Category: observations

this sums it up

Sadly, No! » Best Advice Ever:

Don’t EVER let idiot whackjob wingnuts try to claim they are brave and Liberals are cowards. Let me put it this way:

One group has a huge need to walk around with guns and keep arsenals in their homes to feel safe. The other group has no such need, and doesn’t seem to suffer in the least by not being armed to the teeth.

Remember: republicans are cowards. They prove it with every gun they brag about.

A corollary: all bullies are cowards. Why else pick on the younger/smaller/unarmed?

not sure they get it

Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open-source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use.
The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical’s work on usability and to contribute to other free and open-source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

He wrote: “We are hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, Gnome and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop-experience ideas into reality.”

Shuttleworth has said recently that usability is the top priority for open-source software. Free Linux desktops should have “a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years”, he said at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week.

[From Shuttleworth: Open-source desktops need a facelift | Tech News on ZDNet]

This isn’t solved by a team, though some developers will be needed: what makes this work is a design czar, someone who can tell people when to stop. Citing Apple makes sense if they are going to get deeper than the GUI (and since all the projects named are window managers/desktops, it doesn’t look like it). Will the next two years be different from the last 10 or so?

Genius?

This is a pretty good playlist, all based on the first track in the list.

Weirdo | The Charlatans | Between 10th and 11th | 3:38
Way Down Now | World Party | Goodbye Jumbo | 3:50
Bull in the Heather | Sonic Youth | Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star | 3:05
Start Choppin’ | Dinosaur Jr | Ear-Bleeding Country: Best Of Dinosaur Jr | 5:37
Perfect Skin | Lloyd Cole & The Commotions | 1984-1989 | 3:14
I Love a Man in Uniform | Gang of Four | Songs of the Free | 4:05
What Difference Does It Make? | The Smiths | The Best Of The Smiths, Vol. 1 | 3:51
Take the Skinheads Bowling | Camper Van Beethoven | Telephone Free Landslide Victory | 2:32
Hey Dude | Kula Shaker | K | 4:09
The Bottom Line | Big Audio Dynamite | Planet BAD: Greatest Hits | 3:46
Rejoice | U2 | October | 3:40
Ship Of Fools | World Party | Private Revolution | 4:30
This Is Not a Love Song | Public Image Ltd. | Public Image Ltd.: The Greatest Hits, So Far | 4:13
Generals And Majors | XTC | Black Sea | 4:04
Herculean | The Good, The Bad And The Queen | Herculean – Single of the Week | 4:00
Alec Eiffel | Pixies | Wave Of Mutilation: Best Of Pixies | 2:47
Locked Out | Crowded House | Recurring Dream | 3:19
These Days | R.E.M. | Life’s Rich Pageant | 3:25
Out of the Blue | Roxy Music | Country Life | 4:46
Love Spreads | The Stone Roses | The Very Best of The Stone Roses | 5:47
Disappointed | Public Image Ltd. | 9 | 5:34
King For A Day | XTC | Oranges & Lemons | 3:38
Dirty Boots | Sonic Youth | Goo | 5:29
I’m Free (feat. Junior Reid) | The Soup Dragons | Lovegod | 3:24
Put The Message In The Box | World Party | Goodbye Jumbo | 4:16

the people who need this most won’t see it

Small towns, while they still exist . . .

Leave the fantasy land of convention rhetoric, and you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those “reporters and commentators” with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.?

No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town’s mortal enemies.

Without raising an antitrust finger they have permitted fantastic concentration in the various industries that buy the farmer’s crops. They have undone the New Deal system of agricultural price supports in favor of schemes called “Freedom to Farm” and loan deficiency payments — each reform apparently designed to secure just one thing out of small town America: cheap commodities for the big food processors. Richard Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz put the conservative attitude toward small farmers most bluntly back in the 1970s when he warned, “Get big or get out.”

[From The GOP Loves the Heartland To Death – WSJ.com]

good reads

Chosen Chosen by Mark Millar


My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a dangerously good book, and one of the many reasons why these books w/ pictures, graphic novels, comix, whatever are so good. I think of them as paper movies sometimes, as the action and imagery are driven by the writer but the artist(s) can add so much, just as a good cinematographer and team of actors can do. It’s a quick but substantial read, and there are “behind the music” tidbits that will make you read over it in detail to see what you may have missed.

View all my reviews.