February 2010
34 posts
January 2010
54 posts
The opponents of reform have found their bumper... →
Sen. Al Franken, from Talking Points Memo.
Apple's just not that into me.
On Monday morning, I sat at my desk at home to find a dead hard drive in my 2007-era iMac. (No big deal, I’m fanatical about backing up, and the computer worked fine off the backup drive.)
Then I looked up how one replaces a hard drive in one of these things, which have no visible screws or whatever. Turns out that step 1 of like 25 is removing the glass screen with a set of suction cups,...
The first time I see a guy in Starbucks with a...
Unless he’s me, of course.
A GOP purity test? →
- From MSNBC.
“President Ronald Reagan believed, as a result, that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent,” the resolution states.
But if a candidate disagrees with three of the above, then the group wants the RNC to withhold financial assistance and an endorsement from that candidate.
It’s not yet clear that the resoultion will...
Slant magazine's 50 best music videos of the... →
I’ll never, ever have time to watch all of these. But it’s a good list.
The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health-care overhaul.
“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.
- From a very...
Web Filters Cause Name Change for a Magazine →
Canada’s National History Society, the nonprofit group that publishes The Beaver, decided that the Internet required the magazine to undergo a name change.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-24) →
Todd Barry (29)
Phoenix (17)
Beirut (16)
Vampire Weekend (16)
Spoon (13)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
If you're in Chicago today →
I’ll be on Chicago Public Radio’s “Worldview” - WBEZ 91.5FM - at about 12 noon central time.
Garden centres see bird seed sales fly in cold... →
- headline in today’s Guardian.
How can you read something like that and not be overcome with Anglophilia?
MP3 of Dinosaur Jr's 1/16 concert at the Bowery... →
Downloadable from nyctpaper.com.
“A Michigan defense contractor will voluntarily stop stamping references to Bible...”
– - From the Washington Post.
If Trijicon also stops making Holy Hand Grenades, we’ll lose the Crusades for sure.
Love the design of the page for the latest Sub Pop free music sampler. I think I actually made one a lot like this with Microsoft FrontPage around 1997.
Also, free music.
One of those horrible “how many balls are bouncing” Flash ads was in a webpage on my screen earlier. The phone rang, and I ended up giving a 20-minute interview to a reporter while having nothing but my screen to look at.
I’m pretty sure I told the interviewer:
“The Bush administration was bouncing around, from one strategy to another.”
“When you eradicate...
This, from Talking Points Memo, seems right. Most Democrats I know are really, obsessively focused on the under-the-hood nuts-and-bolts of governing, what can get 218 votes, etcetera. This makes them very good at running a government. But they do get lost in the details and fail to tap into the public’s mood (which right now appears to be “terrified”) or articulate any vision.
...
Remember my post last week asking whether the FBI had an intern do its “Bin Laden aged” photos? The truth is worse:
The FBI is in hot water after using a Spanish parliamentarian’s picture to create a ‘What would Osama Bin Laden look like now?’ image. The photo, released last week, took parts of United Left party lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares’ face and combined them...
“A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a...”
– Matt Taibbi at trueslant.com. That Brooks piece truly was a piece of steaming crap.
The lesson of Massachusetts? Anger
Much of the disaffection in Massachusetts came from self-described independents. That’s significant because independents are concentrated in middle-class suburbs where physical and economic security are overriding preoccupations. Today, those anxieties are both real and justified, though not as critiques of Obama’s first year.
The truth of the matter is that, if you adjust for...
Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue
[T]he Haitian people seem to scare aid workers more than Somali warlords, Darfuri Janjawid or Afghan Taleban. Frightened Dutch aid workers abandoned a mission without reaching the collapsed building where people were trapped, and frightened doctors have left their patients unattended.
The experience of CNN’s medical reporter, Dr Sanjay Gupta, is telling. In a makeshift clinic he encountered a...
New Spoon album is $3.99 over at Amazon →
No idea if it’s any good. But damn that’s cheap.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-17) →
Todd Barry (30)
Jim Gaffigan (17)
The Very Best (17)
Animal Collective (11)
Fever Ray (10)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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I’m at McDonald’s, trying not to think about the chickens that went into the kid’s McNuggets. And the cows that went into my cheeseburger. And the people who had to make our Happy Meal toys. And the people who have to work at McDonald’s.
That’s right, I ordered myself a Happy Meal. And it’s delicious. And I got a My Little Pony.
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Whoever was hiding that Space Shuttle cocaine was the dumbest drug mule ever. The street price wouldn’t be any higher in orbit. Lines just float off mirrors or strippers’ asses in zero-G. And they clearly didn’t think through the whole “astronaut diaper” thing.
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The only way my Facebook “news feed” could be more cloyingly earnest and irony-free would be if you threw in a Bono sermon, backed by Arcade Fire, with a Unitarian congregation attending a motivational seminar at the DoubleTree by the mall.
Actually, strike that. That sounds like it’d be pretty cool. That’s way better than Facebook.
Something happened a long time ago in the Republican Party, and people might not want to talk about it. They got together and swore a pact with Pat Robertson. True story. And so, Pat Robertson said, “Okay, it’s a deal.”
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I read on a “productivity blog” that big tasks are easier when you break them up into smaller tasks.
So I’ve broken this 5,000-word article I’m writing into 5,000 tasks.
Done. Done. Done. Done. Done. Done. Hey, it works! 6 words already.
OK, break time.
“Since the earthquake on Tuesday, I’ve found myself thinking about Haiti in the...”
– Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-1-10) →
Phoenix (18)
Raekwon (16)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs (12)
Animal Collective (12)
The Very Best (11)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
President Evo Morales found in the film Avatar, being exhibited in La Paz, some parallel with his tireless struggle for the protection of Mother Earth and against capitalism, last Sunday when he went to a movie theater for the third time in his 50 years of life.
The Bolivian president saw, together with his 15-year-old daughter and her cousin, the film Avatar by the famed U.S. filmmaker James...
Beirut, “After the Curtain,” live on...
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I think I hear my wife upstairs telling the 5-year-old how babies are made.
In the last 2 minutes I’ve heard “penis,” “vagina,” “what does sperm look like,” “I came from an egg like a chick?” and lots of hysterical laughter.
I’m staying downstairs.
“Avatar” may have been a little too real for some fans who say they have...”
– From CNN.
And it never goes away, really. Why, I’ve been pining for Endor for 26 years now.
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Yesterday I put away the clean laundry.
Today my wife and the 5-year-old each complained that I’d given them the other’s underwear.
I told them not to get their undies in a bunch.
They didn’t laugh.
In the last few months, as I’ve roamed the world from San Francisco to Copenhagen to Beijing to Dubai, I’ve taken to keeping a double- entry list of what works and what doesn’t, country by country. Unfortunately, it’s become largely a list of what works elsewhere but doesn’t work here. In places such as China, South Korea, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland and (until...
In 3 graphs Andrew Sullivan, writing about Politico editor (and former Washington Post political correspondent) Mike Allen, nails what’s wrong with much journalism and much of Washington:
I think this misunderstands how Allen views journalism. His role, he seems to believe, is to become very very close to people with power, to become their friends and confidants, in order to get an...