CBS Vs. A Ray Gun
Now thems some quality reportin'!
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February 29, 2008
Spider
February 28, 2008
PlayMobile Security Checkpoint
The Amazon reviews for this playset are pretty entertaining.
"I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.
The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I've heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I'll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush)."
Your World, Delivered
SugarDaddyForMe.com
What the fuck? I spend ten hours a day online, and I had no idea pimping yourself out for grad-school money to intellectually and emotionally stunted MBAs was now legal. One thing strikes me as I watch their ad: the company's customers are all really, really smart. Enlightened, even. The ad screams Zen mastery and self-knowledge.
Alternet has an interesting article up on what it's like to be one of the girls for SugarDaddyForMe.com, which has been around for a few years. Were bangbus and goatse to have an Internet love child it would seem healthier to me than this cultural seepage:
"There is actually no stack of cash large enough to persuade me to have sex with this guy, but as his income is listed as "more than $1,000,000," I feel slighted. I ask why he uses this website if he's not prepared to dole it out, and he says regular dating sites don't cater to his preferences regarding age or "sensuality," and that the young girls on Craigslist are all unclassy whores. This statement is followed by an offer of $500 to "get into" my "cooch."
My double vodka doesn't do nearly enough to muffle his egotistical blather ("Enough about me," he says 20 minutes in. "Tell me about you. What do you think about me?") or the commentary he provides about his, um, girth. My roommate -- charged with checking in on me -- texts, "If he gets you the guacamole egg rolls you owe him a BJ. Also, ask him if I can have a pony.'
When I arrive home to a houseful of twentysomethings, we rail against the lowball. The lone male in the group asks, "Would it have made a difference if he'd been attractive?" Nobody answers for a second. "Probably," I concede, and everyone reluctantly agrees; we are all sex-positive feminists here, offended not that he offered me money for sex, but that he offered so little and was so gross, and if the idea of doing him were palatable, and I were single, it's possible he'd be doing double duty as my boyfriend and payroll officer."
Depression Is Good For You
Go figure. Depression is often a perfectly healthy biological message from your body that means you need re-asses your shitty decisions, not necessarily drown your synapses in serotonin, head back to your cubicle and pretend that you don't hate your husband/wife/orthodontist/vacuum sales job/life.
"A leading psychiatrist says that depression is not a human defect at all, but a defence mechanism that in its mild and moderate forms can force a healthy reassessment of personal circumstances.
Dr Paul Keedwell, an expert on mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, argues all people are vulnerable to depression in the face of stress to varying degrees, and always have been.
The fact it has survived so long - and not been eradicated by evolution - indicates it has helped the human race become stronger."
Nemesis Wanted
Watch
February 26, 2008
Festival of Ignorance
Comcast Hires Random Boobs To Cheer Them At Public Meeting
Comcast paid a bunch of yokels money to take up seats and cheer for the company's executive at a recent public hearing exploring how the company covertly limits their customers' use of certain bandwidth-intensive Internet services.
The random people were given highlighters and took up seats that would have otherwise been occupied by people who might be critical of the company. Most of them didn't do a very good job, falling asleep and telling other attendees that they had absolutely no idea why they were there. This guy sounds like the next president.
It really doesn't get more "American" than this.
Garfield Without Garfield
Someone pulled Garfield from the Garfield comic strip and the result is actually a slight increase in humor value.
These are also interesting. Click on a date then click on the "Lasagna cat" image for different ones.
The Subprime Crisis Explained By Stick Figures
February 25, 2008
The Grin
Windows Vista: A Good Deal Better Than Techno-Seppuku
I built a new PC from scratch over the weekend (for the geeklings interested it's an Intel E8400, 8800GT, Gigabyte X38-DS4 with a terabyte of drive space and 8 gigs of ram...yes I'm sexy.), and finally upgraded to Windows Vista. In fact I supposedly engaged in absolute sado-masochism by embracing the 64 bit version.
Reading the commentary of my tech blogging brothers and sisters (as well as opinions in mags like Maximum PC) I expected the experience to be akin to technological seppuku. A year of pretty much constant hand wringing and tsk-tsk-tsking by techies had me ready to experience my first operating system root canal meets arctic silver enema.
But other than some annoyances trying to get AHCI/Raid drivers installed and some early problems with network transfer speeds (hot fixable), the OS seems solid. A lot of this is because I'm running it on a PC that would think Hal had a learning disability, but still -- it runs every app and the fastest games without slowdown. And it's purty.
In all, Vista is a good deal better than plunging a sword into your digestive tract.
