I don't know what America is coming to when thousands of people, many of them adults, are willing to be regimented into brushing paint on a jig-saw miscellany of dictated shapes and all by rote. Can't you rescue some of these souls -- or should I say 'morons'?
Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s opens today at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C.“This spring, Slate will ask Dr. Melfi’s real-life counterparts to examine developments on The Sopranos." Good reading.
The relaunch of the XPLANE site is a great excuse to go dig through the xBlog archives. Wow!
This guy must have been happy when dj was born. I was only 1 year old, but I bet I was too. A true soul.
From the referrers: shey.net - a weblog w/good comics and politics.
The past two nights were absolutely incredible; beyond words.Photographers talking about taking pictures of last week’s auroras.
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These images are a poor example of what the experience is like in person.
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This cloud of light suddenly became alive. It grew brighter and brighter and it started pulsing hypnotic waves and rays throughout the entire northern sky.
Some of you will surely enjoy The Leaky Cauldron weblog: “We Blog for Harry.”
In our biggest cities, population growth is being fed by the increasing number of Hispanic and Asian residents, yet the national debate around race and ethnicity remains disproportionately focused on white and black Americans. Too many political leaders are still staring at the rear-view mirror, looking back at what the country was, not at what it is becoming. As the magnitude of this demographic transformation begins to sink in, every institution of American society will have to rethink its policies and priorities, every political organization will have to refashion its platform and strategies.Juan Gonzales writes for In These Times about the results of the 2000 Census. I sure wish I'd learned some Spanish in high school; I think I'm going to look into an immersion course.
You heard about the guy who was fired for posting a map on a USGS website of caribou calving areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where the Republicans want to drill for oil right?
One Chinese translation of World Wide Web literally means Ten-Thousand-Dimensional Web in Heaven and Net on Earth. Isn’t that beautiful?
This MacOS X Issues page offers an honest thorough evaluation of OS X 1.0 which closely mirrors my opinions.
This command line interface tutorial is required reading for anyone who would play “root” with Mac OS X. Also of interest:
Think of me as Chomsky with dick jokes.More about the funny-as-hell Bill Hicks.
Got another one of those Pocket Calls the other day. You know what I'm talking about - you pick up the phone, and all you hear is muffled ambience. Someone's cell phone has called you from inside their pocket, and the call lasts forever because the person doesn't even know about it. Stupid pocket calls.My brother's cell phone called me from his car once. I was like Mulder 25 minutes into the X-Files: "I don't know how or why, but I think my brother just called us and he doesn't know it," I said feeling pretty clever. My wife, of course, was all Scully: "What? Are you sure? Let me see the phone... yeah, it sounds like he's in his car talking to his friends and his cell phone is on the seat and someone sat on it and it turned on and called us by itself." I'll never know how she did that. I read Cardhouse today.
The Utne reader ran this article about ways to have fun. Here's what is "fun": studying languages, crochet, work, work, being Ira Glass (now that would be fun), and work.Hobbsblog II -- Electric Boogaloo is a destination unto itself.
If it's a little like eating an omelet through a really big straw, well, that's part of the beauty of it.Remember Push-Pops? It's what's for dinner.
Missed us. Better luck next time.From a message posted to a Californian website by "Dave", a fisherman in the Mir target zone. The BBC is carrying some eyewitness accounts of the unique event. You'll also want to see some pictures, I suppose.
In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary." That conflation has been reinforced by social theorists and advocates of identity politics who argue that there is no universal morality, only the value systems of particular cultures and power structures.Arts and Letters Daily picks up on some interesting pop scholarship claiming that "The Sopranos" -- the greatest acheivement in American television to date -- has light to shed on the debate over moral relativism:
Stanley Fish blows apart the propagandist notion of "reverse racism".In this country whites once set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves while denying them to others. Now, on the basis of race, blacks are claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other?
The answer is no. One can see why by imagining that it is not 1993 but 1955, and that we are in a town in the South with two more or less distinct communities, one white and one black. No doubt each community would have a ready store of dismissive epithets, ridiculing stories, self-serving folk myths, and expressions of plain hatred, all directed at the other community, and all based in racial hostility. Yet to regard their respective racisms--if that is the word--as equivalent would be bizarre, for the hostility of one group stems not from any wrong done to it but from its wish to protect its ability to deprive citizens of their voting rights, to limit access to educational institutions, to prevent entry into the economy except at the lowest and most menial levels, and to force members of the stigmatized group to ride in the back of the bus. The hostility of the other group is the result of these actions, and whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed.
“Maybe we can talk about Revelations 3:17.” – Jill Scott, “Long Walk”
Alternet is carrying an interesting follow-up to Tim Wise’s School Shootings and White Denial essay, and of course it will precipitate a storm of denial over on MetaFilter, though I hope we can take the discussion in a different direction this time. Unfortunately there are more than a few people over there devoted to promoting color-blindness as the solution to racism out of one side of their mouth, and reminding me that I’m white (and therefore have no right to take certain positions on racism) out of the other.
Sweet Jesus, I’m staring at boxes…
BBC Q&A: Why do interest rates matter? This is like remedial Economics for dummies in lay terms, and I’m still not sure what’s going on.
Now that you’re back, let’s keep talking. Do you think the boxes make randomWalks too discontinuous?