flickering pictures

In case you didn’t catch this back in December, an apparently homeless man named “Mustard” recorded a pretty damn fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” on the sometimes controversial Opie and Anthony show, broadcast on XM Radio and Sirius Satellite.
Little-known fact: “Creep,” now one of Radiohead’s biggest hits, sold just 6,000 copies as a single in […]

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The clip above is from Mr. T’s motivational teen video, awesomely entitled “Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool,” and it’s about as painfully 1984 as it’s possible to be. This segment has Mr. T telling teens to express themselves, “table the label,” write their names on some duct tape, and stick it on their […]

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From Slashdot:

“Law prof Eugene Volokh blogs about a US House of Representatives bill proposed by Rep. Linda T. Sanchez and 14 others that could make it a federal felony to use your blog, social media like MySpace and Facebook, or any other Web media ‘to cause substantial emotional distress through “severe, repeated, and hostile” speech.’ […]

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So you’re an advertising exec at Burger King. In these tough economic times, you reason, Burger King needs a children’s commercial that will grab attention and boost sales. Kids, you know, like Spongebob Squarepants. They also like rap. And lord knows, they totally dig a nice big bedonkadonk. There’s really […]

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It’s a sign of time times — the economy’s in the toilet, America lost 694,000 jobs in March, and a three-bedroom bungalow in Detroit will set you back a cool $500. The natural response to all this? A reality show, of course.
And no, Donald Trump isn’t in it.
Proving yet again that America will […]

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Writing for an awesome-sounding newspaper called the Tulane Hullabaloo, Jeff Silberman has put together a fine op-ed piece on the silliness of a media culture that bombards us with violent music, TV shows and video games but gets squeamish when somebody says the word “nipple.”
Here’s an excerpt:

On television, for every 10,000 murders, we see one […]

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It’s only sleeping.
A few days ago, B sent me a link to an excellent article by Stephanie Nolen, a Canadian Globe and Mail reporter who — in my opinion at least — does some of the finest journalism out there, and has for years. She opened the Globe’s South Africa bureau back in 2003, […]

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From the inspirational self-authored obituary of Lasantha Wickramatunge, editor-in-chief of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader newspaper, written shortly before he was shot and killed on his way to work:

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there […]

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Unless you haven’t turned on a television lately, you know that ten days ago the Israeli army launched a full-scale attack on Hamas forces in Gaza, with the stated aim of halting the barrage of homemade rockets that have been launched into Israeli towns since 2000. As I write this, the fight has left […]

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A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Meg White, a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who’s working on an article about India’s space program. She had stumbled across my post on the Chandarayaan lunar missions, and wanted to bounce a few questions off a non-scholarly blogger type.
Because I though […]

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