A Series of Tubes

Recently I went to the Griffith Observatory.  First off, the Griffith observatory is named after Griffith J Griffith.  No I did not write that wrong, the guy’s first and last name is the same frign name (hilarious).  I of course found this out in a video narrated by spock Loenard Nimoy.  The Wikipedia page on Griffith J Griffith is quite entertaining (attempted murder, failed and successful lies about military accomplishment).  After the city of Los Angeles accepted the controversial money from Griffith J Griffith, seriously read that Wikipedia article, they constructed the observatory as a public institution.  This is the observatory in Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean.

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Well I had a previous post with the back and forth with Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of yelp.  It was incredibly frustrating to have to ask him the same questions over and over since he kept answering the questions he wished I had asked instead of the questions I did ask.  His final response to me is as follows:

We have many thousands of advertisers on Yelp these days, I suggest a much simpler and faster solution… pick up the phone and call a handful of advertisers (they are easy to find on our site) and ask about their experiences with Yelp.

The East Bay Express did that and buried their findings at the end of their 4k word piece…

Interviews with more than a dozen local business owners suggest that Yelp sales reps may be wording their sales pitches more carefully these days. Owners who were approached by Yelp in recent months said they were told they could choose one positive review that would appear at the top of their page, which would clearly be denoted as a “sponsored review.”

And plenty of Yelp advertisers still have negative reviews on their pages. “You pretty much have to fight tooth or nail to get a bad review moved or removed,” said one East Bay restaurant advertiser, who wished to remain anonymous. Peter Snyderman, the owner of Elite Cafe, said his sales rep never mentioned moving negative reviews.

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Meth will mess you up:

I clicked through all the photos from the drugfree.org site with a sort of morbid fascination.  I managed to click to the website off of the Matt Taibbi blog post about religious apologist Terry Eagleton.  It was sort of a non-sequitur from religion to drugs (and now I’m going to do the same but in reverse order).  Fun quote from the blog post:

“This is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables.”

Matt mixes serious arguments, which help prove his point, with ad hominem attacks, which make it fun to read.  Of course Matt might be mad at my use of ad hominem considering his dislike of A priori:

“First of all, why is that no professor alive can make it ten feet from his front door without sticking an a priori into a sentence? Is there some kind of subterranean lair where academics are beaten with whips and clubs until they learn to write alliterative book titles (”Pus, Primates, and Pessimism: Jane Goodall’s Descent into Septic Shock”) and lard up perfectly good sentences with epistemological catch-phrases?”