Epilogue to Yesterday First things first it’s Steve Martin’s birthday today. I must have tuned into that psychic wave or something. Happy Birthday Steve. All the comments about you making crappy movies were merely meant as encouragement to keep doing stuff like Shopgirl.
Family Branding, Family Ties (Tie-Ins) Recently, when going to rate my buddies on AOL (more and more of whom are having professional photo-resumes and Playboy-quality spreads versus a Coolpix snapshot at a birthday), there was an article about how Ashlee Simpson is stepping out of the shadow of teen superstar sister Jessica Simpson.
It seems as if there is a real trend of pushing family ties as family brands…
So with my father’s visit now come and gone I’ve been thinking about families and their fates. Why do some families rise and some others decay? How can someone fight against the chance that their progeny will squander that for which the ambitious have sacrificed and suffered? Can you mandate responsibility from beyond the grave?
It is clear that this question has been with man since the very earliest times. We shall recall in Plato’s Meno that Meno and Socrates have an extensive dialog concerning whether or not virtue (arete) could be taught. Ultimately, it became apparent that virtue could not be taught, for from the most virtuous houses of Athens, wicked scions were quickened.
Every time some kid shoots up a school or steals a car there are always three convenient scapegoats: video games, that music they listen to, and those movies they watch. Recently here in the Bay Area there has been an upswing of service vehicles being stolen: ambulances, police cars, etc.
Now normally I’m of the school of thought that says parents who parent well are to blame for kids stealing cars or being miscreants, not RockStar Games, Eminem, or Quentin Tarantino. Nonetheless, stealing service vehicles is a core part of the Grand Theft Auto series (III and Vice City in particular).
Recently I commented to social gadfly MCS:
i can’t wait for [Bush’s and the ] religious right’s backwards stance on this to make sure that the US pharmacological sector falls apart.
Big Pharma is one of the biggest contributors to campaigns and has even had GWB as a speaker at one of their lobby’s gatherings. What should a free-market Republican not like about Pharma? They don’t empty tankers on Alaskan shores, they don’t tend to take pictures of you with their CEO and then implode, they don’t overcharge to line porkets….there’s a lot going for Pharma.
But there can be no doubt for Big Pharma to grow, make money, grow the economy, and remain competitive in the US, they are going to have to get closer and closer to the magic moment of conception.
It’s amazing, but recently on Fresh Air ’twas opined by entertainment critic David Bianculli that the Trump-related reality show “The Apprentice” will be the most bought “complete season” DVD set in this interview.
Why?
The show, to paraphrase Bianculli, is everything Trump is when he is at his best: instinctively hot, mercurial, impeccably dressed, preening, and equipped with a laser-eye beam that spots defaults and excellences in leadership with a supernatural accuracy.
Bianculli has gotten me thinking though, it is clear that some reality shows teach us something and others show what people will eat while wearing skimpy bathing suits.
If you’re like me and enjoy your tea, newspaper, luxurious slippers, lovely PJs with a side of California sunshine on the patio on Sunday morning, you might enjoy A&E’s superb new show “Breakfast with the Arts.”
In this weekend’s episode a number of very talented opera singers performed an eclectic collection of arias.
Most interesting were the interviews conducted with the ladies after their respective performances. I was introduced to “Madeline Peyroux” and am a great fan of her voice. Check her out.
I’ve been travelling, having visitors, etc…
The issue that comes to mind in my first moment to sit down is.
Is that Kimberly Guilfoyle-Newsom, assistant DA and wife unto mayor of San Francisco Gavin (Flat-Top) Newsom offering her advice and perspective on the R. Kelly case on MTV?!!?
Actually seeing the Mrs. K G-N (I never went in for this hyphenation gig, the aesthetics are all wrong) on MTV is not so strange - she’s occasionally popped up on Fox News. Nonetheless, I thought she was trying to leverage her career and marriage to becoming a telepundit, not an MTV personality.
I had a mess of cleanliness.
I mean, I had heaps of clean clothes.
When I came home Friday night these heaps of wrinkling cleanliness taxed me, drained me, and brought me dooowwwwnnnnn (do that in a Jim Morrison voice when you read it).
I took care of that.
I cleaned my bathroom.
I took the heap of clean clothes off my bed. They had been sharing the spot where typically a girlfriend, or wife, or stuffed teddy bear should go.
As I have none of the last three, I didn’t mind sharing the feathertop with my bleached-clean whites.
With the clutter gone the dynamic of the place has changed.
Beautiful Condo for sale in The Plaza at Turtle Creek (managed by the Mansion on Turtle Creek)
Owned by TV personality Tommy Habeeb (currently on the show “Eye for an Eye” and former host of popular TV show “Cheaters” as Tommy Grand)
(italics mine)
Wow, talk about using the Q list to sell property.
“Cheaters” is the most stupid reality sting show. Tommy in his monochrome black outfit would help the person-done-wrong confront the wrong-doing-person and their wrong-doing-assistant and ask sanctimonious questions like “How could you do that to her, do you know she’s married?”.
I’d be afraid living in that villa would invite the spectre of instant karma.
While I love Swedish rock bands, I do not like the Hives.
It’s just too much of a winking send up of the Rolling Stones in the late 70s / early 80s, too much mugging for the camera, too much focus on the outfits.
I don’t like the late nite MTV ads with the skinny white guy dancing, struggling in a sweater, cavorting on a running track, or using gum to anchor his drink. I hate ads that are designed to annoy.
That’s all.
I’m leaving in a little bit under 48 hours….so I decided I would watch the NBC action drama “Hawaii” to get in the spirit.
