Black Friday in the Herb David Guitar Studio. I know, it was Buy Nothing Day, I forgot.

So the munificent folks at Google have spared us the trauma of drunken emailing. Thanks.

But those of us at U Michigan have a more local conundrum. Now that “7-Fast” book delivery has been experimentally enabled for graduate students, it’s possible to search for a book and have it delivered to your departmental mailbox without the penalty of actually going to a library to find it or even to pick it up from the circulation desk. Without physical costs or library hours to consider, drunken librarying becomes a too-easy option.

It’s not that I’m not enjoying The Way of Ignorance, by Wendell Berry. It’s just that I have no idea what led to it arriving in my mail folder.

Don’t drink and patronize folks. Or, heck, do. Books can never be a bad thing, right?

Some news for my comrades in the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan:

Walking back from the radio station after our fab interview with Thom Princen, I asked him about the future of the “localization” seminar he’s currently running with Ray De Young and Jim Crofoot. He said they’re contemplating turning it into a regular affair, either as a Master’s project seminar (as it currently is) or as straight seminar.

As a Master’s project, it would be the only project I would be tempted to do instead of a thesis. As a regular seminar, it would be by far the course I would most regret having missed during my time at SNRE/U Mich.

So everybody should email him and the other teachers and encourage them to make it a part of the regularly scheduled programming. As he pointed out, it’s probably the only course of it’s kind in the country. It’s sooooo of it’s time.

Last week the Michigan Daily called up during my show and asked if they could come down and do some shooting. Bill Corrigan was next up and said he was down with it. The results (plus Tyler Dancer and Max Fabick from the previous day):

Tomorrow is One Web Day. Is there anything more dorkotopian than One Web Day? I doubt it, so you know I’ll be there.

Turns out OWD is led by Susan Crawford, who is law faculty at U Michigan. Anybody heard of any meatspace OWD events in Ann Arbor?

Reason Magazine is a bunch of infuriatingly cocky libertarian wonks, who write well and are generally convincing despite being fundamentally wrong about life and everything. They’re charmers by and large, living out their Heinlein-goes-to-Washington boy (and girl)hood fantasy lives in print.

Jesse Walker is managing editor for Reason. He lives in Baltimore, but according to his blog, last Thursday he covered a slot on WCBN. I’m sorry I missed that, I guess I was in Chicago. It seems he was a student and dj here back in the ambiguous day and this was a triumphalist return.

For fun, here’s what libertarian turbo-intellectuals sound like when they play music and talk into a microphone:

Sounds good. Go figure. Playlist included in Walker’s blog post.

Update: if I’d read some of Jesse’s other blog posts, I would have realized that he is living in Ann Arbor for a while, and has a regular Thurs. 12-3p show. The posted audio is just the first episode. Right on.

Long live the Alley Bar.

Long live the Alley Bar.

Last week a couple of senior-highschool-looking kids walked boldly on to my porch and took the bottles and cans from my recycling bin. They returned them to a minivan piloted by a soccer-dad looking dad. They were not perturbed when I came out on the porch and watched them leaving. Today a homeless guy (at least he claimed to be homeless) knocked on the door and asked if he could do the same. And tried to sell me a colour TV. Apparently it works good.

My household manages to get the recycling to the curb about one week out of two. So having the porch cleared of the tin and glass weekly is a service to me. And I’m enough of a capatilist to assume that if these folks are taking my waste somewhere that is willing to pay them for it, then that somewhere is presumably more reliably going to in turn move it somewhere productive. So this is all fine with me. Bring on the binners. If Ann Arbor’s economy is supporting this degree of specialization, maybe it means it is really a city.

So I got a few hours in at the pow wow. Fun, as expected. Can’t really beat it for people-watching, and everybody is doing something and having a good time. Still digesting my fry bread and (fried) buffalo burger. I got waved down to an intertribal dance by some friendly old folks in buckskin, but I pretended they were waving at somebody else. I’m shy.

A couple of weeks ago when we were having a GEO rally outside the administration building, we had to wait while a group of Indians and supporters held their own gathering to demand the return of ancestral remains which they say the university keeps in storage. At the pow wow, somebody had thought to drive this point home by roping off sections of seats. Each section had signage indicating the number of people, what county their remains had been removed from, and in what year. The number I heard (or misheard) was something like 1100 seats held empty.

University president Mary Sue Coleman gave some remarks after the opening grand procession. I wonder if she was aware.

The Jefferson Market is back open. Big “Open” banner and everything. How did that happen?

Last year I went to the Ann Arbor Pow Wow on a whim. I can’t really tell you what it was I liked so much about it, but I sure did. I just sat in the stands and ate overpriced buffalo burgers and watched. Somehow that was really satisfying. Something about the energy and the event felt really right.

Since then I’ve had a dream of spending a good chunk of summer riding from pow wow to pow wow across the US. I haven’t quite been able to figure out when that is going to happen, probably not this summer, but next summer is still a possibility.

The 36th annual is this weekend.

I was in Dawn Treader today, which may just be my favourite of many favourite used book stores. They didn’t have The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson. Nobody ever does. They didn’t have it in the place in Virginia either, and when I got home from looking I found out he had just shot himself. Swear to god.

So I’ve ordered it from the book cloud. I like buying from used book stores, but I like the sensation of having books in the incoming mail too.

Checking wikipedia, I discover that in addition to the Rum Diary, Thompson wrote one other novel, “Prince Jellyfish“. Like Rum Diary, it didn’t get published back in the gonzo era. Unlike Rum Diary, it still isn’t.

Just in case anybody hasn’t heard, the GEO walkout is on. See you on the picket lines.

