I’m not terribly interested in soccer, but I might just mention some of the other stuff around the edges that you might find amusing (thanks fishrush!) and that you might not otherwise see. This does not make me a journalist. Heh.
[found at the ‘pile]
I’d like to lay something like this on top of blogspace, using posts and comments as data. Just because. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to actually see any of the demos, probably because it uses DejaNews as a datasource, and of course DN is no more, having been eaten by Google. Still.
A Spanish TV reporter, in a burst of inspiration apparently untempered by any inconvenient pretense of journalistic detachment, has purchased one of the meat-puppies on sale at a market in Ulsan and given him to the Spanish World Cup Team, who have made the pooch team mascot. This would seem to indicate that he will not end up on the dinner table. I will be surprised if the dog is actually taken with the team when they leave Korea.
Nonetheless, cleverly done.
Bum firmly socketed into sofa cushion, I was having one of my occasional ‘flip around the multitude of Korean-language TV channels none of which I can understand to any degree’ sessions when I stopped on one of the 3 or 4 Home Shopping Network-type stations.
These, I find, are often good for some shadenfreude-laden amusement. It is one of my guilty pleasures, watching the human mannequins go through the self-conscious motions of simulating a life that is almost unbearably joyful, enhanced as it is almost to the point of bursting by whatever product is currently being hawked. You can almost hear, watching their avidly gleeful faces, the exhortations of the stage manager to look more joyful. Watching for a while allows me to feel superior and self-righteous in my chosen role as a singularly poor consumer.
The food porn, which is so obscenely fixated on wetness and bubbling, on glistening surfaces and suddenly-exposed textures, can be depended upon to make me a little nauseous, and since I can afford to lose a couple of pounds, losing my appetite for a while isn’t such a bad thing. It must be said that these food porn producers have their job down to a fine art. They are incredibly skilled at eroticizing foodstuffs : so much so that I sometimes worry that I’ll wake up mid-sleepwalk one night in flagrante delicto with our store of kimchi.
The models tend to be on the sexy side of the street, too, which is certainly not a bad thing.
As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself : the screen at this particular moment was occupied by a pair of hands, turning and displaying a live crab, which was waving its legs about in dismay. Understandably. You’d be distressed too. With no warning, to the jaunty retro-pop harmonies of the title song from the mostly harmless Tom Hanks vehicle, ‘That Thing You Do’, the hands proceeded to rip open the shell of the soon-to-be-not-so-live crab, as its little legs went into spastic ‘oh-my-god-I’m-being-dismembered‘ gyrations, and expose its glistening, wet guts to the camera, which dutifully zoomed in. It was a weird combination of the usual food-porn with sudden, unexpected violent death, and it left me a little… discombobulated.
It’s been a fair while since I lived in the west (if less than a year since I lived in Oz), and so I might well be wrong, but I’m pretty damn sure this sort of thing would not go over well outside Asia. It was yet another of the hundred daily reminders I get of difference, and I thought I’d share.
or
Great minds think alike.
I had this idea recently about using Daypop or Blogdex to track ideas and conversations, and lo and behold, someone’s written something that is a first step in that direction. I have implemented it here, to give it a whirl. The magic may take a while to appear, as the script runs after the page is fully loaded, and my instant referrer doodad is acting up a bit. When it does load, click on the little [b]’s beside any link to see who else is talking about that link…
The toy erroneously puts a Blogdex [b] beside my category links, too, which I’ll try to fix tomorrow, but otherwise it seems pretty cool. Let me know if it floats your boat or chafes your scrote (or appropriate other body part, as required).
Bow to the riff lord.
Edit : I’ve disabled it. Too obtrusive.
..although there are possibly many like it that I’ve not seen. This answers, perhaps, some of the questions about syndication that Eeksy-Peeksy was asking here last week, which Shelley attempted to answer.
Confused? Don’t be. Just have a look. Kinda neato.
