March 24, 2011
Deconstructing “Friday”
Jon sent me this link, saying “you owe it to yourself to read up on Rebecca Black and her self-published (in the worst sense of what that used to mean) music video, Friday. You need to see the video and absorb the meme to really enjoy this epic piece of work:”
She offers the camera a hostage’s smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.
“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”
***
Ms. Black first appears as her own computer-generated outline: wobbly, marginal, a dislocated erasure. The days of the week flip by accompanied by dull obligations — “essay due” — and tired clichés — “Just another manic Monday…” Her non-being threatens to be consumed by this virtual litany of nothing at all until, at long last — Friday.
[. . .]
Yet here the discerning viewer notes that something is wrong. Because it is a simple matter of fact that in this car all the good seats have already been taken. For Rebecca Black (her name here would seem to evoke Rosa Parks, a mirroring that will only gain in significance) there is no actual choice, only the illusion of choice.
The viewer knows that she’ll take the only seat that’s offered to her, a position so very undesirable as to be known by a derisive — the “Bitch” seat.
She might well have been better off on the school bus, among the have-nots. But Rebecca Black’s world is so advanced in the craft of evisceration that this was never a consideration. John Hughes died while out jogging, these are the progeny of his great materialist teen-villain, James Spader, a name that would come to be synonymous with desperate sex and high-speed collision. And as she gets in the car Ms. Black’s joy is as patently empty as her liberation.
“Partying, Partying,” she sings, in hollow mantra.
“Yeah!” an unseen mass replies, a Pavlovian affirmation.
March 23, 2011
Breaking! New iPhone 5 features revealed!
Image from PC World article which is a bit more serious than the graphic might indicate.
March 22, 2011
March 18, 2011
March 17, 2011
March 14, 2011
The iBoob saga
Jesse Brown recounts the story of the iBoob app:
Idiots worldwide rejoiced when news came that the iBoobs app, censored by Apple, had found a home in the Android Marketplace.
For those tragically unfamiliar with iBoobs — how can I describe it? It’s boobs. They jiggle. A settings screen lets you adjust things like “boob weight,” “stifness,” and “gravity factor.” If any of this turns you on, I’d like to introduce you to a killer app called porn.
iBoobs is a Freemium product. If you upgrade from the free ”iBoobs light” app to the $2.10 paid app, you can toss the boobs around with the tip of your finger. Or at least, you could last week. It seems that Google has since followed Apple’s lead (at least partially) and banned the paid version of the app.
If your imagination isn’t enough, there’s a YouTube video of the application here.
I’m not sure what a “paprade” is, but apparently Toronto had one
I guess the weekend staff were celebrating St. Patrick’s day a little early, as not only the photo caption (left) but also the pa(p)rade directions leave you a little misdirected:
The parade begins at Bloor and St. George Sts. and heads west to Yonge, where it turns south and goes to Queen and then heads west again to University, ending just south of Dundas on University.
The streets are expected to be closed from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., making driving to the parade difficult.
Highlighting mine. Going west from Bloor and St. George won’t get you to Yonge Street for a fair amount of time:
H/T to Chris Greaves for bringing this to my attention.
March 9, 2011
Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, and Amy Okuda panel discussion
And, part two, with Wil Wheaton’s immortal advice “Guys . . . when a woman joins the game, don’t be a dick.”:
March 8, 2011
Conan, channelled through a 4-year-old
From the amusing Reddit thread “I’m 4 years old AMAA”:
gaadzooks
what is best in life?[. . .]
lynn
My 6-month-old has an answer for that: “To crush your parents’ sleep schedules, to see them flee before your diapers, and to drink the lactations of their women.”
Edit for honesty: credit for that one goes to my husband.
H/T Radley Balko for the link.
March 7, 2011
QotD: Mercantilism
You actually had a short, but interesting chapter in your book explaining why you think our trade balance with China is mostly irrelevant. Could you give people a short, but sweet synopsis of that argument?
Adam Smith was the first to point this out in the Wealth of Nations. The common wisdom at the time, mercantilism was the name it went by, was that the way a nation got rich was by exporting things. In return for the exports they’d get gold. And Smith’s going, I’m paraphrasing broadly here, “You can’t eat gold, you can’t kiss gold, and gold won’t keep you warm at night. Gold is just gold.”
He said the exports, that’s real stuff, and you’re giving it away in favor of gold. He said imports are the good thing. Imports are when you’re getting something you like. You’re getting French wine. You’re getting American tobacco. You’re getting furs from Russia, getting whatever they were getting back in those days. He said exports are the way you pay for those imports. So imports are Christmas morning. Exports are January’s Visa bill.
People getting so upset because everything seems to be made in China — I understand it on the level of the jobs have moved overseas. I think it’s probably an important thing to remember that if the jobs hadn’t moved overseas, they probably would have just gone away. So, it’s not like the Japanese have all of our car making jobs.
John Hawkins, “The P.J. O’Rourke Interview”, Grendel Report, 2010-10-11
March 6, 2011
The economics of urinal cakes
Tim Harford uses Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy” to explain the economics of urinal cakes:
Dear Massimo,
When I read the first sentence of your letter, I was wondering where you were going with this. Not to worry: your question is easily answered. The 19th century French economist and essayist Frédéric Bastiat anticipated it with his famous “broken window fallacy”. A broken window seems good for the economy because it creates work for the glazier. But Bastiat pointed out that the money that the window-owner pays to the glazier is money he can’t spent on something else. The glazier is richer, but the tailor or the restaurateur or the escort girl is poorer. The broken window hasn’t stimulated the economy at all.
In short, don’t think you’re doing anyone a favour by aiming squarely at the urinal cake in front of you. And don’t even think about aiming at the urinal cake in front of someone else.
March 5, 2011
March 3, 2011
Sneak preview of the next Guild comic
Whitney Matheson has a preview of the next comic starting the members of The Guild. This one is about Tink:
This should be in the stores by mid-March.
March 2, 2011
QotD: Humour
A German I know will on occasion tell you his father died in the concentration camps. He waits for the concerned and properly sympathetic faces and then adds that he got drunk and fell out of a watchtower. Europeans find that boorish, faintly crass and rather tasteless; the English love it. It’s a proper joke, and a German doing it is double bubble. The surprise is that neither the Europeans or the English realize that it’s not a joke at all, his father really did fall out of a watch tower and it’s poignant and sad because his son never knew him, never met his dad.
A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, p. 112.
