For the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about a shiny hunk of metal in the shape of a cylinder. This particular cylinder is made of platinum and iridium, and it’s kept under three different bell jars, locked away in a vault outside of Paris. It requires three different officials with three different keys to access it. Human hands are not allowed to touch it, except under special circumstances, on rare occasions.

It’s even known by a special name: Le Grand K. Or Le Grand Kah, if you want to be very French about it, and since we’re all grown-ups here I suppose we can.

What’s so special about this particular metal cylinder? According to an article in the October 2011 issue of Wired magazine, Le Grand K is currently one of the loadbearing support beams of the metric system. The kilogram by definition is equal to the weight of the international prototype, which is the majestic cylindrical beast known as Le Grand K.

Once a year, the officials with the three keys sneak a look at Le Grand K to make sure it’s safe and sound. And about every 40 years, Le Grand K is given a ceremonial weigh-in. Its weight is compared with that of a number of duplicate cylinders, including the ones used as the national standards for other countries, which have traveled all the way to France for the occasion. The cylinder for the US usually lives in an underground vault outside of Washington, D.C. Missing Paris in the springtime something fierce, no doubt.

So here’s the beautiful part: For no good reason that anybody understands, since the 1940s, as compared to the duplicate cylinders, Le Grand K has been mysteriously losing weight.

Either that, or the entire universe has been getting fatter. Really, it amounts to the same thing —since the metric system is the unitary lingua franca of modern science, in some sense every measurement scientists make depends on it. So if something alters the mass of Le Grand K, then by definition, that changes the mass of everything in the universe.

By 1988, when the last official weigh-in was conducted, this discrepancy in mass had grown to be “as much as five hundredths of milligram,” or as Wired puts it, “about the weight of a dust speck.”

You might be thinking that’s not too much to worry about. My own weight can easily vary a good five pounds between morning and evening, depending on the buoyancy of my mood and whether I’ve even thought about anything made from a potato. But for engineers working to, say, make smaller computer chips and expand the frontiers of nanotechnology, that dust speck is a pretty big pea under the mattress of science.

And so the caretakers of our system of weights and measures are, to use another French phrase, losing their merde about this.

Scientists are now working feverishly to redefine the mass of one perfect kilogram based on a constant of nature — a measurement that can’t change, according to the laws of physics — rather than a physical object that might be secretly worrying about what its ass looks like in those jeans. One team of scientists in Germany is attempting to count the number of atoms in a perfect 1-kilogram sphere of silicon precisely enough that the kilogram can be defined as an exact number of silicon atoms. Another team in Maryland is working to redefine the kilogram in terms of the precise amount of electric voltage needed to lift Le Grand K into the air.

A third team, working out of my apartment, is attempting to define the kilogram in terms of the precise number of swear words needed to remove a kilogram of cat hair from the sofa using an ordinary sticky roller.

But talking about unchanging laws of nature leads us to another area of disturbing inconsistency that’s keeping some scientists from sleeping peacefully. In the December issue of Harper’s Magazine, there is an essay by Alan Lightman called “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith.” (Online version is available only to subscribers, alas.) Alan Lightman is a physicist and a professor at MIT, but most people will know him as the author of a spiffy little book called Einstein’s Dreams.

Lightman tells us that what we have thought of as universal laws of nature may be more like … local customs. He writes:

“Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents — a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.”

In other words, physicists used to think that the basic laws that govern our universe would hold true for all of the other universes throughout the multiverse. Now they think that those laws might change from universe to universe, like the speed limit being different in Indiana than it is in Illinois. I’m not entirely sure from reading the essay what these differences might be, but I suppose that there may be universes where the speed of light is different, or water boils at a some other temperature, or where things you buy at the store come in packaging that can be opened without sharp objects and the risk of personal injury. Or where cerebral TV sitcoms can stay on the air for more than three seasons without being canceled. (So long, Community.) [Update: Since I wrote this, it's emerged that Community isn't officially cancelled yet, just on hiatus and fairly thin ice. But still.]

This is understandably disturbing for those who want the world to hew to a consistent set of rules. It’s certainly easier to get around in Chicago, where the blocks are laid out on a consistent number grid, than in New York where you can walk one block east and find yourself apparently several blocks south of where you were, without even trying. And yet it appears that the multiverse may be laid out a little more like New York than Chicago. This is disorienting for scientists, who need consistency in order to do what they do — but then again, we might console them that perhaps this means the multiverse will have better pizza. Although the apartments will be smaller — unless they’re on TV, in which case they will look bigger than most Midwestern houses.

