Google Search Secrets

[ed.  Great resource, if I could just remember all these tricks.  Large infographic after the jump.]

Among certain circles (my family, some of my coworkers, etc.) I’m known for my Googling skills. I can find anything, anywhere, in no time flat. My Google-fu is a helpful skill, but not one that’s shrouded in too much mystery — I’ve just mastered some very helpful search tricks and shortcuts and learned to quickly identify the best info in a list of results.

Sadly, though web searches have become and integral part of the academic research landscape, the art of the Google search is an increasingly lost one. A recent study at Illinois Wesleyan University found that fewer than 25% of students could perform a “reasonably well-executed search.” Wrote researchers, “The majority of students — of all levels — exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process.”

That search process also included determining when to rely on Google and when to utilize scholarly databases, but on a fundamental level, it appears that many people just don’t understand how to best find the information they seek using Google.

Thanks to the folks at HackCollege, a number of my “secrets” are out. The infographic below offers a helpful primer for how to best structure searches using advanced operators to more quickly and accurately drill down to the information you want. This is by no means an exhaustive list of search operators and advanced techniques, but it’s a good start that will help set you on the path to becoming a Google master.

by Josh Catone, Mashable |  Continue reading:

Casanova's Memoirs

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was a gambler, swindler, diplomat, lawyer, soldier, alchemist, violinist, traveler, pleasure seeker and serial seducer.

He was also a prolific writer who documented his adventures and love affairs in a steamy memoir that is one of the literary treasures of the 18th century.

Born in Venice, he considered France his adopted country but was forced to flee Paris in 1760 after seducing the wives and daughters of important subjects of King Louis XV and cheating them out of their money.

Now Casanova is back in France, celebrated by the French state. The original manuscript of his memoirs, “The Story of My Life,” and other writings of his are on display for the first time at the National Library of France in the exhibition “Casanova — The Passion for Freedom.” He is even being called a feminist.

The story of how more than 3,700 pages of Casanova’s papers ended up in one of France’s most prestigious and proper institutions is one that Casanova himself would have loved.

He wrote the memoirs in the last years of his life. Just before his death at 73 in Bohemia in 1798, he bequeathed his papers to his nephew. In 1821 Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, one of Germany’s most prominent publishers, acquired them from the nephew’s descendants. It was assumed in literary circles that the documents had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in World War II. But they were carried on a bike and hidden in a bank vault in Leipzig. An American military truck drove them to safety in Wiesbaden.

by Elaine Sciolino, NY Times |  Continue reading:
Photo: Emmanuel Ngyen Ngoc/Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Current Events: European Debt Crisis 'Metastasizing'

The three main gauges – M1, M2, and M3 – have each begun to decline in absolute terms after slowing sharply over the Autumn.

The broad M3 measure tracked closely by the European Central Bank as an early warning indicator shrank last month by €59bn to €9.78 trillion, a sign that Europe's long-feared credit squeeze is underway as banks retrench to meet tougher capital requirements.

"This is very worrying," said Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. "What it shows is that the implosion of the banking system on the periphery is now outweighing any growth left in the core. We are seeing the destruction of money and it is a clear warning of serious trouble over the next six months."

"This is the first sign of an emerging credit crunch," said James Nixon from Societe Generale. Banks cut their balance sheets by €79bn in October, while mortage lending saw the biggest drop since December 2008.

Simon Ward from Henderson Global Investors said "narrow" M1 money – which includes cash and overnight deposits, and signals short-term spending plans – shows an alarming split between North and South.  (...)
 
The grim monetary data came as Moody's warned that Euroland's crisis is metastasising, with risks of a chain of sovereign bankruptcies unless Europe "acts quickly" to stop the rot. "The probability of multiple defaults by euro area countries is no longer negligible."

The agency said defaults would threaten to break up the euro itself. "Any multi-exit scenario would have negative repercussions for the credit standing of all euro area and EU sovereigns."

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph |  Continue reading:

Leo Kottke

Paris (Paris) on Flickr by JulienB.
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Gyotaku

Stephen Silk
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Alone at the Movies

For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for The Village Voice. But there were also long empty spells. I tried to write some fiction and couldn’t, tried to read and could—but only for so long. I ended up going to the movies.

