A Sobering Thought
So my school used an internal mail system/bulletin board system which kept a log of all the time spent online using the school’s email or message boards. As of today, my total time spent on this system over the past four and a half years is 8 weeks, 1 day, 18 hours and 40 minutes. And that’s purely active time, since the system logs you out after a few minutes of inactivity.
I propose that Facebook and MySpace institute a similar mechanism, that when one logs off, it would say “You have spent x weeks, y days, etc. on Facebook.”
I think that faced with such an exorbitant number, everyone would become more mindful of the time spent online, and perhaps a bit more conscious of their usage. If one knew one spent four hours on Facebook in one day alone, perhaps one would consider making some changes. Remember reading? Painting? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to spend a lot of time online, rather that much like watching T.V., most people are unaware of just how much time they are using.
It’s true. Sarah Palin is in a corn maze.
Sarah Palin is in a corn maze. This does not mean that Sarah Palin is actually in a corn maze, but that there is a corn maze made to look like Sarah Palin. You have to be looking down on the maze and not in it in order to see the likeness.
Courtesy of Jamie Rhein at Gadling.
Flannery Says
A rare audio file has surfaced, Flannery O’Connor gives a lecture one year before her death at 39. She gives this lecture at Notre Dame, about her writing, as well as reads her classic story A Good Man is Hard to Find. Very rare, and her Southern wit and charm are evident through and through.
update: the lecture she gives is also found in the book Mystery and Manners, I forgot to mention earlier.
- “Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without.” – Flannery O’Connor
transgender in the workplace
What happens to female-to-male and male-to-female transgender people in the workplace?
We use the workplace experiences of transgender people – individuals who change their gender typically with hormone therapy and surgery – to provide new insights into the long-standing question of what role gender plays in shaping workplace outcomes. Using an original survey of male-to-female and female-to-male transgender people, we document the earnings and employment experiences of transgender people before and after their gender transitions. We find that while transgender people have the same human capital after their transitions, their workplace experiences often change radically. We estimate that average earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increase slightly following their gender transitions, while average earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fall by nearly 1/3. This finding is consistent with qualitative evidence that for many male-to-female workers, becoming a woman often brings a loss of authority, harassment, and termination, but that for many female-to-male workers, becoming a man often brings an increase in respect and authority. These findings challenge the omitted variables explanations for the gender pay gap and illustrate the often hidden and subtle processes that produce gender inequality in workplace outcomes.
Live from New York it’s Saturday Night
clusterflock open thread, 17
Light a match.
Disposable optimism
I offer this up only because the Flock seems pensive and muted tonight. Yesterday, for an hour and a half, I was an optimist. It passed.
Everything makes sense from a reasonable distance.
(FLIP ultra + balloon + corn = this)
A Portland Moment
Or so my Portland friend characterized it.
Last Sunday all of the old folks had spilled out of the concert hall after the symphony orchestra’s matinee, and they were walking to their cars — guardedly, as this was, after all, downtown. Street people, you know.
And my friend was walking behind a gaggle of elders when what should appear on the near horizon but the ultimate nightmare — five or six scruffy black-clad ruffians, droogy-looking guys in their twenties and early thirties.
Fear and trembling.
And just as the one party passed the other, with perfect timing, one of the ruffians said to another, “Well, I hope ya don’t think I only wanted ta eat her pussy ’cause I wanted ta score another bag offa her.”
clusterflock open thread, 16
Pull my finger.
Paul Newman dies at 83
With his strong, classically handsome face and piercing blue eyes, Newman was a heartthrob just as likely to play against his looks, becoming a favorite with critics for his convincing portrayals of rebels, tough guys and losers. “I was always a character actor,” he once said. “I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood.”
Newman had a soft spot for underdogs in real life, giving tens of millions to charities through his food company and setting up camps for severely ill children. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, and in favor of civil rights, he was so famously liberal that he ended up on President Nixon’s “enemies list,” one of the actor’s proudest achievements, he liked to say.
Good morning America!
Just some music to lighten you up in your financial crisis.
Death in Vegas, Soul Auctioneer.
Death of a Shade of a Hue
A fun and telling exercise/game in which you line up color blocks in a row to change from one color to another. When it’s over, they tell you where you have trouble differentiating. I scored 26, what did you get?
improbable
Seven feather pillows on the highway. One exploded.
Naked Bust of Michelle Obama
By Daniel Edwards entitled ‘Michelle Obama’s Makeover For America’
Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Male
Sasha Baron Cohen was escorted from a fashion show in Milan on Friday.
