June 2009
2 posts
Robert talks to Don about Japan
ROBERT: I love Japan. They have band names like SUPERCAR and Number Girl.
DON: And yet [they're] 5 years more advanced than we are.
ROBERT: That's because they have Supercars and they number their women.
Nick talks to Topher about moving in
NICK: Look, when you move into my place I'm gonna label my stuff in the fridge kthx.
TOPHER: You label it and it'll just be easier for me to dip my penis in.
May 2009
1 post
Russell Ziskey talks to John Winger about monks
RUSSELL ZISKEY: You could join a monastery.
JOHN WINGER: Did you ever see a monk get wildly fucked by some teenage girls?
RUSSELL: Never.
JOHN: So much for the monastery.
April 2009
9 posts
Professor talks to students about loincloths
PROFESSOR [talking about Genesis]: Ok, so we covered the reason for loincloths last class.
STUDENT #1: Wait, why was that again?
PROFESSOR: (silence)
STUDENT #2: Adam had an erection.
PROFESSOR: Exactly. Thank you for cutting though the bullshit.
John Lennon talks to an interviewer about Ringo
INTERVIEWER: Is Ringo the best drummer in the world?
JOHN LENNON: Ringo isn't even the best drummer in The Beatles.
Ryan Purtill talks to an interviewer about what...
RYAN PURTILL: My new album would be like a SuperPoke to the heart. If your soul had a seat belt, you’de better buckle up kiddo. I’m talking music that would blow your mind all over your face type music. Like if heroin was music. Or if like cleavage could play guitar. Yeah like remember 911 and how bad that was? Well this would be like that but a good thing instead of a bad thing. Yeah that’s what...
Melissa 1 talks to Melissa 2 about chat posts
MELISSA 1: i didn't even notice you could post chats.
MELISSA 2: that's because you're not internet literate.
MELISSA 1: what should i write?
MELISSA 2: i don't know. we could just copy the example.
MELISSA 1: okay. um. let's see. could you give me directions to a men's dressing room?
MELISSA 2: no, but i can give you directions to an actual guy's apartment & you can watch him change through his window.
MELISSA 1: whoa. it's like you're reading my mind. so, what am i thinking now?
MELISSA 2: that we should go throw water balloons at the people leaving the bar around the corner.
NewScientist talks to Harold Varmus about life...
NEWSCIENTIST: You worked with Bill Clinton, and now Barack Obama. What about the man who came between them, George W. Bush?
HAROLD VARMUS: It was not a good time for science, but it wasn't an unmitigated disaster. I would say two things that are often forgotten. To his credit Bush completed the doubling of the budget for the National Institutes of Health. And he did good things for global health. But there were many other things that hurt science and undermined the science advisory process. However, that era is over. We need to be clear about the fact that damage has been done, and we need to repair that damage and look ahead.
NEWSCIENTIST: How do we repair the damage?
HAROLD: We've now got the chance to work with a president who has a positive vision of science and a very strong commitment to the fundamental principle that government should operate in a way that is based on rational thinking and evidence rather than dogma.
NEWSCIENTIST: Have you spoken to the new president about science?
HAROLD: Yes, in general terms. He's not a trained scientist, but what we can expect from him is a deep understanding of what scientists can do for society. To solve the nation's energy problems he has named a distinguished physicist to run the department of energy. That's an amazing symbol of his conviction.
NEWSCIENTIST: The "stimulus package" includes a strong investment in science. Wouldn't we be better off building roads and bridges?
HAROLD: Science is a good place to spend money. The long-term benefits are said to be about 150 per cent from government investment in science. In the short term money buys salaries, equipment and infrastructure. It's now our responsibility to find ways to use this largesse in a way that doesn't hurt us down the road by creating a cycle of boom and bust.
[Shamelessly swiped from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227026.700-one-minute-interview-varmus-on-bush-and-obama.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news]
Bonusland talks to whiteXbread about Onan
Bonusland: Not to mention, God TOLD Onan to impregnate the bitch.
whlteXbread: Wow, how do I not remember who Onan was?
Bonusland: OK, here's the story.
Onan was a dude, he had a brother, his brother had a wife.
God didn't like the brother, so he killed him. Said he was evil and shit.
So then God said to Onan, go fuck this broad. Your dead brother's wife. We need more babies because there's only like 23 people in the world so far.
whlteXbread: Who was Onan the son/relative of?)
Bonusland: The son of Judah and Shua.
So, Onan banged his used-to-be-sister-in-law-but-now-she's-a-widow, but he felt bad about it so he pulled out.
Or, "spilled his seed on the ground." as Moses called it.
whlteXbread: And then Onan got dead?
Bonusland: So yeah. God didn't like Onan's birth control method, especially when God wanted a Godson, so he killed Onan.
Technically the first Skeet ever.
Or at least the first documented one.
whlteXbread: right. i love this: "so then God said to Onan, go fuck this broad."
Dillweed talks to Anderew W.K. about hitting on...
rjdlc:
syntheticpubes:
Dillweed: Andrew, my friend told me you hit on her at a bar in NYC. Her name was Leslie and she said you smelled really bad. Is this true? Saturday, April 3, 2004 Andrew W.K.: Dear Dillweed, You’re right, I did hit on her. I hit on her all night until she was bloody and smashed beyond recognition. Right when I got into the bar I walked right up to her and hit her right...
March 2009
3 posts
Bret Anthony Johnston talks to Joel Rice about how...
JOEL RICE: You've said previously that the beauty of skateboarding has moved you to tears. On what specific occasions?
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON: The first time I remember it happening, I had stayed up late one night and then, on CNN of all places, they showed Tony Hawk doing the first 900. And I knew how long he had been going after it, how long skateboarding had been going after it, and all of a sudden I started crying.
And I teared up a little during Bob Burnquist's run from the X Games in 2001. It's a thing of beauty. He comes so close to slamming so badly so many times. He does a kickflip indy to fakie and he grabs the wrong side of the board. He just throws it under himself and then, a few walls later, he does a kickflip ollie blunt, then a switch rock and roll, then a switch backside lipslide revert. It was all so flawless, but the exact opposite of flawless, because it was so sketchy. I almost have the run memorized.
And then when Jake Brown slammed I started crying. Probably the only one who didn't cry was Jake, because he's something of a beast. And then, when Danny slammed at this year's X Games, tears came into my eyes.
JOEL: Could you talk a little bit about your own skateboarding career?
BRET: Like pretty much everyone, I started off on the street. Corpus, where I grew up, is really flat. It's on the coast, and most of the people down there are surfers, and I've always hated surfing. We'd skate whatever was available. If there was a drained pool, we'd skate it. If the roots of a tree had buckled the sidewalk so that it formed a bank, we'd skate there until the cops came. Handrails, ramps, parking curbs behind an elementary school—whatever there was, we skated. My buddies and I would take road trips to skate parks in Houston, Dallas, and Austin as often as we could. We'd use all of our money for gas and live off of peanut butter we'd pilfered from our parents' kitchen cabinets.
Then an indoor skate park opened in town, a warehouse full of ramps. This was in the late '80s, early '90s. I did well in contests and I got sponsored. And then I went on this tour. I guess maybe I turned pro for 30 seconds. We were going to go to Europe, but then I broke all my metatarsals on this Sal flip to fakie in South Carolina and the board sponsor that I was skating for wanted me to stick it out, just stay on the tour and sign autographs at the rest of the demos on our way back to California. He wanted me to stay on not because he thought I was skating so well or because I had such a thing as "fans"— which would have been flattering—but because I was the only one who was halfway responsible. I was the one who made sure we got to demos on time, that we didn't run out of gas or get arrested. Everybody else on the team was off getting high and drinking.
JOEL: You were getting high on the English language, weren't you?
BRET: Exactly, I was getting high on the English language. No, I was the den mother. So my sponsor knew that if I left the team, if I went home because I have this broken foot, then the tour is going to dissolve. Which it did. Which resulted in a huge falling-out between me and my sponsor, and I got really kind of soured on skateboarding. That's when I went back to school.
JOEL: What was the most poignant phase in your skateboarding career?
BRET: Ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two. That was when I was skating better than I had ever skated and was at a place in my so-called career where I had the skills and the confidence to be able to ride different things in a satisfying way. We would go up to Houston and skate Vagabond, a famous drained pool. I think about specific contest runs that I did, or tricks I can't do anymore, and it kind of breaks my heart.
JOEL: So there is a little bit of pining?
BRET: Not a little.
JOEL: How has skateboarding influenced your writing?
BRET: The two have always complemented each other. There are so few things that seem as difficult to me. The biggest link between skateboarding and writing is the discipline. Like here. (Gestures to the park below.) This kid is trying this trick and he hasn't made it and he's going to keep trying. It's like when we go to work on a sentence. You have to log the hours, take the hits, suffer the pain and discouragement, then come back at it.
You're going to have to jumble this around and make it sound smart.
JOEL: Don't worry. I'm a professional.
BRET: That's good. What was I saying? Oh, right. Skateboarding instills a confidence that I don't see in people who haven't skated. I see people giving up on things and I think, "Why are you giving up?" I still can't do frontside ollie blunts! I want to do them so badly. One out of every five sessions, I will get fixated on trying frontside ollie blunts. So far, nothing has come of it. I have been chasing that feeling for 10 years. If you've stuck with skating, even for just a few years, you develop a maniacal tenacity toward what can loosely be called "goals."
JOEL: "The poison is in the wound," to quote _Lolita_.
BRET: You can always count on a skateboarder for a fancy prose style. Skateboarders also look at the world differently, the same way writers look at the world differently. Writers have to notice things that civilians aren't noticing, and it's the same thing with skaters. And I really do think there is a marriage to be made there—at least in this person. I am a better writer the more I skate. And I am a better skater the more I write. I want to be the first one on the ramp and the last one off.
I think you do it as long as it resonates with you. I still lose myself. I really do think skateboarding is good for the mind and good for the soul. It's boundless, you know, and what does belief or faith do but ask us to forget our physical form? To focus on essence. And what are you doing skateboarding except literally forgetting your body. You really are in some ways trying to be liberated from your physical form. And it kind of ripples across every aspect of what we're talking about. You forget about everything else. If I go too long without skating, I'm not a good person to be around.
