tom moody

e-ditch

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ditch

Airbnb is now reaching into the unpopulated exurbs with this offer of overnight accommodation in a "Charming Ditch" in Lake Charles, LA.
One suspects this is net art by "Poey." Check it out before it disappears.
Related: Airbnb for non-sites / Designated Natural Area

Update, June 2018: Poey's listing was up for about a year and then he received this message:

buddy

"Does not meet our standards on many levels" -- is that the standard form rejection language? It almost seems improvised by Buddy, in a fit of professional pique.

Nevertheless, at least one person appreciated the listing before it was pulled:

ditch_response4

hat tip to Poey for providing these materials

autograph

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vanvliet

Something I bet you don't have -- a Captain Beefheart signature.
A bunch of us youths mobbed him after a concert; he was signing "Love Over Gold" on whatever scraps of paper we had handy.
This authentic Don Van Vliet signature is on the back of a receipt for a car battery from a store called Memco.
Priceless.

Drive, book and film

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Drive, the movie, featured disturbing gore, Albert Brooks as a notable villain, and too-long stretches of Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan making cow eyes at each other. It's pretty good but if you backtrack to director Nicolas Winding Refn's "Pusher Trilogy" you can see how the director deliberately, possibly subversively, "went Hollywood." If you want to experience Drive without the sentimental goop, I recommend the Pusher films and also James Sallis' source novel, also titled Drive. (And the book's sequel, Driven.)

Keith Rawson has a good rundown on the Drive book/film differences. Sallis is a writerly writer in the Cormac McCarthy mold who is also a fan of Richard Stark. The Driver character resembles Parker with backstory -- mostly melancholy. Driver is far less zombie-like in the books than Gosling plays him.

One lingering question about Drive, the book, and please email if you have any thoughts. A character is introduced late in the story named "Eric Guzman." There is an earlier character named Standard Guzman (Standard Gabriel in the movie -- Mulligan's creepy husband played by Oscar Isaac.) Who the hell is Eric Guzman supposed to be? Is this Standard back from the dead? A fake name used by mobsters trying to track down Driver? Both? Neither? Very little is said between Driver and another character, "Doc," to explain who "Eric" was and what happened to him. Did Driver "take him out"? The barely-explained reappearance of the Guzman name (and there is a third Guzman mentioned -- Eric's brother Noel, who Doc supposedly fixed up medically) in a novel with a Pulp Fiction-style scrambled chronology throws off the rhythm of the scrambling so the result, for this reader, was confusion as to when events were taking place. Again, would appreciate others' thoughts.

dark pattern politics

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We've talked about Dark Patterns in web design (manipulative page layouts that trick you into subscriptions, etc) but we also encounter them in media and politics. The Clintons are masters at them. One example is claiming a "Russian hack" to deflect attention from their dirty tricks against Bernie Sanders. Another is having Muslim parents of a deceased Iraq War soldier speak at their convention. Predictably their opponent spouts some Islamophobic nonsense and this shiny object diverts the media away from the Clintons' support of the war that put the soldier in harm's way.