Tuesday, July 30, 2002
Welcome to my new career.
posted by LauraB 2:34 PM
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Amuseement
If you've got 5 minutes and you're not aspiring to be productive, this blind dialogue - a sort of blogolific exquisite corpse - is a diverting romp in randomness. (If you are one of my students, you don't have time. You should be viewing the source code for this page.)
posted by LauraB 4:44 PM
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Beauty Parlors are Hell
You know why. No need for a diatribe, right? Husband: prepare yourself for a mandatory cosmetology crash course - you're my new coiffeur.
posted by LauraB 2:17 PM
Friday, July 19, 2002
Bin it!
As a person who once gave 400 extremely cool records to an anonymous DJ in an actual dark alley in Chicago's Little Ukraine neighborhood, I can tell you that this guy is 100% correct and pretty hilarious. (Except for numbers 32 and 94. Well, and 25. And of course 42 and 44 must stay. And 99's something of an insult. But still, the point is well taken - musical attachment is stultifying; we must be disciplined.)
posted by LauraB 6:07 PM
Thursday, July 18, 2002
File under the extremely thick and well documented folder "Really stupid PR mistakes of the US airline industry"
Gracious sakes, imagine if this happened to Tom Hanks...
and speaking of movie stars, this old file keeps popping up - it's a big ole QuickTime movie of Our Brain-Dead Prez (under dog) schnookered to a new nadir of stupid in 1992 (as in, way after he claims to have given up his dipsomania.) Warms the cockles of my heart to see the baddies in black hats.
posted by LauraB 6:44 PM
Who loves to suck?
Get yr scribbling instruments out... it's "Dark and Stormy Night Contest!" time. It's taken me many long sleepless nights, but I'm finally ready to submit a very bad piece of writing:
The plummeting sun looked like a tomato; the tropical coconut tress, stalks of broccoli and asperagii. The "lapping-at-the-shores-of-time" seaweed, rocking rhythmically like cornplants swaying in the wind, was the tea of the sea - fragrant and fetid at the same time. All and all, the island honeymoon paradise was a crunch salad of travel comestibles.
God, that's like exfoliation for the mind. Once you try it, you can't stop. C'mon, you know you want to.
posted by LauraB 7:23 AM
Wednesday, July 17, 2002
My panties = $2000 worth of hotness.
I work near the national debt clock (under g-d), which was recently turned back on, and which, coincidentally enough, is one of those highly trafficked areas of the city where people with "curiously" priced goods frequently unload them from the backs of trucks, random carts, backpacks and suitcases. Usually it's sunglasses and really ugly watches for $5.00, but today my head turned when "they" were offering brand-new CK underwear for a dollar a pop. Now, I'm always on the lookout for bargain knickers (some people gamble, but mine is a slightly more practical pasttime, no?), so I says what the heck, just a chamisole and a thong or two. So I'm pawing through the flimsy fabric and my eye catches the debt sign - turns out my family is going to need to pony up $66,000 to pay this thing back. Gracious Sakes Alive! I say to myself, "gosh, that's a lot of money, good thing i've got such a great cheapie deal on probably-stolen panties." And it's not until I've paid my money that I look back up to the debt clock and see that my family now owes $68,000.
Golly, this is an incriminating turn of events, ain't it? The debt's crashing up towards 6 Trillion, slavery surpasses the drug trade as the means of illegal profit of choice, and my panties cost me 2000 greenbacks. Please pass my invoice on to the Dick Cheney there, guys. I'm nude.
posted by LauraB 5:36 PM
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Uninspired, but probably practical.
Maybe it's the fact that 5-11 acres of open space in Lower Manhattan seems like a naieve pastoral hallucination. Perhaps it's just the word "promenade" which really smacks more of the Naperville River Festival than something that would exist at the tip of the NY Harbor. But all 11 million of us've now got our fifteen minutes of anyone giving a toss: this is what the powers that be forsee for the WTC.
posted by LauraB 1:26 PM
Teaching
So like I know jackall about interface design, right? (Clearly so - look how scruffy this damn website looks!) Nevertheless, the school where I teach asked me to do it so I am - and it rocks. Interface design is everywhere and everything, right? Perception, prosthetics, bots, innovation, language, grammar, graphics, tactility, the body, paleoarcheology, architecture, christmas decorations, the subversion of capitalism, communialism, testing, diagramming, analysis, manipulation of dimensionality, skinning, Minority Report, cell phones, sewing machines, stone axes, the compression and expansion of time, Photoshop, democracy and transparency, the ecstacy of communication, information architecture, photography, glasses, glass, projection in the Fruedian sense, projection in the powerpoint machine sense, magazine and book design, David Foster Wallace's notions of furniture-watching, libraries, imagination in the service of commerce, trade, webbiness, stickiness, Sumerian stylii, e-ticketing, movie phone, the teacher-student relationship itself (viz.a viz. the Socratic method), and Socrates' projections in the cave.
