December 2008
66 posts
“Photography did not become an art because it employed a device opposing the...”
– Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image. Rancière remains—tragically, and without good explanation—woefully under-appreciated in the circles of contemporary theory and philosophy. His Nights of Labor and The Philosopher and his Poor were magisterial indictments of an institutionalized...
I think I quite like the tendency people have to fumble and stutter about when referring to having “read” audiobooks: “Yeah, I read—or, no—listened to that.”
Usually my anti-Luddite instincts reign supreme and I embrace the New at whatever price, but when my mother tells me she’s recently read Henry James (or, no—listened to), something smells.
My...
Kanye West — Welcome to Heartbreak
This is...
“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I...”
– Sigmund Freud, upon being introduced as “the discoverer of the unconscious” at his seventieth birthday celebration.
There’s little to add to the Kristoff kerfuffle that hasn’t already been said better and more intelligently by biteofpythias, but I won’t let that stop me from tossing in my $0.02.
I think the issue becomes particularly thorny when secularism is injected, at least if one considers the very compelling thesis put forth by Jeffrey Stout in his Democracy and Tradition. His general...
Herodotus reported in “On the customs of Persians” in his Histories that it is “their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk; and then on the morrow, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made.”
In a similar spirit, it seems that any summertime...
It seems to me that a national mythology premised on victimization is a very dangerous thing. If Rome (see the fall of Troy), the United States (see Britain) and Israel (see the Holocaust) are any guide, that mythology’s adherents have a troubling tendency to interpret it as a license for all sorts of imperialistic adventures.
“We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like...”
– Lionel Trilling. [I promise: I’ll stop quoting Trilling as soon as he stops being awesome.]
“We are still haunted by a kind of political fear of the intellect which...”
– Lionel Trilling, coming to the critical defense of Henry James.
“Splash that sucker, yeah! That was me laughing, dickhead. Yeah, well so is my...”
– The inimitable Brainland channels Slider from “Top Gun” on my Facebook wall upon discovering (via bite of Pythias / fatmanattee / conorgriff) that Rick Rossovich has a blog.
“The repeal of Moore’s Law would create a renaissance for software development....”
– Steve Wozniak (via mattlehrer and mikehudack)
Woz’s big picture take on this is wonderful. I think there’s another equally significant inflection point that runs in the same spirit, and this is that Moore’s Law often represents for software development and computing what...
“Class power is, in itself, evasive because it is a social relation that eludes...”
– David Harvey, Limits to Capital, introduction to the 2006 Verso edition.
Not hatin', just sayin'
I love a good popularity contest as much as the next guy, but I’ll be sitting out the first annual Tumblr Awards out of protest that I can’t cast a vote for Mills in the category of “Best Original Content/Editorials.”
All this despite the fact that his not being nominated spared me the inevitable paralysis in the voting booth induced by a choice between him and Magic...
By far the best holiday gift I received this year was the twenty minutes my family spent at dinner last night diagramming sentences and passionately arguing both for and against the possibility that ”Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct statement in the English language.
In the immortal words of Liz Lemon: “Nerds!”
The Raveonettes — The Christmas Song
Happy...
Rihanna Ready to Rock Obama Inaugural Ball →
Those who know me know there are few things in the world that could please me more than this. Though I must take issue…
“Rihanna’s always willing to help out,” a source tells PEOPLE. “She’s a good girl.”
Make that a Good Girl Gone Bad.
“If only life were not so tangible, so concrete, so made up of facts that are at...”
– Lionel Trilling
“The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all...”
– Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen in “Network.”
“Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical...”
– Just one of the many laughable and delightfully inane case studies in how not to do philosophy, courtesy of Y Combinator partner Paul Graham’s (ironically titled?) essay, “How to Do Philosophy.”
Another choice sample: “Though the first philosophers in the western tradition...
The West Wing, "H. Con 172"
Donna: You know if it started snowing yet?
Carol: It hasn't.
Donna: How is it supposed to be 18 inches by the morning if it hasn't started yet?
Carol: Accumulates by a magnitude, does a thing, I don't know.
Donna: Okay.
