I just found this Article over at del.icio.us/popular:
How Much Does iTunes Like My Five-Star Songs?
The dude used a sample playlist of 6 songs one for each possible rating and ran the list for a while with and without Party shuffle’s “Play higher rated songs more often” option.
The article is somewhat interesting, but the gist of it is here:
I’ve got good news for Zmurder et al. According to This Article from The Independent Coffee is extremely high in Antioxidants, those vitamins which studies show reduce the risks of cancer.
Folks that make money from coffee couldn’t be happier, and want to let you know that the Route 44 of coffee you’re drinking every morning is both moderate and healthy:
A spokesman for the British Coffee Association said: “This study reconfirms the fact that moderate coffee consumption of four to five cups a day not only is perfectly safe but may confer health benefits.”
This is great news for some, but doesn’t really help those of us that get our caffeine in cold and bubbly form. Take heart though. I’m about to release a little study of my own which indicates that sodas are often high in caramel color,a substance which, according to recent clinical research, makes soda look less like cloudy water than it otherwise would.
According to The Hipster Handbook (p.12), “[h]ipsters believe irony has more resonance than reason.” For example, check out this hilarious article about white hipsters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn “acting black” at all-white hip-hop dance parties, themed “Kill Whitey,” to be ironic and to “kill the whiteness inside.” [photo gallery here]
Ostensibly, “kill[ing] the whiteness inside” means that these white hipsters want to reject their privileged, white cultures. (Or, in the words of the MC, DJ Tha Pumpsta (pictured), “Kinda poking fun at myself and my origins and white people in general.”) Thus, if anything, these parties should offend those who value their white culture. But by acting out a caricature of black culture, as it is portayed in rap videos, the white hipsters are either (1) at best clueless about the culture of real black people or (2) at worst (my opinion) reinforcing and perpetuating white stereotypes about black people. (For example, admission is free if you bring a bucket of fried chicken.)
And starts a blog. Apparently, they’re still making music. [as tumbleweed blows gently by]
Though it will likely be surpassed by the Boards of Canada and/or Fiery Furnaces this fall, this is the best new album I’ve heard all year: Son Volt’s Okemah and the Melody of Riot. I wasn’t that excited about this record: I loved Son Volt’s debut, Trace, and a few tracks on their subsequent albums, but haven’t really dug anything Jay Farrar’s released since then. Plus it’s sort of weird that he’s calling his band “Son Volt” now, since he is the only one in the band that was in it in the 90s. And then there’s the price. I like to buy all my CDs at my local independent, B-Side. But this CD was $16 there, and only a couple bucks less on Amazon. The reason: it’s a “Dualdisc”, meaning that one side is a CD, the other a DVD. The DVD side contains a 30-minute documentary and the entire album in DVD-quality audio, which may mean something to an audiophile but since I can’t tell the difference between a 128 kbps mp3 and an uncompressed wav file, it doesn’t mean much to me. But after a few weeks on the shelves I finally took the plunge, after seeing them perform “Afterglow 61″ on Letterman.
Read the rest of this entry »
A new drug, CX717, counters the chemical changes in the brain related to sleep deprivation. Drug infused, even after 72 hours without sleep, your mind will function “normally” - as if you were awake and alert. The related news article doesn’t mention any negative side effects, but I imagine that regular use of CX717 would drastically alter your body’s equilibrium and rehabilitation processes. However, I’d probably take it for special occasions: exams, papers, Mondays, Sundays, classes, ultimate pratices/tournaments, when I feel mentally tired. If you were mentally awake and physically tired, would you try to sleep? Would you need to sleep or just relax on the couch? If scientists can make CX717, why aren’t there dream-inducing drugs?
