Here is the kind of space math that is completely appropriate for 2012: SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he’s preparing for a permanent Mars colony stocked with 80,000 wealthy humans in their 40s. Are you in your 40s right now? Too late! This won’t happen for another decade, or more. Are you poor and 30? Well maybe you’ve got a shot, but probably not. Do you have a degree from a good school and maybe a new job at Facebook or Twitter or Google? You might get to be a “new pilgrim,” on Mars! You’ll even get to enjoy gardening, the latest craze for people who build APIs all day, because otherwise you’ll die due to lack of oxygen and food and etc. Still, it could be the New Brooklyn, which means you’ll want to get in before prices triple.

Musk says he’s basing his cost-per-colonizer on the price of a house in coastal California, which is about a half-million dollars for something a long ways from spectacular, but still way more than the vast majority of people on Earth could ever afford. And in 10 years, who knows what that adjusted-for-inflation number might be? The great thing about this is that the most exciting possible future for humanity will use a metric based on San Francisco Bay Area housing prices. Hey, wasn’t Star Fleet headquarters in San Francisco, in the pretend future?

Meet the New Affordable:

Musk’s $500,000 ticket price for a Mars trip was derived from what he thinks is affordable.

“The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip,” he said, comparing the purchase to buying a house in California.

He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.

The rest of us, stuck on this stinking Waterworld, will have nothing better to do but clone pet animals and kill your escaped sex robots.

“Britain is in the grip of a winter vomiting outbreak which has already seen many thousands fall victim to the debilitating virus.”
 — It seems like Britain’s winter vomiting epidemic starts earlier each year.

It’s becoming ever-harder to find actual real things on the Internet. How can you learn by way of search about, say, canine diabetes, when you can’t predict or tell which result is a spam farm and which is a labor of love? Here’s a pretty impressive look at how PR Web is undermining search results and gaming Google News and propagating what is essentially spam throughout the Internet. (In this instance, a company used PR Web for pretty obvious market manipulation — and it didn’t even work. LOL.) Two things are gross about that: First, it doesn’t even help PR Web’s clients get Google-rated inbound links. It’s not actually a great product for its users. Except that mid-level company execs can report that they got “all this attention” or “243 pickups” to their press release, and then they get to go to a lunch lunch and keep their job for another day. But worse: it’s terrible watching actual real newspaper websites get paid sad amounts of money to run garbage press releases that clog up the Internet more each day. The Internet is a real dark and messy and commerce-oriented place these days, and it’s not getting much better. (Still, imagine what it’d be like if Google didn’t retain a small army of people fighting against people trying to game the system!) (via)

Today would have been the day guitarist James Marshall Hendrix turned 70. Who knows what he would be doing now had he survived? Ugh, probably putting out an autobiography and a “dubstep” album. Maybe things happen for a reason. Anyway, I’m partial to this but you will have your own favorites.

Tonight could not offer a more exciting array of wildness! At ApexArt, an exercise in SONIC BRANDING, featuring the terrific Tom Moody, in conjunction with an exhibition by Rob Walker. The Baffler is having an issue release party, with “Ayn Rand: The Game Show” as played by Thomas Frank and Julie Klausner, at Housing Works! Doree Shafrir and Sadie Stein are reading at KGB Bar! And that’s just the highlights, there’s so much more. It’s all better than a severe case of canine diabetes.

Did You Remember To Compost Your Thanksgiving Garbage?

The most environmentally ethical way to deal with the waste of Thanksgiving feasts is to go to somebody else’s house or a restaurant, so you can “let others worry about it.” But millions of us who hosted the holiday dinner are now left with the additional work/guilt of doing something with all the rotting containers of increasingly gross five-day-old leftovers in the fridge.

The EPA says that “food waste” is now the “largest component of municipal solid waste being sent to landfills,” at more than 33 million tons per year. That’s good, because it means that recyclables like cardboard and aluminum and plastic are no longer the bulk of stuff going to garbage dumps. But it’s also bad, because most of that food waste can be composted for use on gardens and farmland. And yet it’s also impossible, because unless you live in a magical liberal city like San Francisco, which provides compost bins and weekly pickup for all residents, you’re supposed to figure this out for yourself, and also work for a living, etc.

We will not report you to Michelle Obama (this time) if you just dump all this stinking filth into, say, your neighbor’s trash bin. But if you are driven by guilt, smugness or pure good intentions, we will help you clean your refrigerator, sustainably!

First, designate something as a “compost bin,” if you don’t have one already. You do not need to spend $200 on a fancy piece of plastic. A regular little garbage can works fine, as does any container from the dollar store or even a thick cardboard box. Make some holes in the side with an awl or a handgun or whatever’s around, and dump your gross scraps inside. Roll it around now and then (with the lid on, right?!), alternate the food goop with delivery menus and newspapers and maybe some dry leaves you sweep off the steps, and in the spring you’ll have free plant food for your little garden, or you can give it to your neighbor who actually knows how to grow things, and then maybe she’ll give you tomatoes all summer.

