Garrett M. Vonk

Wow. I just got an email from iRobot pitching their Pool Robot, Verro, and I was suddenly reminded of my childhood fear of automatic pool cleaning devices. You want to talk irrational and consuming fears? If I was in a pool and one of these suction cleaner things was on, you could find me on the opposite end of said pool, eying it suspiciously. It had nothing to do with any real fear of drowning or being hurt; I had the full gamut of swim lessons and was completely comfortable in the water. There was just something about these roving plastic machines that scared the shit out of me.

• Going to vote in the primary tomorrow after a week of trying and failing to find time to advance vote. Ron Paul needs all the help I can give him, especially given that his buzz has waned quite a bit on the internet. It seems like Ron Paul Fever is giving way to the ever growing Obamania. Obamassacre? Obamanslaughter? I guess I’m just not as good at coining neo-bama-logisms as Ken Jennings. Segue alert!
• Going to meet Ken Jennings (again) at the Margaret Mitchell House tomorrow evening to hear him discuss–and see him sign–his latest.
• Finished The Birthday Party last week. I finally read this on a year-old recommendation on boingboing.net. This is a very good story, recounted chillingly, if a bit amateurishly, by the federal prosecutor who was kidnapped in 1998. A stellar example of an unputdownable book, this one had me up until 2am finishing it the same day I got it from the library.
• Also read Then We Came to the End, completely on the recommendation of Tony Simon’s metaphorical pizza of literature. This is not the kind of novel I usually read. The summary wouldn’t have piqued my interest in the least: “A group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the ’90s boom.” But this is something substantial. It’s about office life, something which which I am intimately familiar, and about cancer, with which I am not. The book will resonate clearly, as it did with me, with anyone who works in an office.
• Currently checked out: Altered Carbon and The World Without Us. Not sure which I will finish first.

I’m reading the Foreword to the second collection of Penny Arcade comics, penned by none other than the esteemed J. Allard, and I found this pretty funny:

All love aside, Gabe and Tycho (and their alter egos in the real world) aren’t infallible. It dissapoints me that after all this exposure, success, and profit they’ve amassed from the blatantly capitalistic repackaging of freely available Internet content . . . the fact that they still have a hyphen in their domain name is steeped in a sweaty mass of lameness.

The book showed up in the same box as I Am America (And So Can You!), so the two works will compete for hilarity in my carry-on next weekend when we’re in California.

If our country had been founded by pirates, our money would look a lot cooler.

Buy a pound of fudge brownies for only a buck! Also, watch out for diabetes!

• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. - My new favorite grammatically correct sentence.
• The Buttered Cat Paradox
  

  They propose that as the cat falls towards the ground, it will slow down and start to rotate, eventually reaching a steady state of hovering a short distance from the ground while rotating at high speed as both the buttered side of the toast and the cat’s feet attempt to land on the ground.

• Gimli Glider - Beware the metric system! Due to a miscalculation, two Canadian pilots find themselves in control of a 300,000lb plane with 61 passengers and no fuel at an altitude of 40,000 feet.
  

  The pilots immediately opened the emergency guide looking for the section on flying the aircraft with both engines out, only to find that no such section existed.

  That sounds like it could be a useful section to have in the emergency guide. I’d imagine it would begin “Step One: Change into clean underwear.”

• Henry Box Brown - In 1849, a slave in Virginia shipped himself to freedom in Pennsylvania in a wooden crate. I guess a follow-up one-liner is out of the question… What can Brown do for you? Anyone?
• Always be sure not to let the Magic Smoke out of your devices…

I just came across this fantastic story from a US Navy Surveillance Ship that was captured by North Korea in 1968. The North Koreans forced the American POWs to create propaganda films that would “prove” that they were being treated humanely (which, according to the rest of the accounts I’ve read, was obviously untrue). However, the Americans had a secret message to pass along through these photos…

This was further demonstrated in the second film in which a US Navy Officer flipped off the cameraman. They left it in. We now had a weapon! Back in our rooms we were elated, this was one more thing we could use to discredit the propaganda we were being forced to grind out. Several crew members expressed caution, but the general attitude was use it. We had been captured, but we never surrendered. Damn the Koreans, full fingers ahead!

