Ok, sorry, but this is just too amazing to not share with the world. My friend Brendan is a tattoo artist that recently became blind. Sad, yes, but obviously it's not impeding his professional goals. This is a tattoo he recently did on our friend Rob:
The picture on the left is another artist's interpretation of what it was supposed to look like. HA!
Not politics
Almost a Home Run Ad
The first 45 seconds are too opaque and the last 10 seconds are too heavy handed. Still, an ad that speaks to one of the central issues of gay marriage: the denial of an expression of love. Who could be against that?
Another Children's Book
Since John McCain's daughter is publishing a children's book I thought this might be appropriate.
Topless Cindy McCain?
The pastor who officiated Jenna Bush's wedding recently spoke out against McCain's comments about Cindy going topless.
New Ohio Ad
The spot is a reflection both of how perious the DHL deal is for McCain and how important Ohio is in the general election. The presumptive Republican nominee's campaign manager, Rick Davis, was paid to lobby on behalf of Deutsche Post's takeover of DHL back in 2003. McCain pushed for the deal in the Senate despite the objections of some of his colleagues. At the time, jobs were created because of the merger. And Davis has since left his lobbying post. But the town of Wilmington, Ohio is now threatened with the loss of more than 8,000 should its DHL plant close down.
The Physics of Michael Phelps
Now this type of Physics is Phun.
From the Kansas City Star:
How to explain the physics of Phelps? British swimmer Simon Burnett told U.S. men's coach Eddie Reese his theory.
"He was saying to me, 'I think I've figured out Michael Phelps,"' Reese said. "'He is not from another planet; he is from the future. His father made him and made a time machine. Sixty years from now he is an average swimmer, but he has come back in time to mop up."'
Phelps, 23, has set 30 world records since he was 15. He continues to lop huge chunks off his own marks. He wins not by knuckles but by body lengths. In swimming, these are Secretariat-like margins of victory.
Weekly Quantum Physics Post
Remember when your sixth grade science teacher told you that nothing is faster than the speed of light and you raised your hand and said what if you were riding a light wave and threw a football forward in space, wouldn't the ball be moving faster than the speed of light? and he gave you that sympathetic look not unlike those you gave to the really overweight kid who tried with all determinedness to jump to touch the bottom of the basketball net even though he always came up two feet short?
You remember that? Good. Because this will blow your mind.
Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland tried to determine whether entanglement—the fact that measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another—is actually transmitted by some wave-like signal that's fast but not infinitely fast...Um, dude? If the larger world operated like the quantum world everything would look liked a tricked out Dali painting, only it would make less sense and smell funnier.
The photons were indeed entangled, the group reports in Nature. But in reality, no experiment is perfect, so what they end up with is a lower limit on how fast the entanglement could be traveling: 10,000 times the speed of light.
How Novels Think
I was walking home, inspired by a good day's work, talking, as I often do, into my hand-held micro-recorder, when the following rushed forth.
(Rene says if I don't use it I lose it, so blame her. Or enjoy a few hundred words on the modern liberal subject and how he came to be. Also: Rene: We could totally make this the article for your article club. Just tossing it out there. Hypertext links for those who might actually be interested.)
In How Novels Think Nancy Nancy Armstrong advances Althusserian thought about interpellation in order to demonstrate how “the novel” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England produced the modern subject. Armstrong draws on what Althusser calls “the bad subject” to show how individualist novels, such as those by Jane Austen, used the bad subject as a supplement to “[change] the character to which [the supplement] has been added into something with new and different properties and potentialities.”(28) In the case of Pride and Prejudice, for instance, the bad subject as supplement fundamentally altered the terms of social contract morality, and in doing so contributed to the “extraordinary web of fictions attending to the social contract” (51), the totality of which—the “novel” understood in the broadest sense of the term—came to function as “the supplement that [put] the modern individual in motion.” (51) In this regard the novel served both pedagogical and ideological functions, teaching the reader how to develop the types of selves that functioned according to the reconfigured social contract morality, and in doing so interpellating the reader into the modern subject, thus accomplishing its ideological task.
To understand the traditional morality of the social contract it is necessary to recognize that social contract morality is tied to the contradiction the social contract produces within individuals. “The social contract,” as Armstrong puts it, “demands that an individual restrain his or her individuality in exchange for the state’s protection of that individuality against other forms of self-expression.” The morality of the social contract, then, is figured by the extent to which individuals adequately curb moments of excessive self-expression with self-restraint: how well individuals conform to normative standards of behavior, etc., in the interest of a defined collective good.
