Grow your own potatoes.
It is a shame that an American industry can enforce a civil matter for citizens of a different country who don’t even *have* piracy laws like we do.
I think this would be an excellent way to order food. The chef designs your meal based on words you select for four different characteristics, including emotional state. Awesome.
Remember Elements of Style in English 1010? Some good arguments about how it was just fluffy ego pulp.
I think I should go buy a house in Detroit.
And then I can drive around my abandoned neighborhood in my peapod.
I could really go for the Spina seat by ITOKI.
Chris Cunningham video (via William Gibson’s blog). You may remember Cunningham from such videos as Window Licker or Rubber Johnny.
In other news, conservative republicans were protesting in Downtown Salt Lake City today. I noticed this crowd on the bus and I am probably just guessing that they were Republicans based solely on their misspelled signs, inappropriate clothing (it was about to snow and none were dressed warm) and weird haircuts.
This got me to wondering about where these protesters were during the last eight years of expenditures and why did they wait until we had a new president to express their displeasure. Why did these people wait until it was too late to voice their opinions? Couldn’t they have spoken up before the legislation was even passed? What did their representatives vote for? Why didn’t they stop their legislators and senators from voting in favor of the bailout and stimulus packages?
My guess is that they are just feeling vindictive and want to show the world that they can protest against the current administration just like everyone else did during the last eight years.
I’m going to try out this aggregation thing.
Facebook. It’s where your grandma hangs out.
In the “City of God,” St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, “How dare you molest the seas?” To which the pirate replied, “How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.” St. Augustine thought the pirate’s answer was “elegant and excellent.” — Noam Chomsky
Check out the Ceiling Drip. It’s the fourth one down.
Some thoughts about paranoia.
A neat little social experiment involving robots. I would love to do something like this in my town. I hope that she shares what equipment she used to construct her tweenbots.
Why Lobbying beats out all other forms of government. Because it is more profitable than any other business model.
Relationships based on business models.
That should be enough for today.
Kirsten,
I’m just going to throw some random numbers out there and hopefully they will put the hysteria into perspective. I am responding to your article about criminals working in our schools because any story that has an underlying message of “save the children” always sets off a red flag.
The math from your story shows that 1.4% of teachers found in this investigation were revealed to be one of four types of criminals. We are lumping drug possesion, sexual assault, indecent exposure and aggravated assault all into the same category. That means that I could make an educated guess and state that 3.2% of a normal population are criminals of *any* type. If the 1.4% of teachers that you would have us be alarmed about were also of any type of criminal, we could safely assume that whatever background checks are already in place are effectively reducing the criminal population of this group by over 50%. That’s great news.
What if we were to take it a step further and figure out what percentage of a “normal” criminal population consists of the four types of criminals you mentioned in your story? You see where I am going with this?
I am not trying to say that we shouldn’t be worried. There is nothing wrong with wanting to trust who deals with your children. When we take a look at the actual risk analysis, aren’t there better ways we can be spending that money to enrich our children? I’ll leave that thought open for others to decide.
Everybody knows that the quickest way into taxpayer’s pockets is to threaten their children. This can be accomplished by reiterating common every day risks. The secret is to make it sound like a new threat that didn’t exist before the story was uncovered. I don’t blame you for the story at all. Instilling fear into parents moves copy and that in turn holds value for the advertisers who finance your paychecks.
Would it be possible to reverse engineer this story and find out who is backing the proposed legislation? Even doing some critical thinking and researching beyond what I have provided could maybe balance things out. I have no right to call on you as a journalist as a librarian of critical thinking, but I am still inclined to do so.
I do hope that you do not take this in the wrong spirit. I feel that there should be a little bit more research involved when passing on information to the public. Especially when it concerns such emotionally charged issues. Who is really going to be taken advantage of in the scenario that you proposed?
I don’t have the answer, because I don’t know who financed the studies or who is supporting any bills concerning this subject.
Who makes you feel like I make me feel?
Focusing on the inner dialogue and externalizing my thoughts is an endeavor I soon hope to attain. All alone pumps in stereo through my ears with the Rastafarian accent obliterating my original intent. Inspiration once sprang from a well, now I pass information like my intestines discard pork products or greasy food.
Illiterate in the social sphere of pre-emptive courtesies and Bangkok’s of influential neuro-synaptic Jesus hopping partitioned souls, my essence twitches in safe mode clicking and firing off one by one.
If I could translate my language into a comprehensible sandwich to consume, Peanut Butter.
And Jelly.
Jelly is the optimal describor, the denatured floodless. Which tastes better on toast? Dysfunctional or the former?