Tidbits and Pictures

I'm not sure it's really possible to take a good photo of Nancy Pelosi, and Drudge certainly has no shortage of unflattering portrayals. Everybody make a Star Wars joke.

In other news, Sarah Palin is going on Oprah to promote her printy-book Going Rogue: An American Life. Get ready for the book to contain embarrassing selections and Palin to sputter in interviews before blaming her ghostwriter and finally swearing off liberal interviewers who insist on context.

Finally, Barbara Ehrenreich had a really good interview with Jon Stewart on the danger of "positive thinking" as a philosophy - view it here.

Senior Citizens comment on MGMT to hilarious effect

This is genius. Old people watching, and commenting on, one of the most effed up (and, I believe, subtle and evocative, albeit horrific) music videos in recent memory. One of the video's commentors noted the distance between the preceding generations and ours - most young people, raised on irony, symbolism and meta-meanings to things (after all, that kid is really scared) wouldn't bat an eye at this stuff. The sustained look of horror in that woman's eyes at 2:20 is priceless and unnerving.

I laughed harder than I think I have in weeks, though there's that odd idea hanging in the rafters - what if they're all right, and we're sick for producing and watching this stuff? After all, it's not really a matter of being old and out of touch; the folks in the video were literally raised on a different diet of conceptions.

(Oh, and yes - the "mom" is Joanna Newsom, supposedly doing a spot-on send-off of Britney Spears.)

Morons With Signs

The glorious tradition of modern uninformed process: Morons With Signs. The dumb leading the dumber has never been funnier.

More evidence that Glenn Beck's show is an elaborate, brainy farce

This woman's lab coat says "Richard." (Jump to 7:40 or see the pic below.)



Is she a doctor? Did she kill Richard and supplant his role on the show? See this screenshot for a better, albeit grainy, look:


It wouldn't be fair to read too much into this unintentionally hilarious image, but we are dealing with the master of tenuous connections, so I think for humorous effect I'll interpret this is evidence of faux-libertarian treachery backed by ACORN, the RIAA, Hagar the Horrible and the bass player from Styx.

Next week on Glenn Beck: horses with human masks arguing against stem cell research.

EDIT: To really ride with this as a serious point would be as dumb as attacking Obama for ordering spicy mustard. Read the comments below for some more context - I don't like Mr. Beck but this isn't one of the foundations of my argument.

Source: I'm not saying Glenn Beck [planted] fake doctors in his panel, I'm just saying this woman's lab coat says her name is "Richard"

Dealing With Stuff #2

The point of dealing with stuff is acceptance, not internal combat and turmoil. I think a message such as this can provide an incomparable amount of comfort and provide a beneficial push toward internal security. Some might call it Mad Pride - I call it healthy (in both senses) common sense.

(This video is an episode of the Maria Bamford Show. You need to check out Maria Bamford - she's a fantastic, very human comic, easily my favorite.)

Dealing With Stuff #1

This is a repeat, but I feel an important one. Words of the illustrious Ze Frank:

"This is how I feel today. This is my baseline.

That's a trick. I learned that from an actor. I had asked her how she grounded herself, how she got rid of anxiety before she walked on stage. She said that there were certain things that were very difficult to control, and that how she felt at that moment was one of them. For her it was less about getting rid of that anxiety - less about subtraction - and more about recalibration.

She would pause for a moment to take what seemed to be her emotional temperature - a pause to feel the anxiety, the excitement, the sadness, whatever it was that day. She would try to do this without judgment, without separating out the bad things from the good things with an eye to change them, but rather taking them at face value.

Instead, she would recalibrate. The total of what she found would become her normal, the new baseline from which she would experience the world. Certain emotions can feed on themselves. It's easy to become anxious about being anxious, become more depressed about being depressed. The goal of the recalibration was to normalize these feelings, to make them things that you didn't have to apologize to yourself for, or worse beat yourself up about.

I like this idea, this idea I stole from the actor. It's the idea that you're constantly in flux.

This is how I feel today. This is my baseline."

Bring your neighborhood into unnerving context...

Well, this is creepy - check out a map of all recently-reported crimes in your (or any) neighborhood at CrimeReports.com. You can sort by the distance from your home, type of crime and how recent it was reported. Bonus creepy points for using the site to view the addresses and photos of registered sex offenders in your area. Eerie!

link

Some Pretentious Thoughts on Hip-Hop

People that willfully overlook hip-hop culture and music are generally uninterested in the same things that they claim the music lacks - subtlety, wit, meticulous construction and originality. Hip-hop may be artificial in some superficial ways - its use of samples, unified, particular slang and occasional braggadocio step on some nerves - though at its best, rap's social awareness, attention to meter and lyricial attention is unparalleled. Rap's voice came almost by definition from the marginalized of society, acolytes of the music who usually arrived at their standing through their hard work and attention to detail - a fact which lent the genre a weight and honesty lacking in the overproduced music of the time of its inception.

Socially-conscious rappers are keenly aware of their flaws, unafraid to be gleefully silly or fatalistically repentant as the situation requires. Most rap incorporates both a reverence for the musical game and a recognition of the evils therein. As AZ said on Nas' "Illmatic":

"We were beginners in the hood as five percenters / But somethin must of got in us cause all of us turned to sinners."

But what the concerned parents and commercial establishment usually overlook is that rap can be some of the most relevant, genuinely artistic music available. Like much that is controversial or worth experiencing, rap flirts between commentary, irony and experimentation, often moving uncomfortably into new territory as soon as you think you have it pegged down. MC Dälek may have put it best in describing his group's jagged, unsettling sound:

"If you listen to what hip-hop has historically been, it was all about digging in different crates and finding different sounds, and finding different influences to create."

Yes, much of rap has lost its roots and turned into yet another arm of the corporate game, as dozens of samey videos straightforwardly extolling the party lifestyle seem to attest. Still, despite its occasional flaws rap still has a role in our society and its musical landscape. As with any genre, it's the consumer's job to poke and prod at different faces of the music rather than blindly discarding an entire genre to knee-jerk reasoning. As popular as rap remains, and as terrible as most of it is (rap's quality ratio is no different than any other genre), this seems important to remember.

Google Games

Google has a feature which automatically fills in search results based on the recent searches of Google users. This leads to some truly non-sequitur results:

First, some of the great questions of history. . .



Some of the political results are particularly odd:


And my apologies to Japanese girls but Google's three-for-three on this one:

1:14 of genius

Gotta love that recontextualization.