Category: Internet

Found on Plastic: the gay and Marxist subtexts of the classic Rankin-Bass Christmas TV special, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer.” This isn’t a new thought, having been discussed on at least three other blogs that I found with some lazy Googling, but it’s the most thorough explication I’ve seen.

Um, merry Christmas.

The 2004 Weblog Awards are up for voting. Lots of categories, lots of scrolling. Annoying, frankly, almost as annoying as seeing that shrill ideologue hack Michelle Malkin is currently in the top three for “best media/journalist blog,” way ahead of the far more balanced and deserving Jeff Jarvis. Let’s fix that, shall we? Mmmkay.

Scripting News: Weblogs.com needs a rewrite. If I had C skillz, I’d be there, but I don’t. Surely there must be some folks out there in the blogging community who are ready to give back…

…they could do worse than a framed print of this New Yorker cartoon for me:

(Thanks to Tin Man for the link to the searchable database of New Yorker cartoons.) I remember bringing that cartoon up in my History of the English Language class when it first came out—but I think the date in the database is wrong, since I was taking that class in the spring of 1993. I still maintain that it’s the best illustration of the difference between signifier and thing itself that I’ve seen, though cookies, e-commerce sites, and other modern invasions of privacy have pretty much eroded the core message, which was very much true in 1993.

(Yes, it’s my birthday today. I’m 32.)

In addition to the Scripting News Christmas Party, I’ll also be at the Berkman Center’s Internet & Society conference next week. This year’s theme is “Online Politics: Is the Web Just for Liberals?,” and should be just the thing to get me out of political blogging. With any luck there will be some startup type folks there as well, judging from the panelist and facilitator list (which includes Joi Ito, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, and Craig Newmark of CraigsList. Plus the usual gang—Dave Winer, Dave Weinberger, John Palfrey, Esther Dyson, Dan Gillmor… Oh, and it looks like Andrew Orlowski from the Register will be on a panel. This should be fun. 🙂

Anil Dash: What’s in your search box?. At present, mine says "mission of burma" "peking spring", because it’s the first of a new month and I was on eMusic burning up my 40 monthly tracks, and then filling in all the missing metadata (like cover art and year).

RSS in Government: Blog — Dictionary Word of the Year. Merriam Webster reports that, once you strip out profanity and perennial words like “effect/affect”, blog was the most-searched word this year on Dictionary.com. You can tell it’s a no-news week when I found reference to this fact on three sites I read daily. (I’m pointing to the article at RSS in Government because the original story, a Yahoo! News item, will disappear within the month, and I hate linkrot. At least this way there will be some context in my archives later.)

And how long is it before the anti-blog backlash starts? Surely the Register’s venom and new NBC anchor Brian Williams’s snide comment about bloggers in the bathroom are only the opening shots across the bow…

Boing Boing: Darrin Perry: in memoriam. Perry led the 2002 redesign of WIRED magazine, which freshened the look and feel of the aging geek bible while making it more legible.

Of all the information in the obituary, the most surprising part for me was that he was born in Madison County, North Carolina, where my father’s family is rooted.

I haven’t surveyed my friends and neighbors in the blogosphere for a while, and there have been some developments:

• Tony Pierce: a little housekeeping for your ass. Tony reports that Blook II is done, and that he may have advance copies for ordering shortly.
• And it looks like the book buzz is catching, as Scott Rosenberg is taking a hiatus from his day job at Salon to write a book.
• Speaking of Salon, “Wednesday Morning Download” columnist Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) got taken to task for criticising the string-heavy production on the first two Nick Drake albums in favor of the divine Pink Moon. His interlocutor throws out the following argument: “Pink Moon is the album that all of the Northeast liberal Blue State elites like. For those of you, like me, surrounded by the real people in the Red States, I recommend Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left.” While I can’t argue with Mr. Parasol Blog about the greatness of “River Man,” I’ll raise him “Fruit Tree” in response—and hope that “red state” and “blue state” make it onto the verboten words list for 2005.
• On an entirely different foot, the brilliant Merlin Mann not only writes 5ives, he is also the author of 43 Folders, which turns out to have some tremendously cool tips about a lot of OS X software that, um, I don’t really use. Though reading what he says about Quicksilver, I’m inclined to try.

I haven’t gone to our polling place yet—Lisa and I are going to do that at lunchtime—but I’m going to do some voting right now using Vote Links: I’m voting today for John Kerry and against George W. Bush. View source to see how this works, then check out the tracking page at Technorati to see how it’s going.

By the way, this is the initiative that Dave Sifry talked about on my blog over a year ago; the spec is jointly written by Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik. I wanted to see something like this implemented several years ago—but alas, I can’t find the reference (so much for my backup brain).

New Lensday submission for Spooky. I originally planned to submit this, but decided to not go the black-on-black route.