?? October 2005 | Main | December 2005 ??
Talking to Google
And I notice that right now there's a whole bunch of links for Taxis in my google adsense, no doubt the result of the taxi article below. I wonder what "I'm such a whore" will bring me.
I'm such a whore
Partially inspired by this Onion column, I've installed Explorer Destroyer. Why not get paid to push people in the right direction?
Sexy sexy journalism
Hot or not for the news correspondent crowd. Also features a credibility vote.
Have you been to Pen Island?
Sometimes, compound words get split incorrectly in the reader's mind. As do these unfortunate URLs.
Placing Nutjobs on the Cartesian Coordinate System
The Poor Man has come up with a detailed graph of Wankery versus Wingnuttery in pundits in which the New York Times Op-Ed page bisects the origin with a slope of 1. It's amazing what conclusions a graph can draw.
FutureWatch: No jet packs yet, but this taxi design is pretty cool
NYT discusses this concept design for cabs of the future. Of course, the real question is, what will it look like with gum stuck all over it, and no bumper? Also it looks a little top heavy for highway driving. Apparently there are highways in the outer boroughs.
Wouldn't it be nice if congestion pricing went into effect and these babies were a prime conveyance through the city streets? Better yet, how about if these things were unmanned and therefore cheaper? Slide your metrocard and go anywhere in the city. It can happen people!
Wow, that wasn't so hard...
Marginal Revolution looks at how Islamo-American relations went 200 years ago.
s0wn -y
Buy a CD from Sony music recently? Did you put it in your computer? The disc may have contacted the mother ship and put your computer at risk of attack. Doxpara made this pretty picture of servers experiencing sony rootkit-related traffic:
As seen on Fark...
The winning entry for "What Cartoon Characters do in their spare time"...
Empire State Building, post-bris
You never look up in this city. At 42nd street and 5th, there's an Empire State Building clone -- almost identical, except no capital. Weird! Via the Ubell Brothers, on the Leonard Lopate show.
Boy Genius or Aging Mediocrity?
Amadeus, Amadeus. Can you distinguish Salieri from the Moz?
Ahh, vhf screws.
For what it's worth, BoingBoing and Digg have posted this scan of the Pong owner's manual.
MPAA Lobbies for Retroactive Cutesy Celeb Couple Names
Washington, November 6th - Spurred by success with Bennifer, Tomkat, and Brangelina, the MPAA has proposed legislation to extend its current celebrity couple naming scheme to 1923.
Under the new rules:
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall will now be LoHump.
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy will now be Spepburn.
Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio will now be Mo-Di-Ro.
Liz Taylor and Richard Burton will now be Lizard.
MPAA President Jack Valenti, whose penchant for overstatement is well known, cast the proposal in black and white terms: "These rules exist to make celebrities easier to remember for a new generation of moviegoers. Anyone who would deprive future generations of the golden age of hollywood gossip is worse than Evadolf."
Avoiding a Netflix Rut
This advice was given to me recently: Send them back unwatched often.
I stopped Netflix about a year ago because I became overly ambitious with my movie selections. No one can watch three Tarkovskies in one week. Not even Tarkovsky. And so my dvds would sit on the coffee table, like some demonic Poe creation, waiting for me to invest 3 hours of my life.
The new strategy, if I decide to renew, will be to send anything back which hasn't been watched within seven days. I'll then manually place it on the end of the queue if I feel it's worthy of another shot. It's like the "pass" option in the $50,000 pyramid.
Was Toccata and Fugue not Bach's?
I always thought it was a bit melodramatic for Bach. Now there's some serious debate about its origins.
Star Wars the greatest postmodern artwork ever?
It's a helluva turd to polish, but it's Aidan Wasley's theory. The basic argument: "the Force" is an overt representation of the mechanics of plot. It brings C3PO and R2D2 to Luke at just the moment when they'd have to get there, for instance, to move the story ahead. And so on. The whole yarn is held together by a very thin thread which can only be explained by unseen forces at work. Meanwhile, the Empire represents pure will and control, the opposite of the fatalism that, say, drops Luke within a mile of Yoda when he crash-lands on a presumably earth-sized planet. In other words, Star Wars is "about" the illusion of causality, and the folly of will.
It's one thing to claim that artistry can be unintentional, but it's another to argue that Lucas' hamfisted storytelling is a virtue. Taken in historical context, a thing that postmodernists are usually loathe to do, we realize that the plot is more like Darth Vader than Yoda: The movie starts with something relatively organic: two robots are dropped into the desert after their spaceship is invaded. A nice little seventies throwback to Flash Gordon. Then Lucas begins to beleive his own press, and piles artifice upon artifice to raise the story's supposed mythical import, until it's a stiff caricature of Faust. Sure, it's interesting, but in the same way that a car-crash interesting. Or, perhaps, in the same way that Chance the gardener is a genius.
On the other hand, there are some similarities between the Jedi and postmoderists:
1. They both have a fondness for dressing in black.
2. They both speak in jibberish.
3. They both get accused of undue influence on the Academy.
That's frickin' haiku man
When I walked out my apartment door this morning, I saw what I thought was frost on the ground and light snowfall. But it turned out that some styrofoam exploded. Just sayin'.
Straining the boundaries of our existing tenses
Damn, yo. Some movies are hard to understand. Buckaroo Banzai, for instance. But Primer really takes the cake. Basic plot: A couple Office Space types, working on a startup in their garage, accidentally stumble upon a limited form of time travel. And being Office Space types, they immediately start using it to day trade. Hilarity ensues. And complete incomprehensibility. To give you one example of how things unravel, imagine if the scope of Marty McFly's time travel was limited to fabrication date of the DeLorean. But then imagine he was able to fit one DeLorean inside another DeLorean. And he found out that Doc took a DeLorean back inside a Studebaker time machine he'd made 20 years earlier. And so forth.
But fear not, for every esoteric topic there is a group of nerds, and the internet ensures that their voices will be heard. Behold, the Primer timeline(s).
Kiva.org
This is a great idea... microloans directly through a website. Assuming that they make some loans available, this seems like a much more effective and direct method than the old sally struthers adopt-a-kid approach. Much more teach-a-man-to-fish. And of course your mother can tell her friends that you own your own business, even if it's a $200.00 share in a brick-baking concern in Uganda.
I'd love to see a system like this become an actual savings system for first-worlders. If they could somehow insure against defaults and then add a small interest rate, while leaving it tax deductable as a charity, it could become a simple, powerful way to put your money into a community that needs it. I dunno if the numbers would crunch out right, but it would arguably be more fun than a boring old money market.
Also, they've really gotta watch the wording in these testimonials. Even a whiff of nigerian oil and the whole thing will smack of fakery.
He will test the process on a Han Solo statue
Mmm, delicious white liberal guilt. Maybe George Lucas feels guilty about the whole Lando thing. Or the whole Jar Jar thing. At any rate, he's donated a million dollars to help erect an MLK statue in DC. At any rate, this is a good thing, and it's a long time coming. I only worry about the possible ramifications:
- March on Washington speech inscription, translated into unintelligble zen jibberish, retitled "A Dream I have".
- 25 years from now, he may decide that it wasn't done right and create a special edition memorial.
- Prequel statue in which a young, promising, Jeffersonian agrarian republic, seeing its systemic racial injustices indefinitely prolonged by a lack of centralized authority, is seduced into federalism and crushes a rebellion.
But I kid, George... kudos.
