Glad to know that my enormous melon head has some positive aspects.
Month: January 2001 (Page 1 of 4)
I really enjoy Plastic, the new news and culture aggregation site. But it’s crammed with what design genius Edward Tufte calls chartjunk – lots of heavy boxes surrounding all the stories and headlines, making everything hard to read, or at least harder than it needs to be. They’re partnered with Feed, which recently redesigned to an understated, clean, beautiful look. Plastic, heal thyself.
I tried to send a feedback e-mail to Plastic, but I couldn’t find any sort of e-mail link that wasn’t intended to send a story to them. Another big mistake for a news community site.
Of all people, Ned Flanders is on the cover of Christianity Today, under the headline “Saint Flanders.” As much as I enjoyed this development, it does seem to indicate that the Rapture is at hand.
Definitely the coolest name for a blog ever: splorp
I’m finding that blogging is taking up more and more of my brainspace lately. It’s an addictive pastime on many levels: self-expression, exploration, design, geekiness, and most insidious of all, intense need for validation. “You like me – you really like me!” I pour over my site traffic reports like a starving man gazing at a bucket of KFC.
This despite the many problems with Blogger lately, including its destruction of the first version of this post. I will be the first to line up to pay for Blogger Pro, and it’s hard to complain about a free service. But when something becomes this central to your daily activities, it’s hard to be without it.
I will be entering treatment shortly.
Today’s synonyms:
dogsbody, lickspittle, factotum
In honor of the Super Bowl, I present the undisputed best TV commercial ever made: “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?”
I was expecting that with just two days until Survivor II, I would be all twitterpated with anticipation. I did feel a little excitement when I saw Colleen “I should have won that thing” Haskell on a Chap-Stick commercial, but that was probably another kind of excitement. As it is, I’m looking forward to watching the new series, but I don’t think you can recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the original. Maybe I’m still reeling from Richard Hatch’s win, after which I my extremities went numb for several days.
Here we go again
Well, just days after the era of the Puppet King has commenced, we?re back to that old saw, vouchers, or as new-age media conservatives like to call it, ?parental choice.? The simple fact is, conservatives have two goals here: dismantle the public school system so they can stop paying school taxes, and grab the resulting multi-billion-dollar private education market. It?s a double whammy of economic benefit for wealthy conservatives, who aren?t really convinced that everyone should get an education, anyway.
They realize they can?t attack public education head-on, which results in a lot of hypocritical ?No child left behind? rhetoric (sound familiar?). Meanwhile, they chip away at it, bit by bit. They?ve already created the conventional wisdom which says U.S. public schools are failing, and greedy teachers and overzealous bureaucrats are mostly to blame. At the same time, Bush proposes mandatory testing, piling on federal bureaucracy while promoting private schools which don?t have to educate disabled or even underachieving students if they don?t want to. While we?re at it, let?s drain the underperforming schools in poor neighborhoods of tax money ? that?ll encourage competition!
It?s an amazing triumph of rhetoric over reality. Words mean things, indeed.
Why does every crappy movie have to have a web site? Even the thought of watching ?Dude, Where?s My Car?? makes my internal organs feel as though they will quiver and burst, and production photos and inane, bandwidth-clogging Flash movies just add insult to injury. Even if you enjoyed the movie, what?s the point?
As a side note, the budget of even a modest $20 million production that will beat a hasty retreat to Encore could pay 400 teachers? salaries for a year. Think about that the next time you sit through ?Don?t Tell Mom the Babysitter?s Dead? on cable.