MY BRAIN IS MADE OF THINGS MADE OF GOLD

Change of Address

Things will probably begin to degrade 'round these parts as I slowly (or, compared to recent activity at this address, quickly) attend to the work of shutting down this site and transitioning to a new space.

So, if there was ever anything you wanted saved (an article, a picture, a hi-larious comment) get to screen-capping or copying/pasting.

I'll keep a text version of the site around for posterity, but it won't look so pretty as the images start dropping out like teeth.

Anyway, in case you didn't catch the link -- I'm moving to this space. Slowly, but surely.

Long Take: Clark and Lake

Bookmark for Future Cure-All-Power

This might be the finest thing I've ever listened to.

Click, press play and skip to 1:27; your life will be forever changed. Seriously.

Reference material can be viewed here.

Organic Matter vs. Non-Laughing Matter

Continuing the insanity is different from enabling the enemy.

A Google AdWords Eulogy

The AdWords on this post are perhaps the most compelling proof that Google has become too aware. All Google needed was three, three-line ads to describe a man who lived and died as one of the most paradoxical, complicated, and polarizing/polarized figures in modern American popular culture.

Mind. Blowned.

Also, I'd like to think that the Bing ad is a kind of meta-tribute to eccentric behavior.

Ugly Babby?

Whoa CNN Quick Vote. Whoa.

Print is Dead

Concept artwork for a magazine focusing on true crime journalism. Twitter, you did this to me.

Walk Away

I'm having a touch of the Noonan the more I read about David Carradine accidental death (or incredibly ballsy suicide). To wit:

I'm not trying to kill anyone's buzz, nor am I suggesting that they be banished to the closet or shameful fringes of that feed CSI writer's rooms, but can't David Carradine's kinky knots routine be something that he takes quietly to the grave, leaving unspoiled the precious Universal mystery we all crave.

Seriously, replace "torture memo" with "David Carradine's sex practices" and Peggy and I are reading from the same script. 

See what unplanned trouble this disclosure hath wrought? Noonan and I are in agreement!

Never Forget My Birthday

Sadly, this email did not confirm Joe Biden's promise to remember my birthday; it was a solicitation for a re-occurring contribution. I haven't been that disappointed by an email preview since Obama's "Aaron - As a thank you for your contribution, I'm going to appoint you..." email. Spoiler alert: my "appointment" was to the role of Chief "Team Obama" Fundraiser for my apartment.

"Stay 'til the end of the party"

Sunday Night, Really Real from Aaron Kraus on Vimeo.

From Saturday to You

Macy's
Originally uploaded by MBIMOTMOG

In my head, all I can hear is Erykah Badu's "Bag Lady" playing over and over. And that lift from "Xxplosive" is so so nice to hear on a sunny Saturday.

4 Stops, 800x

Yeah, why not.

46 Days Later...

Either Sprint knows something I don't (e.g., a new month is being released between May and June), or this widget is pretty accurately representing the Sprint experience I knew and loved until my contract expired and I jumped to T-Mobile.

One or the other...

Today's Lunch Salon convened around the contemplation of the following options:

Would you rather be a piece of garbage carried by a gentle breeze though a densely populated city or a piece of a corrugated tin roof being flung on hurricane-force winds across a great empty flatland?

Other choices that were contemplated:

• Blue Line train or a CTA bus?
• Gifted clown in an unpopular circus or Sideshow freak in popular carnival?

Clearly, the work of the Lunch Salon is critical to the betterment of society.

The Reflections Will Get You Everytime

Seriously Adobe: Maybe you could add an option to Pre-flight that reviews and corrects bummy reflections.

The Fevered Dream, Digitized

The first two seem harmless enough:


And then, as if in a dream, it takes a sudden turn down a dark alley of the mind where you work out all the petty sleights and awkward moments of gay panic and there, with escape an impossible dream, you stare into the passive aggressive void:
 


It's top-story feature carousels like this one that necessitate the "Our Purpose" tab in the global navigation. Bring on the civil war.

