mmalone’s Neighborhood

I forgot about this song until it came up in an iTunes genius playlist. It's one of those songs that just gets to everybody...it's so full of hope. I was recently reminded that it's not such a stigma to be ambitious. Good remix.

At the end of a review panning (no, really?) the new slash-and-gore movie Saw VI:

"Saw VI" is rated R (Under 17 requires 

accompanying parent or adult guardian) .  

Tripe, most of it human.

via Too Much Nick:

Walk Don’t Run (Isogabamaware) sung by a knit rabbit and bear with ukuleles and little voices

Reminds me of hacky sack... is that cruel?

More about the band:

Should food look like this?

I love Toph, the Six Apart mascot! (more about Toph here.)

 Now there's a Mac screensaver, created by Hayase-san, featuring Toph (plus various Six Apart logos).

You can get the screensaver here:

SixApartScreensaver.zip

According to Garth, here's how to install it:

Once downloaded and unziped, place the file in:

Macintosh HD > Library > Screen Savers

It should then be visible under the Desktop & Screen Saver section of the System Preferences. Note that when you enter a new RSS URL, you'll need to hit 'return' rather than just click 'Ok' in the dialog. Nobody knows why.

You can use any RSS URL for the screensaver display, including your Vox friends posts feed:

http://USERNAME.vox.com/explore/neighborhood/library/posts/atom.xml

or your Twitter feed:

https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss

Just click "Options...", change the RSS input URL and hit 'return'. You can also change the Toph level, but beware! Toph level 100 is pretty insane.


It's pouring rain here in San Francisco! Which reminds me of my favorite single-purpose website - Umbrella Today.

Umbrella Today asks you for your zip code and tells you if you should bring an umbrella with you today. While it's not that handy for checking the current weather (you could just look out the window instead), you can configure Umbrella Today to send you alerts. Umbrella Today will notify you via email or text message to let you know if the forecast is for rain.

"Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning," Obama said. He described his interaction with his two daughters.

"After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, 'Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo's birthday.' And then Sasha added, `Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.' So it's — it's good to have kids to keep things in perspective."

From reading Pollock's book on Spinoza:

Men are also gained over by liberality, chiefly those who have not wherewithal to buy the necessaries of life.  But helping every one in need is far beyond the means and convenience of any private person. For a private man's wealth is no match for such a demand.  Also a single man's opportunities are too narrow for him to contract friendship with all.  Wherefore providing for the poor is a duty that falls on the whole community and has regard only to the common interest.   ---Spinoza, Ethics

Funny, later I heard Michael Moore talking to Wolf Blitzer about his new movie about the problems inherent in capitalism:

How do you respond to the people who charge you with hypocrisy?  You made a lot of money in this free-enterprise capitalist system and now you're railing against it.

Isn't that amazing? That...I've done ok and I still wanna do these things to help people who have it worse off than I.  That I'm actually following through on the religious principles I was raised with that I will be judged by how I treat the least among us.

The other bit I liked in the Ethics, sounds like Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics:

Now man's power is very much confined, and is inifitely surpassed by the power of external causes; and therefore we have not any absolute power of converting to our own use things outside us.  Yet we shall bear with an even mind that which happens to us against the conditions of our own advantage if we are aware that we have done our part of the business, and that the power we possess could not have gone so far as to avoid those evils; and that we are part of the whole order of nature and bound thereby.