Just remember when you’re tea-bagging the world this weekend with hamburgers and Bud Lights, America once tea-bagged King George III because the founding fathers resented paying taxes on stamps and stuff and they were mad as hell and couldn’t take it anymore; take a moment to reflect that many a good person died in this country so that we could shoot Chinese fireworks from our butts after borrowing lots of money from their government because we are awesome America and we deserve to tea bag whatever it is that deserves to be tea-bagged.
Just sayin’ that despite a lot of bad things and misgivings we’ve had over the years, there isn’t much I would change about you America. You’re aging nicely at 233 years. Must be the butt rockets.
And if you’re the type of person that likes to get drunk and fire bottle rockets from your butt please be safe. Put a buffer zone around the junk or make sure your Bud Light is easily accessible to put out any flames.
Change we can believe in:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
And for those who forget what it is that makes this country great, there is a poem by Emma Lazarus, inscribed inside the pedestal of a certain Lady Liberty, standing at the Gateway to this country in New York, in which she implores:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Happy Birthday America — a land of open arms for those who seek refuge from their troubled homes, a country created not for a religion or race but for a set of ideals that some tend to take for granted or outright ignore, and a place where adolescent men can shoot fireworks from their butts.
We’ll be back on Monday morning, if not sooner to check in. Enjoy the weekend everyone.
At a keynote speech during New York’s Democracy forum at Lincoln Center, Danah Boyd spoke of the racial disparity and possible reasons for mass abandonment of MySpace for the “more cultured” and “less cheesy” social networking site Facebook. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated: “We might as well face an uncomfortable reality … what happened was modern day ‘white flight’.”
Boyd also observed that: “The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.”
What he doesn’t mention in the piece is the reasons many people left Myspace for Facebook. In my particular case, the preponderance of profile spam – hookers, bands, automusic tracks, ads plastered over 80% of the screen, etc. etc. became overwhelming on Myspace.
Facebook was a place that I could manage a digital rolodex of friends, aquintances, and contacts without worry. The user-interface is far superior. With that said, this isn’t a race issue per say, despite the user profiles. If Facebook ends up doing the same things as Myspace, you’ll their user-base crumble as well.
Update: Just found the original paper, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” the article was based upon and it’s much more nuanced and a far better read than Transcosmic’s piece.
Clocking in at a robust 45-minutes, the fan film, which is actually called The Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, has a lot going for it. The flash animation film is a bit slow to start but really picks up about 5-minutes in with a party and then at 15-minutes when all hell breaks loose. How much hell?
Well let’s just say that there’s a Superhero party featuring every freakin’ superhero ever, Captain America disses Cher and teh gays and the Power Rangers’ MegaZord and Voltron combine to form an even bigger robot that fights Marvel’s planet destroyer Galactus. Batman gets dissed but Robin kicks ass and so much happens that my nerd brain overloaded.
Really, there is nothing else to say except that Holy Shit, this is awesome. Like an awesome soft taco that gets wrapped in the deep-fried cheese covered hard shell of more awesome. [via Bam Kapow]
The NY Times examines how to make a perfect hamburger. The first thing I do when I move to any city is try to find a burger joint and pizzeria that knocks my socks off. So far in Portland, I’ve yet to find a pizza place that wows me, but I’ve had several good hamburgers.
The burger from The Slow Bar just about crippled my tastes buds and while the burger at Cafe Castagna was nothing special, it won me over with it’s enormous attention to quality. The other night I polished off a burger from Stanich’s, which has a sterling reputation. Unfortunately, it’s an unearned rep. Though I prefer a thick patty cooked to order, I’m not against a thin patty, unless of course it seems pre-packaged or frozen beforehand.
The article comes with some great advice for preparing a burger at home. Among this includes: treating the burger like a steak (sear the outside finish in the oven or cool section of grill); buy a 70-30 ratio of meat to fat; similar to grating your own cheese or grinding your own coffee beans — the only way to do both of these things — buy some quality meat and ground it in your food processor at home; be liberal with the salt; dimple the patty regardless of big it is or how you form it; put thought into the bun; and always use fresh ingredients.
The burger is a simple food, but it’s not an easy food to make superb. There’s nothing worse than a poorly executed hamburger — either at home or out at a restaurant. Any PDXers know a place to get a great burger?
Michael Rubin’s 518-page tome to the creation of LucasFilm, Pixar, video games, and is essentially a look at modern filmmaking, is now available as a free download on Rubin’s site. Droidmakerhas been described as “one of the most enjoyable reads,” centered on the people and not necessarily the tech that went into this revolution. I’ve never heard of the book until this morning, but I can’t wait to dive into it and at only $23 at Amazon, it’s not a stretch to say I’ll be adding it to my collection in the near future. [via Binary Bonsai]
Reading is a personal endeavor. It’s not a competition; when I engage with a story, I want it to somehow illuminate the dark corners of my world. I want it to shine a light or reveal a path, give me something that pertains to my struggles and everyday ennui. I want it to educate me, to make me feel as though I understand the world slightly more than I did before.
