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-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" |
sábado, marzo 31, 2001
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linkydink i don't think i could work under conditions like this. is this what i have to look forward to in a year? yikes.
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linkydink Hello Christian, good to see you on here as well. I hear you about the post name thing... i thought they would show your username like everything else you sign up for. It's kind of odd to be posting as "Emily Felger". Anyway, strange news for those of you who have lived in Greenwich, i just discovered last night that the colonial diner will be closed for the next few months, due to renovations. I discovered this last night when a bunch of us decided to abandon the punk show at arch street to go get dinner. (After patient 957 played their punk cover of the pharcyde's, "she keeps on passing me by" which was very odd...) we were dismayed to find to find that the diner was no longer open to serve our late night snacking needs. Luckily, i thought to check the landmark diner, and it turns out that it will be open 24 hours while the colonial is out of service. They’ve even moved a lot of our favorite waiters from the colonial over there, which is wonderful. Anyway, i thought that would be an interesting bit of information, even though most of you won’t be effected by it unless you come home to visit. When I asked them what they were doing to the old diner, they replied "fixing the ceiling tiles... and the rest is a surprise." hopefully, they'll put a ramp in the front so i won't have to try and carry Karin or Amanda up the front steps whenever we want to have a cup of coffee after midnight. Having a good friend in a wheelchair makes you acutely aware of just how frustrating the lack or ramps in this town can be. and yes, it is 7:44 on a saturday morning, and yet i am awake. damn my little brain- waking up with the sun. feh.
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linkydink This summer, I'm thinking of applying to work at Newbury Comics, or perhaps Newbury Sound, or maybe forgetting Newbury altogether and working as an "actor/storyteller" at The Boston Tea Party Ship. The major competitor to these ideas is the idea of working with SoundLab in NYC. They are awesome. Unfortunately, I don't think I want to live in NYC. Still, it would be awesome... Christian and Em, I miss you heaps. It's good to see your words. The radio is playing some really horrible TRLized version of You Sexy Thing. I need to leave this "internet cafe" now and never come back.
viernes, marzo 30, 2001
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linkydink christian, it's never too late to apply to work for the forest service. angelie worked for them last year and didn't apply until june. here's the application. as for choosing your park: you have to indicate your top nine choices of locations. each location code includes four or five forest service locations. what park(s) are you looking to work at?
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linkydink ooohhh...forest service. I still don't know what the hell I'm doing this summer. I was actually fantasizing about working with the forest service. Did i miss the aplication boat? Do you choose what park you work at? Sorry, I didn't realize that when you give your name to the blogger it uses that for your post name. Well, I guess "Christian Dog" is better than "Jesus."
jueves, marzo 29, 2001
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linkydink i posted some Peter Mulvey mp3s. anyone have any text-and-link-color suggestions? i know jrandom disapproves of the yellow, but i thought the red was pretty unreadably dark.
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linkydink A Run on the Banks: How "Factory Fishing" Decimated Newfoundland Cod it's pretty horrible how capitalism leads us to treat all of our global public goods (wow, used that phrase twice in two posts...).
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linkydink "'The environmental concerns are often a smoke screen for uneasiness over the viability of a particular law. I see no reason why a free-trade agreement would have any impact on environmental laws,' said Jonathan Huneke, vice president of the U.S. Council for International Business, which represents 300 multinationals, including IBM Corp., AOL Time Warner Inc. and General Motors Corp." i see no reason why a man who would say something this stupid should have any control over the fate of a global public good like rainforests or clean air. please, someone pinch me and tell me the Free Trade Area of the Americas is just a bad dream.
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linkydink em! welcome to the blog. i'm thinking about working for the forest service this summer.  also, it seems one of my old writings was found by an Anti-Social Punkish Atypical White Girl who writes for backwash.com. heh. i wrote that in high school. only three years, yet it seems so long ago. (can it be only three years? it feels like forever.)
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linkydink Greetings, This is Emily, I was invited to post a few days ago, but it's taken me a while to get around to it becasue I have been sick. I don't spend a whole lot of time browsing the internet, and therefore will not have very many interesting links to share with you, but I'm glad to be included. I feel as though I should make some sort of introduction, for those of you who don't know me or haven't seen me in a while, but do not know what to say. And besides, people's intrests are usually far more interesting when uncovered through conversation rather than listed like a personals ad.
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linkydink what say ye to this? are computers useful for children as a toy, or developmental tool? how young is too young? are computers as mind-numbing to children as television? (for that last, consider that most 6-year-olds aren't programming, but merely helping Putt Putt join the parade or some such.)
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linkydink jimmy: Google is your friend: C-based Prolog parser. Giving the Napster folk the benefit of the doubt, they don't expect to find a way to filter copywrite material (as there is none), but hope that The Man has some use for them in a opt-in system.
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linkydink My latest musical infatuation is with brilliant Melbourne-based sample collage lunatics The Avalanches. They first piqued my interest because DJ Dexter is a member. Dexter rocked my world in 98 with his brilliant entry into the 1998 DMC World DJ Championships, which blended Biz Markie with Beethoven and Rage Against The Machine. The same groovy weave of widely disparate samples infuses The Avalanches' debut album Since I Left You. This is the most fun album I've heard in a while! It sounds like a rock band, not a DJ collective; the sounds are massive, thick and chaotic, but crisp and funky. And playful!! Listen for yourself. They're in the UK right now. I would very much like them to stop by their hometown before I leave it!
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linkydink Fuckedcompany.com has 1 slanderous Comment and 4 slanderous Rumors in their database about my previous place of employment. I can't see them without paying lots of money. I can't decide if this is specious or hillarious or both. Phantom pessimism aside, EverAd apparently remains waiting in the ranks for the influx of "refuteniks" (what a dumb term) that will arise from the inevitable (?) demise of Napster...
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linkydink I like reading all these insiders' perspectives on the rise and fall of 90s corporate cyberculture. (Usually thanks to JRandom!) I will be very interested in a few years when we get to find out what's really going on inside of Napster/Sony/etc right now. Especially Napster! Do they really expect to find a way to filter copyrighted material from their service?
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linkydink "People who eat carrots enjoy wild sex lives and coffee drinkers tend to be flirty, according to an Italian survey." Don't all Italians enjoy wild sex lives? Coffee just makes me spastic. Is spaticism flirtatious?
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linkydink If I use C, I need to write a parser to accept a Prolog input file. Learning Prolog might be simpler. Anybody know a good C-based Prolog-parser?
miércoles, marzo 28, 2001
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linkydink i went back and tested them all, and the only one that wouldn't work for me was Little Suicides, which is now working fine. i'm not sure what the problem was...