I swear by all that’s holy, by the sweet unsucked nipples of the mother of jesus, by the small but nonetheless annoyingly itchy watery little bumpy things on the sides of my fingers, by the lords of the underworld and Timmy too, by gum, by gemorrah, by sodom and moloch, by the dirty diapers of the baby jesus, by Aunt Jemima and her god-blessed pancakes, by all the prime numbers up to and including 29, by land (one) by sea (two), by the funniest number that exists (fourteen), in the name of the whiskey and the beers and the holy smokes, by the SUVs and the Naderites, by chimptacular presidents and semi-masticated pretzels, by the barney and the rubble and the smoking crater, by the inescapable haiku and the inevitable goatsex, by the fat guy and the troll, by the pedant and the pederast, by the vegetarians, the vegans the omnicores the omnivores the omniwhores the carnivores and the single cry in the dark of a lone drunken chicken begging to be eaten, just a f–king nibble you bastards, by the Portuguese scribblers, the Australian nutjobs, the Yankee heroes and the dismemberment of thousand-headed Purusha, by the subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space, by the mythical tortoise which upholds the earth, by the shrimplike scent of my swinging dad-balls, by the sacred and inextinguishable fires of the Magi which alone remain to illumine the horizon, by the dirty little chuckle, the self-referential injoke, by the ineluctable modality of the f–king boneheaded, by the end of this post it’ll be time for another beer, by the oft-licked nuts of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog at the gates of Hell, by good intentions, bad intentions, simple misdirection, sleight-of-hand and honest-to-goodness magic, by the great big ball of thread beside the chest of drawers, by the time I figure it out I’ll be dead, by the sweet sweet liquor, by the weed and the hash, by the speed and the coke, by the dimethyl goddamn tryptamine, by the wind and the waves, by the quiet talks on the beach and the naked dancing on the rooftop, by the unreachable goal and the short-term workaround, by the self-obsession and the reaching out to a friend, by the pastoral idyll and the urban hubbub, by the purple steaming mess that spills out onto the pavement as I die, by the husker and the du, by the #006699 and the #CCCC00, by the Math and the Owie, by the wife, the horse and the moustache, by all that’s holy :
I’ve been here before. Archiving. Yeah. That’s it.
They lied about one vital thing : replace the word ‘pigeon’ with ‘wonderchicken’ and all will become clear…
(I guess I missed this the first time ’round.)
Whenever I want you, all I have to do is rea-ea-ea-ea-eam (also know as the ‘ream sequence’).
As a certain friend and coworker would say : thas innerestin’.
Some of the funniest things you will never hear in Korea (latest in a long series) :
I’m struck once again at how even the most literate, erudite and presumably intelligent of thinkers, no matter where they lie on the political map, can be depended upon, when cornered, to bare their yellowed tusks and, with frenzied screeching and flinging of their own excrement, reveal their true simian nature.
This little internecine sh-tfight is instructive to read, while also being sad, pathetic and so completely unnecessary as to bring tears of somedamnthing to my eye. It’s no wonder that America (and it can be said of other nations, a multitude of them, I know) has been ruled by this endless procession of greedy, evil bastards for so long. How sad and ineffectual are those who agree on a common enemy, and then proceed to destroy one another in an argument about how to defend themselves against that enemy.
And this fandangled new personal publishing revolution (read that in a 1950’s TV-huckster, over-amped voice) in which we’re all so proud of participating has at times given me some hope that this time ‘it might be different, really it might,’ but the recent pointed and pointless screeching and feces-hurling in blogland, sparked by differences of opinion about the bloodthirsty tribal warfare of yet another gang of naked apes busily shedding one another’s blood over in the eastern mediterranean… this has left me less optimistic than I once was. How sad and pathetic it is to agree that killing is wrong, then become so involved in arguing about who deserves to die less that we do nothing to stop that killing.
Do I feel smug and superior in pointing this out? No, I do not. Mostly, I feel tired.
The revolution will not be blogged.
[A Lucid Dreaming FAQ] [Another][Dreaming and Reality][kuro5hin – Hacking Your Wetware][Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep][Dream Yoga][A Buddhist Perspective on Lucid Dreaming][More]
Yes, I’ve got a little too much time on my hands at the moment.
