Holding Obama's Feet to the Daily Show Flame

The question for the Daily Show was never really "Is there enough that's funny about Obama?" but "What will Obama do that's just as f-ed up as any other politician?"

This week had a couple of doozies.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Moral Kombat
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

The Kornbluth Brothers: Movie Pitch for "Love and Taxes"

Josh and Jake Kornbluth pitch their latest movie, Love and Taxes, based on Josh's monologue of the same name, a sort-of sequel to Haiku Tunnel.

As an indie feature, they are shooting it bit by bit (as funding allows), and there's already a rough cut of one scene available: YouTube link

More info about the film at JoshKornbluth.com and the film's
fundraising page at IndieGoGo.

Perks for donors: methinks the $1040 level perk is a better deal than the $2500 appear in the movie: at the 1040EZ donation level you get a Case Name. In my book, being name checked in a scene about tax law would be even cooler than a walk-on.

Bristol Palin's New Gig

Gail Collins is leaving Maureen Dowd in the dust.

100 days of Obama: the Facebook news feed

Slate writers Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson relive the first 100 days of the Obama administration through the lens (and language) of Facebook:



If you're not on Facebook (or not extremely in tune with Washington politics) a few of the jokes might fall with a thud. But I totally loved this.

I'd have more to say about it, but I need to go catch up on Lost.

Link

The "We didn't know" defense

The New York Times outlines how the members of the Bush Administration (and Congress) who advocated for and approved the torturing of prisoners in its custody had no fucking clue what they were agreeing to.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said.

This is why the rule of law matters. Because sometimes those in power lack the competence required to be put in charge of life-and-death decisions.

I am sick with disgust.

Read the entire story.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Twitter: You're Doing It Wrong

Joined Twitter, but still don't get it? Perhaps these tips may help.

1. You do not need to follow celebrities.

Most celebrities on Twitter are dull. The fact that they have tens or hundreds of thousands of people following them does not make them any less boring. In fact it suggests to them that Twitter users are all too happy to read the lamest details of their celebrity life.

Now if you enjoy celebrity-watching, and feel a thrill knowing that Ashton Kutcher and P. Diddy are together on Larry King RIGHT NOW, or if it is your dream to get a 140-character answer to your question from John Cleese, go right ahead.

2. You do not need to receive breaking news

It can feel exciting to learn about an earthquake, or a plane crash, or a daring sea rescue minutes (or even hours) before the news shows up on nytimes.com. But unless there's something you can do about it, breaking news doesn't have much actual value to your life.

Alternately, you might want to be the person who turns around and shares the breaking news with others. In which case: sure, become the news desk.

(Note also that people who receive breaking news via Twitter are advised not to crack jokes about said breaking news in the real world, as no one will know what the hell you are talking about until they hear about it the next day on Morning Edition.)

3. You do not need to follow your friends

Unless you and your friends-in-real-life use Twitter to meet up at a conference or on a night of bar-hopping, you do not need to follow your friends' Twitter feeds to keep up with their lives. That is what Facebook is for.

Most of the people I follow (and who now follow me) I don't know in real life. Or, I didn't before Twitter.

4. It is okay to prune your list of people you follow

If someone you're following isn't posting tweets that are interesting, useful, or funny, feel free to stop following them. They might be funny and interesting and lovely in real life, but on Twitter their random mutterings are only so much noise.

5. There is no harm in trying

Find new people to follow by seeing who your favorite Twitterers follow. Funny Twitterers may also have a list of "Favorites", which may point you to other funny Twitterers. There's no cost to follow someone on a trial basis. If, after a week (or in some cases a day) you decide that the person's tweets aren't interesting, useful, or funny, you can prune them off your list.

6. Write tweets that are interesting, useful, or funny

Every time you type in the box and click "update", it's like you're stepping up to a microphone to make a brief statement. Make it worth everybody's time.

Smart people have two Twitter accounts: one personal, one professional. That way you can be interesting or useful about your job to one audience, and interesting or funny about your kids to another.

Me, I just try to be funny, regardless of topic. Which leads me to jokes at the intersection of HTML programming and bluegrass.

Perhaps I'm the one who's doing it wrong.

7. Someone has probably gotten to that joke before you

If you care about these things, there's search.twitter.com.

Tell me what I'm doing wrong below.

The unlikeliness of Susan Boyle

My mom sent me this seven minute YouTube clip (embedding disabled) from last Saturday's "Britain's Got Talent" broadcast. If you haven't seen it I'd encourage you to give it a look rather than read my half-formed yammers about it.

I hate these shows. And while I am not a fan of the reality show in general*, by "these shows" I mean specifically the reality (and celebrity-reality) talent show. I hate the cruelty, the commerciality, the artifice, and the garish expressions of the lowest common denomination of taste. Oh and how I hate the padding.

But I cannot deny these shows' appeal. Which finds somewhat of an apotheosis in these seven minutes.

There is still much to be cynical about here: the bassoon underscore playing up the awkwardness of the contestant, the maudlin praise, the underlying condescension of the format. But as much as I wanted to dismiss this, or deconstruct it, there is something undeniably genuine and awesome in this moment.

Because despite all of the forgettable hours of ridiculous costumes, hairstyles, and product placements what everyone involved--the producers, the judges, the audience--most wants, deep down, is to witness is a nobody stepping out on the stage and coming back a star.

See it for yourself.


*Excepting Top Chef, The Amazing Race, and for a while I was able to enjoy Survivor.

Baraknophobia

Jon Stewart explains what being in the minority really feels like.

Oscar Mayer Commercial

via boingboing

Monkey, Aware of Emptiness

The boys and I were puttering in the backyard after dinner tonight, ostensibly working in the garden. ("How can we call it a garden when we haven't done any work on it since last year?" asked L)

R picked up one of the many bamboo poles and began to pose with it and thrust it about as a weapon against imaginary enemies. I heard him announcing his powers. I realized he was not showing off his finesse with a light saber, but what I did hear surprised me. "Did you say you're Shah Rukh Khan?"

