The thought that Congress serves not the interests of its constituents, but those of its corporate benefactors, used to be reserved for cynics and conspiracy theorists. Now this line of thinking is so banal, so obvious, that it goes without saying. A huge majority (roughly 4 out of 5 Americans) now believes that the game is rigged, and there is virtually no real institutional reform possible without the complete overhaul of our campaign finance system.

And so, today’s news of a Republican Senate blockade of proposed financial regulations comes as little surprise to anyone. Now that the hammer is poised to come down upon the derivatives traders and other financial hooligans responsible for the deep recession, big banks and financial conglomerates have shifted their political donations to Republicans (see Goldman Sachs’ flip-flopping party loyalty from ’08 to ’10) with marching orders to obstruct any potential reform. But make no mistake, institutional lobbying machines support whomever it thinks can carry out its agenda. It rarely concerns itself with party rhetoric.

As a consequence of these new campaign windfalls, Senators like Massachusetts’ Scott Brown are often put in the position of opposing bills that their own constituents favor. Champion of internet freedom, Professor Lawrence Lessig points this out in a video made for an anti-political corruption organization called Change Congress.

As my old politics professor, Mark Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy) used to say, campaign finance reform is a pre-requisite for any real, substantive changes that you want to see happen. You cannot expect democratically supported reforms to take hold, without first restoring real, functioning, Democracy.
Read comments on this article, and add some feedback of your own

Originally posted on Technorati.

Image Source.

And here’s an unrelated video of Reich taking his tough talk to the streets with partner in crime, Coco.

For the student or devotee of the game, baseball provides almost infinite legendary American tales. It has its heroes(the Babe, the Rajah, the Iron Man, or the Say Hey Kid), its goats (the Black Sox, Charlie Hustle, Big Mac, and the Billy Goat) and its share of historians and cultural custodians, whose job it is to chronicle present day feats that they might one day become the next generation’s legends.

Another name for these “cultural custodians” is Baseball Nerds. Baseball Nerds have existed as long as the players, and some haven even risen to prominence amongst the athletic demigods of the game. One writer and baseball historian rightfully dons the mantle as King of the Baseball Nerds, and until the 30 for 30 series, he had been languishing in semi-obscurity. This man is Daniel Okrent, the father of “Rotisserie” baseball, better known to laymen as Fantasy Baseball.

Download YouTube Video

Invented in 1979, it was the first completely engaging, ongoing game for fans of the national pastime. It provided the baseball fanatic a means to completely immerse themselves into the dark hobbyist’s womb of baseball statistics, trades, contracts, and futures markets. The proficient rotisserie baseball player has to be versed on the most obscure of baseball statistics for the most marginal of major league ballplayers.

The only hobbyist parallel that seems fitting is World of Warcraft (nouveau Dungeons & Dragons), with the caveat that baseball actually exists in the world. Imagine the level of obsession you associate with players of games like WoW, and then imagine that their games correspond to real life events.

It’s a world where the deeds of Orcs, Humans, and Elves were recounted in the Crusading section of your local newspaper. A world in which Shamans and Necromancers were called to testify in front of Congress for using unregistered runes on the battlefield. This is the level of interest and immersion possible in fantasy sports.

This meta-level game outside of a game has happily consumed the lives of an estimated 18 to 30 million people. It is an industry that takes in approximately $2 billion a year, and Mr. Okrent sees none of this money. So, let’s all cuddle up in front of the flickering video embed and watch the creation tale of the most obsessive activity known to sports fans. Perhaps, then, the internet at large will finally give the King of Baseball Nerds his due.

Originally posted on Technorati.

And here is the proof. I realize that there is no special significance to this diagram given the arbitrariness of English, and the fact that pi is a Greek character, but still, a worthy effort.

This diagram reminds me of the time I did a Fibonacci derivative of the Fibonacci sequence and was left with numbers which corresponded to letters that were an anagram of “magic hoax.” Think some of us are trying a little bit too desperately to find meaning amongst the nothingness? Pi is an irrational number, they say, but its got nothing on human beings.

Link via the Puzzler at ChicagoNow

I spent Sunday amongst a pulsing throng of humanity attending the 2010 LA Marathon. While there, I happened upon Internet Celeb Klaus Pierre, who had recently crossed the finish line.

Marathon days bring an unusual energy to the city. Instead of people putting on their public faces of ambivalence or disdain, passers by were giddy with euphoria and total exhaustion. I suppose having an influx of 25,000+ real life superheroes does a lot to lift the spirits of the locals. Despite the impossible parking snafus and traffic congestion, it was a terrifically pleasant day in Los Angeles.

Hey Everybody! Come join our bracket pick-em…

Click here to join the Meppers in the fun…

Then join League ID 71211 with password lettheemusoar.

I was going to post this as a comment on Russ’ post, but I have enough to say that it warrants one of these ranty point-counterpoint things we love so much on TMR.

PleaseRobMe is an ingenious little piece of social propaganda. It would be clever or interesting if it weren’t so fundamentally flawed as to expose itself as its own straw-man.

The graphic atop the page says everything you need to know about the proclivities of this page, but also its willingness to be deceptive. The vision is conjured of a Google Maps for Burglars, wherein people can immediately see homes that are documentably empty and round up the goods in said domiciles before the unwitting occupants have time to check their Twitter accounts. Brilliant, right?

Except of course, this is nothing like the service actually offered by the site. Instead, one gets the kind of mangled cloudy information one might expect from the Internet. One gets fake identities (Twitter accounts), no addresses whatsoever, no maps, and uncertainty as to what homes may or may not be occupied.

In fact, the only thing that this website is at all is a series of Twitter updates indicating that the given Twitterer is claiming to be somewhere other than their presumed residence.

Basically, PleaseRobMe relies on many fundamental assertions, each of which is laughably untrue:

1. Twitter accounts can be certifiably linked to real identities.
This is quite hit and miss. Some Twitterers choose to use their real names, which themselves may or may not be that unique. Many are inscrutable to anyone but their close friends or followers, which seems to me to be the whole point of Internet identities. It’s hard to get an exact proportion, but you could spend the whole time someone is around the corner at the cafe just trying to discern who the heck they actually are.