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linkydink I would just like, for the moment, to share how blissful I am now that my DSL is active. Blissblissbliss! Thank you, Speakeasy. There. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog. BTW, cmoore, I tried to download all your MP3s, but the server replied: Not FoundThe requested object does not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it. Please inform the site administrator of the referring page.
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linkydink a couple weeks ago, i was browsing through Turn It Up and found a copy of Peter Mulvey's latest album, The Trouble With Poets. not having ever heard his music but having heard of the man from my wanderings through the folkie community, i decided to buy it. it's good - especially the title track. i'll throw an mp3 up here whenever i bring the cd in from the car. speaking of which, i've changed the mp3 selection.
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linkydink "I was watching from Dandong, China. The Hermit Kingdom is one of the most secretive nations on earth, banning most foreign visitors and eschewing contact with the outside world. But every evening here in Dandong, a port city of 700,000 on the Yalu River separating China and North Korea, a closed society reveals a little more than it may realize to outsiders who flip on the television."
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linkydink "Viewed one way, it was just another form of company rah-rah. But, as time went on, you could start to see it through another lens. Certainly, any journalist who dealt with Apple during the great years knew there was some other weird thing that went along with the Apple pride. Apple not only believed in Apple, it also believed in the party line, and it expected everyone - journalists as well as employees as well as customers - to toe it. Everything was great - except if you said it might not be. You were either friend or enemy. At Apple, business was personal. You had better believe."
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linkydink what time is it? you guessed it: it's the "cmoore's at work, bring on the links!" hour(s). i know you're all as excited as i am. 1. yet another reason to eat your carrots. 2. filepile.org: neat concept. browse the 10 mp3s, movies, and pictures they've got at the moment, and/or upload your own. 3. why do i keep seeing sites like this one - people trying to find an ideal mate via a personal website? i suppose there's nothing wrong with trying, but somehow it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. [all attrib. pixilated]
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linkydink jimmy: There is no "deal"with people, only "ordeals", for lack of the"ideal". Along that line, for your AI project, I would eschew Prolog and C for Scheme... but who wants holy wars with lecturers? cmoore: Affirmative action?
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linkydink sorry, timmy, i don't know anything about Prolog. it does say you can also use C, though, which i assume you're at least passingly familiar with. why not use that? to broach another topic i know little about: what do y'all think about affirmative action? last year there was a big stink about UMass-Amherst getting rid of its AfAc admissions policy... i want there to be no need for such legalities, but being the bleeding-heart liberal that i am, i know that something needs to be done about the racial inequities in our society. whether that's minority quotas or not, i don't know - i'd like to see some statistics on the matter, though. anyone else have an opinion?
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linkydink Anybody know a good way to learn Prolog? I have a sudden urgent need for a rudimentary knowledge of the language.
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linkydink From JR's belowlinked article: "In particular, the goth subculture of Seattle was strongly represented (in the Wizards Of The Coast staff), with numerous employees dressed in black and various bits of metal glinting in their clothes or skin. The crossover between the goth scene and the role-playing geek community was strong thanks to Vampire: The Masquerade, a hugely successful game whose premise was ripped bleeding from the novels of Anne Rice. " Aha! So it's all V:TM's fault, eh? The whole geek/goth hybrid confused me to no end in high school, and still does today. Goths in general confuse me. Subcultures in general confuse me. I just don't understand people. Can anyone tell me: What exactly is the deal with people? Digressions aside, that really is a fabulous article, JR. :)
martes, marzo 27, 2001
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linkydink "Wizards blazed a trail through corporate culture that turned old notions of professionalism and workplace community on their head in the pursuit of a Utopian ideal where geeks would be rich, be cool and get laid. Unlike the dot-coms, however, Wizards survived and even thrived because Peter learned an important lesson early on: Kill your illusions before they kill you."
lunes, marzo 26, 2001
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linkydink Yes. My cellular service is terrible. My phone turns off at random moments, and forgets what time it is. Telstra tells me to take it to Target. Target tells me to take it to Telstra. I have no receipt, and therefore no validity and no soul. Fortunately, I'll only be using it for another 3 months.
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linkydink Along those lines: "I have come here at the beginning of a long journey -- really, a quest of the sort that was common in antiquity -- during which I will cross the continent several times and seek out both oracles and common folk. I am determined to unravel a central mystery of life in modern America: Why is customer service so terrible?"
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linkydink "According to a wholly unscientific survey of friends, all cellular providers suck. Like the airlines, they've wildly oversold a service with a finite capacity."
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linkydink "But letting markets control the flow of power could be bad news for consumers, if the energy crisis in California is any indication. According to state officials, Enron responded to the emergency by threatening that it might withhold power unless the state approved hefty rate increases. "Enron is sticking a gun to our heads," state Senator Debra Bowen told the Sacramento Bee."
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linkydink "Today there is only one bonafide female box office draw in Hollywood -- Julia Roberts. But in the '40s and '50s, female stars held their own, and in the early '30s -- the greatest era for women in American film -- they dominated."
domingo, marzo 25, 2001
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linkydink more current reading: i just finished reading Joanne Harris' Chocolat, which i thought was charming. i didn't see the recent movie, but i gather that it doesn't exactly stick to the novel ("...anyone who tastes a morsel -- braving the disapproval of the town's prissy, sanctimonious leading citizen (Alfred Molina) -- emerges liberated, aroused, hot to trot." um, what?). it's basically a fantastically-flavored story of a single mother trying to survive in a new place, to the fury of the local priest. it follows the typical "liberal" (ie non-Catholic, strong-willed) character vs. "conservative" (ie Catholic, stodgy, stubborn, unwilling to accept the inevitable changes) character pattern, but managed not to get preachy. it's cute, it's quick, and it's interesting. ta.
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linkydink I put forward for your edification: the homepage of JHaas' intruiging companion, Joanna.
sábado, marzo 24, 2001
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linkydink I generally like Tom Robbins, but Skinny Legs And All is a bit preachy for my tastes... actually kind of in the same vein that I thought Quills was. Yes, we know Organized Religion is flawed and evil things are done in its name. Creating a shallow inhuman fanatic representation thereof and having him do Bad Things to Good People who are Sexually Liberated is a thin way to fill a novel or film. Fortunately, Robbins writes ridiculously enough to keep it interesting... ("The radios that pass by here play nothing but rap music. Sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.") Kudos on finding a good Walter Benjamin site, JR. The thing about him is that the bulk of his work was written in the 1930s, for which time what he was saying was actually pretty visionary. I think he forecasted, in his bumbling self-contradicting way, the division between High Art and Low Art, and traced its roots to the (then) newfound ease with which images (art) could be reproduced. Ta. ("Ta" is Ozzie for "so there.") He's also frightfully boring. I'm already feeling bloatedly oversaturated with postmodern critical media theory. Which I guess is what I wanted. Ta.
