I finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union today. I liked it, although I think it overdid it perhaps a little with its sheer Jewishness—it takes place in an entirely Jewish state, one whose inhabitants are all highly aware of their Jewishness in ways I’ve never encountered in real life. It’s not quite caricature, and it’s definitely a loving portrait in many ways, but it felt like Chabon figured out how to convey “a Jewish atmosphere”, and conveys it, and then hires a trucking company to keep on conveying it from his mind to yours, while you’re trying to follow the plot. I suddenly wonder if At Swim-Two-Birds strikes the non-Irish in a similar way, given that it’s steeped (very steeped) in Irishness. In any case, Chabon’s novel is a good one, and a good read, but my question is: is it science fiction?
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What freaks me out is not so much that people like Roger Stone exist, is that there also seems to be a social milieu in which they exist, in which their attitudes and actions are considered normal, even admirable. That freaks me out.
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This was on BoingBoing, but I wanted to post a link to it anyway, partly because it’s definitely worth listening to the audio of Joe Frank’s original monologue, which was plagiarized for the beginning of Scorcese’s After Hours.
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I’m pretty tired at the moment, so this is going to be a short post, mainly a reference to this Mark Morford column about meditation.
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The sfmagic MTG draft group is moving again, after about a year at Milano’s on 9th Avenue.
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For a long time, it’s really bugged me that certain copyright owners do all they can to keep their creations from ever entering the public domain while not acknowledging how much they owe to all the things that were floating around free in the culture before them.
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I’m still conflicted about this meme, but this particular reworking is too funny not to highlight—Hitler responding to news that he’s become an Internet meme…
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What shows up in the op-ed pages of American newspapers should no longer surprise me, but somehow it still does. Last Thursday, “conservative” commentator Kathleen Parker wrote a truly awful column that was syndicated throughout the US, essentially trying to defend racism as patriotism.
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Following on from a BoingBoing post about a 52-second David Lynch film, I found a number of other interesting Lynch-related video online.
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Donald Rumsfeld, in 2006, took part in an analyst(i.e. propagandist)’s luncheon, a recording of which has become available via FOIA requests. Some excerpts have been made available at Newsvine.
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For years I’ve seen the statistic quoted that left-handers live an average of nine years less than right-handers. As a lefty, this naturally concerns me, and today I finally got around to looking into it a little. Apparently it’s not true—at the least, there are differing results and no absolute conclusions.
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I recently read the graphic novel The Nightly News (thanks Dave!), and while there’s plenty of interest in it, what I feel like posting about comes from the author’s comments at the end, about how he succeeded as a comics creator.
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So all those nefarious plots, the terror cells under the bed, the scheming evildoers whose awful engines of destruction needed to be rooted out by spying on, well, everyone? The extra surveillance has yielded few prosecutions, a tremendous shocker I’m sure.
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I don’t really know what this is, apart from looking like the start of a fantasy story, but it fell into my head, more or less in one piece, this morning:
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Due to the the rather fragile state of my technical infrastructure, I’m planning to move the hosting of my blog to another server. I don’t know how smoothly this will go… while I’m hoping for no downtime, there maybe some interruptions in service.

Dino Run (also available here) is a very cute and fun retro-style side-scroller in which you control a velociraptor running away from the blast wave of an asteroid, trying to avoid the disaster that’s wiping out your (and other) species. It’s a style of game I haven’t played much in quite a while, and it’s a lot of fun.
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I’m deeply conflicted about this little piece of video reworking. Partly because it’s unbelievably inappropriate on a bunch of levels—comparing the Democratic nomination struggle to World War II and comparing Hillary Clinton to Hitler, for example. Partly because it relies upon the audience not understanding German, which disturbs me for other reasons (and since I understand German to an extent, it’s also jarring). But the fact remains that, despite its being just wrong, it’s still funny—at least it is today. It’s extremely context-dependent, and months from now I suspect this piece will be regarded as something of an embarrassment. (The other context that makes it more acceptable somehow is that apparently the piece in question has been re-subtitled many times already for other things, and already constitutes a meme that is here being reapplied.)
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Of course this is merely a news report and might not actually be true in all its particulars, but sadly, I feel like it probably is:
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Short post tonight, because I’m way too tired. But I thought I’d leave you with this piece of choice propaganda: John Hagee claiming that it’s easier for students in public schools to get abortions than aspirin. See that link or after the jump for the video.
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High Geekery, this. Webcomics, one about a band of D&D characters rendered as stick figures, the other about a wargaming geek sucked into another dimension… I discovered both of them quite recently, despite friends who are into The Order of the Stick and the fact that Erfworld appears to have garnered critical acclaim.
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Alpha Assault is a fun little game. it takes place on a hex-based board, with a letter in each hex. You have to make words out of the hexes that are adjacent to each other, while some of your tiles get taken over by the enemy (who’s trying to capture your castle hex).
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Snooker is an oddly hypnotic sport to watch. I used to get sucked into it when it was on television in Ireland, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets airtime here (and I don’t watch television per se here anyway). You can still find it on YouTube, which is great, but to really watch it for a long time you need high quality and a large screen.
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