Halle Berry, Lightweight Drinker

Normally I'm against the crazy celebrity culture but I think I link People.com covering the drink ordering habits of celebrities. They're just like us, except lightweights...and obscenely rich for perplexing reasons.

Almost Like Explaning The Inexplicable

It should be some measure of how dry my creative outlets have run that I'm now designing propaganda for a fictional multi-verse.

In Praise Of Accidental Photography and The Blue Line

This morning, as I rode the steel beast into The Loop, I was doing what I normally do: slouching against the doors and reading internets news on my Blackberry Pearl. Today, however, I managed to press the shutter button on my Pearl and take a spectacular photo that commits to pixels all that I find hi-larious about the Blue Line: alt-pug iconography, bird girls with scaled-up eyewear and alt-pug accessories, and creepy staring.

Enjoy.

Yeah, it was totally like that.

Furthering The Mythology, Still Not Much Explanation

So, all you need to know about this kind gentleman henceforth known as "1985 Reverse Terminator" is that he has the following features: sunken marble-round eyes, a small diamond stud earring (worn left-side facing) and he proudly sports a Magnum PI mustache.  Oh, I guess also this: he's clearly a man-out-of-time; I say clearly because his workstation is like some technology installation you'd see in a Recent History museum. Anyway, without further ado:

I promise to explain everything...eventually.

A Mythology Too Complicated To Explain Here, Has Resulted In This:

I'll explain in due time.

Make 9/11 A National Holiday...The Facebook Cause You've Been Waiting For

It begins oddly enough like a cross between a drunk Abe Lincoln and an even drunker Julius Caesar.

People of America on 9/11 a great injustice was done to the people of our fine nation.

Oh totally, when I remember 9/11, the first thing I think of is the great injustice of it all.

The moment of silence we have in our schools is not enough to honor the lives of those innocent people in both of the towers and in the planes, and to honor the brave men and women who risked their lives to save the few that did survive.

Clearly--that's why you're proposing a thoughtful, respectful, well-considered monument that celebrates their lives without needing to exploit their deaths in the service of some creepy belief that their deaths were anything more than a tragedy of circumstance, duty, and spectacle...

As i see it 9/11 should be a day we spend with our friends and family as a unified nation. Some people say that if me make 9/11 a national holiday we are letting the terrorist win. I do not believe this to be true if we do make 9/11 a national holiday it shows that no matter what our families, our citizens will stay together threw the worst. Remember "United we stand Divided we fall"  We do not need to make it a day off from work and school I just think we need more in schools than a moment of silence. I am not sure what we need.

I hate for "the terrorist" to win. That's why I joined Make 9/11 a National Holiday - The Facebook Cause. Totally.

My GangstApple

Seriously, this Fuji has lean!

As you'll notice, Jennifer is not amused by my apple trying to muscle in on her territory. Again, I apologize if you were expecting something of genuine quality. I'll get on that -- in due time.

Numbers in the Crunch

These Huffington Post screen-caps are a few days old; I'm sure by now either 1/7th of a person got the job  or 7 million people waited in line to see a mop. Either way, the economy is in rough shape.

Front page:

From the story:

 

Yeah, you waited all this time for that. Seriously though, you could always just check me out on Twitter...

Fishing Town

Busy? Sure. Kinda sick? Yeah. Too busy to participate in the Wikipedia names your band internet game? No ways.

With some minor adjustments to the source-logic, I think this would also work rather well with short fiction anthologies and even the GOP's 2012 platform.

The Economy is Serious Business

I'm totally serious when I tweet that Obama should just go straight for nationalization (hey, it's the only sensible thing to do) and sell the idea to the Republicans and their supporters by positioning bank nationalization as an enhanced stimulation technique and then throwing them some "this economy is a ticking timebomb" and just wait to see them rubber-stamp that shit.

