Interview with the World’s Foremost Beard Expert

I've never "reblogged" something before, as blogger doesn't have a button for it and I feel weird copy/pasting the entire content of a website posting from elsewhere, but I have never wanted to do so more than now. About two years ago I first heard an excellent interview with Dr. Christopher Oldstone-Moore, a historian at Wright State University. He is a pogonologist, or studier of beards (among other things, I presume). The interview is conducted by David Malki ! of Wondermark.com, an excellent website featuring repurposed Victorian illustrations used to make comic strips. Malki ! (the exclamation point is part of his name) is a very vocal beard advocate, so I was not surprised to see/hear him follow his interest into the academic realm.

I think it is safe to say that this interview is fascinating, even if you are not as thoroughly interested in beards as I am. Particularly notable is the discussion of the origins of shaving, and how it came to be the "default" look of men. Then later, the time when beards suddenly burst back on to the fashion scene. Both can be traced to remarkably specific historical events (hint: they are 2179 years apart)!

To quote Dr. Oldstone-Moore:
"The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that these changes are connected to whatever conceptions we are developing of masculinity. Ultimately, it is always tied to the question of what is it to be a man, and 'how should I be a man?' That’s the existential version of that question, as a man. However that question gets answered is going to have a lot to do with what you do with facial hair. And that’s why I’m interested in studying facial hair, because I think it’s a way of looking at the history of how people think about their masculinity."

The interview is 24 minutes long, and both the mp3 and the entire transcipt (with visual aides!) can be found here:
http://wondermark.com/the-worlds-foremost-beard-expert/

Anyone who cares about me (or history, fashion, or masculinity) at all should listen to or/and read this interview.



The blogger's beard visits Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park

A Moment of Commentary

It is easy to think of the internet as a massive sea of trivialities, memes and pop-culture references. There is a lot of creativity out there but, maybe because of the sheer volume of media one consumes in 10 minutes of internetting, it is easy to think that the actual work took as little time and effort to create as it did to enjoy. Of course it doesn't. A lot of time and effort can go into silly video or a good joke. Even lolcats, perhaps the most ubiquitous and trivial of internet trivialities, require a good photo.

A few months ago my friend Whitney directed me to this neat poster/flowchart describing the logic of crediting an image online. (As it was created on a design blog, it is also appropriately cool looking.) A cartoonist/author/general creative-type person I follow recently wrote about his corner of this emerging debate, extending the conversation to creativity in merchandising authorship and pop-culture commentary. It also gets at why we feel the need to wear images on t-shirts, the motivations behind that impulse that I've not heard articulated as efficiently anywhere else. It's a short but excellent blog post by an internet creator and merchant who is walking the line between "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and "give credit where credit is due." Or between "nobody 'owns' a funny sentence" and "simply repeating a funny sentence isn't funny."

"I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster."
(Read the excellent original piece here.)


By the way, apparently the original insult was removed, from at least one website.

Brain atrophy vs. them learnin' books

I thought this was really interesting, especially for my highly-educated parents, who are approaching their 70's and trying not to be terrified of Alzheimer's or other dementias:
Higher education lowers dementia risk.

First of all, they provide support for the title's preposition that higher ed does help against dementia risk, which is a compelling idea on its own. Fleshing out the topic, the second half of the press release is particularly interesting. They define dementia "risk" as the inability to cope with one's changing brain, since dementia is an experience of symptoms and not a specific physical problem of the brain. The implication is that since more educated/flexible brains cope better, it takes a higher level of physical pathology to manifest the actual impairment that would display the symptoms to be called "dementia." It sounds a bit like splitting hairs/psychobabble, but it's really very profound. Basically, education adds resiliency to the brain, so it can adapt to and endure brain changes and the person still experiences a fairly normal life. It's really cool to see some real meta-analytical evidence of this theory!

It's kind of like the recent recommendation that doctors stop screening for prostate cancer after age 75 because even if a man gets it, he'll probably die from something else first. So he'll have prostate cancer, but won't experience any symptoms, so who cares? Why worry about it or go through painful treatments if it won't change anything? Again, it sounds strange to think of that as a good thing, but since I value quality of life, I see it as great. The chances that I will have the brain pathology that could cause dementia are equal to others in my age group, I have no physical advantages. But the chances that I will actually experience dementia are much lower. And that goes for pretty much everyone in my family, particularly my dad. He has both a Ph.D. and a very sincere fear of his mind diminishing before his body. I sent him this article in the hopes that it will alleviate some of that fear. Now for the next step, I'd like to see the relationship between fear of dementia and experience of dementia. (So all you neuroscientists reading this blog, you know, get on that.)