viernes, marzo 23, 2001
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linkydink jimmy & cmoore: Admittedly, I don't consider de Sade one of the best writers of his time, but that is what the critics seem to be saying... for all their opinion is worth. Indeed, the only reason I wanted to read de Sade is because of Quills, just as it behooved me to see Nosferatu before Shadow of the Vampire. On a somewhat-related note, Tom Robbins is indeed a cool guy. jimmy: Oh, I see, you're frustrated with artists that you work with who lack understanding of technology, not simply as an audience member. Never heard of Walter Benjamin, but for the most part I agree with him. I do disagree, though, that "because of mechanical reproduction, art loses its authenticity" for it becomes authentically mechanical. This would have more to do with the Turing Test than one would think ;) I also disagree with his conclusion that "Art was 'successful' only when it allowed critcal contemplation", as no doubt not all artists have such high aims, nor do all audience members desire so much. Can't agree more with you about Cinematic Orchestra, though I'm not sure Niagra Falls is my kinda thing. cmoore: My ideal vacation activities are nothing more complicated than going somewhere I've never been that always has something different to do ;) For summer jobs, you probably can't do worse than SummerJobs.com or InternJobs.com.
jueves, marzo 22, 2001
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linkydink Current reading is, as of this afternoon, Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs And All. Just got in a Tom Robbins mood. What a cool guy. Oz is treating me ok. I'm getting to know people slowly but surely. I still feel very displaced and uncertain, but I'm attacking a lot of new projects (a play, photography, some stuff for classes, hopefully making some music soon...) with a vigor that I like. Really, I just want to go home! Recent listening has been a re-re-reappreciation of The Cinematic Orchestra. Goddamn, they are amazing; nobody else is doing anything remotely like this. They are a real orchestra, beautifully meshing the complexity and aesthetics of sampled/sequenced rhythms and themes with live clarinets, saxophons, drums, etc. Maybe the next step after Portishead's live album. I dont think their website does them justice (it's heinously out-of-date), but checkemout if you can. Also St. Germain's album Tourist, which is like Stan Getz does house music. Excellent chillout material. Also just bought an old jungle 12" I've been looking for for a long time- DJ Die's Special Treat / Something Special.
miércoles, marzo 21, 2001
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linkydink jrandom! good, good, you're not dead. i've been finding it rather funny that our most frequent blogger is the one who's abroad in Australia. speaking of which, how's Australia treating you, JT? current reading: just started Aimee Bender's novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. i've read a book of her short stories (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt) which demonstrated that she is an intriguing writer who doesn't necessarily stick to the realm of reality. Invisible Sign seems to be more in the same vein, only longer. it's interesting thus far, anyway. travel: i'm having a blast in Maine, although this vacation mostly involves sleeping, walking on the beach, watching the ocean, and consuming vast amounts of food (which, unlike most Smith fare, actually contains some nutritious content). i must say Cape Cod is one of my Vacation Spots Of Choice, though. certainly all of the aforementioned vacation activities could be accomplished on the Cape. i suppose choosing a vacation spot depends mainly on what you'd like to do. what are your ideal vacation activities? marquis de sade: haven't read the man myself, but i have a couple friends who've been required to read various of his stories this semester and had pretty much the same reaction as JR and JT. (which pretty much serves to put me off of reading him; do i really need more preachy repetitive porn in my life? uh, no.) next on the agenda: get through the rest of this semester? yikes. actually, my real goal for the next couple weeks is to find a summer job. the problem is, i don't really know what i want to do or where i want to do it. if anyone has any suggestions for what would be fun, please pitch them to me.
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linkydink JR- Good to hear from you! Travel: I've always thought it would be cool to go to Niagra Falls... Literature: I've never gotten the impression DeSade is considered "one of the best writers of his time". Rather, he's thought of as a revolutionary; nothing quite so flagrantly, well, sadistic had been written before. But it all gets very boring after a while. I had to read a lot of it for a class, and it's just the same stories with the same words and the same seamy metaphors being rehashed over and over again. Kind of like most porn today, actually. Check out the movie Quills if you want a thoroughly biased, rewritten, oversimplified and somewhat entertaining rendition of the end of his life. Art&AI:: Thanks for the Turing essay! I've been meaning to read that, but never gotten around to it. I have expectations from theater because I put a lot of energy into making it myself; when the point of something (especially something I've been working on) falls flat for me because the artistic mind behind it didn't get some fundamental facts about technology, I'm always disapointed. And, yeah, in retrospect, saying experimental theater is all about rebellion is pretty limiting. Next on my agenda: Parade of the mechanically-reproduced Walter Benamins.
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linkydink Hello, World! Alas, I have been too busy at work to be even half as active as I would like to be on the blog, but it's all good. I've got vacation time coming up in late April or early May, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. Cape Cod seems nice, but I'll bet those better-traveled than I might have better ideas? Ideally, nowhere more than a day's driving from Boston, but I can afford a cheap plane ticket if it's worth it. In my free time, I've been reading a lot. I read Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which largely but not completely restored my faith in his ability to write a book, Neverwhere being damning evidence to the contrary. I also tried to read a collection of works by the Marquis de Sade, but as the philosophy was preaching to the converted (and the sex was not quite my taste), I put it down. That said, he is generally regarded as one of the best writers of his time, and deserves some of your attention if you have not yet paid it. Next, I'm going to pick up Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs of a Space Traveler, thus completing my Ijon Tichy trilogy. What is everyone else reading for pleasure these days? jimmy: Why be frustrated with art that doesn't seem to understand technology? Why have any expectations to begin with? It is, after all, art, no? Moving on, working with concepts that are lateral and blurry is supposedly simply a matter of sufficient complexity on the part of the ordered systems, c.f. Alan Turing's Computing Machinery and Intellegence. In more practical terms, perhaps you are looking for a pointer to the CMU Artificial Intelligence Repository. On an other note, if experimental theatre has only been about rebellion against tradition, then it has been a first-degree misnomer.
martes, marzo 20, 2001
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linkydink My mind has been bubbling. Frequently, I find myself, as a tech person involved in the arts, becoming frustrated with art-people trying to make art about technology without understanding it. Last night, I had a thought which has been growing on me: That it works the other way around. Tech people who don't get art frequently make very cool art without realizing it. I'm aware of the awful broad generalizations I'm making here, but I'm convinced there's something to it. I have a vague memory of a webpage I saw a long time ago. A computer had been programmed to generate concepts for advertising campaigns using metaphors. I think one it came up with was that an airline could be advertised with bumble-bees, presumably so that the airline could be endowed wit hthe bee-associated attributes of 'speed' and 'efficiency'. I cannot for the life of me find this webpage!! But I really want to. Has anybody seen it? I have found a similar webpage that I find intruiging; The Illinois State University ProtoThinker Project in Artificial Intelligence made some very cool efforts to make a computer understand and/or generate metaphors. I found the work on Metaphor Recognition to be the most interesting; they even taught the computer to be chauvanistic! On a more abstract level, I think of this as: How can we use something that inherently works in hierarchies and units to work with concepts that are lateral and blurry? I would love to incorporate this kind of thinking into algorithmic music composition; "Computer, make a fugue from the Book of Deuteronomy" or "write a hip-hop song about FORTRAN". Thoughts? Comments?