JOEL: Does writing satisfy you as much as skateboarding?
BRET: Absolutely, but I do long for that certain indescribable feeling that certain tricks will give you. I'll wake up in the morning and the first thing on my mind will be: I wish I could do an Indy gay twist.
JOEL: It seems like, even though skateboarding has waxed and waned in popularity, you've rarely wavered in your commitment to it. Why is that?
BRET: It's the same as if you were trying to be a poet, or trying to be a fiction writer, or trying to be a painter—if you can do anything else, do it. Your life is literally going to be easier if you choose a different path. But if you have to do it, then just accept who you are. Don't conform to what grown-up life is supposed to be. Find a way to put food on the table and keep the lights on, then use the rest of each day doing what you love.
JOEL: How do you feel about skateboarding entering the mainstream now? Do you feel ambivalent about it? Do you feel vindicated?
BRET: It has been a kind of vindication. Skateboarding has had a bad reputation, a reputation for being anarchistic and destructive. Skaters have been stereotyped as addicts and alcoholics and thugs. But, in truth, most of the people I skated with—if they had the choice between getting wasted or going to bed so they could skate the next day—they would go to bed. You can't skate as well or as long after you've partied all night. A few skaters have done drugs and others have made some devastatingly bad decisions, but judging the whole by the few is neither helpful nor ethical.
But there's also a deep sense of ambivalence, you're right. Skateboarding never really courted mainstream acceptance. We were happy to be left alone, happy to thrive on the fringe. There was and is something wholly satisfying about appropriating a piece of the architectural landscape—curbs, handrails, transitioned fountains, swimming pools, etc.—and using it in a heretofore unimagined way. In some ways, the culture came to skateboarding—a fact that is not unrelated to capitalism—and not the other way around. Corporate America saw that there was money to be made. So, no, I'm not surprised that skateboarding has entered the mainstream culture now, nor am I surprised that so many skaters—creative and disciplined kids—have forged interesting and productive lives for themselves.
JOEL: In general, people who found success in skateboarding found it in other fields. Jason Lee. Mark Gonzales. Rob and Big.
BRET: The list is significant and fascinating. Ed Templeton is doing his art and photography. Ocean Howell is an architect. It's not coincidental that so many skaters, a breed of people who trained and conditioned themselves to view their surroundings through different lenses, have gone on to work in visual arts.
There are so many skaters, not even professional skaters, just people able to ride a skateboard with some facility, who have gone on to be artists, mathematicians, poets, rare-book dealers, surgeons. When I've done these pieces on skateboarding for NPR and _The New York Times Magazine_, I get letters back saying, "I still skate and now I'm a high-school teacher," or "I'm a poet and this is my book." I'm starting to trade a lot of books with writers who have this history of skateboarding. All of these folks have chosen from day one to live lives that diverged from expectation. I feel pride and fraternity, but not surprise.
Originally posted at: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/skateboarderinterview.html
Jess talks to Tom about hookers
JESS: So, how's it going?
TOM: Eh. Could be better. Kind of perusing "Casual Encounters."
JESS: Any luck?
TOM: None so far. Sometimes I think "Erotic Services" might be the way to go.
JESS: Eww.
TOM: Eww?
JESS: Are you considering getting a hooker for yourself?
TOM: Not really. But I may do it. I would in a pinch.
JESS: Back to my original point - Eww.
TOM: What do you mean?
JESS: I rep hookers sometimes. They all complain about being hooked on drugs and having VD. And they're fond of stealing wallets.
TOM: All?
JESS: Of course, that's a generalization. But a well founded one.
TOM: Okay. What are you doing right now? Want to go to Wal Mart?
JESS: Sure, why?
TOM: To buy a fake wallet to put in my pants. I'll put some papers and stuff in it, maybe $5. She can steal that.
JESS: Wow.
Aaron Cometbus talks to Yael about growing up on a...
AARON COMETBUS: When did your parents move to the land?
YAEL: In the early 80's.
AARON: Not till then?
YAEL: Yeah, 1980.
AARON: Where had they been all through the seventies?
YAEL: In Southern California. But my dad, he went to Vietnam. And after that, he couldn't really hang so much. So he went to Alaska a lot. He was working in Alaska nine months out of the year, and coming back, and not really digging the city.
AARON: What was he not digging about it?
YAEL: Just people, I guess. Maybe it was just the 70's. He was just like, Fuck this, I want to do it all myself. You know, be self-sufficient, grow weed, and get out of the tax bracket, or whatever. I don't know if it was the economics that was tripping him out, or if it was just society, people in general, the hustle and bustle. He had trouble trusting people in business. He just wanted to trust himself, I guess.
For my sister though, she was just starting to go to high school. She was cutting school and going to the beach, and she had tons of friends. Life was good for a teenage girl at that time and at that place too, and then it's like, BOOM! Up to the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
AARON: Is it a conflict, a parent's need to be self-sufficient, and your needs as a kid? I don't think kids would rank self-sufficiency really high up on their list.
YAEL: No, not at all. No, they want to be, I wanted to be at school or go with friends, and stuff like that, but just didn't have time because we lived so far away from town. It was like, get up early, drive an hour and a half to school. Go to school, go back home, kind of do a little homework.
AARON: Did you remember the city?
YAEL: I was just a little ass kid. I was like, preschool. We came up first for a while and tried to build a house and stuff, started to build our house. We had a teepee and an army tent. And then one storm wiped out our army tent, so we had to go back. I was living with my grandmother down in Southern California for almost a year.
AARON: While they built the house?
YAEL: Well, we came back and the house wasn't built yet. But they had one of those trailers that you can put in the back of your truck to make your pick-up truck a camper, they had one of those up on blocks for me and my sister. And they were in the tent, another tent. The house was being framed and stuff. But I was there when they built it.
AARON: How many acres was it?
YAEL: 36.
AARON: That's twice what the White House has.
YAEL: Hmm.
AARON: Did your parents adjust well to leaving the city?
YAEL: The hardest thing was learning how to grow weed. The first year we only got an ounce. For the whole year. Maybe two. And I'm sure my dad smoked more than that, you know, so it wasn't a cash business until the third year, we finally got enough to pay for sheetrock and visqueen. We had visqueen on our windows for a long time.
AARON: What's that?
YAEL: The plastic stapled to window holes. "Hippie glass," they call it. And "hippie shingles" is tarpaper.
AARON: On that mountain, were there a lot of people whose families were native to it, or was it almost all back-to-the-landers?
YAEL: There was maybe one or two families who had been there for very long. And then there's the ranch families up on there, and they're old school, like third generation. And they had nothing to do with pot farming. Supposedly.
AARON: Was the fact that you were small farmers, did that eventually cross social and cultural lines so that you got along with other farmer's families who had regular crops?
YAEL: There are no regular crops there. The only other kind of farmers are like ranchers, there's a couple cattle ranchers. There seems to be a lot of hicks but not a lot of farms. Just hicks living in trailers, living the same as the hippies, they just don't like the hippies. The only ones that crossed to both were the bikers. The bikers had friends in every single faction, from the hicks to the hippies to the Native Americans. They knew all the people in the cities too.
AARON: Did those barriers reach down to the kids too, or did the kids start to get along more?
YAEL: Well, everyone went to the same school. My parents didn't have any friends that were different, but I did, growing up. Everyone was in the same school, no matter what your parents did. Thre was a pretty incredible amount of respect, actually. Because, the main thing is, your kid isn't supposed to lie. That's the weird thing about doing something illegal for a living as a family. Like, I feared cops. I feared authority. Still, if a cop gets behind me when I'm driving, my knees start shaking. A helicopter, you hear a helicopter, you hit the trees. It's just the way it is.
AARON: Do you find yourself stuck with some of these fears that are a little out of place now?
YAEL: Yeah, and I think lying about what you do for a living too, it can't be that good for you in your growth as a person. It's like, some lies are cool, some lies aren't right. All the pot farmer kids, they shut the fuck up. They didn't talk about it. Everyone kind of knew who was the pot farmers and tried to keep it secret.
AARON: What would you say your family did?
YAEL: Carpenters. There's more carpenters in that town than anywhere else. Everyone's a carpenter.
AARON: As the week growing becomes more successful, are there class distinctions?
YAEL: Of pot farmers? Oh yeah. Who grows the best weed.
AARON: No, I mean, don't the hippies eventually become richer than the people who'd been on the land before, and there's resentment towards that?
YAEL: No, but you see some people that grow for their families, and maybe have a good crop, and you see they get a new truck, or they finish their houe, or they get a TV or something like that. But that's normal. Everyone wants everyone to do well, you know. It's not like you're in direct competition. There's only so many people that buy the stuff.
AARON: But what about the people who don't grow weed? The ranchers and stuff. The ranchers see your dad's house go from hippie shingles to the real thing.
YAEL: They don't see that. They never come anywhere near us, they never come up there. Only the people that even get in the gate, through the driveway, are friends.. Only thing is, you can't get fancy cars, and you can't have nice clothes. That's the thing. Living where you are, you can't have a fancy car anyway. Just a good truck is all you need. Or a Subaru.
AARON: What do you think are some of the good things and some of the drawbacks of having a closed community? Most of the people in that area were transplanted.
YAEL: M-hm.
AARON: So you get this transplanted culture and it's sort of insular. Out of necessity. Because you couldn't have outsiders too much. So does it become xenophobic? Does it become, like you don't get new blood in?
YAEL: Well, when you're a kid you don't really realize any difference because there's nothing to compare it to. But, you know, it's boring as fuck. There's the same kids, you know what kids there are that you can play with when you're growing up. And they're always a few miles away, so either you gotta walk, minimum 3 miles, or 15 miles, whatever.
AARON: But I mean like, with the adults, do you notics that there's not different cultures coming around, there's not new people, a new infux....
YAEL: There's a lot of cultures. There's people from all over the place on the same mountain and all have the same sort of bond. It's like self-sufficiency, and weed I guess.
AARON: I was just wondering if as people grew older, as the relationships changed, the culture kept reinvigorating itself, or if it started to get kind of moldy and freaky.
YAEL: Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it reinvigorated itself. It definitely fizzled out and did its own thing. It wasn't like there was ever a sense of permanence with anyone there. Everyone was kind of like, "I'm doing this for a while." But the community wasn't really a community, it was like different families. It was like tribal, more. We were up there, we had cousins, aunts, my mom's family moved up there, so all her brothers and sisters were there. So it's like real tribal, cousins and things, their family, our family, and you know who belongs to what family.
AARON: Did you like that?
YAEL: No, I hated it. It fucking drove me crazy. I wanted new people every day. I wanted freaks and experience and, you know, interaction with people. I really wanted to meet some girls, man.
AARON: Dating must be kind of rough on the mountain.
YAEL: Oh yeah, it's impossible.
AARON: That idea of self-sufficiency, in a way, if you're growing weed and you're selling it to other people, you're not exactly self-sufficient. You're part of a society. You're doing something which needs other people.
YAEL: See, that was a contradiction that I realized early on, like "This is kind of bullshit, you know?" I knew it was bullshit. I knew that everything serves a purpose and everybody's using everyone else, one way or another. And I just wanted to be on the right side of that, I didn't want to be the one that's getting the boot stomped on my ass every fucking day. I wanted to be somebody that either doing the stomping or just floating free, away from all that.
AARON: You think that's what society is?
YAEL: Society is completely a web of entangled favors, deals, ripoffs. There's a consequence for everything in society, no matter what it is. And somebody always gets the short end of the stick.
AARON: Don't you think it's sometimes based on mutual benefits?
YAEL: There's not always benefits, though. It's like, I'm fucked this way or I'm fucked this way. Which way am I fucked less?
Read the interview in its entirety. Pick up Aaron Cometbus' fantastic zine: _Cometbus #48 - Back to the Land_. Kid seems to always ask the right questions.
February 2009
3 posts
Simon talks to Ainsley about Gmail outages
SIMON: Are you having problems with Gmail? I have a feeling that people are sending me emails, but they aren't showing up in my inbox.
AINSLEY: Yeah, your marriage proposal never got to me.
SIMON: I didn't--
AINSLEY: Shut your mouth.
Sarah (age 3) talks to her dad (a Chemistry...
SARAH: Daddy, were you in the shower?
DAD: Yes, I was in the shower.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: I was dirty. The shower gets me clean.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does the shower get me clean?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the water washes the dirt away when I use soap.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why do I use soap?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the soap grabs the dirt and lets the water wash it off.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because soap is a surfactant.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why is soap a surfactant?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does soap form micelles?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. Can you say ‘hydrophilic’?
SARAH: Aidrofawwic
DAD: And can you say ‘hydrophobic’?
SARAH: Aidrofawwic
DAD: Excellent! The word ‘hydrophobic’ means that it avoids water.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why does it mean that?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: It’s Greek! ‘Hydro’ means water and ‘phobic’ means ‘fear of’. ‘Phobos’ is fear. So ‘hydrophobic’ means ‘afraid of water’.
SARAH: Like a monster?
DAD: You mean, like being afraid of a monster?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: A scary monster, sure. If you were afraid of a monster, a Greek person would say you were gorgophobic.
(pause)
SARAH: (rolls her eyes) I thought we were talking about soap.
DAD: We are talking about soap.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: Because the C-O bonds in the head are highly polar, and the C-H bonds in the tail are effectively non-polar.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Because while carbon and hydrogen have almost the same electronegativity, oxygen is far more electronegative, thereby polarizing the C-O bonds.
SARAH: Why?
DAD: Why is oxygen more electronegative than carbon and hydrogen?
SARAH: Yes.
DAD: That’s complicated. There are different answers to that question, depending on whether you’re talking about the Pauling or Mulliken electronegativity scales. The Pauling scale is based on homo- versus heteronuclear bond strength differences, while the Mulliken scale is based on the atomic properties of electron affinity and ionization energy. But it really all comes down to effective nuclear charge. The valence electrons in an oxygen atom have a lower energy than those of a carbon atom, and electrons shared between them are held more tightly to the oxygen, because electrons in an oxygen atom experience a greater nuclear charge and therefore a stronger attraction to the atomic nucleus! Cool, huh?
SARAH: I don’t get it.
DAD: That’s OK. Neither do most of my students.
[originally posted here: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/a-dialogue-with-sarah-aged-3-in-which-it-is-shown-that-if-your-dad-is-a-chemistry-professor-asking-%E2%80%9Cwhy%E2%80%9D-can-be-dangerous-4/]
Richard Jones talk to Tom Corelis about Last.fm
TOM CORELIS: Last.fm has a pretty large database of information that listeners have input in there through our scrobblers. What’s it like acting as proprietors of such a large database of listener’s habits?
RICHARD JONES: Well, it’s great obviously, it’s what our service is built around and it’s a major asset. It’s great to have all that data that’s fairly unique as well – I can’t think of anyone who has that kind of database that uses it for the same things we do. It gives us a unique opportunity to do some quite funky things with the data. That’s one of the fun things about working at Last.fm as well: there’s so much knowledge and so many things that you can extract from that database. Obviously, we’re doing our best in doing a bunch of stuff with it; we’re always looking at it in different ways and always sort of thinking, “what happened if we tried this, or what happened if we tried that?” and we can actually go back to the raw data and runs some numbers and come up with some other ideas. So yeah, it’s great.
TOM: What were the inspirations behind Last.fm and Audioscrobbler?
RICHARD: There were originally two different projects, really. I was working at Audioscrobbler in 2002. Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel were working at Last.fm completely in isolation but [we were] only a few miles apart from each other. The inspiration behind Last.fm was that Felix and Martin were originally running an online record label where you could upload MP3s, but they had so much content that they didn’t know what to play people.
[Last.fm] used to have a radio station that was just random, and so they wanted to help people find the right music to listen to, and Last.fm really grew out of that.
At the same time, I was working on Audioscrobbler and my motivations were basically to be able to discover new music without having to do all the legwork of reading all the music magazines and keeping up to date with current affairs and so on, so I wanted to find a technical measure to discover new music – but I was also partly interested in the sort of personal statistics side of things.
People would ask you, “Whats your favorite band?” It’s a hard to question to answer, first of all. Technically when people answer, what they say their favorite band is isn’t always what they listen to the most. It’s what they perceive to be their favorite based on what’s trendy or what some of those other influences facts are. It was quite interesting form me to see the difference between sort of perceived tastes and what you thought your favorite music was, compared to what you’re actually listening to the most. For most people, there is a discrepancy there that was interesting to find out.
TOM: What kind of hardware powers the Last.fm main site? What about the Audioscrobbler database?
RICHARD: I checked how many servers we’ve got, and we have about 350 to 400 powering the whole service. Obviously, we do a lot of different things: we have the radio side of things, the number crunching, and the web service. The hardware that we use is fairly standard stuff: it’s all Intel and AMD machines, all rack-mounted hardware. We’ve have some blades as well. There’s not really any exotic hardware.
TOM: I’m told your site is a big customer of Sun Microsystems.
RICHARD: We actually have a mix right now. A few years ago we were buying from a local supplier here, and over the years it became more important to us to get really power efficient equipment, because at the data centers in London and the UK power is a real premium; it was hard to get enough power. So we started looking around for machines that were more tailored to low-powered stuff.
So we have a mix of different suppliers but right now we’re buying quite a lot from Sun. We just got some new low-power blades that we’ve put in to do web serving, and our main database – with which we use PostgreSQL – is also on Sun hardware, for example. So yeah, we’ve been getting some good stuff from them. Sun seems to make a good range of servers that are quite conscious on the power requirements, and are quite good about giving you the spec about how much power they’re going to draw.
TOM: Out of curiosity, how much space does it take to store such a big database? I’d imagine that probably stretches into the hundreds of terabytes.
RICHARD: We have the database itself, there’s the raw data, and then there’s all the mp3s as well, and then there’s all this additional data that we’ve computed over the top in kind of different layers. Yeah, it’s in the hundreds of terabytes, though I can’t give you an exact number.
We actually do a lot of our storage and processing in Hadoop, which is a framework based on a paper that Google released on the same subject. So, that’s actually a distributed computing framework written in Java.
TOM: How big of a challenge is it to normalize, or clean up, the data that Audioscrobbler receives from clients phoning home? I’ve noticed some pretty amazing corrections to metadata in my music collection over the years, just by paying attention to my “recently listened tracks”. A Japanese artist will, for example, show up in Last.fm printed in Japanese characters as opposed to whatever I had entered [in my MP3 file’s tags].
RICHARD: I’d say that’s one of our biggest challenges, trying to stay on top of massive cleanliness problems. For everything we fix, another 10,000 people scrobble the song with the wrong spelling, so it’s a never-ending battle, really.
But earlier this year –actually right at the start of this year -- we released a fingerprinting system that really helps us. So in the scrobbler software now, as well as scrobbling the names you claim, it actually reports an audio fingerprint. That’s actually helped us behind the scenes to match up the songs with all the same but have a different spelling. We’ve made a lot of progress this year, and although not a lot of it is visible yet, we think that next year we’re going to roll out a lot of these changes and actually fix even more problems. It is a huge challenge; the common numbers are something like 300 million different tracks that we’ve recorded (that’s in tons of different spellings), and about 20 million different artists – but obviously not all of those are valid. So that’s the challenge. We still haven’t quite answered the question of how many unique artists there really are -- there’s obviously much less than what we actually have because of all the misspellings. It’s an ongoing problem and it will never be solved, because there’s always new music being released as well and so you have to constantly keep updating the system. But we’ve made a lot of progress, and we’re working on that for next year as well, so we’ll continue to address it.
TOM: As a last.fm user since 2005, whose play count is close to 20,000, I have always had equal parts apprehension and fascination with the “Recently listened tracks” feature. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about how that feature has been used or misused: bosses checking up on employees, ex-boy/girlfriends stalking former partners, and people checking to see if someone’s at their computer by checking if they played anything recently. I’ve noticed that you guys have played around with the timeliness of that data and when it’s available to the general public – but what’s Last.fm’s official position on this feature? Has it been a controversial inclusion?
