Accept no substitutes

Month: January 2007 (Page 4 of 5)

Science Blogging Conference gets closer

Science Blogging Conference

Saturday January 20th is not so far away.

The Science Bloggers Conference is just around the corner. We’ve got over 140 people signed up as of this writing.

Anton says we can handle 150.
So go register now!

New Conference news from Anton: Burroughs Wellcome Fund and BlogAds have signed on as sponsors. Grab bag items will include: copies of The Lancet (Jan 6-12 issue), copies of American Scientist (Jan-Feb issue), and bookmarks and notepads from the NC Science, Math and Technology Education Center, copies of Seed Magazine, and assorted books from HarperCollins (Best American Science Writing 2006 and 3 other titles), copies of The Scientist Magazine, and copies of Nature. We’ll also get  copies of a science DVD from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Social Networking and Teens

The Pew Internet and American Life report on Social Networking and Teens is out. Brief on findings: 55% of teen in America use social networking sites. Girls use them more than boys.

Both genders (91%) use them for relationship maintenance (just like Brett Bumgardner’s honors thesis found), but older girls even more for that. Of those who use social networking to flirt and make new friends (49%), older boys make up the largest section of that group.
Fred has his reactions posted here. And danah boyd has hers here. BBC reports the story in this way.

Jim Ray’s Absinthe update

Jim Ray, who is too shy to publish comments here, send us this update on absinthe:

The New Yorker wrote a pretty definitive piece on the absinthe revival that does a good job of refuting the mythology (Feb 06 in PDF form here ).

A few months earlier, Wired gave the green fairie a similar treatment (seems Conde Nast has an interest in absinthe’s future)

I’ve succesfully procured some of the real deal from Ted Breaux’s absinthe distillery (Jade Liquer’s Nouvelle Orleans was my poison of choice) and was quite pleased with the result, even if a bottle does cost about US$150 shipped. Beat the pants off that acerbic crap I was lighting on fire in Prague a few years back.

And here’s a handy guide on how to properly imbibe, varied by region. Much like kissing, I find the French method preferable.

I prefer the Swiss method for absinthe, myself. All this mumbo jumbo with sugar is a bit tedious and dare I say too sweet.

Catalogers as Critics?

In reviewing Kockroach by Tyler Knox in the December 31 NYTimes Book Review, Matt Weiland writes:

Our finest literary critics hold no endowed chairs and never win prizes, yet their work has the poetry of truth about it and there’s nobody better at answering the fundamental question about any book, a question always more interesting and always harder to answer than whether it’s any good: what is it really about? I mean, of course, the anonymous librarians who prepare the Cataloging in Publication data for the Library of Congress, the brief descriptive classifications that appear on the copyright page of most books. Is there a more succinct description of John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run” than “Middle class men — Fiction”? What writer doesn’t envy the economy and force of “Massacres — Fiction” for Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” and “Industrial accidents — Fiction” for Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”? And will there ever be a finer gloss on Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” than “Eccentrics and eccentricities — Fiction”?

Absinthe gets cleared

Sally points me to this NYTimes article, Trying to Clear Absinthe’s Reputation, by Harold McGee.

Basic points: High alcohol is the killer, not wormwood. But wormwood is psycho-active — so is sage with the same chemical. Czech absinthe generally sucks. If it’s not green, it’s not the real thing. If it doesn’t cloud well, it’s not the real thing. Champagne has its own secrets; unclean glasses work best for bubbles.

Framed by a Hemmingway story. Male journalists all want to be like Papa. Why?

An alert NYTimes forum member sends us to a Terra online video feature, Forbidden Fruit: The Absinthe Drinker, (about 7 1/2 minutes) in which retired neurosurgeon David Cook (who is wearing Merrell Mocs) talks about absinthe and the myths and bad science associated with it.

And Ze Frank explains the real way that champagne works.

Poetry supporters and Stanza offenders

Rus of Poetry and Poets in Rags tells us that two papers other than News and Observer do a great job of publishing poetry — the Oregonian and the Washington Post — but they also screw up the lines and stanzas in their online versions.

Yikes!


Here’s May Swenson’s, after David Biespiel discusses it
[ in the Oregonian]

For doubles-spacing, the Washington Post does it all the time. Here’s Pinsky discussing O’Hara last month

Same poem with stanza breaks [at Book of Joe].


And here’s a poem by Dorianne Laux turned into a prose poem by the Oregonian.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 The Real Paul Jones

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