Kurt Andersen’s Words We Don’t Say
In 1997, when I was first hired at New York magazine, Kurt Andersen, now a best-selling novelist and radio-show host, had just been fired as editor. Everybody was grieving about this, though not me, since I wouldn’t have had a job there otherwise. And though it wasn’t until years later that I even met Kurt, he unwittingly left me a gift: tacked to the bulletin board in the office I took over was a single page titled “Words We Don’t Say.” It contained, as you might surmise, words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine. Just yesterday, I rescued it from a bunch of old office stuff that I was throwing out, and I have to say, 14 years later, it’s still a pretty useful list of phony-baloney vocabulary that editors are well-advised to excise from stories.
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I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little; I’m right, you’re wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
I’ve felt this way for a long time.
Many were outraged when Willie Revillame goaded a child named Jan-Jan to dance in a macho dancer style. Even while he was already crying, he was still goaded to dance. Needless to say, it already caused a Net Rage and it revived initiatives to permanently censure the long-notorious Revillame, who had smears on his name after the MTB incident and the Wowowee stampede, plus more.
But this brings me to a topic I have long thought about: Does Filipino culture really treat children poorly? The treatment of Jan Jan in the show may actually be a barometer of the way Philippine society as a whole treats their children.
[...] Even within families, children are used for adults’ pleasure. At parties, they are sometimes made to dance the Ocho-Ocho, Spaghetti Dance or other funny dances just to make the adults laugh. I find that rather unkind. Adults like these only treat children as a source of entertainment, and not as the future. Thus, the disrespect that media shows in children may or may not be a reflection of treatment in the family.
There was a time when I’d gladly sing and dance and declaim on top of coffee tables, no goading necessary, but not everybody feels the same way and even if it’s “just” a kid who does, that opinion should matter. And people wonder where all the angst and emo(-ness?) come from.
(Title from Matilda.)
The Many Hats of Front-End Engineers
Allen Rabinovich of the YUI team says a front-end engineer has many hats. One must be an engineer, an anthroplogist, an artist, and a writer, and to a lesser extent, a paranoid and a futurist.
Even if this isn’t up your alley, the talk is insightful and inspiring for conference speaking—he used one long slide of doodles (instant sketchnotes) revealed portion by portion. Transcript here.
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Screen: Macbeth
The extended run of Screen: Macbeth is from March 11-13. It’s a shame that there aren’t more tickets because this is a must-see, must-experience.
The production merges live performance with film and draws on traditional shadow theater to create a world where Shakespeare’s poetic language meets with a heightened visual environment. It responds to the quest for a contemporary analogue to the supernatural and finds it onscreen. Screen: Macbeth turns on the dichotomies between our real lives an dour screen selves, recognizing that the boundaries continue to blur between them as we find on screens—whether in movies, television, computers, and other digital devices—mirrors of our deepest desires and fantasies, embodiments of wished-for personas and second selves, a playworld for things we dare not do in reality.
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- Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
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- Lady Macbeth
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- Three Witches
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- Three Witches
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- Army of King Duncan
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- Army of King Duncan
On haters and complainers
Two gems I ran into in an article about a tumblelog about an app store (how many are there already, really):
Where the heck were you when the page was blank? – Paul Butterworth
Most haters are full of ideas yet have low creative output. – Nick Campbell
See what I mean about irrational rage?
Five Emotions Invented By The Internet
- A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled.
- A sudden and irrational rage in response to reading an ‘@-reply’ on Twitter.
- The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation.
- The car collision of appetite and discomfort one feels simultaneously when using the internet to seek and consume images or information that may be considered unseemly or inappropriate.
- The sense of fatigue and disconnect one experiences after emitting a massive stream of content only to hit some kind of ‘wall’ and forget and/or abandon the entire thing.
This feels accurate, although sudden and irrational rage in response to reading something doesn’t just happen on Twitter.
HTML5 is HTML and beyond
As if the mainstream isn’t confused enough as it is, the W3C has gone ahead and unveiled a new logo for HTML5 and used it as the umbrella term for the latest technologies in front-end web development, much to all the standardistas’ protests.
HTML5 is HTML but now, apparently, it now also encompasses CSS3, the new audio and video formats, and even more jargon like geolocation, web sockets, SVG, and so on.
Another interesting development is the resurgence of standards compliance buttons that were in vogue years before the term “social media” even existed. Still not thrilled about a craze that doesn’t really blend well in designs.
At least they look cooler now? There seems to be a bit of a superhero vibe to the logo (with the shield and the “5″ looking like Superman’s “S”) and the rest of the symbols.
