Happy Thanksgiving from Overthinking It! We know, there’s plenty of popular culture to be thankful for, but in the spirit of Overthinking It, I though I’d put a slightly different spin on giving thanks. Let’s take a look at the latest trends in popular culture that we should be thankful for, but now just accept as the norm. Dig in for a three-course Overthinking It Thanksgiving Feast after the jump (warning: Synecdoche, New York spoiler follows).
Convicted felon Ted Stevens has lost his re-election bid for the Alaska Senate seat which he held for the last, oh, eleventy-hundred years. While in the Senate, Stevens gained notoriety for bringing home epic quantities of pork barrel projects, being convicted of a felony, and, how could we forget, comparing the Internet to a series of tubes during a debate on Net Neutrality legislation:
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
But now that Alaskans have routed him from office by a whopping 3,724 vote margin, we must now deal with the aftermath of his absence from the Senate.
The Internet is no longer a series of tubes.
Just as Alaska has moved on and found another Senator, we, too must move on and find another ridiculously inaccurate characterization for the Internet. Help me out after the jump:
Gmail launched in March of 2004. That means that the service has been up and running for longer than the entirety of World War II American involvement in World War II. It now has tens of millions of users.
Google - it’s time to lose the “beta” tag.
(Yeah, I bet all you guys forgot that was still up there.)
According to Wikipedia:
Betaware is a nickname for software which has passed the alpha testing stage of development and has been released to a limited amount of users for software testing before its official release.
Insisting that a wildly successful full-featured website is still in beta is like saying, “Oh, this old site? It’s okay, I guess. One day it’ll be good enough so that we can stop being ashamed of it.” It’s the web design equivalent of showboating.
Let me ask you guys, is it possible that nobody over there is aware they still have the word “beta” up there? Maybe if it was pointed out to them, they’d be like, “Whoa, didn’t Roberts take that down last year?” “Me?! I thought you took it down!” “Well, let me just open up Photoshop here… okay problem solved. Thanks!”
UPDATE: This post originally said that gmail had existed for longer than “the entirety of World War II.” This is not in fact the case. The error has been corrected, and its author forced to watched all of that Ken Burns documentary.
One of my many vices is political blogs. I read a whole slew of them, several times a day (and lord help me, I even read the comments). I especially enjoy reading the progressive DailyKos, and the staunchly conservative RedState, to get two different perspectives.
So when they both publish nearly identical posts, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
The Harvard Classics Project is a very Overthinking It-type enterprise, in that it combines high culture and pop culture.
On the high culture side is The Harvard Classics. In the first decade of the 20th century, Harvard President Charles Eliot claimed that a five-foot shelf of books could provide “a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.” (Which leads me to wonder, was President Eliot implying four years of Harvard was a pointless waste of time and money?)