I think you need a decent PC to run it (don't fling it at your 1999 HP piece of shit and expect Jesus to appear), and I think it was wise to wait for the initial headaches to be cured (iPod syncing for x64 was only resolved just last week), but I think at this point in Vista's life-cycle it's about time for some techno-pundits to stop pretending the OS is the technological equivalent of mainlining Drain-o.
3 Year Old Summarizes Star Wars
February 22, 2008
“Never tell me the odds!”
Hell yes I'm geek enough to want a Han Solo frozen in carbonite desk.
Hey Jude
February 21, 2008
Bionic Bambi
Taxidermy art gets pretty funky, and the work of Lisa Black is no exception.
Hunter S Thompson's Got Nothing On Meghan McCain
I just discovered John McCain's daughter has an on the road campaign blog.
"Today we woke up and had a rally in our hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A really cute crowd of young people came out and it was a great way to get the energy started for the day. . . We're on to Toledo and Michigan tomorrow where I hear we're headed to a dairy farm. (I might just try to milk a cow...)"
OMG teh awesome! I'd like to hear her thoughts on how many dead Middle-Eastern kids 100 years of occupation can produce! Or would that alienate the young and dumb demographic that her handlers are trying to target with this processed cheese? The next time you get annoyed with your job, stop and appreciate the fact that there's almost absolutely a hired PR goon whose job is to screen every one of her vacuous ramblings for anything vaguely resembling independent thought.
You can almost smell the privilege. Definitely the next Hunter S Thompson.
Cult of Mac
I own a Mac. A Powerbook G4. It works. The battery blows, the power cord is cheap as hell and is about to be replaced for the third time, and Safari with its rainbow wheel of death is miserably apocalyptic piece of shit -- but otherwise it's, well, a pretty laptop that works pretty well.
But I hate the cult of Mac. I can't think of a single mass-delusion more obnoxious outside of Scientology, or people who think Hayden Christensen can act.
Someone actually said this today in response to a negative review of the MacBook Air:
"Apple products are measured against their own unique metrics, outsiders need not attempt to understand as it's not for you anyway."
Every PR person who has worked at Apple for the last decade deserves a matching 401k and a new boat for the way they've mutated an entire class of human being into lobotomized brand warriors. This is a company that consistently manages to do the same sleazy shit as every other company, yet somehow maintains their FIsher Price meets German minimalism image.
As I wrote this Apple sent me an e-mail saying the iPod Shuffle I just spent $70 on three weeks ago is now available for $40.
Thanks.
February 20, 2008
Quality
CNN Has Standards. Just The Wrong Ones.
The energy CNN should be directing at improving the inane, lobotomized crap they put on the air, is apparently instead spent on monitoring employee blogging habits and firing them for writing things that aren't endorsed by HR.
February 19, 2008
Obay
These anti-pharma advertisements have started popping up around Ontario and Montreal. Locals believe they're the culture-jamming work of local universities.
Ouroboros
Near Life Experience says: "The Armadillo Lizard adopts a curious defensive posture when threatened by rolling itself up like an Armadillo, with its tail tightly held in its jaws, presenting a spiny ring to the predator and protecting the softer, vulnerable belly area."
Ahoy, the Ouroboros: "The Ouroboros, also spelled Ourorboros, Oroborus, Uroboros or Uroborus (pronounced /ˌjʊəroʊˈbɒrəs/), is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle. It has been used to represent many things over the ages, but it most generally symbolizes ideas of cyclicality, unity, or infinity. The ouroboros has been important in religious and mythological symbolism, but has also been frequently used in alchemical illustrations. More recently, it has been interpreted by psychologists, such as Carl Jung, as having an archetypical significance to the human psyche."
February 15, 2008
Anti-Piracy Ad- Parody
I really do love how the film industry's solution for piracy is to annoy the living shit out of legitimate DVD owners and renters with those obnoxious anti-piracy ads you can't skip, while people who pirate films via BitTorrent don't have to watch them because the pirates have stripped that kind of crap out to conserve space for file transfer. I mean that's a little fucking ironic, don't you think?
Bayer's Concern For Profits = 22,000 Dead
"The lives of 22,000 patients could have been saved if U.S. regulators had been quicker to remove a Bayer AG drug used to stem bleeding during open heart surgery, according to a medical researcher interviewed by CBS Television's 60 Minutes program.....Bayer failed to disclose to the FDA during an FDA advisory panel meeting in September 2006 -- at which Mangano's negative findings were discussed -- that the German drugmaker had conducted its own research which confirmed the same dangers established by his study."
Yeah, whoops. (Reuters)
Telecom Immunity
Occasionally the talking cable meat heads get something right.
