domino motherfucker! Archive

0

Ways in which New York City has failed me today

By
Tom OHare
– May 9, 2012

In response to my appeal of a parking ticket acquired one month ago.

The respondent has been charged with violating Traffic Rule 4-08(f)(7) by stopping, standing or parking a vehicle in a manner which obstructs a curb area which has been cut down, lowered or otherwise constructed or altered to provide access for persons with disabilities. As of 1/31/12, fine mitigation is no longer available simply by request of the respondent. Also, claim that respondent thought parking was legal fails to provide a valid basis for dismissal. Therefore, inasmuch as no persuasive evidence has beeva [SIC] submitted to warrant dismissal of the summons, the violation is sustained and the full fine is imposed.

Clearly, I am going to appeal this decision as well, based on its staggering incoherence indicated by the all-caps, bolded “SIC” above. I should also note that my appeal contained a photograph of a vehicle parked in the spot I was allegedly “illegally” parked in taken the very next night, sans ticket. This evidence was disregarded by the unfeeling pencil-pushers in the NYC Department of Finance, no doubt because they are Yankees fans and I am from Massachusetts — which, SYSTEMATIC DISCRIMINATION MUCH, NYC?!?!?

Thought so. This isn’t over, New York. Not by a long shot.

1

What a Rube!

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 12, 2012

(cross-posted on Motherboard)

When you spend six months and 5,000 hours perfecting a 300-step, Guinness Record-breaking Rube Goldberg contraption, it’s gotta be a bummer to come in second place to some wimpy-ass 191-step machine simply because you had to intervene by hand a couple times when a ball failed to drop or a lever refused to swing correctly during the officially timed test run.

Fortunately, the handy too-much-time-on-their-hand-ers from Purdue University managed to record a successful start-to-finish run of their massive mechanical masterpiece at some point during the process. Unfortunately, the video looks like it was filmed by the crew of The Blair Witch project, but I guess there’s not a lot of crossover between engineering nerds and film school nerds these days, so I’ll give them a pass this time.

As you can see, the incredibly intricate machine is…well, hard to see. Which is to say, there’s just no way to appreciate its mind-blowing complexity in a mere two dimensions on low-resolution shaky-cam video. Although the ultimate goal of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest this year was merely to inflate and pop a balloon, the team overachieved by also incorporating all 24 required tasks from prior years of the contest.

“My rule is to tell an intricate story and make people laugh, and have people sit down and go, ‘Wow!’” [team president Zach] Umperovitch told Wired. “Since it was the [competition’s] 25th anniversary, I thought, ‘Why don’t we have a machine that does it all?’”

And it does indeed do it all. According to Umperovitch, in addition to successfully bursting said rubber bubble (that’s another term for balloon, right?), the Purdue team’s 2012 contraption also incorporated discrete steps for mailing a letter, sharpening a pencil, closing a jar, toasting a slice of bread, unlocking a padlock, screwing in a lightbulb (Q: How many Purdue engineering students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Apparently at least a dozen — assuming they have 5,000 hours or so to spare.), making coffee, turning on a radio, putting coins in a bank, playing a CD, shutting off an alarm clock, putting a golf ball, creating a time capsule, peeling an apple, raising a flag, recycling a can, casting a ballot, turning on a flashlight, shredding paper, squeezing orange juice, making a hamburger, replacing a lightbulb, dispensing hand sanitizer, and watering a plant.

Despite repeated viewings, I’m still not totally sure if I’ve caught the padlock cracking, coffee making, ballot casting, paper shredding, or hand sanitizing phases, so if anyone can give me a time stamp and/or viewing quadrant for these steps…well, then you clearly have too much time on your hands, too.

That said, there’s something beautifully and depressingly poetic about investing so much time and effort to design and build a device whose sole purpose is to destroy in its last act the very thing it creates in its second-to-last act. If only they would have turned their attentions to a machine that could have resulted in Rick Santorum winning the Republican nomination for president. Now that would have been an entertaining, confusing waste of time!

