Pete Yorn’s new album Nightcrawler comes out next week. Ordinarily, I would have already pre-ordered it. Possibly twice. (But probably not.) But Yorn’s on Columbia Records, and they’re owned by Sony, and Sony has a recent history of putting obnoxious software onto its music CDs that can royally mess up a computer. From the news […]
The Marines have announced that they need to fill 1200 roles in the “global war on terror,” and they don’t have enough volunteers to do the job. So they are recalling inactive Marines who are part of the Individual Ready Reserve. The Reuters article I linked to explains a few key points. No one can […]
Lemme just point you over to a discussion on hyper-textual ontology about the concept of “natural ability” and its relationship to effort, level of interest, and those things about ourselves that we generally feel like we have some control over. In the comments, I press the notion that “natural ability” means something. But on an […]
Peter Levine offers a cautionary tale on his blog about service learning programs in education. Levine sees such programs as a valuable tool for building the skills that people would need to be deliberative citizens – he sees a direct connection between a method of educating and a particular kind of political environment. He sees […]
I wound up being disappointed in DC’s Infinite Crisis crossover in large part because, as I said in an earlier post, the main draw for me was Phil Jimenez drawing the crap out of the DC Universe. For whatever reason, that didn’t quite happen – Jimenez was unable to draw every page of every issue, […]
I just got finished reading my daughter her bedtime stories. Tonight she wanted to read a couple of short board books from a Disney Princess set she has. (I’ll let Pattie grumble about the marketing bonanza that is the Disney Princess brand, but anyway.) All of the stories in thsi set are supposed to have […]
Been doing a lot of story-reading at bed time these days, and it strikes me that Grant Morrison is considered a genius, in part, for breaking the fourth wall and inserting a metafictional component into his comics like Animal Man and Invisibles. Meanwhile, thanks to Jon Stone and Liz Smollin, we’ve been feeding the same […]
So every so often I do a Google search on my name, just to see if stuff from Not News has popped up in unexpected places. (At this point it’s amazing how often my name is attached to various message boards, ratings polls, and so on, but anyway.) On a recent search, I found a […]
For some anecdotal evidence that we 1) need to find some alternate sources of energy and 2) might want to continue being cautious about the whole idea of drilling in ANWR, check out this article on BP and the Prudhoe Bay pipeline. Apparently BP had not been particularly diligent in its upkeep of the pipeline, […]
I noticed that the first sentence of the Reuters story on the potential terrorist plot revealed in the UK today is: British police foiled a plot by would-be suicide bombers to simultaneously blow up several planes flying to the United States, arresting 24 people days before they could attack, officials said on Thursday. British police […]