"No," said R. "I said Sun WuKong!"

"Yeah, dude, you're Sun WuKong!" shouted L, and went over to instruct R on the finer points of wielding Sun WuKong's cudgel.

In Chinese, Sun either means or implies "monkey," and WuKong is his Buddhist name, which means "aware of emptiness," or more precisely, ""the one who has Achieved the Perfect Comprehension of the Extinction of both Emptiness and non-Emptiness." 孫悟空, also known as the Monkey King, is the hero of the classical Chinese novel of the 16th century, Journey to the West.

I picked up several volumes of a 34-volume illustrated version of the novel at the Salvation Army. We've been reading them before bedtime this week. The illustrations are terrible-- turns out, this collection is likely the print adaptation of Shangai Animation Film Studio's 1960's animated series based on the novel. The books were released in English in the 1980s, about the time the animated series was released on video.

Monkey can fly (well, leap 54,000 kilometers in a single bound), transform himself, is on a mission (to escort the Tang Priest Xuanzang to the West to obtain Buddhist Scriptures), and beats the tar out of evil spirits and demons. In short, he's a superhero, albeit one that has a tail and take his marching orders from Kuan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion.



Sorry, Yoda. The Force is with Monkey.

Power Ranger or Chinese immortal?

NYTimes: Sugar is back. As a health food.

Grocery store. Bread aisle. Several competing brands. Given two comparable varieties, say, Brand X multigrain, and Brand Y multigrain, which one do I choose?

I used to distinguish on price.

Now, I'll scan the ingredient labels. If I see High Fructose Corn Syrup, I won't buy it. If the competing brand lists Sugar in its place, I'll buy that one. Hell, I'll even pay a premium. I believe I've paid up to a dollar more for a loaf of bread to avoid HFCS.

I'll pay extra for the perception that I'm getting a more "natural" product.

The New York Times covers sugar's second act as a "healthy" food.

Good for sugar, I think. But then the article doesn't just cover this marketing trend-- adjustments by processed food and beverage manufacturers responding to consumer preference: it goes on to quote several scientists who point out that nutritionally-- there's no difference between HFCS and Sugar. An empty calorie is an empty calorie.

So much for my health.

Still, Coke tasted better in India. Like Mexico, they make their cola with sugar, not corn.

And I still get to feel righteous for sticking it to the tyranny of the corn states.

The post-news world

Two brilliant and provocative reads on the future of news (and the collapse of the newspaper business) burned through blogs and RSS readers this week. Both writers sit far enough outside of the industry to offer a clear perspective and to be ignored by anyone inside the industry with the power to change it. (Although you can be sure journalists themselves were emailing each other about both pieces all week.) Both pieces attempt to confront the paradox of ever-falling revenue and ever-increasing readership.

Clay Shirky presents the more harsh vision of the future, which he telegraphs in his title, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable."

He compares our current, electronic shift in information distribution to the invention of the printing press and italic type, and the massive cultural shifts those helped make possible. (Copernicus, anyone? The Protestant Reformation?)

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Shirky doesn't claim to know what journalism will look like once the revolution is completed. He does believe that the future lies not in the hands of the newspaper publishers, but in the hands of the dozens (even hundreds, or thousands) of experimenters who are attempting wholly new ways of connecting people to information (and to each other).

Steven Johnson shortens the lens to look at his own past as a media consumer in a speech he delivered at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin entitled "Old Growth Media and the Future of News".

He describes days he spent in his youth checking the bookstore repeatedly for the arrival of each new issue of Macworld, a magazine he relied on for news that was weeks (if not months) out-of-date by the time he read it. He contrasts that time (just 20 years ago) with the overabundance of news and information he now has at his fingertips via the world wide web.

Johnson, the author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, is far more of an optimist than Shirky. He articulates a vision for the future of professional journalists and news organizations, and asserts that on the other side of the demise of the local paper will be an even greater awareness of the news in one's neighborhood.

I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events...

As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.

Both posts are worth your time.

Shirky's essay is here. Johnson's is here.

And, for a bit of additional fun, here's a feature that ran on KRON-TV in San Francisco in 1981(!) about the future of "electronic newspapers", delivered via modem to your home "computer".



YouTube link

Jaw-dropping YouTube remix "album"

A great deal of hip-hop and electronica artistry begins by digging in used record bins, searching for bits and pieces that can be digitized, chopped up, and reassembled into something new. A snare fill here, a bass line there. Snippets of guitar riffs, piano arpeggios, vocal backing tracks, etc.

For his latest seven-song "album", ThruYou, Israeli musician Kutiman dug into a different wellspring for sampled sound: YouTube.

There he found a treasure trove of audio: drummers, pianists, flautists, church organists, string quartets, guitar soloists, harmonica and bouzouki players, a capella singers and rap freestylists. Plus video after video of synthesizers, vocoders, and audio effects box tests, oscilloscopes and wave form generators, even the sounds of pressing buttons on mixing equipment he was able to put to use. He calls "ThruYou" the "1st movement", an apt choice given that this particular wellspring is so vast (and ever expanding).

I wasn't able to wrap my head (or heart) around the nerd remix smash hit of 2008, Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals". That madcap stirfry of the past few decades of rock, pop, and hip-hop (finely diced and shredded) seemed best enjoyed whilst reading the Wikipedia article that catalogued all of the samples to the second.

Here you quickly realize that Kutiman used video editing software to assemble his mashups, meaning that you can SEE his source material unfolding in front of you. (In his words, "What you see is what you hear.") For me, watching these dozens of random faces and hands, posted initially to YouTube by disparate strangers hoping to instruct, to perform, to show off, to practice, or to simply connect, now juxtaposed in rhythmic counterpoint in ways they could not have foreseen was surprisingly emotional.

