I stumbled on this movie trailer today, and it took me until 1:10 to realize I was watching a biopic of Aron Ralston:

Back in 2003, Ralston had the bad luck to be mountaineering alone in Utah when he got his right hand caught between a large rock and the side of Blue John Canyon. After five days of trying (and failing) to escape, he amputated the trapped hand with a multi-use tool and then hiked to safety.

When I interviewed him later that year, over the phone, I was expecting someone who spoke in a Clint Eastwood growl. I mean, it takes a certain wherewithal to saw through your necrotized flesh with a dull blade, and I imagined the aftermath would leave someone hardened and bitter. That’s how the cliché works, right?

Ralston was the most cheerful person I’ve ever interviewed.

“What’s the biggest change in your life?” I asked him.

“Not being able to sit in the emergency exit row of airplanes,” he replied. He was driving at that moment, though, thanks to a high-tech prosthetic limb.

“You still hike alone?”

“Yeah. Just this last week, in fact.” He named the place, somewhere out West.

“What’d you do with the limb?”

He told about cremating it, and scattering the ashes near the rock where it’d been pinned. As I recall, he described the whole ritual as a cleansing one.

A couple of years later, I went to a Chuck Palahniuk reading at the National Press Club. Palahniuk was promoting his book “Haunted,” and he turned the event into a pseudo-cannibalistic funfest, throwing fake severed limbs into the crowd.

I forget if it was during the reading itself, or the book signing afterward, but Palahniuk mentioned that he and Ralston shared a publicist, who had the misfortune of switching the swag boxes for their respective book tours. Palahniuk opened his cardboard box during a reading, expecting a mess of severed hands and feet, and found a bunch of carabineers.

Imagine Ralston opening his own box to find a bunch of plastic hands and feet, bright with fake gore.

Imagine a publicist feeling the desperate need to crawl under their desk and hide for the rest of the day.

That’s how I remember Palahniuk telling it, at least. I recall him saying something about Ralston laughing his head off about the switcheroo, but my mind could be fooling me; even if he didn’t say it, you can imagine that happening. Once you’ve chopped off your own hand after five days of dehydration, most everything else in life probably feels lightweight by comparison.

From Holman Jenkins, Jr.’s Aug. 14 Wall Street Journal article, “Google and the Search for the Future,” which quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” [Schmidt] elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Back in ye olden days of 2003, I took a bunch of classes in neuropsychology where we discussed the concept of computational complexity. No matter how powerful a silicon-based processor’s ability to solve computational problems within a particular timeframe, the professors argued, the human brain retained an advantage in its ability to conjure nonlinear and creative solutions.

Those were psychology professors, of course; I’m sure someone with a Ph.D in computer science would argue that, given enough resources and a supple enough algorithm, a processor (or a cluster of interlocked processors, if we’re thinking cloud-based) will always overcome the human cortex in the competition to solve any problem. Not to mention decide the best use of that cortex’s time.

Either way, I find Schmidt’s comments mildly frightening—Nicholas Carr said it best when he wrote, “I hope Google will also be able to tell me the best candidate to vote for in elections. I find that such a burden.”

That voting example may be hyperbole—for the moment. But every day, we upload increasing amounts of personal information onto the Web. In turn, that information is used as fodder for all sorts of predictive analysis: if Google or Facebook knows your coffee preferences, in theory, then those sites could start guiding you towards the nearest shop that’s offering mocha lattes at 15 percent off before 10am.

Some people will like that. I mean, decision-making can often be aggravating, and difficult, and who wouldn’t like that sort of responsibility transferred to your smartphone? But it also threatens to remove a certain amount of the self-determination that makes us human—maybe you don’t want coffee today, damnit.

At least I take comfort in the fact that (as far as I’ve seen) all attempts at creating artificial whimsy or humor end in miserable failure. In a few years, my Google Android phone might start reminding me to buy new bike tubes, or poke me to pre-order the upcoming Cormac McCarthy book off Amazon—but there’s no way those distributed servers, chattering away their ever-more-complex equations, could predict my sudden and inexplicable impulse to sit here on the porch and churn out this little spur-of-the-moment post by candlelight, while smoking a Cohiba.

