Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

It's been a while since I've done an old-fashioned linkdump. All of these are articles or posts that I wanted to respond to but never found the time to, and yet had stuck in my bookmarks.

• an interview in Fast Company with John Taylor Gatto about teaching and homeschooling
• three articles by Dave Pollard: ackwnowledging that he's an intense person, arguing that blogs haven't really filled a real need yet, and un-interviews
• an argument for no more advertisements in video games, which I think I found looking for arguments about how video games are the new music distribution channel
• Derek Miller wants more active voice in news broadcasts, and I agree: I bet if you did a content analysis of just one BCTV newscast, you'd find enough passive voice to write a blog post about
• I read Why Newspapers Matter, Danger to Human Dignity: the Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law, The Gentle Art of Selling Yourself, Why Americans hate Paris Hilton, Marketing to Introverts and the Gentle Art of Saying No long enough ago to forget what they said
• William Safire on addressing people in written correspondence. How I address people depends on how close I am to them. I'm cheerier to customers and usually address them by name the first time they send in an email. But generally, the closer I am, the less likely I'm going to address them by name.

Some links from May of this year that went unpublished (until now!):

• antique maps of Iceland [via The Map Room]
• Canada has its own record of military abuse. Yet we unproblematically criticize Americans for the same thing.
• The first of many no's, re: the 1947 United Nations partition plan.
• Make effective use of the power of caffeine: coffee drinkers bug me about the amount of Coke I drink.
• Naked Condo reminds me of myself.
• Another monogamist. It's not husband or wife anymore. Instead, "partner". I had taken to deridingly referring to people as "monogamist" back when I thought monogamy was a bad thing.

It's been a while since I've done a linkdump. A combination of open tabs, bookmarks, and browser history contributed to this one:

• You have bad taste in music: a guy with a megaphone berates queues at rock concerts for their horrible listening habits. Humour ensues. (The one for Staind is the funniest.)
• Technosexual and AlterNet story on the phenomenon. Will the madness please stop?
• Darren points to a man who is pimping his virginity on the Internet. As if. I point out in Darren's comments an excellent article on involuntary celibacy which I linked to earlier in the year.
• I took a photo of kites in Vanier Park that I'm very happy with. Same goes for the photo of spare Ambrosio bicycle tire rims at Tour de Gastown last week. Roland took a really great photo of two racers warming up.
• If I never get to ripping apart Newsweek's terrible article on "infidelity", it would include saying this: for an article that condemns the double-standard towards women "cheating" on their husbands, it sure does focus quite a bit on the women side of things, and negatively so. And if so many people are "cheating", doesn't that say something about the legitimacy of the rules?
• a blast from the past: Heather's reaction to someone who felt it was an accomplishment to stay single for 30 days. I know about whom she's referring, but I believe the item in question is now offline. My reaction to it was something along the lines of, If you think it's amazing being alone for a month, try it for the better part of a decade.
• Breakup News, a weblog devoted to keeping track of non-famous romantic splits, and So.There, anonymous letters to people you know both seem like interesting projects, as does tired.com, a site with only an email address and a question [back-story] and You Whores, where you can buy and sell anything for any price. Yes, anything. Yes, for any price.
• Steph's story about someone mishearing what she said and her quick-thinking is funny because you have to be a geek to understand the last bit of it.

Andrew, in the comments to this entry, says he will be looking at my site for more on what I have to say about "nice guys". To save him (oh, uh, and you) some the effort, here's a collection of "nice guy" links from the archives of Just a Gwai Lo:

• Why "nice guys" are often such LOSERS
• gapingvoid.com cartoon on the subject
• a highlighted quote and a comment from yours truly
• my viewpoint that nice guys are neither lovers nor fighters
• a speculation on why "nice guys" would choose the Dark Side
• a quote from andrew (but you already saw that, so to make up for that...)
• something not-yet-linked: at Erosblog there was some discussion on the subject here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you don't see nudity at any of those links, you're doing something wrong.

