“Swiss voters have supported a referendum proposal to ban the building of minarets, official results show.”
NEWS FLASH: Tolerant, liberal northern Europe potentially even more terribly racist, xenophobic than us. Again.
“
PART I. ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT
TITLE XIV. PUBLIC WAYS AND WORKS CHAPTER
89. LAW OF THE ROAD
Chapter 89: Section 3. Sleigh or sled; bells
Section 3. No person shall travel on a way with a sleigh or sled drawn by a horse, unless there are at least three bells attached to some part of the harness.
”
M.G.L. - Chapter 89, Section 3
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Au Revoir Simone - Anywhere You Looked
I love so many things about this song. Where do I even begin? Maybe it’s the lush synthesizers. Maybe it’s the retro drum kicks. Maybe it’s the contrast between the frenzied percussion and the song’s relatively languid bassline. Maybe it’s the sweetly validating lyrics — especially how they change up the chorus between verses (for which, for the record, I am a huge sucker).
It’s about half as long as I wish it was, though. Easily one of my faves from their album.
“College students and single noncollege adults defined the term date, differentiated dates from going out with a friend, and described their reasons for going on their most recent first date. Responses indicate that single adults vary more in their orientation toward dating (e.g., an emphasis on a lifelong relationship) than do college students. Sex differences in first date goals appeared only in the college sample. College men were more likely to report sexual goals, whereas college women were more likely to report goals reflecting friendship, date-to-date, and having fun. Results highlight the importance of several forms of uncertainty reduction, shed light on an application of predicted outcome value theory, and suggest that the nature of commitment may differ across age groups.”
“ Online petitions, used by good online organizers, are great. Example: At MoveOn, 10 local citizens often show up at a member of Congress’s office to do a media event holding them accountable on some issue. 10 citizens alone are not usually newsworthy. 10 local citizens delivering petitions on behalf of 3000 local citizens — newsworthy. It works over and over. And media stories are a great form of pressure. ”
Open Left:: Profiles in Bad Online Organizing: Part 1 (DSCC)
DejaMenu - multiple menubars for multiple monitors
“DejaMenu will display the current application’s main menu as a context menu when a key combination is pressed. This is particularly useful for people using multiple monitors. Since the Menubar only appears on a single monitor, it is awkward to use applications on a different monitor. DejaMenu solves this - just press the configured key combo, and a copy of the Menubar is right there for your to use.”
This is a stupid hack and I resent having to use it, though I’m glad that it exists. Why can’t Apple let me just render the menubar on more than one monitor?
“ Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. ”
Henry James via Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals”
“ anyway, i’m making a record, as previously blathered about, and this means that my horrible, useless website is getting redone by my friend sonya. i mean, it sucks, which was my choice. i was like “can this look more horrible?” i wish i was kidding, but i happen to like crap. i just do. but she’s promised to work with me to make sure it’s still unwieldy and awkward, which is good preparation for everything else lcdish, and i promise to be less grumpy about things actually being “useful”. it’s just that things that are too “useful”… well, i don’t entirely trust them. i kind of like useless things. for instance—and this is a pretty facile and simplified metaphor here—art is useless, and nazis made lots of useful things. i like dumb meandering things that make me happy and confused, and don’t particularly like “effective marketing tools designed for maximum accurate data capture” blah blah blah. it all sounds so sad and functional. i don’t like the idea of people sitting in a room talking about the best way to word things to get the right reaction from a base of “users” etc. i don’t like thinking that those people used to love to do something, or wanted to be something, and would up measuring the best way to manipulate other people. i honestly don’t judge them, but i feel weird, and sort of sad—not FOR them, in a pitying way, as i have no idea how they fell, for fuck’s sake, and i’m a ridiculous person by the measure of a pretty deep cut of the population—but ABOUT them. ”
the internet - lcd soundsystem’s MySpace Blog |
it’s a good thing you don’t have to be able to get along with someone to enjoy their music.
“ Though Glenn Beck fervently proclaimed his affinity for Muse’s apocalyptic glam stylings last month, it was hard to figure out where the worlds of the conservative talker and the British prog rockers could meet. And because Beck is often purposely outrageous, it’s also hard to tell how much of what he says he believes himself and when he’s simply stirring the pot for the sake of good TV or radio. But we now know one thing for sure: When Beck claimed a few weeks ago that Muse’s people insisted he stop raving on about how much he loves the group’s new album, The Resistance, he was making a funny. ”
Glenn Beck Was Just Joking About The Muse Brush-Off - News Story | Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV News
“ The shared forum of television is an arena for the declaration and confirmation of the “reality” of events. Protests, scandals, and disasters that have not been reported on radio and television do not seem to have “happened.” The Watergate scandals became “real,” not when the Washington Post reported the stories, but when network television news reported that the Washington Post reported the stories. ”
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), p 90.
