Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

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I posted a page of pix including photos of organizer Alex Golub; Disseminarians AKMA, Margaret, and Trevor ; JOHOvial David Weinberger, Payntnetters Beth Hastings and Frank Paynter, Steve Himmer and Sage Brousseau from OnePotMeal; game-meister Greg Costikyan, Happy Tutor Phil Cubeta, and virtual economistTed Castronova. Special thanks to Sage for taking some of my favorites of these photos.

Note: You can find actual DGI conference info linked to by my impressionistic blog about it.

Harvard-blogger Yule Heibel has a smart, funny, quirky voice–and she points (all the way from Vancouver, BC) to cool stuff that you won’t read about elsewhere.

Here is just one of the gems she has pointed me to, an interview with a super-successful yoga named Bikram:

“Bikram…claims to have cured every disease known to humankind and compares himself to Jesus Christ and Buddha. Requiring neither food nor sleep, he says, “I’m beyond Superman.” When you ask how he can make such wild statements, he answers, “Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

Quick, somebody phone the President–we’ve finally found those weapons of mass destruction!

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Clockwise from lower left: George W Bush with newborn twins Barbara and Jenna. Laura Bush with six-month old twins, looking exhausted. Fake ID confiscated from brunette twin Barbara Pierce Bush in a New Haven bar. Tabloid photo of blonde twin Jenna Bush partying.

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Chelsea Clinton, bombarded with “She so ugly” jokes while still in her teens, should have been so lucky as to be invisible. Years after her father left office, Chelsea remains a target for rabid attacks. (Google hits in past six months: 29,000 for “Chelsea Clinton”, 7,000 for “Bush twins”.)

The Bush twins got into the papers only when busted for underage drinking, and then only briefly. (Pro-morality-right-wing-Bush-supporters dismiss these arrests, like their daddy’s DUI when he was 30, as youthful hijinks.) The twins vanished again once their age made their drinking legal.

The twins aren’t the issue here–their father is. Because there may be a darker connection between the twins’ invisibility and Bush’s past history:

“During his presidential campaign, Mr Bush has repeatedly refused to answer questions about self-described “youthful indiscretions” or deny rumours that he had used cocaine in the 1960s or early 1970s. He gave up drinking in July 1986 after waking up with a hangover following a 40th birthday party.”

The twins were born in November, 1981, so for most of the critical first five years of their lives, their dad was a problem drinker. Then he quit–why? His autobiography tells us:

“I am a person who enjoys life, and for years, I enjoyed having a few drinks. But gradually, drinking began to compete with my energy. I’d be a step slower getting up. My daily runs seemed harder after a few too many drinks the night before.”

In the early eighties, W’s business ventures lost many millions of dollars for family-and-friend investors.
Did business worries, or those “few too many drinks the night before,” create problems for his wife or his little daughters? If so, they were not as important as his daily jogging.

Kids get their own page on the White House website. The Clinton White House kids page introduced visitors to recent White-House kids. The Bush White House kids page has links to info about pets Spot and Ebony–Mrs. Cheney gets more ink than Barbara and Jenna.

Well, I suppose we’ll get to hear all about their early lives, once the Bush twins decide to start penning ghost memoirs.

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Thanks to David Weinberger for wondering about this issue in such an interesting way he made me wonder also.

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Gee, did we claim that we’d find WMD in Iraq? “Billmon has knit a noose out of quotes,” says JOHO.

What did the Bush team claim, and when did they claim it? Right now, a lot of embarrassing statements by Rumsfeld and others are still on line–for example, this March 30 interview with Rumsfeld:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Unfortunately, many of Billmon’s links go to interviews hosted by servers at the Department of Defense. I would feel more confident in finding them tomorrow if somebody else with a nice big server would make copies elsewhere.

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Bush says we found those WMD. Did we find nuclear weapons, tons of ricin, stockpiles of anthrax? Nope. But we did find two trailers.

The agency reported that no pathogens were found in the two trailers and added that civilian use of the heavy transports, such as water purification or pharmaceutical production, was “unlikely” because of the effort and expense required to make the equipment mobile. Production of biological warfare agents “is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles,” the CIA report concluded.

Well, my apologies for suggesting that evidence of WMD in Iraq was exaggerated to provide cover for sending US troops. They had not one but two big trailers–gosh, who knew?

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I can skip straight to the dish on the Digital Genres conference, because it has already been blogged by both AKMA and David Weinberger, with photos on Kiplog…

Five cool things about Chicago:

1. Streets running east-west are numbered, so in that one dimension, even I can’t get lost.
2. I got to hear some of Frank Paynter‘s un-given talk on Cole Porter.
3. Korean lilac in bloom smells wonderful–and because Beth Hastings knew what the plant was named, I might be able to get some myself someday.
4. To get more perspective on life, I went to the Oriental Institute and hung out with people who died three thousand years ago.
5. To get less perspective, I went to the Penang restaurant (2201 S. Wentworth) and drank beer and coconut milk with Alex Golub and David Weinberger.

Five cool quotes from talks:

1. “Is the Talmud really written, or is it just written down?” (David Rosenberg) [The question can also be asked of most people’s weblogs.]
2. “You see warnings on slash writing that might offend–for example, ‘PWP.’ That stands for ‘Porn Without Plot’, or ‘Plot? What Plot?’ ” (Holly Swyers)
3. “Listing words alphabetically lets you avoid deciding what’s more important.” (Dan Headrick) [He also pointed out that search engines let you find information stored with no organizing principle.]
4. “An archive is not a library. The former stores everything it produces or collects; the latter is selective.” (Theo Van Den Hout)
5. “A weblog is like a Dada street performance–both the production and the consumption are interactive.” (Steve Himmer, aka OnePotMeal.)

Five cool quotes not from talks:

1. “Bill Gates would be a lot less happy about how rich he is if he had to lug it all around.” (AKMA)
2. “Our [Western] relationship with our physical bodies is already mediated by culture and technology much more than was possible in most other societies in history.” (Alex Golub, who lived on sweet potatoes for two years while doing his anthro fieldwork in New Guinea)
3. “When you live in a virtual world, you need a really good chair.” (Alex again, this time quoting a web-obsessed friend who has a bad back)
4. “What’s the difference between high church and low church? My faith is so low-church that we eat the bread and drink the grape juice while believing that we don’t know what’s going on.” (Trevor Bechtel)
5. “We can argue if you disagree with what I said. But if you say we can’t talk about our values–I don’t see how we can argue from that premise.” (David Weinberger)

Props to Alex Golub for organizing a great conference!

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