It felt like one of the those moments where a technology-fueled future felt more (rather than less) human, and the possibilities for art and music and creativity opened wide.

Plus I liked the tunes. (My favorite is embedded above.)

See and hear them for yourself. Alternate link here, if the site is down.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Steve Wozniak: Dancing with the Startups

Tim & I were wondering about Steve Wozniak's new path to stardom, and surmising that this could signal a much looser definition of 'star'.  Please suggest your nominations for next season's lineup from any of the following new 'star' categories (please add more):

1) Retired Bush administration spokesperson Ari Fleischer.

2) Unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee Harriet Myers.

3) Popular southern food cookbook author Paula Dean.

4) Former congressman Larry Craig.

5) The two guys who sell the beanie babies on late night TV.

6) Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.

7) Daredevil stunt pilot Capt Sully Sullenberger.

8) Newly-retired president Pervez Musharref.

9) Popular 3rd season American Idol semi-finalist [name]. 

10) Comic strip star Cathy of "Cathy".

Economic Recovery by Design

This week Barack Obama unveiled two new executive branch logos, one for recovery.gov, and one for the DOT's TIGER project (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery).

Of course branding is no substitute for results, but what's notable about the Obama administration's efforts (in contrast to the Bush administration's) are that they 1) look crisply modern, and 2) don't come off as baldface lies.

The former was accomplished by hiring Mode Project, the design studio that helped develop Barack Obama's campaign logo. They in turn enlisted the help of designers Aaron Draplin and Chris Glass, two surprising hip choices for government work.

The question of lying is not entirely a political assumption I am making; Bush routinely appeared in front of backdrops that made actual claims ("Helping Small Business", "Strengthening America's Economy", "Mission Accomplished"). Had there been a functioning Office of Legal Counsel under Bush they might have insisted on adding an asterisk to each of these "logos".

Bold visual design can evoke emotions and create implications, but doesn't make such claims.

Of course over the coming years we'll see if the product actually matches the implied brand promise...

Link

(Via Communicatrix, @gruber, et al.)

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

(via boingboing)
For visual learners, artist/designed Jonathan Jarvis explains the credit crisis.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Jon Stewart wraps his mind around Twitter

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Land of the Lost as a movie? They're not. Oh yes they are. Oh yes they did.

Directed by Brad "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" Silberling.

Cheney Dunk Tank Raises $800 Billion For Nation | The Onion

The stimulus has apparently been paid for, by Americans queueing up to dunk the exiting vice president at the 44th White House Carnival.

"All right, you candy arms, let's go,' Cheney shouted at the line of people, which consisted of Americans, non-Americans, out-of-work autoworkers, teachers, luminaries from the science community, gays, lesbians, military personnel, members of Congress, children, and the entire Arab-American population. 'Hey [former British prime minister Tony] Blair. I see you back there. Think you'll be able to stop crying long enough to throw the ball?'"

Read the story in full.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

The Big Picture on the Inauguration.

So yeah, it took me a couple of weeks to get around to The Big Picture's roundup of notable news photos of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. (Link)

And yes there are striking images of the pageantry, and of the crowd in Washington (including that overhead satellite shot of those millions on the Mall, clustered in front of the giant video screens).

But as with most posts from The Big Picture, some of the most revelatory photos are taken in the margins--images not deemed central enough to the story to be featured in national media outlets.

Here some of the most striking photos are of people watching televisions. At an army base in Baghdad. A bar in Montana. A hotel room in Boston. A taco stand in Mexico City. Outdoors at night in Kibera, Nairobi. The Best Buy at the Mall of America.

And my favorites include the sea of cell phone cameras raised by ball attendees hoping to capture a tiny glimpse the Obamas dancing together. The changing of official photographs at Guantanamo Naval Base. Bush inside the helicopter after takeoff looking out across Washington.

If you haven't been already you should go look now.

Who is on Twitter

New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones rounds up just who is using Twitter, including:

• people who are just back from a really awesome run

• people who are involved in "social networking" and optimizing the power of re-Tweeting and "computers"

• people who are hungry

• people who can't figure out what their kids want to eat

• Rachel Maddow

Go read the entire list

(Via Scott Simpson.)

Hide it under a bushel, no

The fact that your particular talent might not be traditionally performed within the context of a pageant is perhaps all the more reason to bring it.

Even if it isn't clear to the audience for the first two and a half minutes what your talent actually is.



From the 2009 Hawaiian Narcissus Festival.

via SeoulBrother, via @robot_operator

The Pooping Log

Ronan has been telling us about the festive yuletide log with the smily face in his classroom.
If you beat it with a stick, it poops candy.

Tonight he predicted that Christmas Eve it might poop out sardines.

Normally, I'd chalk this up to the imagination of a 4 year old. But wikipedia says it's an old Catalan custom.

MDA: An Open Letter to the New York Film Critics Film Circle

Mike D'Angelo posts his picks for the year's best, and quixotically asks the New York Critics Film Circle voters to go beyond the usual award fodder hyped by the studios. And, as usual, a great reference tool for heading to the video store.

That is, if you have time to watch videos anymore.

And if you even have a video store anymore.

Berkeley J-School: Multimedia Boot Camp --> Local News Sites

First week of graduate school in Journalism at Cal: a crash course in audio and video editing, and Flash animation. Why? Because the school (and the Ford Foundation, which is funding this project) recognizes the role of multimedia, multi-platform storytelling in the future of journalism.

Next, the students targeted local communities, asked what locals would want in local news, and then set about building web sites. They went live at the end of October.

There's one San Francisco site:

• Mission Loc@l

And six East Bay sites:

• Oakland North


• El Cerrito Focus


• inEmeryville


• East Bay West Online


• The (510) Report


• Albany Today

You access them all at: localreport.org

Award winning photojournalist and now J-School faculty member Richard Koci-Hernandez even created a video piece on the project (Vimeo link), but it's not as interesting as clicking around the student's local news sites.

