John Kerry Grows a Pair

I just heard the man's speech at the DNC (missed Bill's). Now, I'm not plugged into American politics as much as some of the people on this blog, but damn, that was pretty damn good. The whole uncle bit was unnecessary and took the steam out of an otherwise deliciously aggressive oratory, plus the whole bit about Georgia was lukewarm at best, but he certainly laid if on McCain, and with what I detected to be a feeling of glee at pwning the geezer with a lot of the same rhetoric he got pwned with four years ago.

Christ, if this backbone had come on a bit sooner, say 2004, maybe I wouldn't be so damned disenfranchised with this country that part of me actually wants McCain to win.

Diddy holds Assholecon 2k8 a little early this year

Diddy can't fly around in jet anymore because gas prices are too high. It costs "$200,000 or $250,000" for a round trip NYC to LA. When you have enough money that you can't tell the difference between $50,000 out of your pocket, you really shouldn't be video blogging about how hard it is out there for a pimp.

There's the real bastard who had Tupac killed walking free.

Rise of the Cyborgs

Half man, half machine. All heart.

Powered exo-skeleton now lets people paralyzed from the waist down walk again. If we can restore sight to the blind, let the deaf hear, and the paralyzed walk with technology, I think we can handle the sea level rising an inch, hippies.

Tyranids

I'm still trying to retrace the steps that led to me discovering www.hugecrab.com. I could try and describe the site, but the url pretty much says everything that needs to be said. They are pictures of rather large, soul devouring arthropods that people poke, prod and eat. I find it an interesting observation in cross-culture and cross-generational perceptions that my folks would likely find the site very appetising.

If someone makes a hugespider.com, I'll kill myself.

Thoughts on the DNC: Day One

If CNN has its way, the Democratic delegates in Denver will be rioting in the aisles by the end of the convention. So many people have a reason to get mad about this attempted display of unity: Clinton supporters who can't stand Obama, passionate partisans who scream that the party wasted a day in personal and emotional headliners, and those who spotted Wolf Blitzer chucking rocks from his portable Situation Room onto the crowded floor and waiting for the explosion.

What is the deal with Clinton supporters? I don't like to lump them all together into a monolithic group of crazies, but my hand is forced by the way the polls are put together. This is the poll that CNN was frothing at the mouth over most of yesterday. Its conclusion is that Obama is doomed because the number of (former?) Clinton backers who plan to vote for McCain has increased over the past month (after Obama tapped Biden as his No. 2).

It is sickeningly fascinating to listen to the reasons the Clintonites give for their unwillingness to accept the true Democratic nominee. "He didn't reach out to us," some whine. "He doesn't have the experience necessary to be president," say others. "McCain is a natural fit for us because he, like Clinton, has more national-security experience and foreign-policy expertise than that n00b Obama," conclude some. "He's ready to answer the dreaded 3 a.m. phone call."

This kind of reasoning shows just how effective the Republican strategy has been in terms of framing the election. The consensus among smart Democratic strategists has been that in order to win, Obama and his followers need to make the election a referendum on George W. Bush, not on Obama himself or even on McCain. Obama's life story is too complex for so-called "ordinary Americans" to understand, so every appeal must be framed as such: Are you willing to subject yourself and your country to another four years of Bush? McCain has supported Bush policies 95 percent of the time, so it follows that four years of McCain would be a third term for Bush.

When Clinton supporters declare that they lean McCain, they reject the notion that the election should be about policy and judgment, but rather about what's familiar, what's understandable. McCain was a military pilot and a POW; therefore, he has the credentials to lead in a foreign-policy emergency. This raises the question: Why did the people who think this way support Clinton in the first place? Her life story couldn't be less similar to McCain's, and even when she talked about being in dangerous military situations in Bosnia, she lied about it. Clinton's and Obama's policy positions, however, are very similar.

No better argument can be made that Obama's judgment on foreign affairs is superior than what he has already demonstrated: When he took his big overseas trip, the Iraqi prime minister essentially endorsed his plan for American withdrawal. Now the State Department is trying to hammer out a similar deal with the Iraqi government.

I can't speak directly to the claim that Obama has failed to "reach out" to former Clinton supporters, since I was never one of them. But I can say that after I decided to get behind Obama after Edwards dropped out, all it took was a single visit to barackobama.com to get all the outreach I could handle from the campaign. And to those who were upset that he didn't take on more of her top advisers to help run his operation, get over it. It's his campaign; he has the right to use people who supported his message of change and hope from the beginning.

The appearance (or reality) of Democratic disunity is a golden opportunity for McCain and his legion of "Karl Rove acolytes," as Obama calls them, to sweep truth and reason under the rug. So he's rolled out a couple of incredibly tasteless ads that seem to imply that Clinton would prefer to see her bitter supporters take refuge in the McCain camp. She has repudiated the ads, of course ("I'm Hillary Clinton, and I do not approve this message"), and McCain deserves universal scorn for his claim that he should benefit just because Democrats had a drawn-out primary contest between two amazing and historic candidates.

