infobong.com

verbaje

For some reason, my parents don't know what I do in grad school. Although, "Radio, Television, and Film" seems like it would be easy enough to remember, when people ask they reply with what must be the twenty-first century default, "Something with computers."

This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education reminds me of why they might have a hard time remembering: I work in the wacky world of Cultural Studies. The article acknowledges the value of the approach for privileging people over product, but raises questions about the future direction of Cultural Studies and wonders if its interest in the margins of society reduce its relevance to mainstream Westerners.

decadent liberal culture

Over on The Nation's Website is a wide-ranging feature aptly titled, "Rolling Back the 20th Century," which integrates many of the Bush regime's initiatives from school vouchers to ending dividend taxes, into an overall framework of dismantling many of the inroads made by progressives in the last century.

The article touches on one of the facets of the conservative movement that's befuddled me, the alliance between seemingly heartless business types and people of faith. The article notes, "the right has created the political mechanics that allow these disparate elements to pull together. Greider says, "Cosmopolitan corporate executives hold their noses and go along with Christian activists trying to stamp out "decadent" liberal culture."

I'm reminded of a passage in H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, which details the high school football culture in Odessa, Texas. In one passage, Bissinger details how George H.W. Bush visits the West Texas community on a campaign stop, greeted by overwhelming support. The author then notes the irony that Bush and Reagan actions did more to dismantle the oil industry in the town than anyone else. I heartily recommend Friday Night Lights: I read when I lived in Philly, and I remember sitting on the train crying and angry, as it reminded me of the football hegemony at Jenks High School.

Anyway, Naomi Klein has an article in The Guardian that, in part, presents a future I'd like to see. The No Logo author describes how seamstresses in Argentina seized control of their plant and kept it running after the owners couldn't pay their bills and subsquently abandoned the operations.

sometimes i dream of texas

The Chicago Tribune has a story on the use of pitch correction and other vocal effects in mainstream records. Some industry figures are critical of the practice, since it erodes the distinction between musically gifted singers and, um, more pedestrian talents. While some of the sources cited allude to this, the story doesn't quite address the notion that imperfections in performance give records humanity. I'm sure similar debates have raged since Brian Wilson and The Beatles started messing around with multi-track recording, but perhaps if Will Oldham's next record arrives pitch-perfect, I'll start getting upset about this issue.

let the dogs out

"In Texas, laws exist against sodomy but not bestiality. So legally you can have sex with your dog, but not with a gay partner," The Philadelphia Daily News attempting to explain the context of Senator Rick Santorum's homophobic remarks.

takin' it easy

This blog will probably be on hiatus for the next week or so, as my computer is acting up and I have lots of end-of-semester work to take care of. Just because I post a thing or two over the comihg week, doesn't mean I'll be blogging with my usual fervor.

almost forgot

In honor of the holiday, check out Oolong the pancake-balancing bunny Jaeger blogged about a while back.

pups for peace

My brain is tied up with papers, so little to no blogging for a while. In the meantime, here's a picture for your browsing pleasure

Sally and friend, Austin

train to satansville

I was having a hard time studying, and it occurred to me that it might be the music I was playing, namely Swervedriver's Mezcal Head. Looking for something more, um, ambient, I put on a recent purchase Ramda by Mice Parade. It only took a few bars for me to say, "Man, you listen to some weird music."

its really big

I'm too busy to post much tonight, but I just exported my entries from Movable Type as a backup. I saw that the resulting XML file was over half a Megabyte. Dang, that seems like a lot of blogging.

a throwaway line

Climbing up the charts at Blogdex, is a Washington Post story that relates a benefit for inner-city children hosted by Fox News Channel talk-show host Bill O'Reilly. After a performance by the Best Men, a lip-sync group composed of young men, O'Reilly quipped, "Does anyone know where the Best Men are? I hope they're not in the parking lot stealing our hubcaps."

democracy made real

Andrew Sullivan spoke on "blogging and journalism" at the Texas Union last night, suggesting that blogs provide an end-run around institutional journalism for average citizens. While Michael Moore drew 4,400 the night before, maybe a hundred came out to see the right-wing creep blogger.

