infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

As a quick local note, an entry on the technology gossip blog Valleywag reveals that the third most popular search term driving traffic to Flickr is “Tamara Hoover,” the suspended Austin High teacher I’ve blogged about before. Her name ranked after “Flickr” and “Flickr.com,” but I imagine most of the users are more interested in seeing the nude pictures that got her in trouble than in supporting her cause. It’s particularly telling that the fourth most common search is for “boobs.”

Valleywag has another post that relates to Austin and Flickr. In an item about the Flickr colouring contest, it uses the entry local blogger Prentiss Riddle, without crediting the source. At first, I thought Prentiss might have used a particularly liberal license for the image, but it’s marked “all rights reserved,” so the site is just engaging in copyright infringement. Come on, Valleywag, give Prentiss some credit!

Update: Prentiss says he emailed the folks at Valleywag, and they now credit his image. Good for them.

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Austin blogs are abuzz today with the release of a study that says Austin is the third best-educated city in the US. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that Austin follows Seattle and San Fran in the rankings, considering UT-Austin was for many years the largest college campus in the country. (It’s now the fifth largest.) However, my hometown of Tulsa checks in as the 19th best-educated city, ahead of Columbus, which is home to The Ohio State University. I guess megacampuses can only go so far in raising the collective intelligence of a city, but Minneapolis, with the University of Minnesota, is ranked fifth.

Whenever I read these studies, I’m a little surprised to see really big cities fall at the bottom of the list. It’s not surprising to see Philadelphia come in at number 50 (out of 53). When I lived there, I was confronted with unimaginable stupidity on a daily basis, but I would attribute the low ranking to the white flight that led most of the middle-and-upper class to the suburbs, so much of the city is full of poor neighborhoods and undereducated citizens. Still, New York City comes it at 32, Los Angeles at 41, and Chicago at 39. These cities seem to be full of educated professionals living in the city limits. Perhaps immigration could account for the lower percentages of college and high-school grads.

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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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I was leaving Austin coffeeshop The Green Muse last night when I saw this guy pecking at this PowerBook on top of his Jeep. It was pretty clear that he was downloading information about working on the vehicle. After I asked if I could snap a picture, I asked, “Who needs Chilton, when you’ve got the Interweb?” I’m not sure if he got my reference to the line of auto service manuals, but he said that, yes, he had downloaded the Jeep service manual. “It’s got like 1,400 pages here!” he told me. I keep the Chilton manual for my pickup behind the bench seat, but I imagine tracking down the manufacturer’s documentation online would work in a pinch.

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UT-Austin paper The Daily Texan reports actor Robert De Niro has donated his collecton of movie ephemera to campus archive The Harry Ransom Center. Unlike the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate papers, which fetched $5 million from the archive, it seems like the Hi Mom! star may have simply given the artifacts away. The story gushes over the prospect of students checking out the prosthetic noses the actor used in Raging Bull or the notes on his shooting script for Greetings, a film I’m sure all of three Texan readers know. The HRC has quite an amazing collection of ephemera — like Jean-Paul Sartre’s journals or Edgar Allen Poe’s writing desk — that it’s a little disappointing to think that De Niro’s stuff would be a draw. Maybe some star-struck students will come to see the movie-related stuff, and have their interest in existentialism or photography piqued by one of the other exhibits.

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Driving the other day, I heard Whale’s “Hobo-Humpin’ Slobo Babe” on 101X, Austin’s “New Rock Alternative” FM station. At first I was a little surprised because I don’t think I’d every heard the song played on any radio station then felt a twinge of revulsion when I remembered that I have the CD. It’s a strange song, but a little too mainstream for my current tastes. (Hey, I was in high school, after all.) 101X has been playing some strange stuff lately, I’ve almost started to wonder if they’re becoming a nostalgia station for people like me who came of age in the nineties. I do think their (welcome) shift from rap-rock to this neo-post-punk is a reflection of shifting mainstream musical tastes, but that does little to explain why they play so much music from the late eighties and early nineties.

Earlier this year, the station ran a bunch of on-air promotions soliciting listener feedback in anticipation of tweaking the format. Now it seems its parent company Emmis Communications is struggling financially. The Indianapolis-based Emmis bought 101X, KLBJ and a few other stations from the (Lyndon Baines) Johnson family a few years ago, a purchase that was met with consternation from Austin folks worried about the loss of locally-owned radio. 101X likes to promote itself as “independent, local, alternative” which, in radio, apparently means “not owned by Infinity or Clear Channel.” 101X’s sister station KGSR has also been running TV spots calling it the “Austinest radio station,” situating it as part of the home-grown Austin music industry.

Apparently Emmis is struggling to sell ads in its portfolio of radio, print, and TV properties, leading its CEO to make a bid to buy out its shares and take the company private. Perhaps this business move could give a little more credence to the independent label, but it seems that the consolidation of local media outlets is turning out to be a questionable business strategy.

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Austin Gossip is a new blog devoted to celebrity sightings here in the funky coffeeshop capital of the world™. I don’t want to give this site any more publicity or material, but I just heard a nugget worthy of that site. An acquaintance that works at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown just complained that Quentin Tarantino has been coming in after the theater closes at 2am and hosts private screenings until 5am. My contact says he has to stay and baby-sit until the Pulp Fiction director’s scopophilia is abated. Apparently Tarantino is shooting a film somewhere in central Texas. I told my pal, “You should get a job directing movies, then you can be a bastard.”

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I don’t need to tell my Austin reader this, but it is really darn hot in Austin. I guess it should be no surprise considering the mercury hit 85F on New Year’s Day. But darn it, can’t we have another month of spring-related program activities before the temperature hits 100? I guess it was only 99F yesterday, but that’s still too hot for April, even in Tejas. I should have tracked down an internship in Seattle or some other clime, rather than face the prospect of Texas, global-warming style, this summer/

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Austin Bloggers are having their monthly meetup tomorrow night, and it’s a particularly important one. I don’t know if either of my readers are in Austin, but any Austin bloggers should come out, since we’ll be discussing posting guidelines for the AustinBloggers.org meta-blog. Chip says, “I don’t think we have a common consensus anymore, about what the site is about and how it should be used.” At this meetup, we’ll talk about a mission statement for the site, and guidelines to keep the anti-toll trolls and self-promoting posts to a minimum.

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Chip said tonight that AustinBloggers.org would be moving to AustinBloggers 1.9. Adina asked what would be coming with 1.9. Chip said “Well it will have Ajax, but no rounded corners. If it had rounded corners,” he said, “it would be 2.0.”
It dawned on me that he was making a Web 2.0 joke, and I said, “Oh, so it’s not a rev number, it’s a buzz number!”

Has anyone used “buzz number” to describe a version number used to link a project to a trendy technology, rather than internal versions? If not, I’m claiming this as my contribution to techster jargon.

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