Condalmo

Are you still here?

Go home!  (If you feel you've had enough Yello for a lifetime, feel free to skip to 3:30 in the broadcast.)

Condalmo is moving to a new internets address.

Man Sweat Guy was right.  Need to shake things up around here at CHQ a little bit.  Three vice-presidents were canned this morning, Diane was promoted out of the secretarial pool, and the division of snark is looking at a relocation.  I'll avoid the mistake of going on too much about this site and the new site plans, lest I fall into (another) one of the traps of bad blogging. 

From an old Sullivan post:

Matt Drudge once insisted to me a central fact of the Internet: it's a broadcast, not a piece of writing. Or rather it is writing as a broadcast. The skills for broadcasting - presentation, speed, performance, spontaneity - are not those for writing in the traditional sense. That is partly why I've found the medium so interesting. It really does represent a new, deconstructed, provisional way of writing - halfway between radio and print journalism - and we still don't know where it will end.

Drudge is generally not someone you want to quote from, but this "writing as a broadcast" idea seems to make sense.  Let's see where that goes. 

Please update your bookmarks, favorites, feed readers, spam filters, and feel free to post laudatory, hyperbolic notices regarding the new address at your sites.  I'll be posting change-of-address reminders here for a little while longer, but regular operations will move to the new site shortly.

http://condalmo.wordpress.com/

Psychosis and the 19th-century butler.

They did more than buttle:

1) On the most basic level, how different are some of the narrator's requests from the precise, arcane, and well-practiced moves of 19th-century butlers and other house attendants? In other words, what appears to be mania in a person hit on the head by an unidentified piece of technology falling from the sky is seen as tradition, class structure, and ritualistic social role in the lives of others.

First of three very interesting questions to be posed to Tom McCarthy, Mr. Remainder, in an interview.  Is a transcription forthcoming?  Stay tuned here.  (via Steph and Maud)

Punched in the face.

The Nonist host apparently punched someone in the face the other day, uncharacteristically.  The post and comments are dissecting the reaction someone has when that happens (the punching, not the getting punched).  Interesting reading, might give you time to cool down before you kick over your cubicle wall.

Kurt Vonnegut, Wal*Mart enthusiast?

Unlikely.  And yet, behold, their new logo, at top:
 

At least their self-awareness is improving.  (via)

The LongPen was just the beginning.

...of the end:

New web service PostalMethods lets you send snail mail without touching a piece of paper. Email your letter to PostalMethods, and it will print, collate, envelope, stamp, and mail it for you. There's a free trial, but actually getting your stuff mailed will cost you.

...your dignity, any respect your clients/recipients might have had for you, your sanity when the web goes oopsy with that important cease and desist letter!, any assurance that your confidential missives will remain so, and, of course, even more money than doing it yourself will cost you. 

I wonder if I can make a web-based curmudgeonly outlet profitable.  Oh, wait, that's right.  Never mind

Nothing doing.

This looks interesting, and I like the cover...

Oh boy, oh boy, there's nothing like opening the mail, finding a book you requested for a reason you've forgotten already, and, on the basis of a few opening paragraphs, knowing you're going to fall in love. I can't remember what drove me to ask for a copy of William Davies King's upcoming Collections of Nothing, advertised as a "part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition" by a man who has been driven to accumulate a "monumental mass of miscellany, from cereal boxes to boulders to broken folding chairs," but here's how it begins:

On a hot summer day in 1998, I pulled up at the house I still owned with the woman who was soon to become my ex-wife to find that she had delivered every item connected with me to the garage. My surprise was not that she had divvied up our goods, though I would rather have done the work myself, but the spectacle of what an immense and unattractive volume of me there was, much of it retained only because I collect, as a collector collects, compulsively. And then some...

Land sakes: I had no idea Amazon had a book blog!  (no, really!)  Heads, out of touch & totally 1.0, tails, willfully eschewing the mainstream...

Summertime.

Summertime girl
Originally uploaded by noralovesmambo

Mechanical reproduction.

Here's a cover of one of the re-releases in the Penguin Great Ideas series.  Behold:

"Ideas are like fish; you don't make the fish, you catch the fish."

Alternate subject: "What if Van Gogh had diarrhea every time he went out?" What if, indeed.