Sesquipedalianism: Yesterday’s word of the day was the delightfully scatalogical Japanese word, “Chuugi”, proof that given enough time and boredom I will always be drawn to the lowest of the low that the Internets has to offer.

Art Film:  I have “cut the cable” in my NYC apartment (there wasn’t one to begin with) and spend my evenings edifying myself either via Hulu’s excellent catalogue of the Criterion Collection or Mubi’s generous $6.99 monthly all-the-art-film-you-can-watch plan. Last night’s flick was Elim Klimov’s “Come and See“, a 1985 Russian war film about the horrors of Byelorussia under the Nazi Einsatzgruppen pograms that is about as downright brutal and horrifying as anything I’ve watched, including Kon Ichikawa’s Fire on the Plains. I’m very fond of Soviet/Russo flicks, mainly the work of Tarkovsky, and Klimov pays homage to the master in nearly every frame. Not one for the kiddies.

Ebert's review

Second, I was reading Jesse Richard’s manifesto for the Remodernist Movement, which encompasses the work embodied by Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, Ozu and other wonderfully moody auteurs who prize messiness, sentiment, melancholy over digital precision, snappy dialogue, and plot arcs. Interesting stuff I hope to dive deeper into now that I have a MoMA membership and the annual film pass (my NYC pad is directly behind the museum on W. 54th Street.

Product of the day:  Thanks to Timothy Ferris’ advice in the Four Hour Body (which I take with a grain of skepticism) I Amazoned a tiny little humidifier so I don’t suffer the usual winter desiccation.  The Air-O-Swiss is the size of six stacked smartphones and uses a half-liter water bottle as a reservoir. Under $50 and does the trick.

Know Your Polluters:

The EPA has an interesting Google Maps mashup that lets you checkout how much greenhouse gas is spewing out of the local power plant or landfill. Here’s a link to Massachusetts.

And finally ….

Click here to view the embedded video.

The New York Times reports on the impending launch of the Global Jukebox, a realization of the vision of Alan Lomax, the man who roamed the United States in the 50s and 60s recording the folk music that went on to influence the pop music revolution.

I was unaware that clips from those hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings had been excerpted by, among others, Moby in his decade-old album, Play and in the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers film, O Brother Where Art Thou?

Lomax had a vision of creating an accessible digitized collection of the recordings, and up until his death in 2002, experimented with PCs and other digital music technologies to create a “global juke.” Later this month that vision will launch as the Global Jukebox.

Here’s a link to a compilation of some of the recordings Lomax made.

Sad news in Marstons Mills, as Kevin Galvin, 63, owner of the magnificent red colonial on the mill pond at the herring run on Route 149 and Route 28 and the blogger who’s maintained the Marston Mills River herring count blog, has passed away from rabies contracted from a bite from a brown bat.

He was a big friend to the herring, along with my former Latin teacher and his wife, Tom and Pieter Burgess.

He’s the first person to die from rabies in the state since the 1930s according to the Cape Cod Times.

I like this post of his on how he knew when to check the run for herring in April:

“I’ve lived right beside Mill Pond for 10 years now and have developed a pretty good sense of the events and cycles that occur at the pond and the behavior of the swans, the blue herons, migrating birds, osprey, turtles, frogs & toads, owls, etc, etc.

I learn more and more as time goes by, but one thing I’m certain of is this: the only time of the year that the aptly-named Herring Gull is on Mill Pond is when the herring are running – and the gulls arrive on Mill Pond exactly when the herring do.

What’s even nicer about this is that I don’t even have to look for the gulls, as I can simply just listen for them. And that unmistakable screech is notice to me to get the folks out to start countin’.

Now sometimes the gulls will show up a few days early and kind of just poke around, but there isn’t any noise, because there’s to nothing to fight over. But when the herring arrive (yum!) the fighting and associated screeching begins, because as with many animals, the easiest way to find food is to try to steal it from one who’s already found it.

So we have a few gulls poking around the pond today, and they’re quiet as expected. But my guess is that within a couple of days two things will happen: there’ll be the sound of screeching gulls and we’ll be counting herring…”

Finally I’m back to typing, the voice recognition thing wasn’t doing it for me.

