This dug up by Kylen Campbell, had to post it, it’s just too good. “This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get…

“Place your bets!” Words that can be articulated in virtually any language. The art of the wager is among our oldest cultural inventions. The fun and excitement of gambling notwithstanding, wagering is an affirmation of chance, recognition of a different kind of logic: one that is random, brutish, and sometimes profoundly sweet. “Yes!” We wager to get a shot at…

I’m posting some old writings, mostly untouched (for better or worse). This one’s from 2001 one and is about how well the Net handle’s the mechanism of seduction… If what we desire is the desire of the other, then seduction is where it’s at. For its in our receptivity to the other that desire is awakened even as it yields…

I’m posting some old writings, mostly untouch (for better or worse). Here’s one on projection that i wrote up when thinking about the screening effect of technology in online dating. The “chemistry” moment that comes with meeting a person in real life contrasts sharply with the excitement of the anticipation…. Projection is a term used by psychologists to describe the…

A moment of Baudrillardian irony appeared in the NY Times this morning. Jean Baudrillard is the French philosopher-critic whose concepts of the Hyperreal and Simulacra landed him many frequent flier miles during the late 1980s and 1990s. Mistaken for a post-modernist, he’s actually more of a nostalgic and perhaps melancholic modernist, I think. His passage on the hyperreal was summarized…

I received one of these “Awesome Card” emails today from Mom. Click it if you’d like, but trust me, it’s horrible. A fishy (Christian motif I presume, in my ignorance of such things) Flash “Sol et Lumiere” type of animation in which a humorless still life of fish, shells, and sea weed assembles itself, to rousing music, into the American…

Last night’s ninth inning call on White Sox hitter A.J. Pierzynski, with two outs in the can, allowing him to take first base when he’d been ruled struck out, and leading ultimately to a White Sox win, fell on Angels fans like the period at the end of this sentence. In game play sports (see my last posting), the rules…

Wender’s called it “the anxiety of the goal keeper before the penalty kick.” I think that might be the equivalent, in the soccer world, of the suspense that baseball stretches into an entire game form. I used to think the sport was boring, but that’s when I thought it was a game comprised of a lot of waiting for very…