Monthly Archives: August 2011

Survey Says...

An arm of the Gallup organization based in the United Arab Emirates has just published, in partnership with their U.S. based colleagues, the results of a major polling that compares the attitudes of Muslim Americans to Americans of other faiths. Its title is "Examining U.S. Muslims' Political, Social, and Spiritual Engagement 10 Years After September 11," and its most attention grabbing finding is the fact that Muslim Americans are more likely than Christians or Jews to believe that targeting and killing civilians is never justified, whether it is done by the military or an individual. Put another way, Christians and Jews are more comfortable with civilians being targeted and killed by a wide margin.

Wingnuts are wrong again? Odd.

BJ Pie Filter Update

FYI, I’ve modified the FireFox version of the Balloon Juice pie filter so you can add (and remove) people from your pie list by just selecting their name then clicking a button. No more editing!

The Add/Remove buttons will appear at the bottom of the comments, just under the "Submit". When you add someone, the comments will be updated instantly. If you remove someone, the script will have to refresh the page.

Tres sexy. Oui oui.

The old method of editing the script still works, but this is far easier.

To use this, you’ll need Greasemonkey : for FireFox, for Internet Explorer - not sure if other browsers have GM support or not.

You can download the pie filter, here.

Start Your iPods

Special dilemma edition:
Best way to orient two monitors: landscape or portrait?

Once you've answered that, start your music shuffler, list the first five songs and describe them!

  1. The Beatles - Tell Me What You See. An OK number from "Help!". Kindof sing-song, a little lyrically meh.
  2. Dizzy Gillespie & Stan Getz - Impromptu. The first three minutes of this uptempo number feature neither minutes Gillespie nor Getz; piano and guitar run the show. But, eventually, Getz shows up with a long and exuberant run, and Gillespie comes in with his own at minute 5. Gillespie, Getz and the guitar player close it out with 90 seconds of intertwining solos.
  3. Nick Drake - Hanging On A Star. A nice Pink Moon-style tune, vox + guitar. It's one of the last songs he recorded, for an album he never finished in '74. It's from the mostly excellent Time Of No Reply outtakes and alternates CD, put out in 1986.
  4. Big Black - Pigeon Kill (live). This sounds pretty much identical to any number of other Big Black songs. Rocks pretty damned hard, though - even if it is about killing a bird.
  5. Broken Social Scene - Handjobs For The Holidays. That title sets the bar pretty high. Does the song itself measure up? I don't think so. Not quite. It bops along at a nice clip, but without a hook of any kind. There's a lot of stuff going on, too much, maybe. The lyrics are mumbly, and, I couldn't tell if they had anything to do with the title.

Now, you do it.