Author: Heather Meadows

It’s hard to remember all the way back to the 1990s, but a new club in Greenwich Village called Nerveana can help.

Check out the list of curiosities people will find in the place. Here’s one example:

A facsimile of Lewinsky’s semen-stained blue dress, used as evidence in the impeachment of Clinton, is encased in glass with a chewed-up cigar on the floor beside it.

Classy.

But what I want to know is…where’s the homage to Friends?

But before you get too excited,

Search engine analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research said Google’s latest innovation is likely to disappoint many people because it doesn’t provide a direct link to watch the previously broadcast programming.

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show’s narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

It’s still a good feature, but I have to admit that I assumed I’d be able to watch previously aired episodes when I skimmed the Slashdot post. (That’s why I was filled with disbelief, until I actually read the story.)

I’d like to know how they are going to do this. I mean, really. I can understand how the text search is going to work, by using raw data from closed captioning information, but how are they getting the still images? How do they decide what “snippets” to publish? While most of the other stuff may already be available to them in the form of licensed/subscription-based television information from the networks, I’m not sure about these two items. Is somebody going to be doing this by hand? If so, who? If not, will some program do it randomly? I’m not sure what the usefulness would be of that.

I actually kind of like this idea:

San Francisco, which has long prided itself on environmentally friendly policies, is debating whether it should become the first U.S. city to tax grocery bags to encourage recycling.

On Tuesday, the city’s Department of the Environment will vote on whether to recommend a 17 cent fee on each bag, be it paper or plastic, in an effort to curb the use of an estimated 50 million bags a year in the Californian city.

I have no problem with purchasing my own cloth bags (or whatever) to carry groceries in. My concern is how easy it would be for the various stores to implement procedures allowing for people who bring their own bags. At my local Wal-Mart and Bi-Lo stores, for example, there are these fabulous spinning columns of plastic bags, extremely easy to use and convenient. There is literally nowhere else for groceries to go. Unless you could manage to place a cloth bag into each plastic bag section before the cashier finishes scanning your first item, I’m not sure how this would work.

Essentially, right now it’s easier and it causes less trouble to simply use the bags the store provides. If something like what San Francisco is proposing is actually going to work, store infrastructures have to be changed so that people who want to use their own bags don’t end up holding up the line.

…Reuters.

The price of starting your morning commute in a warm car during Eastern Canada’s recent cold snap could easily have been making your vehicle a hot car in the hands of organized thieves, Toronto police say.

Gah!

Recently I’ve needed two things done that I don’t normally deal with. I was expecting them to be big hassles. The first thing was getting a photo made. The second was getting a nice printout of a document.

For the photo, I discovered I was able to upload it directly to Walmart.com. I did so this morning, and picked up the print after work. Perfect!

For the document, I was planning to take a file over to FedEx Kinko’s, and I went to their website to see what media I should store it on. There I discovered the new “File, Print FedEx Kinko’s” application. Holy cow that is cool!

This is a great time to be alive, people.

Two links via Slashdot this morning.

Scientific American: Making Memories Stick

53-keys New Standard Keyboard

Cory Doctorow has a very interesting piece up today.

Why do newspapers charge for yesterday’s news?

The problem with the NYT’s system is that it ensures that the Times can’t be the paper of record any longer, because even if a thousand bloggers point to a great article on the day it comes out, thirty days later it will be invisible to the 99.999 percent of the Web who won’t pay for access to fishwrap, no matter how interesting.

Doctorow proposes that newspapers offer their archives for free and charge for today’s news.

It’s a great idea. The only way it’s going to happen, though, is either for one agency to do it first and show great success, or for many agencies to all agree to do it at once. I can easily see them all having cold feet about completely reversing their model.

They shouldn’t, though. The web is moving to a pay-per-service model, I believe. People are more than willing to pay for things they enjoy, such as webcomics.

The one big ethical dilemma I see here is that news is a very different commodity from entertainment. For all intents and purposes, people need to read the news. How, then, can we justify charging for it?

Of course, to that question there is always the answer: Well, we charge people for food, don’t we?

The other day, Sean and I finished watching Aishiteruze Baby. The title roughly translates to “Love Ya Baby”, with “baby” taking on a double meaning–the suffix –ze is a boastful masculine form of speech, so we would expect that “baby” would refer to the speaker’s girlfriend, but it actually refers to a little girl the speaker is caring for. (I assume here, of course, that the main character, Katakura Kippei, is the “speaker”. It fits: when the anime begins, he is a total womanizer.)

On the surface, this seems to be an innocent, carefree, heartwarming story, but then things begin to happen.

The premise is that the little girl, Yuzuyu, is dropped into the Katakura family’s lap by her mother, who has stated that she is unable to take care of her. Kippei, a high school student, becomes her primary caregiver. While we are left wondering about a mother who would abandon her child, we get clues–brief flashbacks of the mother being unable to deal with Yuzu, and the father having to balance them both. We learn that the father has died, and this leaves the mother unable to function. While that explains the abandonment to a point, we get a further piece of information about halfway through the series.

Yuzu’s mother, Miyako, shows up at Yuzu’s school, watching her from afar, not showing herself. Kippei discovers her and confronts her about why she left her child. Miyako breaks down and tells him that she once struck Yuzu. Kippei is nonplussed, remarking that he’d been beaten up by his mother and sister all his life, and he was fine. But Miyako whispers, “Chigau. Sou ja nai. Kodomo ga warui ja nai” (or something to that effect; translation: “No. That’s not it. She’d done nothing wrong”).

