Sunday, November 16, 2008

Mashups for this week

Got these from keyword searches for VJ Brewski:

Luda + Scorpions, et al.:



KISS + Tone Loc:



Doobie Brothers + Talib Kweli (I think I might like this one the best out of this batch!):



Free ("All Right Now") + Black-Eyed:

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Friday, November 07, 2008

Obama front pages

Via Kottke, check out this video of Wednesday-morning front pages from newspapers from around the country:



Here they are in more static form. Here are a bunch more.

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Thursday, November 06, 2008

Caribou Barbie strikes again!

Here's an (almost) exact copy/paste of something I posted last December.
  • SF Chronicle interview with Wikipedia founder* Jimmy Wales on the move of the Wikioffices to San Francisco. Q: Do you worry that people at some point will feel like their work here is done? A: I used to worry. Part of the appeal in the early days of Wikipedia (was that) you could click on Africa and there (would be) nothing there and you (could be) the first person to type, "Africa is a continent." Whereas now to write a brand new article on something that does not already exist is kind of hard in English. You're writing about fairly obscure topics. But we haven't seen participation decline at all. It continues to grow.
It looks like certain people would have done well to have paid attention. (The advantage of a wiki is of course that if you-know-who gets to it first, you can easily change the inquiry "Is Africa a continent?" into a statement of fact.) On the other hand, maybe she was just a very early Wikipedia reader, and hasn't had a chance to go back and look for that particular article?

* -- Co-founder.

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Wednesday, November 05, 2008

My thoughts on pan & scan

What Book Would You Give Barack Obama?

Publishers Weekly asks "What Book Would You Give Barack Obama?" The first commenter wanted him to read "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich and somebody else said anything by Jonathan Kozol.

(Somebody else suggested a book on how to take care of your new puppy. Maybe The ♥G♥ and I can bring Gilbert over to play with the new First Labradoodle.)

Look, he's got Ehrenreich and Kozol coming out the wazoo and beyond, as we used to say. Here's what he ought to be reading if he only has one book: "The Mystery of Capitol" by Hernando de Soto. Read it yourself here at Google Books. If he grasps the concepts in there, then the Ehrenreich and Kozol stuff will fall into line by itself.

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South Park brilliant tonight!

They don't have the full episode posted yet, but I hope they will soon - It was AWESOME. Check out the clip here.

Also, side note - I will say this in favor of Sarah P.: She is more attractive than her porn doppelgänger.

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Sunday, November 02, 2008

We call him Emma Emma

President Palin

By the way, if you haven't seen this yet, check it out.

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Saturday, November 01, 2008

Just saw the Big McC on SNL...

See, as a long-time C-Span watcher, I know that John McCain is a really funny guy with an excellent sense of humor... and, I have admired him for a long time. I still do. But, I'm not voting for him. When Obama gave his big speech in Denver, I was groaning at about half the stuff he said. But, I am voting for him.

Here's an excerpt from The Economist's endorsement of Obama that I like:

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

I wish we had the old McCain back, the guy I admired so much after reading The Nightingale's Song. (BTW - I'm pleased to say that I started the Wikipedia article for that book and added it to the McCain banner.) This is the guy who would go on TV ten years ago when all anyone would want to talk about was Monica Lewinsky, and patiently point out that the development of nuclear rivalry between Pakistan and India was much more significant and deserving of America's attention.

My simplified hypothesis (and I know that this is way too unsophisticated an analysis): The Svengalian Karl Rove and his ilk got hold of him, and we end up with Joe the Plumber fulfilling the prophecy of a 1993 Onion headline. I think that plain and simple, McCain entered into a Faustian bargain with the high-rollers of the GOP establishment, and (hopefully only temporarily) lost some of that which made him McCain in the first place. Maybe he was never the guy to be president? What's so horrible about being the loyal opposition, the guy that keeps the president on his toes? Check out this Daily Beast link, What Happened to the McCain We Liked?

My theory was that people like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty saw the Obama rally and decided they wanted no part of the 2008 GOP ticket. But come on, John... Sarah Palin? She's cute and sperky, no doubt, and has probably personified the archetype of the MILF for years to come (or at least some subset of the archetypes, at any rate). Believe it or not, I don't say that to be demeaning to her, but I don't have anything else to go on besides the last two months of seeing her be cute and sperky and mavericky.

John McCain, if you are reading this, you are a great American, but there are numerous great Americans who did not become president.

More on my pessimism and optimism about Obama later. (Hint: I want him to drink the Grape Kool-Aid on Free Trade.)

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Videos about Intellipedia

If you haven't heard about Intellipedia...

Thomas Fingar at the CFR:



Burke and Dennehy, Intellipedia gurus:

(Couldn't figure out how to embed code for this one.)

Also, you can read the CIA document "The Wiki and the Blog" by Calvin Andrus here.



Excellent Chris Rasmussen PowerPoint (even though he says he doesn't like to use PowerPoint anymore.)

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