He left the world of the living two years ago, but Floyd Red Crow Westerman doesn’t let that stop him from having something to say about the Gulf oil spill.

I’ve been sitting on on this piece for over a week because it starts out humorous and turns sour at the end. But what the hell.

Memo to Dr. Carl Mumpower: Mr. Mumpower, on the 880 The Revolution Local Edge Radio with Blake and Lesley, you have on two previous Mondays trotted out the old conservative insult of saying “Democrat Party” when the correct name ‘s “Democratic Party.” Challenged on this, you blandly asserted, two Mondays in a row, that a Democrat had told you this usage was correct. You must have heard this from some far-right Democrat like Zell Miller. Please note that Old Zeller is only a Democrat on paper, and a flimsy paper at that; meant to be used only once, over porcelain. Preferably in private.
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In which Dr. David Brin, science fiction author and highly savvy dude, drops a chunk of knowing on us. And raises my opinion of President Eisenhower.

Soooo…. I put off until the very last night to enter my Google nomination. I admit it: I’m a terrible crasto. But the issue for me was: what could I say that everyone else wasn’t already saying? By definition, the new uses for fat data pipes are just too hard to predict. I could only think of one or two things.

One might be: every music venue gets its own live hi-def internet TV channel if it wants one. Although it’s not completely clear to me how that results in revenue, unless you can convince the couch potatoes that it’s even more fun to be there in meatspace (which it really is, when the mojo is working). But I tendered a different idea, which I’ll reprint here (slightly reworded for this format). Read More→

There will be no overriding theme to this post, amigos, except that Here Are Some Things I Like.

The Beast bills itself as The World’s Only Website. This is what logicians refer to as “self-evident truth.” Since 2002 (but skipping 2003) the Beast has published its list of the 50 Most Loathsome Americans. The 2009 List includes one jerk in particular who seems to make every year’s Loathsome List:
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Translation Party is a website that lets you, the intrepid Internet Explorer, type an English phrase into the empty text box (oh, see how empty, how hungry it is, hungry for your words!) Then Translation Party translates your text into Japanese. O, but the magick is only begun! Then it translates that Japanese text back to English, and repeats this process until the translation stops changing: “equilibrium is reached,” as Translation Party puts it. I got the idea to feed it that already controversial nugget of English writing, the Second Amendment.
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