A couple of years ago, I spent three months in India working at my (publishing) employer’s small Delhi office.  Apart from the amazing people, just about the very best part of this experience was of course the food.  Some of the very best food I had there was the simplest and cheapest.  Most days when I was in the office I had a tiffin of home-cooked food delivered.  It was never too oily, never too heavy and always delicious (and very safe for foreign guts…no Delhi Belly from this great stuff).

Here’s a little photo series of the experience to get you going.  If you don’t like Indian food, you can just go somewhere else right now.

Greetings from the Delhi cafeteria! Please note my purple tiffin, delivered warm at lunchtime each day for 25 rupees (about 50 cents), in the lower right hand corner.

Click to continue »

Not really.  Probably.

If you have 21 minutes and 42 seconds to spare, you might enjoy getting really depressed listening to this few-years-old presentation by professional doom-and-gloomer James Howard Kunstler.  If you can get past the sweeping generalizations and–umm uh-uh-uh–not-so-smoth-talkin’ verbal ticks, he does make some interesting if fairly obvious points with a pleasingly biting sense of humor.

The presentation’s money quote, highlighted in this New Yorker piece (registration required):

“We have about thirty-eight thousand places that are not worth caring about in the United States,” he’d told the audience, while showing a slide of a bleak intersection separating a Wal-Mart from a Target.  “When we have enough of them, we’re going to have a nation that’s not worth defending.”

If that kind of thing gets you going, the New Yorker article will introduce you to several of “The Dystopians” who, as you might imagine, are having something of a heyday at present.

I don’t usually get a chance to say this, but things seem to be far worse than I thought.

American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer and Star, could be out of business within weeks.

If those two go down, there’s going to be a real opening there.  Most of the big online gossip sites just pass on second-hand news.  The world will still need a team of muckrakers doing genuine reporting.  Who will fill the void?

When the economy eventually bounces back, or at least stabilizes, I wonder what the advertising world will look like.  As even more print newspapers and magazines fold or cut back, will web advertising pick up?  If it does, will it take a different form than it does now?  One of the disadvantages of web ads from an advertiser’s perspective, of course, is invisibility.  It’s too easy for a user to ignore an ad on a Web page, or not even see in the first place.  Even if it’s placed right in the middle of the body of text, our eyes have learned just to pass right over it.

We’ve all seen those full screen ads that take over your monitor the moment you land on a web page.  Normally, now, the user has the option to skip the ad by clicking through to the content.  I wonder if we’ll start to see this click-through option disappear so that users would be held captive for the duration of the advertisement (think Salon.com circa 2004). Sites with a lot of audio (Pandora) and/or visual (web broadcasts of television shows) content already do this kind of thing either before or in between segments.

Advertisers would love it, as it would eliminate one of the main drawbacks of web advertising.  DVR aside, most of us accept the need to sit through television commercials because all the stations have them.  What if all the major, advertising-dependent web sites start doing it?  Yes, other web sites perhaps could ban this kind of thing and try to use that fact to their advantage to grow traffic. But if those web sites depend upon advertising, would they be able to survive by standing up to what may become the industry standard?

I have no idea what will happen and certainly don’t have my finger on the pulse of the ad industry.  But routinely being forced to sit through a lot more web advertisments within a couple of years would not surprise me at all.

The Germans, apparently.  But did you know that they can build homes in cold-ish climates that don’t require a furnace or any other kind of heating system?

Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

The relative simplicity of this really appeals to me.  And because no creature comforts are sacrificed, maybe it even stands a chance of catching on.

For office workers, the work year 2008 is now over.  Even those few who are still working have stopped working.

It seems strange to me that we are still so dependent upon cables for our television service and other forms of telecommunication.  Can’t everything just fly through the air now?

But when nearly half the world’s internet connectivity is interrupted because of a ship’s anchor or a minor earthquake damaging an undersea cable, it’s clear just how much we still rely upon tin-can-and-string technology.

When I read that The New York Times would need 1.3 billion monthly page views to profit as a web-only publication, I believe in my little black heart that most these giants will eventually die and we will one day find it so strange that they ever existed at all.

Smart small operators will thrive.

The son of John Foster Dulles, he was a world-renowned theologian and the only American theologian every appointed to the College of Cardinals.

You don’t care?  Well, here’s something you might care about…

True story:  when I was at Fordham, some friends and I found a giant, Godzilla-like green foam dinosaur in the garbage and then hung it by a rope from the roof of Keating Hall so that it dangled immediately outside of Avery Dulles’s office window.

Do you not comprehend the significance of this prank?  Think harder.  Don’t stop until you’ve found the answer.

I guess we’ll have to wait for the movie to know what happened.  Bet it was delicious.

No, not to Obama (or me). Who really needs your money is the organization fighting Proposition 8 in California.  If passed, Prop 8 will invalidate all same-sex marriages in California and change the state’s Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry there at any point in the future.  The polls currently show a statistical tie.

The Yes On 8 forces are being bankrolled by the fucking Mormons…sorry…the “LDS church” to the tune of $20 million dollars.  Do you think our laws should be dictated by a bunch of cultists in Utah?

Donate now.

Wassup Oz?!

Australia will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government.  The government has declared it will not let internet users opt out of the proposed national internet filter.  The plan was first created as a way to combat child pronography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

This has nothing to do with child pornography.  There are numerous ways that child pornography can be shared and traded that this measure will not effect.

This has everything to do with control.

I predict governments around the globe will become more and more aggressive in trying to push through such laws in the coming years.  Get ready to fight.

Nope.

Check out Japan’s Nikkei index over the past 20+ years.

Tht sux.

It peaked at 38,915.87 on December 29, 1989.  After Japan’s economy took its legendary nosedive, the Nikkei has strugged to get back to 20,000.  It’s now at a 26 year low!

So shall we “privatize” Social Security and put our faith in “the market?”  After all, this isn’t Japan.  As Frank Zappa said, it can’t happen here!

Right?

Right?