Take The Venom Out Of A Cobra And What Are You Left With?

My old punkrocks.net comrade and till-recent housemate Barry Scatton has finally done the world a favor and started his own blog. He moonlights as a writer for Decoy, but the censorship he's subject to is depriving the world of his A+ material. If you enjoy relentless ranting, action movies, Bigwig, or take pleasure in the outspoken agony of a lifelong Red Sox fan, you're going to want to pay attention.

(A belt.)

What's So Funny About Depression-Era Institutional Pedophilia?

We're playing a competitve simulation game in Marketing class, and I have twice this week completely and unilaterally overhauled our group's strategy. We went from 36th place to 3rd place, and still fear I may be deposed as group leader (although that fear is based on absolutely nothing). School's weird like that.

It's disturbing to the point of amusement (well... almost) that people in places of political prominence like George Allen and this guy can launch themselves over the handlebars and people are still convinced that a Freudian slip from the eternally idiotic John Kerry can actually hamper the Democrats' bid to reclaim Congress. I'm sure if we looked at video footage of that Kerry speech, you'd see a disguised Karl Rove lurking behind stage with whiteout and a sharpee.

The OC is done. Details (in the form of 24 more poorly-written episodes) to follow.

Even after a reported 18 gajillion youtube streams of Ok Go's treadmill performance on the MTV whatever awards, they've still only shipped a paltry 230,000 records. Viral marketing is an urban myth.

If you hang around the USC business school enough, you'll start to wonder why you overhear "what's your vertical?" throughout the halls. I'm not a particularly athletic person, so I can't say I'd be comforted by people being so concerned with my vertical leap, but this buzzword replacement for "major" is sort of a silly concept. Instead of "majoring in" something, you are "aligned to" your vertical. People actually talk this way. Hi, I'm Kevin, and I'm aligned to the Entreprenuership, Small Business, General Management and Nonprofit vertical.

Gawker's "Great Moments in Journalism" feature has been somewhat enjoyable recently. I still have trouble remembering the site exists, however, so I occasionally have to mention it here. This blog is here for me, not you.

I'm considering just starting to lie a lot on here. Thoughts?

Grasping At Straws

I made one half-hearted (is that word really hyphenated?) attempt to subscribe to the Washington Post out here, because I enjoy it more than the LA Times (it also frequently has multiple crossword puzzles, Scrabblegrams and various random logic puzzles that help prevent Alzheimer's and coolness). Unfortunately, I'm stuck with the online edition. Since I did very little yesterday, I read just about everything available on their website. I had a few problems with it.

Initially, MySpace drew her in, and she spent lots of time looking at her friend's photos or leaving comments on their pages, she said. Now, only a year or so later, ennui is setting in. She spends a lot less time on the site, instead listening to music or talking on the phone, she said. (In Teens' Web World, Myspace Is So Last Year)

Apparently Friendster (remember it?) hit a traffic peak this year. Seriously? Neilson reported their average user session as over three hours. What they didn't mention was that (at least when I used it eight years ago) it takes two and a half hours just to login. As nice as it would be to imagine a post-myspace world, I think we're stuck with it for longer than we'd care to think about.

"Whatever happens in your past, you get second chances," Arenas said. "Basketball is where I put all my pain and let it go. The court became my sanctuary, my outlet. Most males, we don't have outlets. A lot of females don't realize we can't go and tell our friends our problems. We don't talk about that. That's why a lot of men have stress. Some golf, some do strip clubs or whatever. Mine was going on the basketball floor. (The Psychic Scars That Shaped An NBA Star)

I think they mean "psychological scars." This piece on Gilbert Arenas' deadbeat mother that magically resurfaced after he became a wealthy NBA star actually paints a pretty good picture of his past. I don't usually care much about phenomenally wealthy basketball players' personal problems, but since Arenas' has single-handedly resurrected the Wizards, I'll try to care a little bit.

Ban proponents contend that indoor smoking imposes externalities on the nonsmoking patrons and employees of public establishments and is therefore an appropriate target for government regulation. But that's not right. When it comes to indoor smoking (as opposed to pollution outdoors), there is a single individual who ultimately bears the costs and benefits associated with smoke-filled air. (Against Restaurant Smoking Bans)

This is an obnoxiously economic commentary on the negative effects the public smoking ban will have in DC. Maybe he should have written this before they passed the upcoming ban.

Webb, a former U.S. Navy secretary, responded angrily Friday on Washington Post Radio, defending his novels as "serious" works and calling Allen's attack part of the senator's negative campaign that is devoid of ideas. "To take these things out and pull excerpts out and force them on people . . . is just a classic example of the way this campaign is run," Webb said. "Literature is literature. I've made my career as a novelist. George Allen doesn't have a record to run on." (Allen Blasts Webb Novels For Sex Scenes)

That's the sound of George Allen's political career going from presidential hopeful to teaching polysci 101 at The University of Richmond. Jordan wrote a good commentary on this issue Allen seems to have with fiction.