Okay, so studentii? (not that y'all ever read this part of the site, I just can't stop babbling today) I just can't, won't, and don't believe I or anyone else should ever compel you to begin an investigation into a subject so inherently enthralling as Interface Design with a definition.
posted by LauraB 10:37 AM
Reasons to live #452
No, seriously, you read The Crying of Lot 49, right? Stamp designing is so cool - who'd'a thunk you could package so many society-individual interface dilemmas into one tiny piece of paper? It's almost acidish. Speaking of small things that warp yr brain, meet my new stamp-presser.
posted by LauraB 9:48 AM
Thursday, July 11, 2002
Brand loyalty
Unsolicited declarations of the appreciation of one particular brand over the other are ususally obnoxious intrusions of advertising into virginal public space, right, yeah, un-hunh. But these endoresements are different, because 1. they're my recommendations and 2. these things are really very good.
1. Stewarts Jamacian Style Ginger Beer. Actually tastes like ginger - spicy, not too sweet, not too carbonated. Rarer but still delicious in the Diet style. Retails: $0.99-1.49. Or you could make your own.
2. Brooklyn Hooch. At 50/oz, it does the job of the fuzzier Manhattan gear at 1/3 of the price. Of course I'm talking about oregano.
3. Pretty much any music product by Propellerheads.
4. Aluminum lead holders by Charette. You think you know the joy of holding a pencil. And then you meet the charette aluminum lead holder. May possibly be discontinued, and I can't find any on-line.
5. Speaking of aluminum, it also makes for a fantastic water-drinking experience, especially in re the almighty Sigg Water Bottle. To Nalgene you will say "Good Day, Sir!"
posted by LauraB 7:15 PM
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
I'm a wildcat.
What animal are you? It's a silly test. I don't usually put that kind of junk up there, but the discovery of the newest hominid remains in Chad just makes my limbic system twitch with recognition. Family dramas indeed.
posted by LauraB 6:08 PM
Monday, July 01, 2002
It started, unoriginally, at a young age, around two or three, when the young human is unable to reliably 100% distinguish between consciousness and reality, the whole I-Thou thing, the this and the that, dreaming and happening. You may remember the primal rap - story, kiss on the cheek, lights flashing on the way to REM, and then suddenly the King Cortez and Queen Limbic system are pumped up, the blood in the skull made audible, the footsteps of childhood nightmare doom draw nigh, the fear is omnipresent, the nightmare seems as if it's about to kick it. But then, quite on schedule, the brain develops, the young mind almost visibly grows, and the infant dreamer learns to escape the trials of pre-linguistic animal mind, steps into the slumbering void and falls, swoops, lifts up its arms to prevent a crash and suspends itself in slumberflight most masterfully. Through time, fantasy, culture, movies, TV, slip into the psychic flying - the dreamer imagines flying like a hovercraft in Star Wars, a glider, a condor, a missile, a kite, a balloon, a dragonfly. The dreamer learns to adore all these solmnubulent modes of transport, and sleep becomes as joyful as sincere prayer.
Flight
Through adolescence and young adulthood, it gets to the point where the dreamer can summon this sensation while wakeful. A steady, brisk walk in the country (often singing, or listening to headphones) induces a flying trance, and the real-life ground blurs under the zooming, weightless body. It comes to light that the ancients have mastered this mystery, and the witches on brooms, the Tibetan mystics, the Amazonian green-goo sniffers all make sense, and of course, astronauts have no need of pixie dust, and pixies need no rockets. Of course! The invention of aluminum, thrust, jets, radio, and waitresses-in-the-sky is all rote, platonic shadows on the cave wall, and the everyday soarings of Airbuses and Boeings are but pale echoes of the wonder of dreamflight.
So fuck you, US Airways.
posted by LauraB 11:27 AM
