“I’d like to check in to both rallies on Foursquare, but it feels dishonest. I’m Team Keep Fear Alive.”
“Would it be excessive if I got both an 11-inch and a 13-inch MacBook Air? It would? Okay…how about just two 11-inch ones?”
source: Flowing Data via: my friend jareda helpful venn diagram: privacy and the internet
“Son, FYI the link I emailed you is NSFW so open with caution. It’s a picture of a potato that looks like male genitalia. Isn’t Digg great?”
There is certainly much about America’s world dealings in the 20th century that deserves praise: victory in World War II, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, JFK’s diplomacy during the Cuban missile crisis, the Camp David peace accords, the Panama Canal treaty, Richard Nixon’s opening to China, and détente with the Soviet Union, to mention the most obvious. But a more rounded view would have to include its many stumbles. Three enduring illusions — a misguided faith in universalism, or America’s power to transform the world from a community of hostile, lawless nations into enlightened states devoted to peaceful cooperation; a need to shun appeasement of all adversaries or to condemn suggestions of conciliatory talks with them as misguided weakness; and a belief in the surefire effectiveness of military strength in containing opponents, whatever their ability to threaten the United States — have made it nearly impossible for Americans to think afresh about more productive ways to address their foreign problems. Call it the tyranny of metaphor: For all their pretensions to shaping history, U.S. presidents are more often its prisoners.This article is fantastic: Robert Dallek “The Tyranny of Metaphor”
My Accent
Italian classmate: Where are you from?
Me: Originally? Colorado.
Italian classmate: Ah, not New York.
Me: No. Why?
Italian classmate: Of all of the accents of the Americans in our class, yours is the hardest for me to understand.
Me: Ah.
Italian classmate: Yours I think is the most, uh, American.
Me: Ah.
Clicked to reblog this, redirected to a Tumblr error page: Servers Over Capacity. Not a coincidence.
If you want, why not go ahead and recommend Shit My Dad Doesn't Say? →
#4 - jardin de la bière (beer garden)
In September I added 10+ hours of commuting to my weekly schedule. I’ve been filling the time with podcasts (This American Life and Radiolab are even better than all the hype I’d heard) and more recently with an audiobook: David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. It was funny. At times I didn’t know what was going on. Entire chapters are nothing but dialogue and you have to figure out who is speaking from context (this is probably much easier when listening to an audiobook, since the narrator uses little voices for the different speakers).
I liked the book. A lot. But the big thing that I took away from the experience is that the novel is its own beast and experiencing it in a different format changes the experience. I feel like I somehow missed out on or even perverted the true nature of the book. The book itself dealt with themes of language and words and ideas, so it was especially true for this novel, but I think it holds true in general.
A few months ago I read For Whom The Bell Tolls on my iPhone, and I had a similar sense of perversion. Only being able to see an iPhone’s screen worth of text at a time, rather than the two open pages of a book, changes the experience.
And it’s not that it is harder to pay attention to what you’re reading/listening to in one of these formats, it’s that by changing the intake process the experience is fundamentally different.
This probably all goes without saying though, and I’m sure I’ve heard this elsewhere, but it really struck me as true just recently.
I haven’t read a book on a Kindle or an eReader of any kind, but I wonder if folks who have have experienced something similar to what I’m describing here. I think it’s cool that you can click on a word you don’t know when you’re reading a book on your iPad and instantly look it up. And maybe I’m just feeling sentimental, but it is sad for me to think that one day, and maybe one day soon, novels won’t be primarily experienced in physical book form.
In conclusion, I’m going to return to the exquisite radiotastic podcasts of This American Life and Radiolab to get me from Point A to Point B (and then, in the evening, from Point B back to Point A). Other podcast suggestions are welcomed.
“Wisconsin Republican lieutenant governor candidate Rebecca Kleefisch, diagnosed with cancer a month ago, touts the treatments she received under her state-subsidized insurance plan at the same time she rails against government-run health care in a new television ad.
[…]
“This may be the most hypocritical political ad in the history of Wisconsin politics,” said Scot Ross, director of the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now. “It’s absolutely outrageous that Rebecca Kleefisch, who received health care coverage paid for by the government because of who she is married to, is attacking access to affordable health care for the rest of Wisconsin.””
via: reddit
source: Green Bay Press Gazette, Oct. 14th 2010
Stockholm library.
"Jason’s iPod Nano spec commercial."
I made this with the help of some funny folks about a week after the latest generation of the iPod Nano came out. It was already not super relevant then. Now, weeks later, in keeping with my longstanding tradition of not-relevant videos, I’m happy to release it to the world.
My sincere thanks to John, Will, Emily, Sam, and Matt for helping to make it happen on extremely short notice: I wrote the script, contacted all of the actors, and then shot the video all in under 24 hours.
Starring: John Timothy and Will Hines.
Featuring: Emily Axford.
Camerawork: Sam Ellison.
Crew: Matt Weir.
Written and edited by me.
YouTube Play @ Guggenheim - sneak peak of wall projections to go live 10/21
Health kick!
Me: (writing list of healthy foods to eat)
Girlfriend: Want to go on a health kick together?
Me: Yeah!
Girlfriend: This will be fun.
Me: Yeah.
Girlfriend: If we go on a health kick, you know that means you can’t eat cookies for breakfast anymore, right?
Me: …
“I had to leave work early today. Why? Well, I saw a trailer for Conan’s new TBS show and I got too excited to focus. He drove off a cliff!”