Dept. of Richochets and Gooseflesh

Jon Lee Anderson establishes some field cred, and Ian Frazier horripilates at the "uncanny scent of our beginnings."

I never read thrillers growing up, unless you count the Hardy Boys. And no spy novels, apart from "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," by John LeCarré, which I had to read for a fourth-year class on espionage at SFU—the class I was in, incidentally, when the attacks of September 11th took place. I didn't play with G.I. Joes, and, frankly, never understood the ecstasies my Egyptian friend Kareem found in them, flinging himself, and the figurines, around the pool deck at his Toronto home, spittle flying from his mouth—Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, Snake Eyes, noooo!!!

All of which is to say I was unprepared for Jon Lee Anderson's ducking, barrel-rolling, ricocheting account of American opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, "The Taliban's Opium War" (July 9, 2007). About midway through the article the prose turned all And then we heard an explosion over the ridge; there were shell casings and bone fragments all around. We poked our head out of the foxhole, and I had to remind myself that I wasn't reading a paperback I'd found wedged between two bus seats. And just seconds after that admittedly disparaging thought, I had another: Shit, the guy got shot at, for four hours, in Afghanistan. He's got more street cred—field cred, whatever—than Fitty. (Audio here.)

I had two more thoughts, too:

1) Invite more goateed, tatooed DynCorp employees to my next barbecue. How cool would it be to get them all hopped up on Bud and amphetamines and pair them off in human cockfights?

2) Save a little of that opium juice from the knocked-over and broke-open poppy, fieldworker Khalil! I'll swing by around eight. You can show me what to do—we'll make some tea, rub it on our gums, whatever.

Ah, I was going to write more about the insouciant little article that followed Anderson's (hence the post title), but I've run out of time for the moment. It was Ian Frazier's "On Impact," the tale of a meteorite (or perhaps something more sinister) that recently fell into the New Jersey home of Srinivasan Nageswaran. Although I know Frazier's name, I can't call to mind another of his articles. In this piece he's delightfully breezy, and he has a fine ear for slang. Tell me you don't love a guy who could write three opening sentences like these:

"People get excited when strange objects fall from the sky. We seek portents and meaning, we venerate the object, and we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end. Even wised up by science as we are, we tend to freak."

("Horripilate"—I looked it up—means "to cause one's hair to stand on end and get goosebumps," as in "I horripilate at the sight of blood," or "Hitchcock movies horripilate me.")

Dept. of As It Is Lived

Woke this morning and rolled over to read the last two columns of a David Denby film review. It's my fifth morning in my tiny new apartment.

My curtains are drawn, but the windows are open, and on Nelson Street I can hear the cars and fire trucks, of course, but also bicycles and four kinds of birdsong—a squall, a hoot, a gurgle, and a pinched whistle—and pedestrians and their low conversations, footfalls, and pockets jangling with change.

The Denby review, of a film called "Evening," had a beautiful line, and I very much like the idea behind it:

"The two women look at the past, compare marriages, and make an accounting of their mistakes—which turn out to be merely life as it is lived, not as is hoped for."

I'm going out for a coffee, as it is drunk and not hoped for. That means a choice between the 7-Eleven and the better, pricier cafe, with something existential hanging in the balance. You want anything?

Dept. of Our Home and Native

I spent my Canada Day on Mayne Island, in the company of two old friends. I took a ferry to get there; it was slow and the passengers were few. There's something about an empty ferry—the expanse of vacuumed carpet, the odd reassurance of the cafeteria and its fixed-seat tables with raised edges, the whole enterprise heaving and shuddering like a fat lover. The diesel and creosote of the car deck. A cup of coffee and a magazine.

The Sunday run from Victoria hits Pender Island, Saturna, and then Pender again before getting to Mayne's Village Bay. I got a good ways into this week's New Yorker, but I stalled in the middle of John Cassidy's article about the hedge-fund machine. With 45 minutes left in the voyage, I reclined on a moulded plastic bench, flipped the magazine over my face, and began promptly to snore.

Thanks to Finnigan, late of Playa del Carmen, for the illustration, which has Ontario in a bit of saucy contact with Michigan. Does this mean Canada is a Red State? Quick—what's the past tense of "drag"?

Happy Canada Day, all.

Dept. of the Sultry Look

Cat Stevens and his hair. 

Many thanks to Roland for pointing out that Cat Stevens's conversion to Islam has nothing to do with hair, hair products, or envy, at least not in the formal, obvious sense. But he should bear in mind that everything is connected to everything else—Buddhism reduced to a sentence, or so an old humanities professor told me. I mean, it isn't a huge leap from religion to hair. I myself wore a goatee during my experiment with Seventh Day Adventism. Neither suited me. Photos to come.

Work has been hectic, so my posts have been thin. I may yet have to resort to pilfered photos and free association to get something up on New Yorker Comment each week, but consider it a sorbet between the heavier courses of whatever the hell else I'm thinking about.

This current issue, the one with the Lou Romano cover of newlyweds in a taxi, looks so good I can't believe I haven't got around to reading it. If you're a newsstand buyer and not a subscriber, let me whet your appetite. It contains:

• Calvin Trillin on psychos in Nova Scotia
• Seymour Hersh on the shunned US Army General Antonio Taguba
• David Owen on the crazy-ass-looking National Stadium in Beijing
• Nancy Franklin on "John from Cincinnati," a show that smart people who like TV are rumbling about
• Anthony Lane on [movie name here]

"None of this fits together? How very true!" —Albert Camus

Lustre, envy, and Cat Stevens's conversion to Islam

Again, Mr. Cat Stevens. 

