Happy birthday, America.

“Philosophy is propagated by the very small number of those who, against all evidence, decide that it is addressed to them.”

When I was growing up my father worked in the electronics business and always came home with the trendiest gadgets and so my older sister and I were always the first kids on the block with a Walkman or some fresh new boombox or a LaserDisc player or a robotic dog or a CD player or what have you, and my first three CDs were Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis, and the “Top Gun” soundtrack, all of which would have made me a pretty righteous kid if I hadn’t been just a Genesis album away from being summarized by a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

I’ve apparently grown distant from my former self and forgotten amidst the passions of the present and my newfound love for Rihanna that not so long ago there were other pop diva goddesses who got mixed up with bad dudes named Brown who were also just as formative in my life.

And so in the service of personal and cultural memory I wish to inaugrate Whitney Houston Wednesdays™ on this blog with a track from my very first CD.

—

Whitney Houston, “How Will I Know”

My big sis just sent along this shot from my visit a couple months back. It was the first time I’d ever held my niece, or any newborn for that matter. What I still don’t understand is how babies are all bald and chubby and deformed and they drool and scream and shit all over themselves and yet somehow they’re completely fucking adorable. That just doesn’t make any sense.

I received a pop-up ad today exploding with scantily clad seductresses inviting me to “get laid tonight in Boston” and so out of boredom I decided to A/B test their landing page and see how the results would differ if I described myself as a “man seeking a woman” and vice versa.

It’s nice to know that the folks over at Adult Friend Finder do not discriminate based on gender: regardless of whether you’re a man or woman they assume you have no taste.

“As last week began, the continuing protests in Iran, now into their third week, dominated the media. But as the Iranian government began to drive the protests underground, coverage began to recede—even if the tensions in the country had not—a sign that street protests may be easier to cover than political maneuvering behind closed doors.

By Wednesday afternoon, media attention was already shifting from protest to disgrace when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford made a stunning admission of having an extra-marital affair after having gone missing for several days.

Then, late Thursday afternoon, the reports ricocheted across Twitter, celebrity gossip Web sites and mainstream media alerts that Michael Jackson, the self-described “King of Pop,” had been rushed to the hospital in cardiac arrest. The tabloid celebrity Web site TMZ.com was the first to report that he had been pronounced dead. The Los Angeles Times soon confirmed, and within a few hours, Jackson’s demise proved to be the biggest celebrity story in perhaps a decade, something akin to the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. in 1999 and perhaps even that of Princess Diana in 1997…

All media sectors covered Jackson heavily, but it was cable news channels that led the way. Fully 93% of cable coverage studied on the Thursday and Friday following his death was about the King of Pop. On the front pages of Friday morning newspapers, 37% of their coverage was Jackson-related compared to 55% of the leading online coverage.

If anyone needed proof of how much the media culture has changed it might be this. When Elvis Presley died in 1977, CBS News was criticized for choosing not to lead its newscast with it.”

“A man alone always talks too much.”

Jonathon Coulton & GLaDOS (Ellen McLain), “Still Alive”

I finally played through the wildly popular Portal video game last night and, sure, the rest of twenty-something America was out getting wasted and having fabulously uninhibited sex, but whatever.

It was brief, clocking in at roughly three hours of gameplay, but one of those rare plots that’s compelling and memorable enough to leave you feeling as if you’ve actually accomplished something greater than just passing a few hours of your otherwise monotonous life. Like that time when you finally rescued Princess Toadstool. Or the first time you beat the piss out of Dr. Robotnik. Or when you played all the way through Metroid only to discover on the last board when your character victoriously removes its helmet to reveal its flowing blonde locks that you were a woman the whole time (and even though she was only portrayed in 8-bit graphics your ten-year-old self was pretty sure she was the hottest creature ever to walk the earth, but then your ten-year-old self got very confused about the role playing nature of the gaming experience and started to worry what it meant that you were a woman all along, and moreover, whether it was vain or narcissistic or fetishistic to be thinking that this reflective she-as-me-as-she on the TV was as spectacularly hot as you were pretty sure she was, and so your only response was to throw in Excitebike for a few hours because you were certain that dirt and motorcycles were the only things that could help reassert your underdeveloped sense of masculinity*).

Anyway, this is the song that plays when you beat the game.

—

* Interestingly, one also doesn’t realize that one is a woman in Portal until the first time one sees oneself through the wormhole, but whereas the ten-year-old me might have found this unsettling, the more mature me is resigned to the fact that this is the closest I’ve been to a woman in quite some time.

The singularity is now

Speaking of sunsets, there’s apparently a cloud event happening in Brooklyn as we speak:

• katiebakes
• andrewpile
• eastofeden
• @shafferj
• jstn
• @laurenfarmer
• @gawkerdotcom

It’s been a treat to sit here in Boston and see this unfold from so many different sources, some friends, some strangers. This is all making me feel much better about the collective spontaneity of the web than yesterday’s nonsense.

There is a phenomenology of sunsets; it took moving to a city center with a rooftop view before I realized this. To the east, the Hancock tower and the State St. building blend delightfully against a backdrop of azures, ceruleans, cobalts. To the west, across the Charles, the predominance of brick edifices eases the eye’s motion as it traverses that vermilion incandescence of the horizon.

A few blocks in any direction and the colors will clash. This is my view.

Post-mortem

Among the many internet casualties yesterday following news of Michael Jackson’s death was AOL’s Instant Messenger, which suffered forty minutes of outage due to unprecedented levels of traffic. AOL released this statment in response:

Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth. Historically, celebrity news prompts a worldwide outpouring with several key consumer behaviors – searching, sharing and reacting to the news followed by online tributes has become the modern way to mourn. Princess Diana was the first notable Internet example. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are the latest.

That’s a healthy dose of hyperbole, no doubt, but I think they’re onto something. Consider these other downright staggering statistics:

• Twitter saw an instant doubling of tweets-per-second when the story broke
• Google’s architecture had its automatic CAPTCHA security system triggered because the intense traffic spike resembled a distributed denial of service attack
• Akamai recorded a 50% increase in internet traffic by 6:30pm
• The internet on the whole, if viewed from a baseline of 100% availability, fell to an 86% level of availability

The last time the internet suffered such a massive blow was on Sept. 11, an event which differed from yesterday’s news by virtue of the fact that core components of the underlying network infrastructure were actually damaged in the attack.

What is more striking, though, is that news of the attacks took some time to spread; the entire world didn’t find out at once as it did yesterday. I remember that it wasn’t for a solid hour after the first plane struck that my parents had to panic about their son’s safety. My sister, on her honeymoon at the time, didn’t face that same dread until later in the afternoon. This is despite the fact that in the case of Sept. 11 an actual event took place with actual eyewitnesses and tangible evidence, as compared to yesterday’s unverifiable scoop on TMZ.com.

And I think this is why AOL was actually quite on point with their hyperbole: the entire world learned about Jackson’s death at exactly the same moment. In terms of communication, information, knowledge, and shared experiences, the event which occured yesterday at 5:40pm unfolded with a higher degree of instantaneity than has ever been witnessed before in human history. Time and space have never been more fully compressed.

While I should probably find this all very heartwarming and launch into some congratulatory thesis about the “information revolution” bringing us all closer together, I’m afraid it all just strikes me as deeply unsettling. Humanity decided yesterday, in the most cooperative, collaborative, and collective decision that it has ever made, that Michael Jackson was the figure who would sit at the center of this “seminal moment in history”.

As horror looks you right between the eyes, indeed.

Based on the day’s earlier publicity Langer’s friends got Langer drunk and challenged Langer and Alphonse to the second food challenge of the day which was to eat all the remaining food on those steel heat cylinders at 7-11 that spin around and slow cook processed meats over the course of several days and so Alphonse ate three hot dogs and SIX taquitos.

Two food challenges in a single day is unprecedented, and, as per earlier, Langer’s sexual fitness remains quite, quite impressive.

A return to normalcy

So I was a fat kid who hit puberty and got skinny and was left in possession of near-superhuman powers of seismic food consumption absent any weight gain and so during college it was suggested that in the same way pregnant women are “eating for two” I must have had a suppressed awkward fat tween living inside of me and my friends decided to name him Alphonse. One of Alphonse’s favorite pasttimes during his undergraduate years was curling up to “West Wing” marathons on Bravo with an extra large delivery pizza from Domino’s. Alphonse is also quite fond of demonstrating Langer’s sexual fitness by way of food challenges and one time Alphonse was challenged to eat Langer’s height in footlong hot dogs, but because Langer is 6’1 Alphonse had to eat seven feet of hot dogs. Sometimes even Langer’s closest friends confuse him for Alphonse and vice versa and one time Langer’s best friend introduced Langer as someone who “enjoys Rihanna, political discourse, and eating things larger than his head”. Langer does indeed enjoy Rihanna, but it is Alphonse who enjoys eating things larger than Langer’s head.

Thursday’s are burrito days in the office, a weekly ritual codenamed “Operation Hot Brother”, and Langer was feeling hungry today and decided to get two spicy chicken burritos and when his colleagues suggested it couldn’t be done Alphonse’s ears perked up and decided to toss in a spicy chicken taco just for good measure.

Langer’s sexual fitness is quite impressive.