Geeky Chic

I don’t think the desire to go on shopping diets is limited to me.  Today’s SF Chronicle includes a profile
of a group known as the Compact, 50 people who have vowed to
not purchase anything new (with the exception of underwear, health and
safety items, and of course, food) in 2006.

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This article has also forced me to ponder why I rarely thrift
nowadays.  My last thrift store purchase took place in Portland,
Oregon in November of 2004.  Part of me thinks it is because the
current state of fashion (cheap, quick and disposable trends) has
speeded up the fashion cycle to the point where it is hard for
second hand stores to keep up.  Also, designers tweak retro looks
in such modern ways, that it’s hard for an authentic era piece to
work.  The indie hipster look has also become less thrift store
reliant as it has morphed a bit over the years from tight cowboy shirt,
ratty tee, and clunky glasses combo to the billowy dress (think moo
moo) cinched with a belt over leggings trio (though you could find
those three pieces at both Goodwill and UO).

The real reason is that I’m probably just too busy.

To follow up on this post, our very own Di Fi acknowledged that a former staffer altered her wikipedia profile and her husband’s profile.  This admission
came out after wikipedia conducted an investigation of the
Congressional staffers who made edits to the site, and released the results. 
From the report, I am most amused that Senator Rick Santorum’s staffers
erased references to the Dan Savage definition of his last name,
and by WP’s simple deductive technique for IP address mapping:

I have to make a bank run, or Gocco run rather, to PaperSource.  I just learned that Riso announced that it’s discontinuing sales of Print Gocco machines and supplies in the U.S. 
I need to stock up on flash bulbs, screens, and ink.  I hope that
there are supplies left, the online retailers are out of stock, and promising to fill back orders as they receive them.

There goes my discretionary spending for the month.

But yes, this is my current plea:

It’s okay to shop, Betty Friedan did too.

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But on a more serious note, Ms. Friedan
passed away over the weekend.  While I do not identify with the
current state of the organizations that she founded, NOW and Naral
(oddly, just as some Dems unfoundedly scapegoat the Greens and Nader
for Gore’s 2000 loss, I unfoundedly scapegoat the pro-choicers for
handing over Congress and the Presidency to the fundmentalist far
right), I applaud her life work.  Her passing has forced me to
wonder if she ever wrote or spoke about the marketing of Mona Lisa Smile.  That movie was supposed to teach my generation about the pre-Feminine Mystique
days, but instead, I think it served as a vehicle for Vogue to feature
the inpractical, dainty, full-skirt with heels look that was popular a
couple of years back.

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Also, I would be remiss to not mention Coretta Scott King
as well.  Her passing, along with the recent passing of Rosa Parks
highlights the disappearance of the great Civil Rights generation.

One of my friends, an aspiring tai tai, described Milan Station, this chain of widely successful, high-end second-hand boutiques, to me:

This story sickened me a little.  Partly, because it highlights
the common social acceptance in HK and China (and other Asian countries
as well?) of the practice of having a pampered wife, and a younger
girlfriend on the side (it harkens back to past practice of polygamy
and the keeping of concubines).  It’s so widespread that it has
spawned its  own little cottage industry.  

It also disturbs me a little because I have friends who are preparing
to enter into the more legitimate of the two options.  I can’t
imagine trading fidelity for material comfort and to provide “face” to
one’s family through a “good” match.  Why do some
of my friends expect $o much and so little out of marriage?

It also forces me to ponder, how much of the luxury market is dependent
on arrangements, such as this.  Each “arrangement” produces two
customers, the wife and girlfriend, who need to be kept happy with
shiny objects.  It’s enough to make me go off on one of those
feminist/Marxist critiques, but I’ll pass the baton on that point to one of you.  Any takers?

I learned from slashdot that Wikipedia has just posted an RFC on Congressional staffers who clean and vandalize
the pages on the site.  They’ve blocked the Congressional IP
ranges until they are done analyzing this issue (that doesn’t stop a
staffer from continuing to edit and add material from his home
computer, though). I find the section of the RFC
that breaks down the types of edits for the Senate IP numbers to be of
particular interest (they’ve labelled each edit: legitimate, bad faith
edit, or vandalism by IP address).  It’s odd to see the commons
strike back with transparency.

**

Good news for Exxon: They’ve recorded the largest annual profits for an American company.

Bad news for us: Another, “we may be approaching the point in greenhouse gas emissions where global warming becomes irreversible” story.

Every time I write, “Someone should file a class action against X…”
on here, it becomes true within a few days.  So, in light of yesterday’s Oprah
smackdown of James Frey, can someone please file a false advertising
suit against Frey and and DoubleDay?  I just want to read the depo
transcripts.  Pretty, pretty please?

Actually, Frey profited from fraud, so should be be forced to disgorge
those profits.  That’s the real reason why I want the suit brought.

I ran the numbers lately.  Currently, I have time to read 4-5
books a year.  This means, in the next 30 years, I may be
able to read only 120-150 books. I am greatly disheartened by this, but it
will help me be more selective about what I read.

That said, here’s my boingboing link of the week, 50 Books for Thinking about the Future Human Condition (warning: link opens to a pdf).  Sadly, I’ve only read one work on the list (Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel).  I wish that grown-ups had the option of a summer break, so that I could make a dent in this list.

Edit: And as further proof that she is connected to everyone, SSRD has pointed out that her uncle wrote #15 on the list.

The Grand Prize of Business 2.0’s List of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business of 2006 went to Avalon Communities for their plan to convert the shuttered Danvers State Hospital (where they perfected the pre-frontal lobotomy) into luxury condominiums.  According to one webite, it has these nicknames:

This place is so spooky, it was the set of a psychological thriller, where an asbestos abatement crew is terrorized at the abandoned hospital.

This does not appear to be an isolated case.  According to the Times developers are crazy about old asylums. 
Perhaps, I should reserve making my judgments on such projects. 
As the article points out, one such development in the Bay Area, Rivermark Village, is an experiment in new urbanism:

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Bonus: Here’s a new urban (not new urbanism) idea.

It really irks me when I can tell that a reporter entirely bases
his/her story on a Myspace or Friendster profile.  For instance,
the reporter who drafted this piece on a young man who died in a surfing accident this weekend relied a little too much on his myspace page. 
With the exception of how he died, it appears that the reporter looked
up the dead guy’s name on myspace, called up the current employer that
he listed on his page,  and asked the company’s VP a few questions
based on the profile.  For instance, the dead surfer mentioned on
his page that he lives in “in Mission Bay (south of SOMA), so how does
this article conclude?  With the all important fact, “In October, he moved
from Dolores
Street
to a loft he bought in a brand-new condominium building on Bluxome Street in the South of Market neighborhood.” 
Information about the length of his employment at time of death and the
photo that accompanied the article also came from his profile. 
So, I’m not sure what this reporter did, other than run the search, and
make a couple of phone calls.

The other sad thing about this is the distorted view the world would
get of any of us based on our web trails if we were to vanish
today.  I can imagine a reporter reading my profile, then emailing
one of my law school friends to ask, “She really liked foie gras, huh?”
and then punching out a few lines about me being a foodie.