2. People’s addresses are easy to find on the Internet.
This is one of those bright-lines that still exists for a remarkable number of people on the Internet – people will share their cell number, e-mail address, and personal emotions pretty liberally, but most are guarded about their actual physical address. Sometimes you can do a phone-book search and get a direct hit – other times a name will be so common as to create chaos and confusion. Often people live their lives unlisted. Even more frequently, people will move enough that their listed identity is out-of-date.

3. Everyone lives alone.
This is perhaps the most fundamental and crushing flaw in the PRM assumption network. In fact, most people don’t live alone. And very few of these Twitter updates make it clear who is with the person on any given outing, let alone breaking down who may be left at home or whether one lives with the person one is on an outing with. People have spouses, boy- and girlfriends, roommates, friends crashing on couches. The idea that knowing one resident’s whereabouts could in any way mean the remaining home is vulnerable is patently absurd.

4. One can reliably predict how long someone will be away.
Again, hugely inconsistent. Yes, if the person says “Going to Chicago for two weeks” and their address is in Honolulu, that’s a safer bet than “At the Starbucks”. But most updates are “At the Starbucks”. And it’s hard to say whether the Starbucks is in Chicago, Delhi, or Honolulu. Or how long the person will be there. Or whether they updated at the end of their Starbucks run and are almost home already anyway.

But beyond all these basic assertions, there’s a more insidious issue in play. These sites, satirical or not, are designed to get people to think that privacy is being eaten by the Internet and that will obviously lead to more crime and victimization for those losing the privacy. While privacy may or may not be reducing from the Internet, there’s absolutely no causal link between reduced privacy and increased crime or victimization – certainly not in any way that this site is trying to illustrate. By creating an atmosphere of unjustified paranoia about Internet privacy, this site convinces people of threats that aren’t valid and thus has the moral fortitude of the Bush administration invading Iraq over mysterious 9/11-related claims.

But more interestingly, it’s hard to say whether privacy is even all that reduced by the Internet in the ways that PRM is discussing. After all, phone books have existed for decades and are accessible to any member of a community. (Presumably one has to be in the same community as someone one is hoping to rob from.) And while it may seem like an interesting novelty to have a Twitter update saying someone’s at a Starbucks, how is that different from being able to make the presumption that, say, the house is empty during work hours because most homes need two incomes these days? One would actually be much safer and better off looking up basic occupation information that was available publicly long before the Internet and then cross-referencing with a phonebook. You know, basic trappings of 1950′s America that use real identities instead of Twitter handles.

Then again, in the 1950′s, I guess it was mostly just men out working while the women stayed home and cleaned and waited for the kids to arrive. Because certainly no one wanted to do dastardly things to homemakers and rob them.

In any case, PRM’s entire point and argument dissolve upon scrutiny and simply amount to someone shouting in the middle of the street “OMG! The Internet! It’s coming to get us!” for no reason.

One of my new favorite satirical websites is PleaseRobme, a database of absent-minded social networking updates broadcasting that the user is away from home. In the words of the website,

“So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home.”

This reminds me of some favored internet dating profiles. “On the one hand, my website handle is SuperHotMama, on the other hand, I chose to feature a heavily shadowed picture of my left ear in my profile picture.” Self-deception can be fun.

The Hexacopter can zoom in and out of view in the blink of an eye, and sounds like an “angry swarm of bees” as it collects intelligence, scans for impure thoughts, and prepares a euthanasia beam for its thankful victims.

The lack of music, dialogue, and slow pacing of the thing really contributes to score a galactically high score on the absurdity scale. In my opinion, this video peaks when Banana Man fails to properly light one of his fuses, and impotently waves the lighter in front of his face, blindly hoping for yet another fizz and pop, followed by the splash of banana guts.

On the weirdness scale, I think this may even have trumped ‘Dancing Man in a Horse Mask Cooking Mushrooms…”

To be perfectly honest, Exploding Banana Head Man does incrementally reduce my affinity for the internets. It just don’t sit right, I tells ya.

For those of you who think that this is a totally authentic white-trash South African sensation, read up on their long history as internet performance artists. What separates Die Antwoord from the rest of the spoof pack, though, is their legitimately high level musical talent…

This band could easily become the Third World Eminems of the 2010s.

Much as I hate privacy, I am starting to come around to the idea that Facebook and Twitter are the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of the Internet. Purely because I charge them each with half a count of the murder of blogging.

When I first started blogging in the year 2000, I resisted the term “blog”. I didn’t like its shortness, its seeming triviality, the idea that blogging was something blippy and insignificant. I liked “web log” or “web journal” or even “internet diary” and even though I had one of the terser blogs out there, my posts would still almost always dwarf the absurd 140-character parameters of a “tweet”. Yes, there was perhaps the frequency and occasional irrelevance of tweeting, but 140 characters doesn’t even let one express an idea.

What was neat about blogging, in part, is that it was a public and accessible way to get across ideas so almost anyone (within our societal advantages of ambient time and money, of course) could read them and potentially be impacted. While there were early murmurings of this decentralizing information and giving the power to the people, it was pretty obvious that it would (like any good revolution) just replace one elite with another. And thus the newspapers started to crumble and the blogging infrastructure and hierarchy started taking shape.

This was fine, though, because it didn’t obliterate the small blogs. Even though newspaper conglomerates ran small locals out of business (or, worse, just strip-mined their content to the lowest common AP denominator), the point of blogging for most people wasn’t to make money but to communicate. So you couldn’t drive the small bloggers off the tracks. And thus I maintained a real insight into the thought processes and daily lives of many of my friends.

Fast forward to the advent of Facebook. Suddenly, most all my friends stopped blogging. The Blue Pyramid, my impressively popular website of mostly online quizzes since 2003, dropped off a cliff in terms of traffic. Suddenly a maelstrom force had entered the Internet and was eating parts of it wholesale. As more and more got dragged into the vortex, corporations and new ground-floor dwellers started loading Facebook up with trivial content and applications.

What’s insidious about Facebook is the way it presents information. For the most part, it is micro-communication, though “status updates” have limits twice or thrice as forgiving as Twitter (I still frequently find myself going over, but whatever). But Facebook has a way of presenting information that makes it completely overwhelming and, resultingly, trivial. Unless one lives on Facebook, stays logged in and refreshing all the time (I know a couple people who do this, but not many), then whatever floats to the top of the feed is completely random. No one can digest more than 15-20 status updates at a time and those at the top are often from your 55th, 64th, 99th, and 401st closest friends – people you would never bother to keep up with so regularly otherwise. It is fragmentation at its finest.

