Here’s Beyoncé – Run The World (Girls)

And here’s M.I.A. – Boyz

From the title, to the sound, to the video, there’s alot of overlap, to say the least.

And this story, Is Obama about to break the law? – CNN.com, is just blather. It’s hard to tell, but the crux of the matter is this:

Angry lawmakers in both parties say part of the problem now is that their own congressional leaders are not raising a stink about Obama’s failure to come to Congress about Libya.

“Very few people are talking about this; they’re just letting the president do whatever he wants, and I think that’s Congress abdicating the rule of law and abdicating constitutional restraints that he should obey,” Paul said.

The fact is this, ripped from a blog piece by Matt Yglesias: Congress Doesn’t Want Power Over Whether Or Not The United States Keeps Bombing Libya. If they did, the White House would be doing more lobbying to get support. But they don’t have to, because the U.S. congress abdicates this responsibility. There is little if any upside for them, so mostly they vote to support whatever the Executive branch wants.

Including this!

Kill those zombies! Yeah! 🙂 For more great stuff, see: The Last Monkey

There are exceptions, but yeah, if you are bored all the time, the fault lies within. That’s why I have never have much respect for people who talk about “ennui”. Ennui is a fancy way of saying you are bored, and hence, boring. Worse, you should be smart enough to do something about it and you aren’t.

Don’t be bored. Be creative, silly, ridiculous, outrageous, daring, bold, ingenious, outlandish…be any of those things, and more.

P.S. Love the orange too: orange is very not-boring. Image found on this nice tumblr blog.

The good folks at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do important and serious work. But they also have found some time to have some fun and gain some awareness from people who know little of them (but likely know alot about zombies). Since zombies are a constant threat, they put together this kit to help people: CDC EPR | Social Media | Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse. 🙂

This piece of art cost $15 to make and looks striking. For information on how it was made and how you can make it, go to
Just a Girl.  (Found via Apartment Therapy Ohdeedoh)

According to this: Beware the Facebook “Dislike” Button Scam – Security Watch, not only (a) will it spam your friends on Facebook but it has (b) some obscure code (“obfuscated JavaScript”) that is an “opening the potential for even more trouble”.

With regards to (a), not only will it spam your friends, but some of them will also click on it, making it viral, and that is not good.

From f— yeah dementia!!1! (ok, I bleeped out the F word. :))

Like a lot of things, it’s how you go about measuring it. (From 100% from ReflectionOf.Me and 9gag.com)

CBS News has photoessay, at times horrific, of cancer patients of the 19th century, including:

33 year-old Jane Todd Crawford, of Wellington, Ohio, (who) rode 60 miles on horseback to seek treatment for what turned out to be a huge ovarian tumor. Anesthesia wasn’t yet available, so she sang and recited psalms to calm herself during the 25-minute operation. The surgeon made a nine-inch incision and “took out 15 pounds of a dirty gelatinous-looking substance” before removing the rest of the tumor. She was up and about five days later, and 25 days later she got back on her horse and rode home. She lived another 50 years.

Cancer still has a way to go before it is beaten, but compared to then, we’ve come along way.

This is #8:

To know why it looks like this, and to see the rest of the photo essay, see: 10 Best Alleys in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Art – Style Council

It’s simple: I consider clothes a form of expression, just like words. They have a utilitarian side, but words do, too. Past that, they are a way we express ourselves. And not just with text on T-shirts. The clothes we wear, from our hats to our shoes  (even the clothes no one sees) are ways we communicate to the world. Therefore with extremely rare exceptions, no one should infringe on the choice of what you want to wear. To me the only exceptions should be in the interest of public safety and when I enter into a contractual agreement with someone. Otherwise, I should be able to wear what I want.

This doesn’t mean I should expect everyone to like or accept what I wear. But I should have the right and the ability to wear it, and I should not be legally limited or illegally discriminated against for wearing it.