Sullivan said this was the first time he had been invited to speak about blogging specifically and couched the blog trend in revolutionary rhetoric.

Sullivan suggested that blogs offer writers lowered barriers to entry, comparing the amount of institutional experience a journalist needs before becoming an op/ed columnist to the amount of time it takes to set up a Blogspot blog. "All the ancient maladies of journalism are gone in one fell swoop," he said, suggesting blogs are more efficient means of sharing information and ideas.He also praised blogs inherent subjectivity, claiming the blog format allows greater "intimacy" between writer and reader than the editorial page of a newspaper or an opinion journal like The New Republic, which Sullivan once edited. As if to defend his move from print media to online media, he claimed that bloging is much like journalism. "Its the same, only more honest, more original, more flexible [than print journalism]", he said.

Finally, Sullivan invoked the spirit of participatory democracy to tout the potential of blogs. "It allows anyone to be not just a consumer, but a producer," he said, adding, "it is democracy made real." I found it interesting that the Ivy-educated Sullivan, reeking of privilege, would appropriate leftist notions of public participation to promote a medium dominated by middle-class computer-literate whites.

Sullivan prefaced his question-and-answer session by asking to keep questions in good taste, then joked, that tacky questions are often asked anyway. I assumed that this was a reference to the furor over the revelations that the HIV-Positive Sullivan was caught soliciting partners for "barebacking." I was unable to pose my question to Sullivan, which challenged his assertion that blogging uniquely enables publishing opinions by non-institutional writers. When he spoke of lowered barriers to entry, I thought immediately of how the 'zine community erupted as photocopiers became cheap and common during the 1980s. He also pointed to Natalie Merchant's recent self-released and distributed album as lowered barriers to entry, but I thought to myself, "Um, how is this different than Indie Rock?"

How are blogs that different from 'zines? I imagine Sullivan's answer would revolve around the Internet, making him the eToys.com of public discourse. Of course, a second answer would be leftists and progressives produce and consume 'zines and indie rock, while smug educated folk like Sullivan are firmly entrenched in the blogosphere.

tempeh not tempe

As I walked back from the gym this morning a red Honda Insight marked "Austin Fire Department" passed me on Manor then parked at Mi Madre's. As I walked past the restaurant, I saw the officer going in, and I shouted, "Nice Ride!"
With an aw-shucks demeanor, he said, "It gets me around."
"It's cool; I like it."

I've been keeping track of lovable quirks about Austin, like the fact I can easily fit my Ranger pickup in one of BookPeople's "Compact Only" parking spots; Wheatsville Co-op serves a vegan Frito pie; and Little City's hummus-and-tomato sandwhich comes with chips and salsa. (OK, that one may not be so lovable.) The fire department's hybrid-electric command vehicles definitely make the list.

important cultural values

bOINGbBOING reports that GM Canada has apologized for the "Freaks and Weirdos" ad suggesting riders should funk up the environment and drive a Sunfire rather than endure the bus. A pdf of the apology letter is here.

the big one

Tonight I saw filmmaker and general loudmouth Michael Moore speak at UT. The event was originally scheduled at the LBJ School's Bass lecture hall, but demand for tickets was so great he spoke in Gregory Gym, which seemed nearly full. Greeted by thousands of students on their feet cheering, Moore seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the crowd and its enthusiasm. After the crowd died down he exclaimed, "This is the Texas the rest of the world needs to see!"

Moore spoke on a number of topics including the war, his, um, performance at the Oscars, and media consolidation. I'm too tired to write or even remember all of my impressions here, but it was an interesting mixture of political posturing and showmanship. At one point, he pulled out his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine and said, "This is the people's Oscar! Do you wanna touch it?"
He handed the statuette to a student in the front row, then told them to pass it around the audience. However, the Oscar never left a roped-off section of seats for student VIPs. Although it would have taken hours for it to pass through the hands of everyone there, it seemed a little cheap.

