Month: June 2003

Well now, this is sort of interesting:

By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

Found through Mighty Girl.

In today’s Salon, Cary Tennis writes:

Many women, however, have the same visceral abhorrence of porn that you have. If they found their husbands looking at porn it might be like finding them with a needle in their arms — or, more to the point, with a hooker in their arms, as the porn experience is a kind of disembodied adultery carried out in a fleshless world of signs and symbols. Women’s revulsion at porn also seems strangely autonomic, like a shiver out of the amygdala, uncontrollable, ancient, immune to secular society, powerful yet irrational, like a fear of spiders.

But in a physical sense, porn is no more dangerous than spiders. What if a husband covered his face with spiders? Why would he do that? He wouldn’t do it just to freak out his wife, would he? What would be the point? He’d only do it if it felt really, really good to cover his face with spiders — so good that he’s willing to risk losing his wife. Again, that sounds like addiction — why would a guy drink and ruin his life unless he just couldn’t stop?

I don’t exactly know why I felt the need to share that. Perhaps it’s the image of lonely men covering their faces with spiders. That’s just not something you see every day, thankfully.

Neil Gaiman posts a link this morning (or late last night) to “a poetry generator that takes URLs and makes poetry out of the web pages.” It’s fairly neat, and I found what it did to this page surprisingly amusing:

function ycs e { cc=1 {yfs=ycso[10]}29

AM not an improvement, usually just

me. 11:56

PM get_comment_link 95160256 Add a

brief discussion of curiosity. I even admit trying

to understanding the BBC

program schedule online, and,

then that a

Hollywood adaptation in America.

is, anyone

else out

Nevertheless, I found through This evening, I think what listening

for,

Al Sharpton.Oddball Comics ever tells

me I am

at least, Singer and

apparently, those who

responded to New puppy who, contacted me

any photographs.

Also neat is this demo for IBM’s new Text-to-Speech speech synthesis program. My only complaint is that, as a demo, it’s limited to text of 200 characters and less. Found through Maximum Verbosity.

Oh, the places you’ll go… For no particular reason, some of the places I’ve been today:

BookTV — To watch some of the shouting match between Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly from last Saturday’s L.A. Book Expo.

Dennis Kucinich’s website — Out of curiosity. I didn’t watch the debate among the candidates, except what little I saw on The Daily Show, and I don’t think I even knew what Kucinich looked like. Thus far, the candidate I like most is Howard Dean of Vermont, but, at the rate things are going, I’m starting to think I’d even vote for Al Sharpton.

Oddball Comics — Every day, Scott Shaw, presents some of the strangest comics ever inked. I think my favorite so far is still The Adventures Of Manuel Pacifico, Tuna Fisherman. (Thanks to Gerson for the link.)

VideoETA — Last night, I watched four hours of Farscape on DVD (five if you include watching an episode over again with the commentary track). When the DVD set arrived with UPS from Amazon yesterday, I swear I didn’t plan on watching all — well, all but one — of the episodes. Just like I didn’t plan on watching the last eight hours of Buffy this past weekend when the tapes arrived in the mail on Friday. But that’s the sort of geek I am. And I’m already trying to find out when the next Farscape DVDs are due out so I can start my pining in earnest.

Gallo goes on the offensive after ‘Bunny’ flop — “It is true that I am fat,” writes Ebert, “but one day I will be thin, and [Vincent Gallo] will still be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny.'”

A cartoon baby crying — This came up in response, oddly enough, to a Metafilter post. It’s a fairly good description of Metafilter, come to think of it.

Art of Crap? — I scored only 12 out of 16. Also found through Metafilter.

Martha Stewart indicted — I find this story interesting really only because I had no idea Stewart is almost sixty-two years old.

Little Bunny Foo Foo — I’m sure there was a reason I was looking up these lyrics…