April is the coolest month
With all due respect, T.S. Elliott didn’t know what he was talking about. Not only is April the month of my birth, the first month of consistent spring weather and the long-overdue return of baseball, but this particular April has a number of media releases I’m eagerly anticipating.
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On the cutting edge of spam
On my work blog, Mount Blogmore, we get dozens of spam comments per day. Our automated spam filter catches many of them, but enough get through that I get an amusing look at the strategies of spammers.
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Site update
If you’ve visited here before, you may notice some differences. That’s because I took full advantage of my day off yesterday to move Madness & Truth from the Movable Type platform to a Wordpress platform. This has led to a bit of a different look, but the primary reason was to make site administration simpler on my end. Movable Type is a powerful platform but it can be clunky and I had all sorts of problems getting things to work right. Wordpress is a lot smoother.
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Cutting the cable box
Cable TV costs too much – so I’m dropping it in favor of streaming Internet video.
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Known unknowns
Tools like Facebook are gradually bringing real identities onto the Internet. Should we mourn or praise our fading online anonymity?
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Rohan and Realpolitik
A look at an unconventional and unauthorized Russian retelling of The Lord of the Rings.
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Should we cheer the Darth Vader kid?
Among my favorite ads during the Super Bowl was Volkswagen’s “The Force” commercial, featuring a child in a Darth Vader costume trying to use “The Force” on everything around him, and adorably failing until his dad helps out with a Volkswagen Passat:
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More on HuffPo and journalism
Via Nate Silver, I see an insightful piece by Tom McGeveran at Capital New York on the Huffington Post-AOL merger. I agree with most of his points.
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HuffPo in the Playboy Mansion
Thoughts about online journalism inspired by the merger of AOL and the Huffington Post.
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Fear and loathing in the land of the spirits
Spirited Away is interwoven with many high-level messages, making it a film you can watch not just to be entertained but also to provoke thought and analysis.
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Rooting rules
Along with millions of other Americans, I spent Sunday night watching Super Bowl XLV between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. I am a Bears fan; after the Packers managed to beat my Bears in the NFC championship game by virtue of their quarterback actually showing up to play, this left me with no particular rooting interest.
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Nasty, brutish and undead
How a zombie movie is the best way to understand a major stream of Western political thought.
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Fifteen albums that have stuck with me
Music recommendations from Atmosphere to Springsteen.
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Books that shaped my life
Prominent bloggers from around the English-speaking blogosphere over the last few days have been sharing lists of the books which most influenced them. Tyler Cowen kicked it off; since then writers such as Matthew Yglesias, Peter Suderman and Ross Douthat have made their contributions.
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"Alice" underwhelms
How can something so fanciful fall so flat?
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Top 20 movies of the decade
As 2009 comes to an end, I thought I’d take some time and come up with a list of my favorite films from 2000 to 2009. My methodology is particularly sloppy – I combed through Wikipedia’s list of films this decade and copied down all the ones that stood out, then divided them into halves, quarters, and finally ranked them. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some I intended to include. But here’s my list with comments: