WebSlog

Fellow InfiniteSummer traveller Marcus Sakey has this to say about (re)reading Infinite Jest and attempting to suss out every single reference:

[B]rothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you, on a second read, there wasn’t a word I would cut. Once you’ve got a sense of the greater whole, and once you trust Wallace, the thing is fucking genius. I write a very different style of book, but even so, it makes me want to pack it in and go home. He’s that good.

There’s a lot to this in reading through IJ and pushing on through life in general.

Both have the potential to be mammoth, abysmally complicated undertakings … supposedly fun things we’ll never do again as it were.  When and if we get tied up in parsing out every detail, every event into a fully realized entity, we all but guarantee ourselves of losing our minds long before we get halfway through.  On the other hand, if we lie back and realize that every reference (or life event) is meaningful only in the context of the whole, we’ll get to the end and realize that “[o]nce you’ve got a sense of the greater whole … the thing is fucking genius.”

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Continuing a long history of spiffing the Apple faithful as they await new product availability from Apple, Griff Technology’s Jackie and Dave (@davedelaney) hit Green Hills Mall and Apple Store to hand out Griffin goodies to the people waiting in line.  Proud to say that the first two people in line were @griffintechs as well, and were in line Thursday night at 10pm.

j. curtis made a video.  Apollo Up! did the music.

Enjoy.

Quick update from the talent trenches; AGT’s in Seattle and so far, we’ve seen and sent to Vegas a) a 6′8″ yodelling dominatrix, b) a band of break-dancing Cylon Warriors and c) a 60-year-old magician who did his apparations and disapperations to Sir Mixalot’s “Baby Got Back.”

Summer TV, you rock.

Ridiculously large summer reading assignment?  Check.  InfiniteSummer.org

Adult education class to learn to shoot less-bad pictures?  Check.  Flickr.com

In short, I got cultural embiggening coming out my ears.

But what’s REALLY important about summer is summer is when America’s Got Talent is on and tonight is when Season 4 makes its debut (2 Hour Season Premiere, 9p, 8 Central, check your local listings).  This is what makes summer summerier.

What’s in store for us this year?  We can expect Piers, Sharon and the Hoff back as judges.  But this year, the show will be helmed by Nick Cannon (host of MTV’s Wild’N'Out, star of band geek wet dream Drumline and ’70s roller skating geek fantasy Roll Bounce).  How will his street-smart patter mesh with the “explosive combination of celebrity judges David Hasselhoff, Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan”? (from NBC’s press release).

I’ve commented in this space previously on the wonderfulness of America’s Got Talent.  This summer should be no different.  To date we’ve seen a ventriloquist, an opera-singing insurance salesman and an 11-year-old singer take home the million-dollar prize.  What will AGT 2009 deliver?

Tune in.  That’s where I’m headed right now.

- Posted using MobyPicture.com

This was an unexpected treat … a Griffin Technology product got picked up in a Time magazine package on green products.

AirCurve may be green in the fact that it uses no electricity to amplify an iPhone’s speakers, but the coolness (at least for me) comes more from having witnessed the project as it developed from a paper model (furreal … 80# white bond straight out of the copier) to a 3D model to an actual product.  AirCurve boosts the iPhone speakers’ volume by 10 decibels, enough to make it a perfectly serviceable bedside radio.  IMO, it works best with spoken word stuff, where the frequency range is narrower than music.  It’s perfect for listening to the Saturday and Sunday AM NPR broadcasts while I read the paper.

Available lots of different places including Griffin’s website, Amazon and bricks-n-mortar (Wal Mart, Best Buy, elsewhere).

Cheers.

Tomorrow (Sunday) marks the Summer Solstice and the beginning of Infinite Summer. InfiniteSummer.org is the gathering place for endurance biblophiles who’ve committed to reading (or re-reading) David Foster Wallace’s epic novel of high-school tennis, drugs and mind-numbing entertainment.

We’ll read Infinite Jest 75 pages per week through the end of September.

As I clearly don’t have enough on my plate this summer, I’m hitching my wagon to InfiniteSummer.org and read along.

I first read Infinite Jest in 1997, the year Son was born. In retrospect, I don’t know what business I had undertaking a 1078-page book the same summer my first kid was born. I think maybe I had fantasies of Ashley and I at the park under a tree, our offspring cooing happily in the middle of a blanket as I whiled away the afternoon reading. Heh.

I got through Infinite Jest in about 8 months the first time. This is nothing to be ashamed of. The book is big, dense and so occluded by footnotes and endnotes (about 100 pages of the latter) that it was all I could do to divide my attention between work, Ashley, Son and the book.

I’ll blog here whenever the spirit moves me. If you’re interested, click on over and read more at www.infinitesummer.org.

Last official parenting act of the day (hopefully), grilling burger for offspring.

Lawn can wait. Right now, lightning bugs and the hum of AC units hold sway over the front yard. That’ll do pig. That’ll do.