After this point, the series takes on an extremely dark edge. We meet new characters: a boy Yuzu’s age who is physically and emotionally abused by his mother, and a girl a little younger than Kippei who was bullied so badly at school that she’d taken to burning herself all up her arm to prove that she was strong.

The little boy had to fall down a flight of stairs before his mother came to her senses. I have to tell you, I was furious during this part of the anime. While Kippei’s older sister and the kindergarten teachers tried to save the boy from his mother, the boy would always stubbornly say that his mother hadn’t hurt him and that he wanted to stay with her. Children want their mothers, Kippei reflected, and took it upon himself to speak to the woman. But she only took his words to heart after she moved to strike her child and he stumbled and fell down the stairs.

Every scene with the mother was filled with her internal thoughts. “Chigau. Sou ja nai. Kodomo ga warui ja nai,” in an echo of what Yuzuyu’s mother had said. And then she asked herself desperately, “When did I become like this?” I had absolutely no patience for it.

You see, the woman was abusive because she was insecure. Her husband had lost his job. All the woman could think about was how her status fell in the eyes of the other mothers in the neighborhood. Everything she did was an effort to hide her “shame”. So, of course, she had little time for a beautiful, outgoing, funny child who drew attention to himself by acting out. No matter how much she scolded him and struck him, he kept “misbehaving”, so obviously she just had to hit him more.

I hate that character. I hate that she used her position, the position of mother, giver of life, to abuse the greatest gift she had ever received. When things were finally resolved, when she agreed to doctor-advised counseling and the family decided to move so that the husband could find a job, I was still unhappy.

But her son was joyous, and he told Yuzu as he was about to leave that his mother was “a lot nicer now”.

Motherhood is a position of power. I have no sympathy for those who refuse to acknowledge that fact, who turn to excuses to explain their renunciation of responsibility.

The other new character, the girl who was bullied at school, was also being physically abused, this time by her father. She refused to tell her parents what was going on at school, so her parents only knew that she was acting out, dyeing her hair, and being smart to them. She felt more and more alone as the series progressed, and eventually tried to kill herself. Kippei was able to talk her down, though, and a tenuous understanding was finally reached with her parents.

What makes this series truly shocking is that Yuzuyu is the witness to it all. She saw her friend’s mother hit him. She saw the girl try to kill herself. And while she seemed to keep her childish innocence, you could tell that a new kind of wisdom was growing beneath it.

Yuzu was growing up, was forced to grow up by the cruel circumstances of her own and other people’s lives.

Today, when I saw this headline on Mainichi, all I could think of was Aishiteruze Baby and the truths it had taught me.

Young couple starve ‘burdensome’ 3-year-old daughter to death

The world can be a beautiful place. But it is also ugly.

So here’s a guy who has a family with his ex-wife. He lives at the home with them for part of the time. But he also has a family with his girlfriend, and he lives with them part-time too. He owns both houses, and supports both families financially.

Now, a third woman is suing him for more child support for the child they have together.

Sheesh, let’s just ship this guy to Utah!

Further cementing its position as an opinion site, Snopes makes the following pronouncement in its article concerning the absolutely hilarious “Small but tough.” ad:

Companies often try to obscure the connections between themselves and their viral ads, sometimes claiming that promotions were “unauthorized” or “accidentally released.” Though this technique may be effective in generating publicity, it can also backfire: If someone does indeed produce an unauthorized viral ad that creates negative publicity for the business it supposedly promotes, how can a company prove they weren’t behind it? This is the dilemma currently faced by Volkswagen regarding a viral ad seemingly calculated to offend as many human beings as possible.

I haven’t seen too many people offended by this…Miss Em notes,

i think it’s very clever – of course, we all want car bombers to be thwarted in some way (well, most people do, anyway) and it also shows how strong the car is….. but does it make people associate that car with car bombers?

While I’m not particularly concerned about people associating the car with suicide bombers (if you take the ad literally, the bomber would have to be stupid to actually use the car), it did occur to me that a suicide bomber might choose to use one in the future because we’d never expect it. But that, really, is the only (extraordinarily minor) concern I can admit to having on the subject. I certainly was not “offended”. So I suppose the next question to ask is this: is Volkswagen currently suffering due to this “negative publicity”? Or was that simply another Snopes opinion?

The Divine Miss Em linked today to a blog that linked this. Oh, what a treasure. This is absolutely beautiful. I laughed my ass off.

Edit 10:20pm: Volkswagen disclaims responsibility for the ad.

I had looked down to my plate (we always watch Naruto with meals, it seems), and when I glanced back up I was suddenly faced with…that. If I’d been eating something, I probably would have choked on it.

I mean…holy shit.

In episode 80, Wakato does his Change Over into a person I’d never heard of before, Lleyton Hewitt. But he’s real!!!!!!

…yes, I am a dork.

(Thanks to Hai for pointing me to the episode. Does that make him a bigger dork?)

That quote’s from Aladdin. But it fits my results on this quiz, doesn’t it?

“WHAT RELIGION BESTS SUITS YOU?” Agnostic You’ve probably studied loads of different religions, but you’re just not sure if any of it is true. Evolution makes some sense to you, but it doesn’t satisfy you. Lastly, your personality is one of question, but you won’t go out of your way to find -The Truth- It’s more of a hobby.