infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

Last week, I watched FOX’s rerun of the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and I thought it was dumb. After Time TV critic James Poniewozik’s glowing recommendation, I decided to tune in to the second season’s premiere last night. Besides, I thought it was my duty as a former Philadelphian and student of media to see how the City of Brotherly Shove is represented on screen.

At first I was inclined to think that the only think Philly about “Sunny” was b-roll of the city and references to places — the opening titles feature postcard shots of obvious landmarks like the Ben Franklin bridge, Logan Circle, the art museum, and South Street — but I realized the show had a Philadelphian sensibility after all. The humor of the show isn’t really my style, but I found myself laughing. As I laughed I realized that I was laughing not so much because I thought it was funny, but because it was something my friend Jay would think is funny. Jay is a transplant from Tulsa to Philly and found it easy to fit into the culture of the city, something I wasn’t able to do. I was laughing because I knew Jay would be laughing. I realized that his humor is probably more in tune with the city’s than mine. Other Philadelphians probably enjoy the crude sensibility.

The second episode aired last night also included a plot point that might not be unique to Philadelphia, but certainly reflected the character of the city. A new neighbor buys the property next door to the bar owned by the ensemble of main characters. He informs them that the deed includes property 400 feet into the bar. Thanks to surveying errors or custom, this demarcation had been ignored, and the land had been a part of the bar’s building. The new owner wanted to evict the owners from his land. (This is something that would actually happen in Philly.) I won’t reveal how the issue is resolved, but it certainly reflected the character of one of America’s oldest cities.

There are plenty of things that seem out of place in a show about Philly. The bar is vastly larger than any bar I visited in the city, none of the characters have obvious Philadelphia accents, and there aren’t any black people in the show. The show doesn’t convey the sense of claustrophobia and tension I felt when I lived there, but, for a TV show, it does an admirable job of reflecting “the real” Philadelphia.

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• Defending Markos And the Discourse Revolution
  Juan Cole’s take on the political establishment’s increasingly strident criticism of blogs like Daily Kos. There’s not that much new here, but it’s worth reading nonetheless.
  (tags: blog politics power media)
• Control – A Film By Anton Corbijn
  about Joy Division.
  (tags: music punk film biopic)
• CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down
  Citing a database snafu, a Web 2.0 startup takes itselff off line.
  (tags: Web2.0 backup weird)

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• Madison, Not London
  John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats’ take on the new Dr. Octagon album. I’ve been listening to the old one a lot lately, and I had no idea a new one was coming out!
  (tags: music hip-hop blog weird)
• • sonic fabric •
  “A textile woven from recycled audio cassette tape.” It doesn’t come cheap.
  (tags: clothing design oldmedia)

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• Eight Ways to Kill Someone by Using an iPod Nano
  I just now saw this McSweeney’s item.
  (tags: iPod humor)

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Weblogsky points to yet another post suggesting that MySpace’s ugly design is, in fact, responsible for its success. This time, Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com argues that the ease-of-use of MySpace is responsible for attracting hordes of users. I find this a little hard to swallow. Lately, I’ve been really frustrated with MySpace’s habit of hiding functionality. For example, the page that aggregates blog subscriptions is more or less hidden, unless someone has posted a new entry since the last time I checked the site. When a blog is updated, I get a “new blog subscription posts” message on my “home” page, which links to the blog aggregator, but I am otherwise unable to drill through and find this page. (MySpace has URIs that are difficult to decipher, so remembering the URI is out of the question.) A different, but equally annoying problem lies in posting bulletins. If I want to post a bulletin, the link to the posting page is not by “My Bulletin Space,” where I would expect it, but in a table for “My Mail.” If bulletins and mail are in different tables, then the bulletin link should be with the bulletins. Beyond these frustrating design choices, there is a vast amount of useless clutter on the MySpace home page. I really don’t care about uncool “Cool New People,” alerts on Helio, or importing my address book after I’ve done it. There are a variety of useful Greasemonkey scripts for fixing the design flaws on MySpace, but the nice folks at News Corp. should be addressing these as well.

I still contend that MySpace’s liberal policy toward overriding stylesheets and embedding media is the factor most responsible for its success.

MySpace media hysteria seems to be hitting its peak. I saw a hideous segment on CNN the other night that built on fears about child predators on the social networking site. I can understand why parents might be afraid about their children’s safety online, but how is this any different than the dangers of children using AOL and is this really the most interesting story to tell about the wildly popular site? The piece shared a few anecdotes about runaways and abuse victims using the site, then pulled in a clip of Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet and American Life project speaking about MySpace at a conference. In the clip she says:

These sites are incredibly important to teenagers. I heard a teenage boy who was otherwise relatively standoffish talk with a fervor about how the best part of his day was logging into his MySpace page and seeing if someone had commented him or had friended him.

