Via BoingBoing via Joi Ito comes news of the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROjr. The NRO is in charge of our nation’s battery of snoop satellites; NROjr is their child outreach project. What they could possibly hope to gain from this is beyond me. They claim that “Our hope is that the various activities will spark an interest in your child to learn more about space”, ostensibly by inspiring them with the love of science and technology and driving them to excel at math and other academic skills. The thing is, it’s easily one of the most boring and downright crappy sites I’ve ever seen — and Im a big fan of Web Pages That Suck. Start with the awful, Muppet-esque voiceover that sounds when you hover your mouse over a menu item. Add some of the lamest games in the universe, some purely awful stories (admittedly, by students — though how those three students (all from the same school, Cub Run Elementary) got chosen I have no idea) with titles like “Proud to Be American”, an art gallery (mostly models of satellites made by students from — wait for it… Cub Run Elementary), and a few kinda ok projects (making models of satellites like the kids at Cub Run Elementary), and you got one suck-ass website. The questions it raises are so numerous: Should we embarassed to have a ‘gov domain name of this low quality? Why hasn’t the site been updated in at least a year? Where’s the “Satelline Rescue Hero story” (yes, the NRO misspelled “satellite”) we were promised would be up by October of 2003? Why is the Flash section in a frame that cuts off the menu in Opera? Why is their no “back” navigation in the Flash parts? Is this really the best online experience that one of the most technologically advanced agencies of the richest, most powerful government in the world can provide? Finally, given that this experience is soooo poor, are they actively trying to make kids dumber?! [Continue reading]
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things A collective of uber-geeks brings us a daily dose of the neat, weird, sexy, sassy, and just plain awesome. The daily gossip sheet of the techie counter-culture. Better living through technology. If you’re turned on by toasters, this is the place to be. BoingBoing always seemed a little familiar to me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it, until sudenly it dawned on me that somewhere I have a book of articles collected from the magazine of the same name. Some post or another suggested that the website and magazine were one and the same, and I had a lightbulb moment. But it really doesn’t matter — BoingBoing is on my daily visit list, and it’s updated often enough that I often visit more than once. One innovation that I’ve always been rather cold towards is their Guestbar, a sidebar blog written by a guest blogger. It never really impressed me — never, that is, until Rudy Rucker took the side stage and set the bar impossibly high for all bloggers everywhere. Essentially, Rucker bebopped a whole book for our edutainment. It’s still up, at least the last post or two (they’re much longer than the main column’s content!), and something tells me it’ll be a while before the Boingers find someone with nerve enough to follow that act! BoingBoing is just good. What more can I say? [Continue reading]
OK, today is Day 7 of my “Blog a Day” project, and I’ve learned a few lessons:
- The title is totally misleading! Some days I’ve written about two or even three sites. With school starting next week (I’m teaching three classes) and me moving the same week, things are liable to get rather more sporadic. Think of the “Blog a Day” moniker more as a sort of Platonic Ideal (though I am generally in no way a Platonist) rather than a real-world condition.
- It’s really hard! It’s like wondering why I hate tomatoes but love salsa — who can explain matters of taste? Some sites I like just because of the author’s personality, their writing stsyle, a certain je ne sais quai in how they express themselves. Take Burningbird, a site that’s on my list for today (or tomorrow, depending on how together I am today) — for some reason, I just click with the site — it’s got great design, it’s well-written. I don’t necessarily agree with or even like the things she says, at least not all of them. There’s a certain inexplicable something. Here’s a better analogy — why do you love your partner? Other sites, like BoingBoing, also on the list for today, are hard to sum up becuase they’re so damn good at what they do — what could I possibly say about them that isn’t already clear to everyone in the universe?
- Attrition sucks. I’ve skipped a few sites because they hadn’t been updated for months and months. The first one like this, action figures sold separately, I reviewed, but after a couple more popped up in my blogroll, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. These bloggers may just be out of the loop for a while, but… I’m removing them from my blogroll, too (although not till I’ve finished this round of blogging a blog a day). The irony, of course, is that my own site was stagnant for so long — by my own criteria, I should be removed from consideration.
- Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes.
- This is a damn good way to fulfill some of the promise I see in the social Internet. I write about somoene, they see my site in their referral logs, they visit and see themselves written about — warm fuzzies all around! Blogrolls are nice, but they’re impersonal; I think that writing about why I blogroll someone adds the personal touch on which, as the Cluetrainers might say, conversations happen. So there’s that.
Future lessons to be posted as they happen. [Continue reading]
Body and Soul OK, if I had trouble with Alas, a Blog, imagine the trouble Body and Soul is causing me. Let me illustrate exactly how I feel about Jeanne d’Arc’s blog: about a year-and-a-half ago, if I remember correctly, Jeanne added my site to her blogroll, which meant, to me, that I had arrived in blogdom. I don’t always agree with her — and have disagreed quite strongly, and quite publicly, on some issues — but nobody, nobody writes with the pure humanity that Jeanne d’Arc brings to even the most off-hand post. To take an almost random example (her most recent post):
But nearly two months ago, I expressed some concern about the tendency on the left to feed the myth of the noble soldier, and it’s bothered me for a long time that Kerry takes justifiable pride in his service in Vietnam, but rarely talks about the courage he showed when he returned from Vietnam and spoke up about what he witnessed, trying to stop a brutal and insane war from taking any more lives unecessarily.