Good post-racial cast African-American, Japanese-Hawaiian, Vietnamese-named half-Caucasian half-something females, a Samoan gentleman…
Hackers in Paradise Glad to see the presence of APPLE APPLE APPLE: The hacker-cops (more on them later) were using the new flat-panel Apple monitors (was that a CGI blurred out Mac OSX dock I didn’t see at the bottom of the screen?) and the toy of our decade, the iPod, had a cameo…
But here’s the real question, hackers in tropical paradise? Are we supposed to believe that people would voluntarily live in Hawaii who have the genetic inclination to live in perma-semi-dark with gentle red lighting with code?
I hate the Charmin bear ads. I mean, there’s a famous joke about bears and their necessity in the woods, and I think that this commercial is attempting to trade on that ….
But … But … Ugh! It’s freaking disgusting
“Don’t squeeze the Charmin” - Yes I’d prefer that by a mile. A trade of goods and commerce from the inventory stocking gentleman.
But relieved ursae? Yeaaach!
Imagining a bear needing toilet paper, if you’re lucky, merely gets dismissed as an absurdity and the mind rejects it. But if your mind lets it go past then – as I said before
I joined KQED (one of the several NPR affiliates in the area) and got a cool KQED sticker. If I attach it I can drive around and be all sanctimonious about the other leeches on the highway.
I suspect the bay area must have one of the highest NPR listenerships in the states. I can make a sideways joke about some bit i heard on Car Talk and half the room will laugh. It’s uncanny.
“Waking up with the King” from Burger King.
Some plastic headed monarch is on the other side of the bed when I wake up? HELL NO. That’s almost as bad as the Charmin shit-bear ads.
My good friend Mike has the bad luck to be saddled with Microsoft applications. He also bears an unusual last name that Word suggests be changed to either:
Social
or
Bobcat
My colleague Mice and I were having one of our strange quasi-religious, quasi-mystic discussions about Enoch (חנוך) who, among other things:
fathered Methuselah lived the events of the Book of Enoch did not die, but was taken by God’s hand is called Idris in the Koran taught humankind mathematics, writing, astronomy (perhaps this is why the character Enoch Root is named such in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon cycle of books?) May have been “translated to an angel” at the hand of God More on Enoch
While we were discussing this, OlMF made this very cool drawing. I said that if I ever have a band I will use this on the cover art.
It’s great! I’ll generally watch anything that chronicles the evolution of musical styles over time (especially post 1950). I really enjoyed watching the history of hip-hop - explaining where it came from, what its underpinnings were, how completely clueless Reagan was about urban blight…it was outstanding.
It starts off with the old school - GrandMaster Flash, etc. and explores the interesting liason between the NY Punk Rock / New Wave and Hip-hop scenes, moves to tracking the rise of DefJam and LL Cool J, Run DMC, and the Beastie Boys, then charts the bi-coastalization and the gangsta’ rap movement that culminates in the death of Tupac Shakur and Chris Wallace and stops where hip hop now is, many many new areas exploring hip-hop (the Atlanta scene, Nelly ruling St.
Why’d you have to lipsync your SNL appearance?
And why didn’t your band ad-lib, start over?
You’ve been outed as a Milli-Vanilli.
The Train Wreck.
At the end she blamed the band. Classy. I guess that’s why they kept on playing instead of helping you.
Update: Update:
Recently my co-worker was married in the Kashmir region of India.
Regrettably, one group of people who believe in a mysterious force that has political bidding but that no one can see and another group of people who believe in a mysterious force that has political bidding but that no one can see are currently launching mortars and bullets at each other for control of this region.
Kashmir is hotly contested between Pakistan and India. Thus my surprise when my co-worker told me she was going there to be married (you hear about weddings getting blown up in Afghanistan - I was anxious for her safety) could not be contained.
Michael suggested in a comment to yesterday’s post that my pleas had fallen on a God whose ears, like Odysseyus’ oarsmens’, was stuffed with wax.
Well, like Bono’s God - who doesn’t need Jimmy Swaggart to get money for Him - my God really doesn’t give a flying flip at a celestial donut about politics. I suffer no ire at the Almighty on this one.
So here we are, facing the reality of a second Bush term in office, what am I to think, to do?
Well every president walks into a world full of contingencies and issues that were not directly of his making.
I am a total office products snob. More on each and every one of these later.
One of the best office products that I got to use while living in Europe when reading formal drafts was the A4 paper standard.
I love the A4 size. I like longer folders versus thicker binders. With A4 it feels like you have a proper expanse upon which to write notes and margins. On A4 you feel like your thought exists in a bigger world versus the parochial US “Letter” standard.
Dagggh. It’ like the envy i have for people converting liters to kiloleters simply by adding zeroes versus my addled multiplications af 4s and 6s to get to something comprable in the antiquated Imperial system.
This is an NC17-Rated entry - read the extended entry if you’re not offended by such material…
Porn has really gone mainstream (see my review of Jenna Jameson’s book) – but I really think that capitalizing on the fact that everyone (no wait, no one) has a subconscious harmony with some of its stock visual metaphors is a bit excessive.
word here: To needlessly remake a movie and, in doing so, demean the enjoyment of the original, raise contempt for its content, and raise ire against those that quickened the bastard spawn second version
Here is The League’s official mail:
…
Well, gee, it?s any and all of these factors, isn?t it?
The physical aspect is important to meet someone, but nobody is pretty forever. Hopefully, one day, you?ll just be able to feel lucky that this person you care about happens to be pretty. Use it as a tool for meeting somebody, but be certain, people get sick, people get hungover, people get bad haircuts. And what makes you think you?re going to stay all that beautiful, anyway?
You can tell a single guy because he?s concerned about her getting her nails done or him watching football.
Yesterday my sister and I, freshly returned from our Tahoe adventure, went to the local cinema to see A Series of Unfortunate Events . I like the series quite a lot. If Ed Gorey and HP Lovecraft got together you’d get a style similar to “Lemony Snicket” ’s - investigative with a heavy dose of black humor.
