Silver Jacket

Bloggy Blog

  • Somewhere Over the Playa

    Burningmanrainbow

    So, I went to Burning Man this year, my first burn. (In playa terms, I am no longer a virgin but a burner.) It was truly a glorious experience, filled with images like the one above. Yes, that’s an untouched photo [source] (click to enlarge.)

    Here’s a photo of the Temple in front of one of the four pots of gold:

    Temple_rainbow

    Geoff, one of my campmates, climbed on his bike to see how close he could come. He returned with this tale (paraphrased): "Out of everyone in the world, 45,000 people come to Burning Man. Of those, 100 chase the rainbow. Of those, three hop the boundary fence to get there. I could not die satisfied without meeting the other two."

    Later, he wrote:

    So I did the (emotionally) logical thing: I hopped on my bike and tried to find the end of the rainbow. I could see it out in deep playa, for Christ’s sake.

    I discovered that the trash fence was in between me and my goal. At the trash fence were a hundred people who had just been forced to the same conclusion.

    Indistinct on the horizon were two people who evidently did not care that someone had put up a piece of orange plastic in between them and the end of the rainbow: a dangerous and radical concept.

    I dropped my bike and jumped the fence. I wonder if I have ever felt so uneasy in a situation that I knew to be entirely safe. Looking back at Black Rock City, and a hundred rainbow-seekers gawking at me, and thinking about my four years on the playa, I felt a tragicomic exuberance in the back of my throat and the pit of my stomach. When I look back on that moment and imagine it, our little city seems so painfully beautiful, and the people in it so proud, fierce, and vulnerable.

    I had a long, surreal conversation with the Boys of the Horizon that I will carry with me as a protective talisman for many years.

    Eventually Perimeter picked us up. They said very little beyond these sage words: "Inside good, outside not so good."

    I am holding in my hands a big black oily rock from the society beyond the fence.

    may the playa provide,
    Geoff

    ps. I do not recommend harassing Perimeter. They are really nice people and they are working while we are playing.

    The double rainbow happened on Friday afternoon, after the second huge dust storm in two days. You cannot fully appreciate its beauty without surviving one of these things. This video demonstrates the winds, but not the full white out conditions (which were sometimes an alien yellow or red). During the storm on Thursday, I briefly ventured from our camp’s hookah dome, in which 30 or 40 people  eventually took cover, to check on my battered tent. I barely made it back. The dust burned my chest, visibility was 5-10 feet, and I had to walk slowly with my arms out to avoid collisions. Here I am (second from left) in the dome with some campmates early in the storm:

    Joshdome

    (In the foreground is Josh, who programmed and built some of our brilliantly trippy lighting displays. Yes, that’s a red monkey tail.) The dome soon filled up, but really, there’s nothing like a good weather emergency–and some music and beers–to bring people together.

    More tales from the burn to come.

  • Go ¶huck Yourself

    142pxpilcrowsvg I'm in a ranty mood.

    You know what I hate? The use of the pilcrow (paragraph sign, ¶) as a design element. Often in magazines, articles will begin with a block of text that's in bigger type than the rest of the piece. If the part of the story filling that block is more than one paragraph long, instead of using a line break and an indent as usual the designer will keep the text flowing but stick a pilcrow in there.

    There are several reasons to stop this. First, it's an ugly, elaborate character, especially for what it does. Use a pipe or a bullet (| or •) or some other arbitrary symbol, as long as it's clean.

    Second, it's too explicit. The reader shouldn't stop to think, even subconsciously for a few milliseconds, "Oh, that symbol looks like a backwards P with an extra leg, and P stands for paragraph, and they're telling me that they're starting a new paragraph here." No, don't spell it out. Keep it simple. Again, any subtle visual cue would work. Did I mention the bullet?

    Third, it just looks like someone forgot to turn "display formatting" off. Stop being meta and trendy.

    Why do I have so much anger?

  • Don’t mind the pit stains.

    Heathergrey I hate heather grey. It just might be the worst color there is. I don't understand why people wear heather grey clothes when they don't have to. Once in a while I can make an exception for a t-shirt or sweatshirt, like if it has a school logo on it (as if you're at team practice!), but anything beyond that is beyond me.

    Heather grey has several associations I can't suppress. It reminds me of a high school gym class. The kind in 80's movies where they suit you in heather grey duds, presumably the cheapest cloth available, where appearance is not an issue. Why would you wear a blouse made out of gym clothing material? Related: I expect to see sweat stains on anything made of that stuff. And heather grey tube socks I won't touch even if they're clean.

    What gives it that cheap look? I can only assume that the manufacturer doesn't bother to fully mix the solid grey and the solid white. It looks like it's made of random leftover shreds of cotton half-assedly blended together and then somehow melded into a fabric. Heather grey is the sartorial equivalent of chipboard.

    Heather grey accent stripes elicit this response: Oh, they almost had enough normal material to make a full shirt. All but those thin stripes. So close!

  • Oh no you didn’t.

    Gaypride On Sunday I was playing Taboo at a friend's house on 5th Avenue. One of the target words my team had to guess was "bundle," one of the clues given to us being "sticks." This is how I came to yell "faggot!" near an open window as the gay pride parade marched past. Oops.

