Graceland

Where We All Will Be Received 

I know a six-year-old in Berkeley who starts each day by asking his parents to “put on the rock & roll!” and they know he means Graceland. It’s a record that refuses to turn off.

—Daniel Wolff in 1988

by Nell Boeschenstein

When my sister who had been living in Colorado for six years finished chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, she and her husband decided it was time to move closer to family. He went ahead of her to start work as she stayed behind to pack; between the two of them they had collected enough stuff to make the move back to where she and I had grown up in Virginia not a simple matter of throwing worldly belongings in a car and gunning it across I-70. It was a move that required preparation and, to make the trip itself easier, we decided I would fly out from New York and drive east with her.

We couldn’t afford to make a real road trip of it, but we did allow ourselves the luxury of one tourist stop along the way, provided it was not too far afield. It wasn’t much of a dilemma: a brief consult and Graceland was the destination we mentally marked on the map. The inaugural album for the drive was a no-brainer. As the second song reminded us of how the Mississippi Delta could shine like a National guitar, the Rockies receded in the rearview mirror and the Denver exurbs dissolved into grassland. We were going to Graceland, Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. We were going home.

Paul Simon’s Graceland celebrates a quarter century this summer: it hit your parents’ cassette player in August 1986. I was six and my sister was twelve. We were both still single and life was great. This means that Graceland is now the same age that “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” by the Shirelles, “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, “Hit the Road, Jack” by Ray Charles, and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by the King (of Graceland) were when Simon’s album came out. I name only songs because in 1961 albums as we understand them today hadn’t yet been invented. I have not come here to complain about time but to make the point that dues have been paid. Graceland at 25 has reached the echelon that boasts only the most rarified classics.

When he sat down to record the album Simon was struggling creatively. Hearts and Bones, released three years earlier, had been welcomed to the sound of popular and critical crickets. A few years before officially beginning work on it someone had sent him a cassette of umbaquanga music (a genre of South African music with Zulu roots). He had played the tape in his car, been thrilled by it, and subsequently fascinated by the rhythms and culture he heard in the music. He then recruited renowned African musicians to work with him — Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Youssou N’Dour, and Miriam Makeba — as well as the likes of Linda Ronstadt and his childhood heroes, the Everly Brothers, and Graceland came to life. Simon has often said that American popular music of the 1950s was where he found his original inspiration and in the liner notes of Graceland he observes that in umbaquanga he heard rhythms and a musical sensibility that recalled for him that boyhood soundtrack. As soon as the album was released Simon was back on top. It won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1986, eventually sold more than fourteen million copies, and Rolling Stone called it “the whole world’s soundtrack.”

When We Were Strippers

On the stage, I learned to cultivate a persona. But backstage, among the women, I found something more valuable

by Lily Burana

This is the latest entry in a personal essay series called "One Person's Trash," about items you just can't part with.

They came from a trashy store on Hollywood Boulevard, the shoes, but the first sight of them spun me back to an infamous strip club in San Francisco. Clear Lucite platform heels -- a stripper wardrobe staple, they were comfortable and, in a sleazy way, quite practical. But it was the pink glitter accented with the sparkling white heart appliqué that sold me. They looked like something an O'Farrell girl would wear.

The Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre, in San Francisco's rundown Tenderloin district, was most widely known as a post-Flower Power bohemian hangout, where Hunter S. Thompson and other margin-dwelling luminaries would drop by to smoke pot and play cards with owners Jim and Artie Mitchell. I was never invited into the boss's office with Jim and Artie, though -- Jim was in prison for killing Artie with a rifle blast by the time I signed on to dance there.

