Indian government workers demand bribes from people all the time. Solution: hand those crooks some worthless currency made especially for bribing. They say it’s working; corrupt bureaucrats are falling back at the sight of people sticking up for themselves.
If you want to overthrow the government of South Carolina, first you have to pay a $5 registration fee. Even if this article was a joke, it might still qualify as a Best Thing: Comedy Edition entry, considering South Carolina’s especially overthrow-y history. But it’s for realsies — some legislators in South Carolina think Al Qaeda is going to stop by and fill out some paperwork. This is a real law! A real law. You’d think. Um. It’s. Wait, does. Mind broken. Real law. Only just. Really? I. (Let’s move on.)
You’re going to a Super Bowl party Sunday night, but you have no idea which of these two teams Eli Manning plays for. Don’t worry; we’ve got your entire Super Bowl fan pack right here.
In 1965, author J. D. Salinger retired with the world heavyweight book-writin’ title belt. By the early ’80s, his Catcher in the Rye was simultaneously the most-banned and second-most-taught book in American schools. He died this week at 91.
Holden Caulfield says: “Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
The iPad
To paraphrase Dee Dee Warwick and Mike Tyson, iPad’s gonna make you love iPad. Need one good reason to convince yourself that you’ll never fall for it? How about twelve?
The iPad is crap futurism whose lack of Flash compatibility might give us a future without Flash. That would be fantastic. The future also promises nine tablet computers that might wind up being as good, better, or cheaper than the iPad. (As with MP3 players and smart phones, Apple wasn’t the first or necessarily the best; they were the loudest biggest and shiniest most magical.)
Holden Caulfield says: “It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”
Also relevant:
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, who also died this week, shoehorned all history into a single narrative and avoided citing his claims — which you can get away with if you’re writing a history text like this, but not if you’re writing one like this. He didn’t exactly become a historian’s historian. But he achieved a harder thing; he made young people see history for what it is: an evolving story with unreliable narrators, usually written by the winners.
Holden Caulfield says: “People always think something’s all true.”
A word:
Has anyone checked on Matt Damon this week? Good Will Hunting was basically Catcher in the Rye: Math Version, and Damon’s character is a big Zinn fan. In fact, Damon was Zinn’s real-life neighbor growing up, and was one of the first people to read a draft of A People’s History.
The Image Initiative is a Syracuse, New York nonprofit dedicated to helping young women of color. They asked us to build an expressive website that puts them in charge of all their content and gives them plenty of room to grow.
The site features a custom Drupal build, an original theme with multiple highly distinct templates, and lots of Views/CCK work to ensure all their newest content goes where it’s supposed to go. We’re very proud of the finished product!
You’ve heard of the uncanny valley. How about the completely useless valley? Realism in UI Design takes us there. More like Useless Interface, am I right?
A lesson in late-night TV walk-on music, music publishing, and markets by Questlove of The Roots, known by many as the greatest-ever hip-hop band and by others as Jimmy Fallon’s house musicians. If you know them by the latter, then… well, then you and I are probably not friends already, but we can get past this! (The big question: How much would it cost to use “Walk On” as walk-on music?)
When it comes to Lost, I’m like a doorbuster sale… I have ZEROZEROZEROZEROINTEREST!!! But this seems like a thing that took work to make and that you’d like.
Watching football is a big waste of time. The average NFL game features only about 11 or 12 minutes of live gameplay content. The rest is replays, crowd shots, loitering, promos, and so on. But is this really a problem? When watching a game by myself, I can play with my daughter, read blogs, work (as I’m doing right now — Hi mom! — there’s 6:16 to go in Cowboys-Vikings!), etc. without really missing much, and lots of people Tivo games anyway. When watching games with friends, there’s plenty of breaks in the football we can use to discuss football. Who really loses in this arrangement? ELSEWHEREINSPORTS:Calculating Charlie Brown’s Wins, Losses, and Other Pitching Stats based on one man’s Peanuts extrapolatin’. No, not this Charlie Brown.
