In Case of Emergency, Blog for Help

So I stopped blogging. And I guess the only thing that makes me want to blog is other people's idiocy. I think that's what I'll rename this blog. Other People's Idiocy.

I'm sure you've heard of PostSecret. It's a great art project that has touched many people's lives. People write their secrets on postcards and send them to Frank Warren, who runs the site on his own time for no money. He picks twenty or so cards each week, probably from hundreds or thousands, and puts them up as images. PostSecret is usually ranked in the Top 20 blogs read nationally on Technorati .

It's worth mentioning that Frank's mailing address is his actual house and it is displayed clearly on the site.

Frank posts every Sunday. There were no new cards this week, not Sunday morning, Sunday night, or today. In addition, the comments section, which he usually screens and picks out maybe four or five to post, had gone insane, with over 3,500 comments there last time I looked. Alot of them were people posting their own secrets, supporting eachothers secrets, a few of them were people attacking eachother's secrets, some of them were wondering what the hell had happened to Frank. Additionally, the suicide prevention number that had always been on the site was gone. No explanations. The monkeys had totally taken over the lab

After reading 40 or so comments that asked were Frank was or begging someone to drive to his house to check on him, I did the following. It was incredibly difficult and it took days and days of my time.

1) I Googled Germantown + Marlyand + police
2) I called the police department and said "I know this may sound strange, but. . " and then told them what I just told you.
3) The police said they would drive out to check on him and had me repeat what I had said to a dispatcher
4) I called back when they told me to and I was told Frank went on vacation.

I won't get in to the madness that is PostSecret right now, with so many posts that i can't download the site anymore. A lot of the people there seem to be supporting and helping eachother with their secrets, which is great.

What I will say is this -- clearly I don't blog enough for anyone to get worried when I don't, but what happened with Frank was like someone not showing up to work for 8 days. So to my family and friends:

If I ever disappear and you have no way of reaching me, CALL THE F'ING POLICE.

And I promise that if you ever disappear, I won't sit at my computer and wring my hands and try to figure out what message you're trying to send me with your absence. I will also call the f'ing police.

Bloggers, let your audiences know if you are leaving town and don't plan to to communicate.

Ranter signing off.

NYT is the New Pink is the New Blog

I will explain where I've been and what's next soon. But for now --

As you've probably heard by now, Anna Nicole Smith is dead. She was 39 years old. Sad end to a sad life. Was I a fan or even a rubbernecker in her bizarre white trash Marilyn Monroe as performance art existence? No. But I certainly had nothing personal against her.

But apparently at some point in her short life, Anna Nicole kicked the dogs and fucked the boyfriends of Abby Goodnough and Margalit Fox. What else would account for this catty attempt at news reporting that reads like an obituary about the school slut written for the school paper by every other girl in the tenth grade:

Anna Nicole Smith Is Found Dead in Florida

In other news, astronauts always wear diapers in outer space; Nancy Pelosi can fly whatever the hell she wants if she promises to get close enough to Cheney to shiv him with a letter opener in the next State of the Union address; and somebody had better start covering global warming or Darfur or the Mess in Iraq again before I put my eyes out.

Maybe God Himself Needs All of Our Help, Out Along the Road to Peace

About two years ago, my mother -- who was a young woman during the Vietnam War -- asked me why there was so little protest music today. I told her that the music business has a longer gestation period than it used to, and that songs against the war and talking about social issues were probably on the way.

Well, here we are at the end of 2006, coming up on three years into the Iraq occupation that has no name, and I still don't know where the protest songs are. I know they're out there, but I know they're never going to be on the radio. When I want to get riled up about the War in Iraq and the political mess we're in, I listen to Dylan's Masters of War and It's a Hard Rain Gonna Fall -- great songs, but they're forty fucking years old.

American Idiot just doesn't count. Great album, calls the president a gasbag, references september 11th, but it's a concept album, a punk rock opera, and it works more as a commentary on American culture that actually addressing social or political protest.

So where are the songs that feel how you feel? Where are the songs that are getting into the iPods and ears of people who don't consider themselves "all that political" and have to reconsider when they listen? Where are the songs with anger and intelligence and soul over the state of our world today?

Well, I've got two.

I got Tom Waits' Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards for Christmas, fainted, then got up and started playing it. Road to Peace is a seven-plus minute clear-headed indictment of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with no fuzzy metaphors and an almost pedantic, repetitve tune that doesn't allow you to wander off from the intent of the song. Listen to it now:

Road to Peace can be heard here on Tom Waits' myspace page.

Road to Peace lyrics are here

A few weeks ago I got turned on to Barenaked Ladies Fun and Games, which, for a group who tends to sing about chimpanzees and bank robberies foiled by nuns, is all the more a vicious and beautifully shocking "Fuck you" to the Bush administration and anyone within a hundred feet of it. We saw them perform it live at Radio City and the audience was silent through the entire thing, then roared with applause.

YouTube video of Fun and Games can be seen here

Anyone else?

