Rob Pegoraro’s tour through Microsoft’s home of the future reminded me of my own tour through a conceptual future home, lo these many years ago.

It’s circa 1990. My sister’s in town for the weekend, and my parents tell me to find some suitable family activity for us to undertake. Flipping through the section in the yellow pages that describes all the things one can allegedly do in Orlando, I come across the perfect thing — a useless only-in-the-land-of-Disney tourist trap created just to beguile naive children into dragging their hapless parents hence … Xanadu.

When we get there, it’s about an hour till closing time. Just as well, because the “tour” of the place only takes about half an hour. Also, I’ll probably suffer legitimate emotional damage if I have to spend any more time in that godawful structure. Imagine, if you will, the graphical rendering of an explosion from Final Fantasy II built out of frozen shaving cream.

Xanadu is now an abandoned, molded-out pod in the middle of nowhere, and some urban adventurers have brought it to the Internet for us all to see, as well as giving us some of the building’s history:

It was designed by architect Roy Mason. There were three of these built, one in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, one in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and this one in Kissimmee, FL. This is the last remaining house, as the others have been torn down. They were created by inflating large, walk-through balloons and spraying them with foam. After the foam hardened, doors and windows were cut out, and fireproofing and paint applied. The idea was to create a very energy efficient “smart” house controlled by a computer. The end result was something that looked like it came right out of Logan’s Run. The place ended up as a tourist attraction and eventually went under as technology developed and it became obsolete. The Kissimmee Xanadu closed in 1996 and was put up for sale. It was used for storage for a while by the owners and still not been sold to this day.

Who knew the future would be so fugly?

If you do nothing else this year, please take the opportunity to relive a part of my childhood. Watch at least a few minutes of the documentary about Xanadu. You won’t regret it.

More on Xanadu from Neuroscape.

A report from when Xanadu was the future.

(By the way, the future is clearly straw houses. You heard it here first.)

You know by now about Michael Newdow, the atheist who issued the legal challenge to the Elk Grove Unified School District, suing to have the words “under God” stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance. You may know that Newdow argued his own case before the Supreme Court of the United States, and apparently did a damn fine job of it.

But that may not even be the most compelling or striking thing about this case. Check out this spectacular amicus brief filed by 32 clergy of various denominations, arguing for Michael Newdow.

Their argument hasn’t been entirely unmade by others in the debate over those two words, but nowhere else have I seen it made so forcefully. Part of the school district’s argument in this case, and the foundation of the Justices’ arguments so far, has been the idea that “under God” is a little bit of “ceremonial deism,” that it doesn’t actually mean anything, it’s just a little nod to history and tradition.

The clergy say that if that’s true, if “under God” has no meaning, then school districts are instructing children to take the Lord’s name in vain, to violate the Sixth Commandment. It cheapens both patriotism and religion, they argue.

And the brief is not without its healthy share of snark. Marvel at the snark-quotes in this passage:

The United States is creative but unpersuasive in its efforts to imagine other possible meanings for the religious affirmation in the Pledge. It says the Pledge merely “acknowledges” the “historical” and “demographic” facts that the Nation was founded by individuals who believed in God and that most Americans still believe in God. … But that is plainly not what the Pledge says. Teachers might easily ask children to pledge allegiance to “one Nation, most of whose citizens believe in God,” or to “one Nation, founded by a generation that mostly believed in God.”

That’s some sass.

Anyway, see Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic essay on the topic for more.

First, read the question and try to solve the puzzle (it’s pretty easy). Then join the commenters in trying to figure out the code. Then, toward the bottom of the thread, marvel as the code is cracked and revealed.

Open-source, distributed problem-solving. Amazing.

Janeane Garofalo loses.

Her Air America program has been a long thread of facile partisan canards. Her usual drole, doubt-everything deadpan has been swapped for a much-less-compelling “Republicans are evil” refrain. She even used the phrase “corporate media.”

Yeah, yeah, it’s the first night, but they’ve opened with a flurry of publicity, and knowing that this may be their moment in the spotlight before dimming into obscurity, they might have taken the trouble to procure actual content. There’s been a mishmash of decently high-profile guests — Bill Maher, Atrios, Ben (of Ben & Jerry), Dave Chappelle — but the conversation hasn’t stepped beyond slinging mud at conservatives. Not even news peg mud (e.g. “Can you believe they smeared Dick Clarke?”) — generic mud (e.g. “They’re corporate whores!”).

I haven’t had a good experience with talk radio, unless it’s This American Life or Sound Portraits. Somehow, even though it’s just the first night, I already have deep doubts about Air America raising the level of discourse on the medium.

Google has redesigned. Always humorous to see the folks on MeFi go all headless chicken. Much like they did the last time Google “redesigned” the two words on its home page. Or the time UPS swapped their ugly brown logo for an ugly brown logo. Or — ack — the time Poynter Online got prettier.

How is it that with all the drama in the world, we have space in our minds to bug out whenever some company we have little personal connection to changes a font on its website?

Is there a reason that the Boston Herald‘s Election 2004 page lists only four candidates for the Presidential election — George W. Bush, John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, and Ralph Nader? If you’re going to include Dennis Kucinich, aren’t you bound by some statute of journalism law to include Al Sharpton, still in the race with more delegates than Kucinich?

Dodgy.