Donkey Hottie

Two pages on Palestine

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:30:26 +0000

Every morning, I hear on NPR the latest, in their tortured pro-Israel way, about what’s going on in the Middle East. Today the shock was that a rocket managed to land in Gedera, a mere 20 miles from Tel Aviv. It hit a building. Oh, but that rocket did not hit just a building. It “exploded [...]

Pop psychology of blogs for free

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:01:39 +0000

Language Log posted about the Typealyzer last month, and only today (while waiting for some video to digitize) did I get around to playing with it. The Typealyzer scans a blog and then decides what kind of Myers-Briggs personality type the blog represents. I’m allegedly an ENFP, so I thought it would be neat to [...]

Blago- A root that just won’t quit

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:18:54 +0000

Rod Blagojevich, who is probably going to jail, is of Serbian ancestry. But his Serbian surname has a root visible in lots of Slavic languages. So, for the sake of the staggering level of pseudo-ironic coincidences available here, I present you a list with Russian words that begin with “Blago”: благо - blágo - good, blessing благоволить [...]

The Event of Obama, and why ambivalence is good

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 09:21:12 +0000

I started this post two weeks ago exactly, but just as I was trying to get my thoughts about Obama straight–or, more precisely, my thoughts about why I felt how I did about his election–I saw a poster for an event hosted by 3CT on “The Event of Obama.” So I decided to hold off [...]

Could Obama have won Louisiana?

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:13:25 +0000

(This is how I spent GIS Day) I was surprised in my previous post by how young and black Louisiana was (in 2000), yet how not for Obama it went. Only 10 of 64 parishes were carried by the Democrat, though they included three of the four most populous parishes. I wondered if maybe there was [...]

Mapping the South for Obama

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:26:08 +0000

[I massively updated the middle part of this post after thinking about it on the ride home] I was pretty startled by the two maps I saw at Strange Maps over the weekend. They showed a distinct correlation between cotton production in 1860 and Obama support in 2008. Where more cotton was picked 150 years ago, [...]

Less shame

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 22:54:14 +0000

Well, it turns out that my concerns about the turnout in my previous post are now totally wrong. Nate shows today that Obama beat Kerry in pretty much every demographic, and in some he beat him by double digits. Considering that more people voted, period, than in 2004, it follows that more of each demographic [...]

Transformative politics?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:52:30 +0000

I wrote a post for Daily Kos about my feelings about the election, or, well, about how people are reacting to it. I really don’t see the same level of change that everyone else does. I’m not pessimistic or anything, but I think that the optimism (or whatever) is a bit… overdone. Anyway, it’s looking [...]

What am I trying to accomplish?

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:39:43 +0000

I’m sitting in on a seminar this fall called “New Directions in the Study of American Culture.” It’s also the introductory seminar of the new Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. The class, being taught by Center Co-director Eric Slauter, has a clear premise: each week, we read a recently published book about [...]

d/b/a “The Maverick”

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:52:58 +0000

Making fun of Sarah Palin for being dumb has bugged me for a while, and I avoided watching her interview with Charlie Gibson precisely because of that. You don’t get to be governor–even in Alaska–if you’re an idiot. And even so, it’s unclear what being an idiot means and how it helps or hurts one. [...]

Mr. Uppity learns his place

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:29:52 +0000

In first grade, the “Mr. Men” books were all the rage. The short length and taxonomic/essentialist nature of the series and characters appealed to me very greatly. And though many of the books taught me terms for vices that I didn’t know (fussy, mischievous, nosey), the only book I could not understand was Mr. Uppity. [...]

Riding the wave

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:54:38 +0000

Staying away from adding to the voices complaining about the $7e11 bailout of Wall Street is not something I’m very equipped to do. So I would like to compare two paragraphs here: The first is from Glenn Greenwald’s astonishingly muted post from Saturday: And all of this was both foreseeable as well as foreseen — see the [...]

In which I love Brad Pitt

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 03:56:23 +0000

The Coen brothers have some seriously involved things to say about anti-intellectualism. Check it out and join me in the discussion. This, sirs, is the GWB legacy. That and, you know, $7e11 debt to Wall Street.

Obama + The National = ringtones!

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:32:47 +0000

I learned last night how stupidly easy it is to make ringtones for the iPhone. That, coupled with how stupidly easy it is to strip audio from videos on YouTube makes this little project possible: 3 ringtones for the iPhone built from the Obama campaign video “Signs of Hope and Change.” The video is great because [...]

Spending money abroad

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:24:09 +0000

This summer I return to Lithuania for the second time in as many years (and will be back again next summer), so part of my trip preparation has been stressing over how to most economically turn my dollars into litai. This research is using a trip to Lithuania as a specific baseline, but I think [...]