Ramblings & ephemera
From Mark Dery’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):
But we live in times of chaos and complexity, and the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain. Reading and writing are solitary activities. The web enables us to write in public and, maybe one day, [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, on writing, technology | No Comments »
From Evelyn Nieves’s “Slab City Journal; For Thousands, a Town of Concrete Slabs Is a Winter Retreat” (The New York Times: 18 February 2001):
Every winter, when the Winnebagos and pickups shake the desert off Beal Road like a small earthquake, Ben Morofsky gets wistful for the 120-degree days of summer, and the peace of living [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, fiction | Comments Off
From Charlie LeDuff’s “Parked in a Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life” (The New York Times: 17 December 2004):
Directions to purgatory are as follows: from Los Angeles drive east past Palm Springs into the bowels of the Mojave Desert. Turn south at the stench of the Salton Sea. Proceed down Highway 111 to the [...]
Posted on October 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, fiction | Comments Off
From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):
This is how you get to the most isolated human settlement on earth [North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman Islands]: You board an evening flight at JFK for Heathrow, Air India 112, a plane full of elegant sari-clad women, London-bound businessmen, [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, cool stuff | Comments Off
From Daniel Brook’s “A History of Hard Time” (Legal Affairs: January/February 2003):
Dickens wasn’t the first European intellectual who had crossed the Atlantic to visit Eastern State Penitentiary. A decade earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had been sent by the French government to study the Philadelphia prison. …
What drew the attention of Americans and Europeans was an [...]
Posted on May 31st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, science, security | Comments Off
From Damn Interesting’s “Feral Children“:
One of the more mysterious cases is that of Kaspar Hauser, who was discovered in Nuremberg, Germany in 1828. He was unsteady on his feet, held a letter for a man he had never met, and only spoke the phrase “I want to be a horseman like my father is.” The [...]
Posted on May 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, language & literature, weird | Comments Off
From danah boyd’s “G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide“:
In the early 1970s, Stanley Milgram was intrigued by what he called “familiar strangers” - people who recognized each other in public life but never interacted. Through experiments, he found that people are most likely to interact with people when removed from the situation in [...]
Posted on April 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, commonplace book, science | Comments Off
From The New York Times‘ “1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America’s Emptiest County“:
At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County’s 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes  [...]
Posted on February 25th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | Comments Off
From BBC News:
A man lay dead in his flat for 15 months before his body was found.
Recording an open verdict into the death of Derek Perkins, 63, coroner Dr Nigel Chapman said he had never known a body to be undiscovered for so long.
The exact date of Mr Perkins’ death is unknown, but a newspaper [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, weird | Comments Off
From The Washington Post:
Akiko Abe has barely seen her 25-year-old son in six years, yet they live in the same small house. He leaves his room only when he’s sure his parents are out or asleep, she said. She can tell when he has used the kitchen, and she knows he goes to the living [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, weird | Comments Off