yanoblog

Today’s entry is Gangster Rap. It’s a mashup of Eazy E and The Game called Still Cruisin’. It had to be a mashup because The Game was only 16 when Eazy E died.

What’s interesting about this song is the beat is amazing and there is no misogyny or homophobia. Neither rapper is (was) a card carrying member of Pro-feminist Men of America, but for whatever reason, they just go with the other classic old-school gangster rap themes.

(I thought about trying to write a pseudo-babble post-modern analysis of the song, but I don’t have the energy to problematize a sub-text that has been inscribed on popular consciousness…Sorry!)

Anyway, enjoy. Be warned–that piano hook is gonna stick in your head.

There is a growing phenomenon (that’s how I defined a sample size of 3 spread over years–the Bush approach to science is catching) of taking well-known comic strips and mucking with them to produce a new, often more humorous, result. Take three of the most annoying cartoons there are, Family Circus, Marmaduke, and Garfield. Now make them funny:

Exhibit A: The Dysfunctional Family Circus. This one has been around for a while. It involves taking a Family Circus cartoon and re-captioning it:

(If you are in a Family Circus mood, make sure to go appreciate the Amazon reviews of Family Circus books. Proustian introspection with Munch’s visual conundrums is amazing.)

Exhibit B: Given the strip’s often impenetrable “humor”, Joe Mathlete provides the service: Marmaduke Explained (in 500 words or less).

Marmaduke shits his bones.

As my friend Peter (who for some reason, really likes No Country for Old Men) pointed out to me, this is the best one ever.

Exhibit C: It turns out Garfield is actually pretty funny if you take away Garfield. Garfield minus Garfield photoshops out Garfield for each strip. Here’s a sample:

Do yourself a favor. Take 10 minutes to go read through these strips. They are amazing. Especially in their aggregate.

(To quote the author: “Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.”)

If you want to try your hand at captioning random cartoons, go check out the Caption Contest at the New Yorker.

The category of bad baby products is so large that it may be impossible to choose a victor.

That said, this one has to be in the running. Here’s the description from today’s Times:

Last on our list was the LENA System ($399) a language measurement tool developed by Infoture, in Boulder, Colo. The system is based on research demonstrating a correlation between the amount parents talk to their babies during their first three years and their professional success later in life.

The LENA System includes a credit card device and several children’s outfits designed with large pockets in the front. Several days a month, you slip the device into the clothing and it records conversation between parent and child.

At the end of the day, you plug it into your personal computer. Special software (available for Windows, but not Macs) analyzes the speech — separating adult words and baby gurgling from other noises — and reports on how many words you have spoken to your baby, how often your baby responds, and where you match up against the rest of the American population, to ensure your infant is getting that all-important verbal edge on other infants.

W. T. F!!???

I don’t even know where to begin. They’ve cut the price in the last year, from about $1200 to $700 to $400. I think I’d pay not to have to stress about this.

If it wasn’t in the Times, I’d assume this was an Onion article or something.

Front page of the Times today has an article headlined Race Matters Less in Politics of South. It’s an interesting article about a black man getting elected to the State House from a district that’s 96% white. That’s certainly an interesting story. All the more so, given the specific history of that county. (Incidentally, this would be an interesting story anywhere in the country – racism isn’t exactly confined to the Deep South).

Obviously, the hook for the story (and the reason it’s on the front page) is Obama’s campaign.

However, the best part of the article is the way some residents seem to have dissed the reporter without him realizing it. Or even if that wasn’t their intent, it’s funny he (Adam Nossiter) wrote the story that way. I’m not sure what size the beats are at the Times (they appear to grow in size as you move away from the city, from covering 10 square blocks to covering whole continents), but it seems like he has the whole Bible Belt.

Anyway, he writes… Oh wait, I was about to cut and paste from the online article, but its content is a bit different than the paper edition I have. That’s an interesting story in itself, which I don’t have times (Get it?) to pursue. Anyway, in the New England edition, he writes:

And a few weeks ago, voters in a county that is more than 96 percent white chose a genial black man, James Fields, to represent them in the State House of Representatives. It is a historic first, but the remarks of many white voters reveal an unconscious condescension.

