A Slight Delay

A few years back, if you recall, you were Time’s Person of the Year. Because, y’know, you’d posted that thing about Mentos and Diet Coke on YouTube, or edited a Wikipedia post, or blogged, or something. In other words, Time realized that the internet was–belatedly–starting to deliver on some of the democratic promise of its early days.

More evidence can be found on Now Public, a news site that’s powered by the contributions of pretty much anyone who finds something that may be newsworthy and decides to write about it. Unlike Google News or Drew Curtis’s Fark, Now Public isn’t a news aggregator; the idea here is for you, the user, to get up off your ass and report something. Those somethings, when they’ve come, have been from all corners of the world, and have included subjects as diverse as Governor Rod Blagojevic and the Dalai Lama’s speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising.   (more…)

Every holiday and birthday, you hear the same cliché about what you get the person who has everything. Well, heck, if they’ve got everything, what’re they going to do with more stuff? And why not give someone without so much stuff–especially without some really necessary stuff, like potable water–a little something in the name of your friend or family member? This is where Changing the Present comes in.

The site, a 501(c)(3) organization, is a fantastic way to find causes to which you’d like to donate, for nearly any occasion–birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, Boxing Day, what have you. What’s good is that a number of the nonprofits featured aren’t the usual high-visibility charities that attract donor dollars like moths to a flame; they range from UNICEF to the Ploughshare Fund, and they’re active in fields including education, land mine removal, medical research, and poverty alleviation. What’s more, the reach of these organizations is a good balance of the local and the global. (more…)

I’ve always loved maps. Granted, sometimes a map is just a utilitarian thing, a means of getting from point A to point B without getting (more) lost. But the fun thing about atlases and especially about old maps (you know, the ones with archaic boundaries, road and place names) is a sense not only of the “there” there, but also a sense of possibilities. Just as I’d get lost in books or pretty much anything else with words printed on it, maps were wonderful fodder for an overactive imagination; if you didn’t know exactly what went on in Dahomey, you could just imagine it as you went along.

Well, one of the nice things about the web is finding out that whatever you find interesting, you’re probably not alone in your pleasure. Case in point, for me at least, would be the recent discovery of Strange Maps. It’s not devoted to all things cartographic, exactly, just the more interesting bits.

Maps nowadays are pedestrian affairs. Nobody expects a map to be funky, artistic, or thought-provoking, much less poignant. Strange Maps has all of the above, and then some, in spades. Do you see maps in random objects? Wonder what happens when you map people’s weenie preferences in West Virginia (I have to admit, I hadn’t wondered that, but the map provoked a chuckle)? Here’s your site.

Confused yet? Anyway, the folks over at Ask And Ye Shall Receive, a blog where a team of reviewers analyze/vivisect other blogs, have reviewed A Slight Delay. It doesn’t appear as though we were exactly up their alley… which isn’t to say it wasn’t a good review–you kinda have to give props to someone who can make you laugh while they’re telling you they found your blog about as interesting as uncooked tofu. Read the original here.

A long while back, I accidentally got into architecture. Not as an architect, mind you, just as a spectator. The way some people channel surf to find a good game, I’ll scan anything from bookstores to skylines to find something interesting.

What started it was a Rem Koolhaas exhibition at MoMA, and reading the architect’s classic Delerious New York not long after. If Koolhaas’s architecture was interesting stuff, his writing on architecture is really something; you could tell that this was someone who was interested not only in pretty buildings with his firm’s name on them, but also in the architect’s broader social responsibility. The architect’s firm, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) seems to have put out more books on building than the buildings themselves, taking on issues of context, commerce, geography, and pretty much everything else that can be thought and written about buildings.

