The weirdly enduring appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

On the theme of music, I loved this overview of the life and times of Weird Al. > As his name suggested, Weird Al’s comedy operated right at the hot spot of my childhood agonies: weirdness versus normalcy, insider versus outsider. What a Weird Al parody did was enact a tiny revolution. It took the whole glamorous architecture of American mainstream cool — Michael Jackson’s otherworldly moves, Madonna’s sexual taboos — and extracted all of the coolness. Into that void, Weird Al inserted the leas…

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Anti-flow

I loved this piece from Rands in Repose. If you’re familiar with his writing, he often talks about flow and how to get into the zone in order to achieve it. > The Zone is a place, and Flow is an activity that occurs within this precious mental place. Flow is the ability to consider a project or a problem deeply. In Flow, you can keep a superhuman amount of context in your head and can traverse that context with ease. With Flow, you can produce extraordinary value. In this article, he describes…

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Chasing the unattainable?

It would seem that life consistently affords one opportunities to look back at the path you've walked. I do my best to embrace these opportunities, but I've often found my self slightly discouraged in the past when doing so. I would tend to review the goals I had at a period in time, then measure the progress or lack thereof and feel as if I did not make the most of the time I had. And yet in the big picture, things have gone very well. My family has had its needs met, I've…

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Having motivation at your disposal

Kevin Richardson describes [http://encourageothers.com/2012/11/having-motivation/] the issue of matching your times of creativity with your life's schedule. As a father of many youngsters, this resonates with me — I know exactly what he means. > As a result, this impromptu late night motivation is essentially wasted. If only I could bottle it and save it for the morning… While I occasionally indulge myself by working a late night just to scratch my creative itch, I know it’s not practical to wo…

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In the end, creation always trumps curation

Marco Arment opines that Curator's Code [http://www.curatorscode.org/] is solving the wrong problem. I'm a fan of Maria Popova and confident that she's put a lot more thought into this subject than I have, so I'm hesitant to add any of my own criticism to Marco's. Giving credit where it's due is a good thing. I applaud those [http://52tiger.net/attribution-on-the-web/] who make an effort to point people to those who are good at finding interesting things to read. And I agree with Popova'…

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