My review of the album: I like it. And I’m not just saying that because I know the guy. That’s not a particularly insightful review, I know, but you can just go listen for free and decide for yourself if you like it. Be sure to buy it if you do.

While we’re on the subject of Prague: I recently read Arthur Phillips’s novel Prague, which is set in Budapest and hasn’t much to do with Prague at all. Or perhaps everything to do with Prague. I had read a later novel by Phillips, The Egyptologist, a few years ago, or tried to, anyway–I think I got bored and quit before the end. So I was a bit skeptical when I received Prague as a gift, but it sounded like something I should like, and in fact was. I quite liked it, and now perhaps will have to give The Egyptologist another try.

Prague follows five 20-something American and Canadian expats living in Budapest, all of them longing for other places and people. The related ideas of nostalgia, longing, and discontent recur throughout the book–one of the characters is even a scholar of nostalgia. I’ve never been to Budapest but I have been to (and enjoyed) Prague and have heard that the two cities are similar–river down the middle, famous bridge, castle on a hill, funicular, etc. As I read descriptions of Budapest in Prague the mental images I formed were all based on Prague, so the book might as well have been set there as far as I was concerned. Perhaps it was my nostalgia for Prague and my occasional fantasy of life as an expat that made me like Prague.

If you’ve read the book (or any of his others) let me know what you thought.

The other songs he performed (“Prejudice” and “F**k the Poor) were great, too. Check them out here. Then listen to the rest of the show–you’ll probably like it.

My injury was a fracture of the triquetrum bone^*, which is the most- or second-most-common kind of wrist fracture, depending on whose statistics you believe. Usually, a little piece chips off. They put you in a cast, and everything works out fine. However, because I’m special, that’s not what happened to me. I broke off a big piece, and there was a large gap between it and where it was supposed to be. I went to two separate orthopedists who between them had been working on hands for over 25 years, and neither of them had ever seen an injury like this before. The doctor who ended up fixing it for me was quite excited–he took pictures of my x-ray and CT scan with his iPhone, I guess so that he could pull it out and show me off at orthopedist cocktail parties.

Both doctors recommended surgery to fix the bone fragment back in place, so I had that done last week. The surgery went fine, and my parents, who had come to be supportive, were able to leave the surgery center in time to make it to the opera that evening.

After a week wearing a half cast/splint that they put on me in the operating room (clearly designed or applied by someone who has never had to wear one, given how miserably uncomfortable it was), I got my real cast yesterday:

If you look closely, you can see the pin holding things together.

I also got a waterproof cast cover, which is a little more secure than the newspaper bags I’ve been using to cover my arm for showering. I can probably reuse the thing for next year’s Halloween costume, too, since it makes me look like a low-rent monster from Dr. Who.

This is the first time I’ve ever had a cast, so I missed out on that whole cast signing thing in childhood. A black cast is a little tough to sign, and I don’t see most of you in person, but if you’d like to sign the cast you can scrawl out your message, then photograph or scan it and send it to me (or just use the comments below). I’ll print out your messages on stickers and put them on the cast, if I haven’t lost interest in this project by then. Also, I’m willing to sell advertising space or naming rights; get in touch if you’re interested. But hurry, because I only have to wear the thing for three weeks (half as long as I was expecting).

Thanks to all of you who have wished me well and/or told me how lucky I was not to have broken both wrists like your friend/brother/coworker/acquaintance/spouse/distant relative did.

The Guardian reports that

The desolate featureless landscape shown in Rhine II is no accident: Gursky explained in an interview^* that it is his favourite picture: “It says a lot using the most minimal means … for me it is an allegorical picture about the meaning of life and how things are.”

In fact the artist carefully digitally removed any intrusive features – dog walkers, cyclists, a factory building – until it was bleak enough to satisfy him.

That’s right: it’s not really even a photograph–it’s a Photoshop composition.

Well, I suppose the buyer will enjoy bragging about owning it.

But maybe your taste is different from mine, and you think that this “photograph” is interesting. Maybe you even hoped to purchase it, but got outbid. Well, here’s some good news. Shortly after I saw Rhein II, I happened to walk past a cactus that I have in my house, and noticed a similarity.

So I cropped a picture of it…

…and then spent 10 minutes in Photoshop until I was satisfied that it was conveying my intended message about the meaning of life and how things are:

It’s not my best Photoshop work, since I’m working without benefit of my dominant hand and also didn’t want to waste a lot of time on this, so I’m offering it for sale at the bargain price of $4,338.50, which is 0.1% of what Gursky’s photograph sold for. I’d say Cactus II is at least one tenth of one percent as interesting to look at as Rhein II is, so it seems like a fair price. Now, for this unbelievably low price, you’re getting an unframed print that’s about 30 inches long. I realize that part of the appeal of Gursky’s work is the large size of the prints. Therefore, I am also offering my photograph glass mounted at 80″ x 140″ (about the same size as Rhein II) for the still very reasonable price of $43,385.

Or, if you think that both Gursky’s photograph of the Rhein and mine of my cactus are actually quite dull^†, by all means take a look through my gallery and see if there’s something else you’d like instead.

Inside was the 2011 Fall Catalog of collectible coins. I do a few Web searches and all of a sudden the United States government thinks I might want to buy some coins? Creepy.

Things got even weirder when I started flipping through the catalog and found the 2011 American Eagle Gold Coins, which definitely made me feel like I was being targeted:^†

Another thing I noticed is that the word nation is capitalized throughout the catalog:

These half-ounce coins are struck in 24-karat gold and honor our Nation’s first spouses

The United States Mint uses this precious metal as a canvas for two of the most famous coin designs in our Nation’s history

I found this annoying (it makes me think of, well, nationalism and related evils), but apparently it’s a common thing.^‡ The United States Government Printing Office Style Manual says that nation should be capitalized when it is used as a “synonym for United States,” but nation by itself isn’t a synonym for “United States” here–if it were the sentence could be rewritten as “…honor our United States’s first spouses.” “Our nation” is the synonym, so if you want to start tossing in patriotic capitals it should be “Our Nation.”

Anyway. If you’d like to buy yourself one of those coins (without my face on it) you can do it here, but you may be disappointed to learn that they have already sold out the entire run of 30,000 of the 2011 American Eagle One Ounce Gold Proof Coin, priced to move at $1,935 each. The Web site notes that these are available “just in time for the spring graduation and wedding gift-giving seasons” and they’re also “a great way to honor that special person on Mother or Father’s Day,” so presumably everyone else got a Spring catalog earlier in the year that I missed out on. It’s a shame, too, because I think Dad would much rather have had one of these than the $1,935 in cash I tucked into his Father’s Day card.