It was the right decade to be doing that. Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Taxi Driver; Paul Schrader wrote and directed Blue Collar; and Robert Altman directed Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians. The Godfather, both I and II, were news then. Woody Allen seemed to be bringing out something good every six months.

I can’t really tell you whether these movies summarized a national mood, but they summarized some moods of mine. Almost all of the movies conveyed a feeling of missed opportunities, of having been tossed out of the garden just before you came to know you’d been living in one. The only paradises, we’re told, are lost paradises, and I had recently left a couple of them. I’d made the mistake of graduating from the small, hyperexpensive college in Vermont that I’d attended on a massive scholarship. Bennington was full of gorgeous, smart, tightly wound women, in the proportion of three to every one male; the teachers were surpassingly hip; the Vermont green was seven versions of pastoral. Most of the students were rich—rich and a little loopy. Many were the youngest children of prosperous, prominent parents. But the kids often had been ignored by mom and dad, who were absorbed in making their dutiful ways through Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex (second cousin to The Joy of Cooking) with each other and with neighbors and friends, praying that they hadn’t missed all the rapture that the ’60s had had to dispense.

My roommate spent eight years or so at Bennington. He tried six majors, including, if memory serves, musical instrument design. He formed close if temporary conjunctions with many women, among them a princess and a U.S. president’s great-grand niece (one of the solemn, whiskery Ohio presidents, alas). Everyone at Bennington was a show; my roommate was a little more brightly lit and cunningly miked, that’s all. When it became clear that I was voluntarily leaving this earthly paradise after only four years, he wrote me off as mentally ill.

People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon; matinees are therapy for those who can’t afford therapists or don’t know that they should get one. Scraping down the pavement in Manhattan on my way to a matinee, I had to admit that my Bennington roommate probably had it right. New York sent many signs to a young man—it was an empire of signs, to cop a phrase—but one message blared through and over all the rest: This city (state, country, world, cosmos) does not require you at all. No provisions have been made. There is no slot. You’ll have to force your way in, on the off chance that you can get in at all. I sometimes thought, then, of a poem by Stephen Crane that I’d come upon in junior high.

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

I occasionally thought too of a line that I’d fetched from the commonplace books my roommate crammed with quotations to speed him on his way through life: “If nothing comes, then nothing comes. This isn’t exactly the enchanted forest.” Which was true enough: in the mid-1970s, New York, especially up in Washington Heights, the decayed neighborhood where I lived, was emphatically not the enchanted forest.

One gets used to having a slot, however meager. For 16 years there had been a seat reserved for one M. Edmundson at some center of higher or lower learning. Mark E., who sat behind Kevin Donahue and in front of Joan Ehlrich at Medford High, was present or he was absent. Absence mattered. Inquiries would be made. Now there was neither presence nor absence. There was zip. I had nursed hopes, as the poet says, that pointed to the stars. Now I was a walking superfluity, a flea on New York’s shaggy, often rank-smelling coat.

by Mark Edmundson, American Scholar |  Continue reading: 
Photo:  thisisnthappiness

Valerius De Saedeleer, Belgian, 1867-1942
Winter landscape 1931
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Daily Routines

[ed. From Daily Routines. How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days. For example, Winston Churchill (below) and Benjamin Franklin.]

Winston Churchill

Despite all this activity Churchill’s daily routine changed little during these years. He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries.

At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden, and took a weak whisky and soda to his study.

At 1:00 p.m. he joined guests and family for a three-course lunch. Clementine drank claret, Winston champagne, preferable Pol Roger served at a specific temperature, port brandy and cigars. When lunch ended, about 3:30 p.m. he returned to his study to work, or supervised work on his estate, or played cards or backgammon with Clementine.

At 5:00 p.m., after another weak whisky and soda, he went to be for an hour and a half. He said this siesta, a habit gained in Cuba, allowed him to work 1 1/2 days in every 24 hours. At 6:30 p.m. he awoke, bathed again, and dressed for dinner at 8:00 p.m.

Dinner was the focal-point and highlight of Churchill’s day. Table talk, dominated by Churchill, was as important as the meal. Sometimes, depending on the company, drinks and cigars extended the event well past midnight. The guests retired, Churchill returned to his study for another hour or so of work.