RICHARD: That feature has been there since the very first version, and it’s always been one of the most popular features that people actually talk about – because people actually use it and put it on their blog and keep it updated. So I think that, for the most part, people really love it.
We did introduce, earlier this year, an option to hide all the real-time data: if you don’t want anyone to know if you are online right now, you have the option to disable all your real-time data which includes recently-listened tracks.
Some people are a bit concerned about it, but part of our service is to broadcast your music tastes to the world. So it’s part of what we do, it’s quite a big part really: actually saying to the world, “this is what I am listening to right now,” and Last.fm wouldn’t be the same without it. But like I said, we do have the option to hide that data if you want to keep that a secret.
Personally, I like it – it’s a great feature to have.
We have some interesting stories over the years, actually, where people have used it [to help track down a stolen laptop.] We get emails once or twice a month saying, “my laptop was stolen, and I can see the person who stole it is playing music on my iTunes right now,” and then we have actually helped the police track down people’s laptops … from the scrobbling feed on their account.
TOM: Was that in the U.S. or in the UK?
RICHARD: Yes, it’s happened in the U.S. actually – it’s happening around the world but people in the U.S. have contacted us a few times.
We don’t make a point of logging the IP address [in our data collection], but when [thefts have] happened we put a watch on the account, allowing us to collect the IP address the next time it’s used.
TOM: Do you have any thoughts on the weaknesses of Audioscrobbler/Last.fm’s methods for figuring out various artist statistics? For example, Nine Inch Nails is now my “top artist” by a wide (230+) plays margin, simply because “Ghosts I-IV”, with its 36 tracks, turns out to be great background music for writing. Play that a few times and all of the sudden Nine Inch Nails now has twice the weight compared to other artists who put out a more conventional CD. Has Last.fm run into statistical anomalies with things like this?
RICHARD: That’s a good question. We’ve had many people suggest different ways over the years; one of the common things that come up in our forums is that people say, “You know I’d really like to track my tastes based on the number of minutes I’ve listened instead of the number of songs I’ve played.”
We’ve introduced a couple of different ways to deal with this kind of thing. One of the things we’ve done more recently is divide up your listening into different time periods now; in the past, you used to have just one chart which [contained] your overall top artists. But now we have weekly, monthly, three months, six months, twelve month [charts], so we don’t necessary look at what you listen to over all time.
When it comes to recommendations and Last.fm radio, it takes into account a whole bunch of different factors as well. We try to figure out when it’s appropriate to play something – we don’t just look at the number of plays. We look at a bunch of other things as well: tags, time of day, the context, and things like that. So we hope it doesn’t skew the system too much.
One of the other reasons we track the play count like that is because when Audioscrobbler and Last.fm were conceived, all the existing music recommendation services back then (which was early 2001, 2002) used to ask you to rate stuff with a 1-to-5 star system, or like, give it marks out of ten. That was actually a huge amount of effort to put in, and it didn’t seem to give very good results. You’d spend ages rating stuff and in the end it didn’t particularly reflect your tastes as well as it could have, so we think that just tracking the number of plays is the best balance to figure out your tastes.
In the end, we want to recommend new music based on what you actually listen to, not just what you say you like, because that tends to give better results.
TOM: Last.fm recently introduced a new site design that seemed to have met with a bit of a mixed reaction among long-time users. A lot of people felt the old design worked pretty well. Why the redesign?
RICHARD: Since we’ve started, we added a lot of features to Last.fm. We are very feature driven. We reacted to what our users said they wanted – they would ask for an events feature so we added an events feature, for example – and we gradually added more and more things to the site. We felt that the site design and the layout had, over time, suffered because we’d added a lot to it without stopping to think and reorganizing it. What we did this year was sort of took a step back, and looked at all the features and the things we’d added to the site, and then rethinked how we’d lay them out and make them more accessible.
We did a lot of usability studies, and we did a lot of tests with some of our existing users. We have some usability labs in Las Vegas that we used for that as well. So what we did was we ended up with a new design that we thought people would find easier to get around and easier to understand. But obviously a lot of our users knew the old design really well; it’s always hard to adjust and it was a bit of a shock to the system initially for a lot of people. Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think we would have spent more time introducing it to people and getting a bit more feedback.
It would have been nice to have a much longer beta period, and the beta would have addressed a few of the other concerns that came up before we launched.
We learned quite a lot from that experience, but I think on the whole it was for the better.
TOM: What does last.fm have planned for the future?
RICHARD: Ooh, well, some more of the same. We’re expanding onto a lot of different devices now; that’s been a bit of theme recently. We’re on the iPhone, we’re looking very seriously at an Android app, we’re on the Sonos, we’re on the Logitech squeezebox, and we’re on more devices than we can keep track of. We’re trying to make sure that wherever you listen to music, Last.fm is there, and you’ll be able to scrobble the songs that you listen to.
One of the things we hear from users is that once they start using Last.fm, and once they start scrobbbling their music tastes, they feel like it’s a waste if they actually listen to music on a system where they can’t scrobble it. We’re trying to make sure that Last.fm is available everywhere.
Of course we’re going to be putting a lot more effort into the website as well, looking at what features we can improve or add, and in general improvements as well. Also, recommendations are still very important to us, and we will be working on our recommendation system … we think that’s going to be a big thing in 2009, because obviously there’s going to be more choice. There’s more music being made all the time, so we need to stay on top of the game there.
We think we’re in a really good position right now, we think we have the best music recommendation engine, but we also have to keep working hard to maintain that position.
TOM: This is more of a personal request, but I have to admit that “paint it black” is one of my personal favorite features. The preference for this setting is not saved to my profile, though – it seems like I have to click that every time I log in. Any chance of having that permanently saved?
RICHARD: [chuckle] It should be stored in a browser cookie, but I guess if you log out then it destroys the cookie. The “paint it black” thing is a popular feature; I guess I’ll pass that on to the web team and see what they have to say about it.
I can’t promise anything about it now.
[from http: //www.dailytech.com/Full+Transcript+of+Last+Weeks+Lastfm+Interview/article13836.htm]
January 2009
11 posts
Joe Bataan talks to Oliver Wang about Ghetto...
OLIVER: Tell me about Ghetto Records — you started it while you were still signed to Fania but not recording for them, right?
JOE: Yeah. I started Ghetto Records to show that it could be done. It was out of rebellion, of course, like most of my life was. That's when I became a threat to the industry, especially [to] Morris Levy with Roulette Records and Jerry Masucci of Fania.
OLIVER: What was the first album on Ghetto Records?
JOE: Paul Ortiz [Y La Orquesta So]. I produced them and Paul Ortiz became a big hit, because the guy sounded like me. I had a big hit with Oritz: "Tender Love."
OLIVER: This was sweet soul?
JOE: Very, very, very romantic cha-cha ballads, yeah.
OLIVER: How many albums did you end up overseeing on Ghetto?
JOE: I think three: Ortiz, Papo Felix, and [Eddie] Lebron.
OLIVER: As in the Lebron Brothers?
JOE: No, totally separate.
OLIVER: If you were still signed to Fania, how did you manage to get distribution for your records? Couldn't Masucci have shut you down?
JOE: Yeah, he tried to put a wrench in it, but of course [the distributor] didn't care, as long as they could sell a record. I learned that in this business, if you're selling records, nobody cares, they'll take it. They'll probably get threatened by the other guy, but they'll sneak it, they'll take 100 [units] here, and 200 there.
OLIVER: Where did you get the capital to get this done?
JOE: I started the label with this guy who was a drug dealer, George Febo. Of course, I ain't ask where [the money] came from.
OLIVER: How did you know Febo?
JOE: Through the streets, like anybody else, you bump into one guy... We knew everybody in the streets. We knew the drug dealers, and the pimps... that was just a way of life, it was nothing strange about it.
OLIVER: What was Febo's interest in starting a label?
JOE: I think he just wanted popularity; his thing was just to be noticed, and a way to watch his money probably. Of course it backfired. When he got smart, he tried to ease me out of it...sort of bought me out. Like a lot of people, he took my ideas and decided to do it himself.
OLIVER: Did he continue to release records on the label?
JOE: Yeah, I think he had Candido, Richie Ray, and I think there were a couple other albums. He had some success, then it started folding. That's when he gave it back to me...it was sort of a setup because I didn't know the phones were tapped and all that. He was involved with a lot of drugs, and apparently he got hot and I think was under federal investigation. I wasn't involved [in the investigation], thank God.
OLIVER: Did you end up releasing more on Ghetto?
JOE: No, it was in total shambles financially. [Trying] to make ends meet without any capital was just too difficult.
[read this interview in its entirety at http: //waxpoetics.com/content/?article=bataan]
Mo talks to Heather Perry about trepanation
MO: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done?
HEATHER PERRY: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had said that he didn't think Lennon's cranial sutures had healed anyway, because he was such a creative person. At the time, I just thought "Wow! That's a bit freaky" and didn't think much more about it. Then later on, I did a lot of acid, which kind of mashed my head up a bit. I remember getting these pressure or tension headaches, and thinking that John Lennon said he was going to do it to relieve the pressure. By the mid-nineties, I started to realize that it wasn't dangerous, and decided that I was going to it if I could find somebody to give me a hand. But that proved to be quite difficult, so then I let it drop for a while. One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity. I had been working in Cheltenham, and got made redundant. I bought a computer, got online, and eventually got in touch with Pete Halvorson in the States, who had trepanned himself in the early 1970s. I was going over for a wedding anyway, so we arranged to meet so he could help me with it.
MO: Didn't Bart Huges decide to trepan himself after taking acid, because he believed that trepanation was the next step in expanding his consciousness?