I’d probably get a nicotine-patch ad in my Gmail, though, after the fact.

In December 2008, I interviewed the comedian D.L. Hughley. The one and only Ian Spanier shot some amazing portraits for it. But the interview never ran; two weeks after I turned it in, the assigning magazine decided to implode.

Undeterred, I emailed another editor I knew, who evinced great enthusiasm for the concept. One week after I sent it over, his magazine did its best impersonation of the Hindenburg.

Nonplussed, yet brimming with the same can-do spirit that’s gotten me beaten within an inch of my life on more than one occasion, I submitted the story to a third editor.

“Hell no,” she said. “That thing’s cursed. You’re not letting it within a hundred miles of my book.”

Ah, too bad. But the story still had some life in it: three months later, a fourth editor called me. “We’re starting a Website, but we need a whole crapload of content ready for the launch. You got anything?”

I’d been down that particular road before. “Is this the sort of Website that pays in legal tender, or is this a ‘Dude, I’ll buy you a beer later’ sort of thing?” I asked. “Because I don’t do the latter. At least, not these days.”

“No, it’s major corporate backing.” He named a solid figure, payable in advance.

“At least this’ll see the light of day,” I said to myself, sending the article over. This was May 2009.

I received the cash, but the Website never launched. Funding issues, maybe, or creative differences, or any of the hundred other reasons that wreck these types of projects before they leave the runway. Crash and burn, baby.

So I started feeling a little weird about this piece. Like it had morphed into the MacGuffin from a Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft novel: The Celebrity Interview of Unstoppable Doom. Maybe I should delete it, I thought, and then sprinkle my MacBook with a little holy water for good measure.

Instead I buried the article deep in my ‘Old Pieces’ file, among the McSweeney’s pitches never accepted and the reviews killed by editors for lack of space—and there it stayed until tonight, when I stumbled on it while searching for another relic.

For a moment considered printing the thing on my blog, in its entirety. At least it’ll see the light of day, a part of me whispered.

But if I did, who knows what’ll happen? This week’s been awful enough; if I post these seemingly innocuous 857 words, it could unleash something truly Cthulhu-caliber upon the sleeping world. I’m serious here, people.

This question pops up with fair frequency. I’m a tech writer, after all, among other things—surely I must be carrying the newest iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy S or the Droid X, or some other wonder-phone capable of toasting bread or remotely launching a nuclear weapon in addition to making phone-calls.

I actually carry a simple feature phone. It makes calls pretty well. It has an address book. You can text with it. For the most part, reception is good—you can even phone someone from Mexico, or Providenciales, or Canada. For music (Arcade Fire, these days, on repeat) and apps (re: zombie games), I use a 32GB iPod Touch.

Someday soon I’ll upgrade, probably whenever I get sick of drawing maps on little scraps of paper. But lately I’ve also been reading Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget,” when I need a break from having my ass kicked up and down the proverbial block by Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” and it makes me doubt smartphones’ assumed position as an ever-more-necessary thread in the fabric of daily life.

That is to say, as someone who writes about them frequently, I’m perfectly aware of the smartphone’s utility. Indeed, there are times I find myself regretting the inability to access email while in transit, or a map app that’ll guide me to my next location with more accuracy than the aforementioned scribble; but I’ve discovered that I don’t need these things in my personal life, even as I spend a week or two at a time dissecting a particular manufacturer’s brand-new, extra-shiny device.

The same impulse—keep life’s details streamlined—led me to join a CSA this summer, and start growing my own herbs. While my personal-tech ethos aspires to simplicity, however, dealing with organic materials presents its own unforeseen complications: namely, what the hell is this plant?

“What the hell is this plant?” I ask, thrusting some unidentifiable green object from my CSA bag towards the camera aperture on my laptop, for an emergency video conference with one of my CSA-share partners. (Technology does have its uses.)

