Gallery: Pepper Spray Cop Squirts the Internet in the Eye
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McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Roland Barthes Reviews Pac-Man.
Two hierarchies enmesh themselves in the routine of consuming pellets and hunting phantoms, producing a single myth. The first is familial, the patrilineal logic that tells us Pac-Man and his partner, who we know only by her relation to Pac-Man, should bear a son in the image of themselves and in the image of modern…
Flap over Tide ads glorifying stay-at-home dad – Eye on Parenting Blog – CBS News
Blogging this so I can find it again for a future freshman writing course. (It’s too late in the term to introduce a new text, but this could spark some good discussion.) Advertisements for laundry products often feature women, but new commercials from Tide feature a stay-at-home dad. He’s shown throughout the ads folding a…
The (Manic Pixie) Dreamgirl to “Ease the Revolutionary Mind” » Cyborgology
Whereas a mere couple decades ago, one could simply point a finger at the mass media and their powerful cultural producers as the source of most offensive stereotypes about minority groups, Web 2.0 technology and the #Occupy movement shows us how stereotypes can be perpetuated, embellished, nay, even constructed at the grassroots level, by men…
Shakespeare Insult Kit – StumbleUpon
I believe I feel like a pribbling idle-headed mumble-news. (Thanks for the link, Jessica!) Tastefully Offensive | Premium Funny: Shakespeare Insult Kit – StumbleUpon.
Anti-Telemarketing Script | UCAN
Before you start answering questions from a telephone solicitor, you must “qualify” the company as a potential prospect for a law suit. If, during the introductory pitch, the telemarketer indicates that they are working for a non-profit firm, or a survey company, hang up immediately. They are not subject to the law and are a…
Five myths about social media
While I was in Egypt this summer, citizens explained why they flocked to protests early this year. Their stories focused on hardship and grievances; admiration of the Tunisian revolution; and the power of “street networks,” or the techniques used by mosques, unions and community organisers to rally people in the working class, almost none of…
Micheal Flaherty: The Latest Crime Wave—Sending Your Child to a Better School – WSJ.com
Even when I mentally adjust for the alarmist rhetoric, I find this truly frightenting. What a pathetic use of resources… what a painful sign that our public schools are failiing, when they circle the wagons like this and villify their neighbnors, in an attempt to keep their local systems afloat. Other school districts use services…
The Life-Changing $20 Rightward-Facing Cow
Great story capturing the quirky, lonely brilliance of a man who raptured all the pixellated cows right out of their cute little pastures. This is the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how…
Positively 4th Street – And then I was eaten by a grue.
Thanks to my colleague, Josh Sasmor. The badly-indented long quotation is close enough now that the stink of its hot, fetid breath hits you like a wave. >hint You’re a postgraduate student. >make lasso out of tough fibres of pure cynicism You quickly knot a lasso together. >lasso quotation The badly-indented long quotation grunts as…
With More Doctorates in Health Care, a Fight Over a Title
Dr. McCarver calls herself a doctor because she returned to school to earn a doctorate last year, one of thousands of nurses doing the same recently. Doctorates are popping up all over the health professions, and the result is a quiet battle over not only the title “doctor,” but also the money, power and prestige…
Johnstown, PA. High School Cancels Play Due To Islamic Setting
Kismet is set in ancient Baghdad, a time historians call “The Islamic Golden Age.” Johnstown is in western Pennsylvania. “Flight 93 flew right over our heads,” school Superintendent Thomas Fleming Jr. explains. United Airlines Flight 93, of course, plowed into the ground nearby on Sept. 11, 2001, after the hijackers were overpowered by the passengers…
With historic losses looming, Postal Service launches new ad campaign – The Washington Post
And this is, apparently, the best they could come up with? FUD works when you have the advantage of power, or numbers… or, apparently, a still-hefty taxpayer-backed budget. “A refrigerator has never been hacked,” an announcer says in the first message as an actress pins a paper bill to her fridge. In the other ad,…
Nik Cubrilovic Blog – Facebook Fixes and Explains Logout Issue
There, now. You see that? Facebook says it didn’t mean to keep tracking you after you logged out. The bad mistake is gone from the code, and Facebook is as safe and happy a web site as it ever was. What were you all worried about? Let me ruffle your hair and send you outside…
Derek Powazek – “Nobody Uses Their Real Name” and Other Outdated Notions
The idea that the internet is a place that’s separate from reality has faded. People generally have online identities that map to who they really are. Outside of a few legitimate edge cases and the occasional sci-fi fantasy, who we are online is simply who we are. Facebook has done more to influence this than…
Solving the White House photo mystery over ‘Jerusalem, Israel’
Photo captions matter. Someone has to write them. Looking forward to the chapter in my journalism textbook. Here’s a real-world example of how captions can affect the news. In this case, the captions were themselves newsworthy; they created the news. The Weekly Standard reported Aug. 9 about a set of White House photos from Jerusalem that…
The Hunger Games: Seton Hill University Student Videos
In addition to iPads and MacBooks, every freshman who arrives at Seton Hill this fall will get a copy of The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. I taught this book last term in my American Lit class. Here are two of the best student projects on The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games: 2 Sides of…
Correlation is not Causation
According to a somewhat dry AFP article (posted on a URL that will probably expire soon), “The researchers estimated that in 2008 Australian adults aged 25 and older spent 9.8 billion hours in front of the small screen, and that this time was associated with 286,000 years of life that ended prematurely. | Every single hour…
Ian Bogost – Gamification is Bullshit
This rhetorical power derives from the “-ification” rather than from the “game”. -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit. Just add points. Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets…
Pentagon’s Lightning Gun Sold for Scraps on eBay
Interesting story about a performance artist who bought what was once high-tech military gear, but ended up sold as scrap on eBay. A glimpse into the hardware and software suggests some interesting critiques of the industrial-military complex. There was no password on the gear that was supposed to be outfitted on the robot, so he…