Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar Feverish Velocity

Giving In To Tumblr

I have started posting stuff over on the Tumblr powered I Love Ben Brown. You should probably adjust your feed reader.

Greetings from Floripa

Here is a picture of Romych and I climbing rocks in Florianopolis, Brazil. If it is not clear from this photo, we are having A LOT of fun. More here.

Ghostland Observatory plays with the UT Orchestra and Marching Band

I was in Marching Band, so I know that this would pretty much be the coolest gig EVAR.

Lists

Andre Torrez just launched Listable, a tool that lets you make and share lists, and then get them in a variety of formats. I hope this gets some love, because having a reliable source for, lets say, a JSON formatted list of every country in the world would be very handy for people like me who make a lot of stuff on the web. And that you can get at all the data on the site without an API or even an account, well, that’s why Torrez makes the big bucks.

Where The Conservative Things Live

There seems to be a feeling of disappointment amongst leftist bloviators that their conservative cohorts did not disappear in a puff of logic the moment Obama was elected. Perhaps they have forgotten the years of mind numbing, dittohead rallying propoganda during the Clinton years that culminated in, lest we forget, a successful attempt to impeach the president and successfully sully the image of that office so much so that nobody cared enough to stop Bush from being elected.

Arianna Huffington says,

It’s time to drive the final nail into the coffin of laissez-faire capitalism by treating it like the discredited ideology it inarguably is. If not, the Dr. Frankensteins of the right will surely try to revive the monster and send it marauding through our economy once again.

Paul Krugman says,

Why does such stuff flourish? Probably because there is no punishment for it — as long as you’re on the right, and I mean right, side. Let Michael Moore point out, entirely correctly, the close ties between the Saudis and the Bush family, and he’s blasted as a crazy conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, let Donald Luskin suggest, in 2004, that George Soros is planning to engineer a financial crisis to defeat Bush, and he gets to publish front-page articles in the Washington Post Outlook section declaring that there isn’t a recession.

Huffington and Krugman act like the beliefs of the right have anything to do with facts, reality, or rational thought. Obama’s election and the massive and sudden failure of American-style capitalism are certainly illustrative of the underlying problems, but in no way indicate an end to or a victory of progressive thinking over the feudalistic tendancies of our heartlands. I think this will become especially clear after the rosy colored fog of election bliss passes and people wake up to realize that they don’t have a job, don’t have a retirement, and aren’t a contestant on American Idol. Bush will be safe in his ranch by then, and the only person left to blame will be the formerly plucky junior senator from Illinois.

Why does the right get away with it? They pander to the greed and intellectual laziness in all of us. While the left asks us to make sacrifices for the good of others, the right tells us we should be keeping every penny we earn (so they can take it from us through the slot machine of our unregulated financial system.)

So sorry, Paul, sorry Arianna, you don’t get to sit back and have an easy ride for the next few years where everyone believes you because you’ve been proven finally and ultimately correct. We’ve been trained over the last few decades to sit back and let those in power run roughshod over us, and we now need more than ever those voices of reason, those purveyors of fact and history to guide us through the murky times ahead. The left must not become infatuated with itself, complacent in its tenuous victory, because the moment we lose site of the fierce pragmatism that brought us here, we’ve given up the game.

Who better to keep us laser focused on what is real and what is happening than lying idiots like Limbaugh and Kristol and Luskin and their ilk? I say, renew them all for 8 more seasons.

A Lot of Hot Air

I think a lot about the transition in common language from using future tense to using present tense. For example, Dakota and I had a running wager on when people would start saying “we are in a recession” instead of saying “a recession may be coming,” long after it was pretty clear that a recession was already here.

Well, this article does a pretty good job of switching us to the present tense when talking about drastic climate change. The ice caps ARE melting, the permafrost IS melting, the sea levels ARE rising, and we must DO SOMETHING NOW.

Al Gore set the example with his call for a 10-year conversion to noncarbon electricity. It’s at the outer edge of doable, and the outer edge is where we need to be. We’ll have plug-in hybrid electric vehicles on sale by 2010. The question is, can we have nothing else on sale by 2020? We built more than half of the interstate highway system in a decade. Would rebuilding our rail networks to a European standard be all that much harder? Can we get the price of energy up quickly enough to get markets on the task of finding a low-carbon way of life that works? And by works, I mean reverses the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Because physics and chemistry won’t reward good intentions. Methane is seriously uninterested in compromise. Permafrost, notoriously, refuses to bargain. Even the absolute political power represented by King Canute couldn’t hold back the rising seas. Those forces will only pay attention if we can scramble back below 350.

Consider this my vote for $15/gallon gasoline.

Build a Garden!

We built a planter box and planted a garden in our yard over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was very easy to do, and we had a lot of fun working on it together. I highly recommend it! If you learn how to grow your own food, you will not die immediately when the apocalypse comes!

Katie got the plans for the planter box from Sunset Magazine. I am basically a retard when it comes to using screws, but even I was able to figure out how to tack a few boards together and dig a few holes.

We planted chard and carrots and broccoli and beets and bok choy and peas and onions and shallots and 2 kinds of lettuce and brussel sprout in an 8×4 box. If we harvest half of what we planted, we will be filled with delicious for weeks.

Here is a view from inside our new garden, photo by Katie:

I can’t help but think about the broccoli and greens we will NOT be buying from California, about the trucks that will NOT be driving the highways to ship them across the country, about the money we will NOT be spending at the grocery store. And all I have to do is dig around in the dirt?

Sold.

Thirty Episodes

Instant Gratification

Thanks to integration with the Netflix API, we have a new feature on HoorayMovies! We are now not only tracking which movies are available to rent on Netflix, but also which movies you can watch instantly using Netflix’s new “Watch Instantly” system. It works very smoothly, and they have a surprisingly large and exciting catalog of movies already available.

If you’ve already got a HoorayMovies account, you can see which movies from your collection are available to watch right this second, and we’ll keep you posted about new releases as they become available. And if you don’t already have an account, what the hell is wrong with you? You know I’m going to keep pestering you until you join.

See our official announcement here…

This is just about the coolest thing the 12-year old kid who lives inside my brain has ever seen: You can now design your own muppet! And for $90, which seems pretty reasonable to me, FAO Schwarz will deliver your custom designed muppet in a few weeks. SOLD.

Now I just need to figure out what to name him.