Lists Of Top Songs and Wikipedia Fudges and A Pro-Exclamation Mark Essay Under The Google Sky

September 3rd, 2007 at 8:33 am · DrHGuy · Media Mayhem, Music · 1 Comment

DrHGuy Cyber-Bookmarks: 3 September 2007

Cyber-Bookmarks From DrHGuy are annotated links to arguably worthwhile, recently published online reading, new or revised websites of potential utility or ostensible interest, and other internet-accessible experiences that, were it not for the casually collected, cavalierly collated, & capriciously collocated components comprising these posts, could easily be overlooked - which would be, in some cases, a shame,

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Wiki Watchers’ Delight

You may have read about the various corporations, politicians, government agencies, and others who have edited Wikipedia with the apparent aim of eliminating contents they consider negative coverage. (See Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits - New York Times and A new Web site unmasks Wikipedia’s vandals - Slate)

A single salacious edit list by Wired includes, among reports of other editing skulduggery, these gems

Kimberly-Clark Inc. removes all environmental controversy
Allstate removes criticism about claims payout
Greenpeace hides information about its funding
State Farm Insurance deletes references to Katrina lawsuits and the related evidence
Hallmark denies participation in the creation of Hallmark Holidays
McKinsey & Company edits criticism
GSK touts its drug sponsorship
DynCorp removes info on involvement in sex slave trade

Two sites offer assistance to those of us interested in such muckraking:
Wikiscanner allows users to search the IP addresses of the computers used to edit Wikipedia articles. Check out your favorite corporate scoundrels. Find out if you’re paranoid or if the CIA is actually changing the information of the Wikipedia Bay of Pigs article. Great fun.

Wikirarage is a service that reviews the latest edits on Wikipedia, assesses the number of individuals and amount of attention focused on each article, and then publishes the 100 items with the most editing activity in a given hour, day, week, and month with links to the Wikipedia page in question.

Email - Should It Be (Exclamation) Remarkable?

So Many Exclamation Points!
A new style guide says we should pepper our e-mails with them. Really?
By Jacob Rubin; Posted at Slate.com Thursday, Aug. 30, 2007

[Look!!! Another Heck of a Guy blog entry referencing exclamation marks! It has, after all, been a full week since the most recent markedly exclamatory post, Medical Signs and (Their) Symptoms described that nasty Doctor's office sign¹ that utilized an armamentarium of - count 'em - three exclamation points to arm its fusillade of passive-aggressive assaults aimed at HMO patients. But enough about me!!!!!!!!!!!]

The Slate article focuses on Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, the manual on e-mail etiquette by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s, and, in particular, its relaxed attitude² regarding the exclamation mark.

Given Shipley and Schwalbe’s evenhandedness, their merry endorsement of exclamation marks comes as a surprise. ” ‘I’ll see you at the conference,’ is a simple statement of fact,” they write. ” ‘I’ll see you at the conference!’ lets your fellow conferee know that you’re excited and pleased about the event.” To appreciate the unorthodoxy of such counsel one need only have attended a middle-school writing class, where teachers have long forbidden overindulgence in the banger as a kind of literary self-abuse. One ought to show emphasis, the argument goes, through subtlety of style and construction, rather than indicate it with a tail of exclamation points. Elmore Leonard advises, “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Declaim the original Strunk and White, in their legendary sotto voce: “Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation.” Their example? ” ‘It was a wonderful show!’ should be, ‘It was a wonderful show.’ ” (Forget the show—how ’bout that conference!)

A brief consideration of the historical evolution of that piece of punctuation (for example, from its first appearance in 1400 until 1700, it was known as “a “mark of admiration,” though admiration in this case meant something like “wonderment” - of a religious variety) and its role in email follow in this amusing, thoughtful essay.

Google Firmament Nears Completion: Sky Added To Earth
With A Nifty Flight Simulator To Boot

Google Earth, an already impressive application, is now partnered with Sky, a program that enables users to fly around and gaze upon detailed imagery of 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies, give or take a solar system or two.

While the Earth and Sky thing has been done before - and, if Genesis is to be believed, in less time - Google has upped the ante with a lagniappe in the form of a built-in flight simulator with two virtual airplanes (an F16 Viper and a SR22 prop plane) and a variety of airports and runways.

