WNSTN

Look I took pictures! nomadical-hearns: We’re in yet another...

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:21:51 -0500

Look I took pictures!

We’re in yet another temporary home this week while we wait on our Travel Trailer to be repaired. This one has a little better view than the the last one.

Tonight, Freya and I decided that whenever someone tells Win something that he doesn’t...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:25:17 -0500

Tonight, Freya and I decided that whenever someone tells Win something that he doesn’t understand, we’ll teach him to ask for clarification with the question “Is that a euphemism?”

Parenting is the best.

How Much Military Is Enough?

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:22:00 -0500

How Much Military Is Enough?:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This is a world in arms. This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Arrested Productions

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:42:01 -0500

Arrested Productions

"I think for, you know, the moms and dads out there, the people who give money to Christian advocacy..."

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:55:48 -0500

“

I think for, you know, the moms and dads out there, the people who give money to Christian advocacy groups, to the RNC, what they want is something really, you know, important. They want to try and make America better. And they’ve been led to believe that somehow all of that can be achieved through politics. All of if can be achieved particularly through conservative politics. And you fast from something not because it’s evil, but because you want to step away and focus on something more spiritual.

And I really would love to see a period of time for a couple of years where evangelical voter stopped giving to all these political groups and started giving to the poor, you know, started giving their time to after-school programs, started, you know, doing two things that Jesus said, like loving your neighbor and — and again, redirecting that money towards the poor. And I think that it would provide some much-needed perspective on the political environment.

”

- The late David Kuo talking to Terry Gross in 2006 about his call for a fast from politics for evangelicals. Kuo, the Deputy Director of President George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, became disillusioned with the politics of the Bush White House. He died on Friday at age 44. He had brain cancer. (via nprfreshair)

It’s almost embarrassing how many times I’ve...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:51:41 -0500

It’s almost embarrassing how many times I’ve listened to this song. Almost. We saw Josh Ritter in concert last July and every time Freya or I listen to him (easily multiple times a week) we remark that we wish we could go watch him in concert again.

Rose at the altar withered and wilted
Romero sank into a dream
He didn’t make Heaven, he didn’t make Harrisburg
He died in a hole in between
Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God’s a drunkard for pain
Me I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train

You can get this full live album free, along with a sampler of his other stuff and another live album at Noisetrade.. Enjoy.

Harlow’s empathy for the perpetrators signifies a classic move in the rhetoric of rape: victim...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:12:47 -0500

Harlow’s empathy for the perpetrators signifies a classic move in the rhetoric of rape: victim blaming. Blame it on the victim’s clothes. Blame it on the victim’s sexual history. Blame it on the victim’s initial arousal. Shouldn’t we also consider what those accusations say about men: That if women’s clothing prompts men to rape, our culture holds very low standards for masculine self-control? Instead, we treat men like animals who can’t help themselves, and we expect women to police themselves to protect themselves from men as if they were beasts. All to avoid assigning blame where it actually belongs. Consider this, if any woman with a sexual history is “asking” for rape, then most women of age in this country are asking for it. Do we really want to live in a culture where we don’t offer women the right to change their minds in the midst of amorous engagements, and where we don’t consider what kind of men need a sexual conquest without consent? Shouldn’t we contemplate why two young men would drag a barely conscious female around, penetrating her and abusing her body while joking and taking photographs?

Beyond Steubenville: Rape Culture and Complicity

Well I could dip my head in the river, cleanse my soul, I’ll...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:20:35 -0500

Well I could dip my head in the river, cleanse my soul,
I’ll still have the stomach of a sinner, face like an un-holy ghost,
Will you save me all the soliloquies, paid my fines,
I’ll be gone before my deliverance, preach what you like.

‘Cos I don’t mind being lonely,
So leave me alone.
You’re acting all holy,
Me, I’m just full of holes.
Full of holes.

Holy shit I love this song so much and I can’t wait to see Frightened Rabbit tomorrow.