“What’s that you’re chewing on?” she asks, squinting. “A hairpin?”

“Um, yeah.”

“But you have no hair.”

“Found it on a couch pillow. It beats toothpicks.” I thrust the plant toward the camera again, for emphasis. “Help?”

“Is that arugula?”

“It’s not the basil, and it’s not boc choi. Aside from that, I’m lost. This is exotic, unique, unknown. In other words, it’s not one of the five vegetables or fruits I eat on a regular basis.”

“Try Google Images.”

“Contradictory results. This sort of thing was never a problem on Walden Pond, was it?”

“Or use what’s that—what you call it—Bang?”

“Bing.”

“Whatever. Make a decision. Take a leap.”

Yes, make a decision. Whole episodes of your life bend on the fulcrum of a single decision. Food or textbooks? Buy a house in this city, or plunge into the unknown of that city? Head for Tegucigalpa, or risk the drive to Valle de Sula? Save yourself, or hold hands for the plunge to the bottom? I guess this much energy expended over the fate of a mystery herb, in context, means you’ve arrived at a certain plateau.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll just pesto it. You can pesto anything, right?”

“You’re so creative, Nicky.”

I don’t usually play video games, but I’ve watched this trailer for this one, “Limbo,” three times and I’ve fallen in love with the art—it’s as if American McGee and Alfred Kubin had a bastard love-child, and armed that degenerate spawn with a box of charcoal and extensive knowledge of C++:

You know you’re about to have one of those small-world moments when, in the midst of an artists’ loft party in Bushwick—perched on a crumbling concrete shelf beneath a string of blinking Christmas lights and a porcelain doll’s head on a stick, sipping a cup of water against the all-crushing heat, listening to a pair of tattooed gargoyles discuss the finer points of Caravaggio and heroin, flinching every few minutes at the pop-pop-pop of criminal firecrackers exploding in the street on the other side of the compound’s barbed wire—someone points in your direction and screams, “Oh my God! I know you! You write for eWeek!”

The best views of Coney Island are from street-sign poles. You shimmy up those steel trees—bracing one boot against a nearby trashcan or phone-switch box for that extra few inches’ worth of leverage—in order to see above the crowd, and into the chaos rolling down the Avenue in the form of the annual Mermaid Parade.

At least, that’s the theory.

The reality is you arrive at Coney Island at 2:30, a half-hour after the parade’s start, and every freak between Westchester and the Jersey Shore is already present in full force, in their fishnets and body paint, to scream and cheer and slug beer under an Armageddon-blazing summer sun. They cling to the vicinity’s every verticality like crazed barnacles, terrifying the few religious types who have rolled out with their ‘JESUS SAVES’ signs. The Mermaid Parade, with its risqué atmosphere and quasi-Mardi Gras energy, is the sort of thing that can set a conservative commentator ranting for hours on end about the death of American decency, before heading to the bathroom to snort another rail of Bolivian marching-powder.

This year, there seemed to be a good deal of anger against a certain corporate titan:

In any case, the best recourse for the person arriving late, in the face of the heat and general chaos, is to take cover (under a convenient store awning) and gain just a few inches of extra height (thanks to a pipe poking from the concrete) and slug cool water in between taking photographs.

A little later, there’s an opening in the mass of people blocking you from the beach, and you charge through. Down on the boardwalk, someone’s erected a crossbar, with a pair of long streamers dangling from it; and twirling and spinning and gyrating along those streamers, acrobat after acrobat determined to defy gravity:

A photo only hints at the kinetic energy involved; every time one of them plunged toward the boardwalk, after scrambling to the top of the 25-foot crossbar, the crowd of assorted freaks and geeks loosed a collective gasp. Destination morgue! you can almost hear them thinking; but then gravity’s defied again:

The band beneath starts improvising to the acrobats’ movements; a steady drumbeat and guitar chord-work that sets a tempo, with the added benefit of drowning out the inevitable dumbasses’ catcalls from the beach.

Afternoons like this are pretty much why I actually leave the house.

