From the always awesome Strange Maps blog:
Mr Kirkland’s website “is a bit of a grassroots movement, dedicated to breaking the US into smaller, more functional nations”. It provides some extra information on each of the new, smaller American nations, “and a fresh map so that anyone can submit a new proposal.”
For myself, I like the idea of a country called “The Boundary Waters” but I think they would soon go to war with The People’s Republic of the Plains to claim Chicago. It would be bloody.
I was listening to NPR’s blathershow, To The Point, and Warren Olney had on Andrew Keen to promote his worrywort book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture. The man is the sort who lumps in some anonymous post on a BBS board somewhere with Daily Kos and then whinges that we’re not listening to the mainstream media and those bastions of journalistic ethics, Tim Russert and Judith MIller. (He doesn’t mention them, per se, but that’s who I think of.)
Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin came on and called Keen the Ann Coulter of Web 2.0 and then after that I had lunch and stopped paying attention. There is so much wrong in Keen’s arguments (too much anonymity, not enough authotarianism, I mean credentials) I don’t know where to start. Actually, I do know: Lawrence Lessig, who tears Keen a new’un in defending himself against Keen’s charges:
But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity — from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics.
So many books come out of mainstream publishing houses that are loose with facts and that suffer from basic bad grammar that the existence of the book itself refutes Keen’s point.
While the geeks cream their jeans waiting for the iPhone, I’m waiting (much longer) for PT-141. And that ain’t a patrol boat:
“With PT-141, you feel good, not only sexually aroused,” reported anonymous patient 007, a participant in a Phase 2 trial, “you feel younger and more energetic.” Said another patient: “It helped the libido. So you have the urge and the desire. . . . You get this humming feeling; you’re ready to take your pants off and go.”
Not that I need any help, mind you…
I just started using FoxyTunes with my Firefox browser and I kinda like it. It puts a music player controller down at the bottom right of the browser window, which fixed one thing that was bugging me recently: switching from Firefox to iTunes and back again (over and over again). So I went looking and found this.
But it also has oodles of Web 2.0 goodness: you can use whatever is playing and use Foxytunes’ portal to return a page of related searches, including YouTube, LyricWiki, Last.fm, Flickr, Google, Hype Machine, Rhapsody, Amazon, and more. It’s reedonk.
What a lame ass I must be when over the last two weeks I’ve been at the Santa Barbara Intnl Film Festival with my film “The Night of the Falcon,” and instead the entry I bring you is about YouTube. But hey, whatever.
So, YouTube. At first this started as a way to load up fan films and “funny” home videos. Suddenly it’s exploded and it full of music videos and tv clips. Thank you internet. Surely this can’t last, but in the meantime, this is how TV should be: searchable and immediately viewable. I was up to 2 a.m. last night, thinking ‘just one more, it’s only 3 minutes.”
I signed up for a free account, which now allows you to subscribe to yet another of my RSS feeds. Anything I’ve marked as ‘favorite’, you can now see. Here’s the feed.
At the moment, there’s some Japanese music videos and ones from Thomas Dolby and Talking Heads. More to come soon!
Keith Milford’s Motel Hell is a blog that collects postcards of American motels and reststops. If you loved Phaidon’s Boring Postcards books (and who doesn’t?) you’ll love the damp, moldy smell of this site.
You may have noticed a few additions to the blog these days. One is the funky list of what I supposedly have at home from Netflix (left hand column). However, it’s experiencing some difficulty and telling you some of what I sent back. Don’t blame me, blame Netflix’s RSS feed.
The other addition is my del.icio.us links on the right hand side, above the BlogRoll. Both of these feeds were made possible by FeedDigest, which I urge you to check out.
So anyway, I just wanted to alert you to some cool sites I’ve added to the blogroll, as they’re worth checking out:
Cute Overload: A blog of nothing but cute animals. Woogiewoogiewoogie, aren’t you the cutest???
Same Hat! Same Hat!: a blog about translating experimental Japanese manga and American manga-style artists.
Subject Barred: Linked from K-punk, Irish follower of Zizek and cultural critic. Has yet to really get going, but K-punk vouches for this site.
Twitch Film: Latest news and trailers about all cool films that are not Hollywood poo.
Do those ads offering free MacMinis/iPods/iBooks really work? Is it all just a big scam? Well, yes and no.
Hardy Menagh from LowEndMac.com dives in and tries to surface with a free mini.
Yes, You Can Get a ‘Free’ Mac mini – but Is It Worth the Hassles?
Subtracting the cost of the failed DVD order and adding the music CDs, my total outlay, excluding credit card purchases, was $70. I used the credit cards to purchase items I would have bought anyway. If you want to, you can add $60 to the total for these items.
A Mac mini with the features this one has retails for $499 shipped from The Apple Store. If you can be happy with these features, it’s definitely worth the cost.
