Jeremy Piven "is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer."

Said David Mamet on the occasion of Piven's quitting his part in "Speed the Plow" supposedly because he discovered that he has a high level of mercury in his body.

How are you disposing of your fluorescent bulbs?

It's not easy.

[M]uch of the nation has no real recycling network for CFLs, despite the ubiquitous PR campaigns, rebates and giveaways encouraging people to adopt the swirly darlings of the energy-conscious movement. Recyclers and others guess that only a small fraction of CFLs sold in the United States are recycled, while the rest are put out with household trash or otherwise discarded....

Compact fluorescent bulbs each contain roughly 5 milligrams of mercury, which health professionals say is tiny in relation to the amount in a glass thermometer. Using that estimate, almost 2 tons of mercury were in the 380 million sold last year....

Kim N. Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati, said the bigger concern is the hazard that would result if the mercury from millions of bulbs escapes into the air and waterways before working up the food chain.

"I'm just amazed that the government is not paying more attention to this," Dietrich said.

Me too. It's obvious that much of those 200 tons is going to go into ordinary waste dumps every year. [CORRECTION: 2 tons.]

I hate fluorescent bulbs anyway, for aesthetic reasons. I'm willing to save energy by turning off or dimming more lights. But maybe you don't feel the aesthetic problem and you don't care about my trivial suffering. Why don't you care about the mercury?

The Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.

Thank you, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

Via James Lileks, via Instapundit.

Give me freedom of choice on my light bulbs, or I will start a movement to ban your evil mercury fluorescent bulbs of death.

"What kind of message does it give when you tell a group of kids that boys and girls need to be separated because they don’t even see or hear alike?"

Here's a big, interesting NYT Magazine article about educating boys and girls separately.

The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer...

Gah! I'm getting hot just thinking about it. You're cooking the girls!

Actually, I love the idea of classrooms set up for different styles of learning, and I can even accept one classroom designed to appeal to most boys and another designed to appeal to most girls, but you've got to let boys and girls self-select into the classroom that suits them.

AND: 69° is not a cool classroom, and it's a waste of energy heating a room even to that temperature in the winter. I recommend 62° and put on a sweater if you're cold. And as for the warm yellow light... I thought Congress was taking away our incandescent bulbs. I'm pretty upset about that, and I'm warming up to the idea that it's sex discrimination.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

"Taking away" incandescent bulbs? That would be a revolution-provoking act, as far as I'm concerned. And I consider it disability-based discrimination, since fluorescent lights (tubes, the stupid compact fluorescents, whatever) trigger migraines (with and without aura) if I sit under them for prolonged periods. They do not produce continuous illumination, no matter how "flicker free" they claim to be.

I am also very sensitive to color and light, in order for me to work I need proper, non-irritating light. I use both regular incandescents and incandescents coated with neodymium (full-spectrum bulbs), especially in my studio.

I said:

Palladian, the law is already passed. You have 4 years to stock up on incandescent lightbulbs to last the rest of your life.

Palladian said:

Christ.

I hate the fucking compact fluorescent bulbs. Their light is ugly, the bulbs are ugly, they don't fit into a lot of classic lamps that I own, they're expensive, they've got mercury in them, it's illegal to throw they away in New York, placing yet another burden on taxpayers to try and figure out how to dispose of them.

Seriously, it's this kind of petty tyranny, this kind of ignorance to aesthetics, this kind of disregard for personal choice that pushes me closer to anarchism.

This kind of collectivist shit is fast turning us into Europe with less-interesting architecture. Fuck congress and the lobbyists from Philips who I suspect were primarily responsible for hiding this little turd in the "energy" bill.

Doing some calculations to figure out how many bulbs I'll need to buy...

Buy a lot so you can sell them to your aesthete friends who will beg for them and so you don't have to skimp and worry about whether any given situation is "lightworthy" (like "spongeworthy").

Okay, enough with the shoe shopping. Let's live-blog the big debate.

7:58 ET: I am so ready for this. It's do or die time for Hillary. And I'm watching the debate with a big Hillary supporter. I want to see some major action in the first 20 minutes. MSNBC is banging drums and hyping the debate (which starts in an hour). They show a picture of Jonah Goldberg and call him a "clown" who compared Obama to Hitler. I think the sensible people will switch over to "American Idol" and then return to MSNBC when this silliness is over.

9:01: "Oh, the debate."

9:04: Brian Williams plays Hillary the "I am absolutely honored" from the last debate followed by the "shame!" routine from the other day. What's with the mood swings? It's a "contested" campaign, she says and segues into a discussion of health insurance. The follow-up is about the "native garb" photo of Obama. Hillary doesn't know where it came from and doesn't condone it. Obama accepts her assertion about the "native garb" photo. Both of them derail Williams's plan and make this whole huge segment of the debate about the details of their rival health care programs. It's one filibuster after another.

9:19: Hillary seems to think that her getting the first question again is worthy of note, and she makes a clumsy reference to "Saturday Night Live," something about Barack Obama needing "another pillow." I don't like this infantalizing of Obama, and I don't her acting like people are picking on her. Tim Russert is struggling with her over NAFTA now, really trying to pin her down. Is she ready to opt out of NAFTA in 6 months? She says yes — unless it can be renegotiated on labor and environmental standards. This sounds harsh, but since Obama proceeds to agree with her entirely, it's not a point of distinction and should have no effect on anyone's decision.

9:35: Is anyone still watching? So far, it's been an annoying combination of wonky and angry.

9:48: Tim Russert seems angry too as he hypothesizes about how the Iraqis may react to a new President announcing a planned pullout.

9:53: "I think Senator Clinton showed some good humor there," Obama says after seeing the clip of Hillary being sarcastic about his speaking ("the heaven's will open," etc.). He nicely avoids the bait and gets back to talking policy (which is exactly what his strategy should be, since it's only Clinton who can benefit by shaking things up tonight). "I'm not interested in talk. I'm not interested in speeches," he says. Hillary offers that she was "having a little fun," and it's hard to have fun on the campaign trail.

10:08: Russert is raging. Hillary needs to release her tax returns! (She's too busy to do it before next Tuesday, she says, as if she'd personally get the papers together.) Obama should denounce Farrakhan! (He blusters.)

10:13: Hillary scores! When she ran for the Senate in 2000, she rejected the support of the anti-Semitic Independence Party. She "wouldn't be associated with people" like that. So far, Obama has only said that he gave a sermon denouncing anti-Semitism. Then there's some confusing byplay over whether "reject" is a stronger word than "denounce," and Obama gets away with resolving it by saying he would "reject and denounce." So her strong point got fuzzed over. He still hasn't denounced Farrakhan. She loses the moment and says "good, good." He beams. We go to commercial. Her moment is squandered. He got away with something there.

10:19: Obama is confronted with his "most liberal" ranking. I find his talking tiresome and will need to check the transcript to see if he said anything interesting.

10:33: In lieu of a closing statement, each is asked about the other, and many tedious words are blabbed. Arghhh! I hit the wall after that reject-and-denounce fiasco.

11:18: So what did you think of "American Idol"? Did David Cook deserved to be slammed for liking crossword puzzles when the other guys were about tennis and drag racing? Cook was the hardest rocker... yet somehow he's a pussy because he's — by his own admission — a "word nerd." Tonight was interesting because 2 guys who were unimpressive last week were really good: Chikezie and David Hernandez. I really liked Hernandez doing "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" — it was 70s night — what a great song. Now, I'm watching the adorable, scream-inducing David Archuleta singing "Imagine." Randy — who loves him — asks why he skipped the first verse. David does not say because it's against religion, just that he had to cut it shorter and he likes the last verse best, but I think he didn't want to disrespect religion. Now Paula says she wants to hang him from her rear view mirror, which I suppose means she thinks he's Jesus. Either that or she thinks he's air freshener. But the way she goes on to break down crying over how it was the most beautiful thing she's ever heard, I don't think it can just be that he's super-fresh. Simon says "Right now, you're the one to beat." Two guys who fell in my estimation this week were Michael Johns (why is the macho guy bleating Fleetwood Mac?) and Jason Castro (dull). And what are we to think of Luke Menard? He picked an incredibly complicated song — "Killer Queen" — and pulled it off decently (but couldn't be Mercury). Something I don't even want to think about: Robbie Carrico singing "Hot Blooded" (man, I hate that kind of song). Or Jason Yeager (what a cheeseball!). And then there's Danny Noriega. He's very sweet, and he sang a great song ("Superstar"), but he's just not good enough. (Here, listen to Karen Carpenter sing it.) He could be the Sanjaya this year, but the young girls are going crazy for the kid who's actually really good, li'l David Archuleta, so we won't be having a Sanjaya.

"These people are extremely well-suited, by personality and training, to deal with the stresses of being in space..."

Back on earth... not so much. And those "Right Stuff" days are over:

Today’s astronauts find themselves in a world much less glamorous than the original crews. While the Mercury Seven raced Corvettes, today’s family-oriented fliers are likelier to tool around in minivans.

Isn't the Space Shuttle itself sort of a minivan?

They spend much more time in suburbia than in orbit, and there are no more ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes.

Some former officials of the space program said that romantic thoughts and even love triangles were not unknown to the program but that it was up to management to watch carefully and intervene.

Mr. Abbey, the former Johnson Space Center director, said, “You’ve got some hard-charging people...

Hard-charging, in diapers!

"... and you need to manage them.” Problems like this “don’t happen overnight,” and so “you have to be sensitive to what your people are doing.”

Now and then on his watch, he recalled, “I stepped in, and people weren’t happy about it,” he recalled, but it was important to tell them that “what you’re doing is not a personal thing for you — it’s affecting a lot of people around you, and affecting your performance.”

Oh, so it's one big soap opera with them? I await the TV series: "Desperate Astronauts." The possibilities are endless, both on the ground and in the orbiting giant minivan.

Is there no dignity left for that archetypal American figure, the astronaut? Now, they are reduced to whimpering to the media: "we call them urine collection devices."

Bad toys. Really bad toys.

The worst! (Via John Hawks.) For example, there's the U-238 Atomic Energy Lab:

For a mere $49.50, the kit came complete with three "very low-level" radioactive sources, a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson Cloud Chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a Spinthariscope (to see "live" radioactive disintegration), four samples of Uranium-bearing ores, and an Electroscope to measure radioactivity....

The toy was only sold for one year. It's unclear what effects the Uranium-bearing ores might have had on those few lucky children who received the set, but exposure to the same isotope—U-238—has been linked to Gulf War syndrome, cancer, leukemia, and lymphoma, among other serious ailments. Even more uncertain is the longterm impact of being raised by the kind of nerds who would give their kid an Atomic Energy Lab.

Hmmm.... yeah: What strange toys affected your young, impressionable mind, and how do you know the difference between the effect of the toy and the effect of growing up with the sort of parents who let you have it?

Strangest toy I was given and allowed to play with: a small paper cup full of mercury.

A city polarized by sex.

At one end of the city, we've got your testosterone. At the other end, your estrogen. The San Jose Mercury-News provides the gender analysis:

Everyone knows that tens of thousands of crazed fans will be cheering and sweating in downtown San Jose today and Saturday for the San Jose Grand Prix, a celebration of engineering, speed and, of course, manhood.

But in the north of San Jose, 750 female bloggers are cloistered away from the din of the roaring engines. Instead, they gather today and Saturday at the BlogHer conference at the Hyatt San Jose to discuss the roar they are making online on every topic worth talking about -- politics, business, divorce, knitting, parenting.

Tempers may flare. Things may get said. Feelings may get hurt and everything will be blogged on at both ends of the city.

This weekend, San Jose is divided between two playgrounds, the testosterone fueled, gas guzzling, sound-wall-breaking one downtown. And the estrogen-laced community-building, business-savvy one that comes complete with corporate-sponsored child care.

Amusing. Well, I'm still at the testosterone end of town. Though I'm a Central Time person, I'm running late even by Pacific Time. I'm blogging and nibbling a beautiful -- and low carb! -- breakfast at my posh hotel, around which race cars are currently zooming. The concierge has advised me to leave my car in the garage and take the light rail to the Hyatt. I think I'll take in a little of the testosterone end of town and do some photography, then sample mass transportation and make it to the afternoon dose of estrogen.

General Motors, one of BlogHers sponsors, will have its hybrid SUVs, hydrogen fuel cell family cars and Saturn Sky available to test drive.

Perfect.

European-style regulation and the dangerous pipe organ.

The NYT reports:

The new [European Union] directive, to come into force in July, limits the proportion of hazardous substances like lead, mercury or cadmium to 0.1 percent of a finished product that works on electricity.

"We are caught in an absurd anomaly," said Doug Levey, a spokesman for the Institute of British Organ Building, which says it represents most of the country's 400 organ builders in about 65 companies.

The directive, approved by European governments four years ago, was intended to address problems caused by the disposal of products like cellphones or computer circuit boards. Dumped in landfills, the argument goes, discarded items of consumer electronics pollute groundwater as hazardous substances are leached from them.

But no one, it seems, had thought of the organ builders, whose products make unlikely candidates for landfills. Disused organ pipes, some of them containing 50 percent lead or lead-tin alloy, are usually melted down for reuse, Mr. Levey said. New pipe organs, he said, can cost from $85,000 to $850,000 and upward.

A manually powered organ, Mr. Levey pointed out, would not be covered by the directive, no matter how much lead was used. However, he said, "if in the name of progress you use an electronic fan to provide the wind, the same organ with the same amount of lead falls within the restrictions."

But I'm thinking the pipe organ folks are making a big, windy noise, since there is a way to apply for an exemption. Instead of doing that, they're going to the press and complaining, stirring up the usual antipathy toward government regulation. Obviously, the concern about lead in landfills is valid. Just go get your exemption. And pipe down.

Mama mia, Galileo, magnifico.

The story of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Perhaps the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics: "Mama, just killed a man," "Nothing really matters" and "I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all." Mr. Mercury, who died in 1991, always refused to explain his composition other than saying it was about relationships. (He never officially admitted his bisexuality.) Some interpreted it as a way of dealing with his personal issues. To this day the band is still protective of the song's secret.

"I have a perfectly clear idea of what was in Freddie's mind," Mr. May said. "But it was unwritten law among us in those days that the real core of a song lyric was a private matter for the composer, whoever that might be. So I still respect that."

Mr. Baker said, with a hearty laugh, "If I tell you, I would have to kill you."

The idea that springs most readily to mind is that he actually did kill a man!

Fashion economics, fashion psychology.

Last February, in response to fashion writing that tried to analyze, on some deep sociological level, why all the designers were offering up very prim clothes, I wrote :

I'll bet they are just laying the groundwork for saying "All that prim swaddling looks so old now" next year. The trick in fashion is to get you not to notice how bad something is now so that in the future they can sell something else that looks pretty bad by contrasting it to that thing from the previous year.

I want some recognition for my fashion savvy, because here they are now, abjuring primness:

A year ago they were all taken with ladylike clothes. You would have thought a fur tippet was the most exciting thing since fulminate of mercury. Now they're sorry they ever met the lady.

"If I see another tweed pencil skirt," the designer Lazaro Hernandez said, "I'm going to . . . "

Ha, ha ... I think that's the way many of us felt the first time we saw one! But, so, anyway ... what is in style now, you might ask. One thing is clear, it's not grunge! It can't be grunge, we're told. One sells luxury in the fashion industry. But fashion economics has its own outlandish psychology:

David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which forecasts fashion trends and whose clients include Wal-Mart and Nordstrom, [said] ... [i]f a young woman ... used to spend two paychecks for a coveted handbag, she will soon be spending an entire month's wages if it means that much to her.

Anyway, to a forecaster 2005 is already a wash. Mr. Wolfe has his sights on 2006. "It's going to be the start of dropping out, downsizing and divesting yourself," he said. "And that's going to have all kinds of design implications. Too many products right now are overdesigned." He foresees the beginning of "an aesthetic movement" that will lead people actually to brag that they own only one bag or expensive coat.

Mr. Wolfe chuckled. "I like this idea," he said, "that it's so elitist."

If your handbag cost you a month's wages and you think you're in the elite, you're absolutely out of your mind. Yet the fashion industry is built on expert theorizing that pictures a woman who would think such a thing.

Dylan's "Chronicles": Chapter 5.

Finally, I got around to finishing the last chapter of Dylan's autobiography. I was blogging at the blistering pace of a chapter a day for a while. Chapter 1 is here (and here's the text of Chapter 1 on the publisher's website (via Metafilter)). Chapter 2 is here, and Chapter 3 is here. I kept up at a post a day but not a chapter a day with the first part of Chapter 4 here, and the second part of Chapter 4 here. Now, I've let four days go by, only reading a few pages a day. But this post covers all of Chapter 5.

