Benjamin Harrison » Miscellaneous

Happy new year

Benjamin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:59:11 +0000

Some dreams stay dreams. Some dreams come true.

Now Posting on the Legendary Blog

Benjamin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:26:26 +0000

I’m once again a multi-blog man. After a long stretch of badcharacter.com monogamy, I’ve started posting on Double 7 World. This week I’m running a series of meditations on five of my favorite music videos.

Ch-check it out!

Month of Madness

Benjamin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:23:11 +0000

Freeway’s Month of Madness has me excited. I still haven’t heard his album, but I’ve heard good things. Only thing stopping me is that I never buy albums.

Sign Me Up For This Awful-Looking Anime Robot

Benjamin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:17:18 +0000

I am all of a sudden, totally succumbed to the hype surrounding Zeno, the atrociously styled superfriend robot that should be hitting store shelves by 2010. Holy crap, it’s the future!

“The idea is to create a cultural phenomenon and accelerate the use and humanization of the technology,” Hanson said. “Robots have gotten steadily more capable but humans’ expectations that robots should have minds keeps biting robot developers.”

Ch-check it out.

Diddy Must Be Stopped

Benjamin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:41:55 +0000

Meats

Benjamin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:24:47 +0000

In celebration of the soon to be nonexistent bachelorhood of this man, these meats were consumed by me this weekend (in no particular order):

Beef
Chicken
Pork
Rabbit
Lamb
Frog
Geoduck
Razorclam
Various Fishes
Shrimp
Duck

McCain Gets Barackrolled

Benjamin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:47:08 +0000

A Book I Liked

Benjamin — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:11:08 +0000

Today I finished reading “Now the Hell Will Start,” by Brendan I. Koerner, which I picked up based on boingboing’s recommendation. It’s a mind-blowingly detailed account of the saga of Herman Perry, a black GI in World War II who was stationed in Burma during the war as a physical laborer on the Ledo Road, a massively expensive construction project intended to be a supply line to keep the Chinese in the war and distracting the Japanese.

The book starts its tale a little bit before the draft and ends it a little after Perry was hanged for shooting a white officer. In that span it really opened my eyes about the kinds of racism that prevailed in the world at that time. We get a lot of history about the evils of Nazism growing up in the US, but in this book you get a glimpse at the mind boggling racism demonstrated by the Japanese, the Chinese (both with similar Master Race ideologies) and the United States.

Some of the most famous American blacks to have aided in the war effort were the Tuskegee Airmen and the 761st Black Panther tank battalion (which you can learn more about here), but the majority of black soldiers were deemed by military logic to be too cowardly and simple for combat—an interesting counterpoint to the Vietnam-era logic that disproportionately sent minorities into the meat-grinder. The army was so backward at this point that their medical apparatus even kept segregated blood supplies because they feared that white soldiers would refuse surgery if they thought they might receive transfusions of blood that once flowed through the veins of black soldiers.

All in all, this was a pretty staggering re-framing of World War II for me. I recommend you read this book. It might blow your mind.

Ch-check it out.

Watching Gustav

Benjamin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:13:32 +0000

I’m watching gustav on this website. And I’m reading about it’s strange potentiality in the politics here:

Now then — how could Gustav help the Republicans? Let me run briefly through four or five ways:

1. Allows McCain to Appear Magnanimous. By potentially delaying or canceling his “date” at the GOP convention, McCain appears as though he is giving something up to tend to the Gulf Coast. Sympathetic and neutral-to-sympathetic media outlets may view this as underscoring McCain’s “America First” theme.

and here:

“As long as we properly handle the Gustavication of the convention, it may be a positive,” said one GOP operative.

Comfort Zone is the Featured Video this Week on HDFEST

Benjamin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:16:04 +0000

Ch-check it out.