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February 27, 2007

Fishy


Fast Food News: KFC asks Pope to bless their fish

In a PR move to promote the new fish sandwich, KFC has concocted a publicity stunt that at least borders on sacrilegious: they've officially asked the Pope (yes, the one in Rome with the big hat) to bless their new sandwich.

As the KFC hack said, just in time for Lent! Maybe they can do some sort of tie-in.

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February 26, 2007

Radio, the MySpace killer

Scripting News: 2/26/2007

In late 2003, early 2004 we had talks with Yahoo about them acquiring UserLand.

The idea was that Yahoo would get into the weblog hosting business, along with customizable River of News aggregators.

Had we done the deal, it seems Yahoo might today compete with News Corp's MySpace.

Google Reader would still be playing catch-up.


It's absolutely incredible that Yahoo "walked away" from a deal with Userland. I cannot think of a reason that they would do such a thing.

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February 24, 2007

He-Man Web Developer's Club

Daring Fireball: Regarding Kottke's Piece on Gender Diversity at Web Conferences

So the issue here isn’t why there aren’t more women speaking at web conferences, but why there aren’t more women interested in web nerdery.

Not to be too circular, but maybe there aren't more women interested in web nerdery because of the lack of women speaking at web conferences. The argument given is that the percentage of women speakers at web conferences is proportionate to the number of women in the web development field. After briefly noting that the number of women in other "intellectually challenging" fields such as medicine and law is gradually increasing, Gruber throws up his hands and says that
There’s obviously something quite different about science and technology…It’s not because of a lack of opportunity or aptitude; it’s a lack of interest.

First off, I think it's less science and technology than it is computer science and technology; but never mind. What's really at work here is another version of the meritocracy argument, and the same fallacies apply. Instead of addressing root causes of gender imbalance in technology, the web development world is assumed to be a pure meritocracy free of any social or political influences and thus serves as validation. In other words, if there were qualified women, they'd be getting speaking gigs, thus, there are no qualified women. There is no nepotism, favoritism, or undue influence of any sort; opportunity is equal and available for all. So, if women are underrepresented at web conferences, and by implication, the entire web development field, it's not that there's any underlying bias at work; the only logical explanation is that women are mysteriously just not interested in web development. This strikes me as disingenuous, self-serving, and is the sort of argument oppressors trot out against the oppressed. Maybe we need to figure out what those magic forcefields keeping women out of science and technology are. I think we already have a pretty good idea though.

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February 18, 2007

A brave, painful journey, wrapped in paper

The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing. » Blog Archive » Happy Year of the Pig

As I prepared to cut my first bite, it occurred to me that I had never worked so hard for a piece of meat in my life. Of course the time I spent is nothing, a blink compared to the labor of those who raise these animals from birth, growing them from adorable piglet to sumo-wrestler-sized swine. Still, it pleased me immensely to know exactly where my dinner had come from — how it had lived, and how it had died. Studying the cross-section of rib bones embedded in the chop, I even had a good idea roughly where on the hog it had been cut from.

Leaving aside the fact that having to tell the butcher how you want the corpse cut up counts as "work" for this person, this pretty well sums up the real nature of this whole foodie "ethical" fad - farm (so to speak) out the messy, bloody parts of killing animals for food and rationalize the living crap out of it in a rich blend of self-serving justification, consumer environmentalist "back to the dirt" sentimentality, and yuppie squeamishness. Start with the term the farmer prefers, our old euphemistic friend "harvested" again. Why? Because the pigs aren't sent off to a cold, heartless slaughterhouse, but are instead done the generous favor of a "good" death - whatever the hell that is. Perhaps the farmer has learned the value of euphemisms as a marketing tool and has figured out that pigs happily "harvested" by the farmer makes squeamish foodies feel better than "intelligent, inquisitive"-eyed pigs which get their throats cut. Then we get this self-congratulatory, watered-down Pollan lite horsecrap:
Handling the paper-wrapped hog heads was spooky and somewhat unnerving, I confess. Someone else had dibs on them, but I was tempted to open one. After all, I had looked many of the Clark Summit pigs right in their intelligent, inquisitive eyes — perhaps even the one whose head now rested so heavily in my hands. As a society, we’ve become adept at compartmentalizing the animals we watch — Babe, Wilbur — from the reality of the meat that we eat. And so even though my conscience as a carnivore was clear, I could not bring myself to tear down that “chinese wall” by gazing at the face of the animal I had bought to consume. At least not this time.

The reality of the meat we eat is a pig's head wrapped in paper she can't bear to open. It's always the next time we're going to actually look at the slaughter and the butchering. I've read Pollan 3:16 - I don't need to actually see animals being - ewww - killed, thank you. Well, except as good, distant things like big, fat foodie-porn chops. Instead of actually confronting the issue, we get lame excuses and smug, self-congratulatory justification.
Studying the cross-section of rib bones embedded in the chop, I even had a good idea roughly where on the hog it had been cut from.