Despite its old-school hippie associations, the O'Farrell Theatre was avant-garde in its elegance. It was the first strip club I saw that could authentically be described as beautiful, the crown jewel of the club's many rooms being New York Live, where dancers would perform two-song sets bathed in a body-caressing pink spotlight on a gorgeous polished wood stage. Watching dancer after dancer sweep across that stage, her costume, mannerisms and music perfectly coordinated, I knew that in order to fit in and pull down significant cash, I would have to make an effort; I would have to put together something resembling a show. Under the older dancer's tutelage, I learned to kick off my thong and catch it in one hand, how to flip upside down on the brass poles, and how to cultivate a workable persona. I wasn't the sweet one, the popular one, the exotic one or -- let's be frank -- the gorgeous one. I was the aspirational arty girl (still found today in clubs, wearing glasses with her Catholic school girl costume). For all the coaching, my costumes remained lame, hastily assembled affairs. Ambivalent about stripping, I was reluctant to commit to investing in decent gear. Why wear sparkling pink when scuffed, secondhand black would do? That final layer of professional polish evaded me.

So a few years later, when I snuck back into the business to write about it and needed to costume myself again, I couldn't resist the shoes. By stripper standards, they were strictly utilitarian, but they felt like an homage. A shot at image rehab. A shot at stripper redemption.

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1000 Frames Per Second

by Erik Malinowski, Wired Magazine

The delivery and follow-through of a big-league pitcher can be a violent undertaking, torquing up your body to throw a 5-ounce sphere of yarn, cork and rubber at speeds upward of 100 mph.

The San Francisco Giants’ Tim Lincecum, a two-time Cy Young Award winner as the best pitcher in the National League, is especially well-known for his unorthodox mechanics, owing mainly to his short stature. Listed (generously) at 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds, Lincecum consistently launches his fastball at speeds averaging 93 mph and has led the league in strikeouts three years running.

For a glimpse into how his body is able to handle such speeds with ease, Red Bull corralled the 26-year-old flamethrower during spring training last month and filmed him with a Phantom Flex high-speed digital camera system, one of about 50 in the world. The result is a trippy look at the extraordinary forces it requires to be one of Major League Baseball’s best pitchers.

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Paweł Kuczyński

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Are You Sick of Highly Paid Teachers?

Teachers' hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year. It's time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do - babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That's right. Let's give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan-- that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day...maybe 30? So that's $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.  However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

Let's see....That's $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master's degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute -- there's something wrong here.

There sure is.

The average teacher's salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student--a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids.  What a deal.

The Software Behind Facebook

At the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

Facebook’s scaling challenge

Before we get into the details, here are a few factoids to give you an idea of the scaling challenge that Facebook has to deal with:

• Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month (according to Google Ad Planner).
• There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr).
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
• Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. This doesn’t include the images served by Facebook’s CDN.
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
• Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)
• Software that helps Facebook scale

In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.

For example:

• Facebook still uses PHP, but it has built a compiler for it so it can be turned into native code on its web servers, thus boosting performance.
• Facebook uses Linux, but has optimized it for its own purposes (especially in terms of network throughput).
• Facebook uses MySQL, but primarily as a key-value persistent storage, moving joins and logic onto the web servers since optimizations are easier to perform there (on the “other side” of the Memcached layer).

Then there are the custom-written systems, like Haystack, a highly scalable object store used to serve Facebook’s immense amount of photos, or Scribe, a logging system that can operate at the scale of Facebook (which is far from trivial).

But enough of that. Let’s present (some of) the software that Facebook uses to provide us all with the world’s largest social network site.

The Wave-Maker

When Ken Bradshaw caught the largest wave ever surfed, in 1998, he was riding on pure, single-minded passion. But that same quality—plus a deep antipathy to hype—has put him at odds with the increasingly crowded, commercialized world of big-wave surfing. On Oahu’s famed North Shore, the author learns about the 58-year-old maverick’s record-breaking encounter with 85 feet of “Condition Black” water, the battles he still fights, and his unlikely friendship with the publicity-loving Mark Foo, who was killed on a wave he “stole” from Bradshaw.