Architecture - In Berkeley, Toyo Ito’s Plans for a Museum Wrapped in Honeycomb - NYTimes.com

Latest on Berkeley Art Museum, from Nicolai Ouroussoff, the NYT architecture critic. Interesting part is on page two, where practical concerns from the client (the museum) clash with the vision of the architect. Ouroussoff sides with the architect.

Translating the analogy

Tim, writing from the second leg of his India journey:

Autorickshaws in Chennai : autorickshaws in Delhi :: Asteroids : Sinistar

For those too young to remember, or who were busy with an actual life in 1982 to have been playing Sinistar at their local Golfland, I've provided a helpful visual translation.

In Asteroids, players control their ship with short bursts of thrust in an environment approximating zero-gravity physics (in two dimensions). Motion continues in a straight line, and even slows to a stop (as if there were somehow friction in space).

The asteroids you are attempting to destroy/avoid are also moving in straight lines at constant speeds. When they disappear off the edge of the screen, they reappear at the opposite edge (180° opposite), continuing to travel in the same direction at the same speed. The challenge is that as you shoot the larger, slow moving asteroids, they break down into smaller asteroids, now moving in new trajectories at quicker speeds.

At the start of each level, it is easy to sit in one spot and rotate your ship to shoot at asteroids passing by. As the level continues, you are forced to continually adjust your position with short (or long) bursts of thrust to avoid the paths of an increasing number of asteroids traveling at varied (if constant) rates of speed. The video below is illustrative (you do not have to watch the whole thing):



YouTube link

While unrealistic, the physics of the game are extremely predictable. When your ship is eventually destroyed, there is a sense that had you only done a better job of anticipating the various trajectories, you could have escaped your fate.

Sinistar begins cosmetically the same. You pilot a triangular ship in two dimensions, attempting to break apart large asteroids.

But unlike Asteroids,there are multiple things flying at you, in variable trajectories, at variable (non-constant) speeds. Worse still, one cannot control the acceleration of the ship with controlled engine thrusts. In Sinistar, THERE IS NO STOPPING.



YouTube link

Add to that the screaming Sinistar (skip ahead to 1:30 into the video), and a game of Asteroids begins to feel like a spa day in comparison.

Which is simply to say Tim's had an exciting first day in Delhi.

The End of Wall Street

For a while I've meant to read Moneyball, the story of the Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane and his statistics-driven approach to building a winning baseball team.

What I didn't realize was that the author, Michael Lewis, was the same Michael Lewis who got famous for his book chronicling his time as a Salomon Brothers bond trader in the 1980s, Liar's Poker (which I also have yet to read).

Apparently Lewis has started to write a new book attempting to understand and explain the financial system collapse of 2008. After reading this corker of an article by Lewis in Portfolio I cannot wait for this book to come out.

Here Lewis introduces us to a handful of people in and around the industry who did see doomsday coming, and in some cases bet on it. But who themselves could not believe what, exactly, was going on.

One of these character, Steve Eisman, is a merciless character, willing to confront anyone whom he has judged as having no idea what they are doing. Here's a moment from a subprime-mortgage "trade show", at a speech by one company's CEO:

When the guy got to the part of his speech about [his company's] subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. “It wasn’t a Q&A,” says Moses. “The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve’s hand and says, ‘Yes?’”

“Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?” Eisman asked.

A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech.

Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. ... He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. ...

“Yes?” the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. “Is that another question?”

“No,” said Eisman. “It’s a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent.” The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman’s cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “But I need to take this call.” And with that, he walked out.

The article ends with Lewis sitting down for lunch with former Salomon Brothers CEO and "King of Wall Street" John Gutfreund, who has still not exactly forgiven him for Liar's Poker, what he calls "your fucking book".

It's crackerjack storytelling. I started reading it as my car's oil was being changed, and when they came to tell me my car was ready I was angry that they had interrupted me.

Seriously. Take the time to read the article. It's my favorite thing on the subject since The Giant Pool of Money.

(Via Kottke, who links to other Lewis pieces as well)

Michael Pollan's letter to the President-Elect

Back in early October, Michael Pollan wrote a piece in the NYT Sunday magazine in the form of a letter to the incoming president, calling for an overhaul of the nation's food system.

[W]ith a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Of course, these "open letters" are merely literary devices that allow a writer to use prescriptive (as opposed to descriptive) language. They are designed to provoke discussion among a publication's readers, and there is never an expectation that the intended (or imagined) recipient actually reads these things.

Except, of course, when he actually does.

From Joe Klein's sit-down interview with Obama:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.

I don't know what's more awesome; that we have a president-elect that has at least been introduced to Pollan's reimaginings of food or that we have a president-elect that actually reads.

As to whether Pollan's prescriptions will make an impact: we'll know if we see Michelle and the girls planting a Victory Garden in the South Lawn.

(Via Kottke.)

Photos from the (long) campaign trail

Photographer Callie Shell collects a series of her photos of Barack Obama taken for TIME magazine over a span of two years.

Some great stuff here: resting in a back stairwell, cleaning up after himself in an ice cream shop, a couple of spontaneous pull-ups.

Take a look.

(Via Kottke.)

I got the horse right here

I've owned the CD of the 1992 revival of "Guys and Dolls" for fifteen years and did not realize until today that it featured J.K. Simmons as Benny Southstreet.

as featured in "Fugue for Tinhorns":



YouTube link

and "The Oldest Established":



YouTube link.

Simmons was of course the best thing about Burn After Reading, despite appearing in two scenes and not interacting with any of the leading characters.

Tarvuism: It's So Easy to Join!

