Naomi Wolf deplores lack of civic information among the young, blames the Left for making them cynical. Look, Ms. Wolf, I'm a big proponent of civic education and civic engagement. Wrote my college thesis on it and everything (for Dahl of all people, who I was lucky to have for a senior seminar.) But blaming the Left for making youth cynical about democracy is like blaming your mom for making you wary of strangers.
While I appreciate the drugs that are keeping my low-grade flu at bay, I do not need your "Cool Burst Caplets" that taste minty for the two seconds that they are in my mouth. Plus, they turn my tongue blue.
That is all.
Check out the Mikiphone, "probably the smallest gramophone ever placed on the market, folded up to the size of a large pocket watch or a small cheese case."
Apparently all Japanese films made before 1953 are in the public domain. Which means that one of my all time favorites, Kurosawa's Ikiru, is available online. But please, download a decent-sized version. Watching a Kurosawa film at 320 x 240 pixels is like looking at a postcard of a Bierstadt.
Kilroy Was Here was the first cassette I ever bought, on the first date I ever had. Since this was Radnor in the early 80s, the date was a trip to the King of Prussia mall. Since we were in 7th grade, our parents drove us there. Also her best friend came. And I wore a really dorky hat.
Was it Sam Goody's or some other record store? I don't remember. But Sue Mao bought a tape of Kilroy Was Here, and so did her best friend Jen, and so of course I did too.
I thought the whole "concept album" was incredibly awesome. The whole thing told a story! There were tiny pictures in the liner notes that looked like stills from a movie. (I hadn't seen MTV yet.)
So how does the album hold up? It is incredibly cheesy. And not a cheese that ages well over several decades. Nostalgia helps but can't slice through the bombasticity of the cheese.
And then it occurs to me just what will bring this album back: anime. This would make the perfect soundtrack for an anime film. I mean it has revolution! Robots! A big brother preacher named Dr. Righteous! Styx, if you're out there, you need to pitch this to Viacom as a joint VH1 / Cartoon Network production. Please... don't let it end this way.
They'd look like this. (Via Boing Boing). I know Ben's Laptop would have the following buttons on it: Headsprout (Good!), Webkinz (Evil!), and new on the scene, Build Your Wild Self (Growr!)
The lovely and talented Claire Danes! Pictured here at our event yesterday celebrating the national expansion of DonorsChoose.org!
Also present, the former Senator with the highest heightegrity (integrity x height), Bill Bradley:
The whole set is here. You can also see Zac Efron delivering school supplies from DonorsChoose.org in LA.
Matching Album Art Posters -- warning one is NSFW. Via Coudal. And: Best Magazine Covers of the Year.
Yesterday, I was walking toward the subway down the Brooklyn street. The skies were lowering grey, the wind spoke of rain and the coming winter. There were birds in the air. A sudden gust blew yellow leaves from their branches, spiralling in the air. I reached for my camera but knew I could never capture the motion, the moment, so I stood still in the street as the leaves flew.
And a leaf hit me smack in the mouth.
You could do worse during the strike than to watch Ze Frank: Day One and Day Two. A special breath of fresh air for those of us who miss The Show.
What's that? You don't know from The Show? Oh, sit back and prepare yourself...
Thanks to Waxy for the heads-up.
When I first heard about Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service I knew I should sign up. Basically it's a place to securely store your computer files on Amazon's server farm. You have to get a front-end program to use it -- I spent a double sawbuck on Jungle Disk which works just fine and has a simple enough back-up function. Once I signed up, it costs 15 cents a gigabyte per month. Jungle Disk creates an "X" drive and will automatically backup my files to that drive every day.
As good as I try to be about making backups, I only get around to it every few weeks or so. Plus, while backing up to an external hard drive protects me from disk failure, what if something happened to the external drive? I pay renter's insurance every month; paying "data insurance" is well worth it.
Speaking of external hard drives, my trusty Maxtor was starting to run out of space. So I picked up this LaCie 500GB drive for all of $120 at Newegg. Half a terabyte should hold me for a while....
Liz tagged me with this "8 random things about you" meme and so here you go:
1. I am missing four wisdom teeth and my appendix.
2. I have a strong aversion to fruit rollups because I was eating one when I was hit by a car in 1978.
3. I have sailed a boat and flown a plane.
4. I have been suspended from school; I was also valedictorian.
5. Not counting drive-throughs, I have spent time in every state except North Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Indiana.
6. Thanks to a genealogical quirk, I am my own fifth cousin.
7. Because of my common name, I have collected several nicknames: Miguelito, MEL, Kitch, and once at Atari Computer Camp, "Doc." I've never liked being called "Mikey," though.
8. There are 164 google hits for "Mike Everett-Lane" and 35 for "Michael Everett-Lane". "Ishbadiddle" outstrips them with 219. Yes, I couldn't think of an eight interesting thing about me.
Now, chain-letter like, I'm supposed to tag 8 other bloggers with this. Well, there are plenty of Ishposters whom we haven't seen for a while, so if this inspires any of you, go to it!
When women friends ask me about men, I am prone to joke “what you don’t know about men could fit on a fortune-cookie slip. Specifically ‘Men will f**k anything!’ ”
Now science proves me right:
Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.
And "yellow fever" seems to be a reality, but not because of men, but because of Asian women themselves.
Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.
FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here
Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.
Via Boing Boing.
This album is currently on heavy rotation in my head. Coudal Partners notes that this was "filmed using vintage tv cameras bought on Ebay":
Hey all, today's the last day in the DonorsChoose challenge so if you have $10 to spare (or more) head on over to the Ishbadiddle Challenge page and help out some public school kids! I just added a project, From Denmark to the Boogie Down: Grendel Meets the Bronx because I just loved the title. Go give and do your favorite blog proud!
"It's not the dead that concern me about Halloween. And it is not the impact of all that sugar on the weight of our kids. No, it's the dead-weight loss, or pointless lost utility of the entire enterprise. That likely has a dollar value that exceeds $1.5 billion annually. American citizens squander more than a billion and a half dollars a year on an economically inefficient holiday."
-- Halloween Is an Economist's Biggest Nightmare
Via Rebecca's Pocket.