It's absolutely amazing to me that these right-wing asshats whinge and bark at something they call nationalization ("It's just not American") but they have proven themselves proud supporters of that greatest of American untraditions -- torture. I get the sense that we're just a few rewrites of "24" away from having nationalization pass 100-0. Comeon, Paul Krugman as Jack Bauer is an idea with a certain dark-charm to it.

F'reals.

Our First Black President

A Disappointment...

"Not having weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] was a disappointment"

Seriously? I know it's too much to ask for him to choose his words carefully, but saying that it was a "disappointment" that Iraq didn't have WMD is like shooting a menacing-looking person who was walking past your house on the other side of the street and then telling the cops that it's too bad that guy you murdered didn't have a gun and the intent to break into your house.  Actually, it's like shooting that menacing-looking guy and then firebombing the other side of the street.

Or maybe it's like our country, which allowed this moron to take the presidency twice, lamenting the fact that he's a ruinous little prick with a keen ability to cool the press by making insincere pronouncements of responsibility in the most passive of voices.

Whet is a bit more charitable.

One Pissed-Off Dude (That You've Never Heard Of)

Gray Graham, an actor who's filmography is an long as it is unfamiliar to anyone interested in quality television, wants to share a few thoughts on Liberalism...this should be fun. No wait, what's the opposite of fun? Got it: agonizing!

I don’t want to get along with the Left. I want to take them down. I want to expose their idiocy for what it is and reveal it as a harmful, dangerous succession of lies and deceptions. My friends say that that effort, aside from being fruitless, will cost me work. It will cost me my career. And I say Wait-a-minute, Bucko. Those folks who founded this country were willing to risk not only their careers, but their property, their families, their very lives…the least I can do in standing up for our precious freedoms is risk a silly television career.

We'll, "silly" is one way to put it.  By the way, his IMdB profile has given unto me the inspiration for what will surely be the best epitaph ever: Was one of the final choices for the role of "Captain Sisko" on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine".

Must have been the damned liberals holding him back.

Doing Nothing To Dispell The Rumors...

Submitted with brief comments: Top search on Google Trends "have a ball".

Where there are balls (or in this case, just one), there's Ann Coulter. The same can also be said of open microphones, heinous acts in need of a dishonest defense, and bigots; but that is neither here nor there.

Ad Writer's IQ? (UPDATED)

115, 141, 103, 115 -- It's like some kind of riddle:

I feel like my IQ dropped 38 points just looking at this ad.

UPDATE: It was pointed out to me over IM that this quartet of ads is perhaps the definitive proof that Philip Rivers is only an average Chargers player.

Rollover Where Now?

Porsche, still working at dispelling the notion that Porsche enthusiasts are terrible at everything, still failing.

Free advice: if a user can't figure out where to click to activate your creative, one of the following is true a) your creative is really bad or, b) your creative is really really bad.

Then again, after seeing the one above, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that both a and b are true.

Kicking Rungs Out Of The Ladders

Submitted with brief comments: The Ladder's new ad.

Replace "big talent" and "only 100K plus talent" with "whites" and and you've got an ad for the RNC. But seriously, given this economy and their tone-deaf marketing, how long before The Ladders is shown the door?

Church 2.0

It seems that God types and not-so-much-God types are united in their concern for making the experience of either worshiping or not-concerning-yourself-with God a bit more "web 2.0"--which is to say, with more rounded corners and bathed in shine.
 
From the smartly-titled Guardian article: Vicar has 'horrifying' statue of crucifixion removed from church,

"We're all about hope, encouragement and the joy of the Christian faith. We want to communicate good news, not bad news, so we need a more uplifting and inspiring symbol than execution on a cross."

I guess with a pronouncement like that I can expect all the Unitarian-bashing to stop. Meanwhile, it seems that Humanists and Atheists (two absolute essentials for a weekend bender) are taking their opinion to the buses.