Psychology has repeatedly shown that when it comes to brains you either "use it or lose it." So get educated earlier in your life to build your brain's coping and flexibility, then keep using your coping skills throughout your life to maintain them, and you'll end up so far ahead that as your brain starts to fail you won't notice!

And that's my musing on science for the morning.

Logic Games and Web Comics

I'm currently reading Superfreakonomics, the followup to the popular Freakonomics. I really enjoyed the last chapter I read, titled, "Unbelievable stories about apathy and altruism." There's a really interesting part about Economics games/experiments (click for the excerpt, though the book goes even deeper on several of the topics mentioned here). I participated in one such experiment when I was in undergrad, so it was really interesting to hear the theoretical logic behind it. These experiments altered theory and "conventional wisdom" about people's behavior in surprisingly concrete ways. The chapter then goes on to describe real-world and laboratory experiments that changed the new conventional wisdom yet again. I didn't see the later developments in my brief exposure to econ experiments, so it was even more interesting to hear about the changes that have happened since then.

Hearing about these quandaries reminds me of how much fun logic games can be. The book (not the above excerpt) describes "The Prisoners' Dilemma" (note the apostrophe, which I believe to be more correctly placed than the more-common "prisoner's" since there are two people making choices). The Prisoners' Dilemma, and some of its cultural impact, is shown here in comic form. There's also the deceptively tricky puzzle: "There are two doors, one to heaven and one to hell. In front of them are two identical guards, except one always lies and one always tells the truth. You have one question to ask one guard before you make your choice and live with the consequences." It took me a while to remember how to answer this puzzle, and I'll fully admit that I don't think I could have figured it out if I hadn't heard the answer in some long-distant conversation. But in reading about it I came across this even trickier variant. It looks intimidating to read, but I found the email conversation a very thoughtful way of walking a non-logician through the problem. But if you really want to stretch your brain, try this variant.

Speaking of that, I found a new webcomic I like called

Following are some of my favs:

• Today's. What a good day to discover this site! It's like a cautionary tale for me on my laziest of days.


• ...and speaking of cautionary tales, this is a cautionary tale from the past about me on April 14, 2009, at 11:50pm. (Thank God for Tessa, by the way.)


• ...and speaking of the past, try this with your friends from The Future!


• ...and speaking of the future, it's nice to know I'll be appreciated!


• ...and speaking of books I read last year/movies I saw last week, I'm pretty sure this one's straight out of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.


• ...and speaking of the unspeakable!

Buttersafe has been enthusiastically added to my RSS reader. When reading through some of the archives I was literally laughing out loud, which, by the way, I abbrev as "LLOL."

Macksims

Sitting, working, listening to Satie in a coffee shop, I'm pondering one of my favorite quotes:

"When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere."
- François de La Rochefoucauld

Recently I've been interested in François de La Rochefoucauld, a 17th century aristocrat/author. The dude published a whole book called "Maxims" which is quite remarkable. It's just a long collection of pithy sayings, with no narrative and no context other than that which the reader brings. Yet somehow it's really engaging, readable and relevant 350-ish years later. Anyway, I've always thought I'd improve upon quotation over my usual logorrheic way, so maybe I should publish my own books of "Macksims." But I write like I speak, and concision was never my strong suit. Maybe that's why I love punctuation so much: it just lets my thoughts keep on going.

_ . _ .
_ _ . _

The weather is nice and I wish that I owned a bike that wasn't currently being used by some West side thief. (We're coming up on the anniversary of when it was bikenapped out of the old apartment.) I'll get another one eventually, but in the mean time I'm just going to dream about these killer accessories:

Phrenology Bike Helmet. Hand-painted by the artist, all of these bike helmets are amazing. I think it would be well worth $80-$250. I also quite like the wood designs.

Hermes-style reflective pant clips. Are they built on snap-bracelets? There are like 10 cool things about this simple little product.

And as long as I'm dreaming, I wish I had an iPhone so I could put it in this. That's real wood folks! I'd get the bamboo one.

_________________________________________________________

THAT REMINDS ME: I think I'm developing an aesthetic fascination with phrenology (not to be confused with my already established love of Phrenology.) I can add this to my (similar?) fascinations with clipper ships, clocks and old maps. Clearly I am channelling some 19th century explorer, scientist, or general quixotic type.

An interesting story !

Lo, the pony-riders turn in their dusty, rock-topped graves, for David Malki ! tells us how to subvert the US mail.

