Thu
Jan
28
dan-o's blog
Mon
Jan
25
After a humbling, fumble-crazed loss in this weekend’s New Orleans-Minneapolis referendum, I suppose there is little else for the people of Minnesota to do but that which they have done for generations: crawl into a darkened, frozen teepee with the St. Paul poet Paul D. Dickinson, and read poetry and drink Hamm’s beer until April.
I am depicted here doing just that. Note the silk scarf and far-off look of consternation. It’s a way of life, reader!
Photo by Cyn Collins.
This one’s for you, pikop.
Wed
Jan
20
I give up.
TPM got its hands on the Democrats’ latest talking points. This one’s fifth:
It is mathematically impossible for Democrats to pass legislation on our own.I want my money back.
There are a dozen awful things about these “talking points”, but this is another one that particularly sparks my ire:
· Saying “no” might be a good political strategy but it does nothing to create jobs or help improve the lives of struggling Americans.
YOU’RE TELLING THE REPUBLICANS THAT THEY’RE USING A GOOD POLITICAL STRATEGY THAT’S NOT GOING TO PERSUADE THEM TO DO ANYTHING DIFFERENTLY YOU MORONS
Fri
Jan
15
I love my friends
2:52:57 PM: took too much cold medicine
2:57:47 PM: i kind of like it
2:57:59 PM: as long as my boss leaves me alone and i don’t set anything on fire
Thu
Jan
14
“ I’m amazed at the popularity of the Alvin movies. Globally too! It just goes to prove that children are idiots!!! They have no taste! I think the millions of kids who are delighted by these movies are so immature and unsophisticated!!! Seriously, when I was six years old I remember going to see a double bill of De Sica’s, The Bicycle Thief followed by Bunuels’ Cet obscur objet du désir. Then, me and Tommy and Chris went to see Noam Chomsky speak at our local communist bookstore. We were six!!!!! These kids today and their love for cartoon chipmunks…ugh! What a bunch of ignorant philistines.
I love you,
david
I love you,
david
David Cross, on his facebook page today.
Love that guy.
Thu
Dec
31
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Maybe this year will be better than the last.
Sat
Dec
26
Avatar is a bad film.
Not because it lacks any meaningful character development (which it does), not because its plot is laughably flimsy (which it is), and not because it is little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully, but because it is yet another example of b-grade Hollywood moralizing, of not very smart people with typically superficial good intentions offering Americans an insidiously shallow civics lesson along with their 64-oz Cokes and shrink-wrapped boxes of Butterfinger Minis.
I was lucky enough to see Avatar with langer on Christmas day. I agree that it’s a bad film, and I agree it’s “little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully” (which we watched later in the day, so believe me, we’re sure). For me, though, I went in with the expectation that it would be a mostly weak film with stunning visuals, and thought I would be OK with that. Turned out I wasn’t.
The 3D took a lot away from the visuals for me. I’m not sure if it’s because the theater was imperfect — that’s likely the case — but there was enough ghosting and inclarity for me that I simply wasn’t blown away as I ought to have been. I’d kind of like to see it again without 3D, but I really, really don’t want to sit through it again.
There are plenty of films that I’m glad I saw despite finding them generally uncompelling as films, simply because of their stunning beauty (Children of Men, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Pan’s Labyrinth come to mind), but Avatar was not one of them. It was, frankly, a waste of three hours of my life.
my data is just fine, thank you
I think a lot about the evolution of language, and how words come to mean something more or different than they did 50 or even ten years ago. It’s tricky, sometimes, being a bit of a stickler about spelling, grammar, and punctuation (and perhaps more than anything, semantics), while still allowing our language to evolve, and changing with it. I do think it’s possible, though, to live in the grey area between two absolutes. This is the Obama era, right?
So, “data” is the plural of “datum”. Fine. But it’s time all the language purists came out and admitted that another meaning of the word has evolved which, while having the same etymology and essentially the same meaning, is not a plural, but rather a mass noun, just like “water” or “rice” or “helium”. In which case, it’s perfectly fine to say “this data is bogus” or “this is too much data”. These days, anyone who says “these are too many data”, let’s face it, just sounds like a pompous ass.
