The Scottosphere

This is what hap­pens when the ter­ror­ists win.

It’s one thing to ver­bally protest unrea­son­able rules (as I do nearly every time I travel), but it’s another thing entirely to be wrong­fully arrested and intim­i­dated for no just cause. I can’t believe that there are still peo­ple (in this case, cops) who live by cre­dos like “remem­ber 9/11.”

As national retail­ers plan to kick off the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son ear­lier than ever with hours on Thanks­giv­ing Day, some Mass­a­chu­setts mer­chants are start­ing to ques­tion whether the state’s Colonial-era blue laws, which pro­hibit Thanks­giv­ing open­ings, are becom­ing out­dated. “Mer­chants say Mass­a­chu­setts blue laws are out­dated with national retail­ers open­ing on Thanks­giv­ing,” Boston.com

I think it’s great that we don’t enforce laws about danc­ing and sell­ing liquor on Sun­days. But for small busi­nesses, it wouldn’t be fair to let pres­sure from big national chain stores lead to employ­ees giv­ing up their hol­i­days. Let’s keep Thanks­giv­ing a shopping-free day in Massachusetts.

He made a bunch of rights and lefts through the for­est before get­ting out to unlock the gate. Oth­ers might have an elec­tronic gate, but Young likes the mechan­i­cal expe­ri­ence of slip­ping a key into a pad­lock and swing­ing some­thing open. He is fun­da­men­tally ana­log, despite the occa­sional elec­tronic excesses in his music. He likes amps with knobs that go to 12 and things that click when you touch them.

[…] Young picked up a con­troller that appeared to be capa­ble of land­ing a rocket on an aster­oid and reminded me that, as an investor in Lionel Trains, he invented Train Mas­ter Com­mand Con­trol (which allows you to run mul­ti­ple trains at once), as well as Rail­Sounds (which pro­vides real­is­tic rail­road audio). Young lost a lot of money on his invest­ment, but he’s still a board mem­ber at Lionel and ended up with a lot of cool gear, so it all sort of worked out.via Neil Young Comes Clean – NYTimes.com.

I think I would get along with this guy.

Accord­ing to a state­ment released by the Divi­sion of Stu­dent Life last week, land­line tele­phones will be removed from all on-campus dorm bed­rooms by the end of sum­mer.via Land­lines set to be removed from dorm rooms – The Tech.

It makes me a lit­tle sad when a major piece of infra­struc­ture is retired. Tele­phones were a tan­gi­ble part of my col­lege expe­ri­ence. Like dial­ing the front desk. Call­ing for pizza and hop­ing to hear the phone ring from the lounge. Ask­ing ridicu­lous ques­tions of Night­line. Hav­ing the cam­pus police dis­patcher mis­tak­enly dial me instead of the house­mas­ter nearly every time the police needed fac­ulty intervention.

Amus­ingly, MIT’s forward-thinking solu­tion is to return the dorm to its 1980s con­fig­u­ra­tion, with com­mon phones in the hall­ways and lounges replac­ing pri­vate phones in the rooms.

Kodak announced today that it is sell­ing its East­man Gela­tine plant in Peabody, Mass. Could this be the begin­ning of a big sell-off?

At the time of a fan­tas­tic 1999 Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle (which I can now find online only here), East­man was pro­cess­ing 80 mil­lion pounds of bovine skele­tal remains a year to keep up with the world demand for pho­to­graphic film. (And sell­ing the rejects to make Jell-O, which appar­ently does not neces­si­tate the same level of purity as the photo industry.)

Andy Rooney died today. I’ve always felt a strange sort of con­nec­tion with the guy. In my TV-watching days, I would reg­u­larly tune in for his 60 Min­utes com­men­tary. I have read most of his books.

The pop­u­lar opin­ion has pro­nounced him the arche­type of the grumpy old man, but those who look more care­fully will find that his voice—his writer’s voice, that is—was some­thing quite dif­fer­ent. Rooney was a keen observer of the world around him. He wasn’t just cur­mud­geonly in his pieces—he was inci­sive and witty and clever. He was also a seri­ous wood­worker with a deep appre­ci­a­tion for craftsmanship.

His best book, My War, is one of my favorites. It offers a deeply per­sonal and com­pletely fresh per­spec­tive of life in World War II. Go out and read it!

It turns out that every­thing we used to say about busi­ness majors is really true.

Hello, read­ers! I’m still here—just a lit­tle more dis­tracted than usual.

Fol­low­ing the cov­er­age of Egypt’s rev­o­lu­tion has been grip­ping. The big 3-D map of Cairo in Sunday’s Times brought a stream of mem­o­ries flood­ing back. The Nile Hilton, where all the media was holed up? I’ve stayed there! Midan Tahrir (Tahrir Square)? I’ve crossed the street there! (Accord­ing to one travel guide, my sur­vival means that I can safely nego­ti­ate a street-crossing any­where else in the world.) Rev­o­lu­tion, to Amer­i­cans today, is such a dis­tant concept—something seen only in pho­tographs and shaky video. It’s weird to see it unfold­ing in a place that feels familiar.

On a related note, one won­ders why Al-Jazeera Eng­lish is not avail­able in the USA. I don’t have cable or satel­lite, but if I did, I would harass my provider end­lessly about this chan­nel. My usual hotel in Hong Kong has it and it is 1,000% more inter­est­ing and more cere­bral than any Amer­i­can news chan­nel. And, in my lim­ited expe­ri­ence, much more objective.