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Hair Growing Hat

HairhatBefore there were Shriners driving tiny cars in stupendous fezzes, before the advent of tinfoil-helmet-wearing denizens of alt.black.helicopters, before there was Rogaine and hair transplants and “Ladies will love you” infomercials, there were ordinary Joes just like me seeking ever-elusive hair re-growth methods. Available solutions were on par with perpetual motion machines – like this marvelous Hair Hat advertised in Popular Mechanics, 1928.

This new invention—the result of an experience gained in treating thousands of cases of baldness—is in the form of a new kind of hat. It is worn on the head just 10 minutes a day. No unnecessary fuss of any kind. Just put the hat on your head. Wear it 10 minutes. And that’s all there is to it. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? All right. Then let me emphasize this fact. I don’t care how thin your hair is. I don’t care how many treatments you have taken without results. Unless my discovery actually produces a new growth of hair on your head in 30 days, then all you need do is tell me so. And without asking one question, I will instantly— and gladly—mail you a check refunding you every penny you have paid me.

How does it work? “My new invention gets right to the cause of most of hair troubles — the starving dormant roots.” I’m thinking the technology was more akin to the placebo effect, but who am I to say?

Music: Bruce Lash :: Small-hoping People
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Pipi Creek, Granite Lake

Minkalo Amazing weekend hiking, geocaching, playing with Dad at El Dorado National Forest near Tahoe (not near the burned area). Saturday at Pipi Creek, grooving with the boulders and the foliage and dragonflies. Found a natural swimming hole, Miles stoked to swim and climb the slippery face of a mini-waterfall.

Sunday on the backside of Silver Lake, hiking up to the well-hidden natural treasure Granite Lake, a great stone basin under pristine skies. Found a water snake, which Miles followed along the banks until disappeared with a ripple beneath the surface. Lunch on the banks of nearby Hidden Lake, watching postcard reflections dance in the afternoon heat.

Had some excellent geocaching adventures. Saturday evening, traipsing through thickets with M, running out of time, Miles held up a thick stick: “Daddy, what’s this funny log?” Noticed the saw mark around the middle, and had him pull one end. Cacher had hollowed out just enough space for a medicine bottle containing a log book and pencil. So creative. Would I have found it without M’s help?

Sunday thought we were getting close to Minkalo Cliffs cache, when the GPSr started pointing uphill. Realized we’d have to backtrack and scale a butte overlooking Silver Lake. Gorgeous. Got to the cliff edge and found the compass pointing down again. That’s when I realized some climbing was involved. “Remember, no one is forcing you to do this,” said the cache page. Decided to go for it. 20 ft. down, found an ammo box wedged into a crack. Yelled the prizes down to Miles, who was hanging out in the trees with Amy. Left a travel bug that had originated in Hawaii and was asking to be left at Tahoe views… only to find later that evening that it already done a Tahoe circuit and was headed back for Hawaii. Heh – that’s the game.

Total recharge of a weekend. Ready for anything.

Flickr set.

Music: Grey-Afro :: Flying Saucer Attack
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Stuck on the Fourth of July

A couple days late, but hey – tardiness is a hallmark of countless great musicians, so I guess we can ride that wagon too. The crew of Stuck Between Stations has teamed up to compile a comprehensive, all-over-the-map, annotated 4th of July audio/video playlist: Stuck on the Fourth of July. From James Brown and Gerald Ford to Wilco and Public Enemy to Robert Wyatt and Sleater Kinney to Wendy Rene and Funkadelic, to XTC and the Minutemen. It’s what America means to us.

Many thanks to Roger for the nutty amount of legwork required to pull this one together.

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Go PHP5

PHP4 is seven years old now (amazing!), and PHP5 has been out for nearly three years. But while v4 has gotten pretty long in the tooth, the massive entrenchment of web apps targeted at PHP4 has prevented anything like rapid uptake for version 5. As many as 80% of PHP hosts were still running 4.x as of June 2007. Web hosts who undertake an upgrade risk breaking thousands of customer applications – not OK. But something’s got to break the cycle, which is preventing developers from taking full advantage of all the chocolaty, O-O goodness in v5.

GoPHP5.org is assembling a list of major open source PHP apps committed to dropping all support for v4 by February 2008 as a way to goad hosts into undertaking the difficult transition. The Drupal, Symfony, and phpMyAdmin teams have already signed on, while the WordPress hackers are eager, but wary of the fallout.

Music: Kalama’s Quartet :: Maile Lau Li’ili’i (Little Maile Leaves)
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Google vs. “Sicko”

Google ad sales rep Lauren Turner spoke out against Michael Moore’s “Sicko” on a corporate blog, but didn’t stop there. She went on to tell the healthcare industry that Google was there to help them fight back. The industry could counter “Sicko,” she suggested, by buying Google ads promoting all of their good qualities.

I’m all for corporate blogging — transparency is good. In this case, what’s transparent is the fact that Google (or a Google employee – remember, this was a corporate blog, not a corporate statement) feels that advertising is a fine way for deep-pocketed corporations not just to sell products, but to cloud debate on an issue that affects the whole public sphere.

