No, My Lip Gloss Is Poppin'

1. Today, under the influence of the incomparable ideelz, I came across Lil Mama's song "Lip Gloss" for the first time. I'm afraid I can't even pretend to think this is okay. Especially:

   Cherry, vanilla: flavors is a virtue
   They loving lip gloss universal'!

   No, no, no. It's not just brainless; it's sloppy and poorly delivered. I usually celebrate songs that cover territory outside the predictable, circumscribed realm of lovin' and bein' very sad or very happy, but you don't get credit for doing a song about lip gloss if all you can say about it is that some varieties of it are good. I was going to say that this song represents a weird return to the "Parents Just Don't Understand" paradigm -- rap is about fun/funny things we kids can all relate to, not shooting some people and selling drugs to some people (usually (?) different people) -- but at least "Parents Just Don't Understand" didn't restate the same thesis for like infinity minutes. WHO COULD WANT TO LIVE IN THIS WORLD

2. On the other hand, I have learned that "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield is neither a new nor a bad song. It is, in fact, both a couple of years old and good (? (I have a lot of questions lately)). I've probably caught bits of it before, but I was thunderstruck when I heard it yesterday at the local pizza shack -- so thunderstruck that I found myself scribbling down a snatch of the lyrics and a brief annotation in the top margin of a page of the New York Times Magazine containing the middle of an article about economic inequality.

   'feel the rain on yr skin / no one else can feel it for you'
   little girls singing along

   I was pretty irked by these tartlets at the time, but a quick download proved how wrong I was. It reads like a goddamn Cliffs Notes version of Unger:

   I am unwritten, can't read my mind; I'm undefined...

   I break tradition
   Sometimes my tries
   Are outside the lines
   We've been conditioned
   To not make mistakes
   But I can't live that way!...

   Release your inhibitions
   Feel the rain on your skin
   No one else can feel it for you
   Only you can let it in
   No one else, no one else
   Can speak the words on your lips
   Drench yourself in words unspoken [okay, this line is dodgy]
   Live your life with arms wide open
   Today is when your book begins

   Would it be TMI to say that I feel weirdly, genuinely inspired by these schmaltzy pop lyrics, no matter how obscenely Bedingfield oversells them with her I Can't Believe It's Not Butter voice and, god help us, some kind of choir at the end? Tough cookies: this is Keyhole's blog, li'l mama. Did you know that Bedingfield was in a family Christian rock group when she was a kid, and that it was called "the DNA Algorithm"?!

3. Via Defamer, an only somewhat decontexualized quote from Michael Bay, giving the straight dope to the Republic of Korea:

   There definitely will be a massive alien robot war in the future.

   Unfortunately, I haven't found any commentary from the Democratic People's Republic up north, where one instead sees all the traditional, run-of-the-mill headlines: "Bush Team's Sophism Blasted" (they are very concerned with sophism), "Construction of Mushroom Production Centers Brisk under Way" ("The newly-built mushroom farm in Sinuiju City is equipped with all necessary facilities including ozonizer and autoclave"), and "S. Korean Military Warmongers Warned Not to Run Riot" (hey, military warmongers: you better not run riot!).

   The previous day's news was similarly ho-hum: in the article "Poem Recital on Pochonbo Battle Anniversary," the writers couldn't help but yawn their way through a typical work of North Korean piety:

   Recited then was the lyric "Lineage" to the effect that the revolutionary tradition established in the flames of the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle is the historic root of the Korean revolution and it gives steadfast continuity to it. [Yadda yadda yadda.]

   A human-interest piece on the Pyongyang Circus was fun (did you know that the Pyongyang Circus "won a gold prize in the 9th International Modern Jugglery Festival held in Karlovy Vary of then Czechoslovakia in April 1972"? and that its "hundreds of fine acrobatics" include "animal, magic, synchronized and ice feats," including both "Aerial Iron Bar Flight" and "Flying Girls"?), but by the millionth time that the Korean Central News Agency insists of referring to its creative class as "artistes" instead of artists (e.g. "dignified People's Artistes, Merited Artistes, highest skill possessors and talented acrobats"), it stops being enjoyable. (j/k) But you have to appreciate the clarity and sentiment of this headline:

   KCNA Urges U.S. to Stop Acting Fool

   The article describes the U.S. as "a centre of plot-breeding, fraud and swindle" whose claims would normally be of no interest, were it not for the possibility that the allegations of "Lefkowitz [no first name given], special envoy of the U.S. State Department for human rights issue of north Korea" might be taken seriously; alas, "there is the need to let the world community know clearly about the U.S. sinister aim lurking behind the nonsensical malarkey let loose by this guy in view of its crafty and serious nature. ... [W]hat he uttered is no more than a foolish ploy to convince others that he is not useless. ... The U.S. is the country of beasts which regards man-hunting as pleasure."

4. I recently read an old (1974) article from the Journal of Law and Economics by Ronald Coase: "The Lighthouse in Economics." It's apparently somewhat famous, but it's pretty goofy and trivial all the same: Coase debunks the lighthouse as an example of a public good, showing how, as a matter of historical fact, many of the lighthouses built in England were indeed the products of private enterprises operating under the aegis of the profit motive. Causing a sea change in the conceptualization of lighthouses by means of a carefully researched but fundamentally boring essay: I can't tell if it's during my more or my less ambitious moments that I dream of accomplishing something similar.

5. O'Reilly Media, which publishes all the nerds' favorite computer books, has a beautiful mission statement of sorts:

   O'Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

   They'll probably also sponsor the first and only time traveler's convention.

6. Via Language Log, it turns out that condescending multiculturalism may get accused terrorist Jose Padilla killed:

   Defense lawyers also repeatedly jousted with FBI translators over how they converted the intercepted calls into English, suggesting that they used the most sinister language possible. They also noticed that sometimes they translated the Arabic "Allah" as "God" in English and other times left it in the Arabic form.

   "You have to understand, it's my personal choice. I chose to use Allah. I think it's a beautiful word," said FBI linguist Joyce Kandalaft. "Allah does not have a negative connotation in this sense."

   I kanda laft when I first read that.

   But seriously, folks: how many times have we heard some grinning old coot ask a non-white somebody, often a child, what their name is -- and respond, upon receiving some crazy gallimaufry of foreign phonemes as an answer, "Why, that's a beautiful name!"? "Beautiful" here almost always means "vowel-containing." Why do people say this? It is worse (more annoying) than the worst (most annoying) racism. Didn't Edward Said die for these sins?

7. While we're on the topic, I have a difficult time believing this, from Cory Doctorow:

   I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that's only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank--to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing.

   I'll leave the musings on prosopagnosia and Levinas (check out his little Western Philosophy wiki-trading card on the right: "Notable ideas: 'the Other', 'the Face'") to the experts. But I will note in passing that Doctorow should not have been allowed this riff:

   Ubiquitous and demanding, CCTVs don't have any visible owners. They ... occur. They exist in the passive voice, the "mistakes were made" voice: "The camera recorded you."

   Um. "The camera recorded you" is most definitely not in the passive voice. Also, the passive voice isn't a "voice" in the way he's implying; you can't "do" it during an open-mic comedy event. Well, maybe...

8. Did you know that "the bear cub is born as a shapeless and eyeless lump of flesh, which the mother bear shapes into its proper form by licking it"? Well, according to various medieval bestiaries, it's true:

   

   For bonus points, consider the financial implications of the following: "Bears fight bulls by holding their horns and attacking their sensitive noses."

9. There will be more.