UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

This is something that I think is big news, but so far I’ve heard nothing about it in the “News.”

In the words of Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, from an email I received today:

The Obama-Biden Transition Project is a nonpartisan entity whose purpose is to facilitate the transition to a new government and prepare for the next administration.

In the past, efforts like these have often been very secretive and funded by the D.C. lobbying and corporate community.

But, like in the campaign, we’ve decided to do things differently.

For the first time, transition efforts won’t be financed with donations from Washington lobbyists and PACs — which means we’ll need to keep asking for your help. Your generosity during the campaign helped get us here, but building a more transparent and open government means continuing to rely on a broader group of people to do this the right way.

That’s cool, I think, and also significant. I made several donations to the campaign over the course of the year, and I’ve made a donation to the transition project, too. Donating money is the lazy way to get involved, of course, but at least it’s something. I really believe Barack Obama is committed to doing politics differently, and I believe he has the brains and the vision to make it happen. If you agree with me, here’s how you can help.

(P.S. Yes, they got Copeland to play drums.)

But the question on my mind (besides “How is that guy not vomiting?”) is, “Why the hell were they hauling a whale carcass through the middle of a city on a flatbed truck?”

Found here via here.

But to prove that every cloud, or punctured whale carcass, has a silver lining (ugh… sorry… I don’t want that image either), a few clicks onward led me to this wonderment: a photographic compendium of audio cassettes. Now this is a dead technology, laughably inferior to what we almost take for granted today. But from about 1981 when I got my first little red portable tape recorder from Radio Shack, until 1998, when I got my first CD burner, cassettes were it, baby, and I probably went through thousands of blank cassettes from just about every available brand between the ages of 8 and 24. And if you can’t appreciate that, at least I’ve found someone who can.

It’s true: I pay very little attention to professional sports of any kind. It’s not that I don’t like them, I’m just usually not that interested. I used to be; I collected baseball cards in middle school, and my peak of interest in pro sports conveniently coincided with “my” Minnesota Twins winning the World Series for the first time ever, in 1987.

Since then, it’s been all downhill. I was excited about the Vikings in 1998, only to be let down by Gary Anderson’s only missed field goal of the year, in the NFC Championship game. I watched the Twins’ tiebreaker game against the White Sox this year, only to be let down yet again by a team that has an incredible knack for falling ever-so-slightly short, again and again. Perhaps this “always the bridesmaid” trait common amongst the Minnesota pro teams is what makes it hard for me to be a sports fan. But more likely, I’m just not that interested, and that’s all there is to it. These days the only professional sports I actually get excited about watching are Wimbledon and the Olympics, and their relative infrequency probably contributes to my enthusiasm.

Yet, I am still drawn in by unexpected developments, like the Steelers’ 11-10 win this week. I knew that was a weird score, and I thought it was cool when I learned that out of the over 12,000 NFL games played in the league’s history to date, this was the first ever to end with that score.

But this fact still caught me totally off guard. I was reading kottke.org this morning and he just casually mentioned that the Seattle Supersonics had moved to Oklahoma City. To quote Dave McFly, “When the hell did this happen?” This year, apparently, and I had no clue.

Oh well.

You can’t change the tempo, and the visualizer slows it down big time (at least on the Mac, which seems less efficient at some client-side browser technologies like JavaScript and Flash for whatever reason). But nonetheless, I am in utter and total awe at this achievement in JavaScript.

JS-909 JavaScript Drum Machine

It used to be that the web was nothing but sites like this: rambling, semi-coherent… well, webs of absurdist humor with no interest in or consideration of making money or doing anything other than amusing an inner circle and confusing everyone else. Speaking of inner circles, there’s a fair amount of stuff on here devoted to Ayn Rand, but not as a genuine disciple of her grandiose quasi-philosophizing; rather, in parody and/or mockery of it.

I was particularly intrigued when I read the microprint at the bottom of the page and saw a passing thanks to someone who, while surely not the singular worldwide owner of his particular name, is nonetheless unique enough that I suspect he is in fact the same person I went to high school with, but who now lives in Sweden. I’m not sure what he’s up to these days, but seeing as his greatest claim to fame in the early ’90s was having screen printed a number of t-shirts featuring a blow-up of a frame from Bloom County, wherein a generic “Liberal” — who happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to our band director — is popping prairie dog-like out of a hole in the ground* and shouting “No nukes!”, the connection would not surprise me.

And if you’re able to make any sense out of that last sentence, then you might enjoy reading on…

*OK, it’s not a hole in the ground; it’s a bush. But I was describing it from memory prior to my excessive amount of searching for the image finally bearing fruit, and afterwards I didn’t feel like rewriting the sentence.