“I had corn dogs, chocolate cake and rum for breakfast yesterday. Then I went on a hike, and explored an abandoned mine shaft that I don’t think I was supposed to enter. I didn’t have to get anyone’s permission or tell anyone where I was going. Later, I touched a girl with my penis, and nobody yelled at me or sent me to talk to the councilor about it. I watched a scary movie that had boobies and swears in it, and then I stayed up until 2 AM because I didn’t feel like going to bed.

“Childhood has nothing on adulthood. Being a grown-up is an awfully grand adventure.” — My new favorite MeFi commenter

Over at vita.mn, I’m ranting about how the practice of settling the tab at restaurants is woefully broken. It’s launched me on a campaign to demand separate checks whenever dining with a group. Thought this was worthy of the Snarkmarket hive mind. Do you have any foolproof systems for handling checks that must be split? Are there any establishments you’ve been to that deal with this ingeniously?

Margaret pointed me to this mesmerizing stop-motion graffiti masterpiece filmed in Argentina. Make sure to turn the sound on:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Forgot where it was linked, but some blogger recently referred to a famous 1996 essay on the media by James Fallows that I had never read. The essay begins with a description of a public television broadcast called “Under Orders, Under Fire”:

Most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from panelist to panelist asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school’s famous Socratic style.

During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield. The man getting the roughest treatment was Frederick Downs, a writer who as a young Army lieutenant in Vietnam had lost his left arm in a mine explosion. …

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening’s panel, better known even than Westmoreland. These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings, of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes and CBS.

Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading Jennings and his news crew got permission from the North Kosanese to enter their country and film behind the lines. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, he replied. Any reporter would

Jennifer Daniel’s portfolio site is fun in all kindsa ways.

Finally, a website where you can make small quantities of custom bumper stickers. Go nuts. (cf)

For somebody who works in journalism, I really strongly dislike the American press sometimes. It boils over into out-and-out gall during Presidential elections, when news is scarce, and reporters start slavering after the musings of pundits like starved dogs. We find ourselves incapable of sustaining any significant focus on issues, or even stylistic distinctions between candidates that have real implications on how they will lead. Instead, we seed these manufactured clouds of perceptions and expectations over and over, hoping against hope to produce a storm. And if we should happen upon a gaffe or a gotcha moment, we actually praise the gods and we feast.

Bittergate, day six.

Read more…

I’ve been in St. Louis. So I pass you off to Mr. Carmody for canny political commentary.

Delightful. Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., a West Wing writer, serves up a little speculative fiction on a brokered Democratic convention.

Hillary

Couple newish websites make it easy to make formerly complicated things:

1) BitStrips offers a surprisingly robust tool for making comic strips. Fell in love with it a little at first, but the honeymoon’s kinda wearing off. Why can’t I save strips as drafts? Why don’t I have access to *all* the characters other users have made public? Why can’t I make characters based on those characters?

2) AniMoto makes wonderfully kinetic automatic slideshows from your images, synced to a song of your choosing. You can then export the slideshows to YouTube, or dispense with them as you please.

Oh yeh, and also: This has nothing to do with templated creation, but Lifehacker’s talking about the best IM clients. Pleasingly, I see they’ve chosen Digsby, which I’ve been meaning to blog about forever. Digsby is my *jam*. It connects not only to your IM service of choice, but to your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social apps. And it’s got a slick, freakishly customizable interface. And it’s fresh out of a private beta, so developers are polishing it up more every day.