As a short aside, I have to say when I heard Beyonce's "Ring the Alarm" a few weeks ago with that blaring horn in the background and Rage Against the Machine-style bullhorn vocal distortion, it was killing me that here was this great song that sounded like a war and she wasn't saying anything. Can you imagine what Beyonce alone could do for pop culture if she had an opinion about anything other than her man or her ass?

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

A really fucking oppressive tree. I' m sure after this hipsters will start wearing t-shirts with Castro and Chavez stenciled on to them for $40 a pop, because there's nothing like communism without context. While you're at it, pick up a onesie for my kid. I wonder if Castro will somehow come across as loveable in a get-out-of-my-yard, you-punks kind of a way, with subtitles. I can't wait.

In other news, Angelina Jolie recently discussed papparazzi (my God, I've seen names for obscure cured Italian meats that were easier to spell than that word) photographing her kids in an interview. I think the answer to this is similar to the call to send the kids of Republican lawmakers to Iraq under a draft -- with, admittedly, like one one-millionth of the urgency.

Proposed solution: Get the editors' names at the Star, US Weekly, etc and find out where their kids go to school, soccer practice and so on. Do this for the papparazzi (and ask them to send me a damn dictionary) while you're at it. Hire unknown photographers to photograph thse kids every waking step of their lives for a year. See how long their parents can tolerate it.

Within a few months, problem solved, fake news story (how pappa--ahh! are ruining the ethics of the country) off our radar and we can get back to shipping Muffy Tipperton off to ground ops.

More on Castro
and in case you didn't get the title of this post (with added bonus on how much Ms. Wawa loves Castro)

We put the Corp in News Corp

Admittedly, this is a lazy post, due to infrastructure issues at SCTS headquarters (i.e. our pipes burst). So I'm going with the first thing I saw on Media Bistro this morning, the report of Judith Miller getting canned for poor judgement. Uh, no, not for publishing a book about OJ Simpson murdering his wife and friend written in an entirely new verb tense called "what if". It seems poor judgement applies only to third party hearsay about ethnic slurs.

From the NYT (I told you, lazy):

<Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the dismissal of Judith Regan, the publisher of a widely criticized O. J. Simpson book, after he heard reports of a heated conversation Ms. Regan had with a company lawyer on Friday that included comments that were deemed anti-Semitic, according to two people familiar with the News Corporation’s account of the firing.
Mark Jackson, a lawyer with HarperCollins, a division of the News Corporation that includes Ms. Regan’s imprint, reported the alleged comments from a phone conversation with Ms. Regan to Jane Friedman, HarperCollins’s president and chief executive.
“And then Jane called Rupert and Rupert said he won’t tolerate that kind of behavior,” said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.>

Here's a brief list of the behavior Rupert Murdoch will tolerate, to be updated when the infrastructure stops falling down. Please add anything you can think of:

Tony Blair
FOX News
Payola
Censorship

Math is hard, let's go shopping

The above is a quote from a voice-chipped Barbie that came out on the market years and years ago, prompting a group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization to switch those voice chips into GI Joes. This is also a favorite joke with my best friend, who made the switch from studying fluffy pretty words, like me, to becoming a statistician.

The US Census Bureau put out its 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States today. The abstract says, among thousands of other things, that adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices. If you'd like to take all five of those months off, you might be able to get through the report in its entirety. Of course, that's not the intention but there's something perversely enticing about the idea.

For someone like me for whom the above title bears a grain of truth, you might do better checking out the press release. There's a surprisingly nice sense of humor as a gift to those of us who begin blacking out at the sight of so many numbers in so little context, such as "Pet owners walked an average of 1.6 dogs in 36 percent of U.S. households in 2001, while people were tolerated by an average of 2.1 cats in 32 percent of homes. (Table 1227) ". Also, apparently the US endangers more crustaceans than anyone else in the world.

I'm hoping to slowly wend my way through this thing and will post on it as is possible and relevant. If my statistician is out there, I'd love your two cents in the comments.

And from the world of statistical improbability, Tony Snow apologized to an NBC news reporter for calling his question about the Iraq Study Group "partisan". I'm impressed and just ever so slightly turned on.

Dead White Girls -- Across the Pond Edition

Today's major difference between the US and the UK in terms of reporting on murdered prostitues:

The UK cares about their dead prostitutes so long as there is a connection to Britian's proud whore-murdering history

The US does as long as a foot fetishist is involved

The US story-- of street prostitutes of various races murdered weeks and weeks ago, some of who were not reported missing at the time they were found-- will probably make international news now that a kink angle is in the mix as of today. Prior to this, the US story was buried in the TRAVEL SECTION of the NY Times, I guess because the main problem here is it could affect someone's itinerary.

At least the Atlantic City police sounded genuinely upset in previous articles. Nobody else seems to be. Maybe me.

As an aside, check out how the Times' readers get their panties in a knot over the correct use of "Ripper" versus "Strangler"in the comments section of the first story. Their main concern here is getting out their copyediting ya-yas. I'd love to see someone try that with Nicholas Kristoff; he'd probably have them kidnapped and airmailed to Darfur to see what they should really be getting upset about. I love the Times, but sometimes the readership baffles me. On the day after elections, the most read and emailed story on the site was about how to bake bread that doesn't require kneading. Because that's going to change the course of history.