TELL ME WHY YOU ARE SMARTER THAN ME

I feel like everything I read is awesome shit.

The Sitcom Digresses

These marketing dudes have got it covered. They pull out their ideas on how they would market overalls or give Katie Couric the relevance she needs. They're adapting to meet the new way consumers think and interact with media. Being crass here, but it's a huge mindfuck, of course. You're giving consumers a chance to invest a brief amount of time and effort in order to have them have a more memorable experience with a brand. When you feel an emotion or try to "send that out to all my friends" that little personal investment claims its place inside your life. Fucking brilliant. The quirky and weird style and humor that ads seem to tend toward nowadays are perfect for grabbing your attention. Confusion and intrigue is a powerful moment of weakness. Something to discuss with friends or inside yourself. What did that ad signify?

Multiscreen Mad Men

You like tomato, I like tomato... Let's call the whole thing off.

I wonder if humans who go to cold places and hipsters who go to cool places could ever meet halfway and bring ridiculously hip outdoor gear to splendid fruition.

How to Layer Clothing vs. Learning to Layer Clothing

What is it with bringing things together that brings a stupid smile to our faces? I remember having a passing thought a long time ago about this new trend of TV/film having a solid ensemble of characters slowly having their plotlines and backstories mix into other characters dark, dark past.

Offhand I can think of the short-lived TV series "The Nine," and "Lost," and the overvalued film "Crash." I once read something about the definition of creativity--probably linked from kottke or fimoculous given their awesomeness--and one person they interviewed, who was a painter, or scientist or something, said that it was the ability to bring several disparate ideas together in new ways. Although I haven't seen many episodes, "Seinfeld" is another big example of mixing ideas together for entertainment.

In longform improv comedy, spotting patterns and merging ideas and actions from previous scenes into current scenes are the most satisfying laughs. The performers are listening and creating together.

Girl Talk, Gregg Gillis's mashup outfit blasts tunes from your childhood, mixing it with jams from your boss's childhood.

An entry about this is obligated to use of the following word at least once: synthesis. I haven't stumbled onto anything profound. I'm sure this has been described by someone or much more qualified to wax sociologic on why we take such pleasure in putting two and two together.

My game is tight

What pisses me off is that there’s this growing sense that somehow Hollywood is the end-all and be-all of everything, EVAR, and that somehow everything good must be purchased and repackaged and buffed and relabeled with the Hollywood stamp. God, Hollywood, YOU DON’T HAVE TO PUT YOUR THUMB IN EVERY SINGLE GODDAMN PIE.

We do love to do that, don't we? It reminds me of a tourist writing about his realization that he wasn't being fucking cool going to foreign countries and venturing in less popular tourist areas. As he trudged through a jungle located on some remote island, he bumped into a small child that smiled and held out his hands. Another child appeared and began acting rather hostile to him. He was confused by the latter child's defensiveness and walked away thinking about the incident. It came to him that he was being a real dick, wandering into someone's property like that. That was probably their land and territory he was entering and the second boy was trying to protect his little bro.

This reminds me of the incident in Atlanta, Georgia of a Fulton County Superior Court judge ordering white lawyers out of the courtroom, hoping that his words would have a greater impact on the homogeneous crowd of black criminals that passed through his docket. Kicking out the white people in the courtroom caused some murmurs among the locals. I feel like it was the right thing to do in terms of increasing that the chance that these young men would take heed of what he was saying, but I can understand the inherent unfairness of what he did. Part of the judge's explanation:

"I didn't want them to think I was talking down to them; trying to embarrass them or insult them; be derogatory towards them and I was just saying 'Please get yourself together,'" he said.

What the fuck? Guilt is a real bitch. I need to be a bully.

Hollywood to Remake Another Korean Film (via Racialicious)

Correction: I wrote about the post on Racialicious from memory. I didn't re-read it and my version of the story is much cooler and much more of a lie than his story. His story is not a lie. I hope.

Copyright International Dialects of English Archive

This Recording should be mandatory reading for everyone.

Whatever You Like. Patron on Ice.