HEATHER: Yeah... certainly the first self-trepanners in the 60s and 70s - they all knew Bart - and me, we'd all done a lot of acid. I once found a website that theorized that taking too much acid encouraged people to trepan, which is just ridiculous. I just think that the kind of people who take acid are more experimental, so might be more likely to try that kind of thing if they're really into consciousness expansion. I never thought "Why don't I trepan myself?" while I was tripping. But actually, Amanda Fielding was tripping when she first did hers. She knows Pete, and had her first trepanation around the same time as Pete, in the early 70s. She paid a doctor to do it back then, and found another to re-do it a few years ago because the bone had grown back. I spoke to her on the phone just after I was trepanned. Bart's theory about trepanation wasn't as a result of a 'trip' though, he'd studied medicine.
MO: So do you subscribe to Huges' theory that trepanation can lead to a higher level of consciousness by increasing the blood brain volume?
HEATHER: Yes and no. It certainly does initially when you're trepanned. In fact, Pete now has doctors down in Mexico who will do the operation, and they take MRI scans pre- and post-trepanation. After the operation the ratio of brain blood volume to cerebrospinal fluid is increased. I'm not sure if that's true for everyone. Maybe it depends on the size of the hole. It's probably variable from person to person, depending on the person's unique physiology, and on whether the bone grows back. What Huges was saying was that it allows the heart beat to pulsate through the brain better. Funnily enough, I know a woman with an autistic son. Autistics have trouble with empathy don't they? When I told her about my trepanation, she said her son had hit himself on the head with a hammer and fractured his skull when he was younger, and that afterwards he was noticeably more empathetic. He stayed like that until the wound healed, so I guess the blood was moving to that part of the brain to heal it. Because she'd noticed that it had an effect on her son, she didn't think that I was barking mad. There have been a few other cases of people who have been accidentally trepanned and reported similar kinds of effects.
MO: How exactly did you perform the trepanation?
HEATHER: I used a hand trepan initially, but that wasn't proving to be terribly successful. Then there was a problem with the people who owned the property we were staying in, so we decided we'd have to just leave it. I wrapped my head up in a towel and we got out of there. A couple of days later, we had another go. We abandoned the hand trepan and got an electric drill instead. I injected myself with a local anesthetic and then slashed a big T-shaped incision in my scalp, right down to the bone. I was sat there in the bathroom feeling quite relaxed and they started with the drill. It didn't take that long at all, probably about 20 minutes. Eventually I could feel a lot of fluid moving around. Apparently, there was a bit too much fluid shifting around, because they'd gone a little bit too far and I was leaking some through the hole, but this wasn't especially dangerous as there are three layer of meninges before you get to the brain.
MO: How did you feel immediately afterwards? Even though you didn't do the trepanation specifically to treat your depression and chronic fatigue, was there any improvement in your condition?
HEATHER: Something definitely happened after the operation. There was a shifting around of fluids, and I felt an intense sense of peace and relaxation. It was a little bit trippy in that nice shiny sort of way. If I were to compare it to drugs it would be like acid mixed with some kind of opiate. It certainly seemed to help with mental clarity and overall well-being, and I remember that feeling lasting for quite a while. Afterwards I reduced my dose of antidepressants for a while. But I don't think it's long-lasting, because it's probably healed over. I don't know whether that's because I need a bigger hole or because of my under-active thyroid, which I was diagnosed with just recently. Sometimes, when I've been trying different thyroid medications, it kind of feels like I did post-trepanation so I'm wondering if it's not permanent for me because of my condition. I think we'll have to wait and see what those doctors Pete now has working on it say about it.
MO: So are you thinking of re-opening the hole or making another one?
HEATHER: I don't know. I mean surely it takes years for the bone to grow back over a half-inch hole, because Amanda's was smaller than half an inch I think and she's just had hers redone 30 years later. I'm not sure whether the bone's grown back over the hole in my skull. It's hard to tell really, because the skin grows back over it so you can't see it.
MO: Do you advocate trepanation for everyone? Is it a miracle cure that can be used to treat any ailment?
HEATHER: No, it's not something that I would advocate it for everyone. After all the press stuff I was contacted by various organizations, like the ME [Myalgic Encephalomyelitis] Society, asking me to go and give lectures, and there were people writing to me from all over the world asking me if they should have it done. I'd tell them that they should make their own decisions. It's just something that I decided to try, to see what it was like, so there's no reason why I should be counselling them on whether or not they should have it done too. It's definitely not a miracle cure either. Having said that, I'd be a bad one to ask about the overall long-term effects, because I think my thyroid condition makes it hard to really know. Sometimes when my thyroid meds are working OK, I think I'm feeling the same buzz that I was getting post-trepanation. Maybe for me, whilst the hole was still open, it was enough to kind of boost my brain up to feel that way all the time. My head is a bit of a random one to test it on anyway, particularly as I'd done a bit too much acid to begin with.
MO: You say it's not dangerous, but neurologists say that there is a danger of infection and brain damage. According to the news stories, you had to be rushed to hospital.
HEATHER: Actually, I wasn't rushed to hospital. We went to see Bill's doctor, who was a GP but he was into alternative kind of therapies. When he checked me over the following morning he said that we'd pierced the first meninges, but he didn't seem overly concerned. He told me to eat Jello and drink plenty of water to stay hydrated. I had a cough, so I was a bit like a whale - every time I coughed, some fluid would come out of the hole in my head. He gave me some medicine for that and also prescribed me some kind of Chinese herbal remedy. I think maybe we did it in the wrong place because there is an artery there somewhere which is quite close to the surface, so in retrospect maybe we should have done it in a slightly different place. I was aware of the risk of meningitis, but we were taking precautions, and everything was well sterilized in an autoclave. But it shouldn't be that dangerous really. The trepan I used was tapered, so that it would have been impossible for me to go into the brain.
MO: How do you feel about the media coverage of your trepanation? Was it accurate?
HEATHER: The media went mad. Apparently, back in Utah, where I was trepanned, they stared thinking that we had started up a cult, and were showing films in the local schools warning kids about it. It was just a totally hysterical reaction from everybody, especially the media. Pete had got this documentary crew [from the ABC 20/20 programme] because he's quite interested in promoting trepanation. He's got his website and he thinks everybody should have it done. The idea at the time was to try and make out that I did more of the operation, so that he wouldn't get busted. I started it off, then they [Pete and Bill] took over from there. That's what we wanted to get across in the documentary - that they weren't in any way imposing it on me. But the people at ABC were absolute bastards, because they set us up. Pete joked, off camera, that we'll call it a religious practice so that we couldn't get prosecuted, then the guy repeated that in the programme, which annoyed us a bit.
Back in England, my ex-boyfriend sold the story to the News of the World, and he made it look really, really bad. The story made me look like a real idiot; it was on something like page 30, with the headline "Missing graduate lost in America leaking brain fluid". We'd talked to a solicitor about trying to stop it, but he said that there was nothing we could do. That story was just complete nonsense too. It completely misportrayed the whole thing, trying to make Pete look some a cult leader or something. In fact, I had contacted him, and dragged him into this unnecessary mess that he didn't need. Afterwards, he got arrested for practising medicine without a licence, and it cost him lots of lawyers' fees. But then he did encourage the publicity.
I happened to have mentioned to one of the journalists that I had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, and they thought that would make a good headline. It had nothing to do with my chronic fatigue or depression, specifically, but the papers decided to link those things up. The journalists thought it must have been out of desperation. That's why they reported that I was drilling a hole in my head as a last ditch attempt to feel better. They felt it had to be something really severe to make me do that. But it wasn't out of any kind of desperation at all. It was basically a consciousness expansion experiment.
[from Neurophilosophy](http: //scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/08/lunch_with_heather_perry.php)
Graham Johnson talks to Suleyman Ergun about...
Graham Johnson: Tell me a fond memory of your drug-dealing days.
Suleyman Ergun: There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you’ve got 100 kilos of heroin in the trunk of your car. Just to be near it, to smell it. Driving along at 120 mph in France somewhere and thinking: “I know what I’ve got in the car.” Police stopping beside you. A gun under my seat. Wouldn’t think twice about shooting them. Taking the risk. At the end of the day that’s why I became a drug dealer. Not the money or the power, but the buzz.
Graham: Did you serve an underworld apprenticeship?
Suleyman: At 15 I was an errand boy working in the Turkish rag trade in North London. I was earning £70 a week. At 17, I started selling coke, E, and pot, and I was earning £1,000 a week. Then I muled a couple of kilos of coke direct from Colombia and sold it in the clubs, along with tablets. Someone tried to rob me in the toilets of the Camden Palace once — I shot him in the leg.
Graham: How does one go from selling coke in a bathroom in Camden to being the king of all heroin in Europe?
Suleyman: Me, my former brother-in-law Yilmaz Kaya, and an Istanbul babas [godfather] named the Vulcan founded the Turkish Connection—that’s a network that smuggles heroin from Afghanistan across Turkey into Europe. Up until the early 90s, Turks had been bringing it in piecemeal. An immigrant would bring in ten keys, sell it, buy a shop in Green Lane and pack it in. We were the first to start bringing it in 100-kilo loads. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap….
Graham: It’s that simple, eh?
Suleyman: No, that’s only the supply. On the demand side, we bypassed all the usual gangsters and crime families in London. We fucked the Adams family off when they asked us to serve up to them. Instead, we sent it all to one distributor in Liverpool who sold the lot.
Graham: What was your role?
Suleyman: I was hands-on. The gear was driven from Istanbul to Paris in, say, a coach load of Turkish folk dancers. I coordinated the handover to the Scousers in France.
Then I’d drive up to Liverpool a few days later and come back with black bin bags full of cash—£140,000 one week, £100,000 the next, £68,000 the next, £150,000 the next, and so on. Then I’d count it, stack it, and box it in cereal packets and send it back to Turkey using a former Turkish Army colonel disguised as a bone-china collector as a courier. After a while, we rolled out the same system across Europe—Spain, Italy, Holland, and Germany. We dealt with the Mafia, all of that. At one point we could afford to buy our own oil tanker.
Graham: Where did it all go wrong?
Suleyman: One of our workers was having an affair with a woman who was a police informant. He got nicked. Customs put us under surveillance for a year, and then bingo. The whole thing got walloped in July ’93.
Graham: What was the upshot?