How To Fly The Google Sky: Download and install version 4.2 or later of Google Earth (available for PC, Mac or Linux systems), which can be obtained gratis at Google Earth Download. To switch into flight simulator mode the first time, press Ctrl+Alt+A (Windows) or Cmd+Opt+A (Mac). Then, it’s just a matter of choosing your plane, selecting a runway at your favorite airport, taking off, and, if you have skills similar to DrHGuy, creating a spectacular crash scene within seconds. Or, you can read the instructions first - if you’re a wuss. The flight simulator mode can be found in the Tools menu. The keyboard controls are listed at Flight Simulator Keyboard Controls

Credit Due Department: I first read about the almost surreptitious addition of the flight simulator to Google Earth and Sky at Lifehacker.

A Top Two List of Top Ten Music Lists

Songs Songwriters Savor
Songwriters reveal top 10 tracks
This BBC piece is one of several articles about another of those “Top/Best/Worst/Shortest/etc [insert number] [insert musical category]” lists produced every 37 minutes by Q Magazine. In this case, the list is apparently something along the lines of “The Ten Greatest Songs Selected By 50 Songwriters Who Were Home When We Called Them.” The jury includes John Legend, Serge Pizzorno, and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, among others. As is true of most such “best-of” lists, this one is valuable primarily for the arguments it will inevitably trigger.

The ten songs themselves follow:

Bitter Sweet Symphony - The Verve
Blowin’ In The Wind - Bob Dylan
Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
God Only Knows - The Beach Boys
Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
Life On Mars - David Bowie
Perfect Day - Lou Reed
Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday
Strawberry Fields Forever - Beatles
Sympathy For The Devil - Rolling Stones

The careful readers among my fellow Cohenthusiasts [Hello, Dick] will note that, yes, indeed, a list generated by a group of songwriters and published by a pop music periodical listed Jeff Buckley as the artist associated with Hallelujah, a song that, as many among us might point out, was written (and originally performed by) one Leonard Cohen, even if someone else sings the lyrics of a given cover version.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Sneaky Sexy Songs
In researching the preceding “Top Ten Songwriter-Selected Songs” article, I ran across a Stylus essay which seems significantly more interesting: Top Ten Sexiest Songs Not Actually About Sex, written by Clem Bastow in the ancient era (by Internet standards) of 2004.

To support my “significantly more interesting” assessment, I offer the following excerpt:

In a recent edition of Q Magazine, subtitled “The Sex Issue”, a list of “20 Songs To Get You Off” was run, including the usual suspects – “Let’s Get It On”, “The Lemon Song”, “Kiss”, “It’s Ecstasy”… – amongst a few newer choices in the form of “Fuck The Pain Away”, “Closer” and “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”. Of course, somewhat unimaginatively, all of the songs – with the possible exception of Whitesnake’s “Is This Love” – were about sex. Now, correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I could think of nothing that would wilt my girlie hetero hard-on faster than my amour popping Peaches’ “Fuck The Pain Away” on the stereo at that crucial moment. Remind me just what part of “sucking on my titties like you’re wanting me” is actually alluring. It would be like pumping away to your drunken aunt singing karaoke. And “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”? Aside from the droopy synthesiser refrain, there’s nothing particularly alluring about Khia intoning “my neck, my back, lick my pussy and my crack”; she might as well continue, “and clean the toilet and put out the rubbish while you’re at it”.

The annotated list includes “Got To Give It Up, Pt. 1″ – Marvin Gaye, “Love Theme From Spartacus” – Bill Evans, “A Girl Like You” – Edwyn Collins, and, believe it or not “The Immigrant Song” – Led Zeppelin.³

Footnotes

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The more alert grammarians have, no doubt, noticed that "nasty" in this sentence could modify either "Doctor's office" or "sign." For what it's worth, I did recognize that apparent ambiguity but chose not to correct it because - well, I hold both the "Doctor's office" and its "sign" contemptibly nasty so whatever the reader's choice is, it's certain to be correct.↩
One could say “relaxed attitude” or one could say “slutty abdication of authorial responsibility,” depending on ones own moral fiber.↩
To the selection of “The Immigrant Song,” I can only add, echoing the author’s own exposition, Ahh-aah-aaaahhh!?↩

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