Author: Chris Barrus

The New Yorker profile of hard-boiled Kiwi squid scientist Steve O’Shea wins.

We then headed to his university office, where he had to gather various things for the expedition. It was in an attic-like space, and seemed entirely devoted to what he described as his “lunatic obsession.” Pasted to the walls and stacked on tables were pictures, many of which he had sketched himself, of giant squid, colossal squid, broad squid, warty squid, leopard squid. In addition, there were squid toys, squid key chains, squid journals, squid movies, and squid-related newspaper clippings (“warning! giant flying squid attacking vessels off australia”). On the floor were dozens of glass jars filled with dead squid that had been preserved in alcohol, their eyes and tentacles pressing against the glass.

Hooray for American health care…

One morning in January, the 22-year-old woke up in the hospital with her long hair pulled up on one side into a ponytail. On the other, she was bald, with only skin and sutures covering an area where nearly half her skull had been removed. She stayed that way for almost four months, a dent in her head showing where her skull had been taken out to save her life following a car accident.

After Lane was released from hospital in February, her skull remained in a hospital freezer while paperwork changed hands between the hospital and Medicaid to determine who’d pay for the surgery to make Lane whole again.

“When you think of weird things happening to people you don’t think of that,” said the former waitress. “It’s like taking out someone’s heart – you need that!”

…..

Waking up in the morning, she would notice how her brain had shifted during the night to one side. She was given a plastic street hockey helmet to wear during the day for protection.

“You’d think they could give me something better protective,” said Lane. “Like a skull, perhaps.”

Lane blames the delay in her surgery to bureaucratic red tape between the University of Utah Health Sciences Center and Medicaid. Without funds to pay for the surgery herself, a frustrated and unemployed Lane eventually contacted a local television station, a move which she believes hastened the surgery.

“All of a sudden – top of the list!” she said.

But, she said, an uninsured, low-income patient in Lane’s situation must wait for a Medicaid disability ruling to come through, a process that takes 90 days from the time of the initial discharge from hospital. Alternately, the physician could expedite surgery by considering it an emergency and signing a certificate of need, but the patient would still be responsible for payment. The hospital did not initially consider the second surgery an emergency, Brillinger said.

Medicaid refused to pay after it was decided Lane did not meet the insurance program’s disability requirements, said Robert Knudson, Utah Department of Health’s director of eligibility services.

Note to self: read this before considering grad school

What does one say to a newly-minted Ph.D. in Economics immediately after graduation? One says this:

“Congratulations. You’ve done it. Take a deep breath and be proud of yourself. You’ve not only done it, you’ve landed a tenure-track job. You’ve not only landed a tenure-track job, but the fact that you had more than one offer means that over the next several years you’ll not only be much better paid but you’ll also teach less than you have in the years just past.

“But don’t think your life will be easy. In six years your university will send out for letters, asking outsiders whether you should be given tenure. What the letter-writers will say about you in year six depends on the articles of yours that they have read in year five. Since nobody reads the journals cover to cover anymore, they will read in year five only those articles published in year four that others have told them are worth reading. To get an article published in year four, you must submit the final draft to the journal after year two.

Thus you need, for the next two years, to work harder than you have ever worked in your life: what you produce in the next two years plays an extraordinarily large role in making your long-run academic reputation.”

“I was going to wait until tomorrow before saying that to him,” says one Berkeley professor. “You’re the second professor to have told me that today,” says one newly-minted Berkeley Ph.D.

Attention world: now hear this!

Gasoline prices are high not because of a shortage of oil, but because of a shortage in refinery capacity. Oil companies want to reduce inventory and maximize profits, and in the long run it’s more cost effective for them to have higher gas prices and reduced expenses from shutting down refineries.

Case in point: Shell Oil is shutting down a Bakersfield refinery that supplies 2% of California’s gasoline. Why? Because they can…

Full disclosure: I haven’t eaten anything from McDonalds in well over ten years and frown upon fast food in general, so you would think that I’d be championing Super Size Me. Guy-at-large notices a plague of golden arches everywhere, the increase in obesity-related health issues, puts two and two together and faster than you can say “Michael Moore” you’ve got a snarky anti-corporate film that sticks it to the man.

I just wish that Morgan Spurlock wasn’t the one to make it though. Spurlock was the creator and host of the MTV gross-out show “I Bet You Will” where he got people to eat cockroaches and embarrass themselves for money and his crass attitude to people carries on here. Spurlock constantly elbow-jabs you with lingering shots of fat people (especially ones who are front-line McDonalds workers) and constantly points out the rise of obesity in the fly-over states. Super Size Me does have some good moments – a scene at a high-risk school that jettisoned it’s traditional school lunch program for a similarly-priced one based on low fat, organic food is particularly powerful, but the movie doesn’t veer too much from his initial conclusion of fat-junkie Americans and a fast food industry who is all too happy to be the pusher.

Surprisingly, the movie makes no mention f the the McSpotlight trial which comprehensively brought to light McDonald’s practices not just on nutrition, but on advertising, environmental effects, treatment of animals, employment practices, and effect as a global cultural force (the McSpotlight documentary is much more informative). Arguably, that would have made for a longer movie, but Spurlock could have easily have deleted the scenes of him puking, complaining, and waiting on doctors as his McDonald’s diet, which is basically just a scaled up version of one of his MTV stunts. At the very least, the movie should have included a sociologist along with it’s parade of doctors. Evil fast food isn’t the sole reason why Americans are fat, it’s the entire American lifestyle of sedentary work and home conditions, hurried eating, oversized portions, and overall lack of nutritional awareness. And sadly, that lifestyle is being exported to the rest of the world.

Ultimately, the film’s finger-wagging is just that and it’s conclusion of “living an unhealthy lifestyle is bad for you” is ridiculously obvious. Then again, Super Size Me is implicitly marketed at healthy people anyway so the point is rather moot.

And lastly, can anyone explain this? That McDonald’s campaign seems way offensive.

If swank “event” restaurant eating in the 1950s was delineated by exotic Polynesian themes and decors that modern hipsters would murder for, the 1960s was the era of the jet-age revolving restaurant. Put your Pan-Am flight bag down and read Metropolis‘ short history on the revolving restaurant.

To begin to understand their appeal, one must now look to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where the revolving restaurant is still seen as a sign of progress–an emblem of prosperity, not kitsch. Indeed, they have become more indicators of economic development than adornments to the skyline. During the 1990s, a new wave of revolving restaurants swept around the world, from Lebanon to Jakarta to Cairo; often, their openings occasioned visits by heads of state and much adulatory press. (The restaurant atop the 674-foot Saddam Tower in Baghdad may be the only one actually named for a head of state.) When the Forte Grand Hotel opened in Abu Dhabi in 1993, Gulf Construction magazine enthused that “the crowning glory of the hotel is the rooftop revolving restaurant, a masterpiece of modern technology.”

WFMU’s Kenny G broadcasted the entire last episode of Friends (including the commercials) stretched out to fill his entire three hour show. The end result is strangely compelling in a Negativlandic head-shaking way.