Have you checked out Duncan’s videos lately (and some made by his friends)? Go to www.waverlyfilms.com and click on “our work.” I recommend:
music videos: fatboy slim - the joker
commercials: frosted flakes - magic trick
commercials: sony - bad day
commercials: books on campus - viral
narrative: shorts: christopher ford sees a film
narrative: shorts: werewolf solution
narrative: shorts: i love my cat
narrative: trailers: naked pictures
Ever slow gradually, adultery is infiltrating the American mainstream. Philanderer dating websites such as this and adultery greeting cards like this that are a part of the Secret Lover Collection can only make one wonder: How much longer before adultery is not socially taboo — not considered a shameful act — and comes to be actually celebrated?
My stomach is sinking…
My mom emailed me the following essay. It struck me as stylistically well-written, with a cogency and emotion that demands the reader’s attention. You all know I’m not the most political person, and since I don’t really keep up with political things, I don’t think I’m in a position to comment with much authority on the essay. While the writing impressed me, I’m not quite sure about the writer’s accusation that GW feels no remorse at all for those who die in Iraq. He seems to hinge his denouncements of Bush’s character on what he sees on the video cameras — I suppose this is our best way of inferring how the president behaves while behind close doors, though… Also, he seems quite insistent that America is promoting not democracy, but internecine tribal warfare. I am not trying to justify the war in Iraq, but I can’t help but wonder: If we just let the Middle East “work out the kinks” on its own, how long would it be before some rouge tyrant or terroist unleashed a nuclear disaster upon the world? Things are going badly in Iraq now, and American soldiers are dying for a cause that doesn’t seem absolutely clear, as it was in WWI and II. It is an overwhelmingly ambitious plan that GWB has for Iraq and, I suppose, eventually the entire Middle East — stable democracy. While I don’t like the man (and his bullish, Americanocentric unilateralism), I like the mission. If, 10, 15, 20 years down the line, the Middle East is a largely democratic and peaceful area, and it all started with this war, I would have to say the American deaths were worth it. After all, a violent Middle East in the same amount of time may end up costing the U.S., and the world for that matter, many more deaths.
What do you all think of the article? What do you think the chances are for a largely peaceful Middle East in the next 10-20 years?
An essay by E.L Doctorow
>> Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history
>> of American literature. He is generally considered to be among the
>> most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half
>> of the 20th century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award,
>> two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the
>> Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of
>> the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially
>> conferred
>> National Humanities Medal.
>> Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After
>> graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate
>> work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow
>> was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and
>> then served as editor in chief
>> at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to
>> writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American
>> Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at
>> several institutions, including Yale University Drama School,
>> Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence
>> College, and the University of California, Irvine.
>> =====================================================================
>> I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what
>> death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds
>> who wanted to be what they could be.
>> On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for
>> the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew
>> what death was.
>> Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a
>> war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could
>> bear.
>> But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the
>> mind for it.
>> You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for
>> the WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up
>> to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened
>> crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn.
>> He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during
>> the course of a speech
>> written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave
>> young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
>> But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles
>> an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being
>> because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal
>> responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted
>> be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with
>> mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the
>> end of their days a terribly
>> torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable
>> remembrance of aborted life…. They come to his desk as a political
>> liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the
>> arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To
>> mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing.
>> He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he
>> knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his
>> bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his
>> mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather
>> than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he
>> never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought
>> this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had
>> not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who
>> knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war
>> when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you
>> go not because you want to but because you have to. This president
>> knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow
>> of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his
>> supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take
>> power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of
>> themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as
>> anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind
>> you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his
>> knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the
>> grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who
>> does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he
>> does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in
>> poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford
>> health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are
>> turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the
>> chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills —
>> it is amazing for how many people in this country this President
>> does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all
>> sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the
>> population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and
>> that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy,
>> and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to
>> save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of
>> their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is
>> actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional
>> class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for
>> God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party
>> are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. But
>> there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember
>> the millions of people here and around the world who marched against
>> the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul
>> of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it
>> happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen
>> coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the
>> time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of
>> millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last
>> best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic
>> archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The
>> greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the
>> future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance
>> the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind
>> of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people,
>> now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other
>> means than pre-emptive war. The president we get is the country
>> we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually.