by William Langeweische

Last winter, on the North Shore of Oahu, in Hawaii, the man who is believed to have ridden the biggest wave ever surfed, Ken Bradshaw, fell down the outside stairs of his self-built beach house while rushing to take the garbage out. The stairs do not have a handrail. The house does not seem to have been built to code. It looks like an assembly of beach shacks stacked three stories high. Bradshaw lives in parts of the second and third floors, and rents the rest out to other surfers, for income. He is 58, so no longer young, but he remains athletic and strong. This is obvious on first sight. He stands six feet tall and seems to be built of muscle and jaw. If you punched him hard enough you would break your hand. If you hit him with a bat you might break it too. History shows that he shrugs off greater punishment than that. It also suggests that having hit him you would be wise to step back. I don’t mean that Bradshaw is an especially vengeful or violent man. Actually, he is considerate, unpretentious, and polite. He does not drink. He does not eat meat. His neighbors like him a lot. But, after all, you’re the one who picked the fight. Your problem now is that Bradshaw has experience in these matters, because on the water there are rules he tries to apply.

The classic rule is the one-surfer-per-wave or, if that cannot be maintained, the no-coming-at-Bradshaw-from-the-side, the no-crowding-Bradshaw, or the no-cutting-off-Bradshaw-when-he’s-deep-into-a-ride. Afterward, he paddles up to the offender and warns him. If there is a need for a second warning he paddles up again and says, “O.K., that’s two. You will go in on the third one.” He means he’ll send the man to shore—usually by breaking the fins on his board. To me Bradshaw explained, “Sometimes then it gets ugly. They start into ‘Fuck you, asshole!’ If they say that to you, what are you going to do about it? A challenge like that. Are you going to back down, or go for it? I’ve sat on my board saying, ‘You get the first swing, dude. Swing away. But as soon as you hit me, I will take you down so hard you will not believe it.’ Some swing, some don’t.”

The problem is that there are too many surfers in the world and too few good waves to ride. This may come as a surprise, given the extent of global coastlines, but most surf is unrideable or uninteresting, and good locations are small. The North Shore, for instance, is only 13 miles long. It contains several dozen renowned surfing spots—particularly the “inside breaks” of Pipeline, Sunset Beach, and Waimea Bay, one after the other, close to the shore—but their takeoff zones are typically just a few yards wide, and they are crowded with surfers vying for advantage. Bradshaw calls this the dark side of surfing. The crowding is compounded by the fact that, even on good days at good breaks, good waves are relatively infrequent, and when one finally arrives, even if it is large, it usually offers enough space for just one good run. What goes on as a consequence Bradshaw calls natural selection. Actually, he calls it Darwinism, and means the same thing. It’s not about survival so much as getting the rides. In the minds of people like Bradshaw, the two are related. If you leave a challenge unanswered, the punks will start stealing your waves. There are a lot of punks in surfing. Bradshaw said, “Yeah. I’m not afraid to go for it. I’m not afraid to be underwater for a long time. And I guarantee you I have stood on people.” By people he meant men. For some reason this never comes up with women.

I mentioned the options: “You can hit them, hold them underwater, or knock their fins off.”

He nodded. He prefers to knock their fins off. There is a technique to it. First you flip over the other man’s board and brace it, sometimes by holding it under your arm; then you smash through the fins hard with your fist, striking beyond them in your mind, as in karate. It is only if the punk later persists, or challenges you directly, that you have to resort to more drastic measures. At least that’s the way it was before, when scores were settled fast. In recent years the struggle for dominance has become more drawn out, with threats of lawsuits and criminal charges. Bradshaw has been visited by the police several times.

It goes like “There’s been another complaint, Ken. Did you hit this guy?”

“No. I knocked his fins off.”

Or like “Did you really bite his board, Ken?”

“Why, did you see teeth marks?”

“Well, it could have been a mouth, Ken. Hard to believe it was a mouth. Was it really a mouth, Ken?”

“I was trying to make my point without getting in trouble.”

