Steve says that his friend Eric is getting married and has this astute observation on the life of the single male:

The other night, I spoke to him on the telephone, and he mentioned that he’s a little sheepish about sending invitations due to the fact that he hasn’t bought many wedding gifts or baby gifts for his friends over the years.

I told him not to worry about it. Single men are officially foreigners in this strange kingdom called “Polite Society,” and are officially granted diplomatic immunity. Nobody really expected him to give them gifts. Now that he’s getting married, he’ll become a full citizen, however, and he’ll be expected to chip in.

Do you think this is true?

In this CNN.com news story entitled U.S. Military admits error in news releases, we see the ugly side of war: the war of propaganda. This is not new. But when it is so blatant, it is disturbing.

Ultimately though the damage is done. The pass that the media gave President Bush in the build up to war enabled that war to go forward. The justification for war was Bush’s lie. Those who dissented against the administration had to contend with America’s Joseph Goebbels, Karl Rove.

Okay, I’m talking about politics again. It must be Sunday. Anyway, I wanted to give a shout out to Dan and Holly who have started podcasting over at Investigate, Indict, Impeach GW Bush, Inc.

San Jose State University Department of English and Comparative Literature is home of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The 2005 awards have been announced. Basically the objective is to write, as poorly as possible, the first line of a novel. The #1 winning entry from Dan McKay of Fargo, North Dakota is:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual.

Oh my. The rest of this year’s winning entries can be found on the 2005 Results page. Here’s one from Chris Bui of Pensacola, Florida for you:

After months of pent-up emotions like a caffeine-addict trying to kick the habit, Cathy finally let the tears come, at first dripping sporadically like an old clogged percolator, then increasing slowly like a 10-cup coffeemaker with an automatic drip, and eventually pouring out and noisily wailing like a cappuccino maker complete with slurping froth.

And a dishonorable mention to Devery Doleman of Brooklyn:

The night resembled nothing so much as the nose of a giant Labrador in excellent health: cold, black, and wet.

Tschüß! (Thanks, Jane)

A thought re: the War on Terror, adapted from Jim Henley:

If the terrorists really do “hate us because we’re free,” the Bush Administration’s approach to civil liberties constitutes “appeasement” of the first order.

[via CrookedTimber]

“This music has everything in the world going against it. It’s completely artificial, it’s a scam, it’s … you know, I could probably list fifteen different reasons why it shouldn’t work. But, for some reason, something comes through all this stuff. And I think that’s part of the charm and attractiveness that it has.”

—Ellery Eskelin, saxophonist and son of Rodd Keith

“The beauty of song-poems is that they are a result of the intersection, or collision, of ordinary people’s expressions and the desires of musicians/businesses to make a quick buck, making the music as fast as they can, usually in one take. When those two forces combine, they create strangely compelling songs that are unlike anything you’ve ever heard.”

—Jamie Meltzer, filmmaker of Off the Charts: The Song Poem Story

It seemed a dark time for song-poem enthusiasts. The American Song-Poem Music Archives (ASPMA) disappeared sometime between the beginning of the year and when I just looked for it. Gone are all of those MP3s and reviews. The Dion McGregor Dreams Again site is gone too. Send Us Your Lyrics: The American Song-Poem Music Archive, the all song-poem Live365 channel, is missing in action. Even Phil Milstein’s “Profile Of A Dead Song-Poem” has vanished. Dark days indeed.

Dark until yesterday when WFMU became the official host for the final two volumes from the American Song Poem Music Archives. I Like Yellow Things: MSR Madness Vol. 5 and Rat A Tat Tat, America: MSR Madness Vol. 6 feature 56 song-poems that your probably haven’t heard before. Get them while they are hot!

You can learn more about song poems, those ubiquitous ads, the people who make them, the people who pay money to have them made, and the people who collect them by watching Jamie Meltzer’s Off the Charts: The Song Poem Story. It is a wonderful documentary that I really liked and strongly recommend. If you just want to get your feet wet or need to learn more right now, listen to NPR’s Songs from the Common Man: ‘Song-Poems’ Anthology Captures Fleeting Hopes of Fame.

Update

The new home of American Song-Poem Music Archives (ASPMA) seems to be http://www.songpoemmusic.com/. It hasn’t been updated in a while and the MP3s are gone, but at least things like Phil Milstein’s excellent primer What is this “song-poem”? are still there.

