Wednesday miscellany!

* Startling: 50% of people think women should be legally required to take their husbands' names. Watch out, most married woman under forty I know! They're coming for you.

* Jonathan Lethem talks to The Jewish Daily Forward about the greatness of Philip K. Dick.

* Have we reached our civilization's tipping point? See also: why climate change is worse than we feared.

* AMC greenlights zombie series. Sounds promising. Between this and Red Mars AMC is making a strong push for my particular demographic.

* As of tonight, Microsoft can no longer sell Word.

* Another Battlestar reboot? Already? Really?

* Lesser-known editing and proofreading marks. (via)

* 'Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing.'

* And Ze gets philosophical.

You partake in a medical experiment. In the experiment you are given one of two pills. You don't know which one until after you take it. One shortens your life by 10 years, and the other lengthens your life by 10 years. You have just found out which pill you took. The question is: which pill do you think will increase the quality of your life the most? Would one make you change the way you live your life more than the other?

Tuesday Miscellany.

* Sarah Palin's controversial proposal to create a "Department of Law" with the power to block ethics claims against the president is turning a lot of heads this morning.

* I really want to read 1Q84.

* Swine flu: now more popular than Viagra.

* Steve Zissou: scientist.

* Another That Makes Me Think Of from Ze.

* We Are Wizards, a Harry Potter fandom documentary, with appearances from Brad Neely of Wizard People Dear Reader fame. (via @austinkleon)

Even more Sunday night links.

* Ev psych on the ropes? We can only dare to hope.

* MetaFilter remembers the Stonewall protests.

* Also from MetaFilter: Are we doing enough to prevent the asteroid apocalypse?

* Pawlenty says he'll finally let Franken be seated once the state Supreme Court issues its ruling. Aren't we moving a little fast, Tim? It's only been eight months.

* Katrina vanden Heuvel with Steve Benen against bipartisanship.

* 3 Quarks Daily's top science blog posts of 2009.

* And Ze Frank plays "That Makes Me Think Of" again at Time, this week about thigns that are and aren't black and white. Can't we get The Show back already? We keep getting closer and closer.

Ze is back with another "Hard Times" video.

Friday night links.

* 45 ways of looking at the Mario Brothers. Via Kotaku.

* McSweeney's is hiring.

* Pizza Hut is now "The Hut." First response: How is that any better? Second response: somebody call Mel Brooks.

* Ze Frank is playing "That Makes Me Think Of" for Time Magazine. This week the video's about Iran.

Other links.

* Ze Frank wants to sell you some art. Is this The Show slowly coming back?

* The fifty most-looked-up words at The New York Times website.

* Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono unite in service of "meat-free Mondays."

* Top ten comedian Twitterers. Top ten filmmaking Twitterers. Top ten magazines on Twitter. Via Candleblog.

* How Facebook is affecting school reunions. I was remarking just this weekend that Facebook has made the high school reunion completely obsolete. (via Neil, whom Facebook has also made obsolete)

* Fans, vampires, trolls, masters: an academic bestiary.

It's always other people who are 'fans': our own attachments, we like to pretend (to ourselves; others are unlikely to be convinced) have been arrived at by a properly judicious process and are not at all excessive. There's a peculiar shame involved in admitting that one is a fan, perhaps because it involves being caught out in a fantasy-identification. 'Maturity' insists that we remember with hostile distaste, gentle embarrassment or sympathetic condescenscion when we were first swept up by something - when, in the first flushes of devotion, we tried to copy the style, the tone; when, that is, we are drawn into the impossible quest of trying to become what the Other is it to us. This is the only kind of 'love' that has real philosophical implications, the passion capable of shaking us out of sensus communis. Smirking postmodernity images the fan as the sad geekish Trekkie, pathetically, fetishistically invested in what - all good sense knows - is embarrassing trivia. But this lofty, purportedly olympian perspective is nothing but the view of the Last Man. Which isn't to make the fatuous relativist claim that devotees of Badiou are the same as Trekkies; it is to make the point that Graham has been tirelessly reiterating - that the critique from nowhere is nothing but trolling. Trolls pride themselves on not being fans, on not having the investments shared by those occupying whatever space they are trolling. Trolls are not limited to cyberspace, although, evidently, zones of cyberspace - comments boxes and discussion boards - are particularly congenial for them. And of course the elementary Troll gesture is the disavowal of cyberspace itself. In a typical gesture of flailing impotence that nevertheless has effects - of energy-drain and demoralisation - the Troll spends a great deal of time on the web saying how debased, how unsophisticated, the web is - by contrast, we have to conclude, with the superb work routinely being turned out by 'professionals' in the media and the academy.

