Monday, November 19, 2012

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #3

I'm a real citizen of the Internet. Here's all of the places I went to on the Internet today:
  • After a two week hiatus, one of my favorite websites, Vintage Portland, is back! This post is my favorite kind - where they don't know where the photo's location is, and everyone in the comments works to figure it out.
  • Here's a short photo essay about the destruction from Sandy that has occurred to a cable vault owned by Verizon. As @webframp, who I got this link from, says: "Just reminds me how fragile the infrastructure really is."
  • My buddies at the Dutch festival Incubate run a blog with a regular Monday feature called "Was This Your Weekend?" It's not always SFW by American standards, but this week's installment is just a picture of a guy and his sweet pigeon tattoo
  • Over at ZooBorns (a site I go to daily), they have thirteen minutes of video of the four new baby lions up at Seattle's Woodland Park zoo. I have not watched the whole video - yet. Also: baby giant otters! They will get up to six feet in length as adults!
  • In other animal baby news, Rose-Tu (an Asian elephant) is expected to give birth to her second calf any day now!
  • I ended up at "The Movie Cliches List" for a minute, then used the Wayback Machine to confirm that the site has not had a design update since it debuted back in 1999. (Apparently, it became a USA Today "Hot Site" back in March of 2000!) (via @nonobody)
  • So I guess we had an earthquake right before I woke up this morning?
  • Here's a photo of Vice President Richard Nixon at the 1959 Oregon Centennial Exposition. And here's an early 20th century photo of a woman steering an experimental personal paddle boat. Looks fun. (Facebook links)
  • Hey, if you live in the Metro (Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas counties) area, you should take this survey about a possible 5-year parks and natural areas levy that Metro is considering.
  • Al Gore's blog always has rosy news about our warming future.
  • Geez, I've got a lot of bummer links in my browsing history today. Here's a depressing article about the civets that they cage in order to make civet coffee. "Civet coffee". (via @welshkaren)
  • Today's "Yo, Is This Racist?" podcast. It's pretty much the only podcast I really listen to. I also listened to Episode 22 and Episode 23, since I didn't listen to them last week. So after I listened to that last one, I went and watched "The Lone Ranger" trailer, and yep, Johnny Depp in Magical Indian face looks pretty racist. Then, since i was already at IMDB, I watched the "Iron Man 3" trailer.
  • OSPIRG is accused of union-busting.
Obligatory links to Huffington Post articles that were harvested from someone else's work:
  • Sarah Palin 2016. After reading a few sentences of the HP piece, I went to the original editorial arguing in favor of Palin 2016, and, oh boy. The writer argues that Palin would do better than Hillary Clinton because she is hotter than Clinton (then she makes an ad hominem attack on Hil's hairstyle); suggests that Palin could get the gay vote because there are some gay people out there that like her (presumably this would be the same logic that she could apply to racial minorities?); and that general voters are blue-collar dummies that don't pay attention to current affairs and care about the ''tugs on their emotions, fears, revulsions and heart strings provided by hours and hours of uninterrupted television watching." The piece ends with a biographical blurb about the author who "writes frequently about feminism, politics, and religion." Lotsa big YIKES and GROSSes in that editorial. 
  • Marco Rubio will not tell you that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Y'know what? I'm fine with this dude not outright agreeing to science. He has a base of crazy-ass people, and in the respect that he has political ambitions, this is the sort of thing that he has to say. I'm pretty sure that there's some places in Florida where they'll put burning crosses on your lawn if you admit that you believe in science. This is kind of like if someone asked Mayor-elect Charlie Hales if he should Keep Portland Weird.
Pop culture/celebrity links:
  • "Lana Del Ray, the joke's on us" - I read four paragraphs, and then I became really bored with it and that I really don't go for articles like this. (Also, I am an old person who gets confused and cranky by current pop culture?) (link via @_lucky)
  • Penn Jillette writing about being on "Celebrity Apprentice". The article's title states "Donald Trump is a whack job", which, yes, sure, but the actual article is more about a guy trying to explain why everyone acts like an idiot on reality television, then attempting to provide a justification for acting like an idiot on reality television.
  • Videogum's recap of this weekend's SNL, which was not very good (I only made it up through Weekend Update when we were watching it). Watching SNL on Saturday is when I was reminded that Jeremy Renner and Liam Neeson are not the same person.
  • Also, Videogum's Thursday night TV recap. I come for the GIFs.
Links about people who have recently taken their own lives:
  • Bike Portland remembers Justin Drawbert, a bike racer who committed suicide.
  • Here's a brief Willamette Week article covering the memorial for "Working" Kirk Reeves. It includes a link to the fundraiser to put some kind of permanent remembrance to him at his old station on the Hawthorne Bridge.
  • Reading those two articles made me want to link to this page to Multnomah County's Mental Health Crisis resources. The county has a 24-hour crisis number and a walk-in clinic that is open until 10:30pm everyday. 
iPhone apps that I briefly considered downloading but did not:
Links I went to that I wasn't interested in, but you might be interested in:
  • Here's something that indie developers who make games for the Wii might be interested in, I guess? I was 0.5% interested in the contents of this article.
  • I was going to read this NYT article about hipsters or irony or something, and I didn't even make it past the opening illustration. I managed to read the two paragraphs included in the Mercury's link to the article, and just: ugh. I'll have to go back and read this article sometime when I feel up to dissecting why this sort of article is so wrong in its thinking.
  • Okay, I am done reading the Hostess bankruptcy post-mortems.
  • Sometimes I just click on links because I don't know what they are. http://stupidtwittertricks.com/
Wikipedia Pages:

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