Watching the previews for movies coming up both my sister and I were struck by the fact that NONE of the previews were original. The preview (note the singular) that was not a direct remake or conversion of a sitcom, it was a pastiche of several other movies we’ve seen oh-too-many-times.
I love Found Magazine. The found objects are lovely, mysterious, and transcendental.
I must be thinking of Found Magazine because I found some software I had lost last night. It’s not very fancy, but the CSS generator is handy and something I had wanted for from time to time.
I listened to Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” on salon.com. I love Welsh accentation and that thick voice that says “kets” for “cats”.
And here’s a funny little thought…
If, in the course of your holiday celebrations you should get coffee making devices (a new brew-pot, French press, bean grinder, etc.) - pace yourself on putting it to good use. While your relatives certainly want you to enjoy your gift, they don’t want you passing the yuletide day like a speed-freak.
Recently, the League of Melbotis made some statements on the subject of eating at McDonalds. He mentioned the fear and trembling that comes from eating their food, and the vague sense of guilt that comes upon completion of your McMeal.
He rightly identifies the thing which is most annoying about McDonald’s these days, their advertising. The League’s complaints are my complaints as well, but I have another angle to ply: the portrayed infantilism of the black male.
In the episode of racial stereotypes by McDonalds we see 3 young African-American guys at a host’s apartment preparing to watch a lively game of basketball.
The biggest problem with videos these days is that they’re made by people used to directing commericals……not former (or current) art students.
The videos are glossy, the singers toned, the clothing predictable risqu?e….
Art student directors loved playing with light, or shadow, or costume, lasers or letting the singers be unattractive and passionate.
Mike at whybark has posted the resolution to the tale of Hopkin Green Frog, a bit of an internet meme back earlier this year.
It’s a bit sadder than the idealists and Romantics of the blogosphere would have had…but it’s the truth and it usually has a sad sort of beauty.
The CBC is reporting that Hunter Thompson has chosen to end his life, self-euthanising himself.
Thompson appears to have opted for a metaphorical hemlock versus deal with pain and the slow decline of his meat-vehicle.
From this MetaFilter discussion:
I think A-ha’s video for “Take On Me” set a standard nobody’s ever gonna touch. posted by alumshubby at 4:46 PM PST on March 12
For pure evil, perhaps. posted by jonmc at 4:53 PM PST on March 12
My long-suffering co-worker Mice hates A-ha, yet Mrs. Mice loves A-Ha.
Myself, I love their video and “Take on Me”.
This discussion was about this video for the {electronica / square beat / something / huh / what-the-heck} artist M.I.A..
I heard her song “Pull up the people” by MIA yesterday on KSJS and it’s maddeningly addictive:
I just installed the latest release of Mac OS X (10.4 - “Tiger” and it is awwweeesssooommme. The only thing is that I lost all of my “junk mail filtration rankings” in my mail program.
So this afternoon, right before I started typing this, I checked my mail and what happened? Larger than life, a particularly adult bit of photography was plastered across my 15" monitor.
I promptly closed the window but geeezzzz.
I hope no one was peering over my shoulder (sserves them right for being an over-the-shoulder-peeker).
After 4 days of having to wake up at 0530 to make the train up to the city my internal clock finally adapted and this morning I found myself fully awake at that dreadful hour. To be fair, I had turned in at 10 due to “It’s friday and I’m out of training but I still have a bus ride and a long train ride and i just want to go home”, but that was no consolation when I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Fortunately I had ordered some books from Amazon earlier this week. The Japanese House (because I like to look at nice plates of houses using a lot of negative space) and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I finished The World is Flat.
First things first, I must call this a Whiggish [1] interpretation of the globalization of the world. There’s definitely a na?ve belief that things are getting better and will continue to do so, and, quite necessarily, they must continue to do so. Whether you will like this book hinges on your ability to tolerate such a perspective.
Whiggish attitude aside, what’s Friedman on about? Well, Friedman notices that during the years after 9/11 we may have missed the fact that it’s now incredibly easy to get data across the globe. For all intents and purposes data may be considered as equivalent to highly-liquid wealth, malleable power structures, and influence.
When I’m somewhere and young teenage-girls start laughing I worry that they’re laughing at me. I don’t think I soiled myself, is there a snot-cicle hanging out my nose? WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS IT YOU HARPIES?
For all I know they are laughing at the sill nonsense girls laugh at all the time.
Yet still I worry.
I think all men are with me on this. We suspect they’re laughing at us, and I think they would admit that they are, if we had incontrovertible evidence of it.
It makes me consider the famous Jethro Tull line “Eyeing girls with bad intent” to bond the “bad intent” to the girls, not the viewer.
There have been a number of people who have refused to upgrade - like they got the best of whatever it was and refused to get more. There’s a cult of people who refused to leave MS Office 5.1. It was small, effective, perfect, light. Not many people could say that about Office anymore. Those who refuse to upgrade are called “refuseniks”.
Have you seen the latest McDonalds ads, the creepy bobble-headed animated people going on about their “fruit buzz” ? It’s only slightly less creepy and irritating than those weird plastic suit people they used in the Energizer ads a couple years ago.
In light of this, I thought I’d give Mickey D’s a smack of the cluebat and sent them the following email through their contact mechanism:
I would like to encourage you to fire your ad agency.
The last 3 years have been marked by horrible press for McDonalds followed-up with horrible advertising.
Are the people who hire your advertising campaigns so out of touch that they consider 4 creepily animated women talking about a “fruit buzz” an insightful way of communicating “here are some healthy options”?
On the up side, they’rea responsive organization. Here was their take:
I’ll put my commentary in blockquotes.
Hello Steven:
Thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald’s.
We’re sorry you were disappointed with our advertising. We take pride in producing commercial messages that will be enjoyed. We certainly never intended for it to offend anyone [I didn’t say I was offended, I just thought it was bad]. Your comments have been shared with our advertising staff and independent advertising agency who work together to develop our commercials. Please know your feedback is helpful and will be considered in the future planning of our commercials.
