-
from BibliOdyssey
Monthly Archives: February 2009
links for 2009-02-03
-
pretty cool
-
from ResourceShelf: LOTS of feeds in the health realm
-
via BoingBoing "I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways…"
Geography lives
I’ve been saying so for years, and here’s a lovely example:
links for 2009-02-02
-
from Strange Maps: "There is no satisfactory explanation, at least not to my knowledge, for the higher than average incidence of lame word-play in the names of hair salons.."
addendum
…and on another page in the same NYTimes, see Dumb and Dumber 2.0: iFart application for a not-unrelated bit of Nacirema consumer lore, somehow especially appropriate for SuperBowlSunday
Mauled
The almost-tragic rootlessness of the (North?) American psyche is mightily exemplified in a New York Times article on The Mall of America. A snippet:
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.
In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again.
So the mall we married has become the toxic spouse we can’t quit, though we really must quit, but just not any time soon. The mall, for its part, is wounded by our ambivalence and feels financially adrift.
Malls are Nacirema and Naidanac writ large, revealing all the brassy crumminess and deficiencies of taste that these societies celebrate in architecture and mass consumption (how’s that for blanket indictment?). Take a wander through deadmalls.com, and peek into deadmalls.blogspot.com for daily doses of mallery. Note that malls are the quintessential securitized Panopticons, bristling with CCTV and private police forces. And don’t let’s get started on mall food, probably the greatest concentrations of high-fructose corn syrup dispensing on the planet (and of deep fat frying too). And mall music…
…described as “pop contemporary adult hottest hits.” South Avenue collects the upscale, chic stores and pipes in “rock adult album alternative.” East Broadway is supposed to feel contemporary and gets “pop adult contemporary/modern.”
Oooooh.
links for 2009-02-01
-
from Google Geo Developers Blog