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on your win to be president of the United States of America. What are you going to change about littering, gas, and wars? Are you going to make hunting stop? Are you going to lower taxes? Are you going to give more money to schools? What are you going to do about stock markets? What are you going to do about parking spaces? What are you going to do about more jail time, book store prices, gas prices, robbers, the laws, houses, and long lines in Pathmark?

Your Biggest Fan,
Rafi

Why does everything Obama-related make me feel cozy and hopeful? Let's hope America gives him and a Democratically-controlled Congress time to change things. Be patient, folks.

Letters to President Obama from Fourth Graders in Harlem

Razor sharp!

As the returns became known, and Mr. Obama passed milestone after milestone —Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa and New Mexico — people rolled spontaneously into the streets to celebrate what many described, with perhaps overstated if understandable exhilaration, a new era in a country where just 143 years ago, Mr. Obama, as a black man, could have been owned as a slave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us/politics/06elect.html

Cutting-edge journalism.

Boobs

Interesting discussion led by Harvard Professor Sendhil Mullainathan on the irony of poverty.

The whole idea of the poor requiring more resources to educate themselves on making better decisions in order to get them out of the loop of making bad decisions that keep them in poverty. Yeah, I could phrase that better. Basically, you need resources that you often don't have access to to pull yourself out of doing things that keep you in your status of being "in poverty." You are trying to get out but you need resources to educate you and help you along the way. These are resources that are not there.

Okay, so this was what I was trying to tell Bob a few days ago and this discussion pretty much discusses the big idea behind my justification for Obama's tax plan. The "spread the wealth" plan sounds heinous when you describe it as taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. I'm not adept at tracking the historical shifts of how welfare has been implemented, so I cannot comment on how this resembles welfare, if at all. Painting Obama's comment as a negative thing often includes the comparison of his tax plan to socialism and a welfare state where the sedentary poor feed off the hard-working. The people drawing these comparisons are the ones who feel entitled to all of their income, or at least to all of the benefits of their money, whether it be in the form of government services funded by taxes or personal, private spending or investment. I would not call them delusional, but they certainly cling on to the idea that they have worked hard for every dollar (that's fine) and every dollar should directly be spent on something that benefits them (that I have a problem with).

On the one hand I don't want to denigrate the actual effort and time that got the middle- to extreme upper-class where they are. Ideally, everything should be considered on a case-by-case basis: cultural, biological, genetic, and every specific detail scrutinized and placed in context to create a frame of either YES YOU ARE WORTHY or NO YOU ARE NOT WORTHY, those two labels exactly.

Going back to the taking money from one person and giving it to another person. This is not exactly the case because the extra percentage of gross income going to the IRS is often quite immaterial to the high-income taxpayer. What exactly is another $30,000 to a person who has been consistently making $1 million for the past 10 years? You're bumping the marginal tax rate for top income earners by around 3%. Chances are that no matter what sort of wild lifestyle these top dogs have been living, they can still maintain their routine and still have enough leftover to buy whatever they want to buy before: umbrella racks, statues, photos of rare people... I don't know what rich people buy.

The logic behind the comparison is really ridiculous when you look at it. The critics grow incenses when you boil it down to a tableaux of taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. The unfairness is amplified or even pulled out of thin air and the direct effect is created from summarizing what is actually happening, eliding the details for rhetoric.

In the long run, I think taxing the wealthy at a slightly higher rate makes so much sense. Why do you take from those who don't have much? The cleavage ever-widening is a testament to the rich keep getting richer. You can do more with more.

The psychology experiments discussed in the Edge discussion is great. Mischel's marshmallow test, the implicit association, and the exhaustion of resistance to giving into temptation are ripe for the picking. They show how the poor are fucked the way things are now.

So much to type about. This paragraph is barely coherent. It's like smoking and being afraid of a plane crash. You're more like to get cancer than dying because of a horrific jet engine malfunction x 4. But you're looking short term and I guess for some short term is all they can consider since they won't have many years left. The old vote. Look long-term and helping the people at the bottom will benefit society as a whole when they are educated and even more productive members of our daily grind.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/class5.html
(from kottke)

Also, upon writing the word "cleavage" I searched for cleavage in Wikipedia expecting photos and it delivered one wonderful photo.