Yes, you can post “notes” that are more like blog entries. Yes, you can scan one individual’s entire page, though it usually consists of blippy irrelevant “wall post” musings from other people, a few photos, and terse and sporadic updates that don’t provide half the regularity or depth of even the most cursory blogs. I’ll admit that Facebook does photos pretty well through its tagging system and that it’s easy. Easy easy easy. Just sign in and go. And, theoretically, all the content you want is in one place.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no content. It’s really easy to post “HELP HAITI NOW” in your status, but impossible to provide the nuance of a more troubling look at the country, like I posted last month or Russ posted here yesterday. And yes, you can provide links, but who really goes to a lot of other non-video links in Facebook? And the need for character limits in Twitter has given rise to another insidious practice, that of URL-shortening websites.

Most savvy web users hover their mouse over most any link before clicking it to ensure they aren’t about to go somewhere suspect that will destroy their computer. I’ve gotten a little lazier about this since I have Firefox set to prompt me to accept or reject every single site’s cookie and save my preferences site by site, but I still do it most of the time. When you see a “bit.ly” or a “tinyurl.com” instead of a real website, there’s absolutely no telling what’s behind the curtain. When they first came up with these sites, I was mindboggled they’d be acceptable in an era when so much paranoia about spam exists. But apparently the Twitterverse can dictate the terms of the Internet’s surrender.

But of course, these sites do something far worse than just force someone to click links on faith (which, given my experience with fellow Meppers, I am already loath to do). They break down one’s mental link between the content linked and the actual website featuring the content. After all, you got it on Twitter and bit.ly. That’s all you need to remember. Just keep going back to the wells of Twitter and bit.ly – no need to remember anything else.

Like cell phones making people forget the phone number of everyone they know, this is a pretty extreme centralization of the Internet. My Dad reminded me the other day to regularly save as much important Internet as I could, both my own and others’, because we can’t take for granted the depth, breadth, and accessibility of the Internet forever. Russ and I had a conversation about six months ago wherein we re-established that the Internet’s decentralization is the last best anti-establishment hope in our world. If we expect all our content to come through portals like Facebook and Twitter, if we stop blogging in favor of driveling our thoughts to finite character limits and hoops of unsophistication, we’re letting the centralization win.

And what’s so bad about centralization? It’s too easy for corporations to control. It’s too easy to buy two or five websites and end up controlling everything. I fear corporations like most people fear the government, but it’s all for the same reasons. Consolidation of control for less than noble purposes is always a threat to those who want better outcomes.

Here’s my translation of this post for those who can now only process in 140 characters or less:

Twitter and Facebook are destroying blogging and accordingly our ability to process sophisticated or nuanced content on the Internet.

Whew. Seven characters to spare!

In Mep land, the post-Superbowl week is heralded not for parades and fanfare and All-American splendor. It is, instead, the highly anticipated (if unofficial) start of the baseball season.

And while baseball reality is certainly exciting what with the three Mep favorites (M’s, Sox, and Yanks) all poised to be major contenders this year, baseball fantasy is also right around the corner.

Playing fantasy baseball has been a personal tradition for over 18 years. Once the internet streamlined the process of updating statistics and standing, it became a not-too-minor obsession.

For the first time this year, I’m extending an open invitation to any Mep readers who feel up to snuff, to join our traditional fantasy baseball league. I warn you, the field is stocked with highly competitive, trash-talking, walking baseball encyclopedias. I implore you to not accept this invitation lightly. But, if you do want to test your mettle against some of the finest baseball minds in the blogosphere, feel free to e-mail me personally (russ@mepreport.com), and I will send you the league name and password.

We play a Yahoo! hosted, 20-ish team, very deep league, with a straight up fantasy draft (as opposed to a roto-style player auction). See you out there.

This week, England’s Telegraph UK, featured the SarcMark, a purportedly new innovation for warning others of your not so sincere tone. A life-long ironical satirist myself, the SarcMark seemed to offer the prospect of more directly insulting the oblivious. Unfortunately the SarcMark isn’t a novel idea — at all…

Available for download at the rate of $1.99, the SarcMark itself resembles a backwards letter ‘G’ with a kidney stone. Though I liked the idea at first, something seemed oddly familiar about it — as if I had seen it before.

After combing the internet for a bit, I found paydirt…

I knew my aborted 12-year old Hebrew studies would come in handy some day. Yes, the SarcMark is actually the Hebrew letter ‘Pey’ or ‘P.’ It seems that the industrious folks at Sarcasm Inc. are opening up an entire new market to consumers — we now have the ability to buy and sell the letters of foreign alphabets for profit! That’s literally hundreds of new symbols that can be trademarked and sold on the open market. What an opportunity! (Add desired stolen symbol here)

Inspired by Sarcasm Inc, I wanted to unveil the newest Mep Report grammatical addition to the lexicon. It’s this:

I call it the Super Exclamation Point! Why use a regular old line with a dot, when (for only $4.99 plus shipping and handling) you can have this robust image of a slanted ‘T’ next to a man with a stick up his behind. It’s completely novel and definitely not English! Order now!

———-

As an aside, it did also occur to me that we already have the equivalent of a SarcMark. It’s this — . The tongue-sticking out smiley face (made up of a colon and a P) is intended to convey joking or sarcasm, and is already used at the end of the sentence. Perhaps this is why Sarcasm Inc chose to steal the Hebrew letter ‘P’. They are literally buying out the competition. If they trademark all letter ‘Ps’ for themselves, they will own a majority stock in the world’s tongue-sticking out smiley faces and have outright ownership over all of the methods of declaring written sarcasm. How devious! (insert stolen symbol here)

Yesterday, our Digital Overlords (Google Corp) released a new “superphone” that may change life on this planet as we know it…

As reported in TechCrunch, unlike its peers and predecessors, the Nexus One phone will not be plastered all over the media landscape. No one will have to compose a melodic ditty to make the Nexus One seem approachable and familiar. No one will hire John Hodgman to personally mobilize the techno-geek demographic. No one will film silhouettes of dancing hipsters who have found a preternatural groove thanks to the hot new electronic device clipped to their belts.

