This particular one got me thinking, though, so you get to read about it here.

The idea of the list is that you’re supposed to jot down the first 15 albums that come to mind, without thinking about it a whole bunch. Off the top of my head, my list looks something like this:

• Slayer – Seasons In the Abyss
• Nine Inch Nails – Pretty Hate Machine
• John Coltrane – Blue Train
• Orbital – Orbital 2
• Ministry – In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up
• Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique
• Front Line Assembly – Caustic Grip
• Intermix – S/T
• Metallica – Master Of Puppets
• MC 900 Ft Jesus – Welcome To My Dream
• Fugazi – 13 Songs
• Mike Doughty – Rockity Roll
• Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
• Keith Jarrett – At the Blue Note, 1st Set
• Plastikman – Consumed

What struck me about this list (and the reason I’m writing about it all) is that, for the most part, these albums are all pretty old. My immediate reaction was to be somewhat embarrassed at being so hopeless biased toward the music I listened to in college.

At the risk of sounding defensive, though, I don’t think it’s really all that surprising that this sort of list would be weighted towards albums that are older relative to my age. There are plenty of albums that have come out in the five to ten years that I really like, but I just don’t know yet how well they’re going to hold up. Ask me this same question ten years from now, and some of those may have crept on to this list. Until that point, though, I’m not going to make any baseless claims about how long-term awesome they are.

The pedestrian-pedestrian encounter is both chaotic and benign, just so long as you don’t work in the middle of Times Square. (Ahem.) People move slowly enough that they have lots of time to maneuver around each other as necessary, and most of the time, with the help of a little eye contact, large numbers of people are extremely good at walking with and around and across each other.

The motorist-motorist encounter, by contrast, is very highly choreographed, with lights and lanes and speed limits and indicator lights and even a dedicated corps of traffic police to enforce the rules. The rules aim to minimize car crashes, and again, as a general rule, they do a pretty good job.

Finally there’s the pedestrian-motorist encounter, which is based largely on asymmetry: motorists have nothing to fear from pedestrians, but pedestrians have everything to fear when it comes to getting hit by a car. At the same time, their respective spaces (sidewalk, roadway) are very clearly delineated, largely to minimize any need for the two to interact at all. When they do interact, pedestrians take advantage of the rules of the road: a red light, for instance, means that the cars have to stop, so pedestrians can cross against them. Pedestrians trust the motorists to follow the rules, and most of the time that’s what happens.

Bicyclists, on the hand, “feel pretty much completely unconstrained by rules.”

Even in my rather small and sleepy town, it is not uncommon to see people riding bicycles against traffic or the wrong way down streets, sailing through stop signs and red lights, riding on sidewalks, and all sort of other crazy, unpredictable behavior.

My initial response to this analysis is that it is not fair to single out this sort of rule-breaking by bicyclists, when motorists speed all the time, run red lights, fail to signal, etc. However, while that may be true in principle, it offers little comfort when you’re getting run over by a car after ignoring a stop sign.

Pedestrians get away with their occasionally reckless behavior for two reasons:

1. They are generally in a separate space from motorists.
2. They are protected by the same rules that keep motorists from killing one another.

Unlike pedestrians, though, bicyclists tend to be in the same spaces as motorists, so they don’t benefit from #1. When they ignore normal traffic laws and behaviors, they also lose any protection they might have under #2. Long term, the only way any of this is going to change is to have more bicycles on the road so that they constitute more of a presence. In the meantime, I don’t think bicyclists are doing themselves any favors by riding as though they’re the only ones on the road.

At Ars Technica, John Siracusa analyzes this offering and finds it lacking:

As with any new electronic gadget, I must be of two minds about the new Apple TV. The first, most difficult question is, will the new Apple TV be a successful product for Apple? The second question is easier: is this a product I want to buy for myself?

For any consumer electronics product, the degree to which those two questions have the same answer is dictated by—for lack of a better term—one’s geekiness. Mine is substantial. I have not wanted any of the Apple TV products (including the one released yesterday), and thus far, none of them have had much success in the market either. But does that mean that an Apple TV designed to my specifications would be a hit? The easy answer is, probably not.

