Random post is random

[eruthros]

1) Most hilarious typo in a pseudo-professional news story: "Only about 6 percent of dog owners and 4 percent of cat owners are bought from pet stores, according to the most recent statistics."

That's from a salon.com article about pet ownership in the recession. (I'm trying to avoid salon.com these days for various political reasons, but I read their magazine for years and I still sometimes accidentally load it in the morning. Changing habits is hard, but I guess this is a nice side benefit. Srsly, dog owners are bought from pet stores?)

2) Most ridiculous higher-education move of the week: Georgia Republicans attempt to ban (graduate) courses in queer theory. They claim that universities are supposed to "educate people in sciences, business, math," apparently taking a stand against all liberal arts ever! They are now claiming that their statements were blow out of proportion, and that when they tried to get rid of all classes with the word "queer" in the title they didn't really mean it, or something.

3) Most awesome news of the week: thingswithwings and I finally signed a lease for an apartment for next year and it is awesome. And cheap. And AWESOME. \o/

4) Most baffling javascript bookmarklet tool: Cornify, a bookmarklet that I SWEAR TO GOD covers web pages in unicorns and rainbows. Sparkly unicorns and rainbows. Like, I have a bookmarklet to zap colors to black and white -- this does the exact opposite. I am baffled and amazed.

Comments

[livrelibre.livejournal.com]

1) Hee!
2) My eyes roll 4ever.
3) Yay!
4) I thought that was a joke. Or perhaps a ridiculous internet meme.

[eruthros]

Isn't it amazing? I love the "everything exists on the internet" feeling that things like a bookmarklet to unicorn-up your page give me.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

What I particularly love about Cornify is that my "delouse" bookmarklet doesn't get rid of the unicorns. Sure, it deletes all the color and images on the page, but the unicorns are staying, dammit!

[eruthros]

That's awesome -- I hadn't noticed that with my similar bookmarklet. Hilarious.

[ryca.livejournal.com]

Can I ask about the political reasons for avoiding salon? Just curious.

[eruthros]

Sure -- I don't have anything to link to, because I didn't keep links, but over the last two or so years, and especially during this presidential election, salon.com started making me really uncomfortable in terms of their ideas about race and gender and class. The classic gender example is the very existence of broadsheet, which is not a feminist perspective on news and politics, but a blog about women and women's news, which both reifies the differences between men and women and implies that the rest of the site is not news for and about women. Since they don't blog about PoC, the examples are harder to find, but there were a bunch of stories that used classic "what? I'm not racist I'm colorblind!" buzzwords about the Obamas.

I really like Glenn Grenwald's columns there, which is why it was hard to stop going, but I started to wince at story headlines, so.

[m-shell.livejournal.com]

yay lease! yay apartment! yay cheap!

[eruthros]

\o/

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Woah! That unicorn site! WHAT?

[eruthros]

I don't even KNOW, but I knew you'd be interested. Someone on my flist linked to it just after you stopped sending me links to unicorns-and-rainbows-on-black-velvet paintings, and I was like "omg toft_froggy must see this!" It's AMAZING.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

It's like all at once a vortex made the internet splurt unicorns! Gosh. Thank you.

[villainny.livejournal.com]

Apologies for the off topic comment - I just wanted to let you know that someone has left you a valentines message over here (http://villainny.livejournal.com/1213918.html).

Happy Valentines day!