For a while now I’ve been trying to convince Charles that he ought to jailbreak his iPhone. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to do so, exactly, and the reasons that might motivate Charles to take my advice have been even murkier. Getting a free terminal app is reason enough for me, and running Bittorrent off my phone has a certain novelty. But these days most users’ needs are pretty well taken care of by the App Store.

Well, I’ve got a better justification now: comics. As you might imagine, there’s a robust trade in pirate scans of comics on the Bittorrent tracker sites. It’s easy to partake, and, for me at least, a fairly guilt-free experience: downloading back issues has propelled me to dramatically increase my actual comic purchases. For instance, I’d been a little curious about Hellboy when I first heard of the series. But after downloading the complete run, I find myself buying every new BPRD TPB the moment it’s in stores (and slowly but surely picking up physical copies of the older books that I’d first read electronically). In my case, at least, the net effect is clear: comic piracy has allowed the industry to extract much more money from me than it otherwise would have.

We’re still a ways off from digital comics competing with their physical counterparts — much further than for books, I’d say. But it’s still nice to be able to catch up on storylines that you’d otherwise only hear about on Wikipedia (or text boxes signed “– ED”). And having a huge collection of idle reading on your phone is pretty great. It’s hard to make myself suffer through an ebook on a tiny screen, but for some reason the prospect of a comic seems more appealing.

The iPhone turns out to be surprisingly well-suited to the task, too. I won’t claim that it isn’t a little tough on the ol’ eyeballs, but the resolution of the screen makes it just possible to read issues in landscape mode without zooming. And of course you can always do the normal pinch-to-zoom operation that’s offered by mobile Safari.

Enough evangelizing: how do you do this?

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Any smart marks will get a kick out of this Ta-Nehisi Coates comment thread. It makes me wonder why I don’t watch wrestling anymore — but only briefly, then I quickly remember that the industry’s in a fallow period, lacking in talent and filled with junk. A more persistent puzzlement: why haven’t I spent more time geeking out over, say, The Rockers with Spencer? Between the grittiness, emotion and highbrow disdain, pro wrestling seems suited to his unique style of connoisseurship in a number of ways.

Halloween! Words! Contest! Okay, inspiration.

I’m a big fan of old-timey radio — it’s just one facet of my having been approximately 80 years old since birth. I am deeply resentful of the fact that The Big Broadcast doesn’t provide podcasts, and am prepared to draft a curt letter to that effect on my IBM Selectric. Perhaps I’ll send it to my local paper’s editor.

The best old-time radio isn’t very spooky, it’s true — cowboys, detectives and comedy teams are the order of the day. There are a decent number of supernatural programs, but WAMU tends not to play them. Those that I’ve found online are almost all awful. One exception, though, is Beyond Midnight. I won’t claim to be a connoisseur, but it seems to be pretty good, aside from the discordant shilling for a defunct laundry additive named Bio-tex (which is sort of fun in its own right). And it’s considerably easier to listen to than even the audiobooks I’ve posted in the past — creeping woodwinds and alarmed brass can go a long way toward punctuating a tale of fright.

Here’s an episode that I particularly liked. Emily and I shut off all the lights and listened to it over dinner, and it was great.

Beyond Midnight – Let Me See Your Face

The episode page can be found here. More episodes are here.

ALSO / WOW: Check out the Internet Archive’s Old Time Radio Collection for much, much, MUCH MUCH more.

ALSO ALSO: Apparently Beyond Midnight is of South African provenance. I’m not sure why, but I find this interesting; maybe you will, too.

So Dunkin’ Donuts is building LEED-certified buildings, huh? With earthworm composting for the waste material? Fascinating. As a longtime veteran of the Donut Wars (Immobile Assault Division), my first instinct is to add this to the tally and see how Dunkin’ — the hated foe of me and my fellow partisans — now stacks up against my beloved Krispy Kreme.