For Griffin, it is a tough choice -- balancing the undeniable success of the Hubble against the equally undeniable risks to the astronauts who would fix it, as well as the unforgiving schedule of shuttle flights needed to complete the international space station. (NASA Deciding Whether to Close a Window Into Space)

NASA is strongly considering letting the Hubble Space Telescope run its current battery to extinction (it reportedly has one or two years of power left) and simply letting it float in space as a shining beacon to the only project NASA ever completed that wasn't both a financial and scientific disaster. Instead, they'd apparently rather spend the money on continuing to fix the useless International Space Station. This shouldn't be a surprise, I suppose.

I don't like the web version's crossword puzzle at all.

Under Construction

I mentioned tehnoobz before, and against all better judgment, threw it into my links area (it's over there on the right, if you haven't noticed). As such, I feel like I should justify it by occasionally mentioning one of their "articles." For this particular entry, I'll point you toward an article on HOW 2 TALK 2 CHIX @ SKOOL. It seems they have taken care of their original problem of 4-6 month gaps in content by post-dating articles as well.

They're currently running a contest for a 9-pin "cereal" cable. Get on that.

Forget Your Platitudes

Have you ever noticed that most of the upper echelon of heavily-trafficked blogs are simply a flamboyantly represented digest of links to other authors' rigorously-generated content? Of course you have; what am I talking about? (Side note: have you ever noticed how bad english can sound if you just keep piling on the adverbs?)

These editors must get some euphoric feeling after posting a few links, a couple of cleverly-photoshopped pictures of themselves with Jared Leto, a recap of how much they drank last night and, if they can't keep their ego at bay, a scan of their most recent monthly $68,000 Google AdSense paycheck (someone actually did this, although five minutes of searching for it has already taken up enough of my time). Let's give it a shot.

Book Soup posted a recording of the John Hodgman performance from last week. It's about an hour long, and I'm quite certain that none of you have "better things to do."

Latvian researchers have pushed the bootlegging business to wildly new frontiers. The mere idea that a bootlegging industry still exists in some nations will make me sleep well tonight.

Any fans of the Kirby's Dream Land series on NES/SNES (or just GameBoy, if you had mean parents) should probably check out the new version.

Gawker editor Jess Coen quit last week to a sea of "who cares?" from the greater internet public (other than from the people that saw her go on the air on CNN to staunchly defend the social relevance of Gawker Stalker). I wouldn't even mention this except for the fact that the current guest editor is actually quite good.

Since I doubt I'll find a more appropriate space to mention this, I'd just like you to point your various trendy Mozilla-based browsers to animalshirts.net for a moment to observe the stiff competition Paul Frank, Ed Hardy, etc. will be facing in the upcoming years.

The new Jeremy Enigk record came out yesterday on some label I've never heard of. People seem to like it.

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a vacation spot in Italy that allows you to rent an "entire village." Apparently he never learned that there's a fundamental difference between the words village and villa. I'm pretty sure the only entire village I'd ever want to rent is Colonial Williamsburg, anyway.

How exhausting.

Transubstantiation

I believe the so-called "industry" refers to a quietly-publicized website unveiling as a soft launch. With my decision to mention this blog on a few websites, I started to ponder what you'd call the, umm, launch that isn't the soft kind?

"Hard launch" is too sexual and "public launch" sounds like something that goes on in Cape Canaveral or Kitty Hawk. "Debut" isn't really appropriate since I've been posting here for a couple weeks, even if only for experimental purposes. Technically, my "debut" (as far as the internet is concerned) came whenever I started getting in message board wars in high school. You could call it sort of a "reissue," but that's a dirty word for people that have worked in music, particularly given the recent and horrifying trend. Shame on me for even mentioning that one.

You could probably run down a huge list... Re-launch, second wind, proper release, ground-rule double... whatever.

I decided on transubstantiation, which is questionably offensive I guess, but I'm not much of a religious person. At least, I haven't been ever since I got really boring presents for my Catholic confirmation, while all my Jewish friends were raking in thousands of dollars from their various mitzvahs to spend on things like college and nice shoes. I consider this the transformation from a blog known by less than six people to an internet portal frequented by as many as twelve people, and I can't call it simply a transformation, because transformations give me terrible flashbacks to my differential equations textbook.

Anyway. For those who are new here, enjoy. For the people that have been here before, I'm sorry you read this post. For those who really hated all those reviews I wrote about Finch and Strung Out and Copeland and whoever else... get over it. You'll occasionally see similar types of things here, so you might want to pursue other options.

Flashbacks

Although it's mostly sort of stupid, tehnoobz.com started updating again. I'm ashamed to say that I did stuff like this when I was 14, although not with all the h4x0r language. I could never quite figure that stuff out. I had plenty of angelfire pages loaded with midis, animated gifs, frames, obnoxious starfield backgrounds and any other stereotype you could think of. It appears angelfire has deleted all of my old accounts (I think I might have had some stuff on geocities too), so thankfully I can't show you what I wasted my time on in high school. Those sites made punkrocks.net look like the New York Times.

In other news, you should read the Platelets blog. It's supposed to be a band, but mostly it's just an amusing, albeit rarely-updated, blog.