MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/7/12

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RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/7/12

July 6th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

via david haggard at flickr.com

One of my pop-culture obsessions is the history of cartoons. That’s how I stumbled across this tragic tale of the songwriter who gave us “Whistle While You Work” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”. He was a depressive and an alcoholic who shot himself in 1942, with his music for Bambi yet to be released. He was estranged from his 20-year-old daughter from a first marriage; his last wife remarried weeks after his death, to a family employee (who then took her for everything she had and dumped her).
One of the Seattle music scene’s longest running teamings (over 30 years!) has come to a sudden end. Hard-rock mainstays Queensryche have fired frontman Geoff Tate. Tate tells Rolling Stone the next step will be lawsuits, “and it’s probably gonna get ugly.”
The lawyer guy who sued local web cartoonist The Oatmeal isn’t suing him anymore.
Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair says he knows exactly why Microsoft has had what he calls “a lost decade.”
Here for your comment-thread wins is a handy list of “logical fallacies” used by people who can’t really back up their arguments.
For a movement that allegedly seeks to persuade us all to the righteous logic of its ways, today’s right wingers can be so inhumanely rude. Today’s example: a onetime 13-year-old “teen conservative idol” who’s now resurfaced asÂ a 17-year-old progressive. The insults by wingnut web-pundits and comment trolls against him, and against his mother, are as predictable as they are pathetic.
The 24/7 Wall St. site has another list of brands predicted to disappear within the year.Â Among them: American Airlines, Suzuki cars (in the U.S.), Talbots stores, and two media enterprises that Wall Street Republicans would like to see go away (Current TV and Salon.com).
David Auerbach at the webzine “n + 1” would like to remind you of the continuing “stupidity of computers.” Still.
Why does broadcast radio just get blander and less listenable every year? Seattle Weekly found a new villain: the Portable People Meter, which tracks listenership more intensely than the previous diary-based ratings system. I’d place the blame elsewhere, on the huge corporate “station groups” and their anti-creative chains-O-command.
And finally, please say hello to Gus the Diapered Duck. He appeared this past First Thursday at the Core Gallery in Pioneer Square’s T/K Building. The adjacent feet belong to his mistress, artist Kellie Talbot, who depicted Gus in a series of paintings about a New Orleans character called “Ruthie the Duck Lady.” (And yes, the T/K Building is just up the road from the old Pioneer Square Theatre building, where a certain insurance company used to have its regional sales office.)