Maria Bustillos’s interview back in February with Bourdain before his sudden death. Ill be honest, Im still shocked by it. Im glad it opened a discussion about mental health and it’s implications, depression and alcoholism which were not in the mainstream media. I hope it will be in the forefront for the next decades. With the current state of affair, I really do hope alcoholism will be more researched and talked about. Its a nasty poison.
Anthony Bourdain had started smoking again, was the first thing I noticed as he sat down with me last February. He was a bit hung over from a recent working trip to south Louisiana for Cajun Mardi Gras; “Harder partying than I’m used to, I gotta say,” he said, laughing. Despite his great height his leonine head seemed just huge, and a little fleshier than I’d imagined; there was this slight dissipation to him.
But no—who could be troubled about the wellbeing of Anthony Bourdain? Just look at him, so debonair, so completely at ease. A veritable prince of savoir vivre. Sixty-one, and still very elegant in his looks; the word sexy came to mind. Almost an old-fashioned word now. The sort of person who seems to think with his hips, his hands. He was in love, he would later admit; he and his new girlfriend, Asia Argento, had started smoking again together. He was a little rueful about the smoking, had the air of someone who meant to quit soon.
As he started to talk, everything about him became familiar at once; he slipped so effortlessly into the sleek carapace of his fame. The very air of vulnerability he projected, along with the rough candor, was part of this persona. But in fact he was a very private person, as his assistant, Laurie Woolever, reminded me after his death. Something I’d already known, from reading his books; he’d liked the piece I’d written about him and sent me an unbelievably kind note about it, which was what had emboldened me to ask for an interview. That, and he was famously generous to writers in general.
I loved this passage about him redefining of what luxury means and it begs the question, do you really need alcohol to be happy? Im on the spectrum that it shouldn’t. I do understand the feeling of eeriness, just pushed through the day and now letting go of all the care in the world.
My happiest moments on the road are always off-camera, generally with my crew, coming back from shooting a scene and finding ourselves in this sort of absurdly beautiful moment, you know, laying on a flatbed on those things that go on the railroad track, with a putt-putt motor, goin’ across like, the rice paddies in Cambodia with headphones on… this is luxury, because I could never have imagined having the freedom or the ability to find myself in such a place, looking at such things.
To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.
He was quite special and I wish he was still around.
I stumbled into this blog post about quake3 arena. I remembered that I had the original CD somewhere in a deep
and dark dungeon. I dugged it up and figured how to bring it to the 21st century.
“If we look at how we show up and fight in our relationship, it says a lot more about ourselves than it does about the person we’re calling crazy, even if your partner is acting in a way you find crazy,” Klow says. “How might it be possible to instead show up as compassionate and understanding and work toward greater clarity?”
It isn’t easy, Klow admits. Arguments trigger the fight or flight response in the brain, and when we fight, our prefrontal cortex, the part that controls reasoning, problem solving and language, goes “offline,” he says. So often when people fight, they try to manipulate the narrative or framework of the conversation, usually unconsciously, because they’re feeling threatened. In other words: Delegitimizing your partner’s feelings, is a cop-out when you don’t want to deal.
Across the road from Happy Valley, 27 floors up, two Americans sat in a plush office, ignoring a live feed of the action that played mutely on a TV screen. The only sound was the hum of a dozen computers. Bill Benter and an associate named Paul Coladonato had their eyes fixed on a bank of three monitors, which displayed a matrix of bets their algorithm had made on the race—51,381 in all.
Benter and Coladonato watched as a software script filtered out the losing bets, one at a time, until there were 36 lines left on the screens. Thirty-five of their bets had correctly called the finishers in two of the races, qualifying for a consolation prize. And one wager had correctly predicted all nine horses.
“F—-,” Benter said. “We hit it.”
I also am a parent of two kids with iPads and Dave’s post about parental control resonated with me. I agree with everything he said in his post. To be able to make a category of apps disappear during homework hour would be awesome. Having the iPad auto-shutdown at a certain time and not being able to start without entering the parent password would be sublime. Thanks Dave for writing this and I surely hope Apple listens. Go check out his article, he has more ideas to bring forward.
The death of network neutrality and the loosening of regulations on how Internet providers handle customers’ network traffic have raised many concerns over privacy. Internet providers (and others watching traffic as it passes over the Internet) have long had a tool that allows them to monitor individuals’ Internet habits with ease: their Domain Name System (DNS) servers. And if they haven’t been cashing in on that data already (or using it to change how you see the Internet), they likely soon will.
DNS services are the phone books of the Internet, providing the actual Internet Protocol (IP) network address associated with websites’ and other Internet services’ host and domain names. They turn arstechnica.com into 50.31.169.131, for example. Your Internet provider offers up DNS as part of your service, but your provider could also log your DNS traffic—in essence, recording your entire browsing history.
Yet the ability to fall asleep in two minutes or less, anywhere, anytime, is actually a skill like any other, and one anyone can learn. The technique for how to do so was in fact developed for Naval aviators during World War II, and today we’ll share it with you.
