quarterempty

GOOD Magazine | Goodmagazine – Unreliable Narrator:

“The issues of today tend to make me seethe or weep,” he explains. “The Daily Show has been a relief in some ways, as often the humor there derives from simply telling the un-lacquered truth, which, sadly, is far more taboo than even the dirtiest joke. There is nothing lighthearted in the show—if anything, it’s one of the most serious and sometimes heaviest hearted shows I’ve encountered….Jon Stewart isn’t a comedian—he’s a straight man. America is the clown.“

Stick around to the third graph…

Gothamist:

Eep! An off-duty police officer was stabbed in the chest by another person at Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg around 4:30AM yesterday with a folding knife. And what started this confrontation? According to the NY Times, when “one person bumped into someone from the other party on his way to the bathroom.” Kellogg’s Diner manager Theodora Fiotos told the Times, “Basically, they exchanged some words. They were yelling and screaming and pushing each other.

“Witnesses helped the police locate the stabber, 21 year old Luis DeJesus, at his Knickerbocker Avenue home by yesterday afternoon. DeJesus was arrested and charged with assault.

Time Out New York / Corporate suits:

“People don’t realize that each M&M color has a distinct personality. Red is the leader. He thinks he’s the boss. Yellow follows red. I’d say yellow is a little naive. Green is sassy; she’s the only female. Orange, well, he’s stressed out. Sort of on the verge of a breakdown. Oh, and then there’s blue. He keeps his cool.”

Blood, Sweat and Type O: Japan’s Weird Science – New York Times:

In Japan, using blood type to predict a person’s character is as common as going to McDonald’s and ordering a teriyaki burger. The association is akin to the equally unscientific use of astrological signs by Americans to predict behavior, only more popular. It is widely believed that more than 90 percent of Japanese know their blood type.

“In everyday life in Japan, blood type is used as a kind of a social lubricant, a conversation starter,” said Theodore Bestor, a professor of Japanese studies and anthropology at Harvard University. “It’s a piece of information that supposedly gives you some idea of what that person is like as a human being.

“Japanese tend to have a fairly strong kind of inherent belief that genetics and biology really matter in terms of people’s behavior. So I think Japanese might be much more predisposed to thinking about a kind of genetic basis for personality than most Americans would.”

Japanese popular culture has been saturated by blood typology for decades. Dating services use it to make matches. Employers use it to evaluate job applicants. Blood-type products — everything from soft drinks to chewing gum to condoms — have been found all over Japan.

“Fixing” the War:

“Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.“

I love this little quote. It is from an article in the Nation about the general who plays the enemy in Pentagon wargames. Apparently, he’s been doing this for years and has developed quite a reputation for innovative strategies at defeating the United States military. The article discusses the ways the Bush administration fixes data to meet their predetermined decisions, using as a backdrop the 2002 wargames where this general used the same sort of low-tech tactics that the Iraqi insurgents utilized. These tactics were tremendously successful in 2002 wargames, but the Pentagon kept restarting the games and changing the rules until to make the military more successful. I was totally buying into the article, but then there was a comment from a reader pointing out that the good guys rarely win wargames, always restarts them many times, and they were trying out a number of new weapons systems for the first time. And I felt cheated by the author of the article, that he told a cool little story, but didn’t tell the whole story. Especially given the overwhelming number of examples available to support the premise of the article.

Anyway, the quote itself is apparently taken directly from the report of the Iraq Study Group. I like how complicated, diplomatic the quote is, to illustrate a very common truth.

testing…

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testing…

Franklin Delano Roosevelt…