the tweney review

Agenda recently spotted in an unnamed office conference room.

This was a really fun story to work on: Mobile magazine’s list of the top 50 portable video games of all time. Read it in the August issue, or online.

“Don’t know much about history? It’s probably because you spent your time dodging little red blips on a handheld football game instead of reading pages 179 to 193 in your Western Civ textbook, you feckless dingbat. … In this story, we bring you the 50 best mobile video games of all time — from 1976, when the Little Professor started trying to make math fun, to 2005, when the PSP finally made handheld video games look like serious business.”

Is the Moon made of Swiss cheese? Google has the answer (just zoom in all the way).

James Howard Kunstler takes a sober, pessimistic look at what happens when cheap oil goes away — in Rolling Stone, of all places.

America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Serious, scary, and alarmist. Whether justifiably so or not, I can’t tell, but his arguments about oil’s centrality to our economy are hard to refute. If oil production really does decline, and oil prices spike up permanently, he’s no doubt right that it will cause a huge number of problems.

(I recently posted about an interview with Kunstler that is even more direct than the Rolling Stone article.)

Also, Kunstler has a searing, angry weblog called Clusterfuck Nation. Great reading!

I got a new cell phone today — the amazingly badass black Razr. Since Cingular follows the usual cell phone industry practice of offering the worst deals to their loyal customers, I didn’t renew my contract with them — we found a new-customer deal that was far, far better. As a result, I’ve got a new mobile number. If you need that number, send me an email.

How to make chai in a typical office.

Short version: Put teabag and sugar in a mug, fill mug halfway with water, microwave on high for 45 seconds. Let it steep for a minute, then add milk until the cup is 3/4 full and microwave another 15 seconds.

The author says spiced chai is for sissies, but if you must, add a little cardamom. I can’t find cardamom in my office right now, unfortunately.

WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky, broadcasts a good mix of country, bluegrass, and old-time banjo music from the heart of Appalachia. They’ve got a live Internet stream you can listen to right now. And they’re looking for money to replace decrepit transmitters and repeaters, so they can stay on the air. Help ‘em out!

Say you’re a Dadaist poet, but you’re tired of slicing up ribbons of newspaper to make your random poetry. You might stop by this web page where the computer can do the cut-ups for you, based on any text of your choosing. There are lots of variants on the cut- up machine, as well as other games and tools for unleashing writerly creativity: Java-based magnetic poetry based on the lexicons of Anais Nin, Baudelaire, Bukowski; interactive, collaborative poems; techniques and games for writing, etc.

Language is a Virus

If you are vegetarian, can you eat muscle tissue that’s been grown in a laboratory?

Burgers from a lab? US study says it’s possible

I read Thomas Friedman’s early book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, when I was trying to get a handle on what people meant by “globalization.” I’d been told it was one of the pithiest, easiest to understand introductions to the topic available. Although Friedman’s columns are occasionally insightful and useful, I thought this book was almost entirely free of content, and entirely forgettable. Several years on, I can’t remember a thing he wrote in it.

I haven’t read Friedman’s latest book, but Matt Taibbi in the New York Press gives it an incredibly scathing review.

Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I’m not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce.

(via Collision Course)