Michelle sent me this wicked cool Geography Quiz today. So far my highest score is 72. My weak spot is mainly Africa, so I’m going to have to refresh my memory there. Did I mention I love maps and geography? I haven’t posted any obsessive Google Maps entries lately. I need to do that, especially since they’ve finally upgraded their satellite photography of rural Arkansas. Here’s my mom’s house.
1.) Your search – “wicked cool geography quiz” – did not match any documents.
Can you handle the meta? I’ll be commenting on Mark Morford’s comments on a piece in New York Magazine about these kids today and their internets. Here’s Mark’s ever-eloquent, ever-snarky summary:
“If you believe the media skew, if you see it all through a lens of fear or lack of nimble perspective, suddenly it’s all drooling MySpace sexual predators and binge-drinking frat-boy idiots and millions of lost brain-rotted teens snorting ketamine off each other’s stolen iPods and then shooting each other in the face after playing 6 million hours of Grand Theft Auto, one giant violent sexed-up gum-snapping body-pierced eating-disorder STD-ready freak show ready to implode at the drop of a hat or the shave of a Britney.
And it’s also one big dumb, overblown lie. Well, most of it.”
The message to parents: calm down. Raising kids today isn’t weirder or more dangerous than it used to be, it’s just differently weird and differently dangerous. In the 50’s, conventional wisdom was that rock and roll was dangerous, and now people pay upwards of $100 to see crusty dope fiends like the Rolling Stones play at their local arena. Yes the Internet allows kids to put more of themselves online, but the threat of online predators is about as valid as that of muggers in Manhattan: real but rare.
For everything you gain, you lose something. What kids gain with the social Internet (MySpace/LiveJournal/Flickr/Facebook/et al) is a way to express themselves, a platform for communicating more easily with their friends, and an archive of their adolescence that they can refer to throughout their lives. What they lose is perhaps some measure of safety/privacy, the ability to escape past mistakes/embarrassments, and maybe some fresh air.
There’s a real temptation for a parent who grew up in front of a TV watching cartoons to feel disconnected and paranoid about their kids growing up in front of the Internet, because it’s a different world from the one they grew up in; but isn’t that always the case? Personally I’m more afraid of kids growing up eating so much fast food and/or microwaved crap as fewer parents seem to cook these days.
And for heaven’s sake, if the sight of your kid glued to a laptop all day bugs you, take them outside! I had my nieces and nephew over Monday night, and when I saw each of them playing online games, I immediately suggested we go play frisbee. Fortunately they have not lost their zeal for real world activities.
Curt Smith, one half of Tears for Fears, has been keeping a tour blog. Here are some good thoughts from a man who’s seen everything in the music business:
“If you’re of the opinion that wealth will bring you happiness, dream on. You’re either happy/content by nature (or work) or not – money won’t change that. At the richest I’ve ever been I was the least happiest, consequently I chose to leave TFF and my homeland in search of better things, I’m “grateful” everyday that I found them. I live in Los Angeles, “I see rich people” every day, I can’t say the majority of them are happy. They seem to spend inordinate amounts of time talking about their earnings/position and how much they spend. Most of them are medicated in some way, be it through alcohol or the antidepressant du jour. Not only are they not happy, they’re dull to boot. To sum up – it’s my experience that the same percentage of rich people are happy/unhappy as poor people, status doesn’t change anything.”
Helpful reminder: you can assess your Arkansas property tax here. And you can renew your Arkansas tags here.
Which reminds me. I’m 30 years old and I still have no idea what an assessment is. As far as I’m aware, it involves me going to the revenue office, saying who I am, and being handed a piece of paper. No money changes hands. I don’t even have to show an ID. But I have to be handed this piece of paper to take to the another desk where they’ll give me a new sticker for my license plate. And while I’m certainly glad that this process has been simplified by the use of the Internet, I still have no idea what I’m doing when I get my property assessed.
And while I’m at it, the concept of a warranty is somewhat mystifying. Basically you sell me a car, and then you sell me a piece of paper saying that if particular parts of it fail, you’ll pay for it, because apparently you’re not confident enough in the quality of your workmanship that you have to have ME pay a little extra JUST IN CASE something goes wrong and YOU have to pay me. And the specificity of the things a warranty covers seems to be getting ever more narrow, such that they approach the level of Steve Martin’s weight guessing prize shelf in The Jerk – “Anything between the ashtrays and the thimble. Anything in this three inches right in here in this area. That includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers.”
If you like TV, love the Internet, and dislike commercials, may I recommend this: downloadable TV shows. Yes, it’s illegal, but until TV converts its business model from a blunderbuss of unwanted channels to targeted subscriptions, let’s enjoy the fruits of digital piracy like we did in the days of Napster.
I can’t stand it anymore. The Gap commercial with Audrey Hepburn dancing to AC/DC makes me ill. Not because I dislike AC/DC or the Gap (I love the former and have no use for the latter), but because I don’t think Audrey would approve. I think it’s really quite sad that, once you’re dead, you’re apparently public domain and any coke-fueled Madison Avenue dinkwad can make you their dancing puppet.
Of course, now that I’ve said that…here are some digital mashups of the dead I actually enjoy:
DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Video (Jay-Z meets the Beatles)
BBC Radio 2’s Elvis and Friends advert
I should note that Danger Mouse’s video disclaims itself as pure experimentation for non-commercial purposes, and BBC Radio 2 does pay royalties on those artists’ songs when they are aired. So at least the puppetry of the dead isn’t being used for 3rd party profit in those cases.
As you may have heard, AOL released vast swaths of private search history data to the public recently. Now some crafty geek has made that data available for convenient browsing.
AOLSearchDatabase.com allows you to query and randomly view selections from the AOL data. Although users are identified only by an ID number, you’re able to view examples of the phrases on which they have searched. Frankly, I feel pretty dirty looking at it. But like a virtual car crash, I can’t look away. It’s an utterly fascinating series of psychological profiles of average Americans. Add to that the undeniably voyeuristic thrill of peeking into people’s search histories, and you have the makings of an ethical conundrum. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this. Maybe I’ll take this post down later, as AOL tried to do with its data, but for now I’ll just pretend that this information wants to be free. It’s interesting to note how difficult secrets are to keep in the Internet Age.
Katherine pointed out to me today that spam poetry is getting more complex. She sent me some fine selections and I noticed that whatever program is generating the words is also generating hyphenated words, such as “sulphureo-aerial,” which I Googled (with quotation marks) and came up with only 3 sites: a blog, a word list, and this.
It appears to be pages upon pages of randomly generated AND structured text. It has the appearance of a web page – paragraphs of theoretically coherent syntax, bullet points, headers, and links. Even email links. With lots of words generally found only in technical/scientiic parlance. And apparently these pages go on for miles.
The Internet just got weirder.
I keep forgetting to tell people about the Internet Archive and its enormous store of free live recordings. The list is huge and eccentric (and obscure), but if you take the time to skim down the list I’m sure you’ll find something you like. A lot of it comes from the ‘taper’ community, so there’s a ton of Grateful Dead and jam bands, but like I say there’s something for everyone. So far I see good stuff from: Alex Skolnick, Ari Hest, Aquarium Rescue Unit, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Ben Lee, Ben Kweller, Buckethead, Charlie Hunter, David Gray, David Mead, Damian Rice, G. Love, Mogwai, Moe, Kaki King, Jump Little Children, Jack Johnson, Howie Day, Henry Kaiser, Guster, Robert Randolph, Spoon, The Argument, The Decemberists, The Samples, and Toad the Wet Sprocket.