In the NY Times Book Review tomorrow, a review of the book "Digital Barbarism" begins as follows:
One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.
“Are you coming to bed?”
“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”
“What?”
“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”
Anyone familiar with, well, the internet will immediately recognize this as the work of everyone's internet crush Randall Munroe, in xkcd #386.
But uncredited.
The article in question, which can be found here, is about copyright in the internet age, fair use, and outraged internet denizens. Fail.
Also note the interesting assumptions the article's author makes about the relationship and gender of the xkcd characters.
Jenny noted that the article was written by a Ross Douthat, which must clearly be the pseudonym of xkcd's black hat guy. Douthat is pretty much as close to douche-hat as one can print in the NY Times, so I'm gonna go with this explanation. Stay tuned to next week's book review for an extended series on velociraptors.
There's an escaped lunatic on the loose in Valley Stream State Park. Or possibly an escaped kitty-cat. One of those.
I'm reading in the park, around 6 pm, and a helicopter passes overhead. And again, lower. And it quickly becomes clear that it is circling the park at low altitude. Since a string of ninjas didn't come out the drop door, it seemed safe to assume they were looking for someone.
Near me, a guy in a balaclava (also known as a ski mask) was practicing parkour. A balaclava. Mid-day. Mid-June. While exercising. Definitely a terrorist.
After a half hour, I head out. The entrance to the park is blocked by a police car, and a few cops are at the gate. I know for a fact that the other 7 entrances aren't being watched. I try to head back in to investigate, but they aren't letting people into the park now.
"You guys do know that the other entrances are open, right?" "We're looking for someone we think is in this area." "..."
The park, mind you, is maybe a mile around. So because I'm a punk, I bike around the outside of the park and re-enter from another entrance. Because no one ever taught me not to make fun of police officers. The other entrances are all open, as I'd thought, though one is being watched by a couple guys in South Shore Hospital uniforms. Undercover men. Or someone escaped the psych ward.
Back inside the park, two more cops are staring at the trees. There's a trail in there. The entrance to the trail is around a bend from where the cops are standing, out of their sight-line. Okay. Meanwhile, balaclava guy has fled the scene.
At the first entrance, another guy is questioning the cops. "It's not the crime of the century or anything." "Oh okay, so it wasn't violent." "I didn't say that. You move along now."
I'm figuring those darn kids stole Baby Lindbergh from the manger again.
Eventually I got bored of watching my tax dollars at work. Nassau County police are the highest paid in the country. Way to earn it, guys.
So there me and Candace were. Minding our own business. Doing the chicken dance in front of Penn Station. Because we had decided to walk from 23rd St. to Times Square by doing a different dance down each block. Naturally. And 34th St. was the chicken dance.
So we're minding our own business, doing the chicken dance, and the "clap clap clap clap!" part was getting a lot of attention. Not as much attention as our zombie walk got on 25th, but heads were turning. Including the head of Gerard Butler. And the rest of him. As well as his personal gentleman. He looked at us like we were crazy. With good reason. But he was dancing on the inside.
I smiled and waved at Mr. Butler. I didn't know who he was (of course). Candace informed me on the corner. And then we continued on our merry way, Macarena-ing down 35th.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The Harvard Admissions Office announced today that it would reverse its longstanding promotion of equal opportunity through the consideration of race in its decisions.
The move comes in response to the recent discovery that even African-American students who are three weeks from graduation are still dangerous criminal thugs.
"It's a shame", said William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions. "After years of believing we were educating these kids, it's turned out that they are just as black and poor as they were before they enrolled."
Dissatisfaction with current policy reached a breaking point after the shootings in Kirkland house last month, in which Jabrai Jordan Copney of New York City allegedly shot Cambridge resident Justin Cosby in a drug-related incident. The spotlight quickly shifted to Harvard senior Chanequa Campbell, who, to the shock of many, was acquainted with the victim.
"I've known Channy for years, but I never saw this coming" said Chanequa's classmate, Eliot Canaday III. "Who knew she was still "down" with the "street?" Sure, she still looks black, but I mean, this is Harvard."
Widely criticized for failing to prevent this tragedy by properly assimilating black students into Harvard culture, the administration has responded with sweeping policy change. "Decades of occasional effort and perhaps hundreds of dollars have gone into Harvard's attempt to educate all students equally," said President Drew Faust in a video address yesterday, in which she appeared with several armed guards and a pitbull. "But it is time to acknowledge that these efforts have jeopardized the safety of our real students."
Harvard is calling its decision vital to maintaining the 371-year-old institution's educational integrity, but Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes disagrees. "This runs contrary to many years of progress towards the true American dream - to take any lump-of-clay students, whether financially, ethnically, or genderly challenged, and mold them into affluent white men."
Outside Cambridge the change has been applauded, except in the handful of newspapers not published by former Crimson editors, and Yale and Princeton have quickly followed suit. "We have been preparing to unroll a similar change for the last 19 months," grumbled an anonymous Princeton official, "but now that the cat's out of the bag: fine, us too." Neither of Princeton's black students could be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, student life has continued as usual. Junior Fulbright A. Rhodes didn't even notice the change. "The black kids, you know, they kept to themselves. Only time you saw them was at school-wide events, like formals and stuff. And even in tuxedos, they always ended up looking like the hired help anyway."
Jerry Herman, the composer of Hello Dolly, knew last year that he'd licensed some of his songs to Pixar. But he didn't know what they'd be used for. Until he sat down and watched WALL-E. [HuffPo]
Can you imagine? Not only the surprise of having your fifty-year-old songs - by far not the most widely remembered in your songbook - turn out to be a major plot point in this fantastic little movie... but also that this fantastic little movie says your fifty-year-old songs are going to OUT-LIVE CIVILIZATION?!
In other news, despite the unlikely immortality of the b-tracks from Hello Dolly, the Tony Awards last night confirmed that musical theater has jumped the shark.
