Tynan's Anger

Image via WikipediaYou Got Yr Link Bomb is meant as a cross between the Will Cordero Memorial Linkpunch and the Week in Review post of the Gawker Media blog of your choice. Hence: links featuring commentary with heavily regulated snark. These links did not get the full Tynan's Anger treatment, through no fault of their own.

My apologies for not getting this up sooner. Football and theater stopped me. In any event, here are the stories that caught my eye this week.

As much as we worship the godfathers of punk/hardcore/indie rock/what have you, it is not a good time to be Greg Ginn. All the '80s i-rockers hate him, and he's basically become a crazy cat lady in Texas. And he hasn't even made the SST or New Alliance back catalog digital. The major benefit of the Guardian's story on SST and the former Black Flag guitarist was that we finally got to report on the Minutemen on Prefix. I had been waiting for that for months.
Not only did Al Gore officially join the Twitterverse, he came up with some bold new strategies for Web 2.0. What gets lost in all the "I invented the Internet talk" was what the original comment actually was meant to imply: Al Gore was one of the prime movers and shakers in Congress who made the internet happen. It's only natural he'd take to social media so swimmingly.
David Cromer, Chicago theater hotshot, will see his status in the larger American theater world upgraded after a glowing New York Times profile by Charles Isherwood. One of the biggest lapses in my four years at Chicago was missing Cromer's Our Town. It still pains me to this day that I missed it, and it diminishes my authority on Chicago theater. Trying to graduate was no excuse. Anyway, you'd think after his stunningly brilliant work on the Adding Machine that he would have gotten the attention he needed without a NYT profile. This is long overdue.
Bullies are wired to be bullies, says a recent fMRI study. This is not just shadenfreude, or lack of empathy, it's a fundamental relishing in seeing nerds take punishment. Of course, rather than being an up to date neuropsychology enthusiast after graduation, I find out about this study in the nerdcore blog io9. I'll defend cognitive neuroscience studies probably more than I should, considering I spent my entire senior thesis dismantling one. Still though, compared to what they considered "chemistry" in the 18th century, fMRIs and EEGs ain't bad.
What the hell will wonks do after the election? NY Mag's Intelligencer offers some suggestions, but they seem wholly insufficient. The Daily Show mocked potential coverage of the future Obama puppy, but it proved wholly portentious. In short, few things will get the interwebs off like a combination of Obama and puppies. On a side note, I'm surprise the media hasn't latched on to Obama's "mutt like me" comment as much as they have Berlusconi's "even tanned" joke. Is this a sign the media won't touch Obama on race?
Finally, if you don't plan on having sex for the next few months, you may want to watch this series of videos from a rapper/stripper named Ecstasy, rapping about seducing plus sized women on Queens public access television. I can't tell whether these clips are deeply disturbing or hilarious; the fact that they get an endorsement from Porter Mason, the genius behind the webcomic Bassist Wanted, is probably a good sign.