At work tonight, covering the convention while watching baseball, I decided to delve into my daily reading for a respite and uncovered this article that has my head all afire right now. This is a fascinating article about a "radical" traffic engineer that decided that the best traffic controls were as little controls as possible. People would generally act more cautiously and intelligently if they were required to do so, and that structurally we can create situations in which people have to act in a better fashion by not prescribing the appropriate behavior in all situation, or as he states it, ""When you treat people like idiots, they'll behave like idiots."

Today, as I have been for many in the last few weeks, I have been working on an electoral college speculator map. In a presentation of the map I did today, I was asked to make sure we spell out exactly how the user should interact with the map. I think in doing that we fail or users or we fail in our efforts to do effective design, one or the other. I think if you let the purpose of the map be known, users will figure out how to use it, just as you don't need speed bumps or speed limit signs if the environment is designed in such a way that drivers can figure out the proper behavior.

Then I come home. Down the highway and the parkway, through the detour, and into my driveway. Coming up the steps and along the walk that borders the front corner of the house, right before the dogleg, hidden by those unruly shrubs, I find a man-sized pile of shit: first the smell, then the flies, then the visual. It's either from a man, a bear or a great dane, and I'm betting on a man. There aren't that many bear sightings in my neighborhood, and why would a dog find its way to that hidden spot when in my experience they would rather do it in grass where they can scratch? Dogs don't ever seem to have issues squatting and doing the deed right in front of god and the whole world.

The pile is right up close to the exterior wall of my house. Just where a man could've squatted and rested his back against the bricks, extending his legs out far enough so as not to get it on his trousers. I have shat in the outdoors before, just not on someone's sidewalk.

So if it is a man, I think, why would they do it there? Perhaps they are homeless and have nowhere to do it. Perhaps it's Leroy and he's mad at me for some reason.

I guess it doesn't really matter. It appears a man decided to come and shit on my sidewalk and now I have to fight the flies and the stench and go clean it up.

There's the one friend whose love of his life is leaving him, and another that just wishes that he had such a love of his life.

It's early and the morning birds are singing and my tongue is tired.

Okay, this one is not like reading either, but like intake, but listening to Tom Waits is like reading, if your really listen, right? THis is the July 5 concert that I went to here in Atlanta. So excited to find the document. Read it. Love it. If not... you call yourself MY friend?

We've got two weeks left of this experiment that we started three years ago: three more weeks of therapy and then I got to do something else. He says he thinks it might be good to pursue a woman therapist since that's where my problems lie, with women, and that she may teach me how to trust the universal her.

We talk lots of how I am feeling. I guess that's what therapy is. We have been especially keying in on how I feel about the separation. He asks if I feel anger, and I guess I do. The adult part of me understands the state of things, the child feels abandoned - the worst and constant fear. I cannot talk to him about it until he tells me to talk to a third person in the room that is not him.

I tend to cry a lot during these recent sessions.

This piece, apparently written for on-air delivery, is pretty hilarious. As one, like many of us, who has spent days upon days listening to the chipper clichés of managers and the like (remember the days of "synergy" and "out-of-the-box thinking"), it led me to believe that all that an MBA granted you was the ability to use, misuse, coin and abuse such hackneyed tropes.

This article is a grand skewering of such business speak and a fine critique of modern business languages inability to really say anything at all.

Favorite excerpt:

If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office - unless things have gone very wrong indeed.

This only marginally qualifies as reading since it is a photo slideshow with brief captions. It's fascinating to see the families in their homes with food piled all around. It's also interesting to llok at the facial expressions of the people. It's also amazing to see the differential in the amount of packaged foods from family to family, and how it relates to monetary food expenditure.

In the Sicily photo, I am not sure if the husband knows it, but those three kids are not all his.

The older man in the Konstancin-Jeziorna photo is not so happy his wife hoodwinked him into participating in this project.

For the Melander family of Bargteheide, I have a suggestion: family counseling. Dad has a drinking problem and no one in the famuly is very happy about it.

This article in this week's New Yorker is simply fascinating; the stuff of which movies are made. Don't want to ruing the plot for you, but be prepared for several twists and turns.

The most fascinating thing about the whole plot to me is how persistent the guy has been, even after serving time in an American prison, he returned to the same behavior when he got back to France. His insistence that he was always looking for love and a family is supported by his troublesome relationship with his blood family.

There are times when I am depressed that I will look upon children jealously, seeing a simplicity to their lives (that may be an illusion) that do not feel in my adult existence. I don't think I am alone in this feeling: it's been written about time and time again. How many books are filled with longings for childhood, to be like a child?

Bourdin's inhibitions just were not great enough to stop him from taking the next step that at least I know I have pondered before: time machines, magic potions, Tom Hanks in Big.

I can't really put my fingers completely on why the story touched me so much. There are plenty of reasons not to desire a return to chidlhood, or to being a child, I guess that's what keeps me sane, but if the genie granted me one wish...

Throughout my life, I have been surrounded by one form of worry wart or another. It's very entertaining most of the time, but when it boils down to being told what vessels to drink my water out of, and where I should carry my iPhone, it is going too far. I have planned many times to do hours of scientific research to debunk the worries of my wartish friends, but like so many things (like taking out the trash and washing all of my dirty clothes) I just can't find the time or energy.

Lo! Today I see this article on NYTimes.com. A lot of my legwork has been done for me, and in a very few, short paragraphs too. Now I don't have to worry about compiling this list anymore.

My favorite quote (and this one is for my old boss):

Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Now I need to go refill my bottle that I keep on my desk, that I will never take camping.

I heard this piece on NPR this morning and sought it out when I got to work. It made me shed a manly tear that nearly caused me to blow through a traffic light. This page has an audio link to Frank Deford's audio story as well as a transcript of the same story.

Enjoy!

What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond, but that was just not him. It's almost as if the fish were there because a man like Willy could only have a pond with such plentiful fish.

In the fall, my brother and I (and sometimes father and mother) would help harvest the sweet potatoes. It seems that I even remember gathering bailed hay at some point as well. When a tire went flat on one of the cars we would go to the used tire and repair shop that Willy and a friend had established in a building on his property.

He had a wife named Nelly and a daughter named Patricia, my cousin, who lived across the street with her husband. I would not know Patricia if she were to walk right up to me. Probably wouldn't recognize Nelly anymore, maybe not even Willy in his last few years.

And at work there's too much to be done. Self-imposed deadlines the I am trying to shirk. Trying to just cruise into it all, to not have an all-nighter like I seem to always have when getting ready to depart for a few days.

The article's basic gist is that "true" heroes have disappeared from American cinema in the last few decades, or when they do exist, they are relegated to "a world far, far way":e.g. Star Wars, Superman etc. It downplays what it calls "victim heroes," which it says characterizes all of the heroes from films in recent years: e.g. Erin Brockovich, Michael Clayton... The author states that Hollywood fails to give us such "true" heroes, even though audience obviously want such heroes, although the author fails to provide a source for this matter of fact.

If you cannnot tell from tone here, I think this is a load of horseshit. So, tipped by the add for a Newt Gingrich book on the same page as the article, and remembering my college conservative news rag's (The Duke Review) proclivity for printing photos of John Wayne, I decided to do a little research.