No, Google, the ‘do no harm’ corporation is sparing us the deluge. They just want to let us know that they have a new product, and that it’s pretty cool. So they’ll link a Nexus One tutorial to your YouTube page. They’ll gently point you toward a demo video on Engadget. But they’re not going to beat you over the head with the thing in the same way that their esteemed tree-fruit competitor might.

And whether they are aware of it or not, the geek masses are thankful for this.

While the phone itself promises little more than an incremental advance from smartphones already in the marketplace, the true innovation of Google’s Nexus One, is that it could be the first Big Market Gizmo not forcibly jammed down your throat by the mass media.

Say g’night, Billy…

For the uninitiated, Wafflepwn is the YouTube handle of a newly-minted 16 year old internet celebrity. Over the course of a year, Wafflepwn has amassed tens of millions of video views and over 200,000 subscribers by broadcasting the flaily tantrums of his emotionally disturbed big brother.

The piece that initially put Wafflepwn on the map was an Internet Perfect Storm. Combining World of Warcraft-with self-flagellation, the video appealed to the gamer and voyeur alike. Created in the vein of other peer-humiliation videos (see Star Wars Kid), the “Greatest Freakout Ever,” represented much of the worst the internet has to offer.

After garnering over sixteen million views in seven months, the YouTube video has completely changed the lives of Wafflepwn and his Texas family. What was once a son’s privately embarrassing antics is now a revenue stream for the entire clan. As the sequels to “Greatest Freakout Ever” began to come down the pike, other family members began to participate in instigating the big money tantrums from their disturbed son. They filmed him cowering up in a tree, sent the family’s grandmother to paddle him, and gave him an obviously disappointing birthday party in the hopes of eliciting another breakdown. Wafflepwn’s new YouTube channel has even spawned a fledgling production company — “Freak Out Productions.”

While freak shows and carnivals have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, internet freak shows have emerged as their more viral, more accessible, and more lucrative counterparts. Any family with a camera and a computer now has a serious financial decision to make regarding the potentials of exploiting their children for instant fame and fortune. When compared to the huge cost and effort associated with family therapy or counseling, the financial incentives become clear. Why attempt to treat or help a problem child when they can be far more profitable to their parents as an internet celebrity monstrosity?

For Steven, the subject of these pieces, it is very hard to see a route to normalcy. A confused kid who exhibited anger management problems now is being simultaneously ridiculed and rewarded for his anti-social behavior. His value as a money-maker and an attention grabber come solely from his inability to cope with everyday situations. His tantrums have elicited far more attention than anything else he is likely to do for the rest of his life. Wafflepwn’s decision to post and promote these videos will have irrevocable effects on his brother’s path in life.

In his latest video, Wafflepwn himself is interviewed by a British camera crew. Wafflepwn contritely answers the producer’s questions as he is hit by the realization that his YouTube antics haven’t been all fun and games. He is just starting to have a sense of how big the world really is, and how the attention of the YouTube Mob can change the lives of the people around him.

In the latest Mep Report podcast, the Meppers discussed, in part, the ramifications of a world in which privacy is on the verge of disappearing. The Wafflepwn Phenomenon is a harbinger of the darker aspects of this world. It speaks to the powerfully exploitative forces that surround a beloved video sharing website, and the devastation that it is capable of wielding.

I have no idea what this piece was actually hocking, but it’s nice to see Mr. Lipton reaching across gender boundaries to share the aged-old art of beard stroking with a goatee-challenged youngster. Always good to see a formerly plodding, self-absorbed, useless flesh sack actively involved in serving his community.

Take it. Take it now. Take it with reckless abandon. Take it till you get all 64 possible answers. Then tell your friends and take it again.

If you’re interested in my personality, it’s apparently aligned with Jane Eyre:

You’re Jane Eyre!
by Charlotte Bronte
Epic in scope and vision, you like looking at your own complete history. That said, your complete history is pretty much crazy. You seem to be followed by suitors, craziness, fires, and incredible turns of both good and bad fortune. Through it all, you persevere while maintaining adherence to your own somewhat middle-ground moral code. While you have confidence that everything will work out in the end, you sometimes wonder if it’s worth it along the way. Oh sweet sweet Jane.
Take the Book Quiz II at the Blue Pyramid.

Other Meppers? Mep fans? Tell us what “other” book you are…

If you’re one of those people who thought digital photography’s advent was going to kill the art of the picture, here’s a good counterargument.

I’m not as into photography as I used to be, but picture series like this always make me contemplate giving up the words for a while to go in search of these allegedly kiloword packages. I really had a knack for it as a kid, but I probably never would have been capable of stuff like the highlights in this National Geographic photo contest.

It’s in depictions of nature like this (if not actually being out in it directly) that I find some of the strongest proofs for the existence of God. You can believe all this beauty develops by random dice-rolls if you want, but it just doesn’t wash for me.

What, you didn’t think I could write a whole post that was just about “look at this link I found on the internet and how pretty it is,” did you? All speech is political.

So, it could have read something to the effect of:

“OMG stop whining uR LAM3 a$$ off. STFU.”

Yep, old Rupie has decided he would be better off without the help of the search catalogs of the most powerful force on the Digiscape. The fickle browsing public probably won’t even buy into his Plutocratic Propaganda Machine if they have to have its content balanced with actual news sources. Only through full indoctrination (via paid web subscription) can the PPM live up to its full psychologically potent potential. And so firewalls must be erected. Rupie and Co. will happily wall-in their own unsuspecting readership brick by brick. Perhaps they’ll even ordain a few editorialists and build the New Church of Foxentology, while they’re at it. Better that than to expose themselves to the danger that is the Intraweb’s open exchange of ideas.

In one of the greatest World Series performances of all time, Japanese veteran Hideki Matsui totalled six RBIs on three hits to secure the first title for the New York Yankees since 2000.

Here’s a very informative piece about Matsui that may be lifted from the MLB Archives, or perhaps the History Channel, as its production value is so spectacular:

In a night of blissful delirium for the Yankees and their fans, a few more tidbits from the greater intrawebs:

A compelling article by fan and commentator, Keith Olbermann, argues that it is literally impossible to hate Yankee closer, Mariano Rivera despite your rooting preference. He also happens upon network cable rival Sean Hannity in the Stadium crowd.