Here’s the updated pro-Dunkin’ list, which I present in the spirit of temperate objectivity:

• Ubiquity
• Distinctly uncoffeelike coffee (that is still strangely compelling)
• Has now broken with the donut industry’s rapaciously anti-environmental past, apparently

I may be missing a few points. But what is not on this list — what is never on the list — is “excellent donuts”. It’s a bit mystifying to me, even after speaking to Matt and Michael about it at length. Dunkin’ Donuts seems to be this store that Northeasterners like to get coffee from in the morning. It happens to have the word “donut” in its name, and yeah, if you ask for a donut they probably have some in the back.

But — with the exception of the cake donut perverts, who frankly should be rounded up and hospitalized — I’ve never heard anyone defend Dunkin’s donuts on the merits. Stacking the franchise up against Krispy Kreme is therefore bizarre, like saying McDonald’s is better than a steakhouse because the latter doesn’t keep a plastic slide out front. If you want to make a comparison based on the crucial “has a fun slide” metric, it should be between McDonald’s and, say, a waterpark. Or, to bring the analogy home, between Dunkin’ Donuts and a real coffeeshop. Instead the Dunkin’ bullies choose to pick on poor Krispy Kreme (too busy making excellent donuts to defend itself!), rather than take on the coffeeshops that would surely spell their rhetorical doom.

But I won’t belabor the point. By now I can see that I’m on the wrong side of history (it’s something of a family tradition). But those of us who truly love our donuts will keep the faith, and wait patiently for the day when Real Americans are ready to emerge from behind the silence of the glaze curtain and cry Hot Donuts… NOW!

Michael Pollan was on Fresh Air a moment ago. It’s part of his world/public radio tour in support of Farmer In Chief, last week’s NYT Magazine article asking the next president to adopt better agricultural policies. I heard him giving pretty much the same spiel on a Philadelphia-area NPR station over the weekend, too.

I don’t want to quibble with the man’s larger crusade, but he keeps making one particular point that really bugs me. Pollan is fond of pointing out that since 1960 the average American household’s spending on food has dropped as a share of income, from 18 percent to 10.

I’m pretty sure this is dumb. Or half, dumb, anyway. I’m sure food has gotten cheaper in absolute terms, and that those savings have been paid for in animal suffering and environmental destruction.

But it’s also the case that household income tends to increase faster than the rate of inflation, while human nutritional requirements do not. Wikipedia says that real median income has increased about 30% since 1967. Unless I’m missing something, that means that if a family used to spend $1800 on food, today they spend $1300 — not $1000, as Pollan implies. If median household income data was available for 1960, rather than 1967, you can bet that the differential would be smaller still. And if you consider the fact that household size has declined from 3 to 2.6 people since 1967, the gap shrinks even more.

Of course, the picture is much more complicated than just a dollar amount. I’m sure we eat out a lot more, eat more processed food, eat more meat, pay more for specialty food and less for staples, and generally eat in ways that support Pollan’s thesis. But this particular argument about income is a bit dishonest, and I wish he’d quit using it. Nutritional needs do not scale with income.

This is a pet peeve of mine with economic arguments about consumption in general: they tend not to pay any attention to the limits of human biology. This is why I’m similarly suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more video resolution revolution — HDTV2, let’s say (pending the invention of a more confusing acronym). But to go beyond that will require video walls — they look cool in Total Recall, but why would you pay for something larger than your field of view? — or three-dimensional holo-whatnots. I’m sure the latter will be popularized eventually, but I’ll probably be pretty old and confused by then.

The human fovea has a finite number of neurons, and we’re already pretty good at keeping them busy. Personally, I think that household bandwidth use is likely to level off sometime in the next decade or two — there’s only so much data that a human body can use. Our bandwidth expenses as a percentage of income will then start to fall, both because the growth in demand has slowed and because income continues to rise, but also because the resource itself will continue to get cheaper as technology improves.

That won’t constitute proof that we aren’t spending enough on bandwidth, though. It’ll just mean that we’ve found some other stuff to spend our new money on, rather than simply ramping up our budget linearly. (My guess: hyper-ipods.)

