DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Steve Heimoff of Wine Enthusiast Magazine wrote a puzzling story for the weekend Chronicle magazine: a tale of forgotten reservations at a high-end restaurant. It’s a quick read, and worth a couple minutes: Without Reservation: The price one pays for a world-class dining experience

Anyone familiar with the Northern California culinary scene will recognize in less time than it takes to smoke the saute oil that Heimoff is writing about The French Laundry. Yountville becomes “Yondertown,” The French Laundry becomes “La Lavanderie du Paris.” The famously elusive reservation agent, the long drive, the months-long wait for a table all stay the same.

Two things about this story fascinate me. One is that Heimoff got away with $300 worth of the best food in the country, for free. Sure, he had to eat it in his car. I’ll admit that even Thomas Keller’s star would shine a bit less brightly if he was working at a drive-through. But still.

The second thing is the transparency of Heimoff’s fiction. Maybe the whole story is a ruse, a poke at the ridiculous over-the-topness of the entire French Laundry experience. Or maybe Heimoff has a bitter pill to grind, to remix a metaphor, as would anybody who drove for two hours in a suit, anticipating three hours of culinary pampering, only to be turned away at the door.

But if it really happened, why not write about it? Why disguise it?

Curiously, Heimoff’s “Yondertown” morphs to “Yonderville” by the middle of his story, rending a hole in the thin gauze of fiction.

Plastination is in the news.

A plastinated 13-week-old fetus was stolen from the California Science Center in Los Angeles on March 26. It appears from a surveillance camera that two women simply opened an unlocked display case and grabbed it. No motive has been determined.

The AP report, Two Women Sought in Theft of Fetus, ends with a quote I found mildly ironic: The director of the Institute for Plastination said, “How can somebody do this … it’s such a disrespect.”

In related news, SF Chronicle columnist Adair Lara interviewed some of the people behind The Universe Within, in a piece called Seeing Dead People (a curious play on a line from The Sixth Sense, in which, as far as I can remember, nobody was plastinated, although Bruce Willis’ emotive skills can occasionally be described as such).

Lara reveals that Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination (which loyal readers of debris.com already know), has taken in a billion dollars through his traveling Body Worlds exhibit. Small wonder he has competition.

I met a number of people at Etech whose work I’d seen before. Invariably one of my initial reactions was to think, you’re much shorter than I would have guessed. But I suppose this is to be expected, considering that I’m eight-foot-seven.

Steven Levy was at the conference. His 1986 book, Hackers had a huge influence on me in college. It was the first time I’d seen the expression, “Information should be free.” I have vivid memories of writing a paper about the Hacker Ethic for a philosophy class approximately 100 years ago. I spoke with Steven briefly, until he gave me a look like “I’ve gotta sit down in the lobby and wait for the limo,” and I reluctantly let him go, pretending, too, that I had a really important meeting in my hotel room with the stained carpet and bacteria.

Another famous (not particularly tall) author, James Surowiecki, whose name caused everyone who attempted to pronounce it to stumble, gave a presentation on concepts from his recent book The Wisdom of Crowds. The book’s premise would have you believe that polling the approximately 500 conference attendees about the correct pronounciation of “Surowiecki” would, assuming you could filter and refine the answers through some sort of market function, result in the precisely correct pronounciation.

There’s a great transcript of Surowiecki’s Etech talk on Wade Roush’s weblog.

I will be attending the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara in April. Let me know if you plan to attend, so I can rent you the 2nd bed in my hotel room.

I mean no offense to the guys pictured in the banner reproduced here; in fact I’ve just paid $1000 to hear them all speak next month. But isn’t this the least compelling ad you’ve ever seen? I mean, sure, most technical conferences consist of a group of middle-aged mostly white guys standing around hotels yammering about obscure software features and implementation details, but is that the best pitch the promoter can make?

Here, take this test: after seeing this ad, which of the following best describes your next course of action?

1. Buy shares of ORCL.
2. Schedule an appointment with your hairdresser, just in case.
3. Spastically click the browser’s “BACK” button before any more photons bounce off that image and hit your eyeball.

Those are your only choices, because nobody clever enough to read debris.com could possibly see that advertisement and think, “OMG, reserve my seat today!”

During the first few days of his life, my son frequently made an unusual and unsettling noise, a sort of combination gagging and gasping sound that was no small cause for alarm for his first-time papa. I asked a nurse about it. Her explanation was reassuring; she said that Raphael was “managing his own secretions.”

I was relieved. Not only was Raphael not ill, at less than a day old he had managed to learn something lots of college seniors still haven’t figured out.

The nurse’s phrase struck me as excellent advice, in general:

1. Manage your own secretions.

   Combine that with what I’m told are the two core rules of Google’s Engineering team:

2. Don’t be evil.
3. Don’t be stupid.

and you’ve got an entire life philosophy. Those three rules will certainly get you through school with more grace and success than is achieved by most graduates, or at least me. In fact, most of the things I regret about my life so far could be attributed to either being evil, being stupid, or failing to manage my own secretions.

Who do you stare at in public places? Which coworkers do you like the least? Who makes up the endless stream of losers who appear on talk shows like Jerry Springer? In all cases, the answer is the same: people who are evil, people who are stupid, people who fail to manage their own secretions.

The next time you fly, look around at the other passengers. If you’re very lucky, at least those nearby will be neither evil (hogging the armrest, reclining into your lap) nor stupid (trying to stuff a carry-on the size of a refrigerator into the overhead compartment), nor failing to manage their secretions (drooling, sneezing, other possibilities I can’t bear to contemplate).

Unless you keep a journal, in which case all those behaviors are entirely welcome. Heh.