Not quite what you might expect from a group that has at turns played the role of smug vegan and the religious BBQ and fur-wearer to the PETA-party, the Atheists cleverly decided to include a qualifier in their slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

For me, it actually works quite nicely. The message is simple, the layout is about as edgy as you might like your non-denial-denials to be, and the attention to white space is impressive but to be expected from a group who so dearly values the reality of nothingness. Although "enjoy your life" might have been better put "make the world a better place" but who am I to question a bit of self-indulgence.

The Humanists, well, they manage to be more smugly inspiring than the Atheists but significantly less-appealing visually (which is so unlike Humanists):

Truly, there can be no God if such graphics are allowed to exist unpunished. Who needs a sake?

Now There Are 3 Ways To Go, But 2 Of Them Are Still The CTA, So Expect To Be 1 Hour Late

The new Chicago Card Plus/I-Go card is an impressive show of brains by the typically dumb and inscrutable strategy-masters at the CTA. It's forward-looking and it logically closes the loop on city travel options (excepting the zepplin, which I still think is due for a comeback). And hey, the website is no longer a graphic disease.

Now all they need is to reboot the subway so that trains run on or close to posted time (and hey, why not post train arrival times), buses run express when and where it makes sense (Chicago, Damen, everywhere I go), and maybe they could even expand or redraw routes to avoid some of the maddening overlap that never seems to actually benefit the rider.

So yeah, they've got some work to do, but at least this move makes them seem like a service that's planning on being around for the next five years. Given the recent discussion of plans to bus Olympic fans up and down the Kennedy, I would have expected the CTA's big move in 2009 to have been the announcement of a horse-drawn train.

My Secret Purposes Are Secret On Purpose

Facebook needs some manner of collaboratively-generated "context" reference for those friends who bulk up your count but do very little else in the way of enhancing your Facebook for the simple reason that the details of your shared past is limited only to the count of intersecting friends.  Perhaps such a reference tool could be disguised as one of those Likeness-esque applications that are constantly nagging for my personal assurance that I am, indeed, a person with 80% knowledge of "Buffy: the Vampire Slayer" character likes and dislikes.

I imagine it would work something like this: I would select a target person(s) about whom I want to know more (specifically: "How in the hell do they know me?" and "How should I know them?") and then a smartly designed, dynamically-generated quiz would be sent to them disguised as a challenge to match my score. If they were sucker enough to accept the challenge they would find a brief series of random questions, of which half would be designed to help me narrow the possible ways I might know them (e.g., "What's you best memory about Aaron"; "Is your illegitimate child a ginger?"). Upon completion, the application would return their answers to me while assigning them a totally innocuous and largely irrelevant rank/badge of accomplishment (e.g., "You scored a 75/100.").

Or, I suppose I could just be a bit more rigorous in who I accept on FB, but that seems like too much work.

Another Option

I failed to consider another hi-larious option for dealing with the problematic Burris appointment: Why not seat him in the viewing area? It would make for some entertaining C-SPAN 3 and if he were properly paired with another aged senator (take your pick) or a comedian (say with Senator-elect Franken) it's possible the Senate could finally complete its transformation into high-concept Muppet Show.

Additional suggestions for seating Burris:

• Let him be in the Senate via Twitter (our nation's first, another accomplishment for the memorial).
  
• Establish a Senate (beta) and see if there are any kinks, if he proves capable and free of taint, a new build of the Senate could be initiated.
• Just seat him and pretend that his possible corruption is actually an association with a prostitute that centers around infantalization fetishes and we'll all be cool.

Feel free to add your own, it's all about problem-solving here at MBIMOTMOG.

Can't. Look. Away.

Submitted with brief comments: The Twitter homepage of media genius and all-around power user, Peter Shankman. Makes me think he's a man in search of Beamz and in need of a good designer.

Blah-GOOOOO!!!!

The appointment of Roland Burris to Obama's senate seat by the criminally-coiffed Gov. Blago is a pretty spectacular display of boules d'acier and today it appears that the newly sanified United States Senate is getting ready to test their own new pair in the first proper intra-party fued of the new Congress.

Insofar as it's still Blago's right to make appointments (at least as of 10am), well what can you say: it's his right and since no one took it away from him it's not hard to understand why he feels like it's his right to make the call. Insomuch as it's basically magnetizing the ship in a sea of previously-inert Republican mines, well, the "I did because I could" argument loses some of its luster. I guess Blago is testing to see if that "captain goes down with the ship" relationship is reciprocated.

What then of the senate Democrats, famous takers-of-stands and folders-under-pressure? Well, they've declared Burris too tainted to seat, which is sort of true but also sort of foolish. But ever the strategists of graceless victory and widely-publicized acquiescence, they have now had their bluff called by a man as crazy as his haircut and are being forced to produce a winning hand from a collection of totally random cards. Either that, or they'll bring in the guards. Lovely.

So, what will come of the famous-in-his-mind Roland Burris? I'm not sure I understand the arcane rules of the senate enough to hazard anything other than a fantasy guess; so here goes: He is seated at which point he immediately resigns the seat (hey, that's got to be something he can add to his monument) thus triggering a never-before-used senate rule that allows for the vacated seat to be filled by beloved Chicago-rapper/vocorder-enthusiast Kanye West. If that's not the definition of win-win, well, I'd like to see the dictionary.

If on the other hand, Burris has to be seated, I demand that Harry Reid take a moment after recognizing his defeat to raise his fists into the air and scream "Blah-GOOOOOO!!!" à la Darth Vader at the end of Episode 3; it's only fitting.

Hey, Al Franken won, so who can blame me for pressing my fantasy Senate further.

Related: Why is there no fantasy Congress? I feel like that's just the kind of thing I need in my life. Ben, Whet, Joseph--anyone in?

Closer to the bottom

On any given day it's hard to measure how far we've fallen down the rabbit hole of meritless celebrity but I dare say that this ad, particularly the 3rd frame, marks a short distance to the bottom of the barrel.

Seriously: "Attempt suicide"? F'reals, I'm not a person to caution against artistic expression that pushes the boundaries of taboos and/or taste--by all means shit on a cross and call it "The #2 Coming" or feel free to explore the inner-world of Elliott Smith in song or poem or book or whatever--but this is just bazonkers.

If this were Golden Fiddle and not an ad in service of one of America's most least-necessary tomes, that joke might even work; but so much of the contemporary celebutainment scene as represented by Perez Hilton and TMZ is devoid of artisitc vision, a sense of irony, and deeper examination of consequences that the above seems almost misanthropic and crass--like recutting "Fight Club" down to just the fights and none of the exposition--and if there is one thing I can't stand, it's misanthropy and crassness.

Also, people who stop and stand in doorways.

Wha'd I Miss?

Who knew assuming more career responsibility, tending to family affairs, accepting a promotion by switching jobs, coordinating an apartment furniture reboot, and generally being a high-functioning layabout could distract one so completely from the trappings of digital over-sharing? If there's any small consolation to the utter failure of this blog over the last however-long-it's-been it is that I've actually been doing pretty good by Twitter. Yeah, yeah, yeah...it's not much, but it's something.

So what will MBIMOTMOG'09 look like? Well, that's hard to say. I imagine it will look like this, but hopefully with more content, and hopefully little to none about how disappointing the Obama presidency has been.

On that note, let me just say that I'm tired of hearing from moderates who think that prosecuting the Bush administration for crimes they committed in office (of which, once you leave behind Nixon's famous defense, there are many) is missing the point, or too partisan, or too focused on the past, or not addressing the concerns of the people. If Obama does just one thing as president, I'd hope it's convict some criminals.

Anyway...