Playing my turn at Facebook Connect Scrabble, all I had in the rack were letters to spell “blog”. Surprisingly enough, the Scrabble dictionary allowed it as a word.

So words thousand of years old – like “zen” – are not valid words im Scrabble while a complete portmanteau word like “blog” makes the cut. Weird.

Lots of goodies at WWDC and lots of moaning from the interwebz.  In short, business as usual.

• 3 MP camera in the new iPhone …  3 MP.  Furreal?  Isaac’s little point and shoot digital camera that came from Walgreens in a clamshell has got twice that — FAIL
• Area Focus … point to an area in the photo that you want the camera to focus in on and it does.  That’s kind of kickass. — WIN
• Video … full-frame, 30 FPS.  Now everyone can make teenie lo-rez video of themselves in less-than-flattering situations — WIN
• New MacBooks and MacBook Pros … bigger, better, faster, stronger our work is never over — WIN
• iPhone OS 3.0 … goodies galore, hardware/software interaction enabled through the Dock Connector — WIN, EPIC
• Battery Life under 3.0 and on the new iPhone 3G S … mo’ better battery — WIN
• Language Support — 30 languages supported and localized — WIN
• Language Support, part deux — Esperanto, Klingon and ELvish STILL not among those 30. BANKROTI/baQa’/THAR
• Core Cool Enhancement — still not included, this fabled add on is supposed to make the sheer act of holding a carrying an iPhone a singular statement of elan, eclat, cool, moxie and 16 other non-nerd qualities.  Still not activated in iPhone OS 3.0 — FAIL

Look folks.  It’s ones and zeroes zipping through melted sand and toxic trace metals.  There are a lot of things to get torqued up about in the world.  This maybe isn’t one of them.

That said, it continually amazes me that Apple is able to add hardware and software that so intuitively does stuff we didn’t maybe know needed doing.

EDIT 8 June 09 4:51—

Oh yeah.  30 other carriers will support iPhone’s MMS service when it launches June 17.  Conspicuously missing … AT&T.  Support will begin “later this summer.” — Carrier FAIL.

Over at DaveMadeThat.com, co-worker and social web wunderkind Dave is running a separate feature in which he documents his journey as he learns to play guitar.

Bravo to him for sharing the experience. Experienced pickers will see a lot of themselves in Dave’s video posts and people like me who feel like they could never play guitar will have that feeling reaffirmed. For those of you with fingers flexible enough and the muscle memory to to from C7 to G#m7 and back again in two beats, bully for you.

Just as skilled and just as demanding is the ability to see and take great photos. Another co-worker, @bradleyspitzer, is an amazing photographer whose portraiture is so simple and unstaged that you can almost sense the effortlessness with which he shoots. Check out Flickr.com/bradleyspitzer for his work.

I’ll never be able to shoot like that. But I am going to start learning how to make what I capture look less like badly shot iPhone candids and more like real photos. I’m starting a nine-week photography class at Watkins tomorrow. I’ve had my Nikon D40 for almost two years now and I’m not necessarily getting any better. I have the right equipment to shoot good photos, but not the right background.

I plan on documenting the journey here, no matter how awful the first efforts are. Based on the fact that my posting has been sporadic of late (damn you Twitter and your seductive 140 character limit) my readership has dropped significantly. So I may be the only one who notices the change.

In any case, tune in or watch your Twitter timeline for updates. Follow me on Twitter (@webslog) or grab the RSS feed over in the sidebar.

I can’t promise Dorothea Lange realism, but I can promise at least a couple of submissions to “How NOT to Take Photographs.” Join me, won’t you?

I am told these two are important regardless of their seeming toy disabilities.

This one may once have had a head oversized and mid-shapen as doll heads often are. In this case, removal of the head has created a Pink Floyd-esque nightmare. Toys from Despair’s Nursery.

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- Posted using MobyPicture.com

Jim Webster made lousy coffee. Bitter, chunky and black as Dick Cheney’s soul. Not exotic foreign bazaar black. Not old Turkish goat herder black. Not pulp fiction all-night diner bitter detective with a piece of pie black. Just black. What was left of the coffee oils congealed, floating on the top of the cup.

Part of the badness arose from the kind of coffee he used. Until he switched to buying Starbucks at the grocery store and grinding his own, Dad bought coffee using the same criteria he used to buy dog food … that anything that can in a colorful 50 lb sack had to be good.

Part of the badness arose from his method. Coffeephiles say that you’re supposed to coax the essence of coffee from the bean with a clean pot, fresh beans and water brought to just off-boil (210 degrees) Dad’s coffee was beaten into existence using the calcium-ridden Middle Tennessee water that clots pipes and toilet flush mechanism with its grainy blue-white accretions. He’d draw a full pot of Tennessee cocktail into an aged Farberware percolator whose thermostat had long before died. Instead of the gentle 210-degree water, the Farberware superheated the water like the turbine in an old steamship. The bottom of the pot would glow a dull orange as the pressurehead built in the pot, the beans shrinking back in fear, their essential flavor notes and chemistry being torn apart to comprising elements then flung carelessly back into the morass.

