Author: nell-boeschenstein

Guys: NBC. Have you heard of it? Maybe? Sorta kinda? Yeah, it’s pretty famous. It’s a network television station. They have a show called "The Today Show" and other shows, too. Now, as some people might remember, NBC went through a rough period with the end of "Seinfeld" and "Friends," but the network is back on top, baby! And they are keeping up with the Joneses.
 
Yup, NBC’s shows are on the Internet and that is nothing short of totally awesome, both because the shows are on the Internet and because they are shows I want to watch. See, my roommate is a hippie and as such is anti-television. I’ve been too embarrassed by my own obsession with television to overrule her adamant denunciation, so I get my fix curled up in my bed late at night, my computer on my lap, letting NBC give me what I want.

Sure, the picture is a little small and the sound quality isn’t great, but they’ve got episodes of "The Office" and "30 Rock" that Blockbuster has been emptied out of now for three months running and which I don’t want to wait for Netflix to send me. Plus, they have shows like "Heroes," "Chuck" and "My Name Is Earl" that some people seem to think are good but that I either haven’t seen or haven’t gotten into. "The Office" and "30 Rock" are plenty good enough for me. Even better? No commercials. It’s kind of amazing, actually—I never thought I would go back to network TV after getting spoiled by HBO in those years when NBC was stumbling. But NBC has won me over once again. Now I’m all, "HBO who? Whaa?"

And no, I promise you that the network is not paying me millions of dollars to write this. They aren’t even paying me one million dollars.

Occasionally there are sites I like to give shout outs to not because they have any staying power or even any significant entertainment value beyond an initial five minutes, but because the initial five minutes you spend at the site are more entertaining that the first five minutes you spend on other sites. These sites are kind of like those kids that publish books to much acclaim when they are 23 and then don’t ever publish anything else, and yet that first book is still pretty good.

It is with this both disclaimer and promotion that I draw your attention to the online quiz, "Program Language Inventor or Serial Killer." It’s something of an Internet phenomenon and a favorite among web surfing hobbyists. The premise is that you are given a series of 10 photographs. For each photograph, you have to decide whether you think that the man in question is either a program language inventor or a serial killer, and at the end you get your score. Surprisingly or not, program language inventors and serial killers seem to have a similar physical aesthetic going on. They must all read the same fashion magazines or something: Thinning hair, a certain pastiness and a doughy physique are all the rage in both these subsets of humanity.

When I took the quiz I scored a six out of 10 and the site told me that "it might be best to avoid a career in either law enforcement or I.T. recruitment." I guess it’s a good thing, then, that I am headed in neither direction.

Why are the most obvious things always the last things to come to mind? In other words, why haven’t I written about the Charlottesville Blogs site yet?

Realizing that I hadn’t written about it yet for this column was like the time I was giving a stranger directions to the Rotunda that involved many lefts then rights and stoplights and such. When I had finished with my directions, the friend I was with just looked at the stranger and said “Go three stoplights down, make a left and drive straight.” “Oh, right,” I said, feeling like the idiot that I no doubt appeared to be. And that’s how I feel now: I’ve been sending you the roundabout way, but really, Charlottesville Blogs is the direct route to Charlottesville’s online community.

The site is the work of longtime Charlottesvillian and one of the city’s online pioneers, Waldo Jaquith (also the man behind Cvillenews.com). Updated every 15 minutes, the site features various posts from a bevy of local blogs on topics ranging from the Meadowcreek Parkway to high school football to thoughts on why one should go to the grocery store. In addition to aggregating local blogs into one, the site also provides links to each of the blogs it posts from. It’s all very democratic and, if you have a blog that you want Jaquith to include, all you gots to do is e-mail him your link.

As one might expect, a lot of the stuff on there is boring or pointless in and of itself. However, what’s really interesting about the site is the many voices that you hear when you read it. Scrolling through is like being in a crowded coffee shop and eavesdropping now on this conversation and now on that one and then on the one across the room. You’re suddenly surrounded by people and thoughts—a community if you will, a Charlottesville. And that, to me, is very, very cool.

Every day I seem to realize anew that people are crazy. Every day this elicits from me some comment to some person along the lines of “People are crazy,” “It blows my mind how crazy people are,” or “How do people walk around all day inside these brains? They’re crazy!” Inevitably, my companion accepts these statements as fact and contributes a comment of her own along those same lines. The blog Swallowing the Camel is something of an extended ode to such everyday insanity.

The blog describes itself as taking on the mission of “examining hoaxes, scams, schemes, bizarre ideas, bogus products, disinformation, misinformation, impractical jokes, literary fraud and anything else that smells bad.” I mean, I read some of this stuff and I have enough justification to call people crazy every day for the rest of this life and my next life and the life after that. For example, new stories about the real-life Thelma and Louise, a biography of an “anti-gravity pioneer,” evil reptiles who rape people and give them cancer…

The crowning achievement of the site is its list of “The World’s Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories.” The blog is anonymous, so I have no idea what qualifications this person has to judge what is weirder than what, but I’m really in no position to judge. Among my favorites? “Stephen King killed John Lennon.” “George H.W. Bush was really George Scherff Sr., a Nazi sent to destroy America as a teenager and adopted by Prescott Bush.” “The early Middle Ages…never occurred. Everything that supposedly happened during those years was either a misunderstanding, an event from a different era, or an outright lie—Charlemagne, for instance, is a fictional figure.”

Crazy, right? Or am I just being all “glass half empty”? Maybe I should feign delight and say instead, “Ah, the power of our imaginations!”