Machinist: But it wants us to believe that we should resolve public policy disputes through search marketing? Advertising is no longer just for selling soap — it’s for democracy, too. Note, first, the irony: Michael Moore accuses the industry of throwing up a haze of marketing, P.R. and lobbying to hide its practices, and Google tells Big Healthcare to respond by buying up more ads.

Turner later posted an apology for the post, but only for her error in framing Google’s policy on the blog; the idea of pushing AdWords/AdSense as a great way to shape public opinion, rather than just to sell products, stood.

Music: Devendra Banhart :: Anchor
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Buck Refills!

Standing in line with Miles for a soft pretzel at Marine World yesterday, found myself staring at big sign hawking a giant plastic bucket emblazoned with the MW logo, which one could fill with a choice of popcorn or cotton candy for a mere $7 (“Buck Refills all day!”) and thinking of Michael Pollan.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan describes the tricky relationship between capitalism and the food industry. You can always sell people more shoes or CDs – we just make space to accommodate them. But humans have a built-in limit to how much food we can consume. Food makers who have to satisfy shareholders’ demands on the bottom line to sell more [widgets/chalupas/corn products] every year have a tough job.

The tension between nature-limited appetites and capitalism’s need to expand, always expand, explains two things: 1) The obesity epidemic, and 2) The relentless introduction of absurd new food combinations in the drive to manufacture desire. Fast food joints re-conjure new variations on the same old limited palette of ingredients. Taco Bell sells little beyond tortillas, cheese, beans, and beef, yet manages somehow to find new ways to recombine them into Mongo Chalupas and Super Beefeater’s BurrTacos year after year. Fruit Loops Cereal Straws are drinking straws made of Fruit Loops material, lined with powdered sugar. Each suck of milk from the bowl brings a mouthful of sugared milk. When done, eat the straw. You see where I’m going with this.

The giant bucket is not a recombinant food creation – what could be more elemental than popcorn or cotton candy? The giant bucket represents the other kind of attempt to sell more food – gi-normous portions (is there a 128-ounce Coke portion available yet? If not, give it time). But it does represent an unbelievable markup on one of the cheapest food items you could possibly manufacture, with the possible exception of bottled water.

We resisted the giant bucket and enjoyed our pretzel, but the entire day at Marine World felt like equal parts pleasure and pain, this weird collision between enjoying the marvels of the deep blue sea (the people mover that carried us along the inside of a glass tube through a tank filled with sharks and sting rays was an experience of rare beauty) vs. a miasma of the most crass and offensive commercialism, not to mention the depressing weight of massive crowds, overpriced everything, and long lines for just about anything, was confusing.

Next time we either head for the tidepools ourselves or bring our own lunch (though park rules explicitly forbid this – wonder why?)

Music: The Avett Brothers :: I Would Be Sad
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WhatTheFont?

Pretty cool: A client wanted to use a font exactly like a font they had spied in another site’s banner image. I had no idea what it was. Got thinking there must be some kind of font recognition service out there. I was thinking like a forum of fontography fanatics you could pay to analyze an image for you. Googling “What’s that font?” took me to myfonts.com/WhatTheFont, which let me upload the JPEG image directly. Seconds later, it had broken the JPEG up into constituent letters and asked me to fill in the blanks for the ones it couldn’t guess. Two seconds after that it spit back 14 possible matches – and the first few hits were dead on.

Of course, the top suggestion turned out to be a $240 font they were ready to sell me on the spot. But the second suggestion was so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. And available free.

Is there nothing that infernal interweb can’t do?

Music: Frank Zappa :: The Gumbo Variations
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The RIOT Wheel

Riotwheel Tell me you don’t want one. “The RIOT Wheel is a huge, heavy motorized single-wheel vehicle, originally
built for Burning Man, the natural home of deviant vehicles.” The version currently being worked on is actually a hybrid (take that, Toyota!). The weight of the rider out front is counterbalanced by the weight of the engine, which hangs freely inside the wheel. An adjustable crane lifts the engine up and down, changing the angle of the dangle and thus its leverage. Apparently it’s steered by leaning, though it apparently steers like an oil tanker. Coupla videos here. Not too zippy in those vids, though inventor dude claims to be working towards a land speed record (his own, I imagine).

Music: Mahmoud Ahmed :: Belomy Benna

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Wind-Up Whale

Miles Whale Gorgeous photo by Amy of Miles showing off a wind-up whale he found in a geocache at Mt. Diablo last weekend. Today he asked what “chaos” meant and I told him. Then he re-defined the concept for me: “Chaos is when dogs are howling and light poles are bumping into each other and the toilet is walking around the house.” Later, talking about how you could turn a mistake into part of the project while making art: “If an artist makes a mistake she can just bonk her booby bone on her head and then her bones will be gone and she’ll flop over like a jellyfish.” It’s more or less an endless string of delightful dada platitudes around here, punctuated by meltdowns and small miracles.

Music: Janet Seidel :: Deep Purple