From me to Johnny Cash in 5 steps.
Huzzah!
Saturday was my birthday, which capped off a week of the worst pain I have ever felt in my life. I thought ’shingles’ sounded like some weird hilarious skin condition that made you look like a lizard or perhaps the roof of a country home. I am pretty doped up on painkillers at the moment but I believe it is fair to say I was off base there.
Anyway.
Saturday was my birthday! I received very nearly a hundred birthday greetings and well-wishes, which I am totally floored by. Thank you all so much.
Audra got me a present! It is a toothbrush!
Let me tell you about this toothbrush!
It is the ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900, MOTHERFUCKERS.
Do not mock this toothbrush, it is SERIOUS BUSINESS! Witness this FLOSS-ACTION HEAD!
IT MEANS BUSINESS. Does YOUR toothbrush come with this much stuff?
I DON’T THINK SO! Does YOUR toothbrush have a base station that wirelessly monitors your use of the oscillating-rotating technology-enhanced brush using the 2.4 GHz ISM band?
IT IS UNLIKELY! Does YOUR toothbrush include a separate ProWhite polishing brushhead and a massage mode for optimum gum health?
If it does, you are the proud owner of a ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900 and I would like to meet with you regularly to discuss how much better our toothbrushes are than everyone elses! Do you remember life before the ORAL-B TRIUMPH PROFESSIONAL CARE 9900? I hardly do. Can you imagine, MANUALLY moving the bristles around on the end of a stick like some kind of barbarian?
Neither can I.
So, thank you, Audra, for this amazing birthday gift! Thank you for elevating me over all of those people I once considered ‘friends’ to the lofty position I now occupy, which I do not think is hyperbolic to describe as ‘godlike’.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately at my (often NSFW) Tumblr. Won’t you join me?
Why record labels will never win the war against free: An experiment.
The whole file sharing phenomenon (and legal music downloading) is largely driven by a powerful psychological aversion to being cheated.
It turns out that free is so powerful not because it’s free, but because it allows us to minimize the risk of being cheated. Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely conducted an interesting experiment to understand “free”, which he writes about in his book Predictably Irrational.
First, he and his colleagues sold random college students two kinds of chocolates. One was Lindt Truffles from Switzerland. The second was Hersheys Kisses. The truffles were 15 cents and the Kisses were 1 cent. The students reasoned that the difference in price between the two chocolates was due to quality. 73% chose the truffles and 27% chose the Kisses.
Then Ariely did something interesting. He introduced free into the experiment. He lowered the price of each chocolate by 1 cent, so the truffles were now 14 cents and the Kisses were free. All of a sudden, preference for the Kisses skyrocketed.
Ariely concluded that free is so enticing because it eliminates the risk of buyer’s remorse, or what I like to call the “Oh, crap!” factor. Nobody wants to buy something and then discover that it’s not what they expected. Even if the price of that thing is just a few cents, the psychological aversion still exists. When something is free, that risk is eliminated entirely. It may still not be what you expected, but at least you didn’t lose anything by paying for it.
This information and analysis was compiled elsewhere, not by me. The majority of the information comes from the thirteen-volume report of the Joint Select Committee established by Congress in 1871 to “inquire into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary states”.
“The Klan Report” contains dozens of accounts, many of them firsthand, of men and women of both races who were the objects of sexual terror. (If you are uncomfortable with descriptions and analysis of racial and sexual terrorism, you probably don’t want to read any further.)
The utility of the Report is further enhanced by the fact that testimony, substantial portions of which are confirmed by external sources, was elicited across a wide spectrum of southern society, from the humblest freedpeople to the most esteemed planters and politicians.
An illustrative example from one of South Carolina’s major Ku Klux Klan trials evokes something of the texture and meanings that may be gleaned from the historical record of these atrocities.
Arguing for the defense, Cyrus Melton seeks to vindicate his client by employing a familiar courtroom tactic – refuting guilt through emotive reference to the heinousness of the crime alleged. With studied disbelief, he queries “Was ravishing helpless women a part of this conspiracy?”
“We have had here, from women, details of the most disgusting character, put forward for the purpose of showing from this act that ravishing women was one of the purposes of this organization. Now, I ask you, do you believe it, and that there did exist upon the face of God’s earth an organization which would have among its purposes that of committing these gross outrages upon helpless women?”
While he plainly oversimplified the prosecution’s position for rhetorical effect, it is nonetheless true that the KKK and its imitators purposefully resorted not only to rape, but to an entire spectrum of sexual crime as a means of advancing their agenda. Whereas Melton depicts the “ravishing” of freedwomen as an unintended, even regrettable, consequence of klansmanship, I contend that sexual terror was in actuality among the KKK’s most starkly defining features, designedly effected to compromise the stability, resolve, and selfhood of the newly freed slaves at the same time it punished their white “accomplices” as traitors to their race, thereby denying them the privileges of color that would otherwise have accrued.
Of the thousands of physical assaults perpetrated by the Reconstruction-era Klan, whipping was by far the most commonplace.
Klansmen exercised little restraint in these attacks, subjecting men, women, and children of all ages and colors to brutal lashings that resulted in the deaths of many and serious injury to countless more.
While it would be an overstatement to assert that all, or even most, of these attacks were unambiguously sexual in nature, it is fair to say that even“ordinary” klan whippings often bore a distinctly sexualized cast.
The Top 20 Alternative Videos of 1990, as recorded by the 120 Minutes historical playlist archive.
(Via MeFi.)
“This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the past 100 years.”
(Related, via MeFi: Weighing 607 pounds, Bruce Snowdon was a sideshow fat man from 1977 to 2003, billed as “Harold Huge”. His death on Nov. 9, 2009, at the age of 63 marks the end of a long tradition dating back centuries.)
The World’s Most Popular Goals (as compiled by 43 Things) is simultaneously fascinating and depressing.
As you might figure, health and weight issues top the list:
These make me just want to give everyone on 43 Things a big hug:
We discover that it isn’t easy being German:
…and we examine our culture’s ongoing existential crisis:
restraint.org is a loose collection of writing, links, ravings, photos, news, fiction, and bad poetry by Jairus Khan. This website has been here (off and on) for ten years or so, and was around in various other forms for three or four years before that.
I spend most of my off-hours working (in Ottawa, Canada) to promote underground arts and media, and trying to keep independent music from being smothered by an anachronism popularly known as ‘the industry’. I DJ weekly, promote concerts/festivals regularly, make beep-beep noises in an industrial-metal band, and release CC-licensed albums for my industrial-slash-experimental-electronic project Ad·ver·sary, which sounds something like robots fucking to My Bloody Valentine.
When I’m not working with, promoting, listening to, or writing music, I design very angry websites, flyers, book jackets, and the sort for various arts projects. I supplement my music/design income (roughly enough to buy a pocketful of buttons a month) by developing counter-hacking courses and moonlighting as a web coordinator for the man.
I also bake very tasty cookies.
