Steaming Mug

So a decade ago, hack advertisers needed to make everything cyber-this and i-that.  Fifty years ago, everyone was selling a Space-whatsit, and a hundred years ago it was all radium-whatever.  Radium Razor Blades!  (I'm serious.)   But let's say it's 1848: now how do you make yourself the product of the future?

Wonder no more.  It's....

From the Boston Directory for 1848-1849

When Millinery Attacks!

If you're going to get drunk at a Halloween party, I'm just saying -- don't dress like a Victorian:

(Found in the October 7, 1897 issue of the New York Journal.)

Savage vs. Car

I've just finished reading a 1934 memoir that possesses one of the greatest titles to ever come across my desk: SAVAGE OF SCOTLAND YARD.  You can imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be written by one Superintendent Percy Savage.

There's rather more "Percy" than "Savage" in his book, though it has its moments, including a remarkable chapter on the "Crumbles murders" of 1924, a case where Savage was the first at the scene.  The overwhelming sense of the book, though, is that Scotland Yard once spent a great deal of its time dealing with habitual neighborhood criminals who were, in their own way, an ancient and unsurprising part of the social fabric of city life.  The police knew them well, knew which pubs and boarding houses they frequented, and so the real long-haul career criminals learned how not to push their luck too hard.

At the end of his book, Savage blurts out a remarkable comment on the spiking crime rates of the 20th century.  The Scotland Yard detective -- who'd began back before the force even owned a single car -- knew exactly whodunnit:  Henry Ford.

My experience convinces me that the criminals of twenty and thirty years ago were cleverer, more daring and enterprising than the criminals of to-day.... The increase in serious crime is due not to education, but to the incoming of the motor-age.  The introduction of the motor-car has made life easy and less risky for criminals.  They travel faster and farther afield, and this increased mobility makes the chance of capture infinitely less than it used to be.  The activities of criminals knows no bounds.... In the old days a smash and grad was done by a pedestrian with a brick, and he had to rely on his legs to get him quickly out of danger of capture.  The motor-car gave him considerably increased facilities both for committing a crime and escaping detection. 

Hmm.  Has anyone, I wonder, ever tried plotting crime rates in the early 20th century against car registrations among males 16 - 35?

The Collins Almanac is Back!

It's....


After six years of slumber (I prefer to call it "deep cogitation") the Almanac is back as an exclusive on the McSweeney's iPhone App. It is, exactly as you'd imagine, basically me puttering about old and odd books, picking them up, and exclaiming: "What! Ho-ho! Listen to this!"

It all began back when I was living in Hay-on-Wye, and scribbling odd finds into a memo pad while I shoveled the book piles in Richard Booth's antiquarian warehouse; and it started turning into a full-fledged manuscript while writing Sixpence House. In short, the Almanac is that book's eccentric bespectacled uncle.

The first installment's an 18 page stroll through curious extracts from literature, like this passage from an 1898 Baedeker's guide to Paris and Its Environs:


...and there will be more installments to come!

826 London

Very happy indeed about this: today's Guardian is reporting that an "826 London" is in the works. The project founders have a blog here, and the first planning meeting was just a few weeks ago:

Among the themes being considered for the storefront: The London Monster Emporium.

The Book of the Dead

Today's NY Times reports that Verizon wants to get rid of phone books in New York:

The company estimates that it would save nearly 5,000 tons of paper by ending the automatic distribution of the books. Only about one of every nine households uses the hard-copy listings anymore, according to Verizon, which cited a 2008 Gallup survey.... Verizon has a similar request before regulators in New Jersey, Mr. Bonomo said. In some states, including Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma and Georgia, AT&T has already received approval to stop delivering White Pages to all residents.

Back in '08 I wrote in Slate on the seemingly endless death throes of the phone book. But now, at last, it really is passing into history -- and there is the inevitable web site for phone book collectors. Incredibly, their very existence was once something of an act of rebellion:

We started a club for telephone book collectors, with a membership of two. We called it the Organization of Universal Telephone Book Amalgamated Collectors, or OUTBAC. We started publishing a newsletter called the Joutbac, or Journal of the OUTBAC. In my dusty files, I have the four yearly issues from 1964 to 1967. In 1965, we tried to locate other collectors by submitting a small advertisement to Hobbies magazine. The ad was rejected. The advertising department notified us that in Illinois, where Hobbies was published, the telephone directories remain the property of the telephone company. They wanted to avoid any legal complications.

Pleasant Dreams

Some books are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and apparently others have greatness thrust upon them in the form of an Amazon gift card.

This hasn't gotten much play yet outside of California news blogs, but it should. When GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner's memoir (Mount Pleasant: What Happened When I Traded a Silicon Valley Board Room for an Inner City Classroom) hit the NY Times bestseller list last month, not a few people were puzzled; as a new posting on the San Jose Mercury news blog puts it, "No. 5 on the Times' best-seller list? According to local bookstores, it wasn't even selling well in the Bay Area."

They weren't the only ones surprised. As early as April 9th, Chris Reed of the San Diego Union Tribune wondered out loud if Poizner lackeys were buying and dumping books to pump up sales figures. Sure enough, this curious comment turned up at the bottom of the column:

Unfortunately for Poizner, one of those "lucky" recipients -- maybe even that very one -- put on their deerstalker cap and started sleuthing. Let's go to Capitol Weekly of Sacramento, shall we?

In early April, Matthew Donnellan received a copy of Steve Poizner’s new memoir, “Mount Pleasant,” in the mail from Amazon.com. But the San Diego area college student, who is active in local Republican clubs, said he never ordered the book... The Amazon representative he reached told him the book was purchased with a gift card — and that card had also been used to buy copies of “Mount Pleasant” for 249 other people, all of whom had first names that began with “M.”...

The actual card was paid for by one Mat Miller, of the San Diego-based firm Pink Moon Media. The same person told Donnellan that Miller bought “a number” of other gift cards. The name “Mat Miller” also pops up on Google as a contact for ResultSource, Inc. This Carlsbad-based company bills itself as “The leader in book marketing and thought-leadership promotion.” The company’s website offers to “Let ResultSource launch your next book as a New York Times Bestseller..."

Interestingly, if Poizner or the campaign had bought “author’s copies” directly from the publisher, they would not have shown up on sales figures. But by buying them from Amazon, the copies would register on the Times’ figures.

According to the Secretary of State’s CalAccess website, there have been no payments by the Poizner campaign to Pink Moon or ResultSource. However, if payments came after April 1, they won’t appear until the Q2 campaign results are posted in July. If they were paid for by Poizner personally or some private party not officially affiliated with the campaign, they wouldn’t show up at all.

Ah-ha. That would appear to be these gentlemen here.

Not only do the sales figures look suspicious, so does what's inside the book. Poizner's a billionaire who ventures into a bad-ass neighborhood that seems to exist primarily inside his skull -- right down to some basic factual errors about what's even in the neighborhood itself.

Ira Glass called bullshit on Poizner last week in a This American Life segment:

Ira Glass: So I ran all of this by Steve Poizner - the tidy houses, the golf course, what I did not smell in the parking lot.

Ira Glass: Are you overplaying the desperate poverty of this neighborhood?

Steve Poizner: No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’s definitely not like some inner city areas. And I don’t know, what you described doesn’t strike me as the neighborhood I was at. I mean, at least in 2002 and 2003, the neighborhood is rough-and-tumble. In that there’s definitely a lot of crime, and no question lower income. And there’s a lot of, you know, signs that people were struggling economically. That’s why the crime statistics for surrounding the school – you know you can get those from the San Jose Police Department, like I did – and we definitely documented that not only did it appear to be a rough up and coming area, but the police will tell you that too.

Ira Glass: So we went to the police, and they informed us that no, the neighborhood around Mt. Pleasant high school is NOT especially dangerous or crime ridden. It's average for San Jose. And while San Jose might have a reputation in the richer suburbs around it for being sketchy, and definitely was more dangerous in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a police spokesman told us that view is out of date, an urban myth. According to FBI statistics, San Jose is one of the safest cities in the country. There were 371 violent crimes per 100,000 people in San Jose in 2003, the year Poizner was there. You'd be more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Austin, Texas, or Seattle or Phoenix or Columbus, Ohio or San Francisco. When it came to property crime that year, you were more than twice as likely to have something stolen from you in Honolulu, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco or nearly any big city you can name.

Bah, statistics!

