Another way George II’s upcoming war really feels like a sequel to George I’s gulf war: I was in traffic today, behind a new SUV with a yellow-ribbon sticker that had the attached text “Support our troops.” This definitely wasn’t a leftover from the last gulf war–it just looked like it.
Caught a performance by an Indian drummer named Ganesh above the Clay Pit last night. Some of the usual suspects were there, including Adina. Ganesh was playing a tiny handheld drum–smaller than a tamborine–that produced uncannily deep, liquid sounds, somewhat like a kettle drum. I believe it’s called a kanjira. It was a good show, and despite the Indian connection, it was really more of a jazz improv session (they even played Billie’s Bounce, I think it was).
There’s a truly hilarious website out there, blackpeopleloveus.com. It satirizes a quiet and unintentional sort of racism sometimes found in white people.
Evidently, not everyone gets it. And some people who do get it feel that racism is too serious to make light of (violating my personal prime directive, “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke”). The site has gotten enough public attention that it was featured on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Take a look at the ABC page discussing this–it doesn’t actually link to the site (though it does give the URL, so you could get there), and at the bottom, the page has a feedback form which starts off with “Now that you’ve heard about blackpeopleloveus.com, we would like to know what you think.” Note that they are subtly discouraging you from actually checking the site out for yourself, and encouraging you to treat the ABC writeup as the only source you need–to make decisions and offer feedback based on incomplete information when the source is right under your nose.
They just don’t get it.
I’ve been seeing a lot of ads lately for a videogame called Desert Storm: Conflict. Although it putatively is a simulation of the 1990 Gulf War, is it clearly intended as an anticipation of the upcoming Gulf War, Episode II. Cashing in on war fever with a videogame? There’s something about this that strikes me as wrong, wrong, wrong. And weird.
Microsoft Word is legendary for its awfulness. This is not news. But I just ran across a quirk so funny that I had to stop working on my tight-deadline job and blog it.
I’ve got auto-correct turned on. I’m zipping along and type “arcana.” Word corrects it to “arcane.” That’s odd–I couldn’t imagine that there would be an arcana/arcane pair in the auto-correct dictionary. And there isn’t. But there’s another feature (that can be disabled, fortunately) that will auto-correct based on the regular spellcheck dictionary. Apparently that dictionary doesn’t include “arcana” but does include “arcane,” and the spellcheck algorithm decided the latter was the only viable candidate to replace the former. So it did.
Here’s where it gets funny. Word also includes a regular dictionary with definitions–the whole works. Arcana is in that dictionary. Go ahead, make jokes about one hand not knowing what the other is doing, the insane redundnancy of two different word lists, etc. I’m with you.
Saw the Mr Sinus treatment of Crossroads last night. No, not the one with Ralph Macchio, the one with Britney Spears.
As usual, they did a fine job. Of course, with this material, their job was like shooting fish in a barrel, but nevertheless, I was in tears from laughing so hard.
A couple of recent news items about China have intrigued me. NPR reported that a stage adaptation of Animal Farm is showing in Beijing (audio link). And a Chinese national who has spent much of his life in America but recently returned to his hometown, Shanghai, reflects on how much things have changed there.
It seems amazing that Animal Farm could be showing in China. But the story makes clear that while the older generation found it moving and relevant, the younger generation just didn’t get it–perhaps because they were all busy sending text messages to their friends on their cellphones during the play. The story in the NY Times is even more astounding:
I listened to my 14-year-old cousin sing rap in Chinese about the fantasized martial arts, jiang hu. When I asked him about Chairman Mao, he gave me a blank stare, just like teenagers in Harlem had when I inquired about Malcolm X. “Who is Mao?” my cousin asked. “They might have mentioned him in school, but I didn’t pay attention.”
If nobody except for politicians care about politics, then everyone else will leave the politicians alone to do…whatever they want.
Is it possible that China’s political class has secured its future by making the citizens fat and happy, and pretending that it is irrelevant? Is it possible that the same thing has happened in the USA?
Back in the early days of the Web, some random surfing opened my eyes to kinks like plushies, furries, and infantilists. Oh, what carefree, innocent days those were. While the chicks with headphones fetish strikes me as odd but somehow innocent, the one that takes the cake for me (so far) is the conjoined-twin fetish.
I’ve written before about the switch ad parodies. For those of you dissatisfied with the way things are going in the USA, here’s one of a different sort.
Macintouch today had an item on Apple’s infernal model nomenclature
Continuing a tradition of absurdly awkward computer names, Apple has posted technical specifications for the new iBook (Opaque 16 VRAM), iBook (32 VRAM), and iBook (14.1 LCD 32 VRAM). [This naming silliness has gone so far, Apple’s Knowledge Base actually has to use footnotes to help define its iBook names! “Note 1. The parenthetical product description (Summer 2000) refers to the summer of the Northern Hemisphere.”]
While I like the initial attempt at simplicity–just calling models “iBook” or “Powermac” without four-digit numbers added on to the end to impress you–they need to come up with a better way of distinguishing variants of a model. I propose putting a few simple shapes in a discreet (but not inaccessible) spot on the machines, so they can refer to them instead as the “iBook (○△△ circle-triangle-triangle model).