Link

It is all encompassing, and it's all non-encompassing. Learn more about Tarvuism here.

via Jesse Thorn

Wassup? 2008

Eight years later the original "Wassup?" boys return, in a surprising, brilliant mashup of culture and politics. This is what YouTube was made for.



YouTube link

True dat.

You can watch the original Bud commercial (which itself was an adaptation of a short film).

(via Andrew Sullivan)

"a brighter day will come"

My friend Pani linked to MC Yogi's pro-Obama hip-hop video "Vote for Hope" last week, both for its relaxed vibe and its skillful use of motion graphics.



I figured it might take off big, like "Yes We Can", but so far it hasn't (just over 100,000 views so far). The rhymes are a bit simplistic, but the song's bassline, beats, and snippets of Obama's speeches have hooked it in my ear.

And almost any speech by Obama is a reminder of the value of oratory to the presidency. I remain hopeful that come election day the numbers will move towards this candidate who despite his flaws speaks a vision that speaks to people's hope for the future for themselves and their children.

And not to the once-dignified shell of a man who seems only to speak in sneers, sarcasm, derision, and scorn.

YouTube link

Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith

Finally got to see this, albeit with two boys clinging to me and the last reel with the sound turned down. (Oops. Didn't check to see that this was PG-13). Liam pointed out that the thing that made the scary parts scary was the sound. And sure enough, with no sound, no music and no screaming and yelling, the adrenaline levels went waaaay down. The sound came back up for the necessary post-duel exposition that wraps up the story ("this is the boring part," said Liam).

The boys were prepared for the plot, knew many of the characters and planets from library books and The Clone Wars tv movie from the Cartoon Network, although after so many explosions and light sabers duels it's apparently hard to remember that the infant Luke will be a young adult in the next movie and it's the same person ("Whose house is that? What planet are they on? What happened to Luke's father?")

Satisfying, partially since the movie was an improvement over the previous two prequels, but mainly because it puts into place the story details that set in motion the first movie.

Absolutely stunning visuals... although I kept thinking of Hawaii Five-0, with long tracking shots of cars driving down the highway, and parking in front of office buildings, just to remind everybody "Hey, we're in Hawaii!" Lucas has so many subplots he's juggling, he has to put in establishing shots to remind us what planet we're on now, and each planet has to be distinct, just to remind us how big and diverse the galaxy is and how hard his art department is working.

But I wondered if the critics, who had a nominal duty to pass judgement on the film for those who hadn't seen the other five, thought it worked as a standalone. Some of them did, some didn't.

And then I found one critic who absolutely lambasted it. Hated it with a fiery passion. I burst out laughing reading his review.

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.

Hot Topics 2008: General Election Ballot Measures

What's hot?
State propositions are hot!

Cal's Institute for Governmental Studies Library has once again provided state proposition analysis and an list of endorsements (updated as they come in) for all your democratic information-gathering pleasure!

Theme from Shaft. Live. On Ukuleles.

Sheer awesomeness from the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2007.

I'm also quite partial to their covers of:

Ennio Morricone's main theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
and
You Don't Bring me Flowers

Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals

Missed in the initial hubbub over the Palin/Biden/Ifill debate sketch, this two-minute Andy Samberg sketch becomes the stuff of SNL legend.



Via Jesse Thorn et al.

Late Show - George W. Bush: How'd He Do?

Letterman & Co. look back at Bush's promises from the 2000 campaign and sees how well he executed on them.



YouTube link

Yes We Can (hold babies).

An entire blog devoted to photos of Obama (and Biden) with infants and children on the campaign trail. Seeing babies being crowd-surfed over to the candidate is both awesome and vaguely alarming.

Link via Andrew Sullivan.

Take On Me: Literal Video Version

Filmmaker and musician Dustin McLean literalizes A-Ha's iconic video from the 80's.

Ever wish songs just sang what was happening in the music video? Well now they do.

Hat tip to Chordstrike

Laura Marling, Singer-Songwriter, Myspace Artist

Neo-folk artist Laura Marling is 18 years old, and drawing comparisons to Sandy Denny, the McGarrigle sisters, Martha Wainwright. Musically she reminds me of a young Suzanne Vega or Michelle Shocked, but with a darker mood. She started touring the UK soon after people started noticing her songs on Myspace when she was 17. Her first launch party turned into a busking session on the street because she was underage and the venue wouldn't let her in. Captured on video here:



No ukulele, no iSight gimmicks, although now that she's signed to Virgin records, there are several artsy music videos available on her web site.
I find them a bit too artistic as to distract from the music, so here's a live set in the studio in the Netherlands.

LA Times Buzz on the Berkeley Bowl

Google News pointed me to the LA Times feature story on Berkeley Bowl, one of our local grocery stores with a justifably stellar reputation for its produce selection, quality, and price. (Back in 2001, I wrote about the store on Everything2 as a must-see destination in Berkeley)

Staff Writer John Glionna focuses as much on the antics of shoppers as much as the produce, and notes that the penalty at the Bowl for grazing (sampling foods before purchase) is being banned from the store, forever.

Today I learned (hat tip to the Daily Clog) that after it was published on Monday, Glionna heard from Berkeley Bowl owner Glenn Yasuda. According to Glionna's blog, Yasuda didn't like the tone Glionna took in the article, and banned him for life.

Glionna seems to take it in stride. Read the comments following his blog posting, though. I learned as much about Berkeley's reputation, culture, and recent history from these postings as anything I've ever read in all the time I've been living here.

In Case You Missed It: McCain Snubs Letterman

You may have seen this buzzing around the internet this morning. I stayed up to watch the show because of the buzz moving through Twitter last night, and wished I'd waited for the YouTube edits.

For those who aren't caught up: along with McCain's announcement that he was "suspending" his presidential campaign, he called David Letterman hours before his scheduled appearance and cancelled it, saying he had to rush back to Washington to deal with the economic crisis.