My friends, check it. Also you should read his fantastic webcomics, created by repurposing 19th century woodcuts and engravings.

Monkeys in Space

Many thanks to Chris Gammell for pointing me towards this:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104578202

God bless Miss Baker's little hero monkey heart!

Ketubah!

Today I learned about the ketubah and I decided I want one when I get married. It's an ancient Jewish tradition that's like a pre-nup, but that promises to maintain all the good things instead of (or in addition to) promising recompense should the marriage end. It's not as weirdly fatalistic as the pre-nup. It's more that one's great marriage is a continual reward for staying married. Ketubot can be artistically rendered to reflect the aesthetics of the couple, and are hung in the house as a decoration AND reminder of the wedding vows. It sounds like a pretty great time.

This is the internet-official story.

I am compelled by the idea of the "secular humanist" ketubah, such as one using this text, but then decorating it like the one in the wikipedia article. Other cool designs I found were:

• This "tongues of flame" kind of design covered in interlocking leaves, books, and people.
  
• This fancy colorful one which reminds me of a coat-of-arms or a medieval illustrated manuscript.
  
• This attractive circular one which is notable for its unusual shape, its use of Hebrew as a language and as an element of design, and pretty watercolors.
  
• This striking one that looks packed full of symbols, notably books and birds.
  
• And perhaps coolest of all, this one that represents the bride and groom as lions presided over by an intense eagle. I also like how this one shows both the Hebrew and English translations, and has space for an appropriate wedding photo.
  

I was raised and consider myself both culturally and spiritually Christian, but I'm more into the Beatitudes kind of Christianity. Since my wedding ceremony will likely be very humanist and individual to my bride and me, I'm all for adopting any traditions from any cultures that we find symbolic or meaningful.

I think we all know what one create/studies here...

(correct answer: parties)
Photo taken at Artists and Models 2008




In the fall of 2003 I was beginning my junior year of college, working hard, playing hard, and was thoroughly confused about my romance life and my life direction in general. It was a fun but stressful time. I had lauded the first Andrew W.K. record ("I Get Wet") as a tribute/satire/tribute-again to everything over-the-top about rock and, legitimately, the ultimate party starter. Though the joke was basically over, I was anticipating the followup. Turns out "The Wolf" really wasn't anything that spectacular, or even as timely as his first. But there was something special about the video for the first (only?) single "Never Let Down." I found myself going to mtv.com and watching this video at the beginning of every day. Sometimes I'd revisit it in the afternoon. This went on for weeks. It was just out of irony, right? It was building up to some punchline where the music major was writing about Stravinsky while playing 3-chord power pop. ...right? I think it may have started that way, but looking back I think it was more than a joke or a guilty pleasure. I actually appreciated the simple affirmation howled above those even equally simple riffs. At the time, of course, I was far too cool to be admit being lifted by something so adolescent. But even today, it's hard not to believe him when he says "I'm a friend by your side / You're never gonna be alone" the way only he can. As we used to say: WWAWKD? Party. And sometimes in life that's exactly what you need.

No time like the presents

There is no time that I want to blog more than when I have something very important to do. I mean, desperately important. This struck often when I was studying for the GRE's (especially the night before), when I was filling out grad school applications (especially ON deadline day), and when I was writing my final paper last semester (again, especially on deadline day). In less than one hour a grad school is going to call me and interview me and decide if they want to allow me to pay money to them and move to their city and attend their classes. I haven't even gotten out a copy of my resume, let alone looked up the person who's interviewing me. I'm also hoping to grab a shower so I can feel fresh and focused. But before that, I have a few things I want to get off my chest.

It's really been bothering me lately when people mispronounce words and phrases, especially things where the meaning has remained essentially the same but the phrase has been warped.

A perfect example. How do you pronounce (and/or spell-out) the abbreviation etc.? Seriously, think about it. We know what it means, we say it quickly, write the abbreviation, and don't think about what it actually IS.

Most people say excetera. It's not that. It's et cetera. Two words, Latin for "and the rest" if I'm not mistaken. And there's a T in there, not an X. Now, it doesn't change the meaning, you can write the abbreviation just as easily, but you can now speak the phrase correctly. It's so easy. It will be noticed appreciated by the people who are in the know, which now includes you.

Other good examples:
- take it for granite = take it for granted.
- for all intensive purposes = for all intents and purposes.
- (just because I work at a coffee shop) expresso = esspresso.


After a grammar-police missive like this I'm tempted to say "watch your p's and q's," but that's another story.

