The Dish

by Chris Bodenner

Reviews of the book are still trickling in. A reader writes:

I've been a regular reader since sometime in 2002 or 2003. I've written a few times, but nothing that made the blog. I've always really enjoyed the "View From My Window" feature and ordered a couple copies of the book for holiday gifts – one for my wife and one for my  mother in law. After receiving my order of the books (but before opening them, since they're gifts), I decided to submit a picture from my window, which I did a couple of days ago. So tonight, I gave my wife the book as a Chanukah present. In the process of explaining what the book was and how it came about, I mentioned that I'd submitted a picture but didn't expect to ever see it on the blog, given how many submissions you folks get. We both looked through the book and loved it.

And then, while I was leafing through it, she's looking at her iphone and exclaims, "Look, West Chester, Pennsylvania – that's us, that's you!". And sure enough, at the very moment we were having this discussion, just a few minutes after opening her gift, she looks at the blog for probably the first time and our picture is at the top of the page.  A small magical moment enabled by the Daily Dish!  Thank you for that.

Thanks to you! Another writes:

I've been having a more interesting experience with the VFYW book than I expected.  Normally when I see the views on the website, I use it as a moment to breathe deeply and feel some contentment.  I suppose, in theory, seeing all the views at once could lead me to hyperventillation or pure zen, but mostly I've been entertained by the choices.

Chris B. did a bang up job of editing the window views.  I check each set of facing views for what they have in common – whether it's framing, an element of the view like electrical wires or a lake, or the first letter of the country name.  Some are more opposites, but even with the constraint of time of day order, I've found a little something to tie together almost every set of pictures I've pondered.  Just an amazing job.  Thanks!

I bought several copies – one for myself and the most important for my grandmother.  Grandma is in a long term care facility and spends a lot of her day looking out a window on a cornfield in the midwest, not unlike the Ames, IA view.  I figured a few more windows to look out of at her own pace might be something she'd appreciate.  I really hope so; she has all her faculties, she just doesn't spend much time thinking about new things during each day so is out of practice with quick processing.  Maybe she will be able to enjoy it just a few pages a day when the view out her window isn't as entertaining.

But it also occurred to me that it would be a great children's book as well – and the older the children the more they could do with it.  Younger kids could find things they know and things they don't know, name colors, etc. Older kids could mapquest or google search the locations and plot them on a larger map, or read a wikipedia or chamber of commerce blurb about the town.  Not that you're having problems selling the book, but if someone needs more motivation, there are my ideas for how to sell it.

Again, thanks to Andrew for the feature, the readers for sending in views, and youse guys in the background for doing the dirty work to make it all pretty for us viewers.

Another writes:

I received my first three copies of The View From Your Window.  They have been wrapped as gifts.  The book is perfect for that "hard to buy for" person.  Alas!  I realized I did not have a copy of my own.  I immediately ordered three more copies.  One is mine and the others are future gifts. The books are superb.  The whole ordering process was brilliant.  The price was a delight.  The delivery was quick.  "Bravo" to Blurb for a job done exceedingly well.

Despite the higher price (which we still do not make any profit on), we are selling about a dozen a day. Preview the entire book here. Buy it here. Unfortunately it's too late to arrive for Christmas, but, in my opinion, gifts are best when they are received unexpectedly!

In regards to the reader who mentioned photo placement, I just want to say how enjoyable and challenging a process that was.  Although the photos were largely predetermined within the dawn-to-dusk chronology, there were several ways to inject our own creative influence. First of all, we started with a large pool of preselected photos – about 350 – and parred them down to 200 based on how certain photos juxtaposed with others.  And because there were multiple photos taken at specific times of the day – chiefly 12 pm – we could manipulate the order of photos with the same time stamp. The whole process was a fascinating interplay between creative control and pure luck (such as the lining up of the bleak Baghdad shot and the patriotic suburban shot from San Gabriel, taken just minutes apart). Even the subtle cropping of photos – a necessary way to standardize size and shape – allowed for a great deal of connection and flow between the adjacent images.

Update: Blurb just informed me that they have extended their Next Day Air deadline (for Continental U.S. addresses only) to this Sunday. So, if you place an order by Sunday, 12:00pm PST, you can still receive your order by December 24th.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A man walks into a bar.

