Saturday, March 9, 2013
How to Score an Office Wife
Longtime readers of GQ will recognize the term. As Tom Prince wrote a few years back, the work wife is the person who "knows you better than anyone." My office spouse and I were confidants who shared a cubicle pod. Sprightly banter ping-ponged between us all day long. We never hesitated to tell each other stuff too intimate or cringe-making to share with the rest of the office. On the occasions when we were driven to talk nasty smack about our co-workers, we would switch to stealth mode—IM—erupting into synchronous cackles that turned nearby heads. And we stuck close together, for safety, when office parties threatened to turn superweird.
Ours was a beautiful work marriage built on a mutual affection and understanding. I let her prattle on about her idyllic life with her (actual) husband, cooed over photos of three-bedroom condos she hoped to buy, and gave her a big, happy hug when she announced that she'd become pregnant. She let me prattle on about my disastrous romantic misadventures, helped me draft polite but firm text messages declining second dates, and repeatedly assured me that I would not die alone, at 53, via aspiration of unheated minestrone soup chugged straight from the can.
And then one terrible day—citing the onset of morning sickness and a plan to freelance from home once her baby arrived—she up and quit. Our cubicle pod went silent. I'd been work divorced.
It was obvious to me that I needed to work remarry. And soon, before my office-bachelor habits became too ingrained. I surveyed my options: the high-powered execs, the lowly assistants, the randos who sit over by the printer station whose jobs are still not entirely clear to me. I even eyed—vowing to remain open-minded—the hulking mailroom guy with the forearm tattoos and graying ponytail.
I'd been lucky. My first office marriage was pretty much work love at first sight. This time would be different. I'd need to have a game plan.
So I drew up a set of guidelines. Should, heaven forbid, your own work marriage ever dissolve, you may wish to consult and abide by these suggestions.
by Seth Stevenson, GQ | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
The Blind Man Making the World's Best Glacier Vodka
That’s how I’m served my first shot of the stuff one wintry March night after landing in Anchorage. A couple dozen locals are partying inside a ranch house strung with holiday lights near the frontier bars downtown. Jet-lagged and hungry, snow caked up my jeans, I have been whisked into the kitchenette, where the effervescent hostess, wearing a green beaded necklace, pours me a jigger. “It’s better with this,” she says, tossing in the salmon with a tiny splash.
The hostess and some others here are from the Alaska Distillery, based in nearby Wasilla. The small company has made a name for itself in the booming flavored-vodka sector—now 20 percent of the overall market—with a range of innovative blends, including the smoked-salmon vodka, introduced in 2010, and the first commercially available vodka distilled with hemp seeds, dubbed Purgatory and released in February 2012. (It contains no THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.) These concoctions, as well as a half-dozen fruit-infused vodkas, have the unique distinction of being made partly with meltwater from icebergs harvested in Prince William Sound. (...)
Because glacier harvesting is done in insignificant quantities, there’s little regulation of it around the world. There are no federal guidelines in the United States. In Alaska, the only state that requires permits, there has been only one permit holder for most of the past 15 years—Scott Lindquist, head distiller of Alaska Distillery. A salt-and-pepper-haired 51-year-old, he takes to the water several times each year during the September-to-May tourism off-season to collect some 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of icebergs from Prince William Sound. He hauls in blocks weighing 300 to 8,000 pounds so he can tap their ancient water, which he insists is the best in the world. “It’s the quality of something so special and so old,” he says.
The challenges and risks inherent to Lindquist’s work are heightened by the fact that he suffers from optic atrophy, a degenerative eye condition that blurs his vision so much that he is considered legally blind. Though he’s not able to drive a car or navigate a boat, the beauty of the pristine glaciers lures him onto the water.
“I’m blind,” he says, “but I have vision.” (...)
The first surge of interest in Alaskan glacier ice began in the late 1980s. Japan’s economy was the envy of the world, and entrepreneurial bar owners there, looking for another way into the wallets of flush businessmen, started pitching a unique up-sell that tapped into the country’s fascination with the American wild: authentic Alaskan glacier ice cubes. Cocktails went for $50.
