Millhouse!

TeeHee!
The Lewiston Tribune ran a front page last Thursday that had two very lovely pictures in it. The first one was of a burly man in a flannel coat decorating for the holidays. The man was identitified as Michael Millhouse. The second photo was from video survalenance of a local conviencnce store, and showed a burly man in a flannel coat stealing a woman's wallet. The newspaper reported that the man was unknown.
Police finally caught on. They arrested poor Michael Millhouse, most likely still in his blue flannel coat, for felonly second-degree theft.
TeeHee!

No One Really Cares

For those of you who forgot...


...Courtesy of PostSecret.com

Media, Art, and Text Student Patrick Scott Vickers

This is Patrick Scott Vickers and his great-grandmother. At the time of this photo, she was really old and Patrick still looked fresh and innocent.
Things change.
You can find Patrick's Blog here.

Ammendment:
Patrick Scott Vickers may or may not be an innocent soul today. I have no first-hand knowledge either way.

Screen Ties

Sometimes, you just need to have an OLED screen in your tie. Or any other piece of clothing, for that matter. When that's the case, check this out.
You'll be the hit of your next funeral or wedding reception.

Bizarre Scientific Papers

In this time of increasing academic pressures, I'll lead you to the 10 most bizarre scientific papers, as accumulated by Oddee, a blog on the oddities of the world.
If you need a little break from the normal, everyday world, check out these facts on the not-so-normal, non-everyday world. The site is a great one for perusing on rainy weekend days, but only when you have someone sitting on the couch to bother with all the useless information that you find.

Eternal Sunset

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of my favorite movies. With that in mind, I offer you Eternal Sunsets. This site shows you the sunset from a bunch of different locations, wherever the sun happens to be setting at the time that you happen to check the site.
Its real pretty.

Batman and Punishment

In case you haven't gotten around to reading Crime and Punishment yet, here's a shorter, more Batman friendly version. Because who doesn't like Batman? Or Dostoyevsky?

Bird's-Eye View

I found this animal planet video that shows a real "bird's-eye view" of what it is like to fly. I thought that this was particularly interesting because it seems like one of the closest things that we can get to virtual reality these days, and it is just cool video in general. It beats those mini cams that they put on the front of Nascar drivers' helmets, anyway.

News of Note

CNN is entering Second Life, to report on the news of import there and find out what matters to the residents.

"The thing we most hope to gain by having a CNN presence in Second Life is to learn about virtual worlds and understand what news is most interesting and valuable to their residents," said Susan Grant, executive vice president of CNN News Services.

When Second Life residents observe an in-world event they deem newsworthy, they can take snapshots, shoot video, or write a report about the event and submit to CNN.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I wonder if their news is going to be full of murders, robberies, and traffic reports like the news here is.

Da Vinci in My Underwear

A note I put on a class discussion board, that I am posting here for the benefit of those not in my class. Because I know you are oh-so-interested...

Talk about breaking down the boundaries between visual and digital space. Now I can finally view the great works of Da Vinci, in detail, while I'm sitting at home in my underwear eating chocolate ice cream. The link I've posted here shows how, "thanks to yet another happy by-product of the Internet age, Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" is available as a special digital image that lets you get (virtually) closer to its surface than you ever could in real life." (Real life in this instance being a church in Milan where reservations sell out months in advance.)
http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/

The detail here is incredible. I wonder how this trend towards rendering will break down the boundaries between face-to-face images and those virtual ones; will we begin to devalue the real in favor of the virtual? Mitchell claims that pictures want to be looked at, and nothing at all. I think that some pictures, namely, ones hanging in an art gallery famous around the world, want to be looked at in person or not at all. We claim a badge of honor when we have seen The Last Supper "in real life," and then we take a picture with our Kodak digital camera to prove that we were there. Well how does this new rendering shape our beliefs about art? I propose that trends such as this will continue to de-idologize "high" art and make it more accessible to the "common" man (or woman). Yet will this change the art world? Will we no longer revere certain pieces because they have moved from the unattainable to the everyday? Can Da Vinci ever really be "everyday"?