George Saunders

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:20:10 -0500

George Saunders:

I don’t really think the humanist verities are quite enough. Because that would be crazy if they were. It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything. The idea of saying, ‘Well, we can’t see it, therefore we don’t need to see it,’ seems really weird to me.

wnycradiolab: ryanpanos: James McNabb’s Scrap Wood Cityscapes...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:49:45 -0500

wnycradiolab:

ryanpanos:

James McNabb’s Scrap Wood Cityscapes via Colossal

This is great. More of this please.

Yes.

Three Versions of the Same Plan

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 21:52:00 -0600

It started with a list. “Top 10 Places We Want to See In America” I suggested, as I was driving my girlfriend back to college. She was a Junior – although she dropped out after that year as I had done the year before – and she had been up in Nashville for some holiday weekend. We started throwing out names of cities and National Parks one or the both of us had never visited. “Top 10” quickly ballooned to the something like the top 28, and it was cemented in our minds that if the relationship stuck, we would need to travel.

Well, later that spring I asked her to marry me, she said yes, and in October of 2008 Freya and I were wed. The following year two things important to this story occurred. First, we started joking about running away in a trailer for a few months so we could see this grand nation (and the one above us). It really was just a joke at first but the romantic notion underlying the basis of the joke struck a chord in each of us.

The second thing that happened was Pixar released a film called Up, with an old man named Carl Fredrickson who, as a boy in the film is seen exclaiming “Adventure is Out There!” as he pretended to pilot the blimp of his hero, a blimp named “The Spirit of Adventure.” We saw the film in theaters and bawled our eyes out at the first 8 minutes then laughed our heads off for the rest of the film. And we took the moral of the film to heart: don’t let life pass you by.

Version one of “The Road Trip” was quaint and romantic. Step One was to do something we’ve never actually done in the course of our marriage: save up some money. Step Two was to buy a small SUV (we’d chosen the Honda Element; our rationale escapes me) and a 13-foot travel trailer (vintage if possible). Step Three was quit our jobs, and Step Four was travel until we ran out of money, spending two to three weeks in various cities so we didn’t “feel like tourists” but instead we could “soak up the culture” of each city, as well as hitting up a bunch of National Parks. We’d sleep in a tent, use the trailer for a kitchen and storage, and spend our days exploring museums, our nights at breweries and restaurants and wherever else we found ourselves.

We never had to deal with our shortage of savings for Version One because the year we had this planned - 2011 - was the year EVERYONE we knew got pregnant including my wife’s sister, and so we couldn’t just be gone when all the babies arrive, could we? No, we couldn’t. So we pushed the trip back to 2012.

Version Two of “The Road Trip” never even had a chance. Even though none of our family or friends were pregnant, even though at the end of 2011 I got the job I now have and even though this job was awesome and my employers were willing to let me work remotely, the trip was impossible in the face of our unexpected pregnancy. We toyed with ideas of traveling some and then coming home in time for the third trimester, but somehow in the end all we did was take a baby-moon to Vegas and sit by the pool for a week.* The trip would have to wait another year.

That year is this year. 2013. “The Road Trip” Version Three. “It’s all happening!” as they say in the film Almost Famous. “It’s all happening.”

I’ve been hesitant to talk about it. I’ve tempered my excitement, kept my dreams and nervousness on the down low. But I don’t have to anymore. It’s all happening.

Our original plans were quaint. Romantic. Our plan now is somehow more pragmatic and also more crazy. Instead of a 13-foot vintage travel trailer, we have a brand-new 35-foot travel trailer with a king bed and two slide-outs. Instead of a Honda Element or similar small SUV, we have a Toyota Tundra CrewMax with a towing capacity of 10,100lbs. And instead of “just the two of us” sleeping in a tent every night, well, it’s Freya and I and our son Win, 5 months old as of this writing, sleeping in the aforementioned king size bed. And instead of a few months on the road, well, we’ve mapped out a year and if we enjoy that year, we’ll probably stay out for at least another year.

Here’s what we have planned so far.

On March 30, we’re saying au revoir to Nashville and heading to Richmond, VA. We’ll be there for 3 weeks, getting the hang of living in 300sq feet and seeing some super good friends that live there. From there, we’ll spend a month in Washington, D.C. Then it’s back to Nashville for a couple weeks (and a stop to see my family in Birmingham), before we head out west until Thanksgiving.