Is this the time to talk about “cold weather composting”? No, not today. Just know you can continue to keep your compost outside until the below-freezing weather really sets in. Then you either need to put it in the basement or under the kitchen sink or become one of those people who builds a Winter Composting System — and if you’re that kind of person, you certainly don’t need to be reading this particular page of the Internet.

For specific guidance on the Thanksgiving leftovers, we turn to the Environmental Industry Associations, which is what the trade group for the garbage industry now calls itself, to sound more “green” as they’re all forced to comply with strict new waste and recycling laws in America’s cities and counties. Here is what you can do:

• Soggy vegetables, cranberry sauce, all green-ish stuff: Compost it! Add some dry newspaper and leaves so the stuff doesn’t turn into a living mold monster before the magic organisms start to “cook” and actually get warm.
• Stale bread: Saw it up into croutons, so easy! Nothing makes a salad “taste like real food” more than a pile of toasted bread cubes covered in olive oil and salt and seasoning.
• Disgusting cardboard pie boxes: Compost. Get it out of the fridge; that one slice of congealed fructose and liquified crust is not something you want to find a few days from now, when you’re high.
• Corpses of animals: Did you fry a turkey or something? Well, congratulations on that toddler-sized carcass in your tiny fridge. If you’ve got composting pickup, hooray. If not, those bones are going to be in your little compost bucket for probably two years? Might as well throw the carcass in a pot of boiling water and “make stock,” and then toss the skeleton. Nobody even likes turkey, have you noticed that? Next year, skip the turkey.
• Do not put plastic wrap or aluminum foil or even those “compostable” plastic forks in your kitchen compost; those utensils do break down, eventually, but I have found them mostly intact at the bottom of a five-year-old compost pile, fossilized.

Photo by Robbie Sproule.

Ken Layne once wrote a novel that included composting as a major plot element.

★★ Wan sun and flimsy clouds vied to abandon the day to each other. Through midday, the sky was stuck on patchy gray. There was a firm chill, one well-defined step further down toward the depths of real winter. The cold seeped into ungloved fingers, though not enough to make it worth digging out the gloves; condensation beaded inside the window of a dumpling cart. In the afternoon, against the trends and apparent odds, it was the sun that emerged as the winner. Or loser.

“Germany plans to slap a fine of up to 25,000 euros on people having sexual relations with pets, but zoophiles plan to fight the move. They say there’s nothing wrong with consensual sex and that the true violations of animal rights are taking place in the farming industry.”

David Denby wrote a mad-crazy review of Silver Linings Playbook in the New Yorker. Thankfully for his dignity, it was behind the paywall, and came after a lengthy review of that weird dead snoozer, Life of Pi (it’s an effusive but cautious rave, but he does call Life of Pi “one of the great adventure films”). Here’s a taste: “David O. Russell’s ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end,” and he goes on to call it nothing more than an exercise for actors, that it “feels worked up.” This is a point of view at least, if a wrong one, and artificiality is a charge that Russell comes up against constantly. His six released full-length fiction movies are all “artificial,” even 2010’s commercially palatable The Fighter — which was also his least interesting movie.

But Richard Brody, who is smart and edumacated and interesting, and who has a very good sense of Russell, and who is the movies editor for the New Yorker’s Goings On About Town, has big beef with Silver Linings Playbook as well. He also finds it incredibly artificial: “The plot is utterly ridiculous, the characters are created merely to fulfill its requirements, and whatever charm and integrity the movie possesses issues from the actors,” pretty much sums up his complaint. Together the two have linked uncomfortable arms with Rex Reed, who wrote: “I have never been able to tolerate the pointless, meat-headed, masturbatory cinema of self-indulgent writer-director Mr. Russell.” (OH REX REED!) But while they’re all wrong, a basic component of Brody’s complaint is just incorrect.

[T]he story challenges the medical “establishment” and the efficacy of medical science in bringing about results: Pat doesn’t take his medication because he doesn’t like how it makes him feel — and because it makes him gain weight, whereas he wants to be svelte and buff in order to win his wife back. His mental health depends (and guess where this is going in the story) on his ability to control his behavior through force of will and the ability to make emotional connections based on empathetic and mature choices (as if mental illness itself might not be an insurmountable obstacle to those connections and choices). The movie will be a hit with those who think that hyperactivity is just a failure of discipline and depression merely a bad attitude (to the tune of “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” with its reference to “Jonah and the whale, Noah and the ark”).