There’s a great story about how Nick Risinger ended up taking all those photographs and you can find it here: The night sky in 37,440 exposures – Yahoo! News. But what really impressed me is the interactive display of the sky here at Skysurvey.org.

You really have to see it to believe it. Take your time, make it full screen and practice zooming in and out. It’s an incredible view of the sky.

It’s also like something from the science fiction film, Blade Runner, where the main character takes a photograph and is able to zoom in and out of what seems to be an ordinary picture.

Stop reading me and go see for yourself.

I am a strong proponent of women exercising and participating in some form of physical fitness, be they 6 or 106. That said, there is something about this article, At Ballet Workouts, Getting That Dancer Physique – NYTimes.com, that made me think this new fitness trend is less about good physical fitness and more about being ahead of everyone else. Maybe it’s the name dropping and the other things in the article that whispered exclusivity  (“Upper East Side”, exercise only the strongest can do) that made me discount it. Plus the entire article is more like an advertisement than a story.

Read it yourself and judge (and feel free to argue with/berate me if I got it wrong).

Not just an app for iPhone or iPod Touch, but BlackBerry and other smartphones too. It from  Natalie MacLean, and the feedback on iTunes has been very positive. It also looks great and seems to have a comprehensive listing of wines. The perfect thing for those times when you get to the store and you think: should I get the same thing I always buy, or should I go for something different and if so, what?

Did I mention the app is Free? A free app that also will save you from buying bad wine you hate and helping you find great value you didn’t know was there. Sounds great! I’m looking forward to trying it on my Touch.

For more details, see Mobile App | Natalie MacLean

Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was attacked again, and as you can see, it is terribly damaged:

Kyle Chayka at Hyperallergic.com raises a good question:

Will the attacked print be like Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors” and become a new piece of art with the broken glass? It almost looks like a halo.

I think this is a great idea.

This idea also got me thinking that perhaps Serrano should make copies of the image, put sharp tools and hammers in front of it, and invite religious groups on a regular basis to come down and destroy the copy, thereby turning the copy and themselves into a form of performance art. Even as they are attacking a work of art, they become another one.

I am a big fan of the NYTimes.com Lens blog. The photographs are always great, including Julie Platner’s photos of American Neo-nazis. But when I look at what she writes here, Julie Platner Describes Her Coverage of Jeff Hall, the Slain National Socialist Movement Leader – NYTimes.com, it makes my skin crawl.

While the circumstances of their lives may be difficult, what they turn to is terrible and what they hope to achieve is just as terrible. They may seem pitiable because of their size and their means, but the same can be said about scorpions. And they would just as soon deny the human voices of the people they hate and would put down and make suffer.

I’d be very interested in hearing the voices of others in similar circumstances that either turn away from or ultimately reject the beliefs of neo-Nazis. Those are the people whose voices we should hear and who are deserving of a photo spread in the NYTimes.com LENS blog. Not these people.

Talk about taking the lemons life gives you and making lemonade! Coke converts a traffic jam into a drive-in movie! Brilliant.

Sure, it is marketing, but it is also something that got me (and likely many more people) thinking. Why should problems like traffic jams be treated as something that has to be suffered through? It would be best not to have them, but if you are are going to have problems like traffic, why not think of ways to make the situation pleasant?

The great philosopher David Hume was born in 1711, 300 years ago, and he is birth is being celebrated everywhere. You can find out a summary of who he was here (David Hume in 3 Minutes … For His 300th Birthday, at Open Culture) or you can look him up in Wikipedia, but much more fun is watching this 3 minute cartoon on him:

And if you go to this link (YouTube – Three Minute Philosophy – David Hume) you can find a number of other three minute philosophy videos that can get you some basic and fun knowledge. Epistomology FTW!

It’s fresh Coke in the first bottle Coca-Cola used 125 years ago! As the Selfridges web site says:

In celebration of Coca–Cola’s 125th year anniversary, the very first vintage Coca–Cola bottle–the Hutchinson–has been reproduced. This collector’s item comes in a special anniversary box.

