You might be a normal person who hears a child chant, as I just did, “Made you look/Made you look/Now you’re in the baby book,” and forget it immediately. I envy you, friend. I, unfortunately, am not a normal person and I am therefore troubled by a number of things in that nyah-nyah:
- Why does making someone look put him or her into the baby book?
- Why is being in the baby book bad and, as a result, tauntable? I like babies. Wouldn’t being in the baby book be a good thing?
- If being in the baby book is indeed a bad thing, what sort of person would trick another person, probably a friend or family member, into looking just to get him or her into a baby book?
The questions could go on forever (and it felt like they did in the original version of this post), and by now the person once sitting next to me would be running away as surely as if I had been pitching scientology, Atlas Shrugged, or CDs of the New Kids on the Block reunion.
The wrong spokesman
April 6, 2008
Is it me, or should Lance Armstrong NOT be doing advertisements for drugs?
Just saw this ad on CNN.com:
Living like savages in Chestnut Hill: an update
March 28, 2008
Either 20 or 21 Septembers ago, my younger brother moved into a fifth-floor apartment in Back Bay. We dragged the first of his stuff up to the top floor of the elevator-free building. He turned the key in the door, opened it, and discovered that none of the five people living in very close quarters in that studio apartment had even begun to move out. They were all still asleep, in beds spread across the room.
I thought about that this morning as I looked across the living room of our house:
Eli, the model here, still has his own room for now (it’s the only unaffected room on the second floor, but he still has to move eventually because it’ll be Grace’s room when we’re done). The other four of us are stretched across the living room. After more than 20 years together, Jane and I are back in a one-bedroom place … with two other people!
For a more meaningful report on the way we live now, see Jane’s latest report.
The U.S.P.S. can be a slow medium
March 27, 2008
Both of these arrived the same day:
Three fictional characters, each equally equipped to discuss our nation’s predicament
March 27, 2008
I haven’t offered much political commentary since I came back to Jewels and Binoculars, but I can at least point out trenchant observations when I spot them elsewhere:
I’ve been known to keep weird work hours, I know…
March 25, 2008
…but today was the first time ever I was almost late for a 9 a.m. meeting because I was in the car listening to the ninth inning of a live Red Sox game. Happy spring!
David Weinberger, master of all trades
March 21, 2008
Turns out David Weinberger is as astute an observer of politics as he is of everything else. Everything may be miscellaneous (hence the “random” tag below), as Weinberger has written, but when there’s a mind as bold and open-hearted as Weinberger’s at the center of an idea, sometime everything makes sense, too. Read.
How my family lives now
March 21, 2008
We have one full bathroom in our house. It looks like this:
Why screwing up is the smartest thing you can do
March 20, 2008
I gave a talk on “Why screwing up is the smartest thing you can do” last month at TED and delivered a (not as good) stripped-down version of it a week later at ETech. I’ve been asked by several Jewels and Binoculars readers to post the presentation as a blog entry. Here it is. I recognize that a flat blog post doesn’t capture the experience of a live presentation, but I want to get the material out here. And, as an added benefit, you don’t have to look at or listen to me present it!
Being here first thing in the morning, I feel like the opening act at the beginning of one of those long package shows of rock bands. I feel like Yngvie Malmsteen, a godawful heavy metal guitarist not often celebrated at TED.
Indeed, “Yngvie,” as we all know, is Swedish for “opening act.”
So here we go…
I edit Release 2.0, an expensive newsletter, so I hear a lot from readers. Sometimes they’re looking for rules, some secrets to guarantee success. I want to justify their investment in the newsletter, of course, so I tell ‘em what I’ve learned.
And what I’ve learned is that they should screw up.
While anyone who’s spent time with any of the members of Guns N Roses might find them to be screwups, the reason you haven’t heard anything new and substantial from them on the radio for 16 years — 16 years! — is that they’ve committed the opposite of screwing up: overplanning. Since the mid-’90s, by which time every original member of the band except singer Axl Rose had left for one reason or another, Guns N Roses has been working on a new album called Chinese Democracy.
