The Gandhi Nobody Knows was linked to from Alamut recently, and I have to say I enjoyed it as much as the various pieces that Christoper Hitchens wrote after the beatification of Mother Theresa: A Fanatic, a Fundamentalist and a Fraud on Slate, as well as an interview with Hitchens that appears on secularhumanism.org. The author of the Gandhi piece brings up everything that was omitted from the film: salacious details such as the enemas administered daily by teenage girls, massages administered daily by teenage girls, "testing" his chastity by sleeping naked with...teenage girls, as well as the endorsements of violence from a man portrayed as the ultimate pacifist, his latter-day and much delayed excoriations of the caste system...it goes on and on, and roundly debunks the myth perpetuated by the Academy Award winning (and Indian Government funded) movie, as well as many of the official biographies.

We can't live without heroes. They provide us with examples of lives to which we may aspire, and compel us to build better selves. And yet there is an abiding need to destroy or unmask them, to bring them down to our level, whether by means of a considered essay in The New Yorker, or Slate, or by publishing photographs in supermarket tabloids of celebrities without makeup pumping gas, cigarettes dangling from their lips. "But what about the guns, the drugs and the pederasty?" I asked loudly at various points during the insufferably pious Graceland tour, just for the pleasure of the angry looks I'd get from Elvis's idolators (and of course, they quickly complied). The only word that I can use for the feeling I get when enjoying toppling of various types of saints, and that word is glee -- "glee" implies a kind of malicious joy, or as my OED says "scornful, jesting mockery".

Stewart was attempting to assign culpability for the overflow of the coffee maker -- I had been the one who filled it and yet I had not known that if you screw the lid of the thermos part on too tight, the coffee spills out and floods the countertop. So it was and wasn't my fault, if you know what I mean. "Mistakes were made!" I declared, and somehow got around to pointing out that it was Reagan that had made the phrase famous. Stewart wanted to know in what circumstance it had been said, and in searching the internet for it, I found this great excerpt from Dysfunctional Narratives, or "Mistakes were made" by Charles Baxter, on the rise of the passive voice and the decline of integrity in politics:

I have always loved tangos, they are so sexy, murderous and indecent. I've been listening to them non-stop for the past couple of days. I loved tangos and Borges so much that I moved down to Buenos Aires in 1995, but had to come home after I got sick in Brazil (rainforest, Lariam, you know the story...)

Question: are there any really great tango performers touring around the US and Canada? I mean, besides the Gotan Project and the other electronica versions? Write me at the address at the left if you know of any! Unfortunately, Vancouver doesn't seem to be a tango nexus. A fatal lack of Latinos here, if you ask me, especially after living in San Francisco and New York for so long.

(photo by leslie).

I noticed when I moved from New York to San Francisco that many of the SF cafes have a kind of 70s wood paneling and spider plant vibe. This is in evidence all over the bay area, but especially in the Haight and in Berkeley. During my very first visit to a San Francisco cafe, a longhaired man came over to my table, and without preamble, began reciting this poem:

I don't have a copy of this poem anywhere and so am writing it here from memory, which is notoriously unreliable.

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I posted this from 43 Things, specifically the Crawl the Cafes of San Francisco "thing". 43 Things is social software in which you createa community of like-minded people who share your goals and aspirations, and in the case of this "thing", I was noting that Id already "crawled the cafes of San Francisco" and was deeming it "worth doing". 43 Things is being built by a bunch of smart people, formerly of Amazon, who formed the Robot Co-op in Seattle. These guys came up to visit us a couple months ago, there being a lot of overlapping interests between our two companies, and they really get social software. Last night Stewart told me something that Matt Jones said when asked to define social software. "Social software", Matt said, "is something that gets better the more people are using it." This is a lot harder to achieve than it looks. First, it's really hard to build something that people will not only visit, but return to again and again. And then, once they're there, you find that most web sites get significantly worse the more people that are on it -- think Usenet or Yahoo chat rooms. And then, to look at social software that works, think of Amazon or Craig's List. One thing that both the 43 Things and Flickr teams have done is create a gregarious piece of software: it doesn't wall itself in, but interacts with other software, as evidenced by my ability to post on 43 Things and this blog at the same time, and likewise with photographs on Flickr.

(viaxvarenah).