After a few minutes of darkness while Baron Cohen, or Bruno, was escorted off the catwalk, the show started again. Models had kept their cool but the designer was visibly upset when she appeared at the end of the show.
After Life
Stained With A Past Life. Aghios Ioannis (Άγιος Ιωάννης, Κρήτη) Crete. Phil Bebbington.
If any of y’all are going to be in the Texas Hill Country the next couple of months, stop by the Watson Studio Gallery, where the After Life exhibition features this photograph by clusterflock friend Phil Bebbington.
After Life runs from September 27 to November 22, 2008. The Watson Studio Gallery is on North Nugent in Johnson City, Texas.
Sarah Palin – The Alaska Pageant – Intro
(via Waxy)
Update: (from Deron) Looks like the video has been removed from youtube. Andy Baio of Waxy.org saved (most of) the footage and has it here.
Sorry, Mike Dresser
While the bail-out may be neccesary that doesn’t mean it isn’t effectively putting money into “companies’ shareholders and boards” since many of the bankrupties are arguable predicated on the greed of the executives:
Henry Paulson, who in his current role as Treasury Secretary is pushing for a bank bailout, accounts for $82 million of the total. That was his pay for three years (2003 to 2005) as CEO of Goldman Sachs. DeBoskey included the pay of 57 different individuals, pulling the data that companies report on their top 5 officials to the Securities & Exchange Commission, to get to the $2.1 billion total.
Now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, the smallest of the five companies, was tops in pay. It doled out $743 million in compensation for all its top officers from 2003 through 2007. Next was Goldman Sachs with $726.5 million, then AIG at $336 million, Fannie Mae at $207.2 million and Freddie Mac at $90 million.
Applying the same analysis to a broader universe of banks, financial firms, insurers, mortgage brokers and others who DeBoskey identifies as the companies likely to benefit from the proposed bailout and the total executive pay comes to $27 billion.
LaBruzzo considering plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have tubes tied
Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.
“We’re on a train headed to the future and there’s a bridge out, ” LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. “And nobody wants to talk about it.”
LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.
(via Beezies & Bankrolls )
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I just watched the Werner Herzog film last night. The movie is slow and plodding much like the river the conquistadors themselves were fighting against, but you should not let the pacing deter you. Klaus Kinski, who plays Aguirre, alone makes the film worth while.
Plus the film itself has some interesting history:
The camera used to shoot the film was stolen by Herzog from the Munich Film School. Years later, Herzog recalled:
“It was a very simple 35mm camera, one I used on many other films, so I do not consider it a theft. For me, it was truly a necessity. I wanted to make films and needed a camera. I had some sort of natural right to this tool. If you need air to breathe, and you are locked in a room, you have to take a chisel and hammer and break down a wall. It is your absolute right.”
Below is the first ten minutes to wet your palate (I know for a fact you can stream this on netflix):
spoiler alert
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza notes that an ad proclaiming “McCain wins debate!” was already running on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site Friday morning. (A screen shot of the page can be seen here.) The reader who tipped Cillizza also saw a second ad that contained a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis: “McCain won the debate — hands down.”
via Salon
Mom
I saw this image, and it set the alarm bells ringing. It was like a sudden view of the future.
Sarah Palin is “Mom” from Futurama.
Or maybe she represents the embodied combination of Palin and McCain. From Wikipedia:
“…behind the scenes Mom is a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, deeply bitter, cruel and narcissistic gravel-voiced crow with an almost anorexic physique, who routinely abuses her terrified sons (see below) into submission, treating them like dogsbodies.”
Palin/McCain = MomCorp
Stand-up Dave, 3
Stand-up Dave’s archnemsis (in his mind) was a soft-spoken Englishman who made most of his money selling kites in the western coast of Florida.
Cindy
I’m sorry when I rappelled through the closet at the library I broke so many dioramas. I wasn’t aware the crack at the bottom led outside the convention center. Or that the closet would disappear.
The bail-out may not be crazy
To quote martyrstwotunas, this is the “first thoughtful article I’ve read concerning the bail-out:”
Spending a sum of money that could buy you a war in Iraq should not come easily; and the notion of any bail-out is deeply troubling to any self-respecting capitalist. Against that stand two overriding arguments. First this is a plan that could work (see article). And, second, the potential costs of producing nothing, or too little too slowly, include a financial collapse and a deep recession spilling across the world: those far outweigh any plausible estimate of the bail-out’s cost.
