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My Favorite Wasteland. "Need more reasons to stay home? You could probably find them sitting in the row behind you. Many members of the contemporary movie audience, only marginally socialized, would have made a misanthrope of Gandhi... Grownups who do choose to remain at home with the remote--and I often count myself among them, not a TV enthusiast exactly, but certainly a sympathist--have no reason to apologize. TV can now teach Hollywood something about smarts." [via]
comment posted at 6:02 PM on Apr-16-06

Free Air Transport for Cancer Patients
The Corporate Angel Network puts cancer patients and half empty corporate jets together for travel to treatment centers for free. Win meets win.
comment posted at 5:31 PM on Apr-16-06

"Livin' with war everyday": Alicia Morgan was one of about 100 singers summoned Wednesday to a secret recording session in Los Angeles. "When the lyrics we were supposed to sing flashed on the giant screen," she writes on her blog, "a roar went up from the choir. I'm not going to give the whole thing away, but the first line of one of the songs was "Let's impeach the President for lyin'!" Get ready: Neil Young's got a new album coming.
comment posted at 5:21 PM on Apr-16-06
comment posted at 7:27 PM on Apr-16-06

The Symphony OS. Microsoft may have tired something like this before, but it certainly doesn't look as pretty. This beta linux distro is sporting something called the Mezzo Desktop environment. Under its hood resides a http server and a Mozilla renderer which allows you to run any applications coded with HTML, Javascript and PERL. Think small "Web 2.0" applications on your own computer or more Dashboard widgets for tracking your FedEx packages. You might not get your extended family on to the alterative OS bandwagon, but a different conceptualization of the desktop never hurts. Instructions on how to get it running on Ubuntu are here.
comment posted at 4:19 PM on Apr-16-06

The Angry Left: The Washington Post runs a front-page feature about (in)famous Daily Kos diarist, Mary Scott O'Connor.
comment posted at 12:21 AM on Apr-17-06
comment posted at 1:46 AM on Apr-17-06

Wheeeeeeee! Na na na nah (warnings: embedded video, firefox, extreme retardity)
comment posted at 7:35 PM on Apr-13-06

The Great Failure of Wikipedia. Audio of a fascinating and at times hilarious 45-minute presentation by Jason Scott of textfiles.com on the politics and culture of Wikipedia, including tales of The Ninja, The Sex Offender and the Publisher, and the ongoing battle between the Inclusionists and the Deletionists. Will the Wikipedia become "an untenable Katamari-Damacy-like ball out of shit that rolls through the Internet"? (some language NSFW)
comment posted at 7:29 PM on Apr-13-06
comment posted at 2:31 AM on Apr-14-06

Google Calendar has launched. It is compatible with yahoo, Outlook, and iCal and includes many other features.
comment posted at 11:10 PM on Apr-12-06
comment posted at 11:45 PM on Apr-12-06
comment posted at 12:01 AM on Apr-13-06
comment posted at 12:09 AM on Apr-13-06

Argentina On Two Steaks A Day The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon.
comment posted at 1:23 AM on Apr-13-06

Steven Staley was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1991. A few days before his execution in February, he was granted a stay because he was found to be incompetent, a paranoid schizophrenic. Today, the judge has ordered that he be forced to take his medication so he can be legally put to death.
comment posted at 11:13 PM on Apr-12-06

One-link post about blog post without additional explanatory text
comment posted at 7:06 AM on Apr-11-06
comment posted at 5:27 PM on Apr-11-06

The Guardian examines "nu snobbery" and the social acceptability among the British press and middle class of ridiculing the working class. The chav phenomenon has been discussed many times on MeFi, but if anything it has gotten more widespread, and as documented in the article, even spawned Chav Discos. Where will it all lead? Has Britain slipped completely back into class snobbery - in both directions - or did it never really go away?
comment posted at 6:04 PM on Apr-11-06
comment posted at 11:30 PM on Apr-11-06