Rose and his co-conspirators have been thinking and recording Chinese Democracy for 14 years, gone through at least six producers, 17 band members, and $16 million in recording costs. It’s not out yet. They’ve waited so long, perfecting and planning, planning and perfecting, that the industry Axl Rose once ruled no longer exists. Democracy may arrive in China before Chinese Democracy arrives in record stores.
Oh — wait — there really aren’t record stores any more, either. Too much planning, too much process, means no art, no product, nothing.
For a different approach, let’s consider the TV series Twin Peaks from the early ’90s. To refresh your memory…
This man, Leland Palmer…
…possessed by the spirit of a supernatural character named BOB…
…turned his daughter, Laura Palmer…
…into this.
But where did BOB, the conceptual lynchpin of the series, come to be? Surely he was there from the beginning.
No. His introduction into the series came as a result of an accident while the cameras were running.
In a scene late in the Twin Peaks pilot, Laura Palmer’s mother experiences a vision while sitting on her living room couch. On the wall behind her, barely in the shot, there is a mirror. In the bottom corner of the mirror, there’s the reflection of Frank Silva, a set dresser on the crew, unaware he’s in the shot. You or I wouldn’t have noticed it unless we were looking for it — but on the set of a television show, there is someone whose job is to look for just such mistakes.
After the take, that person alerted director David Lynch to the accident and began to set up a reshoot. Lynch stopped him. He spoke to Frank Silva, the set dresser in the mirror. “Can you act?” Lynch asked. This was Los Angeles, so you know the answer…
…and the malevolent, mysterious character of BOB, the key to the weird mystery of the series, was born — from an accident.
Many popular products, advances, and countless works of art have emerged from accidents. In the Internet world, we have Blogger and Twitter. And those two are just from one guy: Evan Williams.
Things may go better with Coke, but Coke was originally designed to go better with pain. It was intended to be a pain remedy.
in 1928, Alexander Fleming, researching the flu, noticed that a mold had taken over one of his petri dishes. That mold, he saw, had stopped bacteria in the dish. Voila! Penicillin. Indeed, the very idea of vaccines was discovered by accident, when Edward Jenner noticed that people who worked with cows didn’t get smallpox.
In 1894, John Harvey Kellogg left some cooked wheat to sit while he attended to some pressing matters at his sanitarium. When he returned, the wheat had gone stale. Because he was either cheap or broke — historians disagree — he tried to save the wheat by forcing it through rollers, expecting to get long sheets of dough he could use. Instead, he got … flakes. He toasted them. He served them to his patients. He got very, very rich.
Post-It notes came to be by accident, too, but the story isn’t that interesting, so I’ll just mention it and keep going.
This one’s more interesting. Fred Katz introduced the cello to modern jazz. One night in the late 1950s, during a break between sets while he was playing piano with a jazz band, Katz pulled a chair to the front of the stage and played some solo cello. When the rest of the band returned to the small stage, there was no room for Katz to return to his piano. Not sure what to do — the set was starting, the band was playing — Katz decided to play the piano lines on his cello. Out of his accident, his real, half-century-long, career began.
Next time you enjoy some ferocious rock’n'roll encased in feedback, thank these guys. A spray of amplifier feedback at the beginning of The Beatles’ 1965 recording of “I Feel Fine,” an accident, sounded so unusual — and so great — that they kept it on the record. And, since I’m talking about brands favored by aging boomers…
…Viagra was first thought to be a promising drug for angina. During 1992 clinical trials in a town in Wales, Pfizer researchers discovered that…
…the drug had a different effect altogether.
So mistakes can be great things. What do we do about ‘em? How do we harness ‘em? Well, if you’re the Harvard Business School, the font of management wisdom (and — disclosure — a client), you’re not quite sure. Sometimes they tell us to be afraid of mistakes…
…sometimes they tell us we can manage accidents, thus making them not accidents. We might call this the Pee-Wee Herman “I meant to do that” theory of managing mistakes…
..and, once, squeezed almost as an afterthought — or, maybe, an accident — as the very last entry in an issue of the Harvard Business Review, they celebrate it, thanks to a terrific, brief essay by Danny Hillis. I’m not trying to pick on Harvard. You can find similar advice from the other Ivy schools, even Stanford. But this is the conventional business wisdom. You can’t be built to last or go from good to great or whatever unless you’re careful to avoid mistakes, the thinking goes. Imagine the difference between the reaction if you tell your boss “I’m planning” and the one you get if you say, “I’m making mistakes.”
Established institutions are in the business of supporting the status quo. And mistakes, if nothing else, go against the status quo, the conventional wisdom, the expected. As Esther Dyson used to sign her emails, “Always make new mistakes!” A key part of planning is being open to mistakes.
The unexpected kiss, the unpredictable punch line: they’re so much of what makes life worth living. Shouldn’t we let the unexpected into our business work as well? It’s by screwing up that we learn and discover. We can’t predict accidents. But we can take advantage of them.
You never know where a mistake is going to lead. Maybe nowhere, maybe somewhere. But it’s definitely nowhere if you don’t at least lean forward and peer down the road after you screw up.
You want the secret of success that my newsletter readers want to know? It’s no secret. It’s that, chances are, whatever you’re looking for — that’s not what you’re going to find.
Thank you.
Greatest TED video ever (first of a series)
March 18, 2008
At least three of this year’s TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover’s, Benjamin Zander’s, and Jill Bolte Taylor’s. The first of them has just been posted:
Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical (”I can’t define where I begin and where I end”) to the borderline-hilarious (”I’m a busy woman. I don’t have time for a stroke”). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.
And now you can see and hear it, too:
The brain she’s holding there is a real one, by the way.
I’ll alert you to the other two classics when they’re published.
Not breaking the chain on Jewels and Binoculars
March 17, 2008
You want me to blog every day (or, at least, every work day)? Fine, I won’t break the chain anymore.
I’m not a half-bad headline writer…
March 14, 2008
…but every now and then I have to step back in awe from another’s contribution.
Maybe I shouldn’t leave the house anymore
March 10, 2008
I’m back home, at last, after a long trip. I’ll get back to usual blogging speed over the next day or so. But look what happened to our house while I was gone!
Worst press release headline of the day
February 28, 2008
“PRESS RELEASE: MYSPACE GOES TO KUWAIT”
The lede was out there, too: “Today, MySpace officially announced Operation MySpace, a concert for troops stationed in Kuwait. Performances will include the Pussycat Dolls, Jessica Simpson, Disturbed, Filter, DJ Z-Trip and the comedic genius of Carlos Mencia.”
Wait: the Pussycat Dolls and Filter aren’t geniuses?
Best. Question asked in an email. Ever.
February 27, 2008
“does anyone have a machine for blowing up helium balloons?”
My William F. Buckley memory
February 27, 2008
William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator, died today. I have no use for his ideas or his writings, but his death reminded me of some immature behavior I engaged in about 20 years ago.
At PC Week in 1987, we used an internal email system notable for its slowness and unreliability. To connect with the outside world, we had to use MCI Mail. We discovered that a celebrity, William F. Buckley, had an account on MCI Mail, so with our collective minimal maturity we decided to copy him on all our correspondence. For example:
From: Jimmy
To: Doug
Cc: William F. Buckley
Re: Lunch
Yes, noon is fine.
We did this several times a day for a few months until the boss yelled at me about it. I had another boss there who used to play Tetris with me every day in his office and erased the high scores after I starting earning them. But that’s another post, for another day.
What’s making me happy today
February 27, 2008
* The hat Grace wore on Sunday
* This morning I got to talk about a topic I care about for an audience open to it — and I didn’t stink up the room.