Plenty of sites attempt this with their best-of currations. And while I get the need for those types of list, many of those books always seem dated, past their relevance; the usual “greatest books of all-time” lists (whatever that means anyways) always includes the likes of The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Lolita, et. al. but they always seems daunting and impersonal. A little too samey.
”The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is,” Newsweek says in their just published Fifty Books for Our Times. “What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books — new or old, fiction or nonfiction — open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.”
Among the selected books are Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, William Faulkner’s The Bear, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live, Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Don DeLillo’s Underworld.
The list is an intriguing mix of fiction and non-fiction and don’t hew to any particular time frame. The common themes running throughout seem to be that of terrorism and war in the Middle East, financial uncertainty, environmentalism and food, social change, and science vs. religion.
It’s an extremely thoughtful and well-thought out list. Many of these books, I haven’t read but I feel as though I must to have a clearer understanding of the world around me.
Fancy Fast Food takes the craptastic meals you find at your average fast food joint and reworks them into fine dining dishes using no other ingredients. This is actually fairly ingenius and demonstrates some really, really fantastic cooking skills.
There are plenty of before and after pictures and recipes so that if you feel so inclined you can replicate this at home.
These photographs show extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants. No additional ingredients have been added except for an occasional simple garnish
It’s basically fast food plastic surgery. Sure, the Spicy Chicken Sushi looks great, but it’s still Popeyes chicken. Which, um, is essentially their tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look!”
This is where Matt Damon ballooned up and grew a mustache. I’m surprised how much this comes off as a comedy. Wasn’t quite expecting that type of tone. Was expecting something more like The Insider, but leave it to Soderbergh to cut left when you’re expecting a button hook. I can get down with it.
Megan Fox, she of porn star looks and acting talents but starrer of actual Hollywood movies, went on CBS’s Early Show and tried to explain to host Harry Smith what the deal with Transformers was. At least she has a good sense of humor about it, with her tongue-firmly-in-cheek, telling Smith, “I’m in the movie, and I read the script, and I watched the movie, and I still didn’t know what was happening. So I think that if you haven’t read the script, and you go and see it and you understand it, you may be a genius…. This is a movie for geniuses.”
It’s awkward enough having to watch what amounts to your dad hitting on your younger brother’s insanely hot girlfriend, but it’s also a pointless interview since CBS covered up her cleavage (her only asset) with inforgraphics. Thanks CBS.
Anyways, it’s clear there is something appealing about Megan Fox, but I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like she knows not to take any of this serious, but she clearly has a sense of humor — dry and slightly … witty? It’s a conundrum as Winston Churchill would say. Hopefully, she does more comedy in the future and less giant robots smashing things.
We continue our quest to be the foremost expert on drunken animals throughout the world. Here are some nice shots of animals getting toasted off of some fermented fruit in Africa.
It’s still not as hilarious as the Caribbean monkeys from yesterday, but it’ll do. And again, in the above clip, the monkeys steal the show at the very end, when they get all human-like and try to drunkenly make out and engage in some coitus, but alas one of the monkeys just passes out and calls it a night. Hopefully, he didn’t have to sneak out in the middle of the night.
The Shroud of Turn has many devoted followers, pilgrims who flock to see what they believe is the bloodied face of a crucified Jesus Christ; yet, scientists have carbon-dated it to the Middle Ages, rendering the possibility of it actually being Jesus null and void.
Now an American artist is entering the debate. Lillian Schwartz, a graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York, claims that the image is a self-portrait of Leonardo DaVinci, which was made using a crude photographic technique. Essentially he used a camera obscura to project his bust onto the shroud and using egg whites and gelatin painted his image.
Of course, Schwartz has nothing more than some giant coincidences; but it’s an interesting hypothesis based solely on the proportions of both DaVinci’s profile and the Turin’s face. Well, that and DaVinci was a genius artist. He understood the technological advances needed to produce the Shroud and was in all likelihood a heretic willing to pull a fast one over on people.
Honestly, though, she doesn’t really have any evidence. But I love the idea that the Shroud of Turn is nothing more than a giant practical joke by Leonardo DaVinci.
It’s in German, but there’s isn’t much talking anyways. Mostly, it’s worth watching to get a sense of where director David Yates is taking the story visually. He’s taking it to Awesometown via Dark Street. Har! Har!
