Ch-check it out.

Posted: August 19th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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I’m a fan of UCB performer, College Humor personality, and all around megatalent Andree Vermeulen. Hey I didn’t know she had a website!

Ch-check it out.

Posted: August 17th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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My boy Brendan sent this along.

Posted: August 13th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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BLUEPRINT 3 from kwest on Vimeo.

I couldn’t possibly be more amped about a team up this epic. (via)

And you can download the studio cut.

Posted: August 13th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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My new favorite food blog, Consumed (I, This), is almost a riff on the format of The Sartorialist, but for food and (someday, I would hope) drink. That doesn’t exactly do it justice, since the aforementioned fashion blogger doesn’t get to eat his subjects, but the degree to which I feel jealous of these two bloggers is roughly equivalent. Truly they both travel in rarified worlds. The author of Consumed (I, This), however, sometimes invites me into his, as he’s my best friend Michael Hoffman.

Ch-check it out.

Posted: August 11th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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Kanye West blogged about the LHC. Further confirming that he’s the best thing that has happened to hip-hop in a long time, the comments to the post generally express interest and excitement about this supremely sciency apparatus. Kanye made it cool to be clever. I’d give him a high five if he was around.

Now maybe he’ll make a beat for the emcee/scientists that run CERN.

EDIT: I have reflected on this a little bit, and have decided that my best fantasy career event would be me directing a Kanye video about the LHC. That is the single best thing I can imagine.

Kanye please. Please, man. It would be awesome. Think about it.

Posted: August 11th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
Comments: 2

In this video, T.I. makes a rich girl of a KFC cashier…OR DOES HE? Dope song. Nothing much to the video, but I do like that rappers are wearing fly haberdashery again.

Posted: August 7th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
Comments: none

Back around the time of the last presidential election I was a snotty, rabid left-wing blogger. My group blog, Lefterer, is alas no more, but if it were you could go there and find me railing against the intrinsic evils of republicans and championing the sensible policies of the far left wing of the American political conversation.

When Bush won that election I basically lost interest in politics entirely, likely as a coping mechanism. Then when I started becoming aware of former hard-line liberals who had defected to libertarianism like RU Sirius, I flirted with that way of thinking, though it never ended up a very comfortable fit. I had also met some people who worked for big foundations, and literally saw the strategic donation of millions of dollars to political campaigns, PACs and interest groups. These wealthy organizations were empowering smaller groups that could advance their agendas.

How then, if the way politicians get funded and people’s stars rise and fall in the big night sky of political power, is through the massive and invisible force of interest groups, can we really call ourselves a democracy, I wondered.

[i]The New Yorker[/i] has a response this week to Thomas Frank’s New Book about the radical notion that all politics, regardless of the form of government, is acted out through the constant power-shuffling of interest groups. The book in which this concept was first espoused was written by Arthur Bentley and published in 1908.

Bentley was writing “The Process of Government” at the height of the Progressive Era, when educated, prosperous, high-minded people believed overwhelmingly in “reform” and “good government,” and took interest groups to be the enemy of these goals. The more populist Progressives liked having the people as a whole decide things by direct vote; the more élitist Progressives wanted to give authority to experts. But Bentley, who seems to have shared the Progressives’ goal of using government to curb the power of big business, rejected such procedural tenets. In Chicago terms, Bentley was the rare Progressive intellectual who believed, in effect, that the machine had a more accurate understanding of how politics worked—how it always and necessarily worked—than the lakefront liberals did.

The article is a really fascinating read, and articulates what I’ve been feeling (and not being able to fully describe) about politics so well that I feel lighter and less frustrated already. Now all I need to do is get super rich, devise and Agenda, and start a foundation to advance it with.

Ch-check it out.

Posted: August 7th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
Comments: none

The site has popped in and out of perfect functionality over the past couple of days, but we’ve completed the migration now, and everything is 100% up on the new Dreamhost server. As always, thanks to Zack Schilling for doing all of it, thereby preventing me from fucking everything up.

Posted: August 5th, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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This is apparently a job listing for a paparazzi (paparazzo? paparazzus?). I always wondered how one got into that line of work…

Posted: July 31st, 2008 under Miscellaneous.
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