I’ve been remiss. I apologize. It’s just that I’ve been busy: with work and meetings, but also with getting sick. It’s not, I’m pleased to report, one of my signature cardiovascular ailments — no, this seems to be a Cosi-born illness, and so far has just made me tired and in need of a more manly alternative to the phrase “my tummy hurts”. Also, Charles and I have been having something of a Halo 3 renaissance, and that’s taken up a fair amount of time.

But all regularly scheduled activities continue: chief among them the Halloween short story contest. I’ve made some progress on mine, and can now assure you that as a fiction writer I am both long-winded and terrible. Still, it’s something.

The essential details, for those only now paying attention: the deadline is a week from today; there’s no minimum length; stories may be submitted anonymously; and the winner of the resulting popular vote gets $100. It’s easy.

My absence from the internet stopped me from posting more inspirational Halloweeniana, so now I’m going to have to pick up the pace. My last offering was particularly lame, so let’s return to one of the classics: M.R. James.

Some of James’ stories are pretty creepy — The Ash-Tree is probably the best one I’ve read on that score — but that’s not the thing about his work that I most enjoy. James taught at King’s College and Eton, and composed many of his stories as part of the English tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas Eve (yuletide, they call it, just to further British things up). It’s a tradition I’d never heard of before, but one that sounds pretty great.

As you might imagine, James was bit of a tweedy academic; naturally, many of his protagonists are, too. Their tales generally go something like this:

“Ho there, Wedgelington! What brings you to the Antiquities Department of Chestlethwick College?”


“Well met, Asterforthe, old bean! To your question: as you can see, it’s this blasted urn I’ve happened across while touring the countryside. By the queerness of the inscriptions I presume it to be Etruscan, or Norse, or perhaps Oriental in nature…”


“Yes, I expect you’re right…”


“…But for the life of me I can’t prise the infernal thing open! I find myself confounded — utterly flummoxed!”


“Perhaps if I just use this ornate silver dagger…”

——AN UNPLEASANT INTERLUDE COMMENCES——

“Well! That was certainly a rollicking supernatural adventure!”


“Quite so.”

This is a bit unfair. Even if James’ supernatural horrors lack some of the existential threat of later authors, they’re still plenty spooky. His stories have satisfyingly unambiguous conclusions, but still manage to express themselves with nuance. The foreshadowing is immediately identifiable, but not irritatingly so. The pacing gets to the point, but isn’t hurried.

They’re good, solid ghost stories — and oh so British. If you’ve ever watched the Indiana Jones movies and wished that Marcus Brody had been given his own spin-off, then you’ll probably enjoy these.

More good news: James’ work is in the public domain, and many of the stories are available as free recordings, courtesy of Librivox. The narrator is Peter Yearsley, whose British accent and languid style complement the text perfectly. Here are the audio versions of James’ first major collection. I suggest downloading them and sticking them on your iPod for the next time you’re traveling at night.

I suppose I should pick one story, though, so we may as well go with Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. It embodies all of the Jamesian traits I described above, is considered among his best efforts, and has an incredibly creepy title (borrowed from a Robert Burns poem, but still).

Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad

• Text
• MP3 @ 64kbps – 23.9MB
• MP3 @ 128kbps – 47.8MB

Adrienne gets personal email from strangers. So do I — with a name as nondescript as mine, it’s inevitable.

I love getting those emails, though. In particular, I’ve become a frequent recipient of pickup-basketball-scheduling emails among a group of devout young Asian teens & twentysomethings. It was all pretty boring until I started getting updates about their star-crossed mission trip to Kyrgyzstan. Plane delays! Lost luggage! The constant, unshakable faith that God cared deeply about their travel arrangements, and had a good reason for abruptly altering them. It was quite a rollercoaster ride, but everything ultimately worked out: they got their luggage and Kyrgyzstan is, presumably, now a Christian nation.

Tim’s article about the social changes that self-driving cars might make possible is fascinating reading (so is his earlier installment of the series, in which Tim discusses the history and present state of robotic car technology). But I wonder about the conclusion that Ryan draws from it:

I think the net effect of autonomous vehicles on suburban areas would be to make them denser (I think the net effect of a lot of things on suburban areas will be to make them denser). As important as those shifts, I suspect, would be the boon such vehicles would be to explicitly urban areas.