Containers and Containment

This video brings to light some of the issues I've been thinking about regarding the container and the thing contained. Fionn Regan, an Irish singer-songwriter, performs his song in various arenas, and the camera jump cuts to him at each different juncture. He doesn't just lip-sync, though, so you can hear the ambient noise (or lack thereof) in the different arenas. I think it is a great illustration of how the environment (or the container) shapes the thing contained. The music takes on different meaning and tones depending on location. Think of that the next time you pick up an old tattered book and begin to read...

I've found the perfect website for those of us who can't afford to travel but still want all the travel junk anyhow. KIOSK - Interesting Things From Interesting Countries is the place to be if you are interested in design and items from other countries. I think that my favorite is the tar-candy, the commentary on which is excerpted below:

To some people, summer is defined by the perfumed odor you have walking by warm train tracks. To others, summer is just a great time for candy. Well, some smart Finn said, “Let's combine the two!” Yes, this is tar-candy! Very diluted wood-tar-water is used to make these licorice pastilles have a distinct taste of tar. Tar was long considered a multi-cure that healed all illnesses and wounds, together with sauna and vodka the three were the cornerstones of Finnish healthcare. Today, most would agree that too much tar gives you a stomachache, too much sauna gives you headache and too much vodka will give you both. Nevertheless, in smaller quantities they are quite divine. Tar-candy, much like sauna and vodka, does have a threshold before you start liking it. The first few pastilles will taste strange and unfamiliar, but soon all you want to do is to walk along those train tracks with a tar-pastille in your mouth!

Awesomely Messy

Here's a link to an awesomely messy commercial for Sony Bravia televisions. I love this commercial, but the best part is that all of this is real! Here are some stats:

70,000 litres of paint
358 single bottle bombs
33 sextuple air cluster bombs
22 Triple hung cluster bombs
268 mortars
33 Triple Mortars
22 Double mortars
358 meters of weld
330 meters of steel pipe
57 km of copper wire

And quoted from the website:

TV ad - featured massive paint explosions - took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.
The cleaning took 5 days and 60 people. Thankfully, the use of a special water-based paint made it easy to scrape-up once the water had evaporated.
Keeping everyone safe was also an important factor. A special kind of non-toxic paint was used that is safe enough to drink (it contains the same thickeners that are sometimes used in soups). It was also completely harmless to the skin.

They also have some really great links to other commercials, like the one where they send 250,000 Superballs down the hills of San Francisco.

And, because I'm an idiot, and I forgot to post it earlier, here is the link.

The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain

I'm pretty excited about a new graphic novel by Peter Sis, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. Sis tells his tale of being born Czechoslovakia during the cold war, growing up relatively happy, the tensions rising, and then "news from the West slowly filters into the country. Peter and his friends hear about blue jeans, Coca-Cola, beat poetry, rock 'n' roll,...and the Beatles!" (book flap). His world changed because of the media flowing into it, the messages that it contained, and the struggle to resist totalitarian control a second time. Much like Maus, this text uses the meduim to deliver a different message. Just like we've been talking about in class. How does that message change? Does it change?

Images from the book reproduced below. They are copyrighted, of course, and not to me. You can buy the book here.

MySpace/Facebook = Classist?

(a photo of dinah boyd "speaking le web," taken from her website)

dinah boyd (yes, the lowercase is intentional), a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, writes about her sociology work involving social-networking sites. dinah's work notes the origins of and differences between MySpace and Facebook and the users they attract. The main dividing line? Socio-economic class. According to boyd, MySpace tends to attract what she calls the "subaltern" while Facebook draws the "hememonic." Or, to put it in blunt Mean Girls clique-speak, Facebook is the domain of choice for college-bound jocks, preps, and queen bees, MySpace the one for immigrants, alternakids, and wannabes. Facebook is more like Target; MySpace, more like Wal-Mart.

boyd's fieldwork consisted mainly of talking to teenagers around the country. Her website can be viewed here, and the essay that talks specifically about the Myspace/Facebook research can be viewed here.

