Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2010

Redesigning the American dollar bill?

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Gerard Vanderleun isn’t over-enthused by the notion:

The ObamaBuck-U: A New Bill to Inspire Confident Recovery

I’d advise these sooper-genius designers to design the ObamaBuck with a lot of room for extra zeroes. Gotta plan for the forthcoming Weimarization of the US economy.

What else are these hamstrung colonized minds designing in the way of currency? Here’s there list. You can smell the overheated whiffs of sanctimony just reeking from the stack:

$1 – The first African American president
$5 – The five biggest native American tribes
$10 – The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 – 20th Century America
$50 – The 50 States of America
$100 – The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt. During this time he led the congress to pass more important legislations [sic] than most presidents pass in their entire term. This helped fight the economic crises at the time of the great depression. Ever since, every new president has been judged on how well they have done during the first 100 days of their term.

When was the last time these fools took a history course? Third grade? Where are these drool-cup designing dolts based in the US? San Francisco, where else? The town where the homeless defecate freely on the street and where the artists defecate freely in their brains.

If nothing else, the proposed designs would do one useful thing: they’d stop Americans from sneering at the design of Canadian banknotes!

June 17, 2010

“Most culture funding inevitably pays for crap”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:52

While providing some deeper explanation for the not-really-in-context sound bite provided by Alberta’s culture minister, Lindsay Blackett, Colby Cosh points out the truth of the matter:

The other knowledge that critics ought to be prepared to display is some familiarity with the material Blackett’s department actually funds. I figure you can’t say it’s not crap unless you’ve at least poked it with a stick. Can the indignant Paul Gross, who received $5.5 million from the Alberta taxpayer for Passchendaele, claim intimate familiarity with In a World Created by a Drunken God or Caution: May Contain Nuts or The Last Rites of Ransom Pride? If not, then why is he shooting off his mouth? It would surely be much more sensible for Gross and for like-minded critics to admit that most culture funding inevitably pays for crap — that the arts world is, in fact, a colossal pyramid of crap, inherently necessary to provide the nurturing and elevating environment from which a few items of permanent value might spring.

But that is something the culturati can never admit. Kirstine Stewart, the general manager of CBC’s English television operations, reacted in the Globe to Blackett’s comments by saying “Nobody can ever question the quality of what we do here in Canada, creatively or otherwise.” Surely this is a much more revealing and intriguing comment than Blackett’s. Does she mean that questioning the quality of Canadian television and film is literally impossible? Or just that criticism is inherently objectionable, a malum in se? And at the risk of appearing to take sides, I must ask: which attitude ultimately seems more healthy and likely to encourage improvement — Blackett’s, or Stewart’s?

Of course, a sensible government wouldn’t be spending any tax money on subsidies for TV and movie production (New Zealand’s most recent study showed a pretty big net loss for their various cultural tax breaks and subsidy programs).

May 4, 2010

The lesson, kids, is don’t ask for colour advice

Filed under: Humour, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:04

A colour survey gone very wrong:

Thank you so much for all the help on the color survey. Over five million colors were named across 222,500 user sessions. If you never got around to taking it, it’s too late to contribute any data, but if you want you can see how it worked and take it for fun here.

First, a few basic discoveries:

* If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
* “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
* Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
* Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
* A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
* Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

Overall, the results were really cool and a lot of fun to analyze. There are some basic limitations of this survey, which are discussed toward the bottom of this post. But the sheer amount of data here is cool.

And a selection of miscellaneous answers:

May 3, 2010

Virginia cracks down on smut . . . on the state seal

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Some folks just don’t “get” art. Others think they do, but they’re wrong:

Virginia’s attorney general Ken Cuccinelli is hard at work on the important issues of the day — like making sure the Roman goddess depicted on his state’s official seal isn’t exposing herself.

The current seal shows “Virtus, the goddess of virtue, dressed as a warrior,” with her foot resting “on the chest of the figure of tyranny, who is lying on the ground.” She is holding a spear and her left breast is exposed.

Or at least it was exposed. At a recent meeting, Cuccinelli provided pins to his staff with a new seal on which “Virtus’ bosom is covered by an armored breastplate,” the Virginian-Pilot reported. These new pins were not paid for by taxpayer dollars, Cuccinelli’s office insisted.

December 18, 2009

Surprising court decision doesn’t favour the artist

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:48

Having just read the brief outline of the case, I was more than a little surprised that the court (correctly, in my opinion) decided that the “art” in question was just glorified vandalism:

Glass act: student fined for smashing gallery window and calling it art
Gallery fails to see funny side after student puts metal pole through window as part of an art project

Does breaking a window count as art? Yes, murmured the 50 or so artniks who recently crowded into a former Edinburgh ambulance garage to view a film of sculptor Kevin Harman doing just that. No, insisted Kate Gray, director of the Collective Gallery in Cockburn Street, whose window it was.

The courts are on Gray’s side. Yesterday Harman, a prize-winning graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, was fined £200 for breaching the peace on 23 November, when he smashed a metal scaffolding pole through one of the gallery’s windows. Fiscal depute Malcolm Stewart described the affair as “a rather bizarre incident” which had left Collective staff “upset.”

I’m actually quite surprised that the court decided this case properly . . . it has seemed for quite some time that an “artist” could declare just about anything to be “art” and get away with it. I’m not against all art, but if in the performance of your artistic work you happen to break a law, I think the police and the courts should not mitigate your treatment just because you’re an “artist”.

November 4, 2009

Transsexual Jesus

Filed under: Britain, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:53

A play in Glasgow is — all together now — “not intended to incite or offend anyone of any belief system”. In spite of that, some Christians are offended:

About 300 protesters held a candlelit protest outside a Glasgow theatre over the staging of a play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual.

