edible offals
Wow. Amazon accepted my review of The 2000 World Forecasts of Edible Offals of Bovine, Sheep, Goat, Poultry, Horse and Ass Meat Export Supplies (World Trade Report). It’s here – scroll down.
new favourite site
I’m fickle. My new fave is yourethemannowdog.com. (via MeFi)
lament 13
My grandmother sent me a book, Laments, by 16th century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski (translated into English by Seamus Heaney and Stanislaw Baranczak). Kochanowski wrote the series of poems after his three-year-old daughter died. The work was not well received at the time, as elegies were acceptable only when aimed at great public figures, and not at one’s own daughter. Yet now, it is widely held that Kochanowski “invented Polish poetry and, through his individual effort, brought it almost instantly to perfection” (Baranczak’s words). Lament 13 in particular speaks to my grandmother, since Heaney read it at the funeral of her own daughter six years ago:
Sweet girl, I wish that you had either never
Been born or never died! For you to sever
All your attachments, take such early leave
What else, what else can I do now but grieve?
You were like one of those recurrent dreams
About a crock of gold, fool’s gold that gleams
And tempts our greed, but when we wake at dawn,
Our hands are empty and the gleam is gone.
Dear daughter, this you did in your own way:
Your light appeared to me but would not stay.
It was as if you wanted to destroy
My very soul by robbing all its joy.
The shock of sudden death tore it in two:
One half stayed grieving, one half fled with you.
Here is your epitaph. Stonecutters, hone
The chisels sharp and cut the words in stone:
“Ursula Kochanowski lies beneath,
Her father’s joy that slipped his loving hands.
Learn from this grave the ways of careless Death:
The green shoot is mown down – the ripe crop stands.”
dutch madness
A great ad. (not safe for work, unless you have headphones; QuickTime; via dontblow)
MeFi
This will mean nothing to many of you, but… I’d like to come out of the closet as a MetaFilter member. Months back I made the decision not to link to MeFi on my own sites. At the time, the reasoning was that the larger MeFi got, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio, so that linking to it would only make it worse. I now think this is not the case. There is a lot of noise on MeFi lately, certainly. There have also been grand, operatic departures of some prominent members, and these have gotten me thinking and reevaluating the site.
It’s still a great site. There have been incredible links of late: posts by y2karl about outsider artist Henry Darger and cynicism; a great thread about math rock; fascinating stuff about Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo and his interactions with online fans. There are many more. And there are still great discussions, if one steers clear of the political stuff. But most interestingly to me, many of the great posts and comments are being made by relatively new members. One could use the metaphor of the human body shedding all its individual cells every few years yet remaining the same as a whole. Whatever, you get the point it’s not the new members that endanger the ‘community standards’, it’s the will, or lack thereof, to maintain those standards. It’s easy to bitch, and in fact it’s easy to leave. But if the standards are maintained, in a friendly and positive way, new members will see how the site likes to run itself, and will adopt those standards themselves. And so the cosmic ballet continues…
So I’ll list the Pancake Paradise under “involved with”, and make a commitment to be more involved with a site I love and would hate to see fall apart. Of course, other than this one feeble act, I’m not sure how one best goes about being involved, but off the top of my head: I can post more there, and weigh in with some positive reinforcement to balance out the already healthy amount of negativity being dropped in the MetaTalk dungeon.
bully
Whoa, Larry Clark really dropped the ball on this one. I loved Kids, even though it got a touch heavy-handed towards the end; but Bully… where to begin? Sure, fine, it has more hot-teen-sex action than you can shake a stick at, but it also has dumb-teen-moron murder schemes that honestly, are dumber than most things in this stupid world. Surely part of the thrill of film noir is the fiendishly complex schemes that the bad ones cook up to get their insurance money, revenge, massive corruption covered up, or what have you. (spoiling may occur…)
So if the evil ones in a film spend approximately one hour of screen time thinking of ways to kill their nasty friend, and the best plan they can come up with is to stab him a bunch of times and toss him in a ditch, well… a) it’s no big surprise if they get caught; b) one is less inclined to feel sympathy for these characters; and c) one may tend to lose interest in the film as a whole. I certainly did. Morons!
