Month: October 2006
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Arts Events & Entertainment Calendars in Houston, Texas
Heck, why is it so hard to locate art events in Houston? The Best Eventful’s Houston page seems to want to be “more meta” than the other event aggregators. Apparently, some of their events are being syndicated onto upcoming.org, which might mean upcoming.org is no longer a big deal. Check Books/Literature and Performing Arts (not…
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Youtube Factor in Politics: Good for advocates, bad for politicians
Here’s a youtube commentary on the bigoted Ford RNC ad. Wow, the ad is loathsome (so much that it’s hilarious), but what a brilliantly obvious idea to interleave commentary within the RNC ad on youtube. Let’s hope this format of criticism will prevent political ads from being too outrageous. The tendency for outrageous political speech…
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Fat, Discrimination, Procedural Liberalism
High cost of being fat. See also this outdated-but-persuasive denunciation of milk and vegetarian recipes online. Also read the book What to Eat, a middlebrow reference book to current nutritional information about supermarket food. See also this list of 20 power foods. Found on a digg comment: Rule #1 of the Internets : Anyone claiming…
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Mild Annoyance at Partisan News
I’m on the run, so I’m catching CNN and MSNBC. Watching a variety. Olberman, Oreilly, etc. Olbermann is the media darling of liberals, and some of his rants are worth watching (especially his piece on habeas corpus). But his selection of subject matter is just as biased as Oreilly; that’s the way you strip away…
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Bawdy Benny Bell
Hilarious bawdy songs by 1940s singer Benny Bell. Don’t miss this one! One of my best finds for the year. Speaking of amazing finds, here’s an mp3 of Walt Whitman reading his own poems!
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Why Don’t Americans like Sitcoms Anymore?
I’ve disheartened to hear that NBC is substantially cutting back its primetime programming : The opening hour of prime time has been a tough time slot for NBC. Friday Night Lights has so far proved a costly failure on Tuesday, 30 Rock and Twenty Good Years have struggled on Wednesday in two outings and My…
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I’ll be liveblogging
I’ll be posting several lengthy pieces on teleread about a conference I’m attending on digital libraries. Check there for the next few days.
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Marketing Tips for your book
Surefire way to market your books: run for public office.
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Odds and Ends on the Web
Screeniac, which reviews web 2.0 applications using screencasts. Definitely cool! Zeldman and commenters have fun doing a compare/contrast on Web 1.0/2.0 Guy Kawasaki on speaking to a group: Don’t denigrate the competition. If you truly do cut the sales pitch, then this won’t even come up. But just in case, never denigrate the competition because…
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More Video Recommendations
First, I notice that the Charlie Rose show now has complete episodes on google video. Bravo! (One complaint: couldn’t they have made them downloadable mp3s too?) I wanted to make you aware of a video documentary showing on PBS next week. I saw extended excerpts of it on PBS Now last Friday. I also saw…
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Rebuilding Stonehenge and other Youtube Inanities
Already dugg, so I suspect everyone and their grandmother knows about it now, but this man demonstration’s about how you could build Stonehenge using easily available tools just blew me away. Other Youtube oddities: Ministry of Fainting (from America’s Funniest). Choir imitating car noises. A Lords of Acid music video, The Crablouse (probably not safe…
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Putting Shoes on Head
The new craze is Internet chatting: asking people to put shoes on their head. This audio/video chat solves a technology problem: the cumbersome nature of verbal chat. I predict this will be enormously popular with young girls with slight exhibitionist tendencies. And male lurkers. I’ve been watching a webcam of some 20 year old exotic…
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Being a Homeowner in Texas: Travails
Randall Patterson wrote a great expose in 2005 of how Texas homebuilders use “mandatory arbitration” contracts to avoid responsibility for badly built houses: Jordan still remembers her pleasant illusions of arbitration—how much “more civilized and nice” it sounded than just suing someone, “like a mom who sits down with her children and says, ‘Now, this…
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Do Partisans Prevaricate with Leading Questions?
Is the asking of questions in media outlets a kind of political slander? One commenter thinks so: Anyone notice that the “it’s just a question tactic” is the foundation of Fox News? They can spew out any slander, lie, or outrage by just putting it at the bottom of their screen with a ? Question…
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Political Debates and Exclusivity
Here’s a commentary by Austin journalist Diane Holloway about why the Texas debate for governor was barely seen or noted in Texas. “We’re not allowed to air live, not allowed to tape-delay, not allowed to put it on video-on-demand or in its entirety on the Web site,” fumed News 8 news director Kevin Benz. “It’s…
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Moment of Humility
After trying to figure something out, it dawned on me that something about linux which I thought I understood fairly well I do not understand in the very least. I’ve posted questions in the right areas, and am waiting with fingers crossed. Hopefully, the next post will be by someone who has attained enlightenment. Update:…