December 2011
38 posts
Oops
Me: I think this is the first year I've had someone to kiss at midnight
H: ...
Me: What?
H: You forgetful jackass!
Me: What!
H: I met you on New Year's Eve you fucking asshole!
How Apple Can Fix The iPad In 2012 →
Paul Thurrott wrote you an incredibly stupid column for Christmas. Happy Christmas!
There’s nothing like
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The information in this electronic mail message is the sender’s business confidential and may be legally...
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#circlejerk
Shawn Blanc’s Android review:
What can I do on Android that I cannot do on iOS?
Followed by a list of things Android does that iOS doesn’t. Later:
Of all the options and choices that I was given by Android, there was nothing in Android that I could not also accomplish on iOS.
Ben Brooks, later:
If you want an example of what I consider an excellently written review,...
Man Eats Cocaine From Brother's Butt, Dies →
A South Carolina man’s brother died after police said he was forced to eat cocaine hidden in his brother’s backside.
What.
Piers Morgan testifies at UK phone-hacking probe →
Piers Morgan is testifying about phone-hacking live on MSNBC right now.
“To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness...”
– Alfred Polgar. “You must help him to an awareness…” Derision is not help; brutal exposure of perceived logical errors is not help; sarcastic decimation of straw-men is not help. Also: neither agreement nor acquiescence nor victory are synonymous with awareness.
This relates to a previous post on...
Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How... →
We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us. But to anyone of moderate intelligence...
Watch‘The Elements of Style’ reinvented as rap video by Columbia J-school students
On Latin Words →
whileyouweregone:
Brent Simmons recently published a critique of the words used in the tab labels of Twitter’s new iPhone app. It’s a fine piece, but one part of it doesn’t ring true.
Pulphead Notes →
Oh hey, John Jeremiah Sullivan is on Tumblr.
“Into this cutthroat mix, BusinessWeek entered and damned if its feature well...”
– Are you reading the best magazine in America? by Jack Shafer
BusinessWeek has been great this year, but better than The New Yorker and New York Magazine? That’s crazy talk.
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Is it just 8,000-word epics that make people hit... →
The popularity of tools like Instapaper and Read It Later give us comfort — because if people are using them to read things later, it stands to reason that those things must be the kind of long-form work that we admire.
The thing is: that comforting vision doesn’t seem to be particularly true.
Dun dun dunnn.
Spoiler: most people using Read It Later are saving articles under 500 words...
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AP’s ‘New Distinctiveness’ →
A memo to Associated Press staffers says: “AP wins when news breaks, but after an hour or two we’re often replaced by a piece of content from someone else who has executed something more thoughtful or more innovative.” Often, the memo says, it’s done by someone who has taken AP’s reporting “and pushed it to the next level of content.” AP senior managing editor Michael Oreskes adds: “We can’t...
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Vocal Fry →
The one where the professional link finder links to the easily debunked article about vocal fry days after everybody else.
Give Me Something To Read's 2011 Highlights →
givemesomethingtoread:
Here are Give Me Something To Read’s highlights of the year. This list is comprised of my favourites and reader favourites, selected from articles posted here in 2011 (limited to those originally published in 2011). Open this post in your browser to make use of the Read Later button accompanying each link.
Digital Mystikz - “Haunted”
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“The Verge is simply one of the best publications in the world. Period.”
– Gruber
What? …What?
Sarah Lacy And Mike Arrington Are Starting... →
One source we spoke to was skeptical about the site because of Lacy’s penchant for long-form journalism. But she could obviously build an editorial team that could focus on whatever format is necessary to make the site successful.
Yeah! Keep your dumb long-form journalism out of lazy tech reporting and pageview whoring, Sarah Lacy! That’s now how this industry works!
Into a Bar →
Fritinancy with a meme from alt.usage.english: “bar jokes that hinge on fine points of grammar, punctuation, and linguistics.” Some of my faves:
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, planning to drink.
The bar was walked into by the passive voice.
A spoonerism balks into a war.
A snowclone walks into the mother of all bars.
A superlative goes into a bar...
$100 Hand of Blackjack, Foxwoods Casino →
Card counting isn’t mathematically very complicated. You keep a running tally in your head of the high cards versus the low cards. Low cards add to the tally, high cards subtract from it. The higher the number the more favorable the conditions for betting; the idea being that a shoe with a high concentration of high cards in it will deal out more winning hands than a shoe with low cards....
Give Me Some Shit to Read dot com
In the style of the fat manatee, here’s a context-less list of some stuff I read this week that I liked.
The ‘CEO of Self’ (New York Book Review)
Stolen Notebooks and a Biochemist in Chains (Slate)
The Joyful Side of Translation (New York Times)
Larry David’s Rough Night Out With The Aging Literary Lion (The Awl)
The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal (New...
The Macalope Weekly: Debatable →
This isn’t complicated. The Macalope likes to give the benefit of the doubt to the serial jerks he takes to task. Maybe they really believe what they’re saying. Maybe they don’t know any better. But Blodget and Business Insider have made their intentions pretty clear. And by linking to Business Insider, even to say “Get a load of these whimsical drawings by Kurt Vonnegut!”, we drive traffic to...
