I’m not sure I understand the glee when it comes to the resentencing and “breakdown” of Paris Hilton. Reactions I’ve seen across the Internet seem to range from joy the “bitch” is back in jail to jokes about her getting raped in prison to a (facetious, I hope) suggestion that she be driven around by OJ Simpson and Robert Blake. (So, let’s see: That’s prison, rape, and getting shot or slashed to death. Add in drowning and poisoning and she’s Rasputin.) ...
Oh, and by the way, I’m back from Washington, DC. I always get paranoid about blogging when I’m leaving the house for any significant length of time, but I should really start blogging on trips. :)
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Not sure how many folks make it to both, but phantom-thought is pretty much my stream-of-consciousness linkblog (or tumblelog, to be more correct). If I see something interesting that I’m not going to write a post about, it ends up there. Here are a few recent items that I think are worth the attention: Autism Unveiled - An article about an anthropologist’s research into autism that I found more informative than almost anything else I’ve read about autism this year. The U.S. Supreme Court may have just injected a bit of sense into our current patent system. In any case, it has rocked a system that badly needs reform. Now, if they can just reinforce fair use in copyright law. Junebug - Good movie. Exhibits the same quality as Garrison Keillor’s earlier Lake Wobegon novels, where it evokes emotion through familiar characterization rather than forcing it through plot. That being said, I was probably just jazzed because I grew up in the same area where it was set and filmed. Jail time likely to fuel Hilton’s fame - Kudos to Sandy Cohen of the Associated Press for working Fatty Arbuckle into a paragraph with Martha Stewart, Robert Downey Jr., Bobby Brown, and Heidi Fleiss. Scottish revolts never seem to turn out well. You? B-List, at best. Bacon on a Cat? A, definitely. “Why, anybody can have a brain.” - I love the Wizard. Twitter: The Evolution of Cat Blogging “In Romagna, the realm of all stupidity…” - The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci I’d rather deal with communist pirate ninjas without unicycles, but you take what you get. Wasn’t that interesting, folks? Oh well, at least someone found it interesting, right, Interested Cat? ...
Google Reader now includes the ability to send an entire article in an email, so I’m trying it out again. I still wish you could rearrange the feed categories, but that’s not a huge objection.
From Anil Dash’s Cats Can Has Grammar: But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon. I’M IN UR X Y ing your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures. Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There’s something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind’s ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details. Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named “lolcats” instead of the more general “image macro” or “cat macro”. The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because “I can has cheezeburger?” has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn’t sure this was true until I realized that it’s possible to get cat-speak wrong. ...
Virginia Tech teacher and filmmaker Paul Harrill on the media spectacle surrounding the shootings, before NBC decided to air the videos. Link courtesy of Boing Boing.
Nikki Giovanni: We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. ...