Category Archives: Uncategorized

this was new york

When ironic hipsters were earnest. Some new lyrics might be in order: Everybody knows that the data’s strip-mined Everybody knows that the wires are tapped Everybody knows that an ad will follow Everybody knows that your steps are mapped @ … Continue reading

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music: mama’s chicken gumbo

The Yiddish Twist Orchestra is not klezmer, though you might think so from the name. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, other than a topnotch band that delighted its audience by fluently quoting everything from the Dayenu to … Continue reading

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things I learned this week

There is a temporary homeless shelter in Ipswich. It is run by seven churches and rotates night to night. It only runs during the winter months. Schedule is posted at the library. #newsyoucanuse The Ipswich County Library has magnificent reading … Continue reading

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finland crash Q&A

Dale, who asks excellent questions, asked this today: I was just reading a blog entry that mentioned the Finnish financial crisis of 1991. The horrifying thing is that its effects on the job market were worse than the current US recession. … Continue reading

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art: the eighties at ica

This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston The subway advertisements for this show promised, in punky cyan-magenta-yellow letters, iconic Eighties artists – Basquiat, Sherman, Mapplethorpe, Koons, Goldin – while the title … Continue reading

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annals of consumerism 2012

My closest friend from college hosts an annual Christmas party that culminates in a present exchange game known as the Yankee Swap [1]. Players get cards and in order of the cards, choose a gift, unwrap it, and then possibly … Continue reading

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time and news

I abused the backdate function of WordPress quite a lot on my old blog and I intend to continue. That is, the date on a post is not necessarily the day I pushed the “send” button, but more likely the … Continue reading

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art: our land at the cable factory

Maamme (Our Land), Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts. Finnish Museum of Photography, Cable Factory, Helsinki Musically, the Finnish national anthem is easy to sing except for the devilish first line, which sounds as if it combines two wrong-way key changes … Continue reading

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I did not realize this was a thing

A childhood spent watching Masterpiece Theater has not prepared me for the fuss around: Electricity. Every plug is controlled by an individual switch and sometimes two or three more switches between the electricity main and the actual outlet or hard-wired … Continue reading

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facts about Ipswich

If people elsewhere know one thing about Ipswich, it is the Ipswich Town football club. Even my Icelandic ex-flatmate knows Ipswich Town, which was an early member of Premier League (-fixed) and is now cannon fodder for teams like Blackburn … Continue reading

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before the fall

Signs of the apocalypse, stateside trip edition: The success of the For Dummies series, which now have entire sections of their own in bookstores. Do readers really think are dummies? Do they really want to own these ugly, condescending books? … Continue reading

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the third act begins

Leslie Harpold, one of the early Internet colonists I encountered on alt.society.generation-x and its spinoffs, died this past weekend of natural but sudden causes. Most of you kids probably don’t remember what life was like back in the early Clinton … Continue reading

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