He wears a charcoal gray suit, a charcoal hat, charcoal socks, black leather shoes, and a silver Porsche watch on the wrist of the hand that carries a rather large briefcase, which he carefully sets down before straddling a stool and addressing the bartender.

"A Knob Creek Manhattan, up," the man says.

"Sure thing, buddy."

As the bartender turns his back to mix the drink, the contents of the briefcase are emptied, and when he returns, serving the drink on a square napkin, he sees spread out on the shiny wooden bar top a miniature piano, a tiny piano stool to scale, and atop it a little man, 12 inches tall, playing faint music that sounds like Brahms' Piano Concerto 2 in B flat major.

"Well I'll be damned," the bartender says. "Where did you get a little guy like that?" He hunches over to scrutinize the musician more closely. "Look at those long, tiny fingers!"

The man, having gulped half his drink, says nothing, but the bartender presses him, and finally he erupts. "It's a long story," the man says. "But it all started with this magic lamp." At this he reaches back into the briefcase, produces in his diminutive hands a small, golden lamp, and shoves it toward the bartender, who yanks the towel from his waist and begins polishing.

POOOF!

When the smoke clears, a genie is revealed hovering in the air between the man and the bartender. "You've got one wish," the genie demands. "Use it or lose it."

The bartender stammers. "I'll be," he says, feeling rushed. "Well I guess I wish for… I wish for… I wish for $10 million bucks!"

POOOF!

The genie is gone.

The bar is quiet, except for the faint sound of Brahms rising from the bar top, and the bartender, regaining his composure, starts to worry.

"Hey, what about my wish," he says. "Nothing happened."

But that very moment, over at the open door, a fluttering is heard, and then a quack, and in waddles a duck, followed by a second duck, and a third — and soon the bar is filling with a badelynge, a bunch, a brace, a grouse, a whole flock of quacking mallards. They stream in without end.

"Now wait just a minute," the bartender cries. "I see what's happening here! I didn't wish for a million ducks! I wished for a million bucks!"

The man, world weary, sighs knowingly.

"Do you think," he said, "that I wished for a twelve inch pianist?"

by Patrick Appel

Reihan counters Ed Kilgore:

[It] is entirely possible for both sets of critics to be correct. The concern from the right isn't that the Obama approach will literally nationalize for-profit health insurers. Rather, it is that for-profit health insurers will continue evolving into heavily subsidized firms that function as public utilities, and that seek advantage by gaming the political process. Profits, including profits governed by medical loss ratios, can and will then be cycled into political action, which leads to the anxiety concerning a "corporate takeover of the public sector." Again, progressives don't literally believe that such a takeover is happening. Instead, they believe, rightly, that subsidies without effective cost containment represent a massive windfall for the private insurance sector, including non-profit insurers that generate salaries for large numbers of politically active middle and upper middle class professionals..

So yes, Obama does not intend to nationalize the private insurance industry and then turn around and auction off the new nationalized health agency to Rupert Murdoch or Monsanto. But the anxieties of critics on the left and right are, to italicize for a moment, perfectly compatible.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Well, not exactly, but this is a blog with a singular aesthetic.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

One of the very best depressing (or at least melancholy) Christmas songs ever written has to be “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” first recorded by Bing Crosby during World War II.  Many people forget that it is a song about soldiers separated from their families.  This year some 300,000 American servicemembers and support personnel will be home for Christmas only in their dreams.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic insomniac? He lies awake all night wondering if there is a Dog.

by Patrick Appel

The Iranian government attacked Twitter late last night:

Other sources told us that the timing of the attack on Twitter is part of a concerted effort across the Iranian government and military to take a stronger diplomatic stance against the United States and European Union in the lead up to negotiations on Irans nuclear plans.

by Andrew Sprung

As an agnostic, chary of the assumed authority of scriptures and clerics, I confess to having a soft spot for mystics.  Just as the human race spawns Michael Jordans, born to play ball, and Michael Jacksons, born to sing, it persists in spawning Michaels- –those near to God, seized heart and soul and mind by what they at least perceive to be direct communication and union with the divine. 

