Best Web Junk (October 30)

This is probably my favorite fail of all time

I’ve never heard of this, but now I want to see it in person

This is a very entertaining story, but I wouldn’t want to be this guy

This is about 50 minutes of video.  But I promise you it is thoroughly interesting, and that you will never watch a cop show the same again

If you only watch one video about the Spitzer Space Telescope, it should be this video

October is Pastor Appreciation Month

I appreciate my Pastor.

This post is nearly identical to last year, feel free to skip it.

Pastor Weeks at the new 1.3 Billion dollar Yankee Stadium

I am a very critical person, and I find that I am very often critical of Pastor Weeks.  Much more than I should be.  I want to take this opportunity to say publicly that I appreciate him.  he is n excellent pastor and in the 5 years I’ve known him he has been nothing but good to me.

Even though he is nearly 60 he still is willing to  learn.

He loves our church.  If anyone needs him, they know they can call.  If you have a birthday or an anniversary, you can count on a phone call.

He loves his family and knows they are his legacy.

He loves the Bible, and has regular quiet time and does his best to communicate it to us each week.

He loves missions.  More than any pastor I’ve ever known, he emphasizes missions prayer, giving, and going.

Thanks for allowing me to ramp & rave

Jon Stewart = Neil Postman

Oops…I guess I sort of left my regular readers hanging.  I promised this last week.  I found myself to be much busier than I expected last Thursday, and now I have sort of lost my energy for this post.  But since I said it was coming, here you go.

Jon Stewart deals in what he calls “fake news.” He is thoroughly self-deprecating, and often laments that he is taken seriously by so many.  In reality The Daily Show is not so much “fake news” as it is commentary on the news.  Most of the Jon Stewart shtick is to point out how terrible news coverage is.  This video I linked to as a prelude to these thoughts illustrates this perfectly.  In it, he shows that CNN did a fact check on a Saturday Night Live sketch, while not even questioning a senator on his views of healthcare reform.  Then there is a barrage “leave it there” quotes.  This is the way that CNN doesn’t bother with fact checking.  They just bring in 2 points of view and debate.  Then end whenever it’s time for a commercial.

The daily show has repeatedly done critiques of the same sort on the networks and each of the cable news channels.

You might say that this is just rampant cynicism and not Neil Postman-like criticism of the news.  But even if it is just cynicism, it illustrates the same point – television news is in terrible condition.  Clearly Stewart is no Postman in terms of gravitas (to use a good cable-news word), and he is much more political, but his criticism is valid nonetheless.

The only thing lacking from Stewart’s criticism is the why.  Postman explained the why. News is terrible because the news organizations exist to make money, not to protect the first amendment.  If it is more profitable to show debates than truly look at the issues being debated, then debates will continue.  And Saturday Night Live is simply more interesting than charts and graphs looking at the financial impact of a given healthcare reform bill.

Best Web Junk (October 23)

I guarantee nobody would say this at Christmas

This is hilarious (be warned it has a couple of swears)

I think Ryan should go with this look

You know how people are always seeing faces in random stuff?  This one I totally see

Also in seeing pictures where they may or may not exist is this awesomeness

I know everybody has seen this by now, but c’mon, it’s hilarious

Neil Postman

I wonder if anyone who reads my blog has any idea who Neil Postman was?

He was what I, and wikipedia, will call a cultural critic.  His most well-known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, the thesis of which is that the ignorance and destruction of the future will not come in the way Orwell prophesied in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the way Huxley prophesied in Brave New World.  That is to say, the downfall of intelligence is not in the form of oppression or governmental control, but in the form of a change in media to one that is enjoyed and desired, but consequently requires no thought.  In other words, our entertainment is making us stupid.

Also in Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman describes what he calls the age of show business.  He says that in this age, entertainment has become the greatest virtue of all, and the things that go with it must be accepted, whether good or bad, merely because they are necessary.  (e.g. Choosing the attractive news anchor over the articulate one.)  He explains how the terse nature of visual media, particularly television news, has the effect of removing the importance from every issue.  He even discusses how TV-izaition has resulted within other media forms.  The result is magazines with virtually no articles and newspapers with extremely short stories.  Postman claims this has destroyed news. Keep in mind that he wrote this book in 1985, long before the internet

He also cowrote a book with Steve Powers called How to Watch TV News.  I will give you the takeaways from the book more or less, straight from chapter one.  1.)TV is an unsleeping money machine. 2.) Management, not journalists, make news decisions based on business considerations. 3.) Decisions of what is newsworthy are based on what keeps viewers watching so that they will see commercials.

Tomorrow.  Why Jon Stewart is the modern Neil Postman

Prepwork for tomorrow’s post

Theoretically I’m going to write an actual blog post tomorrow about how Jon Stewart has become this generation’s Neil Postman. What got me thinking about it is this clip from the daily show last week. Enjoy and come back tomorrow.

The embed doesn’t seem to be playing nice with wordpress.com, so you can watch it by clicking this link

Best Web Junk (October 16)

This map is pretty much amazing. All the space missions ever

This is a good interview with Mike Rowe

This lop-sided guy is really freaky looking

Entertainment Weekly asked people to post pictures of their best pop culture inspired Halloween costumes.  Some of these are very enjoyable (The 4 y.o. Lando Calrissian is by far my favorite)

Um…yay

I haven’t blogged in a week

I even forgot to post last week’s best web junk (so you get a double dose this week)

I have almost never skipped an entire week.

It’s a weird occurrence, but not as weird as this

John Madden Knows How to Watch Football

I want to go to there -

more about “Watching Football With John Madden Is…“, posted with vodpod

An internet project

I like to use my blog to crowdsource things.  I don’t have that large of a readership  but sometimes you are extremely helpful.  So this is another post where I ask you to give me suggestions and ideas.

I am currently teaching Basic Computers at CBC.  At the first class I asked the students to rate themselves from 1-10 in computer knowledge, with 1 meaning, “I can barely turn a computer on,” and 10 meaning “I should be teaching this class.”  Most of them were a 2.

So I began with vocabulary. After learning much of the computer lexicon, I decided to turn my attention to using the internet.  There are 2 reasons for this strategy.  One, almost anything you can do with a  computer can be done online.  And two, it seems to me the trend is toward cloud computing.  I think the proliferation of netbooks demonstrates that we will soon to be mostly a world of terminals where the real computing is done on a server and the browser is the most important piece of software.

Here is where I ask for your help. What are the absolute must-knows of the internet?  I am composing a project in which I assign them a variety of tasks.  What do you think everyone should know about, or know how to do on, the internet?

BTW: I refuse to add “Learn to play Farm Town” to the list