* Junior Senior’s Hey Hey My My Yo Yo, which time may show to be as wonderful as Chic’s Greatest Hits
* Getting some good writing done before coffee and knowing how I learned that trick
* The names of the awful $5 snack boxes on the plane (smartpack, minimeal, quickpick, rightbite)
* I discovered a trove of new writing by Bill James. Hooray for the Internet!
* The solos during the Hammersmith Odeon ‘75 version of “Kitty’s Back”
* Knowing that, somewhere, Alice Munro is writing
* Courtney Love, the choruses of “Doll Parts,” “Violet,” and “Malibu.” Forget the tabloid stuff: Kurt wasn’t the only genius in that marriage
* Next Thursday night
Headline of the day
February 20, 2008
Eight things about me
February 17, 2008
I’ve been blogging (or, as it was once called, “maintaining a personal web page”) on and off since 1994, but no one ever tagged me with the “eight things” blog meme until now. Jane has tagged me with it, so, dear readers, I present you with a post slightly more self-referential than usual.
1. I can tell when people who say they’ve read Proust are faking it.
2. My favorite mode of transportation ever was my orange Raleigh Chopper. As Wikipedia reports, “At higher, but still moderate, speeds, it suffered from speed wobbles, which could lead to wild uncontrollable oscillations (almost invariably ending up with a spill).”
3. When I was 14, I was in a terrible ninth-grade band. It lasted only from September to December but had three names in that span: Plastic Electricity, Electric Shock, and — despite our being a quartet — The Seven Riders of Pegasus. (I was 14. Shut up.) One afternoon after we broke up (after a terrifying one-and-a-half-song performance in front of a Catholic elementary school), I decided it was time to figure out if the problem in the band was me. I set up a portable cassette recorder in my bedroom, put Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” on the turntable, held the microphone, and sang along. I recorded over the cassette roughly 10 minutes after, but it was that day it became clear to me that I could do much less damage to society writing about music than performing it. You’re welcome.
4. I have never seen an episode of Who’s the Boss? But, thanks to my children, I have witnessed nearly every episode of Boy Meets World.
5. As a kid in Bayonne, we briefly lived in a single-family home. It was right on the bend of the Boulevard. At least four times that I remember, a car missed the turn and hit our house.
6. I have never played a videogame as immersive as Zork. You haven’t lived until you’ve been eaten by a grue.
7. I grew up on a dirty peninsula, which may explain why, for so many years, I fantasized about living within site of clean water.
8. I miss XyWrite. After I switched from XyWrite to Word, it took me 13 years to complete another publishable book.
Greatest Spongebobs ever
February 11, 2008
Stick around for The Godfather
On Huckabee’s refusal to leave the race
February 10, 2008
We knew he doesn’t believe in evolution. Turns out he doesn’t believe in mathematics either.
Public embarrassment as a motivator
February 7, 2008
I’ve written about that before here. Now I learn of a web-based service that helps with that: stickK.com - Put a contract out on yourself!
Deciding where to start…
Quote of the day
February 4, 2008
“I’d like a hamburger and an Alka Seltzer.” — Warren Oates, in Two Lane Blacktop (1971)
Good for the Jews
February 1, 2008
So now we know what Bob Dylan and Laura Branigan have in common, sort of.
Oh, Pretty Beetle…
January 30, 2008
Rudy can fail
January 29, 2008
This isn’t a political blog, but since America’s Mayor is going down in flames tonight in Florida, I’d like to reference this post from a year ago.
"I’m going to be late for Davos because of this?"
January 29, 2008
Hello to both of you who’ve waited for this humble weblog to return. I’m going to try something different this year. As those closest to me know, structure and I are not close friends. Everything reminds me of something else, which reminds me of something else, which … well, you get the idea. No structure. If I’m going to stick to blogging for more than a little while this time, I suspect it will be only if I create a structure that encourages me to post here almost every day. And a different topic every day keeps this blogger unbored.