I admit to some inconsistency in my attitudes, since scripture is in large part the direct or indirect product of mystic perception, and clerics study that product in search of a secondary buzz — and many of them are in fact mystics of some sort. But let's just say that most of what comes from the horse's mouth (as the mystically inclined/psychotic artist in Joyce Cary's great novel of that name calls the source of inspiration) — gets lost in an endless game of telephone.

But I do sense the mainline connection at work in some writings. Call the perceived contact with the divine psychosis or an evolutionary quirk, if you will.  But it strikes me as at least marginally more plausible that the human mind connects with some other form of mind than that mind itself is simply an accident of physics. That suspicion gets a further boost from accounts of near-death experiences.

All this is by way of too-long introduction to my own beginner's pleasure in the poetry of Rumi, aka Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, the great Persian Sufi mystic poet, whose works have been called a Persian Koran. It's heady stuff — seemingly straight from the horse's mouth, per Joyce Cary above.  For those of us in the West who encounter Islam chiefly through fearsome Koranic quotes about "infidels" or pious assurances that it is "a religion of peace," these verses open a window. (And many have opened it; Rumi is perhaps the best-selling poet in America.)

I am reading Rumi cold, and my knowledge of Sufiism is Wikipedia-thin, so I will avoid the hubris of commentary and just share my own unmediated 'first contact.' Here's an early favorite — one of a series that figure the world as a tavern and life as drunkenness.

A Children's Game

Listen to the poet Sanai,
who lived secluded: "Don't wander out on the road
in your ecstasy. Sleep in the tavern."

When a drunk strays out to the street,
children make fun of him.

He falls down in the mud.
He takes any and every road.

The children follow,
not knowing the taste of wine,
or how his drunkenness feels. All people on the planet
are children, except for a very few.
No one is grown up except those free of desire.

God said,
"The world is a play, a children's game,
and you are the children."

God speaks the truth.
If you haven't left the child's play,
how can you be an adult?

Without purity of spirit,
if you're still in the middle of lust and greed
and other wantings, you're like children
playing at sexual intercourse.

They wrestle
and rub together, but it's not sex!

The same with the fightings of mankind.
It's a squabble with play-swords.
No purpose, totally futile.

Like kids on hobby horses, soldiers claim to be riding
Boraq, Muhammad's night-horse, or Duldul, his mule.

Your actions mean nothing, the sex and war that you do.
You're holding part of your pants and prancing around,
Dun-da-dun, dun-da-dun.

Don't wait till you die to see this.
Recognize that your imagination and your thinking
and your sense perception are reed canes
that children cut and pretend are horsies.

The knowing of mystic lovers is different.
The empirical, sensory, sciences
are like a donkey loaded with books,
or like the makeup woman's makeup.

It washes off.
But if you lift the baggage rightly, it will give joy.
Don't carry your knowledge-load for some selfish reason.
Deny your desires and willfulness,
and a real mount may appear under you.

Don't be satisfied with the name of HU*,
with just words about it.

Experience that breathing.
From books and words come fantasy,
and sometimes, from fantasy comes union.

——-

* The pronoun for the divine presence

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Two old men, next door neighbors, meet every evening to walk their dogs.

"You know what?" Harry says one evening. "Twenty years walking through this park, and we've never once stopped in at that bar to have a drink."

"Sure, I'm thirsty," Dick says. "But we've got the dogs."

"Oh, I've already thought of that," Harry says. "Just follow my lead."

So they walk over to the bar, where sitting on a stool outside the door is a bouncer.

"Sorry gents, no pets in here," the bouncer says.

"Oh, you don't understand," Harry replies, "this is my seeing eye dog."

"Oh, I beg your pardon," the bouncer says. "Go right ahead."

So Harry leads his German Shepard into the bar, while Dick steps before the bouncer.

"Sorry sir, no pets," the bouncer says.

"Oh, you don't understand," says Dick. "This is my seeing eye dog too. We're all friends over at the old folks home for blind people."

The bouncer looks suspiciously at Dick.

"I don't know, buddy," he says, "they gave you a chihuahua for a seeing eye dog?"

Says Dick, "They gave me a chihuahua?!"