Archive for 2010
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[ 1 Comment ]Posted on April 4, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, April 4th, 2010Now that it’s been established that corporations have the same rights as people, why do we choose to have such masochistic relationships with them?
  If you really ARE into this kind of abuse, I bet you didn’t know Amazon sells all the bondage gear  you’ll need.You’ll also be surprised what people call Sexual Wellness these days. |
I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re a nation of masochists. Why else would we put up with the endless assault on our sensibilities perpetrated by almost every large corporation we do business with? You’ve almost certainly had some kind of interaction with a credit card company, phone company, bank, or some other product maker or service provider that left you astounded, if not enraged. I’m going to list a few specific experiences of my own below, but I’d love to hear yours. I’m honestly just perplexed as to why we, as consumers, don’t band together and address the litany of deceptive, fraudulent, and generally scurrilous practices of almost every major corporation we keep afloat with our hard-earned dollars. I mean, the list is endless. It’s not like you have to nit-pick. You go to do something simple like buy groceries, and as standard practice, chain stores place all the products no-one wants at eye level, put different brands of the same item in different parts of the store, and line all the aisles with misleading sale tags. These and other strategies are familiar tricks, but does the store really generate more sales that way? I’d love to see the solid research. My hunch is that it’s an accepted method that is assumed to increase sales, but in reality only creates more grumpy shoppers. Another common example: if your cell phone provider is Verizon, they tell you that you qualify for a free or cheap phone every two years for your faithful patronage, and when you go to collect it, they give you rebate forms to fill out and mail in while they bill you the full price, banking on the likelihood you’ll miss the deadline and will have already been billed by then. Even if you do follow their Byzantine rebate requirements carefully, they’ve essentially forced you to loan them money for the interim. Pretty clever. But we’re all familiar with the concepts behind these annoying practices, I’m just curious as to why we tolerate them. I’m going to share a few of mine from the last year below; I’d love to hear about yours. Maybe there’s something we can do. I mean something besides complain about complaint web sites on complaint web sites. Read the rest of this entry »
Open Source Fearmongering: What If Everything I Told You Were A Lie?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on April 3, 2010 by admin in Politics
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010The Army’s assertion that whistleblower site WikiLeaks.org is a potential hotbed of disinformation makes me wonder if they created themselves. As William Burroughs said, “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”
You may have seen the episode in the original Star Trek series in which Spock said something like that to a female android, leaving her smoldering in the ears as she short-circuited from the paradox. Recent press about the web site WikiLeaks has left me with a little smoke coming from my ears for similar reasons. I first heard of the whistleblower site a couple of years ago, and as a countercultural, nearly apolitical sort of person thought “Hmmm. That’s a very cool idea”. If you haven’t heard of WikiLeaks, they publish “anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors“, as this Wikipedia entry puts it (don’t be confused by WikiLeaks’ name however, it is in no way connected with Wikipedia). One of the main things that makes it possible for the site to remain in operation is the intentionally unregulated nature of the internet. By spreading the documents across many servers in many locations, the teeth are removed from most countries’ or companies’ ability to file injunctions of any kind against the site. Leave it to the US Military to put the “dis” in “disinformation” though. When WikiLeaks released documents revealing how the US Army was rendering roadside bombs in Iraq useless with radio jamming, the Army was understandably not too happy. In fact, if you believe the information shared on WikiLeaks, the Army assembled this 33 page document (556KB, PDF) assessing the site as a security threat. In its own un-self-conscious doublespeak, it then ironically outlines how the site’s ability to tell the truth and expose corruption is a threat to truth and democracy, going on to point out that the site uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers” and that the “identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action” targeting these people could render the site ineffective. They also point out – letting the paranoid flag fly – that the site itself is a perfect platform to “post fabricated information, misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda and could be used in perception management and influence operations to convey a positive or negative message to specific target audiences“. Which, at the end of the day, leaves me with my own nagging paranoia that maybe Army Intelligence started the site in the first place, and is just playing their part in the elaborate con. What do you think? Should a site like WikiLeaks be allowed to exist and disseminate information so we can assess its truth for ourselves, or do we need a government or agency to assess it for us?
Erykah Badu, Lady Gaga & Beyoncé Try To Go Too Far But Don’t Get There
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on April 2, 2010 by admin in Music
Friday, April 2nd, 2010But Gettin’ Naked & Lesbian Prison Love Still Pays The Bills
 We’re tastefully passing on the rhyming possibilities of the Grassy Knoll. |
[Note: If you've been living in a pop music isolation chamber lately, there are spoilers ahead] Okay. This whole “get naked while walking down the street singing your song” meme is getting reeeally tired. Don’t get me wrong – I have no desire to become a critic, and I really love Erykah Badu – but I can only imagine the production meeting for the recent video for her song Window Seat
CNN Acquires Dissociated Press
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 1, 2010 by admin in Holidays
Thursday, April 1st, 2010In an attempt to reclaim their title as leaders of “the liberal media”, CNN purchases entire blogosphere.
In a surprise move today, Dissociated Press was acquired by the global news outlet CNN. Realizing that their only hope for competing with what one CNN executive referred to as The Glenn Beck Channel, the withering news network made the decision to buy outright the estimated million or so micromarket ranting liberal and libertarian blogs. The decision was made somewhat hastily after market research indicated that CNN had lost nearly 80% of its audience to NPR and weepy liberal superblogs like DailyKos and Huffington Post. By absorbing the entire blogosphere, CNN hopes to reclaim the “liberal media” moniker as their own. How Dissociated Press ended up as one of the victims of this maelstrom of quiet takeovers is beyond us, but we’re happy to get the $250.00 check; that’s more than we made the entire first quarter of this year in Google Ads revenue! No word yet on whether we still have jobs, and if we do whether we can still swear like sailors in headlines or not, but we look forward to marching orders from our new media overlords. Plus, Robin Meade is hot. Read the rest of this entry »
Life Is Short – Films Should Be Too
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 31, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010The internet is one big film festival, and you can be the judge.
 Tokyo/Glow Is Gorgeous, Simple, and Short |
One of my only disappointments regarding the recent Ann Arbor Film Festival was that I didn’t catch enough of it. Which is a little amusing, since I had a press pass*, and it’s a festival comprised largely of short films. Which are coincidentally kind of a fetish of mine, largely because of my goldfish-like media attention span. I regrettably missed winner’s night, but was confident that I could cleverly find a lot of the films online like I had with some of the opening night entries. How wrong I was. What I quickly learned googling the festival winners was that there are two distinct schools of thought on distribution of these festival-oriented works: one that believes in the new economy of “release it free and cash in later” (as in Chris Anderson’s book Free), and one that maintains its cachet mainly via scarcity of distribution. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to spend more time in real theaters, watching real films! Until then though, there’s a never-ending film festival online. The biggest problem ultimately is sorting through the astounding number of indy shorts out there to find that genuine gem. Which is – as I just learned – precisely one of the reasons to go to a festival. So with all my complaining about being short on time, it’s rather ironic that I spent as much time as I did to find some sites to share with you. Of the dozens of sites I perused, two that I found that seemed to have the highest density of quality films were probably NZShortFilm.com and CoffeeShorts. My search is only just beginning though; if you have any suggestions, feel free to share. Read the rest of this entry »