Stupidfool.org

Extending your life

Today, I read this Michael Kinsley piece in a recent New Yorker, the premise of which being that longevity is essentially the last competition that you'll ever have, and that after arriving at sixty years old, it's totally up for grabs whether you'll die tomorrow or live until ninety. Fun!

Oh, and, I certainly wasn't aware of the state of surgery/repair w/r/t Parkinson's:

[The symptoms] got even milder after I had an operation, a couple of years ago, to implant wires in my brain and two pacemaker-type batteries in my chest ... During the operation, your head is screwed into a metal frame and the frame is screwed into the operating table. My surgery lasted nine hours, and for most of it I had to be awake, so that the doctors could test the connection, like asking somebody to go upstairs and see if the light in the bedroom comes back on while you fiddle with the circuit-breaker box in the basement.

It's the future! And it's pretty fascinating.

I always knew Fabio was a dick.

There's a fascinating profile of George Clooney in the latest New Yorker. I particularly enjoyed this description of Clooney's altercation with Fabio last year:

I asked Clooney about the Fabio incident last November, and he laughed, saying, "What do you want? Dinner at an Italian restaurant with Sarah and myself and my buddy Benny and his girlfriend Meilani, and there's a table sitting there full of four or five women and Fabio with his back to me, and it's one of those things where they just keep taking your picture." He went on, "This isn't new to me. I'm going to go to dinner tonight, and they'll do it, they'll position themselves. I know it, and I'm used to it. But it went on and it went on, and I gave them the finger"—a photograph of the gesture was published online—"and they kept doing it and Fabio was looking over his shoulder and laughing and smiling and shit. So finally I go, 'O.K., enough.' I go, 'Knock it off, enough.'" And, speaking across to Fabio's table, "'I thought you were a nice guy.'"

David Chang in the New Yorker

The profile of David Chang in the latest New Yorker (not online, sadly) is brilliant & scary all at once--I wonder if Chang is as manically miserable as the profile makes him out to be? He's certainly an incredible chef; our meal at Ssäm Bar last year was one of the more memorable eating experiences I've had.

The article's filled with great quotes, but here's one of my favorites:

"I'm so sick and tired of how awesome it is to work at Google or fucking Apple or one of those tech companies," he says. "Why can't it be awesome to work for a food company? Why can't we create an environment where people are trying to push each other to do great things, and we're not trying to steal from anybody, we're trying to be good to our farmers and run an honorable business, if there is such a thing anymore?"