When fishermen in Alaska eagerly took to harvesting icebergs, the state’s Department of Natural Resources scrambled to come up with guidelines, which still stand today. No ice can be taken inside a national park. If a seal has hauled itself out on a berg, you can’t collect within a mile of it. Anyone taking more than 40,000 pounds of ice from a single source needs a permit, which now costs $500. Permit applicants at the time estimated that the market for glacier ice in Japan alone would amount to 16 million pounds per year, with another four million sold in California.Lindquist got in a few years after the initial rush. Raised in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, he struggled with his eye condition, repeating several grades and missing plays as a high school tackle. When he was 19, he moved to Cordova, Alaska, to take a job on a commercial seafood-processing boat, a notoriously brutal gig. But he ended up on a beautifully refurbished wooden vessel and fell in love with life on the water. “Once I put my foot on that boat, I knew I was never coming back,” he says. Because of his poor sight, being a fisherman was not an option, but after a year in Alaska he trained to be a herring-roe diver. (The mask magnified his vision.) He’d spend just three months a year diving—the roe was selling for $1,500 a ton—and the rest of his time hanging out in Hawaii. Eventually, he married and settled in Cordova, raising two kids.
Like many Alaskans, Lindquist saw icebergs as a convenient resource, ideal for packing coolers for fish or beer. But he started hearing about guys who were earning money selling the stuff to make fancy ice cubes and wondered if there might be an opportunity there. Before we went out on the boat, he recalled a day in the mid-'80s when he was on Prince William Sound with some friends, contemplating his future. At one point, he looked down into the dark blue waves and saw a sparkling shard of whitish-blue glacier. “I took a piece in my hand,” he tells me, “and I said, ‘OK, this is going to be the next thing in my life, this piece of ice.’”
Several years after that, Lindquist would daydream about making that change. Then, suddenly, he was forced to. On March 24, 1989, Lindquist and his crew were getting ready to set off from the dock when a fisherman told him there’d been an oil spill on Bligh Reef, right in the heart of the herring grounds. Lindquist was assigned to the first reconnaissance boat to investigate the damage from the Exxon Valdez. His stomach dropped the moment he arrived at the site. “It looked like rubber waves: big and thick, no sea or foam, just unbelievable black goo, seabirds covered and sea otters dying,” he remembers. “Then it settled in just what the heck actually happened here.”
The herring were wiped out along with Lindquist’s livelihood, and, soon after, his marriage. “It was a major deal,” he says. “And I never recovered.”
by David Kushner, Outside | Read more:
Photo: Michael Hanson
Russell Brand: My Life Without Drugs
The last time I thought about taking heroin was yesterday. I had received "an inconvenient truth" from a beautiful woman. It wasn't about climate change – I'm not that ecologically switched on – she told me she was pregnant and it wasn't mine.
I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car as an external conduit for the surging melancholy, and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills, the narrow lanes and tight bends were a material echo of the synaptic tangle where my thoughts stalled and jammed.
Morrissey, as ever, conducted a symphony, within and without and the tidal misery burgeoned. I am becoming possessed. The part of me that experienced the negative data, the self, is becoming overwhelmed, I can no longer see where I end and the pain begins. So now I have a choice.
I cannot accurately convey to you the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain. It transforms a tight, white fist into a gentle, brown wave. From my first inhalation 15 years ago, it fumigated my private hell and lay me down in its hazy pastures and a bathroom floor in Hackney embraced me like a womb.
This shadow is darkly cast on the retina of my soul and whenever I am dislodged from comfort my focus falls there.
It is 10 years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook.
The price of this is constant vigilance because the disease of addiction is not rational. Recently for the purposes of a documentary on this subject I reviewed some footage of myself smoking heroin that my friend had shot as part of a typically exhibitionist attempt of mine to get clean.