Regular readers of this site will know that I think Moore is the Rush Limbaugh of the Left, a political entertainer with axes to grind, but lacking a certain political consistency or circumspection. I think its great that someone with progressive political views can capture so much attention, but he also serves as a caricature for critics of the progressive project, feeding their straw-man attacks. Anyway, I thought he played fast-and-loose with his attacks on Clear Channel, suggesting they owned a third to half of the radio stations in the US. While I won't deny Clear Channel owns a lot of radio stations (1,125) and doesn't act in the public interest, I think those numbers are way, way inflated. The FCC says there were 10,983 commerical radio stations in 2001, so Clear Channel may own well over 10% of the commercial radio market, that's a far cry from a third or a half of stations.

In another moment in the talk, he noted how James Baker represented the Bush campaign in the Florida legal tussle after the 2000 election, but suggested some anonymous wimp represented Gore. Moore asked, "Does anyone remember who the Gore team had?"
I shouted, "David Boies!" from the balcony, but that got no reaction from anyone.
I wondered if Moore actually forgot a lawyer with the profile of Boies represented Gore or if he "forgot" for rhetorical effect.

On the whole, I enjoyed the talk quite a bit. My favorite moment was when Moore criticized the administration's profiling of Muslims as terrorists, pointing out that while Osama Bin Laden is a Muslim, he's also a multi-millionaire, and Ashcroft and pals aren't indiscriminately locking up multi-millionaires.

occupation and domination

On KOOP the other day, a show interviewed UT's Robert Jensen about how the U.S. staged the toppling of Saddam's statue . Although I was in class much of the day, Jensen said the cable networks had their cameras trained on the statue long before it was clear the statue would fall, suggesting the event was concocted for propaganda purposes. Information Clearing House has an interesting analysis of photos taken of the event, showing U.S. vehicles were used to pull the statue down and only a small number of Iraqis were actually present cheering. Here's Ward Sutton's comic send-up of the event.

kidnaps everyone else

I think these young children in Norway have a better sense of the United States' international role than most Americans.

zig-zag wanderer

downtown Austin, the night the war started

contextualist, mechanistic, or organicist

I tell my dad "There's no such thing as a weekend in grad school," and, if you need proof, I received a paper assignment at 10:53 Saturday night and read it right away. The assignment, which I've pasted below, call on us to analyse the historical method in one of eight essays. I've already read all of Stephen Kern's amazing The Culture of Time and Space, so I'll probably base my essay on the selection from that book. Unfortunately, my copy is in Tulsa, so I'll probably work from a poorly-Xeroxed version.

RTF 395--Theory and Literature

Spring 2003 Janet Staiger

UTA--GRAD

Paper 3

DUE: Tuesday, May 6, noon, my RTF mailbox. NO late papers.

LENGTH: 7-10 typed, double-spaced (at least 10-point font and double-space)

The Assignment
Write an essay describing the historical method used in one of the essays below. Then discuss (for at least one third of your essay) how you would apply that method to a research question in the area you are studying.
In considering the historical method of the selected essay, you might (but are not obliged to) look at:
1) The overall organizational method of the essay. Does it employ an overall structure of an argument or a narrative? For the narrative, does differences between the plot and story illuminate the essay's structure? Referring to Hayden White's typology, is the explanation idiographic, contextualist, mechanistic, or organicist?
2) The causal logic. For instance, are the historical events presented as causally linked or co-existent within a broader historical period.
3) The cause force. To what does the essay attribute agency? What is the essay's theoretical debts (say, for example, to sociological or psychological theory)?
4) The number of causes.
5) The type of causal change. Does the essay consider its historical object to occur within periods? How does the essay demarcate periods? How does it represent change?

The Logistics

Two sets of these essays will be in a folder in the RTF Media Library (CMA 5.130) no later than 5pm Friday, April 18. You may read them there. One set will be permanent. No part of it may be removed from the Library. The second set (or parts of it) may be removed for up to one hour to do photocopying.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. "O.K. Momma, Who the Hell Am I?: an Interview with Luisah Teish," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Pp. 221-31.

Benjamin, Walter. "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephocott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Pp. 146-62.