Not only was Letterman ruffled by the last-minute need to rejigger his show, but he was genuinely bothered by the implications of McCain's decision to suspend his campaign. He spent much of the show stuck on the issue.

Even *before* he learned (during his sitdown with Keith Olbermann) what McCain was actually doing at the time.

If you only have three minutes, here's a quick version from Air America:



But I'd recommend this nine minute edit, which gives you a better sense of how much talk of McCain's cancellation dominated the entire program. It also includes Letterman's disclaimer in which he spends a full minute lauding McCain for his heroic survival in North Vietnam.



A surreal and classic pop culture moment.

Fictional advice for a real candidate

Maureen Dowd hands over her Sunday column to Aaron ("The West Wing") Sorkin, who dramatizes a meeting between Obama and a certain former president.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

Link

Got Cowbell?

SNL. 2000. Will Farrell. Christopher Walken. "More Cowbell" sketch.

Web. 2008. Your mp3 collection. A web developer with a lot of time on his hands. Cowbell.

Add cowbell to any mp3 file.

Also, add Christopher Walken.

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

A Pro-Life Catholic and Barack Obama

Conservative and antiabortion legal scholar (and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel for Reagan and Bush I) Douglas Kmiec made waves last spring when he publicly endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain.

The clarity of thought expressed in his endorsement is remarkable, but it angered at least one Catholic priest enough to verbally shame him during mass and to deny him communion.

He recounts this story this week in an excerpt from his new book Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.

The irony of ironies was that my motivation for the endorsement was entirely Catholic. No, Obama doesn't share the Catholic faith, but he certainly campaigns like he does. As reflected in his book, the Senator is focused on the human person, on the common good, on the social justice of economic arrangement. All is so very Catholic.

Whether Obama and his base of support are able to capture the election in our current political and cultural environment remains to be seen. But I welcome any and all evidence of intellectual honesty and rigor in America.

Real clarity of thought (and LEARNING) on any issue of importance will always lead to accusations of hypocrisy and betrayal by those who would rather feel good about an issue than do good.

Link

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Insanity is: Skateboarding down Claremont Canyon

The shrinking of digital video cameras has allowed for the creation of new forms of cinema that would not have been possible otherwise. I make kids'-eye-view home movies, others toss their cameras in the air, still others hold cameras to their faces to create "POV" sex movies.

Skateboarding videos take up an entire wing of YouTube. Skaters have become increasingly skilled at performing tricks while holding small HD cameras, to capture footage inconceivable by Hollywood cinematographers and their enormous camera rigs.

This video manages to stand out from the crowd, simply by being UNBELIEVABLY FUCKING NUTS.

Two guys (Noah Sakamoto and Patrick Rizzo) in powder-blue suits and laughably insufficient head and hand protection, skateboard down Claremont Ave in the upper hills of Berkeley at speeds higher than I would probably drive (at one point they zoom past a car), all the while videotaping each other with an HD camera, outfitted with a fisheye lens.

If you can ignore the meaningless title ("Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD"), interminable opening credits, and opaque two-minute intro, you will be "treated" to two gravity-driven runs down the canyon that make street luge-ing seem positively serene in comparison.

Oh, and click through to Vimeo if you actually want to watch it in HD, full screen, so you too can clutch at your seat muttering bad idea bad idea bad idea bad idea BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD IDEA BAD BAD BAD IDEA.


Link

(Via Kottke.)

Les Misbarack

An improv company from LA pays homage to Obama. Or Les Mis. Or something:



Is it me, or does framing the election as the finale of Act I of Les Mis, seem to miss the point of both the campaign AND the musical?

It's been twenty years, so it's kinda hazy, but IIRC this song musical counterpoint threading together inner emotional monologues from disparate subplots and building to a thunderous was meant to musically browbeat the audience into an emotional frenzy-- not because anything was resolved in the story to this point, it wasn't, but because Schoenberg wanted the audience to stay for the second act.

(Also, I'm not sure but I think the tune keeps modulating and the chord progression never resolves until the very end of the four minutes)

Also, while it's framed here as a rallying point for the Obama campaign, in Act II of Les Mis, the mob on the barricades is abandoned by the people and they all realize they're going to be crushed like bugs and that their movement accomplished exactly nothing and then they all die. Maybe that's the point, but seeing as this is coming from an improv group I kinda think they didn't think that far ahead.

Especially because most of lyrics expressed here DON'T fit the visual narrative (a one location number? no way. And if McCain is Javert in what possible world does it make sense that Palin is Madame Thénardier?)

Okay, I've just spent way too much time on YouTube and Wikipedia fact-checking a musical I wasn't that interested in two decades ago just so I could confirm that
this new mashup squandered a key musical theatre geek callback: the marching in place of the actors.

Although I have to say it's growing on me. The fourth time around the video isn't so grating and I'm ready to dash out to the lobby to buy me one of them tricolour Cosette/Obama mashup t-shirts.

The Particle Zoo: Subatomic Particle plushies

When Boingboing posted the photo below of the plush toy version of the as-yet-unconfirmed Higgs Boson particle, I thought it was a rushed attempt to capitalize on this past week's news from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in which they flipped the switch on their massive 17-mile long particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

Turns out though, the Particle Zoo (a home-based business) has been offering plush physics particles, both real and imagined, since last year... you can get your proton, your electron, your neutron, quarks, leptons... and for the truly nerdy, the entire line is also available in their antimatter counterparts.

And, if you browse through the gallery at the Particle Zoo, you can see photos of various famous physicists with their plush particles, answering the question "What do you get a physicist for Christmas when he already has a Nobel Prize?"

Hats off to Particle Zookeeper Julie Peasley, the sole proprieter (and sole seamstress) of this venture.

The Daily Show does journalism. Again.

The Daily Show spent a lot of its annual budget dispatching its sets, writers, and performers to Denver, CO and St. Paul, MN to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions.