Isn't her hair lustrous? Doesn't it shine? How much shinier, would you say, are her infinity-symbol-shaped locks than your damp, lank, rapidly thinning ones? Fifty percent? Seventy? Eighty?

The number is hard to judge, but the result isn't—Pantene makes your hair jaw-droppingly shiny.

How to get free potato chips

It appears that all you have to do to get free potato chips is suffer a moderate injury and write a letter.

Dear Old Dutch,


I'm not one of these cranky shut-ins who, deprived of ordinary human contact, resorts to writing angry letters to corporations. But I have to say something: your new Rave chips burned the crap out of my mouth. For your reference, the offending flavor was Salt & Vinegar.


Here's how it went. I bought a large bag and had an absentminded three or four handfuls. Then I noticed an intense stinging on my tongue. You know when you're washing the dishes and stick your hand under too-hot water, and how all you do is clench up, squint, hiss, and wait till it's over? That's what happened. In my mouth. Because of your chips.


If I had to compare it to another physical sensation, it would be this: putting salt in your mouth and electrocuting yourself, with the mouth-salt finding most of the current.

Here's the kicker (and bear in mind my first sentence): it's been two days, and my tongue still feels strange. Seriously, was there demand for this kind of flavor experience from the snacking public? The tip feels abused, like I dragged it on pavement, and there are little red spots where there weren't before.


Needless to say, I'm never buying Rave chips again. I've always bought Old Dutch, though, and would love to hear from you guys that your pumping up the acid content of your S&V wasn't just a spiteful joke by an ex-employee or something. If you wanted to send me a coupon for a big bag of Ketchup, too, that'd be cool.


Yours in mild physical distress,


John Bucher

Old Dutch, to its credit, sent me two coupons for free product, along with an apologetic letter thanking me for my "phone call."


(Extra: Another flavor of old Dutch rave.)

Dept. of Big Apple Accolades

Emdashes has made it onto the blogroll of The New York Times. In addition, Manhattan User's Guide has named it one of the 400 websites that make a distinct contribution to life in New York City.

Emily Gordon, take a bow.

Dept. of The Skill-testing Question

“When you’re finished here, Spencer, we’ll need you on the bridge-to-nowhere project.”

Congratulations to New York’s Richard Hine for winning this week's New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest with the above line. Head over to Emdashes to see my full interview with Richard; we go deep, discussing death, religion, the pestilence of procrastination, amphibian life, midwifery, and Taoist self-agnegation—and he gets off one of the best one-liners in recent Internet history. The guy's got it going on.

Dept. of What's She Reading

The pixellation doesn't do this fine Adrian Tomine cover (June 11 & 18) any justice, but I knew immediately—didn't you?—what this tourist-bus cutie was reading.

What is it?

(Is it me, or do Tomine's lines have an Asian look?)

Dept. of Boredom and Desire

Once again, James Surowiecki is writing things I already knew but hadn't got around to saying. This week, in "Feature Presentation," he argues that we consumers habitually choose electronic devices that have many more features than we want or use, and that, after the blush of first contact, we grow bored with them. Our addling by gizmo he calls "feature creep," and he describes it this way:

"...fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. This spiral of complexity costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money."

Side note, James: "Spiral," unless you're talking about footballs, confuses me. If your fortunes are spiralling, which way are they going? "Either way," says the OED:

spiral, v.
a. intr. To wind or move in a spiral manner; to form spiral curves.
b. To fly an aircraft in a spiral path. Also with down, downwards.
c. fig. To move rapidly in one direction (usu. upwards), in a manner considered to resemble a spiral; to increase or decrease in response to the same movement of another quantity or other quantities. Cf. sense 2d of the n. above.

I've got a Sony-Ericsson that cost me something like 400 bucks when I bought it in Taipei, three years ago. The only reason I got it was that the PVC-skirted saleswoman in the FarEasTone was keen to sell me one of their house-brand phones (the telecommunications equivalent of Safeway-brand corn flakes), and I was keen to show her I wasn't gullible. So I bought a 400-dollar phone.

Its features have come back to earth since, but at the time it was flash. I had Bluetooth, for sending anonymous messages to intriguing strangers (never happened); Internet at my thumbtips, for those formerly unproductive cab rides (never happened); and the ability to shoot videos. The latter was cool exactly three times: in Bangkok during Songkran, when I filmed some girls dancing on a loudspeaker; here, when I witnessed a "near plane crash" (YouTube commenters can be so cruel); and here, when comic-relief Taeho came to my ESL class with a fresh perm.

The picture is poor because the camera lens has been damaged in my pocket—three years' of rainwater, chewing-gum residue, key scratches, and coin thrashings. The phone now sits on my bedstand, uncharged and alone. I'm going through a Luddite phase.

Cell-phone designers, if you're listening: I'd like something indestructible, in brushed aluminum, with great reception. I'm tired of designed obsolescence and "#" buttons that stick. I don't need photographic capacity, video games, or DJ-mixing programs. Make it like a Zippo lighter—something that warms against my leg, something I can spin on a table.