The westward leg will include Colorado, Yellowstone, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and then (fulfilling a lifelong dream) driving down the 101 to San Francisco. We’ll get back to Nashville in time for Thanksgiving, stick around until Christmas, then we’re doing a “winter tour” of New Orleans, Austin, and San Diego. That takes us through a year, and barely half of the list of places we want to visit. These are of course the cities, there will be park visits in between as well.

It’s still sinking in that this is real life. For 3 years we’ve talked about this, planned various iterations of it, and now we’re less than a month away from the real thing.

We’ll be starting a blog shortly that you can follow all our adventures on and I’m going to create a page where anyone who wants to hang out with us or suggest places of interest along our route can get in touch. In the meantime, it’s beyond exciting to know that Adventure is Out There and on March 30 we’re going to find it.

Which reminds me. As of today we’ve christened our travel trailer “The Spirit of Adventure.” Thanks Pixar.

*My wife reminds me here that we actually traveled to Richmond in April, Asheville in May, Vegas in June, and St. Augustine, FL in July, but no trip was longer than a week.

nevver: Jetpack Solves Everything

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 09:09:59 -0600

nevver:

Jetpack Solves Everything

"The problem — or at least the change — is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex..."

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:04:33 -0600

“The problem — or at least the change — is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It’s not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It’s a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.”

- To Know, but Not Understand

Is the Heat Wave of 2012 What Climate Change Looks Like?

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:27:24 -0600

Is the Heat Wave of 2012 What Climate Change Looks Like?:

Up until fairly recently, it was possible—which, of course, is not the same as advisable—to see climate change as a phenomenon that was happening somewhere else. In the Arctic, Americans were told (again and again and again), the effects were particularly dramatic. The sea ice was melting. This was bad for native Alaskans, and even worse for polar bears, who rely on the ice for survival. But in the Lower Forty-eight there always seemed to be more pressing concerns, like Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Similarly, the Antarctic Peninsula was reported to be warming fast, with unfortunate consequences for penguins and sea levels. But penguins live far away and sea-level rise is prospective, so again the issue seemed to lack “the fierce urgency of now.”

you shall above all things be glad and young For if you’re young, whatever life you wear It...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:26:32 -0600

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you’re young, whatever life you wear

It will become you;and if you are glad
whatever’s living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man’s
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation’s dead undoom.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

ee cummings

"For some students—millions of them—the institutions in which they enroll are more reliable producers..."

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:42:01 -0600

“For some students—millions of them—the institutions in which they enroll are more reliable producers of debt than education.”

- Your Massively Open Offline College is Broken

nevver: The Windows of New York This series is exquisite.

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 10:39:09 -0600

nevver:

The Windows of New York

This series is exquisite.

Junot Diaz, interviewed in The Atlantic

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 09:00:59 -0600

Junot Diaz, interviewed in The Atlantic:

I think that once you get over the age of 20, you begin to understand that there’s a lot of places where you can fall in and they are just locations of stases. Locations of paralysis. Places where there’s no growth. And whether it’s a job, whether it’s a way that you decide to pursue your life, whether it’s a philosophy, whether it’s a politic, we all know in our hearts when we’re choosing paralysis. When we’re choosing the dead zone over life. Yunior is one of these characters. I think that in some ways the closest he can come to love is after it’s fucking gone past and it’s only a shadow blasted in the wall. Then he’ll come every day and bring flowers to it.

I really enjoyed Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I’m hoping to read his new collection of stories this year. I posted a quote from this interview a few months ago, but I really enjoyed the whole piece.

Walt Disney’s animated short “Paperman.” What...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:22:54 -0600

Walt Disney’s animated short “Paperman.” What a beautiful little film.

The New Yorker: A Fake Facebook Wedding

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:26:47 -0600

The New Yorker: A Fake Facebook Wedding:

The Internet is perhaps the closest thing we’ll ever have to the ring of Gyges—the invisibility charm that allows its wearer to be alone while having access to the outside world—which Plato posited as the truest test of how a person will act when freed from accountability or restraint. We…

So, Andrea here was a friend of mine in high school. It’s rather awesome to see her byline appear on The New Yorker. Also, this essay is excellent.