Discoveries guaranteed to be more interesting than you
Katharine Mieszkowski over at Salon does a nice job of reporting on noise pollution. She discusses the health effects of noise pollution and finds some interesting people along her way. Including Henry Bean, the director of Noise, a movie about noise pollution in New York, starring Tim Robbins.
The Morning News did a series on the voices behind phone sex operators. Included in their expose was a series of pictures that portrayed the real people on the other end of the line. Apparently, they don’t all look like the women in the commercials. I know, I was just as surprised as you were.
A bumper sticker for a better president. Instead of a person, elect a song. This is actually a sticker for the song, “If a Song Could be President” by the band Over the Rhine — Bergquist & Detweiler being the two main band members. It’s easily one of the most clever songs I’ve ever listened to.
If a song could be president
We’d hum on Election Day
The gospel choir would start to sway
And we’d all have a part to playThe first lady would free her hips
Pull a microphone to her lips
Break our hearts with Rhythm and Blues
Steve Earle would anchor the newsWe’d vote for a melody
Pass it around on an MP3
All our best foreign policy
Would be built on harmonyIf a song could be president
We’d fly a jukebox to the moon
All our founding fathers’ 45’s
Lightnin’ Hopkins and Patsy Cline
If a song could be presidentIf a song could be president
We could all add another verse
Life would teach us to rehearse
Till we found a key changeBreak out of this minor key
Half-truths and hypocrisy
We wouldn’t need an underachiever-in-chief
If a song could be presidentWe’d make Neil Young a Senator
Even though he came from Canada
Emmylou would be Ambassador
World leaders would listen to herThey would show us where our country went wrong
Strum their guitars on the White House lawn
John Prine would run the FBI
All the criminals would laugh and cry
If a song could be president
I can only imagine what took place here to instigate the two plunger policy.
Songbird is an open source music player project — utilizing Mozilla Layout Engine (MLE) as its rendering base — that looks to unseat or at least give iTunes a run for its money. Although it doesn’t have anything close to the iTunes Music Store, it does have something that iTunes doesn’t have — a built in browser with features for easily finding and downloading music on the Web. They recently released version 0.6, which is a stable and public beta version of their player.
Barack Obama’s campaign team really knows how to effectively use the Internet for their bidding. Fight the Smears is an excellent example of how Obama’s campaign is controlling the message and squashing lies as soon as they occur.
A nosy parent finds a message that their young son was writing to a friend.
In it he says he’s going to our local pool to “scout out some camel toads.” (I believe that’s what it said, he had spilled iced tea all over the desk when writing it…)
Of course, even Leslie isn’t as clueless as this parent. She writes:
What he undoubtedly wrote was “camel toes,” a crude euphemism for, well, too-tight pants worn by females. The good news is that the expression has absolutely nothing to do with drugs. It has everything to do with why teenage boys go to the pool in the first place.
From Barack Obama’s The Blueprint for Change.
“I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists — and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not get a job in my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president.”
- Barack Obama, Speech in Des Moines, IA, November 10, 2007
