Fabrice Muamba and how athletes fall

This weekend the midfielder Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field during a match. Like Brian Philips, I wasn’t watching the game but found out from Twitter almost immediately.

And this, really, is when things got tricky for fans. What do you do, in an era of instant knowledge, when there’s simply nothing to know? I can only speak for myself, but I doubt I’m alone in this: I spent two hours refreshing Twitter, obsessively reloading the Guardian’s live-blog of the match (which turned into a clearinghouse for news), and quietly freaking out. I hadn’t been watching the match when Muamba collapsed, but thanks to the Internet, I heard the news almost immediately, followed the crisis as it unfolded, and now felt absurdly unmoored. My feelings were, I realized, the least important things in the world at that moment, but I was foolishly desperate for news. Again, I don’t think I was the only one.

I kept refreshing my Twitter stream thinking that next tweet was going to be the one with the update. But everyone I followed was thinking and feeling and saying the same thing I was. There was no new information. For an excruciating amount of time.

This sort of pause is rare in my life lately. Read click refresh ⌘-tab. I don’t meditate on one item for a given amount of time. Watching this story unfold gave me pause, I felt frustrated knowing so little.

The design team must feel that it has both the authority to make product decisions and the responsibility for the outcome of those decisions.

I saw Nirvana perform and The Breeders opened for them. Kurt came out and apologized that they were not the Breeders. He said he wished he could be as bad-ass as Kim Deal. A guy said that on stage about a woman at the height of his fame. He was hanging around with Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill who spray painted, ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit’ on a wall, which is where he got the name for that song. He was quoted as saying, ‘The future of rock belongs to women.’ Nirvana often had the girl group Shonen Knife open for them. At first, audiences got angry and violent – as the ‘jocks’ in the audience didn’t want to see chicks in a band. Kurt helped change the culture because he walked it like he talked it. He brought women in front of his audience. He wrote things on his album liner notes (‘what are those?’ you ask – shut up) that said, ‘If you’re sexist and hate women, don’t come to our shows.’

(Source: jenkirkman)

People who really just want easily-reproducible shit for free will always find a way to get it, and any publisher is far better off working on ways to make sure that customers can legally get what they want as easily as possible with the fewest restrictions. That should be the lesson that media moguls take away from iTunes, but to them the lesson is, ‘make sure all digital video content outlets are crippled in some way and we won’t have another iTunes.’

The problem is that at roughly 50 gallons per person per year, our consumption of soda, not to mention other sugar-sweetened beverages, is far from moderate, and appears to be an important factor in the rise in childhood obesity. This increase is at least partly responsible for a rise in what can no longer be called “adult onset” diabetes — because more and more children are now developing it.

You do not do this by leveraging social media, or making content “sticky,” or in any number of other cynical, trendy ways that seek to exploit a group of people instead of supporting them. Rather, you keep your people close by crafting narratives around the values they hold dear—and the best way to do this is to embrace the value of the editor.

Intuition

Last night while not sleeping due to our incessant heating, I started to think about intuition. At first I was thinking about Jimi Hendrix. There is a way to play the guitar where you learn chords and scales and can generally follow directions. This is how I play. Then there is the way Jimi Hendrix plays. Where he anticipates and feels the way the music is working. Or Jimmy Page, he fucking creates a whole new taxonomy of guitar playing, mimicking other worldly sounds. Now how does this happen? What did it look like for Jimi Hendrix to learn the guitar? Did he just play and play? I deeply tried to picture him sitting cross-legged playing and playing. In the Beatles anthology they talk about liking George and having him join the band because he could play all the popular songs flawlessly. Maybe that is what it was, a voracious appetite. Learning as many songs as possible. Is it at that point where you start to have an innate feeling of how to resolve that melody?

Oh, melody! Going back to the Beatles, there is something to be said about melody. Consistency in mind blowing melodies. Melodies that maybe you don’t notice the complexities of because you don’t need to. They resolve right in front of you so damn eloquently that it takes a concerted effort to figure out what just happened. How does that happen? It is like great design, you don’t noticed the type, you don’t notice the page, you only fluidly read the words. It gets out of the way, it presents you with what you need to know, it feels right. The design is the absence of distractions. And how you get great design, I wouldn’t say that it is innate ability, it takes refinement, lots of it, and it takes practice, lots of it. Like Mandy Brown talked about in her A List Apart article, the more you work and work it becomes “secondhand, something we could do without thinking.” So while I think intuition is real, I don’t think it is innate or comes easily.

And yes, I did just finish the Steve Jobs biography.

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

I went for a run in the canyon this morning. It is part of the essence of this place. It wasn’t quite hot yet, I think it is supposed to be 95 again today. The air was so heavy with sage, fennel, and yarrow. So much yarrow, the air thick and cold in the shade.

The sky here is so much different. Cloudless, blue, so large. In that cold Washington town I lived in the sky was always so heavy and close, weirdly suffocating. Here it is so open. There aren’t really that many tall buildings.

I ran cross country in high school. I mostly hated it at the time, running up and down hills in the canyons. In the really hot sun, every day. But now I think about it so differently. I guess I couldn’t really appreciate this place until I had experienced others. I will talk to anyone at length about running in the canyons, it is glorious and magical.

The color palette is so vastly different here too. So many shrubs, ice plant, eucalyptus trees! Man, I really love the eucalyptus trees. The color affects the culture of this place. I mean, I think the color palettes of any place affect it. The way you dress, the way you feel, the way you think.