(The online version is the same, up to “It was a historic first, but” and then reads: “the moment is full of awkwardness.” I assume an editor realized Nossiter was overstating the case.)

Nonetheless, where he sees “unconscious condescension,” I see some white folks messing with a reporter they sense is trying to make them look backward:

“Really, I never realize he’s black,” said a white woman in a restaurant, smiling.

“He’s black?” asked Lou Bradford, a white Cullman police officer, jokingly.

“You know, I don’t even see him as black,” said another of Mr. Fields’s new white constituents, Perry Ray, the mayor of one of the county’s villages, Dodge City.

(By the way, Nossiter did some amazing reporting during Katrina and its aftermath.)

It’s funny enough that my order for a “Time Capsule” (a remote disk Apple product to manage their OS 10.5 backup solution called “Time Machine”) has been delayed. But even better was the approval cutoff date. I need an actual time machine to make the cutoff.

(For those that don’t know, Unix represents time as the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970, GMT (which is late evening, Dec 31, 1969 on the East coast of the United States). Clearly, the approval time somehow had a value of “0”).

We were at the mall this past weekend and I spotted a flier in the food court.

It’s for an upcoming beauty pageant sponsored by Sunburst USA Their full name is Sunburst USA International Beauty Pageant. “USA International”?!? (Also, they’ve misspelled “pageant” in the title of their home page).

This flier is both evil in its approach and annoying in its content.

There are many exclamation points and they always come in pairs!! Because this contest is that exciting!! And there are a lot of “quotation marks” throughout:

“divisional winner”
“Event Scoring System”
“TOP 5”
“optional Event”

...and so on (I got tired of typing these). Consistent use of upper and lower case eludes this flier: “That would be your State Final. Who goes to the state final?” Which is it: “State Final” or “state final”?

Here’s the -deal- scam. For a mere $40, you can enter your child into a contest. But there are up to 4 other “optional” contents (Best Attire, Most photogenic (just bring a head shot), Best Hair, and Best Eyes). Why the optionals?

HOW CAN OPTIONALS HELP ?
THEY CAN PROVE TO BE VERY IMPORTANT!! EXAMPLE; IF YOUR CHILD DOES NOT DO WELL WITH THEIR “EVENT SCORES” AND ARE NOT ONE OF THE TOP FIVE IN THEIR AGE DIVISION AWARDED TEHIR STATE ENTRY FEE THEY CAN EARN THEIR STATE ENTRY FEE BY WINNING AN OPTIONAL IN THEIR AGE DIVISION , AND GO ON TO THE FINALS. REMEMBER; AT THE STATE FINALS, EVERYONE STARTS OVER. HOW THEY PLACED AT THE PRELIM IS TOTALLY FORGOTTEN !! ANYONE CAN WIN !!

(All caps, underlines, incorrect punctuation, bad grammar, and awful marketing in the original).

In other words, you can enter this contest, for $40-$80, for the chance of winning the entry fee for the state finals (where “ANYONE CAN WIN !!”). The state final fee is $300, which implies that anyone can just skip this regional hassle and go straight to the State Finals!!

Don’t worry though, “NO CONTESTANT GOES HOME WITHOUT A PRIZE.” As for the state Finals:

Over $15000 in bonds and prizes. Huge 6 ft. trophies, TWO $1,000.00 OVERALL SCHOLARSHIP BONDS, and a talent agency will be represented to audit ALL contestants. More detailed information will be provided in your state booklet if you qualify to move on. And FAMILY FUN FOR EVERYONE !!

I can forgive the sentence ending in a preposition (“move on”) and the sentence fragment at the beginning. But that second sentence is too obscure.

Okay, enough snarkiness about the flier itself.

I hate these contests. I think they are scams designed to rip off families and more importantly, they are bad for children. Do we really need another tool to teach girls to hate their bodies (“BOYS DO NOT COMPETE AFTER 4 YRS. OF AGE”)? That this is a “NATURAL LOOK ONLY !!” pageant (i.e., no Jon Benet makeup) doesn’t help.

