Rambles at starchamber.com » the onion http://www.starchamber.com Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology. Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:28:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The Onion on social media overload http://www.starchamber.com/2009/06/the-onion-on-social-media-overload.html http://www.starchamber.com/2009/06/the-onion-on-social-media-overload.html#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:58:09 +0000 Ned http://www.starchamber.com/?p=3060 ]]> The Onion is one of the wonders of our age. Here is their swipe at the perpetual self-absorbed posing of Generation Y (as one of the viewer comments I read put it, “Y as in Why are we such losers?”). If you watch this and laugh, I’m guessing you’re uncomfortably close to this phenomenon. I sure laughed.


Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

After examining the evidence from the 25 iPhones, 15 Blackberrys, 10 video cameras, and 40 digital cameras obtained from the students who attended the party, we were able to reconstruct every segment of the event.

(Thanks Todd for the pointer to this one)

]]> http://www.starchamber.com/2009/06/the-onion-on-social-media-overload.html/feed 0 Historic “Blockbuster” Store http://www.starchamber.com/2008/05/historic-blockbuster-store.html http://www.starchamber.com/2008/05/historic-blockbuster-store.html#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 05:03:55 +0000 Ned http://www.starchamber.com/?p=1783 ]]> This is a fine example of what The Onion does best. The premise is simple and potentially very unfunny: historical re-enactors at a carefully reconstructed “video store” of the future. But the writing and the delivery is just perfect.

Historic “Blockbuster” Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

I grew up in a town with a carefully re-created historical village (Old Salem), and Massachusetts, where I live now, is positively lousy with them (Plimoth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, and so on). I can never make up my mind if these things are living treasures or pretentious exemplars of a past that never existed, much in the same way that Monsanto’s House of the Future never will exist. I can just picture old Ben Franklin laughing himself silly, his face wet with tears, as he takes a tour of modern day Colonial Williamsburg.

Watching a bad re-enactor perform is painful in the extreme, but even the good ones make me want to knock them off balance with impossibly hard questions. Who is the Crown Governor of the Virginia Colony? How much did you pay for that pewter salt cellar? Who are you kidding with that ridiculous accent? And if I ever visited the Historical Blockbuster Shoppe, I would ask to rent videos that wouldn’t have been released yet. That would show them! Ha ha!

(Thanks for the Onion link Matthew!)

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