Saralicious

The latest entrants into the rather crowded Sarah Palin parody cottage industry are the Calhoun Sisters doing their rap rendition of Sarah's schtick. They were "discovered" by Joel Achenbach on the Achenblog. I have no idea how he knows them, but the lyrics are just brutal and hilarious. Joel decided that this video needs to go viral, so I'm doing my part. It had about 800 views this morning, so lets link to it and get the ball rolling. Just no Rickrolling. That would be unfair.

Tina Fey is considered the gold standard and while she is very good, the demands of network television cause some punches to be pulled. In contrast, Sara Benincasa (who I featured way back when) just keeps getting edgier. The Sarah Palin Vlogs are up to 27 episodes and Episode 26 in particular is just dead spot on. It's also perhaps just a bit unsafe for work, so put on some headphones.



What both of these videos have in common is that the really get at the heart of the Palin candidacy with resorting to winking at the camera. It's just a shame they only have three weeks left before their careers go the way of Allan Sherman. Enjoy the spotlight while you can.

Power Play

Andrew Sullivan in his Daily Dish blog used to run a feature called “The View Out Your Window” where he would run photos from all over the world that readers had taken out their window. Some of them were quite beautiful. Some weren’t. This picture was taken out my window at 2:15 am Thursday night/Friday morning.

Thursday I had come home and my wife announced that we only had power in half the house. I went around and checked the lights and examined the electrical panel. Sure enough, one whole side of the panel was off. My wife had checked with a few neighbors and they were only on partial power as well.

We called Big Giant Electric Company (BGE) and reported the problem before heading out to dinner. Since the master bedroom was part of the affected problem, I used that as an excuse to stay up until midnight catching up on my DVR inventory. After finally feeling my way into bed, my wife woke me up at 1:45 to say there was a knock on the door.

There in the road was a BGE truck with spotlights blazing and a safety vested crew racing around the neighborhood furiously spray painting the sidewalks. The foreman told me that the problem had been isolated to a short underneath my driveway and they would have to dig it up to fix it. They could do it now or they could have another crew come back in the morning. Here is where my sleep addled thought process went:

• I want my power back on.
• My neighbors probably want their power back on too.
• If I let the truck leave, there is no telling when they would come back.
• Nobody else seems to have noticed the blindingly bright road crew in their front yard.
• My nearest neighbors are a nurse and her daughter, an Air Force officer and his wife, and an elderly widow.
• I'm already awake.
  

I told the foreman to go ahead and break out the jackhammers but to stop if anybody came out to complain. I got some indication that maybe he wanted to go home for the night when he said, “Your neighbors are going to love you, man.”

It took about twenty minutes to jack up a three foot square hole in my driveway. You can see the chunks in the upper left of the photo. I have the back bedroom in my unit and I could hear the noise all the way back there through the closed third floor window. The neighbors on either side have the master bedroom in the front. And the Air Force guy had his window open. But nobody seemed to notice.

I was just starting to doze back off when at 3 am the lights all through the house blazed back on. I went outside to admire the still steaming patch of asphalt where I had used to have a concrete drive. The foreman said that another crew would be back within two weeks to sawcut and repour the concrete. We'll see.

I thanked his crew for their hard work and they said that they were now off for the night. And not one neighbor has said a word to me about the late night construction crew.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:What would you have done? Wait for morning, or get it done then?

Trolls In The Bunker

"Just Before The Dawn Patrol Awakes" by Thomas Kinkade

This whimsical little inside joke of a photoshop pastiche was inspired by this news story about a hotel with rooms that used to be a nuclear bunker.

THE Bunker is the metaphorical retreat for regular readers of the Achenblog to go when the blog comment section (or "the boodle", Achenblog readers don't have much use for standard interweb terminology. See here for more odd terms) is over-run by trolls, flamers, and other drive-by bomb-throwers. Usually the cause is some tongue-in-cheek wry political piece that humor-impaired readers have taken completely out of context. But the hot-topic trolls get easily bored and leave when the topic returns to nuclear physics or needlework.

Trolls are an interesting internet phenomenon in that they explore the boundaries of internet abuse. They aim to, with only words, provoke extreme emotional responses just for their own amusement. They can be psychopathic, sociopathic, or simply mischievous. They exist to prove just how fragile and easily ripped the social contract is. While there are many definitions of troll, this one from a very good internet bestiary gets to the heart of the modern definition.

A troll is basically one who posts messages intended to insult and provoke per fas et nefas. {snip} For each person who responds, the poster (the troll as a person) will consider that person "caught". The troll (the troll as an action) is considered to have been a complete success if it disrupts beyond repair the normal traffic on a newsgroup or on a messageboard. In extreme cases, trolls are posted by groups of trollers and crossposted to unrelated newsgroups in an attempt to destroy those groups by flooding them with flames and off-topic ranting.

