If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Tweet ‘Em

Posted on Friday August 27, 2010 | 2 comments

The Unhappy Mediator is unhappy to announce that No Happy Medium is now on Twitter.

Twitter.com/NoHappyMedium

Indie darlings Built to Spill once said, “I don’t like this air, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop breathing it.” If Weird Al Yankovic had done a parody, he probably would have said, “I don’t like this pear, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop eating it.”

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Well, I, like Built to Spill, an imaginary incarnation of Weird Al and Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (three of the biggest influences on my daily decision making), am breathing the air and eating the pear, stickers and all.

But wait, you say, how can this be? The Unhappy Mediator hates Twitter. Still true. I do hate Twitter and the ubiquitous waves of inanity emanating from it. But the site’s overwhelming popularity is a function of and party to its reach and influence; and it wouldn’t be so influential if it weren’t an inherently powerful tool to begin with. It is as a tool — that is, a marketing tool — and I intend to use it.

I will not stop making fun of Twitter, the Twitteratti, and the just-plain-Twits. I encourage you to call me out if I stray from this vow. Please view this self-interested transgression not as a defecting, but as an infiltration; I’ll be the man on the inside, ostensibly whoring for clicks, but really gathering intel and dismantling the machine from within. But mostly just whoring for clicks.

Please follow me here to keep up with the latest unhappiness.

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Posted in Information Stupor Highway, Shoot the Messenger

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Breaking News: Fake News 1 Bazillion Times More Watchable and Trustworthy than Real News

Posted on Friday August 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Daily Show is better than the real news. We all know this already. It’s smarter and more insightful despite being, you know, comedy. Well, I’ve got something to add to the list of reasons it’s better: Integrity.

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The clip above is from earlier this week. It’s an absolutely brilliant, terrifically funny and fundamentally terrifying bit on Fox News’s ties to the potential jihad-jockey who’s potentially involved in funding the potential “Ground Zero Mosque,” and who definitely has a financial stake in the Murdoch company. The discussion segues into a debate of Evil versus Stupid; is Fox News one or the other? I’m inclined toward the former, as the latter — as you’ll see in this clip — is just too unbelievable. But who says stupidity and evil are mutually exclusive? In any case, an utter lack of integrity is hard to argue with.

Last night Stewart hosted NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to discuss the plans for the Muslim center in Lower Manhattan. It was an interesting and entertaining talk, and I think Bloomberg was calmly persuasive, though he glazed over the emotional aspects a little too easily. (For my part, I’m fully in support of the project as well, but that is the one point on which I have trouble holding ground in discourses about it — throw a a crying family at me and my edgy wit withers ever so slightly.)

At the very end of the segment, in a quick back and forth just before the commercial break when most viewers were likely tuning out, Stewart mentions that he and the Daily Show staff are hosting a benefit dinner for Bloomberg’s foundation. A little friendly banter, a nice way to end an interview. Or is it much more than that?

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I don’t think Stewart was just shooting the shit, I think he was walking the walk. He was, in a subtle way, presenting a disclaimer of having ties to Mr. Bloomberg, his guest. He was doing exactly what he showed Fox to be too stupid or too evil to do: acknowledge a connection between the broadcast and a subject of the broadcast.

Stewart, with his team of goofy sidekicks, holds himself to a standard of a legitimate news organization, a standard that our “legitimate news organizations” often fall short of. Through parody and farce he displays a model of what our Fourth Branch should strive to be. Oh, and he does it sitting down, too.

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Posted in Unhappy Media

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CNN, et al Ridiculous, SNL Reports

Posted on Thursday August 26, 2010 | 42 comments

Ug. Spare me.

TV news is getting harder and harder to watch. I’m not talking about the natural disasters, personal miseries and constant flow of global atrocities. It’s the  stations, anchors and correspondents that make me want to tune out. I long for the days when newsmen sat at a desk and told you what you needed to know.  Why is it in vogue for anchors to stand up all the time? Is it supposed to make the news more fun? It doesn’t. Sit down, please, just sit the hell down. Easy on the banter. Standing and chatting doesn’t draw me into the conversation and you’re not half as charming or witty as you think you are. Quit it with the queer sound effects and Top 40 songs. And spare me the citizen journalism; if I want to get my information from some amateur shmo with a goofy handle I’d go online.

The Internet is also where anonymous tweets and personal-opinion emails need to stay. “‘We need better healthcare reform,’ says @robbyray” is not news and I don’t care what Carol29 thinks about Tiger’s divorce. Astonishingly, Saturday Night Live pretty much hit it on the head this weekend. Spot on. Funny? Meh. But spot on:

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Way to go with the astute commentary, guys. Anchors, take note.

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Posted in Unhappy Media

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Reader Appreciation: This week’s top searches

Posted on Wednesday August 25, 2010 | 2 comments

Thanks to the readers who made these the current top search terms leading to the site:

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Posted in Information Stupor Highway

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Google Game: Don’t Have It, Don’t Want It

Posted on Tuesday August 24, 2010 | Leave a comment

What if? What if? What if? Life is full of what ifs. What if I do this? What if I need that? What if the sky falls, if the mountains crumble, if I break my leg or get knocked up or forget my wireless password? What if Google is down?! (It’s OK, it’s not, deep breath.)

It’s one thing to go online to look for practical solutions to every-day problems, like alternatives to baking soda…

But consulting the Internet for amorphous philosophical quandaries could be troublesome:

Don’t want a background on your Google? Google that. Don’t know if you want to stay in/get out of your committed relationship? I think there are healthier ways to approach your ambivalence. WebMD is a quick alternative to a doctor, but it shouldn’t replace a proper diagnosis; Google may lead you to advice blogs or forums of like-minded folk, but remember, it’s not as personalized as it’s designed to appear. I sincerely hope people are not, in favor of anonymous web-searching, forsaking the wisdom and understanding of friends, family… and professionals.

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Watch Your Head

Posted on Monday August 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

Over a staircase on Mott St, Chinatown, NYC.

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Posted in Write and Wrong

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Best Intextions: A First Look

Posted on Friday August 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

Long before Google Suggest and the Google Game your cell phone was trying to read your mind. Predictive Text, or T9, employs algorithms of spelling and common usage to help you skip all the button-pushing of old school 1-for-A, 2-for-B texting by suggesting words as you type. It creates a suggestion hierarchy — most likely candidates are listed first. For instance, hit 4-6-6-3 and your phone will suggest “good” followed by “home,” “gone,” “hood,” and so on.

Developers for the various manufacturers and carriers use different algorithms to predict what you want to say and the order in which words appear. Sometimes the sequence of suggestions makes you wonder what the hell they’re basing their math on.

Here’s a first look at some of the more entertaining and questionable predictive text suggestion progressions in a new series called “Best Intextions.”

Best Intextions: Howl it Know?

#1: Wolf
#2: Woke

Really, what are the chances more people are texting about wolves than about waking up?

Email  your favorite T9 text missteps to UnhappyMediator@gmail.com.

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Posted in Gadgeteering, Write and Wrong

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A Film By Any Other Name

Posted on Thursday August 19, 2010 | 2 comments

From the directors of Two Stupid Stupid Guys, There's Something Going on with Mary.

Translation is a sticky game. I’ve long wished that I knew Russian so I could better appreciate Tolstoy. I wonder how much more I’d love Love in the Time of Cholera if my Spanish reading comprehension weren’t so dilapidated, or what greater enlightenment I’d have garnered from The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Kundera’s native Czech.

Translation is also a fun game, one that keeps me entertained for at least a stop or two every time I’m on the subway in New York comparing the sparse, pithy copy in the English language MTA ads to the meandering Spanish ones that require smaller font and tighter spacing to fit on the same poster, or pondering the rhythmic differences that make “si ves algo, di algo” sound better to me than “if you see something, say something.”

This post on the Economist’s Johnson language blog takes a look at interesting movie title translations, including “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which is, in its original Swedish “Men Who Hate Women.” Definitely more going on there than just a little lost-in-translation-ing:

When I arrived in Mexico I wanted something easy to practice my Spanish, so I went looking for “La chica con el tatuaje del dragón”, as I assumed Stieg Larsson’s thriller might be known. It isn’t: the title here is “Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres” (“The men who didn’t love women”).What a rubbish name, I thought: why couldn’t Mexicans be given a direct translation? In fact, it’s English-speakers who have been duped: the original, in Swedish, is simply “Men who hate women”. (“It was considered too scary for foreign audiences, while just hitting the politically-correct spot in Sweden,” reckons my neighbourhood Swede.)

Duped indeed. Or maybe “Men who hate women” just wasn’t specific enough to differentiate it from other Hollywood flicks.

By the by, I’ve got a little movie title translation of my own to offer — for “Burn After Reading.” Sorry, Coen brothers, you know I love you, but you got this one wrong. Shoulda called it “Burn Before Watching.”

[Thanks, Ter.]

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Posted in Shoot the Messenger, Unhappy Media

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Online, Turning Lemons into Lemonade, Attempted Rape into Pop Stardom

Posted on Wednesday August 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

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You may have seen the reports on Antoine Dodson’s infectious invective. Likely you’ve heard the Gregory Brothers’ Auto-tune remix. You may have bought The Bed Intruder Song for $1.29 on iTunes.

If you did purchase the song, you helped put its Aug 8 debut on the iTunes US charts at #44, just below John Mayer and above Carrie Underwood. That day, more people bought it than anything by P!nk or Justin Bieber. I’m not sure how many sales the song has had, but Dodson’s maybe-50-cent take of each download was enough, according to the ABC article, to move his family out of the projects.

Some people go on reality shows and get famous overnight. Some people do the same thing in plain ol’ reality. Unreal.

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Google Game: Easiest

Posted on Tuesday August 17, 2010 | Leave a comment

We all have goals, we just don’t want to work too hard to reach them. Indeed, we want the easiest way to get where we’re going — and the easiest way to figure out what the easiest way is. So it stands to reason that we’d seek the existential paths of least resistance as we’d look for the best routes to avoid traffic after a long weekend: Google. What are we hoping to achieve in the easiest possible ways? New skills. A smaller waist and a bigger paycheck. A good looking site, a better looking suit. The easiest way out.

Aw, man. Easiest way to kill oneself? Seriously? That’s such a freaking downer. I mean, it’ s bad enough that there are so many people out there contemplating suicide. But it’s a whole new level of sad that they’re searching Google for the best ways to do it. So much for going out with dignity.

As you can imagine, the search results for “easiest way to kill oneself” contain some rather disturbing tidbits, like this forum discussion on a game developer website. Oh, nerds. Then there’s the creepy Wikipedia summary divided into Bleeding, Drowning, Suffocation and Electrocution. But I think the thing that strikes me most is down, down, down at the bottom of the page, where Google presents its selection of “related searches.” Among them: “cheapest way to kill yourself.” I’m all for thrift, but if there’s one thing to blow your wad on, it might as well be this.

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