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One Big Mouse

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Links, Media Tagged with , , , July 30th, 2010 @ 1:28 pm

Here’s a blog from a family who are trying to spend one year of their lives without any influence from Disney. They’ve decided to take anything produced by a Disney-owned company out of their home, avoid watching any media produced by Disney-owned companies, and spend no money on anything made by a Disney-owned company.

You might not think that’s too difficult, but here’s the list of the television networks, cable networks, radio and television stations, movie studios, online services, periodicals, and other related businesses directly owned by Disney. It’s not completely impossible to stay away from all these entities, but it’s going to be a challenge.

This PDF shows how virtually every media outlet in the United States is controlled by one of five corporations: Disney, Viacom, Bertelsmann, TimeWarner, News Corporation, and Vivendi. Because the landscape changes so frequently, the information is now a little out of date (for example, Vivendi sold off Universal to GE, which packaged it along with NBC and sold NBC Universal to Comcast), but it still paints a disturbing picture.

Best Articles Ever

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , July 30th, 2010 @ 1:10 pm

Kevin Kelly’s “Cool Tools” blog is calling upon the web to pull together a list of the best magazine articles of all time (via BoingBoing). Given the propensity of the web to generate all manner of “best of” and “top ten” lists and other rankings, I’m a little surprised I’ve never seen anyone try this before, but I think the rather transitory nature of magazine journalism and the sheer overwhelming volume of material generated by periodicals probably put the idea pretty far down on the list of thing people were looking to rank. Nevertheless, what’s already been generated is a pretty awesome list of outstanding pieces of work, and the refinement of the list is ongoing.

Because the bias of the list is for things than can be read online, much of the material being considered is pretty recent, but as magazines begin to put their back issue archives online it is getting easier to find material from the ’80s, ’70s, even the ’50s. Some of the first ones Kelly listed are well-established classics: John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”, Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic article that presages the computer era, and pieces by Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, et.al. David Foster Wallace is rising to the top of the list as people begin to contribute, and anyone who reads The Atlantic or The New Yorker with any regularity will recognize names like James Fallows, Malcolm Gladwell, Rebecca Mead, and Calvin Trillin.

You could easily cobble together a reading list from this that would keep you busy for a long, long time. I know I am looking forward to doing just that, but let me also offer some recommendations of articles I’ve already read that are on the list that might be a good starting place for you:

“The Mountains of Pi” — Richard Preston, The New Yorker, March 3, 1992. Two mathematician brothers in New York who built a supercomputer in their apartment to calculate Pi. Truly memorable.

“Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain” — Michael Paterniti, Harper’s Magazine, October 1997. A first-hand account of the author’s encounter with Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist who autopsied Albert Einstein and kept his brain for decades. The Harper’s article Kelly links to requires a subscription to read online, but Paterniti published the piece as a book a few years later.

“The Pitchman” — Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, October 30, 2000. Gladwell profiled Ron Popeil, the guy behind Ronco and all those “as seen on TV” products, and how he actually invented many of them himself.

“The Peekaboo Paradox” — Gene Weingarten, Washington Post Magazine, January 22, 2006. Gene Weingarten is one of my favorite journalists, and this story about a DC-area rent-a-clown who calls himself “The Great Zucchini” is a masterpiece.

“Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?” — Gene Weingarten, Washington Post Magazine, March 8, 2009. Another Gene Weingarten piece that you may even remember, since it was published only last year and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Even if you read it then, it’s worth reading again.

“The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is” — Errol Morris, The New York Times, Opinion, June 20, 2010. This is the first part of a series of articles by Morris that the NYT recently ran (he is an occasional contributor there, but his stuff is always fascinating. I actually thought the third article of this series, which is about the end of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, when he was seriously debilitated after a severe stroke, and how his wife and doctors hid the condition from everyone, was the best one.

Don’t Let The Valet Take The Key

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , July 28th, 2010 @ 10:59 am

Earlier this year, Cisco finally did away with the Linksys brand name on their home wireless networking gear (they had acquired Linksys all the way back in 2003). They added some swoopy industrial design, redid the configuration UI to be “easier”, renamed the product the “Cisco Valet”, and jacked up the price of a basic home wireless router from about $75 to $129.

My blog-buddy “Going Like Sixty” found himself of a new router the other day and bought one on the premise that it would be very simple to set up, but, as he tells us here, any visions of “breezing through the simple screens” quickly disappeared into that sucking morass known as “Bangalore Tech Support Madness”. He’s a little bitter about the whole thing.

Frankly, I’m having a hard time imagining why the marketeering geniuses at Cisco thought setting up a wireless router needed to be “easier”, since wireless routers have been probably the simplest bit of home computer tech ever created. In fact, they have been, to some degree, TOO easy because it has always been possible to just plug one in and have it work with very little intervention required, with the result being tons of home wireless networks being set up with nobody ever changing the default admin passwords or implementing the built-in (and equally simple-to-enable) encryption. And now most people don’t even need to bother with their own wireless router, since the cable companies wised up and built them right into their cable modems. Jacking the price and alienating the technically-disinclined doesn’t really seem like a great business plan…but, then again, we are talking about Cisco.

