Month: August 2004

I’m a little on the busy side today, so may I suggest:

• Hoplit
  Nicholas Kerkhoff’s blog, which comes complete with a story on the front page with an opening that caught my attention:

  The  one
  thing I could always do
  the one talent I could always fall back
  on, ever
  since I discovered it at nine years old with
  a half-rack of Schlitz in my grandfather’s
   
  basement,
  was that I could drink like a son-of-a-bitch.

• Quentin Taratino loves Harold and Kumar!
  Of course, this means that he’s going to copy it now.

• The 20 By 20 Room
  A weblog devoted to role-playing games. I think my old writing buddy from Golden Words, Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, has something to do with this.

• “The corporate whistle-blower lesbian impregnating hang your head in shame movie of the year”
  In spite of referring to Spike Lee’s new movie, She Hate Me, using the phrase above, the critic says it’s bad. Unfortunately, this story is behind a paid registration wall. Check out the reviews for the movie: it’s being universally panned (it got 2,.8 stars on IMDB; even Freddy vs. Jason, which made me want to stab out my own eyes with a butter knife, did better). First the kerfuffle over the name of Spike TV, now this: when did Spike completely lose his mind?

• Manifesto for the Reputation Society
  A rather academic First Monday paper on what is essentially Whuffie: “By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with
  collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an
  interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems — to
  restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive
  social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.”

• Yet another Achewood comic that is a suitable metaphor for life
  For an innocent 5-year old plush otter, Philippe is having a pretty traumatic childhood. He really needs to get the hang of wabi-sabi, and Teodor really needs to learn how to make a half-decent looking Mickey Mouse pancake.

• Keep or Skip
  Okay, this really isn’t reading material. It is, however, a game for
  Mac OS X written as part of a challenge on CreateMacGames.org to make a
  game with no visual interface whatsoever.

  Keep or Skip uses your iTunes library as source material. It chooses a
  song at random and takes a sample of that song. It then cuts that
  sample into two or more pieces and plays those pieces in random order.
  Your job: state the correct order of those pieces!

  Keep or Skip uses the built-in speech system to prompt you with
  instructions and read the names of the song it’s about to play at you.
  The game works best if you have a sizable iTunes collection and if most
  of your songs have lyrics and aren’t full of long, repretitive
  sections. This game is great for rock, pop, folk and country tunes; I
  suspect that an iTunes library full of nothing but Phillip Glass would
  make this game a nightmare.

  Come to think of it, an iTunes library full of Phillip Glass tunes is a nightmare, game or no.

[ via Eschaton ] The Las Vegas Sun has this story about John Kerry:

Former U.S. Sen. Chic Hecht of Nevada is a staunch
Republican, but he thanks his lucky stars for Democratic presidential
hopeful Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might
vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit
Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the
hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht’s side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver — four times.