You can also check out the clip of Harry and Dumbledore preparing for their journey to the cave, which isn’t some sort of pedo-Plato reference. The old man and his young protege are just preparing for some adventure. [via Film Misery]
Also: Paul Dergarabedian heaps lavish praise on the new Potter installment, calling it “not only exquisite in its production values, but was also charming, funny, scary, enchanting, moving (stop me, the adjectives could go on and on) and dare I say, sexy.” He probably ran out of adjectives, if not breath first, but he also proclaimed it Oscar-worthy. Yowzas.
American troops are pulling out of Baghdad and the bigger cities as I write this, prompting dance parties from the people and the oil companies to begin bidding on 20-year contracts for Iraq’s potent oil reserves.
“Baghdad’s river-front parklands, which have been reclaimed this year after being deserted during the height of the insurgency and sectarian war, were last night transformed into outdoor dance venues, where audiences of around 3,000 – almost all of them men – danced to the strains of a recently returned Iraqi singer, Salah Hassan, exiled in Dubai for the past five years.”
Mission Accomplished, indeed! Even if it took six-years and the deaths of 4,500 American troops. We get grown men dancing in reclaimed parks and oil companies getting what they want.
“The auction represented the first opportunity for major oil companies to return to Iraq since they were expelled in 1972 amid a regional move toward nationalization,” reports the Washington Post.
“While eager to tap into Iraq’s fields, oil executives were apprehensive about injecting themselves into a country with volatile politics and an active insurgency. Another disincentive is Iraq’s failure to enact a hydrocarbons law.” BP and China National Petroleum Corp. were the only companies to scoop up an reserves as they sealed the deal for the Rumalia Oil field for $2.85 per barrel.
It remains unknown if there is a Wal-Mart on every corner of Fallujah and other cities, yet, but probably in a year or two. Right?
PC Magazine is reporting that Mozilla has officially confirmed the Tuesday release.
According to Lifehacker, other additions to Firefox 3.5 are: a Private Browsing Mode to hide browser activity (so youse can watch porn all day!), a JavaScript engine known as TraceMonkey, new location services, and HTML5 support.
Just another reason to ditch Microcrash Internet Explorer, if you haven’t already.
No less than Malcolm Gladwell thinks thatWired-editor Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99) is wrong.
Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
The Dirty Projectors have an excellent album and “Stillness is the Move” has been the summer jam and a solid contender for any year end list of 2009’s best songs. And now, the slightly askew pop song has a slightly askewed video to go with it.
According to Stereogum the video (which looks shot somewhere on the west coast but specifically the Oregon coast and more likely Northern California) was directed Matthew Lessner. The video, much like the song, has recognizable features to it but it’s strange and weird just the same. It showcases the synchronized dancing (single ladies dance from Beyonce?) of the Dirty Projector ladies in light blue jumpsuits and Dave Longstreth is some sort of llama herder.
Yup, pretty much when John Turturro’s character looks up at Devastator and says over the radio, “I’m looking at the enemy’s scrotum” and the giant robot has two wrecking balls for a scrotum it’s the definitively crappy moment in a 2.5 hour pooh fest of twisted metal, loud explosions and inane plotlines.
It’s true! Everything you heard about this movie from the very upset critics is spot on, so I won’t rehash it here for you. However, if you haven’t seen the movie yet then watch the above clip and call yourself good. You can read about the making of the clip here.
You’ll thank me for saving you the $10, which you can then go buy yourself a couple of beers or a bottle of wine with. (big thanks to Scott who’s been absolutely killing it with the clips lately.
It’s true! Because it’s on the BBC and the host has a British accent and I’ve been conditioned to believe that anything told to me with a British accent has to be truthful. Regardless, after watching this I want a drunk monkey for a pet. Mostly so we can drink together on the weekends. I have no friends.
I haven’t gotten into Blu-Ray because the supposed benefits are marginal. Sure it’s got better “picture” and “sound” but if you don’t own a sweet surround sound system or own a 1080p HD television then the price for Blu-Ray doesn’t really justify itself. You’re better of paying $60 for a up-convert DVD player and saying the hell with it.
But I will admit, that this commentary track from director Zack Snyder — better known as Maximum Movie Mode — has me wanting to find a friend with a Blu-Ray player.
I understand not a lot of people get geeked out over the process of movie making, so this probably doesn’t matter one iota, but I find the nuts and bolts of the profession just slightly less fascinating than the finished product. I could watch these types of featurettes for days on end.
It’s the first time I’ve seen any movie show off the supposed advances in technology Blu-Ray offers, even if I’m not entirely sold because of it. Much of this feature rests on the charismatic shoulders of Snyder. Whether you hated or loved Watchmen, you’ve got to give him credit for not just getting the comic made into a movie, but for making sure there would be some choice extras when it arrived on DVD/Blu-Ray.
Watchmen hits Blu-Ray on July 21st 2009. You can order the Director’s Cut on Amazon for around $23 (the suggested retail price is $35.99).
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