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linkydink here i am, blogging from Cape Elizabeth, ME. adventures thus far: we explored the Portland Head Light (which, contrary to what one might think, is not a giant car part but rather an old light house where William Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his "Lighthouse" poem). we also puttered around Exchange Street and thereabouts in Portland, which is fairly trendy in that hip un-chain-store way. The streets are all cobblestone and brick and the kind hippies always let us cross the street in front of their four-wheel-drive vehicles. (highly necessary here, i've learned - each time i leave the driveway it's a battle with the mud. i'm never entirely sure i'll make it out to the road.) portia and i tried to come up with some breakup/unrequited love songs. here are a few:
we decided ani difranco is pretty much an endless resource for breakup/unrequited love songs. we're keeping a much bigger list than this. if anyone has any other than their five to add, go ahead. portia and i are thinking of making a cd out of some of the suggestions. (Portia wishes to title said cd "Best of the Breakups".) amy, we all miss you. (especially portia.) we'll see you saturday and eat greasy food at the Athenian.
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linkydink O, Amykins, I feel your pain; I have dreams about the Athenian Diner. They have no diners here. No diners!! Agh!
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linkydink I am currently in Seattle, home of anarchists, dreaded neuvo-hippies, indie grunge rock, the WTO protesters, and Starbucks. I am living in vegan house and learning all about how to manipulate tofu: tofu scramble, tofu chocolate mousse, tofu ice cream sandwiches, tofu soup, tofu tacos, tofu tofu tofu!!! It's a wonderful experiment for me, I even decided to try some homeopathic medicine for my cold (when in Seattle do as the Seattlites do) and it's actually working. I am still having cravings for eggs though, and I have a feeling that the first thing I will do when I get home is go to the Athenian (mayhaps with Cmoore and Portia) and order a big ole' greasy omlet. However, the lack of eggs is balanced by the mental satisfaction of a place that is sustained by social awareness and activism, recycling and organic foods. Think not of Bush here! No no no, Nader 2004. My friend Abby, who I was visiting in Vancouver (not a vegan, actually a meat-eater!) would say that listening to all the tracks on Ani DiFranco's "Dilate" is the best way to get out the depression and angst of any break-up or other relationship distress. That's the chronicle for now.
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linkydink I've just discovered a little-known interesting riff on the fucked-up Greenwich High School Yearbook "Scandal" of 1997. Weird.
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linkydink Only have an afternoon to see all of California and the "fun, celebration, excitement, diversity, and freedom" that it represents? Thanks to the same geniii that brought you Chip'N'Dale's Rescue Rangers, it's no longer a problem. They're gonna love this in 107-080: Commodity Culture.
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linkydink I just watched some nifty theater in the "experimental" postmodern vein: a NYID production called, irrelevently enough, Scenes From The Beginning Of The End. It was in a parking garage, had many video screens, involved us (the audience) moving around a lot and at the end some of us (like me) actually being dragged backstage and put on the videoscreen. At the end, as I went to a bar upstairs to talk about it with some fellow theater students, I was left with the feeling of having watched the results of a series of random theatrical exercizes and experiments, rather than anything approaching a traditional play. E.g., some of the scenes were obviously (to my eyes) the result of theatrical improv games; others were (I later learned) collages and reinterpretations of well-known Australian movies and plays. Some of them were very cool and striking; others seemed to just fail completely to do what they intended. Either way, as I discussed with some friends and one of the performers, the end result was not one of traditional theatrical catharsis; it was either an aesthetic "oo, that is beautiful!" or an intellectual "my, how interesting."-- never a traditional emotional Happy or Sad or whatever. Perhaps it's Scenes From The Beginning Of The End of postmodern theater. As the performer I talked with (a very cool guy named Glen) pointed out, "experimental" theater has been all about rebellion against tradition, but has now run out of anything to rebel against. Instead much of it becomes, in its attempt to be self-referential, a series of theatrical in-jokes. Maybe this accounts for why (for me) watching it often feels like treading water. Go figure. At least some of what I just wrote is bullshit. I'm gonna go sleep so I'll be awake enough to sound cool when I talk about it in class tomorrow. If I sound cool, maybe I'll make some new friends.
lunes, marzo 19, 2001
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linkydink Oh, little Timmy!!! Here I am, ready to ease your homesickness as best I can! To tell the truth, I haven't even been livejournaling lately. SXSW had truly consumed my soul. Sadly, I missed the "Conversation with Scott McCloud" due to scheduling conflicts, as well as "Wave Twisters: The Movie." You can't kick yourself over these things though, or you'll go mad. I think I made pretty good use of my SXSW time, but I'm now better prepared for next year. An interesting blog crossover is that maybe a week after cmoore writes about m. ferrick, I see her playing that song live and am heartbroken that she plays for the other team. I tell you, I don't know whay I find lesbians so attractive. I should be the subject of a study. In web news, I'll direct you to my friend Joanna's page, as well as the page of new friend Dakota. "The Journey" has me looking at my life in a whole different way though, which is nice. As for break-up/unrequited love songs:
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linkydink The Broke Diaries, written by the mastermind webstress behind Okayplayer.com, chronicles the adventures of a broke chick trying to get through college. She has a real funky style both in writing and in web design, so the website is definitely worth looking around. She doesn't know it, but I followed her updates on OKP religiously when it was in its infancy. I may buy the book just 'cos I like her.
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linkydink This Blog is lonely! Amykins' is in Canada, JHaas has gone to LiveJournal land, and everyone else but CMoore is sort of AWOL as well... C'mon, people, I depend on this thing for fending off homesickness!
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linkydink (via MeFi): Look who's got the copyright NOW, suckaz! Bill Goldsmith, director of KPIG Radio Online, has it right: "(The RIAA is) pissing off the artists. If they piss off online radio too, what's to prevent a system that doesn't involve the recording industry at all?" I'll be right there waiting...
