culture

A fascinating way of dealing with enemies and unpleasant subjects; represent them as big eyed, cute little girls. This is the way of moe comics, a Japanese cultural phenomenon I read about in an excellent article from io9 (highly recommended).

Do these stories trivialize political issues and problems, or do they make them accessible to generalized debate by putting a softer face on them? I go with the latter view, especially since comics are the modern day court jesters; they have the freedom to have a little fun with their subjects while at the same time driving home moral lessons. Read more »

When I was very young, there were few TV shows that kids could enjoy, and one of my favorites was The Cisco Kid. Very loosely based on an O. Henry story, it told the tale of a pair of outsiders who righted wrongs against the poor and powerless. I liked Cisco, but my favorite was his sidekick Pancho, played by the character actor Leo Carrillo. He was a very warm and likable man and loved by all. Read more »

Rod Serling commented that creating a dramatic tv show that dealt realistically with social problems was very difficult, yet if you disguised it as "science fiction", you could get away with most anything - hence the creation of The Twilight Zone. Unfortunately, things haven't really changed much in fifty years. But the principle remains the same; these days, some of the more profound social observations are coming from cheap and cheesy teen comedies! Read more »

I just relaunched a site I built for my good friend Lee Poundstone back in 1998 (the original version was built in Netobjects Fusion, which was the cool tool at the time). It is now in a spiffy Drupal 6 treatment, with internationalization support - many pages have a Spanish version, and there are even a few in German, to reflect his international customers. Drupal's i18n support makes translations pretty easy, and we hope to get the rest of the site translated soon.

Lee and I go back many decades, when we were both struggling musicians. He retired to Costa Rica and took over Loco's Tropical Tours, expanding it into quite a fine operation. Read more »

So how's that "drill, baby, drill" thingy going? Hmmm, maybe not such a good idea? Considering the very small amount of oil offshore drilling could bring (maybe about 1% of our deman, which sounds like a rounding error to me), is it worth the possible environmental catastrophe? And if the oil is so vital to our security and national interest, why are we selling leases to foreign companies? Read more »