The Blog Awakening is Coming, But Links for now.
1960's Parody of 1960's Commercials
Good to know we've been mocking ourselves for at least 50 years now. Maybe some day we'll actually put away our cliches for a few years.
The Original Blogger, circa 1580
"Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt. Most of all, he wrote about himself and was amazed at the variety he found within. 'I cannot keep my subject still,' he said. 'It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.' His writing followed the same wayward path."
Economics theory taught through Seinfeld episodes. Lovely stuff.
The Waste of Waiting for Inspiration
"Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction."
Google created the world's biggest search engine by devising the best way to chart the relationships between the billions of pages that make up the Web. Facebook became the world's most important social network by building the best system for understanding the identities and relationships of the people who use the Web. A database that allows users to identify and search every object in the world could be as elemental, and profitable.
"This is why I’m so evangelically excited about The Anthology of Rap, Yale University Press’s monumental new collection of rap lyrics. It feels like it was published, exclusively for me, by the vanity press of my own subconscious. It’s an English major’s hip-hop bible, an impossible fusion of street cred and book learning. The anthology spans the entire 30-year history of the genre, from Afrika Bambaataa to Young Jeezy."