Some candidates:

• Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I got my first copy of this when I was about 12, at the annual public library book sale. I read it a few years later, and remember being amazed and baffled by it. It was pretty far over my head at the time, but made a deep impression on me. When Stewart and I put all our books on the shelf we found that we both had two copies of each of Hofstadter's books. Everybody I know loves this book. Not realistic, however. I only have two or three days of actual reading time, since I'll probably be busy either skiing or declining proffered fruitcakes.
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Because I still haven't read it, and it always comes up whenever I compile a list of books I want to read. Before the Nielsen ratings, when people reported what they were watching, they were always watching Masterpiece Theatre and the Discovery channel. But after Mr. Nielsen plugged in the set-top boxes, it turned out that no one was watching costume dramas -- they were watching Teenage Mud Wrestling Bimbos Live! instead. Since this blog is entirely self-reported, my reading list will never include:
• Sex Lives of the Rich and Famous by Andrea Love. I went to my friend Lovisa's house for spring break from college one year, planning on reading the great Renaissance epic The Faerie Queene, but what we actually read, with much giggling, was a drugstore copy of Sex Lives of the Rich and Famous which someone had left in the guest room where I was staying. It probably left a more indelible mark on my memory than three thousand lines of Spenser's poetry.

Scene & Herd is the new blog from ArtForum, though it's more in diary format, and the entries are much too long for blog entries. The blog natters on about Who was Where. It's too bad, really, that it lives up to its (amusing!) title. There's no heart in the art.

When I was little, I used to believe that the priest, at the end of Mass, was saying "Thanks Speedy God". From the I used to believe web site, these gems:

(via pasta & vinegar)

A photoset from Dannyboy.

Anne posts about the houses in Apulia:

Space and Culture is a really good blog.

I haven't been posting that much because I keep having days like yesterday where we were up at 5 and on a plane at 7 and then had meetings back to back all day, up and down the dreadful 101, and the traffic unbelievable, including our last meeting of the day, which, since it was 11 PM, took place at the Santa Clara Denny's, and then fell asleep at the Ramada Limited -- a motel so Limited, in fact, that they didn't provide a blanket, just a sheet and the bedspread, and a pillow of the same thickness, then up bright and early to try to get through the email so we could get to the first meeting and do it all over again today.

A reader named Eric wrote to me, and reminded me of my post about the great English ballad Tom O'Bedlam, and while looking around, I found this lovely version of a man singing Mad Tom O'Bedlam to the tune of a Civil War song, -- the lyrics are here.

Yesterday evening Stewart finally got Cal and Alina and me together for some delicious Pyrennean sheepmilk cheese from Les Amis du Fromage -- we call it "Cheese Friends" -- and a game of Puerto Rico, the latest came we bought by Rio Games, who also makes Princes of Florence. I've played a ton of games since moving to Vancouver. I played a lot of games as a kid, but I've gone through gusts of intense gameplaying followed by years of never playing a single game. I'd played a bit of Dungeons and Dragons when I was a teenager, and had inherited a few Magic decks, but the only complex board games I'd played were Cosmic Encounter, which we played a lot at college, as well as Diplomacy, which I just discovered was created in 1959 (! Is that true? How crazy! I'd thought these games were fairly new). Some other games we have are Settlers of Catan, which is a particularly good one (and we haven't played any of the game board variations yet, just the standard setup) and Quo Vadis, which had an interesting outcome in several games: the winner didn't win by his or her own merits, but instead was chosen by a "King Maker" -- another player who at the end of the game had to decide on a move that would make one or the other player win. The thing that makes these games interesting is watching the dynamics of the rule sets, their sometimes unexpected outcomes, and playing different strategies to see the outcomes.

On the web I discovered that there is a German Board Game Night at Drexoll Games here in Vancouver every Friday night, which is great, we'll have to go.

• National Public Toilet Map of Australia When you gotta go you gotta know where to go. (via Incoming Signals)
• People coming out as representational artists "“It’s like having a heterosexual relationship if you’re gay,” the Los Angeles–based painter says of the earlier pictures"
• Korean Face Sizes Are Getting Smaller, Attributed to Hamburgers 'Professor Kim Hee-jin from the department of dentistry in Yonsei University explained, "The decrease in face length can be attributed to the diet of preferring soft food such as hamburgers.” and added, “If one gets in the habit of eating food that mainly uses the front teeth when one is young, the jaw muscles which we use for chewing food may become weak and it may cause the size of the jawbone to become smaller."'
• Guys do their best gangsta poses and get rated on their badassness. The comments are all in great street slang -- "not feelin da kickz" and "You can't flaws the unflawsable" -- but what's really great about it is here these guys are acting all tuff and "I don't care what you think about me" and it's really just a thinly disguised Queer Eye for the Badass Guy: "I really like the look because its clean. The colors are fine, but the sweater has to go given it doesn't really compliment the rest of your outfit. I would suggest a SLEEVELESS zip up or pullover hoodie with a hot graphic on it instead of the creme sweater you have in the picture.***Oh, and just like FUBU & Phat Farm, Enyce is on its way out of respectibility. And don't wait for Jay-Z or P.Diddy to tell you this! I'm saving you all from embarassment! Say no to Enyce!" (from The Daily Jive)