Logorama on Vimeo.

[Also note that if iPhones are sort of crappy as phones, AT&T willingness to take the heat on connectivity issues may explain Apple's hesitant approach to pushing the iPhone on alternative carriers.]

As of this writing, Carmon’s post has generated almost 1,000 comments and nearly 90,000 page views. It’s a prime example of the feminist blogosphere’s tendency to tap into the market force of what I’ve come to think of as “outrage world”—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate‘s own XX Factor and Salon‘s Broadsheet. They’re ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. These firestorms are great for page-view-pimping bloggy business. But they promote the exact opposite of progressive thought and rational discourse, and the comment wars they elicit almost inevitably devolve into didactic one-upsmanship and faux-feminist cliché. The vibe is less sisterhood-is-powerful than middle-school clique in-fight, with anyone who dares to step outside of chalk-drawn lines delimiting what’s “empowering” and “anti-feminist” inevitably getting flamed and shamed to bits. Paradoxically, in the midst of all the deeply felt concern about women’s sexual and professional freedom to look and be however they want, it’s considered de rigueur to criticize anyone, like Munn, who dares to seem to want to sexually attract men.

The post causing all the controversy is here. The Daily Show responds here. If you’re interested in learning more about feminism, I’d recommend avoiding the blogs and starting with any of the numerous articles at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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That is to say I don’t really get anything concrete out of this crazy process of hanging out in the long tail devoting energy here that ought to be spent elsewhere. It is, in pretty much the purist sense, strictly a hobby. Sometimes we get to choose our hobbies. Sometimes hobbies choose us. But one of the upsides of toiling away at a useless website is that in the process I end up exposed to some areas and ideas that I might not have anything to do with otherwise. I’m almost exactly the opposite of an artistic person. I can’t draw, paint, or handle myself in any artistic act involving actual tools. I was that kid in 5th grade whose diorama looked like shit.

But even really amateur bloggers like myself intersect issues of graphic design right up front. How do we want our blog to look? What theme is best? We get to make a critical judgment about a design issue that we wouldn’t have if we didn’t have this crazy obsession. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about the problems of design on the web, driven in part by my own crazy obsession with this website, and in part by the natural need to think outside of one’s own narrow focus, just to flex a different mental muscle every once and awhile.

In retrospect, I should have requested a hearing.

Apple fans. Even when we get it right, we sound like portly teenage boys, lecturing the maids until they compliment our yachts correctly.

While many colleges are accepting more moderate- and low-income students to increase economic mobility, many students and administrators complain that the growth in unpaid internships undercuts that effort by favoring well-to-do and well-connected students, speeding their climb up the career ladder.

Fortunately, the problem is very easy to solve. Do away with unpaid internships.

This seemed like a perfect Woot.

For those of you who don’t know what Woot is, check it out. The basic idea is that they sell one product a day at a steep discount. You find out what the product is at midnight, and the next day it goes away. Sort of like found object shopping for the Gestalt set.

Anyway, I only half-hazardly check Woot even when I’m waiting for something like a discounted camera to show up, and as luck would have it, a camera did show up (a Kodak with 10MP and a four star rating for like $60). I quickly jumped on the deal. Woot charges a $5 flat fee for shipping for big items and small (and random bags of crap — which itself is a kind of end-times innovation in consumer marketing psychology — they will literally sell you a random bag of crap). Then I get this nice tracking link sent to my inbox. I was sort of expecting a quick delivery, since Woot is based in Dallas and I live in Austin, but the FedEx delivery service decided to:

1. Ship my package from Dallas to Houston.
2. Hand it off to USPS.

Huh? When all is said and done, I’ll have waited something like 10 days for a purchase to travel about 200mi down I-35. USPS couldn’t handle taking charge of the package in Dallas? FedEx doesn’t ship direct from Dallas to Austin? I’m sort of hoping that USPS routes the package back to Dallas before sending it to Austin. That would have a certain appealing symmetry, would it not?

UPDATE: Huh. After posting this the package arrived. So it only took 6 days instead of 10. Seems like a nice camera, but I didn’t get a chance to play with it before Ana whisked it away to Vegas. Hopefully what happens in Vegas will dribble out of Vegas one 10 megapixel picture at a time.