• How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write – WSJ.com
  “I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.”
  (tags: technology literacy kindle stevenJohnson future publishing culture via:twitter=valdiskrebs)
  (sources: Twitter user @valdiskrebs (Valdis Krebs))
• Google News Timeline
  News items rendered in a week-at-a-glance view, with customizable queries.
  (tags: news google web2.0 via:twitter=valdiskrebs)
  (sources: Twitter user @valdiskrebs (Valdis Krebs))
• @ohnoerino I’m no expert but Sahara Kabob on Clark in Rogers Park serves that kind of stuff. I like their grilled cornish hen. (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @robotwisdom) “The market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent” –JohnMaynardKeynes via SamSmith
• LTHForum.com • View topic – Regional North Carolina Barbecue – Eastern & the Piedmont
  “The battle between Eastern Carolina whole hog vs. Western Piedmont shoulders is an age old feud. Advocates of whole hog claim that the varying textures and fats coming from the both dark and light meats found throughout a pig, chopped and mixed together, will create a more complex array of flavors. Those from the Piedmont say that the higher fat content and dark meat of the shoulder will yield a richer and more satisfying result.
  …
  “I finally demanded that we check out what’s happening in enemy territory. We plotted a barbeque road trip that would encapsulate highly praised and notable places from both Eastern Carolina and Western Carolina (the Piedmont) to sample in succession their differences as well as similarities.”
  (tags: food barbecue north_carolina)
• (from @ianbicking) @JoeGermuska @matt_fisher thanks for suggestion, following @MrTweet now, we’ll see what he suggests… (in reply to this tweet)
• material exchange – King Ludd’s Midway Arcade
  “9 artist-made, family-friendly, analog arcade and carnival games, from air-hockey to lawn bowling, pinball to video games.

  PLUS Magic = Clowns = Tarot Readings = Music = Home Brew
  At the Experimental Station in Hyde Park
  6100 South Blackstone Avenue

  Opening night: Saturday, April 25th, 7-11 pm
  Then open Sunday the 26th from 2-8 pm
  Friday, May 1st, 7-11 pm
  Saturday, May 2nd, 2-8 pm”

  (tags: chicago event analog art games)
• @ianbicking You could check out MrTweet.com ; I haven’t played with it much but it has some features along those lines. (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @emckean) RT @bhammerling: “Stop-tional. A new word I learned tonight which refers to the art of rolling thru a stop sign in the Hollywood Hills.”
• The Washington Independent » Let’s Play ‘Who Gave Chris Dodd More Money Than Connecticut Residents?’
  “ICE has good reason to cultivate a friendship with the Banking Committee chief. The company was recently approved by government regulators to begin “clearing” trades of derivatives, the risky financial instruments that helped take down AIG and were estimated last year to exceed the real value of the whole world’s financial holdings. ICE now has an interest in ensuring that derivatives trading remains supervised by a small group of firms, thus maximizing its ability to profit from the market.”
  (tags: campaignFinance banking christopher_dodd connecticut via:twitter=ellnmllr)
  (sources: Twitter user @ellnmllr (Ellen Miller))
• (from @ajturner) Not convinced online voting is beneficial or good. Would rather see early voting and vote audit tracking #polc09
• Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will – WSJ.com
  “The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.’” On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.”
  (tags: typography history via:twitter=happy_stomach)
  (sources: Twitter user @happy_stomach)
• (from @happy_stomach) RT @gapersblock Mayor Daley has named this Thursday Talk Like Shakespeare Day http://tinyurl.com/d7z3xk (What would we do w/o our mayor?)

• A ‘Copper Standard’ for the world’s currency system? – Telegraph
  “China has woken up. The West is a black hole with all this money being printed. The Chinese are buying raw materials because it is a much better way to use their $1.9 trillion of reserves. They get ten times the impact, and can cover their infrastructure for 50 years.”
  (tags: economics copper currency via:metafilter)

• (from @subhan_michael) @JoeGermuska did you go to Northwestern back in ’91?
• Did not expect to hear today: “I always wanted to hire a monkey.” – R. Wojcik (Sorry, folks, that was a past Dusty Groove event, not today.)
• I’m at Dusty Groove.
• Good crowd at Reckless. Do I have another record store stop in me? I think so…
• Fresh tube on bike, ready for a ride. Think I’ll observe Record Store Day.
• Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO – O’Reilly Radar
  “Chopra demonstrates a deep understanding of the idea that the government is an enabler, not the ultimate solution provider. From the list of initiatives above, you can see that Chopra grasps the power of open source software, Web 2.0, user-participation, and why it’s better to harness the ingenuity of a developer community than to specify complete top-down solutions.”
  (tags: government technology opengovernment)

• The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan | The Tea Tantrum Movement
  “As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don’t feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.”
  (tags: politics conservatism taxes activism)
• The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale – O’Reilly Radar
  “Now is the time for a renewal of our commitment to make our own institutions, our own communities, and our own difference. There’s a kind of passivity even to our activism: we think that all we can do is to protest. Collective action has come to mean collective complaint. Or at most, a collective effort to raise money.”
  (tags: government civics participation activism diy)
• MIKE REED drummer & composer – Same old shit…but with Nazis
  “Of course they were searching us out for a confrontation. Greg led the way and since he’s slight and didn’t have much baggage he managed to squeeze by the line of bald Nazis headed towards us, while only being pushed and yelled at. I, however, having my cymbals did not manage to be able to slide through their advancement.”
  (tags: chicago music race europe slovakia)
• The FEC Supports the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act | OMB Watch
  “The Federal Election Commission (FEC) released their 2009 legislative priorities which includes four recommendations. Of these four, the FEC considers electronic filing of Senate campaign finance reports to be a priority. OMB Watch has supported this for years, and most recently with the introduction of S. 482. You can help by calling your senators and asking them to cosponsor the bill.”
  (tags: democracy transparency via:twitter=ellnmllr)
  (sources: Twitter user @ellnmllr (Ellen Miller))

• Running Internet Explorer on my Mac using Crossover. Bizarre, but it seems to work just fine. No Windows license necessary.
• Americans’ Tax Burden Near Historic Low – washingtonpost.com
  “As thousands of anti-tax protesters rallied across the nation yesterday and the president promised tax cuts for most, new data showed that the federal income tax burden is already hovering near its lowest level in three decades for all but the wealthiest Americans.”
  (tags: government taxes)
• Gapers Block : Drive-Thru : Chicago Food – Jones’ Goodass Barbecue and Foot Massage
  “As long as it’s fryable and edible, we gonna make it delicionable…”
  (tags: chicago food comedy video via:twitter=gapersblock)
  (sources: Twitter user @gapersblock (Gapers Block))
• I know nothing about Gavin Newsom, but listening to his Long Now talk, I picture Tommy Carcetti.
• @deezthugs I know that CNN’s political bias is not really new, but it’s more shouty than I’d seen it before, and that is tedious. (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @deezthugs) @JoeGermuska If by “Partisan” you mean “the Oligarchy”, then yes, CNN is partisan:) some ppl used to call it “Clinton News Network” (in reply to this tweet)
• just what we need, CNN is going partisan too… reporter at Chicago “Tea Party”: http://tinyurl.com/dfdzk6
• @robotwisdom she indirectly answered “no one was keeping track, but I’m calling them out on that.” Now journos need to hammer on that questn (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @robotwisdom) @JoeGermuska I wish jStewart had asked eWarren who pocketed the $100-$66 difference (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @anniemmm) Retweeting @JoeGermuska: I wish Jon Stewart’s amazing interview with TARP oversight chief Elizabeth Warren got as much buzz as Jim Crame …
• I wish Jon Stewart’s amazing interview with TARP oversight chief Elizabeth Warren got as much buzz as Jim Cramer. Watch! http://tr.im/iXt3