Yankee fan propaganda central, Nomaas.org, saved the premiere of a complete website redesign for the Yankees championship clinching game. One wonders what would have happened to the WordPress upgrade if the Yanks collapsed in seven.

River Avenue Blues features a great GIF showing us a full spectrum of hope transforming into relief and finally to bliss, on the face of Yankee manager Joe Girardi.

Great night for baseball.

International Man of Mystery and former star of BoingBoingTV, Klaus Pierre, has recently been spotted by the Los Angeles Bloggarazzi.

According to the article in LA’s Metroblogger, Klaus is planning some sort of news release to recap his adventures outside the bounds of BoingBoing over the past year. I wonder what emu-centric pop culture site will have the world premiere release of said interview? You’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, enjoy some classic Klaus below, and remember that you can’t keep a good French-German Action-Hero-In-Training down.

Moving “Live-Win” probability graph via fangraphs.

Truth be told, I was doing my Jimmy Fallon impression for much of last evening, attending a reading of a theatre piece hosted by an up and coming playwright. Having DVR’d the entire 4 hour affair, I was determined to receive no updates and intel of the ongoing festivities…

So go ahead and condense that entire graph to 45 minutes of furiously fast-forwarding, pausing, and screaming into my television. In a flash, Yankee Manchild Ace CC Sabathia was completely neutralized by Everyman Joe Blanton and a lackluster Yankee bullpen performance.

Fortunately for the Yanks, the Phillies’ closer, Brad Lidge, had had his soul stolen back in 2005 by a young Witch Doctor/First Baseman named Albert Pujols…

Here’s another vantage of this event (Special Thanks to the MLB’s Stalinist policy of disallowing remixes of game footage):

And so, in the 9th inning, the Yankee big money hitters made mince meat of a Mojo-less Lidge, taking a firm grasp of the 2009 World Series, and possibly forever changing the legacy of Alex Rodriguez.

Think again, formerly disgruntled friend.

Now, if we could only hop in the Delorean and mimeograph a few copies for Wilson Pickett and the Bee Gees:

Link via Laughing Squid.

With this Wordle thing, you can take any webpage or piece of writing and have it analyzed for frequently occurring words. One cautionary note: blogs seem to rely only on the last few entries rather than a holistic summation of the whole blog, which strikes me as a real weakness. Though I guess that provides the incentive to keep redoing it every few weeks.

This is good for at least as much fun, in a more verbal Storeyesque way, as the Japanese hair machine (which was, btw, totally disappointing for me, because it didn’t sufficiently cover/replace my extant hair).

Let’s examine this afternoon’s headlines, shall we?:

Now, there are a ton of reasons to root against economic recovery in the US, ranging from hoping for a total collapse of capitalism to saving the environment to simply giving the country an unprecedented dose of humility. But to avoid flight delays? Really?

Also, let’s look at the context in which CNN so cleverly chose this horror story of the coming flight delays. Was it just a slow news day? Is there nothing else to report to Americans hungry for 24/7 news?

Let’s see… the seminal turning point in the war in Afghanistan, an upcoming movement on healthcare that has dominated the American political scene for the last few months, the first ever serious excavation on the moon via explosion, the Taliban claiming credit for the latest bombing… yeah, I’d probably choose the specter of increased flight delays that comes from more scheduled flights too.

What’s great about the article is that it’s not even news so much as basic logic. When more planes are in the air, it creates more traffic, thus leading to more delays. The same principle by which, uh, all traffic in the world has always worked, from horse and buggies to trains to cars. Spectacular.

CNN might as well have put a simple math equation as the top story of October 8th. It would probably be less intuitive to the average reader.

To be fair, there were also some colossal duds they didn’t pick for the top story, though it makes you wonder if CNN has any editing at all on their website. Levi Johnston stripping? Jennifer Hudson has a kid? Ted Williams’ frozen head? Since when does CNN stand for Celebrity Nothing News?

At least they also ran a feature on the avalanche video. We totally scooped CNN.

The story here was that I had agreed to do stand up comedy last weekend, but wasn’t particularly in the mood for joke-telling (especially given that the venue was a standard comedian trap — a privately hosted party). So, instead, I decided to employ the audience as the cast and crew in a YouTube video.

The results were mixed. Obviously I had little control over what we ended up recording, but it was a promising experiment. I sort of like the idea of having strangers collaborate spontaneously on a web project. It’s very internet ethos-y. On the bright side, it may be an entirely new form of performance art. Fun.

Digg.com is one of the largest websites on the planet. Like many of its competitors in the social media arena, it doesn’t purport to create or provide anything of substance. Digg’s value comes in the community that it organizes and speaks for. In Digg’s case, that community’s function is to vote for the most worthy news stories of the day for more casual visitors to consume.

With the announcement of some prospective changes to its voting rules, is Digg capitulating to big money interests? Or has its slow march to corruption already rendered its original mission moot?

With its massive growth over the last five years, Digg has become a virtual kingmaker. One link from the Digg front page can send massive swaths of internet traffic to any given website at any time. This ‘Digg Effect‘ is one of the more powerful forces known to the internet. It can instantaneously promote stories, videos, or news items into super-viral memes that have the potential to reach millions of users.

With the advent of online ads, web traffic became a very real form of currency, turning Digg from a virtual billboard into a virtual ATM machine. Not surprisingly, the key to the Holy Teat of Internet Traffic became an incredibly valuable commodity. And the holders of such relics are especially susceptible to corrupting influences.

But, let’s not kid ourselves. Digg wasn’t ever a democracy in the truest egalitarian sense of the word. The site runners have always kept their ‘Feature Algorithm’ a secret. In other words, no one knows how many votes it takes to bring a story to Digg’s vaunted home page. No one knows how many down votes it takes to bury a story. No one knows why some stories seem to linger on the front page longer than others. As far as pure democratic processes go, you can rank Digg somewhere in the neighborhood of Iran or Afghanistan.

Even with its flaws, Digg was once a thriving community of diligent news consumers, constantly pouring over incoming submissions and voting especially compelling ones to the front page. This culture is no more. Algorithm changes have discouraged Digg users from being too active in reading and filtering new submissions. A shift in focus on socializing and befriending other users has lead to the creation of virtual Digg Voting Blocks. The results of this new policy has dramatically reduced the diversity of stories that end up on the featured page.
One study concluded that 46% of Digg’s front page is controlled by as few as 50 websites. Not surprisingly, these 50 websites represent some of the biggest, most well-funded players on the internet.