In many ways, the academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence. Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity (opposed, in their minds, to the allegedly infantile attachments of The Fan). But there is nothing more adolescent - in the worst way - than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from - the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only that in terms of time and energy wasted - the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people's toys away from them).

Via Larval Subjects, who adds the Minotaur:

To K-Punks bestiary, I wonder if we shouldn’t add Minotaurs and their Labyrinths. One of the most frustrating things about the trollish figure of the scholar is the manner in which they proceed as minotaurs presiding over labyrinths. For the Minotaur it is never possible for there to be a genuine philosophical difference or a genuine difference in positions among philosophers. Rather, the Minotaur converts every philosophical opposition into a misinterpretation. The text(s) guarded by the Minotaur thus become a Labyrinth from which there is no escape. The Minotaur is even willing to go so far as deny explicit textual evidence to the contrary, speculating about the motives animating the Minos-Master they defend, suggesting that the thinker was either being humble or didn’t really mean such and such or that it is just a manner of speaking.

* Atheists vs. believers: who's funnier? The answer is George Carlin.

Friday night links of variable goofiness.

* Ze Frank has your optical illusion of the night.

* Lateral thinking interview questions from Microsoft.

You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of getting a red marble using your scheme?

* My friend Jay explains the story behind his possession of the world's most badass scar.

* Who ate all the Neanderthals? Oops.

* Which of our own closely held beliefs will our own children and grandchildren by appalled by?

* Also: classic sci-fi box office adjusted for inflation.

* Jacob directs our attention to the growing threat of Transforminators.

* Bo Obama, Dog Superhero.

* Wes Anderson, the YouTube Channel.

The Internet's greatest living folk hero, Ze Frank, is back with two short "The Show"-like videos for Buzzfeed: 1, 2. Don't delay.

Misc.

* NYC's maple-syrup smell mystery resolved! It was New Jersey. (Really!)

* The AP lacks a basic understanding of fair use. More at MeFi.

* Raccoons have invaded the White House. Sadly the Secret Service has only trained for nighttime raccoon assault.

* How Obama is screwing up the stimulus: failure to counteract zombie Republican lies. More on this from Steve Benen.

* Also on the Obama-screwing-up front: he's publishing op-eds in dead-tree media. Nobody reads newspapers anymore, gramps!

* Though they do, apparently, read alt-weeklies.

* Also: Judd Gregg still sucks.

* Climate Progress now has one-stop anti-nuclear shopping.

* The nonprofit industrial complex.

* How various songs react to Ze Frank's voice-activated drawing applications.

* And via Kottke: Who wouldn't want to take a class entitled "What's So Great about The Wire?"?

Ze Frank is the Internet's greatest living treasure. Just more proof: check out this draw-by-voice application he's cooked up.

A spectre is haunting Europe. Actually it's a giant spider. Via Ze, who is also still struggling through the impossible last levels of You Have to Burn the Rope.

The best thing I've done all morning is watch post-apocalyptic web comedy 'The Remnants' starring Ze Frank, Justine Bateman, and Veronica Mars's dad. It's really too bad this one wasn't able to take off the way Dr. Horrible did—it's a cultural tragedy.

Here's a review with some background, and here's the script.


The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

Yes we can update for a Friday night.

* Obama wins Omaha.

* Franken fairly likely to win Minnesota.

An Associated Press analysis of the nearly 25,000-vote difference in presidential and Senate race tallies shows that most ballots lacking a recorded Minnesota Senate vote were cast in counties won by Democrat Barack Obama.