As the political season heats up, troll attacks (or RoveStorms in Boodle parlance) have become more common and more virulent.

The Achenblog has a long history of trolls. We adopt them and give them cute names and turn them away with our strongest weapons: surprise, whithering sarcasm, and a fanatical devotion to The Pope Boss. Heck, I was even one once.

Our latest troll flits around several WaPo message boards making personal attacks on individuals. His disdain for us is undercut by his persistence in pronouncing how banal and boring our conversation is several hundred comments into a post where only regualr readers would dare tread. Someone truly bored would have bailed long before. These comments clearly violate the Terms of Service and can and are deleted by the administrators when they get out of hand. In the meantime, while it is never a good idea to feed trolls, some are just so cute you can't resist patting them on the head while you strangle them by the throat.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Where have you been attacked by trolls?

The Ratio

Y'all are going to be sick of Georgia Tech related posts by this time next week, but this video is too good to pass up. It has great production values and really nails a particular aspect of campus life peculiar to Tech.



The Ratio is the number of guys to every girl enrolled at Tech. When I was there, it was 4 to 1. Two decades later, after major efforts at enrolling more women including recruiting and scholarships and other enticements, the Ratio has improved to...wait for it...3 to 1. And holding steady.

Back in the day, I used to eat lunch on Fridays with a group of co-eds that were friends of a girl I met in my freshman drafting class (yeah, with t-squares and triangles, that's how old school I am). They were all complaining that they didn't have dates. My jaw dropped. I asked how with The Ratio could they complain. They explained that half the guys at Tech you wouldn't want to date and the other half already had girlfriends from back home or at other schools. All-girl Agnes Scott College was and still is a major source of female companionship for Tech guys. And since I had met my girlfriend/fiance/future wife in high school, I had no room to dispute their explanation. These girls had a point.

The distaff side has this saying about how The Ratio does not always work in their favor:

"The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

Rachel Ray and Rubber Bands

This is the filthiest video I have ever seen on YouTube. It goes to show you that Rachel Ray can make anything look exciting.



Yummo.

BuzzTown

While at Georgia Tech, I noticed that the campus had succumb to the Fiberglass Animal Display fad. FAD-fad. Started in Chicago many many years ago, it has been trickling down to smaller and smaller locales. The last time I saw them was in Mystery Business Trip City Named After A Sport Played With Sticks. I have to confess that Georgia Tech isn’t even the first college campus to jump on this well worn bandwagon. Two years ago I stumbled across a flock of Hokies at Virginia Tech while my son searched for a decent bookstore in Blacksburg that would have made exile there tolerable.

Our favorite one was the one called COE Superstar, but we nicknamed his Buzzsaw Buzz because of the sawblade coming out of his head. And if you look real carefully, that is a GT logo on his gold tooth. Sadly, Buzzsaw also represented a disturbing trend among these silly acts of boosterism, random and senseless acts of vandalism. Any accessory on any of these sculptures was doomed. Buzzsaw had on a very cool pair of welding goggles when we saw him Thursday night. By Friday morning when we came back with the camera, both lenses had been snapped off.

As we wandered around campus hunting all the Buzzes, we noticed ties askew, flags missing, and worst of all, antennae broken off. Something about the fragile sensory apian sensory devices was irresistible to passers-by with poor impulse control. Like most of these silly stunts, the statues are to later be auctioned off and nobody wants an abused bee in their yard as a conversation piece.

You can see all the Buzzes on my Flickr set devoted to them or wait a day or so because I intend to put together a post or two showing all the Buzzes with some commentary.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:What silly F-A-D has or would your area use?

Pi-Mile

In my BooksFirst post this month, I made fun of so-called "stunt journalists" that do things that they otherwise wouldn't just so they can write about the experience. I have to confess that I am a stunt blogger. I frequently pick activities based on their blogworthiness. I'm in Atlanta this weekend for Family Weekend. While the ostensible purpose of the trip is to see our son, who is showing a severe lack of homesickness in every way, I'm going to be able to squeeze several blogposts out of the trip, including this one.

While out of town, I try to vary my exercise routine to match what is available. The GT Hotel and Conference Center where we are staying so as to be within walking distance of all the activities, has a decent workout room, but the weather is too nice to stay inside.



In 2007 I blogged about Pi Day which is March 14th every year. I mentioned in that post that Georgia Tech sponsors a 5K race every year called the Pi-Miler because it is 3.14 miles in length. They have made it a year round activity with the creation of the Larry Brown Pi Mile Running Trail. The sheer geekiness of concept is just genius.

The trail is really just a route along existing sidewalks that goes around the campus and passes nearly all the major attractions including Bobby Dowd Stadium (at Historic Grant Field), the Tech Tower, the Student Center, the Campus Recreation Center (which was built around the 1996 Olympic Aquatic Center) and Alexander Memorial Coliseum (aka the ThrillerDome aka The Tit).