I sit wasted and slumped with an unacceptable haircut against a wall in another Hackney flat (Hackney is starting to seem like part of the problem) inhaling fizzy, black snakes of smack off a scrap of crumpled foil. When I saw the tape a month or so ago, what is surprising is that my reaction is not one of gratitude for the positive changes I've experienced but envy at witnessing an earlier version of myself unencumbered by the burden of abstinence. I sat in a suite at the Savoy hotel, in privilege, resenting the woeful ratbag I once was, who, for all his problems, had drugs. That is obviously irrational.
The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.
by Russel Brand, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Mark Nolan/WireImage
I had to take immediate action. I put Morrissey on in my car as an external conduit for the surging melancholy, and as I wound my way through the neurotic Hollywood hills, the narrow lanes and tight bends were a material echo of the synaptic tangle where my thoughts stalled and jammed.Morrissey, as ever, conducted a symphony, within and without and the tidal misery burgeoned. I am becoming possessed. The part of me that experienced the negative data, the self, is becoming overwhelmed, I can no longer see where I end and the pain begins. So now I have a choice.
I cannot accurately convey to you the efficiency of heroin in neutralising pain. It transforms a tight, white fist into a gentle, brown wave. From my first inhalation 15 years ago, it fumigated my private hell and lay me down in its hazy pastures and a bathroom floor in Hackney embraced me like a womb.
This shadow is darkly cast on the retina of my soul and whenever I am dislodged from comfort my focus falls there.
It is 10 years since I used drugs or drank alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships and generally a bright outlook.
The price of this is constant vigilance because the disease of addiction is not rational. Recently for the purposes of a documentary on this subject I reviewed some footage of myself smoking heroin that my friend had shot as part of a typically exhibitionist attempt of mine to get clean.
I sit wasted and slumped with an unacceptable haircut against a wall in another Hackney flat (Hackney is starting to seem like part of the problem) inhaling fizzy, black snakes of smack off a scrap of crumpled foil. When I saw the tape a month or so ago, what is surprising is that my reaction is not one of gratitude for the positive changes I've experienced but envy at witnessing an earlier version of myself unencumbered by the burden of abstinence. I sat in a suite at the Savoy hotel, in privilege, resenting the woeful ratbag I once was, who, for all his problems, had drugs. That is obviously irrational.
The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.
by Russel Brand, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Mark Nolan/WireImage
Ask Dr. Google
Analyzing queries made to Google, Bing, and other search engines can reveal the potentially dangerous consequences of mixing prescriptions before they are known to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to a new study. Such data mining could even expose medical risks that slip through clinical trials undetected.Pharmaceuticals often have side effects that go unnoticed until they're already available to the public. This is especially true of side effects that emerge when two drugs interact, largely because drug trials try to pinpoint the effects of one drug at a time. Physicians have a few ways to hunt for these hidden risks, such as reports to FDA from doctors, nurses, and patients. One study, in 2011, data-mined those FDA reports and uncovered a hidden drug interaction: When taken together, the antidepressant paroxetine and the cholesterol suppressant pravastatin cause hyperglycemia, or high blood sugar. After verifying that finding with experiments, the researchers behind the study wondered what other information sources were left untapped.
Enter search engines. Much like Google Flu Trends reveals influenza outbreaks by tracking flu-related search terms, search queries about drug combinations and possible side effects—say, "paroxetine," "pravastatin," and "hyperglycemia"—might enable researchers to identify unanticipated downsides to medications, says bioinformatics researcher Nigam Shah of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "If a lot of people are concerned about a symptom, that in itself is valuable information."
Although many bad reactions to drugs never get reported to doctors, people talk about what's bothering them all the time on a casual basis to their friends or online, notes computational biologist Nicholas Tatonetti of Columbia University, who was also involved with the study. "They don't really know," he says. "They're just reporting on their symptoms, which is just a normal thing that humans love to do."
by Sean Treacy, Science | Read more:
Photo: ParentingPatch/Creative Commons
Friday, March 8, 2013
Marina Abramovic and Ulay
Marina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the 70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again.
At her 2010 MoMa retrospective Marina performed ‘The Artist Is Present’ as part of the show, where she shared a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing and this is what happened.
