The Raven

Tuesday, March 4, 2003

Coolspotting

One thing that really rips the fronds off my cabana is the sad bunch of bloggers who run around the Net collecting "cool" stuff to showcase. These are the geeks with the twitchy index fingers, broadband access, and a pumped-up list of bookmarks who, after a scatterbrained surf-session, come prancing back to their wretched Weblogs with an armload of miserable "trophies," and then—even worse—these muttonheads expect you and me to look at 'em and...do what, exactly?

Are we supposed to click on those lameassed links and wander dutifully in the dingbat's footsteps? Are we really supposed to take an idjit quiz that tells us what brand of yoghurt we are? Does this trove of hidden gems suggest that the artiste who dug 'em up is some kind of dreadlocked Mountain Dew-swigging hipster we'd change our sexual orientation for to bang in the backseat of a Toyota Camry? Dream on, data clown, dream on.

Well now it's time to fight back with every ounce of firepower at our disposal, because if we unite against these numbnuts, we can win. Next time you run across the handiwork of a digital Trick Daddy, leave 'em a comment telling 'em how much fun you had dodging their hokey hyperlinks and skating around their suggestions. You'll drop a bomb on somebody's good times, I guarantee it.

Now then, here's some cool stuff we snagged this morning.

The Trendy Bunch

Here's an interesting look at coolhunters, the people who get paid to figure out what's hot-and-happening at the cutting edge of youth culture. Some of 'em call themselves "ethnofuturists," which would look righteous on a business card.

Youth Intelligence also prepares a daily online newsletter, accessible at TrendCentral.com, in which quirkier ideas are floated. Last week, the site featured a blurb about the recent proliferation of racing as a barroom pastime or art-gallery happening—toy car drag racing in New York City, turtle racing in Marina Del Rey.

Turtle racing. Somebody's getting taken for a ride here. Y'know, by the time you can identify something as "cool," it ain't. The way it works is, you're either leading or following. That's why the Raven is retro—when you're way behind you're way ahead.

What's the Frequency?

Remember when Dan Rather got mugged on Park Avenue? Did wonders for his ratings. Looks like Daisy Lundy, who's running for Student Council president at the University of Virginia, is going to likewise get a boost after she was victimized in a "racially tinged assault" on campus.

Lundy told police she was assaulted by an unknown man shortly before 2 a.m. Wednesday when she left a friend's room on the historic Lawn at the center of campus to retrieve a cellular phone from her car. The Cavalier Daily student newspaper reported that she told police her assailant slammed her head into the steering wheel and referred to her candidacy with a racial epithet.

Lundy's assailant made a huge mistake when he epithized, since it allowed school authorities to rope in the FBI for assistance in prosecuting the affair as a "hate crime."

AFAIK

Saw this item at the Chi Trib about a British teenager in the UK who turned in an English essay written in text-messaging shorthand. This is very disturbing and it's rightly freaking a lot of people out. A more complete story is running at the Daily Telegraph, which offers this excerpt from the essay:

My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc.

The translation, if you need it, is given as "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York, it's a great place."

Being a traditionalist, I'd endorse giving the kid an F, and a sound birching as an additional comeuppance for the frippery, but no, apologists are crawling out of the woodwork to defend the linguistic stylings of this reincarnation of Shakespeare. People like Dr. Cynthia McVey, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, who observes that writing a standard essay is difficult for today's youth, and thus "they revert to what they feel comfortable with—texting is attractive and uncomplicated."

Texting. Let's order a birching for Dr. McVey, too, while we're handing them out.

Madison Avenue Politics

Several stories are running here and there about the resignation of Charlotte Beers from her post at the State Department, ostensibly "for health reasons." Beers was given the position of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy because of her work masterminding the Uncle Ben's Rice marketing campaign. The thinking was that if she could sell instant rice to wary consumers, she'd be a natural at selling the image of the United States to Middle Eastern countries. Yes, it looks crazy to me, too. Here's Colin Powell:

"Guess what?" Powell told a television interviewer. "She got me to buy Uncle Ben's rice. So there is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something."

Critized for working too slowly, Beers said in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "the gap between who we are and how we wish to be seen, and how we are in fact seen, is frighteningly wide." What frightens me is that we hire ad executives to manage our foreign policy, and as the story notes, "she introduced the State Department to familiar tools and terms from the advertising world, such as focus groups and 'message retention.'"

This suggests that instead of communicating with other countries and working to address our common concerns, our government is trying to sell its policies to them like so many boxes of Tide detergent. No wonder we're mistrusted.

In the Mind of the Enemy

Here's an inside look at Saddam's feared Republican Guards. It's an interview with a sergeant from the Quiada Quat "Adnan," a Republican Guard division based in Mosul, Iraq. Great reading here, like this:

"We want to fight and we expect to die. There is no other option. A special death unit, the Siriya, will be positioned behind us. They are there to kill anyone who tries to flee."

Speaking of fleeing, the sergeant defected because he's of Kurdish descent, and he made the mistake of taking photographs of senior officers at a party. Turns out this was a breach of etiquette, and informed of his "crime," he took off for the border, leaving his wife and children behind in hiding. As the article correctly notes, "it would be better that they died than the Iraqi secret police find them."

1:07:21 PM