Category: categories

Did you read about the mother of a Kursk sailor who was sedated while criticizing a Russian official? There’s a photo of a medic jabbing her with a needle as she collapses. Boy, that Putin is a PR wiz.

2:18 p.m.

This is an excerpt from Brad Kloza’s “Decoding the Official Soundtrack of the Democratic National Convention.”

Occasion: Speech by Tipper Gore

Potential First Ladies choose one cause to devote their time to should
their husbands get elected. The DNC needed to select a song in synch
with Gore’s mission: understanding and caring for America’s mentally
ill. Gloria Estefan’s “Turn the Beat Around” does just that.

The Estefan song has become an anthem for mental illness
understanding and caring since it appeared in “Sweating It
Out”�episode #129 of “Beverly Hills 90210,” a popular program
formerly broadcast on the Fox television network. During this episode
the characters Kelly and Valerie attend a psychology seminar. Valerie
laughs off the professor’s philosophies and decides to leave, but Kelly
takes his words to heart because of her recent experience in a fire,
where she suffered burns on her wrist, ear, and the side of her neck.
“Turn the Beat Around” was a featured song in this episode, and drove
home the fact that Kelly’s lingering fear and associated mental concerns
were assuaged, or, if you will, turned around, with the help of a
licensed psychologist.

Estefan, who is as reclusive as J.D. Salinger, author of books such as
The Catcher in the Rye, refuses to comment on the metaphors in her
song, but countless critics have persuasively argued that “beat” is code
for “mind” while “turn” translates to “cure.” It does not escape their
notice that Estefan entered the University of Miami in 1975 with the
dream of becoming a psychologist. True, she tossed this dream aside
during her freshman year, when she joined a precursor of Miami Sound
Machine, but still this can be no coincidence. And surely Estefan had
Freud on her mind when she wrote the lyrics for “Turn the Beat
Around.” To wit: “Flute player play your flute ’cause / I know that
you want to get your thing off.”

11:30 a.m.

If you’ve got Photoshop and a spare half hour, you can erase your ex-boyfriend from the family photo. Presto, George was never at Lake Winnemuck. Now, live video can be edited the same way, but here’s the creepy part. It can be edited in real time. This allows producers to insert ads on the walls at ball games or completely delete a person who “shouldn’t be there.” The implications? “Here’s footage of the field in question. As you can see, there aren’t hundreds of dead civilians here. Oh no! Just another day in old Kosovo.” Yikes. This article has more info.

3:59 p.m.

According to the Useless Facts site:

All of the clocks in Pulp Fiction are stuck on 4:20.

The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle.

Charlie Brown’s father was a barber.

A pig’s orgasm lasts for 30 minutes.

Octopi have gardens.

4:04 p.m.

Yo mama jokes from McSweeney’s:

Yo mama so poor…

she can’t afford a Christmas tree so she goes and finds a sad little twig in the yard and cuts out construction paper ornaments so that she can bring just a glimmer of light to her children’s Christmas celebration.

1:47 p.m.

I just read a fantastic statistic in Time Magazine. Apparently, only 6 percent of brick and mortar CEOs would eat another human being if they were starving and stranded. However, 23 percent of Internet startup CEOs said they’d break out the carving knives.

10:02 a.m.

I found an article

on Slashdot about the possibility of using bacteria in semiconductors to create “biotransistors.” Powering machines with the energy of living things kinda creeps me out.

9:44 a.m.