See my reaction to the passage of the Stupak Amendment here.

We made history by passing health care reform! Also by taking away women’s health rights.

From Feministing:

This also sets apart women’s rights from the Democratic/progressive/whatever agenda. As something expendable. But fundamental rights for women are not peripheral. They are core. And not just because of so-called “progressive” values. In a political sense, too: Seeing as how the Democratic party relies on women voters to win elections, you would think they would have come around to this no-brainer by now.

Our tech guy (or, as he’s known on WP “Webmaster) Mazi has been kind enough to step in and do some posts for us while we struggle to finish out this hellish semester. He is hilarious and a wonderful writer, so please give him a warm welcome.

Pictured here is a screengrab (Cmd+Shft+4) from my Facebook homepage.  ”Make Facebook better for this person by writing on their wall” instantly clicked in my mind as “no one writes on this person’s wall and we want you to so that she is on Facebook more and we can make more money showing you/her/the world our shitty advertisements.” So I clicked through to her wall and sure enough the last post is Nov. 4 with the one before that Oct. 19…Facebook is totally trying to “include the unpopular kids” as a cover for generating more clicks.  And for the record, “Falling asleep while cuddling” is just about as useful as the Facebook fan group for “sleep.” Sheesh, that is entirely autonomous diatribe that every sensible J&J reader has probably gone on at some point, no need to retread the point here.

Jess and Josh are clearly busy young undergrads, bless their hearts, but jessjosh.com needs some more content for the duration, yes? I’ve taken it upon myself to invent a job for myself as weekly tech contributor.  Now I’m no slouch either – taking 15 units and working four days a week – but will attempt to keep this regular and at the very least give Jess and Josh a freakin’ November post.  If this becomes a venue for a lazy link dump, so be it.

The Motorola Droid is the tech world’s hottest new child.  It debuts the new Android software 2.0 that is supposed to be much improved. Unfortunately Google refuses to allow pinch and zoom in its native apps and they name their software updates after pastries/they will never beat the iPhone.  Included is a slide out keyboard, a new free Google GPS app, and a sense of longing and regret that you didn’t just get an iPhone.  Seriously though, the major point here seems to be the marriage of a halfway decent big touch screen phone and the very viable Verizon network.  ”AT&T sucks” seems to be the only knock on the iPhone that sticks and is not fixable through a software update, so there is definitely a market for this and basically any smartphone Verizon puts out.  A nice win here is that the Android OS appears untouched by the usual gloss of red paint, locked-down EVERYTHING, and lack of functionality that Verizon kindly adds to every phone that goes through their door (Moto Q9M anyone?). Motorola generally makes solid hardware and has packed in a processor that matches the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre in power.  The only true advantage it holds (and with annual iPhone releases at the beginning of summer immienent, for how long?) is its 267ppi (iPhone = 163) thanks to its dank  854×480 resolution, but there is no way to sync a music library and video playback seems straight Mesozoic. Is Google bowing to the software God that is iTunes?  If yes, waiting for a third party developer to plug this hole is very weak for the generally software-adept Mountain View firm. Once the device is deployed and in users’ hands, we shall see if is ineffectual and buggy like the notoriously shitty original Blackberry Storm and a consensus of fail fills in around it. Launched 11/6. $200 (w/ 2 yr contract on which Verizon is about to double the early termination fee)

Apple’s completely touch-integrated Magic Mouse isn’t exactly the freshest of tech news, granted only a few weeks old, but I’ve had one since the first day they shipped separate from the new iMacs (yes, I ordered one an hour after they were announced before even trying it out/seeing it on a computer screen larger than my iPod touch; yes I enjoy Apple products) and love every second of using it.  The main impetus for the purchase was the suckiness of the Apple mouse (formerly Mighty Mouse, but this happened, and now a company called Man & Machine making “washable ‘hygienic’ input devices” stakes a claim to the trademark) and its gunk-magnet scroll ball.  The former mouse required regular cleaning and lots of faith to remain scrolling reliably.  The new one is amazing because it incorporates a momentum scroll that sends you flying down pages with ease (like the iPhone scrolling) with just the touch of one finger on the perfectly friction-y mouse surface.  Additionally, two finger side-swiping moves you backwards and forwards in Safari (I have now removed my back and forward buttons from the toolbar), page-to-page in PDFs, photo-to-photo in iPhoto/Aperture, and month-to-month in iCal – all with an amazing “it just works” intuition. Hopefully Apple adds more advanced gestures (three finger swipe down for Expose/Spotlight please!) with future software updates, it kind of hurt losing the middle click and squeeze functionality of the previous Apple mouse, but I am positively declaring this the best mouse ever. $69