I guess what I’m saying is, if the laws of the nature are less steadfast than we’ve been led to think, perhaps there’s some hope in that. If we must enlarge the realm of the possible, perhaps that creates additional room in the multiverse —even within our own universe — for unexpected good things as well as bad.

As recently as three months ago, I would have told you that it was a settled law of the political universe that street protests can’t change anything in the US. They’re too easy for the media and politicians to ignore, I would have said. They do nothing but wear people out, and then people go home feeling like they’ve made their best effort without having accomplished anything. None of the hours I spent marching around chanting in my twenties and thirties ever seemed to make the universe any lighter or any heavier.

And now look at us. Well — I say us, I mean them. The people younger than me who haven’t given up on street protest, in some cases because they hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet. When I first heard about Occupy Wall Street, I thought it would be another exercise in futility. And yet — just to offer one possible measurement of its success at influencing the public mood — by the time Bank Transfer Day rolled around on November 5th, more than 650,000 customers had opened new accounts at credit unions, transferring as much as $4.5 billion away from big banks. And suddenly bankers, like the guardians of Le Grand K, are feeling a growing unease over the unexpected loss of weight in their own vaults.

This week on MSNBC, Chris Hayes reported on a memo from a prominent lobbying firm addressed to one of its Wall Street clients, worrying that US politicians may begin to embrace the Occupy Wall Street agenda, which could have “very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

I think about how suddenly the Berlin Wall fell when its time came, and I think of the Arab Spring, and the news story that Salman Rushdie tweeted this week, reporting that the government of Libya is now ceremonially unbanning books that had been blacklisted in the Gaddafi era — including those of Salman Rushdie. I watch the Occupy protesters on YouTube, taking batons to the stomach and pepper spray to the face, and although I’ve seen this kind of thing before, I no longer feel like what these particular protesters can accomplish is necessarily limited by constant and unchanging universal laws.

And I like to think that maybe, just maybe, the forbidding mass of political impossibility is getting lighter, leaking electrons away into the ether like Le Grand K.

Also: This morning I read that Netflix will be airing 10 brand-new episodes of Arrested Development beginning in early 2013. Which helps make up a little bit for the Community thing.

A little context: The following piece was written to be performed in the March 26, 2011 edition of The Paper Machete, a weekly showcase for Chicago journalists, comedians, and other writers, hosted by Christopher Piatt.

The Paper Machete has posted the audio of the performance as a podcast. You can listen to it here:

The Paper Machete — Dave Awl: The Fukushima Litotes

The text is below for your reading pleasure. Or your reading epistemological discomfort, perhaps.

This essay also posted as a diary on Daily Kos.

I suppose every historical disaster comes with it the opportunity to burn one or more memorable quotations into our collective mind. The Hindenburg gave us, “Oh, the humanity!” More recently, the Iraq War presented us with “Mission Accomplished,” Katrina introduced “Heckuva job, Brownie” into the national discourse, and even the BP oil disaster may forever remind us of CEO Tony Hayward’s plaintive “I’d like my life back.”

And Fukushima? The story of its aftermath is still being written, but there’s already one sentence that will be lodged in my brain, at least, for a while to come.

I read it in a news story on the Guardian site on a Wednesday morning, and later that day someone used it as the title of a recommended diary on Daily Kos, so I know I’m not the only one who found it striking. It was a few days after the initial disaster, when people were starting to realize that it wasn’t just the nuclear reactors themselves that we had to worry about. There were also large numbers of spent fuel rods that needed to be kept cool.

As you probably know by now, spent fuel rods are fuel rods that have been retired from use, because they’re no longer useful as fuel, and they’re kept in pools full of special cooling water for many years. If they aren’t kept cool enough, there is the possibility that the fuel rods might go critical again, meaning that nuclear fission would begin to take place, like it does in the reactors themselves. Which could lead to very bad things, such as explosions. Something like a dirty bomb, we’re told.

In discussing what might happen to the spent fuel rods if things didn’t go well, a spokesman for Tepco — the Tokyo Electric Power Company — uttered the following memorable sentence:

“The possibility of re-criticality is not zero.”