Suleyman: Fourteen years, nine months. The gang got 123 years between them.
Graham: Did that teach you a lesson?
Suleyman: Did it fuck. I started dealing in prison within two days, trading heroin and coke for phone cards, food, tobacco. In September 1995 I used heroin for the first time, out of boredom and curiosity. It felt lovely and warm, like somebody putting an electric blanket over you. But the best thing about it, and this is why the jails are full of heroin, is that it makes time go by very quick. Twenty hours on heroin is like two hours normal. I got out ten years later and I didn’t know I done the bird [prison time].
Graham: How did you get your heroin in jail?
Suleyman: Before I got nicked, I had five kilos of pure heroin straight from Turkey buried along with two Berettas, an Uzi, and four shotguns at St. Pancras graveyard in North London. Every week I’d phone a girl up and use the word “brandy,” which was code for brown—heroin—and she would go and get it. She dug up the stash and shaved off some, and then it was given to a second girl who had a boyfriend in my prison. It was wrapped in a condom and nylon sheeting, shaped up proper like a dildo. She stuck it up her cunt. On the visit, they’d snuggle up close, and her boyfriend would put his hand slyly down her knickers, get it, and then stick it up his arse. Back in my cell, he’d get 60 grams and I’d get 60 grams.
Graham: Didn’t the prison wardens ever find out?
Suleyman: I had the DST—Dedicated Search Team—permanently on my case. They even used to take apart my batteries in the radio. But they never found gear in my cell because I used to hide it in my vegetable plot. I hollowed out an onion and put the gear inside and buried it. When the stalk wilted, I just taped a fresh one on. Take three grams out a day. Sell half a gram for my phone cards and that, and smoke the rest. Sometimes I would put it up my arse wrapped in tape so if the screws made me squat during a search, it wouldn’t fall out.
Graham: Couldn’t anyone smell you smoking it?
Suleyman: As long as you’re not causing trouble, cutting people over deals, and fighting, then the screws turn a blind eye. They know you’re on it because your pupils are like tiny pinholes and you start scratching and go red and raw. But the authorities let it go because if you stop the heroin it causes murders and they can’t handle that. Withdrawal symptoms. Kicking doors. Drugs will never be stamped out in jail.
Graham: How many bent screws did you know?
Suleyman: About six all over. They approached me because I was rich. I never ate prison food. They brought me in Marks and Spencer salads. In one prison the screw brought me in four ounces of weed, half a carrier bag full of phone cards, half a bag of tobacco, a TV, a phone, and two bottles of brandy, every week, for £500 a week, plus the bill for the food. He’d wink and say: “Your box is under your bed.” Then I’d pay another inmate to look after it. If you don’t have money, you have nothing.
Graham: I suppose when you got out of prison in 2003 you gave up drugs?
Suleyman: No, it got much worse. I discovered crack cocaine. The world had changed so much. I couldn’t cross the road—it was too fast. I used to see people talking to themselves on their hands-free and think they were off their heads.
Graham: What’s crack like?
Suleyman: It’s great. It blew my fucking head off. Over the next four years I blew half a million pounds on it. Sold my flat. My jewelry. Spent the few hundred grand I had stashed away.
Graham: What was the lowest point?
Suleyman: My mate robbed a rock off my table. I dragged him into the kitchen and chopped his little finger off with a knife on a chopping board. Then I flushed it down the toilet.
Graham: Some people would say that it was natural justice—that you were being punished for selling heroin by becoming a drug addict.
Suleyman: An eye for an eye. I’d created thousands and thousands of addicts. My past had caught up with me. I got depressed and then I took more crack and heroin to stop thinking.
Graham: How did you finally get off drugs?
Suleyman: I went for treatment in Turkey twice. A detox where they put you to sleep through withdrawal. It cost £20,000. My family paid. But when I got back onto the streets here in London, I kept slipping. Finally, I fell in love. It’s as simple as that. I haven’t touched a stone since.
Graham: Would you ever go back to being a heroin baron?
Suleyman: Not in a million fucking years. I’ve been offered a million pounds in cash to start up again. I could fly to Turkey now and get 100 keys and be away. £100,000 in cash by tomorrow. Mine. I get approached every week by someone or other, some of the country’s biggest gangsters, to go into business. But I can’t do it.
Graham: Why? Are you scared?
Suleyman: Fuck off. D’you want a smack?
[from http: //www.viceland.com/int/v15n10/htdocs/ex-biggest-heroin-dealer-111.php]
Mike Payne talks to astronaut Clayton C. Anderson...
Mike Payne: First, it's common for children to dream of such careers as firefighter, president, athlete or astronaut. It's likely that no young child dreams of growing up to be an accountant. At what age did the dream of life as an astronaut strike you?
Clayton C Anderson: My mom and I argue this one a bit. She says 4-5 when she dressed me in aluminum foil and a hat box to be one of the Mercury Astronauts in my home town's annual Kiddie Parade. I got second place and she says I was robbed. My recollection was when I was 8 years old and my parents got my sister and brother and me out of bed to watch the Apollo 8 astronauts fly around the moon for the first time in history. When they lost command, I was enthralled and scared…when they got it back as they emerged from the far side I was ecstatic; and decided then and there that I would become an astronaut.
Mike: Now that you’ve achieved that storied job title, is life as an Astronaut what you expected as a child?
Clayton: Yes and no. Of course it is a thrill to be an astronaut and the opportunity to fly in space and represent my State of Nebraska and my Country was more than I could have ever dreamed of. However, there is a tremendous amount of stress (self-induced and otherwise!) that accompanies the job. That stress has been difficult for me and my family to overcome at times. The travel to other countries, the long training hours and, of course, the 5 months spent in space were difficult at times. Yet we survived and we believe are stronger as a family because of it.
Mike: At times, do you wish you were “just an accountant”?
Clayton: Nope…never. I have wished for a break and a nice relaxing vacation at times, but having this job has been a thrill.
Mike: Briefly, what is a normal work week like for an Astronaut?
Clayton: My training weeks were often varied, yet often the same. They were between 50-60 hours at times comprised of meetings, training classes…perhaps a dive in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) or a 6 hour NBL session to practice for an upcoming spacewalk. We may have a flight in a T-38 jet to attend a training class or meeting in another state. Perhaps there will be some medical tests or training that we must undertake. Undoubtedly there will be a simulation of some type during any given week once you are training for spaceflight.
Mike: Aside from the work you’ve done in space, what is your favorite part about the job?
Clayton: My favorite part has to be talking to the public. I think it is truly important that we as astronauts go on the road to let people know why what we do is important and how it benefits all of us on the Planet Earth.
Mike: On June 8th, 2007, you launched aboard the Shuttle Atlantis to dock with the International Space Station for a 152 day tour of duty. What was it like seeing that shuttle depart back to Earth without you?
Clayton: It was tough indeed. At that point I was staring 5 (or more) months in space straight in the eyes. At that point I wasn't sure what to expect or whether I could do it or not. It was a very surreal time for me. In addition, I was facing a long time away from my wife and children. That was the hardest part of the whole endeavour.
Mike: Your teammates aboard the ISS were Russian Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov. How did the cultural differences between you and your “new roommates” impact your experience aboard the ISS?
Clayton: They are two of the most intelligent, gentle and friendly men that I will ever have the pleasure to be associated with. In addition, they are family men, just like me. That was a key for us on orbit as that commonality of family really brought us together. We were the Three Musketeers in space and I said many times that I had found my space brothers on Expedition 15. To me, there were minimal cultural differences that ever manifested themselves onboard. In fact, some of our mealtime discussions were such that we were able to learn about each other's cultures in a relaxed and informative environment.
Oleg loved to listen to music. Oleg and Fyodor both loved to shoot pictures of the Earth and then sort through them and organize them. I enjoyed that as well, but with an electronic keyboard and guitar on board, I tried to write some piano music and teach myself how to play that guitar. I had minimal success at both, since there wasn’t much free time. We all enjoyed calling friends and family using the International Space Station’s Internet Protocol (IP) phone. On Fridays, we often gathered in the Russian Segment to watch a movie together.
Mike: During your tour of duty on the ISS, what level of connection did you have to the world below– your family, the news, entertainment and sports?
Clayton: It was actually quite good. We had the IP phone, which is a huge psychological benefit as well as the ability to send and receive email (usually two to three times per day… very similar to what you would expect on Earth). Each weekend we were able to have a video conference with our family or friends that would last between 15 and 35 minutes. As for news, entertainment and sports… that was covered as well. Some of our favorite newspapers and periodicals were uplinked to us for reading as well as our favorite TV shows (Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, Seinfeld, NBC Nightly News, etc.) and movies. One of my most cherished times came when the ground would let me watch the Nebraska Cornhusker and Houston Texan football games (live) through our KU Band Satellite system. I felt like I was home in my recliner watching my favorite teams. Awesome.
Mike: You handled some heavy-duty operations aboard ISS– in your work on upgrading and repairing the ISS, what was the margin of error in your work? What amount of training for these procedures did you complete on the ground?
Clayton: The ground training team prepares us very well for most of the major tasks we are expected to perform on orbit. However, with schedules being a bit flexible at times, they can't cover everything. So, we often learn skills that will carry us through many different types of tasks, some which we may have never seen or practiced on the ground. This skill based training is critical to life onboard the ISS. The margin of error is not large, but it's not small either. With the help of the team in the control centers in Houston, Huntsville (AL) and Moscow (along with the newly added ESA and JAXA control centers), we can usually cover and overcome any deficiencies in the training, procedures and task that come up. I trained for some 3.5 years before flying and many of the tasks I trained for were covered by previous crews while many we didn't get to because other higher priority tasks appeared. Much of our time is spent in maintenance of the onboard systems as well as the adding of new capabilities.
Mike: Do you expect more space flights in your career?
Clayton: I hope so. My wife and I have agreed that we could immediately accept a space shuttle assignment. These are typically 2 week missions, with about 9 months of training, the majority of which is done in the U. S.. So, Daddy (Hubby) could be home with the family for the majority of the time, thus minimizing the family disruption. Another ISS flight, which for me would mean a launch and landing in Russia (the Shuttle is to be retired in 2010, and an ISS assignment for me would be after that), is something that my entire family would have to discuss. With the ages of my kids (11 and 7) and the impact it would have on all of us, it requires some very serious family planning.