More details here. Not bad for £1.99.

A short film about love that looks something like this:

Found here at Open Culture, where you can find more information about it.

Taken from the film 100 x 100: IBM Centennial Film which can be found here (along with this poster) at the blog, The Casual Optimist

I hadn’t heard of Flash Graffiti before as a term, though I have seen other artists project onto walls and embassies. (I remember in particular there was an artist during the apartheid era who flashed images at night on the South African embassy in London.) It is quite subversive, and though it is harmless as a ghost, still, it makes its mark, as this article, shows: Chinese Army Unhappy Over Ai Weiwei ‘Flash Graffiti’ from ANIMAL:

As if Chinese authorities weren’t angered enough by the rash of pro-Ai Weiwei stencils popping up all over Hong Kong, someone is now projecting the same message on unauthorized locations around the city, including the barracks of the People’s Liberation Army.

(Discovered via Andrew Sullivan.)

…can be found here in Slate Magazine. He sums up Chomsky’s statements scathingly at the end of his article like this:

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn’t even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

If you were persuaded by Chomsky and his line of thinking, you should also read this by Hitchens. His argument against  Chomsky and others critical of the attack on the Osama bin Laden is robust and persuasive. A must read.

If you want to create a KML file of your Google Maps, do this:

1. Go to your map
2. Right click on the hyperlink “View in Google Earth”
3. Select “Copy Link Location” from the menu
4. Open a new tab in your browser and paste the link into your address bar
5. Before pressing the ENTER key, change part of the URL from “Output=nl” to “Output=kml” and leave everything else the same and press ENTER
6. Save the file.

At a minimum, this makes a good backup file for your map. But better still, you can edit it in a text editor and import it later. Google Maps is great and very usable, but sometimes only a text editor (or some custom code) can change the file the way you want.

Have fun!

P.S. I learned this from another page, but I lost the link! Thanks to whomever blogged about this before. Great tip!

Over at Techlicious is a good run down on Five Tech Products that Will Be Dead in Five Years.

It seems reasonable, if by “dead” the author means “they will no longer be a mainstream product”. In truth, what happens is that products get displaced or absorbed, rather than die. You could argue, for example, that PDAs like Palm Pilots are “dead”. But really, they were displaced by other products. I know people who still use them, and I’d argue that the iPod Touch I have is simply a PDA+.

For example, I think tablet computers will displace eReaders, but if the price of eReaders dive, there may still be a market/use of them. Kids may get them in schools, for example. Likewise, DVD/CD-ROMs may be going extinct, but separate media, be it 5.25″ soft floppies, 3.5″ hard floppies, etc, will always be with us. I also think that the fragility of such devices might mean that they eventually get displaced by something as well.

It’s a good article, and a good example of where technology is heading. In the long run, all technology becomes extinct, be it 5 years or 50 or more. Predicting it’s demise is fun, but looking at what displaces and absorbs it is much more useful.

Namely, ask questions first and follow the law. Case in point: Mozilla. Recently Homeland Security requested Mozilla to take down the MafiaaFire Add-on. What did they do? (See here.) Rather than automatically comply, they took some extra time and proceeded as follows:

Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order. Thus, to evaluate Homeland Security’s request, we asked them several questions similar to those below to understand the legal justification:

* Have any courts determined that the Mafiaafire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
* Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
* Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down the Mafiaafire add-on is based?

Having received neither a response or a court order, they did nothing.

Was this so hard? Did it require alot of legal resources to do this? It appears not. The question I have is: why don’t more IT companies do this?

I hope you like this: you can expect to hear it all summer, blasting out of every car filled with young people as they drive by going “boom…” 🙂

P.S. I knew Nikki Minaj could rap (and she is superb here) but I hadn’t realized how “pop” she is. Then I went looking at other videos by her and she does pop really well. No wonder her views on YouTube are so high: she’s a cross over giant.