Darnton, Robert. "Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin," in The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Pp. 75-104.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Fiction and Friction" in Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. 66-93

Kern, Stephen. "Speed," in The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Pp. 109-30.

Kerr, Louise Año Nuevo. "Chicanas in The Great Depression," in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press, 1990. Pp. 257-68.

Noble, David F. "The Wedding of Science to the Useful Arts--III: The Emergence of the Professional Engineer," in America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Pp. 33-49.

Somerville, Siobhan. "Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2 (1994): 243-66.

moment of its resurrection

Mother Jones has a Q&A with clip artiste extraordinaire David Rees, creator of "Get Your War On" and "Get Your Enr On." This story is over a week old, I know; I wish I had the time to keep up with coursework and read all the media I love. I also sadly missed Rees when he spoke at a benefit in Austin last fall.

mountains with black faces

So I was riding in my pickup listening to Nas' infectiously catchy "I Can." The sound critiques European colonialism, so I thought it was ironic that it quotes Beethoven's "Für Elise," until I remembered the theory that holds Beethoven was black.

On the subject of Germans of color, the Gray Lady is running a story on Turkish-German youth, which profiles filmmaker Neco Celik and the emerging hip-hop subculture within Gastarbeiter communites.

wir füllen Käse

Meine Schwester insists Germans are not funny, but, after taking five years of coursework, I still think German is funny as all get out. If you need proof, check out Google's auto-translation of this page.

OK, I know automated translation almost always results in something funny, but I just imagine a Pizza commericial claiming, "wir füllen Käse in den Plätzen an, die Sie nie ungefähr träumten" or watching "der landwirtschaftlichen Funktionskategorienamerikaner" on "Die Herzöge von Hazzard" and I have to laugh.

cleaning up after a party

Clip art or no clip art, David Rees moves fast. The latest "Get Your War On" is up and it raises questions about the future of Iraq. Here's hoping they see democracy.

unique body of material

Its old news to Ausinites, but UT-Austin announced it purchased journalists Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate papers on Monday. The University paid $5 million, which this Washington Post story suggests may have been too much. The Harry Ransom Center certainly has an impressive collection of historical artifacts, including a print that is arguably the work's first photograph.

obey authority mindlessly

OK, this is has to be the most elitist thing I've read, since, well, iZac's suggestion they should use private thugs security services to quell critics of the adminstration. My irony detector is going off, (it doesn't help that it's on a Harvard server) but its entirely possible he's playing devil's advocate.

pre-existing social formations

For one of my courses we read a chapter, "Breakages Unlimited," from Brian Winston's book, Misunderstanding Media, which I think offers a great framework for thinking about technological change through the lens of culture. In the chapter, he looks at the introduction of technology into culture from economic, industrial, and scientific perspectives, positing that the revolutionary rhetoric surrounding communications technology has existed for ages. However, the uptake of a technology, he says, follows four stages, accompanied by three intervening periods of transformation. To put this in context, the model would suggest that the vaunted "Internet revolution" closely follows the adoption patterns of the telephone, the motion picture, or any number of new technologies.

The phase I found most interesting was the third period of transformation, "the law of supression of radical potential." As products reach consumers, instituitional forces, like the government, entrenched industries, and other forces limit the potential of a technology for social change. In his words, "general social constraints operate to limit the potential of a device to radically disrupt existing social formations."

When I learned of this, I immediately thought of the attempts by the entertainment industry to limit the ability for networked personal computers to share intellectual property. In the model, the MPAA and RIAA see the potential for computer to distribute culture like movies and music without them and seek to supress the radical potential of these machines. A perhaps more powerful example is the Chinese government's attempts to control Internet content through a nationwide firewall. If the Navy's success in constraining peer-to-peer radio use in the early 20th century or the relatively toothless VCRs we have today are a guide, much of the potential of the Internet may never be realized.