So, here’s the structure that I’m going to attempt:
Every Monday, I will post about Cooking. [insert pause for laughter.] Yeah, I know, but hear me out. When I look at the things about myself that I want to improve, cooking keeps coming up at the top of the list. Partly it’s because I’m a lousy cook (married to an adventurous, imaginative one) and I want to become a better one. Partly it’s because my failure in the kitchen often feels like a metaphor for other failures in my life. Just as last year my cryptic decision to post sentences here from my novel-in-progress helped me focus on writing every day, I’m hoping that chronicling my disasters and occasional successes in the kitchen will keep me focused. The possibility of public embarrassment remains a powerful motivator.
Every Tuesday, I will post something Work-Related. The vast majority of my writing these days is for my work at O’Reilly (and, to a much lesser degree, Harvard). On Tuesdays, I’ll post something related to what I actually do for a living.
Every Wednesday, I will post the latest Greatest Song of All Time of the Week. No further explanation necessary.
Every Thursday, I will post something related to the Novel-in-Progress. They may be sentences from the work (currently, but tentatively, titled The Rock Star Next Door), they may be complaints about the process, they may be lessons I’ve learned.
Every Friday, I will post nothing, probably, because Man was not meant to blog with the weekend coming so soon.
Random Crap can appear any day, as it is, er, random.
I will also tag each post, to make searching by topic easier, and to help anyone coming here who wants to peruse, say, the music posts but none of the cooking posts.
Seeya Monday…
The map is not the territory…
December 14, 2007
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1977925616&size=o” … or is it?
Cameras on mobile phones: good
December 11, 2007
A Criterion correction
December 6, 2007
Just under a year ago, on this very blog, I blurted out how excited I was that a friend had sent me a massive DVD set of classic art house films distributed by Janus. Several of you wrote to suggest which of the 50 art house classics I should see first I soon cancelled my Netflix membership, in the expectation that Jane and I would turn the basement into our personal Brattle and watch a film a week.
The year’s nearly over. As they say on Marketplace, let’s do the numbers:
Number of the 50 classic films that I saw this year: 1
Number of those that I saw with Jane: 0
I’m committed to doing better in 2008, but it’s not like I’m going to be able to make the case for The Seventh Seal as a date movie…
Doo Wa Diddy Diddy
December 3, 2007
Caption, please
November 21, 2007
I’ll look for your responses in the comments. First prize is a free subscription to “Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars.” Second prize, of course, is two free subscriptions.
(photo from the website of Shore Fire Media.)
Monday morning random notes
November 5, 2007
Fellow Twin Peaks nuts: Don’t buy the new “gold box” DVD of the series. Its 10 discs do a good job of collating what’s available into one package (it’s convenient to have both the U.S. and international versions of the pilot, for example), but there are only a mere NINE MINUTES of deleted scenes, none of them particularly illuminating. This is only worth buying if you’re such a completist that you want to have to have the flyer for David Lynch-branded coffee.
Headline of the week (thanks, Eric)
I’m reading Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. It’s engaging, except for the fragmented, repetitive, unrealistic, topic-sentence dialogue. For some reason, all these characters talk like they’re characters in a Don DeLillo novel. What’s up with that?
I’m biased, of course, but if you want a blog that’s more than just random musings you should be reading Jane Kokernak’s Leaf-Stitch-Word. In it, you’ll learn, among other things, that Henry David Thoreau was a blogger, sort-of.
Back to work…
Semi-random thoughts that I started while the girls were asleep and Eli watched South Park last night but I forgot to post until today
November 1, 2007
The following is self-indulgent, self-referential, and self-involved. In other words, it’s a blog post.
I don’t eat much candy, so I don’t have much of a chance to read candy wrappers. But it’s Halloween, and the side of the Milky Way package says it “may include peanuts.” May? Don’t you think they should know what’s in the candy?
