poems for kids, diamonds for no one

We have had the Children’s Poetry Archive on our screens for longer than we can remember. Find poems by name, by poet, or even by subject. What a great way to sing or play with your children through language.

Meanwhile. fguide (“the ultimate guide to the US Economy”) gives 10 reasons why to avoid diamonds altogether. We are not big fans of diamonds, we admit. They are cultureal products that have been beaten into the hearts and minds of consumers to equate love with outrageous spending. How else can you measure who wins at love if you don’t keep score? And what better way than by the size of or amount spent on a diamond? They’re a girl’s best friend, you know. Chief among the reasons (for us, regarding economics, anyway) to avoid diamonds is that their resale value is for shit. If they were truly worth something, then resale value would be much higher. As it stands, the only value in diamonds is from jeweler to consumer.

Actually, we do admit that the pricing structures of jewelery in general baffle us. How, for instance, can a site like say, xaxe.com, where we recently purchased a beautiful pearl and coral necklace, sell items so much lower than other sites? (is it just that they are in Beijing? Yeah, we got a package from Beijing; that was interesting.) Often, similar items are sold on one site quite inexpensively, where on others it is through the roof? Do a search on Froogle for Freshwater Pearl, for instance, and see that the same items are priced with outrageous price differences. (There’s a $130 diff. between the low and high prices on this double-strand of black pearls.) What gives?

Now, say, media? We know media has no intrinsic value. Take the movies. The only value there is what “people” are willing to pay for them. Some will buy, some will rent, some will only watch on cable. Take Blockbuster Video. They were once the unstoppable juggernaut of video rental. And then Netflix killed their bread-and-butter, the late fee, and now Blockbuster is on the outs. We say, good riddance. (Are we still bitter about them not hiring us in our teen years? Maybe. But do we not like their cleaned up video policies? Most definitely!)

And speaking of movies, the new teaser trailer for Clerks II is online. And BigSleep666 turned us on to a great little Chinese commercial for Coca-Cola. Is it always sex that sells? Not if you have 3 ass-kicking ninja girls.

handy tools

Work Happy (via lifehacker) offers up a nice toolbar tool called foobar from Matrix Software. It’s a handy collection of tools that life down in the toolbar zone. The thing we really like about it is the time tracker.

But, oh! We fawn and we drool for FolderSize, which grants us a long-desired ability to see the size of a folder without hopping down into the folder properties. Swoon!

We have been on the lookout for tools and apps for our new/old Mac. Todayt, the mighty lifehacker gave us a collection of apps, some free some not. Some, then, we shall use and some we shan’t. Essential OS X Applications from MacSpecialist.

A site called Flagrant Disregard offers up a bunch of flickr “toys” which look interesting. Essentially, they are tools to mess with pictures on flickr. Nice.

And lastly today, we have a bunch of parenting hacks from parent hacks.  No, it’s not a site of parents who are hacks, but you know, hacks for, like, your kids… if you were Mr. Smith and your kids were Neo. Or something. Anyway, we like them.

Office Cleo!

Over the weekend, we watched Clockwatchers, a Parker Posey (meow) movie we saw “back in the day”, before we were old and jaded. We were young and jaded. And we cringed at the verisimilatude of the movie to our own lives. The FreeTacos of 10 years back are shaking their drunken heads at us, even as we type this.

Central to the plot is an office thief. Someone begins stealing all sorts of stuff from people’s desks. And, true to life, wouldn’t you know it, when we get to work on Monday, our favored orange-handled Fiskars scissors are missing (insert Depeche Mode lyrics… *here*). Son of a bitch! Who stole our scissors?!

Edit: we found them.

Last week we bemoaned the end of year lists that inevitably crawl out of the muck, allowing us to relive the ups and downs of the year. We claimed we only liked the photos of year. Not true! We love the traditional Life in Hell “banned words” lists, but seem to have missed out on them this go-round. We have, however, found Lake Supior State University’s list of “banished words” (oh, those people on that lake are just *so* superior, aren’t they?). Although technically, they are more 2-3 word phrases (*now* who’s superior, huh?). Our favorite is “97% fat free,” although with “dawg” gone, what will Randy Jackson say on American Idol? Does it matter that much of his “dawgs” will have been said in 2005?

We also enjoy the linguistic voting for “word of the year”. Stephen Colbert has made his stamp on the culture. Truthiness is the word of the year. Although, we certainly do like the Cruise-lex. Hey people, do you like to get to Cruisazy? We like to get cruisazy!! (Though, admittedly, that one sounds like a cross between Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze, so buyer beware.)

confident, connected… and blue and green

The Windows95 sound, the famous 15-second piece that began the Microsoft revolution, was composed by Brian Eno. It is said that it’s his most popular and most-played piece ever.