...

"These numbers present a roadmap for a Franken challenge," he said. "It suggests there are about 10,000 votes in the largest Democratic counties that are potentially going to tilt in Franken's direction."

Waive the recount, Norm! For the good of the nation.

* Uncounted votes may push Begich past Stevens.

* "Revolution as Fulfillment," or "It was a creed written into the founding documents": how America perpetually repositions its revolutionary breaks as continuity with the past.

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. … At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

* From 52 to 48 with love: Ze Frank lets the healing begin.

Friday leftovers.

* The director of a leading US cancer research institute has sent a memo to thousands of staff telling them to listen to Ze Frank and use a cell-phone headset (even if Salon is right and it won't really make you a safer driver).

* Hometown heroes Hurwitz and Hayden are writing another Harold & Kumar—which is a good thing, because it was always conceived as a trilogy. (I'm told they actually have nine H&K movies planned out, including the three prequels.)

I regret to admit I missed the second in theaters, but I plan to make up for that error when the DVD is released in just four days.

* Now that its competing Facebook application is up and running, Hasbro has renewed its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous. More at Slashdot, which notes: "EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million." I still say they ought to just buy Scrabulous and be done with it.

* Math may be hard, but there's no gender difference in math performance, according to a new study in Science. Via MeFi, where the poster adds: "Bite me, Larry Summers."

* And the Edge of the American West continues to impress: here's a look back at the decision in United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, handed down 24 years ago today.

* The minimum wage: a disgrace and a scandal.

Here is how the political and economic system has been ripping off workers. Once upon a time, if you worked hard and were productive, that translated directly into your paycheck. Not anymore. From 2000 to roughly 2007, productivity went up 20 percent -- while the median hourly wage was up 3 percent. My friend Joel Rogers,director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, made a stunning calculation not too long ago: Had wages tracked productivity as they have over the past 30 years, "median family income in the U.S. would be about $20,000 higher today than it is." Check this out: Taking into account productivity, the minimum wage should be $19.12 -- which would make it almost 50 percent above today's median wage (not to mention the pathetic $6.55).

That's right. The minimum wage should be more three times what it is today. At that level, you would make almost $40,000 a year. Not an outstanding amount given all the other costs and the likelihood that you would not be in a job with health care and a pension (that's another issue). But, beginning to be in the realm of respectable.

Ze Frank: The Movie?

The first part of the Joss Whedon strike project Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is today up at Hulu. The server problems have apparently been fixed, too—I just watched the whole thing without a hitch.

Am I the only one who hears a shout-out to Ze Frank's League of Awesomeness in Dr. Horrible's Evil League of Evil?

More on cell phones: Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioral problems, according to a study of more than 13,000 children.

I've been saying this for years, but I've got to get myself a headset.

Leading off this lovely Tuesday linkdump is Barack Obama's college poetry. (Thanks, Tim!) Also in what I loosely refer to as the news:

* Strange Maps tracks the path of a shipment of plastic yellow duckies that fell off their transport in 1992 and still turn up in surprising places. Paging Ze Frank...

* Marginal Revolutions has fun naming ethics papers.

* Bitter Laughter has the sad story of the Rainbow Man.

* And hulu has the original Japanese inspiration for The Office, a surreal and characteristically too-long SNL skit to which there is little to add but Ricky Gervais's own valedictory remarks: "It's funny because it's racist."

Blogging's been slow today, which is odd because I have a ton of tabs open. Here are a few:

* The Daily Show does the Lord's work mocking Scalia's 60 Minutes interview, while Colbert enters the strange, strange world of John McCain's superstitions.

* Ze rightly calls out CNN's attempt to monetize their own shitty journalism. Also re: Ze: 'Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video'.

* What American politicians might learn from The Godfather. It's just too bad we keep electing Fredo.

* And Matt Yglesias warns us, once more, of the rise of the humanzee. Will no one heed this dire warning?

I continue to be amazed at Ze Frank's ability to get people to do whatever he tells them to do. Just for instance, here's twenty pages of photos of people reenacting pictures from their youth.