fluid when shaken, stirred or otherwise disturbed

over 100 worthwhile dilemmas

quite possibly the best widget ever - a widget that is the oblique strategies created by brian eno and peter schmidt. how cool is that?

truths:cards

posted by thixotropic @ 8:09 PM 0 comments

a walk in tuxedo park

last weekend we went on a walk near bear mountain to check out some fall colours... having been a drought year, a lot of the trees had prematurely lost their leaves or had sparse crowns, so the scenery was not as dramatic as usual - but i still think it was worth the stuck-in-traffic gridlock drive back to the city.

posted by thixotropic @ 1:34 PM 0 comments

a weekend in shanghai

saturday morning - post sus2 - was spent wandering the narrow alleys of old town, which is the most traditionally chinese area of shanghai. old town is a great place to let yourself get lost in - we just wandered and wandered and wandered - it was like a walk back in time to when streets were narrow and carless, and part of the household's living space - laundry strung on power lines, hissing woks in the open family kitchens - and the amazing food smells coming from the street food vendors. the houses were so old that no one had running water inside - all the faucets and toilets were located by the side of the street; and electric wires were jerry rigged to the sides of buildings in bewildering tangles.

we walked past old men playing wei ke (?) - that game with the black and white pieces on a grid, where your goal is to occupy as much of the board space as possible by surrounding a group of the opposite colour; another group of men gambling on cricket fights; through an alley that was clearly the food market, and into a vast indoor market that sold crickets of every imaginable size and birds and fish; and some old men critiquing the calligraphy of the characters being painted on the wall.

this being shanghai of course, the new and shiny is rapidly closing in on old town.

in contrast to old town, pudong is glitzy, stylish and thoroughly modern. saturday evening was spent in the highest hotel in the world - the grand hyatt in jin mao tower, the building with the fifth tallest roof in the world. we drank cocktails and ate dessert at the hotel lounge at the base of the hotel's astounding and famous barrel-vaulted atrium, which starts at the 56th floor and extends upwards to the 87th, each floor's hallway a balcony ringing its perimeter. this was the view up from my seat.

the experience was more than worth the wait and the price of the drinks - although the waiting was very very pleasant, as we had dinner at the hotel's grill (and jesse had his first taste of kobe beef). the altitude also gives the alcohol an extra kick, an added bonus.

sunday we spent again in old town, visiting the silk market where i bought 3 metres of real silk for about five u.s. dollars; early evening drinks we had at face in the french concession - which looks almost exactly like sections of paris, a legacy of shanghai's cosmopolitan history. this was followed by what was easily one of the best and most opulent meals i have ever eaten in my life, at the restaurant t8 - a monkfish salad with mango and chilis, an amazing sechuan high pie (braised lamb), milk-fed veal cheeks with seared fois gras and consumme with black truffle dumplings - proved that t8 well deserves its ranking as one of the world's top fifty restaurants. it wasn't cheap, but it was worth every penny. dinner was followed by a walk down the historic bund which faces the crazy architecture of pudong, and down the electric nanjing donglu with its flashing neon signs.

posted by thixotropic @ 7:12 PM 0 comments

shameless

how could anyone resist a pitch like this?

Howdy All,

To show you how bad I am at the kind of shameless self-promotion they were always telling us in film school it was necessary to master if we ever hoped to make it in the film business, which like any other responds only to the cold, cruel demands of the market (OK, they didn't put it exactly like that; maybe I've been reading too much Marx, or Saint Matthew) - my student film THE GULF, about a young Marine coming home from the first Gulf War, was picked up for distribution by the National Film Network and I forgot to tell anyone. It was picked up about a year ago. Maybe a year and a half. Could be two. I don't remember exactly. Anyway, it was a while ago. Every quarter they send me a royalty statement for zip, zero, nada, bupkus. It occured to me that my faith in the promotional capabilities of a tiny documentary distributor might be misplaced. So I'm writing you.

I'm not asking you to buy my film - although at the remarkably low price of $14.95, there's no denying it's a bargain - no, the angle NFN is promoting, which makes a lot of sense, is to sell the film to schools, universities, etc. So if you know anyone who teaches, or knows a teacher, especially of history and related subjects, would you kindly forward the link below? The Gulf is a work I remain very proud of, and now that we find ourselves in the middle of a second Gulf war, one that I believe is still relevant. One caveat: as those who know me would guess, the film is full of black humor, minor sexual innuendo, and some profanity So what's not for a high school student to like?

Thank you, sorry for my lack of shame, and all the best,

Todd

gulf:film

posted by thixotropic @ 6:22 AM 0 comments

off the grid

here i am. i'm still here. it has been a while - switching my i.s.p. was quite the drama - and the bummer is that i'm still not up to full speed. but at least right now its up fast enough that i can actually check my email, for example. i also now have a research meeting next week for which i have to do some modifications to a math model. have i started? no. but be sure to watch this space for updates in the next few days as i pretend to work on my research - i know that at least dan likes my travel stories, and andrew likes my pictures.

no travel stories for now - but the nytimes had an article a few days ago about massive underground oil spill in greenpoint. i've actually known about this for a while (a lot of folks who live around here don't) but it was interesting to get more of the backstory. just in case you needed another excuse to hate Exxon Mobil, BP and Chevron.

The spill, the result of a 1950 tank explosion that the Coast Guard estimated leaked 17 million gallons of oil and gasoline into the ground, has been a constant presence, the suspected cause of everything from the oddly persistent stains on Ms. O'Neill's patio furniture to the weird, metallic taste of her neighbor's tomatoes. "We always thought it was something that was just underground," she said.

But a lawsuit that some residents filed on Oct. 21 against three oil companies, charging that toxic fumes from the underground spill may be endangering the health and property of those who live nearby, has left Ms. O'Neill and her neighbors feeling unsettled. Based on soil tests performed by the environmental group Riverkeeper over the summer, the plaintiffs allege that the fumes contain levels of benzene and toluene that have been associated with elevated risks for cancer. The contaminants might be seeping into as many as 100 homes directly above the spill, including Ms. O'Neill's, and affecting neighboring areas.

but it's not just in greenpoint where folks live with yummy environmental toxins every day - williamsburg is home to radiac and several power plants and garbage transfer stations. but hey, somebody has to live near these things.

oil:greenpoint

posted by thixotropic @ 10:16 PM 0 comments