December 2008
Happy New Arbitrary Division of a Socio-Physical...
Around here, December 31 is notable for being the date on which we celebrate my son’s birthday, but apparently that’s not what you lot are drinking to. I hope 2009 brings you everything you wish for. Thank you for being the most interesting, funny, thought-provoking group of people on the infopike.
See you next year.
UK housewives are world's top internet surfers →
Private firm may track all email and calls →
The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound database of all UK communications traffic into private...
MAN: So, I'm tendin' bar there at Ecklund & Swedlin's last Tuesday and this little guy's drinkin' and he says, 'So where can a guy find some action - I'm goin' crazy down there at the lake.' And I says, 'What kinda action?' and he says, 'Woman action, what do I look like,' And I says 'Well, what do I look like, I don't arrange that kinda thing,' and he says, 'I'm goin' crazy out there at the lake' and I says, 'Well, this ain't that kinda place.'
GARY: Uh-huh.
MAN: So he says, 'So I get it, so you think I'm some kinda jerk for askin',' only he doesn't use the word jerk.
GARY: I unnerstand.
MAN: And then he calls me a jerk and says the last guy who thought he was a jerk was dead now. So I don't say nothin' and he says, 'What do ya think about that?' So I says, 'Well, that don't sound like too good a deal for him then.'
GARY: Ya got that right.
MAN: And he says, 'Yah, that guy's dead and I don't mean a old age.' And then he says, 'Geez, I'm goin' crazy out there at the lake.'
GARY: White Bear Lake?
MAN: Well, Ecklund & Swedlin's, that's closer ta Moose Lake, so I made that assumption.
GARY: Oh sure.
MAN: So, ya know, he's drinkin', so I don't think a whole great deal of it, but Mrs. Mohra heard about the homicides out here and she thought I should call it in, so I called it in. End a story.
GARY: What'd this guy look like anyways?
MAN: Oh, he was a little guy, kinda funny-lookin'.
GARY: Uh-huh - in what way?
MAN: Just a general way.
GARY: Okay, well, thanks a bunch, Mr. Mohra. You're right, it's probably nothin', but thanks for callin' her in.
MAN: Oh sure. They say she's gonna turn cold tomorrow.
GARY: Yah, got a front movin' in.
MAN: Ya got that right.
(From FARGO, a screenplay by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen)
30GB Zunes all over the world fail en masse →
pterodactyls:
themattsmith:
itsbedtime:
inothernews:
Oh, man. This is either Microsoft’s biggest snafu ever (besides Vista, ha ha) OR THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER.
marjoree:
“Fan boards and support forums all have the same mantra saying that at 2:00 AM this morning, the Zune 30s reset on their own and doesn’t fully reboot.”
Hello, 2009!
Y2K, IS THAT YOU?
Wow, how is Microsoft going...
Sara's Imaginary Band Names 2008
saramcpherson:
At jhnbrssndn’s request, here are the band names I posted this year:
The Argyle Retaliation Squad
Pulsating, Gelatinous, and Refrigerator-Sized
Whores & S’mores
Fanny Pack Death Squad
Asterisks and Ampersands
The Significant Others
The Sickening Thud
Pentagrams & Popsicles
Sequins & Suicide
Quoi Le Fuck?
Bullshit Parade
Rufio! Rufio! Rufio!
Device...
“Photography did not become an art because it employed a device opposing the...”
– Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image. Rancière remains—tragically, and without good explanation—woefully under-appreciated in the circles of contemporary theory and philosophy. His Nights of Labor and The Philosopher and his Poor were magisterial indictments of an institutionalized bourgeois...
Hmm. Is Mr Feastingonroadkill Wrong About Hamas?
feastingonroadkill:
Maybe, maybe not. Time to do some more checking though. Via here:
“In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch...
Trippy!
msbadkittie:
idannodoyou:
If distinguished from hypermodernity, supermodernity is a step beyond the ontological emptiness of postmodernism and relies upon a view of plausible truths. Where modernism focused upon the creation of great truths (or what Lyotard called “master narratives” or “metanarratives”), postmodernity is intent upon their destruction (deconstruction). In contrast...
Antisemitism: an apology
On Saturday, I posted a quote from Richard Seymour’s blog about the Israeli attack on Gaza. The passage used particularly vivid language to draw attention to the rhetoric that Israel and its supporters might be expected to use in justification of the assault. Trainwrecks later posted a characteristically brisk objection to the language used, and I and others in turn criticised him/her/them...
The Tumblr™ dashboard is broken
I’ve just nearly brought myself to tears wading through 32 pages of dashboard. Opening links in new tabs/windows doesn’t help - in fact it makes it worse. I end up with dashboard open at different points on about four or five different tabs, each one opening onto more unread material.
Following fewer people - surely - defeats the whole object of Tumblr. I don’t know what user...
theoriginaljoefisher:
Tom Waits - Drunk on the...