I am getting to that age of being just past the age of being able to stay abreast of the latest “thing.” I know this because I do not know the answer to the question, “Is Facebook already passé?” But when I asked a friend who works at Wired whether these social networking sites were still in fashion, he responded with a confident affirmative and recommended I take a look at Good Reads, a relative newcomer to the genre.

Like all social networking sites, Good Reads allows you to invite friends, screen potential friends, investigate new friend options, keep tabs on friends who are already your friends and create a personal profile of yourself in which you become the friend you want to have. Whereas most other social sites—MySpace, Friendster, Tribe, Facebook, etc.—are not specifically thematic, Good Reads is all about books. You can see what books your friends are reading, list what books you are reading and list books that are on your list to read before you die.

Based on what I saw, Good Reads is entertaining but still experiencing some growing pains. What I mean is that if someone not into reading consulted the site for recommendations as to where to start, they might be led astray. The following are books listed on the site’s homepage and the ratings—based on the five-star system the site employs—that random people have given the works: The Bible-5 stars; Backyard Ballistics-5 stars; The Gulag Archipelago-1 star; The Declaration of Independence-4 stars.

This last rating is my favorite. I would love to meet this “Mike” character. Not to chide or mock him, but simply to ask him, “Why, Mike? Doesn’t TJ just get 5 stars by virtue of being TJ?”

Sitting at dinner with a few friends the other night, one friend recounted how, when she used to babysit, she would set the clocks ahead and tell the kids it was time to go to bed; she would then raid the refrigerator. “Literally,” she said, “I would change the clocks.” Another friend—a high school English teacher—erupted across the table, not over the strange lapse in judgment the anecdote related but on a decidedly more neurotic matter. “‘Literally’?! Not ‘literally,’ Christina, Jesus! How come no one knows how to use that word? What, could you have ‘figuratively’ changed the clocks in that context? Get it right. There’s a whole blog devoted to just this matter.”

Indeed there is. And if ever the old adage “pick your battles” meant something, it does here. Who knew such an innocuous word could be the subject of so much preoccupation? And yet, as evidenced by this moment of outrage, “Literally, A Web Log” is getting its point across with a surprising degree of success.

Run by an Atlanta-based Internet nerd and a linguist, the website tracks misuse of the word in the news and on the Internet. The entries are periodic, but the site has been up for two years, so there’s plenty of material. Reading through the multitude of examples, I found myself—never particularly bothered by the misuse of the word before this site—getting really annoyed at these idiots who seem to use the word “literally” when writing as blithely as people use the word “like” when talking.

A favorite example from one of Charlottesville’s dearly departed neighbors, Jerry Falwell:
“Someone must not be afraid to say, ‘Moral perversion is wrong.’ If we do not act now, homosexuals will own America! If you and I do not speak up now, this homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women.”

Isn’t that something you’d literally like to see? I mean, that would be totally insane!

It’s not uncommon for a common type of snob to thumb his or her nose at the notion of "anthology," be it an anthology of modern American poetry (ah, Norton) or an emo-themed mix CD. I’ve never really held that attitude, preferring instead to just be thankful that there are people out there that have a passing interest in poetry at all.

Same goes for visual art: Retrospectives are cool, but so are the museums that host them. Recently, however, I happened across local photographer Bill Emory’s website, Black and White, which is basically an online gallery—or ongoing and on-growing retrospective, if you will—of his work.

Since March 2005, Emory has been posting his photographs daily. The majority of the photos are black and white, and scrolling through the months and years of work I felt like I got to know—intimately—both Emory himself and the people in his life: his neighbors in the Woolen Mills, his twin daughters, his dog, Sophie. It’s a website that, as you make your way through it, you actually begin to see the world through someone else’s eyes. (Who knew that’s the superpower art fosters?!) The experience is simultaneously eerie and fascinating and beautiful. "Beautiful" thanks to the photos themselves, on a purely aesthetic level.

Examining Emory’s website, I finally understood the benefits of that old notion of having everything in one place. There’s a story to be told that no single sentence could sum up. It’s not that I think anthologies or mixed CDs or museum collections are any less cool than I did yesterday: I just understand the desire to anthologize a little bit more.

One of the best and worst things about Charlottesville is that it’s a small town. This is a dichotomy that I have long struggled with: On the one hand, I delight in knowing a good piece of gossip about the random person sitting next to me at the bar; on the other hand, I cringe at the fact that he might well know an unsavory thing or two about me as well.

For precisely these reasons, this town has long been ripe for an online gossip repository and (I think) that’s the hole cVillain is trying to fill. My own small-mindedness, however, led me to believe—or hope—that this site would be about my definition of what constitutes good gossip: sex, sex and more sex. This, apparently, is not what makes cVillain tick.

The site is newsy and, with regular restaurant reviews and calendar events, seems aimed a bit more at a Charlottesville newcomer or transplant than a native like myself (and yes, I do say that with a dose of pride in my voice). It’s less nerdy than Cvillenews, but far less gossipy than an idle conversation with your girlfriend. There’s no sex, but there is a lot of local news and news media commentary. If you want to know the latest shoutout Charlottesville got in the national media, cVillain is probably a good place to start.

Really, "cVillain" is something of a misnomer. Between raving about C&O and the inexplicably intense advertising campaign cVillain ran for the Artini party, cVillain is hardly the "villain" in the story of Charlottesville. But maybe we don’t need one. Maybe villainy is better left to idle ears in dark bars.