The surgical dressings came off Tuesday at Mass General, where the surgeon pulled the sutures out of the incision on the back side of my elbow, and then had me fitted into a tron-like Range Of Motion brace that the physical therapist can add a few degrees of flexion and extension to every week. No gym induced sweat for another ten days (which is causing me to climb the walls in frustration), and no real weight on the arm for another three months. But I can type and no longer have to disturb the peace with my slow-paced, head injury dictation. “Open parenthesis. And then the quick brown Flax … strike that … Frack …. strike that ….. Fox. Close parenthesis. New paragraph …..” Dictation has to be the godawfulest form of writing in the world, a last resort for the era of Mad Men with Dictaphones and winsome stenos who took shorthand and batted their eyelashes. I realize I think through my finger tips and not my mouth.

This is pretty amazing. I’ve heard of messages in bottles travelling long distances, but never abandoned boats. This tale of the little center console that could is going to be some lucky boat builder’s dream advertisement very soon [update, it's on the manufacturer's homepage]. Thanks to Joe Nick and Charlie for figuring out it is a Regulator 26.

Link to video

Link to story

This blog will go dark on January 18 in support of the campaign to stop SOPA.

please visit http://sopastrike.com for more information and please sign an online petition or write your congressidiot directly.

arm surgery went well. recovering thanks to wonderful wife and son, a nerve block, and pain killers. let the healing begin.

My interest in native American issues has grown over the past few years, fueled in part by Nathaniel Philbrick’s account of the King Philip Indian War in The Mayflower, and because of my close proximity to Mashpee and the efforts/strife of the local Wampanoag tribe to achieve tribal recognition and restore their language.

Until this past weekend I’d never visited the southeastern corner of Connecticut, home to the Mohegan and Pequot tribes and their better known casinos — Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. Both have been in operation for more than a decade and are excellent examples of sovereign indigenous rights and, to some poetic extent, ironic revenge for past atrocities by the English settlers and their descendants.  Fleecing the locals and using the cash to better themselves and buy back their ancestral lands seems fitting once you put into context the events of May 26, 1637.

My interest in the Pequot followed a visit to the site of the Great Swamp Fight in Kingstown, Rhode Island during the winter of 2009. Philbrick brought this neglected piece of American history to light in the Mayflower, telling the grim story of the battle when an army of colonists massacred hundreds of Narragansett Indians in their hidden swamp redoubt one cold December evening.  My post on that visit is one of the most visited and commented on this blog.

The Great Swamp Fight of December, 1675, while interesting because of its senseless violence (it drew the peaceful Narragansett tribe into the bloody three-year war between the whites and the Wampanoags), was not the first nor the worst of the colonial era massacres.  Forty years before and only 20 miles to the west, near what is known today as the village of Mystic,Connecticut an English force (which included Mohegan and Narragansett warriors) led by Captain John Mason attacked and massacred an encampment of Pequot Indians inside of their fort on the western shores of the Mystic River. I’ve rowed on that river at the annual Mystic Coast Weeks regatta hosted out of the Mystic Seaport Museum of American maritime history, unaware of the atrocity that took place only a half a mile away. That 400 to 700 women, children and old men died there has been a source of macabre curiosity and is definitely not something on the typical Mystic tourist’s agenda between the aquarium and its beluga whale and ye olde quaintness of the Seaport (which is an excellent maritime museum and experience).

One recent January weekend, with the prospect of nothing to do but sit on the couch and watch football,  my son and I woke early and drove the 125 miles from Cape Cod to New London ostensibly to visit the submarine museum in Groton where the first nuclear submarine Nautilus is moored. We talked about zombie issues during the drive, remarking about the relative attractiveness of various structures as being zombie-proof or not, and listened to internet radio kludged through his iPod and an FM radio adapter. Our first stop was in downtown New London, home of my favorite playwright, Eugene O’Neill, for a healthy organic brunch at a crunchy little café off of State Street recommended by Yelp.

My son, unimpressed with my dietetic eccentricities, extracted a promise that the day would end with a hamburger from the nearby Five Guys in Mystic.