Love, Jack

"I am a serious dude who loves Spongebob"

Last semester I was working with an arts integration program at the Oracle Charter School. The school was not a great place. Middle school is a rough time for everyone, but some middle schools are more enriching than others. Oracle was a place where the strains of adolescence were constantly compounded by a student culture of near-constant derision and a faculty culture of every-man-for-himself disempowerment. This was a place that seriously needed the arts, but the students were so guarded that it was like pulling teeth to ask them to do something creative. Whenever the slightest point of creativity broke the surface it was all we teachers could do to nurture it before the environment inevitably crushed it back under the surface. The triumphs were small, but meaningful. The following poem was written by a student in 6th or 7th grade. I believe it speaks volumes about the processing of the author's internal life and the prospects of his external life.


Spongebob by Nijio Porter

I am a serious dude who loves Spongebob
I wonder why the sky is blue
I hear the phone ringing loudly
I see a book about Spongebob
I am a serious dude who loves Spongebob

I pretend that I could meet Spongebob
I feel so light in the water
I touch the top of my doghouse
I worry there will be no more Spongebob
I cry when I miss Spongebob when he is on
I am a serious dude that loves Spongebob

I understand that animals are dumb
I say reading is good
I dream I would be famous
I try to do good in school
I hope I will have a life
I am a serious dude who loves Spongebob

What's the big Idea?

It has been over two months since I last posted anything here. I'm sorry to admit that, but it is the Truth. I have heard that it should set me free. I am looking forward to that.

From what I am in need of free-setting? The GRE Psychology Subject Test, that's what. The adjective I chose to describe it two months ago was "heinous," and I stand by my diction. There are about 1 million things that could be on the test, some of them absolutely unpredictable, and I'm convinced a few of them are unknowable (at least, no Reasonable person could known them). But I have been studying, for two months putting Facts into my brain. I have not done much else. My social life has waned. I haven't seen a movie or heard a new record in weeks. Several friends have forgotten I existed. Upon seeing me at work, one friend fainted, thinking me a ghost. Parts of my skin have become transparent due to lack of exposure to the sun. My family members cut me out of their wills. I have lost the ability to communicate verbally. I dream in college-rule.

But, like Dave Eggers, I have found the perfect panacea for my personal problems: a magazine! Or more accurately, a 'zine, because you and I both know I can't afford any "maga." It is only in a very conceptual stage right now, as I am thinking of it as The Next Project after I finish this test. It will probably be very similar in interests and style to this blog. This should not be surprising.

It should be good. I mean, they always say "it looked good on paper" for a plan that doesn't work in the practical world (see: Communism, Trickle-down economics), but there is no idiom for a good plan that has not yet been set to paper.

At this point I realize that I'm just killing time, and I should get back to my test review. More on all this later. By the way, the test is tomorrow morning. So good luck to me,
(and good luck to you too, whatever you're doing,)
Jack

Looking forward to numbers 23 – ∞

I have written 2 blogs recently, but they were both on paper ("taking the "b" out of the portmanteau "blog"), and I'll upload them when I get to it. In the meantime, I'm compelled to tell a short story.

I'm taking a graduate school class at the University of Buffalo this fall. A departmental secretary named Nancy Myers signed me up for the class, but to do anything else I need my UB "person number" and my UB password. In order to get one, you need the other, and vice-versa. Now I know UB is a giant bureaucratic public school where students are treated as numbers, but I have the handy connection of my recent nice interactions with the aforementioned departmental secretary. These people hold all the power at universities, so I am always extra nice to make sure I can get help when I need it. (And because, you know, I'm nice.)

In order to circumvent the need for person number or password to get the other, I finally found a help link saying I could request my info be sent to me if the department also requested it. Bingo, I know just who to ask. So I sent Ms. Myers a very nice email carefully explaining the situation and clearly requesting her help, and I received this as a response:


Alright, no big deal. These types of auto-responses are common enough in busy offices. I'm sure Ms. Iszkun was more than capable of helping me out, especially if I wrote another nice email explaining the situation. So I did, and received this as a response:


I am not ashamed to admit that I only read 148 pages of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 (especially because the book report I gave, including questions by the teacher, got an A+), but I read enough of it to know one when I see one. Come on, UB, don't be like this. I am new to you, UB; I am a blank slate waiting to be impressed by every level of your institution. I will treat you right, promising to participate beneficially in your community and to sing your praises to other potential members, if you will only just offer me a logical path to follow on my academic journey. This is all I ask, UB, and we are off to a bad start.