4

The Decline of the Novel and Jonathan Franzen

By
Tom OHare
– March 8, 2012

I’ve read most of Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection “How to Be Alone” over the course of the past week, and one of the overarching themes of the book, aside from the rather obvious “reading teaches you how to be alone, dummy,” is a certain earnest sadness about the decline of the novel. It’s a sadness I share, even if my reading patterns have very much skewed nonfiction for the past decade. Franzen laments that when we haven’t turned to movies, teevees, iPhones, and Internet porn in place of the novel, we’ve turned to memoirs and personal essays. The “serious” novel — whose publication is seen as cultural event — is doomed. There won’t be another “Catch-22,” or another “Old Man and the Sea.” When an exception pops up (Franzen’s own, more recent “Freedom,” e.g.), it only cements the point: “serious” novels have been turned into novelties.

I work for a company that sells donated books on the Internet. I sift through book donations on the regular. I’ve seen and dealt with tens of thousands of books. Probably hundreds of thousands. No. Definitely hundreds of thousands. In that time, I’ve seen David Foster Wallace books precisely twice, and I brought them home both times (perk of the job). I’ve seen “Freedom” enough that I was able to get two different copies of its first printing and keep the nicer one for myself, while giving the lesser to my probable-future-brother-in-law (sorry, PFBIL!) for Christmas. Where was I going with this again?

Oh right. People don’t read “serious” novels anymore, says Franzen. They read James Patterson and Danielle Steel. And memoirs. Aside from the occasional breakout hit like “The Shipping News,” it’s memoirs and mass markets all the way down. Our collective imagination — the manifestation of our cultural capacity to be alone — is suffering as a result. Or so it’s argued, broadly speaking. Franzen wants us to learn to be alone again, and the key is to read more “serious” literature. “Of course he does,” you say, “He hawks ‘serious’ fiction. What novelist wouldn’t want a coordinated ICBM nuclear strike on Comcast and Verizon and DirecTV, and whoever else out there happens to be in the cable business?” (The writer speaker admits to not having cable, and therefore being better than you.) “What novelist wouldn’t want the memoir to be banned? THEY’D SELL MORE FUCKING BOOKS THAT WAY! Bonanza! Domino, motherfucker!”

(I should be clear that I’m probably misremembering this rueful emphasis on the memoir replacing the “serious” novel and that I’m too lazy to look it up right now. I don’t think it’s as bad as I make it out to be, though. I kept reading the essays, anyway. They’re pretty good. [And yes, that was me covering my ass in case Jonathan Franzen's wife, following in the footsteps of Marjorie Walsh's Creeper Husband, has a Google News alert set up for her spouse, and is going to come into my comment section to defend her better half, guns blazing.])

At any rate.

Though I personally would blame Frank McCourt (or, hell, even Jack Kerouac) for the current preference for memoir over fiction in American literary sensibilities, there’s a really great essay over at The American Scholar that suggests that the real villain is our boy F. Scott Fitzgerald. Consider:

The publication of the “Crack-Up” essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the “omniscience” afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.

Whitman had set American poetry on this road a few generations earlier: the voice of “Song of Myself” belongs to a lyric essayist, contending with himself and his time, using the personal self as the representative of the national type, fusing the individual to history. And the presence of faux memoirists as narrators in American fiction—including Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s own Nick Adams, and before that the narrators of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick—also betrays a preference for the first-person voice.

The “Crack-Up” essays are a similar poetic project. Fitzgerald’s strangled cry in them makes clear that a lyric impulse links the personal essay with poetry, even though essays are a prose form and seem to pose a chronic scourge (or companion) to their apparent kin—narrative fiction. In fact, the essay inhabits an intermediate territory between story and poem. That may be its fundamental appeal. Tell a story and then think about it—all in the same work.

And this is what I think Franzen fails to understand about the appeal of memoir. It’s strange that he wouldn’t: he creates characters for a living, and memoir is simply creating a believable character who also happens to be the narrator. Fundamentally, memoirs are fiction with a whiff of truth. Fundamentally, that is, they’re stories. The goal of a story is to speak to people truthfully, not to tell them the straight dope. I don’t care if James Frey pulled “A Million Little Pieces” out of thin air and then pretended it was true. I don’t feel violated, cheated, or dishonored when a writer elides over uncomfortable facts, or makes up entirely new ones, in the service of a story. A story that doesn’t lie is boring, a laundry list, the minutes of your meeting. Outside of journalism, when I read I want the reality to be tangible; I don’t care a bit about whether it’s verifiable.

