No, I'm not heralding the end of blogs (and neither—I don't think—was Baldur Bjarnason when he coined the phrase meme in 2003) any more than Roland Barthes was heralding the end to individual authorship hinted at (in quite different phrases and tones) in both the original Esquire article on Wikipedia recently submited for wikification and the wiki-edited version thereof. Please! I just started mine and I still need time to play with it.

But in Monday's Textuality class, a fellow student brought up the possibility that the immediate and pointed nature of hypertext perhaps makes its author's intention more capable of being pinned down than that of a non-hypertext author. It was an interesting point, even though the focus of Barthes' academic-meme-initiating essay was on the idea that "a text is made of multiple writings" that come together in the act of reading rather than in the act of writing—not the (also important) idea that an author's intentionality is too difficult to determine to be a worthwhile point of literary study.

But the logical conclusion of my classmate's point would have been that web writing brings the focus back to the person of the writer, so I had to point out the emphasis of web 2.0 content—textual or otherwise—on interest and, more importantly, usefulness to the reader/user…to the point that the multiple writings/apps of the web not only come together in the experience of reading/using but are altered from their original state by the reader/user. (Man, there needs to be a single word for that…re-user?)

rollyo logo

Then, as if posted from the ether to make me feel good about my point of view, into my bloglines popped a boing boing post about rollyo, the candy-named DIY-er's dream come true with a childhood-snack-evoking logo. Rollyo subverts even the authors of the web app to end all web apps: search.

This guy has a whole heap of website buttons. These buttons all look too much alike and it hurts my eyes to look at them all together like that. Can't some innovation-minded graphic designer think of a better, less eyestrain-inducing, and more creative button format? Isn't the internet all about ingenuity? Why do everyone's buttons look the same???

Anyway, this one is my fave:

Beau Brummell engraving

Today in my Textuality class I learned for the first time of Beau Brummell, (apparently) the original dandy.

You may wonder, what does this have to do with Textuality? If you were familiar with my syllabus, you would further wonder, and what could it possibly have to do with Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground?

Well.

You see, the underground man's neurotic narcicissim makes him, in my professor's opinion, rather rock 'n rollish. And rock 'n roll, it was explained to us, would not exist without dandyism (by way of suaveness, natch). And thus without Beau Brummell, we would have no Kurt Cobain (and no underground man).

Of course, all this has nothing to do with my professor's personal research interests.

Hey, as long as I learn about cool, obscure dandies I'm not complaining.

Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day 2005! You know what this means: Free range to act like a complete idiot all day long, ay matey!

I guess this year the guys who dreamed this up are mostly celebrating the release of their new book. If I'd known that inventing a simply ludicrous holiday could get me a book deal, I'd have done it years ago. So I guess we could say this is the holiday to celebrate the concept of: If you thought of it and it's funny, do it before someone else does.

Say it ain't so! According to a BBC article, Paul Haggis is writing a new James Bond movie with no gadgets!!!

According to Haggis, "it's going to be good." Hah! Everyone knows that the only reason to watch Bond flicks is the gadgets (and the chicks, if you're into that sort of thing). What could be less appealing than a 28-year-old Bond with "no Q" and "no gadgets"? Bond's appeal is totally that of the debonair older man running around saving the world with the coolest piece of useful technology that no one's ever going to be able to use in real life (oh, and usually some girl in a bathing suit).

[via agenda, inc.]

DJ Spooky's video remix of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is pretty darn spooky alright.

[via kottke]

my first Kupat Ha'ir pamphlet

Nothing brightens up my day quite like the promise of a personal Bracha, which is why I was delighted to receive my first glossy 8.5" x 11" Kupat Ha'ir fundraising brochure, full of tales of tzedaka-givers blessed with babies and photographs of rabbis davening their hearts out, last spring (theme: "Shavuos is Approaching").

But seriously, folks: What the… ?

What I want to know is how the heck I got on the Kupat Ha'ir mailing list. I hate to admit this, but I did a brief stint of direct mail marketing and, after buying and selling people's name like so many head of cattle, I need to determine the source of all junk mail large and small. This is a particularly mysterious case, since I'm not involved in or subscribed to anything that would have sold my name off to a tzedaka organization. I don't even subscribe to The New Yorker, people!

my second pamphlet, arrived Monday

So Monday I got my second Kupat brochure (at least they aren't innundating me with this stuff). My favorite parts are the medical success stories:

The doctor was surprised…but we weren't surprised, because we knew that Kupat Ha'ir has the power to vanish bacteria.

[...]

The baby was screeching with pain. Another ear infection… I contributed the cost of a trip to the health clinic and the treatment… and we all enjoyed a pleasant Shabbos.

My friend suffered from serious pain for quite a long period of time…I suggested that she contribute to Kupat Ha'ir, assuring her that she would see yeshuos. She did…to the doctor's surprise they saw that the fluid (around the membrane of the heart) was receding and there was no need, at this pint, to carry out the treatment they had originally planned
to do. [sic]

Actually, the wallet story is pretty rich too:

The family spent forty minutes searching every inch of the floor, shaking out the tablecloths, looking in flowerpots and even emptying the garbage. No wallet.

[...]

"I am now contributing NIS 20 to Kupat Ha'ir on your behalf," the sister announced, "and don't say you never heard me say so."

When the wallet was found, less than a moment later, he couldn't say he hadn't heard her say so, because everyone in the family heard her say it, loud and clear.

Ahhh, Kupat Ha'ir: the answer to all life's little problems. Well lucky me for being signed up to their blessed list. Heh, and I'm not alone, either. Too bad it's such a shady organization, or maybe I'd get a daven to help me find my keys.