Falindrome: The World's Largest (Only) Source of Fake Palindromes!
includes entries like:
Ray, eat a ripe pirate tea. YAR!!
and
No sass on a livid Advil — Vidal Sassoon
4.30.2008
4.29.2008
Clay Shirky: "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus"
Two excerpts. Read full transcript here. Video of talk here.
One:
A couple of weeks ago one of my students at ITP forwarded me a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.
[bold mine]
Two:
In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."
At least they're doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
One:
A couple of weeks ago one of my students at ITP forwarded me a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.
Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don't go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark." But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."
Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn't, it's illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.
[bold mine]
Two:
In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."
At least they're doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
4.27.2008
...and then there are the good typos:
Scrap found at the library:
my favorite month is july
because I was born
on that mouth
my favorite month is july
because I was born
on that mouth
4.23.2008
They got...the mustard...out!
Last night's American Idol with Andrew Lloyd Webber reminded me that I've wanted to post a recent Improv Everywhere mission: Food Court Musical! (below or click link)
In high school, whenever I had a big audition after school, I'd walk down the crowded senior hall waving my arms around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music singing "I Have Confidence"; there are multiple occasions on which I've burst out with Grease 2's "Cool Rider" (if you are unfamiliar with this Michelle Pfeiffer masterpiece, go see it!) in public, and I unfortunately remember drunkenly singing "Somewhere in my Youth (Or Childhood), I Must Have Done Something Good" (a song I could've sworn I hated) at the top of my lungs at New College the night a girl I'd had a long crush on asked me out. So "Food Court Musical"--in which a bunch of planted food court "employees" and eating customers perform a "spontaneous" musical at a mall--gets me in all the right places.
In high school, whenever I had a big audition after school, I'd walk down the crowded senior hall waving my arms around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music singing "I Have Confidence"; there are multiple occasions on which I've burst out with Grease 2's "Cool Rider" (if you are unfamiliar with this Michelle Pfeiffer masterpiece, go see it!) in public, and I unfortunately remember drunkenly singing "Somewhere in my Youth (Or Childhood), I Must Have Done Something Good" (a song I could've sworn I hated) at the top of my lungs at New College the night a girl I'd had a long crush on asked me out. So "Food Court Musical"--in which a bunch of planted food court "employees" and eating customers perform a "spontaneous" musical at a mall--gets me in all the right places.
4.11.2008
This week in praise
Less praise than one might reasonably hope for:
Editor of largish poetry press, to me:
"I heard you read at the Loft a few weeks ago. I liked that anecdote you told about American Idol and Million's Poet" [so, apparently, not your poems].
More praise than one might normally expect:
Woman at Preschool Storytime, to me:
"I just wanted to tell you you have an amazing singing voice!" (after I sang "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands")
Editor of largish poetry press, to me:
"I heard you read at the Loft a few weeks ago. I liked that anecdote you told about American Idol and Million's Poet" [so, apparently, not your poems].
More praise than one might normally expect:
Woman at Preschool Storytime, to me:
"I just wanted to tell you you have an amazing singing voice!" (after I sang "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands")
3.21.2008
3.20.2008
Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps
The 21 Steps is a short story designed to be read while following the action on Google Maps. It's actually a lot more interesting (not the story, the experience of reading the story with the map integrated) than I thought it would be. It adds a "sense of immediacy" (in quotation marks because I suspect that's meaningless) I didn't expect. Getting the story in little, delayed bits heightens suspense and clarifies the charm of cell phone novels.
From CNN: "Euthanasia Debate Woman Found Dead"
This story is from France. Here's a guide to assisted suicide laws around the world.
I find laws against assisted suicide even more (far more, really) outrageous than laws against gay marriage. If I could see only one of these--assisted suicide or gay marriage--become widely legal in my lifetime, I'd choose assisted suicide. Especially if more damn places of work, including mine, would make health benefits available to unmarried long-term partners.
I find laws against assisted suicide even more (far more, really) outrageous than laws against gay marriage. If I could see only one of these--assisted suicide or gay marriage--become widely legal in my lifetime, I'd choose assisted suicide. Especially if more damn places of work, including mine, would make health benefits available to unmarried long-term partners.
Nice Tool: DailyLit, Brijit, and Zamzar
DailyLit
Good news--a huge chunk of Cory Doctorow's oeuvre is now available for free at DailyLit. DailyLit has a brilliant premise: sign up, choose a book or two, and get a shortish segment of the book delivered to you each day (email or RSS). They have tons of free public domain books (and some Creative Commons ones, like Lessig's Free Culture), and more recent books are available for anywhere from $4.95 to $9.95. I'm all about the free, but there are some very useful selections (given the daily way you'll be receiving them) available for pay: language books, SAT review, etc. The poetry section is currently limited to dead, free folks. If you're a poet who makes your books (oop, outside of copyright, owned by you, etc.) available on the web, please consider contacting DailyLit. I'd love to see more poetry selections available.
