Early in our relationship — so, late 1980s or so — we were driving around, and Ulrika mentioned beige Volvos. And I said, “Beige Volvos? Do they even make those?”
Whereupon we saw about five beige Volvos in the next fifteen miles. (This was on an LA freeway. That’s a short distance.)
“Beige Volvos” has become our shorthand for something that is ubiquitous, but invisible, until your attention is called to it. (I think there’s a different term for it, but this is ours.)
How far can we be from the George Santos Writer’s Workshop?
* From an interview in Der Spiegel, called “Evil Can Also Be Beautiful”:
SPIEGEL: Some people say that if architects had to live in their own buildings, cities would be more attractive today.
Koolhaas: Oh, come on now, that’s really trivial.
SPIEGEL: Where do you live?
Koolhaas: That’s unimportant. It’s less a question of architecture than of finances.
SPIEGEL: You’re avoiding the question. Where do you live?
Koolhaas: OK, I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.
{hat tip to John Massengale}
Potter Stewart was the US Supreme Court justice who said, in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), “I shall not today attempt further to define (pornography)… But I know it when I see it…”
I was reading In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré, and he quotes Augustine: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not…” (Book XI, ~400AD)
So Mr. Stewart had a bit of prior art on that idea.
“As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I’m not going to use them up.”
— Samuel Delany, in an interview in The Paris Review.
“Able Fox Five to Able Fox. I got a target but ya gotta be patient.”
From my friend David D Levine comes a pointer to this post about a poignant burial site — which includes the oldest record we have of a domesticated dog. The skeleton of a puppy, from 14,000 years ago. Plus a woman in her twenties, and a man in his forties. Buried “with honour and ceremony.”
But there’s no question the dog was domesticated. It was nursed “through three bouts of distemper when it was four to five months old.”
More at this 2018 paper.
Dave Winer writes: “If I see something on Micro.blog that I would Like on another system, I don’t comment, I just do nothing, not because I’m bashful or overly quiet, rather because this is a language, and a comment has different meaning from a Like.”
This is another example where science fiction fanzines had this situation decades before online venues. (Not a surprise — many online customs clearly have precursors.) In this instance, there’s an acronym. RAEBNC. Read And Enjoyed But No Comment.
I’ve said before among my circle on Facebook that the FB Like fulfills much of the function of RAEBNC. Twitter is somewhat different, because of velocity. Instagram, because of the implicit aesthetic assessment.
But both Like and RAEBNC are doing that same thing — I read it, I agree with it, and no more communication at this time, Captain. (snappy salute)
Dave Winer wrote that, back in 2005. “People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.”
I did, Dave.
Alert users might have noticed I make my posts linkeriffic. One of the things I’ve missed on Twitter and Facebook is the ability to link more than once, maybe twice. Because links are a form of footnoting, to me. Even Ted Nelson might appreciate that. And I want to reach beyond Wikipedia entries, and go to people’s own sites, if possible.
And then there’s the AuthaGraph projection.
As you can see, they’re claiming it can be folded into a sphere, but I have to squint really hard at the end result to see it. Russia, for example, looks distorted to me.
This entry is here mostly because I want to reduce my reliance on Google to find it.
(Ah. I was right. The way I found Justin Haruaki Kunimune, who came up with the Danseiji IV projection, was I was googling term “AuthaGraph,” and found his post, Secrets of the AuthaGraph Revealed!)