The finger became an integral part of our anti-propaganda campaign. Any time a camera appeared, so did the fingers. A concern grew among us that sooner or later the Koreans would notice this and ask questions. It was decided that if the question was raised, the answer was to be that the finger was a gesture known as the Hawaiian Good Luck sign, a variation of the Hang Loose gesture. In late August one of the duty officers asked about the finger and seemed to be accepting of the explanation, but most of us realized that our zeal to ruin their propaganda would come back to haunt us.

It did come back to haunt them, but it’s still a great story.

Master of Business Administration

I flew down to Palm Beach for a day to see my Dad walk across the stage and get his MBA from FAU. Now, he can teach business school if he wants to (and I think he wants to), imparting the many lessons he’s learned over his career on a new batch of would-be entrepeneurs and businesspeople. Congratulations, Dad! I was happy to get to spend some time with the family yesterday and go shoot pool with Stephen, Ashley, and Christine. Also, Happy Birthday to my sister, Christine, who turned 24 yesterday.

My Head Explodes

This is probably the most frustrating customer service phone call I’ve ever heard in my life.

This is a whole new level of frustration that not even Vincent Ferrari ever encountered. At least in the case of slimy retention specialists, you’re both on the same page. If I were dealing with people making so egregious a mistake, it would probably be all I could do not to stab myself in the eye with a salad fork. This isn’t “cancel the account” 47 times while the guy pretends not to hear you. This is thirty straight minutes of CSRs at increasing levels of management failing to recall their fourth grade math lessons. To me, it’s almost unbearable to listen to. The best part, the shining pinnacle of ignorance, is near the end of the call when the “floor manager” tells George that their math error–overcharging him by one hundred times the amount they’re quoting–is just a “difference of opinion”.

In All Seriousness

I’m sitting here at PBI waiting for my plane to Hilton Head to board. The guy next to me just reached over to plug in his laptop and noticed my laptop’s power cable plugged into the outlet by his seat. He whipped out his travel surge protector and turned to me and asked, in a very serious voice, “Sir! Would you like to plug your laptop into my surge-protected outlet?” For some reason, this struck me as riotously funny at 7:15 in the morning. I stifled a chuckle and said “No thanks, I’m fine.” It guess was funny in both a wow-you’re-really-excited-about-your-surge-protector way and an um-is-that-supposed-to-be-a-euphemism way.

It made the rounds earlier this week, but in case you missed it, I recommend this piece in Radar online… Especially the anecdotes about Don Young and (of course) Cynthia McKinney.

Bonus: Reason magazine explains why libertarians just might like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Heather and I enjoy the show, but I’m not sure I cared too much about the politics in the first place. The author of the piece is, I suppose, saying that in comparison to The West Wing, the politics of the show are more palatable.

After work yesterday, I dashed up to Buckhead to attend the book signing for Brainiac, the book Ken Jennings wrote about his experiences with Jeopardy! and as a paean to trivia in general. I highly recommend the book and the blog.

Maybe the best test of a well-composed trivia question is how you feel when you don’t know the answer. Anybody can enjoy getting a question right, even if it’s poorly written or dull. It’s fun to show what you know. But the ideal trivia question is so good that you even enjoy getting it wrong: you liked the mental exercise of rooting around for the answer, and you like the surprise of hearing the right answer after you gave up.

[...]

I took apart trivia questions and interviewed trivia writers hoping to find the “quintessence,” the life-giving force, that made trivia tick. I wanted to hold in my hand the mysterious Element X that differentiates a humdrum run-of-the-mill fact from the kind of sparkling, brilliant memorable fact that spawns trivia questions, the hidden factor that separates trivia from minutiae.

Well, defining “good trivia” turned out to be elusive, but the more trivia I look at, the more I realize that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about porn, I know it when I see it. And at least you don’t need to hide trivia under your mattress so your mom doesn’t find out.