Links catch up

I put together this entry nearly a month ago. Oops.


+ Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens.

+ Banksy art. As I was looking through this, it occurred to me that, in my mind at least, his skill as an artist was superceded by his message.

+ Kermit Bale. This made the rounds on the internet a few weeks ago, but it's still gold.

+ Dolphin Rings. I could spend hours watching this. There is just something so delightful about watching dolphins play.

+ The Butterfly Effect. A one-in-a-million close encounter with an insect convinces him that the theory is true: The fluttering of gossamer wings can change the world. This is a charming article (from the Washington Post, so you might have to log in) about a man who finds himself in the company of a red admiral butterfly.



Lastly, I am lightheaded with coughs. This probably won't be funny to anyone but me, but at the local grocery store, they had remedies for various coughs: Chesty Cough, Tickly Cough, and something else that I can't remember. Tickly cough! How accurately worded, how simply put!

Two nights left...

I have a bunch of tabs open that I'd like to get rid of. Here are a few random links!


+ Phillip Pullman's essential reading list. I'm mostly linking this for myself. I'd really like to pick up some of these books. Not only do I really want to read some of these for myself, I also just like to see what moves other people.

+ Orwell Diaries. George Orwell's diaries posted exactly seventy years after he wrote them. There are ongoing discussions in the comments whether he is observant or uninspired, with regards to his more mundane entries, but I like the feel of the every day.

+Anomaly. Hilarious, awful comic. It borders on the legitimately offensive, but (in my opinion) makes up for it in funny. As a point of reference, here is the very first strip:




+ YesStyle.com. Caters to Asian women, but has -- or so I'm told -- very nice petite clothing. Not quite my thing, but linked just in case someone mentions clothing woes and I can't remember the actual site name. (I'm also really entertained by the fact that, in a few days, I will be in a place where pants means underwear! Hilarious!)

+ 'I fell in love with a female assassin.' They met on a train and fell in love. Then Jason P Howe discovered that his girlfriend Marylin was leading a secret double life – as an assassin for right-wing death squads in Colombia's brutal civil war. With their story set to become a major Hollywood film, he recalls an extraordinary, doomed romance.

She then hit me with a confession that would both thrill and confuse me. She explained that in the months that I had been away in Iraq her role within the AUC had changed; she had joined the urban militia and become an assassin. Her job was now to eliminate informers and traitors. So far, she told me, she had killed at least 10 people in the area. I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, Marylin looked at me through the smoke as I exhaled, waiting to see how I would respond to what she had just told me.

Strangely, her confession did not have the impact one would expect; I did not recoil in horror. The months I had spent in Colombia and in Iraq surrounded by violence had altered my perspective. I don't think that I had become immune to death or suffering but I had certainly become less easily shocked. The difference between victim and victor, rebel and refugee, often felt like only a matter of perspective.

The most striking thing about this article for me was not the relationship, but the depiction of the emotional and physical space in which they tried to cultivate it. Both of them were damaged in some way, and everything, from the way they got together to Howe's retelling of the experience, is given meaning and shape through this particular article. I haven't heard anything about the movie (I don't think?), but it'll be interesting to see how they shape this narrative. There're double mirrors of influence, from the way Howe frames his initial impressions as a Quentin Tarantino movie and how he tries to relate to her through the lens of a video interview to how Hollywood will, in turn, interpret it. Interesting stuff.

That little cup of sadness: "Is Jon Stewart The Most Trusted Man In America? [NYT]

Is Jon Stewart The Most Trusted Man In America? [NYT] It's an interesting article, and the end is particularly poignant.

Mr. Stewart described his anchorman character as “a sort of more adolescent version” of himself, and [co-executor producer Kahane] Corn noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”

“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.

I've had this article up on my tabs for a week or so now, and I haven't been able to bring myself to write about it. There's a lot I wish I was smart enough to enunciate about sarcasm and genuineness and how it is too easy, too seductive, to replace the latter with the former. Irony for irony's sake is becoming one of my least favorite things (to hear, to use, to experience), and this article does a beautiful job showing that, for how it is generally perceived in media, The Daily Show is rooted in sincerity. The quotes from Stewart, from Corn and Colbert are all so honest and so telling. It's a pleasure to read.

Along those lines, the article also referenced the first Daily Show aired after September 11, and I thought it was worth linking.

[BBC] Bad spelling 'should be accepted'

Bad spelling 'should be accepted.' [BBC] Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not corrected, a lecturer has said.

Mr Smith, a criminology lecturer, said: "Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea.

"University teachers should simply accept as variant spellings those words our students most commonly misspell.

The funniest part of the article is the Have Your Say section, many of which say something along the lines of, "Down with spelling errers and Americanization!"