Recently this article touched off a furor for its author.
I consider it to be a very well thought-out dissection of why people cling to the power of religion. Essentially people are motivated by tribal identity and a need to belong - even when the entry costs for belonging are irrational, sadistic, and/or evil.
To be fair, I think he runs a bit to vitriolic success at the end, but the interesting idea that snagged my attention is this parallel:
We want the benefits of scientific progress, but are afraid to leave behind the voodoo dolls, sense of belonging and legitimation that religion offers.
The League of Melbotis has taken up the standard of people mau-mauing the bureaucrats in the corporate overlordship. The League’s excellent sense of humour shines through in his mailing to the Golden Arches located here.
From the BBC [SOURCE].
“You’re glib. You don’t even know what Ritalin is,” Cruise told Lauer on Friday night’s show.
“Psychiatry is a pseudo science,” he said. “You don’t know the history of psychiatry - I do,” he added.
First things first, I’m not sure he’s using the word “glib” properly. From what I understand, Lauer asserted that Ritalin was helpful to some people. This is just a fact. That’s not glib.
Cruise, a devoted follower of the bizarre Church of Scientology, said: “I was much happier in previous existences when I wrote plays, composed music, conquered nations, discovered continents and developed cures for diseases"I only took my present form because Bingodulla, whom all Scientologists worship as the Supreme Thetan, selected me to spread the gospel of Scientology to the glib, uninformed masses.
The “Washington Post” suggests that we make peace with leaving New Orleans behind. I’m not ready for that, but climate apocalypse might mean that beloved things like NO and Venice won’t endure.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090902448.html
Thursday night Elle and I went to visit lovely downtown San Jose to see avant-garde rock band Interpol play.
It was an excellent show in an intimate venue. Paul Banks’ powerful voice really belted out strong song after strong song. I was worried that I wasn’t going to hear “Roland” but they closed out the show with it. I was so pleased.
Today I had the chance to watch the season premiere of Numb3rs and I’m pretty worried about where it’s going this season.
Here’s what made the first season work:
Mathematically / scientifically competent technologists (nerds)
#1, portrayed by hot women
A really interesting family dynamic between genius Charlie (David Krumholz), FBI big-brother (Rob Morrow), and Dad (Judd Hirsch). What’s it like to be the older brother while your younger brother is at Ivy League?
Assuming that the audience might actually be smart
It was for all these reasons that I was sure such an inventive show would be cancelled. It scraped by, but I’m sure the no-talent, formulaic bozos up in CBS management had some ideas on how to “improve” things.
I was reading in National Geographic about the domestication of dogs and they cited a bit from “The Cat that Walked by Himself” from the Just-so Stories.
When Wild Dog reached the mouth of the Cave he lifted up the dried horse-skin with his nose and sniffed the beautiful smell of the roast mutton, and the Woman, looking at the blade-bone, heard him, and laughed, and said, ‘Here comes the first. Wild Thing out of the Wild Woods, what do you want?’
Wild Dog said, ‘O my Enemy and Wife of my Enemy, what is this that smells so good in the Wild Woods?
At the Interpol show the tickets said that no cameras were allowed….
…yet it’s very obvious that the presence of recording devices such as cameraphones, phones used to record the music, and Canon Elph cameras would not be denied. It’s time for BGP and artists and promoters to come to their senses and realize that they cannot stop the shrinking and fidelity improvements of
taping / recording / image producing devices.
They should take an attitude whereby for some sliding scale percentage they will let you have access to a recording area. The better the equipment, the bigger the royalty.
Nicky Hilton asked the following outrageous question:
“I just want to say to these writers, ‘I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?’ I feel very accomplished for my age.”
To which was replied:
Nicky Hilton asked, “I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?” I would like to repond to that. When I was 21, I was busy working toward my Ph.
When researching reviews on the internets, I became aware of a particularly interesting development that I call the pure meta-review.
It seems that it is more hip to discuss movies in purely meta-film reviews, perhaps because no up-and-coming edgy writer or _writer of substance _or _person writing as a day job until their 4 short-story novella is released _wants to be so mundane as to address the actual plot (was Kael the last honest movie reviewer?).
Let’s take The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an example. Now, in the run-up to the release of the film quite a lot of review ado was made from the question of “is this movie / is it not an secret weapon in the Christian front’s attempt to introduce all children to the Crucifixion?
When my sister was in the early grades of elementary school, her class received the recipe for : “E"asy Cheezy Pretzels”. One might ask why the “E” is quoted, that’s because “E” was the letter they were learning at the time.
In any case, the recipe for “E"asy Cheezy Pretzels was often consulted during the long, sweltering summer days that she and I were indoors hiding from the fearsome Texas sun.
For you, the Internet, I would like to share the recipe, in the extended entry
EASY “Che-e-e-sy” Pretzels
1 1/1 c flour 2/3 c milk ½ c shredded cheddar cheese (2 oz.
Recently I’ve added another web zeitgeist story to my read: reddit. I heard about it at StartupSchool and I’ve really enjoyed it lately. Via the aggregator I found the following story about what happens when you take 50 civilians, dress them up like Best Buy employees,
Well I feel like I would be horribly behind on the news of the internet if I didn’t comment on Stephen Colbert calling G.W. Bush “Arsenio” at the White House Correspondents dinner.
Colbert’s vicious use of irony served to show what a chummy, buddy-buddy, insular, self-congratulatory un-virtuous cycle the press’ relationship to the White House has become. He clowned the President, clowned the press, and basically dared say what about two-thirds of the country has come to realize.
Incidentally, it’s a really rough thing to watch. The jaw-dropping from the correspondents and the “is he really saying this?” look from the roastee is priceless; painful, but priceless.
Some quasi-revolutionary thinking in a place where revolutionary thinking is rarely found:
He [Brother Consolmagno] described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it harked back to the days of “nature gods” who were responsible for natural events.
