American Madness

Reading food blogs tends to make me hungry, some even inspire me in the kitchen. Of course this is all dependent on how detailed they are. Is the writer just talking about what a great cook they are and making you jealous of all the good stuff they have to eat or are they trying to help you to be a better cook and teach you great new ways to make some food? Well, with CleanYoPlate it is a little of both.

Now I know Ben, and I don’t think he is trying to make any of us jealous, but I also know Ben’s cooking and reading about it does just that. He started CleanYoPlate this year and with the super detailed recipes he has put up I have seen everyone and gotten jealous because of the great pictures and how great I know his cooking is. Of course that is followed by inspiration and cooking plans for the weekend, so it is a bit of the best of both worlds. Ben also knows an incredible amount bout food and cooking.

If you like to cook or read about food or look at some great food pictures I suggest you go on over and check out Ben’s blog.

WeFeelFine is a project I learned about at the Beautiful/Decay: Vis/Ed event last week.

To learn more about Jonathan Harris, the mind behind WeFeelFine you can watch a video of him talking about this project and his new project, Universe on CoolHunting. Anyway…

WeFeelFine is a project that… Well, actually, they have a really good description of what they are doing, so let’s let them say it in their own words:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

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Writing for AmericanMadness has been good for me. It has allowed me the opportunity to hone my writing style (I was going to say “skills” there, but we all know I don’t actually edit or learn from my common mistakes. Josh has tried breaking me of using dashes, ellipses and semicolons when a period is actually all that is needed, but that just isn’t much fun. I am a much bigger fan of creating my own grammatical magic), as well as helping me to create a definitive voice within my writing.

It has also opened my writing up for others to read (outside of professors, no one has ever really been subjected to my babble. I rarely read over what I write myself, which explains most of my errors). Well, one of the “others” who has been reading my babble thought that it would be good for a broader* audience.

As of yesterday I have also started writing posts for Dame Magazine’s blog, The Dose. My first post appeared on Sunday morning (it’s on a new Japanese designer, and chindongu or “queer tools”) and I will be writing two posts a week for them, so now there are more places to catch my writing.

*No pun intended

So, 10 x 10 is a pretty interesting website/blog.

Basically they trawl the web and find the most popular and newest news content represented by a single word and image. It is all then displayed in a 10 x 10 grid of thumbnailed images. When you click on one of the images the top head lines related to the word pop up. It is all refreshed hourly so you can actually track stories and words and see if the gain in popularity or lose it from one hour to the next. It is a a nice visual representation of the news in an easy to use interface. The site defines it self as:

10×10™ (’ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

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Some folks out there may have been aware that last week was the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge where congress men & women ate for a week on a food stamp budget (in NY that is $28 a week). You can read about some of their experiences here.

Think you could do it? What would you eat? Where would your money go to?
I am considering giving it a try, see how far I could get on $28 a week (or $4 a day), unfortunately I really like to eat, but it does make you think about the poverty levels and how much the government really is “helping.”

Something to consider. Anyone up for trying this out with me in order to gain a deeper understanding of what the government considers to be passable?

I keep a list of things to blog about.

Most of these things will never make it off the lsit because they don’t cut the interest factor when I go back to them on day 2 or they were a current event that is no longer that current (Russell Simons’ talking about cutting the cursing out of Rap, Mice at another NYC restaurant). These were all things I was hot to write about at the time (both of those about 2 weeks ago) but have since stopped caring about (Simmon’s needs to rethink his plan and what NYC establishment doesn’t have pests and vermin?)

But this was something I wanted to post because I have such great childhood memories of it and then a college memory of it as well: The Snoopy Sno Cone Machine. This product is kinda awesome, making tasty sno-cone treats. I do not however, recommend trying to grind enough ice to make margaritas with it. It just takes too long.

