Careers, Co-working, Forbes, and Our Blessed Age of Telecommuting

A couple of quick items now that I’m back in town and in the computing seat:
1) I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. The August column (which obviously snuck in kinda late; I was out of town) is about How To Launch Your Writing Career in Four easy steps:

Launching a writing career is a four-step process:
1. Get a Baby
2. Write Some Stuff
3. Go to Library Story Time
4. Check Your Email
I know, I know, you have a few questions. So, I will clarify in detail below, with footnotes.
. . .
“Hey!” you’re about to type, “This isn’t a career plan, it’s just a string of random events involving a nameless baby! None of it applies to me; I don’t even have a baby! What a rip-off!”
What’s tripping us up is this word “career.” . . .

It’s just that easy! Learn more and ACT NOW: The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for The Money: How to Career as a Writer
2) A few months back a nice blogger from Forbes visited my coworking community to talk about remote workers and coworking and stuff. So, if you want to read a little more about the “terrible investment decisions” portion of my “career,” check that out.

“Beach Ball Jumping” and other *terrible* Depression Era diversions

These are all courtesy of a 1937 issue of Mechanics and Handicraft magazine; click through for a deeply unsafe barrel-stave kneeboard-ish thing, a floating rifle target (!!!), and more.
That said, *damn* if the kid in the illustration don’t got some cocky *strut*! You go, beach-ball shoes kid! I’ll sign your full-body cast when you get out of the ICU!

via: More Pleasure at the Seashore | Modern Mechanix

42 gauge pickup winding wire

42 gauge guitar pickup winding wire

New Supplier!

This is the wire you’ll use to make the pickup for the $10 Electric Guitar (Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred Project 13) as described in the book.
A 750-foot spool of 42-gauge pickup winding wire will make four or five diddley bow pickups. It’s a good price for the hobbyist (just $6!), and I’ve had solid service from the company, Antique Electronic Supply.

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Holy Crap! “Beautiful LEGO” Is a Hella Apt Title for this Book!

No Starch Press (my publisher) is releasing Beautiful LEGO this fall, and it’s shaping up to be a very aptly titled book. Check this out!

No Starch’s other coffee-table-ish books (like LEGO Adventure and CUlt of LEGO have been consistent crowd-pleasures in my family (and that’s across age groups, from my folks down to my seven-year-old), so I’m pretty excited to see what’s in this latest offering.

OH GOOD GOD! THE SUN IS *REVERSING POLARITY!!!* which is gonna hella screw up my sun compass, right?

I tell you, if it isn’t one damn thing, it’s another. First the hummingbirds are fighting at the feeder, and now this.
The Sun’s Magnetic Field is about to Flip – NASA Science

Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun’s vast magnetic field is about to flip.
“It looks like we’re no more than 3 to 4 months away from a complete field reversal,” says solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. “This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system.”

Chomsky and I Are Everyman! #RaceIsOver #FACT

It’s come to my attention that, according to Google, this selfie of Chomsky and me:
(from this article)
is “visually similar” to these selfies:





It’s as though Google Image Search is the true Mexican magical realism camera: In his heart of hearts Chomsky is saucy chicks and happy black kids (*Race is over!*), while I’m the stern bartender/goofy galpal/cranky trannie–which is all pretty accurate, actually.

Noam Chomsky and a “Journalist” Walk into a Bar . . .

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. In a bit of a departure from my normal tedious exegeses of gun statistics and local bridge policy, this latest column is based on a conversation I had with Noam Chomsky in early July. It begins something like this:

I’m interviewing Noam Chomsky in the bar of the Campus Inn a block from the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The bar is dim and entirely abandoned at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning. Because I’m highly distractible, I can’t help but periodically marvel at the symmetry of this: I only ended up interviewing Noam Chomsky at all because I’d Tweeted a link to a joke about Heisenberg, Gödel, and Chomsky walking into a bar [1], and Dave Askins (editor of this fine publication) had responded by noting that Chomsky would be speaking at the University of Michigan a week or so later, and essentially dared me to interview him.

I’d agreed, on the assumption that it would be impossible to land an interview with the man almost universally regarded as America’s foremost public intellectual. I was wrong [ . . . ]

. . . and goes downhill from there. Enjoy!

(For those more interested in Chomsky and less in my chatter, you can read the unedited transcript of the interview or listen to all 48 minutes of the audio.)

Linguistics Krazy Korner: “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”

“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” is a 92-character modern poem written in Classical Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao, in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. [Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

In other words, the following series of sushes is this poem:

In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.


Man, now I’m mad-crazy craving stone-lion sushi . . .

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