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All The Angry People

[ed.  On the ground snapshot of the OWS movement through the eyes of Ray Kachel, a supporter who traveled from Seattle to New York City to participate. Also this from John Heilemann. Both are excellent reads.]

Zuccotti Park—or Liberty Square, as its occupiers called it—takes up a small rectangular block in the financial district, shadowed by skyscrapers, just east of the World Trade Center site. When Kachel arrived, the leaves on the park’s fifty-five honey-locust trees were still green. Tents were forbidden by the city, and the overnight occupiers had to lay blue tarps on unforgiving granite.

At the west end of the park, a drum circle rolled out a wild, interminable beat, adrenaline for the occupiers and annoyance for the neighbors. The drummers’ area, called “the ghetto,” was made up of hard-core anarchists and long-term homeless people, a world unto itself, where interlopers were made to feel unwelcome. The center of the park was crowded with various hubs dedicated to the occupation’s self-organization: the kitchen tarp, where food prepared on the outside and delivered was served to anyone who lined up; the comfort station, where occupiers could obtain donated wet wipes, toiletries, and articles of clothing; the recycling site, where protesters composted food waste and took turns pedalling a stationary bike to generate battery power; the library, with several thousand volumes stacked high on tables; the open-air studio, where computers and cameras streamed live footage of the occupation twenty-four hours a day.

At the east end of the park, along the wide sidewalk next to Broadway, beneath a sculpture of soaring red steel beams called “Joie de Vivre,” the occupation and the public merged. Demonstrators stood in a row, displaying signs as if hawking wares, while workers on their lunch hour and tourists and passersby stopped to look, take pictures, talk, argue. An elderly woman sat in a chair and read aloud from Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Another woman stood silently while holding up a copy of Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men”—day after day. An old man in a sports coat and golf cap: “For: Regulated Capitalism. Against: Obscene Inequality. Needed: Massive Jobs Program.” A union electrician in a hard hat: “Occupy Wall Street. Do It for Your Kids.” A woman in a blue nurse’s smock: “This R.N. Is Sickened by Wall Street Greed. Trust Has Been Broken.” A young woman in jeans: “Where Did My Future Go? Greed Took It.” The crowd was dense, the talk overlapping.

Kachel, exhausted from his cross-country trip, was overwhelmed by the pandemonium. He could barely sleep, as the only bedding he had was a thermal wrap made of Mylar. At one point, someone told him that a shower could be arranged at the comfort station. When he arrived, there was no shower to be had, and suddenly he was confronted with the fact of being broke and homeless in a strange city. He withdrew into himself, curling up to sleep in his fleece and waterproof shell on the steps near the east side of the park.

One day, Kachel overheard a group of young occupiers, who were sitting on the steps just a few feet away, talking about him as if he weren’t there. “He’s not going to make it here doing that,” one of them said. “He isn’t taking care of himself.” They were right—his socks and shoes, drenched in a rainstorm, had been wet for several days. Kachel saw that he couldn’t survive in the park alone. He had to become part of the collective in an unreserved way—something that he’d never done.

He volunteered for the newly formed Sanitation Working Group. To keep warm after dark, he spent part of each night scrubbing the paths and the sidewalks. Another occupier, seeing Kachel working, gave him a sleeping bag and a tarp. Kachel began making friends: Sean, an Irish immigrant from the Bronx who worked the graveyard shift spraying fire retardant on steel, then came downtown to spend his days at Zuccotti; a homeless substitute teacher with a degree in physics; Chris, a drifter from Tarpon Springs, Florida, who had been so outraged by a YouTube video of a New York City police officer squirting women protesters in the face with pepper spray that he had ridden the rails to Manhattan in order to defend female honor. (...)