Trouble? Ken, like which kind? This is a man who rides waves so heavy they shake the earth when they break. Who has sacrificed comfort and wealth to do it. Who has willingly suffered the derision of conventional minds for the choices he has made. Who recently married for the first time, and to a much younger woman. Who may give her children. Who knows that she may break his heart. Who accepts that we are all alone when we die. Who rides with a single-mindedness that no one can equal—crouched low on his board in a predatory stance, left foot forward, body coiled, intently assessing the contours ahead, swerving and carving through the salt water. And for what? To do it again without repetition. And why? Because he is an athlete. Because every wave is different.

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Sweet Sausage and Arugula Manicotti

Ingredients

Serves 4

• 12 x 4.5-inch manicotti (1 1/2 pound box), cooked al dente
• Kosher salt
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• FOR FILLING:
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 pound loose Italian pork sausage
• 3 cups lightly packed baby arugula, roughly chopped
• 1 1/2 cups good quality ricotta
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 cup finely grated Parmigiano Reggiano, plus 1 cup for topping
• 1/2 cup shredded packaged mozzarella, for topping
• FOR TOMATO SAUCE:
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 medium yellow onion, finely diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves picked
• 1 cup fresh basil leaves, torn
• 1 28-oz can San Marzano tomatoes

Directions

Begin by making a quick tomato sauce: Set a medium sauce pan over medium-high heat. Add olive oil and saute onion and garlic until just translucent. Add thyme leaves, basil leaves then pour in canned tomatoes and juice. Break up tomatoes into smaller pieces with a wooden spoon. Bring to a simmer and cook for 20-25 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Make filling: Add olive oil to a large saute pan over medium heat. Once hot, add sausage and start to brown. Break it up into smaller pieces with a wooden spoon as it cooks. Once browned, add arugula to pan and cook until just wilted. Add extra olive oil as required. Season with salt and pepper. Spread out onto a plate then place in the refrigerator so it cools quickly.

In a large bowl add ricotta, eggs and parmesan. Stir well to combine, then add cooled sausage and arugula mixture. Set aside.

Using a pastry bag or a large zip-top bag, fill each manicotti with the cheese and sausage mixture. Fill from each end of the tube to the center for the best results. Set aside the filled tubes.

To assemble, spoon half the sauce into the bottom of an 8x11 baking dish. Arrange manicotti in rows and top with remaining sauce. Shower with grated parmesan and shredded mozzarella. Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes until golden and bubbly. Finish under broiler for 2 minutes until slightly golden.

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Matterhorn at Sunrise

Radiant at sunrise, the Matterhorn towers over Riffel Lake near Zermatt, Switzerland.

 

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Post-A-Nut

by Mark Fruenfelder

Compared to Oahu, Maui, the Big Island, and Kauai, Molokai is very undeveloped, with a population of only 7,000 people. I took quite a few photographs during our brief visit to this beautiful and interesting island and I will post more about Molokai later this week, but I wanted to share one highlight: the Post-A-Nut service offered by the Hoolehua Post Office. Here, you can select a free coconut and mail it, unboxed, anywhere in the world simply by writing an address and sticking postage stamps on it.

Postmaster Lam told us that the Post-A-Nut service was started about 20 years ago, and that over 50,000 coconuts had been mail from his post office. (It costs about $10 to ship a coconut in United States.)

more pictures here:

Why GE, Coca-Cola, and IBM Are Getting Into the Water Business

by Charles Fishman

If there is one truly arresting sign that our relationship to water is about to shift in fundamental ways, it comes not from the world of science or climatology, not from United Nations officials or aid workers desperately trying to get water to people in developing countries. It comes from businesses like Michell Wool -- and other corporations with water-intensive businesses, such as Coca-Cola -- but also those whose water dependence is less obvious, like GE and IBM. They all have that same tickle of anxiety about water security. For business, water management is fast becoming a key strategic tool. Companies are starting to gather the kind of information that lets them measure not just their water use and their water costs but also their water efficiency, their water productivity, how much work they get from a gallon of water, how much revenue, how much profit.