This said, I have to admit that when I first found DailyLit last fall, I signed up for The Scarlet Pimpernel--available in only 105 parts, which seemed unambitious--but quickly fell behind, felt like I was drowning in backed-up Scarlet Pimpernel emails, and quit.
Brijit
Brijit reads magazines--both print and web-based--so you don't have to--or, better yet, so you can choose which articles you want to track down and read in full. It's also free. Receive 100-words-or-less reviews/abstracts of articles in Slate, Salon, The Onion A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Believer, Conde Nast Traveler, The Economist, and so on, by email or RSS feed. Brijit pays writers 5 bucks per article to write the summaries/reviews. Some publications aren't reviewed as frequently or thoroughly as others (I haven't received too many from The Believer). I subscribe to about fifteen and read them in my feed reader. I love this tool, because I rarely read magazines even in waiting rooms (always have a book along), and it helps me get a feel for what's going on in magazine-reader-land. Brijit also offers summaries of a number of TV shows, including The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and Meet the Press.
Zamzar
Zamzar offers free online file conversion. Convert an ancient WordPerfect doc to a Word doc, a doc to a pdf or docx, a jpg to a gif, etc. Super simple, done in an instant, and very useful to me at the library when someone brings in a document in a format our computers don't recognize. Can also convert music and video files in one format to another.
Good news--a huge chunk of Cory Doctorow's oeuvre is now available for free at DailyLit. DailyLit has a brilliant premise: sign up, choose a book or two, and get a shortish segment of the book delivered to you each day (email or RSS). They have tons of free public domain books (and some Creative Commons ones, like Lessig's Free Culture), and more recent books are available for anywhere from $4.95 to $9.95. I'm all about the free, but there are some very useful selections (given the daily way you'll be receiving them) available for pay: language books, SAT review, etc. The poetry section is currently limited to dead, free folks. If you're a poet who makes your books (oop, outside of copyright, owned by you, etc.) available on the web, please consider contacting DailyLit. I'd love to see more poetry selections available.
This said, I have to admit that when I first found DailyLit last fall, I signed up for The Scarlet Pimpernel--available in only 105 parts, which seemed unambitious--but quickly fell behind, felt like I was drowning in backed-up Scarlet Pimpernel emails, and quit.
Brijit
Brijit reads magazines--both print and web-based--so you don't have to--or, better yet, so you can choose which articles you want to track down and read in full. It's also free. Receive 100-words-or-less reviews/abstracts of articles in Slate, Salon, The Onion A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Believer, Conde Nast Traveler, The Economist, and so on, by email or RSS feed. Brijit pays writers 5 bucks per article to write the summaries/reviews. Some publications aren't reviewed as frequently or thoroughly as others (I haven't received too many from The Believer). I subscribe to about fifteen and read them in my feed reader. I love this tool, because I rarely read magazines even in waiting rooms (always have a book along), and it helps me get a feel for what's going on in magazine-reader-land. Brijit also offers summaries of a number of TV shows, including The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and Meet the Press.
Zamzar
Zamzar offers free online file conversion. Convert an ancient WordPerfect doc to a Word doc, a doc to a pdf or docx, a jpg to a gif, etc. Super simple, done in an instant, and very useful to me at the library when someone brings in a document in a format our computers don't recognize. Can also convert music and video files in one format to another.
3.17.2008
The VQR blog, which last September gave us a groovy list of the 10 most common titles of work submitted to the journal, now gives us a neat table of poems on cliched topics (percent submitted to and percent accepted by VQR).
The post begins: This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering cliched topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true...As it turns out, our editor is all about those dreaded paeans to cats."
(more here)
The post begins: This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering cliched topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true...As it turns out, our editor is all about those dreaded paeans to cats."
(more here)
3.05.2008
"Global Mourning"--Clive Thompson in Wired
I'm just now catching up with the January 2008 issue of Wired, and found this, from Clive Thompson's one-pager "Global Mourning: How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds," interesting:
Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht--a philosopher by training--is how his fellow Australians are reacting.
They're getting sad.
In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly...
[It's a] fascinating new way to think about the impact of global warming. Everyone's worried about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem...sea levels...clean water...species...that'll go extinct.
But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health...
[italics Thompson's. Pg. 70, Jan 2008 Wired]
Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht--a philosopher by training--is how his fellow Australians are reacting.
They're getting sad.
In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly...
[It's a] fascinating new way to think about the impact of global warming. Everyone's worried about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem...sea levels...clean water...species...that'll go extinct.
But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health...
[italics Thompson's. Pg. 70, Jan 2008 Wired]
3.03.2008
This is a Poem that Heals Fish
PEZ SWEET WORLD--a fantastic gallery of modified PEZ dispensers by ATYPYK.