February 14, 2008
Jacob Epstein
"The Rock Drill" 1914 (Via)
If I remember correctly this is sitting on the third floor of MOMA in NYC by the elevators. I've always liked it for some reason. I think it reminds me of Maximillian from The Black Hole.
paleontologist
When I was a child, and I was asked by the teacher what I wanted to do when I grew up, my answer was NOT:
a sysiphisian "writer-esque" occupation where every moment of every day, everything I produced was to be commented on ad-nauseam by a never-ending legion of half-insane, ultra-conservative, greedy, parasitical shiheels who believe that American corporations are utterly infallible and that anything resembling humanism or empathy is essentially the same as communism.
Actually, I think my answer was paleontologist.
Major Tech Bloggers Don't Discuss Telecom Immunity
Reading Techmeme (a site that breaks down everything tech currently being written/blogged about) depresses me. Assuming it really does reflect ongoing discourse.
Conversations about startups, conversations about revenue, conversations about startup revenue, but I can't seem to see any conversations about the fact that we're giving AT&T and Verizon complete retroactive immunity for handing over all civilian phone & Internet data to Uncle Sam without any real form of judicial oversight.
I mean it is technology, right?
The idea that changing the law to protect these companies' finances has anything to do with national security is covered by a layer of patriotic fear-mongering idiocy that, if we had a functional press, would be dissected and discarded as reporters did their job: reporting the truth.
I know I'm supposed to believe these days that the truth is a floating point that moves based on how compelling my argument is, but I'm stubborn like that. The truth is the truth, and the truth here is that AT&T and Verizon spent millions in lobbying cash to get Uncle Sam to protect them from lawsuits that show they're funneling ALL consumer Internet traffic directly to the NSA without functional checks and balances, judicial oversight, or anything vaguely resembling either.
The top tech-bloggers in the land can't be bothered to even cover the issue. The political version of Techmeme lacks any discussion of it, either. Strangely I see a lot of individual bloggers talking about it, but it's something the major technology blog networks don't touch much on. I just did a search for "immunity" at probably the two hottest Silicon Valley technology blogs right now and found one post combined at both that even addressed the issue.
Maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe the major blog networks are as vapid and one-dimensional as cable news channels out of fear of upsetting fickle, partisan user-bases and/or advertisers by actually discussing issues of substance. I don't see any of them ever really rattle the cage of the current paradigm.
Or maybe they just don't care. Maybe the world to them is a giant candy store where the only relevant topics of worth are those that involve them, or the people and venture capitalists they know, making additional income via their latest startup-promoting conference.
By the way, if you give a shit about checks and balances and privacy, contact your Representative this week.
I Guess Madonna Shouldn't Direct
This Guardian review of her new film is probably more entertaining than the new film:
"Well, it had to happen. Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now - fiercely aspirational as ever - she has graduated to being a terrible director. She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens. She is also the producer and co-author of the script. If she'd done the location catering as well, they'd have had a Jonestown situation on their hands.
Madonna has made a dumb and tacky comedy-drama about three people sharing a flat in a quaintly conceived "London" and her conception of super-cool streetwise reality is so clueless it's as if Marie Antoinette had made a film about cake-munching peasants."
February 13, 2008
Mark Goffeney
Mark Goffeney. Balboa Park, San Diego
Anonymous Scientology Protest
Jobs And Stuff
From a local board member in my hometown region commenting on bringing Best Buy to the neighborhood:
"Vestal is in need of more businesses like Best Buy to come in on the Parkway. It diversifies the economy, and it also helps people project and get jobs and stuff," says board member Fran Majewski."
Some hard hitting local reporting, that. I love how the reporter digs head first into whether the Best Buy actually benefits the community in any way culturally or economically.
People get jobs and stuff. High quality jobs, indeed. And there's already eighty million big-box stores on that strip, so any diversification is hallucinated. Like most American Northeast towns, the city center was decimated as local shopowners were crushed in a variety of ways. All local cash is sucked out of the area and delivered elsewhere, while employees get the bare minimal medical and other coverage. Perhaps that's what Fran means by diversity.
Of course I'm currently reading Naomi Klein's No Logo finally, some eight years after I should have. Back when it was published in 2000, I was sucking down gin in Manhattan, worried primarily about when I'd get my corner office with a window.
February 12, 2008
La Pequeña Prohibida
This was in my inbox. It terrifies me.
Painting With Pollution
Ryan Heshka
Mass Producers Of Distortion
"Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda."
Sorry About The Down Time
I was so grieved by Mitt Romney's decision to drop out of the Presidential race, I committed blog seppuku.
I mean really, who will serve my favorite corporations interests with as much vim and vigor as Mitt would have?
Sure, both Hillary and John McCain will probably coddle the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries as their primary constituents, but they just lack the wholesale passion for selling their entire culture down the river Mitt would have displayed.
Anyway, I'm back now.