Five Best System Rescue Discs
When your computer starts behaving strangely, won't boot, or you start getting strange errors that you can't pin down, a great way to troubleshoot the problem is to boot to a rescue disc and see if you can isolate the problem. It might be your operating system, it could be hardware, but you'll never know until you boot to some other media to take a look. That said, there are tons of great system rescue discs to check out if you want a tool to save your ailing system. This week we're looking at five of the best, nominated by you, our readers.
Earlier in the week, we asked you to nominate the best system rescue disc for our roundup. You rolled in with tons of great suggestions, and now we're back to look at the top five.
The Trinity Rescue KitThe Trinity Rescue Kit is a customized Linux distribution that's designed specifically for troubleshooting and reviving ailing systems, whether you're running Windows or Linux. It fits nicely on a CD (or a USB stick if you prefer) and once booted gives you tools to reset lost Windows passwords, scan hard drives for viruses and malware, clone drives, recover lost partitions, even open up the drives as network shares so you can get files off of them and to other computers on your network. It's completely free, although a donation to the developer behind it is always appreciated and keeps the project alive.
Hiren's BootCDHiren's BootCD is pretty legendary, and anyone who's ever worked in support or systems administration has probably used it at least once (or has several version of it lying around still.) The rescue disc is aimed squarely at repairing Windows systems, and includes a wealth of tools to that effect, including antivirus tools to scan your hard drive, anti-malware utilities to clean out spyware and adware, even rootkit detection tools. Hiren's BootCD can also help you repair, adjust, or re-flash your system's BIOS or wipe your CMOS, clean out temporary files and folders, securely erase files, back up your data to another hard drive or to the network, update and back up hardware drivers, scan your system for hardware failures, repair lost or damaged partitions, and much much more. We're only scratching the surface here. It's completely free and always has been. Even if there are other tools in your toolkit, Hiren's BootCD should be among them.
by Alan Henry, Lifehacker | Read more:
Photo by Karin Dalziel.
Upgrade or Die
Yelp has a hundred million unique monthly visitors, up from seventy million at this time last year. The Dow Jones average just reached an all-time high, having passed 14,000 last week, while, according to the Times, corporate profits are enjoying “a golden age”; as a share of national income, they are at their highest point since 1950.
Day by day, problem by problem, American life is being fine-tuned to the point where experts now confidently predict a state of near-complete perfection by Season Five of “Girls.”
In other news, America’s economic and social decline continues. The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total—historically high figures that continue to baffle economists. “We have an unemployment crisis and only a debt problem,” says Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate at M.I.T. The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent.
Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. Analysts predict that the figure will pass ninety per cent at some point during Season Three of “House of Cards.”
The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent.
The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers. Last month, four days after the price of its shares passed a record high of ninety dollars, the company announced that it would eliminate three thousand employees, after having let go four thousand in 2012.
Detroit is experiencing a boom in private investment, with two new clothing stores already open, and a boutique hotel, coffee-bean roasters, and a Whole Foods store planned for downtown.
Detroit is so broke that its firefighters don’t have enough boots and toilet paper. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has announced the appointment of an emergency manager to run the city’s finances.
“It’s almost a tale of two cities,” Rachel Lutz, the thirty-two-year-old owner of the clothing stores, told the Times.
It’s almost a tale of two countries—on the same news day, in the same story, in the same sentence, in the violent yoking together of apparent opposites. “Around the country, as businesses have recovered, the public sector has in many cases struggled and shrunk.” “Although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits—or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock market.” “The wealthiest .1 per cent of Americans now enjoy a life expectancy of 107.3 years and typically die in their sleep, while the bottom sixty per cent can anticipate living only 56.8 years and are statistically more likely to perish in hideous car accidents and firearm incidents, from drug overdoses, or after losing their lower extremities to diabetes.”
All right, I made up the last one. But it’s thinkable, even probable. Things are moving in that direction. Peter Thiel—perhaps the only conservative libertarian tech billionaire who spends much time worrying about this situation, and who also contributes part of his fortune to finding the “cure for aging”—once told me, “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”
Thursday, March 7, 2013
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