Confessions of a TV Junkie

I can admit that I'm not Britney Spear's biggest fan. I've seen her make mistakes and chronicled some of those mistakes in this blog. But I'm also more hesitant to admit that I watch what she does, who else is watching what she does, and what those other people think of what she does. And the VMAs was no different.

I didn't actually watch the awards show. I knew I wouldn't need to. Because the next morning when I woke up, the most important parts were being shown again and again on television stations, blogs, and youtube. And what were the most important parts? The parts that didn't belong. Specifically, only one part was being shown world-round again and again. That part? Britney's wastline.

The New York Post headline proclaims "Lard and Clear." Oh, there were plenty of other clever little sayings too. I bet you have one in your head right now. The entire show, it seems, was eclipsed by Britney's bulge in her belly and her somewhat off dance moves. I'm constantly amazed by our obssesion with Britney Spears, and the glee with we we push her off of her high horse and watch in amazement as the horse stomps her to death.

Let me add, here, that I am not above the fray. I saw this headline pasted on E! while I was at the gym on the treadmill. I watched as some twenty-odd college students stopped, mid-stride, to gape at the same video that they had already seen ten times before earlier in the day. I tried to figure out if she was fatter too.

But the question shouldn't be centered around Britney's center. As a society, why do we get our giggles from watching other people fail? I've got my own reasons for it. I think this has to do with our insanely competitive world, in which we covet what others have and hate we we've found ourselves stuck with. I do it too. But I don't know how to get past it. How can we stop salivating when we see someone who has it all go off the deep-end? I don't know if we can. Is it the media's fault? Is it our parent's fault? Is it just the way the world is now, with no one to blame (and, with nothing to blame, nothing to look to fixing)? Is it Britney's fault for getting up on stage in that tiny outfit when she knew that we'd be watching, and waiting, like wolves in the field? Can we stop the massacre on each other that we've been plotting all along? Do we even want to?

Who knows.

As an aside, Kanye West spoke out for Britney Spears, criticizing MTV's "explotation" of her at the VMAs. Then he went on to talk about how MTV robbed him of the center stage and made him play to a small room of fans instead of the mob out front. So Kanye hates MTV, loves Britney Spears, likes to rap about the way "he need Jesus," and hates to give up the spotlight. Oh Kanye, you must be my doppelganger in the hip-hop world.

Exploring the Medium

Here's an awesome Flickr page, "Exploring the Medium."

From the page:

Experiments, Studies, and Explorations. Seeing binary — but importantly; what befalls the heroic exploits of our central character when he takes controls and rains up colour and light to this vacuous shallow pond of digital artistry.

Majority of works here were generated with the use of Flash. Enlisting the logic of code and a playful mind to create works that explore colour and compostion.[sic]

That's all just fancy speak to say that these pics are pretty mind-blowing.

From the page:

So, the question seems too almost too basic to ask. But, I'm willing to ask it. Did Al Gore invent the internet?

...Seems like not so much. But, there are plenty or sites out there that might tell you otherwise.
Here's a site that seems to have a somewhat non-biased opinion on the internet; and doesn't base the crux of it's arguement on making fun of Gore.
Well...not much, at least.

I've found this map of Web Trends, developed in a style reminiscent of Subway Transit Maps, on Geekologie.com. Follow this link and you can access an ineractive version.

I think that my fears my finally be self-actualized. Having never taken the time to learn CSS, or even what it means, I now have to turn in a CSS-based website on Friday. I've yet to figure out the specifics behind websites and the CSS aspects of them, or how one goes about producing this CSS element.
Instead of showing off my website with movies and various elements of surprise and intellectual adacity, I'll continue to be the only one in the room eating paste and looking at picture books. I think that my fellow students are going to soon take pity on me, and perhaps slip me a spare cracker every now and then, as though I am the monkey at the zoo. Monkeys, I've heard, are also not well versed in Internet tools.