Friday Collection of the Worldwide Internet

The Friday Collection is back. At least for now. It's been since gone since August 29th, quite a while for what was supposed to be my steadiest recurring feature. Better throw in many more links to distract everyone.

• The American Society of Magazine Editors has released its list of finalists for the best magazine covers of the year. I always love these. The one of Ahmadinejad in the bathroom stall is my favorite, with the Spitzer cover a close second.
• America the Gift Shop:

If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?

America the Gift Shop is an installation project that reflects the current foreign policy in the fun-house mirror of American commerce.

My palette is the vernacular of retail. The more familiar it is, the better host it becomes for the idea. Once of the sugar coating of the ordinary dissolves, we are left with the hard and uncomfortable truth about where we've been as a nation.

We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?

Awesome description of his vision. And the art itself is hilarious.

• The YouTube interactive videogame is here. We have way better games than this nowadays, but it's a clever concept. You click on the specific place which loads the next video, moving you along to the next level. Clever.
• This is a fantastic way to design a cover for a book: let someone else do it. In contest form. The results are fantastic.
• Some interesting stats that give us some sort of idea of what technology the cool kids are using.

If you didn't expect this, you probably don't know me very well

I'm going to try to not be pushy with the DFW stuff. I can't imagine anyone else would be interested in reading through the dozens upon dozens of responses to his suicide that are being collected on The Howling Fantods. I just wanted to explain to everyone how I've been spending this week of unemployment.

Two links which I recommend:

• Kottke's first stab at a post, mostly because you should be reading Kottke anyway, but also because his judiciously chosen excerpts and links is a great (and manageable) way to learn more about Wallace.
  
• The seriously beautiful thing going on now at McSweeney's. They set up a forum for rememberences by almost anyone. It's fantastic to see non-professional writers, people who had maybe brief encounters with DFW, remember the man. Not surprisingly, many of these letters are written by his former students; it sounds, from all accounts, that he was a better teacher than he was a writer. A must read for anyone who teaches.

Image via the DFW Motivational Poster Competition over The Howling Fantods.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

I'm back with more of the internet. Let's jump right on it.

• The Spanish basketballers scoff at political correctness. Jason Kidd raises an interesting point: If the American team had pulled off a similar stunt, NBA Commissioner David Stern would have been none too happy, and suspensions or fines would be expected. But, wait a second, there are NBA players on the Spanish team; what's going to happen to them? Nothing, that's what. From the Yahoo! Sports article: "And for his European peers, well, Kidd suggested, 'They won’t do anything to them. It’s a double standard.'”
• This has been getting lots of internet press lately, and for good reason. The Parallel Universe Film Guide is basically IMDB for movies that never existed. I thought at first that this guy collected fake movies mentioned in other media, like Troy McClure's complete filmography. But it's not. This guy made up all these movies that were never filmed and wrote brief summaries of them. The scary part is how detailed the thing is: he created this whole universe of movies. The fake actors and directors are used consistently throughout the database. So if Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is getting boring for you, you can play Six Degrees of Marshall Fair, who, remember, isn't real.
• Here's a really tough WorldWide Internet time-waster: How many of the 100 most common English language words can you name in five minutes? It's cool to think about how we use words and which ones are most common.

We'll end off with some youtubery. The first is of Chris Chambers of the Classy Chargers football squad doing cool things, and the second is of (allegedly) Kelly Clarkson and two of her backup singers drunk at Fenway Park singing Sweet Caroline. I watched the video a coupla time and can't for the life of me verify that this is actually Clarkson, but this guy seems very certain.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

The founding principle of this blog remained just as true yesterday as it was nearly 20 months ago when this blog was founded. And it continued to be true during the frequent four-month hiatuses. The principle I'm referring to, of course, is: This blog suffers from a serious lack of direction.

But today marks a hesitant baby-step towards a modicum of internal structuring. For today witnesses the beginning of a new feature at TDS. And it's the first ever recurring feature at TDS. I proudly present the inaugural Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet. Every Friday that this blog, the internet, and the universe exist, you'll receive a smattering of the things that I found interesting from the week that was. Most of these things will be collected from either deadspin.com or kottke.org because they most consistently deliver the goods. You should probably just read those sites instead of mine. And judging by their daily hits, you probably are doing that already. But only here, at TDS, will you be able to find my pithy remarks on the stuff I find cool. Sorry, joseph, for the blue, underlined words.

Let's get right to it.