So he didn’t panic when, one rain-swept night, his duffel was stolen as he slept, and water entered the tarp in which he was rolled up, soaking his sleeping bag, and he stayed calm when his daypack—including the portable hard drive—was taken away the next morning by zealous members of the Sanitation Working Group who were clearing out waterlogged objects, leaving Kachel with nothing but the clothes he had on. He simply turned to his new friends for help, and was given a dry sleeping bag. By then, he belonged to the occupation. Liberty Square was his home.

by George Packer, New Yorker |  Continue reading:

Photo: Wayne Lawrence

Small Plates

Welcome. Have you eaten with us before? We do things a little differently here. All our entrees are what we call “small plates,” which means that the portions are slightly... smaller than you’re used to, and come on serving vessels that can be accurately described as being both “small” and “plates.”

We think it’s a fun way to get you to order something that you wouldn’t usually order: everything on the menu. We recommend you each order six dishes; or 10 dishes if you are very hungry; or an endless stream if you’re looking to fill the shank of your evening.

How small are we talking? The Octopus Plate is not a whole tentacle, but one sucker off of one tentacle: it looks like a diaphragm for a mouse, or a dollhouse bathroom’s wash basin, or a calcified contact lens. It’s my favorite thing on the menu. The Micro-Toasts would fit on the head of a pin; Two Grains of Rice is a very generous term for what is, at heart, cellular. The Three Strands of Spaghettini is DNA.

Shall I give you a minute?

How did we do? Have we made some choices? Excellent. The octopus is a great choice, a great choice. The Fennel Pollen: also great. Just so you know, though, that one is especially small: a member of our waitstaff will come and spray .00005 milligrams of fennel pollen into the air, and then encourage you to walk into its cloud while a light breeze from an overhead fan blows the cloud toward the back of the restaurant in the direction of the parking lot. It’s my second favorite thing on the menu.

by Henry Alford, NY Times |  Continue reading:

Review: The Descendants

In the course of (what passes for) my “career” as a movie critic, I have avowed to avoid the trite phrase “heartwarming family film” as a descriptive. Well, so much for principles. The Descendants is a heartwarming family film. There, I said it. Now, let me qualify that. Since it is directed by Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways ) it is not a typical heartwarming family film. It is a heartwarming family film riddled with dysfunction and middle-aged angst (which is how I prefer my heartwarming family films, thank you very much). Think of it as Terms of Endearment goes Hawaiian.

Despite the lush and verdant tropical setting for his tale, Payne wastes no time clueing us in that there is trouble in Paradise. People who live in Hawaii get cancer, feel pain and generally encounter their own fair share of potholes as they caterwaul down the road of life, just like anyone else. That is the gist of an internal monologue that opens the film, delivered by its protagonist, Matt King (George Clooney), as he holds vigil in an ICU, where his wife (Patricia Hastie) lies in a coma, gravely injured from a water-skiing mishap off Waikiki. As he contemplates the maze of IV tubes and other apparatus keeping his wife alive, Matt, like anyone confronting the Abyss, begins taking inventory.

After all, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs? On the “up” side, Matt is financially set for life, as an heir to and executor for a sizable chunk of prime, undeveloped land on Kauai, held in a family trust (thanks to genuine Hawaiian royalty buried in the woodpile a ways back). On the “down” side, his workaholic tendencies have precipitated an emotional distance from his wife and two daughters in recent years. His 17-year old, the sullen and combative Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) is away at boarding school; and precocious 10-year old Scottie (Amara Miller) is in hot water for antics like bringing photos of her comatose mother to school, and for cyber-bullying a classmate.

In the past, Matt’s wife has served as the buffer between him and this type of day-to-day daughterly drama, but now that she is indefinitely incapacitated, it’s all landed in his lap. He may be a respected pillar of the community and more than capable of running his own law office, but now finds himself akin to the proverbial deer in the headlights. After awkwardly putting out Scottie’s fires, Matt decides that he will need to enlist the assistance of her older sister for riot control. Besides, he figures it would be best to keep both of his girls close by, should the worst happen. As if this weren’t enough on his plate, Matt is also up against a pending deadline to sell the family’s land to a real estate developer. He is being egged on by a sizable coterie of cousins who (a couple anti-development dissenters aside) are eager to milk this potential cash cow for all its worth.

