Help my friend Samnang improve life in his home village

When Mrs. Oblogatory and I went to Cambodia in December 2011, we were lucky enough to make the acquaintance of Sok Samnang, a monk and business student in Siem Riep. Samnang is a tireless advocate and worker for the people of his home village, which, like most villages in Cambodia, is very rural and very poor. Check out the video to meet Samnang and get a glimpse of life in his home village, then click the link below to learn how you can contribute. Thanks. 

Latest highlights from my neighborhood listserv

HELLo NEIGHBORS!!!! I EITHER LOANEDED MY RAKE TO SOMEONE OR BORROWED SOMEONE ELSES’S RAKE AND LOSTED IT!! CAN SOMEONE HELP ME!!!  ?—BERTHA ON HOLMES AVE

PS: NEED RAKE!!!!

Does anyone know who I call when I see a person of poorness in the neighborhood? Thank you.—P. Landy on Marsh Cir.

Howdy, neighbors! Just wanted to invite everyone to come on down to Have-a-Cuppa tonight at 7:30. We need to start planning for the organic, gluten-free neighborhood garden we’re going to build this spring, and Step 1 is nominating members to the pre-planning steering committee steering committee. Who’s in?—Safflower on Myrtle Ct.

Hi, we just don’t want to deal with it anymore, so we need to find a good home for our 2-year-old dog that was just diagnosed with a chronic stomach disorder. Any takers?—Russ on Larkspur Ln.

OH!!! YES NOW I REMEMBER! I BORROWED A RAKE AND LOSTED IT! CAN I HAVE IT BACK!!!!!!—BERTHA ON HOLMES AVE

Notice: I set a 55 gal. drum of waste byproducts resulting from my alchemy experiments out on the curb. First come, first served.—Dale on Smith St.

Waste byproducts gone.—Dale on Smith St.

To whom it may concern: Once again, I used my yard-vac this weekend, and, once again, there were leaves on my lawn come Monday morning. There is no neighborhood mit no order! Citizens of Marigold Subdivision: maintain your yards or be crushed!—A. Eichmann on Cherry St.

DAMN NOT RAKE I MEAN HO!!!—BERTHA ON HOLMES AVE

Netflix sleeper: The Story of Film: An Odyssey

I’d never heard of this 15-part documentary series until I discovered it while browsing on Netflix I.V. I watched the first installment last night and got throroughly hooked. 

Series creator and narrator Mark Cousins is a film critic from Northern Ireland. His 2004 book, also called The Story of Film, is the basis for this series. The entire series was also screened at MoMA last year. 

Cousins is a provocateur, but an engaging one. In his 2012 review of the series, NYT film critic A.O. Scott accurately describes Cousins’s narration as “exquisitely dry and lilting,” and that drew me in as much as anything. You can get a sense of it from the trailer embedded below. 

What I really liked about the first episode was how Cousins traced the development of film language, like match cutting, parallel editing and shot/reverse shot. Today we take this stuff for granted to the extent that we don’t even notice it. But all of these things had to be invented by people grappling with the limitations of a new and revolutionary storytelling medium. And by showing the earliest known examples of these techniques, Cousins illustrates just how imaginative they were compared to what came before them. 

To the extent that Cousins has an agenda, in part it is to give unheralded film pioneers—including women and lesser-known foreign film makers—their due. And I got no beef with that at all.  

I’m looking forward to the remaining 14 episodes.

Austin kids discuss competitive couch schlepping

Lupita and Louis, the lovable canine canoodlers, were having a ball-fetching date in the park yesterday afternoon when this gaggle of little gigglers walked across the field carrying a couch. They looked to be headed to the Stevie Ray Vaughan Statue. After shouting some encouragement after them (“Hey, where’s the recliner and love seat we ordered?!”), I was filled with regret for not finding out what the heck they were carrying the couch for. 

But a few minutes later, they backtracked, still carrying the couch, and I got my chance. They explained that they were in a competition:

Kids these days. They’re adorable. And they’re helping keep Austin weird. 