Which is a long way of saying that “serious” literature, whether “based on a true story” or entirely fabricated, should probably be judged by a uniform standard, and we ought not worry so much about facts, when the matter at hand is truth.

Anyhow, go read this.

0

This guy is probably cooler than you

By
Trevor Macomber
– March 7, 2012

Remember that time you tried to kite surf across an absurdly large body of water, only to lose the wind halfway through and then have to spend the next two days fighting off prehistoric killing machines with a small piece of sharpened metal?

This guy does:

Janek Lisewski, 42, a kite surfing champion from Poland, was two-thirds of the way through a 124-mile trip between Egypt and Saudi Arabia when the wind died down and deflated his kite. He survived by drinking energy drinks and two energy bars. He used a knife to fend off sharks… ”I was stabbing them in the eyes, the nose and gills,” Lisewski told Polish state news agency PAP.

“And then I proceeded to have sex with four international supermodels at the same time while earning my Ph.D in marine biology and filming a Dos Equis commercial,” he may as well have continued.

0

This is heartbreaking

By
Trevor Macomber
– February 27, 2012

And this is why the only place a black-and-white view of the world makes sense is in the land of retro Oscar darlings:

(Extra-long excerpt because…well, it’s merited.):

Rick Santorum, Meet My Son

This week my son turned blue, and for 30 terrifying seconds, stopped breathing. Called an “apnea seizure,” this is one stage in the progression of Tay-Sachs, the genetic disease Ronan was born with and will die of, but not before he suffers from these and other kinds of seizures and is finally plunged into a completely vegetative state. Nearly two years old, he is already blind, paralyzed, and increasingly nonresponsive. I expect his death to happen this year, and this week’s seizure only highlighted the fact that it could happen at any moment—while I’m at work, at the hair salon, at the grocery store. I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me. I don’t regret a single minute of this parenting journey, even though I wake up every morning with my heart breaking, feeling the impending dread of his imminent death. This is one set of absolute truths.

Here’s another: If I had known Ronan had Tay-Sachs (I met with two genetic counselors and had every standard prenatal test available to me, including the one for Tay-Sachs, which did not detect my rare mutation, and therefore I waived the test at my CVS procedure), I would have found out what the disease meant for my then unborn child; I would have talked to parents who are raising (and burying) children with this disease, and then I would have had an abortion. Without question and without regret, although this would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision. I’m so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he’d never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.

That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and narrow-minded nature of Rick Santorum’s assertions that prenatal testing increases the number of abortions (a this equals that equation), and for this reason, the moral viability or inherent value of these tests should be questioned. Prenatal testing provides information, a value-less act. I maintain that it is a woman’s right to choose what to do with the information that attaches value and meaning, and that this choice is—and must be—directly related to that individual’s experiences. What’s at stake here is not the issue of testing, but the issue of choice. I love Ronan, and I believe it would have been an act of love to abort him, knowing that his life would be primarily one of intense suffering, knowing that his neurologically devastated brain made true quality of life—relationships, thoughts, pleasant physical experiences—impossible.

[...]

The tenor of the current debate frightens me, as it heralds a return to another age when women were not the trustees of decisions made about their own bodies. What I hope for other women is that they have the power to make their own decisions with as much information as it is possible to have, with respect to the specificity and complexity of their own circumstances, according to their own minds and hearts and not the dictates of another person’s worldview. Santorum believes that all life is inherently valuable, no matter how compromised or of what limited quality; that is one view. I believe that we need a more nuanced discussion about what quality of life is, and that it should be a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy when the path of her child’s life is as compromised—and as terrible—as my son’s.

(via)

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Holy Moly, Mitt Romney Needs to Fire Someone

By
Tom OHare
– February 24, 2012

So apparently Mitt Romney’s campaign people thought it would be a good idea to use the Detroit Lions’ stadium for mindless speechifying today. The problem with this is that the stadium accommodates 65,000 people, and Romney only drew 1,200.

EMP-TY. Exemplified. And incredibly embarrassing.

