Preference Personnelle
Here's a Mefi
post about Left Behind. And, via
Gizmodo, a Wired
story about prison riot tech.
Via
slashdot, a
Wearable Computing Fashion Show. It's at least as funny as it sounds. Via
mefi,
War Rationale 10.0, and a page about Dan Rather and
drugs. Ooh, and a wonderful post about
Thomas Pynchon.
And, just as a heads-up, Bob Dylan's
Bootleg Series Volume 6 is about to be released. It's probably the most popular Dylan bootleg ever, and now it's getting a legitimate release, one that's sure to sound much better than the cassette I've got now.
Lately I've been reading a lot of
Michael Eric Dyson, who is rapidly becoming my second-favorite black public intellectual (big shout-out to
Mark Anthony Neal). Dyson's '
Holler if You Hear Me' is the best book ever written about Tupac by a wide, wide margin. (It's not like with the O.J. Simpson trial, where
Jeffrey Toobin's book is the best, but
Vincent Bugliosi's and
Larry Schiller's are, y'know, in the vicinity.) 'Holler if You Hear Me' makes every other Tupac book I've ever seen look like the
Randi Reisfeld Tiger Beat ephemera that they are. Dyson's biography is an interesting one. Here's the short version: his teenage babymama was getting
WIC while he worked two shit jobs. Then, years later, he got a Ph.D. from
Princeton.
One thing I just learned about Dyson is that, trying to get his academic life in order before going off to college, he attended one of Detroit's best schools,
Cranbrook. "Cranbrook," I thought to myself. "Where have I heard that name before? Ah, yes, in '
8 Mile.''' That's the alma mater of the Eminem character's nemesis,
Papa Doc (just another MC in a long line of Third World dictators like
Noreaga, Tragedy
Kadafi and Tupac homie
Kastro). Em (uh, I mean B. Rabbit) brings it up during the climactic battle scene. 'But I know something about you/ You went to Cranbrook/ That's a private school' (and, a few bars later, my favorite line in the whole movie: 'And Clarence's parents have a real good marriage.')
Eminem seems to agree with
Mobb Deep: there ain't no such thing as halfway crooks (in fact, it seems to be a major theme in '8 Mile.') I wonder what Dyson, the tenured professor whose brother is in prison for murder, thinks about the topic. And speaking of Mobb Deep, Prodigy and Havoc met at Manhattan's Graphic Arts High School,
and they had a bit of a feud with Jay-Z. (Check the non-Nas verses in '
The Takeover.' Nice Doors sample, by the way.)
I've also been listening to some 'rap beef mixtape,' source unknown, that details the Nas/Jay-Z story, starting with their first guest shots, on '
Live at the BBQ' and '
The Originators,' and wrapping up with 'The Takeover,' '
Got Ur Self A...' '
Ether,' '
Super Ugly' and '
The General' (incidentally, Thirstin Howl III's '
Osama Spit Latin,' which jacks the beats from 'Takeover' and the flow from 'General,' is worth hearing (aside to an aside: Thirstin also recorded '
Watch Deez' with Eminem back in the pre-Dre days), and a clip from some radio station of Nas winning their call-in poll right as Jigga walks in the building.
And the people were right, I think. Nas' dis songs, with the exception of 'The General,' are much better than Jay's, with the possible exception of 'Super Ugly.' If that makes any sense. Or, to put it more simply, 'Ether' is the best dis song either one of them has ever done, though Jay gets mad points for calling out Nas' homophobia in 'Super Ugly.' Or his reliance on cheesy faggot rhymes, anyway. Still, though, Nas gets the title. 'How many more of Biggie's rhymes are gonna come out your fat lips?' Damn.
The thing is, though, I think Jay might've--well, I don't want to say he threw the battle, but I don't think he gave it 110% either. To paraphrase what Moe said after the
Duff Bowl, Nas wanted it more. Listening to that beef mixtape makes it perfectly clear that Jay was more commercial right from the getgo, while Nas, like 'Pac, was consumed with thuggisms (weird example: at some point, he identifies
his father as a blues musician, instead of the avant-garde jazz player he is--the former's harder, right?). And the 'I... will... not... lose' chorus in 'Ether' couldn't be much clearer. He delivers that line with more sincerity than he summoned for several of his albums put together.
Nas' most commercial songs, like '
Hate Me Now' (favorite tidbit: the video ran with a Michael-Jackson's-Thriller-style disclaimer), '
Nastradamus' and '
Oochie Wally,' are mostly junk, while Jay's commercial songs are the best things he does. And Jay's own rhymes on '
Moment of Clarity,' on the
Black Album, to say nothing of his continual upping of things like the
Robb Report (and, face it, his entire ouevre), strongly suggest that he's just in it for the money. Is it a stretch to say that Jay popularized the 'game' metaphor that's so ubiquitous nowadays?
Jay was battling Nas to sell records, while Nas was trying to protect his reputation. It's no surprise who won. (Though if Nas really wanted to protect his reputation he would've gotten shot immediately after releasing '
Illmatic.')
(Bonus Eminem/Nas/Jay connections: Em produced a track on Nas' 'God's Son' album. He also appears on Jay's song '
Renegade.' But just ask Nas, who says 'Eminem murdered you on your own shit.' He also calls Jay a 'Stan.' Nice.)
Someone throws a party, gets some of their stuff stolen, attempts to use the Internet and social networks to, uh, catch the perps. This is really pretty interesting.
Mefi, not surprisingly.
Via
mefi,
Confessions of a Midlist Author. Also, a Flash
orgasm simulator. Not as exciting as it sounds (and for most folks, probably NSFW. Duh.). And a way to
search for Presidential campaign
donors by address, or
name. It seems like I've seen pages along these lines before, but I can't think of where.
On
metafilter, a discussion about
baseball. The discussion's better than the post. I am becoming interested, I think, in steroids. My on-and-off obsession with
Mick Foley, my recent reading of former Atlanta Falcon Tim Green's '
The Dark Side of the Game,' my long-ago reading of books like
Bill 'Spaceman' Lee's loopy 'The Wrong Stuff' and Southern humorist Roy Blount, Jr.'s entertaining first book, '
Three Bricks Shy of a Load,' about the
Pittsburgh Steelers in '72-'73, it's all coming to a head. Something else about Lee: he also wrote what is apparently a revisionist history of the
Red Sox, and did voicework for a short film by
Emily Hubley, '
Blake Ball,' which uses baseball metaphors to explicate the nine nights of
William Blake's poem. Or, perhaps more likely,
Edward Young's poem. I'm not really clear on that. WorldCat lists two libraries with a copy of 'Blake Ball.' The people in ILL probably aren't too crazy about me.
Incidentally, I say let the athletes take steroids. Hell, let them get cybernetic implants like
Steve Austin (uh,
The Fall Guy, not
Stone Cold). It's not a level playing field, period. Playing professional sports is fairly risky, even without steroids, and very lucrative. The player who's willing to put their body at risk has an advantage. I feel like I might change my mind, though, if I heard a persuasive argument. If only I knew someone who wanted to talk about the topic.
Also, here are a few appealing videogame sites:
toastyfrog (check the (unfinished) Embarrassing Game Companies
list, scathing Sega
dis and this Kingdom Hearts/Animal Crossing
review), and
SegaBase, by far the best Sega history site I've seen.
Why isn't underclocking more popular?
Here's a slashdot
review of David Foster Wallace's '
Everything and More.' Among other things ∞-related, some entertaining discussion about whether 0.999... equals 1 (I desperately want to use a real
vinculum (a word I just learned (hey, layered parentheses--how ya like me now?)), but all I can figure out how to do is an overscore after the repetend, like this: 0.999‾). I'll be checking out some of the books mentioned in the comments. Incidentally, I must remind myself to read
Godel Escher Bach sometime.
Hofstadter is right up there with
Donald Norman and
Edward Tenner among, hmm, intellectuals I've been into lately.
Update: It looks like I could do the vinculum with stylesheets, or with that
math-specific markup language, but either of these options seem like cutting-butter-with-a-chainsaw approaches, and inelegant besides.
British studies suggest we're in the midst of a
mass extinction. Perhaps you've seen this story.
"By 2050, between 25 percent and 50 percent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.
Without its natural diversity the world will be a poorer place. It will be boring."--conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, in a
Wired interview.
For some reason, this evokes for me the criticisms people make about, like, malls and suburban sprawl and the ubiquity of places like Starbucks and Wal-Mart. There seem to be a lot of widely disparate forces, in many different arenas, pushing toward the same kinds of homogenous monocultures. And how stable, how sustainable, is a monoculture? Ask a conservation biologist, or somebody who keeps up with Windows security patches.
Is it unreasonable to find parallels between extinct species of butterflies, endangered indigenous cultures and threatened mom-and-pop businesses? (I hate the cliche, but you know what I mean.) At the risk of oversimplifying, I might suggest that, frequently, it's the same people who are profiting.
Also: if I had Lexis/Nexis access, I could do a search for articles which contain the words "Courtney Love" and the words "reign of terror." For now, here's one from the
NYT, and some Google
results.
Imagine how happy I was to find that every single Google result for
"tell him to stop lying about my record" relates to Bob Dole.
Via slashdot, on gamespot,
When Two Tribes Go to War: A History of Video Game Controversy. Ooh, and have you heard about
NARC? What about
Manhunt?
Steel Battalion? What a time to be alive. Incidentally, lest anyone forget,
State of Emergency is a pretty crappy game.
And, just to bring in some of my other obsessions,
here's a SNPP page about video games mentioned on The Simpsons.
The person who made my favorite throwing-yourself-down-the-stairs game, Porrasturvat, has a new game that appears to involve throwing yourself out of a moving truck. Here's the
site.
