Missable or Dismissable: YouTube video of awful interview

Take this specimen:



It's what I call a classic.

I couldn't get this on TV. Hearing it on the radio would mean missing John Cusack's murderous gaze. And listening to a friend tell me about it would make me go, "Oh, ok. Sounds funny. I'm sure it was awesome."

But actually watching that video makes my day. Because I'm that kind of person.

Which leaves me with only one possible conclusion about this video:

Verdict: MISSABLE

I don't know what doctors have nightmares about. Maybe sewing tennis rackets into people's abdomens. And I don't know what police officers have nightmares about. Maybe arresting the wrong person and then getting invited to the White House for a beer summit, only to have the president serve Bud. Nyuk nyuk.

As for reporters -- at least this reporter -- worries about corrections and, perhaps more terrifying, realizing something is wrong with your story but it's too late to change it. That's the stuff of nightmares. I bet now I'm going to dream about an interview where I confuse John Cusack with... Joan? Clinton with -- Actually, I'll bite my tongue. To do anything else would be... untoward.

Missable or Dismissable: Wikipedia entry on thermal conductivity

As I was trying to falling asleep last night, I moved my feet to the cool part of the sheets.

And as I did that, a question popped into my head: What makes a substance transfer heat well or poorly? I mean, for years I've taken for granted that the sheet will be cooler wherever my body wasn't touching it, but WHY? Really, deep down inside, WHY?

So this morning, I googled heat conductivity and thermal conductivity. Most of the results were for scientific papers and something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which if I didn't know better I would have assumed is something about privileged access to counterfeit cigarettes for Stasi informants in the GDR.

But after enough digging, I got a satisfactory answer to my question. In fact, I learned way more than I originally intended to. Now I can smugly explain that the easier a material heats up or cools down, the more freely its electrons wiggle around and hit one another; the better the dance party, the more conductive the material is. I also understand how air transfers heat through convection, and how conductivity increases from wood to alcohol to rubber to cement to glass to soil to ice to diamond. Mostly, thanks to wikipedia's entry on thermal conductivity and this handy page.

But is all that...

Missable or Dismissable?

My first instinct: fairly missable. I mean, in 20 minutes or so, I got a recap of an entire chapter of high school physics. All thanks to my wifi connection. Could I live without knowing that? Sure. Yet would my life be less fantastic, without that knowledge? Also yes. Bottom line: When I want to find something out, I can. If that's not exhilarating, I don't know what is.

But after mulling it over in the time between I reached that conclusion and I actually got around to writing this, my opinion changed.

A faster way to find out would have been to call my dad and ask. He's great at explaining things, and knows a great deal about the scientific world. When I was a little girl he was my key source for information about why the sun goes around the earth and how old Adam and Eve where when they had their sons. (Kidding.)

Besides my dad I could have asked AR, who as an engineer knows things about electrons.

Not only would that have been quicker and more efficient route (letting me bypass dozens of google results that involved scientific publications), but the information would have been tailored to me. Those people know how my brain works. AR learned long ago that if he wants to explain anything about his technical projects, he should put it in terms of shoes. (Seriously.)

So ultimately, for this query and others like it, the internet is:

DISMISSABLE

[image one via pica + pixel, image two via Brooklyn Center]

Missable or Dismissable: Slate's Freaky Fortnight

Next contender for the title of:

Missable or Dismissable?

Slate's Freaky Fortnight.

For two weeks, Slate's Michael Agger and freelance writer Susan Burton (of This American Life and more) are switching places. He's staying home with the kids and writing from there, like she used to do, and she's going in to his office at Slate and editing his pieces.

Their reflections are intriguing. Here's how Burton talks about adjusting to life outside the home, in her second post (it's a series):

It's like I'm in another time zone. Like when you're on vacation, and it's 4 p.m. Mountain Time, you think to yourself, But it's really 6 p.m. Eastern.