Now, before I even begin, I must preface this little mousy-squeaky post, this whisper of uncertainty and doubt and anti-communitarianism that will hopefully go unnoticed and unremarked, this little strung-together line of characters drunkenly hunt-and-pecked out late in the evening on a day in which I found that for some reason my IQ unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped about 40 points or so, I must introduce this with the admission that I’ve had a drink or two. This should not be a surprise to you, dear reader.
But : lately, repeatedly, and consistently, I’ve found my InTarWeb HerOes, the men (and yes, most, well, OK, pretty much all of my real leftover-from-Spiderman-pajamas heroes, at least on this IntArWeB thing, are men) for whom in the last while, since I’ve become interested in what’s happening out amongst the Magesticallanic Clouds Of Bits, I have come to have respect and to like and perhaps wish to emulate, imitate, celebrate or alternately crush like bugs (being as it is the eternal and everlasting man-desire, no sh-t Dick Tracy, to destroy and supplant the alpha-male bing bang boom) –
…take a breath, wonderchicken…
those fine gentlemen have disappointed me, badly. You slack bastards. Icons, idols, they’re leaving me colder than an arctic char’s ass (and I don’t even know if fish have asses, but carry on my wayward son carry on) of late. Need I explain why? No! f–k that. I’m just venting here, and the fridge is calling.
I’m going to drink a few more beers, and watch Waking Life again. This post may well disappear when I wake up tomorrow.
Well, whatever. Nevermind.
The question on the table is : ‘who do you believe‘?
My answer is : not even my own mother.
Edit : Stuff like this – “As U.S. officials continued to issue warnings yesterday about the possibility of attacks by suicide bombers and terrorists, the White House quietly acknowledged that the threats are not urgent and that they are partly motivated by political objectives” – makes me considerably less inclined to believe The Little President That Could and his pack of weasels, though. How about you? Is it excessively hyperbolic to call them worthless scum?
No, no, I didn’t think so.
[via the usual suspects]
When the movie Wayne’s World was released in Latin America, a lot of the film’s American idiom and idiosyncratic language didn’t translate well, if at all. As a result, many of the phrases and expressions were translated into something very different in the subtitles or dubbing.
For example, when Wayne exclaimed (much to my amusement, which is a shame with which I must forever deal) “Shyaaa! And monkeys might fly out of my butt!” it got changed to, “Yes, when Judgment Day comes,” or “Si, cuándo llegue el dÃa del juicio.”
What I don’t get is why it was felt that Spanish speakers would find the image of monkeys flying from someone’s butt any less comprehensible or immediately interpretable as indicating a highly unlikely event than Anglophones would. I’m enormously curious now about how that phrase got translated in other languages when the movie was released elsewhere.
Most amusing, as really dumb things frequently are.
People love to hate cranky old uncle Chomsky, and it’s no surprise really, with the stuff he goes around saying in these dissent-discouraging times. This recent CBC interview with him shows him in fine form, talking about the same things he usually does, jumping up and down on the head of the interviewer, uttering the word ‘No’ more times that I’ve ever seen anyone say it before in a single conversation. For what it’s worth, though, I agree with many of the things he has to say about governments, and about the press. I’m aware that’s an unpopular thing to say, and that many consider him a loon.
Something like this, though, doesn’t seem to me to be the words of a lunatic. On the contrary, it seems quite lucid indeed :
[more]
Speaking of hypocrisy, and the Chomster does, this piece covers well-trodden ground, but worth a read nonetheless, perhaps :
[more]
Are we in the weblogging community shouldering the burden of that responsibility to preserve the right of people to know the facts, as traditional media increasing fails in its role as watchdog?
I cetainly don’t know. But that should be clear, sporting as I do a tagline like the truth can blow me.
Edit : An interesting exchange between the Chomster and Christopher Hitchens.
Cheesily riffing on the erudititudinosity and linkeriffomafication of Tom’s recent post, I give you this darn-near equally-recent popular image (which I did not make) found at the Site Which Must Not Be Named.
Heh.
Edit : I have discovered that this image originally came from the SomethingAwful forums. SA rocks. Or is that San Dimas Football? sh-t, I dunno. But the bad, bad man who posted it to Filepile didn’t credit it. Apologies.