In Jane Austen’s work there is a shift in social contract morality. To account for the full weight of this shift Armstrong first starts with the example of Robinson Crusoe, in which the terms of morality are defined in relation to the successful curbing of self-expression with self-restraint. In his negotiation of the implicit contradiction of the social contract Crusoe’s morality is also his rhetorical downfall—the more moral Crusoe becomes on these grounds, the less [the] “modern readers wish for the kind of homogeneity required of members in the new community.” (36) That is, the only way for Crusoe to achieve some level of morality is to curb the very individualism that initially compels readers to identify with him. As such, according to Armstrong, the traditional morality of the social contract demands a loss of individualism.
However, for Enlightenment intellectuals, such as Jane Austen, this “curb on selfish gratification [was] the first and best guarantee of full citizenship. To their way of thinking, such self-restraint entailed no loss of individuality but, quite contrary, guaranteed an accretion to the self of individual rights.” (48) According to Armstrong, Austen’s work set the terms of morality so that “self-expression and self-government exist in perfect accord.” (45) In doing so the terms of social contract morality, namely self-expression and self-restraint, shift from a relationship of antagonism, in which the success of one comes at the expense of the other, to a relationship of harmony, in which the success of one means the success of the other. How Austen accomplishes this reconfiguration of morality is directly tied to Armstrong’s account of how the novel interpellates readers.
In discussing bourgeois morality as it relates to the bad subject, Armstrong asks: “How can the bad subject become a good citizen? Bourgeois morality accomplishes this slight of hand.” (33) Bourgeois morality draws a distinction in the forms of self-expression, distinguishing “those passions and drives that serve the general good from those more likely to disrupt the social order. For the expressive individual to become a good subject, his desires must not only be strictly his; they must ultimately serve the general good as well.” (33) Understood in these terms, morality “appears to emanate from the very core of an individual.” (27) Armstrong notes that in Austen’s novels her heroines are converted into bad subjects by, for instance, rejecting unwanted sexual advances and advantageous marriage proposals. (43) Austen’s heroines are reluctant to “enter into relationships with men occupying a position above them” even though this is required of them by social dictates. “By saying no, these heroines challenge the marriage rules that maintain the social hierarchy” (43). In defying social dictates the heroines are transformed into bad subjects. It is through adhering to bourgeois morality that they become good citizens. How does bourgeois morality accomplish this task?
By way of an example Armstrong cites Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Collins. Elizabeth, in rejecting Mr. Collins, risks her father’s position as head of household, and thus acts as a bad subject. But in rejecting Mr. Collins’ proposal because she is “[holding] out for a contract based on a certain quality of feeling” (45) she defies social dictates in “the only way that can be morally authorized.” (45) In doing so Elizabeth transforms from bad subject to good citizen. What’s more, this is the only logical course of action for Elizabeth to take according to bourgeois morality. In the same way that Althusser argues that “the early modern church gave the individual freedom only to submit to external forms of authority,” (29) Armstrong argues that the individualist novel, by way of the rhetoric of bourgeois morality, sets the terms for how the modern subject should act, as evidenced by how Elizabeth acts. This is what Althusser means when he says that ideology has a material existence. “It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system: ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.” (170, italics mine) The modern novel enacts this sort of system.
Armstrong links this historical and textual discussion of Pride and Prejudice to the pedagogic and ideological work this novel accomplishes by drawing on Althusserian thought. Armstrong notes that Pride and Prejudice laid the ground work for bourgeois morality, a category that mediated between individual desire and social authority, and which in turn became the “rhetoric by which the novel [signaled] at different moments in history where exactly to draw the line that limits individualism so that a balance may be struck between [self-expression and self-restraint].” (51) In order for the rhetoric of bourgeois morality to do the necessary work to teach readers where to draw this line, the novel itself must function as a supplement.
We can come to understand the novel as a supplement, Armstrong claims, by way of Althusser’s reading of Rousseau’s social contract. Citing Althusser Armstrong states, “the [social] contract represents itself as a voluntary act on the part of the individual. That individual does not lose individual agency by submitting to the laws of the state, because he submits under his own volition.” (50) Submitting to a collective of similarly submitted individuals becomes understood as an act of personal freedom in exactly the same way that Enlightenment intellectuals such as Austen understood it. Armstrong continues: “The presupposition is that any and all individuals will not only submit but, in doing so, come to understand themselves and their personal interests in much the same way.” (50) Crucially important for Armstrong’s use of Althusser, however, is that Althusser proposes that this can only ever be realized if there is “some third party to ensure that the exchange between individual and collective is in fact an exchange between an individual and an aggregate of more or less similar individuals.” (50) Some cultural apparatus must see to it that a group of individuals “imagine their relation to the real in approximately these terms.” (50) The novel, Armstrong argues, is such a cultural apparatus. The novel creates a space in which bad subjects are transformed into good citizens by way of bourgeois morality, and in doing so teaches the reader to develop the kinds of selves that can be understood on this basis. In this way the novel interpellates its readers into modern subjects.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
I Ain't No Ghetto Bitch
Micheal Phelps ain't no ghetto bitch. I guess they don't test for cocaine at the Olympics. Woulda thought they did. (NSFW)
Um, John?