We recrossed the Thames River and found the United States Navy’s submarine base off of Route 12 in Groton. This was familiar ground to me as I had spent one grueling May in the 1970s rowing on the Thames with the Yale heavyweight crew preparing for the annual Harvard-Yale race, the oldest collegiate competition in the country. My father sent me a new Laser sailboat as a birthday present, having it delivered to the crew house at Gales Ferry. One day I decided to try the Laser out by myself and tacked it downriver towards the Route 95 bridge. It was very breezy day and I capsized in front of the submarine base’s sub pens. As I drifted perilously close to the warning line marked by a string of orange buoys I tried to right the boat and get going again as a group of alarmed shore patrolmen jogged down the dock, white rifles in hand yelling that I was invading off limits territory. A friend who attended Connecticut College on the other side of the Thames told me once about getting arrested for bird watching in the woods with a set of binoculars. A car pulled up, some Navy personnel hopped out, and he was questioned.

New London and Groton were definitely high on the Soviet missile target list during the cold war. The fact that General Dynamics, the shipyard that builds the massive nuclear submarines, is sitting right on New London Harbor and that New London is also home to the Coast Guard Academy makes it a very attractive target.  There’s something strangely functional and sad about a military base. I felt it on the Presidio in San Francisco during the recent holidays, and again last weekend in Groton as we drove past the gates of the sub base, the rows of enlisted personnel barracks, the retired Polaris missile standing sentry.

The museum was fantastic, a relatively new museum that I’d never seen before. We toured the exhibits, marveled at the display of American military technology and heroism, and eventually boarded the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered “vehicle.” My claustrophobia immediately kicked in, making me realize I would make a neurotic submariner.

We took a left out of the museum and continued north on Route 12 along the Thames to Gales Ferry, home of the Yale crew camp. I felt very old and blue and nostalgic and boola-boola standing on the old croquet pitch looking down at the boathouse (trivia: the saying “paint the town red” was uttered by a traitorous mayor of New London who exhorted the Harvard crew to paint his city Crimson if they beat Yale)

Junior was impatient, honked the horn, so we hit the road and continued north in search of the mystical Mohegan Sun, casino of the Mohegan tribe in Uncasville. I’m a moron when it comes to gambling, so I have no affinity for casinos (and am profoundly happy not to be in Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show this week) and the alleged glamour associated with them.  We used the GPS to find the way, and suddenly astride the Thames, was the most out of place building I’ve ever seen — a shining metallic rectangle looming above the brown sere winter woods.

Good for the Indians, I thought. Getting back at the civilization that boned them and using the proceeds to better themselves and buy back their ancestral lands. The Mohegans and Pequots had been screwed, utterly so, and their history is fascinating, particularly in the 20th century as they struggled to preserve their language (banned by the state of Connecticut at one point) and culture. But they did, and by the 1990s had achieved Federal recognition, investors, and eventually prosperity.

We didn’t stop to visit, just drove through the valet area and back to the highway and eventually the creepiest place I’ve seen in years, the campus of the abandoned state mental hospital in Ledyard and Norwich. This place was amazing. You can get a great sense of it at the website, Forbidden-Places, a catalog of abandoned factories, hospitals and power plants hosted out of Belgium. I’d film a horror movie here in an instant. Make that a zombie movie.

We drove silently through the edge of Norwich, past the tired millworker housing and shuttered mills, Asian groceries and check cashing stores. The place was sleepy and stagnant and so evocative of the death of the industrial revolution in countless other New England mill towns. It made me think of my friends the Lotuffs, and their efforts to revive the American manufacturing tradition with their high-end leather working company, Lotuff Leather (whose briefcase I lust for). What will restore manufacturing to America? A drive through Fall River or Pawtucket or Norwich is like going to a drive-in wake.

We gazed upon the Pequot casino, Foxwoods, just as garish and out of place as the Mohegan version, and taking a back road, happened upon the actual reservation where the surviving Pequots live in a gated community with very nice houses in the middle of the glacial moraine crossed by rows of colonial stonewalls snaking through the Connecticut woods. Given that the Mohegans under their sachem, Uncas, participated in the Mystic Pequot massacre, I wonder how cut-throat competitive the two casinos are today.