og

• Statebook
  Clever parody of Facebook suggests risks of a high-surveillance society.
  (tags: surveillance privacy parody facebook)
• The Failure of #amazonfail « Clay Shirky
  “This isn’t because I am a generally stupid person; it was because I was, on Sunday, a specifically stupid person. When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, and in a rout.”
  (tags: amazon twitter emotion via:twitter=cshirky)
  (sources: Twitter user @cshirky (Clay Shirky))
• Open Progressive Analytics | Google Groups
  “Discussing low-level implementation of an open, shared political analytics platform (code libraries, modules, apps, APIs) for the progressive community, focused on python and related agile technologies. Topics to cover: randomized field experiments, voter file matching, census analysis, modeling, polling, targeting, simulation, data management, and getting set up. Technologies will likely include: Python (numpy, scipy, pymc, simpy, pycluster, cython, etc.), R, MySQL / SqlLite / MapReduce, Rails / Drupal 7 / Django, jQuery, EC2 / Google App Engine, and Git.”
  (tags: politics activism progressive python mailing_list)
• NASA’s early lunar images, in a new light – Los Angeles Times
  “Pictures from the mid-1960s Lunar Orbiter program lay forgotten for decades. But one woman was determined to see them restored.”
  (tags: space science history photography)
• @maximolly Is that for your Christopher Alexander talk? Will there be a recording? (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @justinmassa) message i’m taking from #teaparty: it’s ok for a white guy to waste our money on war, but that black guy better not spend it on the poor
• (from @Delicious) @brampitoyo @dsims @JoeGermuska Yeah, Delicious is giving a few errors to people this morning. We’re working on it right now.
• @delicious are you broken? “0 bookmarks saved in the last minute” seems implausible, and I keep getting errors saving one myself.
• (from @carlmalamud) Washington Post reports when Grateful Dead visited Oval Office yesterday, there was a vase of scarlet begonias by the door.

• (from @drtiki) Ketchup is a poor substitute for spaghetti sauce. Even if you add Tabasco and peanut butter. Trust me.
• @vielmetti Doesn’t sound so different from Chicago. (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @deezthugs) apparently, there is a sport called “Canoe Jousting”: http://nationalcanoejoustingassociation.com/photos.html
• MyHumana registration fail: “You MUST scroll down…” even though I had. grr. Used Safari javascript console to remove stupid check.
• @neilhimself I think you are a one man slashdot effect. (in reply to this tweet)
• Unleash your inner librarian: “flash mob cataloging” at Puerto Rican Cultural Ctr on Sunday http://tr.im/iOag (via @librarythingtim)
• Climate 411 » “He said, she said” Reporting Mangles Climate Economics Story – Blogs & Podcasts – Environmental Defense Fund
  “The conclusions are sobering. Most reporters treat the story as stenographers, engaging in “he said, she said” reporting, instead of serving as honest referees of the issues.”
  (tags: climate journalism via:twitter=jayrosen_nyu)
  (sources: Twitter user @jayrosen_nyu (Jay Rosen ))
• Tweet this: Rapid-fire media may confuse your moral compass
  “Brain imaging showed that the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain. However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain. The study raises questions about the emotional cost—particularly for the developing brain—of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.”
  (tags: twitter emotion brain science via:twitter=hrheingold)
  (sources: Twitter user @hrheingold (Howard Rheingold))
• GazeboNews: Minding Their Beeswax
  “Bob Meyers and David Ritter won’t get rich as beekeepers, and they’ll never become famous from their hobby. They spend more money on their beehives than they earn selling amber jars of Lake Bluff Honey at Bluffingtons. But this doesn’t bother the retirees, who believe their role as beekeepers is far more important than fame or fortune: “We consider these bees to be our gift to the world,” said David while examining a hive for dysentery recently.”
  (tags: bees chicagoland via:twitter=gapersblock)
  (sources: Twitter user @gapersblock (Gapers Block))
• that pain in the ass vegan: eggplant bacon? get outta here!
  “was it bacon? of course not, but i think this is a very good use for eggplant if you’re sick of making babaganoush or moussaka.”
  (tags: food recipes)
• Cory Doctorow: Game developers find ways to make industry recession-proof | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  “The excitement wasn’t over the right to print money per se –rather, the game developers were interested in the role that money plays in, well, play. What happens to your honest, fun game when real lucre is injected into it.”
  (tags: economics games)

