Call this real

So Near, So Far

From today's New York Times, "Densely Populated, but No Shortage of Grisly Dumping Sites," a story of an uncanny New York City overlaid and entangled with mundane New York City:

Bodies have been discarded less than 100 feet from well-traveled highways and parkways. The dead are close, but not that close. “You just don’t think there’s any place that people can dispose of a body anymore,” said Robert Sullivan, the author of “The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City.” “You think every place is noticed. But it’s not. There’s so many places that are mysterious. There’s two maps of New York overlapping here. The map of places that are somehow forgotten and beautifully mysterious, and the map of people that are forgotten.”

The are, in fact, many such Strange Cities within the City. The homeless know some of them. Graffiti writers know others. Urban explores too. And kids. One stretch of land, many networks of paths, multiple cities.

What's (a) Google wave?

1. A secret gesture Google employees use to identify one another when they’re on a spy mission in, say, China.

2. A unisex hairstyle available free of charge to Google employees in on-site styling salons.

3. Modeled on ‘the wave’ at sporting events, it’s gesture of solidarity among thousands upon thousands of people in a public place, such as Times Square in New York City, Piazza San Marco in Venice, or Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

4. Like microwaves, except very much higher in frequency. Used to carry the net traffic of ‘preferred’ users. Or perhaps it’s used in weapons designed to vaporize communications satellites.

5. A super tsunami created when an asteroid plunges into the ocean.

6. A special weave in the fabric of the jerseys required of all ‘inner circle’ Google employees.

7. The pattern of revisions to history books as a consequence of changes in the page-rank algorithm.

8. Earth tremors resulting from the explosion of a Goggle data center as a consequence of a massive viral attack.

9. The gesture Sergy and Larry make to the remaining inhabitants of earth when they set course for Mars in their solar sailer.

Question, Loaded for Bear, Boar, and Bull

Are gargantuan Wall Street bonuses a gross perversion of our gifting instinct*? It's perverse because the executives bestowing the gifts didn't earn their gift-goods in any obvious way. They simply get to distribute the largesse back to the people who, on a generous interpretation of their activities, actually did the earning. In the case of the recent financial scandals it's clear that the gift goods were stolen and that we, the tax payers, are on the hook for them.

*Ah, yes, I know, "instinct" is a tendentious word. But I'm sticking with it for the moment. I'll consider mounting a rigorous defense of the usage when those executives come clean about what they've done. Meanwhile, it might be interesting to re-read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, which is about perverse gifting.