a small illustration of the stupidity and inanity of Complex

let's ignore the fact that they are highlighting track bikes in their Style Guide A-Z (we don't need more idiotic style outlets heaping on this bandwagon), or that it's a picture of a guy on the BQE holding onto the spoiler of a Lotus. but you'd figure that if you were trying to highlight a trend, that you'd actually be aware of what are the main components (as it were) of that trend. as will be obvious to even the most casual bike rider, this bike is certainly not a track bike.



if you weren't aware of the fact that Complex simply co-opts and highlights style trends of which they are often completely clueless, then here's simply one example.

piratz!

yes, they do exist, and this year has been a particularly bad one. mostly they operate off the somali coast in the gulf of aden, which borders the red and arabian seas, with yemen and somalia to the north and south, respectively. almost all cargo going to europe from asia must pass through the gulf, since it is the passageway to the red sea and the suez canal.

in this instance, they seem to have gotten their hands on some serious weaponry. might be beyond their capacity to use all the tanks, but there is an as yet undermined amount of light weaponry onboard, which can't be good for the situation in somalia, as it's already in crisis.

silence is golden

but the chatter will be missed, nonetheless.

one of many?

when this all started, i intended to have a series of posts about my neighborhood (see for example the title and URL), several of which are still mulling around in draft form here in blogger. i published a couple about columbia height, but not many.

well today i got sucked into reading a bunch of random posts about my locale via the Prince of Petworth, which is the kind of website i avoid for various reasons (time suck, triviality).

but i had been wondering about some restaurant goings-on the other day, and i found my answers, sort of. and i found out we're getting another crappy chain, this time a restaurant.

i can't really get into all of my sentiments about DC, columbia heights, gentrification, etc., but i will say that so much about this process is baffling. not so much how it happens, but how seemingly clueless people are about it. the ramifications are always glossed over or unacknowledged. but that seems to mirror so many things in our contemporary society.

but then again, the comments here left me with the feeling, as is often the case, that people are pretty clueless in general. so maybe this isn't the exception that proves the rule, just another example of the rules in action. at least part of it, in retrospect, is the audience of the blog, gentrifiers all and proud of it it seems.

oh, and PS, seems there was a big shooting three blocks from my house last month. who knew?

before we begin

i actually watched some of SNL saturday for the first time in ages. and apparently i missed the only funny part:

almost at a loss for words...almost

this video on the daily show perfectly encapsulates the hypocrisy of the modern republican party and the pundits who populate the "liberal media."

craigslist best of

stay away from it. hilarious but a huge time suck. if you've got the time, have at it.

highlights:
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/804253499.html
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/780311954.html
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/det/794605266.html

last.fm back in effect

when streaming tracks (scrobbling in their parlance) to last.fm, i always used only the scrobbling feature (via an iTunes plug-in), and never downloaded the actual last.fm application. this was pretty much only because I was an early adopter, and had started the whole scrobbling thing before their was an actual application for your desktop.

eventually, last.fm stopped issuing updates or support for the scrobbling plug-in. this move makes sense by last.fm, from a business perspective, since presumably the value of their service is enhanced by people having and using the physical application. they were bought (twice?) recently by an established conglomerate, and with a lot of companies struggling with how to monetize these web 2.0 assets (i.e. facebook, myspace, etc.), i guess this move wasn't unexpected.

at some point earlier this year an update to iTunes rendered the plug-in inoperable. and although i downloaded the last.fm application, for a variety of reasons i never installed it, and last.fm sort of faded from my usage. today i installed it, and am "scrobbling" again.

the OCD portion of me will end up listening again to those artists that over the last 6 months i played heavily, to make my last.fm "accurate." why i'm willing to do this but don't care that last.fm doesn't reflect my cd/vinyl listening (which is mostly what i do at home), i don't know, but i'm fine with it. it remains to be seen whether i'll pursue ipod functionality. i used to have that, but it was a huge pain. we shall see...

whither?

i have no idea what this image is of, really, but i thought it was beautiful. via mudd up, via viva el colectivo?

jazzy b for real

doin' it so big right now

totes awesome totes

let the link love begin. get your obama fix from true souljah jazzy b. totally totes.

oh, the insanity!

this is so f-ing cool, and completely nuts. three cheers for american ingenuity and stupidity.

vice redux

i have talked in a previous post about my occasional disdain for vice magazine. although i still really enjoy many of their foreign articles and obviously dos and don'ts, among other stuff. but this marketing tie in with the release of the charlie bartlett DVD on VBS TV was just tiresome, lame, and totally a sell-out move. i expect more from a magazine with such an anti-establishment streak, even if it is laden with ads from major corporations. weak sauce.

a different level

obviously my blogging activities never reached this level, as documented by former Gawker blogger Emily Gould in the NewYork Times Sunday Magazine. that's certainly a good thing, and of course at this point the readership here is practically (if not assumedly) non-existent, given the severely diminished frequency of new material.

the idea of constant exposure to public scrutiny, particularly as a facet of varying levels of self-promotion, complicity, and outright encouragement, is fascinating. ultimately, i think these arrangements are untenable for the vast majority of people, because they shatter the normal veneer or mental space that we occupy distinct from the world around us.

people for whom this presents limited repercussions are generally just oblivious to the ramifications or are driven enough by their desire for celebrity to ignore them. others wishing to maintain their status often lash out at criticism in the traditional manner of defending ones ego and self-confidence against external comment (actions driven by a subconscious need to maintain ones "edge" and ability to act without self-doubt).

it seems that the experience for almost all, in some form or another, is fraught with difficulty and is often quite dis-empowering. those who profess to be normal and unaffected by this process may be those who are ultimately the most damaged. for it is difficult if not impossible to fully control our external image, and it seems that most problems derive from this inability.

the tibet issue

i have been following the recent issues in tibet since their occurrence with great interest. i've probably spent far too much time on it, and i think i need to make a clean break from getting too deep again, so i won't post lots of links or anything here.

my thinking on this issue has certainly evolved, but it's difficult to have a productive discourse via the internet, for several reasons. i did spend an inordinate amount of time reading comments on this post, on Nick Kristof's blog. I posted twice, #248 and #460. Sadly I didn't really get great responses to my questions of the other posters, and after my second comment I had to just leave it at that. Part of the problem is that the post was linked to by lots of pro-Chinese (and pro-Tibetan to a lesser extent) websites, which heightened the invective and seemed to make a rational discussion of the issues at hand all the more difficult.

the whole process was an illuminating experience for me, however. history, the media, the internet, all seem a little bit different in my conception of them now. but i was nonetheless disappointed, not only in the responses to my thoughts but in the difficulty in having a reasoned debate, given the medium, language barriers, and other issues.