Donna: Josh?
Josh: Yeah?
Donna: You wanted me to tell you when it's 10:45.
Josh: See ya.
Donna: I'll get home fine.
Josh: What's the problem?
Donna: It's not fit for man nor beast out there.
Josh: Has it started snowing yet?
Donna: It accumulates by a magnitude.
I’ve never felt older than just now when seeing my carbonated beverage of choice (Diet Coke) billed by a prominent online pizza delivery establishment as “Beautifully balanced adult cola taste in a no calorie beverage.”
Internet Explorer 6
I die a little bit on the inside every time I lose two days of my life trying to make new revisions of our product function in IE6, considering the fact that the only people who still use that browser are homeless guys looking at porn on public library terminals.
topherchris, my hero. →
Hats off to you, Christopher. This is the most riotously funny thing I’ve seen in a long time.
I ♥ my Mac.
I discovered an undocumented keyboard shortcut today in Windows: turns out that if you furiously pound your fist on the keyboard of a laptop the system will reboot. All with 66% fewer keystrokes than ctrl+alt+del.
Pavement — Cataracts (unreleased)
The latest...
WatchSo, so NSFW, but so, so amazing.
(high-quality version here)
Just got a call from a friend in D.C. who’s privy to some of the finer logistics of inaugural event planning, and apparently if only a million people show up to the Mall (a low-end estimate) there will be a ratio of roughly 6,800 people to each portable toilet.
J.J. Cale — Clyde
This song is in the vein...
Ron Howard confirms Arrested Development movie →
What a fun sexy time for all of us.
(via gillianmae)
Whenever I walk into a public (unisex) bathroom to wash my hands and notice the seat is up I habitually put it down out of fear that the next occupant will be a woman standing right outside who’ll assume I was the unconscientious jerk who left it up in the first place.
Shame evidently has quite a hold on my life.
I’m reminded of something Marco posted some time back on the subject of musical work motivators. He said “whenever I’m listening to Phish at work, I’m getting a lot done.”
Since I’ve been steadily pulling 10-16 hour days since Thanksgiving I’ve had to resort more often than usual lately to my preferred motivator. Confessing what it is will likely be the most...
“An Obama job approval rating of 79%—that’s the sort of rating you...”
– Bill Schneider, CNN
Inasmuch as a.) the likelihood of a subway line to run above ground while servicing frigid passengers in uninsulated station stops is vastly increased in direct proportion to the distance from an urban center, b.) property values bear an inversely linear relationship to that distance, and c.) the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, it is therefore easily...
“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been...”
– Isaac Newton
Jace: You're going to Starbucks, not Dunkin' Donuts?
Me: Yeah, I hate Dunkin' Donuts. Though I don't know why; they're functionally equivalent. There's just something about the Dunkin' Donuts aesthetic that bothers me.
Jace: Well, one's faux-proletarian and the other's faux-bourgeoisie, so pick your flavor.
Sound the alarm
The nation’s capital is being invaded by grown-ups:
The new Congress will reassert its constitutional independence from the White House by barring the vice president from joining in internal Senate deliberations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview with The Sun. The move is intended to restore checks and balances to a system that tilted heavily toward the White House in...
P.S.
Last night’s quip about ‘transformative hermeneutics’ was a joke: I’m finally getting around to reading “The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy” (summarized here), which has occasioned my first re-reading of Sokal’s irreverent horseshit in quite some time.
I’ve naturally got very little tolerance for intellectually fraudulent grenades being...
I find myself still thinking about Andrew Sullivan, which bothers me. I also find myself agreeing with Michelle Malkin, which bothers me even more.
But what bothers me most of all is this completely subjective and unregulated wild west of public opinion wherein influential people on soapboxes make the final call on what qualifies as legitimate inquiry and what crosses that blurry and ambiguous...
Weezer — The World Has Turned
Remember when...
Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a...
(just kidding!)
“Wikipedia’s list of Unix utilities is my new source for startup ideas. I...”
– far33d
Honda quits Formula 1 →
I’ve written before on the positive impact of F1 on automotive technology, and today’s news is mildly devastating for the future of innovation.