Well, without any more dummies to buy Poizner's book -- I mean that figuratively, of course -- just one month after hitting #5 on the Times bestseller list, Mount Pleasant is now slumbering at #12,494 on Amazon.

The Napoleon of Not a Clue

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the most incoherent book title of 1907!

This description certainly sounds promising:

Think they're joking about a detective love-story starring a delusional Napoleon reincarnation? Well, here's the frontispiece:

Come to Think of It, My Scalp IS Tingling...

From Harper's, 1886:

Tweet, Tweet

I'm now up on Twitter: twitter.com/thelitdetective

Do We Get Jetpacks This Time?

A New Scientist Histories column from '05 noted that the last really huge volcanic eruption led to the invention of the bicycle:

ON 5 April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia began to grumble. A week later the volcano blew its top in a spectacular eruption that went on until July. It was the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 92,000 people and ejecting so much ash into the atmosphere that average global temperatures dipped by 3 °C. In the northern hemisphere 1816 became known as the year without a summer. New England had blizzards in July and crops failed. Europe was hit just as badly.

On holiday by Lake Geneva the 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her husband Percy were trapped in Lord Byron's house by constant rain. To divert his guests Byron suggested a competition to write a ghost story. The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Across the border in the German state of Baden the soaring price of oats prompted the 32-year-old Karl Drais to invent a replacement for the horse - the first bicycle....

Greetings from 1896

There's no way to embed it here, alas, but the Times of London has video of the newly discovered 1896 film that appears to be Australia's first movie:

Patineur Grotesque shows a bearded man, dressed in a top hat and smoking a cigar, rollerskating in a park before a circle of onlookers. He stops and lifts his jacket to reveal a white hand print on the bottom of his trousers in a cheeky gesture to the camera."

How To Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself

...is the most awesome title ever for a book, and Tin House Books now has Robert Paul Smith's long-lost 1958 masterpiece reissued complete with a blurb from Lemony Snicket and an intro by yours truly.

TH editors got intrigued by it after I wrote a "Lost and Found" piece for them about the book for their "Off The Grid" issue a couple years ago:

I don't know about you, but I wasted all but about fifteen minutes of my childhood. Those fifteen minutes were spent on a beach in Cornwall busting a nodule of quartz out of a fist-sized chunk of flint; thirty years later, I still have it somewhere in my office, in an old coffee can. Everything else I made during those years—the swords nailed together from old pickets, the forest forts that defended nothing from nobody, the poorly assembled Revell model cars with Testor's paint smeared lazily on them, the Sherman tanks drawn in near-medieval 2D perspective—they're all pretty much gone now.

Come to think of it, I haven't used the piece of quartz for much either.

But if I want reminding of where the rest of that time went, I have this book. A step-by-step guide to grinding oyster shells against the front stoop for no reason, to turning buttons and string into buzzsaws that won't cut anything, and to making paper boomerangs that don't come back, How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone By Yourself is about what you do when you're a kid and have neither money nor anyone paying much attention to you, and where your one guiding principle is that you avoid grown-ups and don't ask for help...

The Times calls it "definitely the wildest how-to manual I've seen this year" -- maybe because of, ahem, the sections on how to use a penknife and an icepick -- and Tin House now also has a terrific find up a Youtube: a ten minute interview with Robert and Elinor Smith by Edward R. Murrow.

Chess for the Insane

What got me started this week on my whole Victorian board game kick -- or, I should say, my latest one -- was a passing mention in this ad of Hexagonia, put out by Jaques & Son of London:

(Jaques is still very much around, by the way.)

Hexagonia was, apparently, the first commercially manufactured hexagonal chess game. (At left is a modern hex set from chessvariants.com.)

I haven't been able to find a picture of one of these Hexagonia sets yet, but there's an intriguing description of the game from Routledge's Every Boy's Annual for 1866:

And, of course, if you really want all-out polygonic war, there's always... three-player chess.

(via Mastersgames.com)

War Without Tears

From Peter Parley's Annual for 1865: "peaceful combat, without the horrors of actual warfare." It's...

Also: Carpet Croquet!

(From the Boston Almanac for the Year 1871)

The Return of Dr. Viper and Reverend Bruiser

Robert Darnton has a great post over at NYRB on precursors to blogging:

Blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet. Here, for example, is a recent post on The Superficial:

RadarOnline reports “traditional marriage” crusader and former Miss California Carrie Prejean is living in sin with her fiancé Kyle Boller of the St. Louis Rams where they’re no doubt eating shellfish. BURN THEM!

