This American Life Marathon

This is final production week in preparation for Monday's review. While tediously retracing working drawings onto vellum I keep my mind occupied with old This American Life episodes that I haven't heard before. Highlights from yesterday's listening (February to June of 2004):

Life in the Fast Lane. (22 minutes in) Solemn, deep-voiced David Rackoff decides not to eat for 20 days to gain spiritual insight. He's Fraiser on qualudes, wit and literary allusions intact. My (paraphrased) favorite quote, "This is the most selfish thing I've ever done and I am a first-person journalist."

What Really Happens in Marriage. (6 minutes in) John Gottman is a scientist who studies marital interactions using videos and electrodes. After decades of experience he and his team can predict with surprising accuracy whether a couple will stay together or divorce. Turns out anger and disagreements are healthy, what matters is how the couple treats each other during heated discussion.

My Experimental Phase. This entire show is excellent. Nancy Updike talks about how she was the ultimate lesbian except that she couldn't bring herself to date women. Then there's the story of Chaim the Hasidic Glam Rocker (no joke). And finally Sascha Rothchild shares her transformation into a 13-year-old party girl as documented in her diary at the time.

More Prague Weather 2

And this was the view out my window this morning at 6:45AM. The Praguers kept saying that it wasn't going to snow, that it's too early, that it usually waits until after the New Year. Overall, I hope they're right. I don't want to find out what it's like for snow to stick around for weeks, but the reflected light is appreciated. 

More Prague Weather 1

This is what yesterday morning and Thursday morning looked like. After a week of gray, it was overwhelming to have so much sunshine and blue sky. 

The intro to Radiohead's "A Reminder"

One of the guys in studio stopped what he was doing, took out his ear buds, and announced, "The intro to this Radiohead song on my iTunes is the metro announcement for our stop." What he means is that it's a recording of the recording played when the doors close in the train at a stop before ours on the A/Green Line here in Prague. Translated it says something like, "The doors are closing. The next stop is Jirzho z Podebrad." It would be amusing if it was made from the Flora station, the one under the mall next to the cemetery. I have a vision of Thom making his lonely and depressed way back into the city after a surreal tour of that mall. Maybe he watched the marmosets, too.

That castle on I-5

Despite the fairytales associated with the Interstate 5 castle (in Creswell, OR) it's just a home for ordinary people, even lacking an estate name. Gimghoul Castle, in Chapel Hill, NC easily has it beat with ghosts and a secret society, called the Order of the Gimghoul. [via via]

Gray sky frowning on me

Okay, so I'm bored with the infill project, a bit lonely, obsessed with being online, eating unhealthy, having trouble focusing for longer than half an hour or so, feeling like I want to cry and I don't want to cry at the same time. When was the last time the sun came out? Um... Friday, sort of, for about an hour. Before that was Tuesday for about twenty minutes. The forecast for this week? Sun on Tuesday and Friday. I'm seeing a pattern here. It's nice to be reminded of exactly why I can't move back to Portland, in case I'd forgotten, but, wow, this sucks.

The Sunshine Hours Page lists U.S. cities and their average annual days of sunshine. I may choose my next city solely off of this.

Raleigh - a respectable 111 days, but I ain't staying.

New York - similar to Raleigh, 107 days

Portland - a measly 68 days

San Francisco - 167 days... Oh, that looks nice.

Truisms

My Google quote of the day is:
"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
- H.L. Mencken

Can I get an Amen?

That goes right along with that other pearl of wisdom:
"L'enfer, c'est les autres."
- Jean-Paul Sartre

(Literally,
"The Hell, it is the others," but more commonly
"Hell is other people.")

Citizens and the spying spies who spy

Pragmatic Prague has a long and intimate history with it's secret police. From at least the 1850's until the 1970's and 1980's, intellectuals had regular tables in certain coffee shops and the police informers had tables right next to the intellectuals. Informers would attend the funerals of those they spied on. Often, one was spied on for no other reason than earning the informer's attention. The stifling world of Franz Kafka's The Trial wasn't, as I had thought, a complete invention of a troubled mind. Imagining this nightmarish situation always leaves me with a sense of release, "Whew. Boy, I'm glad it isn't like that now." And then I read something as depressing as it is disturbing.

Winter starts Nov. 1st

I'm kicking myself for being too lazy and not seeing more of Prague. Sunday's list of places to visit included the Wallenstein garden and the new tunnel underneath the Powder Bridge, up at the castle. What I didn't know was that all of the gardens and the experiential alternate route up to the castle are closed on November 1st until April 1st. Ugh! I've wanted to see the new tunnel since last summer, but I only figured out where it's located this week, although I had a couple of fun days wandering around trying to find it a couple of months ago. There is an outside chance that M., our Czech co-professor, could talk someone into letting our class see it on a field trip.

I did make it to St. Nicholas in Mala Strana (Minor Town), though. What a silly building. It's a stage set for a melodramatic Dionysus, completely lacking the sense of awe present in every other Catholic sanctuary I've visited.

Hotlinking

I link directly to images and video on other sites all the time, but instead of being efficient from a user standpoint, it's actually bandwidth theft. Whoops. So I will be adding a Flickr "badge" (a sidebar box that Flickr provides for users) instead of linking directly to my photos on their site, even though the "badge" doesn't offer enough design flexibility. And from now on I will link only to the page an image or video is found on. I apologize for my past transgressions, but I'm not going to go through old posts to fix them.

LibraryThing, my latest vice

Because I'm completely addicted and because Tim is such a cool guy to create and maintain it, here is my huge plug for LibraryThing.

Catalogue the books you own (or recreate your library of read books, like me),

see who has similar libraries,

get suggested additions based on the books you "own" compared to others who own the same books,

rate them (5 star system, but unlike Amazon's click-once system, you have to click once for each star, cumbersome. It's not Amazon, but there could still be a faster way of rating, sorry, Tim.),

add tags (keywords) to multiple books at once with the nifty Power Edit mode,

add books quickly by clicking a bookmarklet when on an Amazon.com page, or by clicking the "plus" icon next to someone else's' book,

see sitewide statistics on the Zeitgeist page (14,320 books added in the last 24 hours)

and spend hours reading through other libraries.

It's bibliophile porn that keeps getting juicier.

It's free up to 200 books, $10 for a year, and $25 for lifetime use. (This is the first website that I've decided to pay for and I used to work for a dotcom!) You want to be addicted, too, you know it.