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an indispensable accessory for the New Masculinist

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Was called a concern troll recently for making fun of Apple, since I don't use Apple. You can't escape their products, though. A few days ago I mentioned to someone that I had written about Minecraft here. He gave me his phone and I typed "Minecraft" into the search field to the right. I got an "Apologies, but we were unable to find..." notice from the Word Press software. How could that be? Tried it again and realized the so-called smart phone was changing "minecraft" to "mineshaft" as I was typing. There's the Apple philosophy: "We will protect you from your mistakes even if we are less reliable than you are."

For some reason I thought of Hugo Flesch yesterday, who wrote amusing filler items for the Village Voice back in the '80s. Filler is an odd vestige of the print era, before computerized typesetting, when gaps appeared in the final newspaper page layout that had to be filled with classifieds or random bits of text. Flesch, who also wrote for the National Lampoon, turned deadpan, absurdist filler items into his special art. A quick Googling revealed no cult of Hugo, but I found a PDF of his college newspaper, which showed him writing filler before he even graduated! Above is a screenshot from the Stony Brook paper.

Update: In case it needs mentioning: Lou Grant doesn't exist, he is a TV character played by Ed Asner.

Rather abruptly, the Open Left blog announced yesterday it wouldn't be posting new content. Not terribly surprising--Matt Stoller left a while back to work with Alan Grayson and Chris Bowers hadn't posted in ages (he went to DailyKos, supposedly). Nevertheless the site will be missed, sort of, by loyal RSS readers the last four years.

From the farewell posts it sounds as if many of the OL bloggers are moving on to fabulous careers further up the food chain. After ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, stopping the bailouts, and keeping Dems in both houses of congress, their successful lives are truly deserved.

STRATFOR compares the uprising to the 1979 Iranian revolution and wants to know who's really behind the protests. (The comments to the linked post are rather, er, skeptical of this analysis.)

Two essays consider the split over Egypt among US neocons, who are usually better with message discipline. Interesting excerpt from one of them (Jack Ross, writing in Right Web):

...the Anti-Islamist Scare that has gained full steam since the election of Obama appears to be a completely distinct phenomenon from historic neoconservatism, notwithstanding how opportunistically it has been embraced by figures like Bill Kristol and the Liz Cheney-led Keep America Safe. It is a phenomenon straight from the pages of Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style In American Politics. Whereas Hofstadter famously pointed to projection in the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan who “donned priestly vestments and constructed an elaborate hierarchy and ritual,” the backlash against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque—with its frank talk of “sacred ground”—reflected the desire to construct an American holy of holies.