It was no Macintosh sound, granted, which was a diagnostic letting the user know at startup that everything was A-OK: each diagnostic, we were told by a friend, chorded its own sound, and the full and complete sound let you now all was well. Well, that and the Happy Mac.

The Win95 sound went away a few years later with the intro (and new sound, of course) of 98, 2000, and XP. Serious NT (“new technology”) had no startup sound.

And now Windows Vista is in the works. So we need a new sound, right? Enter Robert Fripp. Here is a 25 minutes video (yes, 25 minutes) of a darkened studio with Fripp working out a new sound. His guiding principle? Vista is “Clean, connected and confident.” “And green and blue,” Fripp adds. Yes, and green and blue. The future’s so bright, we have to put shades on our windows.

And while we are addressing media connection you cannot escape, we wonder how much TV the taquitos should watch. Our guts says none, of course, but is this just reactionarism or is there some factual evidence behind it? This is why we love Ask Metafilter. Should a baby watch TV?

How about this: should a baby Wi-Fi internet-connected bunny? We saw a news spot about this, the Nabaztag, over the end of the year break. While we might scoff — and have scoffed — at such things, Mama Taco wouldn’t mind us not running to the compy during “family time” to check if email’s come in. Which it usually hasn’t.

One of the distant salsas in the family will love this bit of connectivity: Hamachi is instant peer-to-peer networking. We wonder how far we can take it without opening doors to bad folks.

Edit: We tried this out and it did not work at all for us. The unique address Hamachi assigns turned out to not be findable when we used its “browse” function. So the only thing we could use it for was inter-computer messaging. Which we have plenty of apps for already, thanks.

And lastly today: we have talked about addall.com, which allows you to search and compare book prices. And while we love that, we some times do need to shop for other things, besides books (although a look around the Taco Compound might make you think otherwise). We have enjoyed MySimon in the past, but frequently it does not do what we need it to do. So we are looking forward to Clipfire, which promises us to be a good comparison checker.

what you think and what you know

We really like the Edge Foundation. They and the GBN (Global Business Network). Almost anyone who is affiliated with these two amazing orgs, and there is frequent cross-over which is no surprise, I will enjoy reading or listening to.

Every year, the Edge Foundation asks 1 big question of its members. They are usually big, open-ended questions to get you thinking. This year, it’s “What is your dangerous idea.” Go ahead and click them down the side. Andy Clark, as usual, pulls in one of our favorites (and it’s remarkably akin to Malcom Galdwell’s recent research in blink. While you might think Clark is cribbing, keep in mind he’s been doing this work for years).

And while we have GBN on the mind, let’s check in with one of our favorite features on the web, the GBN Book Club. The freebie web version is always a few months behind the paid-member one, but we are totally cool with that. Nov 2005 is about Terror. GBN has thrown up a number of books in the past couple years about Terror and trying to understand it. Mostly, they talk about how Terror organizations work, cells of chaos, disruptions, communications networks. All interesting stuff. But what we want to know about Terror is that (and we will put this as politic as possible) given that most Terror organizations in the world are backed by a radical Muslim ideology, A) what is the ultimate end-goal of this form of Terror, B) why does it cling to Islam, and C) why does Islam (radical or not) prop up such a view? While we continue to gain insight into how people communicate to perform Terror acts, we know little as to the how or why.

For instance, we saw last night on the news a story about the Iranian president speaking out against the Holocaust again. A “childhood friend” was interviewed who said he “didn’t really believe that”, but what the hell do they think happened? The president’s podium was decorated with a sign which read, “A world without Zionism.” We can understand an Arab hatred of Jewish-occupied Israel; we get it. It’s about land, okay. But there is a deeper hatred there, which lies seething. The news story concluded with the Iranian president talking about moving forward with a nuclear weapons plan. And then we remembered a Jerusalem Post article we saw yesterday that the US might be planning an attack on Iran.

On another note, one of the perils of turning a new year is the inevitable lists and comparrisons with previous years (although ESPN’s year-end fawning over USC being the “best team ever” sure didn’t mean much last night–what happens to “SC wins” shirts?). Most of these lists we dread. Although the BBC’s list of 100 things we didn’t know last year, with facts like “A single ‘mother’ spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today,” is fun. And first cousin to the lists are the year in pictures. Here’s 2005 by MSNBC and Time magazine.

BigSleep666 recently told us about Learning to Love you More, a series of artistic “assignments”. We tend to enjoy these sorts of generative experiments. Chalk it up to early OuLiPo influence in our formative years.

our favorite gmail hacks

Hello, true believers. Today we post 2 gmail hacks (greasemonkey scripts, really) that we have been testing at Taco Labs, Inc. As you know, we aim to test everything we can before recommending (or not) a product to you.

