January 2012
5 posts
Learning to Fly
People who don’t know how to travel crack me up.
The efficiency of the security situation at JFK’s JetBlue Terminal 5 has been deteriorating in recent months as they struggle to reconcile the time-consuming Backscatter X-Ray with the crush of some of the world’s largest traveling crowds. It’s irritating, and I have a lot of serious doubts about the utility of the...
Of Octopuses and Nirvana
Australian radio program The Philosopher’s Zone is one of my two favorite podcasts, and recently they ran a show called How Do Octopuses Think that provides a fascinating discussion of animal cognition and consciousness.
Guest Peter Godfrey-Smith on octopi:
It’s probably the closest we’ll get to meeting an intelligent alien. So as you said a few minutes ago, if we think...
Profane Sacrament
The lights dim, and the scent of incense wafts into the hall as chanting starts to rise within the room. At the back of the stage is a triptych of banners all resembling the stained glass of a cathedral, but depicting pagan iconography. Five masked hooded figures step out from the wings and take their instruments upon the stage. As the chants reach a crescendo and die off towards silence a...
First Night.
I was glad to see 2011 go, and watching it slip away at a subdued cartoonist party in Brooklyn where only one person was paying attention to the time and called out, “Uh, hey everybody, it’s midnight” was exactly perfect. No anger, no disdain, no celebration — it’s gone and it’s time to move on to the next thing.
Bill Kartalopoulos hosted a small group of us...