I guess it’s an unfair comparison, since he did it in May of an election year rather than late February, but it’s worth pointing out that Barack Obama could easily have filled a stadium of that size during his campaign. At least, if Portland, Oregon had anything to say about it.

(via Steve Benen)

0

The Best State-specific Burn of the Year

By
Trevor Macomber
– February 17, 2012

Came from Yglesias yesterday:

The austerity mongers at the European Central Bank and in the German government have come in for a lot of criticism from Americans, particular of the progressive ilk, and it’s mostly been deserved in my view. But on the specific subject of Greece, I think a lot of the critics are not grappling with the full extent of the problem. The best possible solution for the United States of America would be for the European Union to just treat Greece the way we treat Mississippi—as a not-so-big, not-so-important, not-very-functional geographical region that’s full of poor people and needs open-ended transfer payments—but there are obvious reasons why this isn’t on the table politically. [emphasis my own]

Haha. Mississippi’s a festering backwater.
9

Book Review: “Cooking for Dogs” by Marjorie Walsh

By
Tom OHare
– February 14, 2012

At my job, I encounter a lot of very stupid books. There are a lot of very stupid people, you see, and they like to read very stupid books. And then those get donated to my non-profit and I sort through them and judge the anonymous people who donated them, usually harshly. It grants me the rare opportunity to feel superior to people who likely make more money than I ever have or will. Like the guy who took the time to leave a half-garbled sentence in my seller feedback when I had to cancel his order of “The Preppy Handbook” or some shit, due to Amazon being glitchy? Yeah, I still make fun of that dude in my head sometimes. And I make fun of you when you drop off thirty Danielle Steele novels at my donation bins, too. It’s a perk of being in the book donation world: I get to examine your marginalia, the titles you read, the boarding passes you leave in the middle of shitty airport books. I get to peek into your life and decide whether or not you’re a good person. What’s that? You just donated five Rachael Ray cookbooks?

Oh, hi. I think less of you.

But I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered a more loathsome book than the one that I’m about to describe. Published by Random House in 2007, penned by the illustrious Marjorie Walsh, who runs “an elite dog resort in the UK catering to a handful of pampered pooches, with… specially-developed meals,” we have the one and only “Cooking for Dogs: Tempting Recipes for Your Best Friend to Enjoy.” Seriously. That’s the title. It only goes downhill from here.

Full disclosure: it’s a cookbook, and I haven’t read the recipes beyond their titles. I’m not judging the book on the basis of its recipes. I’m judging it on the basis of it having been written. Also, the introduction. And then I’ll probably pick some of the recipes to highlight for the purposes of pointing out how ludicrous the whole thing is. And then I’ll say “Fuck” a few times and conclude. Or maybe I’ll just conclude with “Fuck.” Hard to say. Let’s get going.

Here is Marjorie in the intro:

When I looked at the nutritional information on commercial pet food and saw by-products, fillers and derivatives I decided that I didn’t want to feed that to my dogs. I wouldn’t eat these things, so why should our dogs?

BECAUSE THEY’RE FUCKING DOGS AND THEY EAT THEIR OWN SHIT AND MAYBE YOU SHOULD THINK ABOUT THAT BEFORE YOU TRY TO WINE AND DINE THEM INTO SUBMISSION? THEY EAT THEIR OWN SHIT, THEY EAT VOMIT, THEY EAT TRASH!! THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT MONSANTO, HONEY!

I’ll try to ease up on the all-caps. Pressing forward:

I started out by just making extra food when cooking the family’s meals, so that our dogs ate what we ate. Because I wanted to get it right, I did a lot of research and invested in some nutritional software. The end result is happy, healthy dogs with coats like velvet, plenty of energy, and hardly any pooping.

Hardly any pooping. Great. Instead of pooping, they just beg all the time because they’re being treated to fucking lamb with lentils (actual recipe) and salmon stroganoff (also an actual recipe), because some idiot with way too much time and money is pushing a book that encourages feeding dogs people food. But hey, no shitting! No more cleaning up shit! Sure, you have to spend 20 minutes prepping and 55 minutes cooking Scruffy’s avocado and chicken casserole, but no poop! Who’s walking who, now, motherfuckers?

MAS!