The horror! The courage! Why, it's almost as if she had killed and butchered the pig herself. Sorry, I meant "harvested." Or is it almost as though she'd seen one of those diagrams locating the cuts on a drawing of a pig?
Tell us the part about how you used to be a vegetarian again, Queenie.

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February 17, 2007

s/y/d/


megnut.com -- a food blog by meg hourihan

It's hard to believe any food writer worth his weight would defend Sandra Lee, or encourage someone who uses the word "sammy."

Or someone who (ab)uses the word "yummy."

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February 16, 2007

Some pigs are more heritage than others

The Ethicurean: Chew the right thing. » Blog Archive » Digest: Slaughterhouse unionizing, Peter Pan recalled, breeding rare breeds

Tom Philpott documents the history of Americans’ alienation from food production, and argues that the resurgence of Julia-Child-driven “weekend cooking” in the ’70s set the stage for today’s back-to-the-dirt food movement. We’re not so sure — we think the former was about class aspirations and the latter is more populist.

I'm not sure how much any food "movement" based mainly on finding more-local-than-thou food "products" to buy can be construed as "back-to-the-dirt" or populist. The "movement" mainly seems to be about invoking a sentimental nostalgia to justify the consumption of expensive and elitist animal products. Oh, sorry, "heritage pork." "Humanely harvested," of course. By someone else.

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February 15, 2007

A non-SAT analogy


I was wrong about “NoFollow” « Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

That said, I don’t go for the point that comment links should be judged by search engines the same as links in a blog. That sounds really elitist, I know, but I’m seeing all sorts of gaming going on in comments and it’s a lot easier to build authoritative Webs in blogs than in comments.

Comments are to A-list blogs as A-list blogs are to mainstream journalism. And what's that "authoritative" doing in there? Smells like experts and gatekeepers to me. Not very meritocratic.

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February 13, 2007

Wall-to-wall

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Nobody wants less reporting

But too often, real reporting is not what we see from big outlets. We see wall-to-wall Anna Nicole Smith.

Ah, the latest blogger putdown - we're serious, dammit. We see plenty of crap from your smaller outlets as well; blog snobbery just has different targets. Just substitute "Amanda Congdon" for "Anna Nicole Smith" in that last sentence quoted above for an example. I don't know that blogging is so consistently delivering a continual stream of Things of Serious Import that its practitioners can fairly condemn CNN et al for Anna Nicole coverage. Plenty of blogging concerns are so much inside baseball and as unimportant to outsiders.

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lizardo

Recent - Lamy Safari with Noodler's Walnut and colored with Pitt pens.
Lizardo

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Subject headings 2.0

Annotate the web, then rewire it « Jon Udell

It’s the slicing and dicing and tagging, not the rewiring, that’s the real bottleneck. I talked last week about factoring group formation out of the various social networks into a common infrastructure. We need to do the same for tagging. How do I know whether to tag my contribution as HillaryClinton and NewHampshire and manufacturing or Hillary Clinton and NH and manufacturing? Where’s the immediate feedback that shows me, across tag-oriented services including YouTube and Blip, how my contribution does or doesn’t align with others, and how I might adjust my tag vocabulary to improve that alignment?

In which technologists re-invent and attempt to automate the authority file.

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February 2, 2007

Separating the sheep from the goats

From the comments on BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Some sausages are more equal than others:

Vegetarianism isn't trendy like it used to be in the 80s and early 90s. Most of the people I knew who went veggie probably did it to be cool, and now most of them are back eating meat, because that's fashionable now.
I can't count the number of "ethical meat" stories that tout the ex-vegetarian nature of the blogger and friends (despite pretty shaky definitions of "vegetarian" in some cases) as some sort of justification for the decision to eat meat again. I think the comment above explains it far better than all the other rationalizations currently in use. Now you can get all that coolness that the organic crowd used to get, but you can still eat bacon toffee! You can even still work the foodie angle and recommend wines that go with it! Genius!

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February 1, 2007

RIP Ms Ivins

Via Ed, Molly's Gone:

In these days of Stewart and Colbert and Olbermann (and The General and The Rude One, too), it's hard to remember that there was a time, just a decade or two ago, when Molly was pretty much the only funny progressive in America. She understood, long before the rest of us, the power of laughter -- the way mocking your enemies bursts their pretentions, and shrinks them down to a manageable size.
I was so sad to open the paper this morning and see Molly Ivins' obituary. One of the funniest things I ever read was her comment on Pat Buchanan's RNC "culture war" speech: "I'm sure it sounded much better in the original German." So sad. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done.

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