Regarding the strange and unreadable Esquire thing about Jay-Z… Oh man. Plenty of writers had problems with its content, while others focused on its baffling syntax. (FULLDISCLOSURE: I liked that “campefire flickers” line.) I’m not sure which part of this messy, messy article qualifies as a “Best” anything. It’s the most forced writing I’ve ever read — it reads like it was written by a suburban 15-year-old boy who always looks for chances to remind his teachers that Mos Def is poetry. Maybe it’s the article’s amazing music-writer-unifying properties, as the spectacle of rap writers rallying to shoot it down was inspiring.
Jimmy Kimmel lays into Jay Leno on Leno’s own show. Around 1:40, Kimmel dings Leno and Leno refuses to play along. You can see Kimmel’s eyes light up, as he realizes he gets to tee off on Leno for the next four minutes. Jay loses his audience, and all he can do is wait it out. I don’t watch any of these shows, so I don’t really have a dog well-trained competitor in this fight, but Leno is impossible to like at this point.
“Why would anybody ever wanna leave Baltimore? That’s what I’m askin’.”
The new trailer for Treme, the upcoming series by The Wire’s creators:
He was the happiest guy in the world, always joking and getting away with hitting on customers and belting out island music. We nicknamed him BADADO (all caps: essential) because that’s what his songs sounded like to us. He thought that was hilarious and started calling everybody else BADADO too. Even when he was sad because he couldn’t see his kid after his ole lady left, he still greeted us by hollering “BADADOOOO!”
I remember one night it snowed as were closing the store. He’d never seen snow before and was taking pictures of everybody in the parking lot like we’d won something.
Last I recall, he was putting himself through tech school. Ronald’s from Haiti.
(2)
In the 1800s, the U.S. had a military policy called the Monroe Doctrine. Basically, the U.S. intended to protect the many smaller islands and nations in its hemisphere from European colonization. Sure, some people involved likely didn’t have the purest of intentions, but that’s beside the point — somewhere along the line, somebody realized that neighbors have to look out for the neighborhood.
Haiti’s in our neighborhood. If you live near us in Atlanta, for example, you live closer to Haiti than you do to anything past El Paso, Texas or northwest of Aspen, Colorado.
Anil Dash shows how Twitter’s much-worked-up-about Suggested Users List is actually nothing of consequence: Life on the List makes it clear that even though Anil gains “100 new followers every hour” thanks to the List, almost all of these are first-and-only-time users, robots, or zombies. Nobody Has a Million Twitter Followers extends the survey beyond Anil’s site, demonstrating why the Suggested Users List should work at a zoo and stop bothering people*, as it plainly offers no value to any woman, man, child, or organization that could ever exist.
You didn’t see this coming, but we’re about to kind of talk about Miley Cyrus. Now. Specifically, how “Party in the USA” is more of a Jay-Z song than a Michael song, no matter what Miss Cyrus’ editor would have us believe. “We are post-racial to the extent that an incredibly elaborate set of determinations has got us to the place where a song can be at once entirely dipped in the language of hip-hop and come out of the river shining of country grammar.” Miley Cyrrrrrrrrrus.
You thought the Amazon was being deforested due to overexpansion and quests for riches. Of course not! We were just trying to find El Dorado all this time, which it seems, has happened. El Dorado, of course, was the legendary city whose kings took turns dumping a lot of money in a hole. Told you we found El Dorado.
Heads up, friends: This post is part of ENGINE’s decade-closing blogsplosion. Click here to witness the rest of the damage. The aughties!
Everybody’s seen 100,000 or so 10 Best Movies of the Decade lists by now. But how many Top 10 Superhero Deaths lists have you seen?
While building yesterday’s monster list of the worst-of-the-decade lists, I came across plenty of oddball lists that contribute mightily to the art and science of original listmaking. Here are 10 of the best and uniquest*.
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