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linkydink Ugh, yeah, that was my ugly unnecessarily slanderous side showing through again. (But insulting other peoples' taste can be so fun!!) Is it bad that I said "swimmingly bittercheerful lounge-hop classic"? I think I'm trying too hard to be a music critic... JRandom, I'll take your $0.02 over most peoples' $50.00. (Figuratively speaking, of course.) In fact, I distinctly remember that when you first introduced me to Portishead, I dismissed it as unnecessarily depressing and trite. Now I love it, and laud them as one of the most incredible musical accomplishments of the 1990s. Guess I'm not infallible after all... (Crap-you-probably-don't-care-about-but-I-am-fascinated-by: Portishead's awesome DJ Andy Smith uses a sample from The Pharcyde's 'She Said' [another {unfortunately mediocre} bitter breakup track!] in the Portishead track 'Only You'. So it all comes around!) Incidentally, my $0.02 is actualy worth about $0.04 right now. Except that they round everything to the nearest multiple of $0.05 here, so I'm sure that complicates things somehow. Go figure.
viernes, marzo 16, 2001
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linkydink "To be sexy, hackers need to learn how to emit fitness-to-reproduce signals. That much is easy; what's harder is to understand which signals are more or less under your control and how to amplify them."
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linkydink Limiting myself to five songs was quite a challenge, since I am more inclined to think in terms of albums, but none the less: Nine Inch Nails - March of the Pigs Rage Against The Machine - Killing in the Name Portishead - Numb DJ Shadow - What Does Your Soul Look Like Bjork - There's More to Life Than This <$0.02>"Depressing" music is as equally important to the process as music to "live" to is. Ignore it at your own peril.</$0.02>
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linkydink what's up with the wishy-washiness emanating from the white house? first bush campaigns with an anti-regulatory platform. then, as my Environmental Econ prof put it, the administration came to the startling conclusion that global warming is an actual problem and changed their tune. but not two days later (predictably?) he's caved in to industry pressure and leapt back into conservative-land. doesn't bush (or one of his thinking lackeys) realize that changing positions repeatedly on issues like this doesn't do anything to gain the confidence of the majority of voters who doubt his ability to run the country? (heck, even most of the bush voters i know only checked the republican box because of the promised tax cut.) i am perfectly willing to praise the man when he does something right (that is, "right" in my green-washed view), and, as the aforementioned professor said, "You should never be unkind even to the most retarded of scholars," but sometimes it's so, so hard.
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linkydink the one post-breakup song that's come to mind is Melissa Ferrick's "Some Kinda Nerve", featuring such lyrics as "you got some kinda ego / yeah for looking at me like that / like your eyes are gonna make me crawl back to you / like what am i supposed to do now / just forgive you?" it is not at all angsty and depressing; it's very empowering. i listened to it a lot this summer after seeing Melissa play (and, coincicentally, after my breakup with brad, which doesn't at all resemble the lyrics of the song). other than that, just the normal music i use to manipulate my mood on a regular basis.
jueves, marzo 15, 2001
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linkydink Wow, the fivesongs.com crowd are quite the angsty indy-rockers. I mean, c'mon, Radiohead? Some people like it, but if I'm already depressed, the last thing I need to hear is Thom Yorke's debilitating falsetto croon in a 7/8 time signature. Give me something I can live to! The track that most vibrantly helped me through my most recent quasitraumatic breakup debacle was definitely The Pharcyde's swimmingly bittercheerful lounge-hop classic Otha Fish. I reminisce, try to clear up all the myths for an imaginary kiss with you again Not even friends, though I wish that I could mend like a tailor and be Olive Oyl's number one sailor I ams what I am, still I falls like an anvil She's heavy on the mind sometimes it's more than I can handle... There'll be no suicide attempts for this slim-trim kid Cuz you know there's otha fish-- in the sea, that is. The lyrics are brilliant; deceptively silly yet possesed with a definite wisdom punctuated by ocassional nonsense for good measure. (Like me!) You really need to hear the song to get the feel for it. It's so fucking groovy. Go Audiogalaxy it. Plus, as a breakup-bonus, the same album ("Bizzare Ride II Tha Pharcyde") contains Passin Me By and For Better Or For Worse. The Pharcyde make it fun to be bitter. The runner up is definitely Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince's Girls Of The World Aint Nothin But Trouble. Favorite of the moment is (or would be) Donna Summers' Autumn Changes, but that's just because I just found it on 7" and it's really really good. (Giorgio Moroder, baby!) (Yes, I said "swimmingly bittercheerful lounge-hop classic". You got a problem with that?)
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linkydink what are the top five songs that get you through a break-up or never happened relationship? i'm gonna have to think about this one for a while.
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linkydink remember when i posted that angry article about how Gore was pushing for African countries to stop allowing the sale of generic AIDS drugs? today Bristol-Meyers Squibb said they'd no longer try to stop the sale of generic drugs in Africa. score one for the "compassion not capitalism" team.
miércoles, marzo 14, 2001
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linkydink "I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I'll say it again: white people live in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from "those people" in the cities we'll be safe. If we can just find an "all-American" town, life will be better, because "things like this just don't happen here." "
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linkydink "Jurors—several of whom admitted animus toward gays—heard the prosecutor say during closing arguments that "sending a homosexual to the penitentiary certainly isn't a very bad punishment for a homosexual.""
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linkydink anyone who puts a Jhonen Vasquez picture on his webpage gets bonus points in my book. the fact that he's articulate and intelligent make him all the more interesting. ;) timmy, i'm sorry about your cds. how did they come to be lost? i can't believe it's ten minutes to three in the morning and i'm still awake and i still have gobs of work to do. but i did get the aforementioned web server written in a relatively short amount of time.
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linkydink Ugh. I lost 11 CDs yesterday. Boogie Down Productions, Ultramagnetic MCs, Hexstatic, "Beethoven Wrote It But It Swings", Tom Waits "Rain Dogs", Aphex Twin "RDJ Album", Jeep Beat Collective, the BRAND NEW Wagon Christ album that I bought 48 hours ago, and some burned albums. Oh well. Looks like I'll be spending some quality time with my CDR and whatever replaces Napster.
martes, marzo 13, 2001
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linkydink tonight's project: write up my Urban Economics midterm. the question deals with a hypothetical city called Portland whose two main industries are oil refinery and automobile assembly. my job is to analyze what will happen to the city structure, modes of transportation, industries, etc. if an oil crisis occurred and gas prices jumped to $25/gallon. it's pretty fun. (and no, this is not a solicitation for suggestions. i'm perfectly capable and besides, input from others is cheating. so there.) tomorrow night's project: write a multi-threaded web server. peanuts. but, unfortunately, time-consuming peanuts.
lunes, marzo 12, 2001
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linkydink timmy, you know if i could bring myself to part with $1800 i'd be down there on friday. unfortunately, at my current working wage and number of work hours, it takes me approximately a semester and three-quarters to make that much money. can't wait 'til i have a real job. although it's nice that my boss didn't get mad at me for forgetting to lock up the lab on saturday night (even though the key is now missing... d'oh).
domingo, marzo 11, 2001
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linkydink things overheard at the USC-UC Riverside baseball game on tuesday afternoon: (to the visiting UC batter) among the normal "You suck" and "Go home, losers" etc "You're dead inside!" (to the game's officials) "Hey, ump, get off your knees, you're blowin' the game!"
