow the supply chain of the famous Panama Hat (made in Ecuador much to his surprise) from the source, the weavers and even the straw (toquilla) all the way to haberdashers in the US. Miller deftly uses this narrative arc to explore the country through it's landscape, literature, culture, religion. history, migration patterns and cuisine.

It's a thoroughly enjoyable ride despite the clear exploitation and deplorable conditions of the indigenous weavers. As the hats pass through the supply chain from toquiila to the weavers to the buyers, finishers, exporters and finally the hat shops, they become increasingly more valuable. At the bottom end, the weavers are earning next to nothing for their herculean efforts. Some of the finest hats, the Monecristi Finos, sell for hundreds of dollars, with the weavers seeing very little of that largess.

Miller seems to me to be very even handed and fair to his hosts. However, he doesn't pull many punches and reveals many of the country's warts, including the relationship with the Indians, as I mentioned before, but also the deplorable state of the infrastructure, the poor quality of the health care system, the feud between the residents of Quito, the capital, and Quayaquil, the economic engine of the country, the manaña culture, the raping of natural resources by Texaco, it's defenseless in the face of it's more powerful neighbors, Peru and Columbia and so on.

The end result is that you start to feel a little sorry for poor downtrodden Ecuador. It doesn't make we want to go there any less. In fact, I'm all the more curious having read Miller's account.

For more recent trips to Ecuador, check out Tony Bourdain's No Reservations show.

The Rude Pundit is on the trail:

The whole history of our post-9/11 brain damage doesn't need to be rehashed here. But the continuing use of terrorism as a political tool, and the success it has, speaks a great deal about the character of the nation. Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's hysterical attack on the Justice Department is part of the right's attempt to undermine the credibility and the legitimacy of the Obama administration. Without demonstrating in any way that the "al-Qaeda 7," the DOJ lawyers who did pro-bono work for Gitmo detainees, have broken any laws or ethics rules, young Cheney is doing the same work as old Cheney, that Dick: giving al-Qaeda legitimacy as a force in determining the way the United States functions.

Indeed, the right has so successfully torqued the country into what our enemies believe it is, it's almost as if the GOP is a subversive arm of al-Qaeda. They have nearly bankrupted us, thus making any great social advances impossible; they have turned mild dissent into sedition; and they have turned the Constitution into a loophole-ridden contract, filled with more fine print than a subprime mortgage. They did most of that shit when they were in power. Now, out of power, the right is seeking, as it did in the Clinton years, but even more insidiously, to undermine the very functioning of government. And, frankly, it ain't like the Obama administration is doing a whole lot to stand up to these political forces. Close Gitmo. Try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. Say, "Fuck you, cowards everywhere. This is what a country does that ain't intimidated."

Here's the dirty secret: we were pretty fucking safe prior to 9/11. We aren't really much more safe after. We should be vigilant and strong. We should be infiltrating groups and breaking them up. We should be negotiating with other countries. Ultimately, though, you can use all the technological geegaws in the world, you can get DNA and feces samples of everyone coming into the country, you can drown every detainee, but you're not gonna stop the lone fucker who wants to crash a plane or blow up his balls. It's the price of living in these armed times.

And, honestly, on the whole, for those of us who remember the Cold War, it's a little easier to live with the odds of a terrorist attack versus the odds of an earth-destroying nuclear war. (But we were still told on a daily basis to bug out over Commies.) At some point, we have to decide if we are a nation of principle or a nation that capitulates to the merest threats.

I think we've decided. And we've decided to be terrorized.

I love these maps by Christoph Niemann on the New York Times site. Especially this one:

Here's the artists bio from the site:

Christoph Niemann's illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His work has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration. He is the author of "The Pet Dragon," which teaches Chinese characters to young readers. The Abstract City chapter "I LEGO N.Y." has been released as a board book. After 11 years in New York, he moved to Berlin with his wife, Lisa, and their three sons. His Web site is christophniemann.com.

I'm happy to report that Google has finally gotten around to adding directions for cyclists in Google Maps.

After a long wait and more than 50,000 signatures on an online petition, cyclists will be happy to know that Google has finally added bicycle routes to Google Maps.

In Google Maps, users can now find "Bicycling" in the tool's "Get Directions" drop-down box. After choosing the option, bikers can input two addresses and find the bike route that will get them to their desired destination. Like Google Maps' other modes of transportation, the mapping tool provides turn-by-turn directions and an estimated travel time.

The new Google Maps bicycling feature is available in 150 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. The tool boasts over 12,000 bike trails. When users look for directions, the company's mapping algorithm weights trails more heavily than roads for safety reasons. If cities have bicycle lanes, those are also weighted more heavily than roads without them.

I tried a few routes and got mixed results. The route from my house in Emeryville to where I work in Hercules put my on the Ohlone Greenway bikepath, which is awesome. However, plotting a course from Emeryville to Mt. Diablo has me going over Shepherd Canyon, which has about 20% grade at the top—probably not the best route for most cyclists.

It's in beta, so it's no surprise that it's far from perfect. I sent feedback into Google, as I suspect thousands of other eager cyclists will do. When Google Maps for Cyclists is ready, it's no doubt going to be a fantastic and incredibly useful tool.

UPDATE FROM GOOGLE:

The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions - similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible. Just like Google pioneered with driving directions, you can click-and-drag your route to customize it as you'd like. You can also access the other features in Google Maps, such as Street View, so you can tell exactly where you might need to turn on your route or preview how wide a bike lane is, and Local Search, so you know where you can take a water break or where the bike shops are along your route. Biking directions provides time estimates for routes based on an algorithm that takes into account the length of the route, the number of hills, fatigue over time, and other variables.

In addition to directions, a new bicycling layer for Google Maps, accessible via the "More..." drop down menu at the top of the map, will display an overlay of the various bike-friendly roads and trails around town. The layer is color-coded to show three different types of paths:

* Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
* Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
* Dotted green indicates roads without bike lanes but are more appropriate for biking, based on factors such as terrain, traffic, and intersections.

Also, check their blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/biking-directions-added-to-google-maps.html

I took a break of my tour of Scandinavian mysteries and picked up Peter Lovesey's The Last Detective. I enjoyed it as a nice change of page. But I really loved this money quote at the beginning of Chapter 5 where Lovesey takes him most famous predecessor to task:

In the modern police, as any detective will tell you, a murder mystery is rarely, if ever, solved by scintillating deductions from clues that baffle inferior minds. Unless the killer's identity is so obvious that the case is cleared up in the first hours, the investigative process is likely to be laborious, involving hundreds of man-hours by police officers, forensic scientists and clerical staff. If any credit attaches ultimately to a conviction, it is diffused among numerous individuals, and has to be qualified by administrative delays, false assumptions, and sometimes fatal errors. These days criminal investigation is not a sport for glory hunters.

Here are some famous movie quotes graphed.

Makes my inner geek smile.

Have trouble focusing? Can't seem to get through a book any more? This might explain why.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial " brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets'reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I can still get through books and am always reading something, but more then ever, I find myself switching between books, giving up after a few pages. My memory is shot and I can't spell anymore either. Why do I need those things when I have Google? It's a little scary. I wonder how this is going to affect the generations growing up without knowing a world without the Internet. If it's this bad for us, how will they be able to read anything longer than a few pages or paragraphs?

Just returned from a great afternoon ride up the coast to Pt. Richmond and back. I was fighting a headwind most of the way north and west which kept me at a paltry 13.8 mph on the outward leg. But with the wind at my back on the way home, I was hammering down the coast at 25 mph. Super fun. Details to come soon.