Die Wohltemperierte Schreibmaschine

In a piece of breaking news, a man was attacked by a shark this morning in Solana Beach while he was swimming with friends, but as I read the story, it struck me that this LA Times piece seems to be exactly the kind of story that will generate a fantastic response. The first clue is in the Scripps Institute’s Richard Rosenblatt saying that it was “almost certainly a great white shark.”

Beyond the writing, it’s funny that the shark still carries such a mythological weight in our communities (likely fueled by film, if that gives any clue as to the power of film to shape a culture and its mythologies) in that a fatal attack like this is nearly instantaneously heard around the surfing community as well as the broader community of San Diego (I was emailed by three people on the story, notified by two others in other ways, and I found the story among the top stories in the Times).

The attention this story has already received is notable and reminiscent of other shark incidents in the last decade. In fact, shark attacks are extremely rare here in Southern California (a number of stories are reporting 1959 as the last known instance f a San Diego attack).

Of course, it’s also possible that more and more sharks are out there interacting with ever greater numbers of swimmers and surfers.

In the mail just now arrived the strangest political mailer I’ve ever received. It was sent to me by the good people over at John Hartley for City Council and a banner across the top reads “I apologize!” Hartley moves on to explain to his confused potential constituents (this one included) what it is he’s so sorry about:

It all started because I had to take a leak; and the next time I’m walking door to door and I have to take a leak, I promise not to do it in my truck, but to find a bathroom instead.

I harbor no hard feelings towards the police or the city attorney, who were doing their job, or towards the women who complained, who care about our neighborhoods, or towards the press, who have been working to inform the public.

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We were passing the San Diego Zoo one afternoon this week, northbound on Park Boulevard, and as we overtook a bus that had stopped to deposit and load passengers, I got a glimpse of an ad slicked across the side. In the ad there was an image of an athletic fellow drinking from a gallon container of orange juice, and the lettering to his right read, “Recycle! Because plastic is too precious to waste!”

Below that, of course, read “Paid for the Plastics Council,” because who else would be so insane as to try to convince an American public that “plastic” and “precious” are two terms that deserve to be associated with each other? Anything that we package every other thing in so that we can throw that packaging away is obviously not widely considered precious. Anything that produces the most toxic chemicals known to exist on the planet is obviously not precious. And if recent science on plastic is to be believed, this abundant space-age polymer is really just a vile laboratory trick, a molecular magic show meant to mislead us into thinking that we can get away with all kinds of abominable chemical management.

In fact, all the plastic that’s ever been manufactured is still with us, most likely floating in the pacific ocean.

So it turns out (in a very loose causal connection) that blogging might kill you if you get stressed enough about it. The death factor comes, apparently, from the incessantly instantaneous demands of the internet information cycle.

Now,  I certainly know what this article is talking about it because I, for one, stay up thinking about what I’m going to post each month on this site. But the article does draw out an interesting element that few mention: there is an extreme demand for news that is cultivated by the content pushed out daily on the internet. Actually, I think it’s an artificial demand and evidence for this shows up in the fact that it is tech-news that is most widely consumed.

In fact, the only thing that makes tech-blogs special is the fact that they were really the first instant-news blogs to populate the landscape. Thus, there are a lot of people out there sucking up feeds that they probably wouldn’t miss, and they’re doing this probably just to have something to read when they could be otherwise working.

Moreover, the volume of content from the producer’s side is actually unsustainable.  Forgetting writer death for a moment, it’s simply not wise to produce this much stuff for so little profit, but it will probably be a little while before the market catches up with this fact.

At that time, expect to see a lot of recycled content, like re-runs, and a lot of cut corners. Until then, how many more bloggers will have to die before the insanity stops?

So this word for memory-devices comes from an old Greek word that sort of means “mindful,” and today as I’ve been looking up medical mnemonics, I was struck by one clever aspect of them: they are designed to be provocative or even partly offensive. In fact, it seems that the more dramatically they can provoke listeners, the more easily they stick on the mind. Here’s an example:

Cyanide Tastes Like Sweet Candy

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Here’s a photo of the thing from our new camera.

We responded to a Craigslist posting the other day that listed 3 free typewriters in a house over by San Diego State. Appearances indicated that the poster of this ad was a guy who had just bought a house with a lot of crap in it and we swooped in to pick up the three typewriters that he wanted to get rid of as quickly as possible.

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