But the sharpest segment of either week, as assembled by the writing and video research staff, could (and may) have been put together from the show's New York home base.

It leaves one wishing that "real" television news organizations were as quick or as skilled in retrieving footage from their voluminous archives.

Or as willing to call people on their bullshit.



Or go here

Pat Buchanan Gives It Up for Obama

I wasn't watching MSNBC last night, so I missed this moment where Pat Buchanan declared Obama's nomination acceptance speech "the greatest convention speech, and probably the most important."



It's pretty remarkable to see this typically-condescending jackass express such unaffected enthusiasm, as he strains to read a passage of the transcript without his glasses.

YouTube link

via @laughingsquid and @KarinaLongworth on the Twitter

Stunning Olympic Photos from The Big Picture

If you haven't yet been pointed to the Boston Globe's new photojournalism blog The Big Picture, then this wrapup of the Beijing Olympics is as good of a place as any to start.

One of the many casualties of the transition of newspapers from print to online has been the art of photojournalism; online news sites originally designed their template grids with a minimum of images to avoid alienating readers with slower internet connections. What photos do appear are too small to make much of a visual impression.

Enter The Big Picture, which assumes that a critical mass of Americans are now surfing the internet with fast connections and widescreen displays, and presents the work of some of the world's best photojournalists in gigantic, gorgeous, sometimes shocking color (since computer displays can present a wider range of sharpness and contrast than newsprint could ever muster).

Like a museum exhibit or a good coffee table book, The Big Picture reawakens viewers to photography's power to startle, move, and astonish, whether depicting the Iowa flooding, California's wildfires, or images of people from around the Northern Hemisphere merely trying to beat the summer heat,

It may sound like hyperbole, but I'd nominate this four-month-old site as one of the best uses to date of the world wide web.

Go there now.

Unresolved anthrax questions - Glenn Greenwald

Taking a break now from the general internet oddities I've posted of late.

I would feel remiss if I didn't point to this article by Glenn Greenwald posing questions about the apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins, the FBI's most recent lead suspect in the anthrax mailings of late 2001.

Greenwald generally offers smart, lengthy, ridiculously well-researched analysis for Salon.com. Here he is clearly struggling not to jump to wild assertions or theories, despite a series of facts that in their aggregate stink to high holy heaven.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information [about the presence of bentonite, a chemical additive used by Iraq] that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

Lots more, including reports of suspicious behavior by Ivins back in 2001 that went uninvestigated by the Department of Justice, and a sideswipe at McCain that asks why he was asserting a link to Iraq even before ABC's original bentonite report.

(Via Boing Boing.)

InDecision 2008: The News Better Run

The Daily Show loudly states its case as to why it has the best political news team (and the most Situation Rooms) on basic cable.

CNN mailbox, meet the Daily Show bat, as swung from a moving convertible.

Decoding Joe Cocker

This is one of those bits with a premise (Joe Cocker's unintelligible Woodstock performance of "With a Little Help from My Friends", with added comedic subtitles) that depends entirely on the execution.

Which in this case made me laugh. More than I might like to admit.



By Jared Pike. Via Your Monkey Called

"Mom, Dad, I'm Into Steampunk"

(via boingboing)

This gem available on Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Short Imagined Monologues

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle.

Dubya: It's The End of the World As We Know It

via I'm Learning to Share:

Mashup of George W. Bush covering REM:

Ernie & Bert Ante Up

This does not appear to be the first example of someone recutting Sesame Street footage to match up the muppet lipsync to rap songs, but the execution on this one definitely makes it a winner.

Here Ernie & Bert take on M.O.P.'s hit "Ante Up".



YouTube link

via Monoscope

Slate: You've already spent your tax windfall on gas and bread.

Citing Merrill Lynch's chief economist, Slate's Daniel Gross writes:

The chunk of the stimulus package likely to get spent is roughly equivalent to the amount Americans are paying for higher food and gas prices because of inflation. Put another way, you've already spent your stimulus at ExxonMobil.

Here's the math. Merrill Lynch is basing its calculations on two assumptions:
1. that Americans will spend only 40% of their rebate (and pay down debt with the rest, or save it); and,
2. energy and food inflation combined is costing us $50 billion per quarter.

Total stimulus package in rebates: $120 billion.
40% of 120 is 48 billion, eaten up in one quarter.

At first I thought, big deal, there are still three other quarters in the year. People might--operative word, might --choose to spend more than 40% of their rebate. Say, 100%.

$120 billion minus $50 billion minus $50 billion minus $50 billion (3rd quarter) minus $50 billion (4th quarter)...

Oops.

We don't track the gasoline expenses in our house, but this year we're on track to pay $700 extra in groceries, not because the kids are eating more, or because of more organic produce, but simply the increased cost of everything at the store. $4.50 gasoline doesn't faze me. But $4.50 bread: I get sticker shock.

Wait. This isn't a fake documentary?

(via Whack-a-Flick)

I watched this movie trailer, and wondered at first if it was a low-budget indie movie. Then, once the trailer revealed its premise, I thought it was a put-on. Like Christopher Guest doing a "Best in Show" take on the war in Iraq. (Warning: graphic images in the trailer)



Turns out, this is a straight ahead documentary.

There really is a fake town in the Mojave Desert where the military pays Iraqi refugees to play the part of Iraqi police and insurgents so that the army can conduct war games, complete with fake explosions and movie make up and funerals.

J. Hoberman's review in the Village Voice

David Edelstein in New York magazine

Ethicurean: Eating Local isn't about Greenhouse Gases

Ethicurean, the group blog dedicated to the notion of food mindfulness, or, as they so artfully put it, "Chew the Right Thing", responds to Dubner's post in the New York Times Freaknomics blog.

Well, not directly. They respond to the same peer reviewed study that Dubner cites in his blog, namely "Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States," by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews.