Let me repeat that so that we can fully appreciate it: “The possibility of re-criticality is not zero.”

What’s striking about this sentence is that it doesn’t come right out and say what it means. It implies that the possibility of re-criticality is so disturbing that we can’t look at it directly; just the thought of it is itself kind of radioactive. So we need to wear special protective glasses of language before we turn our verbal gaze in that direction. We can’t say what the possibility of re-criticality is: Instead we’ll just rule out one small thing that it is not. It is not zero.

If, like me, you’re a little bit of a geek for the wonderful Greek words that define the various tropes and schemes used in rhetoric and poetry, or you just had a good classics teacher, you may recognize these linguistic protective glasses: They’re called litotes.

Technically, the term litotes refers to any kind of understatement. “New York is kind of a big city” or “The winters in Chicago can get kind of nippy” are both litotes.

In practice, however, we most often use the term litotes to refer to the specific kind of understatement where you say something by denying its opposite.

For example, “I wouldn’t mind if spring came early this year.” Or, “As the host of a weekly performance series, Christopher Piatt is not exactly a bumbling incompetent.” Or, “It would not make me tremendously sad if a pigeon flying overhead were to take direct aim at Governor Scott Walker’s open mouth.”

From a strictly logical standpoint, this may not sound like a very effective way of communicating. All I’ve done in regard to Christopher Piatt, for example, is to strike one terrible possibility off the long list of shortcomings that he might have. And yet, through long cultural practice, we instantly understand that I mean he is a terrific host. Probably.

And of course, litotes has a long history in political discourse. In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell specifically complained about the overuse of the “not un” construction, as in “not unlikely” or “not unjustifiable,” and recommended that we “laugh [it] out of existence” by memorizing the sentence “A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”

What’s particularly memorable about what I’ll call the Fukushima Litotes, or “not zero,” is the way it’s used as a last resort to avoid saying something unspeakable. And in a way, that gets at the whole issue with nuclear power: We’ve only been able to proceed with it by refusing to contemplate certain outcomes. We wear various kinds of protective glasses in order to avoid looking directly at the possibilities that are not zero.

Some of us are more comfortable than others with those possibilities. Others of us would like to be able to take those possibilities and just go ahead and make them zero.

This is the question we’re left with in the wake of Fukushima: Is nuclear power worth the risk?

I have several friends in Japan, all US citizens, and one of the things I noticed in the days after the Fukushima disaster began was the difference in tone between the news articles they were posting on Facebook, compared to the articles my friends in the US were posting. In general, my friends in Japan wanted to promote the perspective that things were going to be okay; that we shouldn’t overreact or become hysterical or exaggerate the bad things might happen as a result of Fukushima. Early on, one of them politely begged his friends in the US to stop making references to Chernobyl.

My friends in the US, on the other hand, were more likely to post speculations about worst-case scenarios.

It’s understandable that my friends in Japan didn’t want to panic unnecessarily. But it’s also reasonable to wonder if the differences in my friends’ perspectives were a reflection of the difference in what the authorities in Japan were saying versus what the news media in the west have been saying. As Rachel Maddow has pointed out on her show, governments and nuclear power companies have a long history of downplaying and sometimes lying about the severity of the situation when things go wrong with nuclear power, from Three Mile Island to Chernobyl. And the Japanese government and Tepco obviously have every reason to want to minimize the appearance of having, to put it bluntly, screwed up — in addition to not wanting to cause panic in the streets.

So which perspective should we embrace?

After the last couple of weeks, many of us now know much more than we ever expected to about fuel rods, cladding, containment vessels, radioactive isotopes, and so forth. But ultimately, no matter how smart we are, we are all at the mercy of people who are smarter than we are. People who have invested years of their lives to study and think about subjects we haven’t. Very few of us are capable of understanding the subtleties of nuclear physics and medicine and how the insides of our computers work and everything else there is to know in our complicated age. So we’re forced to rely on what we’re told by experts. And when the anointed experts disagree among themselves, as they will, then we have the difficult task of deciding which experts to listen to.

Which leads us to what I think of as the great crisis of the 21st century: epistemology.

Epistemology, of course, is the branch of philosophy that investigates the nature and origin of human knowledge. Epistemology asks the question, “How do we know what we know?”

In the Internet age, we live in an oversaturated overabundance of information. We marinate ourselves in information. The problem is no longer getting information; it’s figuring out which information we can trust. Which sources of information are credible. And by extension, when that information is too complex for us to understand, which experts we can rely on to interpret that information for us.

As Laurie Anderson puts it in her piece “Only an Expert“:

Only an expert can deal with the problem
Because half the problem is seeing the problem.

… So if there is no expert dealing with the problem
It’s really actually twice the problem.
Because only an expert can deal with the problem.

And so the experts are beginning to debate the future of nuclear power while the workers at Fukushima are still trying to get the situation there under control. And the rest of us watching at home will simply have to pick a horse.

Example: A left-wing environmental journalist I respect named George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian, argues that we shouldn’t let Fukushima steer us away from nuclear power, because the alternative is burning more fossil fuels — such as coal. He argues that the costs of fossil fuels in terms of carbon, climate change, mountaintop removal, and other environmental damage are actually worse than the possible damage from all nuclear disasters put together. Quote:

“While nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong. The only safe coal-fired plant is one which has broken down past the point of repair.”

… and although I’ve been a “no nukes” type since I was a teenager listening to Dan Fogelberg, I wonder if maybe he’s got a point.

But then Laurence Lewis, writing for Daily Kos, points out that in order for us to build enough nuclear power plants to seriously curb climate change, we would need to build 21 nuclear power plants every year for the next 50 years, and those plants would require 10 dumps the size of Yucca Mountain in order to store all the nuclear waste they’d generate. Yucca Mountain itself, of course, is still so controversial it will probably never happen, and its estimated price tag is $90 billion dollars. Ten Yucca Mountains would cost $900 billion.

The possibility of building ten Yucca Mountains may not be zero, but it might as well be.

So in this particular battle of the experts, I have to give the match to Laurence Lewis. But that’s just me taking my best epistemological guess — based on my limited understanding of what people I think of as smarter than me are saying.

In some ways I might as well be a citizen of ancient Rome, watching two different augurs scrutinizing the same pair of chicken entrails, trying to decide which one has the more knowing gaze, seems to knit his brow with a little bit more acuity.

And unfortunately, Fukushima has proven that when the experts are wrong, the stakes are high.

The experts who built the Fukushima plant tested it to make sure it could withstand an earthquake of up to 7.9 in magnitude. The actual earthquake that struck in March was a 9.0. But even worse, the generators that powered the plant and its cooling system were wiped out because they were built on low ground. They were supposed to be protected by a seawall that was designed to withstand a tsunami up to 19 feet high. The actual wave that hit Fukushima was 46 feet high, more than twice the height of the restraining wall.

Here in Illinois, where we have a number of reactors with the exact same design as the ones in Fukushima, our experts have told us that our nuclear power plants have been “built to withstand the worst quake likely in [our] area.” Of course, the experts in Japan thought that, too.

According to the Chicago Tribune (link above), some scientists think “there is a 25 percent to 40 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0 quake again during the next half-century.” But if our nuclear plants can only withstand a quake of 7.9 and the actual quake we get is, say, an 8.5, what then?

No one can say precisely how likely it is that we will experience a quake that is greater than 7.9 in Illinois. But armed with the mystic powers of litotes, we can say what that likelihood is not. In fact, we can identify what it is not by a numerical value. Anyone?

That’s right: It is “not zero.”

Of course, when we talk about unexpected disasters, it’s only fair to acknowledge that on a daily basis we live with all kinds of unimagined possibilities that sometimes prove themselves to be surprisingly not zero.

For example: In the year 1919, on an unusually warm day for January, a 50-foot tall storage tank in Boston owned by the Purity Distilling Company, and containing more than two million gallons of molasses, unexpectedly burst, in what became known — I kid you not — as the Boston Molasses Disaster.

It sounds hilarious, but the results were horrifying. The collapse released a virtual tsunami of molasses that traveled at an estimated rate of 35 miles per hour and was between 8 and 15 feet high. According to the Boston Globe, people “were picked up by a rush of air and hurled many feet.” A truck was actually picked up and swept into Boston Harbor.

In his book Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, author Stephen Puleo described what happened like this:

Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was … Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.

21 people were killed, along with several horses. Approximately 150 people were injured.

Why did this happen? Well, funnily enough, there’s a certain similarity here to what happened at Fukushima.

According to the New York Times, shortly after government regulators approved a 10-year extension for the oldest reactor at the Fukushima plant, “its operator admitted that it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment related to the plant’s cooling systems.”

And long before that, Mitsuhiko Tanaka — one of the engineers who helped build the No. 4 reactor at Fukushima — came forward in 1988 to say that there was a serious flaw in its containment vessel, and he’d helped to cover it up. His concerns were brushed aside.

On a similar note, Stephen Puleo notes that the Purity Distilling Company’s molasses storage tank had been constructed hastily, and the company skipped the step of filling it with water to test it for leaks. When it was first filled with molasses, it leaked so badly that neighborhood children used cans to collect its drippings. The company’s response was to paint the tank brown to try to hide the leaks.

So, somewhat like the Fukushima plant, the great molasses tank was constructed poorly and tested insufficiently. As a result, the possibility of 21 people dying in a flood of sweet sticky syrup turned out to be not zero.

And yet if you’d asked any of its victims the day before how they imagined they might die — if you’d said to them, What do you suppose the odds are that you will be fatally candified right here in the streets of Boston, and asked them whether that possibility was a) zero or b) not zero, it is not unlikely that a not insignificant percentage of respondents might have failed to choose “not zero.”

My takeaway from this is that there is room for us all, in our daily lives — whether we build nuclear power plants or not — to be a little bit better than we are at expecting the unexpected.

Many have commented on the bravery and heroism of the workers at Fukushima who have been struggling to contain the damage. In particular, for the past couple of days I’ve been thinking about the three workers who accidentally stepped in radioactive water. They were replacing a cable at the plant, and although they were wearing protective suits, it turned out their boots were too short to stop the water from seeping in.

In that respect it’s hard not to think of their boots as being like miniature versions of the seawall that failed to protect the Fukushima generators.

The water itself turned out to be 10,000 times more radioactive than expected. The workers were hospitalized after suffering radiation burns.

It would perhaps be not inaccurate to say that those three workers, at least, got the short end of the litotes stick. They must have hoped when they went to work that the odds of suffering severe radiation exposure were, if not zero, as close as possible.

Unfortunately, a string of failures took place, as unforeseen as a wave of molasses: First the restraining walls that were supposed to protect the generators from water failed them. Then the containment vessel housing the reactor apparently failed them. And last but not really least, their boots failed them.

And behind every one of those failures was at least one expert who made a very bad guess. Who underestimated the possibilities that were not zero.

Footnote: If you’re interested, you can find me on Twitter under my real name: Dave Awl.

For me, Mike Leigh’s best films become a kind of shorthand for key bits of understanding about the crazymaking challenges of being human. This one is in that category and will stick with me for a long time.

Roger Ebert’s review is spot-on.

My favorite is Nigel, the grey tabby, who when you scratch him under the chin, rewards you with a giant yawn and then his orange eyes fill with tears.

They all accept my presence except for Jordan, who stares at me balefully when I open the door and coo my hellos, and then sadly creeps away under the bed or the sofa, only occasionally poking his head out to ascertain whether the trespassing ape has gone away yet.

Lush, the orange one, doesn’t like to be touched but gives me little eye-squinches of acknowledgment, the feline tip of the cap.

Elliot, the Maine Coon mix, is friendly and inquisitive and follows my progress by leaping to the top of whatever surface is nearest to me, like Kiwi does at home. He’s blue-grey like Mr. Blue was, but with a giant leonine mane. Mane Coon. And bears a slight resemblance to Cocteau’s Bête, maybe. Something in the eyes.

Noah, white and voluminous as the imagined beard of his namesake, clambers into a large pot in the kitchen — apparently his favorite roost — and presents his upturned face so his own endlessly leaking eyes can be gently dabbed with a tissue. He makes soft croaking noses in his throat, which startled me at first because I thought they were a sort of hiss, but in fact they seem to signify pleasure.

By the way, I know the lists of group names for animals advise you to refer to a group of cats as a clowder or a cluster or a clan, among other things. But I think of these cats as a flock, possibly because of the slow soft gentle drifting way they move around the apartment.

All of them have something of the quality of owls as much as cats. If any of them let out a soft whoo instead of a meow I’m not sure I’d be surprised.

When I’m in their apartment, I definitely feel like a visitor in their world, which has its own customs and rules and perhaps its own magical laws. I try to be careful not to transgress.

And when I return to my own apartment, Kiwi looks strangely minimal and slender and round-eyed, and sniffs me over ferociously, wondering what I’ve been up to and who these others are, and whether he ought to allow these field trips to continue.

The thing is, it’s not just a charming historical drama about royalty and speech therapy; it’s about people who allow their own anxieties and self-doubt to silence them, and what it takes to overcome that.

On that level, it spoke very powerfully to what I’ve been struggling with as a writer lately, especially for the last five years or so. Some of its images will stick with me for a long time, I think: particularly the scene where speech therapist Logue (Geoffrey Rush) gets the Duke of York (Colin Firth) to read a soliloquy from Hamlet beautifully by having him wear headphones playing music, so that he can’t be distracted by the sound of his own voice.

As a writer, I think I need to figure out how to put on those headphones for a while, to keep my awareness of my own voice from unnerving me.

Which reminded me of an old piece of mine called The Writer’s Prayer (performed in Too Much Light and included in What the Sea Means), about what writers need to tell themselves to overcome what Russell Hoban calls “blighter’s rock,” and get on with it.

I reproduce it here for whatever therapeutic effects that might have, and to let it out to play on the Inter-mo-net.

The Writer’s Prayer
© 1999 Dave Awl

I write these words knowing that no eye will ever read them and no ear will ever hear them. I write these words for no one but myself. These words will never be published, read aloud, disseminated, distributed, circulated or shown. These words are a secret between the ink that forms them and the paper on which they are written. I write these words from a place of utter security, knowing that what I say here need not impress or persuade, charm, amuse, uplift, comfort, move, or heal anyone anywhere, for no one but me will ever know they were written. They need rise to no standard of quality or art. These words serve no master but me, and convey no meaning but that which rests lightly on the surface of them, an ephemeral ripple moving vaguely across my consciousness. These words carry no responsibility and no agenda. They feel no pressure and honor no duty. These words will go into the wastes of time unregarded, unconsidered and unremembered. These words are free to be exactly and only what they are, what they were, what they will be; and then to evaporate, erasing themselves in their destined transcendence, returning to the original long word that contains all the other words, and from which they but briefly imagined themselves to be separated.

… and so mote it be.

I’m going to make another run at integrating this blog into my daily Facebooking and Twittering activities, partly by simplifying the way I post here. I’ve cleaned up the oppressively elaborate tagging system I used to use — pretty much only top-level categories now, no more cascading hierarchies like “Kids in the Hall > Daryll > Little Oompah-Band References.” And I’m not going to spend hours every day digging up copyright-free images to lovingly tweak in Photoshop to produce illustrations.

So, no promises, but we shall see what it is that we see. If nothing else this ought to be a useful place to park chunks of text that are too long to post as status updates or tweets.

Also, I’m no longer clinging to the silly mid-00s illusion that I can be semi-anonymous by hiding behind a blog name. It’s the era of real names on the Internet, so the blog is still Ocelopotamus but I’m Dave Awl now, like anyone who bothered to click on the About link or read a few postings could figger out pretty quick.

Richard Barone on the video above:

The Bulrushes video is my favorite of the several we made. Instantly archival-looking, even new, it had the appearance of lost footage… like The Beatles at the Cavern Club. Besides the sense that Phil was documenting moments with the urgency of someone who knows they will never happen again – matching and complimenting our energy with his camerawork – the look and feel of this video was truly influential: Grainy, saturated Super-8 footage was simply not seen much in the early 80s, when the emphasis was on florescent colors, sharp edges, and and the false clarity of videotape.

And I love this quote:

I got more than one phone call from other bands asking how we got that Super-8 effect in our new video. “We used Super-8,” I would answer, in a tone that can only be described as… well… impish.

Moby is a big fan of this song, too, bless him, and even did a remake of it with Richard B, but I have to admit that I much prefer the original.

I’m new enough to the Twitterverse that I’m still finding people I like to follow, but have been particularly enjoying Rainn Wilson and of course the current Grand Emperor of Tweetsylvania, Stephen Fry. Was also very excited to find Mike Scott of the Waterboys today.

Up until this week my Twitter feed has been mostly just a mirror of my Facebook status updates … but going forward I’ve decided to try mixing it up a little bit and issuing some Twitter-only tweets.

Also, I’m pretty sure you can read my Twitter page without joining Twitter or logging in. So there’s that.

Anyway, here I am if you want some of what’s in my beak:

Twitter / DaveAwl
 

Oh, yes, you read that right, Mabel. The Partly Dave Show has been unpacked from its wooden chest, mothballs brushed away, and is ready to flatter your figure again just like the old days — and it’s happening in just one short week, on Friday February 20th!

Partly Dave’s triumphant return (our first show since 2007!) takes place at the Viaduct Theater as part of this year’s Rhinoceros Theater Festival.

The theme for this edition is “Please Mister Postman”: an evening of pieces about letters, mail, and the post office! Both of my scintillating co-hosts, Christopher Piatt and Diana Slickman, are on board, and our super-special guests include Scott Hermes (of the Neo-Futurists and the legendary Cardiff Giant) and Dan Godston (poet, trumpeter, and curator of the Chicago Calling Arts Festival).

And we have the privilege of presenting the debut of a hot new band as our musical guests this time out! For those of you who remember Analog Radio from the “Way of the Worrier” edition back in 2004 — well, Dann Morr from Analog Radio is in a brand-new outfit called Wells-next-the-Sea, featuring (I’m told) boys, girls, flutes, fiddles, and I don’t know what all kind of mayhem. This is gonna be good!

Hear are all the specs in handy at-a-glance form:

The Partly Dave Show: Please Mister Postman

Hosted by Dave Awl,
with co-hosts Christopher Piatt
and Diana Slickman

Guest performances by:
Dan Godston
Scott Hermes

And live music by:
Wells-next-the-Sea

Friday, February 20, 2009, at 9:30pm
as part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival 2009
at the Viaduct Theater
3111 N. Western Avenue
Chicago, IL

Tickets: $12 or “pay what you can”
All reservations are handled through the
Viaduct Theatre box office at (773) 296-6024.

More info:
partlydaveshow.com

Oh … and check out the shiny new Facebook page for the Partly Dave Show!
Click through to “become a fan,” as they say over there!

And thanks to Chicago Stage Review for the mention!
 

What happened is that I was writing a book.

Yes, it’s a book about Facebook. A Facebookbook.

See, for the last nine years I’ve been freelancing for Peachpit Press as a tech writer and/or editor on various book projects. Last year when I started spending all my time on Facebook, and then started helping friends figure out how to use it, I idly asked my editor if Peachpit would be interested in a proposal for a book about Facebook — never really dreaming they’d take me up on it.

Well, they called my bluff, and I spent the second half of last year working on the thing.

And now it’s at the printer and about to hit the shelves. The official release date is February 22. (Sweet tea biscuits! That’s soon!)

It’s called Facebook Me! A Guide to Having Fun with Your Friends and Promoting Your Projects on Facebook. It’s one third a how-to manual, one third an etiquette guide, and one third a manifesto for using Facebook to promote bands, theater companies, comedy groups, craft shows, films, zines, little graphic design companies, and whatever other creative projects you might want to spread the word about. (Plus, there’s a whole bonus fourth third of it that’s just pure fun, baked right into the crust!)

The specs:

Facebook Me! A Guide to Having Fun with Your Friends and Promoting Your Projects on Facebook.
Paperback: 216 pages
Author: Dave Awl
Publisher: Peachpit Press (February 22, 2009)
ISBN-10: 032159195X
ISBN-13: 978-0321591951

And look at this splendiferous back-cover blurb I got from Ms. East Village Inky herself:

“No better Virgil than Dave Awl when it comes to orienting the uninitiated to this strange and many-circled world of Facebook.”
—Ayun Halliday, author of No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late

If you’re itching to get your hands on a copy ASAP — and how could you not be? —
you can pre-order the book from Amazon.

(I also have it on good authority that Unabridged Bookstore here in Chicago will have the book in stock, along with plenty of other booksellers here, there, and everywhere across this great land of ours.)

Oh, and there’s an official Facebook Me! group on Facebook you can join for news and updates about the book.

So, that’s why things got so eerily quiet around here. Once I got started on the writing, I pretty much had to kick everything else in my life to the curb for a while — including poor, neglected Ocelopotamus here.

Now that the book is in the can, I’m hoping to start pumping fluids into the Ocelopotamus and see if I can bring it back to life.

I have some other news to post, soon, too. So if anyone’s listening — stay tuned.