The Five Guys burger ended the adventure — me eating mine like a caveman out from in between the paleo-forbidden bun, Junior inhaling his along with a massive greasy paper bag of fries. All was well with the worlds, the Pequots and Mohegans were making bank, our Navy is keeping us safe, but nowhere in Greater New London can one find a Eugene O’Neill play.

Silly me, hanging like an orangutan, swinging and touching my toes to a bar at the Crossfit gym and POP! something important breaks inside of my left arm. A big bruise ensues, then deadness, then all sorts of pain. Now the arm is hanging useless by my side.

My selt-diagnosis: a rupture of the bottom of the bicep tendon, causing it to separate from my forearm. I’m waiting for an MRI to be scheduled to confirm it, but right now it looks pretty messed up and destined for surgical reattachment.

So there goes the 2012 ergometer racing season and my quixotic pursuit of a personal record. From what I’m reading in the support-forums the recovery will take four months.

Sucks getting old.

Nick Bilton blogged at the New York Times yesterday about the experience of trying to photograph a San Francisco sunset with his iPhone and realizing that he had squandered a sublime experience trying to capture that it by messing with filters and settings and watching the dramatic fireball through a 3.5 inch screen.

On Sunday morning, the first day of 2012,  I woke to this front page:

Look closely at the photograph across the middle four columns: a mob of New Year’s Eve revelers experiencing the ultimate NYE experience — the drop of the ball in Times Square — and how are they seeing it?

Through their screens, like little computerized periscopes our grandparents used to see over crowds at parades, everyone “capturing” the moment and then selecting “share” to send it to FourSquare, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Google +  and on and on. I’m happy for them. Everyone is smiling and having a great time.

But it’s gone too far.

In 1988 I wrote my first cover story for Forbes Magazine on the topic of information overload. In the course of researching that piece I came across the work of the MIT professor, Ithiel de Sola Pool (the man who coined the term “convergence”). He tracked the growth of information over time — the massive explosion of media brought about by what the critic Walter Benjamin called “Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”  The net impact of this is, to quote Wikipedia, that “the modern means of production have destroyed the authority of art: for the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free.”

Edward O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard professor of biology, wrote in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge that a man of letters in the late 18th century — the age of Franklin, Jefferson, Priestly — could reasonably consume most of the published information in any given year across all fields. It was expected that an intellectual in the 1700s would not only be familiar with the classics, but would also have an interest in the sciences. The result was an amazing consilience of knowledge, with the concept of a “renaissance man” exemplified by the leaders of the era. Today? We’ve fractured into specialists and all we hold in common is some familiarity with the latest pop star, blockbuster movie/tv show, or world news event.

To state that there is more information available today  than could ever be consumed is trite and obvious. Just stating the fact is existentially depressing as I’m engaged in the very act that I’m bitching about.  I’m referring to so-called authoritative information produced by experts, not my nephew and neighbor who suddenly have, in theory, the same means of production that the Sulzbergers had to themselves 100 years ago when the New York Times was truly dominant.

I found an amazing list on time management, by Dr. Donald Wetmore (I guess the “Dr.” means he’s an authority. It’s an interesting and depressing list. Here’s some highlights:

1. The average working person spends less than 2 minutes per day in meaningful communication with their spouse or “significant other”.
2. The average working person spends less than 30 seconds a day in meaningful communication with their children.
3. The average person gets 1 interruption every 8 minutes, or approximately 7 an hour, or 50-60 per day. The average interruption takes 5 minutes, totaling about 4 hours or 50% of the average workday. 80% of those interruptions are typically rated as “little value” or “no value” creating approximately 3 hours of wasted time per day.
4. 95% of the books in this country are purchased by 5% of the population. 95% of self-improvement books, audio tapes, and video tapes purchased are not used.
5. The average worker sends and receives 190 messages per day.
6. The average American watches 28 hours of television per week.
7. 78% of workers in America wish they had more time to “smell the roses”.
8. 49% of workers in America complain that they are on a treadmill.

