Diederichsen on The Prince and the Wolf

The prominent German author Diedrich Diederichsen discusess The Prince and the Wolf, among other things, in THIS POST.

the late Omar Suleiman at work

I posted this NY Times photo on April 16. My first reaction was that it made Suleiman look like the world’s sleaziest architect. Of course, he was something a lot worse than that.

I’m actually quite surprised by his death. He seemed to have unnatural powers of dark vitality that would allow him to live to age 100 and then shape-shift into a bat or wolf and take on another incarnation elsewhere. At any rate, I certainly never thought he would be outlived by Mubarak. How quickly they’ve all turned into yesterday’s men.

How much of the Suleiman story was myth and how much was reality? I don’t know, but I do know that you’d have to think twice about anyone surrounded even by myths of the sort linked with Suleiman’s name. One story involves a difficult interrogation with a prisoner who would say nothing. It is said that Suleiman then summoned a second prisoner into the room and shot him straight in the head in front of the first prisoner in order to show that he meant business.

Omar Suleiman reportedly dies

A fearsome and frightening man has passed:

“Mubarak’s spy chief passes away while undergoing medical examinations in US hospital; he was a staunch enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist forces”

He was not just a staunch enemy of “the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist forces,” but also of anyone who wants to live in peace without fear of arbitrary arrest and torture.

The Lego Wire

HERE. Self=explanatory even from the title.

Hat tip, Stuart.

It makes me wonder whether Legos might be cultivated into a medium of more serious dramatic expression, much like marionettes have always been in Europe.

don’t ever use Boingo if you can avoid it

I haven’t mentioned lately how much I despise Boingo wireless service, which has a wifi monopoly in London Heathrow, Chicago O’Hare, and some other airports. They don’t do honest business.

For one thing, their signup pages have such misleading wording that even a skeptical professor of philosophy can fall into the trap of accidentally signing up for perpetual monthly service.

What they do is give you the explicit option to sign up for either one day of service or the ongoing monthly plan. You click for today only and you think the issue is settled. Then, after you enter your credit card information, they send you a gently friendly message saying something like “we highly recommend that you sign up for our automatic Boingo server alert,” or something like that. The impression they give is that you’re just signing up for some sort of innocuous alert service. But then there’s fine print of the sort that most of us never read, and buried in that fine print is a notification that you’re about to sign up for the monthly service.

It’s a reprehensible modified bait-and-switch operation. You feel like you’ve already clearly expressed that you only want to buy service for today and after that you never wish to hear from them again. But once you’ve cleared that hurdle, they sneak you back into the fold after you’ve already declined their larger package.

By the time I checked my credit card bill carefully, they’d already charged me for something like 4 months. I asked them to erase all those charges since clearly I had never used the service again, but of course they wouldn’t.

And now I’m facing another possible stunt from them. During that long flight delay in Chicago in June I had no choice but to use those Boingo chumps again. This time I was careful to read all of the fine print and not sign up for anything. But I still can’t be sure of what they’re up to, those manipulating crooks. They never sent me my user name and password, and damned if I remember them from June, and thus I can’t check my account on their website. So they may yet sneak some more charges in on me this time.

At any rate, Boingo is a scummy, manipulative company, and I suppose Heathrow and O’Hare must be getting some sweet kickbacks from them. Congratulations on earning a dishonest living, Boingo.

Their address is listed as: “10960 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 800, Los Angeles, CA,” which sounds just like the address of a Raymond Chandler villain.

At moments like this I often fantasize about an alternative life as a vicious Attorney General tearing out the throats of gougers and misleaders. I’d be really tough. These scum-scraping Three-card Monte dealers would be obliterated in my world.

It’s not that difficult a principle: provide an honest service for a fair price.

intense question on Brazil visa application

Wow:

“Have you ever ordered, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion under the control, direct or indirect, of the Nazi government of Germany, or of any area occupied by, or allied with, the Nazi government of Germany, or have you ever participated in genocide?”

No.

another of my least favorite clichés

The usually incisive Nate Silver, in an article (with which I agree) about how the New York Knicks made an economic mistake by not matching Houston’s offer for Jeremy Lin:

“If the definition of insanity is trying the same process over and over and hoping for better results, Dolan’s strategy of locking in 30-something veterans to max contracts every year has been a little mad.”

The act of trying the same process over and over and hoping for better results is sometimes known as “patience,” “determination,” or “perserverance.” It seems to have been a relatively minor novelist who minted this idea, but it has now reached viral proportions, at least in the United States, among both educated and uneducated people. I’m disappointed that someone of Silver’s brilliance tripped into the manure.

Actually, this seems to be one of Silver’s lazier columns. Even in the opening, he gave us a lazy cliché:

“In February, during the height of the Linsanity phenomenon, I attended a game at Madison Square Garden between the Knicks and the Sacramento Kings. The tickets cost an arm and a leg.”

Forgivable in conversation. But if you’re writing a major media column, it’s not too tough to come up with some sort of fresh variation on “cost an arm and a leg.”

NFL facing monster class action suit

Lester Munson, ESPN’s in-house legal sportswriter (he’s an actual lawyer no less than a sportswriter), has a typically fine piece of work HERE. The NFL now faces the consolidation of more than 3,000 lawsuits by former players related to concussions. Among the claims is that the NFL falsified research on the issue to minimize the potential risks. There has been a rash of dramatic brain damage cases to former players in recent years, and I for one think it’s far from ridiculous to speculate that the very existence of the sport might be in trouble.

The recent Dave Duerson case was exemplary. The former Chicago Bears player was well-liked, a successful businessman, and in 2004 was even recruited by the Illinois Republican Party to run for the Senate against Barack Obama (though he declined to enter politics). Within a couple of years he was behaving erratically, abusing his wife, and failing miserably in areas where he used to succeed. Duerson committed suicide with a gunshot to the chest in hopes that his intact brain could be studied. Studies of his brain did indicate serious concussion-related injury.

But that wasn’t the first case. Former Pittsburgh great Mike Webster was demented, homeless, and living out of a truck before he finally died young.

Would you let your sons play the sport? My answer right now would probably be “no.”

Ian Bogost on Turing

In The Atlantic, HERE.

more Schopenhauer on Hegel

Steven Shaviro posted another funny reminder:

“crazed word-combinations which torture and exhaust the mind that tries in vain to extract some meaning from them”