That’s how iTunes showed the description for this week’s episode of This American Life. Stupidly funny.
For the record, the full description reads, “The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.”
in case it hadn’t passed through your FB feed, the self-explanatory group, “I bet we can find 1,000,000 People who Support Same Sex Marriage,” surpassed its goal by the end of 11 days, and is still going strong.
so i guess the question is whether we have a really big choir preaching to itself, or if this kind of action really gets noticed and influences any kind of change.
In the aftermath of the Super Bowl, it’s time to revisit this “Men on Football” sketch from 1992’s In Living Color:
“The books has been read, and the library is closed!”
(h/t: Joe. My. God.)
Okay, so maybe referring to The Obama as specious is a bit of a stretch, but, dammit, I wanted that pun! And, really, it was just a setup for this awesome graphic by artist Mike Rosulek:
What did people daydream about before popular culture? History? Religion? Geneology? Was I suffering from some sort of condition exacerbated by the internet culture of link and remix?
Author James Lileks explores how his own brain works. He travels associatively from Camptown Races to Foghorn Leghorn to Lou Grant to Singin’ in the Rain to Twitter to the Simpsons, and concludes, “I, for one, welcome the day when people no longer say ‘I, for one’.”
Read it and laugh and smile and shake your head.
Christine Smallwood, writing at the Baffler blog, examines the question, “What Does the Internet Look Like?” It’s a long way from the question to the answer, and the journey is well worth it.
After noting that many visions of the Internet rely on images of connectedness, she explores the essentially solitary nature of the Internet search:
We are born alone, we die alone, and we use the Internet alone. You may gather round the screen with friends to watch a video clip (turning the Internet into a television), or hang out while you play music on Pandora (turning the Internet into a radio), or post to your blog, or “comment” on someone else’s blog (turning the Internet into a roundtable, or a bathroom wall, depending). But these are subsidiary Internet uses. The essence of the Internet, the thing it does that nothing else can do, its Internet-ness, is the search. Comedian Dave Chappelle captured this with the skit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which he loitered in a seedy mall like a modern Odysseus, ransacking CD stores, ducking into curtained rooms to indulge various temptations, and running away from spammers. Wandering around the Internet, the thing we are always searching for is the door—the exit ramp off the superhighway, the way home. But it’s hard to find. How do you know when you’re done doing nothing?
Please, read the whole thing.
(h/t to Dr. Hoo for noting that Thomas Frank is one again producing The Baffler in print!)
Since everyone in the media is all agog over the latest existential threat to our very way of life (i.e., Yemen), I thought I’d look around a little and see what I could find. Via a link Jonathan Schwarz’s A Tiny Revolution, I came across this excellent blog post by Adam Curtis, a documentary filmmaker who produced, among other gems, The Power of Nightmares (2004) and The Mayfair Set (1999).
It’s really worth reading the whole post, but one key takeaway is that
only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners… [T]he chaos that has engulfed the Yemen today and is breeding new terrorist threats against the west is a direct result of that conflict of forty years ago.
His blog post contains some excellent archival video from the BBC documenting British adventures there in the 1960’s. It’s worth every minute of your time.
The other key takeaway is that, apparently, British people call it “the Yemen.”
A great article about Timothy Leary includes this bit of a conversation between Leary and media/society scholar Marshall McLuhan:
In one of their prophetic conversations McLuhan made the following prediction: ‘You’re going to win the war, Timothy. Eventually. But you’re going to lose some major battles on the way. You’re not going to overthrow the Protestant Ethic in a couple of years. This culture knows how to sell fear and pain. Drugs that accelerate the brain won’t be accepted until the population is geared to computers. You’re ahead of your time. They’ll attempt to destroy your credibility.’ Leary replied with typical Irish blarney: ‘It’s incredibility I’m after’, declaring himself a true futurist once and for all.
Leary’s Wikipedia page is excellent, too.
