John Menick Blog | Archive for December, 2008

Happy new year from the Imperial Valley.

(Photo from my Salvation Mountain photo set.)

This week’s selection of somewhat fresh links presented here for your time-wasting pleasure:

FiveThirtyEight debunks the myth that African-Americans are to be held responsible for Prop 8 passing. Old news, I know. (The post is a month old.) According to his reading of the data, a voter’s age was a better predictor of how he or she voted on Prop 8 than race. New voters actually narrowed the margin of Prop 8 passing. In his words: “Prop 8’s passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two.”

In A Desert In A Large Bunker Covered With Snow by Liam Gillick. A couple of years ago I did a research into last-person-on-earth films. Somehow I missed Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man. Liam Gillick tracks down a copy from the one English-language printing and files a book report.

LiveStation. I no longer own a TV. The average of one hour of television I watch a week I watch online, and most of that I view in either 10-minute snippets or from a network’s archive. What I’ve been missing is a news network, especially an international news network like the BBC World or Al Jazeera English. LiveStation aggregates already existing live feeds from both of these stations and dozens more. And it’s exactly the right price: free.

The Stopped Clocks Foundation. I’m positive it’s not just some ironic art prank. I think these folks are for real, making their project all the more… insane. I love it. I wish I thought of it.

For more links, follow my bookmarks on Delicious.