I can’t stop listening to “Ordinary People.” It’s way too short. Neil, is there a longer version?
Reading while writing is dangerous. I just finished Jane Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills. It’s got lots of talking and lots of sex and, surprise surprise, the fiction I’m working on now has much more talking and more sex than it did a few weeks ago. It’s hard — for me, at least — not to have my writing be infected by something good I’m reading. I shouldn’t read at a time when I’m trying to write.
Forget “Ordinary People.” I can’t stop listening to “I’m Not There.” Having the legendary song liberated from decades of bootlegs hasn’t robbed it of any of its dark allure. Until this week, it was certainly Dylan’s greatest unreleased song. Now I’m wondering whether it’s one of his greatest, period.
And, in the spirit of randomness, let me leave you with the amusing/pathetic/whatever image of the Sex Pistols on The Tonight Show:
A rare argument in favor of television
October 25, 2007
Werewolf Bar Mitzvah (30 Rock)
What’s making me happy or optimistic today?
October 24, 2007
This is a blog, so it must have a list.
* Being Lydia’s driver
* Reading something enjoyable and useful by someone I love
* Remembering that a problem out of your control at work may lead to your learning something important that you’d never have known about if something hadn’t gone “wrong”
* Accepting a “friend” request on Facebook from a former colleague who I am actually happy to be back in touch with
* Owing only $.30 on my overdue copy of Ten Days in the Hills
* Listening to Neil Young’s “Ordinary People,” finally released today, around 19 years after I heard him play it live: if you wait long enough… (hope I don’t have to wait another 19 years for a full Blue Notes live record)
* Listening to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss sing “Killing the Blues”: sometimes unexpected pairings work brilliantly
* Discovering that all that time spent learning how to use Oracle systems may pay off at last
* Segueing the shuffling iPod from The Roches’ “Losing True” (the greatest song of all time of the day) into Aretha Franklin’s “Talk to Me, Talk to Me” (its sucessor as greatest song of all time of the day) into Katrina Leskanich’s “Hitsville U.K.” (from my favorite album of the year, for some reason
* Talking to Grace about how different moms handle Brownie meetings differently
* Using up my iPhone minutes with the right people
All small things, I know, but all wonderful
Catchup
October 3, 2007
Well, it’s been a few months. Some Q&A is in order.
What was your most favorite song of the summer?
“Rehab,” Amy Winehouse
What was your least favorite song of the summer?
“Rehab (Remix),” Amy Winehouse Featuring Jay-Z
What was your most favorite album of the summer?
New? That box from the Magnolia Electric Co.
There was another one, though, wasn’t there?
Oh, yes, The White Stripes’ Icky Thump. Powerful, funny, crazy rhythms, excellent Robert Plant impersonations, pretty good Jimmy Page impersonations, “Conquest!”
Has The Sandinista Project run its commercial course?
Oh yeah, and it turned out to be a pretty short course. Need a copy?
Who do you miss?
Grace Paley
You’ve been listening to The Band a lot lately.
That’s not a question.
Do you want to talk about the live album?
OK. My great friend Mark gave me his copy of The Band’s Live at Watkins Glen. He’d had it for years, but he had never taken it out of the shrink wrap. I now know why. IT ISN’T A LIVE ALBUM. It’s mostly second-tier studio recordings with crowd noise grafted on. I’d suggest a boycott, but it’s long out of print. How could this have happened?
What movie did you see this summer that stayed with you?
Well, most of the movies I saw this summer had the words “High,” “School,” and “Musical” in ‘em. But during an early-summer trip to Sebastopol, right around the time this fair blog went into hiatus, I saw the full miniseries version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. It’s lacerating stuff, shocking in its directness, but it does include the occasional inexplicably funny line like “Getting through Ibsen on nothing but a hot dog was an ordeal.” In moments like that, Ingmar Bergman does Woody Allen just as well as Woody Allen does Ingmar Bergman.
Back to work?
Back to work.
