bookofjoe

brellas.wordpress.com — Just five days old and already a star

I figured I better feature this website immediately, what with its having premiered only last Thursday, May 8, with the following introduction: "I’m not exactly sure what’s going to occur here. There will be umbrellas. That is all."

The photo up top is the site's "Umbrella image of the week."

I like the cheekiness, what with the site being only five days old today.

More please.

Enter the Rumbler

Long story short: It's a souped-up, tricked-out new police siren with an amplifier and two sub-woofers augmenting the standard sound palette.

According to today's Associated Press story, it works by "... creating a lower-pitched sound that should cut through pretty much any traffic din and that can create vibrations that might get the attention of otherwised soundproofed motorists or pedestrians."

Hear it in action above and below.

Tell you what: It won't do much to alert the increasingly frequent drivers wearing closed headphones and listening to music I'm seeing in Charlottesville.

I can't imagine it's not happening everywhere.

Here's the AP article as it appears in today's Wall Street Journal.

Police Test Souped-Up Siren

The town of Vienna, Va., isn't big, but anyone who has tried to navigate its main streets at peak times knows it can be crowded and noisy. And that can hamper a police cruiser trying to get somewhere quickly.

Enter the Rumbler.

Vienna police are testing the Rumbler, a device that augments the standard siren with an amplifier and two subwoofers, creating a lower-pitched sound that should cut through pretty much any traffic din and that can create vibrations that might get the attention of otherwise soundproofed motorists or pedestrians.

Police hope drivers or walkers "will start looking around, and hopefully they'll find the emergency vehicle" and clear the way, said Officer W.G. Murray of the Vienna Police Department. Vienna, which has 11 patrol cars to cover its 4.4 square miles, will rotate officers into the single car outfitted with the Rumbler, to give most officers a chance to gauge its effectiveness.

The Rumbler consists of two speakers, mounted inside the front bumper, that emit a lower-pitched siren that seems to slice through ambient noise more effectively. The device even creates a small but noticeable vibration inside a car, much like when a passing car is playing a thunderous hip-hop song. Police, fire and ambulance drivers often express frustration when traffic doesn't clear for an emergency vehicle, and the situation can be potentially fatal if cars unknowingly drive across the path of a speeding firetruck or police car.

"I had times, when I was on patrol, where I knew people didn't hear" the siren, said Vienna Detective James K. Sheeran as he watched the Rumbler being demonstrated. "I know they didn't hear it, because they didn't know why I walked up to their cars" when they did pull over, the detective said.

The Rumbler is about two years old, but it has been picked up by about 200 police and sheriff's agencies throughout the country, according to its manufacturer, Federal Signal Corp. of Oak Brook, Ill. District of Columbia police equipped about four dozen cars with the Rumbler in the fall and plan to expand it to all 767 of the department's marked patrol cars.

At a cost of about $350 a unit, "it's definitely not cost-prohibitive," Mr. Murray said.

....................

I'd like to see this technology crammed into a travel alarm clock — I'd buy one in a New York yoctosecond.

Half Brolly — Episode 2: Will this appease Flautist?

When last we visited the half brolly in Episode 1 last week — on Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 3:01 p.m., to be precise — its appearance was greeted with a fusillade of derision from down Atlanta way.

bookofjoe's very own Georgia peach commented, "Four hundred dollars for a half-(assed) umbrella and base, just for some shade???? My Tweety & Sylvester parasol would keep you in the dark with style and flair — $10.00. Or... garbage bag stretched over an old TV roof antenna: $2.50."

That stung just a wee bit.

But we're resilient here, me and Shawn Lea and her mighty crack research team, so we went on an all out search for a version that might better suit the sensibilities of our musically inclined friend.

And I do believe (pending Flautist's weighing in here, of course) we may very well have succeeded.

Without further ado, then, the second, far cheaper — $139 v $400 — coming of the half brolly.

From the website:
....................

Even a small patio has room for this half umbrella.

Now you can enjoy shade where a full-size umbrella just won’t fit!

This half umbrella fits up against the wall and only needs half the space.

