March 2009
78 posts
“I Happen to Like New York” by Bobby...
February 2009
58 posts
Budget forecast.
The coming weeks are sure to be a spectacle. The figurative Republican deficit hawk that flew away so many years ago will make an exalted return, coming in for a celebrated landing on Mitch McConnell’s forearm much like Mordecai’s return to Richie in The Royal Tenenbaums. Democrats like Pelosi and Durbin will be most assuredly demonized, with the “tax and spend liberals”...
I was just about to pull the trigger on a new Amazon Kindle when I saw this bullet point in their promotion and got distracted by violent, uncontrollable rage: “Low Book Prices: New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise.”
There are two problems with this sentence, both of which stem from the same root cause: the publishing industry is fucked!
So...
“The strength of America is not found in its government.”
– Gov. Bobby Jindal, demonstrating that now, as always, the Republican party platform is reducible to a complex series of hand-waving and speech-like utterances circling around the central axiom of a big government straw man.
“Dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting...”
– President Obama to the United States Congress, Feb. 24, 2009.
I think the gravest threat to the web’s infrastructure is no longer that of the thirteen-year-old in Nebraska who brings the entire internet backbone to it’s knees by connecting Facebook to Twitter to last.fm to Tumblr to Flickr to imeem to FriendFeed, initiating a recursive and infinite loop of redundant packet transfer which halts all other IP transmissions, crashes NASDAQ, and...
Seeing as I’m shy, socially dysfunctional, and horrible with women, there’s little I have to offer the world in the way of dating advice save for a highly active imagination and this brief list of Non-Confrontational Courtship Tactics For Winning Over Office Hotties. The actual number of these I’ve attempted, successfully or not, will, for the sake of my own dignity, have to...
"Techcrunch are full of shit." →
Amen.
Chromeo v. Rihanna v. The-Dream v. Cut Copy from...
When we’re young we wake up on Sunday mornings and watch cartoons. When we’re older we wake up on Sunday mornings and watch cartoons we call “political talk shows.”
At Work: The Big Picture →
From Boston.com:
When the economy makes big news, many photographs of people at work come across the wires, usually to help illustrate a particular story or event. By collecting these disparate photos over the past few months, I found that a global portrait emerged of we humans producing things. People assembling, generating, and building items small and large, mundane and expensive, trivial and...
I like a good routine. I like the way ritual can humanize our day-to-day lives. I like the way Clark Gable exhaustively describes his undressing habits for Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night.”
Lately I’ve noticed that If I start “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” right when I’m leaving my apartment, there’s at least a one in ten chance that Stephen...
“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since...”
– the opening paragraph of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.
Coworker, upon finishing a bowl of Cheerios: Dude, you know what I just did?
Me: What?
Coworker: I just lowered my cholesterol!
me: i eat delivery pizza almost nightly.
me: my life is a parody of itself
brainland: EW
me: IKNORITE.
me: also, that was a joke.
me: i would never seriously type 'iknorite.'
me: because i'm not 'scene'
brainland: blogging it...
brainland: ...jk?
me: the many-layered irony at work here is unfolding like a Derridean text.
me: (that was recursive, obvs).
brainland: I just vomitted on my keyboard. You want to buy me a new one?
me: ARE YOU BEING IRONIC? I CANT TELL ANYMORE.
brainland: no, I was making fun of you
me: oh.
brainland: it's cool, baby
me: so are you blogging this or what? why the fuck else do we use google talk if not to blog about it?
me: i mean, amirite?
brainland: I'll blog if you reblog.
me: SO RECURSIVE.
Meta.
I remarked to someone over email the other day how it would make for an interesting social experiment to take Julia Allison’s recent comment about internet civility and reword it just enough to decontexualize it, then post it as a quote attributed to Barack Obama and sit back and watch how wildly it was reblogged. I’m confident the data would be compelling.
Tumblr had a public...
A song so subtly nuanced it requires a chart.
Me: So I was reading Faulkner last night--
Coworker: --yeah?