It’s hard to blame founder Kevin Rose and his inner cabal for Digg’s corporate devolution. I mean, if you were a kid who designed a network capable of leveraging insane amounts of traffic on behalf of a rowdy internet throng, wouldn’t you want some measure of control over the thing? Wouldn’t you set up secret features that allowed your staff to counter the rampant Digging of unacceptable content, or allow yourself a backdoor to throw a bone to websites that paid you to feature them? Wouldn’t you set up safeguards to prevent out and out revolt that threatened the livelihood of your virtual property? I think you would.

This is why democracies aren’t generally run by kids fresh out of a computer science program at UNLV. Thriving democracies have transparency; they have checks and balances, they have interest groups working to ensure that the interests of the few are communicated to the many. Digg has never had any of these protections.

Therefore, Digg has never been a true democracy. But it was close, once. Unfortunately it has slowly succumbed to the addictive brew of advertising dollars, strategic partnerships, and celebrity. So don’t bother raising a stink about the new proposed changes. And don’t expect to find this story on Digg’s front page any time soon. Its corporate overlords wouldn’t approve.

Image via MaximumPC

Earlier today, internet business culture behemoth, TechCrunch, posted a riddle for its millions of devoted followers. Branded as a heretofore unbroken code, the decipherer was promised Good Will Hunting-like stardom and a potential job with Google, no doubt as the Alpha Team Leader of a Top Secret Super-Genius Infiltration Training Program. Not to mention a TechCrunch t-shirt…

These prizes were more than enough to coax thousands of readers to devote their early afternoon naptimes in search of the key to the cipher. Even Yours Truly could not resist the lure of an unbreakable code that had previously foiled unworthy MIT twerps.

And so we crunched. We juxtaposed. We rearranged, substituted, and counted. Early discoveries of a phone voice mail belonging to the Google central nervous system were quickly debunked. Other phone numbers surfaced, seemingly belonging to a Boston law firm. I, personally, came up with several fax numbers and the contact phone for a Bay Area company called Integral.

And in the end, both on our worksheets and in the post’s comment thread, it was revealed that the correct answer belonged to a voice mail that belonged not to Google, but to some network-marketing scum looking for a few sharp minds to enslave and ultimately impoverish with yet more promises of unattainable riches.

Sadness. On several levels. First of all, that a first-rate website could so easily be scammed by snake-oil salesmen into putting out an internet call-to-arms. Secondly, though, that this vast resource of intelligentsia all over the world can only be harnessed by a virtual prankster.

Is there no cause more worthy of this kind of collective mental effort? Can’t we use these kind of thought experiments to do something useful, like figure out the Unified Field Theory or balance the budget, or create a Phantom Zone to exile all News Corp Executives into oblivion?

Probably not for awhile. As it seems that TechCrunch will be thought of as the Website that Cried Wolf for the foreseeable future. For shame.

PS: For you super nerds still keen on finding the answer… Here is my original worksheet…

Occurences:

1 = 1 6
2 = 2 8
3 = 2 2
4 = 0 3
5 = 1 1
6 = 4 5
7 = 0 4
8 = 3 7
9 = 0 9

A = 3 A
B = 0 I
C = 0 L
D = 2 M
E = 1 Q
F = 2 D
G = 0 F
H = 1 J
I = 3 O
J = 2 R
K = 0 E
L = 3 H
M = 3 N
N = 1 S
O = 2 T
P = 0 U
Q = 3 X
R = 2 B
S = 1 C
T = 1 G
U = 1 K
V = 0 P
W = 0 V
X = 1 W
Y = 0 Y
Z = 0 Z

55 possible characters. 8 gaps.

gaps at 7, 9, 17, 20, 28, 33, 42, 49

gaps of gaps: 2 8 3 8 5 9 7 BHCHEIG

each line gaps: 7,9, 6,9 6, 11, 9, 5

gaps of gaps 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 2, 4

7 9
6 9
6 11
9
5

QLQ6 6I1 R8I3 Fx IA3J
8386 691 9893 69 9131

number of characters

6,1,2 break or, excluding breaks: (617) 274 -8660
5,2,2 break the final zero representing the last needed digit
5, 4, break with no characters following the phrase.
8, 2 break
4, 6 end

Update:

Never mind. The thing was recently solved. It was a substitution cipher that went something like this:

Code for translation:

0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (JOBS)

456789ABCDE2FGHIJKL0MNOP1QRS3TUVWXYZ (0123)

The result:
CONGRA T UL ATION SK EE PSEAR CHIN GORCALL6 17 6390 570×10

CONGRATULATIONS KEEP SEARCHING OR CALL 617 639 0570 (extension 10)

Google Jobs answers that call

via fivetechsoft

This Japanese site will take any portrait-like picture that you upload and automatically convert it into a blinking, nodding, quasi-zombie animated template ready to model various animal heads, wigs, and facial hair.

It’s easily good for 45 minutes of time wasting. Fun, fun.

Link via BuzzFeed.

In a stunning turn of events this week, Facebook revealed that it now takes in enough actual money to pay for its own business expenses.

“There’s a myth that you can’t make money on the internet, these days,” said recently post-pubescent CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“As it turns out, all you have to do is become a social organizer for a virtual nation of 300 million, and keep them distracted with Mafia Wars while you sell off their personal shopping habits to retailers,” Zuck noted.

Here’s to hoping other internet entrepreneurs heed Zuckerberg’s message and find new and creative ways to engage (exploit) internet users, at large.

One of my new favorite toys is this online tool that allows you to indulge your wildest internet egocentricities. The tool seeks out your each and every Google-worthy act and unceremoniously dumps it into one of many pre-determined category bins, forever branding the nature of your service to the human race.

It’s so uncompromising and final… This pleases me.

And now, the Personas breakdown of the entire Mep staff. Apologies to Greg, who has a somewhat more common name than the rest of us (hence the prominent “illegal” heading in his breakdown).

I wonder if they’re paying Stephen Tobolowsky royalties for his Needleheaded improvisation.