Mutants rising! Save the humanoids! Defender! The first video from ManChildATX!

Here’s my first music video. I hope you enjoy it. I recommend changing the image quality to HD and viewing full screen. Or watch it on YouTube. 

This song will appear on my next album, My Mouse Finger’s Insured for $10 Million, although I have to say there probably won’t be another electronica style song on the album, so buyer beware. 

If you like the vibe, though, you’ll probably like my first record, Kickass Tunes for Jamming Out. It’s available here for only $5, or on iTunes.

Please share, like, etc. I really appreciate your support.  

ManChildATX talks about the debut of new video, Defender

Jerry Seinfeld gets the Internets

The Times today has a story about Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee being picked up by Sony for a second “season.” Something Seinfeld said about the inspiration for the series really struck me:

“Mr. Seinfeld said he was taking ideas that held personal interest and adapting them for the Internet. ‘I thought of all the things I liked,’ he said, which included almost anything about cars, talking with other comics, and coffee in its various forms. He put that together with his observation that all around him ‘people were watching stuff on phones and pads,’ and he concluded, ‘Well, this is stuff I like, and this could be a match.’”

I realize that Jerry Seinfeld is richer than God and is well-positioned to make his own breaks. But he got there for a reason. This Seinfeld profile from the Times Magazine a few weeks ago discusses his relentless drive to keep after his craft, in spite of the fact that he never has to work another day in his life if he doesn’t want to.

The bit from the quote I included above that really impressed me was that Seinfeld observed people engaged with their portable devices and wondered, essentially, “Since I love to create stuff, what can I create that will serve the needs of those people engaged with those new types of devices?”

Contrast this with the dinosaur-style thinking of so many other show biz pros of his generation who have only seen fit to try to preserve the status quo, even as the status quo shrinks into irrelevancy. Too bad there weren’t any Jerry Seinfelds in the music business 10 or 15 years ago. 

The original version of this post called Seinfeld’s web series Comedians Getting Coffee. As corrected above, it’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Oops.

Codgers ignoring each other the modern way

So, don’t ask why, but I was having breakfast at McDonald’s in Temple, TX this morning. It was a huge ego boost, because I was the youngest customer in there by at least two decades. Also, I had my first and very probably my last Egg McMuffin ever. 

Anyway, I noticed these two codgers sitting at a table near me. But they weren’t talking to one another. And it seemed weird to me. I thought, maybe they’ve been friends so long that they’re like an old married couple and have developed the ability to communicate without words. Hell, maybe they are an old married couple (but I seriously doubt it). 

Then I looked again, and I realized what was up and I took this photo, all sneaky like:

Yup, that’s right—they were practicing the modern phenomenon of smartphone mediated non-togetherness togetherness.

Who says you can’t teach old dogs new ways of experiencing modern-day misanthropy? 

"Affordable Quality" and "Well Planned" not necessarily the same thing

The haphazard layout of this sign, seen in front of a remodel in our neighborhood, alternately drives me crazy and amuses me:

Name obscured to protect the ridiculed.

Cat details New Year's plans

2013 Texas Monthly Bum Steers issue available now!

Click pic to read why Lance got the honors this year (not like it wasn’t obvious).

It’s the ALL-SINGINGEST, ALL-DANCINGEST, ALL-PEE-YOUR-PANTSINGEST Texas Monthly Bum Steers ever! 

READ about the man who adopted his girlfriend!

LEARN the wrong way to work on your tan while unicycling!

THRILL to the cruel antics of educators who should not be allowed near children!

LAUGH to keep from crying over the prurient behavior of our law enforcement officers!

CRY when you realize you live in the same state with these nutjobs!

In all seriousness, as a humorist, working on this was more fun than ever this year, and I think the results show in the work. It’s really funny.

Pick it up at your newstand today, or, hey, why not?—SUBSCRIBE

Donnie Andrews, inspiration for The Wire's Omar: RIP

Donnie Andrews (r), with Michael K. Williams, the actor who portrayed Omar Little, the character based on Donnie, on the HBO series The Wire.A few months ago, I posted about the death of DeAndre McCullough, a bit-player on The Wire who in real life played a starring role in David Simon and Ed Burns’ The Corner, a year-long chronicle of life amidst Baltimore’s drug trade. 

