This is probably the neatest Halloween costume I've sen this year Here is the first runner up
yep...WIN
Whoever thinks that Twitter is a waste of time should look at this list of people to follow. This tweet from @common_squirrel alone is worth joining
Here is some useful knowledge for you
This could possibly be the best commercial I've ever seen
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RLqLx1iYI]
I enjoyed this very much
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.892555&w=425&h=350&fv=]
Here is part one of this year's story. Have fun adding to it, it's in a tab at the top -
It was November and William was out for his daily walk through the neighborhood. It was cold this morning but walking through the neighborhood was better than a treadmill and looking at the same wall for an hour. As he arrived back at his house he checked the mail and found a package.
There was no return address on the package and he didn't remember ordering anything so he opened it as he was going into the house.
The package contained a t-shirt that said, "I'm with stupid," a note that read "wear this on your trip," and a plane ticket to Brazil.
"At least it's not a train ticket," he thought, recalling a frightening dream he had about a year ago. He began to debate in his mind whether he wanted to be a part of another mysterious adventure. The ticket was for a flight tomorrow at 7 a.m. so he had a while to make up his mind.
Remember this? That story did not go at all the way I expected it to. I certainly didn't see Michael Strahan showing up. It was kinda fun
Well it's November again, NaNoWriMo, so let's take another crack at writing a collaborative story. Again this year I'll make a tab at the top with a link to the story. You add your contribution in the comments and I'll move it up to the body of the story.
The one thing we need to make it better is your contribution.
Here are the rules. same rules as last year:
Finally – Try this. even if you don’t think this is your thing or if you aren’t creative, write one sentence. Give it a shot. I think this might be fun.
Each month I collect the interesting searches that bring people to my blog and share them with you unedited. They are simply cut-and-pasted exactly as they appeared. Whatever you see in parenthesis is my commentary. This month it seems like 40% of searches included the word tattoo. But only a few were funny. Really it was a pretty boring month of searches overall
This is probably my favorite fail of all time
I've never heard of this, but now I want to see it in person
This is a very entertaining story, but I wouldn't want to be this guy
This is about 50 minutes of video. But I promise you it is thoroughly interesting, and that you will never watch a cop show the same again
If you only watch one video about the Spitzer Space Telescope, it should be this video
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRJeaNtxN4]
I appreciate my Pastor.
This post is nearly identical to last year, feel free to skip it.
I am a very critical person, and I find that I am very often critical of Pastor Weeks. Much more than I should be. I want to take this opportunity to say publicly that I appreciate him. he is n excellent pastor and in the 5 years I've known him he has been nothing but good to me.
Even though he is nearly 60 he still is willing to learn.
He loves our church. If anyone needs him, they know they can call. If you have a birthday or an anniversary, you can count on a phone call.
He loves his family and knows they are his legacy.
He loves the Bible, and has regular quiet time and does his best to communicate it to us each week.
He loves missions. More than any pastor I've ever known, he emphasizes missions prayer, giving, and going.
Thanks for allowing me to ramp & rave :-)
Oops...I guess I sort of left my regular readers hanging. I promised this last week. I found myself to be much busier than I expected last Thursday, and now I have sort of lost my energy for this post. But since I said it was coming, here you go. Jon Stewart deals in what he calls “fake news.” He is thoroughly self-deprecating, and often laments that he is taken seriously by so many. In reality The Daily Show is not so much “fake news” as it is commentary on the news. Most of the Jon Stewart shtick is to point out how terrible news coverage is. This video I linked to as a prelude to these thoughts illustrates this perfectly. In it, he shows that CNN did a fact check on a Saturday Night Live sketch, while not even questioning a senator on his views of healthcare reform. Then there is a barrage “leave it there” quotes. This is the way that CNN doesn’t bother with fact checking. They just bring in 2 points of view and debate. Then end whenever it’s time for a commercial.
The daily show has repeatedly done critiques of the same sort on the networks and each of the cable news channels.