• Andy “Hankering after things that are out of reach only makes you dissatisfied, so after a while you build a high wall so that you can’t see them any more and that way you don’t get so dissatisfied. You don’t notice the rut, because everyone living your side of the wall has their own rut.” I wrote something similar the other night, something about intimidation. But...
• ..Betsy Devine says it's not a good idea to blog about your personal crap if you're name is #1 in a search for your name, or if you link to your personal crap from a site that is #1 for your name.
• Michael Kimmelman thinks that elitists should be in charge of a Sept. 11th memorial. The argument isn't very well-written, but the most of the controversial art—controversial because it challenged the contemporary regime in such a way that made that art long-lasting—were either commissioned or done one one's own dime without it being put to a vote. Any corrections or elaborations on this broad generalization of art history are welcome.
• Aaron Friedman thinks that car alarms are seriously annoying (I would have gone with "fucking annoying", but it's a family newspaper). There's one that goes off near my apartment complex, and it only goes off around 2 AM or so. I actually considered posting an angry note, but that just escalates the anger of all involved: “False alarms enrage otherwise lawful citizens, and alienate the very people car owners depend on to call the police.”

Not a whole lot this time.

The following links came from here (so did the links in the unbiased weather and spanking posts):

• john ray links to a David Brooks column suggesting that “[t]he Republicans used the powers of government to entrench their own dominance” (which is to be expected for the party in power: those who don't have power still want it). George W. Bush, as john ray mentions, isn't all that conservative. Right-wing, maybe, but expanding government spending and imposing steel tarrifs do not a conservative make. [do not a * make]
• how come this was posted before this, yet the former appeared in a Google News search and the latter did not? Smells like an email forward to me.
• Michael Kantor: on the word "metrosexual": “The average guy does not want to be thought of as gay, or even feminine. If you imply some sort of gay sexual connotation to buying an expensive suit, I suspect that you will sell less expensive suits and not more of them. If you want to sell something to a man, you have to demonstrate how it will help him get sex with women, not how it will help him become like women.” Emphases in original.
• “So what happens when you are a single male, living alone, without a culinary caretaker of the opposite gender? (I phrase this so delicately because "woman to cook for you" is one of those crowded-room ear perk head-turn phrases, like "puked on the lawn" or "spent the night in jail.") How does one conquer the thankless job of cooking for oneself day after monotonous day?” The King of Fools has the answers.

Just clearing out some old bookmarks. The ones that are crap were (and will be) deleted before being blogged here. The good ones are blogged here then deleted. Got it? Good.

• In/flux Mixoff: a site with MP3s of members of the In/flux mailing list which, while ostensibly about DJ Shadow, ended up just being a list of DJ Shadow fans talking about mostly music. I've been subscribed to it for a good 6 years now. The premise of the site: take some samples provided beforehand and make a new song. Be sure to check out Mixoff 2 and Mixoff 3. Evidently there are no files left for Mixoffs 4 and 5.
• Crut: the product of this guy, who probably has more records than you. More obscure too. Smartest guy with regards to music I can think of.
• Gemm, which purports to be the world's largest catalog of music. They probably have a good case, and if you're looking for that CD single you once saw in a record store but couldn't justify buying until now (well, if you're reading this, then odds are you know how to get the MP3), Gemm is a good place to start.
• Library jobs in the Northwest; Oregon. I had this grand scheme that I was going to get my MLIS and work in the States via NAFTA. (You didn't know you could work in the United States as a librarian through NAFTA? Well, now you do.)
• Some sites I researched for webhostings: Aletia Hosting; tera-byte.com; and One on One. It appears Aletia offers a better deal than the one I'm currently getting with Vervehosting, but the cost in time to transfer everything over and get everything up and running again outweighs any savings gained.
• Transit in B.C.; B-Line study in Vancouver. I was a big transit nerd, and even contemplated a transit weblog at one point.
• Stuff that looks really great but I don't have the time/energy/both: .boy.; Things a Man Should Know; sodaconstructor [MeFi discussion]

• Jason Shellen: “My Mom is so mean. She won't let me wear makeup or anything.”
• Simon Dumenco deconstructs celebrity culture (especially, in the second part, the role magazines play): “A celebration of vapidness as a form of postmodern brand purity, [some girl who doesn't matter] is a beautiful rich girl unencumbered by any agenda beyond ubiquity.”
• An article from January of this year talks about the low entry costs of blogging.
• I have daydreams similar to Aaron's.
• Watching MuchMusic the other day, this female, Asian-Canadian rapper was on the TV screen. I was like "What's this? A female, Asian rapper? Must be Canadian." And I was right.
• My name does not appear on this list nor does it appear on this list. SCANDAL!
• The best accordion picture ever?
• a paragraph missing from the death notice of a rabbit translated from Japanese. (Yet another item first blogged at nipponophilic BoingBoing—not that I, a Sinophile, am any better.) Oolong is the name I'm giving to my computer if it ever gets networked with another, but I decided that before I heard of the similarly-named now-dead rabbit, because Oolon Colluphid finally and clinchingly proved the non-existence of God. On second-reading (more like fourth-reading; my eyes are failing me today), Oolong != Oolon.

Updated throughout the evening.

• Jay has some thoughts and links about the upcoming Buy Nothing Day.
• Room 209, a cute weblog written by second graders.
• Interesting discussion on difficult users, i.e. trolls.
• A girl licking an accordion. Some people are into that kind of thing, evidently.
• On living with one's parents: “Your love life? Perhaps an even more disastrous topic than it was in earlier eras. Especially when your friends, siblings, relatives, and co-workers have long since happily married and are living in their own homes.”
• The Washington Post's Sunday Outlook and Washington Post Magazine need RSS feeds, not to mention The New York Times Magazine. Other feeds for The New York Times are available, however.
• Maps and Territories: my Geography class this semester turned me into a map nerd.
• Instapundit on sex. I've been reading his weblog a lot lately.
• Websites that I don't have the patience to read, but feel the need to increase their spread: Ladder Theory; Fast Seduction; and 123 EFT. I was page-slapped the last two by a reader who thought I needed to change my ways.
• Kevin Marks spoofs John C. Dvorak.

• Tim Bray: “Every time I open the pages, I get a little thrill at the thought that I'm reading words written two and a half millenia ago.” I've been getting the same thrill, having read a few "classics" for class. And this after thinking that reading the classics was a waste of time, since we're swimming in a Western culture that constantly references it. Bray is talking about Herodotus, and I think I prefered Thucydides, both in style and content. Bray talks in the end about Herodotus that it's tempting to draw parallels to current events, but that it doesn't have much mileage. Worth checking out if you want a brief taste of one of the classics.
• George Lakoff argues that liberals and progressives have to change how they frame the debate. I'll admit to being seduced by the rhetoric of conservatism (a few years of reading The National Post, especially in its early days, was all it took). My dad is reporting some success in changing the culture of responses to industrial accidents: instead of emphazing that safety is a good thing—when companies hear, coming from a union, that safety is a good thing, the companies start to wonder as to the ulterior motive of the unions—my dad is trying to popularize the slogan "unsafe is unacceptable", unacceptable to all involved.
• But She's a Girl links to a program to get your life back into balance.
• Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex With You: who knew there was so much to talk about on that subject?
• There's no "birth" in partial-birth abortions. This applies to all polls: “I'd like to know how many of the people who answered that question understood exactly what they were being asked about.”

One idea, one post is a really good way to blog, but nuts to that for now. Too much to clear off the aggregator and—increasingly—email. Somebody said email was dead. Rumours of its demise...