The paper does note that the last miles to the table are not the major source of greenhouse gas emissions... agricultural inputs are. So you make more of a "green" impact by reducing consumption of red meat (since you're using a lot less agricultural inputs (fertilizer) to grow soy and corn which is fed to methane-producing cattle) than by buying local.

Ethicurean doesn't disagree. But their analysis of the paper doesn't lead them to the conclusion that local isn't better. There are other quality of life reasons for eating locally (which Dubner doesn't address... since he sticks to simple economics).

Ethicurean also stands up to Salon's recent attack on localvores here:
http://www.ethicurean.com/2008/06/28/salon-locavore/

A dissenting commenter on this latter post dismisses the food miles issue and notes: "I buy food at farmers markets. Mostly for the reason you mention: it's picked later and thus tastes better."

I'll See Your "Jordan Jesse Go" and Raise You: The Bugle

For a while I was limiting my comedy podcasts to bootleg RSS feeds of the CBC's Wiretap --Jonathan Goldstein's weekly offering which lands somewhere between a solo sitcom and a Larry David-inflected version of NPR's This American Life.

But while it was funny, it was an acquired taste. Like David Sedaris' work, you had to get used to the voice, and then the mind behind the voice, and over time, as you got to understand Goldstein's quirks and the regular foibles of his co-stars, the humor built up occasionally into laugh out loud moments.

Then the feed stopped. Don't know why.

Then, a chance bit of Facebook trivia ("Brett S. has joined the group The Bugle- Audio Newspaper for a visual world") led me to follow the link to, of all places, the The Times Online, the web site for one of the United Kingdom's national newspaper.

The Bugle has British comedy writers John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman dissect the news of the week. They've been compared to The Onion, but fake news is a mere 5-10% of their show. They comment on the news-- it's more like The Daily Show (Oliver, is, in fact, a writer and correspondent for that show).

The two hosts also play off each other, like the Car Talk guys, but, I have to say, English accents work way better for this shtick than Boston ones.

With Zaltzman based in London, and Oliver in New York, they tend to cover world affairs... and it's surprising how many laughs they can generate over political violence in Zimbabwe, the war in Iraq, the global response to climate change (true, much of the humor is at the expense of the United States). The international perspective on American politics is nice to hear, and they even make British sports (rugby, cricket, football) funny knowing that their American audience has little idea what they are talking about.

At least one laugh out loud moment, usually more, per episode.
3 out of 4 episodes will actually find me in tears from laughing so hard.

Available on iTunes, or get episodes here: The Bugle

Vintage Americana

For your 4th of July viewing pleasure, a glimpse of our nation's halcyon days as viewed through the lens of "Dynasty".  I see in this charming folk-dance an echo of Martha Graham's work in "Appalachian Spring".

TED 2008: Benjamin Zander on classical music

This made the rounds on a couple of arts administration and theatre blogs, and it's my second favorite TED talk of all time.

Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. I didn't know that when I followed the link. I watched it because a couple of bloggers found it a great example of evangelizing for the power of art.

Julia Nunes: Singer-Songwriter, YouTube artist

I'm a bit delayed in writing about Julia Nunes (pronounced "Noons"). (Tom blogged about her way back in May.)

She's a college student in upstate New York, who over the past few months has built up a strong YouTube following, with more than 30,000 subscribers and with many of her videos topping 200,000 views.

Her "schtick", at first glance, is performing covers of pop hits directly into her iSight camera, while accompanying herself on ukulele. She won a uke manufacturer's "World Ukulele Video Contest" back in December for her cover of Destiny's Child's "Survivor."

Here's a characteristic performance from last September, of NSYNC's "Bye, Bye, Bye":



(Link to video)

Where most amateur musicians with Macs might use GarageBand as songwriting tool, Nunes started using the iSight and iMovie for that purpose after taking a high school new media class, performing in-progress songs as videos (according to an interview she gave this year). She got comfortable adding harmony tracks, percussion, or alternate guitar or ukulele tracks by listening to the main video playback using iPod earbuds, and then editing the multiple tracks/takes together.

Here's her cover of The Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" featuring herself on harmony vocals:



(Link to video)

Nunes' comfort in performing to the camera, her clever multitracking, and her goofy enthusiasm make her a terrific match for YouTube. But I think even more than these, it is her willingness to publish unpolished or unguarded moments that creates a feeling of sincerity and authenticity, and builds an emotional connection with her viewers.

Here, for example, is an original song of hers entitled "First Impressions", in which emotion flits across her face in reaction to both the lyrics and the awkwardness of a couple of her chord changes.



(Link to video)

Revealing this kind of vulnerability is antithetical to traditional showmanship, but creates a powerful emotional hook particular to online/portable video (small formats where the viewer stays close to the screen, enhancing a feeling of intimacy). Plus she responds in video to the many video comments she receives, and has started up a separate YouTube channel just for videos of her talking to her fans and peers.

In fact it's as a YouTube artist that I most admire Nunes. I ponied up the $10 to order her CD of original songs, which pretty much matches one's conception of an album by an earnest college freshman singer-songwriter. (It doesn't feature the song above, but does include both a studio and live version of her hit single.)

It'll be interesting over time to see what kind of musical "career" she can build, either through touring and live performances (she opened for Ben Folds for a few nights in May, and headlines a show at the Knitting Factory next week) or as a mostly online presence. Like Jonathan Coulton, she's got just enough technical savvy to have established something like a direct relationship with her fan base, even if it is using someone else's platform.

Speaking of which, she's savvy enough to know that the still image shown to represent YouTube videos comes from the exact middle of the video. So she cleverly spliced this quick flash frame into her video of "Build Me Up, Buttercup" so as not to give away a surprise she had in store.



(Link to video)

You can visit Nunes' main YouTube page or on MySpace, or buy her CD at her home page.