McCullough was the hapless son of Fran Boyd, a tough-as-nails drug addict whose eventual rehabilitation is one of the few bright spots among Simon and Burns’ chronicles. Now Donnie Andrews, the convicted murderer whose supportive phone calls from prison Fran credited as helping her get clean, and the man she would eventually marry, has died at age 58.

But Andrews is best-known as the inspiration for The Wire character Omar Little, the stick-up man who preyed on drug dealers in keeping with his own unique moral code. 

Wow, what a life. Hang in there, Fran Boyd. 

NYT: Donnie Andrews, the Real-Life Omar Little, Dies at 58

Baltimore Brew: Donnie Andrews: an appreciation of the real Omar Little

VICE: An Interview with Donnie Andrews, the real-life Omar Little

UPDATE:

Here’s a clip from The Wire where Andrews plays a jail-house enforcer enlisted by Butchie to serve as Omar’s protector. Andrews appears around 00:50. 

My wish list through the years

Ages 1-3: N/A (wish instinct not fully formed)

Age 4: Play-Doh

Age 5: Sled

Age 6: Lego Downtown Real Estate Developer Set

Age 7: Hot Wheels Daytona Trackside Trauma Ward Set

Age 8: The Young Chemist: My First Munitions Lab

Age 9: Tandy Leathercraft Make Your Own Bullwhip Kit

Age 10: Police Scanner

Age 11: Lamborghini model, 1:1 scale

Age 12: Locksmith tools

Ages 13-present: Cash

Follow-up on ammo control post

Über-blogger Jason Kottke has been in overdrive since the Newtown tragedy. Today he posted this about a bullet tax proposal Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed in the ’90s.

And then a couple of people on Facebook pointed me to this bit from Chris Rock:

Guns don't kill people, ammo kills people. So starve the guns.

It seems like the tragedy in Newtown, CT, may actually spur some substantive national debate on the problem of gun violence. I mean, it already has stirred some debate, but so did every similar lone-gunman massacre, to some extent. Like so many similar debates before it, will this one wither and die with nothing having been done? 

The big problem, it seems to me, is that we could ban all gun sales and shut down all domestic gun manufacturers tomorrow, and guess what? We’d still have hundreds of millions of guns out there. 

But that will never happen anyway. I couldn’t be more pessimistic about the possibility of restricting firearms sales as a way to stem the tide of mass killings. Thanks in large part to the scare tactics of the NRA, there are a lot of zealous gun enthusiasts out there who see any attempt to restrict the sales of firearms as a harbinger of totalitarianism. During his first term, President Obama, to my knowledge, never introduced or voiced support for a single initiative to curb gun ownership. Yet look what happened when he was re-elected. 

The title of this post is not meant to be ironic. The guns are here. So focus on the bullets.

Like razor blades and printer cartridges, bullets are a consumable. They get used up, and if they aren’t used up, they go bad. So there must be a continuous stream of new ammo to feed the guns. 

We could make bullets much harder to get and limit the amount a single buyer could purchase. We could make bullets less lethal. There’s a lot we could do to affect the ammunition supply that would make it harder for the guns that are already out there to be used to kill people. 

The politics of this is easy, especially now. Placing restrictions on the ammount and types of ammo available wouldn’t limit peoples’ right to keep the guns they have or to buy more of them. It would limit peoples’ right to use those guns to slaughter humans. Right now, it’d be really, really hard to take a political stand against that. 

Because the guns are out there. You aren’t going to get them away from the gun owners. But sooner or later, they will all need to reload. 

Mark Penn revealed as Scroogler-in-chief

I guess my post about Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign lit a fire under those lazyasses at the New York Times, because a couple of days later they ran this article about Mark Penn. Penn is a longtime political communications pro probably best known for running Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign (he resigned when the campaign floundered in its attempts to stop Obama). 