CNN delights in this kind of strife, and they're eager to prolong it. That's why they have people on like Bill Bennett, who talked about how much better it would be if Clinton were on the ticket, and James Carville (the most bitter and passive-aggressive person in the world), who basically deemed the convention a failure because Dems didn't spend enough time attacking Bush on a night when Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama rocked the house with their emotional and personal speeches. And they weren't shy about inviting conservative analysts, such as Amy Holmes and Alex Castellanos (who, ironically, seemed to cause less dissent than their Democratic counterparts). Donna Brazile remains one of the few consistent voices of reason on CNN's Democratic panel.

I hope that for the rest of the convention, the media's riot-inducing rocks keep missing—and that Democrats emerge without the drama, ready to persuade the American people to deny Bush his third term.

Lolcats: A Venerable History

Highly informative article on the history of canihascheezburger. I liked the fact that they talked about how the investors initially approached the site, and also about how they have a staff of full time moderators moderating lolcat submissions. That sounds like one hell of a job.

Plus I'm hungry for TV ratings

What does the M stand for? Moceri. That's right, his name is Marc Moceri and he's finally brought the internet's sickest animations to television. Unfortunately, it's only on some random UK channel called E4, but we can hope that some kind British soul will upload these episodes soon. A few random web pages are also suggesting that Marc's show may make its way to Comedy Central, but I won't get my hopes up.

Personally, I really want a new album more than anything. The Ultimate Party Collection Volume 1 obviously needs a Volume 2.

We all went to the wrong school...

Oberlin college teaches a course called Super Smash Brothers Theory and Practice. Okay, Oberlin's no Yale, but they're certainly dece, so this isn't the same league as that "Philosophy of Star Trek" crap they spew out on U. of Phoenix.

On second thought, any of us probably more than qualify as faculty. I know I can do a whole lecture entitled "Losing to Win: The Zen of Being an Asshole w/ Kirby" AKA "giving Jay an aneurysm," or "Ice Climbers: Behind the Bullshit," "Samus Balls in Modern Feminism," "The Desalvo Method of Stealth Wanking," etc. etc.

Fun fact, btw: the Smash devs overwhelmingly prefer to use the Gamecube controller for Brawl, so Jay isn't such a toggaf after all.

Step aside Hot-Or-Not

Make way for Hot-And-Nun.

An Italian priest with a blog, Antonio Rungi, is basically insane. The Miss Sister Italy online contest will start on his blog in September. The idea is to post pictures of hot nuns.

I think this officially calls for a patented Brian Thompson "How high are you?"

Bob Dunne: teacher, mentor, inspiration

The YDN is reporting that "popular" computer science professor Robert Dunne is dead. But "popular" doesn't begin to describe the impact professor Dunne had on us and on the entire Yale community.

His lecture course, "Computers and the Law," was among the most widely attended during any given semester, and he always had to turn away many applicants—even seniors—from his two follow-up seminars. Of the six contributors to this blog, all but one took Bob Dunne's lecture; two of us also took both seminars, on privacy and intellectual property in the digital age.

"Computers and the Law" was unlike any other big lecture course. No one comes back from Econ 110 excited about telling his suitemates all about Pareto efficiency and supply and demand curves. I never returned from the so-called "Physics for Poets" ready to start a conversation about conservation of rotational momentum. But after the doors of SSS 114 opened after yet another fascinating Bob Dunne lecture (really a storytelling session), one could always hear groups of students abuzz about the enforceability of contracts or the various defenses to copyright infringement. Thanks to professor Dunne, we lowly undergrads could get excited about not only the technicalities of the law but also the larger intellectual questions concerning the application of legal precedent to new frontiers of technology.

Terminology learned in his classes became part of the everyday vocabulary of this group of friends and even provided the basis for several inside jokes. De minimis, for example, which is part of the fair-use doctrine in copyright law, soon became our hypothetical defense to any number of crimes, such as murder. And professor Dunne's assertion that involuntary intoxication could get one off the hook for just about anything led to our development (in many a lunch conversation) of the "Nibbles Machine," a hamster-powered device that would get the user drunk without his knowledge, leaving him free to exact appropriate revenge on his ex-wife.

The seminars provided an opportunity to interact with professor Dunne in a smaller setting. The only drawback was that when only 20 were gathered around a conference table in Watson on the edge of their seats, he didn't automatically feel the need to be entertaining. But he is truly an expert on his subject, and once he started going into detail about the cases we were studying, or the cases he was working on (though he was always careful to protect the confidentiality of his clients), or even how past classes had dealt with the challenging material, he was at his best as a teacher. I sincerely regret that future generations of Yalies won't get that experience, but I have hope that the textbook he was close to finishing (as of May) will carry on his remarkable legacy in legal pedagogy.

Farewell to one of the true institutions of Yale. Thank you for the inspiration you provided to so many of us.

Requiescat in pace.

[Please feel free to share your own memories of professor Dunne in the comments.]