On the topic of file-sharing, Slashdot has a discussion today about the RIAA's lawsuit against a Michigan Tech student accused of piracy. The university president issued a release condemming the actions of the RIAA: although Michigan Tech pledged to cooperate with the RIAA in shutting down file-sharing on campus, the RIAA sued the student individually.

schlepped in a giant television

Meine Schwester Julia, who is studying in Berlin, sent me this NPR article, writing, "Dude, I walk by this everyday!"

is that a goiter

War-mongers attack the peace posse by reminding them that Saddam Hussein - a man we kept in power and supplied with weapons for years - tortures dissidents. So, I may ask, is it wrong for Saddam to torture dissendents, but its OK to see images like this in our own nation? Here's a veritable catalog of the devices used against protestors today in Oakland, including huge wooden bullets launched from shotguns. Yup, this is how democracy is supposed to work.

Since iZac suggest cops should protect government installations when Black Bloc anarchists threaten them, I'm posting this NYTimes story that says protestors were targeting private shipping companies. The Alameda naval base is a few miles south of Oakland's port, so its not like they had to use the port to ship millitary gear. The story also notes police attacked demonstrators before allowing them to leave.

back from the CSS trenches

Well, all y'all using MSIE on Mac are either going to have to suffer looking at the mainbar overlapping the right sidebar or just use a better browser. I checked out this site on Netscape 7 for OS X today, and, indeed, there's hella whitespace on the right side of the mainbar, so I fixed it so my friends running Mozilla or Netscape 7 can see the m4dbl0g the way it was meant to be seen. The problem comes from the different way the different browsers render the "margin-right" and "right" CSS tags. To keep the mainbar from overlapping in MSIE 5 for Mac, I have to use "margin-right," which gives you a bunch of whitespace in Netscape. Yeah, I can do a browser-detect, but I don't think its worth the effort.

just a bunch of body parts

According to this comic strip, literacy advocate and former teacher Laura Bush is asking Americans to "please read to a dead Iraqi child." I'm glad to see Ward Sutton's Schlock -N- Roll is now available at the Village Voice Web site. I remember reading it in the pages of Philadelphia City Paper and wanting to blog it, but it wasn't online anywhere. Here's another comic by Sutton depicting Rumsfeld's uses and gratifications of "shock and awe."

And since I'm pointing to comics online, this amusing Ted Rall joint ran in today's Daily Texan. Is it just me, or does the term "embed" evoke ingrown toenails or wisdom teeth that need to be pulled?

just some good ole wankstas

It doesn't take me long to vacuum my studio apartment, but it takes long enough for me to think of something truly asinine. As I was vacuuming, I imagine handing someone a mix CD, and they would ask,
"What's on it?"
"Oh, just some Morrissey and Merle Haggard with a few 50 Cent club mixes thrown in," I would reply.
Then I imagined Morrissey and 50 Cent recording The Dukes of Hazzard theme song as a duet - and making a very special guest appearance on Hee-Haw to promote the cut.

My mom says my favorite show as a kid was Hee-Haw, which used to drive my babysitters crazy. I remember loving The Dukes as well, thinking Daisy's Jeep was tight. The other day in class I joked about writing a dissertation about The Greatest American Hero, but Hee-Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard would actually make an interesting research project, investigating representation of rural working class Americans during in the television of that era.

that css love

I just discovered this site looks terrible in Netscape 6.2 for Windows. Nearly half of my visits are from people using Netscape, primarily on Linux, so if it looks like crap on Linux and Mac, I am chagrinned. I spent a lot of time fiddling and fiddling to make it look right in Netscape and IE for Mac, so this was a startling revelation that came months later. My apologies if you've been looking at a skinny mainbar with a lot of whitespace between it and the sidebar.