During college, the summer job is a rite of passage. It’s a brush up with the real world in a controlled, limited way. When I was in college, one of the summer jobs that paid the most was asbestos removal. For a summer, you could join a crew working on taking asbestos out of a building. This was of course hot, sweaty work, but hey, it paid well. And you the summer job applicant need not be concerned about health issues because the employer would supply a face mask and goggles.

That is one summer job I am glad I didn’t apply for. As you may know, asbestos workers have been filing lawsuits to seek compensation for the cancer they developed, which is called mesothelioma. Asbestos is dangerous stuff. Remember kids, don’t while away the summer with hazardous substances. But if you do, keep a lawyer in your Rolodex.

“Athletes are part of our world. They have a relationship with our world, and it is important for us to engage with them, as we would engage with anybody, as people with thoughts, ideas, dreams and maybe even fighters alongside with us in the move towards a more just society.”

Dave Zirin on Democracy Now!

I just heard a captivating interview with Dave Zirin on Democracy Now! (Broadcast Date: July 21st, 2005) about What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, his new book about the intersection of radical politics and pro sports.

Topics include:

• A history of the utter emiseration of civil liberties in Olympic host cities
• Muhammad Ali’s roll as both a symbol of America as heavyweight champion of the world and a war resisting member of the Nation of Islam
• Jackie Robinson’s unusual political behavior; relationships with Nixon and Martin Luther King; and infamous condemnation of Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Dave is very passionate and rather loquacious. Amy didn’t need to ask too many question to fill the segments. Anyway, the book is definitely going on my Amazon wish list and I strongly recommend giving the interview a listen.

I’ve never heard of Dave Zirin before. According to his bio, he is News Editor of The Prince George’s Post, for which he writes the weekly column, Edge of Sports. A senior writer at Basketball.com, his writing has also appeared in The Source, Common Dreams, College Sporting News, CounterPunch, Alternet, International Socialist Review, Black Sports Network, War Times, San Francisco Bay View and Z Magazine. He is also the monthly sports commentator for Air America’s ‘So What Else Is News’.

Amalia points us to a handy little site that rents out the graphing calculator of choice, the TI-83 Plus. For only $9/month you can get yr hands on one of these. If you’re a poor college student taking a stats class, there’s really no need to shell out $104.99 for one of these from Amazon.com (free shipping). Simply go to MyTI83.com and rent the finest graphing calculator in the world for a couple of months (actually I’m a little more partial to this guy). Gosh, think of all the money you’d save. You could get a few rolls of quarters for laundry, go on a road trip in yr SUV, and still have a little beer money left over. Life is good, no?

There’s a fun Google search I like to do every once in a while. If you have a website, you can do it too. It’s the “related:” search. So if I plug in this blog into Google like this:

related:manufacturedenvironments.com

Google will respond with a few pages of sites it thinks are somehow related in content to my site. I’ve found some great sites that way, especially Mike Rohde’s, but mostly this search never fails to amuse me.

Three links in a row that showed up this morning that I strangely feel compelled to tell you about are New Media Musings, The Gay Vote, and The Introverted Exhibitionist. New Media Musings makes sense. I talk about new media and journalism, and I’ve been meaning to subscribe to Lasica’s RSS feed for a while. Now The Gay Vote, which was called the best political blog of 2004 by the Guardian, seems to be defunct. And I’m sorry to disappoint you boys, but I’m 100% All-American red-blooded metrosexual. As for The Introverted Exhibitionist, well, uh…I have no idea.

Everyone’s been talking about this first-person piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that says academics should not blog, if they want to be hirable, that is. The article, which is called Bloggers Need Not Apply, was written by “a humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.” The author, who signed his missive “Ivan Tribble,” writes:

The content of the blog may be less worrisome than the fact of the blog itself. Several committee members expressed concern that a blogger who joined our staff might air departmental dirty laundry (real or imagined) on the cyber clothesline for the world to see. Past good behavior is no guarantee against future lapses of professional decorum.

He continues:

Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn’t want to know more.

At my university, there are a few faculty making use of blogs in educational ways by having a “class blog.” It’s a means of interaction outside of the classroom. Students can post articles they’ve written for a journalism class and have the other students comment publicly on the piece. It’s especially interesting to see conversations spring up online as students respond to each other’s comments. Also because these blogs are out on the internet, sometimes people from outside the class will respond to an issue being discussed. Obviously a public blog wouldn’t be appropriate for all classes, but it’s an innovative and appealing way to get journalism students comfortable with putting their words “out there” for all to see.

