From the short NYT profile of Quinton "Rampage" Jackson:

Two years ago he was arrested at gunpoint not far from his home in Irvine, Calif., after plowing his pickup into three vehicles and narrowly missing several pedestrians and bicyclists. Though Mr. Jackson's name and picture were decaled on both sides of the truck, he led police on a high-speed chase through Newport Beach.

Mr. Jackson now says he was depressed, sleep deprived and hadn't consumed anything but Throwdown Rampage Punch energy drinks for four days.

"I don't see myself doing anything crazy again," he announced in January after being sentenced to three years' probation for reckless driving. "I want to be a positive role model."

Especially, he said, to his four children. Two of his boys have the middle name Rampage. His daughter, Naname, had to settle for Page. "I compromised with her mom," Mr. Jackson more or less explained. "She wouldn't let me call her Rampagea."

KEEP. Casey Affleck doesn't have a beard in his ultra-violent new film.

DON"T KEEP. All of these guys do have beards, which is just as scary.

But the idea of winning a year's supply of Dockers is appealing. Hmm.

Turner Classic Movies, you rarely do me wrong. Lee Marvin, same with you. Add a singing Clint Eastwood, an entire town falling apart and a wildly overblown movie-musical budget that A) came as the popularity of musicals died and B) hired no choreographers, and this scene goes well with my lemonade and burger from the neighborhood flea market.

"l guess there's two kinds in the world. People who move, people who stay. Ain't that true?"

"No, that ain't true."

"Well, what's true?"

"Oh, there's two kinds of people. Them going somewhere and them going nowhere, and that's what's true."

"l don't agree, Ben."

"That's cause you don't know what the hell l'm talking about. l'm an ex-citizen of nowhere, and sometimes l get mighty homesick."

… sitting at a red light, you find yourself lost in thought. You think of the song, wishing you could hear on the radio right at that moment.

The light changes. You snap out of it and realize you are hearing the song. It's playing on the radio right now. Finding your head busy, it's gone to your subconscious, knocked, quietly entered, and hit play.

After debating whether "Rain at the Zoo" was a poem about zoos or a poem about sex with the zoo as a somewhat-odd, somewhat-sensual metaphor, I looked up the writer, Kristen Tracy, and found her FAQ.

What are you doing right now?

Currently, I have a high school cheer stuck in my head and I don't know why. Here it is: What do we eat? What do we eat? Tiger meat! Tiger meat! How do we like it? How do we like it? Rah! Rah! Rah! I'm trying to get it out of my head. But I don't think it's going anywhere.

What did you do before you wrote this book?

I'm a teacher, though I'm not teaching right now. I've taught all sorts of writing and literature courses at Brigham Young University, Johnson State College (in Vermont), and Western Michigan University. And I taught at Hawthorne High School in Los Angeles. If any of my former students are reading this, hey, what ever became of you?

Where's home?

San Francisco. And I am very thrilled about this.

Who are your heroes?

*** This information has been redacted by the author. *** This decision was made after a series of conversations with friends in which the author's heroes were mocked relentlessly, and a series of subsequent conversations in which these friends requested to be listed as heroes.

I'm excited to see Karen Russell, long a fav of this blog, on The New Yorker list of "20 under 40" fiction writers. "The list will be published in the double fiction issue of The New Yorker that arrives on newsstands Monday," the NYT tells us. Can we have writing with this list, please?

Between Russell, the fantastically debuting Joshua Ferris, all the folks who have blown me away in their New Yorker work (like Yiyun Li), let's feature their short stuff and forget about Talk of the Town for a week.

In related news, it appears that Russell's Swamplandia! is now due for either a February 2011 or spring 2011 release. Looking forward to it.

Update, days later: Should've mentioned that I first heard about the issue via Gawker's quality "How to Complain About The New Yorker's 20 Favorite Writers Under 40." And the post answers my concern — "eight of whom will be published in an upcoming 'fiction' special; the other 12 in subsequent issues of the magazine." Awesome.

All recently spotted on the roads and captured…

Can you do this? Really? U DO 55. Julie similarly spotted L8R POPO.

Or could this one be speed plate perfection? Meghan found it.

(more…)

As you may or may not know, USA TODAY and Gannett have been diving into the philanthropy space for a couple years now. Wrote a version of this text for a colleague last winter, with the intention of eventually posting it here. Over the holiday weekend, finally got around to edits and WordPress.

So… about volunteer search engines. An issue for them is how generic the results appear in your search.  How might we help engagement?

Consider this item marked August '09 into February '10 in All for Good data. "Volunteer or a group of volunteers would prepare and freeze breakfast casseroles that later will be used in our program to feed homeless clients," it says. "This can be done as a one time only event or a great opportunity for groups." Generic, right? But when you dig into the Salvation Army site, you find the opportunity has a specific recipe and a regular result. And it's easy to do, not a big commitment.

Each Tuesday and Friday morning The Salvation Army's mobile food canteen follows a route of the inner city of Des Moines offering a hot breakfast to the homeless and near homeless. An average of nearly 700 men, women and children are fed each morning. The hot breakfast includes a hot quiche-like egg casserole, cold cereal, pastries, fruit, milk, juice and coffee.

The egg casseroles are prepared, baked and frozen by volunteer individuals and groups. The Salvation Army provides the 9"x11" aluminum baking pans and the volunteers provide the ingredients which cost about $6.00 per casserole.

In a way, the item reveals a sequence of conflicts worth exploring:

1. An ongoing nature makes this opportunity appear generic. But this nature is what so many causes need to operate sustainably. Events help and bring publicity, but ongoing interactions are their lifeblood.

2. It would be painful to input each instance of ongoing opportunities. But even if nonprofit event sites could automatically split these periods into daily events, making them appear specific and upcoming, you face management issues. In this Salvation Army case, too little or too much food on one day is a problem. Same with going off-recipe, being a bad cook or people needing back their baking pans. The Salvation Army is managing the process and looking past the day-to-day for a reason.

3. The nonprofit world talks about finding equilibrium behind volunteer supply and demand. But when you get down to it, I think this example shows how they're often only set to handle volunteer supply. Maybe what the industry needs more is a way of handling volunteer demand.

4. To be sustainable, the Salvation Army casserole chief must establish relationships quickly, work in specifics, manage needs transparently, and compensate for issues over time. Which sure sounds like what we talk about news audiences wanting. To be attractive, the first couple aspects here — if you can convey them to audiences — go a long way with audience in the short term, and the last couple help long-term.

So, how do you convey these aspects?

Not standard volunteer search, it would seem. It feels more like you need task management… workflow care… but distributed in process… consistently pitched toward a broad, sometimes unfamiliar audience.

Volunteers = the crowd

I don't know if the content world presents an effective model here. We all take on tasks at work, but then we go home to a search world, an opt-in world. When do we take on tasks in Facebook or Google? Other than accept or ignore? Even great collaborative tools in Google Docs leave collaboration without a basis in results. How do we measure?

A work model seems to present more opportunities. It's opt-in but with a transparent, parallel needs track encouraging action. Collaboration is needed for results. Facebook can force this for events (1,000,000 to make John Mellencamp quit smoking) but doesn't try in the everyday.

Who does open, collaborative task management? Maybe this exists. I think what the space needs is a Google Wave-like thing that manages to results. Wave right now doesn't do that and is the wrong tool. Even if you use Wave, you still need project management outside of it. And at the other end, something like Basecamp fails because it's a closed environment, and the needs disappear in its communications storm.

What nonprofits need is Wave-like item refreshing, in a Facebook-like stream, with an Outlook-like task management… on the social graph.

Managing modern demand has a "if you build, they will come" quality. B2B today plays out B2C because audience controls everything now. Each interaction between businesses or organizations needs to keep the crowd — increasingly not more than steps away — in mind. With nonprofits, that's true, but the opposite's also true. B2C is the legacy, but the velocity of the 21st century requires volunteer operations to have a B2B level of professionalism. Every one and every thing are both a B and a C, and volunteers from the crowd are no exception.

Among her 45s in the basement, I can't remember whether my mom has Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand and Sie Liebt Dich. That is, I Want to Hold Your Hand and She Loves You. Her fam's years in Germany came before the Beatles. But the two translations from the group have always, for whatever reason, held my attention in the catalog. They're so odd. But in the post-war development of European relations, they make sense.

So, it's with interest that I listen to NPR's story on the Motown Around the World album. I had no idea Berry Gordy had Motown translating its best songs for foreign audiences, but the idea fits with the machine.

The talk with the producer and the Temptations' last original are good, but your own vantage point — from where you hear the music clips in the piece, from where you visit iTunes or Amazon and hear the rest of the previews — is where you are going to get the most enjoyment.

Among the clips: The Temptations appear to be having the most fun. The Supremes appear to have the least. The Temptations' Bluebird in German is the most fun track on the record, and it's no wonder in the NPR audio the group immediately mentions it to the album producer.

Stevie Wonder may have the best song on the release, A Place in the Sun in Italian. By the end, he'd almost sold me a Tuscan villa or three.

Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes of the Brokenhearted in Italian may be the album's gutsiest recording, with the elongated pronunciation. Or any of the Four Tops' material with forceful speed. Marvin Gaye makes it look easiest. While the rest of the track doesn't do justice, the best chorus is Martha Reeves and the Vandellas' I'm Ready for Love in Spanish.

Bonus material: From Spiegel, "Because of record labels' demands, some of the era's most influential stars couldn't escape a trip to the studio to cut a hit in German. There are German versions of the Beach Boys' In My Room, Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line, The Beatles' She Loves You and Dusty Springfield's Wishin' and Hopin'."

Italo Calvino always fits in moments for me. A shared love of narrative forms and impact likely explains this, but I'm still surprised each time.

Following the lessons last month from "Lightness," the first of Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, I picked up the book again last night and read his second memo, "Quickness." It fit the moment perfectly.

Calvino tells an old story of Charlemagne and a magic ring. He notes different methods in which the story moves before focusing on one.

The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. It has a narrative function, whose history we may trace in the Norse sagas and the chivalric romances — a function that continues to surface in Italian poems of the Renaissance. In Ariosto's Orlando furioso we find an endless series of exchanges of swords, shields, helmets, and horses, each one endowed with particular qualities. In this way the plot can be described in terms of the changes of ownership of a certain number of objects, each one endowed with special powers that determine the relationships between certain characters.

In realistic narrative, Mambrino's helmet becomes a barber's bowl, but it does not lose importance or meaning. In the same way, enormous weight is attached to all the objects that Robinson Crusoe saves from the wrecked ship or makes with his own hands. I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.

Quickness enters this picture for Calvino as the special forces around objects, characters, phrasing, or other narrative tools bring continued meaning with concision. For a story's moments or a moment's assets, the speed of their imparting adds to their power, which adds back to speed. Both effects help understanding. It's narrative aerodynamics.