Annals of Procrastination

Today, I would like to pay homage to Al Gore. Not for his environmental stand, although its awesome, but for inventing the internet.

But the internet is not only for porn! According to this article in the NYT magazine a couple months back it is actually the lack of porn that is what makes youtube so awesome.

One look at YouTube’s eccentric offerings, and I figured its days as a free-for-all “video-sharing site” were numbered. Sooner or later it would become a porn depot. But it did not. Chen and Hurley were committed to taking down videos that users objected to, and they maintained their own standards, too. Chief among the site’s assets, in fact, were top-secret pattern-recognition technologies that block porn uploads...By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems.

So in the absence of infinite varieties of bizarro porn subgenres, youtube has become the site every other bizarre subgenre including my new favorite!

Real life enactments of free procrastination computer games!

First: Minesweeper

Favorite line:
"Soldier, why are you here?"
"Because I want to clear mines!"
"No, why are you really here?"
"Because, I'm bored"
"Good"

Second: Tetris

This is just weird. I am pretty disappointed, tetris definitely offers opportunities for much better drama.

Third: Frogger

I am speechless

P.S. Baracky II is out!!!!

P.P.S I am a big nerd and watch CSPAN at 3 am. But I happened to catch the replay of Dennis Kucinich's speech to the DNC last night and it was actually one of the best I have seen so far. It is only six minutes long, but it is a great concise explanation of what the Democratic Party should stand for.

Sunday Screening

I try not to get sucked in by all the 2008 campaign mashup videos; this stuff is all so temporary. But I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to the new gold standard in YouTube politics, via the American Scene: BARACKY.

Now, the original Rocky was 1976. But I think it's fair to call Rocky a 1980s figure, inasmuch as Sylvester Stallone is a 1980s figure, and the Rocky franchise is a 1980s artifact. (For instance, see this classic scene from Rocky IV, which could only have been the Reagan era. Wow.) Certainly the Rocky message, about a heroic individual overcoming despair, seems rather ahead of its time in the "malaise"-ridden energy crisis days.

I bring this up because 1980s cultural forms seem to lend themselves easily to this business of armchair-propaganda -- recall the Obama "1984" bit that made everyone crazy last March -- which is probably because the aesthetic of the 80s rejected subtlety so completely. The sort of loud, obvious, balls-out style that characterized all of the 1980s understandably translates well into short-attention-span Internet clips. (Hence the Rick Roll, another popular bit of 80s trash, which is funny within 3 seconds and ceases to be funny after about 10.)

The 1980s... you know, I have written before about the total sensory deadening that came out of the 1980s, and frankly it's such a beautiful night I don't have the heart to go into it again. So I'm just going to give you one video, one, that tells you everything you need to know about that godforsaken decade.

This song was #1 on the U.S. charts the week I was born, in 1988. And that's nice, because it means everything that has happened in my entire life is an improvement:

Billy Ocean. Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car. And now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go take a shower and wash all the TERRIBLE off me.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, everybody. This is an open thread.

Mike Gravel=Rocky (btw, He is also going to get the Democratic Party Crunk)

Who need Sylvester Stallone? We've got Mike Gravel!

The photo shopped John Edwards image in here is just ridiculously unnecessary. Still, I think Mike Gravel's hip hop is superior to Mitt Romney's. I sincerely hope that he makes himself of good use to society now that his presidential bid has ended to using his vaunted management skills to find out who actually did let the dogs. Who? WHO?!?!

(this a little weird until about 30 seconds in...then it gets a lot weird)

Get pumped for Friday! I am ready to endorse...