Last weekend, I watched a black cat walking down a railway track rail. Probably because the ground was snowy but the rail was clear. It was a remarkable sight, for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on. I just wanted to remark on that before I forgot it.

I don’t take advantage of the local music scene nearly enough around here, but last night I got lured out by a no-cover early-doors My Dear Disco gig at Live at PJs. This is a quick review: good.

The band’s “hey wow great crowd” stage banter sounded sincere, so maybe they don’t inspire the same heated dance implosion everywhere they go, but I can’t think why they wouldn’t. In retrospect, I guess the last time I saw people grooving that hard during the sound check was Tabla Beat Science tuning up at a world music festival in the California gold country foot hills. So yes, it may have been an especially willing crowd. But these guys deploy the basic palette of dance-pop with a really competent inventiveness, all fired up with genuine post-ironic hipster glee. And their special weapon (hold B button and move joystick right twice) is to reveal their second keyboardist as an all-of-sudden champion Irish bag-piper, playing an electrified kit. Good trick that. Taken altogether, I haven’t lost that much sweat on a dancefloor in a while.

Their studio material lacks a certain personality that comes from seeing them in-context, but it’s certainly catchy enough that if you’re into catchy, you might want to have a go. They do succeed in dragging some clever new skin to the old ceremony of electro-pop. They’ve got some files on their website and myspace.

On the down side, I think I screwed up my back.

In the comments for this flickr photo of the Beer Despot’s lovely old neon sign is some historical commentary on how the joint used to be a drive-in, why it isn’t now, and why the sign is regulatorily doomed to entropy.

As Utah Phillips might say, the University of Michigan isn’t the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from here. So it’s nice that lots of interesting people keep coming here to keep us entertained.

At lunch I went to at talk on the historical development of the nuetral theory of evolution, from STIS staff scientist Egbert Leigh. It doesn’t sound like such a hot topic, but I’m fascinated by just how un-obvious tropical biological richness is when you really start to look at it, and I’ve been told I should consequently know about neutral theory, and thought the talk might be just the thing. So did lots of other people apparently, the large-ish room at the museum of natural history was at capacity. It turned out to be just this side of incomprehensible for my genetics-theory underequipped brain (and frankly some people should just not be allowed around powerpoint). But there was something soothing and pleasant about sitting on a radiator in a room packed up with young and old smart folks, listening to this bearded old dude droning on about really smart stuff he clearly really knew a lot about, and idly contemplating the firing of neural networks throughout the crowd. There were necessarily no academic high points for me, but the non-academic high point was when he suggested in his even, dispassionate way that Steve Hubbell built out the powerful and influential neutral theory, which every sensible person knows is fundamentally bonked, “because it was a sweet job, the same way building the atomic bomb was a sweet job for Oppenheimer”, and the crowd accepted that in their even, dispassionate way. I’m sure the lecturer didn’t mean it that way, but still, c’mon, Hiroshima?

After lunch I went and hung out in the Center for the Study of Complex System, where I feel legitimately entitled to check my email in a complex systems way since I probably passed my Evolutionary Dynamics test yesterday and thus still have a shot at getting my minor in complex systems. Then I went back to my home department, where my advisor had arranged an informal afternoon seminar with Michael Batty and some other Brits who were in town for a social sciences conference. Last year I spent a long weekend in Chicago, exploring the neighbourhoods there. I took a copy of one of Batty’s many books about city simulation with me. I didn’t end up doing a lot of reading, but to the extent that I did it was fun to contrast the rich and surprising reality of the very visceral and assertive city of Chicago with the abstractions and essences of the book. So it was particularly pleasant to spend a non-directed afternoon around a table with Prof. Batty and other smart people batting around big ideas in agent-based modeling.

Being a grad student has it’s ups and downs, and there are plenty of times when I’ve wished for the mindless tedium of manual labour as a preferable substitute for the adult-student lifestyle, but when it comes through, the life of an academic can really come through.

Someone has reclaimed a chunk of boulevard at the corner of 3rd and W Madison (I think) and converted it to a kitchen garden. Right on! For a while there was an enormous pumpkin growing there, within inches of the passing cars (not that there are all that many passing cars at 3rd and Madison). The pumpkin is gone now, but a sign has replaced it that says simply “it was 54 lbs.”

While walking to campus this afternoon, I was ‘excuse me’d buy a burly young guy in non-synthetic clothes on a heavily laden bicycle. In the reasonable tones of someone looking for Zingermans, he asked me if I had any interest in a bible? I told no thanks. He nodded, curtly but with knowing sympathy. “Very few do”. And rode away down the sidewalk. There were a lot of people at the intersection. I’m honoured he chose me for that little routine.

So since Charlie Slick signed with big-deal megalabel Cerberus his myspace page stopped letting you download his songs. See if I care.

Let’s get something straight here slick, I’m not going to pay money for your album. I dunno, I guess I’d think about but I wouldn’t actually do it. I will go to every show you play in Ann Arbor or Ypsi that isn’t at the damn Nuetral Zone, same as I ever have (that’s once). I will keep playing up your songs on the radio every time I host a show (yeah that’s once).

In the meantime, here’s a link to a page that explains how to rip songs from myspace pages. I have never been reduced to ripping songs from myspace pages and I don’t think I’m there yet.

So I guess I’m stuck with Charlie Slick’s back catalog. I don’t care.

In other news, does anybody have a copy of Dan Kahn’s stuff? Because I can’t find it in the WCBN record collection, and he’s probably off touring in Germany or some damn thing. Why is it so hard to listen to local acts?