YouTube – Nicki Minaj – Super Bass

You can read it here: Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death. One thing that struck me was this:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

I am really surprised Chomsky would make such a poor comparison. First off, bin Laden was not the former head of Pakistan, so the comparison is not apt. Secondly, there is a better comparison, and that is with Orlando Letelier. Similar to bin Laden, Letelier was a (Chilean) refugee living in another country (the U.S. in the 1970s). A foreign country (Chile) sent agents who killed him with an explosive planted in a car. The end result of that was that one of the assassins, Michael Townley, was extradicted, and instead of a death sentence or life in prison, he ended up getting placed under the Witness Protection Program. There is suspicion that the C.I.A. withheld evidence (see ASSASSINS AND SLEUTHS – NYTimes.com) in the case. Perhaps that is how Americans would react, which, I suspect, is how Pakistan will react.

So that would be a much better comparison, and it is based on something that actually happened. Also it is one that Chomsky would certainly be aware of. Why he didn’t make it I will leave to you to decide.

Sandra Boynton makes great kids books. Now they have been turned into apps for your iPhone/Touch/iPad! And at a very good price, too. I think this is great: more kids and parents should know about these great works and enjoy them.

What I don’t think is great is how I see this child interacting with the “book”:

What I loved about the books of Sandra Boynton is that they are books: I spent many a time reading them to my kids, and then having my kids read them. In the video, the book is turned into a toy, and the reading aspect seems to be downplayed. This is not to fault the app, and it is certainly not the only way to enjoy the book, Moo Baa La La La! from Loud Crow Interactive Inc. But it would be a terrible shame if parents, instead of reading the books to their child, just handed the iPad to them instead. And it would be worse if the child played with the app rather than practiced their reading skills.

Parents, read to your kids, and make sure your kids read too.

Is now on sale for a great price, here: Amazon.com: The Ultimate Collection – Sade. Only $9.99 for 29 great songs. It is hard, looking at this photo, to think that I have been listening to Sade since the early 1980s. Her music, like her appearance, is timeless.

P.S. What’s remarkable for me is that this is 9.99 here, but 14.99 on Amazon.ca, even though the Canadian dollar is on par or better than the U.S. dollar. And on iTunes, it costs me 17.99! Maddening! (The pricing, not the collection or the artist. :))

David Hicks has taken the results of the Canada’s 41st Election as mapped out by the CBC, and has given it a humourous twist!

Great stuff! You can see his photostream here: Flickr: ALL_CAPS’ Photostream.

Is this print from 20×200:

There’s 600 prints, going for $100 each. And there are others as well. It is certified, numbered and signed by the artist. Check it out.

 Roots of War in Popular Song (forest of no return), by David Byrne

In order to print that page and not the one they were going with, the New York Times literally had to stop the presses. (Something they rarely do.)  FishbowlNY has the details on it.

It is easy to overlook Stephen Brunt’s essay on boxing in this weekend’s Globe and Mail (Requiem for boxing: the decline of the Sweet Science). You’d be missing out on very fine writing if you did. Brunt is one of the top writers at the Globe as it is, and he is never better than when he is writing about boxing. What makes it better still is that he is writing about the decline of something he clearly loves. Even if you are uninterested in boxing, you can appreciate it for the thought and feel and craft he brings to it.

As for me, I remember being very young and watching the three Ali-Frasier fights. I saw most of Ali’s bouts, and lots of other boxing as well, but nothing left as big an impression on me as watching those fights did. When Brunt describes how Frasier literally wanted to kill Ali in the ring, that does not surprise me. The toughness, the ferocity, and the excellence that both men brought to each fight was breathtaking. Arguably some of the greatest sporting events of the 20th century.

Brunt reference a great painting by Bellows of the Dempsey vs Firpo fight. Here it is:

No doubt a photo capable of shaking all sorts of preconceived notions. 🙂 From George Bernard Shaw | This Is Not Porn – Rare and beautiful celebrity photos