Originally posted at http: //www.gearcrave.com/2008-05-01/gearcrave-dream-job-interview-astronaut-clayton-c-anderson/
Twisted Monk talks to Ainsley Drew about rope
AINSLEY DREW: First of all, let’s get this out of the way. Are you an actual monk?
TWISTED MONK: No, that’s just a nickname, although at one time I thought I wanted to be a minister. At fifteen, I announced that I had “Answered The Call,” and that I wanted to pursue a life of evangelicalism. I spent the subsequent summer spent working in a mission in Mexico City, and thus, my older brother dubbed me “The Monk.” It sorta stuck.
AINSLEY: How did you get involved in rope bondage?
MONK: My mother-in-law, actually. She gave me my first book on the topic, Midori’s groundbreaking “The Seductive Art of Japanese Rope Bondage.” Like most folks just starting off, I ran down to my local hardware store and bought some cheap, synthetic rope. The results were okay, but not spectacular. In addition to photos and instructions, the book also had a recipe for conditioning raw hemp rope. I bought some scratchy stiff hemp, cooked up a batch and tried it out on the wife… the results were, well shall we say she was very enthusiastic? I believe she said something like, “make more of this, now!”
AINSLEY: Are there any aspects of the BDSM scene that you don’t like?
MONK: While SM can be at times a very intense thing, both physically and mentally, sometimes tapping into taboos that may scare some and titillate others; I fear at times folks can take it all too seriously. Some days I want to remind folks that at the end of the day this is all about sex and having a good time, about fulfilling a need that makes you happy. Relax, have fun and don’t take yourself so seriously that you can’t laugh, even at yourself.
AINSLEY: I saw in some of your videos that you use your wife as a model/assistant. How did you two meet?
MONK: Ah yes, that would be my darling Tambo. We met in high-school, I was a mere freshman and she a senior, and we rode the same bus home after school. She played the cello and if you have ever seen the case for one of those, then you would know that there are not a lot of options for where to store one on your average school bus. Everyday as the last bell rang, I’d race down to the bus and stake out a seat that would hopefully be close to where she and her hulking instrument case would come to rest. I did this for a year before I built up the nerve to move from casual small talk to asking her out on a date. Last August marked our 20th wedding anniversary.
AINSLEY: What’s the strangest request for rope that you’ve ever received?
MONK: What is surprising, although flattering, is that people want to buy my personal rope – that is, the rope I’ve been using for my own bondage scenes. Hemp is tough, but I’m tough on my hemp, so it gets frayed and worn out. But when I first mentioned throwing it away, some of my blog readers wrote me and asked to buy it! Now I always offer it for sale, and people quickly snap it up.
AINSLEY: How did you begin promoting your business?
MONK: I’ve always been a story teller. Give me a stiff drink and an audience, and I’ll spin tales till the sun comes up. I started blogging in the hopes of documenting some of these stories, as well as documenting the unique adventure I was undertaking as I walked away from the corporate world and began my life as an “alt businessman” From the blog, the word grew, and today my blog is still the best marketing tool I have! On my blog, I can release a new product and have it sell out in hours! I have found new staff through the blog too. And mainly I just keep sharing this adventure I’m on. I also admit I began blogging in hopes of catching the eye of a certain female blogger that I had a serious crush on, Mistress Matisse. Must have worked, as we’ve been lovers now for nearly 5 years.
AINSLEY: What was it like “coming out” as a sex worker?
MONK: Making and selling bondage rope is a form of sex work, as we are working in the business of pleasure after all, but about a year ago I “came out” publicly as a sex worker. I create erotic BDSM experiences for my clients, but rather than call myself a “Pro Dom”, I jokingly call myself a “Rent-a-meanie” as my style is more about the sensual and playful aspects of SM and not that guy decked out in all black leather, standing in front of a St. Andrews cross brandishing a flogger and a sneer. For Tambo, it was just another adventure. Over the course of our life together she has supported me thorough all manner of adventure. Matisse, on the other hand, just laughed. For years she’s been telling would-be gigolos, “The Straight Male Sex Worker is a myth, like the unicorn or universal healthcare.” She and several of my female sexworker friends have had to amend that statement, which they have done happily. Truth be told, Matisse has been mentoring and guiding me as I first began what has been a really fascinating and enriching experience.
AINSLEY: What’s your favorite variety of rope and why?
MONK: I’ve always said that I will not sell a single piece of rope that I would not use on my lovers, after having all manner of exotic fiber run through my fingers, I still really love the rope we make day in and day out. It just feels right.
AINSLEY: How does one make rope? Did you start out apprenticing?
MONK: I started out cooking giant kettles of raw hemp rope in my kitchen and back yard! One of the really fun challenges of all this is that nobody has ever done this to this scale before. Till now, it was some guy working alone in his basement making just enough rope for his own needs, or maybe to sell to some of his friends. Scaling from that to an industry with a half dozen employees, tens of thousands of customers all over the world, and literally miles of rope in various stages of completion at any given time has been a daunting, but wildly fun task. There is no “this is how the big boys do it” that we can look to and see what the next growth step should be. Rather we are the big boys, and it is up to me to define the rules of the game, and what we will do next to meet the ever growing demand.
AINSLEY: How do you hire people to work in your rope making factory? Is it even a factory?
MONK: We like to call our shop, “The Abbey,” and it is very much a factory. At the height of the holiday rush, I’ll have 6 full time employees working for me, as well as a handful of contract / piece-rate workers. I like to say that it takes a unique brand of crazy to work for me. Sure, I get lots of requests from folks who have a romantic idea of what it must be like working in a bondage rope shop, but the truth is that it is dirty, hard work. At the end of most days, we are filthy, cold and our fingers ache. Not the most glamorous of work environments. That said, those who work for me also love it - the challenge, the fact that we are playing without a net, and doing something that has never been done before. Sure there is the obvious OSHA stuff, but the workplace “rules” as to what you can and can’t do or say? The rules do not apply to us.
AINSLEY: What are EMT safety shears?
MONK: Also known as “Bandage Shears,” EMT shears are heavy duty scissors where on of the edges is blunted so that you can press them against skin and cut things without the danger of cutting the person’s flesh. These are a must have safety tool for anyone doing rope bondage, because it anything goes wrong – from a muscle cramp to an earthquake – you have to be able to get someone untied quickly and safely. The scariest 30 seconds of my life were the ones when, very early in my rope career, I found myself with a partner who had forgotten to eat before playing and was about to pass out while tied up. The handful of seconds it took for me to locate my shears, cut the rope off her, and get her into a safe position was the longest, scariest of my life. Thankfully it was nothing serious and she recovered in a few minutes. However, if I did not have shears on hand, it would have been much harder to get her safe and comfortable to recover from her lightheadedness. This is why I include shears with every rope kit that leaves my shop. It is my hope that they will rust from never having to be used.
AINSLEY: How do you explain what you do to strangers?
MONK: Eventually, everyone will ask that. Talk to someone long enough and the conversation will go down that path. Now for the most part I’m very open about what I do, however not everyone is too keen on the whole “sex industry” thing so I sometimes have to fudge a bit about such things. I suppose I could just out and out lie. Tell them that I am a “Drug Mule” or an “Image Consultant for the Moral Majority” perhaps? No, instead I prefer to play the “3 strikes and you’re out” game with them.
Take, for example, a recent conversation I had with an insurance sales person. Now she was a nice enough gal, a fifty-something mom who drove an absurdly large SUV, lived in the suburbs and probably considers “adventurous sex” to be fucking with the lights on, in any room other than the bedroom.
“Blah, blah, blah… so what do you do for a living?”
“Me? Oh I have a small retail internet company, so tell me about this dental benefit again?”
“Oh that is nice. What do you sell?”
“Organic hemp products”
“Really? What kind of products? ”
“I make and sell bondage rope to the sex industry.” Several seconds of dumbstruck silence.
“You what?”
“Bondage rope, you know so people can tie each other up and fuck? I supply most of the sex shops on the west coast and some of the best hardcore bondage websites in the industry. In fact I’m currently in negotiations with a major porn studio to supply rope for an upcoming series of videos.” That usually shuts them right up.
AINSLEY: Do you ever get tired of working within the realm of titillation?
MONK: No, I love this job. Of all the jobs I have had, nothing has ever given me such a sense of real satisfaction. One entire wall of the Abbey is dedicated to the cards and letters we get from customers from all over the world. Letters of thanks, photos of the rope in play and tales of how introducing our rope brought a new level of intimacy and excitement to a relationship plaster the wall 2 layers thick. I guess is some ways, I’m finally fulfilling the calling I had when I was a kid and being that evangelist, changing the world one bedroom at a time.
[via TheRumpus.net]
Ainsley Drew talks to Simon Goetz about swimmers
SIMON GOETZ: Blowfish or sperm whale?
AINSLEY DREW: To be or to have?
SIMON: To be.
AINSLEY: Blowfish. You?
SIMON: Blowfish, definitely. Although I'd probably refer to myself as a "pufferfish" on social networks.
9-year-old talks to TorrentFreak about filesharing
TORRENTFREAK: Hi Hannah! How old are you?
HANNAH: I’m 10 in 12 days.
TORRENTFREAK: What sort of music are you listening to right now?
HANNAH: Sean Kingstone, Shayne Ward, and High School Musical 2.
TORRENTFREAK: Where did you first get into music?
HANNAH: On the music channels, on MTV.
TORRENTFREAK: When did you get a PC?
HANNAH: People had computers but I couldn’t go on them. My dad bought me one last year. I have Internet.
TORRENTFREAK: What do you do on the Internet?
HANNAH: MSN, talking to friends and cousins, games and dressing-up games [dolls].
TORRENTFREAK: When did you first start using the internet to get music?
HANNAH: My cousin showed me YouTube and then LimeWire and I was like “whoa cool!”
TORRENTFREAK: What was cool about it?