• A kid I went to high-school with is a big NY Giants (American Football) fan, was planning a trip to Nicaragua, and decided to search out the Patriots Super Bowl Champions (they lost) paraphernalia which was sent to Central America to clothe the naked. He found one. And wrote about it for the Boston Herald. Which was reported by Deadspin. I'm not at all surprised by this: he had one of the best jump-shots in the Yeshiva League. Speaking of bitter Boston sports memories, I have a pennant at home proclaiming the Red Sox to be the 1986 World Series Champs, which they, famously, were not. I didn't have to go so far to get that, but I did have to spend time in Boston.
  
• My favorite of the hundreds of reports being filed by American reporters on the utter weird- and gross-ness of China.
• Thorstein Veblen wrote this awesome book in 1899 called The Theory of the Leisure Class. He talks about how in cities, where residents are surrounded by strangers, objects which communicate economic and social stature grow in importance. He calls this conspicuous consumption. Here's the best example I've ever seen of that.
• This article is nothing so special, but, my God, look at the comments. I never knew there were that many possible donut puns.
• Didn't Ennismore do this for a color-war breakout once?
• I'm sick of Favre already--SportsCenter this morning devoted the opening twenty minutes of their hour to only Favre--so it's good that the NY media tends to be a laid-back bunch.
  

That's enough for now, I believe.

One last FYI tidbit--I'm leaving Denver on Sunday after having a raucously good time. This may affect my blogging, since I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with myself come Monday morning. If I find gainful employment, there's a chance I won't be able to continue the every-weekday blogging schedule. But if I remain unemployed for a bit, I might accelerate the pace. But I might pick up some other hobbies--like origami--which will take me away from TDS. In short, don't be surprised if there are a whole bunch more origami-themed posts coming your way.

Enjoy the weekend.

I Said I Wasn't Going to do This, But It Appears That I am Quite Spineless

I really wasn't planning on sharing my thoughts on that new bat-man flick, but loyal reader josh commented thus on July 24, at 2:51 AM:

Tell us your thoughts about the movie, snowman-man. Best ever?

This site relies on the continued kindness of readers, so I'll try to answer josh's request. As I already mentioned, I don't like movie reviews which tell me what to think about a movie before I see it, so this is your warning about spoilers, sharing my opinion, etc.

So, is The Dark Knight the best ever? Emphatically no. Here's why:

• I thought that no one besides for that Joker fellow was given enough screen time. I know some pundits are already awarding the Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Ledger (which is always foolish to do six months before the year is up; 18 days is also sometimes too early) but they've got it all wrong; Ledger supported nobody. He was the lead actor here, and no one came particularly close. Which is all fine and dandy. The problem here isn't with Ledger taking too much screen-time, it's with the lack of development of anyone else.
• Rachel Dawes was not a character; she was a plot contrivance designed to make Bruce Wayne sad and Harvey Dent crazy. Also, why is it that she always falls in love with her boss? If Dent's the new guy in town, how long have they even known each other before he proposes? But, again, it doesn't matter, because Rachel isn't real--she just moves the plot along.
• The director, Nolan, does too much telling and not enough showing. For example, the Joker overcomes that cop who has lost six friends in the interrogation room. I think that'd have been pretty cool to see how he did that. But it all happens off-screen. All we see is the Joker holding a jagged piece of glass to the poor guy's throat. How did that happen? Also for example, the kidnapping of Dent and Rachel was kinda a big deal in the plot. That is the type of thing that the viewer needs to see, instead of just being told about it afterwards through dialogue. I hate to say it, but telling a story through dialogue is a pretty lazy way to go about making a movie. This isn't radio. Show us what happened, please. I think Nolan made that decision because he wanted to preserve the surprise of who betrayed Dent and Rachel. But the price wasn't worth maintaining this very mild suspense.
  
• I didn't for a second believe that Lucius Fox, so principled that he would resign his post if B. Wayne kept the wiretapping technology, would use this weaponry "Just this once." Having developed characters agree to do something abhorrent to them just this once in order to move the plot along undermines that character. It's bad storytelling.
  
• One of the saddest parts for me--because it overshadowed the bat-man impersonators, one of the cooler parts of the movie--was that the Scarecrow showed up pretty much out of leftfield in that parking garage scene. What was he doing there? I think he shows up again later as one of the Joker's henchmen. Wasn't he in prison or an asylum or something? This was just confusing.

