In one of the recently most linked pages in blogdom, a famous North Dakotan blogger humorously performs a public service of sorts: taking on, paragraph by paragraph, a typical sample of unreflective European condescension towards the U.S., in this case the inane scribblings of a British snob-in-residence employed by the Guardian.
posted by Kai Carver 2:42 PM
Le Monde découvre les blogs. L'article est un peu nul, mais bon, c'est Le Monde ! Andrew Sullivan a récemment écrit un bien meilleur article, mais la version française laisse à désirer...
posted by Kai Carver 8:51 AM
Interesting one-hour talk (summary) at Harvard Business School by Dean Kamen about the Segway (and literally on it). He also talks about pollution-free Stirling engines, why the dot-com bust is a good thing, his attempt to make science hotter than sports, and how to save the world and make lots of money at the same time (from MeFi). Segway fanatics can also check out a Segway blog (in the future, everything will have a blog).
posted by Kai Carver 6:13 PM
Arts & Letters Daily, edited by Denis Dutton, controversial creator of the annual Bad Writing contest, often has good on-the-intellectual-side-but-not-too-much articles, a kind of replacement for the late lamented Lingua Franca web site.
Anyway, reading an article criticizing the "new Communist Manifesto", I had the following, probably obvious but new for me, thought: in some circles, and especially after 9/11, religion is called the source of much that is bad in the world. However, the two obvious candidates for worst evils of the last century, Nazism and communism (OK, OK, Stalinism), were notably atheistic and anti-clerical. Hmm...
(it would be nice to have comments... maybe I'll have to install Movable Type soon)
posted by Kai Carver 6:22 AM
America
the
beautiful.
Is back!
posted by Kai Carver 1:21 AM
Record battu :
posted by Kai Carver 5:42 PM
I'm very disappointed by Frédéric Beigbeder, who I've enjoyed watching on Paris Première, after reading 99F. This autobiographical novel, about an advertising executive who tries to get fired by writing a tell-all story based on his job, starts promisingly and has some clever quotes, but it's soon apparent that it's a pale imitation of Michel Houellebecq. The book is unfortunately the best illustration of its subject, that advertising irremediably taints anything it touches. Putassier.
posted by Kai Carver 3:04 PM
I like reading fellow failed Parisian nanovelist Stuart Mudie's web log. He mentions a great example of how good digital photography on-the-cheap can be, if you have a good eye and a light touch on PhotoShop. I want one too! Stuart's still writing, by the way. I also, ahem, ran across some of his, well, deeply mind-numbing early work. Tee-hee.
posted by Kai Carver 6:16 PM
Tracy's link to my Pages Jaunes-based movie went bad, so here it is again, resizable or TV-style (Alt-F4 to close). It's snowing pixels! It's raining men!
posted by Kai Carver 4:25 PM
Slate mentions this unusual memorial proposal.
Though I'm not sure there should even be a big memorial (it's OK for Germans to remember their defeats, but should Americans?), I like the transpositions of this design: vertical to horizontal, 3D to 2D, sky to water.
posted by Kai Carver 4:01 PM
posted by Kai Carver 8:08 PM
posted by Kai Carver 5:05 PM
Everyone in Chicago is going to read the same book.
UPDATE: New York too.
posted by Kai Carver 7:33 AM
posted by Kai Carver 11:01 AM
Filling in on Tracy's TV-addled banana post, the United Fruit Historical Society has a 100-year chronology of United Fruit which lists in passing over 20 cases of US invasions in Central America (more commie propaganda here).
The company is now called Chiquita Brands International and though the history page on its Disney-like ("Hello amigo!") web site doesn't mention anything nasty, its annual report acknowledges its "complex history" in some detail and says "Today, we are a different Company". So go ahead and eat a banana every day.
posted by Kai Carver 5:16 PM
The ISP doesn't like me to steal images, which is why it displays "image hosted by...". Maybe I'll put them on my site, then refer to them. What a drag.
(I updated your post: don't forget to close the font tags with </font>, otherwise everything gets the font...)
posted by Kai Carver 4:35 AM
twink
has
music
and
good
links
The site is so cute it almost makes me want to use that cool tiny sans serif font and stuff all the time.
posted by Kai Carver 5:46 PM
Mark Dunn is the author of Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.
Each letter must navigate off page by jinxing quick zippy words.
How quickly daft jumping zebras vex!
posted by Kai Carver 1:43 PM
Strange love: bombing Afghanistan saves lives. So when do we start on Korea and finish in Irak? Hum.
posted by Kai Carver 7:09 AM
Is Bill Gates a saint? Why is he interested in poor people? He clearly doesn't want to sell them software. Maybe it's his truly nerdy fixation on changing the world through technology: "Like a great piece of software, a vaccine can have an enormous impact on the world". Or maybe he's just a good guy after all? Nah.
In more sensational "Believe It Or Not" news, the United States is by far the world's largest donor of humanitarian assistance (30%) (page 9) and of relief food aid (40%) (page 99). Oh and private donors give away 2.1 percent of the U.S. GNP each year.
posted by Kai Carver 7:49 AM
Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens are also interesting and entertaining together on TV (2 hours!). If only Noam Chomsky had joined them it would have been perfect. And here's a gratuitous George Orwell book cover.
posted by Kai Carver 7:28 AM