HANNAH: Because you can put anything in and it will come up and you don’t actually pay for it. Well you have to pay for the Internet and LimeWire comes with the Internet but you have to pay for that, so LimeWire isn’t really free.
TORRENTFREAK: Ok… I see.... Do you get music from anywhere else?
HANNAH: My cousin gets it from BEBO. She copies it from other people’s pages and puts it on her own.
TORRENTFREAK: Do you think it’s OK to copy the music?
HANNAH: Yes, it’s OK because she only does it to make her page better.
TORRENTFREAK: So you’re sure that it’s OK to copy it? What do you think about copying?
HANNAH: I suppose it’s not OK to copy but people copied it off her site so she just copies theirs. It’s like, you’re copying my t-shirt so I’m copying you on shoes.
TORRENTFREAK: OK, so a bit like copying school work? Hmm. OK, let’s talk about copying on the computer again. When you started using LimeWire, did anyone ever mention that if you did certain things you might be breaking some laws?
HANNAH: Why would they put it [music] on the internet and invent mp3 players if it was against the law?
TORRENTFREAK: Confusing, isn’t it? You mentioned you like Sean Kingstone. What if I told you that Sean Kingstone’s boss might send you a letter asking for money because you shared his album on LimeWire? What would you say to him?
HANNAH: W.E.! [whatever!]
TORRENTFREAK: Come on, play along with me. What would you say if he did?
HANNAH: I’d say, “Tooooo strict!” And anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me, he’s the boss of Sean Kingstone.
[excerpt from http: //torrentfreak.com/inside-the-mind-of-a-9-year-old-file-sharer-071021/]
Steve Portigal talks to Dan Soltzberg about...
[excerpt from http: //www.aiga.org/content.cfm/ever-notice]
PORTIGAL: I’m excited to discuss “noticing” with you. Ironically, I think its importance in design and innovation is under-recognized.
SOLTZBERG: It is ironic. People don’t notice that noticing is important! Or that they’re already doing it. It’s kind of like breathing—we’re not usually that aware of it. It’s much easier to recognize more “outbound” activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important—it’s really where everything begins. There’s a funny Zen saying about that: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” It’s a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.
PORTIGAL: That reminds me of improv. Newcomers expect that improv is a very active, concerted effort to be funny. But what’s so stimulating about doing improv is that it’s not (necessarily) about being funny, but that the whole approach of saying, “Yes, and...,” guides us to notice and act in response to what the rest of the team is doing. It becomes this collaborative problem-solving activity that happens to generate a performance, rather than the typical “stuff from the inside comes out” model of performance. And the key to making that performance flow is that everyone is paying close attention each other.
SOLTZBERG: It’s funny you say “notice and act.” To reference Zen again, one of the maxims of Zen practice is “notice and allow.” In both practices—improv and meditation—I think giving yourself permission to “just be,” to receive without transmitting, makes it possible to really drink in sensory data and to really listen to other people with an incredible kind of unforced compassion. It reminds me a lot of the approach we take to being with people when we do fieldwork. In the field, you have to simultaneously drink all kinds of information in, and at the same time be active in guiding the interaction. There’s this tightrope walk between action and non-action, ego and non-ego. To move back and forth gracefully between these different ways of being requires noticing not just what’s going on around you but what’s going on inside you as well. It’s one of these things that sounds so simple, but really takes practice to be good at.
“My process of interviewing people is I do not interview people… I’m...”
– Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica [from Unbeige]
The Obamas talk to Mariana Cook about plans
MICHELLE OBAMA: There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
When you are involved in politics, your life is an open book, and people can come in who don’t necessarily have good intent. I’m pretty private, and like to surround myself with people that I trust and love. In politics you’ve got to open yourself to a lot of different people. There is a possibility that our futures will go that way, even though I want to have kids and travel, spend time with family, and like spending time with friends. But we are going to be busy people doing lots of stuff. And it’ll be interesting to see what life has to offer. In many ways, we are here for the ride, just sort of seeing what opportunities open themselves up. And the more you experiment the easier it is to do different things. If I had stayed in a law firm and made partner, my life would be completely different. I wouldn’t know the people I know, and I would be more risk-averse. Barack has helped me loosen up and feel comfortable with taking risks, not doing things the traditional way and sort of testing it out, because that is how he grew up. I’m more traditional; he’s the one in the couple that, I think, is the less traditional individual. You can probably tell from the photographs—he’s just more out there, more flamboyant. I’m more, like, “Well, let’s wait and see. What did that look like? How much does it weigh?”
BARACK OBAMA: All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background—very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life.
Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
[from the New Yorker, 1996]
Studs Terkel talks to David Barsamian about...
Q: What sources of information do you depend on for your news?
Terkel: I watch TV. I watch baseball games a lot, of course. PBS is a joke. PBS is as much of a joke as Fox. Moyers is the one exception, and that’s it.
Q: Do you listen to National Public Radio?
Terkel: I do and I don’t, both. I don’t hear too well, anyway. National Public Radio has gone more and more bland.
Q: What do you read?
Terkel: I read all kinds of stuff. I find the Chicago Tribune has changed considerably since the Colonel’s day [referring to Robert R. McCormick, the newspaper’s longtime rightwing owner.] It’s still a conservative paper, but I think it’s a more honest paper than The New York Times. I get more out of the Chicago Tribune than I do The New York Times. I believe it more, though I do admit I love Frank Rich of the Times.
Q: What other journalists do you admire?
Terkel: A kid named Tom Frank, who just did What’s the Matter with Kansas? Sy Hersh certainly has done an excellent job. I like Bill Greider. Young journalists on alternative papers.
Q: How did you start doing interviews and oral histories?
Terkel: I got into interviewing accidentally. I became a disk jockey before the word was used. It was an eclectic program with a select following. I would play, say, “Umbra mai fu,” a Caruso aria from Handel’s Xerxes and then go into Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” and, after that, a Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl ballad.
And I would play the record of a certain woman I heard sing in the Greater Salem Baptist Church in Chicago. Her name was Mahalia Jackson. I loved this record, “Move On up a Little Higher.” All the black people in the country knew it. None of the whites knew it. So I played it, and so whites got to know it. Mahalia always said, “Studs, you’re the one who led me to the white world,” which, of course, is untrue. She would have been known anyway.
Q: Were you ever blacklisted?
Terkel: When Mahalia Jackson became internationally known, CBS offered her a network radio program. Once a week. And she said, “I’ll do it on one condition, that Studs is the host of the program.” And they tremulously agreed.
During the third week or so of the dress rehearsal, about a half hour before the audience is let in, a guy from CBS in New York comes on the stage with a little piece of paper for me to sign. “Oh, Studs, this is just a pro forma.” And it’s a loyalty oath. “Throw it away. I don’t believe in that.” He says, “You gotta.” “No, I don’t. You know the brethren? I’m with the brethren. My yea is my yea and my nay is my nay. And that’s it. I’m sorry.”
Voices are raised, and Mahalia is on her way to the piano to rehearse. She hears this argument. She knows all about me. She used to say, “Studs, you’ve got such a big mouth, you should have been a preacher.” She said, “Is that what I think it is, baby?” I say, “Yes.” “Are you going to sign it?” I say, “Of course not.” She says, “OK, let’s rehearse.” He says, “Oh, but Miss Jackson,” and he’s very diffident, “Mr. Terkel has to sign it. Headquarters, New York, the official word.” Mahalia says, “Look, I’ve got no time for this. You tell Mr. So-and-So that if they fire Studs Terkel, to find another Mahalia Jackson.” And you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened. The guy vanished. The emperor had no clothes.
If I were in New York or Hollywood, I would have been dead meat. For example, I never made Red Channels. You know what Red Channels was? Red Channels was the bible, the scripture, put out by a couple of political thugs, listing people that were considered un-American. And all sorts of people were on it -- Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Lillian Hellman. Where is me? I don’t find my name on it. And I felt like a blue-haired dowager who didn’t make the Social Register. You know what I attribute that to? New York parochialism.
Women’s clubs would hire me to talk about folk music. At that time, they paid me 100 bucks. But there was a guy in town, a legionnaire, who was a one-man Americanism committee. And I was his favorite pigeon. He would write these warning letters to the local women’s clubs not to have me. And to their everlasting glory, not one canceled.
But this one woman I’ll never forget. She was elegant, aristocratic, old, old money, Brahminesque. And she was so infuriated by the letters, she said, “Mr. Terkel, we are doubling your fee from $100 to $200.” What do you think I did? I wrote the legionnaire a letter, and I sent him a $10 check with a note saying, “Here’s your agent’s fee for the extra 100 bucks.” He never acknowledged my check.
Q: You’ve kind of set the standards in doing interviews.
Terkel: Standards were set thousands and thousands of years ago. I’m called an oral historian. I have no idea what that means. It means I’m a nonacademic, really. In my books, you can find the astonishing wisdom and eloquence of people who have never spoken of their lives before.
Q: When you approach an interview, do you have questions written out?
Terkel: I improvise.
Q: Tell me about your interview with Martin Luther King Jr.
Terkel: Mahalia Jackson became his favorite singer. One day Mahalia called and says, “Studs, come on over. Martin wants to talk to you.” He never even heard of me. So I go over. I said, “I know your time is limited, Doctor.” He says, “No, no, you go ahead.” I asked him about the role of laughter. He says, “Without laughter we’re lost, the laughter of adversity.”
Q: If you were able to go back into time, who would you like to interview?
Terkel: George Bernard Shaw, of course. Think of what he did. He helped form the Labour Party, which was not the same as the Labour Party of Tony Blair. Can you imagine? And Shaw wrote some of the best, most witty, most thoughtful plays. He also was an orator, and just for conversation alone and letter writing, no one came close to him.
After Shaw, I think, Mark Twain and Tom Paine. That’s not a bad trinity.
Q: What are you working on now?
Terkel: I’m working on a book on music. I’ve interviewed all sorts of artists: opera singers and composers, jazz musicians, and, of course, folk singers. It’s called They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disk Jockey. I hope I get to finish it.
[for The Progressive, November 2004]