Me: Yeah.
Coworker: Was he doing that thing he does? When he punches you in the balls over and over again, telling you each time how you'll never write as well as he can no matter how hard you try?
Me: Yeah, basically.
Coworker: And then he got drunk and slept with your mom?
Sales displays at bookstores featuring the works of the recently deceased always strike me as a sort of shameless profiteering. So I rationalize: death is as fine an occasion as any on which to draw attention to an author, if for no other reason than that this—save for any posthumous late additions—is the moment when an oeuvre is officially complete.
Yet today I passed a DFW spread...
An oldie (in internet time) but so good: Matt...
My grandmother died about an hour ago.
I had no relationship with her—I think I’ve seen her twice over the last decade—yet her passing has jarred me. Not her death, per se, but rather the circumstances and confluences surrounding it.
I was raised in a divorced household, which meant I had eight grandparents. As of now there are none left, and it’s hard for me to digest...
Listen
“One point that seems to be largely lost in the discussions about what to do...”
– Atrios
When the GOP is in the minority,
60 is the new 50.
Update your civics textbooks accordingly.
“Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust...”
– from: Bill, to: Mills.
The advent of the personal computer—and the many layers of abstraction with which it makes accessible the immensely powerful and yet indecipherable machine language at its core—has produced a generation of computer users who need not have an intimate familiarity with the goings on behind their monitors. This should be considered a Good Thing.
What should not be considered a Good Thing...
“The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow...”
– T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent. In reply to my question of whether twittering can be poetry, Chris Muscarella, a fellow survivor of my alma mater, presented this link to Eliot’s piece, elegantly typeset and offered up as part of a praiseworthy effort to “to bring great...
Form and Twitter
Twitter pulled in a truckload of a C-round this week, and for good reason. For such an alarmingly simple utility it offers a diverse array of potential uses. Jack Dorsey may have conceived the project as a status service akin to instant messenger away messages, but it has evolved—as these things tend to—into a multi-faceted communication medium.
And as is so often the case, one of...
Unfollowed
While I’m a big fan of v.5 of the Tumblr dashboard, I’ve found the way it front-pages follower counts to be something of a nuisance. That number is a distraction from an activity that ought to be about creation, curation, and conversation, not vanity or popularity.
Also, I made the mistake of watching this today, which almost made my head explode.
And because writing code on...
So I may have just spent $20.00 on Tumblr...
Because giving money to startups that provide great, free services on the internet just feels good.
Late update: $20.00 $24.00
Later update: $20.00 $24.00 $28.00. Oh fuck all this is getting out of hand.
Laterer update: $20.00 $24.00 $28.00 $32.00. Done now. For real.
Personal aesthetics tend towards the value-neutral. Often they result from no conscious judgment whatsoever (cf. Wal-Mart chic as an imposition of economic conditions). On occasion we see positive assertions in fashion—allegiance to a sports franchise, membership in a subculture, identification with a particular musical genre—though these are morally silent. Even rarer in fashion is...
Rihanna — Good Girl Gone Bad
Fuck you, Chris...
Jem — Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney...
The frequency with which the eyes of two unwitting lovers will meet through a subway car window—as compared to the sum of all other such encounters—has less to do with good statistical fortune than with the pane of glass which separates them.
GOP senator over-shares on Twitter →
Democratic caucus reportedly “lulz.”
Jeremy Irons reads the first chapter of Lolita.
Funny, for about as long as I’ve had a pulse it’s been all too clear that political journalists tend to be puerile twits whose small minds can’t comprehend the nuances of a public policy debate, let alone communicate them. So they fill airtime with the only things they know: polling data and gossip. And public policy suffers as a result.
Yet it’s taken me this long to...
Katy Perry — Hot ‘n’ Cold (Yelle...
Maybe the reason why life never plays out the way it does in movies is because we find it easier to wait for the cinematic simply to happen to us, rather than making cinema out of what we’ve been dealt.