The latest spam comment on this blog just got blocked. From this post.
Does rickrolling seems really long ago to you?
A larger mystery: why spam comments appear on posts from five years ago, and not on the latest ones. (This is usual, and regular if not particularly frequent.) Do the spammers think they'll have a better chance with the old posts of sneaking in unnoticed? But if so, why would they think anyone would ever see them?
Here is "Custard Pie" from one of those nights. Pretty much a straight-up version of the original recording -- the song remains the same, one might say, were one prone to cheap and obvious jokes -- but it's fun to see Page smile and bounce around, even, and to hear a backing band who obviously grew up on his stuff tear it up so well.
Even for renowned science fiction authors.
Here is John Scalzi speaking at Google on 27 April 2007, just five short years ago. Start listening at 18:28 and let it run for about five minutes.
No diss, and I'm sure he's had this pointed out before. I also think he's an insightful guy about a whole lot of things. I just thought this was kind of funny.
Reminded of a post from last year by this parenthetical remark:
The paper also tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world's English-speaking population switches from "sneaked" to "snuck").
The above appears in a WSJ piece about a recently published journal article, "Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death." The paper's authors used the database created by Google's massive book-scanning effort and looked at the English, Spanish, and Hebrew languages.
A pre-print version of the paper is also available on arXiv, in case the first one above becomes inaccessible. As of this moment, you can read the whole thing online at the first link, and download a PDF from either.
(h/t: @GammaCounter, RT by @GreatDismal )
Thanks to a spam commenter, I had my attention drawn to something I noted right after the previous presidential election. It is reproduced below for your enjoyment.
Prediction [Jonah Goldberg]
Now that McCain has lost, and Sarah Palin has time to reintroduce herself down the road, the anti-Palin conservatives will almost surely look foolish in retrospect.
Foolish is as foolish does. We'll be watching, Mr. Pantload.
And you, too, Mark Steyn:
As for us losers, there's no point going down the right-wing version of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Any shrill vicious ad hominem invective would be much better directed at each other.
The NYT, or a NYT employee, has a Tumblr that's worth a look. Looks like it's just getting started. Let's hope it keeps going.
Note to the young: a morgue in the newspaper sense is not what you might think. It is, or was, their word for an archive of clippings, back when that meant rooms full of paper in filing cabinets. No, really. We did that once.
(h/t: MK, via email)
Embedded below is an interview by Molly Wood of Steven Levy, which was posted on 21 April 2011. The whole thing is interesting, but the part I really wanted to call to your attention is the six minutes or so, beginning at about 26:19.
While looking for something else, I came across an old note to self. I thought you might enjoy it. The date of the original post was 4 Nov 2008.
Prediction [Jonah Goldberg]
Now that McCain has lost, and Sarah Palin has time to reintroduce herself down the road, the anti-Palin conservatives will almost surely look foolish in retrospect.
(x-posted)
We're coming up on that time in America where we celebrate our ancestral invaders being welcomed with the 17th century equivalent of candy and flowers, and so to that end, I direct your attention to the prep work of our Mr. Riley, and I also recommend an earlier classic from him on the liquid portion of the meal.
I never saw her so young. Hard to believe I missed this episode of "The Partridge Family."
But, you ask, does it get weirder? Oh, it can get a lot weirder. Would you believe herself and then-hubby, years later, on the "Brady Bunch Hour?"
No, I did not know there was a "Brady Bunch Hour," either. And the first 1:53 may well speak to why. EhhhhxxxCRUTIATING! But hang in there -- once the sketch starts, you have only another minute to wait until the big entrance. And then it gets … I guess oddly compelling would be the way to put it. Childhood zen, even, with apologies to Mr. Clarke.
(Blame Japan's hardest rocking Canadian photographer, in the comments for an earlier post.)
P.S. Tech note: please let me know if the embedded videos misbehave (more so than usual, at least). YouTube is trying out a fancy new embedding system, and I figured I'd help beta test it. Thanks.
Previously on this blog:
Ta-Nehisi tweets (via @elonjames):
An occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with.http://bit.ly/cdSevD
That URL leads to this:
A Final Thought
Here is former head and current spokesperson for the Tea Party Express Mark Williams …
And now for some updates (via tip from KK):
NY Daily News reported yesterday (Sunday 18 July 2010):
"We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote," federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
[...]
In a press release, the National Tea Party Federation says it ordered the Tea Party Express to kick Williams out and say so "prominently" on their Website. They did not.
Williams' response: who's the National Tea Party Federation anyway?
"There are internal political dramas amongst the various self-anointed tea party 'leaders' and some of the minor players on the fringes see the Tea Party Express and Mark Williams as tickets to a booking on Face the Nation," he said.
"There is no tea party leadership; every tea partier is a tea party leader."
And everyone gets a trophy at the Special Olympics, which I believe is Central To His Point™.
TPM has more news here and here of other teabagger groups scrambling to Distance Themselves.
Media Matters wonders why CNN is still allowing him on their channel. My response: You're asking this of a station that hired Erick Erickson?
(x-posted)
Here is an eight-minute excerpt from a lecture James Randi gave at Caltech in 1992, which I swiped from Jesse Galef at Friendly Atheist, via oldcola at Coffee and Sci.
We are concerned in this segment with the aerodynamics of reindeer. Sorry, I could not wait another month and a half to post it.
... blasts from the past and Daniel Davies (which I was, last post), here's something shorter, on a completely different subject, that bears a look.
And don't miss the bonus Carlin quip at the end. (Actually, it's the first comment under the post.)
Thanks to djw, I happened across an old (in Internet time) D-squared post that I somehow missed. You must go read "In Praise of Budweiser (contains extended footnotes)," and yes, read all the footnotes.
(And I say this as a strong proponent (adherent?) fan of IPA. The post is that good.)
Please enjoy this blast from the dawn of the Internet.
(h/t: Matthew Yglesias via uncle ebeneezer)
P.S. If you missed it, in April I posted a vid, made even farther back in time, reporting on the birth of electronic newspapers.
And no one under 35 will believe for a second that this is real.
What's kind of amazing to me is that for all the prehistoric look to the computers, let alone the electronic newspapers, the way TV news tells a story has not evolved much at all. Change the hairstyles and add some swooshy graphics, and boom -- 1981 would be 2009, just like that.
(h/t: ShortsandPants)
[Added] The YouTuber who posted this clip appears to be the guy who did the reporting -- Steve Newman. More stuff on his channel page, starring him. And really, who doesn't want to watch weather reports from 1973, etc.? It's like a time capsule.
[Added2] You might also like this video covering the dawn of the Internet.
Probably you heard: John Updike died.
I haven't read much of his stuff. I tried a couple of times to get through the first of his Rabbit books, and couldn't. I have a vague memory of liking Hugging the Shore. Terrorist was worth reading once, I thought -- I appear to have liked it better than most critics I saw.
Joel Achenbach has a pretty good post up about him, and nicely links to an article Updike wrote almost fifty years ago for The New Yorker. It may not be my favorite baseball story ever, but it's up there, and it is without a doubt my favorite baseball story title.
Yeah, I know: Probably a nameless staffer at The New Yorker came up with it. But I try not to think about things like that sometimes.
