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Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette

“While Mr. Brown and his party may deserve to be punished, their political opponents don’t deserve to be rewarded. After all, would a Conservative government have been any less in the thrall of free-market fundamentalism, any more willing to rein in runaway finance, over the past decade? Of course not.” — Paul Krugman: Gordon the Unlucky

147xxxx:

Someone brought their desktop computer into the store. REDIC.

“Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. “Batman Begins” … What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ?” — Anthony Lane on Star Trek

“The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people. They’re the ones who do the bragging about how newspapers enrich democracy by uncovering pollution, malfeasance in office, abuses of power, and unsafe consumer goods.” — It’s time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential for democracy.

“‘This computer thing,’ my editor said to me one time in 1983, ‘I don’t get it.’ And I think about that conversation a lot. It’s a perfect example of how newspapers have botched everything connected to everything new ever. Granted it was one conversation with a 72-year-old man back in the era of Flock of Seagulls, but that didn’t stop me from making it the title of my upcoming book, ‘This Computer Thing, I Don’t Get It,’ coming out in October from Obsequious Press.” — How to Become a “Death of Newspapers” Blogger

Old Growth Media And The Future Of News

This is far better than the Shirky piece everyone is clanging on about.

“I wonder if the BBC shouldn’t run some kind of opt-out scheme where celebrities can sign a form that reads “In the event of my untimely death, please, under no circumstances should the BBC invite everycunt to share their half-formed opinions of me (after googling me to work out who the fuck they think I was)” — spEak You’re bRanes » Does Anyone Know Who We’re Grieving For?

Philosophy has become packed with potential terminological minefields, each of which could explode so massively that philosophers step very gingerely around the humblest sentences.

The result is footnotes like this one from Oppy’s Ontological Arguments: “This talk of ‘sets of sentences’ is shorthand for more convoluted talk about sets of standardly interpreted sentences … The difficulty here is to make a more accurate claim that does not suggest a perhaps undesirable commitment to the existence of abstract entities associated with utterances or inscriptions of sentence-tokens”.

Bloody Wittgenstein. He should have remained silent.

Experimental New York Times interface