…[T]he experts don’t really know what makes the perfect dog food. Breeders and vets will have their favorite foods, too. So, how do you know?

PICK ME PICK ME! I bet if you feed them people food they’ll like that best of all! Yay! Where the fuck is my medal?

Dogs are like humans:

No, they’re not.

all different.

Soda cans are like humans: all different. Grains of sand are like humans: all different. Giant green dildos are like humans: all different.

For larger dogs it is much kinder to put their feed bowl in a stand adjusted for their height so that they are not stooping to eat their food.

Because who would subject a dog to the indignity of stooping for his meal? Now, maid? Cook Scruffy some tuna polenta, it’s his birthday.

From here, the introduction becomes slightly less patently offensive. Walsh assures us that dogs need plenty of calcium, and that the ideal meal “should consist of 25% protein, 30% fat, and 45% carbohydrates.” “Hold on a second,” you might be thinking. “Didn’t she admit in the second paragraph that there’s a wide range of opinion when it comes to what to feed your dog, and that every dog is different? Like humans?” Well yeah, sure, you pedant. But that was a whole page ago, and Walsh has a deadline to meet, books to sell. This is the right formula for all of the iddy-biddy, special snowflake dogs on the planet. Or you know. Close enough.

(I should note here that the second page of the particular copy I have is highlighted in pink and underlined in ink, suggesting that the previous owner has read this introduction at least twice, each time with an eye toward studying its hidden wisdom. This is deeply depressing on a number of levels, but I don’t feel like crying right now, so let’s keep going, if we could.)

So, armed with this information you can actually share your evening meal with your pet, remembering to add calcium to their portion. Dogs also need fat for energy so their meat should not be too lean, and don’t get too hung up on calories. Just be guided by your pet.

That this advice, “Don’t get too hung up on calories. Just be guided by your pet” comes in the context of a discussion about SHARING YOUR FUCKING MEALS WITH IT is troubling. I can just imagine Walsh’s husband Craig getting home from work on a Wednesday evening. “What do you want for dinner, Marjorie?”

“I’m quite not sure quite, Craig.” (She’s British: they say “quite” a lot.) “What does Scruffy want?”

“Scruffy wants beef and black bean stew, love,” Craig replies.

“Maid?” Marjorie calls.

And, scene.

I hope the maid steals their jewelry is what I’m saying.

No, what I’m really saying is that somehow a book was written that advised pet owners to take their nutritional cues from dogs. You’re counting calories? How silly, my dog isn’t counting them! Why don’t you listen to your dog more? Maybe you’d have more friends.

How easy is it? Well just cook extra, either from one of these recipes or from your own evening meal. Divide into portions and either refrigerate or freeze the excess for later use so you have ready-made meals on hand when you have run out of dog food.

In sum, fuck starving people everywhere. You have the opportunity to feed your dog salmon, and you should take it. You thought those leftovers would be tasty for lunch tomorrow? Think about how much your dog will love them right now!

Just add some crushed up eggshells. For calcium. Oh, also, here’s a bunch of stupid recipes. KTHXBAI. <3 Marjorie

Overall reading experience: 1/10. Would not recommend.

1

President Obama Totally Just Owned a Bunch of Old White Catholic Bishops

By
Tom OHare
– February 10, 2012

Watch this video for a bit of backstory to this stupid controversy, and the “compromise” Obama offered.

So a bunch of old, God-fearing, Catholic Bishop virgins wanted to occupy women’s vaginas and allow religious institutions that objected to providing women with contraception to recuse themselves from the obligation, under the Affordable Care Act, to provide it to their employees. The religious right, ever wary of women being given control over their own bodies, threw a temper tantrum and got it on the news. Everyone was talking about it. How would this wedge issue affect Campaign 2012?

Obama basically says in the above video, “Fuck it, you misogynist twits, if you don’t want to provide contraceptive services to your employees, you don’t have to. But guess what? YOUR INSURANCE PROVIDER DOES IF YOU OPT OUT OF THAT REQUIREMENT. NA-NA-NA-NA-NA, FUCK YOU AND GET THE FUCK OUT! THAT’S THE COMPROMISE! DOMINO, MOTHERFUCKER!” Only with less swear words and more eloquence. Also, sadly, no dominoes.