tidbit

They are keeping an eye on us, now you can keep an eye on them. MIT is working on a Government Information Awareness site, a sort of search-engine to keep track of the feds.

phenobarbiedoll just popped up in my GeoURL feed.

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of George Orwell’s birth.

He tried to warn us…

Freelancer’s Union sounds like an interesting idea, but if you don’t live in New York City, it won’t do you much good.

Jenny writes about snacks. She rightly ridicules snacks trying too hard to be health food.

But the other end of the spectrum alarms me. I’ve noticed that at the grocery store, there are some sections I almost never visit, and when I do, I am astounded at the shit that people are evidently cramming down their gullets. Many of these products seem to be ways to extend existing manufactured food products (or at least brand names) into new niches–especially to make condiments into standalone food items, to make messy food more portable, and to claim as much shelf space as possible in an arms race of product diversification between food-manufacturing conglomerates. In the dairy section, Philadelphia-brand cheesecake bars. Tubes of yogurt–called “gogurt” if I recall correctly–that you rip open and squeeze into your mouth (I am guessing the beneficial lactobacillus has been killed in these). In the frozen-foods section, Sara Lee (I think) cheesecake “bites”. Tubes of pudding that you freeze. Cookie-dough-flavored snack food–how incredibly perverse! Eggo waffles made with Fruit Loops. Brightly packaged string-cheese logs, cheese niblets in a can, and so on. Potato chips intended to taste like baked potatoes smothered with condiments.

An analogous trend is found among hard-liquor companies producing malt beverages (ie, beer) that’s been de- and re-flavored to taste like a margarita, rum-and-coke, or whatever.

I keep getting all this spam for pills that promise to make my penis larger. (And, curiously, my balls too. I mean, who ever feels they need bigger balls?)

I know this is a scam. How do I know? Because penile enlargement drugs don’t come in the form of a pill. They come in an ointment that you rub on.

Saw these two covers (of Blur and Boards of Canada albums) side-by-side at Waterloo records.

Barbarella >> Lady Miss Kier of Deee Lite >> Ulala of Space Channel 5 >> Mena Trott of Movable Type

Found at Central Market, wasabi peanuts are a taste sensation.

The correct way to eat: Put one (1) in your mouth. Close the can. Crunch down. Savor the amazingly hot wasabi goodness, as your eyeballs rattle in their sockets and smoke shoots out your ears (just like in a cartoon). Repeat.

Pictured above is the new Mazda RX-8. You don’t have to be Jean Dixon to predict that this is going to be an extremely popular car. Apart from a Wankel engine, the notable thing about it is that it is a sports car with four doors, the rear doors being half-sized and reverse-opening. Snazzy design, with sharply pronounced front fender bulges.

And in the white corner is a Subaru concept car, the evocatively named B11s. Now, I like Subarus. I own a WRX. Subarus, however, have never been noted for good styling–if anything, the company has seemingly gone out of its way to design dorky-looking cars. This is obviously a new direction for the company, if they actually build it. It’s a good looking car. But it’s somebody else’s good looks. Same shape, same unusual door configuration, similar fender bulges.

Gwen suggested it should be marketed as the “WRX-8.”

David, the soup peddler, had a second-night-of-pesach dinner last night, at which I was present. A very new-agey type of affair. Following are some ideas that cropped up during conversation:

1. It used to be that Americans of any political stripe could make fun of the French and feel good about it. Since GW2, the right wing has co-opted this practice. Yet another reason to be anti-war: I resent the fact that I can’t feel good about ridiculing those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys anymore.
2. Jewish holidays are a downer: “this is the day God didn’t kill the firstborn male child of each household”; “this is the day of atonement.” Jesus! The Christians did a much better job of co-opting the fun aspects of pagan holidays. Why don’t Jews have days for collecting brightly-colored eggs, decorating indoor trees, etc?

Best use of smilie icons yet.

Sometimes two icons in my Mac’s dock will be juxtaposed in a funny way.

People like their Swiss Army knives. But in these troubled times, we can’t travel with them on airplanes. A simple solution: sell time-shares in knives. Set up offices at all the major airports; a traveller would pick up a knife after landing at his destination, returning it before going back home.

Heard on NPR: “Your potential inspires us to create the software to help you reach it.” Or something like that. Microsoft’s bloatware philosophy applies to advertising, too.

Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr is a local law firm with a name that sounds like a guy clearing his throat.

I picked up the tenth anniversary issue of Wired yesterday.

I remember when Wired came out (and still have a copy of issue 1.01 lying around somewhere). It was very exciting at the time. On a trip to San Francisco around then, I went to a party for Wired (which was headquartered in the same building as a friend of a friend). That was pretty cool. I subscribed. I enjoyed it, as did many people–I knew one couple that lived together but had two subscriptions so they wouldn’t fight over who got to read it first.

As the dot-com bubble expanded, Wired changed from a fairly experimental, counter-cultural, brash magazine to a neo-establishment, business-oriented, smug one. It was as if the vertiginous success of the way-new economy had validated all its earlier futurism, and so it redefined itself as the establishment. The graphic design became a lot calmer (probably for the best, on balance). With a few brilliant exceptions, the stories it ran interested me less and less. I stopped reading it.

I haven’t looked at it much since the dot-bomb, but decided to pick up this issue for old-time’s sake. Perhaps only for this issue, they’re back to the wild graphic design.

Wired seems as if it should be the first in line to be superceded by Net-based media. It speaks to, well, the wired population that can get all its news online. And after all, sites like Gizmodo do a better job of reporting gadget news than Wired ever could, personal blogs often have insightful and informed commentary on the world at large, and the Web offers more fertile ground for visual experimentation than print, right?

Well, yes and no. The fact remains that online journalism still isn’t really a going concern. A print magazine can still send reporters on assignments that bloggers would not be able to cover. And although there are some websites that are amazing design experiments, the fact is, most of the ones I peruse (to the extent I bother to leave my RSS reader) are using plain, quick-loading designs. Print still looks a hell of a lot better. And is much more portable.

“Without a W, there’d be no War”

Everquest is coming to the Mac. So the rest of us can throw our lives away.

A new site, Raging Cow (which I will not link to lest I boost their googlejuice, but you’re smart, you can probably find it if you want) takes the concept of astroturf marketing and applies it to blogs. The site purports to be a blog, but is really a marketing tool concocted by project blogger, which exists solely for the purpose of creating faux-blogs (flogs? faugs?), apparently. All the little site badges link to other faux-blogs.

And I though the Barbie Blog was bad.