“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…

It bugs me, as a European by birth and identification, that the French voted no to the European consitution. It bugs me because there’s an asymmetry in the yes/no choice. To say yes is much more difficult. It is not just affirmation of something present at hand; it is affirmation of a future, of change, and of things unknown. No,…

amazon apparently revealed names of anonymous reviewers last week on its Canadian site. And took a week to provide a fix. A lot of reviewers, as it turned out, were reviewing their own books. Or worse, trashing competing authors. I’d like to think that the folks at Amazon did this on purpose. Just as a way of reminding reviewers that…

i was thinking last night about Niklas Luhmann’s “Social Systems,” which I just slogged through. An incredible book, but very very dense. He defines communication in part by the fact that any communication can be accepted or rejected. Which of course is consistent with communication theories and makes sense. But last night I was thinking about the fact that it’s…