witch doctor curses LeBron on air in Cleveland

HERE.

All right, it sounds like light “shock jock” radio humor, and I guess it is.

But imagine how these people are going to feel if anything really bad happens to LeBron now.

Yes, the announcement of the move to Miami was very badly handled. But LeBron is still a nice guy as well as one of the greatest players of all time, and he’s only 25 after all. I think we all still did some immature things at 25.

Paul the octopus dies

Famous for his flawless World Cup predictions this summer, Paul the Octopus HAS DIED at the age of two-and-a-half.

This raises an interesting question… It is very common to have shared global mourning over the deaths of various humans. John F. Kennedy was placed on postage stamps around the world, Princess Diana was a global icon whose death sent shockwaves in all directions, John Lennon was familiar to everyone, etc.

But what have been the best examples of collective global mourning for an animal?

I suppose there have been some disturbing sudden deaths of racehorses, such as RUFFIAN, the filly who was euthanized after a 1975 match race with Foolish Pleasure. (I have a vague memory of seeing this happen at age 7 and not really being sure what it was all about, except that the disturbingness was obvious.)

Any other cases come to mind? I feel like there have been some that I’m forgetting.

But there aren’t too many global celebrity animals to begin with. And whereas the really tragic human deaths of a global scale are those by assassination or accident, celebrity animals (what few there are) are never assassinated, and thus we are probably considering cases of celebrity animals dying in accidents.

And by these criteria, racehorses would be the prime candidate: there are lots of famous racehorses, and they do have a legitimate chance of fatal accidents every time they compete.

Michael Austin coming to Claremont

Hey, this is great news. Just saw it on the COMPLETE LIES blog.

That makes a number of old friends who will be there, plus Michael and also Andrew Goffey, both of them known to me only by email.

which reminds me of a catchphrase from my early 20’s…

At one point early in the DePaul years, I read a newspaper story (probably apocryphal, since this was way way before 9/11) claiming that the CIA listens in randomly on 20% of U.S. domestic phone calls.

Just in case it was true, my friends and I would make sure to throw in a couple of outrageous statements per conversation, followed by the disclaimer: “Just kidding, CIA.” Maybe we all have files somewhere now.

what Amazon needs

Amazon needs a button that says “Sorry Amazon, I was just joking,” for whenever you browse a book solely for the sake of a laugh. Otherwise, their marketing computer takes it very seriously.

When I clicked on that romance novel The Princess and the Wolf just because of its resonance with the Latour/Harman/Erdélyi volume of a similar name, I was having embarrassing Harlequin-type recommendations for the next week or so.

Now, having directed everyone to those crazy miscellaneous books by Dutch authors yesterday, I’m paying a karmic price for it with a number of preposterous recommendations that haven’t the least connection with the Netherlands, but do link up with some of the flimsier subject matter addressed by some of those volumes.

Good thing Latour isn’t female, because then I might have called it Princess of Networks, and then Peter Erdélyi would have run into infringement on his excellent choice of title for the LSE volume.

first book sighting

Speaking of Los Angeles:

“Just got TOWARDS SPECULATIVE REALISM in the mail — excited! Just thought you’d wanna know the book has made its way in properly objective form to Los Angeles…”

Heck yes, I’m glad to know. This is the first confirmed sighting of the book by any purchasing human.

In this case just as with Prince of Networks (which Ian Bogost hand-delivered to me in a Cairo hotel lobby during the first two seconds of our personal acquaintanceship) I’ll probably be about the 200th person to get a copy.

extra talk at UCLA

I’ll be giving “An Overview of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Philosophy” on the morning of the UCLA event on December 1. If you happen to be in Los Angeles that day, you know where to go.