Then, the real bombshell gets dropped on Matt’s head. The bombardiers are his daughters, who let it slip that, completely unbeknownst to Dad, Mom has been getting a little action on the side as of late, with a younger man (Matthew Lillard). And he’s a real estate agent, no less (shades of American Beauty). Poor Matt. He’s no sooner steeled himself for the looming possibility of becoming a grieving widower who must stay strong for his kids, than he instead finds himself suffering the confounded humiliation of a blindsided cuckold…as they look on. Flummoxed, Matt demands confirmation from his wife’s friends, who fess up. Although he has no real idea what he wants to say (or do) to him, Matt nonetheless decides that he must track down his wife’s lover (it’s a guy thing). With Scottie, Alexandra and her boyfriend (Nick Krause) in tow, he embarks on the Alexander Payne Road Trip, which in this case involves taking a puddle jumper to Kauai.

While the setup may feel somewhat familiar (like the aforementioned American Beauty meets Little Miss Sunshine ), or even rote, in Payne’s hands it is anything but. Yes, on one level it’s another soaper about a middle-aged male heading for a meltdown, but every time you think you’ve got it sussed, Payne keeps pitching curve balls. His script (which he co-adapted with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings) consistently hits the sweet spot between comedy and drama, giving us characters who, in spite of (or perhaps, due to) their contradictions and flaws, are people to whom we can all easily relate to. The film also showcases Clooney’s best work in years; it’s the closest he has come thus far to proving that he may indeed be this generation’s Cary Grant, after all.

This is one of the first true knockouts on the autumn release calendar, and one of the best films I’ve seen this year. There are many reasons to recommend it, not the least of which is a bevy of fine performances from the entire cast. Lillard shows surprising depth, and it’s a hoot to watch veteran character actors like Robert Forster and Beau Bridges doing that voodoo that they do so well. I also like the way Payne subtly utilizes the Hawaiian landscapes like another character in the story, much in the same manner he employed the California wine country milieu in Sideways. After all, it is only when human beings are set against the simple perfection of an orchid or a grape that we are truly exposed as the silly, needlessly self-absorbed and ultimately inconsequential creatures that we really are.

by  Dennis Hartley, Hullabaloo |  Continue reading:

Diane Birch, Daryl Hall

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Bendy Elbows

Isn’t it horribly sad when you reach the bottom of the wine bottle only to simultaneously discover that your “wine cellar” (ie. your counter top) is bare. Bone dry. Finito. Dunzo. Emptier than a banker’s heart (buuuuuurn. no seriously. burn.) Isn’t it?!!?!?!?

Pepperwood Grove Syrah ($5.99) gives off aromas of pepper, and I know because I took large whiffs of the pepper from those little white packets that used to accompany my tray lunch at school making me an expert on pepper aromas. Pairs well with salt…y foods.

via:  The Third Bottle
* Bendy Elbows - a great phrase from the Awl.

“untitled implosion” by Erosie Erosie
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Harnessing the Untapped Energy in Water Pipes

Water is often stored high above the city that consumes it. To reach its destination, water travels through a system of gradually shrinking pipes until it comes out the faucet. As the water travels, excess pressure gathers in the pipes, which is dissipated by pressure valves. All that built-up energy leaves the system, wasted.

This type of energy waste is hard to design away. Some water systems are so old they still have hollowed-out cedar logs as pipes. And huge numbers of people depend on the systems continuing to function without a break. So rather than figuring out ways not to waste energy, it's easier to harness and repurpose it. Rentricity, an energy company based in New York City, is doing exactly that by creating electricity from excess pressure in water pipes.

Frank Zammataro, Rentricity’s president, learned about the inefficiencies of municipal water systems after he spent too many hours thinking about a New York City water tower. In 2001, he and his colleagues looked down from their 40th floor Midtown office on the building below and joked about how every time someone flushed on the first floor, water had to travel from the tower on top of the building all the way down. Someone, they thought, ought to put in a wheel in the pipe to capture that squandered energy.

Zammataro took the idea seriously enough that he scheduled a visit to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York to investigate further. The professors told him that a single building didn’t have enough sustainable flow or pressure to make harvesting the energy practical. But one suggested he take a look at municipal water systems and the points where they regulate pressure in the pipelines.