Taxis and car-sharing services are very much complements to walkable urban life. Cheap and effective autonomous vehicles would likewise be complements to urban life, but in a much more significant manner. It’s hard to overstate the negative effect of parking on dense, urban areas. When fighting against dense, new development, NIMBYs cite parking and traffic concerns first, second, and third. Given the value of urban land, parking has massive opportunity costs. Street space in urban areas is very limited and is currently given over almost entirely to driving lanes and parking lanes. If self-driving vehicles freed up much of that space, it would make room for large increases in transit right-of-way, bike lanes, and sidewalk space.

I think the less parking/more density argument being put forth is a bit optimistic. Obviously self-driving cars would be phased into the fleet on the road slowly. So long as that’s the case, it’s hard to see how self-rearranging, super-dense parking lots can be made to work. We’ll have to wait for the entire fleet to turn over — a process that, given the steadily increasing quality of modern cars, will take longer and longer as we wait for robot cars to arrive. I can see how a car that’s easier to share — or even just one that can drop you off and then go its merry way — could help reduce the amount of parking we need and build. But it doesn’t seem likely to make a significant difference during my lifetime.

The more immediate consequence is this, though: if automated carsharing drives down the cost of taking a trip in a private vehicle (you don’t have to pay for the full upkeep or purchase of the vehicle, or pay for a driver’s time); and if not having to spend time piloting the car drives down the personal cost even further, won’t that encourage more trips in private cars? And won’t that actually encourage suburban settlement patterns?

Don’t get me wrong: I think self-piloting cars will be a boon to everyone. It’s just hard for me to see how easier locomotion from arbitrary point to arbitrary point will push people toward the dense settlement patterns that Ryan favors. There’s a widespread perception that city schools are bad and that having a yard is nice. I really like living in a city, but I’m not sure that either of those ideas is wrong. If you tell people they can have it all — and better, that it’ll all be delivered BY ROBOTS — they’ll take you up on the offer.

Yesterday I tweeted this video, in which a bottle is neatly divided by tying a string around it, igniting the string, and plunging the bottle into cold water. The thermal shock causes the heated portion to fracture, producing a surprisingly clean break.

I’m in the market for some cheap candleholders, you see. I ordered a bunch of votive candles yesterday for the Halloween party, but getting glass holders would have drastically increased the shipping cost, so Emily and I decided to improvise. Something a bit less uniformly shaped will probably look creepier, too.

Cut beer bottles are an appealing option, since we produce those at a much faster clip than we do, say, tiny perfectly-shaped food jars. This page seems to be a pretty definitive clearinghouse of information on how to cut bottles. Even though the author expressed skepticism about it, the burning string method sounded appealing to me. Or cheap, anyway.

Well, I gave it a shot yesterday. Eventually, it worked:

It took about ten attempts, though. It does seem like the sort of thing that, with practice, could be mastered. What made the difference for me was banging the bottle into the sink’s bottom as I plunged it into the water. But it didn’t work when I tried it again with another bottle, and at that point I gave up.

There are other problems with the method, too. You’ll need to wear gloves and eye protection, of course, and work in a ventilated area, which can be a pain to find and set up. On my successful attempt the top of the bottle shattered, which was contained by the water but still not fun to clean up. Acetone isn’t all that pleasant a thing to work with, and will inevitably get on your gloves, requiring you to take them off before lighting the string. Alternately you can keep a candle burning from which to light the string, as I did, but then you’ll have to be sure to keep it clear of the acetone. And of course you still might light your gloves on fire if you aren’t careful.

In short: it doesn’t work that well, and it’s kind of a pain in the ass. I think we’ll be pestering friends to save jars after all.

I told you I wasn’t crazy; now Kriston grudgingly agrees.

I needed this. Just last Sunday Mrs. Gray looked at me with unbearable pity, asking me if I really thought it was normal to get my hair washed after it was cut. “Oh, honey,” she said, and I was sure I was right to be ashamed.