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You are just a number
to me! And that number
is:

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PAGES UD MADE:

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My Books Page

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My Reviews Page

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My Reference Page

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My Music Page

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My Pictures

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My Store

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UD-RELATED PAGES:

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My LiveJournal

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My del.icio.us page

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My Last.fm page

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My Amazon Wishlist

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HEAVY ROTATION

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Dan Deacon:
Bromst
Animal Collective:
Merriweather Post Pavillion
Bon Iver:
For Emma, Forever Ago
Vampire Weekend:
Vampire Weekend
Fleet Foxes:
Fleet Foxes

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BLOGS ETC

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claude le monde
nuncstans
rock 'em stock 'em
tomato nation
postmodern drunkard
tuckova 22
ghastly mess
constintina
total virility
fuzzysquid
drunken bee
stacey nightmare
elyse from ANTM
stereolabrat
dark side points
jf_franklin
123 i love you READ NOW
brotherhood 2.0

NOT BLOGS ETC

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qwantz (dinosaur comix)
go fug yourself
the burg
cat and girl
book of ratings
married to the sea
icanhascheezburger
fire joe morgan
fivethirtyeight.com
READ NOW
hospitality on parade

WEIRD LOVE

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dead amusement pks
craters!

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all content
© 2002-2010
Jeremy Broomfield

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PRAISE & REVIEWS

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"[UD] is a genius."
--Christian Oates

"[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not."
--Tricia Howey



MOTTO

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egeo huic vigorum

MY WRESTLING NAME

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Titan Gently

MY PUNK NAME

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Razor Ection







WHO LINKS TO UD?

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and here's something
weird: my place
in Humor 3-space

  Okay, before I post anything else, here's the long promised NHL Team Name Tournament.
     Everything takes so stupidly long to complete. I want to complete team name tournaments for every major (and some minor) sports leagues in the country, so that I can then have a super super team name tournament of all the winners of the earlier ones. That would be a serious clash of titans, yeah. But I think it would get ridiculous or impossible at a certain point.
     As I mentioned in the notes for the NHL tourney, I've identified six unbeatable team names, instant winners of any team name tournaments: Gravity, Chaos, Time, Energy, Infinity, the Void. Before you argue with me about them, I want to head off some obvious criticisms at the pass:
• I'm not saying these are the only six.
• A lot of other big candidate concepts are synonyms, subsets, or siblings of the ones I've got (e.g. Heat doesn't need to be there because Energy kind of encompasses it).
• I can see how you could argue that Infinity and the Void are opposite sides of the same coin and maybe should only count as one concept, in which case I'd rather go with Infinity.
• I know I didn't include Mass in the list. Partly I left it off because Energy is there, and E=mc². I realize that by this logic I shouldn't include Time on the list, as I also left off any expression of the concept of Distance (Dimension, Space, etc.); and some would say that Time is just another dimension, another measure of distance. Hey, and Chaos, when considered as a synonym for Change, is a time-based phenomenon, so what gives, right? Fuck, I don't know.
• I'm willing to listen to arguments in favor of things like Life, Sentience, Intelligence, or even Art. But for the moment they seem less universal than terrestrial, and hence not as powerful. But I'm listening.

A reader asked for my views on "the recent tourist-stabbings here in our fair city," and I'm all too happy to oblige, in a babbly, barely-coherent, late-night fashion. I don't actually pay attention to hysterical disaster tabloid news, because it's bad for your brain, bad for your heart, and bad for mankind -- I'll get back to that in a second. But I saw a local news program while I was eating at the diner the other night, so I caught some details of this case. Also I looked up a few other facts on the web, and here's a summary: A homeless man with two first names stabbed four people over the course of two days before being apprehended. Victims included two Canadians, a Texan, and a Brooklyn man. The stabbings happened in the subway and in Times square.
     Okay. My commentary has more to do with the coverage than the event. I don't like to get my news from local TV news programs or tabloid newspapers, nor do most of the people I know. But a lot of people only get their news from such sources. I don't know the demographics for the NY Post's readership, but I'm betting that the poor, the undereducated, and the stupid are heavily represented. Seriously, that paper is for shit, and it shares several characteristics with the local news show I caught that night.
     Not to mention that every other story on the TV news show was about death, crime, or something burning, the angles on the stabbing story were perverse. The points they kept on hitting: A homeless man. Random, senseless attacks. Tourists attacked. Young women tourists, from Canada. Also a Texan, whose uncle made a point of saying to the press that he had forgiven the attacker. Um. The stabber had been arrested many times in the past for various things and GASP let back on the street. Brave people chased the attacker down after witnessing the Times Square attack. Blah blah fucking blah. (In an obvious attempt to keep the story from damaging tourism, several news organizations included NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's comments that a) the attacks did not seem to be intentionally targeted at tourists, and b) violent crime in the city has gone down blah percent and crime in the subway has gone down blah percent.) Basically, the entire broadcast was saying: you're not safe. Fear strangers. The system is broken. Cars move fast and kill your babies. People lose their homes in fires. Drug arrest! Random violence is out to get you. Stay at home. Trust only your family, and maybe not even them. And oh yeah: buy lottery tickets!
     Fuck, I don't know. This is such well-tread ground. Local news sucks, smart people have always known that. But real journalism isn't sexy, and it isn't scary, and it doesn't make good TV. It doesn't make judgments, and one of the main thrills of exploitative sensationalist journalism seems to be the way that it allows its consumers to feel morally superior to other people.
     All right, I'm getting sleepy now. But how do we solve this shitty "news" problem? That documentary about the Fox News Channel mentioned a study that showed that Fox viewers knew demonstrably less about the news, and believed things that were wrong. I'm not stating that as impressively as I could; the results were truly shocking. But I think this happens all the time. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that certain news sources -- or even certain types of news source -- cause actual damage to their consumers. Should there be laws about what can be called news? Fuck, maybe not. But if an organization purporting to present "news" can be shown to be an instrument of control or repression, a source of misinformation, or just the propaganda arm of a corporation or political organization, shouldn't they be called some thing else? I'm so sleepy.
     Bad journalism is anti-American. Bad journalists, tabloid papers, and local news programs are this close to committing treason. Then again, trying to curb free speech is un-American too. Somebody help me out here? Can somebody explain to me how to save the country from rabid, unchecked, unregulated free-market capitalism? I don't understand anything anymore. I can't think anymore. Too much Murdoch.
posted by Universal Donor 9:22 PM 0 comments

OTHER REVIEWS:
Scrabble NEW!

LATEST BOOK REVIEWS:
The Game
Moneyball
One-Upsmanship
Siddhartha

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You need the
Fear Not Guide to Life.
Buy it already. ($4)

Now available!
The Broomfield Variations CD
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or go to The UD Store

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MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS

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Chan Marshall
Rotem of the IDF
Eleanor Friedberger
Amy Goodman
Bernardine Dohrn ('69)
Maya Rudolph
Joanna Newsom
Imogen Heap
Caroline Dhavernas

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Shana Rae Ray

DISALLOWED FOREVER

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"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!"
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"from whence"
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"...the exception that proves the rule"
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any use of the question "spit or swallow?"
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the phrase "drop trou"
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fake-o reviewer verbs:
"penned" for wrote
"helmed" for directed
"lensed" for whatever
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"expat"
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the euphemism
"passed away"
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pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!"
(see also: "grassy-ass!")

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PET PEEVES

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"confinscated"
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trying children "as adults"
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"drownded"
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misuse of reflexive pronouns, as when someone says "Please talk to Bob or myself." Come on people now. "Myself" is not just a fancy version of "me"! LEARN IT.
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tattoos in the Courier font
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any use of Comic Sans

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