By the end it felt like a scare film: hey kids, it’s a lot harder than you think to kill people! You could end up in jail! Don’t do it! Like the old-school scare films, it has a certain disrespect for its target audience. Morons. Can’t you see that marijuana leads to horse, smack, chasing the dragon, insanity, suicide, kicks, baby, kicks? Looking back, Kids had a touch of this too. It just covered it up better. And the Harmony Korine script didn’t hurt.
new photos
Photos of my recent LA trip are up. Please let me know what you think so I can decide which ones to post on photographica. Also, as you can tell, the overall design has been “tweaked.”
d-log
Props out to my namesake, d-log!
boring old site news
This is undoubtedly the most boringest category I have, isn’t it? Anyway, as you may have noticed, there have been changes. Mostly I am taking better advantage of MT, what with the comments and the categories and such. And d/photo is more or less there. Check it out, dude!
(and I am abusing this “more” feature like goddamned crazy. I never knew I was such a windbag.)
There are still layout problems with d/photo that have stumped me (in IE5.5/Win, anyway), but the backend is bootylicious. Also, over here in this end of town, the category archive pages are haunted: what should be a list of recent posts is in fact a list of arbitrary picks — I think MT has grown a brain. Anyway, this will be fixed with the next MT release. Thanks Ben!
And finally, with the latest redesign, I have axed the poll. It may return a) when I overcome pollster’s block and b) when I can make one myself. The winning movie title, if you can remember back that far, was “Teenage Bilge Dwarves 2: Space Court.” There is a story behind it that I have been meaning to tell.
toiletfinder.com
It has got to be one of the most pathetic websites yet made.
This website is dedicated to finding a toilet as and when you need one, it also has Toilet Tales from around the world and links to toilet related sites.
I found zero Toilet Tales for North America. Yet the front page also says,
Additionally if any Venture Capitalists feel that they have a couple of million burning a hole in their pocket that they wouldn’t mind parting with, then please feel to drop a line to the above address to hear more about the Toiletfinder business plan.
D’you suppose toilets will pay to be listed? Or is it the WAP access that will bring the mad stacks? Granted there’s some attempt at humour here… but also, if I’m reading it correctly, a dot-com-esque urge to make truckloads of money. Boy howdy.
bung prognosticator
Googlewhacking is a lot more fun than it should be. Try to get a single search result when you enter two common english words, i.e. “bung prognosticator.” (MeFi thread) You can play a similar game with the Oracle of Bacon’s star links device. Note the goal is to get 7 degrees of separation, not infinite, which is easy.
Did I mention that God hates figs? (via kafkaesque) And, if my information is correct, He drives an El Camino.
Oh, and here’s my new favourite book, co-authored by Ass Meat Research Group.
prodmusic
Hello there. I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the
wonderful world of production music.
What is it? Well, it’s cheaper than music. TV/film/interactive production
companies use it when they can’t afford to pay a composer or license an
existing song. It tends to be sold in CD sets, much like sound effects. Some
of it is perfectly fine at first listen – especially tracks like “Drama
Drums,” “Percussive Drama” and “Drama Percussion”, which are meant to lie
under a given scene and not get anything more than a first listen anyway.
Much more of it, however, is greatly entertaining for how narrowly, or
sometimes hugely, it misses it’s target.
I once chatted with a composer who was doing stuff like this. He was
composing a TV theme for a basketball team. Circumstances dictated he use
hiphop elements, yet he confessed, “I hate rap. I’d rather be listening to
Mozart.” Accordingly, his composition was waaaaaay off. Sax over
Kraftwerk-esque beats, and a whole lot of trashy synth.
Career angst is audible in production music.
I’d love to post some tracks here, but the potential for legal headaches
discourages me. However, there is more than enough entertainment in the song
titles and descriptions. So here is a list of my favourites, with the requisite quippery appended.
- Experienced: “medium up-tempo, three piece, 60s psychedelic rock.” Can you guess what this song sounds like? Many production music tracks are like this one; they’re the background-music equivalent of Bruce Le.
- Vonette: “acoustic headbanger pop with cello lead melody.” I have no idea what they were trying to clone here, but I wish I had some.
- Paranoid suicide: “dark, hard-hitting.”
- Slap my bass up: “energetic, accelerating slap bass.”
- Mission Just Possible!: “dark, dramatic opening to all action & heroic climax.”
- Full time jack move: “urban gangsta drama (contains explicit lyrics).” Bonus points for redundant use of the much-loved “urban.”
- Cool blue: “fast, ambient drum & bass jungle featuring sax.” Help! Administrator! There’s sax in my jungle! Please help me!
- Information jungle: “hip hop jungle bass, drum & bass.”
- and my personal favourite – Dance Energy: “up tempo, punchy, Pan-European house, features ‘do it all night’ vocals.”
