Digital Culture Studies

Tomorrow night (6/17) Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet…And How to Stop It, will be on Colbert. This should be fun.

I bought a copy of this book for my summer reading list because I am oldskool and like to hold books in my hand to read them, but you can download and read it for free directly from its website, and if so inclined, there is a group annotation in progress.

• ERNursey: It is my fondest dream that every politician in this country start reading a health care provider’s blog on a regular basis, so that they may better understand how money and power have isolated them from the health care crisis in America. See also, White Coat Rants, DB’s Med Rants, and Med Blog Groupie.

• Passive Aggressive Notes: Be sure to check out the minor gall, the major lift (bonus points if you get the reference), The angry graduate assistants, and a great email from the front-lines of post-post feminism.

• I am RICH and I want to spend it on YOU tonight: I wish my husband would stop posting his personal ad on craigslist like this :)

A few of my faves:

• A penguin species that flies (note the narrator).
• Gordon Brown appoints French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy to post of UK’s First Lady of Style.
  
• Gordon Ramsey bans swearing from restaurants.
• New campaign to relocate Polar Bears to Antarctica.
• Google and Virgin announce the creation of Virgle, a jointly held mission to settle Mars.
  
• All featured videos on UK YouTube are actually a Rickroll.
• Betamax to HD converter.
  

A comprehensive list of April Fool’s Day nonsense (including past years), can be found at the April Fool’s Day On The Web Repository.

Crgslist.com: so web 2.0 we don’t need vowels.

Microsoft Researchers make me cry. Yeah, Scoble, I am running Vista Business on an IBM laptop, so Microsoft researchers make me cry on a daily basis, at every boot-up.

89 Second Jane.

….the first spoof site. 90 Day Jayne. And….90 Day Poop. You really don’t want to click that second link, mmkay?

This might be funniest for the Canadians, but Best Week Ever is giving out Alternative Awards for the US and European Figure Skating Championships. I like ‘least spined’ the best, and the discussion in the comments - how is it that, 20ish years after it left the theatres with a limited box office take, the movie The Cutting Edge still has so much pop culture relevance? Well, the Pamchenko, of course - the deadliest skating move ever attempted by a spoiled rich girl and her hocky-player turned figure skater of a partner from across the tracks. This is, of course, the movie being spoofed by Blades of Glory.

If I ever figure out what box my skates are in, I might wander across the street to the rink and throw a few solo Pamchenkos, just for old time’s sake :)

A Capella tribute to Facebook.

• Bloggers win the “Test the Nation” trivia challenge. First of all, I would be on any team headed by Samantha Bee. Second, how fun is Canadian television? Third, apparently every blogger in Canada was involved :)
• “What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?” An interesting experiment over on Grand Text Auto.
• Watching the economy dump yesterday got you confused. This Modern World explains the global economy.