Thursday Videos

Heavy Metal Baghdad, Part 1 of 5, courtesy of the sketchy dweebs at Vice Magazine.

Herbert's Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise

Mathman: "Play by the rules, get eaten by the rules."

Television

The Nielsen Ratings service is trying to get my coop to sign up with them. A guy came by our door; I happened to answer the door. He gave me a brochure in an envelope with the question on the front, in fat red marker, "Do you watch TV?" I raised this prospect at last Sunday's house meeting. It wasn't taken very seriously. No one wants to have to record their TV watching every week, and since we're not actually paying for our cable (the cable company has so far forgotten to disconnect it, even though we haven't paid anything since last July), a box electronically monitoring our usage would probably not be a good idea. Too bad, because we could then keep the TV tuned to Animal Planet or CSPAN twenty four hours a day (we imagined a clerk at Nielsen headquarters in Florida exclaiming, "well, gee, there's a curious spike in the viewing of animal documentaries and senate hearings in Hyde Park!"). A few days ago, we got an letter from them. I decide to keep it for myself. Last night I opened it and found five new dollar bills, apparently as an inducement to fill out the enclosed questionnaire. Finding cash on the street is one thing; having it mailed to you is quite another kind of pleasant surprise. Thank you, Nielsen!

word of the day: incunabula

From OED:

L. incunabula(neut. pl.) swaddling-clothes, hence cradle, and fig. childhood, beginning, origin, f. cunæ cradle.

1. The earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything.

2. (With sing. incunabulum): Books produced in the infancy of the art of printing; spec. those printed before 1500.

3. Ornith. The breeding-places of a species of bird. Hence incunabular a., of or pertaining to early printed books.

Earliest usage was in the first sense, by Thomas de Quincey in 1824: "Here they fancy that they can detect the incunabula of the revolutionary spirit."

Why Don’t Republicans Write ("Literary") Fiction?

Yes, why don't they?