Why Dylan liked Neil Sedaka more than other big New York songwriters: he performed his own songs. P. 227.

Dylan seems to have gotten some ideas from Harry Truman, whom his parents took him to see when he was a kid: "Truman was gray hatted, a slight figure, spoke in the same kind of nasal twang and tone like a country singer. I was mesmerized by his slow drawl and sense of seriousness and how people hung on every word he was saying." Pp. 230-231.

Dylan and guns: "As kids, we shot air guns, BB guns and the real thing--.22s--shot at tin cans, bottles or overfed rats in the town garbage dump." P. 232. He explains "rubberguns" and how the introduction of synthetic rubber ruined all the fun. Pp. 232-233.

Description of folk music: "It was life magnified." P. 236.

What Woody Guthrie's voice was like: "a stiletto." P. 244.

How Woody Guthrie writes: "like the whirlwind." P. 245.

Goal Dylan set: "to be Guthrie's greatest disciple." 246.

How the goal was thwarted: he found out Jack Elliot had already done it. P. 250.

What Dylan thought of asking John Wayne when he met him, but didn't because it "would have been crazy": "why some of his cowboy films were better than others." P. 250.

Description of Joan Baez: "Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God ..." P. 255.

Interesting talent possessed by Noel Stookey: "He could imitate just about anything--clogged water pipes and toilets flushing, steamships and sawmills, traffic, violins and trombones. He could imitate singers imitating other singers ... [for example] Dean Martin imitating Little Richard." P. 259.

How Wavy Gravy dressed when he was still Hugh Romney: "he was the straightest looking cat you'd ever seen--always smartly dressed, usually in Brooks Brothers light gray suits." P. 259.

What Dave Van Ronk's wife Terri talked about: "highfalutin' theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness." P. 263.

What Terri couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to buy: an electric can opener. P. 263.

What Dylan drank between sets in his early days in New York City: "shooters of Wild Turkey and iced Schlitz." P. 264.

How Dylan felt when he met Suze Rotolo: "The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves." P. 265.

Why Suze was just his type: "She reminded me of a libertine heroine." P. 265.

Movies Dylan went to see to try to get Suze off his mind for a while: "Atlantis, Lost Continent" and "King of Kings." P. 265.

Song name I wrote in the margin of page 266, where Dylan describes Suze's mother and sister: "Ballad in Plain D."

What Suze's mother said to Dylan: "Do me a favor, don't think when I'm around." P. 267.

Suze's age: 17.

How Dylan furnished his first apartment in NY: he borrowed tools and built furniture. He even made his own mirrors with plate glass, mercury and tin foil. P. 267-268.

What Suze taught Dylan about: artists! Pp. 268-269.

Favorite artist that seemed to express what folk music expresses: Red Grooms. P. 269-270.

Anti-fallout shelter song he wrote early on at his handmade table: "Let Me Die in My Footsteps." P. 270-272. That reminds me, obvious as it is now, when I was an adolescent in the early 60s, I couldn't understand why my parents weren't building a fallout shelter.

How people felt about Communists in northern Minnesota: "People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing." P. 271.

Kurt Weill/Bertholt Brecht song that made Dylan think of Duluth: "Pirate Jenny." P. 273-276.

Dylan's description of himself as a child in Duluth, listening to foghorns: "slight, introverted and asthma stricken." P. 274.

Dylan song I'm reminded of by his description of trying to learn a lot about songwriting from "Pirate Jenny": "When the Ship Comes In."
Singer Dylan thought was great--he was right--but couldn't get other folksingers--like Dave Van Ronk--to care about: Robert Johnson. Pp. 282-283.

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

Bob Dylan song that mentions Goldwater: "I Shall Be Free, No. 10."

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want ev'rybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy!
I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.

A Bob Dylan political opinion: "I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better." P. 283.

Description of Robert Johnson's lyrics that shows what Dylan learned about songwriting from him: "old style lines and ... free-association ... sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction." P. 285.

What the second to the last paragraph of the book is devoted to: Minnesotans.