culture

...about coffee.

via vintage ads

via Jason Scott. visit GET LAMP for more information.

via UBM.

and previously.

Nice essay in the Village Voice: village voice > news > David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’ by David Mamet

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

It turns out I think David Mamet’s Rabbi is awesome. It’s a heckuva challenge to see things as others might see them, and to care about the tone of discourse.

via the excellent Open Culture blog

From Q&A: Talking with Stephen King in Time Magazine.

Do you actually think Britney and Lindsay should be on our cover?
Yeah, I do.

Sort of a, ‘This is what the media’s actually interested it, so let’s just put it out there’ thing?
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that’s really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don’t know who their f———Representatives are.

But you’ve been well in the public eye for decades now. Is it pretty blatant how much worse it’s gotten?
It’s worse every year. And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn’t get the guy’s name. Granted, I haven’t been feeling real well and it was a long day of interviews. But he said to me, “If we didn’t cover cultural things, we wouldn’t be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie.” And I’m like, “Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren’t cultural.” They aren’t political. They’re economic only in the mildest sense of the word. In fact, if I had to pick somebody, some celebrity who has had some impact this year, some sort of echo in the larger American life, I would say Hannah Montana. That whole issue of online ticket sales and scalping fascinates me. There are [legitimate] issues there about the Internet, so that actually does seem to have some cultural significance. But Britney? Britney Spears is just trailer trash. That’s all. I mean, I don’t mean to be pejorative. But you observe her behavior for the past five years and you say, “Here’s a lady who can’t take care of her kids, she can’t take care of herself, she has no retirement fund, everything that she gets runs right through her hands.” And yet, you know and I know that if you go to those sites that tell you what the most blogged-about things on the Internet are, it’s Britney, it’s Lindsay. So I think it would be terrific [to have them as TIME Persons of the Year]. There would be such a scream from the American reading public, sure. But at the same time, it’s time for somebody to discuss the difference between real news and fake news.

(via Open Culture)

I’m up relatively early this morning. I can hear rain outside the window of the office. Leah acquired some of the lovely All Natural Cola by Whole Foods and I’m having one of those. I feel a tickle in my nose and I think I might be getting a cold. That’s not optimal.

I have a backlog of Misc and here it goes, helpfully organized by vague category!

Programming

I’m very impressed by DateJS—it provides functionality like PHP’s function strtotime() but in JavaScript. This is a tool I’ll be using. I found this via the excellent Ajaxian blog.

The Amazon Kindle has been getting nothing but hate on the net, but it feels like a different class of product to me. These two reviews in particular make me wonder if this device might be something I’d use: Andy Ihnatko and Don MacAskill.

Douglas Crockford wants to fix HTML. I think Crockford is the smartest programmer in JavaScript-land, but I think he’s late to that party. I do like some of his ideas though. Crockford also points out how crazy the expectations are on programming for the web, when talking about Unobtrusive JavaScript he says:

It also calls for Graceful Degradation, which means that a page should do something useful even if the JavaScript assets fail to run. This is bizarre. No other programming environment threatens to pull the rug out from under the programmer the way the web does. If you are writing applications in Java, you do not have to be prepared for having Java turned off. But because of the browser’s long and tragic history of security screwups, JavaScript does get turned off. It is ultimately the only security control given to users that works. So not only does the programmer have to be prepared for failure, the program is expected to fail gracefully.

And he adds: Madness.

Yup.

Speaking of madness, The Web Standards Project points to the Email Standards Project. I end up with responsibility to debug and test HTML mail sometimes and it’s a mess dealing with the various email clients. This a good development. As one of the original members of what would become the WSP, I am all for this. I’m glad to see momentum here.

I’d like to see JavaScript Beautify added to either/both of Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar.

Comics and Animation

This image of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy posted by Slashfilm reminds me of two of my cousins. I got into (back) into comics at age 13 and while I didn’t get into TMNT, the art style was cool. This figure really seems to hit the aesthetic of those black and white indie comics well.

One of the funnier blogs about comics Again With The Comics, did a series called Thanksgiving Turkeys, featuring terrible supervillains from comics past that made me laugh.

Not funny, but aesthetically beautiful is the work of illustrator Julienne Hsu, on startdrawing.org. Spare, impressionistic, but a turns precise. I find it very inspiring. Her website is www.juliennehsu.com

Marlo Meekins is a cartoonist from the John K. posse who has a way with markers I envy. She says of her work, anticipating the question, this about marker choice: “To answer a super common question about marker brand: I use most brands of markers and only a few select shades. But, all and even the best brands make gross colors and plenty of them. Never buy marker sets. It’s decisions about color combinations, line and application not brand.”

Also from the John K. posse is Uncle Eddy, on Underlight.

Terminus is a short film that spans animation and culture. It’s a disturbing but perfectly executed short film about a man and a looming concrete figure. via jwz.

Culture

Ads from the past might have been demeaning to women.

The estimable ze frank has two Christmas songs out: Listen and Buy, if you want! I particularly like Santa Ain’t Fat.

This interview with the Coen Brothers on Charlie Rose makes me want to see No Country For Old Men more. Open Culture has a few more links.

Anil Dash points out what’s interesting about memes and net culture, and points out ROFLcon, which looks seriously fascinating, bizarre, and potentially educational and entertaining.

Undercover Black Man points out some silliness by one Tay Zonday—a Dr. Pepper promotional song called Cherry Chocolate Rain. It’s fun, it’s silly, it’s a, well, I suppose it’s a parody of hip-hop videos, sort of, but it also uses the conventions of the genre, but funny. So fine, it’s cute, it’s funny—but this feels like a “forced” viral meme, and the production values are way too high to be homegrown. Then I zipped over to the young man’s YouTube Page and check out Internet Dream and I found myself inexplicably laughing. Well, maybe explicable. The dude is funny and talented. Sort of They Might Be Giants meet Biz Markie. Just watch Internet Dream:

And to complete this series of Misc items, I’ll make this a loop—this post on O’ Reilly Radar is about the confusion between Bill O’Reilly (right wing windbag) and O’Reilly (the publisher, mostly known for programming books).

And with that, I’ll start my day.