Hormone rock "Rock with the cock taken out and it's what a lot of women want to listen to right now"
comment posted at 1:53 AM on Apr-11-06
comment posted at 1:58 AM on Apr-11-06

UCLA Economist Ed Leamer reviews Thomas Friedman's "The world is flat." (.pdf) When the Journal of Economic Literature asked me to write a review of The World is Flat... I shipped it overnight by UPS to India to have the work done. (via)
comment posted at 12:00 AM on Apr-11-06
comment posted at 12:49 AM on Apr-11-06
comment posted at 9:31 PM on Apr-11-06

Fun with Photoshop and Illustrator Incredibly detailed photo-realistic image of the Chicago Transit Authority's Damen Station [map]. Here's a similar photo. [more inside]
comment posted at 1:37 AM on Apr-11-06

Adidas earns the love of the masses once again, this time with racist shoes! The most offensive part of the design is taken from original work by Barry McGee. Yeah, maybe it's taken out of context (of, say, other work dealing with racism), or is it some kind of inevitable comic artist attraction to stereotypical imagery of the past? At any rate, those wily Asians at Giant Robot seem to like it, and his fans don't seem that offended.

Whether you love or hate that particularly inscrutable mascot, McGee is actually an experienced, prolific, and talented guy. (He was also married to artist Margaret Kilgallen until her death in 2001, and is now the single father of their daughter Asha.) McGee once said, "Sometimes a rock soaring through a plate of glass can be the most beautiful, compelling work of art I have ever seen". Oh, and p.s.--he's half-Chinese, you cry-babies ;-) More on the controversy: 1, 2, 3.
comment posted at 1:46 AM on Apr-11-06

I am still alive. Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara sent these telegrams to friends throughout the 70s. He's most famous for his date paintings, in which he paints the day's date on canvas before midnight. His book series I Met is a 12 volume list of the people he met in the '60s and '70s. His ten volume One Million Years (Past and Future) comprises books with every one of 1,000,000 years (998,031 BC-1969 AD (past) and 1980-1,001,980 AD (future) listed. Reading One Million Years is a series of installations of readings from the books. One was placed in Trafalgar Square, and in a further wrinkle in time, this guy caught it with his pinhole camera. Here is a short essay about Kawara's existentialism, and here's a longer essay (Google cache) about Kawara's art's ontology. (PDF)
comment posted at 11:11 PM on Apr-10-06

Get Smart! Can a few simple exercises really sharpen your mental acuity in 7 short days? According to this BBC program, yes.
comment posted at 10:41 PM on Apr-9-06

"I've been silent long enough... My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the results." Marine Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, the Pentagon's former top operations officer, becomes the latest military insider to raise his voice against the "zealots" who led the US into war in Iraq. He writes in Time magazine: "Never again, we thought, would our military's senior leaders remain silent as American troops were marched off to an ill-considered engagement. It's 35 years later, and the judgment is in: the Who had it wrong. We have been fooled again... After 9/11, I was a witness and therefore a party to the actions that led us to the invasion of Iraq--an unnecessary war." During the Vietnam war, such discontent among soldiers sparked a massive campaign of disobedience and peace activism (as well as, more darkly, fragging) within the ranks, as recounted in a new documentary called Sir! No Sir! Can it happen again? Ask the Soldiers for the Truth.
comment posted at 10:50 PM on Apr-9-06

Pro-Life Nation. What happens when you completely criminalize abortion? Over the last eight years, El Salvador has found out.
comment posted at 6:43 PM on Apr-9-06

The Iran Plans by Seymour Hersh.
comment posted at 7:18 PM on Apr-9-06
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comment posted at 7:37 PM on Apr-9-06
comment posted at 9:02 PM on Apr-9-06
comment posted at 10:22 PM on Apr-9-06

Man tells President Bush that he should be ashamed of himself. Bushie has been touring the country talking to the people and the people have been talking back. Today he met with his toughest and most elequent angry citizen, one Mr. Harry Taylor who began with this salvo:

Q: You never stop talking about freedom, and I appreciate that. But while I listen to you talk about freedom, I see you assert your right to tap my telephone, to arrest me and hold me without charges, to try to preclude me from breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating safe food. If I were a woman, you'd like to restrict my opportunity to make a choice and decision about whether I can abort a pregnancy on my own behalf. You are --

THE PRESIDENT: I'm not your favorite guy. Go ahead. (Laughter and applause.) Go on, what's your question? (full transcript here)
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Apr-6-06
comment posted at 6:10 PM on Apr-6-06
comment posted at 7:20 PM on Apr-6-06

Gnostic Gospel of Judas, they say! Hot on the heels of Christ On Ice and the, er, "newly discovered" Gospel fragment, the news outlets are currently drooling all over National Geographic's recent conclusive dating and translation of surviving fragments of the Apocryphal Gospel of Judas, now dated to about 300 CE. The text is classically Gnostic, emphasizing a duality splitting Christ's "spiritual" and "fleshly" natures, as opposed to Christian orthodoxy's belief in the Incarnation. Looking beyond the wide-eyed "OMG THIS WILL REVOLUTIONIZE CHRISTIANITY AS WE KNOW IT" sensationalism, Internet Monk asks if a 300 year-old apocryphal biography of George Washington would be regarded as authentic were it discovered in 1970. James F. Robinson, an expert on ancient Egyptian texts, regards the Judas Gospel as mostly a dud, produced by Cainite Gnostics who took it upon themselves to "rehabilitate" villians of Bible mythos. Even if you don't believe in the account of Judas, there's no denying his contributions to the Christian narrative. Truly a historical icon.
comment posted at 6:37 PM on Apr-6-06
comment posted at 7:03 PM on Apr-6-06

American businessman "stranded" in China. Now safe back in Seattle, Eugene Nelson could barely restrain his tears as he told his harrowing tale of accidently being put on a flight to "remote" Western China ("literally 200 miles south of the Mongolian border"!), "damn near fight[ing his] way out" of a brothel, and barely making his way back to civilization. While Eugene seems a bit unresourceful, his story does illustrate how difficult travel in China can be without Mandarin skills, despite the supposed prevalence of English speakers. Maybe someday his employer can hire one of the legions of students (and toddlers) now studying Mandarin. Or maybe they won't need to.
comment posted at 5:22 PM on Apr-6-06

Thirty Straight Years Of Flailing What do you do when your favorite musician releases a confessional, personal, heartfelt, shitty record? You forgive him, of course, because he's Mike Watt, bassist of America's greatest band: The Minutemen. If you never heard them, you missed it, and if you liked them, then maybe you you started a band yourself.
comment posted at 12:41 AM on Apr-6-06
comment posted at 12:44 AM on Apr-6-06

"Primitive animation is part of the charm of TV's boldest, most politically incorrect satirical series. Its simple style also makes possible the show's unmatched topicality." For its "notoriously rude, undeniably fearless lampoon of all that is self-important and hypocritical in American life, regardless of race, creed, color or celebrity status," South Park was announced today as a recipient of the George Foster Peabody Award, arguably the most prestigious award in television news broadcasting.
comment posted at 9:41 PM on Apr-5-06

iRider. Is it more than just an IE shell? Could it possibly be worth paying for? Can it really do anything that Firefox can't? Discuss.
comment posted at 9:58 PM on Apr-5-06

"In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit." -- Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft
comment posted at 5:32 PM on Apr-4-06

Silence in class. "University professors denounced for anti-Americanism; schoolteachers suspended for their politics; students encouraged to report on their tutors. Are US campuses in the grip of a witch-hunt of progressives, or is academic life just too liberal?" From today's Guardian.
comment posted at 9:05 PM on Apr-4-06
comment posted at 9:09 PM on Apr-4-06

How not to do MDMA.
comment posted at 5:40 PM on Apr-4-06