In text, this seems like a relatively harmless description of how teens use MySpace, but the “predator” story angle combined with Lenhart’s histrionic performance make it seem that teens are helplessly drawn into the project. Although I hardly want to side with News Corp., the news media is being irresponsible about their reporting on MySpace and online activity in general, boiling everything down to child abuse and business reporting.

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• Language Log: Dzongkha Linux
  Microsoft wouldn’t localize Windows for the Dzongkha language spoken in Bhutan, so hackers developed a Linux distribution for the mountain kingdom.
  (tags: opensource globalization language China)
• “Deadheads Are What Liberals Claim to Be But Aren’t”: An Interview with Ann Coulter
  Jambase.com sits down with the professional troll to discuss the Grateful Dead.
  (tags: music politics scary fandom)

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There’s a rally tonight for suspended Austin High art teacher Tamara Hoover at AISD headquarters: 1111 W. 6th St. at 7pm. Hoover got into a spat with another teacher over the use of a kiln, and it only got hotter from there. A student told the teacher of the existence of nude images of Hoover that had been taken from a private area of her girlfriend’s Flickr account. I’m not sure I would be particularly worked up about this, if it weren’t for the fact that the photos were not accessible to the public. Someone gained unauthorized access to the photos and redistributed them on the Web. It’s not as if she was appearing in Playboy magazine or a porn site. Not only was Hoover’s privacy violated, but the school district and the media are stretching the facts. Each news report should mention that the images were in a protected area — not “on the internet” — but the coverage seems to frame it as “daffy lesbians putting dirty pictures in the hands of kids.” It seems that homophobia and fears about the internet are trumping the facts of the case. I sort of wonder where Flickr is in all of this mess. Are Flickr’s privacy controls too weak, or is its security too lax? Or was it a simple case of an easily-guessed password?

Here’s an interview with the photographer Celesta Danger at Austinist.

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Gabbly is a interesting project that uses Javascript to create chat windows on any given page. For example, you can browse to http://gabbly.com/http://infobong.com and chat on this blog. Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone would be chatting here, since I have so few readers. Since bOINGbOING is the most widely read English-language blog according to Technorati, I decided to check and see if there was a Gabbly chat going on there, but at that time, there was no one chatting. One nice thing about the service is that the chats seem to be persistent — you can see old chats even if everyone has left. It also allows you to embed chats into other sites. I tried to embed a chat window in LiveJournal and MySpace, but apparently those sites block iframes. It’s nice to discover MySpace blocks something other than HTML entities.

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• Database of American Proprietary Eponyms
  Via Cory Arcangel, a list of service marks that have become generic signifiers. Be sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom.
  (del.icio.us tags: business commodification trademark advertising)
• Next-gen RFID tools expand the market
  Via Bruce Sterling: “New standards, prohibitive costs, and the lack of upper-level business context left most companies tuned out to this much-ballyhooed technology.”
  (del.icio.us tags: buzzword business rfid)

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A few blogs have pointed to Classic Movies it’s OK to Hate” at The Onion AV Club. As I had hoped, Star Wars made the top of the list. As a child, I positively loved the universe and collected the dolls action figures, but, when I watched it in class as an undergrad, I was bored out of my gourd. It just seemed to drag. I don’t think the prequels have done anything to improve the film’s status in my mind either, so I’m a little bewildered by commitment of its fan community. For example, Austin has a weekly radio show about the films. Why?

The article doesn’t reveal its criteria for a “classic movie,” and, as someone who’s spent the better part of his adult life in academic film-TV programs, there are some classics missing I expect to see. Casablanca or Citizen Kane aren’t mentioned. I frankly enjoy Citizen Kane, but I’d certainly entertain an argument over why it’s OK to hate it. And where’s The Sorrow and the Pity? Many of these movies like Caddyshack and The Big Lebowsky aren’t “classics” in the sense that you’d watch them in film school, but apparent favorites among certain twenty-something buff communities.

I’d like to add my own list of classic movies it’s OK to hate, but I’m frankly drawing a blank. One movie that comes to mind is Full Metal Jacket, which I found pretty offensive when I watched it last summer. Compared to other Vietnam American War in Vietnam movies, the film used a painful moment in history and the suffering of soldiers and families for a dry, formalist experiment. To me, it just seems pretentious and disengaged from the characters depicted on screen.

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