"In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations," said Mr. McCain, to the bewilderment of this simple-minded guy sitting at his desk in Chicago. This quote cannot be attributed to Mr. McCain, he thinks. Or if it is then certainly it's a misquote, or a quote taken out of context. There is no way a man who voted to authorize a war in Iraq would think that nations don't invade other nations. Unless he doesn't think of Iraq as a nation, which is possible our man in Chicago supposes as he stares out the window wondering what it would be like to follow a president with a useless brain with one whose brain is cozying up to dementia.
Create Your Own Electoral Map
I just played the game and even tossed Ohio in for Mr. McCain.
My results:
Obama 276/McCain 262
Rove Analyzes Election Map
From the WSJ via Salon:
In Thursday's Wall Street Journal, the "architect" of George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns writes that the chief battlegrounds between Barack Obama and John McCain this fall will be Colorado, Virginia, Michigan and... Ohio. Rove says:
To win, Mr. Obama needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama's Electoral College math very difficult. And if Mr. McCain can limit GOP losses to one or two small states from those won by the GOP in 2004, he'll be America's 44th president.If there's one state Rove knows well, it's Ohio, which clinched Bush's reelection four years ago; if Kerry had managed 120,000 more votes there, he would be president now. Rove sees friendly territory in the Buckeye State for McCain, especially in the Appalachian regions where Hillary Clinton blew Obama out in the Democratic primary. "Obama was wiped out in the primary among the blue-collar Reagan Democrats of southeastern Ohio," Rove writes.
As the only Ohio resident on this blog I'll say this much: Ohio is in desperate condition and if Obama can't pull out a solid victory there then that does not bode well for him overall.
Oh F-uck Me. Seriously?
From the New York Times:
I have an idea. Stop pandering to these psychopaths. She lost. Had she had any shred of selflessness remaining in her empty soul she would decline having her name placed into nomination at the convention. Although I think we learned that's not the case when it took her three months and two speeches to announce she was dropping out of the race.Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s name will be placed into nomination at the Democratic National Convention, a symbolic move approved by the Obama campaign in an effort to soothe a lingering rift with Clinton supporters.
The decision was reached this week, according to Democratic officials, and will be announced later today.
And something for the ladies...
meaning me, Tegan and Kelley. I had to post something to counter that WonderBra ad. And Mr. Phelps seemed like the perfect choice.
A Landslide Unlikely
I can dream all I want, but according to this story, it doesn't seem likely.
"Yet for all the breathless analysis and number-crunching that has convinced observers Obama is en route to an epic victory, there is one key historic fact that is often overlooked — most popular vote landslides were clearly visible by the end of summer. And by that indicator, 2008 doesn’t measure up.
In five of the six post-war landslides (defined as a victory of 10 percentage points or more) the eventual winner was ahead by at least 10 percentage points in the polls at the close of August, according to a Politico analysis of historical Gallup polls. Over the past week, however, Gallup’s daily tracking poll pegs Obama ahead of John McCain by a margin of 2-5 percentage points."
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Three Cheers For Bras
It's like ten thousand of men's favorite things combined to make one super large version of our favorite things. It's like awesome built out of awesome times a gajillion.
More information here, perv.
Double Disappointment
First by John Edwards, then by one of my favorite writers. Granted, the source is Us Weekly, but it's a direct quote. He was fascinated with her. Boo.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thin Women and Advertising
A new study on thin models and eating habits of women discover what many of us already sensed to be true:
Villanova School of Business Marketing Professor Jeremy Kees and Karen Becker-Olsen of The College of New Jersey finds a definitive link between the use of thin models in advertising and women’s eating habits.
However, there is a more interesting discovery:
I prefer advertisements with good looking models to those with ugly models, as I imagine everyone else does as well. So it looks like we have a little chicken or egg scenario.* Are advertisements responding to standards of beauty that exist largely independent of the advertising industry or are advertisements key agents in creating those standards? Probably a little of both, right?
Despite the fact that women feel worse about their bodies after seeing images of thin models, the researchers found that women prefer ads with thin models to those with models of more “normal” physiques.
* Joke my friend Simon told me over the weekend: A chicken and egg are lying in bed after having sex. The chicken is smoking a cigarette. The egg looks over to the chicken and says, "I guess that answers that question."