Best Medicine
August 29, 2009
Just rediscovered this Woody Allen classic, “The Moose.”
“Ya gotta be kiddin’ me. Paypah Towels”
Ali G and Pat Buchanan. “Izit eva werf…fightin’ a war…ova sanwiches?”
Slavoj Žižek
June 3, 2009
The last time I saw my older brother he gave me a book by Slavoj Žižek.
“Happy Birthday,” he said. My birthday was two months earlier. “I saw this in London and it seems like some of the stuff you’re into.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret that seeing as how the book was entitled Violence.
I had no idea who Žižek was, but I started getting pretty into the book. Reading Žižek is like getting really messed up on drugs and experiencing total chaos for a few hours before finally having a beautiful moment of clarity and then doing it all over again. Or maybe I’m just not well-read enough to really soak in his endless allusions.
Žižek is a Slovenian-born sociologist and psychoanalyst, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was also an atheist and a Marxist. (Though that’s not to say that he aligns himself with leftist political movements.) I wavered between adoring and loathing this book, and as I’ve learned more about Žižek, I’ve started to project the same ambivalence onto him. I greatly admire his analytical ability and his talent for analogy, but I could do without the extremism and the unchecked pretension and judgments. I like that he calls into question things that are normally automatically given the stamp of “goodness,” such as love, tolerance, political correctness, and human rights. But I’m annoyed that he never insinuates that, in the same breath, his opinions could and should also be called into question. I appreciate his desire to show that things are never as simple as the categories and labels that we create for them, but his aversion to these methods of organization make it seem like he rarely draws meaningful conclusions or offers solutions.
I love this, for example:
Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them, we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are.
And this:
[If] a jewel is stolen from a locked container, the solution is not telekinesis but the use of a strong magnet or some other sleight of hand; if a person vanishes unexpectedly, there must be a secret tunnel. Naturalistic explanations are more magic than a resort to supernatural intervention.
But sentences like this made me want to throw the book across the room:
The standard Marxist hermeneutics of unearthing the particular bias of abstract universality should thus be supplemented by its opposite: by the properly Hegelian procedure which uncovers the universality of what presents itself as a particular position.
Although I’m probably just angry because I have know idea what he’s talking about.
Here, Žižek describes his “spontaneous attitude towards the universe” and concludes that love is evil:
Then, he describes true love as seeing “perfection as imperfection itself”:
Žižek on ABC explaining why the world’s toilets show ideology and why being a philosopher means living with a “personal trauma”:
Žižek on vegetarians
Get learned.
April 1, 2009
Great new post on Lifehacker, the website that comes frighteningly close to fixing all of your problems…
Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education
10. Teach yourself programming
9. Get a personal MBA
8. Learn to actually use Ubuntu
7. Get started on a new language
6. Trade your skills, find an instructor
5. Academic Earth and YouTubeEDU
4. Teach yourself all kinds of photography
3. Get an unofficial liberal arts major
2. Learn an instrument
1. Learn from an actual college course online
Thanks to Adam for the heads-up.
Claire Suddath (Time Magazine)
February 9, 2009
Depending where you look, Claire Suddath has had her share of kudos as well as disses this week. She writes for TIME and recently harshed on Facebook’s ’25 things’ phenom. Twice. Whether or not you agree with her—I don’t feel one way or another about anything that has anything to do with Facebook—her articles are worth reading because they—forgive me—bring the LOLs. And the more serious ones are just plain good. Here is a highlight from January:
Cute Things Falling Asleep
OMG, y’all, look at the puppies! They are sooo cute! And kittens! And ponies and bear cubs and fluffy bunny rabbits and little yellow ducklings!
The Puppycam may be over, but thankfully, the blog Cute Things Falling Asleep is still going strong. Want to see a baby chick pass out atop a slice of bread (yeah, we don’t know why either)? A narcoleptic dachshund? How about a baby polar bear sleeping next to a plush, stuffed polar bear? Cute Things Falling Asleep might be the most adorable time waster since Animal Planet began hosting puppy sporting events.
As a comedy writer, Nick Malis (whose credits include Curb Your Enthusiasm and Mind of Mencia) has a lot of downtime. He began posting videos of sleepy cute things in 2006, but nobody really took notice until a month ago. More and more websites started linking to him, and then came the news outlets. “CNN called, and suddenly I found myself on Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer,” says Malis. “I was like, ‘Do you realize there’s a war going on?’”
Malis combs YouTube and other websites for videos, then rates the animals on cuteness and sleepiness scales from 1 to 5. The younger and fluffier the animal, and the harder it fights off slumber, the higher the rating. Some animals are at a disadvantage. In fact, he’s never given anything the coveted 5 rating. “I would love to see a 5 animal,” he says, “but I don’t know what one would look like.”
So does he ever get complaints? “I once rated a baby a 2, and the mother wrote me and said, ‘I think my baby is more than a 2.’ ” Malis refused to change the rating. “My attitude is this: I didn’t make your baby a 2 — you did. It just happens to be a 2. That’s what it is; I’m sorry.”
Low ratings aside, there’s nothing on Cute Things Falling Asleep that isn’t adorable. One visit and the site will have you cooing like a 12-year-old girl at a petting zoo.
More Claire Suddath:
A 9-Year Old’s Guide to Girls (Surprisingly Accurate)
Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes: A Linguist and Missionary in the Amazon
Also…
January 28, 2009
This. Since my last two posts were total downers.
I’m predicting a beardy 2009.
January 25, 2009
It seems like everyone’s got a beard these days. I don’t know what’s happening, but I think I like it.
My bro, his beard, and his girl at the Obama inauguration
Justin Vernon from Bon Iver whose For Emma, Forever Ago was consistently on lists of 2008's best albums
The band Fleet Foxes
