- Oh, that Tucker Carlson…what a kidder! [via]
- Still, he’s gonna have to step up his comedy game if he’s going to match “off with their mics and their heads” Bill O’Reilly! [via]
- I think John Seavey may be right about this recent election — namely, that “the Republicans’ only winning strategy was to shut up and let the Democrats lose.”
Those Republicans lost, big time. Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle–every one of them said in detail what they’d do if elected, and every one of them heard the resounding voice of the American people saying, “No thank you.” Even in reliable red states or red districts, outspoken conservatives like Rand Paul and Michelle Bachmann had to spend millions of dollars to hang on to what should have been safe seats. The fact of the matter is, in order to get re-elected, the Republicans had to pretend not to be Republicans. That’s the narrative that you’re not hearing about right now. But you might hear a lot about it in a couple of years. Because two years is a long time to ask the Republicans to pretend not to be Republicans.
The sad thing is, shutting up and letting the Democrats lose is pretty frequently a winning strategy.
- Thudfactor points out the difference between security and authentication.
- And finally, Abstract Pixel Art. Below, the cast of Futurama [via]:
art
Thursday various
- Just what is a documentary these days?
So the salient question might not be, “What is a documentary?†— an abstract, theoretical approach to a form that is grounded in the concrete facts of life. Instead it might make sense to ask what (or whom) a given documentary is for? Is it a goad to awareness, an incitement to action, a spur to further thought? A window? A mirror? The more you think about it, the less obvious the truth appears to be.
- I think somewhere, in the back of my brain, I knew that Eric Stoltz had originally been cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future — had, in fact, filmed for several weeks — but it’s still weird and kind of amazing to see the footage.
- The Wire Monopoly? Sometimes parody edges up right up against the things we wish were real. [via]
- Children’s picture books are apparently a dying art, thanks to parents starting kids on chapter books earlier and earlier:
Picture books are so unpopular these days at the Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Mass., that employees there are used to placing new copies on the shelves, watching them languish and then returning them to the publisher. [via]
- And finally, The Doctor is now immortal. Or always was. Or whatever. I’m still a Doctor Who neophyte compared to some, but even I know “continuity” is a very slippery slope in that universe.
Tuesday various
- I feel totally vindicated now: Study: Doodling Helps You Pay Attention. [via]
- Professional wrestler Mick Foley — who I know mostly as Mankind, mostly because a friend of mine once dressed up as him for Halloween — talks about how Tori Amos changed his life. [via]
- Stan Lee won’t rest until he’s created a comic book character for every last man, woman, and child on the planet, and then some. Excelsior! [via]
- Ever wonder how ink is made?
- And finally, John Seavey on Pokemon:
It’s a show about a little boy who runs around capturing wild animals, locking them up in a tiny cage, and then pitting them against other wild animals in brutal gladiatorial contests. Really, I don’t think there’s anything you could do to make this one darker if you tried.
Thursday various
- I like Doctor Who. I’m not sure I like it enough to have a A Doctor Who-themed wedding, though.
- Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism:
Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words.
- A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London). [via]
- You know, it is kind of funny that programs like Word still use a disk as the save icon when lots of computer users these days don’t even know what a disk is.
- And finally, even qwerty keyboards are falling by the wayside:
Like the “Enter†key that becomes a “Search†key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.
As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things†— apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet. [via]