Gmail has been our favorite email client for a while. Let’s face it, their come on with a free gig of space a year and a half back was irresistable. Anyway, there are, of course, some minor flaws with it.

One of the things we never liked about it was that there is no friggin delete button. You can do almost anything you need to do with a message from a handy drop-down menu, but there is no friggin delete button! We delete, damnit, with buttons. It’s just how we are wired. Lo and behold, we are not the only ones wired this way. Arantius to the resuce: this greasemonkey script (we employ the ‘user script’ and not the ‘full extension’) will add a delete button to gmail.

OUr second favorite hack is message preview. We get a kick out of Outlook’s message preview, and we hear that the new and fancy yahoo email (for which we signed up for a beta and yet never quite got onto the ‘must get’ list, harumph) has it as well. Well, gmail’s got ya covered, little soldier. With this greasemonkey script, right click on a message to preview and take action on it (except add labels, that doesn’t work from preview).

We found both of these links from lifehacker.com.

networked!

And now, let us pause to thank Big Randy for his gracious work in getting the Taco Compound fully networked.

Since we bought the Apple G3, we have been trying to get the dang thing on the Internets. But to no avail. We even tried putting on our old (and worn, and tattered) networking gloves (and hats and protective eyeware). Alas, they were too worn and frayed, and we could not get everything talking. Well, we could, we just couldn’t get it talking to each other. And so we called in our big guns.

And our biggest gun is, you guessed it, Big Randy. He came over and got everything working ship-shape. And so we say thank you. And the Taco Matron thanks you as well, seeing as she can now find out for herself, as the rest of us already know, that the Internet is for Porn.

toys of the future

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog mentions that Amazing Amanda is the “it-toy” for girls of the near and coming future. She talks, her expression changes, she “knows” what she’s wearing, and if she doesn’t get what she requests, she tells you about it. And they wonder why boys have trouble plugging in to emotions.

But the toy we are most interested in is the LG Migo, a cell phone for kids. We at the Taco Compound love to kick around the idea of what gadgets the taquitos will carry around and how they will use them. One such indispensible item–in our times, it seems–is the cell phone. But with downloadable picture and video porn, not to mention phone sex–will the kids of the future consider phone sex “sex”, if they don’t consider oral sex “sex” now?–we worry.

Enter the Migo: a 4-button programable pre-set phone with GPS. Of course, you can’t keep kids from giving out the call-in number, but the simple text display and 4 simple keys seems to greatly cut down on a lot of danger. Plus, it has GPS, for keeping track of your kids. We wonder if Verizon, the company currently rolling out the Migo, will have a handy online interface for parents as well.

literary history 2 – living the history

We took a major break last year. It’s the first paid vacation we have had in 5 years (at least). It was a scant 4 and a half days from work, but with national holidays and weekends, we managed to parlay it into 11 days off. In that time, we had to say an official goodbye to our original site, which fills us with deep sorrow. We traveled some (nothing of note, really), sent out a lot of cards, set up a new computer (a really good deal on an old Apple G3 from Discount Electronics), set up the HD of the HDTV (just in time for the Rose Bowl–Hook ’em Horns!), and appeared in 2 First Night Austin pieces, including one where we managed to draw the ire and curses of standersby during a family friendly show. And last in the wrap up news, we finished our last book of 2005, Bee Season.

We confess that we picked up Bee Season originally when we saw a preview of the movie a few months back, mostly likely in front of March of the Penguins or Murderball. It was something that the father figure, played by Richard Gere, says in the preview that caught our attention. It appears that he is driving in a car, and he talks about how it is our job in the world to help complete creation. This, if you know, is the Jewish doctrine of Tikkun Olam, a strange thing to hear from the mouth of that quirky Buddhist. Anyway, we never actually ended up seeing the movie, but we finished the book while traveling. Was it good? Is it worth recommending? We wish there was another chapter, actually, but over all, it was good. We suppose our desire is a desire to spend more time in Myla Goldberg’s world.

A great book we came across this break is the first volume in a 7-volume set called My People’s Prayerbook. This excellent series describes the origin, history, and meanings of the Siddur, as well as its varieties and editions. (Though we link to amazon.com for the book, we recommend, as always, using addall.com for finding the best overall prices on your books.) Also, on the topic of prayer, we were fortunate enough to find a CD of Shlomo Carlebach music for Shabbat services. Earlier last year, we met his widow and traveled with her, but that is another story.

Thanks to Jason Kotke and his Best of ’05 links, we have come across 2 great interviews of people we greatly admire. The first is Chip Kidd. While not an interview of him, it is an interview by him of Milton Glaser, and that is good enough for us. The second is an interview of Errol Morris, whom we have loved since we caught Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control at the Dobie.