Silent rave flash mob

It's a Wing thing

Wing rocks. She is a middle-aged Chinese-New Zealander who sings the songs you love the way you love them.



And of course she's already appeared on South Park



Not sure where the lovebird comes in...

Magnolia time

Beaming with delight

Rurence is ours...

Obama the new Lincoln?

Interesting article by Gary Wills in the NYRB:

Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president... Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party's nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation—Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk's Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush's Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

He goes on to compare the two speeches. The parallels are there, but how should we interpret them? Heroes serve an important political function. Human societies need to create great leaders to incarnate--literally--nations and movements and ideas. Thus casting Obama as a leader for change is vital for building the political movement that will improve this country. But if we have learned anything over the last 8 years it is the danger of overreaching, and that is why I ultimately find this kind of article at best self-indulgent and, at worst, dangerous.

By all means let us sing Obama's praises. But hold off on the deification until AFTER he has saved us. By jumping the gun we only set ourselves up for failure and disillusionment.

"Memory is the new sex"

Today's column proves beyond doubt that David Brooks is becoming a senile old coot. Some choice tidbits:

"They say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it’s going to be the Bad Memory Century."

"In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex."

"Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots."

"The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles."

Maybe Baby-Boomers find this stuff hillarious, but really it's just sad. In no way is it newsworthy. Also, grand-theorizing-as-satire doesn't work very well when you are, like Brooks, a satarized grand theorist. My advice: go write for the large-print edition of Readers' Digest before you have to start wearing adult diapers.

And, in keeping with the theme of this blog, let's remember (if we can) Funes el memorioso, the Borges character who remembered so much it killed him. Let that be a lesson to you.

Animated Genius

In a brilliant symbyosis of old and new media, South Park has parrodied all those funny internet videos you've been watching. For example....