There was a great billboard campaign going on in Madison from one of the local radio stations, 105.1, who's motto appears to be "We Play Everything." To make their point, they have been rotating their billboards through sets of rock bands that they play, but in magnetic poetry style.

I could never remember to write down the ones I chuckled at, but a few good ones stuck with me for some reason:

Police Sting Doobie Brothers
Eagles Rush A Flock Of Seagulls
Vanilla Ice Cream INXS

It's a great idea, and one theme that the Magnetic Poetry folks seem to have missed; they have a rock band lyrics set, but not the names of the bands. Sounds like an opportunity...

---

Ned Batchelder has a link to a story on a tour of Pixar. As he says, it's quite amazing. These are not your father's (or your) cubicles. I get the sense that the people who work there would love what they do no matter where they had to work, but that having surroundings like that makes it that much more amazing. Like Charlie walking into the Chocolate Factory.

---

I admire and envy cartoonists. Even though I know it's not an easy job by any stretch, they have a channel for venting their frustration, and in a way that can make you smile. Jef Mallet does a great job on a daily basis with The Fraz, but he outdid himself in my eyes with his entry last Sunday.

The panel that dragged me in was the one that expressed a truth that extends beyond just election time, but which becomes painfully clear when the attack ads and spin go into overdrive:

Extremes are easy, grays are hard
and thought takes precious time.
The means are trumped by ends
as is debate by mud and slime.

---

Supposedly, there are lots of alt news sites that have RSS feeds, but try finding the one at CommonDreams.org. I can't.

The AlterNet site supposedly has one, but they don't point you to it. I managed to find it by trial and error after searching for "RSS" on their site, and coming across a couple of RSS-looking URLs. I tried them in Bloglines, and finally one worked.

It seems, odd, though, that if you went through the work and hassle of creating a feed, why hide it?

George Lakoff, eminent linguist, will apparently be talking politics on Alternet this election year. The first entry in the series starts out making it sound as though he might apply some of his deep insights into linguistics to the issues of the campaign for both parties - what devices are they using to get their message across, and what devices are they overlooking, for example.

But this first interview with him seems to devolve all too quickly into more standard rants against Bush and his policies. From the second question on, there's nothing that distinguishes Lakoff from any other pundit, and that's too bad. His research into linguistics and cognitive pyschology has produced remarkable findings, and I think it would be fascinating to hear some analysis of the messages of both sides, especially as ways for the Democratics to improve things.

Or perhaps I'm not as up on Lakoff as I might be. His book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind is a dense academic treatise, and although it's on linguistics, it was a formative book for my own thinking on software development a number of years ago, and I sensed that he was A Sharp Guy. His views within the field it seems are not necessarily mainstream, but he makes them compelling. His book Metaphors We Live By seems to be a shorter and more approachable book, although I haven't read it. This, though, is what I would expect him to draw from in the AlterNet interview.

I see, though, that he has a newer release, Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. From the sounds of it, they could just reprint excerpts from this book and have enough to easily last until November.

Or perhaps I should just skip the AlterNet columns and buy the book.

---

I just came across Ian Frazier's hilarious book of laws for the household in print. I first heard a recording of him reading this on A Prairie Home Companion, and with pre-school kids of our own, Sara and I were in tears. Reading it is almost as good, but I now bless the MPR programmers who have it in the archives. We aren't past these years yet, so it's still funnyy, but only after the kids are in bed for the day.

"And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why. Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass."

Amen.

I'm ready to admit that selling your house is an exercise in madness, but when I opened Robert Irwin's Tips and Traps When Selling A Home to the chapter "14 Days to Shaping Up Your House for Sale", I had to double check that I hadn't picked up Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes instead. Here is the two week plan that Irwin feels that "anyone should be able to handle":

• Day 1: Trim the Hedges
• Day 2: Paint the Front
• Day 3: Paint the Trim
• Day 4: Mow the Lawn, Clean the Driveway, Polish the Brass
• Day 5: Evaluate and Remove Furniture
• Day 6: Paint the Kitchen
• Day 7: Clean or Replace the Kitchen Floor
• Day 8: Paint the Guest Bathroom
• Day 9: Paint the Master Bathroom
• Day 10: Pain (or Clean) the Entry and the Living Area
• Day 11: Paint (or Clean) the Bedrooms
• Day 12: Wash the Windows, Clean the Lights
• Day 13: Clean, Trim, Mow, and Plant Flowers in the Backyard
• Day 14: Have the Carpet Cleaned (or Replaced)

If the rest of the book wasn't so serious, I would really suspect that this guy was a comic genius. It certainly adds some lightness to an otherwise grinding process.

---

With one aspect of blogging being the creation of virtual communities, I've been wondering about how that intersects with the physical communities that we place ourselves in. The folks at Localfeeds.com have craftily built on the work of GeoURL.org to make finding that intersection simple. I haven't had time to explore the blogspace that eminates from Madison yet, but I really like the idea.

---

In a fascinating paper, "Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web", the authors put forth their research findings that web sites of political groups seem to have the same type of visibility characteristics as other categories of web sites - that is, that a few big, well-known sites are visited and referred to, and most others are seldom seen. The implications of this are that the common view of the web as a great leveler by providing an outlet for the individual voice doesn't mean much, since people will still largely see and read only a few large voices.

Meanwhile, there's a discussion going on over at Lessig's blog over a tiny piece called "more please" that merely points to what he refers to as a "citizen blogger." One thread of the debate is whether small-scale citizen bloggers such as this who provide political commentary are part of a growing movement that could change the landscape of political power, or whether they are just pissing into the wind, as far as affecting the thinking of any sizeable portion of the voting public. While I want to think that this type of blog is an important development of the utility of the web, this research seems to show what forces it is up against.

Googlearchy, though, doesn't address how sites get to where they are in terms of influence, it simply points out the data that show few non-traditional sites do. But how does that scale down to politics in the local? What good is it if a small community tries to be better informed and have discussions online. One of the commenters on the Lessig post points to their efforts to create a citizens blogosphere in Northfield, MN, Northfield Citizens Online. While it may never make it on to the radar of anyone searching Google, will it make a difference in Northfield? I don't know, but it has lots of interesting possibilities and questions.

---

The name draws you in, then the concept hooks you: a dynamic language modeled on concepts from Python and Ruby but with its roots (and branches) in Java. Groovy just sounds very fun, to the ear and to the Java-edged mind. With languages like these graduating from "scripting languages" or "little languages" to the more elegant sounding "dynamic languages" in the trade press, there could be some good momentum behind them.

I'm very curious to check it out, drawn in by a combination of forces. From
...getting cross-eyed trying to read and write Perl scripts that look like line noise (I don't dismiss the language's power, just it's entrance fee),
...to using Python as my one language to learn this year,
...to hearing Dave Thomas' gentle suggestion to check out Ruby just for the ideas it can give you,
...to seeing Jon Udell's post on dynamic languages' potential in the new year,
Groovy seems like one to keep an eye on. I'm not far enough into Python or Ruby to enter the argument of "why not just use Jython or JRuby?" but it will be interesting to see how that debate affects the attraction of Groovy.

The cuteness of the name does need to be kept in check - Groovlets and Groovy Beans I can take, but it could get too rich for the tummy if it goes much further.

---