randomWalks

• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
• Write in recollection and amazement for yourself Kerouac was a blogger.

TJ is home to geniuses, the merely brilliant, and yes, a fair number of kids who are bright but not wildly so, or who somehow manage to find things other than academics about which to be passionate in their middle teen years. The Shame And Horror Of The B-Minus Student - Raw Fisher

WATCHMEN MOVIE ‘nuff said?

Watching the transformation is like discovering that one’s favorite teddy bear has fangs and a taste for human flesh. Before long, I’ll bet we’ll see squads of Segway cops in full riot gear running down fleeing demonstrators at some future anti-globalization demonstration. Street Use: Guns on Segways

This isn’t like getting tickets to a Fugazi reunion at the Black Cat; there will be plenty of iPhones to go around. Rob Pegoraro says Don’t Run Out To Buy An iPhone Today

…That might be the atomized fate of the West in general: desperately seeking visions, alone in the wild, surrounded by portable gadgetry. BLDGBLOG: The Digital Replacement of the Natives

Talking Points Memo | Obama’s Is an Appalachia Problem, Not a Whites Problem

What people don’t understand about Appalachia is that we’ve heard all this ‘hope’ and ‘change’ stuff since the English kicked the Scotch-Irish out in the 1700s.

I have a lot of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. A Letter From Jack | Edie Kerouac Parker

I show up in a town and call up my friends, and I’m like, “Guys, we gotta go out. Let’s hang out, I haven’t seen you in forever.” And their response is “Yeah, well, our baby needs to be going to sleep and I can’t be out all hours of the night anymore. It’s time to move on in our lives into another phase; we can’t live in this perpetual adolescence forever.” Paste Magazine :: The Meaning of Life by Ben Gibbard.

On The Media: Transcript of "Search is the New Black" (May 2, 2008)

And what we’ve seen with the Internet is that the digital divide was really, I think, more about a moment in time where there was a lag between early adopters and mass America. It’s become something that’s much more part of the fabric of everyday America, including black America.

Where we do see a divide on the Internet continues to be around sort of class and education, less so about race. Omar Wasow spoke with On the Media’s Bob Garfield about African-American media.

For the poor Christian Moslem Jewish saps duped by fundamentalist nihilism the Last Day is both horrorshow and Rapture, just as for secular Yuppies global warming is a symbol of terror and meaninglessness and simultaneously a rapturous vision of post-Catastrophe Hobbit-like local-sustainable solar-powered gemutlichkeit. Thus the technopathocracy comes equipped with its own built-in escape-valve fantasy: the Ragnarok of technology itself and the sudden catastrophic restoration of meaning. MAGPIE: ENDARKENMENT MANIFESTO by Peter Lamborn Wilson. (Gemütlichkeit?)

>OPEN CAN OF WORMS

Opened. Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org

bexns: what do you think of http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/?
its getting a lot of press

me: i wasn’t really impressed

bexns: why is it all over then?
i was telling d about blackpeopleloveus
which i thought was hilariuous

me: yeah that was totally awesome
whitepeopledon’tlikeblackpeopleloveus

me: it’s all over because it’s by white people for white people and it doesn’t challenge them on race

bexns: so white people trying to make fun of themselves?

me: it’s a celebration of whiteness pretending that it’s a critique of whiteness

bexns: interesting
so why so much press?

me: i have seen it linked but haven’t really read what people are saying about it, so i don’t know.
probably because it’s so safe

bexns: http://www.thinkunique.net/stuffasianpeoplelike/
http://www.racialicious.com/
latoya peterson wrote about both sites

me: “white” has become a signifier of a post-racial consciousness, so white people are happy for a chance to use it without actually engaging anything substantive

bexns: totally on point d
like all those hipsters calling themselves white and embracing the fact they’re white, while not doing anything beyond that

me: right, as if to acknowledge one’s whiteness is sufficient

bexns: yes exactly
these are the same poeple who call themselves uber liberal too

me: yeah. dude do you mind if i blog this convo

bexns is typing…

People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind. Coming Soon: Nothing Between You and Your Machine - New York Times. I’m delighted by this suggestion that the Wii and the iPhone represent a coming shift in human-computer interface design; apparently the generation driving design demands new paradigms. A welcome development – my patience wears thin!

His very name was a microcosm of the system he invented: the exotic “Gygax,” calling to mind the pantheon of Lovecraftian gods and remote regions of Hyborea; the mundane “Gary,” reminiscent of suburban kids all over the nation who were ignoring their algebra homework in favor of The Dungeon Master’s Guide. Deified and Demagogued by Matthew Baldwin - The Morning News

Which candidate will pledge to be the Gardening President? Who will be the one to take the lead in teaching food self-sufficiency and good nutrition to the American public? What a fine example it would set if the food miles traveled by presidential produce added up to zero. Roots Politics: Planting a Seed - washingtonpost.com

We broke the world. Now what?

Reading Steve Jobs - John Markoff

At Macworld, when I asked Mr. Jobs about the idea of an iTouch in a larger "Safari Pad" format, he snapped at me, "I can’t talk about unannounced products."

Last night I dreamed I met Steve Jobs. We happened to be sitting near each other at a restaurant or something. I wasn't going to talk to him (I was sure I'd have the worst case of celebrity dumbstruck) but, for some reason I can't remember, he was interested in me. We ended up having a nice chat, expressing a lot of mutual respect. After that we hugged for a long time.

My parents homeschooled me so that I could get more experience in the world, not so that I could shelter myself from it. Learning Curve, Bitch Magazine