And according to various posts on the net, if you make it to the State finals, the “NATURAL LOOK” is ignored. Here’s a sample

SUNBURST BEAUTY PAGEANTS Post By EJ (Guest Post) (05/29/2006) HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE AT THE STATE FINALS IN ORLANDO FL. THEY DO NOT WANT NATURAL BEAUTY. THEY WANTED TOTALLY GLITZY. CHILDREN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 3 AND 6 WEARING FAKE LASHES, WIGS, HAIR PIECES AND PLENTY OF MAKE-UP. THANK GOD MY DAUGHTER WAS A GREAT SPORT.

Sigh. I hate these scam artists.

Rant over.

Well, it’s the holiday that Ronald Reagan vetoed.

Happy MLK Day.

If you haven’t listened to or watched Public Enemy, By the Time I Get To Arizona, this is a good day to do so.

I would embed the video, but the person who uploaded it to YouTube won’t allow that.

So, Click Here

Enjoy!

(If I wasn’t feeling lazy, I’d upload and embed the audio of the song, but I am feeling lazy, so sorry..)

Yesterday, I blogged about David Brooks’ latest error and wondered when the correction would come.

Well, it looks like they won’t be openly correcting it – it’s been silently changed in the Times archive.

Whatta schmuck.

There is precedent for having columnists openly correct their mistakes.

For example, a few years ago, Frank Rich wrote an article about the Pentagon’s desecration of the Koran. It clearly enraged the White House. But the only error they could find was a misstated date. This led to one of the finest snarky corrections ever. Read it slowly to really appreciate it:

Last week I misstated the Friday evening on which the Pentagon buried its report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards. It was June 3, not May 27.

In fact, even David Brooks has done it. He wrote a rant about Spain’s decision to pull out of Iraq. It included this paragraph:

Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy’s La Stampa, ’’It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists.’’ Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?

While it might be a reasonable approach to consider the context in which terrorists act (as well as what gets defined as “terrorism”), I can’t even imagine Prodi saying that. Because he didn’t. Brooks issued this correction:

In Tuesday’s column I quoted the European Commission’s president, Romano Prodi, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that force was not the answer to terrorism. I was relying on an Agence France-Presse translation, which was incorrect. Prodi actually said force should not be the only answer to terrorism. He said terrorism would not abate until the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was resolved.

(Not that that causes Brooks to revisit any of his actual arguments.) But at least he issued a correction.

What gives this time? (Maybe it’s coming with his next column. But the Times usually appends its corrections on the website. It doesn’t just silently change the original article. We’ll see…)

UPDATE

Once again, my blog’s influence grows. With his next column, Brooks issued a formal correction. A correction has also since been added to the archived version of this column (which should’ve been done when they changed the column silently).

My brother-in-law just told me to read David Brooks’ current column to see if I could spot the glaring error. Fortunately for my dignity, I passed the test.

It appears in this paragraph (ignore the illogic of Brooks…this is just a factual error.):

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

I didn’t know Ward Churchill had swung so far to the right. Because he hasn’t.

However, I knew Ward Connerly, who funds anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives (e.g., Proposition 209 in CA), was a scumbug.

But you know people of color – all their names sound the same.

I’m surprised the Times let this slip through. Next blog post from me (I assume): The Correction.

[UPDATE There’s an easier way to do this. Launch Acrobat. Go into Preferences -> Internet and uncheck “Display PDF in browser using: ...” That should do it (at least in CS3). OTOH, moving it around on the command line is very satisfying…]

If you’ve installed Adobe CS2 or CS3 on your Mac, you’ve probably experienced it’s aggressive approach to Safari.

It installs its own Acrobat plug-in viewer that gets invoked by Safari (and other apps) when you view a PDF.

I find that really annoying – it takes forever for the initial page to load, i’s much slower than the built-in PDF viewing, and takes up a huge chunk of memory). Damn you Adobe!

So, if you want to disable it, here’s what to do (assuming you have admin privileges).

1. Launch Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)

2. Type:

# sudo mkdir "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.disabled" 
# sudo mv "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/AdobePDFViewer.plugin" "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.disabled" 

Now if you restart Safari and go look at a PDF, life will again be fast. If you decide you are becoming too productive, you can always revert the change:

# sudo mv "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins.disabled/AdobePDFViewer.plugin" "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins" 

Enjoy!