Newgle.
Lifehacker tells you how to replace the old Google G in your Firefox search box with the new Google G. —Good God, why?
It took its toll on all of us.
Is it just me, or is the Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome of 2008 a little more… tired, than usual?
Boatswain!
I’ve been watching an inordinate amount of Prospero’s Books lately, because it is an ideal entertainment for an infant who’s sitting in your lap while you’re trying to get some work done in a window on the other monitor over there—glorious music, a charismatic man doing all sorts of silly voices, every second there’s something new and rich and strange and beautiful to look at.
—Also, I now remember why it was I’d thought of giving Perdix all those memory-dancers, but that’s neither here nor there. Nor would you be interested to learn that I want my office to look like this:
At least I’ve got the papers-and-books-everywhere æsthetic down.
—While we’re on the subject of movies playing repeatedly in a corner of the screen, remind me to tell you at some point (and I’m not even kidding here) why Speed Racer was maybe 2008’s best movie. Fuck The Dark Knight—those fucking Wachowskis filmed a sequence in the goddamn subjunctive!
Say boots without shoes.
A dictum from Wikipedia’s ongoing effort to isolate that formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article, noted without comment:
Neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities. Protologisms are neologisms that have not yet caught on widely. (In fact, “protologism” is a neologism to be avoided.)
“If indeed mankind came to earth for a specific reason, it certainly wasn’t to enjoy ourselves.”
I keep forgetting to mention how much I really really enjoyed this Zadie Smith essay on family and comedy.
But only if we can point to it.
“Architecture is by its very nature a specific form of science fiction: whether we’re using it to design luxury high-rises, modular refugee camps, solar towers, or complete urban ecotopias, architecture gives us the means, on par with literature and mythology, through which we can re-imagine the world.” —Geoff Manaugh, on Craig Hodgetts’ designs for Ecotopia
Actually, I kinda want to see it after that.
“It’s like reading a really bad webcomic with a vast continuity and its own tiny and deeply insular LiveJournal community,” says Alexandra DuPont of Frank Miller’s The Spirit.
Proper.
I didn’t watch that much television growing up, and anyway we moved a lot, so I’ve always taken the primacy of Blake’s 7 on the faith of an anglophilic SF fan. (Also, the Spouse loved it. So.) —Now, we’ve got a region-free DVD player and amazon.co.uk. We’ve worked our way up through the third episode of the second season, and it’s starting to cook, oh yes; it’s gotten as good as they said it gets. Still. I’m going to perplex the grandkids and the great-grandkids some many years from now by chuckling all unexpectedly at the recurring image of two very proper space-goths in high-cowled flowing black robes marching across an abandoned industrial depot somewhere in the middle of England with their luggage.
This is your fight.
“Reading Runes of Ragnan is like watching someone make a movie with an oiled-up weightlifter that can barely move or hold a sword after years of viewing the best fight films from Hong Kong. It’s watching a kid drop a Boston album onto a turntable in the middle of a party whose soundtrack is a mix of eclectic music culled from someone’s iPod. Its naked yearning for a kind of heroic overlay on life where everything looks awesome for a few seconds, and you can fight in a really effective way and you walk through tough guys like water and your life has mythic resonance and the most beautiful, incredible girl in the world is pledged to your heart, all says something to me that a lot of better art cannot. It makes me want to cry, this ugly but beautiful black velvet painting of a funnybook.” —Tom Spurgeon
Tags I’ve recently appreciated.
“Songs for standing still in the crowds of hurried frown people.” —I mean, Christ, have you heard this remix of “I Need a Life”?
—How the frat boys laughed! Almost every week they got to see something like that. It was a charmed life.
“We used to play a lot of chess together in Washington Square Park with all the homeless men. But then Yoko Ono got me into Go, a Japanese chess game that’s more sophisticated.” [via]
There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.
I dunno, maybe my opinion will 180 on or about Hallowe’en of this year, but Stop Child Predators’ current campaign seems to be a bit of an overreaction.
A special focus of the campaign is devoted to a particularly alarming technology provided by Google maps. As part of the launch, Ms. Rumenap is featured in a video on http://www.StopInternetPredators.org, which shows how the Google “Street View” application allows Internet users to view high resolution pictures of homes, schools, and in some cases, children playing outside, simply by typing in a local address.
My internet shrieks.
Why Bill Mudron should never be allowed ample quantities of spare time (no. 374 in a series).
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis apparently thinks his offering on the death of George Carlin is “irreverent.”
I did, indeed, mean George Carlin at the Pearly Gates as an irreverent commentary within the cartoon. I readily admit I have drawn my fair share of pearly gates and crying mascots in the past. But recently I have tried to take my inspiration from the obit cartoons of Pat Oliphant. When he does do them he places them in some kind of context of the persons life and impact. With George Carlin, (of whom I consider myself a fan), his contribution to comedy and social discourse was to tear down the walls of conformity and ridicule the overly serious. His anti-religion screeds grew longer and more serious near the end.
Hence, a cartoon I hoped would be viewed as irreverent. At least to those familiar with the subject.
Which, okay, I suppose it’s irreverent enough to speak some truth to power and all, you take Roy’s perspective into account:
—try to imagine being so utterly blind to your surroundings that you think George Carlin’s “most famous work,” which is decades old, “coarsened American culture,” rather than, “is American culture.”
Myself, I’d call the cartoon “obscene,” but I’ve always had a problem with perspective. The last few days I haven’t been able to get this couplet out of my head:
how do you like your blueeyed boy
You Cocksucker
Swan, swan, hummingbird hurrah.
Apparently it was not quite 22 years ago that I walked into a Sam Goody or whatever it was in the mall a longish bike ride from our house in Barrington Hills and saw to one side a towering stack of Lifes Rich Pageant (Bill Berry peering quizzically over those bison) and, to the other, a great record-store poster of The Queen is Dead, Alain Delon lying back over all those casette tapes. —I’d say something about how wistfully I wonder what might have happened had I franklied Mr. Shankly instead—but I already have, four years before. (That’s the thing about blogging, after a while; you don’t have to say anything more. You can just look back and point.)
Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from poetry.
From Norway via Mr. Snead, One Foot in the Wild—an RPG poem on nature and footwear. (Perhaps “indistinguishable” isn’t quite right—?)
They will come back—come back again,
As long as the red Earth rolls.
He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Why should He squander souls?
And then Textism lit up once more in my feed reader. —This might just be a good year.