In the past decade, businesses have discovered water as both a startling vulnerability and an untapped opportunity. Monsanto is developing a new line of seeds and crops that require less water. Robert Fraley, Monsanto's CTO, says, "We believe that by 2030 we can double the yield for many crops, compared to the year 2000." In the hospitality industry, Celebrity Cruises has replaced ice with chilled river rock for cold food on the main buffet line at breakfast, lunch, and dinner on all nine of its megaships. That saves 2.7 million pounds of ice-making a year for each ship, ice that requires 330,000 gallons of water to be frozen, treated, and then pumped back overboard. In Las Vegas, the folks at MGM Resorts have worked with Delta faucets to prototype new water-saving showerheads. No less a sage than Warren Buffett has quietly realized how the water landscape is changing. In 2009, his company, Berkshire Hathaway, became the largest shareholder in Nalco, a water-services, treatment, and equipment company that has no public profile but 12,000 employees and nearly $4 billion in revenue.

GE Water is an ambitious new division of the global conglomerate, with 8,000 employees at 50 manufacturing facilities worldwide and revenue of about $2.5 billion. GE Water cleans water for a West Virginia coal mine to reuse; GE Water has built the largest desalination plant in Africa, in Algiers; GE Water has created a wastewater-purification plant that produces 172,000 gallons a day of reuse water to keep the fairways and greens lush at Pennant Hills Golf Club in Sydney.

The new business is busy, but it hasn't grown as fast as GE would like. It turns out that many companies are skeptical about spending money on water when there is no urgent pressure -- be it financial, governmental, or scarcity -- to do so. "Customers aren't feeling a cost for their water," says Jeff Fulgham, chief marketing officer for GE Water, "so they're reluctant to spend money to improve their situation."

Every gallon of water we use has an economic value -- the value of whatever we can actually do with that water, whether it's brew our morning coffee, grow an acre of wheat, or make a microchip. Yet in our homes, our schools, our companies and organizations, we typically behave as if the opposite were true. We act as if clean, on-demand water has zero economic value. Especially in the developed world, the value inherent in water is hidden under a cloak of invisibility. Although the water has indispensable usefulness, it rarely has a price.

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Stress Test

Stress Wrecks Intestinal Bacteria

Stress not only sends the human immune system into overdrive – it can also wreak havoc on the trillions of bacteria that work and thrive inside our digestive system.

New research suggests that this may be important because those bacteria play a significant role in triggering the innate immune system to stay slightly active, and thereby prepared to quickly spring into action in the face of an infection.

But exactly how stress makes these changes in these bacteria still isn’t quite clear, researchers say.

“Since graduate school, I’ve been interested in how stress affects the bacteria naturally in our bodies,’ explained Michael Bailey, an assistant professor of dentistry and member of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University.

“Even though we’ve known that stress changes these bacteria, we didn’t really understand what that meant or if there was any sort of biological function associated with effects on these bacteria.”

The new study appears in the current issue of the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

The human digestive tract is a universe filled with microbes.  There are probably 100 trillion bacteria in the average human, 90 percent of which live mainly in the intestine.  They easily outnumber human cells 10-to-one in each person.

The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ~Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride 

by Brian Clark

It may be inconceivable for you to misuse a word, but a quick look around the web reveals plenty of people doing it. And it’s all too easy when we hear or see others use words incorrectly and parrot them without knowing it’s wrong.

We know by now that great copy and content often purposefully break the rules of grammar. It’s only when you break the rules by mistake that you look dumb.

So let’s take a look at 27 commonly misused words. Some are common mistakes that can cost you when trying to keep a reader’s attention. Others are more obscure and just interesting to know.

Adverse / Averse 
Adverse means unfavorable. Averse means reluctant.

Afterwards 
Afterwards is wrong in American English. It’s afterward.

Complement / Compliment 
I see this one all the time. Complement is something that adds to or supplements something else. Compliment is something nice someone says about you.

