Will just purchased a 2007 Cannondale Rush 4. I find my reaction evenly divided between three poles:
Excitement on his behalf, because the Rush has the reputation of being a rather sweet marathoner.
Anticipation of the chance for a test ride.
Dread of the man-beating I can sense descending upon me the next time we attack hilly terrain together.
In other words, “Yay!”, “Woohoo!”, and “Oy” all at once.
If you’re going to accuse your opponent of plagiarism, it might be a good idea to check first that the alleged plagiaree is not, in fact, a friend of the alleged plagiarist, one who will readily tell the paper of record that not only do the two of them routinely kick speech ideas back and forth, but that in this particular instance he encouraged his friend to adopt the approach and rhetorical device used.
Crack some windows at campaign HQ. Think about shelling out for a Vornado or two while you’re at it. (You do still have enough cash on hand for a couple of air circulators, right?) The stench of desperation has got to be giving some of your more sensitive staffers splitting headaches by now.
In a field that has seen more than its share of shameless posturing, this still manages to impress me:
“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.
It’s like a neutron star of mendacity, a few inches of self-serving hyperbole layered atop a mind-bogglingly dense core of pure horseshit, the whole mess spinning thousands of times a second.
I haven’t seen this kind of devotion to the common good since Marion Barry expounded upon the virtues of smoking crack as an act of public service.
If we could only produce fertilizer of this purity on demand, we could make the deserts bloom.
It’s a no-holds-barred fight to the finish between a Floridian woman who went on a felony data-destruction spree after (mistakenly!) concluding on the basis of a classified ad that she was about to be laid off, and her very much former employer, who apparently was unfamiliar with the concept of offsite backup. Or offline archival. Or access control. Or…
My vote goes to her employer.
If you were around for the glory days of Usenet, those golden years spanning the early 1990s, chances are that you were exposed to Chip Morningstar’s seminal essay, “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure”, in which the author chronicles the cultural confusion that resulted when members of the Engineer Tribe found themselves wandering the unfamiliar territory of the Literary Theorist Clan.
Ultimately, the essay seemed to be saying, the literary theorists had evolved themselves into a cul-de-sac; we should be nice to them, and help them where possible. Its citation by engineers was almost invariably accompanied by a measure of self-congratulation, even smugness, as if to say, “Are we not manly men, fortunate to ply a trade with no need of such verbal frippery?”
Lately, though, I’ve noted an obnoxious trend nestled inside a positive one, and while I won’t go so far as to call the former disturbing, I find it just a touch disquieting.
The larger, encompassing trend is the increasing accessibility of the means for do-it-yourself production, especially of microelectronics. That one, as far as I’m concerned, is pretty much an unalloyedly good thing, and I’m all for it. I delight in the proliferation of inventive personal projects, and the cross-pollination which tends to result from their being shared on the web.
However, I delight considerably less in the smaller, attendant trend, which seems to involve summarizing these projects using deliberately abstruse language and self-conscious circumlocutions. It’s as though Morningstar and Farmer returned from their foray those many years ago the unwitting carriers of an absurdly slow but incredibly virulent pathogen, one that, having quietly and unobtrusively pervaded the population, is now switching over to the scything-us-down-like-wheat phase of its life cycle.
Take, for instance, the summary for Lady Ada‘s Fresh Air design, which makes my toes curl every time my eyes stray across it.
The Fresh Air project is a low-power, extensible RF jamming system for personal use. It is intended for city-dwellers who feel that their personal space is being overrun with undesired radio transmissions.
…
Much like the personal air ionizers available in catalogues, this device is for cleaning up the air around the user. By pinning this device to a bag or jacket, the user can enjoy a radius of silence.
I mean, come on. “People who talk loudly on cell phones in public places are annoying as Hell. Fresh Air lets you shut them down cold. Savoring their resulting expressions of helpless confusion is entirely optional. But fun.”
(Please note that I’m not trying to harsh on Lady Ada here. She has more badass electrical-engineering fu in the tip of her little finger than I do in my entire body, and is tireless in sharing what she knows with others. Moreover, her store and the kits sold therein rock just as hard as she does. I’m guessing that she had to put that verbiage in there for her thesis, and the description for the followup Wave Bubble design is, gratifyingly, much more straightforward.)
Today, though, we have this gem:
Wifi Camera reveals the electromagnetic space of our devices and the shadows that we create within such spaces, in particular our wifi networks which are increasingly found in coffee shops, offices and homes throughout cities of the developed world.
For fuck’s sake. “Hey, we built a gadget that lets you visualize the distribution of WiFi signal in the air around you. It’s neat. Check it out.” Is that so hard?
Seriously, this stuff makes me feel like a surly patron in some overrated restaurant. “Yes, I’d like the Technical-Skill Entree with the mixed Innovation, Inspiration, and Cleverness side salad. Oh, and please hold the pretentious horseshit. Thanks.”
Perhaps I’ll calm down once the drinks arrive.
You’re listening to your politicians—
They claim to speak to God.
Can’t you see it’s just a fraud?
Your rituals and superstitions —
Don’t you find them kind of odd?
Might as well kneel before Zod.
— Electric Six, “Rip It”
Now, though, it turns out that you don’t actually have to choose between the electoral process and Krypton’s most notorious malefactor.
The question has hung in the air for over half a decade now. Friends have asked it. So have strangers. I’ve never known exactly how to reply.
On Tuesday, lying in a dentist’s chair, listening to an FM radio station burble a non-stop stream of Christmas songs — not the occasional Christmas tune interspersed with more generic easy listening, but one long, unbroken, treacly strand of artificially-sweetened “holiday cheer” — I thought I could almost discern the outlines of an answer; the buzzing of the drill, however, made it hard to be sure.
Yesterday I wandered the aisles of Home Depot, subjected to more uninterrupted Christmas music. It might have been during the chorus of “Jingle Bell Rock”, a song that has always made me want to inflict grievous bodily harm upon its original perpetrators, that I recognized, in a moment of blinding clarity, the truth that had always been right before my eyes:
This is why I hate America.
Wil Shipley takes a break from inventing new games to compile the feel-good list of the year. Personally, I can’t decide if my favorite is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 2: We Still Do Not Require Any Form of Identification, or Garfield 3: 2 in the Head, 1 in the Chest.
John C. Welch on why the first version of Amazon’s e-book reader is not going to take the world by storm:
The other major problem with replacing books is that there isn’t an online store that you want to browse the way you will a book store. Jeff Bezos can hump his Kindle until it’s as sticky as a stripper’s shoes, but you don’t browse Amazon, not really. You might link-hop a bit, but face it, Amazon’s strength is that it lets you get shit done like a SEAL sniper. You find your target, take the shot, and get out. That’s not bad, not on any level. It’s one reason why I use, no why I love Amazon so much for buying gifts and the like. They have a lot of stuff, it’s easy to find, and it’s usually pretty cheap. It’s also really easy to get through the whole “trading money for stuff” part of the transaction.
The consistently-brilliant John Rogers takes most of what’s made me want to sob brokenly about this country and its politics for the last year, and actually manages to make it funny. Read it while you cry in your beer and practice saying, “Regular or synthetic, Master?”