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linkydink I don't know much of anything about Jerry Garcia, Tony Rice, or David Grisman, but I will say this: The (apparently) famous Pizza Tapes is rare beautiful blissful chilled-out music, even for someone as leery of acoustic-guitar work as myself. These tunes were originally snatched from an in-studio jam session by a pizza delivery boy in 1993, and became wildly popular on bootleg for a long time before finally being legitimately released last year. It includes covers of Miles Davis, Aerosmith, and the now-famous Man Of Constant Sorrow song from O Brother Where Art Thou. This is most definitely worth getting your hands on if you can find it.
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linkydink from Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business: "What about high-powered women who have the old-fashioned kind of marriage--with a couple of kids and a husband who brings home some bacon too? They really stretch. Says PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi (No. 43), who moved to the U.S. from India after business school: "The reality is that women have to be just a little better at their jobs to succeed. But rather than wonder why inequality is holding women back, I spend my time doing things to expand my abilities." As if being CFO of PepsiCo, a mother of two (ages 7 and 16), and a wife of a partner at a management consulting firm weren't enough, Nooyi says she reads a book a day--"more books than anyone else--topical books, romance novels, bestsellers, everything. To keep me being a real person." Real person--yeah, tell us about it. Nooyi says that most nights she reads from 11 until one or two in the morning. In her spare time she plays electric guitar." what interests (and amuses) me about this is that Indra is a friend of my mom's - the high-powered corporate women of PepsiCo club, ha ha - and she talks about her all the time. i haven't met her, but my family's eaten dinner at their house (and vice versa, i think). it's weird when you're two degrees of separation from people in famous publications. or maybe the world is just getting smaller and smaller the older i get.
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linkydink Yeah, baby! The magical Wagon Christ will spin beautiful music for me Friday night with visuals from the fantastic Hexstatic! O, a happy man I am. :)
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linkydink This weekend has been the Melbourne MOOMBA Festival! I haven't been to the major celebrations, but I have witnessed a number of shiny neon-colored seminaked people walking around looking smug and cheerful, been treated to spontaneous steel-drum-band renditions of Watermellon Man and some other fun tunes, and seen what appeared to be a giant bouncey ball with a torso sticking out of it delivering a magic show on the side of the road. This is really genuinely awesome stuff-- a far cry from the tame corporate-logos-on-parade bullshit that is typical of government-sanctioned/sponsored celebration in America. It continues through Labor Day, so I'll keep you posted on what else I come across!
viernes, marzo 09, 2001
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linkydink here is my news for the day: my hair is long enough (or self-clinging enough) that i can manage to put it all up in one rubber-band in back of my head. this is highly exciting (even though i don't like having long hair, no no.) because i haven't been able to do so for, oh, over two years. maybe three. in other exciting news, this weekend is the Western Mass Sacred Harp Convention! it's at the Northampton Center for the Arts from 9:30am to 3:30pm on Saturday and Sunday. and you don't have to know how to sing. come visit, and i'll feed you tasty black bean soup and teach you shape-note. in other other exciting news, phil is playing at the Flywheel in Easthampton on April 9th. i'm going. anyone who wants to tag along is welcome to.
jueves, marzo 08, 2001
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linkydink The computer labs at U-Melbourne are ridiculous. In fact, EVERYTHING here's ridiculous, as in ridiculously overfunded. There is a massive BAR in the student union building. A really nice one! With plush cozy couches and a big balcony and good food, beer and "coffee" (meaning "lattes"). I think that the Uni just gave far more money than was necessary towards building computer labs, because we have special magnetic-strip security cards needed to get into the building and then again to get into the labs and then again to print anything, plus one userid and password to use a computer plus ANOTHER userid and password to browse the web externally from the intranet, a daily 5MB external web-download limit, and no external telnet or ftp access. My Artificial Intelligence prof, Allan Blair, is very cool. Blair on goal-based top-down model intelligence: "Ok, so what is my goal? I want to rule the world. Ok, so what do I need to accomplish that? Ok, I need a highly trained army of superpowered soldiers and international spies. Ok, so how do I get that? I need lots and lots of money. So, maybe I'll, y'know, get a job at a fast food restaurant. And then the task is not to lose track of your goals while you're busy, y'know, (insert mimery here) flipping burgers."
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linkydink REVEALED: The cause of JHaas's blogging absence! Also dig the LiveJournal of another good friend of mine. (Oops. Link fixed 3/11.)
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linkydink look! one of the Blogs of Note on the Blogger frontpage is Neil Gaman's American Gods journal. a nifty little peek into the head of an amazing writer.
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linkydink way to go, timmy! that is awesome. on a smaller scale, i got up, auditioned, strutted my stuff, etc. and got cast in a part in one of the Midnite Theatre scenes. (and i've only been in the country for twenty years and three months!) i'm in a murder mystery. i am, in fact, the one who gets murdered. performances are April 6th and 7th, 11pm, if anyone's interested.
miércoles, marzo 07, 2001
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linkydink Union House Theatre presents Pirate Eyes Written by Lally Katz, directed by UHT Artistic Coordinator Jane Woollard. Pirate Eyes is an intriguing blend of neon, noir, Wizard of Oz and The Little Mermaid. The play takes us on a journey with two dysfunctional sisters, Dorey and Laina; a giant who performs unusual operations and Minnie and her sea rat Skampy. Filled with colour, beautiful poetry and very strange people, this is a story to disturb the dust in the mind’s eye. Venue: Union Theatre, Union House Preview: Wednesday 9 May Season: Wed-Sat 10 – 19 May Tickets: Preview $5 Concession: $9 Full: $15 Now officially featuring the amazing Timothy Jones as The Hitchiker, in his usual role as the super-fun completely substanceless bit-part comic relief. Yeah, baby, I went into auditions, strutted my stuff, made my silly faces, and got myself cast in a totally awesome play with less than a month in the country. I am awesome, oh yes I am. (Insert victory dance here, to the tune of Biz Markie's "The Biz Dance".)
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linkydink ah, i find myself at work once again (after a brief snow-induced respite). here's a peep at what i'm reading today.
