I read about this movie in “The Week” and then saw an ad for the trailer on my very own website. I am totally looking forward to this movie:
Last year I read Imperial Life in the Emerald City after seeing Rajiv Chandrasekaran on “The Daily Show” . . . someone saw me reading it on the train and inquired. “It reads like a Vonnegut novel,” I replied.
What I read in “The Week” is that this film is less Michael Moore-style polemic and more along the lines of people involved telling their stories as to how we managed to screw things up, over and over, in the worst ways possible. This is exactly how Chandrasekaran’s novel goes, but with a sort of wry feel, which yes, reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut.
We need to split the country into 3 smaller countries. After WW2 we split Germany in two to make them less dangerous. Three mini-Iraqs would be easier to manage. Comments?
I have been keeping my opinions to myself for a long time, but I had to respond: (more…)
[Update: weaselly underscores omitted from cuss words per Andrew Ho’s patriotic fervor, and because it might look neat.]
Girlfriend came over, with six peaches she picked from her peach tree this very morning. I washed the earwig out of one. We walked down to the beach, and back up again, stopping for pastries and a slice of pizza. We watched “Winged Migration” which is really good if you don’t pay attention to the self-important French people, and tolerate the silly parts when the bird flies up an out of the atmosphere to circle the Earth like Sputnik, except yeah, “no special effects were used while filming the birds.”
Saw the girlfriend off . . . neighborhood goes boom . . . boom . . . occasional bursts in the distance. A groovy Independence Day.
I know I’m starting to sound like a curmudgeony old bastard but… it really did used to be better, even just a few years ago. I swear to God right now you could watch Dick Cheney beat a homeless vet to death with a cinder block and everybody would just kind of let out a weak sigh and go “only two more years” but then go into full-blown warrior mode when the Youtube button on their iPhone got scratched. Stand in line to buy portable telephone, wondering what you’ll say to the first person to ask you to touch it while the thing you Pledged Allegiance to everyday when you were growing up gets gang-banged by a handful of frat boys that pay less taxes than you and don’t have to go to jail when they may have committed treason.
And, quiet as I have kept, I gotta admit, I think the iPhone spectacle . . . geeks waiting in line to pay $600 for a cell phone with a $1400 service commitment . . . but what is worse is to hear President Bush prattling on about how we must defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq or else they’ll follow us home–the best that can be said for why we need to be over there is because we chose to go there and f_ck up that sh_thole of a countryfuck up that shithole of a country, and it is hella true if Dick Cheney beat the crap out of a homeless man we would just shake our heads with a tear in our eye. If you commit treason you should go to jail, even, hell, especially if you’re just some hack taking a bullet for the White House! GAH!
Okay, back to munching on my toast and pondering my regular life. If there’s a protest in the streets sign me up . . .
If you enjoy listening to Internet-based radio stations like SOMA FM, please take a brief moment to lobby your legislators. The Internet Radio Equality Act needs co-sponsors in the Senate. The aim of the bill is to override a March decision by the Copyright Royalty Board, at the behest of the RIAA, to drastically increase the royalty fees for music streamed through the Internet.
What is really upsetting is that the $20 billion commercial radio industry is exempt from royalties!Meanwhile, over on the Internet:
The six largest Internet-only radio services anticipate combined revenue of only $37.5 million in 2006, but will pay a whopping 47% (or $17.6 million) in sound recording performance royalties under the new CRB ruling.
Since a lot of Internet broadcasters are small, independent operations with shallow pockets, it is feared that many will be forced to cease operations. There is substantial fear that this will bring the funky weird planet known as Internet Radio more towards the monotonous monopolistic drone usually heard on traditional commercial radio. I would rather that not happen, so I dropped the following missives on my Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and I’ll share it here with you, too, in case you’d like to spend a few minutes to make the Internet a better place:(more…)
So, I was checking up on my Flickr buddies when I saw Malavagma posted a screenshot, showing that she had deleted her JPG Magazine account. Why? Because the founders had been pushed out. Derek Powazek tells his account of how JPG came to be as an effort coordinated between he, his wife, and a guy named Paul. But as things evolved, the guy named Paul quietly managed to take things over, and recently, Paul decided to rewrite history. Derek’s post explains:
. . . once we looked at the spec for JPG 2.0, we realized that, if we built that tool, we could make a magazine on any topic. The opportunity we had before us was really “Magazine Publishing 2.0.”
. . .
Paul and I talked about all the different magazines we’d start, but ultimately decided to begin with JPG. The brand had two years of momentum behind it and a strong community. 8020 bought JPG from Heather and I for a modest sum.
. . .
We are no longer working for JPG Magazine or 8020 Publishing.
Why? The reasons are complicated, and the purpose of this post is not to air dirty laundry – it’s just to let the community know why the founders of JPG are no longer there. We owe you that much.
In one evening, Paul removed issues 1-6 from the JPG website, removed Heather from the About page, and deleted the “Letter from the Editors” that had lived on the site since day one. Paul informed me that we were inventing a new story about how JPG came to be that was all about 8020. He told me not to speak of that walk in Buena Vista, my wife, or anything that came before 8020.
Here’s where the whole “not lying” thing comes in. I just could not agree to this new story. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, make any business sense to me. Good publishing companies embrace their founding editors and community, not erase them. Besides, we’d published six issues with participation from thousands of people. There’s no good reason to be anything but proud of that.