Without a word about religion in the script, “Silver Linings Playbook” advocates a faith-based view of mental illness and, overall, of emotional redemption.

Brody goes on to claim that the film “presents a personal, faith-and-family-centered approach to holding mental illness in abeyance” and that it “embraces and endorses a populist conservative doctrine.”

This is not true about the movie at all.

So Pat and Tiffany meet. Pat has just done eight months of diversion in the nut hut, and gone back to his parents. (Instead of going up to prison for assault, he goes down to the institution for mental health treatment.) Pat and Tiffany initially bond over their various (and extremely common) complaints about medication.

Pat’s diagnosis is bipolar. A particular manifestation of bipolar disorder, and of other similar illnesses, is that such people nearly all despise medication. That is part and parcel. It triggers narcissism: “I know what’s best for me.” It triggers loss and sorrow: “I can’t feel anything.” (In particular, the mania.) It triggers paranoia: “You’re trying to control me.” The number one battle in treating bipolar disorder (or perhaps number two, after preventing self-harm) is getting people to take any medication at all, for any period of time.

In the film, Pat has been passing off his meds, spitting them on the floor, and seems to have gone unmedicated entirely in the institution. Like many mental health treatment facilities, this one seems so-so: it probably serves some well and others less well, and isn’t prepared to entirely supervise a smart, high-functioning and sneaky bipolar dude. When he gets home, he’s manic and off his game. He fantasizes about his relationship with his ex. He’s paranoid, believing she’s going to receive reports on his behavior from the police and his shrink.

Finally, finally, after a big middle-of-the-night throw-down episode — one for which there are actual consequences, and an emotional response to his behavior — he decides to actually take medication. Yes, his parents are gathered around him in the kitchen as he takes his first pill. But that’s because he realized that he’d hurt them — physically, even. He’d finally gotten an appropriately sized response to his own out-of-control behavior. And that’s when things begin to improve for him. It has nothing to do with “faith” or “will” or what have you. He just finally gets an insight that 1. something actually is wrong and 2. that he has tried everything except for the prescribed treatment for his condition.

So recasting this bit of plot, or whatever, as a “faith-and-family-centered approach” to mental health treatment, or as essentially “conservative,” seems willfully wrong to me. And in fact, I don’t think it’s actually so untypical of real life.

[AN IMPORTANT SIDEBAR HERE about the “real world” and “mental health”: I am not a huge medication advocate! I’m a moderate fan of “taking medication in consultation with a trusted professional to smooth out crisis periods then getting off it at the right moment and of all of us being uniquely chemically who we are,” and also a fan of “discuss these things with your community and/or health professional of choice.” So you can STOP TYPING THAT ANGRY COMMENT AND/OR EMAIL already, my friend, I thank you respectfully.]

* * *

So what does the New Yorker uniformly have against David O. Russell? Here is a weird thing. Denby wrote actually a fairly persuasive review of I ♥ Huckabees: “’Huckabees’ is the real thing — an authentic disaster — but the picture is so odd that it should inspire, in at least a part of the audience, feelings of fervent loyalty.” That’s true, though it’s a magnificent movie, but in the end Denby can’t get on board, and he throws up his hands and basically says “roll with it.” He panned Three Kings (“At its worst, it’s an irresponsible, infuriating mess”). Anthony Lane dealt with The Fighter, saying it approached corniness and also seemed quite a bit like a very good acting class. That the magazine should so barely appreciate Russell’s best-regarded movie seems odd. And previously, the mag kinda dismissed Flirting With Disaster and dissed Spanking the Monkey, both of which are really pretty good movies, if one is a bit too dry and the other a bit too juicy.

There are some things “wrong” with this new film, namely that whatever fun stuff the amazing Jacki Weaver cooked up mostly got cut from the film. This is a funny Russell thing: the men usually do dominate, and that’s unfortunate, as the women are all so much better in his movies. (You could give me the five minutes of the gang of sisters from The Fighter and skip all the rest and I’d call it a great movie.) The women were by far the best thing about Huckabees, even if some of them were, let’s say, gratuitously screamed at by Russell. (Clooney got it too, on the set of Three Kings.) Jennifer Lawrence is better than anyone in Silver Linings — except maybe Julia Stiles, who is on-screen for maybe 3 minutes, and who is spectacular.

So the only solution for Russell to win the heart of the New Yorker, and to make the best possible movie he can make, is, quite obviously, to set his next film in a real all-lesbian barter-economy separatist community in Australia. It’ll be so “stagey” and “artificial” that it’ll no longer be possible to complain about the basic fact that “artificial” is his preferred mode and is, in fact, his métier. I can’t hardly wait. Also, if he screams at them during filming, they’ll rise up and tear him apart, and that wouldn’t be so bad either.

“France’s former first lady Carla Bruni thinks feminism is outdated.”