*
The book's pretty good, but I'm especially taken with the title of a picture book I came across today:
This is a Poem that Heals Fish
*
Harriet the Spy: Lesbian Role Model? (NPR)
*
The Hello Experiment, in which a group of artists attempt to sculpt Lionel Richie's head while blindfolded
*
Can't write sestinas (me neither)? For their next issue only, McSweeney's is calling for senryu and pantoums.
*
Interesting: "Babies See Pure Color, but Adults Peer Through Prism of Language" at Wired: "When infant eyes absorb a world of virgin visions, colors are processed purely, in a pre-linguistic parts of the brain. As adults, colors are processed in the brain's language centers, refracted by the concepts we have for them."
*
Customer (male, mid-late 60s) at my library today, to me: Do you have any videos that show how to do the Hokey Pokey?
Me (searching): Hmm, doesn't look like we have any videos. We have CDs with the song on it, and the lyrics describe how to do it.
Customer: I have the song on CD. I just wanted to see how to do it.
Me: Well, the lyrics kind of tell how to do it--you know, "You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out..."
Customer: I wanted to see what it looks like.
Me: [seeing no real choice, obliges]
2.29.2008
J K Keller's American Sign Language alphabet in matchbooks
(Yes, one extra letter's at the end. Via Neatorama)
2.28.2008
w00t!
Friday, March 14, 7:00 p.m.
MENTOR SERIES READING
Rafael Campo with Emily Freeman and Emily Lloyd
Rafael Campo (poetry mentor) is the author of The Other Man Was Me, which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry;and most recently, The Enemy. He is also the author of a memoir, The Desire to Heal, which also received a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he currently teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, GLBT people, and people with HIV infection.
Emily Freeman (fiction) is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. She recently served as the editor-in-chief for Dislocate, the program's literary journal. She lives and works in Minneapolis.
Emily Lloyd (poetry) is a freelance writer and librarian for Hennepin County. Her work has appeared online at versedaily.org and mcsweeneys.net and in the print journals Court Green, Bloom, Phoebe and elsewhere.
$5/Free Loft members
MENTOR SERIES READING
Rafael Campo with Emily Freeman and Emily Lloyd
Rafael Campo (poetry mentor) is the author of The Other Man Was Me, which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry;and most recently, The Enemy. He is also the author of a memoir, The Desire to Heal, which also received a Lambda Literary Award. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Medical School, he currently teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, GLBT people, and people with HIV infection.
Emily Freeman (fiction) is completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota. She recently served as the editor-in-chief for Dislocate, the program's literary journal. She lives and works in Minneapolis.
Emily Lloyd (poetry) is a freelance writer and librarian for Hennepin County. Her work has appeared online at versedaily.org and mcsweeneys.net and in the print journals Court Green, Bloom, Phoebe and elsewhere.
$5/Free Loft members
2.17.2008
"Only an expert can deal with the problem."
Reading The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, I was surprised to see no entry in the index for Laurie Anderson--which reminded me I had no idea what she was up to these days. At YouTube, I found this video of a great live performance recorded in May of last year. Also a short 2007 interview clip from a Swedish TV program, in which Anderson mentions that she's lost her taste for the huge multimedia shows she used to put on, now that walking down a city street is a huge multimedia show.
2.12.2008
Jennifer Maestre
Via Neatorama:
Jennifer Maestre's spiny pencil sculptures seem to seethe--
--while the jewelry in her Etsy store (swoon) couldn't look more gorgeously smooth:
Jennifer Maestre's spiny pencil sculptures seem to seethe--
--while the jewelry in her Etsy store (swoon) couldn't look more gorgeously smooth:
2.02.2008
"In her bed she was always Lolita"--Maud Newton
Woolworths has decided to stop offering its "Lolita" girls' bed model, after complaints from parents about the inappropriateness of the name.
Steph at Crooked House offers some new product ideas for Woolworths: the Medea maternity wear line, the Bovary wedding dress, Lady Macbeth gloves (only available in red). A commenter on the post suggests "The Bartleby motivational poster"; I added the Sylvia Oven and the Circe Pork Rub. Surely you have something to add...
Steph at Crooked House offers some new product ideas for Woolworths: the Medea maternity wear line, the Bovary wedding dress, Lady Macbeth gloves (only available in red). A commenter on the post suggests "The Bartleby motivational poster"; I added the Sylvia Oven and the Circe Pork Rub. Surely you have something to add...
2.01.2008
Sleeveface
In our specially-effected, heavily Photoshopped times, the Sleeveface Pool at Flickr (almost 900 images now) is a great reminder that the most striking effects can simply involve no-tech new ways of seeing:
by esci le foto
by John Roston
by Talbot Ridgway
by unsure shot
by esci le foto
by John Roston
by Talbot Ridgway
by unsure shot
Frozen Grand Central
Performance group Improv Everywhere invited 207 people to freeze and hold their positions for 5 minutes in Grand Central Station. Check out the great short video of the event:
Ranks right up there with IE's earlier Cell Phone Symphony.
Ranks right up there with IE's earlier Cell Phone Symphony.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)