That said, I loved a whole bunch of aspects of this movie, including:

• As I mentioned before, I thought the bat-man impersonators were really cool. This is a superhero movie which was conscious of the hero's effect on the city at large. These movies too often rely on the cliches of showing newspaper headlines or some type of like serious CNN debate whether the bat-man is good or bad. The Dark Knight had plenty of that also, but it also managed to go beyond these cliches, and show how the average citizen may have reacted to all these big events going on in their city. In general, Nolan did a good job of utilizing the media, particularly when the Joker called in his hospital threat to that cable news show.
  
• Ledger was pretty much awesome.
  
• I thought the wiretapping/sonar debate was timely and well done (except for Fox's decision, of course).
• I loved the idea of learning less about the Joker and his backstory the more he told us about those things. It certainly interrogates something or other.
  
• This movie went beyond the superhero norm by the positioning of bat-man as the hero the city needs, even if it means taking the blame for all those deaths. This goes hand-in-hand with the nice contrast between Dent as the public, legitimate (white) hero and bat-man as the private, faceless (dark) hero. The limitations of bat-man's ability to change Gotham were particularly satisfying.

Overall, really solid movie that did a whole bunch of things right. However, there was just enough that I didn't like that prevents me from labeling this the best ever.

Final Grade: 4.7/5

A Summer of Firsts

I've done many a thing this summer which I had not previously--in my life--done. For example, this summer I, for the first time,...

• did laundry by myself,
• ate foie gras,
  
• slept in a waterbed (my verdict: kinda cool because you can sorta rock yourself to sleep by just moving around a little, but, ultimately, waterbeds are only a sometimes bed because you can't sit up on [in?] them, they're mad hard to get out of, and I woke up with a sore back; but it was fun to try, even if I kept worrying that the thing would pop, because that seems to be the thing that happens to waterbeds on TV),
• stepped foot in the part of this country between Cleveland and California (I think the technical title of this is the mid-coast),
  
• drank absinthe, twice, and I didn't hate it the second time,
• attended a non-Jewish institution of higher learning, and I'm not sure what took me so long,
• prayed with old Sefardi-type men in Spain,
• visited Europe (that time like ten years ago I spent two hours in the airport in London doesn't even come close to counting),
• saw a bull-fight (and that was, I can guarantee, the last time I'll see a bull-fight),
• did pilates,
• saw a popular moving picture on an i-maximum screen,
• um, rode in a hybrid car.

There's probably more, but I think we're way past the still-interesting line.

Martha! Martha! Martha!

In the most recent episode of the YU Commentator an article of mine was published. The article is split pretty evenly between describing the experience of visiting the taping of The Martha Stewart Show and between an irresponsible feminist analysis of Martha. Here's the director's cut of that article, in a convenient, easy-to-read bullet-point format:

• It was really hard condensing the several-hour-long experience into a somewhat focused article. Normally, when I'm writing a paper, let's say, I have an easier time leaving things out, perhaps because I feel little to no ownership over, for example, The Waste Land. I experienced all of the show, and wanted to, at least, mention all of the relevant parts, but I couldn't figure out a way to incorporate certain details without resorting to a bullet-point list at the end. Thank God for blogs.
• A-Rod is huge. He doesn't look like it when he's standing next to other pro athletes. I was sitting on the floor of the studio, about twenty feet away from him, and, from up close, he is remarkably big.
  
• I skipped shiur to watch the show. (Some things I just couldn't mention in a YU paper.)
• I applied for more tickets. If I miss shiur on a Thursday or Friday morning during the week of April 16 this might be why.
  
• They edited one of my lines. This was my original sentence: "And now, a mostly unfounded and completely irresponsible feminist analysis of Martha Stewart." I was greeted with this sentence upon opening the paper: "And now I will try a somewhat feminist analysis of Martha Stewart." I was more amused than anything else, but it was a weird feeling seeing something you wrote changed around without being consulted.
• After the A-Rod interview, some skinny guy with a neat sweater and glasses showed us how to arrange roses nicely. They did this in the special flower shop all the way on one edge of the stage. After A-Rod, no one was really excited for flower guy. I think even Martha was bored.
• The concept of the show is interesting: Martha doesn't do much. She participates in everything, but it's really a guest driven show. It's get slightly uncomfortable when one of the guests outshines her, as was the case of A-Rod, who was the bigger star. At one point, Joey the WUG was even forced to remind the audience that "Martha is the one hosting the show."

[UPDATE: Gila N. Feinblum got the tickets for the show and accompanied me to see it. Sorry for the omission.]