…take some time to recenter yourself. ..bruce w..

Now, go wipe your eyes and have a better day.  ..bruce w..

Clearly, I’ve been looking at this music video all wrong:

Rebecca Black wakes somewhat too perfectly in the early scenes of her viral video, “Friday.” Her eyes open exactly as the clock beside her bed flashes seven. She wears full make-up. Rare for a teen, she isn’t tired, longs not for any receding dreams.

Her cultural debt is less to Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles than Evie Vicki the robot girl from Small Wonder, we realize, as in a voice controlled by Auto-Tune she enumerates the banalities of an anti-existence: “Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs, gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal… gotta get down to the bus stop.”

She offers the camera a hostage’s smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”

Definitely read the whole thing — it is a masterpiece. And as one commenter notes, “Of course you know that you have now ruined this subject as material for a PhD thesis in the social sciences.” Heh.

Hat tip to my good friend Mike Godwin, over on Facebook. (Yes, that Godwin.)

P.S. Of course, in all this, Rebecca Black is laughing at the rest of us. Her video is approaching 40 million views on YouTube in less than six weeks. I suspect that must be a record of some sort. We so excited!

CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs

The Onion, as usual, nails it. Once you’ve watched it, watch it again in full-screen mode to read the headlines and factoid crawls (starting around 1:45).  ..bruce w..

[UPDATED 03/13/11 -- 1809 MDT]

Jerry Pournelle links to the blog of an American engineer in Japan who points out at length just how well everything has worked in Japan during and in the aftermath of the quake, with a gentle reminder of how big Japan is:

Quite a lot of the reporting on Japan, including that which is scaring the heck out of my friends and family, is the equivalent of someone ringing up Mayor Daley during Katrina and saying “My God man, that’s terrible — how are you coping?”

and how well prepared Japan is for events like this:

Japan is exceptionally well-prepared to deal with natural disasters: it has spent more on the problem than any other nation, largely as a result of frequently experiencing them.  (Have you ever wondered why you use Japanese for “tsunamis” and “typhoons”?)  All levels of the government, from the Self Defense Forces to technical translators working at prefectural technology incubators in places you’ve never heard of, spend quite a bit of time writing and drilling on what to do in the event of a disaster.

Read the whole thing.

[Original post]

By the time all the digital media is collected and made available, I suspect the Sendai Quake of 2011 may be the most filmed and photographed natural disaster to date. There is an air of unreality about many of the images (moving or still) that have come out so far, particularly since a real tsunami — as opposed to Hollywood’s version — is far more like a sloshing or overflowing bathtub than like a gigantic wave. But what becomes clear, particularly from the video footage, is just how powerful, how inexorable, that surge of water is, even when it doesn’t appear to be moving terribly fast.

Here, with a hat tip to Ann Althouse, are perfectly oriented and aligned overhead photographs of selected areas of Japan before and after the tsunamis. To get the full effect, drag the slider in the middle of each picture all the way to the right — showing the full ‘before’ photo — then drag it slowly over to the left — showing the full ‘after’ photo. [NOTE: based on comments over at Althouse, the slider doesn't appear to appear under IE.]  What I find most telling are the areas where standing water is left behind. I don’t know if that’s because the area is below sea level, or because there’s higher ground between those areas and the sea, or for some other reason. But it makes clear just how staggering difficult the cleanup and reconstruction will be.

And here, with a hat tip to Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings, is new video showing the initial tsunami surge in Miyako and Kamaishi. You get a real sense of how much energy is contained in the deceptively quiet surge, particularly as you see the large fishing boat smashed and torn apart on the underside of the elevated highway (as cars are driving on it!).

If I find more new footage (beyond that which has been showing constantly on news channels and shows), I”ll post it here.  ..bruce w..

Just watch. ..bruce w..

I could do without the music and intense narration, but I post this in memory of my late father, John A. Webster, who was there at Pearl Harbor as a 17-year-old seaman first class aboard the USS San Francisco.  If you click through on the video to YouTube, there are additional segments. Hat tip to Philip Klein at the American Spectator blog.  ..bruce w..

…though it’s sort of funny to think of flash mobs singing in mall food courts as “more traditional”.

No, I don’t know what it means. But I keep watching it, over and over. “I feel strangely hypnotized.” Hat tip to Ace of Spades. ..bruce w..

For those wondering, here’s some information on the singer’s reference to “2257″.

Hat tip to Paul Chesser over at the American Spectator blog.