Like this: It's 2:32. In Brooklyn Time, that's Mike-as-Susan's afternoon trip on the bus to school; in Slate Time, that means I should finish up this dispatch and file. 2:40: Brooklyn Time, Mike at pickup, chatting with parents; Slate Time, me refreshing Facebook, Twitter, feeling petrified. 2:45: Brooklyn Time, Nick exiting classroom, his arms probably covered with the red paint that makes him look swollen; Slate Time, me returning e-mail. 3:20, Brooklyn Time, Mike-as-Susan stopping with Nick for cappuccino; Slate Time, me leaving the building for Starbucks. Caffeine: the great unifier of work-and-home life. (Read her whole post here)

In the most recent post, Agger talks about the expectation that men must be the primary breadwinners:

What do men fear exactly? This notion was brought home to me yesterday when a teacher at Nick's school began asking me questions about our experiment. "Do you feel emasculated?" he wondered.

At the moment, the two of us were the only men in a hallway full of baby sitters and moms. Emasculated is too strong a word. But I do feel as though I am swimming against the tide. I certainly come across other dads during the day. I've even met a grandpop who helps out as a regular "manny." But we are the exceptions, like those albino squirrels you see on occasion.

Verdict: MISSABLE

This project gets to the heart of something I keep asking myself: Which side has it better? In my particular case I don't see it as a gendered thing, since my boyfriend's job is an office job, period. There's no way he could stay home, even if I worked outside the house. But as a freelance journalist and grad student, I get bouts of curiosity about how the other half lives. Full time workers with pensions and officemates. Their dispatches, and memories of my past experiences in an office, make me think that maybe I don't have it so bad, after all.

But there's another reason why their project is very missable:

For someone contemplating giving up the internet for a year, Freaky Fortnight is a reminder of why the internet is the best medium for telling certain stories. Yes, this could be a book or a magazine, but their blog posts are almost in real time. The gaps make me feel the same way Dickens' readers probably felt between installments of Great Expectations. With the exception that Agger and Burton can actually write. And they're not foised upon ninth graders who preferred Salinger, thank you very much.

Missable or Dismissable: Mouse poop, ampu-kittens and more!

In the first installment of

Missable or Dismissable?

I bring you...

www.regretsy.com

Featuring the best of the worst of Etsy. Here's one, er, gem:

Verdict: Missable.

Seriously, now that I've discovered this site how will I stop myself from checking it daily? Where else will I get my fix o' crappy crafts?

This isn't to bash Etsy per se -- there are a lot of nice things there. On a side note, though, I bear a certain contempt for a site that panders a fantasy of gainful self-employment through petty artisanship. I don't mind the petty, or the artisanship, but it's the gainful self-employment that gets me. Slate's Sara Mosle picked up on this in a piece a few months ago. Read her article here. A band of Jezebel writers slapped Mosle back, saying she propagates gender stereotpyes and a certain Groucho Marx-y "too cool for a club that will have me as its member" condescension. Read that here.

Regardless of the deep social, politic and economic repercussions of the gender breakdown of the crafting masses, regretsy rocks.

New Feature: Missable or Dismissable

Ever since starting this project, or starting to start it, I've been reading the web with new eyes.

It's like when you take a walk in a city you know you'll be leaving or approach the end of college. You realize there are certain things you'll be doing, one day, for the last time. You register more consciously what you love, what you want to come back to, what you thought was annoying but isn't that bad. Of course that end phase is tinged with preemptive nostalgia.

But something else happens, too. You start to use your time better. Skip that mediocre cafe, go to the one with the green chairs because the view is nicer; and definitely go back to the crepe stand run by the nice old man, since who knows when you'll see him again.

In this case, it's not forever -- yet who knows. If one thing is certain about the internet, is that things are uncertain. If I'm away for a month I think it would be different when I came back -- new trends and startups, defunct or repackaged sites -- let alone a year.

With that in mind, I've started grouping some of the places I visit online into two categories: Missable or Dismissable.

The first is what I'll miss most. The second is what I won't.

If anyone stumbling across this here corner of cyberspace has anything to contribute, send me an email (or comment below) and I'll post it! It would be cool to see how these categories play out for other people out there.