I've been wanting to redsign this site for a while now, but it certainly won't happen before the end of the semester. Obviously a three-column layout is not feasible with the plethora of ways browsers render style sheets, so I'll certainly move to a two-column layout and perhaps even with fixed width. The thing, is, I want to avoid "the never-ending blogroll," yet I want to point people to my friends' sites and other blogs I like, as well as have the archives accessible from the front page. So, I guess I have three options, namely, get over it and deploy the blogroll of death, get over it and significantly prune the sidebars, or take the plunge and try doing some thing with rollover menus in DHTML. The third option seems like a good solution, but I already feel burned by CSS and I don't see the point in spending a lot of hours and energy on trying to solve unexpected rendering problems. I don't see a lot of sites use rollover menus much anymore, perhaps its because they're flaky and stuff.

put on the kid gloves

I'll admit that I'm not an avid reader of The Onion, but I never really picked up on a political tone to their satire. However, since Bush began saber-rattling, the paper's coverage of "Operation Piss Off the Planet" has become overtly critical of the adminstration. This point/counter-point from last week beatifully summarized the right's responses to the anti-war movement for all its knee-jerk silliness and ad hominem attacks. Now this guest editorial lampoons our nation's attitudes toward civil liberties:

I guess The Onion always sneered at middle-class ideology, but it seems particularly strident (and understandably so) these days.

books not bombs

At today's march, a man was hauling this wagon full of books and signs protesting Bush's lack of attention to domestic issues, particularly education. He was collecting books for the Inside Books project, so it was both street theater and direct action at the same time.

We congregated at the Lyndon Baines Johnson library on the UT-Austin campus, then marched up Red River Street to the federal building in downtown Austin.

This young man was distributing bagels from his modded bike as part of the Food Not Bombs project.

I asked him if it was difficult to maneuver. He said he got used to riding it quickly, but you can't ride very fast because its hard to stop with its coaster brakes.

marching up Red River

The march took us past the track and soccer field, where the Texas Relays were taking place. Many of the spectators, particularly African-Americans showed their support as the march went past. These young women were particularly excited, hollering their support and dancing to the drummers.

When we got to the federal building, the drummers set up shop under a structure hanging over the street. The noise was darn near deafening.

The news media was in attendance this afternoon, and I took a couple of shots of them in action.

pretty when you're unfaithful

I was reading this thread over on Plastic; a post mentioned Avril Lavigne's taste for The Pixies; and I immediately put on Surfer Rosa. Its been too damn long. I think Doolittle might be the first indie album I ever bought: at least its the first one that I still own.

if you'll be my flotsam

Tonight, I stopped by Waterloo Records on a lark, and, boy howdy, did I score. A sign on the door announced they were having a 20-percent-off-just-about-everything sale, so I resolved to be especially thorough as I scoured the used vinyl, but I only flipped through three or four LPs before I saw June 1, 1974 by Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Brian Eno, and Nico. I've wanted this record for years, but its out of print and occasionally available in a ridiculously expensive import, so, when I saw Waterloo was asking $3.99, I was like "WORRRRRRD!" Yeah. The LP itself is in fantastic shape, but the jacket's becoming unglued along the bottom seam. I can fix this with a little Elmer's but the jacket is generally flimsy. Its a Greek import, so maybe the Greeks don't like heavy cardboard LP covers like us Americans.

Afterwards, I headed down to Sun Harvest to get some cheap bulk herbs. As I was picking up produce, there was a hottie in a Greta Garbo T-Shirt picking up pre-rinsed spinach and whatnot. In class, Prof. Staiger suggested grocery stores are a good place to pick up women, so I was like, "Dude, maybe you should like talk to her or something." Unfortunately, I'm severely mack-impaired, so I spent a long time trying to think of stuff to say, like, "Um, yeah, like do you like Garbo?" then try to impress her with my not-quite-vast knowledge of depression-era Hollywood. She was buying a lot of prepared food like bottled pasta sauce and those bagged salad mixes, so I figured it wasn't worth the effort.

anxious to discuss the war

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has issued a report on Internet use and the War on Iraq. Some of their conclusions like,

reflect my impatience with quantitative methods, but, interestingly, a section is devoted to blogging during wartime, where they concede "the overall number of blog users is so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs."

the power of e

No not that E. According to this chat transcript, my second favorite comic strip (after The Boondocks) Pearls Before Swine began life as an online comic strip, then later picked up by a synidicate. I wonder if this will be trend in the future, where syndicates pick up successful online strips. Maybe someday we'll see Diesel Sweeties tucked away in the pages of The Daily Oklahoman.

