Amidst the rubble that is the current conflict between Israel and Gaza, the combatants did manage to unearth one tiny gem — in the form of an internet exchange, of course, because where else?
Elizabeth Tsurkov, who works for the Israeli NGO Hotline for Refugees and Migrant Workers, made headlines last week when she tweeted at Hamas in order to correct the terrorist organization’s Hebrew grammar — and found herself in something of a dialogue:
I always joke I want to hire an intern. Like everyone else, I’m behind on life, and an extra set of hands to do all the things I’d like to but don’t have time for would go a long way towards fixing that problem — and until I can clone myself, an intern is the only viable option.
But as I said, that’s a pipe dream; though it has twice featured guest bloggers, this blog has always been wholly owned and operated by a single individual. It has never hired an employee to do its work, dirty or otherwise.
With one exception.
Back in 2011, when Paper Treiger was the subject of virulent protest less than one short week after its inauguration, it hired UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike to disperse the dirty occupiers:
Continue reading Paper Treiger braces for upcoming worker’s comp claim
Youtube comments can be fun and adventurous and troubling and unpredictable and bizarre and questionable and wonderful, but as noted previously, the most you could say about the first sixteen comments on Drew Brees’ Nyquil commercial — which I uploaded to Youtube — was that they were comments.
They pretty much all followed the same particular pattern, which is a nice way of saying that every single redundant comment was redundantly interested in the song that plays in the background of the commercial. And even after I listed those first 16 comments in order toward the end of January, they didn’t stop coming:
17. song:
18. Does any1 know the song?
19. BEST FKING SONG EVER TELL ME!!,
20. song?
21. It is not J. Ralph [editor’s note: someone had suggested in comment 14 that it was J. Ralph]
22. I want to know the artist of this song now! Please!
23. It seems like it really is “J Ralph – One Million Miles Away” but it’s some type of remix… same notes really, just different instruments. I will get to the bottom of this.
24. I want this song!
25. Sounds like Spooky Back but not quite…
26. yea i want to know the name of the song
27. yea it’s a dope track…
But it would be a shame to leave the record incomplete. This post should help remedy that. So it was, that it wasn’t until comment 28 that someone finally chimed in with something even anonymous could be proud of:
Continue reading Youtube curse broken – at least for a while
You may have noticed that Youtube is full of comments. You may have also noticed that those comments are generally a “treat”. But you probably did not notice that some of those comments are mine.
Not mine, in the sense that I wrote them. Mine, in the sense that they were posted in response to my videos.
You see, at around the time I started writing this blog, I also created a brand new Youtube account to go with it. So now, every time someone comments on a video uploaded through that account, I get an email alert. Granted, not a lot of them; I’ve used the account to post only six clips — none of them Gangnam Style — but they do pile up after long enough.
Those emails have given me a minor sense of entitlement. At the risk of stating the tautological, my comments are mine.
And until recently, those comments lived up to my expectations (particularly, the anti-Semitic ones chronicled in The Youtube comments I chose to censor). Until, that is, I uploaded this advertisement featuring Drew Brees:
Continue reading Come on, Youtube – I would much prefer your worst
It all started with a straightforward email from Dean Post:
I am delighted to report that Cristina Rodriguez has accepted our offer, and that she will be joining the YLS faculty effective January 28, 2013. Cristina, who has been at NYU Law School since 2004, will come to Yale from her present post in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department in Washington D.C. Cristina’s email is [redacted]. I’m quite sure that she would very much appreciate hearing from you.
Curious about Professor Rodriguez’s specialty, I decided to google her. And so, I discovered that she is glatt kosher*:
One student graduating from Grand Valley State University (in Michigan) made it big this evening with a shoutout from Anonymous:
https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/282027735705063424
The graduation — which originally transpired on December 8 — reminded me a lot of my own: from the parade of students down to the man and woman switching off with the names they’ve never read before in their lives. That’s never a recipe for something good.
At GVSU, the card-reader card-read with surprising fidelity — but it didn’t have to be that way. In May 2010, my graduation readers had some difficulty with even the simplest names; no “Emily” or “Jacob” was too common or too simple for them to read error-free.
As the butchered names were ticked off slowly, one by one, I naturally expected the worst. A librarian once read my name “Malikai”, and she reads for a living! Fortunately, because the name-mangling was so predictable, I had taken special pains to communicate just how to pronounce the “ch.” And in the end, it paid off: my name came out perfect, largely thanks to my crystal-clear clarification — even down to the proper Ḥ:
But if I’d been blessed with Kelsie’s reader at GVSU — that is, with someone who reads first and thinks later — I might have been in trouble. I imagine “ch as in choot-spa” would not have gone over well with my assembled family members (assuming, of course, that they could hear anything at all — looking at you, Grandpa!).
So thank you, Kelsie, both for being frick-en-awesome, and for helping me come to appreciate my card-reader’s competence more than I already did. And congrats on graduating. You’ll go far, kid.
I clearly remember the first time I saw a cockroach outside of a zoo. I was about to take the subway in New York when my mom stopped by a payphone – yes, a payphone – to make a call. A cockroach happened to pick that exact moment to also try and place a call. We got better acquainted during my time in Philadelphia*, and again in Nepal, but that first encounter in New York City will always hold a special place in my heart.
*Raquel é minha heroína [thanks, Louisee]
So I can’t say I was particularly surprised to come across the following excerpt in Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World, a book about the ecology of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York (through which I drove two weeks ago on my way to Toronto and Niagara):
Continue reading This horrifying thought goes out to all my friends in New York
Anonymous asks:
Why were you searching for Dora the Explorer on Netflix?
Excellent question. Thank you, Anonymous.
You might imagine it’s because I have too much free time. Really, it’s because I was working on this:
Oooh, pretty.
Only $120? For a tablet with a $359 value? Plus, SHIPPING INCLUDED? And, I could send pictures to Bubbe? That is a surprisingly expensive tablet – but an amazingly good deal!
Oh, right:
On Monday, I made the worst possible mistake on the Internet: I provoked the ghost of Godwin.
More specifically, I wrote about the Holocaust, and in doing so invited an army of Poles (who seem to be members of a Yahoo! group devoted to ‘Polish Media Issues’) to descend on Paper Treiger in a valiant effort to defend the honor of their motherland.
I found many of the comments generally reasonable, though understandably motivated by the desire to deflect any blame away from Poland:
Hi,
You write that the German Nazi extermination camp Treblinka was largely run by Poles. Can you provide some sources for your statement?
/Artur Szulc
I checked my original source, realized that I could not substantiate that particular claim, and updated my post to reflect that fact.
But other comments were less helpful, in that they failed to address my main point, or failed to address my main point and were also just sort of offensive:
Paper Treiger 