(Source: jennilee)
How Developers, Designers, Project Managers, QA & Clients see each other (click to enlarge)
Watch Michele Bachmann’s Openly Gay Stepsister Praise Obama - http://tinyurl.com/3zucppo
Sir Harold Evans of The Week talks about cars. So good.
(Source: autos.aol.com)
I don’t think that sharp, immediate cuts in the deficit would create more jobs. I think in the short run that we’re seeing already a certain amount of fiscal drag coming from state and local governments from the withdrawal of previous federal stimulus, so I think in the short run, you know, the fiscal tightening is at best neutral and probably somewhat negative for job creation.
— Ben Bernanke
(Source: Mother Jones)
A Supposedly Fun Guy Who Will Never Live Again
Who hasn’t read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest yet? It seems like required these days if you want to seem conversant in high-brow pop culture, right along with “Arrested Development”. DFW’s suicide at the age of 46 (in 2008) served to further cement its cult status. The slew of obituaries that followed his death were certainly respectful – some even reverent – but they were almost without exception utterly factual. There was a obsession among eulogizers with the death itself. Its causes, its circumstances, its meaning.
I’ve been reading his collection of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and its struck me that DFW’s death, more than anything, was just sad. And it’s not because he was an exceptional writer or a former junior semi-pro tennis player. It’s because he gave voice to an incredible mind. He saw the world both sardonically and affectionately. He never talks down to you, but you still feel the presence of genius in his writing. He quite deliberately describes the puzzle his own style tries to solve in “E Unibus Pluram” (PDF):
The rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn’t only credible as art; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture critics call “a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems.” Kesey’s dark parody of asylums suggested that our arbiters of sanity were maybe crazier than their patients; Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread tin the corporo-bureaucratic wave; DeLillio exposed image, signal, data, and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. …
So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liverating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a mode that wears especially well. As Hype puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” …
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean whatI say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? … Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. …
And this is why the fiction-writing citizen of our televisual culture is in such deep doo. What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart. …
What response to television’s commercialization of the modes of literary protest seem possible, then, today? One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary culture evil and turn one’s back on the whole Spandexed mess and genuflect instead to good old pre-sixties Hugh Beaumontish virtues and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Flouride, antidiluvian. The problem with this is that Americans who’ve opted for this tack seem to have one eyebrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and just seem like an excellent crowd to want to transcend.
Although he never reaches an answer to the question that fuels the essay, he seems to have achieved something similar in his writing, somehow. And when I refer to DFW’s writing I’m talking about his novels, sure, but also – and especially – his hilariously maudlin first-person essays. More than any other writer, he manages to bring the reader inside himself without writing about himself. He makes himself the blank slate, the universally relatable protagonist (thx Paul) and invites the reader to see hugely normal phenomena through his massively abnormal eyes.
In an absolute stroke of genius, some editor at Harper’s sent DFW to document various typical American experiences. The Illinois state fair, a luxury cruise. In these works, more than anywhere else, you begin to feel like you know this man. Like you could have a conversation with him about nearly anything. Like he’d laugh at your jokes, or make jokes you could laugh at. He’s deadly smart but approachable, a very special kind of friend. A friend you’ve never met.
At the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, he said that the purpose of education was to teach “how to keep you from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable, adult lives dead, unconscious, a slave to your … natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperiously alone”. In this respect, DFW was a kind of educator for us all, waking us up to the beautiful, lovable irony of the world all around us.
You guys have this all wrong. Everything you’re doing is anticipating that they’re somewhere having a meeting which is like, ‘What if Beck says something that embarrasses us?’ That’s an NBC meeting. They have eight guys in suits in a conference room, and you’re playing this like an NBC meeting. Now, let me tell you what a Fox meeting is: A Fox meeting is, ‘Boy, he’s really emotional. Now he’s tearing up. What if he gets really emotional and doesn’t do the show and we don’t get the ratings, what are we going to do?’
— David Rhodes, ex-VP for news at Fox News, on Fox News
(Source: New York Magazine)
When Mildred Baena, matriarch of Schwarzenegger’s secret basement family, says she’s been “on his staff” for 20 years, she really means it!
— Kelsey Hopkins
This week, Smoke the Iraqi donkey will arrive in the US after a 37-day, $30-40k journey. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International, which funded the journey, has identified no cruelty. However, says the Society’s Terry Crisp, “Once you met him and saw what a unique donkey he was, it was hard to say no to him.”
We have officially won the war on terror.
NPR is doing a very cool series of interviews in which it asks Republican prominents what made them “fall for politics”. Click through the picture to read the articles.
It is engraved on the back. HAPPY MOTHERS DAY ALYSSIA. FRED RACHEL AND KENNY
— my mom, re. her iPad
Organisers say the field has traditionally been dominated by Europeans but that the US, which has twice hosted the event, is fast becoming “the world’s new facial hair super power”.
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(Source: BBC)
Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity. (Pause.) Perhaps one day I will go into space.
— Stephen Hawking (For more great Hawking click here. Really, do it.)
(Source: The New York Times)