From a less glib standpoint, there are actually a lot of really interesting things going on in the comments. For one, the British perspective towards the degeneration of English apparently includes American English. According to these comments, it's equivalent to txtspeak or typos, a lazy way of writing that is worthy of pet peeve status. I had no idea. (Although, it's interesting to consider that in light of "Britpicking," a secondary level of editing done within certain fan communities, transforming American writers' words into something passably British.) Second, unlike what I imagine American comments to have been, the British are not concerned about typos so much as people phonetically writing like chavs. There's an element of what accent you have and what that says about you in Britain that, for the most part, does not seem to be that huge in the US. (I could be completely wrong about that, though. I am, after all, from the Midwest and still in the Midwest.)

Oh, and for the record, I can't say I agree with Mr. Smith on this one. It would hurt my soul a little bit, if varients -- ha, see what I did there?-- became accepted rather than ridiculed.

Geekery abounds!

+ Anthony Giddens and Michael Foucalt action figures [geekery]. "Fully poseable limbs with special academic movement!" Thoughtful head movement, go!

+ From A to Zyxt [NYT]. A book review of a man who read the OED from, as the title says, A to Zyxt. If I had more determination and self-control, I would want to be Ammon Shea when I grow up.

“Some days I feel as if I do not actually speak the English language,” he writes, his verbal cortex overflowing. “It is,” he observes, “like trying to remember all the trees one sees through the window of a train.” Once he stares for a while, amazed, at the word glove. “I find myself wondering why I’ve never seen this odd term that describes such a common article of clothing.”

It's like my life, except with a slightly more expansive vocabulary. But only slightly more. Also, I really want to read this book.


+ Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling [NYT]. Absolutely fascinating article of an outsider looking into the world of trolling.

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

There's a really compelling thread of tension and mistrust on both sides of the interviewer and the interviewees, and Mattathias Schwartz really gets at the core issue behind why trolling is worth learning about. He doesn't just ogle at the weirdos who seem to hate life and each other, so much as try to understand why they do it and the motivation/philosophy behind it. His outsider perspective does him credit; just as he is keenly aware of the ramifications of online cruelty in the real world, he is also aware of how people project themselves on the internet do not necessarily reflect how they are in real life. Even for someone like Weev, who has come as close to becoming the online identity in person, there are hints where that tendency to bluster and bluff come into play.


RANDOM LINKS:

+ Comic-Con: Mad Magazine [livejournal, comics, watchmen] Part of the Swag Bag this year was a special issue of MAD Magazine with a parody of Watchmen ("Botchmen") and Sergio Aragones's parody of the con itself...an all too true parody.

+ And while it's in my head, I called a Jon Osterman the other day. Unfortunately, while this was a Jon Osterman, it wasn't the Jon Osterman (that I was supposed to call). Obviously. I don't know what I was thinking. Ours has left our galaxy for one less complex.

+ Genderfuckery Is the Name of the Game [music]. Music by bands altered so that the gender of the lead singer is switched. Kind of cool, kind of weird. It reminds me of this one website I came across years ago that posted music by cover bands where they did or did not switch the gender of the person in the lyrics.

+ NPH Sweeps The Clouds Away As The Shoe Fairy on 'Sesame Street.' [media, Neil Patrick Harris] As much gold as this is, it's even better after you watch the his interview with Conan O'Brien. Fairy jokes aside, he's just so enthusiastic about it!

+ Interview with Dali, cut up and animated by Alexander Butera [youtube]. Surreal humor that totally cracked me up. Other people were less entertained.

Thoughts on: "Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading?"

Literacy Debate - Online, R U Really Reading? [NYT] - Motoko Rich explores whether or not reading online is equivalent or should be counted as equivalent to reading books. (Or, as the blurb on the NYT site ever so dramatically declares: "Is the Internet the enemy of reading, or has it created a new kind of reading, one that society should not discount?")

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

I've had quite a few interesting conversations with people about this article in the past week, and, while they've been rather in depth, something felt inherently lacking. We didn't seem to be talking about the same thing, and every time someone brought up a new point, I felt like arguing against what they were saying because, despite being in agreement, there was still something disjointed or unconnected. It was only after reading the previous article that I understood why I couldn't make any coherent arguments; it's because this article is not coherent in a sense that it needs to be. By tackling all of "internet reading," the article clumps together sites like Fanfiction.net and Quizilla.com with reading newspapers and scholarly journals online. It is also trying to make a case that internet reading is not linear reading, and that it is a sort of jumbled amalgam of what people hopskip over in their internet travels. Because Rich tries to make a conclusion about internet reading without defining what kind of reading, done by whom, and for what purpose, the article collapses in on itself, a veritable sampling of quotes and anecdotes that contradicts or misrepresents its own point.

I assume that a large part of what Rich wanted to do, judging by the title, is focus on the repercussion of the reading and writing community found solely online. This discards the ho ho irony of reading the New York Times online and the consequences of books available as through Project Gutenberg. As a result, the question that she would and does run into is whether or not the quality of writing available affects literacy. Her argument on this focuses on her teen case study Nadia, who is a regular reading and writer on fanfiction.net and quizilla.com. She presents a very pointed view of her: Nadia posts ("publishes," in another sense of the word) a story with a blatant misspelling in the title; the story features a reincarnation as a half-human, half cat; she doesn't believe that you need to read books to become an English major in college; and so on. As I'm sure Rich intends, she represents the stereotype of this modern reading age.

While Rich doesn't explicitly pass judgment on her, she cherrypicks lines and actions to make her a veritable illiterate caricature, which I had a serious problem with. After explaining the nature of Nadia's fanfiction, she cuts to critics of internet reading without trying the two together. Critics say that internet makes people lose the ability to sustain interest, don't allow them to critically engage in literature in a way that books do. The way the article is laid out, it makes it seem as though Nadia is one of those people, when, in fact, it's precisely the opposite. Ken Pugh, the neuroscientist from Yale that Rich seems to be arbitrarily quoting from, should be a proponent of fanfiction. "[T]aking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing" is precisely what fanfiction is. Writing stories, no matter how terrible, requires a level of attention and care that reading a book for the sake of reading a book does not. The act of being in a fanfiction community-- again, no matter how bad-- is being in a community that is engaged with a body of text. In no way can you equate that to being someone who does not read.

I would assert that Rich's treatment of Nadia's writing and reading is the result of the outsider perspective. The internet exposes us in ways previously impossible, and Rich's treatment of Nadia's writing is patently unfair. She seems to think that it is more significant that Nadia is posting stories with misspellings in the title than it is that she is writing and that she is critically involved with the text. This undoubtedly bad writing is a signal that kids can't write, that literacy is doomed because this girl can't write a novel at the age of fourteen. While I can't make excuses for Nadia's title, I do want to say that by giving this example, Rich is doing the equivalent of thrusting one of Annie Dillard's shitty first drafts into the limelight and using that as a way of saying that Dillard is a shitty writer, that she'll never develop that writing into something better. Only you'd have to scale that back a few decades or so, and assume that she'll never change from what she wrote as a fourteen-year-old. Nadia's writing is a snapshot of all fourteen-year-old's writing, only up on the internet rather than read aloud in class. (Also, Rich betrays her internet naivete by giving the readers all the information they need to find her stories online, basically outing this pseudonym to the world. I trust that most readers of the NYT aren't the type of people to troll her stuff, but, as I found, there is already at least one person who reviewed her story on fanfiction.net with a virtual tonguelashing.)

As for the type of reading online not found in fanfiction (which I would consider to be linear and not too different from reading a book) but more related to the hopskipping across websites, I don't see why that's related to the decrease in people reading books. My mind could be changed about this, but I don't really know if it's that much different than reading the backs of books, the subheads of articles, or the abstracts of scholarly papers. Don't we browse magazines and newspapers like that anyway? What kind of pre-internet reading is this being compared to? And, on a different line of questioning, what does it mean that web users are "persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy"? I am intrigued by this, because I could believe it, but I am skeptical of the example that Rich gave. People are a generally trusting bunch and I don't believe that if the Tree Octopus article was written in a magazine format of a hypothetical cephalopod magazine that people would condemn it immediately as false. Isn't the fact that Leu linked to outside websites testament to the fact that people on the internet expect corroboration between sources?

In either case, the more I think about the article, the more frustrated I am by it. It could have gone several extremely interesting ways, but Rich's description of the internet as a whole denies or devalues the more mature, substantive types of reading available. Instead of looking at those types of communities or even looking at legitimate statistics, she seems to depend on pullquotes from committees and professors and lacks any sort of hard evidence. By flattening "the internet" into some single entity that lacks nuance or depth, she does a great disservice to the people who are reading this article online, who comment, who review, who do anything involving the exchange of ideas through the written word.

After all, we're apparently the reason people don't read anymore. Hooray for correlation.

Things I've learned today

+ When I grow up, I want to be Raymond Kurzweil. Not because I take pride in my ability to predict things or because I want to be wildly successful in all aspects of my life, but because I want my wikipedia article to be half as amazing as his. No, seriously, when I say things like "centuries hence," people give me strange looks, not awards. That should change. [wikipedia, science]


+ Being too fat 'can damage sperm.' (And also, searching for "obese men" on BBC is incredibly depressing.) The article itself is interesting, but what caught my attention was this bit towards the end:

Dr Ian Campbell, chair of the charity Weight Concern, said it was known that overweight people had a tendency to have fewer children.

He said there had been a suspicion that was mainly due to lack of opportunity.

Ouch. [BBC news science]


+ Most importantly, this life tip: If you're trying to find a video rental place that you've never been to before, bring directions or a sturdy umbrella. Both would be optimal, but, in case of emergency, that one or the other will improve prospects and morale considerably.

This lesson was learned on an epic quest to get a movie. Ryan and I walked approximately three and a half miles to get to a video store located half a mile away. Three and a half miles in the rain with only a sad, sagging umbrella between us and true misery.

On the plus side, we eventually triumphed and celebrated with an excellent dinner at the inimitable Hamburger Mary's. I'd say lesson learned, but, knowing us, it'll probably happen again at a different stop. Between the two of us, I'd say we have enough character for a third. [real life]