Did we leave anything out?
petition to Lucas
Petition to have Peter Jackson replace Lucas as director of Episode III. I can get behind that. Jackson is suddenly the New Lucas anyway, really, whereas Lucas has moved on to making Teen Movies in Space. Which brings me to some dialogue suggestions for Mr. Lucas. I imagine he’s not hep to the latest slang the kids are using.
Annakin: Yo, Yoda, yo.
Yoda: Whaddup.
You outta Space Yoohoo, yo.
Yoda: (shrugs) Whatever.
Amidala: (snowboarding, in space) To the max!
Annakin crashes into a tree.
Annakin: Aww damn! I broke my Space-Snowboard.
Amidala: Dude, I am so totally Space-Blogging that.
the benevolent cabal
The Global Business Network, a research consultancy. Devoted to “scenario planning,” a type of nonlinear and heretical prognostication. GBN (and its predecessor, the Royal Dutch/Shell’s Group Planning) successfully predicted the end of the cold war, the 70s energy crisis, the changes in South Africa. Members include Brian Eno, Bill Joy, John Perry Barlow, Walter Parkes. For a good backgrounder, see this Wired article from ’94; for a glance at the breadth of their thinking and some opinions on the short-term future of the world, read that.
Schwartz bemoans the sorry state of broadband “When was the last time your TV crashed?” He argues that the VC field is healthier than ever. He considers the world to be on the cusp of massive scientific breakthroughs. He raises concerns about the US becoming a “rogue superpower,” the Microsoft of governments. The reemergence of the state after market dominance in the 90s: “the model around the world is increasingly Singapore, not the United States.” The difference between dictatorships and the new criminal states (Burma, Columbia, Sudan, etc). And on changes in intelligence:
What is interesting to me is to see the degree to which we are having an influence over places like the CIA, in how they think, how they approach thinking about the future .. Because we are at a moment where the global rules of security are changing in a very big way … It’s a privilege to be an active participant in the process of rethinking the future of national security and global security.
Amongst other things, the lack of political bias is refreshing. Schwartz speaks harshly about Bush’s actions on the international stage, yet elsewhere argues for the deployment of ground troops in Afghanistan. Too often we assume that if we agree with someone on one point, we should agree with their other points as well, and if we hate one action, we should hate all others produced by that person. Whereas things are rarely that simple.
And, uh… “check out the big brain on Schwartz.”
flashandscream
Finally, some good old fashioned flashing and screaming. Requires, um, Flash.
enron
While I’m mentioning man-behind-the-Britney Oliver Willis, I should mention his EnronGate page, a superior way to get some good background info about this fiasco.
fictional blogs
Fictional blog roundup: my warmongering alter-ego Caesar has inspired some other historical blogs, such as Cleopatria and Eusebius (who didn’t really take to blogging, it appears). I’m quite fond of Snoop Doggy Blog, and tha Doggfather is now joined by Britney in the pantheon of popstar-bloggers.
Of course, there’s a whole history of online-journal people doing fiction in their preferred format, which you could explore via the DMOZ. And let’s not forget Dracula, which is just begging to be turned into a group blog or series of blogs…
narco-return
I’m back from LA, that depraved sweatbox, that suburb without an urb, that surprisingly beautiful shithole, that artifice magnet, that sprawling bitch goddess, that — oh, somebody kick me. Anyway it was a blast.
One thing that caught my eye down there was this article in the LA New Times concerning narcocorridos, Mexican traditional music about drug trafficking. It’s a fascinating type of gangsta folk. (Apologies to my US readers who may already be familiar with this stuff, but to a naive Torontonian the piece was quite an eye-opener.) There’s a book available on the subject. That page there about the book also has links to further topical material – much better than I could turn up via half-assed googling – so take a look.
spiders
An incredibly well-written comic. Be sure to click “next” at the end of the first page. Here’s the first part; haven’t read that yet. (via randomwalks.)
capital of the 3rd world
I’m going to LA next week. Never been there before. I’d like to hear about hotspots, coldspots, happyspots, sadspots, or any type of spot I should visit. Film landmarks would be nice. I know to go to Sunset Blvd., Mulholland Drive, Venice Beach, and Mann’s Chinese… Any suggestions? (if you don’t want to leave an email address just make one up, please)
milo
Good friend Matty C has produced a kid. Congrats to Matt & Alison. In Matt’s words, “Holy shit I’m a dad!”