The Santosbrazzi killer
magicmolly:
You know how certain public figures can float at the edge of your consciousness for years without coming into focus? Robyn Hitchcock, Miranda July and Ari Fleischer are three personal examples. For a long time I knew their offices vaguely—and ran across their names often—but failed to figure out anything else. Anyhoo. Such figures tend to either eventually disappear from your...
Band Name
saramcpherson:
The Argyle Retaliation Squad
Sara, please please please post all your band names together in a year-end list.
The Jesus Landing Pad: : Bush White House checked... →
retropolitics:
By Rick Perlstein, Village Voice Dateline Spring 2004 It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current...
Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)
curate:
Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) works for the health of Palestinians (especially in conditions of occupation, displacement or exile) based on principles of self-determination and social justice
ekswitaj:
RT @gazanews RT: @Ahmadization Donate to GAZA- SEND AID http://tinyurl.com/7dkx6z #Gaza
Michael Arrington: "I'll try to think of the drugs...
Or something like that, in re: this.
I made a big decision today:
frangry:
I’m going gay.
And frankly, when you look around, who can blame her, eh gents?
Tired and emotional →
nostrich:
“Tired and emotional” is a chiefly British, Irish or Australian euphemism for “drunk”. It was popularised by the British satirical magazine Private Eye in 1967 after being used in a spoof diplomatic memo to describe the state of Labour Cabinet minister George Brown, but is now used as a stock phrase: British slander and libel law makes it unwise ever to directly refer to someone as...
“Now, more than ever, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National...”
– “Stop the Massacre in Gaza – Boycott Israel Now!” | Global BDS Movement (via curate)
The union on whose behalf I organise at my university has wrestled endlessly and tediously over recent years with the question of joining an academic boycott of Israeli universities. Given the neoliberal assault...
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation : Help... →
(via curate)
feastingonroadkill:
More from Finlands answer to...
andrewrfox:
Alkaline Trio - Fuck You Aurora
“For the first time in the world, research has established a predictive link...”
– Family Rejection a Health Risk for Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Youth - NAM (via curate)
“Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe...”
– Harold Pinter (via azspot)
Israel bombs university in Gaza →
robot-heart-politics:
craytonc:livesophia:
Over 300 Palestinians have died, nearly 60 of them civilians. More than 1400 have been wounded.
Two Israelis have died. Three more were wounded.
Anyone who argues that this is an appropriate and just response doesn’t know how to count.
But how many have been killed in all of the attacks leading up to this that Israel has not responded to? Hamas...
Download BLK JKS "Mystery" EP for free. →
britticisms:
Unsigned no more, Johannesburg’s BLK JKS have found a home on Secretly Canadian who have re-released their debut EP as FREE DOWNLOAD for a limited time. Recorded at NYC’s Electric Lady Studios with Secret Machines’ Brandon Curtis producing, this quartet challenges every genre, social and cultural stereotype associated to their homeland, the diverse arrangements echoing both the...
“Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that...”
– Nir Rosen (via azspot)
“In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They...”
– Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler, War Is A Racket (via retropolitics)
Yes, good morning, England.
inteawetrust:
We have thin walls and drafty doors, with cat flaps and mail flaps and the ability to hear everything on the street as if it were here in the kitchen. Just now, the neighbor was leaving, and shouted back as they shut their door, “See you lateh!” I thought to myself that they had a very pretty and interesting accent, and wondered where they were from. And then, the light bulb went on...
Top 10 Worst Predictions of 2008
feastingonroadkill:
here:
e.g. ““I believe the banking system has been stabilized. No one is asking themselves anymore, is there some major institution that might fail and that we would not be able to do anything about it.” —Henry Paulson on National Public Radio, Nov. 13, 2008”
unburyingthelead:
Gregory vigorously praised the job which he and his “journalistic” colleagues did in the run-up to the Iraq War — the period which Salon’s Gary Kamiya called “one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media.” Proclaimed Gregory, with a straight face: “Questions were asked. I think we pushed. I think we prodded. I think we challenged the President. Not...
Take this with you from 2008
monkeytypist:
The Climate. Don’t mean to be a pessimist, but we won’t have it for much longer. Our children certainly won’t. So go visit places, spend time outdoors.
“If you don’t think, if you just listen to TV and read scholarly things, you...”
– Howard Zinn, The Problem is Civil Obedience (1970) (via retropolitics)
“So, if text messaging is piggybacking on signals that get used anyway, why the...”
– The Consumerist’s Alex Jarvis on this NYT article (via alohanico)
“When is the last time any of you dusted the control moment gyroscopes? Or swept...”
– This International Space Station Is A Pig Sty
The myth of Hamas rejectionism →
The Qassam rockets myths →
“The super-rich seem to me, during the past few decades, to have wafted off into...”
– Obsidian Wings: Oblivious (via robot-heart-politics)