Criteria
Criteria is plural, and the singular form is criterion. If someone tells you they have only one criteria, you can quickly interject and offer that it be they get a clue.

Farther / Further
Farther is talking about a physical distance.
“How much farther is Disney World, Daddy?”
Further is talking about an extension of time or degree.
“Take your business further by reading Copyblogger.”

Fewer / Less 
If you can count it, use fewer. If you can’t, use less.
“James has less incentive to do what I say.”
“Tony has fewer subscribers since he stopped blogging."

The American Dream As We Know It Is Obsolete

In an era of insecurity, we all want security.

by Arun Gupta, Alternet

We want a decent home to call our own, healthcare to heal us when we are sick or old, education to improve our minds and job prospects, healthy food and clean water to nourish us, income to provide for all our needs and even some affordable luxuries, a career to give us social status and a sense of self-worth, and a pension for our golden years.

These seemingly universal desires define the post-WWII American Dream, and are still the reference point for both left and right. The “Golden Age of American Capitalism” from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s is commonly seen as the triumph of the middle class, a time when the fruits of a robust capitalist economy extended to tens of millions.

But today we are trapped in the fault lines of a violent global economy, and these dreams seem as archaic as waking up at dawn with the grandparents, children and cousins to milk cows, bake pies and plow fields.

However outdated the American Dream, organized labor and liberals desperately cling to it as they retreat in the face of the Republican and corporate blitzkrieg. In this war, the battlefield is social spending and the public sector, and for the losing side the situation is dire. (The critique that follows is not of the rank and file or all unions, but rather the dominant tendencies among many labor leaders and large national unions.)

For Mother Jones, it’s an “Attack on the middle class. Jim Hightower describes it as “the corporate-GOP attack on the middle class.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says, “It is our job to channel this Midwest uprising, this populist outcry into the large-scale creation of good jobs that can resuscitate America’s middle class, America’s people and our economy.”AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, referring to Ohio legislation that strips public workers of collective bargaining rights, called it “a reprehensible attack on the middle class.” According to 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, Gov. Scott Walker is trying to “deny the American Dream to the vast majority of Wisconsinites.”

Really? The contention that the middle class is suddenly under attack – and by implication should be defended – is thoroughly flawed. For one, this trend goes back more than 30 years to the savaging of private-sector unionism and the social welfare state combined with deregulation, reloaded militarism and tax breaks for the rich. The current attack on public-sector unions and the remnants of welfare is just the latest stage.

Instant Audience

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is expensive and extras are difficult to handle, besides costing money. The Inflatable Crowd Company offers the alternative – plastic, inflatable mannequins, thirty thousands of them for use in movies where large crowd is required. The company was formed in 2002 for creating crowd scenes for the Hollywood movie Sea Biscuit. Their inflatable crowd have since appeared in over 80 feature films including many memorable ones like The King’s Speech, Frost/Nixon, American Gangster, Spiderman 3 and many more. These plastic men and women were featured in many TV shows and commercials as well.  Click on the link at the bottom to see more.

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A Little Meditation Goes a Long Way

A new study offers the strongest evidence to date that meditation can change the structure of your brain.

by  Jason Marsh

I consider myself something of a prospective meditator—meaning that a serious meditation practice is always something I’m about to start… next week.

So for years, I’ve been making a mental note of new studies showing that meditation can literally change our brain structure in ways that might boost concentration, memory, and positive emotions.

The results seem enticing enough to make anyone drop into the full lotus position—until you read the fine print: Much of this research involves people who have meditated for thousands of hours over many years; some of it zeroes in on Olympic-level meditators who have clocked 10,000 hours or more. Pretty daunting.

Well, a new study offers some hope—and makes the benefits of meditation seem within reach even for a novice like me.

The study, published last month in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, suggests that meditating for just 30 minutes a day for eight weeks can increase the density of gray matter in brain regions associated with memory, stress, and empathy.