Even use it as an instant awning for a window.

Because the pole fits up against a wall you can use this umbrella with or without a table.

There’s even room to stand under it because it’s almost 8' high.

Use to shade a small table on a narrow balcony, or place in front of a window where it can do double duty as an awning.

Sturdy steel pole, easy-up crank handle, and mildew-, fade- and weather-resistant polyester canopy.

Details:

• Plastic ring, metal clip, steel base pole and hardware included

• Decorative floral designed cast iron base [below] included

• Canopy measures approx. 7'6"W x 3'9"D x 7'10"H

• Base measures approx. 19"W x 12¼"D x 1"H

• Steel umbrella pole with crank handle
....................

Hey, Flautist, don't get your knickers in an even bigger twist — "crank" handle is their copy, not mine.

Beige or Green.

$139 (cast iron base included — can you believe it?).

BehindTheMedspeak: Would you pay extra to have your dental anesthetic wear off in half the time?

Novalar Pharmaceuticals is betting lots of people will be happy to add $25-$50 to their bill to cut the time it takes full sensation to return to their lips by 75–85 minutes, in about half the time it would normally take after receiving an injection of local anesthetic prior to undergoing dental work.

Me, I'm old school so I'll pass but I can't see the harm in opting for the additional reversing shot.

Here's Andrew Pollack's article from yesterday's New York Times with the details.

Drug Promises to Restore Sensation After Dental Visit

For those who don’t like to drool, slur their speech or unknowingly bite their tongue after a visit to the dentist, help might be at hand.

A small drug company said it won approval Friday from the Food and Drug Administration to market the first drug meant to undo the effects of local dental anesthesia.

In clinical trials, the drug cut the median time it took for full sensation to return to the lips by about 75 to 85 minutes, or by more than half.

The drug, called OraVerse, was developed by Novalar Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company in San Diego. The company said it would begin selling the drug to dentists late this year for $12.50 an injection.

After a dentist finished a filling or some other procedure, he or she would inject OraVerse into the same spot where the anesthetic had been injected.

Is a drug really needed for what seems like a trivial use? Novalar and some dentists who advise the company said it might be useful for children, who can injure themselves by biting their lip or tongue without knowing it.

“Kids tend to chew on their tongue when it’s numb,” said Dr. Athena Papas, a professor at the Tufts University School of Dental Medicine. The drug, however, is not approved for children younger than 6 or weighing less than 33 pounds.

Dr. Papas, an adviser to Novalar and an investigator in its clinical trials, said she thought the drug would appeal especially to those receiving cosmetic dentistry “who like to look good when they leave the dentist’s office.”

Novalar said its surveys showed great interest in the product among consumers and among dentists, some of whom said they would mark up the price of the drug as a source of profit.

With about 300 million anesthesia injections given by dentists each year, company executives say the drug could easily achieve sales of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

OraVerse is a formulation of a decades-old drug, phentolamine mesylate, which is used to treat severe episodes of hypertension.

When dentists administer lidocaine or another local anesthetic, they usually combine it with another drug called epinephrine, which acts to constrict the blood vessels. That keeps the blood from carrying away the anesthetic from the mouth too quickly.

OraVerse does the opposite, dilating the blood vessels and speeding up blood flow so the anesthetic can be carried away.

“We aren’t reversing the local anesthesia,” said Dr. Paul A. Moore, chairman of anesthesiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, who is an adviser to Novalar. “It is reversing the epinephrine.”

The label for the hypertension drug phentolamine contains warnings about heart attacks and occlusion of blood flow to the brain. Novalar said the label of OraVerse would also contain the warnings, but note that OraVerse is given in a different manner. In the clinical trials there were no serious side effects, Novalar said.

Novalar also said patients did not have pain because the anesthesia wore off more quickly, except for a little extra pain at the injection site. But the trials excluded people who got root canals or tooth extractions. Those patients would be expected to have lingering pain, and should not get Oraverse, Dr. Moore said.

