the tweney review

We all know the atomic bomb is dangerous. But if you boys and girls know how to duck and cover, you’ll be perfectly safe.

Most entertaining essay of 2004: Planes, Trains, and Plantains: The Story of Oedipus.

This has really gone too far: When the WSJ starts writing about how cool Moleskine notebooks are, and even BoingBoing starts drooling over the things and talking about how many bloggers love them, you know something is amiss. Really, now: Moleskines are cute, black, metrosexual notebooks with off-white paper and clever-ish folders in the back where you can stuff receipts, scraps of paper, $20 bills, sticks of nicotine gum, and the like. They cost $10 and up and they come with a long, mostly bullshit story about Hemingway and Cezanne and Italy to make you feel like the cost is justified. But people, come on: You are getting excited over nothing more than a stack of yellowish paper and some cardboard, even if it does have a good story and a built-in elastic band. I mean, there’s not even a loop to hold a pencil or pen.

I’ll admit, I am heavily reliant on paper notebooks, and god knows I’ve tried dozens of different notebook styles and notetaking schemes over the years. I even own a moleskine, and had high hopes for it — for awhile. But I keep coming back to 99 cent, 3×5, top-bound spiral memo pads. Just before they fall apart, as they always do after a month or so in my back pocket, I bind them together with duct tape. Cheap, low-tech, available from any store, and eminently practical. Plus, it’s the most compact and portable notetaking mechanism I know of — even moleskines are big by comparison, and too rigid to ride comfortably in a pants pocket. Plus, the damn things are expensive and available only in select bookstores and stationery shops. No wonder the technorati love them.

This interesting essay in City Journal examines how classic literature — often disparaged as a “canon” of irrelevant works by long-dead white males — has in fact been profoundly liberating for more than a century of working-class autodidacts in the U.S. and Britain. In fact, the article points out some real correlations between awakened class-consciousness–leading to social activism–and the reading of classics, even when those classics are ostensibly conservative or upper-class writers.

The article takes some cheap shots at postmodernism and its concerns for multicultural relevance, but the point is a powerful one: reading books can free your mind.

… Plato is intensely relevant to former drug addicts. “Those of us in the grip of addiction use this process to rethink our lives,” one student explains. “Socrates makes clear that you have to have the courage to examine yourself and to stand up for something. A lot of us have justified our weaknesses for too long a time.”

City Journal Autumn 2004 | The Classics in the Slums by Jonathan Rose

(via Bookslut)

I love it when judges smack down the fundamentalists. It happens so infrequently that it’s especially gratifying when it does happen. In this case, a judge saw through the transparent creationism lurking behind a Georgia school board’s “evolution warning stickers,” (see parodies here) and ruled that they unconstitionally crossed the line separating church and state.

“The school board has effectively improperly entangled itself with religion by appearing to take a position,” Cooper wrote. “Therefore, the sticker must be removed from all of the textbooks into which it has been placed.”

In fact, given the recent spate of stories about “people of faith” putting their smug (and sometimes evil-hearted) interpretations on the random chaos wrought by the Asian tsunami, you might be forgiven for feeling–as I increasingly do–that religion is good for little more than muddling the minds of humankind and turning people against one another. Who could possibly have the gall to suggest that a neighbor’s children were drowned by a giant wave because they didn’t believe in the right religion? In light of this kind of nonsense, even William Safire seems reasonable and compassionate.

It’s not like me to brag too much, but at the recent Vegas trade show CES, I got to party with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and American bike racing hero Lance Armstrong. OK, I didn’t actually party with them–but I did get to party *near* them, and that was pretty cool to me. Also cool: The well-stocked private bar at each table in the VIP zone. And the buffet at the Bellagio rocks, too. Here are some pics.

The waxy looking one is Steven

Gabrielle and Kenneth Adelman have been flying up and down the California coastline in a helicopter, with a Nikon D-1 digital camera and a GPS receiver. They’ve photographed almost the entire coast, and put their images online. It’s an amazing project!

California Coastal Records Project