Strip

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Float Like a Punching Bag

Made from 1,300 punching bags, 6.5 miles (10.46 km) of stainless steel cable, and 2,500 pounds (1,134kg) of aluminum pipe, this 22-foot high (6.7 m) art installation of the legendary Muhammad Ali can be spotted at LA’s Nokia Plaza. Designed by artist Michael Kalish, with structural supports by architectural firm Oyler Wu, this larger than life portrait is certain to draw attention.

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Dorothy Parker

[ed. I appended some of Ms. Parker's best quotes at the end of this article.]

Today In Literature

On this day in 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker, so ending the “Reign of Terror” she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. This last stint was only a two-month stand-in for Robert Benchley, and altogether she reviewed plays for only a half-dozen years in a fifty-year career, but Parker’s Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.

Parker’s debut column at Vanity Fair in 1918 was that of a twenty-four-year-old newcomer filling in for P. G. Wodehouse, but it gave notice: of the five musical comedies reviewed, one got “if you don’t knit, bring a book”; another got a review that did not include any names, because she was “not going to tell on them”; another did not get reviewed at all, Parker deciding instead to review the performance of the woman sitting next to her as she searched for her lost glove. “I went into the Plymouth Theater a comparatively young woman,” she said of a production of Tolstoy’s Redemption, “and I staggered out of it, three hours later, twenty years older. . . .” More to her taste, and a relatively rare recipient of her good will, was Sem Benelli’s The Jest: “The simple, homely advice of one who has never been outside of these broadly advertised United States, is only this: park the children somewhere, catch the first city-bound train, and go to the Plymouth Theater, even if you have to trade in the baby’s Thrift Stamps to buy the tickets. The play will undoubtedly run from now on.”

The more famous lines — that a Katharine Hepburn performance ran the gamut of emotions from A to B, etc. — came later, and by this time she was herself a favorite target. Her quips and habits became characters in a half-dozen plays — to the point that when a publisher offered big money for her autobiography, she said that she couldn’t because she’d be sued for plagiarism. When introduced to one young man who, she’d been told, had lifted some of her witticisms, she innocently asked him what his play was about:

“Well, it’s rather hard to describe, except that it’s a play against all ‘-isms.’” “Except plagiarism?”

By 1925 Parker confessed to being weary of reviewing plays, and by this time her own writing career was well underway. So too were the drinking, the suicide attempts, and the string of broken relationships — including the one with Hemingway, which declined from her praising his “grace under pressure” novels to his writing of ‘Dottie under hatchet’ poems:

Little drops of grain alcohol
Little slugs of gin
Make the mighty notions
Make the double chin –
Lovely Mrs. Parker in the Algonquin
Loves her good dog Robinson
Keeps away from sin
Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses
Better to see to kiss the critics’ asses —

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The Loose Nut

by Michael Cipley

LOS ANGELES — Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, “The Loose Nut,” when he started seeing things.

Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall.

“What was that?” Mr. Klein, now an animation professor at Loyola Marymount University, recalled thinking. Only later, after years of scholarly detective work, did he decide that he had been looking at genuine art that was cleverly concealed by an ambitious and slightly frustrated animation director named Shamus Culhane. Mr. Culhane died in 1996, a pioneer whose six decades in animation included the sequence of the dwarfs marching and singing “Heigh Ho” in the 1937 film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

In the March issue of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Mr. Klein relates an intriguing theory. He says that Mr. Culhane broke the boundaries of his craft when he worked on the Woody Woodpecker cartoons in the 1940s, going well beyond the kind of commonplace puckishness that supposedly led later animators to stitch frames of a panty-less diva into “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Mr. Culhane’s stunts, Mr. Klein posits, were of a higher order. He worked ultra-brief experimental art films into a handful of Woody Woodpecker cartoons.

“Culhane essentially ‘hid’ his artful excursions in plain sight, letting them rush past too rapidly for the notice of most of his audience,” Mr. Klein writes in the 15-page article, titled “Woody Abstracted: Film Experiments in the Cartoons of Shamus Culhane.”

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