In two trials of 484 patients in total, people were given either OraVerse or a sham injection. (Patients were blindfolded so they could not see the needle and, being numb, supposedly could not tell if the needle penetrated.)

People then tapped their lips every five minutes for five hours, feeling for sensation. Observers measured the symmetry of their smiles, checked for drool and listened to them read sentences.

About 41 percent of patients who got OraVerse reported normal lower lip sensation one hour after getting the drug, compared with 7 percent of those getting the sham injection. About 59 percent of those who got OraVerse had normal sensation in the upper lip after one hour, compared to 12 percent in the control group.

....................

Note that though OraVerse will cost dentists $12.50 a dose when they buy it, they're free to mark it up as much as they want.

That's why I noted $25–$50 additional on your bill, two to four times what it cost the dentist.

Nice little chunk of change, that: multiplied by, say, 20 injections a week, 80 a month, around 1,000 a year — an extra $25,000 annually isn't chump change where I come from.

Miōn Bhakti

My nominee for Official Shoe of Burning Man.

Very "Beyond Thunderdome."

$35–$39.

Widgets for everybody

Google calls them "Gadgets" but they're the same thing — features and add-ons you can put on a customized iGoogle home page.

I've been jealous of everyone I know who's got Tiger or Leopard, with their nifty desktops full of great things, but now even I, in my TechnoDolt™ Luddite Panther-using state, can have some fun.

I happened on this world of stuff via Virginia Heffernan's "The Medium" column in this past Sunday's New York Times magazine, in which she wrote, "For iGoogle — an extra-sharp way to curate and arrange your home page — consider taking on the handy widget called Web Definitions. In a flash, it combs through a dizzying range of lexicographical material and returns thorough defiinitions so efficiently you're tempted to try to stump it. Get it through "Add Stuff" [at the far right margin of the page] on iGoogle."

Sure, you're on Google as opposed to your own desktop when you access all these nifty virtual toys but who really cares (other than Google)?

Party Pump

Great name!

From the website:

Party Pump™

Make a batch for a bunch in this unbreakable jar — carefree entertaining with this self-serve dispenser that holds more than two gallons, so there's no need for constant replenishing.

While this big dispenser comes with a mix and recipes for margaritas, it’s perfect for any summer thirst-quencher.

Serve lemonade, sangria, fruit juice or punch to a crowd — guests can serve themselves.

A flat bottom lets you place it on a table, or put it in a cooler full of ice.

Holds almost 2½ gallons (37 8-ounce drinks).

Plastic — won’t break if knocked to the ground.

....................

That last feature's key.

$19.95 (Flautist, yours comes pre-filled with margaritas — everyone else, you're on your own).

McDonald's around the world

In India you can ask for a Maharaja Mac (above) —€” a Big Mac made with chicken or lamb. Or a vegetarian burger called the McAloo Tikki.

Fish-loving Norway features the McLaks, a sandwich made with grilled salmon and dill sauce.

Parts of Canada feature a McLobster roll (above). In French it's a McHomard.

In Chile you can order a McPollo (above) —€” chicken with guacamole.

Hong Kong features Riceburgers (above), with the fillings held between not buns but, rather, two patties of glutinous rice.

[via Eatnine Ghost]

Keychain Digital UV Meter

From the website:

Keychain Digital UV Sun Exposure Monitor

Keep track of your exposure to harmful UVA and UVB rays

This digital monitor automatically computes and counts down recommended safe sun exposure times based on your skin type and the SPF level of your sunscreen.

Attach to belt, purse or golf bag with included carabiner clip.

Alerts you when it's time to apply more sunscreen.

Also displays time and temperature.

Battery included.

$29.

How to think like Lynda Barry

The surreal cartoonist, whose following rose to cult heights in her 1980s heyday before she crashed and burned in the 90s, has returned from oblivion with a new book entitled "What It Is" (above), in which she explains her method of making drawings and stories.

Here's Carol Kino's entertaining profile of this unique artist, as it appeared in yesterday's New York Times.

How to Think Like a Surreal Cartoonist

By celebrity standards the cartoonist Lynda Barry leads a reclusive existence. When she first developed a cult following in the 1980s, she cut a highly public figure, with frequent appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” and the like. But after the market for her work began shrinking in the late 1990s, she gradually withdrew, refusing to talk on the phone with reporters or her editors. Today she draws her 30-year-old weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” on a dairy farm just outside Footville, Wis., where she lives with her husband, Kevin Kawula, a prairie restoration expert. Since moving there six years ago, the couple have been relatively self-reliant, growing much of their own food and chopping their own wood for fuel.

Even though Ms. Barry has a new book coming out next week — “What It Is,” which explains her method of making drawings and stories — she isn’t always eager to emerge. “I can go three weeks without leaving, or driving my car,” she said in a recent interview.

But you would never guess that from Ms. Barry’s behavior on a recent weekend here. On a balmy spring day she stood at the front of a classroom, effusively greeting 25 strangers who had signed up for her two-day workshop, “Writing the Unthinkable,” which is also the basis for her new book. “I can’t believe you’re here and you look so 3-D!” she said, grinning toothily at them from beneath thick black glasses. “I was wondering about you all last night!”

On a table behind her she had laid out scores of scribbled 3-by-5 note cards, each of which held a nugget of information that she would relay over the next several hours (like “Don’t read it over” and “An image is a pull toy that pulls you”). On the blackboard was a chalk drawing of Marlys, the spunky pigtailed kid protagonist of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” the strip about growing up that made Ms. Barry a star of new-wave comics soon after it began running in alternative weeklies in 1978.

“Dang! I’m in Pittsburgh!” Marlys was saying in a word balloon. And Ms. Barry, who at 52 still has the habit of twisting her own curly red hair into Marlys-like pigtails, addressed her students in a similarly exclamation-mark-studded style. As they snapped open their three-ring binders, she said delightedly, “That’s the only sound I want at my funeral!”

Taking the workshop, which Ms. Barry teaches several times a year, is a bit like witnessing an endurance-performance piece. Aided by her assistant, Betty Bong (in reality, Kelly Hogan, a torch singer who lives in Chicago), Ms. Barry sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration for Jimmy Carter and the joys of menopause.

But this is just camouflage for the workshop’s true purpose: to pass on an art-making method that Ms. Barry learned from Marilyn Frasca, her junior- and senior-year art teacher at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

It involves using a random word, like “cars” or “breasts,” to summon a memory in unexpected, filmic detail; writing about it by hand for a set time period (as she says, “Limitation creates structure!”); and then not reading it or talking about it for at least a week. Within the workshop it also involves positive feedback. As students read aloud, Ms. Barry kneels before them, head bowed, listening intently, and says: “Good! Good!” (“I was a kid who was never read to,” she explains.)

This is essentially the method that Ms. Barry has always used, not just for “Ernie Pook” but also her novels: “The Good Times Are Killing Me” from 1988, about biracial childhood friends, and “Cruddy” (1999), whose 16-year-old narrator recounts a long-ago murder rampage. She also deployed it for “One! Hundred! Demons!,” a soulful 2002 graphic memoir that she describes as “autobifictionalography.”

“What It Is,” which outlines the method in detail, could be considered a picture book for grown-ups. Using ink brush, pen and pencil drawings as well as collages and luminous watercolors, many of them on lined yellow legal paper, it explores deep philosophical questions like “What Is an Image?” (The answer, Ms. Barry says, is something “at the center of everything we call the arts.”) It also includes an activity book, instructions, assignments and several passages of purely autobiographical writing and drawing in which Ms. Barry recounts her own journey to making art.

As the book starts, we see her as a child, crouching as still as possible in a corner, waiting patiently for pictures in her bedroom to come to life. “We lived in a trailer then, and any pictures we had up were taped to the walls,” she writes. “Sometimes they fell. But this is not what I mean when I say they could move.”