You might say that this is just rampant cynicism and not Neil Postman-like criticism of the news. But even if it is just cynicism, it illustrates the same point – television news is in terrible condition. Clearly Stewart is no Postman in terms of gravitas (to use a good cable-news word), and he is much more political, but his criticism is valid nonetheless.
The only thing lacking from Stewart’s criticism is the why. Postman explained the why. News is terrible because the news organizations exist to make money, not to protect the first amendment. If it is more profitable to show debates than truly look at the issues being debated, then debates will continue. And Saturday Night Live is simply more interesting than charts and graphs looking at the financial impact of a given healthcare reform bill.
I guarantee nobody would say this at Christmas This is hilarious (be warned it has a couple of swears)
I think Ryan should go with this look
You know how people are always seeing faces in random stuff? This one I totally see
Also in seeing pictures where they may or may not exist is this awesomeness
I know everybody has seen this by now, but c'mon, it's hilarious
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzY5i4A1zgA]
I wonder if anyone who reads my blog has any idea who Neil Postman was?
He was what I, and wikipedia, will call a cultural critic. His most well-known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, the thesis of which is that the ignorance and destruction of the future will not come in the way Orwell prophesied in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Also in Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman describes what he calls the age of show business. He says that in this age, entertainment has become the greatest virtue of all, and the things that go with it must be accepted, whether good or bad, merely because they are necessary. (e.g. Choosing the attractive news anchor over the articulate one.) He explains how the terse nature of visual media, particularly television news, has the effect of removing the importance from every issue. He even discusses how TV-izaition has resulted within other media forms. The result is magazines with virtually no articles and newspapers with extremely short stories. Postman claims this has destroyed news. Keep in mind that he wrote this book in 1985, long before the internet
He also cowrote a book with Steve Powers called How to Watch TV News. I will give you the takeaways from the book more or less, straight from chapter one. 1.)TV is an unsleeping money machine. 2.) Management, not journalists, make news decisions based on business considerations. 3.) Decisions of what is newsworthy are based on what keeps viewers watching so that they will see commercials.
Tomorrow. Why Jon Stewart is the modern Neil Postman
Theoretically I'm going to write an actual blog post tomorrow about how Jon Stewart has become this generation's Neil Postman. What got me thinking about it is this clip from the daily show last week. Enjoy and come back tomorrow. The embed doesn't seem to be playing nice with wordpress.com, so you can watch it by clicking this link
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.885793&w=425&h=350&fv=]
This map is pretty much amazing. All the space missions ever This is a good interview with Mike Rowe
This lop-sided guy is really freaky looking
Entertainment Weekly asked people to post pictures of their best pop culture inspired Halloween costumes. Some of these are very enjoyable (The 4 y.o. Lando Calrissian is by far my favorite)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUensqImzXM]
Um...yay
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0j3bNh-PQs]
I even forgot to post last week's best web junk (so you get a double dose this week) I have almost never skipped an entire week.
It's a weird occurrence, but not as weird as this
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2mFfgaHyo]
I want to go to there - [vodpod id=ExternalVideo.880508&w=425&h=350&fv=%26titleAvailable%3Dtrue%26playerAvailable%3Dtrue%26searchAvailable%3Dfalse%26shareFlag%3DN%26singleURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Flatimes.vidcms.trb.com%2Falfresco%2Fservice%2Fedge%2Fcontent%2Fa76942d9-5c16-42db-80c4-05d87650b0fc%26propName%3Dlatimes.com%26hostURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%26swfPath%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Flatimes.vid.trb.com%2Fplayer%2F%26omAccount%3Dtribglobal%26omnitureServer%3Dlatimes.com]
I like to use my blog to crowdsource things. I don't have that large of a readership but sometimes you are extremely helpful. So this is another post where I ask you to give me suggestions and ideas. I am currently teaching Basic Computers at CBC. At the first class I asked the students to rate themselves from 1-10 in computer knowledge, with 1 meaning, "I can barely turn a computer on," and 10 meaning "I should be teaching this class." Most of them were a 2.
