Josh McHugh

The Air is Thick With Hummingbirds

 

True Story: My Dad Once Cleared the Entire Etch-A-Sketch Screen For Me

From XKCD, the cool and occasionally poignant comics site.

Nice Try / No Mercy

Why We Drive the Way We Do

My latest piece in Wired - a book review of Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)." I love this topic - love it.

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UPDATE: Grotto icon Mary Roach reviewed the very same book in the 8/10 NYT Book Review. I think I may like her review better.

read more | digg story

iPhone - I hardly knew ye

During a trip with my son to the allergist's today (he's fine - no allergies, just parents who need to slather him with yak butter and Crisco more often) my iPhone fell out of my pocket and under a chair in the waiting room. At the same time, Finn was initiating an investigation the stash of chemicals beneath the waiting-room fish tank. Figuring the iPhone was the less immediate poisoning risk at that moment, I lunged for him instead.

Not sure, in retrospect, that was a good call.

Death to Blow-Ins

Chris Anderson writes, in: The Long Tail: The Connection Between Global Warming, PR spam and Magazines.

Take those "blow-in" subscription cards that we put in our magazines. Our circulation department wants to put in as many as possible, because five cards have a slightly higher chance of one being sent back than four, and six is slightly higher yet. As long as those cards earn more in subscriptions than the cost of paper and print, they're considered a good thing from the circulation department's perspective.

Yet as we editors who talk to readers and get their email know, people HATE those cards. They fall out of magazines when you pick them up, forcing you to bend over to retrieve them and find a trash can in which to throw them away. This is a real negative cost that hurts our relationship with our readers, but because we can't measure it directly, it's an externality and thus mispriced at zero in the economics of the magazine industry.

No more. I've been spoiling for a showdown with the blow-in blackguards for some time now, and am going to fire up a Facebook Cause dedicated to eradicating blow-ins. In a nutshell: I'm going to be urging anyone who will listen to take those blow-in cards and deposit them not in the nearest trashcan, but in the nearest mailbox.

The economics of blow-in cards are pretty compelling to magazine publishers, as Chris points out above. But here's the thing -- the USPS charges the source of the litter (also known as business reply mail of the blow-in variety) by the piece returned. Here's a list of the fees, which, when compared to the infinitesimal cost of blow-in cards that must underlie the systematic littering we're talking about, could get to be fairly whopping.

Personal Tank

I was thinking about making a Toyota FJ Cruiser the successor to my 1985 Grand Wagoneer, a.k.a. the Sea Donkey. I decided to wait until the diesel version comes out. Then I came across this little item for sale on Amazon. There are a lot of similarities between the Donkey and the Badonkadonk.

Perfect nonsense

Ridiculous hilarious video and vocals from Princess Superstar mashed with Mason's Exceeder, the best club groove since Bodyrox - Yeah Yeah. I heard both of these tunes for the first time at Sirkus in Reykjavík. 

p.s. Hah - just saw a bunch of stories about Jude Law getting frisky at Sirkus with an Icelandic TV personality. The story calls Sirkus "exclusive," which I guess it is in that the velvet-rope procedure involves a tiny woman who pops the door open every 5 minutes or so, grabs a lucky someone by the coat and yanks them into the club, slamming the door behind her.

Friday Brunch

Heading for a session in the slate-grey Pacific slop beneath a high sheet of grubby clouds, I pattered down the concrete steps of stairway 25 off the VFW's parking lot at Ocean Beach, my 6'9" plastic Wayne Lynch replica board under my arm. Smoke from a wood fire, with some heat still in it, wafted over the stairway, lightly stinging my nostrils. Sitting in the sand just to the south, left of the stairs, were a man and a woman, the fire in a shallow hole, and three yellow dogs. The bottoms of the man's jeans were rolled up and his feet were bare. The jeans wire dirty in a way that money can't buy - dirt-saturated with actual dirt, almost shiny, like leather. Dungarees.

"Smells good," I said.

He grinned. "Have some!"

 

Genome Story Wiki

Honestly, when I thought of this in 1995, it might actually have been possible for me to learn most or all of the stuff I would've needed to learn to pull it off. Though I must say it wasn't inter-dash-active, the way I imagined it at the outset. Originally it was more of a 3-d environment where I would kind of riff masterfully (huh?) on the varied expressions of genes, all laid out visually in the form of a double helix you could cruise up and down on each chromosome to see the masterful things I had decreed . The verse (oh yes, it was to be verse) would have somehow corresponded metrically and rhyme-ically to the base pairs making up the genes, and somehow I would have been able to cover a meaningful number of genes. Hah. Somehow.