A happiness meter featured prominently near the head of the structure reports on how the Cybraphon perceives its search for fame is going at the moment. Unlike its human counterparts, though, the Cybraphon doesn’t post inane facebook status updates of drunken weekend Cabo pictures in the vain hope of seeming more interesting. That remains a uniquely human convention.

In having a more complete picture of border activity, Fox hopes to inspire Starcraft-proficient gamers to remotely manage Border Patrol Resources to more efficiently swarm and destroy the MexMenace. THQ Software is also planning an upcoming release to cross-promote the Fox Map, entitled: Company of Heroes: Poncho Villa’s Revenge.

As per its usual protocol, the Fox Interactive Mexico Map (FIMM) will be posted on all Waffle House menu/placemats, Jon Deer Outlet Storefronts, and projected onto the faces of Wallmart Greeters.

In the inspiring words of map proponent, Sean Hannity,

“We must use every tool at our disposal to stop the brown people.”

Link via mediabistro.

Last week, I guest hosted an episode of We’ll Fix It In Post. If you like nerdy discussions of different types of cinematic time travel, this episode is for you. There was also some eating of disgusting candies for novelty’s sake — a feat first unleashed in this earlier episode…

Of course, none of the attendees can actually verbalize what’s good or useful about Twitter, they just enjoy being around like-minded Twits.

The Emu Peck of the Week is a new weekly feature on TMR that will point you to something on “teh intrawebs” that especially stands out, and/or pleases the Giant Flying Beaver That Rules the Universe.

In the first ever installment of the Emu POTW, I’d like to bring your attention to an amazing little website called FUH2.

FUH2 presents a special tribute to the GM’s defunct guzzler, Hummer H2. FUH2 is a mecca where hundreds of devoted followers take pictures of themselves flipping off these vehicles wherever they come upon them. There are FUH2 tribute videos, song parodies, and even a haiku:

Hulking black Hummer
Purchased in rank atonement
small peckered driver

And honestly, who of you hasn’t had the urge to flip off the drivers of one of these ego-enhancement abominations? Good thing for us that the internet always thinks ahead.

According to TechCrunch, China has really ramped up its censorship fervor recently. Visitors have reported blockages on Twitter, Flickr, and Hotmail, in addition to the well known kiboshing of YouTube.

Users speculate that the new wave of intolerance is in anticipation of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, coming up on Thursday.

I suppose one way to demonstrate your evolution as a nation is by petulantly denying any wrongdoing by your former notoriously oppressive regimes. It must be, since our own debonair and worldly President has adopted similar practices, in protecting and preserving Bush administration abuses of yore. All that’s left is to rope off the Bush family archives and sequester all relevant commentary. Done and done.

These are some of the hopefuls to be cast as the role of Carl Brutananadilewski, the next door neighbor and comic foil to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Though it doesn’t show on their faces, these boys are lining up to score the role of a lifetime. Is there a live human being with enough verve, enough anima, enough emanations to truly inhabit this character? Only in the premiere live action episode/season six finale of ATHF will this be revealed.

In the words of Carl, himself, “If you need anything, you know who to look to – someone else.”

For more on why meppers dig the ATHF, see this.

Full-Sized View

Update: As the ever-vigilant impartial-ist, here’s a terrific editorial from TechCrunch on the presumed death of RSS in the face of Twitter’s conquering of the real time sphere.

I received this flyer in today’s batch of junk mail. Apparently, there is now a (paid?) service that allows you to be a litigious dickhead even in the context of your fantasy baseball league.

On the one hand, this feels like proof that we finally have spawned too many attorneys in this country. On the other hand, I do like the idea of service industries evolving to the point that they exist only in digital contexts. It brings me one step closer to my dream of being a full-time, paid, fantasy baseball commissioner.

So torn!

This low-budget ridiculousness brought to you by crap purveyor, Everything is Terrible.

According to Kotaku, any visitor to ESPN’s main page can input the legendary Konami Code and turn the world’s premier sports website into a haven for frolicking unicorns.

Unfortunately, it seems that ESPN has caught on and disabled the code. I’m sure some Contra-nostalgic web designer is being shit-canned as we speak.

Serious Emu points go to the first person who can find another website that responds to the Konami Code.

Earlier this week in front of his weekly board meeting in the San Diego office, AP chairman, Dean Singleton, cried foul.

In complaining about the unlicensed use of AP stories all over the blogosphere, Singleton actually conjured up the old Network tagline: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Well, let’s visit the original context of that quote for a moment…

Why Singleton would want to conjure up the mental image of this speech, I have no idea. The ‘mad as hell’ speech came at a revelatory moment when one commentator realized the effect the mass media was having on society at large. Newscaster Howard Beale implored the audience to leave the television set and face the reality of their living room windows. He asked them to look outside and see the real world for what it is.

The whole thesis of Network was that corporate controlled media is a scourge upon free society. You cannot have a democracy, nor freedom, nor autonomy without a free exchange of information. Having one (or a select few) sources of centralized news is a direct and imminent threat to liberty and the evolution of thought.

Several responses have already cropped up to denounce the APs new official stance. And I need not pile on any further. These old world journalists are doing nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Their world is over, and not soon enough if you ask me.

We are inexorably moving toward a much freer, nobler, more efficient system of educating ourselves about the world. We’re organically developing a system in which independent investigators and commentators can be found interspersed in every population, in every government, among every people on the planet, immune to retaliation and censorship through their sheer numbers. The old gatekeepers are dying off. The information will flow freely to anyone who wants to access it. No archaic laws or regulatory bodies can impede this movement.

To loosely quote Network again:

Mr. Singleton, you are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of information. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

We have the too-hot-for-her-environs girl interviewing the SuperNerd (personified by Bre Pettis).

The too-hot girl neither cares nor understands what’s going on. Her primary function is to look as hot as possible and anchor the male demographic in place.

SuperNerd tries vainly to entertain her with his various half-built gadgets and Star Wars collectables.

She perfunctorily tries to move the interview along. He lamely tries to hold her eye contact. She tries to not visibly look disgusted.

Welcome to Internet TV.

video via Bargain Bin Oblivion

In the Summer of 2006, Congress passed the Internet Gambling and Prohibition Act. To the chagrin of tens of millions of online poker players, the bill sought to restrict banks from allowing their customers to buy in to their preferred online poker sites.