So I began with vocabulary. After learning much of the computer lexicon, I decided to turn my attention to using the internet. There are 2 reasons for this strategy. One, almost anything you can do with a computer can be done online. And two, it seems to me the trend is toward cloud computing. I think the proliferation of netbooks demonstrates that we will soon to be mostly a world of terminals where the real computing is done on a server and the browser is the most important piece of software.
Here is where I ask for your help. What are the absolute must-knows of the internet? I am composing a project in which I assign them a variety of tasks. What do you think everyone should know about, or know how to do on, the internet?
BTW: I refuse to add "Learn to play Farm Town" to the list
This site is fun but this is one of the many things I think is just here so people can get on the site This was on Digg, so you've probably seen it. But these are awesome Mario wallpapers
I officially think this is the best website I have seen in recent memory. Express your road rage safely (and check yourself to see who you've angered)
This video is more than a little bit impressive
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpGz6OG8NjI]
This video is hilarious - warning - contains a mating parrot
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY]
Each month I collect the interesting searches that bring people to my blog and share them with you unedited. They are simply cut-and-pasted exactly as they appeared. Whatever you see in parenthesis is my commentary. Enjoy
Yesterday’s post was about the future. Specifically about the media formats that are dying because of technological advancement. My argument was that there will always be quality material out there and there will be money for those people who are skilled to earn a living at their craft. But there is one area that I am afraid will be lost to technology and, at least at this time, I do not see a replacement for it.
So what is this one thing that I worry will be truly destroyed by technology? Local news by actual journalists. As I see it, there will always be outlets of national and world news that are profitable enough to continue on with real journalists. Those things will have a bias, but that is okay. Newspapers and magazines today are biased as are all people. At least when you read Huffington Post or the Drudge Report you know what you are getting when you read. As I see it, this as a push.
However for local news I envision a very
hard road. It is no secret that newspapers are struggling now and many of them are shutting down. Soon we will be hearing the same stories about network affiliates. When this happens, there will really be no source for local news.
I happen to believe that local news is more significant to my life than national news, and I know that whoever is my mayor will have a greater effect on my life than the president. So I believe that local news is quite important. I care what goes on at my city council and I want to know how high school football turns out.
I live in a mid-sized city. It’s huge compared to my home town but tiny compared to New York or Houston. In greater Fayetteville NC there are about 300,000 people. Unless things change seriously, even a city this size will have a difficult time employing reporters with only ad revenues from a website.
As things stand currently, the Fayetteville Observer is a respectable paper and I get headlines via RSS. I click on ads occasionally because I want them to get the revenues. But I simply have no interest in having the paper delivered.
Imagine that I was back in my hometown, roughly one tenth the size of Fayetteville. I would still care about the city council and the mayor, there would be only a few less stories for them to cover. There would be fewer local schools to follow and fewer crimes to report, but still a similar low-end cost. (And I don't think the local paper even offers headlines by RSS now. )
What are the options I see?
First, an [online] subscription model. I know this is what the papers plan to do. It makes sense right? People paid for the delivered version, they will pay for the online version. The only problem is that it’s nearly to make people see something that was free as having value. And as far as I know, except for the Wall-Street Journal, this model seems to have failed for every newspaper that has tried it.
Another option is user contributed local news. The problem with that is reliability. My concern is with good local news I guess there could be a digg-like system for rating stories or authors by veracity, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.
There is my irrational fear of technology. Feel free to call me stupid in the comments and tell me how you get your local news.
I listen to a podcast called Fourcast. It is all about the future that always makes me think. In the most recent episode they predicted the death of network TV and alluded to the impending death of record companies. Just a few days before listening to that, I read an article by Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly. In this article he bemoans the death of [music] radio, physical books, good movies, and network TV. At the end of the article he says that his fear is that the replacements for these things is low-quality and that quality versions of all these things are going to disappear. I have hard similar arguments over the years, and the purpose of this post is to offer my disagreement. Last week I asked you to help me make a list of important things you believe are going to die because of technology. Our list included office equipment which is not really a surprise because tech has always moved office equipment pretty quickly. Video stores and banks were on the list. They are also not surprising because the services offered by those buildings can be done cheaper over the internet. (Ultimately, the disks through the mail business is doomed as well. It will be replaced by streaming movies over the web.) The list also included old-style phones and wrist watches. I doubt if anyone is overly concerned about those things, because we have the technology in place to replace them.
Then there's this item; last week I read this article about the death of cursive writing. I personally haven’t written anything other than my signature in cursive since the 9th grade. And this is another thing that technology has made needless. Penmanship doesn’t matter when we type everything.
These things are not that frightening by themselves, but for many people, the cumulative effect of so many changes seems both scary and wrong. I think this is what scares Stephen King, though he expresses his fear a bit differently. In his words "right now there are no adequate replacements for the quality that looks to be on the way out." So let's consider his fear. Do we need to worry that the quality of the media is going to degrade because there’s no money in the new media options and all the skilled people will do something else?
My answer is a strong NO.
Books aren’t going anywhere. Quality authors will always be widely read and they will make good money for their craft. Books made of paper will fade, and the digital copies we all buy will cost less. Publishing companies may even disappear. (I believe their death is certain unless they change their archaic and draconian DRM concepts.) If publishing companies disappear what will replace them? One possibility is that there will be freelance editors to edit for the freelance authors. The good ones will be in demand and will earn a good living. The bad ones will find a new job. The same will be true for authors. A second possibility is some sort of collective or trade group that carries out these duties but has the authors in mind rather than the bottom line of the publishing companies. I’m not trying to predict the future, but I will say with certainty that the way things are is not the way things will be. (Do you think Plato would have written the Trial of Socrates if he had to negotiate his advance.)
The same can be said for each of these media formats. Quality will rise and people who are talented will earn a good living. In fact, I think I can make the argument that whenever network television dies, the overall quality of that media will rise. I am completely certain that music isn’t going to disappear, but I’m also certain that musicians will not earn their income in the same way that they do now.
An inability to imagine the future becomes fear of the future. So much of the hand wringing and fear bears this out. I do not pretend to know how all these things will be replaced in the future. But I am certain that my great grandparents couldn’t have imagined what movies or television would become. (And that they would be appalled at how much we spend each month on entertainment) I am also certain that media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, as technology makes our work easier we will probably spend even more time consuming media.
One last thought that I didn’t know how to connect. I believe that the media we consume will be high-quality. Ask a Ninja, Homestar Runner, and Chad Vader are well-known, funny, widely watched and higher quality than Accidentally on Purpose.
Tomorrow…the one impending change that I cannot envision a replacement for.
Even though it's not from this week, this is the funniest lolcat I've seen in a while The Star Wars Soundboard ver. 2
Did you ever wonder what the worst song in the world would sound like? In my opinion it's "I Will Always Love You" the Whitney Houston version, but apparently the scientific answer can be found here.
I posted this on Facebook earlier this week and since then I've seen at least 10 others post it, but it definitely is the best thing I've seen this week. I present All the Single Babies. And you know it is one of the best videos of all time
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikTxfIDYx6Q]
The generation that led us through the conservative resurgence is aging and their influence is fading. My prayer is that we would not abandon their passion for the inerrancy of the Bible, and that we have learned the lessons they taught. I pray that the SBC would stand on the shoulders of these men and reach to new heights to see the world changed for Christ. My prayer is that the new leaders of these entities would be seekers of God’s will more than politicians. And my prayer for my own generation is that we don’t abandon inerrancy because we believe “the battle for the Bible is over” I also pray for my generation of Southern Baptists that we make an impact on the world that the previous generation could not simply because they were fighting over inerrancy. That’s it, that is my prayer for the SBC
I probably could have included this in yesterday’s post but it was already very long.