And here is a typical entry from Le Gazetier cuirassé ou anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France (1771):

Mlle. Romans is soon to marry M. de Croismare, Governor of the Ecole Militaire, who will use six aides de camp to take his place in performing the conjugal service.

...To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names. As editors of the Morning Postand the Morning Herald, two men of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Bate (known as “the Reverend Bruiser”) and the Reverend William Jackson (known as “Dr. Viper”) packed their paragraphs with gossip about the great, and this new kind of news sold like hotcakes. Much of it came from a bountiful source: the coffee house.

Without some good eye-straining time at a monitor or a microform reader, it's hard to appreciate just how different newspapers once were. Even for many years after Viper and Bruiser, front pages remained a wilderness of indistinguishable shipping news, assorted and sundry royal doings, notices that fine bolts of linen were to be had at so-and-so's shop, and the occasional really excellent carriage wreck. Feature writing and star reporters had their rise with the New York Sun and the Herald, while the look of modern papers came from Pulitzer's New York World: illustrations, human interest, compelling stories with big heds on page 1. And tabloids and Fox-mongering more or less evolved -- or devolved, I guess -- from Hearst's Journal and the National Police Gazette.

So maybe the comparison is not entirely a fanciful one:

(Via Gawker)

The Underground Scene

(Thames Tunnel as it appeared on Friday, via Flickr.)

Oh, how I wish I was in London this weekend...

From the Times Archive Blog:

I've been fantastically lucky today to be able to go on a walk through the Brunels' tunnel under the Thames, from Rotherhithe to Wapping and back, under the expert guidance of Robert Hulse, director of the Brunel Museum. The tunnel has been carrying trains under the Thames since 1869, but was closed three years ago during extension work on the East London line. This weekend they've taken a break to allow the public in as pedestrians for the first time in 145 years.... This Times report from just after it opened records the first sub-terranean, or sub-Thamesian mugging, and finishes, charmingly, with the news that

We are given to understand, that after a certain hour of the night the tunnel is infested with loose women.

From their blog, here's how a "grand fancy fair" there was announced on March 27, 1850:


Presumably this weekend's event was rather heavier on the anorak and lighter on the crinoline, but no less amazing. Here are the first pedestrians entering the Thames Tunnel in 145 years:

(via Londonist)

Lip Oulipo

For those who haven't checked out BBC Radio 4, here's a particularly peculiar pleasure: Just a Minute, which is constrained writing brought to life. Contestants are given a subject which they must discuss for a full minute without repeating a single word that has been previously used. Some of the segments have been turned into film shorts, including the one above...

Victorian Photoshop

Check out the slideshow of Victorian photo-collage over at Slate....

Amazon Gets Up A Creek

Last year I noted in Slate that Amazon's been having it both ways for a while on state sales taxes -- not paying any where they were not due, and not paying any even where they were due:

Amazon.com has spent a decade opposing the enforcement of online taxes so that its noncollection of sales tax creates a powerful pricing incentive over bricks-and-mortar competitors. Why buy a MacBook Air in Boston, after all, when online you'll save nearly 90 bucks in Massachusetts sales tax? But there have long been warnings that consumers just might get ruinously addicted to the tax-free ride Amazon and others appeared to be giving them—and that states might just get, well, ruined.

I say the ride appeared tax-free: In fact, there is tax due on some online sales. Amazon and other online retailers have benefited from the lack of an enforcement mechanism. States have started taking notice, and when New York state recently attempted to fix this situation, Amazon.com took them to court—and got shellacked. The company, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Eileen Branstein ruled last month, did "not come close" to showing that the state was wrong to demand that these taxes be collected. With millions in desperately needed uncollected revenue from online retailers at stake for the state, Amazon.com hasn't said yet whether it will appeal.

You wouldn't expect a financially ruined state like California to leave that kind of money laying on the table -- and now they're not. From Friday's Tech Flash:

Things are heating up for Amazon.com on the sales tax front again. The California Senate just passed a bill that would require online retailers like Amazon to collect sales tax on web purchases. According to reports, the measure was part of a $5 billion budget package making its way through the California legislature. Virginia, Colorado and Illinois are also considering sales tax bills targeting online retailers.

Amazon's been able to fight this off for years, but the stakes -- and the state budget gaps -- are getting much higher now.

Twitter Finds Its Destiny

Tweets of... lines from Harry Stephen Keeler!

A recent sample:

Till, of course, Old Man Death accepts him--in the magazine called "The Grave."

(Hat tip to Ed!)

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!

The Austin bookstore BookPeople has been hosting "literary day camps" for kids....

Bad Luck

I find this Wikipedia category weirdly fascinating: List of Las Vegas Casinos That Never Opened.

A sample:

Titanic
Themed after the doomed luxury liner RMS Titanic, this resort was to have been modeled after the ship and would have been 400 feet (120 m) long with 1,200 rooms, standing across the street from the Sahara Hotel and Casino. The project was rejected by the Las Vegas City Council.

World Trade Center
To have been located at 925 East Desert Inn Road, Las Vegas.

Leonard Shoen, co-founder of U-Haul truck rental, purchased the property of what had been the Chaparral Hotel & Casino in 1996, renovating it into the World Trade Center Hotel. A gaming license was applied for, but when it was discovered that two of Mr. Shoen's closest partners were convicted felons, the application was denied in 1998. He withdrew his application, and later died in a car crash in 1999 that was ruled a suicide. Cards and gaming chips were produced for the World Trade Center Casino, but were never used.^[3] The property has since been demolished and is now vacant. The old World Trade Center Casino site is now a parking lot, part of the Sands convention center annex.

World Wrestling Federation
A casino resort themed after the World Wrestling Federation was proposed for a property near Interstate Highway 15 across from Mandalay Bay. The project never went past the proposal stage. WWE also proposed to open on the property best known as the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino, but now known as the Royal Resort Hotel and Casino.

Free Dreadfuls

Terrific news in last Sunday's Times of London:

MORE than 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library’s collection are to be made available for free downloads by the public from this spring....Many of the downmarket books known as “penny dreadfuls” will also be made available to the public, including Black Bess by Edward Viles and The Dark Woman by J M Rymer. Altogether, 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books — now all digitised — are inaccessible in other public libraries and are difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops.

Penny dreadfuls and dime novels verged were basically disposable literature, so they can be absurdly difficult and sometimes outright impossible to track down -- this is a wonderful development.

Run Faster For the Exits

Hard on the heels of last week's ominous report by the Financial Times, more at Borders: their CEO bolted on Tuesday, corporate HQ announced layoffs on Thursday.

Oh, and in between those two events... the iPad announcement.

I'd say the $499 base model pretty well (and pretty deliberately) plunges a dagger into the heart of Amazon's $489 Kindle DX, whose monochrome screen and DRM now make it look like the worst deal since... well, since whatever e-reader Borders was working on.

And now that has knocked Amazon off balance enough that it almost immediately capitulated today to a pushback on pricing by Macmillan -- though not before reminding Kindle owners once again that their Seattle overlords can peevishly yank content off their devices.

Interesting times, etc.

It Cannot Grow Old!

A great find over at Boing Boing, with a writeup on the history of this infinitely expandable project ...


Ah, where's Hari Seldon when you need him?

Run for the Exits

Also not getting much press yet: Financial Times reported on Wednesday that small vendors are retaining counsel to make sure they get paid by Borders.

Four years ago in the Village Voice -- pause for irony -- I noted that musclebound chains could be in deep trouble if they didn't get on board with electronic and on-demand technologies that would slowly render their credit-on-return Xanadus into a massive liability.

Guess what?:

The average time it took for Borders to pay back suppliers spiked over 40% to 97.9 days in the year ended 31 October, from 69.4 days in the prior year period... As of 31 October, the company had USD 215m available under its USD 1.125bn revolver, based on inventory and credit card receivables. According to the credit agreement backing the Bank of America-led loan due 2011, a 1.1x fixed charge ratio kicks in if the retailer’s borrowings exceed 90% of the maximum amount permitted. Borders would not currently be in compliance with the fixed charge ratio if it were tested, SEC filings show...

Battle of the e-readers aside, Border’s faces an even greater threat from loss of in-store shoppers to internet retailers, particularly Amazon, and was forced to shut its 200-store Waldenbooks chain last year. For 3Q09 ended 31 October, Border’s revenues were USD 602.5m versus USD 693m in the comparable period.

Bear in mind, by the way, that the comparable period in '08 was when the economy was already in an absolute pants-wetting freefall.

Alt Weakly (Pt 2)

Still weirdly overlooked by most of the press, Business Week is now headlining this: Village Voice Affiliate May Face Forced Bankruptcy in Ad Fight.

VVM's executive ed, not surprisingly, denounces it all as a "false, inaccurate smear" -- namely, by pointing out that while New Times and SF Weekly are affiliated entities to VVM, they are not the same. And -- wouldn't you know -- it appears there's nothing in the pockets of New Times and the Weekly but lint and Chuck E Cheese tokens.

Got no money -- see!

As long as SFBG's lawyers slept through all their law school lectures on Vicarious Liability, I'm sure this strategy will work just great.

Alt Weakly

For some reason this hasn't attracted much notice nationally, but this last week the San Francisco Bay Guardian won a whopping $21 million dollar judgment against Village Voice Media for monopolistic practices by VVM-owned SF Weekly. But because VVM was apparently too cocky to post bond before the case, now the Bay Guardian can start seizing VVM assets from pretty much anywhere it likes in the 16-paper chain.

It's already grabbed SF Weekly's delivery vehicles...

Zut alors!

Another week, another headache for the Chunnel. It's amusing to recall that at one time, proposals for a Channel Tunnel were attacked by British nationalists as inviting certain destruction by a French invasion.

Check out this rabble-rousing novel from 1882 that I once came across:



Behold the horrors of the invasion!:

John Smith's first experience of an invader was not a pleasant one. Accustomed to live quietly in a little street just running off the Strand, and there to sell butter and bacon and eggs in sufficient quantity to maintain himself and small family, he had certainly never looked forward to a time when a French sergeant and four infantry privates would be billetted upon him, and would choose his upstairs parlour as their sleeping and living room.... he saw their filthy mess utensils on his light Brussels carpet, and his piano turned into a sort of cupboard for preserved soups, while a silk-covered couch that had been his pride was made into a bed for the sergeant, and some of his chimney ornaments were flung out of the window as being in the way... Screamed at by the sergeant because the domino-box, which he had produced to order, was a small one, and wholly beneath the dignity of a French soldier, and ordered to fetch wine instead of stout, and to put a good dinner on the table, he hastened to obey...

It is true he saw his plate and knives go to fill the haversacks of his invaders, and was obliged to let them take the contents of his till. But after all his was not a specially hard case; it must be confessed he deserved more. For John Smith had contributed as much as anybody, or more than some people, to the very state of things which he now deplored.

He it was who had seconded a resolution at Exeter Hall against a proposed large increase of the English navy.

He it was who had taken shares in the Anglo-French Channel Tunnel...

If It's Too Loud...

NPR has a terrific piece this week on the Loudness War -- as mourned/explained by this YouTube video:


As a drummer, hearing every part of the kit and every single beat rammed to the front of mixes is as depressing as... I don't know, probably as depressing as Auto-Tune abuse is to singers. Anyway, NPR has Bob Ludwig on hand to explain -- he's mastered pretty much every classic album you've heard of, ever -- and the historical context of 45s makes this an especially fascinating look at the phenomenon.

Omniscience

I'm in Slate this week with an article and slide show remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine:



The piece began after I found a stash at a junk store, and was hit by a shock of recognition of a 1979 cover -- I actually remembered getting that issue as a kid. And inside the issues, the ads of long-lost firms -- DAK, Fidelity Chess, Infocom games, Commodore 64! -- were as weirdly evocative as the articles. Leafing through pages I last read 25 to 30 years ago, I found myself remembering them. A lot of them, in fact. I've become so used to the ephemeral nature of magazines that I've forgotten how some reading experiences -- especially at the age of 10 -- can still deeply, subtly imprint themselves.

Among the many riches I found in a junk-shop stash of Omnis -- (Yonkers spaceport! A 1984 account of telecommuting! An Italian atomic bomb!) -- I also came across this astounding ad from the final days in 1995, long after I and just about everyone else had stopped reading. No matter how hard up times may be for science magazines today, just remember: nobody's asking their editorial assistants to staff a 900-number.