• MediaBerkman » Blog Archive » Radio Berkman: What do you call a web-enabled political system?
  “President Obama himself led one of the first online townhalls in which Americans submitted and voted on over 100,000 questions, which Obama then responded to in more traditional setting. Gene Koo, a Berkman Fellow, posted some advice on his blog for the Obama administration on how they could improve this process in the future, and potentially build a more web-savvy democracy. We caught up with him last week to get his thoughts on this fascinating topic.”
  (tags: politics opengovernment participation barack_obama berkman_center podcast audio)
• @anselm if only you’d use python, I recently tweaked out basic extensions to PyRSS2Gen for GeoRSS. (in reply to this tweet)
• (from @rainnwilson) I went to Balboa Park to rent paddle boats with Walter on Easter. He calls the black ducks there ‘waterchickens’.
• OpenRegulations.org
  “OpenRegulations.org is an alternative interface to the federal government’s Regulations.gov regulatory dockets database. Below are the newest agency notices of proposed rulemaking published in the Federal Register. Click on a regulation’s title to go to that docket’s page. To see a particular agency’s dockets, choose the agency from the menu to the right. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of a particular agency’s rulemaking notices.”
  (tags: government opengovernment via:twitter=ellnmllr)
  (sources: Twitter user @ellnmllr (Ellen Miller))
• Bryant – Amazon Troll Busting
  “To make it even better, Twitter was the main vector of communication about the Amazon stuff. Twitter is lousy for any communication which takes more than 140 characters; it strips logic leaving us only with reputation capital. The #amazonfail tag got a lot of reputation capital, initially from upset people and later from sheer volume…

  “But you can’t tell from a Twitter post whether or not something’s authentic. You gotta do your own research and thinking. Some people do; lots of people don’t. No matter what Amazon did or didn’t do, intentionally or not, there is absolutely not enough evidence right now to draw any conclusions other than “it’s bad that this happened.” Our troll used the same transmission technique, because who’s gonna take the time to read his post and think about his claims?”