I thought this comic from the other day was particularly amusing, but I wondered why it was set at an anti-globalization protest, rather than, say, an anti-war action. In the transcript artist Stephan Pastis says that the synidicate is re-running the greatest hits from Pearls online-only days, so maybe this is an older strip.

a beacon of liberty

Here's a slowly-paced Flash presentation that uses photographs to document changing international attitudes toward the US between 9/11 and the present.

rent a balaclava

According to my page stats, a US Department of Justice computer accessed this blog today after querying Google with the name of an Iranian-American friend of mine, who happens to be involved with progressive causes. I want to think that our pal at the DOJ was simply interested in Kasra's musical pursuits and little else. But these are different times. Earlier this week, Intel engineer Maher Mofied 'Mike' Hawash, a naturalized citizen, was arrested without charges by the FBI. The Feds cited his contribution of money to a charity linked to terror groups as grounds to hold him as a material witness.

pomposity and hubris

Earlier this week, NBC fired war correspondent Peter Arnett for appearing on Iraqi state TV, and noting American forces were unprepared for Iraqi resistance. UT journalism prof Robert Jensen has an editorial up on Newsday criticizing Arnett and discussing some of the lessons learned from this incident.

Robert Jensen on the bullhorn durng the Guadalupe Street sit-in.

corrosive effects of electronic media

Course descriptions for next fall are up on the Web, and I'm mulling over what I want to take. I'll probably enroll in three hours of thesis research, a Radio-TV-Film seminar, and a course outside the department for my minor. I'm super thrilled with my classes this semester, but there are some interesting course titles for next term. RTF 387F Global Vs. Regional Media; RTF 384C Media Economics; and RTF 386C Youth, Media, and Cultural Studies all sound awesome. I'd like to take a class with RTF's Mary Kearney, who's teaching RTF 386C Feminist and Queer Film Theory in the fall, but despite holding a degree in film, I don't find film all that interesting.

I'm also intrigued by this course in the English department, Literacy in the Digital Era, which I may take, but I would also like to take a course that lets me get my hands dirty and work with technology. I'm thinking of emailing the art department, and see what courses I could take over there.

What do you readers out there in Cyberspace think I should take? If you were an RTF student, what would you take?

laudable goals in education

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on affirmative action:

The operative word here seems to be "visibly" - as in a glance at a person of color tells Scalia and his pals they don't belong in a presitigious institution. Yuck. The social unconciousness of these people who want to dismantle affirmative action only prove racism still runs rampant in America.

go usa

I think this picture proves why we should be spending our precious tax dollars on education instead of the war on Iraq.

seven decades of funk

Last night I went to the Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo and caught the mutton busters and trick ropers, followed by the very special musical guest James Brown. The Godfather of Soul stopped through Austin on his "Seven Decades of Funk Tour," commemorating his 70th year on this planet. Mr. Brown played on a revolving stage set in the middle of the dirt rodeo arena, as you can see from this map. Thanks to the motion of the stage, all of the fans had an opportunity to see the hardest working man in showbiz work his magic, but Matthew and I had particularly good seats, sitting in section EE, which the band faced for much of the show. Although we were in the back row, I felt that our view compared favorably with seats I've had in concert halls.

Seeing James Brown perform at a rodeo was nothing short of a priceless experience, outstripping even George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars at the Home of Bob Wills, in terms of cultures colliding. Yet it came at the low, low price of $20. I frankly wondered why they would pair a rodeo show with a James Brown concert. Are people like, "James Brown is coming to Austin? Hmmm, twenty dollars seems kind of steep. Wait, you said there's gonna be calf ropin'? Well, damn, that makes all the difference!"

Props to Kim for alerting the Austin blog community to this event.

naturally good

I have not altered this image in any way: I plopped the bag in the scanner, scanned, and cropped. Each time I've passed the Golden Stream display at H-E-B, I've done a doubletake, then thought to a grab bag of the questionably branded hippie treats to post on the blog, and, tonight, I finally did it. At first I thought, it might be an example of Engrish, poorly-used English from Asian companies, but the bag says Golden Stream is based in Fisher, Indiana, so that theory is out the door.