read about it here, at my main blog!
My Favorite Animal Is…
I have finally picked my favorite animal. Some of you might be surprised by my choice.
My favorite animal is not the dog, which shouldn’t be that shocking. Dogs aren’t animals, they’re very furry people with sharp teeth and the good graces to not comment on how fat you are when you get naked in front of them. Having said that, dogs are definitely my favorite kind of person.
I arrived at my choice purely by accident. I was thinking about different animals and how gross most of them are. I’ve built up quite a mental library of disgusting facts about various animals over the years, and my favorite animal seems to have the fewest of them. If dogs weren’t people, they would probably have the most, a list which includes eating their own vomit, which might be the grossest thing an animal or person could do.
Another gross animal fact: a mother mouse will sometimes devour her entire brood. That means she eats her babies, which is something I thought was never supposed to happen.
My favorite anima doesn’t do that. My favorite animal doesn’t even have teeth.
And now, the big reveal: my favorite animal is the duck.
Look at this picture and tell me it doesn’t make you happy to be alive:
Here’s why the duck is my favorite animal:
1) They’re fluffy and smooth at the same time.
2) They have snowy white feathers.
3) They have an innate sense of style, since white and bright orange look so great together.
4) They never get wet, even though they spend their lives in water.
5) They can swim, walk and even fly.
6) They make a very funny noise that is even spelled funny.
I don’t have a pet duck, because they’re wild animals and wild animals don’t make very good pets. I also don’t want duck poop all over my house, which is one of the few gross things that ducks do.
If there is a special hell for ducks, I bet it’s empty.
Microsoft’s New Ads Are Dumb
(Ben posted this video first)
They’re directly trying to combat the negative perception of Microsoft, fighting fire with fire against Apple’s switch ads, but they seem to misunderstand a few things.
1. Apple’s ads are short. Very short. The Microsoft ad goes on for two full minutes of weird non sequiturs, including stuff about wearing shoes in the shower.
2. The premise isn’t very funny. Here it is: two extraordinarily wealthy men buy shoes at a suburban mall. They talk about dumb things. Jerry Seinfeld mugs. Not funny.
3. Bill Gates is a zombie. He sucks the energy right out of it.
4. Jerry is funny when he plays straight, not monkey. He’s playing monkey, not straight.
5. Apple’s ads are iconic. Two guys stand in a white infinity. PC guy is the monkey, Apple guy is the straight.
6. Apple’s ads are clear. The two guys talk about how much better Macs are, and then they cut to a picture of a Mac. The Microsoft ads don’t mention Microsoft until the very end, and even then it’s some muddled dialogue about magic beans or something.
7. Apple’s ads are hip. It helps that Apple’s products are hip, too. Microsoft isn’t hip. Microsoft desperately wants to be hip, which is why it made this ad in the first place. That’s horribly misguided, because Microsoft’s stuff isn’t ever going to be hip. It’s so self-aware in its unhipness that the ad seems to think that this alone will propel it right back to being hip. But it doesn’t. It just looks lame.
8. Jerry Seinfeld was very popular in the 1990s. I don’t think he’s very popular now.
As is typical for Microsoft, they’re trying to appeal to people with a huge, committee-created, board-certified Marketing Initiative endeavor that supports a limp, unexciting, unhip, uninteresting product in a way that comes off as an old guy who buys New Balance sneakers and gets a tribal tattoo so the women he hits on won’t realize how old and flaccid he actually is.
I Have Decided Which Candidate To Vote For
A Brief History of Me (Abridged)
Because this domain is named after me, it’s probably going to be the one I keep for, like, ever. Pursuant to that, I’ve integrated all of my oldest blogs into this blog, starting in the summer of 2002, a mere month after I moved to Pittsburgh. Back in those days, we didn’t have to title our blogs, so they’re currently kind of tough to access (because of a quirk of the blog template I’m using). I’ll go through eventually and title them, so everybody can see what life in the early aughts. Those blog posts go up as far as my marriage, but the divorce and subsequent life-changing events are covered by my other blogs, which are currently incapable of being integrated into this one.
Before I started this blog, I was cross-posting between my MySpace blog and my VOX blog. You know what those two platforms have in common?
SANDBOXES.
See, you can post all sorts of stuff there as much as you like, and it’s all integrated together into a big social network. Websites make money mostly through advertising – the more eyeballs they have looking at their website, the more money they make. They will let you write as much content for their free service, but they don’t want you to be able to take your content somewhere else.
It’s hard to argue with the logic behind it. They own the bandwidth, and they’ve done the development for the web apps that let everything work so well together. It makes sense for them to want to protect their investment. Even so, it’s not playing fair.
As a contrast, Google’s Blogger service lets you export your blogs anywhere you’d like, and in any format you like.
But VOX and MySpace don’t let you export your work in any form of any kind, except as RSS feeds, which are truncated or otherwise altered to prevent the sort of thing I’m doing with my Tumblr feed (which you can see displayed here), or to prevent the sort of things I very much want to do with my sandboxed blogs.
So until either site lets you do what you want with your own work, there will be a two year gap in the History of Jim, Late 20s Edition.
Things You Should Use
“Things,” as I use it, refers to technological tools. Most of them have a social component, which is why I want you to use them, too. They’re not very useful without other folks to play with.
Facebook. I’ve been harping about this for a long time, but nobody really listens. That’s ok. All social networking sites are toilets, but if you have to take a dump you might as well enjoy it. I won’t bore you with another detailed treatise on the virtues of Facebook over MySpace, but I will implore you to make an account and join me!
Twitter. You all know what a blog is, right? Well, Twitter is like a blog and an instant messenger in one. Some are calling it a microblog, because no post can be longer than 160 characters.
Why such a seemingly arbitrary limit? Because that’s the maximum number of characters for most text messages! It’s made to operate inside the parameters of your current text message usage – you post a Twitter and it is broadcast to all of your “followers.” Likewise, if one of the people you follow posts a Twitter, you can choose to have it delivered to your phone. iPhone users will find it even easier, with a little program called Twitterific.
You should join this, too, and join me and my sister and a bunch of her friends in our never-ending conversation! I’m jamesforeman. Follow me!
Google Reader. If you already have a Google Account, then you already have access to one of the most useful apps I’ve ever used. Do you know what RSS is? You see it all over the place on the web, but you might not know what it is. Well, RSS is a means of delivering content, just like the web is. You get a feed reader and “subscribe” to RSS feeds using that feed reader. Most feed readers are separate applications you run on your computer, but the best one is built right into Google.
RSS feeds are like newspaper subscriptions, except for reading blogs and other sites that are updated frequently. With one click, you can share interesting articles with the world at large or email them to your friends.
You can read about it more here.
My Blog. I’ll continue to cross-post to MySpace, because that’s where a moderate portion of my audience still sees my stuff, but that won’t last forever. I would implore you, my loyal MySpace readers, to add a link to my blog to your list of sites you visit. There’s lots more there than just what you’ve read here! Here’s the link: JamesForeman.com.
Things You Should Use
“Things,” as I use it, refers to technological tools. Most of them have a social component, which is why I want you to use them, too. They’re not very useful without other folks to play with.
Facebook. I’ve been harping about this for a long time, but nobody really listens. That’s ok. All social networking sites are toilets, but if you have to take a dump you might as well enjoy it. I won’t bore you with another detailed treatise on the virtues of Facebook over MySpace, but I will implore you to make an account and join me!
Twitter. You all know what a blog is, right? Well, Twitter is like a blog and an instant messenger in one. Some are calling it a microblog, because no post can be longer than 160 characters.
Why such a seemingly arbitrary limit? Because that’s the maximum number of characters for most text messages! It’s made to operate inside the parameters of your current text message usage – you post a Twitter and it is broadcast to all of your “followers.” Likewise, if one of the people you follow posts a Twitter, you can choose to have it delivered to your phone. iPhone users will find it even easier, with a little program called Twitterific.
You should join this, too, and join me and my sister and a bunch of her friends in our never-ending conversation! I’m jamesforeman. Follow me!
Google Reader. If you already have a Google Account, then you already have access to one of the most useful apps I’ve ever used. Do you know what RSS is? You see it all over the place on the web, but you might not know what it is. Well, RSS is a means of delivering content, just like the web is. You get a feed reader and “subscribe” to RSS feeds using that feed reader. Most feed readers are separate applications you run on your computer, but the best one is built right into Google.
RSS feeds are like newspaper subscriptions, except for reading blogs and other sites that are updated frequently. With one click, you can share interesting articles with the world at large or email them to your friends.
You can read about it more here.
Go Ahead and Leave Comments, If You Want To
I’ve decided to bow to the interminable public pressure and finally allow comments on the Info-Matic section of my blog. I don’t like the sight of 0 comments all over my blog (it makes me feel lonely and irrelevant), so I didn’t have them before. But after a year of blogging at this domain, my traffic is always going to be what it is, and there’s no point in stifling the public discourse because of my little insecurities.
Therefore, comments are back on.
Democrats – Still Reading From the Script
Reason Magazine’s greatest asset is its point of view: that any law or policy that directly infringes upon an individual’s right to pursue his own happiness must be very carefully considered, with a bias against such laws. This is why Libertarians scare people – we have some pretty major ideas in common with both parties, and yet fundamentally differ them. You can read their awesome, nonpartisan critiques here.
Who am I going to vote for? I haven’t decided yet. I’m not even sure I’ll be voting at all. I have an argument against VOTE VOTE VOTE AT ALL COSTS!, but I’ll save it for a later time. Not voting is a perfectly acceptable option in an election, and I might just exercise my right to abstain.
When I watch the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, I keep coming back to the same conclusion – these folks, every single one of them, is a what their detractors would call ivy-league elitist intellectuals. On both sides! Barack Obama and John McCain have more in common with each other than they do with us.
It’s all hype. It’s all marketing. Hillary Clinton is saying the same things that Democrats have been saying for decades: Republicans love rich people, hate the poor, want to privatize everything and only care about money and restricting your right to choose.
These candidates are reciting the same script, over and over again. They will continue to do so, the ultra-rich power-wranglers who will never have to worry about a mortgage payment, will play to their bases when they need to, open their arms to the independents when the polls lag, move closer to the center as the election day approaches and sneak through the finish line while their pundits and flacks accuse the other side of playing dirty.
In my own little way, in my own little red, brick bunker here in the rust belt, I voice my frustration and dissatisfaction with the status quo. I defy it in my own way, by writing these blogs, by posting passive-aggressive twitters and maybe even by staying home on election night.
What are you doing? Voting the party line?
Hugh Laurie Abracadabra
Here’s my wish:
I wish I could see a video of Hugh Laurie singing and playing piano on one of my favorite Dr John songs, all while wearing a delightful hat.
What’s that you say, World Wide Web?
You granted my wish!