So, I’ve been obviously absent recently. I had my mother in town, and have been too busy to post any of the cool cool thing I wanted to. Anyway, it will be a few more days before I have anything written up of importance, but you may see a few music posts soon. ALSO! I have got web hosting elsewhere and that will soon be set up, so this blog will be moving. “conservativehipster.com” already is pointing away from the blog, so you can only get here through the “hipamcon” wordpress link at the moment. This is exciting, because I’ll be able to have more than just a blog online, and I’m looking at possibilities or having a store and some other neat things up there. Once the blog is there (which may take some time) I’ll send everyone a reminder to stop checking here and to begin checking it there, including the RSS feed. Anyway, see you all sooooooooon.

So, I had a wonderful weekend up in Northampton, MA (where I picked up a vintage coat, a Talking Heads LP and a cute little rainbow sticker that says “All Families Matter”), and I have some writing I did while up there that will hopefully find its way onto this blog tomorrow. Right now I just wanted to post some wonderful twee music for a friend, since she admitted to me tonight that she didn’t know the band Camera Obscura. So here are three songs I’ll share with everyone: the first from their newest album, and the second two from their first (which was produced by another Scottish twee master — Stuart Murdoch).

• Camera Obscura – Loyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken
• Camera Obscura – Eighties Fan
• Camera Obscura – Happy New Year

Oh man, the good old twee days. How I, little indie boy, miss them.

Probably not the most fiscally conservative government ever.

My favorite detail? Watch what he’s sworn in on.

I’m going out of town tomorrow, so my two longish posts in the works might take until the end of the weekend to actually find their way onto this blog. However, I am making things very purdy with my hand-coded html + css at work. Randall would be proud.

Quickly, because I’m at work (where I’ll soon be working on securing the application I am currently working on), but Wired has an interesting op-ed piece on what the next president should do to help security. I’m interested to hear what a certain someone has to say on it.

In celebration of my having landed a DJ’ing and bar tending gig in New York next week, I has a muxtape.

The playlist is as follows. Title links to an mp3. Band name links to purchasing. And the above is how to listen to the entire playlist as a whole.

1. Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues – Eels
2. 5 Years Time – Noah and the Whale
3. Time After Time – Jake Shimabukuro — Acoustic ukulele cover of Cindi Lauper
4. The Richest Kids – This is Ivy League
5. New Soul – Yael Naïm
6. LDN – Lily Allen
7. Future Faberage (MGMT & Of Montreal) – AmpLive — Of Montreal’s new album is out soon, too.
8. Lolita – Throw Me the Statue
9. Quiet Town – Josh Rouse
10. Don’t Stop – Fleetwood Mac
11. Strange Overtones – David Byrne and Brian Eno — From their new album together.

  Noah and the Whale

Nathaniel has a great post up detailing the work of this fine band. Make sure to grab their single “5 Years Time” from him, which is a perfect twee pop song for the morning. Even I feel chipper after listening. And, if you liked that, check out their myspace page this Thursday at 9 am EST to hear them play a streaming show (which is one of those little tidbits you get to learn when you speak another language).

  Wood punk?

From Wired comes a neat photo gallery of wooden sculptures, many of which have a sci-fi bent to them.

  Conspiracy theories are my guilty pleasure

Which is why reading Glen Greenwald’s Slate column is so fun. Over the weekend he’s posted three long articles regarding the ongoing anthrax investigation. He’s right about one thing: whatever the role of the government in the scare (and I still have a hard time believing any stories about the US attacking its own; yes, I’ll probably be one of the first to drink the Kool-aid), the media played a pretty despicable one.

  Fin

And finally, I had a good weekend with this guy et al., discussing all sorts of politics and culture. So now I must get to my real job, but I’m looking forward to this week, where I plan to post a bit more on music and have a longer article in the works. Also, in the distant future will be coming a bigger project with a better-known blogger, so I’m really excited about that. I’ll let y’all know as it happens.

When the word “jab” first came into politics, it was used so innocently. The second syllable of a two-syllable nonsense phrase, naming the website where funny videos were (and are) shown. Now, though, our language is being corrupted by these whipper-snappers who would have you think that “jab”’s only place in political discourse is at the end of a very nocent phrase:

(the video’s worthless after about 10 seconds)

More seriously, Arnold Zwicky has a post up at Language Log in which he decries the usage of the term “Terrorist Fist Jab“, regardless of context. The post is uncharacteristic of Zwicky and Language Log in general in that it comes off as a politically-correct piece of prescriptivism. The article is a history of recent usage, both in language and in visual media, of the fist jab since the Obamas’ infamous incident. Zwicky ends with an ominous warning against using the term “terrorist fist jab”, even in jest, lest “such uses of the expression [...] reproduce nasty (and false) claims about African-Americans.” Apparently, the linguist has never heard of irony.

When I first saw the Obama fist bump, I didn’t even realize what I was seeing. Not because I didn’t recognize the gesture, but because it was one that even my white ass uses so often myself that I didn’t realize it was out of the ordinary. The next day, a friend mentioned it to me, and when I expressed ignorance to what he was talking about, he sent me a link to a Baltimore Sun article about the gesture. The article was, as I put it to him, “one of the most naive, stupid, and uninformative articles ever.” It was so bad I almost don’t want to link to it, but here it is.

Little did I know that, at nearly the same time, a commentator on Fox News was describing the gesture as a “terrorist fist jab.” Now, no one has ever accused Fox News of being fair and balanced, but such obvious (to me) slander was a bit surprising even from that news outlet. Other outlets continued to make a big deal of the simple gesture, culminating in the New Yorker’s making fun of the whole fiasco in their satirical cover, posing the terrorist Obamas in mid-bump, which all the news outlets decided to make a big deal out of again. Le sigh.

So, this is where Zwicky comes into it. When I realized how big of a deal was being made about the simple and common gesture, I began using the phrase “terrorist fist jab” instead of “bump” when extending my fist towards someone in valediction, in irony. Why? Because it’s a tell. It’s a comment on the ridiculousness of the media, who show themselves to be so out of touch when they write exposés on the “primarily black” phenomenon and can’t make up their mind whether it’s unamerican or “racially hip” to fist bump. The whole thing is just so damn stupid, and those of us who use the phrase ironically (I don’t pretend to have pioneered that usage: it was pretty obvious) are showing that we’re in the know, that we’re hip, that we’ve been using the gesture for years, and that everyone else just doesn’t get it because they’re trying to read too much into something that really isn’t that interesting. In condemning the use of the term, even in irony, Zwicky is showing that he isn’t hip, either.

The Language Log linguist is correct to point out that in the interwebs no one can hear you be sarcastic, and one should thus be careful whilst typing rather than speaking, but he is overly worried that the usage will promote “nasty (and false) claims about African-Americans”. When 14-year-olds in 98% white towns in rural Alaska (that would be me, 8 years ago) learn the fist-bump as an alternative to a high-five, the fist bump is no longer an African-American thing. If it ever was, it hasn’t been for a long time, so anyone worried that the ironic usage obviously doesn’t get it. And really, when someone uses the term ironically, that’s the whole point.

I don’t care what the NYTimes says. This is wrong wrong wrong! You will wear your long pants at work and deal with it, like the rest of us do. Too hot for you? Then get looser pants, or pants of breathable material. Hell, for a really relaxed environment, normal shorts might even work. Just, please, don’t wear short shorts.

Men: your knees are not attractive and never will be, so please don’t show them.