Another Damned Blog

For those moments when you think music is over and done with: Lily Allen, ladies and germs.

“Everyone’s at It” (4:38)

“Back to the Start” (4:14)

From the upcoming album It’s Not Me, It’s You

“…with time wearing short and the prospect of a new administration descending upon Washington, Bush may shortly act to issue a pre-emptive class-based pardon to insure that his helpers not be prosecuted. And if the pardon is class-based, one prominent beneficiary will be George W. Bush himself.”

A preemptive pardon? How is that even OK? Details from Harper’s here, and very simple form supporting a Congressional resolution to stop it here.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

As a consequence of a perfectly innocent Google search, I stumbled upon The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, an early-19th-century woodcut believed to be the oldest surviving example of, uh, tentacle porn. Below the fold, just in case.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, io9 posted some illustrations, taken from an interview on another blog, that were supposedly concept art from James Cameron’s upcoming movie Avatar. Since then, the illustrator has emailed them saying that the pictures are personal work and not connected to the movie, and that he’d like them taken down.

As of yet, the images are still up, spurring a little discussion in the comments that might be of interest to people like Eileen who want to take journalism behind the middle school and get it pregnant. Here is part of what I said:

Yep, the artist could definitely take legal action, and then they might have to take the pictures down. But you don’t cave right away—let him hire a lawyer if it’s such a big deal.

You’re assuming that the artist is acting in totally good faith, but again, the story is fishy. That doesn’t mean he might not be telling the truth, just that a good journalist wouldn’t take him at his word. With all due respect, he did let the images out into the world on his own—it’s not like an io9 operative stole them off of his hard drive.

As far as copyright law goes, I’m no expert either, but here’s my best understanding (and anyone who knows better, feel free to chime in): Whether you can legally use copyrighted material or not in a news story depends on things like newsworthiness, the pertinence of the copyrighted content, and how much of it you use. No, you could never get away with reprinting whole books, because any judge worth their salt would say you were full of shit (which you would be). But you can reproduce passages of books—book reviewers do that all the time.

Here, I think the newsworthiness and pertinence is indisputable. Of course, a judge might feel differently, but the ultimate point is that (as sanctimonious as this sounds) io9 would actually be failing in their journalistic duties by taking Bacallado at his word despite the strange circumstances and immediately pulling the pictures.

I can see how it seems wrong—it’s certainly not really polite, but then, if it’s done right, journalism should often be at odds with politeness—but there really is a bigger philosophical question at stake here: Is keeping information that was already public still public important enough to fight for? I totally think it is.

AFFLICT THE COMFORTABLE.

The new Jive Tarkin is up at io9. Excerpt:

Yes, newspapers are dying, and even if flying backwards around the earth to reverse time really worked, it would only delay the inevitable: The Internet would just get invented again, revenue from classified ads would drop sharply, Franklin Stern would be forced to conclude that pay-to-view was a flawed model and abandon the PlanetSelect program, and where would that leave Metropolis’s favorite couple?

As a two-reporter family, almost certainly screwed, that’s where. You think tenure counts for something? Alas, it does not. Lois might get to keep her job, for a time at least, but Clark? Clark Kent? The guy who disappears as soon as anything interesting starts to happen? Sure, he types fast, and his copy is clean, but editors will have to make choices, hard choices, and Perry White will be looking for any excuse he can find. He’ll be counting on Clark, the affable dope, to make this easy on everyone. Maybe he’ll offer him a spot on the copy desk. But that won’t work—copy editors have to be at their desks all the time, and besides, they’re weirdos. Real weirdos, worse than the Toyman. No, Clark will take the buyout.

Copy editors are, however, very handsome.

“I think it’s wonderful. All the different kinds of people here: the ones who like dressing up, and the singers, and the craftsmen, and the street theater. And all the different types of people who come to see it and have a great day out.

“It’s great.”

—Death, The Sandman #73, expressing exactly how I’d like to feel about the world and everybody in it as often as possible

In case any of you haven’t seen it yet, the A.V. Club has an enjoyable interview with Neal Stephenson up:

AVC: There are a lot of neologisms in your books in general—in Anathem, largely iterations of or plays on existing words, in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, invented words for invented futuristic concepts. Do you have a method for making made-up words sound sensible, for avoiding the terrible-made-up-word disease that hits so much science fiction and fantasy?

NS: “Method” is an awfully dignified word for it, but here goes: In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I’m going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. Whenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.

I’ll tell you one thing: I am pretty jealous he has access to (owns, even?) a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary.

Are we listening to Chinese Democracy instead of getting work done? Yes, yes, we are.