  (tags: amazon via:twitter=cshirky)
  (sources: Twitter user @cshirky (Clay Shirky))
• Rosemarie Fiore: Firework Drawings
  ‘”Firework Drawings” These large works on paper are made by exploding and containing live fireworks, resulting in bursts of saturated color that are overlaped and collaged into abstract compositions.’
  (tags: art via:twitter=anselm)
  (sources: Twitter user @anselm (anselm hook))
• Eye Exam: A Night in Bohemia | Newcity Art
  “Today the term “hobo” may simply mean a beggar or homeless person, but back then hobohemia was a lifestyle, and Chicago embraced its tramps. Although they are not as romanticized as the beat poets of the fifties and sixties, the hoboes of the twenties and thirties (really, the beats’ protégés) formed a subculture—perhaps America’s first counter-culture—by actively engaging such outlaw topics as women’s rights, birth control, homosexuality, vegetarianism, labor laws, World War I protests and other socially aware topics.”
  (tags: chicago history hobo bohemian art gallery)
• Roger Ebert’s Journal: Parrot asks, “What’d the frozen turkey want?”
  “I am not writing these lessons to prepare you for Vegas. Possibly you may be able to risk amateur night at a comedy club. Standup comics make it look easy. It isn’t easy. But if you master these ten rules, you can kill at a dinner party. Break them, and you die.”
  (tags: humor comedy jokes via:twitter=Chicago_Reader)
  (sources: Twitter user @Chicago_Reader (Chicago Reader))
• tehdely: On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown
  “Bantown is a tactic for inciting meta-lulz on multiple levels through the alignment of third-parties against each other. Bantown is like the plot of most James Bond movies, wherein some nefarious evildoer brings the US and the Soviets close to war. Bantown is a trolling technique of the highest order, which usually pits communities against each other, or communities against companies, or organizations against companies, or companies against organizations… Lest I sound too starry-eyed, let me list a few successful Bantown trolls…”
  (tags: amazon queer hack)
• YouTube – FND Films – Parkour Kids!
  “Sometimes when I parkour I just run for extended periods of time.”
  (tags: parkour video chicago funny via:twitter=happy_stomach)
  (sources: Twitter user @happy_stomach)
• Karl Rove’s G.O.P.—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)
  “Through the week, Rove was busy accusing Obama, now riding a wave of high popularity, of being divisive—in support of which he cited an April 2 Pew Research Poll showing that Republicans dislike Obama more intensely than any recent president. That was true, but of course Rove suppressed the poll’s major finding—that large numbers of Republicans are leaving the party over its bitterness and rancor, redefining themselves as independents or even as Democrats. Only 24 percent of respondents self-identified in the latest poll as Republicans, a modern low-water mark. Dig a little deeper by examining this Muhlenberg College study of how roughly a half million Pennsylvania Republicans switched their allegiance in the last years of the Bush presidency. This is the party that Karl Rove wrought: increasingly at the margins, isolated and angry.”
  (tags: politics karl_rove gop via:twitter=harpers)
  (sources: Twitter user @harpers (Harper’s Magazine))
• Nextgov – Opponents protest Obama’s proposed rule in his Web 2.0 style
  “The technology doesn’t have a point of view,” said Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “While progressives have been quicker in recognizing the power of these new tools, it’s not surprising that conservatives would be quick to use them, too. It’s still an open question on whether they will be successful.”
  (tags: activism web2.0 opengovernment participation via:twitter=EllnMllr)
  (sources: Twitter user @EllnMllr (Ellen Miller))
• (from @hrheingold) Professor uses Twitter as backchannel in class http://bit.ly/2rzW5
• AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth: Ben & Jerry & George
  “Ben & Jerry created “Yes Pecan!” ice cream flavor for Obama. They then asked people to fill in the blank for the following: For George W. they created “_________”. Here are some of their favorite responses…” (BTW I doubt this was actually a Ben & Jerry program, but there are still some funny responses…)
  (tags: icecream gwbush funny via:twitter=paulsmith)
  (sources: Twitter user @paulsmith (Paul Smith))
• ‘Gay writing’ falls foul of Amazon sales ranking system | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  ‘One Twitter user noted: “THE ANARCHIST COOKBOOK is ranked; THE JOY OF SEX is unranked. In other words, Amazon would rather you make napalm than get laid.”‘
  (tags: amazon censorship queer)
• (from @deezthugs) @JoeGermuska Yeah – I should use that as my twitter avatar! (in reply to this tweet)
• @deezthugs I do kind of love the eavesdropping eagle (in reply to this tweet)
• 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice – ChronicleReview.com
  “So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”
  (tags: language grammar history booktagged book:isbn=9780205632640)
  (references: The elements of style by by William Strunk Jr. ; with revisions, an introduction, and a chapter on writing by E.B. White.)
• Is “He Said, She Said, We’re Clueless” Coverage Dying? | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
  “I will concede that there’s a creme of sophisticated print journalists who get the problem with phony balance. But I mean, if you watch CNN or something, it’s as omnipresent as ever. Moreover, cutbacks in the media industry, and the slaughter of journalistic “expertise” that has occurred as various kinds of media specialists (like science journalists) lose their jobs, makes the lazy crutch of “balance” more likely than ever to prevail.”
  (tags: journalism science via:twitter=jayrosen_nyu)
  (sources: Twitter user @jayrosen_nyu (Jay Rosen ))
• Spare change for news | Salon News
  “I don’t think that if the New York Times or the Boston Globe went nonprofit tomorrow they could sustain the size newsroom that the old model did,” he says. “I don’t think that the nonprofit model will get you there. I think it can create a lot of small success stories, but there is no way our model will support hundreds of journalists. It’s just not going to happen.”
  (tags: journalism economics business)