The protest was held outside the Tron Theatre, where Jesus, Queen of Heaven — in which Christ is a transsexual woman — is being staged.

It is part of the Glasgay! arts festival, a celebration of Scotland’s gay, bi-sexual and transsexual culture.

Festival organisers said it had not intended to incite or offend anyone.

Of course, given the parlous state of Christianity in Britain, maybe they really did think that nobody would be offended. Portraying the founder of a different religion in this way might spark a bit more than protest.

October 9, 2009

Awful book covers

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:50

John Scalzi has a nominee for the “Worst Book Cover by a Major Publisher” award:

Worst_book_cover_nominee

Seriously, now, DAW, wtf? I know there’s a recession on, but there must be a better class of 12-year-old you can hire to push about the “liquefy” tool in Photoshop. I get that you were aiming for “chintzy, kooky fun” but you landed on “Fourth grade class project on Lulu.com,” and that just isn’t cool, and more to the point, you should know the difference. Were I an author in this particular anthology I would be sad I couldn’t show my friends the book I was in without them asking how much it cost me to publish it. I’m frightened to show it to graphic designers I know because I don’t want to be sued for damages when it causes blood to shoot from their ears. And as a reader, I can say the cover makes a really excellent argument for owning a Kindle.

September 21, 2009

Sir Humphrey is about to be proven correct again

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:30

The American government is trying to exhort artists to support its goals . . . and doing more than just exhorting:

If you’ve ever wondered–and worried–about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10 telecon between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a group of “independent artists from around the country.” The short version: It leads to the use of taxpayer-funded culture as a means of propagandizing for specific, partisan political aims. Which corrupts not just art but artists.

[. . .]

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators’ genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

Embedded in the discussion is at least one other disturbing point: a nearly lunatic delusion that artists are the vanguard of the proletariat. As Mike Skolnick, the political director for music impresario Russell Simmons, told the participants, the assembled crew “tell our country and our young people sort of what to do and what to be in to; and what’s cool and what’s not cool.” While that command-and-control notion is widely shared by liberals and conservatives alike, it is patently false. Artists and politicians hate to hear this, but the audience does have a mind of its own.

Sir Humphrey Appleby put it best: “Plays attacking the government make the second most boring theatrical evenings ever invented. The most boring are plays praising the government.”

September 14, 2009

Should publicly funded media be free?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:59

Let’s just set aside the whole question about whether the government should be even in the media-provider business* . . . if the government paid for it (that is, if you paid for it), shouldn’t it be available to you for free?

Let’s put aside my personal frustration at having my work locked away. The real question here is, since CBC content is funded by the public, shouldn’t the public own it? Or at least have access to it? Actually, the CBC archives are just the tip of the iceberg: the overwhelming majority of stuff made for Canadians with Canadians’ money is inaccessible to Canadians.

In Canada, movies are supported by Telefilm, TV by the Canadian Television Fund, books and art by The Canada Council for the Arts, and so on. But most of this stuff isn’t distributed very well or for very long, and you can only get your hands on a fraction of it.

So I want to put forth one more contrarian position: I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.

Thoughts?

* No, they bloody shouldn’t be. IMO. YMMV, etc.

July 29, 2009

Not at all sure how to take these . . .

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:25

. . . paintings of Barack Obama with a unicorn. This is a not-unrepresentative example:

obama-painting2

Obama, Stalin, a unicorn, and House. I’m having difficulties coming up with a connection other than they’re all on the same image here.

H/T to John Scalzi for the link.

July 24, 2009

Think at least twice before emulating these folks

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

It’s a joke I’ve told many times, and based on current trends, I’ll be telling it for many more years: we should have invested all our retirement savings in tattoo removal research:

tattoo_think_different

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong: This is not the first tattoo on the “worst” list just because it’s an Apple tattoo. In fact, PC fangirl though I am, I’d much rather be walking around with an Apple image tattooed on my body than I would a Microsoft logo (like the infamous Zune guy). A little black apple might even be cute, and iconic enough that people would know exactly what my tattoo meant…which brings us to this lovely creation. Can we say overkill? The apple, well, fine. Even the power symbol in the middle, while a bit much, is acceptable. But “Think different” underneath? And to top it off, the fuzzy blue glow around that? This person could definitely take a leaf out of Apple’s advertising book: Understatement is key.

Whole story here.

Is justice served?

Filed under: Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Clive sent me this link with the comment “So often we see [stories] about justice perverted. Ridiculous sentences, punishment as an example to others. This one seemed just. Fun too.” This is the end of the Barrel Monster story:

barrelmonster

A North Carolina State University student who created a “monster” out of construction barrels and placed it on the side of a road was sentenced Tuesday to 50 hours of community service.

District Judge Vince Rozier deferred judgment against Joseph Carnevale until Oct. 30. If Carnevale complies with the sentence, the charges against him will be dismissed.

Raleigh police charged the 21-year-old history major and part-time construction worker last month with misdemeanor larceny and destruction of property after he took the orange-and-white traffic barrels from a construction site near N.C. State.

Okay, at least Judge Buzzkill didn’t send Carnevale to jail, but what did the “victims” think of the crime?

Even Hamlin Associates, the construction company from which Carnevale took the barrels, has become a fan and has asked him to create a replica of the figure that led to his arrest on June 10.

“It’s been positive publicity for us,” Hamlin President Steve Hussey told The Associated Press in June. “If we’d known he’d do that good of work, we’d have given him the barrels.”

Authorities pursued the case, despite the construction company’s desire not to press charges.

So the awesome majesty of the state is deployed against a renegade artist, whose “victim” says it’s actually been a good thing for his company and who didn’t want to press charges.

“The law is a ass — a idiot.”

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