The now-famous Nate Silver has a post up about the strange interview he had earlier this week with right-wing talk radio host John Ziegler (which is totally worth reading). Silver’s point is that “[t]here are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do,” and the post is an exploration of how talk radio—sort the right wing’s pet medium—might have contributed to that mind-set. He quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace’s profile of Ziegler that’s as good an explanation as any I’ve seen of why radio, although electric, is a hot medium:

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious “umm”s or “you know”s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English—the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling.

Radio is linear and continuous in format, and it emphasizes a single point of view over a collection of voices. It gives you “the whole story,” as it were; as Will puts it here in one of his typically excellent contributions to the comments here, “a ‘hot’ message is one impossible to influence or answer to.”

MPF ranks the Muppets:

Rowlf

I know, I know, I wasn’t expecting a dog to rank this high either. But Rowlf is cool. He plays piano, has a not-too-optimistic worldview, and has good lines in the movie. Example: describing the end of an okay night out, he says, “I’ll just have a couple beers, take myself for a walk, and go to bed.” And like Fozzie, he also has some journalistic experience, as the photo shows.

(Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band, while one of the best ensembles of the late 20th century, are in fact not superior to U2, it should be noted.)

Conbon—who, incidentally, luuuurrrrves it when I talk about Marshall McLuhan—posted this guy today. Many of you have probably seen it, but I just wanted to mention that if I ever had to make a five-minute presentation explaining “the medium is the message,” I would totally use this as an example of what it means. The remixed trailer demonstrates aptly just how irrelevant the difference is between a Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick horror film and a stereotypical romcom when it comes to movies as a medium.

I think, anyway. Feel free to argue with me, of course.

(A little lyrical shout-out to my man Fancy J.)

All of this is absolutely correct, based on the handful of excursions I’ve ever made over to the Corner at the National Review. It’s like Rush Limbaugh cloned himself a few dozen times, made the clones take a spelling class, and then gave them all laptops.

You can find the Corner for yourself, with Google magic, if you’ve never had the pleasure. I’m not linking to them. I’ve done it at least once, earlier this month, and I still feel…not guilty about it, but the way I feel when I get into a fight with someone on Gawker or io9 and it becomes clear that they are not even aiming for intellectual honesty, but are just going to move the argument around in whatever way possible so long as they don’t have to admit that the sky is blue, and yet I keep arguing. Embarrassed for myself. That’s the feeling I mean.

No, fuck it. Here’s the link. Not that you couldn’t have found it yourselves, but I just had a revelation. This post was going to be about how I don’t get why anyone even gives these people—or Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity, or Taylor Marsh, or any of the innumerable knobheads out there of any political stripe who care more about self-promotion and spectacle than authentic truth-seeking—the benefit of joining the conversation. Like, I wouldn’t have a serious debate about the future of the country with a hyperspastic first-grader either (at least, not most hyperspastic first-graders), so why give these people the pleasure of taking their arguments seriously enough to bother dismissing them?

The only alternative, however, is to ignore them. And while when I was seven my mom told me that if you ignored people who were bothering you, they’d go away, I soon learned that wasn’t true: It turns out, if you ignore people who are bothering you, they just take your Doritos anyway and poke you over and over again, saying, “Are you still ignoring us? Are you still ignoring us?” I have no doubt that the dunderheads over at the Corner would do exactly that, but worse, I fear that if ignored, they would swell and multiply like freakish pale mushrooms in the sour corner of a dark and long-unused cellar. And then somehow they would grow legs and come after and poison the rest of us.

So, no. I was going to say, “Why give these people any attention at all?” But the truth is, we should shine as much light as we possibly can on the fruitcakes at the Corner and elsewhere, because otherwise they will turn into poisonous mushroom people who will destroy us.

Via Alternet; worth a read:

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

(Courtesy Cajun Boy)

A week or so ago, Eileen sent me this column from The Union, a newspaper whose copy I edited and whose news and features pages I laid out for nearly two years.

There is nothing here, really, of interest to anyone who’s never lived in Nevada County, California. But anyone who has will appreciate that it pretty much continues to be a magical zone where the comments on every blog on the planet somehow manifest themselves as living, breathing human beings. It is also absurdly difficult to find weed there, at least if you are me.

From Vanity Fair:

“Putting Thomas Kinkade in an art-historical context is like trying to put Jack Chick in the context of the illustrated comic strip,” says Peter Frank, associate editor of The Magazine Los Angeles and senior curator at the Riverside Art Museum. “In the age of Photoshop, anybody can do this kind of crap.”

(Courtesy Balk)

Sometimes you kind of know something, and you know you should really seek out a definitive answer, but even though doing so wouldn’t take very long, you don’t for a long time.

Until today. In case you guys are wondering, according to Merriam-Webster, vacillate and oscillate mean more or less the same thing in most cases.

Thank you, MattGaymon and Colonel Mustard. Thank you.