Hence one of the more popular memes in contemporary life is “lifehacking” or the art of “getting things done.” I won’t point to the obvious manifestations, but check out David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” or the excellent Lifehacker.com for examples.

Being early January, it is resolution time.  I sense the rising meme in resolutions isn’t quitting smoking or losing weight (although the new mob at my CrossFit gym would suggest the new year is indeed a cliche in terms of gym memberships), but in “Information Diets.”

I’m getting on the Information Diet bandwagon. My life of screens — this laptop, my iPad, the television, the Android phone — is driving me closer to a state of attention deficit disorder than any prescription for Adderall or Ritalin could ever cure.

It’s time to become a Stoic again and starting doing more with less. Time to cowboy up, spit on my palms, and get tough.

For the past year I’ve been engaged in a physical transformation through two “primal” committments. The first was adopting a so-called “paleo diet” in the fall of 2010  following the embarrassing mime attack outside of the Duomo in Florence. I weighed 280 pounds, felt like shit, none of my clothes fit, and I was beset with aches, pains, and prescriptions.

I read some stuff by Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, and Loren Cordain and came away convinced by their theory of dieting that basically agreed with the controversial hypothesis that my body is the result of 2 million years of evolution, yet my diet is the result of 10,000 years of modern agriculture. Too much processed food, grains, dairy, sugar, etc. and I was going to get fat no matter how hard I exercised.  In a year of totally going organic, cutting out all grains (no bread, no pasta, no rice), legumes (no beans), dairy (no cheese, no butter), and sugar I lost 35 pounds without “dieting” in the sense of going hungry. I basically exist on chicken, fish, beef, broccoli, tomatoes, lettuce and good fat like nuts, avocados and olive oil.  I eat, in essence, like a caveman.

With nutrition follows exercise and I renewed my commitment to CrossFit, the “open-source” school of functional movement and exercise that was started by gymnast Greg Glassman in Santa Cruz in the early 2000s.  As the t-shirt says, I am the only machine at my gym (except for the ergometer). I do short, intense burst of work lifting up heavy things and putting them down again, and lifting my own weight through sit ups, push ups, pull ups, rope climbs, handstand push ups, box jumps …. etc. The Crossfit method is, in 150 words:

“Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts: Deadlift, clean, squat, presses, clean & jerk, and snatch. Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics: pull-ups, dips, rope climb, push-ups, sit-ups, presses to handstand, pirouetts, flips, splits, and holds. Bike, run, swim, row, etc, hard and fast. Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense. Regularly learn and play new sports.”

Now to do the same for my mind.

I talked to a former colleague this morning about attention deficit disorders and he said he manages his through a combination of prayer and exercise.  Since he is a man of faith, I can see how prayer fits in his life, but for atheistic me, where is that period of nothingness in my thinking? When do I simply watch the sunset and don’t photograph it? Or sit in a chair and stare into a fire with only my thoughts for company?

I’m hanging some things up this year. Here’s my information diet:

1. No phone in the car. If it rings it goes to voicemail. If I must call I will pull over. I am strongly in favor of an outright ban on phone use in cars. Every moron motorist moment I’ve experienced is inevitably made by an oblivious idiot with a phone held to their head.
2. News once a day, in the morning, over breakfast. From the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Cape Cod Times.
3. One hour of moving pictures per day. That includes YouTube, Netflix, network television or sports (with the exception of baseball)
4. One email check in the morning. Another in the evening. No emails longer than 100 words. Anything longer: phone call or memo.
5. Instapaper all articles and read them in one sitting at one prescribed session. No aimless “surfing.”
6. Two three-hour periods of focus per day.  One in the morning. One in the early afternoon. Writing and thinking. Making, not consuming.
7. Books dominate. I will make a list of 100 books I need to read before I die and start tackling it.
8. No games. I’ve outgrown them. I’ll play Words With Friends once a day, not on every notification.
9. Face to face trumps email every time. Phone call is second.
10. No PowerPoint in 2012. It is the Blackberry of our times: doomed, terrible, and pointless.
11. Learn something new in 2012. A language? A skill? I am open to suggestions.