Élan Vital

While reading up on international 50-year ”’identities”’ the other day, and thinking about how fundamental names are (even in this post-biblical and post-$10M domain-name purchase era), it occurred to me that I should take more seriously the matter of preemptive name-conflation.

I keep running across other SJ’s on the web (some of whom don’t even know how to pluralize or punctuate “SJ“), so I thought I’d just clear up some of my private identity crisis by keeping tabs on them all. After an early on-wiki attempt to do this, I realized there were enough instances to warrant a separate story on the issue. I hear some people have entire sites devoted to people with their name… but that seems like overkill.

If you find (or ARE) a particularly compelling version of me out in the rest of the world, ping me and I’ll update the list. I think the only reason I never did this before was my abiding shame that a nutrition doctor name Samuel Klein was vastly more popular than I… but his clever SEO schemes could only hold out for so long.

Somewhere between my machine and Google [and a whole chunk of domain
names], something in the vicinity of DNS went wrong.  I
don’t know how widely or by whom or since when, but since yesterday
night, I haven’t been able to access any of a wide variety of google
IPs from my machine without an explicit entry in my hosts file.  
 google.com, www.google.com,
 What’s going on?  Clearly DNS itself is working, since ping and whois can resolve their IP addresses…

Google HACKED ?! …

Two men came to repair my kitchen ceiling yesterday morning. 
Second time in three years that ceiling had to be fixed.  Last
time it was a professional, three-day job.  This time it was a
hack job, two days of patchwork followed
by a week of half-finished ceiling and another day of patchwork. 
Now the ceiling looks like a failed home-deco experiment, with seams
where the repair took place, but you have to look twice to notice.

These men were two of the laziest people I have ever met in the confines of a city. 
They moved slowly, came to decisions slowly, talked slowly except when
yelling at high volume (and even then the process of argument was slow,
only the words were staccato and fast).  Their tools never worked, and they had to leave on two occasions to buy replacements from a hardware store three miles away.

They also had no common sense, so perhaps retiring to the countryside
wouldn’t solve all of their problems.  They started work with a
tiny tarp and no ventilation… and began to sand.  No wait, they
opened the basement door for ventilation.  They turned on a fan
while sanding (“to blow the dust towards the wall”), and got a fine
layer of plaster-dust all over the room and the one next to it before I
stopped them. 

Meanwhile, a friend’s apartment complex in central square burned terribly,
damaging many of his things..  I remember the last time there was
a big fire in that part of town in an apartment complex…  it was
just across the road from Upton St where I was living, and I happened
to miss it by being out of town.

How easy it would be to lose everything.  I think of the hundreds
of years of labour put into building beautiful monuments, opulent
houses, glorious fortifications, which were later targeted not even for
theft and recycling, but for destruction,
because of their quality.  And of the millions of years put into
building beautiful biomes, life-forms, other crystallizations of order, which are inevitably disintegrated, wiped out, crushed into the simple chaos of their component parts.

Our world is built on such layers of dust.

If you want to see the world through some disturbing and deeply tinted glasses, there’s always Jihad Unspun, a flashy site featuring columns by proudly pro-terrorist journalists, and others by Americans (like Steven Backus, professor of English at a university in Minnesota).

Here’s an exceprt from an article explaining how recent beheadings of captives by terror groups in the middle east jibes with the dictates of the Koran.  There are some one-liners in here that would have seemed like hilarious MadLibs five years ago.

Seymour Hersh revealed that young Iraqi boys were sodomized and shrieking while… being filmed as souvenirs for the friends and relatives back at home. When the Pentagon showed the pictures and videos, implicit references were made to executions and Necrophilia… If this were not an American phenomenon, why else did Arnold Schwarzenegger recently abolish Necrophilia in California?  The abuse is not confined to Abu-Ghraib [1]. 

Beheading a handful of captives is far less painful than being tortured to death as acknowledged by Nick Berg’s father. Even… degrading sexual torture can be worse than beheading. However, that only applies to those who have some degree of self-respect and honor. Sexual abuse inflicted on Lyndie England is unlikely to constitute punishment but rather a kind of titillation… Islam is indeed very different from the secular fanaticism of ‘freedom’!

Phew. Maybe someone can market this site as a diet drug.

So everyone’s heard about the video Eminem made for the upcoming election, right? Mosh. It’s a bit about portable mosh pits for expressing anger,
a bit about getting out the vote, and a bit about sticking it to the president really, really hard. In one five minute video, Slim Shady manages to:

• reprise the scene from Fahrenheit 9/11 where Bush sits reading to elementary school kids while the second plane flies toward the Twin Towers;
• suggest that Bush knew about the attacks
• suggest that Cheney et al are behind the Bin Laden videos
• encourage a recalled soldier to rebel against the administration (yelling ‘Fuck Bush!’ and putting a combat knife through Bush’s head in effigy) and against his fellow soldiers (fooling them long enough to let protestors turn a firehose on them)
• encourage massive civil disobedience, including storming government buildings — though in the end, ha ha, it turns out to be in order to vote in an orderly line.

I’ve always wondered whether and how large companies coordinated touting for their products in online fora. I remember fake Amazon book reviews going back to 1998; even today, most books get so few reviews that it pays to throw in a few fake reviews from friends of the author.

For years, it seemed as though only individuals bothered to do this — again, see the small number of reviews for most products. But they’re wising up; just today I ran across someone who is clearly now a professional “Yahoo movies” reviewer, trained in the ways of Writing Like an Enthusiastic Average Joe, Proper Mispellign, and Mimcking a Hard-core Fan. His Yahoo user profile lists just three reviews, two of them terrible, but I’d guess that this person has a hundred accounts just like it… and I wonder what a review like his Alien v. Predator review is worth.

It reads like a film-industry pro who’s had just enough training not to give it away — mentions “the Novel”, the director, and the movie names by abbreviations that few fans use, but that someone who uses the term hundreds of times a week might. And, hmm,

I strongly believe that there will be an extended version on DVD
but that’s just a thought of mine, so don’t take it as a fact.

by the same articulate guy who then closes with

My Final thought!
I’M GONNA WATCH THIS BABY 5 MORE TIMES!!

And the film he’s writing about? Right, Alien v. Predator. About which real reviewers tend to say things like “you can just burn a ten dollar bill and get more enjoyment out of that then sitting through this horrible movie.” (damianisnice)

He’s not the only toadie out there. And there must be lots of reasons to be a toad other than being paid for it. But Damian makes the good point that anyone who gives AvP high marks is likely associated with the film somehow, and there are a *lot* of A reviews for this one; check out the list and you’ll find some reviewers with… unusual histories. Some traits shared by the best of them:

1. no personal information; only a few sporadic reviews; could be one of a long list of dummy accounts… OR lots of detailed personal information, w/conflicting information coming out in individual reviews to make the reviewer fit more squarely into the target audience (See chickmagnet, below);
   

   For instance, chickmagnet, whose profile says hes “19″ and heading into the Air Force, but who claims to be 15 when reviewing SpongeBob Squarepants.

2. lots of A+/F movie reviews the day/weekend a movie is released (don’t forget that an F review for the other movies in your space is almost as good as an A review for your own)
3. PR speak in the middle of a rambling, misspelled teenage post.
   

   this battle between the Queen and the Predator and scientist is much more fast-paced, suspensful and action-packed, that is actually the way the whole movie was compared to other Alien and Predator films, more fast-paced, slightly more suspenseful, and much more action.

4. Combine detailed knowledge about backstage details (never EVER misspell the director’s name) with atrocious orthography.
   

   The way Paul W. Anderson created the story was just fenominle. (bushead)

5. Don’t forget to hype the DVD. “I can’t wait for the DVD!”, “I hear there’s going to be a director’s cut DVD, that would be so cool”, etc.
6. Don’t forget the hype, period. “This was, without a doubt, one of the best movies I have ever seen.” “i don’t care what others say it the best movie i’ve ever seen!”
7. Compare favorably with a recent major success (“I, Robot” seems to be the fave here)

Perhaps the most interesting upside of this look at the AvP reviews, is what it suggests about other recently-touted films — Fahrenheit 9/11, Punisher, and Spiderman 2 tended to get similar boosts…

You always knew it was possible. Now people are working on metrics to describe how well, for how long, with what reliability and detail. But couldn’t they find researchers with good faces?

And don’t forget that they’re already implanting chips in schoolkids in Japan…

Implanted channels …

somewhere beyond inattention to, yet before ignorance or exclusion of, there is dismissal of detail, in a performance, rendition, analysis, or original work. by this I mean detail is recognized, but presumed broadly irrelevant to the work, and whether or not it is present in any particular aspect of the work is subject to the whims of the creator, or to chance.

such is the gloss given to rowling‘s text by the latest harry potter flick… wantonly meticulous in places – as only a rich, spoiled film can be – yet with more disjointed gaps in continuity, character personality, and character intention, than I can count on both hands.
It is hardly worth mentioning the absence of both charm and meaning in the opening and closing scenes, or the negative effect of the B-movie score. The sparseness of dialogue, however, and of scenes with any powerful acting, was stunning – considering the film’s rushed feel and the talent of its cast.

Leave it to those slap-happy clowns at globalsecurity.org to keep on top of breaking news like the temperature range and female body count in placid agricultural regions of Texas like Bee County.

1…Love…xONNA …

Oh, and if you want a piece of me, virtually or otherwise, you’ll have to wait until February… ‘less you’re jettisonning into the mountains and graveyards with me next week.

Before a good watch stops ticking? Two of mine are sitting alone in a corner. Stats for the month:

   Toolchain items destroyed:  4    ...with replacement:  1
   Former links still broken:  5    ...and partially: 2 + 1
   Weekends that have sucked:  2    ...with redemption:   1
   Cancelled events: 2  [I hate people.]      ...trips:   1  [Yes, you.]
           ...dates: 3  [And you.]         ...and lips:   7  [Even you.]
   Dormant projects:  3   Merely needy and understaffed:  2
   Mentors located:  -1   Advising satisfaction [0-5]:   0.5
   Official requests ignored:  5+
   Classes of [t]ots unmeshed: 4+   ...merely unacquired: 6

“Dead” lines: 3. Time for another Timex.

H*ly sh*t.  What are they thinking?  Also, briefly: “Uh.“

Kicking Ass …

Clark puts off announcement …

Wesley Willis, Chicago icon, dead at 40.

Yow.

Amazing Lives …

I’ve been away for much of last month, but I made it back in time for this week’s berkman blogger meeting.  It was delightful as always, though I didn’t get a chance to slip chris lydon a copy of his Dresden Dolls paean.

A good Dean quote from a Vermont environmentalist:

I actually have worked with and against Howard Dean as an environmental advocate and lobbyist when he was governor of Vermont, and I have to say that he is both likeable and very ‘tightly wound’. But he is able to make both work to his advantage, because what he really is is a very skillful, extremely bright retail politician who can anticipate how the chips will fall amongst different political interests and weave his way to victory by managing to hew to the middle between the warring factions. And that’s how he gets things done, without sucking up to one side or another – a remarkable ability.

And after a while (perhaps we Vermonters are just as strange as the media/political establishment likes to paint us) his combative style is, well, likeable. He’s not going to bullshit you [and] you come to enjoy that.                                     - Sarah, from RogerSimon.com

A bright retail politician, eh?