Brother Consolmagno is entirely correct. The human mind has sought to apply reason and narrative to the disorder of our world of experience since the very first humans. First we attributed the creation myths and the “why does X happen” myths to mysterious forces. We then structure those forces to have relationships to one another (The goddess of wisdom erupted whole and unborn outside of the ruler-god, etc.
Wow,
Jermaine Jackson and Pia Zadora: When the Rain Begins to Fall
The badness is absolutely insurmountable.
Note the excellent use of stage dancing as a martial art.
It drives me nuts when sports fans talk about what they would have done had they been coaching.
“Well, if you’d called a time out at 48 seconds you could have run the clock etc.”
“Well, if you’d told your defense to step up their offense wouldn’t have had a chance to score.”
Most of these observations are absolutely vacuous. I’m pretty sure that the quarterback who just took cleet to the guts probably thought “Hm, perhaps I wouldn’t be in this position if my offensive line hadn’t crumbled. When I stand up again, I shall have to confer with these chaps about Bill Swarkowski’s keen observation that they should ‘Grow A Pair and Stop Defending Like a bunch of little girls’.
This headline at MSNBC grabbed my interest.
Who’s to blame for your waistline? An in-depth report on Dateline NBC, August 18, 8 p.m.
You must be joking? Way to pander to the couch-potato demographic.
are we overweight because we are not trying hard enough, or are we overweight because somehow the food and marketing industries have eroded our ability to just say no?
I can’t wait to see this one work. I imagine the world in which the answer is not the individual shoving the calorie-laden sugary stuff into his maw, but the corporation that provides it.
“I’m sorry officer, I didn’t mean to drink and drive, but those irrizzzizztible beats from Lil’ John celebrating the crunk lifestyle have rendered me incapable of not opening my pie-hole and pouring high-octane rum down it.
Reddit has netted myself ( and the now hopelessly addicted Social Bobcat ) a real gem: The Ward Nerd.
“Gary Brecher” ( possibly a nom d’ecrivain de guerre ) writes for [exile.ru][4] and has given non-military people a historical and geopolitical context in which to understand modern warfare. Gary’s text is bleak: tribal warfare makes sense, dying for nation-states is absurd; Hezbollah won, the war in Iraq will be quickly won, but occupation will see total loss.
In modern conflicts, where I’ve been more attentive of late, Gary is like a scalpel, cutting through the media spin and good feelings and photo ops with some goofball in a bomber jacket on an aircraft carrier saying it’s over.
I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz? It’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by Frank Herbert where Herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, I’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.
No, there will be no goth poetry in this post.
After watching Reform School Girls you’d have to be an un-curious person to not want to go and find out more about the life and times of Wendy O(rlean) Williams.
This lady was absolutely fearless.
In her death scene, she moves taut sinews and flesh like a wounded animal. In those few seconds she communicates more animal domination and charisma than any pop star Idolette I’ve ever seen.
If you watch a bit of her videos with The Damned on youtube you see the macho, the preening, the presence, you can feel the way she tells you about the car crash that’s coming, crashes the car, and leaves you gaping at what she just made you see.
First things first, there is nothing manlier than the name Cormac McCarthy.
I think if it were that name stitched into a leather belt…
versus
…a Ford F150 with a poker table in the bed around which cowboys were drinking a case of Black Label while arguing over football while getting straightrazor shaved by strippers while puffing on Cuban stogies
…I think the name on the belt may have an edge.
If you have a last name that can bear that manly weight, then I beg you, give us more Cormac-en.
About The Road, it’s an unsentimental and very realistic portrayal about life after a global firestorm.
Hey all, after a day of running about and signing a lease for a new apartment and finding out that “Pan’s Labyrinth” was sold out we headed home ( after a quick pop in at Border’s to get the Exam cram guide for the Java Programmer Exam ) and Lauren took another spin at GHII.
As a laughing point for those of us familiar with Spinal Tap, they’re one of the “Encore” songs. The round ends, appropriately, with the drummer spontaneously exploding in true Spinal Tap fashion.
The Leauge sent in an email to see if I had fallen off the edge of the world. Although it appears irony has fallen upon The League, for as I type this, his web site has, in fact, fallen off the edge of the world: Blogger appears to be down.
I have not left the gravitational field of this big, blue, glob. There’s a bunch of interesting work stuff going on ( more later ), my mom was in town and I started classes at Austin Community College.
I’m taking two classes: Intermediate Algebra and C++.
First, this is the kind of mathematics I learned in high school ( or should have learned better ).
In effort to contribute something to the internet community more substantial than my musings on music, people in the environment, and a laundry list of “what I did today”, I have decided to undertake ( perhaps ) a series of writings about living with the technology-minded partner. Today I will write on what I have come to call “twitch mode”: what it is, how it affects relationships, and how you and your partner can handle its presence.
Your guy can’t focus on you, your attention is distracted after a day hard at work, everything feels too slow, after juggling chainsaws all day you feel like you’re can’t be involved at home?
Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon.
Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”.
And then the answer became clear….
I realize this is coming some 2 months late from the event, nevertheless, in Google, every moment of history is now, so putting these words to bits late is no crime
During SXSW I saw this shirt everywhere.
Congratulations Target, with this particular item you hit your target demographic square in the chest.
You hit the:
Post-religious, but spiritual ( Buddha ), educated ( correlate to earning power and choices elsewhere in this summation ), making enough money to have disposable income but not so much that they’d be snobby about actually buying clothes at Target, working in the tech industry, Mac-inclined, likely to have relaxed workplace clothing strictures, buys pre-faded so that machine-wash isn’t a hassle male between 21 and 35.
I’ve recorded how I was recently in Boston at the beautiful Westin Boston Waterfront hotel. The foyer is beautiful, the bar dark and sleek, the staff courteous. In every way a high-calibre hotel should be enjoyable, it is.
Ancillary to this aesthetic, when turning on the beautiful plasma LG screen, you are given, instead of some graphic menu of “here are the movies we hope to bilk you an extra x bucks for”, a rotating series of interactive vignettes with this lovely, non-offensive, pretty, but not threateningly hot-pretty, conservatively-dressed, non-Caucasian ( because we’re down wit’ diversitay ) lady as your virtual interlocutor.
I have a philosophy degree and, as such, I am uppity and snippy about a great many philosophical ideas that the non-philosophy-degree-holding public ( that is to say, those not asking “want fries with that” as the heart of their occupation ( I kid, I kid, my decadently over-educated bretheren )) believe they already know plenty about.
Much like an engineering magazine left in marketing, which leads to promises of Flux Capacitors in the next release, the non-Philosophy students occasionally get exposed to strange ideas which enamor them and which they begin to speak of regularly and, more dangerously, knowingly.
Wow.
Adam riding a saddled dinosaur. WMD’s actually being found in Iraq. Evolution being denied for the sake of creationism, er, “Intelligent Design”. Welcome to Idiot America. Where intellectuals are mocked and expertise is suspicious. The organ of wisdom is the gut, the organ of elimination.
Thre are many things in this world that I am not supposed to say, but I find it intolerable that the word “N#gger/a” be used. It such a vile term – and I don’t buy for a minute that whole story of “reclaiming”.
I’m glad to see some others are taking a stand within the community that has the exclusive monopoly on acceptable use of the term.
…at a Black Enterprise event. TMZ reveals that Griffin’s performance was cut short after magazine owner Earl Graves showed the not-so-funnyman the door due to his frequent use of the N-word. “We … will not allow our culture to go backwards … We will pay Mr.
Because they use internal cues – such as no longer feeling hungry – to stop eating, reports a new Cornell study. Americans, on the other hand, tend to use external cues – such as whether their plate is clean, they have run out of their beverage or the TV show they’re watching is over.
This will be spoiler-laden, so if you want to keep the mystery, move on.
##Topic 1: Why was there even a story?
In the back-story some conquistador finds a lost kingdom run by trans-dimensional beings ( aka aliens, but I guess that noun’s too pedestrian ) magic city and STEALS one of the skulls. Our Hero and The Bad Guys contend for the skull and are in the room as it is returned to the body from which it was stolen. This triggers an action such that the “hive mind” of the aliens “re-activates” and they become a living alien entity.
que
Spanish word for interrogation meaning what Spanish and French relative pronoun queue
What British people call a bunch of people standing one after another as they await something ( like entry to a bus, or a movie house ) What your netflix movies are stored in prior to delivery
I feel sorry for the Lesbians.
Imagine, if you will, for a moment that you are a resident of the isle where that finest of Greek poets, Sappho, practiced her craft. While hailing from a tiny island, you have much history of which to be proud: written of by Thucydides, home to no lesser intellects than Aristotle and Epicurus, etc. The Lesbian has a rich classical heritage to be proud of and a vibrant beach-culture in the here-and-now.
But when searchers of the internet go to discover more about your home what do they get? Well.
…And more of it than you can shake a stick at!
Once upon a time there was a genius software developer named Hans Reiser. He used to join Linux forums and lambaste other hackers as being foolish, prodigal, indolent, and was generally a bit of an egomaniacal ass.
In other words, par for the course in the world of software development.
But then he was indicted, and convicted, for the murder of his wife amid a tale of S&M;, Linux development ( intimately linked ), Russian internet-ordered brides, and infidelity.
A crucial feature of the trial was, well, that the cops couldn’t find the body. Upon being found guilty, Reiser seems to have copped a plea with the judge such that he could get a lesser sentence in exchange for the victim’s family and, nota bene, his own children being able to lay the body of their daughter / mother to rest.
Greeting any new Leaguers while The League is away
I am a huge “This American Life” fan. Last year, for my birthday, The Leagues’ bought me an iTunes gift card which I promptly spent on TAL episodes. I got into it when I first moved to CA. Not knowing many people, having those stories there late on Saturday night became part of a ritual that helped me transition to living there.
My absolute favorite episode is #74 “Conventions”. The first segment ( or, “act”, according to show host Ira Glass ) introduces John Connors, a man from the midwest who goes to New York City for a weekend to celebrate “Dark Shadows”.
I was born in Texas, I currently reside in Texas.
My entire life there’s been been one woman, and fellow Longhorn, who has made public service a core part of her life ( and getting rich in banking or oil, or both; about par for the course for Texipublican candidates ): Kay Baily Hutchinson.
I disagree with her on a great many topics, but I agree with her on more than just a few. Keep in mind that this woman served in the Texas legislature before I was born and has been a serving senator since 1993. Now she certainly had a bit of trouble here in Travis county about some misconduct around state resources used for her campaign, but these were not substantiated in a court of law.
I really think Barack, excuse me, The President is really the coolest world leader.
Previously, my list was:
King of Thailand Carla Bruni Angela Merkel of Germany, for freaking out so stylishly when she got the Bush back-rub treatment Now it is
Barack Hussein Obama, POTUS King of all Cosmos Carla Bruni King of Thailand It was a hard choice…
versus
In all seriousness, I recall my mom once saying that in her childhood, the Kennedy era, they thought that the government were “cool” guys. I remember her saying this to me and thinking, this is somewhere in the Bush I era, “you’ve got to be joking.
William Gibson said one of my favorite dicta about the future: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
I feel like a wave of the future washed over my shore recently. I received a postcard from my health benefits program encouraging me to take advantage of “an exciting new service…a personalized, confidential genetic analysis.”
A what?
It continued:
“With a simple DNA test,…you can work with your doctor or a Navigenics genetic counselor”
Say what? Is that a job you can apply for, “genetic counselor?” Can you imagine the resume for the person that applies for that job.
I think Ryan and I must be on a similar wavelength lately as I too was thinking the exact same thing as him: I am thankful to not have come of age in an era where the internet’s depthless hard drives could store my equally depthless teenage narcissism or youthful folly for-ever.
As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?
Mr. CK, mentioned below is a comedian with some poignant, yet “blue” observations on life. You are warned.
From an interview with Louis CK in Slate:
A waitress said to my kids the other day, “Isn’t that nice that you’re getting to have a little lunch with your daddy?” And I was insulted by it, because I’m like, I’m fucking taking them to lunch, and then I’m taking them home, and then I’m feeding them and doing their homework with them and putting them to bed. She’s like, Oh, this is special time with daddy. Well, no, this is boring time with daddy, the same as everything.
I love the track “Heroes” off of Bowie’s album “Heroes.” Bowie was at an interesting inflection point here in his career having burned through two (three?) identities. The iconic cover makes me think of Japanese Noh theatre, perhaps a hint of Bowie’s impending directional shift, but nevertheless falls, rightly, into the designation as being part of “the Berlin Trilogy.” It was a great run of work with Bowie and Brian Eno collaborating in West Berlin and harnessing the city’s schizophrenic energy to paint the beautiful story of the title track “Heroes.”
I, I can remember (I remember) Standing, by the wall (by the wall) And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads) And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall) And the shame, was on the other side Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever Then we could be heroes, just for one day
The other night Lauren and I caught the new film “Ruby Sparks”. Written by Zoe Kazan, Hollywood royalty, and directed by the team that brought us the quirky Little Miss Sunshine a few years ago, “Ruby” seemed like a well-constructed re-visitation of a familiar theme: “If you had the ability to control, edit, and ’tweak’ the behavior of your love interest, would you? And if you did, could you ever possibly be happy with the result?” While the trailer didn’t seem to promise the exploration of any new territory, we were pleasantly surprised to find that it was willing go to new and interesting places.
What is it about tech conferences that makes individuals who work in a highly cerebral and reflective industry like software development go quite so nuts? Why the oral sex jokes, the thong-model backgrounds on slides, etc.? And why are the sponsors so willing to bring out Hooters girls or hire go-go dancers at their events?[1] In short, why does the tech conference misbehavior look so much like the hormonal, puerile misbehavior associated with Spring Break misbehavior? I believe that a contributing force rarely mentioned is the way conventions and their host cities (intentionally or not, tacitly or not) market the host city’s “vice” industries as a selling point[2].
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/lauren-bacalls-coffee-ad-is-cheesy-70s-at-its-best/story-fn907478-1227022842341
Listen to her Mid-Atlantic diction!
I’m going to post this every fall to my friends with young children.
http://m.motherjones.com/media/2014/06/computer-science-programming-code-diversity-sexism-education
Code is the new literacy. IF you let them play with the iPhone or iPad but do not start making them make the games, you are dooming them to be a consumer. You are capping their career mobility. You are ensuring that the people who can code will be their masters for their entire life. You are setting them on a path of servitude and lower-wage in the same way you would if you promoted ESPN over arithmetic flash cards.
If your school does not have CS, rage today.
I recently heard Parag Khanna on the A16Z Podcast and I was sufficiently
interested that I bought and read “Connectography.” In this post I’ll give an
review of the book qua book and also cover an outline of its big ideas.
Note:
In subsequent posts I explore some of those ideas further:
[Connectography and Refactoring][cf]
Connectography
It’s the Hegelian in me: I love a Europe-coming-to-know-itself through history
(and economics) master narrative book. I’ve found the most predictive book for
the last 15 years of economic and global theory has been (Marxist) Hardt &
Negri’s Empire. Empire predicts a move to a global communist panacea only
after global capitalism (i.e. multinationals) guts and obviates the
nation-state. Accordingly to understand capital’s progression to this end, we
should listen to the most passionate global capitalists.
In the early part of the aughts I found the leading writer on the topic to be
(capitalist) Tom Friedman, NYT Op-Ed columnist and author of The World is Flat.
While Friedman always had big ideas, I found his over-emphasis on who he knows
and anecdotes a bit sloppy and frankly, taxing. Like Hegel, Friedman’s work
benefits from being read at a swift clip: he’s meant to be enjoyed like the
Romantics: with loud thundering emotions and sweeping torrents
of vision.
Khanna offers an update on Friedman’s work but with considerably more economic
data. While Friedman was occasionally insufferable in mentioning where he had
lunch and with whom, Khanna’s core critical ideas occasionally get lost in maps
or exhaustive detailing. Given a choice, I’ll take Khanna’s approach and take
the data versus the Friedman’s social itinerary, but we lose sight of many of
his core pillars in the sea of details about Malaysian trade agreements.
[Khanna suggests][prev] that the over-large nation-states of the 19th and 20th
centuries - many of which were created by the fiat and bureaucracy of the
British Empire or other colonialist machinations - be “refactored” in line with
the “SOLID” software design principles. In this post I take the SOLID
principles and try to transform them into the language of national identity
establishment.
SOLID and Refactoring
In my [previous post about “Connectography”][prev] I noted that one of Khanna’s
Big Ideas is that:
Many nation-states are held together by fiat or tradition but have no real
internal attraction to one another: we should let these break apart or break
them apart e.g. Iraq, Yugoslavia.
As a programmer I knew exactly what Khanna was saying. How many times did I,
as a beginner in object-oriented programming, allow a class to stand
unchanged because its functions had “always gone together?”
I began steering away from those negligent practices when I learned the [SOLID
principles][SOLID] listed by “Uncle” Bob Martin. These five simple dicta set a
new bar for how (new) code ought look. But how to go about fixing the
historical messes? For that, I read Martin Fowler’s book [Refactoring][] where
“refactoring” is described as:
…a controlled technique for improving the design of an existing code base.
Its essence is applying a series of small behavior-preserving
transformations, each of which “too small to be worth doing”. However the
cumulative effect of each of these transformations is quite significant.
Having learned from both of these inspirations I was able to methodically pull
apart complexity and limit its creeping in. So in software, so, too, in
nations.
One of the points Parag Khanna brought up in “Connectography” is that mobility
is a key to keeping influential cities thriving. The pointed example he pitches
(around page 122) is that of the city of Detroit (a city I love) which, at one
time, was the wealthiest city in America. As the automobile industry slackened,
the talent largely stayed put hoping that patriotic sentiment (“BUY AMERICAN”)
or trade protectionism would restore their coffers and their civic trajectory.
That, of course, did not happen. Hondas and Toyotas were bought by the boatful
and the future for Detroit diminished with each bill of lading.
But is there a lesson for us that we can take from this error? Let’s take a
look at the systems they had built in the early 80’s in Detroit:
early robotics-based industrial work
industrial development practices expertise
labor facilitation expertise
In 2016 all of those skills are valuable expertise that are, in essence, locked
in an old industry and which will share the fate of it (lest they find a way to
unbundle themselves).
But what might have history looked like if the experts had realized that their
host incubator was not necessary to their success earlier?
…WHAT IF those engineers who built the assembly lines had encoded better logistics systems in software (to rival Germany’s SAP)
…WHAT IF those engineers who built auto-assembly robotics had roboticized the port of SF, the port of Oakland (there might be dock work in SF), been influential in the upgrades to the Panama Canal, Corpus Christ’s port, the Nicaragua canal?
…WHAT IF….that expertise had allowed the first generation of port (re-)builders to win contracts in central America in the late 90’s instead of Chinese competitors in the 2010’s?
If that were the case I could imagine many snowy Monday mornings in Detroit
leading to direct flights to Managua, Corpus, or linking to a hop to Shanghai.
And the reverse could be true as well: Detroit could have become the home of
process optimization, industrial flow analysis and the flights (and capital,
and residents) would be flowing in to offset the decline in automotive
manufacturing dominance.
Based on my reading of Khanna there are two principal institutional changes
that could have helped and one cultural change. Ease of mobility, ease of spot
education, and the unwinding of American exceptionalism. I’ll start with the
last first, after the jump.
I discern again and again some socio-cultural force that I’ve never been able
to identify. It has loomed there, just out of sight, just beyond description for
as long as I’ve had the ability to do serious, adult-grade self-examination and
feel serious, adult-grade remorse.
The words that I had to describe the mysterious force seemed to miss the mark.
It wasn’t just “violence” or “homophobia” or “misogyny” or “jealousy” or
“competition” or “bullying.” It was tinged with “rage” and “depression” and
“isolation,” too. The force also made known to me that it wasn’t going to be a
transient moment or series of moments like “heartbreak” or “grief.” It let me
know that it was a system that would outlast any one man’s emotional state
and would rule us until we stepped into our graves.
When I’ve talked to close friends about pivotal moments where it was there,
whispering cues offstage, I’d often find them dismissing it as a regional
quirk, hangover of patriarchal Abrahamaic religious indoctrination, or
post-Boomer narcissistic greed-culture tenet. But to classify it didn’t provide
me relief or insight. Still unresolved, recently I’ve found myself triggered
when hearing of friends’ kids encountering it. But I still could not name
it until Lauren found its secret name and told it to me.
This force that made so much of how and where I grew up hard to survive and
intolerable to me as an adult is called: domination-based masculinity. And
here’s the rub, it’s been ruining all of our lives for a very long time.
Named by Mark Greene, this short video shows how it works.
The upshot is that boys are policed from a very early age to “be tough” and
“not like women” thus femininity and emotional availability are disparaged. In
an effort to scourge the hated woman-ness out of themselves, boys are taught
that scourging woman-kind (physically, emotionally, sexually) is a behavior
that can be used to augment their masculine esteem.
I was walking down Broadway the other day and a trio of teen boys were talking
and walking when one of them copped his best New York accent — something
between the average resident of Pachogue, Long Island and Tony Soprano —
and said “I got a guy.” His friends laughed, and the rest of their interaction
carried on.
I think “having a guy” reveals something profound about New York City. Here we
are, piled upon each other in great density. How is the customer to be served
when those who can provide service e.g.:
Those on the floor at a department store
Those behind the glass cases at a jeweler’s
Those across the counter at a fast-food joint
Those pulling box after box of shoes “from the back”
I have always admired the English culture of organization, communication, and
frankly, civilization. There are some definite low-points (Boer War, Partition
of India, Partition of the Mideast, Partition of the Kingdom’s Islands), but there is
some attention paid to how things “ought be done for the welfare of all.”
For example, pregnant women get an adorable pin (UK: “badge”) consistent with
the look and feel and design aesthetics of the Underground that say “baby on
board” which lets everyone know, “Hey, give up the seat” — even in the
weeks and months when it’s not quite so obvious. Experiencing the anti-case in
NYC and France, it’s a good idea.
I also admire that the English take the tube’s visual monopoly as an
opportunity to extol civic virtues.
Like most American children, I was taught cursive writing around 4th
grade. I was then obligated to write in it, and my poor teachers were forced to
read it, through the 8th grade. As students entered high school, we
were deemed intelligent enough to decide which handwriting scheme we preferred.
All of that, of course, was becoming moot by the rising prevalence of
electrical typewriters and computers. But when my school-supply-kit-issued Bic
ball-point pen reached paper, I opted for print letter-forms.
But somewhere in my 20’s, I rediscovered cursive and now primarily write in it
with a fountain pen (when I’m not at a keyboard). And when I saw linguist John
McWhorter take cursive to task in a recent Times article, I saw
both a pragmatic (wrist pain and hand cramp) and an aesthetic reason that it
should remain in curricula.