Boing Boing: HOWTO get a CD, DVD or book listed on Amazon. Looks relatively easy, especially if you’ve already invested in the UPC code for another retailer. Cheese Lords, are you listening?
LifeHacker: blogs imitate Python
With articles like How to photograph snow, How to make a life poster, and How to read effectively, new Gawker-authored, Sony-sponsored blog LifeHacker reminds me of nothing so much as a certain Monty Python sketch, “How to do it”:
(Cut to a sign saying ‘How to do it’. Music. Pull out to reveal a ‘Blue Peter’ type set. Sitting casually on the edge of a dais an three presenters in sweaters – Noel, Jackie and Alan – plus a large bloodhound.)
Alan: Hello.
Noel: Hello.
Alan: Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynaecologist. And this week on ‘How to do it’ we’re going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here’s Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.
Jackie: Hello, Alan.
Alan: Hello, Jackie.
Jackie: Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there’ll never be any diseases ever again.
Alan: Thanks, Jackie. Great idea. How to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.
Noel: Great, great, Alan. Well, next week we’ll be showing you how black and white people can live together in peace and harmony, and Alan will be over in Moscow showing us how to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese. So, until next week, cheerio.
Alan: Bye.
Jackie: Bye.
(Children’s music.)
Pork chop sandwiches!! And knowing is half the battle
And speaking of horrific Internet mindworms, these inspired remixes of animated GI Joe public service announcement spots should earn a fond spot in the heart of anyone who watched a lot of syndicated cartoons on weekday afternoons in the ’80s. Personal faves: “Jamaican Nyquil” and “Fire” (not to be confused with “On Fire,” which is also pretty funny). Warning: contains copious amounts of profanity, so watch with headphones on.
Checking in with PES
When MetaFilter talks about one of your friends, you link it (even if you’ve linked it several times before). New since the last time I visited Adam “PES” Pesapane’s production company: an inspired spot for Coinstar, a surreal brand video for Diesel, and some pretty good articles. Unchanged, of course: Roof Sex, possibly my favorite Internet video meme of all time.
Relationship marketing in a liquid exchange
Universal Hub – The online Boston community.: What’s the Point?. The Point, in Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, is the first bar in Boston, and the first bar I know of period, with an RSS feed. Granted, it’s an RSS feed with links that don’t work unless you hit the most recent item, but hey, they’re trying.
And I could use a beer. We had another few inches of snow last night, and I found two broken shear bolts on the axle of our snowblower this morning (translation: it stopped clearing the driveway).
Another blogging Sloanie… er, Sloan CIO
Al Essa, the CIO of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, has not one but three public blogs: Tatler , described as “A personal perspective on intellectual history, aesthetics, political economy, and arts and letters”; The NOSE (Navigating Open Source Elearning); and Rude Mood, about running. I’m not sure that three complete independent, separately branded blogs aren’t overkill, but I guess it keeps things from getting confusing. A belated welcome to the blogosphere, Al.
Discomfortingly accurate
Salon: I got derailed somehow!. I’ve been saving this one in my aggregator because the general tone is just about right. Boy, do I understand what “functionally depressed” means. Not to mention “walking, talking avoidance mechanism.” File this one under psychology of the black dog.
It’s wicked pissa
Boston Online: Wicked Good Guide to Boston English. This is a compendium put together by Adam Gaffin, who maintains the Universal Hub site—and who, on the strength of this guide, will be a judge today in the Wicked Boston Accent Contest.
The guide, in the spirit of HL Mencken’s The American Language, captures information about pronunciation, odd vocabulary, and usage. Where else would you learn, for instance, about the Massachusetts Negative Positive? Or, for that matter, what the title of this post means?
ThisOldHouseblog
My parents came in last weekend for a fun-filled weekend of sightseeing and home improvement—we didn’t plan it but it kind of turned out that way. This was the first visit to our new place by my mom & dad, and it turned out to be a perfect introduction to New England winter.
I already mentioned the Boston Camerata concert on Friday night. On Saturday morning we piled into the car, drove out through Lexington and on toward Carlisle. We were curious to see if we could find the current This Old House project. (My dad, Lisa, and I are addicted to the show, and my mom is very tolerant.) As there are only three or four major roads in Carlisle, it was pretty easy to find the house, though we did have to stop and get directions from some cookie-selling Girl Scouts. We did a brief drive-by and took a few photos to prove we were there.
Afterwards we went downtown. Lisa introduced Mom to the wonders of Filene’s Basement, and my dad and I wandered the North End, taking in Modern Pastry and the Old North Church.
On Sunday Lisa and I went and picked up a long-awaited tool purchase, our first major power tool: a 12″ compound miter saw. My dad and I assembled it—and promptly learned that the extension cord powering my workshop didn’t provide sufficient juice to power the saw and the lights. Guess I’ll be running in a new outlet—and learning about fishing cable above plaster ceilings. (I’ll probably take the opportunity to try to run some conduit up there to make it easier to run future cables.)
