Category: Musicology

I’m sure the Gettysburg Powerpoint is already a well circulated meme, but it’s new to me, and such a perfect send up of the reductive power of slideshows as communication tools that I could not resist linking to it here.

To the people I referrred to in Outrage over Pete Townsend, who are busily debating the story over in the discussion area of my Pete Townsend reviews Kurt Cobain’s diaries entry, I feel that I should pass along this report from the Smoking Gun, which lends at least some credence to Townsend’s vapid-sounding defense that…

WANTED for MURDERING time Make your own composite sketch at Ultimate Flash Face, a Russian site. Put up flyers of your friends, or fiddle together a self-portrait. People who know me will realize that the likeness above is pretty crude, but I think if I’d been willing to spend a lot more time tweaking it,…

Instapundit graces another (well deserved) link to the Devil’s Excrement today with a gratuitous swipe at Berkeley. I’m not sure I get the subtext. Is it that the perennial protesters here in the East Bay don’t have as much fun as Venezuelan protesters do? This follows the continuing S.F. sucks theme at the Gawker (and…

Scot Hacker has posed a provocative thought-experiment to his readers who defend video games that depict killing. In his post entitled Just Pretending he asks which is worse, rape or murder. Then he asks whether it would be OK for children to play rape games. This has spawned an active discussion, at the birdhouse and…

Here’s something odd. Back in November I posted a link to Pete Townsend’s review of Kurt Cobain’s diaries. Now that the pedophile (or paedophile, for British readers) arrest story has broken, it seems that people must be Googling his name and somehow finding their way to my old post. Even though it was written about…

One day I’ll need to come up with a big list of sites that track memes, especially those that do so automatically or semiautomatically (as opposed to sites like Metafilter and half the weblogs in the universe that track memes all the time by virtue of their infectious passing of memes from one to another).…

Just asking.

Elizabeth Spiers does some original reporting for the Gawker, getting to the bottom of how the cocaine business really should be run. Maybe what these dealers need is a good CRM implementation. The article, long for the Gawker, runs in the form of a taped interview with a ditzy-but-funny Wall Streeter: Of Wall Street’s obsession…

The condensed parody version of the Two Towers is densely witty. Here’s a snippet: TREEBEARD: We have opted, hoom, not to do a damn thing. PIPPIN: I didn’t expect that. PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE BOOK: Neither did I…

Nick Denton continues to bash the San Francisco bay area, now discerning a brain drain going on in the form of an exodus of notable bloggers: So Dave Winer, a Silicon Valley institution, is moving to the East Coast. Winer, an influential independent developer, as influential as he is crotchety, is taking up a fellowship…

A recent forwarded newspaper article singing the ills of birdfeeders had us going for a while. If we had read more closely or paid more attention to the source (the Wall Street Journal), we may have more easily seen it in the light presented by Laura Erickson’s Wall Street Journal Bird Feeding Article Distorts Truth.…

Reading a Buffy spoiler fan website today, I encountered an unfamiliar term: shipper. I know what slash fiction is (having stumbled on a book about k/s fanfic in the Princeton library a good 20 years ago), and I gather a shipper is someone who either likes to write slash fiction or who at least likes…

Dave Winer’s First Essay of the Year sums up some of the themes he has refined over the last year, partly in discussion/debate with Larry Lessig. One passage that particularly caught my attention was a brief discussion of the ethical issues involved in software development: I strongly believe there are ethical rules, we just have…