Archive for August, 2009

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The Next Civil War: Red vs Blue

[ 7 Comments ]Posted on August 10, 2009 by admin in Politics

Monday, August 10th, 2009

It may be the beginning of the week, but it’s the end of the country.

Slate recently ran a How is America Going to End game/survey in which you get to choose the way that you predict the American Empire will come to an end. Well, the results are in, and I have to say I’m a little disappointed that my chosen scenario – the Red vs. Blue Civil War – came in 13th. That map on the left highlights an interesting fact: the whole red state vs. blue state debate becomes a little irrelevant when you look at things on a more granular level. Those aren’t mega-highrises of the future, those are voters by population density. And you’ll notice that most of the spikes are blue. An American civil war may seem preposterous, especially when a crazy Russian academic predicts it, but the re-emergence of the “bubba militias” makes it seem a little less far-fetched in a country that’s been split in two by Rovian/Luntzian politics. When winning is everything, everyone loses. It says a lot when a large group of people (the average knee-jerk, ignorant Republican voter) gets behind a trillion-dollar activity that kills thousands of Americans but violently protests one that is intended to save American lives. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if things eventually got ugly on a larger scale; when you get a bunch of ignorant PBR-swilling yahoos riled up, there’s usually going to be some kind of fight. But I’m not worried. We city-folk have this one covered in spades, and we have maps and charts to prove it. First of all, we all know blue voters are smarter, and all the smart Read the rest of this entry »

Poor Taste In Friends May Inhibit Pervasiveness Of Cannibalism

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 9, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Wherein my girlfriend and I decide who we’re having for dinner.


This piece reads much better if Toto
Coelos’ “I Eat Cannibals” is playing.
Lyrics below for further pleasure.

We often say odd things when we’re in love. For instance, in a completely unoriginal moment the other day, I said to my girlfriend: “I could just eat you alive“. Which got me wondering. Could I? Like most of us, when I have a question about romance, I seek the counsel of friends. I don’t know any cannibals though, so I of course headed over to the How Cannibalism Works page at HowStuffWorks.com. This wasn’t very helpful. They started off with a piece about Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal who enticed his victims with charming online dialog like this, and then moved on to things like How The Donner Party Worked. Wanting something a little more guide-like and factual, I tried Wikipedia. Although it was interesting to learn that stories of cannibalism – like so many things that white people say about other social groups – have been historically rather exagerrated to suit some personal needs, at this point I became distracted by the story of Issei Sagawa, Celebrity Cannibal, who was freed four years after being incarcerated for his cannibalistic murder, and moved on to become quite the celebrity in Japan. Sound strange? What do you expect from a country that has an established method for dealing with train groping, a pervasive fascination with tentacle sex, and an entire industry devoted to providing alibis? Anyway, by this time I’d lost my appetite for more information on the topic, but if you’re hungry for more yourself, this rather lengthy LRB review of An Intellectual History of Cannibalism was actually rather interesting. I have to go now, my girlfriend just asked who we should have for dinner. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Voice, iPhones, And SpyPhones

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 8, 2009 by admin in Technology

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Google Voice is amazing. And creepy.

I just got an invite to try Google Voice, and after giving it a quick test run, I was left a little uneasy. I’m not really a tin-foil hat type, but I’m often reminded of William Burroughs’ remark that “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”. The uneasiness kicked in as soon as I clicked on the “accept” link, and had to decide whether or not to use one of my existing G-Mail accounts. Should I use my business account? My personal account? I knew that to test the service, I’d be entering both my mobile and land line numbers. Which meant I’d be linking pieces of my Google search history with my e-mail content, two phone numbers, and my name. And storing it all in one place on a Google server. I opted to create a new G-Mail account. In spite of Google Voice’s amazing features, I’m going to have to ponder exactly how to put it to use, because the same things that make it cool make it creepy. You can record calls, transcribe them to text, do conference calls, and even pick up as someone leaves a voice message, just like an answering machine. All in one place. Which is exactly the issue. All in one place. On a Google server. I know we’ll all eventually have shaved heads, a number instead of a name, and be constantly under surveillance like in the George Lucas movie THX 1138. For now though, especially given the random Google privacy blunders that have already occurred, the insidious behavior of AT&T, and the way Google is invading every aspect of our lives, I’ll hang on to the last shreds of my illusions of privacy. Speaking of AT&T and Google: although Google’s already found a workaround to being blocked as an iPhone app, we should be thankful that AT&T and Google are still competitors. Remember. AT&T’s a telephone company. Not a communications company.

The Bad News Is That Good News Isn’t Free

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 7, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, August 7th, 2009

Rupert Murdoch wants his two dollars, and my hometown newspaper is better off dead.

Rupert Murdoch’s plan to start charging for online news is an interesting test of the theories laid out in the recent bestseller Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I think most consumers feel that given the quality of journalism over the past decade, the price of free news is just about right. It’s interesting to me that Murdoch would choose to monetize online news at a time when real-world papers are failing at an epidemic rate; I’m of the opinion that his massive media empire is simply unable – much like the music industry – to adapt to the evolving market. And apparently Gartner Research agrees. Unfortunately, with the current trend of blogs-as-news and Twitter-driven media, the problems created by completely profit-driven journalism (outlined nicely in the book The Elements of Journalism) are replaced with new ones, primarily a total lack of professionalism and ethical guidelines. I’m sorry to say that in the supposedly media-hip town that I live in, I did little grieving over its recently failed newspaper. It was an awful publication. And while I had some hopes for its online/hybrid replacement, they’ve created what many already feel is a failure of epic proportions. It’s hard to tell how bad the content is; the interface is so awful you’ll never find it! Likewise, even savvier attempts to infuse online news with a degree of journalistic professionalism and integrity – like The Faster Times – end up falling short in a number of ways. Maybe if the government somehow supported and regulated the news we could find a balance. That always turns out well. See you in the funny papers!

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Remembering Hiroshima

[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 6, 2009 by admin in Politics

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

As far as I’m concerned, the only good thing that came out of World War II was the 80′s song Enola Gay by OMD.


The Bikini Atoll Test

Albert Einstein, whose letters to FDR are credited with inspiring the race to build an atomic bomb, later said “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, upon seeing the results of the Trinity Test, said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds“, quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Ken Bainbridge, the test director on the project, is quoted as saying “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” None of this stopped the actual dropping of the bomb on August 6, 1945. And scientist and Truman advisor Karl T. Compton’s 1946 Atlantic article If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used – while a realistic assessment – probably did little to absolve any of these men of their guilt and remorse in the coming years. I’m just glad a generation has been able to grow up without the ever-present threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, a concept that definitely drained my enthusiasm for living until my mid-twenties. We live in a much hipper era now, one in which we can play games to pick our own apocalypse, and in which the Mayor of Hiroshima can call for support of an ‘Obamajority’ that believes in nuclear-free world. Until that day comes – if it ever does – I think we owe it to ourselves to keep fresh an awareness of the horrifying devastation of nuclear war. Boston.com has a compelling photo collection documenting the bombing of Hiroshima, and the widget below lets you pick a city and see what affect various nuclear weapons will Read the rest of this entry »

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