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linkydink i know the blog hasn't been publishing for days now. i'm trying, guys, i'm trying. i don't know who the evil users are who don't delete their hung FTP processes, but if i ever find out i will kill them- uh, i mean, ask them nicely to do so in the future.
martes, marzo 06, 2001
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linkydink well, the New Yorkers may have been disappointed (or relieved) by their sparse snowfall, but we Smithies are thrilled by the smothering of snow we got here - which resulted in the only Official Smith Snow Day in recent memory. aaaaamazing. Smith never, never, never officially cancels classes. (well, i guess now they do...)
lunes, marzo 05, 2001
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linkydink Run - do not walk - to see Before Night Falls, based on the book by Reinaldo Arenas and directed by Julian Schnabel (who also directed Basquiat).
domingo, marzo 04, 2001
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linkydink I wish to reneg on my previous statements concerning Crescent City Rhapsody. I finished it, and it ultimately just wasn't that good. Something about scifi with Duke Ellington as a main character just doesn't sit well with me. In its stead, I wish to offer a much more relevant, interesting and beautiful piece of art: the movie American Psycho, which I have just watched for the first installment of my hopefully-good Commodity Culture class. It's a fascinating and (in my amateur opinion) masterful film. And I'm not just saying that because Coldcut is on the soundtrack. Incidentally, the professor of said Commodity Culture class also made reference to the Nike "sweatshop" monogram fiasco that's been going around the email-forward circuit. I felt elite because I knew it already, but you might not, so check it out.
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linkydink i want marn to be my bitch. she writes one of the most hilarious personal webpages ever. truly. and she wants to be your bitch. well, really she just wants you to want her to be your bitch, but still. and i do. yep. i want her to be my personal bitch. it'd be fun. she could come down here from Canuckia and do all those bitch-things for me that bitches are supposed to do. uh huh. yep. ooooay. maybe cmoore needs to get more sleep.
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linkydink in response to grim's latest entry: i've discovered a real band that uses a recorder. in fact, i saw them last night: our beloved local folk phenoms The Nields. Nerissa played it on several songs. so there. ;)
sábado, marzo 03, 2001
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linkydink An interesting part of the article dkp posted some time ago: "...Physiologist and ecologist Jared Diamond, who wrote the book Guns, Germs, and Steel which both Bill Clinton and Bill Gates adored, predicts in a recent interview in Skeptic Magazines that, if we leave our current use of resources unchecked, we will have destroyed the earth in 50 years... Since we have all this technology, and since individuals do have power to communicate and meet one another with Internet technology, maybe we could try to use it to save the planet, rather than to become even more selfish e-consumers. That would be a good application of the TCP/IP protocol, I think." I seem to recall local genius Victor Mazmanian saying something similar a few years back. Makes you wonder...
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linkydink for all y'all who live in the Northeast (and, like me, don't usually pay attention to the weather forecasts), the Northeast's gonna be hit with a whopping big storm sunday/monday. if it beats the 25-inches-in-5-hours we got a few weeks ago, i'll be impressed. of course, smith won't be cancelling any classes, so i'll be bundling up and trudging through the snow. (<sarcasm>oo, oo, plea for sympathy!</sarcasm>)
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linkydink "Television and internet programmers, responding to the unpredictable viewing habits of the newly liberated, began to call our mediaspace an "attention economy." No matter how many channels they had for their programming, the number of "eyeball hours" that human beings were willing to dedicate to that programming was fixed. Not coincidentally, the channel surfing habits of our children became known as "attention deficit dissorder" - a real disease now used as an umbrella term for anyone who clicks away from programming before the marketer wants him to. We quite literally drug our children into compliance."
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linkydink J.S. Bach says: "Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have coffee!" I'll need to buy this one at some point...
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linkydink You can read the first chapter to the belowmentioned 'Crescent City Rhapsody' here, thanks to Goonan.com, the rather interesting homepage of the book's author. Goonan is pretty cool; dig her nicely-done essay on Science Fiction & Jazz Music: Art is an attempt to defy, at least momentarily, the heat-death of the universe, to pluck random elements from the materials at hand and give them an arrow of time and a satisfying (if often edgy) order. To meld two major musical and literary ideas of the twentieth century, to portray human change in a technological, if musical, milieu, seems to me to be an interesting and almost inevitable enterprise. Now that sounds like food for some Scifi Performance Art! Stay tuned, world.
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linkydink From Ninja Tune news: The week before last we did a Ninja Special on One World on (UK) Radio 1 with Mr Scruff, Luke Vibert and PC (of DJ Food). For his section, PC played some of the experimental new stuff that he's been working on with Cinematic sax-god Tom Chant. When the actual show went out, it (the music) had so many gaps and weird frequencies that all the alarms went off in Broadcasting House because the computer system thought that there was a fault. Engineers were freaking out thinking that Radio One had gone off the air or was cracking up. Ninja screw the network! Awesome.
viernes, marzo 02, 2001
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linkydink "It's the kind of pain you would feel if you were being burned, said Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. "It's just not intense enough to cause any damage."
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linkydink "Executive Producers BEN AFFLECK and MATT DAMON, in association with CHRIS MOORE (co-producer of "Good Will Hunting" & producer of "American Pie"), MIRAMAX FILMS and HBO, have all joined together to call upon the amateur screenwriters and filmmakers of the United States to submit their original screenplays online to: http://www.projectgreenlight.com. The winning Contestant(s) will become eligible to direct their original screenplay into a MIRAMAX-distributed feature film, AND the entire production of the film will be covered in an HBO documentary-style television series. The series will focus on the plight and adventure of this first-time writer/director Contestant, taking the reins of his or her own feature film."
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linkydink "Leaving aside the lack of mutual understanding between the Taliban and the world, the important question remains as to their staying power. Presently, in the almost two-thirds of Afghanistan under their domination, there is no valid, organized and effective opposition to challenge their power. Their proven effectiveness in maintaining law and order as well as their adherence to the commandments of Islam and to cultural norms where traditional Afghan women are obedient rather than challenging to men, seem to have won over the predominantly illiterate peasants and working class."
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linkydink "Dana Powell wanted an insider's view for her college thesis on whether beauty pagents exploit women. Now she's getting one while competing in the Miss USA pagent tonight."
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linkydink here is how i've been thinking about it: we are basing the Sophian web version on the Sophian print version. the print editors have decided what to include in the paper, and that includes Hornier Than Thou. i don't think it's the web editors' place to censor that; that's not what the web project is about. maybe i'm more liberal than most, but i think the point of the student paper (it's totally separate from the school except for the rickety shed it's housed in - raises its own money and everything) is to provide a forum for all student opinions. granted, i'm probably more liberal than most people in the world, but something professing to represent the student body and its opinions which then refuses to publish the opinions of certain groups seems self-defeating. i asked myself if, were i the editor in charge of such things, i'd be willing to publish a column on, say, naziism or gay-bashing or some such thing that i vehemently disagree with. and? well, since the author's name gets published along with the article, if they're willing to take that risk they should be able to. if it was my personal paper, i'd be free to publish only opinions i wanted to propagate. but this isn't that forum, so i feel that it's journalistically irresponsible to refuse to publish an article a student wants to publish. and obviously - obviously - not publishing articles about sex in the paper or on its website won't keep Smithies or anyone else from thinking about sex.
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linkydink No doubt, some feel it is journalistically irresponsible to report on behavior they feel is undesirable because they feel it promotes the very behavior they are trying to stop. This reasoning should be false on it's face and leads to such fabulous policies as keeping people in the dark about sex so that they won't know how to protect themselves or enjoy themselves. On a professional note, some in computer security feel that it is irresponsible to ever disclose vulnerabilities to anyone other than the company/person responsible because it puts users at risk by also disclosing to crackers who monitor the same public forums, whereas most know that others are already looking for and perhaps found the same vulnerability and aren't telling if and when they do... and which is more dangerous: the vulnerablity that everyone knows about or the vulnerability that only crackers know about? A fond saying for both cases is that you can't control when, but you can control how.
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linkydink so. this past monday i went to a meeting for the Sophian webpage, which (as you can see) doesn't exist yet, but of which i'd like to be a part of the creation. it was a pretty boring meeting - they can't seem to drum up as many people as they want to who want to help (although i think they have plenty of people, they just have to do some work now). so here's the real issue: as we were all walking home after the meeting, one of them mentions that the real Sophian people wanted them to include the column Hornier Than Thou on the website. (note: HTT is a sex column which can get pretty graphic - they've covered topics from renting porn videos to fisting.) but, she says, the webpeople refused to do it because "it wouldn't be journalistically responsible" or some shite like that. what?! how is censorship journalistically responsible? i don't understand what possible reasons she could have for not wanting to put HTT on the web, other than her own ingrained puritanical anti-sex attitudes. does anyone have any comments on this? i'd like to understand her viewpoint - i'm having second thoughts about working with these people now. i don't feel like i know them well enough to attack them on this point, but i don't know that i want to pretend i'm compliant with their censorship.
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linkydink re: prison-industrial complex: smacks of a return to that other much-maligned institution, doesn't it? here for people who want a slightly more caffeinated and verbose version of early ani.
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linkydink i don't know that i agree with the man (certainly not on all points), but it's refreshing to see someone back up his opinion with actual statistics for once. i'm pretty sick of people yelling things like "down with the World Bank!" without knowing anything more than hearsay about any of their policies. i do still think blacks are oppressed. i don't agree with this point: Five: Because black men are disproportionately incarcerated, racism reigns eternal. This belief assumes that blacks do not commit crimes any more frequently than whites. But if black men make up almost 50 percent of the prison population, they committed roughly 42 percent of violent crimes in the 1990s, and many studies have shown that, when severity of crime and past record are taken into account, there is no bias against blacks in the criminal justice system. he then follows this with the fact that the Black Caucus supported the War on Drugs in order to reduce crime in the inner cities, and thus if the War on Drugs is really a War on Blacks, the Black Caucus are racists. hello? no. it's easy to think a policy will work and later, after the test of time has proven that it doesn't work, change your mind. people do it all the time. so cut the Black Caucus some damn slack, okay John? i also think he's a bit glib in attributing the disparity in black and white test scores, despite parents' degree of education, etc., to blacks "sabotag[ing] themselves through victimology." doesn't the question then become "Why have blacks fallen into this cycle of victimhood?"? expecting people to change simply because they realize from reading a few statistics that they're not really as victimized as they've thought (arguably, arguably) is naive. i don't think it's necessarily the inequality of funding for disparately black inner-city schools that keeps many blacks from succeeding; i think much of it's to do with the internalized societal racism that blacks and whites alike carry around inside them. (and don't even tell me you're not a racist. we're all recovering racists.) immigrants and other minorities don't face the same societal pressures from birth onward. McWhorter spends a lot of time talking about the peer pressure that keeps black students from "acting white" - i.e. working hard in school, getting good grades, etc. - as if it's the students' fault for not realizing that they should rearrange their priorities. but should they? peer pressure is a hard weight to struggle under, and ostracism is a tough punishment to try to ignore. offer me some real solutions. of the solutions he does offer - that whites should stop "pitying" blacks and that affirmative action should be eliminated - the first seems a little farfetched (isn't asking whites to simply change their attitudes is just as much of a fallacy as asking blacks to stop thinking of themselves as victims) and the second... well, i don't see how telling a group of people who aren't doing so hot in dealing with the system that they'd better learn to deal with the damn system on their own, no help, sink or swim. what a very stellarly effective policy.
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linkydink timmy! is... living with his clone? glad you've got a place to live, anyhap. re prisons: i don't know if the prison population will actually surpass the free population, but it's sure headed in that direction. there are many times as many people in prison now as there were even 20 years ago. most of them, of course, are in for non-violent crimes (drug crimes especially), and a disproportionate number are black. i've been reading some frightening stuff about the prison-industrial complex: that according to the constitution prisoners are allowed to be used as slave labor, and often are; that many of these people are no longer allowed to vote once they've been convicted, even after release from prison. no wonder our prison laws are so fucked up. why not get some "reformed" prisoners' opinions on the effectiveness of the prison system? so who's doing journalism on prisons, eh?
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linkydink New York strikes a (preliminary) blow against the Boy Scouts. woo hoo! it's kinda like The Man fighting the man. or something. (whoo... past my bedtime, eh.)
jueves, marzo 01, 2001
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linkydink I remember hearing some statistic to the effect of "by 2015(?) there will be more people in the US in prison than out". Am I hallucinating, or is this (or something to this effect) true? I know at least one Blog-reader is currently doing intense journalism on the US prison system...
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linkydink I'm currently reading Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan. I am completely immersed in it; it's the best recent (post-?)cyberpunk fiction I've read. I have a place to live with a lanky blond DJ named Tim. Classes start Monday. It's lonely, but fun! If anybody reading this is in Melbourne, talk to me!
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linkydink at work once again. so. here's some links for you from the fingers of the illustrious Randy Bartlett, who teaches my Urban Economics class (that'll put these in some context, eh): a map "produced on-the-fly from a special binary version of TIGER/94 data". just one of the many services your tax dollars pay for. a look at the populations of the 100 biggest US cities over the past 200 years. (interestingly, not a single city in connecticut is currently in the top 100. and NYC has never, ever wavered from position #1.)
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