Posts by matt

Hello? Why has nobody pointed out that Friend of Snarkmarket (and the wizard behind EPIC’s musical goodness) Minus Kelvin has his mug all up in the September issue of Wired?! There I am, reading the magazine, when all of a sudden, “Is that Aaron?? Holy crap, that’s Aaron!” OK, so he mentioned it himself. But if a blog post falls in the forest without an RSS feed — nah. That’s cooler than is physically possible, A.M.! Congrats!

August Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who just completed his mammoth cycle of plays documenting black life in America throughout the 20th Century, has been diagnosed with liver cancer. His doctors told him about the cancer in June and said at that time he had 3 to 5 months left to live. I’m very happy he got to see “Radio Golf,” the end of the cycle, open and close on Broadway, and I hope to eventually see the whole cycle myself. (Via Bejata.)

Ha! Matthew Yglesias takes a look at the rough road to democracy:

The fact that Iraq will have a democratic constitution that honors women’s rights, the rights of minorities, is going to be an important change in the broader Middle East. So says the President of the United States. But let’s take this analogy seriously. Iraq is maybe going through something like its Articles of Confederation stage — you’ve got your Whiskey Rebellion, your disorder, your confusion, etc.

But in a few years, they sort things out and the elite members of the nation’s dominant ethno-sectarian group will work out an agreement establishing order throughout the country. The Sunnis, naturally, will be held as chattel slaves. Kurdish land and natural resources will be slowly expropriated via a series of genocidal military campaigns.

Some decades down the road, the conflicts papered-over in the initial constitutional compromise will break out into the open leading to a horribly destructive Civil War.

Now do you see why I fear them so much? (See also. Via.)

OK, we all knew Google was releasing an Instant Messenger client, but how pissed will the gearheads be when they discover it actually isn’t configured to work with AIM/MSN/Yahoo/etc.? Yet, at least. They say in their FAQ that they’re working on it. Currently accessible only with a Gmail username.

So, as I mentioned, “Six Feet Under” ended, in a melancholy blaze of glory (spoiler alert). They added a wonderful coda to the show’s Web site (soooooo many spoilers) for anyone who saw the final episode. The song that had us all in tears, by the way, was “Breathe Me” by Sia.

I will gladly post this link from my friend El Fe to StuffOnMyCat.com, because as the site posits, stuff + cats actually does = awesome.

This is actually a fascinating way to view time.

PS: Speaking of sands of time, I lost a lot of those checking out this site, dedicated to testing the limits of CSS. Fellow geeks, check it out. Many of the CSS hacks are ridiculously tedious and have no real-world applications, but they will absolutely expand your view of what CSS can do.

BTW, Robin and I have been outsourcing the content of this blog. Hope you enjoy.

Today’s read of the day is this New York Magazine profile of Bill Clinton. This man has got to be the best real-life tragic hero of the last three decades:

I ask Clinton why the Bush administration has gotten much softer press coverage than he did. He gives a variety of explanations, including September 11 and the rightward drift of the media. Then he gives an explanation that