Monday, though, was the real home improvement day, thanks to a surprise six-inch snowfall. My dad and I started by hanging a coathook board in the entryway/mudroom to mitigate some of the winter coat clutter. Then we took the closet door off its hinges and took a half inch off the bottom with a reciprocating saw. Not only was this fun and therapeutic, it also meant that we could now open the closet door all the way, even with our snow-absorbing all-weather carpet in the mudroom. (Incidentally, there are probably a few more precise ways to cut a door than with a reciprocating saw, but most of them involve tools I don’t have—and, even with a 12″ blade, the new miter saw couldn’t cut all the way across the bottom.) I finished the job by sanding the new bottom, and priming both the top and bottom of the door. The previous owners hadn’t bothered to finish the tops and bottoms of several of the doors, and we had noticed that some of them got swollen and impossible to open and shut properly in the summer humidity. In between, we also took down a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room that was obstructing traffic flow between the rooms, and Lisa painted the hall connecting the kitchen to the living room.
Somehow with all this going on, we had time to make homemade pasta, roast lamb, and polpettone (Italian meatloaf, basically a very large meatball). On subsequent nights, not all at once.
It was a great visit—I only hope that the snow and hard work didn’t scare my folks off!
We hate it when our friends become successful
I posted about my college friend John “JP” Park’s book the other day, but he makes his Screen Savers debut tonight talking about Maya and plugging his new book. See the program listing here—I’ll see if an online version of the episode becomes available later.
Baconblog
Joho the Blog: Bacon rulz (not). Thanks to the irascible and vegetarian Doc Weinberger for pointing to the fabulous Bacontarian blog. Latest posting is about the dilemma of referring to bacon as a “side dish”; one of the commenters says, “I think we should start a movement to have a ‘side of bacon’ ordered at a restaurant refer to an entire side of bacon, or half a pork belly minus the ribs.” Right on.
Subscribe to what I’m listening to
Craig asked for an RSS feed for his iTunes so he could share what he was listening to. Turns out that’s a feature of Audioscrobbler, the community app for sharing your playlists. With a simple plug-in for iTunes for Windows or the Mac, you can upload everything you’ve listened to, and your friends can subscribe to the content in RSS (1.0).
Frinstance, here’s my Audioscrobbler feed. The only problem: what do you do with the information once you have it? Here Audioscrobbler is missing an opportunity. An automatic “buy on iTunes” or link to a tune excerpt, where available, might be pretty damn cool—and might make some money.
The politics of Beethoven
Tin Man: Sing Softly. Interesting story from my friend the Tin Man about being asked to identify himself as a member of the Gotham Chorus, not the Gay Gotham Chorus, for the sake of a bunch of Baptist college girls who were paying to sing in Carnegie Hall with them. I like the solution that Mipiel identifies in the comments: “after the concert, casually walk hand in hand with Matt until the Baptists can see, and then give each other a big hug and kiss. Then walk away as if nothing happened. If they’re unable to accept that gay men (and lesbians) are ordinary people just like them who do ordinary things like singing Beethoven that’s their problem, not yours.”
Still, it sucks all the way around—sucks for Tin Man and Matt, sucks for the Alabama kids that they have to be protected that way, sucks for Tin Man’s former glee club director that he, even as the concert manager, didn’t feel he had enough power to turn the occurrence into a “teachable moment” for his Southern guests.
I’m reminded, by contrast, of Robert Shaw, who regularly integrated Southern hotels and restaurants as he traveled around the country in the ’40s and ’50s with the Robert Shaw Chorale. Or Donald Loach, who directed the Virginia Glee Club from the 1960s through the 1980s, who integrated diners at truck stops in rural Virginia with his integrated Glee Club at the same time that the state was mounting its Massive Resistance campaign.
Farewell, Uncle Duke
MSNBC: Writer Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide. Dr. Gonzo’s insistence on eradicating the illusion of objectivity in his reporting paved the way for the blog world’s embrace of subjectivity. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to overcome his demons.
I feel a little like I did when Elliott Smith killed himself. Not quite the same sense of loss—I wasn’t that emotionally connected to Thompson—but the same anger. There is no bigger opponent for some of us than our own black angels of darkness.
Committee to Protect Bloggers finds first cause
BBC: Global blogger action day called. Two Iranian bloggers, known as Mojtaba and Arash, have been imprisoned in Iraq, and the new Committee to Protect Bloggers has declared today “Free Mojtaba and Arash Day.” Mojtaba was arrested for reporting the arrests of three fellow bloggers on his blog; Arash for keeping a blog called Panhjareh Eltehab (The Window of Anxiety) which focused on the arrests of bloggers and online journalists.
The original post has instructions on how to contact Iran’s UN representation (Iran has no US embassy).