Rentricity takes the energy from those points in a water system and uses it to turn a turbine, creating electricity. The system itself didn’t require any breakthrough technology: the company’s primary innovation was recognizing that a valuable resource was being thrown away. “We applied the technology in a unique way and in a unique place,” says Zammataro. “We're not innovating at a turbine level.”

by Sarah Laskow, Good |  Continue reading:
Photo via (cc) Flickr user CarbonNYC

The Era of Small and Many

Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?

Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?

Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.

Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.

But last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.

And what works on the farm works elsewhere too. Think about our energy future—the phrase that engineers like to use now is “distributed generation.” Since our old fuels were dense in BTUs and concentrated in a few locations, it made sense to site a few giant generating stations where coal or uranium could easily be brought and burned. But the logic of sun and wind is exactly the opposite: millions of rooftops and ridgelines producing power. You can do it in cities as easily as in the country—new satellite and airplane mapping of New York City’s five boroughs showed that the city’s rooftops could provide half its electricity. If you can do that in New York, imagine Shaker Heights, not to mention Phoenix. And once you’ve done it, you’ve got something practical and local: an interconnected grid where everyone brings something and takes something away. A farmers’ market in electrons.

Many of us get a preview of life in the age of small and many when we sit down at our computers each day. Fifteen years ago we still depended on a handful of TV networks and newspaper conglomerates to define our world for us; now we have a farmers’ market in ideas. We all add to the flow with each Facebook post, and we can find almost infinite sources of information. It’s reshaping the way we see the world—not, of course, without some trauma (from the hours wasted answering e-mail to the death of too much good, old-school journalism). All these transitions will be traumatic to one extent or another, since they are so very big. We’re reversing the trend of generations.

by Bill McKibben, Orion |  Continue reading: 
Painting: Suzanne Stryk

What It Feels Like To Get A Tattoo Removed From Your Ass

There's a tattoo studio near my office called Skin Thrills. A sign out front advertises their special offers — $50 roses on Tuesdays, or $25 dollar kanji letters on Thursdays. As I drove past the sign last week, work was quickly driven out of my mind and replaced with two thoughts. One: I wonder what the kanji for "shrimp tempura" looks like. And two: I live in a tattoo-saturated nation.

What used to be a rite of passage reserved for sailors and circus troupes has exploded in the past half century, making the sharp transition from subversive act to fashion statement. In the over-forty crowd, men still bear most of the ink. For the generation to which I belong, neither gender, nor skin tone, nor profession of choice (come to think of it, a Caduceus tat would be pretty awesome) is off limits. I should know. I'm a member of tatted-up, twenty-n-change masses. But, in addition to belonging to that every-increasing minority, I also belong to a smaller rank and file that will undoubtedly come to grow along side the multiplying rates of tattoo-getters in my age bracket. I am, I admit with some ambivalence, one of the thousands of Americans who is undergoing the process of tattoo removal this year.

"Everyone thinks they're hot shit when they're sixteen, right?" I quipped to the laser technician the first time he examined the offending ink. I tried very hard to sound calm and nonchalant. I'm sure I failed. Hey, it's not easy to crack wise when you're half naked in the presence of a complete stranger, especially not when they ask you about the origin of the tattoo you're removing. Just two months before the start of my senior year of high school, my best friend du jour and I skipped merrily into the local tattoo parlor in downstate New York on a whim. We then proceeded to request –- wait for it, now –- matching tattoos. Matching. And it gets worse: we picked them off of a display on the wall. The cherry on top of this cupcake of a scenario? Our tattoo of choice actually was a pair of cherries. The end result was anything but badass. But it was bad. And it was definitely on my ass.

Long after my banal compatibility with the ink-bound BFF had dissolved (in retrospect, I guess a mutual fondness for Sour Cream n' Onion Pringles isn't the strongest of starting points for a lasting friendship), I was left with an indelible, faux-rockabilly stamp on my rump and a Thursday afternoon appointment with Danny Fowler, tattoo legend turned tattoo removal expert. The technology of choice, he assured me, had developed a sophisticated sensitivity to a wide range of colored inks in recent years. I am compelled to note that an increase in efficacy fails to correlate with a greater measure of delicacy.

by Gemma de Choisy, Jezebel |  Continue reading:
Image via Andy Nortnik/Shutterstock.com