An Apology

By Brian Filed in Atheism, Blogs Tagged with , February 1st, 2010 @ 10:57 am

A former Christian publicly apologizes for being a shit-head for all those years.

Money quote:

3. I apologize to all my former Sunday school students because I taught you that the bible was the word of god. I perpetuated a myth that the bible is a special book that should be regarded ‘much more highly than it ought’. I encouraged you to trust this book, to think this book contained sacred ideas about life and god. I made you think that the stories in the bible were intrinsically valuable and could teach you about how god works and who god is. I apologize for always referring to god as a ‘he’, thereby further anthropomorphizing a pretend deity and making you think ‘he’ was real and decidedly masculine. I apologize for teaching you to think that you were a sinner and that Jesus had to die for you when you are really just a beautiful child, perfect in every way from the minute you were born (except for when you aren’t). I apologize for telling you that Jesus conquered death and that you should put your trust in him when there is not a shred of evidence of the resurrection except for what is in the bible. I apologize for not respecting your intelligence and glazing over thorny issues and rationalizing all the bullshit that is so present at all times in ‘god’s word’. (I apologize for saying bullshit in this apology). I apologize for ever calling the bible ‘god’s word’. It isn’t ‘god’s word’. It’s just a book. There are a lot of other much better books. There are books that helped humanity move beyond misogyny and slavery and tyranny. There are books that led to scientific discoveries which led to medicine and helpful machines and made the world a better place. None of those books are in the bible. In fact, the bible helps people to justify misogyny and tyranny and slavery and the bible made church leaders fear science and so they burned scientists and doctors and smart people because what those smart people were learning was often in direct conflict with what the bible and the church taught. I apologize for not telling you that the bible and christianity are two of the main reasons that it took people so long to move from tyranny into democracy, from slavery to human rights, from cruel religious mandates to civil law. I hope someday you will figure that out for yourselves in spite of what I taught you.

The unfortunate thing is that she gets so much Christian hate-mail, she’s shut off the comments on her blog, so I guess they haven’t exactly accepted her apology.

I Want Mine Medium Fucking Rare

By Brian Filed in Amuse, Blogs, Food Tagged with , December 4th, 2009 @ 10:21 am

steak

How To Cook A Fucking Steak

Just make sure that it’s not one of those piece-of-shit Omaha Steaks

Nintendo Bad, Fire GOOD!

By Brian Filed in Amuse, Blogs Tagged with , , , December 4th, 2009 @ 10:15 am

zippo

Lately I’ve been checking out some of the “Recommended” blogs that Google Reader offers based on your RSS feeds, and one that I’ve started following as a result is called “Blag Hag”.

Yesterday she posted about bringing her Nintendo Wii to a party, but leaving behind the sensor bar that the Wiimote game controllers need to interact with the console. You should read her post to discover how she came up with a very creative workaround.

It’s A Small World After All

By Brian Filed in Blogs, Life, Misc, Site Tagged with , , , November 24th, 2009 @ 11:46 am

social-networking-logos

Related Links: Most People Use The Web To Talk To People Nearby
10 Things You Need To Stop Tweeting About

I caved in on my intended three-month hiatus from Facebook this morning. I lasted two months, which isn’t too shabby. It was a good break, and it spurred me to make a whole slew of changes in my online life: I canceled my Twitter account outright, I purged my RSS feeds and discovered a variety of other sites I hadn’t seen before, and my interest in this site was rejuvenated. I also had to come to terms with leaving a website I had been very involved with for a long time, which was painful but ultimately the right thing for me to do for my own good.

I still have some issues with the nature of the discourse on Facebook. As online communities have flourished and fallen over the years, it seems that the good ones are those that carefully balance substantive discussion and the tendency of online people to fall back on snark and fatuous quipping. There’s room for both, but the sites that try too hard to be earnest and sincere tend to become either sanctimonious or batshit-insane, and the sites that never get beyond quips and snark devolve into constant games of one-upsmanship that can be entertaining but ultimately pointless. Facebook suffers from the latter, along with a few other borderline tendencies. I do think, though, that as long as one is attuned to these tendencies, it’s possible to make use of the site; the trick is not succumbing to the temptation of playing the game.

Back at the beginning of October, I said that I believed that blogging would have to pretty much die out before it could begin again the way it was at the beginning — small clusters of people writing and commenting on one another’s writing — but it would appear that day is still far off. Getting back to the business of posting most days of the week has been a good exercise for me, but blogging is still busy dying rather than waiting to be reborn. My decision to start participating on Facebook again despite its many drawbacks is a solid acknowledgment of that fact. What has to change in the meanwhile, I think, is how I make use of this website to get beyond the blog model that has propelled it for almost a decade.

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