There’s a section near the end of David Weddle’s biography, “If They Move…Kill ‘Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah,” that blames the death of Hollywood’s ‘70s auteur era on the rise of the modern blockbuster. In some ways, that’s a fair argument; once studio executives realized they could make millions from movies like “Jaws” or “Star Wars,” there was comparatively little need to fund, say, “Taxi Driver” or “The Wild Bunch.” (This was obviously before the Weinsteins realized, in the early ’90s, how to make considerable bank on prestige films.)

Now, film geeks will often bemoan that particular transition as a sort of cultural Armageddon. I’m tempted to disagree on two fronts. First, the upsurge of quality films in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in no way interrupted the tide of celluloid crap that, mercifully, has been eliminated from the cultural memory. Second, re-watch “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” particularly the truck chase midway through the film, and tell me that’s not a perfectly executed piece of filmmaking.

My point is, even though Spielberg, Lucas et al. are sometimes blamed for sucking most of the quality out of American film—or at least birthing a whole generation of camera-wielding enfants terrible who did that job for them—they were masters of the craft.

Which brings us to “Jonah Hex,” the new summer movie with Josh Brolin and John Malkovich: not exactly the most deftly executed piece of work. I’ve been joking with people since the advance screening earlier tonight that I could have written a better script over the course of a weekend, if you locked me in my apartment with a case of beer and that 2-CD set of Morricone’s greatest scores. But I suspect, as with so many poor films, that the first-draft script was probably pretty good; the whole miserable wreck—ghosts, cowboys, dastardly plots, 19th century steampunk super-weapons, whores with tight bustiers and hearts of gold—feels like it was filmed, chopped, re-filmed, re-chopped, and then booted into the gutter of the marketplace to collect whatever cash possible from 13-year-old boys with nothing better to do.

The end result is an 80-minute mess, and it makes you long a bit for a time when summer blockbusters—even the most soulless ones—came with a bit more competency. At least some good actors got paid, though.

The one and only Randall Lane autopsies Doubledown’s Peter Max affair in this month’s Vanity Fair. The 30-second summary, for those anxious to click back to Chatrouette: my former publishing company, which produced Wall Street-friendly titles like Trader Monthly, entered into a deal with Peter Max to create portraits of various financial titans. The deal eventually went south, along with the magazines and the rest of the economy.

Unmentioned in Lane’s article is Max’s other set of Doubledown-related portraits: the tobacco titans we profiled during that same bubbly period in the pages of The Cigar Report. We held an unveiling party for those artworks at the Venetian Hotel, during the summer of ’08—desert nights whose details blur in my mind, except for the time I wandered onto the casino floor with a power drill in one hand and a bottle of 20-year-old scotch in the other.

(I had been unpacking art crates with the former, and in the midst escorting the latter back to my room; that nobody bothered to stop me came as a small shock. Then again, it was Vegas.)

In any case, the article’s worth reading. Think of it as a snapshot from the period; or better yet, an insect frozen in amber, stuffed with the rich blood of a bygone era.

Meanwhile, another (positive) Playboy cigar book review here.

So here I am, grafting steel toes onto my Vibram footwear whilst wondering whether I can (via the magic of the Internet) secure a t-shirt with Ice Cube’s snarling face in time for Jury Duty tomorrow morning—when the realization hits: my Website’s Clips page is looking about as lively as Michael Jackson.

Fortunately, this revelation coincided with someone telling me how to actually upload .PDFs to the site. I’ve started with my larger pieces from Private Air, a magazine that catered to personal-jet owners until January 2009, when the cratering economy took the bulk of the readership and advertisers with it. That ignoble tale can be found in full detail here.

In that spirit, a scattering of artifacts from the late, lamented bubble: John Travolta and Morgan Freeman opine on the magic of flying, wild boars meet a delicious end in Tuscany, fire-fighting jets crash in southern California, etc. It’s all on the Clips page, below the updated eWeek articles.

Also, nice (and short) review of the upcoming Playboy Cigar book I co-wrote, courtesy of Format Magazine.