general

Just left this comment for Marisa Olson on Rhizome. The topic was her review of the Double Happiness* blog:

Hi, Marisa,
Good summation of what Dubhap and other surf clubs do ("is chock-a-block with the fruits of inordinately long websurfing sessions: frayed gif mashups, hilarious if sometimes unnerving audio loops, shameless resizes calling for inconsistent page widths, ekphrastic word/image paradoxes, and very often beautiful collages of similar images (graffiti tags, gummi bears, umbrella hats... Google Image Searches are their friend)")
Am curious, though--Why did you never write this kind of formal exegesis about Nasty Nets, on Nasty Nets, as a member of Nasty Nets?
Or, put another way,
Why is it that everyone talks like an 18 year old in the comment sections of the surf club blogs?
Lots of surf clubbers aren't 18 and can write very well. There seems to be an unspoken convention that only "Dude" and "You rule" are appropriate language for comments.
It's OK to have the formal "one-way," print-style writing on Rhizome but it would be nice if it could be the beginning of an equally articulate conversation in comments (or passing between blogs) rather than just drive-by props*.
Best, Tom

*commendations

Update: No response to this other than a joke from someone (not Olson) about the unruly internet.

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/9/let-it-spin/

These photos are from MSNBC, not the Onion:

After the 9/11/01 attacks a bunch of smart people said it wouldn't be a good idea to invade Afghanistan and Iraq because then those countries would become US colonial possessions and those are never easy to manage and having such possessions would make us no safer. This turned out to be the case. Now the US is stuck trying to run those countries without enough troops to do it so they have to use our tax dollars to hire people from abroad. Lots of those people understandably can't be trusted to help us manage our colonies so here's the Defense Department's solution: a handheld lie detector to be used for screening non-US personnel. If there is a problem, American knowhow can always come up with a space gizmo* that wouldn't be admissable in our own courts but would cow our colonial subjects exposed to movies like Men in Black. Trying to come up with a word to describe this device and its intended uses the best Unqualified Offerings could come up with was "evil." That will work.

*that uses algorithms and stuff

Somewhat related to the "infinite fill" blog posts from 2004: illustrated essay on the connections between MacPaint computer fill patterns and Memphis plastic laminate designs. (thx travis) The links are mostly visual and zeitgeisty--it's not like Mac hired Memphis designers to do MacPaint patterns or the designers used Macs. Ettore Sottsass, it is explained, had a history of working with computers (his design for a mainframe interface depicted in the essay is extremely tasty). But whether he used MacPaint is something the essay just speculates about. The computer designs by Memphis-ers depicted in the essay all predate MacPaint.

copied and pasted:

graphic pattern of wildly offset letters printed on wacky sculptures and every other surface of the gallery
metal mesh cages for beach vacationers
architecture gallery reproduced at a smaller scale inside architecture gallery--described as "a radical critique"
children are indoctrinated to white cube space
photos of the towns and countryside around chernobyl (excerpt)
water bottle pushed like lawn mower washes clothes
guys play tennis, work on farms, stay at Ritz as photodocumented conceptual art with stated prices
headless female mannequin, lights on tripods
wall painting (design) of compact car with machine gun on roof
parked cars transformed into cab and police car using paper overlays "without requesting the owners’ permission"
youtubes of red green and blue monochromes; press play on each and a chord sounds
feed of audio and video reduced to component wavelengths (supposedly) and reassembled/regurgitated as white light and white noise
slick photo of white bunny with rainbow patch--dye or reflected light?????
3D computer-constructed fluorescent light (looking like a Flavin at first glance) projected into a corner - fly buzzes in
yellow lettered IMAGE & POWER poster; patriotic ladies/pimply teen Photoshopped into Yin-Yang configuration
shaky objects blur in photo field of view: flags, photographers' backdrops behind plants
residents of high rises turn colored lights in apartment windows on and off to make pictures
windows opening and closing by themselves in public space freak people out
photodocumentation (supposedly) of "tree exchange"--primeval oak in Netherlands for young oak in Poland
manet luncheon on the grass as porn shoot with cheese about to be eaten off the models' vulvas
Video compilation of people glancing into the camera from their home-made porn
styrofoam product packaging carved in marble
spangly TREMOR RUMOUR HOOVER sign; various hotel and motel signs
2 years of VVORK. Thanks to all readers, artists, friends, critics, and twitter-narrators
Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece (1969) distorted via various commercial translation services
more "translation" of american pop culture--this time Disney
A sound and video installation where a computer program continuously changes between the different vocal incarnations of Woody Allen
You Talkin to Me scene from Taxi Driver (I assume) translated into seven languages
pareto principle handwritten lists
Stripper pole coated with a description of a striptease scene encoded in Braille alphabet--no, I'm not kidding
animated gif of dude wanking in field
groovy photodocumentation of cheapo "goth" flavin
motorized exhaust-belching barrels inside shipping container
refugees photoshopped into ideal virtual spaces; almost-identical postcards from different times/places (supposedly)
Bottle inside bottle; female in nude sweaty 80s grace jones pose

The man known to some as General Betray-us and to others as a God who walks the earth is back in front of Congress this week. From Democracy Arsenal:

Petraeus and [Ambassador] Crocker have no problems projecting out the potential implications of leaving Iraq - but they refuse to make projections of what staying will look like. That double standard is absurd. Is there a strategic plan for our presence in Iraq? If so what? The answer is pretty clearly no. They have no end game. There is no exit strategy. The Bush/McCain/Petraeus/Crocker plan is simply to stay and to stay a very very long time in the hopes that things slowly get better.