Epistemographer

…got a phone call from a private investigator yesterday that someone used my social secutiry number to cash a bad check at a Winn-Dixie in Alabama back in 2000. Even worse, apparently, someone else has been passing off my SSN as theirs since 1994.

Just spent an hour on the phoen with credit bureaus and the FTC’s ID Theft Hotline, so it looks like I’ve done everything I cna right now. Doesn’t look like there’s been any real damage to my personal accounts, though we’ll see what my credit reports turn up when I get them in the mail next week.

Weirdness…

• I’d always thought of Ithaca as untouched by the rampant spread of franchised stores (or, at the very least, I thought the town would be able to hold them at bay on the periphery of town, where the strip of fast food stores is). One of the quirky things about the town is that there’s nothing to be found in the genre of mid-range American food; no T.G.I. Fridays, no Bennigans, no Ruby Tuesday’s. So I take a bus in Tuesday, and one of the first things I see is a new building going up in a parking lot near the uber-grocery store. I ask one of the construction guys what he’s building, and he points to a sign overhead that reads “A new Chili’s, coming soon!”
  It’s not a McDonalds on the commons or anything, but it still doesn’t feel quite right.
• Ithaca is a lot more tiring when you’re walking everywhere.
• The sheer tedium of flipping through a decade’s worth of Playboy in search of articles on VCRs and videotapes is much more bearable than the vaguely queasy feeling you get when you flip through 5 years of Hustler looking for the same.
• The librarians who pull materials from the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection are total pros – nobody batted an eyelash when I asked them to pull every issue of Hustler they had before 1985. Now, the person sitting next to me in the reading room, however, seemed a bit flustered by all the porn scattered on the table in front of me.
• I miss my friends in Ithaca – it’d been too long since I’d been immersed in the community, both in and out of the S&TS department. There are lots of great people up there that I don’t know as well as I’d like to, and there are old friends who I wish I could see more often. It’ll be great to be teaching a class at Cornell next semester, since I’ll be in town for a few days (at least) every week, but after that, it’ll be even harder to say goodbye to Ithaca for real.
• Ron Kline is a fantastic advisor. He’s supportive, constructive, and just an all around good person. Plus he’s smart as all hell, and can help you figure out how to say what you’re trying to say in no time flat.

Speaking of holiday events, I didn’t make it to Punkin’ Chunkin’ this year, but I’m happy to see that a new record was set of 4434 feet. That’s right, someone built a cannon to shoot a pumpkin more than 8/10’s of a mile…

I heard about Unsilent Night years ago, and have been wanting to go…I think this year I’ll actually make it!

Every year since 1992 I’ve presented Unsilent Night, an outdoor ambient music piece for an INFINITE number of boom box tape players. It’s like a Christmas carolling party except that we don’t sing, but rather carry boom boxes, each playing a separate tape which is part of the piece. In effect, we become a city block long stereo system!

In 2003 the piece will happen on Saturday December 13th. We will meet at the Arch in Washington Square at 6:45 pm, begin at 7 pm and proceed eastward to Tompkins Square Park, where the piece will end around 8 o’clock.

It would be really cool if you could join us and bring a boom box. The more tapes we run, the bigger and more amazing the sound will be. This past Christmas we had 50 boomboxes and over 200 people total, it was really spectacular… If you’d like to do it, please email me at boombox@mindspring.com so I will know how many tapes to make. If you’d like to do it but don’t have a boombox, I have several dozen and you can reserve one…and if you want to come and just listen, that’s cool, too. Help us make a BIG (and joyful) noise.

If you live outside of New York and would like to arrange a performance in your area, email to the above address for details. Unsilent Night has now been presented in Tallahassee, San Diego, Vancouver, B.C. and Berlin, Germany. On Friday December 19 2003 it will have its second annual Philadelphia performance.

Who’s in with me?

So, it looks like the return of the automat ain’t gonna happen after all:

WASHINGTON – Residents of the city’s trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood will have to buy their toilet paper, shaving cream and middle-of-the-night sandwiches elsewhere now that McDonald’s has shut its 24-hour streetside vending machine, which the company had heralded as the convenience store of the future.

A tarp covered the minivan-size machine Wednesday, and a sign thanked customers for their business. Only the DVD rental service remained active, charging $2.97 for a three-night rental. McDonald’s was also closing three other area machines. Most were outside McDonald’s restaurants.

The 24-hour kiosks, operating under the name “Redbox,” dispensed a wide variety of convenience foods and groceries, including milk, eggs, bread, detergent, shaving cream, paper towels, bandages and sandwiches.They took credit cards and cash and featured an ATM machine with a 25-cent surcharge.

I interviewed the guy who ran the DVD part of these earlier this year – he’s had a hell of a history in video, running a chain of stores north of San Francisco since the early 1980’s, getting involved with Netflix in its early days, then helping out with the Redbox project. Interestingly, he was championing video rental vending machines in the early 1980’s, and he’s still got one of the prototypes tucked away at one of his stores…

(Woo-hoo! 100th entry! Does this mean I’m ready for syndication yet?)

Wow…these are great. Really really great. Just go see for yourself.

(My favorite is “goals“)

Though there are wrath-of-God-force winds whipping down the streets and avenues of New York right now, I’m still venturing out in an hour or so for a series of readings that comprise a benefit for the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania…should be a great evening, especially so long as we stay indoors!

Since it’s past midnight here on the East Coast, I’ll bid a fond farewell to the Virtual Book Tour, as it moves on to James McNally’s Consolation Champs. I’ll be following the tour over the next week and most likely posting more responses as it hops around North America, so keep checking back…

[I’ve been working on this short radio essay about Orphan Thanksgiving dinnners. I thought it spoke to the way in which tribes formalize over time if they stay in the same location and keep their momentum up. -Ethan]

Not at Home for the Holidays

Years ago, when we were new to the city, we called them “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” These were the gatherings for those among us who could not afford the expense or time to make it back to family for the holiday. At the beginning of November those stranded in town would spread the word one by one friends of friends would make themselves known. When Thanksgiving Day rolled around the card tables placed end to end could not hold us all and many would be forced to couches and the edges of beds to balance paper plates on our knees. (more…)