Links that I’m reading/watching/listening to/thinking about
*Kris jumps on yet another meme bandwagon*
So everybody’s lookin’ up their Oz Prison Bitch Name, right? Go on, try it out. Mine’s the worst. I don’t even wanna reprint it here, for fear my mom’ll see it and freak. Okay, okay… I’ll censor it a bit: “Keller’s F**k Boy”. I ask you, what the heck does that mean? Who is Keller, and why does he refer to me (obviously a girl) as a boy?
Well, so far it looks like the riots aren’t nearly as bad as last year. The police managed to just outnumber the protesters and most of them are penned in at Oxford Circus, I guess. (Holy cow! Check out the picture the BBC’s got!) Of course, as soon as everything gets back to normal tomorrow, the Tube workers are striking again. This week will probably set a record in terms of absentee workers in London…
“Dingo eats baby!” Well, actually it was two dingos. And it wasn’t a baby, it was a nine-year-old. But still…
Well, actually it’s May Day, but I guess for a lot of people the two are equivalent. Violence has already erupted in Australia and Europe, and England will be no exception. This year the police say they’re ready, but for lots of morning commuters, the problems have already started. The BBC has a photo gallery that should fill up as the day progresses. The thing that amuses me most about all this is the “May Day Monopoly” plan that the media keep mentioning. The protestors are supposed to be targeting streets and locations on the British Monopoly board, which basically means that everybody (including the police) knows exactly where they’re going to strike. If they know where the violence is going to be, why can’t they stop it?
Kim pointed to an interesting article on Generation X. Despite the author’s “whining,” I really really liked what he had to say, and I agree with pretty much all of it. The Internet did feel like our thing and the bitterness a lot of us feel isn’t just for our own lost jobs and stock options. We’re depressed because we blew our chance.
Wee Ben just IMed me with an amazing link: WM Team. It’s a German internet company of some sort. They have one of the coolest Flash sites I’ve ever seen. (If you knew how much I hate Flash, you’re realize what a compliment that is.) Make sure you watch the whole intro and then click through the different areas. You can even change the music on the boom box!
John linked to an interesting story in the Financial Times about personal electronics and the “beauty zone.” The author, Peter Martin, argues that with mobile phones appearance has become as important as functionality. He wonders, though, why that hasn’t happened with PDAs and computers. Personally, I think this guy is a little too dismissive of the steps Apple‘s made in this direction. For example, if you walk down Tottenham Court Road in London on any Sunday afternoon, you’ll discover a crowd – yes, a crowd – of people standing outside the Micro Anvika drooling over Titanium iBooks and Power Mac G4 Cubes with 15-inch flatscreen cinema displays. Computers are more beautiful now than they ever have been before. With any complex mass-produced item, the first versions are always the clunkiest and ugliest (the Model T Ford, the early telephones and televisions, the first radios). Mobiles have had an accelerated pace of aesthetic development because they’re A) relatively cheap and B) show-offable. I mean, when you whip out brushed steel Nokia the size of a matchbox on the Tube, people notice. How many people ever see my iMac? Pretty much just me and Snookums. She’s still damn beautiful though.
Pubs to stay open round the clock. Hooray! Of course, it’s an obvious ploy from the Labour Party to get re-elected, but I don’t care. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you can’t get a beer in London after 11:00 pm. In college, we never even went out til after 11! England, welcome to the 21st century.
Edited 29/04/2025: Link is dead and not archived.
Apparently Calista Flockhart fainted when she heard the news that Robert Downey Jr. had been arrested for drugs again. Fainted. Has any woman actually swooned with emotion since, like, 1885? I suppose when you’re that tiny, any disruption in your trickle of blood flow is enough to bring on a collapse. (It’s horrible, but I found this really funny: “Everyone ran over and tried to revive her. David’s face was pale but Calista, who is usually very pale, was as white as a sheet.” Of course she’s pale, she’s a skeleton.)
Have you been following the David Horowitz story? He’s a journalist and “conservative provacateur” who sent ’round an advertisement attacking the notion of slavery reparations to dozens of American universities. When many of them refused to print it (or did print it and then published apologies), he accused them of censorship and claimed that his real point had to do with the First Amendment and the liberal press. It’s become a real headache for a lot of college papers and some of them are even revising their advertising guidelines. (For the record, my alma mater was among those who declined to print it.) Anyhoo, another Salon writer decided that if Horowitz is gonna try to paint the conservatives as the real defenders of the First Amendment, he’d put it to the test. So he devised an ad that said “God is an abortionist” and sent it to several prominent conservative universities. Needless to say, only one out of eleven printed it. I wonder what Horowitz would say about that?