We had a long meeting with Ron. I tried to compromise. I suggested we add text to the website, explaining the difference between issues 1-6 and the new issues. I wanted to embrace the truth: Tell people how we started, how we grew, and what we were now. It’s the story of how a successful, organic community begins. It’s the story of how authentic media gets made. And it has the added benefit of being true. Compromise could not be reached.
It became clear that we could not continue to work together with this fundamental disagreement. And because he was the CEO, I was the one who would have to leave. I still own a percentage of the company, so I hope to see JPG continue to grow and prosper. Unfortunately, it will be without its founding editors.
Note: Typos corrected and the emphasis is mine.
So . . . having recently subscribed to JPG Magazine, and having my own account, I had to consider . . . what do I do? (more…)
Today, I was invited to add the crazy naked lady to the Flickr wheelchairs pool. So, I took another look at the photo, with an eye toward the old lady in the wheelchair, and figured I’d play with a crop to see if I could re-balance the scene a bit.
Uhm, there’s a naked lady involved . . . in case you’re at work . . . you should know that . . . (more…)
That’s awesome! My Alma Mater made a significant contribution to the modern Internet, but culturally speaking, we are still dragging ourselves kicking and screaming into the latter half of the twentieth century, when we the civilized world figured out that it was somewhat rude to use other peoples’ cultures to “honor” our sports rituals. Some of our fine White People took great offense when told that they must endure the shackles of political correctness. They responded that it was incorrect to call the Native American Mascot a Mascot, that the preferred nomenclature was that Chief Illiniwek is an Honored Symbol, following an Honorable Tradition, wherein the Illini people from whom our state took its name would be remembered by having a White Guy an Eagle Scout who is 1/8 Native American perform an exaggerated Lakota “war dance” during the half time performance at sports games. What better Honored Tradition could we possibly maintain for these people? (A Native American Studies Program or a Museum? Boring! You liberals love your museums and cultural programs–get down from your ivory towers and get with the team!)
The argument against retiring the Hollow Hallowed Symbol is that a lot of alumni would get freaked out and stop contributing money to the campus. That always struck me as silly . . . but just to be sure, I have been stingily holding back from giving anything until we adopted a new mascot Honored Symbol. Right? If some alumni are going to stop giving when the Chief goes away, then other alumni ought to be waiting for the Chief to go away before they give.
On my way home on Thursday, I stopped to check out a protest on Market Street. It has been a while, and people were gearing up to protest the President’s recently-proposed “troop surge”. I stopped to take a few pictures, and when I got home I spliced together a short video:
“More than 155,000 American women have served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Among their ranks, the Pentagon said, are more than 16,000 single mothers.”
The Washington Post via The Week
My hunch is that a lot of these women are reservists or National Guard, doing a true “hardship” deployment. I imagine than some became single parents while deployed–serving overseas puts a lot of strain on young families, and many families do not survive.
Anyway . . . any veteran who might read this, I say “thank you.”
And, any single parent who might read this, “thank you.”
And, any single parents who is serving or has served in a combat zone? I guess I would add “wow!” And, I suppose “I hope that life will smile upon you. I hope you come home safe.”
A toe-tappingly titillating trade, which demonstrates that if you’re going to be a player hater, you should do it with a smile, and hopefully a strumming guitar, so we can be reminded of awful things while chuckling despite ourselves:
Do do do do doo dee do / Clinton got a blowjob!
ObWordPress: If you want to enable embedding of YouTube videos, disable the stupid GUI editor.
Thanks, gapingvoid for a Friday Afternoon Diversion. :)
The problem, in a paragraph-shaped nutshell, as described by George Packer in The New Yorker:
It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced–in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006–security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
I know that I don’t know what the solution is. I think “bring the troops home now” is irresponsible. And nobody likes “stay the course” either, any more, which is a good thing: we need to get our collective brainpower together to find some less-bad solution to the mess. (more…)
[Here in San Francisco] they have these GIANT ballots in English, Chinese, and Spanish. Really neat! Its like a giant scantron, and it is somewhat gratifying to hold this huge five-pages of ballot in the blue secrecy folder between your hands and feel like maybe the participatory democracy thing is of some importance.
Proposition J: Shall it be city policy to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney?
They also do ranked-choice voting for some municipal offices, though it was a bit silly because in both cases there was only one candidate running. I suppose a really enterprising citizen could have ranked in three write-in candidates and that crazy person would already be living here anyway.
And, it is not like I’m really impressed with the Democrats, and their fear of articulating some vision of a better America, but it is nice to see the system correcting itself a bit. The best wisdom I have heard is that at least now President Bush will have a check on his power, and he’ll have to behave a bit more like a President. It seems the process has already started, as the GOP has announced that Donald Rumsfeld is going to resign.
The system works.
As far as impeaching Bush goes, I admit that is a silly ballot proposition for a municipal poll, but it is totally San Francisco, and it is a pleasing break from reading up on school bond proposals and sick leave. Unfortunately, they only had “yes” and “no” as options, I would have preferred “oh, hell yes!” (Though, I’m not sure how well that translates into Chinese.)
You hear about the three guys who hanged themselves to death at Guantanamo, using their bedsheets? You might have thought “suicide” but apparently, you were wrong:
“They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.” – Navy Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, base commander
I myself, have been wondering about the purity of my seed since I began drinking flouridated water.