But pondering the prospects of a cheaper, smaller, streaming-only, renting-only, iOS-based Apple TV device in the rumor-filled weeks leading up to its announcement yesterday has changed my mind. In this particular case, I think my desires are actually very well aligned with the mass market—and continue to be at odds with the products Apple has decided to create.

Siracusa goes on at some length on the topic, but I really don’t think it’s all that complicated to figure out why even Apple is struggling with home video. While it pains me to admit it, Steve Jobs is right—this market is a hobby.

Cable and satellite television, along with the content they provide, pretty much define ubiquitous. The small percentage of people who opt out of the standard delivery methods have already found solutions—home theater/media center PC’s, hacked/augmented game consoles, and Roku/Slingbox-type stuff—that fit their needs. For the rest of the video-consuming population, though, there is no clear benefit to counterbalance having yet another box to plug into their television.

Wretched as cable companies’ set-top boxes may be, they provide viewers with guaranteed and predictable access to their shows. Even the best alternatives come encumbered by delays and restrictions, and none of them provide a full range of programming. I love my XBMC setup, but I’m a hobbyist who doesn’t care about watching a show at the time it originally airs and would be perfectly happy to see a live broadcast of a sporting event.

To really achieve success in this market on the same scale that they have in the music and phone realms, Apple would need to have a box that fully replaces the set-top cable box. Short of that, I don’t see how the added complexity of yet another piece of gear in the entertainment center would appeal to the general public.

Besides, even if they stuck a CableCard in their device, worked out agreements with all of the various streaming services, and came up with the world’s greatest UI, they would still be dependent upon the pipe provided by the cable company. What possible reason could Time Warner and Comcast have to encourage or even tolerate that sort of attack on their cash cow of bundled cable packages and up-sells like pay-per-view and on-demand movies?

Barns infested with flies, maggots and scurrying rodents, and overflowing manure pits were among the widespread food safety problems that federal inspectors found at a group of Iowa egg farms at the heart of a nationwide recall and salmonella outbreak.

Inspection reports released by the Food and Drug Administration on Monday described—often in nose-pinching detail—possible ways that salmonella could have been spread undetected through the vast complexes of two companies.

The inspections, conducted over the last three weeks, were the first to check compliance by large egg-producing companies with new federal egg safety rules that were written well before the current outbreak, but went into effect only last month.

For those who considering regulation by federal agencies like the the FDA to be an anti-business power-grab, I have to wonder what the response is to something like this.

Maybe we should wait for the free market to punish companies like this after their products kill one too many people and customer spend their money elsewhere. Absent federal inspections, though, how are customer even going to find out what’s going on at these factories? Even if they did find out, I’d bet it is extraordinarily difficult for individually consumers, standing in front of the dairy case at Stop-n-Shop, to even know which cartons might come from the factories/companies in question.

Or maybe the answer from the Free Marketeers is that there is no Constitutional basis for the FDA to inspect/regulate companies (or even to exist, for that matter).

Sure enough, according to the googles, it’s another attempt by Christianists to revise American history in their favor, this time casting colonial preachers as primary actors in the establishment of the United States as a Christian nation. The first link that came up was to some religious nutball’s site, and his write-up on the topic contains this gem:

These men of God would get in their pulpits and they would basically tell people what or who they should and should not vote for, because they understood that in order to have a great government, then you must have great citizens.

So, by “great citizens,” what you actually mean is “People who do what their preacher tells them,” which would be about as far as you can get from the notion of a well-informed citizenry able to think through policy issues and make decisions for themselves. For this crowd, the legitimacy of the government doesn’t come from the will of the governed, it comes from god—their god. But hey, best not to let Locke, Rousseau, and the entire Enlightment get in the way of your project to set up a Christian theocracy.

So there’s no sort of fond connection for me whatsoever. In fact, I would go even farther and say that… I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.

“Cheapens the medium.” Right, because Avatar was high fucking art. You took 4+ years, spent a bazillion dollars, and stole a script from Kevin Costner to make a movie about how generic noble natives being slaughtered helps the white man find himself. You didn’t invent a brilliant new artform—you helped out with the latest scheme by the movie and theater industry to justify their increasingly exorbitant prices.