Penn is now on staff at Microsoft, where his portfolio includes blunting Google’s dominance in search. The Scroogled campaign is his first salvo.

Dude is notorious for his bare-knuckle tactics. I predict he will create a lot of work for corporate lawyers. 

Inventor of barcode dies, leaving legacy of ugly tattoos

N. Joseph Woodland, according to his NY Times obituary, drew four lines in the sand and a merchandising revolution was born. 

Woodland is credited with inventing the Universal Product Code, more commonly known as the barcode. You pretty much can’t sell anything today without it. 

His masterstroke was to translate the idea of morse code—that each alpha-numeric symbol could have an equvialent composed of dots and dashes—to print, reasoning that it would be easier to teach machines to read symbols representing alpha-numeric characters rather than the characters themselves. And he realized those symbols could be nothing more than lines of varying widths. (In Woodland’s imagining, the lines were circular, not vertical—that development came later.)

Woodland and the partner who helped him develop the idea earned $15,000 by selling the patent. But as the image above shows, he more than left his mark. 

NYT: If It’s for Sale, His Lines Sort It

Microsoft's Bing goes after Google over "scroogling"

I was served the not particularly attractive banner above on Talking Points Memo. Boy, does this ever smack of desperation on Microsoft’s part. So I had to click.

The landing page at Scroogled.com argues that Google “scroogles” its users because it now only serves paid ad results for shopping searches. Microsoft’s search engine Bing serves a mix of paid and “organic” results for shopping searches, as Google formerly did.  

Not that Bing doesn’t have a point. But this kind of campaign leaves me with the feeling that Bing is circling the drain. It’s as if they’ve acknowledged that they can’t win by highlighting their product’s advantages, so their only hope is to cry foul against their dominant competitor.

Microsoft itself, of course, has faced a litany of criticism and legal action about uncompetitive practices over the years. Regardless of the validity of those claims, Microsoft’s resorting to the same kind of tactics against its competitors exposes them to charges of hypocrisy. 

I’m not saying they’re wrong. Nor am I saying that I wouldn’t make the same play if I were in their shoes. But it definitely seems like something you’d try when the enemy is about to overrun you and you’re down to the last few arrows in your quiver. 

Here’s the video that lays out the Microsoft/Bing case:

Cat muses about fiscal cliff

The annual Christmas letter

Dear friends,

Wellsir, it’s time to take Pentel in hand once again and record the year’s blessings our family has received. However, we will not talk about Robert.

This year has been a wonderful one in many ways. Probably the big news that many of you already heard about was the time this summer that Darrell’s back eczema formed a scab in the spittin’ image of Jesus, which then started weeping real blood! Darrell’s back (though not Darrell—you know how shy he is!) was on Channel 7, Channel 22, Channel 18 AND Channel 79. (That’s the Latin station and they were SO polite about not coming in the house.) Suffice it to say we can hardly wait for dry, flaky season next year!

Celera sends letters regularly from college, although we were sad to learn she will not be returning from campus to join us for the holidays this year. That’s because of something called a quarantine they are having there. I don’t know, those college kids and their events.

I know some of you want to know about Robert, but the less said about Robert the better.

Matthew continues to be a delight, if something of a handful. Before his diagnosis, we had no clue about this pituitary business, but the boy can really go through the groceries! We are almost finished converting the garage into his containment facility. Oh, these contractors!

Sally is still dead-set on the ballet. Poor thing works so hard. The odds of making it are so high, even for a girl with two legs the same length, but she will not be deterred! I’m proud to say her last recital was longer on poise than it was on her toppling over onto the other cast members.

As for our youngest, Timmy, he is such a cut-up! He still tells anyone who will listen that he is not part of our family and will move away the second he turns 18, and all with a straight face! Such a performer for an 8-year-old! You’d think he’d let on that he’s kidding at least once, but oh, no, not our Timmy!

Well, I’d best end for now. Wishing you and yours the best for the holidays and the new year. If you do see Robert, please do not give him money or tell him where we moved to.

Martha