Even though the bill didn’t impose any penalties on the individual poker player, it did seem to imply that the online poker player was doing something wrong, and possibly illegal. Major poker providers like Pokerstars continued to operate under the logic that the bill only outlawed games of chance. Poker, they argued, was a game of skill, and therefore not subject to this new ban.

This weekend, The New Scientist has come down decidedly on the side of the rounders.

Several studies cited by the magazine show an increased return for players who experience more than 1,000 hands of poker (an absurdly low amount for any practiced player). Another study showed that over 76% of hands end before a “showdown,” meaning that the players had made their decisions about folding or playing without seeing the cards in play. In other words, chance is completely eliminated from determining where the money ends up most hands.

To be perfectly fair, this bill was less a referendum on gambling (as it completely exempted online horse racing sites, for instance) and more a hissy fit thrown by a Congress upset that they couldn’t properly tax online gaming websites based overseas.

And so, apparently this hissy fit is not only without merit, it’s entirely without teeth. Nice work there, Congress.

Filmthreat.com has a newly released interview with Gary Kurtz, the director of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

Given the rising tide of fanboyo-fueled rage against the recent works of George Lucas, Kurtz is finally being recognized as one of primary forces behind the quality of the Holy Trilogy.

As it turns out, if old George hadn’t been steering the ship for Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader may have convinced Luke to rule the Empire alongside him. Also, Lando would have (rightfully) perished in the Death Star explosion, and the Ewoks would have all contracted forest ticks and be systematically exterminated by their rebel friends.

Oh well. At least we’ve got Kurtz’s new indie project, ‘77, to look forward to. May the Force be with him.

Shamed senator and internet whipping boy Ted Stevens has apparently been subjected to a corrupted and contradictory investigation by the Justice Department.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have used this TMR video as evidence worthy of presentation in court:

Here’s the reference key.

Via YesButNoButYes

Senavene April 2008

A year ago, I took Senavene to the post office.  She was strapped to my front wearing all pink, half covered in a pink blanket, with a pink pacifier in her mouth.  Why?  We were given LOTS of pink, I swear.  I put “yellow please” on the registry, but I don’t think anyone paid attention.

Anyways, what did the teller ask me?  “How old is he?”  How old is HE?

After 14 months of this, I can honestly say I don’t care that people continue to call her a boy.  I’m told it’s common for babies with very little hair.  Most moms tape a bow to their daughter’s bare heads.  But honestly I don’t care.  I simply respond by telling them how old she is.  I’m more fascinated by how someone’s brain would ignore all the social clues in the form of pink paraphernalia and use the male pronoun.  Not only that, they quite often also say that “he is really beautiful.”  I can’t blame them.  I mean she is gorgeous.

Sent image to Wilhelmina kids, but no response...sigh, there's goes her College Fund

But again, I digress.  My question is: are most people stupid or are their brains on auto-pilot and make errors because there is no gender neutral pronoun?  People can’t say “how old is it?”  That would piss any parent off.  So, they either need a gender neutral pronoun or come up with some convoluted phrasing that sounds weird — “how old is your baby?”  “Pardon me, have you any Grey Poupon?”

So to continue the sexism, SNL came up with a skit focusing on MALE bald babies.  Because don’t we all feel bad for the bald male babies?

Pay no mind to creating something for the poor, misunderstood FEMALE bald babies.  Well not any more, thanks to the mental prowess of the fine people at Baby Bangs.  So, which one do you think we should get?  We’re taking votes.  I think I’m liking “Fairy Tale Flowers.”

Flickr User Techthis, seems to be on a roll. Another excellent periodic table. Though I would nitpick here and mention that I’m pretty sure Intellivision was distinct from Colecovision. As such, it fails to get a mention.

Link to larger image.

UPDATE 3/28: Hi there. Welcome to our little podcast/blog project. Due to last night’s BoingBoinging, we seem to have a lot of new visitors. So after you read about our shot across the bow of AIG, you might wanna check out some of our other features, like one of our 100+ podcast episodes. Here’s a good sample to start with.

Anyway, thanks for visiting. Feel free to leave comments and feedback and let us know how we can improve the Emu. END UPDATE

Mep Headquarters is all abuzz with activity. By hook and by crook, fellow Mepper Storey and I have plumbed the depths of the internet and restored no less than five buried AIG commercials that can be found NOWHERE ELSE ON THE ENTIRE INTRAWEBS. I shit you not. You see, AIG has taken great pains to remove these incredibly embarrassing spots from the public eye. When you watch them, you will see why. Oh, the irony.

You can visit the TMR YouTube page for the rest.

But, not only that, Meppers. We have taken three of these videos and, shall we say…. updated them? We’ve made them a bit more relevant to the current status of the company. Watch, and enjoy:

Viva la Mep!

Update 3/25: This story was just picked up on ad insider website, Agency Spy.

And also on Urbzen.

Update #2: Just hit Gawker and BNet.

Update #3: Aaaand, we have been Boinged. Oh my dear lord. Basque in the Uber Pwning of AIG.

Maybe it’ll hit AIG corporate tomorrow. One can only hope.

For those of you, like myself, who aren’t particularly compelled by March Madness, here are some alternative bracket pools that you can follow:

Mentalfloss is running a “Tournament of Genius.” Einstein is, of course, the prohibitive favorite there. Keep an eye out for my sleeper pick, Nikola Tesla and fan favorite, Stephen Colbert.

On the flipside, HolyTaco is currently running the 2009 National Douchebag Tournament. You’ve got to think that A-Rod is in the driver’s seat here. While Bernie Madoff, Rush Limbaugh, and the Notorius AIG all have compelling cases, I’m holding out hope for Dane Cook to pull it out.

The well known Xinhua Province Television Network is reporting that the Chinese government is cracking down on online gamers.

Government tactics include random internet disruptions for citizens under 30, rationing the national supply of Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, and distributing free samples of heroin.

Other news outlets are reporting that a mammoth Chinese government project is underway to create an MMORPG-wide-government-sponsored gank group. The gank group, run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would be designed to “grief” addicted gamers to the point of forcing them to either quit gaming or throw their computers out the window.

Not to be outdone, the Americans are working on their own elite team of griefers:

Here’s your first lesson: