DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

There are areas in San Francisco where the day-laborers congregate, hanging out on the sidewalk at certain intersections waiting for someone to drive up and hold a couple fingers out the window. Negotiations, if any, are done in Spanish, because English fluency is not a prerequisite for this profession. Just a willingness to bust one’s hump for the day, in exchange for transportation, lunch, and $10/hr.

Last Saturday we drove to the City early to meet friends for breakfast. Turns out our friends live two doors from one of these intersections. We pulled up in front of the house and stopped the car, scanning for house numbers, not sure where to park… when on the periphery of my attention I realized our car was being swarmed by a dozen running Mexican guys.

Fight or flight! Hormones move faster than rational thought. But no faster than irrational thought — because I thought we were being carjacked. “Drive!” I yelled to my wife in a panicked voice. Two of the guys had reached the car and were trying to open the back doors!

I was flashing back to a time when my wife and I, lost on the wrong side of Potrero Hill, ended up in a line of cars in front of some housing projects. The cars had stopped. Aggressive-looking men lined both sidewalks. One or two guys would approach each driver, in turn, and carry out a transaction of the sort that people go to jail for, assuming the police had the guts (or sufficiently poor sense of direction) to drive through this particular housing project. We were not shopping for crack, unlike the rest of the drivers. I’m grateful to this day that the neighborhood sales staff recognized us for what we were — lost and anxious — and let us drive through without incident.

Anyway, since then I’ve felt vulnerable in my car. Cars don’t offer nearly as much protection as you might think. Not even big cars; big cars just cost more to fix. You can’t out-drive a bullet, or even a well-thrown rock.

The funny thing about last Saturday — well, funny in retrospect — is that the guys who I momentarily thought were trying to steal my car and/or wife are without doubt among the most cheerful, Catholic, hard-working people in the City. They’re the sort of people who wait in line at the Post Office in Friday afternoons to wire money home to their families. The sort of people who are happy to dig out concrete and asphalt and haul boulders for eight hours a day in the summer sun. The sort of people who would cut my grass with a smile, if only I spoke enough Spanish to arrange it.

OK, so this is the most gruesome thing I’ve read all day:

The infamous transorbital lobotomy was a “blind” operation in that the surgeon did not know for certain if he had severed the nerves or not. A sharp, ice-pick like object would be inserted through the eye socket between the upper lid and eye. When the doctor thought he was at about the right spot, he would hit the end of the instrument with a hammer.

The lobotomy is in the news this week; the LA Times interviews a lobotomy survivor in Psyche’s Torn Curtain: Now seen as misguided butchery, lobotomies were once the treatment of choice for mental illness. Doctors, patients confront a dark past. (local mirror)

He was 12 when a “psychosurgeon” hammered ice picks into his eye sockets. His parents took him to the hospital “for testing;” he woke up with a “massive headache,” spent 5 days in the hospital, vomiting, and only later found out what had happened. He appears to have been a troubled kid, but the treatment does not fit the disease. Then again, I don’t have a medical degree, so I’m not really qualified to say when hammering ice picks into people’s brains is an appropriate course of treatment.

The history of the procedure is interesting, in that it went from cutting-edge to mainstream to butchery in 40 years. I wonder what trends of present-day society will be viewed as misguided or, at the extreme, horrific, 40 years from now: LASIK? Low-carb diets? Celebrity? Earth-trashing, gas-guzzling personal armored vehicles masquerading as passenger cars?

Speaking of vehicles of destruction, don’t miss the story about Dr. Walter Freeman’s “lobotomobile.” What a unique co-marketing opportunity for Hummer — were Freeman alive today, Hummer could sponsor his mobile brain-damage operation. Freeman could perform the procedure in the back seat while making a run for groceries or dropping his kids off at soccer practice. But I guess Hummer isn’t hurting for endorsers.

Having already seen the film adaptation of The Bourne Identity, I knew the basic plot… or so I thought. In fact, the book is completely different.

The characters are shaded differently: the book’s Bourne is a darker and significantly less stable character. The Marie character in the movie is just along for the ride, whereas in the book she plays a more central role, stabilizing the brink-of-self-destruction Bourne.

And the book is 22 years older than the movie, making it less high-tech. For example, the fancy LED projector extracted from Bourne’s hip at the beginning of the movie began its life as a simple piece of microfilm. To put the time difference in perspective: in 1980, when The Bourne Identity was published, Paul Allen and Bill Gates began writing DOS 1.0.

The storyline of the book is different, and significantly more complex: Bourne isn’t who he thinks he is — or is he? And much of the plot is driven by the hunt for Carlos, the international assassin, who doesn’t appear in the movie. As the original NYT review exclaimed, “Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined.”

The nice thing about the disparity in stories is that the book becomes a rich, compelling, fresh experience for people who enjoyed the movie. I had a hard time putting it down.

Patronize these links, man:

• Mass-market paperback (Amazon)

“Hi, this is Wayne. I just stepped out to get my ass waxed. Please leave a message after the groove.”

       1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +  | 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + |    (1/4 = 100)
4  HH   xx  xx xx x  x  |  xx  xx xx x  o |
-  SD     O   o    O    |    O   o    O   |
4  KD  o         o   o  | o         o   o |

Patronize these links, man:

• MIDI
• MP3

I planned to post photos from Wired Magazine’s NextFest, but as it turns out I’ll only be able to show you one: the ticket line.

We arrived at 2pm. We saw two ticket lines of depressing length. But it was a nice afternoon, so we waited.

After 30 minutes we were near the front of the line, maybe 10 minutes from the ticket booth. We noticed that a third line had formed to the right — another ticket line? No, because everyone in this new line held a ticket in their hands. I followed the new line to its head at the front door of the exposition hall. This was the line to get into the show!

It was huge. Everyone who had been ahead of us in the two ticket lines was now in one (very) long line to get into the building. The staffperson at the front door said that they’d reached the building’s capacity; due to safety regulations, they could only allow new people into the show after other people left.

This meant we weren’t waiting for a short process like a ticket-purchase transaction. Rather, we were waiting for 500 people to leave the NextFest. We might be standing in the sun for another hour.

So we bailed. Between parking (a 15-minute task) and walking four blocks (another 10 minutes) and waiting in line, we’d invested nearly an hour already, only to learn that an event about future technology, put on by self-proclaimed futurists, can easily be bogged down by lousy capacity planning and poor crowd control.