The song below is the B Side on her Obsessions single which appears only to be available on 7″ vinyl in the US. I think it is for sale on CD in the UK though, so I recommend you fly there and get it.
Anyway, I love this song—reminds me of Lene Lovich kinda—but I was reading her blog and was v disappointed to learn that she must be colorblind or something because how could she be so wrong about the colors of the numbers? I must set the record straight and prevent this misinformation from spreading.
Three- Green (SO fucking green) ORANGEY BROWN
Four- Purple [CORRECT]
Five- Red [CORRECT]
Six- Blue SILVER
Seven- Gold/ Yellow WHAT?! BLUE
Eight- Deep Purple BROWN
Nine- Brown GOLD
Ten- Black YELLOW
Eleven- Silver NO COLOR
If you search the phrase prize ribbons on Google, Jessica Grindstaff’s prize ribbons page is #9 — on the first page of results!
This probably has more to do with the excellence of the ribbons themselves than my coding, but hopefully with some more attention it can go even higher on the page!
Wow—really inspiring and in-depth beta demo from Google about their upcoming product Google Wave. I had seen headlines of the announcement last week, but it was Andy Ihnatko’s thoughtful Sun-Times article that got me to sit down and watch the 80-minute presentation. Some good quotes from the article:
Wave is an ambitious, brand-new infrastructure for communication in general … Wave is hugely ambitious. Which means that it’s bound to fail.
I have no idea whether it’ll fail (I hope not) but it will depend on the implementation. I second Ihnatko’s assertion that no other company could pull this off. He rightly points out that Microsoft would be too concerned with monetizing it, and Apple would be too concerned with tightly controlling every aspect of it. That’s probably true, but I think it’s also because no other company can come with the level of web magic that Google can.
As a developer, it’s really a joy to behold them reinventing the web every year or so. Gmail, then Maps, Reader, Docs, then Maps again, and now Wave.
They basically sat down and were like “we’re going to reinvent email. And while we’re at it, all other forms of internet communication. But let’s not try to own it, because then it won’t work.”
Who else does that? Part of their demo shows how a direct competitor can develop a skin for their implementation and not interact with Google at all. That’s just amazing.
Spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said there was no meaning in the new name, which the company spent over a year to arrive at in an internal search. [WaPo]
No mention of Blackwater on their new website, not even on About Us. BlackwaterSecurity.com is not working, BlackwaterUSA.com is now USTraining.com.
Anyway, marketing WIN. The word (Xe) is like memory kryptonite. I can’t even remember it and I’m still writing the post about it. I guess sometimes losing mindshare is the goal. Also see: Altria.
People Who Care About “Tweet” Being the Verb Form of “Twitter” and Have Opinions About Its Usage
This includes people who think you should say “tweet” when you talk about the activity associated with Twitter and people who think you should just use the word “Twitter.” These opinions are equally uninteresting. If you must use the Twitter, or not use the Twitter, just do it (or don’t). Let’s not bring grammar and logic and giving a shit into this.
People Who Claim to Be Afraid of Clowns
These people (and they are numerous) are attempting to cultivate a cute quirk, but they are really just aping a cute quirk cultivated by thousands of cute-quirk-cultivators before them in a giant, gross, boring feedback loop. Yes, clowns can be mildly creepy. But come on. Among the many things that are scarier than clowns: fire, earthquakes, a guy with a knife, riding the bus, colon cancer, falling down the stairs (it could happen at any time!), rapists, people who just kind of look a little rapey and are standing too close to you in line at 7-Eleven, Marlo from The Wire, influenza, and scissors.
Minnesotans today can breathe a sigh of relief, now that 6th District Republican congresswoman “Michele Bachmann” has revealed herself to be an elaborate performance-art hoax.
No stranger to outlandish and “guerilla-style” art projects, the openly-gay [Trinity] Ohm said she created the Bachmann character as part of her ongoing mission to use experimental performance art to “confront issues of gender, patriarchy, and the mainstreaming of authoritarian politics in America.” Previously, Ohm was best known for her video art project “Tyrannosaurus Sex,” a five-hour video, which featured a nude Ohm, with a latex phallus attached to her forehead, making, then destroying balloon animals…
Rjd2′s 2003 album The Horror is great. I’m not loving the new album though (“The Third Hand”). Also, it’s worth mentioning that his site is pretty rad.
Point is, I want to support Bill Keller’s latest initiative to reduce his organization’s carbon footprint. Here’s some superfluous language I suggest they might cut out of tomorrow’s paper—actually this whole story:
Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan
The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here.
The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants’ main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.
Uh, so they’re going to side with the corrupt landlords! You have to admire their commitment to demonstrating their position in nearly every word of the lede. If this were neutral, it could have been titled something like “Taliban Seen as Engineering Revolt in Remote Area of Pakistan” or “Taliban’s Dictum Appeals to Pakistan’s Rural Working Poor” or something (these are their words). But no, we have “exploit” (how dare they?) and “class rifts” (my favorite) right there in the title. Class rifts? Talking about “class” instead of “poverty” makes it seem like the difference is part of the natural order. “Rifts” reinforces that. To my ear, “rifts” connects with the “fissures” below, like it’s a geologic rock formation.
Now of course I’m not a fan of any religious extremists, nor of bloody uprisings, but what’s the story here? It’s that there is a society of people (poor Pakistanis living in a remote northern corner of the country 100 miles north of Peshawar) who have been enduring an untenable hardship for a long time, and that they joined a cause that promised to improve their lives. At the expense of “about four dozen landlords” [aka oligarchs]. The story goes on to say just that only a few paragraphs down.
But in the Times’s language, it sounds like these criminals are subverting the very laws of nature to “advance” their vast armies in a linear fashion toward the dreaded soft target of Punjab.
Taliban don’t give the poor people money, they offer “economic spoils.” I suppose they have to because listen to the heartbreaking plight of the exiled oligarchs:
A landlord who fled with his family last year said he received a chilling message last week. His tenants called him in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, to tell him his huge house was being demolished, he said in an interview here.
The most crushing news was about his finances. He had sold his fruit crop in advance, though at a quarter of last year’s price. But even that smaller yield would not be his, his tenants said, relaying the Taliban message. The buyer had been ordered to give the money to the Taliban instead.
I noticed in 