All of this is a long-ish way of saying that I’m glad I found Studio Wikitecture. The group is a loosely-knit collective of architects and others* that applies the same open-source/crowd-sourced methodology that underpins Wikipedia to architecture. This may not sound like much on its surface, but let’s take your typical architectural project as a basis for comparison. Generally speaking, there will be a competition to draw in designs from a number of top firms, from which a winning design will be selected, and on which basis building can start; from time to time–as was the case with the Freedom Tower–the designs from the first round will be found wanting, and another round of designs will be submitted. The winning design won’t always be re-tooled to take into account the better features of other entries, and so the end result will be built with its shortcomings intact. (more…)

If you’re one of those people for whom the obituaries are essential reading (or the first part of the paper you go for), I think I may have found you the perfect website. It’s called The Music’s Over, and if you go in for music, obituaries, pop culture, or some combination of the three, it’s to die for. Okay, bad choice of words, but you get the idea.

The blog’s author has pretty catholic tastes, commemorating the passing of the famous (i.e. Buddy Miles), the obscure or quasi-mythical (Syd Barrett), the unfortunately forgotten (Mia Zapata), and those famous just as much for being dead as for their music (Kurt Cobain), among dozens of others. And this isn’t some slapdash, half-assed effort; the author–I keep referring to him as “the author” ’cause his name’s not listed on his site–has clearly done his homework. Hopefully Don McLean never sees The Music’s Over, or we’ll be subjected to a rewritten, 77-minute, CD-length version of “American Pie;” unless and until that day comes, enjoy the site.

I read two articles this week that seemed to me almost a call-and-response. The first was a piece in Slate, Lazy Eyes: How we read online, by Michael Agger. The other is What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains: Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr, appearing in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Agger’s article is simultaneously a how-to for those who’d like to write snappy internet prose, and a reasoned critique of same; Carr arrives obliquely, through his own critique, at a similar but not identical conclusion.

If, as McLuhan famously stated, the medium is the message, then it would seem as though the message is efficient, long on bells and whistles, and stripped down to its barest essentials. Much writing online is barely recognizable as prose, having been stripped to a terse, almost telegraphic economy. Sentences and paragraphs, the staples of the printed page and much of the blogosphere, fall by the wayside in favor of a shorthand that reads like an advertisement. Prose often as not ends up reading like advertising copy, a choppy flow of simple declaratives, bullet points, and sentence fragments. Paragraphs, like this one, are decidedly unfashionable. (more…)

This post is safe for work. See Mike Draw, not so much. It’s decidedly un-PC, warped, scatalogical, sacreligious, and seriously disturbed. Mind you, I mean each of those things, in this instance, as accolades. Mike Jacobsen has a sense of exactly how far to go; the humor doesn’t rely on shock value, which is probably a good thing (look what an over-reliance on shock value did to South Park over the long run, and you’ll see what I mean).

This isn’t “Family Circus.” Be thankful for that.

Rubber ducks are a bit like Doritos. It seems you can’t have just one. I started with a single duck some years back, and what started off as something to keep in my bathroom became a minor obsession; that duck has multiplied as if by parthenogenesis, and we now have a couple dozen ducks of varying shapes and sizes, complementing a rubber duck shower curtain, plus a duckie wastebasket, toilet brush holder, and soap dispenser. As it turns out, though, there are some people for whom this is more than just a “minor” obsession. (more…)

Sometimes you just need a good laugh. Jeff Vrabel’s blog delivers pretty reliably, though it also contains some solid music writing. The columnist’s writing is a regular fixture, apparently, at the Island Packet/McClatchy-Tribune, and crops up with groundhog-like irregularity in Billboard and elsewhere. I hesitate to link to his recent post on Barack Obama because I’m nearly afraid some bozo will take it seriously, but I’m going to hope that anyone who reads this on a regular basis (all three of you) has their sense of humor intact.

The first thing I ever read on Jeff Vrabel’s blog was a post titled, “How my Uncle Jim was at the forefront of the green revolution.” I made the mistake of reading said post while drinking at my computer (seltzer; I don’t advocate writing while intoxicated) and nearly sprayed both my keyboard and monitor with it. We’ve all got families, and they’ve all got at least one character like Uncle Jim, but our familes don’t all have Jeff Vrabel to tell their stories.