Some links

Gizmodo’s Droid Review

A UsabilityPost About Interface Philosophy and the iPhone

A clip from the new film Objectified incl. Jon Ive, lead Apple designer

An amazing app for Mac users that tweaks Apple’s built-in hidden settings

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Safran Foer again, but this time for Salon. I could try to be nonchalant, but I’m incredibly excited about this: my JSF story is the Salon cover! When people used to ask me what I wanted to do when I grow up I would respond “write for a web publication like Salon.” And now I DO. I rarely allow myself to get excited about shit like this but this time I can’t help it. Woo! Read the story, please!

I got Google Wave but I’m not sure I really get it yet.

Kaela and I have been doing this webcomic for NYU Local. This week’s installment was rejected by our editors! One called its humor “lazy,” another “hilarious.” I dunno, it took me like 30 seconds to write the “script” for this thing, so it’s not like there was much effort to “explore things.” W/e. Jaela (Josh + visual wunderkind Kaela) has a weird sense of humor, I guess, and what’s funny to us is “borderline racist” to other people. Enjoy, after the jump.

So you know how there are some movies in which the protagonist wants (or rather, thinks he wants) something, but then over the course of an hour and forty minutes he realizes that it’s not what he wanted at all? Like if a little boy wanted a toy sailboat, so he gets lost in the toy store looking for one but in the end what he really needed was a father figure. You know what I mean.

Point is, I had a moment like that today. Because…I had the option of not taking American Lit I, but I turned it down. So, yes, I agreed to accept the bane of my (academic) existence. Because it’s not gonna be that awful.

After meeting with my English advisor, I learned a couple things. First and foremost: there will be Thursday recitations! So I could maintain the no-Friday-classes position I’ve firmly taken since sophomore year. These Thursday meetings would be hella early (most likely 8am, they haven’t worked out the scheduling kinks yet), but it’s nice to know that the option would be open to me. I could deal with having to go to bed really early on Wednesday evenings, if I had to. The choice is mine/world is my oyster, woo!

And then she showed me the syllabus, and it’s…not that bad. There’s a lot of American Puritanism bullshit, but at least all those writings are short and plainly worded, since flowery language was (rightly) a sin back then. And then there’s Revolutionary writings, which is okay because Ben Franklin was our nation’s first “drunk-ass bitch” and as such turns out to be a pretty funny read. Then Moby Dick, which I’ve already read so, ya know, no biggie. Then, finally, comes Walden and his boring, stupid friends. Whatever. That’s what SparkNotes is for (kidding, professor!)

I do notice that there’s an 8am final, the fact of which kind of makes me want to kill myself, but this syllabus is from Spring 2006 so maybe it’s different now. (My advisor assured me that the reading material has largely gone unchanged for like the past decade.)

I could have gotten out of it. It’s not the class itself that’s important, but rather Early American Studies that the English Department thinks I need to know. I could have taken two smaller (aka not for freshmen) classes about Early Americanism, but as it so happens, they’re specifically about Herman Melville and, you guessed it, the American Wilderness (aka existentialism, aka why would I take a class solely about that). It’s just nice to know that I didn’t absolutely have to do this to myself. Things work out in the end.

But I swear to god if I have to take an 8am final as a second-semester senior, I will fucking murder somebody’s face. ^_^

Man, remember when Stephen Colbert was on The Daily Show? I’m not gonna be one of those snooty people who says something like “That was when the humor was so much better and fresher,” but it was certainly different, a little edgier, and very weird. Here’s a favorite: