Category: Arts and Culture

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Turtle Egg Defender

Santo Que es mas macho? Sea turtle egg, or Mexican wrestler? Millions of Mexican men believe eating sea turtle eggs will enhance their sexual potency – an unfortunate reality for endangered turtles like the Leatherbacks.

Wrestler supreme El Hijo del Santo (“Son of the Saint”) has been appearing in ads assuring his fans that he acquired his super wrestling powers with no help from turtle eggs. Now that’s a role model. Also in on the campaign is Mexican supermodel Dorismar.

The model appeared in print ads wearing a slinky black bikini alongside baby turtles scurrying across a beach. “My man doesn’t need sea turtle eggs, because he knows they don’t make him more potent,” reads the ad’s caption.

Brilliant tactic. I’m trying to imagine how similar campaigns might appear in other countries where species are threatened in part due to demand for animal parts with alleged aphrodisiac powers. Which super-hunks or glamour-pusses are going to stick up for the rightful owners of Chinese tiger penises, or African rhino horns?

Music: Califone :: Pink & Sour
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nonfictionmedia

Birdhouse Hosting user Scott Squire has a gorgeous new portfolio site capturing some of his representative photography and “moving pictures” (not quite video, but not just photography either). Loved his photo slideshow Jump School, on U.S. Army paratroopers in training. Squire also remains one of the most interesting wedding photographers I’ve seen. The site for his coming book Edges of Bounty: Adventures in the Edible Valley is also hosted by Birdhouse.

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Nothing Racial

And people call Berkeley a political bubble, detached from the rest of the country? CNN: Students attend school’s first integrated prom.

The comments in the story are astounding. On the surface because of the underlying racism of Georgian culture, but also because of this weird sense that the endemic separatism isn’t necessarily coming from conscious decisions to maintain segregation, but rather a desire to maintain tradition, as if tradition ipso facto diminishes racism. Imagine a California teenager saying:

“The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

People sometimes see tradition as inherently valuable, no matter how twisted its roots. Satisfying to see that even if children there aren’t being brought up to question racist traditions, they’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

Thanks baald

Music: Dean Martin/Paul Weston & His Dixieland Eight :: I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine
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Religion in Second Life

A sincere religious community is developing within the synthetic atmosphere of Second Life.

Leaders of Christian, Jewish and Muslim sites estimate about 1,000 avatars teleport into churches, synagogues or mosques on a regular basis. Hundreds more list themselves with Buddhist, pagan, Wiccan and other groups.

The extracted video, both beautiful and eerie, gives me the willies, and I’m not exactly sure why. On one hand, it’s no more or less odd than any other simulation of the real world that takes place within the game. On the other, religion is all about community, and the religious community in 2L is virtualized – people never meet, and yet they do. Not sure what that means for things like religious involvement in local charities (are there soup kitchens in 2L too?), but I suppose it’s not so different than a drive-in church.

Thinking now of Europe’s great cathedrals and the centuries of hard labor it took to build them. Since Second Life is so heavily construction oriented (everyone’s both an architect and a contractor), will avatars set themselves to toil and construct some of the grandest and most ornate places of worship ever conceived?

Parallel question: Is Second Life a game, or is it something else? I know what Wittgenstein would say, but I’m not sure even the Second Life community itself have an answer to that one. If it is a game, what would that say about engaging religion within it? Perhaps “It’s only a game if you treat it like one.”

Music: Jim White :: Wayfaring Stranger
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I Bought Votes on Digg

Interesting example of how what looks like a nice, friendly democratic socialism on the surface can be easily corrupted with an elixir of money and a non-critical voting populace.

For Wired, Annalee Newitz describes her social experiment in gaming social news ranking site digg.com by purchasing votes through an external service.

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!

Digg claims that its algorithms are able to detect patterns reflective of vote purchasing, and that it shouldn’t be possible for popularity to be bought and sold on the open market. But there was more at work here — only some of the diggs received were bought – many more came from non-bought diggers “jumping on the bandwagon” — digging the story just because others were doing so. Newitz was able to goose the site with purchased votes just enough for it to rise through the ratings until it hit the tipping point, at which point critical mass took over and the site became a minor hit.

So, the magic mixture seems to be a just-right blend of pimps and lemmings.

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Married on Twitter

Count me among those who don’t “get” the Twitter phenomenon, which seems like it’s bursting at the seams lately. The need/desire to have your cell phone buzzing all day with transient random noise-bursts from everyone you know: “Eating a pretzel.” “Fiddling with printer.” “Feeding the cat.” Suddenly we’re all Japanese school girls? Being on Twitter (sending or receiving, not to mention both) seems like one of the worst things I can imagine doing to my day. I don’t even turn on IM most of the time, can’t deal with the distraction. But I guess meaningful things do happen on the network. From today’s Twitter newsletter:

There was a 9 minute delay between Alex twittering, “Being engaged. Timoni said yes!” and Timoni updating with, “Wearing my ‘I’m engaged!’ pin.”

And that, folks, was Twitter’s jump the shark moment. Whaddya bet.

Thanks Milan

Music: Stereolab :: Our Trinitone Blast
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Lord of the Flies

Got an inadvertent up-close view into the reality of the internet experience for millions of people today, when I received a fairly typical spam message from a smoking cessation program. But rather than the usual spam-feeding mechanisms used by spammers, they had sent their message out through a Mailman listserve, to which I and thousands of others had been subscribed against our will.

For mysterious/bizarre reasons, the spammer had changed the default Reply-To header from “reply to sender” to “reply to list,” which meant that every screaming unsub request* was re-broadcast to thousands. Apparently not realizing it was a listserve, dozens of recipients thought the unsub requests were directed to them. The thread quickly snowballed into a cavalcade of confusion and name-calling — the blind leading the blind in a flurry of misunderstanding.

*Nevermind the fact that unsub instructions were clearly written at the bottom of each message, people tried the old stand-bys — write in all caps and scream in the message body to be released from the madness… or else!!!

Something perverse in me made me stay subbed for much of the day, just to see how this little Lord of the Flies experiment would play out. Notes: Thousands of people have no idea that responding to a listserve will broadcast your response to all recipients. Repeated “But I don’t even smoke!” messages reveal an apparently deep-seated belief that spam is somehow targeted at individuals rather than carpet-bombed. Each recipient seemed to think that each unsub demand was directed to them – which reveals how many people have never been on a listserve before, have absolutely no idea what they’re experiencing. Everyone threatens to rat the spammer out to their own ISP (“If you don’t stop, I’ll tell AOL on you!”). Even after hundreds of repetitions, people are not able to infer that all replies are being refelected to all — which made me wonder how people get through the day to begin with.

Pasted below – a dozen or so examples of today’s madness.
Continue reading “Lord of the Flies”

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Specialist Limbo

So I’ve been dealing with a persistent ear infection thing for the past 10 days. Started while I was sick, but has lasted long beyond the other symptoms, which have passed. Scarily, it has survived a round of antibiotics without diminishing. Feels like a knot of something behind the inner ear – either a vacuum or a clod somewhere in there, leaning against the cochlea maybe. My hearing in the left ear is diminished by about 50%, and there’s a persistent ringing. My voice reverberates in my head, as does my every footstep. It’s uncomfortable and scary and leads to hypochrondriacal thoughts about tumors and other dangerous nasties – not typical thoughts at all for me, but its resistance to medication and unrelenting nagging at my state of being is doing a number on me.

My M.D. has run out of theories and has referred me to an otolaryngologist. Here’s where my patience with the medical system runs into a brick wall. When you get referred to a specialist in this country, you go into this double limbo state. First, you’re given a list of doctors covered by your plan. In this case, I had 18 to choose from, with zero criteria to use in choosing one. Throw a dart at the wall and see where it lands. No Consumer Reports for medical specialists, no user rankings, no anecdotal assistance. Just pick someone at random to entrust with your most critical needs.

Fortunately, I did have one criteria: I needed to see someone yesterday or today, because I fly tomorrow to Austin for a week at SXSW/Interactive. That’s where you hit limbo state #2. Started calling names on the list, only to find that earliest appointments were three weeks out. If you need to see someone soon, you’re directed to the emergency room — where you end up not seeing a specialist, like your doctor ordered. These are your choices: wait weeks (while more damage is possibly caused, depending on the malady), or go to the E.R. where you’ll wait all day and see someone who doesn’t specialize in the problem (gee, isn’t that why my doctor sent me to a specialist to begin with?) If you’ve got something that needs rapid attention, you’re S.O.L. What really weirds me out is that when you try to talk about this paradox with nurses and receptionists, there’s zero sympathy. That’s just the way the system works, and my goodness, aren’t you a weird one for bringing attention to it?

Finally did find someone with an appointment for today (a cancellation), but it took hours out of my work day yesterday, wading through phone trees, waiting on hold, waiting for call-backs, having the same conversation over and over again…

Everything – everything – is wrong with this picture. The idea seems to be that medicine somehow stands apart from the free market. I would expect that there being more demand than supply would result in there being more practices. But it’s not even about that. A lot of the offices I spoke too said things like “We only see patients Tues and Thurs mornings.” Huhn??? If you’re setting appointments three weeks out, why don’t you work more hours?

Every time I’m forced to deal with Medicine in America I feel like I’m walking on a strange planet where the rules of reality are in permanent suspension. None of it makes any sense.

Continue reading “Specialist Limbo”

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Environmentalism: Satan’s Work

Q: What’s worse, ignorance or apathy?
A: I don’t know and I don’t care.

Treehugger:

Jerry Falwell is decrying global warming as “Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism. “Naive Christian leaders,” in fact, have been duped—DUPED, I say—by dirty hippies like Al Gore.

Meanwhile, Mark Morford has an entertaining piece on the 13% of Americans who claim never to have heard of global warming. Think about that. Tens of millions of Americans. Never heard of it.

Reality is just crushing sometimes.

Music: Ry Cooder :: Good Morning Mr. Railroad Man
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The Shocking Final Word

Dylan points to a dust-up amongst librarians sparked by a paragraph in the latest Newbery award-winning children’s novel:

“The Higher Power of Lucky” is the story of a 10-year-old girl in rural California and her quest for “Higher Power.” The opening chapter includes a passage about a man “who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ‘62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” Librarians have been debating whether “scrotum” was an appropriate word for young readers, especially from a book with the Newbery seal.

The librarian was apparently not perturbed by the fact that the story covers a dude drinking half a bottle of rum — in his car — but by the inclusion of the medically correct term “scrotum.” Which made him think his readers could probably craft even better examples of inappropriate-for-kids content trailed by a “shocking” last word. He’s offering a copy of a Roald Dahl book to the weener, so jump in. I made a quick attempt on his site, but could have done better*. Bring it on, before I win that book.

* The idea of course is that the offensive content would not trigger prude radars, while the innocent word at the end would – my attempt fails the first part of that test.

Music: Richard Hell And The Voidoids :: Betrayal Takes Two