You are not logged in.

Woodhands

2008-07-09T10:01:00.002-07:00

YOU'RE A VERY GOOD DANCER. WHAT IS YOUR NAME? WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

Caps intended. Listen.

COMPLY.

I'm weirdly obsessed with this song. The band sort of reminds me of what would happen if Fischerspooner teamed up with the Scissor Sisters to mug Nine Inch Nails in a back alley behind a dance club somewhere.

America's uncomfortable relationship with celebrity

2007-07-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Unless you're, say, Oprah or something, becoming famous in America ought to come with a free 'Please destroy me!' sign you can wear around your neck. Honestly, we seem to like tearing down even more than building up.

I'm reminded of this most recently by looking at the savaging that Victoria Beckham's reality show got from the press, and similarly by observing the barely-concealed delight with which the sports press reports on David Beckham's injury-induced inability to practice or play with the LA Galaxy yet. All that money, and all he's managed to do successfully is find his way to California!

Neener neener.

In praise of the latest iTunes

2007-07-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

I should preface this with two important facts: One, I'm a librarian by training, if not by profession. As such, I get weirdly obsessive about weird classification and categorization things. Two, ... OK, well, I forgot what the second thing was.

But anyway. Since the invention of ASCII, computers have improperly sorted numerals so they appear before the alphabet. That's wrong. And by extension iTunes has been wrong since its invention, because it always put bands like 10,000 Maniacs ahead of bands like a-Ha and Air.

Not anymore, though. With the most recent update, iTunes sorts your music library properly, putting bands, songs and albums with numerals at the start of their title at the end. Yay, Apple!

As for everyone out there who's complaining that they suddenly can't find half their music or something, shut up and quitcherbitchin.

Qatar Airways and the 787

2007-07-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

What does it mean, exactly, when an airline half owned by the government of a Persian Gulf oil state orders 30 of the 'greenest' jet liners ever produced?

Hot dog!

2007-07-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

Hurray for horrible, revolting, stupid, gratuitous overeating competitions. Because if there's one thing that reminds me how many people are starving in the world, it's the freakish, foolish waste of food for purposes of entertainment and fascination.

I'm just waiting for one of the contestants to die sometime in a very high profile manner, so it'll finally become fashionable to dislike these flagrant displays.

Sometimes I think we really DO need a drastic reallocation of resources to restore balance to the world.

Happiness is ...

2007-07-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

Happiness is, according, to Aristotle, the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.

Just a miscellaneous deep thought for you today.

"Your Call is Important to Us"

2007-07-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

"Please continue to hold. Your call is important to us."

Mm-hmm. That's funny, I could swear from the fact that you've had me sitting here for 20 minutes staring at the texturing on the wall opposite me that you really probably would rather I had never picked up the phone. But the recorded voice uttering syllables of hollow care and concern has really changed my mind about that!

It's so much easier to say the right thing than do the right thing! I'd never noticed that before. Thank you, Faceless Telecom.

A ludicrous, impractical and illegal, but morally defensible, suggestion

2007-07-01T01:21:00.001-07:00

Go to your nearest megachain record store or, preferably, the Arkansas-based retailer we all love to hate. Steal some music by an artist you like, assuming you can find something in their stock that doesn't make you want to retch. Don't get caught.

Then, send a check for $5 to the artist. It's rather more than they'd get otherwise. Now that's really supporting your favorite musicians.

Yes,

2007-06-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

before you ask, the Google ads are an intentional and essential irony. Attend them or ignore them as you wish.

Frigidity

2007-06-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

Holy dancing jesus, it's cold in the office where I work today. Maybe we could export some of the coldness to Iraq, where the lack of electricity and attendant lack of air conditioning seems to be the root cause of many problems.

If only those reconstruction contractors were as good at, say, reconstructing as they are at carting off boatloads of money, maybe it could happen.

Television viewership

2007-06-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

So I understand Larry 'For the Hour!' King's interview with that woman snagged 3.2 million viewers. This is seen as something of a ratings coup. Media pundits are practically fellating themselves over this triumph for the news network nobody watches anymore.

But this isn't about her, or about CNN.

At its peak, Arrested Development would draw 6 million viewers. Constantly the show was in danger of cancellation until the day, of course, when it finally was.

I find the Bluths infinitely more entertaining. At least they were intelligent.

An important question

2007-06-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

Have you done something to make yourself happier today?

(note: Masturbation does not count.)

Is there a Hilton in Paris, anyway?

2007-06-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Consider this. It is equally bad to complain about all the coverage Paris Hilton receives as it is to provide that coverage in the first place. She still serves as a vacuous distraction from the truly important events of the day.

Yes, even this post. Embrace the hypocrisy.

i Phone ...

2007-06-28T12:25:00.001-07:00

just fine with my Samsung A640, thank you very much.

I'm a recent Apple convert and devotee, so you'd think that I'd be chomping at the bit to purchase an iPhone, to empty my bank account so that company at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, CA, can pad the executive bonuses a little more this year.

It looks pretty. And it does absolutely nothing that I need a phone to do. of course, I'm still trying to figure out why they thought putting cameras on cell phones was a good idea. You end up with a crappy phone AND a crappy camera.

But I still like my Samsung A640. It's black and mysterious, like the monolith in 2001.

So it's like this ... (The YANLI Manifesto)

2007-06-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of society we live in. Your value as a being is, broadly and generally speaking, literally your value -- that is, how much you have and how much you can spend (particularly this last; I'd point to that social pressure as the chief reason for the explosion of untenable consumer debt we've seen in recent years).

I'm not even saying that's necessarily or entirely wrong. To a certain extent, if you're not contributing greatly to the arts or the sciences or philosophy or things like that, the one thing you can do is work and buy things. And if everyone stopped buying anything but the bare necessities and made everything else themselves, I daresay our society would collapse. But everything in moderation.

And we've now arrived at a place where we pay for everything -- our TV, our internet, our telephone ... even water, despite the fact that there's perfectly good stuff coming out of our tap (though sometimes it may need a little filtering), and still we get marketed to.

With technology, too, it's possible to crunch data about us that we didn't even know we were leaving behind, so as to narrowcast advertisements and endlessly customize media and online content to match us and only us.

In the process, we become prisoners of what the computer thinks we are. Our identity is that trail of things with which we've identified ourselves. We become slotted into an increasing number of tiny boxes, usually to the exclusion of other things. We become a listener to British hip-hop who gives to Republican candidates, reads the New York Times, watches The Office and only calls long distance to Pennsylvania, and always from the cell phone, which has a Lady Sovereign ringtone purchased for $2.99.

Each of those bits, and hundreds more besides, puts us in a little box from which those who study the data think they can draw information about who we are. Each of those choices implies the exclusion of others, because when we become one thing, in the eyes of those who need to study these things, we equally become not a whole bunch of other things they've decided are mutually exclusive of the thing we are.

So when you are logged in, you are telling The Machine to classify you, to stratify you, to tell you who you are. What I strive to be about here is shattering that paradigm, embracing the duality and multiplicity of existence and embracing the necessary hypocrisy of modern life. Because if nothing else, if you can hold two 'opposing' ideas in your head at the same time, or see how they're not really opposites at all if you hold them at the right angle, you at least have something going for you that the Neo-Cons never will.

This is not a political blog. But politics may enter in sometimes. I can't help it; I'm a political animal.

But music, pop culture, consumer electronics, the fate of humanity and the incredible shrinking (and simultaneously ballooning and growing-more-complex) global village, random deep thoughts and carefully considered silliness ... I intend for them to be more the par for this course than the heavy blog entry you're reading now.

If you're reading. I can't tell.

You are not logged in.