I’ve learned a number of things since arriving in Davis, California last September – that speed bumps can be rather suggestively referred to as “undulations” or “speed humps,” that the entire state is obsessed with hamburgers, that archaic “snow chain” technology is favored over actual snow tires, and that any roadside pit stop worth its salt has espresso. 

One of the most curious things I’ve learned has to do with Uggs, those gross-looking, bulky boots that look like high-top moccasins and that were favored by youngish women in a much-derided fad that swept the country a couple of years ago.  Uggs seem to have since become a punch line for the rest of the U.S., shorthand for the sort of blind anti-fashion casualness that makes Americans look like the laziest of slobs whenever we travel abroad – witness Danny McBride’s snazzy pair of black Uggs in last summer’s Pineapple Express.  However, Uggs are somehow, for reasons unknown to me, alive and well in Davis.  While this is interesting on an anthropological level (why Uggs? Why Davis in particular?), it is, for me, nonetheless a perpetual source of annoyance, evidence of the dopiness of those about a generation younger than I am and an insult to my personal sense of aesthetics. 

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ok, I should emphasize the site isn’t being rolled up. I think the whole thing that got me started on it was just general dissatisfaction with myself for not coming up with things to write.

check out how excited the guy is at 0:28.

anyway mark was saying he might be “rolling up” the site. i guess i can’t help but feel i’m part of the problem in that my posting frequency is not the highest, especially recently. but i think, even though the site often gets by on only a trickle of content, we all get enough out of it that it would be a real shame if it ever put boards over the windows.

What have you been digging, besides your own

For obvious reasons I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the severe economic crisis we’re experiencing (can anyone ignore this, even if they try?).  One of the interesting questions the crisis poses has to do with how younger Americans – say, people around the age of my undergraduate students – will react to it, and in particular, what kind of impact it will have on their attitudes toward the free market as an apparently intuitive part of social arrangements in this country.

Those of us who are now around 30, give or take a couple of years, grew up in a period of free market ascendence inaugurated by Reagan, Thatcher, and the rest of the conservative, pro-market politicians who dominated our childhood.  By the 1980s, the Soviet Union, bogged down in Afghanistan and rotting from the inside economically and institutionally (and with little moral authority to speak of), in no way represented the viable alternative to the free market that it did – or seemed to – in earlier decades, when large swaths of the developing world looked to central planning and maybe single-party government as effective means of achieving development.  The crumbling of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and of the USSR itself  in 1991 only confirmed that, as Fareed Zakaria put it in a recent speech in Silicon Valley, capitalism modeled on the U.S. was in the post-Soviet world the  ”only game in town.”  This became orthodoxy during the nineties, and why not, with the domestic economy booming and the stock market reaching heights never seen before?  

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Hey guys, apologies for the long absence.  The site seems to have grown quiet.  I’m still kind of hunkered down in emergency mode trying to finish up an experiment, alluded to by mark and still ongoing, before my thesis is due on the 16th.  But, here are some link i’ve been digging over the past few weeks:

• Let’s all get killed by volcanoes!
• Macbook wheel
• gaming
• Exploring design with Mathematica
• BackGames
• Kindle vs. P.A.D.D.

And finally: