DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Fast Company features an interesting article about the growth of Google — how a group of perfection-obsessed geeks run the best search service on the web: How Google Grows… and Grows… and Grows

Related: an old posting about the technology behind the google search.

sfgate.com columnist Mark Morford pokes some fun at Texas for its sodomy laws. This is one of the best bits:

As recently as 1986, the [Supreme Court], to much derision and general scorn, upheld an older, 1976 ban on homosexual and heterosexual sodomy in Georgia, a precedent which Texas then followed, though Texas took the additional step of criminalizing only consensual anal or oral sex with your same-sex lover, but not with your hetero partner. Or with an animal. It’s true. Sheep: legal. Gay lover: illegal. Now you know why they call it cattle country.

Here’s the whole piece: Is Sodomy Patriotic? Where naughty gay sex in Texas meets the rigid U.S. Supreme Court. Hide the children.

Warning to prudes and Midwesterners: this article may upset you. Don’t worry, though; your condition is not without a cure. I lived in the Midwest for 21 years, and just a few months after moving to California I was no longer afraid of gay men.

OK, I admit it; I’m teasing Midwesterners… I mean it good-naturedly, as I’m a relatively recent transplant. But I am embarrassed to see that my home state has a sodomy law that targets homosexuals exclusively. Is this really a behavior that we need to outlaw and punish? Why are we even having this conversation?

Three bits of old-world fun:

Look up your telephone exchange at the Telephone EXchange Name Project. Then you can tell people your phone number using the code words that went out of fashion in the 1950s, e.g. PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
This site has a compound retro-cool factor. Not only does it describe something retro-cool… it is, itself, retro cool. Its list of official “Ma Bell” exchange names was published on the web in 1996. Had it been online a few years earlier, there wouldn’t have been a “line” to be “on.” (No, nobody remembers pre-1994 USENET but me.)

See the “future we were promised” in the exhibit of futurist and illustrator Art Radebaugh. Especially appealing are the hip cityscapes in the “Lost Portfolio” exhibit. One of those may end up on my wall at some point.

And just to round out the trio, here’s the Google homepage from 1998. Note: it still works!

As I was writing a check to the woman who had restretched the lumpy carpet in the basement, she was filling out an invoice. I delivered my standard privacy inquiry, which I do every time someone asks me for my address: “You don’t sell or share your customer mailing list, do you?” Most reputable businesses not only affirm that they don’t; they also manage to simultaneously convey distaste.

But she surprised me. She said, “I don’t know; I’ve never been asked. What did you have in mind?”

Clearly, my privacy is not her concern… she thought I was making an offer to purchase her customer list, which I considered doing briefly if only to warn everyone that their carpet installer shouldn’t be trusted. I was about to launch into a tirade about privacy rights, beginning with the the question, “So you think your customers’ home addresses constitute an asset you own?“… but then I saw that the woman had inscribed my address incorrectly.

Problem solved!

We went to meet a local cabinetmaker because we have a cabinet we want made. His shop is at the end of a long driveway at the end of a private road, at the end of another road that isn’t private but might as well be for all the traffic it gets — I’ve driven by it a hundred times and never noticed it.

The estate sprawls. “My shop is the building below the playground,” he’d said, as if I’d overlook the 1200 square foot barn with huge doors and skylights, filled with power tools, built on a hillside atop a grid of lumber-storage shelves. All the doors are custom-made; each demonstrates some boundary-pushing door-construction technique. I guess it’s his proof of education, a craftsman’s equivalent to a framed degree on the wall.

He was happy to hear we weren’t interested in kitchen cabinets. “I’m tired of doing kitchens,” he said. Later I saw his own kitchen. It’s the one room in the house that doesn’t look like he built it himself out of hand-planed, oil-rubbed teak-mahogany-walnut-maple-cherry with inlaid jatoba-purpleheart-koa; in fact I think the cabinets came from Ikea. His curvalicious California walnut bent-laminated bed organism, in contrast, has only one equal in the world, because he only ever made two of them. It looks like a mushroom.

I asked how much land he owned. “Just ten acres,” he replied. I marveled out loud that even with ten acres, we could still hear the neighbor running a lawnmower. “Oh, that’s my lawnmower,” he said. “I’ve got a guy working.”

Yep, this is one of those stories that doesn’t have an ending.