Category: Miscellany

  • Testing iTunes reporting format (administrivia).

    Testing iTunes reporting format (administrivia). When I feel like referring to or quoting from the music I’m listening to at the moment, I want the reference to be succinct and to link to a search for the song title, album name, and band or artist name (as opposed to just a search for the band…

  • Back of an envelope

    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. [via X-POLLEN]

  • For what it's worth

    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…

  • Apologies for the reruns

    For readers of my X-POLLEN blog via (an RSS) news feed, which includes LiveJournal friends reading the xpollen user Mark Pasc setup for me, I apologize for the way the feed just resent something like seventeen recent posts. I just made a minor administrivial change to this blog’s archiving nomenclature. Posts are now stored in…

  • Camper back together for real

    It now appears that the one-time Camper Van Beethoven reunion shows last fall were some kind of dry run for a more substantial reunion. Look at all the tour dates listed at the Cracker site. The show I saw was a great nostalgia trip for me and it seemed to be an almost religious experience…

  • Outrage over Pete Townsend

    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…

  • Which is worse, rape or murder?

    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…

  • Another fine meme-tracking site

    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).…

  • So it's tuff-tee, eh?

    I always wondered how to pronounce Tufte. (Thanks to plasticbag.org for the pointer.)

  • When did 'demagogue' become a verb?

    Just asking.

  • See you at Barney's?

    I’m about to brave bridge traffic to head into the city for the blogger’s dinner at Barney’s in Noe Valley tonight (at 6 pm). Warning: I’m bringing my digital camera.

  • Ask Dick Cheney!

    Dick Cheney may be hiding out in an undisclosed location unavailable to answer questions from the public (just as his boss ended the practice of holding press conferences back in February of 2001), but you can ask a simulation of Dick Cheney anything you like. My question: Will Halliburton benefit from the reconstruction of Iraq…

  • stop breathing. Stop Breathing from

    stop breathing. Stop Breathing from the album “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” by Pavement write it on a postcard “dad they broke me”…

  • I'll send Haldir or something. He's expendable.

    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… I still kinda like the Humphrey Bogart version (also at iFilm).

  • Class warfare? Bring it on!

    Republicans hauled out “class warfare” talking point this week as they do every time one of their “tax relief” plans is challenged as extremely tilted toward the superrich. It must poll well for them. If you’re tired of hearing this feint or disappointed with the timid rigidity of the Democrats’ response, Matthew Miller of Tribune…

  • Shrevie Hoister's day off

    New current favorite blog of note: shrevie hoister’s LiveJournal. Jump in anywhere. Looks like shrevie’s been backfilling to 1995. Random shards of a mind (and fingers, and probably toes) at work, good linkage. Brain says: yummy.

  • WSJ 'Birdfeeders bad' meme deconstructed

    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.…

  • Origin of 'shipper'?

    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…

  • This is it?. This is

    This is it?. This is your big plan?…

  • California quarterback finalists

    Hey, why are we letting out-of-staters choose our California Quarter Design? Some of these are hilarious. Apparently Davis will pick one from the top 5 vote getters.

  • Killer serial

    (Just realized I drafted this on 12/15 but never posted it till today.) Dylan Tweney reports that Stanford is re-publishing facsimiles of the original broadsheet serialization of Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. A new edition comes out every Wednesday. It’s retro tech! Read it or subscribe on Stanford’s Dickens site.