THE GOOD NEWS: I usually don’t associate the Microsoft Money Machine with feel good news stories, but here’s a nice one. A 10-year-old Pakistani girl named Arfa Karim Randhawa is the youngest known person to achieve a Microsoft certification. She’s a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, and we applaud her with certainty on her achievement. Apparently news of Miss Randhawa’s computer expertise spread, and Microsoft brought her and her father over to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA for a visit including some facetime with Bill Gates. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has the full story: In smarts, she’s a perfect 10.

THE BAD NEWS: If Miss Randhawa gets an internship with Microsoft in, say, 10 years during college, she’ll probably be working on the “most secure version of Windows EVER!” (insert joke here). Actually, PC’s running Microsoft Windows have gotten so bad that people are chucking perfectly good computers into the trash and getting new ones. Why? Pop-up ads, spyware, adware, all that Windows-centric crap. Read about this new trend in Microsoft computing over at the NYTimes.com: Corrupted PC’s Find New Home in the Dumpster.

After listening to a lot of Narco Tango this spring, on heavy rotation this summer at Casa Stout is Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats. It’ll get you moving. It’ll get you thinking. Interesting stuff. In this remix culture, here is some authentic folk music of the electronic variety. It’s heavy Miami Bass to get the body moving, weird samples, rough lyrics in Portuguese—it’s perfect for summer. Highly recommended.

Stylus Magazine review here. Minneapolis City Pages review here. And also the Village Voice review.

The Google Toolbar was a handy companion for evaluating websites and doing searches back in the day when Internet Explorer was the only game in town. I’ve been using Firefox (previously Firebird, Phoenix) for a while now, and I’m glad that Google finally has released their toolbar for Firefox. The Google Toolbar for Firefox doesn’t need to have a pop-up blocker since that is built-in to Firefox, but it has some good features. There’s an open source alternative to the Google Toolbar called Googlebar, but like most open source software it has solid technical capabilities but a horrible, horrible interface. The Googlebar is hugely ugly, and it is missing one key feature that only the Google Toolbar has: PageRank. With the Google Toolbar, you can opt-in to see the Google PageRank for any web page on a scale of 1 to 10. If you need to evaluate web pages, it’s a handy tool.

Do you have a notebook that runs hot? I have an old HP Pavilion zd7000 that I love. The eleven pound beast has a 17-inch wide-screen display, full-size keyboard that includes a number pad, FireWire port, four USB ports, a DVD+RW drive, 802.11g WiFi, and even a parallel port for my ancient laser printer. Since I purchased it to be a desktop replacement to take with me on the rare occasion that I travel or easily move to the porch when the weather is nice, the usual battery of complaints (heavy, short battery life, noisy, too wide, too thick, etc..) don’t bother me. But it runs hot.

It runs really hot. It runs so hot that the fans never stop and often kick into high gear for the least of tasks. It also over heated in a rather warm training center.

I found a solution that does not entail hanging half of the unit off the side of a table or propping it up with a book to increase air flow under the unit. The Targus Notebook Chill Mat and ChillHub are cooling mats with two fans for heat dissipation. I opted for the heavier (2lb 5oz vs 15oz) ChillHub because it had an AC Adapter to power the USB ports and fans. Now, my zd7000 runs cooler and quieter.

I know that there are several people laughing at me and my nearly fifteen pounds of formerly febrific hardware. Go ahead and have a good laugh. I am happy and hope this will help someone in a similar situation keep cool too.

So you may be saying to yourself, “Wow, this Manufactured Environments thing is really goddamn awesome.” We hear you, and we love you. We also want to point out that the previous entry—the photo of Lyndon Johnson’s oval office—marked the 500th post here. Some of you have been with us since the beginning, and some of you have only started reading us recently. We hope you’re finding a little bit of the sunshine here on ManuEnvi, and we look forward to five and a half more years of blogging insanity.

Thanks for all the support.

LBJ Oval Office, originally uploaded by dstout.

At the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, there is a 7/8ths-scale recreation of the Oval Office at the White House as it was during Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration.

LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, originally uploaded by dstout.

The archives at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. Each red box has a gold presidential seal and contains documents related to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency. There are something like 55 million documents in those red folders.