“These words are not tools of communication They are shards of metal Dropped from eight story windows They are waterfalls and gas leaks” “There in the spine of the dictionary, the words are worthless; they’re a mere weight pressing against my thoughtlessness.” Goddamn, Saul Williams knows how to string words together. Share this:PrintFacebookDigg

Computers and automation make everything easier. Like stalking! Do you use Facebook Places, Foursquare and Twitter? Do you have a vaugely tech-savvy obsessive ex-boyfriend/girlfriend or sworn enemy dedicated to your destruction? If you have answered “yes!” to both questions, you should hope that they don’t become aware of a free Geolocation Information aggregator with the [...]

I discovered Lin Manuel Miranda by way of my daughter’s love for the new hip-hop flavored ELECTRIC COMPANY on PBS. I resisted the reboot of my beloved classic at first; ELECTRIC COMPANY held a special place in my heart. As a kid in the late 70s, you took your live-action Spider-Man appearances wherever you could [...]

Holy Awesome-Internet-thing, Batman! Google’s informal corporate motto (that, being a business, it doesn’t always quite live up to) is Don’t Be Evil. They try to do and fund things that they don’t have to that are cool and awesome, if not necessarily immediately able to be monetized. One of these things is the scanning and indexing [...]

A squirmish? Oh, dear. Maybe she meant a 43 Man Squamish. OK. So you’re saying, “Hey. that’s petty. Skirmish, squirmish, potato, poTAHto, let’s call the whole thing off.”  A simple slip of the tongue on a word, it happens. Fine. Then the story becomes the freaky word-salad crazy-talk that sounded kind of coked up  about how [...]

From George Orwell’s 1984: And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced [...]

I was a devoted Channel 5 WNEW watcher as a little kid. I remember when I was in the hospital, age 3, with a ruptured appendix that led to a host of complications, having them wheel over a TV to my bed and enduring the pain of sitting up, just for a chance to catch [...]

I do not follow baseball, so I only know Jose Canseco as the twitchy, hulking  behemoth from Celebrity Apprentice.  And now, I know him as a real life supervillain, in the mold of the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis, Dr. Victor Von Doom. From Dr. Doom’s Wikipedia page: Doom’s calculating and strategic nature leads him to use [...]

Sometimes, the universe gives you a nice little gift. I found an old ZIP disk (remember those?) that had my dad’s familiar idiosyncratic handwriting across the label. It had “Joel Stuff” as a header and “letters” and “musings” written in underneath. I was eager to read it, as it would be the closest I’m going [...]

  Nerd. It is a term that has been diluted by inappropriate self-declaration. The most non-nerdy people will gleefully proclaim, “Oh, I’m such a nerd!” if they, say, can give you a recap on the series arc of LOST or if they used to watch Buffy The Vampire-Slayer for a season back in the 90s. [...]

  Can you tell the difference between perky Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway and real-world-Scrooge McDuck analog Warren Buffet? If so, congratulate yourself. You are smarter than the assembled might of the super-smart Wall Street crowd who, according to business-types and professionals, need their obscene bonuses because to deny them would take “talent” out of the [...]

The 8-bit MIDI of “Mad World” is awesome and weirdly poignant, no? I don’t know if I should be so proud of the fact that I watched this and rattled off most of the names of the games as they came up. But I am. UN SQUADRON was a great unsung shooter whose concept, I [...]