Still Not Going To Do This Every Day

First mistake

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:30:37 -0500

First mistake

"I don’t know just what you heard, but Alabama is my favorite word"

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:06:20 -0500

“I don’t know just what you heard, but Alabama is my favorite word”

- Lyle Lovett, et al.

tanya77: themattsmith: britticisms: “Tainted Love/Where Did...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:07:24 -0500

tanya77:

themattsmith:

britticisms:

“Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?” by Soft Cell (Gloria Jones/The Supremes cover)

Nine minutes of synth perfection.

When Kel and first I started dating (11 years ago) this was her favorite song. When they would play it on the radio, sometimes they would play the edit that lopped off the “Where Did Our Love Go?” segment. Whenever the unedited version would come on, Kel would exclaim “They never play this version!” Soon it became the norm to play the long version, but she continued to say it, “they never play this version!”, every time. It became our first inside joke, and continues to this day.

This and “Sex Dwarf” were two of my favorite songs in High School.

Go figure.

Me too. This, by the way, was not a good idea when you attended high school in Kansas.

I Have No Comment for This, Because This Says it All

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:06:05 -0500

nerdshares:

“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

…

The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.”

— David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, “The Review of Contemporary Fiction” (1993)

(Via this comment on The Awl)

Yes, But What About the Money that AIG Paid Them?

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:43:36 -0500

Yes, But What About the Money that AIG Paid Them?:

BofA says it will repay the entire $45 billion in TARP money it received. That’s good! Except, um, it isn’t all the money that BofA got to stay afloat. Remember, the bank also was one of AIG’s counterparties that got back, at taxpayer expense, 100% of their doomed investments that they had insured through AIG.

So when is BofA going to pay that back?

A Pretty Good Indication That a Movie Will Disappoint

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:43:34 -0500

If it contains the phrase “We’re not in Kansas anymore” and the film is not titled The Wizard of Oz.

No names, no links: Writers give themselves a pass and denounce the "information wants to be free" crowd

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:06:26 -0500

jayrosen:

Mark Cuban: Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart

I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place

Wherever it’s found, bigotry deserves to be called out— say, with a link?

eweek, When Legal Strikes—Chaos Theory Meets DRM

While theres a certain infantile, self-serving view (common among the information-wants-to-be-free crowd) that just about anything one might want to do with others intellectual property is covered by fair use, the law bends pretty effectively to codify what Grant says the majority intuitively knows to be right.

Infantile and self-serving both? Juicy! Got a name?

Jeff Bercovici, Daily Finance

The conventional wisdom on whether and how newspapers ought to charge for their online content is changing so rapidly, some people are having trouble keeping up. One of those people is Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, who Monday repeated one of the favored fallacies of the information-must-be-free crowd: that publications that try to squeeze some cash out of readers, however delicately, risk losing their audiences.

Actually, the crowd Kurtz was talking about is people who won’t patronize pay sites; that’s not a fallacy, it’s just… what they do.

Douglas Rushkoff in the Daily Beast

Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a “free” Internet. The simple reason: it might just work…

Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by “old media” to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one’s content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.

Doug: this is the web. You know…hypertext? Can’t we visit the troops ourselves?

Ken Davis, moderator of the Chicago Journalism Town Hall

Eventually even the “information wants to be free” crowd, a little greyer and sobered by mortgages and tuition bills, will come around to, and benefit from, a sane payment methodology.

Do “crowds” grow up? Seems to be what you are saying.

Jason Wilson, newmalitda.com

Some of the people in the “information wants to be free” crowd, who say News can’t do it, make some unwarranted assumptions.

First, they assume that News will only enclose the newpaper content that it currently gives away, and that they will enclose all of it.

Second, they assume that there will always be a free equivalent to anything that News puts behind the wall, meaning that people won’t have any reason to pay for it.

Third, some seem to think that just because they don’t like something, that means there’s no market for it.

Fourth, they assume that no News journalists have skills, expertise or access that might be worth paying for.

And last, there seems to be a belief in some quarters that News Corporation is largely staffed by idiots.

That’s a lot of assumptions, and they sound pretty specific, like you might have read them somewhere…?

Martin Belam, currybet.net

Malcom Coles yesterday wrote a great blog post looking at ways that News International could succeed in monetising their content. I think it addresses a lot of issues and niche content that does exist, that the naysayers of the ‘information wants to be free’ crowd tend to sweep under the carpet as it doesn’t fit with their argument.

Wait: there’s a big crowd of folks who say you can’t charge for niche content? Really?

Michael Becker at Hypercrit: Set the good stuff free and charge for the peas

The title of this post doesn’t make a lot of sense until you read an interesting post by Lucas Grindley, the online managing editor for NationalJournal.com. Grindley’s responding to the revived idea of charging for news content online, an idea that’s stuck in the craw of many “information wants to be free” advocates.

Craw-stuck-upmanship can be fun to observe. May we have a link please?

Scottfox.com, Twitter Gurus Please Stop Whining!

Remember how the first generation of bloggers howled when the 2nd and 3rd generation of bloggers started including advertisements on their blogs? And, even before that, how the “information wants to be free” crowd rebelled against commercialization of the Web? And in the middle 1990’s, Internet purists even objected to the addition of images on web pages!

Well, we all know how that turned out…

Purist gurus howling and whining? Hook us up!

Amen. Let us know exactly who these people are that you’re complaining about, and what they’re saying.

I have been on a bus for nearly four hours. I am still in NEW...

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:33:20 -0500

I have been on a bus for nearly four hours. I am still in NEW JERSEY. This should not be possible.

Look, I know Tennessee Mountain was Not Good, but I’m...

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:26:35 -0500

Look, I know Tennessee Mountain was Not Good, but I’m skeptical that a Crocs superstore is an improvement.

copycats: No Woman No Cry by Xavier Ruddoriginally by Bob...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:37:24 -0500

copycats:

No Woman No Cry by Xavier Rudd
originally by Bob Marley
(posted by bunkercomplex)

A new editor at BusinessWeek

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:06:00 -0500

A new editor at BusinessWeek:

loudsmiles:

‘Bloomberg annouced today that we’ll have a new editor-in-chief at BusinessWeek. He’s 37 years old and has little background in business….’

JT’s a great editor and a good guy. And I know why, when you have a new boss coming in, you’d write something like this. Still, the lede of this post cracks me up:

Bloomberg annouced today that we’ll have a new editor-in-chief at BusinessWeek. His name is Josh Tyrangiel. He’s 37 years old and has little background in business. Those are both pluses, as far as I’m concerned.

Um, Hi There

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:46:19 -0500

Um, Hi There:

Long time, to be sure. More fun stuff to come, for sure, but for now, may I direct your attention here, for posts of journalistic substance, and here, for random things.

Posted in…

Also, this.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:55:44 -0500

Also, this.

Elsewhere, Romano explains why we don’t think of this sort...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:53:07 -0500

Elsewhere, Romano explains why we don’t think of this sort of thing as selling out anymore, but, honestly, I love this song, from when New Order still sounded like Joy Division, so much I wouldn’t care even if it was.

Dobbs Got $8 Million to Quit

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:47:33 -0500

Dobbs Got $8 Million to Quit:

According to the NYP. To be fair, that’s only a 2 year severance package

inadvisable: soupsoup: Broken Social Scene cover Joy...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:20:37 -0500

inadvisable:

soupsoup:

Broken Social Scene cover Joy Division : Love Will Tear Us Apart

Love

Today in songs we’re not ashamed to love.

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:17:28 -0500

Today in songs we’re not ashamed to love.

"@poniewozik:I think I just heard the Internet weep. Per Hollywood Reporter, Dollhouse canceled:..."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:56:24 -0500

“@poniewozik:I think I just heard the Internet weep. Per Hollywood Reporter, Dollhouse canceled: http://bit.ly/22l5LY”

- Sigh. If I had to hear this sad news from anyone, I’m glad it was JP…

Today in things we’re not ashamed to admit we love: Romeo...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:56:46 -0500

Today in things we’re not ashamed to admit we love: Romeo Void (via Alex Smith)

NY TIMES: Studies show pigs are smart; plotting revenge on humans for loving all dat bacon

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:33:19 -0500

NY TIMES: Studies show pigs are smart; plotting revenge on humans for loving all dat bacon:

inothernews:

In the current issue of Animal Behaviour, researchers present evidence that domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use their understanding of reflected images to scope out their surroundings and find their food. The researchers cannot yet say whether the animals realize that the eyes in the mirror are their own, or whether pigs might rank with apes, dolphins and other species that have passed the famed “mirror self-recognition test” thought to be a marker of self-awareness and advanced intelligence.

…The finding is just one in a series of recent discoveries from the nascent study of pig cognition. Other researchers have found that pigs are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest. They’ve shown that Pig A can almost instantly learn to follow Pig B when the second pig shows signs of knowing where good food is stored, and that Pig B will try to deceive the pursuing pig and throw it off the trail so that Pig B can hog its food in peace.

Didn’t you read Oryx and Crake? It’s all there.