It seemed like a perfect route for a morning jog. This summer I started jogging some mornings and have built up to about a mile at a time. Over three miles just seemed to much to even imagine. But what a cool blogpost it would make. At first, my goal was just to get as far as I could without walking. By the time I had gone from Fifth and Techwood to the CRC, I realized I was over halfway there.

So I decided to see if I could make the whole circuit. Even when my iPod locked up, I resisted the temptation to stop and rest. The Fates were tempting me, but I refused to give in. The course makes it easy to set smaller goals along the way. There are sidewalk markers every quarter mile in addition to the arrow imbeds to make sure you take the correct turns. All you have to do is press on another quarter mile thirteen times in a row. By the time I reached the north end of Ferst Street in the shadow of Ted Turner's empire, I knew I could make.

I passed tailgaters setting up for the game and high school bands unloading for their part of the halftime show. And them I got back to Fifth Street and had just one uphill block to go. I poured out my remaining energy and tagged the sign where I had started and gasped in triumph.

It took me about forty minutes to make the full circuit, which is hardly a marathon ready pace. But I had never run more than a mile and a half at once before. And what kept me going was the thought of how lame it would be to blog that I had to stop and rest. By making it a continuous run, the stunt had become blogworthy. I had run 3.14 miles just so I could brag about it on the internet.

So who says that blogging can't be good for your health?

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What have you done just to have something to blog about?

BooksFirst: September 2008

Books Bought
none

Books Read
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by AJ Jacobs
Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson

Comments
The two books I read this month were both non-fiction, but represent two very different styles. I say styles, not genres, because the style can be applied to any specific topic.

Last month I made a brief mention of what I call “stunt journalism.” This is where the writer does something unusual or different solely for the sake of writing about it. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma (from last month), Michael Pollan did things like buy a beef cattle, work on an organic farm, and go boar hunting, all things he normally wouldn’t have done if he weren’t writing a book about the food chain.

In The Know-It-All, A. J. Jacobs reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Clearly this is something a sane normal person would not have done without a book contract. This book is subtitled “One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World”, but “My Year As An Insufferable Prick” would have been more apt. Not only does he read the entire encyclopedia, to the distress of his wife, friends, and coworkers, he tries to drop into conversation little nuggets he learned whenever he can. While clearly this is done for comic effect, it annoyed me and I wasn’t even the woman he was trying to impregnate.

One of the sub-threads in the book is a running tale of the attempts by his wife to get pregnant. For some reason, writers tend to find fertility and the lack thereof fascinating to themselves, and by extension to their readers. The heroics he goes through to plant a seed are sitcom stale and really have nothing else to do with the book. But he does manage to knock up his old lady, thus giving the book a happy ending.

A less happy ending is the other running bit, which is his attempt to win Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (because he once interviewed Alex Trebek, he is ineligible for Jeopardy, a much better way to land a claim as the smartest guy in the world). He finally makes it on the show, and while I won’t spoil the ending, let’s just say he’s keeping his day job.

Spread throughout the book are smaller mini-stunts such as joining Mensa just to mock its members, attending a crossword convention, interviewing a rabbinical scholar, and just behaving like an asshole. The chapters are done alphabetically and the little vignettes all tie into individual encyclopedia entries. The book is funny and breezy, but by the end of it I was ready to clock him and tell him that people that think they know everything really annoy those of us that do.

Another non-fiction format that I frequently fall for is the insider’s expose. Anthony Bourdain with Kitchen Confidential really reinvented this genre by ladling on heaping loads of sarcasm over generous dollops of eye-opening revelations. Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man was my most recent foray into this field.

With Smile While Your Lying, Chuck Thompson takes the reader into the world of travel journalism where every hotel is more luxurious than the last and every foreign dish is a delicacy waiting to be discovered. That travel journalism is an incestuous web of blurb-happy hacks feeding at the trough of publicity hungry resorts should be no shock. If anything, the book is too tame. I want more gorey tales of the fraud and lies that perpetrate the glossy magazines and the Sunday travel sections.

Like Know-It-All, this is several books struggling for equal time. One is a memoir of a young wastrel slowly sucked into a sleazy disreputable slice of journalism. He’s got great stories of his youth traveling in Asia on a shoestring. And the chapter on his short-lived attempt to break the mold of standard travel writing is revealing and fresh. The book also attempts to tell what to really expect when traveling and give insights on how to find the REAL country. Finally, it also tries for some snarky observations. I got a blogpost a while back from his lambasting of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and other Tacky Tourist Drinking Districts™ (my phrase, not his).

Thompson is an amazingly talented writer. Every page has a wicked turn of phrase or incredible insight. But overall, the book falls short. Read it for some great insights, but I thought it fell just a little short of its promise.

In two months I've read four non-fiction books. In a way, it's my own form of stunt blogging. Next month I go back to some light entertainment. I promise.