    But, really, why were they still going at like 6pm? That thing started at like noon. I asked my friend what could keep the gays dancing for 6 hours nonstop in 80 degree heat. His response: "They're powered by pride. And Meth."

    Ok meth I could understand. But pride? Seriously, there is nothing in my life I am that proud of. I could solve world hunger but after a couple hours of bopping around through the sweltering concrete jungle I'd be all, ok I need a time out because somebody better solve my thirst situation.

    Later this week my friend sent me an email with the message "are you being bugged or something?" There was a link to Wednesday's Onion story: "Where Do Homosexuals Get All Their Energy?" Buddy, I'm sorry I dragged you into big brother's net; a line in the story reads, "So I ask, where do they get all their energy? Is it from all that meth?"

  • Ur peoples haz flavor.

    Icanhasplanet

    (I can’t take credit for the underlying feline photohack.)

    I can has ur planet? I can has your planet?

  • Do Not Want

    Hutsonsown
    Did you realize this stuff was on the market? Newman’s Own raunch ranch flavored personal lubricant, "for tossing salads when your first course is intercourse."

  • What’s wrong with this sentence?

    Last week I received a press advisory from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that began:

    "A hamster-size dose of sildenafil, known as Viagra, helps the rodent recover more quickly from a six-hour advance in its daily cycle, researchers report."

    A hamster-size dose of Viagra? Yikes, that better not be a suppository.

    Contexts, a publication of the American Sociological Association, was more careful with their representation of appropriate dosage when they captioned the following image last year (volume 5, number 2, page 41):

    Viagra

    Actual size

    The academic periodical played a bit more fast and loose in captioning the image of Bob Dole on the following page:

    Dole

    But who can blame them? That’s totally my favorite kind of joke: one that combines Viagra, invalids, and bestiality.

  • Ain’t Nothing But Mammals

    Lions

    It’s been almost a month, but I’m finally giving you a link to some pics from my trip to Kenya in April. You should totally check them out because they are awesome.

    There are animals eating each other, hunting each other, and fucking each other; people fighting with sticks; and tribal warriors giving me dance lessons.

    In fact, I’m willing to bet that you will have a better time looking at them than I did taking them, because you will not be hampered by concerns about malaria, cockroaches, or third world mass transit/B.O.

    Of course, you will not have Holly to serve as your beautiful and charming travelmate (and bikini model.) Pole sana, rafiki.

  • New York is Fun. You Should Come.

    Mystique I'm not really one to get starstruck. I'm of the "they're just human; do they have anything interesting to say to me" variety. But there's still something enervating about close encounters with celebs in the wild, like watching a comic book character (say, Mystique) come to life and shake your hand. I think there's some evolutionary psychology behind that.

    Two nights ago I went to a book party hosted by a dealer of rare tomes. Not typically a breeding ground for action figures, but follow along. At one point I introduced myself to a woman with funky glasses who looked interesting to talk to. Her eccentricity didn't end with her accessories, which I soon noticed also included analogs of raver beaded bracelets clogging up her  sleeves—they had little trinkets on them, at least one of which was a unicorn. She noted that she bought the same designer glasses for her husband, but in green, and kept talking to me, and the woman I'd been talking with earlier, about Montauk, noting that she had never worked a summer in her life. When she asked where we went in the summers (though thankfully without using summer as a verb) we were like, uh, we live in the city. We work. At this point I thought I had her pegged. A wealthy artist or designer. Then she drops it like it's hot and reveals she's a retired school teacher. Recalculate.

    She goes on to ask how long my chat buddy and I have known each other. Since about 8pm we say. She does not believe us, noting our casualness. We're casual people, we say. For the next 30 minutes Jessica and I try to convince her that we are not married. I think she still believes we're pranksters.

    TomcatsAt this point I'm thinking I would love for her to be my crazy old aunt, so I could have lunch with her once a month. And then the full reveal. Jerry O'Connell (Stand By Me, Jerry Maguire), who'd been standing by me, introduces himself and thanks us, as if in apology, for talking to his mom. Jessica thinks this is weird, as she does not know who he is. I think that is weird.

    Then his fiancée introduces herself. I'll give you a hint. Her first name starts with "Rebecca," and her last name starts with "Romijn" (but does NOT end in "-Stamos," mind you.) Celeb introductions always seem weird to me. It's slightly tempting to play dumb and respond with, "I'm sorry, what's your name again?" just to see if it elicits any kind of interesting microexpression before they dutifully repeat themselves. (An actual tantrum would be hilarious.)

    I think when I'm a household name I will crib a line from a Fabolous [sic] jam: "Hello, my name is/ Fuck that, I'm famous." You know, just as a psychology experiment.

  • Not Off the Presses

    For each of the three press releases below, all put out today, guess which summary was provided by EurekAlert and which was not.

    Bully Saliva clue to chronic bullying

    A) Saliva in children's hair may be a biological indicator of the trauma kids undergo when they are chronically bullied by peers, according to researchers who say permanent markers can also aid in the early creation of long-term psychological effects on youth.

    B) Hormones in children's saliva may be a biological indicator of the trauma kids undergo when they are chronically bullied by peers, according to researchers who say biological markers can aid in the early recognition and intervention of long-term psychological effects on youth.

    (more…)