• news item of the Icelandic penis museum. More evidence—as if it were needed—that Icelanders do indeed rock.
• Real Life Comics: the title sounds good to me.
• Self Referential Aptitude Test
• a fairly nerdy FoxTrot cartoon. Good thing I know C++ (barely). Evidently it's poorly formed code, a source tells me. Something about lack of a namespace. Poorly formed code in cartoon form is verboten.
• From a review of "Split Sides" which focusses on the bands composing music for it: “Both Radiohead and Sigur Ros are used to writing songs. Freed to compose open-ended pieces, they turned to patterns and samples. Both bands seemed to be thinking about Mr. Cunningham's longtime collaborator, John Cage, who found music in everyday sounds. Both pieces started out sweetly and ended in discord.”
• Bob Blaisdell: “Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless.” Faith in people, not technology. Also: Factoring in why technology goes awry.
• Joel Yanofsky: “While The Naked Truth covers a lot of sexual ground, from stripping lessons to cybersex, it tends to be a kilometre wide and a centimetre deep. We're escorted into a variety of dens of iniquity or open-mindedness, depending on your point of view, but we never stay long enough to get to know anyone there or to understand why they do what they do.”

When in doubt, linkdump.

• Lola Ogunnaike on Lucy Liu in Kill Bill: Vol. 1: “it is her role as O-Ren Ishii, a kimono-clad femme fatale in Quentin Tarantino's blood-drenched, slice-'em-up "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" (which opened Friday), that has elevated Ms. Liu, 34, to an entirely new level of ruthlessness and secured the actress's position as one of America's leading action heroines, at the risk of being typecast as a dragon lady.” What risk? She is typecast!
• Adam: “I started to think about emailing her to say thank you. I kept putting it off. Now it’s too late.”
• Blogging for Dollars. Well, blogging for hits, then dollars. Dollars only really go to sites with lotsa hits.
• the psychology of "open relationships": you do not have licence to tell me which category you fit under.
• Top Ten Most Overused Music Critic Words, Phrases and Clichés
• Jess Harvell: “Then there's Dizzee's flow. It's not just the Britishness [...] but the complete lack of U.S. hip-hop's mix of me-against-the-world survivalism and nouveau riche triumphalism.” "Seems 2 Be" (RealPlayer req'd) is one of the darkest, funniest, loudest and best braggadocio rap songs of all time. The part where he makes up URLs (about 1:40 in) to show how much you suck is awesome.
• Rogers Cadenhead has a great idea for uncomfortable social situations: play possum!

• There's a really great article co-written by Dizzee Rascal and his high school teacher about how the latter was an important influence on the former's musical career.
• Amanda Fortini: “Yet the real problem with extremely low-riding pants is that they're impractical. Sitting is difficult: If you can't find a chair with a closed back, you have to tie a shirt around your waist—always highly attractive—or risk scandalizing the room. If you drop something, or need to tie your shoe, abandon all hope; bending over with dignity is next to impossible. You must perfect the art of squatting, back straight, head up, as though preparing to curtsy. Low-riders also tend to slide down, requiring the wearer to hitch them up repeatedly.” All of these things happened at the basketball game I was at tonight (see here): the pretty girls sitting in front of me were constantly either tugging up their pants or or tugging down their shirts, which, counter to their intentions, calls attention to them rather than away from them. I'd rather you didn't, but if you're showing, I'm looking.
• David M. Kennedy: “Americans apparently prefer misgovernment that will leave them to their own devices to an effective government that might actually do something for them — or ask something of them.” Makes sense to me. I always wondered why conservatives hated big government. It never gets anything done, and isn't that what conservatives want of government? To do nothing?
• The 10 Commandments of Simon: “How can an atheistic, seemingly normal person reach such depths of insecurity and lack of self-confidence? How can one reach 29 years in life and not form a single intimate relationship with another human being? How can one stand a life of unending longing, loneliness, and sexual frustration?”
• Caryn James: “There is no perfect hybrid that serves as a model for a new genre, because the best recent film to use documentary and fiction, "American Splendor," is so inventive and iconoclastic it should defy cloning. In this witty depiction of Harvey Pekar's life and work, the real comic book creator Harvey Pekar is interviewed on camera documentary-style. We see his comics, based on his life, as well as dramatized segments with Paul Giamatti playing Mr. Pekar.” There's a lot that I identified with in that movie—especially the first half of it.
• Aaron wonders what to do when someone says something obviously false. Like how giving fellatio reduces a woman's risk of breast cancer, which is a hoax. The URL (http://www4.ncsu.edu/~brwilli2/cnn.html) gives it away. In Dave's defense, he's actually telling the truth, just as the Bush Administration may have technically told the truth about the yellowcake from Niger. But it's a really terrible excuse. Why is there no update here?
• chastitycatt: “There are worse things than having a little extra Douglas Adams about the house.”
• Dahlia Lithwick: “Is sexual conversation confusing? Yes? Is it frustrating? Maybe. Should we change laws because women are conflicted and men are horny? No.”

