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I post well-considered, well, better-considered ideas here. For incidental thoughts, check out my Twitter feed.

In Pixar’s “Wall-E,” we encounter an adorable robot who is left to clean up the mounds of trash associated with the global spread of the consumerist lifestyle across the planet. Ancillary thereunto with the disregard for the natural world is the disregard of one’s own body and one’s own wellness. Pixar seems to be sugesting: “Hey, stop buying stuff and eating neon-colored food, get back to the basics and enjoy living as an able bodied human.”

In Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” heart strings are tugged as toys are left behind, subject to jeopardy, or wage petty internecine battles. All of this tugs at our emotional response as they toys seem to say “Remember to play, and play with us, don’t get rid of us — don’t throw away your sense of childlike wonder by scrapping us.”

And so I am confused, Pixar, what am I to think about the acquisition of gizmos and geegaws of plastic and metal?

I recently got a Cisco Flip camera. It’s awesome, but OSX has a major problem that it launches iPhoto (in addition to the Flip software) when I plug in the device to the USB port.

This means that two applications are busily indexing the contents of a USB device every time I want to use it.

To inhibit:

Plug device in → → Launch Image Capture → Select the device → Change the drop-down for “When device is connected” from iPhoto to do nothing → Be happy.

Yesterday at dinner my dining companion said, when speaking of a certain “bad neighborhood:” “…the smell of weed and hookers.”

For a moment my mind flashed and I imagined one of the Tenderloin brownstones (Ellis and Post-ish) whence a head sticks out the window because it has been awoken by an acrid, herbal smell and a powdery, cigarette-y, smell wafting in the open window and it bellows: “Get your weed and hookers out of here, some decent people have to go to work in the morning!”

Curiously, the other two listeners at the table had also been so aurally misdirected and, upon asking the raconteuse to clarify, much mirth ways had.^*

And here lies the problem in our English, we lack a way, both in speech and typographically, to limit the distribution of a concept across a conjunction. Case in point, and borrowing the C ternary operator structure:

the smell of (weed && hookers) ? “the smell of weed and the smell of hookers” : “(the smell of weed) and hookers”

Now, we at the table took the distribution to mean (the smell of weed) and (the smell of hookers), the first case in the statement above. We distributed (much like the power of distribution over multiplication) across the conjunction. The speaker intended, we discovered, the second case. The interesting problem is that there’s no way to limit this in spoken discourse without an appeal to some sort of visual aid, a gestural cue, or some implicit context.

The problem also appears in written discourse, however:

“the smell of weed and hookers”

To disambiguate we could try “the smell of weed, and hookers.” The “,” is unnecessary here. One could, make an appeal to including the serial comma as in (American) English writing as model: “Tom, Dick, and Harry” might suggest that “the smell of weed, and hookers” is acceptable, but that simply doesn’t scan right to me for a dyadic entity.

The only way I can get this to work is by appealing to computer science, which is naturally under a mandate to be very clear in the order in which statements are processed. “(The smell of weed) and hookers” winds up being very clear, but that’s certainly not standard English writing.

And lo, here is the problem again in the wild from The Sydney Morning Herald:

The same tests revealed that infected men were less intelligent and prone to novelty-seeking behaviour.

Here it’s less distributing across the and. Did that mean the infected men were “less intelligent” and “less prone to novelty-seeking behaviour,” or were they “(less intelligent) and (prone to novelty-seeking behaviour)?

I’m not sure what the right method for disambiguation is, or if it’s even desirable given the humor it can provide.

*: This was actually even funnier than this first transformation because once I disambiguated that it was “the smell of weed” and “hook_something_” I thought she meant “the smell of weed” and “hookahs”. But no, she meant as I originally mis-apprehended: the smell of weed STOP and hookers.

I don’t have cable but when I’m in a hotel (rarely) and up late (rarely) and happen to have a TV on (rarely) I like Chelsea Handler’s show. It’s about as much Hollywood as I can really take in a given sitting and, recognition where due, Handler is an able comedienne.

For these reasons, I decided to check out her second book without having read the first Are you there Vodka, it’s me, Chelsea. I was expecting something along the lines of David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) meets Stephanie Klein (Moose).

Almost predictably enough, the opening vignette was about female masturbation. Le Sigh. Why is it that every comedienne since Rita Rudner feels the unstoppable compulsion to write about their gear? I get it, you’re post-feminism, you can sleep around, and feel good whenever you want too, just like men, right men, you get that, just like you! A story about menstruation or masturbation serves to titillate (just enough) but also gives enough plausible deniability such that if any backward-looking Neanderthal says “Did you really have to open with that?” the questioner is either a repressive, oppressive, or a pleasure-hating troglodyte.

This vignette, it’s subject matter aside, covered what’s best in Handler’s writing. Her voice is not much different than Paul Feig’s or Stephanie Klein’s: being a young, kinda nerdy kid in America isn’t easy (especially when your family is insert identity class here) and leads to humiliation, often, especially where parents, sex, or worse parents and sex are concerned. Handler’s career in Hollywood seems to have its antecedents in her youth, for as she narrates the occurrences she never fails to mention the pop culture milestones around her: Growing Pains or a Three’s Company lunchbox. It’s a style that we often see in Tom Friedman (who never leaves a brand name out) or, visually, in Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson.

The opening story about getting “the feeling” and on the matter of the Cabbage Patch Doll are the strongest stories.

As I said, where her family or her history is the topic, her voice is the strongest. But this book was written after she achieved some level of fame with her first book and her show, “Chelesa Lately.” The second theme is life post-fame, stunts she pulls in Santa Monica on her CEO boyfriend (from whom she is now estranged, as the press has it), jaunts to Turks and Caicos, etc.

It is here that the substance is so thin that it has a hard time being spun into a narrative substantial enough for humor to bounce back off of it. It’s a bit like reading someone’s blog post or email dispatch about their spring break. “Oh man, our taxi driver was so crazy, he roped this iguana…”

Now, to be fair, I didn’t think I was picking up Catch-22 (one of the few books that can make me laugh out loud), but I did want some diversion from the oodles of boxes stuffed in my home and the hours of technical reading I’m doing at work. I guess I just expected this divertissement to be more…diverting.