Ok, what’s the deal?
I have recently been checking out the stats for the site. Ok, I have actually become a little obsessed with checking them. Some make total sense to me, others confuse the hell out of me, and some scare me a bit, let’s just run through a few:
The 4th most popular search term to find American Madness: “Robert Charles Browne” are there a lot of people interested in serial killers who come to our site and are just disappointed that American Madness is not a site devoted to US serial killers?
Then there is the 3rd most popular search term: “Eating Lemons,” there was an article posted 2 years ago about eating lemons, and the concern of dentists in Texas with this phenomena. This article is so popular that it is our 3rd most viewed posting. Can some one who stumbled upon us while searching for “Eating Lemons”tell me what they are actually looking for? I am genuinely interested.

Also, hello to our international readers, especially the ones from Palam, Taipei, Clontarf, Kiev, Kaisariani, Caracas and Budakeszi (not that I want to leave anyone out like most of our European readers and our US readers, especially the huge showing in NYC where about 10% of our readers subside).

So, every now and again I am asked what Blogs I read and what sites I frequent to get my totally random news. Well, I am not going to divulge my sources on that, especially since a bunch of them are pretty major blogs that don’t need more hits anyway. I will however cite a couple of blogs my friends post for as well as a couple of sites that are just really nice:

First up we have a site I came across today “Teddy Sczudlo Photography,” nice site and a good photographer, really worth checking out.

“No Days Off” written by Fubz (Publisher & Photo Editor for Beautiful/Decay), he doesn’t post often, but when he does you’ll usually get a hot photo and an interesting rant about what ever is on his mind that day and has gotten him typing.

Kate Torgovnick is a writer working on a book about cheerleading, she also has written for New York Magazine, the New York Times and Jane Magazine. At “Crucial Minutiae” she writes the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Column” every Tuesday. More sites after the jump and a few more pictures.
(Top photo by Sixeight)
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So, while this site appears to be targeted primarily at teens and their parents it is good to know that someone out there is still putting out Public Service Announcements about safety. Of course, some of the videos (like Bulletin Board) do get a bit creepy towards the end, but I guess that is the point. Get creeped out enough you are far less likely to post your photo.

So many things to write about, where to start? Okay, let’s pick up from my last entry- I am at a conference this week and while typing that last entry from my phone was actually in a meeting about “legal” and “illegal” use of the internet and information found on the internet in admissions and, by extension, the hiring of new employees. Basically this is how it works: If you apply to a school or a job and you think everything is going really well: you passed the initial screening process, aced the interview and are just waiting for that call with the offer, well, keep waiting, cause they are still getting information on you. You can bet that once you walk out of that door from your interview, that interviewer you just met with is going to get back on to their computer, open up Google and type your name into that search box.
And it doesn’t stop there, after they’ve Googled you they’ll probably search for your MySpace page, Friendster Profile, Facebook Page, Personal Blog etc. Now this may be great for the number of hits you get on your pages, but you know that video you pjust posted of yourself on MySpace, you know the one, you drinking an entire bottle of Cuervo in one gulp, punching someone’s grandmother in the face and then throwing up before you black out, well, they just saw that too and all of that “community service” that you have listed under interests on your resume starts to look more like “court-ordered community service.” That comment you wrote on your friends blog about what a great idea it was to play hookie from work the other day cause you hate your boss and much prefer to take hits from a gravity bong then listen to the corporate mumbo-jumbo that spews from his mouth, yeah, they’ll see that too. So, when they call you and tell you they have decided to go in another direction don’t be surprised.
Remember, the internet is all public domain, you are posting for the world to see and now your greatest desire for everyone and their grandmother to read your blog has become your worst nightmare. Oh, and if you thought you could go back and sanitize it all, get rid of the blogs you wrote divulging company secrets, yeah, thanks to Google caching they are all still around, floating in the ether. Now go forth and cleanse your pages, pull the naughty videos from MySpace and the embarrassing pictures from FaceBook, you know the ones I mean, the ones that are going to cause that law firm you just interviewed with to reconsider hiring you, forcing you to look for a job at 1-800-LAWYER instead.
Okay, you are done reading now, I know your fingers are twitching, let me help you out- Just click here and see what you find out about yourself.
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This entry was written by Orlando Jetblue