>> He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not
>> only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives
>> and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his
>> image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his
>> characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character
>> into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the
>> conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United
>> States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the
>> constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics
>> of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral
>> vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
>> E.L. Doctorow
Mohsen asked me that photos of lastnight’s edward 40 hands at bwb’s house be posted on the blog…and I cannot bear to disapoint mohsen.
Found this over at Downloadsquad.com. You just give the url of a Flickr photo and enter the text you want and it generates a pretty convincing looking fake magazine cover.
and in case you havent checked it out, Flickr is pretty cool. It’s a photo sharing site that Yahoo aquired a while back. Like Technorati and del.icio.us Users can associate their submisions with various tags. for instance check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/legos/interesting I’ve never actually been to this link, but I’m guessing it’ll be interesting photos of legos.
also many of the photos are released under the creative commons license so it’s a good way to find photos that you can legaly redistribute.
“Jack in the box employee running late. As he was
leaving the voice mail message, he witnessed an
accident and went on to provide “play by play” of the
incident. This is the actual voice mail message. It
was passed along and forwarded so many times within
Jack in the Box; it crashed their voice mail server.”
audio clip
Holy shit, this is my fourth post this month, I’m totally trashed but highly recommend this read on the lack of people’s ability to tell the difference between reality and MMORPG’s. Totally ripped from slashdot, but who else is reading that besides me and joel brown?
That’s the real beauty of it. The first thing you do in the MMORPG World of Warcraft is design your own body and decide what your strengths will be. You pick your race. What could be more seductive than that, the ability to turn in all of the cards you were dealt at birth and draw new ones from a face-up deck?
And Read this one on all the money you should be making: here!
Check out how NASA gets the space shuttle back to Florida (its launch site) when it’s forced to land in California. The lil’ tyke gets strapped onto a Boeing 747 and flies home piggybacked.
Is it really that strange for President Bush to publicly suggest public schools should teach “intelligent design” alongside the theory of evolution. I thought so.
But in fact it’s not really, if we’re talking about the average American’s beliefs. According to a 2004 Gallup Poll, 45% of Americans believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
Polls like this remind me how insulated a life I live, where everyone I have significant daily interactions with has a similar education and therefore similar beliefs. And then there’s this other 45%.
I just back from a wonderful two weeks in China where I coached passing at a basketball camp and played more ball in one week than I have in the last five years. I will blog and post pictures later, after I catch up on sleep and am not packing to get on another plane.
I will be in the Okla-sas region from tomorrow (Aug 11) thru roughly Aug 20 if anyone is in Fayetteville around that time…I think Mohs will be, and I’m guessing jhb01 will be too.
Text on garbage recepticles in Huangyuan, Qinghai Province: “Protect Circumstance Begin with Me”
President Bush is currently in the midst of not only the longest vacation of his presidency but also the longest presidential vacation in at least 36 years– nearly five weeks in Texas.
The August getaway is Bush’s 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and Tuesday was the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford — roughly 20 percent of his presidency to date…. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents’ compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush’s time away from Washington even further.
[Insert your own punchline here.]
There are really only a few names involved in movies today that guarantee my ass will be in the seat opening weekend: Wes Anderson, Will Ferrell (OK, not anymore — he’s too prolific these days), Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Bill Murray, the Coen brothers (I’ve yet to be disappointed). Two of these are involved in Broken Flowers, directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Bill Murray. It comes out this weekend (somewhere). You can watch the trailer here.
The New York Times has a great article on Jarmusch that calls him the “last of the indies”.
This is one of the coolest basketball-related things you will ever see. It is footage of a 5′8″ player named Nate Robinson (some of you will remember him as the star of the Washington Huskies this past season) freakin’ dunking on a PUT-BACK DUNK. I don’t think a player this short has ever done this in an actual game. It’s way too hard, but this guy has crazy hops, and is very strong. Sure, it’s only summer league, but at least it’s official, and was caught on tape…