Almost all of us have our schtick — the right-wingers and nearly-con liberals are prone to chest-beating, Tarzan-style; others to cooler-than-thou hipness or techier-than-thou geekness; others, like myself, to satire and absurdity and (in Steve Bates’ case) doggerel — but Jeanne just says it. A more cynical person might claim that not having a schtick is Jeanne’s schtick — even if that’s the case, it works. There’s not many blogs that can bring a tear to your eye — Body and Soul is one of them. And the crowning factor is this: if Jeanne happens to read this, I have no doubt that she’ll deny everything I’ve just said. [Continue reading]
blivet What’s a blivet, you ask? According to the site’s author, a blivet is 10 pounds of crap in a 5-lb bag — a pretty messy problem! In this particular case, though, blivet is the weblog of a Vegas-based archaeologist, buddhist, and co-procrastinator of blog entries. Although blog entries are light, when he finds the time, he says some pretty interesting stuff. Like this post from February, describing his take on the reaction to Mel Gibson’s S&M party, The Passion of the Christ:
Judging by the way reactions are to this movie, from yea to nay, it would seem that the rejection of the post-enlightenment world is alive and well in the popular culture of the West. All observations elsewhere of Mr. Gibson (and his father’s) politics and faith aside, this work would seem to be the very call for a return to the world of divisive theology. To only lightly reference the central teachings of Christianity such as the Sermon on the Mount while focusing on the final part of the Passion is to advocate a return to that ‘good old-time’ Medieval faith and a summary rejection of the central teachings that lead to the faith today.
Hopefully he’ll find more time to blog in the future, if the freaking heat out here doesn’t kill him. People do archaeology in this weather? [Continue reading]
Alas, a Blog What am I gonna say about Alas? It’s one of the big fish, with a huge community of commenters and cross-linkers, hardly an unknown player. But such is the task I’ve appointed myself… Alas, once the domain of the punctuationally-named Ampersand, has transmogrified into a full-on group blog. Although — as expected from a group of posters with different interests and specialties — subjects cover range pretty widely, I go there for the commentary of gender, sexuality, and feminism, which is, regardless of who’s posting, uniformly excellent. Even when I disagree, I’m generally impressed with the thoughtfulness of the posts, and have more than once seen incredible exchanges unfold in the comments threads, which can often top 100 or even 200 posts. Plus, the drawings are really cool. [Continue reading]
A three-part program for structuring arguments with representatives of the Right: Do your Homework, Stay Cool, and Keep Organizing. Each section includes tips and advice that is really just good debating sense, whatever part ofthe political spectrum your opponent/ discussant calls home. [Continue reading]
In Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Wade Davis (he of The Serpent and the Rainbow fame) describes the tenuous ways in which death has been defined, historically and even into the present day. It’s a frightening account, filled with examples gleaned from the modern media, of folks who have been declared dead and consigned to the morgue or funeral home, only to suddenly recover and be not-so-dead anymore. Take this example in China. A guy kidnaps a couple folks and is holding them hostage on a window ledge. Some enterprising cop hits him with two shots, point-blank, to the head, knocking him off the ledge and to the pavement 5 stories below. I mean, that’s some serious dead-making action! And yet…
The paper said his body was put in a coffin and taken to a funeral home, where it was to be refrigerated before being cremated. But funeral home workers heard a groan on opening the coffin and were shocked to find the man still alive. They rushed him to hospital.
Makes you want to write a “living will” for after you die, doesn’t it? Something like “In the event of my death, give it a few weeks before you bury me alive, ok?” [Continue reading]
I forgot I wanted to include this quote in my previous post on boxing, found on the ThinkExist quotation site:
“I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” –Mohammed Ali
[Continue reading]
Anne Galloway: Purse Lip Square Jaw Anne Galloway is (as far as I can make out, and among other things I’m sure) an ethnographer of architecture and the architectural — that is, she’s concerned with spaces and places, a concern I share and have written on a lot here, though far more amateurishly than Galloway. Her writing can be a little academic and dense at times, though giventhe complexity of the subject matter, I doubt that’s avoidable. Give it some effort, it pays off — as it does in the bit I excerpted below, from a post last month on “restricting mobility”:
As part of my research on tensions between mobility and stability, I’ve become particularly interested in ways we attempt to control the movement of people – especially given the well-established Western (and especially American) tradition of associating mobility with freedom. … Coming at the question from a different direction, I’ve been thinking about how photographs stabilise the movement (arguably the essence) of parkour and skateboarding. And even how old daguerreotypes were incapable of capturing movement. But mostly I’ve been thinking about how settled people have historically reacted to nomads. For example, under the Israeli state the life of the Bedouin has changed dramatically, and the Irish government has long tried to fix the itinerant problem associated with Irish Traveller culture. Mongolian nomads are increasingly moving to the city, but urban infrastructure and policy – as well as nomadic cultural values – are not adapting well to this shift.
I cut a bit out — you’re sposed to follow the link and read it, silly — which deals with stuff like “no skateboarding” signs and dress codes, military baricades and riot control strategies, and so on. Galloway links together a whole spectrum of mobility-denials , from the private strategies we use to keep those crazy kids off our walls to the machinations of nations and their efforts to sedentarize people who have, often unwillingly and even unwittingly, become national subjects. Purse Lip Square Jaw is one of those sites that makes you glad to live in the age when humanity decided to blog. It’s the kind of work that, a decade ago, you’d only be exposed to in hallway chats at universities and professional meetings, and once in a while in an academic journal (which while certainly good for what they are sposed to be good for, do little to convey the process of ideas developing and growing). [Continue reading]
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