Poured into a mug, no amount of milk, creamer, sugar or highway striping paint could alter its mephitic, oily thiqidness.

And when we complained, his answer was inevitably the same … mock offense that his coffee was being insulted and then smilingly welcoming you to make your own.

There was more to it, of course. There always is.

Like everything else in the last 29 years of Dad’s life, Dad’s coffee was his sobriety. In a cup. And not in the way that you think it was when I make a cliched statement like “Dad’s coffee was sobriety in a cup.”

Obviously, coffee, its making and drinking, were a key ritual before the weekly AA meetings that formed my Dad’s spiritual core. First person to the meeting started the coffee, last person to leave made sure everything was put away. Whenever he traveled, Dad would seek out a meeting. The city might be different, but the venues were always the same, a room at a church filled with a group of guys sharing their experience as alcoholics. The smell of cheap coffee mixed with freshly waxed linoleum of countless church undercrofts. Sobriety has a smell. Sobriety smells like coffee.

So, too, at home, but in a slightly different way. As is the case with many families, matters of import, policy and character were discussed at the kitchen table … one on one, when the house was conveniently empty, Dad would sit me, or Megan, or Ben down and we would hash through the more painful parts of learning to be grown-ups. Grades in school. Attitude and general outlook. Automobile maintenance (and the lack thereof). Matters of finance. All of the conversations that we wanted least but needed most happened at the table. And these meetings always began as he finished pouring the cold remains of the morning’s coffee into one of the cracked blue mugs Mom would bring back from her month in Hilton Head with my Grandparents.

These sit-downs weren’t limited to family. I’d come home occasionally to find dad sitting across from Tom F. or Steve K. or some other Friend of Bill W. While they might not be rebalancing a checkbook or re-learning the link between regular oil changes and personal character, these AAs were there under a lot of the same kinds of circumstances … broke. Jobless. Car-less. Whatever-less. And the only alternative any of us knew to the bottom of the hole we were in was sitting there across the table, brow furrowed, chin thrust forward, slurping cold black Folgers and reminding you that it was far easier to act your way into a way of thinking than it was to think your way into a way of acting. For Dad, cold coffee at the kitchen table probably tasted like learning experiences. Like a sacrament that someone had shared with him early in his sobriety and charged him to share with others.

Dad died three years ago today. He and I had slurped cold black coffee just two days before here in the living room. He’d dropped by while running errands that morning.  I offered him what was left in the pot because it was late in the morning. Our coffee had came into existance by way of a grinder, a Cuisinart drip machine and a gold filter.

“See how good coffee can taste?” I joked.

“You don’t like my coffee?” he responded. “Then don’t drink it.”

We talked about nothing … I think we talked about the Indy 500 scheduled to run that afternoon and a little bit about work. He got ready to leave and we told each other “I love you.” We’d been doing that a lot more since the kids were born.

He died 3 days later.

So while I won’t beat the hell out of you with the Symbolicness Stick, I figure that my drinking cold stale coffee (albeit cold stale high-quality coffee versus his utility-grade rotgut) is a sort of sacrament Dad and I shared. To paraphrase from the Eucharist (Episcopalians holla!), I drink it in remembrance of him.

I love you Dad.

al fresco, of course. Fiona’s perched out on the balcony drawing beach chairs and having breakfast.

We haven’t been to the beach in a while, so this is a much needed break. Beatifil weather so far and an unbelieveably nice condo … 4th floor beachfront, very tastefully decorated.

Nap coming on. This is what vacay should be about.

–

"ShamWow's made in Germany and you know the Germans build great stuff."

Sometimes, Webslog Army, they just write themselves.

The Smoking Gun has, as usual, all of the juicy details.

No word on whether Vince actually had asked her to roll around on a carpet soaked through with cola and red wine wearing a ShamWow bhurka.

That’s all I got.

I’ve recently had a piece that I wrote for squeakystroller.com published!  “10 Things You Probably Haven’t Done Before Your Baby Comes”.  It’s exciting because I’m trying (slowly) to get more material out there.  Stop by, give it a read and if you like it, show the love and comment.

This is a picture of a tiny concentration camp uniform and a Star of David armband.

Son just completed an assignment that involved a reading of “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” an absolutely wretched piece of overwritten, over-sentimentalized trivialization of the Holacaust. I plan on reading it all the way through, but the beginning few pages feel like ABC knocked together an after-school special that sort of “cleaned up the Holacaust, because it’s hard to take.”

I think one of the biggest crimes we commit against kids is treating them like they’re stupid. This wretched piece of pulp works like the emotional equivalent of a snuff film. And it’s offensive to the memory of the millions who died.

Welcome Spring in all your springiness. Waking up this morning one hour earlier was maybe no treat but the looong afternoon is most appreciated. Missed you. Glad you’re back.