Later we see her as a young adult, puzzling over the method as she learns it from Ms. Frasca. And later, on the farm with her husband, we see her battling depression and frowning as she struggles to quiet her inner editor’s voice and get back to making pictures and stories happen “in a way that didn’t involve thinking.” Meditations, stories and images float past in a random fashion, segueing between darkness and hope, or adulthood and childhood, the way they might in dreams or memory.

“I think of images as an immune system and a transit system,” she said; not only does working with them keep her emotions running smoothly, but it has also taken her to unexpected places. (As she told the class: “I am here in Pittsburgh because I drew a picture. And all of you are in this room because you saw this picture.”)

Clearly her ability to draw and tell stories was her ticket out of a difficult childhood. When she was 5, her family moved from Wisconsin to Seattle, where they at first lived with five Filipino families (Ms. Barry’s mother immigrated from the Philippines) in a house whose rooms were subdivided by bedsheets. Her father, a butcher, decamped a few years later, leaving Ms. Barry and her two younger brothers at the mercy of what she describes as an unhappy mother. (Ms. Barry said she has had no contact with either parent for more than 15 years, and “it’s been mutually joyful.”)

Although her more fictional work has always focused on children, she is not sure why. “I used to think it was easy to write about them because their world is small,” she said. “But it might be because writing about what’s happening with people my age, I’m too deeply in it.” (Surprisingly, her next novel is about a man in his 70s.)

Perhaps she has memorialized childhood because she didn’t have much of one herself. By 16 Ms. Barry was virtually independent, supporting herself by working nights and weekends as a hospital janitor. “I lived at home,” she said, “but that was it.” The experience gave her great exposure to people’s stories. “I don’t think it was good for me, necessarily, but I saw stuff, and I grew up really, really fast. And I wrote all this really sad janitorial poetry.”

With savings, a scholarship and work-study Ms. Barry made it to college, where she struck up a long friendship with a fellow student, Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.” In those days Mr. Groening was editor of the school newspaper, and she was a reporter. As a self-described hippie, “I used to love to torment him because he looked really straight,” she said.

“I always kind of mixed up drawings and words,” she said, “but college is where I definitely started to do cartoons, and it was mainly for Matt.”

In secret she began to concoct odd drawings and zany letters to the editor, which she submitted anonymously. Mr. Groening, who knew it was her all along, called her bluff and published the lot. “I had a policy of running all letters to the editor, and Lynda took advantage of it,” he said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.

“She was very, very funny,” he said. “It seemed obvious that creative self-expression was going to be her life.”

It was a happy accident that Ms. Barry graduated just as alternative weeklies were springing up around the country and searching, as she put it, “for oddball comics.” She soon became one of a small elite, her strip appearing with Mr. Groening’s “Life in Hell” alongside the work of Jules Feiffer. At its peak in the mid-1990s her strip appeared in 75 papers. She also published books and collections, and in 1991 her theatrical version of “The Good Times Are Killing Me” had an Off Broadway run.

But her career took a nose dive as alternative weeklies fell victim to corporate acquisitions and mergers in the 1990s. “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” now appears in only six papers, and the bulk of her books are out of print. These days, Ms. Barry said, her most reliable source of income is eBay, where she sells original artwork, and MySpace, where she markets her workshops.

She hit a low point in 2002, she said, right after the publication of “One! Hundred! Demons!,” when her longtime publisher, Sasquatch Books in Washington, rejected an early proposal for “What It Is” and declined to publish more new work. “It was like an ax in the forehead,” she said. But today her career seems on the verge of resurgence. In early 2006 Drawn & Quarterly, a small comics publisher in Montreal, approached her with a surprise offer to reprint her old work and collect all the Ernie Pook strips. Ms. Barry leapt at the opportunity and proffered her new book.

The plan is to publish one Ernie Pook collection a year, starting this fall. In early 2009 another new book, “The Nearsighted Monkey,” on which she is working with her husband, will be issued.

To Ms. Barry her career trajectory still seems somewhat unbelievable. “The fact that anybody knows what I do and likes it feels surreal to me,” she said. “It feels like the Make-a-Wish Foundation.”

.....................

Here's a link to a slide show narrated by Ms. Barry about how she does what she does.