Get over yourself, Cameron. At least the Piranha guys know they’re making crap.

I eventually got tired of hearing all my friends go on about it at school, so I finally watched it on the black and white TV in my parents’ bedroom, with my hand on the switch ready to turn it off and run back to my homework at the first sound of someone coming up the stairs.

Of course, the movie gave me nightmares (see above, re: “timid child”). The scene that most people tend to single out is that of Ralphie Glick floating outside the window and scratching at the glass. While that scene was plenty creepy, the one that really got to me was Mike Ryerson, sitting in the rocking chair:

It’s the slow, creaking rock, man, like he was just sitting there waiting and there was nothing you could do. Oh, how many times I hesitated to open a door and go into a room for fear of finding something like that waiting for me.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why. Every Hellraiser movie after the second installment was total shit. The fourth movie (Pinhead in space!) had its moments, but still—total shit.

From the bits and pieces I’ve read about it, this new one is heading down the same microscopic budget/straight-to-video path as the previous four sequels. Doug Bradley has apparently had the good sense to opt out of playing Pinhead this time around. Given that he’s really been the only part of any of the recent sequels worth watching, it’s really a mystery what appeal this one might hold.

On the other hand, maybe it’s the endless low-rent sequels that are to be credited with staving off the inevitable remake/reboot. Hellraiser is, as far as I know, the only remaining classic 1980′s horror staple that has yet to be given the Platinum Dunes/jump-cut treatment.

…except that the “infinite loop” metaphor is dying, almost dead. At 41, I’m almost certainly one of the youngest people to use (in middle school, when it was already almost obsolete) a reel-to-reel tape player on which one could actually splice the tape containing some music or words into a loop for the machine to play ceaselessly. Granted, “infinite loop” is also programming talk for a subroutine from which there’s no exit—hence Apple Computer’s corporate address—but that’s hardly common knowledge. I suspect most younger people have no idea what an infinite loop is, nor should they.

Kevin Drum objects:

Granted, I’m a nerd, but it’s never even occurred to me that there was ever any other origin of the phrase aside from programming lingo. That’s always seemed like the “common knowledge” version to me.

Really, guys? Aren’t we making a bit more out of this topic than is actually there?

It’s not a metaphor, it’s a description. Something that goes around is a loop. When it does it again and again and never stops, it’s an infinite loop.

Now, if you attend some tea party meetings in Indiana, a different kind of challenge is emerging. On the information tables, along with candidate brochures and handouts from right-wing blogs, is a stack of DVDs, one of them titled “Rothschild’s Choice: Barack Obama and the Hidden Cabal Behind the Plot to Murder America.”

As described in breathless narration over ominous, pounding, suspenseful music, the cabal is made up of Jewish financiers and billionaires, run today by Lord Jacob Rothschild, the 4th Baron. Along with Jewish-run secret societies and globalist organizations, their control of Barack Obama has turned him into a water boy to their causes.

Obama is a Zionist puppet, goes the argument, supported by Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Barney Frank — all Jews, all part of the banking system, all tools of the conspiracy. “David Axelrod,” says the narrator, “That’s right, he had a Jewish campaign manager.”

I can already hear the chorus starting up from the Tea Party crowd. This is just a fringe element, doesn’t represent the overall movement, blah blah blah.

Rather than getting into yet another argument about whether or not the Tea Party movement has a significant basis in racism, nativism, and xenophobia, I’m going to take a different route here. For decades, Republicans and conservatives have been tarring Democrats with every nutball and loon that shows up at anything that is even remotely related to the party. Democrats have been forced to answer for and disavow an endless stream of fringe groups and figures, down to the level of forum-posters on non-affiliated websites.

Now, faced with an escalating series of kooks, bigots, and crackpots showing up at their events and frequenting their forums, conservatives are falling back on the same “We’re not responsible for those guys” answers for which they have torched Democrats over and over again.

You can’t have it both ways, guys. Either drop the guilty-by-association tactics, or admit you’ve got some scary shit happening within your “party”.