A quick pre-essay-writing linkdump. (The essay is for Geography, and no, it will not be posted here.) There are a bunch of in my email's sent folder awaiting further blogulation.

• Anil: “Who's an unsung geek genius with an unfairly low profile?” Please, please don't say me.
• Some unbridled sarcasm (but deserved sarcasm, since he's critiquing a Craigslist post) from The Black Saint: “Yes, I wish there were more men out there impressing gullible, simple-minded women by giving a few dollars to a recently released drug addict who will take that cash, score some smack, and promptly OD in the street. With any luck, you two will climax during his death throes.”
• David Gelernter on what he wants for email client software: “What's required is a two-button mail-reader. One button is labeled "acknowledge (quick!)," the other "answer (slow!)."” Right on! Also: I've purposely ignored emails too, usually ones where I read too much into what the girl is saying to me, even when she persists with followup emails.
• "15 simple steps to marriage: Self-help guide aims to help women to market themselves" by Anne Kingston: am I the only guy who chuckles at the fact that "how to get married" books are targetted almost exclusively towards women? See what the sexual revolution hath wrought? (Yes, my credibility on the issue is a little more than suspect. Shut up.)
• This will have already made the rounds, but that's okay, I'm not (always) above blogging something everybody else is blogging: evidently George W. Bush wrote a poem. What a conundrum this must pose for those who don't like Bush, trying to figure out if they should criticize the poem and say "don't quit your day job" or instead encourage him in his new-found hobby.

I'll go crazy if I don't get this stuff out of my head. Er, bookmarks.

• Charles Crawford: “I claim that the anorexic-like body image of women in the media is caused by the media responding to women’s stress-caused desires for thinness, rather than because the media are attempting to oppress women.”
• Sexual Racism: “Just because I find fat people unattractive, does that mean I don't deserve to be treated like a human being?”
• You don't look fat in that.
• This and this photo are the ones that interested me most as a political geek.
• Allen Barra: “Major League Baseball has become more competitively balanced over the past 100 years, not less.”
• Andrew Zimbalist: “Baseball's competitive balance problem is mostly a problem of bottom-dwelling teams performing poorly year after year.”
• Portrayal of Librarians...: “The characters, most frequently female, portrayed as librarians are always library employees, but may actually be paraprofessional, clerical, or student assistants. The libraries described include public, academic, high school, and special libraries of a variety of types and sizes. Some library descriptions seem to have been written by librarians or by regular library users, as they're quite realistic; other authors have apparently never even been in a library. The annotations further describe the characters and settings, give a brief plot summary, and provide information about sexual activities other than those mentioned above, such as male homosexual sex, bondage, violence, rape, and animal sex.” And you thought the quote was going to be mundane!
• Mark Vincent Diotte: “Here, information and knowledge are nonsense because information and knowledge are quantifiable and measurable. Instead there is the pseudo-science of education which, because it deals in reflection, emotion, outcomes, and appreciation, cannot be measured, but can be expanded to just about any topic you can think up.” A friend of mine is having serious second thoughs about joining the teacher certification programme for the same reasons Mark points out reasons. Education seems too "touchy feely" for my friend's liking. That sucks. She was going to be the friendly face in a pond of unknowns, but maybe not. (Oh, the last paragraph of that article makes no sense.)